The Great Terror

Yezhov now had his machine cleared and ready for action. At the same time, the other main element in the Purge mechanism, Vyshinsky’s Prosecutor’s apparatus, was being similarly renovated. A number of the old Prosecutors had attempted to maintain a semblance of legality. For example, the Assistant Chief Prosecutor of Water Transport had put in a memorandum on 26 June 1936 urging this. Similar protests were made by a number of provincial Prosecutors—for example in Bryansk, where two were arrested “for spreading false and defamatory rumors.” Ninety percent of the provincial Prosecutors were removed, and many of them were arrested. “Vyshinsky carried out a mass purge in the organs of the Prosecutor’s office. With his sanction, many prominent workers in the Prosecutor’s Office who had tried in one way or another to mitigate repressive measures and stop the lawlessness and arbitrariness were arrested and subsequently perished.”²⁴⁵ As late as the beginning of 1938, the ironically titled Stalinist law journal Socialist Legality²⁴⁶

called for further work in purging “fascist agents” among the Prosecutors.

The authorities on Soviet law who had inculcated the “formalist” attitude to legality were held to responsibility. The Deputy Commissar for Justice, the Soviet Union’s leading legal theorist, E. Pashukanis, was severely criticized in January 1937²⁴⁷ and shot, and in April was to be linked by Vyshinsky with Bukharin as a wrecker “who has now been exposed.”²⁴⁸ Another unsatisfactory Deputy Commissar for Justice, V. A. Degot, was arrested on 31 July 1937. Sent to camp, he died in 1944.²⁴⁹

By early spring, all the machinery was in good order. The old Communist police and prosecutors, ruthless as they had been, had not proved sufficiently so for the new phase. Russians who had thought that the country was already in the grip of terrorists were now to see what terror really meant.

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.”