Great Terror (Soviet Union)

Memorial plaque for victims of the Great Terror on the grounds of the Butowo execution site (2007)

The Great Terror ( Russian Большой террор , scientific transliteration Bol'šoj terror ) - also known as the Great Purge ( Russian Большая чистка , Bolshaya chistka ) or Ezhovshchina ( Russian ежовщина ), Yezhov's reign, which lasted from autumn 1938 to the end of 1938, was extensive Persecution campaign in the Soviet Union . This terror campaign , initiated by Josef Stalin and approved by the Politburo , was carried out by the organs of the Interior Ministry of the USSR (NKVD) under the direction of Nikolai Jeschow . The terror was directed primarily against alleged opponents of Stalinist rule and "elements" or groups that were viewed as unreliable.

The period from July 1937 to mid-November 1938 is understood as the time of the Great Terror in the narrower sense. During this period alone, around 1.5 million people were arrested, around half of whom were shot, the others, with a few exceptions, were taken to the Gulag camps or imprisoned in prisons. The mass repression is considered the culmination of a chain of waves of purges from the Stalin era.

Those responsible for the terror initially staged a series of show trials , the most famous of which was the Moscow trials ; primarily against members of the elite in politics , the military , business , administration , science and culture . The secret “mass operations” from mid-1937 onwards, which affected so-called kulaks , “socially harmful” and “socially dangerous elements” and ethnic minorities , resulted in a far greater number of victims.

In 1956, three years after Stalin's death, the then First Secretary of the Central Committee, Nikita Khrushchev , reported during a secret speech at the XX. Party conference of the CPSU on earlier " political cleansing " against party members. The mass operations continued to be a state secret . It was only after the end of the Soviet Union that extensive archive finds and studies made the nature and extent of the terror clear.

There has long been controversy in research on the Great Terror , mainly over the number of its victims and its causes. Interpretations within the framework of the totalitarianism theory contrasted with interpretations that locate the main causes in the contradictions of Soviet society and in political conflicts between the center and the periphery.

Background and history

Upheaval society

Since 1914, Russian society - or from the end of 1922 the Soviet Union - went through phases of dramatic and violent upheaval: Within around 20 years, it suffered the First World War , the February and then the October Revolution in 1917, and the civil war . A brief phase of recovery in the form of the New Economic Policy (NEP) was followed - now under Stalin's direction - by forced industrialization , deculakization and forced collectivization .

The rapid industrialization decided at the end of the 1920s and the forced collectivization at the beginning of the 1930s fundamentally changed the entire social structure . In 1928, only eight percent of all workers were employed in industry and construction, but this proportion tripled to 24 percent by 1937. Heavy industry generated well over half of total industrial production. In contrast, the proportion of people working in agriculture and forestry decreased from 80 percent to 56 percent over the same period. Added to this was a rural exodus that world history up to that was without precedent: From 1926 to 1939 attracted at least 23 million people from the countryside to the city. At the end of the 1930s, 40 percent of all city dwellers had only moved in from rural areas in the last ten years. The urban population had doubled from 26 million to 51.9 million people between 1926 and 1937. Following Moshe Lewin , many historians speak of an “airline sand company” to characterize the Soviet migration dynamics of those years.

Tradition of Terror and Show Trials

The terror as a political instrument of struggle was of Lenin advocated forcefully repeated after the October Revolution. In doing so, he found himself in harmony with his party, the Russian Communist Party . The Cheka or its successor organizations GPU (1922 to 1934 OGPU) and NKVD developed into the central organ of terrorist violence . The most important milestones of mass terror were until 1936

• the red terror of the civil war years (1917–1921),
• the ruthless policy of collecting taxes in kind from the farmers - this policy led to around five million starvation deaths and another 25 million starving people in 1921/22
• as well as the forced collectivization and deculakization in the early 1930s, which brought with it the deportation of two million peasants, and the Holodomor , a famine with four to six million deaths.

In the course of the deculakization, an instrument was used that had already been used in the civil war: in each district of the country, committees made up of three people each decided out of court

• who was to be interned as a "Kulak" or to be shot in the event of resistance,
• those who were deported to distant and inhospitable areas after their property was confiscated
• and who was resettled within their region of origin.

These so-called troikas were made up of the first secretary of the party committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) , the local representative of the OGPU and the chairman of the executive committee of the respective Soviet . Troikas with a similar personnel structure played a central role in the months of the Great Terror as secret court martial that decided de facto on the ground in hundreds of thousands of cases of life and death.

Until the mid-1930s, the state organs of the Soviet Union also staged several show trials .

• As early as mid-1922, the Bolsheviks initiated one against 34 Social Revolutionaries , which ended with death sentences against eleven accused.
• In 1928, 53 “bourgeois specialists” from the Shakhty region of the Donets Basin were on trial, mostly engineers and mining directors. The accusation in the so-called Shakhty trial was sabotage on behalf of foreign powers. The trial resulted in death sentences for eleven accused, five of whom were executed .
• In March 1930, 35 Ukrainian politicians and intellectuals found themselves exposed in a show trial of the allegation that they were secretly pursuing the separation of Ukraine from the USSR and the reintroduction of capitalism .
• At the end of 1930 the show trial of the so-called industrial party took place. Eight of the defendants stated that they had built up a conspiratorial network of 2,000 specialists and were supported by foreign embassies . The aim was to undermine the Soviet economy.
• In March 1931, the allegedly subversive activities of a “Union office of the Mensheviks ” were the focus of another show trial, which was primarily directed against employees of the state planning authority Gosplan . In addition to disrupting economic processes, a planned foreign intervention had been worked on and the overthrow of the Soviet government had been prepared.

Assassination of Kirov

After the end of the NEP and in setting the course of forced industrialization, Stalin succeeded in marginalizing his internal party opponents. A policy began which later became known as Stalinism and which secured Stalin's personal power. The left opposition around Trotsky had been eliminated since the mid-1920s - nevertheless, Soviet propaganda repeatedly invoked " Trotskyism " as a fundamental threat to the existence of the Soviet Union and as a source of numerous conspiracies . In 1929, the leaders of the “party rights” around Bukharin and Rykov , who pleaded for a continuation of the NEP , suffered a heavy defeat. They were accused of "forming factions ", which had been banned since the Xth Congress of the Communist Party in March 1921, and were temporarily excluded from the party.

On December 1, 1934, Leonid Nikolayev , a worker from Leningrad , murdered the First Secretary of the Leningrad Party Organization, Sergei Kirov . The background to the crime has not yet been fully clarified. Khrushchev later claimed that Stalin was implicated. This, so the assumption in many older biographies, was angry about the result that Kirov had achieved at the party congress of 1934, the "party congress of the winners" . Kirov received only a few of the secret votes against, while Stalin and some of his closest loyal supporters each received over a hundred votes against. Due to this surprising result, which Stalin did not publish at the delegates' meeting, but had forged it, his decision had matured to finally eliminate the "old guard" of the Bolsheviks. So far there is no irrefutable evidence either for the thesis of election fraud or for the thesis of Stalin's involvement in the Kirov murder. It is indisputable, however, that Stalin used the murder to immediately order emergency measures with the “Law of December 1” , which made it possible to quickly access and punish all kinds of opponents - up to and including execution. These opportunities were used extensively during the months of the Great Terror. The murder of Kirov seemed to confirm the constantly repeated allegation of a conspiracy against the leadership of the state and party and was therefore particularly suitable as a trigger for a widespread wave of repression.

Repression

The wave of arrests began a few days after Kirov's murder. On December 16, 1934, it also recorded Kamenev and Zinoviev , who had previously been excluded from the CPSU as "left deviants" for several years. The indictment against a wide circle of people unfolded the scenario of a comprehensive conspiracy: led by Kamenev and Zinoviev, a "Leningrad center" together with a "Moscow center" carried out anti-subversive activities, which included the murder of Kirov. In December 1934, 6,501 people were executed in Leningrad in response to the Kirov murder.

Stalin instructed the country's local authorities to exercise heightened caution against all those who, as communists , had opposed his policies in the past or appeared to be dissenters . On January 26, 1935, he signed a decision of the Politburo ordering the exile of several hundred former supporters of Zinoviev from Leningrad to northern Siberia and Yakutia . Lists of people suspected of belonging to the "Trotskyist-Zinovievist bloc" were also drawn up across the country. In May 1935, Stalin also instructed the local party branches to carefully check all party IDs. The ID-control campaign led to the exclusion of nine percent of all party members, that is around 250,000 people. At the end of December 1935, Nikolai Jeschow , head of the ID-check campaign and responsible for party executives, reported to the plenum of the CPSU Central Committee that 15,218 of the excluded members of the CPSU had been arrested. In his report, he mainly drew attention to the resistance of local party leaders to cooperation with the NKVD, which had led to comparatively few "Trotskyists" and "Zinovievists" being exposed. This hint from Yezhov clearly showed Stalin where the levers should be applied in the future.

The repression immediately following the murder of Kirov not only hit party members but also led to ethnic cleansing .

• On December 27, 1934, the Politburo decided to relocate 2,000 “anti-Soviet families” from the border areas of Ukraine.
• On March 15, 1935, the decision was made to expel “unreliable elements” from the border areas of the Leningrad Region and the Karelian ASSR . They are to be deported to areas of Kazakhstan and Western Siberia . Around 10,000 people, mostly Finns , were affected by this measure because of their ethnicity.
• A second wave of deportations followed in the spring. It recorded 15,000 Polish and German families who lived in Ukraine - around 50,000 people together. Places in the Karaganda region or in Kazakhstan have been designated as deportation destinations for these people .

Persecution, condemnation, banishment, annihilation

On July 29, 1936, the Central Committee of the CPSU sent a closed letter to all party organizations in the republics and autonomous regions of the Soviet Union. This letter, which Stalin himself helped draft, warned against " enemies of the people " who would work subversively anywhere in society. As a rule, the enemy of the people appears “tame and harmless” and presents himself as a supporter of socialism. In truth, however, he is its dangerous enemy, and if the enemy feels threatened, he “takes the utmost measure”. At the same time a campaign began in the Soviet press against spies, traitors, murderers, divers , "the Trotskyist gang of restorers of capitalism ". This created the impression of a threat in society that a decisive battle was imminent. The concept of the "enemy of the people" (Russian враг народа, wrag naroda ) - a term that Lenin had already used when the Cadet Party was banned in November 1917 - became fundamental to the Great Terror that was now beginning. With it, every criticism and every opposition was withdrawn from legitimation: Anyone who raised their voice against the leadership of the state and party was defined as an enemy and had to be exterminated. One advantage over the Marxist concept of the class enemy , which had been used until 1936, was that members of the communist party itself could now also be persecuted.

“Purges” of cadres and elites

Moscow show trials

Prominent former critics of Stalin were indicted in the three major Moscow show trials from 1936 to 1938 . For the main defendants, these trials resulted in death sentences and , in a few exceptions, long prison sentences. The judgments were not based on material evidence, but were determined in advance. Stalin himself directed the background. The trials focused on the defendants' self-accusations and confessions. These had been won through extortion , torture , clan liability and false promises. The aim was not to punish proven violations of the law. Rather, the addressees of the productions were the national and international public.

The show trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev and 14 other functionaries - many of whom were close supporters of Lenin - lasted from August 19 to 24, 1936. A “Trotskyist-Zinovievist terrorist center” was charged with a wide range of capital crimes and others planned, among other things, involvement in the murder of Kirov, sabotage, “pest labor”, espionage , terror , betrayal and conspiracy . The chief prosecutor Andrei Wyschinski repeatedly covered the defendants with serious insults. His verbal rudeness alternated with phases in which the negotiations were more like political dialogues between the accused and the accused. As part of the trial, other people were accused of planning and carrying out crimes, thus expanding the alleged network of conspirators against the party, state and society on all sides. All of the accused were sentenced to death on August 24 and shot in the basement of Moscow's Lubyanka secret service center before the reprieve had expired .

Vyshinsky (center) reads out the indictment in the second Moscow trial

The second Moscow show trial began on January 23 and ended on January 30, 1937. The indictment charged 17 people with conspiring in an "anti-Soviet Trotskyist center". According to the indictment, this included Georgi Pyatakov , Karl Radek , Grigori Sokolnikow , Leonid Serebryakov and 13 other functionaries of the CPSU. Ten of the 17 accused were former leaders of the main people's commissariats . Defendants in the 1936 show trial had previously referred to this group as the "reserve center" of high treason . The allegations and confessions focused on acts of sabotage in business, transport and industry. The trial ended with 13 death sentences. Radek and Sokolnikow were among the few who got away with ten years' imprisonment. Both were killed in custody a few years later.

The third trial presented a number of prominent Bolsheviks to the audience from March 2 to 13, 1938: Nikolai Bukharin , Alexei Rykow , Nikolai Krestinsky , Vladimir Ivanov , Christian Rakowski , Genrich Jagoda , Fayzulla Xoʻjayev and 14 other functionaries. According to the indictment, they formed the “bloc of the right and Trotskyists”, which was mainly accused of terrorism, espionage and extensive machinations to reintroduce capitalism.

This trial was considered the culmination of the show trials, among other things because three of the accused had been members of the Politburo during Lenin's lifetime. Krestinski pleaded “not guilty” at the start of the trial. Bukharin often contradicted specific statements with which witnesses or Vyshinsky incriminated him. At the same time, he confirmed the accusation of high treason if this was formulated in abstract terms. As in the two previous show trials, the indictment and the reporting of the trial in the Soviet press provided the population with scapegoats for all imaginable inadequacies and hardships in economic and everyday life. As in the previous trials, mass demonstrations organized by the party and the state demanded the death of all accused. The trial ended with 18 death sentences and three defendants received long prison terms.

Show trials in the province

In addition to the Moscow trials, there were hundreds of show trials across the country that were similar in terms of their sequence and function. These show trials took place between September and December 1937 and were also initiated by Stalin. They included the local population in the “cleanup campaign” or suggested such participation . Like their Moscow models, the local trials were accompanied by demonstrations and resolutions by various work collectives against the defendants - local and regional officials who were accused of abuse of power, corruption and mismanagement. Through these processes, the state claimed interventions to protect “the people” who had previously allegedly or really suffered from these functionaries. There were trials of this kind in Siberia , in the Belarusian SSR or in the Yaroslavl Oblast .

Further "purge" of the party

The highest-ranking CPSU members among the victims were the five political bureau members and candidates loyal to Stalin: Robert Eiche , Stanislaw Kossior , Pavel Postyshev , Jan Rudsutak and Vlas Chubar . Of the 139 members of the Central Committee, 98 were victims of the Great Terror, of the 1966 delegates of the XVII. Party congress of the CPSU (1934), called "Party convention of the victors", was 1108.

The Komsomol , the party's youth organization, was also affected. 72 of the 93 members of the central committee of this organization were arrested, of the 385 regional secretaries there were 319, of the 2750 district secretaries 2210. The personnel changes as a result of the terror were enormous: of the 32,000 cadres who belonged to the nomenklatura in 1939 , 70 percent were in the appointed two years since 1937.

Certain regions of the Soviet Union are known to have suffered particularly badly from the repression. This was the case for Leningrad, for example. The party organization there was considered suspect because Zinoviev had chaired it for a long time. 90 percent of all Leningrad party cadres were imprisoned. The harassment of the Ukrainian party cadres after Nikita Khrushchev took over the chairmanship of the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1938 was similarly extensive . Only three of the 200 members of the Ukrainian Central Committee survived. In all parts of the Soviet Union, however, the repression against party cadres formed only a small part of the Great Terror: only around ten percent of its victims were party members, although their share (only around 1.4 percent of the total population was party members) was disproportionately high.

"Purge" the Red Army

The five marshals of the Soviet Union in November 1935 (from left to right): Mikhail Tukhachevsky , Semyon Budjonny , Kliment Voroshilov , Vasily Blucher , Alexander Jegorow . Only Voroshilov and Budyonny survived the purge.

On June 11, 1937, the Soviet press reported that a military tribunal had secretly sentenced Mikhail Tukhachevsky , Marshal of the Soviet Union and Deputy People's Commissar for Defense, along with seven other generals to death. The charge was high treason and espionage, especially in favor of National Socialist Germany . Together with Tukhachevsky, other high-ranking military officers were arrested in the summer of 1937 and forced to make confessions under torture. Within nine more days, the state organs arrested 980 senior officers and political commissars . In 1937 and 1938, around 33,000 to 35,000 of the approximately 178,000 military leaders were arrested. These military personnel included

• 3 out of 5 marshals ,
• 13 out of 15 army commanders (3 out of 5 KomandArm I. And all 10 KomandArm II . Ranges)
• 8 out of 9 admirals ,
• 50 of 57 corps generals ,
• 154 of 186 division generals ,
• all 16 political commissars assigned to the armies and 25 of the 28 political commissars assigned to the army corps .

Until the 1980s, the thesis was repeatedly put forward in historical scholarship that the elimination of the head of the Red Army was the result of a German intrigue : In order to weaken the Soviet Union militarily, the head of the Reichsführer SS (SD) security service Reinhard Heydrich had documents faked, according to which Tukhachevsky was planning a coup d'état against Stalin, and played to Moscow via the Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš . Recent research based on Soviet archival documents shows that the fiction of an imminent military insurrection by the Red Army came from Stalin himself, who needed a credible pretext to crack down on Tukhachevsky and the other generals. The false reports were sent to Berlin via the double agent Nikolai Skoblin , where further alleged evidence was falsified and reported to Moscow via the French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier : while the SD believed that he had successfully manipulated Stalin and caused him to behead his own army, he had himself rather, made into its tool. The forged documents were not even presented in the secret trial; the convictions were based on the confessions made.

The Red Army lost about twice as many generals in the two years of the "purges" as in the entire Second World War . In the years that followed, the extent of the repression decreased, but it did not stop until the attack by the German Reich in the summer of 1941.

It was similar with the naval forces . Their leadership was also considerably weakened by the so-called purges. At the end of November 1935 the top management consisted of

• Fleet flag officer 1st rank WM Orlov (Chief of the Naval Forces of the Red Army),
• Fleet flag officer 1st rank MW Viktorov (Commander of the Pacific Fleet ),
• Fleet flag officer 2nd rank LM Galler (Commander of the Baltic Fleet ),
• Fleet flag officer 2nd rank IK Koschanow (Commander of the Black Sea Fleet ),
• 1st rank flag officer IM Ludri (Deputy Commander of the Naval Forces),
• Flag officer 1st rank KI Duschenow (Commander of the Northern Sea Flotilla),
• Flag officer 1st rank IN Kadatski-Rudnew (commander of the Amur flotilla)
• and Flag Officer 1st Class GP Kireev (Deputy Commander of the Pacific Fleet).

Of these officers, only Galler survived the years of the Great Terror. The junior officers who came up had little experience. For example, Rear Admiral A.G. Golovko was just 34 years old when he was appointed commander of the Northern Fleet in 1940 and could look back on no more than 13 years of service.

Around 11,000 arrested persons were returned to military service between 1939 and 1941, because the extensive "purges" of the Red Army had considerably weakened their clout in the winter war against Finland (1939/40) and in the war against National Socialist Germany (1941–1945). This weakening was partly due to the poor qualifications of the officers who were advancing. In an internal report from December 1940, the head of the "Combat Training" administration reported that of the 225 regimental commanders called on for a course, only 25 had actually completed the actual officer training, all the others came from courses for sub-lieutenants or reservists. Shortly afterwards, due to the repression, there was another wave of promotions when, on March 7th and 8th, 1941, 4 army commanders, 42 corps commanders and 117 division commanders were newly appointed. They only had three months to familiarize themselves with the higher positions. At the same time, the size of the armed forces was further increased so that the number of officers steadily decreased. Attempts were made to remedy this by calling up reservists and setting up further courses, but all these measures were at the expense of the competence of the officer corps. In 1941 the deficit in the land forces was still 16 percent, in the western border districts alone it was as much as 17 to 25 percent. The air force recorded a shortage of 32.3 percent of the aeronautical personnel and the fleet was short of 22.4 percent of the personnel. Even of the officers present, about 75 percent had been in their posts less than a year. They therefore had to go to war against the German Reich shortly after their training and without any in-depth leadership experience in the positions assigned to them .

“Purges” of other elites

The Great Terror also gripped scientists. They included the two aerospace engineers Andrei Tupolew and Sergei Koroljow . Tupolev was arrested in 1937 and Korolev in 1938. They were convicted of alleged high treason or the preparation of an assassination attempt on Stalin. Later they had to work in a “Sharashka”, a research center operated by the NKVD. This particular type of camp was described from personal experience by Solzhenitsyn in the novel The First Circle of Hell .

Arrests, long prison terms and executions also hit Soviet astronomers . More than two dozen of its leaders were affected, including many experts from the Pulkovo Observatory near Leningrad, which was deeply affected by the "purges". Because they found numbers in the 1937 census that fell short of Stalin's previous "success reports", the leading statisticians of the Soviet Union responsible for this census were arrested and executed. The census was canceled.

NKVD photos of the arrested Ossip Mandelstam (1938)

Photographs of the arrested Nikolai Wawilow (1942)

The group of writers, publicists, journalists and theater people also suffered from the purges. Around 2000 members of the Soviet Writers' Union were arrested and sentenced to forced labor in the gulag or to death. The most famous victims were Ossip Mandelstam , Boris Pilnjak , Isaak Babel and Tizian Tabidse . The most famous director who was executed in the course of the Great Terror was Vsevolod Meyerhold . He had previously refused to publicly self- criticize. Musicians were also affected by the repression, for example the conductor Evgeni Mikeladze and the composer Nikolai Schiljajew .

The yezhovshchina also reached the science of history . All students of the Marxist historian Michail Pokrowski , who died in 1932, were considered "enemies of the people" from mid-1934. Several hundred biologists were subjected to repression because they refused to accept the claims of Lysenkoism approved by Stalin . The best known victim was the botanist Nikolai Wawilow . The Great Terror also made a deep cut among the country's geologists . From the beginning to the end of the Soviet Union, a total of 968 geologists were victims of persecution. Around 560 to 600 of these repressions took place between 1936 and 1938. The punishment ranged from simple job loss to execution. Geologists were often sentenced to long prison terms.

Another target group of the Great Terror were clergy. They were seen as resolute opponents of the Soviet system with considerable influence on the population. According to the canceled census of 1937, 55 million people over the age of 16 described themselves as religious - a rate of 57 percent. Even 44.4 percent of 20 to 29 year olds said they were believers. These were people who had been socialized under communist rule.

Yemeljan Jaroslawski , the chairman of the Association of the Fighting Wicked , claimed in 1937 that there were still 39,000 religious organizations in the country with around a million activists. The party and the state then struck another blow against religious life: in 1937 alone, NKVD members arrested 136,900 Russian Orthodox priests , 85,300 of whom were shot. At the NKVD firing range in Butowo alone, 374 church dignitaries - from deacons to metropolitans - were executed during the months of the Great Terror . In 1936 around 20,000 church buildings and mosques were open for the purpose of religious practice, by 1941 this number sank to under 1000. In 1941 only 5665 clergy were officially registered - around half of them were in regions that had not yet belonged to the Soviet Union in 1936 , for example in eastern Poland , in the Baltic States , in Bessarabia or in northern Bukovina .

Bulk operations

"Kulak operation"

NKVD command no.00447

→ Main article : NKVD Order No. 00447

On July 30, 1937, Nikolai Yezhov signed the NKVD order No. 00447 in his capacity as head of the secret service . This order prepared by Yezhov's deputy, Mikhail Frinovsky , “On the Operation to Repress Former Kulaks , Criminals and Other Anti-Soviet Elements” was approved by the CPSU Politburo a day later.

The aim of the “kulak operation” in the NKVD jargon was the ultimate goal of destroying all people who were traditional enemies of the rulers. In his introductory remark, Yezhov formulated that "this whole band of anti-Soviet elements can be broken up without the slightest sparing". The “vile, corrosive goings-on” of those to be repressed should be put to an end “once and for all”. The target group of the "kulak operation" included in particular

• Former kulaks who have returned from exile after the deadline or who have fled,
• Members of previous insurgency organizations,
• former White Guards ,
• former members of non-Bolshevik parties,
• former members of tsarist punitive organs,
• former officials of the tsarist empire.

In addition to these “alumni”, this also included “socially harmful elements” such as

• repeat offenders,
• so-called bandits,
• Professional smuggler,
• Speculators,
• Robber,
• Cattle and horse thieves,
• Followers of sects and church members,
• other allegedly “ counter-revolutionary ” people who were said to have been active in camps against the Soviet Union.

At the republic, regional or regional level, troikas were already established throughout the country. They decided on the punishment of those arrested and consisted of the respective party secretary, the representative of the NKVD and the public prosecutor. For each of the territorial units, the order gave exact casualty rates . 75,950 people should therefore be shot as members of "Category 1". Another 193,000 "elements" of "Category 2" are to be sentenced to eight to ten years in a camp. The operation was supposed to be carried out within four months, and in total this mass operation lasted until November 1938. During this time, the local party and NKVD leaders kept asking Moscow headquarters to raise the quotas. On the basis of NKVD Order No. 00447, a total of around 800,000 people were eventually persecuted, 350,000 to 400,000 of them shot.

Ethnic cleansing

Decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU of January 31, 1938 concerning the so-called national operations, signed by Stalin, Molotov , Kaganowitsch , Voroshilov . Mikoyan and Chubar

In addition to the "kulak operation", twelve other mass operations are known, which were also carried out in camera. Most of them were directed against ethnically defined groups of people and had diaspora nationalities in mind. The so-called “national operations” had no quotas or limits. In addition to the NKVD order No. 00447, five corresponding commands have now been published.

Already on July 25, 1937, before the "kulak operation", the secret NKVD order No. 00439 was put into effect, an order with the official title: "Operation to take repressive measures against German nationals involved in espionage against USSR are suspect ”. According to the text of the order, the so-called " German Operation " was directed against agents and spies of the German Reich , in particular in armaments factories and in the railway sector . In fact, however, the measures affected Soviet citizens of German descent , German specialists who had come to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s to help build socialism, emigrants from Germany - including members of the Communist Party of Germany - and anyone with professional or personal relationships entertained to Germany or Germans. Germans and people with contacts in Germany were considered suspicious because National Socialist Germany had repeatedly made known its anti-Soviet intentions. The German Reich and thus potentially all Germans became the “main enemy” of the Soviet Union in the terminology of the NKVD orders that justified the mass operations. 55,005 people were convicted on the basis of this order, 41,898 of them were shot and 13,107 were sentenced to between five and ten years in prison.

NKVD command no.00485

On August 11, 1937, the so-called “ Polish Operation ” began with the signing of the NKVD Order No. 00485 “On the Liquidation of Polish Sabotage and Espionage Groups and Organizations of the POW (Polish Military Organization)”. This order, to which a 30 page long explanatory letter - approved by Stalin and signed by Yezhov - was attached, assumed the existence of a corresponding military organization of the Polish state , which was subversively active in the Soviet Union . In reality, the order was used for the massive repression of Soviet citizens of Polish origin or with Polish-sounding names, as well as of Soviet citizens with work contacts or private connections to Poland. In addition, residents of the Soviet-Polish border area were particularly at risk. All these people came under suspicion because Poland was perceived by the leadership of the Soviet Union as an enemy. The 14-month “Polish Operation” was by far the largest of all “national operations” by the NKVD. 143,810 people were arrested, 139,885 were convicted, and 111,091 convicted were shot.

Shortly afterwards, on September 20, 1937, NKVD order No. 00593 followed . This order, entitled “On measures in connection with terrorist activities, as well as sabotage and espionage activities by the Japanese agents from the ranks of the so-called Charbiner”, was aimed at another “suspicious” group of people. The Charbiner - named after the Manchurian city ​​of Harbin - were Soviet citizens who had returned to the Soviet Union in 1935 after the Soviet Union sold the Chinese Eastern Railway to Japan. Before that, they had worked as engineers, employees or railway workers for this railway company. The NKVD and the leadership of the CPSU accused them of being paid by the Japanese secret service . A total of 46,317 people were sentenced as part of this “national operation”, 30,992 of whom were sentenced to death by shooting .

NKVD circular no. 49990 is dated November 30, 1937. Based on this order, NKVD members persecuted Soviet citizens with Latvian roots as well as Latvian emigrants under the pretext of espionage for the benefit of the " Latvian Operation " from December 3, 1937 Latvia - from the point of view of the Soviet government, also an enemy state. 22,360 people were convicted and 16,573 of them were sentenced to death.

During the Great Terror, it was not just the aforementioned groups that were the target of NKVD mass operations. A decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU on January 31, 1938 named a total of twelve ethnically defined operations: In addition to Poles, Latvians and Germans, Estonians , Finns , Greeks , Iranians , Charbins, Chinese , Romanians , Bulgarians and Macedonians were also affected by ethnic cleansing. In May 1938 these operations were supplemented by an Afghan “contingent”.

Another ethnic group fell victim to mass repression: on August 21, 1937, the Politburo decided to arrest all Koreans living in the Russian Far East (the so-called Korjo-Saram ), a total of more than 170,000 people, and deport them to sparsely populated areas of Central Asia. The reason given in the relevant directive was protection from the activities of the Japanese secret service. Stalin issued direct instructions to the NKVD functionary responsible for the deportation measure.

The number of people murdered in the course of “national operations” is estimated at 350,000 to 365,000.

Persecution by militia troikas

In addition to the "kulak operation" and the "national operations", the militia also participated in the persecution. It also formed troikas who condemned citizens of the Soviet Union. The people in question were often considered petty criminals or people with socially deviant behavior ("socially harmful elements"). The militia troikas, however, were not allowed to impose the death penalty. The number of victims of these tripartite bodies, whose work has so far hardly been researched, is estimated at 420,000 to 450,000.

collective punishment

Stalin and Dimitrov (right) in Moscow (1936)

The mass operations of the NKVD were in full swing when, on November 7, 1937, on the occasion of the celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution, Stalin announced the annihilation of all enemies among high officials. Their families and relatives would also have to share this fate. Georgi Dimitrov quoted Stalin in his diary on November 7th:

“We will destroy each of these enemies, even if he is an old Bolshevik, we will completely destroy his clan, his family. We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, with his deeds and in his mind, attacks the unity of the socialist state. To the destruction of all enemies, themselves, their clans - until the end! (Approving exclamations: To the great Stalin!) "

The principle of clan liability was not only applied during the yezhovshchina; it had been in force since 1921. Since then, the aim has been to effectively prevent potentially hostile activities from the outset. In the early 1930s, entire families were always deported as part of the deculakization campaign. From the beginning of 1933, after the introduction of domestic passes, entire families were also banned from cities with special status. On July 20, 1934, Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federative Socialist Soviet Republic (RSFSR) was supplemented by a passage threatening “family members of enemies of the people” with punishment. The ethnic "cleansing" of 1935 in border areas also affected entire families.

After order 00447 had only permitted the persecution of family members in exceptional cases, the NKVD reaffirmed the principle of clan liability on August 15, 1937 with the NKVD order no. 00486 "On the operation to repress the wives and children of traitors to the fatherland". Initially, this order only applied to relatives of people who had been convicted by the military college and courts-martial of the USSR - it was aimed primarily at the families of persecuted cadres and elites.

The order provided for a prison sentence of five to eight years for wives or life partners . Young people over the age of 15 were to be arrested along with their mothers and also sentenced. Children under the age of 15 were separated from their parents and - for the purpose of "delocalization", as the authorities use jargon - admitted to crèches or children's homes far away . The political development of these children was closely monitored. Pregnant women, breastfeeding women, the seriously ill and old women were exempt from remand. They were immediately taken to special camps.

According to NKVD statistics, more than 18,000 wives were persecuted on the basis of this order. The information and estimates about the children affected vary, ranging from 20,000 to "tens of thousands". up to 150,000 and 300,000.

Mechanisms and Features

Use of registries

When tracking down real and alleged enemies, the NKVD employees fell back on data that had been collected since the early 1920s. Each regional department of the NKVD or its predecessor organizations had a register with "hostile categories".

This includes people who had worked as tsarist officials, fought as White Guards , participated in peasant uprisings, who re-migrated to Russia or immigrated to the country for political reasons, returned from Austro-Hungarian or German captivity, condemned as clergymen or as peasants who had been deculacized had been arrested. In addition, there were registered Soviet citizens who had lived abroad, as well as "kulaks" who had fled their deportation location and exiles for political reasons. Persons whose voting rights had been withdrawn by the authorities were also noted, as were all communists who were expelled from the CPSU.

Troika, dwoika, and album method

The local troikas , whose composition the Politburo had approved on July 31, 1937 , took care of the verdicts during the "kulak operation" . In them, the representative of the NKVD de facto played the decisive role. Often he alone decided on the imposition of the death sentence or the length of the prison sentence, the other members often limited themselves to signing the finished sentences. There was no assessment of the individual cases. Troikas often dealt with several hundred cases per session. It happened that over a thousand cases were tried in one trial. A defense of the accused was not provided, nor did the convicts have a right of appeal . The respective verdict was not presented to the convicts.

In the “national operations”, so-called dwoikas, made up of two people, took on this task at the local level. They consisted of the NKVD chief and the regional prosecutor. These bodies were not empowered to give final judgments. Their penalties, which came about in the same way as the judgments of the troikas set up by NKVD order No. 00447, had to be confirmed by the so-called "Great Dwoika" in Moscow, which consisted of Yezhov and Vyshinsky.

Every case dealt with by the local dwoikas of "national operations" was therefore summarized in a few lines. This quintessence contained brief information about the defendant's identity, his alleged crime and the proposed punishment. It was copied and transferred to a special "album" - that is the terminology of the NKVD. When an “album” was full, an NKVD courier brought it to Moscow. One such “album” contained several hundred cases. Neither Yezhov nor Vyshinsky found the time to evaluate each individual case. This work was carried out by high-ranking NKVD functionaries. In 99 percent of all cases, they upheld the proposed judgments. The task of Jeschow and Wyschinski consisted in practice only to sign the last page of such an album. Nevertheless, the involvement of Jeschow and Wyschinski created an enormous processing backlog. In July 1938 several hundred “albums” with a total of more than 100,000 cases were waiting to be signed.

Because complaints from the provinces about overcrowded prisons increased, the Politburo banned the "album method" on September 15, 1938 and had "special troikas" set up. The local party secretary took the side of the Dwoika members (public prosecutor and local representative of the NKVD). The staffing of these special troikas did not require confirmation from the Politburo. The task of the special troikas was to swiftly work off the backlog that had arisen through the "album method". The Politburo granted them until November 15, 1938. Over 105,000 people were sentenced by the Special Troikas, over 72,000 of them were shot. Only 135 people have been released from custody. Basically, the special troikas only confirmed the recommendations that two of their members as Dwoika had previously made.

Perpetrator

First page of a list from 1940 with the names of 346 people scheduled to be shot. Isaak Babel is named as number 12. Stalin confirmed the list with a "for" and his signature.

The central responsibility for the mass operations and the “purges” fell to the Politburo of the CPSU. It issued the instructions for carrying out the operations, confirmed the corresponding NKVD orders and approved the most important show and secret trials against high officials. It also upheld the judgments of the Military College of the Supreme Court of the USSR and of military tribunals and other courts. In addition, it gave the troikas on site a framework for action by setting quotas and approving quota extensions. In addition, members of the Politburo personally signed off extensive lists of death sentences and long prison sentences. These lists of around 44,500 names of victims have been in the archives of the President of the Russian Federation since 1991 .

Stalin's signature can be found on 383 such lists. Between February 1937 and October 1938, these lists contained the names of 44,477 leading army officers, NKVD leaders and state officials. 38,955 were shot without trial after Stalin marked their names on the lists. Vyacheslav Molotov signed 373 lists , Kliment Voroshilov signed 195, Lasar Kaganowitsch 191 and Anastas Mikoyan 62 lists. The special responsibility of the Politburo was also shown in the trips that Politburo members made to the provinces to monitor the implementation of the mass actions:

• For this purpose, Kaganovich drove to Chelyabinsk , Yaroslavl , Ivanovo and the Donbass .
• Andrei Zhdanov went to Bashkiria , Tatarstan and the Orenburg region .
• Mikoyan went to Armenia ,
• Andrei Andrejew to Uzbekistan , Tajikistan and the North Caucasus .
• Voroshilov, Molotov, Lavrenti Beria and Georgi Malenkow also made such trips.

Stalin as the undisputed "Voshd" (Russian for " Führer ") not only signed most of the lists of verdicts , he was also the author of most of the decisions of the Politburo on which the Great Terror was based. Often times he decided on related issues on his own. Yezhov, who was portrayed as an “iron fist” by the Soviet propaganda, repeatedly drove the NKVD to increase its efforts in the fight against “enemies”. Cities, kolkhozes and factories were named after him, but in the months of the Great Terror he remained a high-ranking functionary who was controlled by Stalin at all times.

On April 26, 1938, the Irkutsk representatives of the party and the NKVD asked the Central Committee in Moscow by telegram to increase the quota of people to be shot under NKVD order No. 00447 by 4,000. This request was granted by the Politburo on April 29, 1938 (for further details see picture description).

As part of this central control, there have repeatedly been opportunities for local communist functionaries and NKVD representatives to shape the extent and direction of the Great Terror. This was evident, for example, in the setting of penalty quotas for NKVD order No. 00447. The regional party leaders sent the corresponding proposals to Moscow in July 1937. Khrushchev, then Communist Party Secretary of Moscow and member of the Moscow Troika, reported the highest numbers: 8,500 for "Category 1" (execution) and 32,805 for "Category 2" (eight to ten years in prison). He also intended to turn the "kulak operation" into a campaign against "criminals", because the ratio of "kulaks" to "criminals" was roughly one to four on the Moscow lists. The party leaders also repeatedly asked for these quotas to be increased. Even NKVD cadres, who often competed for “reports of success” in “mass operations”, turned to idiosyncratic solutions when they did not have enough victims. Cases are on record in which new numerical targets for arrests were simply passed on to the population in line with the employment statistics. The NKVD head of Ashgabat took an even simpler solution: he had a market cordoned off and all passers-by and shoppers removed. In Turkmenistan , an NKVD commander used a factory fire to tap new victims of the yezhovshchina by arresting everyone on the factory premises. In Sverdlovsk , the local authorities used a forest fire allegedly started by “White Guard kulaks” to ask Moscow to increase the conviction quota by 3,000 people. 2,000 people from this additional “contingent” were scheduled to be shot.

The NKVD executives, acting as the transmission belt between the political and secret service headquarters in Moscow on the one hand, and the simple NKVD members in cities and rural regions, on the other, were veteran Chekists . At the end of 1936, 70 percent of NKVD executives began their secret service careers in the years 1917 to 1920. Almost all of the others had joined between 1922 and 1925. Extensive experiences of violence shaped her family and professional development. Because of their age, the majority of the NKVD leaders shared the experiences of the First World War, the revolution and the civil war: destroyed families, abandoned educational careers, traumatic experiences of neglect and wilderness. She had also taken part in the deculakization campaign, in which the "annihilation of the kulaks as a class" (Stalin) was forcibly put into practice. She was also familiar with the epochal famine of the Holodomor.

This biographical background of experience met a situation in which even a job with the "organs" no longer seemed to protect against repression and executions: Jeschow, who had not made a career in the secret service, also "cleared" the state security service NKVD from 1936 to 1938 alleged enemies. The most striking example was the arrest, conviction and shooting of Yagoda, his immediate predecessor.

The NKVD executives directed a workforce of around 23,000 people. They were poorly educated, but had enormous power over almost every Soviet citizen. According to internal NKVD statistics, on July 1, 1935, only 1.6 percent of all NKVD employees had a university degree, 23.8 percent had attended secondary school, and 74.6 percent of all employees reported a lower education. There were convicts among the NKVD members. Factors that fostered behavior in accordance with expectations during the persecution measures were also the practice of absolute obedience, adjustment and pressure to adapt, psychological deformations, an internal system of privileges, clan-like interrelationships within the "organs" and a practice of repression that had been practiced over the years.

