The Great Terror

The cellars of the Lubyanka were really a sort of basement divided into a number of rooms off corridors. Later on, in ordinary routine, the condemned handed in their clothes in one of these rooms and changed into white underclothes only. They were then taken to the death cell and shot in the back of the neck with a TI eight-shot automatic. A doctor then signed the death certificate, the last document to be put in their files, and the tarpaulin on the floor was taken away to be cleaned by a woman specially employed for that purpose.²⁵² (Execution with a small-bore pistol is not, as might seem, very humane. Of the 9,432 corpses exhumed at Vinnitsa, 6,360 had needed a second shot; 78, a third shot; and 2, a fourth shot, while many others had been struck over the head with some blunt object to finish them off. Again, we are told in a recent Soviet article that in the mass graves at Kuropaty the sand thrown above a new batch of those executed could still be seen moving some time later.)²⁵³

At the Lefortovo, the corpses were cremated, and other crematoria seem also to have been used: a tombstone to “ashes of unknown persons” recently noted at the Danilovskii Monastery is believed to cover some who were executed and never identified.²⁵⁴ Elsewhere in Moscow, at the Kalivnikovskoye Cemetery in the heart of the city, there was what has now been described in the Soviet press as “Moscow’s Babi Yar,” where “naked bodies were brought in carts in the middle of the night during the thirties, with rags stopping the two bullet holes in their heads.”²⁵⁵

The final documents in a case were a note to the sanitary-burial services of the NKVD: “please take six, twelve, or some such a number of corpses, date, signature,” and on the other side, “six, twelve, or some such a number of corpses cremated, date and signature of the director of the crematorium.” This refers to important cases, not to those merely shot and buried in mass graves.²⁵⁶

And so it was elsewhere. In Gorky, for example, during the height of the Purge, one estimate is that from fifty to seventy executed corpses were taken out daily from the NKVD headquarters on Vorobievka Street. One prisoner was employed to whitewash the walls of the cells of executed prisoners immediately after they were taken to the NKVD headquarters for execution. This was to cover the names that they had scratched on the walls.²⁵⁷

As I write, mass execution sites are known in several places: the one in Vinnitsa, discovered by the Germans in 1943, where over 9,000 corpses were exhumed, even though part of the area remained uninvestigated; one between Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, where some 50,000 seem to have been executed in 1937 and 1938; one at Gorno-Altaisk; one at Bykovnya, near Kiev; one, with over 46,000 bodies, near Leningrad; one near Tomsk; one close to the well-known Polish grave site at Katyn; near Chelyabinsk; near Poltava; in Donetsk; near Voronezh; and, above all, the mass grave at Kuropaty, near Minsk, of which much was written in the Soviet press in 1988 and 1989, which became the eponym of the later discoveries and where no fewer than 50,000 victims lie buried, while considerably higher estimates have been given in the Soviet press.²⁵⁸ These included many from newly annexed western Byelorussia in 1939 to 1941 (five of the eight mass graves actually dug up were of western Byelorussians, and three were from 1937 and 1938, though this may not be representative). The total in any case is unexpectedly large, especially when five more sites are reported waiting investigation in or near Minsk alone, with others in the Byelorussian provincial capitals. And Byelorussia had in 1937–1938 about one-thirtieth, or 3.4 percent, of the Soviet population, and even in 1939–1941 only about one-eighteenth, or 5.6 percent. The great majority of the dead were peasants and workers.²⁵⁹

So the Purge had gone on, striking further and further into every layer of the population until finally it reached the mass of the peasantry and the ordinary workers (often accessories in sabotage cases). Although many at this level were shot, most escaped

with a simple confession that, for purposes of counter-revolutionary agitation, they had alleged that there was a shortage of certain foods or of petrol that shoes manufactured in Soviet factories were of inferior quality, or something of the kind. This was sufficient for a sentence of from three to seven years’ forced labor under Article 58 .²⁶⁰

Many accounts by former prisoners contain stories like the following: in September 1937, several hundred peasants were suddenly brought in to Kharkov prison. None of the officials in the prison knew what they had been arrested for, so they were beaten up to produce some sort of confession. But the peasants did not know either. Finally, a case was put together: