1. Feliks Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym (Moscow, 1991), 410–12.
2. Memo from V. Abakumov to Stalin, 17 July 1947, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (hereafter RGANI), fond 89, opis’ 18, delo 12.
3. Tivel’s story is contained in his party file in RGASPI, f. 589, op. 3, d. 1466.
4. See, for example, Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York, 1990), chapter 17.
5. For examples see Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford, 1990), and two books by Oleg V. Khlevniuk, 1937: Stalin, NKVD i sovetskoe obshchestvo (Moscow, 1992), and Politbiuro: Mekhanizmy politicheskoi vlasti v 1930-e gody (Moscow, 1996).
6. H. R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays (New York, 1968), 114–15.
7. The best work on this subject is Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929: A Study in History and Personality (New York, 1973).
8. Technically, the word nomenklatura refers to the list of positions, appointment to which requires confirmation by a superior party body. Thus the nomenklatura of the Central Committee was the list of high positions reserved for Central Committee confirmation. With time, however, the word became a collective noun referring to the ruling stratum of the party itself.
9. James Hughes, “Patrimonialism and the Stalinist System: The Case of S. I. Syrtsov,” Europe-Asia Studies 48 (1996), 551. See also Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 303–4.
10. Inside the party, this was considered to have been the ultimate and unforgivable sin of the Trotskyist opposition of the 1920s.
11. To take only one local example, in See Rabochii put’ (Smolensk), October 30, 1936, 1.
12. For a discussion of “transcripts” see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, 1990).
13. Ibid., 18.
14. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995).
15. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977), 193–94.
16. For such considerations see Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, Intimacy and Terror (New York, 1995), and Jochen Hellbeck, “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Polubnyi (1831–1939),” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 44 (1996), 344–73. See also Hellbeck’s review of Kotkin’s book ibid., 456–63.
17. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006), 19. The preceding two paragraphs rely upon and condense Yurchak’s excellent survey of John Austin’s and Judith Butler’s theoretical considerations about the nature of speech.
18. For a discussion of breakdowns in the party chain of command, see J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (New York, 1985).
19. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 190.
20. J. Arch Getty, “Afraid of Their Shadows: The Bolshevik Recourse to Terror, 1932–1938,” in Stalinismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Neue Wege der Forschung, ed. Manfred Hildermeier and Elisabeth Mueller-Luckner (Munich, 1998).
21. For an analysis of this literature and its limitations see Getty, Origins, 211–21.
22. See Walter G. Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service (New York, 1939), 181, 183, 241, 242, and Alexander Orlov, The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes (New York, 1953), 178, 310.
1. On the Civil War see Diane P. Koenker, William G. Rosenberg, and Ronald G. Suny, eds., Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History (Bloomington, Ind., 1989); Peter Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920 (Berkeley, 1977). An unsurpassed early work is William Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, vol. 2 (London, 1935).
2. See Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921 (Oxford, 1989); Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–1921 (New York, 1985).
3. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (New York, 1975); Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, 1918–1929 (New York, 1992); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington, Ind., 1991).
4. Robert H. McNeal, Stalin: Man and Ruler (Oxford, 1988).
5. See Graeme Gill, The Origins of the Stalinist Political System (Cambridge, 1990), for the development of party organization.
6. The classic work on Trotsky is still Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1959).
7. Robert V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (New York, 1969).
8. See the memoirs of Stalin’s daughter: “Nikolai Bukharin, whom everyone adored, often came for the summer;” Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend (New York, 1967), 31.
9. See Cohen, Bukharin, and Michal Reiman, The Birth of Stalinism: The USSR on the Eve of the Second Revolution, trans. George Saunders (Bloomington, Ind., 1987).
10. Rykov told this to the American newspaper reporter William Reswick; W. Reswick, I Dreamt Revolution (Chicago, 1956), 254.
11. Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization (London, 1968); R. W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture, 1929–1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (Oxford, 1994).
12. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (New York, 1979).
13. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, 1990), 57. See also Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977), chapter 4, for a discussion of “symbolic capital.”
14. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 453, ll. 53–61, 70–74, 77–78, 87–92. Two puns are involved here: 1) a pun on Kamenev’s name: kamen’ means “stone;” and 2) the expression: derzhat’ kamen’ za pazukhoi, that is, “to nurse a grievance, to harbor a grudge.”
15. Scott, Domination, 49, 58.
16. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 453, ll. 169–71, 175–86.
17. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 1002, l. 218 (from the “special folders” of the Politburo).
18. For information on Riutin, see Boris A. Starkov, Martem’ian Riutin: Na koleni ne vstanu (Moscow, 1992). See also Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 6, 103–15, and 1990, no. 3, 150–62.
19. “Ko vsem chlenam VKP(b),” in Starkov, Martem’ian Riutin, 252–59.
20. The committee, which was also the central leadership group of the Union, consisted of Old Bolsheviks M. S. Ivanov, V. N. Kaiurov, P. A. Galkin, and P. P. Fedorov. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1990, no. 8, 200.
21. For this rumor, which appears to have originated in Paris, see Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite: The Letter of an Old Bolshevik and Other Essays (New York, 1965). Although this story is unsubstantiated, we do know of another incident eighteen months earlier, when a Politburo majority “strongly opposed” and overruled a Stalin motion for lenient punishments of Central Committee dissidents. The majority were for harsher punishments. See RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, ll. 199, 218.
22. Published in I. V. Kurilova, N. N. Mikhailov, and V. P. Naumov, eds., Reabilitatsia: Politicheskie protsessy 30–50-x godov (Moscow, 1991), 334–443.
23. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1972), 217.
24. In 1934 Stalin quoted from Trotsky’s Biulleten at the 17th Party Congress; XVII s’’ezd Vsesoiuznoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii(b). 26 ianvaria–10 fevralia 1934g. Stenografichesky otchet (Moscow, 1934), 32. In 1935 N. I. Yezhov quoted extensively from it to a closed meeting of the Central Committee; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 542, ll. 73–76.
25. For Trotsky’s analysis of the Stalin regime see Robert H. McNeal, “Trotskyist Interpretations of Stalinism,” in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1977), 30–52.
26. Trotsky Papers (Exile Correspondence), Houghton Library, Harvard University, 15821. The contents of these letters have not been preserved; Trotsky’s archive contains only the postal receipts.
27. Ibid., 8114 (emphases in the original).
28. Ibid., 13095. See also J. Arch Getty, “Trotsky in Exile: The Founding of the Fourth International,” Soviet Studies 38 (1986), 24–35.
29. Trotsky Papers; excision in the original document.
30. George Breitman and Bev Scott, eds., Writing of Leon Trotsky [1932–1933] (New York, 1972), 34.
31. Trotsky Papers, 4782.
32. Ibid., T-3522.
33. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 577, l. 14.
34. See Sarah Davies, “‘Us Against Them’: Social Identities in Soviet Russia, 1934–41,” Russian Review 56 (1997), 70–89.
35. RGALI (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art), f. 1518, op. 4, d. 22, ll. 27, 28; ANSPb (St. Petersburg Archive of the Academy of Sciences), f. 717, op. 1, d. 16, l. 48. We are indebted to Gábor Rittersporn for these citations.
36. There is a copy in RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 68.
37. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 106, ll. 56, 56ob, 58–59.
38. See Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, for a discussion of peasant hostility to Stalin and the regime.
39. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 106, l. 17; op. 42, d. 90, ll. 10–11.
40. See Merle Fainsod, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), chapter 19, “Censorship: A Documented Record.”
41. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 272, ll. 10–16.
42. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 965, ll. 30, 63–64. See also high-level concern with libraries in Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 5446, op. 22a, d. 339, ll. 5–12.
1. T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917–1967 (Princeton, 1968), 52.
2. For a discussion of this problem, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (New York, 1994), chapter 3.
3. For the best analysis of these developments, see Nabuo Shimotomai, “Springtime for the Politotdel: Local Party Organizations in Crisis,” Acta Slavica Iaponica 4 (1986), 1034; see also J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (New York, 1985), chapter 2.
4. See the documentary account in Neizvestnaia Rossiia, no. 1, 1992, 56–128.
5. Smirnov’s arraignment before the Politburo was transcribed: L. P. Koshelova, L. A. Rogovaia, and O. V. Khlevniuk, Stenogrammy zasedanii Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 1923–1938. Tom 3, 1928–1938 (Moscow, 2007), 551–676.
6. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 511, ll. 137–39. Typescript with Smirnov’s corrections.
7. Sean Wilentz, Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics Since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1985), 6.
8. See Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York, 1994). On the Stalin cult, see Graeme Gill, “Personality Cult, Political Culture, and Party Structure,” Studies in Comparative Communism 17 (1984), 111–21; J. Arch Getty, “The Politics of Stalinism,” in The Stalin Phenomenon, ed. Alec Nove (New York, 1992), 104–63.
9. Clifford Geertz, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power,” in Local Knowledge (New York: Basic, 1991), 124. For Geertz, “the easy distinction between the trappings of rule and its substance becomes less sharp, even less real” the closer they are examined.
10. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, 1990), 57. For a treatment of the function of apology as a “remedial ritual” or “remedial interchange,” see Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New York, 1971), 113–16.
11. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1972), 226.
12. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 511, ll. 205–14. Typescript with Akulov’s corrections.
13. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 511, ll. 168–78. Typescript with Shkiriatov’s corrections.
14. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 70, l. 58.
15. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 511, ll. 12–22. Typescript with Rudzutak’s corrections.
16. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 511, ll. 215–20. Typescript with Bukharin’s corrections.
17. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 511, ll. 117–19. Typescript.
18. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 511, ll. 260–66. Typescript with Voroshilov’s corrections.
19. For this view see Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford, 1990); Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York, 1990); A. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, The Time of Stalin: Portrait of Tyranny (New York, 1980).
20. For this argument see J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (New York, 1985); J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning, eds., Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (New York, 1993); Gábor T. Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR, 1933–1953 (Reading, 1991); Robert Weinberg, “Purge and Politics in the Periphery: Birobidzhan in 1937,” Slavic Review 52 (1993), 13–27.
1. Stalin had personally nominated Bukharin to the Izvestia position in 1934. See RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 939, l. 2.
2. See John Barber, “Stalin’s Letter to Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya,” Soviet Studies 28 (1976), 21–41, and George M. Enteen, “Writing Party History in the USSR: The Case of E. M. Yaroslavsky,” Journal of Contemporary History 21 (1986), 321–39. On the activities of Soviet censors both locally and nationally, see Merle Fainsod, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 365–77, and Marianna Tax Choldin and Maurice Friedberg, The Red Pencil: Artists, Scholars, and Censors in the USSR (Boston, 1989).
3. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 453, ll. 169–71, 175–86.
4. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 874, l. 15.
5. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 219–20.
6. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 87, ll. 27–28.
7. For copies of these letters and orders, see Istochnik, no. 4, 1996, 137–44.
8. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 961, l. 16.
9. For background, see Peter H. Solomon, Jr., Soviet Criminal Justice Under Stalin (Cambridge, 1996); Robert Sharlet, “Stalinism and Soviet Legal Culture,” in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1977), 155–79; Gábor T. Rittersporn, “Soviet Officialdom and Political Evolution: Judiciary Apparatus and Penal Policy in the 1930s,” Theory and Society 13 (1984), 211–37; and Eugene Huskey, “Vyshinsky, Krylenko, and the Shaping of the Soviet Legal Order,” Slavic Review 46 (1987), 414–28.
10. See Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice, chapters 3 and 4.
11. Pravda, 2 March 1930. See also Stalin’s “Reply to Kolkhoz Comrades,” Pravda, 3 April 1930.
12. I. V. Stalin, Sochninenia (Moscow, 1951), 13: 72.
13. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 840, l. 9.
14. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 13, ll. 99–100.
15. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice, 117.
16. L. A. Paparde, Novoi etap klassovoi bor’by i revoliutsionnaia zakonnost’ (Novosibirsk, 1933), 4–26.
17. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice, 223, 225.
18. See GARF, f. 3316, op. 2, d. 1534, ll. 87, 112; d. 1754, ll. 21, 26; f. 9474, op. 16, d. 48, ll. 15, 17, 35–36, 42; d. 79, ll. 6, 16. See also the discussions in V. P. Danilov and N. A. Ivnitsky, eds., Dokumenty svidetel’stvuiut, 1927–32: Iz istorii derevni nakanune i v khode kollektivizatsii 1927–1932 gg. (Moscow, 1989), 40–46, and J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn, and V. N. Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” American Historical Review 98 (1993), 1017–49.
19. See Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford, 1990), appendix.
20. Gordon W. Morrell, Britain Confronts the Stalin Revolution: Anglo-Soviet Relations and the Metro-Vickers Crisis (Waterloo, Ontario, 1995), 150.
21. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 922, l. 16. Some exceptions were made. Troikas in the Far Eastern Territory could continue passing death sentences. Moreover, in the following period, the Politburo continued to authorize death sentences by troikas on a case-by-case period during specified periods. See, for example, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 15, ll. 2, 27.
22. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 922, ll. 50–55. Printed. This document was first described by Merle Fainsod in Smolensk Under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 185–88, from one of the circular copies found in the Smolensk Archive. Two months earlier, in March 1933, the Politburo had ordered a reduction in prison populations and normalization of rations for prisoners. V. N. Khaustov et al., eds. Lubianka. Stalin i VChK-GPU-OGPU-NKVD. Ianvar’ 1922–dekabr’ 1936 (Moscow, 2003), 410–13.
23. GARF, f. 5446, op. 15a, d. 1073, l. 35.
24. See Glenn G. Morgan, Soviet Administrative Legality: The Role of the Attorney General’s Office (Stanford, 1962).
25. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 939, l. 2; Izvestiia, 11 July 11 1934.
26. See the documents in the Politburo’s “special folders,” RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 1043, ll. 33–39.
27. Izvestiia, 22 December 1934.
28. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 16, ll. 88–89.
29. B. A. Viktorov, Bez grifa “sekretno.” Zapiski voennogo prokurora (Moscow, 1990), 139–40.
30. Khaustov et al., Lubianka, 814.
31. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 943, l. 10; op. 3, d. 954, l. 38.
32. See J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (New York, 1985), chapter 2, for a description of party purges. See also T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917–1967 (Princeton, 1968), 204, for a discussion of these nonpolitical targets.
33. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 922, ll. 50–55.
34. P. N. Pospelov et al., Istoriia Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, tom. 4, chast’ 2 (Moscow, 1971), 283.
35. XVII s’’ezd, Vsesoiuznoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii(b). 26 ianvaria–10 fevralia 1934g. Stenografichesky otchet (Moscow, 1934), 33–34.
36. Ibid., 32–34.
37. See, for example, Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite: The Letter of an Old Bolshevik and Other Essays (New York, 1965), 43, 48–50.
38. See, for example, Conquest, Great Terror.
39. J. Arch Getty, “State and Society Under Stalin: Constitutions and Elections in the 1930s,” Slavic Review 50 (1991), 18–36.
40. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice, chapter 5. For a discussion of Stalinist state building, see J. Arch Getty, “Les bureaucrats bolcheviques et l’État stalinien,” Revue des Études Slaves 64 (1991), 1–25.
41. Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (New York, 1985), 281–84.
42. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 1033, ll. 61–62.
43. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 165, d. 47, l. 3.
44. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice, 166.
45. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 1052, l. 153.
46. See Getty, “State and Society.” For another view, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (New York, 1994), 281.
1. Robert Conquest, Stalin and the Kirov Murder (New York, 1989), 4.
2. Ibid. See also Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York, 1990), chapter 12. Anastas Mikoian, writing years later, wondered whether Stalin’s relatively lenient treatment of NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda after the assassination meant that Stalin and Yagoda had conspired to kill Kirov. A. I. Mikoian, Tak bylo: razmyshleniia o minuvshem (Moscow, 1999), 316–17. On the other hand, Yagoda probably avoided taking major blame because two months before the assassination he had complained about the Leningrad NKVD’s incompetence and had tried to shake up its leadership. V. N. Khaustov et al., eds., Lubianka. Stalin i VChK-GPU-OGPU-NKVD. Ianvar’ 1922–dekabr’ 1936 (Moscow, 2003), 569–71.
3. “Vokrug ubistva Kirova,” Pravda, 4 November 1991, and A. Yakovlev, “O dekabr’skoi tragedii 1934 goda,” Pravda, 28 January 1991.
4. See, for example, the accounts of persecution of the opposition in Izvestiia TsK KPSS, nos. 7 and 9, 1989.
5. Adam Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (New York, 1973), 375–88.
6. In 1956 Khrushchev formed a commission chaired by N. Shvernik to investigate the Kirov murder. It “found nothing against Stalin…. Khrushchev refused to publish it—it was of no use to him.” Feliks Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym (Moscow 1991), 353.
7. Francesco Benvenuti, “Kirov in Soviet Politics, 1933–1934,” Soviet Industrialization Project Series no. 8, University of Birmingham (England), 1977. See also Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro: Mekhanizmy politicheskoi vlasti v 1930-e gody (Moscow, 1996), 118–25.
8. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 7, 1989, 114–21.
9. See the analysis ibid., and in J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning, eds., Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (New York, 1993), 44–46.
10. “Vokrug ubistva Kirova,” Pravda, 4 November 1991.
11. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s “Iron Fist” (New Haven, 2008), chapter 7.
12. See J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (New York, 1985), appendix; J. Arch Getty, “The Politics of Repression Revisited,” in Getty and Manning, Stalinist Terror, 40–62.
13. S. V. Kulashov, O. V. Volobuev, E. I. Pivovar, et al., Nashe otechestvo. chast’ II. (Moscow, 1991), 310; Boris Starkov, “Ar’ergardnye boi staroi partiinoi gvardii,” in Oni ne molchali, ed. A. V. Afanas’ev (Moscow, 1991), 215; Oleg V. Khlevniuk, 1937: Stalin, NKVD i sovetskoe obshchestvo (Moscow, 1992), 46.
14. Anna Kirilina, Rikoshet, ili skol’ko chelovek bylo ubito vystrelom v Smol’nom (Saint Petersburg, 1993).
15. Matthew E. Lenoe, The Kirov Murder and Soviet History (New Haven, forthcoming, 2010).
16. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 7, 1989, 69, and no. 1, 1990, 39.
17. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 955, l. 24; Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 7, 1989, 75. When the Politburo announced NKVD staff changes after the Kirov assassination, it included an unusual formulation “obligating” Yagoda to report back to the Politburo in three days on fulfillment of the orders. See RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 955, l. 24.
18. Pravda, 23 December 1934 and 16 January 1935; Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 7, 1989, 70.
19. See Leningradskaia pravda, 6, 8, 11, 12, 18 December 1934, for reports.
20. Leningradskaia pravda, 20 March 1935.
21. Getty and Naumov, Yezhov, 139–40; Khaustov et al., Lubianka, 670–71, 821.
22. Khaustov et al., Lubianka, 592–93.
23. V. N. Khaustov, “Deiatel’nost’ organov bezopasnosti NKVD SSSR (1934–1942),” Ph.D. diss., Akademiia FSB, Moscow, 1997, 38.
24. RGASPI, f. 617, op. 1, d. 118, ll. 25, 34. Yezhov’s letter to Stalin was his own idea. Typically, reports and memos written to Stalin in response to his request or order contain phrases like “in response to your order” or something similar, wording that is absent in Yezhov’s letter. Yezhov’s campaign against Yagoda is treated in detail in Getty and Naumov, Yezhov.
25. Yagoda deeply resented Yezhov’s meddling in his bureaucratic bailiwick. He complained to his subordinates about it and told them not to talk business with Yezhov without his, Yagoda’s, permission. When one of them did so anyway, Yagoda exploded: “He screamed at me, demanding to know why I had not sought permission from him” before talking to Yezhov. “He told me that Yezhov was not the Central Committee, that his orders were not directives, and that only he— Yagoda—had the right to deal with the Central Committee on questions of the NKVD’s work.” When Agranov told his boss Yagoda that a certain measure should be coordinated with Yezhov, Yagoda exploded at him too, “If you are not the boss in your own house, then go ahead and coordinate your work with him.” See RGASPI, f. 17, op, 2, d. 598, ll. 2–4, 12–18, ll. 23–26, 29–35, 41–42. See also I. V. Kurilova, N. N. Mikhailov, and V. P. Naumov, eds., Reabilitatsiia: Politicheskie protsessy 30–50-x godov (Moscow, 1991), 153–54, and Yezhov’s statement at his own trial in Moskovskie novosti, no. 5, 1994.
26. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 8, 1989, 95–115. Printed.
27. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 174, ll. 11–14, 74–75; d. 175, ll. 73, 76; d. 176, ll. 13, 125, 127, 128, 133, 135.
28. “Anti-Soviet agitation” could include anything from printing subversive leaflets to telling dangerous political jokes.
29. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 1, 1990, 38–58.
30. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 7, 1989, 85, no. 1, 1990, 39.
31. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 1, 1990, 54.
32. This, at least, was Molotov’s memory of him. Chuev, Sto sorok besed, 438.
33. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 805, l. 16. For Yezhov’s early career, see Getty and Naumov, Yezhov.
34. The verifications operations had to do with interagency economic agreements and investigation of customs fraud. See RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 916, l. 6; d. 913, l. 1.
35. Kaganovich, his apparent patron, was chairman of the KPK.
36. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 948, l. 36; d. 951, l. 1.
37. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 7, 1989, 65–93. See also Khaustov, et al., Lubianka, 599–669.
38. For background on the Yenukidze affair, see Iurii Zhukov, Inoi Stalin. Politicheskie reformy v SSSR v 1933–1937 gg. (Moscow, 2003), chapter 6.
39. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 542, ll. 55–86. Typed.
40. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 542, ll. 125–41.
41. Yezhov’s remarks and implied criticism of Yagoda’s NKVD were part of his long-term campaign to discredit Yagoda.
42. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 542, ll. 175–78.
43. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 542, ll. 158–59.
44. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 547, l. 69.
45. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 544, l. 22. Printed stenographic report.
46. Khaustov et al., Lubianka, 663–69.
47. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 42, d. 136, l. 87.
48. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 965, l. 30. For the list, see ll. 63–64.
49. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 970, l. 50.
50. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 374, l. 108; d. 974, l. 137.
51. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 965, l. 75.
52. See reports of Party Control Commission inspectors in RGANI, f. 6, op. 1, d. 5, ll. 90, 95, 98–99, 165–66; and d. 59, l. 186.
53. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 179, ll. 34–77, 253–68. Note: syntax in original is incoherent.
54. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 171, ll. 62–67ob.
55. Smolensk Archive file 499, ll. 308–9.
56. See Getty, Origins, chapters 2 and 3, for background on this and other purges. These new data on NKVD participation in the proverka revise the earlier conclusions there, based on other archives, that the police played little role in the operation.
57. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 177, ll. 20–22. This number is almost certainly incomplete. A subsequent internal Central Committee memo of February 1937 inexplicably gave a figure of 263,885 proverka expulsions (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 278, l. 2). It was not uncommon in this period for the same agencies to give wildly varying figures for party membership.
58. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 184, ll. 60–66.
59. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 179, ll. 34–77.
60. See Stalin’s speech on “fulfillment of decisions” at the 17th Party Congress in early 1934: XVII s’’ezd Vsesoiuznoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii(b). 26 ianvaria–10 fevralia 1934g. Stenografichesky otchet (Moscow, 1934), 23–35.
61. For example, see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 71, d. 34, ll. 114–15.
62. Yezhov frequently noted, in 1935 but not later, that allowing party committees to purge themselves was a good idea. See RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 77, ll. 4 ff.
63. The most publicized case was the Central Committee’s rebuke of the Saratov party organization. See RGASPI, f. 17, op. 114, d. 585, ll. 1–2 for the Orgburo meeting on Saratov. The resulting press campaign is in Pravda, 12 July 1935; Partiinoe stroitel’stvo, no. 13, July 1935, 44–45; and A. A. Zhdanov, Uroki politicheskikh oshibok Saratovskogo kraikoma (Moscow, 1935). The subject would come up again the following year.
64. See Yezhov’s and Stalin’s remarks to the June 1936 plenum of the Central Committee; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 572, ll. 67–75.
65. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 278, l. 7.
66. Several thousand persons who had been expelled for oppositional activities were deported from Moscow. See Khaustov et al., Lubianka, 724–35. Oleg V. Khlevniuk has written that eventually more than two hundred thousand expelled party members were placed under NKVD surveillance: 1937: Stalin, NKVD i sovetskoe obshchestvo (Moscow, 1992), 57. It is difficult to imagine how this could have been possible.
67. For the report, see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 181, ll. 102–5.
68. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 182, ll. 93–94; d. 183, l. 166.
69. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 576, ll. 67–70. Ellipses in the original.
70. For examples, see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 183, l. 166; d. 181, ll. 102–5, and GARF, f. 9415, op. 5, d. 487, ll. 90–91.
1. “O kolichestve osuzhdennykh po delam organov NKVD za 1930–1936 gody,” GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 4157, ll. 201–5. For analysis of these data, see J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn, and V. N. Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” American Historical Review 98 (1993), 1017–49. See also Robert Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934–1941 (New Haven, 1996), 9–12.
2. See Eugene Huskey, “Vyshinsky, Krylenko, and the Shaping of the Soviet Legal Order,” Slavic Review 46 (1987), 414–28; J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (New York, 1985), 199–201; Robert H. McNeal, “The Decisions of the CPSU and the Great Purge,” Soviet Studies 23 (1971), 177–85. See also Peter H. Solomon, Jr., Soviet Criminal Justice Under Stalin (Cambridge, 1996), part 3.
3. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 976, l. 17.
4. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 980, l. 9.
5. For examples, see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 21, d. 2206, ll. 228–29.
6. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, 1990), 50.
7. Pravda, 5 June 1936. For security reasons, it was customary for Pravda to announce Central Committee plenums only after they had been completed.
8. See, for example, Pravda, 7–10 June 1936.
9. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 568, ll. 135–36.
10. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 572, l. 67.
11. It seems that the plenum did in fact produce a resolution criticizing the regional secretaries for mass expulsions, although none was published at the time and none can be located in the archives. It was only quoted in part two years later: Pravda, 19 June 1938.
12. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 572, ll. 73–75.
13. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 568, ll. 13, 141, 154–55.
14. Here Stalin seems to have changed his mind once again on Yenukidze. The previous September he had written to Kaganovich that NKVD materials suggested that Yenukidze was “not one of us,” chuzhdyi nam chelovek. RGASPI, f. 81, op. 3, d. 100, ll. 92–93.
15. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 572, ll. 67–73.
16. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 568, ll. 165–68.
17. Voprosy istorii, no. 2, 1995, 9 (stenographic report of the February–March 1937 plenum). At the time of this writing, no archival version of the full stenographic report of this plenum is available to researchers. It is serialized in the journal Voprosy istorii; subsequent references to that journal are to this published plenum transcript, unless otherwise indicated.
18. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 562, l. 2; f. 17, op. 2, d. 598, l. 34; Voprosy istorii, no. 2, 1995, 18.
19. Scott, Domination, 55–56.
1. Olberg may have been a double agent or a police informer, secretly spying on the Trotskyist organizations on behalf of the NKVD. To date, no documents have been found to support or disprove this theory.
2. Voprosy istorii, no. 10, 1994, 21, 26 (stenographic report of the February–March 1937 plenum).
3. Voprosy istorii, no. 2, 1995, 17 (stenographic report of the February–March 1937 plenum); Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 8, 1989, 85.
4. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 9, 1989, 35. The so-called Kirov Law of 1 December 1934 was passed immediately after Kirov’s assassination and mandated abbreviated legal proceedings and immediate application of death sentences, without appeal, to those convicted of terrorism.
5. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 8, 1989, 83.
6. Molotov dismissed this idea out of hand because the accused would have correctly found such an offer preposterous: “They were not fools, after all.” Feliks Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym (Moscow 1991), 404.
7. See Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (New York, 1941).
8. “Zasluzhennyi prigovor,” 4 August 1936; RGASPI, f. 671, op. 1, d. 172, ll. 497, 525.
9. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 8, 1989, 91–92, 102.
10. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 8, 1989, 100–115; printed.
11. This first show trial was hardly a “bolt from the blue,” as some émigré commentators, far from the events they described, wrote. See Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford, 1990), p. 150, citing the apocryphal “Letter of an Old Bolshevik.”
12. Trotsky Papers (Exile Correspondence), Houghton Library, Harvard University, 13095.
13. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 8, 1989, 92; no. 9, 1989, 42.
14. The transcript of the trial was published as Sudebnyi otchet po delu Trotskistko-Zinov’evskogo terroristicheskogo tsentra (Moscow, 1936), and was translated into English as The Case of the Trotskyist-Zinovievite Center (New York, 1936). For examples of other such sentences from the “special folders” (osobye papki) of the Politburo, see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 16, ll. 1, 62, 64.
15. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 8, 1989, 93.
16. RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 271, l. 21. For other examples, see op. 21, d. 2195, ll. 114, 114ob.
17. See Roberta T. Manning, “The Soviet Economic Crisis of 1936–1940 and the Great Purges,” in Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, ed. J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning (New York, 1993), 116–41.
18. Voprosy istorii, no. 10, 1995, 8.
19. Voprosy istorii, no. 3, 1995, 3–15.
20. For examples, see speeches by Malenkov, Mekhlis, Beria, and Kudriavtsev to the February–March 1937 plenum. Voprosy istorii, nos. 5–6, 1995, 10; no. 7, 1995, 19–21; no. 10, 1995, 10–15.
21. Smolensk Archive file 116/154e, l. 88.
22. See Malenkov’s speech to the February–March 1937 Plenum of the Central Committee. Voprosy istorii, no. 10, 1995, 7.
23. See J. Arch Getty, “Pragmatists and Puritans: The Rise and Fall of the Party Control Commission in the 1930s,” Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 1208 (1997), 1–45.
24. See Stalin’s concluding speech in Voprosy istorii, no. 3, 1995, 3–15, nos. 11–12, 1995, 11–22. His remarks were published as a pamphlet called Mastering Bolshevism (New York, 1937).
25. For a fuller discussion of this problem, see Gábor T. Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR, 1933–1953 (Reading, 1991).
26. Voprosy istorii, nos. 5–6, 1995, 4.
27. Quoted in V. N. Khaustov et al., eds. Lubianka. Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD, 1937–1938 (Moscow, 2004), 92.
28. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 981, l. 58. The Politburo did not meet to approve this resolution. Drafted by Kaganovich and later signed by Stalin (who was on vacation at the time), the Politburo resolution was approved by polling the members. See Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 5, 1989, 72.
29. See Gábor T. Rittersporn, “The Omnipresent Conspiracy: On Soviet Imagery of Politics and Social Relations in the 1930s,” in Getty and Manning, Stalinist Terror, 99–115.
30. For examples of such far-fetched accusations from this era, see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 71, d. 35, ll. 6–15, and d. 74, ll. 2–3.
31. For Yagoda’s claims see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 598, ll. 1–18.
32. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s “Iron Fist” (New Haven, 2008), chapter 9, uses materials, including rough drafts of letters to Stalin from Yezhov’s archive, to show his psychology and techniques of manipulation.
33. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 729, ll. 81–84.
34. Nikita Khrushchev, The Secret Speech Delivered to the Closed Session of the 20th Congress of the CPSU (London, 1956), 35–36. The “four years behind” referred to the formation of the Zinoviev-Trotsky bloc and the simultaneous appearance of the Riutin Platform in late 1932. See also the discussion of Yagoda’s fall in J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (New York, 1985), 119–26.
35. A. M. Larina, Nezabyvaemoe (Moscow, 1989), 269–70.
36. RGASPI, f. 85, op. 27, d. 93, ll. 12–13. Handwritten.
37. See Pravda, 20 December 1937, and 20 let VchK-OGPU-NKVD (Moscow, 1938).
38. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 71, d. 42, ll. 1–8.
39. Voprosy istorii, no. 2, 1994, 22.
40. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 9, 1989, 36–37; RGASPI, f. 85, op. 1, d. 136, ll. 47–48.
41. Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin i Ordzhonikidze: Konflikty v Politbiuro v 30-e gody (Moscow, 1993).
42. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 85, d. 186.
43. Larina, Nezabyvaemoe, 327–28.
44. Voprosy istorii, nos. 11–12, 1995, 14–16.
45. For an example, see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2 d. 614, l. 214ob.
46. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 573, ll. 23, 26, 35, 36.
47. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 573, l. 33.
48. RGASPI, f. 85, op. 29, d. 156, ll. 5–12. Typed text without corrections.
49. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 272, ll. 54–55.
50. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 272, ll. 76–78.
51. Letter by I. Kuchkin to N. I. Yezhov, 11 August 1936. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 272, l. 41.
52. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 5, 1989, 72–73. Those to be reinterrogated included Nikolai Uglanov, former district party secretary in Moscow, and M. Riutin.
53. Ibid., 71.
54. Ibid., 74, 84.
55. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 575, ll. 11–19, 40–45, 49–53, 57–60, 66–67. From the uncorrected shorthand minutes.
56. In the 1970s an unrepentant Molotov defended the terror in precisely the same prewar terms. See Chuev, Sto sorok besed, 390, 413, 432.
57. Using the informal ty.
58. Bukharin’s Speech to the December 1936 CC Plenum, 4 December 1936. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 575, ll. 69–74, 82–86, 122–26, 144, 159–62, 165–67, 169–72, from the uncorrected shorthand minutes; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 576, ll. 67–70, from uncorrected “excerpts” pages of the minutes.
59. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 5, 1989, 75–76.
60. Ibid., 76. In the versions of the plenum available to researchers in RGASPI, this part of the transcript has been removed.
61. Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend (New York, 1967), 31.
62. Chuev, Sto sorok besed, 463.
1. Pravda, 29 March and 1 April 1937.
2. For Andreev’s speech to the plenum of the Azov–Black Sea Territorial Committee, 6 January 1937, see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 21, d. 2196, ll. 10–13, 16–17, 22–23, 32–40. Typed, without corrections.
3. Resolution of the Azov–Black Sea Territorial Committee on Removal of Comrade Sheboldaev, 5 January 1937. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 21, d. 2214, l. 5.
4. B. P. Sheboldaev’s speech to the Plenum of the Azov–Black Sea Territorial Committee, January 6, 1937. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 21, d. 2196, ll. 5–9. Typed text, unsigned and uncorrected.
5. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 21, d. 2196, ll. 266–70.
6. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 21, d. 2196, l. 279.
7. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 21, d. 2214, l. 9.
8. RGASPI, f. 558, op 1, d. 5023, ll. 1–17. Manuscript, apparently in Stalin’s hand.
9. Pravda, 6 March 1937. For the stenographic report of Zhdanov’s speech and the discussion of it, see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 612, ll. 3–42. For less than enthusiastic comments from CC members, see the remarks of Kosior (l. 19), Khataevich (l. 21), and Mirzoian (ll. 27–29). See also Voprosy istorii, no. 10, 1995, 21.
10. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 612, l. 42.
11. Smolensk Archive, f. 111, ll. 2–66; f. 321, ll. 87–96. See also the discussion in J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (New York, 1985), 151–53.
12. Voprosy istorii, no. 10, 1995, 3–4.
13. Voprosy istorii, nos. 11–12, 1995, 21.
14. For a discussion of the Nikolaenko affair, see Oleg V. Khlevniuk, 1937: Stalin, NKVD i sovetskoe obshchestvo (Moscow, 1992), 102–9.
15. RGANI, f. 6, op. 6, d. 23, ll. 1–2, files of the Party Control Commission.
16. Pravda, 1 April 1937; Voprosy istorii, no. 3, 1995, 5.
17. RGASPI, f. 73, op. 2, d. 4.
18. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 21, d. 2214, ll. 16–18, 26; op. 3. d. 989 (Protocol no. 51 of the Politburo, 20 June–31 July 1937, no. 39).
19. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 4, 1989, 76, 84. Six months later, at Stalin’s order, Astrov was released from prison and given an apartment and a job in historical research. Later, in the Khrushchev period, Astrov stated that Yezhov himself had “confirmed” to Astrov that the rightists were in fact terrorists. As Astrov said in 1957, “This confirmation removed my moral impetus to resist the demands of the investigators.” I. V. Kurilova, N. N. Mikhailov, and V. P. Naumov, eds., Reabilitatsia: Politicheskie protsessy 30–50-x godov (Moscow, 1991), 259.
20. See the account in Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin i Ordzhonikidze: Konflikty v Politbiuro v 30-e gody (Moscow, 1993), 111–29.
21. Voprosy istorii, nos. 2–3, 1992, 6.
22. Ibid., 43.
23. Voprosy istorii, nos. 4–5, 1992, 16.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 22.
26. Ibid., 24, 32–34.
27. Voprosy istorii, nos. 6–7, 1992, 4, 16–17.
28. Ibid., 1992, 23–24, 30.
29. Voprosy istorii, nos. 8–9, 1992, 3, 8–9.
30. Ibid., 1992, 17–19.
31. Ibid., 1992, 20, 25, 29.
32. Voprosy istorii, no. 10, 1992, 6–7.
33. Voprosy istorii, no. 2, 1993, 3–10, 17.
34. Ibid., 26, 27, 33.
35. See XVII s’’ezd Vsesoiuznoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii(b). 26 ianvaria–10 fevralia 1934g. Stenografichesky otchet (Moscow, 1934), 435–36, 648–50, and the accounts in Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society Under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941 (Princeton, 1978), 302, and Eugene Zaleski, Stalinist Planning for Economic Growth, 1933–1953 (Chapel Hill, 1980), 115–29.
36. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 577, l. 4.
37. Voprosy istorii, no. 1, 1994, 12–13.
38. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 612, vols. 1 and 2.
39. Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro: Mekhanizmy politicheskoi vlasti v 1930-e gody (Moscow, 1996), 210.
40. Istochnik, no. 3, 1994, 75.
41. Beria told this to Bukharin’s widow. A. Larina, Nezabyvaemoe (Moscow, 1989), 178.
1. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 9, 1989, 36. See also Robert Conquest, Inside Stalin’s Secret Police: NKVD Politics, 1936–39 (Stanford, 1985).
2. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 114, d. 622, l. 13.
3. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 577, ll. 9–10. From the printed stenographic report.
4. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 598, ll. 2–4, 12–15, 17–18. Typed, corrected minutes.
5. Agranov was not arrested until mid-1937. Three weeks after the plenum, he addressed an NKVD conference on the sins of Molchanov. See Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 8, 1989, 84.
6. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 598, ll. 23–26, 29–35, 41, 42. Typed, corrected minutes.
7. Voprosy istorii, no. 2, 1995, 21.
8. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 614, ll. 103, 119.
9. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 985, ll. 3, 34.
10. See J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (New York, 1985), chapter 6, for an analysis of the 1937 party elections.
11. See, for example, Roberta T. Manning, “The Great Purges in a Rural District: Belyi Raion Revisited,” in Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, ed. J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning (New York, 1993), 168–97.
12. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 114, d. 623, l. 5.
13. Istochnik, no. 3, 1994, 73.
14. The most authoritative account of the “military conspiracy” based on still secret archives is in Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 4, 1989, 42–80.
15. See V. A. Zolotarev, ed., Prikazy narodnogo komissara oborony SSSR, 1937–21 iiunia 1941g. (Moscow, 1994), 11–13.
16. See V. N. Khaustov et al., eds., Lubianka. Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD, 1937–1938 (Moscow, 2004), 202–9.
17. Feliks Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym (Moscow, 1991), 418, 442.
18. Ivo Banac, ed., The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949 (New Haven, 2003), 11 November 1937, 70.
19. RGASPI, f. 39, op. 2, d. 45, ll. 105–7. This was relayed to Stalin in March 1937 from the NKVD.
20. A. Larina, Nezabyvaemoe (Moscow, 1989), 27.
21. Boris A. Starkov, “Narkom Yezhov,” in Getty and Manning, Stalinist Terror, 35, based on documents in the KGB archive.
22. Chuev, Sto sorok besed, 390, 413.
23. See, for example, A. Svetlanin (pseud. V. Likhachev), Dal’nevostochnyi zagovor (Frankfurt, 1953); Walter Krivitsky, I Was Stalin’s Agent (New York, 1939).
24. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 4, 1989, 50.
25. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 615, l. 68.
26. Ibid., ll. 79–79ob.
27. Roger Reese, “The Red Army and the Great Purges,” in Getty and Manning, Stalinist Terror, 198–214.
28. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 989, l. 60.
29. See RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 614, for numerous Politburo orders to arrest Central Committee members and other high-ranking party leaders.
30. See Khaustov et al., Lubianka, for many of these.
31. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 614, ll. 1–4.
32. See Roberta T. Manning, “The Soviet Economic Crisis of 1936–1940 and the Great Purges,” in Getty and Manning, Stalinist Terror, 116–41.
