Case Study:

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 B- Decision-makers, Organizers and Actors

It has long been discussed whether the murder of Leningrad party boss, S. M. Kirov, on December 1, 1934 marked the beginning of the Terror in the USSR. In the Leningrad region at least, it is undeniable. First of all, the arrival of the main organizers of the Terror on December 10, 1934 and the designation of a new head of the regional NKVD, namely Leonid Mikhaylovich Zakovsky suggest as much. It was under Zakovsky’s rule that most of the repressions took place and were shaped. A few days later, on December 15, Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov became the regional head of the party.

Several waves of repression hit the Northern capital between 1934 and 1937, even before the mass operations began. 40,000 people were deported from the city during what was called the “Kirov stream”. Just for the operations of February-March 1935 (initiated by the circular of February 27, 1935), more than 11,000 “former” citizens were expelled from the city (on the consequences see Chuykina, 2006: 83-84).

Sculpture "the moloch of Totalitarism"
Photos : © François-Xavier Nerard

As for the Great terror itself, Zakovsky obtained one of the highest quotas for the implementation of operational order 00447: 14,000 people (of whom 4,000 were to be shot), he also presided over the troika. The representatives of the party in the troika varied between the First Secretary Zhdanov, but also the Second Secretary P. Smorodin (until august 1937), and later T. Shtykov (from September 1938). The regional prosecutor, also a member of the troika, for the whole period was Boris Pozern. These operations were well organized in the Leningrad region as recently published documents testify (Razumov, 2002: 618-638). Zakovsky composed a text explaining the central instructions to his subordinates in a specific operational order on August 1, 1937. The Leningrad region was divided into 12 operational sectors in accordance with the specific border areas of Pksov, Murmansk and Kingisepp.

For all theses subdivisions a person responsible for the operations was nominated and additional staff assigned. For example, 212 persons for the Leningrad city zone (mostly students from military and police institutes but also members of the NKVD in the reserve). The lists of arrests were to be established on information provided by the different security organs and validated personally by Zakovsky. The operation was to be reported daily to the regional head of the NKVD.

All the stages of the process were carefully thought through: the arrested were concentrated into one place for each above-mentioned subdivision, either in prisons or in “centers for pre-trial detention” (DPZ). In the city of Leningrad, these places were the famous “Kresty Prison” on the Arsenal embankment and the DPZ of the Militia. It seems that the executions in the region were organized at different points, but mainly took place in the prisons (Razumov, 2006: 5 or Razumov, 2002: 626). During the summer of 1937, the NKVD organs looked for the best place to bury the corpses. The main secret cemetery was found north of Leningrad in the forest of Pargolovo, near the village of Levashovo. It is the only place the existence of which is confirmed by written sources, but there are probably other places such as the Preobrazhensky cemetery. A woman selling flowers there was arrested in November 1937 and accused of “anti-soviet propaganda” as she was telling people in the cemetery of the “secret burials” of victims of the Terror (Razumov, 2002: 604-617). This case will be analyzed more extensively in section D below.

The Yezhovshina in the Leningrad region also targeted people already in prisons and other places of detention, as mentioned in Zakovsky’s operational order 00123 (August 9, 1937). ?n August 16, 1937, Yezhov once again ordered Zakovsky to clean up the prison camps of already arrested but nevertheless “active anti-soviet elements” (Junge, 2003: 100-102), specifically targeting the prison camps of the Solovky Islands in the White Sea (the first of the Gulag camps). Yezhov gave them a quota of 1,200 for the first category. The orders were implemented: the Sandarmokh tract is the location where the first 1,111 prisoners were shot (Shapoval, 2002; Junge, 2003: 52). The implementation of the order given by Zakovsky on October 16, 1937 was supervised by M. Matveev. Seven hundred more prisoners were later executed.

Zakovsky was called by Yezhov in Moscow and promptly became his aide. He was later replaced by Mikhail Litvin, the former head of the secret-political section of the NKVD, another close protégé of Yezhov, on January 20, 1938. Litvin remained in this post until November 1938, almost until the very end of the Terror, he committed suicide and was replaced by S. Goglidze, a close collaborator of Beria’s, who prolonged and intensified the Terror. On January 31, 1938, after a meeting of the regional heads of the NKVD in Moscow, the Politburo authorized an increase in the quotas of people to be shot on the basis of the order 00447. For Leningrad, this augmentation was of 3,000 (i.e. 75%). On April 13, 1938, this figure was once more increased by 1,500 in a special Politburo resolution (Junge, 2003: 129), bringing the overall figure to 8,500.

 C- Victims

It is still difficult to give a precise overall figure of the victims of the Great Terror in the Leningrad region as different repressive structures were galvanized. Globally 65,223 (of which 31,339 came under order 00447) were arrested from October 1, 1936 to July 1, 1938 (Werth, 2006: 143). Another source puts the total at 73,045 arrests in the Leningrad region (Mozokhin, 2006: 333-341).

Finish victims memorial
Photos : © François-Xavier Nerard

Nevertheless, the publication of the first eight tomes of the Leningrad Martyrology by Anatoly Razumov gives us a more precise idea of the victims of the Great Terror (Razumov, 1995-2008). This data was partly analyzed by Melanie Ilic (Ilic, 2000) and Denis Kozlov (Kozlov, 2002), but deserves further statistical analysis as the publication continues. Nevertheless, their conclusions are largely confirmed by the latest publication of statistical data undertaken by the team of Anatoly Razumov that concern the year of 1937 and 19,724 people (data from the six first tomes are available from the website: http://visz.nlr.ru/search/stat.html). Most of the analysis provided in this section are based on these data.

The Great Terror was a marked gendered- phenomenon as 95.2% of the victims were males even if wives and families of the “enemies of the people” were specifically targeted by operational order 00486 of August 15, 1937. Most of them were in their prime (65.8% were younger than 50 years old, 86.4% younger than 60 and the oldest being 85). The gender aspects and consequences of the Great Terror still require thorough scholarly attention and analysis.

The importance of the national operations in regions on the borders of the USSR and of their lethal effects can be read in the statistics on nationalities. The Leningrad region was one of the bloodiest in the USSR: 87% of people arrested were shot, whereas in the Kuybyshev region, the equivalent percentage was 48.16% (Petrov Roginski, 1997). The Great Terror marked the climax of the campaign of repression against nationalities and “enemy nations” that began in 1934-35 (Martin, 1998: 852) and corresponded to a U-turn in Soviet politics regarding nationalities. In the Leningrad region, the process began in March 1935 with deportation to Central Asia and Siberia of Finns (30% of the Finnish population were transferred in 1935-1936), Estonians and Latvians (Martin, 1998: 849).

The Leningrad region was very multinational, and so it is not surprising to see that 65 different nationalities were affected by the orders. Russians moreover represented only 58.5 % of the total population (whereas by 1939, according to the census of that year, they represented almost 90% of the population). The statistics of the victims of the Terror in the Leningrad region, as they were compiled by the team of A. Razumov (see reference above) allow us to have a more precise understanding of the repression . Almost 14 % of the victims were Polish (who represented less than 1% of the population in the 1939 census). The Polish operation there was very important as a report by Yezhov to Stalin describing the operation and the “spy webs” already dismantled testifies (Werth, 2006: 122-125). Leningrad was the third largest region of USSR for the number of arrests after Ukraine and Byelorussia (but Ukraine was far more densely populated). Estonians, Finns (around 4% each) are the two other overwhelmingly over-represented nationalities among the victims. These conclusions are confirmed by the fact that slightly more than 50% of the victims in the Leningrad region were born in the city of Leningrad or its surroundings. 18% were born outside the borders of the USSR. What Martin calls “Soviet Xenophobia”, i.e. “Soviet fear of foreign influence and foreign contamination” (Martin, 1998: 829), can also be read in the fact that rail workers and transport workers (who had links with foreign countries) were also specified as targets, they represent almost 10 % of the total victims.

Figures compiled by A. Razumov also show how the Great Terror can be interpreted as an enterprise of social engineering (Werth, 2006: 32). Communists were certainly victims of the Terror as they represent 13% of the total, despite party membership in 1939 for the whole of the USSR being less than 1.5% (Ilic, 2000: 1520). However, the bulk of the repression (84%) targeted non-party people. Several “enemy” groups, mentioned in the decree 00447 are overrepresented: this is the case for religious practitioners (and especially for women), 5,5%, but also for edinolichniki (the independent peasants who did not join the collective farms), accounting for 7.1%. Peasants as a whole represent 23% of the total. The margins of the Soviet society were thus hit hard by the Terror as confirmed by the high figure of 4.6% for people “without any specific occupation”. This category is especially female (8% of women) as is the category for other non-working persons (on retirement, housewives and dependents), half of these victims are women.

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