Abstract
There is nothing exceptional in the fact that the Soviet government used repression. All governments use repression against those they consider to be criminals or enemies, and the use of repression tends to increase during times of war, revolution and counter-revolution. The Soviet government was born in a time of war, and had to face the onslaught of counter-revolution, political terrorism and civil war in its early years. Twenty years later it had to face the even greater onslaught of the Second World War. Throughout the intervening period the Soviet regime considered itself threatened by internal and external enemies. What requires explanation is not so much the existence of repression, but the scale, nature and timing of the specific forms of repression that took place under Stalin in the 1930s. This was a repression that led to the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of people, the imprisonment of millions more, and the destruction of many members of the regime’s own elite — and this, at a time when there appeared to be no particular danger facing the regime. This was a highly specific kind of repression that became known as ‘the Great Terror’.
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Notes
For a consideration of the overall trends in Soviet repression and an argument about the importance of ‘mass killings’, see Stephen Wheatcroft, ‘The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings, 1930–1945’, Europe-Asia Studies, 48, no. 8 (1996) 1319–53. The major survey of developments in the labour camps is provided by J. A. Getty, G. Rittersporn and V. Zemskov, ‘Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: a First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence’, American Historical Review (October 1993) 1017–49. The term ‘execution’ covers both ‘judicial execution’ and ‘non-judicial execution’. The terms ‘non-judicial executions’ and ‘killing’ are used here in the same sense. The Holocaust and the Ezhovshchina were both cases of mass killing, but there was a difference in as much as the Ezhovshchina did involve a kind of execution that was supported by some degree of legal process, although a nonjudicial process. The Holocaust made no pretence at any degree of legal process.
Recently there has been some interest in attempting to upgrade the significance of the 1936 harvest failure, as though this were the major cause of the economic problems. See Roberta Manning, ‘The Soviet Economic Crisis of 1936–1940 and the Great Purges’, in J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning, eds, Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 116–41. The intention here is possibly to support an economic explanation for the repression. However, despite the undoubtedly poor harvest of 1936 there can be no comparison with the desperate economic situation of 1931–33. Moreover, the chronology does not fit, because the 1937 harvest was a good one, and the peak of repression in 1937 came in the second half of the year that was influenced by the 1937 harvest, not the 1936 harvest.
R. Beck and W. Godin, Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1951), provides a comprehensive survey of the large number of explanations of the repressions that were current at the time. Robert Conquest has written the best known account of the repression, but while his narrative is highly readable, it offers a highly simplified and personalised version of causation;
R. Conquest, The Great Terror (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). Oleg Khlevnyuk has recently produced a good account of the repression emphasising its international context;
O. Khlevnyuk, ‘The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937–38’, in J. Cooper, M. Perrie and E. A. Rees, eds, Soviet History, 1917–53: Essays in Honour of R. W. Davies (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), pp. 158–76, and ‘The Reasons for the “Great Terror”: the Foreign-Political Aspect’, Annali della Fondazione Giagiacomo Feltrinelli (1998), pp. 159–69.
See R. J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1997), pp. 934–5. Of course, these figures for executions exclude the mass killings associated with the Holocaust.
See R. W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive: the Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture, 1929–1930 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980).
See O. Litvinenko and J. Riordan, eds, Memories of the Dispossessed: Descendants of Kulaks Tell Their Stories (Nottingham: Bramcote Press, 1998). The six stories were all taken from the Kurgan Region in the Urals. The three eyewitness accounts date their dekulakisation from December 1929 (Viktor M., p. 34), 1928 and spring 1929 (Anna R., pp. 55–6), and simply 1929 (Yevdokia G., p. 67). The other three non-eyewitnesses (grandchildren) report 1929 (pp. 81–2), 1930 (p. 90), and 1931 (p. 98).
E. G. Evdokimov (1891–1940): party member from 1918, head of Special Department of Moscow Cheka from June 1919, then head of Special Department of South Western and Southern Fronts, and from May 1921 head of Special Department of Ukrainian Cheka. From 1923 special plenipotentiary of OGPU in South East and then North Caucasus krai, where he led the struggle against mountainous rebels in which he was allowed to use emergency extrajudicial procedures. In 1927 his proposal to prosecute an exemplary trial of industrial wreckers in Shakhty was rejected by Menzhinskii and Yagoda, but accepted by Stalin to whom Evdokimov reported directly. In late 1929 the Secret Operational Department (SOU) was removed from Yagoda’s control and handed over to Evdokimov, who began work on the Promparty and Menshevik trials. See A. Papchinskii and M. Tumshis, Shchit, raskolotii mechom NKVD protiv VChK (Moscow, 2001), pp. 208–10.
