The Great Terror

In fact, the outbreak of war was made the occasion for a general increase in police activity and power. Individual grudges were paid off, and potential malcontents dealt with—as with the case of the widow of the Deputy People’s Commissar of the NKVD in the Ukraine, Brunivoy, who had died under interrogation. She was arrested in 1937 and severely interrogated, with permanent injury to the kidneys and several broken ribs. She was released in 1939 and rehabilitated. She believed throughout that everything that had happened was the result of hostile elements in the NKVD, and wrote to Stalin and Vyshinsky to this effect. At the beginning of 1941, the NKVD officials in her case were tried and sentenced to short terms of imprisonment for the use of torture. She felt herself completely justified. Two days after the German invasion, on 24 June 1941, she disappeared once more.⁴⁶

When the Russians withdrew before the German advance, attempts were made to evacuate NKVD prisoners. Not only was their labor needed, but they were, of course, expected to sympathize with liberators, even German ones. The retreat was so disorganized, especially in the Ukraine, that evacuation was often impossible. Killings on a mass scale took place. These are reported from Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, Kharkov, Dniepropetrovsk, Zaporozhe, and throughout the Baltic States. Near Nalchik, in the Caucasus, there was a molybdenum kombinat operated by the NKVD with convict labor. The prisoners were machine-gunned on the orders of the Kabardino-Balkar Republic’s NKVD Commissar.

⁴⁷ There is another report of a group of 29,000 prisoners accumulated in the Soviet retreat. When threatened with a further German advance and the abandonment of the camp at Olginskaya, the NKVD released all those serving less than five years and on 31 October 1941 shot the remainder.⁴⁸

More generally, we are told that mass shootings took place in the camps in November 1941, when the Germans were at the gates of Moscow; in early June 1942; and in September 1942, when Stalingrad seemed about to fal1.⁴⁹

And yet the war was also an occasion for the relaxation of certain pressures. Religion, for example, was no longer persecuted. The public reversion to the old patriotism heartened at least the Russians. Above all, there was everywhere hope that once the war finished, things would become easier: the collective-farm system would be abolished; the Terror would end.

Even apart from the sanguine mood of the people, the war brought a feeling of release, as Pasternak’s characters remark:

You could volunteer for front-line service in a punitive battalion, and if you came out alive you were free. After that, attack after attack, mile after mile of electrified barbed wire, mines, mortars, month after month of artillery barrage. They called our company the death squad. It was practically wiped out. How and why I survived, I don’t know. And yet—imagine—all that utter hell was nothing, it was bliss compared to the horrors of the concentration camp, and not because of the material conditions but for some other reason….

… It was not only felt by men in your position, in concentration camps, but by everyone without exception, at home and at the front, and they all took a deep breath and flung themselves into the furnace of this deadly, liberating struggle with real joy, with rapture.⁵⁰

THE CONSOLIDATION OF STALINISM

But in proposing the toast at the victory banquet in the Kremlin in June 1945, Stalin spoke significantly of the “ordinary” people as “cogs in the wheels of the great State apparatus.”⁵¹ His intention, completely fulfilled, was the restoration of the old machine.

In the same month, it was made clear that the confession–trial system had been abandoned after 1938 because it was, in the then circumstances, no longer necessary, rather than because Stalin thought it unconvincing or useless. Sixteen leaders of the Polish underground Government and Army were placed on trial. The accused were headed by General Okulicki (who had taken over command of the Home Army following the surrender of General Bor Komorowski after the heroic Warsaw Rising) and Jankowski, the chief delegate in Poland of the Polish Government. (Okulicki, then underground, had been asked to contact the Soviet Command, with a guarantee of safe conduct, but was arrested when he presented himself.) They and thirteen of their fourteen co-defendants pleaded guilty to charges of anti-Soviet activity. This was the last of the great public trials to be held in Moscow. Its aim was to discredit the Polish Resistance and to bring pressure on the Polish Government-in-exile to enter into a coalition with the Communist-sponsored Lublin Committee, then ruling Soviet-occupied Poland, on terms adequate to secure Communist predominance.