The Great Purge

Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Concerning The Soviet Thermidor and the Yezhovshchina, delivered to the 19th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik), 5 October 1949

This report is not intended to be the final word on the subject of counter-revolutionary political repression in the Soviet Union. Its findings are of a preliminary nature. Ongoing and additional work will continue to document the process of bureaucratic deformation in both the party and state, the abuse of power by politicians in the Stalin clique, the imprisonment, torture and murder of revolutionaries as part of the consolidation of power, and in the final act the snake of counterrevolution eating its own tail.

This report thus concerns what has been spoken of in whispers as the “Yezhov Phenomenon” (Yezhovshchina), the program of politicide against trade union leaders, Red Army officers, proletarian intellectuals and party members occurring under the leadership of former People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, who would himself be arrested, tortured into confessing a number of counter-revolutionary crimes and subsequently shot. We do not wish to excuse Yezhov’s own criminal culpability, but in our introductory remarks we here criticize the terminology.

The documents obtained from the Lubyanka archive, the archives of the General Secretary’s office, and the personal correspondence of the late General Secretary Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin complicate assigning singular blame to any one official. The whole upper echelon of the party Many in the party were an accessory to this process, though it must be noted that its murderous nature does mean most did so under duress.

This Commission’s Report is not an exercise in placing blame, criminal or otherwise. We believe that the time for such fratricidal bloodletting, if there ever was a time for it, has passed. We are concerned only with the truth.

The purpose of this report is to begin to set the record straight. In Section 1, we shall chronicle the rot in the core of the security service, and how it continued to fester following the retirement and death of Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinksy. In Section 2, we chronicle the consolidation of political power by the Stalin clique and the application of anti-Leninist methods to expel political opponents from the party and engage in a campaign of terror against mass organizations such as Workers’ Truth.

In Section 3 we shall turn to the so-called Yezhovshchina itself, a nationalist/chauvinist counterrevolution to consolidate the new class against the internationalization of the revolution. In Section 4 we begin the painful process of exoneration, to restore the honors and memory of some of the most prominent victims of repression. This list will be far from exhaustive; the work of many decades will be required to fully clear the names of all the innocent.

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§ 1

It can never be forgotten that its founder, Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, regarded the VCheKa as a “half-rotten” formation. It was a tool rapidly cobbled together during the dark days of 1919, and its rapidly expanding ranks were filled with men of the worst moral character. The Chekist task forces were brutal and indiscriminate. They paid little attention to whether their violence would advance the revolution, and frequently used their office to settle old scores or enrich themselves.

Dzerzhinksy’s solution was to shoot the worst Chekists and to push for the abolition of the death penalty in peace-time. Aptly, we found the same solution being undertaken lately.

Nonetheless, even with their reorganisation into the Joint-State Political Directorate (OGPU) in 1923 and the attempt at renormalization by Lenin’s government in the latter years, the rot had set in. Dzerzhinsky conducted a major purge of its membership (before, it must be emphasised, the word “purge” gained its murderous connotation). But this process was hampered by his ill-health, and Stalin’s patronage towards useful allies within the OGPU.

Shortly before his retirement in 1926, Dzerzhinsky finalised a report summarising the membership of the OGPU. In it, he concluded that many of the members had been opportunists and careerists. Official examinations demonstrated that their understanding and respect for communist principles was severely lacking. A great many were nationalists and Great Russia chauvinists.

Many had come under suspicion of embezzlement, misuse of official powers, and a number of petty crimes of aggrandizement. What might have been if Dzerzhinsky had completed his restructuring of the OGPU, we will never know. But it is clear that SovNarKom was well aware of the serious deficiencies.

In retirement, Dzerzhinsky continued to hold some influence in the party and the OGPU. His relationship with Stalin was increasingly strained. But after he passed in July 1927 from a second heart attack, the OGPU came fully under control of the Stalin clique.[…]

§ 2

The process of consolidation of power by the Stalin clique begins in the factional struggle of the 1920s. In brief, the defeat of the revolutionary wave in Europe in general, particularly in the German Republic, the defeat of the Red Army in the field by the nationalist regime in Poland, and the devastation of the Soviet working class in the civil war forced a general revolutionary retreat. The Party was forced to plot a course that reflected this reality.

