Stalin: A Biography полностью

The fact that he ordered the killing of nearly three out of every ten people arrested under Order No. 00447 invalidates the suggestion that Stalin’s mass purges in mid-1937 were motivated mainly by the quest for slave labour.¹⁷ Undoubtedly the NKVD’s enterprises needed such labour to fulfil their targets for building, mining and manufacturing. But the Great Terror, while having an economic purpose, was systematically wasteful of human resources. The mass killings demonstrate that security interests were at the forefront of Stalin’s mind.

On 25 July 1937 he and Yezhov had also put forward Order No. 00439, which spread a net of terror across a further category of people. German citizens and Soviet citizens of German nationality were to be arrested. The order did not designate a quota: the NKVD was charged simply with getting on with the operation on its own initiative. In fact 55,000 people received punitive sentences and these included 42,000 executions.¹⁸ Stalin had decided that some types of foreigner were just as dangerous to him as kulaks and other ‘anti-Soviet elements’. He did not stop with the Germans resident in the USSR. After them came the Poles, the former émigrés in the Chinese city of Harbin, the Latvians and several other peoples. ‘National operations’ of this nature continued through the rest of 1937 and all 1938.

The conclusion is inescapable. Stalin had decided to deal with the objects of his security worries in a sustained burst of NKVD mass arrests and murders. Additions were recurrently made to the quotas set for the operation against ‘anti-Soviet elements’ and to the list of nationalities marked down as hostile. Leaders in the provinces were not discouraged from applying for permission to raise the number of victims to be seized. Stalin wrote telegrams fostering the murderous enthusiasm. No document survives of his having gone the other way and trying to stem the flood of arrests, torture and killing. When the Krasnoyarsk Party Regional Committee wrote to him about a fire in a grain store, he simply replied: ‘Try the guilty persons in accelerated fashion. Sentence them to death.’¹⁹ There was no injunction to local leaders to exercise care in repressing the ‘correct’ people. His emphasis was always upon getting his subordinates to carry out the Great Terror with zeal. Thick, bloody slices were cut from the personnel of party, government and all other institutions. The word went forth that the only way to save your life, if it was at all possible, was to comply eagerly with orders for repression.

Even Kaganovich had to plead his case before him when Stalin objected to his past association with ‘enemy of the people’ Marshal Iona Yakir. Kaganovich plucked up courage to point out that it had been Stalin who had recommended Yakir to him a decade before.²⁰ Nikita Khrushchëv, Moscow Party Committee Secretary, was similarly threatened when Stalin accused him of being a Pole. At a time when Polish communist émigrés in Moscow were being routinely shot, Khrushchëv was understandably keen to prove that he was a genuine Russian.²¹

Stalin’s involvement remained direct and deep as his envoys went to the main centres to preside over the sackings and arrests of local leaders. One of these envoys was Politburo member Andreev, a repentant member of the Workers’ Opposition whose past made it imperative to carry out orders implicitly. He went to cities such as Chelyabinsk, Krasnodar, Samara, Saratov, Sverdlovsk and Voronezh as well as Soviet republics such as Belorussia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.²² Andreev quickly decided whom to arrest and whom to replace them with. But he consulted Stalin before going ahead with his plans. From Stalinabad in Tajikistan he reported that ‘enemies have been working here in a basic fashion and have felt fairly free in doing this’. Stalin telegraphed back on 3 October 1937:²³

Andreev, Malenkov, Zhdanov and others toured the various regions carrying out their master’s policy.