The Great Terror

A point not adequately covered in The Great Terror was the huge volume of paperwork produced. Even for minor ‘criminals’ there are long-winded, highly formal orders for arrest and identifications by age, nationality, address and status, signed by a local NKVD man. Then there are pages of interrogation, question-and-answer sessions, also so signed, with a more senior NKVD officer’s counter-signature, then longish verdicts by Troikas or courts. In fairly important cases these run into volumes. They often include ‘confrontations’ where the accused are questioned with other suspects: a practice earlier known to have been used with Bukharin, Pyatnitski, etc. with Stalin present. All this was typed up, employing a large secretarial staff. There are several tens of millions of NKVD files of this type in existence and as many relevant party files.

One now has the records of interrogation of major victims – even Yenukidze from Stalin’s own past (sent to Stalin ‘for information’), and Yagoda, and (later) Yezhov. Typically, Yagoda’s interrogation on 26 April 1937 is described as ‘the result of prolonged interrogation’ with eyewitness confrontations, during which he denied what was testified by fellow conspirators such as ‘Pauker, Volovich, Gay and others’. But at a later session he gives nine pages of suitable evidence – an improvement over the first effort also noted of Yezhov, Frinovsky and others.

As to the major high-level victims in general there is, at last, the full list of those of that description shot at the end of July 1938: 139 of them (countersigned by Stalin).14 The cemetery records, with prison photograph, of myriads of such victims are themselves astonishing. The charges are mostly routine, but (for instance) it is odd to find of Kamenev’s widow that in addition to terrorism, she was shot for ‘a counter-revolutionary conversation with a foreign diplomat’.15

The victims even of the mass terror are registered, with each individual’s identification – in the files and publications of that splendid organisation MEMORIAL, and in such collections as Leningradskii Martirolog and local equivalents over the whole country. Each such volume appears with expert editorial prefaces and so on that are often most illuminating.

More generally, there are such collections as the fifty Rossiya XX Vek series, especially its Reabilitatsiya volumes 1–3. And, in addition to the new (for us) documentation, there are hundreds of well-researched books in the field, by Russian, Ukrainian, German, English, Dutch, French and Italian writers (though some excellent Russian research has been unbelievably mis-edited in an English version). Hundreds of sources are quoted, with thousands of footnotes – often to the archival number of fond, register and file page (the originals still, of course, in their old sites – though many of them are also copied to Western and other libraries). Some references are to Russian archives that are still, or again, restricted, and only quoted from researchers’ notes or memory.

The result is a long and highly detailed record of total and grotesque falsification, bringing us ever more deeply into the distance between untruth and reality. The sheer magnitude of the former stands out. It is a different world, a different universe.

7

By far the most substantial additions, or amendments, to our knowledge have been the set of decrees on ‘Mass Operations’ in 1937–8, of which I was not earlier able to present so coherent a picture.

The lists of those sentenced by the Military Collegium were sent to Stalin, and given his approval, with only a few Politburo members also signing. Nor did this informal leadership group have much time to spare. Records show that they had to make so many decisions on other urgent matters of policy that these terror orders were usually handled in twenty or thirty minutes. When it comes to the Mass Operations, one finds that the number of victims in these accounted for nearly twenty times the number of victims of the Military Collegium and other lesser tribunals.

I had, indeed, reported on a number of local examples of denunciatory hysteria. But it all had still registered as something like overspill from the main event; that it had worked its way down, as it were by inertia, into the general population. In reality the mass terror was ordered in detail from the top and was directed, with the numbers to be repressed laid down for each province and republic, for strata of the population – with individual crimes of terrorism, espionage and so on added later by the local Troika – and the lists of names then submitted to Moscow for final approval.