The first “anti-Soviet elements” affected by the operation were the kulaks, who, according to Order No. 00447, had continued their “anti-Soviet subversive activities” after returning from camps and exile. Order No. 00447 placed so much emphasis on kulaks that it has often been called “the kulak order.” This is a misnomer, however, since it provided for the arrest and execution of many other population groups: former members of parties that opposed the Bolsheviks, former members of the White Guard, surviving tsarist officials, “enemies” who had completed their sentences and been released, and political prisoners still in the camps. Toward the end of the list came common criminals.
This list of targets suggests that the operation’s purpose was the extermination or imprisonment of anyone the Stalinist leadership considered a current or potential threat. This goal was even more clear-cut in the “nationalities” operations that were conducted alongside the “anti-Soviet elements” operation. The “nationalities” operations were also planned in Moscow and governed by special NKVD orders approved by the Politburo. They had a catastrophic impact on the Soviet Union’s ethnic Poles, Germans, Romanians, Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Afghans, Iranians, Chinese, Bulgarians, and Macedonians. The Soviet leadership viewed all these groups as ripe for recruitment by hostile foreign powers. A special operation was also conducted against Soviet employees of the Chinese Eastern Railway, who had returned to the USSR from Harbin after the railway was sold to Japan in 1935.
The two campaigns, the “anti-Soviet elements” and the “nationalities” operations, comprised the Great Terror. It was a highly centralized effort begun in the summer of 1937 and concluded in November 1938. Based on the most recent knowledge, approximately 1.6 million people were arrested, and 700,000 of them were shot.
2
An unknown number perished in NKVD torture chambers. Over the roughly year-and-a-half duration of the Great Terror, approximately 1,500 “enemies” were killed every day. None of Stalin’s other crimes against the Soviet population matched the Great Terror in either scale or savagery, and human history offers few episodes that compare.
These figures explain why the Great Terror has come to symbolize Stalin’s dictatorship and personal cruelty. That Stalin himself was the inspiration behind the Terror has never been disputed by serious scholars, and further evidence of his involvement was found after the opening of the archives, which revealed how closely Moscow directed the operations. Having put to rest any lingering doubts that Stalin was the instigator and organizer of the Great Terror, historians have now turned to the task of reconstructing his plans and calculations during these bloody months. Scholars have debated Stalin’s motives for years. The horrific nature of his deeds has led some to think he might have been insane. Clinical proof of such a possibility is undoubtedly beyond reach at this point, but we do have extensive evidence of Stalin’s mental state during this period. For the first time in many years he did not take his usual summer vacation in the south, remaining in Moscow to oversee the roundup. More telling are the many notations and instructions he left on interrogation protocols and the vast body of correspondence between him and the NKVD during this period.
Com. Yezhov: Very important. You have to go through the Udmurt, Mari, Chuvash, and Mordov republics; go through them with a broom.
3
Beat Unshlikht for not naming the Polish agents for each region.
4
Comrade Yezhov: Very good! Keep on digging and cleaning out this Polish spy filth.
5
You don’t need to “check,” you need to arrest.
6
Valter (a German). Beat Valter.
7
One important source for understanding the fury Stalin unleashed in 1937–1938 is the complete transcripts of his speeches and remarks from this period; these have recently become available. Unusually convoluted and incoherent, they are filled with references to conspiracies and omnipresent enemies. In remarks to a meeting of the defense commissar’s council on 2 June 1937, Stalin asserted, “Every party member, honest non-member, and citizen of the USSR has not only the right but also the duty to report any failings that he notices. Even if only 5 percent are true, it will still be worthwhile.”
8
In another example, the top-performing workers in the metallurgical and coal industries, while being honored with a special reception at the Kremlin on 29 October 1937, were told by Stalin that he was not certain he could trust even them: “I’m not even sure that everyone present, I truly apologize to you, is for the people. I’m not sure whether even among you, I again apologize, there might be people who are working for the Soviet government but at the same time have set themselves up with some intelligence agency in the West—Japanese, German, or Polish—for insurance.” These words, which must surely have surprised those present, were expunged from the official record of the reception.
