Stalin was historically paranoid and used the NKVD as his own private force for eliminating people he thought were disloyal or a threat. The main purpose of the NKVD was national security, and they made sure their presence was well known.
People were arrested and sent to work camps for the most mundane things. With one-fifth of its total group repressed, Soviet citizens of Polish origin paid the heaviest toll of all ethnic minorities forming the "Great Soviet family". A remarkable feature should be stressed at this point: relatively few Soviet Germans living in the Autonomous Republic of the Volga Germans by far the largest community of soviet citizens of German origin were arrested in the course of the German Operation.
In , Soviet citizens of German origin living in the Autonomous Soviet Republic of the Volga Germans seem to have been considered as "better integrated" in the Soviet system than individuals of German origin scattered in "sensitive" border areas or in industrial towns German, Ethnicity as such was not the prime criteria, as it would be two or three years later, when entire ethnic groups would be deported among them, all Soviet Germans.
The main characteristic of the mass operations was their absolute secrecy: no more than a hundred high party and NKVD officials received a copy of the NKVD secret operational orders; all the other executants were given oral instructions on how to proceed with the operation. The dvoiki and troiki sat behind closed doors, in the absence of the accused and without any defender. The obsession with secrecy went so far as not to inform the condemned person - nor his relatives - of the death sentence passed on him.
The instructions issued on August 14, to the NKVD regional chiefs, emphasized the need "to ensure that there is absolute secrecy concerning time, place and method of execution. Immediately on receipt of this order you are to present a list of NKVD staff permitted to participate in executions. Red Army soldiers or ordinary policemen are not to be employed. All persons involved in the work of transporting the bodies and excavating or filling in the pits have to sign a document certifying that they are sworn to secrecy" McLoughlin, Nevertheless, some NKVD chiefs not only infringed these regulations, but invited colleagues to attend the "wedding" — a coded expression, in NKVD circles, to designate executions.
Except for those who were forced to testify during the limited purges of the NKVD apparatus after the end of the Great Terror it goes without saying that these testimonies should be subjected to strong historical criticism , very few witnesses, such as people living in the neighborhood of the NKVD "shooting ranges" for example, left testimonies on this secret mass crime.
The mass operations of remained secret for over half a century, until the beginning of the s. Two and a half years after the end of the Great Terror, Soviet society was confronted with the Nazi invasion.
The murderous cataclysm of the Great Patriotic War in the course of which over 20 million Soviet citizens were killed and the collective sufferings of a whole nation at war deeply buried the secret, unspeakable and thus strictly individual memory of the arrest and disapearance of beloved and relatives during the Great Terror. Only a handful of prisoners, sentenced in to a ten-year sentence were released in Only after the death of Stalin did hope return for the relatives of the repressed.
In , special commissions were set up in order to "review the cases of individuals condemned for counter-revolutionary crimes and serving their sentence in camps or labour settlements". Among those released, how many were survivors of the Great Terror"? Less than , out of the , ascribed to the "second category". The return of the survivors brought about a stream of letters sent to the Procuracy or the KGB State Security by relatives of those who had vanished since The question of what they should be answered was discussed at the highest level of the Party and the State Security.
On August 24, , Ivan Serov, the newly appointed Chief of the KGB, directed, in a secret instruction to the State Security staff, "not to inform the relatives of persons sentenced to the death penalty of the sentence … and tell them that the condemned was sentenced to a ten-year term in camp and had died at a date which will be arbitrarily fixed in the lapse of time between and " Artizov et al. I can see that you are an unwavering enemy.
You are bent on destroying yourself. Years of jail are in store for you. You are the ringleader of the Trotskyite conspiracy. We know everything. I want to try and save you in spite of yourself.
This is the last time that we try. So, I'm making one last attempt to save you. I don't expect very much from you - I know you too well. I am going to acquaint you with the complete confessions that have been made by your sister-in-law and secretary, Anita Russakova. All you have to do it say, "I admit that it is true", and sign it.
I won't ask you any more questions, the investigation will be closed, your whole position will be improved, and I shall make every effort to get the Collegium to be lenient to you. Stalin decided to arrange for the assassination of Kirov and to lay the crime at the door of the former leaders of the opposition and thus with one blow do away with Lenin's former comrades.
Stalin came to the conclusion that, if he could prove that Zinoviev and Kamenev and other leaders of the opposition had shed the blood of Kirov, "the beloved son of the party", a member of the Politburo, he then would be justified in demanding blood for blood. Up to last Sunday persons had been executed in Soviet Russia as the direct result of the Kirov assassination.
To what extent are Zinoviev and Kamenev implicated in the plot. The hysteria of Karl Radek's and Nikolai Bukharin's charges against them in Pravda and Izvestia fails to carry conviction. Russia's right to crush Nazi-White Guard conspiracies or other plots of murder and arson no one questions; few have anything but approval for it. What is in question is the guilt of particular persons who have not been tried in an open court of law. Hundreds of suspects in Leningrad were rounded up and shot summarily, without trial.
Almost hourly the circle of those supposedly implicated, directly or "morally", was widened until it embraced anyone and everyone who had ever raised a doubt about any Stalinist policy. I would like to repeat that I am fully and utterly guilty. I Kamenev, together with Zinoviev and Trotsky, organized and guided this conspiracy. Some commentators, writing at a long distance from the scene, profess doubt that the executed men Zinoviev and Kamenev were guilty. It is suggested that they may have participated in a piece of stage play for the sake of friends or members of their families, held by the Soviet government as hostages and to be set free in exchange for this sacrifice.
