Purge, Kill, Purge, Kill!! Don't Take Care of Your Roses

The ‘Five’ (Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Yezhov) starts targeting generals.

… Between 19 and 21 March [1937], [Nikolai] Yezhov [NKVD chief, who in 1936 succeeded Genrikh Yagoda] summoned the surviving Chekists to the Officers’ Club. There, the diminutive Commissar-General announced that Yagoda had been a German spy since 1907 (when he joined the Party) and was also a corrupt thief. (p. 194)

Yezhov ‘discovered’ that Yagoda had tried to poison him by spraying mercury on to the curtains of his office. It later emerged that Yezhov had faked this outrage. None the less, Yagoda was arrested at his Kremlin apartment, even before the Politburo had formally given the order. (p. 195)

[Marshal Mikhail] Tukhachevsky, Stalin’s Civil War foe and probably his most talented general, was bound to be his main target….

Stalin tried to indict Tukhachevsky for treason in 1930…. But there was another row with the touchy, vindictive Voroshilov in May 1936. Voroshilov became so heated with Tukhachevsky’s justified criticism that he shouted ‘Fuck you!’ They made up but it was just at that time that the first of the Red Army generals were arrested and interrogated to implicate Tukhachevsky. More generals were mentioned in the January trial. Yagoda, [Abel] Yenukidze and the benighted generals delivered more kindling for this bonfire. (p. 197)

Random arrests and killing

On 30 July, Yezhov and his deputy Mikhail Frinovsky proposed Order No. 00447 to the Politburo: that between 5 and 15 August, the regions were to receive quotas for two categories: Category One – to be shot. Category Two – to be deported. They suggested that 72,950 to be shot and 259,450 arrested, though they missed some regions. The regions could submit further lists. The families of these people should be deported too. The Politburo confirmed this order the next day.

… The quotas were soon fulfilled by the regions who therefore asked for bigger numbers, so between 28 August and 15 December, the Politburo agreed to the shooting of another 22,500 and then another 48,000. In this, the Terror differed most from Hitler’s crimes which systematically destroyed a limited target: Jews and Gypsies. Here, on the contrary, death was sometimes random: long-forgotten comment, the flirtation with an opposition, envy of another man’s job, wife or house, vengeance or just plain coincidence brought the death and torture of entire families. This did not matter: ‘Better too far than not far enough,’ Yezhov told his men as the original arrest quota ballooned to 767,397 arrests and 386,798 executions, families destroyed, children orphaned, under Order No. 00447. (pp. 203-204)

… On 11 August, Yezhov signed Order No. 00485 to liquidate ‘Polish diversionists and espionage groups’ which was to consume most of the Polish Communist Party, most Poles within the Bolshevik leadership, anyone with social or ‘consular contacts’ – and of course their wives and children. A total of 350,000 (144,000 of them Poles) were arrested in this operation, with 247,157 shot (110,000 Poles) – a mini-genocide…. Altogether, the latest estimates, combining the quotas and national contingents, are that 1.5 million were arrested in these operations and about 700,000 shot. (p. 204)

The best way to survive was to be invisible because sometimes ghastly coincidences brought people into fatal contact with Stalin: Polish Communist Kostyrzewa was tending her roses near Kuntsevo when she found Stalin looking over her fence: ‘What beautiful roses,’ he said. She was arrested that night…. (p. 207)

Stalin often forgot – or pretended to forget – what had happened to certain comrades and years later assumed an air of disappointment when he heard they had been shot. ‘You used to have such nice people,’ [Stalin] later remarked to Polish comrades. ‘Vera Kostyrzewa for example, do you know what’s become of her?’…. (pp. 207-208)

Stalin himself specialized in reassuring his victims and then arresting them. Early in the year, the wife of one of Ordzhonikidze’s deputies at Heavy Industry was called by Stalin himself: ‘I hear you’re going about on foot. That’s no good… I’ll send you a car.’ Next morning the limousine was there. Two days later, her husband was arrested.

… Stalin’s Ambassador to Madrid, Antonov-Ovseenko, an ex-Trotskyite, entangled himself by trying to prove his loyalty; he was recalled, affably promoted by Stalin, and arrested the next day. When Stalin received the journalist Mikhail Koltsov, he teased him about his adventures in the Spanish Civil War, calling him ‘Don Miguel’, but then asked: ‘You don’t intend to shoot yourself? So long, Don Miguel.’ But Koltsov had played a deadly game in Spain, denouncing others to Stalin and Voroshilov. The ‘Don’ was arrested. (p. 208)

‘Believe me, Joseph Vissarionovich, I’d bring a son or daughter to the NKVD myself if they were against the Party…’ Stalin’s own secretary from the twenties, [Grigory] Kanner, who had been in charge of his dirty tricks against Trotsky and others, was arrested. ‘Kanner cannot be a villain,’ wrote a certain Makarova, perhaps his wife. ‘He was friends with Yagoda but who could think the Narkom of Security could be such scum? Believe, Comrade Stalin, that Kanner deserved your trust!’ Kanner was shot.

Then [Stalin] received letters from doomed leaders desperate to save themselves: ‘I am unable to work, it’s not a question of Partymindedness, but it’s impossible for me not to act on the situation around me and to clear the air and understand the reason for it… Please give me a moment of your time to receive me…’ wrote Nikolai Krylenko, the People’s Commissar of Justice no less and signer of many a death sentence. He too was shot. (p. 209)

山崎拓さん、北京で会見。一体何しに行ったん？拉致でも、核でも進展なし。最初からわかってた結果やけど。