A complete history of the purges of 1937–8 may very well never come to be written. But if we wish to grasp a phenomenon that exceeds the bounds of the imagination, we need to consider different data. We shall begin with the estimates made by various agencies, which are sometimes difficult to interpret because they are based on different sources, calculations, figures and dates, but which nevertheless permit a reasonable approximation. For the pivotal phase of the purges – 1937–8 – we can turn to a text written by an ad hoc commission appointed by the Central Committee Presidium in 1963, and chaired by I. M. Shvernik.
According to some sources, the years 1937–8 saw the arrest of 1,372,392 people, of whom 681,692 were shot. The figures given by Khrushchev to the Central Committee plenum in 1957 were somewhat different: more than 1,500,000 arrested and 680,692 shot (the differences stem from the criteria employed by KGB statisticians). Sources for 1930–53 indicate 3,778,000 people arrested, of whom 786,000 were executed.1
Other data are concerned exclusively with the category of ‘administrative repression’ – i.e. handled by non-judicial bodies: the NKVD’s ‘special concilium’ in Moscow and its equivalents at lower administrative levels, the aforementioned ‘troikas’ responsible for most of the ravages of 1937–8. They virtually had carte blanche and, as we have seen, pressed the Kremlin to increase their quotas. The NKVD’s special concilium, set up on 10 July 1934, was an exceptionally industrious body: it condemned 78,989 people in 1934, 267,076 in 1935, 274,607 in 1936, 790,665 in 1937, and 554,258 in 1938. If they were able to do such a ‘great job’, it was because they dispensed with procedural niceties. In most instances, the accused was not even present. A case might be dealt with in ten minutes, resulting in sentences of between five and twenty-five years in a camp or even immediate execution. Most of the victims were accused of ‘counter-revolutionary activities’ – hence the brevity of the trials and the quantity of executions.
The data produced by NKVD researchers themselves afford another source. The ‘historic’ Central Committee decree of 2 July 1937, which we have already mentioned, instructed the NKVD to destroy ‘enemy groups’. Quotas for arrests were fixed in advance and transmitted to administrative regions for fulfilment, just like grain procurement campaigns. These quotas were subdivided into categories of crimes, and the sentences likewise prescribed. Thus, category 1 included 72,950 people to be arrested and executed, the total being divided between the different regions. Category 2 numbered 186,000 people to be transported to camps. Additional forestry camps were to be opened for this purpose, but rapidly became overcrowded. The whole procedure was truly Kafkaesque: the number of enemies was stipulated in a quota, but it was permissible to exceed it. It only remained to name the culprits.
The figures for annual arrests are as follows: on 1 January 1937, 820,881; on 1 January 1938, 996,367; and on 1 January 1939, 1,317,195. Of these totals, the labour camps received 539,923 prisoners in 1937 and 600,724 in 1938. That year, the influx into the Gulag peaked. In fact, 837,000 detainees were released from camps and colonies following a reexamination of their cases under Beria’s authority during a ‘rectification campaign’ ordered by Stalin. In 1939, however, the repression resumed afresh and on 1 January 1940 the number of inmates of camps and colonies reached 1,979,729, most of them common-law prisoners. Political prisoners, condemned under the ‘counter-revolutionary’ articles of the criminal code, accounted for 28.7 per cent of the total, or 420,000-plus persons. The number of inmates was also increased by the transfer of prisoners from recently annexed territories, to whom we must add the people arrested following these annexations. The application of the decrees issued in 1940 and 1941 punishing theft and unauthorized departure from the workplace also helped to swell the numbers.2
The havoc wrought by the purges, particularly among party and state cadres, is not easy to assess numerically. A valuable source on turnover among personnel in the Railways Commissariat in 1937–8 indicates that 75 per cent of managers and technical officials (senior and middle-ranking cadres) were replaced in the course of these years.3 These data cannot be extrapolated to the whole machinery of government, but they permit us to speak of a haemorrhage of cadres, even in the strategically most sensitive agencies.
The consequences of the terror were felt throughout the economy, the bureaucracy, the party, and in cultural life. By mid-1938, the human, economic and political damage and its cost were such that a change of course was essential and almost predictable. A ‘normalization’ was indicated and was conducted in the usual fashion: someone had to be ‘named’ as the culprit responsible for the ‘deviations’. This was not a problem, since there were no innocents in this affair. The turn was signalled by the dismissal of Yezhov from his post as NKVD head and his replacement by his deputy, Beria, on 25 November 1938. Yezhov was arrested in April 1939 and accused – as the standard formula dictated – of being ‘at the head of a counter-revolutionary organization’. He was executed in February 1940, in accordance with the same script as that of 1936 when the then NKVD head, Yagoda, was eliminated. Those in the know could begin to speculate about the next occurrence of the same scenario.
In the context of the ‘new line’, several hundred thousand people were released from the Gulag, but these were primarily common-law criminals, not political prisoners.4 After the Eighteenth Party Congress, some victims of the purges were rehabilitated. Once again, however, this cosmetic operation involved only a limited number of people relative to the scale of the purges – just enough for Stalin to be able to appear as the one who restored justice and punished the guilty. Such benevolence was further displayed somewhat later by the arrest and partial massacre for a change of numerous NKVD agents, accused of going too far by attacking party members and innocent citizens. Between 22,000 and 26,000 of them joined their victims in camps or graves. No one knows whether this cohort included the worst of them. Still, it must have reassured many people. Khlevniuk maintains that in the course of 1939 self-confidence inside leadership circles returned: salaries were increased and arrests were now subject to more stringent rules. Moreover, the perceptible downplaying of Yezhov’s agency after his demise persuaded party cadres that they had regained ground from the security apparatus, even if a number of regional and city party bosses were purged together with unworthy chekists for having deviated from the right path.
Khlevniuk also surmises that the retreat from mass terror resulted from Stalin’s sense that he had attained his prosaic objective: rejuvenating the party’s cadres. (We might note that the pedagogy employed to bring on young talent was rather unusual.) At the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, Stalin announced that between April 1934 and March 1939 more than 500,000 cadres had been recruited to breathe new energy into state and party administration, particularly at the top levels. At the beginning of 1939, of the 32,899 post-holders forming part of the nomenklatura administered by the Central Committee (from People’s Commissar to party official assigned to important duties by the Central Committee), 15,485 had been appointed in 1937–8. This figure is interesting, for it involves the post-purge cohort: the so-called ‘Stalin promotion’. The rapidity of their advancement was phenomenal, given that they had often not finished their studies. Among them were those who would lead the USSR after Stalin’s death.
After the loss of human life, the heaviest losses were suffered by the economy. Appointed immediately after the terror, new cadres found nothing but empty desks and chairs in their offices: obviously, their predecessors were not present to introduce them to their jobs. Inexperienced, many of the new arrivals were afraid to take the slightest initiative. The purges had destroyed discipline and undermined productivity (even if many in Russia insisted on asserting the opposite). Government agencies were now full of all sorts of morally dubious types. To remedy this situation, some ‘honest specialists’ were rehabilitated (assuming they were still alive) and released from the camps. Among them were military figures – future generals and marshals, scholars, strategy experts, engineers – like Rokossovsky, Meretskov, Gorbatov, Tiulenev, Bogdanov, Kholostiakov, Tupolev, Landau, Miasishchev, and so on. The outstanding ballistic-rockets expert Korolev had to wait until 1944, and many others remained in detention until 1956. But those who regained their freedom in 1939 represented quite a contingent. Some of them were not in a fit condition immediately after their release to resume work and thus could not help repair the damage inflicted on the army by the destruction of the high command and many of the lower ranks. In the summer of 1941, 75 per cent of field officers and 70 per cent of political commissars had been in post for less than a year, so that the core of the army lacked the requisite experience in commanding larger units. That the Red Army was scarcely battle-ready was amply demonstrated by the disastrous war with Finland in 1940. The highly accurate analysis of this ‘victorious defeat’ conducted by military and political leaders laid bare lamentable shortcomings in leadership, training, the officer corps, and coordination between different army corps. Yet the main culprit – Stalin – was never mentioned.
The dementia of 1937–8 would never be repeated on the same scale, even if it continued at a more modest level. In 1939, the party recruited a million new members and everything seemingly returned to ‘normal’.
This abrupt retreat from mass terror – signalled, as we have said, by the elimination of Yezhov, who took the blame – was never acknowledged as such. Thereafter, a whole series of manoeuvres sought to camouflage it. It was claimed that the bulk of saboteurs had been eliminated, as had those who were guilty of excesses in combating them. Even so, the propaganda against ‘enemies of the people’ persisted, clamorous and insidious by turns, for the regime did not want it to be thought that enemies had altogether evaporated. The state’s terrorist machinery and activity remained veiled in secrecy, even from otherwise well-informed top officials. The Politburo was imposing a ‘rectification’, but in a manner that bordered on the absurd, since it did it clandestinely, while denying that it was doing so.
Some now declassified documents from the presidential archive lift a small corner of the veil.5 In the minutes of its 9 January 1938 session, the Politburo instructed Vyshinsky to inform the Prosecutor General that it was no longer acceptable to dismiss someone from a job just because a relative had been arrested for counter-revolutionary crimes. This was a move in a ‘liberal’ direction, putting an end to the unspeakable suffering endured by many. But even if the relative in question was ‘rehabilitated’ – in other words, even if the state admitted its error – no one was to know of the regime’s admission. An example: on 3 December 1939, the Supreme Court suggested to Stalin and Molotov that the revision of sentences for counter-revolutionary crimes should be carried out via a legal procedure – a welcome change! – but dealt with by a tribunal sitting in some simplified format. In other words, even if the tribunals acknowledged that errors had been made, everything was to be done to ensure that public attention was not drawn to such cases. In a similar vein, on 13 December 1939 Pankratov, USSR Prosecutor General, suggested to Stalin and Molotov that relatives should not be informed of the revision of sentences in cases where the victims had already been executed.
The government was likewise fearful that the methods used during interrogation would become public. To avoid this, Beria wrote to Stalin and Molotov on 7 December 1939 to say that defence lawyers and witnesses should not be admitted during ‘preliminary investigations’ (instigated to review illegal proceedings), ‘in order to prevent disclosure of the way in which these investigations are conducted’. Even in this top-secret document, however, Beria was resorting to a ruse. What he actually meant was this: in order to prevent disclosure of what the current investigations revealed about the earlier ones. The very fact that they had involved torturing people (as ordered by Stalin personally), and forcing them to sign ‘confessions’, was never mentioned even in the most confidential exchanges. To put that on paper was to run the risk of some official coming across it and blurting it out. In other words: do not tell anyone that the enemies and saboteurs, above all those who were executed, were innocent; do not disclose how their confessions were extracted; or the fact that someone just rehabilitated has already been shot.
Two further Politburo decisions point up the limits of the ‘retreat’.6 On 10 July 1939 it instructed those in charge of NKVD camps to abolish the reductions in sentence that common-law criminals, and some political prisoners, could receive for good conduct. Sentences were henceforth to be served in full. Similarly, when it came to political charges, there was no question of abandoning a hard line. The infamous Chairman of the Supreme Military Tribunal, Ulrikh, proposed to Stalin and Molotov that in cases involving ‘right-wing Trotskyists, bourgeois nationalists and espionage’, defence lawyers should not be allowed to see the files or appear in court. Those who had been selected for such categorization continued to be targeted and suffered the same treatment at the hands of investigators as before. Without such methods, how could a ‘right-wing Trotskyist’ be flushed out?
So the veil of secrecy was to remain tightly drawn. Lawyers were excluded from tribunals, even if the law required their presence. Nothing was to transpire concerning the regime’s errors, methods, or targets – even if they were actually in the process of being reviewed.
The paradoxes are unavoidable: the much-bruited struggle against enemies of the people was in fact a conspiracy organized by a government that knew full well it was committing illegalities on a mass scale. And this government intended to keep secret the errors it had made. Some changes were, of course, needed to reassure the deeply demoralized and frightened elites. They were sometimes made in public, sometimes through more discreet channels. Not unlike the persecutions, however, the ‘retreat’ had to be controlled. Getting the balance right required great skill. Stalin’s close lieutenants admired his mastery – or said they did.
Stalin had reason to be satisfied after the purges. Now that most of the old cadres had been exterminated, he finally possessed a new system: his own. Many of those who had failed to be transported by admiration for him, or who considered him a traitor to the cause, had been destroyed. The ruling elite had been almost entirely renewed; society as a whole now seemed subdued. All of Stalin’s acolytes, old and new, were cowed; the Politburo as a ruling body was virtually stripped of power. As we have seen, Stalin henceforth worked with a small group of sometimes just four people. The others had no information about ‘secret matters’ – and most things were secret. The party’s leaders, hitherto briefed on a whole range of issues by regular bulletins, stopped receiving them. And the Central Committee, although sometimes summoned to ‘debate’ questions that had already been settled, lost its importance as well.