Stalin's Paranoid Military Purges - The Great Terror | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1938 Part 4 of 4 - YouTube (1)
It is one of the most self-destructive series of events in Soviet history. It is an escalation
of the already oppressive, suppressive, murderous behaviour of Josef Stalin's regime. It is
a parody of justice and a disgrace even to Communism. It pits friends against friends,
spouses against spouses, children against parents, and destroys the social fabric of
the Soviet Union. It is a sign that Stalin is not only ruthless, but pathologically paranoid.
It will cost hundreds of thousands of lives over mere months, and its consequences will
waste millions more. It is Stalin's great terror and military purges.
Welcome to Between-2-Wars a chronological summary of the interwar years, covering all
facets of life, the uncertainty, hedonism, and euphoria, and ultimately humanity's descent
into the darkness of the Second World War. I'm Indy Neidell.
We saw in our episode on the Holodomor that Stalin is willing to have perceived enemies
or 'undesirables' killed by the millions. Political terror is a cornerstone of 1930s
Soviet politics, and as historian Hiroaki Kuromiya will later describe it, 'it was a
policy of extraordinarily intense, concentrated and purposeful killing of, at least, hundreds
of thousands of people.' This is not limited to specific operations directed at particular
groups like the Ukrainians. Hordes of Soviet citizens and soldiers get caught up in the
hysteria and are sentenced to death by Soviet courts or purged from the army.
The terror and the purges impact the entire Soviet community, and it trickles down from
the most high-profile people in the army to the most modest farmer.
Because it isn't just big names like Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the number one military man
in the whole nation since the revolution, and his colleagues who are killed on suspicion
of being 'hidden enemies'. It's anybody. Okay, purges already became a thing in the
Soviet military in the 1920s. They were used to 'improve ideological conformity', and to
get rid of anyone who didn't fit into the heavily politicized Red Army. In fact, most
people living in the Soviet Union are by now already kinda used to this practice. So when
the Great Terror takes a hold of the Soviet Union in 1937, many ordinary soldiers and
officers see it as their duty to report anyone who might be unfit for duty or could be a
threat to the Soviet Ideology. But while Soviet History has many twists and turns, with revolutionaries
and counter-revolutionaries left and right, the events of 1937 really stand out.
In the summer of 1936, a group of alleged Trotskyist counter-revolutionaries- including
Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinovyev, two of the original seven leaders of the Bolshevik revolution-
are arrested and charged with conspiring to murder high-ranking communist party members.
But though the Red Army is supposed to keep a check on its own members, it is the NKVD
which 'discovers' the conspiracy, and with that, the trust in the army's ability to cleanse
itself from undesirables vanishes. This is the starting point of a thorough NKVD sweep
through the Red Army Ranks. It's well illustrated by a letter sent to one of the most prominent
Soviet political and military leaders, Kliment Voroshilov. The letter is from his friend,
military commander Semyon Budyonny. 'It seems to me that it is necessary to check especially
carefully people in the army, since in the ranks we see people from the command, the
officers and political workers, who on the one hand have careerist tendencies and on
the other a tendency to consider serious questions not from the point of view of the state but
from a narrowly personal point of view […] and also people who easily give in to any kind
of influence, in particular counter-revolutionary.' Voroshilov forwards this letter, effectively
damning the red Army's Military and Political officers, to both Stalin and influential Soviet
Bureaucrat Nikolai Yezhov.
In September 1936, Yezhov replaces Genrikh Yagoda as the new head of the NKVD on Stalin's
orders. This is where things really start to escalate, as Yezhov is prone to conspiracy
theories and even keen to make up his own. Also, he doesn't really care that much about
having sufficient evidence before putting someone on trial - or he just has it fabricated.
The number of show-trials and convictions rises steeply. The scope of the investigations
into Trotsky-conspiracies is widened, and the arrests grow in number.
Furthermore, any industrial accident or output shortfall is explained as sabotage - meaning
that many workers go down for this, especially since Stalin's five years plans have upset
the industrial and agricultural sectors. People who had opposed the current leaders back in
the early1930s or the 20s are apprehended retroactively, and political enemies are taken
care of. Yagoda himself is executed in 1938 after being found guilty of treason and protecting
Trotskyists.
But though Yezhov's appointment causes an escalation of terror, it is always Stalin
who has the last word, but they are a deadly combination.
When Yezhov writes to Stalin in September 1936 that he believes that 'there must still
be Trotskyist officers undiscovered in the Red Army', everyone in the army who is even
slightly associated with any undesired thought, movement, action or individual is arrested.
Furthermore, 'guilt by association' is just as deadly, as the friends, family and intimate
colleagues of an arrestee are easily taken in along with them. People often report their
friends or co-workers to get rid of any negative association with them that might cause trouble
in the future. Also, the more people you report, the more the authorities would think that
you are 'one of the good guys', right? And you can't just lay low and wait for all of
this to blow over either, as' doing nothing' implies that you have something to hide. With
someone like Yezhov at the steering wheel who cares little for evidence or motive, being
denounced means that often you will be sent straight to a gulag.
