The Great Purge

On 1 October 1936 Nikolai Yezhov signed his first order as People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs of the USSR. Five days earlier Joseph Stalin had removed Genrikh Yagoda from the post, accusing him of having been too slow to uncover the conspiracy of Trotskyists and Zinovievites. Under Yezhov the NKVD – the Soviet Union’s interior ministry and political police in one – unleashed over the next two years the bloodiest peacetime state terror in the history of the USSR. According to the NKVD’s own records, more than one and a half million people were arrested in 1937–1938 and some 680,000 were shot. Most of the Old Bolsheviks perished, as did hundreds of Comintern officials and a large part of the Red Army’s command, but above all hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens: peasants, workers, clergy, former “kulaks” and members of national minorities, among whom Poles formed the largest group of victims. The Great Purge transformed the Soviet Union only a few years before it entered the Second World War.

Name and date

It is often said that the Great Purge “really began in October 1936”. The terror has no single starting date. Some historians date it from the murder of Kirov in December 1934, others from the first Moscow trial in August 1936, and others still from the summer of 1937, when the NKVD’s mass operations began. October 1936 nonetheless has a strong claim: on 26 September the Central Executive Committee of the USSR appointed Yezhov People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, and on 1 October the new chief took office. That day is therefore sometimes regarded as the beginning of the purge.

The names vary. The popularisation of the term “Great Purge” is usually credited to Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski, who wrote a memoir of his time in NKVD prisons, and that of “the Great Terror” to the British historian Robert Conquest, author of the first major study, published in 1968. In Russia people speak of the “Great Terror” or of the “Yezhovshchina”, after the head of the NKVD. The latter term can be misleading: Yezhov carried out the terror, but the decisions were Stalin’s.

The road to terror

The murder of Kirov gave Stalin both the tools and the pretext. A decree of 1 December 1934 allowed “terrorists” to be tried under an accelerated procedure, without defence counsel and without the right to petition for clemency. Former oppositionists, led by Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, were imprisoned, and in 1935 Yezhov, as a secretary of the Central Committee and chairman of the Party Control Commission, carried out a verification of party cards that ended with several hundred thousand members being expelled. In August 1936 Zinoviev, Kamenev and fourteen other defendants were sentenced to death in a show trial and shot.

Stalin, then on holiday in Sochi, decided that the NKVD was acting too slowly. On 25 September 1936, together with Andrei Zhdanov, he sent a coded telegram to Moscow: Yezhov’s appointment as commissar was “absolutely necessary and urgent”, because Yagoda had “clearly proved unequal to his task” in exposing the Trotskyist–Zinovievite bloc, and the OGPU was “four years behind” in the matter. Yagoda was moved to the post of Commissar for Communications and arrested at the end of March 1937.

Yezhov began with a purge of the NKVD itself. He replaced Yagoda’s men with his own, and his first deputy was Mikhail Frinovsky. Between 1 October 1936 and mid-August 1938 more than two thousand security officers were arrested.

1937: trials and the plenum

The second Moscow trial took place in January 1937. In the dock were Yuri Pyatakov, deputy commissar for heavy industry, Karl Radek, one of the party’s best-known publicists, and fifteen other defendants. They were accused of sabotage in industry and of conspiring with Germany and Japan, which in return for helping to overthrow Stalin were supposedly to receive Ukraine and the Soviet Far East. Thirteen were sentenced to death. On 18 February 1937 Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Commissar for Heavy Industry and an old friend of Stalin’s, who had tried in vain to protect his people, shot himself.

At the plenum of the Central Committee in February and March 1937 Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov were arrested in the hall. Stalin delivered a report there in which he declared that the stronger the Soviet state grew, the more fiercely its enemies fought, and that wreckers, spies and saboteurs working for foreign intelligence services had infiltrated every organisation. This thesis of the intensification of the class struggle became the ideological justification for the terror.

The purge of the army

From August 1936 the NKVD arrested Red Army commanders, among them the Komkors Vitaly Primakov and Vitovt Putna, and in May 1937 it reached the very top. On 22 May Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Deputy Commissar for Defence and the author of modern Soviet military doctrine, was detained. On 11 June a special military tribunal convicted him and seven senior commanders, among them Ieronim Uborevich and Iona Yakir, of membership of a “Trotskyist military organisation” and of spying for Germany. They were shot during the night of 11–12 June. The members of the tribunal included Semyon Budyonny and Vasily Blyukher. Blyukher, commander of the forces in the Far East, himself died in prison in November 1938 after torture, and Marshal Alexander Yegorov, Chief of the General Staff, was shot in February 1939.

According to Soviet figures, more than 35,000 commanders and political commissars were removed from the army in 1937–1938. Some were arrested, some dismissed for other reasons, and several thousand were later reinstated. The highest ranks, however, were decimated. According to a frequently cited tally, three of the five marshals were killed, as were thirteen of the fifteen army commanders, fifty of the fifty-seven corps commanders, one hundred and fifty-four of the one hundred and eighty-six divisional commanders and all the army commissars. The navy also suffered heavily.

The mass operations

Most of the victims died not in the show trials but in secret mass operations. On 30 July 1937 Yezhov signed NKVD Order No. 00447, approved by the Politburo, on the repression of “former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements”. The order divided its victims into two categories: the first meant execution, the second eight to ten years in the Gulag. Each region was given a quota; in total, the initial plan was to shoot about 76,000 people and imprison about 186,000. Sentences were passed by three-member “troikas”, made up of the head of the local NKVD, the party secretary and the prosecutor, without the accused being present. Local NKVD chiefs asked for their quotas to be raised, and the Politburo agreed. By November 1938 more than 760,000 people had been sentenced in this single operation, and about 387,000 of them shot.

At the same time the NKVD carried out national operations aimed at minorities regarded as a potential “fifth column” of hostile states: Germans, Latvians, Finns, Greeks, Estonians, Romanians, Iranians and former employees of the Chinese Eastern Railway who had returned from Manchuria, the so-called Harbinites. The largest of them was the Polish Operation, launched by Order No. 00485 of 11 August 1937 against an alleged network of the Polish Military Organisation. According to figures compiled by the Memorial society, about 140,000 people were sentenced in it, of whom 111,091 were shot. Most of the victims were Poles from Ukraine, Belarus and Leningrad. On Yezhov’s report on the progress of the operation in September 1937 Stalin wrote: “Very good! Keep on digging and cleaning out this Polish spy filth.” In the autumn of 1937 some 172,000 Koreans, suspected as a whole of sympathising with Japan, were deported from the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Arrests were made according to quotas and lists, and confessions were extracted by torture, which the Politburo formally sanctioned in 1937. The condemned were shot at night in prisons and at special execution grounds near the big cities: at Butovo and Kommunarka outside Moscow, at Levashovo outside Leningrad, at Bykivnia (PL) outside Kiev, at Kurapaty outside Minsk and at Sandarmokh in Karelia. At the Butovo range alone more than 20,000 people were shot between August 1937 and October 1938.

The party, the Comintern and foreign communists

The terror did not spare the elite itself. Of the 1,966 delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934, 1,108 were arrested, and of the 139 full and candidate members of the Central Committee elected at that congress, 98 were shot or driven to their deaths, as Nikita Khrushchev revealed in 1956. In March 1938, at the third Moscow trial, Bukharin, Rykov and Yagoda were sentenced to death. Five full and candidate members of the Politburo perished, among them Stanisław Kosior and Robert Eikhe. Stalin personally approved the lists of people to be sentenced by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court: 383 such lists survive, with more than 40,000 names, the vast majority bearing his signature and those of Vyacheslav Molotov and other members of the leadership.

Foreign communists who had sought refuge in the USSR suffered particularly badly. Among those shot was Béla Kun, founder of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, while Hugo Eberlein, a co-founder of the KPD, went to a prison from which he never emerged. The hardest hit was the Communist Party of Poland: most of its leadership, including Julian Leszczyński and Adolf Warski, died in Moscow, and in August 1938 the Comintern dissolved the party on the grounds that it had supposedly been taken over by agents of Polish intelligence.

The end

In the summer of 1938 Stalin concluded that the terror had served its purpose and was beginning to get out of control. In August Lavrentiy Beria became Yezhov’s first deputy. On 17 November 1938 the Council of People’s Commissars and the Central Committee adopted a resolution that banned the mass operations and dissolved the troikas, laying the blame for the “mistakes” on the NKVD. On 23 November Yezhov asked to be relieved of his post, and two days later Beria replaced him. Yezhov was arrested in April 1939 and shot in February 1940, as were many of his subordinates.

The repression did not stop, but it diminished. Some of those arrested were released, and several thousand officers returned to the army. At the same time, from the autumn of 1939, Beria’s NKVD began a new wave of repression in the occupied Polish territories and later in the Baltic states.

The scale

In a report prepared in 1953 for the party leadership, the NKVD stated that in 1937–1938 it had arrested 1,575,259 people and convicted 1,344,923, of whom 681,692 were sentenced to death. To these must be added the deaths in the Gulag, which rose sharply in those years, and the people sentenced by the ordinary courts. Historians estimate the total number of those killed in the Great Purge at between about 750,000 and more than a million. On that scale, it meant that over two years an average of nearly a thousand people were shot every day.

Why?

The causes of the terror have been the subject of a long debate. Conquest and many other scholars saw it as the work of Stalin, who wanted to destroy anyone who might become an alternative to his rule. Historians of the so-called revisionist school, such as J. Arch Getty, stressed the chaos within the state, the conflicts between the centre and the regions and the momentum of denunciations from below. Documents from the archives opened after 1991 settled the key question: the mass operations were planned and directed from the centre, and Stalin personally initiated, supervised and ended them.

Many present-day scholars, such as Oleg Khlevniuk, believe that one of the main motives was fear of war. The Spanish Civil War, the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan of November 1936 and Hitler’s rearmament convinced Stalin that war was close. Before it came, he wanted to destroy everyone who might turn against him in the event of defeat: former oppositionists, peasants wronged by collectivisation, clergy, and national minorities with ties to neighbouring states. In his eyes, then, the terror was the liquidation of a “fifth column” ahead of the coming war.

Significance

The Great Purge had a profound effect on the road to the Second World War and on its course. The Red Army lost experienced commanders at the very moment it was re-equipping and expanding. Their places were taken by young men, often inexperienced and afraid to take decisions. In the winter of 1939–1940 the army’s weakness was laid bare by the war with Finland, and Hitler and the German generals took it as proof that the USSR could be defeated quickly. The catastrophic defeats of the summer of 1941 had many causes, but the purge of the army was one of them.

The terror also changed the calculations of international politics. The British and French politicians and soldiers who negotiated with Moscow in 1939 rated the Red Army’s value as an ally low, and that judgement weighed on their attitude. In the Far East Genrikh Lyushkov, head of the NKVD in the Far Eastern Krai, fearing arrest, fled to Manchukuo in June 1938 and handed the Japanese information on Soviet forces a few weeks before the fighting at Lake Khasan.

Most important of all, however, after 1938 no one in the Soviet Union dared question Stalin’s decisions any longer. It was he alone, without opposition in the party, the army or the diplomatic service, who could conclude the pact with Hitler in August 1939. The methods worked out in 1937–1938 – lists, quotas, night-time executions and mass graves in the forests – were soon applied by the NKVD to the citizens of Poland. For many families the Polish Operation of 1937 was the first act of a tragedy whose next chapters were the deportations of 1940–1941 and the Katyn massacre.