The Great Terror

One day Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested on the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which later was mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.

Russians who had been abroad and came back toward the autumn of 1937, like Ilya Ehrenburg, were deeply shocked by the change. Even on his way through from Spain, when he rang his daughter from Paris, he could get nothing out of her except conversation about the weather. In Moscow itself, he found that writer after writer and journalist after journalist had disappeared. In the lzvestiya office, they had given up putting nameplates outside the doors of department heads; as the messenger girl explained, “Here today and gone tomorrow.” In the ministries and the offices, it was everywhere the same—empty seats, haggard faces, and an extreme unwillingness to talk.

³⁸ An American journalist living in a block of about 160 apartments in the summer of 1937 notes that the Secret Police had made arrests in more than half of them, “and our house was no exception.”³⁹

There were various methods of avoiding arrest. A well-known scholar avoided the first wave of the Purge by pretending to be a drunkard. Another, taking the same line a little further, got drunk and created a disturbance in a public park, thus getting six months for a minor criminal offense and avoiding political trouble.⁴⁰

By a curious irony, some genuine enemies of the regime—perhaps more prescient than most—escaped by simply fading into the background. For example, Nicholas Stasiuk, who had actually been Minister of Supply in the anti-Communist Rada Government in the Ukraine in 1918, survived in Mariupol working as a park attendant until the German occupation during the Second World War, when he became a leading figure in the nationalist movement in the area.⁴¹’

There was sometimes a period between disgrace and arrest which a lucky individual might make use of by leaving the main centers. S. G. Poplawski (who was to be installed by Stalin as Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Army after the war) was at the Frunze Military Academy in 1937. Expelled from the Party and the Academy, he at once left Moscow to avoid the next step. “A year or a year and a half later”—that is, presumably after the fall of Yezhov—he reappeared and was then rehabilitated and readmitted to the course.⁴²

Again,

the editor of the Kazan newspaper, Kuznetsov, who was to figure in my charge sheet as belonging to the same “underground group,” disappeared into the wilds of Kazakhstan and was never arrested because they lost track of him and eventually stopped looking. Later he even had his translations of Kazakh odes to “Stalin the Great” and “Father Yezhov” published in Pravda.⁴³

In general, moving frequently was a certain protection, since it usually took “at least six months or a year” before the local NKVD paid much attention or accumulated enough evidence against a figure whom there was no exceptional reason to persecute. It also took a great deal of time before his personal documents from the NKVD of his previous place of residence were forwarded, “particularly as all such documents were dispatched by special NKVD express messenger and not through the ordinary post.” Sometimes they never arrived at all.⁴⁴ Siberia, in particular, was a good place to go. Comparatively speaking, the local authorities were glad to have settlers, hardly distinguishing between people in forced exile and those freely arriving. The NKVD in a province in European Russia would have little interest in providing suspects for its Siberian opposite number, and though it could have a man under “suspicion” brought back, this was troublesome and hardly worth going through, except in important cases.

But moving was an option open to few, and was often no more than temporary protection. The arrests came, eventually, in millions.

Vyshinsky’s assistant, Roginsky, who got a fifteen-year sentence, continued to argue in camp that the regime was justified in isolating from the community large numbers of people who might cause trouble and in continuing to exploit to the maximum, regardless of any guilt or innocence, the labor of those who were economically “old and useless.”⁴⁵ More sophisticated NKVD and Party members would defend the Purges on subtler grounds. Even if mild jokes or criticism of the Government was all that had taken place, this was a potential for future active opposition, and the NKVD, by excising such people, was carrying out a justified preventive operation.

In the factories, public denunciation meetings of the established type spread to the workers as a whole. A Soviet novel of the Khrushchev period typically describes such a works scene in 1937: