Stalin and His Hangmen (52 page)

Stalin and Ezhov therefore decided that the percentage of ‘enemies’ sentenced to death rather than forced labour must rise from 0.5 to 47 per cent. In 1937 and 1938 the NKVD’s own records show that 1,444,923 persons were ‘convicted’ of counter-revolutionary crimes, and of these 681,692 were shot. The flow to the camps was halved, but processing so many prisoners – who had to be beaten into incriminating others and thus provide further fodder for the NKVD – was still unmanageable. The NKVD ran out of paper to record sentences and executions.

Prisoners could be shot expeditiously – 200 in a night was the average in Leningrad, and experienced butchers could manage this number single-handed – but disposing of the corpses, given the shortage of bulldozers and open spaces in cities, was harder. Sometimes victims were taken to areas where NKVD officers had dachas; they dug their own graves, on which pine trees would be planted and wooden chalets built. From December 1937 the NKVD stopped sending its corpses to hospital morgues to be processed with those who had died naturally. Three times as many bodies now had to be disposed of daily in Leningrad. The NKVD took over eleven hectares of forestry land at Pargolovo near the closely guarded Finnish border, where 46,771 corpses were buried.

Thanks to the efforts of a few dedicated men and women, we now
have full knowledge of what happened in Leningrad and in parts of Moscow. The
Leningrad Martyrology
gives details of the 47,000 men and women of the city and the province who perished at the hands of the NKVD over eighteen months.
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None of the arrests resulted from an investigation. The target set by Ezhov for Leningrad had been 4,000 shot and 10,000 sent to the camps over four months from July 1937. Ezhov instructed all NKVD headquarters that all former kulaks, common criminals, Germans, Poles and those repatriated from Manchuria after the Japanese seizure were to be rounded up and results reported to him every few days, with the warning: ‘If in the coming days the present position is not put right, the appropriate conclusions will be applied to you.’

Certain categories of the population were more vulnerable to arrest than others: 95 per cent of those shot were men. Xenophobia was key: non-Russians, only 18 per cent of the population, provided 37 per cent of the victims. Poles, Finns, Estonians and Latvians were singled out to the extent that the USSR in 1937 had half as many ethnic Poles and Balts as it had in 1926. Virtually all ethnic Poles – some 144,000 – were arrested and three quarters of these were shot.

Ironically, Zakovsky, head of the Leningrad NKVD from the murder of Kirov until March 1938, was a Latvian – his real name being Štubis. Aleksandr Radzivilovsky, who began his Cheka career in the 1921 bloodbath of the Crimea, revealed his instructions when interrogated by Beria’s men in 1939:

I asked Ezhov how to carry out in practice his directive on exposing the anti-Soviet Latvian underground, and his reply was that there was no need to feel embarrassed by the absence of concrete material, but I should mark out several Latvians who were party members and beat the necessary statements out of them. ‘Don’t beat about the bush with this lot, their cases will be decided in batches. You need to show that Latvians, Poles, etc. in the party are spies and saboteurs.’ Frinovsky recommended that I should, in cases where I failed to get confessions from detainees, sentence them to shooting just on the basis of indirect witness evidence or simply unchecked informants’ materials.
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Manual workers and peasants made up 24 –28 per cent of the victims; 12 per cent were professional workers, a much smaller group within the
population. The Leningrad purges (and they were typical) thus hit hardest skilled professionals – doctors, veterinary surgeons, agronomists, engineers – and priests, as well those previously accused of counter-revolution. Blue-collar railway workers, thanks to Kaganovich’s vigilance, also suffered badly. Some minority peoples effectively faced genocide, but only the Chechen and Ingush in the high Caucasus took up arms against Ezhov’s NKVD.

Anyone who lived in the same building as arrestees or was related to them was natural prey. NKVD men scanned lists in concierges’ offices and arrested those with unusual surnames as spies. Just possessing a desirable apartment or furniture was a motive for arrest. Most victims were sentenced by a troika or a joint commission of the Public Prosecutor and the NKVD; some received quasi-judicial sentences from the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court. Nearly all were sentenced under Article 58, covering counter-revolution, of the Soviet criminal code. Most of Ezhov’s victims were charged with those crimes (Article 58, Paragraphs 10 and 11) that needed least evidence – ‘propaganda and group activity’ – offences which could be committed by a chance remark or playing cards with friends.

