Cahiers du monde russe Russie - Empire russe - Union soviétique et États indépendants
42/2-4 | 2001 La police politique en Union soviétique, 1918-1953
Andrea Graziosi, Terry Martin and Jutta Scherrer (dir.)
Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/1170 DOI: 10.4000/monderusse.1170 ISSN: 1777-5388
Publisher Éditions de l’EHESS
Printed version Date of publication: 1 April 2001 ISBN: 2-7132-1398-3 ISSN: 1252-6576
Electronic reference Andrea Graziosi, Terry Martin and Jutta Scherrer (dir.), Cahiers du monde russe, 42/2-4 | 2001, « La police politique en Union soviétique, 1918-1953 » [Online], Online since 16 January 2007, Connection on 19 July 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/1170 ; DOI : https://doi.org/ 10.4000/monderusse.1170
This text was automatically generated on 19 July 2020.
© École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. 1
La place, le rôle, le fonctionnement de la police politique en Union soviétique sont demeurés longtemps, pour des raisons évidentes, un territoire largement opaque dans l'histoire de ce pays, qui, d’autre part, ne saurait être comprise sans l’étude approfondie de cette institution dont la création date des tout débuts du nouveau régime. Ce volume rassemble les premiers résultats des recherches en cours, menées par des historiens français, russes, ukrainiens, lituanien, américains, allemands, britanniques et néerlandais. Ces études, toutes fondées sur des investigations importantes dans les archives de l'ex-URSS, jettent un éclairage très neuf sur des aspects aussi cruciaux que les relations entre la police politique et le parti de la population, la collecte de l’information, les relations entre la police politique et la police criminelle, les mécanismes de la terreur et la violence d’État. La plupart de ces contributions ont été présentées lors d’un colloque international tenu à la Maison des sciences de l'homme à Paris, en mai 2000, avec le concours du Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, de l’Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici et du Centre d'études du monde russe, soviétique et post-soviétique de l’EHESS.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Avant-propos
Surveillance, information et réseaux d'indicateurs
The MECHANISMS of the informational activity of the GPU-NKVD The surveillance file of Mykhailo Hrushevsky Iurii I. SHAPOVAL
The role and place of secret collaborators in the informational activity of the gpu-nkvd in the 1920s and 1930s (on the basis of materials of the Donbass region) Volodymyr SEMYSTIAHA
Le système d’information de la GPU : la situation politique en Ukraine dans les années 1920 rapportée à Kaganovič. Valerij Ju. VASIL´EV
Les organes du contrôle d’État et les journaux dans l’URSS de Stalin : des auxiliaires de la police politique ? François-Xavier Nérard
Gender and policing in Soviet West Ukraine, 1944-1948. Jeffrey BURDS
La composition et les méthodes secrètes des organes de sécurité soviétiques en Lituanie, 1940-1953. Arvydas ANUŠAUSKAS
Organisation bureaucratique et relations avec le parti
Razvitie sovetskih organov gosudarstvennoj bezopasnosti : 1917-1953 gg. Vladimir N.HAUSTOV
Les transformations du personnel des organes de sécurité soviétiques, 1922-1953 Nikita PETROV
L’OGPU en 1924 Radiographie d’une institution à son niveau d’étiage Nicolas Werth
Dual subordination ? The political police and the party in the Urals region, 1918-1953. James HARRIS
“Chekist in essence, chekist in spirit”: regular and political police in THE 1930s Paul M. HAGENLOH
The passport system and state control over population flows in the Soviet Union, 1932-1940. Gijs Kessler
Social disorder, mass repression, and the NKVD during the 1930s. DAVID R. SHEARER
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Stalin i organy gosudarstvennoj bezopasnosti v poslevoennyj period. Oleg HLEVNJUK
Les documents du Ministère public de l’URSS comme sources de l’histoire du Goulag, 1945-1953. Dina N. NOHOTOVIČ
Terreur et Goulag
Wie Dder terror “Gross” wurde: Massenmord und Lagerhaft nach Befehl 00447 Rolf BINNER and Marc JUNGE
Conflict and complicity : The expansion of the Karelian Gulag, 1923-1933. Nick BARON
Magadan and the evolution of the Dal´stroi bosses in the 1930s. David J. NORDLANDER
Alliés ou ennemis ? Le GUPVI-NKVD, le Komintern et les « Malgré-nous ». Le destin des prisonniers de guerre français en URSS (1942-1955). Le destin des prisonniers de guerre français en URSS (1942-1955) Gaël MOULLEC
The Great terror in the provinces of the USSR, 1937-1938 A cooperative bibliography Rolf BINNER, Marc JUNG and Terry MARTIN
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Avant-propos
1 Nous présentons ici des textes d’un colloque intitulé « La police politique en Union soviétique, 1918-1953 » qui a eu lieu à la Maison des Science de l’Homme en mai 2000 et qui a pu se tenir grâce au concours de nombreuses institutions. Nous tenons à les remercier ici, notamment le Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, l’Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme et le Centre d’Études du Monde Russe, Soviétique et Post-Soviétique de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
2 Ce colloque poursuit une tradition qui a maintenant plus de dix ans et qui a débuté sous la forme d’un séminaire franco-italien d’histoire russe et soviétique ; ce séminaire s’est élargi au fil des ans en associant des chercheurs d’autres pays de l’Europe et des États- Unis. L’entreprise bénéficie du soutien de M. Maurice Aymard, de la MSH, de M. Wladimir Berelowitch, directeur du Centre d’Études du Monde Russe, Soviétique et Post-Soviétique de l’EHESS, de MM. Gerardo Marotta et Antonio Gargano de l’Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, et aussi du comité de rédaction des Cahiers du Monde russe. Nous sommes reconnaissants à tous de l’aide fidèle qu’ils nous apportent.
3 Grâce aux Cahiers du Monde russe, la plupart des actes de nos colloques ont pu faire l’objet de numéros spéciaux ; en voici la liste :
4 « Spécialistes, bureaucratie et administration dans l’Empire russe et en URSS, 1880-1945 » (32, 4, 1991)
5 « Cultures économiques et politiques économiques dans l’Empire tsariste et en URSS, 1861-1950 » (36, 1-2, 1995)
6 « Guerre, guerres civiles et conflits nationaux dans l’Empire russe et en Russie soviétique, 1914-1922 » (38, 1-2, 1997)
7 « Les années 30. Nouvelles directions de la recherche »
8 (39, 1-2, 1998)
9 « Archives et nouvelles sources de l’histoire soviétique, une réévaluation »
10 (40, 1-2, 1999)
11 Pour le dernier colloque, les initiateurs, Andrea Graziosi et Jutta Scherrer, ont associé un collègue américain, Terry Martin, qui en a été le véritable organisateur. Nous
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espérons que la publication de ces travaux de recherche sera utile à la communauté scientifique et que cette entreprise pourra se poursuivre dans l’avenir.
12 Andrea Graziosi (Università di Napoli « Federico II »)
13 Terry Martin (Harvard University)
14 Jutta Scherrer (EHESS)
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Surveillance, information et réseaux d'indicateurs
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The MECHANISMS of the informational activity of the GPU- NKVD The surveillance file of Mykhailo Hrushevsky
Iurii I. SHAPOVAL
1 To begin, I will focus briefly on the meaning of the word “dossier” (delo-formuliar). As is known, there were two basic categories of secret informers in the Soviet political police : the informer (osvedomitel’), who provided so-called primary information, and the agent (agent), who took part in the operative surveillance of an individual. The keeping of dossiers began with informers. These cases would be opened when information about concrete individuals was considered sufficiently important. Cases were initiated by various operative divisions after preliminary verification of the primary information.
2 In the case of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, dossier no. 1023 was opened on March 24, 1924, by a resolution of H. Eimontov, the official in charge of the 1st group of the Counter- Intelligence Department of the GPU department of Kyiv guberniia. Like others, this division was engaged in the study of all categories of the population considered important within society at that time, including the scientific intelligentsia.
3 The main pretext for launching the case was the fact that Hrushevsky was not simply a distinguished Ukrainian scholar, but at one time had also been very engaged in political activity. His “crime” lay in the fact that he had headed the Tsentral´na Rada (Central Council) that resisted the Bolsheviks in 1917-1918. It was this very circumstance that became the basis not only for opening a dossier, but also for gathering further information about him. For this reason the case was launched “according to the coloration (okraska) of Ukrainian counter-revolution.”
4 It is characteristic that the first decision on the opening of a dossier was a kind of experiment. On February 5, 1925, another dossier was opened in accordance with a decision passed by Borin, the official in charge of the Counter-Intelligence Department of the GPU department of Kyiv guberniia. This resolution, in contrast to H. Eimontov’s,
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was more categorical. Here the scholar was already marked as a “Ukrainian chauvinist,” and the accumulated materials gave the green light to suspect him of “anti-Soviet activity.”1 At the same time, according to tradition, the Chekists gave the academician the pseudonym “Staryk” (Old Man).
5 Mykhailo Hrushevsky returned from involuntary emigration in Vienna on March 8, 1924. In his view, his return was an act of compromise. He had fulfilled the Bolsheviks’ demand that he abandon his tireless political activity in the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (UPSR). He had publicly declared his loyalty to the Communist regime that was then carrying out the policy of “Ukrainization” and had accepted a proposal to eventually occupy the post of president of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (Vse- Ukrainska Akademiia Nauk -- VUAN).
6 However, Hrushevsky, who did not trust the new rulers, had managed to obtain two written documents that were akin to “decrees of protection.” The first was a letter from the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee (Vseukrainskyi Tsentral´nyi Vykonavchyi Komitet --VUTsVK) stating that he was allowed to live freely in the Ukrainian SSR and that he would suffer no repercussions as a result of his past political activity. The second document was signed by Vlas Chubar, the head of the Soviet Ukrainian government, and Vsevolod Balytsky, the head of the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR. They confirmed in writing that the academic was not subject to searches, arrest or persecution.2
7 Neither of these promises was fulfilled. Hrushevsky would not become president of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences ; in 1931 he was secretly forbidden to live in Ukraine ; in June 1927 he was subjected to a sudden and total search ; and in March 1931 he was arrested. He would be persecuted until his very death in Kislovodsk in November 1934.
8 To a significant degree all these acts of the regime are manifested in the contents of the absolutely top-secret dossier that was opened on the scholar. This dossier comprises nine volumes and contains over 4,000 different documents and materials. The documents include statements by secret GPU informers, special reports, informer and operative notes (or extracts), circulars, official Chekist correspondence concerning Mykhailo Hrushevsky, written declarations about his activity (in actual fact, denunciations against him) that were transmitted to the organs of the GPU, results of secret inspections of correspondence written by and to the scholar, as well as letters of individuals who wrote about him or simply mentioned his name.
9 An analysis of all this material attests to the fact that for Hrushevsky, life in Ukraine from 1924, and in Russia from 1931, was like living in a “glass house.” Virtually every step in his civic, scholarly, and personal life was scrutinized and thoroughly studied. After this the Chekists established their own line of conduct and recommendations to the party-state structures for their actions vis-a-vis the academician.
Secret informers
10 The primary material of the dossier consists of reports of secret informers who were in the academician’s milieu. It is true that initially the Chekists did not succeed in creating a wide network of informers ; such a network was established only during 1925-1926. At first, probably owing to Hrushevsky’s declaration of loyalty to the authorities, they
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considered the group of scholars headed by Academician Serhii Iefremov, which was dominant in the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, to be more dangerous. Thus, in March 1924 the head of the Counter-Intelligence Department of the Ukrainian GPU, V. Ivanov, wrote : “It is necessary to create a net of our agents not around Hrushevsky but around Iefremov.”3
11 Shortly after, however, another viewpoint came to the fore, according to which Hrushevsky had returned to Ukraine in order to conduct a struggle against the Bolshevik regime from the inside. Immediately after his arrival, the academician met with his colleagues from the UPSR and in conversations with them gave his critical assessment of what he had seen -- his views on the general situation in Ukraine. These conversations were immediately noted down by informers, each of whom incidentally had been given nicknames, as had Hrushevsky : “Evropeets” (European), “Akademik,” “Belyi” (White), “Udachnyi” (Lucky), “Kulturnik” (Cultural Activist), “Kochubei,” “Evgeniia,” “Turbogenerator,” “Om” (Ohm), “Svidomyi” (Conscious), “Frant” (Dandy), “Ian,” and so forth. Some of these secret informers, as, for example, “Kievskii” (probably a scholar from VUAN), were used to help the Chekists gain a thorough grasp of the scholar’s role and place in the political history of Ukraine in the twentieth century. In this instance, some of the reports were similar to historical information.
12 One of the most important informers went by the name of “Diplomat.” He was not only close to the academician in VUAN, but was also an old friend of his from the UPSR. Another noted informant was Professor Kostiantyn Shtepa of the Nizhyn Pedagogical Institute, who was recruited in 1928. He moved to Kyiv in 1930 and was used as an agent of the Secret-Political Department of the GPU division of Kyiv oblast´; his pseudonym was “Medvedev.” He played a deadly role in the fate of Hrushevsky’s daughter Kateryna by providing false information that served as the formal basis for her arrest and sentencing.4
13 In 1934 an agent named “Khymera” (Chimera) was called in to monitor Hrushevsky. Earlier he had lived in exile where he was used in the monitoring of Ukrainians living abroad. This individual was extremely close to the academician. In Moscow an “accidental” encounter with Hrushevsky was arranged for him. Afterwards, he visited the scholar’s family and then renewed his past connections that were absolutely crucial to the Chekists.
14 As a rule, reports of secret informers were written in Russian. Occasionally they took the form of direct speech ; usually they were already written down by the secret informer. At the same time the Chekists wanted to maintain the cover of their informers. For example, on April 11, 1928, Valerii Horozhanyn, the head of the Secret Department of the Ukrainian GPU, and Borys Kozelsky, the head of the 2nd Department in this same division, sent the following letter to the head of the GPU department of Kyiv okrug: “At the same time we bring to your attention an extract from our agent’s report. Under no circumstances should these reports be acted on. Addendum : what has been mentioned.”5
15 First of all, informers noted the academician’s positive and negative qualities and his relations with other scholars. Thus, in the notification of the secret informer named “Belyi’ of September 1, 1925, we read : “Academician Hrushevsky is a distinguished figure in all respects. An organizer of great magnitude. Loyal to his word once it is given, even if circumstances prevent him from carrying it out. Occasionally knows how to forget about his personal
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relations and converses with an enemy as with a friend. A great intriguer. A flatterer. Likes to join intrigues from the rear, through the back door. A person of far ranging enterprise. In the political respect, cannot forget his past.”6
16 In April 1924, the secret informer, “Kievskii,” reported : “Hrushevsky’s most important and mightiest tool that he always sets into motion for the most varied and most unnoticeable motives is Ukraine’s past, a past that is brilliant, marvelous, and full of prospects. The structure of Hrushev-sky’s mind, his line of work, his conduct with his colleagues can only be compared with the politics of a highly educated Jesuit. Hrushevsky should be given full credit for his ability to influence people and place them in a moral or -- most importantly -- material dependence on him. His principle is never to dismiss without satisfaction a person who has turned to him for help, support, or advice. Naturally, if the person who has turned to him is Ukrainian.”7
17 At the same time “Kievskii” emphasized the danger of the scholarly and organizational activity of the academician, who was editing the journal Ukraina. For the informer, this journal was the center and symbol of Hrushevsky’s anti-Soviet activity.8 Finally, “Kievskii” indicated one more important circumstance that the Chekists received with particular attention, namely, that in various regions of Ukraine Hrushevsky was creating academic structures, the goal of which was the study of local history and folklore. In “Kievskii’s” view, the real goal lies in the fact that local colleagues “will be informants, they will be those ;luminaries ; who should hold high the idea of an academy with all its concomitant consequences.”9
18 Indeed, upon heading the Historical Section of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences after his return, Hrushevsky initiated prodigious scholarly and organizational activity with respect to the study of Ukraine’s past. He had plans to create a Historical Institute of Ukraine and an Institute of Primitive Culture. The Chekists regarded these plans, as well as the study of Ukraine that he was organizing by districts, as the academician’s attempt to create a center of gravity capable of opposing the regime. The current party-state structures were immediately informed about this. Now it is clear why they began to re-examine their plans for Hrushevsky’s role within VUAN.
19 Even before Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s return to Ukraine, it was already understood that he was doomed to the futile prospect of opposition to the group headed by academicians Serhii Iefremov and Ahatanhel Krymsky. These scholars could not pardon his compromise with the Bolsheviks and had great doubts concerning the “purity” of Hrushevksy’s ideology. That is why on the eve of his return the Iefremov-Krymsky group manifested its negative attitude toward him. In their reports the secret informers paid special attention to this.
20 While the academician lived in Kyiv (until his departure for Moscow in 1931) on Pankivska street, no. 9, direct surveillance was carried out by Kyiv Chekists who constantly informed the Kharkiv authorities about his activities. However, they did not merely inform on him. Already on March 15, 1924, they framed a question about how to exploit Hrushevsky. In their opinion, two possibilities existed for such exploitation : “1. Appoint him president of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences on condition that he carry out the party line ; 2. Exploit him along the ;Chekist line, ; i.e., through ;the creation around him of a network of our people who, by shielding themselves with his name, will be carrying out our tasks. ;”10
21 On March 24, 1924, the head of the Secret-Operative Section and the head of the Counter-Intelligence Department of the Ukrainian GPU criticized the Kyiv Chekists,
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stressing that “Hrushevsky in the president’s chair of the Academy of Sciences does not represent any political expediency for us.” Instead, the main task lies in the “exacerbation of differences among the leaders of the Ukrainian chauvinist community.”11
22 For this very reason the most important task of the secret service was not simply information gathering, but also work that was aimed at deepening the split within the Ukrainian scholarly intelligentsia. This work turned out to be rather successful. Another interesting fact emerged during a conversation between Hrushevsky and one of the secret informers. Already in November 1926, the academician was skeptical about his chances of being elected president of VUAN: “With regard to his presidency of the Academy, academician M. S. Hrushevsky stated in a conversation with ;Ian ; that he is expecting failure, since a hostile line is being conducted against him. Hrushevsky said that even under pressure (and in case of necessity, there is no such doubt) he can nevertheless still be elected president.”12
23 This is indeed what happened. Elections of the presidium and the president of VUAN were held on May 3, 1928. The academy was chaired by Danylo Zabolotny, who was replacing Volodymyr Lypsky. Here is how one of the secret informers described Hrushevsky’s behavior : “Hrushevsky completely distanced himself from active participation in the elections. Like Korchak says, he was sitting like an old man with his head bent down, without saying a single word, without raising his hand a single time.”13
Chekist directives and analysis
24 A considerable number of circulars, official Chekist correspondence, special analytical reports, and generalized analytical documents about Mykhailo Hrushevsky have been preserved in the dossier. This is an extraordinarily interesting and important part of the dossier, since it contains much valuable information about the internal relations of the Chekists and their work methods.
25 Thus, for example, before Hrushevsky’s arrival, the Chekists were not seriously preoccupied with the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries, as they themselves admitted in one of their letters to the head of the Secret-Operative Section of the GPU V. Ivanov. The reason for this was that “they regarded them as feeble groupings that are degenerating [...].”14 However, shortly afterwards the situation radically changed, and the former members of the UPSR, particularly those close to Hrushevsky, were transformed into permanent “clients” of the GPU. The Kyiv Chekists soon informed the authorities that “we are utilizing a number of measures to seek out loopholes and recruit informers among Hrushevsky’s supporters.”15
26 Very often the work of the Kyiv department of the GPU elicited dissatisfaction on the part of the Kharkiv authorities. Particularly striking in this respect was the situation concerning the preparations for Hrushevsky’s jubilee in September 1926. It had been decided to mark the academician’s 60th birthday and the 40th anniversary of his scholarly activity at the same time. From the very beginning the Chekists realized that these celebrations would help bolster the academician’s authority. They could also be turned into a kind of manifestation, a reminder of the fact that Mykhailo Hrushevsky had entered the history of Ukraine not merely as a researcher but a politician and leader of forces opposing the Bolsheviks.
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27 It so happened that the GPU chiefs in Kharkiv learned of the jubilee celebrations that were being planned in Kyiv from the newspaper Komunist, rather than from their own Kyiv colleagues. Naturally, this caused great displeasure. On September 10, 1926, Karl Karlson, the assistant head of the Ukrainian GPU, sent a document entitled “Directives concerning academician Hrushevsky” to Kyiv, in which he expressed his dissatisfaction. He proposed that administrative punishment be meted out to F. Hrazhul (Dorin), the individual in charge of the Secret-Political Department of the Kyiv GPU.
28 On September 13, the Kyiv Chekists sent a reply in which they attempted to justify themselves by saying that, owing to the holidays and the fact that the lecturers and associates of VUAN were on vacation, it was impossible to collect the appropriate information.16 However, Karlson’s position was irreversible. On September 21, he sent a reply insisting on punishment. He emphasized that “the timely reaction of the departmental apparatus to all events in counter-revolutionary circles, the correct exploitation of your quite good secret informers, will prevent in the future such measures on our part.”17
29 The documents in the dossier attest to the great difficulties that Hrushevsky’s jubilee caused the Chekists, as well as the party and state organs, who ultimately failed (despite appropriate efforts) to “tame” the academician and force him to express himself clearly and favorably about the ruling regime. This was reflected in full measure in the special analytical reports that were written on the basis of statements made by secret informers (It is interesting to note that when there were differing opinions, the Chekists took special note of who said what about Hrushevsky).
30 In one of their special reports the Kyiv Chekists reached the following conclusion : “[...] On the whole the jubilee took place in a lackluster fashion, it did not celebrate the relations with Hrushevsky, to a considerable degree this was caused by vacillations concerning our attitude toward the jubilee and the story concerning the autobiography. [This is a reference to a biography that the academician himself was preparing for print. Owing to excessive caution, for a long period of time the authorities did not dare sanction its publication]. Today it will probably be necessary to seek a pretext in order to elicit Hrushevsky’s frankness once again.” 18
31 In a special report of October 7, 1926, the Kyiv Chekists made a more thorough analysis of the course of the solemn tribute to Mykhailo Hrushevsky, which took place on October 3, in the Kyiv Institute of National Education. Here is an extract from this document : “In the opinion of ;Diplomat ; and the circle of people whom he is monitoring, the positive results of the jubilee are that : 1. The jubilee is a commendable example of true Soviet democracy. 2.We made a wonderful impression on the foreign guests. The Galicians are in raptures over the jubilee and say that such festivities are possible only in our country. 3. The jubilee exacerbated the struggle among the academic groupings and mainly, 4. The jubilee laid the groundwork for Hrushevsky’s election as president of VUAN. The drawbacks of the jubilee were, first of all, the fact that in his speech Panas Liubchenko [the head of the Executive Committee of Kyiv okrug] spoke too sharply. But in the opinion of ;Diplomat, ; this is typical of Liubchenko. Secondly, it was rather awkward to note that more greetings were received from abroad than from the Soviet okrug-s, and, finally, there were too many different types of people at the reception [...] In ;Diplomat’s ; opinion, the Soviet authorities’ hopes for the jubilee were far from being satisfied 100 percent, for Hrushevsky did not say everything that was
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demanded of him, and he will not say this even now. It is true that Hrushevsky bribed the jubilee, nevertheless he has still not adequately distanced himself from right-wing Ukrainian elements. However, the secret informer believes that Hrushevsky probably did not express himself consciously today, for he probably does not wish to critically alienate these circles from himself before he occupies the chair of president of the Academy. Hrushevsky is a great tactician and takes everything into account.”19
32 All the material about the jubilee that was collected by the secret informers and generalized in a preliminary fashion by the Kyiv Chekists formed the basis of a document entitled “A special report about Hrushevsky’s jubilee.” It was prepared by the Ukrainian GPU no later than October 10, 1926, and sent to the party-state organs. The authors of this document avoided reaching any explicit conclusions but stated that the jubilee did not touch the periphery.
33 A series of documents entitled “About academician Hrushevsky,” which have been preserved in the dossier, demonstrate that the Chekists considered it imperative to inform the party-state structures about the depressed state of the scholar, his difficult material status, the lack of funds for the publication of scholarly works, and even about the excessively biased attitude toward him on the part of representatives of the nomenklatura (I have already cited the example of Panas Liubchenko who continued to make “attacks” on the academician in the press even after the jubilee). Hrushevsky reacted very painfully to all this.
34 A unique set of correspondence about the way the Chekists wished to exploit the scholar’s situation has also been preserved. The Soviet secret police instructed the secret informer “Evropeets” to confer with Hrushevsky about his more active civic work, e.g., his membership in the Kyiv city council. This is what is stated in one of these special reports : “Taking advantage of the first convenient moment, ;Evropeets ; spoke with Hrushevsky, however the results turned out to be unsatisfactory. At first Hrushevsky joked around, but later, when ;Evropeets ; continued to question him more insistently, Hrushevsky suddenly interrupted him and refused to continue the conversation.”20
35 Hrushevsky’s unwillingness to cooperate with the regime in any form whatsoever made him a “two-faced person” in the Chekists’ eyes, especially since the academician had remained in contact with his former colleagues in the UPSR. Although Ivan Lyzanivsky’s or Teofan Cherkasky’s relations with Hrushevsky were neither simple nor unequivocal, these individuals figure in a number of documents as people who wanted to influence the academician’s conduct, particularly after the constant scandals with the representatives of the Iefremov-Krymsky groups made normal work in VUAN an impossibility. Under these conditions, the Chekists obtained information about the fact that Hrushevsky’s supporters were advising him to leave the academy. The following was noted in a special report dated December 29, 1927: “In our opinion -- this is also the opinion of comrade Korniushyn who is leaving today for Kharkiv and will be broaching this question to the Central Committee -- it is essential to apply measures so that ;Staryk ; will not be released from the academy [...]. The question of measures that are crucial for Hrushevsky joining us will emerge in connection with this.”21
36 However, the GPU provided recommendations not only in connection with the question of engaging Hrushevsky to cooperate with the regime. It is extraordinarily fascinating to learn how the Chekists decided the fate of his scholarly mission abroad in 1928 to
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attend the International Etruscan Congress in Italy and the International Congress of Historians in Norway. The scholar submitted an application for the trip to the Historical-Philological Department of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, but it was not the academic directors who made the decision whether the academician would be allowed to travel or not. The dossier contains a unique handwritten “Conclusion” made by the head of the Secret Department of the GPU on this question : “The most recent information available to us attests to the fact that academician M. S. Hrushevsky stubbornly desires to go abroad. We have at our disposal a copy of a letter from Hrushevsky’s wife, in which she writes to him, recalling their arrival in the Ukrainian SSR: ;So much has happened during this time that it is hard to believe that it has only been four years : it would be enough for eight or more. Therefore, it is completely essential that you have a change of scene. ; At the present time Hrushevsky’s wife and daughter are abroad (near Vienna). There are grounds to believe that after Hrushevsky’s recent failures in the Academy (his failure to be elected) he is considering leaving the USSR permanently, which is politically inexpedient for us. For these reasons the Secret Division of the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR considers it essential that Hrushevsky be denied permission to leave.”22
37 This document is dated June 7, 1928. On June 15, the Kyiv GPU received the following permission from the Foreign Division of the OGPU in Moscow : “Citizen Hrushevsky, M. S. (Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR) is permitted to travel to the city of Oslo for participation in the 6th Congress of Historical Sciences. Issue a passport at once upon presentation of the appropriate documents for the mission.”23 However, the Ukrainian power structures still achieved their goal : Hrushevsky received a telegram from the representative body of the Ukrainian SSR in Moscow only on August 13, 1928; meanwhile, the congress in Oslo was opening on August14. “Even if I went,” Hrushevsky wrote to Kyrylo Studynsky, “I would not arrive in time [...].”24
38 In a special report we find information about the source of rumors concerning Hrushevsky’s intention to go abroad : “Rumors are emanating from Krymsky’s circles that Hrushevsky is preparing to leave the Ukrainian SSR.”25
39 Rumors from circles hostile to the academician also spurred the Chekists to seek a “compromising incident” in Hrushevsky’s past. Here is one example. In November 1928 the secret informant named “Frant” provided the information that after returning from Leningrad, academician Volodymyr Peretts, who was one of Hrushevsky’s antagonists, recounted a conversation that he had had with S. Oldenburg, the permanent secretary of the All-Union Academy of Sciences. The latter told him that they wanted to elect Hrushevsky academician as early as 1906, but the head of the Academy at the time, the great prince Kostiantyn Kostiantynovych, blocked this process because of Hrushevsky’s “separatism.” In 1914, when the scholar was arrested and deported to Kazan, academician Shakhmatov appealed to Kostiantyn Kostiantynovych to intercede on behalf of Hrushevsky in view of his scholarly achievements. At the time the great prince allegedly said that the Academy is making fruitless efforts on his behalf, because he has a letter from Hrushevsky himself. And this letter that was apparently in Oldenburg’s possession confirms the loyalty of the academician, who had written that he is for “one indivisible Russia,” that he was never a separatist, was always devoted to the throne, etc. On the statement concerning this matter an unknown person had written the following decision : “It is necessary to write to Leningrad with the advisory that a photograph or to a lesser extent a copy of this letter would be extremely valuable to us. 12.11.”26
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40 On November 28, 1928, the letter with the question were sent from the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR to the head of the Secret Department of the Permanent Plenipotentiary of the OGPU of the Leningrad military okrug. On November 29, the Kyiv Chekists sent a question that was similar to Kharkiv’s and Leningrad’s.27 However, these quests proved fruitless.
41 By the end of 1927, it was officially known that Hrushevsky would not be president of VUAN. However, he was permitted to take part in other elections. On January 12, 1929, by the authorities’ permission and recommendation, he was elected academician of the All-Union Academy of Sciences. At this time an attack had already been launched against Hrushevsky’s historical school and that same month the Politbiuro of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party approved a decision about the change of line “concerning material support for Hrushevsky.”28 A wave of destructive criticism of his views was unleashed in the press. The participants of the 1st All-Union Conference of Marxist Historians, held in Moscow in December 1928-early January 1929, also joined in the attacks.
42 However, we find somewhat different ideas and assessments in the special reports of the Kyiv GPU. Occasionally, they did not coincide with official and widely circulated assessments. Particularly characteristic are the pronouncements of the secret informer “Evropeets,” who believed that “Soviet rule has adopted an incorrect line towards Hrushevsky, which is leading to increasingly greater divergence between Hrushevsky and Soviet rule [...]. ’Evropeets’ confirms that some kind of distrust is constantly felt toward Hrushevsky, for which there are no grounds in the opinion of the secret informer, since Hrushevsky has defined himself ; in the event of a war he has nowhere to go, and he would go to work with the Soviet authorities if appropriate measures were adopted for this [...]. Hrushevsky has abandoned his old platform, although he has not quite come around to the Communist platform, but is standing in between these two platforms. Thus, the opinion of ;Evropeets ; boils down to the fact that Hrushevsky can work with the Soviet authorities, but for this it is necessary that the authorities meet Hrushevsky half way.”29
43 This is quite an essential point, inasmuch as the cited analytical report was addressed to the party-state leadership, which had already formulated its own opinion of Mykhailo Hrushevsky. During 1929-1930 the pogrom of scholarly establishments headed by the academician or those that had been created through his participation or assistance continued. His dossier contains quite a number of documents that reflect this process and characterize the situation of the academician, who had essentially been cornered.30
44 Particularly demoralizing were the arrests made in connection with the “Union for the Liberation of Ukraine” (Spilka vyzvolennia Ukrainy -- SVU). The academician Serhii Iefremov was proclaimed its leader, and he was arrested in July 1929. The Chekists diligently monitored and noted down facts when Hrushevsky attempted to rise to the defense of his former, now neutralized, enemy, and protested against the hounding of Iefremov that had been organized on the highest level. He even planned to make a public appearance in this connection, but in the end did not do this.
45 The statements of Iefremov, now under arrest, were also gathered and analyzed. An informer who shared a cell with him noted down his reaction. On November 16, 1929, after returning from interrogation, Iefremov mentioned Hrushevsky :
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“Even though he is a great figure in society, he also has a petty character, he is an intriguer, he always leans to the side of the strong (he joined the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries in the summer of 1917 because it was the leading one), envious, ambitious, and especially a lover of money and greedy for gain [...]. The struggle was expedient to those who thought to challenge me and other undesirable elements in the Academy. It [the struggle], being masterfully inflated and elaborated (sic), also led conclusively to this grandiose and senseless affair and to the destruction of the Academy. I told Hrushevsky when this affair was cooked up that not only will I suffer but also the Academy and he himself, since in the final reckoning they will also seize him. He was shaken up by what had happened and helplessly excused himself that he had not expected that this could happen.”31
46 Documents dating to 1930-1931 reflect the Chekists’ desire to learn every detail of Hrushevsky’s future plans and intentions, all the more so since the first arrests in connection with the “Ukrainian National Center” (Ukrainskyi Natsional´nyi Tsentr -- UNTs) were taking place at this time. One of the key names in the protocols of interrogations of the arrested individuals was that of the academician.32
47 On September 5, 1930, when Hrushevsky was vacationing in Kislovodsk, a notification arrived from the official in charge of Ukrnauka (Ukrainian Department of Scholarly Development) in Kyiv about the liquidation, as of September 15, of the Scientific- Research Chair of History of Ukraine. In the 1930s practically all its coworkers would be physically or morally annihilated.33 In January 1931, a Historical cycle headed by new directors was created in place of the Historical Section of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences that had been headed by Hrushevsky.
48 In March 1931, Hrushevsky left for Moscow on a scholarly mission. Surveillance of his movements, particularly after the failed attempt of the Kharkiv Chekists “to make” him into a leader of the UNTs, would continue there. On December 23, 1933, a new (!) dossier would be opened on him as an individual with links to “anti-Soviet elements.”34 These documents were included in vol. 9 of the dossier and for a long period of time were stored in Moscow. On February 10, 1965, this volume, bearing the inscription “To be preserved forever,” was transferred from the Central KGB Archive to the 1st Directorate of the Ukrainian KGB as “materials of an archival case of the operative register no. 262 on M. Hrushevsky.”35 The volume contains documents about Hrushevsky’s residence in Moscow during 1931-1934, as well as documents from Kislovodsk where the academician died while on vacation in November 1934.
49 The newly uncovered volume contains documents on the daily surveillance of the scholar. According to these Chekist documents, Hrushevsky became the leader of the “Ukrainian counter-revolution” in Moscow, but for some reason he is “listed” as a member of the “Russian National Party.” At this time a new attack on the academician was being launched in Ukraine. However, the “leaders” of Ukraine did not obtain permission for Hrushevsky’s dismissal from the academy. Today it is difficult to say why things happened this way, but permission was not granted for this. Neither did the authorities touch the academician in Moscow, although “compromising material” against him was accumulating literally by the hour. In May 1934, the acting head of the Secret-Political Division of the Ukrainian GPU B. Kozelsky sent an announcement to the head of the Secret-Political Directorate of the OGPU of the USSR G. Molchanov concerning a conversation that took place between a secret informer and Viktor Petrovsky, the editor of the military publishing house “Na varti.” During this conversation it was revealed that Hrushevsky was intending to flee to Finland by taking advantage of a scholarly mission to Leningrad.36 The Moscow authorities took a serious
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interest in this report and on May 19, 1934, Molchanov requested Kozelsky to send all the documents about the academician’s possible flight abroad.37 At the same time Molchanov sent the following memorandum to Gorin, the permanent representative of the OGPU of the Leningrad military okrug: “According to existing data, academician Hrushevsky Mykhailo Serhiiovych, who is living in Moscow, is preparing to flee abroad in the very near future. In Leningrad a plan for crossing the border illegally has been drawn up. Carry out measures for a detailed investigation of Hrushevsky’s connections. In the event of his arrival in Leningrad, take him under external surveillance and monitoring. Hrushevsky is subject to arrest only in the area of the border during an attempt to cross it. During the monitoring process, report with ;Special Communication ; [VCh : vysoka chastota] no. 9272. Molchanov, 19 May 1934.”38
50 The statements of two secret informers named “Zero” and “Andreev” were sent to Moscow. They recounted their meetings and conversations with Viktor Petrovsky and a former member of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries Olha Kovalevska. Here is what “Andreev” reported in particular : “Kovalevska asked me what I had heard about Mykhailo Serhiiovych Hrushevsky. I replied that I had not heard anything in particular and in turn asked what it was about. Kovalevska replied that something is being prepared for Mykhailo Serhiiovych and that he should soon be across the border. Kovalevska avoided giving direct answers to my detailed questioning, declaring that today she will be in a house where she will obtain more detailed information about this.”39
51 Of course, Viktor Petrovsky and Olha Kovalevska were put under close surveillance, but to no avail. In June the Chekists were interested to know whether Kateryna Hrushevska had gone to Leningrad, but they did not find her there. At that time there was only one Kateryna Hrushevska in all of Leningrad, but her patronymic was not Mykhailivna but Matviivna, and she worked as a statistician for Leningrad Tramway.40
52 In the meantime, the Chekists were maintaining surveillance of those individuals with whom the academician was in contact. However, even during this time they still did not touch Hrushevsky. Moreover, he was offered the possibility to leave on vacation. On September 6, the academician left Moscow and on September 9, 1934, he arrived with his wife and daughter at Mineralni Vody station from where he journeyed to Kislovodsk. From this very moment he was put under surveillance.
53 Prior to this, on August 17, 1934, the deputy head of the Secret-Political Directorate of the Main Administration of State Security (GUGB) of the NKVD of the USSR, G. Liushkov, sent the following telegram to Lavrushin, the chief of the NKVD in the North Caucasus region : “Hrushevsky has maintained his leading position among Ukrainian nationalist cadres to this very moment. We are actively monitoring him according to the ;Starets ; (Old Man) case that has recovered secret informer data about the preparation for Hrushevsky’s flight abroad. We do not exclude the possibility that Hrushevsky’s trip to Kislovodsk will be used for meetings with the organizers of the escape and possibly for its practical realization. The prevention of Hrushevsky’s escape has exceptional political significance. We propose : 1. To dispatch an experienced operative worker to Kislovodsk for the organization of secret monitoring of Hrushevsky in Kislovodsk ; 2. To ensure the secret inspection of his entire correspondence ;
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3. To ensure constant surveillance of him through intelligence and secret service actions. In the event of his departure, he is to be tailed ; 4. To ensure the exposure and verification of Hrushevsky’s contacts in Kislovodsk and particularly of those individuals who come to his home to meet with him ; 5. Inform us about the progress of Hrushevsky’s monitoring by special notification every five days. We are tailing Hrushevsky.”41
54 Mykhailo Hrushevsky died on November 24, 1934. His death took place at 2:00 p.m. in O. Rykov Municipal Hospital of Kislovodsk where he had been admitted to Ward no. 2 on November 13, 1934, with a diagnosis of “malignant spinal carbuncle -- sepsis.”42 The dossier contains a copy of the academician’s complete medical history file no. 1364.43 On November 26, the body of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, accompanied by Maria Sylvestrivna and Kateryna Mykhailivna, was dispatched by train no. 15, which arrived in Kyiv on November 28, at 3:00 p.m., after a two-hour delay. At the train station the deceased was met by the members of a government commission appointed to organize his funeral. The delegation was headed by Vasyl Poraiko, several scholars- academicians, and relatives. The body was brought to the Academy of Sciences where viewing took place from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. and on the following day, i.e., November 29, from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. The funeral took place the next day at Baikove Cemetery.
55 The NKVD continued to keep an eye on all these sorrowful events and to send informative telegrams to Moscow addressed to V. Balytsky, Ia. Agranov, and K. Pauker. 44 In my opinion, the fact that this information reached the latter, who was the head of Stalin’s personal guard, proves the continued interest of the “leader of nations” in the fate of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, even at this stage of events.
56 The funeral proceedings were also of interest to the Chekists. One document notes that everything took place calmly and that 600 people accompanied the scholar on his final journey, of which 400 were present at the cemetery.45 In a document signed by B. Kozelsky, the head of the Secret-Political Directorate of the Administration of State Security of the Ukrainian NKVD, we read : “The conveyance of the body from the Academy, the procession to the cemetery, and the funeral took place calmly.”46
57 Special reports on the reactions to Hrushevsky’s death have also been preserved. The Chekists carefully analyzed information about who said what in connection with this sorrowful event. It is interesting to note that immediately after the scholar’s death rumors of his violent death began to circulate. This was stated in particular in a special report : “Anti-Soviet nationalistic circles are attempting to interpret the death of academician Hrushevsky M. S. as an act of violence. In the Institute of Chemical Technology of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences a small group of scholars, discussing the first announcement in the press, indicated that Hrushevsky had in fact been poisoned.”47
Secretly inspected correspondence
58 It is well known that the secret inspection of correspondence was always one of the most important channels by which the Chekists obtained essential information. The case of Mykhailo Hrushevsky was no exception. Practically his entire correspondence, including personal letters, underwent secret inspection. Quite a few letters, or more accurately, memoranda of letters, were added to special reports.
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59 The dossier contains copies and letters of those individuals who believed that Hrushevsky had betrayed the interests of the struggle for Ukraine’s independence after his return from emigration. The Chekists constantly monitored the arrival of such correspondence and analyzed it. A copy of a letter written by readers of the Lviv newspaper Dilo (Action) (this was in fact a letter from the Foreign Committee of the UPSR), which was given to Hrushevsky in Vienna prior to his departure to the Ukrainian SSR, has been preserved.48
60 The copy of this letter bears the following inscription written by the chief of the Counter-Intelligence Division of the Ukrainian GPU Iukhym Kryvets : “Hrushevsky obtained this letter from the Foreign Committee of the UPSR back in January in Vienna and then gave them a reply. Today this letter is being forwarded to Kyiv not for transmission to Hrushevsky, but definitely for circulation within Ukrainian society with the goal of compromising Hrushevsky.”49
61 Quite often Hrushevsky would receive letters of this nature, including criticisms. Thus, in January 1927 he was sent a letter by a person masquerading under the pseudonym “Skryvdzhenyi” (Injured). The letter contained an appeal for the academician’s help in the defense of former emigrants who had returned to the Ukrainian SSR and been officially amnestied. In fact, they had been registered with the GPU as harmful elements, and the 1926 Ukrainian SSR constitution deprived them of their civil rights. In connection with this letter the head of the Secret Department of the Ukrainian GPU, Valerii Horozhanyn, passed the following resolution : “To Comrade Kozelsky. This letter was delivered to the addressee in vain, it could have been easily held back. Tell this to Kyiv. 15.01.”50 Kozelsky had probably already prepared a reply to Kyiv, which he signed together with Horozhanyn. It stated : “It was not necessary to allow ;Skryvdzhenyi’s ; anonymous document to be forwarded to Hrushevsky’s address. Such documents provide Hrushevsky with undesirable arguments against us, even if they are groundless. In the future let the leadership take this under consideration.”51
62 Occasionally they did confiscate letters. For example, in February 1931 the Chekists intercepted a letter that never reached the academician. This was an anonymous letter dated February 12. Its author wrote : “I read with admiration the item in the newspaper of February 11, this year about your protest and that of other respected scholarly workers at the opening session of VUAN against the terror in Western Ukraine. The Academy’s action is a good matter, but one thing is confusing : why is the Academy, in rising to the defense of our ;western brothers, ; forgetting about the ;eastern ; ones ? Is it not because our newspapers are writing a lot about the terror in Poland, while remaining silent about the terror in our part of Ukraine ? Is it possible that you, respected fathers of scholarship, are unaware of the facts about the terror in our country ? Have the tens and hundreds of thousands of people who have been deported and expelled from their native places during the past year alone passed unnoticed by you ? Have you not heard how in the dark nights our Ukrainian peasants were chased from their pathetic buildings dressed only in what the ;dekulakizers ; found them ? [...] And the system of taxes on the peasants and the methods of their acquisition -- is this not the same kind of terror or simply legalized robbery ? Respected ;academicians, ; peer into our jails, see those who often fill them. And when our investigators interrogate [...] they often interrogate a completely innocent victim for three hours or more a day without a break, bringing people to madness, suicide [...] And is this not terror ?”52
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63 Let us turn to another example that clearly illustrates Chekist work practices with letters addressed to Hrushevsky. In February 1929, information (prepared in the Ukrainian language, which clearly exemplifies how the GPU was being “Ukrainianized”) was sent from the GPU division of Odessa okrug to the same division in Kyiv. This information, entitled “About citizen Sokolenko with a forwarded document,” bears an interesting signature stamp : “With this the GPU division of Odessa okrug is sending you a recommended document from citizen Sokolenko S. O. addressed to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences for academician Hrushevsky. Sokolenko, from whom the document originates, appears in our materials as a Ukrainian nationalist who argues in his works in support of the idea of a dictatorship of the peasantry, but according to information that we have at our disposal, he is not quite normal. If you forward this document to the addressee, academician Hrushevsky, there is a request : 1) affix the proper seal at the Kyiv post office ; 2) expose the connection between academician Hrushevsky and Sokolenko and his works that are being sent with this document under no. 181. If you consider it unproductive to send the document to Hrushevsky, then we request that you return it to us.”53
64 Hrushevsky’s business correspondence and his letters to the current party-state or academic leadership were also subjected to secret inspection. For example, he prepared a letter addressed to the Head of the Ukrainian Council of Peoples’ Commissars, Vlas Chubar. In it he refuted the latest accusations that he had not recognized Soviet rule. Hrushevsky took umbrage at Chubar’s statement that he was paying attention to “a little heap of emigrants” and not working. In his letter he also explained how difficult it was for him to work “under conditions of technical, financial, and censorship obstacles.”54 This rather lengthy letter was read carefully by someone in the GPU leadership, who added underlinings and question marks. For example, a question mark was added in the margin beside where Hrushevsky wrote : “My position -- I consider that the Soviet government is continuing the work that I was doing with my fellow-thinkers in the Central Rada and that a free Ukrainian literature was carrying out at one time -- that it is building socialist Ukrainian statehood, a national worker-peasant culture. In my position I am helping this [...].” 55
65 Thanks to the secret inspection of his correspondence, the Chekists were able to pursue one of their favorite subjects : Hrushevsky’s material interests abroad. This story began when two secret informers of the Kyiv GPU, “Belyi” and “Akademik,” reported that in the VUAN offices they accidentally saw an opened letter. It was addressed to the “Academy of Sciences, to the President.” A bank in Geneva was informing Hrushevsky about some kinds of changes to his account. This letter was given to the academician, and the Chekists never got their hands on it. However, within a brief period of time they were secretly inspecting a letter to Hrushevsky written in French by a Swiss bank, informing him that in keeping with his request the bank would be responsible for the care of his daughter Kateryna Mykhailivna.56 Perhaps this sparked suspicions that Hrushevsky was intending to leave Ukraine at some point and go abroad.
66 The Chekists also showed an interest in those individuals who expressed support in their letters for the academician. As a rule, these letters were accompanied by instructions to place the letter writers under GPU registration.
67 The Chekists were also interested in letters that were not directly addressed to Hrushevsky, but contained references to him or his family and milieu. For example, in January 1928 M. Zhukovska sent such a letter to Mykola Chechel in Kharkiv. In
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connection with this the following instruction was sent from the Secret Department of the Ukrainian GPU to the Kyiv GPU: “Forwarding with this a copy of a letter to Chechel M. F., whom we have on our surveillance register of Ukrainian citizens, we request that a secret inspection of Zhukovska’s correspondence be initiated in order to keep track of Chechel’s reply.”57
68 It is interesting to note that in 1924, when Hrushevsky was first taken under surveillance as an untrustworthy individual, a registration card listing him as a member of the UPSR (although he had officially left the party) was created in the Counter-Intelligence Division of the Kyiv GPU department. Point 14 on this card states the following : “Active or not (how is the activity manifested ?).” On the signature stamp someone in the GPU wrote the following : “Maintains links by correspondence with foreign countries and in the USSR mainly with [indecipherable] the scholarly world.”58
69 Of course, all the academician’s foreign correspondence was also secretly inspected. For example, in August 1927 he received a letter from Iurii Siryi from Prague. The letter included the text of a speech presented on October 17, 1926, at a meeting of the Kuban communities in the city of Podebrady near Prague. The speech is entitled “Academician M. S. Hrushevsky as an organizer of cultural and scholarly work in Ukraine.” The notations on the text of the speech attest to the fact that it was read by the GPU.59
70 In November 1928, Hrushevsky received a letter from Volodymyr Vynnychenko, which was, of course, duly noted. In his letter Vynnychenko requested help in locating materials for a novel about the age of Khmelnytsky. His letter, Hrushevsky’s reply, and Vynnychenko’s thanks for the consultation were all attached to the dossier.60
71 Finally, a significant portion of the inspected correspondence consists of letters written by Hrushevsky’s adversaries. It was from these very letters that the GPU agents extracted information about those individuals who were preparing to act against the academician and in what manner, and about those individuals that were judging his conduct and their opinions of the scholar. In the first place, this allowed the political police to formulate a strategy of action vis-à-vis the scholar and to deepen the schism within the Ukrainian intelligentsia.
72 This group of letters clearly reflects the dramatic nature and absurdity of the struggle and resistance into which distinguished Ukrainian scholars were being dragged. These letters attest to the fact that not everyone had sufficient wisdom to judge him as Mykola Vasylenko did in a letter (secretly inspected, of course) written to Mykhailo Slabchenko in May 1927: “The collection of articles in honor of M. S. Hrushevsky is not his personal affair ; in my opinion, this is a phenomenon of a social order. M. S. Hrushevsky is such an eminent and important figure in the development of Ukrainian historical scholarship that he has created an entire epoch. No matter how one considers him as a private individual or social activist, his methods of struggle, etc., no one can repudiate those immense services to scholarship that he has to his credit. When the question of honoring these services is broached, one cannot deny this. Here one must forget about personal relations. They have no significance before the fact that is being honored.”61
73 In the meantime a large number of letters reflecting the opposite approach to Hrushevsky have been preserved in the dossier. Thus, on September 15, 1926, the Kyiv Chekists sent the following letter to their Kharkiv bosses :
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“At the same time we are forwarding a copy of a document, the author of which is citizen Mohyliansky Mykhailo, who at the present time is residing in the city of Chernihiv. In the document he writes to academician Iefremov about his mission to Leningrad ; among other things he adds that it will be undesirable for him to be in Kyiv when ;the explosion of obligatory and voluntary foul language of the jubilee ; will take place. It is obvious that Mohyliansky is talking about Hrushevsky’s jubilee.”62
74 Indeed, this is exactly how Mohyliansky expressed himself in his letter. Among other things, he was renowned for the fact that in the first issue of the literary journal Chervonyi shliakh (The Red Path) in 1926, he had published a short story entitled “Vbystvo” (The Murder) about three activists who carry out a political assassination. These men destroy their leader for betraying the national cause. Every person who read this “short story-dream” understood that the author had Hrushevsky in mind when he wrote about the leader-turned-traitor. In his correspondence Mohyliansky expressed himself about the scholar without any euphemisms. He was not the only one to do so.
Denunciations
75 The dossier contains several documents belonging to another favorite genre of the Chekists. These are declarations that were written voluntarily or at the request of agents of the Bolshevik political police by various individuals about the scholarly and organizational activity of Mykhailo Hrushevsky. They were written and transmitted not only to the GPU-NKVD but also to other departments.
76 For example, one of the first declarations of this kind is dated November 1926. It was written by a graduate student in Hrushevsky’s department, not to the GPU but to Ukrholovnauka (the Ukrainian Main Department of Scholarly Development). However, after becoming acquainted with its contents, the current deputy Peoples’ Commissar of Education of Ukraine Ia. Riapno sent it “to the attention,” as he wrote, of the deputy head of the GPU, Karl Karlson.63
77 Precisely what was “incriminating” to the academician in this letter ? First of all, he declared that Hrushevsky does not care about the “proletarization of the department,” since he is filling it with “right-wing elements hostile to the proletarian cause.”64 Then he criticized Ukrholovnauka for having drawn up a statute according to which graduate students do not enjoy the right to have a decisive voice in the admission of new graduate students, and that this “permits the directors to bring into the department not only people who are hostile to us, but also inept scholars.”65 Naturally, this is followed by concrete examples. First of all, the author of the declaration protests against the acceptance into the graduate program of I. Mandziuk, who is a “a hetmanite according to his views.”66 Then he lists the names of those who, in his opinion, are worthy of being transferred from the status of candidate-graduate student to graduate student. Their status “until this time has not been changed to that of graduate students only because these comrades are ideologically entirely ours.”67 Such graduate students were judged in the declaration as being “neither fish, nor meat.” The following conclusion concerning them is reached : “In general, the department cares more about those who are more hostile toward us.”68 Finally, the author of the declaration promised : “I will provide the final supplementary materials later.”69
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78 The Chekists reacted to “signals” of this kind particularly actively since at the beginning of his declaration the author emphasized that he is not simply a graduate student but a member of the Communist party. A much more serious “signal” can be found in a declaration to the Ukrainian GPU written in January 1927 by another graduate student and party member, this one from Kharkiv. Here very serious accusations are leveled at Hrushevsky : “I consider it essential to bring the following to the knowledge of the Political Directorate : As a graduate student of the Kharkiv Scientific-Research Department, I have occasion to meet with workers of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and be somewhat aware of the work of various sections of the Academy, mainly the Historical Section headed by M. Hrushevsky. The selection of workers and the organization of scholarly work (by regions) elicited my suspicion concerning the existence of a political organization hostile to us, under the screen of the Historical Section [...]. That from the very time of his arrival in Kyiv M. Hrushevsky is surrounding himself with active ;fellows ; from the Ukrainian counter-revolution (he is very fond of the Socialist Revolutionaries Ivanets, Hlushko, Savchenko, although occasionally he also uses such monarchists with cadet leanings as academician Vasylenko). I am speaking here only of those people whom I personally know as having been ;active workers ; in the past. If the Political Directorate inspects the others Hrushevsky has organized here, then very likely even more interesting facts will become clear. The fact that this entire group has not changed its convictions and has not become Soviet at all may be judged by Hrushevsky, who to this very time has not declared his relationship with Soviet power, as well as by the tone (the acme of apoliticalness) of the journal Ukraina [...]. This is the ;leadership, ; its center is in Kyiv. Do they have contact with each other ? According to Levchenko, this entire company (besides the named individuals, there are six more people whose names Levchenko did not mention) almost on a regular basis, twice a month, gathers for a ;drinking bout ; in the Academy building, in the editorial offices of the journal Ukraina. The selection of participants is stable and very punctilious. Most probably this is the group’s ;plenum ; [...]. This is how the center is organized. The periphery. Hrushevsky has established the study of Ukraine ;by regions ;: the Right-Bank, the Left-Bank, Western Ukraine, Volhynia, Steppe Ukraine, and the Chernihiv region. Hrushevsky ;himself ; chairs the majority of the regional commissions, and for the most part the leaders are from among ;his ; people (Western Ukraine -- Savchenko ; Archeographic -- Ivanets ; Ancient Kyiv -- Shcherbyna, etc.) The main one is probably the commission for Western Ukraine (the office is linked with countries abroad), in which sit two diehards like Fedir Savchenko (Hrushevsky’s right-hand man) and Semen Hlushko (his left-hand man, as it would appear). All these commissions have correspondents in place in their regions. There is information about only two of these correspondents in the Academy : Vasyl H. Kravchenko (Zhytomyr) and V. K. Luhovsky (Chernihiv). They are probably the most respectable, whose inclusion in the list would not be an embarrassment. The remaining correspondents are known only by the commissions that are in contact with them and which issue instructions. What kind of selection this is may be judged by the group of ;leaderships. ; A close link with foreign countries is maintained through the commission for Western Ukraine. Every month between 200 and 400 dollars are sent to Studynsky’s address, for what purpose it is not particularly clear. This entire group bestirred itself especially during the opposition’s action [...]. No less characteristic is the selection of graduate students in Hrushevsky’s department. This year a certain Mandziuk (an autocephalist and Petliurite whom I
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know from the Institute) put in his application. Hrushevsky was forcing him through by all possible means. And only the open protest of the Soviet group of graduate students headed by the party member Kaminsky, a promise to lodge a protest against him with Glavnauka [All-Union Main Department of Scholarly Development] temporarily cooled Hrushevsky down, but like before, he is spinning around here and will be unconditionally stuck onto one of the commissions. All the enumerated facts speak unconditionally about the existence under Hrushevsky’s wing of an organization that is inimical to us, in the meantime perhaps not particularly active but capable of bringing out a ;cabinet of ministers ; at the necessary moment [author’s emphasis], as the Academy has done in the past. For this reason it is now necessary to pay particular attention in order to expose this group.”70
79 After reading this document, one can understand the source of the GPU workers’ acute interest in the regional commissions that were created by Hrushevsky, which -- under the pen of the excessively diligent graduate student -- appeared to be centers of discord on the periphery.
80 Finally, there is a declaration dated December 27, 1930, several months before Hrushevsky’s arrest. At this time arrests were taking place, as well as interrogations of those who had already been accused of membership in an underground organization that was headed by him. It was structured to suit the accusation of “anti-Soviet activity” that the Chekists were constructing against the scholar and his milieu. First of all, the author of the declaration notes that once he and other graduate students managed to enter the department, “in fact we fell into a fascist state that existed within the Soviet state -- even our terminology terrified the Hrushevskyites (in connection with which several incidents took place).”71
81 Emphasizing that the “entire actively hostile element of Soviet Ukraine from all corners of the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR” was being selected for the department, the author of the declaration named those “counter-revolutionaries” who had been handpicked by Hrushevsky. Here is an example of his characterizations : “The leading center of the department is M. S. Hrushevsky, O. S. Hrushevsky, a great fool and the brother of the great historian, is no less an enemy of the proletariat, Shcherbyna, V. I., some sort of uncle of Hrushevsky, a liberal with cadet leanings, Hermaize, I. Iu., a fascist, Savchenko, Fedir Ia., Hrushevsky’s personal secretary, the former head of the national union of the Ukrainian emigration in Prague (the facts have not been confirmed). Incidentally, Savchenko is the former friend and Institute colleague of Ozersky, the former head of Ukrnauka. Through the agency of this Savchenko, who is extremely perspicacious and clever, Hrushevska K. M., the daughter of M. S. Hrushevsky, a true seed of her roots, is attempting to shore up the shaky ground beneath her feet ; in her works she has taken upon herself the honorable role of fascism in order ;to revise the views of Engels. ; And finally the most decent person is Klymenko P. V., who was sent from Kharkiv. He is a former Social Democrat ; owing to his principled conflict with the entire brotherhood of Hrushevsky’s fatherland he has now been dismissed from all paying jobs in Hrushevsky’s institutions.”
82 This is followed by a list of names of the scholarly collaborators and graduate students in the department.72
83 It is completely understandable that this kind of description and generally this type of document could be exploited (and was exploited) in the fabrication of accusations against Mykhailo Hrushevsky and his milieu. Indeed, all the individuals named in the denunciations were subjected to repressions in one form or another.
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Brief conclusions
84 At one time Oleksander Ohloblyn made venomously biting remarks about those who asserted that Hrushevsky had returned to Ukraine on directives from the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries with the aim of conducting “underground work” that was to be crowned by a revolt against the Bolsheviks. In Ohloblyn’s opinion, “this historical fantasy can only elicit amazement and smiles from those who were more knowledgeable about Soviet conditions in those days, relations among the emigrés, and, ultimately, his [Hrushevsky’s] character [...]. There was nothing unusual in the fact that in the 1930s similar accusations against Hrushevsky were leveled by the NKVD and the Communist party, who needed formal grounds for his liquidation.”73 An analysis of the documents contained in Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s dossier serves as convincing confirmation of the words of Oleksander Ohloblyn, who, in fact, did not sympathize with the academician in the 1920s and 1930s.
85 The dossier of Mykhailo Hrushevsky may also serve as a good example for researching the ways in which the GPU-NKVD extracted information and the mechanisms that lay at the heart of this activity. At the same time, this case also demonstrates the crucial need for scholars to utilize not secondary but primary documented sources, most of which, unfortunately, are still inaccessible to researchers of Communist totalitarianism.
86 (Translated from the Ukrainian by Marta D. Olynyk with the financial support of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute)
87 National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
88 Institute for Political and Ethnic Studies
89 Kyiv-11
90 Kutuzov st. 8
91 e-mail : [email protected]
NOTES
1. Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Sluzhby Bezpeky Ukrainy, Kyiv (hereafter DA SBU), dossier on M. Hrushevsky , vol. 1, fol. 69. 2. For more information see : Volodymyr Prystaiko and Iurii Shapoval, Mykhailo Hrushevsky i GPU-NKVD. Trahichne desiatylittia : 1924-1934 (Kyiv, 1996): 19-34. 3. DA SBU, dossier on M. Hrushevsky , vol. 4, fol. 9. 4. See : O. Iurkova, Diialnist Naukovo-doslidnoi kafedry istorii Ukrainy M. S. Hrushevskoho. 1924-1930 (Kyiv, 1999): 262. 5. DA SBU, dossier on M. Hrushevsky, , vol. 3, fol. 152.
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6. Ibid., vol. 1, fol. 100. 7. Ibid., vol. 4, fols. 93-94. 8. Ibid., fol. 94. 9. Ibid. 10. Cited in V. Prystaiko and Iu. Shapoval, op. cit.: 131. 11. Ibid.: 134. 12. DA SBU, dossier on M. Hrushevsky, , vol. 4, fol. 277. 13. Ibid., vol. 3, fol. 170. 14. Ibid., vol. 4, fol. 11. 15. Ibid., fol. 13. 16. Ibid., fols. 100-101. 17. Ibid., fol. 106. 18. Ibid., fol. 197. 19. Ibid., fol. 217. 20. Ibid., fol. 392. 21. Ibid., fol. 460. 22. Ibid., fol. 480. 23. Ibid., vol. 3, fol. 244. 24. Ibid., fol. 307. 25. Ibid., vol. 4, fol. 466. 26. Ibid., fol. 493. 27. Ibid., fols. 494-495. 28. Cited in V. Prystaiko and Iu. Shapoval, op. cit.: 78. 29. DA SBU, dossier on M. Hrushevsky , vol. 4, fols. 496-497. 30. Ibid., fols. 501-502. 31. Ibid., vol. 5, fol. 314. 32. For more detailed information, see Volodymyr Prystaiko and Iurii Shapoval, Mykhailo Hrushevsky: sprava “UNTs” i ostanni roky (1931-1934) (Kyiv, 1999). 33. For more detailed information, see O. Iurkova, op. cit.: 207-265. 34. V. Prystaiko and Iu. Shapoval, Mykhailo Hrushevsky : sprava “UNTs,” op. cit.: 103. 35. DA SBU, case , fol. 368. 36. Ibid., fol. 240. 37. Ibid., fol. 243. 38. Ibid., fol. 244. 39. Ibid., fol. 248. 40. Ibid., fol. 258. 41. Ibid., fols. 262-263. 42. Ibid., fol. 310. 43. For more detailed information, see V. Prystaiko and Iu. Shapoval, Mykhailo Hrushevsky : sprava “UNTs,” op. cit.: 107-110.
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44. DA SBU, case no. 11130, fols. 313-314. 45. Ibid., fol. 322. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., fol. 316. 48. DA SBU, dossier on M. Hrushevsky , vol. 4, fol. 18. 49. Ibid. 50. Cited in V. Prystaiko and Iu. Shapoval, Mykhailo Hrushevsky i GPU-NKVD, op. cit.: 174. 51. DA SBU, dossier on M. Hrushevsky no. 7537, vol. 5, fol. 349. 52. Ibid. A letter to M. Hrushevsky dated February 12, 1931, fols. 1-3. 53. Ibid., fol. 193. 54. Ibid., vol. 4, fols. 96-99. 55. Ibid., fol. 98. 56. Ibid., fols. 417, 420. 57. Ibid., vol. 3, fol. 52. 58. Ibid., vol. 4, fol. 45. 59. Ibid., fols. 428-434. 60. See V. Prystaiko and Iu. Shapoval, Mykhailo Hrushevsky i GPU-NKVD, op. cit.: 221-223. 61. DA SBU, dossier on M. Hrushevsky no. 7537, vol. 4, fol. 461. 62. Ibid., fol. 74. 63. Ibid., fol. 319. 64. Ibid., fol. 320. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., fol. 321. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., vol. 2, fols. 312-313. 71. Ibid., fol. 5, fol. 524. 72. Ibid. 73. Oleksander Ohloblyn, “Mykhailo Hrushevsky na tli doby : dumky pro tretiu i ostanniu dobu istoryka (1924-1934),” Ukrainskyi istoryk , 1-4 (1996): 81.
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RÉSUMÉS
Résumé Les rouages de l’activité de surveillance des GPU-NKVD. Le dossier de Myhailo Hruševsky. Notre article analyse les documents uniques des GPU-NKVD contenus dans le dossier de surveillance du célèbre historien et homme politique ukrainien Myhailo Hruševsky. Celui-ci fit l’objet de filatures permanentes -- à son retour dans l’Ukraine communiste au printemps 1924, après son départ forcé pour la Russie au printemps 1931 et jusquà sa mort en novembre 1934. Les documents et matériaux qui témoignent de cette filature nous permettent non seulement de reconstruire pour la première fois plusieurs pages de la biographie du chercheur, mais de faire également la lumière sur les rouages des structures des GPU-NKVD qui ont accompli cette surveillance. Nous décrivons en détail toutes les étapes de la collecte des renseignements et leurs sources, leur étude par les structures tchékistes et l’usage qu’elles en faisaient, et nous évoquons les relations de ces structures avec les organes étatiques du parti. C’est la première fois dans l’historiographie contemporaine que l’on traite scientifiquement un dossier d’archive de ce type.
Abstract Our article analyzes unique GPU-NKVD documents from the surveillance file of Mykhailo Hrushevsky. The famous Ukrainian historian and political figure was subjected to constant surveillance -- after his return from emigration to communist Ukraine in spring 1924, his forced departure to Russia in spring 1931, and until his death in November 1934. The documents and materials which reflect this surveillance allow us not only to reconstruct many pages of the scholar’s biography for the first time, but also to have a clearer view of the mechanisms of the GPU-NKVD structures which carried out this surveillance. We give a detailed description of the stages undergone by the collection of information, of its sources, and of its analysis and use by Chekist structures, and we touch upon relations between these structures and the party’s state organs. Our article is the first attempt in contemporary historiography at a scientific study of an archive file of this type.
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The role and place of secret collaborators in the informational activity of the gpu-nkvd in the 1920s and 1930s (on the basis of materials of the Donbass region)
Volodymyr SEMYSTIAHA
1 A system of secret informers serves, without exception, as the eyes and ears of any secret police in any state. Different secret police share many common features. At the same time, certain traits are distinct and germane to a particular state. They depend on the particular characteristics of the secret police itself, on the environment in which it works, on its methods of secret surveillance, on the surrounding political institutions and on the authorities whose orders are being carried out. The organs of the Ukrainian GPU-NKVD are no exception to this general rule. The most characteristic feature of the activity of secret informers was, first and foremost, devotion to the principles of the Bolshevik Party.
2 The topic of secret informers is not only a novel one, but also a topic with a moral and ethical dimension. In keeping with resolution 206, passed by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine on April 1, 1994, the documents of the GPU-NKVD are currently preserved in the State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrainy - SBU). In contrast to the former Soviet Baltic republics, in Ukraine information on “operative- investigative activities” of the state security organs, as well as on individuals who are collaborating or have collaborated with these organs in the past, has been legislatively designated as a state secret. This is the main reason why the topic has not been adequately studied in Ukrainian historiography. In addition, the study of this data represents certain difficulties for the researcher. On the one hand, there is a rather limited base of source materials. On the other hand, there has been extensive study of this topic by experts within the state security organs, but these remain classified and designated exclusively for internal bureaucratic use within the security services themselves.
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3 Nevertheless, after the proclamation of Ukrainian independence, memoirs and scholarly studies have appeared in Ukraine, which examine the activity of secret agents and the broader surveillance work of the GPU-NKVD during the 1920s and 1930s.1 The memoirs of the jurist L. O. Okynshevych describe the methods used by the GPU-NKVD for the recruitment of the secret service and the possible repercussions of refusing to be a secret informer.2 In examining the formation and functioning of the administrative-information system, Serhii Bilokin quite plausibly argued that the great majority of Chekists during the 1920s and 1930s began their careers as secret informers when they were youths between the ages of 15 and 17, and that such collaboration had a thoroughly negative influence on these individuals.3 Nevertheless, on the whole, this problem has not received adequate attention. This is especially true of the Donbass region. Published memoirs provide a few rare glimpses of secret informer activity. For instance, V. Halytsky, who suffered political repression in the Donbass in the late 1930s, recounted the forms and methods of secret informers in the NKVD prison torture chambers in Kamianets-Podilsky, Luhanske, and Artemivske.4 The research proposed here, however, is the first of its kind. It is based on documents of the All-Ukrainian ChK-GPU-NKVD, the militia, the procuracy, and the Communist Party that are preserved in the state and party archives of Donetsk and Luhanske oblasti.
4 From the first days of its existence, the Cheka began to put in place a network of secret informers, which gradually came to encompass all strata of society without exception. In the Donbass region, owing to its occupation by the Austro-Germans and later the White armies, this work was temporarily interrupted. It was resumed only after the retreat of Denikin’s armies in 1919 and the creation of Donetsk guberniia with its center in Luhanske, which was later transferred to Bakhmut (now Artemivske). Archival documents demonstrate that information about the political and economic situation throughout the entire Donbass territory, including the mood among the various strata of the population, was gathered and elaborated in great detail in each okrug department of the GPU. This information was then transmitted to the guberniia center and finally on to the registrational-informational administration of the central Ukrainian GPU in Kharkiv. Only from there did it land on the desks of the higher state- political leadership. From the first days of the creation of these GPU information departments, local party organs actively assisted in the gathering and transmission of information to the organs of the GPU-NKVD. For example, on October 30, 1923, the Donetsk guberniia party committee issued a circular stating that without the “support of party organizations, it will not be possible to establish the informational work of the GPU on their efforts alone.” The circular demanded that all local party organizations issue appropriate directives obliging “responsible party workers to provide the organs of the GPU, through the okrug party secretaries, with information concerning questions of interest to the organs of the GPU on the emergence of various counter- revolutionary groups, the conduct of anti-Soviet individuals, changes in mood among the masses of workers and peasants, which are revealed by party centers during the process of their work.”5 Incidentally, in a number of circulars issued in 1923, the guberniia party committee enjoined party members not to interpret such collaboration with the GPU as “gendarmes’ work.”6
5 This necessity of party help to the GPU can be explained by the poor financial situation of the GPU, particularly after the introduction of the New Economic Policy. In 1923, central financing was almost entirely cut off and the local GPU survived exclusively
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thanks to financing by the local authorities. Until September 1, 1923, the salary of GPU workers was three to four times lower than that of people working in other government institutions.7 Food rations and material help were given out irregularly and below the established norms, and therefore could not compensate for the inadequate salaries.8 It is certain that in such conditions the small GPU apparatus could not independently conduct informational work at an adequate level. By the end of 1923, there were 30,000 party members in Donetsk guberniia. They were most often “up to date on all matters” that were within the scope of their activity. In addition, they possessed a widespread network of party informants.
6 It should be stressed that such collaboration in the informational sphere among party organs and organs of the GPU-NKVD is very characteristic of the 1920s and 1930s. Despite the fact that at times informational materials of party informants were subjective, unconfirmed, and occasionally used for settling personal scores, they were welcomed by the GPU-NKVD. Thus, on March 25, 1929, the Luhanske party committee transmitted to the district department of the GPU information from a party informant named Rudnytsky about the suspected espionage activities of six teachers and lecturers in the Donbass and Kharkiv.9 Although in reality these individuals were merely members of a local group studying economic questions, they all ended up under GPU- NKVD surveillance and were repressed as a group in both 1933 and 1938.
7 The GPU’s use of secret informers was particularly successful in the struggle against banditism in the Donbass after the Civil War. Such work involved not only a careful selection of informants and a broad expansion of their informational network, but also constant education and detailed instructions to each secret informer. To this end, in 1923 the okrug department of the GPU formulated special instructions for senior informers in their struggle against banditism, that obliged them to keep their role secret and that provided a detailed elaboration of their tasks.10 By the end of 1923, 158 secret informers worked in the Transport Department of the Debaltsevo OGPU, which served ten railway stations in the Donetsk okrug. In November 1923 alone, through the senior member of the group attached to the information apparatus and the district representatives of the Roads Department of the OGPU, they transmitted sixty valuable analytical reports and received twenty new assignments. As a result, the locations and personal ties of the “Ponomarenko,” “Rozorenyi,” “Hushcha,” and other armed gangs who were terrorizing the local population were discovered.11 The data obtained was analyzed and shortly afterwards the gangs were liquidated.
8 As a result of long-term secret informer surveillance, the Luhanske okrug and Donetsk guberniia departments of the GPU determined that in 1924 the majority of armed robberies of trains on the territory of Donetsk guberniia and the railways of Ukraine and the adjacent RSFSR was carried out by an armed gang led by Fomenko. The painstaking work of secret collaborators gathering information about the bandits enabled the authorities on September 25, 1924, to detain Fomenko and fifteen of his accomplices.12 In 1925, in Luhanske okrug alone, there were 484 secret informers investigating banditism in a joint secret informer network of the organs of the GPU and the militia. All of them were classified by separate categories - “A,” “B,” and “C.” Sixty- four of them belonged to the category of special informers.13 By 1926, the Luhanske okrug department considered that banditism had been reduced to levels that could be managed by the regular militia and so gave up this role. On January 5, 1927, the head of
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the Ukrainian GPU, V. A. Balytsky, extended this policy to the rest of the Donbass region.14
9 For the most part, the organs of the GPU-NKVD in Ukraine duplicated the structure of the central political police apparatus. Naturally, the structure of the secret service- informational apparatus of the Ukrainian special services, the forms and methods of the collection of information also duplicated the all-union ones. Therefore, the main categories of secret informers also comprised informers (osvedomiteli), who provided so-called first-hand information, and agents (agenty), who took part in the surveillance of individual suspects. These informers served as the starting point of the formation of dossiers (dela-formuliary) by the different operative departments, if the acquired information was considered important and if it was verified as accurate. In order to understand this process, one must understand the many informational departments of the political police in the 1920s and 1930s, since it was in these departments that informers’ declarations were registered, accumulated, and analyzed. For this a special network of plenipotentiaries (upolnomochennye) and their assistants, agents, and informers was created in various spheres of the economy, in various organizations and institutes, as well as in apartment houses. The plenipotentiaries and their assistants each had a network of agents and informers, from whom they received information for their reports on local events. Over the years, the size and form of this network varied greatly depending on the political situation, financing, and the abilities of the local “Chekists.”
