The Great Terror

For this sizable part of the population was already listed in the files of the NKVD and its local branches under various headings, such as

AS

anti-Soviet element

Ts

active member of the Church

S

member of a religious sect

P

rebel—anyone who in the past was in any way involved in anti-Soviet uprisings

SI

anyone with contacts abroad

Such categories were not in themselves legal grounds for prosecution, but they automatically made those listed natural suspects and almost automatic victims when an NKVD branch was called upon to show its merits by mass arrests.

We have a more detailed division of these suspect categories in the lists of dangerous elements issued on the annexation of Lithuania by the USSR in 1940.²⁷ Since even by January 1941, after half a year’s occupation, there were admittedly only 2,500 Communists in the country,²⁸ few of the worst suspects—real Trotskyites—could be found. And no threat to Stalin’s position as a whole could come from so small a territory. But in the selection of those whose elimination was required to turn the country into a more or less reliable fief, we can see some of the way of thinking which had been applied to Russia itself. The lists itemized all former officials of the State, Army, and judiciary; all former members of non-Communist parties; all active members of student corporations; members of the National Guard; anyone who fought against the Soviets (that is, in 1918 to 1920); refugees; representatives of foreign firms; employees and former employees of foreign legations, firms, and companies; people in contact with foreign countries, including philatelists and Esperantists; all clergy, former noblemen, landlords, merchants, bankers, businessmen, owners of hotels and restaurants, and shopkeepers; and former Red Cross officials. It is estimated that these people covered about 23 percent of the population.²⁹

In the Soviet Union, many in these categories had already died or emigrated. But many were left. And around each was a widening circle of colleagues and acquaintances who automatically entered the field of suspicion by “association with alien elements.” Anyone in a job worked under a State official who might turn out to be a Trotskyite. Anyone, anywhere, might find that he bought his groceries from a former kulak or was neighbor to an Armenian bourgeois nationalist.

Thus in Nikopol, when the Party Secretary fell, the NKVD arrested his

assistants, his friends, the men and women whom he had put into jobs anywhere in

Nikopol. The Commandant of the Nikopol garrison went into the hunters’ bag, then the local Prosecutor and all his legal staff, finally the Chairman of the Nikopol Soviet … he local bank, the newspaper, all commercial institutions were “cleansed” … the manager of the Communal Administration, the Chief of the Fire Brigades, the head of the Savings Institution…. Crowds of women and children swarmed around the NKVD building in Nikopol at all hours, in spite of the bitter cold.³⁰

A recent Soviet comment on the purges is that as against the argument, sometimes met, that the purges were largely confined to party officials, “they hit everyone—doctors, intellectuals, peasants, atheists, priests, industrial managers, diplomats, former private businessmen.”³¹ In the Butyrka, Eugenia Ginzburg’s cell mates were, as she puts it, “a much broader section of the population” than in the “special block” in Kazan: “There were many peasants, factory workers, shop girls, office clerks.”³²

Roy Medvedev, again, mentions about 1,000 arrested in a single factory.³³ In fact, as the Soviet trade-union organ Trud recently put it, it is “a myth that the working class was not touched by the repressions,” for statistics show that “millions of all sections of the population suffered.”³⁴

In Moldavia “an absolute majority of the repressed were workers and peasants often semiliterate or illiterate, with no interest in politics.”³⁵ Figures given in the Soviet press for Kursk province imply that about 20 percent of the arrests were in the countryside—that is (for the USSR as a whole), about 1.5 million.³⁶ A recent Soviet article describes how in the writer’s home village of 100 households, one day in April 1937, two policemen arrived, stopped the farm work, and arrested all the men between twenty and fifty years old, on charges of having started the sowing too late for sabotage reasons. Numbering sixty-five in all, they were taken off in lorries, the writer’s father among them. (In 1956, the writer learned that his father had not survived.)³⁷

Thus while officialdom, the intelligentsia, and the officer corps were prime victims, by mid-1937 practically the entire population was potential Purge fodder. Few can have failed to wonder if their turn had come. Pasternak, in the bitterly matter-of-fact passage with which he ends the main body of Doctor Zhivago, gives the expectations of the time: