CHAPTER 2
In the decades leading up to the war, Stalin rallied his loyal supporters to follow a paradoxical policy aimed at consolidating Soviet power among the nationalities. On the one hand, he initiated intensive propaganda campaigns to mobilize the populations of the non-Russian republics by stressing unity and equality in building socialism, opening up opportunities for political advancement in the party and state bureaucracies, promoting local cultures and economic development. On the other hand, he conducted extensive purges of veteran party leaders among the nationalities, imposed restraints on perceived nationalist deviations and ordered selective deportations of nationalities on the frontiers of the country. The gradual shift that took place towards the more coercive aspects of his dual-nationality policy intensified as Stalin anticipated a coming war. Although foreign relations had played a role in motivating his actions on the periphery as in the centre, this factor assumed greater importance with the passing of every year. A reverse turn would only take place when the war actually broke out.
THE NATIONALITIES AND THE BORDERLANDS
In the early thirties, the policy of promoting non-Russian nationalities to administrative and party positions in their republics – korenizatsiia (‘indigenization’) – crumbled under a combination of internal and external pressures. Within the Soviet borderlands, peasant resistance to collectivization and the attempts of local party leaders to protect their regions from arbitrary and unreasonable quotas for the collection of grain were interpreted by the centre as proof that class enemies and the ‘nationalist deviations’ were joining forces. This had always been Stalin’s greatest nightmare, which he had sought to dispel by promoting indigenization. At the same time, the Piedmont principle – a term used at the time to refer to the role of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia as the core of the movement for Italian unification – which had been intended to attract elements of the nationalities outside the Soviet borders, was being appropriated by Germany and Japan to exercise a centrifugal pull on the Soviet borderlands.1
In the national republics and autonomous republics of the USSR the decimation of party cadres was no greater than in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) during the purges, yet there was one essential difference. Most of the victims in the non-Russian republics were condemned for nationalist deviation; none was so condemned in the Russian Republic. In the words of the Soviet historian Roy Medvedev, ‘by destroying tens of thousands of good Communists among the minority nationalities, the charge of nationalism helped to revive many nationalistic moods and prejudices’.2 These were, it should be added, never very far below the surface.
Along with the retreat from the high point of indigenization, Stalin launched a strong revival of Russian patriotism, beginning with the recasting of Russian history and spreading rapidly to other sectors of cultural and intellectual life. The purges were in one sense merely a continuation – albeit in radically intensified form – of the prolonged struggle between the Great Russian centre and the periphery over cultural issues. Statistics tell only part of the story, but even by themselves they are eloquent. In the 1920s there was a steady rise in the percentage of indigenous Communists in all the republics, except the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), but especially in Ukraine, Belarus and the Crimean Tatar ASSR. After the mid-1930s, when the purges cut deeply into their membership, the percentages declined in most of them. In the Central Asian republics, the drop was from 5 per cent in Kazakhstan to 15 per cent in the Kirghiz SSR. Only in Ukraine did no decline take place, although the pace of indigenization slowed and the earlier steady increase in numbers of Ukrainians in the Communist Party of Ukraine ceased altogether.3
At the end of 1934, the year of ominous signs for Stalin, the Politburo introduced a new regime for the western borderlands. Terry Martin has argued that this was the prelude to a shift in Soviet policy to large-scale ethnic cleansing. The new regulations created a ‘forbidden border zone’ of varying depth ‘into which no one could enter without special NKVD permission’.4 But even before this, the security organs detected a potentially dangerous link between the resistance to collectivization in Ukraine and Belarus and Polish intervention. As a precaution, in 1930 the Politburo ordered a vigorous campaign against deviations from the party line in the frontier districts of the two republics and a series of operations to strengthen border security. The arrest and deportation of kulak elements was to be carried out with great speed, but quietly (bez shuma), avoiding any indication of a mass deportation.5 The campaign gradually gained momentum, but up until 1936 the security organs were still more involved with internal actions. By the end of 1936 approximately half the German and Polish inhabitants in the border districts had been deported throughout the Soviet Union. At the same time, similar policies were applied to the Finnish, Estonian and Latvian populations of the Leningrad border region.6
In the Inner Asian borderlands, the NKVD finally carried out the long-planned deportation of the Korean population inhabiting the frontier districts. In the process, however, they rounded up almost all the Koreans – at least 175,000 – in the Far Eastern region (krai) and packed them off to the Central Asian republics. About 8,000 Chinese were also snared by the NKVD nets. Especially hard hit were those associated with the army, secret police or defence industries.7 Similar deportations were taking place almost simultaneously along the Caucasian and Trans-Caspian frontiers.
At Stalin’s behest, beginning in January 1938 the secret police unleashed a new wave of mass repression against the so-called ‘national contingents’, targeting a hitherto unprecedented range of ethnic groups – Poles, Germans, Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Iranians, Afghans and Chinese.8 These were essentially the peoples of the borderlands.
