The Great Terror

Not only old associates of Stalin’s like Dybenko were now to perish (together with his wife).²⁰² There were still grudges to be paid against former enemies. Among those in jail was, as we have seen, Army Commander Vatsetis, first Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, whom Stalin and others had attempted to remove as a traitor in 1919, but whom Trotsky had successfully defended. He had meanwhile held important posts in the Army Inspectorate and in the Military Academy.²⁰³

At the end of July came a second and even larger slaughter of the High Command, though no announcement was ever made. This went together with a major killing of political and other figures (see here). As far as I know, this massive operation was referred to for the first time in an article of mine in Encounter

in October 1968. I then noted eleven death dates, military and civilian, to be found in various publications of the Khrushchev period. As I write, twenty years later, forty-six names (civilian and military) have become available with death dates 27 July to 1 August 1938, though so far few new names have been given in the glasnost literature of 1986 to 1990.

The military component of this mass operation included no fewer than nine Army Commanders—Alksnis of the Air Force, Belov of Byelorussia, Dubovoy, Dybenko (lately of the Leningrad Command), Levandovsky (until recently in the Far East), Khalepsky (former armored forces commander), Sedyakin (antiaircraft), Vatsetis (former Civil War Commander-in-Chief), and Velikanov (unlike the others, newly promoted to this rank); Corps Commanders Gailit, Gribov, Gryaznov, Kuibyshev, and Kovtiukh (the legendary Civil War hero who appears under the name Kozhukh in A. S. Serafimovich’s Iron Flood, which curiously enough continued to be sold without alteration after the purge of its hero, who was “brutally tortured”);²⁰⁴

Divisional Commanders Kuchinsky (Head of the General Staff Academy), Serdich, and Stigga; Fleet Admirals Orlov (Commander-in-Chief of the Navy) and Viktorov (his successor); Admiral Kireev; Army Commissars Berzin (lately in effect Commander-in-Chief of the Spanish Republican Army) and Okunev; Corps Commissar Ozolin; and the military theoretician (at one time briefly Chief of Staff of the Red Army) A. A. Svechin.

No doubt others not yet named perished; clearly the higher the rank, the more likely is its holder to be found in the reference books, so that nine Army Commanders to five Corps Commanders to four Divisional Commanders may not represent the real proportion. But even as it is, this is clearly a major blow to the Army and Navy: one not perhaps so striking, yet more massively devastating even than that of June 1937.

It may be worth stating that the military and political victims do not seem to have been taken in separate categories. One Army man was shot on 27 July; six soldiers and five civilians on 28 July; thirteen soldiers and thirteen civilians on 29 July; and six soldiers and two civilians on 1 August. This may not be entirely representative, but at least it appears to show that there was a blending of the two elements into a single alleged plot. Berzin was accused of belonging to the “anti-Soviet nationalist band Rudzutak–Berzin,” which had served “British, French, and German intelligence.”²⁰⁵ Both were Latvian, to which the “nationalist” charge must refer (indeed, nine of the accused were Latvian). We are also told that the new Army plot was a matter of Right Socialist Revolutionaries and German, Polish, Finnish, and Latvian nationalists.²⁰⁶

Then we learn that the accusations against Dubovoy included his having killed his superior, the legendary Shchors, during the Civil War, in order to take his place.²⁰⁷ But a variety of charges of this nature had been melded together in previous trials. More generally, as far as the evidence goes, the political victims were accused of Rightist conspiracy, and we can perhaps assume that a military–Rightist plot was the main allegation.

One last major blow, against the Far Eastern Army, remained to be struck, and Marshal Yegorov and others were still to be dealt with. We shall go into that in a later chapter, and afterwards consider the whole effect of this unprecedented destruction of the officer corps. But it will already be obvious that if Stalin had destroyed a potential threat to his power, he had also inflicted enormous damage on Soviet defense.

8

THE PARTY CRUSHED

You have made of liberty a weapon for the executioner.

Lermontov

IN THE PROVINCES