The Great Terror

7

ASSAULT ON THE ARMY

Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles

Sont pour nos propres générawc

“The Internationale”

On 11 June 1937 it was announced that the flower of the Red Army Command had been charged with treason, and next day that they had been tried and executed. Unlike the victims of the political purges, there had been virtually no public build-up of feeling against the generals. For most people, in the Soviet Union and outside, the news came as a complete and shocking surprise. No details were given of the “treason.” The “campaign” appearing in the papers on 12 June could hardly have the effect obtained on previous occasions by months or years of abuse. The newspapers did their best with meetings demanding the death penalty for the “foul band of spies”; there had already been time for Demyan Bedny to compose a fifty-four-line poem including the names of the generals in the rhyme scheme; and in the pages around them, factory demonstrators, the Academy of Sciences, the polar explorers on Rudolph Island, and in fact representatives of the entire community demanded the shooting of the traitors, which had, as it turned out, already taken place. On 15 June, Pravda published Voroshilov’s report to a meeting of members of the Government and the Military Soviet of the People’s Commissariat of Defense on the crimes of the soldiers. They had “admitted their treacherousness, wrecking and espionage.”

The men concerned were Marshal Tukhachevsky, Deputy People’s Commissar of Defense; Army Commander Yakir, commanding the Kiev Military District; Army Commander Uborevich, commanding the Byelorussian Military District; Corps Commander Eideman, Head of the civil defense organization Osoaviakhim; Army Commander Kork, Head of the Military Academy; Corps Commander Putna, lately Military Attaché in London; Corps Commander Feldman, Head of the Red Army Administration; and Corps Commander Primakov, Deputy Commander of the Leningrad Military District. In addition, Yan Gamarnik, Head of the Political Administration of the Red Army and First Deputy Commissar of Defense, whose suicide had been announced on 1 June, was implicated in the alleged conspiracy. The original communiqué said that “the above-named persons were accused of breach of military duty and oath of allegiance, treason to their country, treason against the peoples of the USSR and treason against the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army."¹

There was some discrepancy between these charges and those given in Voroshilov’s report, which associates the accused with Trotsky and charges them with “preparing the assassination of leaders of the Party and Government,” as well as with espionage.² As we shall see, both the Trotskyite and the treason themes had been prepared over many months, and the treason at least was well “documented.”

The accused were all leading members of the group around Tukhachevsky which had pioneered military rethinking through the 1930s. They had developed the ideas and to some degree the organization of an efficient, modern army.

The military leaders were still young men. They had been commanding Armies while still in their twenties. Apart from Kork, who was just fifty, those now seized were all in their forties. Even now, Tukhachevsky and Putna were forty-four; Yakir and Uborevich, only forty-one—the same age as Zhukov, who was to play an important military and political role for many years to come. Gamarnik, too, was only forty-three.

Tukhachevsky had by general recognition the finest military brain in the Army, and the strongest powers of will and nerve. He came of the minor aristocracy. During the First World War, he had served as a subaltern in the Semeonovsky Guards Regiment. He had been taken prisoner by the Germans in 1915. After five attempts to escape, he was lodged in the security fortress of Ingolstadt, the Colditz of the First World War (where his fellow inmates include young Captain de Gaulle). In 1917, he got back to Russia, where he joined the Bolsheviks. “Brilliant, quick of mind, with a streak of cruelty allied to an impetuousness which bordered on the rash, the young Red Army Commander cultivated a certain hauteur and an arrogance which was not calculated to ease all his friendships.”³ He was twenty-seven when, in 1920, he commanded the Armies attacking Poland, having several times saved the Communists on the Eastern Front. He later commanded at Kronstadt and against the Antonov rebellion in the Tambov region.

The Kiev and Byelorussian Military Districts, under Yakir and Uborevich, respectively, were the two largest, containing between them twenty-five of the ninety rifle divisions and twelve of the twenty-six cavalry divisions.

Yakir, brisk and young in appearance and activity, was the son of a small Jewish chemist in Kishinev. He had organized a Bolshevik band in the Ukraine when only twenty-one, and had risen within three years to command the so-called Fastov army groups against the Poles. From 1926, he had commanded the key Ukrainian Military District, under its various successive names. He was the only professional soldier who was a full member of the Central Committee.fn1

Uborevich, a bespectacled military intellectual, had also commanded an Army against the Poles in 1920, and had then figured in the brilliant operations which finally led to the storming of the Crimea at the end of 1920 and put an end to the Civil War. He was a candidate member of the Central Committee, the only Army one besides four Marshals fn2 and Gamarnik’s Assistant Head of the Political Administration, A. S. Bulin.

The other accused were almost equally distinguished. Kork and Eideman, too, had commanded Armies in the Civil and Polish wars. Eideman, a square-headed, mustached, sergeant-major-looking type, was in fact a Latvian writer. Putna, who had served with Tukhachevsky in the Semeonovsky Guards before the Revolution, had had lesser commands, but had held major posts in the training side of the Army in the 1920s. Feldman, of Jewish origin, was one of Tukhachevsky’s closest associates.

The other main victim of Stalin’s blow, Yan Gamarnik, Head of the Army Political Administration and First Deputy People’s Commissar for War, was not in quite the same category. He had been engaged in controversies against the military leaders on matters of political–military organization. A typical Old Bolshevik, he had fought in very dangerous circumstances in the Ukraine in the Civil War, and had voted with the Sapronov faction at the time of its influence in the Republic.⁴ But he had had no connection with the oppositionists since the mid-1920s. He had been appointed Head of the Political Administration of the Red Army in 1929. With his long, rough beard and resemblance to Dostoyevsky, he was thought of—in the Party context, it is true—as a sort of saint.

Far from their fine records being of any service to the generals, the contrary seems to apply. In 1937, one-fifth of the officer corps were still veterans of the Civil War; this included almost all the High Command. But there were many grudges outstanding from those earlier times. During the battles for Tsaritsyn, a group had formed around Voroshilov and Stalin which continually disobeyed and stood out against the orders of Trotsky as Commissar for War. A long, bloody-minded intrigue, in which Voroshilov in particular behaved extremely badly, caused perhaps the worst ill-feeling to be found even among the freely quarreling Bolshevik leadership.

Under this Tsaritsyn group had come a cavalry unit headed by Budenny, initially little better than bandits. He himself relates that Trotsky at the time spoke of them as “a horde,” under “an Ataman ringleader…. Where he leads his gang, there they will go; for the Reds today, tomorrow for the Whites.”⁵ One of Budenny’s commanders actually shot a commissar for protesting against the sack of Rostov. As recruits came in, the “horde” was later expanded, with Stalin’s help, to be the First Cavalry Army. It had attracted efficient as well as erratic elements, and improved with organization. Its Military Council had consisted of Voroshilov, Shchadenko, and Budenny.

The First Cavalry Army was involved in the fiercest controversy of all—the argument about responsibility for the Soviet defeat in the Battle of Warsaw in 1920. As Tukhachevsky had struck north of the Polish capital with the main bulk of the Soviet forces, Yegorov and Stalin with the Southern Front, including Budenny’s men, had been attacking toward Lwów. Orders to divert Budenny northward had been disregarded until too late, at best on technical excuses, at worst in a short-sighted attempt to secure local glory at the expense of the main effort. It is arguable that the Soviet forces were anyhow overextended, but the bulk of Soviet military opinion followed Tukhachevsky in feeling that Stalin, Yegorov, and Budenny had wantonly robbed the offensive of whatever chance it had. Lenin seems to have agreed, remarking, “Who on earth would want to get to Warsaw by going through Lwów?”⁶ The whole matter was thrashed out in public in military lectures. There can be no doubt that it rankled bitterly with Stalin, and when he gained full control of the history books the whole episode was represented as a strategically sound drive on Lwów, sabotaged for motives of treason by Tukhachevsky and Trotsky.fn3

But at the time, the controversy soon began to seem minor and academic. Compared with the true political virulences then prevailing, the Army gradually became a quiet area amid the storms of Soviet political life.

In the 1920s, Communists in the armed forces were at first strongly and openly involved in the political arguments of the time. Antonov-Ovseenko, Head of the Army Political Administration, had been forthrightly Trotskyite. Lashevich, the Zinovievite Deputy Commissar for War, had actually held a more or less secret oppositionist meeting in a wood while still at his post.

But later, this sort of overt action ceased. For a time, Army Communists still entered, though more discreetly than the civilians, into the controversies of the time. Putna was among the officers signing some sort of confidential defense of the opposition in 1927.⁷ Tukhachevsky had not been involved in this, or any similar move. We may make a certain distinction between the professional soldiers who became Communists, like Tukhachevsky, Kork, and Yegorov, and the Communists who became professional soldiers, like Yakir, Blyukher, and Alksnis. Even at this time, the former played little part in politics—except when military matters were directly affected, as when Tukhachevsky and Uborevich opposed Trotsky’s ideas of Army organization.

But in any case, from the establishment of Stalin’s primacy at the end of the 1920s, the Army Command had wholly withdrawn from the political struggle. In part, this was evidently due to the same ideas that decided Pyatakov: the leadership question was settled. What remained was the professional problem of creating a sound military force. And, conversely, Stalin had been careful not to stir up trouble among the soldiery. Just as he had “neutralized” the Ukraine by withdrawing Kaganovich in 1928, so he now left Tukhachevsky and his fellows a comparatively free hand. The Army’s Communists had a high reputation in the Party. In the comparatively mild Party purge of 1929, some 5 percent of military Communists were purged, compared with 11.7 percent in the Party as a whole; in the 1933 purge, the figures were 4.3 percent and 17 percent, respectively.

It is true that an occasional officer suffered. But this was usually a special case, like that of the military academic Snesarev, formerly a Tsarist general, since rehabilitated. “In January 1930, on a charge of having participated in a counter-revolutionary monarchist officers’ organization, he was arrested along with other military specialists,” and at the age of sixty-five was deported to hard labor in the far north, where he died in 1937.⁸

But on the whole, the Army received more and more friendly attention, and less and less persecution. Its prestige began to be built up in a variety of ways. The principle of shared responsibility between the commander and the political commissar was abolished in March 1934, leaving the commander in full control, with the commissar simply as his political adviser. The old military ranks up to, but not including, general, were restored on 22 September 1935. The same decree gave all except junior commanders the privilege of immunity from arrest by the civil organs without a special authorization from the People’s Commissar of Defense. At the same time, the first five Marshals of the Soviet Union were named: Tukhachevsky, Blyukher, and Yegorov of the genuine military, plus Stalin’s nominees Voroshilov and Budenny.

At his trial in 1938, Bukharin was to speak vaguely of the “military men” among his fellow plotters. When Vyshinsky asked, “Which military men?” he answered, “The Right conspirators.” Vyshinsky, accepting this, asked for the names in the particular context, and was given those of Tukhachevsky and Kork.⁹ In his speaking of them as not simply members of the far-flung “bloc” but as actual Rightists, we can perhaps find a clue to part of the reason for Stalin’s resentment of the military. They had not been Rightists in the sense that Bukharin was. But it is more than likely that they had shown Rightism, in the sense that Rudzutak, Chubar, and so on had done—that is, in failing to show enthusiasm for the increasing tempo of the purge during the final phase, from September 1936 to February 1937.

