Great Purge

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The Great Terror, also called the Great Purge, was a series of campaigns of repression in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, during which the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, under the leadership of Nikolai Yezhov arrested, tried, imprisoned and executed hundreds of thousands of people, many merely for being part of a social group the Soviet government considered an anti-social element. According to Khrushchev many of the accusations were based on forced confessions and on loose interpretations of vague articles of Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code), which dealt with counter-revolutionary crimes. Due legal deliberation was largely replaced with express trials by NKVD troikas. The purge targeted all categories of the society: members of the Communist Party, the government, the armed forces and the intelligentsia, as well as "anti-Soviet elements" among peasants (kulaks), in industry, and in transport. The height of the purge occurred while the Soviet secret police (the NKVD) was headed by Nikolai Yezhov, from September 1936 to August 1938; this period is often referred to as the Yezhovschina ("Yezhov storm"). However, orders for the campaigns came from the highest level of the Soviet government, Stalin himself

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Background

The bureaucracy of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party itself contained many individuals who were not enthusiastic regarding Stalin's policies. Part of the Great Terror was a purge of the Party and the bureaucracy in an effort to put personnel in place who would follow orders without question.

The second goal was to eliminate "social dangerous elements", ex-kulaks, former members of opposing political parties such as the Social Revolutionaries, criminals and former Czarist officials. This group formed the bulk of those caught up in the Terror. Another issue was the Soviet concern with spies which Stalin felt were being infiltrated into the Soviet Union by neighboring countries.

Repression against actual and perceived enemies of the Bolsheviks had been continuous since the October Revolution, although there had been periods of heightened repression such as the Red Terror or the deportation of kulaks who opposed collectivization. A distinctive feature of the Great Terror was that, for the first time, the ruling party itself underwent repressions on a massive scale. Nevertheless, only a minority of those affected by the purges were Communist Party members and office-holders. The purge of the Party was accompanied by the purge of the whole society. The following events are used for the demarkation of the period.

Purge

The term purge in Soviet political slang was an abbreviation of the expression "purge of the Party ranks", the Party being, of course, the Communist Party. In itself, the term was innocent enough, until the time came when being expelled from the Party was a short notice of horrible changes in the fate of the person.

After the Great Purge, described below, the term "purge" gradually ceased to be a synonym of death warrant, especially after Stalin's death, but the consequences still remained unpleasant. For a party functionary it meant being delisted from nomenklatura and loss of numerous perks. Rank-and-file members were left with no chance of future advancement. A wife's threat to complain to her husband's Party Committee was therefore a serious weapon in family quarrels.

Great Purge

Anyone perceived as a potential threat to the regime's authority -- including some of its strongest political supporters, and most senior army officers -- were systematically identified and either executed, incarcerated in the Gulag prison system, or sent into forced labour or internal exile in Siberia and other remote regions.

In Moscow, several show trials were held, to convince domestic and foreign opinion of the existence of a vast anti-Soviet conspiracy and to serve as examples for the trials that local courts were expected to carry out elsewhere in the country.

Almost all of the Bolsheviks who had played prominent roles during the 1917 Russian Revolution, or in Lenin's Soviet government afterwards, were executed or exiled during this period. Leon Trotsky went into exile in Mexico, but was murdered by a Soviet agent in 1940. Of the senior revolutionary Bolsheviks, only Molotov and Stalin himself survived the Great Purges unscathed.

The Moscow Trials

Between 1936 and 1938 three Moscow Trials of former senior Communist Party leaders were held. The defendants were accused of conspiring with the western powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union and restore capitalism.

  • The first trial was of 16 members of the so-called "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre," held in August 1936, at which the chief defendants were Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, two of the most prominent former party leaders. All were sentenced to death and executed.
  • The second trial in January 1937 involved 17 lesser figures including Karl Radek, Yuri Piatakov and Grigory Sokolnikov. Thirteen defendants were shot, the remainder received terms of imprisonment in labor camps where they soon died.

