Stalin полностью

296. Memo of Govorukhin, chief of PUR in Leningrad Military District, June 12, 1937, RGVA, f. 33 987, op. 3, d. 993, l. 159ss, Volkogonov papers, Hoover, container 17. Similar mood reports that month to Voroshilov contained the following: “Now, no one except the politburo can be believed.” “Only Comrade Stalin can be believed now, and no one else.” RGVA, f. 33 987, op. 3, d. 993, l. 157–8, Volkogonov papers, Hoover, container 17 (Kruglov, temporarily implementing duties of chief of PUR.)

297. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 194 (citing APRF, f. 3, op. 24, d. 312, l. 162, June 29, 1937). “Over there, over here, they started to arrest commanders, about whom we had never heard a bad word before,” recalled a division commander in the Kiev military district. “From mouth to mouth rumors were whispered, one more absurd than the next, about plots and espionage malefaction.” Gorbatov, “Shkola Iakira,” 176. See also Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 199 (APRF, f. 3, op. 24, d. 308, l. 212–3).

298. Afanas’ev, Oni ne molchali, 380.

299. The defense commissariat received more than 200,000 letters in 1938 (and would receive more than 350,000 in 1939). No small number were petitions sent from prisons. Kommunist, 1990, no. 17: 70.

300. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I: 438; Suvenirov, “Za chest’ i dostoinstvo voinov RKKA,” 372–87 (at 377).

301. Kuznetsov, Krutye povoroty, 59, 76–9.

302. Just one of many examples: between May 7 and 10, Voroshilov issued a plan for liquidating wrecking—check all warehouses, all construction sites, all secret information storage holdings, all military units—but he did so without naming a single example of actual wrecking in the army. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 75 (APRF, f. 3, f. 401, l. 107–9).

303. Suvenirov, “Narkomat oborony,” 29 (citing RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 1023, l. 22, 24, 26: June 1937). Notes to himself for his Nov. 1938 speech to the Main Military Council show how far Voroshilov had come. Suvenirov, Tragediia RKKA, 74–5 (citing RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 1137, l. 3, 5, 6).

304. A few days after the June 1937 military soviet gathering, Voroshilov told an assembly of party members at the defense commissariat that the army was “the last place” in terms of “revealed” enemies, but that during the previous three months the situation had “sharply changed.” Whitewood, Red Army, 249 (citing RGASPI, f. 74, op. 2, d. 118, l. 3).

305. Kollontai, Diplomaticheskie dnevniki, II: 369–70. Voroshilov’s despair would also be evident in a draft outline of his speech to the June 1937 Central Committee plenum, in which he had written that the unmasking of the military-fascist plot “means that our method of work, our whole system for running the army, and my work as people’s commissar, have utterly collapsed.” This line was evidently not uttered. Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis, 190.

306. Dubinskii, Osobyi schet, 212. Dubinsky was slandered and arrested back in Kazan.

307. Trotskii, Stalin, II: 276.

308. Machiavelli, Discourses, 181–2, 184–5.

309. Chuev, Sto sorok, 37.

310. Kosheleva et al., “Materialy fevral’-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda” (1995, no. 3), 6.

311. Kosheleva et al., “Materialy fevral’-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda” (1994, no. 2), 21.

312. Chuev, Sto sorok, 416. Or again: “We owe the fact that we did not have a fifth column during the war to ’37.” (Of course, the Soviet Union did have an immense Fifth Column during WWII.) Chuev, Molotov, 464. One scholar, who correctly cautioned against accepting the fifth column argument to explain Stalin’s motivations, hypothesized that Molotov’s and Kaganovich’s resort to the fifth column rationale might have assuaged their consciences. Rees, “Stalin as Leader, 1937–1953,” 210.

313. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 575, l. 69. Kaganovich, in June 1938, addressing the Donbass party organization, would state that if the enemies, spies, and kulaks had not been annihilated, “perhaps we would be at war already.” Kuromiya, “Accounting for the Great Terror,” 96 (citing RGASPI, f. 81, op. 3, d. 231, II. 73, 79). G. K. Dashevskii [Donskoi], a Latin Americanist at the Soviet Union’s Institute of World Economics and World Politics, published a pamphlet in 1938 drawing the parallels: Fashistskaia piataia kolonna v Ispanii (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1938). See also Kublanov, “Razgrom fashistskoi trotskistko-bukharinskoi ‘piatoi kolonii’ v SSSR.”