Welcome to Russian History Retold, Episode 310 The Great Purge Part 1 Last time, we listened to my interview with Professor Marlene Laruelle.
Today, we begin a series on one of the most treacherous times to be a citizen of the Soviet Union, the Great Purge, also known as the Great Terror, or Yezhov Chichina, aka the period of Yezhov.
My primary sources for this episode include Robert Conquest's The Great Terror, A Reassessment, Getty and Naumov's The Road to Terror, Stalin, Ellen's Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932 to 1939, and Martin Amos's Coba, The Dread.
Interestingly, the Conquest book was originally published in 1968 its first update in 1990 and then was further updated in 2008.
Because of Glasnost, scads of new material were uncovered, allowing for more detail and insight into this three-year period when Soviet society was filled with paranoia and sheer terror.
With Lenin's death in 1924 and Trotsky's deportation in 1928, Stalin began consolidating power.He was also quite paranoid about losing his grip on the Soviet Union, so he had to find a way to get rid of anyone who he saw as a threat to his control.
The Great Purge was preceded by a smaller and less violent purge of people viewed as apolitical, hangers-on, petty criminals, and other bureaucrats.This was done between 1933 and 1936.Prior to the release of documents from the archives post-1991,
The common thought was that this was a relatively small purge.Only 400,000 members were thrown out of the Bolshevik party, and that it was bureaucratic in nature.
Turns out, the NKVD, then the Soviet secret police, was behind all of this and was laying the groundwork for the future catastrophe.
Many have asked whether Stalin had a plan going into these purges, or was this just a haphazard event out of his control?Earlier historians have claimed he was a master manipulator and had a master plan.Archival materials suggest the opposite.
As authors Getty and Naumov write about Stalin, quote, until 1937, he seems to have been neither the bureaucratic moderator that I suggested, nor the careful planner that others claimed.
The sources show neither a master plan to carry out the terror, nor a liberal opposition that tried to stop it.
As they further write, quote, labels, really tropes, like Trotskyist were filled and refilled with content by different people at different times and used to ascribe meanings to various operations and events.
Thus, when some Moscow leaders demanded a purge of Trotskyists, they had very different understandings of those targets in 1933, 35, 36, and 1937.
One person's Trotskyist, or wrecker, was another person's arbitrary bureaucrat or disobedient worker, and there were ongoing struggles to define the enemy.
Another question we must ask is why, aside from Stalin's paranoia and lust for power, did the purges occur?This is, of course, a hotly debated issue. My take is that it was partly due to the horrific famine that occurred from 1930 to 1933.
Estimates of the number of lives lost ranged from about 5.7 to 8.7 million.They needed to lay the blame on someone or groups of people, as they really couldn't admit that the system of communism or forced collectivization was at fault.
Nor could they blame the upper leadership, like Stalin. They would initially call for the total liquidation of the kulaks, those property-owning proprietors, as the leading cause.
There has been much speculation, even on this podcast when we did the episode on the Holodomor, that Stalin had specifically targeted Ukrainians and Kazakhs. Still, my research points in a different direction.
The archives reveal that he really didn't care who was targeted.Those two ethnic groups happened to reside in a region that had been rich in agricultural output for centuries.
They were the losers when Stalin ordered forced collectivization of those regions. Whatever the reasons for the famine and the subsequent purge of the Kulaks, it was still an enormous human tragedy with Stalin's fingerprints all over it.
Before 1956, historians were unsure of the extent of the purges.
It was only openly revealed that it occurred in its ferocity when, on February 25th, 1956, at the 20th Party Congress, Nikita Khrushchev delivered the secret speech which denounced the crimes of Stalin.
While he did this, and it did unveil some aspects of the purges, it did not tell the whole story.
What the opening of the archives did, first under Gorbachev in his period of glasnost, and then more revealed after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, was to show the world the extent and the details of the purges, especially the Great Purge of 1937 to 1939.
As Getty and Naumov write, quote, with new documents, Stalin's serpentine and convoluted road to terror can no longer be explained by organized resistance to him.
Instead, the real picture is even more depressing than a heroic but futile resistance to evil.
At every step of the way, there were constituencies both within and outside the elite that supported the repression of various groups, sometimes with greater intensity than Stalin did.
The terror was a series of group efforts, though the groups changed frequently, rather than a matter of one man intimidating everyone else. This finding does not take Stalin off the hook or lessen his guilt.
But it does mean that the picture is more complex.Repression was as much a matter of consensus as one of man's dementia.And this is somehow even more troubling. The group think that the author alluded to is evident throughout history.
You look at the collaborators in France, Ukraine, Romania, Yugoslavia, and other nations during World War II, and their willingness to send Jews to the concentration camps set up by the Nazis.
Aggrieved people will look for scapegoats for their tribulations in life.Immigrants are targets, as well as people of color or different ethnicities, as we saw with the Turkish genocide of Armenians in the early 20th century.
Sometimes, all that is necessary is someone in power to light the match and say it's okay, like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and many others in the past and, unfortunately, today.
That little tiny flame becomes a bonfire when people feel free to take retribution against perceived enemies.The Great Purge was such a bonfire.