Also informers appeared at the Great Terror actively, as wives of "enemies of the people". After their husbands were denigrated, they were expressly exempt from persecution based on NKVD order No. 00486. Furthermore, appointed witnesses were among the accomplices. Many of these were members of the local nomenklatura, in rural areas, for example, collective farm chairmen or members of the village soviet. In addition, regular witnesses appeared who signed statements made by the investigating officer.

Death rates and risk factors

Almost one percent of all Soviet citizens - around 1.5 million people in total - were arrested during the time of the Great Terror. NKVD members shot around 750,000 of them - around 0.5 percent of the total population, and more died in custody. The KGB admitted during the de-Stalinization that 681,692 people were shot in 1937 and 1938. Many historians consider the number of victims named by the KGB to be too low.

The severity of the punishment differed significantly depending on whether the persecution took place as part of the "kulak operation" or as part of the "national operations". While 50.4 percent of all judgments on the basis of NKVD order No. 00447 were death sentences, this figure was 74.1 percent during the “national operation” against the “Latvians” and 76.2 percent against the Germans. The death rate from the “Polish operation” was 79.4 percent, making it the highest of the major “national operations”. Smaller operations of this kind occasionally had even higher death rates: The "Greek" operation, initiated by a secret NKVD circular of December 11, 1937, resulted in the arrest of 11,261 people. Of these, 9,450 people were sentenced to death (87 percent).

The risk of being convicted of being a “Pole” was twenty and forty times higher than that of the “average person” of those years. “Germans”, “Finns”, “Latvians” and “Greeks” also had above-average risks.

In certain regions the persecution pressure was higher than average. Karelian ASSR residents were particularly at risk. This border region between the Soviet Union and Finland was in the eyes of the Moscow party and secret service leadership a refuge for potential spies and divers . At the same time, with its “special settlements” for deportees and its Gulag labor camps, it was considered a “garbage zone” and a danger for Leningrad - the second “showcase of socialism”. Almost three percent of the approximately 500,000 inhabitants of the Karelian ASSR were arrested in the course of the Great Terror. Of these slightly more than 14,000 people, 90 percent were executed.

Another regional focus of the Great Terror was Siberia. Large parts of this large region were also considered "garbage zones" by leading functionaries. At the same time, there was a threat of an attack by Japan in the eyes of Moscow headquarters . Alleged and potential disloyals are to be combated preventively. 200,000 to 210,000 inhabitants of Siberia - this corresponds to a rate of around 1.8 percent compared to the total population of 11 million - have been persecuted.

The Donbass, the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of the Volga Germans , the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic , the Krasnodar Region and the Sverdlovsk Oblast had repression rates of 60 to 20 percent above average .

On average, the Ukraine had 265,000 to 270,000 persecuted people out of a total population of around 28 million, Leningrad had 65,000 to 70,000 convicts with a population of around 6.8 million, and the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic with 52,000 convicts and a population of 5.2 million People.

With a conviction rate of 0.4 to 0.5 percent, some regions were well below the average. Among them were Tatarstan, the Voronezh Oblast , the Oblast Gorki , the Ivanovo , the Ryazan and Yaroslavl Oblast . These central Russian parts of the country played no strategic role either from an industrial or agricultural point of view. During collectivization, they were also not among the priority areas. The peasant resistance to the Bolsheviks was less lively here. The upheavals caused by forced industrialization were also less pronounced. After all, these regions were not considered front-line areas or “garbage zones” for deportees.

The social origin and social status of the convicts were manipulated in the statistics of the NKVD, sometimes several times on their way to the Moscow headquarters of the secret service and the party. The aim of the manipulations was to demonstrate that the terror actually reached the intended target groups. In addition, the inaccuracy of the categories into which the victims of persecution were classified is a factor that makes it difficult to precisely determine the social origin and status of the persecuted.

The files of the persecution show that believers have been subjected to more intense repression, both lay and clergy. The persecution hit the Orthodox Church and religious organizations known as “sects” in the Soviet Union, such as Baptists , Evangelicals and Pentecostals .

The former members of non-Bolshevik parties, especially former Social Revolutionaries, were particularly hard hit by the Great Terror . “Kulaks”, who were forced into “special settlements” in the early 1930s - primitive settlements in inhospitable areas intended to serve penal and colonization purposes - also formed a particularly vulnerable group. In some of the corresponding settlement areas, for example in Perm Oblast or Sverdlovsk Oblast, NKVD employees arrested up to 20 percent of adult men. People with previous convictions were also conspicuously often exposed to particular repression during this period. People who were employed in the armaments industry also suffered from increased risks of repression, as did those who worked in accident-prone industries (railways, mining , metal industry , shipbuilding industry ) in which suspicions of sabotage could be constructed at any time.

The risk of being shot also depended heavily on the time of arrest. The later it came in the months of the Great Terror, the more likely a death sentence was because there was simply not much room for newcomers in the gulag.

Technique of killing

Local NKVD workers shot those sentenced to death either in prisons or in specially selected, secluded places in the open air. There are no known innocent witnesses to the executions. Only members of the NKVD were allowed to carry out the shootings; members of the militia or the army were strictly forbidden. At the local NKVD offices, the number of executives was regularly limited to a few people.

The execution usually resulted from a shot in the back of the head. Traces on the Butowo firing range near Moscow showed that the victims were probably executed with Nagant revolvers , Tokarev TT-33 pistols and apparently also with the help of Degtjarjow machine guns . Those who had been shot were buried in pits that also contained other bodies. Corresponding traces, for example in Butowo, suggest that such pits had previously been dug with excavators .

The death row inmates were not informed of the verdict until the end. As instructed, NKVD members withheld from the victims' relatives that an execution had been carried out. Instead, they responded to inquiries about long sentences without the right to correspondence.

Situation in the Gulag

As a result of the Great Terror, the system of prisons, camps and special settlements of the Gulag also fell into a crisis. The number of inmates increased considerably: from 786,595 on July 1, 1937 to 1,126,500 on February 1, 1938 to 1,317,195 on January 1, 1939. The inhumane living conditions of the Gulag continued to deteriorate as a result. In 1937 alone, according to official Soviet statistics, 33,499 people died in the camps, special settlements and prisons. A year later it was 126,585. The number of people who died during the deportation transports and on transports between Gulag bases also soared by 38,000 between 1937 and 1938. The statistics also showed that the number of inmates unable to work due to illness, disability or emaciation was more than nine percent in 1938 - more than 100,000 people. In 1939 around 150,000 inmates were unable to work, not including disabled people. The Russian historian Oleg Khelvnyuk judges that the Great Terror turned the Soviet camps into extermination centers and speaks explicitly of extermination camps.

End of the Great Terror

Decision to end the terror

From August 1938 there were signs that the Great Terror was drawing to a close. Lavrenti Beria took over the position of deputy of Yezhov on August 22nd. Two high-ranking NKVD employees of Yezhov were arrested in early summer. In addition, on October 8, 1938, a commission composed of Jeschow, Beria, Vyshinsky, Georgi Malenkov and Nikolai Rytschkow , the People's Commissar for Justice, was formed. The committee was tasked with drafting a resolution within ten days to regulate the arrests, the public prosecutor's supervision and the investigation procedure. In addition, from October 8 to mid-November 1938, confidants of Beria occupied management positions in the NKVD.

On November 15, 1938, the Politburo approved the directive drafted by the October 8th commission. This should be passed by the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the party. Their core message was that from November 16, 1938 until further notice, all negotiations of criminal matters by the Troikas, the military tribunals and the military college of the Supreme Court of the USSR should be suspended. This resolution of the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the Party, signed by Stalin and Molotov, is dated November 17th. It was sent to all local heads of the NKVD, the party secretaries and the senior public prosecutors of all territorial divisions of the Soviet Union, a group of around 14,000 people.

In this document, Stalin and Molotov first highlighted the "successes" of the repression campaigns. However, they then denounced “the most serious mistakes and distortions”. This prevented the final victory over the "enemies". They also criticized unfounded and illegal mass arrests, the lack of material evidence and violations of elementary legal norms in investigative proceedings. According to Stalin and Molotov, "enemies" had managed to break into the NKVD and the prosecutor's office, thereby removing these institutions from the party's control.

The directive also stipulated that in future arrests would only be legal on the basis of a court order or with the approval of a public prosecutor. A long catalog of regulations should ensure the protection of those arrested from the arbitrariness of the investigators. As a result, this centrally made decision not only stopped the Great Terror, the NKVD was also made a scapegoat by a commissioned perpetrator authority with this document.

Repression of perpetrators

The best-known victim of the "purges" within the NKVD, led by Beria since November 25, 1938, was Yezhov. He was arrested on April 10, 1939 and executed by Vasily Blochin on February 4, 1940 .

Yezhov had already carried out "purges" among the employees of the NKVD. The focus was on the lower ranks of the hierarchy, although they also met Yezhov's predecessor Jagoda. This changed under Beria, who mainly worked with suspensions rather than law enforcement. In 1939, 7,273 employees had to quit their job - that was 22.9 percent of all operational employees. A total of 1,364 NKVD members were arrested between the end of 1938 and the end of 1939. Another important cornerstone of Beria's measures was the replacement of almost all heads at the republic and regional administration level. In particular, senior NKVD cadres were shot.

Beria expanded the NKVD personnel and changed the principles of employee selection. In 1939, 14,506 people started working for the NKVD, corresponding to a rate of 45.1 percent of the population. A clear majority of the new employees came from special NKVD schools, the party and the Komsomol.

The ethnic composition of the NKVD changed noticeably. Before the Great Terror, around a third of all senior NKVD officers were Jews . In November 1938 this proportion had already fallen to around 20 percent. A year later it was only 4 percent. Russians benefited most from the personnel changes after the Great Terror. They now occupied about two-thirds of all high officer posts. This proportion exceeded the proportion of Russians in the total Soviet population. The only minority that was over-represented in the NKVD ranks after the Great Terror was the Georgian group , Stalin's compatriots.

Beria rehabilitated some victims of the Yezhov era. At the same time, the fight against "pests", "conspirators" and "enemies" continued under his direction, using the same methods that other NKVD employees were accused of. The extent of the persecution fell, however, because the guidelines of the political leadership around Stalin had changed. In addition, there were no more mass operations.

A large number of the Troika members were also later victims of persecution. The total number of all members of these tripartite bodies is estimated at around 350 people. So far, sufficient biographical data has been determined in 169 cases. 47 NKVD representatives, 67 party members and two representatives of the public prosecutor's office were sentenced to death.

consequences

Cadre revolution

The yezhovshchina led to the disappearance of the Bolshevik “Old Guard”, who had held leading positions during and immediately after the October Revolution. The vacancies were filled by young climbers. There was a real cadre revolution in the party, state and economy, of which between the XVII. Party Congress ("Party Congress of the Victors", 1934) and the XVIII. Party Congress (1939) benefited more than half a million mostly young people. In 1939, 8.5 percent of party secretaries at the regional, regional and republic level were between 26 and 30 years old, 53.2 percent were 31 to 35 years old, and 29.4 percent were between 36 and 40 years of age.

"The party youth has had a dizzying career under the conditions of mass repression, and this has cemented their devotion to the Führer and their support for the repression against the old guard."

Of the 32,899 state-economic leaders included in the nomenklatura of the Central Committee of the CPSU, 426 were younger than 25 years, 3331 cadres between the ages of 26 and 30 and almost 59 percent between the ages of 31 and 40. About half of these cadres came from the working class and peasantry. However, in contrast to members of the "old guard", many of them had completed a university degree - often their path led them directly from the university to management positions. With this cadre revolution came the generation that would shape the Soviet Union in the second half of the 20th century. Stalin himself had announced the cadre revolution at the notorious February-March plenary session of the CPSU Central Committee, which met between February 23 and March 5, 1937. Stalin's goal was achieved: functionaries whom he did not trust were no longer alive. In their place came a submissive newcomer elite.

Contemporary intellectual reception

In the 1930s, only the show trials were received, in the Soviet press with approval, as well as in the communist party press abroad. The mass actions, however, found no response, they remained a secret.

The Moscow trials sparked different reactions among intellectuals. Victor Serge , who himself suffered from persecution in the Soviet Union and was able to leave the country in 1936 before the start of the Great Terror, assumed that evidence had been extorted and political staging. Even Leopold Schwarzschild wrote magazine exile in his The new day-book , you can not wrong in Nazi Germany complain if you conceal it in the Soviet Union. Ignazio Silone publicly warned that the justification of the Moscow trials would make anti-fascists unbelievable, and that they would turn into “ red fascists ”.

Cover of the first American edition of Darkness At Noon (Solar Eclipse)

Cover of Feuchtwangers Moscow 1937

In 1940 Arthur Koestler published his novel Solar Eclipse , with which the CPSU as a violent, power-hungry, criminal, unprincipled organization and its members - including those who were publicly tried - were to be unmasked as disoriented puppets of an inhuman party will. The novel was translated into many languages ​​and had large editions after 1945.

In the exile magazine Weltbühne , however, Heinrich Mann's judgment was different. Conspirators, so Mann, would have to "disappear quickly and thoroughly" for the benefit of the revolution. Lion Feuchtwanger went to Moscow at the height of his fame and spoke to Stalin and Dimitrov, among others, about the trials. In his travel report ( Moscow 1937 ) there was not a word of protest against the staging. Both Mann and Feuchtwanger were politically interested in seeing the Soviet Union as an important part of an anti-fascist alliance and not being marginalized.

Ernst Bloch called the trials in Moscow a defense of the revolution from gamblers who had allied themselves with the “fascist devil”. He held this position until 1957.

