The Great Terror

A short man in a lambskin cap angrily announced, “My foreman Sereda failed to issue me with cement. I thought at the time this was suspicious. Yesterday I learned that Sereda was concealing his relationship with one of Makhno’s followers who married his cousin!”

“The fitter Tsvirkun when taking up employment concealed the fact that his old man was an elder of the church!” announced a second speaker.

A third speaker proceeded to expose his former comrade whose parents had been deprived of electoral rights for sabotage during the period of collectivization…⁴⁶

The extension of the Purge throughout the country was not, as sometimes suggested, just the result of too much eagerness on the part of local NKVD officials who let things get out of control. On the contrary, it was insisted on from the center. For example, on 29 November 1936 Vyshinsky was already ordering that within a month all “criminal cases of major conflagrations, accidents, and output of poor-quality products be reviewed and studied with the aim of exposing a counter-revolutionary and saboteur background in them.” In certain areas, where few prosecutions on charges of counter-revolutionary activity had been brought, severe censure was issued from the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Moscow. In 1937, only eight cases in this category were brought to court through a large part of Siberia, and Moscow blamed this on “a weak and inadequate struggle to stamp out the nests of saboteurs.”⁴⁷

Arrest quotas were imposed from above. An NKVD local officer who had been in charge of the small Ukrainian district of Chrystyneska is reported in jail as telling of an order sent to him to arrest 3,800 people; even arresting all former prisoners, all those reported by seksots and others would not have fulfilled the quota, so he had to ask village soviets to nominate lists, himself being arrested for this.⁴⁸

At a higher level, the 1938 Head of the Byelorussian NKVD was reproached for not matching the Ukrainian bag of Polish spies, and managed to pull in 12,000, many of them Jewish shopkeepers.⁴⁹

In general, occasional highly organized mass trials and much more frequent mass arrests marked the period. In May 1937, the Far Eastern press announced fifty-five death sentences in such trials;⁵⁰ in June, another ninety-one; in July, another eighty-three; and so on through the year. In Byelorussia from June onward, hardly a week went by without wrecking and espionage being discovered in various industrial enterprises, the Academy of Sciences, the Polish theater, the physical culture groups, the banks, the cement industry, the veterinary services, the bread-supply organization, and the railways. (The local railway authorities were denounced on 8 October 1937 and charged with being not only Polish but also Japanese spies, in accordance with railway tradition.) In Central Asia, it was the same: 25 executions were announced in Kazakhstan⁵¹

and 18 in Uzbekistan⁵² in November. In January 1938 came 26 in Kirghizia⁵³ and another 134 in Uzbekistan .⁵⁴

On 28 July 1937 E. G. Evdokimov assembled the Party leadership of the North Caucasus Territory and gave instructions for a long-planned superpurge in the area. On 31 July, the local phase of this “general operation” was launched in the Chechen-Ingush Republic in the North Caucasus: 5,000 prisoners were crammed into the NKVD prisons in Grozny, 5,000 in the main garage of the Grozny Oil Trust, and thousands of others in various requisitioned buildings. In the Republic as a whole, about 14,000 were arrested, amounting to about 3 percent of the population. Shkiryatov in person oversaw a further mass operation in October.⁵⁵

The cold-blooded administrative organization of such mass arrest and deportation comes out very clearly in Serov’s Order No. 001233 for the Baltic States:

Operations shall be begun at daybreak. Upon entering the home of the person to be deported, the senior member of the operative group shall assemble the entire family of the deportee in one room…. In view of the fact that a large number of deportees must be arrested and distributed in special camps and that their families must proceed to special settlements in distant regions, it is essential that the operations of removal of both the members of the deportee’s family and its head shall be carried out simultaneously, without notifying them of the separation confronting them. ARREST