After the Kronstadt Tragedy, Lenin became greatly pessimistic and his health deteriorated. Simultaneously, the government of the Russian FSSR, and later the All-Union government, implemented the New Economic Policy, a social democratic and capitalistic compromise to facilitate economic development absent an international revolution.

This policy had its immediate dissidents, and Lenin’s government and the Party were forced to triangulate between the Workers’ Opposition in the rank-and-file, which agitated against the bureaucratization of the party, the peasantry and petit-bourgeoisie on the Party’s right flank, and the advocates of crash industrialization such as L.D. Trotsky in the Left Opposition.

It is in this scene that I.V. Stalin begins to consolidate his position as General Secretary, transforming the office from chief administrator of the party’s organisational affairs to the de facto chief of the party’s ideological line and the master of the Soviet government. Stalin took the centre, cultivating his allies through control of party membership and progressively isolating rivals.

His leadership style was conservative. Stalin would tail-end discussions in the Party and government, giving himself the last-word and carefully taking the most defensible ground. In this period, he sided with Bukharin and the so-called Right, supporting the NEP, seeking to normalise relations with the bourgeois world during this period of revolutionary retreat.

But simultaneously, Stalin also intensified the factional war through his proxies, and increases the repression of dissenting voices; first against the Workers’ Opposition. The civil war’s temporary ban on factions is resurrected well past its shelf-life to serve as a tool of maintaining compliance in the party.

A network of patronage was developed in the bureaucracy and Party apparatchiks, a vast pyramid of allegiance and tutelage that culminates with Stalin at its summit. Opponents of this process are isolated and ridiculed by a press that Stalin has gained increasing control over. Finally, in 1928-9, the dissident factions were expelled from the party, and some were imprisoned for “anti-Soviet activity”.

Stalin’s “Great Break”, the shift from the NEP to co-opting the militarised crash industrialisation programme of the Left Opposition, can no longer be effectively opposed by Stalin’s estranged allies on the Right.

Opposition to the programme was treated as counterrevolutionary anti-Soviet behavior. The once restrained OGPU is now at war with the Soviet working-class and peasantry. The repressive apparatus is elevated to a full People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD).

The program of “Dekulakization” would serve as the dress rehearsal of the despotism to come. In the following subsections, we shall cover the details of each feature of the plan. In brief, the “kulak” was an exaggerated enemy, the rich and spiteful peasant grown fat on the NEP. A few such men existed, for sure. We know because a fair number became successful spetsy in the sovkhozy and kolkhozy. The ordinary peasants were the primary victims of this process.

Resistance to collectivisation was met with violence. Travel was restricted by internal passports. Hundreds of thousands of resistors were arrested and deported to forced labor camps. There, they joined union leaders who resisted the militarisation of labor.

In the cities, idleness was criminalised. The working day and week were both lengthened. Those who complained would receive harassment by the police or even arrest. To lose one’s job would invariably mean being sent to a labor camp.[…]

§ 3

The Yezhovshchina began in early November 1936, with the arrest of former United Opposition members Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. An extensively prepared and rehearsed show trial began on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. To avoid complicating relations with the UASR, the pre-trial plan was changed from showcasing a “Trotskyite” conspiracy to one placing Zinoviev and Kamenev in the spotlight as leaders of an anti-Soviet fifth column.

They were ideal victims; not well liked and having few international supporters. The result of the carefully prepared media coverage was the intensification of the climate of paranoia in the Soviet Union. This trial would be the ice breaker for the campaign of terror that would follow, which we more properly call the Soviet Thermidor.

Like the Thermidorian Reaction in the revolutionary French Republic, this period of counterrevolution cloaked itself in the ideals of the revolution against imagined internal enemies, and claimed far more victims than the radicals of the left factions ever did.

