Restoring the Balance between the NKVD and the Communist Party
The question of the relationship between the Communist Party and the NKVD is among the most controversial matters in the study of the mass operations. The Odessa materials testify to the fact that the disturbance of the balance between the party and the NKVD that occurred at the highest levels was not only as the result of the appointment of NKVD leaders to high posts in the party and state.77 Indeed, one of the most significant results of the Great Terror was the imbalance “below,” where NKVD workers of the middle and even lowest ranks of state security came to perceive themselves as more important than the party organizations.
In this, they followed Ezhov, who already in mid-1937 bragged: “I am the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs; I am the Secretary of the Central Committee; I am the chair of Party Control. If anyone tries to complain about me, where will you go? To the NKVD? I have my own people here.... To the Central Committee? I will receive a report immediately. And in Party Control, I’m the Chair after all, how could any matter be decided without me. You see how it turns out, you can’t cast a stone without hitting Ezhov [kuda ne kin’, vse Ezhov].... Internal and external affairs are in my hands now.... The [NKVD] chiefs on the local level presently have immense power; in many places they are now the leading figures [pervye liudi].”78 During the Great Terror, the NKVD became an organization that effectively terrorized the local party committees, became the main power base, and took charge of selections of cadres for party and state offices. In November 1938, the center pulled back the NKVD’s punitive and cadre-building duties. It was necessary to visibly demonstrate to local NKVD actors the extent to which the acceptable bounds of their behavior had been narrowed, particularly with respect to the party organizations.This is not meant to suggest that Chekists ever left the purview of the higher party leadership altogether. The operations of the Great Terror were tightly controlled by the center. Nevertheless, the Chekists’ freedom of action was vast (to the point of the arbitrary inflation of quotas for executions, as in the Turkmen SSR).79 The course of the terror at the local level took on its own particular dynamics, particularly considering the unrelenting demands and pressure from Moscow. Testimony about “accomplices”—the naming of names—was beaten out of suspects. That fed a chain reaction of arrests. This was especially widespread with respect to members of the party-state elite.80 For their part, the party committees undertook the ideological and propagandistic facilitation of the Great Terror. Siberia and the Ukrainian, Belarusian, Georgian, and Azerbaijani republics each had leaders like N. S. Khrushchev, P. K. Ponomarenko, L. P. Beria, M. J. Baghirov, I. I. Alekseev, L. N. Gusev, and A. S. Shcherbakov who actively organized repression. Despite the role of these party leaders, following November 1938, all of them participated in the punishment of the NKVD “perpetrators of excesses.”
That the highest party leaders perceived a serious danger in this developing imbalance is evidenced by the 1 December 1938 resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, “On the Order of Sanctioning Arrests,” and the NKVD USSR decree, “On the prohibition of the recruitment [of secret agents] from several categories of workers of Party, Soviet, economic, professional, and public [obshchestvennye] organizations” affirmed by the Politburo of the Central Committee on 26 December 1938.81 Both documents sought to protect party members from the threat from the state security organs. Regardless, until the very end of the Stalin period, the party-state elite would remain a target of the operative work of the NKGB-MGB organs, subject to surveillance, recruitment, provocation, and selective repression.82
The story of Beria’s Purge serves as a highly visible confirmation that the main victim of the Great Terror was the ordinary population of the USSR.
In regulating the situation and disciplining the NKVD, authorities did not seek to re-establish justice with respect to ordinary citizens. Even the conviction of NKVD cadres, never mind their expulsion from the organs of state security, remained an internal administrative affair and did not lead to the re-examination and cancellation of sentences in the vast majority of the cases that had been led by convicted Chekists. The campaign to “restore” socialist legality had only a marginal effect on the great bulk of its victims. The Soviet people stood merely as a peripheral beneficiary of the Stalin-Beria campaign to discipline the NKVD. Notes
| 1. |
Nikita Petrow, “Die Kaderpolitik des NKWD 1936–1939,” in Stalinscher Terror 1934–1941: Eine Forschungsbilanz, ed. Wladislaw Hedeler (Berlin: W. Hedeler, 2002), 31. See also the introduction to this book for a discussion of the statistics.
| 2. |
To best comprehend the scale of Beria’s purge, it is worth comparing it with Ezhov’s purge of “Iagoda-ites” (Igodintsy). From October 1936 until the middle of August of 1938, 2,273 NKVD SSSR staff were arrested. See N. V. Petrov and K. V. Skorkin, eds., Kto rukovodil NKVD, 1934–1941: Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven’ia, 1999), 501; and Petrow, “Die Kaderpolitik,” 29.
| 3. |
Petrow, “Die Kaderpolitik,” 31.
| 4. |
For more detail, see A. I. Savin, “Etnizatsiia stalinizma? ‘Natsional’nye’ i ‘kulatskaia’ operatsii NKVD: sravnitel’nyi aspect,” Rossiia. XXI vek, tom 3 (2012), 40–61.
| 5. |
See Marc Iunge et al., eds., “Cherez trupy vraga na blago naroda”: “Kulatskaia operatsiia” v Ukrainskoi SSR 1937–1941 gg., tom 1 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2010), 385.
| 6. |
N. Cherushev, Udar po svoim: Krasnaia Armiia, 1938–1941 gg. (Moscow: Veche, 2003), 403–4.
| 7. |
Iunge et al., eds., “Cherez trupy vraga,” tom 2, 148.
| 8. |
Vadym Zolotar’ov, Oleksandr Uspens’kyi: osoba, chas, otochennia (Kharkiv: Folio, 2004), 165–67.
| 9. |
Vadym Zolotar’ov and Olha Bazhan, “Mykla Fedorov: odes’kyi tramplin v kar’ieri,” Iugo-Zapad. Odessika. Istoriko-kraevedcheskii nauch. al’manakh, tom 4 (Odessa: Optimum, 2007), 202–19; Zolotar’ov, Oleksandr Uspens’kyi, 67; and M. A. Tumshis and Vadim Zolotar’ov, eds., Evrei v NKVD SSSR, 1936–1938 gg.: Opyt biograficheskogo spravochnika (Samara, 2012), 297.
| 10. |
Iunge et al., eds., “Cherez trupy vraga,” tom 2, 41–42.
| 11. |
State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (HDA SBU), f. 16, op. 31, spr. 49, 93–96.
| 12. |
HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 31, spr. 49, ark. 93–96.
| 13. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti (Archive of the Security Service Administration of Ukraine for Odessa Oblast), ASD (arkhivo-sledstvennoe delo) na 38299 (N. M. Tiagin), ark. 356–58.
| 14. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 38299 (N. M. Tiagin), ark. 356–58. (Dashniaks were an Armenian nationalist and socialist political party.)
| 15. |
Iu.
Shapoval and V. Zolotar’ov, “Evrei v rukovodstve organov GPI-NKVD USSR v 1920–1930-kh gg.,” Z arkhiviv VUChK-GPU-NKVD-KGB, tom 1 (2010), 53–93; Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ACD na 38580 (V. F. Kaliuzhnyi), tom 1, ark. 287–88.
| 16. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 38580 (V. F. Kaliuzhnyi), tom 2, ark. 38–45.
| 17. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 03424 (S. I. Gaponov et al.), tom 2, ark. 138.
| 18. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 38580 (V. F. Kaliuzhnyi), tom 3, ark. 244 zv.
| 19. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 38580 (V. F. Kaliuzhnyi), tom 3, ark. 244 zv.
| 20. |
Senkevich was expelled from the party on 21 June 1938, arrested on 2 July 1938, and released on 4 June 1939.
| 21. |
Eidelman was arrested on 8 August 1938; he was released from prison in July 1939.
| 22. |
Barger was in prison from 6 July 1938 to 4 November 1939.
| 23. |
Iakubits was arrested in the headquarters of the Odessa Oblast Committee of the Communist Party on 15 June 1938.
| 24. |
Brant was arrested on 16 July 1938 and released on 14 January 1939.
| 25. |
Lunenok was arrested on 10 June 1938.
| 26. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 03424 (S.
I. Gaponov et al.), tom 2, ark. 30.
| 27. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 03424 (S. I. Gaponov et al.), tom 1, ark. 39–42.
| 28. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 03424 (S. I. Gaponov et al.), tom 1, ark. 86.
| 29. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 03424 (S. I. Gaponov et al.), tom 1, ark. 96–106.
| 30. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 03424 (S. I. Gaponov et al.), tom 1, ark. 123–123 zv.
| 31. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 03424 (S. I. Gaponov et al.), tom 1, ark. 148.
| 32. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 03424 (S. I. Gaponov et al.), tom 4, ark. 1–10.
| 33. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 03424 (S. I. Gaponov et al.), tom 1, ark. 15–16.
| 34. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 03424 (S. I. Gaponov et al.), tom 1, ark. 47–51.
| 35. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 03424 (S. I. Gaponov et al.), tom 1, ark. 115.
| 36. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 03424 (S. I. Gaponov et al.), tom 1, ark. 137–38.
| 37. |
Shpak was released from prison on 14 September 1939.
| 38. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 03424 (S. I. Gaponov et al.), tom 1, ark. 52–53.
| 39. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 38580 (V. F. Kaliuzhnyi), tom 3, ark. 31.
| 40. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 38580 (V. F. Kaliuzhnyi), tom 3, ark. 276–77, 285.
| 41. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 38299 (N. M. Tiagin), ark. 373.
| 42. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, os. spr. no. 34 na A. E. Gnesina, ark. 35–38 zv.
| 43. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, os. spr. no. 34 na A. E. Gnesina, ark. 35–38 zv.
| 44. |
Arkhiv USBU po Odesskoi oblasti, ASD na 03424 (S. I. Gaponov et al.), tom 3, ark. 22–23.
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