The Great Terror

This purge of politicals swept the units as well. In the two months following the June 1937 meeting of the Military Soviet, arrests in the Fifth Mechanized Brigade of the Byelorussian Military District included the Brigade Commissar, the head of its political section, plus five out of the six Battalion Commissars, while the sixth was severely reprimanded.¹⁶⁰ A Soviet textbook speaks of “thousands” of leading Party workers in the Army and Fleet being repressed.¹⁶¹

Mekhlis, one of the most sinister and unpleasant of all Stalin’s agents, was confirmed as Head of the Political Administration of the Army in December 1937. He had lately worked as editor of Pravda

, but in the Civil War had served as a Political Commissar at Army level. He had a special quirk—to cashier and arrest many political workers on the grounds of their connection with the “anti-Party Army Byelorussian–Tolmachevite Group.”¹⁶² In fact, he was condemning the Political Commissars for this long-extinct deviation, which had consisted of enthusiasm for greater political control in the Army! In any case, the grouping of senior Political Commissars who had criticized the Party leadership in the late 1920s was, whatever its particular program, far too independent-minded for the new regime. Mekhlis had insisted that any who attempted to defend them, such as the Head of the Political Administration of the Byelorussian Military District, I. I. Sychev, deserved the same fate as this “band of spies.”¹⁶³

At the beginning of 1938, the number of political workers in the armed forces was only one-third of its official establishment. As the numbers still in position were 10,500, the implication is that at least 20,000 political workers had gone under.fn10 By 1938, more than one-third of all the Party political workers had had no political education at al1.¹⁶⁴

The number of Party members in the Army shrank by about a half.¹⁶⁵ At the XVIIth Congress, Voroshilov had given 25.6 percent of the Army as Party workers, the Army numbering in February 1935 approximately 1 million: the net deficit here was therefore some 125,000.

THE OFFICERS FADE AWAY

Everywhere—except as yet the Far East—the Purge began to strike at the whole command structure. The generals who had just been promoted to fill the vacant places now started to disappear.

At a meeting of the Military Soviet of the Caucasus Military District in November 1937, the new District Commander, N. V. Kuibyshev (brother of the dead Politburo member), criticized the purge of the Army as affecting its battle-preparedness. He was shortly afterward arrested.¹⁶⁶ And the same fate overtook the Military District Commanders all over the Soviet Union. By the summer of 1938, all who had held these posts in June 1937 had disappeared. At the center, a similar sweep took all eleven Deputy Commissars of Defense.

A Soviet account says that the Air Force and the tank and mechanized forces suffered most heavily.¹⁶⁷

Khalepsky of the Armored Forces, Alksnis of the Air Force, and Khripin, Alksnis’s deputy, had made an excellent impression on foreign Military Attachés in the autumn 1936 maneuvers. Khalepsky, who had been relegated to the Communications Commissariat, was arrested in 1937 and shot in 1938.¹⁶⁸ Army Commander Alksnis was the youngest of the Tukhachevsky group, being barely forty. Backed by Corps Commander Todorsky, Head of the Air Force Academy, he had worked hard to save his juniors from persecution by NKVD. Alksnis is given on the electoral lists as late as 13 November, but by the last days of 1937 he was under arrest, together with Khripin (as was also Todorsky). Todorsky, arrested in the spring of 1938, was sentenced to fifteen years in May 1939. He survived (the only “repressed” Corps Commander to do so) and was released in 1953.¹⁶⁹

The extraordinary deviousness of the NKVD is shown in Gorbatov’s experiences. He learned he was in disfavor (for the second time) when, temporarily commanding the Sixth Cavalry Corps, he went to the stores officer to draw his winter uniform, and found that orders had been received from the corps political officer, Fominykh, then in Moscow, not to give him one. He went to Moscow and was arrested. His wife could not find out what had happened to him. No one would even tell her he had been arrested, until a girl whispered it to her in the corridor of the Red Army Officers’ Hostel.¹⁷⁰