The Great Terror

On the final reckoning of the Yezhov cadres and other victims left over from the earlier period I gave the little that was known in 1990. The full story has now been given. It took place from a list submitted to Stalin on 16 January 1940, of whom 346 were shot over the next couple of weeks. They included, as I noted, such figures as Isak Babel, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Mikhail Koltsov, and political high-ups like Robert Eikhe. Now one finds that Yezhov himself was among them, with his whole top following. He, Frinovsky, E. G. Evdokimov, and the worst NKVD torturers, were shot on 3 and 4 February (Frinovsky’s wife and son were also shot, as were those of E. G. Evdokimov); the more peripheral former Deputy People’s Commissar S. L. Zhukovski was also shot, but his wife only got a Gulag sentence (‘suitable for HEAVY physical labour’).21

It is perhaps rather an irony that Frinovsky, with a long record of torture, was himself tortured into a confession that he had thus broken socialist legality. And we now find that the supposed final document of the great terror, Stalin’s secret telegram of 10 January 1939 (saying that ‘physical pressure’ on prisoners had been permitted ‘since 1937’), was published during the early ‘de-Stalinisation’ phase without this crucial passage:

The method of physical pressure was abused by Zakovsky, Litvin, Uspensky, and other scoundrels … For these abuses, they have been given due punishment, but this in no way detracts from the value of the method itself when it is properly used.22

The interrogation of Yezhov himself, on 26 April 1939, starts ‘in the preliminary confrontation you said that for ten years you had been a spy for Poland’. In the long documentation of the question-and-answer session that follows he also (with such other names as Yakir, Chubar, Kossior) becomes a spy for Germany. Yezhov goes on to implicate most of the Chekists (all at immense length), but finally adds that he himself only became a British spy later – through his wife, who had by that time committed suicide.23

9

I cover the army purges fully, but should add that much more is now known about the results – in particular on how they affected the high command. A full list with the whole careers of the officers down to the brigade commanders, with dates and circumstances of death is given. A later analysis notes that the military education of a general staff major takes a minimum of ten or twelve years, and of an army commander twenty years; ‘and they were almost all liquidated’. Even Zhukov at the beginning of the war in no way matched Tukhachevsky or Yegorov in his training.24

In 1940 the German High Command rated the Soviet army as very powerful, but noted that it would not be effective for several years, because the lack of experienced commanders could not be quickly remedied. The material now available on the 1939–40 period includes much on the debacle of the Finnish War, followed by the almost ruinous effect of Stalin’s actions before and after June 1941.

The only point that one has not seen fully stressed is how the repulse of the Germans from Moscow in December 1941 was such a near thing – partly because Hitler had diverted the troops’ attack. But it was not until 28 July 1942 that there came Stalin’s ‘Backs to the Wall’ Order No. 227, saying that so much territory and population and so much industry and production has been lost, that no further retreat was possible. Here again the Germans had diverted half their blow away from Stalingrad. And even so (and even after Hitler’s ban on a breakout), it took years of hard fighting to reach Berlin, although now the Soviets had enormous inputs of war material from the West, without which, as Marshal Zhukov said, ‘victory would have been impossible’.

A crucial point is one of the direct results of the downgrading of the High Command: that the replacements’ ‘lack of training’ resulted, even after 1942, in reliance on frontal attack, as back on the Somme or on the Chemin des Dames. Untrained in tactics and minor strategy, the commanders had little choice – particularly as Stalin seems to have judged a commander by the level of his casualties. One sadly ironic result was that Moscow was to claim moral superiority over the Allies on the grounds of higher losses. Alexander Yakovlev, himself badly wounded, once told me that the first grain of his scepticism about Party rule was sown when he noted the pointless casualties ordered.

A striking footnote is that the wives of Tukhachevsky, Uborevich, Kork and Gamarnik, who had only been given eight years’ imprisonment, were retried and shot after the outbreak of war, whose disasters their husbands might have helped the country avoid.