Most Western observers who attended the trials were taken in by the fraudulent charges and said that they were fair and that the guilt of the accused had been established. They based this assessment on the confessions of the accused, which were freely given in open court, without any apparent evidence that they had been extracted by torture or drugging.

The British lawyer and MP Denis Pritt, for example, wrote: "Once again the more faint-hearted socialists are beset with doubts and anxieties," but "once again we can feel confident that when the smoke has rolled away from the battlefield of controversy it will be realized that the charge was true, the confessions correct and the prosecution fairly conducted."

In the political atmosphere of the '30s the accusation that there was a conspiracy to destroy the Soviet Union was not incredible, and few outside observers were aware of the events inside the Communist Party that had led to the purge and the trials.

It is now known that the confessions were given only after great psychological pressure had been applied to the defendants. From the accounts of former GPU officer Alexander Orlov and others the methods used to extract the confessions are known: repeated beatings, torture, making prisoners stand or go without sleep for days on end, and threats to arrest and execute the prisoners' families. For example, Kamenev's teenage son was arrested and charged with terrorism. After months of such interrogation, the defendants were driven to despair and exhaustion.

Zinoviev and Kamenev demanded as a condition for "confessing" a direct guarantee from the Politburo that their lives and that of their families would be spared. Instead they had to settle for a meeting with only Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov and Yezhov, at which assurances were given. After the trial Stalin not only broke his promise to spare the defendants, he had most of their relatives arrested and shot. Bukharin also agreed to "confess" on condition that his family was spared. In this case the promise was partly kept. His wife Anna Larina was sent to a labour camp but survived.

In May 1937 the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, commonly known as the Dewey Commission, was set up in the United States by supporters of Trotsky, to establish the truth about the trials. The commission was headed by the noted American philosopher and educator John Dewey. Although the hearings were obviously conducted with a view to proving Trotsky's innocence, they brought to light evidence which established that some of the specific charges made at the trials could not be true.

For example, Piatakov testified that he had flown to Oslo in December 1935 to "receive terrorist instructions" from Trotsky. The Dewey Commission established that no such flight had taken place. Another defendant, Ivan Smirnov, confessed to taking part in the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, at a time when he had already been in prison for a year.

The Dewey Commission published its findings in the form of a 422-page book titled Not Guilty. Its conclusions asserted the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow Trials. In its summary the commission wrote: "Independent of extrinsic evidence, the Commission finds:

  • That the conduct of the Moscow Trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no attempt was made to ascertain the truth.
  • That while confessions are necessarily entitled to the most serious consideration, the confessions themselves contain such inherent improbabilities 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.

The commission concluded: "We therefore find the Moscow Trials to be frame-ups."

Purge of the army

The purge of the Red Army was supported by fabricated evidence that German counter-intelligence had introduced through an intermediary, President Beneš of Czechoslovakia. This forged evidence purported to show correspondence between Marshal Tukhachevsky and members of the German high command. However the actual evidence introduced at trial was obtained from forced confessions. The purge of the army removed 3 of 5 marshals, 13 of 15 army generals, 8 of 9 admirals (the purge fell heavily on the Navy who were suspected of exploiting their opportunity for foreign contacts), 50 of 57 army corps generals, 154 out of 186 division generals, 16 of 16 army commissars, and 25 of 28 army corps commissars.

The wider purge

Eventually almost all of the Bolsheviks who had played prominent roles during the 1917 Russian Revolution, or in Lenin's Soviet government afterwards, were executed. Out of six members of the original Politburo during the 1917 October Revolution who lived until the Great Purge, Stalin himself was the only one who survived. Four of the other five were executed. The fifth, Leon Trotsky, went into exile in Mexico after being expelled from the Party but was murdered by a Soviet agent in 1940. Of the seven members elected to the Politburo between the October Revolution and Lenin's death in 1924, four were executed, one (Tomsky) committed suicide and two (Molotov and Kalinin) lived. Of 1,966 delegates to the 17th Communist Party congress in 1934 (the last congress before the trials), 1,108 were arrested and nearly all died.

