The Great Terror

The Politburo decision of 2 July 1937, on Anti-Soviet Elements, is signed by Stalin, and addressed to all secretaries of provinces and republics, as a telegram. It starts by saying that many ‘former kulaks and criminals’ are guilty of ‘anti-Soviet and diversionary crime’. The NKVD is immediately to arrest and shoot the most hostile, and send the others to exile. For this purpose Troikas are to be created within fifteen days.

This is followed on 30 July 1937 by the crucial NKVD Operational Prikaz 00447 to ‘repress former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements’. In more detail its first paragraph adds, ‘churchmen, members of sects’, and of ‘anti-Soviet political parties, the SRs …’ and others, together with targets such as ‘“Aferisty”’. Various directives based on it were issued – one on the Social Revolutionaries on 18 January 1938, one on Mensheviks and Anarchists on 14 February 1938.

The second section of Prikaz 00447 lists the numbers to be shot or jailed at once in each of the sixty-four provinces and republics named – numbers often increased, frequently with Stalin’s signature, over the next fifteen months. This is followed by treatment of wives of the repressed, who are to serve sentences of varying harshness, depending on their complicity.

This Prikaz then lists by name the members of the Troika in each province or republic. Each Troika is to report its sentences, on a form indicated, six times a month by telegram or urgent post to the Head of the Eighth Department of the Central NKVD (at this time V. E. Tsesarski), though later transferred to the First Special Department (and I. I. Shapiro). The verdicts were sent in the form of ‘albums’, and Moscow’s men had only time to put in a figure (for GULAG years), or, more commonly, just the letter R for rasstrel (shoot).

This anti-‘kulak’ Prikaz was accompanied by orders targeting a different category – the ‘national’. Operative Prikaz 00485 is on the repression of ‘members of the Polish Military Organisation’ in the USSR. Then there is the German Prikaz, 00439, directed in the first place against German citizens, including political refugees from the Nazi regime. The Latvians are covered in Memorandum 49990 of 30 November 1937. The last of these ‘national’ decrees was on the Greeks – Directive 50216, to take effect on 15 December 1937.

Operative Prikaz 00693 of 23 September 1937, citing the original ‘National Prikaz’, covers all ‘border crossers’ – for political reasons or because of ‘better material conditions in the USSR, as a result of unemployment and famine in their own countries’. But the oddest of the ‘national’ categories (see Chapter 9) is that of the Harbintsy – former Russian subjects and their families working on the Chinese Eastern Railway, handed over by the Soviets to Japan in 1935 and until then run by the USSR. (Not a ‘nationality’ at all!)

One finds Frinovsky writing to the Sverdlovsk NKVD of the ‘national’ categories that the victims’ identification documents as sent to Moscow seldom register them as in their supposed national target. But of those arrested in the province as ‘German’ only 390 were German out of 4,142, as also with Poles and others. And similarly with the ‘kulak’ operation: only less than half of the charge sheets identify the victim as ‘kulak’ at all, and even of the 3,789 ‘former kulaks’, 3,552 were workers.16 Similarly, in the West Siberian Krai, those arrested under 00447 included almost as many SR victims as the ‘kulak’ component proper (9,689 and 10,541 respectively).17

It will be seen that the Prikazes do not specify any political or other crime, but merely sections of the population. The Troikas (or Dvoikas Commissions of the NKVD and Prosecutor) are to fill in the actual accusations afterwards. And it is clear, above all, that it was organised and controlled from the centre. So it is now beyond dispute that the mass terror was set in motion from above, and not on any objective basis, true or false, but by quotas of categories thought unamenable to Soviet rule. That is to say the strata were condemned as such and the mass terror is seen as a removal of all that seemed unassimilable to the Stalinist order. Stalin’s mass action against a section of the population was thus taken on ‘ideological’ grounds, merely disguising it as a purge of terrorists, spies and saboteurs necessary to the safety and survival of the regime.

Even local NKVD chiefs, though certainly incited to or predisposed to the currently raging paranoia, are reported as becoming exhausted. When things had got completely out of hand an NKVD Prikaz 00762 was given on 26 November 1938 (following a Politburo decision on 17 November), annulling eleven Prikazy and other instructions from July 1937 to September 1938, and immediately bringing to a close any sort of mass operation, noting too that ‘arrests are to be made on a strictly individual basis’.