33. For an example of such an incident when Kaganovich visited Smolensk, based on transcripts of local party documents, see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 21, dd. 3966–4092.
34. RGASPI, f. 73, op. 2, d. 19, ll. 1–106.
35. RGANI, f. 89, op. 48, d. 9, l. 1.
36. RGASPI, f. 73, op. 2, d. 19, ll. 6, 44.
37. RGASPI, f. 73, op. 2, d. 19, ll. 6–7, 27, 106.
38. V. Danilov, R. Manning, and L. Viola, eds., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni. Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie. Dokumenty i materialy v 5 tomax, 1927–1939, vol. 5 (Moscow, 2004), 306–8.
39. RGANI, f. 89, op. 48, d. 12, l. 1–2. For local press coverage see Rabochii put’ (Smolensk), 29 August, 6–8, 20–24, 25–27 September, 2, 27 October, 17–18 November. See also Sheila Fitzpatrick, “How the Mice Buried the Cat: Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian Provinces,” Russian Review 52 (1993), 299–320.
40. RGANI, f. 89, op. 48, d. 20, ll. 1–2.
41. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 628, ll. 115–19.
42. The only two members said to have protested were G. Kamensky and O. Piatnitsky, either at the June 1937 or June 1938 Central Committee plenums. See V. I. Piatnitskii, Zagovor protiv Stalina (Moscow, 1998). Unfortunately, no record of their remarks can be found in available archives.
43. Chuev, Sto sorok besed, 463.
44. Ibid., 393.
45. TsA FSB collection of documents, and published in A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 1917–1960 (Moscow, 2000), 433. Although many people who were not kulaks fell victim to this operation, we shall here retain the title “kulak operation.” This was the contemporary usage in party and police documents and serves to distinguish it from other mass terror campaigns.
46. For space considerations, and because these “national operations” had different targets, causes, and procedures, they are not treated here. See Terry Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” Journal of Modern History 70 (1998), 22; A. E. Gur’ianov, ed., Repressii protiv poliakov i pol’skikh grazhdan (Moscow, 1997), 33; I. L. Shcherbakova, ed., Nakazannyi narod: Repressii protiv rossiiskikh nemtsev (Moscow, 1999), 44.
47. The quoted phrase is from Peter H. Solomon, Jr., Soviet Criminal Justice Under Stalin (Cambridge, 1996), chapter 3.
48. TsA FSB, collection of documents.
49. See J. Arch Getty, “State and Society Under Stalin: Constitutions and Elections in the 1930s,” Slavic Review 50 (1991), 18–36; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (Oxford, 1994), 212–13, 282–85.
50. See Danilov, Manning, and Viola, Tragediia, 79–86, 90–91, 114–16, 172–73, 240–41, 521–26.
51. Voprosy istorii, no. 5, 1993, 14.
52. See Steven Merritt, “The Great Purges in the Soviet Far East, 1937–1938,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Riverside, 2000.
53. Voprosy istorii, no. 5, 1993, 18 (Vareikis); no. 6, 1993, 5, 6 (Eikhe).
54. Voprosi istorii, no. 6, 1993, 8.
55. Ibid., 23–24 (Mirzoian).
56. Ibid., 27 (Kabakov).
57. See Gábor T. Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR, 1933–1953 (Reading, 1991), for this argument in detail.
58. Aleksandr Eliseev, Pravda o 1937 gode. Kto razviazal “bol’shoi terror”? (Moscow, 2008).
59. Troikas, or three-person tribunals, had existed during the Civil War to provide drumhead justice to enemies of the regime on an expedited basis without usual judicial procedure. They had been revived during collectivization to deal out mass sentences of exile or death to opponents of the collective farms. Their reestablishment in 1937 reflected what the regime thought was a crisis atmosphere in the country. For a survey of the history of extrajudicial organs, including troikas, in Soviet history see Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 10, 1989, 80–82.
60. Danilov, Manning, and Viola, Tragediia, 258; Khaustov et al., Lubianka, 230.
61. Danilov, Manning, and Viola, Tragediia, 319.
62. Stalin gave up on contested elections only in the autumn of 1937. See Getty, “State and Society,” 31–32.
63. “Polozhenie o vyborakh Verkhovnyi Sovet SSSR,” Pravda, 2 July 1937, 1; “Ob antisovetskikh elementakh,” Politburo resolution, 2 July 1937; Trud, 4 June 1992, 1.
64. This account of the mass operations is presented in greater detail in J. Arch Getty, “‘Excesses Are Not Permitted’: Mass Terror Operations in the Late 1930s and Stalinist Governance,” Russian Review 16 (2002), 112–37. I am grateful to the Russian Review for permission to quote from that article. For details of the execution of the mass operations, see also Mark Iunge and Rolf Binner, Kak terror stal “bol’shim.” Sekretnyi prikaz No. 00447 i tekhnologiia ego ispolneniia (Moscow, 2003).
65. A. F. Stepanov, Rasstrel po limitu. Iz istorii politicheskikh repressii v TASSR v gody “ezhovshchiny” (Kazan, 1999), 14.
66. For Bukharin’s letter, see Istochnik, 1993/0, 23–25, and an English version in J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven, 1999), 556–60.
67. Plenum of the Central Committee, VKP(b) 11–12 October 1937, stenogram, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 625, ll. 1–10, 38, 49, 55, 63, 70.
68. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice, 127.
69. Lynne Viola, “The Campaign to Eliminate the Kulak as a Class, Winter, 1929–1930: A Reevaluation of the Legislation,” Slavic Review 45 (1986), 503–24, was the first to document the inclination of local leaders to use force in the countryside regardless of Moscow’s current policy.
70. Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 55.
71. Trud, no. 88, 4 June 1992, 1, 4.
72. Calculated from Politburo protocols (special folders): RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, dd. 21–23; TsA FSB, collection of documents; Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG, 97–104; V. M. Samosudov, Bol’shoi terror v Omskom Priirtyshe, 1937–1938 (Omsk, 1998), 160–61, 241; Nikolai Il’kevich, “Rasstreliany v Viaz’me: novoe o M. N. Goretskom,” Krai Smolenskii 1–2 (1994), 129–44; David Shearer, “Crime and Social Disorder in Stalin’s Russia: A Reassessment of the Great Retreat and the Origins of Mass Repression,” Cahiers du Monde Russe 39 (1998), 139–41; Moskovskie novosti, no. 25, 21 June 1992, 18–19; Izvestiia, 3 April 1996; O. V. Khlevniuk, “Les mechanismes de la ‘Grande Terreur’: Des années 1937–1938 au Turkmenistan,” Cahiers du Monde Russe 39 (1998), 204–6. Nikita Petrov believes that additional permissions were given orally or by telegrams and puts the excess shooting figure at about thirty thousand (personal communication). Such evidence is not currently available to researchers.
73. See Khlevniuk, “Les mechanismes,” 204.
74. See Roberta T. Manning, “Massovaia operatsiia protiv ‘kulakov i prestupnykh’ elementov: apogei Velikoi Chistki na Smolenshchine,” in Stalinizm v Rossiiskoi provintsii: Smolenskie arkhivnye dokumenty v prochtenii zarubezhnykh i Rossiiskikh istorikov, ed. E. V. Kodin (Smolensk, 1999), 239–41; Il’kevich, “Rasstreliany v Viaz’me,” 138.
75. Mikhail Shreider, NKVD iznutri: zapiski chekista (Moscow, 1995), 80.
76. Khlevniuk, “Les mechanismes,” 203.
77. Thus in another telegram “Supplementing Operational Order No. 447,” deputy NKVD chief Frinovskii warned local police: “Sentences of condemned persons can be announced [to them] only for the second category [sentences to camp]. Do not announce [death sentences] of the first category [to the accused]. I repeat, do not announce.” Memorandum no. 247 of the Secretariat, Narkom NKVD, TsA FSB, f. 100, op. 1, por. 5, l. 275.
78. See, for example, the breakdowns for Omsk in Samosudov, Bol’shoi terror, 160–61, 241, and in Stepanov, Rasstrel po limitu, 51–55, 71–74.
