Every murder had to be covered up with ten more. The Stalinist police butchers Yagoda and Yezhov were themselves purged. For every economic bungle, and they were inevitable without the democratic control of the workers, scapegoats had to be found. Every day another group of officials branded themselves as paid counter-revolutionaries. Bolshevik workers and light-fingered bureaucrats perished alike in the bloodbath. Beloved figures like the writer Maxim Gorky, whose constant pleading for victims of the Purges were inconvenient for Stalin, disappeared mysteriously. Since people were later accused of poisoning him, we may safely assume that his death was not natural. Literature (and especially drama in conditions of mass illiteracy) which had played an important role in mass communication since the revolution, was brutally suppressed. Anybody who had even the most tenuous connections with October was liquidated, even some of Stalin’s aides and accomplices, as was the case with Ordzhonikidze.
Denunciations and informers were encouraged and every friend or relative of any suspected malcontent was imprisoned. In the mass paranoia, every zealous policeman found as many victims as could be manufactured, to avoid denunciation himself. Children were encouraged to denounce their parents. General Petro G. Grigorenko recalls how he was almost denounced by his own wife. The scope of the repression was vast. No one can say how many perished. According to one estimate, one person in five in Leningrad was either killed, imprisoned or exiled. Not a single genuine letter, not a single document, not a single impeccable piece of evidence was presented at the trials. The only ‘evidence’ was the self-confessions of the defendants – extracted under torture. Kamenev and Zinoviev, already morally broken by capitulation, actually demanded their own execution, having been promised that they would be spared. But Stalin betrayed them. They were the first to be shot.
Not since the witchcraft trials and the Spanish Inquisition had such methods been used to break people and force them to admit to the most appalling crimes of which they were entirely innocent. In his autobiography, the former Soviet general and dissident Petro G. Grigorenko details the kind of tortures used on those who fell into the hands of the GPU, as witnessed by his own brother:
He talked about trumped-up sabotage, terrorism, and espionage charges, the biographies the ‘enemies’ were forced to write, and the tortures used – beatings, crushed fingers and sex organs, cigarette burns on the face and body, standing tortures, and torture by bright lights and with thirst.
And again:
Standing torture consisted of forcing a man to stand for a very long time in a special small locked closet in which he could not turn or change his position. Gradually, from a lack of air and from fatigue the prisoner would lose consciousness and sink downward. Then he would be taken out of the closet, aroused, and once again locked in. From standing up for so long the circulation in his legs would be interrupted and they would swell with stagnant blood. This man had those horribly swollen legs. He spoke in a whisper. “Do not be afraid of people here. I know what you are thinking: ‘They are all fascists, enemies of the people, and I got here by accident, by mistake’… I thought that too. But now I know: there are no enemies here. Someone is compelling us to call ourselves ‘enemies of the people’.” He told Ivan about his interrogation. He was an engineer from the Zaporozhye Steel Works; subsequently he signed a confession saying that he had been planning to bomb the factory. After subsequent interrogation, the man said to Ivan, “They are not yet torturing you. That means you may be released. They need that for some reason, too. If they let you out, try not to forget anything you’ve seen here”. (P.G. Grigorenko, Memoirs, p. 96.)
The methods used by Stalin in these and later trials, according to Khrushchev at the 20th Congress was as follows:
Stalin personally called the investigative judge, gave him instructions, advised him on which investigative methods should be used; these methods were simple – beat, beat and, once again, beat.
He continued:
Confessions of guilt of many arrested and charged with enemy activity were gained with the help of cruel and inhuman tortures.
In his report to the 22nd Congress, he refers to the methods used to extract confessions from the leaders of the Red Army:
Many excellent commanders and political workers in the Red Army were destroyed. There are comrades among the delegates here – I don’t want to give their names so as not to cause them pain – who have spent many years in prison. They were ‘persuaded,’ persuaded in certain ways, that they were German, British or some other spies. And some of them ‘confessed.’ Even when they were told that the charges of espionage against them had been withdrawn, they themselves insisted on their earlier depositions as they felt that it would be better to abide by their false statements in order to have done with the torture, to die the quicker. (The Road to Communism – Report of the 22nd Congress CPSU, p. 113.)
The Purges, which touched every level of life, served to create havoc as leading Party cadres, army officers, technicians, statisticians, planners, managers and workers were swept away. A frenzy was unleashed against what Stalin termed the “enemies of the people”. After the initial successes of the Five-Year Plans, the 17th Party Congress in January 1934, called the “Congress of Victors”, was where Stalin sought to consolidate his power. Years later Khrushchev, in his famous ‘secret speech’, pointed out that out of the 1,966 delegates to this Congress, no less than 1,108 were later charged with counter-revolutionary crimes! In the words of Khrushchev, Stalin “chose the path of repression and physical annihilation”.
Just before the war, the whole of the General Staff was arrested and brilliant military strategists like Tukhachevsky, Yakir and Gamarnik, from the civil war days, were executed by Stalin who evidently feared a coup d’état. Hundreds of thousands were shot and millions sent to concentration camps, while Stalin solemnly condemned them all as spies, assassins and wreckers – and worst of all ‘Trotsky-Fascists’.
