Centre of Centres was to be eliminated but even whole social categories were to be savaged.16 It would affect former kulaks, Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, priests, Bolshevik oppositionists, members of non-Russian parties, White Army soldiers and released common criminals. Order No. 00447 was drawn up by Stalin and Yezhov and sanctioned by the Politburo on 31 July. The campaign was set to start on 5 August, and Stalin signalled his intention to oversee it by not taking his regular vacation by the Black Sea. Yezhov, consulting him frequently, had established a USSR-wide quota for people to be condemned. With elaborate precision he determined that 268,950 individuals should be arrested. The procedures would involve judicial farce; the victims were to be hauled before revolutionary
The fact that he ordered the killing of nearly three out of every ten people arrested under Order No. 00447 invalidates the suggestion that Stalin’s mass purges in mid-1937 were motivated mainly by the quest for slave labour.17 Undoubtedly the NKVD’s enterprises needed such labour to fulfil their targets for building, mining and manufacturing. But the Great Terror, while having an economic purpose, was systematically wasteful of human resources. The mass killings demonstrate that security interests were at the forefront of Stalin’s mind.
On 25 July 1937 he and Yezhov had also put forward Order No. 00439, which spread a net of terror across a further category of people. German citizens and Soviet citizens of German nationality were to be arrested. The order did not designate a quota: the NKVD was charged simply with getting on with the operation on its own initiative. In fact 55,000 people received punitive sentences and these included 42,000 executions.18 Stalin had decided that some types of foreigner were just as dangerous to him as kulaks and other ‘anti-Soviet elements’. He did not stop with the Germans resident in the USSR. After them came the Poles, the former emigres in the Chinese city of Harbin, the Latvians and several other peoples. ‘National operations’ of this nature continued through the rest of 1937 and all 1938.
The conclusion is inescapable. Stalin had decided to deal with the objects of his security worries in a sustained burst of NKVD mass arrests and murders. Additions were recurrently made to the quotas set for the operation against ‘anti-Soviet elements’ and to the list of nationalities marked down as hostile. Leaders in the provinces were not discouraged from applying for permission to raise the number of victims to be seized. Stalin wrote telegrams fostering the murderous enthusiasm. No document survives of his having gone the other way and trying to stem the flood of arrests, torture and killing. When the Krasnoyarsk Party Regional Committee wrote to him about a fire in a grain store, he simply replied: ‘Try the guilty persons in accelerated fashion. Sentence them to death.’19 There was no injunction to local leaders to exercise care in repressing the ‘correct’ people. His emphasis was always upon getting his subordinates to carry out the Great Terror with zeal. Thick, bloody slices were cut from the personnel of party, government and all other institutions. The word went forth that the only way to save your life, if it was at all possible, was to comply eagerly with orders for repression.
Even Kaganovich had to plead his case before him when Stalin objected to his past association with ‘enemy of the people’ Marshal Iona Yakir. Kaganovich plucked up courage to point out that it had been Stalin who had recommended Yakir to him a decade before.20 Nikita Khrushchev, Moscow Party Committee Secretary, was similarly threatened when Stalin accused him of being a Pole. At a time when Polish communist emigres in Moscow were being routinely shot, Khrushchev was understandably keen to prove that he was a genuine Russian.21
Stalin’s involvement remained direct and deep as his envoys went to the main centres to preside over the sackings and arrests of local leaders. One of these envoys was Politburo member Andreev, a repentant member of the Workers’ Opposition whose past made it imperative to carry out orders implicitly. He went to cities such as Chelyabinsk, Krasnodar, Samara, Saratov, Sverdlovsk and Voronezh as well as Soviet republics such as Belorussia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.22 Andreev quickly decided whom to arrest and whom to replace them with. But he consulted Stalin before going ahead with his plans. From Stalinabad in Tajikistan he reported that ‘enemies have been working here in a basic fashion and have felt fairly free in doing this’. Stalin telegraphed back on 3 October 1937:23
We sanction Protopopov as [Party] First Secretary, Iskanderov as Second, Kurbanov as Ch[airman] of the Sovnarkom, Shagodaev as Ch[airman] of the Central Executive Committee.
Ashore and Frolov ought to be arrested. You need to leave in time to be back here in Moscow for the Central Committee plenum of the All-Union Communist Party on 10 October.
Let Belski proceed to Turkmenia in a few days’ time to carry out a purge. He will receive his instructions from Yezhov.
Andreev, Malenkov, Zhdanov and others toured the various regions carrying out their master’s policy.
Although it was physically impossible to ratify each and every operation carried out in particular localities, Stalin still managed to examine 383 ‘albums’ of proposed victims brought to him by Yezhov in the Great Terror. These albums alone contained the names of about 44,000 people. The higher the status of the victim, the more likely it was that Yezhov would seek Stalin’s signature before proceeding. Stalin, a busy man, was expected to go through the lists and tick off recommended sentences whenever he spotted a name he knew and had a preference for what should be done. He did this with his usual assiduity; there is no sign that he objected to doing things in the ‘album fashion’. All the time, too, he bound the rest of the Politburo to the process. Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov and others were asked for their approval, and they frequently added their rhetorical flourishes to their names. ‘Give the dog a dog’s death!’ was one of Molotov’s touches. Stalin was still avoiding incurring exclusive responsibility. Obviously he retained a residual worry that he would not get away with the outrages he was organising. Having bludgeoned his comrades into condoning the measures, he wanted their continuing formal complicity.
The fact that Stalin targeted millions of persons who had broken no law had operational consequences. So too did his determination to purge every single public institution. In this situation it was crucial to obtain assent and co-operation from officials in party, government and police who might otherwise have disrupted the process — and as things turned out, many of them were doomed to pay for their compliance with their own lives. It was presumably for this reason that Stalin needed the trials, however spurious and brief they were, to take place. Not only that: he felt constrained to obtain proofs of crime. Somehow he had to demonstrate to the survivors of the Great Terror, including the individuals he promoted from obscurity, that the dreadful state violence had been justified. A comparison with Nazi Germany is apposite. When the German security agencies rounded up Jews, Roma, homosexuals and the mentally disabled there was no secret about the regime’s antagonism towards them. Hitler kept quiet about the scale of the arrests and the fate of those who had been arrested; but this coyness was aimed at avoiding unnecessary opposition among citizens of the Reich: he had no need as he saw things to pretend that the victims were spies or saboteurs. They had been arrested exactly because they were Jews, Roma, homosexuals or mentally disabled.
Such an approach would not do for Stalin. Kulaks, priests, Mensheviks, Germans, Harbinites and Trotskyists lacked the popular antagonism towards them that Hitler had whipped up against his victims. They had to be shown to be a malignant presence in respectable, loyal Soviet society. Stalin was running a terror-state. Yet the requirement existed even for him to keep the confidence of the office-holders whose lives he spared. It did not greatly matter that his case against the victims was inherently implausible. What counted was that stenographers could record that, as far as the state was concerned, due legal process had taken place. Perhaps there was a personal edge to this. Stalin had characteristically seen the world in black-and-white terms. Intermediate colours did not exist for him, and he implicitly believed that those persons whom he felt he could not trust were indeed working actively and conspiratorially against him and his policies. For psychological reasons, then, he too required that his victims could be shown to have done wrong; and since the NKVD lacked material evidence, the sole option was for the alleged spies and saboteurs to be brought to admit their guilt. Interests of state came together with the aberrant purposes of an unbalanced Leader.
Ostensibly he acted as he did because evidence was brought to him that ‘enemies of the people’ — imperialist agents, subversives and counter-revolutionaries — had been exposed by the NKVD. Stalin was so suspicious that he probably persuaded himself that many of those whom he condemned to the Gulag or to execution were genuinely guilty of such crimes against the state. The nearest he came to witnessing the result of his barbarism was when he held confrontations between some broken leader willing to ‘confess’ and some other leader