Not that we can so simply exhaust Stalin’s motives. Former grudges and present nuisance value certainly played a part. But there are more general, and more powerful, considerations.

Despotism enforced by a terrorist and terrorized bureaucracy may be in a general way extremely strong. But it presents certain points of vulnerability. There is a brittleness in the strength. Even the most rigorous precautions can never entirely rule out the possibility of assassination. There is no real evidence of any serious attempt on Stalin’s life. There are a few vague reports of genuine plots, usually among young Communists, discovered before they came to fruition. And there are one or two individual incidents, such as that reported during the Second World War of a soldier who shot at random at a car emerging from the Kremlin which chanced to contain Mikoyan.¹⁰

The other vulnerability was to a military coup. Even a few dozen determined men might conceivably have seized the Kremlin and the persons of the leadership. And in those circumstances, the type of machine Stalin built can crack very easily. Even the farcical attempt by General Malet to overthrow Napoleon in 1812, by sheer bluff, had an almost incredible measure of preliminary success. The best chance of getting rid of Stalin would have been a coup by Tukhachevsky in alliance with the surviving oppositionists, just as the best chance of blocking Hitler in 1933 would have been a coup by Schleicher backed by the Social Democratic Party.

But just as the German Social Democrats were hobbled by their notions of constitutionality (and just as, later, most of Hitler’s generals were hamstrung by their formal allegiance to Hitler as Head of State), the Soviet Marshals, like the civilian oppositionists, seem to have been mesmerized by the notion that the Stalin leadership, with all its faults, had inherited the Party legitimacy.

For there is no evidence that any conspiracy really existed. Isaac Deutscher has indeed written that “all non-Stalinist versions concur in the following: the Generals did indeed plan a coup d’ état.”¹¹ In reality, there is virtual unanimity that this was not the case. The leading defector information (including that deriving from NKVD officers in prison who discussed the matter with cell mates who eventually came West)¹² and later Soviet revelations all agree on the nonexistence of any plot. The Nazi secret archives contain no evidence of anything of the kind. Admittedly, one cannot prove a negative, and we must not formally exclude the possibility of evidence one day turning up to show that some of the military were seriously considering action.fn4 But it seems unlikely, to say the least. The curious thing is that the legend of a real conspiracy long persisted, though the “conspiracies” alleged at the three great political trials either were rejected from the start or have long since been seen through.

The reason, paradoxically, seems to be that this is the one case in which Stalin did not produce his evidence. From Stalin’s point of view, it was the best method. If a real military plot had suddenly been discovered, immediate court-martial and execution were natural-looking reactions. They had many precedents in other countries and, indeed, in Russia. Moreover, while the likelihood of the plots hitherto exposed in court was on the face of it dubious, the seizure of power by Tukhachevsky appeared a perfectly rational and possible move. In this case, public “proofs” were not required. In a sense, this is itself a curious irony, as this is the only case in which Stalin did dispose of documentary evidence. It was, of course, faked, but it really was of German origin.

But Stalin had the wit not to publish these documents. They had not been devised solely for his benefit, and perhaps did not entirely suit his intention. And if they had been made public, it might, for all he knew, have been possible for experts to detect flaws, or even for the Germans to blow the gaff.

Thus the result of Stalin’s sudden blow, and the absence of specific evidence, was that people found it easier to believe that a plot genuinely existed. As the Minister of War remarks in Penguin Island of the efforts of his Chief of Staff in providing reams of proofs against the accused Jewish officer,

Proofs! Of course it is good to have proofs, but perhaps it is better to have none at all … the Pyrot affair, as I arranged it, left no room for criticism; there was no spot at which it could be touched. It defied assault. It was invulnerable because it was invisible. Now it gives an enormous handle for discussion.

It was not so much that people believed the precise charges. Some of these, as later developed, were incredible—in particular that Yakir and Feldman, both Jews, had really worked for Nazi Germany. What was found tolerable was simply the central thesis that the generals were plotting to use their power against Stalin.

The essence of the plot, according to evidence in the Bukharin Tria1,¹³ was Tukhachevsky’s “favorite plan”—the seizure of the Kremlin and the killing of the leadership by a group of military men. Gamarnik had proposed also seizing the NKVD headquarters. He is represented as believing that “some military under his direct command” would obey him. He considered he had sufficient Party and political prestige in the Army and that some of the commanders, “especially the daredevils,” would support him.¹⁴

A curious sidelight is that Gamarnik, with a choice of “daredevil” officers allegedly at his disposal, and Yakir, the fighting general, are supposed to have instructed the Chief of the Department of Savings Banks of the Ministry of Finance, Ozeryansky, to prepare a terrorist act against Yezhov.¹⁵ This is another of those little touches which might perhaps have fortified the skepticism of Western dupes.

Various versions were planted. For example, the American Ambassador, Joseph Davies, says in his memoirs that he was told by Ambassador Troyanovsky on 7 October 1937, when he had queried the idea that Tukhachevsky would have become a German agent simply for money, that the Marshal had a mistress who was herself a German agent. This story was evidently planted elsewhere: Davies reports hearing it also from the French Ambassador on the authority of the Deuxième Bureau, which is supposed to have got it from Prague. Walter Duranty recounts a similar story. There is no reason to believe it.

As we have said, the apparent suddenness of the blow at the Army, the great air of urgency, contributed to the plausibility of Stalin’s story. And this theme was put about even in the outer circle of the NKVD. A senior NKVD officer, as late as October 1937, was telling his subordinates in Spain, “That was a real conspiracy! That could be seen from the panic which spread there on the top: all the passes to the Kremlin were suddenly declared invalid; our [i.e., NKVD] troops were held in a state of alarm: as Frinovsky said, ‘the whole Soviet Government hung by a thread….’”¹⁶

To another, Frinovsky remarked that the NKVD “had uncovered a giant conspiracy—we have got them all!”¹⁷ though this seems to have been said around 20 May, when the “uncovering” was accomplished, but three key arrests were yet to come.

This notion of a sudden secret emergency was doubtless useful in providing a panic tension in military, Party, and NKVD circles. But it was not in accord with the facts. The pressure against the Army, though little publicized, had, on the contrary, been gradual and cumulative.

It was eleven months since Stalin had in fact made the first moves against the High Command, which had now borne such fantastic fruit.

The first arrest in the series that was to lead up to the great blow at the generals had taken place on 5 July 1936, when the NKVD seized Divisional Commander Dmitri Shmidt, commanding a tank unit in the Kiev Military District, without informing or consulting his superior officer, Yakir. Yakir went to Moscow, where Yezhov showed him “material” implicating Shmidt.¹⁸ This material presumably consisted of the confessions of Mrachkovsky, Dreitzer, and Reingold, which revealed Shmidt and his accomplice B. Kuzmichev (Chief of Staff of an Air Force unit) as having been under Mrachkovsky’s instructions, through Dreitzer, to assassinate Voroshilov, in the interests of the Trotskyite element in the “Bloc.”¹⁹ In accordance with Stalin’s style, Shmidt was a man against whom a particular individual grudge awaited settlement. Not only was he an ex-oppositionist, but he had give Stalin personal offense.

Shmidt, a Party member since 1915, was the son of a poor Jewish shoemaker. He had become a sailor, and then, through the Civil War, a brilliant cavalry commander in the Ukraine. During the period, all sorts of rival factions were fighting right through the area; for example, Vasily Grossman recounts that Berdichev had changed hands fourteen times. It had been occupied “by Petlyura, Denikin, the Bolsheviks, Galicians, Poles, Tutnik’s and Maroussia’s bands and ‘nobody’s Ninth Regiment.’”²⁰

Amid this chaos, Shmidt had risen to command first a regiment and then a brigade, had captured Kamenets-Podolsk, far to the west and surrounded by enemy forces, and had finally been ordered to prepare for the attempt, never in fact made, to break through Poland and Romania to help the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. He had ridden into a camp of nationalist guerrillas with two aides and, after negotiations failed, engaged in a successful gunfight. In fact, he was a typical though not outstandingly gifted “natural leader” of partisans—swashbuckling, simple, frightened of nothing, a true product of the Civil War. Later, in peacetime, he had shot, but failed to kill, a senior officer who had insulted his wife, the matter being hushed up.

Between 1925 and 1937, Shmidt had become associated with the opposition, though not in any significant way. Arriving in Moscow at the time of the 1927 Congress, when the expulsion of the Trotskyites was announced, he had met Stalin coming out of the Kremlin. Shmidt, in his black Caucasian cloak and silver-ornamented belt, with his fur hat cocked over his ear, had gone up to Stalin and, half-joking, half-serious, had started to curse him in the extravagant soldier fashion of the time. He ended by gesturing as though to draw his great curved saber, and told Stalin that one day he would lop his ears off.²¹

Stalin said nothing, listening white and tight-lipped. The incident was taken as a bad joke, or at most an insult beneath political notice. Shmidt, after all, had accepted the Party decision which he objected to so strongly, and for nearly a decade he continued to serve. In fact, the Trotskyites were allegedly to find him suitable conspiratorial material precisely because he was “under no suspicion in the Party.”²² As to his rudeness, after all, Stalin had defended “rudeness” among comrades. And, indeed, that sort of thing from a rough soldier would not have been much regarded earlier on, or by any of the leaders but Stalin.

From the start, it was clear that Shmidt’s arrest was not an isolated act. The “cases” of Shmidt and Kuzmichev are among those named in the indictment of the Zinoviev Case as “set aside for separate trial in view of the fact that the investigation is still proceeding.” In court, Mrachkovsky spoke of a “terroristic group of people including Shmidt, Kuzmichev and some others whom I do not remember,” which already implied a larger military organization. Reingold, too, mentioned them as forming only a part of a “Trotskyite group of military men,” which had a number of other members whose names he did not know.

Kuzmichev, like Shmidt, was an old comrade of Yakir’s. Another friend of his, Ivan Golubenko, Chairman of the Dnepropetrovsk Soviet, was also arrested in August 1936²³ as a Trotskyite, though later transmuted to a spy. Already a member of “a counter-revolutionary Trotskyite–Zinovievite nationalist bloc”²⁴ in the summer of 1936, he was mentioned in January 1937 as a member of a terrorist group formed to assassinate both Stalin²⁵ and “the leaders of the Communist Party and the Soviet Government of the Ukraine.”²⁶ He is said to have really been associated with Ordzhonikidze’s attempts to halt the Terror.