Ultimately this would lead to the appointment of Osinskii (the early oppositionist and critic of the security agencies) as his deputy and as head of the new independent statistical agency, TsUNKhU, in January 1932. For Osinskii’s early opposition to the expansion of the Cheka’s authority see V. Brovkin, Behind the Lines of the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); for Osinskii’s later role in TsUNKhU, see
S. G. Wheatcroft and R. W. Davies, eds, Materials for a Balance of the Soviet National Economy, 1928–30 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 40.
See O. Khlevnyuk et al., Stalinskoe Politburo v 30-e gody (Moscow: Airo-XX, 1995), p. 203. This was the first Politburo session that Bukharin attended after being stripped of Politburo membership at the 10–17 November 1929 TsK Plenum. Bukharin was to attend Politburo sessions irregularly from 25 July 1931 to 27 June 1936, at first in his capacity as a TsK member, and then, after the XVI Party Congress, as a Candidate TsK member. Arch Getty and (rather surprisingly) Anna Larina (Bukharin’s wife) are clearly mistaken in their assumption that Bukharin could not have attended Politburo meetings at this time. See
J. A. Getty, Origins of the Great Purges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 215, and
A. Larina, Nezabyvaemoe (Moscow, 1989), p. 263.
Ivan Alekseevich Akulov (1888–1937): born into a family of small traders in St Petersburg; Old Bolshevik with a party stazh of 1907. He was engaged in party work as regional secretary (1917–21), and then in trade union work (1922–29), before becoming deputy NKRKI-TsKK (1929–31). He was a member of TsKK (1923–25 and 1930–34), and a member of TsK (1927–30) and Orgburo (1930–32); A. D. Chernev, 229 kremlevskikh vozhdei (Moscow, 1996), p. 89.
Artur Khristianovich Artuzov (Frauchi) (1891–1937): born into a Swiss family of cheese-makers; revolutionary Bolshevik with a party stazh of December 1917. He fought in the Red Army till 1919 and then joined the VChK in 1919. He became deputy head of the OGPU Foreign Department on 1 January 1930 and was promoted to head of the Foreign Department on 1 August 1931, the day after being appointed to the collegium of OGPU. See N. V. Petrov, K. V. Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD 1934–1941: Spravochnik (Moscow, 1999), pp. 93–4.
Peter Solomon has pointed out that although there were 22 347 convictions under the law of 7 August in the general courts of the RSFSR in 1932, the total number of RSFSR death sentences in this year was 2686, and that, according to Krylenko, less than 1000 of these had been executed by 1 January 1933. See Peter H. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 117, 126.
Of those convicted under this law, a very low proportion were given death sentences, and of these many were reprieved. See ibid., pp. 113–29, and endnote 32 above. If Krylenko’s estimate that less than 1000 of the 22347 RSFSR convictions under this law in 1932 resulted in executions were to apply for the 69523 RSFSR sentences in the first half of 1933, there would have been 3000 executions, and probably twice this for all-USSR. However, the level of execution may well have reduced after the Politburo decree and instruction of 7 and 8 May 1933 (see above). The available data for civil death sentences which begin in 1937 indicate a USSR figure for that year of 3176 (see GARF, f. 9492, op. 6, d. 14, 1. 29), and an RSFSR figure of 469 (see Report of B. Khlebnikov, head of Department of Court Statistics of Supreme Court of USSR, reproduced in A. N. Dugin, Neizvestnyi Gulag: Dokumenty i fakty (Moscow, 1992) as document 59).
Volkogonov says little about this meeting other than to describe the comments that Stalin scribbled on his agenda: ‘1) Who can make arrests?; 2) What should we do with the White Guards in the Economic Administration; 3) The prisoners need employment; 4) What should be done with those arrested?’. See D. Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire (HarperCollins, 1998), p. 43. This secret decree became famous when it was reproduced by Merle Fainsod from the Smolensk Party Archives to demonstrate ‘the ineffectiveness of the procuracy and judicial organs in checking arbitrary arrests and mass deportations of kulaks in the period 1930–1933’. See Merle Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 185.