The trials and executions of the former Bolshevik leaders were, however, only a minor part of the purges. By the MVD estimates carried out by the order of a special commission of the Communist Party in preparation to the 20th Party Congress, 681,692 people were executed during 1937–38 alone, and only accounting for the execution lists signed personally by Stalin from archives of NKVD. The exact total number of persons affected remains uncertain and depends on how the count is made, especially depending on the time period considered and whether deaths related to the Gulag and transportation losses are included.

By the summer of 1938, everyone in power realized that the purges had gone too far, and Yezhov was relieved from his head of NKVD post (remaining People's Commissar of Water Transport) and eventually purged. Lavrenty Beria succeeded him as head of the NKVD. This signalled the end of the Great Purge, although the practice of mass arrest and exile was continued until Stalin's death in 1953.

One of Russia's leading human rights groups, the Memorial human rights group, has released a list of 1,345,796 names of people who fell victim to Stalin's purges. The best current estimate is that during the period 1934 to 1939 about 12 million people were sentenced to terms in the labour camps, where the harsh conditions caused the death of most prisoners within a few years. Estimates as high as 20 million have been published, but these often include the estimated 10 million deaths during the famine associated with the collectivization agriculture in the early 1930s.

Western reactions

Although the trials of former Soviet leaders were widely publicized the hundreds of thousands of other arrests and executions were not. These became known in the west only as a few former gulag inmates reached the West with their stories. Especially in France, attempts were made to silence or discredit these witnesses; Jean-Paul Sartre took the position that evidence of the camps should be ignored, in order that the French proletariat not be discouraged. A series of legal actions ensued at which definitive evidence was presented which established the validity of the former concentration camp inmates' testimony.

Robert Conquest, wrote the book The Great Terror in 1968. According to Robert Conquest, writing in The Great Terror, with respect to the trials of former leaders some Western observers were unable to see through the fraudulent nature of the charges and evidence, notably Walter Duranty, of the New York Times, a Russian speaker; the American Ambassador, Joseph Davis, who reported, "proof...beyond reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of treason" and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, authors of Soviet Communism: A New Civilization. According to Robert Conquest, writing in The Great Terror, while "Communist Parties everywhere simply parroted the Soviet line", some of the most critical reporting also came from the left, notably the Manchester Guardian.

Despite great scepticism regarding the show trials and occasional reports of Gulag survivors, many western intellectuals retained a favorable view towards the Soviet Union which persisted until definitive proof began to appear after Stalin's death with, first, the relevations of Khrushchev, then, the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the publication of The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties by Robert Conquest in the late 1960s, the release of Soviet records during glasnost and finally, in France, where the intellectual climate was most sympathetic to Soviet communism, publication in 1997 of The Black Book of Communism. Minimizations of the Great Purge continues among revisionist scholars in the United States..

Rehabilitation

The Great Purges were denounced by Nikita Khrushchev, who became the leader of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death. In his secret speech to the 20th CPSU congress in February 1956 (which was made public a month later), Khruschev referred to the purges as an "abuse of power" by Stalin which resulted in enormous harm to the country. In the same speech, he recognized that many of the victims were innocent and were convicted based on false confessions extracted by torture. To take that position was politically useful to Khrushchev, as he was at that time engaged in a power struggle with rivals who has been associated with the Purge, the so-called Anti-Party Group. The new line on the Great Purges undermined their power, and helped propel him to the Chairmanship of the Council of Ministers.

Starting from 1954, some of the convictions were overturned. Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other generals convicted in the Trial of Red Army Generals were declared innocent ("rehabilitated") in 1957. The former Politburo members Yan Rudzutak and Stanislav Kosior and many lower-level victims were also declared innocent in the 1950s. Nikolai Bukharin and others convicted in the Moscow Trials were rehabilitated later, in 1988.

The book Rehabilitation: Political Processes of 30-50th years (Реабилитация. Политические процессы 30-50-х годов) (1991) contains a large amount of newly presented original archive material: transcripts of interrogations, letters of convicts, and photos. On this basis, it is shown in detail how numerous show trials were fabricated.

Further reading and references

External links


References

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