10 For instance, after the division of the Donbass into the Voroshilovhrad and Stalinsk oblasti in 1938, two NKVD oblast´ administrations were likewise created. Their new secret informer networks were initially very small and far from effective. There were only 12 new informers in the Manhushiv district department of the Stalinsk NKVD administration a full six months after its creation. Altogether there were only 27 active informers in the entire districts and none at all in the two village soviets of Melekin and Bilosarai. As a result, out of 30 dossiers initiated by the district department, only 13 were supplied with secret informer surveillance.15 The same situation was said to exist in the districts of Avdiivka and Selydove.16
11 The secret informer network of the Makiivka city department of the NKVD was also small. For 32 mines, there were a total of 45 informers specializing in so-called “anti- sabotage informational work.” The same situation existed in the Horlivka city department, whose informational network included 27 individuals. Incidentally, there was no informing at all done at large mines, such as Kocheharka, Kondratiivka, Oleksandr-Zakhid, and Radianskvuhillia.17 Also, in violation of instructions issued by the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party and the All-Union NKVD, the Makiivka city department allowed the recruitment of the secretaries of party and Komsomol organizations, as well as the heads of trade union mining committees. The city department was also reprimanded because all seventeen documents that it produced within a six-month period concerning serious flaws in the work of the coal- mining sector did not include any materials acquired through the secret informer network.18
12 The Red Army district department, whose work was considered satisfactory by the Stalinsk oblast´ NKVD administration, had 124 active secret informers ; 59 of them were engaged in collecting information at enterprises in the coal-mining sector. Of the 61 active dossiers in January 1939, 43 of them (75 %) were being worked on by secret
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informers developed as secret service dossiers, while in mid-1938 this was the case for only 16 out of 45 (35 %).19 Nevertheless, the state of the secret informer network was still judged inadequate. An anti-sabotage network had not been established in the coal- mining industry ; informants were recruited unsystematically and not in accordance with previously worked-out and confirmed plans. There were not enough residents and even qualified residents and their assistants governed no more than 14 active informers. Owing to the lack of safe houses, operative workers met some of their secret informers either in their own apartments or on the open street, which did not permit them to issue assignments, accept information, instruct or teach in any effective fashion.20 These examples are not exceptional in the history of the territorial and transport organs of the GPU-NKVD of the Ukrainian Donbass region.
13 An investigation of the Transport Department of the NKVD of the Southern Donetsk Railway, for example, showed that between January and April 1939 the secret informer network for political investigations almost broke down completely, while operative work was organized in a thoroughly primitive fashion. For this reason, order no. 21 concerning the Transport Department of the Southern Donetsk Railway contained assignments that were aimed first and foremost at creating a clear-cut system of secret informers, including their further instruction and allocation to the secret informer network as railway station guards, cashiers, hall porters, porters, waiters, baggage check attendants, attendants at newspaper kiosks, postal, and baggage departments, hairdressing salons, conductors of suburban trains, and controllers. They were obliged to gather and transmit information not only about passengers and transport workers but also about the residents of settlements adjacent to railway stations.21
14 The study of the organization and use of the GPU’s secret informer network during collectivization is of particular interest. In order to acquire indispensable information, the GPU created an extensive network of secret informers. In one single case, pertaining to the surveillance of the “Sybiriak” group from 1929 to 1931, more than 30 secret informers of the Luhanske okrug department, and later also the Luhanske city department of the GPU, actively monitored almost 200 peasants of the Luhanske, Novosvitlivka, and Uspenske districts. Who were these secret informers ? What were their place and role in the surveillance carried out by local GPU organs ? How valuable and objective was the information that they were acquiring ?
15 Documents show that for the most part these were native-born, relatively young farmers ; 80 % of them were between 28 and 30 years of age ; 17 % were under 30 to 45 years old, and 3 % were over 45. None of them belonged to the Communist Party. Like the majority of the rural population at the time, they had little education, although they carried some authority in the peasant milieu and among former Red partisans, because they were good agriculturalists. In the past they had taken part in various armed formations against the Austro-German and Denikin occupations of Ukraine. They collaborated with the organs of the GPU for several years. Since they were to acquire information within the national Ukrainian milieu, they were Ukrainians by nationality and almost all of them were local residents. Seven percent of them also worked as informers within the cells of the local GPU prison, reporting on what detained or arrested individuals were saying. These informers, in contrast to the others, had a higher or comparatively higher education, sometimes they were a member of the clergy, or in the past had supported the Bolsheviks and even served in
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the armies of the All-Union Cheka and had settled in the Donbass after the end of the Civil War.22
16 Some of them had rather colorful biographies. Thus, A. D. Chaika, who was born in the Uspenske district, worked as a hired laborer until he was 18 years old. In the years of the first Russian democratic revolution he leaned toward the Bolshevik faction of the Social Democratic Party. In 1905, he took an active part in the armed demonstration of Donbass workers in the city of Horlivka. Concealing his participation in the armed revolt against the tsarist government, he was conscripted into the army where he served as secretary of a military unit in the city of Bakhmut. He was arrested in 1907 for taking part in a May Day meeting. Released shortly thereafter, he secretly provided fellow soldiers who were evading arrest with documents from the army administration. When he was discovered, he deserted. With the help of falsified documents, he hid in Germany, Austria, and Poland, where he was arrested several times. After being deported from Russia, he was arrested in 1910, deprived of his rights, and imprisoned in St. Nicholas’s Fortress in St. Petersburg. Upon his return to Ukraine, he was arrested for distributing leaflets appealing to workers of the Donbass to protest against the arbitrariness of the Austro-German occupiers and the regime of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky. Evading arrest, he joined a partisan squadron. After the defeat of Denikin’s armies and the creation of Donetsk guberniia, he served in the Luhanske party committee and later in a special-task county battalion attached to the local Cheka. After demobilization, he collaborated secretly with the GPU department of Luhanske okrug. At the beginning of collectivization, Chaika, who was convinced that the Soviet leadership was conducting an erroneous policy in the villages, personally transmitted his proposals and view of the situation to the head of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, I. M. Kalinin, the head of the All-Ukrainian Executive Committee, H. I Petrovsky, and the organs of the all-union and republican procurator’s offices. Many times he challenged the arbitrariness of the local authorities who, in turn, persecuted him.23 He was an unusual person and undoubtedly had undeniable authority and many connections in a number of districts in the Donbass. He was very well informed and was justifiably considered one of the most valuable secret informers of the GPU’s Donetsk operative sector number 2.
17 In general, the GPU secret informers involved in the monitoring of the “Sybiriak” group were well-informed and their information about the local situation was objective and, for the most part, realistic. The secret informers displayed initiative in acquiring information. For example, D. I. Savchenko and P. M. Kolisnychenko transmitted exhaustive information about the political moods of various strata of the population, the milieu of former Red partisans and participants in the Civil War, officials of the district administration, and the most active low-level members in the villages. They purportedly prevented several terrorist acts from being carried out.24 On the other hand, the means by which they obtained information often involved provocations and bordered on legal violations. Often their information was presented in a subservient and dogmatic form, marked by ideological clichés, as the local GPU required.
18 Thus, Savchenko, endeavoring to acquire information about the existence of anti- Soviet manifestations among former Red partisans in Luhanske district, held meetings in his own building. During these encounters he offered strong alcoholic beverages to those present, encouraging the tipsy and drunken citizens to launch into political discussions of forbidden topics. Meanwhile, the representatives of local power, who had
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hidden themselves in the building ahead of time, were listening and noting down everything that was taking place. As a rule, the local militia would disband the meeting and information acquired in this manner would be accumulated in GPU dossiers as material compromising individual persons.25 The information provided to the GPU about a rebel kulak group armed with sawed-off shotguns, Nagan revolvers, and Brownings in the village of Novo-Annivtsi also had no basis in reality.26 As investigative materials eventually showed, the 120 “rebels” in three rural districts and in the industrial city of Luhanske were “armed” only with four hunting rifles and a Nagan revolver.27
19 The secret informer, A. D. Chaika, also acted in a provocational manner. While mingling with arrested and detained villagers in the cells of the Novosvitlivka militia and the Luhanske city department of the GPU, Chaika disseminated newspaper materials about the trial of members of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU) then taking place in Kharkiv. Calling the leaders of this organization the defenders and liberators of the peasantry, he proposed that his cellmates join a local SVU branch that he headed. At the same time he explained that many members of the SVU were still at liberty and continuing their national-patriotic activity. Chaika called for open opposition to the current Soviet regime and the policy of collectivization and dekulakization that was destroying innocent people.28
20 Completing the surveillance action, the local Chekists proclaimed that some of the secret informers had been leaders of an anti-Soviet counter-revolutionary organization that was preparing to topple Soviet rule and restore a capitalist system of agricultural management. In order to lend verisimilitude to these falsifications, they also revealed a connection between the rebels’ committee and an organization of specialist saboteurs uncovered earlier. These were agronomists and land surveyors of the former Luhanske okrug land division, as well as a rebel kulak organization that allegedly existed in the north, whose members were kulaks that had been deported there earlier from the Donbass.29 Confirming these fabrications during interrogations, the secret informers D. I. Savchenko, P. M. Kolisnychenko, A. D. Chaika, and others, after “repenting” of their supposed acts, named everyone who allegedly took part in rebel activity.30 This led to the arrest and punishment of several dozen men.31 In the absence of evidence against them, 62.7 % of them were instead punished “for failing to inform the organs of the GPU about the existence of anti-Soviet rebel aspirations.”32
21 As might be expected, the secret informers A. D. Chaika, P. M. Kolisnychenko, A. Ia. Shchehlov, D. S. Shulha, and a number of others were released, and the cases against them dropped.33 The only one to suffer was D. I. Savchenko, who was not considered of any particular value. He was dismissed from the secret service-informational network and deported for three years to Siberia.34 With this the leadership of the local GPU did not complete the monitoring of the “Sybiriak” group but transformed it into another dossier, in connection with which some of the cases against those villagers who had not been tried were set apart for further secret informer surveillance.35 Later, many of the secret informers, including A. D. Chaika and M. F. Ierokhin, were actively exploited by the Voroshylovhrad NKVD city department.36
22 The number of secret informers in the Donbass in the latter half of the 1930s began to be taken to an absurd degree. They were present in practically all civic organizations, institutions, and branches of industry, transport, and agriculture. They were far more numerous than those engaged in political investigations in the entire Russian empire at
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the beginning of the twentieth century, when the secret informer network also encompassed practically all civic organizations and political parties in the country.37
23 As one characteristic instance, out of 20 staff members of High School no. 3 in the city of Voroshylovhrad, 13 (that is, 65 %) were secret informers of the local NKVD department : “Luhansky,” “Kolidchenko,” “Chervonyi” (Red), “Oko” (Eye), “Stepanovsky,” “Sotyi” (One Hundredth), and so forth. Over a period of years they investigated one of their colleagues, H. A. Borshch, who was the finest mathematics teacher in the city. Periodically, the city NKVD department also brought the secret informers “Bohaienko,” “Melnykov,” “Fedchenko,” and others into this investigation. These individuals were his fellow classmates from the university that they had attended, directors and administrators of the teaching staff sections of a number of other municipal schools, leading workers of the local department of national education, and so forth. Their total number even surpassed the teaching staff of the school in which the subject of the investigation worked.38 Each day they noted down every step, glance, and word that was uttered by Borshch : his conversations at home, on public transport, among his colleagues at work, with his children working on their school assignments. They uncovered spelling mistakes in the protocols of trade union meetings of the school teaching staff, which he had written and signed. There were even attempts to “read” his mind when he was alone. Particular industriousness was demonstrated by the secret informer of the local NKVD department named “Oko,” the only woman in the secret informer network, who wove her own network around the subject under investigation.39 From their collected reports the workers of the local NKVD department selected and classified only that information which would incriminate the subject under article 54 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. During the interrogations of H. A. Borshch, who was arrested in 1937, illiterate NKVD investigators cynically lectured him, declaring that as a specialist with three higher degrees he was of no value to socialism since he had not discovered Pythagoras’s second theorem.40 In the end the subject was sentenced by a panel of three Ukrainian NKVD judges of the former Donetsk oblast´ on the basis of “anti-Soviet counter- revolutionary Ukrainian nationalist agitation” and disappeared in the concentration camps of the Gulag system.41
24 The higher educational establishments of the Donbass were particularly well penetrated by secret informers of the GPU-NKVD. In his memoirs, the well-known Ukrainian scholar H. O. Kostiuk describes an incident that took place at the Donetsk Institute of Education. The director of the institute told Kostiuk that the general situation in this educational establishment was favorable to creative work and that no one was spying on him. If he were to come under surveillance, he, the director, would warn him of such a danger. With no warning, Kostiuk was abruptly dismissed from his job for nationalistic manifestations and distorting the teaching program.42 Kostiuk did not suspect that “Virnyi,” a secret collaborator of the Luhanske city NKVD department, and the director, were one and the same person. During one year alone at his post, 41 students and seven “professors-class enemies,” not including Kostiuk, were expelled from the institute on direct orders from the NKVD.43
25 True, this same “Virnyi,” who was relying on his former collaboration with the organs of the All-Union Cheka in the Civil War years and after the war with the central apparatus of the Ukrainian GPU-NKVD, tried to exert his influence somehow on the general situation in his higher educational establishment and to protect some of the
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students and lecturers from the lawlessness of the local Chekists. He, too, suffered as a result of this : he was dismissed from his post, expelled from the ranks of the party, and repressed.44 However, for his active collaboration with the GPU-NKVD he was soon released from the Sevvostlag (Northeastern Camp) of the NKVD and reinstated at his former place of work where, during the next ten years, he headed the Faculty of Marxism-Leninism. He remained a secret informer of the NKVD and MGB until he was transferred to a higher educational establishment in the Transcarpathian region.
26 The fate of other secret informers in this university was not as fortunate as “Virnyi’s.” A secret informer of the same Luhanske city NKVD department named “Lavriv” accidentally revealed his identity to “Virnyi.”45 For this, on December 7, 1937, a panel of three NKVD judges of the former Donetsk oblast´ sentenced him to 10 year’s imprisonment in a corrective hard-labor camp. After completing his full term in Irkutsk oblast´, on January 11, 1950, he was re-sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment, which he served in Magadan.46
27 Even harsher punishments were meted out to those who, under the conditions of a totalitarian society, had the courage not only to warn subjects figuring in investigations that they were being spied on by the NKVD, but also offered advice on how to save themselves from the persecution. Thus, in the indictments of crimes committed under articles 54-10 and 54-11 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR, Ia. Ie. Oleksiiv, the head of the teaching department of Luhanske Pedagogical Institute, admitted that as a secret informer of the NKVD “he committed a treacherous act, having warned the subject under investigation that he had a directive to spy on him.”47 On April 19, 1938, by a decision of a trio of judges of the NKVD administration of the former Donetsk oblast´, he was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad.48
28 Documents indicate that in the 1930s secret double agents were not only dismissed from the secret agent-informer network of the GPU-NKVD, but were also the cause of the destruction of a large number of innocent people. Thus, a secret informer of the territorial organs of the All-Union Cheka-GPU-NKVD in the Dnipropetrovsk region, Zaporizzhia, and the Donbass, known as “Populiarnyi” (Popular), enjoyed great authority among the participants of the Makhno movement in his capacity as the former head of the Revolutionary Council attached to Nestor Makhno and as one of the publishers of the newspaper Nabat (The Tocsin). Despite his active collaboration with the organs of the All-Union Cheka-GPU-NKVD, he retained a high opinion of the organizational talents of Makhno as the distinguished leader of a popular movement.49 Although the information that he transmitted to the organs of the All-Union Cheka- GPU-NKVD was of great value, owing to his opinions, he was considered a double agent. For this reason, several times he was deprived of his voter’s rights, dismissed from his post with or without cause, arrested, and dismissed from the secret informer network. Finally, he was arrested by the 4th Directorate of the Ukrainian NKVD for the former Donetsk oblast´ and executed. Using his name and connections, the NKVD fabricated a case in 1938 about the existence of a large Makhnoist insurgent underground in Ukraine. On April 1, 1938, 13 “rebel squadrons” were uncovered. Sixty-two men were arrested, including 23 who were former members of the command staff of Makhno’s military units.50 Naturally, they experienced the same fate as “Populiarnyi.”
29 A comparative analysis of GPU-NKVD documents in the 1920s and 1930s attests to the fact that the punishment meted out to secret informers of the GPU-NKVD for disclosing their identity in the 1920s was milder, and cases did not always reach court. For
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example, on September 19, 1926, the NKVD department of Luhanske okrug restricted itself only to initiating a case against S. Romanov under article 117 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR for disclosing his identity as a seksot (sekretnyi sotrudnik - secret collaborator).51
30 Those secret informers who served the existing regime in good faith established their careers very quickly. They obtained promotions and were encouraged both materially and morally. Thus, for more than 30 years a secret informer named “Kvitko” was active as a secret informer of the organs of the GPU-NKVD-MGB-KGB in the Kyiv region, Zaporizzhia, and the Donbass. He was born in the Kyiv region and from the age of 20 took an active part in the Ukrainian national liberation movement in the Pereiaslav region. While studying at the Kyiv Institute of Economics, he was first arrested by the GPU organs in 1925 and received a suspended sentence of up to five years. After completing his law studies at the Institute, he worked as a correspondent for the newspapers Bilshovyk (Bolshevik), Visti (News), and Student revoliutsii (Student of the Revolution). In his articles and creative sketches he exposed “Ukrainian nationalism.” From 1927 to 1929 he worked as an investigator. After obtaining a teaching degree, he switched over entirely to pedagogical work in 1929. In 1927 alone, he provided the GPU with valuable information about 27 individuals. Despite the fact that almost all of his and his wife’s close and distant relatives had been repressed by the NKVD, on the basis of materials provided by him the Voroshylovhrad oblast´ department of the NKVD administration monitored and engineered the “Nizhyntsi” case (1936), the “Plisniava” case (1937-1939), the “Pokydky” case (1940-1941), and cases against individual representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the Donbass, Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Zaporizzhia regions. Left in place by the organs of the NKVD on the territory of Ukraine occupied by the Nazi Germans, he exposed the underground operations of the OUN (b) (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists - Bandera faction) in Voroshylovhrad, Kyiv, and Kamianets-Podilsky oblasti - the so-called “Prosvitiany” and “Heolohy” groups. As a reward for his services to the GPU-NKVD, he was allowed to occupy the combined positions of head and dean of the Faculty of Literature at one of the largest pedagogical establishments of higher education in Ukraine. Transferred to Western Ukraine, he occupied leading positions there and remained an active secret informer for the organs of the MGB-KGB.52
31 There were other incentives for secret informers. As attested by order no. 32 of the Transport Department of the Main Administration of State Security (GUGB) of the Southern Donetsk Railway of December 19, 1937, “Concerning the rewarding of collaborators of the Transport Department of the GUGB and the United Transport Department of the GUGB of the Southern Donetsk Railway for active work against counter-revolution,” in addition to 41 of the finest Chekists, the secret informers of the NKVD “Lehkyi” (Light), “Semenov,” and “Skromnyi” (Modest) received rewards. Besides expressions of gratitude, each of them received a payment of 200-300 rubles.53
32 Frequently, the incentives awarded to secret informers were criminal in nature. This happened in cases when, at the request or under pressure from the organs of the GPU- NKVD, the courts and the procurator’s office were compelled to suspend criminal cases against secret collaborators, who then evaded punishment completely. For example, on August 9, 1926, the GPU department of Luhanske okrug requested the head of the okrug court and the okrug procurator to take under personal consideration during the court’s examination of the criminal case the fact that the accused, I. P. Kashuba, “has been a
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secret informer of the GPU since January 30, 1925, and is a very valuable worker.” Judging by the resolution contained in the letter, this request was satisfied.
33 This was fairly typical during the 1930s. At the same time, it should be kept in mind that relations between the GPU-NKVD, procuratorial supervision, and the courts were governed by special resolutions of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee (VUTsVK) and later the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR. These resolutions were frequently supplemented by sub-legal acts and secret instructions. For example, the October 10, 1928, resolution of the VUTsVK about the relations between law- enforcement organs was supplemented by a joint special secret instruction of the VUTsVK and the Council of Peoples’ Commissars permitting secret informers of the GPU to be subpoenaed as witnesses only by agreement of the political police.54 In fabricating numerous cases against various counter-revolutionary organizations, the GPU organs utilized this instruction in their own interests. They launched court cases or examinations by extra-judicial organs against their own secret informers. In this way, they would rid their secret informer network of passive secret informers who showed little initiative, while encouraging the rest actively to seek out and provide indispensable information and to attribute significance to elaborated and fabricated cases. The materials pertaining to the secret informer investigation of the “Sybiriak” affair that we have examined here confirm this observation.
34 (Translated from the Ukrainian by Marta D. Olynyk with the financial support of the Havard Ukrainian Research Institute)
35 Luhansk Pedagogical State University
36 Ukraine
37 91011 Luhansk
38 Oboronna Street 2
NOTES
1. Volodymyr Prystaiko and Iurii Shapoval, Spilka vyzvolennia Ukrainy: nevidomi dokumenty i fakty (Kyiv, 1995); Volodymyr Prystaiko and Iurii Shapoval, Mykhailo Hrushevsky i GPU-NKVD. Trahichne desiatylittia: 1924-1934 (Kyiv, 1996); Iurii Shapoval, Volodymyr Prystaiko, and Vadym Zolotarov, Cheka-GPU-NKVD v Ukraini: osoby, fakty, dokumenty (Kyiv, 1997); Volodymyr Prystaiko and Iurii Shapoval, Mykhailo Hrushevsky: sprava “UNTs” i ostanni roky (1931-1934) (Kyiv, 1999); I.V. Verba, “Kost Shtepa,” Ukrainskyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 4 (1999): 98-114; R. Iu. Podkur, Dokumenty radianskykh spetssluzhb iak dzherelo do vyvchennia politychnykh, sotsialno- ekonomichnykh, kulturnykh protsesiv v Ukraini, 20-30-ts rr. XX st. (kandidatskaia dissertatsiia, Kyiv, 1998); R. Iu. Podkur, “Informatsiino-analitychna robota iak odyn z napriamkiv diialnosti spetssluzhb v 20-30-rr.,” Z arkhiviv VUChK-GPU-NKVD-KGB, 1-2 (1998): 342-356; R. Iu. Podkur, “Povstanskyi rukh ta opozytsiini politychni uhrupovannia v informatsiinykh dokumentakh ChK-GPU (pochatok 20-kh rr.),” Z
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arkhiviv VUChK-GPU-NKVD-KGB, 2-4 (2000): 390-397; R. Iu. Podkur, Za povidomlenniam radianskykh spetssluzhb (Kyiv, 2000); V. V. Chentsov, Dokumenty organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti kak istochnik po sotsialno-politicheskoi istorii Ukrainy v 1921-1925 godakh (na materialakh Ekaterinoslavskoi gubernii (kandidatskaia dissertatsiia, Dnipropetrovsk, 1992); V. V. Chentsov, Politychni represii v Radianskii Ukraini v 20-ti rr. (Kyiv, 2000). 2. L. O. Okynshevych, Moia akademichna pratsia v Ukraini (Lviv, 1995): 50-52. 3. S. I. Bilokin, Masovyi teror iak zasib derzhavnoho upravlinnia v SRSR (1917-1941 rr.) (Kyiv, 1999): 109. 4. V. Halytsky, “Za gratamy NKVD,” Nove zhyttia [Voroshylovhrad], (November 22, 1942): 2; (November 29, 1942): 2. See also, Rytsari dolga : Vospominaniia chekistov (Donetsk, 1986); Edinozhdy priniav prisiagu...: rasskazy o chekistakh (Donetsk, 1990). 5. Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Luhanskoi Oblasti (hereafter DALO), 34/1/2, 20. 6. DALO, 34/1/1, 134. 7. Tsentralnyi Derzhavnyi arkhiv vyshchykh orhaniv vlady Ukrainy, 2/2/742, 36. 8. V. Okipniuk, “Pravovi zasady finansuvannia orhaniv GPU USRR u 20-ti rr.,” Z arkhiviv VUChK-GPU-NKVD-KGB, 1-2 (1999): 359. 9. DALO, 34/1/665, 135. 10. DALO, 766/2/2, 247. 11. DALO, 373/1/483, 76-78. 12. DALO, 636/2/13, 370. 13. DALO, 636/1/27, 195. 14. DALO, 1176/2/30, 47. 15. Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Donetskoi Oblasti (hereafter DADO), 326/5/37, 12-13. 16. Ibid., 14. 17. Ibid., 15. 18. Ibid., 15. 19. Ibid., 20. 20. Ibid., 21. 21. Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Upravlinnia Sluzhby Bezpeky Ukrainy v Donetskii Oblasti (hereafter DA USBU DO). A collection of documents of the Transport Division of the NKVD of the Southern Donetsk Railway. File no. 494, case 15, fols. 19-20. 22. Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Upravlinnia Sluzhby Bezpeky Ukrainy v Luhanskii Oblasti (hereafter DA USBU LO), case 19262r, vol. 1, fo1. 120; tom. 3, fol. 82. 23. DA USBU LO, case 19262r, vol. 1, fols. 61, 120-121, 123-123ob, 134. 24. Ibid., vol. 1, fol. 132; vol. 2, fols. 82, 90. 25. Ibid., vol. 1, fols. 135-136. 26. Ibid., vol. 1, fols. 152-154. 27. Ibid., vol. 4, fol. 182. 28. Ibid., vol. 1, fols. 30, 31, 33, 60, 91, 163; vol. 2, fol. 96. 29. Ibid., vol. 1, fol. 132; vol. 2, fols. 32, 33, 35, 36, 59, 62, 68, 80, 83; vol. 4, fol. 181.
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30. Ibid., vol. 1, fols. 58, 59, 60-6, 89-91, 97-98, 126, 152, 154, 163; vol. 2, fol. 96; vol. 4, fols. 185, 186, 189. 31. Ibid., vol. 4, fols. 183-204. 32. Ibid. Calculated by the author. 33. Ibid., vol. 4, fol. 206ob. 34. Ibid., fol. 206. 35. Ibid., fol. 183. 36. DA USBU LO, case 14236r, fols. 5-6. 37. S. A. Stepanov, Problema dvoinykh agentov v sisteme politicheskogo rozyska nachala XX veka. Istoricheskie chteniia na Lubianke (1998); Rossiiskie spetssluzhby na perelome epokh : konets XIX veka - 1922 god (Moscow-Velikii Novgorod, 1999): 63. 38. DA USBU LO, case 5469r, fols. 55, 63, 67, 69. 39. Ibid., fol. 55. 40. Ibid., fol. 22. 41. Ibid., fols. 98-100. 42. H. O. Kostiuk, Zustrichi i proshchannia. Spohady (Edmonton, 1987), Book 1: 461. 43. DA USBU LO, case 5258, vol. 1, fols. 69, 90 verso, 118-125, 393. 44. Ibid., fol. 4 verso. 45. DA USBU LO, case 682 r., fols. 114, 116, 138; case 5258, vol. 1, fols. 124, 126. 46. DA USBU LO, case 682 r., fols. 164, 179, 188. 47. DA USBU LO, case 6934r, fols. 16-17. 48. Ibid., fol. 19. 49. DA USBU LO, case 2119 f. p., fol. 213. 50. Ibid., fol. 249 51. DALO, 636/1/53, 58. 52. DA USBU LO, Kolektsiia dokumentiv UMGB Voroshylovhradskoi oblasti 1943-1945 rr., fol. 1949. 53. DA USBU DO, Kolektsiia dokumentiv TO [Transportnogo otdela] NKVD Pivdenno- Donetskoi zaliznytsi. File no. 494, case 13, fol. 28. 54. Visti (October 25, 1928).
RÉSUMÉS
Résumé Le rôle et la place des collaborateurs secrets dans la collecte de renseignements des GPU- NKVD pendant les années 1920 et 1930 (à partir de documents d’archives de la région du Donbass). Dès le premier jour de son existence, la police politique commença à mettre en place un réseau
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d’informateurs secrets qui s’étendit peu à peu à toutes les couches de la société sans exception. Les organes locaux du parti contribuèrent activement à la collecte et à la transmission des renseignements. La plupart des organes ukrainiens des GPU-NKVD reproduisaient la structure de l’appareil central de la police politique. La structure des service secrets qui géraient les renseignements au sein des services spéciaux ukrainiens et les méthodes utilisées pour la collecte des renseignements reproduisaient elles aussi celles de l’Union. Il fut créé un réseau spécial de plénipotentiaires accompagnés d’assistants, d’agents et d’informateurs dans plusieurs secteurs de l’économie, dans différents organismes et instituts et dans les immeubles. Les plénipotentiaires et leurs assistants avaient chacun un réseau d’agents et d’informateurs qui leur fournissaient les renseignements nécessaires à leurs rapports sur les événements locaux. Au fil des ans, la taille et la forme de ce réseau se sont fortement transformées au gré de son financement, de la situation politique et de l’efficacité des tchékistes locaux.
Abstract From the first day of its existence, the political police began to put in place a network of secret informers which gradually came to encompass all strata of society without exception. Local party organs actively assisted in the gathering and transmission of information. For the most part, the organs of the GPU-NKVD in Ukraine duplicated the structure of the central political police apparatus. Naturally, the structure of the secret service-informational apparatus of the Ukrainian special services, the forms and methods of the collection of information also duplicated the all-union ones. A special network of plenipotentiaries and their assistants, agents and informers was created in various spheres of the economy, in various organizations and institutes, as well as in apartment houses. The plenipotentiaries and their assistants each had a network of agents and informers, from whom they received information for their reports on local events. Over the years, the size and form of this network varied greatly depending on the political situation, financing, and the abilities of the local “Chekists.”
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Le système d’information de la GPU : la situation politique en Ukraine dans les années 1920 rapportée à Kaganovič.
Valerij Ju. VASIL´EV
1 L’étude du système d’information adopté par la Tchéka pour faire connaître aux dirigeants politiques d’Ukraine l’état d’esprit de la société, les jugements portés sur la ligne politique, l’activité des certains groupes sociaux ou de certains individus, suscite un vif intérêt chez les historiens.
2 Dans l’historiographie ukrainienne, il existe déjà bon nombre de travaux consacrés à l’activité de la Tchéka-GPU-NKVD en Ukraine. L’historien ukrainien S. Kul´čickij, par exemple, en vient à la conclusion que le parti communiste, ayant instauré la dictature du pouvoir en Ukraine, n’a pu se passer d’un organe de force exerçant des fonctions de police politique. Avec l’aide de cet organe, le Comité central du parti (RKP(b)) a pu réaliser un contrôle de la situation locale, parallèlement au contrôle du parti. Dès les années 1920, les tchékistes pouvaient utiliser librement tous les moyens d’observation et de contrôle de la situation politique, y compris les arrestations et la surveillance de la correspondance postale et télégraphique1.
3 L’ouvrage de Ju. Šapoval, V. Pristajko et V. Zolotar´ov permet une sérieuse avancée dans l’interprétation du phénomène de la Tchéka-GPU-NKVD dans le système politique soviétique. Les auteurs ont noté tout particulièrement le rôle de premier plan joué par les organes de la Tchéka dans la formation de l’opinion des dirigeants de l’appareil du parti quant à l’état et aux tendances de la vie sociale en Ukraine. Au cours des années 1920, les organes de sécurité ont cessé d’être sous le contrôle non seulement du Ministère public, mais également des instances étatiques supérieures d’Ukraine. En revanche, la coopération s’est renforcée entre le Comité central du parti communiste ukrainien (KP(b)U) et la direction de la GPU d’Ukraine2.
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4 Le but de notre travail est d’étudier les relations entre Kaganovič et les organes de la Tchéka dans les années 1920, ainsi que les spécificités des documents d’information et d’analyse que les organes de la GPU adressaient au principal « spécialiste » de Stalin pour l’Ukraine3.
5 Le présent article repose sur les dénonciations, les notes de synthèse, les lettres adressées à Kaganovič par l’OGPU d’URSS et la GPU d’Ukraine pendant les années 1920-1930. Ces documents sont conservés dans le fonds d’archives personnelles de Kaganovič (RGASPI, fonds 81). On a utilisé également les sténogrammes des congrès, des conférences et des plenums du Comité central du KP(b)U, les procès-verbaux et les matériaux accompagnant les procès-verbaux du Politbjuro du Comité central du KP(b)U, les « dossiers spéciaux » de ce même Politbjuro, ainsi que des documents émanant de différents départements du Comité central (CGAOO d’Ukraine, f. 1, op. 1, 6, 16, 20).
Le rôle de Kaganovič dans l’élaboration de la politique du parti en Ukraine
6 La décision d’envoyer Lazar´ Kaganovič en Ukraine en qualité de secrétaire général du Comité central du KP(b)U fut prise le 26 mars 1925 par le Politbjuro du RKP(b)4. La nomination de Kaganovič à ce poste était liée à la lutte acharnée pour le pouvoir qui se déroulait à l’intérieur du parti entre Stalin, Kamenev et Zinov´ev. Il est clair que, pour contrôler le parti ukrainien, la plus importante organisation du parti au niveau des républiques, il fallait nommer à sa tête un homme personnellement dévoué à Stalin.
7 La nomination de Kaganovič fut plutôt une surprise pour le parti ukrainien, car ce n’était pas une figure politique de premier plan. Cependant, bien qu’âgé seulement de 31 ans, il était déjà secrétaire du Comité central du RKP(b) et possédait une solide expérience du travail administratif.
8 Lazar´ Kaganovič, né en Ukraine en 1893, avait été l’un des chefs des organisations bolcheviques de Kiev et de Juzovka (Doneck) et, par conséquent, connaissait bien les conditions locales et les travailleurs du parti de cette région.
9 Un élément important également, pour les interventions publiques, était sa connaissance de la langue ukrainienne (très russifiée), et le fait qu’il était juif. L’origine ethnique de Kaganovič représentait, bien sûr, une cible pour l’antisémitisme qui régnait dans le parti et la société, mais pouvait l’aider à réaliser une ligne politique. En tant que juif, il ne risquait pas d’être accusé d’antisémitisme et il pouvait apaiser les tensions qui existaient entre les communistes : ukrainiens d’une part, russes et juifs de l’autre.
10 Kaganovič était très lié avec Molotov et Stalin. Il avait quitté l’Ukraine seulement huit ans auparavant, en 1917, fonctionnaire du parti bolchevik parmi d’autres, et il y revenait maintenant en tant que chef du parti politique au pouvoir en Ukraine.
11 Le 3 avril 1925, le Politbjuro du Comité central du KP(b)U approuva la proposition du Comité central du RKP(b) de recommander Kaganovič comme secrétaire général du Comité central du parti communiste d’Ukraine. Le 5 avril, sur proposition de G. Petrovskij (président du Comité central exécutif d’Ukraine), le plenum du Comité
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central du KP(b)U vota l’entrée de Kaganovič au Politbjuro et à l’Orgbjuro du Comité central et le nomma secrétaire général du Comité central du KP(b)U5.
12 À l’occasion de l’une de ses premières interventions, le 3 mai 1925, dans le cadre du IXe Congrès des soviets de toute l’Ukraine, Kaganovič énonça les approches de principe qui avaient été retenues pour l’Ukraine par le pouvoir soviétique et le régime communiste : « Notre Union des Républiques Socialistes Soviétiques est un modèle pour l’Union des Républiques Socialistes Soviétiques du monde, et montre au prolétariat de l’Occident et aux nations opprimées de l’Orient comment il faut résoudre les problèmes du pouvoir. »
13 Le parti communiste, selon Kaganovič, offrait à tous les ouvriers et à tous les paysans ukrainiens la possibilité de participer à l’exercice du pouvoir. Le parti avait un autre mérite d’importance, qui justifiait sa légitimation sur le territoire de l’Ukraine : le développement de la culture ukrainienne : « Ici, en Ukraine, où la culture nationale a été opprimée pendant des siècles, seul le pouvoir soviétique a donné aux travailleurs la possibilité de développer librement leur culture. Nous observons actuellement un essor colossal de la culture ukrainienne. »6
14 Les problèmes que mentionnait Kaganovič n’étaient pas fortuits pour le parti communiste de Russie en Ukraine. Les bolcheviks ne disposaient pas en Ukraine du même soutien social qu’en Russie. Créé en 1919 à Moscou, le parti communiste bolchevik d’Ukraine était une organisation assez faible, qui ne comptait dans ses rangs que 16363 membres7. Seule l’aide de l’Armée rouge put permettre au parti communiste de conquérir et de garder le pouvoir sur le territoire ukrainien.
15 Au printemps 1920, les communistes ukrainiens, membres du RKP(b) en tant que représentants de son organisation territoriale inclurent dans leurs rangs le parti communiste nationaliste ukrainien de gauche (les borot´bisty). Pendant les années 1920, un nombre important d’anciens borot´bisty, parmi lesquels A. Šumskij, G. Grin´ko, V. Zatonskij, occupèrent des postes à responsabilité au KP(b)U, alors que d’autres travaillaient pour le parti et les soviets, principalement dans les districts (okruga) de l’Ukraine de la Rive droite [du Dniestr] (Pravoberežnaja Ukraina)8. Cependant, la tentative de « diluer » les éléments russes dans le KP(b)U en y introduisant des communistes nationalistes ukrainiens, dans le but de modifier la perception que pouvait avoir la société ukrainienne du parti communiste, ne fut guère couronnée de succès. Le problème de la légitimation du pouvoir soviétique aux yeux de la majorité de la population ukrainienne, ainsi que celui de la constitution d’une base sociale stable pour le régime en place, demeuraient. Ces mêmes problèmes se posaient aux bolcheviks dans les huit autres républiques soviétiques, formées sur les débris de ce qui avait constitué l’empire de Russie (la Lituanie, la Lettonie, l’Estonie, la Finlande et la Pologne avaient obtenu non seulement l’indépendance, mais étaient devenues des États autonomes).
16 C’est pourquoi, au début des années 1920, la ligne politique des bolcheviks dut subir des changements importants. La ligne officielle de la politique des nationalités fut élaborée par le XIIe Congrès du RKP(b) en 1923. La résolution du congrès, rédigée par Stalin, orientait le parti vers une politique plus souple vis-à-vis des revendications nationales, faisant en particulier des concessions sur le plan culturel et linguistique. Cette politique, qui reçut l’étiquette d’« indigénisation » (korenizacija) (pour l’Ukraine : « ukrainisation »), permit d’asseoir le pouvoir soviétique dans les républiques, grâce à
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la nomination au sein des instances dirigeantes de représentants des groupes ethniques titulaires de ces républiques.
17 Pour les Ukrainiens, dont les aspirations nationales s’étaient manifestées dès les années 1917-1920, un sérieux problème persistait : une partie importante des « terres ukrainiennes » (etnografičeskie zemli) était encore sous le contrôle de la Pologne. En Ukraine occidentale, le parti communiste clandestin, le KPZU (Kommunističeskaja partija Zapadnoj Ukrainy), prenait une part active à la lutte pour l’indépendance des « terres ukrainiennes » (ukrainskie zemli) et leur réunification avec l’Ukraine soviétique. Autre particularité de la situation : l’Ukraine, incorporée à l’URSS pendant les années 1922-1924, conservait quelques signes d’autonomie, aussi bien au niveau du parti que de l’État.
18 Arrivé en Ukraine au début d’avril 1925, Kaganovič se montra d’emblée partisan de l’ukrainisation. Dès sa première intervention publique au plenum du Comité central du KP(b)U, il exigea l’application du processus d’ukrainisation au sein même du parti.
19 La ténacité de Kaganovič fut telle que rapidement l’ukrainisation s’appliqua non seulement à l’appareil du parti, mais également à l’appareil syndical et à l’appareil d’État. Kaganovič prononça une allocution à la conférence du parti de la région militaire de Kiev (Kievskij voennyj okrug), démontrant la nécessité d’une rapide ukrainisation de l’armée, pour éviter au pouvoir soviétique une intervention étrangère9.
20 Toutefois, l’ukrainisation suscita au sein des instances dirigeantes de l’Ukraine de sérieuses dissensions. Sur un fond d’opinions discordantes, l’essentiel du combat pour l’ukrainisation se déroula entre Kaganovič et les anciens borot´bisty, A. Šumskij et G. Grin´ko.
21 Stalin en personne prit part à la bataille, appuyant Kaganovič et soutenant ses efforts pour mener à bien le processus en cours. Dans une lettre datée du 2 septembre 1925, il approuvait les actions menées par le dirigeant ukrainien10. Dans une autre lettre datée du 26 avril 1926, adressée « Au cam. Kaganovič et aux autres membres du Politbjuro du Comité central du KP(b)U », Stalin exposait sa conception de la politique nationale en Ukraine. Il soulignait que Šumskij avait relevé dans la sphère nationale une tendance significative, à savoir un large mouvement de soutien en faveur de la culture ukrainienne et de la vie sociale. Pour Stalin, il était impératif de soutenir cette tendance et il était donc important de modifier la position des collaborateurs du parti et des soviets, « encore imprégnés d’un esprit d’ironie et de scepticisme à l’égard de la culture ukrainienne et de la société (obščestvennost´) ukrainienne »11. Il était indispensable également de recruter avec le plus grand soin et de former des cadres capables de mener les nouvelles orientations en Ukraine.
22 Par ailleurs, Stalin déclarait que Šumskij avait commis de sérieuses erreurs en confondant l’ukrainisation de l’appareil du parti et de l’appareil des soviets avec l’ukrainisation du prolétariat. Le prolétariat, selon Stalin, ne devait pas être « ukrainisé d’en haut », forcé de renoncer au russe pour adopter la langue et la culture ukrainiennes. Ainsi Stalin laissait entendre que Šumskij voulait ukrainiser de force le prolétariat en Ukraine. « Cela ne serait plus la liberté nationale, soulignait Stalin, mais une forme d’oppression nationale. »
23 Stalin affirmait, en outre, dans sa lettre, que Šumskij avait négligé les côtés négatifs de l’ukrainisation, par exemple l’aspiration d’une partie de l’intelligentsia, opposée aux
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communistes, à prendre la tête du mouvement ukrainien. De ce fait, ce mouvement pourrait prendre le caractère d’une lutte « pour l’émancipation (otčuždennost´ ) de la culture ukrainienne et de la société ukrainienne par rapport à la culture et à la société soviétiques dans son ensemble, le caractère d’une lutte contre Moscou en général, contre les Russes, contre la culture russe et sa plus haute acquisition -- le léninisme. »
24 Au nombre de ces « dérives » (krajnosti), Stalin citait l’article du poète ukrainien Mykola Hvylevyj, qui appelait à une rapide dérussification du prolétariat en Ukraine. Tout en conservant l’union politique avec la Russie, il engageait la poésie ukrainienne à prendre ses distances avec la littérature russe, et l’Ukraine littéraire à s’éloigner de Moscou « aussi vite que possible ». « Šumskij ne comprend pas, écrivait Stalin, que seule la lutte contre de telles positions extrémistes peut transformer la culture et la société ukrainiennes en train de se former en culture et en société soviétiques. »
25 Stalin, qui avait visiblement lu Hvylevyj, donnait à des passages littéraires un caractère ouvertement politique. Sa lettre du 26 avril 1926 était dirigée non seulement contre Šumskij, mais surtout contre le mouvement nationaliste ukrainien et contre le danger que celui-ci représentait pour la Russie, l’Union Soviétique et le parti communiste. La logique de Stalin était significative. Dans sa lettre, il considérait Moscou comme la citadelle du mouvement ouvrier international et du léninisme. Pour lui la « soviétisation » du mouvement ukrainien signifiait la soumission et la fidélité de ce dernier au parti communiste et au léninisme comme réalisation suprême de la culture russe. Ce faisant, il apparaissait non seulement comme le dirigeant de l’État communiste soviétique, mais comme un patriote russe, dont l’idéologie trouvait de profondes racines dans la culture russe. Il ne restait plus au mouvement national ukrainien et à la culture ukrainienne qu’à se reconnaître politiquement et spirituellement dépendants, « au second plan » (vtorosortnye) par rapport au léninisme qui incarnait la réalisation suprême de la culture russe.
26 Le 12 mai 1926, après la réception de la lettre de Stalin, le Politbjuro ukrainien écouta un exposé de V. Zatonskij intitulé « Les premiers résultats de l’ukrainisation ». Le débat suscité par cet exposé et aussi par la lettre de Stalin renforça encore les sérieuses dissensions entre la majorité de la direction ukrainienne, qui soutenait Kaganovič, et les anciens borot´bisty. Kaganovič intervint longuement, expliquant sa conception des problèmes nationaux en Ukraine et de la politique d’ukrainisation.
27 Pour Kaganovič, les bolcheviks en Ukraine se heurtaient à deux sortes de difficultés en ce qui concernait le problème national. La première consistait dans le fait que, après la révolution d’Octobre, qui avait rendu possible la création d’un État (gosudarstvennost´) ukrainien, le mouvement antisoviétique se dissimulait derrière l’étendard du mouvement de libération nationale. Cela expliquait l’intensité de la guerre civile en Ukraine, qui avait entraîné l’apparition, dans les rangs du parti communiste et même de la classe ouvrière, de « préjugés » contre la politique nationale et l’ukrainisation. La seconde difficulté consistait « dans le caractère russifié de la ville et le fossé ainsi créé par rapport à la campagne ukrainienne ». Ensuite, Kaganovič cita les déclarations de Stalin, qui avait, à la conférence nationale du Comité central du VKP(b), caractérisé la situation en Ukraine de la façon suivante : « On peut considérer que le deuxième point faible du pouvoir soviétique est l’Ukraine. La situation, du point de vue de la culture, de l’alphabétisation, etc., est ici la même qu’au Turkestan. L’appareil d’État est aussi peu familiarisé avec la langue et la vie quotidienne de la population qu’au Turkestan. Cependant, l’Ukraine a la même importance ou presque pour les peuples de l’Occident que le Turkestan
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pour les peuples de l’Orient. La situation en Ukraine est rendue encore plus complexe du fait de certaines particularités du développement industriel du pays. En effet, les principales branches de l’industrie, comme l’industrie houillère ou la métallurgie, ont été introduites en Ukraine d’en-haut, comme une implantation artificielle de l’extérieur, elles ne sont pas venues d’en bas, comme une étape du développement naturel de l’économie. »
28 Ainsi on se fixait pour tâche de parvenir à créer une scission dans la conscience des masses du parti et des cadres dirigeants par rapport à l’ukrainisation. Kaganovič annonça fièrement que cette situation existait déjà, puisque « même ceux qui, d’une façon ou d’une autre, ne sont pas d’accord avec le programme d’ukrainisation, ne se résolvent pas à prendre position contre la politique menée par le parti. »
29 À partir de là, Kaganovič assignait trois tâches principales à la politique nationale du parti communiste en Ukraine : 1) Le renforcement de l’État (gosudarstvennost´) ukrainien comme partie constitutive de l’URSS ; l’engagement de masses importantes de la population de souche dans la construction de l’État et de l’économie ; le rapprochement entre l’appareil de l’État et les masses. 2) Le développement de la culture. 3) Le maintien de la suprématie du parti dans la direction du processus d’ukrainisation.
30 Quelques succès avaient déjà, selon Kaganovič, été obtenus dans cette voie. Mais il fallait également faire face à de sérieuses difficultés, en particulier le renforcement du militantisme politique du nepman dans les villes et du koulak dans les campagnes. C’était justement dans ces deux couches de la société que l’on trouvait les « racines sociales » de ce chauvinisme engendré par la NEP.
31 Il y avait en Ukraine des gens susceptibles de devenir les leaders politiques et idéologiques de ce chauvinisme. « Nous avons en Ukraine toute une série de ministres et premiers ministres (prem´ery) qui nous étaient hostiles dans le précédent gouvernement [...], qui se tiennent tranquilles, dans l’attente du moment propice pour agir », affirmait Kaganovič.
32 Sur le territoire de l’Ukraine se trouvait également un homme qui était un véritable symbole du mouvement nationaliste ukrainien : M.S. Gruševskij. Kaganovič le jugeait en ces termes : « Gruševskij apparaît, dans une certaine mesure, comme le centre autour duquel se mobilisent les pseudo-forces scientifiques qui empoisonnent la jeune génération montante d’une idéologie étrangère au prolétariat. »
33 Caractérisant la situation dans son ensemble, Kaganovič notait le développement parallèle de deux mouvements : « l’un, soviétique et prolétaire, à programme social et culturel, sous la conduite de notre parti, l’autre, antisoviétique, qui, même dissimulé sous des apparences légales, exprime les attentes de couches sociales qui nous sont étrangères. »
34 L’ukrainisation apparaissait comme la condition nécessaire à la mise en œuvre de la dictature du prolétariat en Ukraine, de l’union de la classe ouvrière et de la paysannerie, de la mainmise du parti communiste sur un mouvement national ukrainien d’une ampleur énorme. Mais le mouvement national ukrainien ne représentait pas pour le parti communiste un but en soi, c’était seulement une étape, un degré dans la marche vers le socialisme. C’est pourquoi Kaganovič précisait : « Il faut parvenir à ce que chaque membre du parti envisage la culture nationale d’un point de vue de classe, et non comme une entité nationale unique, ce qui ne serait pas une approche marxiste et léniniste. » Les membres du parti devaient saisir combien il était
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important que le renforcement de l’État (gosudarstvennost´) ukrainien aille de pair avec le renforcement de l’URSS, que le prolétariat ukrainien garde un lien étroit avec le prolétariat de Russie, que l’Ukraine reste liée à Moscou, centre de la révolution mondiale12.
35 Vingt jours plus tard, au plénum du Comité central du KP(b)U (2-6 juin 1926), Kaganovič formula l’approche théorique de la politique nationale en Ukraine. « Si les républiques d’Ouzbékistan, du Turkménistan, du Kazakhstan, etc., doivent servir d’exemple pour les peuples d’Orient, l’Ukraine, à son tour, doit montrer comment le prolétariat résout les problèmes de libération des masses asservies, les problèmes de la construction de l’État dans les républiques nationales, dans le cadre du système soviétique. Nous devons montrer comment on peut réaliser l’union volontaire des républiques soviétiques tout en accordant aux masses jusque-là asservies le maximum de liberté et d’initiative dans la construction de leur État (gosudarstvennost´), dans le développement de leur économie, dans la mise en valeur de leur culture nationale, dans l’initiation de millions de gens à la culture de la construction du socialisme. »13
36 La déclaration de Kaganovič faisait de la politique nationale du pouvoir soviétique en Ukraine une véritable politique de l’internationalisme. La question nationale en Ukraine était subordonnée à deux tâches principales : travailler à la construction du socialisme et renforcer la dictature du prolétariat. Une telle approche de classe de la question nationale en faisait un instrument au service de la révolution mondiale.
37 Le sens de l’intervention de Kaganovič au plenum commun du Comité central et de la Commission de contrôle centrale (CKK) du parti communiste ukrainien (26 février-3 mars 1927) répondait tout à fait à cette logique. Kaganovič affirmait que le but de l’ukrainisation n’était pas d’élever le niveau de conscience nationale, qui dans son esprit était liée à la question de l’« autonomie » de l’État ukrainien, indépendant de l’URSS. L’intérêt de l’ukrainisation était une intégration, plus réelle que pendant les années précédentes, de l’Ukraine dans l’URSS, fondée sur la modernisation économique du développement des forces de production de l’Ukraine. Cette politique fructueuse du parti communiste en Ukraine était illustrée par la construction du Dneprostroj, la centrale électrique la plus puissante d’URSS14.
38 Au Xe Congrès du KP(b)U (20-29 novembre 1927), Kaganovič lut un rapport du Comité central, dans lequel il formulait une série de thèses, qui devaient déterminer pour de longues années l’attitude de la direction soviétique à l’égard de la question nationale ukrainienne et la politique nationale du parti communiste en Ukraine. Il fallait considérer avant tout, selon Kaganovič, les menées de l’impérialisme mondial, qui préparait obstinément une guerre de classe contre l’URSS. La position géographique de l’Ukraine, avec des voisins « tendres » (milye), comme la Pologne et la Roumanie, faisait d’elle le premier pays à tomber sous les coups de l’ennemi.
39 Ce n’est pas un hasard si de nombreuses publications étrangères abordaient à cette époque le problème ukrainien et les perspectives de l’indépendance de l’Ukraine. Cependant, les intérêts de la Pologne, et donc de l’Angleterre, n’étaient pas dans la création d’un État ukrainien indépendant, mais dans la transformation de l’Ukraine en champ d’opérations dans la lutte contre l’Union Soviétique, ainsi que dans son asservissement économique et politique. Pour les États impérialistes, l’existence d’une Ukraine rouge, soviétique, représentait un danger ; par ailleurs, ces États étaient intéressés par un débouché sur la mer Noire et par la jonction, à travers le territoire de l’Ukraine, avec la Transcaucasie et la Perse.
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40 Cependant, il ressortait de la déclaration de Kaganovič qu’il ne serait jamais possible de faire de l’Ukraine soviétique une colonie. Il y eut à ce sujet des prises de position virulentes de la part du gouvernement de la République nationale d’Ukraine (UNR) en exil, considéré comme un gouvernement d’opérette.
41 Après avoir fait justice de ses adversaires politiques potentiels, Kaganovič notait que l’État ukrainien ne pouvait croître et se développer que dans le cadre de la dictature du prolétariat. Le secret était simple : le système soviétique, le parti et le bolchevisme. « L’explication, affirmait Kaganovič, c’est que la révolution d’Octobre a conjugué la révolution agraire avec la révolution prolétarienne, la révolution nationale avec la révolution socialiste. L’exemple le plus probant de la force et de la puissance de la révolution d’Octobre est qu’elle a relié et résolu la question nationale et la construction d’un État national, pour parler concrètement, d’un État ukrainien, à l’accomplissement des tâches de la révolution prolétarienne et à la construction du socialisme. »
42 Il est intéressant de noter que Kaganovič ne fit aucune objection quand un des leaders mencheviks, Noj Åordanij, déclara que les bolcheviks avaient reconstitué la nation ukrainienne, qui se caractérisait dans le passé comme une « nation non historique ». Bien au contraire, Kaganovič parla avec fierté des réalisations de l’ukrainisation, de la politique culturelle des bolcheviks, à laquelle il accordait une attention particulière. Il souleva un tonnerre d’applaudissements dans les rangs des participants au congrès quand il donna l’exemple des deux fils de Tarass Boulba (dans le récit du même nom de Gogol) : « Au moment de l’exécution d’Ostap à Varsovie, celui-ci fut ferme et stoïque, il s’écria seulement : ‘Père, où es-tu ? M’entends-tu ?’, son père, Tarass Boulba, lui cria : ‘Je t’entends, mon fils’. Nous aussi, l’Ukraine soviétique, quand Ostap nous appellera et nous criera : ‘M’entends-tu ?’, nous crierons : ‘Oui, nous t’entendons’. Vive la politique nationale léniniste de la révolution mondiale prolétarienne ! »
43 Après son intervention, Kaganovič reçut des délégués du congrès un certain nombre de billets anonymes, désagréables pour lui, à l’entendre, au sujet de Šumskij et du « šumskizm », ainsi que du budget de l’Ukraine. Dans son allocution finale, Kaganovič, agacé, déclara : « Si cet individu veut dire que nous n’avons pas d’État (gosudarstvennost´), comme l’a dit hier le camarade Ljubčenko [P. Ljubčenko avait critiqué les déclarations de certains communistes qui prétendaient que l’Ukraine, au sein de l’URSS, n’avait pas d’État], il veut donc que nous ayons des frontières douanières étanches, qu’une clôture nous sépare de l’Union soviétique. Il veut qu’à Belgorod il y ait un cordon, que pour aller à Moscou, nous ayons besoin d’un passeport diplomatique pour l’étranger. Mais nous, nous disons que, dans la tâche que nous menons conjointement avec le prolétariat des autres républiques de l’Union, dont le but est le renforcement de l’État prolétarien, nous n’avons pas besoin de cette notion d’État souverain (nam takaja deržavnost´ ne nužna). Nous avons besoin d’élargir progressivement nos frontières, pour que progressivement les frontières qui existent entre nous et la RSFSR existent entre nous et la future république socialiste polonaise soviétique. »15
44 Ainsi, dès le milieu des années 1920, suivant les indications de Stalin, Kaganovič fut le partisan le plus décidé de l’ukrainisation. La vision marxiste, caractéristique de la direction du parti communiste, et l’évaluation en terme de classes du développement de la société faisaient apparaître l’Ukraine comme l’une des composantes essentielles de l’URSS et, parallèlement, comme un terrain d’opérations pour étendre la révolution mondiale prolétarienne aux pays d’Europe occidentale. L’exemple qu’avaient donné les
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bolcheviks en montrant comment résoudre la question nationale en Ukraine au cours du processus d’ukrainisation, comment construire un État (gosudarstvennost´) soviétique ukrainien, comment faire participer des millions d’Ukrainiens auparavant analphabètes à des processus culturels, devait renforcer le pouvoir du parti communiste en Ukraine (l’URSS se renforçant parallèlement comme base de la construction du socialisme dans un seul pays) et exercer sur les peuples d’Europe une grande influence en faveur de la révolution. C’est pourquoi « la politique nationale léniniste », dans l’interprétation de Kaganovič, était une politique de révolution prolétarienne mondiale, ce qui correspondait tout à fait aux vues de Lenin et de Stalin.
Comment Kaganovič était informé par la GPU d’Ukraine
45 La conception marxiste de la politique chez Kaganovič apparaissait dans l’élaboration non seulement de la stratégie, mais encore de la tactique du parti communiste en Ukraine. Cette conception reposait sur la théorie de la lutte des classes. L’intervention de Kaganovič au IXe Congrès du KP(b)U (6-12 décembre 1925) est très significative sous ce rapport : « Nous n’avons pas seulement pris le pouvoir dans un pays isolé, mais nous sommes capables, également, dans les conditions très complexes et difficiles d’un double encerclement -- encerclement intérieur par un nombre énorme de 22 millions d’exploitations paysannes dispersées et encerclement du capitalisme mondial --, nous sommes capables dans ces conditions des plus difficiles, d’avancer dans la construction d’une véritable économie socialiste. »
46 Pour Kaganovič, pendant ces années-là, la construction du socialisme, c’était avant tout la lutte de l’économie socialiste, c’est-à-dire de l’industrie d’État contre le capitalisme privé dont les représentants étaient les nepmen et les koulaks qui, dans le contexte de la NEP, avaient commencé à revendiquer des droits politiques ; aux yeux de Kaganovič, c’était absolument inadmissible.
47 De cette analyse des phénomènes sociaux découlait logiquement le rôle de premier plan que devaient jouer les organes de la GPU dans la construction du socialisme. Cela explique pourquoi Kaganovič, avec le style grossier qui lui était habituel, s’en prit avec virulence, dans son intervention au IXe Congrès du parti, au social-démocrate allemand Karl Kautsky, qui avait dit que les bolcheviks avaient mieux saisi l’art de la police que l’essence de l’enseignement de Karl Marx. Kaganovič déclara avec beaucoup d’aplomb : « Nous ne nions pas le fait que nous avons effectivement acquis une grande expérience dans l’art de la police politique, que notre GPU travaille très bien et que, si Kautsky arrivait chez nous, il pourrait sentir le poids de cette main [rires, applaudissements]. Nous ne contesterons pas cela. À vrai dire, nous pensons même que, si Marx vivait chez nous, il serait l’un de nos meilleurs tchékistes [rires, applaudissements], car c’est lui le premier qui a avancé l’idée de dictature du prolétariat, comme idée d’une dictature impitoyable, destinée à écraser la résistance des exploiteurs et de leurs laquais. »16
48 L’idée d’une dictature impitoyable, fonctionnant avec l’aide d’une police politique, c’est-à-dire de la GPU, était appliquée par Kaganovič d’une façon très conséquente. Au IXe Congrès, il raconta aux délégués qu’il avait rencontré en juin 1925 les anciens leaders politiques ukrainiens. Comme il a déjà été indiqué plus haut, il avait évalué
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l’énorme danger qu’ils représentaient dans le contexte de la recrudescence de l’activité de forces de classes potentiellement hostiles au parti communiste.
49 Dans une communication devant le Politbjuro du Comité central du KP(b)U, le 26 juin 1925, Kaganovič mentionna une conversation qu’il avait eue avec A. Krymskij, M. Gruševskij et Doroškevič. L’ordre fut donné de constituer une commission « pour étudier la question de l’intelligentsia ukrainienne [...], et la tactique à adopter à son égard, en particulier à l’égard de l’Académie et de Grušev-skij [...]. » Cette commission fut composée de Kaganovič, V. Čubar´, A. Šumskij, G. Grin´ko et B. Balickij.
50 Au cours de cette même réunion, la situation politique dans la république fit l’objet d’un rapport de la GPU. Dans la résolution adoptée ensuite, il était prévu d’augmenter les moyens destinés à « l’activité de renseignement et à la lutte contre le sabotage de la GPU d’Ukraine, car l’Ukraine était le principal terrain d’opérations de la lutte entre l’Union soviétique et les armées de Pologne et de Roumanie ». Une commission spéciale fut créée, comprenant le secrétaire du Comité central du KP(b)U, M. Vladimirskij, ainsi que V. Balickij et d’autres dirigeants ukrainiens. La conférence fonctionnait comme un organe permanent qui suivait la situation dans la république, en accordant une attention particulière à l’activité des conseils religieux (cerkovnye sovety)17. Ces derniers, selon l’opinion de Kaganovič, telle qu’elle s’était exprimée au IXe Congrès du parti, étaient les foyers de l’activité croissante des nepmen et des koulaks. La religion étant considérée par Kaganovič comme « l’un des éléments de la politique de la classe bourgeoise », il était tout à fait logique que l’Église fût au centre de l’attention de la direction du parti et de la GPU.
51 L’intelligentsia ukrainienne et l’Église (en particulier l’Église orthodoxe ukrainienne autocéphale) n’étaient pas les seules à être considérées comme contre-révolutionnaires par Kaganovič : il y avait également le mouvement sioniste, le mouvement monarchiste et le mouvement en faveur de Petljura. Il n’y avait pas, bien entendu, de mouvements organisés de ce type dans l’Ukraine de 1925, mais il existait bien dans la société différents courants, pas du tout en faveur du régime soviétique18.
52 Dans l’ensemble, il importe de noter que la direction politique de l’Ukraine avait repéré une série de problèmes et identifié les forces et les structures qui lui étaient hostiles d’un point de vue de classe, et sur l’état d’esprit et l’activité desquelles elle souhaitait que la GPU de la république la tienne informée19.
53 Après le IXe Congrès du parti, les informations et les rapports de la GPU furent assez régulièrement examinés pendant les réunions du Politbjuro ukrainien. Le 8 janvier 1926, par exemple, ce dernier examina une communication de la GPU au sujet de la situation politique en Ukraine, ainsi qu’un certain nombre d’autres informations. Une commission spéciale fut créée afin d’examiner les rapports (svodki) de la GPU. Le 22 février 1926, cette commission examina une note de la GPU concernant les groupes religieux, et débattit également de l’état d’esprit de l’intelligentsia ukrainienne. En outre, le Politbjuro du parti écouta, en 1926, un exposé du Département de contre- espionnage de la GPU sur la situation des colonies étrangères en Ukraine, ainsi qu’un exposé de la GPU sur l’action menée dans les milieux du clergé catholique romain et des colonies polonaises20.
54 En 1926, au sein des organes de la GPU apparurent des circulaires, l’une, du 30 mars, sur « la société (obščestvennost´) ukrainienne », l’autre, du 4 septembre, sur « le séparatisme ukrainien ». L’analyse de ce dernier document montre que les « agents du
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nationalisme ukrainien » qui y étaient désignés correspondaient tout à fait aux définitions de Kaganovič, telles qu’elles s’étaient exprimées au IXe Congrès. De plus les tendances séparatistes étaient reconnues comme « l’axe de l’idéologie officielle » de la contre-révolution ukrainienne. On notait au sein de la société ukrainienne « l’émergence » (vsplyvanie) de l’idée d’un État national (nacional´naja gosudarstvennost´)21. Ainsi, les tchékistes ukrainiens voyaient dans le séparatisme qui s’exprimait dans la société au cours du processus d’ukrainisation une menace pour l’intégrité de l’URSS.
55 De telles conclusions concrétisaient les idées politiques de Kaganovič, et, de plus, conduisaient à penser que le renforcement du rôle de la GPU dans l’activité des structures de l’État et du parti s’imposait. Rien d’étonnant, donc, à l’entrée de V. Balickij à l’Orgbjuro du Comité central du KP(b)U en novembre 1926 et à sa candidature au Comité central l’année suivante22.
56 Si l’on en juge d’après les procès-verbaux des séances du Politbjuro ukrainien en 1927, Balickij continua de tenir la direction ukrainienne informée de la situation dans la république, témoignant d’une activité particulière à la tête de la Commission pour les affaires juridiques et politiques auprès du Comité central. Au Xe Congrès du KP(b)U (20-29 novembre 1927), il déclara aux délégués que « l’opposition ukrainienne » avait des structures clandestines et était en contact avec l’étranger par l’intermédiaire des mencheviks23.
57 Au début de l’année 1928, le retour de la direction soviétique aux méthodes du communisme de guerre amena un durcissement du régime dans le pays. Kaganovič caractérisa ce tournant de la façon suivante : « Quand il s’agit du renforcement de la puissance politique et économique de la dictature du prolétariat, il ne saurait être question de délicatesse. Il faut agir en bolcheviks, serrer la vis s’il le faut, sans craindre d’offenser les uns ou les autres. »24
58 Ces paroles furent prononcées par Kaganovič au plenum du Comité central du parti, le 12 mars 1928, et les actions concrètes menées « en bolcheviks » désignaient les opérations des tchékistes pour « éliminer les militants ukrainiens antisoviétiques ». V. Balickij, qui avait utilisé ces termes, annonça à Kaganovič que l’opération menée en mars 1928 avait conduit à l’arrestation de plus de 400 personnes25.
59 Le 13 mars 1928, à la suite d’une communication sur « les arrestations dans les houllères du Don », le Politbjuro ukrainien jugea « nécessaire de poursuivre énergiquement l’enquête sur cette affaire, en procédant à toutes les arrestations voulues ». V. Balickij fit le voyage à Moscou pour assurer la coordination des actions dans « l’affaire de Šahtinsk » avec l’OGPU d’URSS26.
60 Le surlendemain, au cours du même plenum, Kaganovič fit une intervention sur « la contre-révolution économique et les tâches politiques de l’organisation du parti ». Selon lui, ce qui était nouveau dans « l’affaire de Šahtinsk », c’était « qu’elle avait un caractère politique nettement contre-révolutionnaire »27. De quelle « délicatesse », en effet, pouvait-il être question, quand il s’agissait d’une affaire judiciaire entièrement truquée par les organes de l’OGPU.
61 Le 4 mai 1928, le Politbjuro du Comité central décida, après l’intervention de Balickij, de procéder à de nouvelles arrestations parmi l’intelligentsia ukrainienne. Il fut conseillé à la GPU de s’intéresser à l’état d’esprit et aux groupements nationalistes parmi les anciens membres du KP(b)U, ainsi que de reprendre l’affaire de l’académicien Sergej Efremov28, figure bien connue de la vie publique ukrainienne. Deux ans plus tard, on
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fera de S. Efremov l’un des dirigeants de la mythique SVU (Spilka vyzvolennja Ukraïny, Union pour la libération de l’Ukraine), dont les membres seront condamnés à l’issue d’un procès truqué. Et les répressions politiques autour de l’affaire de la SVU concerneront des milliers de gens.
62 Kaganovič contribua donc personnellement, à la tête du parti ukrainien, à une interaction étroite de la direction politique de l’Ukraine et des organes de la GPU, ainsi qu’à l’intensification du rôle des tchékistes dans les structures du parti et de l’État en Ukraine. Grâce à l’action personnelle de Kaganovič, et sous sa direction, les organes de la GPU étaient passés, à la fin des années 1920, à une activité ouvertement terroriste et répressive.
63 Il reste une question intéressante, qui n’a pas été suffisamment étudiée : dans quelle mesure l’influence des tchékistes fut-elle déterminante dans la formation de l’opinion des dirigeants du parti et de l’État au sujet des orientations et de l’état de la vie sociale en Ukraine au milieu et à la fin des années 1920. Pour Šapoval, Pristajko et Zolotar´ov, « le glaive de la révolution » joua un rôle-clé dans ce processus.
64 Cependant, cette conclusion, juste dans l’ensemble, exige quelques précisions. Les documents de la GPU, conservés dans le fonds Kaganovič, permettent de faire une analyse de la lecture qu’en fit ce dernier et de son appréciation de l’information qu’ils contiennent. Pour les années 1920, on trouve en tout neuf documents. Deux d’entre eux sont très significatifs pour la problématique de notre recherche.
65 Le premier document intitulé « Panorama de la situation politique en Ukraine au 3 novembre 1925 (d’après les matériaux de la GPU) », fut préparé par le responsable du Département de l’information et des statistiques du Comité central du KP(b)U, Mar ´jasin. Il n’a pas été possible de préciser l’identité de l’agent de la GPU qui a fourni les matériaux ayant servi de base à ce rapport de Mar´jasin.
66 Si l’on en juge par le nombre de remarques et d’annotations dans la marge, le texte a fait l’objet d’un examen attentif de la part de Kaganovič. Le document traitait de la montée du mécontentement chez les ouvriers et de la multiplication des grèves dans les entreprises d’Ukraine. L’auteur du texte (Mar´jasin n’y a pratiquement apporté aucune modification) annonçait une montée de l’antagonisme entre les ouvriers et la direction des usines. Les raisons de cette situation étaient la brutalité et l’arbitraire à l’égard des ouvriers, la mauvaise gestion des administrateurs, l’inégalité économique (qui recouvrait essentiellement l’inégalité sociale).
67 Le document mentionnait également le manque d’autorité des syndicats et le fossé qui les séparait des ouvriers. D’après l’agent de la GPU, auteur du document, l’antisémitisme, ayant pour origine une insatisfaction matérielle, se développait largement dans la société. L’atmosphère était considérée comme tendue parmi les chômeurs chez qui on soulignait particulièrement le développement du hooliganisme.
68 Le mécontentement des paysans avait sa source dans les défauts du système des impôts, le prix très bas du pain, la réglementation agraire. Par ailleurs, les paysans aisés manifestaient une grande activité sociale : « Notre pouvoir, c’est notre terre » (Naša vlast´ -- naša zemlja), « sans nous, les paysans riches, vous ne valez rien ». Le moral des membres des Comités de paysans pauvres (Komitety nezamožnyh seljan -- KNS), sur lesquels s’appuyait le parti communiste dans les campagnes, était au plus bas. Le document traitait à part des groupements antisoviétiques, parmi lesquels, était-il noté, les sionistes se distinguaient par leur activisme.
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69 Après lecture du texte, Kaganovič rédigea une résolution à l’intention des membres du Comité central du parti : « Au camarade Andruščenko. Prière de me transmettre tous les matériaux utilisés par le Département de l’information pour préparer ce rapport. Prière de s’informer du nombre d’exemplaires imprimés et de les retirer de la circulation. » De plus, Kaganovič ordonnait « que soient produits les faits (quantitatifs et qualitatifs) qui avaient servi de fondement à d’aussi audacieuses généralisations »29.
70 Ces dernières remarques de Kaganovič montraient qu’il était mécontent des conclusions formulées dans le rapport. Il exigeait de la GPU des faits, et s’il le faisait ce n’était pas seulement pour vérifier les conclusions du tchékiste et leur traitement par Mar´jasin. Il me semble que Kaganovič entendait ici souligner clairement qu’il se réservait, et à lui seul, le droit de formuler des conclusions politiques et des généralisations. Cela était tout à fait normal de la part d’un dirigeant du parti, chargé d’asseoir le pouvoir en Ukraine. Mais cela imposait également à la GPU de rester dans un cadre de commande politique précise, et soulignait que le dirigeant du parti communiste ukrainien portait plus d’intérêt à l’information fournie par les tchékistes qu’à l’analyse qu’ils en faisaient.
71 Il importe de souligner que l’opinion de Kaganovič sur la situation politique en Ukraine ne dépendait pas uniquement des informations fournies par la GPU. Kaganovič suivait fidèlement les idées et les directives de Stalin, et tenait compte également de ses impressions personnelles, fruit de rencontres et de relations avec différentes personnes, sans quoi il n’aurait pu mener une action de leader politique. Il recevait continuellement des informations des organes locaux du parti, ainsi que de ses compagnons de lutte dans les plus hautes instances de la direction politique ukrainienne.
72 Les matériaux fournis par la GPU étaient une composante importante du système général d’information concernant la situation politique de la société ukrainienne, mais, en fin de compte, l’opinion, les appréciations et les conclusions de Kaganovič dépendaient d’un grand nombre de canaux d’information. Qui plus est, les jugements politiques exprimés par Kaganovič indiquaient à la GPU la ligne à suivre dans son investigation sur l’état de la société.
73 Il reste, bien sûr, que les tchékistes, accomplissant les missions qui leur avaient été confiées, fournissaient à la direction du parti des données factuelles, sur la base desquelles ils formulaient, dans le cadre de leurs compétences, leurs propres conclusions, qui confirmaient les lignes politiques déjà fixées, en l’occurrence, par Kaganovič.
74 Le caractère spécifique de l’activité des services de sécurité soviétiques les amenait à considérer tous les cas de mécontentement ou de divergence comme hostiles au régime en place. Cela correspondait aux traditions d’intolérance idéologique et politique qui régnaient au sein du parti bolchevik. Cela confortait la direction du parti dans l’idée de sa légitimité et de son action indispensable dans « la guerre de classe permanente », qui se déroulait prétendument dans la société, et leur permettait, consciemment et inconsciemment, de se sentir en permanence des combattants, des révolutionnaires, des prophètes guidant l’humanité vers un monde radieux à travers l’apocalypse du « vieux monde », c’est-à-dire la révolution mondiale prolétarienne.
75 Parallèlement, la dictature impitoyable, établie dans le pays avec l’aide de la GPU, permettait d’étouffer toute résistance dans la société. La police politique soviétique, en
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recherchant les mécontents et les dissidents, justifiait son existence aux yeux de la direction du parti.
76 L’existence d’un tel « cercle fermé » (zamknutyj krug) d’idéologie politique irréelle et d’une pratique d’un régime antidémocratique et dictatorial est confirmée par le deuxième document, analysé ci-dessous. Il s’agit d’un rapport de V. Balickij : « Le regain d’activité de la contre-révolution ukrainienne » adressé à Kaganovič fin mai -- début juin 1928. Presque toutes les pages de ce texte, qui en comporte soixante et une, portent des remarques de Kaganovič au crayon rouge.
77 Il est intéressant de noter que Balickij situait le regain d’activité des éléments nationalistes ukrainiens dans la première moitié de l’année 1926. De plus, il établissait un lien entre ce processus soi-disant observé dans la société et l’arrivée au pouvoir en Pologne de Pisudski, dans lequel les nationalistes ukrainiens voyaient « le vieil allié et le protecteur de Petljura ».
78 Cependant, les conclusions du rapport concernant la vigoureuse montée en force des nationalistes ukrainiens et le début d’une nouvelle étape de leur lutte contre le pouvoir soviétique, ne me semblent pas solidement étayées par des données factuelles. Au lieu de cela, Balickij se contentait de la traditionnelle formulation qui voyait la source de cette recrudescence de l’activité des éléments nationalistes ukrainiens dans le renforcement « des couches capitalistes des campagnes ukrainiennes, constituées par les koulaks ». Le koulak aspirait à un système économique et politique qui ne ferait pas obstacle à son développement. Le koulak faisait pression sur l’intelligentsia ukrainienne des villes, qui exprimait ses aspirations, en les revêtant d’une forme nationaliste.
79 Une telle argumentation de la part de Balickij amène logiquement à se poser la question : la montée en puissance des éléments nationalistes en Ukraine commença-t- elle réellement au début de l’année 1926? Ou bien cette prétendue « montée en puissance » (loin de moi l’idée de contester l’activité de la société ukrainienne dans le contexte de l’ukrainisation) a-t-elle été enregistrée par Balickij après les directives données par Kaganovič au IXe Congrès du KP(b)U30 ?
