Welcome to Russian History Retold, episode 311, The Great Purge, part two.Last time, we covered the basis for the Great Purge of 1937 to 1939.Today, we will cover the people who were caught up in this tragedy.
Historically, we tend to focus on the broad effects of decisions made by leaders.While researching this topic, in older works, they talk about the purges being a monolithic event and not a human tragedy on a person-by-person basis.
The later works do focus on those individuals who were scooped up in the vortex of the purge.
In his book, though, The Great Terror, Robert Conquest writes, quote, Stalin's terror, in fact, begins to show a more rational pattern if it is considered as a statistical matter, a mass phenomenon, rather than in terms of individuals.
Last episode, we talked about the life, arrest, and subsequent execution of Alexander Tivel. There are one million stories similar to his.Obviously, we don't have that kind of time to discuss each and every one of them.
On top of that, there isn't documentation of each life taken during the purge.I will try to share the experiences of those who were not in the top positions of the Bolshevik party, like Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, or Zinoviev.
They were direct threats to Stalin, so they were logical choices for the purge.Others, like Tivol or Ossip Mendelstam, were no threat at all, but they lost their lives for off-the-cuff comments, beliefs, or associations.
Let's start with Matvei Petrovich Braunstein.Born in 1906, he, quote, was a Soviet theoretical physicist, a pioneer of quantum gravity, author of works in astrophysics, semiconductors, quantum electrodynamics, and cosmology.
Well, he was accused of the ridiculous charge of fostering terroristic activity.Bronstein was arrested and executed in 1938.One person who died from starvation while in prison was someone we did an entire episode on, Nikolai Vavilov.
He was only guilty of disagreeing with the pseudoscience of Trofim Lysenko. While he was arrested in 1940 and died in 1943, he was ostracized in 1938.
By being against Stalin's favorite scientists, Vavilov would be accused of foreign espionage and sabotage.Again, an absolutely absurd charge. His wife, Elena Barlina, would lose her job, move to Saratov from Moscow, and live in abject poverty.
In a strange twist of fate, Nikolai was in prison in Saratov, but Elena did not know that.She would send food to Moscow, where she thought her husband was incarcerated, but he never received it.
Another scientific genius caught up in the purge was Lev Vassilievich Shubnikov.He was a Soviet experimental physicist known as the founding father of Soviet low-temperature physics.
So what crime did he commit that would lead Shubnikov to be executed in 1937? Well, he just happened to work at the Ukrainian Physics Technology Institute in Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine.
Many of the scientists who worked there were caught up in the purge in what was known as the UPTI affair.
Two Soviet physicists, Moisei Korets and Lev Landau, authored the Korets-Landau leaflet, which directly condemned Joseph Stalin and the secret police, the NKVD.
This was a big no-no at the time, and because of this, suspicion fell on anyone who worked with the two men.Shubnikov got caught up in the affair and was to pay with his life.
One large swath of those who would be purged is anyone who had a hint of being a Trotskyist.Conversely, you could be accused of being a Trotskyist and not be one.
It depended on who was making the accusation and whether the authorities wanted to make an example of you, whether it was true or false. The first purge of those supposed followers of Leon Trotsky was in August 1936 during the first show trial.
Its purpose was to publicize the threats to the Soviet Union and to Stalin personally by the, quote, Trotskyite Kamenevite Zinoviet Leftist Counter-Revolutionary Bloc.I mean, the Soviet Union, they love these long names for conspiracies.
The focus of this trial was on Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, but it took down 16 people who were all found guilty and summarily executed.They were accused of assassinating Sergei Kirov and plotting to kill Joseph Stalin.
The next show trial was held in January, 1937, and its focus was on the anti-Soviet Trotskyite center, which incurred, included Karl Radek, Yuri Pyatnikov, and Grigory Sokolnikov, along with 14 others.
13 of the defendants were executed immediately after the trial, with four being sent to a gulag where they died quickly after their arrival.
What is important to note about the execution of rivals to Stalin was that not only were those found guilty murdered, but many of their families were also rounded up and shot.Stalin had a number of reasons behind these heinous acts.
First off, he was paranoid that one of the children of those executed would grow up and attempt to assassinate Stalin sometime in the future.His ego could not cope with that possibility.
Another was to strike fear throughout the Soviet Union that crossing Stalin and the Communist Party wasn't just costly for your life, but for everyone around you.Just to be associated with someone who was arrested, as I've mentioned, was dangerous.
But to have a family member taken into custody was even worse.
In the United States in May 1937, the Commission of Inquiry into the charges made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, also known as the Dewey Commission, set out to ascertain if the trials were legitimate.
Now, the man who led the commission was not Thomas Dewey, but John Dewey, an educator and philosopher.
Some of the absurdities that they found included one Ivan Smirnov pleading guilty to taking part in the assassination of Sergei Kirov, despite having been in prison for a year prior to the event.
Also, Georgi Pyatakov testified that he flew to Oslo, Norway, quote, to receive terrorist training, despite there's no record of such a flight.In addition, the commission found the following.
The conduct of the Moscow trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no attempt was made to ascertain the truth.
While confessions are necessarily entitled to the most serious consideration, the confessions themselves contain such inherent probabilities as to convince the commission that they do not represent the truth, irrespective of any means used to obtain them.
that Trotsky never instructed any of the accused or witnesses in the Moscow trials to enter into agreements with foreign powers against the Soviet Union, and that Trotsky never recommended, plotted, or attempted the restoration of capitalism in the USSR.
They concluded, quote, we therefore find the Moscow trials to be frame-ups.
While it began to become apparent that the rest of the world was coming to the realization that Stalin was not the shining light of a new world order, but a monster who was killing off anyone who opposed him in the slightest, Stalin really didn't give a darn what they thought.
The depths that the NKVD went to find Trotskyists were insane.
Karl Radek, when testifying after being tortured, claimed that there was, quote, a third organization separate from the cadres which had passed through Trotsky school, as well as semi-Trotskyites, quarter Trotskyites, one-eighth Trotskyites, people who helped us, not knowing of the terrorist organization,
but with sympathizing with us, people who, from liberalism, from a frond against the party, gave us this help.I mean, come on, a one-eighth Trotskyist?What even is that?
It opened up the net to taking just about anyone they wanted, which was important as quotas were sent out throughout the Soviet Union to arrest a given number of people in a given amount of time.
The quotas system during the Great Purge helped fuel the massive killing machine.As Cullen, Professor of Economics at the University of Houston, Paul Gregory said in an interview, quote, �We call it quotas.In Russian, they call it limity.
Stalin used limitee to punish his perceived enemies twice.Once during collectivization, which began in 1929 and was largely completed by 1932, he used quotas in the period 1937-38, which was the period of the Great Terror.
In each case, he divided the Soviet Union into regions and gave the regional leaders quotas.
In the case of collectivization, quotas were how many people to shoot, not terribly many, how many to put in jail, more, and how many to deport to remote regions.
Professor Gregory goes on to further say, quote, in 1937, Stalin sent out a telegram to 35 regions saying, it has come to our attention that enemies are collecting in your regions.
You should look at your records and tell me how many enemies are living in your region, and you should divide them up into very dangerous enemies and less dangerous.So there was category one and category two. Category 1.They should be shot.
And if you read the order, to be shot was put in capital letters.The others should go to the Gulag.This telegram went out in early July.
The 65 regions had to calculate how many people they should kill or put into Gulag and sell this telegram back to Stalin. Many believed for a long time that Stalin was not involved in these orders.
But as Professor Gregory shared in the interview, quote, there was some academic research done about who caused this to happen and why it happened.Some thought maybe Stalin was not to blame and that there were other reasons for doing it.
Now that we have the full records, it's clear that he ordered it and he stopped it when he wanted it to stop, which was in November of 1938.
Now, let's return to some of the people who were victims of the Great Purge and why they were both arrested and executed.
One was Osip Emelievich Mandelstam, a Russian and Soviet poet and the foremost member of the Acmeist school known as the Guild of Poets.He would be arrested for trumped up charges before the purge.We'll be back after a quick break.
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Mendelssohn would originally get into trouble due to the poem's Stalin epigram. While never putting it on paper, he would perform it in front of friends in Moscow in 1933.Here's an excerpt.
His thick fingers are bulky and fat like live baits, and his accurate words are heavy as weights.Cucaracha's mustaches are screaming, and his boot tops are shining and gleaming.
Well, you might imagine that Mendelstam knew he would get into trouble and would likely lose his life.But that wasn't the case in 1933.Instead, he would be sent into exile in Chardin in northern Ural, along with his wife Nadezhda.
After returning from exile, he would be arrested on May 5, 1938 and charged with quote-unquote counter-revolutionary activities.Mandelstam would die of typhoid fever the following year.
One of the sadder cases was that of Fritz Alexander Ernst Noether, a German-Jewish mathematician who made the correct decision to leave Nazi Germany in 1934, but a major league bad decision to go to the Soviet Union, despite his sister Emmy moving to the United States.
While he was quickly appointed to a professorship at the Tomsk State University in November 1937, he was arrested by the NKVD and charged with espionage and sabotage.
Noether was sentenced to 25 years in the gulags, but would be executed on September 10, 1941. Even Albert Einstein pleaded on his behalf to Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov without success.
Isaac Babel is another example of a writer who was implicated as being a spy for both Austria and France.Babel was a Soviet writer, journalist, playwright, and literary translator.
His best-known works were Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, and he was claimed by many as, quote, the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry.So why was such a talented man arrested and accused of trumped-up charges?
It was part of Stalin's attack on the intelligentsia. Also, his book, Red Cavalry, was a depiction of the brutality of war, and Marshal Budyonny hated it because of its honesty and vivid descriptions of the horrors he witnessed.
Budyonny would become a close associate of Stalin's and had a hand in his arrest. Babel would be arrested on May 15th, 1939.After months of torture, one of the Soviet Union's finest short story writers would be executed on January 27th, 1940.
After Khrushchev took the reins of the Soviet government, Babel would be rehabilitated on December 23, 1954.The statement would read, quote, the sentence of the military collegium dated January 26, 1940 concerning Babel, i.e.
is revoked on the basis of newly discovered circumstances and the case against him is terminated in the absence of elements of a crime.
