The Great Terror

In the provinces, it was the same: in the Kiev Military District, 600 to 700 officers of the “Yakir nest” are said to have been arrested at this time.¹⁴⁴ A Soviet account of the Khrushchev period tells us that

a new leadership arrived in the Kiev Military District, Shchadenko, a member of the Military Council, from the very first started to take an attitude of suspicion toward the members of the staff. He kept watch, without bothering to conceal it, on the commanders and political officers of the units and was thereafter acting hand in hand with the Special Department. He was also extremely active in the campaign to compromise the commanding officer personnel, which was accompanied by the massive arrests of command cadres and political cadres. The more people were arrested the more difficult it was to believe in the charges of treachery, sabotage and treason.¹⁴⁵

A Soviet engineer officer was one of a number who had been working under Yakir (and Berzin) to prepare secret partisan bases, and to train partisans, in the Ukraine. In 1937, they were arrested and accused of “lack of faith in the Socialist state” and “preparation for enemy activity in the rear of the Soviet armies”—or “training bandits and storing arms for them,” as Voroshilov put it.¹⁴⁶ The bases were destroyed—to be much missed in 1941, when abortive attempts were made hastily to reconstruct them. The destruction of all but 22 of the 3,500 partisan detachments sent to the Ukraine in 1941 and 1942 is now largely blamed on this fact.

¹⁴⁷

The future Marshal Biriuzov tells in his memoirs of being appointed to be Chief of Staff of the Thirtieth Rifle Division, stationed in Dnepropetrovsk. When he arrived, he found that the entire command had been arrested, apart from a couple of junior staff officers—with a major in charge of the division. Biriuzov asked on what authority this officer had command, and got the answer, “We act according to regulations: when one chief leaves the division, he’s replaced by the next in command. Just like in wartime.”¹⁴⁸

The Commander of the Seventh Cavalry Corps, Grigoriev, was called to the Kiev Military District Committee and accused of connections with the enemy. He was allowed to go back to his post, where he was arrested the next day,¹⁴⁹ and shot on 20 November, together with another Kiev District officer, Divisional Commander Dyumichev. Here we have a picture of the NKVD not feeling any necessity to put a general officer under arrest immediately he must have realized his case was hopeless. It cannot, in fact, have had much real fear of desperate military action, as is sometimes suggested.

Even retired veterans became involved. General Bougetsky, the Civil War hero whose wife had been crippled and son blinded while in the hands of the Whites, and who himself had lost his right arm in battle, was interrogated in the inner prison at Kiev. On the heart of this dignified sexagenarian they pinned the Nazi swastika and emptied a spittoon over his head. He was charged with an attempt to assassinate Voroshilov.¹⁵⁰

Juniors were treated even more brutally. A recent Soviet account tells us that in the Chita prison, a number of Air Force pilots were interrogated. One had his collar bone broken. They all had their teeth knocked out.¹⁵¹

In Minsk, Uborevich’s “judge” and successor as Commander of the Byelorussian Military District, Army Commander Belov, was almost immediately in trouble. A member of Uborevich’s “nest,” Corps Commander Serdich (an officer of Yugoslav origin) was arrested on 15 July.¹⁵² Imprudently enough, Belov intervened in his favor.¹⁵³ For the moment, Belov was not proceeded against, and presided impotently over the further massacre of his subordinates.

PURGE OF THE POLITICAL COMMISSARS

At the beginning of August 1937, a conference of political workers in the Army was addressed by Stalin. He once more violently attacked enemies of the people.¹⁵⁴ Gamarnik’s Political Administration suffered even more than the rest of the forces. At the top levels, there was a clean sweep. Gamarnik’s deputy, A. S. Bulin, had been dismissed by 28 May,¹⁵⁵ and later arrested.¹⁵⁶

The other deputy, G. A. Osepyan, was already under arrest by the end of May and, refusing to answer questions, was shot on 24 (or 26) June. He was followed by almost all the heads of the political administrations and most of the members of the soviets of the military districts.¹⁵⁷ Ippo, Head of the Military–Political Academy in Leningrad, who had been criticized in April, was dismissed on 1 June for political blunders¹⁵⁸ and later arrested. By rank, all seventeen of the Army Commissars went, with twenty-five of the twenty-eight Corps Commissars.¹⁵⁹