The Great Terror

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.