Stalin's Genocides (13 page)

participating in it. In the view of Stalin and the Soviet leadership, countless “two-faced” party members, those who vociferously supported Stalin and the Soviet state on the surface but in fact worked as spies and agents for foreign powers, had infiltrated the machinery of the state, conduct-ing industrial espionage and undermining Soviet institutions. They had to be chased down, the “truth” extracted from them one way or another, and sentenced to death.

Georgi Dimitrov records in his diary a toast that Stalin gave at a lunch at Voroshilov’s (November 7, 1937), in response to a toast that had been raised to the Great Stalin.

Whoever attempts to destroy that unity of the socialist state, whoever seeks the separation of any of its parts of nationalities—that man is an enemy, a sworn enemy of the state and peoples of the USSR. And we will destroy each and every such enemy, even if he was an old Bolshevik; we will destroy all his kin, his family. We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or thoughts—yes, his thoughts—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves, and their kind!

(Approving exclamations: To the Great Stalin!)12

As a result, Stalin put Yezhov, “the mad dwarf” (in Khrushchev’s characterization), in charge of the NKVD in September 1936, and Yezhov proceeded to purge Yagoda and his clientele in the NKVD and elsewhere in the apparatus. Yezhov himself was as vile a perpetrator as one will find in the history of modern genocide.13 He was a drunk-108

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ard and dissolute, despite his intellectual pretensions and contacts, and he personally participated in the interrogation and torture of his victims. He was also mesmerized by Stalin and conformed completely to his master’s wishes to spread terror and killing throughout Soviet society, spar-ing no one. Like Stalin, Yezhov was known to justify the execution of many innocent people if the trade-off was to catch the guilty ones. His speech in the election campaign of December 1937 underlines his genocidal character: During their struggle [against the Soviet people], this whole disgusting band of Trotskyist-Bukharinist degenerates play the most dirty, fishy, monstrous tricks on us, in order somehow to call a halt to the triumphant advance of our people toward communism. Our further success to a high degree will depend on our ability to identify these clever methods of the class enemy against us, on our will to at least cleanse the Soviet country of this vermin. . . . Our Soviet people will exterminate to a man all these de-spicable servants of the capitalist lords, vile enemies of all workers.14

Yezhov was also determined to crush the families of the accused. He issued orders “to confine all wives of condemned traitors” and to arrest any of their children over fifteen years of age as “socially dangerous.”15

The executions of the primary defendants of the Moscow show trials and the repression of their families, friends, acquaintances, and alleged accomplices were only the tip the great terror 109

of the iceberg of the Great Terror. Yezhov drew up a plan, complete with quotas, for arresting “enemies of the people” who allegedly threatened the existence of the country.

In 1937 and 1938 the NKVD arrested some 1,575,000

people, the vast majority of whom were brought to “trial.”

Of those, 681,692 people were executed, while the rest were assigned to exile and potential death in the Gulag.16

The number of victims is likely to be much higher in both cases.17 These were mostly ordinary people, workers, peasants, unemployed, petty criminals, civil servants of the lower order, few of whom had any opportunity, much less intent, to commit treasonous acts. Once they were identified by the police as enemies and swept up into the system of repression, they had little hope of release.

The very extent of the killing and repression lends weight to the argument that one could call this genocide instead of the normal appellation of “terror.” After all, we speak confidently about the Cambodian “genocide,”

which had many of the same characteristics as the Great Terror: a party leader—Pol Pot—turning against his own party leadership and its history, as well as survivors of the prior regime, and persecuting intellectuals and those who thought for themselves, in the name of a “clean slate.” Pol Pot also attacked national minorities, as did Stalin. On the other hand, the Cambodian genocide involved a far larger percentage of Cambodian citizens than did Stalin’s repressions. If not genocide, the Great Terror was, write Jörg Baberowski and Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, “a Soviet variant of the ‘final solution’,” or, in Ronald Suny’s estimation, “a political holocaust.”18

