Even Hitler’s Gestapo had to trick Jews to travel peacefully to the gas-chambers, and Stalin had to be still more deceitfuclass="underline" the risible fiction had to be disseminated throughout the country that a conspiracy of millions of hirelings of foreign states existed. Victims usually had to sign a confession mentioning participation in a terrorist conspiracy headed by Trotski and Bukharin and directed by the British, American, Japanese or German intelligence agencies. An immense punitive industry was developed with guaranteed employment for torturers, jailors, stenographers, van-drivers, executioners, grave-diggers and camp-guards. Meticulous records were kept, even though the blood of the signatories occasionally smudged the documents.51
Bukharin, who was put on show-trial in March 1938, was one of the luckier ones inasmuch as he was not physically abused. But he was nevertheless put under acute psychological duress to ‘confess’. Bukharin surrendered as part of a deal to save the lives of his wife and son. The protracted rigmarole of denunciations, confessions, trials and sentencings in any event made the immense stratum of surviving officials complicit in the Terror. Even Nikita Khrushchëv, a rising party official in the 1930s who lived to denounce Stalin posthumously in 1956, was heavily involved; and Georgi Zhukov was exceptional among Red Army generals in refusing to make allegations of criminal activity against fellow generals.52 At the central level Stalin’s civilian associates competed with each other in the stylistic flourish with which they confirmed death sentences. Among Molotov’s favourite addenda was: ‘Give the dog a dog’s death!’
Vans and lorries marked ‘Meat’ or ‘Vegetables’ could carry the victims out to a quiet wood, such as the one near Butovo twenty-five kilometres north of Moscow, where shooting-grounds and long, deep pits had been secretly prepared. Plenty of work could be found for prisoners spared capital punishment. Cattle-trucks were commandeered for journeys to the labour camps of the Gulag in Siberia, Kazakhstan and arctic Russia. The trains rumbled through towns at night-time to avoid public curiosity. Food and drink on the journey were grievously inadequate. The convicts were treated as badly as the Negro slaves who had been shipped to the West Indies. On arrival at their camp they sawed timber, dug for gold, mined coal and built towns. Their meals left them constantly famished: Yezhov’s dieticians had estimated a provision of calories barely enough to sustain men and women who were not doing strenuous physical labour with wholly inadequate clothing and medical care in some of the USSR’s most inhospitable regions.53
The exact death-rate of inmates is not known, but was indubitably high. Contingent after contingent of fresh (or rather newly-battered) prisoners were needed to replenish a labour-force that afforded a crucial portion of the state’s industrial output. Not even Stalin, an enterprising proponent of the virtues of penal servitude, turned over his camps to agriculture. The kolkhozes and sovkhozes were already so close to being labour camps that the transfer of wheat cultivation to the Gulag would have brought no advantage. In times of famine, indeed, peasants in Vologda province were reduced to begging for crusts of bread from the convoys of prisoners in the locality.
And so it would seem that by 1939 the total number of prisoners in the forced-labour system — including prisons, labour camps, labour colonies and ‘special settlements’ — was 2.9 million.54 In each camp there were gangs of convicted thieves who were allowed by the authorities to bully the ‘politicals’. The trading of sexual favours was rife. Many inmates would kill or maim a weaker fellow victim just to rob him of his shoes. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was arrested after the Second World War, later wrote that experience of the camps could ennoble the character of prisoners. But Solzhenitsyn served most of his sentence in a camp in the Moscow suburbs where the inmates were given unusually light conditions in order to carry out scientific research. More typical for the Gulag inmates were the camps outside central Russia where it was every person for himself and moral self-control was rarely practised.
This convulsion of Soviet state and society had the severest consequences. Only one in thirty delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 returned to the Eighteenth Congress in 1939. The loss from the Central Committee was also drastic: just sixteen out of seventy-one members survived.55 Another devastated institution was the Red Army. Tens of thousands of officers fell into the grip of Yezhov’s ‘hedgehog gloves’, including fifteen out of the sixteen army commanders.
These figures are most easily compiled for high and medium-ranking functionaries. But other folk could also get caught by the mass repression. In his pursuit of political security Stalin resumed and expanded the policy of national deportations. Especially vulnerable were national and ethnic groups which had a large number of people living beyond the USSR’s frontiers: Stalin was concerned lest they might prove disloyal in the event of war. Thus the Poles were removed from Soviet Ukraine by a secret decree of April 1936, roughly deposited in Kazakhstan and left to build their settlements. In the following year the Kurds were driven out from the North Caucasus, and the Koreans from eastern Siberia. Uninhabited tracts of Kazakhstan became a dumping ground for all peoples which incurred Stalin’s suspicion.56 As Yezhov carried out his master’s command, countless deportees died before reaching their destination.
The impact of the Great Terror was deep and wide and was not limited to specific political, administrative, military, cultural, religious and national groups. Even a harmless old Russian peasant woman muttering dissatisfaction with conditions in the kolkhoz or her young worker-son blurting out complaints about housing standards would be dispatched to the horrors of the Gulag. No trace of ‘anti-Soviet agitation’ was meant to survive. Casual jokes against Stalin, the communist party or the Soviet state were treated as the most heinous form of treason. In this fashion practically all Soviet citizens were extirpated who had displayed an independent mind about public affairs.
Yet Stalin’s very success brought about a crisis of its own. The original purpose of his clique in the central leadership had been to reconstruct the state so as to secure their authority and impose their policies. In carrying through this design, the clique came close to demolishing the state itself. The blood-purge of the armed forces disrupted the USSR’s defences in a period of intense international tension. The arrest of the economic administrators in the people’s commissariats impeded industrial output. The destruction of cadres in party, trade unions and local government undermined administrative co-ordination. This extreme destabilization endangered Stalin himself. For if the Soviet state fell apart, Stalin’s career would be at an end. He had started the carnage of 1937–8 because of real hostility to his policies, real threats to his authority, a real underlying menace to the compound of the Soviet order. Yet his reaction was hysterically out of proportion to the menace he faced.
Stalin had a scarily odd personality. He was in his element amidst chaos and violence, and had learned how to create an environment of uncertainty wherein only he could remain a fixed, dominant point of influence. His belief in the rapid trainability of functionaries and experts, furthermore, gave him his equanimity when butchering an entire administrative stratum. The Stalin of the Civil War and the First Five-Year Plan lived again in the Great Terror. His hyper-suspicious, imperious temperament came to the fore. No one coming into frequent contact with him in the late 1930s had a chance to become disloyaclass="underline" he had them killed before such thoughts could enter their heads. He was unflustered about murder. When his old comrade Vlas Chubar telephoned him out of concern lest he be arrested, Stalin warmly reassured him; but Chubar was arrested the same day and, after disgusting physical torment, executed.