79. The Politburo had authorized persecution of families of oppositionists and of “enemies of the people” convicted by military tribunals and military collegia, but not under the kulak operation of order no. 447. See Politburo resolution “Vopros NKVD” of 24 May 1937, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 21, l. 45; “Operativnyi prikaz No. 486: Ob operatsii po repressirovaniiu zhen i detei izmenikov rodiny,” 15 August 1937, TsA FSB, f. 100, op. 1, por. 1, ll. 224–35. These harsh regulations had been softened already by 1938. See “Tsirkuliar NKVD SSSR No. 106: O detiakh repressirovannykh roditelei,” 20 May 1938, TsA FSB, f. 100, op. 1, por. 1, ll. 248, and “Prikaz NKVD SSSR No. 689: O poriadke aresta zhen izmennikov rodinii,” 17 October 1938, TsA FSB, f. 100, op. 1, por. 1, ll. 258 –59.
80. TsA FSB, collection of documents.
81. The mass operations were formally halted on 17 November 1938 by a joint order of the Politburo and the Council of People’s Commissars, signed by Stalin and Molotov: “O prokurature SSSR,” Moskovskie novosti, 21 June 1992, 19. Accompanying directives restored procuratorial sanction for all arrests: “Iz protokola No. 65 zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK VKP(b): Postanovlenie Soveta Narodnykh Komissarov SSSR i Tsentral’nogo Komiteta VKP(b),” RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 1003, ll. 85–87. The Politburo decision halting all troika cases and “other simplified procedures” had been taken in a 15 November 1938 secret resolution: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 24, l. 62.
82. “Prikaz No. 762: O poriadke osushchestvleniia postanovleniia SNK SSSR I TsK VKP(b) ot 17 noiabria 1938 goda,” 26 November 1938, TsA FSB, f. 100, op. 1, por. 1, ll. 260–64.
83. Vyshinskii to Stalin and Molotov, 21 May 1939, RGASPI, f. 82, op. 2, d. 897, l. 28.
84. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998). Scott discusses Stalinist collectivization in these terms, arguing that it failed because as a “centralized high modernist solution,” it could not encompass the complexities and peculiarities of agriculture and thus failed either to achieve the state’s goal of scientifically advanced farming or to put food on the table (see 193–222). Scott notes that other goals such as space exploration, transportation planning, flood control, or aircraft manufacturing were more susceptible to centralized high modernist treatments. On the other hand, it is not at all clear that these efforts differed from collectivization in degree of complexity. Collectivization was different from them insofar as it was implemented by a quasi-military and violent campaign that produced more chaos than centralization or legibility in the end. It may be that efforts to achieve standardization, centralization, control or concerted national effort are doomed to failure if implemented by their antithesis, a wild and uncontrollable military offensive whose wounds and arbitrariness last forever.
85. For a similar example of detailed instructions followed by chaos in an earlier mass operation, see Lynne Viola, “A Tale of Two Men: Bergavinov, Tolmachev, and the Bergavinov Commission,” Europe-Asia Studies 52 (2000), 149–66.
86. See Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 194–98; Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (London, 1968), 373; Joseph Edward Davies, Mission to Moscow: A Record of Confidential Dispatches to the State Department, Official and Personal Correspondence, Current Diary and Journal Entries, Including Notes and Comment up to October, 1941 (New York, 1941). Molotov made this point in his conversations with Feliks Chuev: Chuev, Sto sorok besed, 390, 393, 413–14. Bukharin also connected the terror “with the pre-war situation,” Istochnik, 1993/0, 23–25. Rumors among those arrested in the mass operations included the thought that war had started and the regime was neutralizing suspicious elements: Stepanov, Rasstrel po limitu, 14. On the other hand, the first steps were taken to stop the terror in autumn 1938, precisely when the Munich conference, the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, and the Polish crisis produced the most direct security threat to the USSR.
87. J. Arch Getty, “Afraid of Their Shadows: The Bolshevik Recourse to Terror, 1932–1938,” in Stalinismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Neue Wege der Forschung, ed. Manfred Hildermeier and Elisabeth Mueller-Luckner (Munich, 1998), 169–92.
88. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (New York, 1998), xxviii.
89. Banac, Diary of Dimitrov, 7 November 1937, 65.
90. Chuev, Sto sorok besed, 415.
91. Banac, Diary of Dimitrov, 11 February 1937, 52.
92. According to Molotov: Chuev, Sto sorok besed, 423.
93. Ibid., 410–12.
94. Ibid., 413–14, 393.
1. J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn, and V. N. Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” American Historical Review 98 (1993), 1022–23, based on NKVD archives found in GARF.
2. Robert H. McNeal, Stalin: Man and Ruler (New York, 1988), 210–11.
3. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York, 1990), 248–49.
4. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Workers Against Bosses: The Impact of the Great Purges on Labor-Management Relations,” in Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity, ed. Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 311–40.
5. Pravda, 19 January 1938. A partial English version can be found in Robert H. McNeal, Resolutions and Decisions of the CPSU (Toronto, 1974), 3: 188–95. This resolution quoted the June 1936 CC resolution on excessive expulsions.
6. Pravda, 7 August 1938. See also T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917–1967 (Princeton, 1968), 214–18. Rigby called the January 1938 plenum “the turning of the tide” in party expulsions.
7. RGANI, f. 89, op. 48, d. 19, l. 1.
8. See the files in RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, dd. 327–29 on Postyshev, which bear Andreev’s name.
9. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 327, ll. 1, 2, 23–27; d. 329, ll. 31–36.
10. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 329, ll. 43–45; d. 327, l. 27.
11. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 782, l. 3.
12. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 1180, l. 57–59.
13. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 639, ll. 14–16, 20–22, 32–33. From the printed stenographic report.
14. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 640, ll. 1–2, and f. 17, op. 3, d. 996, l. 4.
15. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 114, d. 642, ll. 10.
16. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 996, ll. 34–35.
17. See RGANI, f. 89, op 73, d. 41, ll. 4–11; Moskovskie novosti, no. 25, 21 June 1992, 19.
18. RGANI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 124, ll. 1–2.
19. RGANI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 149, l. 1.
20. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 12, 1989, 100.
21. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 996, l. 60; op. 114, d. 642, l. 3.
22. An English edition appeared as Report of the Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyists” (Moscow, 1938).
23. Feliks Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym (Moscow, 1991), 404.
24. See Conquest, Great Terror, chapter 11; Robert C. Tucker and Stephen F. Cohen, eds., The Great Purge Trial (New York, 1965).
25. After a lengthy delay, Bukharin’s wife was arrested. She spent years in exile and in labor camps.
26. For a discussion of Radek’s interesting testimony, see Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York, 1990), 394–409.
27. Chuev, Sto sorok besed, 401, 404.
28. GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 4157, ll. 201–5.
29. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 998, ll. 21, 37, 40–41.
30. Boris A. Starkov, “Narkom Yezhov,” in Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, ed. J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning (New York, 1993), 36, based on NKVD documents not currently available to researchers. For an earlier view of Zhdanov as a Yezhov opponent, see J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (New York, 1985), 119–21, 199–201.
31. For the preceding few years Beria had been first secretary of the Transcaucasus Party Committee, but in the Civil War and 1920s he was a professional chekist.
32. Starkov, “Narkom Yezhov,” 37–38.
33. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 1002, l. 37.
34. Although they continued in the Far East. Moskovskie novosti, 21 June 1992, 19.
35. Ibid.; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 1003, ll. 85–87.
36. Zhuravlev’s report has not been found in the archives.
37. V. N. Khaustov et al., eds., Lubianka. Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD, 1937–1938 (Moscow, 2004), 662–63.
38. Starkov, “Narkom Yezhov,” 38.
39. Khaustov et al., Lubianka, 662–63.
40. RGASPI, f. 671, op. 1, d. 265, ll. 29–41.
41. See Istoricheskii arkhiv, 1995, nos. 5–6, 25, for Stalin’s calendar showing the meeting with Yezhov.
42. Pravda, 22 January 1939.
43. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 1003, ll. 34–35, 82–84; d. 1004, l. 11; d. 1008, l. 59.
44. Quoted in Khaustov et al., Lubianka, 629.
45. Chuev, Sto sorok besed, 399.
46. A copy of a memorandum in Stalin’s hand approving an increase in limits for execution appeared in Moskovskie novosti, 21 June 1992, 19.
47. Chuev, Sto sorok besed, 437.
48. Ibid., 401.
49. Khaustov et al., Lubianka, 663–64.
50. RGANI, f. 89, op. 18, d. 2, l. 1.
51. Chuev, Sto sorok besed, 437.
52. Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System,” 1048–49, based on NKVD archives.
