The Great Terror

The origins of the Terror 

Andrei Vyshinsky, 
chief prosecutor at the show trials.

See here for a comprehensive account.

‘The party can never be mistaken’, said Rubashov. ‘You and I can make a mistake. Not the Party. The Party, comrade, is more than you and I and a thousand others like you and I. The Party is the embodiment of the revolutionary idea in history. History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she flows toward her goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which she carries and the corpses of the drowned. History knows her way. She makes no mistakes. He who had not absolute faith in History does not belong in the party’s ranks.’ Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940)

The Great Terror: an overview

By 1928 Stalin had defeated the Left Opposition. Trotsky was in exile and his former supporters, Zinoviev and Kamenev, had been humiliated. With his triumph, the atmosphere in the Soviet Union changed from one of relative toleration to one of fear. Stalinist leadership exercised a monopoly control over the press and radio. No voice was raised in public to criticise the leader or to contradict him on a statement of fact (even when he asserted, for example, that living standards were rising in the winter of 1932-3). Stalin and his associates were mounting a huge cultural revolution that aimed to refashion society from top to bottom. This involved waging war on customary ideas such as religion. It was important to manipulate public opinion, and the unmasking of traitors and wreckers provided a suffering population with a target for hatred. It also provided a convenient explanation for the many mistakes involved in the Five Year Plans. 

Stalin had none of Hitler's gifts as a performer. He also faced a bigger problem that Hitler in that he had to communicate with a much larger country, with lower standards of education. One way of communicating was to use show trials as a form of political theatre built round confessions extracted beforehand with the aid of physical and psychological torture. These trials were given maximum publicity by press and radio, including the international press, who were often deceived.

Stalin was paranoid but he had much to be paranoid about. There were many who hated him: Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, nationalists, the religious and up to three million émigrés, who longed for the collapse of the Soviet Union. The collectivisation of agriculture was to add many more.

The estimated number of victims of his purges ranges between 180,000 and a million. However there is much dispute about the figures and there will never be a precise number. (What, for example, about the children of the 'enemies of the people' who died in the state-run orphanages, or the elderly parents who died for lack of care?) It has been estimated that one in three families lost a member during this period. 


The ‘Right Opposition'

Nikolai Bukharin,  one of the most celebrated 
of Stalin's victims
(executed, 1938).

After his victory over the Left, Stalin turned to his former allies, the ‘Rightists’, the supporters of NEP within the Politburo: Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov and Mikhail Tomsky, chairman of the Soviet trade unions. Bukharin was the editor of Izvestiya, head of the Comintern, and the party’s Marxist theoretician. Stalin had treated him as his political equal. However, in July 1928 Bukharin took the politically disastrous step of opening secret discussions with some of the defeated Left Opposition leaders. Kamenev later informed the police of the meeting, including the fact that Bukharin called Stalin, 

Genghis Khan, an unscrupulous intriguer who sacrifices everything else to the preservation of power. 

The industrial trials

An early sign of what was to follow can be seen in the first of the show trials, held between May and July 1928 when fifty-three engineers and ‘industrial specialists’, including several foreigners working in the north Caucasus town of Shakhty, were charged with deliberate sabotage. This was the first of a series of show trials of bourgeois experts in which the prosecution alleged intervention by foreign capitalist powers and the accused confessed their guilt and offered circumstantial accounts of their conspiracies. 


Officially the secret police, now named the OGPU (United State Political Administration) under Genrikh Yagoda was in charge, but in reality, Stalin was both accuser and judge. The trials were reported verbatim in the papers, which ran the headline ‘Death to the Wreckers’. The presiding judge was Andrei Vyshinsky.  

Genrikh Yagoda, Director of OGPU and 
NKVD from 1934-6
(executed in 1938).

The arrested men were beaten into confessing imaginary crimes and five were sentenced to be shot. They were scapegoats for the many inefficiencies, the food shortages and transport and power breakdowns caused by the breakneck pace of industrialisation.  

The Shakhty trial was followed by the trial in November- December 1930 of members of the so-called ‘Industrial Party’, led by Professor Ramzin, a famous specialist in boiler-making and director of the Moscow Thermo-Technical Institute. Five of the eight accused were condemned to death though the sentences were subsequently commuted.

OGPU and the Gulag

The period 1930-34 saw the expansion of the police state in the hands of OGPU. Its head, Yagoda, reported directly to Stalin and was responsible for his personal security. Its officers were the most highly paid and privileged of the Soviet officials, but no more exempt than anyone else from punishment - they, like their victims, lived in a state of terror. 

Map of the Gulag.

The largest division of the OGPU was what became known as the GULAG (Chief Administration of Camps). It was an entire subcontinent or, as described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an archipelago, a network of penal institutions inhabited by slaves who made up some ten percent of the Soviet workforce. Recent analysis suggests that the numbers held in them were between two and four million (fluctuating, because people were constantly dying and being replaced). At first most of these camps were situated in the remote northern area of the White Sea but soon they were set up in other regions, mainly Siberia and the Far East. Arrests of alleged opponents of the regime were stepped up and their leaders were shot. 

Many distinguished intellectuals ended up in the Gulag. In 1934 Osip Mandelstam read out an anti-Stalin poem at a private soirée. The listeners included an informer. He was arrested on 5 May in the same year. On 5 May 1938 he was again arrested and charged with counter-revolutionary activities. On 5 August he was sentenced to five years in ‘correction camps’.  He died in the Soviet Far East on 27 December. 

Nadezhda Mandelstam
chronicler of the Terror.

In her memoirs, his widow, Nadezhda, was to describe the experience of living through these terrible years in two books, neither of which was published in the Soviet Union: Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1977). (Nadezhda means 'hope' in Russian.)

Workers in a Kolyma goldmine.

See here for more information on the notorious Kolyma camps in the Far East.

At least 3.5 million and possibly 10 million people became slave labourers on some of the huge Stalin projects in the White Sea and other regions. Some were criminals, others political prisoners. 

The key book on this terrible period is Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (Penguin, 2003). She gives the number of deaths as 2,749,163 (p. 520), but immediately qualifies it. The Gulag camps were not death camps like Treblinka. When the secret police wanted to kill people, they did so secretly in forests (and three-quarters of a million might have been killed in this way). Twenty-thousand Polish officers were killed in the Katyn massacres of 1940, the most notorious of these forest killings. 

Convicts at work on the Belomor (White Sea Canal) project 
in 1932, a massive white elephant that might have
cost a quarter of a million lives.

The Seventeenth Party Congress 

The Seventeenth Party Congress was held in January-February 1934 in the wake of these purges. It appeared to signal the triumph of Stalin. The Congress at the time was described as the 'Congress of Victors' (by which was meant that it celebrated the economic transformation) but it might more appropriately be called the ‘Congress of the Condemned', as Stalin's former enemies were now making their final appearance on the public stage. 

Of the 1,966 delegates to the 'Congress of Victors', 1,108 were to be executed. Ninety-eight of the 139 members of the Central Committee delegates were to be shot. 

The murder of Kirov

Sergei Kirov His death intensified the terror,
though the murder might not have been political.

On 1 December 1934 Sergei Kirov, the head of the Leningrad party and a friend though potential critic of Stalin, was shot dead at the party headquarters, the Smolny Institute. The assassin, Leonid Nikolayev, a thirty-year-old party member, was probably annoyed at Kirov’s dalliance with his wife. In 1956 Khrushchev hinted at Stalin's involvement, but no incriminating documents have been uncovered. The murder gave Stalin the opportunity to unleash his terror, designed to root out all oppositionists within the party. 

As soon as he received the news of Kirov's death, Stalin issued his emergency decree of 1 December. This directed investigating agencies to speed up the cases of those accused of preparing acts of terror and it ordered the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, formerly OGPU) to carry out death sentences as soon as they were passed.  

In the middle of December 1934 Zinoviev and Kamenev, twice before arrested and expelled from the party, and twice rehabilitated, were re-arrested in Moscow.  By the time the indictment had been drawn up in mid-January 1935, they had been joined by nine more former leading members of the party, who had been expelled in 1927. At their trial and admitted political and moral responsibility. On 16 January Zinoviev was given ten years, Kamenev five. Six hundred and sixty-three former supporters of the Leningrad Opposition were rounded up and exiled to eastern Siberia.

Further harsh laws were introduced in 1935. One decreed that all family members of ‘enemies of the Motherland’ were automatically guilty and all children over the age of twelve were liable to prosecution. A law of June 1935 laid down the death penalty for attempting to cross the Soviet border into Poland or the Baltic States.

In the first phase of the terror, the operations were directed by Yagoda, now Commissar General of the NKVD. The NKVD officers were an elite corps, with their own special uniform, quarters and privileges. 

The show trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev

The sentences handed down to Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1935 did not satisfy Stalin. On 29 June 1936 a secret message went from the Secretariat to local bodies alleging the discovery of the ‘terrorist activities of the Trotskyist-Zinovievite block’. In August 1936, after months of careful preparations and rehearsals in secret police prisons, Zinoviev, Kamenev and fourteen others were put on trial again. 

This Trial of the Sixteen (or the trial of the ‘Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre) was the first Moscow Show Trial and set the stage for subsequent show trials where Old Bolsheviks confessed to increasingly elaborate and monstrous crimes, including espionage, poisoning, sabotage, and so on (including the murder of Kirov). The trial coincided with a violent press campaign demanding 'death to the traitors'. Hundreds of resolutions in factories and kolkhozes called for them to be shot. 

The trial was held in open court with foreign journalists present. Most of the defendants confessed to the murder of Kirov and the attempted assassination of Stalin. Kamenev said:

My life has been spared twice but there is a limit to the magnanimity of the proletariat. 

Zinoviev, too, summed up his descent into 'error.' 

Here is an extract from the closing speech of the State Prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky:

Shoot these rabid dogs. Death to this gang who hide their ferocious teeth, their eagle claws, from the people! Down with that vulture Trotsky, from whose mouth a bloody venom drips, putrefying the great ideals of Marxism... Down with these abject animals! Let's put an end once and for all to these miserable hybrids of foxes and pigs, these stinking corpses! Let's exterminate the mad dogs of capitalism, who want to tear to pieces the flower of our new Soviet nation! Let's push the bestial hatred they bear our leaders back down their own throats!

They were found guilty on August 24, 1936, removed to the Lubyanka prison, taken down into the cellars and shot. Their last written words survive in secret files held by the former State Archive of the October Revolution. Yagoda collected the bullets as mementos. The few relatives who could be traced were sent to the camps or shot. One of the victims was Kamenev's seventeen-year-old son.

Foreign observers were divided on how to interpret the trial. Many who saw the Soviet Union as the only defence against Fascism (this was the time of the Spanish Civil War) were inclined to believe that former revolutionaries might plot assassinations. 

Throughout 1936 there were purges of ‘the Trotskyite, Zinovievite, Counter-revolutionary Bloc’ and constant calls for vigilance against hidden enemies. Many were rounded up and sent to camps, and 5000 of them were shot in the camps after the Zinoviev executions. One of the victims was Yagoda, dismissed in September 1936 for being too lenient.

The Yezhovshchina

This is the name given to the two years in which Yagoda's replacement, Nikolai Yezhov, was head of the NKVD before he was replaced by Beria in December 1938. They were the two most dreadful peacetime years in the history of the Soviet Union, during which, according to documents released after the fall of Communism, 681,692 were executed. Yezhov was a party careerist, a former factory worker with little formal education. 

Nikolai Yezhov Yagoda's replacement,  'the bloody dwarf';
He inherited from him the
bullets that had killed Zinoviev and Kamenev.
(he was executed, 1940).

