In fact, the occupational hazards of the cadres in the Navy were even higher than those of the cadres in the Army. They had one very minor advantage. Except in the case of the Pacific Fleet, naval officers were usually British “spies,” and, until 1939 at least, this carried slightly higher social status than attached to treason in favor of Germany, Japan, and Poland.
A SECOND MILITARY MASSACRE
Orlov’s case became associated with a new wave of military arrests launched in the early part of 1938, whose theme was made clear in a letter issued on Stalin’s instructions calling for further purging of the armed forces, not only of enemies of the people, but also of “the silent ones” who had failed to take an active part in the Purge.193
The replacements of the slaughtered commanders of 1937 now went themselves to the Lubyanka. In the first days of January, Belov was recalled to Moscow. The train journey, we are told, was gloomy, full of recollections of similar ones of the previous year. On arrival, he was arrested; his intervention in favor of Serdich was now turned into a criminal matter.194
And now a second Marshal of the Soviet Union fell. Yegorov, a former Tsarist officer, was an older man than the members of the Tukhachevsky group, being fifty-five, a year younger than his former colleague in the Imperial Army, Shaposhnikov. He was one of Stalin’s boon companions. Stalin is said to have offered Tukhachevsky’s country villa to Yegorov after the execution, and Yegorov to have refused to take it.195
Yegorov had commanded the South-Western Front in the Polish Campaign, with Stalin as his political chief. He was one of the few figures from Stalin’s old military entourage to suffer.
The first blow in the military purge had taken out all the military members of the Central Committee except Voroshilov, Budenny, Blyukher, and Yegorov. Yegorov is said to have complained that the extent of the purge was gravely affecting military efficiency. He was removed from his post as Deputy People’s Commissar of Defense at the end of February 1938, and Stalin circulated to the Central Committee a note urging his expulsion from the Committee because he had been compromised in “confrontation” with the arrested conspirators Belov, Gryaznov, Grinko, and Sedyakin, and also because his wife was a Polish spy.196 He was soon under arrest.
The same month saw the dismissal, and April the arrest on a civilian mission in the Urals, of Army Commander Dybenko,197 who now commanded the Leningrad District. During the Civil War, Dybenko had served with Voroshilov and Stalin, but that was no longer sure protection. The huge sailor had led the mutiny of the Imperator Pavel I in 1916, and had commanded the Baltic Fleet sailors in the Revolution. He had once been married to the fiery aristo-deviationist Alexandra Kollontai. He had led the soldiers who suppressed the Constituent Assembly in 1918. But idealism had persisted for a time: he actually tried to resign from the Party when the death penalty was not, after all, abolished by the Soviet Government.198 His closest friends at the Military Academy had been Uritsky, shot in 1937, and Fedko, who was brought on 2 February 1938 from Yakir’s old post in the Ukraine to be Deputy Commissar for Defense for a short and insecure tenure.199 They had all been sent from the Academy to take part in the assault on Kronstadt.200 And now Dybenko was a German agent, though also (then a rarity) a spy for the United States, a group of Americans having visited Samarkand when he was commanding there.201
Not only old associates of Stalin’s like Dybenko were now to perish (together with his wife).202 There were still grudges to be paid against former enemies. Among those in jail was, as we have seen, Army Commander Vatsetis, first Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, whom Stalin and others had attempted to remove as a traitor in 1919, but whom Trotsky had successfully defended. He had meanwhile held important posts in the Army Inspectorate and in the Military Academy.203
At the end of July came a second and even larger slaughter of the High Command, though no announcement was ever made. This went together with a major killing of political and other figures (see here). As far as I know, this massive operation was referred to for the first time in an article of mine in Encounter in October 1968. I then noted eleven death dates, military and civilian, to be found in various publications of the Khrushchev period. As I write, twenty years later, forty-six names (civilian and military) have become available with death dates 27 July to 1 August 1938, though so far few new names have been given in the glasnost literature of 1986 to 1990.
The military component of this mass operation included no fewer than nine Army Commanders—Alksnis of the Air Force, Belov of Byelorussia, Dubovoy, Dybenko (lately of the Leningrad Command), Levandovsky (until recently in the Far East), Khalepsky (former armored forces commander), Sedyakin (antiaircraft), Vatsetis (former Civil War Commander-in-Chief), and Velikanov (unlike the others, newly promoted to this rank); Corps Commanders Gailit, Gribov, Gryaznov, Kuibyshev, and Kovtiukh (the legendary Civil War hero who appears under the name Kozhukh in A. S. Serafimovich’s Iron Flood, which curiously enough continued to be sold without alteration after the purge of its hero, who was “brutally tortured”);204 Divisional Commanders Kuchinsky (Head of the General Staff Academy), Serdich, and Stigga; Fleet Admirals Orlov (Commander-in-Chief of the Navy) and Viktorov (his successor); Admiral Kireev; Army Commissars Berzin (lately in effect Commander-in-Chief of the Spanish Republican Army) and Okunev; Corps Commissar Ozolin; and the military theoretician (at one time briefly Chief of Staff of the Red Army) A. A. Svechin.
No doubt others not yet named perished; clearly the higher the rank, the more likely is its holder to be found in the reference books, so that nine Army Commanders to five Corps Commanders to four Divisional Commanders may not represent the real proportion. But even as it is, this is clearly a major blow to the Army and Navy: one not perhaps so striking, yet more massively devastating even than that of June 1937.
It may be worth stating that the military and political victims do not seem to have been taken in separate categories. One Army man was shot on 27 July; six soldiers and five civilians on 28 July; thirteen soldiers and thirteen civilians on 29 July; and six soldiers and two civilians on 1 August. This may not be entirely representative, but at least it appears to show that there was a blending of the two elements into a single alleged plot. Berzin was accused of belonging to the “anti-Soviet nationalist band Rudzutak–Berzin,” which had served “British, French, and German intelligence.”205 Both were Latvian, to which the “nationalist” charge must refer (indeed, nine of the accused were Latvian). We are also told that the new Army plot was a matter of Right Socialist Revolutionaries and German, Polish, Finnish, and Latvian nationalists.206 Then we learn that the accusations against Dubovoy included his having killed his superior, the legendary Shchors, during the Civil War, in order to take his place.207 But a variety of charges of this nature had been melded together in previous trials. More generally, as far as the evidence goes, the political victims were accused of Rightist conspiracy, and we can perhaps assume that a military–Rightist plot was the main allegation.