The Great Terror

The charges against them were relatively light. Most of them were merely asked to confess that they had carried on counter-revolutionary agitation and sabotage. They had planned to poison wells and burn down barns, and they had put a spell on Stalin and agitated against grain collections. All mere bagatelles. But about twenty of them were in more serious trouble. They were accused of a plot to steal horses, ride into the nearest town and proclaim an insurrection. The church bells were to ring out and at that sign the countryside was to rise. Nothing of all this had actually happened: the wells had not been poisoned, the cattle had not been harmed, the barns had not been burned down, the horses had not been stolen, the bells had not rung out, and the countryside had not risen. The whole thing was a complete invention.²⁶¹

For the remainder of the Yezhov period, they dominated the prison. They came in groups almost identically composed. First the chairman of the collective farm was arrested. He would give the names of his committee as accomplices, and they would name their foremen, who would involve the ordinary peasants. Peasants usually confessed as soon as they found out what was required of them. The NKVD at this stage let them know what was needed informally through its own stool pigeons. They went off to the camps in the far north in batches twice a week²⁶²

Even out on the far Soviet periphery, a British observer, then in Lenkoran, Azerbaijan, saw lorry following lorry at intervals throughout the day, filled with Turkic peasants under NKVD escort. Ships, including passenger boats taken off their ordinary routes for the purpose, were waiting to take them across the Caspian.²⁶³

Already in the summer of 1937, a later Soviet writer notes “the tremendous scale of the operation”: “All the agencies were inhumanly overworked. People were run off their feet; transport was insufficient; cells were crowded to bursting; courts sat twenty-four hours a day!”²⁶⁴

An NKVD officer arrested in November 1938 said that for six months it had become clear to the NKVD that the Purge could not go on in its present form.²⁶⁵

The NKVD by now had files proving that almost every leading official everywhere was a spy. Many of them were never arrested. An example is Professor Bogomolets, at the time of his death President of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences; at least ten statements from arrested scientists were on the record involving him as a fascist spy.²⁶⁶

The snowball system had reached a stage where half the urban population were down on the NKVD lists. They could not all be arrested, and there was no particular reason to take one rather than another. All the old “categories” had been largely liquidated: former partisans, Old Bolsheviks, oppositionists, and so on. The new arrests in the NKVD itself were a sign that this was understood. The feeling also got around that a vast number of people had been arrested quite indiscriminately, and now “they don’t even know what to do with them.”²⁶⁷

Not less than 5 percent of the population had been arrested by the time of Yezhov’s fall—that is, already at least one in twenty. One can virtually say that every other family in the country on average must have had one of its members in jail. The proportions were far higher among the educated classes.

In 1938, even from Stalin’s point of view, the whole thing had become impossible. The first substantial question an interrogator asked was, “Who are your accomplices?” So from each arrest, several other arrests more or less automatically followed. But if this had gone on for a few more months, and each new victim named only two or three accomplices, the next wave would have struck at 10 to 15 percent of the population, and soon after that at 30 to 45 percent. There are many theories of Stalin’s motives throughout the whole horrible business, and the question of why he stopped the mass Terror at this stage has puzzled many commentators. But we can see that the extreme limits had been reached. To have gone on would have been impossible economically, politically, and even physically, in that interrogators, prisons, and camps, already grotesquely overloaded, could not have managed it. And meanwhile, the work of the mass Purge had been done. The country was crushed.

10

ON THE CULTURAL FRONT

Mandelshtam always said that they always knew what they were doing: the aim was to destroy not only people, but the intellect itself.

Nadezhda Mandelshtam