80 Il me semble que la deuxième question appelle une réponse positive. En tout cas, si l’on compare méthodiquement le rapport de Balickij de juin 1928 avec la circulaire déjà mentionnée de la GPU « Sur le séparatisme ukrainien » en date du 4 septembre 1926, on y trouve un grand nombre de détails semblables aux conclusions du précédent document. D’une part, c’était un document qui tentait de prouver le développement des tendances contre-révolutionnaires et séparatistes du mouvement national ukrainien au cours des deux années précédentes. D’autre part, le document contenait un tableau développé des tendances « contre-révolutionnaires » et de l’activité « antisoviétique » au sein de la société ukrainienne, qui servit de point d’appui à la politique de répression de la GPU en Ukraine dans les années 1930.
81 Il est indispensable, pour conclure cette recherche, de noter que le système d’information de Kaganovič par la GPU au cours des années 1920, malgré toute son importance, n’était qu’un des multiples canaux du système par lequel l’information parvenait aux instances dirigeantes de l’Ukraine. Les directives de la direction du parti, et en particulier celles de Kaganovič, jouaient un rôle déterminant dans les matériaux d’information fournis par la GPU. L’utilisation par les instances dirigeantes d’Ukraine de ces informations permettait aux leaders du parti d’entreprendre des actions
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politiques et idéologiques tout à fait ciblées, destinées à renforcer le régime et le pouvoir du parti communiste.
82 Il est bien évident que les conclusions avancées dans le présent articles demandent à être approfondies. Pour élargir cette étude des problèmes de l’information des instances dirigeantes d’Ukraine par la GPU il faudrait s’appuyer sur un corpus d’archives plus étendu. Seul un accès plus large des chercheurs aux matériaux de la GPU peut apporter un nouvel éclairage sur l’étude de la place et du rôle de la police politique soviétique dans la vie de la société.
83 (Traduit du russe par Yvette Lambert)
84 Institut d’histoire de l’Ukraine
85 Académie des sciences d’Ukraine
86 Kiev
87 e-mail : [email protected]
NOTES
1. Stanislav Kul´čic´kij, Komunizm v Ukraïni : perše desjatyrič©ja (1918-1928), Kiev, 1996, pp. 48, 251, 253. 2. Jurij Šapoval, Volodymyr Prystajko, Vadym Zolotar´ov, ČK-GPU-NKVD v Ukraïni : osoby, fakty, dolumenty, Kiev, 1997, p. 27. 3. L’auteur tient à exprimer ses remerciements et sa reconnaissance à E.A. Riz, O. Hlevnjuk, Ju. Šapoval pour les conseils utiles et les consultations qu’ils lui ont accordés pendant la préparation de cette recherche. 4. Ju. Šapoval, Lazar´ Kaganovič, Kiev, 1994, p. 5. 5. Ibid. ; LKaganovič, Pamjatnye zapiski rabočego, kommunista-bol´ševika, profsokuznogo, partijnogo i sovetsko-gosudarstvennogo rabotnika, Moscou, 1996, p. 373. 6. Izvestija, 5 mai 1925. 7. R. Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution, Londres-Basingstoke, 1979, p. 128. 8. James E. Mace, Communism and the dilemmas of national liberation : National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918-1933, Cambridge, MA, 1983 ; Ju. I. Šapoval, Ljudyna i systema (Štryhy do portretu totalitarnoï doby v Ukraïni), Kiev 1994, pp. 10-13. 9. James E. Mace, op. cit., pp. 95-106. 10. Rossijskij Gosudarstvennyj Arhiv Social´no-Političeskoj Istorii (RGASPI), f. 81, op. 3, d. 99, l. 1. 11. Cf. V.I. Stalin, Sočinenija, t. 8, pp.149-150. 12. Central´nyj Gosudarstvennyj Arhiv Obščestvennyh Organizacii Ukrainy (CGAOO Ukrainy), f. 1, op. 6, d. 88, ll. 118-120.
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13. Cette discussion au plénum concernant les questions de la réalisation de la politique nationale en Ukraine a déjà fait l’objet d’une analyse scientifique : cf. E. Mace, op. cit., pp. 103-105 ; M.I. Pančuk, « ‘Nacional uhyl´nyctvo’. Anatomija problemy », in Maršrutamy istorii, Kiev, 1990, pp. 228-229 ; CGAOO Ukrainy, f. 1, op. 1, d. 205, ll. 9-10, 17, 31-32, 37, 45, 57, 179, 195, 199, 201, 208-209, 227, 308; d. 209, l. 1; RGASPI, f. 81, op. 3, d. 107, ll. 12-13, 19-20. 14. CGAOO Ukrainy, f. 1, op. 1, d. 253, l. 13. 15. RGASPI, f. 81, op. 3, d. 106, ll. 2-7v., 9-11, 17 ; CGAOO Ukrainy, f. 1, op. 1, d. 229, l. 195. 16. Citations tirées du sténogramme corrigé par Kaganovič du IXe Congrès du KP(b)U. Cf. CGAOO Ukrainy, f. 1, op. 1, d. 134, ll.90,100. 17. V. Pristajko, Ju. Šapoval, Mihajlo Gruševs´kij : sprava « UNC » i ostanni roky (1931-1934), Kiev, 1999, p. 38 ; Ju. Šapoval, V. Pristajko, V. Zolotar´ov, ČK-GPU-NKVD..., op. cit., pp. 232-233 ; CGAOO Ukrainy, f. 1, op. 16, d. 1, l. 178 ; op. 6, d. 58, l. 95. 18. CGAOO Ukrainy, f. 1, op. 1, d. 134, ll. 142-143. 19. Roman Podkur a justement fait remarquer que les problèmes mis en lumière dans les matériaux fournis par la GPU étaient déterminés par les plus hautes instances politiques de la république et du pays ainsi que par les comités locaux du parti. Cf. R. Podkur, « Informacijno-analalityčna rabota jak odyn z naprjamkiv dijal´nosti specslužb v 20-30-h rokah », Z arhiviv VUČK-GPU-NKVD-KGB, 1-2, 1998, p. 353. 20. CGAOO Ukrainy, f. 1, op. 16, d. 2, ll. 5-6, 79-114, 117-123, 124-133, 135-138, 142-143. 21. Ju. Šapoval, V. Pristajko, V. Zolotar´ov, ČK-GPU-NKVD..., op. cit., pp. 255, 259. 22. Storinky istoriï Kompartiï Ukraïny : zapytannja i vidpovidi, Kiev, 1990, pp. 453, 467. 23. X z´ïzd KP(b)U, 20-29 lystopada 1927 r. Stenograf. Zvit., X, 1928, p. 213. 24. CGAOO Ukrainy, f. 1, op. 1, d. 284, l. 16v. 25. RGASPI, f. 81, op. 3, d. 127, ll. 292-293. 26. À cette date, des arrestations furent opérées dans l’okrug de Šahtinsk qui était passé de l’Ukraine à la RSFSR en 1925. 27. CGAOO Ukrainy, f. 1, op. 1, d. 284, l. 78 28. V.I. Pristajko, Ju.I. Šapoval, Sprava « Spilky vyzvolennja Ukraïny » : nevidomi dokumenty i fakty. Naukovo-dokumental´ne vydannja, Kiev, 1995, p. 44. 29. RGASPI, f. 81, op. 3, d. 127, l. 3. 30. Ibid., l. 235.
RÉSUMÉS
Résumé Notre article examine le rôle de L. Kaganovič dans l’élaboration et la mise en place de la politique du pouvoir soviétique en Ukraine dans les années 1920, ainsi que la façon dont Kaganovič était
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informé par les organes de la GPU. Sur la base de nouveaux documents d’archives conservés dans le fonds personnel de Kaganovič au RGASPI, nous étudions comment les dirigeants du parti communiste voyaient la politique de l’ukrainisation, le mouvement nationaliste ukrainien et l’industrialisation. La volonté des dirigeants d’intégrer l’Ukraine à l’URSS le plus complètement possible, d’utiliser le mouvement nationaliste ukrainien pour légitimer leur pouvoir et élargir le fondement social du régime communiste faisait partie intégrante de cette vision. En même temps, Kaganovič, avec le soutien de Stalin, voyait dans l’Ukraine une base pour le déploiement de la révolution prolétarienne mondiale vers les pays d’Europe de l’Ouest. Le concept de lutte des classes et l’idée d’une dictature brutale du prolétariat étaient le fondement de la conception qu’avait Kaganovič des processus sociaux. Selon lui, les organes de la GPU devaient jouer un rôle crucial dans la construction du socialisme en Ukraine. D’un côté, il donnait des instructions politiques et idéologiques à la GPU qui prédéterminaient la direction de l’activité des tchékistes, même en ce qui concernait le renseignement, et de l’autre, les renseignements de la GPU permettaient aux dirigeants communistes de prendre des mesures politiques et idéologiques extrêmement précises visant à maintenir le cap politique et à renforcer le pouvoir du parti communiste en Ukraine.
Abstract The informational system of the GPU: How L. Kaganovich was informed about the Ukrainian political situation in the 1920s. Our article examines what role L. Kaganovich played in the elaboration and realization of the Soviet leaders’ political program in Ukraine in the 1920s and how he got information from GPU organs. Based on new archive materials held in Kaganovich’s personal files at RGASPI, our study analyzes specific features of party leaders’ approach to Ukrainization, to the Ukrainian nationalist movement and to industrialization. Party leaders aimed primarily at integrating Ukraine in the Soviet Union as thoroughly as possible and at using the Ukrainian nationalist movement to legitimate their power and enlarge the social basis of the communist regime. At the same time, Kaganovich, with Stalin’s support, viewed Ukraine as an operating ground for spreading world proletarian revolution to West European countries.
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Les organes du contrôle d’État et les journaux dans l’URSS de Stalin : des auxiliaires de la police politique ?
François-Xavier Nérard
1 La dénonciation1 dans l’URSS des années 1930 n’est pas un phénomène caché2. Bien au contraire, le pouvoir lui assure une visibilité importante. Les Soviétiques y sont confrontés quotidiennement : dans les journaux, à la radio, dans les réunions publiques... Il existe un réseau relativement vaste de capteurs de la dénonciation3 : ce réseau s’organise autour d’un pôle secret (la police politique) et d’un pôle public aux diverses ramifications. Comme dans la plupart des États modernes, on peut porter plainte -- une des modalités de la dénonciation -- auprès d’un tribunal4. Mais ce qui frappe surtout, c’est l’ampleur prise par d’autres capteurs de la dénonciation : le parti, les secrétariats de personnalités, les médias et les organes du contrôle d’État (Goskontrol´, RKI, CKK, KSK, KPK5). Leur nombre et la propagande que le pouvoir organise en faveur de la dénonciation constituent une réelle spécificité du régime bolchevik6. Pourquoi le pouvoir assure-t-il une telle place à cette pratique et la sort-il du secret qui est le plus souvent son lot ? Parmi ces capteurs, certains, comme les journaux, ne servent que de boîtes de réception, d’autres sont dotés de pouvoirs répressifs (OGPU/NKVD, CKK/RKI, parti, etc.) Pourquoi une telle architecture ? Quel est le fonctionnement interne de ce système complexe ? Quels sont les rapports entre les organes de sécurité et le pôle public de la dénonciation ? Quel est le rôle de la police politique dans la gestion de la dénonciation ? Comment la population, en permanence sollicitée, répond-elle à ces multiples appels à dénoncer (signalizirovat´) ?
I. Le système de recueil de la dénonciation
1. Promouvoir la dénonciation
2 Le pouvoir, avide de renseignements et de collaboration, multiplie pendant les années 30 les appels à la dénonciation ; mais ces derniers sont souvent très flous quant au
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destinataire des « signaux ». L’historien peine aujourd’hui à trouver une homogénéité dans les instructions du pouvoir : il n’y a pas, à notre connaissance, de texte canonique qui indiquerait, en fonction du sujet de la dénonciation, l’organisme auquel elle doit être adressée. Plutôt que d’aiguiller les dénonceurs7, on préfère des phrases très générales qui insistent surtout sur la transmission de l’information. Cette attitude est bien résumée par une formule du président de la Commission de contrôle soviétique (KSK), Nikolaj Antipov : « Tout citoyen d’Union soviétique, s’il voit ou s’il estime quelque chose d’irrégulier, peut écrire à qui il veut, au président du Conseil des commissaires du peuple, ou au Comité central de notre parti, ou au Comité central des syndicats, bref où il veut. [...]. »8
3 La liste serait longue de ces campagnes où la participation des masses passe par la dénonciation : autocritique9 (1928), mise à jour des listes de lišency lors des élections aux soviets de 1930, « semaine des bureaux des plaintes »10 en 1932, attaques de Stalin contre les bureaucrates à la tribune du XVIIe congrès, relance du mot samokritika en 193711, appels à la vigilance lors des purges du parti12.
4 Leur objet varie, mais le message reste le même. Il faut signaler au pouvoir toutes les irrégularités constatées. C’est l’acte même d’information du pouvoir qui importe. L’aspect concret de la démarche (« où faut-il adresser les signaux ? ») passe le plus souvent au second plan. Ainsi, l’appel du Comité central, texte fondateur de la campagne de la samokritika (autocritique) publié par la Pravda le 3 juin 1928 désigne bien les maux à dénoncer (alcoolisme, bureaucratisme...), il n’oublie pas de préciser que la samokritika doit viser des personnes concrètes mais ne dit pas réellement où doit s’exercer cette critique (même si certaines instances, notamment la RKI, sont évoquées). De même, lorsque l’organe du Comité régional (krajkom) du parti de la région de Saratov13 incite ses lecteurs à « comptabiliser et [à] démasquer les étrangers », il ne mentionne que les « bureaux d’archives et les autres administrations des organes ».
5 Il serait exagéré de dire que, dans ce concert d’appels à dénoncer, les « organes » ont une place privilégiée. Il n’y a certes pas besoin de leur faire une publicité excessive, leur notoriété est suffisante : signaler des personnes déviantes à la police politique, c’est signaler « là où il faut » (kuda sleduet) ! De temps à autre, le pouvoir rappelle à son devoir le bon citoyen, mais c’est à l’époque de la « Grande Terreur » que la dénonciation auprès du NKVD bénéficie de la visibilité la plus grande. En juillet 1937, Nikolaj Ežov est décoré de l’ordre de Lenin14, en décembre le pays fête le vingtième anniversaire, très médiatisé, des organes. Les journaux regorgent alors d’appels à collaborer avec le NKVD15. Pour célébrer Ežov, la Pravda soutient que « [...] le NKVD dispose déjà de millions d’yeux, de millions d’oreilles, de millions de mains de travailleurs [...] et en disposera d’autres encore. »16 Mikojan affirme : « Chez nous, chaque travailleur est un collaborateur du NKVD. » C’est aussi cette année-là, et pas avant, que, dans le courrier conservé dans les archives, les correspondants se vantent d’avoir à un moment ou à un autre dénoncé des gens au NKVD ou à la GPU. Toutefois, pour obtenir des renseignements, le pouvoir doit franchir un obstacle de taille, à savoir celui de la réticence à dénoncer à la police politique.
6 En effet, dénoncer à la GPU ou au NKVD reste dans les années 30 un acte difficile à accomplir. Une forte pression sociale continue à s’exercer autour de cette pratique moralement condamnée. Nombreux sont ceux qui renâclent à la coopération avec les
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« organes ». Le sentiment de franchir une ligne est net dans le cas de ce père rapportant les hésitations de son fils : « S. me conseilla de déclarer (zajavit´) à l’OGPU. Mihail ne voulait pas, mais j’ai insisté. J’ai estimé qu’il fallait révéler cette affaire, même s’ils devaient le tuer. J’ai pensé qu’un citoyen honnête était obligé de déclarer les saloperies qui se trament, même si la mort menace [...]. Nous avons déclaré à l’OGPU. Là, Mihail a encore demandé qu’on ne dévoile pas le nom du déclarant. »17
7 De plus, au début des années 30, cet opprobre tend à contaminer tout acte de transmission d’information. « Signaler » au pouvoir demeure synonyme de « dénoncer aux organes ». Ainsi, un dénonceur des malversations commises dans son entreprise est rejeté par ses collègues après que ses victimes ont fait courir le bruit qu’il les avait dénoncées à la GPU. Il s’en défend et affirme n’avoir écrit qu’au krajkom et à la RKI18. Le pouvoir tente de répondre à ces hésitations en offrant l’impunité aux dénonceurs et en faisant de la dénonciation un acte ordinaire.
2. Favoriser la pratique de la dénonciation
8 La peur des représailles étant vivace, l’anonymat des dénonceurs est garanti. De plus, l’État s’engage à les protéger s’ils sont victimes de sanctions à la suite de leur démarche. Dans un opuscule consacré à promouvoir l’envoi de correspondances aux journaux, on insiste sur cette protection de l’informateur trois fois en 23 pages ! « Sache que la rédaction gardera ton nom secret et ne le révélera à personne sauf aux organes judiciaires. Si l’on te persécute à cause de tes entrefilets (zametki), la protection de tous les organes du parti et de l’État ainsi que de la presse t’est assurée. Les lois soviétiques punissent ceux qui persécutent les collaborateurs des journaux. »19
9 Plus loin on rappelle la décision de la Cour suprême de la RSFSR (31-1-1925) qui assimile le dévoilement des noms des dénonceurs à une violation du secret de l’instruction. Cette promesse de protection revient comme un leitmotiv dans toute la littérature et correspond à une véritable demande. S’il y a peu de lettres anonymes parmi les signaux, nombreux sont les dénonceurs qui réclament avec insistance la non- divulgation de leur identité. « Ensuite je demande à tous les organes d’enquête de ne transmettre à personne mon adresse et mon nom de famille même à ceux que j’ai cités ici [...] et j’espère également que nul ne saura que j’ai écrit cette déclaration et que mes nerfs fragiles n’en souffriront pas. »20
10 Dans les faits, l’anonymat du dénonceur est souvent conservé, mais les exceptions sont nombreuses. La protection de l’informateur n’est pas un moyen suffisant pour convaincre les citoyens de franchir la ligne. Pour achever de persuader les réticents à la dénonciation, le pouvoir en banalise la pratique.
11 Ce phénomène est en effet attesté par de nombreux témoignages. Ainsi, un intellectuel moscovite, Ivan Ivanovič ·itc, dans des notes rédigées lors des quatre premières années de la « révolution stalinienne », souligne bien la visibilité que le pouvoir donnait aux dénonciations21. Il rapporte souvent, tout au long de son journal, et en particulier en 1929 et 1930, des cas de dénonciations. Dans ses notes du 12 juin 1929, il insiste sur le caractère massif et visible du phénomène : « Des dénonciations et des dénonciations sans fin. De tous sur tous. Orales et même publiées. Ils jugent nécessaire de trouver de la place dans les journaux pour des faits importants comme celui-ci : un étudiant, non seulement “continue d’avoir des
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relations” avec sa famille, mais mange à “la même table” que son père, “pope” (cf. Večernjaja gazeta, le 4 juin). Des nouvelles comme celle-là, il y en a quotidiennement autant qu’on veut. »22
12 Or, sans accès aux dossiers de l’OGPU ou des autres organisations, il n’a d’autre source pour estimer l’ampleur du phénomène que la publicité que lui donne le pouvoir. Cette présence importante de la dénonciation dans la société soviétique est fondamentale : le pouvoir soviétique cherche à affaiblir l’interdit moral qui pèse sur la dénonciation.
13 Comme le note bien ·itc23, la presse soviétique joue un rôle clef. Non pas tant par la publication de lettres de dénonciation stricto sensu que par la tonalité des matériaux publiés. On y multiplie les exemples, les attaques ad hominem. Ainsi, pendant le mois de janvier 1930, plus d’un numéro sur deux (13 sur 24) de l’organe du krajkom de Saratov, la Povol´žskaja pravda, contient des matériaux dénonciateurs (19 articles au total). Il s’agit de textes variés : reproduction de lettres de lecteurs, textes officiels faisant ou bien allusion à la pratique de la dénonciation ou bien l’encourageant, articles de journalistes dénonçant soit une pratique soit des personnes. Ces différents types de textes sont le quotidien de la presse soviétique : en juillet 1937, seuls sept numéros de la Pravda en sont exempts. Les 23 autres rassemblent 56 articles de ce genre, soit de deux à trois par numéro.
14 La dénonciation s’opère également lors des réunions publiques ou des réunions du parti. C’est bien sûr au cours des sessions de purge (au sens large du terme) que les appels à la dénonciation et les passages à l’acte lors des prenija (débats) rendent le phénomène très apparent. ·itc le note en juillet 1929 au sujet des « réélections » dans « l’enseignement supérieur » : « Les dénonciations [...] sont encouragées par tous les moyens, jusqu’à l’affichage dans des lieux visibles d’annonces où l’on demande de signaler (signalizirovat´), même sans signature, des informations sur l’activité des professeurs. »24
15 Cette pratique est également attestée lors de la purge de l’Académie des sciences en 1929. « Nous espérons recevoir de nombreuses déclarations (zajavlenija) écrites, au sujet du travail de l’Académie. Pour cela nous mettrons en place des boîtes spéciales, scellées, que personne ne pourra ouvrir sauf les membres de la commission. On acceptera aussi les déclarations anonymes, dans lesquelles de nombreux faits seront mentionnés. Ces faits, nous les vérifierons et, s’ils sont avérés, nous les porterons pour examen devant l’assemblée générale des collaborateurs. [...] Si les collaborateurs le souhaitent, nous ne donnerons pas leur nom même si, je le répète, chacun se trouvera sous notre protection. »25
16 Ce système d’appel à la dénonciation perdure tout au long des années 30 et en particulier en 1937 26.
17 Les journaux muraux (stengazety), fabriqués sur les lieux de travail, représentent le dernier moyen par lequel les Soviétiques sont en contact régulier et proche avec la dénonciation. Composés de courts articles pas toujours signés, certains « entrefilets accusateurs » (razoblačitel´nye zametki) peuvent être extrêmement violents. On insiste en effet pour qu’ils soient concrets. Ainsi, une sorte de mode d’emploi, publié par la Gor ´kovskaja kommuna en janvier 1937, indique que ces textes doivent préciser « qui est le porteur concret du mal », « un entrefilet dans lequel il n’y a pas de critique concrète ne sert à rien »27.
18 La dénonciation publique exclut, par définition, la police secrète qui travaille à l’abri des regards. Mais la multiplication des cas de dénonciation hors du système de la police
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politique et, surtout, leur visibilité, produit une accoutumance. On s’habitue à cet acte qui n’est plus systématiquement associé à la police politique. Renseigner le pouvoir devient une chose normale. La banalisation de la dénonciation est renforcée par le choix du vocabulaire28. Le mot russe habituel pour signifier dénonciation (donos) est rayé du vocabulaire pour faire place à une série de mots plus ou moins interchangeables (žaloba, zajavlenie, zametka : plainte, déclaration, remarque ou entrefilet) et surtout à celui de signal. Le mot donos, et la condamnation morale qu’il induit, restent associés au passé, au tsarisme. Il n’y a pas de donos dans la Russie soviétique.
3. La participation de la population
19 Cette politique pour obtenir de la population des renseignements rencontre un certain succès. La dénonciation, tous capteurs confondus, est très répandue en URSS dans les années 30. On ne dispose bien sûr que de peu de chiffres (aucun pour les services OGPU/NKVD) cependant, chaque jour, ce sont des centaines de milliers de lettres qui parviennent au pouvoir : Kalinin en reçoit près de 160 000 par an entre 1929 et 1934, le journal du parti pour la région de Gorki en reçoit 12 000 en 1934, le Bureau central des plaintes 32 000 en 1932... Si toutes les lettres29 ne sont pas des « signaux », les dénonciations représentent néanmoins une proportion importante du total (entre une lettre sur 5 et une lettre sur 3 selon les fonds et selon les périodes)30.
20 Les Soviétiques écrivent donc pour dénoncer. Le plus souvent - et ce, quelle que soit la période31 -, ils ont une approche extrêmement utilitaire du système qui est mis en place. Ils utilisent tous les capteurs. Une même lettre peut ainsi être adressée simultanément à plusieurs instances ; de même, au cours d’un conflit, différentes administrations peuvent être successivement contactées. C’est également le cas des « organes » : au début des années 30, comme le souligne avec peut-être trop d’emphase une correspondante de Molotov32, dénoncer à la GPU, c’est faire preuve d’un « courage inouï et d’audace » (neslyhannaja smelost´ i derzost´). Avec le temps, le recours à la police politique se banalise : ce n’est plus que l’une des instances qu’il faut savoir utiliser à bon escient.
21 On perçoit bien le caractère « interchangeable » des différents capteurs dans l’exemple suivant33. En 1935, un cadre d’un trust de machines-outils de la région de Smolensk détecte des dysfonctionnements dans son organisation (gaspillage des moyens d’État, alcoolisme, corruption de l’appareil) et les dénonce au NKVD de la région. L’affaire est enterrée à la suite de l’enquête de la police politique. Le dénonceur éconduit s’adresse alors par deux fois à la Commission de contrôle soviétique (KSK) qui finit par envoyer un représentant sur place. Celui-ci confirme les faits dénoncés. Pour l’auteur du signal, le NKVD et la KSK sont perçus comme des instances susceptibles de traiter la même information de déviance. Les Soviétiques semblent donc bien avoir intégré la leçon : écrire aux « organes » devient pour beaucoup un acte comparable à l’envoi d’une lettre à un journal ou au dépôt d’une plainte auprès d’un tribunal.
22 Il faut compléter ce tableau en insistant sur la volatilité des dénonceurs, très sensibles aux sollicitations du pouvoir. À la suite de la campagne de publicité autour des bureaux des plaintes en avril 1932, le Bureau central des plaintes à Moscou, qui avait reçu 4 000 plaintes en 1927, en reçoit plus de 32 000 en 1932 et près de 23 000 lors du premier semestre 193334. Les commissions ad hoc mises en place pour inspecter et purger les
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administrations concentrent les dénonciations35. En 1934, l’appareil de la Commission centrale de contrôle et de l’Inspection ouvrière et paysanne, l’une des instances fondamentales dans le traitement des dénonciations, est supprimé. Le XVIIe congrès, qui estime qu’il a « déjà joué son rôle positif », le remplace par deux institutions jumelles (KPK et KSK) moins indépendantes du Comité central. Il est difficile de déterminer les conséquences de ce changement. Certes moins puissantes, ces structures auraient dû moins attirer les dénonceurs pragmatiques. Pourtant, autant que l’on puisse en juger36, elles ont continué à jouer leur rôle de capteur.
23 Il est également indéniable que la visibilité donnée au NKVD en 1937-1938 attire les dénonciations. Des lettres qui ne lui auraient pas forcément été adressées en d’autres temps le sont sans aucun doute à ce moment-là. En 1937, plusieurs lettres de notre corpus adressées à de grands dignitaires du régime (Stalin, Molotov ou Kalinin) sont en même temps envoyées à Ežov37 alors qu’auparavant l’appel à Kalinin ou à un autre dirigeant semblait se suffire à lui-même.
24 On peut bien sûr, dans cette pratique de la dénonciation, constater une relative spécificité thématique : on dénoncera les cas de bureaucratisme plutôt à un Bureau des plaintes et un complot au NKVD ou à la GPU. Au besoin, on modifiera la forme de la dénonciation en fonction du destinataire. Les lettres de dénonciation adressées aux « organes » mettent plus facilement en cause la fiabilité politique de l’accusé mais tout cela est très ténu. L’impression générale est quand même celle d’une relative homogénéisation des différents capteurs dans l’esprit des dénonceurs. À la marge, jouent un effet d’aubaine, une certaine rationalité de la dénonciation, mais globalement on peut tout dénoncer, partout. Il importe maintenant d’analyser le fonctionnement de ces structures qui recueillent les dénonciations. Comment coopèrent-elles ? Les capteurs publics sont-ils des auxiliaires de la police politique ?
II. La gestion des dénonciations
1. Le domaine réservé de la police politique
25 Il existe sans aucun doute une collaboration entre les « organes » et les capteurs publics38. Celle-ci est néanmoins souvent unilatérale. On trouve en effet peu de « signaux » qui auraient été reçus par le NKVD et transmis à d’autres instances pour instruction39. De plus, cette collaboration est limitée : les capteurs civils de la dénonciation instruisent la grande majorité des signaux qu’ils reçoivent. Les bureaux des plaintes, les comités du parti, les représentants des organes de contrôle d’État sont autant d’instances qui traitent toutes les étapes de la dénonciation : réception, enquête, sanctions. Un certain nombre de lettres qui leur sont adressées sont pourtant systématiquement communiquées à la GPU ou au NKVD. C’est à ces dernières que nous nous intéresserons ici.
26 Deux catégories de lettres sont concernées : les lettres anonymes (anonimki) et celles qui mettent en cause des collaborateurs de la police politique.
27 Les lettres anonymes que l’on trouve dans les archives disponibles renferment dans leur grande majorité des attaques contre le pouvoir : insultes, menaces, critiques de la politique menée40 (en particulier au moment de la collectivisation mais également au moment de la Grande Terreur). Ainsi, en 1932, Kalinin reçoit des lettres où l’on peut lire :
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« Le soviet municipal de Sevsk, son conseil exécutif, sa milice, l’OGPU et aussi le conseil municipal, la milice et l’OGPU de Trubčevsk, ne sont qu’une bande de types culottés (nahaly) ! Dans ces trois districts (rajony) règne un chaos total, qui porte atteinte au pouvoir soviétique. Ils organisent des perquisitions nocturnes, des vols et puis, après les raids, des arrestations et des passages à tabac de tranquilles citoyens. » 41
28 Ces lettres souvent très violentes sont parfois tout simplement classées (« v arhiv »), mais, le plus souvent, elles sont confiées aux organes de sécurité pour identification et répression des auteurs. De façon plus générale, les lettres trop acerbes (même si elles sont signées) sont transmises à la police politique qui apparaît comme l’instrument de la répression de la « mauvaise » critique. Ainsi, pendant la campagne de samokritika, un secrétaire d’okružkom menace un journaliste qui critique avec trop d’enthousiasme d’une formule cassante : « Les “critiquards”, on les attrape avec la GPU. »42
29 Les lettres qui dénoncent l’action des organes font l’objet d’un traitement qui s’inscrit dans cette même logique de répression politique. Le responsable du secteur courrier de la Pravda explique, fin 1938, que les lettres, le plus souvent anonymes, qui dénoncent pendant la Grande Terreur l’emploi de la torture par le NKVD sont mises de côté lors d’un premier tri43. Visées par Manujlskij qui, à la direction de la Pravda, couvre le secteur lettres, elles sont transmises directement au secrétariat de Ežov et circulent le moins possible dans le but avoué de maintenir secret leur contenu. Elles sont traitées comme des « calomnies » qui visent le NKVD. Le secrétariat de Stalin n’en est même pas informé44.
30 Comme l’a déjà noté Merle Fainsod45, les lettres de dénonciation de collaborateurs du NKVD ou de l’OGPU qui parviennent à des capteurs publics y sont systématiquement renvoyées pour instruction46. Lorsqu’un tchékiste est accusé de malversations ou soupçonné d’être d’origine sociale douteuse, la RKI confie l’enquête (qui, pour tout autre citoyen, entrerait dans ses attributions) à la police politique. Même quand le dénonceur semble utiliser la RKI pour essayer de contrer la GPU en l’accusant de bureaucratisme, la lettre est envoyée à cette dernière. C’est ce qui arrive à cet habitant de Sébastopol qui envoie une première lettre à la CKK-RKI pour y dénoncer des « défauts dans le travail et dans le mode de fonctionnement (byt´) de l’OGPU ». Sa lettre est alors transmise « pour instruction (dlja razbora dela) » à un responsable de l’OGPU. Peu de temps après, il est arrêté. Sa deuxième lettre à la RKI où il dénonce le précédent dysfonctionnement est, encore une fois, transmise à l’OGPU47!
31 Tout ce qui concerne l’activité de l’OGPU ou du NKVD et leurs agents semble donc un domaine réservé, les capteurs civils de la dénonciation ne doivent pas s’en mêler. L’ensemble des capteurs agit là indéniablement dans le même but : étouffer toute contestation du pouvoir et surtout assurer la domination de la police politique. Dans ce cas, les capteurs civils, simples leurres, sont bien les auxiliaires de cette dernière.
32 Les lettres transmises à la police politique ne se limitent pas aux catégories précédemment mentionnées. Il est cependant très difficile de déterminer une logique de transmission des dossiers aux « organes ». Il semble bien qu’une certaine latitude soit laissée aux administrations compétentes. D’autre part, le nombre de cas avérés de transmission définitive du dossier à la GPU ou au NKVD dans notre corpus est relativement faible (une dizaine, soit environ 2 % ). Dans ces conditions, il est très difficile de parvenir à des conclusions définitives. Il semble néanmoins que l’OGPU soit le destinataire final des signaux lorsque la dénonciation porte sur une menace de résistance ouverte contre le régime (activité contre-révolutionnaire, accusation de
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banditisme, etc.)48. Les lettres de délation pure (X est un ennemi du peuple), lorsqu’elles sont reçues par d’autres instances, sont, elles aussi, souvent transmises49. Pour le reste, l’intervention est plus aléatoire.
2. La participation de la police politique aux enquêtes des capteurs publics
33 Lors de l’instruction de certains signaux, les différents organes d’enquête (contrôle d’État et parti) et la police politique peuvent collaborer. Cette dernière devient alors un auxiliaire précieux du parti ou de l’Inspection ouvrière et paysanne. Cette coopération s’exerce essentiellement dans le but de réunir des renseignements sur un individu et surtout sur son origine sociale. Le capteur récepteur de ce genre de signaux s’adresse souvent à l’OGPU ou au NKVD pour vérifier la véracité des accusations portées sur le passé des individus.
34 Une grande partie des documents émanant des organes que l’on trouve dans les archives des capteurs civils sont des fiches de renseignement sur l’origine sociale de tel ou tel. Parallèlement à l’instruction sur le fond de la plainte, on pouvait se renseigner sur l’origine sociale du plaignant. Le recours à l’OGPU est particulièrement fréquent lors des contestations de licenciements. À la fin des années 20, sur la base de renseignements fournis par la police politique, certains directeurs d’usine licenciaient leurs ouvriers ou leurs cadres à l’origine sociale douteuse50. Mais le motif de ce licenciement restait secret. L’intéressé, face à ce qu’il considérait (naïvement ou pas) être un acte injustifié saisissait souvent les organes de la RKI en attaquant ceux qu’il estimait responsables de sa « persécution ». Les inspecteurs de la rabkrin devaient se renseigner auprès de la GPU pour vérifier l’origine sociale du plaignant. Le secrétariat de Syrcov, président du Sovnarkom de la RSFSR, le dit explicitement en 1930. Le dénonceur est un ancien cadre d’une usine de tabac de la région de Saratov. Licencié, selon ses propres termes, « par la faute d’un élément étranger », il saisit le président du SNK dans une lettre qui mêle autodéfense et attaque contre ceux qu’il estime responsables de son licenciement et qu’il accuse d’être d’origine sociale douteuse. L’affaire concernant un licenciement, elle est transmise par le secrétariat au Bureau du travail de la province de Saratov qui répond n’avoir aucun moyen de savoir si les accusations d’appartenance à l’Armée blanche sont fondées. Excédé par cette réponse, le secrétariat dénonce dans ses conclusions « [...] le comportement formel du Bureau du travail de la province de Basse-Volga dans l’affaire du licenciement de I. et son manque d’attention inadmissible pour les données sur S., qu’il aurait dû vérifier par l’intermédiaire des organes de l’OGPU. »51
35 En dehors du simple échange d’informations (facile à détecter dans les archives puisqu’il y laisse une trace écrite), on dispose également de quelques indices de cas d’enquêtes menées en commun par le contrôle d’État ou le parti et la GPU ou le NKVD. Il est difficile d’en déterminer l’ampleur et les raisons. La plainte d’une institutrice de 18 ans en poste dans un petit village de Sibérie et victime de persécutions de la part de koulaks en juin 1928 est ainsi instruite par une commission d’enquête au niveau de l’okrug composée d’un membre de la Commission de contrôle, d’un instructeur du Comité du parti et d’un collaborateur de l’OGPU de Ačinsk52. Ces institutions semblent toutefois fonctionner plus souvent en parallèle qu’en synergie. Cela peut parfois déboucher sur des situations ubuesques : l’auteur d’une lettre-article adressée à la
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Krest´janskaja gazeta est arrêté par le NKVD en 1937 comme élément socialement dangereux. Dans le même temps, l’enquête menée par le rajkom démontre que sa plainte est fondée et conduit au licenciement du président de l’artel´ qu’il dénonçait53 !
36 En plus de cette coopération avec la police politique au cours de l’instruction, il peut y avoir collaboration après l’instruction. Dès lors le NKVD ou l’OGPU deviennent le bras répressif des organes civils.
3. La répression
37 La majorité des dénonciations qui parviennent à ces organisations sont des dénonciations spontanées qui arrivent régulièrement avec des variations en fonction des campagnes du pouvoir. Dans la majorité des cas, les organes civils prennent des mesures eux-mêmes ou transmettent les dossiers pour sanction au parquet. La transmission à l’OGPU de dossiers déjà instruits reste exceptionnelle.
38 Là encore il semble qu’une certaine latitude soit laissée aux responsables et il est difficile de définir des règles précises pour la transmission de dossiers instruits. La mauvaise humeur de Rozalinda Zemljačka, responsable du Bureau des plaintes, excédée par l’insistance d’un plaignant est, par exemple, à l’origine du transfert d’un dossier au Département spécial (Osobyj otdel) de l’OGPU sous bordereau « secret ». Il s’agissait d’un plaignant pour licenciement abusif qui, après avoir été éconduit par de nombreuses instances dont le Bureau central des plaintes, se mit à harceler les collaborateurs de la RKI allant même jusqu’à les traiter de « bandits blancs ». Zemljačka estime que son « comportement est excessivement suspect et inhabituel pour un plaignant ». Elle fournit alors à l’OGPU des renseignements plus précis et lui demande de prendre des « mesures adéquates »54. Le cas est exceptionnel mais symptomatique. Dans cette autre affaire, la transmission à l’OGPU plutôt qu’à la justice est probablement dictée par la nécessité de faire un exemple rapide : à la suite de la dénonciation d’un « communiste » qui se serait approprié les biens de koulaks pendant la collectivisation dans la région de Tula, la RKI mène l’enquête et conclut à sa culpabilité. Elle transmet le dossier à l’OGPU pour « prise de mesures » car, d’après le responsable du Bureau central des plaintes signataire, l’activité de l’intéressé a un caractère « clairement contre-révolutionnaire ». Le dénoncé est arrêté55.
39 Dans la plupart des cas que nous avons pu découvrir dans les archives, le transfert du dossier après instruction à la GPU ou au NKVD semble ainsi relever plus du libre arbitre que de règles bien précises.
40 Un deuxième type de dénonciations est plus exceptionnel, il est le fruit des moments de crise. Ce sont les dénonciations que provoquent les différentes purges qui rythment la vie de l’État et du parti. Ces dénonciations sont limitées dans le temps à de courtes périodes. Induites par la volonté du pouvoir, elles bénéficient d’un traitement particulier. Là encore, les instances de réception des dénonciations ne jouent pas seulement le rôle d’antichambre du NKVD. Souvent les commissions ad hoc se contentent de rassembler les dénonciations pour les utiliser en fonction de leurs besoins56. En 1937 pourtant, le lien entre les deux instances peut être extrêmement efficace. Le secrétaire du Comité du parti d’une usine de meubles de Himki, dans la banlieue de Moscou, raconte comment, lors d’une réunion de discussion sur les conséquences du premier procès de Moscou, on examina une dénonciation selon
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laquelle un komsomol aurait propagé des idées trotskistes. L’accusé nia tout en bloc puis petit à petit reconnut les faits : « Pendant la réunion, lorsqu’il fut clair qu’il fallait l’arrêter rapidement, j’ai appelé deux fois au téléphone le secrétaire du Comité du district du VKP(b), [...] je lui ai raconté le déroulement la réunion et je lui ai demandé de prendre des mesures pour l’arrestation. J’ai appelé deux fois le responsable du NKVD, le cam. A., en lui demandant d’arrêter M. [...]. »57
41 Dans tous les cas, c’est la fonction répressive du NKVD ou de la GPU qui est à l’origine de la transmission du dossier aux « organes ».
42 Ainsi, le pouvoir stalinien, en s’appuyant sur des institutions mises en place après la révolution bolchevique, diffuse la pratique de la dénonciation dans la société soviétique. Tout dysfonctionnement, tout manquement de loyauté doivent être signalés. Pour recueillir ces informations en dehors du cercle restreint des psychopathes, des idéalistes et des envieux, le régime banalise une pratique qui, au début des années 30, restait moralement condamnée et assimilée à la collaboration avec la police politique. En écrivant à un journal ou à un Bureau des plaintes, le Soviétique dénonceur n’a plus réellement le sentiment de franchir une ligne. La dénonciation devient un phénomène de masse dans l’URSS stalinienne. Il ne s’agit pas pour autant d’un système entièrement tourné vers la répression politique et destiné à masquer l’action de la GPU ou du NKVD. Il y a une sphère de la dénonciation à l’écart de la police politique. En effet, si les rapports entre les organes de sécurité et les organes publics de la dénonciation existent, ils sont relativement limités. Certes, sur certaines questions, les destinataires publics de signaux peuvent s’adresser à la police politique au cours de leur enquête. À la fin de l’instruction, ils peuvent également avoir recours à la force répressive des organes plutôt qu’à la justice ou à leurs propres mécanismes de sanction. Mais en dehors de certains domaines extrêmement précis (l’action du NKVD/GPU) et de cas avérés d’opposition au régime (lettres anonymes), les organes publics de réception de la dénonciation ne servent pas d’antichambre à la police politique. Il semble donc abusif de les qualifier d’auxiliaires de la police politique.
43 e- mail : [email protected]
NOTES
1. Sur la notion de dénonciation au sens large du terme, on consultera utilement Luc Boltanski et al., « La dénonciation », Actes de la Recherche en Sciences sociales, 51, mars 1984, pp. 3-40. Pour l’application de cette notion au cas soviétique, cf. François- Xavier Nérard, « Entre plainte et délation : les “signaux” en URSS (1928-1939) », Revue d’Études comparatives Est-Ouest, 30, 1, mars 1999, pp. 5-30. On reprend ici la définition élaborée dans cet article (p. 9) : la dénonciation que nous étudions est à la fois celle qui est « synonyme de délation (révélation des actes répréhensibles d’un individu aux autorités) et celle, plus large, qui évoque également la dénonciation d’une injustice ou
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d’une situation jugée insupportable. » Elle correspond, dans l’URSS de Stalin, à celle du « signal ». 2. Cette étude est basée sur un corpus de près de 500 lettres de dénonciation (signaux) recueillies dans différentes archives russes aussi bien centrales (Archives d’État (Gosudarstvennyj Arhiv Rossijskoj Federacii -- GARF), Archives du Parti (Rossijskij Gosudarstvennyj Arhiv Social´no-Političeskoj Istorii -- RGASPI), Archives du Komsomol (Centr Hranenija Dokumentov Molodežnyh Organizacii-- CHDMO) et Archives de l’Armée (Rossijskij Gosudarstvennyj Voennyj Arhiv -- RGVA)) que provinciales (Régions de Saratov et surtout de Nijni-Novgorod.) Elles couvrent la période des années 30 au sens large, c’est-à-dire de 1928 à 1941. Ce corpus rassemble donc des lettres d’origines géographiques très diverses (même si Moscou et Nijni-Novgorod sont surreprésentées). Il est difficile de se prononcer sur les auteurs des lettres car on dispose généralement de peu de renseignements à leur sujet. La représentativité de ce corpus est discutée dans F.-X. Nérard, art. cit., n. 9, p. 7. Pour effectuer ces recherches, nous n’avons pas eu accès aux archives de la police secrète et des autres organes de répression politico-judiciaire. Cet article est donc construit sur des matériaux provenant des administrations civiles. Cette restriction limite bien évidemment notre recherche : le devenir des lettres de dénonciation transmises à la police politique n’est, par exemple, pas abordé. On ne dispose pas, en effet, d’informations fiables à ce sujet. 3. Ce système est mis en place dans les années 20 : l’Inspection ouvrière et paysanne est créée en 1923, l’appel à collaborer avec les journaux et le mouvement des correspondants ouvriers et paysans date également de la même période. Sur le contrôle d’État, on consultera en particulier E. A. Rees, State control in Soviet Russia, The rise and fall of the Peasants’ and Workers’ Inspectorate, Londres, MacMillan, 1987, 315 p., coll. « Studies in Soviet History and Society » et Sergej N. Ikonnikov, Sozdanie i dejatel ´nost´ ob´´edinennyh organov CKK-RKI v 1923-1934 g. (Création et activité des organes unifiés CKK-RKI, 1923-1934), Moscou, Nauka, 1971, 480 p. Sur les correspondants ouvriers, on dispose de la thèse non publiée de Maria Ferretti, Le mouvement des correspondants ouvriers, 1917-1931. Révolution culturelle et organisation du consensus dans l’Union Soviétique des années 20, Paris, EHESS, 1998, 866 f. 4. Une étude récente du système de la justice est due à Peter H. Solomon, Soviet criminal justice under Stalin (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996), coll. « Russian, Soviet and Post-soviet Studies ». Les mécanismes de saisie de la justice par le citoyen ordinaire sur dénonciation au sens large sont consignés dans l’article 91 du code de procédure pénale : Ugolovno-processual´nyj kodeks s izmenenijami na 1 dekabrja 1938 g., Moscou, Juridičeskoe izdatel´stvo NKJu SSSR, 1938, p. 23. 5. RKI ou Rabkrin - Raboče-Krest´janskaja Inspekcija : Inspection ouvrière et paysanne, ministère (narkomat) supprimé en 1934 ; CKK - Central´naja Kontrol´naja Komissija : Commission centrale de contrôle ; KSK - Komissija Sovetskogo Kontrolja : Commission de contrôle soviétique ; KPK - Komitet Partijnogo Kontrolja : Comité de contrôle du parti. 6. L’existence d’interfaces entre la population et les instances de répression n’est pas originale : Jean-François Gayraud montre bien comment, dans le monde contemporain, la police et les médias jouent ce même rôle. Cf. J.-F. Gayraud, La dénonciation, Paris, PUF, 1995, pp. 44-53.
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7. Formé sur l’ancien français, ce néologisme nous permet de désigner l’ensemble des auteurs des signaux de la manière la plus neutre possible. L’administration fiscale française parle d’« aviseurs ». 8. GARF, f. 7511, op. 1, d. 193, l. 115. 9. Voir en particulier l’organe du mouvement des correspondants ouvriers et paysans, le Raboče-krest´janskij korrespondent, par exemple le n° 12 (1928), pp. 3-5 ou le n° 22 (1928), pp. 5-8 mais également toute la campagne lancée autour de l’appel du 3 juin. 10. À l’occasion de laquelle Stalin publie un article « O značenii i zadačah Bjuro žalob » (Du sens et des tâches du bureau des plaintes) dans la Pravda du 7 avril 1932. 11. I. Ingulov, Bol´ševistskaja samokritika - osnova partijnogo dejstvija (L’autocritique bolchevique est la base de l’action du parti), Moscou, Partizdat CK VKP(b), 1937. Il rappelle (p. 19) que « la vérification par le haut doit obligatoirement être complétée par une vérification par le bas, par la plus sérieuse attention aux signaux venus d’en bas. Une démocratie scrupuleuse au sein du parti, l’électivité, la responsabilité, le développement de la critique et de l’autocritique dans les réunions des membres du parti et des sans-parti aideront à découvrir bientôt les ennemis du parti et du peuple pas encore démasqués, les Janus de toutes sortes. » 12. Certains aspects de ces campagnes sont traités par Nicolas Werth, « L’appel au petit peuple selon Staline », Vingtième Siècle, 56, oct.-déc. 1997, pp. 132-141. 13. Povol´žskaja pravda, 29 janvier 1930, p. 1. 14. Pravda, 18 juillet 1937. 15. Certains profitent de l’aubaine sans aucun doute car nombreux sont ceux qui écrivent au NKVD à ce moment-là. Un correspondant du secrétaire du parti de la région de Saratov justifie son courrier par le fait que « le NKVD a démasqué des ennemis dans des endroits tellement inattendus » que la personne qu’il dénonce pourrait bien être un de ces ennemis. Il adresse pourtant sa lettre à Krinickij à l’obkom plutôt qu’au NKVD. Ce n’est que ce dernier qui transmet la lettre à Ežov. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 289, p. 21. 16. Pravda, 18 juillet 1937. 17. RGASPI, f. 610, op. 1, d. 223, l. 15. 18. GARF, f. 374, op. 28, d. 2995, l. 12 v°. Voir également la même méthode de discréditation : GARF, f. 374, op. 28, d. 2999, Affaire Tomaševič. 19. Kak i o čem pisat’ v gazetu ? (De quelle façon et à quel propos écrire au journal ?), Moscou, Izdanie gazety Pravda, 1928. 20. RGASPI, f. 613, op. 3, d. 36, l. 2 v°. 21. I. I. ·itc, Dnevnik « velikogo pereloma », mart 1928 - avgust 1931 (Journal du « Grand Tournant », mars 1928 - août 1931), Paris, YMCA Press, 1991. 22. Ibid., p. 123. 23. Dans neuf des douze cas de dénonciation évoqués par ·itc dans son journal, il s’agit d’exemples relevés dans la presse. Pour les trois derniers exemples, il ne mentionne pas sa source. 24. Ibid., pp. 128-129. 25. GARF, f. 374, op. 28, d. 3063, l. 664.
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26. C’est le cas, en particulier, lors des réunions des militants du VLKSM (Vsesojuznyj Lenin-skij Kommunističeskij Sojuz Molodeži) qui suivent le IVe Plenum du Comité central du Komsomol en juillet (?) 1937. Cf. CHDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 1213, l. 1. 27. Zametki v stennoj gazete : rabočij material dlja seminarov redaktorov stennyh gazet (Entrefilets dans le journal mural : matériel de travail pour les séminaires des rédacteurs de journaux muraux), Gor´kij, Rabsel´korovskij otdel « Gor´kovskoj Kommuny », 1938, pp. 21-24. 28. Pour des remarques plus précises quant au choix du vocabulaire, voir F.-X. Nérard, art. cit., pp. 10-12. 29. Sur les lettres au pouvoir, on consultera : Sheila Fitzpatrick, « Supplicants and citizens : Public letter-writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s », Slavic Review, 55, 1, 1996, pp. 78-105 et Aleksandr Livšin, Igor´ Orlov, « Revoljucija i social´naja spravedlivost´ : ožidanija i realnost´ (“Pis´ma vo vlast´” 1917-1927 godov) », Cahiers du Monde russe, 39, 4, 1998, pp. 487-514. 30. Le secrétariat de Molotov par exemple reçoit toute sorte de courrier : une partie importante est composée d’un courrier de complaisance (soutien, affirmation de soutien...). Dans les archives que nous avons dépouillées la proportion des signaux sur le total du courrier reçu est d’environ 20 %. Néanmoins, il est difficile de dire dans quelle mesure cette proportion est représentative. Les échanges que nous avons pu avoir avec les archivistes ne nous ont pas permis de comprendre le principe qui a présidé à la constitution de ces dossiers. Les lettres ont-elles été conservées proportionnellement à l’ensemble des lettres reçues ? Parmi celles-ci, les proportions entre les différents thèmes ont-elles été respectées ? De plus, ces proportions dépendent des destinataires du courrier (pour la Krest´janskaja gazeta, Sheila Fitzpatrick estime les dénonciations et les plaintes à 35 % du total) et du moment (le courrier de Kalinin augmente régulièrement de 1926 à 1930 pour atteindre un sommet pendant la collectivisation puis diminue à nouveau : - 32,9 % en 1931). Certains événements provoquent un courrier abondant sans dénonciations : les élections au Soviet suprême en 1937 suscitent une avalanche de lettres de soutien ; dès 1937, les services de la Commission de contrôle du parti à Saratov sont inondés de demandes de réhabilitation. À cette occasion, la proportion de dénonciation baisse probablement. Il est donc extrêmement risqué de se prononcer quant à l’ampleur réelle du phénomène. 31. Dans notre corpus, les exemples -- une quinzaine -- d’auteurs qui signalent s’être déjà adressés à d’autres instances ou qui mentionnent dans l’intitulé de leur lettre ou dans le corps du texte d’autres destinataires sont répartis sur l’ensemble de la période 1928-1937. 32. GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 56, l. 163. 33. GARF, f. 7511, op. 1, d. 171, ll. 6 sq. 34. E. Dvinskoj, Bjuro žalob v bor’be za uluščenie apparata (Le Bureau des plaintes en lutte pour l’amélioration de l’appareil), Moscou, Partizdat, 1934, pp. 8-9. 35. Voir par l’exemple les dénonciations reçues par la commission chargée de la purge de la rédaction de la Pravda en 1938 (Ådanov, ·kirjatov, Malenkov) : RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 318-319. 36. Leurs archives, tant au niveau central qu’au niveau local, sont soit beaucoup moins bien conservées soit très difficiles d’accès (en particulier celles de la Commission de
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contrôle du parti composées pour l’essentiel de dossiers personnels à l’accès limité par la loi). 37. Voir par exemple GARF, f. 3316, op. 39, d. 94, ll. 7 sq. (déc. 1937), GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 56, ll. 245-246 ou GARF, f. 5446, inv. 82, d. 66, l. 18. 38. Il faut distinguer, parmi les capteurs, ceux qui sont également des instances d’instruction (comme la CKK, la RKI ou la KSK et le KPK) et ceux qui sont uniquement des réceptacles (comme les journaux et les secrétariats). 39. Pour un rare cas de saisie d’une instance civile sur « dénonciation » par le NKVD voir Centr Hranenija Dokumentacii Novejšej Istorii Saratovskoj Oblasti (CHDNISO), f. 594, op. 1, d. 1215, l. 18, il s’agit du cas d’un président de kolkhoz examiné par le KPK après réception d’une note du NKVD. Par ailleurs, les rares lettres directement (et exclusivement) adressées aux « organes » que l’on peut retrouver dans les fonds des autres capteurs sont des pièces du dossier. Voir par exemple RGASPI, f. 610, op. 1, d. 224. Voir également GARF, f. 374, inv. 28, d. 3328, ll. 3-10 v° pour un cas de licenciement abusif. 40. Pour se faire une idée de ce type de littérature, on consultera le fonds du secrétariat de Stalin en 1927 : RGASPI, f. 17, op. 85, d. 529 sq. ou celui du secrétariat de Kalinin en 1932 : GARF, f. 1235, op. 66a, d. 80, ll. 86 sq. Le secrétariat du président du Comité exécutif central a ainsi reçu 408 lettres anonymes en deux mois et demi (août - octobre 1932) (environ 1,5 % du total, soit un peu moins de 2 000 par an). Cf. GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 66, ll. 287-288 pour une lettre anonyme pendant la Grande Terreur. 41. GARF, f. 1235, op. 66a, d. 80, l. 78. 42. GARF, f. 374, op. 2, d. 46, l. 71. 43. C’est également vrai pendant d’autres périodes, par exemple en 1929 : GARF, f. 374, op. 28, d. 4036, p. 152 sq. (il s’agit d’une lettre qui dénonce l’emploi de la torture dans les camps de l’OGPU et qui est adressée à la RKI par le père du plaignant). 44. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 318, ll. 79 sq. Lorsqu’un individu se présente à la rédaction de la Pravda, porteur d’une lettre collective dénonçant l’emploi de la torture, il est « transmis » aux organes du NKVD en même temps que la lettre. Le responsable du secteur lettres dispose même d’un « reçu » (sic). 45. Merle Fainsod, Smolensk under the Soviet rule, Londres, MacMillan, 1959, pp. 169-171. 46. Pour un échantillon de lettres reçues par le secrétariat de Kalinin en 1930 et transmises à l’OGPU voir GARF, f. 1235, op. 66a, d. 38. Pour des lettres de 1935, voir GARF, f. 1235, op. 66a, d. 160. Pour le secrétariat de Molotov en 1938, on consultera GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 56, 61, 66. 47. GARF, f. 374, op. 2, d. 23, l. 234. 48. Voir par exemple GARF, f. 374, op. 28, d. 2994, affaire Deev. La dénonciation d’origine fut envoyée d’abord à la CKK VKP(b) puis transmise à la RKI de Tula qui, elle, confia l’instruction à l’OGPU. 49. Par exemple, une lettre reçue par la direction politique de l’armée porte l’instruction manuscrite suivante : « au NKVD, pour action » : RGVA, f. 9, op. 39, d. 44, l. 51. On peut également consulter GARF, f. 5446, op. 82, d. 56. 50. GARF, f. 374, op. 28, d. 4038, ll. 61-63. 51. GARF, f. 374, op. 28, d. 4037, l. 150.
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52. GARF, f. 374, op. 2, d. 23, l. 98. Pour d’autres exemples, voir par exemple GARF, f. 374, op. 28, d. 4038, ll. 41 sq. 53. Rossijskij Gosudarstvennyj Arhiv Ekonomiki (RGAE), f. 396, op. 10, d. 143. 54. GARF, f. 374, op. 28, d. 2998, l. 58. 55. GARF, f. 374, op. 28, d. 4040, ll. 37-41. 56. C’est le cas de la commission du Comité central pour la purge de la rédaction de la Pravda qui rassemble des « données compromettantes » sur plus de 120 personnes tout en utilisant seulement les renseignements dont elle a besoin. 57. CHDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 1236, ll. 38-39. Le « trotskiste » ne sera pourtant arrêté que trois jours plus tard.
RÉSUMÉS
Résumé Dès 1928, le pouvoir stalinien banalise la pratique de la dénonciation : il la rend visible, quotidienne, « normale ». Cet article veut montrer comment les « signaux » deviennent un phénomène de masse en URSS. Les différentes campagnes menées, le discours tenu tendent à estomper les frontières morales : il n’y a plus de honte à dénoncer. Le système de recueil des dénonciations reflète également cette politique : le pôle secret (la police politique) est doublé d’un pôle public vaste et amplement « médiatisé ». Il s’agit de permettre à ceux que la dénonciation aux « organes » rebute de sauter quand même le pas. Pour autant, ce deuxième pôle n’est pas un simple supplétif de la police politique. Certes, certaines lettres sont systématiquement transmises à la GPU ou au NKVD (les lettres anonymes et celles qui mettent en cause les collaborateurs de ces organismes). D’autres le sont de façon beaucoup plus aléatoire sans qu’il soit possible de dégager de véritable logique. Parfois la police politique participe aux enquêtes du parti ou de l’Inspection ouvrière et paysanne : elle fournit le plus souvent des renseignements précieux sur l’origine sociale des individus. Elle intervient également en fin d’enquête comme organe de répression. Si la collaboration est réelle, les deux pôles travaillent cependant plus en parallèle qu’en synergie. Il ne s’agit donc pas d’un système uniquement tourné vers la répression politique.
Abstract Did Soviet newspapers and state control organs under Stalin act as sub-offices of the political police ? Starting in 1928, Stalin’s regime turned denunciation into ordinary -- visible, daily, “normal” -- practice. This article aims at showing how “signals” (signaly) became a mass phenomenon in the Soviet Union. All sorts of campaigns and public discourse tended to blur the boundary between morality and immorality so that considering denunciation as shameful became a thing of the past. The bipolar nature of the denunciation collecting system represents one more aspect of this policy : at one end was the political police and secrecy, and at the other, a vast, public arena offering numerous channels for denunciation. The latter allowed those reluctant to address denunciations to the “organs” to take the plunge anyway, but it did not serve as a surrogate for the political police. Of course, it forwarded some letters, such as anonymous ones and those
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involving collaborators of the political police, to the GPU or the NKVD. Others it forwarded in a much more haphazard fashion, without any apparent logic. Sometimes the political police took part in the party’s or in the Worker and Peasant Inspection’s inquiries and provided precious information on private individuals’ social origins. It also intervened at the end of inquiries as an organ of repression. Even though there was real collaboration between these two ends, both operated more along parallel lines than in synergy. One can therefore conclude that the system under consideration was not oriented merely toward political repression.
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Gender and policing in Soviet West Ukraine, 1944-1948.
Jeffrey BURDS
Prelude
1 On 21 January 1947, working on information obtained through reliable informants, a special forces unit (spetsgruppa) of the Main Directorate for the Struggle Against Banditry (Glavnoe upravlenie po bor´be s banditizmom -- GUBB) of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) learned the location of the hideout of “Mykhailo,” the chief of the dreaded Sluzhba Bezpeki (SB), or Ukrainian rebel underground intelligence service, and a member of the central command of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurrection Army (UPA).2 The Soviets had hunted for Mykhailo as a priority target for apprehension or liquidation for more than five years, and they took every precaution to make sure he did not slip away. His hideout was located just two kilometers east of Zhukov village, in Berezhanskyi raion, Ternopil oblast´.
2 On the night of the 21st of January, a heavily armed Soviet unit surrounded Mykhailo’s underground hideout, and ordered those inside to surrender. One of the men in the hideout responded with a volley of machine-gun fire, and was instantly cut down. In the ensuing minutes, and faced with insurmountable odds, Mykhailo, his wife “Vera” and his communications officer “Natalka” set fire to documents. Then, one by one, Mykhailo killed his wife and his messenger with shots to the head from his own revolver, then subsequently turned the gun on himself.
3 The four bodies were later identified from MVD “trophy photos” taken at the scene. Mykhailo was Mykola Arsenych-Berezovskyi. Born in 1910, and with a higher education, he joined the OUN in 1939, after he fled the Soviets by crossing over into German-occupied Poland. In 1940, as the Germans prepared to invade the Soviet Union, Mykhailo received advanced training in sabotage and diversion at a special espionage school for infiltration agents set up by the Germans in Krakow. After leaving the school, Mykhailo began working in the central command of Ukrainian rebel intelligence from
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1940. Returning to Ukraine as an officer in a special sabotage unit attached to the German army in June 1941, Mykhailo was appointed commander-in-chief of the entire SB by the end of the first year of the war.
4 Mykhailo’s wife Vera had been the chief of the women’s unit in the L´viv city command of the OUN. Natalka had been a liaison officer for the central staff of the OUN. The face of the fourth -- another man -- had been destroyed by a grenade and was unrecognizable.
5 Despite Mykhailo’s frantic efforts to destroy SB archives before his suicide, the successful Soviet seek-and-destroy operation recovered two knapsacks of documents from his dugout. These included valid Soviet passports with assorted aliases, party, MVD, militia, and Komsomol identification cards, lists of locals killed by the Soviets, and other documents.3 By far the most valuable document recovered from Mykhailo’s personal archive was an eight-page letter he had written to Roman Shukhevych, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Insurrection Army, just one week before Mykhailo’s death. In that letter, Mykhailo perceptively appraised the status of the Ukrainian insurrection, and identified the chief threat to the movement to lie in Soviet agentura: “Secret informers -- these are the most numerous and dangerous of denouncers. These ‘moskity’ (mosquitoes) infect the healthy body of our organization. From this form of agentura we have suffered our greatest losses.” Mykhailo was certain that these secret informers were ubiquitous within the rebel movement : “If one considers that there are no less than five such informers in every village, their significance becomes clear.”4
6 Unknown to Mykhailo, the rebel leadership, or to scholars for the next fifty years was the fact that Mykhailo’s whereabouts had been betrayed by a Soviet informant within his own inner circle : Natalka, the liaison officer, was a Soviet spy.5
The Soviet recruitment of agent “Natalka”
7 Natalka’s story was all too typical. Her recruitment in June 1945 had been handled by the star and principal innovator of Soviet spetsgruppy tactics in West Ukraine, Major A. M. Sokolov, based in Ternopil oblast´. Sokolov was so good at his job -- transforming diehard anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalists into members of his own force to destroy the rebel underground -- that he had written the standard primer for Soviet MVD/MGB field officers on spetsgruppy tactics against anti-Soviet rebel groups.6
8 As I have shown elsewhere, the Soviets effectively used agentura or informants’ networks as a means to sow suspicion among anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalist rebel groups in West Ukraine at the end of World War II. Agentura became a powerful tactical weapon utilized by the Soviets to provoke rebel terror as a means by which to drive a wedge between organized rebel forces and their support bases among local civilians.7 Here, I will focus my investigation on the Soviet use of agentura: how the Soviets detected the opportunities afforded by the rebels’ shift to gender-based recruitment tactics, and how they eventually began to target ethnic Ukrainian women and girls as Soviet siksotki or “secret agents” to provoke cancerous terror reprisals from within the underground.
9 In this pursuit, we are fortunate because Major Sokolov left a detailed handwritten account of his successful turning of agent Natalka in a top secret report to Major- General A. P. Gorshkov, the chief of the First Department of the elite Soviet police unit,
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the Main Directorate for the Struggle Against Banditry (GUBB NKVD).8 Sokolov wrote in his candid summary report : “At that time, the Berezhany [MVD] raion office had detained a [rebel] courier -- ‘Natalka’ -- who had confessed during interrogation that she was a liaison officer for the commander of the OUN in [Ternopil] oblast´, ‘Nestor.’9 She [Natalka] had tried to escape from her place of detention -- and had even shot with a pistol the militiaman who was guarding her. And it was evident from information received that her figure was interesting (figura byla interesnaia). My assistant -- Lieutenant-Colonel [A.I.] Matveev -- and I went to Berezhany to take a look at her.”10
10 Soldiers shared stories, and during her short time in Soviet captivity, Natalka had already earned herself the reputation of a “cantankerous filly” who would be a challenge to break. Evidently, Sokolov was lured by the challenge.
11 Self-confident after a series of successes, Sokolov took personal charge of Natalka’s recruitment. “When we arrived in Berezhany, she was being interrogated by GUBB-NKVD Ukrainian SSR Lieutenant-Colonel Kaganovich. She gave her answers in such a way that made it impossible to exploit them operationally. It was clear she was lying about everything, and hiding something big. I shared my opinion with Matveev, who agreed with me, and so we decided to take her to Chertkov. During her interrogation at Chertkov, she likewise essentially gave us nothing, so [my commanding officer Colonel A.A.] Saraev ordered me to take her into my spetsgruppa, take her back to Berezhany, and find some way of compelling her to tell us what she knew, and to exploit that information uncovered during her interrogation.”
12 Sokolov’s account does not reveal what happened in the intervening period. Whatever happened between Sokolov and Natalka for the few days before he chose to bring her back to Berezhany, she evidently returned convinced that she had fooled Sokolov into believing she was now a Soviet agent. The wily Sokolov knew otherwise, and time and again in his account, he seemed to recognize and respect the fact that threats, violence, and intimidation alone would never break Natalka. Her turning would require a major deception. “On our return to Berezhany, I decided to act as if [I believed] she had been successfully recruited. And so I gave her her first assignment : to murder [her commanding officer in the rebel underground] ‘Nestor.’ I was confident that she would run, and had set a plan wherein during the time she was trying to escape us she would be captured by [one of my units operating] under the guise of the [rebel] SB, who would interrogate her as a siksot. One could do nothing else with her. On the road to Berezhany, we made sure she did not see the entire unit. We treated her well. In Berezhany I formally recorded her recruitment, gave her the assignment to murder ‘Nestor,’ issued her a pistol (with the firing pin removed), and dispatched her to carry out the assignment.”11
13 Natalka did her best to deceive Sokolov, playing the role of a successfully recruited Soviet siksot. Feigning compliance, she indicated that she often met with some rebel soldiers from Nestor’s unit in a cottage in village Byshky. The rebel soldiers, she alleged, would lead her from there to Nestor’s hideout in the woods. Sokolov played along, but unknown to Natalka, he ordered an NKVD unit to surround the village and make sure no one escaped. “Just as I suspected, so it happened : Natalka went into the cottage for a few minutes, then exited through the rear door, and hid herself in the cornfield behind the cottage. My agent Horodetskyi saw everything, but let her sit a while in the
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corn. Then, as if by accident, [and masquerading as an SB officer] he detained her, found her pistol and immediately accused her of being a siksotka.”
14 Natalka was evidently floored, and utterly duped by the ruse. She immediately imparted to the false SB chief that she was a liaison officer for the central staff of the OUN, and that she needed to see her commanding officer as soon as possible. Having missed the first two planned meetings with her associates, she had just one more fallback meeting before her contacts would assume she had been arrested, and would sever their contact altogether. The information she carried was of vital interest to the rebel underground, and she begged the SB chief to help her.
15 Continuing the meticulously planned and executed masquerade, Horodetskyi resisted, called Natalka a liar and provocateur desperate to save her own skin. Following standard SB procedure, Natalka was blindfolded and led to a hideout in Berezhany, where she was interrogated at length. More and more desperate, only then did Natalka pass the point of no return and become an unwitting accomplice of the NKVD: she confessed to know the location of a liaison point in village Avgustovka where she could connect with the leadership of the rebel unit Belyi.
16 That was all Sokolov needed to know. The well-hidden rebel hideout of Belyi unit was subsequently taken, most of its inhabitants captured alive. The rebel commander “Rynchak” was killed in the operation, but his deputy commander “Chad” was captured alive and broken. And step by step the operation to turn Natalka began to bear fruit. Interrogated by the Soviets, Chad revealed the location of a rebel hideout near village Rai where rebel commander Belyi was supposed to be quartered. Instead, his adjutant “Artem” was surrounded : Artem too resisted, setting fire to his archive, to a large cache of money, and to his hideout -- even killing his own woman liaison officer “Legeta” before he was shot in the leg while attempting to escape. Artem was captured alive.12
17 By this time the rebel deputy commander Chad had been recruited into the NKVD spetsgruppa, and he and Sokolov worked together closely to exploit his intimate knowledge of local rebel units. Chad led the Soviets to “Chaban,” former chief of the gendarmerie for the rebel Bystryi unit. Chaban was also recruited into the Soviet spetsgruppa, and his extensive knowledge about the identities and locations of local rebel cadres kept the Soviet secret police in Ternopil busy for an entire month of successful liquidation operations. Just one successful recruit had delivered a devastating blow to the SB in Ternopil.
18 From this point, we lose track of Natalka in declassified Soviet files for nearly eighteen months, until the operation to liquidate Mykhailo in which she herself was killed. Undoubtedly, Sokolov imparted to his unwitting recruit the consequences of her information, news that would have broken her psychologically : the rebel underground did not tolerate betrayal, and took no account of a traitor’s motivations or circumstances. Natalka had but one choice : either to cooperate with Sokolov, or to die, and bring reprisals on her family and loved ones. Such was the impeccable and brutal logic of Soviet agentura operations.
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The gender question and the Ukrainian rebel underground
19 One of the most notable features of the history of gender in the Ukrainian underground of the 1940s is the relative silence about women’s contributions. Soviet operations files reveal a regular presence, even majority, of women in Ukrainian rebel operations. In contrast, Ukrainian nationalist and diaspora publications contain comparatively little concrete information regarding women’s roles in the underground. It is remarkable that in a literature that has produced such a rich and voluminous hagiography of Ukrainian male heroes, there are so very few accounts of women warriors. In the most recent two-volume edition of nationalist biographies, for instance, Petro Sodols The Ukrainian Insurrection Army : A reference guide (published in 1995), there are 338 “heroes” (and traitors) named, but only 17 are women. Of those 17 women members of the UPA, less than a handful were noted to have died “heroic deaths” in the field of battle against the Polish, Soviet, or German enemy. And, without exception, these 17 women heroes were deemed heroic either because they were murdered, because they served prison sentences, or -- most often -- because of their contributions to ancillary branches of the movement : to culture, child care, or education. In almost every case, ethnic Ukrainian women considered worth remembering for their contributions to the underground were wives, siblings, or offspring of male heroes. Equally telling is The Ternopil area : A list of heroes of the Ukrainian revolution fallen in the struggle with the Russian Bolshevik occupying power, 13.3.1944-31.12.1948, originally published in typescript in September 1949. The memorial book identifies 718 “fallen heroes,” of whom only 18 were women.13
20 In a rare example where the heroic roles of Ukrainian women rebels have been discussed in detail, Marta N. (the writer’s alias for UPA hero Halina Savits´ka-Holoiad) upheld the Soviet observations that Ukrainian women proved to be just as courageous and steadfast in the field of battle as men. “A woman [in the Ukrainian underground],” she wrote in the late 1940s, “would always heroically maintain herself during Bolshevik or Polish interrogations, betraying neither secrets, nor neighbors, determined sooner to face torment and death.”14 Similarly, Soviet and German intelligence and counter- intelligence operatives consistently observed that, under interrogation, “female agents usually stuck more obstinately to their stories than did male agents. Logical arguments brought forward by the interrogating officer who tried to explain that the stories told by female agents could never be true, did not affect them to the same extent that they would have affected male agents.”15 Women were, it was generally believed among interrogators, harder to break with logical arguments, or the threat of force. Instead, women and children agents were more easily recruited either with blackmail or threats of reprisals against their families, or with a promise of enticements.16
21 We are left then with this conundrum : why, if in most Soviet accounts Ukrainian women played such a notable role in the Ukrainian liberation movement after the war, has so little been written on women’s contributions ? Why do we know so little about the women who belonged, and especially about their contributions beyond the ancillary roles in provisions, communications, and medical aid ?
22 The challenge of ferreting out women’s roles in West Ukrainian rebel operations goes far beyond merely chronicling women’s substantial contributions. It also involves coming to terms with the haunting silence that has marked the intervening period.
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Women in West Ukraine
“In war women have to do things they wouldn’t dream about in peacetime. We all have to survive.”17
23 NKVD operations reports, informants’ files, and documents seized from the Ukrainian underground during the wartime and postwar periods reveal that there was a dramatically increased role of women in the anti-Soviet Ukrainian rebel underground in 1944-1945. Upon reflection, that observation seems reasonable. Ethnic Ukrainian men in West Ukraine between 1939-1950 had a one-in-three chance of dying during the era -- either from violent disputes with ethnic Poles, the mass arrests and mass executions that marked the Soviet occupation of 1939-1941, followed immediately by the period of Nazi occupation from June 1941 to July-August 1944. Young men fit for work also stood a good chance of deportation -- to Siberian forced labor under the Soviets, or as Ostarbeiter under the Nazis. By autumn 1944, with the return of Soviet forces to the region, any Ukrainian male fourteen years or older was likely to be arrested, shot, or forced into Red Army or NKVD/NKGB service. Most West Ukrainian men aged 14-45 were as a result driven to forests or into underground hideouts, literally tombs underground where they waited for the end of hostilities. Friendly cadre or enemy other, the anti-Soviet warrior’s gender was -- in the Soviet view -- distinctly male.18
24 At the height of the Soviet battle to re-occupy West Ukraine by driving out the Germans, a Ukrainian commander of a rebel unit based in Rava-Rus´ ka raion on Poland’s southeastern border, wrote in an extended report dated 21 August 1944: “The Jew-Communist-Bolsheviks treat us [Ukrainians] like enemies. Not a single young [Ukrainian] man can even be seen by the Bolsheviks [without being detained, beaten, shot, or taken away]. The NKVD is conducting arrests with the assistance of secret agents (siksoty) and terror. In this way on 13.8.44 in village Lavrikiv nine people were arrested with the help of two informants -- one of them, a Belorussian who had been here since 1941, and the other a fool from our own headquarters, who gave away and ruined our whole network. [The Soviets] surround villages, then detain anyone they can find. They so harshly taunt [villagers] that in the end [the Soviets] manage to find out everything they know : who was the officer-in-charge of the local band, where he is hiding, where are all the men. The bolsheviks used this method in Bilka Masovitska. On 16.8.44 they surrounded almost 200 people in the village, but arrested only the 50 men, and beat them very badly. They took 10 men away with them, and left 2 very seriously beaten. Some others were freed that same day, but the remaining 25 men were held until 21.8.44. In the same way on 18.8.44 [the Bolsheviks] surrounded village Lypna, detained all the men in the village and took them away with them, burned down three homes, shot one, and then left for Rava-Rus´ka.”
25 It had gotten to the point, he wrote, that “whenever [men] catch sight of even one [Soviet] soldier they run away from their homes. At night they [the local men] don’t sleep.”19 And elsewhere : “In village Lisets [in Stanyslaviv oblast´ in early August 1944] there was a recruitment levy that took away many men. The old men were released,” while the rest were mobilized into the Red Army.20
26 The initial impact of the Soviet re-occupation of the western borderlands drove local men away from their villages. This observation was confirmed in numerous eyewitness reports. A doctor in eastern Poland, Zygmunt Klukowski in Szczebrzeszyn, left a
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description of the same pattern of gender-specific targeting by Soviet occupation forces in his diary entry for 10 October 1944: “Late in the evening on Sunday, Soviet troops encircled the village of Maszow. Going from house to house, they arrested approximately three hundred men, all of draft age, and transported them to the military barracks in Zamosc. It seems that this is the new way of forcing enlistment.”21 In a March 1945 letter to her relatives, ethnic Ukrainian woman Z. F. Shevchuk wrote from her village in Drohobych oblast´: “Spring here will be difficult. The Germans carried off all our horses and wagons, while the Soviets [have taken all the] men up to age forty-five into the army. Only a few [of the men] remain, [who] work in the forests [cutting wood].”22 In a similar vein, another peasant woman from Drohobych, M. S. Vasiurko, wrote to her husband on 4 April 1945: “It’s very warm here now, the weather only knows how to be spring. But this comes to nothing since we have no horses in the village, and likewise no men. Only women and a few old men remain in the village.”23
27 In the early Soviet occupation of West Ukraine in 1944, violence was perpetrated and repression was applied in a gender-specific way. Initially, Ukrainian men bore the brunt of the Soviet onslaught, while women -- though victimized directly and indirectly -- were (comparatively speaking) far more free to move around and go about their lives. Under the circumstances, and with no other choice, the Ukrainian nationalist underground relied increasingly on women and girls to perform tasks vital for the rebel movement.
28 This had not always been the case. John A. Armstrong has upheld the traditional impression that women were largely ignored in the ranks of the Ukrainian rebel underground before 1944. “In general, nationalist observers agree that the [Ukrainian] women were less politically active than the men. While there is too little evidence to warrant a firm conclusion on this score, it is just possible that the [Ukrainian] nationalist movements neglected a useful source of support, which was certainly tapped by the Communist underground.”24
29 But necessity is the mother of invention, and in West Ukraine, this translated into a Ukrainian rebel policy that increasingly targeted women and girls as recruits into vital services for the rebel underground. The architect of this fundamental shift of tactics of the OUN and the UPA from a focus on male to female recruitment was Hryhorii Pryshliak (alias : “Mikushka”) -- in spring 1944, chief of the Sluzhba Bezpeki (SB) or rebel secret police in West Ukraine.25 The transcript of an NKVD interrogation of L´viv city SB chief Iosif Pan´kiv, captured by the Soviets on 28 October 1944, is quite specific about the new gender-based tactics of the Ukrainian underground on the eve of the Soviet return to West Ukrainian zones : “Working on the basis of an evaluation that men, particularly members of the SB, would with the arrival of the Red Army be seriously hampered operating as ‘legals’ in L´viv, MIKUSHKA decided to reorient [our tactics] towards the utilization of women for work in the SB.”26 Subsequently, Pan´kiv was ordered to dismantle existing male-based networks, who were reorganized into military units mobilized for the partisan war against the Soviets. In their place, Pan’kiv recruited and trained women agents exclusively. As he prepared to leave L´viv himself, Pan´kiv’s own 23-year-old sister Yulia (alias : “Ul´iana”) was appointed SB chief for L ´viv city.27
30 The call for more women in the ranks of the underground was soon taken up by the supreme command of the Ukrainian nationalist rebel leadership. Initially, mass recruitment began to attract more women into ancillary roles : for instance, there were
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instructions in July 1944 to increase the number of women in economic work.28 A rebel communiqué dated 14 August 1944 expanded the role of women in underground communications : “As soon as possible organize a communications network with sub- raion OUN units. Each communications link should be composed of four girls : one from the raion, and three from the sub-raiony.”29 On 11 August and again in early October 1944 there were explicit instructions to expand zhinochi sitky -- rebel “women’s networks.”30 These expanded networks were to become the recruiting grounds for reliable women to perform more clandestine work : women in communications, liaison work for underground transport along clandestine routes, espionage, and attached to specific units for medical care, provisions support, and even military and so-called “black” or “wet” operations. Rebel instructions from October 1944 reflected these more varied roles for women : “Under various pretexts send some of the [rebel] cadres -- especially women -- to the towns and [infiltrate them] among the [Soviet] workers.”31 Other instructions in October 1944 required Ukrainian women to work in the UChKh -- the Ukrainian Red Cross.32 After rudimentary training, beginning in late 1944, additional women agents of the Ukrainian rebel underground were regularly sent into eastern Ukraine for clandestine operations.33 Soon, it became standard operating procedure that Ukrainian “women are just as obligated to serve underground as men. [...] All women in the underground should carry pistols and, depending on availability, other weapons.”34 By July 1945 Soviet NKVD units were regularly reporting evidence of armed rebel units made up predominantly or exclusively of young Ukrainian women.35
The feminization of the Ukrainian underground
“Woman, when intent on turpitude, is capable of sounding lower depths than the vilest of the male species.”36
31 Even before the Soviet “liberation” of West Ukraine by the end of July-August 1944, the marked shift in rebel tactics to utilize women warriors was noted favorably in German military intelligence reports. In a top secret memorandum, General-Major Brigadeführer Brenner wrote in mid-1944 to SS-Obergruppenführer General Hans Prützmann -- the highest ranking German SS officer in Ukraine and the architect of the so-called “Prützmann Bureau,” Germany’s stay-behind or “werewolf” networks -- that “The UPA has halted all attacks on units of the German army. The UPA systematically sends agents (razvedchiki), mainly young women, into enemy-occupied territory, and the results of the intelligence are communicated to Department 1c of the [German] Army Group” on the southern Front.37 This report was captured by the Soviets and became part of the Soviet NKVD’s permanent “special file” on German wartime and postwar intelligence operations in West Ukraine.38
32 The distinct gender shift in Ukrainian rebel tactics had almost immediately become apparent to NKVD field units operating in West Ukraine. In a top secret memorandum dated 11 November 1944, NKVD Major in Soviet State Security V. A. Chugunov summarized information gleaned from interrogations of key personnel in the Ukrainian underground. His report spearheaded the growing Soviet awareness of a shift in rebel tactics that utilized Ukrainian women and girls more extensively than before :
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“Following the expulsion of the German occupation from the western oblasti of Ukraine and the conducting of a mobilization of the male population into the Red Army, by order of the regional command of the OUN there were created village, sub-raion, raion, territorial (okrug), and oblast´ OUN command centers from among [local] women, who have the following departments (referentury): economic, communications, and reconnaissance. At the present time the women’s Economic Department plays the principal role in gathering provisions and other items needed by the UPA, since they can usually go about their economic activity more or less without suspicion. All collected provisions and items are then transferred to rebel control. The primary task of women’s reconnaissance (razvedka) is the collection of information about the movements of Red Army units, and about the departure from raion centers of NKVD personnel for operations. An officer-in-charge (stanichnaia) [is appointed from among local] women [who] each day assigns each of several female agents (razvedchitsy) to specific tasks. Every female agent is required to report back to a local command center three times a day (morning, afternoon, and evening) to find out what is new, and [to indicate] whether there are [Soviet] troops there [in her sector], and to inform the [female] officer-in-charge in the neighboring village regarding the situation in the village from where she came. This information is verified [each day directly by the female officer-in-charge] in a personal meeting with each female agent. Each day information is centralized with the local female officer-in-charge, who must make the decision whether to warn the rebels or to conceal illegals [hiding out nearby]. Women liaison [officers] (sviaznye) operate constantly and must maintain strict clandestinity. The liaison in one village knows the identity of only one liaison in a neighboring village, the one with whom she must maintain contact. [Rebel] correspondence moves from village to village along this relay network (estafetnaia sviaz´), as do various orders, pamphlets, and nationalist literature. These same female liaison [officers] also serve as commanders of various messengers (posyl ´nye), who follow the organization’s affairs and keep tabs on the movements of OUN members.”39
33 Local women and children were commonly responsible for sounding the alarm to warn rebels illegally hiding out in or near their village. Since the traditional cry of “Kloptsi, vorog blyz´ko!” (Men, the enemy is near!) increasingly brought reprisals, the new cries by the end of 1944 were designed to protect the speaker from Soviet retaliation : “Bandits!”, “They’re robbing us!”, or “They’re killing us!”
34 Of course, gathering intelligence is not the same as developing successful tactics to combat the problem. In this case, the growing reliance of rebel forces on women and children was reflected in Soviet files more and more often throughout late 1944 and early 1945, as Soviet personnel scrambled to come up with a solution. In a top secret report dated 6 October 1944, the commander of the NKVD border patrol on the Ukrainian front observed the sticky problem of Ukrainian women and children spies who, he argued, were seriously undermining the effectiveness of Soviet operations : “Many children aged 12-15 and women have worked and continue to work as active informants and messengers between bands and underground organizations of the OUN and UPA. They also organize the delivery of provisions for the bands and warn them about the appearance of [Soviet] border patrol units in their populated areas and about the latter’s possible military operations against them. This corresponds with the instructions of OUN Center, which ordered [local commanders] to utilize [more] women for underground work -- mainly for center-periphery communications.”40
35 The feeling that Soviet occupation forces were not doing enough to combat the specific challenges associated with women and children warriors appeared with rather
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alarming ubiquity in reports flowing out of West Ukraine. As the Zholkevskyi raion secretary Bychkov observed in a tête-à-tête with Ukrainian General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev in January 1945: the Ukrainian underground “has a large women’s organization -- the so-called women’s network (zhinocha sitka). [...] [Women] are their main force -- in communications (signalizatsiia), provisioning, and so on. I have met them. Yet we arrest very few women.” Bychkov added sinisterly in a direct personal appeal to Khrushchev : “We have got to do something more about these women!”41
36 Not a single woman appeared among rebels killed or captured in the regular NKVD reports to Stalin regarding the struggle against the resistance in West Ukraine until February 1945.42 From that time on, women appeared more and more frequently in those summary reports of rebel casualties, reflecting the increased proportion of suspected rebel women killed by Soviet forces in local reports.43 Although there are no gender breakdowns in aggregate numbers of casualties reported by the Soviets, it is possible to reconstruct the growing proportion of women as victims of Soviet violence through specific reports.
37 By March 1945, the ranks of the OUN-UPA had shifted from a relatively low reliance on women to an absolute dependence on women and girls in virtually every sector of underground activity. To take one example : from 20 February to 24 March 1945, the regional organs of the NKVD and NKGB arrested 115 members of the OUN underground in Lopatynskyi raion (outside L´viv). Of these, 25 had carried on underground infiltration work for the OUN in the raion capital, passing information back to military units in the field. The majority of these rebel secret agents were women.44
38 Such a rising proportion did not go unnoticed by local Soviet cadres responsible for suppressing rebel activities. For instance, Borgunov, the party secretary from Strumilovskyi raion (also near L´viv), identified women as the chief enemy to Soviet power off the battlefield : “We have an enormous number of [Ukrainian rebel] women’s networks (zhenskie setki, ‘zhinocha sitka’). From the data it appears that in villages with, say, 1,000 people, there are 50-60 members of the OUN, and a considerable proportion of them are women. In some villages, they direct the [underground] work. Women’s networks are not [as a rule] military units, but rather form the organizational, ancillary force of [rebel] bandits, with whom,” Borgunov concluded ominously, “we must reckon, if not now then later.”45
“The sins of their fathers”: The Soviet drive against insurgent families
39 The unprecedented growth in numbers of Ukrainian women in the underground movement in 1944-1945 was more than just a matter of shifting rebel needs. The induction of increasing proportions of Ukrainian women into the rebel underground corresponded with a general political awakening of West Ukrainian women under a brutal Soviet occupation. Women were drawn into rebel support for a variety of reasons, but here as elsewhere a Soviet policy that failed to distinguish between civilians and organized rebels powerfully encouraged Ukrainian women’s greater participation in the anti-Soviet insurgency. The main problem was that women and family members were implicated and punished for the activities of their menfolk. As a Ukrainian rebel officer noted in an August 1944 report : “The Bolsheviks, not understanding what they themselves are doing, either drive people into hiding or
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arrest them. We must take this into consideration since in [Soviet abuses] lie both our strength and our hope.”46
40 Punishing family members in insurgent areas was a vital and intrinsic part of Soviet police methods. As early as January 1945, the Soviets were keenly aware of distinct gaps in their methods. At a conference of raion chiefs and NKVD-NKGB officers in L´viv oblast´, these principal agents of the Soviet pacification were openly critical of the failure to do more about rebel families. “In our work there is one mistake,” argued the commanding officer of the 88th NKVD Border patrol. “We kill rebels, we see the rebel lying dead, but each [dead] rebel leaves behind a wife, a brother, a sister, and so on” -- family members whose shared sense of victimization would generate incalculable future resistance. When, he asked, will Soviet forces begin to punish families ?47
41 Among Soviet officials in West Ukraine, there was a dawning recognition that it was not enough to remove the active rebels alone : rather, the cancer of opposition had to be torn out by the roots -- by harassing, arresting, imprisoning, torturing, and deporting family members as well. In a highly charged exchange with Khrushchev in a February 1946 meeting of raion and oblast´ party, NKGB and NKVD chiefs plus battalion commanders in West Ukraine, Drohobych obkom secretary Oleksenko made a direct appeal to Khrushchev himself : “I beg you, Nikita Sergeevich. Give us the echelons so that we can deport the families of the rebels. This has great significance and will help us to achieve [our goal]. We are ready to conduct mass deportations. [...]”48
42 Within weeks, Khrushchev gave his formal approval for expanded operations, and the mass deportations of rebel families from West Ukraine expanded dramatically. As of June 1945, 10,139 Ukrainian families (26,093 persons) of suspected anti-Soviet rebels had already been deported to Siberia.49 Initially, “Many believed that we [Soviet officials] would not actually deport them, but were only trying to scare them.”50 The bitter truth came as the pace of deportations accelerated. By the end of 1947, a total of 26,644 “rebel families” -- 76,192 persons -- had been deported from the seven oblasti of West Ukraine to the Soviet Far East : 18,866 men ; 35,152 women ; and 22,174 children -- meaning that women and children dependents outnumbered their adult male counterparts by more than three to one. In a resolution dated 10 September 1947, 21,380 families -- 61,814 persons -- from West Ukrainian oblasti were assigned work in coal-mining operations in the Soviet Far East.51 Deportation meant intrinsically that Soviet law would punish not just suspected rebels, but also their families as well.52 Caught within this catch-22 imposed by a brutal Soviet occupation policy, women and girls increasingly joined the ranks of the Ukrainian anti-Soviet rebel underground.
Women spies
43 The gender shift in rebel procedures dictated a distinct Soviet tactical response : to destroy the Ukrainian underground through its female-dominated liaison networks. While a series of factors on and off the battlefield had provided new opportunities for women among the Ukrainian rebels, the growing reliance of rebels on women and girls also provided new opportunities for Soviet security forces to infiltrate and liquidate rebel forces through the use of ethnic Ukrainian women spies.
44 To counter the newly perceived threat associated with women, the Soviets instituted systematic raids and repeated mass arrests of local Ukrainian women. In doing so, the
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Soviet police pursued two main objectives. First, consistent with Soviet agentura tactics generally, they worked to sow suspicion within the ranks of the rebel underground : by arresting virtually everyone, the Soviets undermined rebel vetting procedures, and made it very difficult for the rebel SB to verify cadres. Second, the Soviet goal was to find the proverbial needle in a haystack : in the course of arresting and interrogating large numbers of women in the underground, Soviet police evidently treated every detained Ukrainian woman or girl as an enemy. Guilty or innocent, local women faced interrogations that were at the very least terrifying, but more often brutally violent, and in which the Soviets imparted a sense of “knowing” the arrested woman had actively worked with the underground. If the woman detainee was actually innocent, from the Soviet point of view, no harm was done : a few days later, she would be released, battered but free. And her experience would have the added advantage of intimidating any future collaboration with rebels. But if the woman was guilty, the systematic cycle of sleep- and food-deprivation, isolation (including incarceration in a dark room with executed corpses), brutalization, and intimidation usually broke the prisoner.53
45 The texture of women’s experience in the Ukrainian underground is best understood by looking closely at the interweaving of private and service lives of women rebels. Intrinsically anecdotal, each life represents in itself a powerful illustration of the complexity of the era, and of the often elusive series of factors that transformed some Ukrainian women rebels into Soviet siksoty, or secret agents.
46 Against a background of wholesale violence and abuse, interrogation and agent recruitment took on numerous subtleties and variations. Soviet police files offer us valuable insights into the complex process of siksotka recruitment, and the factors that motivated ethnic Ukrainian women to betray their former cohort in the nationalist underground. An especially useful case study is the story of the arrest, interrogation, and recruitment of Liudmilla Foia, an ethnic Ukrainian woman who survived repeated rape, beatings, and interrogations for over two months, but was only “turned” when her parents were implicated. Foia’s case is especially revealing because of the virtually unprecedented quality of her files : in the archives appear not only her Soviet police records, but also the records of her subsequent interrogation by the Ukrainian rebel underground, captured two weeks later in a Soviet raid.
47 Liudmilla Foia was born 3 September 1923 in the village of Topora, Ruzhanskyi raion, Zhytomir -- in central Ukraine. The unmarried daughter of an ethnic Ukrainian school teacher and war veteran who had served in the Austrian army from 1914 and the struggle for Ukrainian independence in 1918, Foia became a member of the OUN in 1942, at the age of nineteen. Subjected to three months of incarceration, brutality, rape, and deprivation, Foia was turned as an agent of the NKGB in April 1944, when her interrogators delivered an ultimatum : work with us, or your family will be made to suffer for your obstinate resistance. She operated under the code name “Aprel´ska” until her detention by the Ukrainian SB at the end of May 1945.54
48 Unlike so many other women siksoty who collaborated with the Soviets, Foia was not executed following her apprehension by Ukrainian rebel counter-intelligence. Recognized for her beauty and her integrity, Foia candidly responded to questions, and in the course of her ordeal managed to win the respect of her interrogator, the commander-in-chief of the UPA, Roman Shukhevych. Shukhevych was so impressed by Foia that he enlisted her into underground cultural work, and sent her to deliver
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lectures about her personal experiences to Ukrainian women’s groups throughout West Ukraine. From this point, we lose track of Foia in the Soviet files.
49 Alas, other Soviet women agents were not so fortunate. Alla Linevych, agent “Galka” in Soviet files, was only eighteen when -- in October 1944 -- she was arrested following a denunciation by a local member of the OUN during Soviet interrogation. An ethnic Ukrainian woman from village Bol´shaia-Tseptsevychy, Vladimiretskyi raion, Rivne oblast´, she was at the time of her arrest a low-ranking member of an OUN communications network in her native region. She drew the attention of Soviet officers not just because she was beautiful, well-spoken, and smart, but also because she was very well-connected. Her forty-year-old brother, Aleksei Linevych, was a former deputy commander of the UPA’s Kora band in their native region, and had recently been appointed commander of the local SB unit Barsuka. One of Galka’s closest friends was Mariia Demydovich (alias : “Rusal´ka”) an ardent Ukrainian nationalist who was chief of OUN communications in Sarnenskyi, Rafalovskyi, and Vladimiretskyi raiony.55
50 Galka’s first assignment was to recruit her brother, agent “Burak,” into Soviet intelligence work, which she did successfully in October 1944. Soviet files here and elsewhere refer only to “verbovka agentov” -- agent recruitment -- and generally fail to mention that most recruitments were accomplished with threats to loved ones, holding family members hostage until a written oath was taken by the ob´´ekt or target of recruitment, and then that oath was proven in a Soviet operation. Active service was generally considered the line of demarcation or “point of no return” for ethnic Ukrainian collaborators, since acts against the nationalist underground carried with them an automatic death sentence to be carried out by rebel punitive units not only against the agent, but also against his or her family as well. Agent files reveal a disturbing pattern : male or female, young or old, once a person was targeted for Soviet recruitment, few could resist. Which was why so many OUN-UPA rebels chose to fight to their deaths, or even to commit suicide, rather than to be captured alive. The Soviets evidently had a relentless capacity to break rebels once captured, and the overwhelming majority -- men as well as women -- were usually turned into Soviet assets.
51 Having successfully recruited her own brother for the NKVD, agent Galka’s second assignment powerfully reveals the brutally tragic lives of Soviet siksoty. On 2 November 1944 Galka was ordered to murder her close friend Rusalka, which she did early morning on 11 November in Tseptsevychy forest with a shot from a Soviet- provided pistol. A Soviet spetsgruppa handled disposal of the body. The Soviets intended the murder to open the way for one of their own agents, ideally Galka herself, to step into the position of chief of rebel communications in that sector. That Galka herself should have been forced to carry out the murder was a normal part of Soviet agent recruitment : transforming ardent rebels into faithful agents by forcing them to perpetrate unforgivable acts against their own. With this baptism in blood, agent Galka was both psychologically and physically ready for more complicated operations. This Soviet figurant -- Russian for “stage performer” but also an NKVD euphemism for an agent performing in a field operation -- was ready to dance.
52 Unfortunately for the Soviets, and for Galka herself, their plans to infiltrate her into the Kora band with the aim of its eventual liquidation (razlozhenie) were foiled. It seems that even as one Soviet NKVD team was positioning Galka-Linevych to infiltrate the Kora band, another NKVD team was trying to accomplish the same task with their
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own agent Galka, formerly “Kapustianskaia,” one Anastasia Spitsyna, recruited in late 1944 and sent against the Kora band in December. Less well-prepared for the tasks ahead, Galka-Spitsyna apparently gave herself away almost immediately, and was subsequently detained and interrogated by the rebel SB. The problem was that Soviets had received intelligence from one of their informants that their agent Galka had been unmasked. In an effort to rescue the operation, Galka-Linevych was called back.
53 As a result of her abrupt removal from the field, Galka-Linevych’s cover was blown ; she was, in NKVD parlance, rasshifrovana. Rebel reprisals were brutal and immediate. Her brother Aleksei was detained by the rebel SB, interrogated, tortured, and sadistically murdered. Her mother and aunt, who lived in village Tseptsevychy, were assassinated, their corpses desecrated in the normal way vengeance was meted out to family members of traitors. All of the family’s possessions were either destroyed or carried away by a rebel band. Following standard SB practice, the Linevych family name was forever annihilated in that village.
54 Soviet case files for agent Galka-Linevych end there : with the demoralized and terrified Galka hidden away in a Soviet safe house in Rivne, awaiting her next instructions. A mere eighteen and a half years old, she was already directly responsible for the murder of her best friend, and indirectly responsible for the deaths of her beloved brother, mother, and aunt. But her Soviet controller still had further plans for her, and it was clear from her case files that “she would be used [again]” -- literally “used,” budet ispol´zovana -- “for operations against the OUN underground.”56
55 Ostensibly, agent Galka-Spitsyna fared better. The SB commander who interrogated Galka-Spitsyna persuaded her to write a harshly anti-Soviet note to the Vladimiretskyi raion NKVD chief. Attached to the note was a communication from the SB commander to the local NKVD chief indicating that Galka-Spitsyna’s life would be spared. He taunted : “You should not think that Ukrainian insurrectionaries cut off the heads of Russians and others because of their nationality. No. We Ukrainians love the peoples of other nations, but despise your communes and collective farms.”57 Though the NKVD made an active effort to apprehend Galka-Spitsyna, those operations were unsuccessful. The search continued for some months, but the Soviets lost all trace of her.
The rebel response : liquidating the women’s threat
“Anyone who helps the Stalinist clique will be drowned in the blood of the [Ukrainian] people.” 58
56 Soviet success at infiltrating the Ukrainian underground through women spies forced the rebel leadership into a powerful conundrum : absolutely dependent on women and girls, how was the underground to rid itself of the threat posed by suspected “weak” or “treacherous” cadres -- especially (in their view) women -- who had been turned by Soviet perfidy ? The cold ingenuity of the Soviet tactics consisted not so much in the ruthless application of violence, but in the effectiveness with which the Soviet special police units provoked a palpable atmosphere of suspicion within the rebel underground. Violence begot violence, and Soviet recruitments of local siksoty provoked a bloodbath of rebel reprisals against members of their own cohort, especially against young ethnic Ukrainian women and girls. This was an intrinsic part
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of Soviet dezorganizatsiia, or disorganization : to force the rebels to violate their own rules of engagement ; to provoke the underground into escalating the terror against their own cohort, with the inevitable result of sowing suspicion and distrust within organized resistance, and driving a wedge between rebels and the local civilian population.
57 The cultural milieu of the rebel underground fighter played directly into the hands of Soviet provocateurs. For the underground war in West Ukraine was driven by a distinct machismo, one that preached loyalty unto death as its most sacred rule. The confrontation between Soviet cadres ready to stop at nothing to crush the underground, and rebel leaders who preached martyrdom as a sacred duty of national patriotism, created the setting for scenes like this one, where a former member of the Soviet special forces in West Ukraine bragged among fellows in the Higher Party School in Moscow in summer 1945: “I hung one nationalist upside down and burned him on a slow fire ; I cut pieces of flesh out of him [...] and he, that son of a bitch, died shouting ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ What a son of a bitch! How many of them I tortured!”59
58 In the face of Soviet terror, all Ukrainians -- men and women alike -- were expected to bear the strain with stoic bravery. To communicate that message, the Ukrainian rebel leadership had even prepared a special Handbook for underground partisan warfare to assist in the proper training of nationalist soldiers. The Handbook contained stark images of real-life experiences of the true underground warrior : “There are various tortures. Regular beatings, sleep deprivation, water torture, other physical tortures (needles under fingernails, fingers between doors, tearing out of hair...) and finally moral tortures ([the promise of enticements like] money, foreign passports, family, ideas...). A lot of them. One has to be ready for them by now and in full consciousness (without hesitation) to tell oneself this cardinal ninth point of our ten commandments -- ‘Neither entreaties, nor threats, nor torture, nor death will force me to betray secrets.’”60
59 Countless other instructions echoed the same basic message : “Prohibit underground cadres from operating alone. Everyone should be assigned to a designated unit, ready to fight to the very end, and should know that no one should surrender alive into the hands of the [Soviet] enemy.”61
60 In such a context, surrender was construed as an act of treachery punishable by death -- with underground reprisals often carried out not only against the one who surrendered, but likewise against his or her family members as well.
61 There was widespread expectation that captured women rebels would toe the line, martyring themselves or committing suicide rather than surrendering alive to the Soviet enemy. While countless instructions reminded men and women rebels alike of the sacred code of struggle unto death, one can also observe a concerted effort of the rebel leadership to wean themselves of their dependence on women cadres. A close investigation reveals a rather remarkable evolution of rebel attitudes : from a general consensus of the unsuitability of women for most kinds of rebel work up to 1944; the sudden reliance on women for numerous tasks after the arrival of Soviet forces in West Ukraine in July-August 1944; and a growing resentment towards women in key rebel positions as Soviet intelligence more and more successfully infiltrated the rebel underground by forcing ethnic Ukrainians (men, women, and children alike) into agentura or Soviet-operated informants’ networks.62 By the end of 1946, a backlash
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from within the rebel underground greatly curtailed or rolled back women’s roles in key branches of the underground rebel force.
62 That backlash began within individual units. For instance, the commander of an SB unit, “Stepan,” ordered members of his unit to “discharge women from work in the organization.”63 Similarly, the last of eight points of instructions distributed in late 1946 on the need for strict conspiracy among members of the rebel underground emphasized the particular danger posed by women : “Do not speak with girls about organizational questions. Try to avoid them. The [Soviet] enemy specially sends women in order to initiate a love connection with members of the OUN, using her [sic] to obtain information. More than once through marriage ‘revolutionary’ activity was transformed into an aid to the enemy, and in this way [careless rebels] have paved their own way to their deaths.” 64
63 Yuriy Tys-Krokhmaliuk, who wrote the Ukrainian diaspora’s definitive military history of the struggle against the Soviets during and after World War II, likewise identified the chief threat of Soviet infiltration as “sending young girls into the insurgent areas to gain influence through their sex over UPA commanders or OUN leaders with the purpose of helping [the Soviets] apprehend or kill them.”65 Spending long winters in the underground, rebel soldiers were deemed easy prey for these classic espionage “honeytraps.” But the threat of romantic entanglement was just part of the intrinsic threat associated with the backlash against women in the underground. Subsequent instructions stipulated that all women, not just potential romantic partners, represented a perceived security threat for male rebels. Hence, some rebels -- the members of Self-Defense Units (VKS) were singled out particularly -- were strictly prohibited from visiting their womenfolk at all : “The VKS member has no right [...] to visit his mother, wife, children, girlfriends.”66
64 Likewise, by the end of 1946 the long-standing rebel relay courier system of communication was replaced by a new network of “dead drops” -- hidden locations where the two principals were the only ones to know the location. This was designed to reduce Soviet access to written rebel instructions, plans, and communiqués. But it was also a reflection of the general perception in the OUN-UPA leadership that the weakest links in rebel operations were sectors depending largely on women. Since over 90 % of the underground’s liaisons had been women, the “dead drop” communications network would remove vulnerability to alleged “weak women” from vital rebel operations.
65 A similar strike against perceived “weak women” was the reorganization of the Ukrainian Red Cross (UChKh) that, until 1946, provided primary medical support for underground cadres. The Ukrainian Supreme command’s instructions were explicit : “Instead of women, men are to be trained in special medical courses.”67 The organization of an independent male-provided medical service within the underground undermined yet another channel the Soviets had used to track rebels.
Rebel death squads
“We warn Ukrainian citizens : anyone who works with the organs of the NKVD-NKGB, all those who by any means whatsoever work with the NKVD [...] will be considered traitors, and we will deal with them as with our greatest enemies.”68
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“We were not intimidated by the screams or suffering [of our victims]. [...] I don’t remember the last names of the people we killed. [...] I know they were all [ethnic] Ukrainians, local people.”69
66 Even as women were being pushed out of underground work by late 1946, the Ukrainian rebel underground ruthlessly punished suspected betrayal. As early as 1944, as the underground became more and more dependent on women, special death squads were formed to liquidate women suspected of collaboration or fraternization with Soviet soldiers and officials.70 Underground reprisals were, here as elsewhere, swift and brutal. As one Ukrainian peasant recalled, Ukrainian underground “rebels brutally murdered my wife, my child, and my best friend. Why did they murder them ?”71 The Ukrainian peasant Bertsiuk from Krakovetskyi raion complained that rebels had “murdered my wife and two young children. They burned my house and [ruined] my whole farm.”72
67 The standard SB death order reflected the emergence of particular forms of “women’s treachery.” Typical was this “List of secret collaborators [with the NKVD] in Region 4,” a Ukrainian rebel SB document seized by a Soviet special forces unit in Zolochiv raion in late 1944. It is not without significance that six of eight of the names on the typical list were local women denounced by neighbors sympathetic to the OUN: “2) Woman of village Rozvazh MORTSA Yuliia, [ethnic] Ukrainian, in 1941 was a member of the Communist youth (komsomolka) and an informer for the NKVD. When the Soviets returned in 1944 she began to work still more actively, denouncing the local officer-in-charge or the provisions expert, [reporting] what he was doing, whom he was meeting. She informed about everything to the NKVD and the president of the raion. [...] Every day she would stroll with [members] of the NKVD, and [once was heard to] shout ‘Down with the Banderivtsy!’ She informed against everyone who joined the UPA. 3) Woman of village Rozvazh POPIUK Olga, Ukrainian, was connected to the partisans in our village. She informed some [Communist] prisoners about our entire movement. When the Soviets returned she began to report who did what in the village, that there were meetings and who attended. She informed against the families of those who joined the UPA. She informed the NKVD and the local communist party about all this, reporting who among the youth were hiding from forced levies, who had deserted from the [Red] Army, or escaped [forced] labor in the Donbass. She [was heard to] say that the end [was near] for us and for [independent] Ukraine. 4) Woman of village Rozvazh MIKHAILIUK Yuliia, ethnic Russian,73 was connected with the Poles and the Soviet partisans, and now has become a major informer for the NKVD. She informs against those who collaborated with the Germans, [and] who is still hiding out. She informs the NKVD and the local party representative about everything that happens in the village. She [was overheard] saying : ‘Down with the Banderivtsy! Now it’s time to start living the life we’ve all been waiting for. To hell with you and your Banderivtsy!’ 5) Woman of village Rozvazh LYTARCHUK Fima, ethnic Ukrainian, works as a secret agent of the NKVD, reports about who is in the village, who is hiding out, and has betrayed many friends -- both men and women. She reports who collaborated with the Germans, and what they did. Has a very strong connection with the president of the village soviet and the president of the local party apparatus. She’s been squeezed many times by the NKVD and the local party representative. She gives everything away : who appears in the village, who is hiding out. [She was overheard] to say : ‘Down with the Banderivtsy! We’ve waited long enough for freedom. Now it’s time to live!’
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6) Woman of village Rozvazh BRONOWICZKA Marianka, ethnic Pole, works as an informer for the Polish [underground] and the NKVD. Was connected with the local police. Has informed against those who are hiding out, who returned from the [underground] army or ran off from [forced] labor in the Donbass. [Was overheard] saying : ‘Down with Ukrainians and down with Banderivets families!’ 7) Woman of village Rozvazh PUSHKA Agaf´ia, Ukrainian, betrayed everyone -- who collaborated with the Germans, what sort of work they did [during the German occupation], that there were meetings and who attended the meetings. She gave away those who are hiding out from the [forced enlistment] levies, who has deserted from the [Red] Army. She has betrayed many friends -- men and women -- to the NKVD: who has weapons, who runs the meetings and where. She has informed about the whole movement, everything that’s happening now, and [has been overheard] to say : ‘Down with the Banderivtsy!’ [Signed] ZEVERUKHA. Glory to Ukraine! Glory to her heroes!”74
68 Obviously tenuous and riddled with hearsay, such “documented proof” of a woman’s alleged betrayal began the process of liquidation. The target lists were themselves based more on denunciations by neighbors, or misconstrued rumors, than on solid intelligence. Nonetheless, every one of these women was brutally executed within weeks of appearing on the underground’s target lists. Regardless of the unreliability of the evidence, makeshift rebel courts, closely tied to SB assassination teams, did, as a rule, order summary executions, with little delay between verdict and execution. There follows an example of a typical rebel death sentence : VERDICT “On the 19th day of October 1944 this court of the military tribunal [of the Ukrainian Insurrection Army], having reviewed the case against MIRONCHUK Tat ´iana and having found her guilty of collaboration with the NKVD, and on the basis of her confession this court hereby sentences MIRONCHUK Tat´iana to death. [Added below] This sentence was carried out on 19.10.1944 at 5 o’clock in the morning. Glory to Ukraine! Glory to her heroes!” [Two signatures] Kom. Pol. Berezhniuk75
69 An especially macabre ritual of rebel execution was that nearly every person charged was, as a rule, first made to confess his or her treachery. During his own interrogation by the Soviet NKVD in November 1944, the commander of one of these special death squads, Iosif Pan´kiv, described the circumstances under which such confessions were extracted : “At the end of February 1944 I learned that an actress in the L´viv opera theater -- Maria Kapustenski -- was allegedly connected with the Gestapo and had betrayed another actor, a member of the OUN. With the consent of the SB leadership she was kidnapped by my own people in the unit and brought to a shooting-range, where we had earlier prepared a place for her interrogation. She was kidnapped outside the [L´viv opera] theater and brought directly to the site. I personally interrogated her. [Initially] she categorically denied any connection with the Gestapo. So then we stripped her naked and with willow-switches we had earlier prepared, each man in my unit beat her until all we had left was one shredded switch. Then she said she would confess.
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After this [beating], she ‘confirmed’ that she had had a connection with the Gestapo. Then, under my orders, she was dragged 500 meters from the site of the interrogation and shot by [rebel soldier] GLUKHYI.”76
70 Pan´kiv took evident pride in his work, confessing to similarly bloody assassinations of at least sixty ethnic Poles -- suspected German or Soviet “collaborators” -- during the war.77
71 Soviet investigative files are filled with references to follow-up investigations of brutal reprisals carried out by rebel SB units against women suspected of pro-Soviet sympathies. “In village Diad´kovichi [underground rebel units] murdered Sof´ia PAVLIUK, who heartily welcomed soldiers of the advancing Red Army.”78 “On the night of 19 September [1944] in the village Bol´shaia-Osneshcha, Kolkovskyi raion the STRESHA band murdered four women, in whose apartments lived Red Army soldiers.”79 “On the night of 23 September [1944] in village Mikhlin, Senkovichi raion, a rebel unit of four persons killed four women and injured one. [The women] had gotten together to write letters to their husbands and sons [serving] in the Red Army.”80
72 While targets of underground rebel violence were certainly not exclusively women and girls, a close look at patterns of rebel violence against local citizens suggests that reprisals against “collaborators” was a euphemism for violence against ethnic Poles during World War II and the first two postwar years, when three quarters of the violence against “locals” was directed against ethnic Poles. Following the forced deportation of over 100,000 ethnic Poles from West Ukrainian oblasti in 1945-1946, however, available evidence suggests that as many as four of five of victims of rebel violence against suspected “collaborators” were ethnic Ukrainian women, especially young women suspected of sexually fraternizing with men of the Soviet occupation.81 These so-called “moskal´ki” -- a derogatory term describing certain ethnic Ukrainian women or girls as “Red Army whores” -- were among the most hated and resented categories of Ukrainian enemies. A member of the Rivne raion SB, A. Hritsiuk, apprehended by Soviet police in late 1944 following a denunciation by a local woman, left the typical confession regarding the rebel drive to annihilate suspected moskal´ki: “In mid-January 1944 in the village of Iasenichi, on orders of [my unit commander] ‘DUBA,’ I murdered a 19-20 year-old woman from the village, Ukrainian by nationality. The murder was perpetrated by means of hanging with a noose [putovaniem (literally : ‘stringing her up’)]. The corpse was buried by [local] inhabitants at the site of the execution. [...] At the end of January 1944 in [...] village Hrushvitsa I took part in the murder of another woman, hanging her with the same noose [the Soviet NKVD] had used to execute members of the raion SB units ‘NECHAI’ and ‘KRUK’.”82
73 For perpetrators, victims, and bystanders alike, reprisals were intimate acts of terror against well-known targets. Hanging was the favored form of ritualized public execution when rebels perceived some popular support for their action, followed -- in particularly heinous cases of perceived betrayal by the victim -- with ritualized desecration of the corpse.83
74 Often, orders to execute suspected women “collaborators” were issued well in advance, and then systematically carried out by specially organized units. One such SB unit specially designated for carrying out reprisals against suspected moskal´ki was discovered operating in L´viv in June 1948.84 On 21 June 1948, a cleaning woman at L´viv State University (today, Ivan Franko University in L´viv) was dumping waste in the
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university stable when she caught sight of a pile of severed human legs. In horror, she immediately summoned the police. Upon further investigation, Soviet investigators uncovered eighteen naked and mutilated corpses -- seventeen women and one adolescent boy. As a member of the unit who confessed during MGB interrogation recounted : “The members of the unit [operated] on orders of the OUN underground. From November 1947 we systematically assassinated persons loyally disposed to the Soviet regime who lived in regions near L´viv city. With this purpose we met with those marked for liquidation at the L´viv railway station or the town bazaar, luring them on various pretexts to the stables at L´viv State University. There we killed them with blows [wielded] by a blunt instrument to the [back of the] head.”85
75 Nearly all of the corpses were so badly decomposed that only six could be identified by family members (mainly through personal objects or clothing).86 Each of these six could be linked in some way or other to suspicion of pro-Soviet activity or fraternization. Details from the list will illustrate the often tenuous reasons for which SB vengeance was applied : - MOISIN, Marina, born 1930, age 17. Murdered 8 April 1948. Two cousins of MOISIN had served in the Red Army. MOISIN had been observed regularly bringing milk for sale to a building where agents of the MVD-MGB lived. - MIRON, Maria, 23 years old. Refugee from Poland. The SB order for her execution contained only a general indictment : ‘Loyally disposed to the Soviet regime. Promptly fulfilled all obligations to the state.’ - BUIANOVSKAIA, Maria, born 1922, age 25. Murdered 16 June 1948. BUIANOVSKAIA was deported to Germany for forced labor from 1942 to 1946. Her brother had served in the Red Army and had been killed at the front. - IVANISHINA, Anna, born 1908, 39 years old. Murdered 30 May 1948. Her sister’s husband had been labeled a Soviet collaborator by the underground for taking the post of president of a village soviet in 1945. Subsequently, he and his whole family were brutally murdered in an UPA raid. IVANISHINA had lived in the same house as her sister, but she miraculously escaped death during the initial raid. The SB death sentence was eventually carried out nearly three years later. - KUKHAR´, Ekaterina, born 1923, age 24. Murdered 20 May 1948. Her brother was a demobilized soldier who had served six years in the Red Army. - MAER, Pelageia, born 1924, age 23. Murdered in April 1948. She had worked in ancillary labor during the German occupation. She and the rest of her family were transported for forced labor in Germany at the time of the German retreat in 1944. On her return to L´viv oblast´ in 1947, MAER joined the local Soviet aktiv in her village. Her home was observed by OUN informants to have been visited frequently by MGB officers.87
76 However tenuous these charges may seem now, such minor infractions -- the mere appearance of pro-Soviet collaboration -- carried grave consequences : evidently, the appearance of collaboration was synonymous with an actual act of betrayal against the Ukrainian people. In each case, the victim had been beaten to death on the back of the skull with an ax, hammer, or pipe.88 As a reflection of the macabre ritual interrogation that usually preceded rebel executions of suspected collaborators, one corpse still had more than a meter of noose around her neck.
77 This particular Ukrainian SB assassination squad had nine members, and acted on the direct instructions of the commander of an UPA regiment based in a nearby forest in Bibrka raion. One of the university’s wagoners -- Kuz´ma Ken´o -- drove periodically to collect wood in the forest and to meet with UPA superiors who would issue him instructions for relay to the other members of the unit. All of the executions had been
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perpetrated under orders. Ken´o had been recruited into the unit by an old friend, Zakharyi Lychko, an officer from the Ukrainian SS Galicia Division, who was arrested by the Soviets in 1946.89
78 The repeated violence against women was certainly noticed and feared by the local population. As peasant A. V. Vasil´ev wrote from Stryi raion to his cousin on 1 September 1946: “Bandits cut the throats of six women in one night! It’s horrifying here now -- you go to sleep and don’t know if you’ll ever wake up again.”90
79 Instructions in mid 1946 ordered OUN-UPA units not to murder Ukrainian women who wanted to become legal citizens -- and to restrict liquidation to insubordinate cadres, collaborators, and provocateurs, and not their families.91 With the growing demoralization of the underground in the war against the Soviets, and the decline of cadre discipline, the instructions came too late to exert much influence. The initial orders to root out women spies gave way to vigilante-style retaliation against women slurred for a wide variety of reasons. More and more often, Ukrainian women were scapegoated for the growing frequency of rebel failures.
Patterns of denunciation
“I’ve heard about a growing number of denunciations, usually about hidden weapons. Most denunciators are women.”92
80 The cycle of state-sponsored terror and rebel reprisals left the population of West Ukraine with little recourse but to develop tactics common to marginalized groups caught in the borderlands between two warring parties : in the public sphere, at least, they endeavored to appear to collaborate with either side as little as possible.
81 Another way of approaching the problem of women in West Ukraine after the war is to look at patterns of denunciations. There is considerable evidence in Soviet operations files to suggest quite confidently that women were in fact the primary channels for leaks to Soviet authorities regarding the whereabouts of members -- mainly men -- in the rebel underground.93 But there are two significant patterns suggested by the evidence. First, Ukrainian women collaborators by and large imparted information about loved ones with whom they were intimately connected : convinced of the futility of further armed struggle against superior Soviet forces, and operating on the hope of bringing the menfolk back home alive, ethnic Ukrainian women not infrequently passed on information to Soviet authorities. It is important to note that these were not typically anonymous, back-stabbing denunciations motivated by resentment, enmity, opportunism, or greed, but rather acts of feminine mediation motivated by concern and love.94 Caught between the seeming invincibility and ruthlessness of the Soviet campaign versus the rebel machismo of “war unto death,” Ukrainian women introduced a third road aimed primarily at breaking the deadlock of violence and bringing their menfolk back home alive. As L´viv oblast´ Party secretary Iakov Grushetskii reported to Khrushchev in late 1945: “The [women] peasants themselves assist the organs of Soviet power in the surrender of their husbands, brothers, sons and fathers, and likewise reveal the locations of rebels.”95 A Professor Dumka at the L´viv Pedagogical Institute unwittingly explained the logic of denunciations to a Soviet informant : “[Ethnic] Poles and the Soviets are wiping out the Ukrainians. Happy are the ones who are deported [to Siberia]. Only by this means can you escape destruction.”
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96 Under the circumstances, arrest and exile were often preferable to living in a war zone, caught between two implacable enemies.
82 A second feature of female denunciations of menfolk to Soviet authorities was that paradoxically the denunciations were often made at the behest of the men themselves. Far from being merely passive victims of alleged female weakness -- the orchestrated fiction upon which family survival depended -- men in the Ukrainian underground were often the perpetrators of their own apparent demise. Why would men in the Ukrainian underground collude with their wives and other loved ones to denounce them to Soviet authorities ? The subterfuge was imposed by conditions of civil war and terror, conditions that -- as we have seen -- labeled surrender an act of overt betrayal and which provoked brutal reprisals against the ex-rebel and his family and friends by roving SB units. Surrendering members of rebel units were absolutely clear on this point : “[The rebel officers] warned us that if we surrendered, they would massacre our families.”97 “The unit officers intimidate us, [saying that the Soviets] will laugh at us and massacre us and our families.”98 In contrast, to be captured or arrested was not just more honorable before rebels and neighbors, but also the sole means by which to escape the underground’s “war unto death.” As L´viv oblast´ Party secretary Iakov Grushetskii reported to Khrushchev on 12 January 1946: “Among the banderovtsy familiar with the state decree [of 19 May 1945 offering amnesty to those who surrender], there are many [rebel soldiers] who desire to break with their units, but they are afraid of their leaders. So they send their wives to the NKVD to inform us that they want us to arrest them. [...] Surrendering rebels declare : ‘Better to join the Red Army than to know that our families will be repressed.’”99
83 To take just one of many examples : in July 1945, the peasant woman Mariia Paliuha of Sknylov village, L´viv oblast´, denounced her husband Ivan to local authorities. Ivan had deserted from the Red Army and joined an underground unit stationed nearby. Another case involved the passage of a heavily-armed Soviet special forces unit through the village of Horodyslavich in Bibrka raion (L´viv oblast´), evidently on a seek- and-destroy mission. A peasant woman who feared the ensuing bloodbath ran into the street and screamed : “I’ll show you right now where the rebels are hiding. I’ve had enough of enduring [this violence] and of being afraid.” She then led the NKVD directly to three hideouts and was personally responsible for the Soviet capture of eight rebels. At a fourth hideout, the local rebel unit commander “Rybak” was allegedly shot trying to escape. The same peasant woman likewise gave the NKVD surnames of twenty more rebels still in hiding.100
84 Women also denounced rebels to Soviet authorities based on their objections to the excesses of the rebel terror. In a voluntary denunciation to the NKVD in Rivne raion in late 1944, ethnic Ukrainian woman E. A. P-k angrily gave up the identities and crimes of each of the local members of the rebel SB: “In our village at the end of 1943 a band of murderers calling themselves the SB was formed. These bandits murdered very many innocent people. I know that they kidnapped and murdered a local pharmacist and his wife, her name was Olia, that they strangled a unit of Red Army prisoners who had escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp, and that they tortured to death the family of the [ethnic] Pole ZAVADA. To conceal from Soviet power and [local] people their dirty crimes, the bandits threw the murdered bodies into a well located two kilometers from Diad´kovichi village at Kurovskyi’s farm.”101
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85 This denunciation was subsequently investigated, leading to the arrest, confession, and execution of four members of the Ukrainian rebel SB unit in Rivne raion : Trofimchuk, A. Kiriliuk, A. Hritsiuk, and Slobadiuk.102 In a similar case, acting out against the murders of several local ethnic Polish families by OUN units, in August 1944, a young Polish woman from village Patsykiv agreed to collaborate with the NKVD in Stanyslaviv. According to an OUN report, this young woman “betrayed to the NKVD 20 families and several other young women from village Patsykiv who had ties to the [Ukrainian nationalist] partisans.”103
86 Soviet forces in West Ukraine often used gender as a channel to influence family members. The method of influencing rebels through their women folk was a common Soviet tactic. Ukrainian rebel wife Mariya Savchyn, for instance, was arrested in January 1949 by the MGB. Knowing that her husband was an officer in the Ukrainian resistance, the MGB released her on the presumption that she would persuade her husband to leave the underground and work for them. Instead, she exploited her release as an opportunity to go underground with her husband in Volhynia, where she remained until she was apprehended again in summer 1953.104
87 Similarly, the Ukrainian rebel underground tried to influence men through their wives. In instructions calling for the boycott of elections to the Supreme Soviet in February 1946, women were called upon directly : “Women, stay out of trouble, for the sake of your children -- boycott the Stalinist ‘elections.’ Stop your husbands from voting. Death to Stalin! Death to Khrushchev! Long live the OUN! Long live the unified Ukrainian independent state!”105
The meaning of violence
“Words may be eloquent, but how much more so is silence. [...]106 “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. [...] Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried.”
88 Having endeavored to identify distinct gender patterns in the civil war in West Ukraine, and having taken the step toward rediscovering Ukrainian rebel women’s contributions and tragic lives, there still remains the task of explaining the conundrum with which this investigation began : how do we account for the relative silence of Ukrainian discussions of women’s roles in the rebel underground, versus the Soviet accounts that emphasize women’s active participation ?
The logic of Ukrainian silence
89 In the course of researching and writing this article, I spoke with hundreds of people about this divergency between Ukrainian and Soviet accounts of women’s roles in the underground movement, and received just as many different responses. It is interesting to note that nearly all those ethnic Ukrainians questioned -- male or female, young or old, native Ukrainian or diaspora -- agreed that we know so little about women’s contributions because of Ukrainian male attitudes. Men and women alike spoke rather passionately on this theme, and often referred to a distinct male machismo among “Old
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World” Ukrainian men. Certainly, the leadership of the Ukrainian Insurrection Army were not the sort of men who would readily share the limelight with their women.
90 While it is tempting to accept such an explanation at face value, there are limits to what we can achieve by blaming traditional patriarchalism or male chauvinism alone for this long-neglected area of historical inquiry. Certainly, a record of countless female victims is hardly the stuff of which “heroic struggle” is made, even as diaspora accounts have long endeavored to transform male victims into heroes : evidently, male suffering is somehow more “courageous” and “heroic” than female suffering. Male victimologies lend themselves more readily to heroic histories. In contrast, female victims of gender violence are less likely to be viewed as heroes and more likely to be construed as reminders of defeat. This is especially so in patriarchal societies. As Gerda Lerner perceptively noted in her pathbreaking study of female subordination : “The impact on the conquered of the rape of conquered women was twofold : it dishonored the women and by implication served as a symbolic castration of their men. Men in patriarchal societies who cannot protect the sexual purity of their wives, sisters and children are truly impotent and dishonored.”107 Descriptions of the horrific scenes of gender violence left over from ethnic nationalist brutality certainly eluded heroic imagery. As a nationalist partisan recalled : “Special treatment was always meted out to women. Rape is the male conqueror’s instinctive privilege, his way of defiling and possessing his victim, and killing and sex are thus intertwined. [...] The naked remains of women often showed signs of mutilation -- their vaginas had usually been slit open. Even small girls had been carved with knives and bayonets.”108
91 The more extreme version of this “chauvinism” line would assert that having found themselves dependent on women in 1944-1945, and having faced increasing losses to the Soviets, “chauvinistic” Ukrainian men lashed out against suspected “weak women” in their ranks : increasingly stymied by Soviet forces, Ukrainian rebel men took out their anger and frustration on their own womenfolk ; hence, the absence of effort in subsequent years to rehabilitate the memory of women’s contributions. A broader, less judgmental amalgam of the above would identify the context of widespread violence and brutality, and see the evidence of skyrocketing violence of Ukrainian men against their own womenfolk as a characteristic symptom of their own post-traumatic stress. As a leading authority on the psychology of male gender violence has argued, “Abused men abuse women.”109
92 And, what is equally true, there was a dearth of women candidates pushing for recognition of their own heroic status. The Latvian émigré writer Agate Nesaule put it best : “No one ever wants to hear about the painful parts of my past. People have hundreds of ways, both subtle and harsh, to reinforce my own reluctance to tell.”110 The foremost American psychiatric expert on women and trauma, Dr. Judith Herman, adds : “To speak about [violent] experiences in sexual or domestic life was to invite public humiliation, ridicule and disbelief.”111
93 An interpretation that emphasizes the interplay of male intolerance and female reluctance would not be without historical precedent. Working on a similar set of circumstances in postwar Soviet-occupied East Germany, psychologist Erika Hoerning has argued that while German women who had suffered rape at the hands of Soviet soldiers in 1945 were by and large loyal to their men, and did not blame them for the violence they had suffered, the men were in denial and often accused their abused and terrorized women of fraternizing with the enemy, a contemporary equivalent of
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victimizing the victim of rape twice : terrorized by Soviet forces, the rape victim was in turn ostracized by her family and community.112 The woman’s implied “consent” to be a victim of violence (exemplified by the fact that she lived to tell the tale rather than dying in the struggle to save her virtue) meant ipso facto that she had collaborated with her perpetrator, and deserved not compassion but disdain.
94 In all of the above scenarios, there are ample combinations for reaching a satisfactory, though tragic, explanation for the relative silence on women’s contributions, and gender violence, in the Ukrainian insurrection. Ukrainian women certainly provided substantial contributions to the Ukrainian struggle, and there is little excuse or explanation for the subsequent silence about it.
The dynamics of Soviet policing
95 But is it fair to focus on the victims alone to explain the apparent divergency between Soviet and Ukrainian accounts ? Mass terror, mass arrests, imprisonment, torture, rape, were all tactics that fell under the rubric of Soviet dezorganizatsiia -- “disorganization” of the enemy’s home base. Soviet state violence was a means, not an end : it was neither the product of excesses of individuals, nor an end in itself, but was part of a deliberate campaign to destroy the self-identity of local populations, to drive a wedge between organized resistance and the society-at-large, and to intimidate further potential acts of opposition. Two accounts, taken verbatim from a Soviet Communist Party Control Commission review in 1946 of the first eighteen months of the Ukrainian Communist Party’s struggle against nationalist rebels in West Ukraine after the war, reveal the degree to which Soviet MVD/MGB officers in West Ukraine exploited rape for their own personal and operational interests : “Chief of the Gliniavskyi raion MVD in L´viv oblast´ Matiukhin P.E. in February [1946], while interrogating [ethnic Ukrainian woman] Mikhal´skaia E.G., raped and brutally beat her. Kept under arrest from 27 January to 18 February of this year, Mikhal´skaia has been released from prison [following a determination that she had been arrested on the basis] of unsubstantiated charges. Matiukhin likewise raped at least four other illegally arrested girls : Pasternak, Kostyv, Pokyra and Stepanova. [In each case], they were released after having been subjected to violence and insults.”113 “Chief of the Bogorodchanskyi raion MVD in Stanyslaviv oblast´ Bespalov M.D. and his deputy Borisov I.Z. in February of this year illegally arrested women citizens Snyt´ko Mariia and Fanega Praskov´ia. Both were beaten during interrogation and then incarcerated in a cold cell. After her release Snyt´ko died from wounds suffered during the beating. Snit´ko’s corpse lay in her apartment for two days until it was discovered by neighboring peasants who threatened retaliation against those who had done this to her in the raion MVD headquarters.”114
96 Rape was an integral part of Soviet interrogation methods of West Ukrainian women. In his diaries, Polish doctor Zygmunt Klukowski recalled : “In our cell we could sometimes hear the shouts and loud crying of those questioned [...], particularly women.”115 The precise nature of what went on there was suggested by the powerful words of Polish inmate Eugenia Swojda : “[A]s a woman I was driven to despair.”116 A Latvian woman who survived six months of Soviet incarceration and interrogation back in the 1940s, and then remained silent about her ordeal for the next fifty years, recalled : “I was questioned in all sorts of ways, beaten in all sorts of ways, they did everything. They took me where nails are pulled off, where people were writhing
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on electrical chairs. They said, ‘you will get the same if you don’t tell us where your brothers and the others are.’ Dear lord! What can I say ?”117
97 In the face of organized Soviet mass terror, local populations were dumbstruck, silenced, cowed into submission, often remaining silent for decades after the violence had ended. And perhaps this was, after all, the whole point of the Soviet brutality : to disorganize the local population, to deprive them of any hope of effective resistance to Soviet power.
98 There are no better illustrations of the Soviet use of rape as a tactical weapon in warfare than those found in the records of Soviet spetsgruppy in West Ukraine : evidently, special MGB maskirovka units regularly brutalized local Ukrainian women while disguised as rebels. Here is just one of myriad examples found in Soviet police files : “On the night of 23 July 1948 the same spetsgruppa [masquerading as rebel bandits] from Podvysots´ke village abducted in the forest a young woman REPNYTSKA Nina Iakovlevna, born in 1931. In the forest REPNYTSKA was subjected to tortures. While interrogating REPNYTSKA, members of the spetsgruppa beat her severely, hung her upside down by her legs, forced a stick into her genitalia, and then one by one raped her. In a helpless condition, REPNYTSKA was abandoned in the forest, where her husband found her and took her to the hospital, where REPNYTSKA spent an extended period recovering.”118
99 The logic ? Following officially sanctioned procedures, Soviet policemen disguised themselves as rebels, then perpetrated atrocities in their name, hoping in this way to provoke distrust and antagonism between rebel units and the local population. In this context, gender violence was not an end in itself, but a tactical weapon that utilized women’s bodies to fight a wider conflict.
100 Whether they were rapists in Soviet uniforms, petty officials in the local apparatus, or even members of Soviet spetsgruppy perpetrating acts of gender violence under orders, Soviet authorities did themselves play a critical role in the creation of an image of the enemy other that included not just Ukrainian men, but also Ukrainian women and children. The logic of Soviet institution building dictated a definition of the Ukrainian enemy that would justify violence against young and old, male and female. At a meeting of thirty-five Soviet Party, MGB, and MVD officers in West Ukraine with then General Secretary Lazar´ Kaganovich, Nikita Khrushchev, and Ukrainian Minister of State Security S.R. Savchenko in L´viv on 23 April 1947, the Drohobych obkom secretary Gorobets noted that 60 % of all locals sentenced for Ukrainian nationalism in 1946 had been women and girls, even as only 8 % of the local UPA rank-and-file were female.119 Stanyslaviv obkom secretary M. Slon´ explained the reasoning for the disproportionate focus on Ukrainian women and children : “We must repress family members as traitors against the nation. We must deport families of rebels as dangerous threats to state security.”120 The logic of the mass arrests and mass deportations was to punish not just the rebels, but also their families, friends, and loved ones, all who fell into Soviet punitive traps as “collaborators” with the organized anti-Soviet opposition. Add to this the practical issue : while male rebels often managed to elude Soviet capture, their wives, mothers, daughters, cousins, and neighbors were readily available for retaliation delivered at the hands of frustrated Stalinist policemen.
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101 The corollary of this argument would be that if the Ukrainian rebel woman had not existed, the Soviet state would certainly have created her. For we are speaking here not just about individual acts of violence, but of a deepseated and powerfully institutionalized state violence in which Soviet cadres had to be rallied time and again to transform abstract justice into particular acts of “enforcement.” Which is to say : Ukrainian women appear so often as enemy rebels in Soviet profiles not just because there really were so many women rebels, but also because there were so many women victims of Soviet power. Here, as so often, the crime contained the seeds for its own self-justification and legitimization : from the Soviet police perspective, Ukrainian women were punished because they were rebels. Which is just another way of saying : if their victims were guilty, then the police were self-assuredly innocent of any crime when they perpetrated acts of terror against them. In the same way that well-dressed women were once blamed for luring their own rapists, Ukrainian women were -- by Soviet definition -- deserving of any punishment they received at the hands of Soviet policemen. For Soviet power in West Ukraine, the law could be adapted to legitimize any act of state-sponsored terror.
102 Department of History
103 Northeastern University
104 249 Meserve Hall
105 Boston, MA 02115
106 e-mail : [email protected]
NOTES
2. The two key agencies of the Soviet secret police were the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) and the People’s Commissariat of State Security (NKGB). In March 1946, they were renamed the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and the Ministry of State Security (MGB). Until 21 January 1947, the spetsgruppy or special tasks units were subordinated to the NKVD/MVD’s State Directorate for the Struggle Against Banditry (GUBB). Thereafter, they were transferred to the control of the MGB until the reorganization of the Soviet police system following Stalin’s death in 1953. 3. See the original report in a coded telegram from the scene, dated 27 January 1947. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. R-9478 Glavnoe upravlenie po bor’be s banditizmom MVD SSSR (1938-1950 gg.) (GUBB MVD/NKVD SSSR), op. 1, d. 888, ll. 111-112; and the top secret report from Soviet MVD S. Kruglov to Stalin, dated 29 January 1947. GARF, f. R-9401 Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del SSSR, 1934-1960 (MVD SSSR), op. 2, d. 168, ll. 145-146. This account is substantiated by versions published in the OUN’s own histories. See Petro R. Sodol, Ukrains´ka Povstancha Armiia, 1943-1949. Dovidnyk (New York : Proloh, 1994-1995), 2 vols, I: 64. In this diaspora account, Mykhailo is said to have died “a heroic death,” while neither his wife nor his communications officer are even mentioned.
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4. Arkhiv MVD SSSR, f. 488 Upravlenie vnutrennikh voisk MVD Ukrainskogo okruga, op. 1, d. 227, ll. 76-95. 5. Soviet police files are problematic sources. For a survey of special concerns, see Boris V. Anan´ich, “The historian and the source : The problems of reliability and ethics”; and Jeffrey Burds, “Ethnicity, memory, and violence : Reflections on special problems in Soviet and East European archives,” forthcoming in a special issue of Archivum, “Archival politics in dissolving states,” William Rosenberg and Nancy Bartlett, eds, 2002. 6. “Nastavlenie po ispol´zovaniiu voisk NKVD pro provedenii chekistko-voiskovykh operatsii,” NKVD SSSR, top secret, 1944. From a third typescript copy preserved in Arkhiv SB (L´viv, Ukraine). According to his personnel file at GUBB, Major A. M. Sokolov, Chief of the Ukrainian MVD-GUBB in Ternopil oblast´ in early 1946, was later that year transferred for special duty in Lithuania, “as a person having practical experience regarding the organization and work of the spetsgruppy” -- the GUBB clandestine units that specialized in domestic black operations. Sokolov’s specialty was disorganization. See GUBB chief A.A. Leont´ev’s orders for Sokolov’s temporary transfer to Lithuania, dated 26 March 1945. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 527, l. 14. On Sokolov’s preeminent role leading Soviet spetsgruppy disguised as underground anti-Soviet partisans in the postwar suppression of anti-Soviet rebels in Lithuania, see : Juozas Daumantas [alias for Juozas Luksa], Fighters for freedom : Lithuanian partisans versus the USSR (1944-1947) (Toronto : The Lithuanian Canadian Committee for Human Rights, 1975), 2nd ed.: 81-82; and K. V. Tauras, Guerilla warfare on the amber coast (New York : Voyager Press, 1962): 78-80. Also see top secret communiqué from Deputy MVD V. Riasnoi to Lithuanian MVD Major-General Vartashunas in Vilnius, 29 June 1946. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 527, l. 27. 7. See Jeffrey Burds, “Agentura: Soviet informants’ networks and the Ukrainian rebel underground in Galicia, 1944-1948,” East European Politics and Societies, 11, 1 (Winter 1997): 89-130. 8. The extraordinary summary report was originally written in Sokolov’s own hand, preserved in GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 487, ll. 175-199. Subsequently, the report was typed and re-submitted over Sokolov’s name to Leont´ev, with a cover letter from Gorshkov successfully nominating Sokolov for a medal. See the typed and corrected report on GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 487, ll. 212-223. The report is a summary of how Sokolov put together the spetsgruppa “Bystryi” in Ternopil oblast´ in 1945. 9. “Nestor” was the alias for Ivan Shinayda, the UPA’s oblast´ commander in Ternopil. Nestor was not apprehended in this operation, but was subsequently killed by the Soviets in March 1946. For biographical information, see P.R. Sodol, op. cit., I: 132. 10. Sokolov deliberately used a double entendre here. Figura byla interesnaia would usually mean : “This was an interesting person.” But here and throughout the account of Natalka’s recruitment, Sokolov uses sexual connotations, and hence the dual meaning : “her figure was interesting” or “she had a good figure.” 11. For the NKVD/NKGB, “formally recording a recruitment” was a highly ritualized procedure that included the requirement that new recruits sign written oaths of allegiance to Soviet power, and choose a special field alias, a new name for their work as Soviet agents. Psychologically, this process was designed to assist the recruit to adopt a new identity. Practically, it also put the recruit under the total control of Soviet
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police : if leaked, that information would bring an automatic death penalty to the signatory, as well as to his family and loved ones. 12. Initially resistant to Soviet overtures, “Artem” -- alias for Vasyl´ Chizhevs´kyi -- was eventually turned by the Soviets. Soon after, in April 1945, he became chief of communications between rebel units of the UPA under the leadership of Roman Shukhevych and their foreign base of operations in Munich, Germany. Traveling back and forth between Galicia and Munich, Artem was -- according to diaspora sources -- captured by the Soviet MGB on the Czechoslovak border with West Germany on 4 December 1945. In fact, as Sokolov’s account suggests, Artem was probably turned into a Soviet double agent as early as April 1945; which means the 4 December “arrest” was probably just a regular debriefing by his Soviet controllers. In any case, Artem continued to work for the Soviets until summer 1947, when he was assassinated in Germany by the Ukrainian SB. For Artem’s biographical information, see P.R. Sodol, op. cit., II: 108-109. 13. Reprinted in a corrected edition, Ie. Shtendera and P. Potichnyj, eds, Ternopil ´shchyna. Spysok upavshykh heroiv ukrains´koi revoliutsii v borot ´bi z moskovos´ko- bil ´shovyts´ kim okupantom za chas vid 13.3.1944 r. do 31.12.1948 r. (Toronto : Litopys UPA, 1985). 14. Marta N., “Zhinka v Ukrains´ komu vyzvol´ nomu Rusi (Z vlasnykh sposterezhen´ ),” in Ukrains ´ka Postans ´ka Armiia : Zbirka dokumentiv za 1942-1950 rr. (Munich, 1957), Ch. 1: 90. 15. D. Karov, Interrogation methods used by German counterintelligence in Kharkov, Russia, 1941-1943 (Historical Division of the U.S. Army Europe, Foreign Military Studies Branch, 1953): 14. On men versus women agents in Ukraine, see pp. 12-13. Declassified by the U.S. Department of Defense on 31 October 1997. MS# P-138. 16. Cf. the 20-page, closely reasoned analysis of Soviet secret police methods in West Ukraine entitled, “Agentura NKVD-NKGB v deistvii,” produced by the Ukrainian rebel SB. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 643, ll. 13-34. The only full-length West Ukrainian women’s memoirs fail to discuss women’s contributions on their own terms, but instead discuss memories of heroic men. For the most recent example, see Mariya Savchyn, Tysiacha dorih (spohady) (Toronto-L´viv : Litopys UPA, 1995) (Litopys UPA, Vol. 28). Similarly, of 25 autobiographies of women members of the Ukrainian underground who survived the 1940s that appear in Litopys niskorenoi Ukrainy : Dokumenty, materialy, spohady, Vol. 1 (L´viv : Prosvita, 1993), only one discusses women’s contributions in detail. The overwhelming majority are victimologies chronicling the writer’s hardship at the hands of Soviet authorities. The other famous example of women’s service to Ukrainian nationalism is likewise founded on the image of women as victims : during an inmate uprising in the Soviet forced labor camp at Kengir in 1953, more than 150 Ukrainian women and girls demonstrating in a peaceful march were crushed to death by Soviet tanks deployed to suppress the “riot.” This case is often referred to in Ukrainian and diaspora texts to demonstrate the courage of Ukrainian women. 17. Quoted in Waldemar Lotnik, Nine lives : Ethnic conflict in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands (London : Serif, 1999): 191. 18. For a parallel case, see the perceptive reading of Lynne Viola, “‘We let the women do the talking’: Bab´i bunty and the anatomy of peasant revolt,” in id., Peasant rebels under Stalin : Collectivization and the culture of peasant resistance (New York : Oxford
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University Press, 1996): 181-204. Viola explains how comparatively lenient Soviet treatment of women led peasants to develop distinctly feminine forms of popular revolt, where women often led the expression of dissatisfaction, while men stood back. 19. Report of the UPA company commander Erema dated 21 August 1944, found on the corpse of a rebel in Orlik company following a Soviet firefight on 24 August. The subsequent translation was forwarded by Lt.-Col. Tarasenko, deputy commander of the 5th Department of the Ukrainian NKVD. Derzhavnyi Arkhiv L´vivskoi Oblasti (DALO), f. 3 L´vivskyi obkom Kompartyi Ukrainy, op. 1, d. 70, ll. 56-56 ob. 20. See the report for 15 August 1944 from Lisets raion rebel commander Kochevik to OUN headquarters, subsequently seized by the NKVD. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial´no-Politicheskoi Istorii (RGASPI), f. 17 Tsentral´nyi Komitet VKP(b), op. 125, d. 336, l. 181. 21. Zygmunt Klukowski, Red shadow : A physician’s memoir of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, 1944-1956 (Jefferson : McFarland and Co., 1997):24. 22. Letter of Ukrainian woman Z. F. Shevchuk in village Dovhe, Medenicheskyi raion, Drohobych oblast´, to relatives in Kirovograd oblast´, dated 20 March 1945. Interdicted and copied by military censors. DALO, f. 5001 Drohobychskyi obkom Kompartyi Ukrainy, op. 6, d. 46, ll. 96-96 ob. 23. Letter of Ukrainian woman M. S. Vasiurko in Lyshnia village, Drohobych raion and oblast´, to her husband, dated 4 April 1945. Interdicted and copied by military censors. DALO, f. 5001, op. 6, d. 46, l. 97. 24. John A. Armstrong, Ukrainian nationalism, 1939-1945. Third rev. ed. (Englewood : Ukrainian Academic Press, 1990): 187-188. On gender and Soviet partisans, see the groundbreaking discussion in Kenneth D. Slepyan, “‘The people’s avengers’: Soviet partisans, Stalinist society and the politics of resistance, 1941-1944,” Ph.D. Diss., University of Michigan, 1994, 250-265. 25. One of these new recruits was Mariya Savchyn (alias : Marichka), who has left an extensive memoir of her recruitment and subsequent service. See Mariya Savchyn, Tysiacha dorih (spohady), op. cit. 26. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 135, l. 193. 27. Evidently, “Ul´iana” was herself turned and became a Soviet agent in June 1945. Though her agent files were removed to central archives of the Committee of State Security (KGB), her agent folder still remains, along with an informational note regarding her recruitment. The report reveals she was a high-priority agent run directly by T. A. Strokach, People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs (NKVD) in Ukraine. See the folder and Strokach’s report (dated 13 June 1945) in GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 487, ll. 75-76: “Dublikat lichnogo dela agenta UL´IANA.” 28. Secret rebel “temporary instructions” on the arrival of the Red Army in West Ukraine, dated 7 July 1944. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 126, l. 234 29. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 336, l. 48. 30. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 126, ll. 226-228 ob.; ll. 315-315 ob. 31. Instructions from the OUN-UPA’s central headquarters, dated 10 October 1944, as preserved in Stalin’s MVD “Special Files.” The top secret report of Beriia to Stalin was dated 6 January 1945. GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 92, l. 55. There are indications that this “feminization of the underground” was common in all areas that fell under Soviet
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control. See the numerous references to women in Z.Klukowski, op. cit.: passim ; eg., p. 41: “It is possible to [maintain] contact [...] only through women messengers.” 32. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 126, ll. 316-317 ob. 33. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 292, l. 15. 34. DALO, f. 5001, op. 7, d. 220, l. 143. 35. See, for instance, the handwritten field report to the chief of the Shumskyi raion NKVD Capt. Tresko from operations commander in Shumskyi raion, NKVD officer Iakovlev. Iakovlev described an UPA raiding unit of ten women armed with tommy guns and dressed in military clothing that sometimes masqueraded as a Soviet partisan unit. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 487, ll. 203-203 ob. 36. As cited in Julie Wheelwright, The fatal lover : Mata Hari and the myth of women in espionage (London : Collins and Brown, 1992): 1. On images of women in espionage, see the provocative work of Christine Bold, “Under the very skirts of Britannia : Re-reading women in the James Bond novels,” Queen’s Quarterly (Summer 1993): 311-328; and Julie Wheelwright, “Poisoned honey : The myth of women in espionage,” Ibid.: 291-310. For a summary of women as targets of espionage recruitment, replacing the traditional ;honey trap ; with a modern ;Romeo spy, ; see the autobiography of the chief of foreign security operations of the East German Stasi, Markus Wolf, “Spying for love,” Man without a face : The autobiography of Communism’s greatest spymaster (New York : Random House, 1997): 123-150. 37. GARF, f. R-9401, op. 1, d. 4152, l. 340. On ;Prützmann Bureau, ; see Perry Biddiscombe, Werewolf! The history of the national socialist guerrilla Movement, 1944-1946 (Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 1998). In contrast, the Germans themselves evidently avoided using women agents in the East : “Female Agents : It was feared that a woman who was open to German suggestions could too easily be influenced again in other ways. Also, troop discipline was impaired when women were employed. Therefore, F[ront]A[uf]K[laerung] III used women agents only in special cases where no other solution could be found.” The FAKs were responsible for front intelligence and counter-intelligence for the Abwehr. “German methods of combating the Soviet intelligence services,” 3 May 1946, NARA RG 319 Records of the Army Staff, Records of the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, Intelligence. Records of the Investigative Records Repository. Security Classified Intelligence and Investigative Dossiers, 1939-76, NND921046 Heinrich Schmalschlaeger, IRR Box 11, Folders 1-2, 5-6. German tactics had changed by the end of the war. “Among the trainees [for Werewolf detachments] were women and large numbers of Hitler Jugend.” NARA, RG319 Records of the Army Staff, Records of the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, Intelligence, Records of the Investigative Records Repository. Security Classified Intelligence and Investigative Dossiers, 1939-76. U.S. Army Interrogation of Josef L. Roosen, 29 May 1945. Extract, 3. 38. On Western intelligence operations in West Ukraine during and after the war, see Jeffrey Burds, The early Cold War in Soviet West Ukraine, 1944-1948 (Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh, 2001) (Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, N° 1505) . 39. Top secret communiqué of deputy chief of the Sixth Department of OBB NKVD SSSR, MGB Major Chugunov, 11 November 1944. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 381, ll.
