The Great Terror

To have had anything to do with foreigners was one almost certain road to arrest. People who had actually been abroad—for example, footballers like the three Starostin brothers, stars of the prewar period—were almost all in camps by the 1940s.¹²² In general, sport was thoroughly purged: “loathsome counter-revolutionary work” at the Institute of Physical Culture led to the denunciation and arrest of the “human degenerates” concerned, who included I. I. Kharchenko, Head of the All-Union Committee on Physical Culture and Sports Affairs.¹²³ Philatelists were arrested en bloc, as were Esperantists, for their international connections.¹²⁴ Professor Kalmanson, Assistant Director of the Moscow Zoo, had been educated abroad, so was assumed to be a “spy” by his cell mates. After his first interrogation, he triumphantly told them that he was only a “wrecker”—16 percent of his monkeys having died of tuberculosis (a lower figure, he pointed out, than the London Zoo’s). But they were vindicated by his second interrogation, which reached “the main question”—espionage for Germany.

¹²⁵ Everyone connected with the organizations for contact with “Friends of the Soviet Union” abroad was automatically suspect. These organizations sponsored pen-pal exchanges. One young science student is mentioned as being sentenced as a German spy because he had, on this basis, been writing to a Communist in Manchester, though his letters had consisted almost entirely of Soviet propaganda.¹²⁶

All direct contact with foreign consulates was likely to prove fatal. Doctors who had treated German Consuls; a veterinarian who had dealt with consular dogs; even more indirect connections, such as the veterinarian’s son, were arrested in the Ukraine; and another man, an old caretaker, always explained in prison that he was there as “the brother of the woman who supplied the German Consul’s milk.”¹²⁷ Another had copied and given to the Polish Consul the weather forecast pinned up in the public park.¹²⁸

An opera singer who had danced longer than permitted with the Japanese Ambassador at an official ball is reported in camp. A cook had applied for a job advertised in Vechernaya Moskva, the evening paper. It turned out to be at the Japanese Embassy. She got the job but was arrested for espionage before she had time to start it.¹²⁹ Another typical case is of two engineers and their families, arrested in the winter of 1937/1938 because of a gift parcel one of them had received from an uncle in Poland, consisting of two pairs of shoes, some crayons, and a couple of dolls. The engineer who had not received the parcel, but was a friend of the one who had, got ten years.¹³⁰

A Greek doctor was charged with espionage on the grounds that he had written to relatives in Salonika describing the characteristics of some fish being bred with a view to the extermination of malarial mosquitoes.¹³¹ In December 1937, Greeks were arrested everywhere. Later, the Greek-inhabited area of Mariupol, on the Black Sea, was thoroughly purged in connection with a special Greek nationalist plot which was to create a Greater Greek Republic over a large part of the Ukraine. Its “Minister of Education” was in fact a Russian, but he had been Professor of Ancient Greek at Kharkov University and had spent a year in Athens. The “Prime Minister” had been an adviser on minority questions to the Ukrainian Central Committee.¹³²

Chinese were also arrested en bloc. One is reported as having been charged with taking a job as a tram driver in Kharkov, with the aim of crashing it into any car on the tracks in front of him which contained members of the Soviet Government.¹³³ The national minorities in Russian towns were virtually eliminated. In September 1937, the Armenians in the Ukraine were rounded up. There were 600 of them in Kharkov.¹³⁴

The Latvians were arrested the same month. An alleged Latvian secret organization had worked for a Greater Latvia stretching over a large part of Russia, including Moscow.¹³⁵

Members of the smaller national minorities were in as “bourgeois–nationalist” plotters. So were, in most cases, members of larger groups like the Ukrainians. One commented:

I was bound in any event to be regarded as a Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist. True, I had never had anything to do with Ukrainian nationalism, and had never had any sympathy with it, but I had a typically Ukrainian surname, and I had several sympathizers with Ukrainian nationalism among my acquaintances.¹³⁶

It is an interesting fact that there were almost no accusations through the Great Purge of allegiance to any genuinely reactionary idea. Those accused were almost always linked with the Mensheviks, the Armenian progressive nationalist “Dashnaks,” the Socialist Revolutionaries, or Communist deviationist groups—practically never with Monarchists, Kadets, and the like.