Because it had so many officials, professionals and persons from other regions and countries, Moscow province and city, with twice the population of Leningrad, had three times as many casualties. Here too the executioners were overstretched. In 1937, some time before Hitler, Stalin’s NKVD hit on gassing as a means of mass execution. Lorries advertising bread drove around the Urals, pumping exhaust gases into the rear compartment where naked prisoners lay roped together in stacks, until their loads were ready for the burial pits.

The society called Memorial has traced 21,000 buried just in the Butovo military area south of Moscow. The victims include hundreds of local peasants, most of the monks and priests of the Troitse-Sergeev monastery in Zagorsk who had survived earlier purges, inmates from the Dmitlag – the camps which supplied the labour force for the Moscow – Volga canal – and thousands from central Moscow prisons. Many professionals vital to the economy, such as Leopold Eikhenvald, a professor of radio-electronics, had naturally studied and researched abroad; their ‘spy-like way of life and anti-Soviet agitation’ doomed them. There was no gratitude: the Tsar’s head of gendarmerie, the elderly General
Dzhunkovsky who had taught the Cheka all he knew about counter-subversion, was shot. Any contact with Europe was lethal. The Commissariat of Foreign Affairs lost ten diplomatic couriers to the pits at Butovo. Forty-seven Austrian refugees from Hitler were shot as Nazi spies, as were 600 Germans and over 1,000 Latvians. Butovo specialized in artists: over a hundred painters, iconographers, sculptors and designers, the 1920s Moscow avant-garde, perished in December 1937 and January 1938.

As men and women were shot, their names were struck off endless typed lists which bore the signatures of an NKVD troika or, if the condemned were of any importance, of Politbiuro members. Attached to the lists were photographs of harrowed and beaten faces, taken shortly after arrest – the NKVD owned perhaps the world’s largest photographic archive, of some ten million faces. The execution orders bore just one instruction: ‘When carrying out the sentence it is obligatory to check the person against the photograph.’

Butovo was a killing ground from 8 August 1937 to 19 September 1938. The flow of corpses peaked in September 1937 (3,165) and March 1938 (2,335), and varied from a handful to 474 victims in one night. Most of the 21,000 were executed by a small team of NKVD hangmen: M.I. Semionov, I. D. Berg and P. I. Ovchinnikov. Most killers in the NKVD never rose high and few were ever held to account; their usual punishment was alcoholism.

When Ezhov vanished – unmourned, unmentioned in the press – and the terror paused before taking new directions, it was assumed that Stalin had reasserted control over the purges which he had temporarily lost. But now it is indisputable that he was aware of all Ezhov’s actions in detail and in advance. Ezhov not only enthusiastically sought authority to purge more and more spheres of industry or classes of person; Stalin himself spurred Ezhov on, pointing out, for instance, the Baku oilfields as an area likely to be harbouring great numbers of saboteurs and spies. Whenever senior party members or key professionals were sentenced, lists went to the Politbiuro – to Stalin, Kaganovich, Molotov and Voroshilov – for their emendations. The names of some 7 per cent of the victims of the Great Terror – 40,000 – were perused by one or more of these four. Occasionally Stalin crossed out a name or substituted imprisonment for death; Molotov, for reasons he would not later recall,
did the opposite. All four added comments: ‘deserves it’, ‘prostitute’, ‘scum’. On one day they confirmed over 3,000 death sentences. Georgi Malenkov had, as the Central Committee’s personnel officer, a hard job finding replacements and Stalin told each new commissar to appoint two deputies to take over if he was arrested. From time to time Stalin would gently apply the brakes, requiring a party secretary or prosecutor to sanction certain arrests.

Ezhov exercised all his ingenuity to keep up the pace. His original target, agreed with Stalin, of 200,000 arrests and 73,000 executions, was exceeded ninefold, with Stalin’s full cooperation. Moreover, Stalin’s younger acolytes Malenkov, Khrushchiov and Andreev never deviated from his line by a millimetre, and starred in the troikas that sent thousands to their death. Stalin brought Ezhov into the Politbiuro in October 1937 and saw him almost every day. In 1937 and 1938 they spent over 840 hours working together. Only Molotov saw more of Stalin at that time.