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164-168. The report is based on a summary from interrogations of captured OUN-UPA personnel conducted in October 1944: D´iachishyn and Mykhailo Gachkevych. For biographical information, see P.R. Sodol, op. cit., II: 21. 40. From a top secret report of the commander of the NKVD border patrol on the Ukrainian front to Grushetskii, 6 October 1944. DALO, f. 3, op. 1, d. 70, l. 5 ob. 41. From the stenographic report of Khrushchev’s meeting with leaders of the Soviet drive to pacify West Ukraine, 10 January 1945. DALO, f. 3, op. 1, d. 191, l. 51. 42. This is based on a review of periodic reports to Stalin from the NKVD, preserved in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, indexed in V. A. Kozlov and S.V. Mironenko, eds, Osobye papki I. V. Stalina (Moscow : Blagovest, 1994). The first Ukrainian woman spy to make it into reports to Stalin was Dr. Mariia Kotsiuba, a.k.a “Marta,” detained in Stanyslaviv in February 1945. “Marta” was the daughter of a famous Ukrainian-Galician general from World War I, M. Tarnavskyi. See GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 93, ll. 54-62, top secret report dated 12 February (ll. 55-56). 43. For a depiction of the “heroic” aspects of women’s contributions to the Ukrainian anti-Soviet underground resistance, see Marta N. [Halina Savits´ka-Holoiad], “Zhinka v Ukrains´komu vyzvol´nomu Rusi (Z vlasnykh sposterezhen’),” in S. F. Khmel´, Ukrainska partyzanka : z kraiovykh materiialiv (London : Vyd. Zakord. Orhanizatsii ukr. natsionalistiv, 1959): 88-102. Marta N. also offers numerous cases of Ukrainian women tortured for information about underground rebels. More recently, see twenty-five autobiographical sketches by women in the Ukrainian underground, published in Litopys niskorenoi Ukrainy, op. cit., I: 424-640; and fifteen biographies of women rebels in P.R. Sodol, op. cit., I: 70-73, 79, 83-84, 104-105, 116-117, II: 10, 20, 26-27, 35-36, 44-45, 81. 44. From the report of the Secretary of the Lopatinskyi raikom Kostenko, DALO, f. 3, op. 1, d. 195, l. 115. 45. DALO, f. 3, op. 1, d. 195, l. 125. For similar data, see GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d 126, ll. 201-202. Here, among 300 members of an OUN-UPA band, 80 were women. 46. Report of the UPA company commander Erema dated 21 August 1944, found on the corpse of a rebel in Orlik company following a Soviet firefight on 24 August. DALO, f. 3, op. 1, d. 70, l. 56. 47. DALO, f. 3, op. 1, d. 191, l. 46. A report from Drohobych dated 27 December 1945 suggests substantial popular support for this notion. DALO, f. 5001, op. 6, d. 53, ll. 233-234. 48. Extract from “Stenogramma soveshchaniia sekretarei Obkomov KP(b)U, nach[al ´nikov] oblupravlenii NKVD, NKGB, komanduiushchikh voennykh okrugov, ot 14 fevralia 1946 g.,” Tsentral´nyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Hromads´kykh Ob´´iednan´ Ukraïny (TsDAHO), f. 1 TsK Kompartii Ukrainy. Osobyi sektor. Sekretnaia chast´, op. 23, d. 2884, l. 39. 49. Data for seven oblasti in West Ukraine compiled from reports in GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 349, l. 1; d. 352, ll. 69-77. 50. The popular response was summarized in regular reports. See, for example, a report of Drohobych obkom Oleksenko to Khrushchev, dated 27 December 1945. “O reagirovanii naseleniia i banditov na vyselenie semei banditov,” DALO, f. 5001, op. 6, d. 53, ll. 233-234 (l. 233).
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51. Top secret report of MVD Kruglov to Stalin and Beriia, dated 7 February 1948. GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 199, ll. 205-209. The West Ukrainian families were relocated under the rubric of Sovnarkom resolution No. 35, dated 8 January 1945, regarding political deportation or spetspereselentsy. In October 1947 alone, 13,592 persons from the organs and armed forces of the MVD took part in mass deportations of members of families of suspected active rebels. GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 199, ll. 288-298; GARF, f. R-9479 Otdel spetsposelentsev NKVD SSSR, op. 1, d. 257 “Svodnye statisticheskie dannye”; and “Dokladnaia zapiska o provedennykh meropriiatiiakh po obespecheniiu vyseleniia semei aktivnykh natsionalistov banditov,” MGB-Ukraine Savchenko to L. Kaganovich, dated 14 October 1947. RGASPI, f. 81 Kaganovich, Lazar´ Moiseevich (1920-1957 gg.) [1893-1957], op. 3, d. 129, ll. 226-232. 52. The most comprehensive study to date of Soviet deportation policy is I. V. Alferova, “Gosudarstvennaia politika v otnoshenii deportirovannykh narodov (konets 30-kh -- 50-e gg.),” Dissertatsiia kand. ist. nauk, Moscow : Moscow State University, 1998. Cf. Terry Martin, “The origins of Soviet ethnic cleansing,” The Journal of Modern History, 70, 4 (December 1998): 813-861. 53. Here, the texts of Soviet police files differ markedly from claims presented in post- Soviet memoirs of detained Ukrainian women. I have yet to find a single account left by a detained woman (or man) where she admits to having been broken during interrogation. In contrast, Soviet records suggest summary execution was standard practice for non-cooperative prisoners, and moreover that most prisoners did, as we would expect, break during Soviet interrogation. 54. The record of Foia’s biography is preserved in the case files for a failed NKGB penetration operation against the northwest sector of the OUN-UPA in 1945. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 643, ll. 237-311. The file includes Foia’s records with the NKGB, plus the transcripts of her interrogation by the Ukrainian underground, plus similar records for two other Soviet double-agents apprehended in the sting. The file also includes a perceptive analysis of the failed operation by Lt.-Col. V. Konstantinov, Deputy Director of GUBB’s First Department. Elsewhere I have described the pivotal role played by Aprel’ska in a failed Soviet MGB penetration operation in 1944-1945. See J. Burds, “Agentura,” art. cit.: 121-123. 55. Biographical information for Agent Galka has been drawn from her agent file. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 487 “Materialy o rabote spetsgrupp, deistvuiushchikh v zapadnykh oblastiakh U[krainskogo] SSR (1945 g.),” ll. 53-54, 59. The operation was run by NKVD officer of state security, third rank, Riasnoi, future deputy director of the Soviet MVD. 56. Top secret report of Captain of Soviet State Security Artiunov, dated 17 April 1945. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 487, l. 59. 57. Top secret report from GUBB Lt.-Col. Gritsenko in Rivne to Leont´ev and Zadoia in Moscow, dated 22 February 1945. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 487, ll. 62-63. 58. DALO, f. 5001, op. 7, d. 220, l. 143. 59. Words of a student in the Higher Party School in Moscow, as reported by Ukrainian film director Oleksandr Dovzhenko in his diary, entry dated some time between 30 June-11 July 1945. Cited in the Introduction to Litopys UPA, Vol. 1 Vydannia Holovnoho Komanuvannia UPA (Kyiv-Toronto : Litopys UPA, 1995), ix, xx. Extract originally published in Aleksandr Dovzhenko, “Dnevnik. 1945, 1953, 1954,” Iskusstvo kino, 9 (1989): 48.
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60. From the 29-page partisan handbook produced in 1942: I. I. Zdorovenko, Sanitarni vkazivki v naglikh zakhvorinniakh (populiarnyi doklad). There are several soiled copies in Derzhavnyi Istoricheskyi Arkhiv L´viva (DIAL), f. 201, op. 1t, d. 269. This section is based on the version appearing in ll. 32-47. The quote appears on l. 46. I. I. Zdorovenko was one of several aliases of Vasyl Kuk, high-ranking officer of the OUN-UPA. Though he preached suicide before surrender, Kuk was himself captured alive, served 25 years in Soviet prisons, and was released after serving his full sentence in 1972. He still lives today in Kyiv, Ukraine. 61. OUN-UPA instructions dated 10 October 1944, translated and copied to Stalin’s “Special Files” by the MVD. GARF, f. R-9401, op. 2, d. 92, l. 52. Emphasis in the original. 62. The pattern of accepting women’s changing roles during times of need or crisis, then reverting back to traditional antagonisms once the crisis has passed, has been observed in numerous studies of women’s roles in social movements. The very best of a large number of works on this theme was written by Joan B. Landes, Women and the public sphere in the age of the French Revolution (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1988). Landes shows that French women’s opportunities were extensive on the revolutionary barricades, but the same women were expected to return to traditional gender roles once the revolution was won. 63. Instructions seized from the corpse of an OUN rebel killed in a firefight on the night of 27 May 1945 in Kalushskoi okrug. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 292, l. 66. 64. TsDAHO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 2968, l. 203. 65. Yuriy Tys-Krokhmaliuk, UPA warfare in Ukraine : Strategical, tactical and organizational problems of Ukrainian resistance in World War II (New York, 1972): 284. 66. From “Instructions for Self-Defense Units,” a copy of which was forwarded from NKVD Ukrainian SSR Riasnoi to L. Beriia in a top secret report dated 1 December 1944. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 292, ll. 319-324 (l. 324). 67. TsDAHO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 2967, l. 45. 68. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 292, ll. 29 ob. As cited in J.Burds, “Agentura,” art. cit.: 104. 69. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 128, l. 227. On following orders, see the testimony of former teacher and OUN officer Petro Mikitenko, in a Soviet interrogation transcript dated 20-25 May 1944: “In the OUN there exists the principle of vozhdizm (dictatorial rule). The commander’s order is law for his subordinates.” GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 134, l. 36. 70. On rebel terror units generally, see the author’s discussion in “Agentura,” art. cit.: 104-111. 71. DALO, f. 3, op. 1, d. 212, l. 114. 72. Ibid., l. 156 ob. 73. The name is actually Ukrainian, which suggests she was probably the offspring of a mixed marriage : Russian mother, Ukrainian [or East Ukrainian] father ; or that she was a Russian married to an ethnic Ukrainian. Such mixed families were often targeted by rebel suspicion of pro-Soviet collaboration. 74. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 126, ll. 327-328. In 1939, village Rozvazh -- Zolovhiv raion, L ´viv oblast´ -- had a population of 1,050. It is interesting that the author of the denunciation was a woman. In a comparable situation, white women in the American south were formally banned from Ku Klux Klan membership, but nonetheless utilized
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Klan support for their own personal ends. See Nancy Maclean, “White women and Klan violence in the 1920s : Agency, complicity and the politics of women’s history,” Gender and History, 3, 3 (Autumn, 1991): 285-303. 75. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 126, l. 329. 76. See the extraordinary top secret transcript of the interrogation of Iosif Pan´kiv, referent of the SB in L´viv city and simultaneously rezident for German counter- intelligence (Gehlen Org), conducted by NKVD Lt.-Col. Zadoia on 28 October to 2 November, 1944. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 135, ll. 156-246 (ll. 183-184). 77. Ibid., l. 182. In Pan´kiv’s case, it is evident that other forms of coercion were applied to get him to speak freely during his interrogation. “I intend to hide nothing from the organs of the NKVD, since I understand that on this depends not only my own life but -- and this is what disturbs me -- the life of my family” (l. 157). 78. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 128, l. 226. 79. Ibid., l. 228. 80. Ibid. 81. Aggregate figures calculating victims of rebel terror do not provide statistics on gender. These data are based on estimates gleaned from operations reports and rebel target lists from 1946-1948. 82. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 128, l. 227. 83. On corpse desecration, see J. Burds, “Agentura,” art. cit.: 104-111. Soviet records do not generally include information that would allow for a close study of gender-specific forms of corpse desecration. See the materials on Bosnian genocide in Natalie Nenadic, “Femicide : A framework for understanding genocide,” in Diane Bell and Renate Klein, eds, Radically speaking : Feminism reclaimed (Melbourne : Spinifex, 1996): 456-464. 84. Top secret report of Chief of GUBB-Ukraine Colonel Sergienko in Kyiv, July 1948. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 1285, ll. 19-26. The original discovery warranted a speedily sent top secret telegram from Deputy Director of MVD Ukrainian SSR Major-General Bulyga to Soviet MVD S. Kruglov in Moscow, dated 24 June 1948. GARF, f. R-9401, op., 1, d. 2973, ll. 152-153. In pencil across the top of the telegram, Kruglov wrote : “C[omrade] Serov. Pl[ease] meet with me. Kruglov.” This communication demonstrates the perceived importance of the case. There was a subsequent top secret summary report from Ukrainian MVD Strokach to Soviet MVD Kruglov, dated August 1948. GARF, f. R-9401, op., 1, d. 2973, ll. 283-286. On the first page of this report, future KGB chief Ivan Serov wrote : “To C[omrade] Davydov. Familiarize yourself [with this document] and show C[omrade] Kruglov. [Signed] I. Serov. 30.8.48.” 85. Signed confession of Kuz´ma Ken´o, 24 June 1948, contents communicated by ciphered telegram to Moscow. GARF, f. R-9401, op., 1, d. 2973, l. 152. 86. According to Soviet forensic pathologists, none of the corpses had been sexually abused. Apprehended subjects later confessed that the bodies had been stripped to prevent positive identification. 87. Summarized from data in GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 1285, ll. 20-21. 88. Forensic specialists suggest this sort of pattern would have indicated two possibilities : ambush, or the murderer’s own discomfort with perpetrating the violent act. Since in each case murder was perpetrated in the presence of several men, it is unlikely that ambush would have been an essential part of the method of execution.
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Forensic pathologists suggest the act of violence was distasteful to the perpetrator, who murdered from behind -- out of sight of the victim -- so as not to meet the eyes of the woman designated for the kill. This is an important distinction. It suggests that SB assassins were simply following orders, murdering women designated for liquidation by others. These were not excesses of an individual unit of sadists, but fulfillment of duties of rebel soldiers. On rites of violence as indicators of perpetrator attitudes and motives, see the informative recent study of American expert, John E. Douglas, Mindhunter : Inside the FBI’s elite serial crime unit (New York : Scribner, 1995). 89. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 1285, l. 22.. 90. From a top secret summary of interdicted letters in Drohobych oblast´ for the period 1-19 September 1946, from MGB Lt.-Gen. Voronin to the secretary of the Drohobych obkom, dated 3 October 1946. DALO, f. 5001, op. 7, d. 279, ll. 119-121 ob. (120 ob.). This report was a summary of 98 instances of Ukrainian “bandit” activity from 21,325 pieces of mail read by MGB censors. 91. TsDAHO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 2968, l. 54. 92. Zygmunt Klukowski, Diary from the years of occupation, 1939-1944 (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1993): 77. For an interesting comparative perspective of “Judas-women” -- women denunciators in Nazi Germany, see Helga Schubert, Judasfrauen : Zehn Fallgeschichten weiblicher Denunziation im Dritten Reich (Munich : DTV, 1990). I am grateful to Alison Fleig of Harvard University for bringing this work to my attention. 93. In contrast, recent research has found that over 90 % of denunciations to the East German Stasi were submitted by men. See Timothy Garton Ash, “Comparative horrors,” London Review of Books (19 March 1998): 18-20; and Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann, “Politische Denunziation -- Eine ‘weibliche Domäne’? Der Anteil von Männern und Frauen unter Denunzianten und ihren Opfern,” 1999: Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts, 11, 2 (1996): 11-35. 94. For a useful comparative analysis of denunciations, see Sheila Fitzpatrick and Robert Gellately, eds, Accusatory practices : Denunciation in modern European history, 1789-1989 (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1997). 95. Grushetskii to Khrushchev, dated 17 July 1945. DALO, f. 3, op. 1, d. 212, l. 170. For similar observations, see monthly reports on the struggle against banditry in West Ukraine, TsDAHO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 1741, ll. 42-48 (l. 46). For a comparative perspective on women’s survival strategies, see the insightful work of Annamarie Tröger, “Between rape and prostitution : Survival strategies and changes of emancipation for Berlin women after World War II,” in Judith Friedlander, et al., eds, Women in culture and politics : A century of change (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1986). 96. Extracts from a top secret special communiqué from NKGB Chief in L´viv oblast´ Voronin to Grushetskii, dated 19 November 1944. DALO, f. 3, op. 1, d. 212, l. 169. 97. DALO, f. 3, op. 1, d. 212, ll. 169-170. Cf. several similar statements on ll. 168-174. On the deeper implications of communities that make a virtue of deceiving of outsiders, see the discussion in Perez Zagorin, Ways of lying : Dissimulation, persecution, and conformity in early modern Europe (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1990); and James C. Scott, Domination and the arts of resistance : Hidden transcripts (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1990).
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98. DALO, f. 3, op. 1, d. 212, l. 169-170. 99. DALO, f. 3, op. 1, d. 212, ll. 115-116. 100. DALO, f. 3, op. 1, d. 212, ll. 171-172. 101. GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 128, . 227 ob. 102. See the summaries and extracts from their subsequent confessions in GARF, f. R-9478, op. 1, d. 128, ll. 225-230, dated 26 December 1944. 103. See the report for 15 August 1944 from Lisets raion rebel commander Kochevik to OUN headquarters, subsequently seized by the NKVD. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 336, l. 181. 104. Mariya Savchyn (“Marichka”), Tysiacha dorih (spohady), op. cit. 105. OUN-UPA instructions calling for boycott of the 10 February 1946 elections for the Supreme Soviet, TsDAHO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 2968, l. 216. 106. Wanda Pó tawska, And I am afraid of my dreams (London : Hodder and Stoughton, 1964) : 107. 107. Gerda Lerner, The creation of patriarchy (New York : Oxford University Press, 1986) : 80. 108. W. Lotnik, op. cit.: 66-67. Though he was a Polish partisan, Lotnik made it clear that such descriptions could be applied equally to the carnage inflicted by both sides, ethnic Ukrainian and ethnic Polish : “The ethnic Ukrainians responded by wiping out an entire Polish colony, setting fire to the houses, killing those inhabitants unable to flee and raping the women who fell into their hands, no matter how old or young. This had been the pattern of their behaviour east of the Bug [River], where tens of thousands of Poles had been either expelled or murdered. We retaliated by attacking an even bigger Ukrainian village and[...]killed women and children. Some of [our men] were so filled with hatred after losing whole generations of their family in the Ukrainian attacks that they swore they would take an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. [...] This was how the fighting escalated. Each time more people were killed, more houses burnt, more women raped” (65). Cf. Beverly Allen, Rape warfare : The hidden genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 109. Jim Hopper, “Factors in the cycle of violence,” Journal of Traumatic Stress, (1996): 721-743. Drawing from an extensive comparative study of statistics of criminal violence and homicide in 110 nations since 1900, sociologists Dane Archer and Rosemary Gartner found that the frequency of domestic violence dramatically increases after wars. See their landmark study : D. Archer and R. Gartner,Violence and crime in cross-national perspective (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1984-1987). 110. Agate Nesaule, Woman in amber : Healing the trauma of war and exile (New York : Soho,1995): 9. 111. Judith Herman, Trauma and recovery : The aftermath of violence -- from domestic abuse to political terror (New York : Basic Books, 1992, 1997): 4; Katherine R. Jolluck, “Gender, identity and the Polish experience of war, 1939-1945” (Ph.D. Diss., Stanford University, 1995): 160-161. 112. Erika M. Hoerning, “The myth of female loyalty,” Journal of Psychohistory, 16, 1 (1988): 19-46. Cf. Elizabeth Heineman, “The hour of the woman : Memories of Germany’s ‘crisis years’ and West German national identity,” American Historical
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Review, 101, 2 (April 1996): 354-395. On Soviet rape in East Germany, see Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany : A history of the Soviet Zone of occupation, 1945-1949 (Cambridge : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995): 69-140. Cf. Meinhard Stark, “Ich muß sagen wie es war” Deutsche Frauen des GULag (Berlin : Metropol-Verlag, 1998). After forty-five years of silence, noted Hungarian child psychologist from Transylvania, Alaine Polcz, revealed in her memoirs first published in 1991 that she had been gang- raped hundreds of times by Soviet soldiers in 1945. In Polcz’s account, Soviet soldiers reserved especially brutal reprisals for women suspected of pro-German collaboration : “The Russians, after first raping them, cut off with knives the breasts of the women who had cohabited with the Germans.” This usually followed ritualized scenes of humiliation where the women’s heads were shaved, and then they were marched down local streets humiliated by jeers and insults from their former neighbors. A. Polcz, A wartime memoir : Hungary, 1944-1945 (Budapest : Corvina, 1991-1998): 65. 113. Top secret report of N. Gusarov, Inspector TsK VKP(b), to secretaries of the Central Committee of the USSR, Stalin, Zhdanov, Kuznetsov, Patolichev, and Popov, “Nedostatki i oshibki v ideologicheskoi rabote KP(b)U[krainy],” 13 August 1946. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 122, d. 137, l. 44. 114. Ibid., ll. 44-45. 115. Z. Klukowski, op. cit.: 148; Cf. the account in Jan Tomasz Gross, Revolution from abroad : The Soviet conquest of Poland’s western Ukraine and western Belorussia (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1988): 181. 116. From an account in 1940. K. R. Jolluck, op. cit.: 142. On Soviet interrogation of Polish women, see Ibid.: 87-190. 117. From an interview in the 1990s by medical anthropologist Vieda Skultans, as cited in The testimony of lives : Narrative and memory in post-Soviet Latvia (New York and London : Routledge, 1998): 137. 118. TsDAHO, f. 1, op. 16, d. 68, ll. 10-17. For the text of the report and discussion of broader operational considerations, see J. Burds, “Agentura,” art. cit.: 129-130. 119. “Protokol o soveshchanii sekretarei obkomov i nachal´nikov oblupravlenii MGB zapadnykh oblastei USSR,” RGASPI, f. 81, op. 3, d. 128, ll. 150-171 (l. 155). 120. Ibid., l. 153.
RÉSUMÉS
Résumé Les femmes et la police politique dans l’Ukraine occidentale soviétique de 1944 à 1948. Notre article examine le rôle des femmes dans la campagne anti-insurrectionnelle menée par l’Union soviétique en Ukraine occidentale pendant et après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Nous nous sommes basés sur des documents des archives de Moscou, Kiev et Lvov. Au printemps de 1944, l’Armée insurrectionnelle ukrainienne (UPA) et l’Organisation des nationalistes ukrainiens (OUN) firent de plus en plus appel à des femmes et des jeunes filles pour effectuer des tâches
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vitales pour les rebelles nationalistes. La police secrète soviétique réagit en orientant sa stratégie autour de ces femmes. Les réseaux d’indicateurs (agentura) intégrèrent de plus en plus de femmes alors même que se développaient des tactiques spéciales visant à les terroriser. Celles de la police soviétique, qui mettaient en œuvre des violences sexuelles, engendrèrent en outre une réaction brutale de la part du mouvement clandestin ukrainien. Les moskal´ki (les « collaboratrices ») devinrent ainsi la cible des représailles des unités punitives du mouvement clandestin.
Abstract Drawing from research in archives in Moscow, Kyiv, and L´viv, this paper examines the role of gender in the Soviet counter-insurgency in West Ukraine during and after World War II. By the spring of 1944 the Ukrainian Insurrection Army (UPA) and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) became increasingly dependent upon women and girls to perform duties vital to the Ukrainian nationalist rebels. In response, the Soviet secret police adapted counter- insurgency strategies to target the female element in the anti-Soviet underground. Soviet agentura or informants’ networks were increasingly focused on women recruits, even as special tactics were developed to terrorize women rebels. Soviet police tactics had the effect not only of terrorizing Ukrainian women in gender-specific ways, but they also provoked a brutal reaction from within the Ukrainian underground itself, so that moskal´ki -- ethnic Ukrainian women “collaborators” -- became the targets of reprisals carried out by special underground rebel punitive units.
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La composition et les méthodes secrètes des organes de sécurité soviétiques en Lituanie, 1940-1953.
Arvydas ANUŠAUSKAS
Introduction
1 Dans l’État soviétique totalitaire, les services secrets servaient à la fois de rempart dans le maintien du régime et d’instrument dans ses différentes fonctions. Les services secrets pénétraient dans les secteurs les plus variés de la vie sociale ; de façon plus générale, la conception même de l’État supposait une omniprésence du « secret ». Des éléments importants de l’administration de l’État et de la société étaient dissimulés sous le sceau Ultra-secret ou Secret. La rétention de l’information et sa divulgation mesurée aux différentes instances gouvernementales, sociales et politiques compliquaient considérablement la perception et la compréhension que l’on pouvait avoir de l’histoire du régime totalitaire soviétique. L’une des tâches les plus complexes qui incombe aux historiens consiste à mettre au jour l’influence des services secrets sur les processus qui se sont déroulés dans la société, sur les causes de certains événements et les actes de certains agents de l’histoire. Enfin, il est important de définir les activités et les objectifs véritables des services secrets de même que les limites de leur action. Le présent article examine le rôle de la police politique (plus connue, par la suite, sous le nom de KGB) et certaines des méthodes qu’elle a utilisées dans le processus de soviétisation de la Lituanie en 1940 et 1941, puis entre 1944 et 1953.
2 Il est clair que le caractère secret des archives des services spéciaux a été et est toujours le principal obstacle au développement de la recherche dans ce domaine. Seules les archives du KGB restées en Lituanie, en Lettonie et en Estonie, la partie accessible en Russie des archives de la police politique, ainsi que les ouvrages publiés par d’anciens officiers du KGB passés à l’Ouest nous permettent de pénétrer dans les arcanes de ces services secrets.
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3 Quand on examine les sources nécessaires à l’étude de ce sujet, conservées dans les anciennes archives du KGB, se pose inévitablement le problème de la fiabilité des documents de la police politique marqués du sceau du secret. Il ne faut pas oublier en effet que le KGB considérait l’utilisation de ses archives comme la possibilité de mener un travail idéologique sur la société ou d’influencer l’opinion dans la direction souhaitée. L’un des éléments destinés à influer sur la conscience sociale était la présentation de l’histoire du KGB (y compris en Lituanie1). Une description purement idéologique de cette organisation ne présente évidemment guère d’intérêt pour les chercheurs. Il n’en va pas de même en ce qui concerne des éléments particuliers de son histoire dont le sens réel n’a été dévoilé que récemment. Il est paru au cours des dernières décennies un grand nombre d’ouvrages de recherche, de caractère scientifique ou autre, qui sont d’une aide considérable pour l’étude de l’histoire de la police politique soviétique. Mais dans cet article nous accordons une attention particulière aux recherches des dix dernières années, période pendant laquelle on pouvait s’appuyer sur des sources plus nombreuses et plus précises. Il est paru en Lituanie un certain nombre d’études générales et d’articles sur cette question2. Tous les travaux mentionnés s’appuient sur des données d’archives et sont consacrés exclusivement à l’activité des structures du KGB (NKVD-MGB) sur le territoire lituanien. Cela devrait permettre, sans toutefois prétendre épuiser le sujet, de préciser le caractère spécifique de la mise en place des organes soviétiques de sécurité en Lituanie, de définir la composition de ces organes et certains aspects de leur activité sur place, de dévoiler les méthodes secrètes qu’ils utilisaient pour écraser la résistance antisoviétique (en particulier l’emploi, pendant de nombreuses années, d’agents- combattants, etc.).
Les organes de sécurité soviétiques et les caractéristiques de leur composition en Lituanie en 1940 et 1941
4 Les chercheurs divisent le processus de soviétisation de la Lituanie en deux périodes, l’avant-guerre (1940-1941) et l’après-guerre (1944-1953). Bien que la Seconde Guerre mondiale ait occasionné une rectification décisive dans le développement et la dynamique des processus de soviétisation, le rôle spécial joué par les structures secrètes des organes de sécurité, qui constitue l’élément commun à ces deux périodes, ne s’est pas modifié.
5 C’est à partir du 15 juin 1940 que les structures des organes de sécurité de l’URSS commencèrent des opérations spéciales devant garantir une relative stabilité politique et la mise en place d’un terrain favorable à la réorganisation socio-politique, à la réforme ou à la destruction des institutions de l’ancien État indépendant, à la liquidation des couches politiquement actives de la société (en particulier de celles qui appelaient au rétablissement de l’indépendance politique) de la République lituanienne occupée, puis annexée. Elles tentèrent d’y implanter en une seule année ce qui s’était accompli en Russie et en Ukraine entre 1928 et 1938.
6 Avant l’occupation et l’annexion de la Lituanie, les dirigeants du parti communiste clandestin, qui s’étaient réfugiés en URSS, eurent l’occasion de pâtir des purges staliniennes. On peut dire qu’à la suite de ces purges, c’est la nouvelle génération qui
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prit les commandes du parti communiste et qui entreprit la soviétisation de la Lituanie à partir du 15 juin 1940. Entre la fin du mois de juin et le début du mois de juillet, le parti plaça son « élite » dans les organes de sécurité. Pour certains, ces fonctions dans le système de sécurité représentèrent un court épisode de leur biographie politique. En effet, le parti les transféra au bout d’un mois ou deux dans d’autres services. D’autres restèrent plus longtemps à la direction des organes de sécurité. Sorti de prison le 18 juin 1940, A. Sniečkus, secrétaire du Comité central du parti communiste clandestin de Lituanie, fut nommé chef du Département de la sécurité d’État (Gosudarstvennyj departament bezopasnosti, GDB) le jour suivant. Il ne fait aucun doute que cette nomination s’opéra en concertation avec l’émissaire de Moscou V. Dekanozov et l’ambassadeur d’URSS en Lituanie N. Pozdnjakov.
7 Les protégés des occupants de la Lituanie eurent pour principal souci de rechercher des agents secrets de la Police de sécurité (Policija bezopasnosti) à l’intérieur du parti communiste lituanien (Lietuvos Komunistu Partija (bolševiku) -- LKP (b)). C’est alors seulement que les communistes apprirent que le secrétaire du comité de rajon (district) de Šiauliai A. Bervičius (« Griška »), que l’instructeur du Comité central du LKP (b) de l’uezd (district) de Šiauliai G. Melamedas (« Le Commandant »), que le secrétaire du comité de rajon d’Alytus K. Graževičius et d’autres encore, travaillaient pour la Police de sécurité. On y découvrit même l’agent le plus estimé du GDB, Stas Trakimait (Sprindien). Ceci fut mis en évidence par les archives du GDB et les interrogatoires des fonctionnaires de la Police de sécurité. Ce fut le prélude aux premières arrestations en masse. Dans le cadre du « Plan de liquidation des cadres des partis d’opposition » signé par A. Sniečkus le 7 juillet, 507 personnes furent arrêtées entre le 10 et le 17 juillet3. Des instructeurs expérimentés du NKVD de l’URSS prêtèrent main forte aux groupes opérationnels qui procédaient aux arrestations.
8 Pendant le mois de juillet, jusqu’au 19, on arrêta aussi les plus hauts fonctionnaires des services secrets lituaniens. Le 23 juillet, les premiers wagons de prisonniers furent envoyés à Moscou. Les responsables des services secrets comme l’ancien chef du GDB, Augustinas Povilaitis, et des espions militaires comme les colonels Kostas Dulksnys, Petras Kirlys, Juozas Matusaitis et d’autres, furent emmenés à la Lubjanka4. Officiellement, leur arrestation n’eut lieu qu’au bout d’environ deux mois de détention dans la prison moscovite de Lefortovo. Ils furent interrogés par des enquêteurs du NKVD déjà bien connus. Par exemple, le lieutenant-colonel P. Kirlys fut interrogé par Boris Rodos (1905-1956). Chef adjoint des services du NKVD chargés des enquêtes en 1939 et plus tard enquêteur chargé des dossiers de première importance, celui-ci mena une enquête sur les hauts fonctionnaires et les militaires soviétiques V. Čubar´, P. Postyšev, A. Kosarev, Loktionov, Ryčagov, Štern, I. Smuškevič et d’autres. N. Hruščev lui-même parla des méthodes que B. Rodos utilisait pendant les interrogatoires lorsqu’il « dévoila » le culte de la personnalité de Stalin en 1956 (B. Rodos fut arrêté le 5 octobre 1953 pour son activité et fusillé le 20 avril 1956). P. Kirlys le vit pour la première fois à Lefortovo le 3 août 1940. Après les interrogatoires, P. Kirlys fut exécuté le 28 juillet 19415.
9 Pour mener à bien les projets, mûris à Moscou, d’organisation des répressions par les occupants, on avait besoin d’individus fiables au sein du GDB. Les premiers tchékistes soviétiques (des militants opérationnels du service intérieur de renseignements du NKVD) D. Zagarov et D. Švarcman, arrivèrent en Lituanie dès le 15 juin avec V. Dekanozov. À la fin du mois, plusieurs membres du NKVD envoyés par Moscou (David
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Bykov, D. Švarcman, Haritonov, Semen Holev, Solov´ev, Plaskobaev) donnaient déjà des cours de formation aux nouveaux dirigeants des administrations des organes de sécurité de Kaunas6. À la place des agents de la Sécurité démis de leur fonction, on désigna en premier lieu d’anciens prisonniers, communistes dignes de confiance. Des spécialistes du NKVD envoyés en nombre de plus en plus grand de Moscou commencèrent aussi à travailler avec eux en tant qu’« instructeurs ». Une liste du GDB datant du 1er août 1940 contient les noms de 61 militants du NKVD7 venus de Moscou (il restait encore deux jours avant l’annexion officielle de la Lituanie le 3 août). Les occupants et leurs comparses ne se mirent pas tout de suite à détruire les structures du GDB, mais firent en sorte de les utiliser à leurs fins jusqu’au bout. Les « instructeurs » commencèrent tout d’abord par une purge des cadres. Tout était réglé par les instructeurs du NKVD : V. Merkulov, adjoint de L. Berija, P. Gladkov, D. Zagarov, D. R. Bykov, A. V. Kutjakin et d’autres. Tout fut fini avec le départ le 30 juillet d’A. Sniečkus pour Moscou où il devait prendre part à la célébration de l’annexion de la Lituanie. L’« instructeur » D. Zagarov commença à assumer les fonctions de chef du MGB à partir de la fin du mois de juillet. Ceci mit un terme à la première phase des activités clandestines de l’URSS en Lituanie. Le GDB, qui n’était pas l’organisme adéquat pour mettre à exécution les répressions de masse, fut supprimé le 26 août 1940.
10 Bien que Sniečkus ne reprît pas son poste de chef du service de sécurité après son voyage à Moscou, l’intérêt du parti pour les institutions répressives ne faiblit pas. Le 18 septembre, le Bureau du Comité central du LKP (b) obligea les organes du parti à prendre une part plus active dans le recrutement au NKVD et envoya à ce service 2 600 personnes, des communistes, des membres du Komsomol et des individus non inscrits au parti mais considérés comme fiables. La milicija en reçut 1 830, la direction gouvernementale de la Sécurité 206, et les gardiens de prison 515. Les chefs des départements de district (uezdnye otdely) du NKVD furent dans l’obligation de recevoir de nouvelles recrues, non sans en avoir auparavant fait approuver les candidatures par les secrétaires des comités d’uezd du parti8.
11 À cette époque, les structures soviétiques des organes de sécurité avaient déjà traversé plusieurs étapes de leur développement et, en 1940, c’est une organisation jouissant déjà d’une grande expérience dans la répression de l’opposition, dans la persécution des dissidents et dans l’organisation de la terreur qui entama son activité en Lituanie. Mais en 1940 et 1941, le NKVD (et plus tard le NKGB) menait une répression basée sur des méthodes rodées en URSS et on ne pouvait rien observer de spécial dans son activité en Lituanie. D’après une liste de noms de prisonniers politiques établie récemment, on sait qu’avant la déportation massive du 14 juin 1941, on avait arrêté pas moins de 6 606 personnes (25,2 % d’entre elles étaient polonaises, 5,1 % juives 4 % russes, et la majorité du pourcentage restant était représentée par des Lituaniens)9.
12 La rhétorique des organisations clandestines lituaniennes mettait alors fortement l’accent sur la composition nationale des agents des organes de sécurité. Par exemple, à la fin du mois de mai 1941, sur 138 dirigeants du NKVD dans la SSR de Lituanie (chefs de départements et de sous-départements, leurs adjoints et assistants, commissaires plénipotentiaires, enquêteurs et inspecteurs), 72 (52,2 %) étaient russes, 43 (31,2 %) étaient lituaniens et 23 (16,6 %) étaient Juifs10. Il apparaît clairement que le personnel dirigeant était formé d’agents envoyés par l’URSS et que le nombre de Juifs et de Russes ne correspondait pas à la composition nationale de la structure des organes de sécurité de l’URSS. Les Juifs représentaient entre le tiers et la moitié des membres du parti
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communiste clandestin de Lituanie. Parmi les communistes on sélectionnait en premier lieu ceux qui étaient aptes à travailler pour le NKVD. Ce choix se refléta dans la direction du NKVD et, plus tard, du NKGB.
Nombre d’agents locaux et d’agents envoyés par les commissariats du peuple à la Sécurité d’État et aux Affaires intérieures de l’URSS en juin 194111
13 Lorsque l’URSS entra en guerre contre l’Allemagne, la majorité des agents du NKVD- NKGB, en particulier les dirigeants, réussirent à quitter la Lituanie. Selon les données du commissaire du peuple des Affaires intérieures de la SSR de Lituanie A. Guzevičius, à la fin de 1941, 1 196 agents du NKVD sur 5 006 furent évacués (40 faisaient partie du commissariat, 896 de la milicija, 140 du personnel carcéral et 120 de la police des frontières). Sur les 680 agents du NKGB, 159 furent évacués12. Ces chiffres ne sont évidemment pas tout à fait exacts, puisqu’en 1943, dans la seule 16e division, la division dite lituanienne, se trouvaient 1 200 anciens agents du NKVD et du NKGB et aussi ceux qui travaillaient dans le système du NKVD-NKGB de l’URSS ou qui avaient été laissés à l’arrière en qualité de partisans et de saboteurs sur le territoire lituanien occupé par les Allemands.
14 Les cadres de la Tchéka de la Lituanie « libérée » furent recrutés déjà pendant la guerre. Des cours d’entraînement pour les agents opérationnels des républiques baltes débutèrent dès le printemps 1943 à Pavlovskij Posad, non loin de Moscou. C’est là que fut créé le groupe d’agents des organes de sécurité dirigé par A. Guzevičius, qui constituait une réserve de tchékistes et qui fut de ce fait l’embryon des futurs NKVD et NKGB de la SSR de Lituanie.
Le NKVD-NKGB en Lituanie entre 1944 et 1953
15 Le centre du NKVD de la SSR de Lituanie créé à Vilnius le 14 juillet 1944 s’empressa de recruter des cadres et, le 20 décembre, il comptait déjà 4 638 agents, dont 972 étaient d’anciens partisans soviétiques et militants clandestins, 300 étaient d’anciens fonctionnaires du NKVD qui avaient été évacués au moment de la guerre, 1 300 étaient des agents du NKVD venant de « républiques sœurs » et le reste était composé de membres de la population locale nouvellement intégrés13. La composition nationale se
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présentait ainsi : Lituaniens 25,3 %, Russes 51,5 %, Polonais 1,2 %, Juifs 5,5 %, représentants d’autres nationalités 16,5 %. Le NKGB de Lituanie se forma lui aussi à un rythme accéléré ; à la fin de 1944, il comptait 931 agents dont 35 anciens partisans et militants clandestins, 133 agents qui avaient été évacués et 604 nouveaux agents de la Sécurité venant d’autres républiques14. Les Lituaniens représentaient 20,8 % du personnel, les Russes 62,9 %, les Polonais 0,1 %, les Juifs 10,4 %, les autres nationalités 5,8 %.
16 Au 1er janvier 1945, on comptait déjà 4 965 agents dans le système du NKVD sur 9 235 postes à pouvoir ; l’appareil central administratif du commissariat du peuple et de la milicija de la république fut pourvu à 86 %, le personnel carcéral aux deux tiers (852 sur 1 276) et les organes périphériques seulement à 42 % (2 770 sur 6 533)15. Il était difficile de recruter le personnel voulu dans la population locale -- tant parce qu’elle s’y opposait fortement que pour des raisons idéologiques ; c’est pourquoi, juste avant le 1er avril 1945, les services centraux de l’URSS envoyèrent 6 116 agents vers la SSR de Lituanie, dont 2 783 au NKVD et 664 au NKGB16. En dépit du grand nombre de ces arrivants, au début de 1946, les effectifs du NKVD étaient pourvus à 78,2 % (9 957 agents sur 12 729 postes)17, et le 1er janvier 1947, ils l’étaient à 83,7 % (12 017 sur 14 337)18. Le NKGB et plus tard le MGB connurent une situation analogue. Le 1er janvier 1946, le NKGB était pourvu à 75 % (1 505 sur 2 017).
17 Sur ce fond de pénurie permanente de personnel, les attaques des partisans engendraient des pertes considérables. Pour cette raison, le recrutement dans les échelons inférieurs de la hiérarchie (policiers, gardiens de prison, personnel technique auxiliaire) se fit parmi des personnes idéologiquement fiables n’ayant reçu aucune éducation : au début de 1947, dans le système du NKVD, 81,4 % des agents avaient une formation primaire ou étaient autodidactes. Tandis que la part relative des Lituaniens dans le personnel ordinaire atteignait jusqu’à 40 %, le 1er juin 1946, par exemple, dans les départements de district (uezdnye otdely) et les divisions de canton (volostnye otdelenija) du MVD, sur 1 435 responsables et agents opérationnels, les Lituaniens représentaient 15 %19, et ils n’étaient que 35 parmi les 798 hauts et moyens fonctionnaires du MVD, soit 3,5 %. Au début de 1945, sur 131 responsables du NKGB, on trouvait 8,4 % de Lituaniens20.
18 Le noyau des structures soviétiques de répression était constitué par des agents des organes de sécurité envoyés depuis la Russie, la Biélorussie et l’Ukraine. Entre 1944 et 1953, on dépêcha ainsi 10 000 agents au MVD-MGB de la SSR de Lituanie. On envoya des tchékistes « d’élite », ceux qui étaient les plus cruels, dans une Lituanie en proie à une guerre de partisans. Ainsi Evgenij Rudakov, ancien commissaire du peuple du NKVD dans l’ASSR de Tchétchéno-Ingouchie, fut-il nommé premier vice-commissaire à la Sécurité d’État de la SSR de Lituanie. Un autre haut fonctionnaire de Tchétchéno- Ingouchie, chef du Département politique secret (contre-espionnage) du NKVD, le lieutenant-colonel de la Sécurité Aleksandr Ševatov, dirigea de 1947 à 1950 les départements lituaniens du MGB des uezdy de Biržai, Kelm et Pasvalys. En automne 1944, le colonel Jakov Sinicyn, ancien vice-commissaire des Affaires intérieures de la SSR turkmène, puis chef de la direction du NKVD de l’oblast´ (région) de Penza, fut nommé chef du département du NKVD de l’uezd de Raseiniai. Georgij Basov, ancien chef adjoint de la direction du MGB de Leningrad en 1947 et 1948, devint vice-ministre de la Sécurité d’État de la SSR de Lituanie. Au début de 1945, Leonid Djudin, lieutenant- colonel de la Sécurité, chef adjoint de la Direction centrale des camps (Glavnoe
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upravlenie lagerei, Goulag) de l’URSS, fut nommé vice-commissaire du peuple du NKVD de la SSR de Lituanie. À son retour de missions spéciales liées à la sécurité en Chine, en Manchourie, au Japon et en Allemagne orientale entre 1944 et 1947, le colonel Pavel Kolomejcev fut nommé chef du département du MGB de l’uezd de Vilnius. Le lieutenant-colonel de la Sécurité Matvej Buravcev, chef de la 3e section (otdel) de l’état- major des armées du NKVD en Pologne, devint chef du 3e département de la direction « 2-N » (Upravlenie « 2-N ») du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie chargé de la lutte contre les partisans. En novembre 1947, le colonel de la Sécurité Andrej Enukidze, ancien vice- commissaire du peuple aux Affaires intérieures de l’ASSR d’Abkhazie, fut envoyé en Lituanie en qualité de chef de la direction du MVD de Kaunas, et au printemps de 1946, le lieutenant-colonel Grigorij Čahava, vice-commissaire aux Affaires intérieures de l’ASSR d’Adjarie, devint chef du département du MVD de l’uezd de Kdainiai, puis de Panevžys.
19 À cette époque, le Département de la « lutte contre le banditisme » (Otdel po bor ´be s banditizmom, plus tard, direction « 2-N ») et les services du contre-espionnage militaire (le SMERŠ -- smert´ špionam : mort aux espions) étaient les structures les plus importantes du NKVD et ensuite du MVD et du MGB. Compte tenu de la guerre de partisans qui se déroulait en Lituanie, on y envoya des agents de la Sécurité ayant l’expérience du combat avec les forces clandestines armées. Le lieutenant-colonel de la Sécurité Boris Burilin, qui pendant la guerre occupait un poste important dans l’appareil de la « lutte contre le banditisme » en Ukraine, fut nommé en 1947 chef du Département de lutte contre le banditisme au NKVD de la SSR de Lituanie. Après la guerre, le lieutenant-colonel David Urušadze, ancien chef du Département de lutte contre le banditisme de Géorgie, occupa le poste de chef du département d’uezd du MVD de Vilnius pendant près de quatre ans. En janvier 1946, le major Fedor Šabanov, ancien chef adjoint du Département de lutte contre le banditisme de Kabardino- Balkarie devint chef du département d’uezd du NKVD de Joniškis. Le lieutenant-colonel de la Sécurité Ignatij Glazunov-Ejsmont, ancien chef adjoint de l’état-major des bataillons de chasse du NKVD de l’oblast´ de Leningrad, occupa après la guerre un poste important à la direction du Département de lutte contre le banditisme du NKVD de la SSR de Lituanie et plus tard à la direction « 2-N » du MGB. Le major général Petr Kapralov21, après avoir été chef adjoint du Département de contre-espionnage du NKVD de l’URSS pendant la guerre, fut pendant longtemps vice-ministre du MVD-MGB de la SSR de Lituanie et finit par devenir lui-même ministre. Le colonel Andrej Leonov, qui occupa pendant la guerre le poste de chef adjoint du Département de contre- espionnage de la région militaire de l’Est du Bajkal (Zabajkal´skij voennyj okrug), fut nommé vice-ministre de la Sécurité d’État de la SSR de Lituanie22. Près de la moitié des chefs et des chefs adjoints de départements d’uezd du MVD-MGB qui furent envoyés en Lituanie entre 1946 et 1947 étaient d’anciens cadres du SMERŠ.
20 Comme nous l’avons mentionné plus haut, les structures soviétiques de répression essuyaient de fortes pertes à la suite des attaques des partisans. Les données officielles elles-mêmes indiquent que, pendant la période allant de juillet 1944 au 15 juin 1947, les partisans tuèrent 358 agents du MVD-MGB, 629 hommes de troupes du NKVD, 996 « défenseurs du peuple » (narodnye zaščitniki) et 1 302 activistes du parti23. Moscou et Vilnius exigeaient unanimement qu’on mette fin à la guerre de partisans et qu’on réprime l’opposition nationaliste au plus vite. Ce devait être fait avant le 1er janvier 1945, ensuite, avant l’été, puis avant l’automne de la même année, etc., mais on dépassait tous les délais sans voir la fin de la résistance. On remplaça alors
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massivement les cadres de la Tchéka : ceux-ci furent délocalisés, nommés à des postes subalternes et même renvoyés pour incompétence dans les « grands espaces de la patrie ». Le 11 juillet 1945, Aleksandras Guzevičius fut démis de ses fonctions de commissaire du peuple à l’Intérieur et à la Sécurité. Mécontente de l’échec de l’opération de destruction rapide des partisans lituaniens, la direction moscovite remplaça tous les chefs de secteurs opérationnels du NKVD en été 1945, et Guzevičius, dirigeant du NKGB, ne fut pas épargné24. Dans une appréciation (harakteristika) de la fin de 1945, Mykolas Junčas-Kunčinskas, secrétaire chargé des questions des cadres du Comité central du LKP (b) écrivait à propos de Guzevičius : « Dans le contexte critique de lutte de classe que connaît la république, le camarade Guzevičius n’a pas réussi à organiser les actions opérationnelles, la liquidation en temps voulu des chefs et des membres des organisations nationalistes clandestines de Lituanie et de leurs bandes armées. » Guzevičius fut révoqué pour incompétence par décision du secrétariat du Comité central du LKP (b) du 2 août 1945 et, par décision du bureau du Comité central du LKP (b) du 14 septembre 1945, nommé président du comité des foyers culturels auprès du Sovnarkom de la SSR de Lituanie25. Mais les plus nombreux à être révoqués furent les petits et les moyens fonctionnaires. En 1945, 78 % des chefs et des chefs adjoints des départements urbains et d’uezd du NKVD furent remplacés, en 1946, 44 % et en 1947, 39 %26. À la Sécurité d’État, les remplacements de chefs de ce rang étaient plus fréquents : 80 % en 1945, 95 % en 1946, 35 % en 1947. Il arrivait souvent qu’un chef de département d’uezd ou que son adjoint fût remplacé plusieurs fois par an.
21 Les dirigeants du LKP (b), et plus particulièrement le premier secrétaire A. Sniečkus, s’efforçaient d’augmenter le nombre de Lituaniens au sein des organismes de répression du pouvoir, ceci à des fins pratiques et aussi par principe : pour écraser la résistance le plus vite possible et pour démontrer que la nation lituanienne elle-même était en lutte contre les « bandes bourgeoises de nationalistes ». Dans une certaine mesure, Moscou, c’est-à-dire le Comité central du parti, les ministères des Affaires intérieures et de la Sécurité d’État de l’URSS, ne s’opposait pas à une telle politique de la part des dirigeants de la république. Malgré tous leurs efforts, les Lituaniens éprouvaient des difficultés à s’habituer aux structures répressives et leur nombre n’y augmentait que très progressivement. Une grande partie de la population locale, en particulier la plus cultivée, ne voulait pas y travailler, d’autres en étaient empêchés par leur passé « inadéquat », leur « mauvaise » origine sociale, ou par le fait d’avoir des membres de leur famille expatriés en Occident. À ceci s’ajoutait le fait non moins important que les dirigeants russophones des organes de répression de la SSR de Lituanie, en particulier la Sécurité d’État, ne faisaient pas confiance aux cadres locaux, même communistes. Après la guerre, il ne restait plus de Juifs lituaniens aux postes de dirigeants de la Sécurité. Grigorij Fejgelson, chef adjoint du département « A » du NKGB, fut révoqué au printemps de 194527. En automne 1946, ce fut le tour d’Evsej Rozauskas, chef du département chargé des enquêtes28. Aleksandr Slavin et Daniel´ Todes du MGB de l’URSS furent transférés à Moscou et tous deux furent renvoyés de la Sécurité en 194729. Ces destitutions ne devaient rien au hasard : elles faisaient écho aux campagnes antisémites qui avaient commencé à Moscou.
22 Les dirigeants de la SSR de Lituanie concentrèrent de plus en plus les fonctions de répression de la résistance au MGB et portèrent une attention plus particulière aux cadres de cette administration. Après le transfert de la Direction de la « lutte contre le banditisme » (qui comptait 979 agents entre les départements d’uezd et de volost´) du ministère des Affaires intérieures à celui de la Sécurité d’État, la lutte contre la
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résistance antisoviétique armée se concentra presque exclusivement au MGB. Dans ses rangs on trouvait même des troupes de l’intérieur, des bataillons de chasse militarisés30, et à l’automne 1949, une milicija de gardes-frontière31. Au début de 1948, le MGB comptait près de 2 300 agents (personnel domestique et technique non compris), et à la fin de 1949, après le transfert de la milicija, il comptait 10 500 postes et 9 300 agents32. Sur les 2 427 agents opérationnels du MGB, 20,5 % étaient lituaniens33. Cependant, la composition nationale des dirigeants du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie avait peu changé par rapport aux premières années de l’après-guerre. Au printemps 1952, sur 575 responsables, 8 % étaient lituaniens34.
23 Le 13 juin 1953, J. Vildžiºnas, nouveau ministre de l’Intérieur, encouragé semble-t-il par la nouvelle « politique nationale » de Berija, déclara au plenum du Comité central du parti communiste lituanien : « La direction du ministère de la Sécurité d’État a mené une politique des cadres erronée vis-à-vis des nationalités pendant de nombreuses années. Le nombre de Lituaniens dans le système du MGB était minime et très peu d’entre eux occupaient des postes d’encadrement. Les vieux cadres tchékistes lituaniens ont été dispersés et ceux qui ont été réintégrés ou qui ont suivi la formation des écoles opérationnelles se sont vu confier un travail technique ou des postes insignifiants [...]. Ceci a permis à l’agitation nationaliste d’affirmer que les Russes “occupaient” la Lituanie. »35
Les méthodes opérationnelles de répression. Les agents-combattants
24 Entre 1944 et 1953, les structures de la Sécurité mirent en pratique en Lituanie tout un arsenal de moyens de répression, y compris ceux qui avaient été mis à l’essai pendant trois ou quatre décennies en Russie, en Ukraine, dans le Caucase et en Asie centrale, dans le but de réprimer la résistance. Mais nous traitons ici des méthodes secrètes de répression, non des moyens militaires mis en œuvre dans l’exécution de cette répression (leur utilisation en 1944 et 1945 pendant les expéditions militaires punitives entraîna la mort de 12 200 personnes dont la majorité appartenait à la résistance armée). Le MGB releva le niveau d’utilisation des méthodes opérationnelles ultra- secrètes. Le KGB a consciencieusement dissimulé les dossiers relatifs aux activités des agents-combattants (agenty-boeviki ou agenturno-boevye gruppy) du MVD-MGB entre 1946 et 1959. Mais sur les 140 dossiers d’archives de l’ancien KGB en Lituanie, 37 ont tout de même été conservés. L’activité des groupes spéciaux a laissé des traces dans les documents du secrétariat du MGB, dans les comptes rendus des responsables d’oblast´ du MGB et dans les dossiers des agents conservés dans les archives de l’ancien KGB à Vilnius. Une publication ultra-secrète du KGB datant de 1972, le Slovar´ kontrrazvedki (Dictionnaire du contre-espionnage), donne cette définition du terme agenturno- boevaja gruppa : « groupe formé par les organes du KGB constitué d’agents opérationnels et d’agents-combattants, qui agit sous le couvert de petites unités de soldats affectées spécialement par les États capitalistes, les groupes armés et autres groupes antisoviétiques [...]. Il peut en toute indépendance capturer ou liquider les formations de renseignements et de sabotage, les bandes, et même les pousser sous le coup d’autres forces et d’autres procédés des organes du KGB. L’utilisation de ces groupes est une mesure de temps de crise rendue nécessaire par le besoin de neutraliser rapidement les groupes d’espions et de saboteurs et les groupes de
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bandits, de mettre fin à la coopération entre eux et les éléments hostiles de la population locale, de couper les voies de communication entre ces groupes et leurs états-majors, et d’éveiller chez eux un sentiment d’incertitude. »36
25 Cette description concentre en réalité toute l’expérience de l’utilisation des groupes d’agents-combattants entre 1945 et 1959. En Lituanie, ces groupes portaient plusieurs noms : bandes de faux partisans (ložnye bandy, lžebandy), détachements de provocateurs (provokacionnye otrjady), détachements spéciaux, groupes terroristes, groupes d’agents-combattants (agenturno-boevye gruppy), groupes d’agents opérationnels ou simplement groupes d’agents (agenturnye gruppy). Leur développement a connu plusieurs étapes. Nous étudions leur création et leur activité dans les pages suivantes.
Les détachements de provocateurs en 1945
26 N’ayant pas réussi à liquider rapidement la forte résistance antisoviétique armée de Lituanie en 1944, on se prépara à utiliser des détachements de provocateurs ou faux partisans (ložnye provokacionnye otrjady) afin de battre les partisans. Cherchant à contourner les initiatives des structures locales de la Sécurité (qui depuis l’automne 1944 proposaient de créer de telles unités), V. Kobulov, vice-commissaire général du NKGB de l’URSS, ordonna le 12 juin 1945 aux chefs des secteurs opérationnels de ne pas former de détachements de provocateurs sans son autorisation37. Dès le 13 juin, à la réception de l’autorisation de Berija, quatre détachements furent organisés en Lituanie. Ils se faisaient passer pour des Allemands qui avaient réussi à s’échapper de l’encerclement, des hommes de Vlasov, des déserteurs de l’Armée rouge ou des partisans parachutistes (dans la Lettonie voisine, on avait créé un détachement spécial formé d’anciens partisans soviétiques sur l’initiative du Comité central du parti communiste letton38).
27 Le premier détachement (120 hommes armés), dirigé par le lieutenant-colonel Mirkovskij, héros de l’Union soviétique, passa à l’action dans l’uezd de Panevžys. Il répandit diverses rumeurs dans la population locale et chercha à joindre les partisans de la région. R. Girietis, ancien membre de la résistance armée antisoviétique, mentionne cette petite unité dans ses mémoires : « On nous avait dit que 300 Allemands qui venaient de rompre le contact près de Liepæja en 1945 voulaient prendre Panevžys. Ils cherchaient à attirer les partisans dans leur opération. [...] Ils firent une halte au creux de la forêt Verte, dans le village de Vilkapieviai. Sans attendre le regroupement, ils se mirent à arrêter ceux qu’ils soupçonnaient de liens avec les partisans et les partisans eux-mêmes. [...] C’était un détachement de provocateurs formé par les organes du NKVD. »39
28 Les rapports du NKVD font état de 16 arrestations et de 21 exécutions en tout40. Ensuite, ce même détachement se déplaça de 150 kilomètres et se mit en campagne dans l’uezd de Marijampol, dans la volost´ de Kazl Rºda, se faisant passer pour un groupe de partisans parachutistes. Il n’hésita pas à agir avec cruauté pour atteindre son but. Ces méthodes sont le sujet du livre Partizanai (Les partisans) de Juozas Lukša, un auteur qui a traversé par deux fois le « rideau de fer » : « Le paysan Bilskis fut sauvagement torturé. On retrouva son corps à la lisière de la forêt, pendu à une branche d’arbre par les pieds, la tête enfoncée dans une grosse fourmilière. Bilskis fut la première victime car il avait plus que les autres proposé des vivres aux “partisans parachutistes”. [...] Huit partisans qui avaient été
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“invités” chez lui furent torturés de façon plus sadique encore. [...] Ils étaient nus, attachés aux arbres avec du fil de fer, écorchés, les extrémités calcinées ou coupées, les yeux crevés [...] On avait gravé sur leur poitrine les colonnes de Gediminas ou les croix de Vytis. Un bâillon en morceaux d’étoffe avait été enfoncé dans leur bouche. [...] Le chef de la division, un ancien lieutenant de l’armée lituanienne, légèrement soulevé de terre, avait été cloué à un pin avec sa propre baïonnette. On la lui avait plantée dans la gorge. »41
29 Juozas Lukša n’est certainement pas un témoin direct de ces faits, mais les chiffres qu’il cite correspondent à ceux du NKVD : en tout, 11 partisans torturés et huit arrêtés42.
30 L’activité des autres détachements fut similaire dans la tragédie mais de courte durée : elle s’exerça surtout entre mi-juin et début août 1945, jusqu’à ce que leurs méthodes fussent entièrement démasquées. Le deuxième détachement (117 hommes armés), dirigé par le lieutenant-chef Šihov, héros de l’Union soviétique, était actif dans la volost ´ de Seredžius, uezd de Kaunas, où un détachement de 24 personnes (dont 14 seulement étaient armées) fut écrasé le 11 juin. Le troisième détachement (110 hommes armés), dirigé par le major de la Sécurité Viktorov, opérait dans l’uezd de Šiauliai où il écrasa plusieurs détachements de partisans pendant la seconde moitié du mois de juin43. Plus tard, cette division déplaça ses activités sur Åemaitija, entre Raudondvaris et Taurag. On ne dispose d’aucune information sur les activités d’un quatrième détachement.
31 À cette époque, les structures locales du NKVD et les départements de renseignements de certaines sections de l’armée intérieure du NKVD commencèrent à organiser les premiers groupes formés de partisans qui avaient changé de camp. À l’époque de l’intégration (legalizacija) générale des membres de la résistance, beaucoup de partisans qui avaient déposé les armes furent obligés non seulement de dire tout ce qu’ils savaient des détachements de la résistance armée, mais aussi d’abattre leurs anciens chefs qui ne s’étaient pas rendus. Certes, ces méthodes avaient été utilisées surtout contre la résistance antisoviétique armée clandestine de Pologne, maintenant moribonde. En juillet 1945, le département de renseignements du 31e régiment d’infanterie du NKVD forma dans la forêt de Rºdnink un groupe d’agents-combattants avec trois anciens partisans de l’Armée de l’intérieur polonaise (Armija krajova -- AK). Ceux-ci devaient capturer ou éliminer plusieurs commandants de détachements de partisans polonais. En août 1945, l’ancien partisan (Rekin-Rulka) du détachement de l’AK « Lepik », dirigé par un détachement d’agents-combattants, arrêta dix résistants clandestins polonais dans la volost´ de Rieš, uezd de Vilnius. Sur la base des renseignements fournis par ce groupe, le NKVD mena une opération militaire du 27 au 29 août et arrêta huit personnes44. En 1945, les détachements de provocateurs et les premiers groupes d’agents-combattants ne causèrent pas de préjudice notable à la résistance antisoviétique armée et il s’avéra même qu’en prenant contact avec la population locale et les partisans alentour, les grands détachements de provocateurs se démasquaient trop vite. De plus, la population craignait d’apporter son aide aux nombreux détachements de provocateurs déguisés en Allemands ou en hommes de Vlasov, qui étaient pour elle des inconnus.
L’activité des groupes d’agents-combattants. Première étape : 1946-1949
32 L’utilisation à grande échelle de groupes d’agents-combattants fut suscitée par une lettre écrite le 9 janvier 1946 par le lieutenant général A. Leont´ev, responsable de la
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Direction centrale de lutte contre le banditisme (Glavnoe upravlenie po bor´be s banditizmom, GUBB) de l’URSS aux chefs des secteurs opérationnels. Cette lettre les informait des méthodes utilisées par les groupes d’agents-combattants qui opéraient en Ukraine occidentale45. Le 28 janvier 1946, le major général Juozas Bartašiºnas, commissaire du NKVD de Lituanie, le major général Dmitrij Efimov, commissaire du peuple à la Sécurité d’État de Lituanie (NKGB) et le lieutenant général Ivan Tkačenko, commissaire plénipotentiaire du NKVD-NKGB de l’URSS pour la Lituanie, émirent une directive dans laquelle ils proposaient aux chefs des départements urbains et d’uezd du NKVD-NKGB de créer un groupe d’agents du NKVD-NKGB pour chaque détachement actif de partisans. Ce groupe d’agents s’efforcerait d’introduire dans les détachements de partisans des agents de l’intérieur (vnutrennie agenty) choisis parmi des partisans, anciens ou en activité, et des officiers de l’armée lituanienne46.
33 Au début du mois de mars 1946, J. Bartašiºnas ordonna aux départements d’uezd du NKVD de créer de faux détachements de partisans afin de découvrir les membres actifs de la résistance et leurs sympathisants. Dans ce but, il recommanda d’user de mises en scène (kombinacii) associant provocation, ruse et répression47.
34 En mars et en avril 1946, les départements d’uezd du ministère des Affaires intérieures de Lituanie avaient déjà mis sur pied 14 groupes spéciaux (special´nye gruppy, SG) dans les uezdy de Taurag, Lazdijai, Utena, Mažeikiai, Zarasai, Telšiai, Panevžys, Švenčionys et Joniškis. Ils comptaient en tout 103 combattants (qui avaient tous appartenu à des bataillons de chasseurs rebaptisés sous la douce appellation de « défenseurs du peuple »). Dans un groupe spécial, le nombre de combattants oscillait entre 7 et 3148. La coordination de leurs opérations fut confiée à la 1re division du 1er département de la Direction de lutte contre le banditisme du MVD de Lituanie49.
35 Poursuivant son but, à savoir la destruction de la résistance antisoviétique armée de Lituanie, la direction du MVD de Lituanie fixa plusieurs missions aux groupes spéciaux :
36 1) Capturer ou éliminer physiquement les dirigeants des organisations de partisans ;
37 2) Recueillir des renseignements sur les détachements de partisans et sur leurs contacts et détruire ces contacts ;
38 3) Infiltrer les états-majors des organisations clandestines ;
39 4) Découvrir les agents de liaison, les sympathisants et les réservistes ;
40 5) Pousser les détachements de partisans à tomber dans des embuscades préparées par les troupes intérieures du MGB ;
41 6) Liquider un par un les détachements de partisans, leurs unités et leurs membres50.
42 Les agents-combattants étaient sous les ordres d’agents de la Sécurité soviétique qui avaient souvent mené des opérations secrètes. En mars et avril 1946, les groupes d’agents-combattants créés par les départements d’uezd du MVD furent vite démasqués. Les anciens chasseurs ne connaissaient ni le comportement ni les habitudes des partisans et s’adonnaient au pillage. Les agents de la Sécurité soviétique au niveau de l’uezd n’avaient pas l’expérience de l’organisation ou de l’utilisation des groupes spéciaux.
43 La direction moscovite de la Sécurité était bien informée de l’activité des groupes spéciaux. C’est pourquoi, le 1er mai 1946, elle envoya Aleksej Sokolov, organisateur de groupes spéciaux bien connu, depuis l’Ukraine occidentale vers la Lituanie, dans le but d’utiliser plus efficacement les agents-combattants51. Le 29 juin 1946, le lieutenant
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général V. Rjasnoj, vice-ministre des Affaires intérieures de l’URSS, informa J. Bartašiºnas, ministre des Affaires intérieures de Lituanie, des activités du major A. Sokolov dans l’oblast´ de Ternopil en Ukraine. Un groupe d’agents dirigé par A. Sokolov qui s’y était fait passer pour un groupe de partisans ukrainiens avait soumis un prêtre, Nedilski, à un interrogatoire, l’avait torturé et relâché au bout de 48 heures après l’avoir détroussé. C’est pour cette raison que V. Rjasnoj recommanda de contrôler attentivement l’activité du major A. Sokolov et de guider ses opérations en permanence52.
44 Le 1er mai 1946, A. Sokolov fut nommé chef de la 2e division du 1er département de la Direction de lutte contre le banditisme du MVD de la SSR de Lituanie (en février 1947, il devint chef adjoint de la 3e division du 1er département de la direction « 2-N » du MGB, et en juin 1947, il devint chef adjoint de la 5e division du 2e département de cette même direction)53. À la fin du mois de mai 1946, A. Sokolov créa le 1er groupe central d’agents- combattants, détachement spécial de la Direction de lutte contre le banditisme du MVD de Lituanie54, et en dirigea les activités jusqu’en 1950. Les agents d’assaut qui étaient sous ses ordres exécutèrent et gardèrent en détention près de 150 partisans, et torturèrent de nombreux agents de liaison et réservistes. L’activité du major Sokolov fut intense, les chiffres le démontrent : il participa aux opérations du groupe spécial pendant 164 jours en 1946, 256 en 1947, 213 en 1948, 246 en 1949, 88 en 1950 (967 jours en tout). En mars 1954, il travaillait déjà à la direction du MVD du territoire (kraj) de l’Altaj55. La direction du MGB le gratifiait fréquemment de primes d’encouragement. Il était considéré comme l’un des agents les plus consciencieux. Ses collègues le décrivaient comme un homme qui inculquait la cruauté à ses agents et les incitait au pillage56. Les méthodes qu’il a inventées sont restées en usage tant qu’il a existé des groupes d’agents-combattants, et les agents-combattants qu’il avait formés furent un exemple de cruauté hors du commun pour les nouveaux membres des groupes spéciaux. Aleksej Sokolov fut décoré trois fois de l’Ordre du Drapeau rouge, de l’Ordre de l’Étoile rouge et de l’Ordre de la Guerre patriotique de première catégorie (1949) « pour son exécution efficace des missions spéciales du gouvernement de l’URSS ». Il est mort à Moscou en 1973. Il avait le grade de lieutenant-colonel.
45 Entre 1946 et 1949, le groupe spécial central fut dirigé et organisé par deux autres chefs (outre le major A. Sokolov dont il vient d’être question) : le lieutenant-chef (plus tard, capitaine) Nikolaj Antonovič Sokolov, chef de la 5e division du 2 e département de la direction « 2-N » du MBG de Lituanie, et, à partir de la fin de 1947, le lieutenant-chef Nikolaj Čurakov. Le non moins célèbre spécialiste des groupes spéciaux qu’était le capitaine Nikolaj Sokolov avait pris part à l’organisation du déplacement des Tchétchènes et des Ingouches57. Les agents-combattants utilisaient tous les moyens pour torturer les partisans, leurs agents de liaison et leurs sympathisants lorsqu’ils les capturaient, et exécutaient des civils (des personnes âgées, des femmes, des mineurs) comme autant de témoins indésirables -- avec bien souvent la bénédiction du capitaine N. Sokolov. Il leur arrivait même de torturer les partisans au fer chauffé à blanc. Le major Figurin, chef du 2e département de la direction « 2-N » du MGB, son adjoint Makov, le lieutenant-colonel Vladimir Vasil´ev, chef du 1er département, le lieutenant- colonel Bruevič, chef adjoint du 2e département, le lieutenant-colonel Boris Burilin, chef adjoint de la Direction de lutte contre le banditisme du MVD et les chefs adjoints de la direction « 2-N » du MGB, le lieutenant-colonel Il´ja Počkaj et le colonel Jakov Sinicyn contrôlaient les agents et planifiaient leurs opérations. Le major général J. Bartašiºnas, ministre des Affaires intérieures de Lituanie et les ministres de la Sécurité
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d’État de Lituanie, le major général D. Efimov et le lieutenant général N. Gorlinskij, entérinaient les plans d’opérations des groupes spéciaux élaborés par les chefs des services subalternes.
46 En mai et juin 1946, le groupe central d’agents-combattants en activité était formé de 18 anciens chasseurs58 qui se trahirent en pillant la population pendant les opérations. En conséquence, le groupe fut dissous en juillet et un nouveau groupe de 20 agents fut formé en août, regroupant 11 Russes, deux Ukrainiens, et sept Lituaniens. Fait nouveau, ce groupe comprenait cinq anciens partisans. Sa composition changea souvent, au fur et à mesure qu’on remplaçait les agents peu fiables par de nouveaux agents. Un deuxième groupe spécial de la direction « 2-N » du MGB fut créé dans le but d’élargir le champ des opérations des agents-combattants, par ordre du major général D. Efimov, ministre de la Sécurité d’État de la SSR de Lituanie (Prikaz n° 0118, 27 juillet)59. Ce groupe, qui devait comprendre 30 agents-combattants, fut ensuite dissous. Les résultats de ses activités sont inconnus. En juillet 1948, le groupe spécial était formé de 24 agents-combattants et agents de la Sécurité :
47 1. Le chef (načal´nik) du groupe, qui était le chef adjoint de la 5e division du 2 e département de la direction « 2-N » du MGB ;
48 2. Son chef adjoint, commissaire plénipotentiaire de la division ;
49 3. Le responsable (rukovoditel´) du groupe spécial, agent-combattant ;
50 4. Son adjoint (aussi enquêteur), agent-combattant ;
51 5. L’adjudant-chef (responsable du groupe de défense, magasinier), agent-combattant ;
52 6. La division de combat (10 personnes), agents-combattants ;
53 7. La division de défense (7 personnes), agents-combattants ;
54 8. Le gardien (cordonnier, tailleur, gérant du dépôt de vivres), agent-combattant ;
55 9. Le chauffeur du groupe spécial.
56 La base se trouvait à Vilnius sous couvert de section militaire60. Le groupe était bien armé : 3 mitrailleuses Brno, neuf fusils automatiques SVT (à 10 coups), six mitraillettes, 20 pistolets, 40 grenades, trois lance-fusées, etc.61
57 La division de combat du groupe spécial devait exécuter les opérations directement : réaliser des mises en scène (kombinacii) avec des personnes désignées, mener celles-ci dans les bunkers, établir des liens avec ceux qui aidaient les partisans et avec les partisans eux-mêmes. Selon les circonstances, les combattants avaient le droit de prendre les partisans vivants ou de les exécuter. La division de défense avait pour mission de couvrir la division de combat en cas de conflit armé avec les partisans et de garder les prisonniers62. Les agents d’assaut gagnaient entre 1 000 et 1 200 roubles par mois et recevaient des primes généreuses pour les missions accomplies63.
58 La sélection des agents-combattants se faisait de façon ultra-secrète, sur examen de la personnalité, des capacités et du passé du candidat. Son travail faisait en permanence l’objet d’une surveillance et d’un contrôle secrets. Les membres des groupes spéciaux devaient être forts physiquement afin de mener à bien des opérations difficiles. Leur activité était tenue secrète même des autres agents du MGB64.
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L’évolution des méthodes de travail des agents- combattants
59 La première étape des activités des groupes spéciaux centraux comprenait dans les grandes lignes une méthode appelée « persuasion (obrabotka) du sujet par l’utilisation de mises en scène ». Lorsque les agents de la Sécurité ne pouvaient pas obtenir d’indications, même sous la torture, d’un partisan ou d’un sympathisant qu’ils avaient arrêté, ils lui faisaient traverser la forêt en voiture ou à pied, escorté par des agents. Le prisonnier pensait qu’on l’emmenait à une confrontation avec des témoins dans un autre département du MGB. La voiture « tombait alors en panne », s’arrêtait, un détachement de faux partisans l’attaquait, les soldats d’escorte « prenaient la fuite » ou se « faisaient tuer », et les faux partisans « libéraient » le prisonnier. Ensuite, le groupe spécial emmenait sa victime dans la forêt ou dans un bunker préparé à cet effet et lui faisait subir un interrogatoire. Les agents posaient des questions auxquelles le prisonnier devait répondre de façon exhaustive par écrit. On l’obligeait généralement à décrire son passé, à expliquer ce qu’il faisait avec les agents de la Sécurité, à dire ce qu’il y avait de positif à lutter contre le bolchevisme, ce qu’il faisait pour la nation lituanienne, ce qu’il savait sur le mouvement des partisans, quelle était la nature de ses rapports avec eux, etc. C’était le plus souvent un enquêteur des groupes spéciaux qui menait l’interrogatoire. Il insistait pour que le prisonnier consignât par écrit les noms des agents de liaison, des sympathisants, des réservistes et des partisans, qu’il indique où se trouvaient leurs bunkers. Tout ce qui avait été caché au MGB était noté dans une lettre adressée au chef du faux détachement, de la compagnie ou de la brigade. Ensuite, les agents-combattants emmenaient le prisonnier au faux état-major. En route, les faux partisans tombaient dans une embuscade dressée par les soldats du MGB. La victime se retrouvait en face du même tchékiste avec cette fois-ci les indications écrites de sa main qu’on avait trouvées dans les sacoches des « bandits exécutés »65.
60 Une mise en scène de ce type fut organisée dans la première moitié de juin 1946 par le groupe spécial central dirigé par le major A. Sokolov dans la volost´ de Kaltannai, uezd de Švenčionys. La victime était le réserviste Kazys Anknas-Kovas de l’okrug de Vytautas (Lituanie orientale). Pour masquer les activités du groupe spécial, d’anciens agents- combattants jouaient le rôle d’une section du génie militaire en train de travailler innocemment près du bois de Labanoras. Lorsque vint le moment de passer aux opérations, ils enfilèrent des uniformes de partisans et « attaquèrent » le convoi à l’endroit convenu. Au cours de l’interrogatoire mis en scène par le groupe spécial, K. Anknas avoua être le chef de la division de détachement de Kamarauskas-Kariojotas et donna près de 30 noms de réservistes et d’agents de liaison de ce détachement. Il donna en outre trois partisans à qui les agents-combattants se présentèrent comme s’ils étaient un détachement de l’okrug de Dainava (en Lituanie méridionale) exécutant des sabotages sur la voie ferrée. Le 11 juin, K. Anknas revit le groupe spécial en compagnie des trois partisans. Ces derniers, qui ne se doutaient de rien, furent introduits dans un bunker sur le prétexte qu’ils devaient prêter serment et furent exécutés. Le « travail » du groupe spécial fut maquillé par une section militaire expédiée sur place pour simuler un affrontement armé66. Les corps des partisans exécutés furent exposés sur les places des villes de province comme s’ils avaient péri au combat.
61 Le 21 juin 1946, on monta une mise en scène pour Bron Blažyt, agent de liaison de l’okrug de Vytautas. Pendant les interrogatoires, elle réalisa que les questions qu’on lui
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posait étaient similaires à celles qu’elle avait entendues dans les locaux du MVD. Elle comprit la supercherie et ne donna plus aucun renseignement au groupe spécial. Les subdivisions militaires du MVD simulèrent un « nettoyage » de la forêt et « trouvèrent » la jeune fille dans le bunker. Les faux partisans furent « liquidés » par les troupes intérieures à quelques kilomètres du bunker67. Le 29 juin, le groupe spécial interrogea Ona Katinyt-Mirta, agent de l’okrug de Vytautas, et l’agent Labeikis-Lobov68 exécuta un jeune homme de 17 ans, Stasis Ivonis-Kovas. Le major A. Sokolov, mécontent de ces opérations, estimait que les agents faisaient du mauvais travail. Dans un rapport spécial du 6 juillet 1946 adressé au major général P. Kapralov, vice-ministre des Affaires étrangères, il proposa de former un groupe spécial avec des partisans qui s’étaient compromis vis-à-vis du mouvement clandestin : « Je ne refuse aucune mission dangereuse, et je n’en refuserai jamais, mais je ne veux pas travailler avec des agents comme ceux du groupe spécial. Je préfère travailler avec les bandits et faire du bon travail tout en risquant de recevoir une balle plutôt que gâcher une mission sans doute importante avec les meilleurs “défenseurs de la patrie” triés sur le volet et finir en prison pour les vols et les pillages qu’ils ont commis. »69
62 Cette lettre doit peut-être son existence au fait qu’en juillet 1946, les chefs partisans de l’okrug de Vytautas distribuèrent une déclaration à la population dans laquelle ils la mettaient en garde contre les provocations de tchékistes agissant sous un déguisement70. La direction des agents-combattants dut prendre ce fait en considération et modifier en conséquence la sélection des candidats. Cependant, des agents-combattants continuèrent même plus tard à piller, torturer et exécuter des innocents. Toutefois un seul cas est connu, celui de deux agents et d’un officier du MGB qui furent condamnés à une courte peine de prison71.
63 Pendant la seconde moitié de 1946, les méthodes et les activités clandestines des groupes spéciaux se perfectionnèrent de façon considérable : si un groupe agissait comme une division de partisans venant d’un autre okrug, ses agents devaient être armés et équipés comme les partisans de cet okrug. Les membres des groupes spéciaux avaient tous des surnoms et s’approvisionnaient auprès des sympathisants des partisans. Si un groupe spécial agissait comme un détachement venant d’un autre okrug, les agents-combattants devaient se familiariser avec le terrain de cet okrug, la structure organisationnelle, les dirigeants et un itinéraire fictif à suivre pour arriver à l’endroit donné. Les dirigeants du MVD préparaient des « scénarios » (« legendy ») appropriés pour les agents72. Dans leur zone d’activité on interdisait toute opération des sections militaires. Si des informateurs annonçaient au MVD l’arrivée de détachements de « partisans », on envoyait sur place une petite unité d’hommes des troupes intérieures qui simulait un coup de main du groupe spécial et une fusillade. Le tchékiste qui dirigeait l’opération maintenait le contact par radio ou par messagers. Le groupe spécial devait suivre un itinéraire préétabli avec précision. Après l’élimination des vrais partisans, on mettait en scène un combat et l’évacuation des morts. Ordre était donné d’enfouir les dépouilles des partisans exécutés « de telle façon qu’elles ne soient pas découvertes ».
64 Cette méthode déloyale d’élimination physique des groupes individuels de partisans s’accompagna plus tard de celle de la « persuasion des agents de liaison par le biais de mises en scène ». Citons par exemple l’opération qui fut menée du 17 août au 2 septembre 1946 dans le village de Grendav, volost´ d’Onuškis, dans l’uezd de Trakai, contre le détachement « Siaubas » du groupe « Geležinis vilkas » (le Loup de Fer) de
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l’okrug de Tauras. De l’automne 1944 au 1er septembre 1946, ce détachement tua 92 personnes -- chasseurs, agents de la Sécurité, soldats des forces de l’intérieur et activistes soviétiques -- et en blessa neuf. Très actif et insaisissable, il avait fréquemment affronté les unités du NKVD73. Au début de l’opération, un groupe de 20 agents-combattants se faisant passer pour un détachement de l’okrug du Grand Combat (Velikaja bor´ba, situé entre les villes les plus importantes de Lituanie, Vilnius et Kaunas, où les partisans étaient actifs) commença à rendre visite aux agents de liaison du détachement « Siaubas ». Afin de gagner leur confiance, les agents-combattants durent simuler le meurtre de trois combattants (joués par des agents-combattants de la division de défense) à la ferme de l’agent de liaison Antanas Survilas.
65 Pressés de trouver le groupe « Siaubas » le plus vite possible, le 23 août, les agents- combattants emmenèrent un certain S. R. dans la forêt sur l’accusation de collaboration avec le MVD. L’agent-combattant Krot, profitant de la situation, retourna à la propriété où il viola la femme de S. R. Il raconta aux autres agents qu’il l’avait forcée à devenir agent de liaison sur la promesse de laisser la vie sauve à son mari. Le 2 septembre, avec l’aide des agents de liaison, Jonas Dambrauskas-Siaubas, chef du détachement, Stasys Legetavičius-Aušra, Jonas Dulius-Klevas et Vaclovas Budrevičius-Lietus vinrent à la rencontre du groupe spécial et tombèrent dans son embuscade. Tous furent exécutés ainsi que les propriétaires de la ferme où eut lieu la rencontre, Petras Blažonis, son épouse, leur fils de 18 ans Antanin et une fille, Monika, âgée de 17 ans. Antanina (14 ans), qui s’était cachée dans la grange, fut la seule survivante. Le major A. Sokolov, qui avait dirigé les opérations, demanda à J. Bartašiºnas, ministre des Affaires intérieures, de récompenser les agents-combattants qui « s’étaient distingués » : Zakrevskij-Koršun, N. Åaba-Kruk, G. Kiselis-Lesnoj, P. Jonaitis-Karosas, S. Frankonis-Volk, S. Bibenas-Ugr´, J. Ramanauskait-Lisa74.
66 Le 10 octobre 1946, le major général Prošin, chef adjoint de la Direction centrale de lutte contre le banditisme du MVD de l’URSS, recommanda au major général J. Bartašiºnas d’organiser plus souvent des opérations de ce type. Il suggéra également d’utiliser des mises en scène nouvelles pour chaque opération afin d’éviter aux agents d’être démasqués75.
67 Les partisans percèrent peu à peu ces méthodes à jour et, à la fin de 1946, le major A. Sokolov proposa de changer de tactique. Par exemple, lorsqu’ils simulaient la libération d’agents de liaison d’état-major, les agents-combattants devaient les emmener dans la campagne, faire connaissance avec eux et les relâcher sans les interroger après avoir convenu de maintenir le contact. Ensuite, on envoyait un groupe de terroristes à ces agents de liaison dans le but de détruire l’état-major des partisans. Ou bien, après une fausse fusillade, plusieurs agents-combattants annonçaient aux agents de liaison qu’ils partaient pour un autre okrug. Quelques semaines plus tard, un groupe de trois à cinq agents-combattants se présentait aux agents de liaison et leur annonçait que le détachement avait été détruit et qu’ils devaient se cacher et attendre que les éléments restants du détachement ne repassent par la région. C’est de cette manière que les agents-combattants trouvaient les partisans d’une localité76. Des méthodes analogues furent utilisées entre 1947 et 1949.
68 Cependant, en 1947, la méthode de « persuasion des personnes par le biais de mises en scène » était utilisée plus fréquemment que les autres. Afin de se faciliter la tâche, les tchékistes sommaient leurs prisonniers de signer un document dans lequel ils déclaraient qu’ils allaient collaborer avec le MGB. Cherchant à s’arracher des mains du
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MGB et sans avoir aucune intention de devenir des espions, les prisonniers signaient sans faire de difficultés les papiers qu’on leur présentait, pensant ainsi tromper l’ennemi. Après une fausse attaque du convoi, sur les corps des faux soldats, les faux partisans découvraient la feuille signée portant la déclaration de collaboration avec le MGB et menaçaient l’agent de liaison de mort par décision d’un tribunal de campagne. C’est ainsi qu’on extorquait les noms des combattants clandestins et les endroits où ils se trouvaient.
69 Grâce à cette méthode, le 9 août 1947, on obtint de Bronius Ripkevičius-Spindulis, chef des renseignements du 2e rajon de Vytautas dans l’okrug de Tauras (Sud-Ouest de la Lituanie), un grand nombre de données sur le mouvement clandestin. Les agents- combattants s’étaient fait passer pour des partisans de la région rattachée (ob ´´edinennyj okrug) de K´stutis (Lituanie occidentale). Mais au MGB, comprenant qu’il avait trahi bon nombre d’amis par la perfidie des agents de la Sécurité, B. Ripkevičius voulut prendre une arme, se jeta sur l’enquêteur et fut abattu77. Le 29 août, dans l’uezd de Joniškis, des agents-combattants obtinrent des renseignements de Mykolas Kilčiauskas après l’avoir menacé de mort78. Le 1er septembre, Juozas Karalius-Rambinas fut soumis à la même méthode79, et du 19 au 23 novembre, ce fut le tour de Petras Monstis et Petras Stankus dans l’uezd de Telšiai80.
70 Selon les circonstances, les agents du MGB recouraient à des méthodes éprouvées par le temps. Par exemple, on emmenait sous escorte un prisonnier et un agent-combattant qui jouait le rôle d’un partisan vers un autre uezd que celui où habitait le prisonnier. Des agents-combattants habillés en partisans attaquaient le convoi et libéraient le vrai partisan et le faux. Après un court interrogatoire, les faux partisans relâchaient l’agent de liaison, et l’agent-combattant restait avec le groupe spécial. Quelques semaines plus tard, accompagné du groupe, il recontactait l’agent de liaison et essayait d’entrer en contact par son entremise avec les groupes de partisans. Cette méthode, comme l’écrivait le major A. Sokolov, avait été utilisée de 1928 à 1929 en Asie centrale pendant la guerre contre les Basmači et avait donné de bons résultats81.
71 Les personnes suivantes ne purent échapper à la méthode de « persuasion » et aux diverses mises en scène du groupe spécial : Juozas Novickas et Jonas Grigas (2 octobre 1947, uezd de Lazdijai), Antanas Valatkevičius et Stasys Balčius (10 octobre 1947, uezd de Lazdijai), Vladas Zemianskas (27 octobre 1947, uezd de Varna), Simas Valentukevičius (26 octobre 1947), Juozas Ardzevičius (16 décembre 1947, uezd d’Alytus) et beaucoup d’autres membres du mouvement clandestin. Les agents- combattants suivants ont pris part aux mises en scène : V. Uzela-Karklas, V. Vikonis- Uosis, P. Monstis-Serbentas, N. Åaba-Kruk, V. Lapušniak-Junak, R. Otting-Kirvis, A. Chainauskas-Šalna, J. Vilkas-Barzda... Les opérations étaient montées par le major A. Sokolov et le capitaine N. Čurakov82.
72 À la fin de 1947, la méthode de fausse libération ayant été démasquée par les partisans de plusieurs régions, on l’utilisa beaucoup moins souvent. Le 25 janvier 1948, dans l’uezd de Šakiai, on s’en servit sur Eugenija Janušaityt et Aldona Mekšraityt. S’écartant du convoi, E. Janušaityt déclara aux agents-combattants qu’elle connaissait bien cette comédie et exigea qu’on l’emmène au MGB83. Néanmoins, dans plusieurs districts, on continua d’utiliser cette méthode jusqu’en 1952.
73 En novembre 1947, dans un rapport adressé à Figurin, chef du 2e département de la direction « 2-N », le major A. Sokolov fit remarquer qu’il fallait orienter les frappes opérationnelles des groupes spéciaux vers la suppression et la dissolution des
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détachements mêmes de partisans et ensuite seulement vers les états-majors unifiés et régionaux (ob´´edinennye i okružnye). Dans ce rapport on trouve pour la première fois la proposition de recruter secrètement les partisans faits prisonniers et de les dépêcher immédiatement avec le groupe spécial dans la zone d’activité de leurs détachements en tant que guides84. Cette idée se concrétisa peu à peu dans l’activité des groupes spéciaux. En 1948, le groupe spécial central de la direction « 2-N » fonctionnait comme une unité militaire indépendante dont les dirigeants du MGB exigeaient déjà qu’elle anéantisse les groupes de partisans isolés et les agents d’états-majors.
74 Les assassinats clandestins se succédèrent. Le 22 juin 1948, un groupe spécial dirigé par le lieutenant-chef N. Čurakov abattit sept partisans par traîtrise dans la forêt de Babtai dans l’uezd de Kaunas85. Du 11 au 13 juillet de la même année, dans la volost´ de Skuodas, uezd de Kretinga, un groupe spécial dirigé par le major A. Sokolov convoqua huit membres de l’état-major de la brigade Alka de l’okrug de Åemaiči (Lituanie occidentale) et les exécuta. Pour cette action, les agents reçurent du ministre des récompenses allant jusqu’à 1 500 roubles86. Les exécutions de partisans s’accompagnaient de l’élimination des témoins indésirables. Le 16 septembre 1948, dans la volost´ de Pažaislis, uezd de Kaunas, on exécuta six partisans et les propriétaires d’une ferme où avait lieu une rencontre : Juozas Griškelis, son épouse Agota, leur fille Skirmant, une jeune fille non identifiée et la mère de Griškelis, âgée de 70 ans. Les agents suivants prirent part à la tuerie : Genis, Kirvis, Bijºnas, Vilkas, Serbentas, Ažuolas et le capitaine Šviedrys, commissaire plénipotentiaire87. Les agents-combattants R. Otting-Kirvis (un soldat allemand enrôlé alors qu’il fuyait la prison) et J. Balita-Ažuolas exécutèrent en outre des civils88.
75 Les opérations que les groupes spéciaux menèrent en 1948 ne furent pas toutes couronnées de succès. Par exemple, en février, dans l’uezd de Raseiniai, les partisans de la région rattachée de K´stutis (Lituanie occidentale) firent des prisonniers parmi les agents-combattants pendant les opérations des groupes spéciaux tels Aidas, Tauras et Šernas. Les agents-combattants furent soumis à des interrogatoires et pendus89. Les dirigeants du mouvement clandestin de Lituanie occidentale mirent la population et les partisans en garde contre les agents-combattants une première fois à la fin de 1947 et une deuxième fois en 194890. Et en 1949, l’activité du groupe spécial s’étendait à toutes les régions sauf à la région rattachée de K´stutis.
76 Entre 1946 et 1949, près de 60 personnes (ce chiffre est basé seulement sur les faits connus) furent interrogées par les groupes spéciaux. Plus de 600 sympathisants, agents de liaison, réservistes et partisans furent découverts et plus tard sans doute arrêtés. De même, près de 50 civils, agents de liaison, et plus de 200 partisans furent exécutés. Des attaques importantes furent lancées contre les partisans du Nord-Ouest et du Sud de la Lituanie. La résistance armée subit de lourdes pertes à la suite des activités des agents- combattants et des agents de l’intérieur, mais la pénétration des agents-combattants dans les états-majors régionaux ne s’était pas faite encore à grande échelle.
L’activité des groupes d’agents-combattants. Deuxième étape : 1950-1953
77 Cette deuxième étape se caractérise par l’utilisation des groupes spéciaux à une échelle particulièrement large et par l’emploi de nouvelles méthodes d’opération. En janvier 1950, le capitaine N. Sokolov fut nommé au poste de chef de la 3e division du 2 e
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département de la direction « 2N » du MGB par le capitaine Čurakov (la 3e division dirigeait le groupe spécial central, qui à cette époque comptait 16 agents). Un deuxième groupe spécial central de 16 agents fut créé à la direction en juin 1950 dans le but d’élargir l’utilisation des agents. L’organisation de ce groupe fut confiée au lieutenant- chef P. Rimkevičius, chef adjoint de N. Sokolov à la direction « 2N » et au lieutenant- chef Staškevičius, commissaire plénipotentiaire91. La base du deuxième groupe spécial était composée de cinq anciens chasseurs, deux agents du premier groupe spécial, un agent du 2e département, Vanagas, et des agents venant de différents uezdy (Tigras, Aušra, Katinas, Genis, Aras, Åilvitis, Sakalas), qui étaient pour la plupart d’anciens partisans92.
78 En septembre 1951, il restait encore 854 combattants dans les organisations de résistance armée clandestine. Comme l’activité des agents-combattants s’était révélée efficace, le MGB de l’URSS approuva la création de groupes spéciaux dans les oblasti de Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipeda et Šiauliai93. En janvier 1952, le MGB de Lituanie comptait six groupes spéciaux (77 agents-combattants) : deux dans la direction « 2N » du MGB (25 agents), et un dans chacune des directions du MGB des oblasti de Klaipeda (16 agents), Kaunas (15), Šiauliai (10) et Vilnius (11)94.
79 Outre les tchékistes dont on vient de parler, d’autres responsables assumaient la coordination des activités des groupes spéciaux, la formation des agents-combattants, l’organisation et la validation des plans d’opérations de ces groupes entre 1950 et 1953. C’étaient les chefs adjoints de la direction « 2N » du MGB de Lituanie : le lieutenant- colonel Vukolov, le major N. Dušanskij, le colonel Vaupšas, et même ses chefs : le lieutenant-colonel Åupikov, le major P. Rasplanas (qui se cache en Russie depuis 1992 car en Lituanie s’est ouvert un procès criminel pour l’organisation en 1941 de l’exécution de 76 prisonniers politiques) ; les vice-ministres du MGB-MVD de la république : le colonel I. Počkaj, le colonel L. Martavičius et le colonel Gavrilov ; ainsi que les ministres du MGB-MVD : le major général P. Kapralov, le major général P. Kondakov, le lieutenant-colonel J. Vildžiºnas et le colonel K. Liaudis. Les personnes suivantes étaient informées des activités des groupes spéciaux : les lieutenants généraux N. Sazykin et Haritonov, chefs de la 2e direction centrale du MGB de l’URSS (4e direction du MVD de l’URSS depuis avril 1953) ; les lieutenants généraux L. Canava, S. Ogol´cov, V. Rjasnoj et le colonel général B. Kobulov, vice-ministres du MGB-MVD de l’URSS ; L. Berija, les colonels généraux S. Kruglov et S. Ignat´ev, ministres du MGB- MVD de l’URSS95.
80 Vers la moitié de l’année 1950, le MGB commença à utiliser des groupes spéciaux d’un type un peu différent -- les groupes d’agentura (agenturno-boevye gruppy), qui comprenaient un commandant de détachement de partisans fait prisonnier, recruté et utilisé en secret pour les opérations, et un ou plusieurs agents-combattants96. Entre 1946 et 1949, il y avait jusqu’à 25 personnes dans les groupes spéciaux pendant les opérations. Par contre, entre 1950 et 1953, les groupes d’agentura comptaient entre deux et cinq personnes. Les agents-combattants d’un groupe d’agentura étaient sélectionnés dans les six principaux groupes spéciaux ou parmi les agents de n’importe quel rajon. La différence essentielle entre les groupes spéciaux en activité entre 1946 et 1949 et les groupes d’agentura utilisés entre 1950 et 1953 tenait au fait que le partisan détenu secrètement était recruté immédiatement comme agent-combattant (souvent appelé agent spécial, -- special´nyj agent -- dans les documents), et était dépêché sans attendre avec d’autres agents-combattants dans son ancienne zone d’activité. Ainsi le
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partisan d’hier se transformait-il en ennemi mortel en l’espace de quelques jours. Il devint extraordinairement difficile aux membres du mouvement clandestin de déceler si un agent appartenait en vérité à un groupe d’agentura.
81 En avril 1952, dans les rajony de Kibartai, Raseiniai, Kavarskasis et quelques autres, des groupes d’agentura étaient en activité en même temps que les groupes spéciaux centraux97. Tous les moyens étaient utilisés pour recruter immédiatement les chefs partisans gardés en détention secrète ou les simples combattants, allant de promesses sur un ton « amical » d’une vie tranquille et heureuse en cas de collaboration, à de terribles tortures physiques et psychologiques. Ainsi en fut-il de P. Pečiulaitis- Lakštingala, un partisan capturé vivant (avec l’aide de groupes d’agentura), avec qui les agents de la Sécurité essayèrent dans un premier temps de s’accorder : ils lui donnèrent à manger, lui promirent de faire revenir sa famille de Sibérie et de la faire bénéficier d’une remise de peine. Ils l’emmenèrent même au cinéma. Comme ils n’obtenaient pas de résultat, ils le frappèrent avec une matraque en caoutchouc jusqu’à ce qu’il perdît connaissance. Ensuite, des agents-combattants partirent avec lui à la rencontre d’agents de liaison. Pour l’empêcher de s’évader, on noua à ses jambes et à ses organes sexuels un fil de fer qu’on passa par la poche de son pantalon. L’agent-combattant qui marchait à côté de lui contrôlait ses mouvements à l’aide du fil de fer. De loin, on ne pouvait pas voir que le partisan n’était pas libre de ses mouvements98. De tels témoignages d’anciens combattants antisoviétiques armés encore vivants sont cependant très rares.
Les mises en scène destinées à approcher les chefs des partisans
82 En 1951 et 1952, les mises en scène furent légèrement modifiées dans la mesure où l’on se mit à simuler des rencontres « fortuites » entre les groupes spéciaux et l’homme qu’on se proposait d’interroger99. Les groupes utilisaient aussi un autre moyen, celui de la « libération » de la personne en question du convoi100 tandis que l’élimination de citoyens innocents au cours des opérations de maquillage se pratiquait toujours. Ainsi, le 11 avril 1951 à Strazdai, village du rajon d’Utena, quatre agents-combattants (du groupe spécial n° 2), sous les ordres du lieutenant-chef Staškevičius, tirèrent sur le détachement de Balis Vaičnas-Liubartas de la brigade Lokis de l’okrug de Vytautas. Six partisans trouvèrent la mort ainsi que les témoins qui se trouvaient là : Juozas Čiribas, propriétaire d’une ferme, sa femme Paulina Čiriben, la mère du propriétaire, Marcelja Čiriben et Teofil Tijºnelien. Dans cette opération ultra-secrète, c’est le partisan recruté Juozas Bulka-Skrajºnas qui servit de guide. (Cet homme, dont le surnom d’agentura était Bimba101, vit maintenant en Biélorussie.) Le 4 octobre de la même année, à Dulkiškis, village du rajon de Pakruojis, le groupe spécial n° 2, sous les ordres du lieutenant-chef P. Rimkevičius, soumit un jeune homme de 17 ans, V. Dveilys, à un interrogatoire. À la suite des tortures subies alors, ce jeune homme devint fou. Il fut fusillé et enterré en cachette102.
83 Pourtant, tout en continuant à utiliser les vieilles méthodes, les agents-combattants eux-mêmes se mirent à avoir plus souvent recours à des mises en scène à grande échelle comme la création de faux états-majors d’organisations régionales de partisans ou des manœuvres avec les services de renseignements des pays occidentaux. Ainsi, entre février et septembre 1951, les deux groupes centraux étaient à la recherche du
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chef des services de renseignements de l’état-major du mouvement lituanien de lutte pour la liberté de J. Lukša-Skirmantas, qui avait par deux fois traversé le rideau de fer et était revenu en Lituanie avec l’aide des services de renseignements des pays occidentaux. Les agents-combattants soumirent à leur méthode de « persuasion » un grand nombre de personnes qui avaient maintenu le contact avec lui, mais en vain. Il leur fut possible de trouver la trace du chef légendaire des partisans lorsqu’un membre du 2e groupe de parachutistes, Jonas Kukauskas-Gardenis, tomba aux mains du MGB le 21 mai. Le 4 septembre, Lukša partit à la rencontre de J. Kukauskas accompagné de quatre partisans. La personne qui l’accompagnait vers l’embuscade dressée par le groupe spécial était l’agent-combattant Juozas Rimavičius-Aušra, l’« agent de liaison » de Kukauskas. Craignant que Lukša ne fît exploser une grenade, les agents-combattants qui attendaient dans les fourrés (A. Chainauskas et d’autres) tirèrent sur lui à bout portant103. Ceci ne mit pas fin aux mesures opérationnelles dirigées contre les services de renseignements occidentaux. D’ailleurs, dans la Lettonie voisine, les agents- combattants furent utilisés plus souvent dans ce genre d’opérations104.
84 En juillet 1951, la direction du MGB de Lituanie reçut une lettre confidentielle du Comité central du VKP(b) critiquant assez sévèrement les organes de Sécurité. Cette lettre doit son existence à l’arrestation, le 4 juillet 1951, de V. Abakumov, ministre du MGB de l’URSS. Peut-être l’examen de l’activité du MGB en Lituanie avait-il joué un rôle dans les décisions que prit le major général P. Kapralov, ministre de la Sécurité d’État de Lituanie ? Celui-ci écrivait en 1952 dans une lettre de service adressée à la direction du MGB de l’URSS : « Quelques agents-combattants et agents opérationnels qui travaillaient avec les groupes spéciaux ont violé les lois soviétiques, se sont conduits de façon amorale et malhabile : ils se sont approprié les biens des bandits, des agents de liaison et des sympathisants, ils ont utilisé des méthodes de contrainte physique et dans certains cas ont exécuté des agents de liaison et des bandits qui, s’ils avaient travaillé correctement, auraient pu être capturés vivants. »105
85 P. Kapralov adressa un blâme sévère au capitaine N. Sokolov, chef de la 3e division du 2e département de la direction « 2-N » pour le meurtre de sept civils en 1948. Il fit mettre en prison pour 20 jours le chef adjoint du capitaine, le lieutenant P. Rimkevičius, et le nomma à un poste subalterne. Le lieutenant-chef Staškevičius fut condamné à 20 jours de prison106. Les agents-combattants ne changèrent pas leurs méthodes, mais leurs groupes commencèrent à laisser la vie sauve aux chefs d’organisations clandestines détenus.
86 Dès lors que les groupes d’agents-combattants commencèrent à garder les chefs des organisations partisanes en détention et qu’ils recrutèrent certains d’entre eux dans leurs rangs, les organisations encore actives du mouvement clandestin armé furent liquidées les unes après les autres (en commençant par le Nord-Est de la Lituanie) : les états-majors régionaux de Vytautas et de Vytis de la région nord-est de la Lituanie, ainsi que les états-majors unifiés des brigades de Tigras, Liutas, Vaižgantas, Åaliosios, Gediminas. Le major général P. Kondakov, ministre de la Sécurité d’État de Lituanie écrivit dans un rapport à la direction du MGB de l’URSS en date du 19 janvier 1953 : « Nous avons obtenu des résultats très positifs dans la liquidation du banditisme après l’adoption de formes de travail comme la création des groupes d’agentura dirigés contre les bandes, [...] l’utilisation opérationnelle de chefs de bandits détenus secrètement dans les groupes d’agentura et leur recrutement par les agents, nos agents, [...] en qualité de faux représentants de bandes, d’états-majors et de centres, l’infiltration dans les bandes et les groupes nationalistes, le
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recrutement d’agents de liaison, de sympathisants et d’autres membres du mouvement clandestin et leur utilisation “à leur insu” (“vslepuju”). »107
87 Ceci a permis aux groupes d’agents-combattants d’atteindre un niveau supérieur, et en utilisant des groupes d’agentura à la place d’anciens états-majors, de constituer, sous le contrôle du MGB, de faux états-majors. Ces derniers étaient déjà dirigés par d’anciens chefs partisans recrutés108. Plusieurs fausses organisations de partisans furent en activité au MGB jusqu’à l’été 1953 : la 3e section du conseil du LLKS (Lietuvos Laisves Kovos Sajunga -- Mouvement lituanien de lutte pour la liberté), dirigée par Jonas Kimšta-Åigunas (l’agent spécial Jurginas) ; l’état-major du Nord-Est de la Lituanie, dirigé par Bronius Kalitis-Siaubas (l’agent spécial Ramojus) ; l’état-major de la région de Vytis, dirigé par Povilas Puodžiºnas-Årolis (l’agent-spécial Mokitojas) ; l’état-major de la région de Vytautas, dirigé par Juozas Bulka-Skrajunas (l’agent-spécial Bimba) et encore quatre états-majors de région et de brigade109.
88 Dans une note à Berija du 18 avril 1953, le major général P. Kondakov, ministre des Affaires intérieures de Lituanie écrivait : « Une méthode bien plus efficace contre les bandits de la résistance clandestine a été adoptée récemment dans la campagne de liquidation du banditisme, à savoir la détention secrète des meneurs et leur utilisation opérationnelle dans les groupes spéciaux d’agents-combattants et dans les mises en scène [...]. Grâce à la formation de faux groupes de bandits, il est devenu possible à nos agents de capturer les unités organisées de bandits les plus dangereuses, même la soi-disant section centrale de direction des bandits, de détruire la structure organisationnelle des formations restantes et de paralyser l’activité terroriste des groupes de bandits. »
89 Dans ce même rapport, il est dit qu’en 1953, dans les quatre premiers mois et demi, le MGB de Lituanie avait capturé vivants 72 membres du mouvement clandestin armé, dont 18 furent enrôlés, 23 utilisés dans des groupes d’agents-combattants, et les autres arrêtés après avoir été utilisés dans des opérations110.
90 Avec l’affaiblissement de la résistance organisée des partisans et la rupture des liens entre les organisations clandestines, l’utilisation des agents-combattants devint chaque année de plus en plus effective. En 1950, les agents-combattants mirent sur pied 240 mises en scène, exécutèrent 52 partisans (8 % du nombre total de morts chez les partisans) et en arrêtèrent 18 (parmi les personnes exécutées et arrêtées se trouvaient 33 chefs de détachements et de brigades de partisans)111. En 1951, les groupes d’agentura montèrent 270 mises en scène, exécutèrent 84 partisans (16 % du nombre total de partisans tués) et en firent prisonniers 26112. Le 17 mai 1953, le lieutenant- colonel J. Vildžiºnas, ministre des Affaires intérieures de Lituanie, écrivit à Moscou qu’en avril 1953, 80 % de tous les partisans avaient été liquidés grâce aux méthodes confirmées de ses agents113. En 1953, les groupes d’agentura exécutèrent plus de 50 partisans et firent plus de 54 prisonniers, ce qui représentait 25 % de tous les partisans tués et 46 % des partisans gardés en détention. Au total, entre 1950 et 1953, les groupes spéciaux et les groupes d’agentura exécutèrent près de 300 partisans et en firent prisonniers 140.
91 Les groupes spéciaux de Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipeda et Šiauliai furent dissous entre octobre et décembre 1953 sous le prétexte qu’il ne restait plus que de petits groupes de partisans, et 48 agents furent congédiés. La 4e direction du MVD congédia neuf agents- combattants des deux groupes spéciaux centraux114. En 1954, la 4e division du MVD avait des groupes spéciaux de 35 agents-combattants sur deux bases de l’uezd de Vilnius, en tant que sections techniques du ministère de la Défense115.
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92 Le KGB, formé en 1954, devint une variante modifiée du MGB. Il conserva tous les anciens agents et leurs méthodes, et continua les opérations secrètes en cours. Il prit aussi les agents-combattants sous sa tutelle. Le 2e département du KGB s’occupa désormais du suivi des groupes spéciaux. Les renseignements sur l’activité des agents- combattants étaient communiqués en permanence au président du KGB de l’URSS I. Serov, au vice-président, le major général K. Lunev, au chef de la 4e direction du KGB de l’URSS, le lieutenant général F. Haritonov, au lieutenant général E. Pitovranov, au chef du 3e département de la 4e direction du KGB de l’URSS I. Počkaj (ancien vice-ministre du MGB de l’URSS)116.
93 Après la mort de Stalin, on limita l’utilisation de certaines des méthodes appliquées par les agents-combattants. Le 3 février 1954, le major général K. Lunev, vice-ministre des Affaires intérieures de l’URSS, reconnut que les méthodes de torture utilisées par les agents-combattants qui se faisaient passer pour des partisans « étaient illégales », et il interdit l’utilisation de telles méthodes de « persuasion » sur les agents de liaison et les sympathisants. Il donna aussi l’ordre de limiter l’utilisation par les agents-combattants des mises en scène « surtout contre les groupes antisoviétiques de la nouvelle génération, car de telles méthodes pourraient ranimer les restes du mouvement nationaliste armé clandestin117.
94 En 1955, P. Rimkevičius et les agents-combattants J. Rudženis et A. Chainauskas-Šalna furent condamnés par le tribunal militaire à des peines de prison allant de deux à sept ans pour « avoir enfreint les lois soviétiques », c’est-à-dire pour avoir torturé et exécuté un jeune homme mineur, V. Dveilys, en 1951118. Mais ce procès est le seul du genre. Plusieurs partisans qui s’étaient ralliés aux agents-combattants furent plus tard arrêtés et fusillés, comme ce fut le cas par exemple de Jonas Beliunas-Variagas et Juozas Jankauskas-Demonas. Les tchékistes accomplirent ces exécutions car certains d’entre eux avaient éliminé trop d’agents soviétiques alors que d’autres avaient montré moins de zèle. Le MGB de Lituanie épargna quelques agents et présenta un pourvoi en grâce ou en commutation devant le Presidium du Soviet Suprême de l’URSS, qui fut accordé. Le KGB continua à utiliser les services de certains autres agents. Par exemple, l’ancien soldat allemand Rudolf Otting, qui était devenu l’agent-combattant « Kirvis » (La Hache) en 1947, et qui avec d’autres agents avait capturé et tué près de 150 partisans et civils, fut envoyé en RFA sous le nom d’agent « Balandis » au milieu des années 1950. Mais il se rendit aux services de contre-espionnage et continua sa vie paisiblement en Allemagne119.
95 En janvier 1955, la 3e division du 2e département du KGB, qui jusque-là avait dirigé les agents-combattants, fut supprimée120. Les agents-combattants du KGB tuèrent quand même 64 partisans et firent 40 prisonniers entre 1954 et 1959. Au fur et à mesure que le nombre de partisans diminuait (il passa de 122 en janvier 1954 à 10 en janvier 1959), l’utilisation des agents-combattants diminuait également (leur nombre passa de 35 en janvier 1954 à 14 en janvier 1959)121. En 1959, les 14 agents-combattants qui restaient (Lazda, Aidas, Unguris, Aleskas, Aušra, Kaštonas, Aras, Drasuolis, Ramojus, Katinas, Beržas, Mokitojas, Mažitis et Matrosas122) continuèrent à traquer les derniers combattants armés clandestins qui se cachaient et les éliminèrent. L’utilisation pratique des agents-combattants sur le territoire lituanien prit fin avec ces événements. En tout, 250 personnes furent agents des groupes spéciaux à plus ou moins long terme. Malgré les éléments négatifs ou criminels de l’utilisation des agents- combattants, le KGB a suivi cette expérience avec attention. Jusqu’en 1991, il était fait
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mention dans ses plans de mobilisation de créer des groupes d’agents-combattants (une tâche qui incombait au 5e service du KGB) en cas de guerre 123, et les anciens agents- combattants restèrent sous la tutelle permanente du KGB.
Conclusion
96 Entre 1945 et 1959, les groupes spéciaux et les groupes d’agentura exécutèrent près de 500 partisans et en firent prisonniers près de 220 (en Lettonie, les groupes spéciaux exécutèrent 98 partisans et en firent prisonniers 45124). Les agents-combattants soumirent à des interrogatoires déloyaux près de 700 membres de l’opposition. Ces interrogatoires permirent au MVD-MGB de découvrir et d’arrêter près de 5 000 sympathisants, agents de liaison et réservistes du mouvement armé clandestin. Les documents disponibles permettent également d’affirmer que les groupes spéciaux ont exécuté près de 60 civils125. Avec la destruction de la plupart des documents d’archives, il est vraisemblable qu’aient disparu les preuves d’autres faits de ce type. Notre description de la composition de la police politique soviétique en Lituanie entre 1940 et 1953 et de certaines de ses méthodes n’est pas définitive, mais elle permet de distinguer les traits spécifiques de son activité dans les territoires annexés face à une résistance antisoviétique de grande ampleur, et le caractère non moins obstiné (et raffiné) de sa répression de tout mouvement nationaliste de libération.
97 (Traduit du russe par Christine Colpart)
98 Genocide and Resistance research Center of Lithuania
99 Didzioji str. 17/1
100 2001 Vilnius
101 e-mail : [email protected]
NOTES
1. Litovskie, latyšskie i estonskie buržuaznye nacionalisty (Les nationalistes bourgeois de Lituanie, de Lettonie et d’Estonie), Moscou, VŠ KGB, 1961 ; Iz istorii operativnoj dejatel´nosti organov gosudarstvennoj bezopasnosti SSSR v predvoennye gody (oktjabr´ 1938 goda-ijun´ 1941 goda). Sbornik dokumentov (Histoire de l’activité des organes de la Sécurité d’État de l’URSS pendant les années d’avant-guerre (octobre 1938-juin 1941)), Moscou, VŠ KGB, 1962. 2. A. Bubnys, « Buv´s Lietuvos SSR KGB archyvas : dokument sudtis, kiekis ir tvarkymas » (Les anciennes archives du KGB de la SSR de Lituanie : quantité et composition des documents), Lietuvos archyvai, 8, 1997, pp. 7-16 ; G. Gečiaukas, « Buvusio LSSR KGB archyvo slaptosios raštvedybos fond sudarytojai » (Les compilateurs des fonds d’écritures secrètes des anciennes archives du KGB de la SSR de Lituanie), Lietuvos archyvai, 8, 1997, pp. 16-27 ; Id., « Soviet užsienio žvalgyba “per Lietuvos teritorijà” antrosios sovietins okupacijos metais » (Les services intérieurs de
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renseignements « à travers le territoire lituanien » pendant la seconde occupation soviétique), Lietuvos archyvai, 13, 1999, pp. 14-22 ; Id., « Trys pagrindiniai buvusio LSSR KGB archyvo trečiojo slaptosios raštvedybos byl fondo sudarytojai » (Trois principaux compilateurs du troisième fonds d’écritures secrètes des anciennes archives du KGB de la SSR de Lituanie), Lietuvos archyvai, 13, 1999, pp. 148-159 ; L. Truska, A. Anušauskas, I. Petravičiºt, Sovietinis Saugumas Lietuvoje 1940-1953 metais (La Sécurité d’État soviétique en Lituanie entre 1940 et 1953), Vilnius, 1999 ; A. Anušauskas, Lietuvi tautos sovietinis naikinimas (La destruction de la nation lituanienne par les Soviétiques), Vilnius, 1996 ; N. Gaškait, D. Kuodyt, A. Kašta, B. Ulevičius, Lietuvos partizanai 1944-1953 m. (Les partisans lituaniens entre 1944 et 1953), Vilnius, 1996 ; Id., Lietuvos partizanu kovos ir ju slopinimas MVD-MGB dokumentuose 1944-1953 m. (La lutte des partisans lituaniens et leur écrasement dans les documents du MVD-MGB entre 1944 et 1953), Vilnius, 1996. 3. Copies manuscrites des rapports d’Efimov, rezident du NKVD, des 14 et 15 juillet 1940, Archives spéciales de Lituanie (Lietuvos ypatingasis archyvas, LYA), f. K-1, op. 49, d. 828, l. 85. 4. Copie manuscrite du rapport d’Efimov, rezident du NKVD, du 23 juillet 1940, ibid., l. 92. 5. Condamnation de P. Kirlys du 7 juillet 1941, Archives du service fédéral de sécurité de Russie (Arhiv Federal´noj služby bezopasnosti Rossii), dossier P. Kirlys n° 1721, ll. 177-178. 6. Ordre n° 27 du chef du Département de la sécurité d’État de la SSR de Lituanie du 9 août 1940, Archives Centrales d’État de Lituanie (Lietuvos centrinis valstybs archyvas), f. 756, op. 6, d. 5, l. 83. 7. Département des documents du parti communiste lituanien dans les Archives spéciales de Lituanie (Lietuvos komunist partijos dokument skyrius, LYA LKP), f. 1771, op. 1, d. 3, ll. 1-2 ; L. Truska, « NKVD-NKGB darbuotoj personalin sudtis » (Composition du personnel du NKVD-NKGB), in L. Truska, A. Anušauskas, I. Petraviciºt, Sovietinis...op. cit. 8. LYA LKP, f. 1771, op. 1, d.17, ll. 4-5. 9. National composition of the repressed, Lietuvos gyventoj genocidas (Le génocide des Lituaniens), Vilnius, 1999, p. 62. 10. L. Truska, A. Anušauskas, I. Petravičiºt, Sovietinis..., op. cit., p. 93. 11. Dans ce tableau sont reportées les données présentées par A. Guzevičius, commissaire du NKVD, au département du Comité central du parti communiste lituanien, LYA LKP, f. 1771, op. 5, d. 102, ll. 191-192 ; L. Truska, « NKVD-NKGB... », art. cit. 12. Données sur les agents évacués du NKVD-NKGB de la SSR de Lituanie au 1er janvier 1942, LYA LKP, f. 1771, op. 5, d. 102, l. 191 ; I. Petavičiºte, Sovietinio saugumo struktºra ir funkcijos Lietuvoje, 1941-1954 (Structure et fonctions des organes de sécurité en Lituanie, 1941-1954), Vilnius, 1999, p. 68. 13. Information du département des cadres du NKVD de la SSR de Lituanie sur le recrutement au commissariat au 20 décembre 1944, LYA LKP, f. 1771, op. 7, d. 249, ll. 50-51 ; L. Truska, « NKVD-NKGB... », art. cit.
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14. Information du département des cadres du NKGB de la SSR de Lituanie sur le recrutement au commissariat au 1er janvier 1945, LYA LKP, f. 1771, op. 7, d. 249, ll. 52-53. 15. Compte rendu du département des cadres du NKVD de la SSR de Lituanie pour le 2e semestre de 1944, LYA, f. 142, op. 1, d. 1, l. 74 ; I. Petravičiºte, Sovietinio..., op. cit., p. 72. 16. L. Truska, Lietuva 1938-1953 metais (La Lituanie entre 1938 et 1953), Vilnius, 1995, p. 137 ; I. Petravičiºt, Sovietino..., op. cit., p. 72. 17. Compte rendu du département des cadres du NKVD de la SSR de Lituanie pour 1945, LYA, f. 142, op. 1, d. 2, l. 98. 18. Compte rendu du département des cadres du NKVD de la SSR de Lituanie pour le 2e semestre de 1946, ibid., d. 7, l. 73. 19. Information du département des cadres du Comité central du KPL(b) sur la composition qualitative des agents au 1er juin 1946, LYA LKP, f. 1771, op. 9, d. 416, l. 59. 20. Information du département des cadres du NKGB de la SSR de Lituanie sur le recrutement des cadres dirigeants (1er janvier 1945), ibid. 21. Dossier personnel d’A. Rudakov, LYA LKP, f. 1771, op. 3, d. 950 ; Dossier personnel d’A. Ševatov, ibid., d. 6129 ; Dossiers personnels, ibid., op. 227, d. 3862 ; Information biographique, ibid., op. 9, d. 156, l. 42 ; Dossiers personnels, d. 3964, 1182, 5659, 4792, 5982, 6112 ; Dossier personnel, ibid., op. 3 ; Dossier personnel, d. 3969, 4815, 1598, 2112 ; Dossier personnel, op. 10, d.93, l. 47. 22. Dossier personnel, ibid., op. 227, d. 3166. 23. Compte rendu du département des cadres du MVD de la SSR de Lituanie de janvier 1946 au 15 juin 1947, LYA, f. 142, op. 1, d. 13, l. 82 ; M. Pocius, « Ginkluotas pasipriešinimas Lietuvoje 1944-1953 m. : represini struktr nuostoliai ir civili gyventoj netektys » (L’opposition armée en Lituanie entre 1944 et 1953 : les pertes dans les structures répressives et parmi les civils), in Lietuvos istorijos metraštis, 1997 metai (Annuaire de l’histoire lituanienne, 1997), Vilnius, 1998. 24. A. Anušauskas, Lietuvi..., op. cit., p. 254. 25. LYA LKP, f. 1771, op. 227, d. 2585 (Dossier personnel d’A. Guzevičius), l. 15. 26. Calculs du professeur Truska basés sur les listes des noms des chefs des départements urbains et de district qui étaient soumises deux fois par an (au début de juin et de décembre) au Comité central du KPL(b), LYA LKP, f. 1771, op. 8, d. 296, 298 ; op. 9, d. 426, 427 ; op. 10, d. 531, 532 ; L. Truska, A. Anušauskas, I. Petravičiºte, Sovietinis..., op. cit., p. 93. 27. Liste des agents de la nomenclature du Comité central du KPL(b) révoqués entre le 1er janvier et le 15 juin 1945, ibid., op. 8, d. 296, l. 20. 28. LYA LKP, f. 1771, op. 9, d. 427, l. 24. 29. Cartes professionnelles d’A. Slavinas et D. Todes, LYA. 30. A. Anušauskas, op. cit., p. 276. 31. Ibid, p. 286. 32. I. Petravičiºt, Sovietinio..., op. cit., p. 77. 33. Information du département des cadres du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie du 10 avril 1952, LYA, f. K-1, op. 10, d. 147, ll. 6-8.
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34. Rapport d’A. Sniečkus au plenum du Comité central du KPL du 11 juin 1953, LYA LKP, op. 131, d. 179, l. 153. 35. Sténogramme du 5e plenum du Comité central du KPL, f. 1771, op. 131, d. 181. l. 420. 36. Kontrrazvedyvatel´nyj slovar´ (Dictionnaire du contre-espionnage), Vysšaja krasnoznamennaja škola KGB, Moscou, 1972. 37. Réponse du 4 octobre 1944 de V. Merkulov à A. Guzevičius, ibid., op. 10, d. 3/4, l. 105 ; d. 2/28, l. 10 ; Ordre aux chefs des secteurs opérationnels, ibid., d. 2/28, l. 10. 38. R. Jansons, « Latvian SSR MGB special troops and special agents against national armed units in 1946-1953 », Genocidas ir rezistencija, 2, 1997, p. 82. 39. R. Girietis, « Niekšams tylint, broliams raudant » (Le silence des salauds, les larmes des frères), Laisvas žodis, 31 janvier 1990 ; M. Pocius, « MVD-MGB specialiosos grups Lietuvoje (1945-1959) » (Les groupes spéciaux du MVD-MGB en Lituanie entre 1945 et 1959), Darbai, 1, 1996, p. 53. 40. Rapport du 6 juillet 1945 de B. Kobulov, A. Apolonov, I. Tkačenko adressé à L. Berija, LYA, f. K-1, op. 10, d. 2/29, l. 125 ; A. Anušauskas, Lietuviu..., op. cit., p. 297. 41. J. Daumantas [pseudonyme de J. Lukša], Partizanai (Les partisans), Vilnius, 1990, 2e éd., p. 101. 42. A. Anušauskas, op. cit., p. 297. 43. H. Šadžius, « 1944-1945 metai : sovietin prievartos mašina prieš ginkluotà pogrind∞ Lietuvoje (1944-1945) » (1944-1945 : la machine soviétique de suppression du mouvement clandestin armé en Lituanie), Lietuvios rytas, 19 mars 1994. 44. Rapport du 25 juillet 1945 du colonel de l’armée du NKVD Romanov sur la défense du 1er arrière-front de la Baltique, LYA, f. K-1, op. 18, d. 1, ll. 48-50. 45. Ibid., d. 1/27, ll. 4-6. 46. Ibid., l. 18. 47. Ibid., op. 3, d. 41/131, l. 39. 48. N. Gaštait, « Åmons be dievo : NKVD agentai smogikai » (Des hommes sans dieu : les agents-combattants du NKVD), Laisvs kov archyvas, 11, 1994, p. 125. 49. Information de Zinov´ev du 25 avril 1946 sur le service de la 1 re division du 1 er département de la Direction de lutte contre le banditisme du MVD de la SSR de Lituanie et des départements de district (uezd) du MVD sur le travail des groupes spéciaux, LYA, f. K-1, op. 3, d. 224, ll. 63-65. 50. Instructions du lieutenant-chef N. Sokolov (juin 1947) sur la façon d’organiser et d’utiliser pratiquement les groupes d’agents-combattants dans la lutte contre le mouvement clandestin nationaliste sur le territoire de la SSR de Lituanie, ibid., d. 31/6, ll. 104-107. 51. Rapport du major A. Sokolov (28 août 1946) au major général J. Bartašiºnas, ministre des Affaires intérieures de la SSR de Lituanie, ibid., d. 22/4, l. 70. 52. Lettre du lieutenant général V. Rjasnoj, vice-ministre du MVD de l’URSS, au major général J. Bartašiºnas, ministre des Affaires intérieures de la SSR de Lituanie, ibid., d. 22/9, l. 11. 53. Rapport du major A. Sokolov (28 août 1946) au major général J. Bartašiºnas, ministre des Affaires intérieures de la SSR de Lituanie, LYA, ibid., d. 22/4, l. 70. 54. Ibid., l. 68.
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55. Lettre du major Matulaitis, vice-président du KGB de la SSR de Lituanie (21 mars 1954) au capitaine Epifanov, directeur adjoint du MVD chargé du territoire de l’Altaj, ibid., op. 3, d. 66/3, l. 16. 56. Rapport du lieutenant-chef P. Rimkevičius (12 janvier 1952) à P. Kapralov, ibid., d. 33/3, l. 40. 57. Lettre du lieutenant Harčenko, chef adjoint du département économique de la direction du MVD chargé de la région de Groznyj, au lieutenant-chef N. A. Sokolov, chef de division du 2e département de la Direction de lutte contre le banditisme de la SSR de Lituanie (9 avril 1947), ibid., op. 31, d. 6, l. 18. 58. Rapport du major A. Sokolov au major général J. Bartašiºnas, ministre des Affaires intérieures de la SSR de Lituanie (2 août 1946), ibid., d. 22/4, l. 68. 59. Ibid., d. 33/4, l. 64. 60. Confirmation en juin 1948 de l’organigramme du groupe spécial par le colonel Ja. Sinicyn, chef adjoint de la direction « 2-N » du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie, ibid., d. 33/4, l. 34. 61. Confirmation de l’inventaire de l’armement du groupe spécial par le colonel Ja. Sinicyn (juin 1948), ibid., l. 36. 62. Rapport du major A. Sokolov au colonel Ja. Sinicyn (16 août 1946) ibid., d. 22/4, l. 9. 63. Comptabilité des salaires des groupes spéciaux (juillet 1948), ibid., d. 33/4, l. 34. 64. Instructions du lieutenant-chef N. Sokolov (juin 1947) sur la façon d’organiser et d’utiliser pratiquement les groupes d’agents-combattants, ibid., d. 31/6, l. 104-107. 65. N. Gaškait, « Åmons... », art. cit., p. 129-130. 66. Information de Vasil´ev, chef du 1er département de la Direction de lutte contre le bandistisme du MVD de la SSR de Lituanie (18 juin 1946) sur les résultats de l’activité du groupe spécial, LYA, f. K-1, op. 3, d. 22/8, ll. 12-14. 67. Information du major A. Sokolov (8 juillet 1946), ibid., ll. 17-21. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., ll. 91-95. 70. N. Gaškait, « Åmons... », art. cit., p. 125. 71. Rapport de K. Liaudis, président du KGB de la SSR de Lituanie, au général d’armée I. Serov, président du KGB de l’URSS (décembre 1956), ibid., d. 68/51, ll. 116-118. 72. Plan d’action pour juin 1946 préparé par Smirnov, chef adjoint du 1er département de la Direction de lutte contre le banditisme, ibid., d. 22/8, ll. 3-4. 73. Liste des apparitions du détachement de J. Dambrauskas-Siaubas, ibid., d. 22/9, ll. 7-9. 74. Rapport spécial du major Kerin (6 septembre 1946), ibid., d. 22/6, ll. 47-53. 75. Lettre du major général Prošin au major général J. Bartašiºnas (18 septembre 1946), ibid., d. 22/9, l. 10. 76. Rapport du major A. Sokolov (24 décembre 1946), ibid., d. 22/4, ll. 175-177. 77. Rapport du commandant des groupes spéciaux Šarunas (7 août 1947) au major A. Sokolov, ibid., d. 31/1, l. 192. 78. Plan d’action des agents opérationnels pour septembre 1947 à l’usage des groupes spéciaux dans l’uezd de Joniškis, ibid., d. 31/10, ll. 19-24.
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79. Procès-verbal de l’interrogatoire du 1er septembre 1947, ibid., d. 1, ll. 112-119. 80. Faux rapport d’agents-combattants au commandant de la région K (19 novembre 1947), ibid., d. 5, l. 66-67 ; Faux rapport du commandant de la brigade « VD » Rambinas (23 novembre 1947) au commandant de la région de K´stutis, ibid., ll. 113-115. 81. Rapport du major A. Sokolov (22 septembre 1946) au major général J. Bartašiºnas, ibid., op. 3, d. 22/4, ll. 76-79. 82. Rapport spécial de P. Kapralov, ministre du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie sur les résultats de l’activité de la direction « 2-N » du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie dans l’uezd de Lazdijai (octobre 1947), ibid., d. 31/4, ll. 121-125 ; Rapport de l’agent Barzda au major A. Sokolov (13 décembre 1947), ibid., ll. 252-257 ; Rapport de l’agent Barzda au major A. Sokolov (14 décembre 1947), ibid., ll. 258-265 ; Rapport de l’agent Barzda au major A. Sokolov (16 décembre 1947), ibid., ll. 281-287 ; Rapport du major A. Sokolov au major Figurin, chef du 2e département de la direction « 2-N » du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie (30 décembre 1947), ibid., ll. 313-319. 83. Rapport du major A. Sokolov au colonel Ja. Sinicyn, chef adjoint de la direction « 2- N » du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie, ibid., d. 31/1, ll. 44-49. 84. Rapport du major A. Sokolov au lieutenant-colonel Figurin, chef du 2e département du bureau « 2-N » du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie (octobre 1947), ibid., d. 31/6, l. 221-223. 85. Rapport du lieutenant-chef N. Čurakov, chef de la 5e division du 2e département de la direction « 2-N » du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie (juin 1948), ibid., d. 33/10, ll. 1-3. 86. Rapport du major A. Sokolov pour juin 1948, ibid., d. 33/11, ll. 1-4. 87. N. Gaškait, « Åmons... », art. cit., p. 128. 88. Rapport du commandant de groupe spécial Kirvis au major A. Sokolov (17 septembre 1948), ibid., d. 8, ll. 60-61. 89. Rapport du major A. Sokolov à Kapralov, ministre du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie (3 juillet 1948) ibid., d. 33/2, ll. 38-41 ; Rapport de service du lieutenant-colonel Bruevič, chef adjoint du 2e département de la direction « 2-N » du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie à P. Kapralov, ministre du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie (1er mars 1948), ibid., d. 3, ll. 17-22 ; Communication du commandant de région « Juros » Vikintas n° 205 du 2 décembre 1947, ibid., d. 11, l. 79. 90. Rapport du capitaine N. Sokolov à P. Kapralov, ministre du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie (27 décembre 1951), ibid., d. 33/13, ll. 56-60. 91. Rapport du lieutenant-chef P. Rimkevičius à P. Kapralov, ministre du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie (12 janvier 1952), ibid., d. 33/13, l. 36. 92. Rapport du colonel K. Liaudis, ministre du MVD de la SSR de Lituanie, à K. Lunev, vice-ministre du MVD de l’URSS (16 janvier 1954), ibid., d. 54/1, ll. 1-4. 93. Rapport de P. Kapralov, ministre du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie, à S. Ignat´ev, ministre du MGB de l’URSS et au lieutenant général Canava, vice-ministre (janvier 1952), ibid., d. 56/28, ll. 1-25. 94. Rapport du colonel K. Liaudis, ministre du MVD de la SSR de Lituanie à K. Lunev, ministre du MVD de l’URSS (16 janvier 1954), ibid., d. 54/1, ll. 1-14. 95. Lettre du colonel Novikov, chef adjoint de la 2e direction centrale du MGB de l’URSS, au colonel I. Počkaj, vice-ministre du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie (28 avril 1952), ibid., d. 56/28, l. 153.
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96. Information du colonel I. Počkaj et du lieutenant-colonel Åupikov, chef de la direction « 2-N » du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie, sur le travail du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie effectué du 1er août 1951 au 1er avril 1952 (10 avril 1952), ibid., l. 211. 97. Compte rendu de P. Kondakov, ministre du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie du 19 janvier 1953 sur les résultats des activités opérationnelles des groupes d’agentura pour 1952, ibid., d. 43, t. 3, l. 102. 98. P. Pečiulaitis, Šità paimkite gyvà : Atsiminimai (Prenez celui-ci vivant. Mémoires), Vilnius, 1993, pp. 130-138. 99. Information du colonel P. Počkaj, chef de la direction « 2-N » du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie sur l’activité des groupes spéciaux (août 1951), ibid., d. 56/22, ll. 61-62. 100. Information du lieutenant-colonel Åupikov, chef de la direction « 2-N » du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie du 6 décembre 1951, ibid., d. 56/22, ll. 162-171. 101. Rapport du lieutenant-chef Staškevičius au major général P. Kapralov (3 décembre 1951), ibid., d. 33/13, ll. 28-35 ; Rapport du capitaine N. Sokolov au major général P. Kapralov (27 décembre 1951), ll. 56-60 ; N. Gaškait, D. Kuodyt, A. Kašta, B. Ulevičius, Lietuvos..., op. cit., p. 307 ; Information du colonel I. Počkaj sur les résultats de l'activité du groupe spécial en août 1951, LYA, f. K-1, op. 3, d. 56/22, ll. 65-66. 102. N. Gaškaits... », art. cit., p. 130. 103. D. Kuodyt, « Skirmanto žºtis » (La Mort de Skirmantas), Laisvs kovarchyvas, 11, 1994, p. 117 ; Rapport du capitaine N. Sokolov à P. Kapralov (27 décembre 1951), LYA, f. K-1, op. 3, d. 33/13, l. 59. 104. R. Jansons, « Latvian SSR MGB special troops... », art. cit., pp. 83-87. 105. A. Anušauskas, op. cit., p. 305 ; Rapport de P. Kapralov, ministre du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie, à S. Ignat´ev, ministre du MGB de l’URSS et au lieutenant général L. Canava, vice-ministre (janvier 1952), LYA, f. K-1, op. 3, d. 56/28, l. 18. 106. Information de Guzevičius, commissaire plénipotentiaire de la 5 e division du 2 e département de la direction « 2-N » du MGB de Lituanie (1er juillet 1952), ibid., d. 33/13, l. 65. 107. Compte rendu de P. Kondakov, ministre du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie du 19 janvier 1953 sur les résultats de l’activité opérationnelle des groupes d’agents pour 1952, ibid., d. 56/43, t. 3, l. 78. 108. N. Gaškait, D. Kuodyt, A. Kašta, B. Ulevičius, Lietuvos..., op. cit., pp. 288-291 ; Information du lieutenant-colonel Åupikov, chef de la direction « 2-N » du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie sur les partisans de la région nord-est de la Lituanie (15 mai 1953), ibid., d. 60/7, l. 11. 109. A. Anušauskas, op. cit., p. 306 ; Note adressée à L. Berija par P. Kondakov, ministre du MVD de la SSR de Lituanie sur les résultats des activités relatives à la lutte contre la résistance nationaliste clandestine pour 1953 (18 avril 1953), LYA, f. K-1, op. 3, d. 56/43, t. 2, l. 44. 110. Ibid., ll. 42-44. 111. Information du colonel I. Počkaj, chef de la direction « 2-N » du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie sur les activités des groupes spéciaux (août 1951), ibid., d. 56/22, l. 58. 112. Information du lieutenant colonel Åupikov, chef de la direction « 2-N » du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie du 6 décembre 1951, ibid., d. 56/22, ll. 163-164.
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113. Rapport de service du lieutenant-colonel J. Vildžiºnas (17 mai 1953) à S. Kruglov, B. Kobulov, vice-ministres du MVD de l’URSS, et à N. Sazykin, chef de la 4e direction du MVD de l’URSS, ibid., t. 2, l. 13. 114. Communiqué opérationnel n° 175 de P. Kondakov ; ministre du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie à S. Ignat´ev, ministre du MGB de l’URSS (17 juillet 1952), ibid., d. 56/32, t. 2, ll. 78-79 ; Rapport de service du lieutenant-colonel J. Vildžiºnas, ministre du MVD de la SSR de Lituanie (17 mai 1953) à S. Kruglov et B. Kobulov, vice-ministres du MVD de l’URSS, et à N. Sazykin, chef de la 4e direction du MVD de l’URSS, ibid., d. 43, t. 2, ll. 12-32 : Rapport du lieutenant-colonel J. Vildžiºnas, ministre du MVD de la SSR de Lituanie, au lieutenant général Haritonov, chef de la 4e direction du MVD de l’URSS, ibid., l. 106 ; Note de service adressée à L. Berija par J. Vildžiºnas (3 juin 1953), ibid., l. 116 ; Rapport de P. Kapralov, ministre du MGB de la SSR de Lituanie à S. Ignat´ev, ministre du MGB de l’URSS, au vice-ministre Canava, et à S. Ogol´cov (25 janvier 1952), ibid., d. 56/28, ll. 55-56. 115. Rapport du colonel Liaudis du 16 janvier 1954, ibid., ll. 1-4. 116. Rapport du colonel K. Liaudis, président du KGB de la SSR de Lituanie au colonel général I. Serov, président du KGB de l’URSS (13 avril 1954), ibid., d. 55/1, l. 43 ; Communiqué opérationnel du 1er juin 1954 adressé au lieutenant général Haritonov, chef de la 4e direction du KGB de l’URSS, ibid., l. 48 ; Rapport adressé à I. Počkaj, chef de la 4e direction du KGB de l’URSS (janvier 1955), ibid., d. 64/34, l. 90 ; Rapport adressé au lieutenant général E. Pitovranov, chef de la 4e direction du KGB de l’URSS (31 mars 1959), ibid., d. 71/47, l. 6. 117. Lettre de K. Lunev, vice-ministre du MVD de l’URSS au colonel K. Liaudis, ministre du MVD de la SSR de Lituanie (3 février 1954), ibid., d. 54/1, l. 5. 118. Rapport du colonel K. Liaudis, président du KGB de la SSR de Lituanie au colonel général I. Serov, président du KGB de l’URSS (décembre 1956), ibid., d. 68/51, ll. 116-118. A. Chainauskas devint fou pendant sa détention dans un camp et fut transféré dans une clinique psychiatrique. 119. Information du lieutenant-colonel Åupikov sur l’agent spécial « Kirvis » de la direction « 2-N » du MVD de la SSR de Lituanie (14 mai 1953), ibid., d. 60/7, ll. 80-81. 120. Rapport de service du 4 février 1957, ibid., d. 68/69, l. 80. 121. Acte du 2e département de la 4e direction du KGB de la SSR de Lituanie du 12 mai 1959, ibid., d. 71/47, l. 10 ; Information établie par le lieutenant-colonel du KGB de la SSR de Lituanie N. Dušanskij, ibid., d. 48, l. 38 ; Information du 2e département de la 4e direction du KGB de la SSR de Lituanie (juillet 1959) sur les résultats d’activité entre 1957 et 1959, ibid., l. 92. 122. Acte du 2e département de la 4e direction du KGB de la SSR de Lituanie du 12 mai 1959, ibid., d. 71/47, ll. 11-12. 123. A. Anušauskas, « KGB pulkininkai Lietuvoje » (Les colonels du KGB en Lituanie), Lietuvos aidas, 2 décembre 1997. 124. R. Jansons, « Latvian SSR MGB special troops... », art. cit., p. 87. 125. P. Pocius, « MVD-MGB specialiosios grups Lietuvoje (1945-1959) » (Les groupes spéciaux du MVD-MGB en Lituanie de 1945 à 1959), Genocidas ir rezistencija, 1, 1997, p. 24.
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RÉSUMÉS
Résumé Il est important d’identifier les activités et les objectifs réels des organes de sécurité des services secrets ainsi que les moyens qu’ils mettent en œuvre dans un État totalitaire. Dans cet article, nous examinons le rôle, les effectifs, la composition et quelques-unes des méthodes secrètes de la police politique (plus connue par la suite sous le nom de KGB) dans le processus de soviétisation de la Lituanie (c’est-à-dire, dans la création d’un terrain favorable à la réorganisation socio- politique de l’ancien État indépendant de Lituanie, à la réforme ou à la destruction de ses institutions) de 1940 à 1941 puis de 1944 à 1953.
Abstract The composition of Soviet security organs in Lithuania and their secret methods, 1940-1953. Defining the activities and real objectives of the secret services’ security organs and the methods they utilize in a totalitarian state is an important task. In the present article we study the role, staffing and composition of the political police and some of the secret methods it used in the Sovietization of Lithuania (that is, in the creation of a terrain propitious to the socio-political restructuring, the reform, or the destruction of the institutions of formerly independent Lithuania) in 1940-1941 and from 1944 to 1953.
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Organisation bureaucratique et relations avec le parti
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Razvitie sovetskih organov gosudarstvennoj bezopasnosti : 1917-1953 gg.
Vladimir N.HAUSTOV
1
RÉSUMÉS
Résumé Le développement des organes de sécurité d’État soviétiques, 1917-1953. Dans cet article, nous mettons au jour plusieurs aspects essentiels de l’activité des organes soviétiques de sécurité entre 1917 et 1953. Dès février 1922, les GPU-OGPU-NKVD-MGB se trouvaient sous l’entière autorité du parti au pouvoir, le parti bolchevik, qui définissait les axes principaux de leur activité et la politique des cadres. Leur tâche principale consistait à exécuter les « directives » du parti. En fait ils se trouvaient sous la tutelle personnelle de Stalin. Ils ne furent jamais une entité politique indépendante, mais l’instrument docile du parti bolchevik. Le trait spécifique du développement des services spéciaux soviétiques fut l’utilisation active des organes de sécurité dans l’exécution des tâches relatives à la construction économique. Les
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organes des GPU-NKVD-MGB étaient les instruments de la politique répressive et de l’ingérence dans la vie économique. Les départements puis les directions de l’Économie et des Transports étaient pour le pouvoir suprême un levier de contrôle supplémentaire sur ces domaines de l’économie. Peu à peu, l’utilisation des organes de sécurité comme instrument de répression fut remplacée par leur utilisation comme instrument de contrôle et de vérification de l’application des décisions de l’État, et de renseignement sur l’exécution des tâches majeures du plan.
Abstract The development of Soviet state security organs, 1917-1953. Our article deals with several important aspects of the activities of the Soviet state security organs between 1917 and 1953. Starting in February 1922, the GPU, OGPU, NKVD and MGB were under the complete control of the ruling Bolshevik party, which defined the main lines of their activities as well as their personnel policy. The organs’ main task consisted in fulfilling the party’s “directives”. In fact, they were under Stalin’s personal authority. They never were an independent political entity, but the ruling Bolshevik party’s docile instrument.
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Les transformations du personnel des organes de sécurité soviétiques, 1922-1953
Nikita PETROV
1 Au cours de ces dernières années, plusieurs travaux ont été consacrés à la formation et à la hiérarchisation des couches dirigeantes de l’appareil du parti et de l’État, à l’analyse du personnel et aux modifications qualitatives de l’élite soviétique au pouvoir en 1937-1938, consécutives aux purges staliniennes conduites parmi les cadres du parti, des soviets, de l’armée et des sphères économiques1. Aucun organe ne s’est trouvé épargné, pas même le commissariat du peuple aux Affaires intérieures (NKVD) au sein duquel plusieurs générations de fonctionnaires tchékistes ont été remplacées entre 1934 et 1941. La modification des effectifs du NKVD avant et après la « Grande Terreur » est si importante qu’il n’est pas exagéré de parler de véritable révolution. Afin de mieux comprendre les changements intervenus au cours de cette décennie, il convient au préalable de rappeler certains des paramètres les plus importants et les plus caractéristiques de la composition des cadres de la VČK-OGPU-NKVD-NKGB-MGB aux différents moments de la période étudiée et de mettre en évidence la logique des mouvements de cadres observés.
2 Au 1er décembre 1922, le personnel de l’appareil central de la GPU comptait 2 213 collaborateurs. Au cours de la période 1921-1923, on observe une réduction significative des effectifs globaux de la VČK-GPU à travers le pays. En effet, à la fin de l’année 1921, on recense 90 000 collaborateurs rémunérés au budget (glasnye sotrudniki) à la VČK. Lors de la création de la GPU, en février 1922, leur nombre se limite à 60 000 et se réduit encore au cours de l’année. Finalement, au 1er novembre 1923, il ne restait plus que 33 152 personnes dans les circuits de la GPU. Une évolution similaire a affecté les collaborateurs rémunérés sur les « fonds secrets » (sekretnye ou neglasnye sotrudniki) : début 1921, ils étaient 60 000 et moitié moins un an plus tard. Au 1er novembre 1923 le personnel « secret » ne comptait plus que 12 900 agents. Une tendance comparable peut être observée au sein de l’armée. En octobre 1922, le chiffre total des troupes de l’intérieur (vnytrennie vojska), des gardes-frontières (pogračnye vojska) et des troupes
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d’escorte (konvojnye vojska) s’élevait à 117 000 hommes, alors qu’un an plus tard, en novembre 1923, il n’était plus que de 74 800 hommes, dont 24 800 rattachés aux forces armées de l’intérieur, 32 977 aux gardes-frontières et 17 000 aux troupes d’escorte2.
3 Au cours des années qui ont suivi, le nombre total des employés de l’OGPU a continué de décroître. Au milieu de l’année 1930, il n’était que de 22 180 pour l’ensemble du territoire (non compris les troupes de l’OGPU et les gardes-frontières)3. Puis, à la suite de la réforme administrativo-territoriale de juillet-août 1930 et conformément à la réorganisation des structures territoriales de l’OGPU, le personnel des organes de sécurité totalisait, au 1er octobre 1930, 25 288 agents 4. Ce chiffre intégrait toutes les catégories d’employés de l’OGPU y compris le personnel du secrétariat et le personnel de service. Si l’on compte à part le personnel « opérationnel » (operativnyj sostav), selon les données statistiques fournies dans les rapports de la section des cadres de l’OGPU-NKVD, la composition des organes de sécurité était la suivante5 :
4 En outre, le personnel du secrétariat et le personnel de service des organes de sécurité (UGB-GUGB : (Glavnoe) Upravlenie Gosudarstvennoj Bezopasnosti - Direction de la sécurité d’État) comptait, au 1er juillet 1935, 1 519 personnes6.
5 Les variations quantitatives du personnel opérationnel de l’OGPU-NKVD au début des années 30 s’expliquent par les restructurations opérées. Ainsi, fin 1932, des postes de directeur-adjoint des sections politiques des stations de machines et de tracteurs ainsi que des sovkhozes furent créés dans le cadre de l’OGPU. On nomma exclusivement à ces postes des collaborateurs de l’OGPU auxquels furent conférés exactement les mêmes mandats qu’aux directeurs des sections de districts (rajonnye otdely) de la GPU. En conséquence, les effectifs du personnel opérationnel de l’OGPU-NKVD pour l’ensemble du pays se sont accrus en 1933 de 4 124 personnes et, en 1934, de 551 personnes7. Durant la première moitié de l’année 1935, ces postes furent supprimés au profit d’environ 800 nouvelles sections de districts et de nouveaux départements du NKVD, ce qui a entraîné une réduction de 2 385 personnes du nombre des agents opérationnels du NKVD8.
6 Il convient de revenir plus particulièrement sur la composition nationale des organes de l’OGPU durant les années 20, question qui a déjà fait l’objet de différents travaux, quoique peu nombreux9. Dans ces études, l’accent a été mis sur la représentation importante et disproportionnée des Lettons, des Juifs et des Polonais dans les organes répressifs soviétiques. Ainsi, d’après les données publiées par L. Ju. Kričevskij, dans les effectifs de la cellule du parti de l’appareil central de l’OGPU qui comptait 980 personnes en janvier 1925, les Russes représentaient 66,5 %, du total, les Lettons - 16,7 %, les Juifs - 7,6 %, et les Polonais - 6,1 %10. S’agissant de l’ensemble des collaborateurs de l’appareil central de l’OGPU, la représentation en fonction de la nationalité (au 1er mai 1924) était la suivante : sur un total de 2 402 employés, les Russes
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représentaient 69,5 % de l’ensemble, les Lettons - 8,6 %, les Juifs - 8, 5 % et les Polonais 3,7 %11.
7 L’origine sociale des agents des services de sécurité n’était pas non plus représentative des différents groupes sociaux existant en URSS au milieu des années 30. En effet, la catégorie de tchékistes « d’origine sociale étrangère » (čuždogo proishoždenija) était sur-représentée. En revanche, les employés issus de familles paysannes étaient très peu nombreux. D’après le bilan établi au 1er juillet 1935, sur un total de 23 188 collaborateurs des services de sécurité, 44,8 % étaient issus de la classe ouvrière ; 13,7 % de la paysannerie, et 41,5 % de la catégorie des employés12. Certes, le phénomène peut facilement être expliqué par le fait que, jusqu’en 1917, les enfants de parents aisés pouvaient recevoir une assez bonne formation. Autrement dit, ce sont les fils d’anciens fonctionnaires, de marchands et de petits entrepreneurs qui constituaient la partie la plus lettrée du personnel opérationnel. Cependant, le niveau général de formation de l’encadrement opérationnel laissait à désirer. Au 1er juillet 1935, seuls 1,6 % des cadres avaient reçu une formation supérieure, 23,8 % une formation secondaire et la majorité, soit 74,6 %, ne possédaient qu’une formation élémentaire13.
8 Des contradictions semblables se manifestaient, avec plus de relief encore, à l’échelle des cadres supérieurs de la direction de l’OGPU-NKVD, comme nous le verrons par la suite en décrivant les changements observés dans les caractéristiques socio-politiques de l’oligarchie dirigeante du NKVD avant, pendant et après la « Grande Terreur » de 1937-193814.
9 Les Tableaux 1 à 9 font état de la dynamique des changements pour les indicateurs suivants : âge, origine sociale, composition nationale, niveau de formation, durée des fonctions à la Tchéka, ancienneté dans le parti (RSDRP(b)-VKP(b)), appartenance dans le passé à d’autres partis, données concernant les arrestations et les jugements durant la période 1937-194115.
10 Dans tous ces tableaux, les informations sont données en chiffres absolus et, entre parenthèses, en pourcentage du personnel total pour la période considérée.