See F. Benvenuti, ‘The “Reform” of the NKVD, 1934’, Europe-Asia Studies, 49, no. 6 (1997) 1044–5.
A. Papchinskii and M. Tumshis, Shchit, raskolotii mechom NKVD protiv VChK (Moscow, 2001), pp. 29–30. The book was written by two former KGB/FSB workers who had access to the security archives, but, as is typical with this genre, archival references are lacking.
Tukhachevskii had been arrested on 22 May 1937. He was sentenced by a special court of the Supreme Court on 12 June and executed the same day. The next meeting of the Politburo occurred on 15 June, but with Peters and Yaroslavskii representing KPK instead of Akulov and Yaroslavskii. Akulov appears to have kept a low profile during the 23–29 June TsK Plenum when Pyatnitskii allegedly refused to approve of the growing repression and when Kaminskii and Krupskaya appear to have supported him. Kaminskii was arrested on 25 June 1937. Pyatnitskii appears to have been arrested at some time between 7 June and 7 July 1937, but there is some confusion over this. Starkov claims that Pyatnitskii was arrested personally by Ezhov on 7 June; see Boris A Starkov, ‘Narkom Yezhov’, in Getty and Manning, Stalinist Terror, p. 36. Pyatnitskii’s wife and son claim that Pyatnitskii’s resistance occurred at the party plenum on 24 June following an attempt by Stalin to give plenipotentiary powers to Ezhov, but Pyatnitskii’s son thinks that some of the dates in his mother’s narrative may be incorrect; see Yuliya Sokolova, Tz dnevnika [1937–1938 gody] (s kommentariyami Igorya Pyatnitskogo)’, in Semen Samuilovoch Vilenskii, compiler, Dodnes’ tyagoteet, vyp. 1 (Moscow, 1989), pp. 263–85. Medvedev claims that Krupskaya and Kaminskii used this plenum to object to the arrest of Pyatnitskii, which by implication had already occurred; R. Medvedev, Let History Judge (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 199. Akulov was arrested on 23 July 1937 and sentenced to death by the military collegium of the Supreme Court on 29 October 1937.
V. Kovalev, Dva stalinskikh Narkoma (Moscow, 1995), p. 240. Like all of Kovalev’s works, these statements, based on privileged access to the documents, were not supported by professional archival references. In fact, in several key areas the oblast’ party second secretary took up this role. This would have avoided the first party secretary admitting the seniority of the local head of UNKVD.
In August 1933 the British Embassy reported a conversation between the veteran Russian reporter Cholerton and Jakov Podolskii of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs concerning the appointment of Akulov as procurator of the Soviet Union. Podolskii is reported to have said that ‘there were many old and influential Party members who had no love for the OGPU and could bring it to heel at any moment’. Cholerton is reported to have said that ‘this was all very well in theory, but experience showed that the OGPU, when threatened, had only to raise the cry of treachery or “the Revolution in danger” for its influence to be fully restored’. M. Carynnyk, L. Luciuk and B. Kordan, eds, The Foreign Office and the Famine: British Documents on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932–1933 (New York: The Limestone Press, 1988), p. 275. Unfortunately Cholerton proved to be correct.
While agreeing with Stephen Kotkin that the question of ‘how’ repression occurred is an important preliminary to understanding ‘why’ it occurred, I differ with him concerning his apparent lack of interest in the even more fundamental question of ‘what’ repression was. Kotkin writes as though he knows instinctively what the scale of repression was, and can thus determine who is exaggerating or underestimating its importance. Kotkin does not appear to have interrogated the basis of his own knowledge in this matter, and is prepared to criticise others for attempting to improve their understanding of this. Contrary to Kotkin’s opinion, an understanding of the scale and chronology of the different aspects of repression is of the utmost importance, and the question ‘what’ logically precedes those of ‘how’ and ‘why’. See S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1995), p. 285, and his ‘1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks’, Journal of Modern History, 70 (June 1998) 414.
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Wheatcroft, S.G. (2002). Towards Explaining the Changing Levels of Stalinist Repression in the 1930s: Mass Killings. In: Wheatcroft, S.G. (eds) Challenging Traditional Views of Russian History. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230506114_6
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