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Coordinated in the Kremlin and carried out by the NKVD in the localities, the Great Terror spread throughout society as a series of mass campaigns to purge the country of ‘anti-social’ and potentially ‘anti-Soviet’ elements in the event of war. By far the biggest of these mass campaigns was the ‘kulak operation’ instituted by the infamous Directive 00447: it accounted for half of all arrests (669,929) and more than half the executions (376,202) in 1937–8. Nearly all the victims were former ‘kulaks’ and their families who had recently returned from ‘special settlements’ and Gulag labour camps after completing the standard eight-year sentence for ‘counter- revolutionary agitation and propaganda’ imposed during the collectivization campaign in 1929–30. Stalin was afraid that the country would be swamped by disgruntled and embittered ‘kulaks’ who might pose a threat in time of war. He was particularly concerned by NKVD reports about a White monarchist organization, the Russian General Military Union (ROVS), which was said to be preparing a ‘kulak uprising’ to coincide with a Japanese invasion of Siberia. Tens of thousands of alleged ROVS members were shot in the course of the ‘kulak operation’, although they were seldom counted in official statistics (the Altai NKVD, for example, made a separate report on the 22,108 ROVS members it had shot in 1937). The ‘kulak operation’ was connected to a wholesale purge of the local Soviets. It was particularly brutal in border areas, like the western provinces, and in regions, like the Donbass and western Siberia, where the regime feared the population most.24
There were also large-scale ‘national operations’, wholesale deportations and executions of Soviet minorities who were deemed potential ‘spies’ in the event of war: Germans, Poles, Finns and Latvians, Armenians and Greeks, Koreans, Chinese, even Kharbin Russians, who had returned to the Soviet Union from Manchuria following the 1935 sale of the Eastern China Railway to Manchukuo, the puppet Manchurian state set up by the Japanese in 1932. Stalin’s distrust of the Poles in the western Soviet regions was particularly strong. It dated from the Russian Civil War, when Poland had invaded the Ukraine and then defeated the Red Army when it counter- attacked against Warsaw – a military defeat in which Stalin had been personally humiliated because of his tactical mistakes as a front-line commissar. Stalin saw the Soviet Poles (and many Belorussians and Ukrainians, whom he considered to be really ‘Poles’) as a fifth column of the ‘semi-Fascist’ Polish state of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, which the Soviet leader feared would unite with Nazi Germany to attack the Soviet Union again. As a result of the ‘national operation’ against the Poles, launched by Directive 00485 in August 1937, almost 140,000 people were shot or sent to labour camps by November 1938.25
So many people disappeared in 1937–8, particularly in the Party and intelligentsia circles of the major capitals, that the arrests appeared random, as if anyone could be picked up by the Black Marias that roamed the streets at night. The prison population was a broad cross-section of the population. Most prisoners had no idea for what crime they were in jail. By the autumn of 1938, virtually every family had lost a relative, or knew of someone with imprisoned relatives. People lived in fearful expectation of the knock on the door in the middle of the night. They slept badly and awoke when they heard a car pull up outside. They would lie there waiting for the sound of footsteps to pass by on the staircase or in the corridor, before going back to sleep, relieved that the visitors were not for them. Liubov Shaporina, the founder of the Puppet Theatre in Leningrad, wrote in her diary on 22 November 1937:
The joys of everyday life. I wake up in the morning and automatically think: thank God I was not arrested last night, they don’t arrest people during the day, but what will happen tonight, no one knows. It’s like Lafontaine’s lamb – every single person has enough against him to justify arrest and exile to parts unknown. I’m lucky, I am completely calm; I simply don’t care. But the majority of people are living in complete terror.26
Vladimir Piatnitsky, Osip’s son, recalls the atmosphere in the House on the Embankment before the arrest of his father:
There were more than 500 flats for elite Party workers in that gloomy building, and arrests were a regular occurence. Because I was always playing in the yard and corridors, I saw several arrests. In the evenings, as it grew dark, the house became deserted and silent. It was as if the inhabitants had gone into hiding in the expectation of catastrophe. Suddenly, several cars would drive into the yard, men in uniform and plain clothes would jump out and walk towards staircase entrances – each one knew the way to ‘his’ address. Then one saw the lights go on in several apartments. Since I knew where everybody lived, I could work out who was being arrested. If all the lights in the apartment went on, it meant there was a search. In those days many people expected to be arrested, but they did not know when their turn would come.27
People waited for their turn. Many packed a bag and kept it by their bed in order to be ready when the NKVD knocked on the door. This passivity is one of the most striking features of the Great Terror. There were many ways to avoid arrest – moving out of town and taking on a new identity by buying papers on the black market being the most simple and effective, for the NKVD was not good at tracking down people on the move.28 The Russian people had a long tradition of fleeing persecution by the state – from the Old Believers to runaways from serfdom – and this tactic was adopted by millions of peasants who ran away from the collective farms and ‘special settlements’. But the urban population by and large remained in place, without any sign of resistance, and waited for the Terror to take them.
Looking back, the film writer Valerii Frid (1922–98), who was arrested in 1943, thought that most people were paralysed by fear. They were so hypnotized by the power of the NKVD, which they believed was everywhere, that they could not contemplate resistance or escape.
I can think of no analogy in human history. So I’ll have to make do with an example from zoology: the rabbit hypnotized by the boa constrictor… We were all like rabbits who recognized the right of the boa constrictor to swallow us; whoever fell under the power of its gaze would walk quite calmly and with a sense of doom into its mouth.29
Viacheslav Kolobkov recalls the panic of his father, a factory worker in Leningrad, when a car stopped outside their house at night.
Every night he would stay awake – waiting for the sound of a car engine. When it came he would sit up rigid in his bed. He was terrified. I could smell his fear, his nervous sweating, and feel his body shaking, though I could barely see him in the dark. ‘They have come for me!’ he would always say when he heard a car. He was convinced that he would be arrested for something he had said – sometimes, at home, he used to curse the Bolsheviks. When he heard an engine stop and the car door slam, he would get up and start fumbling in panic for the things he thought he would need most. He always kept these items near his bed in order to be ready when ‘they’ came for him. I remember the husks of bread lying there – his biggest fear was going without bread. There were many nights when my father barely slept – waiting for a car that never came.30
Faced with arrest, the Bolshevik elite were particularly passive. Most of them were so indoctrinated by their Party’s ideology that any thought of trying to resist was easily outweighed by a deeper need to prove their innocence before the Party. Yevgeniia Ginzburg was the wife of a senior Party leader in Kazan and herself a Party activist. After her husband was taken, she lost her job and feared that her own arrest was imminent. Her mother- in-law was ‘a simple, illiterate peasant woman born in the days of serfdom’, recalls Ginzburg; she ‘was of a deeply philosophical cast of mind and had a remarkable power of hitting the nail on the head when she talked about the problems of life’. This old peasant woman advised her to run away:
‘ “Out of sight, out of mind,” they say. The farther away you are the better. Why not go to our old village, to Pokrovskoye?’…
‘But how can I, Grandmother? How can I leave everything, the children, my work?’ [Ginzburg replied].
‘Well, they’ve taken your job away anyhow. And the children won’t come to any harm with us.’
‘But I must prove my innocence to the Party. How can I, a Communist, hide from the Party?’31