These arrests, and particularly Shmidt’s, caused considerable worry in military circles in the Ukraine. No one believed he was guilty. Although he had once voted for Trotsky, he had long since “repented” of this. And throughout August, there were further arrests. On 25 September came that of Divisional Commander Yu. Sablin. A woman NKVD officer, Nastya Ruban, who knew Yakir, went to him secretly and told him that she had seen the materials against Sablin, and it was quite clear that he was not guilty. Three days later, her death by heart attack was announced. It was soon learned that it had really been suicide.²⁷

Meanwhile, in the Lubyanka, Shmidt was being interrogated “in all degrees” by top-ranking NKVD operatives, including the Head of the Special Department, M. I. Gay, and the notorious Z. M. Ushakov, on the charge of planning to kill Voroshilov. Documentary evidence was produced: a route card of Voroshilov’s movements at the maneuvers, as issued to all commanders. For some time, Shmidt denied all the accusations.²⁸

While Shmidt and Kuzmichev had been implicated in the preliminary interrogations of the Zinoviev Trial prisoners and publicly named in the indictment, it was only in the course of the trial itself that, on 21 August 1936, a more senior figure, and one of the Tukhachevsky group proper, was unexpectedly brought in. Dreitzer, who had finished his evidence on 19 August, was recalled. And as the last evidence given at the whole trial, he implicated Putna. This officer was now alleged to have been in direct contact with Trotsky and Ivan Smirnov. Smirnov denied that Putna had anything to do with it. But Pikel, Reingold, and Bakayev corroborated Dreitzer.²⁹ Putna, recalled from London, had been arrested on 20 August.³⁰ His wife learned of the arrest in Warsaw on her way to join him.³¹ By 31 August, he had already admitted the existence of various Trotskyite groups.³²

Corps Commander Primakov, though not so implicated at the Zinoviev Trial, had been arrested on 14 August.³³ He had already been in NKVD hands in, apparently, 1934,³⁴ so was particularly vulnerable. However, he denied all the charges, even at a confrontation before Stalin and the Politburo, for nine months.³⁵

On the face of it, it was no more extraordinary for Trotskyite plots to involve Communists in the Red Army than in any other field. It could not easily be complained of as an attack on the Army as such. On the other hand, according to Dreitzer, Trotsky’s instructions had included as a particular duty “to unfold work for organizing nuclei in the Army”³⁶—a direct threat. During the autumn, there were rumors that a show trial of “Trotskyist” commanders in the Army was to be held, with Putna in the leading role. Tukhachevsky himself appeared to be under a cloud, if the lack of prominence given to him in the Army maneuvers was any guide. Voroshilov made sinister comments on lack of vigilance to the Kiev commanders during his visit to their autumn exercises.³⁷

The fall of Yagoda was interpreted as, in part, a victory for the Army. German diplomatic reports of the time say that no more was to be heard of any Army trial, and that Tukhachevsky himself was fully “reinstated.” And Stalin is now, in fact, reported at the December 1936 plenum mentioning material against Tukhachevsky which had proved unfounded.³⁸

As ever, this relaxation proved to be simply another maneuver of Stalin’s. Shmidt, Primakov, and Putna were not released, and Yezhov was soon planning a more effective blow at the military. There is an unconfirmed report that Putna was worked on from the start for evidence incriminating Tukhachevsky as a British spy.³⁹ This would, indeed, be natural from Putna’s London post. And in the trials, the accused were often charged with working for several foreign powers. But, anyhow, the charge was not developed in later propaganda, and may have been overtaken by the Nazi connection.

As we have seen, at the Pyatakov Trial, Putna was once again incriminated—though still for terrorism only, not treason. On 24 January 1937, Radek remarked, as if in passing, that Putna had come to him “with some request from Tukhachevsky.” An extraordinary exchange between Vyshinsky and Radek on the following day ran like this:

Vyshinsky:

Accused Radek, in your testimony you say: ‘In 1935 … we resolved to call a conference, but before this, in January, when I arrived, Vitaly Putna came to me with a request from Tukhachevsky…’ I want to know in what connection you mention Tulchachevsky’s name?

Radek:

Tukhachevsky had been commissioned by the Government with some task for which he could not find the necessary material. I alone was in possession of this material. He rang me up and asked if I had this material. I had it, and he accordingly sent Putna, with whom he had to discharge this commission, to get the material from me. Of course, Tukhachevsky had no idea either of Putna’s role or of my criminal role.…

Vyshinsky:

And Putna?

Radek:

He was a member of the organization, and he did not come to talk about

the organization, but I took advantage of his visit to have this talk.

Vyshinsky:

So Putna came to you, having been sent by Tukhachevsky on official business having no bearing whatever on your affairs since he, Tukhachevsky, had no relations with them whatever?

Radek:

Tukhachevsky never had any relations whatever with them.

Vyshinsky:

He sent Putna on official business?

Radek:

Yes.

Vyshinsky:

And you took advantage of this in order to engage in your own particular affairs?

Radek:

Yes.

Vyshinsky:

Do I understand you correctly, that Putna had dealings with the members of your Trotskyite underground organization, and that your reference to Tukhachevsky was made in connection with the fact that Putna came on official business on Tukhachevsky’s orders?

Radek:

I confirm that, and I say that I never had and could not have had any dealings with Tukhachevsky connected with counter-revolutionary activities, because I knew Tukhachevsky’s attitude to the Party and the Government to be that of an absolutely devoted man.

⁴⁰

An experienced NKVD officer who read this at once remarked that Tukhachevsky was lost. Why, his wife asked, since Radek’s evidence so emphatically exculpated him? Since when, was the reply, had Tukhachevsky needed a character reference from Radek?⁴¹

The whole clumsy interchange must have been a set piece, doubtless dictated by Stalin himself, perhaps at Tukhachevsky’s own insistence after the earlier mention of his name. Typically, it gave the Marshal full satisfaction in a superficial sense. He could hardly ask for a plainer assertion of his loyalty and innocence. But at the same time, the idea had been launched. And when Vyshinsky in his final speech complained of the accused having confessed much, but not enough, of their criminal connections, the foundations were laid for further development in his direction as in others.

When Shmidt finally broke down under severe interrogation, his confession was apparently circulated in the upper levels of the Party. Yakir determined to check the charges. He insisted on seeing Shmidt in jail. Shmidt had become very gray and thin, seemed apathetic, and spoke listlessly. Yakir described him as looking “like a Martian,” a being from another planet. But when Yakir asked him if his confessions were true, Shmidt repudiated them. Yakir was not allowed to question him on the details, but had Shmidt write a note to Voroshilov denying all the accusations. Yakir took this to Voroshilov and told him that the charges were clearly false.

Yakir went back to Kiev well pleased with this result, but his pleasure did not last long. For soon after, Voroshilov rang him up and said that on the very next day Shmidt had reaffirmed his confessions, and wished to inform Voroshilov and Yakir that his early evidence was true.⁴² (Shmidt had given, or was shortly to give, evidence which was not to be circulated to Yakir and the other commanders, for it implicated Yakir himself. The Divisional Commander was required to confess that at Yakir’s instigation he had planned to raise his tank unit in revolt.)fn5

After all this, Yakir could not have believed in the accusations. And he is also reported as having said that those shot after the Pyatakov Trial were innocent.⁴³ It must have been clear to Stalin that Yakir was against the new purge. And his boldness in insisting on the interview with Shmidt shows him not lacking in undesirable courage.

On 3 March 1937, at the plenum itself, after the arrest of Rykov and Bukharin, Stalin spoke briefly about what harm “a few spies in the Red Army” could do. And Molotov “directly incited to the murder of the military cadres, accusing its participants of lack of desire to develop the struggle against ‘enemies of the people.’”⁴⁴

The crucial political victory of the Purge had been won at the plenum. The organizational basis for extending it was also now becoming adequate. It was in April that the NKVD, purged by Yezhov, became ready for further operations. It was “soon after the plenum” that “careerists and provocateurs in the organs of the NKVD fabricated a story ‘on the counter-revolutionary military fascist organization’ in the armed forces.”⁴⁵

Hitherto, Stalin’s victims had almost all been former members of the oppositions. This was, of course, true even of Bukharin and Rykov. Now, for the first time, Stalin was to begin a massive offensive against his own supporters everywhere.

With the oppositionists, even Bukharin and Rykov, the Party elite may to some degree have felt that this was a sort of very rough justice after all—and justice had been rough in the Soviet Union for a long time. Or they may have been influenced to some extent by the notion that at least a potential alternative leadership was being dealt with. But if undoubtedly loyal followers of Stalin, men who had taken no part in opposition movements, were now to be destroyed, then no one was safe. And no principle was involved. In such circumstances, it was quite reasonable for Stalin to have thought that the Army leadership, whose representatives may have opposed even the Bukharin purge, or at any rate had only assented with obvious reluctance, might finally be driven into resistance. Stalin himself, in destroying the principle of political loyalty, would be undermining the restraints which had so held them. Thus it is natural enough that he should have planned his blow at the Army leadership to coincide exactly with the period when he was turning on his own insufficiently subservient followers.

Meanwhile, Stalin proceeded gradually. On Yagoda’s arrest on 3 April 1937, his post as Commissar of Communications was taken by Army Commander Khalepsky, Tukhachevsky’s tank expert—an absurd as well as a sinister transfer.

Corps Commander Gekker, Head of Red Army Foreign Liaison and thus a particularly sensitive figure in espionage charges, disappeared in April. During the same month, Corps Commander Garkavi, commanding the Urals Military District, was taken in. He was one of Yakir’s closest associates; in fact, they were married to sisters. Again, Yakir showed undesirable boldness, by going to see Voroshilov and eventually Stalin. Stalin soothed him, saying that serious charges against Garkavi had been made by those already under arrest, but that if he was innocent he would be released.⁴⁶

On 28 April 1937 Pravda published a pointed call to the Red Army to master politics and to fight the internal, as well as the external, foe. This powerful, if oblique, blow was understood by the already shaken High Command.

At the May Day Parade, Tukhachevsky was the first to arrive on the tribune reserved for the Army leaders. He walked alone, with his thumbs in his belt, to the reviewing stand. Yegorov then took his position, but did not look at or salute his colleague. Gamarnik also joined the silent rank. A gloomy and icy atmosphere surrounded the soldiers. At the end of the Army parade, Tukhachevsky did not wait for the civilian march-past, but walked out of the Red Square.⁴⁷

He had been nominated to attend the coronation of King George VI. On 21 April, Yezhov reported that the NKVD had learned of a plot by German and Polish agencies to commit a terrorist act against Tukhachevsky if he went to the coronation in London, and next day the Politburo decided to avoid this “serious danger” by not sending him.⁴⁸ On 4 May, the British were told that for reasons of health Tukhachevsky would not now be able to go. Admiral Orlov took his place.

An officer who saw Tukhachevsky several times in May describes him as looking unusually gloomy after an interview with Voroshilov. A few days later, he went to see Voroshilov again. Voroshilov was cold and formal, and simply announced to him his removal from his post as Deputy Commissar of Defense and transfer to the Volga Military District, a backwoods command with three infantry divisions and assorted troops.

Tukhachevsky commented to a friend, “It is not so much a matter of Voroshilov as of Stalin.”⁴⁹

This posting, and others, were made official on 10 and 11 May, in a series of shifts among the higher officers which gave the clearest evidence yet of Stalin’s animus. Gamarnik, as well as Tukhachevsky, was relieved of the position of Deputy Commissar of Defense. More deviously, Yakir was transferred from Kiev to Leningrad; unlike Tukhachevsky’s posting, this was not an obvious demotion. Nor were either of the two ignominiously rushed to their posts, remaining in Moscow and Kiev, respectively, until almost the end of the month.

