The Great Terror

The Special Board continued to have this legal position throughout the Stalin period. But while the Board in its official form went on handing out prison sentences (though longer ones than in the previous period), a new and illegal body emerged from it. As early as 27 March 1935, a mere order of the NKVD gave the powers of the Special Board to committees of three NKVD officers, though a representative of the Prosecutor’s Office was to be present at their proceedings, and they were only empowered to inflict the same sentences as the Special Board proper. On 30 July 1937, though this was never announced, new and deadly “Troikas” were set up on Stalin’s instructions (though “on Kaganovich’s initiative” and formally established by a “special instruction” from Vyshinsky), with the power to impose the death penalty.²⁴⁵ Recalling, no doubt consciously and with a view to suggesting revolutionary urgency, the so-named emergency tribunals of the Civil War, they now in fact often—as “Dvoikas”—consisted merely of two members. At the center, as we have seen, Yezhov and Vyshinsky fulfilled this role.

Troikas were established in all the provinces and Republics; their composition varied a little, but seems usually to have consisted of the NKVD chief as Chairman, the Provincial or Republican First Secretary, and the Chairman of the local Executive Committee (or a representative of the Prosecutor’s Office). A recent Soviet article tells us that in practice, the NKVD chief initialed the sentence and it was then carried out, the other two adding their initials ex post facto. As with the Special Board, the defendant was not present at the proceedings of the Troikas. They inflicted the death penalty in absentia on a vast scale. In Uzbekistan, the Soviet press lately noted, the Republic’s Troika ordered 40,000 executions in 1937 to 1938, which would mean over 1 million for the USSR as a whole. (And this, of course, over and above the sentences by the Supreme Courts of the Union and Autonomous Republics, the Military Tribunals, and similar bodies. Moreover, executions could be carried out without even the pretense of a trial, by “special order,” as with G. E. Prokofiev and his subordinates in 1937 and M. S. Kedrov and others in 1941.²⁴⁶

Orders for further executions came from Moscow. Yezhov telegraphed the NKVD chief in Frunze, capital of Kirgizia: “You are charged with the task of exterminating 10,000 enemies of the people. Report results by signal.” The form of reply was, “In reply to yours of … the following enemies of the people have been shot,” followed by a numbered list. An order to the Sverdlovsk NKVD called for 15,000 executions. Another, to a small town near Novosibirsk, ordered 500, far above normal capacity, so that the NKVD had to shoot priests and their relatives, all those who had spoken critically of conditions, amnestied former members of White Armies, and so on, who would ordinarily have got five years or less.²⁴⁷

In February 1938, a recent Soviet account tells us, Yezhov himself went down to Kiev to call a special NKVD conference to order 30,000 more executions in the Ukraine.²⁴⁸

For all the various forms of trial, official death sentences are estimated at not over 10 percent.²⁴⁹ However, this is based only on the information given to relatives, and there was falsification on a large scale, with the sentence of “ten years without the right of correspondence” in fact meaning execution; all the identified bodies in the mass graves at Vinnitsa and Kuropaty were of people who had had such sentences.

A Soviet authority of the Khrushchev period remarked that “many were exterminated without trial or investigation.”²⁵⁰

Vyshinsky himself favored the extralegal method. He several times said, “When it is a question of annihilating the enemy, we can do it just as well without a trial.”²⁵¹ There seem, in fact, to have been few executions without “trial,” apart from the liquidation of oppositionists already in camps, until 1937. The first blow seems to have been against foreigners resident in Russia, including naturalized Soviet citizens. With no important defenders in the Party and susceptible to the charge of contact with foreign espionage, they began to go to the execution cellars in large numbers late in 1936.

It was usually obvious when an execution was to take place in a central prison. Several warders and an NKVD officer would appear at the cell door, which otherwise seldom happened. There was sometimes time to say goodbye and hand over any remaining property, such as clothes, to one’s cell mates.