Stalin полностью

333. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice, 166 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 165, d. 47, l. 3). USSR procurator general Ivan Akulov had followed up a petition by Aleksei Selyavkin (b. 1896), the former head of anti-aircraft defense, who was serving a ten-year sentence in Gulag from 1933 for the alleged sale of secret military documents. Selyavkin’s petition, which Akulov forwarded to Stalin, stated that he had falsely admitted his guilt under the threat of execution. Stalin decided to use this as an example. On June 5, 1934, the politburo freed him and admonished the OGPU leadership and even the procuracy for ignoring Selyavkin’s earlier petitions. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 106 (no citation); APRF, f. 3, op. 58, d. 71, l. 11–31; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 16, l. 88–9. On July 9, Voroshilov had written to Stalin in Sochi about granting early release to the Provisional Government war minister General Alexander Verkhovsky from his ten-year sentence (“considering that the situation has now sharply changed, I think that we could free him without special risk, using him in scholarly-research work”). Stalin accepted the recommendation, further evidence he had decided to rein in indiscriminate repression. Khlevniuk, Khoziain, 222 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 1015, l. 61–2).

334. The secret-police central apparatus in Moscow alone now numbered more than 8,200, and the chaotic expansion had come at the expense of educational levels, competence, and probity. Police bookkeeping, as the rival procuracy’s investigations showed, entailed all manner of “black” accounts enabling self-dealing, while contraband running and other abuses of office were pervasive. OGPU archives were spread around many buildings of Moscow’s Lubyanka quarter. Yakov Genkin, head of the OGPU records and statistics department, wrote to the hierarchs (Feb. 15, 1934) that the archives then contained almost 825,000 folders (dela), and more than 100,000 folders were not enumerated. Investigation records were merely “a mountain of paper which presents itself for reading with difficulty,” often handwritten, in pencil, and sewn in such a way that trying to read them led to ripping the pages; they were also filthy, overwhelmed with stamps on the cover. Of his predecessors Genkin wrote, “They looked upon the archive like a warehouse, where they could dump paper, if there was no room to hold it or send it some place.” In May 1934, the OGPU archives got a new facility, in the basement of one of the Lubyanka quarter’s buildings, and a staff increase to five, as well as folders for redoing files and metal cupboards for securing secret materials. Vinogradov, “Istoriia formirovaniia arkhiva VChK,” 15 (citing TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 3, d. 1607, l. 1).

335. Yagoda cited Stalin’s speech of Jan. 1933 about enemies (“This of course is not frightening. But we have to keep it in mind if we want to terminate these elements quickly and without especially numerous victims”). Vinogradov, Genrikh Iagoda, 407, 410 (TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 1, d. 4, l. 1–35).

336. Molchanov would later testify that “in 1934 Yagoda many times pointed out to me the need to conduct a more liberal course in our punishment policy. I recall, for example, a conversation in the summer of 1934 at the Water Station Dynamo. In this conversation Yagoda openly said that it is time perhaps to stop shooting people.” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 174, l. 137.

337. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice, 168–70; Sharlet and Beirne, “In Search of Vyshinsky.” See also Goliakov, Sbornik dokumentov po istorii ugolovnogo zakonodatel’stva SSSR, 333–4.

338. “Autocracy,” as one scholar observed of the tsarist regime, had “maneuvered between arbitrariness and legality, between the principle of unlimited personal power and the imperative to strive for a more rational organization of the state.” Taranovsky, “Osobennosti rossiiskoi samoderzhavnoi monarkhii,” 166.