These figures are most easily compiled for high and medium-ranking functionaries. But other folk could also get caught by the mass repression. In his pursuit of political security Stalin resumed and expanded the policy of national deportations. Especially vulnerable were national and ethnic groups which had a large number of people living beyond the USSR’s frontiers: Stalin was concerned lest they might prove disloyal in the event of war. Thus the Poles were removed from Soviet Ukraine by a secret decree of April 1936, roughly deposited in Kazakhstan and left to build their settlements. In the following year the Kurds were driven out from the North Caucasus, and the Koreans from eastern Siberia. Uninhabited tracts of Kazakhstan became a dumping ground for all peoples which incurred Stalin’s suspicion.56 As Yezhov carried out his master’s command, countless deportees died before reaching their destination.
The impact of the Great Terror was deep and wide and was not limited to specific political, administrative, military, cultural, religious and national groups. Even a harmless old Russian peasant woman muttering dissatisfaction with conditions in the kolkhoz or her young worker-son blurting out complaints about housing standards would be dispatched to the horrors of the Gulag. No trace of ‘anti-Soviet agitation’ was meant to survive. Casual jokes against Stalin, the communist party or the Soviet state were treated as the most heinous form of treason. In this fashion practically all Soviet citizens were extirpated who had displayed an independent mind about public affairs.
Yet Stalin’s very success brought about a crisis of its own. The original purpose of his clique in the central leadership had been to reconstruct the state so as to secure their authority and impose their policies. In carrying through this design, the clique came close to demolishing the state itself. The blood-purge of the armed forces disrupted the USSR’s defences in a period of intense international tension. The arrest of the economic administrators in the people’s commissariats impeded industrial output. The destruction of cadres in party, trade unions and local government undermined administrative co-ordination. This extreme destabilization endangered Stalin himself. For if the Soviet state fell apart, Stalin’s career would be at an end. He had started the carnage of 1937–8 because of real hostility to his policies, real threats to his authority, a real underlying menace to the compound of the Soviet order. Yet his reaction was hysterically out of proportion to the menace he faced.
Stalin had a scarily odd personality. He was in his element amidst chaos and violence, and had learned how to create an environment of uncertainty wherein only he could remain a fixed, dominant point of influence. His belief in the rapid trainability of functionaries and experts, furthermore, gave him his equanimity when butchering an entire administrative stratum. The Stalin of the Civil War and the First Five-Year Plan lived again in the Great Terror. His hyper-suspicious, imperious temperament came to the fore. No one coming into frequent contact with him in the late 1930s had a chance to become disloyal: he had them killed before such thoughts could enter their heads. He was unflustered about murder. When his old comrade Vlas Chubar telephoned him out of concern lest he be arrested, Stalin warmly reassured him; but Chubar was arrested the same day and, after disgusting physical torment, executed.
By then Stalin was privately identifying himself with the great despots of history. He was fascinated by Genghis Khan, and underlined the following adage attributed to him: ‘The deaths of the vanquished are necessary for the tranquillity of the victors.’ He also took a shine to Augustus, the first Roman emperor, who had disguised the autocratic character of his rule by refusing the title of king just as Stalin was permitting himself at most the unofficial title of Leader.57
Other rulers who tugged at his imagination were the Russian tsars Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. He admired them with the critical eye of a twentieth-century dictator: ‘One of Ivan the Terrible’s mistakes was to overlook the five great feudal families. If he had annihilated those five families, there would definitely have been no Time of Troubles. But Ivan the Terrible would execute someone and then spend a long time repenting and praying. God got in his way in this matter. He ought to have been still more decisive!’58 And, when proposing a toast at a celebratory banquet in honour of the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov in 1937, Stalin declared that any party member trying to weaken the military might and territorial integrity of the USSR would perish: ‘We shall physically annihilate him together with his clan!’ He summarized his standpoint with the war-cry: ‘For the destruction of traitors and their foul line!’59
This was a leader who took what he wanted from historical models and discarded the rest — and what he wanted apparently included techniques for the maintenance of personal despotism. No candidate for the Lenin succession in the mid-1920s would have done what Stalin did with his victory a decade later in the Great Terror. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, quipped that if he had not died in 1924, he would be serving time in one of Stalin’s prisons.
Lenin would surely have been appalled at the NKVD’s bacchanalia of repression. But it must not be overlooked how much Stalin had learned and inherited from Lenin. Stalin continued to admire Lenin even though Lenin on his death-bed wished to sack him from the General Secretaryship. Lenin’s ideas on violence, dictatorship, terror, centralism, hierarchy and leadership were integral to Stalin’s thinking. Furthermore, Lenin had bequeathed the terroristic instrumentalities to his successor. The Cheka, the forced-labour camps, the one-party state, the mono-ideological mass media, the legalized administrative arbitrariness, the prohibition of free and popular elections, the ban on internal party dissent: not one of these had to be invented by Stalin. Lenin had practised mass terror in the Civil War and continued to demand its application, albeit on a much more restricted basis, under the NEP. Not for nothing did Stalin call himself Lenin’s disciple.
It is hard to imagine Lenin, however, carrying out a terror upon his own party. Nor was he likely to have insisted on the physical and psychological degradation of those arrested by the political police. In short, Lenin would have been horrified by the scale and methods of the Great Terror.
He would also have been astounded by its autocratic insouciance. Stalin over the years reviewed 383 lists of the most important arrested persons in bound booklets he endearingly called albums, and his self-assigned chore was to append a number to each name. A number ‘1’ was a recommendation for execution, a ‘2’ indicated ten years in the camps, a ‘3’ left it to Yezhov’s discretion. A single album might contain 200 names, and the technique of reviewing cases ‘in the album fashion’ was copied at lower rungs of the ladder of state repression.60 Also attributable to Stalin personally was the insistence that leading victims should not be shot until they had been thoroughly humiliated. In one of his last pleas to Stalin, Bukharin wrote asking what purpose would be served by his death. This question must have given profound satisfaction to Stalin, who kept the letter in his desk until his own death in 1953. Countless unfortunates across the USSR were similarly robbed of every shred of dignity by interrogators who extracted a grovelling confession before releasing them to the firing squad.
Stalin had an extraordinary memory, but not even he could know the biographies of every real or potential antagonist. His method of rule had always been to manufacture a situation which induced local officials to compete with each other in pursuit of his principal aim. It gladdened him that troiki in the provinces sometimes appealed against centrally-assigned arrest quotas, conventionally known as ‘the limits’, that they regarded as too low.61 Nor did he punish local officials who went beyond their quotas. Between August and September 1938, for instance, the security police in Turkmenia carried out double the originally-assigned number of executions.62
Thus the Great Terror followed the pattern of state economic planning since 1928: central direction was accompanied by opportunities for much local initiative. While aiming to reach their ‘limits’, NKVD officials were left to decide for themselves who were the ‘anti-Soviet elements’ in their locality. Neither Stalin nor even Yezhov could ensure that these ‘elements’ fell precisely into the categories defined in their various instructions. Nor were even the local NKVD officials entirely free to choose their own victims. As well as personal jealousies there were political rivalries in play. Conflicts at the local level among leaders, among enterprises and among institutions could suddenly be settled by a nicely-timed letter of ‘exposure’. There was little incentive to delay in denouncing an enemy; for who could be sure that one’s enemy was not already penning a similar letter? Old scores were murderously paid off. And it greatly simplified the task of repression, once a fellow had been arrested, to compile a list of his friends and associates and arrest them too.
But if vile behaviour was widespread, it was at its worst among the employees of the NKVD. Neither Stalin nor Yezhov in person directly inflicted pain on those under arrest. But the duties of the NKVD attracted some enthusiastic physical tormentors. One such was Lavrenti Beria who became Yezhov’s deputy in July 1938.He had a collection of canes in his office, and Red Army commanders ruefully talked of such interrogations as occasions when they went ‘to have a coffee with Beria’.63 This newcomer to Moscow was notorious in Georgia, where he beat prisoners, sentenced them to death and gratuitously had them beaten again before they were shot.64 And Beria was by no means the worst of the gruesome sadists attracted to the NKVD’s