At the same time, a decree (dated 8 May)⁵⁰ restored the old system of “dual command,” with the powers of the political commissars being greatly increased relative to those of the fighting officers. The original powers of political commissars had been given them because the military specialists of the Civil War were mainly ex-Tsarist officers who were not regarded as trustworthy. The reimposition of the system on a Communist officer corps was an extraordinary demonstration of lack of trust in the new cadres. On 9 May, an “instruction” was put out calling for greater vigilance .⁵¹

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the net was closing. On 22 to 25 April 1937, Yagoda’s former Deputy, G. E. Prokofiev, and his former Head of the NKVD Special Department, M. I. Gay, who had interrogated Shmidt, were forced to give testimony about the criminal connections of Tukhachevsky and other officers with Yagoda. (Yagoda himself, at this stage, refused to confirm this.) On 27 April, A. I. Volovich, arrested Deputy Head (under Pauker) of the Operative Department, also implicated Tukhachevsky in a plot to seize power.⁵² Also in April, the interrogators were ordered to get evidence from Putna and Primakov against Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Feldman, and others.⁵³

Frinovsky, Yezhov’s Deputy People’s Commissar in charge of State Security matters, now called in the Deputy Head of the Moscow Province NKVD, Radzivilovsky, and asked him if he had any important military men among his prisoners. Radzivilovsky said that he had a General Staff officer, Brigade Commander M. E. Medvedev, lately expelled from the Party and the Army for “Trotskyism.” Frinovsky said that a huge plot in the Red Army needed uncovering. Radzivilovsky obtained the necessary confession from Medvedev by “physical” means. On 8 May, he confessed that he had long been privy to a conspiracy in the central apparatus of the Red Army. Medvedev was brought before Frinovsky and Yezhov, and told them that his testimony was invented. Yezhov sent him back for further interrogation, after which he confirmed his earlier confession to Yezhov, who then forwarded it to the Central Committee.

Army Commander Kork of the Frunze Military Academy was arrested on 16 May. At first he denied the charges, but on 18 May he signed a confession that Yenukidze had recruited him to the Rightist conspiracy, to which the “Trotskyite” group of Putna and Primakov was also connected. Tukhachevsky, he said, had also joined the Rightists, and the intention was a military coup d’état.⁵⁴ On 8 May, after beatings and being kept without sleep, Primakov had finally admitted to plotting with Dreitzer, Shmidt, Putna, and Mrachkovsky. On 14 May, he implicated Yakir, and by 21 May, Tukhachevsky and others. On 14 May, Putna too had, under torture, implicated Tukhachevsky.⁵⁵

On the basis of Medvedev’s evidence, Feldman was arrested on 15 May.⁵⁶ Interrogated by Ushakov, Feldman at first denied all the charges. But after intensive interrogation, he signed a full confession of the plot, implicating “Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Eideman and others.”⁵⁷ On 20 May, Yezhov sent Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, and Kaganovich the protocols of Feldman’s interrogation, and asked for a decision on arresting the others now implicated.⁵⁸

Thus by mid-May, three of the destined victims of the Tukhachevsky operation were already under arrest, and the pressure was being increased on Tukhachevsky and Yakir. At this time, Stalin, who read all the interrogation protocols, was seeing Yezhov almost every day (accompanied on 21 and 28 May by Frinovsky) and taking “a direct part in the falsification of charges.”⁵⁹

And now, in addition to the charges of conspiracy, the themes of treason and espionage began to develop. The former head of the NKVD Foreign Department, A. Kh. Artuzov, who had been arrested on 13 May, was soon testifying to a pseudonymous plotter with the Germans, identifiable as Tukhachevsky (a report long known to the NKVD and hitherto rejected, an act now blamed on a cover-up by Yagoda).⁶⁰

But a far more impressive “dossier” of evidence that Tukhachevsky was a German spy came into Stalin’s possession at about this time.⁶¹ It had been forged in the Ostabteilung of the German Sicherheitsdienst (SD). But the story is not as simple as that.

STALIN AND FASCISM

I know how much the German people loves its Fiihrer.

I should therefore like to drink his health.

Stalin, 24 August 1939

Stalin’s view of Fascism has some very peculiar features. It had, of course, long since been denounced as the worst form of bourgeois rule and “analyzed” as a form of control of the State by monopoly capitalists. But though fascism thus became a very evil word, the effects of this were considerably diluted by the method of calling the Social Democrats “Fascists” too—“Social Fascists.” In the resulting confusion, the German Communist Party had been ordered, against its will,⁶² to direct its main force against not the Nazis, but the Socialist–bourgeois coalition Governments, to the degree of the Prussian referendum of 1931 and the transport strike of 1932, in which Nazis and Communists actively cooperated against the moderates.

When such tactics resulted in the victory of Hitler,fn6 the crushing of the German Communist party was represented, according to the new Stalin style, as a victory. A new concept of Hitler as the “icebreaker of revolution”—the last desperate stand of the bourgeoisie, whose failure would lead to the collapse of capitalism—came into vogue.

When it became apparent that Hitlerism was not going to collapse—a conclusion Stalin seems to have reached at the time of the Nazi Roehm Purge in June 1934—Stalin was not to be inhibited by doctrinal reasons from coming to an arrangement with the new dictator. The difficulty was rather that Hitler appeared to be quite intransigently anti-Communist. As Hitler built up Germany’s military and economic power, Stalin began a complex approach. Hitler’s evident military threat could be blocked in two ways: by force or by agreement. If force was to be necessary, then a powerful antifascist alliance needed to be built. If agreement were possible, it could best be achieved from strength. So from the mid-1930s, Soviet foreign policy, and Comintern tactics, were directed to creating a system of Party and State alliances against German power.

In 1936, following this shift in foreign policy orientation, Foreign Commissar Litvinov, long an advocate of alliance with the West, received every sign of support. Leaving a discussion, Stalin put his arm around Litvinov’s shoulder and said that now it appeared they could agree. Litvinov (or so he later told Ehrenburg) answered, “Not for long….”⁶³

It has often been suggested that one of Stalin’s motives for the Purge, and especially for the Army purge, was to give him the freedom of maneuver which finally produced the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. The old pre-Nazi pro-German orientation had not been an ideological one, and alliance even with a very reactionary Germany against the “have” powers was in principle long since accepted by the Army and most of the Party. Only when Nazism was seen as an overt threat to the Soviet Union did a change come, with the Popular Front campaigns of the Comintern, the Franco-Soviet Pact, and so forth. But when it came, it was warmly accepted. The Rightist mood in country and Party saw in these State and Party alliances the possibility of an “opening to the Right,” a reconciliation with democracy. Meanwhile, Tukhachevsky and the soldiery worked enthusiastically at a true modernization of the Army, to make it capable of facing not merely the Poles or Turks, but also the high military potential of a mobilized Germany.

But for Stalin, the fronts and pacts were matters not of conviction but of calculation.

As long as any qualms were able to make themselves felt in the Communist International, Stalin’s freedom of action to come to an arrangement with the Germans was limited. The ideological conceptions, the socialist sentiments, were directed firmly on antifascist lines. As far as the international field was concerned, the crushing of all independent, undisciplined motivations was necessary if Stalin was to make the best bargain. Prisoners were predicting the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1938 on the basis of the categories being arrested—in particular, the foreign Communists.⁶⁴

When the Pact came in August 1939, the effects of years of hard organizational and propaganda work in the Comintern became visible. All over the world, with negligible and temporary exceptions, the Communist Parties accepted the switch and began to explain its necessity—sometimes in the later editions of papers which the same day had been urging a fight to the last against Nazism. Only individuals among the leaderships dropped out.

Even at the XVIIth Party Congress in 1934, Stalin had hinted of the alternative policy of agreement with Germany: “Of course we are far from enthusiastic about the Fascist regime in Germany. But Fascism is beside the point, if only because Fascism in Italy, for example, has not kept the U.S.S.R. from establishing the best of relations with that country.”⁶⁵

A pessimistic estimate was presented to Stalin by the NKVD Foreign Department in August 1935 about the strength of elements in Germany favoring settlement with Russia. But the officer making the report noted that it made no impact on Stalin’s feeling that accord could be achieved.⁶⁶

For Litvinov was right. From 1936, and on the basis of the threat of his alternative anti-German policy, Stalin began to put out feelers to the Nazis, through his personal emissaries.

The representative of Stalin’s personal secretariat, his old henchman David Kandelaki, was sent as “Commercial Attaché” to the Soviet Embassy in Berlin to make these delicate approaches. In December 1936 Kandelaki approached Dr. Schacht at his own request to inquire about the possibility of enlarging Soviet—German trade. Schacht answered that a condition of this must be the ending of Soviet-sponsored Communist activity in Germany. Kandelaki went back to Moscow to consult Stalin and at about the turn of the year was given a written draft proposing the opening of negotiations either through ambassadors or, if the Germans so desired, in secret. The draft reminded the Germans that agreement had previously been suggested by the Russians.

On 29 January 1937 Kandelaki, with his deputy Fridrikhson, again visited Schacht with a verbal proposal from Stalin and Molotov for the opening of direct negotiations. Schacht said that these suggestions should be passed to the German Foreign Ministry, and added once more that he felt that Communist agitation would have to be damped down. On 10 February, Neurath saw Hitler about the proposals and wrote to Schacht the next day, sensibly saying that there was no practical point in getting an agreement from the Russians to cease Communist propaganda. On the main issue, he said that as things were at the moment the Russian proposals were not worth proceeding with. If, however, Russia was “to develop further along the lines of an absolute despotism supported by the Army,” contact should certainly be made.

Meanwhile, the Pyatakov Trial had gone ahead, with its anti-Nazi implications. Even here, Stalin was able to have it both ways. General Köstring, the German Military Attaché who had been in effect implicated in the trial, was not declared persona non grata. This decision seems to have been taken after considerable pressure from the Germans and is, to say the least, curious.

For the time being, Stalin’s approaches did not bear fruit. But the point had been made. The German leaders had had the advantages of an arrangement put before them.

Meanwhile, as Stalin’s real approaches to Hitler went ahead, the nonexistent contact between the Soviet High Command and the Nazis was made the subject of the decisive accusations of treason.

In the murky world of the secret organizations, some measure of contact had already been established between the NKVD and Reinhardt Heydrich’s SD.

After the suppression of the German Communist Party, operations against its underground remnant became simply a Secret Police matter. As with all sophisticated operations of this type, the Nazi secret agencies left some underground Communists untouched, with a view to retaining political contact.fn7

Among the organizations penetrated by both the NKVD and German espionage was the Union of Tsarist Veterans, with its main body in Paris. On 22 September 1937 the NKVD was to carry out, as a special operation, the kidnapping and murder of General Miller, its leader. This seems to have been in an attempt to put General Skoblin, Miller’s deputy, in command of the organization. Skoblin had long worked as a double agent with both the Soviet and the German secret agencies, and there seems no doubt that he was one of the links by which information was passed between the SD and the NKVD. According to one version, the first move in the whole dark business, which “originated with Stalin,”⁶⁷ appears to have been an NKVD story sent through Skoblin to Berlin to the effect that the Soviet High Command and Tukhachevsky in particular were engaged in a conspiracy with the German General Staff. Although this was understood in SD circles as an NKVD plant, Heydrich determined to use it, in the first place, against the German High Command, with whom his organization was in intense rivalry.⁶⁸ For in Heydrich’s motives, in this whole business, the compromising of the German Army ranked high. This side of it rather dropped into the background as the operation proceeded, and it does not anyhow particularly concern us.

