Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (17 page)

The Soviet purges within the army, party, and NKVD were the prelude to Stalin’s Great Terror, which in 1937 and 1938 would take the lives of hundreds of thousands of people for reasons of class and nation. The interrogations of tens of thousands of people during the purges generated a multitude of “organizations,” “plots,” and “groups”—categories into which more and more Soviet citizens could fall. The executions of communist party members no doubt gave rise to fears within the communist party; but the party would generally be spared, if its members followed Stalin’s lead in summer 1937 and agreed to pursue the true enemies within the mass of Soviet society. The purges also tested the loyalty of the NKVD, as its leadership was changed at the whim of Stalin, and its officers were forced to watch as their colleagues were purged. Yet in summer 1937 the besieged NKVD would be turned against social groups that many of its officers were ready to define as enemies. For months the top leadership of the Soviet Union had been plotting a blow against a group that they perhaps did fear: the kulaks.
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The kulaks were peasants, the stubborn survivors of Stalin’s revolution: of collectivization and famine, and very often of the Gulag. As a social class, the kulak (prosperous peasant) never really existed; the term was rather a Soviet classification that took on a political life of its own. The attempt to “liquidate the kulaks” during the first Five-Year Plan had killed a tremendous number of people, but it created rather than destroyed a class: those who had been stigmatized and repressed, but who had survived. The millions of people who were deported or who fled during collectivization were forever after regarded as kulaks, and sometimes accepted the classification. What Soviet leaders had to consider was the possibility that the revolution itself had created its own opponents. At the plenum of the central committee of the communist party in February and March 1937, several speakers drew the logical conclusions. “Alien elements” were corrupting the pure proletariat of the cities. The kulaks were “impassioned enemies” of the Soviet system.
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To be a kulak was not only to have suffered, it was to have survived movement across vast distances. Collectivization had forced millions of kulaks into the Gulag or into the cities. This meant journeys of hundreds or even thousands of miles. Some three million peasants, at least, had become paid laborers during the first Five-Year Plan. That, after all, was the Plan: that the Soviet Union would be transformed from an agrarian to an industrial country. Perhaps two hundred thousand people who would have been stigmatized as kulaks had made for the cities before they could be executed or deported. About four hundred thousand kulaks had managed to flee the special settlements, some for the cities, more for the countryside. Tens of thousands more had been allowed to leave concentration camps and the special settlements after serving their terms. Five-year Gulag sentences in 1930, 1931, and 1932 meant mass releases of Gulag survivors in 1935, 1936, and 1937.
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The optimistic assumption had been that the movement and the punishment would strip the kulak of his harmful social origins, and make of him a Soviet person. By the second half of the 1930s, Stalinism had shed any such expectations of progress. The very social mobility intrinsic to his policy of industrialization was now unsettling. Kulaks were rejoining the collective farms: perhaps they would lead rebellions, as other peasants had done in 1930. The kulaks were returning to a social order that was traditional in many ways. Stalin knew, from the 1937 census that he suppressed, that a majority of adults still defied the atheism of the Soviet state and believed in God. Twenty years after the Bolshevik Revolution, religious faith was perplexing, and perhaps unnerving. Could the kulaks rebuild the society that once had been?
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The kulaks sentenced later or to longer terms in the Gulag were still in exile in Siberia or Kazakhstan, in Soviet east or central Asia: might not such people support a Japanese invasion? The NKVD reported in June 1937 that exiled kulaks in Siberia constituted a “broad base on which to build an insurgent rebellion.” Surely, given the support of a foreign power and the cover of war, the kulaks would fight against Soviet power. In the meantime, they were the enemy within. One repressive policy created the foundations for another: exiled kulaks did not love the Soviet system; and their place of exile, so far from their homes, was close to a source of foreign threat, the expanding Japanese empire.
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Reports from the NKVD in the Far East provided the scenario for an alliance between internal opponents and a foreign power. In April 1937 riots had broken out against the Soviet presence in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. In the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo, the Japanese were recruiting Russian émigrés, who were making contact with kulaks in exile throughout Siberia. According to the NKVD, a “Russian General Military Union,” backed by Japan, planned to incite exiled kulaks to rebel when Japan invaded. In June 1937 the regional NKVD received permission to carry out mass arrests and executions of people suspected of collaborating with the “Russian General Military Union.” The targets of the operation were to be exiled kulaks and the former Russian imperial officers who supposedly commanded them. Naturally, the former were in much greater supply than the latter. And so began the killing of the kulaks, in their Siberian exile.
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Soviet leaders always regarded the Japanese threat as the eastern half of a global capitalist encirclement involving Poland and Nazi Germany. Preparations for a war against Japan in Asia were also preparations for a war in Europe. Precisely because many kulaks were returning home at this time from Soviet Asia to Soviet Europe, it was possible to imagine networks of enemies that extended from one end of the Soviet Union to the other. Though the shooting of peasants began in Siberia, Stalin apparently decided to punish kulaks not only in eastern exile but throughout the Soviet Union.

In a telegram entitled “On Anti-Soviet Elements,” Stalin and the politburo issued general instructions on 2 July 1937 for mass repressions in every region of the Soviet Union. The Soviet leadership held kulaks responsible for recent waves of sabotage and criminality, which meant in effect anything that had gone wrong within the Soviet Union. The politburo ordered the provincial offices of the NKVD to register all kulaks who resided in their regions, and to recommend quotas for execution and deportation. Most regional NKVD officers asked to be allowed to add various “anti-Soviet elements” to the lists. By 11 July the politburo already had a first round of lists of people to be repressed. At Stalin’s initiative, these initial numbers were rounded up, adding “an extra thousand.” This raised the stakes of the operation, sending a clear signal to the state police that they were to do more than simply sentence all of the people on whom they already had files. In order to demonstrate their diligence in a climate of threats and purges, NKVD officers would have to find still more victims.
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Stalin and Yezhov wanted “the direct physical liquidation of the entire counter-revolution,” which meant the elimination of enemies “once and for all.” The revised quotas were sent back down from Moscow to the regions as part of Order 00447, dated 31 July 1937, “On the Operations to Repress Former Kulaks, Criminals, and Other Anti-Soviet Elements.” Here Stalin and Yezhov anticipated the execution of 79,950 Soviet citizens by shooting and the sentencing of 193,000 more to eight to ten years in the Gulag. It was not that the politburo or the NKVD central office in Moscow had 272,950 particular people in mind for repression. Just which Soviet citizens would fulfill these quotas remained to be seen; the local NKVD branches would decide that.
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The killing and imprisonment quotas were officially called “limits,” though everyone involved knew that they were meant to be exceeded. Local NKVD officers had to explain why they could not meet a “limit,” and were encouraged to exceed them. No NKVD officer wished to be seen as lacking élan when confronting “counter-revolution,” especially when Yezhov’s line was “better too far than not far enough.” Not 79,950 but five times as many people would be shot in the kulak action. By the end of 1938, the NKVD had executed some 386,798 Soviet citizens in fulfillment of Order 00447.
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Order 00447 was to be implemented by the same institution that had brought terror to the Soviet countryside in the early 1930s: the three-person commission, or troika. Composed of a regional NKVD chief, a regional party leader, and a regional prosecutor, the troikas were responsible for transforming the quotas into executions, the numbers into bodies. The overall quota for the Soviet Union was divided among sixty-four regions, each with a corresponding troika. In practice, the troikas were dominated by the NKVD chiefs, who usually chaired the meetings. Prosecutors had been ordered to ignore legal procedures. Party chiefs had other responsibilities, were not experts on security matters, and were afraid that they might themselves be targeted. NKVD chiefs were in their element.
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The fulfillment of Order 00447 began with the emptying of the file cabinets. The NKVD had some sort of material on kulaks, since
kulak
was a category created by the state. Criminals, the second group mentioned in the order, were by definition people who had an encounter with the judicial system behind them. In practical terms, the other “anti-Soviet elements” named in the order were simply the people on whom the local NKVD had a file. Local NKVD officers, helped by police, carried out investigations in “operational sectors” within each of the sixty-four zones. An “operational group” assembled a list of people to be interrogated. Those targeted were arrested, forced to confess, and encouraged to implicate others.
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Confessions were elicited by torture. The NKVD and other police organs applied the “conveyer method,” which meant uninterrupted questioning, day and night. This was complemented by the “standing method,” in which suspects were forced to stand in a line near a wall, and beaten if they touched it or fell asleep. Under time pressure to make quotas, officers often simply beat prisoners until they confessed. Stalin authorized this on 21 July 1937. In Soviet Belarus, interrogating officers would hold prisoners’ heads down in the latrine and then beat them when they tried to rise. Some interrogators carried with them draft confessions, and simply filled in the prisoner’s personal details and changed an item here or there by hand. Others simply forced prisoners to sign blank pages and then filled them in later at leisure. In this way Soviet organs “unmasked” the “enemy,” delivering his “thoughts” to the files.
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The numbers came down from the center, but the corpses were made locally. The troikas who fulfilled Order 00447 were responsible for sentencing the prisoners, with no need for any confirmation from Moscow, and no possibility for appeal. The three members of a troika would meet at night with investigating officers. For each case they would hear a very brief report, along with a recommendation for sentencing: death or the Gulag. (Only a very few of those arrested were not sentenced at all.) The troikas would almost always accept these recommendations. They handled hundreds of cases at a time, at a pace of sixty per hour or more; the life or death of an individual human was decided in a minute or less. In a single night the Leningrad troika, for example, sentenced to death 658 prisoners of the concentration camp at Solovki.
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Terror prevailed in the Gulag, as everywhere else. It might be difficult to see how concentration camp inmates could threaten the Soviet state: but like the regions of the USSR, the Gulag system had its own death quota, to be met or exceeded. Just as people who had been defined as kulaks might be dangerous, so might people who were incarcerated as kulaks—so went the logic. The camps of the Gulag had an initial quota of ten thousand executions, though in the end 30,178 of its prisoners were shot. Omsk, a southwest Siberian city whose environs were full of special settlers deported during collectivization, was the site of some of the most vicious campaigns. Its NKVD chief had already requested an additional quota of eight thousand executions on 1 August 1937, before Order 00447 even went into effect. His men once sentenced 1,301 people in a single night.
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This kulak operation was carried out in secret. No one, including the condemned, was told of the sentences. Those sentenced would simply be taken, first to some sort of prison, and then either to a freight car or an execution site. Execution facilities were built or chosen with an eye to discretion. Killings were always carried out at night, and in seclusion. They took place in soundproofed rooms below ground, in large buildings such as garages where noise could cover gunshots, or far from human settlement in forests. The executioners were always NKVD officers, generally using a Nagan pistol. While two men held a prisoner by his arms, the executioner would fire a single shot from behind into the base of the skull, and then often a “control shot” into the temple. “After the executions,” one set of instructions specified, “the bodies are to be laid in a pit dug beforehand, then carefully buried and the pit is to be camouflaged.” As the winter of 1937 came and the ground froze, the pits were prepared using explosives. Everyone who took part in these operations was sworn to secrecy. Only a very few people were directly involved. A team of just twelve Moscow NKVD men shot 20,761 people at Butovo, on the outskirts of Moscow, in 1937 and 1938.
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