While many view the Great Purge as Stalin's chance to rid himself of those who opposed him while Vladimir Lenin was alive, a sliver of opinions believes his plan was to unify the Communist Party.
They claim that the rise of Japanese militarists and the fascists in Italy and Germany made Stalin realize he needed to galvanize the party around him. As absurd as that might seem, there may be a glimmer of truth to that.
If he couldn't trust those in positions of power, how would he fend off threats in the East and West? If that were the case, as some historians argue, then why would he purge a large percentage of military leaders in his country?
Robert Conquest, in his book, The Great Terror, A Reassessment, named his chapter on this part of the purge, Assault on the Army.It is absolutely aptly put. One of the main targets of the military purge was Marshal Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky.
The man was considered one of the most brilliant military thinkers and was crucial in the Red Army's victory during the Russian Civil War. The reason that many believe that Tukhachevsky was targeted dates back to the Soviet-Polish War of 1920.
The Marshal was plowing through Poland, winning battle after battle, until the decision was made to attack the capital of Warsaw.
The attack failed when Polish Chief of State Józef Piłsudski fought off a two-pronged attack, one of which was headed by Józef Stalin.Tukhaczewski blamed the future head of the Soviet state for the loss, and vice versa.
There would be a deep-seated hatred for the Marshal by Stalin, but he was patient enough to wait until his power was supreme. Stalin also knew that the Soviet Red Army had been greatly weakened after the brutal Civil War and needed to be reformed.
Part of Stalin's reasoning was that Trotsky was the person who ran the Red Army and there was no way he could keep things the way they were under his arch rival.Tukhachevsky was given the task and he performed brilliantly.
Given how jealous Stalin was, that probably irked him to no end. Anyone who was associated with Tukhachevsky would eventually face the firing squad, regardless of their efficiency and military intelligence.
This would include Army Commander Ajona Jaakir, Army Commander Irunum Ubravich, and Estonian Corp Commander August Kork.They were the top men to be purged out of the military.
Others included Robert Eidman, Witwad Putna, Boris Feldman, and Vitaly Primakov.At the end of the Great Purge—you've got to hear these numbers—three of five Soviet marshals, 90% of all Red Army generals,
80% of Red Army colonels and 30,000 officers of lesser rank had been purged.Some were rehabilitated, if they were lucky, after the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi forces on June 22, 1941.
This destruction of the majority of the leadership of the Russian military caused far more deaths than the education of the people themselves.
It led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths due to the chaos that ensued after the start of Operation Barbarossa, a topic that I will be doing an episode into early next year.And yes, I have plans that go all the way into December of 2025.
While the military genius of Marshal Zhukov would help the Soviet army destroy the Nazi Wehrmacht, it would also leave incompetents like Klimt Voroshilov in place, who botched up many of the assignments given to him, especially regarding the siege of Leningrad.
There is some evidence that the Nazis supplied rumors about the Soviet Union officers being spies for them, but that's sketchy at best. Stalin had more than enough paranoia to purge the military without any Nazi interference.
On top of it, the allegations that Generals Jaqir and Feldman were spies for the Nazi, given that they were both Jewish, highlights the made-up charges that would doom thousands.
What is puzzling about the military purge is that almost all of those who were murdered were apolitical.As Robert Conquest asserts, they had, for the most part, quote, wholly withdrawn from the political struggle.
Also, in the years leading up to the purge, they were given more and more leeway than before.In the 1920s, every commander had a political commissar attached to him to make sure that they remained true to the Bolshevik cause.
In 1934, the idea of the political commissar was actually abandoned, giving commanders full control of their subordinates.
In 1935, a decree was announced that gave immunity to the top generals, Tukhachevsky, Blucher, Yegorov, Voroshilov, and Budyanyi.That all changed in 1938 when Bukharin testified there was a right conspiracy within the ranks of the generals.
When asked who they were by the prosecutor judge, Vyshinsky, Bukharin mentioned Tukhachevsky and Kork.This was the beginning of the end for the military hierarchy.
On April 3rd, 1937, right before the secret trial against the army, Genrikh Yagoda, head of the NKVD, was arrested. He would be replaced by Nikolai Yezhov, as Stalin believed that Yagoda was being too nice during interrogations.
Yezhov would not be quite so genteel.Within the month, the roundup began with a trial date of June 11 and 12, 1937.All of the defendants were found guilty and executed on the night of the 12th.
Within days of the trial of the top commanders, the NKVD would begin the mass arrests and executions.Thousands of men died for nothing more than being stationed near someone who had already been arrested and executed.
Many of the members of the families of the arrested were also killed. There would be another wave of purges this time within the Navy, and then in 1938, another surge of executions would hit.
Many men who replaced the, quote, slaughtered commanders of 1937 now went themselves to the Lubyanka prison, as Conquest writes. Well, I hope you enjoyed today's episode.
Join me next time when we finish up the Great Purge series and discuss how it ended.So, until next time, do svidaniya i spasiba za vinyamanya.