The evidence that Stalin, or the NKVD, planted the idea with the Germans is far from conclusive. But whatever its origins, it is certainly true that it was only the atmosphere of extreme suspicion now engulfing the Soviet Union which made the idea seem worth pursuing from the German point of view. Meanwhile, the rumors trickled into Moscow. In January 1937, the Pravda correspondent in Berlin, A. Klimov, sent information that German Army circles were talking of their connections in the Red Army, especially Tukhachevsky.⁶⁹ And S. P. Uritsky, head of Red Army Intelligence, reported directly to Stalin and Voroshilov that there were rumors in Berlin of opposition among the Soviet generals, though he himself did not credit this.⁷⁰ The Soviet embassy in Paris sent a telegram to Moscow on 16 March that it had learned of plans “by German circles to promote a coup d’état in the Soviet Union” using “persons from the command staff of the Red Army.”⁷¹

The most probable account⁷² (to which Gomulka, when leader of the Polish Communist Party, gave his authority in a formal speech)⁷³ makes it out that towards the end of 1936, in a conversation with Hitler and Himmler, the pros and cons of “betraying” Tukhachevsky and crippling the Red Army were discussed, and a decision was taken. Several Soviet and other accounts⁷⁴ make it clear that the story of the German contacts with Tukhachevsky was originally “leaked” by the Nazis through President Beneš of Czechoslovakia. Beneš had the information as early as the end of January 1937 (and confidentially passed it on to the French, whose confidence in the Franco-Soviet Pact was considerably weakened by it).⁷⁵ He also, as several recent Soviet accounts agree, passed the reports to Stalin, in all good faith. Gomulka tells us that this false information had been planted some time before the documentary “evidence” arrived, so that preliminary reports of the “treason” were in Stalin’s hands “at the time of the February—March plenum.”⁷⁶

The creation of the actual documentary evidence was an artistic job and took time. In March and April 1937, Heydrich and Behrens (who later became Chief of the SS in Belgrade and was executed by the Tito Government in 1946) directed the forgery of a “dossier” containing an exchange of letters over a period of a year between members of the German High Command and Tukhachevsky. Largely the work of the German engraver Franz Putzig, who had long been employed by the German secret agencies on false passports and so on, it consisted of thirty-two pages and had attached to it a photograph of Trotsky with German officials.⁷⁷ One later Soviet book quotes a number of Western and German accounts of the forgery of the dossier, and appears to accept that given by Colonel Naujocks, formerly one of Heydrich’s men.⁷⁸ This says that the German security service got a genuine signature of Tukhachevsky from the 1926 secret agreement between the two High Commands by which technical assistance to the Soviet Air Force was arranged. A letter was forged using this signature, and Tukhachevsky’s style was imitated. The letter carried genuine German stamps, and the whole dossier consisted of it and fifteen other German documents. The German generals’ signatures were obtained from bank checks. Hitler and Himmler were shown the dossier in early May, and approved the operation.

A photocopy was in Prague within days. Beneš confirmed the existence of the plot to the Soviet Ambassador on 7 May, and on 8 May sent a personal secret message about it to Stalin. Heydrich’s secret agent was put in touch with an officer of the Soviet embassy, and showed him two pages, asking payment for the rest. The officer immediately flew to Moscow and returned with full power to buy the whole dossier. Half a million marks were paid over (though these later turned out to be forged). And by mid-May, the documents were in Stalin’s hands.⁷⁹

Possession of this definite “proof” of treason may have contributed to a final decision on the conduct of the blow against the generals. On 20 May, Dmitri Shmidt was shot in secret without further ado.⁸⁰ On the same day, the emergency stories about the just-discovered plot began to be put about inside the NKVD. An official who left Russia on 22 May says that real panic was now gripping the officer corps.⁸¹

The same day saw the arrest of yet another of the leading figures in the alleged plot—Eideman. He was called out of a Moscow Party conference in the House of the Moscow Soviet, where he had been sitting on the presidium, and taken away by the NKVD.⁸² The original pretext was that he had signed a Party recommendation for Kork. Like Yakir, Eideman is represented as having become disillusioned with the Purges. After a Party meeting in the spring of 1937, he had remarked quietly to a friend, “Last night they arrested another comrade here. It seems to me that he was an honest man. I don’t understand….”⁸³

One officer describes a last conversation with Tukhachevsky. He was looking gloomy. When this was mentioned, he said that he had indeed had bad news. He had just learned of Feldman’s arrest. “What a monstrous provocation!” he commented.⁸⁴ Tukhachevsky knew, in fact, that he was cornered. Driving to the station on his way to Kuibyshev, his chauffeur suggested that he should write to Stalin to clear up the obvious misunderstandings. The Marshal replied that he had already written.⁸⁵

On about 24 May, Stalin, after consultation with Molotov, Voroshilov, and Yezhov, gave the order for Tukhachevsky’s expulsion from the Central Committee and arrest.⁸⁶ On his arrival in Kuibyshev on 26 May, Tukhachevsky gave a short address in the evening to the District Military Conference. One who had known him well noted that in the two months since he had last seen him, his hair had begun to turn gray.⁸⁷

He did not turn up at the next session.⁸⁸

For he had been asked to call in at the offices of the Provincial Committee of the Party on the way to his headquarters. After a while, Dybenko, who he was relieving, came out pale-faced and told his wife that Tukhachevsky had been arrested.⁸⁹

On the evening of 28 May, news of the transfer of Tukhachevsky’s case to the “investigative organs” had reached the other generals, through some official though confidential channe1.⁹⁰ So it is plain that the arrests after Tukhachevsky’s were by no means bolts from the blue.

Tukhachevsky was interrogated by Yezhov personally, aided by the new Head of the NKVD Special Department, I. M. Leplevsky, and the ubiquitous Ushakov, now Deputy Head of that Department. By 29 May, the Marshal was confessing to espionage, links with the Germans, and recruitment by Yenukidze into Bukharin’s conspiracy. Here and here of his testimony, when examined twenty years later, had on them forensically verifiable bloodstains.⁹¹

Army Commander Uborevich was the next to go. He was at a meeting in Minsk on 29 May when his A.D.C. passed him a note calling him urgently to Moscow. He excused himself and went to the station, where he was arrested as he entered his train. He told his wife and daughter, who were present, not to worry.⁹² In the Lefortovo, Uborevich denied the charges, even after a “confrontation” with Kork. But after “physical methods” had been applied, he too confessed.⁹³

Yakir was normally a cheerful man. A general who was present reports him as looking gloomy and distrait at a conference of the Kiev Military District, immediately after Tukhachevsky’s arrest had become known to those present.⁹⁴ On 30 May, Voroshilov telephoned Yakir and ordered him to come urgently to a meeting of the Military Revolutionary Soviet. Yakir offered to fly, but Voroshilov told him to take the train—a clear indication that the Defense Commissar knew the plans of the NKVD in detail.⁹⁵

Yakir took the 1:15 P.M. train from Kiev on the same day. At dawn on 31 May, the train stopped at Bryansk, where NKVD men boarded it and arrested him. His A.D.C., Zakharchenko, was not taken, and Yakir was able to send a message to his wife and son that he was innocent.

Yakir asked to see the warrant for his arrest, and when it was shown to him he asked to see in addition “the decision of the Central Committee.” He was told that he could wait for that until he got to Moscow. He was bundled into a Black Maria; they drove to Moscow “at a hundred kilometers an hour”; and he was lodged in a solitary cell in the Lubyanka, where his chevrons and medals were ripped off.⁹⁶

On 31 May, the last of the “conspirators” was dealt with. It was announced the next day that “former member of the Central Committee, Ya. B. Gamamik, having entangled himself in connections with anti-Soviet elements and evidently fearing that he would be arrested, has committed suicide.”⁹⁷

There are several slightly different accounts of Gamamik’s end. The latest Soviet one, derived from his daughter, says that on 30 May, Blyukher visited Gamamik, who was sick. Gamarnik was told that he would be a member of the court which was to try the Tukhachevsky plotters. Blyukher implied that if Gamarnik refused, he would himself be arrested. Gamarnik told his wife that he knew Tukhachevsky was innocent. On 31 May, Blyukher (or, in another account, Bulin) came in and said that Gamarnik had been fired. NKVD men sealed up his safe. When they had gone, he shot himself.⁹⁸ He was publicly attacked as a Trotskyite, fascist, and spy on 6 June.⁹⁹

Meanwhile, from his cell in the Lubyanka, Yakir had written at once to the Politburo demanding immediate release or a meeting with Stalin. He assured Stalin of his complete innocence.

He wrote: “… My entire conscious life has been spent working selflessly and honestly in full view of the Party and its leaders …—Every word I say is honest, and I shall die with words of love for you, the Party, and the country, with boundless faith in the victory of Communism.”

Stalin wrote on this letter: “Scoundrel and prostitute.” Voroshilov added: “A perfectly accurate description.” Molotov put his name to this and Kaganovich appended: “For the traitor, scum and [next comes a scurrilous, obscene word] one punishment—the death sentence.”¹⁰⁰

He was, instead, subjected to nine days’ harsh interrogation, at which he was told that the “whole Yakir nest” had been arrested.¹⁰¹ The charges presented to him were ‘’so serious that in comparison the previous evidence for which Yezhov’s interrogators had been working on Shmidt appeared to be amateurish concoctions.”¹⁰² That is, the Nazi connection was now being put forward, rather than mere Trotskyite terrorism, though the official title of the conspiracy remained “The Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Military Organization.” A final day of beatings by Ushakov produced a confession from Yakir.¹⁰³

From 1 to 4 June, the Military Revolutionary Soviet at the Commissariat of Defense, together with members of the Government, held an extraordinary session—the one to which Yakir had been invited, not knowing that the agenda consisted of a single item: the exposure of the counter-revolutionary military–fascist organization,¹⁰⁴ reported on by Stalin personally.

And now, after all the trouble and ingenuity which had been invested in it, he did not after all produce the “dossier.” Instead, “in his statement, and also in many interjections, he based himself on faked evidence from repressed military men,” though he also abused the accused at length as “agents of the Reichswehr.”¹⁰⁵ He called for their execution, and denounced a number of other officers, including Army Commander A. I. Sedyakin, Head of Anti-Aircraft Command, and Divisional Commander D. A. Kuchinsky, Head of the General Staff Academy.¹⁰⁶

Army Commissars Bulin and Slavin are said to have given offense to Stalin by not putting their names down to speak against the accused. However, other officers, like the Central Committee members three months earlier, joined in the denunciations; Dybenko is reported vilifying Gamarnik.¹⁰⁷

The “dossier” seems to have had its use in giving the limited Stalin–Yezhov circle a proper sense of outrage and urgency. And since we are told that Stalin used it “to instruct the judges to pass a death sentence on Tukhachevsky,”¹⁰⁸ it is possible that they, or some of them, were shown or told about the document. But it received no official use. Stalin seems to have decided that he could after all manage without it, and that the well-tried system of confession could provide all the evidence needed. It would have been awkward even in a secret court if one of the officers could perhaps have exposed the fraud through some point which had escaped Yezhov’s notice. And good fakes though they doubtless were, they had not been planned with a full feeling for the nuances of Stalin’s technique.fn8

It seems clear, in any case, that “that quickfire court” found the accused guilty “on the basis of the verbal statements of Stalin at the Military Soviet” without the “dossier” being raised,¹⁰⁹ even to substantiate the charges of recruitment by Nazi intelligence which were laid. (In the indictment in the Bukharin Trial, it is asserted that that case was based on

the materials not only of the present investigation, but also on the materials of the trials which have taken place in various parts of the U.S.S.R., and in particular the trial of the group of military conspirators, Tukhachevsky and others, who were convicted by a special session of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. on 11 June 1937.¹¹⁰

All the accused had eventually confessed under torture.