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Even though there was unambiguous direction from the top of the Soviet hierarchy and from Stalin above all, the purges of 1937–38—including Order 00447—did indeed take on a life of their own. The initiatives of Soviet officials in the Great Terror, as well as in dekulakization, the Ukrainian terror famine, the attack on nationalities, the “cleansing” of the cities, and other actions, were in part the result of a Soviet version of “working toward the Führer,” the concept developed in the historiography of Nazism to explain the activism of Nazi bureaucrats, particularly in the killing of the Jews, in the absence of direct orders from Hitler. Soviet officials understood Stalin’s bloodlust in this period and did more than their part in satisfying it. At the same time, the victims of NKVD interrogations implicated wide networks of people, who in turn named further circles of accomplices to satisfy their per-secutors. Like quotas in the Soviet economic system, those set for numbers of arrested in the provinces were “met and surpassed” by overzealous local officials.

There were devastating competitions between rival NKVD hierarchs, who sought to prove their worth to Yezhov and Stalin by arresting and executing even more

“enemies” than called for in their plans. Regularly, they asked permission from Yezhov to increase the numbers in their quotas, especially for those in the “first category,” to be executed. Since very, very few of those seized by the NKVD were
really
guilty of any crime against the state, it was easy enough to widen the circles of those implicated.

Yet one has to be careful with the official figures for arrests and executions. To win favor, some Soviet officials, the great terror 111

especially in the periphery, would inflate the numbers of prosecutions and convictions as a way to curry favor with the bosses.

“Troikas” and “dvoikas”—hastily assembled local

judicial bodies composed of representatives from the NKVD, the Justice Ministry, and the party—did their work quickly and efficiently of “trying” those brought before them by the NKVD. According to one estimate, some 800,000 people were executed over sixteen months, at a rate of 50,000 executions per month, or 1,700 per day for nearly 500 days.19 All of this was carried out with the highest level of secrecy. The victims were taken to nearby NKVD-administered forests and then shot and buried in unmarked graves. The executioners—almost all NKVD

officers—were told not to say a word about the events and even to “forget” what they had seen and done, on pain of severe punishment themselves. The sculpting of Soviet society was to take place without leaving any traces of the extraneous material that was cut away. Relatives were not informed of the fate of their loved ones; they were told either nothing at all or unfounded stories about terms of exile in unidentified places or about deaths in the camps.

In all of these extraordinary judicial processes and killing, there was a strange mixture of secrecy and publicity. The show trials highlighted the extent to which Stalin wanted the public to know about the treachery of many of their political leaders. Meanwhile, others were tried in secret and shot without any notification. But sometimes even the secret tribunals were designed to serve Stalin’s agitational purposes. On June 11, 1937, as Central Committee 112

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secretary, he sent the following note to all of the party national central committees, regional committees, and provincial committees (
natskom
,
kraikom
,
obkom
) regarding the leadership of the Red Army: “In connection with the ongoing trial of the spies and enemies Tukhachevskii, Yakir, Uborevich and others, the TsK recommends to you that you organize meetings of workers and, where possible, peasants, and also meetings of Red Army units and pass resolutions about the necessity of carrying out the highest measures of repression [the death sentence.] The notifications about the sentences will be published tomorrow, that is, June 12.”20 But even in less important cases, Stalin wanted the public to know the fate of alleged enemies. He wrote to the Smolensk
obkom
secretary in August 1937: “I recommend that you sentence the enemies of Andreevskii region to be shot, and to publicize the shooting in the local press.”21 What was at work was Stalin’s perverse conviction that the common folk—workers, peasants, youth, and others—would believe that his government was doing a vigilant job of uncovering the misdeeds of the wreckers and spies who were responsible for the impossibly hard lives the Soviet people had to endure.

Torture, of course, was a very effective means of extracting denunciations of others, not to mention detailed confessions, from completely innocent victims. One nasty case of torture, that of the famous theater producer, director, and innovator Vsevolod Meyerhold, will have to stand for a whole generation of torture victims, especially since archival materials on the methods, forms, and “science”

of NKVD torture, if they exist, have not been made avail-the great terror 113

able to researchers. Meyerhold was able to send a letter to Molotov, which has survived, protesting his imprisonment and torture by the NKVD in 1939.