Once in charge of the NKVD, he proceeded to quadruple staff salaries and ensure that they had the best apartments, rest homes and hospitals^. NKVD special departments now functioned in all large enterprises and educational establishments, and a huge network of informers pervaded the whole country, with people fighting for the right to inform. The new generation of Yezhov functionaries quickly mastered the use of torture. The Sukhanovo prison he set up (and where he was later to be imprisoned himself) was the most terrible in the whole system.

The Military Trial

On 11 June the Civil War hero, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, and other top military figures were branded as traitors and shot; he had signed a confession with a blood-stained hand after a horrific beating. 

Mikhail Tukhachevsky,'the Red Napoleon',
a brilliant general who
would have been very useful in 1941.

This was followed by a slaughter of the top brass, including the shooting of all eight admirals - this at a time when the USSR was threatened by Germany and Japan.

The show trial of 'the twenty-one'

The last great show trial opened on 12 March, 1938. The purpose of this trial was to draw together publicly all the different types of opposition and present them as branches of a single conspiracy: the 'bloc of the right wingers and Trotskyites'. The indictment included every crime in the counter-revolutionary calendar from espionage for foreign powers and assassination to plotting the dismemberment of the USSR and a return to capitalism. 

Bukharin, the most prominent of the twenty-one accused, was cast as the archfiend; he was accused of having plotted in 1918 to murder Lenin and Stalin and seize power. He is reported to have confessed, after refusing for three months, because of threats to kill his young wife and newborn son. His strategy in the dock was to accept a general responsibility for all the crimes of the 'bloc' but to disclaim each special case. His 'guilty' plea was equivocal.

I plead guilty to being one of the leaders of this 'Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites'… I plead guilty to the sum total of crimes committed by this counter-revolutionary organization, whether or not I knew of, whether or not I took part in, any particular act... For three months I refused to say anything.  Then I began to testify.  Why?  Because while in prison I made a revaluation of my entire past. For you ask yourself: 'If you must die, what are you dying for?'

For an analysis of the psychology behind this type of reasoning, see Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon.

From his prison cell, he wrote Stalin a note, 

Koba, why is my death necessary for you? 

The verdict was announced on 13 March and he was executed on the 15th. His wife, Anna Larina, spent twenty years in the Gulag. On her release she devoted the rest of her life to clearing his name.

Yezhov replaced by Beria

By this time, the NKVD itself could no longer keep up with the numbers. It has been estimated that roughly one and a half million people were seized by the NKVD in 1937-8. Only around two hundred thousand were eventually released. After the summer of 1938 the intensity slackened though the repression continued. 

On 23 November 1938 the Great Terror came to a sudden end when  Yezhov was replaced by Stalin’s fellow-Georgian, Lavrenti Beria. 

Lavrenti Beria, an exceptionally brutal interrogator 
but more self-disciplined that Yezhov
(executed after Stalin's death).

Yezhov was arrested in April 1939 and tried and executed in February 1940. Beria was a brutal man, but his was a more stable character than Yezhov's. Arbitrary arrest and torture continued, but the frantic atmosphere of the Yezhovshchina was over.

There remained one final prominent victim. On 20 March Trotsky, then living in Mexico, was attacked with an ice pick by Ramon Mercader, and died the following day.

The Purges: a summary

1. One explanation for the Purges lies in the nature of Marxist-Leninism – the inner logic of absolute rule and utopianism. But there was no single cause.
2. For Stalin, terror was not simply a response to an emergency but a permanent formula of rule. His paranoid tendencies made it easier for him to satisfy both his political and his psychological needs. The scenario of conspiracy and treachery in which hundreds of NKVD investigators were employed in fabricating indictments was a remodelling of history to suit his personal myth and his political needs. He needed to stay safe and that meant putting others in danger. His actions were not those of a madman, but were part of a ruthlessly consistent logic. 

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