The Great Terror

The papers published a faked letter from Mrs. Yakir repudiating her husband. She protested to the NKVD, which rebuffed her, but later told her in a threatening manner that it was willing to receive a withdrawal, though not necessarily to publish it.¹²³

At the beginning of September, she was arrested. She was later liquidated, together with Yakir’s brother, the wife of another brother and her son, and other relatives.¹²⁴ A woman cousin is reported as being sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in 1938.¹²⁵ Little Peti, now fourteen years old, was sent to a children’s home. Two weeks later, at night, the NKVD took him, and he spent “many years” in camps and prisons. He chanced to meet his father’s A.D.C. in one of the Arctic camps and learned from him the full story of the arrest.¹²⁶ (In 1961, when Khrushchev was visiting Kazakhstan, Peter Yakir approached him. “He asked me about his father. What could I tell him?”

¹²⁷ At the time of Yakir’s arrest and execution, Khrushchev had spoken of him as “riff-raff who wanted to let in the German Fascists.”)¹²⁸

Uborevich’s wife (sent to Astrakhan on 10 June) had kept the charges against her husband from their little daughter, not yet in her teens; the girl learned of them from young Peter Yakir. On 5 September, Mrs. Uborevich was arrested by the NKVD. She was able to give her daughter a few photographs, and they never met again. Nineteen years later, in 1956, the daughter learned that her mother had died in 1941.

The daughter was taken to a children’s home, where she found other young girls: Veti Gamarnik, Svetlana Tukhachevsky, and Slava Feldman. They were rounded up on 22 September and sent off, evidently to NKVD children’s settlements.¹²⁹

Tukhachevsky had a large family. “On Stalin’s direct instructions, the wife of the Marshal, his sister Sofia Nikolayevna, and his brothers Alexander and Nikolai, were physically annihilated. Three of his sisters were sent to concentration camps, as well as the young daughter of the Marshal whom they interned when she reached the appropriate age.”¹³⁰

This was Svetlana, eleven years old at her father’s death; given a five-year sentence when she was seventeen, as “socially dangerous,” she is later reported as having been in the Kotlas camp, south of Vorkuta, together with Uborevich’s daughter.¹³¹ The Marshal’s mother, Mavra, also perished;¹³² she had refused to repudiate him. His wife, Nina, is said to have first gone insane and to have been taken to the Urals in a straitjacket.¹³³ Two former wives of Tukhachevsky’s, together with Feldman’s wife, are reported to have been in a special “Wives and Mistresses” section of Potmalag—a camp area strict as to discipline, but comparatively mild as to living conditions—in 1937, and to have later been transferred to the Segeta camp.¹³⁴ Another of the Marshal’s sisters announced that she was seeking permission to change her name. (The daughter and three sisters survived to attend a memorial meeting in his honor at the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow in January 1963.)

Gamarnik’s and Kork’s wives were also shot.¹³⁵

1937⁃1938

As the Red Army’s best generals were dragged off to execution amid a vast campaign of public abuse, Stalin and Yezhov launched the NKVD on the officer corps as a whole.

Four days after the Tuldrachevsky executions, Brigade Commander Medvedev was tried and shot, on the charge only of Trotskyite ideas, though he told Ulrikh and the Military Collegium that he denied all accusations of counterrevolutionary crimes.¹³⁶ Within nine days after the trial, 980 officers had been arrested, including 21 Corps Commanders and 37 Divisional Commanders.¹³⁷

On 19 June, Yakir’s subordinate, Divisional Commander Sablin, was shot. On 1 July, Corps Commanders Garkavi, Gekker, Turovsky, and Vasilenko and Divisional Commander Savitsky perished. (Garkavi’s wife, Yakir’s sister-in-law, was sent to camp, where she died in 1945; his two young sons, after some years in NKVD homes, were both killed in the Second World War.)¹³⁸ Twenty younger generals from the Moscow headquarters alone were also executed.¹³⁹ Almost the whole command of the Kremlin Military School was arrested.¹⁴⁰ The Frunze Military Academy, which Kork had headed, was swept by arrests. The Head of its Political Department, Neronov, was arrested as a spy. For a time, Shchadenko took over. Not a day passed without the arrest of a member of the staff. Almost all the instructors went to the jails.¹⁴¹ Army Commander Vatsetis was giving a lecture. After an hour there was a short break, which ended with the announcement, “Comrades! The lecture will not continue. Lecturer Vatsetis has been arrested as an enemy of the people.”¹⁴² The students, too, were rounded up in droves. All who had references from Gamarnik, for example, were taken. So were those, and there were many of them, who had been sent to the academy from units whose commanders had been arrested.¹⁴³