The Great Terror

The Jewish Social-Democratic Bund was a particularly fatal association, and many Jews qualified for accusation as either Bundists or Zionists. A case is quoted of an elderly Jew who had worked as a defense lawyer in earlier trials in the Donets Basin and had conducted himself in a way that antagonized the NKVD—by asking it for documents which might be helpful to the defense and so forth. He had learned enough not to defend himself, and on his arrest signed everything that was put before him without reading it. He later found that he had installed himself as a leader of a Bund group, in touch with other counter-revolutionary organizations, including one headed by the Provincial Party Secretary, Sarkissov (a candidate member of the Central Committee). On one occasion, he was told that he was going to be “confronted” by an important accomplice called Abramsohn, of whom he had never heard. When this man was brought in, the investigator said, “Stop looking at each other as if you’d never met before,” so he immediately remarked, “Hello, Abramsohn.” “Hello, er … er … ,” the other started, having to be prompted with his chief’s name. Then they both signed the records of their confessions about each other without looking at them.¹³⁷

Genuine Bundists, on the contrary, are always reported as being the most refractory in interrogation, being better educated in Marxism than their interrogators, and toughened by a harder underground life in Tsarist times than that of the Bolsheviks.

All former Socialist Revolutionaries were arrested. Weissberg tells¹³⁸ of a man in Kharkov jail who had joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, but who in 1905 had distributed among the Tsar’s soldiers leaflets provided by the Socialist Revolutionaries. He had then been a young student and, far from being a member of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, did not even realize that there was any difference between it and the Bolsheviks.

Almost all ex-Mensheviks were also arrested. We are told that “in 1937– 1941 ninety-seven to ninety-eight percent of Russian socialists were physically annihilated.”¹³⁹

But everybody with unorthodox ideas of any sort was liable to end up in the camps. Jehovah’s Witnesses were automatic victims. But there were also too-enthusiastic members of legal religions, such as the Baptist mentioned by Solzhenitsyn. Tolstoyans are widely reported, including an aged Tolstoyan woman whose twelve-year-old granddaughter had fought the NKVD officers to try to prevent her arrest.¹⁴⁰

Priests had always had a difficult time under the Soviet regime. Now they became almost automatically suspect of capital crimes. Trials of priests were announced throughout the Union. One in Orel in the summer of 1937, involving a bishop, twelve priests, and others, had as one of the accusations “publishing prayers in Old Slavonic.”¹⁴¹ Other accusations were less credible. Three bishops sentenced in February 1938 had “agitated for the opening of previously closed churches,” but their further crimes included sabotage.¹⁴² The main Soviet authority of the time mentions that Buddhists were commonly agents of Japan, engaged in sabotaging bridges and farms.

¹⁴³ It was also true that “the activity of the counter-revolutionary Muslim priesthood in the U.S.S.R. is directed by the Japanese Secret Service.”¹⁴⁴ Many were accused of railway sabotage.¹⁴⁵

One Tatar Imam who had been allowed to visit Mecca was naturally suspect and was soon arrested as a German spy. A “meeting” of about forty leading mullahs, in fact all under arrest, but acting as if it were a normal assembly, accepted the charges against him, and he was shot.¹⁴⁶ The authorities also “destroyed not a few nests of spies directed by ‘holy’ Catholic priests” who had been responsible for the sabotage of factories, bridges, and railways as well as espionage.¹⁴⁷

If it was neither nationality nor past nor ideas that brought a prisoner in, it might be relationship: the purge within the Party, the Government, and the Army automatically spread in that way. Each of the accused had relatives, and acquaintances who also had relatives. We have already noted (here) the four categories sent by Yezhov to Stalin of people to be shot, of which List 4 is the simple “Wives of enemies of the people.”¹⁴⁸ We have seen the liquidation or imprisonment of the generals’ relatives. The military men had, it is true, been shot in comparative haste without public trial. Confessions in the longer-drawn-out affairs were in part obtained by promises not to kill the surviving dependents. Stalin’s promises were sometimes kept. A woman prisoner met in labor camps twelve wives, two daughters, two sisters, and a daughter-in-law of prominent purgees.¹⁴⁹ Eight years was the usual sentence.