The Great Terror

Gorbatov has given a brief account of his interrogation. At the Lubyanka, he was at first treated fairly mildly, but bullying set in on the fifth day. He was in a cell with seven others, all of whom had confessed. He was then transferred to the Lefortovo prison, where he shared a single one-man isolator with two others. There he was tortured on the fourth interrogation, and five more torture sessions followed at two- to three-day intervals, from each of which he had to be carried back bleeding to the cell. There were then twenty days’ rest, then five more bouts of torture. No confession could be wrested from Gorbatov, and on 8 May 1939 he was sentenced at a trial lasting four or five minutes to fifteen years’ imprisonment plus five years’ disfranchisement. The NKVD told his wife that as she was “young and interesting,” she could easily get married again.¹⁷¹

Another officer, a former revolutionary sailor in the Baltic Fleet, is reported as also having refused to confess and actually being acquitted, getting a civilian job on his release. He was, however, rearrested six months later.¹⁷²

But “many splendid comrades and political officers” confessed.

They were “persuaded”—persuaded by quite definite techniques—that they were either German or British or some other kind of spies…. Even in cases when such people were told that the accusation of espionage had been withdrawn, they themselves insisted on their previous testimony, because they believed it was better to stand on their false testimony in order to put an end as quickly as possible to the torment and to die as quickly as possible.¹⁷³

One Divisional Commander is reported as confessing that he had “recruited” every officer in his division down to Company Commanders.¹⁷⁴ And there are many similar stories. Mekhlis even discovered and denounced a group of twelve terrorist-spies in the Red Army Chorus.¹⁷⁵

Rivalries between the NKVD and the Army were of course natural in various fields. (The possession by the Police of a large armed force was itself an irritant.) But in addition, the military-intelligence network abroad operated to a certain extent independently of the Foreign Department of the NKVD, and there was a struggle to win it. When Tukhachevsky was arrested, the NKVD gained control. Almost all the military-intelligence agents were recalled from abroad and shot.¹⁷⁶

S. P. Uritsky, Chief of Soviet Military Intelligence—the “Fourth Bureau”—from 1935, was arrested on the night of 1 November 1937 and shot “soon afterward.”¹⁷⁷

His predecessor as Head of the Fourth Bureau, from 1920 to 1935, J. K. Berzin, who had held a post in the short-lived Soviet Latvian Government of 1919, had been sent to the Far Eastern Army on handing over. From there, he had gone to Spain, as virtual Commander-in-Chief of the Republican Armies under the name “Grishin.” He had clashed with the NKVD, and was arrested on his return.¹⁷⁸

The Commander of the International Brigade, “General Kleber,” a Soviet officer whose real name was M. Z. Shtern, but was represented as a Canadian to suit international decorum, was accused of being a member of Berzin’s “spy organization” and beaten on the legs with iron bars.¹⁷⁹ However, he was only sentenced to twenty-five years and sent to a labor camp, where he died.

¹⁸⁰

Brigade Commander “Gorey” (Skoblevsky), who had fought and won the Battle of Madrid for the Spanish Republic, was much feted on his return to the USSR. But soon afterward, about the end of 1937, “the hero of Madrid was slandered” and shot.¹⁸¹ He is said to have been arrested only two days after receiving the Order of Lenin.¹⁸²

Other military victims among Soviet veterans of the Spanish Civil War were to include the senior military adviser “Grigorevich” (G. M. Shtern), later promoted to Army Commander in the Far East, and the leading Soviet air ace in Spain, “Douglas,” later, as Lieutenant General Smushkevich, Head of the Soviet Air Force; both were shot in 1941.¹⁸³

Marshal Malinovsky, until his death Minister of Defense, who was also in Spain, describes failing to obey two orders to return and finally getting a third threatening to list him as a “non-returner,” upon which he went back, at a time when, fortunately for him, the worst period of the Purge was over.¹⁸⁴ Soviet civilians in Spain also fared evilly. Antonov-Ovseenko, who had operated in the delicate position of Soviet Consul-General in Barcelona, perished, as did Rosenberg, the Soviet Ambassador to the Republican Government. Rosenberg’s crime seems to have been an attempt to arrange the exchange of prisoners with the Franco authorities. Stalin always regarded this sort of thing as suspicious, and was later to show resentment when the Yugoslav partisans entered into similar conversations with the German Command in the Balkans.¹⁸⁵

PURGE IN THE NAVY