Either Ezhov needed a tight rein or Stalin found mass murder so enthralling that he could not delegate, but in 1937 and 1938 Stalin forwent the annual break of two months or so that he had taken in the Caucasus or on the Black Sea ever since ousting Trotsky from the Politbiuro. After terror came war, and Stalin would not take a holiday again until October 1945.

The Last Show Trials

Freedom of the person lies largely in protection from questions.

The strongest tyranny is the one that allows itself the strongest question.

Elias Canetti,
Mass and Might

Shock waves from the show trials by which Stalin got rid of the last remnants of the old Bolsheviks swept away up to three successive administrations in all districts of the Soviet Union; tens of thousands of loyal Stalinists were devoured by the leviathan that they had engineered and lauded. The last show trials of 1937 and 1938 were the epicentre, but the greatest suffering was at the periphery, among workers with no political interests.

Ezhov had a secondary role in the two show trials that would get rid of the last traces of opposition. He could beat prisoners into submission, but had no gift for devising scenarios for foreign journalists to observe. Stalin therefore settled with Andrei Vyshinsky what the prosecution and the accused would say in court. Stalin left Ezhov, together with Kaganovich, to bark at Central Committee plenary meetings; Ezhov’s underdogs would bully the defendants into learning the scripts that Vyshinsky would devise.

Despite sleep deprivation and other torments, it took a month to break the defendants of the ‘Parallel anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre’ to be tried from 23 to 30 January 1937. Karl Radek, the only victim for whom Stalin had any residual respect, agreed to plead guilty only if he could write his own part; Radek’s desire to have memorable lines was stronger than his will to live. According to Stalin, he said, ‘You can shoot me or not, as you like, but I’d like my honour not to be besmirched.’ Others in this trial had already been broken by a previous trial of Trotskyists in Siberia. Piatakov was prepared not just to damn his own wife as a traitor, but to shoot with his own hand those convicted in the first show trial. Stalin politely declined, explaining that in the USSR executioners had to remain anonymous.

Despite 400 pages of documentation, this second show trial was even more shoddily fabricated than that of Kamenev and Zinoviev in 1936. Piatakov was alleged to have flown to Oslo but the Norwegian authorities stated that no foreign aircraft had landed there at the time. The crimes were more implausible than Zinoviev and Kamenev’s ‘assassinations’, Vyshinsky pathetically citing a signalwoman crippled in a train crash arranged by Trotsky’s agents. All but four of the accused were shot although the lucky four lived only a few years. Radek, who had teased Vyshinsky in court with the implausibility of the evidence and whom Stalin reprieved, was murdered in prison in 1939. Before the trial Radek read Vyshinsky his proposed last words. ‘Is that all?’ Vyshinsky asked. ‘No good. Redo it, all of it. Try and admit this and that… You are a journalist after all!’
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Radek sent his wife a letter which the NKVD interpreted in one way and she, no doubt, in another: ‘I have admitted I was the member of a centre, took part in its terrorist activity… I don’t need to tell you that such admissions could not have been extracted from me by violent means nor by promises’.
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Vyshinsky was rewarded with the dacha of Leonid Serebriakov, former commissar for roads and one of those he had condemned to death.

Western reaction to this second trial was muted: the Spanish Civil War made it unseemly for the left to criticize Stalin, the Spanish republic’s last supporter. British MPs and journalists assured the public that the accused had confessed because the evidence was overwhelming. Japanese and German correspondents declared the trial an outrageous fabrication, but because they were fascists, they were not believed in Britain or America. Any improbabilities which Western observers had noticed in the confessions, explained the exiled German writer Lion Feuchtwanger, were due to faults in translation. In court Karl Radek denied that he had been coerced: ‘If the question is raised whether we were tortured during interrogation, then I have to say that it wasn’t me who was tortured, but the interrogators who were tortured by me, since I caused them unnecessary work.’