What we know about the Great Purge is that one of its main goals was to eliminate what they called the old Bolsheviks.It begs the question, why?
As Gedeon Naumov put it, quote, the Bolshevik Party was a product of idealistic, egalitarian, and socially progressive strands in the Russian intelligentsia and working class.
By the 1930s, much of the original idealism had been lost or transformed, and Bolshevik revolutionaries had become state officials.Stalin, for his part, had no need for idealism or anything approaching intelligentsia.
These were the very people who could change and challenge his ideas, his beliefs, and his vision. Almost all dictators and autocrats throughout history and in the present day follow the same roadmap.
Many of the names we've mentioned in the past when talking about the Soviet era who were caught up in the purge and executed included Bukharin, Nikolai Vavilov, Alexei Rykov, Karl Radik, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev.
The last two were promised in return for confessions that they and their families were not going to be executed.Of course they were all shot.We'll be back after a quick break.
Face Your Ears is a podcast for musicians of all levels working in their own home studios, eager to bring their creative ideas to life.
Join us as we explore the ins and outs of music creation in an approachable and engaging way.
Each episode features a blend of technical tips, practical advice, and insightful anecdotes, making it both informative and fun.
Listen to the Face Your Ears podcast on your favorite podcast platform today.
While those were the names we remember, most of the people who were caught up in the Great Purge were ordinary people, petty bureaucrats like Alexander Yulievich Tyvel.Authors Getty and Naumov talk about him as an example.
Born in Baku in 1899, Tyvel was Jewish, which limited his opportunities under the czarist regime. And the Bolshevik revolution was moving ahead full steam when he graduated from college.
The following year, Tivul began work with the Bolsheviks, first in the military office of the Pyatigorsk Soviet, then in Moscow in the propaganda department of the newly formed government.
Tivul would go on to marry Eva Lipman in 1924, while working as an editor and writer for the Comintern. All the while, he had not yet joined the Communist Party, which would come back to haunt him.
The Central Committee wanted him to work in their Department of Culture and Propaganda, but membership in the party was a requirement.
They fast-tracked his membership application, and over the following 10 years, from 1925 to 1935, he had an exemplary record, aside from three seemingly minor offenses.
The two bad offenses Tybalt committed, aside from the previously mentioned ones, were by association.
In 1925, when he was stationed in Leningrad, he worked under Grigory Zinoviev, and his immediate supervisor was Karl Radek, who was once a Trotskyist.They were also part of the leftist opposition, which Stalin would focus on.
The show trial of Zinoviev in 1936 would begin the Great Purge, especially for people like Tivul.He would be arrested at the end of August along with Radek.That would be the last time his wife and son would see him.
Tivul would be held in prison for the following six months, with the NKVD likely torturing him for a confession.
On March 7, 1937, a military commission convicted, without any evidence, that Alexander Tivol was, quote, preparing to commit a terrorist act against Nikolai Yezhov.
Yezhov was, by this time, the head of the NKVD, having replaced Genrikh Yagoda, who had been executed in a previous purge.Tivel would be executed that same day, but the horror would not end there.
His wife would be fired from her job and evicted from her apartment, which forced her to live with her mother. That also would not last long, as she would be arrested in May 1937 and banished to Omsk in Siberia.
Five months later, Eva was arrested yet again and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp.Her son would be sent to one of the infamous orphanages.Eva would be sentenced to an additional eight years after her initial term had been served.
She would not be released until 1953 after Stalin's death. Eva would fight to have her husband's life rehabilitated, which would occur on May 23, 1957, 20 years after Alexander's execution.
Like so many others, the USSR Supreme Court ruled that his conviction, quote, had been based on contradictory and dubious materials.Of course, being rehabilitated didn't do much for your state of health or life.
Even then, rehabilitation was not always permanent, as Robert Conquest reminds us in his book.Raskolnikov, for example, was de-rehabilitated.Now, it's almost funny as you get arrested, executed, and years later, rehabilitated.
Then, having no way to do anything, as you already did, they de-rehabilitate you. There is another potential and very likely reason why Stalin initiated the Great Purge, and that is due to the popularity of his rival, Sergei Kirov.
During the 17th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, held in 1934, Mikhail Gorbachev revealed that there were a large number of votes against Stalin and for Kirov.We now know that there was likely enough to get rid of Stalin,
but he had good old Lazar Kaganovich chairing the counting committee.Kaganovich erased 290 votes against Stalin, leaving only two, while Kirov only had three against him.Now that's a fixed election.
From this point on, Stalin knew that there was opposition within the party. His reaction reminds me of a YouTube video of Saddam Hussein's very public purge.
I highly recommend watching it as Saddam's extraction of tens of supposed traitors caused a crazed reaction among those left at the gathering.Those left had one choice, become a fanatical backer of Hussein or risk death.
This very same effect was seen when the NKVD began to pick off people randomly at times, either Stalin or death.That was your only choice.
Stalin would proclaim that he had uncovered a plot to murder the leadership of the Soviet Union in collaboration with Western powers.This would be the beginning of the show trials and the execution of an estimated one million people.
