Welcome to Russian History Retold, Episode 312, The Great Purge, Part Three.Last time, we covered the purge of intellectuals and the military.Today, we finish up the series.
We'll discuss the destruction of the old Bolsheviks, the Cultural War, and the end of this tumultuous period in Soviet history.
While the military men were being hunted down, tried and executed, it was time to purge the party of the old Bolsheviks, especially those who resided in Leningrad.
That focus was in part due to the assassination of Sergei Kirov, who was the first secretary of the Leningrad City Committee of the All-Union Communist Party.Love these long titles.
Kirov himself was considered an old Bolshevik, which is why many believe that Stalin was behind his assassination, as he was a definite threat to his power.
To divert suspicion on himself, Stalin ordered the rounding up and executions of those associated with the Leningrad Bolsheviks, claiming they were behind Kirov's murder.
During the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, held in 1961, one of the speakers had this to say about the purge of the old Bolsheviks in Leningrad. Quote, the Leningrad party organization suffered particularly large losses.
For a period of four years, there was an uninterrupted wave of repressions in Leningrad against honest and completely innocent people.Promotion to a responsible post often amounted to a step toward the brink of a precipice.
Many people were annihilated without a trial and investigation on the basis of false, hastily fabricated charges.Not only officials themselves, but also their families were subjected to repressions.
Even absolutely innocent children, whose lives were broken from the very beginning.The repressions were carried out either on Stalin's direct instructions or with his knowledge and approval.
Diverting from the main topic for a second, the 22nd Congress was one where the split from Stalin's era was widened, but it was also the one where Khrushchev began to be undermined in his leadership.
The premier would ask for essentially term limits for members of the Politburo, claiming that if this didn't pass, it would lead to a period of stagnation, which is exactly what happened.
The ensuing purge was the most violent and brutal of all of the ones between 1937 and 1939.
According to Soviet historian, Roy Medvedev, in his book, Foil Rehabilite Stalin, 90% of the provincial and city committees and Republican central committees were liquidated during the Great Purge.This means that the Leningrad Purge was nearly 100%.
The three men most responsible for the purge, aside from Stalin, were Andrei Zhdanov, his right-hand man, Leonid Zakovsky, and his left hand, the highly disliked Alexander Shcherbakov.
The latter was kind of a roving purger who would go into provinces that were reluctant to destroy their fellow communists and whip out everyone in any seat of power.
Zhukovsky actually wasn't much better, and in 1938 he would become a victim of the purge of the Latvians in the NKVD.The first two men that were targeted were Mikhail Shudov and Ivan Kudatsky.
Both would be executed after being charged with, quote, participation in a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization.
During the 18th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party, it was revealed that they, quote, uncovered and expelled from its ranks the anti-Soviet rightist Trotskyist double-dealers, the Japanese-German diversionists, and spies.
As Robert Conquest writes in his book, The Great Terror, quote, expulsion was the extreme measure of party discipline proper.In these circumstances, it almost invariably meant relaxation to the secular arm of the NKVD followed by arrest.
Interestingly, only 2% of those in attendance at the 18th Congress were at the 17th Congress held just five years previously. While the top people were being rounded up, the purge began to pull in those in the lower echelons.
One of the reasons was that Leningrad had a large group of people who really wanted to remove Stalin, but were scared to carry out any plans.To quote Conquest again, quote,
During the secret speech by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, he mentions an important person in the persecution of the Leningrad group.Quote, During the examination in 1955 of the Kornurov case, Rosenblum revealed the following fact.
When Rosenblum was arrested in 1937, he was subjected to terrible torture, during which he was ordered to confess false information concerning himself and other persons.
He was then brought into the office of Zakowski, who offered him freedom on condition that he made before the court a false confession fabricated in 1937
by the NKVD concerning, quote, sabotage, espionage, and a diversion in a terroristic center in Leningrad.Zhukovsky goes on to further say, you yourself will not need to invent anything.