The interrogations continued right up to the morning of the trial, when Tukhachevsky was required to implicate Corps Commander Apanesenko and others. When Vyshinsky saw the accused, to complete the formalities (a process that took two to two and a half hours for the whole group), they admitted their guilt and made no complaints.¹¹¹

Stalin, who was keeping direct personal control, saw Vyshinsky twice on 9 June, and, with Molotov, Kaganovich, and Yezhov, received Ulrikh on 11 June, doubtless to give final instructions.¹¹² The membership of the court which tried the generals consisted, in addition to Ulrikh as Chairman, of Marshals Blyukher and Budenny, Army Commanders Shaposhnikov, Alksnis, Belov, Dybenko, and Kashirin,fn9 and Corps Commander Goryachev. Only the second and third survived the Purges.

When the court opened, Ulrikh stated the proceedings by asking, “Do you confess to the testimony which you gave at the NKVD interrogation?”

Although the defendants mostly confessed in general terms, only Primakov, who had been in prison for almost a year, admitted everything, and said that he had personally told the investigation of the names of more than seventy conspirators. Uborevich denied the charges, upon which the court had an hour’s break and then went on to the other accused. The rest admitted that they (and Gamarnik) had had conversations about replacing Voroshilov, though denying that these had any criminal intent. Putna admitted that he had had personal relations with I. I. Smirnov, and Feldman that he had had them with Pyatakov; but they seem to have denied that these connections were criminal.¹¹³

They were also charged with various military errors. Budenny, from the bench, attacked them for overemphasizing the role of the tanks at the expense of the cavalry.¹¹⁴

As to complicity with the Nazis, the court relied on the fact that several of the officers had had connections with Germany: Kork had been Military Attaché in Berlin; Yakir had lectured at the German General Staff Academy; and Tukhachevsky had negotiated on the Soviet assistance in rearming Germany—but, as he said, this was before Hitler’s coming to power.¹¹⁵ Yakir confessed in a general sense, but when asked to confirm certain points said he could not add to his written evidence. Harangued by Ulrikh to the effect that the German officer attached to him on his last visit to Berlin had recruited him for Hitler, Yakir denied direct implication in espionage. Tukhachevsky denied connections with Polish espionage agencies, and more generally said merely that perhaps some contacts “might be considered espionage.” Kork remained silent when the espionage charge was put to him. Uborevich said that he had not committed espionage.¹¹⁶

Another Soviet report says: “The court-martial was held behind closed doors…. Some witnesses’ statements, which coincide, say that Tukhachevsky, speaking to one of the accused, who was talking about his connections with Trotsky, said, ‘Have you been dreaming about all this?’”¹¹⁷

As usual, promises had been made to the accused that confession in court would save their lives.¹¹⁸ All were condemned to death.

The military “judges” clearly had no real say, and it is plausible that (as one account, based on a conversation with the Assistant Head of the NKVD Foreign Department, has it) their signatures were attached to the verdict after the executions at a conference with Yezhov.¹¹⁹ In any case, Stalin asked Yezhov how the members of the court had conducted themselves. Yezhov replied that apart from Ulrikh, only Budenny had cooperated enthusiastically, with the others almost silent. This angered Stalin.¹²⁰

Rumors of the manner of the generals’ end were many and various: it is reported that they were shot, not in the cellars, but in the courtyard of the NKVD building at 11 Dzerzhinsky Street, during the daytime, with NKVD trucks being revved up to cover the sound of the shots.

Khrushchev tells us that “when Yakir was shot he exclaimed: ‘Long live the Party, long live Stalin!’ … When Stalin was told how Yakir had behaved before his death, he cursed Yakir.”¹²¹

Khrushchev reports this “long live Stalin!” as if it were a simple case of political devotion. But the generals were not really naive enough to believe that Stalin had no responsibility for their fate. Yakir was an old Communist, perfectly able to carry out political activity at the moment of death. And the program of support for Stalin, combined with condemnation of the NKVD, was already in existence. It was the line on which the maximum support for a program opposed to the Purge could be mobilized. It seems plausible to think that Yalcir may have been trying, in fact, to establish an anti-Yezhov “platform.”

But, at least equally compelling, we know he had thought of his family, and it was clearly not in their interests for him to utter words of defiance or abuse. He had made a last appeal for them. Two days before he was shot, he sent Voroshilov this letter:

To K. Ye. Voroshilov. I ask you, in memory of my many years of honest service in the Red Army in the past, to give instructions that my family, helpless and quite innocent, shall be looked after and given assistance. I have addressed the same plea to N. I. Yezhov.

Yakir, 9 June 1937.

On his copy, Voroshilov minuted, “In general I doubt the honesty of a dishonest person. K. Voroshilov. 10 June 1937.”¹²²

Yakir’s attempt to save his family was unsuccessful. His wife, his “close companion for twenty years,” was at once exiled to Astrakhan with her son Peter, and their passports were confiscated. In the Volga town, they met the families of Tukhachevsky, Uborevich, Gamarnik, and others. The boy’s grandfather had hidden the paper containing the charge against Yakir from the mother, and she only saw it when Uborevich’s wife showed it to her.

The papers published a faked letter from Mrs. Yakir repudiating her husband. She protested to the NKVD, which rebuffed her, but later told her in a threatening manner that it was willing to receive a withdrawal, though not necessarily to publish it.¹²³

At the beginning of September, she was arrested. She was later liquidated, together with Yakir’s brother, the wife of another brother and her son, and other relatives.¹²⁴ A woman cousin is reported as being sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in 1938.¹²⁵ Little Peti, now fourteen years old, was sent to a children’s home. Two weeks later, at night, the NKVD took him, and he spent “many years” in camps and prisons. He chanced to meet his father’s A.D.C. in one of the Arctic camps and learned from him the full story of the arrest.¹²⁶ (In 1961, when Khrushchev was visiting Kazakhstan, Peter Yakir approached him. “He asked me about his father. What could I tell him?”¹²⁷ At the time of Yakir’s arrest and execution, Khrushchev had spoken of him as “riff-raff who wanted to let in the German Fascists.”)¹²⁸

Uborevich’s wife (sent to Astrakhan on 10 June) had kept the charges against her husband from their little daughter, not yet in her teens; the girl learned of them from young Peter Yakir. On 5 September, Mrs. Uborevich was arrested by the NKVD. She was able to give her daughter a few photographs, and they never met again. Nineteen years later, in 1956, the daughter learned that her mother had died in 1941.

The daughter was taken to a children’s home, where she found other young girls: Veti Gamarnik, Svetlana Tukhachevsky, and Slava Feldman. They were rounded up on 22 September and sent off, evidently to NKVD children’s settlements.¹²⁹

Tukhachevsky had a large family. “On Stalin’s direct instructions, the wife of the Marshal, his sister Sofia Nikolayevna, and his brothers Alexander and Nikolai, were physically annihilated. Three of his sisters were sent to concentration camps, as well as the young daughter of the Marshal whom they interned when she reached the appropriate age.”¹³⁰ This was Svetlana, eleven years old at her father’s death; given a five-year sentence when she was seventeen, as “socially dangerous,” she is later reported as having been in the Kotlas camp, south of Vorkuta, together with Uborevich’s daughter.¹³¹ The Marshal’s mother, Mavra, also perished;¹³² she had refused to repudiate him. His wife, Nina, is said to have first gone insane and to have been taken to the Urals in a straitjacket.¹³³ Two former wives of Tukhachevsky’s, together with Feldman’s wife, are reported to have been in a special “Wives and Mistresses” section of Potmalag—a camp area strict as to discipline, but comparatively mild as to living conditions—in 1937, and to have later been transferred to the Segeta camp.¹³⁴ Another of the Marshal’s sisters announced that she was seeking permission to change her name. (The daughter and three sisters survived to attend a memorial meeting in his honor at the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow in January 1963.)

Gamarnik’s and Kork’s wives were also shot.¹³⁵

1937⁃1938

As the Red Army’s best generals were dragged off to execution amid a vast campaign of public abuse, Stalin and Yezhov launched the NKVD on the officer corps as a whole.

Four days after the Tuldrachevsky executions, Brigade Commander Medvedev was tried and shot, on the charge only of Trotskyite ideas, though he told Ulrikh and the Military Collegium that he denied all accusations of counterrevolutionary crimes.¹³⁶ Within nine days after the trial, 980 officers had been arrested, including 21 Corps Commanders and 37 Divisional Commanders.¹³⁷ On 19 June, Yakir’s subordinate, Divisional Commander Sablin, was shot. On 1 July, Corps Commanders Garkavi, Gekker, Turovsky, and Vasilenko and Divisional Commander Savitsky perished. (Garkavi’s wife, Yakir’s sister-in-law, was sent to camp, where she died in 1945; his two young sons, after some years in NKVD homes, were both killed in the Second World War.)¹³⁸ Twenty younger generals from the Moscow headquarters alone were also executed.¹³⁹ Almost the whole command of the Kremlin Military School was arrested.¹⁴⁰ The Frunze Military Academy, which Kork had headed, was swept by arrests. The Head of its Political Department, Neronov, was arrested as a spy. For a time, Shchadenko took over. Not a day passed without the arrest of a member of the staff. Almost all the instructors went to the jails.¹⁴¹ Army Commander Vatsetis was giving a lecture. After an hour there was a short break, which ended with the announcement, “Comrades! The lecture will not continue. Lecturer Vatsetis has been arrested as an enemy of the people.”¹⁴² The students, too, were rounded up in droves. All who had references from Gamarnik, for example, were taken. So were those, and there were many of them, who had been sent to the academy from units whose commanders had been arrested.¹⁴³

In the provinces, it was the same: in the Kiev Military District, 600 to 700 officers of the “Yakir nest” are said to have been arrested at this time.¹⁴⁴ A Soviet account of the Khrushchev period tells us that

a new leadership arrived in the Kiev Military District, Shchadenko, a member of the Military Council, from the very first started to take an attitude of suspicion toward the members of the staff. He kept watch, without bothering to conceal it, on the commanders and political officers of the units and was thereafter acting hand in hand with the Special Department. He was also extremely active in the campaign to compromise the commanding officer personnel, which was accompanied by the massive arrests of command cadres and political cadres. The more people were arrested the more difficult it was to believe in the charges of treachery, sabotage and treason.¹⁴⁵

A Soviet engineer officer was one of a number who had been working under Yakir (and Berzin) to prepare secret partisan bases, and to train partisans, in the Ukraine. In 1937, they were arrested and accused of “lack of faith in the Socialist state” and “preparation for enemy activity in the rear of the Soviet armies”—or “training bandits and storing arms for them,” as Voroshilov put it.¹⁴⁶ The bases were destroyed—to be much missed in 1941, when abortive attempts were made hastily to reconstruct them. The destruction of all but 22 of the 3,500 partisan detachments sent to the Ukraine in 1941 and 1942 is now largely blamed on this fact.¹⁴⁷

The future Marshal Biriuzov tells in his memoirs of being appointed to be Chief of Staff of the Thirtieth Rifle Division, stationed in Dnepropetrovsk. When he arrived, he found that the entire command had been arrested, apart from a couple of junior staff officers—with a major in charge of the division. Biriuzov asked on what authority this officer had command, and got the answer, “We act according to regulations: when one chief leaves the division, he’s replaced by the next in command. Just like in wartime.”¹⁴⁸

The Commander of the Seventh Cavalry Corps, Grigoriev, was called to the Kiev Military District Committee and accused of connections with the enemy. He was allowed to go back to his post, where he was arrested the next day,¹⁴⁹ and shot on 20 November, together with another Kiev District officer, Divisional Commander Dyumichev. Here we have a picture of the NKVD not feeling any necessity to put a general officer under arrest immediately he must have realized his case was hopeless. It cannot, in fact, have had much real fear of desperate military action, as is sometimes suggested.