When the investigators began to apply to me physical methods they beat me, a sick, old man of sixty-five. They placed me on the floor, face down; they beat me with a rubber whip on my heels and back.

When I sat on a bench, they used the same rub-

ber whip to beat me from above, with great force.

In the days that followed, when these parts of my legs hemorrhaged profusely, they again beat these red-blue-yellow blood-filled places with the same rubber whip and the pain was such that it seemed they were pouring on these sick, sore areas intensely boiling water, and I screamed and cried from pain.

They beat my back with this rubber; they beat me by hand on the face, swinging from above. . . . They combined this with a so-called psychic attack. The one and the other aroused in me such monstrous fear that my personality was stripped to its very roots. . . .

Lying on the floor with my face down, I twisted, con-torted, and howled like a dog whom its owner beats with a lash. . . .

I lay down on my cot and fell asleep only in order an hour later to be led again to the interrogation, which previously had lasted eighteen hours, awak-ened by groans and by having tossed on the cot like a sick man dying of fever. “Death (yes, of course!), death is easier than this?” is what one person under 114

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investigation said to himself. I, too, told myself this.

And I began to slander myself in the hope that they would lead me to the scaffold.22

Meyerhold confessed to being a British and Japanese spy and was executed in February 1940.

The matter of torture is separate from, though related to, that of genocide. The willingness of the authorities to use these vicious and inhuman methods against a substantial number of people, without any hesitation, qualms, or regrets, indicates the kind of murderousness that prompts cases of genocide. In some sense, there is no genocide without systematic torture, though, of course, one can easily identify cases of torture in which genocide is not at play. There is plenty of evidence that Stalin not only knew about the horrors and extent of NKVD torture, he also encouraged it. In one case, Stalin ordered Yezhov to extract a confession from an accused one way or the other:

“Isn’t it time to squeeze this gentleman and force him to report on his dirty little business. Where is he: in a prison or a hotel.” On one of the arrest lists that Yezhov routinely sent to Stalin, the
vozhd’
jotted down by the name of M. I.

Baranov, “beat, beat!”23 Stalin believed, as he already noted at the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934, that though the Soviet state had “smashed the enemies of the party, the opportunists of all shades, [and] the nationalist deviators of all kinds,” the “remnants of their ideology still live in the minds of individual members of the party, and not infrequently find expression.”24 The only way to get these “two-faced” party members to confess their real thinking was to beat it out of them.

the great terror 115

In the Soviet setting, there was widespread fear that arrest and interrogation meant torture, though by no means was this always the case. In this way, the very threat of torture itself became a means of social control and information gathering. Faced not just with the possibility of arrest, interrogation, and exile, but with that of horrendous physical abuse, Soviet officials easily found ways to report on their rivals and bosses for deficiencies in their administrations or industries. In doing so, they attempted to avoid responsibility and thus the likelihood of arrest and potential torture themselves. If the NKVD investigators trans-lated these denunciations into invented stories about the spying and treason of colleagues and friends at work, the accusers were all too willing to go along with them.

Yezhov personally participated in torture sessions and reported on the outcomes directly to Stalin. Historians have found documents in which Stalin indicates to Yezhov that “physical means” of interrogation should be used. But Yezhov frequently demonstrated his own initiative when it came to torture, arrest, and executions.25 In this sense, like the purges themselves, torture was insti-tutionalized by a system that needed to search out and find enemies, in order to justify its very existence and find excuses for its failings. The case of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii, the central figure in the widespread purge of the Red Army, is typical in this connection. Yezhov later revealed that the question of torture had come up at the highest levels when discussing how to make the widely respected marshal confess. The chief prosecutor Vyshinskii demanded that he be tortured. Stalin essentially gave the go-ahead to Yezhov: “See for yourself, but 116