The NKVD will prepare for you a ready outline for every branch of the center. you will have to study it carefully and remember well all questions and answers which the court might ask.
Plus the case will be ready in four to five months or perhaps half a year.During all this time, you will be preparing yourself so that you will not compromise the investigation and yourself.
Your future will depend on how the trial goes and on its results.If you begin to lie and testify falsely, blame yourself.If you manage to endure it, you will save your head, and we will feed and clothe you at the government's cost until your death."
Imagine how frightened Rosenblum was at this. What's highly ironic about the speech of Khrushchev was how he himself was an avid perjurer during this period, which he avoids discussing in his autobiography.Nikita claims that Stalin had deceived him.
After being removed from power, Khrushchev tried to rehabilitate himself in his role in the Great Purge.As he writes, quote, you could put together a whole book consisting of nothing but the names of the important military,
party, administrative and diplomatic leaders, all men of the Leninist school, who were Stalin's first victims, honest, loyal Leninists, devoted to the cause of the revolution.
They were the first to go when Stalin imposed his arbitrary rule on the party.Only two of the 154 delegates from Leningrad who appeared at the 17th Congress were seated at the 18th. Zhdanov would place those loyal to him in their place.
Unfortunately for many of them, they would perish in 1950 during another purge known as the Leningrad case.Stalin really had it in for anyone from Leningrad.
Some believe that it was his dislike for the city as it had been the home of many of the elite during the time of the czars, and that Stalin believed that the city itself would poison people's minds.
Next up on the target list were the first secretaries of the provinces.Only two would survive, Khrushchev in Moscow and Lavrentiy Beria in the Caucasus.
When men like Khaganovich, Malenkov, Zhdanovich, and Shkiratov went to the provinces, they quickly had the first and often the second secretaries arrested.
Often, they would communicate with Stalin, who would recommend that they, quote, not be too liberal, unquote, in their handling of the situation.
In one province that Kaganovich visited, the following was written about the three-day stopover, quote, he accused the entire party organization, which had great revolutionary traditions, of supposedly standing aloof, of being off to the side of the high road.
At a plenary session of the provincial committee, he pinned the label Enemy of the People on the majority of the executives without any grounds.On and on it went, from one province to another.Whole swaths of loyal Bolsheviks were annihilated.
In some cases, if you mentioned a person as a comrade, you could be arrested as you might not know that they had just been detained minutes before.
One speaker at a plenum got up to the stage and said, quote, as the previous speaker already stated, we must complete the harvesting in a shorter period.
At the same time, comrade Kostyukov failed to point out that at these last words, the people's commissar again put his hands on his hip and inquired sneeringly.Is Kostyukov your comrade?Curious, very curious.The accomplice of Kazakov.
his henchman Kostyukov was arrested 15 minutes ago.The speaker was then swept up in a way as were all members of the Bureau of the Provincial Committee within 40 minutes.Such was the terror of the Great Purge.And it didn't stop there.
Many of the people who succeeded, those who were purged and executed, were themselves destroyed.These types of purges would take out anyone not deemed fully behind Stalin and those who carried out his orders.
Even old friends of the boss could be targets, especially if they questioned why he picked certain people to purge. Yosef Tariqis, who was a close confidant of Stalin, was a case in point.
He had served as the first secretary of Voronezh and Stalingrad.But he decided to call the boss and ask why he was arresting some of his comrades.After a while, he mentioned the Tukhachevsky arrest.
According to Conquest, Stalin shouted, �That is not your business.Don�t interfere in what doesn�t concern you.The NKVD knows what it�s doing.� He then went on to say, �Only an enemy would defend Tukhachevsky,� and threw down the telephone.
Varikis was deeply shaken.He told his wife that he could hardly believe it was Stalin. Within a month of the call, Varikis was arrested and shot.His wife suffered the same fate.In 1938, things began to reach bizarre levels of violence.
In a February and March plenum, Stalin ordered that two men stand for every position within the different National Soviets.However, as Conquest points out, it, quote, did not go far enough.