9
These examples, of which there are many, are consistent with a statement made by the commissar for foreign trade, Arkady Rozengolts, and contained in his NKVD case file. Rozengolts, who knew Stalin well, described him as “suspicious to the point of insanity” and felt that by 1937 he had changed. In the past, Rozengolts noted, whenever he had reported to Stalin, the
vozhd
had calmly signed whatever papers needed his signature. Now he would fall into “a fit, a mad fit of rage.”
10
This rage was undoubtedly an important factor in the huge scope and brutality of the Great Terror. By the same token, Stalin’s agitated state does not fully explain the decisions he made throughout this period. Pivotal questions remain unanswered. With whom was Stalin so furious, and why did this fury emerge specifically then?
To understand the nature of Stalin and his regime it is important to keep in mind that the Soviet Union was born out of war. The country came into being as a result of World War I, established itself through victory in the Civil War—a victory that involved overcoming foreign intervention—and was perpetually preparing for the next war. Having come to power solely through war, Bolshevik leaders always believed their power could be taken away by the coordinated efforts of a foreign enemy and domestic counterrevolutionary forces. War readiness, for them, had two aspects: a strong military economy and a secure homeland. The latter required destroying internal enemies.
The gradual move toward terror during the second half of the 1930s coincided with growing international tensions and a growing threat of war. In addition to Japanese aggression along the Soviet Union’s Far Eastern borders, events in Europe were increasingly alarming: Hitler had come to power, and Poland, which lay between the USSR and Germany, seemed in Stalin’s eyes to favor relations with Germany over the USSR. Western powers were pursuing a policy of appeasement toward the Nazis, and the Rhineland had been remilitarized in 1936. Another factor influencing Stalin’s foreign policy was the civil war in Spain, which convinced him that England and France were incapable of standing up to Germany. He had little faith in the Western democracies in any case. A policy of non-intervention no longer made sense for the Soviet leadership, and it decided to enter the war in support of Spain’s Republicans, who were fighting Hitler’s ally, General Francisco Franco. Stalin, observing the situation in Spain, became further convinced of the need to purge the homeland in the interests of military readiness. The Spanish Civil War was bringing to the fore a familiar assortment of ills, including anarchy, guerrilla warfare, sabotage, a drifting and ambiguous line dividing the front from the rear, and all manner of treachery. This was the war that gave us the concept of the fifth column. In October 1936, at a critical moment when four columns of Francoist forces were approaching Madrid, the Nationalist general Emilio Mola claimed to have a “fifth column” within the Republican-held city that would rise up and help his forces take it. This term quickly became embedded in the Soviet leaders’ political lexicon.
War in Spain and repression in the USSR escalated in parallel. When the conflict broke out in Spain, on 18 July 1936, the Stalinist leaders initially reacted with caution. But catastrophic defeats suffered by the Republican army led them to intervene. On 29 September 1936, the Politburo adopted a plan of action.
11
(It may be significant that this decision coincided with Yezhov’s appointment as head of the NKVD.) The Spanish defeats were taking place alongside setbacks in Europe and the Far East. On 25 October 1936, Italy signed a treaty with Germany, followed on 25 November by the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan. All of these developments seemed to heighten the danger of war.
Newly available archives confirm that Stalin was heavily involved in Spanish affairs. The evidence clearly shows that he believed Republican defeats were caused by saboteurs in the ranks. He demanded that the internal enemy be dealt with decisively. On 9 February 1937 Soviet representatives in Valencia and Madrid were sent a telegram asserting that a series of failures at the front had been directly caused by treachery at headquarters: “Make use of these facts, discuss them, observing caution, with the best of the Republican commanders … so that they may demand … an immediate investigation of the surrender of Malaga, a purge of Franco agents and saboteurs from army headquarters.… If these demands by front-line commanders do not produce immediately the necessary results, put it … that our advisers may find it impossible to continue working under such conditions.”
12
A few days later, he repeated these demands: “We tell you what our firmly established opinion is: that the General Staff and other headquarters must be purged thoroughly of their complement of old specialists who are unable to understand the conditions of civil war and, in addition, are politically unreliable.… Headquarters must be reinforced with fresh people, staunch and full of fighting spirit.… Without this radical measure the Republicans will unquestionably lose the war. This is our belief.”
13
At the same time that Stalin was dispatching telegrams to Spain, the notorious February–March 1937 Central Committee plenum, which signaled an intensification of repression, was taking place in Moscow. Stalin, reading a draft of the speech Molotov planned to make to the plenum, made some comments in the margins. He underlined the parts where Molotov talked about Trotsky ordering his followers in the USSR “to save their strength for the most important moment—for the start of war—and at that moment to strike with total decisiveness at the most sensitive points in our economy.”
14
Near the words “those incapable of fighting the bourgeoisie, who prefer to cast their lot with the bourgeoisie rather than the working class, have abandoned [the party],” Stalin made a notation: “This is good. It would be worse if they abandoned us in time of war.”
15
The theme of the special danger posed by wreckers and spies in wartime ran through the speeches delivered at the plenum, including Stalin’s: “Winning a battle in time of war takes several corps of Red Army soldiers. But reversing that victory at the front requires just a few spies somewhere in army headquarters or even division headquarters, able to steal the battle plans and give them to the enemy. To build a major railway bridge would take thousands of people. But to blow it up, just a few people would be enough. There are dozens, hundreds of such examples.”
16
Stalin took an active hand in preparing an article for the 4 May 1937 issue of
Pravda,
titled “Certain Insidious Recruitment Techniques Used by Foreign Intelligence.” This lengthy piece, taking up the bottom halves of three pages, was an important element of the Great Terror’s ideological underpinning. It was reprinted in various publications, actively used in propaganda, and discussed at party study groups. We can see from the initial draft, which Stalin filed in his personal archive, that he modified its headline, which originally read “Certain Methods and Techniques Used by Foreign Intelligence,” to give it a more sinister tone.
This article, unlike others that Stalin helped produce, was not at all theoretical. It described specific (most likely fictitious) instances in which Soviet citizens, especially those sent overseas on state business, had been recruited by foreign intelligence agencies. These examples made the article credible and persuasive. Stalin contributed almost an entire page of text describing an instance in which a Soviet official working in Japan met regularly with an “aristocratic lady” in a restaurant. During one such meeting, a Japanese man in a military uniform appeared, claimed to be the woman’s husband, and made a scene. Another Japanese man appeared and offered to help resolve the matter, but only after the Soviet citizen agreed in writing to keep him informed of what was happening in the USSR. This “helpful intermediary” turned out to be an agent of Japanese intelligence, and the Soviet citizen became a spy.
17
In the months that followed, Stalin’s suspicions were translated into massive police operations. During the spring and summer of 1937, the urgent call to expose spies and forestall potential treason became the basis for a case against a counterrevolutionary organization within the Red Army. On 2 June 1937, Stalin explained the goal of the plot to members of the defense commissar’s Military Council: “They wanted to turn the USSR into another Spain.”
18
Reports of treachery and anarchy in Spain were an important component of the propaganda campaign to “intensify vigilance” and fight against “enemies” within the USSR. In June and July 1937, when the government was preparing to launch large-scale operations against domestic anti-Soviet elements, Soviet newspapers were filled with articles about arrests of German spies in Madrid and of Trotskyites in Barcelona and the fall of the Basque capital Bilbao brought about by a treacherous commander in the Basque army. Also during that summer, the Spanish Republican government created a special state security agency to counteract espionage and combat the “fifth column”—the Servicio de Investigacion Militar (SIM), which sent tentacles into all parts of Republican Spain and brutally suppressed any opposition. The methods used by this new structure prompted sharp criticism even by sympathetic leftists in Western countries. Intensified repression in the Soviet Union was being mirrored in Spain (including by Soviet agents operating there).
19
The Spanish Republican police and the Soviet secret police each worked to crush their own “fifth columns.”