The Great Terror

Typical of purgees of the second rank was Zalpeter, a commander of Stalin’s bodyguard, a Lett, who was arrested, together with his wife. She refused to confess, but was finally confronted with her husband in a very bad state, who mumbled that she had said she would get rid of a picture of Stalin that hung in their new flat (formerly Yagoda’s). For this, she got eight years.¹⁵⁰

The wives of the Soviet elite adjusted most slowly of all to their situation in the cells. Their position was an especially difficult one. They had nothing to confess and were unable even to deny the charge, since it was simply of being “wives of enemies of the people.”¹⁵¹ In many cases they had not, as their husbands had, understood the dangerous possibilities before them. On arriving in the cells, some of them were priggish and intolerant of women who had been under arrest for a long time—believing that these earlier cases must have been guilty of some genuine offense.

¹⁵²

Even when not arrested, families suffered terribly. An attempted mass suicide is reported by a group of four thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children of executed NKVD officers, found badly wounded in the Prozorovsky Forest near Moscow.¹⁵³ The daughter of an Assistant Chief of Red Army Intelligence, Aleksandr Karin (who was arrested and shot, with his wife), was thirteen in the spring of 1937. The Karin apartment was taken by one of Yezhov’s men, who turned her out into the street. She went to her father’s best friend, Shpigelglas, Assistant Head of the Foreign Department of the NKVD, who put her up for the night, but was virtually ordered the next day, by Yezhov’s secretary, to throw her out. Shpigelglas remembered she had relatives at Saratov and sent her there. Two months later she came back: “She was pale, thin, her eyes filled with bitterness. Nothing childish remained in her.” She had meanwhile been made to speak at a meeting of the Pioneers, approving the execution of her father and mother and saying that they had been spies.¹⁵⁴

When Weissberg was in the sick bay of the Kharkov prison, there were a number of children there, including a boy who was nine years old.¹⁵⁵ When, early in 1939, the Soviet press started to report the arrest of various NKVD officers for extorting false confessions, one case at Leninsk-Kuznetsk in the Kemerovo province concerned children as young as ten years old.¹⁵⁶ Four officers in the NKVD and the Prosecutor’s Office received five- to ten-year sentences. In all, 160 children, mainly between twelve and fourteen, had been arrested and subjected to severe interrogation, and had confessed to espionage, terror, treason, and links with the Gestapo. These confessions were obtained with comparative ease. A ten-year-old broke down after a single night-long interrogation, and admitted to membership in a fascist organization from the age of seven. Similar mass trials of children took place in various other cities.

¹⁵⁷ (There is, indeed, one report of a genuine children’s organization which planned to avenge arrested parents by killing the NKVD officers they held responsible.)¹⁵⁸ But, in general, as a Soviet speaker has pointed out, “not only the workers themselves were victims of repression, but also their families, down to the absolutely innocent children, whose lives were thus broken from the beginning.”¹⁵⁹

Another “category” was composed of automatic suspects—anyone connected with production, and in particular engineers. In their case, no guesses were needed. They were saboteurs to a man. It did not matter if their record was generally good. Stalin himself had said:

No wrecker will go on wrecking all the time, if he does not wish to be exposed very rapidly. On the contrary, the real wrecker will show success in his work from time to time, for this is the only means of staying on the job, of worming himself into confidence, and continuing his wrecking activity.¹⁶⁰

In the economy, the security mania of the NKVD seems to have been genuine. For quite apart from the persecution of actual people, it imposed by about the end of 1935 a system through which guards and watchmen multiplied enormously in the factories, research institutes, and so forth throughout the country. This was in part supposed to be for the prevention of theft, but also against the penetration of “secrets,” many of which were not secret even by Soviet standards and almost none of which would have been regarded as secret in any ordinary community. Moreover, there already existed in every Soviet institution a “secret department,” covering both the political reliability of personnel and the technical secrets; and into its safes anything remotely confidential had to be put each night. It is now stated that in 1939 there were, in a labor force of 78,811,000, no fewer than 2,126,000 guards and watchmen—not counting NKVD militia—and only 589,000 miners and 939,000 railwaymen.¹⁶¹