In many cases, it was only the fourth or fifth nominee who was to keep the post through the ensuing years.Stalin wanted men in key positions who were completely subservient and dependent on him for their lives and jobs.
Some of the men who replaced the old Bolsheviks held their positions for just a few months.According to the authors Beck and Godin in their book, Russian Purge and Extraction of Confession, quote,
People of their type tended, in their unscrupulous and zeal, to carry the party line to absurd extremes, with the result of their actions had to be later explained away as deviations.
People of this type were also inclined by nature to corruption and exploitation of their positions for personal advantage.They thus roused the hatred of their juniors.This further contributed to the shortness of their stay in office.
The young survivors would become the future leaders of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death.These included Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko.
Throughout Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, and other regions, wave after wave of executions of party members. But then another wave was to go after the persecutors, the NKVD itself.
Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD after purging and executing Yagoda, tried to concentrate his power in his hands, something that did not go unnoticed by Stalin.The boss, though, had a tight grip on the proceedings with Yezhov as his point man.
In the first two years of the purge, Stalin received 383 lists of names of people to be executed or sent to the gulags.Four men would sign the lists of people to be shot.Stalin, Molotov, Gaganovich, and Malenkov. Here is a sample of a list.
Comrade Stalin, I am sending for you approval four lists of people to be tried by the military collegium.List one, general.List two, former military personnel. List three, former personnel of the NKVD.List number four, wives of enemies of the people.
I request sanction to convict all in the first degree, signed Yezhov.A first-degree request meant execution.1938, though, would be the beginning of the slowdown in executions, although the numbers were still staggeringly high.
In 1937, 936,000 people were arrested.1938 saw 638,000 taken into custody.But the focus changed from just about everyone to specific targets.
There was a deep concern amongst the members of the Politburo that Stalin and the party were decaying far too rapidly. As Gedeon Naumov write in their work, The Road to Terror, quote, the party had to be rehabilitated.
Mass expulsions had to be stopped.Admissions of new members and readmissions of those expelled had to be speeded up.The Moscow leadership realized that it could not govern without a nomenklatura.
The party, now cured of disease, had to be given a clean bill of health. The trick was finding a symbolic formula for that pronouncement.We'll be back after a quick break.
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The problem was how to do this with paranoia being rampant amongst the new party officials.They also had to find scapegoats, as the Politburo members could not be blamed, because this would erode their power and prestige.
The beginning of the end of the Great Purge would start with the January 1938 plenum.According to Gideon Naumov, quote, it attacked the false vigilance of certain careerist communists
who are striving to insure themselves against possible charges of inadequate vigilance through the indiscriminate repression of party members.
Such a leader indiscriminately spreads panic about enemies of the people and is willing to expel dozens of members from the party on false grounds just to appear vigilant themselves. Even with this apparent reversal, they continued with the purges.
At first, the NKVD was praised for reeling in the fervor and for having indeed discovered those who were overzealous.One of the first targets was Pavel Postyachev, a territorial party secretary who's one of the most prolific purgers.
Many complaints were lodged against Postashev, but he was well protected until he was no longer necessary.The lower party secretaries were the other group that needed to be slowed down.They needed to restrain those who were totally uncontrolled.
This was yet another method of deflecting blame from the top to the bottom. Things needed to be wrapped up.Now, the last of the show trials, the Moscow show trials, were held in March 1938.
This is where Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda, and 13 others were found guilty.It tied everything from the first two show trials together.
When Yagoda was implicated, it explained why it took so long to uncover, as the secret police were involved in the collusion.Yezhov wanted to continue with the trials, specifically a prosecution of Polish spies.Stalin declined to allow it.
And then he named Yezhov the head of the Commissariat for Water Transportation. Oh, the NKVD head must have known that this was not good, as his predecessor, Yagoda, was given a similar promotion.
In the summer of 1938, associates of Yezhov were under suspicion.His ultimate downfall began with the defection of one of his assistants, Liushkov, head of the NKVD in the Far East, to Japan.