53. RGANI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 3, ll. 1–4. No answer has been found in the archives.
54. Peter H. Solomon, Jr., Soviet Criminal Justice Under Stalin (Cambridge, 1996), 261–63.
55. Chuev, Sto sorok besed, 395.
1. Gennadii Bordiugov, ed., Tiuremnye rukopisi N. I. Bukharina, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1966).
2. A. M. Larina, Nezabyvaemoe (Moscow, 1989), 269–70.
3. Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro: Mekhanizmy politicheskoi vlasti v 1930-e gody (Moscow, 1993), 206, quoting uncited text from Yezhov’s archive.
4. Istochnik, 1993/0, 23–25. All emphases in the text are by Bukharin himself. Bukharin addresses Stalin throughout by the familiar “ty.”
5. The memoranda have not been found in the archives.
6. Alluding metaphorically to a political romance.
7. Stalin’s late wife.
8. Nadya was Bukharin’s first wife, Anyuta his current wife.
9. According to Yu. Murin’s accompanying notes, after the introductory “If,” Bukharin has crossed out the words “You have decided in advance.”
10. Moskovskie novosti, no. 5, 30 January 1994.
11. Even though the data are inexact, Yezhov is wildly exaggerating here. According to one calculation, Yezhov arrested 1,220 NKVD officials through 1937, the height of his purge of Yagoda’s people. V. N. Khaustov et al., eds., Lubianka. Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD, 1937–1938 (Moscow, 2004), 664. According to another source, the number of NKVD security personnel arrested from mid-1937 to August 1938 was 2,274.
12. A. S. Zhurbenko was one of Yezhov’s department heads at NKVD who was also head of the Moscow province NKVD at the time of his arrest in November 1938. He was shot ten days after Yezhov’s statement.
1. For the use of the Party Control Commission, see J. Arch Getty, “Pragmatists and Puritans: The Rise and Fall of the Party Control Commission in the 1930s,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 1208 (1997), 1–45.
2. A. Eliseev, Pravda o 1937 gode. Kto razviazal ‘bol’shoi terror’? (Moscow, 2008).
3. The various contradictory versions of Yezhov’s draft are in RGASPI, f. 671, op. 1, d. 273.
4. See RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 547, l. 69, and d. 544, l. 22 (on Yenukidze); Voprosy istorii, no. 2, 1995, 21 (on Yagoda); RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 577, ll. 30–33, and Voprosy istorii, no. 1, 1994, 12–13 (Stalin’s remarks on Bukharin).
5. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 1002, l. 218.
6. Lazar M. Kaganovich, Pamiatnye zapiski (Moscow, 1996), 557.
7. See Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (New York, 1985), 44, 265.
8. Ibid., 281–85.
9. J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn, and V. N. Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” American Historical Review 98 (1993), 1017–49.
10. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York, 1972), 248–49, 252–54, 284–85.
1. For the most significant high estimates see S. Rosefielde, “An Assessment of the Sources and Uses of Gulag Forced Labour, 1929–56,” Soviet Studies 33 (1981), 51–87, and “Excess Mortality in the Soviet Union: A Reconstruction of Demographic Consequences of Forced Industrialization, 1929–1949,” Soviet Studies 35 (1983), 385–409; Robert Conquest, “Forced Labour Statistics: Some Comments,” Soviet Studies 34 (1982), 434–39, and The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford, 1990), 484–89.
Lower estimates can be found in R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft, “Steven Rosefielde’s ‘Kliuvka,’” Slavic Review 39 (1980), 603; S. G. Wheatcroft, “On Assessing the Size of Forced App_Aentration Camp Labour in the Soviet Union, 1929–56,” Soviet Studies 33 (1981), 265–95, and “Towards a Thorough Analysis of Soviet Forced Labour Statistics,” Soviet Studies 35 (1983), 223–37; Jerry Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 176–77; Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver, “Demographic Analysis and Population Catastrophes in the USSR,” Slavic Review 44 (1985), 513–36.
2. The data discussed here and presented in the text of this book are analyzed in depth in J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn, and V. N. Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Prewar Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” American Historical Review 98 (1993), 1017–49.
3. See GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1139, l. 88, for what is likely to be the record number of prison inmates at the beginning of 1938 and GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 4157, ll., 202, 203–5, for figures on exile, which may nevertheless contain a certain number of people banished in the wake of collectivization.
4. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny (New York, 1980), 212; Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, rev. ed. (New York, 1989), 455; Moskovskie novosti, 27 November 1988; O. Shatunovskaia, “Fal’sifikatsiia,” Argumenty i fakty, no. 22, 1990; Conquest, Great Terror, 485–86.
5. GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 4157, ll. 203, 205. A handwritten note on this document tells us that 30 percent of those sentenced between 1921 and 1938 “upon cases of the security police” were “common criminals,” and their number is given as 1,062,000. As the report mentions 2,944,879 convicts, this figure constitutes 36 percent; 30 percent would amount to about 883,000 persons (l. 202).
6. GARF, f. 9492, op. 6, d. 14, l. 14.
7. This is calculated on the basis of GARF, f. 9492, op. 6, d. 14, l. 29, by subtracting the number of “counterrevolutionaries” indicated on l. 14. The actual figure is nevertheless somewhat smaller, since the data on death sentences include “political” cases.
8. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 455; Moskovskie novosti, November 27, 1988; O. Shatunovskaia, “Fal’sifikatsiia.”
9. Pravda, 14 February 1990, 2.
10. Pravda, 22 June 1989, 3; Kommunist, 1990, no. 8, 103; GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 4157, l. 202.
11. “Spravka o kolichestve osuzhdennykh po delam organov NKVD” (GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 4157, l. 202). Judiciary statistics mention 4,387 death sentences pronounced by ordinary courts in 1937–38, but this figure includes also a certain number of “political” cases (GARF, f. 9492, op. 6, d. 14, l. 29).
12. This was the year of a heavy-handed application of a particularly harsh decree against the theft of public property (the “Law of August 7, 1932”), and 5,338 people were condemned to death under its terms in 1932 and a further 11,463 in 1933 (GARF, f. 9474, op. 1, d. 76, l, 118; d. 83, l. 5). Not all these people were executed (d. 97, ll. 8, 61).
13. At least 69,566 deaths were recorded in prisons and colonies between January 1935 and the beginning of 1940 (GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 2740, ll. 52, 60, 74). The other data are 288,307 for strict regime camps and 726,030 for people executed “upon cases of the political police.”
14. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 278, ll. 8, 10; RGANI (the Central Committee Archive) f. 77, op. 1, d. 1, l. 8.
15. Spravochnik partiinogo rabotnika, vyp. 18, Moscow, 1978, l. 366. This figure corresponds to that calculated by a Western scholar ten years earlier; one wonders whether the Soviet editors did not decide to rely more on the painstaking research of this scholar than on their own records. See Thomas H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917–1967 (Princeton, 1968), 52.
16. J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (New York, 1985), 58–64, 86–90.
17. See, for example, GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1138, l. 6.
18. See, for example, GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1139, ll. 88–89; d. 1140, l. 161.
19. See, for example, Robert Conquest, Letter to the Editor, American Historical Review 99 (1994), 1038–40, and 1821.
20. See, for example, GARF, f. 8131sch, op. 27, d. 70, ll. 104, 141; f. 9414, op. 1, d. 20, ll. 135, 149.
21. “Vestnik Arkhiva Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii: I.1995,” Istochnik, no. 1, 1995, 117–30.
22. V. V. Tsaplin, “Arkhivnye materialy o chisle zakliuchennykh v kontse 30-kh godov,” Voprosy istorii, nos. 4–5, 1991, 157–60.
23. See Oleg V. Khlevniuk, “Prinuditel’nyi trud v ekonomike SSSR, 1929–1941 gody,” Svobodnaia mysl’, no. 13, 1992, 73–84.
24. See E. M. Andreev, L. E. Darskii, T. L. Khar’kova, Istoriia Naseleniia SSSR 1920–1959 gg., vypusk 3–5, chast’ 1 of Ekspress-informatsiia, seriia: Istoriia statistiki (Moscow, 1990), 31, 37; V. N. Zemskov, “Ob uchete spetskontingenta NKVD vo vsesoiuznykh perepisiakh naseleniia 1937 i 1939 gg.,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, no. 2, 1991, 74–75.