The Great Terror

Jozsef Lengyel, however, recounts that though he remembers “humane guards” and “decent commandants,” the investigators were without exception despicable.²⁰⁷ (This minor divergence certainly reflects the increasing brutalization of the NKVD: Koestler’s “Gletkin,” even, is a figure of the Yagoda rather than the Yezhov period.)

An NKVD sentry was returning a prisoner to his cell, after an interrogation in the Butyrka. They stopped at a tap for the prisoner to wash the blood off himself. As he did this, he was shaken with sobs. The sentry said:

Don’t take it too hard, Comrade! Life’s hard on us all, one just has to bear it. Maybe he did beat you for no good reason, but think nothing of it. Probably his black heart aches more than your white body. You can wash the blood off just like that, but what about him? Where’s the water that can clean his black heart … ?

The prisoner, an Army officer named Vasilev, returned to his cell much cheered, and spoke of the special humanity of the Russian people.²⁰⁸

A woman prisoner, a German Communist, reports a guard on the deportation train as saying to her, when she was in tears, “Don’t cry. It won’t be as bad as all that. You’ll live through it and get home again.” (She was later, when handed over to the Nazis, to note in the same way the occasional kind and thoughtful Gestapo man.)²⁰⁹

Eugenia Ginzburg tells a similar story.

In 1937 (though this is a somewhat different point), some of the old NKVD officers continued to show sympathy for obviously innocent and nonoppositionist Old Bolsheviks. A Soviet account by Antonina Levkovich, who was arrested as “the wife of an enemy of the people” in 1937 following an appeal for her already arrested husband, quotes several instances of kindness. They often turned out badly for all concerned. After a month spent in bad conditions on the way from Moscow to Kirghizia, she and her companions found an NKVD officer who tried to save them from starvation. He was charged with “intolerable pity for wives of enemies of the people” and had to shoot himself to avoid arrest.²¹⁰

Such things are worth recording. But at the best of times, they were most exceptional. The norm was callous brutality, or at best cloddish indifference to death and suffering. A Soviet writer remarks of the interrogators, “They were all sadists of course. And only a handful found the courage to commit suicide. Pace by pace, as they followed one routine directive after another, they climbed down the steps from the human condition to that of beasts…. But this happened only gradually.”²¹¹ The few humane officers and guards did not anyhow survive Yezhov’s purge of the NKVD. His new intake of NKVD troopers were well-trained, well-fed, heartless young thugs. Any display of human sympathy, they had firmly implanted in them, was a concession to bourgeois feeling and a form of treachery in the class struggle. As the Purge broadened, it also got worse.

“TRIAL.”

With interrogation completed, the cases were transferred to the judicial and quasi-judicial bodies for sentence. Since 1934, the competent court in political cases was the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court. It had a large staff and was able to mount many cases simultaneously. It took mere minutes even for leading officials (see here) or generals (see here). A lesser figure, Eugenia Ginzburg, describes her seven-minute trial before the Collegium in 1937. The Court returned in two minutes with a “verdict” which she estimates must have taken twenty minutes to type.²¹² Thus the Collegium got through tens of thousands of cases over the years of the Terror. From 1 October 1936 to 30 September 1938, it passed 36,157 sentences—30,514 of death and 5,643 of imprisonment.²¹³

But these constituted a very small proportion of those condemned.

Those who came before a court were judged according to the Criminal Code, whose long Article 58 covered all forms of remotely political crime. This article was broad enough, or so it might have been thought, to encompass anyone the NKVD wished to “repress.” And it had long been Draconically interpreted. A Supreme Court ruling of 2 January 1928 had laid down that counter-revolutionary offenses were committed “when the person who committed them, although not directly pursuing a counter-revolutionary aim, wittingly entertained the possibility of this arising or should have foreseen the socially dangerous character of the consequences of his actions.”²¹⁴ The definition of terrorism was gradually extended to violent acts against a wide range of people. Not only all Party officials, but also members of grain-procurement commissions (in 1930), shock workers (in 1931), and “pioneers” (in 1934) were covered.²¹⁵