Bertolt Brecht never spoke publicly on the subject. In letters, however, he assumed that the defendants were conspirators. Although he stated the improbability of her confessions, he interpreted the ostensibly conspiratorial activity and the confessions as an expression of social democratic and thus negative attitudes. According to Brecht, the accused had become criminals in association with all sorts of "rabble", had messed with all "rubbish from home and abroad" and all "parasitism, professional criminality and informers" had "lodged" with them.

Many of the German-speaking intellectuals living in exile in Moscow adopted the guidelines of Soviet propaganda as their own. Willi Bredel demanded the death of the " Gestapo agents - and the Trotsky-Zinoviev pack". Franz Leschnitzer compared Trotsky with Adolf Hitler . In January 1937, Johannes R. Becher wrote a poem about the "maddened" enemy of the people.

The British socialist Beatrice Webb was happy about the show trials because Stalin had removed “dead branches”. There were also artists overseas who defended the Moscow events. In 1938, more than a hundred American intellectuals signed a declaration claiming the legality of the show trials. These included, for example, the writers Dashiell Hammett , Lillian Hellman , Dorothy Parker and Langston Hughes . Also, the Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty defended the processes.

Criticism of the show trials was also difficult for many intellectuals because the Soviet Union, under Stalin's direction , had replaced social fascism theory with the popular front ideology from mid-1934 and at the same time presented itself as the home of anti-fascism. Soviet support for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the establishment of a Popular Front government in France appeared to make the Soviet Union a strong partner for the Democrats.

XX. Party congress of the CPSU

Three years after Stalin's death, Nikita Khrushchev held on February 25, 1956, at the end of the XX. Party congresses of the CPSU , a secret speech about the personality cult and its consequences . He settled accounts with Stalin and charged him with a large number of errors and crimes. At the beginning of March 1956 he decided to have key passages of his “revelations” read out to all party members. A copy of the speech was sent to the CIA via the Israeli secret service Shin Bet . The New York Times printed it on June 4, 1956, making it public around the world. Two days later she distributed Le Monde . Broadcasts from Radio Free Europe , Voice of America and the BBC made them known in Eastern Europe.

In his lecture, Khrushchev had addressed, among other things, the extent and nature of the repression against party members and cadres during the months of the Yezhovshchina. But he concentrated on assigning sole responsibility to Stalin. He left out the intensive involvement of the party leadership, as well as his own role as a stalemate agitator in Moscow and the Ukraine. Despite the preparatory archival studies of the KGB he was familiar with, his speech suggested that the main thrust of the Stalinist crimes was directed against the elites in the party, business and army. He completely concealed the mass terror with its significantly higher number of victims.

Revision procedure and rehabilitation

The first discussions about the rehabilitation of victims of the Great Terror arose as early as 1939 to 1941, without this term having appeared in the official pronouncements and documents. The only question that was discussed was whether there should be revision procedures and how they should be designed. Corresponding orders and circulars stipulated that the decision as to whether a judgment should be revised had to be made by the previous NKVD perpetrators. The public prosecutor intervened in only a few proceedings in order to examine the revisions of the NKVD. In the course of the months between November 1938 and 1941, the decision on requests for revision was increasingly centralized, so that the individual requests were hardly processed in a differentiated manner due to the lack of time and overload of the responsible offices. When individuals were released from custody, the "organs" continued to monitor them. There were further problems when the proceedings were delayed: The revision proceedings rarely led to the development of new evidence. Often only other “witnesses” were questioned by the NKVD. Their statements were mostly seen as confirmation of the file situation. Formal errors in the original arrest and investigation proceedings did not automatically lead to the annulment of the relevant judgment. Overall, revisions of sentences and releases from prison remained the absolute exception.

Immediately after Stalin's death, Beria ordered relief from the overcrowded and inefficient gulag camps. On March 27, 1953, 1.2 million prisoners were released. “Political” prisoners did not benefit from this amnesty , but rather those who were alleged to no longer pose a threat to society and whose imprisonment was justified by violating general legal provisions of the Soviet Union. After Beria's arrest on June 26, 1953, the new leadership around Khrushchev continued this policy. A committee headed by the Soviet Chief Public Prosecutor examined the files of those convicted of "counter-revolutionary crimes". At the republic level, 15 commissions supported the work of this body. Members of these committees were high representatives of the secret service and members of the public prosecutor's office - both perpetrator institutions in the months of the Great Terror. The appraisers looked through 237,000 files of people who were detained under Article 58 of the RSFSR Criminal Code - this corresponded to a rate of 45 percent of all detainees who had been persecuted on the basis of this regulation. 53 percent of all peer-reviewed judgments were confirmed, 43 percent of all sentences were reduced so that those affected were released from custody. Four percent of all judgments were overturned.

In the second half of 1955 there were amnesties that also affected the "political". At the end of the year, the total number of all Gulag prisoners was below one million for the first time in 20 years. Shortly before the beginning of the XX. At the congress of the CPSU, the number of “politicals” was around 110,000. At the end of the party congress, a commission re-examined the judgments made on the basis of Article 58. By the end of 1956, around 100,000 people had been released from the Gulag. In early 1957, only about 15,000 people were incarcerated for this article. Thus, 20 years after its end, the last imprisoned victims of the Great Terror were free again. The authorities had previously systematically extended their sentences through "extensions". Until well into the 1980s, relatives of people who had been executed during the Great Terror were informed that the person in question had died in the labor camp.

Even during and after perestroika , the authorities did not generally overturn the judgments made during the months of the Great Terror as injustices. According to the Russian Rehabilitation Act of October 18, 1991, there is only the possibility of rehabilitation for prisoners who have been convicted of “political crimes”. Convictions for “criminal” acts remain largely untouched. At best, the severe sentence is classified as an injustice. The enormous expansion of the definition of crime in the 1930s is not taken into account.

Culture of remembrance

Around 70 years after the start of the Great Terror, German media reported on how these events were dealt with in 2007. Russia in particular was the focus. A number of observers emphasized that official Russian historical policy had little interest in devoting itself to this event. Several references were made to Vladimir Putin . Putin had warned that 1937 should not be forgotten. In considering the history of one's own country, however, the positive moments always deserve priority. Russia must not allow itself to be convinced of guilt by dealing with the Great Terror and other epochs of the Soviet era. Other countries have an even darker past. In this context, the reporting referred to the positive image of Stalin among the Russian population.

The human rights organization Memorial formulated theses in 2007 that called for a change in the way we deal with the historical experience of the Great Terror. Memorial demanded a comprehensive analysis of the past . This includes the legal processing of the Great Terror. Access restrictions to archive material should be abolished. The Great Terror must be dealt with in schools and universities and at the same time regularly addressed through television programs. A national museum on the history of state terror should be created, as well as a national memorial for the victims, accompanied by plaques and memorials throughout the country. Place names that go back to people who were responsible for the acts of violence should be changed. Furthermore, a program to search for anonymous burial sites of victims should be set up. Memorial sites are to be set up at found sites . It must be advocated that this reappraisal of history does not remain a matter for Russia and the successor states of the Soviet Union alone , but internationalises, since the Great Terror like Auschwitz or Hiroshima is a symbol of the fragility and instability of human civilization.

The local historian Yuri Dmitriev , head of Memorial in Karelia , discovered large mass graves of victims of Stalinist crimes in a 30-year search of archives and with the help of expeditions . He erected memorial plaques, small cemeteries and wrote two books. In December 2016, Dmitriev was arrested. The Russian writer and opposition activist Lyudmila Ulitskaja criticized this as political persecution. Public pressure eventually led to his release in early 2018. The trial against him also resulted in an acquittal. In June 2018, he was arrested again. At the end of August 2018 , the Russian Military and Historical Society began excavations on a site near Sandarmoch where Dmitriev had discovered the remains of victims of the Great Terror . This society, which has a reputation for wanting to rehabilitate Stalin, claimed that Red Army soldiers who were shot by Finns in the Winter War were buried here . Critics of this excavation fear the rewriting of history .

Memorial Church of the Russian New Martyrs and Confessors at the former place of execution in Butowo (2007)

Memorial plaque in Moscow for Ekaterina Schelwatich as part of the project "Last Address" (2014)

In Butowo near Moscow, the Russian Orthodox Church operates a memorial on the site of the former NKVD firing range, which served as the execution and burial site for thousands of victims of terrorism in 1937 and 1938. The church victims of the Great Terror are particularly emphasized, which gave rise to sometimes violent criticism. In 2007, the Russian Orthodox Church in Butowo celebrated a central memorial service for the victims of the Great Terror. Putin also took part in this church event.

Since 2014, the Posledny adres (Last Address) project has been commemorating the victims of the Great Terror in Russia . For this purpose, similar to the stumbling blocks , memorials with the dates of life are attached to the outer front of the last house.

Every year on the “Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Political Repression” human rights activists read out the names of the victims of the Great Terror near the Lubyanka secret service center.

A history guide for teachers on how to deal with Stalinist repression in schools received regional praise, but according to Nikolai Swanidze it was indexed for ideological reasons by “arbitrarily selected experts” from state supervision .

Research Development and Controversies

Totalitarianism and "Revisionism"

The interpretation of the events in the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938 initially followed the path of totalitarianism. In 1968 Robert Conquest presented the standard work of this interpretation ( The Great Terror ). He portrayed Stalin as the undisputed leader who planned and directed politics and terror down to the last detail.

From the mid-1980s onwards, English-speaking historians in particular, who feel committed to social and societal history , contradicted this reading . Her “ revisionist ” interpretation emphasized the conflict-ridden interaction of various social groups, from which the terror ultimately arose. At the same time, they accentuated the self-interests of the periphery, which had promoted terror. In the studies of the "revisionists", Stalin's power was seen as rather weak, and terror as chaotic and uncontrollable. The “revisionists” methodically demanded the exclusive use of primary sources . Unlike Conquest, they rejected memoirs and analyzes by Soviet emigrants as the basis for historical works. In many cases, the debate between the representatives of the totalitarian view and the representatives of the “revisionist school” resembled the argument between intentionalists and functionalists, as known from Nazi research .

Studies by the “revisionists” made it clear that Soviet society and the party were more contradictory and torn than a totalitarian interpretation would suggest. Groups with their own interests were identified, local studies on the conditions in the provinces supplemented the view of the “headquarters” in Moscow and Leningrad. At the same time, the studies of the “revisionists” showed the limits of Stalin's power and that of the party leadership. Terror has social and societal causes, not those that are to be found in Stalin's mental disposition.

It has been objected against the revisionists that they clearly underestimated Stalin's power. The sources found on the decision-making processes in the Politburo proved that the terror emanated from the center and was also stopped from there. The party leadership - especially Stalin - was in a position to keep giving terror in new directions. It was also questioned whether it was possible to transfer the concept of interest groups gained from analyzes of pluralistic societies to the Soviet Union of the 1930s. A group with resources similar to that of the Communist Party is not recognizable in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. An open challenge to the power center by groups on the periphery cannot be proven either. The role of communist ideology is also overly neglected.

Causes, motives, character

The questions about the motives and causes of the Great Terror are not conclusively answered in the literature. The interpretations range of assumptions about the fact that Stalin paranoia have suffered, so the causes are to be sought in the psyche of the state leader, to theses in the Great Terror, the eruptive and forceful penetration of conflicts in society or the party or between the center and the periphery. When asked about Stalin's motives and those of his closest collaborators, reference is made to the intention to eliminate the Bolsheviks' "old guard". Their loyalty to Stalin was not certain. She had to vacate her post in order to make room for a young elite that was absolutely devoted to Stalin.

Various researchers point to the conspiracy theory that formed the background of the Great Terror: With this ideology , in which Stalin himself did not necessarily believe, new groups of alleged "conspirators" and "enemies of the people" were identified and released for annihilation . These conspiracy theories continued beyond the end of the Great Terror and, after the Second World War, had clearly taken on anti-Semitic traits in the campaigns against the rootless cosmopolitans and in the medical conspiracy .

Foreign policy causes and motives are also mentioned. The Bolsheviks had been shaped by the idea that war against the imperialist powers was inevitable. In particular, Japan in the Far East and Germany in the West appeared increasingly bellicose in the 1930s. In addition, Germany had not been slowed down in its foreign policy expansion plans by the western democracies. This widespread war expectancy and the lessons that Stalin and his leadership circle attracted against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, the aim was the Great Terror, to make all individuals and the population harmless, which were suspected in case of war to a fifth column to include because they are hostile to the communist leadership.

Arguments relating to domestic political problems in the Soviet Union have been put forward against the thesis that the terror was primarily aimed at protecting against a feared fifth column. For example, Ukrainian NKVD sources about the terrorist measures there contained hardly any evidence of external threats until early 1938. Rather, the main thrust of terror was directed against those who were considered “socially undesirable” or who did not do “useful work”. The same applies to Georgian NKVD sources from the time of the Great Terror. They address the elections for the Supreme Soviet and the struggle against internal enemies, especially “Trotskyists”. The fundamental question to be asked is whether the terror, and in particular the "kulak operation", should be interpreted by historians as a reaction to the great and worsening economic and social crisis, as a violent and ultimately intended struggle against the consequences of forced industrialization.

Some researchers, such as the leading "revisionist" J. Arch Getty and Karl Schlögel have a possible association of terror with the Stalin Constitution from December 1936 and the Stalin scheduled for December 1937 universal, free, equal and secret election to the Supreme Soviet attention made. Although the proposed choice between several candidates was canceled shortly before the election date, the prospect of an election based on such principles has apparently deeply troubled many local party officials. Church representatives and "kulaks" in particular were accused of teaming up with other "enemies" of Soviet power in order to gain influence on politics in the Soviet Union through election campaigns and the elections themselves and then to enforce a democratization of the political system. This kind of fear of competition has given food to the terror against these "enemies". At the February-March 1937 plenary session, the regional party leaders present voiced their concerns. However, they could not prevent this election. Getty, however, sees it as a concession from Stalin that on July 2, 1937, not only were the provisions for the planned elections of December 1937 published in Pravda , but the Politburo also approved the main features of NKVD Order No. 00447 on the same day which should serve to destroy these enemies. The thesis that there was a democratic threat to communist rule in the second half of the 1930s, however, did not go unchallenged in the professional world.

According to further interpretations, the Great Terror was altogether a genocide . The American historian Ronald Grigor Suny described it as a "political Holocaust". According to Norman Naimark , the series of campaigns of violence and waves of terror in the Soviet Union all together constitute genocide. Jörg Baberowski characterizes the Soviet mass terror of 1937 and 1938 as the “attempt to redeem society from its enemies. It was a Soviet variant of the ' Final Solution ' ”. Karl Schlögel spoke of a "hurricane of violence", generated from the "idea of ​​a final solution to the social question". Eric Weitz believes that while the Soviet regime was guilty of some “genocidal actions”, in the absence of a racial ideology and restrained by belief in human malleability, it did not become a “genocidal regime” that would have put genocide at the center of its political program. The majority of genocide researchers and Eastern Europe historians, on the other hand, expressly refuse to classify the Great Terror as genocide. Rudolph Rummel suggests the term democide .

Number of victims, elites and masses

The magnitude of the number of victims remained controversial for many years. Until the archives were opened, the researchers here had to rely on estimates, reports from experiences and memorial literature, as well as individual later unofficial revelations. Often “victims” were not or only insufficiently differentiated between those who were executed on the one hand and those in prison on the other. The various forms of deprivation of liberty were also neglected. Overall, with regard to the number of victims, the very high figures on the arrests are hardly shared any more. Robert Conquest, for example, estimated the number of those arrested at seven to eight million. Other researchers significantly exceeded that estimate, speaking from 19 to 20 million. In the current literature, this number is given as around 1.5 million people. The number of executions is now hardly numbered at several million, as was occasionally the case before perestroika. Instead, a number is now assumed to be around 700,000.

The temporary opening of the archives in the early 1990s also made it clear that party officials, cadres and elites were not primarily affected by the Great Terror. They were only "the tip of the iceberg". The repression mainly hit ordinary citizens. They fell victim to the mass operations. Her fate was practically unknown until then due to strict secrecy. In this context, Nicolas Werth spoke of a public and a secret side of terror: The public side had shown itself in the show trials in Moscow and the province and in the advancement of a young and better educated elite loyal to the Stalin. The secret side was the planning and implementation of the mass operations.

See also: Stalin Purges

attachment

literature

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• Barry McLoughlin: "Destruction of the Foreign": The "Great Terror" in the USSR 1937/38. New Russian publications. In: Hermann Weber, Ulrich Mählert (Ed.): Crimes in the name of the idea. Pp. 77-123 and pp. 303-312. (First publication in the yearbook for historical communism research. 2001/2002, pp. 50–88.)
• Barry McLoughlin, Kevin McDermott (Eds.): Stalin's terror. High politics and mass repression in the Soviet Union. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke [et. a.] 2004, ISBN 1-4039-3903-9 ; Partial digitization at Google Books .
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• Nikita Petrow: The cadre policy of the NKVD during the mass repression of 1936-39. In: Hedeler (Hrsg.): Stalinscher Terror 1934–41. Pp. 11-32.
• Nikita Petrov, Arsenii Roginskii : The “Polish Operation” of the NKVD 1937-8. In: Barry McLoughlin, Kevin McDermott (Eds.): Stalin's terror. Pp. 153-172.
• Stefan Plaggenborg (Ed.): Stalinism. New research and concepts. Berlin Verlag Arno Spitz GmbH, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-87061-697-0 .
• Ulla Plener , Natalia Mussienko (ed.): Sentenced to the maximum penalty: death by shooting. Fatalities from Germany and German nationality in the Great Terror in the Soviet Union in 1937/1938. Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-320-02080-3 ( PDF online from Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, text volume 27).
• Mikhail Kuzmich Ryklin : Life thrown into the fire - The generation of the Great October. A research. From the Russian by Sabine Grebing and Volker Weichsel, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-518-42773-6 ( reading sample )
• Karl Schlögel : Terror and Dream. Moscow 1937. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-446-23081-1 .
• Timothy Snyder : Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin. From the English by Martin Richter, Beck, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-62184-0 .
• Alexander Vatlin : Kunzewo crime scene. Victims and perpetrators of the Stalin terror 1937/38 , Berlin: BasisDruck 2003, ISBN 3-86163-130-X review (PDF; 36 kB).
• Hermann Weber, Ulrich Mählert (Ed.): Crimes in the name of the idea. Terror in Communism 1936–1938. Construction paperback, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-7466-8152-8 .
• Markus Wehner : Stalinism and Terror. In: Stefan Plaggenborg (ed.): Stalinism. New research and concepts. Berlin Verlag Spitz, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-87061-697-0 , pp. 365-390.
• Nicolas Werth : A state against its people. Violence, Oppression and Terror in the Soviet Union. In: Stéphane Courtois , Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin. Collaboration: Rémi Kauffer, Pierre Rigoulot, Pascal Fontaine, Yves Santamaria, Sylvain Boulouque: The Black Book of Communism . Oppression, crime and terror. With a chapter "The processing of the GDR" by Joachim Gauck and Ehrhard Neubert. Translated from the French by Irmela Arnsperger, Bertold Galli, Enrico Heinemann, Ursel Schäfer, Karin Schulte-Bersch, Thomas Woltermann. Piper. Munich / Zurich 1998, ISBN 3-492-04053-5 , pp. 51–295 and 898–911.
• Nicolas Werth: The Mechanism of Mass Crime. The Great Terror in the Soviet Union 1937-1938. In: Robert Gellately (Ed.): The specter of genocide. Mass murder in historical perspective. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge [and a.] 2003, ISBN 0-521-82063-4 , pp. 215-239.
• Nicolas Werth: The importance of the “Great Terror” within the Stalinist repression. Attempt to take stock. In: Hermann Weber, Ulrich Mählert (Ed.): Crimes in the name of the idea. Pp. 269-280 and pp. 336-339. (First publication in the Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung. 2006, pp. 247–257.)
• Nicolas Werth: L'Ivrogne et la Marchande de fleurs. Autopsy d'un meurtre de masse, 1937–1938. Tallandier, Paris 2009, ISBN 978-2-84734-573-5 .
• Manfred Zeidler : "A modern army is an offensive army". The Soviet forces under the sign of Stalinism. In: Stefan Plaggenborg (ed.): Stalinism. New research and concepts. Berlin Verlag Spitz, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-87061-697-0 , pp. 419-440.

Web links

Commons : Great Terror (Soviet Union)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Brief chronology of the Great Terror , website of the human rights organization Memorial (accessed April 12, 2010).
• Margareta Mommsen : Mass Persecutions in the Great Terror. A project of the DHI Moscow and the Ruhr University Bochum. Balance sheet and perspectives. Report from the conference on December 6, 2010 on H-Soz-u-Kult , February 15, 2011 (accessed February 15, 2011).
• Bernd Bonwetsch: How Stalin had the blacksmith Z. murdered , in: Zeit online , September 23, 2009.
• Article by Barry McLoughlin on the Great Terror and its Austrian Victims ( Memento from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) on the website of the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance (archived version).
• Barry McLoughlin: The Great Terror (extensive bibliography German / English PDF; 184 kB) ( Memento from February 4, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed January 13, 2019), archived version.
• Wladislaw Hedeler: Archive research on the "Great Terror". A literature review. In: Berliner Debatte Initial , October 1912; online on Linksnet , October 15, 2012 (accessed May 13, 2012).
• Stalin's shooting lists , Memorial Russian website (accessed October 24, 2013)
• Stalin's lists by name on the Memorial.ru website (accessed October 24, 2013)
• Stalin's lists by region on the Memorial.ru website (accessed October 24, 2013)
• Files of the persecution under Documents on the Memorial / Krasnoyarsk website (accessed January 5, 2016)
• Victim of terrorism = жертвы террора. Documentation of the fate of German-speaking victims of state arbitrariness in the sphere of influence of the USSR on the website of Raimund Dehmlow (accessed February 26, 2020)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Heiko Haumann : The history of the Soviet Union - an overview ; in Hellmuth G. Bütow (Ed.): Country report on the Soviet Union. Series of publications studies on history and politics Volume 263 of the Federal Agency for Civic Education , 2nd act. Ed., Bonn, 1988, p. 36.
2. ↑ Figures based on Der Große Ploetz . The data encyclopedia of world history. Data, facts, connections, created by Carl Ploetz. Edited by 80 specialists. 32., rework. Edition, license edition. Komet, Frechen 2001, ISBN 3-89836-147-0 , p. 1003.
3. ↑ Numbers according to Schlögel: Terror and Dream. P. 81.
4. ↑ Schlögel: Terror and Dream. P. 163.
5. ↑ Exemplary references for example from Norman Naimark : Revolution, Stalinismus und Genozid. In: APuZ , 44–45 / 2007 (PDF; 2 MB), pp. 14–20, here pp. 18–20 .
6. ↑ Comprehensive on the history of terror in the Soviet Union: Baberowski: The red terror . Wehner provides a brief overview: Stalinism and terror . See also Gérard Chaliand, Arnaud Blin: Lenin, Stalin, and state terrorism. In: Gérard Chaliand, Arnaud Blin (Ed.): The history of terrorism. From antiquity to al Qaeda. University of California Press, Berkeley, Cal. [u. a.] 2007, ISBN 978-0-520-24533-4 , pp. 197-207.
7. ↑ Werth: A state against its people. P. 140.
8. ↑ See Werth: A state against its people. Pp. 165-177. See also Hildermeier: The Soviet Union. Pp. 37-39.
9. ↑ Numbers according to Werth: A state against its people. P. 165 and Hildermeier: The Soviet Union. P. 39.
10. ↑ Werth: A state against its people. P. 166. See also McLoughlin: “Destruction of the stranger.” P. 93 f. and Litvin, Keep: Stalinism. P. 59.
11. ↑ The execution of these death sentences was suspended because international protests were loud and, above all, because there were fears of uprisings in rural areas, where this party was popular. The convicts were not released, however, but were shot in the 1930s. For the trial against the Social Revolutionaries see Werth: A state against its people. P. 144.
12. ↑ Werth: A state against its people. P. 161. For the significance of this show trial, see Peter H. Solomon: Shakhty Trial. In: Russian History Encyclopedia and Sheila Fitzpatrick : Education and social mobility in the Soviet Union. 1921-1934. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [u. a.] 1979, ISBN 0-521-22325-3 , pp. 113-116 and passim .
13. ↑ Hildermeier: History of the Soviet Union 1917–1991. P. 476.
14. ↑ Werth: A state against its people. P. 191.
15. ↑ See Jürgen Zarusky briefly : "Freisler is our Wyschinski". The Stalinist and the National Socialist “justice”. A sketch of the problem from a comparative dictatorship perspective. ( PDF ), p. 17.
16. ↑ On this briefly Hildermeier: The Soviet Union. Pp. 35 and 39 f.
17. ↑ Hildermeier: The Soviet Union. P. 42; Werth: A state against its people. P. 201. For the murder of Kirov see also Baberowski: Der Rote Terror. Pp. 140–144 and Baberowski: Verbrannte Erde , pp. 232–237. For the “party convention of the winners” see Hildermeier: History of the Soviet Union 1917–1991. Pp. 444-447.
18. ↑ See on this Chlevnyuk: The Politburo. P. 191 f; Werth: A state against its people. P. 201 f.
19. ↑ Wehner: Stalinism and Terror. P. 379.
20. ↑ Werth ( A state against its people ), p. 202 names the number 988, Chlewnjuk ( Das Politbüro ), p. 193, names the number 663.
21. ↑ Khelvnyuk: The Politburo. P. 193.
22. ↑ Werth: A state against its people. P. 203.
23. ↑ On ethnic cleansing see Werth: A state against its people. P. 203 f.
24. ↑ Dimitri Volkogonow : Stalin. Triumph and tragedy. A political portrait. Econ Taschenbuch Verlag, Düsseldorf and Vienna 1993, p. 376.
25. ↑ Martin McCauley: Stalin and Stalinism. 3rd ed., Pearson Education, London 2008, p. 102.
26. ↑ A total of 16 defendants stood before the court, their names are listed in Hedeler: Chronik. P. 73.
27. ↑ For the first Moscow show trial, see Hedeler: Chronik. Pp. 73-79; Schlögel: Terror and Dream. Pp. 103-118.
28. ↑ For the second Moscow show trial, see Hedeler: Chronik. Pp. 142-48; Schlögel: Terror and Dream. Pp. 174-197.
29. ↑ For the third Moscow show trial, see Hedeler: Chronik. Pp. 375-393; Schlögel: Terror and Dream. Pp. 661-670.
30. ↑ See Bonwetsch: The "Great Terror" - 70 years later. P. 129 f; further value: a state against its people. P. 215. For significance, see also Ellman: Provincial Show Trials. Pp. 1308, 1310 and 1315.
31. ↑ See the notes on Ellman: Provincial Show Trials.
32. ↑ Chlevnyuk reports on the fate of these five people: The Politburo. Pp. 305-323.
33. ↑ All numbers according to Werth: A state against its people. P. 214.
34. ^ Werth: Mechanism of a Mass Crime. P. 222 f.
35. ↑ Werth: A state against its people. P. 215 f; Numbers there p. 215.
36. ^ Jansen, Petrov: Stalin's loyal executioner. P. 105. McLoughlin: "Destruction of the foreign." P. 109.
37. ↑ The figures are not uniform in the literature. For example, Jansen and Petrov ( Stalin's loyal executioner. P. 70) name the number of 33,460 to 33,947 arrests, Werth ( A state against its people. P. 221) speaks of 35,020.
38. ↑ Werth: A state against its people. P. 221; Jansen, Petrov: Stalin's loyal executioner. P. 69 f.
39. ^ Ivan Pfaff : Prague and the Tukhachevsky case. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 35 (1987), pp. 95-134 ( online (PDF; 8.2 MB), accessed on November 26, 2010).
40. ↑ Dimitri Volkogonow : Stalin. Triumph and tragedy. A political portrait. Claassen, Düsseldorf 1989, pp. 411-414.
41. ↑ Rudolf Ströbinger: Stalin decapitated the Red Army. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1990, pp. 150–156 and 200–204.
42. ^ Walter Laqueur : Stalin. The Glasnost Revelations. New York 1990, pp. 105-110.
43. ^ Igor Lukes: Czechoslovakia Between Stalin and Hitler. Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 94 ff.
44. ^ Igor Lukes: Stalin, Benesch and the Tukhachevsky case. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 44 (1996), pp. 527-548 ( online (PDF; 7.1 MB), accessed on November 26, 2010).
45. ↑ Jurij J. Kiršin: The Soviet armed forces on the eve of the Great Patriotic War. In: Bernd Wegner (Ed.): Two ways to Moscow - From the Hitler-Stalin Pact to "Operation Barbarossa". Munich / Zurich 1991, p. 389.
46. ↑ See on this David R. Jones (Ed.): The Military-Naval Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union. Vol. 2, Gulf Breeze 1980, p. 215.
47. ↑ Werth: A state against its people. P. 221. On the purge of the army see also Baberowski: Der Rote Terror. Pp. 167-172.
48. ↑ Jurij J. Kiršin: The Soviet armed forces on the eve of the Great Patriotic War. In: Bernd Wegner (Ed.): Two ways to Moscow. From the Hitler-Stalin Pact to "Operation Barbarossa". Piper, Munich / Zurich 1991, p. 390.
49. ↑ ^{a b c} Werth: A state against its people. P. 223.
50. ^ Robert A. McCutcheon: The 1936-1937 Purge of Soviet Astronomers. In: Slavic Review. Vol. 50, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 100-117.
51. ↑ For the census of 1937 see Schlögel: Terror und Traum. Pp. 153-173.
52. ↑ The dead souls . In: Der Spiegel . No. 22 , 1956, pp. 28-31 ( online ).
53. ↑ Werth: A state against its people. P. 223. For the repression of scientific opponents Lyssenko see also Mick: Wissenschaft und Wissenschaft. P. 322.
54. ↑ Schlögel: Terror and Dream. P. 343. For the persecution of Soviet geologists see also Mick: Wissenschaft und Wissenschaft. Pp. 340-346.
55. ↑ McLoughlin: "Destruction of the Stranger". P. 90; Binner, boy: Destruction of the Orthodox clergy. P. 516 f.
56. ↑ Werth: A state against its people. P. 224. Number of Priests Arrested and Shot at Litvin, Keep: Stalinism. P. 63. Number of church dignitaries shot at the Butowo NKVD shooting range near Binner, Junge: Destruction of the Orthodox clergy. P. 523.
57. ↑ Comprehensive on this order Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Massenmord und Lagerhaft . The full German translation of the order can be found there on pages 106–120. It can be viewed online in German translation on the portal “100 (0) key documents on Russian and Soviet history (1917–1991)”. For an introduction to this command, see Paul R. Gregory: Lenin's Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives. Hoover Institution Press, Stanford / Calif. 2008, ISBN 978-0-8179-4812-2 , here pp. 43–61 (PDF, accessed March 31, 2010; 140 kB). Also Binner, boy: How the terror got “big”. and the same: "S etoj publikoj ceremonit´sja ne sleduet". See also Baberowski: Scorched Earth , pp. 327-332.
58. ↑ The Politburo decision is printed in German translation by Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Massenmord und Lagerhaft. Pp. 121-123.
59. ↑ Quoted from Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Massenmord und Lagerhaft. P. 108.
60. ↑ The number of around 350,000 can be found in Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Massenmord und Lagerhaft. P. 661 f. The information of around 400,000 can be found in Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge (ed.): Stalinism in the Soviet Province. P. 11.
61. ↑ Khlevniuk: The Reasons for the "Great Terror". P. 162.
62. ↑ To this Ochotin, Roginskij: On the history of the "German operation".
63. ↑ Ochotin, Roginskij: On the history of the "German operation". P. 155.
64. ↑ Schlögel: Terror and Dream. P. 637; McLoughlin: "Destroying the Foreign." P. 97; Werth: Mechanism of Mass Crime. P. 232.
65. ^ Werth: Mechanism of Mass Crime. Pp. 232-234. See also Snyder: Bloodlands , pp. 110-125. Comprehensive on this Petrov, Roginskii: The “Polish Operation” of the NKVD.
66. ↑ http://www.memorial.krsk.ru/deu/Dokument/Ariicles/2007HrBT.htm : “The Great Terror”: 1937–1938. Short chronicle. Memorial Russia site, Krasnoyarsk region
67. ↑ "The Great Terror": 1937–1938. Short chronicle , website of the human rights organization Memorial (accessed April 12, 2010); Werth: Mechanism of Mass Crime. P. 232.
68. ↑ Schlögel: Terror and Dream. P. 637; McLoughlin: "Destroying the Stranger." P. 97.
69. ↑ Hedeler: Chronicle. P. 358. The paraphrases of this resolution are occasionally inconsistent in the literature. Hedeler, for example, mentions Koreans instead of the Charbiner elsewhere. See Hedeler: Kinship Liability. P. 193.
70. ↑ Khlevniuk: The Reasons for the "Great Terror." P. 168.
71. ↑ Marc Junge: The mass operations . In: Ders., Bernd Bonwetsch (Hrsg.): Bolshevik order in Georgia. The Great Terror in a Small Caucasian Republic , Berlin, Boston 2015, pp. 33–39, here p. 34.
72. ↑ Bernd Bonwetsch: Gulag. Arbitrariness and mass crime in the Soviet Union 1917–1953. Introduction and documents. In: Julia Landau, Irina Scherbakowa (Ed.): Gulag. Texts and documents 1929–1956 , Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, pp. 30–49, here p. 32 and p. 36. ISBN 978-3-8353-1437-5 . Marc Junge: The mass operations . In: Ders., Bernd Bonwetsch (Hrsg.): Bolshevik order in Georgia. The Great Terror in a Small Caucasian Republic , Berlin, Boston 2015, pp. 33–39, here p. 38.
73. ↑ Quoted from Schlögel: Terror und Traum. P. 459. Also quoted by Baberowski: The red terror. P. 182.
74. ↑ On the repression of family members, cf. comprehensive Werth: L'Ivrogne. Pp. 140-146.
75. ^ German translation of this legal provision in a version after the Second World War on the website of the Documentation Center for the History of Resistance and Repression in the Nazi Era and the Soviet Occupation Zone / GDR ( PDF ), accessed May 20, 2010.
76. ↑ ^{a b} Hedeler: Kinship liability. P. 192.
77. ↑ Printed in Reinhard Müller: Menschenfalle Moscow. Exile and Stalinist Persecution. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-930908-71-9 , pp. 448-454.
78. ^ Kuhr: Children of "enemies of the people". P. 399.
79. ^ Hedeler: Kinship. P. 191 f.
80. ↑ "The Great Terror": 1937–1938. Short chronicle , website of the human rights organization Memorial (accessed April 12, 2010). Werth: L'Ivrogne. P. 146, gives a number of about 20,000 children.
81. ^ Werth: L'Ivrogne. P. 146.
82. ↑ How Russia displaces the terror of 1937 , article in the portal one day on Spiegel Online from August 2, 2007 (accessed May 19, 2010).
83. ^ Kuhr: Children of "enemies of the people". P. 413.
84. ↑ McLoughlin: "Destruction of the Stranger". P. 102; Schlögel, Terror and Dream. P. 570 and p. 638. See also Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Massenmord und Lagerhaft for a short time on the use of files with compromising material . 367.
85. ↑ Bonwetsch: The "Great Terror" - 70 years later. P. 136 f; Werth: The importance of the “Great Terror.” P. 336, note 6; Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Mass murder and imprisonment. P. 405.
86. ↑ Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge ( Stalinism in the Soviet Province. P. 11) speak only of dwoikas when referring to “national operations”. Werth ( The Mechanism of Mass Crime. P. 235) gives dwoikas and troikas as special courts for these campaigns.
87. ^ Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Stalinism in the Soviet Province. P. 11, note 8.
88. ↑ On the troikas, dwoikas and special troikas as well as on the “album method” in the context of “national operations” see Werth: The Mechanism of Mass Crime. P. 235 f.
89. ^ Snyder: Bloodlands , p. 120.
90. ↑ Khelvnyuk: The Politburo. Pp. 279-281.
91. ↑ Introduction to Stalin's shooting lists on the Russian website of Memorial
92. ↑ Baberowski: The Red Terror. P. 174.
93. ↑ Werth: The importance of the "Great Terror". P. 270.
94. ↑ Khelvnyuk: The Politburo. P. 281. On the appearance of Kaganowitsch in Iwanowo see Baberowski: Der Rote Terror. Pp. 175-178.
95. ↑ Jörg Baberowski: Civilization of violence. The cultural origins of Stalinism . In: Historische Zeitschrift , Volume 281, Issue 1 (August 2005), pp. 59–102, here p. 96.
96. ↑ Khelvnyuk: The Politburo. P. 294.
97. ↑ Khelvnyuk: The Politburo. P. 295; Jansen, Petrov: Stalin's loyal executioner. P. 207. The relationship between Stalin and Yezhov explains in detail Chlevnyuk: The Politburo. Pp. 282-304.
98. ↑ On Khrushchev's participation in NKVD Order No. 00447 see Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Massenmord und Lagerhaft. P. 25, p. 41 (there the Moscow numbers) and p. 72 (telegram in which he names himself a member of the Moscow Troika).
99. ↑ Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Mass Murder and Camp Imprisonment. P. 21 and p. 51.
100. ↑ ^{a b} See also McLoughlin: "Destruction of the Stranger". P. 103.
101. ^ Werth: The Mechanism of Mass Crime. P. 229.
102. ^ Petrov: The cadre policy of the NKVD. P. 13.
103. ^ Werth: L'Ivrogne. P. 147.
104. ^ Werth: L'Ivrogne. P. 148.
105. ↑ Comprehensive on this Petrov: The cadre policy of the NKVD.
106. ^ Petrov: The cadre policy of the NKVD. P. 12.
107. ^ Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge (Ed.): Stalinism in the Soviet Province. P. 26 f.
108. ↑ Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Mass Murder and Camp Imprisonment. P. 369.
109. ↑ Rolf Binner, Marc Junge: "S etoj publikoj ceremonit´sja ne sleduet". P. 226.
110. ^ Werth: L'Ivrogne. P. 235.
111. ^ Art. Stalin, Joseph . In: Leslie Alan Horvitz, Christopher Catherwood: Encyclopedia of War Crimes and Genocide . Facts On File, New York 2006, ISBN 978-1-4381-1029-5 , pp. 404-406, here p. 405.
112. ↑ Numbers according to McLoughlin: "Destruction of the foreign". P. 97.
113. ^ Werth: L'Ivrogne. P. 245.
114. ↑ Polish citizens, Soviet citizens with Polish roots or Polish names or with contacts to Poland.
115. ↑ 20 times the risk: Werth: L'Ivrogne. P. 243; 40 times the risk: Snyder: Bloodlands , p. 120.
116. ^ Werth: L'Ivrogne. Pp. 242-245.
117. ^ Werth: L'Ivrogne. P. 236 f.
118. ↑ On persecution in Siberia see Werth: L'Ivrogne. Pp. 237-239.
119. ^ Werth: L'Ivrogne. P. 239.
120. ^ Werth: L'Ivrogne. P. 240.
121. ^ Werth: L'Ivrogne. P. 241.
122. ↑ Werth: L'Ivrogne. Pp. 252-257.
123. ↑ On the prominent persecution of Christians see Binner, Junge: Destruction of the Orthodox clergy. ; Werth: L'Ivrogne. Pp. 257-268.
124. ^ Werth: L'Ivrogne. P. 268 f.
125. ^ Werth: L'Ivrogne. P. 270.
126. ^ Werth: L'Ivrogne. P. 272.
127. ^ Werth: L'Ivrogne. P. 275 f.
128. ^ Snyder: Bloodlands , p. 121.
129. ↑ Evidence for the explanations in this chapter can be found at: François-Xavier Nérard: The Butovo Shooting Range. Article of the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence ( PDF version ) (accessed on May 16, 2010), here pp. 4 and 6; McLoughlin: "Destroying the Stranger". P. 99. See also Schlögel: Terror und Traum. 615-618.
130. ↑ Figures from Khlevniuk: The History of the Gulag. P. 178 f.
131. ^ Numbers according to Chlevnyuk: The History of the Gulag. P. 179.
132. ^ Numbers according to Chlevnyuk: The History of the Gulag. P. 179 f.
133. ^ Oleg Vitalievich Chlewnjuk: The History of the Gulag. P. 185 and p. 170.
134. ↑ It was about Lev Mironow and Leonid Sakowski. See Baberowski: Scorched Earth , p. 358.
135. ↑ Khelvnyuk: The Politburo. P. 299 f.
136. ↑ It is printed in Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Massenmord und Lagerhaft. Pp. 479-483. The Politburo resolution is also reproduced on the website 100 (0) Key Documents on Russian and Soviet History .
137. ↑ Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Mass Murder and Camp Imprisonment. P. 451 f.
138. ↑ Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Mass Murder and Camp Imprisonment. Pp. 452-454.
139. ↑ On the discontinuation of the terror campaign see also Jürgen Zarusky: Introduction [to the decision of the Politburo of the CK of the VKP (b) on the discontinuation of the proceedings before Trojkas, military tribunals and the military college of the Supreme Court of the USSR, November 15, 1938, and decision of the council of the People's Commissars of the USSR and the CK of the VKP (b) “On arrests, public prosecution supervision and investigations”, November 17, 1938 ] on the website 100 (0) key documents on Russian and Soviet history .
140. ^ Jansen, Petrov: Stalin's loyal executioner. Pp. 181 and 189. On the loss of power by Jeschow see also Baberowski: Verbrannte Erde , pp. 356–362.
141. ^ Petrov: The cadre policy of the NKVD. P. 29.
142. ^ Petrov: The cadre policy of the NKVD. P. 31 f.
143. ↑ McLoughlin: "Destruction of the Stranger". P. 114.
144. ^ Petrov: The cadre policy of the NKVD. P. 31.
145. ^ Snyder: Bloodlands, p. 125.
146. ↑ Bonwetsch: The "Great Terror" - 70 years later. P. 144.
147. ↑ Status: 2009.
148. ↑ Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Mass Murder and Camp Imprisonment. P. 697 f. It also contains information on further arrests, prison sentences, acquittals and the suspension of proceedings, deaths and suicides in custody, and troika members who remained unmolested.
149. ^ Oleg W. Chlevnjuk: 1937-j Stalin, NKVD i sovetskoe obščestvo. Moskva 1992, p. 233, quoted from Schlögel: Terror und Traum. P. 572.
150. ↑ On the cadre revolution, cf. Schlögel: Terror and Dream. Pp. 571-575.
151. ↑ On this Schlögel: Terror and Dream. Pp. 239-266.
152. ↑ Schlögel: Terror and Dream. Pp. 264-266.
153. ↑ Baberowski: Scorched Earth, p. 355.
154. ↑ On Serge, Schwarzschild and Silone see Dwars: Deutungsmuster. P. 300.
155. ↑ See the review of a new edition by Ursula Pia Jauch in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of June 23, 2001. See also the manuscript of a lecture ( Memento of July 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) about this novel, which Frithjof Trapp wrote as part of a multi-part Lecture on The European Exile 1933–1945 - Emigration and Political History as Reflected in Exile Literature in the summer semester of 2004 at the University of Hamburg .
156. ↑ Quoted from Dwars: Deutungsmuster. P. 300.
157. ↑ On Feuchtwanger's Moscow trip and his position in relation to the show trials, see Schlögel: Terror und Traum. Pp. 119-135.
158. ↑ In relation to Mann, Dwars: Deutungsmuster. P. 302; in relation to Feuchtwanger this Schlögel: Terror und Traum. Pp. 126-128.
159. ↑ Dwars, Bertolt: Deutungsmuster. P. 302 f.
160. ↑ On Brecht's attitude towards the Moscow trials, see Dwars: Deutungsmuster. Pp. 303-305.
161. ↑ see Jörg R. Mettke: Bottomless Naivety in Spiegel Spezial Geschichte (2007), p. 84.
162. ↑ For Bredel, Becher and Leschnitzer see Dwars: Deutungsmuster. P. 305.
163. ^ Snyder: Bloodlands : p. 93.
164. ^ Katherine Hirschfeld: Show Trials and the Ritual Purification of Hypermodernity. In: Irving Louis Horowitz (Ed.): Culture and Civilization. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ 2009, ISBN 978-1-4128-1065-4 , pp. 5-29, here pp. 14 f.
165. ↑ On the assessment of the Moscow trials by intellectuals see also Stefan Reinecke : Mythos Stalin. Inheritance from this time , in: the daily newspaper , November 22, 2007 (accessed June 10, 2010). On how German writers in particular deal with the Moscow trials, see also the manuscript of a lecture ( Memento of July 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) that Frithjof Trapp gave as part of a multi-part lecture on The European Exile 1933–1945 - Emigration and Political History in the Mirror who held exile literature in the summer semester of 2004 at the University of Hamburg .
166. ↑ Snyder refers to this background: Bloodlands : p. 86 f.
167. ↑ For this speech, see 50 Years Ago: End of the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU - The Disenchantment of Stalin , “Deadline” of February 25, 2006, contribution on the website of Westdeutscher Rundfunk ; Hildermeier, History of the Soviet Union 1917–1991. Pp. 762-764. Jan Foitzik : Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" on the XX. CPSU party congress and the de-Stalinization crisis in East Central Europe 1956–57 ( PDF ( Memento of May 3, 2006 in the Internet Archive ), accessed June 10, 2010).
168. ↑ Werth: The importance of the "Great Terror". P. 269.
169. ↑ Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Mass Murder and Camp Imprisonment. Pp. 551-557.
170. ↑ Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Mass Murder and Camp Imprisonment. P. 560.
171. ↑ Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Mass Murder and Camp Imprisonment. P. 562 f.
172. ↑ Werth: The importance of the "Great Terror". P. 278 f.
173. ↑ Werth: The importance of the "Great Terror". P. 279 f.
174. ↑ Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Mass Murder and Camp Imprisonment. P. 563.
175. ↑ Putin is silent on Stalin's mass murders , in: Welt Online , August 8, 2007 (accessed June 14, 2010); Russia: Coming to terms with the past not in sight , article on the Deutsche Welle website , August 8, 2010 (accessed June 14, 2010); Vladimir Putin's historical picture: No to Yeltsin, Yes to Stalin , Süddeutsche Zeitung of July 12, 2007 (accessed June 14, 2010).
176. ↑ See also the articles in issue No. 148 (November 9, 2007) of the Russia analyzes .
177. ↑ The year 1937 and the present - theses from “Memorial” ( Memento of December 17, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed June 1, 2010; PDF; 32 kB).
178. ↑ ^{a b} Russian civil rights activists breathe easy , NZZ, April 6, 2018
179. ↑ «Putin still allows me to think differently» , Tages-Anzeiger, December 21, 2017
180. ↑ The Ghosts of the Past , dekoder.org, May 30, 2017.
181. ↑ “Nobody knows how it will end” , Decoder, February 2, 2018.
182. ↑ In Karelia the investigation into the case of the head of Memorial Dmitriev has been completed , Interfax, August 22, 2018
183. ↑ The court has confirmed the pre- trial detention of the head of the Karelian memorial Dmitriev , Interfax, September 20, 2018
184. ↑ Katja Gloger: Putin's World: The New Russia, Ukraine and the West , eBook Berlin Verlag, 2015, ISBN 978-3-8270-7854-4 .
185. ↑ Rewrite Sandarmoch , 7x7
186. ↑ "There is a hypothesis by Karelian historians ..." , Novaya Gazeta, September 8, 2018.
187. ↑ In Ordinka, in the clearing , Novaya Gazeta, September 20, 2018
188. ↑ For this François-Xavier Nérard: The Butovo Shooting Range . Article of the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence ( PDF version ) (accessed on May 16, 2010), in particular pp. 6–8. See also Margarete Zimmermann: The Russian Orthodox Church as an actor in the politics of memory (1995–2009). The Butovo shooting range as a case study for post-Soviet commemorative culture , in: Jörg Ganzenmüller , Raphael Utz: Soviet crimes and Russian memory. Places - Actors - Interpretations ( Europe's East in the 20th Century. Writings of the Imre-Kertész-Kolleg Jena , 4), de Gruyter Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, pp. 59–90.
189. ↑ Zimmermann: The Russian Orthodox Church as an Actor of Memory Politics (1995–2009) , p. 79.
190. ↑ the posledný adres project site
191. ^ Robert Baag: Stalin's show trials against the supposed opponent. Stalin's “Great Terror” , broadcast on Deutschlandradio Kultur on October 30, 2012 (accessed on May 13, 2013) , began 75 years ago .
192. ↑ Roskomstalin , Novaya Gazeta, January 29, 2019
193. ↑ Baur: Great Terror. P. 332 f; Hildermeier: The Soviet Union. P. 126.
194. ↑ Baur: "Great Terror". Pp. 333-337. See also Hildermeier: The Soviet Union. P. 127.
195. ↑ Baur: "Great Terror". P. 337 f.
196. ↑ On this Baur: "Great Terror". Pp. 338-340.
197. ^ Daniel Pipes : Conspiracy. The fascination and power of the secret. Gerling Akademie Verlag Munich 1998, pp. 154-158, 165 fuö.
198. ↑ Wolfgang Wippermann : Agents of Evil. Conspiracy theories from Luther to the present day. Bebra, Berlin 2007, p. 110 f.
199. ↑ On the incomplete research see, for example, the remarks by Barry McLoughlin and Kevin McDermott: Rethinking Stalinist Terror. in: The same: Stalin's terror. Pp. 1–18, here p. 4. On foreign policy influencing factors and the significance of the Spanish Civil War, see in particular Khlevniuk: The Reasons for the “Great Terror”. Pp. 162-168. On the role of the Spanish Civil War, see also Zeidler: "A modern army ..." pp. 437–440. For a discussion of causes and motives as well as a research strategy that is open to as many causes and factors as possible, see Baur: “Great Terror”. Pp. 343-348. To summarize the thesis of the Fifth Colon also Junge & Bonwetsch: “All around enemies, nothing but enemies” , pp. 47–53.
200. ↑ On the following Junge & Bonwetsch: “All around enemies, nothing but enemies” , pp. 54–65.
201. ^ J. Arch Getty: "Excesses Are Not Permitted". Mass Terror and Stalinist Governance in the Late 1930s. In: Russian Review. Vol. 61, No. 1 (Jan. 2002), pp. 113-138, here pp. 122-127.
202. ^ Getty website. ( Memento from July 9, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
203. ↑ Schlögel: Terror and Dream. P. 266 and Karl Schlögel: Review of: Goldman, Wendy Z .: Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin. The Social Dynamics of Repression. Cambridge 2007, in: H-Soz-u-Kult, October 9, 2009. Also: Karl Schlögel: Ballot against enemies of the people. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . January 9, 2018, accessed March 4, 2018 . 
204. ↑ See for example the review by Felix Schnell of: Schlögel, Karl: Terror und Traum. Moscow 1937. Munich 2008. In: H-Soz-u-Kult. October 8, 2009 . There it says: "The assumption of a democratic threat to the Stalinist dictatorship is simply absurd."
205. ^ Ronald Grigor Suny: Stalin and his Stalinism: Power and Authority in the Soviet Union, 1930-1953. P. 24 (Excerpt from Ronald Grigor Suny: Stalin and his Stalinism: Power and Authority in the Soviet Union, 1930-53. In: Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (Eds.): Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison. Cambridge University Press , New York 1997.) (PDF; accessed December 20, 2010).
206. ↑ Norman Naimark: Stalin and the genocide. P. 113. For criticism of Naimark's expansion of the genocide term see Jürgen Zarusky: Review by: Norman M. Naimark: Stalin und der Genozid. Frankfurt / M .: Suhrkamp Verlag 2010 in: sehepunkte 11 (2011), No. 5 (May 15, 2011).
207. ↑ Jörg Baberowski: The red terror. P. 188.
208. ↑ Karl Schlögel: Terror and Dream. P. 643.
209. ↑ Eric Weitz: A Century of Genocide. Utopias of Race and Nation. Updated edition. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2015, ISBN 978-1-4008-6622-9 , pp. 100 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
210. ↑ See an overview: Boris Barth : Genozid. Genocide in the 20th Century. History, theories, controversies (Beck'sche Reihe 1672), Beck, Munich 2006. ISBN 3-406-52865-1 , pp. 136-148. With precise knowledge of the history of Soviet violence, Bernd Bonwetsch also argues negatively: The GULAG and the question of genocide. In: Jörg Baberowski (Ed.): Modern times? War, revolution and violence in the 20th century. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-525-36735-X , pp. 111-144.
211. ↑ Cf. Boris Barth: Genozid. Genocide in the 20th Century. History, theories, controversies. (Beck'sche Reihe 1672), Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-52865-1 , p. 136.
212. ↑ Hildermeier: History of the Soviet Union 1917–1991. P. 453 f.
213. ↑ Bonwetsch: The "Great Terror" - 70 years later. P. 128.
214. ↑ See Hildermeier: History of the Soviet Union 1917–1991. P. 454.
215. ↑ Bonwetsch: The "Great Terror" - 70 years later. P. 128 f.
216. ^ Litvin, Keep: Stalinism. S. viii.
217. ↑ Binner, Bonwetsch, Junge: Mass Murder and Camp Imprisonment. P. 9 f.
218. ^ Werth: Mechanism of Mass Crime. P. 219. Werth: L'Ivrogne. P. 22 f.

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