I will discuss the various arguments that claim far more people were caught up in the terror and those who claim it was far less, and that's going to happen in the following two episodes after this one.
Something I found interesting while doing my research on the Great Purge was the amount and detail of information that was revealed relating to those arrested.
As Conquest writes, quote, a point not adequately covered in The Great Terror was the huge volume of paperwork produced, even from minor criminals.
There were long-winded, highly formal orders for arrest and identifications by age, nationality, address, and status, signed by a local NKVD man.Then there are pages of interrogation, question and answer sessions,
also so signed with a more senior NKVD officer's counter signature.Then longish verdicts by troikas or courts.In fairly important cases, these run into volumes.
We also have lists of the charges of many of the high-level victims, with some being almost bizarre.Lev Kamenev's widow was an example when it was found that she was shot for having a counter-revolutionary conversation with a foreign diplomat.
Many more were even more outlandish. One of the things that needs to happen before you get the full buy-in relating to mass executions being willingly carried out is to dehumanize the targets.
The dehumanizing of the people of Russia began with the Russian Civil War.The people began to become numb to the presence of dead bodies.They would be found everywhere there was fighting.And as one diarist put it, quote,
To die in Russia these times is easy, but to be buried, that is very difficult.When the Bolsheviks took over the funeral industry, as well as ownership of the graveyards, they realized they had a terrible problem, what to do with all the bodies.
You might think this is easily solvable by the process of cremation, but the Russian Orthodox Church has strict rules against this. The Bolsheviks used this method of disposing of bodies as a means of undermining the church.
The other option, of course, was mass burials.Butovo, near Moscow, is said to hold over 100,000 bodies in one mass grave.Another gruesome part of the Great Purge was the use of torture to gain confessions from those arrested.
Once in custody, it was the job of the interrogators to gain confessions from their inmates.They needed to meet quotas of signed admissions to make up crimes they were accused of.
As Martin Amis puts it in his book, Coba the Dead, quote, it feels necessary because torture, among its other applications, was part of Stalin's war against the truth.
I thought for a brief second that I would share some of the unimaginable tortures that these poor people had to endure.Still, reading them would have been impossible without becoming overwhelmed by the emotions they would evoke.
I mean, I've read these things in some of these books and they're truly horrific.As cruel as anything in the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages or during Roman times, it was truly horrible.
Prior to the Great Purge, as I mentioned before, you had the Terror Famine of 1933.This was another time when dehumanization process was in full gear.
Tens of millions of people were displaced from their ancestral homes and forced to settle in places that could not provide the basic necessities for life.Traveling to these places was often deadly.Over three million children died in that year alone.
All of this dying set up what was to become the purge of 1937 and to 1939.One of Stalin's plans to shake up Soviet society and the bureaucracy was to target segments that he did not agree with, that didn't agree with his opinions.
One such target was the Census Board in 1937. Here's how Martin Amis puts it.Quote, there was a national census in 1937, the first since 1926, which had shown a population of 147 million.
Extrapolating from the growth figures of the 1920s, Stalin said he expected a new total of 170 million.The Census Board reported a figure of 163 million, a figure that reflected the consequences of Stalin's policies.
So Stalin had the Census Board arrested and shot.He further writes, quote, in 1939 there was another census.This time the Census Board contrived the figure to 167 million, which Stalin personally topped up to 170 million.
Perhaps the Census Board added a writer to his report saying that if Stalin found the figure too low, then it would have to be lowered still further.Stalin would have to subtract the membership of the Census Board.
His final two lines on this page were, quote, the 1937 Census Board was shot for treasonably exerting themselves to diminish the population of the USSR. And there it is, Stalinism, negative perfection.
Robert Conquest gives us an example of orders that were to be the impetus for the Great Purge.
Quote, the Politburo's decision of July 2nd, 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 to immediately arrest and shoot the most hostile and send the others to exile.For this purpose, troikas are to be created within 15 days.
Conquest points out that another edict, known as NKVD Operational Prikaz 00447, was sent out just four weeks later.They are to, quote, repress kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements.
In more detail, the first paragraph adds churchmen, members of sects, and of anti-Soviet political parties, the SRs. This would be followed in 1938 by including Mensheviks and anarchists.Well, I hope you enjoyed today's episode.
Join me next time when we continue this series on the Great Purge.I want to thank everyone who has emailed me through the fan mail option from my host, Buzzsprout.
To Yasmin, I have slotted an episode on the famed Russian actor Konstantin Stanislavsky for next year, as I've already scheduled another 20 episodes.I also want to make an announcement today.
I have been invited to speak at a virtual podcaster's conference in February 2025 called Intelligent Speech 2025. The tickets are only $20 each and pretty soon you'll be able to find them and I'll tell you when at intelligencespeechonline.com.
The conference will feature some of the top podcasters in the world and this year's theme is deception. The event will bring you the greatest and worst lies that have shaped history.
Speakers will discuss battles won by strategic deception, sneaky plans unveiled by truth, and shocking hoaxes that have fooled the best of us.So, until next time, до свидания и спасибо за внимание.
Sign in