Even retired veterans became involved. General Bougetsky, the Civil War hero whose wife had been crippled and son blinded while in the hands of the Whites, and who himself had lost his right arm in battle, was interrogated in the inner prison at Kiev. On the heart of this dignified sexagenarian they pinned the Nazi swastika and emptied a spittoon over his head. He was charged with an attempt to assassinate Voroshilov.¹⁵⁰ Juniors were treated even more brutally. A recent Soviet account tells us that in the Chita prison, a number of Air Force pilots were interrogated. One had his collar bone broken. They all had their teeth knocked out.¹⁵¹

In Minsk, Uborevich’s “judge” and successor as Commander of the Byelorussian Military District, Army Commander Belov, was almost immediately in trouble. A member of Uborevich’s “nest,” Corps Commander Serdich (an officer of Yugoslav origin) was arrested on 15 July.¹⁵² Imprudently enough, Belov intervened in his favor.¹⁵³ For the moment, Belov was not proceeded against, and presided impotently over the further massacre of his subordinates.

PURGE OF THE POLITICAL COMMISSARS

At the beginning of August 1937, a conference of political workers in the Army was addressed by Stalin. He once more violently attacked enemies of the people.¹⁵⁴ Gamarnik’s Political Administration suffered even more than the rest of the forces. At the top levels, there was a clean sweep. Gamarnik’s deputy, A. S. Bulin, had been dismissed by 28 May,¹⁵⁵ and later arrested.¹⁵⁶ The other deputy, G. A. Osepyan, was already under arrest by the end of May and, refusing to answer questions, was shot on 24 (or 26) June. He was followed by almost all the heads of the political administrations and most of the members of the soviets of the military districts.¹⁵⁷ Ippo, Head of the Military–Political Academy in Leningrad, who had been criticized in April, was dismissed on 1 June for political blunders¹⁵⁸ and later arrested. By rank, all seventeen of the Army Commissars went, with twenty-five of the twenty-eight Corps Commissars.¹⁵⁹

This purge of politicals swept the units as well. In the two months following the June 1937 meeting of the Military Soviet, arrests in the Fifth Mechanized Brigade of the Byelorussian Military District included the Brigade Commissar, the head of its political section, plus five out of the six Battalion Commissars, while the sixth was severely reprimanded.¹⁶⁰ A Soviet textbook speaks of “thousands” of leading Party workers in the Army and Fleet being repressed.¹⁶¹

Mekhlis, one of the most sinister and unpleasant of all Stalin’s agents, was confirmed as Head of the Political Administration of the Army in December 1937. He had lately worked as editor of Pravda, but in the Civil War had served as a Political Commissar at Army level. He had a special quirk—to cashier and arrest many political workers on the grounds of their connection with the “anti-Party Army Byelorussian–Tolmachevite Group.”¹⁶² In fact, he was condemning the Political Commissars for this long-extinct deviation, which had consisted of enthusiasm for greater political control in the Army! In any case, the grouping of senior Political Commissars who had criticized the Party leadership in the late 1920s was, whatever its particular program, far too independent-minded for the new regime. Mekhlis had insisted that any who attempted to defend them, such as the Head of the Political Administration of the Byelorussian Military District, I. I. Sychev, deserved the same fate as this “band of spies.”¹⁶³

At the beginning of 1938, the number of political workers in the armed forces was only one-third of its official establishment. As the numbers still in position were 10,500, the implication is that at least 20,000 political workers had gone under.fn10 By 1938, more than one-third of all the Party political workers had had no political education at al1.¹⁶⁴

The number of Party members in the Army shrank by about a half.¹⁶⁵ At the XVIIth Congress, Voroshilov had given 25.6 percent of the Army as Party workers, the Army numbering in February 1935 approximately 1 million: the net deficit here was therefore some 125,000.

THE OFFICERS FADE AWAY

Everywhere—except as yet the Far East—the Purge began to strike at the whole command structure. The generals who had just been promoted to fill the vacant places now started to disappear.

At a meeting of the Military Soviet of the Caucasus Military District in November 1937, the new District Commander, N. V. Kuibyshev (brother of the dead Politburo member), criticized the purge of the Army as affecting its battle-preparedness. He was shortly afterward arrested.¹⁶⁶ And the same fate overtook the Military District Commanders all over the Soviet Union. By the summer of 1938, all who had held these posts in June 1937 had disappeared. At the center, a similar sweep took all eleven Deputy Commissars of Defense.

A Soviet account says that the Air Force and the tank and mechanized forces suffered most heavily.¹⁶⁷ Khalepsky of the Armored Forces, Alksnis of the Air Force, and Khripin, Alksnis’s deputy, had made an excellent impression on foreign Military Attachés in the autumn 1936 maneuvers. Khalepsky, who had been relegated to the Communications Commissariat, was arrested in 1937 and shot in 1938.¹⁶⁸ Army Commander Alksnis was the youngest of the Tukhachevsky group, being barely forty. Backed by Corps Commander Todorsky, Head of the Air Force Academy, he had worked hard to save his juniors from persecution by NKVD. Alksnis is given on the electoral lists as late as 13 November, but by the last days of 1937 he was under arrest, together with Khripin (as was also Todorsky). Todorsky, arrested in the spring of 1938, was sentenced to fifteen years in May 1939. He survived (the only “repressed” Corps Commander to do so) and was released in 1953.¹⁶⁹

The extraordinary deviousness of the NKVD is shown in Gorbatov’s experiences. He learned he was in disfavor (for the second time) when, temporarily commanding the Sixth Cavalry Corps, he went to the stores officer to draw his winter uniform, and found that orders had been received from the corps political officer, Fominykh, then in Moscow, not to give him one. He went to Moscow and was arrested. His wife could not find out what had happened to him. No one would even tell her he had been arrested, until a girl whispered it to her in the corridor of the Red Army Officers’ Hostel.¹⁷⁰

Gorbatov has given a brief account of his interrogation. At the Lubyanka, he was at first treated fairly mildly, but bullying set in on the fifth day. He was in a cell with seven others, all of whom had confessed. He was then transferred to the Lefortovo prison, where he shared a single one-man isolator with two others. There he was tortured on the fourth interrogation, and five more torture sessions followed at two- to three-day intervals, from each of which he had to be carried back bleeding to the cell. There were then twenty days’ rest, then five more bouts of torture. No confession could be wrested from Gorbatov, and on 8 May 1939 he was sentenced at a trial lasting four or five minutes to fifteen years’ imprisonment plus five years’ disfranchisement. The NKVD told his wife that as she was “young and interesting,” she could easily get married again.¹⁷¹

Another officer, a former revolutionary sailor in the Baltic Fleet, is reported as also having refused to confess and actually being acquitted, getting a civilian job on his release. He was, however, rearrested six months later.¹⁷²

But “many splendid comrades and political officers” confessed.

They were “persuaded”—persuaded by quite definite techniques—that they were either German or British or some other kind of spies…. Even in cases when such people were told that the accusation of espionage had been withdrawn, they themselves insisted on their previous testimony, because they believed it was better to stand on their false testimony in order to put an end as quickly as possible to the torment and to die as quickly as possible.¹⁷³

One Divisional Commander is reported as confessing that he had “recruited” every officer in his division down to Company Commanders.¹⁷⁴ And there are many similar stories. Mekhlis even discovered and denounced a group of twelve terrorist-spies in the Red Army Chorus.¹⁷⁵

Rivalries between the NKVD and the Army were of course natural in various fields. (The possession by the Police of a large armed force was itself an irritant.) But in addition, the military-intelligence network abroad operated to a certain extent independently of the Foreign Department of the NKVD, and there was a struggle to win it. When Tukhachevsky was arrested, the NKVD gained control. Almost all the military-intelligence agents were recalled from abroad and shot.¹⁷⁶ S. P. Uritsky, Chief of Soviet Military Intelligence—the “Fourth Bureau”—from 1935, was arrested on the night of 1 November 1937 and shot “soon afterward.”¹⁷⁷

His predecessor as Head of the Fourth Bureau, from 1920 to 1935, J. K. Berzin, who had held a post in the short-lived Soviet Latvian Government of 1919, had been sent to the Far Eastern Army on handing over. From there, he had gone to Spain, as virtual Commander-in-Chief of the Republican Armies under the name “Grishin.” He had clashed with the NKVD, and was arrested on his return.¹⁷⁸

The Commander of the International Brigade, “General Kleber,” a Soviet officer whose real name was M. Z. Shtern, but was represented as a Canadian to suit international decorum, was accused of being a member of Berzin’s “spy organization” and beaten on the legs with iron bars.¹⁷⁹ However, he was only sentenced to twenty-five years and sent to a labor camp, where he died.¹⁸⁰

Brigade Commander “Gorey” (Skoblevsky), who had fought and won the Battle of Madrid for the Spanish Republic, was much feted on his return to the USSR. But soon afterward, about the end of 1937, “the hero of Madrid was slandered” and shot.¹⁸¹ He is said to have been arrested only two days after receiving the Order of Lenin.¹⁸²

Other military victims among Soviet veterans of the Spanish Civil War were to include the senior military adviser “Grigorevich” (G. M. Shtern), later promoted to Army Commander in the Far East, and the leading Soviet air ace in Spain, “Douglas,” later, as Lieutenant General Smushkevich, Head of the Soviet Air Force; both were shot in 1941.¹⁸³ Marshal Malinovsky, until his death Minister of Defense, who was also in Spain, describes failing to obey two orders to return and finally getting a third threatening to list him as a “non-returner,” upon which he went back, at a time when, fortunately for him, the worst period of the Purge was over.¹⁸⁴ Soviet civilians in Spain also fared evilly. Antonov-Ovseenko, who had operated in the delicate position of Soviet Consul-General in Barcelona, perished, as did Rosenberg, the Soviet Ambassador to the Republican Government. Rosenberg’s crime seems to have been an attempt to arrange the exchange of prisoners with the Franco authorities. Stalin always regarded this sort of thing as suspicious, and was later to show resentment when the Yugoslav partisans entered into similar conversations with the German Command in the Balkans.¹⁸⁵

PURGE IN THE NAVY

In the Navy, the Purge was as sweeping as in the land forces. Of the nine Fleet Admirals and Admirals First Grade, only one (Galler) survived the Purge, to die in prison after the war.¹⁸⁶ First to be arrested was the brains of the Navy (though no longer holding naval position), R. A. Muklevich. Muklevich, a comfortable, strong-looking man, was an Old Bolshevik with an extraordinary career behind him. Born in 1890, he had become a Party member at the age of sixteen, and in the difficult years 1907 to 1909, still in his teens, had been secretary of the Party organization at Bialystok. He had been called up for the Imperial Navy in 1912 and been active in the Party’s military work from then through the Revolution. During the Civil War, he had served on the staff of various armies and fronts, become Deputy Director of the Army Academy in 1921, then served with military aviation from 1925, and finally taken over effective control of the fleet from 1926 to 1927. As Director of Naval Construction, he had played a leading role in the modernization of the Soviet Navy. His clear view of the problems and unambitious efficiency made him a natural and welcome associate of Tukhachevsky’s group.