The Purges decimated the Red Army. Between 1937 and 1938, 20,000 to 35,000 Red Army officers were liquidated. 90 per cent of the generals and 80 per cent of all colonels were murdered by the GPU. 3 marshals, 13 commanders, 57 corps commanders, 110 divisional commanders, 220 brigade commanders, and all the commandants of the Military Districts were executed by GPU firing squads. The number of arrests carried out at this time included 3 out of 5 marshals; 3 out of 4 of the first-rank army commanders; 60 of the 67 corps commanders, 136 of 199 division commanders, and 221 of 397 brigade commanders; both first-rank fleet admirals (flagman), both second-rank fleet admirals, all 6 first-rank admirals, 9 of the 15 second-rank admirals, both first-rank army commissars, all 15 second-rank army commissars, 25 of the 28 corps commissars, 79 of the 97 division commissars, and 34 of the 36 brigade commissars.
There were also huge losses among the field-grade and junior officers. The shocking truth can be stated quite simply: never did the officer staff of any army suffer such great losses in any war as the Soviet army suffered in this time of peace.
Years of training cadres came to nothing. The Party stratum in the army was drastically reduced. In 1940 the autumn report of the Inspector General of Infantry showed that, of 225 regimental commanders on active duty that summer, not one had been educated in a military academy, 25 had finished a military school, and the remaining 200 had only completed the courses for junior lieutenants. At the beginning of 1940 more than 70 per cent of the division commanders, about 70 per cent of regimental commanders, and 60 per cent of military commissars and heads of political divisions had occupied these positions for a year only. And all this happened just before the worst war in history. (Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, pp. 213-4. 1976 edition.)
Countless people disappeared without trace in the prisons of the GPU, having died under torture or been shot. In fact, many more died without confessing than those who were broken by torture. Millions more perished in Stalin’s camps, where they were starved or worked to death, froze, or were shot. The food ration in the camps was always close to starvation level, in some cases as low as 400 grams of bread a day, and not every day. On such rations, the prisoners were put to work on heavy construction and mining, in freezing Arctic conditions. The following is a description of one of the camps:
I will not repeat all the things I heard but did not see myself. I will tell only about how people died before my eyes, every day, by the dozens, sent ‘over the hill,’ dying in the tents, freezing and crowding around the iron stoves, dropping from hunger and cold, from dysentery and malnutrition…
The high rate of illness and death at Adak was caused by the fact that when the people from Vorkuta arrived, not only were the tents not ready – so that people caught cold from sleeping on the frozen ground under the open sky – but also no food had been provided and there was no kitchen, bakery, or bathhouse. Out of desperation the starving people pounced on frost-bitten potatoes that were rotting out in the open. Because they were rotten, they caused dysentery and diarrhoea to all who ate them, after which the weaker ones began dying like flies. In kettles over open fires, a kind of foul-smelling codfish, some that had gotten frozen and some that had frozen and thawed, was boiled and then served in this boiled form right into people’s dirty hands. There was no bread. Instead they boiled lumps of dough in the same kettles over open fires. One of these, half-wet and boiling hot, would be doled out to each person to last the whole day. The starving people would bolt these down greedily and the next moment be clutching at their stomachs in pain. (George Saunders (editor) Samizdat: Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist, p. 170.)
Even in these hellish places, the Trotskyists maintained their organisation and revolutionary faith. They held political discussions, and attempted to follow events in the Soviet Union and internationally. Finally, under intolerable pressure, they organised a hunger strike, something without a precedent in Stalin’s labour camps. In October 1936, the prisoners declared themselves on strike. In the barracks occupied by the Trotskyists, the strike was 100 per cent solid. Even the orderlies struck. About one thousand prisoners participated in the strike in the Vorkuta mines which lasted more than four months, and only ended in March 1937 when the strikers received a radiogram from the headquarters of the GPU conceding all their demands. But later the prison regime got worse. Finally, in March 1938, the Trotskyists of Vorkuta were taken out into the tundra in groups and shot:
The executions in the tundra lasted the whole month of April and part of May. Usually one day out of two, or one day out of three, thirty to forty prisoners were called. It is characteristic to note that each time, some common criminals, repeaters, were included. In order to terrorise the prisoners, the GPU, from time to time, made publicly known by means of local radio, the list of those shot. Usually broadcasts began as follows: ‘For counter-revolutionary agitation, sabotage, brigandage in the camps, refusal to work, attempts to escape, the following have been shot…’ followed by a list of names of some political prisoners mixed with a group of common criminals.
One time, a group of nearly a hundred, composed mainly of Trotskyists, was led away to be shot. As they marched away, the condemned sang the Internationale, joined by the voices of hundreds of prisoners remaining in camp.
At the beginning of May, a group of women were shot. Among them were the Ukrainian Communist, Chumskaya, the wife of I.N. Smirnov, a Bolshevik since 1898 and ex-peoples’ commissar; (Olga, the daughter of Smirnov, a young girl, apolitical, passionately fond of music, had been shot a year before in Moscow); the wives of Kossior, of Melnais, etc. … one of these women had to walk on crutches. At the time of execution of a male prisoner, his imprisoned wife was automatically liable to capital punishment; and when it was a question of well-known members of the Opposition, this applied equally to any of his children over the age of twelve. (Ibid., pp. 215-6.)