And if you think it doesn't get any worse than this, you're mistaken. With the appointment
of Yezhov and the trial and execution of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, things are only really getting
started.
See, if even some of the Red Army highest leaders, like Tukhachevsky, are involved in
a conspiracy of THAT magnitude, then undoubtedly many, many others in the army below them are
complicit. And those leaders were literal celebrities, everyone in the army knew who
they were and many officers had in some way ties to them. And then those officers had
links to the ordinary rank-and-file soldiers, so suspicion trickles down through the entire
army. A Red Army newspaper article of June 14, 1937 'calls for Red Army organizations
to help the NKVD find conspirators and subversives'. Yezhov and Voroshilov add another message
on the 21st, urging their men to step forward while promising that, even if they are implicated
themselves, they would not be arrested. In practice, the ones that do come forward are
just as likely to be executed. In any case, there is no stopping it now, and though many
might actually believe that their superiors are implicated in the conspiracy, there are
those who abuse the opportunity to further their own careers or to settle personal feuds.
Distrust sweeps through the ranks, and thousands are dismissed or put on trial - many executed.
But if there ever was a danger here to the Soviet Union, removing that threat proves
to be a lot more complicated.
Police and NKVD lists keep expanding as investigations are made. Stalin is not always
clear in his directives, and his subordinates have to guess what it is he wants. Furthermore,
the Soviet Union has 170 million inhabitants in 1937. When the state asks people to report
any 'suspicious behavior', the amount of work involved in processing this is off the charts.
They are using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. This does have advantages, though. It is a
big-time propaganda project as well, as fear becomes a driving force behind a pro-Soviet
mentality, and any loyalty beyond the state is to be destroyed, even commitment to family.
Collateral damage is inevitable. There is no 'real' or tangible evidence to suggest
a coup or invasion is at hand. Instead, the enemy is always 'hidden' and 'unknown', making
every single person a potential suspect. I mean, what if the one person you didn't
kill turns out to be the spider in the web of a lethal conspiracy against Stalin and
the Soviet Union?
In 1937-38 alone, close to 681.000 people are sentenced to death by the so-called NKVD
Troikas, a three-headed special council of the Military tribunals from the Soviet Interior
Ministry that uses simplified procedures that do not give the defendants rights. 635.000
more are sent to prisons and Gulag Camps, where many more die performing heavy manual
labor. And these numbers are no guesses either. These are bureaucratically recorded court-mandated
sentences for 'political crimes' - not the result of random, chaotic killings. But just
to get a grasp of the scale, 91% of the death sentences passed by the Soviet courts between
1921 and 1940 are passed in only two years, 1937 and 1938. Hundreds of thousands more
are sent to Gulags for other criminal offences, making the total of prisoners sent to gulags
in 1937-1938 1.36 million - resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands more.
The scale of it all is just too large to really do the victims any justice by remembrance.
The ones that do make it into the history books are those most prominent Soviet political
and military leaders, including eventually four of the original members of the 1917 November
Revolution Politburo. They too, are executed in the purges. Many others who had acquired
political renown in Soviet History are removed and often murdered. Additionally, multitudes
of scientists, artists, writers, and other intellectuals - at least those who were fortunate
enough to make it to 1937 in the first place, are considered to be un-Soviet and are also
killed or sent to the Gulags. The same applies to 'Ex-Kulaks', the Orthodox Clergy, and ethnic
minorities such as Poles. As for the military, it is decimated by these purges. Almost literally.
Some 35,000 officers are discharged during in 1937 and 1938. 11,000 of them will eventually
return to the ranks, though. Roughly 10.000 more are arrested, of which many are executed.
The total number of Red Army casualties is much higher though, as these estimates do
not include regular soldiers. They do however, include a majority of the top Generals, army
commanders, admirals, and army commissars.
On 17 November 1938, Stalin calls for the end of the purge. It's intensity slowly but
steadily decreases over the rest of the year.
Also in November 1938, Voroshilov writes how 'the enemy has lost his eyes and ears in our
ranks', and how the number of purged military personnel is 'fairly impressive'. Sure, he
said, there might still be dangerous people in the Red Army ranks, but they should be
found carefully, and not by, quote, 'shooting from the hip'. This suggests that Voroshilov
too thought that the purges were too carelessly executed and that many innocent and in fact
essential people died. And the fact is that a vast wealth of experience was destroyed
when large numbers of Red Army officers were executed and that many inexperienced new ones
took their place.
The final wave of execution is designed to create distance from the terror. In an attempt
to wash his hands, Stalin has Yezhov arrested on April 10, 1939. Reaping what he sowed,
Yezhov is charged with incompetence, collaboration with the Germans, and homosexuality. He is
found guilty of treason and will be shot February 4, 1940.
But the big question that remains is: why did Stalin do all this?
There was no military-fascist conspiracy- you know, the one that got Tukhachevsky killed.
The Trotskyist, fascist, and counter-revolutionary plots too were mainly just figments of paranoia
and distrust. 'Evidence' was, in most cases, the product of forced confessions under torture
or was created by NKVD agents, so while the whole country fell into a culture of purging,