In August, Stalin installed Lavrentiy Beria to become Yezhov's deputy.The final straw was an almost violent encounter between Molotov and Yezhov, with the NKVD head threatening to arrest the premier.This led to a series of reviews of NKVD policies.
This put Nikolai on the crosshairs of his critics.As one expert about Yezhov commented, Yezhov's primary crime, however, consisted in the fact that he had not informed Stalin of his actions.
Now, the boss really hated not being in the loop, so this was a significant breach of authority. At first, the blame for the uncontrolled purge was at the feet of Yezhov's underlings.They'd be the first to go.
He would be blamed for not unmasking them early on.Yezhov quickly sent Stalin their resignation, which was immediately accepted.It is said that Nikolai began to drink heavily and was deeply depressed as he knew what was in store.
Yezhov was arrested on April 10, 1939 and executed on February 4, 1940 by either future KGB chairman Ivan Serov or by Chief Executioner Vasily Blokhin in the basement of a small NKVD station on the Vernovskaya Lane.
Tens of thousands of people would be released from the prisons and gulags throughout the Soviet Union.The evidence uncovered after the fall of the USSR suggests that if you didn't confess to any crime, you had a much better chance of being released.
This did not mean that the Soviet government stopped the repression of its citizens.It was just smarter at doing it. Looking back at the Great Purge, we have opinions from some of those at the heart of it.Like this from Molotov.Quote,
After the war, there were no opposition groups.It was such a relief that it made it easier to give a correct, better direction.But if a majority of these people had remained alive, I don't know if we would be standing solidly on our feet.
Here, Stalin took upon himself chiefly all this difficult business. We helped properly, correctly, and without such a person as Stalin, it would have been very difficult.Very.Especially in the period of the war.All around, one against another.
What good is that?Molotov further suggests that had Stalin not purged all of those people, especially the military, the Soviet Union may not have won the war.
There may have been too many opponents of Stalin who might have given safe haven to the invading Nazis.There is some evidence that there were people in the Ukraine who sympathized with the Germans, but very few were employed by the invaders.
Also looking back at the Great Purge, the question that needs to be answered is why?Why did Stalin feel that he needed to murder all of these people? In history, there is never an absolute truth.
In this case, there is little doubt that Stalin was deeply involved in the grandest scale of the purge.
Pre-1991, several apologists claimed that he didn't know that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the opened archives tell a very different story.Some of the excesses were out of his hands, But he knew what was going on.
We have written evidence that his signature was on numerous lists of the condemned.To be honest, the Soviet Union of 1932 was a huge mess.
The economy was in shambles, not having recovered from the Russian Civil War and the aftermath of collectivization. The USSR needed to industrialize, but didn't know quite how to switch from an agricultural-focused economy to an industrialized one.
Stalin's side had won by this time, but they had to find scapegoats to put the blame on.We can also say with some certainty there was no real plan for the terror.It evolved as it went about.
The threat of war also had to be thrown into the mix, as there was an absolute certainty that Nazi Germany would one day invade, and they had to make sure that everyone was on Stalin's side.
In their conclusion, Getty and Naumov write, quote, Stalin evidently distrusted the NKVD until late 1936 and the army until mid-1937.
It would have been insufferably stupid of him to play with the elite lives in such circumstances, and no one has ever accused him of being stupid. So what was the effect of the Great Purge years later?To quote Gedeon Naumov again, quote,
A generation of Soviet citizens never found out what happened to their friends and family.A generation of children wondered about their parents.
A huge number of lives had been destroyed in one of the greatest human and personal tragedies of modern times.They further say, in the 1990s, the victims, ghosts, and heirs of the terror still walk the earth.
We must ask ourselves in the 2020s, what effect did the Great Purge have on Russian today and its policies?It is an ongoing issue that we may have to answer one day. I hope you enjoyed today's episode.
Join me next time when I discuss the life of Sergei Vitya, the Russian statesman who served as the first Prime Minister of the Russian Empire.So, until next time, Dasvidaniya, i spasiba za vinyamanya.