He was arrested in May 1937.¹⁸⁷ He was not brought to public trial—indeed, there was no announcement made about the trial of any of the naval leaders. He and the Navy Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Orlov, were, however, denounced as accomplices of Tukhachevsky at the XVIIIth Party Congress in 1939. The attack on them, unlike those made on the Army men, contained a specific criticism of their military policies. People’s Commissar for Shipbuilding Tevosyan announced that they had opposed the idea of a powerful surface fleet and that their removal had made it possible to build “a most mighty attacking force”¹⁸⁸—a chimera which diverted a large amount of Soviet effort into a hopeless and pointless attempt to match the major naval powers with a battle fleet.

This is doubtless the factual basis to be found, as so often, for one of the incidents in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon: the execution of the Fleet Commander “Bogrov” on account of a dispute about the nature of the future Soviet Navy. The precise issue, however, is rather different. Koestler has “Bogrov” advocating large, long-range submarines as against Stalin’s view that small, short-range craft were required, the political distinction being that the former implies a policy of aggression and world revolution, and the latter one of coastal defense and a general defensive policy. In reality, the Stalinist view was the more, rather than the less, aggressive (“Stalin had threatened to mete out heavy punishment to anyone objecting to heavy cruisers”).¹⁸⁹ Muklevich’s attitude, doubtless dictated by a realistic appraisal of the possibilities, given actual Soviet resources, was a short-range, defensive one. When war came, the Soviet Navy lost effective control of the vital seas, and Muklevich was proved right posthumously—the Soviet Admiralty reverting to his views, though not acknowledging them.

In any event, this argument cannot have been the main motive behind the Navy purge, whose origins were clearly the same as those of the purge in the Army and in the country as a whole. It was less a matter of settling technical disputes by executions than of using technical disputes as one excuse for executions. Muldevich confessed after a week’s severe torture in the Lefortovo prison.¹⁹⁰

Next to fall was the Commander of the Naval Forces, Admiral Orlov, together with Admiral Sivkov, Commander of the Baltic Fleet, and Admiral Kozhanov, Commander of the Black Sea Fleet. Orlov was arrested in November 1937, but he seems to have been dismissed as early as June, when Admiral Viktorov, Commander of the Pacific Fleet and himself shortly to fall, was acting as Head of the Navy.¹⁹¹

With the leaders, their subordinates fell in scores.

The Navy by its very nature gave contact, or the possibility of contact, with foreigners. Soviet warships paid courtesy visits. They cruised in international waters. During the Second World War, these suspicious circumstances were to be much exacerbated, owing to collaboration with the Royal Navy at the Murmansk end of the Northern Convoy route. One of the chief figures in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is Buynovsky, “The Captain,” who has actually spent a whole month on a British cruiser as liaison officer. “Then after the war some British admiral who should’ve had more sense sent me a little souvenir with an inscription that said: ‘In gratitude.’ I was really shocked and I cursed like hell, so now I’m inside with all the others.”

The atmosphere had been established much earlier. Rear-Admiral Isakov, in his memoirs published in 1961,¹⁹² tells a story of a flag officer of his acquaintance, Ozarovsky, who was wrecked in his small sailboat off the coast near Kronstadt. A Norwegian steamer came in sight and lowered a boat. Ozarovsky refused the offer of rescue, though his situation was desperate. Isakov describes Ozarovsky’s feelings. He was bound to be saved. Although he himself could not have been seen from the shore, “the foreign steamer entering a prohibited zone would be seen at once. A cutter would be sent to the scene.” And this in fact happened. Isakov visited him in hospital and asked why he had not let himself be brought to Leningrad by the Norwegians. Ozarovsky replied, “I should have had to give an explanation: when and how this meeting with foreign agents had been arranged and for how much I had sold our operational plans while the ship was passing through the channel.” Isakov felt compelled to agree, and adds that even so Ozarovsky did not escape. He was arrested, interrogated, and tortured for the very reasons he had advanced.

In fact, the occupational hazards of the cadres in the Navy were even higher than those of the cadres in the Army. They had one very minor advantage. Except in the case of the Pacific Fleet, naval officers were usually British “spies,” and, until 1939 at least, this carried slightly higher social status than attached to treason in favor of Germany, Japan, and Poland.

A SECOND MILITARY MASSACRE

Orlov’s case became associated with a new wave of military arrests launched in the early part of 1938, whose theme was made clear in a letter issued on Stalin’s instructions calling for further purging of the armed forces, not only of enemies of the people, but also of “the silent ones” who had failed to take an active part in the Purge.¹⁹³

The replacements of the slaughtered commanders of 1937 now went themselves to the Lubyanka. In the first days of January, Belov was recalled to Moscow. The train journey, we are told, was gloomy, full of recollections of similar ones of the previous year. On arrival, he was arrested; his intervention in favor of Serdich was now turned into a criminal matter.¹⁹⁴

And now a second Marshal of the Soviet Union fell. Yegorov, a former Tsarist officer, was an older man than the members of the Tukhachevsky group, being fifty-five, a year younger than his former colleague in the Imperial Army, Shaposhnikov. He was one of Stalin’s boon companions. Stalin is said to have offered Tukhachevsky’s country villa to Yegorov after the execution, and Yegorov to have refused to take it.¹⁹⁵

Yegorov had commanded the South-Western Front in the Polish Campaign, with Stalin as his political chief. He was one of the few figures from Stalin’s old military entourage to suffer.

The first blow in the military purge had taken out all the military members of the Central Committee except Voroshilov, Budenny, Blyukher, and Yegorov. Yegorov is said to have complained that the extent of the purge was gravely affecting military efficiency. He was removed from his post as Deputy People’s Commissar of Defense at the end of February 1938, and Stalin circulated to the Central Committee a note urging his expulsion from the Committee because he had been compromised in “confrontation” with the arrested conspirators Belov, Gryaznov, Grinko, and Sedyakin, and also because his wife was a Polish spy.¹⁹⁶ He was soon under arrest.

The same month saw the dismissal, and April the arrest on a civilian mission in the Urals, of Army Commander Dybenko,¹⁹⁷ who now commanded the Leningrad District. During the Civil War, Dybenko had served with Voroshilov and Stalin, but that was no longer sure protection. The huge sailor had led the mutiny of the Imperator Pavel I in 1916, and had commanded the Baltic Fleet sailors in the Revolution. He had once been married to the fiery aristo-deviationist Alexandra Kollontai. He had led the soldiers who suppressed the Constituent Assembly in 1918. But idealism had persisted for a time: he actually tried to resign from the Party when the death penalty was not, after all, abolished by the Soviet Government.¹⁹⁸ His closest friends at the Military Academy had been Uritsky, shot in 1937, and Fedko, who was brought on 2 February 1938 from Yakir’s old post in the Ukraine to be Deputy Commissar for Defense for a short and insecure tenure.¹⁹⁹ They had all been sent from the Academy to take part in the assault on Kronstadt.²⁰⁰ And now Dybenko was a German agent, though also (then a rarity) a spy for the United States, a group of Americans having visited Samarkand when he was commanding there.²⁰¹

Not only old associates of Stalin’s like Dybenko were now to perish (together with his wife).²⁰² There were still grudges to be paid against former enemies. Among those in jail was, as we have seen, Army Commander Vatsetis, first Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, whom Stalin and others had attempted to remove as a traitor in 1919, but whom Trotsky had successfully defended. He had meanwhile held important posts in the Army Inspectorate and in the Military Academy.²⁰³

At the end of July came a second and even larger slaughter of the High Command, though no announcement was ever made. This went together with a major killing of political and other figures (see here). As far as I know, this massive operation was referred to for the first time in an article of mine in Encounter in October 1968. I then noted eleven death dates, military and civilian, to be found in various publications of the Khrushchev period. As I write, twenty years later, forty-six names (civilian and military) have become available with death dates 27 July to 1 August 1938, though so far few new names have been given in the glasnost literature of 1986 to 1990.

The military component of this mass operation included no fewer than nine Army Commanders—Alksnis of the Air Force, Belov of Byelorussia, Dubovoy, Dybenko (lately of the Leningrad Command), Levandovsky (until recently in the Far East), Khalepsky (former armored forces commander), Sedyakin (antiaircraft), Vatsetis (former Civil War Commander-in-Chief), and Velikanov (unlike the others, newly promoted to this rank); Corps Commanders Gailit, Gribov, Gryaznov, Kuibyshev, and Kovtiukh (the legendary Civil War hero who appears under the name Kozhukh in A. S. Serafimovich’s Iron Flood, which curiously enough continued to be sold without alteration after the purge of its hero, who was “brutally tortured”);²⁰⁴ Divisional Commanders Kuchinsky (Head of the General Staff Academy), Serdich, and Stigga; Fleet Admirals Orlov (Commander-in-Chief of the Navy) and Viktorov (his successor); Admiral Kireev; Army Commissars Berzin (lately in effect Commander-in-Chief of the Spanish Republican Army) and Okunev; Corps Commissar Ozolin; and the military theoretician (at one time briefly Chief of Staff of the Red Army) A. A. Svechin.

No doubt others not yet named perished; clearly the higher the rank, the more likely is its holder to be found in the reference books, so that nine Army Commanders to five Corps Commanders to four Divisional Commanders may not represent the real proportion. But even as it is, this is clearly a major blow to the Army and Navy: one not perhaps so striking, yet more massively devastating even than that of June 1937.

It may be worth stating that the military and political victims do not seem to have been taken in separate categories. One Army man was shot on 27 July; six soldiers and five civilians on 28 July; thirteen soldiers and thirteen civilians on 29 July; and six soldiers and two civilians on 1 August. This may not be entirely representative, but at least it appears to show that there was a blending of the two elements into a single alleged plot. Berzin was accused of belonging to the “anti-Soviet nationalist band Rudzutak–Berzin,” which had served “British, French, and German intelligence.”²⁰⁵ Both were Latvian, to which the “nationalist” charge must refer (indeed, nine of the accused were Latvian). We are also told that the new Army plot was a matter of Right Socialist Revolutionaries and German, Polish, Finnish, and Latvian nationalists.²⁰⁶ Then we learn that the accusations against Dubovoy included his having killed his superior, the legendary Shchors, during the Civil War, in order to take his place.²⁰⁷ But a variety of charges of this nature had been melded together in previous trials. More generally, as far as the evidence goes, the political victims were accused of Rightist conspiracy, and we can perhaps assume that a military–Rightist plot was the main allegation.

One last major blow, against the Far Eastern Army, remained to be struck, and Marshal Yegorov and others were still to be dealt with. We shall go into that in a later chapter, and afterwards consider the whole effect of this unprecedented destruction of the officer corps. But it will already be obvious that if Stalin had destroyed a potential threat to his power, he had also inflicted enormous damage on Soviet defense.