We do not need to speculate on motives behind this. Stalin’s papers have been declassified by this commission for the preparation of this report. Stalin, L.M. Kaganovich and V.M. Molotov in several Politburo sessions considered the purge a war measure, eliminating potential fifth columnists prior to the inevitable war with Germany.

Left unstated was the role the purges would play in annihilating all opposition with the Party to Stalin’s clique. The next trials were more secretive. The majority of the “Old Bolsheviks”, men who’d held important political positions while Lenin still lived, were arrested, tortured into signing “confessions”, and then were either executed or died in a forced labor camp. Many others, like M.A. Spiriandovna, A.M. Kollontai, and K.B. Radek, were forced into internal or external exile.

The confessions were extracted through the most extreme methods of physical and psychological torture: beatings, drownings, sleep deprivation, sensory overload, mock executions and, threats against family.

From there, the purge would ripple throughout the entirety of the Party and larger Soviet society. A key feature of this process was the forced denunciation. Men and women brought in for interrogation would be tortured until they gave up “co-conspirators”. The NKVD three-man commissions responsible for this would chase each red herring like rabid hounds, and like all inquisitors, never met an innocent man.

It is a mistake to treat this process as a singular master plan devised by Stalin. He was undoubtedly responsible, but the number of guilty men is far too numerous to count. In early references, the climate of paranoia and mass repression spiraling out of control would be euphemistically referred to as the Yezhov Phenomenon, a politically safe way to discuss it after the man who headed most of the period’s repression was himself denounced and executed as a fifth columnist.

In this regard, we only object to the “Yezhov” in “Yezhovshchina.” It was a phenomenon that defied even the efforts of Stalin, master of the Soviet state, to control and direct it[…]

Of particular note is the “Case of the Trotskyite Anti-Soviet Military Organisation”, the first major trial in the long and bloody purge of the military. Unlike the other trials of major figures in this period, it was conducted in complete secrecy. The confessions were obtained quickly and sloppily, and some, such as those of Marshal M.N. Tukhachevsky were presented to the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court still stained with blood.

The axe fell on the competent and incompetent alike in the Red Army. But the undoubted effect was to force junior officers to assume levels of responsibility they were unprepared for, with a majority of Soviet officers above the rank of major being dismissed, and many of them shot. It also created a climate of fear that paralyzed innovation and training. Many units performed no exercises at all during the largest expansion of the Soviet military, for fear that the damage to equipment might led to them being denounced as saboteurs.

There can be no greater condemnation of this violence than the fact that some of our greatest heroes of the Great Patriotic War were tortured by the NKVD and ultimately only spared because they stubbornly refused to confess; M.V. Frunze and K.K. Rokossovsky most notable among their legion of honor[…]

§ 4

The total list of victims of this murder is still being counted. Our preliminary estimates are between 300,000 to 500,000 directly murdered by the security apparatus and a further 200,000 dying of privation in GULag. Not less than one million were imprisoned. This, it must be stressed, is an incommplete estimate. The files of the NKVD operations pursuant to Order No. 00447 (the “Anti-Kulak Operation”), Order No. 00485 (the “Polish Operation”), and still others yet to be known to this commission are still being analyzed.

Nonetheless, in general we recommend a full exoneration and rehabilitation of everyone convicted in violation of Soviet procedural law, which has always prohibited torture and confession. This process will take some time.

In the interim, specifically conclude that the victims of the major trials are to be fully exonerated upon the acceptance of this report. This would mean the sixteen victims of the 7 November 1936 “Trial of the Zinoviev-Kamenev Terrorist Centre,” the seventeen victims of the 23 January 1937 “Case of the Anti-Soviet Fifth Column”, the fifteen victims of the 21 August 1937 “Case of the Internationalist-Adventurist Anti-Soviet Conspiracy”, and the twelve victims of the 1 December 1937 “Case of the Trotskyite Anti-Soviet Military Organization” be immediately rehabilitated and restored of all honors.

This commission ends this report by echoing one of N.I. Bukharin’s last notes to Stalin: “Koba, why do you need me to die?” *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation