The Great Terror

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?”