The Great Terror

The atmosphere had been established much earlier. Rear-Admiral Isakov, in his memoirs published in 1961,¹⁹² tells a story of a flag officer of his acquaintance, Ozarovsky, who was wrecked in his small sailboat off the coast near Kronstadt. A Norwegian steamer came in sight and lowered a boat. Ozarovsky refused the offer of rescue, though his situation was desperate. Isakov describes Ozarovsky’s feelings. He was bound to be saved. Although he himself could not have been seen from the shore, “the foreign steamer entering a prohibited zone would be seen at once. A cutter would be sent to the scene.” And this in fact happened. Isakov visited him in hospital and asked why he had not let himself be brought to Leningrad by the Norwegians. Ozarovsky replied, “I should have had to give an explanation: when and how this meeting with foreign agents had been arranged and for how much I had sold our operational plans while the ship was passing through the channel.” Isakov felt compelled to agree, and adds that even so Ozarovsky did not escape. He was arrested, interrogated, and tortured for the very reasons he had advanced.

In fact, the occupational hazards of the cadres in the Navy were even higher than those of the cadres in the Army. They had one very minor advantage. Except in the case of the Pacific Fleet, naval officers were usually British “spies,” and, until 1939 at least, this carried slightly higher social status than attached to treason in favor of Germany, Japan, and Poland.

A SECOND MILITARY MASSACRE

Orlov’s case became associated with a new wave of military arrests launched in the early part of 1938, whose theme was made clear in a letter issued on Stalin’s instructions calling for further purging of the armed forces, not only of enemies of the people, but also of “the silent ones” who had failed to take an active part in the Purge.¹⁹³

The replacements of the slaughtered commanders of 1937 now went themselves to the Lubyanka. In the first days of January, Belov was recalled to Moscow. The train journey, we are told, was gloomy, full of recollections of similar ones of the previous year. On arrival, he was arrested; his intervention in favor of Serdich was now turned into a criminal matter.¹⁹⁴

And now a second Marshal of the Soviet Union fell. Yegorov, a former Tsarist officer, was an older man than the members of the Tukhachevsky group, being fifty-five, a year younger than his former colleague in the Imperial Army, Shaposhnikov. He was one of Stalin’s boon companions. Stalin is said to have offered Tukhachevsky’s country villa to Yegorov after the execution, and Yegorov to have refused to take it.¹⁹⁵

Yegorov had commanded the South-Western Front in the Polish Campaign, with Stalin as his political chief. He was one of the few figures from Stalin’s old military entourage to suffer.

The first blow in the military purge had taken out all the military members of the Central Committee except Voroshilov, Budenny, Blyukher, and Yegorov. Yegorov is said to have complained that the extent of the purge was gravely affecting military efficiency. He was removed from his post as Deputy People’s Commissar of Defense at the end of February 1938, and Stalin circulated to the Central Committee a note urging his expulsion from the Committee because he had been compromised in “confrontation” with the arrested conspirators Belov, Gryaznov, Grinko, and Sedyakin, and also because his wife was a Polish spy.¹⁹⁶ He was soon under arrest.

The same month saw the dismissal, and April the arrest on a civilian mission in the Urals, of Army Commander Dybenko,¹⁹⁷ who now commanded the Leningrad District. During the Civil War, Dybenko had served with Voroshilov and Stalin, but that was no longer sure protection. The huge sailor had led the mutiny of the Imperator Pavel I

in 1916, and had commanded the Baltic Fleet sailors in the Revolution. He had once been married to the fiery aristo-deviationist Alexandra Kollontai. He had led the soldiers who suppressed the Constituent Assembly in 1918. But idealism had persisted for a time: he actually tried to resign from the Party when the death penalty was not, after all, abolished by the Soviet Government.¹⁹⁸ His closest friends at the Military Academy had been Uritsky, shot in 1937, and Fedko, who was brought on 2 February 1938 from Yakir’s old post in the Ukraine to be Deputy Commissar for Defense for a short and insecure tenure.¹⁹⁹ They had all been sent from the Academy to take part in the assault on Kronstadt.²⁰⁰ And now Dybenko was a German agent, though also (then a rarity) a spy for the United States, a group of Americans having visited Samarkand when he was commanding there.²⁰¹