The Great Terror

The Soviet novelist Konstantin Simonov gives an account of a conversation between two generals—Serpilin and Ivan Alexeyevich—in his Soldiers Are Made, Not Born.¹⁷ Ivan Alexeyevich comments that the Purge was not merely a matter of individual generals:

“The whole thing goes deeper. In the autumn of 1940 when the Finnish war had already ended, the Inspector-General of the Infantry carried out an inspection of regimental commanders and in the course of my duties I saw the resulting data. The review was attended by 225 commanders of infantry regiments. How many of them do you think had at that time graduated from the Frunze Academy?”

“I cannot really guess,” said Serpilin, “judging from the preceding events, presumably not very many.”

“What if I tell you that there was not a single one to have done so?”

“It just cannot be …”

“Don’t believe it then, if you find that easier. Well, how many of the 225 do you think had gone through ordinary military college? 25 of them! and 200 of them had come from junior lieutenants’ courses and regimental schools!”

As Ivan Alexeyevich himself points out, 225 regiments constitute 75 divisions, or half the strength of the peacetime Army, a reasonable sample. What Simonov is saying, in effect, is that the Army purge (plus the comparatively minor Finnish War of 1939 to 1940) accounted for virtually every single regimental commander throughout the entire Soviet Army apart from those promoted to fill gaps higher up. Although fictional in form, the figures Simonov gives also appear in factual Soviet literature.¹⁸

Similarly, in his labor camp, Gorbatov

wondered how the officers newly appointed to high rank, with no battle experience, would deal with operations in a real war. Honest, brave men, devoted to their country they might be, but yesterday’s battalion commander would be head of a division, yesterday’s regimental commander of a corps; in charge of an army, or a whole front, there would be at best a former divisional commander or his deputy. How many futile losses and failures would there be? What would our country suffer just because of this?¹⁹

As is confirmed by Russian military writers, the Purge had indeed led to “inexperienced commanders” being promoted. As early as 1937, 60 percent of the commanding cadres in rifle units, 45 percent in tank units, and 25 percent in air units were given as in this category.²⁰ Moreover, “the cadre of leaders who had gained military experience in Spain and in the Far East was almost completely liquidated.”

²¹

Nor could the atmosphere fail to affect the discipline of the Army:

The policy of large-scale repression against the military cadres led also to undermine military discipline, because for several years officers of all ranks and even soldiers in the Party and Komsomol cells were taught to “unmask” their superiors as hidden enemies. It is natural that this caused a negative influence on the state of military discipline in the first war period.²²

Mekhlis, in his report to the 1939 XVIIIth Congress, expressed horror and sorrow at “incorrect expulsions” from the Party which had taken place in the Army in 1935, 1936, and 1937, on the basis of “slander,” instead of the correct method of “documents and facts.”²³

And over the next few years, a handful of generals were released—Rokossovsky and Gorbatov, for example. But still, as with the civilian purge (and the similar crocodile tears of Zhdanov), the arrests did not actually cease and cases continued to be processed. Herling mentions a number of Soviet generals with whom he shared a cell in 1940. Most of them had been badly beaten, and showed the marks of ill-mended broken bones.

Even now, the Red Army had considerable striking power in the right hands. This was shown over the summer of 1939. After a very shaky start, a build-up of superior forces (itself a feat), luckily entrusted to the one superlative soldier of the old First Cavalry Army, Zhukov, threw back the Japanese invaders of Mongolia in model fashion at Khalkhin-Gol. But even as this was being done, the armored tactics he had used, sponsored under Tukhachevsky (who with his group had by 1937 been beginning to create an “elite army emerging from the mass”),²⁴ were being condemned and abandoned, and within two months the tactical doctrine of the Red Army was back to old-fashioned “mass,” and the tanks were distributed in packets to lesser unit commands.

The post-Purge promotions placed men totally unsuited or untrained for high command in key positions. None of them showed any capacity for strategic thinking, and even the tactical dispositions on the frontier were proof of “a dull or listless mind.”²⁵ The rigidity of the military–political machine meant that failure at the top produced certain dislocation. The “mass” on which post-Tukhachevsky doctrine relied became too large and sluggish to be manipulated in such circumstances.