The Great Terror

Then came the suicide of Lyubchenko and his wife, N. Krupenik. Unfortunately, the wife had been a university lecturer, and the whole staff of Kiev University naturally became high-grade suspects. A vast network of bourgeois nationalists in the universities and cultural agencies came to light. Nevertheless, the professor was not arrested until March 1938. After a severe interrogation for fifty days, by a series of thirteen “magistrates,” he was charged with complicity in an attempt to assassinate Kossior. The fall of Kossior led to the withdrawal of this charge in his and many other cases, and for it was substituted espionage for Japan. This was based on the following facts: the professor had for some time been head of the “Byzantological” Committee of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. The term then came to be regarded as reactionary and was replaced by “Near East.” This connection with the “East” was regarded as adequate for at least some suspicion of sympathy with, and espionage for, a country a good deal farther east. It was shown that the professor had lectured on Alexander the Great and Hannibal to senior Red Army officers. This had given him contact with the Army and therefore the opportunity to carry out espionage. It was then proved that he had actually met foreigners in the person of Professor Hrozny, the great specialist in Hittite history, who had “recruited” him through another Byzantologist who had lectured in the Soviet Far East, thus getting very near Japan. Finally, an indirect contact was found with a professor in Odessa who had actually met the Japanese Consul there. The reports passed through this espionage link to Tokyo consisted of remarks about the “political morale” of the Army, and here a genuine fact was established in that the accused had once told a colleague that some senior officers had confused Napoleon III with Napoleon I, and Alexander the Great with Caesar.⁸

When things became easier, after Yezhov’s fall, some of the surviving academics withdrew their confessions, the charges began to be toned down, and eventually, in the early autumn of 1939, the professor was released. He was lucky. Others were still going, from V. G. Sorin, of the Institute of Red Professors, repressed as an enemy of the people in 1939, who died in prison or camp in 1944,⁹

down to non-Party lecturers. (Sorin is said to have been willing to supply Stalin with suitable texts, but “he drew the line at inventing texts and falsifying

quotations.”)¹⁰ At the February–March 1937 plenum, Zhdanov had complained that of the 183 members of the Institute of Red Professors, 32 had been arrested between 1933 and 1936, and 53 more had more recently been found to be enemies of the people.¹¹

At a Party meeting in a university, where a member was denounced with the approval of the chair, it sometimes happened that a supporter would rise and ask for proof of the charges against his colleague. The makers of such demands were invariably denounced for counter-revolutionary attitudes, always silenced, and often arrested. At a meeting of the Kiev Academy of Sciences, for example, someone denounced Professor Kopershinsky. Another Communist scientist, Kaminsky (not the Minister of Health), remarked, “Where class instinct speaks, proof is unnecessary.” He, too, was later arrested. The Secretary of the Academy was publicly accused in the local press of having demanded proof about a similar denunciation.¹² He was one of the thirteen successive Secretaries of the Academy between 1921 and 1938, all of whom were arrested. (Of the seven Principals of Kiev University in the same period, six were arrested and one died a natural death.)¹³

In the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences, too, a “center for the espionage work of enemies of the people” was discovered, including most of those in leading positions—thirty-seven names are listed for eight institutes.¹⁴

The Academy of Sciences covers a wide range of disciplines. But we should note that the purge was violent not only among Byzantologists and so on, whom a technologically minded State can perhaps do without at a pinch, but also among scientists proper. The physicist Weissberg describes the situation at the Kharkov Physics Institute: