Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

Stalin and Ezhov therefore decided that the percentage of “enemies” sentenced to death rather than forced labor must rise from 0.5 to 47 percent. In 1937 and 1938 the NKVD’s own records show that 1,444,923 persons were “convicted” of counterrevolutionary crimes, and of these 681,692 were shot. The flow to the camps was halved, but processing so many prisoners—who had to be beaten into incriminating others and thus provide further fodder for the NKVD—was still unmanageable. The NKVD ran out of paper to record sentences and executions.

Prisoners could be shot expeditiously—200 in a night was the average in Leningrad, and experienced butchers could manage this number single-handed—but disposing of the corpses, given the shortage of bulldozers and open spaces in cities, was harder. Sometimes victims were taken to areas where NKVD officers had dachas; they dug their own graves, on which pine trees would be planted and wooden chalets built. From December 1937 the NKVD stopped sending its corpses to hospital morgues to be processed with those who had died naturally. Three times as many bodies now had to be disposed of daily in Leningrad. The NKVD took over twenty-seven acres of forestry land at Pargolovo near the closely guarded Finnish border, where 46,771 corpses were buried.

Thanks to the efforts of a few dedicated men and women, we now have full knowledge of what happened in Leningrad and in parts of Moscow. The Leningrad Martyrology gives details of the 47,000 men and women of the city and the province who perished at the hands of the NKVD over eighteen months.²⁰ None of the arrests resulted from an investigation. The target set by Ezhov for Leningrad had been 4,000 shot and 10,000 sent to the camps over four months from July 1937. Ezhov instructed all NKVD headquarters that all former kulaks, common criminals, Germans, Poles, and those repatriated from Manchuria after the Japanese seizure were to be rounded up and results reported to him every few days, with the warning: “If in the coming days the present position is not put right, the appropriate conclusions will be applied to you.”

Certain categories of the population were more vulnerable to arrest than others: 95 percent of those shot were men. Xenophobia was key: non-Russians, only 18 percent of the population, provided 37 percent of the victims. Poles, Finns, Estonians, and Latvians were singled out to the extent that the USSR in 1937 had half as many ethnic Poles and Balts as it had in 1926. Virtually all ethnic Poles—some 144,000—were arrested and three quarters of these were shot.

Ironically, Zakovsky, head of the Leningrad NKVD from the murder of Kirov until March 1938, was a Latvian—his real name being Štubis. Aleksandr Radzivilovsky, who began his Cheka career in the 1921 bloodbath of the Crimea, revealed his instructions when interrogated by Beria’s men in 1939:

I asked Ezhov how to carry out in practice his directive on exposing the anti-Soviet Latvian underground, and his reply was that there was no need to feel embarrassed by the absence of concrete material, but I should mark out several Latvians who were party members and beat the necessary statements out of them. “Don’t beat about the bush with this lot, their cases will be decided in batches. You need to show that Latvians, Poles, etc. in the party are spies and saboteurs.” Frinovsky recommended that I should, in cases where I failed to get confessions from detainees, sentence them to shooting just on the basis of indirect witness evidence or simply unchecked informants’ materials.²¹

Manual workers and peasants made up 24–28 percent of the victims; 12 percent were professional workers, a much smaller group within the population. The Leningrad purges (and they were typical) thus hit hardest skilled professionals—doctors, veterinary surgeons, agronomists, engineers—and priests, as well those previously accused of counterrevolution. Blue-collar railway workers, thanks to Kaganovich’s vigilance, also suffered badly. Some minority peoples effectively faced genocide, but only the Chechen and Ingush in the high Caucasus took up arms against Ezhov’s NKVD.