The dual mania directed against foreign spies and domestic class enemies in the borderlands was not limited to the nationalities. In the early stages of the raids on the national contingents, Nikolai Ezhov, the commissar of internal affairs (NKVD), targeted hired workers and refugees from abroad who had entered the Soviet Union in recent years as ‘defectors’. Following up his warnings to the party and military leaders in the first half of 1937, Stalin ordered Ezhov to arrest all Germans employed in defence industries and to deport numbers of them. The targets were originally German citizens but the campaign rapidly engulfed Soviet citizens of German nationality or those who had some contact with Germans or Germany. The Poles and those who were in any way linked to Poland were next, followed by numerous other nationalities.9 Instructions to purge extended even to large numbers of ‘Kharbintsy’, the approximately 25,000 ethnic Russians who had been repatriated in 1935 following the sale of the Chinese Eastern Railway. They were suspected of harbouring anti-Soviet sentiments dating back to the civil war and of collaborating with the Japanese.10
It soon turned out that the deportations and purges in the western borderlands were insufficiently thorough. This at least was the message that the Politburo member Andrei Andreev relayed to Stalin in 1938, during his whirlwind tour of potential trouble spots throughout the Soviet Union. In the frontier districts of Belarus he uncovered weak party structures and subversive elements among the Poles and families of purge victims. He recommended that these elements be deported farther into the interior. Although the secretary of the Belarus Communist Party, Panteleimon Ponomarenko, received a passing grade, Andreev fingered Belarus’s commissar of education as ‘a traitor and probably a Polish spy’, and its commissar of agriculture as a ‘suspicious character’. He suggested the removal of many party secretaries in the frontier districts who were Poles or Latvians. He also pointed out weaknesses in the frontier defences and proposed a series of measures to prevent cross-border movement.11
Ukraine was particularly hard hit by the purges because of its large party organization, the number of prominent Ukrainians in the central apparatus and the vigorous cultural life within the republic. The nationalist character of the Ukrainian purge was etched clearly from the outset. During the 1920s the Ukrainians were second only to the Georgians in their criticism of centralization and Great Russian chauvinism. The strongest voices came from two of the many factions and tendencies that had gone on to make up the Communist Party of Ukraine during the early years of the revolution and civil war. There were, first of all, the Old Ukrainian Bolsheviks like Mykola Skrypnyk, a staunch defender of Ukrainian cultural autonomy and an outspoken critic of what he called the ‘unified-indivisible change of landmark striving of our Soviet apparatus’. Second, there were the former members of the Borotbist Party, a Ukrainian socialist revolutionary party that had co-operated with the Bolsheviks and then fused with them in 1920. These included Grigory Grinko, the commissar of education in the Ukraine, who also deplored the ‘centralizing inertia’ in the party that crippled the cultural-national work of the Ukraine. At the Twelfth Congress they and the Georgians provided the main backing for Rakovsky’s proposed amendments that forced some minor concessions from Stalin on the draft of the Soviet constitution. An unexpected source of support for their position came from Bukharin, who emphasized the dangerous consequences of a dogmatic Great Russian chauvinist position. He warned that turning away from a policy of indigenization would only redound to the benefit of Mensheviks in Georgia, Petliurists in Ukraine and Basmachi in Central Asia; in other words, to the centrifugal forces that still threatened the integrity of the state.12
Ukrainian resistance to the centralists did not come to an end with the adoption of the new Soviet constitution. The leaders, joined now by Vlas Chubar, who had replaced Rakovsky as chairman of the people’s commissars of the Ukraine in 1935 and was soon to become a candidate member of the Politburo, maintained a drumfire of criticism against administrative, budgetary and judicial procedures that deprived the republics of their rights; in several cases they gained their points.13 A muted struggle continued over the question of bringing the Ukrainian republic’s constitution in line with the Soviet constitution. It required five years of intermittent discussion before a revised Ukrainian constitution was approved. It retained the formula that the Ukraine had entered the USSR as an ‘independent treaty state limited only in matters reserved to the USSR under its constitution’. As E.H. Carr has stated: ‘This was a stronger affirmation of formal independence and sovereignty than appeared in the constitution of any other Union republic.’14 It also kept alive, if only feebly, the hoary question – dating back to the treaty of Pereiaslav in 1649 – of the precise constitutional relationship between Russia and the Ukraine.
While the Soviet leadership was firmly in the hands of centralists, Bukharin having abandoned his endorsement of republican rights, it perceived the need to strengthen the cultural identity of the nationalities under the Bolshevik aegis as a method of neutralizing nationalist sentiments. In Stalin’s view, the spread of Ukrainian cultural institutions was an important hedge against accusations of Great Russian chauvinism that could weaken the border regions and endanger the dictatorship of the proletariat. He admitted that the Ukraine was a test case for Soviet nationality policy that would have as great an effect on ‘the peoples of the West as Turkestan has for the peoples of the East’.15 But there were, inevitably, growing disagreements over the interpretation of the policy of ‘Ukrainianization’. The existence of small, strongly pro-nationalist elements within the Ukrainian party and the outspoken statements of Ukrainian intellectuals were used by Stalin to compromise the more moderate elements represented by Chubar.
As tension mounted, the issue of cultural autonomy was swept up into the debate over industrialization, where the leaders of the Ukrainian party were in a weaker position to defend the interest of Ukraine against the imperative of an all-Union policy of central planning.16 Resistance to collectivization in Ukraine further blurred the distinctions between cultural rights and political opposition. The first purges of Ukrainian intellectuals took place in 1930–31; a wholesale replacement of party cadres followed; in 1933 Skrypnyk, under relentless fire, took his own life. He had been accused of a raft of errors, including his support of the Piedmont principle which might lead, in the words of Pavel Postyshev, the newly appointed second secretary of the Ukrainian party, to ‘the separation of Ukraine from the Soviet Union, [which] would be the beginning of the end of the entire Soviet Union, the beginning of the end of proletarian and peasant power’.17 The Ukrainian Communist Party was thrown into confusion. Did this mean the demise of indigenization? Was this a shift in the official policy that had identified great power chauvinism as a greater danger than local nationalism to the internal stability of the country?
In a characteristic move, Stalin now assumed the position of absolute arbiter in defining the middle road. The ‘man of the borderlands’, speaking ex cathedra at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, indicated that the questions had been badly posed. ‘It would be stupid to endorse a formula that would be valid for all times. Such formulas do not exist. The greatest danger is that deviation against which one ceases to battle and which therefore grows into a danger to the state.’18 He offered the cadres no clear guidance for the future. The implication was clear. They would have to fight it out among themselves while he remained above the battle until it was necessary from his point of view to intervene.
The problem facing the local leaders in Ukraine and elsewhere at this crucial moment was similar to that which historically had complicated relationships between the borderlands and the centre. No matter that they were handpicked by Moscow (or Saint Petersburg); no matter that they may not have shared ethnic identities with their subjects; no matter that they professed their primary loyalty to the centre: they had to operate within a distinctive cultural milieu shaped by historical memories. The tradition of wavering loyalties went back to Count Kirill Razumovsky and Prince Ivan Mazepa in the era of the tsars. A successful career in Ukraine demanded some accommodation with the local elements, and more often than not officials appointed from outside the republic took on the coloration of their new environment. The centre was bound to interpret any form of resistance to its commands as tinged with nationalist sentiments; Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Nicholas I had reacted in similar ways. The difference with Stalin came from the extent and violence of his reaction. While he maintained many of the formal aspects of indigenization and some of its educational policies, he unleashed a violent campaign against the local cadres. In the terrible year 1937 the Ukrainian apparatus was destroyed several times over. Almost all the leading officials of the party and soviets of the republic were arrested, and most of them were executed. Over 180,000 party members – representing 37 per cent of the total – were repressed.19 Old opponents of Stalin like Grinko, moderate defenders of Ukrainian rights like Chubar and even loyalists like Postyshev who could not, however, conceal their distaste for Stalin’s excessive demands for subordination, were swept away, as were their immediate successors. A group around Grinko was accused at the trial of Rights and Trotskyites of having organized a ‘National Fascist Organization’ that plotted with foreign agents to detach Ukraine from the USSR. It was the only case in which the Ukrainian leaders were publicly identified with nationalist deviation, but it was enough to taint the entire Ukrainian party, which had failed to discover and eradicate it. As if to confirm this identification of political opposition and culture, the purges of the leadership were accompanied by a campaign to moderate ‘Ukrainianization’ and to inject a dose of russo-centrism through the medium of language.20 The combined assault on the Ukrainian party apparatus and use of Ukrainian language were the kind of mistakes in Soviet nationality policy that, as Bukharin had warned, played into the hands of the real nationalist enemies of the Soviet Union.
On the eve of the war, the purges of the Ukrainian communists could only have benefited the number of Ukrainian nationalist organizations outside the Soviet Union active in Ukrainian communities in the Western Ukraine, in the Carpatho-Ukraine under Czech sovereignty, in the Bukovina under Romanian control and scattered in smaller émigré colonies in Germany and France. Of these the most militant and best organized was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) whose main strength was in the Western Ukraine. When Red Army forces occupied the area in 1939 as the Soviet share of the partition of Poland with Germany, Moscow discovered the supporters of the OUN bitterly divided and demoralized. The party confronted a strong network of underground opponents of Sovietization. After the German invasion in 1941, they became the core of an anti-Soviet resistance that fought a civil war within the larger war of the great powers over the fate of Ukraine.21 In Belarus, the purges made an almost complete sweep of the party leadership; half of the membership lost their party cards. By 1937 there was no one left to work in the Central Committee in Minsk, and replacements were chewed up within a year of their arrival.
Moscow’s reaction to the perceived threat of Ukrainian cultural autonomy had traditionally sparked a reaction on the Polish side of whatever territorial demarcation existed at the time. And vice versa; if Ukrainianization had its counterpart in Warsaw’s ‘Volhynia experiment’ of extending cultural rights to Ukrainians in Poland, then the Soviet repression of nationalist deviation had its cross-border counterpart in the ‘revindications of souls’. In December 1937 the Polish Defence Corps put into play its plans to encourage Ukrainians to convert from Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism. The inspiration came from the military rather than the clergy. In the mix of incentives and coercion employed to restore ‘their true nationality’, there were no harsh measures of arrests and deportation comparable to those taking place across the border. But the aims were more radical. There were plans to Polonize the entire Ukrainian population of Volhynia by 1944.22 The main beneficiaries of the attempts of both Moscow and Warsaw to impose their control over the fractious peoples of the Ukrainian borderlands were the extreme nationalists in the OUN and the deviant communists in the remnants of the Western Ukrainian party.
The North Caucasus, like the Ukraine, suffered enormously from collectivization; the purges inflicted greater suffering, disorganization and demoralization on the local cadres. In Ossetia almost the entire obkom (regional committee) bureau was arrested and a large part of the small intelligentsia wiped out. The Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Republic was decimated in two massive waves of arrests that may have amounted to 3 per cent of the population. In the Kabardino-Balkarian Autonomous Republic, the popular hero of the civil war and first secretary of the obkom, Betal Kalmykov, was arrested and executed. Because of the relatively small numbers of Old Bolsheviks and party intelligentsia in these less advanced regions, the losses were probably more damaging than in the Ukraine, where replacements could be found more easily. In any case, the purges severely weakened local resistance to the German invader during the Second World War, contributed to widespread disaffection and delayed the re-establishment of Soviet power in these areas after the liberation.23 Recent evidence from the Soviet archives reveals that Beria assigned over 100,000 NKVD troops in the midst of the war to organize the deportation of 650,000 Chechen, Ingush, Kalmyk and Karachai people; they were packed into railway wagons and dispatched from their homeland to Central Asia under conditions of great hardship.24
In the South Caucasian borderlands Stalin took a personal interest and played a direct role in the destruction of the old cadres. Knowing Stalin and the region as he did, Beria presented Stalin with a picture that he was all too ready to accept of close links between internal subversion and the threat of external intervention assisted by old political enemies in the emigration. The potential existed for exploiting widespread disaffection with Moscow, and Stalin was never one to underestimate potential opposition, especially when he had been responsible for inciting it. Stalin’s conflict with the Georgian Mensheviks before the revolution and during the civil war, together with his dispute with Lenin over the Georgian Communists in 1922, had provided him with many old scores to settle. He had appointed Beria as first secretary in 1931 to carry out a more or less continuous purge of the local cadres. During the Great Purge Trials, some of the survivors of these quarrels, like Budu Mdivani, an Old Bolshevik and member of the Caucasian Bureau from 1920–21, were implicated with the leading oppositionists, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin, as well as being denounced as British agents. Massive replacements for the top posts of the Georgian Communist Party in 1937 suggest that virtually the entire leadership from the 1920s perished. But the executions were not limited to party members. Prominent writers, poets, dramatists and intellectuals also disappeared.25
During the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and tense relations with the Western powers, Beria reported on the creation in Istanbul of a branch of the Council of the Confederation of the Caucasus, an émigré organization formed in Paris in 1934, under the leadership of Noe Zhordaniia. Its members included Georgian Mensheviks, Muslim Musavatists and North Caucasus mountaineers. (One of the last group, Sultan-Girei Klych, collaborated with the Germans in an attempt to raise the Adyghe and other tribes in revolt against the Soviet power.) After the fall of France, the Paris group had scattered and together with remnants of the Prometheus group had found refuge in a number of European and Middle Eastern countries. These groups were allegedly connected to Trotskyite elements supported by the Turkish government.26 Given the belief, widespread among the Soviet leadership, that Turkey, and possibly Iran, would join in an attack on the Soviet Union if German forces penetrated deeply enough into the North Caucasus, such reports could not but reinforce and intensify suspicions of nationalist deviations. To be sure, in 1942–43 the German army fell short of its objectives in the region. Moreover, although there were German-sponsored anti-Soviet movements among the mountaineers (see p. 222), the Germans bungled efforts to expand their contacts with Georgian émigrés which dated back to the Georgian independence movement they had supported at Brest-Litovsk. But this could not have been foreseen in 1939–41.
Armenia, like Ukraine, was particularly singled out for having harboured a ‘Right-Trotskyite national centre’. In 1938, a see-saw struggle over the review of party documents had revealed the resistance of some local party leaders to wholesale repression. Then Nersik Stepanian, one of the Armenian party leaders, denounced Beria’s book The History of the Bolshevik Organization in the Transcaucasus as a blatant falsification. Beria’s published reply attacked the party leadership and demanded their physical elimination. This sealed their doom. Veteran Bolsheviks like S.N. Martikian, hero of the Baku Commune and president of the Sovnarkom in Armenia, and A. Khandzhian, the first secretary of the party, were executed; less than six months earlier, both had received the Order of Lenin. After ten months of massive repressions, Stalin sent a letter to the bureau of the Armenian Central Committee expressing dissatisfaction that the leadership was protecting enemies of the people; he declared that certain executions had been ‘premature, with the aim of preventing the unmasking of the remaining enemies who remained at large’. A wave of arrests followed which destroyed most of the top leaders of the party, government, armed forces and cultural establishment in the republic. The purge reached down to the local level, where one third of the secretaries of primary organizations and of party organizers were eliminated. Even after 1938 the process continued.27
The Azerbaijan party organization suffered greater losses than any other republican organization except for Georgia. In Azerbaijan the role played by Beria in Georgia was filled by Mir Jafar Baghirov, a close associate of Stalin who had also entered the secret police during the civil war. Baghirov wiped out the entire leadership of the party, government, local military commanders and much of the older generation of the Azerbaijan intelligentsia. From 1937 to 1938 over 10,000 officials were removed and presumably shot. Baghirov also denounced as ‘politically suspect’ the entire émigré colony of Iranian Azerbaijan, which had fled to Soviet Azerbaijan after the collapse of the Gilan Republic in northwestern Iran. These purges had a pronounced effect on the Soviet position in northern Iran during and after the Second World War.28 During the period of tension with France and Britain following the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Beria’s reports emphasized the threat to the oil industry of Azerbaijan of émigré diversionists directed by the French and penetrating Soviet territory across the Turkish and Iranian frontiers. He urged a thorough purge of the personnel of the big industrial complex Azneft, especially the distilling plants, and the recruiting of additional agents to combat sabotage.29
In the five republics of Soviet Central Asia the purges had no direct effect on foreign policy except in so far as they played a role in the evolution of Soviet nationality policy during the war. The party organizations in Central Asia were small and the arrests so sharply reduced their numbers that in certain districts of Tajikistan, for example, only one out of four members were left alive. As was the case throughout the national republics, the top leadership of the party and soviets was destroyed; again the Old Bolsheviks – who were even rarer here than elsewhere – were among the first to go. For several months in the winter of 1937/38 the Central Committee of the Turkmen party ceased to exist. Recruitment of new party members virtually came to a halt in this period. In Uzbekistan the first secretary, Akmal Ikramov, a Bolshevik since 1918 and member of the All-Union Central Executive Committee, perished with most of the Uzbek leaders of the party, soviet, Komsomol and main army units. Ikramov and his chief rival in the Uzbek organization, Faizulla Khodzaev, a Bolshevik since the revolution and chairman of the republic’s Narkom, were implicated in the trial against Bukharin as the leaders of a nationalist plot to work for an independent local economy and ultimately secession of Uzbekistan under British protection.
Kazakhstan passed through the greatest ordeal. In the late thirties all members and candidates of the Central Committee Bureau were executed along with most of the Central Committee itself, almost all the secretaries of the gorkom and raikom organizations in addition to many rank-and-file communists. The Kazakh intelligentsia lost many of its leading figures. Rigid centralization was imposed in the administration and economic life of the republic. These measures retarded recovery from the terrible losses inflicted on agriculture, primarily the herds of livestock by collectivization.30 The Tajik frontier was particularly vulnerable to penetration from Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey by kulaks and Basmachi, tribesmen raiding across the frontier. Stalin’s trouble shooter, Andreev, recommended the transfer of Tajik army units to the European part of the Soviet Union to remove them from subversive influences.31
Stalin’s purges of the nationalities, as with other targeted groups, spared individuals whose talents he recognized, valued and rewarded by promoting them to the heights of their professions. The army provided a few such outstanding examples. General Aleksei Antonov, born into a family of Volga Tatars, rose to become Army Chief of Staff and one of Stalin’s top advisers on strategic planning, including the assault on Berlin. Ivan Bagramian, from a lowly Armenian family, was the only non-Slavic front commander. Displaying a ruthless attack mentality on the Baltic sector earned him Stalin’s respect and won him marshal’s baton after the war.32
Despite these paradoxical success stories, the picture was a grim one for the nationalities on the eve of the war. The fact that Russians in the state and party organizations were not spared, the removal of the national cadres who had been the founders of the local parties and ardent supporters of the Bolsheviks in the civil war, when their cause was not popular among many of the local populations, created widespread and deep bitterness in the republics which only surfaced after the denunciation of the Stalin cult. Stalin’s indiscriminate assault on the national parties weakened Soviet influence in all the borderlands on the eve of a war that would test and strain the bonds of the ‘great friendship’.
THE COMINTERN
The purge of the Comintern did not strike a healthy organism, but the treatment hastened its decline. Its history had been marked by intense factionalism, periodic purges, rapid volte-faces and, up to 1935, a general decline in membership. The Seventh Congress of 1935 bid fair to reverse the declining popularity of communist parties by demoting world revolution to a secondary concern and identifying the fortunes of the communist parties with a broad anti-fascist front. But the gains in membership and electoral successes in the few countries where they were still legal were offset by resentment among the professional cadres over the apparent indifference to revolutionary goals, and the ever-deepening sense of complete subordination to Soviet security interests.33 Moreover, the leaders of the parties that were illegal in their own countries were obliged to shelter in Moscow where they were vulnerable to direct Stalinist pressure. In 1929 the patient took a turn for the worse. The removal of Bukharin as head of the Comintern changed the way in which decisions were reached. Stalin was determined to eliminate all traces of open disagreement and dissension. In a series of spiteful measures, he demonstrated that the Comintern would no longer play a prominent role in international politics. He placed the Comintern administration under his personal control and created a special section of his secretariat to bypass the established chain of command; no decisions could be taken without his sanction.34 He turned the full force of his dark suspicions on the activities of the local parties. The old factional fights in the Comintern centred on real policy differences. Beginning in 1929, a new wave of repression began as a purge of the moderates or ‘Rights’, that is, Bukharin’s supporters, but rapidly degenerated into an orgy of personal denunciations that crossed factional lines. For his own dark reasons, Stalin did not turn over the Comintern to the left doctrinaires. A number of prominent supporters of Bukharin, including a few – like the Swiss pastor and member of the Swiss Communist Party Jules-Frédéric Humbert-Droz – who did not openly recant, were not removed but merely transferred. The Stalinists came down hard on the German, Czech and Polish parties. The Italian and Bulgarian parties enjoyed relative immunity because the Italian leaders had chosen exile in France and the Bulgarian leader Georgi Dimitrov was able to protect some – if not all – of his countrymen. The ferocity of the purges can be explained in part by the factions and personal animosities inside the exiled parties.35
Stalin had drawn the clumsy distinction between the right as a tendency not yet well defined which should be exposed and chastised and the right as a group or faction which should be repressed by the same harsh measures that he had imposed on the Trotskyites. His agents in the Comintern defined ‘the right’ in the German Communist Party as a faction and demanded its destruction by ‘organizational methods’. The hammer fell next on the leading rights in the Czech party.36 The Polish party was the most deeply shaken, foreshadowing its complete destruction eight years later. It was accused of having worked for the Polish secret police by establishing links with the Western Ukrainian party in order to infiltrate the Ukrainian SSR. Mass arrests followed. The savagery of these purges in the years before the assassination of Sergei Kirov, which precipitated the Great Terror, may be in part attributed to Stalin’s grave concerns over the loyalty of Ukrainian communists to the regime during the worst years of collectivization and the real fears that the Polish secret police would exploit discontent in the borderlands for their own aims. In fact, the wave of denunciations merely facilitated the Polish secret police infiltration of the Polish party; the provocateurs then helped destroy it by denouncing its leaders.37 Increasingly feeble and dominated by sectarians, the Polish party showed little enthusiasm for embracing the popular front. Dimitrov prodded them to get rid of their image as ‘Moscow’s agent’. He urged them to build bridges to other parties and mass organizations and find an authoritative and self-confident leadership.38 The Comintern Executive also encouraged them to address the question of an incomplete bourgeois democratic revolution in Poland and thus to abandon the policy that had brought the Stalinist minority to power. Yet at the same time it announced the need to undertake ‘a surgical intervention’ in order to remove from party leadership the Trotskyites and agents of the class enemy. The policy of class collaboration was undermined almost immediately by revival of the old methods. The rising drumbeat of accusations against the Polish communists resonated in the bitter struggle over the Ukrainian borderlands.
Several new factors in the mid-thirties changed the tone of Soviet-Polish relations and signalled a general shift in targeting enemies of the people. Ethnic considerations mixed with and then superseded class factors in selecting the victims. In 1934, shortly after the rise of Hitler to power, the Poles signed a non-aggression treaty with Germany. In the eyes of the Soviet leaders, Poland had suddenly become less of a potential ally against Nazi Germany and more of an opportunist, waiting for the best offer before moving to one side or the other. A year later, Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the strong man of the Polish government, died, and with him perished his policy of accommodation with the Ukrainian minority in the border province of Volhynia. A nationalist reaction set in, appealing more directly to Polish sentiments in Volhynia and beyond its frontiers to the east. During the same period, the Communist Party of Western Ukraine proclaimed its own insurrectionary line against the Volhynia experiment of the Polish government. Their action was taken independently of the Comintern and in defiance of the official policy of the popular front. These events coincided with Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War with the two fascist powers, Germany and Italy, supporting the Nationalist rebels. There could be little doubt in Stalin’s mind that the threat of war had increased exponentially.39
Stalin’s first response, in August 1936, was to orchestrate the trial of the ‘Trotskyist-Zinovievite Centre’ around the central theme of linkage between the accused and foreign intelligence agencies throughout the world, but mainly in Germany and Japan. The following year, at the trial of Karl Radek and Piatakov, members of the Left Opposition, Vyshinsky embroidered the idea of a conspiracy to weaken the Soviet state. He falsely accused them of promising territorial concessions in the western and eastern borderlands to Germany and Japan. He also stoked the fires of a campaign to liquidate the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) in Spain, an anarcho-syndicalist group sympathetic to Trotsky.40 In 1937, as the mass repression and decimation of the Comintern reached a climax, Stalin summed up his views on terror in private remarks to Dimitrov. He identified five historical turning points: 1905, 1917, Brest-Litovsk, civil war and collectivization. At each point, he explained, weak elements fell away from the party, especially during collectivization. They went underground and ‘being powerless themselves, they linked up with our external enemies, promising the Germans Ukraine, the Poles Belarus, the Japanese our Far East’. Stalin hammered at this theme at the February and March 1937 plenum of the party, when he urged his colleagues to remain aware at all times that under conditions of capitalist encirclement the threat of spies and saboteurs was constant.41 At a banquet following the 7 November celebrations in 1937, Stalin amplified his remarks by justifying the terror as the necessary means to preserve the Russian state, what he called the ‘legacy of the tsars’:
We, the Bolsheviks, for the first time, united and strengthened this state, making it one and indivisible . . . We united the state in such a way that any part that might be torn away from the common socialist state, while a loss in itself, could not exist independently and would inevitably fall under foreign domination. Anyone, therefore, who attempts to destroy this united socialist state, who strives to separate it from its single parts and nationalities, is an enemy, a sworn enemy of the state and of the peoples of the USSR.42
Against this background, the focus of the terror on linking internal and external enemies stands out in stark outline.
Beginning already in 1936, the NKVD launched a campaign to uncover agent provocateurs within the Communist Party of Poland and to root out members of the alleged Polish Military Organization in the USSR, which by this time no longer existed except as a convenient fiction in the fertile imagination of the NKVD. Stalin had long harboured suspicions of the Polish Communist Party, perhaps dating as far back as its formation when it combined three distinct elements of the pre-revolutionary left in Poland, and re-enforced by his experiences in the Soviet-Polish War of 1920. Ominously, from his point of view, the Polish party was the largest communist party in Eastern Europe and its members occupied important posts in the Comintern. By 1936 the Comintern Executive responded to mounting pressure to exert greater vigilance by notifying Ezhov that the Polish Communist Party was ‘the major supplier of spy and provocateur elements to the USSR’.43 Simultaneously, on orders from Moscow, the Ukrainian Communist Party organized the deportation of over 8,000 families, more than a third of them Polish, from the frontier with Poland. This action was followed up in early 1936 with the even larger deportation of 15,000 Polish and German families to Kazakhstan and a final ‘cleansing’ of the frontier districts later that year. As many as 60,000 Poles were deported.44
In 1937, when the mass purge reached its climax, Ezhov organized with the approval of the Politburo the ‘Polish Operation’.45 This unleashed the most devastating attack on a single national group within the Soviet Union and the destruction of the Polish Communist Party. Approximately two thirds of the more than 600,000 Poles living in the USSR were residents of Ukraine, among them unrecorded numbers of refugees from Poland. Beginning its campaign against ‘Polish spies’, the NKVD spread its net of arrests to sweep up all Poles who had ‘links with abroad. The alleged crimes of those living in the frontier areas ranged from sabotage and wrecking to planning uprisings in time of war’. Although exact figures remain elusive due to the irregular process of recording, it has been estimated that 143,000 Poles were convicted of crimes, of whom 111,000 were shot; the rest were sent to camps in the two years from 1937 to 1938.46
At the same time, the NKVD was carrying out arrests of members of both the Polish Communist Party and the Comintern apparatus. Within Poland, the purge wiped out the remnants of the old majority, which had been sympathetic to Bukharin, and then crushed the minority. Members of the Politburo in exile in Paris were recalled to Moscow and arrested. Other Stalinist loyalists considered it their duty to return from Prague, Spain and Warsaw to defend themselves. They too perished. The entire leadership was engulfed in the cataclysm including the last member of the Polish Politburo, who had endorsed the arrests of all his colleagues. Yet the operations were carried out in secrecy so that neither the Comintern executive nor the rank and file of the Polish party knew about them.47 Nevertheless, in November 1937 the Comintern Executive ordered the dissolution of the Polish Communist Party. Reorganization was out of the question because ‘the central party organs were in the hands of spies and provocateurs’. Stalin approved but noted that ‘the dissolution is about two years late’. The Comintern urged the re-creation of the party by Polish members of the International Brigades fighting in Spain.48 Comintern agents fanned out over Europe with orders to persuade the remnants of the party to accept and endorse the decision. Discipline prevailed but doubts remained. Elements of the aktiv remained sceptical; there had been no factual evidence to prove the accusations of treason.
The communist parties of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine had been weakened by fierce attacks in the early 1930s when the top leaders were denounced as agents of Ukrainian nationalist organizations, recalled to Moscow and executed. In 1938 the parties, decimated by further denunciations and arrests, were dissolved and officially ceased to exist. The communists in Western Ukraine, always mavericks, continued their active operations against the Polish state. They even went so far as to form a working alliance with the Ukrainian nationalists of the OUN. The two groups intermingled in typical borderlands fashion and mutually endorsed a policy of social and national revolution.49 Was it here that the seeds were sown of a separate path to Polish socialism?
In 1937 the Polish and Hungarian sections of the Comintern were reduced to one man each. The two parties were so badly mauled that they virtually ceased to exist. The Chinese and Bulgarian sections of the Comintern also lost almost all their personnel to the ‘conveyor’, a euphemism for the process of secret killings. The German Section was reduced by 70 per cent. Of the Yugoslav party cadres in the Soviet Union, numbering about 900, at least 800 were arrested and only forty of them survived the camps. The party was virtually decapitated, leaving Tito unchallenged at the top. The leaders of the Romanian party in Moscow were almost all shot, including Marcel Pauker (whose wife Ana survived, adopted Soviet citizenship and emerged after the war as a leader of the Romanian party). The Iranian communists who had fled to Moscow following the collapse of the Gilan Republic in 1921 were already under suspicion as nationalists in 1932, and little was heard of them after that date. Their most prominent leader, Avetis Sultan-Zade, who had crossed swords with Bukharin at the Sixth Comintern Congress, was secretly executed in 1938 along with almost all the Iranian exiles in the Soviet Union.50
The Latvian party, many of whose members had played a key role in the Bolshevik taking of power in Petrograd in 1917, was treated with particular brutality. Driven underground by the government in 1934, its Central Committee was abolished by the Comintern and replaced by a provisional secretariat which was then also liquidated. Pēteris Stučka, who had been head of the short-lived Latvian Soviet government of 1919 and its representative to the Comintern, was posthumously denounced. In 1936 the Foreign Bureau of the Central Committee in the Comintern was wiped out, including Lenin’s former colleague, the Old Bolshevik Jānis Lencmanis (Lentsman), who had occupied positions in the Soviet government as well. A massive purge of party members followed, reducing the Riga party organization to 150 people. A brief period of renewal followed the decisions of the Seventh Comintern Congress to rebuild the organization with workers, but the purging continued; all the Latvian cultural organizations in Moscow were also abolished and their members killed. In 1940 there were only 1,000 members of the party left in Moscow. They were completely cut off from the Comintern and unprepared to assist in taking power, which was mainly the work of the Red Army, Soviet police and party elements.51
The Estonian Communist Party was also crushed by the purges of 1937–38. A large number of Estonian communists lived in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, including many of the Old Bolshevik leaders of the revolution in Estonia and veterans of the civil war and many communists from the ranks of ordinary workers. In a rising tide of suspicion, large numbers of them were accused of maintaining links with the ‘bourgeois police of Estonia’, and executed. Among the most prominent of these were Jaan Anvelt, a Bolshevik since 1907, one of the founders of the first Estonian Bolshevik newspaper and in 1917 a leader of the Estonian soviet, and a veteran of the civil war. He survived four years of illegal work in the underground, led the rising of 1924 and finally emigrated to the Soviet Union where he served as a commissar in the Zhukovsky Military Academy and as a high official in the fleet and the Comintern. His close colleague, Hans Pöögelmann (Pogelman), another journalist and party veteran since 1905, had suffered arrest and exile before 1917 when he returned and plunged into revolutionary work, leaving Estonia after the civil war to become prominent in the Comintern Executive. With them perished the rest of the Estonian leadership. Along with the other Baltic parties, the Estonian party was so badly crippled by the shootings that the Central Committee simply ceased to operate after early 1938; the Estonian party’s links with the Comintern were severed. Scarcely a year later, when the Nazi-Soviet Pact placed Estonia in the Soviet sphere of influence, the absence of experienced local party members was keenly felt. Zhdanov, who was sent in to consolidate Soviet power, had to rely on numerous Russian cadres who backed up the low-level and politically ineffective surviving Estonians.52
The Lithuanian Communist Party, numbering no more than 2,000, lost its entire leadership in the purges and was a negligible factor in the Soviet incorporation of Lithuania into the USSR in 1940. More seriously, as was the case in Estonia, the absence of any reliable communist cadres required the use of Russians including army officers to command the Lithuanian units incorporated into the Red Army. At the same time the Soviet authorities carried out an extensive policy of mass deportation of those suspected of being anti-Soviet elements, which numbered, according to some Western sources, approximately 35,000 people. According to subsequent Soviet admissions, these measures were ‘insufficiently prepared and organized’ so that ‘dangerous opponents’ were left at large and many innocent people were swept up in the nets. Acting as foreign invaders without any significant local support, the Soviet Union attempted to compensate for its ‘errors’ by nationalizing industry and redistributing land to over 200,000 poor and landless peasants.53 It was a fruitless operation. The combination of Soviet blunders, the absence of reliable local cadres and the widespread hostility caused by the occupation and loss of independence destroyed any Soviet hopes of transforming the Baltic states into a defensive glacis.
The purges struck hard at the elite Comintern training schools in the Soviet Union. The Communist University for the National Minorities of the West was dissolved; it had enrolled about 600 students from the western nationalities of the USSR in the period 1933–36. Most of the students were sent to Spain, except for the Volga German contingent, who were arrested. A handful of the German graduates survived, however, and occupied important posts in the German Democratic Republic after the war. The Communist University of the Toilers of the East suffered fewer losses but the Chinese students appeared to have been singled out. The staff of the Lenin School training the upper ranks of the Comintern was decimated. The German-language newspaper published by the Comintern was purged, leaving only one person in charge by the end. When the paper was finally suspended most of its readership had also joined the staff in the camps. The most fortunate communists were those who had been imprisoned in their own countries, especially in Hungary, Romania and Poland, beyond the reach of the NKVD.54
The devastating effects of the Comintern purges on the national parties emerge most clearly from the complaints of a few communist leaders that important organizational work was being sacrificed and cadres demoralized. The eminent economist Eugen Varga wrote a personal letter to Stalin courageously arguing that the purges were leading to the demoralization of communist cadres in fascist countries ‘who would have a prominent role to play in the forthcoming war!’55 Dimitrov also tried to protect some of his colleagues in the Comintern but willingly sacrificed others in what amounted to triage.56 Perhaps his most important rescue operation was Tito. No one was more keenly aware of the devastating effect of the purges on the organization. But he was unwilling to confront Stalin. The best he felt he could do was to point out that, following the arrests of the former leaders of the parties in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia as well as Poland, ‘sincere communists in those countries have been left disoriented and with no connection to the Comintern’. He requested assistance from the Central Committee in selecting a few comrades from the All-Union Communist Party (b) who spoke the native language to be used in reconstructing the shattered parties.57
Stalin had designed the purge of the nationalities and the Comintern as a radical means to eliminate potential sources of opposition at home linked to the growing threat of war on the part of an aggressive Nazi Germany and militarist Japan. These actions were not incompatible with a policy of collective security abroad. Paradoxically, they fit the propaganda of the popular front by exposing the threats posed by the aggressive policies of Germany and Japan, who sought by subversive means to undermine the loyalty of the most vulnerable international defenders of the Soviet Union. To be sure, the Western powers did not see it that way. As a theme of mobilizing the Soviet population to work harder and be more vigilant, the purges began to lose their appeal as the international situation began to change by the spring and summer of 1938. The Western powers were hesitant to support the embattled Spanish Republic and only the Soviet Union and Mexico sent substantial aid. The popular front government in France lost its majority, and French leaders showed signs of weakness in defending its closest ally, Czechoslovakia, in the face of Hitler’s threats. In China once again, the Soviet Union was the only major power to send military aid to the Nationalists in their war to resist the Japanese invasion. Litvinov’s voice rang hollow in the halls of the League of Nations. Sensitive to shifting winds from abroad, Stalin and his associates, especially Zhdanov and Molotov, grew uneasy and then alarmed at the prospect that the Soviet Union was becoming isolated in the first line of trenches against fascism.58
On 8 August 1938 two apparently unrelated events signalled to those with sensitive political antennae that Stalin was shifting his priorities in his preparations for war. The first was the appointment of Lavrenty Beria as deputy head of the NKVD; the second was the publication of the long-awaited Short Course of the All-Union Communist Party (b). Within a few months Beria had replaced Ezhov as head of the NKVD – Ezhov was then arrested and shot. The purges did not come to a sudden stop, but gradually diminished over the next few months, never completely disappearing as an instrument of Stalin’s rule.
In the months before the publication of the Short Course, Stalin had systematically gone through the first draft prepared by his subordinates to remove many of the references to the previously prominent international themes of mobilization, including the conspiracies and the role of the Comintern.59 The impact of these two events on changes in domestic policy should not obscure their implications for the conduct of foreign policy. What is important for the main thesis of this chapter is that Stalin’s radical editing included a revision in his theory of the threat of war. Reverting to his earlier concept, he again envisaged that a war among the imperialist powers – France, Britain and Germany – would be more likely than one directed against the Soviet Union.60
The purge of Comintern personnel in the borderlands annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939–40 also appears at first glance to have been highly dysfunctional. As Dimitrov had foreseen, the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania represented a special case. The destruction of the three small communist parties of the Baltic states hampered efforts to Sovietize these countries in the brief hiatus between their occupation by the Red Army in the summer of 1940 and the German invasion a year later. It is quite possible that one of the reasons that Stalin hesitated for over a year after having established protectorates over the Baltic states in 1939 following the Nazi-Soviet Pact was his inability to find suitable replacements for the ‘bourgeois’ officials and army officers of the independent governments. Instead, fellow-travelling intellectuals were chosen, like the writer Justas Paleckis (Poletskice) in Lithuania, the microbiologist Augusts Kirhenšteins (Kirchenstein) in Latvia and the poet and physician Dr Johannes Vares in Estonia. Vares was not even a member of the Communist Party until he became prime minister and then president of Estonia in the summer of 1940.61
When the deterioration of relations with Germany impelled him to occupy the Baltic states in 1940, Stalin had little choice but to leave most of the middle-level civil servants and army officers in place, obliging them only to take the oath of loyalty to Soviet power. This was a sharp reversal of his policies in the borderlands during the Russian Civil War; but in 1940 his military power was much greater, and was not – for the moment – challenged directly from abroad. He would face a similar situation in much of Eastern Europe in 1944–45 and would respond pragmatically in the same way.
In the long run, the implications of the Comintern purge for Soviet foreign policy proved profound. The killings in Moscow severely weakened the ability of the left to resist Hitler in Eastern Europe from 1938 to 1941. Their weakness persisted throughout the war. The leadership losses affected most of the East European parties like those of Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, and complicated the tasks of liberation and reconstruction. The Yugoslav party was exceptional due to the ability of Tito to build up a powerful personal following among younger Yugoslav communists, and then to organize and lead a strong partisan movement. The victims among foreign – as among Soviet – communists cannot be categorized by ideological tendency; ‘rights’ and ‘lefts’ alike perished, and representatives of all factional tendencies also survived in the same parties. The wonder was that the international cadres were not utterly demoralized, that they did not simply crumble and disappear. But many in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union quite literally had nowhere else to go; to attempt to escape from prison or evade arrest and flee would probably have meant falling into the hands of the Gestapo. In Spain and Western Europe, a subtler power held them in place. They were unable to conceive of a political existence outside the party which defined their entire worldview. Those celebrated intellectuals who denounced ‘the God that failed’ were exceptional both in the ability to rationalize their actions and to reconstruct their worldview on a different basis.62 Yet even more astonishing than the behaviour of the rank and file was the attitude of the Soviet leaders towards the condemned. During and even after the Second World War, some survivors of the purges in the camps were permitted to return to their homelands and even to occupy positions of real responsibility in the new regimes. Of course, there were pressing practical reasons for this unofficial ‘amnesty’. There simply were not enough trained communists to administer the liberated borderlands. Still, one has to admit that it is a curious employment of men and women who had been denounced as spies and saboteurs.
Focusing on Stalin’s preparations for war reveals the paradoxical nature of his approach to questions of power. His policies may be summed up as a radical transformation of a backward agrarian society, deeply scarred and divided by revolution and civil war, into an industrialized society with a modern army. At the same time he embarked on an equally radical policy of neutralizing every real, potential and imagined opposition to his policies in the army, diplomatic corps, technical intelligentsia, nationalities and international communist movement, whose expertise and experience appeared to be vital – indeed indispensable – to the achieving of his aims. He attempted to resolve the contradiction between creative and destructive policies by employing mass mobilization techniques aimed at creating new and testing old loyalties through propaganda and centralized administrative measures on an unprecedented scale. His initiatives were often arbitrary, badly co-ordinated and wasteful of lives and resources. The design for a new society, however flawed, was beginning to emerge on the eve of the war. Yet more time was required to consolidate the gains and to settle down a population convulsed by violence imposed from above. The coming of war, so often invoked, had to be delayed. The deal with Hitler in 1939 was shockingly opportunistic to true believers in the moral superiority of the communist mission, but it made sense just so long as Stalin believed he had bought time, had acquired a defensive glacis and continued to have access to high technology through trade with Germany. He miscalculated the timing of Hitler’s aggressive intentions, and almost lost everything as a result. The deal was made not because he trusted Hitler, but rather because he calculated that Hitler would not make the same mistake as Napoleon in 1812 or Germany in 1914 of fighting on two fronts. As long as Britain could hold out, Stalin thought the chances of a German attack were slight. And for Britain to survive, it needed the Russians to come in, which was one good reason to avoid doing so. Soviet intelligence was good, but not well co-ordinated; the ‘noise’ was distracting. Stalin had taken too much into his own hands.
Like his paradoxical policies in the central institutions of the Soviet Union, so too his preparations for war in the borderlands and the international communist movement undermined the basis of resistance to a foreign enemy. Initially an advocate of building a new loyalty among the nationalities who formed the outer perimeter of defence, he reversed course when it appeared to him that a growth of autonomy even in the cultural sphere would weaken his authority and expose the territories to penetration by trans-border, hostile foreign elements.
Although he had never put much stock in the international communist movement to serve as a forward, screening force in the defence of the Soviet Union, nevertheless, his deep suspicion of their reliability and unity drove him to decimate their ranks, thereby reducing their potential contribution to subverting the war effort of his potential attackers; exceptions like the Yugoslav and Greek communists were largely due to survivors and local conditions. To be sure, his actions made the local parties even more dependent in the postwar period on his authority and the liberating forces of the Red Army to pursue their bid for power.