We see no reason to accept any of these laboured hypotheses, or to take the trial in other than its face value. Foreign correspondents present at the trial pointed out that the stories of these sixteen defendants, covering a series of complicated happenings over nearly five years, corroborated each other to an extent that would be quite impossible if they were not substantially true.
The defendants gave no evidence of having been coached, parroting confessions painfully memorized in advance, or of being under any sort of duress. Very likely there was a plot. We complain because, in the absence of independent witnesses, there is no way of knowing.
It is their Zinoviev and Kamenev confession and decision to demand the death sentence for themselves that constitutes the mystery. If they had a hope of acquittal, why confess? If they were guilty of trying to murder Stalin and knew they would be shot in any case, why cringe and crawl instead of defiantly justifying their plot on revolutionary grounds? We would be glad to hear the explanation. And on 14 August, like a thunderbolt, came the announcement of the Trial of the Sixteen, concluded on the 25th - eleven days later - by the execution of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Ivan Smirnov, and all their fellow-defendants.
I understood, and wrote at once, that this marked the beginning of the extermination of all the old revolutionary generation. It was impossible to murder only some, and allow the others to live, their brothers, impotent witnesses maybe, but witnesses who understood what was going on.
I do not recognize that I am guilty. I am not a Trotskyite. I was never a member of the "right-winger and Trotskyite bloc", which I did not know to exist. Nor have I committed a single one of the crimes imputed to me, personally; and in particular I am not guilty of having maintained relations with the German Secret Service.
Yesterday, a passing but sharp impulse of false shame, created by these surroundings and by the fact that I am on trial, and also by the harsh impression made by the list of charges and by my state of health, prevented me from telling the truth, from saying that I was guilty. The basic mechanism and chief reliance of the extortion artists were physical torture.
In every city the Valuta Department might develop its own sadistic specialties, but apparently several basic techniques were common to them all. The parilka, or sweat room, has been described to me so often that I feel as though I had seen it with my own eyes.
I can see it now with my mind's eye. Several hundred men and women, standing close-packed in a small room where all ventilation has been shut off, in heat that chokes and suffocates, in stink that asphyxiates, one small bulb shedding a dim light on the purgatory.
Many of them have stood thus for a day, for two days. Most of them have ripped their clothes off in fighting the heat and the sweat and the swarming lice that feed upon them. Their feet are swollen, their bodies numbed and aching. They are not allowed to sit down or to squat.
They lean against one another for support, sway with one rhythm and groan with one voice. Every now and then the door is opened and a newcomer is squeezed in.
Every now and then those who have fainted are dragged out into the corridor, revived and thrown back into the sweat room The so-called "conveyor" has been graphically described by Professor Tchernavin in his book, I Speak for the Silent. His description coincides substantially with the accounts I have heard myself from victims who had been through the torture. Examiners sit at desks in a long series of rooms, strung out along corridors, up and down stairways, back to the starting point: a sort of circle of G.
The victims run at a trot from one desk to the next, cursed, threatened, insulted, bullied, questioned by each agent in turn, round and round, hour after hour. They weep and plead and deny and keep running If they fall they are kicked and beaten on their shins, stagger to their feet and resume the hellish relay.
The agents, relieved at frequent intervals, are always fresh and keen, while the victims grow weaker, more terrorized, more degraded. From the parilka to the conveyor, from the conveyor to the parilka, then periods in ugly cells when uncertainty and fear for one's loved ones outside demoralize the prisoner I am aware of my impotence to translate more than a hint of the Gehenna into words.
One must hear it from the mouth of a haggard, feverish victim fresh from the ordeal to grasp the hellishness of it. If physical torture failed to break down someone I heard the detailed story of a former merchant who insisted for weeks that he had nothing, absolutely nothing left. Only when one of his children, a little boy, was thrown into the Parilka with him and kept there for three days did he remind himself that he did have a box of jewels buried in his back yard.
Then another child was brought for torture, and he admitted to more valuta in another hiding place. His whole family was on the rack before he was stripped clean of his surreptitious wealth.
A Russian-American businessman came as a tourist to visit his aged parents in Kiev. For years he had been sending them a monthly remittance, which was their only support. Completely distressed by the squalid poverty in which his father and mother lived, he tried in vain to arrange for them to leave the country; this was before the valuta ransom racket was inaugurated.
He did the next best thing and found them a better room to live in by paying American dollars to the trust which controlled the tenement house. Its special boards were empowered to sentence people for up to five years' imprisonment without judicial process. The secret police became the primary pillar of Stalin's personal dictatorship: it was deployed not only against the general population and the intelligentsia , but also against the Party, the military, and the government.
The Communist Party of Ukraine and Ukrainian government leaders, who had shown a reluctance to extend the purge , were decimated by arrests and executions in —8. Bukharin, L. Kamenev, and Grigorii Zinovev, and in Leon Trotsky 's assassination. It was responsible for the massacre of over 9, people in Vinnytsia in —8 see Vinnytsia massacre and of some 4, Polish officers in Katyn Forest in Ironically, Stalin turned the NKVD upon itself: its last three chiefs along with thousands of their followers were destroyed in the great terror of the late s or in the succession struggle after Stalin's death.
They provided military assistance to the armed forces, organized Soviet partisans see Soviet partisans in Ukraine, —5 , and engaged in intelligence and counterintelligence activities. At the start of the German offensive in , they brutally executed thousands of political prisoners held in their prisons in Western Ukraine.
After the war they administered mass deportations of Ukrainians , Balts, and other non-Russians from the newly annexed territories and suppressed anti-Soviet underground organizations and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
In January L.
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