The Great Terror

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.