Tableau 1. Nombre de dirigeants du NKVD en fonction de leur âge
11 Ce premier tableau montre que, durant la période considérée, un rajeunissement significatif s’est opéré dans le noyau dirigeant du NKVD. Ainsi, en 1937, plus de la moitié des dirigeants avaient 40 ans et plus, tandis qu’en 1939-1940 l’écrasante majorité
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des cadres avaient entre 30 et 35 ans. Ce constat correspond tout à fait à la réduction du stage dans les « organes » qui a caractérisé les générations d’employés de la Tchéka appelés par Berija (cf. Tableau 5). D’autre part, le changement s’explique également par le fait qu’en décembre 1938 et janvier 1939, on a procédé à un « recrutement du parti » (partijnyj nabor). Des responsables du parti, des soviets et de l’économie ont été dirigés vers des postes de direction dans les circuits du NKVD sur ordre du Comité central.
Tableau 2. Nombre de dirigeants du NKVD selon l’origine sociale
Tableau 3. Nombre de dirigeants du NKVD selon la nationalité
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12 Ce Tableau 3 montre clairement la tendance à l’accroissement de la représentation de la nation en titre (les Russes) à la direction du NKVD en 1937-1939. On y voit aussi l’orientation des purges du NKVD : les représentants des « nationalités étrangères » (inostrannye nacional´nosti) -- selon la terminologie de 1937-1938 -- c’est-à-dire les Polonais, les Lettons et les Allemands ont été éliminés. Dans le contexte des événements survenus au cours des années suivantes, la brusque diminution du nombre des Juifs à la direction du NKVD est également significative16. La présence, jusque vers 1937-1938, dans les plus hautes instances du NKVD de telles proportions de Lettons, de Polonais et surtout de Juifs trouve en partie son explication dans les restrictions qui les affectaient directement sous l’ancien régime. Le régime bolchevik, avec sa conception romantique de l’abolition des frontières nationales, a ouvert de nouvelles voies aux représentants de ces nations qui s’identifiaient avec le nouveau régime. Un nombre important d’entre eux s’inscrivit activement dans la vie politique et sociale soviétique et fit carrière après octobre 1917. L’effectif dirigeant du NKVD apparaît, en définitive, comme l’expression concentrée de cette tendance.
13 Cependant, sur la masse des employés des services de sécurité, ce phénomène était moins visible. Ainsi, selon les rapports de la section des cadres du NKVD, au 1er mars 1937, sur un total de 23 857 employés à l’UGB pour l’URSS (appareil central non compris), on comptait 15 570 Russes (65 %), 2 509 Ukrainiens (11 %), 1 776 Juifs (7 %), 980 Biélorusses (4 %), 426 Arméniens (1,8 %), 363 Tatares (1,5 %), 298 Géorgiens (1,2 %), 256 Lettons (1 %), 144 Polonais (0,6 %), les autres nationalités représentées étant proportionnellement insignifiantes17.
14 À la suite des purges, sur un total de 29 737 employés dans les services de sécurité de l’URSS (non compris les employés de l’appareil central, des sections spéciales et des organes de transport), on comptait, au 1er janvier 1941, 19 528 Russes (66 %), 4 877 Ukrainiens (16 %), 1 273 Juifs (4 %), 797 Biélorusses (2,7 %), 525 Arméniens (1,8 %), 391 Géorgiens (1,3 %). Le nombre de Polonais (6) et d’Allemands (10) était tout à fait insignifiant, tandis que les Lettons n’étaient même pas mentionnés18.
Tableau 4. Nombre de dirigeants du NKVD selon le niveau de formation
15 Comme l’indique le Tableau 4, le niveau de formation des cadres de la Tchéka s’est élevé en 1939 et durant les années suivantes, alors que, jusqu’en 1938, le pourcentage des dirigeants du NKVD munis d’une formation élémentaire était très important. On voit clairement à qui Stalin confia la réalisation de la terreur de masse : il misa sur des exécutants à demi lettrés. Une fois passée la Grande Terreur, ces mêmes agents tombèrent sous le coup des arrestations. Il est intéressant de noter qu’au cours de cette période, le nombre de ceux dont l’enfance s’était déroulée dans des circonstances
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défavorables a augmenté au sein des instances dirigeantes du NKVD. Il s’agissait de personnes qui, dès leur jeune âge, avaient perdu l’un de leurs parents ou les deux, d’enfants abandonnés ou de vagabonds, exclus des établissements d’enseignement en raison de conflits avec les enseignants ou d’insoumission préméditée ou bien encore de mineurs ayant quitté le domicile parental à cause de conflits familiaux ou pour d’autres raisons. En 1934-1936, leur proportion était de 5 à 6 % parmi les tchékistes dirigeants, en 1937, elle était de 8 %, et en 1938 de 12,7 % ; par la suite, en 1939-1940, elle est retombée brutalement à 6 %.
16 À l’évidence, les difficultés éprouvées dans l’enfance ne pouvaient que rejaillir sur le devenir de la personnalité du tchékiste. Qui plus est, pour la génération de tchékistes nés entre 1901 et 1905, il est probable que de telles circonstances aient favorisé leur admission au service de la VČK-OGPU - organe de justice sociale sommaire et « de vengeance prolétarienne ».
17 Les exemples biographiques abondent. Ainsi, le chef de l’UNKVD du territoire de l’Altaï, S. P. Popov, avait perdu sa mère prématurément et s’était enfui de chez lui à l’âge de 17 ans en raison de l’hostilité manifestée par sa belle-mère ; le commissaire du peuple aux Affaires intérieures de Biélorussie, B. D. Berman, avait quitté la maison paternelle à l’âge de 11 ans ; le chef de l’UNKVD de l’oblast´ de Riazan, S. Ja. Veršinin, avait été élevé dans une institution pour orphelins, celui de l’oblast´ de Tula, S. I. Lebedev, était orphelin depuis l’âge de 8 ans ; le vice-commissaire du peuple aux Affaires intérieures de l’URSS, L. M. Zakovskij, orphelin de père à l’âge de 4 ans, puis exclu de l’école, avait été laissé à l’influence de son frère aîné, un anarchiste. Les exemples pourraient ainsi être multipliés. C’est précisément sur ce type de parcours de tchékistes entrés en fonction dès leur jeune âge au service de Dzeržinskij que reposaient les enjeux des répressions staliniennes lors de la Grande Terreur.
18 L’un des objectifs (à en juger du moins d’après les résultats) des purges de la seconde moitié des années 1930 a été de renouveler les effectifs des fonctionnaires dirigeants de tous rangs et de relever le niveau de formation des responsables. De ce point de vue, le NKVD ne constituait nullement une exception. Il faut toutefois remarquer que, dans cet organe, la part de dirigeants ayant reçu une formation supérieure était en 1939-1940 peu élevée - 38 %. Au 1er juillet 1939, comme l’indique le Tableau 4, un cinquième des dirigeants du NKVD n’avait reçu qu’une instruction élémentaire. Dans cette structure, l’expérience professionnelle, la fidélité et le dévouement étaient des qualités plus recherchées que le niveau de formation.
19 Les changements majeurs opérés dans l’encadrement des services de sécurité après la chute de Ežov se sont essentiellement manifestés par le relèvement du niveau de formation des dirigeants à tous les échelons du NKVD. Au 1er juillet 1935, dans l’ensemble du système GUGB-UGB de l’Union, seules 1,6 % de personnes avaient reçu une formation supérieure, 23,8 % - une formation secondaire et 74,6 % - une formation primaire19. Au 1er janvier 1941, 26,1 % du personnel de l’appareil central du NKVD étaient dotés d’une formation supérieure ou de niveau équivalent, 44,6 % d’une formation secondaire ou de niveau équivalent et 29,3 % d’une formation primaire ; dans les organes périphériques des services de sécurité, ces proportions étaient respectivement de 9,3 %, 54,2 % et 36,5 %20.
20 Les données présentées dans le Tableau 4 concernant le personnel dirigeant aux plus hauts échelons caractérisent beaucoup plus clairement et concrètement la situation. Il convient de noter, en particulier, la croissance du nombre de collaborateurs ayant une
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formation supérieure ou équivalente durant la période qui va du 1er septembre 1938 au 1er juillet 1939, période au cours de laquelle leur proportion passe de 10 à 38 % alors que, simultanément, la part des dirigeants dotés d’une formation primaire chute de 42,7 % à 19 %. Autrement dit, les dirigeants à demi-lettrés du NKVD, mais bardés de grands mérites révolutionnaires et passés par le stage de tchékiste, ont accompli leur mission historique sous la direction de Ežov en conduisant « les opérations massives » d’arrestations et d’exécutions, à la suite de quoi ils furent considérés comme inutiles.
21 Il convient également de noter la tendance à la baisse du poids spécifique des personnes de formation supérieure en 1941 et simultanément la part croissante de celles ayant bénéficié d’une longue période de travail dans « les organes » (Cf. Tableaux 4 et 5). On observe une dépendance inversement proportionnelle entre le niveau de formation et l’expérience du travail dans les services de sécurité. Plus grande était l’expérience professionnelle et moins élevée était la formation, et réciproquement. Les nouveaux dirigeants, provenant du parti et des soviets, promus au NKVD vers la fin de 1938 et au début de 1939, n’ont pas tous réussi à s’accoutumer au système et à s’acquitter de leur tâche. Ils furent donc à nouveau remplacés par des tchékistes expérimentés, c’est-à-dire sans formation. Parmi ceux qui furent démis de leurs fonctions de dirigeants régionaux du NKVD en 1940 figurent notamment A. I. Starovojt (d’Odessa), I. F. Komarovskij (de Dnepropetrovsk), I. T. Jurčenko (de Nikolaevsk) et quelques autres. Leur courte formation effectuée dans les cours mensuels de l’École centrale du NKVD était clairement insuffisante pour mener à bien leur mission. Néanmoins, la majorité des promus en provenance du parti, arrivés pour un travail de direction à la Tchéka en 1938-1939 avec une préparation professionnelle minimale, ont réussi à faire carrière jusqu’au grade de général, ce qui constitue la meilleure illustration de la thèse bien connue de Lenin selon laquelle un bon communiste doit être un bon tchékiste.
Tableau 5. Nombre de dirigeants du NKVD en fonction de leur expérience tchékiste dans les « organes » de la VČK-OGPU-NKVD
22 D’après le Tableau 5, on constate qu’en 1937-1938, il y avait dans le groupe dirigeant du NKVD un pourcentage élevé de personnes ayant pris leurs fonctions avant le milieu des
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années 1920. Jusqu’à présent, il était d’usage d’opposer « les vrais tchékistes » (les hommes de Dzeržinskij) à ceux appelés par Ežov ou Berija on ne sait d’où. Cependant, on voit bien que l’ossature de base de la direction du NKVD au 1er janvier et au 1 er septembre 1938 était constituée par des personnes ayant rejoint les « organes » durant la période 1917-1925 (77 % et 71 % respectivement), c’est-à-dire ayant servi sous Dzeržinskij. Ainsi est mise en évidence l’erreur courante concernant les hommes à l’aide desquels Staline a conduit les répressions de masse des années 1937-1938.
Tableau 6. Nombre de dirigeants du NKVD selon leur ancienneté au parti (RSDRP(b)-VKP(b))
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Tableau 7. Nombre de dirigeants du NKVD selon leur appartenance passée à différents partis ou mouvements
23 * Mencheviks et « Internationalistes ».
24 Les données présentées dans les Tableaux 2, 3 et 7, fournissent de manière évidente les motifs des répressions menées à l’encontre des dirigeants du NKVD. Dans le contexte du début des répressions de masse, les origines sociales étrangères, l’appartenance à des nations limitrophes, à l’époque considérées comme ennemies, et enfin l’appartenance passée à des partis ou à des courants politiques non bolcheviks ont immanquablement entraîné des arrestations ou en ont accru la probabilité. Se pose cependant une question de logique dans le fait d’exercer des purges au sein même de l’appareil punitif appelé à conduire la répression la plus large possible. La purge interne au NKVD n’a-t-elle pas entravé la réussite des répressions à l’échelle de la société dans son ensemble ? À la différence des campagnes d’arrestations et de déportations précédentes qui touchaient des catégories de population strictement définies, la tendance générale des répressions de 1937-1938 a été d’englober toutes les couches de la société soviétique sans exception, et de toucher l’ensemble des structures de l’appareil du parti et de l’État. Dans ces conditions de « purge généralisée » l’appareil du NKVD ne pouvait constituer une exception.
25 La vaste campagne de révélation de la « conspiration du bloc de droite trotskiste » contre le gouvernement de Stalin, lancée par N. I. Ežov lors du plénum du Comité central du VKP(b) de juin 1937, exigeait des victimes jusqu’au sein du NKVD. C’était l’achèvement logique, inéluctable, de « l’affaire Kirov », dont le meurtre s’expliquait désormais non pas par la négligence de tchékistes isolés mais par l’existence d’un large « complot » au cœur du NKVD, conduit par Jagoda. Dans ce contexte, Stalin estimait que l’appareil même du NKVD dans son ensemble s’était ossifié. La rigidité des méthodes, la crainte des changements et la peur de perdre son fauteuil de direction avaient provoqué une forme d’inertie dans le travail et de repli de l’institution sur elle- même. Stalin avait bien senti qu’une sérieuse secousse du corps dirigeant était devenue
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indispensable et qu’il fallait opérer des mutations dans l’encadrement. Plus que d’autres facteurs, « l’obstruction » (zasorennost´) des cadres de la Tchéka l’inquiétait particulièrement. Parmi ces derniers, la proportion d’agents au passé « non communiste », originaires de classes « étrangères » ou « ennemies » (cf. Tableau 2) était jugée trop importante, de même que celle des cadres appartenant à des nationalités « non titulaires » de l’URSS (cf. Tableau 3), et inscrits dans le passé à différents partis ou mouvements non bolcheviks ( cf. Tableau 7), ce qui, au milieu des années 1930, était considéré comme un facteur aggravant.
26 Le pourcentage de dirigeants tchékistes qui avaient appartenu dans leur jeunesse à des partis ou à des mouvements anti-léninistes, même s’ils étaient socialistes, ou qui, plus encore, avaient servi la cause des Blancs, était extraordinairement élevé en 1934. De toute évidence, ces tchékistes constituaient les premiers candidats aux arrestations dans la vague de purges entreprises au sein même du NKVD. Cela étant, les répressions avaient leur propre logique, et, du temps où Ežov était aux commandes, certains en réchappèrent en parvenant à taire les aspects douteux de leur passé, d’autres en étant particulièrement proches et appréciés de Ežov. Leur carrière s’acheva lorsque Berija prit la tête du NKVD. Comme l’indique le Tableau 7, il ne restait sous sa direction qu’un seul homme ayant pris part au mouvement Musavat - Berjia en personne
27 Tous ces facteurs conjugués ont prédéterminé la purge de l’ensemble de l’appareil du NKVD. Les arrestations pratiquées dans les rangs des tchékistes ont, en soi, créé l’atmosphère indispensable au renforcement des « organes » dans la préparation des répressions et leur gestion. En réalité, le personnel de niveau intermédiaire du NKVD - les chefs adjoints des directions et les chefs de départements des directions régionales, qui avaient des perspectives de promotion rapide, pouvaient, sans aucun égard, briser les autorités avec véhémence et enthousiasme, procéder sans encombres aux arrestations de hauts dirigeants du parti et, ainsi, « faire feu sur les états-majors ». Ils n’avaient pas de cohésion, ne faisaient pas corps avec les cadres du parti et des soviets comme c’était le cas des dirigeants locaux du NKVD à l’époque de Jagoda. Les purges au sommet touchèrent avec la même intensité le système interne du NKVD dans lequel Stalin cherchait à se débarrasser des « clans » forts et des groupes tchékistes en les cassant, en brisant les liens existant de longue date, en atomisant l’oligarchie dirigeante.
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Tableau 8. Nombre de dirigeants du NKVD arrêtés
n = 241.
28 Le Tableau 8 met en évidence l’échelle des purges effectuées parmi les cadres de la direction du NKVD. Sur 322 dirigeants des organes du NKVD dans les républiques, de ses directions dans les kraja et les oblasti et des subdivisions de l’appareil central, qui ont occupé ces postes à différents moments entre juillet 1934 et septembre 1938, 241 personnes ont été arrêtées (soit près de 75 %). Le pic des répressions se situe dans les premiers mois où Berija a pris les commandes du NKVD. Par comparaison, la purge conduite par Ežov semble on ne peut plus modeste. Notons également la réduction des purges du NKVD au début de l’année 1938, Ežov ayant dû estimer, après l’arrestation des principaux partisans de Jagoda, que les cadres restants étaient « sous contrôle ».
29 Si l’on considère le début de la grande campagne d’arrestations au NKVD (Tableau 8), durant la période 1934-1936, ce qui caractérise les arrestations c’est leur aspect fortuit ; elles ne correspondent pas encore à une purge politique réfléchie. Ainsi, en décembre 1934, fut arrêté le chef de la direction de Leningrad, F. D. Medved´, accusé de négligence criminelle dans l’affaire liée au meurtre de Kirov. En 1935, on n’enregistre aucune arrestation de dirigeants tchékistes. En 1936, les victimes furent le chef de la direction de Karakalpakie, F. D. Ul´drik, pour abus de pouvoir et, en novembre 1936, le chef adjoint de la direction de Saratov, I. I. Sosnovskij, accusé d’espionnage au profit de la Pologne. L’arrestation de ce dernier fut justement considérée comme le présage des importantes purges à venir. En février 1937, eut lieu l’arrestation du commissaire du peuple aux Affaires intérieures de Biélorussie, G. A. Molčanov (autrefois à la tête du SPO GUGB - Special´nyj Političeskij Otdel, Glavnoe Upravlenie Gosudarstvennoj Bezopasnosti), et, à compter de mars 1937, à la suite d’une résolution spéciale prise en février-mars par le plénum du Comité central du parti, les purges du NKVD prirent un caractère régulier et ciblé.
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Tableau 9. Nombre de jugements de dirigeants du NKVD
n = 225.
30 Le Tableau 9 met en évidence les principales campagnes de jugements des tchékistes arrêtés. Le fait que le total des jugements soit moins élevé que celui des arrestations (cf. Tableau 8) s’explique sans doute en partie parce que nos données sont incomplètes mais surtout parce que tous les tchékistes arrêtés ne survivaient pas jusqu’au verdict, comme ce fut le cas, par exemple, du vice-commissaire du peuple aux Affaires intérieures, M. I. Ryžov, du commissaire du peuple aux Affaires intérieures d’Arménie, V. V. Hvorostjan, du chef de la direction de l’oblast´ de Čita, G. S. Horhorin. Certains ne survécurent même pas jusqu’à leur procès, tels le commissaire du peuple aux Affaires intérieures de Kalmykie, P. G. Ozerkin, et l’ancien chef de la direction de l’oblast´ de l’Ob´-Irtyš, S. V. Zdorovcev ; d’autres furent tout simplement libérés lors de la révision des procès en 1939. Par rapport à l’époque de Ežov, il est clair qu’un nombre beaucoup plus important de dirigeants tchékistes fut jugé du temps de Berija, même si certains d’entre eux avaient été arrêtés sous Ežov. Mais, durant les premiers mois de son activité à la Loubianka, Berija ne s’est pas montré très empressé de les faire passer en jugement, ayant l’espoir d’obtenir d’eux des dépositions contre Ežov et ses plus proches collaborateurs. Ainsi s’explique l’absence de condamnation entre octobre 1938 et janvier 1939. La série des procès n’a repris qu’en février-mars 1939. Il arrivait que le laps de temps entre l’arrestation et le jugement ne soit que de quelques mois. Néanmoins, le plus souvent, l’instruction était longue - un an et plus. En 1937-1938, les sentences contre les dirigeants tchékistes (à la peine capitale dans un nombre écrasant de cas) étaient, plus ou moins régulièrement, établies à l’avance par Stalin et ses proches. Cette prédétermination des condamnations est également caractéristique de la période 1939-1941 même si les procès de ces années-là relevaient davantage d’une campagne. Le nombre considérable de condamnés enregistrés au tout début de 1939 et de 1940 s’explique par l’existence d’ordres directs de Stalin et du Politbjuro imposant
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des audiences secrètes au Collège de guerre (Voennaja Kollegija) de la Cour suprême de l’URSS pour les affaires concernant les dirigeants du NKVD (il en fut de même en juillet 1941).
31 L’appréciation à porter sur les chiffres de la répression dans l’ensemble du réseau du NKVD mérite un commentaire particulier. Combien y a-t-il eu au total de victimes tchékistes des purges staliniennes ? D’après les statistiques internes du NKVD pour la période du 1er octobre 1936 au 15 août 1938, qui correspond à l’ère Ežov, 2 273 collaborateurs de l’UGB (Sécurité d’État) furent arrêtés dans tout le pays ; 1 862 d’entre eux seulement furent arrêtés pour crimes contre-révolutionnaires, les autres l’ayant été pour crimes de droit commun (désorganisation du travail, discrédit jeté sur les services et corruption des mœurs)21. Dans ce nombre total d’arrestations ne sont pas inclus : les hommes des troupes de l’intérieur, les gardes-frontières, les pompiers, les miliciens, les employés du Goulag et d’autres services auxiliaires qui furent poursuivis à la même époque. Si l’on compare le chiffre concernant les collaborateurs des services de sécurité (1 862 arrestations) avec la liste approximative du nombre d’agents de ce service, soit 25 000 personnes au 1er mars 1937, on constate que seulement 7,5 % des employés de la sécurité furent arrêtés sous l’accusation de crimes contre- révolutionnaires, ce qui n’est pas si considérable, surtout si l’on a en tête qu’à la fin des années 1980, le chiffre de 20 000 tchékistes victimes des répressions était officiellement avancé22. Ce dernier chiffre a eu cours jusque dans la littérature historique et même dans des documents scientifiques. Il requiert toutefois quelques éclaircissements. En effet, ce n’est pas un hasard si au cours de la « perestroïka » de Gorbačev, l’accent a été mis sur les tchékistes victimes des répressions, car il s’agissait de conforter la thèse selon laquelle les répressions staliniennes, soi disant étrangères à la nature du régime soviétique, avaient rencontré une opposition au sein même de l’appareil du NKVD menée par les tchékistes « de Dzeržinskij » que Stalin dut réprimer.
32 En outre, il n’est jamais précisé à quelle période se rapportent les répressions et qui en a particulièrement souffert. En réalité, ce chiffre (20 000), conformément aux données des archives, concerne la période 1933-1939 et comprend non seulement toutes les catégories de collaborateurs du système de l’OGPU-NKVD (depuis les gardes-frontières jusqu’aux surveillants de camps en passant par les appelés des troupes du NKVD), mais également toutes sortes de criminels y compris les dangereux criminels de droit commun. Le nombre de collaborateurs du système de l’OGPU-NKVD arrêtés au cours de ces années se répartit de la manière suivante : en 1933 - 738 personnes ; en 1934 - 2 860 ; en 1935 - 6 249 ; en 1936 - 1 945 ; en 1937 - 3 837 ; en 1938 - 5 625 ; en 1939 - 1 364 . Au total, de 1933 à 1939, 22 618 personnes23.
33 Comme on le voit, en 1937-1938, au total 9 462 collaborateurs du NKVD furent arrêtés. Toutefois, ce chiffre comprend une écrasante majorité de miliciens, de pompiers, d’hommes de troupes du NKVD, dont des hommes du rang (ils étaient assez nombreux et faisaient partie de l’encadrement du NKVD), d’employés du Goulag, de fonctionnaires de l’état civil, etc., mais pas de collaborateurs des services de sécurité - agents directs de la terreur. De plus, la majorité d’entre eux avaient été condamnés pour des crimes de droit commun et non pour des motifs politiques.
34 Comme on l’a déjà été précisé, 25 000 personnes environ travaillaient dans les services de sécurité de la GUGB-UGB à l’époque de Ežov. Relativement à cette masse d’employés, le chiffre avancé de 20 000 personnes qui auraient subi les répressions semble tout
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simplement insensé. Il est clair qu’elles n’auraient pas toutes pu faire l’objet de répression, à supposer même qu’elles se fussent auto-réprimées.
35 La purge engagée au sein des cadres opérationnels de la Tchéka a pris un tour planifié en 1939. Mais cette purge engagée sous Berija, qui commença d’ailleurs dès l’automne 1938 et qui avait pour objet de « restaurer la légalité socialiste », ne peut vraisemblablement pas être considérée comme une répression politique à l’encontre de « tchékistes honnêtes ». Il s’agissait, pour l’essentiel, de la première révolution professionnelle dans les organes de la sécurité d’État, orientée vers le renouvellement radical des effectifs, comme le montrent les révocations massives dans les organes du NKVD qui ont constitué le fondement de la purge : en 1939, 7 372 collaborateurs ont été destitués (22,9 % selon les effectifs déclarés de tchékistes opérationnels). Sur ce total, 973 collaborateurs de Ežov, meneurs les plus odieux de la terreur de masse, tombèrent sous le coup des arrestations24. Si l’on prend également en compte les arrestations de la fin de l’année 1938, il s’avère que, selon certaines données, la somme totale des collaborateurs des services de sécurité arrêtés du temps de Berija à partir de la fin 1938 et pendant toute l’année 1939 s’élève à 1 364 personnes. Des dernières générations d’employés en poste sous Ežov, 34 % de ceux en poste au 1er janvier 1938 et 35 % de ceux en poste au 1er septembre 1938 ont été arrêtés dans la deuxième moitié de l’année 1938, ainsi que 20 % et 29 % respectivement durant la première moitié de l’année 1939. Soit une écrasante majorité. Ainsi, s’agissant de la couche dirigeante du NKVD, la purge de Berija a été beaucoup plus importante que celle de Ežov.
36 La « Grande Terreur » aboutit au quasi doublement des effectifs de collaborateurs des services de sécurité. Au 1er janvier 1941, les employés opérationnels étaient au nombre de 3 656 au sein de l’appareil central du NKVD de l’URSS, de 29 737 dans les organes locaux, de 7 901 dans le Département spécial (Osobyj otdel) du NKVD (renseignement militaire), de 3 804 dans les services du transport du NKVD et de 1 118 personnes dans le réseau des écoles du NKVD (École Supérieure et inter-territoriale), soit un total de 46 216 personnes25.
37 Comme l’indiquent les rapports statistiques de la section des cadres du NKVD, au 1er janvier 1941, la majorité des nouvelles recrues tchékistes (soit 53,7 %) pouvaient faire état d’une expérience de 3 ans au plus dans les services, étant entrés au NKVD en 1938-193926. Fin 1938, les principes de formation des cadres des services de sécurité furent modifiés en profondeur, en particulier pour les postes de dirigeants. La plupart de ceux qui ont été promus au niveau des directions du NKVD dans les républiques, les territoires et les régions, sont arrivés en poste sur décision du Comité central du VKP(b) après avoir rempli des fonctions de cadres moyens au sein du parti, des soviets, des établissements d’enseignement supérieur ou de l’industrie.
38 Les nouveaux principes de formation du personnel d’encadrement des services de sécurité et l’ampleur des changements sont spectaculaires. Au cours de la seule année 1939, 14 506 personnes furent embauchées à des postes opérationnels dans l’appareil du NKVD (soit 45,1 % de l’ensemble des effectifs). Ils furent recrutés comme suit :
39 - 11 062 agents (76,3 %) en provenance des organes des komsomols, du parti et des écoles du NKVD ;
40 - 1 332 agents (9,7 %) ont été transférés d’emploi non opérationnels d’autres départements et d’autres directions à des postes opérationnels ;
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41 - 1 129 agents (7,7 %)27 ont été promus de leurs postes technico-administratifs vers des emplois opérationnels.
42 S’agissant des différentes phases de purges de l’encadrement du NKVD et des données quantitatives y affairant, les conclusions à tirer peuvent, à première vue, sembler paradoxales et en contradiction avec les représentations dominantes. Ainsi, jusqu’alors, on admettait couramment que la purge majeure du NKVD avait débuté dès l’arrivée de Ežov à la direction des « organes ». Il est certain que le début des arrestations de tchékistes formés sous Jagoda se situe dès la première moitié de l’année 1937, mais ce fait n’a pas modifié en profondeur les caractéristiques socio-politiques du personnel d’encadrement. Pour tous les indicateurs (en pourcentage) fournis au cours de la période 1937-1938, les variations observées semblent correspondre à une évolution naturelle. Par contre, l’arrivée de Berija à la tête du NKVD est marquée par les variations très brutales des différents indicateurs qui témoignent de la purge entreprise. C’est dire que cette période reste caractérisée par d’importants bouleversements dans l’effectif dirigeant. Pour s’en convaincre, il suffit de rappeler l’ampleur des changements de cadres sous Berija : du 1er septembre 1938 au 1er juillet 1939 presque tous les dirigeants du NKVD des républiques et des oblasti de l’URSS ont été remplacés. Ceux qui firent exception à la règle sont T. M. Borščev, commissaire du peuple aux Affaires intérieures de Turkménie, nommé à ce poste en juillet 1938 et V. A. Tkačev, commissaire du peuple aux Affaires intérieures de la République autonome de Bouriatie-Mongolie, ce dernier n’ayant été maintenu en fonction que par inadvertance puisqu’il fut en rapidement démis, puis arrêté et fusillé en 1941. Seul, T. M. Borščev, qui avait travaillé dans les années 20 pour les services de l’OGPU de Transcaucasie, était un homme de Berija au plein sens de terme, et c’est précisément ce qui allait le perdre par la suite car il fut, lui aussi, fusillé en 1956.
43 La période suivante (1941-1951) fut plus ou moins stable du point de vue de la composition socio-politique des effectifs d’encadrement dans les services de sécurité. Il ne s’est pas produit de brusques changements, ni de purges significatives ou d’autres reflux importants de cadres. La tendance de cette période a été, au contraire, celle d’un accroissement constant d’effectifs dans les appareils (tant à l’échelon central que dans les organes périphériques).
44 En février 1941, le commissariat du peuple à la Sécurité d’État (NKGB) devint un organisme indépendant, détaché des effectifs du NKVD. Les organes militaires du contre-espionnage ne furent pas inclus dans ses effectifs, ils furent transmis au commissariat du peuple à la Défense. Ceci explique le nombre relativement faible de cadres opérationnels du NKGB au moment de sa création. Ainsi, au 21 mai 1941, la nomenclature des postes du personnel d’encadrement du NKGB d’URSS comprenait 6 722 postes (depuis les chefs adjoints des sections indépendantes jusqu’aux responsables des directions et aux commissaires du peuple à la Sécurité d’État) pour tous les organes territoriaux (hors appareil central). L’existence du NKGB en 1941 fut de courte durée : en juillet, il fut rattaché au NKVD.
45 La seconde partition du NKVD se produisit en avril 1943. Cette fois, les organes du contre-espionnage militaire (les Départements spéciaux) ne furent pas rattachés au NKGB mais furent placés sous le commandement direct de Stalin et réorganisés en Direction principale du contre-espionnage (Glavnoe Upravlenie Kontrrazvedki - GUKR), le SMER· (Smert´ špionam - Mort aux espions) du commissariat du peuple à la Défense d’URSS. Cependant, le nombre de titulaires du NKGB remodelé en 1943 dépassait de
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beaucoup celui de 1941 et comptait à ses débuts 67 050 agents28. Les effectifs postérieurs du NKGB-MGB s’accrurent et, au 1er mai 1946, cet organisme comprenait 115 664 personnes. Ce qui ne signifie pas que tous les postes étaient pourvus. Une insuffisance aiguë de cadres s’était fait sentir au cours de la guerre : en 1943, seulement 30 % des postes du NKGB étaient pourvus. Au sortir du conflit, la situation s’était un peu améliorée mais 10,5 % de postes de cadres au MGB étaient encore vacants au 1er mai 194629.
46 Comparativement à la situation d’avant-guerre, on observe un changement dans le niveau de formation des collaborateurs du NKGB-MGB et notamment une tendance à la diminution des agents ayant reçu une formation supérieure, ce qui peut s’expliquer par l’afflux de jeunes cadres qui n’avaient pas pu poursuivre leurs études au cours de la guerre. Ces derniers représentaient la génération qui avait néanmoins bénéficié d’une formation secondaire complète (cursus de 10 ans) ou partielle. Il s’ensuivit une tendance générale à la diminution du nombre d’agents dotés seulement d’une formation primaire.
Tableau 10. Niveau de formation des collaborateurs des organes de sécurité d’État30
47 Cependant, les modifications concernant le niveau de formation du personnel d’encadrement intervenues au cours de la guerre ne sont pas tellement sensibles au sein de la sphère dirigeante de l’appareil central de la Sécurité d’État. Bien qu’à cette échelle, la rotation des cadres ait été considérable durant le conflit (l’arrivée des jeunes cadres est clairement perceptible à travers les changements d’indicateurs concernant le niveau de formation secondaire ou équivalent), il n’y a pas eu au cours de ces années- là de relèvement sérieux du niveau de formation des cadres de l’appareil central.
Tableau 11. Niveau de formation des dirigeants de l’appareil central du NKVD-MGB d’URSS31
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48 On peut juger des modifications intervenues pendant la période de la guerre d’après la réduction de la proportion des membres formant les couches intermédiaires du parti au regard de l’ensemble des agents du MGB.
Tableau 12. Appartenance au parti des collaborateurs du MGB d’URSS Situation au 1er mai 194632
49 ** Il s’agit principalement de collaborateurs des directions économiques.
50 Ici, dans les effectifs de tous les organes du MGB, sont inclus les collaborateurs des secrétariats et des directions économiques (ce qui n’était pas le cas dans les rapports émis avant guerre), c’est pourquoi il serait incorrect de comparer ces chiffres avec ceux fournis plus haut concernant la période 1939-1941.
51 Après la guerre, les conditions d’embauche dans les organes du MGB ont changé, exigeant un niveau de formation bien précis. Conformément à la décision du Comité central du parti prise le 20 août 1946, une préparation d’enseignement général a été organisée pour les collaborateurs du MGB « sans qu’ils fussent pour autant détachés de leur travail ». Autrement dit, les tchékistes qui n’avaient pas reçu de formation secondaire devaient suivre un enseignement dans des écoles secondaires en cours du soir ou par correspondance. Désormais, il était donc exigé que le postulant à l’embauche dans un poste du MGB eût au moins un formation secondaire. À la fin de l’année 1950, parmi l’ensemble des agents opérationnels du MGB, 75,2 % étaient dotés d’une formation secondaire et 19,9 % d’une formation supérieure33.
52 L’appartenance au parti des cadres tchékistes est restée un objet de préoccupation particulière. En comparaison avec la situation de 1946, de profonds changements sont intervenus et la couche intermédiaire des agents du parti s’est considérablement accrue. En novembre 1950, 78,5 % des collaborateurs du MGB figuraient comme membres du VKP(b), 6,2 % étaient membres postulants et 12,7 % étaient membres du VLKSM tandis qu’à peine 2,6 % n’étaient pas inscrits au parti (il s’agissait pour l’essentiel de cadres des sections auxiliaires technico-opérationnelles)34.
53 C’est également à cette époque que s’est clairement affirmée la tendance, déjà notable, à l’homogénéisation nationale des effectifs d’encadrement des services de sécurité. Selon le rapport présenté le 30 novembre 1950 par G. M. Malenkov du MGB au Comité central du parti, la composition nationale des collaborateurs était la suivante :
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Tableau 13. Appartenance nationale des collaborateurs des organes de Sécurité d’État35
54 Les chiffres concernant la période de travail dans les « organes » tchékistes permettent également de mettre en lumière les années d’afflux massif de cadres dans les organes de sécurité. Le pic intervient ici durant la période allant de 1940 à 1946.
Tableau 14. Répartition des collaborateurs du MGB en fonction de la durée de leur travail au VČK- OGPU-NKVD-MGB36
55 Au cours de la période 1946-1952, le chiffre des effectifs de la sécurité a continué de croître en raison du transfert du MVD au MGB des troupes de l’intérieur et des gardes- frontières, de la milice et de l’appareil chargé de la surveillance des déportés ainsi que d’autres subdivisions37.
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Tableau 15. Nombre de collaborateurs des organes du MGB d’URSS Situation au 28 mai 195238
56 L’accroissement si brutal de l’appareil de sécurité proprement dit, qui a presque doublé, passant de 115 664 à 221 848 agents en six ans seulement (de mai 1946 à mai 1952), peut s’expliquer non seulement par l’inflation bureaucratique caractéristique du système soviétique, mais aussi et avant tout par la mise en place des forces de la police secrète chargées de contrôler l’ordre public. Cela témoignait aussi de la crise profonde au sein de la direction du pays qui estimait indispensable d’accroître les effectifs des organes de répression pour assurer la stabilité du régime.
57 (Traduit du russe par Françoise Cordes-Baudrillard et Catherine Klein-Gousseff)
58 Memorial-Moscou
59 Malyj Karetnyj per., 12
60 103051 Moscou
NOTES
1. M. S. Voslenskij, Nomenklatura. Gospodstvujuščij klass Sovetskogo Sojuza (La Nomenklatura. La classe dirigeante de l’Union Soviétique), M., 1991 ; L. E. Bonjuškina, « Opyt izučenija stanovlenija professional´noj sovetskoj elity (SNK 1937-1941 gg.) » (Essai d’étude de la mise en place d’une élite professionnelle soviétique, le SNK 1937-1941), Mir Rossii, 3-4, 1995, pp. 108-130 ; O. V. Naumov, S. G. Filippov, « Rukovodjaščij patijnyj rabotnik v 1924 i 1937 gg. Popytka sravnitel´nogo analiza » (L’ouvrier du parti aux commandes des années 1924 à 1937. Essai d’analyse comparée), Social´naja istorija. Ežegodnik, 1998, pp. 123-136. 2. A. Kokurin, N. Petrov, « GPU-OGPU (1922-1928) », Svobodnaja mysl´, 7, 1998, p. 115. 3. Cf., pour plus de détails, N. V. Petrov, K. V. Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 1934-1941 : Spravočnik / Obščestvo « Memorial », RGASPI, GARF (Qui dirigeait le NKVD, 1934-1941 : Annuaire / Association « Mémorial », RGASPI, GARF), sous la dir. de N. G. Ohotin et A. B. Roginskij, Moscou, Zven´ja, 1999, p. 35.
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4. Ibid. 5. GARF, f. 9401, op. 8, d. 40, ll. 1-2. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Cf. L. Ju. Kričevskij, « Evrei v apparate VČK-OGPU v 20-e gody » (Les Juifs dans l’appareil de la VČK-OGPU dans les années 20), in O. Budnickij, ed., Evrei i russkaja revoljucija. Materialy i issledovanija (Les Juifs et la révolution russe. Matériaux et recherches), Moscou-Jérusalem, 1999, pp. 320-350 ; O. I. Kapčinskij, Nacional´nyj sostav central´nogo apparata OGPU v 1920-e gody (La composition nationale de l’appareil central de l’OGPU dans les années 1920, http//www.fsb.history/read/1999/ kapchinsky.html 10. L. Ju Kričevskij, art. cit., p. 335. 11. Ibid., p. 334. 12. GARF, f. 9401, op. 8, d. 40, l. 10. 13. Ibid., l. 16. 14. L’étude actuelle est fondée sur des informations biographiques et sur les effectifs déclarés de tchékistes, cités in N. V. Petrov, K. V. Skorin, op. cit. Les quelques distinctions de données dans les tableaux fournies dans l’ouvrage et ici même s’expliquent par la précision des renseignements sur les répressions (dates d’arrestation et de jugement) des dirigeants tchékistes. Dans notre étude, sont pris en compte les commissaires du peuple aux Affaires intérieures d’URSS et leurs adjoints, les chefs des directions et des sections de l’appareil central du NKVD, les commissaires du peuple aux Affaires intérieures de toutes les républiques de l’Union et des républiques autonomes (à l’exception de la République autonome du Nakhitchévan), les chefs des directions régionales (UNKVD) dans les kraja et oblasti de RSFSR, d’Ukraine, de Biélorussie et du Kazakhstan. Nous n’avons pas pris en considération les dirigeants du NKVD des oblasti autonomes de RSFSR qui n’ont pas changé de statut administratif durant la période considérée, ni les dirigeants du NKVD des oblasti de Kirghizie, du Tadjiki-stan, du Turkménistan, et de l’Ouzbékistan. Nous avons tenu compte des dirigeants de l’UNKVD des oblasti autonomes de RSFSR ayant accédé au statut de républiques autonomes. 15. Le nombre total des dirigeants du NKVD a constamment augmenté, de juillet 1934 à février 1941, du fait de la formation de nouvelles unités administratives et territoriales, et aussi en raison des changements structurels de l’appareil central du NKVD, de la création de nouvelles directions et de nouvelles sections. Les effectifs du NKVD travaillant à l’échelon considéré ont presque doublé, passant de 96 à 182 personnes. On a pu observer un accroissement particulièrement élevé en 1938-1939, phénomène dû avant tout à l’élargissement de la structure de l’appareil central du NKVD. Le nombre de dirigeants de chaque séquence chronologique s’établit comme suit : au 10.07.34 - 96, au 1.10.36 - 110, au 1.03.37 - 111, au 1.07.37 - 113, au 1.01.38 - 128, au 1.09.38 - 150, au 1.07.39 - 153, au 1.01.40 - 172 et, enfin, au 26.02.41 - 182 personnes. Comme on l’a déjà indiqué précédemment, les chiffres en pourcentage fournis dans les Tableaux 1 à 7 prennent en compte les effectifs d’ensemble des dirigeants en fonction durant chaque séquence chronologique. En outre, il faut noter que le nombre assez élevé de données imprécises pour la période 1937-1939 s’explique essentiellement par l’existence d’un
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nombre important de postes vacants chez les dirigeants, ce qui se comprend aisément dans le contexte des arrestations et des purges opérées. 16. Sur la totalité des employés des services de sécurité, la représentation des Juifs n’est pas très significative. Au 1er mars 1937, les Juifs représentaient 7 % de l’effectif total du système du NKVD alors qu’au 1er janvier 1941 ils n’étaient plus que 4 % (cf. GARF, f. 9401, op. 8, d. 43, ll. 33-34 ; d. 64. l. 24.). Dans la période d’avant-guerre, le principe de sélection des cadres du système de sécurité d’État à partir de la nomenclature a inévitablement abouti, au sein du NKVD, à retrouver le niveau général de représentation de tous les groupes nationaux du pays. Il n’existait pas encore de politique visant explicitement à évincer les Juifs des organes de la sécurité d’État. Il en alla tout autrement durant la période 1950-1953, lorsque les répressions au sein du MGB s’exercèrent exclusivement contre les Juifs. Dès la fin de l’année 1950, il ne restait que 1,5 % de Juifs dans le total des cadres opérationnels (Central´nyj Arhiv Federal´noj Služby Bezopasnosti - CA FSB, f. 4-os, op. 8, d. 11, ll. 310-341). 17. GARF, f. 9401, op. 8, d. 43, ll. 33-34. 18. GARF, f. 9401, op. 8, d. 64, l. 24. 19. GARF, f. 9401, op. 8, d. 40, l. 16. 20. GARF, f. 9401, op. 8, d. 64, ll. 6, 18. 21. CA FSB, f. 3, op. 5, d. 996, l. 189. 22. V. M. Čebrikov, « Peretrojka i rabota čekistov » (La perestroïka et le travail des tchékistes), Pravda, 2 septembre 1988. 23. CA FSB, f. 3-os, op. 6, d. 33, l. 4. 24. GARF, f. 9401, op. 8, d. 51, l. 2. 25. GARF, f. 9401, op. 8, d. 64, ll. 1, 17, 25, 40, 49. 26. Ibid., l. 18. 27. GARF, f. 9401, op. 8, d. 50, l. 1. 28. CA FSB, f. 4-os, op. 4, d. 23, ll. 228-230. 29. Ibid. 30. Le tableau est établi sur la base de matériaux d’archives : GARF, f. 9401, op. 8, d. 40, l. 16 ; d. 50, l. 7 ; CA FSB, f. 4-os, op. 4, d. 23, ll. 228-230. 31. Le tableau est établi sur la base de matériaux d’archives : GARF, f. 9401, op. 8, d. 64, l. 6 ; CA FSB, f. 4-os, op. 4, d. 23, ll. 228-230. 32. CA FSB, f. 4-os, op. 4, d. 23, ll. 228-230. 33. CA FSB, f. 4-os, op. 8, d. 11, ll. 310-341. 34. Ibid. 35. Pour rendre les chiffres plus parlants, nous avons inclus les données de 1937 et de 1941. Le tableau est établi sur la base de matériaux d’archives : GARF, f. 9401, op. 8, d. 43, ll. 33-34 ; d. 64, l. 24 ; CA FSB, f. 4-os, op. 8, d. 11, ll. 310-341. 36. CA FSB, f. 4-os, op. 8, d. 11, ll. 310-341. 37. Pour plus de détails, cf. A. Kokurin, N. Petrov, « MGB : struktura, funkcii, kadry » (MGB : structures, fonctions, encadrement), Svobodnaja mysl´, 11, 1997, p. 112. 38. CA FSB, f. 4-os, op. 10, d. 73, l. 177.
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RÉSUMÉS
Résumé Les transformations du personnel des organes de sécurité soviétiques, 1922-1953. Notre article examine les questions relatives à la formation des cadres des organes de sécurité et les principales tendances dans les modifications de leurs effectifs pendant l’ère stalinienne. Nous décrivons en détail la composition sociale, nationale, politique et la répartition par tranches d’âge du groupe des dirigeants du NKVD, ainsi que la dynamique gouvernant ses mouvements et ses changements pendant la Grande Terreur en 1937 et 1938. Nous examinons ensuite le rôle des facteurs externes (régulation par le parti du processus de sélection des cadres, purges de cadres et vagues d’arrestations) et internes (luttes entre clans et groupuscules à l’intérieur du NKVD). Nous examinons le statut des cadres du MGB de l’URSS dans l’après-guerre et notons une régression générale -- l’abaissement du niveau d’éducation des tchékistes. Nous comparons la situation des cadres de la sécurité avec celle des cadres des autres subdivisions (le Goulag). Nous dégageons des tendances générales tels le nivellement de la composition nationale, l’élévation du niveau d’éducation, l’expansion structurelle permanente de la sécurité et l’augmentation de ses effectifs.
Abstract Changes in the Soviet security organs’ personnel, 1922-1953. Our article examines questions relative to the staffing of Soviet security organs with high-level personnel during the Stalinist era, as well as the basic tendencies underlying the changes brought to this group’s composition. We give a detailed description of the group based on social, ethnic and political origins and on age, and study the dynamics at work in the developments and changes which it underwent during the Great Terror (1937-1938). We then study the role of external factors (regulation by the party of the selection process of personnel, purges and waves of arrests) and internal ones (strifes between clans and cliques inside the NKVD). We examine the status of the personnel of the Soviet MGB during the post-war era and observe an overall regression, i.e., a drop in the Chekists’ educational level. We compare the situation of security personnel with that of the personnel of other subdivisions (the Gulag, for instance) and note a number of tendencies such as a levelling of the national composition, a rise in the educational level and a constant expansion in the security’s structure and size.
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L’OGPU en 1924 Radiographie d’une institution à son niveau d’étiage
Nicolas Werth
1 La source principale sur laquelle se fonde cette étude est une série de rapports adressés par les responsables de chacun des principaux départements de l’OGPU à Feliks Dzeržinskij en décembre 19241. Extrêmement détaillés (l’ensemble des rapports compte un millier de pages, avec un grand nombre de diagrammes et de tableaux statistiques), ces dossiers s’apparentent à ce que l’on appellerait aujourd’hui, en langage administratif, une « programmation budgétaire », avec un bilan des actions entreprises par la police politique au cours de l’année 1924 et l’exposé des besoins budgétaires et des priorités pour l’année 1925.
2 À ma connaissance, nous ne disposons pas, dans les archives aujourd’hui accessibles, de documents du même type concernant d’autres années. Ces dossiers ont été conservés dans le fonds personnel du fondateur de la police politique soviétique, Feliks Dzeržinskij. Plusieurs d’entre eux ont été annotés par le chef de l’OGPU, qui s’est sans doute servi de ces documents -- qu’il avait expressément commandés à ses subordonnés pour la date butoir du 15 décembre 1924 -- afin d’étayer son argumentaire devant la commission du Politbjuro chargée d’arbitrer, fin décembre, le différend qui avait surgi entre le commissariat du peuple aux Finances (dirigé par Grigorij Sokol´nikov) et l’OGPU à propos du budget de la police politique.
3 Ainsi, c’est grâce à un différend inter-administratif, somme toute assez courant, entre deux administrations, que l’on dispose de cette « radiographie » de l’OGPU à un moment donné. L’intérêt de ces documents est double :
4 - en tant qu’ils nous fournissent un organigramme précis de l’OGPU, avec ses effectifs région par région, le budget détaillé de ses différents services, les domaines d’activité et les actions menées, les « objectifs » visés, à un moment relativement peu connu (l’étude de George Leggett sur la Tchéka 2 s’arrêtant au début de l’année 1922), qui marque, en cet apogée de la NEP, le niveau d’étiage de la police politique pour l’ensemble de la période soviétique ;
5 - en tant qu’ils nous révèlent la vision qu’avaient les dirigeants de la police politique de leur mission, dans un contexte davantage défensif qu’offensif. Comment répondaient-
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ils aux critiques qui leur étaient adressées par d’autres administrations -- le commissariat du peuple aux Finances, mais aussi le commissariat du peuple à la Justice, le commissariat du peuple aux Affaires étrangères --, par certains dirigeants politiques, et non des moindres, tels Nikolaj Buharin ? Quelle était leur vision de la place de l’OGPU dans la configuration de la NEP « réaffirmée et triomphante », après le Plenum du Comité central d’octobre 1924, qui avait mis notamment à l’ordre du jour le mot d’ordre « Face à la campagne ! » (Licom k derevne !) ? Comment une institution qui s’était développée de manière exponentielle et avait proliféré de façon anarchique, sans entraves ni contrôle, durant les années « héroïques » du communisme de guerre et de la guerre civile, une institution qui était le lieu absolu de l’arbitraire où « tout était possible » (« C’est la vie même, disait Dzeržinskij, qui règle la conduite de notre organisation »3) réagissait-elle au « contrôle comptable et politiquement myope des Messieurs du Narkomfin bien au chaud dans leurs bureaux moscovites »4 ?
6 Avant d’examiner l’état des lieux de l’OGPU tel qu’il transparaît à travers les rapports internes adressés à Feliks Dzeržinskij en décembre 1924, je présenterai brièvement le contexte dans lequel s’inscrivent les documents qui ont servi de base à cette étude.
I
7 « L’affaire » débute le 9 octobre 1924, lorsque Grigorij Sokol´nikov envoie une note au Politbjuro dans laquelle il propose de diminuer, de manière substantielle, le budget de l’OGPU (celui-ci passerait, pour l’année 1925, de 59 millions de roubles à 48 millions) et de réduire, en conséquence, les effectifs de la police politique. Ceux-ci ne devraient pas excéder 24 000 agents civils, soit 20 000 agents rémunérés au budget (glasnye) et, au maximum, 4 000 agents rémunérés sur les « fonds secrets » (neglasnye)5, alors qu’au 1er octobre 1923, les effectifs civils de l’OGPU comptaient encore 34 452 agents (dont environ 8 000 agents rémunérés sur les « fonds secrets »)6. Le commissaire du peuple aux Finances préconisait des coupes sombres tout particulièrement en matière de « fonds secrets », qu’il proposait de réduire de 8,2 millions de roubles à 3,7 millions. Par ailleurs, Sokol´nikov demandait une forte diminution des effectifs des troupes territoriales de l’OGPU (territorial´nye vojska) et des troupes d’escorte (konvojnye vojska), qui devraient passer de 30 600 à 22 000 hommes.
8 En réponse à « cette pression inouïe du Narkomfin »7, F. Dzeržinskij envoie, le 2 novembre 1924, une note au Politbjuro, dans laquelle il rappelle qu’en trois ans (1921-1924), l’organisation qu’il dirige a vu ses effectifs fondre des trois quarts pour le personnel civil (passé, selon Dzeržinskij, de 90 000 à 21 100 agents) et de près de 90 % pour le personnel militaire (passé, de 126 000 à un peu plus de 13 000 hommes)8. Dzeržinskij souligne qu’il a toujours lui-même pris le premier toutes les mesures pour lutter contre le « gonflement des effectifs » (razbuhanie štatov) de l’OGPU, mais qu’une limite a désormais été atteinte. Il met en avant deux éléments que l’on retrouve dans la quasi-totalité des rapports des responsables de département de l’OGPU :
9 - d’une part, le fait que la situation intérieure du régime restait très fragile à cause des difficultés économiques persistantes, notamment dans les campagnes mal contrôlées, frappées, en de nombreuses régions, par une très mauvaise récolte, et qui constituaient, de ce fait, un terrain propice à l’action de groupes hostiles au régime : « Aujourd’hui, écrit F. Dzeržinskij, la situation intérieure est particulièrement tendue
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en raison de la pression très forte des forces antisoviétiques de tout poil : groupes d’espions, de contre-révolutionnaires et de bandits » ;
10 - d’autre part, l’immense désenchantement, la grande misère psychologique et matérielle des tchékistes de base, qui ne disposaient pas des moyens nécessaires à leur « mission de défense de la Révolution ». « Diminuer une fois encore le budget de l’OGPU, conclut F. Dzeržinskij, serait une expérimentation qui risquerait d’ébranler définitivement l’organe de défense de la République (sic) qu’est l’OGPU [...] Céder nos positions, ce serait battre définitivement en retraite face à la NEP des obyvateli et des bourgeois de toute espèce, désarmer le bras armé de la Révolution. »9
11 Le 5 novembre 1924, le Politbjuro discute du budget de l’OGPU. Faute de consensus, une commission est créée, composée de Molotov, Stalin, Sokol´nikov, Kalinin, Dzeržinskij, Unšliht et Buharin10. Le lendemain, Dzeržinskij envoie une note à tous les chefs de département de l’OGPU leur demandant de fournir, pour le 15 décembre au plus tard, un « état des lieux » précis de leurs services, ainsi qu’une programmation de leurs besoins financiers. Dzeržinskij écrit à Jagoda : « Sans céder sur l’essentiel -- l’avenir de notre institution --, il faut naturellement traquer toute dépense superflue et ne pas oublier que nous sommes un organe non productif dont chaque dépense pèse lourdement sur le pays, à un moment où la situation économique et financière reste très difficile et où les ouvriers reçoivent des salaires de misère. Ce faisant, nous aurons la conscience claire devant le pays et devant la Révolution. »11
12 Naturellement, le débat sur le budget de l’OGPU va bien au-delà d’une simple question financière et comptable. Il révèle des conflits inter-institutionnels et des options politiques différentes à ce moment charnière de la NEP. La discussion budgétaire est close fin décembre 1924 : elle s’achève, à la commission du Polit-bjuro, sur une victoire de Dzeržinskij, soutenu par son adjoint Unšliht, et surtout par Stalin, Molotov et Kalinin, face à Sokol´nikov et Buharin. Le budget et les effectifs de l’OGPU sont globalement maintenus à leur niveau d’octobre 1924. Ils ne diminueront plus, et reprendront leur croissance à partir de 1926-1927.
13 Quant aux discussions politiques sur la place de l’OGPU, elles se poursuivent durant la première moitié de 1925. Quelques jalons importants de cette discussion transparaissent à travers la correspondance des dirigeants bolcheviks12. Sans entrer dans les détails, je mentionnerai brièvement les principaux protagonistes de ce débat, en rappelant que les discussions, au sein de la direction bolchevique, sur la place et les fonctions de la police politique, avaient en réalité débuté dès les premières années du régime (notamment au moment des « excès » de la « Terreur rouge » de septembre- octobre 191813, ou lors de la transformation de la Tchéka en GPU, au début de 1922, lorsque furent redéfinies les prérogatives de la police politique, notamment en matière de répression extra-judiciaire). Au nombre des dirigeants qui souhaitent, en 1924-1925, restreindre la place de l’OGPU figure, en premier lieu, Nikolaj Buharin. Au moment de la discussion du budget de la police politique, il écrit à Feliks Dzeržinskij, le 21 décembre 1924 : « Je considère que nous devrions passer plus rapidement à une forme plus “libérale” de pouvoir soviétique : moins de répressions, plus de légalité, plus de discussions, plus de pouvoir local (sous la direction du Parti naturaliter [naturellement]), etc. C’est pourquoi je me prononce parfois contre les propositions visant à élargir les attributions de l’OGPU. Comprenez, cher Feliks Edmundovič (et vous savez combien je vous aime), que vous n’avez pas la moindre raison de me soupçonner de quelques mauvaises pensées à votre égard ou à l’égard de l’OGPU
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comme institution. Ma position est une position de principe -- voilà le fond de l’affaire... »14
14 Autre conflit larvé, et traditionnel : entre l’OGPU et le commissariat du peuple à la Justice, Feliks Dzeržinskij et Nikolaj Krylenko. En avril 1925, Krylenko envoie au Politbjuro une longue lettre dans laquelle il critique la tendance de l’OGPU à « élargir le champ, déjà considérable, de ses droits en matière extra-judiciaire »15. Durant l’année 1924 et le premier trimestre 1925, les « Collèges spéciaux » (Osobye soveščanija) de l’OGPU avaient condamné, pour la seule RSFSR, 9 362 personnes ; sur ce nombre, 650 (soit 6,9 %) avaient été condamnées à mort16. Nikolaj Krylenko rapprochait ce chiffre des 615 condamnations à la peine capitale prononcées par l’ensemble des tribunaux de la RSFSR durant la même période, sur un total de plus de 65 000 condamnations. Le commissaire du peuple à la Justice dénonçait, par ailleurs, les conditions inhumaines dans lesquelles étaient exilées en Sibérie et dans l’Extrême-Nord, sur simple mesure administrative et sans le moindre pécule, des milliers de personnes « socialement dangereuses », parmi lesquelles on trouve aussi bien de jeunes étudiants de 18-19 ans que des vieillards de 65-70 ans, notamment de milieux cléricaux, et même des vieilles femmes « socialement étrangères et nuisibles »17. Pour limiter les « abus » de l’OGPU, Krylenko proposait de limiter « sévèrement et fortement » les droits de l’OGPU en matière extra-judiciaire : ne seraient plus du ressort de la police politique que les affaires relatives aux seuls membres reconnus de « partis politiques hostiles au parti communiste » (et non pas les affaires de « contre-révolution en général »), les affaires d’espionnage, de grand banditisme, de faux-monnayage, d’abus de pouvoir ou de crimes commis par les fonctionnaires de l’OGPU. L’enfermement, par mesure administrative, dans un camp, ne pourrait dépasser un an (au lieu de trois jusqu’alors). Ces mesures -- qui ne furent jamais adoptées -- devaient considérablement restreindre les droits accordés, par un décret du Praesidium du Comité exécutif central de l’URSS, en date du 24 mars 1924. Ce texte permettait aux Collèges spéciaux de l’OGPU d’exiler pour trois ans dans les régions inhospitalières du pays ou d’enfermer dans un camp de concentration pour trois ans toute personne « socialement dangereuse », catégorie extrêmement large regroupant pêle-mêle individus soupçonnés d’activités « contre- révolutionnaires », de contrebande, de faux-monnayage mais aussi personnes « sans occupation déterminée ou productive », tels que les « affairistes », les « joueurs de jeux de hasard », les « trafiquants de drogue et d’alcools », les « spéculateurs au marché noir » et les « éléments socialement dangereux de par leur passé, c’est-à-dire ayant été condamnés à deux reprises ou ayant été à quatre reprises interpellés pour atteinte aux biens ou aux personnes. »18
15 Dzeržinskij réagit très vivement aux attaques du commissariat du peuple à la Justice dans une lettre à Lev Mehlis. Un des arguments principaux du chef de l’OGPU en faveur du maintien de la répression administrative et extra-judiciaire était le fait que toute publicité des débats dans un procès public de « contre-révolutionnaires » apparaissait hautement « contre-productive » du point de vue politique : « L’expérience a montré que, plus on parle du terrorisme, plus il devient populaire. Des procès publics d’opposants monarchistes ne feraient que stimuler l’activité des groupes monarchistes à l’étranger et leur permettraient d’obtenir une aide financière, et une aide tout court, de tous les états-majors et autres services d’espionnage des pays capitalistes... »19
16 Remarque intéressante, qui éclaire -- entre autres facteurs, naturellement -- la pratique de la konspiracija, au coeur de la politique bolchevique en général.
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17 Un troisième détracteur de l’OGPU semble avoir été le commissariat du peuple aux Affaires étrangères. Les relations étaient exécrables entre Georgij Čičerin et son adjoint Maksim Litvinov, d’une part, et les responsables des départements « étranger » (Inotdel) et de contre-espionnage (Kontrrazvedotdel) de l’OGPU, dirigés respectivement par Mihail Trilisser et Artur Artuzov, d’autre part. Le commissariat du peuple aux Affaires étrangères se plaignait régulièrement du fait que l’OGPU ne le tenait pas informé des arrestations -- trop nombreuses et souvent infondées -- d’étrangers, notamment sous prétexte « d’espionnage économique » (en 1924, l’OGPU avait arrêté 926 ressortissants étrangers ; selon le Narkomindel, les trois quarts de ces arrestations n’avaient aucun fondement)20. Trilisser et Artuzov, de leur côté, n’avaient que suspicion vis-à-vis des diplomates et du personnel du commissariat du peuple aux Affaires étrangères, composé, en majorité, de specy bourgeois. Dans ce climat de méfiance réciproque, Dzeržinskij semble avoir été soucieux de ne pas envenimer les rapports : ainsi, le 8 février 1925, le chef de l’OGPU envoie une lettre assez ferme à Trilisser, le mettant en demeure d’améliorer, dans les plus brefs délais, ses rapports avec le commissariat du peuple aux Affaires étrangères : « Nos relations, faites en permanence d’hostilité envers le Narkomindel, sont dommageables pour l’image de l’URSS à l’étranger et nous réduisent à une totale impuissance. Notre travail et nos renseignements sont insuffisamment pris en compte, ce qui est nuisible pour l’État [...] Le c. Litvinov a émis à notre encontre les critiques suivantes : 1. Nous arrêtons les étrangers sans en avertir au préalable le Narkomindel. 2. Les perquisitions et les arrestations d’étrangers ne sont pas suffisamment fondées. 3. Les demandes d’explication du Narkomindel restent sans réponse de notre part, ou reçoivent une réponse inexacte, ce qui, en fin de compte, discrédite non seulement le Narkomindel, mais l’URSS en tant qu’État. Cette accusation est assurément la plus dure [...] Vladimir Il´ič nous aurait démoli sur cette question. En fin de compte, on se met tout le monde à dos et on donne aux étrangers l’occasion de faire campagne sur le thème : en URSS, c’est la Guépéou qui décide de tout. Politiquement, c’est extrêmement dangereux. Cela permet aux ennemis de l’URSS de faire de l’OGPU l’épouvantail qui légitimerait l’intervention et la contre-révolution. »21
18 Quatrième détracteur de l’OGPU -- le commissariat du peuple aux Finances, dirigé par G. Sokol´nikov. Le 11 décembre 1924, Dzeržinskij écrit à son adjoint Menžinskij : « Aujourd’hui, Sokol´nikov est revenu à la charge au Politbjuro en développant, à l’encontre de l’OGPU, les reproches suivants : l’OGPU “soigne” trop bien ses fonctionnaires et coûte trop cher à l’État ; l’OGPU cultive une totale opacité dans ses dépenses secrètes ; l’OGPU est incontrôlable, plus on lui donnera de moyens, et plus il y aura d’affaires “gonflées” -- telle est, aux dires de Sokol´nikov, la spécificité de notre organisation [...] Il nous faut rassembler un dossier solide pour démolir ces accusations infondées. »22
19 Sur la défensive, le personnel dirigeant de l’OGPU développe, en bonne logique administrative, une argumentation sans surprises : immensité des tâches, d’un côté ; moyens dérisoires pour les accomplir, de l’autre. Immensité des tâches, parce que la situation de l’URSS, face à ses ennemis extérieurs et intérieurs, demeure très fragile tout au long de l’année 1924. Et ce, de quelque manière que l’on interprète les principales évolutions de cette année contrastée ayant débuté par la disparition de Lenin23 et s’étant achevée par un tournant politique résolument en faveur d’un renforcement de la NEP (avec l’adoption, lors du Plenum du Comité central d’octobre, de la ligne « Face à la campagne ! »), après l’alerte du soulèvement géorgien, fin août- début septembre. Que l’on mette l’accent sur la disette, voire la famine, qui frappe, à
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l’été 1924, environ huit millions de paysans, comme le font les délégués régionaux de l’OGPU réunis à Moscou les 14 et 15 août 1924 pour discuter des conséquences de la mauvaise récolte24, ou qu’à l’inverse, l’on mette en avant une certaine amélioration de la situation économique dans le pays25, dans les deux cas, l’interprétation de l’OGPU dégage les « potentialités contre-révolution-naires » présentes dans chacune des situations.
20 Le responsable du Département de l’information de l’OGPU, G. Prokof´ev, explique dans son intervention devant les délégués régionaux : « La disette et la famine ne peuvent déboucher que sur une différenciation croissante au sein de la paysannerie, qui verra le rôle du koulak s’accroître considérablement. Les difficultés détournent les paysans pauvres du pouvoir soviétique. Elles les rendent bien plus perméables à la propagande des Gardes blancs et des koulaks, qui ont considérablement renforcé leurs organisations ces derniers temps. En témoigne notamment la récente affaire de Crimée26 [...] Dans cette situation, nous devons pénétrer plus profondément dans ces campagnes que nous connaissons si mal et livrer une information fiable pour signaler à temps les dangers qui nous menacent. »27
21 De son côté, Artur Artuzov, le chef du KRO (Kontrrazvedyvatel´nyj Otdel -- Département du contre-espionnage) insiste, dans son rapport de décembre 1924, sur le renforcement économique du pays au cours de l’année écoulée. Mais c’est pour conclure que « dans cette situation de retour à la normale, on observe une forte activation des éléments koulako-monarchistes [...] À preuve, la montée des revendications concernant la légalisation des “unions paysannes” (krest´janskie sojuzy). Les koulaks ont reçu, cette année, le renfort d’un immense contingent de cadres contre-révolutionnaires. »28 Selon Artuzov, ce contingent d’« ex- » (byvšie ljudi) s’était considérablement accru en 1923-1924 « à la suite d’un certain nombre de processus socio-économiques » (on remarquera ici, dans la pensée de ce cadre dirigeant de la police politique, l’influence des « catégories » et des « postulats » d’une « vulgate marxiste » primitive, inculquée par les écoles de formation des cadres, selon laquelle tout changement politique devait avoir un soubassement sociologique, lequel reflétait nécessairement des évolutions économiques). Ces processus socio-économiques étaient, selon Artuzov : « 1. la diminution du nombre des fonctionnaires à la suite des purges administratives de 1922-1923 ; 2. la fermeture d’un certain nombre d’établissements commerciaux privés évincés par le secteur coopératif ; 3. la diminution de l’Armée rouge et la démobilisation de la partie la plus réactionnaire des cadres officiers ; 4. la purge des universités, qui a démultiplié le contingent des étudiants aigris ; 5. le retour massif au pays d’émigrés désargentés [...] De la sorte, les koulaks peuvent compter sur un nombre important de cadres contre-révolutionnaires, rejetés des villes vers les campagnes par suite des processus économiques et politiques ci- dessus mentionnés. »29
22 L’immensité des tâches auxquelles est confrontée l’OGPU a une traduction géographique, c’est l’immensité des espaces hostiles et incontrôlables de « l’URSS profonde » : les campagnes, tout d’abord, dans leur ensemble, cette terra incognita, ce milieu hostile « grouillant d’éléments koulaks, de SR, de popes, d’anciens propriétaires fonciers, de rapaces que l’on n’a pas eu le temps d’achever », selon la formule imagée du président du Gubotdel de l’OGPU de la province de Toula30 ; les « périphéries » de l’URSS, depuis l’Ukraine occidentale limitrophe de la Pologne, jusqu’à l’Extrême-Orient soviétique, soumis aux incursions des « Gardes blancs » de Harbin, mais aussi la Crimée, la Transcaucasie (notamment la Tché-tchénie et le Daghestan) ou l’Asie Centrale,
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régions encore mal contrôlées par le régime. Pour les dirigeants de l’OGPU, la quintessence politico-administrative de cette réalité est le ratio : agents de l’OGPU par habitants, voire le ratio : agent de l’OGPU par verste carrée. Ces « éléments chiffrés » figurent dans nombre de rapports de chefs de département ou de responsables provinciaux de la police politique ! Un tel souligne « qu’un agent doit contrôler 6 250 verstes carrées »31 ; un autre calcule que « si 9 329 fonctionnaires territoriaux de l’OGPU surveillent 136 754 000 Soviétiques, cela fait un agent de l’OGPU pour 14 659 personnes à surveiller ! »32 La formule mathématique : objectifs à surveiller/agents nécessaires est également prisée dans l’administration tchékiste. Un bel exemple nous en est fourni dans le rapport du chef du Département secret de l’OGPU, Terentij Deribas : « J’ai une grande expérience des objectifs visés, à savoir : anarchistes de cinq espèces, mencheviks de trois tendances, SR de droite de deux et SR de gauche de trois courants, monarchistes de six espèces, quarante mille gendarmes et provocateurs tsaristes, dix mille conseils de paroisse composés chacun de huit à vingt monarchistes et cléricaux patentés [...] Soit, à raison de 100 villes de province + 500 à 600 chefs-lieux de district multipliés par 25 variétés d’ennemis = 15 à 17 500 informateurs, étant donné qu’il faut un informateur par objectif. »33
23 Immensité des tâches et des espaces, d’un côté ; nombre dérisoire des hommes -- agents épuisés, usés psychologiquement et moralement --, faiblesse des moyens matériels, de l’autre : c’est sur cette disproportion qu’est bâti, pour l’essentiel, l’argumentaire des cadres dirigeants de l’OGPU.
24 Le thème de la misère psychologique et matérielle des tchékistes n’est pas nouveau. Il ressort avec force en 1922, lorsque l’OGPU est soumise à des restrictions budgétaires et à des coupes sombres de personnel. Le 30 juin 1922, Vasilij Mancev, responsable de la GPU d’Ukraine écrit à Feliks Dzeržinskij : « La situation matérielle et psychologique des tchékistes est catastrophique. La rétribution en argent ou en nature que reçoit le tchékiste est si misérable que celui- ci, surtout s’il a une famille, ne peut survivre qu’en vendant tout ce qu’il a, c’est-à- dire trois fois rien. Aussi les tchékistes sont-ils en état de sous-alimentation chronique, ce qui entraîne une diminution de leur capacité de travail, une frustration permanente, une chute prononcée de la discipline. On a enregistré de nombreux cas de suicide ou de folie. Je reçois personnellement des lettres d’agents de sexe féminin, qui m’écrivent qu’elles doivent recourir à la prostitution pour ne pas mourir de faim. Nous avons dû arrêter et fusiller des dizaines, voire des centaines de tchékistes qui se livraient à des attaques à main armée et à des pillages. Dans la totalité des cas, il a été établi que la faim était à l’origine de tels actes criminels. Les tchékistes fuient l’organisation [...] La proportion des membres du parti dans notre organisation est passée de 60 à 15 % [...] Il existe aujourd’hui un réel danger de désagrégation de la Tchéka. Si personne n’a plus besoin de cet organe, alors qu’on le dise clairement et fermement ! »34
25 Sur le thème de la criminalité de droit commun des tchékistes se livrant à la « spéculation » et autres grandes et petites « combines », faute d’une paie décente, les documents internes pour les années 1923-1924 abondent en exemples : ainsi en 1923 pas moins de 600 tchékistes avaient été condamnés par les organes de la police politique pour divers crimes de droit commun, prévarication, vols à grande échelle, abus de pouvoir, assassinats. « Les tchékistes ont la nostalgie des années où rançonner, piller, prélever une “contribution extraordinaire sur la bourgeoisie” était la règle. Ils vivent leur statut de tout petit fonctionnaire comme une profonde déchéance », note un rapport35.
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26 Le tchékiste de base était-il si mal payé en 1923-1924 ? Un grand nombre de dossiers, présentés par le responsable du Département financier de l’OGPU, L. Berenzon, analysent en détail les grilles de rémunération des agents de l’OGPU et leurs « frais de mission ». Il apparaît qu’à échelon égal, les fonctionnaires de la police politique gagnaient de 30 à 45 % de moins que leurs collègues militaires -- un fait qui générait tensions et récriminations dont Stalin, dès le début des années 1930, allait tenir compte en revalorisant considérablement les salaires des tchékistes36. Néanmoins, le salaire mensuel moyen des instructeurs, enquêteurs, commissaires et autres grades intermédiaires classés parmi les « opérationnels » (l’operativnyj sostav, par opposition aux kanceliarskie rabotniki, les secrétaires et autres ronds-de-cuir de l’administration de la police politique) se situait entre 50 et 70 roubles, une paie décente en comparaison avec les rémunérations moyennes des fonctionnaires civils37. Certes, les dépenses annexes et les frais de mission, généralement imputés sur les « fonds secrets », étaient, semble-t-il, chichement attribuées. Les rapports des chefs de département fourmillent de détails dignes des récits de Zoščenko sur les dépenses nécessaires pour l’entretien « d’appartements conspiratifs », sur le prix, évalué à cent roubles par an, de la « garde- robe du tchékiste » (alors que le budget ne prévoyait, pour ce type de dépense, que dix roubles...). On peut lire dans un de ces rapports : « Il est évident qu’un enquêteur qui passe huit à dix heures en hiver dans la rue à surveiller un objectif a impérativement besoin d’habits chauds : un manteau, des moufles, un chapeau de fourrure. En été, ce même enquêteur aura besoin d’un costume décent, de chaussures en cuir. Il devra avoir une tenue correcte pour ne pas se faire remarquer, dans les milieux qu’il peut être amené à fréquenter ou à surveiller, par son aspect dépenaillé, ce qui pourrait le mettre dans une situation inconfortable, propice à le démasquer. »38
27 Mille détails aussi sur le quotidien des tchékistes de province contraints de se rendre en mission souvent à pied sur des dizaines de kilomètres, l’organisation de district -- voire, dans certains cas, de province -- de la GPU n’étant même pas en mesure de mettre à leur disposition un cheval !39
28 Au-delà des difficultés matérielles d’une organisation qui, dans bien des domaines, fonctionne, comme le reconnaît le chef du Département de l’information, de manière « artisanale », de nombreux rapports internes soulignent « l’usure » (iznošennost’) physique et mentale des tchékistes. À cet égard, le rapport de V. Balickij, responsable de la GPU d’Ukraine, est particulièrement éclairant. Sur environ 3 500 fonctionnaires civils sous ses ordres, près de 1 600 étaient chroniquement malades ; 569 souffraient de « diverses maladies nerveuses », 628 d’« anémie aggravée et d’épuisement », 162 de maladie cardiaque, 217 de maladies pulmonaires graves (tuberculose). Et Balickij de conclure : « Les conditions matérielles et l’état d’usure avancée de ces hommes qui ont connu la guerre civile influent profondément sur le psychisme des tchékistes, à la limite du désespoir et de la folie. Au cours des derniers mois, j’ai eu directement connaissance de 17 cas de démence et de 8 cas de suicide [...] On assiste à une progressive dégénérescence physique (fisičeskoe vyroždenie) de nos hommes. Si rien n’est entrepris pour mettre fin à cette situation anormale, l’État risque de se retrouver avec un appareil hors d’état de fonctionner. »40
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II
29 L’intérêt principal des dossiers préparés par les chefs de département de l’OGPU en décembre 1924 est de nous fournir un état des lieux, des structures et des activités de l’organisation à un moment donné. Malheureusement, les informations sur certaines branches de l’OGPU restent très parcellaires, notamment en ce qui concerne les gardes- frontières (environ 27 000 hommes41) et les troupes spéciales (« troupes territoriales » et troupes d’escorte), au nombre d’environ 24 000 hommes42. Nous nous concentrerons donc plus particulièrement sur les effectifs civils des principales directions (upravlenija) et départements (otdely). En dehors de la Direction des gardes-frontières et des troupes spéciales (Upravlenie pograničnoj ohrany i vojsk OGPU), les directions principales, d’importance et de taille très différentes, étaient au nombre de trois :
30 - la Direction administrative et organisationnelle (Administrativno-organizacionnoe upravlenie), regroupant le Département des prisons, le Département des liaisons, le Département sanitaire et l’Intendance, avec un millier de fonctionnaires environ ;
31 - la Direction économique (Ekonomičeskoe upravlenie), forte d’un millier de fonctionnaires, chargée spécifiquement de la lutte contre la criminalité économique et financière. Cette direction devait être, début 1925, intégrée, en tant que département, à la Direction secrète et opérationnelle ;
32 - la Direction secrète et opérationnelle (Sekretno-operativnoe upravlenie) était, de très loin, la plus importante des directions civiles de l’OGPU, avec environ 19 000 fonctionnaires appointés au budget (sans compter les agents émargeant aux dépenses secrètes). Cette direction regroupait, en 1924, les départements suivants :
33 le Département des transports (Transportnyj otdel), avec 8 178 agents (dont 1 540 stagiaires des écoles de l’OGPU, dépendant de ce département). Ce département avait pour fonctions de maintenir l’ordre sur ces lieux hautement stratégiques et vitaux qu’étaient le réseau ferré et le réseau fluvial ; de surveiller les 600 000 cheminots, « milieu de tous les trafics et de tous les vols »43, et plus de 5 000 specy travaillant dans le secteur ferroviaire ; de protéger les convois de marchandises et de voyageurs contre les attaques de bandits ;
34 le Département secret (Sekretnyj otdel) avec 5 900 agents environ, était chargé de la lutte contre toutes les formations « antisoviétiques » à l’intérieur du pays. Dans cette tâche, il était assisté également du :
35 Département opérationnel (Operativnyj otdel), 1 900 agents environ, plus particulièrement chargés d’infiltrer les milieux criminels, mais non exclusivement « antisoviétiques » ;
36 le Département de contre-espionnage (Kontrrazvedyvatel´nyj otdel) et le Département étranger (Inostrannyj otdel), avec environ 1 000 agents à eux deux, s’occupaient plus particulièrement de la « contre-révolution » venant de l’extérieur : surveillance des missions diplomatiques et commerciales étrangères, des étrangers et des citoyens soviétiques rapatriés ou récemment revenus de l’étranger, lutte contre les groupuscules émigrés, contre-espionnage ;
37 le Département spécial (Osobyj otdel), environ 1 400 agents, surveillait les unités de l’Armée rouge et de la marine ;
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38 le Département du contrôle politique (Otdel politkontrolja), environ 500 agents, était chargé de la censure et du contrôle du courrier ;
39 le Département de l’information (Informacionnyj otdel), environ 300 agents, s’occupait de la collecte et de la synthèse des informations sur l’état du pays, rassemblées par un réseau d’informateurs. Ce département produisait presque quotidiennement une série de rapports sur les sujets les plus divers, aujourd’hui largement exploités par les historiens travaillant sur les années 1920 et 1930 en particulier44.
40 La structure interne de l’OGPU en 1924 n’avait guère évolué depuis les années 1918-1920, au cours desquelles s’étaient mis en place les différents départements de la Tchéka, bien plus étoffés cependant en personnel à l’apogée de la guerre civile qu’au milieu des années 192045. Il s’agissait d’une structure assez simple, bien moins ramifiée et complexe que celle du NKVD des années 1930, grand conglomérat policier et économique, qui devait gérer des immenses secteurs économico-pénitentiaires de millions d’individus aux statuts différents, depuis les exilés, les « déplacés spéciaux » jusqu’aux détenus du Goulag46.
41 Naturellement, aux quelque 21 000 agents civils appointés au budget de l’année 1924 s’ajoutait un volant important d’agents rétribués sur les « fonds secrets ». Ces agents secrets (neglasnye sotrudniki) étaient eux-mêmes divisés en trois catégories : les agents secrets « titulaires » (štatnye sekretnye sotrudniki, parfois appelés, dans le Département de l’information par exemple, sekretnye upolnomočnye), au nombre de 3 635 à la fin de 192447 ; les « résidents » (rezidenty) et les indicateurs (osvedomiteli). Les rezidenty coordonnaient l’action des osvedomiteli. Ils percevaient une rétribution plus ou moins régulière, mais faible (de l’ordre de cinq à dix roubles par mois). Les rapports de décembre 1924 ne permettent malheureusement pas d’établir le nombre total des rezidenty. Le plus gros contingent d’entre eux travaillait pour le Département de l’information : ce secteur annonçait 6 374 rezidenty48. Connaissant la répartition des « fonds secrets » attribués à chacun des départements49, on peut estimer grosso modo que le nombre total des rezidenty était de l’ordre de 10 à 12 000.
42 Le nombre des osvedomiteli, informateurs occasionnels, dont plus de 90 % ne touchaient rien (les 10 % restants touchant des rétributions occasionnelles et dérisoires de l’ordre de quelques roubles)50, est encore plus difficile à établir avec précision ; tout ce que l’on peut dire, c’est qu’il se chiffrait en dizaines de milliers, voire plus. Seuls deux départements de l’OGPU rendent compte, dans leur rapport, du nombre des indicateurs qu’ils emploient : le Département des transports annonce 12 580 informateurs ; le Département de l’information -- 26 52051. Assurément, comme le révèlent nombre de circulaires internes du Département de l’information, un grand nombre des informateurs de l’OGPU n’étaient autres que les petits fonctionnaires locaux du volispolkom ou du rajkom, qui fournissaient au département une information qualifiée, non sans mépris, de bureaucratique (kazennaja) par opposition à la vraie information « opérationnelle » (operativnaja) puisée « sur le terrain » par des indicateurs patentés52.
43 À la suite des réformes administratives et territoriales de 1923, la structure géographique de l’OGPU se présentait ainsi :
44 - 13 régions, calquées sur les régions militaires : Moscou, Leningrad, Volga, Ouest, Ukraine, Oural, Crimée, Sud-Est (incluant notamment le Caucase du Nord, la Tchétchénie, l’Ingouchie, le Daghestan), Sibérie, Kirghizie, Turkestan, Transcaucasie,
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Extrême-Orient. Les huit dernières régions faisaient partie d’une structure territoriale appelée le « Département oriental » (Vostočnyj otdel).
45 Chaque région était dirigée par une Représentation plénipotentiaire (Polnomočnoe predstavitel´stvo), véritable état-major de la police politique dans la région. Le nombre des agents de la Représentation plénipotentiaire variait en fonction de l’étendue et de l’importance stratégique de chaque région, classée en « première », « seconde » ou « troisième » catégorie53 ;
46 - au-dessous de la région, les Départements provinciaux (Gubotdely) de la police politique54 étaient classés en cinq catégories d’intérêt et de surveillance, avec des effectifs pouvant varier de 170 fonctionnaires (Kiev) à une quinzaine seulement (Briansk)55 ;
47 - enfin, les Départements de district (Uezdotdely) classés en quatre niveaux d’intérêt et de surveillance, disposaient d’effectifs variant de deux à huit agents civils56.
48 La répartition des effectifs de l’OGPU était très inégale sur le territoire de l’URSS57. Moscou et sa région (Moskovskij Voennyj Okrug -- MVO) concentrait plus d’un cinquième des effectifs civils de la police politique58 (4 800 agents sur 21 000 environ) répartis entre l’administration centrale (1 750 agents), la Représentation plénipotentiaire de la région militaire de Moscou (MVO), les Départements provinciaux et de district des sept provinces (Moscou, Vladimir, Kostroma, Nijni-Novgorod, Orel, Riazan, Toula) faisant partie du MVO, les écoles de cadres de l’OGPU.
49 La région militaire de Leningrad comptait environ 1 600 fonctionnaires civils (dont la moitié dans la ville même de Leningrad)59.
50 La GPU d’Ukraine, sous la direction de Balickij, concentrait le second plus important contingent de la police politique (après Moscou et sa région) : environ 3 500 agents civils au budget et un tiers des « agents secrets titulaires » (1 050 sur 3 635)60.
51 Le Département oriental, qui regroupait les vastes territoires récemment pacifiés de la Transcaucasie, du Caucase du Nord, de l’Asie Centrale, de la Sibérie, de l’Extrême-Orient soviétique, comptait un peu plus du tiers des effectifs civils globaux de l’OGPU : 7 800 agents sur 21 000 environ. Ramenés aux milliers de kilomètres de voies ferrées à surveiller et aux immenses espaces, certes le plus souvent peu peuplés, à contrôler, les effectifs de l’OGPU (1 400 agents pour la Transcaucasie, 1 200 pour la Sibérie, 1 200 pour le Caucase du Nord, 1 200 pour le Turkestan, 700 pour la Kirghizie, 800 pour l’Oural, 900 pour l’Extrême-Orient, 400 pour la Crimée), même grossis de quelque 5 à 6 000 hommes des troupes territoriales répartis à raison de quelques centaines à un millier par région, donnaient assurément aux tchékistes le sentiment d’affronter des tâches surhumaines en milieu profondément hostile. Le rapport du Département oriental était particulièrement alarmiste. Il notait, pour l’Asie Centrale tout particulièrement, mais aussi pour le Daghestan, la Tchétchénie, l’Ingouchie, l’absence totale de structures soviétiques fiables hors des villes, le nombre important de groupes armés de « bandits » et d’armes en circulation, les difficultés de communication, l’absence « du moindre groupe social sur lequel on puisse s’appuyer ». « Dans ces régions, concluait le rapport, nous évoluons en territoire ennemi. L’OGPU n’a aucun relais institutionnel sur lequel s’appuyer, d’où la difficulté d’obtenir la moindre information sur l’ennemi. »61
52 Après cette présentation d’ensemble, je voudrais aborder les activités spécifiques de quelques départements de l’OGPU telles qu’elles apparaissent dans les rapports de décembre 1924.
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53 Le Département des transports, dirigé par Georgij Blagonravov, restait, comme durant les années de la guerre civile et du communisme de guerre, le secteur le mieux doté en hommes et en moyens, concentrant à lui seul plus d’un tiers des agents de l’OGPU62. Les chemins de fer étaient un lieu hautement stratégique, politiquement et économiquement, pour le contrôle des immenses espaces soviétiques. Axe de pénétration du pouvoir soviétique, réseau principal de communication, de transport et de circulation des marchandises, les chemins de fer étaient encore fréquemment la cible d’attaques par des groupes de « bandits » : 240 attaques de train en 1923, 280 (dont 170 pour la seule RSS d’Ukraine) en 1924, ayant entraîné cette année-là la mort de 388 gardes de la Milice des chemins de fer63, de 76 agents de l’OGPU et de plusieurs centaines de passagers et de cheminots64. Lieu de violences, les chemins de fer étaient aussi le lieu de tous les trafics, un espace de contrebande et de vols. Selon le rapport de G. Blagonravov, les vols découverts sur le réseau ferroviaire seraient descendus en 1924 à leur plus bas niveau depuis 1918, ne dépassant guère 1 000 tonnes de fret par mois (contre 14 000 tonnes par mois en 1922) ; en 1924, l’OGPU et les diverses milices des transports avaient arrêté sur le réseau ferré 18 369 personnes pour vol, pots-de-vin et « spéculation »65. Le bilan d’activité du Département des transports nous rappelle la nature pluri-fonctionnelle et ambiguë de cet organe de l’OGPU, chargé tout à la fois de contrecarrer le « sabotage économique » des ingénieurs et autres specy du réseau ferré (en 1924 -- fait remarquable à noter -- une seule « affaire » sur près d’une cinquantaine citées dans le rapport avait une « coloration politique » de ce type), d’éradiquer les mille et un trafics, petits et grands, des « cols-blancs » de l’administration ferroviaire et des cheminots, de prêter main-forte aux diverses milices dans la lutte contre les vols « ordinaires », de livrer de véritables batailles rangées contre des bandes souvent puissamment armées. La frontière était assurément floue entre le politique et le droit commun : en témoigne la lutte contre le banditisme -- une des principales activités de l’OGPU au milieu des années 192066. Outre le Département des transports, étaient directement impliqués dans la lutte contre le banditisme le Département opérationnel et le Département secret de l’OGPU. Au niveau des régions et des provinces existaient des « sections de lutte contre le banditisme » regroupant des représentants de divers départements de la police politique. Dans leurs rapports, les tchékistes distinguaient le « banditisme politique » -- prétendument lié à des groupes antisoviétiques étrangers et présent tout particulièrement dans les régions frontalières, à la fois occidentales (dans les régions de la Biélorussie et de l’Ukraine limitrophes de la Pologne) et orientales (Extrême-Orient soviétique), en Asie Centrale (basmači), au Daghestan et en Tchétchénie -- et le « banditisme de droit commun », endémique dans un grand nombre de régions (Russie centrale, Volga, Ukraine, Crimée, Oural, Sibérie occidentale)67. Globalement, en 1923-1924, les grandes bandes, fortes de centaines d’individus armés, qui tenaient le « pays profond » dans bien des régions en 1921-1922, avaient été éliminées ou s’étaient désagrégées, sauf dans certains districts du Turkestan, du Daghestan et de la Tché tchénie. Ailleurs, la plupart des « bandes » ne comptaient guère plus d’une dizaine de personnes68. Néanmoins, selon les statistiques de l’OGPU, pour la seule année 1924, pas moins de 2 337 bandits avaient été tués dans des accrochages avec des agents de l’OGPU ou des différentes milices ; 895 avaient été fusillés sur-le-champ, 10 633 avaient été capturés, 2 582 s’étaient rendus sans résistance69. Au cours des neuf premiers mois de l’année 1925, 10 352 bandits avaient été tués, fusillés ou capturés70. Sur le front de lutte contre le banditisme, secteur de loin le plus dangereux pour les tchékistes, 224 agents de l’OGPU avaient été tués en 1924 (dont 121 en Ukraine)71.
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54 Avec plus de 6 600 agents (dont un peu plus de 700 émargeant aux fonds secrets), le Département secret, dirigé par Terentij Deribas, était en importance le second secteur de l’OGPU. Travaillant en étroite collaboration avec le Département opérationnel, fort de quelque 2 700 agents (dont 768 émargeant aux fonds secrets), le Département secret comprenait huit sections, chargées chacune de surveiller une catégorie d’opposants potentiels : monarchistes et constitutionnels-démocrates ; socialistes-révolutionnaires et mencheviks ; anarchistes ; propriétaires fonciers et koulaks ; « opposition ouvrière » et « ex-communistes » ; clergé et sectes ; intelligentsia et étudiants ; « groupes antisoviétiques et nationalistes des régions orientales de l’URSS ». Malheureusement, le rapport de T. Deribas72 apparaît comme le plus confus et le plus imprécis des dossiers internes envoyés à F. Dzeržinskij. Il ne permet guère d’éclairer et d’approfondir, par exemple, les données très générales sur le nombre de personnes arrêtées pour « activités contre-révolutionnaires » en 1924, évalué par le commissariat du peuple à la Justice à un peu plus de 4 00073. Le rapport du chef du Département secret énumère 81 opérations contre les « groupes anarchistes de Moscou, de Leningrad, d’Ukraine, de Rostov, de Crimée, de Sibérie et d’Asie Centrale ». Il fait état de la « liquidation » d’une dizaine d’organisations socialistes-révolutionnaires (Moscou, Ukraine, Sibérie, Leningrad), d’une douzaine d’organisations mencheviques en Ukraine (Kharkov, Odessa, Kiev, Poltava), à Sormovo, Rostov, et de la mise en place, dans des centres ouvriers (Leningrad, Briansk, Toula, Perm, Nijni-Novgorod) d’une campagne de réunions d’ex-mencheviks ralliés au bolchevisme. Il résume, en quelques pages, l’action menée par la 6e section (clergé et sectes) pour entretenir et activer le schisme entre Tikhoniens et « Rénovateurs » au sein de l’Église orthodoxe, surveiller les nombreuses sectes, dont certaines avaient, durant un court moment, bénéficié d’un préjugé plutôt favorable de la part du régime74. Le rapport de Deribas annonce la « liquidation » ou le « contrôle » d’une centaine de groupuscules d’intellectuels et d’étudiants, mais aussi d’ouvriers « oppositionnels », aux étiquettes imagées... ou fantaisistes, dont malheureusement, en l’état actuel de la documentation, on ne peut guère savoir jusqu’à quel point elles étaient sorties de l’imagination des cadres tchékistes, soucieux de « gonfler leur tableau de chasse » : le « Vrai parti clandestin des communistes » (Istinnaja podpol´naja partija kommunistov) de la ville de Eletz, province d’Orel (12 personnes arrêtées) ; les « Argonautes », « cercle clandestin d’étudiants de Simferopol, aux tendances mystiques » (6 personnes arrêtées) ; le « Cercle de Briansk des ouvriers et des paysans victimes des ennemis de la classe ouvrière » (Brjanskij kružok imeni rabočih i krest´jan, pavših ot vragov rabočego klassa) -- 6 membres ; le « Parti des vrais communistes rouges » (Partija istinnykh krasnyh kommunistov), de la ville de Saratov (15 membres), etc.75. Selon T. Deribas, la grande affaire de l’année 1924 avait été le démantèlement de deux grandes organisations de « Gardes blancs » en Crimée et dans l’Extrême-Orient soviétique (plus de 500 arrestations, 132 exécutions pour la seule « affaire de Crimée »)76.
55 Le Département secret portait, par ailleurs, au crédit de ses agents la surveillance régulière de centaines d’administrations, d’établissements d’enseignement supérieur et de recherche, d’usines. Dans son rapport d’activité, le Département secret annonçait le fichage de près de 100 000 personnes (exactement 99 680 individus « na učete »77). Malheureusement, le tableau du nombre des individus fichés par régions et villes principales est incomplet. Il en ressort néanmoins clairement que plus on s’éloignait du centre, plus le nombre des individus fichés dans des régions pourtant réputées les plus hostiles au pouvoir soviétique, telles que l’Asie Centrale, la Sibérie, l’Extrême-Orient, la
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Transcaucasie, diminuait. Tandis qu’à Moscou, le nombre des individus fichés par l’OGPU était de 19 364, dans la région Ouest de 6 373, il n’était que de 2 121 en Sibérie, de 1 181 pour l’ensemble de la région Sud-Est, de 660 en Asie Centrale, de 674 dans l’Extrême-Orient soviétique, de 227 en Transcaucasie ! Selon T. Deribas, le fichage des ennemis du régime restait très insuffisant et aléatoire, notamment dans les campagnes et sur l’ensemble des régions dépendant du Département oriental. Le chef du Département secret évaluait à « deux millions environ » le nombre des « éléments hostiles », regroupés en particulier dans les « innombrables sectes et conseils de paroisse, dirigés par des monarchistes patentés et des cléricaux », qui devraient faire l’objet d’un fichage précis. « Ces masses d’individus constituent aujourd’hui un conglomérat ennemi anonyme, écrivait-il. Ce n’est qu’à l’issue d’un long et minutieux travail de surveillance que nous parviendrons à identifier dans cette masse des Ivanov, des Petrov, etc. »78
56 Le Département spécial (Osobyj otdel), fort de quelque 2 100 agents (dont environ 700 émargeant aux fonds secrets), avait pour mission de « rendre compte de l’état d’esprit et des humeurs politiques des recrues », de « lutter contre la spéculation économique parmi les fournisseurs de l’Armée rouge » et de « démasquer toutes les formes de contre-révolution à l’armée, notamment parmi les officiers et les specy militaires »79. Durant l’année 1924, l’une des principales préoccupations des agents du Département spécial semble avoir été de surveiller les « humeurs paysannes » des recrues appelées à servir dans le cadre du nouveau système de « divisions territoriales » récemment mis en place. La lecture du courrier reçu et envoyé par les recrues occupait un grand nombre d’agents du Département spécial, de même que la surveillance des prétendus « groupes de recrues originaires de la même région » (zemljačeskie grupirovki) soupçonnés « d’opposer un front uni face aux propagandistes et au commandement »80. Tous les cas de suicide de soldats ou d’officiers étaient également systématiquement rapportés et analysés. D’une manière générale, les rapports des Départements spéciaux confirment ce que l’on sait, par ailleurs, des grands thèmes de discussion « politique » dans les campagnes au milieu des années 1920 : vive opposition à la ville et au « pouvoir des ouvriers privilégiés » ; fort mécontentement vis-à-vis des impôts, de l’arbitraire, de la corruption et de la violence des comportements quotidiens des fonctionnaires soviétiques de tout niveau vis-à-vis de leurs administrés ; demandes, de plus en plus fréquentes, d’une reconnaissance de droits politiques pour les paysans, par le biais de la légalisation des « unions paysannes »81.
57 Avec ses quelque 600 fonctionnaires appointés au budget (dont 280 émargeant aux fonds secrets), ses 6 300 « résidents » et ses 26 000 informateurs occasionnels, le Département de l’information avait pour tâche de collecter une masse d’informations sur la situation dans le pays. Cette information était, in fine, synthétisée sous forme de svodki et d’obzory centralisés, rédigés par une trentaine de rédacteurs (referenty) travaillant dans les organes centraux du département à Moscou, puis envoyés (à un rythme quotidien pour les svodki les plus importantes), sous le sceau de la plus haute confidentialité, à une trentaine des plus hauts responsables politiques du pays82. En 1924, le travail du Département de l’information fut soumis à de sévères critiques de la part des principaux dirigeants de l’OGPU : Feliks Dzeržinskij se plaignait, dans une lettre à Vjačeslav Menžinskij, de ce que les svodki donnaient « un tableau partial -- entièrement noir -- de la situation, sans mise en perspective ni description du rôle réel de l’OGPU »83. Plus circonstanciées et détaillées étaient les critiques de G. Jagoda, dans la circulaire qu’il adressait, le 23 février 1924, à tous les chefs des Gubotdely de l’OGPU.
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Relevant que les responsables provinciaux chargés du secteur de l’information « n’avaient pas rempli, au cours des deux dernières années, les tâches qui leur avaient été assignées », Jagoda expliquait que les agents chargés de collecter l’information n’étaient pas parvenus à « pénétrer dans les campagnes ». La quasi-totalité des canaux d’information de l’OGPU « étant concentrés dans les villes », la collecte de l’information sur ce qui se passait au-delà du chef-lieu de district reposait sur des « sources bureaucratiques » qui fournissaient des données « semi-ouvertes » (poluglasnye) émanant des canaux administratifs habituels (police, comités exécutifs de soviets, comités locaux du parti communiste). Ces données « étaient moulinées d’une svodka à l’autre, sous des variantes légèrement différentes ». De surcroît, les caractérisations données par les agents des Départements de l’information sur la situation locale restaient beaucoup trop vagues. On ne pouvait se contenter, écrivait Jagoda, de dire que « l’humeur de la population était satisfaisante ou insatisfaisante, bonne, moyenne ou abattue ». À cette « information bureaucratique » (kazennoe osvedomlenie) obtenue sans véritable travail d’enquête, le dirigeant de l’OGPU opposait l’« information opérationnelle » (operativnaja informacija) qu’il fallait aller chercher sur le terrain84.
58 Tout au long de l’année 1924, plusieurs autres circulaires signées par de hauts responsables de l’OGPU (G. Jagoda, V. Menžinskij ou G. Prokof´ev, le chef du Département de l’information) pointèrent d’autres « graves défauts » des svodki provinciales : « beaucoup trop de lieux communs et de phrases au contenu pâle et fumeux », « absence totale d’éclairage » sur des questions jugées importantes telles que « les tensions inter-villageoises », « la caractérisation économique du koulak », « les conflits ethniques dans les régions où coexistent plusieurs nationalités », etc.85.
59 Travaillant, semble-t-il, en étroite collaboration avec le Département de l’information86, le Département du contrôle politique (environ un millier d’agents, dont la majorité émargeant aux fonds secrets87) était chargé de la censure de l’ensemble de la production imprimée, filmographique et théâtrale, ainsi que du contrôle du courrier (perljustracija). Les trois quarts des agents de ce département travaillaient à Moscou et à Leningrad. Les normes de travail des zakleiščiki (chargés de recoller les enveloppes) et des kontrolery (censeurs) semblent avoir été très élevées (250 lettres par jour ou 2 500 télégrammes), les salaires parmi les plus bas de la « grille indiciaire » de l’OGPU. Aussi, Nikolaj Surta, le chef du Département du contrôle politique, se plaignait-il dans son rapport de ne pouvoir garder son personnel plus de quelques mois d’affilée : « Nous le reconnaissons nous-mêmes : nous devons lâcher les gens au bout d’un an de ce travail. Ils “pourrissent sur pied”. »88
60 Le Département du contre-espionnage (KRO), dirigé par A. Artuzov, avait pour champ d’activité la lutte contre « les organisations militaires contre-révolutionnaires » et « toutes les formes d’espionnage » (excepté « l’espionnage économique », relevant de la Direction économique de l’OGPU), la surveillance des missions diplomatiques étrangères et de l’ensemble des étrangers sur le territoire de l’URSS, mais aussi du personnel soviétique des commissariats du peuple aux Affaires étrangères et au Commerce extérieur, le fichage des ex-officiers tsaristes, des rapatriés, ex-prisonniers de guerre et autres individus « entretenant une correspondance ou des contacts personnels avec l’étranger »89. Dans le long rapport d’Artuzov, adressé le 30 novembre 1924 à Dzeržinskij, l’URSS apparaît comme une forteresse assiégée par une véritable armée d’espions envoyée par les pays du « cordon sanitaire » (Pologne, Roumanie, Finlande, Pays Baltes), lesquels, selon le chef du KRO, servaient de base arrière pour les
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services secrets britanniques, allemands, français et scandinaves. Naturellement, tout l’argumentaire d’Artuzov, dans la perspective d’une défense des crédits alloués au département, était construit sur un « gonflement » des « succès » du KRO (« Les états- majors des armées des Puissances étrangères reçoivent à 95 % des informations concernant l’Armée rouge préparées par nous... »)90, sur la disproportion entre les dépenses engagées par les services d’espionnage étrangers travaillant en URSS (évaluées à plus de 2,4 millions de roubles) et les crédits alloués au KRO (moins de 700 000 roubles)91, sur l’existence d’une réelle menace terroriste, provenant de « groupes surgis spontanément, composés, pour l’essentiel, de cadres aigris d’ex- » (ozloblennyh kadrov byvših ljudei)92. Faisant état des 31 tchékistes du département « tués en mission » dans le seul secteur « Sud-Est » (sur les frontières de la Turquie et de la Perse), Artuzov concluait son rapport en réclamant une forte augmentation des effectifs et des crédits du département pour faire face à « l’intensification de la contre- révolution mondiale contre l’unique pays socialiste du monde. »
61 Assurément, les sources qui ont servi de base à cette étude laissent d’importantes zones d’ombre : elles ne disent presque rien sur le personnel de la police politique. On apprend seulement, au détour d’un tableau, malheureusement incomplet93, qu’à peine plus d’un tiers des agents titulaires (hors agents rétribués sur fonds secrets) étaient d’origine ouvrière ou paysanne. Que deux tchékistes sur trois fussent d’une origine sociale de « seconde classe » (employés, intellectuels ou « autres ») était un facteur qui, dans une configuration politique autre que la NEP, pouvait fragiliser ce milieu « mal né », composé d’éléments très hétérogènes94, présentant, de surcroît, comme le rappelait le chef de la GPU d’Ukraine, tous les signes d’une « usure physique et mentale ».
62 Par ailleurs, les rapports, de qualité inégale, préparés en décembre 1924 par les chefs de département pour Dzeržinskij, posent parfois plus de questions -- sur la réalité des actions entreprises et des résultats obtenus -- qu’ils n’apportent d’éléments de réponse probants.
63 Le tableau d’une institution « en veilleuse », toujours présente mais sur la défensive, profondément frustrée par la situation politique du moment, incertaine de son avenir, se dégage néanmoins avec force. Il n’est guère de chef de département qui ne se plaigne des limitations, des contrôles, des pressions qui entravent quotidiennement l’action de ses services. Ainsi le chef du Département secret explique, en défendant le bilan de ses agents : « Ce n’est pas ma faute si je n’ai pas reçu l’autorisation de mettre directement en prison tous les membres des organisations contre-révolutionnaires que j’ai démantelées. Il ne se passe pas une semaine, pas un jour même que je ne sois bombardé de pressions (sic) me demandant de libérer les inspirateurs idéologiques de ces organisations contre-révolutionnaires, tantôt sous prétexte qu’ils ont des cors aux pieds, tantôt sous prétexte qu’ils ont une insuffisance respiratoire, tantôt parce que leur grand-père aurait rendu, par le passé, quelque service à mon parti. » 95
64 Dans les années qui ont suivi la « période héroïque » de la guerre civile et du communisme de guerre, il n’y a eu aucune redéfinition du rôle et de la place de la police politique dans la nouvelle conjoncture politique du moment. En même temps, les moyens -- illimités durant les premières années du régime -- attribués à l’OGPU ont chuté de manière spectaculaire. Ainsi s’est créée une situation fausse, génératrice de malentendus, de frustrations, de malaise. Quelle place l’institution pouvait-elle avoir
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dans le nouvel État ? Synthétisant les besoins en hommes et en moyens de l’OGPU, le responsable des services financiers, L. Berenzon, ne trouve, pour justifier son budget, d’autre point de repère, d’autre élément de comparaison... que les statistiques de l’Okhrana tsariste en 1912 ! Si le puissant Empire russe, doté, sur le plan international, d’un vaste réseau d’alliés, avait besoin d’une police politique forte de 13 407 agents pour « défendre l’État », n’était-il pas légitime d’accorder à l’OGPU 21 100 postes d’agents pour « défendre l’État » du seul et unique pays socialiste du monde, menacé de toutes parts d’ennemis extérieurs et intérieurs ?96
65 Seule la « révolution par le haut », la relance de la guerre de classes et du projet volontariste de transformation de la société lèveront, à la fin des années 1920, l’hypothèque, libéreront les « potentialités » de ce lieu d’arbitraire absolu, « extraordinaire », de liberté totale de l’action qu’était l’institution créée par Lenin et Dzeržinskij le 7 décembre 1917.
66 CNRS
67 Institut d’histoire du temps présent
68 École normale supérieure de Cachan
69 61, avenue du Président-Wilson
70 F-94235 Cachan Cedex
71 e-mail : [email protected]
NOTES
1. Rossijskij Gosudarstvennyj Arhiv Social´no-Političeskoj Istorii (RGASPI), f. 76, op. 3, d. 306 et 307. 2. G. Leggett, The Cheka : Lenin’s political police, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1981. 3. M. Lacis, « Tov. Dzeržisnkij i VČK » (Le cam. Dzeržinskij et la VČK), Proletarskaja Revoljucija, 9, 1926, p. 81. 4. Selon les termes de L. I. Berenzon, chef du Département financier de l’OGPU, dans son rapport à Dzeržinskij, RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, l. 195. 5. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 305, ll.36-37. 6. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 307, ll. 217-218 ; d. 305, l. 36. 7. Projet de note au Politbjuro, adressé par F. Dzeržinskij à G. Jagoda, RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 305, l. 56. 8. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 305, l. 50. Il apparaît qu’entre le 1 er octobre 1923 et le 1 er octobre 1924, les effectifs civils de l’OGPU avaient déjà été fortement réduits, passant de 34 452 à 26 000 agents (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 307, ll. 217-218). En réalité, comme il ressort du tableau détaillé préparé par L. I. Berenzon, le responsable du Département financier de l’OGPU, le nombre effectif des agents de l’OGPU était inférieur au nombre des postes budgétaires officiellement attribués, ceci afin de permettre le paiement de
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« compléments de salaires » et de primes (ibid., ll. 218-219) : les 26 000 postes budgétaires correspondaient en réalité à 21 100 agents civils effectifs. Par ailleurs, les responsables de l’OGPU entretenaient, dans les données statistiques qu’ils produisaient, une ambiguïté, sans doute volontaire, concernant les agents rémunérés sur les fonds secrets, qui étaient tantôt comptés, tantôt omis des statistiques globales, en fonction de l’argumentaire développé. Ainsi le chiffre cité par Dzeržinskij dans sa note au Politbjuro -- 21 100 agents civils -- ne prenait-il pas en compte les agents rémunérés sur fonds secrets. Concernant les effectifs militaires de l’OGPU, les données citées par Dzeržinskij sont aussi sujettes à caution : ainsi les 126 300 hommes des troupes de l’OGPU, début 1922, comprenaient les troupes territoriales, les troupes d’escorte et les gardes-frontières, alors que le chiffre de 13 000 hommes, pour la fin de 1924, cité par Dzeržinskij ne prenait en compte que les seules troupes territoriales. Sur les effectifs civils et militaires de l’OGPU de 1921 à 1924, cf. : RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 307, ll. 4-15. La diminution des effectifs globaux de l’OGPU apparaît néanmoins très spectaculaire au cours de ces années, avec toutefois des variations significatives : le point de basculement n’est pas l’année 1921 (durant laquelle les effectifs civils de l’OGPU restent stables, à leur plus haut niveau -- 90 000 hommes), mais le second semestre de l’année 1922 (le nombre des agents civils de l’OGPU passe de 76 000 en avril 1922 à 45 000 au 1er janvier 1923). On constate une évolution parallèle en ce qui concerne les effectifs militaires (119 400 au 1er juillet 1922, 69 500 fin 1922). Ces données confirment ce que nombre de recherches récentes sur la période ont montré -- à savoir la laborieuse mise en place de la NEP et la lente retombée des tensions entre le régime et la société, perceptible principalement à partir de l’été, voire de l’automne 1922. Cf. : Viktor P. Danilov, Alexis Berelowitch, eds, Sovetskaja derevnja glazami VČK-OGPU-NKVD. Dokumenty i materialy (La campagne soviétique à travers les yeux de la VČK-OGPU- NKVD. Documents et matériaux), T. 1 : 1918-1922, Moscou, Rosspen, 1998. 9. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 305, ll. 56-57. 10. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 473. 11. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 305, l. 53. 12. Cf. le recueil de correspondances publié sous la direction d’Aleksandr Kvašonkin et d’Oleg Hlevnjuk : A. Kvašonkin, O. Hlevnjuk et al., eds, Bol´ševistskoe rukovodstvo. Perepiska 1912-1927 (Les dirigeants bolcheviks. Correspondance 1912-1927), Moscou, Rosspen, 1996. 13. G. Leggett, op. cit, pp.116-120. 14. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 345, l. 2. Cette lettre a été publiée in Voprosy istorii KPSS, 11, 1988, pp. 42-43. 15. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 362, ll. 1-6. 16. Pour l’ensemble de l’URSS, selon les statistiques centralisées de la police politique, 2 550 personnes avaient été condamnées à mort durant l’année 1924. Ce chiffre figure dans le rapport sur le nombre de personnes jugées par les juridictions spéciales de la police politique entre 1921 et 1953, envoyé par le ministre de l’Intérieur, S. N. Kruglov, à Malenkov et Hruščev le 5 janvier 1954 (V. P. Popov, « Gosudarstvennyj terror v Sovetskoj Rossii, 1923-1953 » (La terreur d’État en Russie Soviétique, 1923-1953), Otečestvennye arhivy, 2, 1992, p. 28). Considérant les recherches récentes sur le soulèvement géorgien d’août-septembre 1924 (Markus Wehner, « Le soulèvement géorgien de 1924 et la réaction des bolcheviks », Communisme, 42-43-44,
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1995, pp. 155-170), qui font état de plus de 12 000 exécutions sommaires ordonnées à la suite de cet épisode par Sergo Ordžonikidze, premier secrétaire du Comité du parti bolchevik de Transcaucasie, et Lavrentij Berija, chef de la GPU de Transcaucasie, il apparaît que le chiffre de 2 550 exécutions pour l’année 1924 ne reflète qu’une partie de la répression, sans doute celle dûment rapportée aux instances centrales, approuvée par elles et archivée pour les statistiques centralisées de la police politique. 17. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 362, l. 4. Krylenko relevait que sur 14 104 personnes condamnées par l’OGPU de janvier 1924 à avril 1925, un quart environ (3 181) l’avaient été pour leur seule appartenance à une « classe socialement étrangère », 4 097 pour « activités contre-révolutionnaires » (sans autre précision), 3 423 pour banditisme. En outre, 743 individus avaient été condamnés pour faux-monnayage, 715 pour « passage illégal de la frontière d’État », 627 pour « contrebande ». Dans sa longue note au Politbjuro, N. Krylenko donnait des exemples éclairants sur le déroulement des « sessions » des « Collèges spéciaux » de l’OGPU : en moyenne, chaque « session » examinait, en l’espace de quelques heures, entre 100 et 300 dossiers. La dernière en date, avant la rédaction de la note de Krylenko, celle du 27 avril 1925, avait ainsi examiné 110 affaires en quatre heures : 16 personnes avaient été condamnées à la peine capitale, 51 à une peine de camp, 29 à une peine d’exil intérieur, 6 à une peine d’emprisonnement, 1 à l’exil hors d’URSS ; 7 affaires avaient été transmises au Parquet ou suspendues (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 362, ll. 4-5). 18. Texte complet du décret du 24 mars 1924 in A. I. Kokurin, N. V. Petrov, Lubianka, 1917-1960. Spravočnik (La Lubianka, 1917-1960. Guide), Moscou, Iz. Meždunarodnyj Fond Demokratija, 1997, pp. 179-181. 19. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 362, l. 7. La lettre de F. Dzeržinskij à L. Mehlis a été publiée in A. Kvašonkin, O. Hlevnjuk et al., eds, op. cit., pp. 302-305. 20. Cf. la note envoyée par M. Litvinov au Politbjuro le 28 janvier 1925, citée par F. Dzeržin-skij dans sa lettre du 8 février 1925 à M. Trilisser, RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 349, l. 1. Cette lettre a été publiée in A. Kvašonkin, O. Hlevnjuk et al., eds, op. cit., pp. 299-300. Sur les statistiques des étrangers arrêtés par l’OGPU en 1924, RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, l. 15. 21. Ibid. 22. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 305, l. 62. On rapprochera cette lettre d’une autre, écrite peu après par Dzeržinskij à Zinov´ev : « L’OGPU est dans une situation très difficile. Nos collaborateurs sont exténués, certains jusqu’à un état d’hystérie. Pendant ce temps, au sommet du parti, un certain nombre de dirigeants mettent en doute l’utilité de l’OGPU en général (Buharin, Sokol´nikov, Kalinin, tout le Narkomindel... » (RGASPI, f. 76, op.2, d. 51, l. 8). 23. Pour les dirigeants de l’OGPU, F. Dzeržinskij en tête, la disparition de Lenin était susceptible d’entraîner un certain nombre de « phénomènes négatifs » (depuis une envolée des « rumeurs contre-révolutionnaires » jusqu’à des soulèvements locaux, en particulier dans les vastes espaces mal contrôlés des campagnes, et dans les régions frontalières). Cf. les télégrammes et les dépêches spéciales envoyés par la direction de l’OGPU aux Gubotdely de la GPU fin janvier-début février 1924 in V. P. Danilov, A. Berelowitch, eds, op. cit., pp. 28-29. 24. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 338. 25. Cf. le rapport d’Artuzov, RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, ll. 3-16.
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26. En mai 1924, les services de la GPU de Crimée lancèrent une vaste opération qui se solda par l’arrestation de plusieurs centaines de « contre-révolutionnaires » (132 furent exécutés). Selon la GPU, la plupart de ces « contre-révolutionnaires » étaient des grands propriétaires tatares, qui avaient conservé une position privilégiée « grâce aux spécificités de la politique nationale visant à favoriser les indigènes » et d’anciens officiers de l’Armée blanche (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, ll. 6-7). Cette affaire, mentionnée dans plusieurs des rapports remis à Dzer-žinskij en décembre 1924, fut largement exploitée par la direction de l’OGPU comme preuve de « l’activisme des koulaks et des ex-propriétaires fonciers » (contre ces derniers, au nombre d’environ 80 000 selon les statistiques de la police politique, les autorités locales lancèrent, fin 1924- début 1925, des opérations d’expulsion). 27. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 338, ll. 44-45. Quelques semaines avant cette réunion, G. Jagoda avait envoyé, le 24 juillet 1924, une lettre circulaire aux Gubotdely de la GPU des provinces frappées par les mauvaises récoltes. Il y développe une argumentation analogue sur les « processus négatifs en cours dans les campagnes », qui, selon lui, « sont sorties de la passivité politique consécutive à la famine de 1921. Aujourd’hui, la conscience politique des paysans s’est considérablement développée, ce dont témoigne le mouvement grandissant en faveur des “unions paysannes”. » (V. P. Danilov, A. Berelowitch, eds, op. cit., p. 36). 28. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, ll.4-5. 29. Ibid., ll.5-6. 30. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 87, d. 199, ll.14-15. 31. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, l. 171. 32. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 307, l. 218. 33. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, l. 141. 34. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 245, ll. 5-6. Parmi d’autres documents sur le même thème, cf. la lettre adressée par Iosif Unšliht, un des principaux adjoints de Dzeržinskij, à Lenin, le 25 mai 1922, sur « la dégénérescence » des tchékistes laissés sans salaire et sans la possibilité de vivre du butin prélevé sur « l’ennemi de classe » (RGASPI, f. 5, op. 1, d. 2558, l. 7). 35. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 307, l. 88. 36. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 307, ll.230-235 ; d. 306, l. 222. 37. Le salaire moyen des fonctionnaires de l’OGPU (59 roubles) était nettement supérieur à celui des fonctionnaires d’autres ministères (Santé : 33 roubles ; Instruction publique : 30 roubles ; Commerce intérieur : 40 roubles ; Justice : 47 roubles). Seuls les fonctionnaires d’institutions employant un grand nombre de spécialistes de haut niveau comme le Conseil suprême de l’économie nationale (salaire moyen : 76 roubles) ou le commissariat du peuple aux Affaires étrangères (84 roubles) percevaient, en moyenne, un salaire supérieur. La principale revendication des tchékistes restait, cependant, l’alignement de leurs salaires sur ceux des militaires. Sur ces questions, RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 307, ll. 235-237. 38. RGASPI, f. 76, op.3, d. 306, l. 145. 39. « Faute de moyens, les fonctionnaires du Gubotdel de Vologda se rendent régulièrement en mission dans les districts à pied, parfois sur des distances de 250 kms,
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avec en poche 5 ou 10 roubles pour couvrir leurs dépenses de toute une semaine. » (RGASPI, f. 76, op.3, d. 307, l. 23). 40. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, ll. 223-224. 41. Ibid., l. 195. 42. Soit 13 588 hommes des troupes territoriales et 10 500 hommes des troupes d’escorte, RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 307, l. 219 ; d. 306, ll.200-201. 43. Selon la caractérisation de G. Blagonravov, chef du Département des transports de l’OGPU (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 2, d. 307, l. 158). 44. N. Werth, G. Moullec, Rapports secrets soviétiques. La société russe dans les documents confidentiels, 1921-1991, Paris, Gallimard, 1995 ; V. P. Danilov, A. Berelowitch, eds, op. cit. 45. Sur les structures de la Tchéka, l’étude la plus complète reste celle de G. Leggett, op. cit. 46. A. I. Kokurin, N. V. Petrov, op. cit. 47. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 307, l. 224. Sur ce nombre, 700 étaient affectés au Département spécial, 488 au Département du contrôle politique, 462 au Département des transports, 280 au Département de l’information, 768 au Département opérationnel, 720 au Département secret (ibid.) 48. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, l. 21. Le rapport du Département de l’information donne la répartition la plus détaillée de ses rezidenty : 1 069 pour Moscou (221 pour la ville) et sa région ; 842 pour Leningrad et sa région ; 849 pour la région Volga, 820 pour la région Sud-Est, 624 pour l’Ukraine, 616 pour la Sibérie, etc. (ibid., l. 22). 49. RGASPI, f. 76, op.3, d. 306, l. 101. 50. Le rapport du Département des transports de l’OGPU signalait que 94 % de ses 12 580 informateurs ne recevaient pas la moindre rétribution, faute de budget. Il précisait aussi que, sur ce nombre, 1 714 étaient « très utiles », 4 624 « utiles » et 6 242 « inutiles » (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 307, ll. 49, 156-157). 51. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 307, l. 49 (Transports) ; ibid., l. 29 (Information). Le Département de l’information fournit, avec un grand luxe de détails, une répartition de ses informateurs région par région. La liste, malheureusement incomplète, pose, en l’état actuel de nos connaissances, davantage de questions qu’elle ne fournit de réponses : Odessa (4 821 indicateurs) était-elle réellement la ville de très loin la plus prolixe en indicateurs travaillant pour le Département de l’information ? Selon ce rapport, Moscou aurait compté 2 875 indicateurs (et 221 rezidenty), Kharkov 788, Leningrad 532, Saratov 323 (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 307, l. 29). 52. V. P. Danilov, A. Berelowitch, eds, op. cit., pp.30-34. 53. Les Représentations plénipotentiaires de 1re catégorie (Moscou, Leningrad, Rostov- sur-le-Don, Kharkov) avaient théoriquement droit à 250 agents civils ; celles de 2e catégorie (Omsk, Tachkent, Saratov, Tbilissi) à 120 agents ; celles de 3e catégorie (Simferopol, Sverdlovsk, Minsk) à 80 agents. 54. Ces unités étaient sur le point d’être remplacées par les OKRO (Okružnye otdely) et les OBLO (Oblastnye otdely). 55. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 307, ll. 217-218. Cinq Gubotdely classés en 1 re catégorie avaient, en moyenne, 110 agents ; 22, classés en 2e catégorie, en avaient, en moyenne,
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60 ; 20, classés en 3e catégorie -- 48 ; 23, classés en 4e catégorie -- 26 ; 11, classés en 5e catégorie -- 15. 56. Le nombre des agents civils affectés aux Départements de district était de 3 120 pour l’ensemble de l’URSS (contre 6 209 agents affectés aux Gubotdely et aux Polnomočnye pred-stavitel´stva), RGASPI, f. 76, op.3, d. 306, l. 217. 57. Le tableau le plus synthétique de l’ensemble des dossiers figure dans le rapport de L. Berenzon, RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 307, ll. 219 sq. 58. Sans compter les agents rémunérés sur les « fonds secrets ». 59. Il faut rajouter à ce chiffre les 1 337 hommes des troupes territoriales stationnées à Leningrad (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, l. 200). 60. Il faut rajouter à ce chiffre 1 881 hommes des troupes territoriales basées à Kharkov (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, l. 200). 61. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 307, ll. 166-167. De manière significative, le rapport du Département de l’information faisait état d’un nombre négligeable de rezidenty et d’osvedomiteli en Asie Centrale (132 rezidenty), en Kirghizie (128 rezidenty), en Crimée (43 rezidenty), ibid., l. 21. 62. Soit 6 638 agents, 1 540 élèves des écoles de l’OGPU rattachées à ce département et 462 agents secrets « titulaires » -- au total 8 640 personnes. 63. La « Milice ouvrière et paysanne des chemins de fer soviétiques » fut créée en février 1919 dans le but d’assurer le maintien de l’ordre public dans ces lieux propices aux trafics et de petite délinquance qu’étaient les gares, les trains, le réseau ferré en général. Dès sa création, la Milice des chemins de fer entra en conflit avec le Département des transports de la Tchéka, du fait de l’imprécision des compétences respectives des deux organismes. 64. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 346, ll. 4-6 ; d. 306, l. 77. Voici ce qu’écrivait, le 7 novembre 1924, le responsable de l’OGPU pour la ligne Moscou-Koursk : « Les parties des provinces de Kiev, Tchernigov, Briansk et Kharkov qui jouxtent la ligne ferroviaire dont j’ai la garde sont depuis longtemps infestées de bandits. [...] En juin 1923, devant la recrudescence des attaques, a été formée une unité spéciale de réserve, qui a efficacement protégé les trains contre les attaques de bandits. En février 1924 [...] cette unité a été dissoute. Depuis, les bandits ont repris de plus belle leurs attaques contre les trains, perturbant gravement le trafic ferroviaire. Ainsi, si l’on exclut les innombrables cas de sabotage de voies n’ayant pas eu de conséquences graves, on a noté récemment deux attaques avec déraillement, destruction de matériel et pertes humaines : le 13 août dernier, attaque du train de voyageurs n° 4 en provenance de Moscou ; le 24 septembre, attaque du train de voyageurs n° 8 en provenance d’Odessa. » (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 87, d. 180, ll. 29-30). 65. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, ll. 52-53 ; d. 307, ll. 158-159. Le rapport de Blagonravov donne une intéressante sélection des affaires les plus importantes découvertes par le Département des transports de l’OGPU. On notera le nombre relativement important d’affaires de faux-monnayage, les faux billets étant, le plus souvent, diffusés par les cheminots (ibid., ll.160-164). 66. Cf. les nombreuses notes et propositions de Dzeržinskij sur cette question en 1923-1924 (lettre de Dzeržinskij à Rudzutak, 16 août 1923, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 84, d. 587 ; note de Dzer-žinskij au Politbjuro du 29 janvier 1924, demandant qu’en raison de la forte recrudescence du banditisme, l’OGPU puisse faire passer par ses organes extra-
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judiciaires non seulement les bandits « pris les armes à la main », mais aussi tous les individus faisant partie de « bandes criminelles », RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 294, l. 1 ; lettre de Dzeržinskij à Stalin du 9 juillet 1924, ibid., d. 338, ll. 1-10). 67. On trouvera un tableau très détaillé du banditisme en URSS en 1925 dans le rapport du chef du Département de l’information de l’OGPU, in V. P. Danilov, A. Berelowitch, eds, op. cit., pp. 338-344. 68. Pour une étude détaillée du banditisme soviétique, cf. : Nicolas Werth, « Les rebelles primitifs au pays du socialisme : bandits et banditisme en URSS de 1918 au milieu des années 1950 » (à paraître). 69. RGASPI, f. 76, op.3, d. 294, l. 8. 70. V. P. Danilov, A. Berelowitch, eds, op. cit., p. 339. 71. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 346, ll. 1-3 ; d. 306, l. 221. Sur le « front de lutte contre le banditisme », 132 policiers, 269 fonctionnaires des soviets et du parti communiste, 221 soldats et officiers de l’Armée rouge avaient été tués en1924. 72. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, ll. 152-168. 73. Cf. note 17. 74. Sur ces questions, cf. le rapport de Tučkov, chef de la 6 e section du Département secret de l’OGPU, à Menžinskij, « Sur le travail effectué parmi les cléricaux et les sectes au cours de l’année 1923 », N. Werth, G. Moullec, op. cit., pp. 281-288. 75. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, ll.164-165. 76. Sur ces affaires, on dispose de deux rapports émanant l’un du Département secret, l’autre du Département de contre-espionnage. Les versions et les chiffres donnés dans ces deux rapports se recoupent, pour l’essentiel (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, ll. 3-16 et ll. 152-168). 77. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, l. 156. 78. Ibid., ll. 156-157. 79. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 307, ll. 33-34. 80. Ibid., l. 37. 81. Sur ces questions, cf. : V. P. Danilov, A. Berelowitch, eds, op. cit. ; A. Kurenišev, Krest ´janstvo i ego organizacii v pervoj tret´i XX veka (La payannerie et ses organisations dans le premier tiers du xxe siècle), Moscou, Iz. Gosudarstvennogo Istoričeskogo Muzeja, 2000. 82. Sur les svodki et les obzory de la police politique, aujourd’hui largement exploités par les historiens travaillant sur l’URSS des années 1920 et 1930, cf. : N. Werth, « Une source inédite : les svodki de la Tchéka-OGPU », Revue des Études slaves, 66, 1, 1994, pp. 17-27 ; V. P. Danilov, A. Berelowitch, « Les documents des VČK-OGPU-NKVD sur la campagne soviétique, 1918-1937 », Cahiers du Monde russe, 35, 3, 1994, pp. 633-682. L’étude la plus complète sur la surveillance de la population soviétique au cours des premières années du régime est celle de Vladlen Izmozik, Glaza i uši režima : Gosudarstvennyj političeskij kontrol´ za naseleniem sovetskoi Rossii v 1918-1928 godah (Les yeux et les oreilles du régime : le contrôle politique d’État sur la population de Russie Soviétique, 1918-1928), Saint-Pétersbourg, 1995. Cf. également, pour une approche comparative des pratiques de surveillance de la population, dans un contexte « pan-européen », et à partir de la Première Guerre mondiale, P. Holquist,
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« Information is the alpha and omega of our work : Bolshevik surveillance in its pan- European context », The Journal of Modern History, 69, September 1997, pp. 415-450. 83. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 345, l. 1. Cette lettre a été publiée in A. Kvašonkin, O. Hlevnjuk et al., eds, op. cit, pp. 297-298. 84. V. P. Danilov, A. Berelowitch, eds, op. cit, pp. 30-31. 85. Cf. les circulaires internes des 7, 9 et 23 juillet 1924, citées in V. P. Danilov, A. Berelowitch, eds, op. cit., pp. 34-36. 86. De nombreuses compilations d’extraits de lettres saisies (ou simplement lues) par les agents du Département du contrôle politique figurent dans les svodki du Département de l’information. Cf. : « Voices from the twenties : Private correspondence intercepted by the OGPU », Russian Review, 55, 1996, pp. 287-308 ; I. Davidian, V. Kozlov, « Častnye pis´ma epohi graždanskoj vojny » (Lettres privées du temps de la guerre civile), in V. Kozlov, ed., Neizvestnaja Rossija (La Russie inconnue), Moscou, 1992, vol. 2, pp. 200-250. 87. On rapprochera ce chiffre des 49 censeurs travaillant, pour l’ensemble de l’Empire russe, en 1913, dans les « Cabinets noirs » chargés de la censure, et des 10 000 agents, civils et militaires, employés à contrôler le courrier en URSS en 1920 (P. Holquist, art. cit, p. 422). 88. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, l. 36. 89. Ibid., l. 3. 90. Ibid., l. 15. 91. Ibid., l. 20. 92. Ibid., ll. 9-10. Selon Artuzov, ces « groupes terroristes [...] présents dans presque toutes les grandes villes soviétiques » étaient composés de « jeunes officiers au chômage et d’étudiants exclus des universités ». Ces groupes isolés, donc « difficilement repérables », utilisaient divers moyens terroristes, « y compris des gaz ». Artuzov évoquait l’existence d’une organisation ramifiée de lycéens. « Les crédits qui nous sont alloués pour surveiller ces groupes terroristes sont incomparablement plus maigres que les sommes allouées par le gouvernement tsariste dans la lutte contre le terrorisme. Certes, il n’existe pas encore contre notre État d’organisation centralisée pareille à celle des SR contre le tsarisme, mais l’apparition de groupes terroristes isolés, sans liens entre eux, est d’autant plus dangereuse. » 93. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, l. 210. 94. Environ 50 % des tchékistes étaient membres du parti communiste. Parmi ces derniers, 94 % avaient adhéré depuis 1918. Les sources que nous avons consultées ne disent rien des parcours individuels et professionnels. La seule enquête un peu plus approfondie sur le personnel de la police politique est celle de juillet 1918, que nous avons exploitée dans notre article, « Qui étaient les premiers tchékistes ? », Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, 32, 4, octobre-décembre 1991, pp. 501-512. 95. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 306, l. 141. 96. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 307, l. 206.
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RÉSUMÉS
Résumé À partir de rapports internes présentés par les différents services de l’OGPU à Feliks Dzeržinskij à la fin de 1924, cet article analyse la structure de l’OGPU à un moment peu connu de l’histoire de la police politique. Durant le bref apogée de la NEP, la place et le rôle de la police politique dans le système soviétique font l’objet de vifs débats. Un certain nombre d’institutions (justice, finances, affaires étrangères) souhaitent limiter les moyens de l’OGPU. Quant aux tchékistes, ils font valoir la forte diminution, depuis 1921, de leurs moyens, et l’immensité des tâches auxquelles ils sont confrontés dans un environnement interne et externe hostile. Les rapports de l’OGPU présentés à l’occasion de la discussion du budget de la police politique fournissent un état détaillé des structures et des activités d’une institution sur la défensive, profondément frustrée par la situation politique du moment, incertaine de son avenir, après les années héroïques de la guerre civile et du « communisme de guerre ».
Abstract The OGPU in 1924: A close look at an institution in crisis. This article, which is based on internal reports prepared by the OGPU’s different departments for Feliks Dzerzhinskii in late 1924, focuses on the organizational structure of the OGPU at a specific and largely unknown period in the history of the Soviet political police. At the height of NEP, discussions about the status and functions of the political police in the Soviet system were raging. A number of “soft-line” administrations (justice, finance, foreign affairs) tried to cut the OGPU’s budget. Secret police officials, however, pointed at the sharp reductions that their budget had been undergoing since 1921 and stressed the immensity of their tasks in a hostile environment. OGPU reports written for the political police budget vote offer a precise and thorough picture of the organization and activities of the OGPU -- an institution deeply frustrated by the political situation of the time and uncertain about its future after the “heroic years” of the Civil War and War Communism.
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Dual subordination ? The political police and the party in the Urals region, 1918-1953.
James HARRIS
1 Who did the Soviet political police answer to ? Few existing studies of the Soviet “organs” (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, MGB, MVD) analyse in depth the significance of their structures and lines of subordination. This is particularly striking given that a substantial majority1 of political police officials worked in the regions, subordinated at the same time both to regional party committee, and to the central “organs” in Moscow. Many scholars have nevertheless worked from the assumption that the apparatus of the political police as a whole was a tool of the highest party leadership and of Stalin in particular.2 However, even some Cold War-era studies hesitated to accept such assumptions without qualification. In Smolensk under Soviet rule, Merle Fainsod pointed out that in the 1930s the regional party recruited most officials of the political police, and that the regional party secretary “directly handled problems involving [them].” To what extent did the local agents of the political police answer to the local party and not the centre ? Fainsod admitted that the documentary record could not provide an answer.3 Almost thirty years later, in his study of the Cheka, George Leggett examined the controversies over the relationship of the regional political police organs and regional Soviet and party authorities in the early years of the Soviet regime. Hampered, as was Fainsod, by the poverty of the sources, he nevertheless observed that the centre shrank from resolving the controversial matter of who was subordinate to whom.4
2 The following examination of the archives in Moscow and Sverdlovsk oblast’ shows that the relationship of the regional political police and regional party organisations could be both collaborative and antagonistic. In the decade and a half of Soviet power, it was more collaborative than perhaps the central leadership might have preferred. In the Urals region, the fact that the party apparatus appointed, paid and provided perks of employment to political police officials generally made them highly sympathetic to the local party.5 While the local Cheka/OGPU/NKVD officials responded loyally to
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directives of the central leadership, they also served and protected their local masters. At first, dual subordination involved few contradictions, but by the early 1930s the local and central agendas had diverged substantially. When this was discovered, in the course of the Great Terror, new measures were introduced to safeguard the independence of the NKVD. After 1937, antagonism, rather than collaboration, characterised the relationship of the regional political police and party organisations in the Urals region.
3 The close relationship between the political police and the oblast’ leadership deepened in the course of the 1920s. The local ChK/OGPU helped the party leaders fend off challenges from party “oppositions.” They helped local party leaders promote regional economic plans. When the five-year plan descended into crisis and the centre demanded complete and unquestioning fulfilment, the political police began to defend the regional party leaders from the pressures of the command-administrative order, in contradiction of the spirit and substance of directives from their superiors in Moscow. The local political police plenipotentiary was a central member of the emerging Obkom “family circle” or “clique.” His key function was to find scapegoats for problems of production, to find “wreckers” and “saboteurs” in order to evade investigation from the centre. When Moscow nevertheless uncovered these tactics in 1937, the vestiges of dual subordination were eliminated in favour of strict subordination to Moscow. The effect imposing an antagonistic political police on the local party organs was to destabilise politics in the regions, and to make terror a fact of everyday political life.
ChK/GPU and the local “oppositions”
4 In the Urals region, the relationship of the regional party leaders and the Cheka/OGPU tended from the outset to be mutually supportive. The regional party organs had responsibility for the selection of political police officials and they paid their wages. These officials were, in turn, inclined to protect party officials from challenges to their rule. But it was in the course of defending party leaders in local power struggles (“skloki”) that the relationship was initially forged.
5 On the eve of the February Revolution, there were approximately 24,000 members in the Bolshevik underground. By the end of the Civil War, over 700,000 new members had joined the now ruling party.6 As a consequence of the colossal rate of growth, the general quality of officialdom was extremely low in terms of basic literacy, administrative skills and even loyalty to the party. Particularly in the immediate aftermath of the October seizure of power, many had joined the Bolshevik party in order to take advantage of the privileged access to food, housing and jobs accorded to members. At the very height of the Civil War, in 1919, the party leadership had felt compelled to initiate a purge of corrupt and “morally dissolute” members. The long struggle against the White Armies, combined with political training in the army did reinforce loyalty to the party, and literacy campaigns raised educational levels, but corruption and incompetence remained serious problems in administration.
6 Ironically, the more talented, experienced and ambitious party members presented a far more troubling problem. This narrower, though still substantial, group competed for a limited number of leading positions. Not everyone could be a provincial party committee secretary, a department head in a commissariat, even a district party committee secretary or village soviet chairman. Throughout the growing party and
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state bureaucracy, officials wanted to give orders, not to take them. As the bureaucracy absorbed new cadres, struggles for power erupted at all levels in the drive to capture the “responsible positions” within and among organisations. Local officials were locked in struggle with cadres sent in from Moscow. New recruits to the party refused to accept the seniority of members with underground experience. Soviet executive committee chairmen refused to follow the directives of the party committee secretaries, local economic councils (sovnarkhozy) fought with local trade unions.7 In part, the struggles were fuelled by policy differences among Politbiuro leaders. Policy disputes were a matter of principle for some Bolsheviks, but for others they were an excuse to attack the position and authority of their opponents. No senior official could be sure that one of his colleagues was not conspiring to take his place. The struggles (skloki) pervaded the apparatus, paralysing entire organisations throughout the country.
7 The Urals regional organisation was no exception. In the first years after the revolution, the regional party leaders constantly complained to the Central Committee of the poor quality of cadres, drunkenness, abuses of power, but also of insubordination and power struggles. In 1918, the discussion of the Brest-Litovsk Peace deeply divided the regional party as almost half the organisation opposed the Treaty. Several years on, little had improved. Drunkenness and abuses of power remained just as common as before. Meanwhile, the struggle with the White Army had left much of local industry in ruins and much of the countryside was in the midst of famine. Just as there was a great need for decisive action, a new controversy -- this time on the role of trade unions -- split the organisation. In advance of the X Party Congress, the “Workers Opposition,” had gained significant support in the larger urban party organisations. Though they were defeated in most votes in the region, and at the party Congress, the local leaders of the Opposition, Sergei Mrachkovskii and Nikolai Ufimtsev, refused to stop their attacks on the regional party organisations.8 A year later, Mrachkovskii and Ufimtsev led a new attack on the regional leadership, this time in a debate on the internal party situation.9 Again they were defeated, and again they continued their attacks. The ban on factions, instituted at the X Congress, had little immediate effect. They withdrew into their base, in the regional metallurgists trade union in order to plan their next move.10
8 For nearly five more years the same core group of “oppositionists” railed against the regional party organisation both within regular party meetings and in public demonstrations. But thanks to the services of the OGPU, they were less a threat than an irritation. OGPU compiled an exhaustive list of active oppositionists and tailed all of them.11 They regularly reported all incidents of “oppositionist activity” to the regional party leadership and the regional control commission. Regional party officials then passed the information to the party secretariat, to Stalin.12
9 And yet, should we not assume that the OGPU was acting on behalf of Stalin rather than the regional organisations ? And that the struggle against oppositions in the regions was only a part of his struggle against his own political opponents ? Wasn’t the local OGPU taking orders from Stalin through the central political police organs ? What is striking is the confluence of the interests of Stalin and the regional leaders. At the time Stalin was named General Secretary, the main subject of correspondence between the Secretariat and regional party organisations was the struggles for power (skloki).13 Regional party secretaries constantly appealed to the Secretariat for assistance in the
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resolution of power struggles. There is little evidence to suggest that the Secretariat or Stalin was directing the struggle against oppositions, or enforcing conformity to any set of policies or “political line.”
10 Instead the Secretariat generally encouraged the resolution of such conflicts locally.14 The simplest way to do so was to clarify and strengthen the hierarchy of existing party and state organisations, and reinforce the powers of the current “bosses,” most notably, the network of local party secretaries. The resolutions of the XII Party Congress (April 1923) strengthened the role of party secretaries in selecting “responsible workers of the soviet, economic, co-operative and professional organisations” in their regions. In effect, the party secretaries became the main arbiters of the struggles, with the power to remove officials who refused to submit to their decisions. Stalin further supported regional organisations by encouraging them to label as anti-party “group struggle” any attempt to challenge to their rule. This he did by advocating the restriction of intra-party democracy.
11 At the XIII Party Congress, the Left Oppositions demanded a strengthening of intra- party democracy including such measures as a restoration of elections to party organs (party committee bureaux).15 To any party secretary, the implications of such a program were immediately clear. They would be open to attack from any disgruntled party member, to say nothing of groups of “comrades” who might want to topple them from their leadership posts. Stalin told them what they wanted to hear.
12 He insisted that the Opposition was promoting not democracy, but a “freedom of group struggle” (svoboda gruppirovok) that would be fatal in the “current conditions” of the New Economic Policy : “If we were to permit the existence of group struggle, we would destroy the party, turn it from a monolithic, united organisation into an alliance of groups and fractions. It would not be a party, but rather the destruction of the party.”16
13 The “retreat” from democracy proved to be very durable. Party secretaries were pleased to repeat Stalin’s phrases about the importance of party unity and use them to legitimise the repression of any challenge to their power.17 And as the regional secretaries took action against all those who engaged in “group struggle,” they made organised opposition to Stalin almost impossible.
14 Documents of regional and central archives leave no doubt that Stalin and the central party leadership were kept well informed of the activities of oppositionists and others who challenged the power of regional secretaries.18 The local OGPU passed information to the okrug control commissions, which sent regular reports to the regional Control Commission.19 The commissions began to expel oppositionists from the party in the autumn of 1926.20 Was the local OGPU, in this instance, directed by the regional party organs, or by the central OGPU, the central leadership, if not by Stalin himself ? Well into the late 1920s, these relationships remained close, and mutually reinforcing. The regional archives suggest that the regional party was directing the local OGPU, with the approval, or at least the knowledge, of the centre. But in the early years of the “Stalin revolution” evidence emerges of local OGPU actions, directed by the regional party, of which the centre would not have approved.
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OGPU and the plan
15 In the mid-1920s, the regions exerted considerable pressure on the centre to expand levels of investment and construction. Regional leaders perceived that central investment in the local economy was the key to regional economic health. Modernisation of the existing capital stock and new construction improved the efficiency of production, which increased the ability to sustain the competition for markets and sales. In the context of the New Economic Policy, with its emphasis on commercial principles (khoziaistvennyi raschet), uncompetitive -- and thus unprofitable -- industries were shut down. Profitable ones brought the regions tax income, employment and the potential for further reinvestment and growth. Enterprise profit was an important part of capital investment, but Soviet industry was still too weak to generate internally a significant rate of growth. Central investment, on the other hand, could give a relatively quick competitive advantage to its beneficiaries. 21
16 In this context, the five-year plan was a matter of particular concern for the regions. They understood that five years of central investment would have a profound impact on the state and status of the regional economy. As the five-year plan emerged from its preliminary outlines toward its final version, it was the object of ever-greater controversy and conflict. Each region tried to prove that its own contribution was indispensable, that it could produce better, faster and less expensively than the others were. In the process, interregional competition created further upward pressure on the levels of investment and construction. It also exacerbated existing tensions between those who believed in a revolutionary potential of the planned economy and those who understood the essence of planning to be thorough and careful calculation. Within the regions, the fear of losing five-year plan investment to competing regions drove support for ambitious proposals, but it also led to conflicts within the regional leadership and between the regional party and economic officials over the capacity of regional economy to achieve them. In the centre, the enthusiasts of high tempo industrialisation, led by Stalin, were able to manipulate these conflicts for their political ends. The Shakhty trial and the campaign against the “Right danger” -- both signals to attack opposition to high tempos -- served not only Stalin’s desire to gain control of the central leadership, but also the determination of many regional leaders to promote ambitious plans.
17 Within the party leadership, there was considerable support for testing the upper limits of investment and growth, but there was also concern for the potentially disruptive effects of an over-aggressive industrialisation program-in particular, the danger of a break with the peasantry. Within the central economic and planning organs the issue of the tempo of industrialisation was the subject of ever-sharper conflicts. VSNKh continued to be the most ambitious planner, while Gosplan, NKFin and NKZem fought to restrain tempos. Each group was convinced of the dire consequences to the economy of a failure to accept their plans. At the same time, a more important set of conflicts was emerging within each of the economic organs. The debates had brought forth a division between non-party specialists and their party colleagues, between “bourgeois” specialists and their soviet-trained counterparts.
18 In the Urals, regional party leaders were absorbed with the task of maximising industrial investment and growth, but they could not agree on how far or how fast they
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should proceed. They disagreed as to how ambitious regional plans could be, how hard they could push the centre for investment in the Urals and how hard they could push local trusts and enterprises to produce. Enterprise directors were not opposed to high “tempos,” but the accompanying pressures on their performance disturbed many. “Bourgeois” specialists were perhaps the most troubled by the demands for improved efficiency and the sudden acceleration of industrialisation. As the question of sustaining growth rates became a matter of blinkered determination for many Bolsheviks, some specialists found themselves unable, or unwilling, to fulfil their roles. And yet the steady advance of Ukraine’s ambitions and the danger of being passed over for first five-year plan investment lent new urgency to the issue. Members of the Obkom lost patience with any hesitation to meet the Ukrainian threat head-on.
19 In April 1927, the central party apparatus began to take an active interest in local resistance to rising plan targets. The Obkom received a letter from the Central Committee Information Department requesting information on “incidents of opposition to rationalisation and [the region’s] methods of struggling with it.”22 As in the Urals oblast’, some members of the central leadership took a dark view of local resistance. That same month, the OGPU took a newly active interest in “sabotage” at the factory. It is unclear on whose initiative the OGPU was drawn into the matter,23 but on April 7, a letter sent to okrug leaders warned that “a sudden increase of accidents, explosions and fires at enterprises and construction sites of all-union significance has been observed [...] Taking into account the seriousness of the situation, the organs of the OGPU have been given a broader range of powers, including both the defence of the enterprises themselves and punitive functions [...].
20 This letter was relayed “to all secretaries of okrug party committees, chairmen of okrug executive committees and chairmen of okrug trade union councils” by F. I. Lokatskov, the chairman of the Urals oblast’ executive committee, and two other members of the Urals Obkom. Lokatskov led an oblast’ level commission on cost reductions in industry, and he used this position to pressure okrug officials to get results from the factories “at all costs.”25 In the months that followed, attacks on directors and technical specialists increased. There were no arrests or accusations of “counter-revolutionary activity,” but acts of intimidation were common. Particularly in cases where efficiency targets were substantially underfulfilled, okrug and raion leaders commonly accused factory officials of resisting directives or labelled them as incompetents and took measures to fire them.26
21 The tide had yet to turn entirely against the directors and technical specialists. Both in the Obkom and the centre there were those who believed that repression would only make targets harder to achieve. It was ultimately Stalin who, in early 1928, broke the tensions between those who promoted a hard and soft line. Some time in February, he had received a letter from the Azovo-Chernomorskii krai describing an alleged criminal conspiracy of old specialists in the coal industry of the Donets basin (Donbass) to disrupt the Soviet fuel supply on behalf of foreign interests. After the letter was presented to the Politbiuro and discussed with members of the OGPU (Ianson and Menzhinskii), a top-level delegation was sent to the Donbass to “make recommendations for practical measures that can form the basis for the work of a Politbiuro commission.”27 The primary recommendation of the Commission is well known : the organisation of a show trial-the Shakhty trial.
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22 At the beginning of April, a Central Committee plenum met to discuss the Shakhty affair. The plenum showed the continuing division of opinion on economic policy. In a speech introducing the issue, A. I. Rykov observed that “since the conspiracy was uncovered, some party comrades have thought that the affair was blown out of proportion.” Rykov insisted that, as the investigation proceeded, it was becoming clear that the seriousness of the conspiracy was, if anything, initially underestimated. Some subsequent speakers, including A. A. Zhdanov of Nizhnii Novgorod and A. A. Andreev of the North Caucasus, enthusiastically agreed that there were counter-revolutionary elements among their economic managers.28 Other delegates, including K. V. Sukhomlin of Ukraine and M. Oshvintsev of the Urals, warned about the dangers of whipping up hostility to managers. Sukhomlin suggested that creating a political campaign on the Shakhty issue could “bring harm, make matters worse.”29 Oshvintsev agreed, explaining that many managers were already so frightened that they spent much of their time getting written approval of all their actions and had little time left to oversee production.30
23 The Plenum ended in a stalemate between the advocates of repressive action against old specialists and non-party managers and those who sought to prevent a campaign against them. Despite Stalin’s open advocacy of a “class struggle” of old and new economic officials,31 the resolutions of the Plenum showed clear evidence of a compromise between the conflicting groups in the leadership.32 The resolutions neither afforded protection for managers and specialists, nor signalled an attack. Party leaders in the regions were essentially free to proceed as they saw fit. Consequently, existing tensions went unresolved.
24 In the Urals, conflict over the tempo of industrialisation intensified in the course of 1928. The need for dramatic action was apparent. It was generally perceived that the majority of new investment was going to Ukraine. An article in the VSNKh newspaper had observed that with projected investment of over 100 million rubles in the Southern Steel Trust, Ukraine could significantly expand production, but that projected investment of 50 million rubles in the Urals might not even prevent production in the Urals from shrinking.33 Urals leaders increasingly felt the necessity to show that regional industry could provide a higher rate of return in order to avoid losing projects to Ukraine and other regions. They had hesitated to pressure local managers and planners to revise their plans, but as Ukrainian industry advanced, the mood began to change.
25 In the fall of 1928, in connection with an investigation of wrecking in the gold and platinum industries in the USSR, the Urals OGPU uncovered a local group of “counter- revolutionary specialists.”34 The new Oblast’ Executive Committee chairman I. D. Kabakov, among others in the Urals leadership, made much of the discovery-which came to be known as the “Uralplatina affair.” At the November 1928 Central Committee plenum, Kabakov announced that documents found on local specialists-geologists- showed they had long hidden reserves not only of gold and platinum, but also of coal and ores.35 The Urals State Geological Surveying Administration (Ural’skoe Gosudarstvennoe Geologorazvedochnoe Upravlenie - UGGRU) became a special target for political pressure from the Obkom. Urals geologists were told to find new reserves of metals, ores and especially cokeable coal in an extremely short period. Significant proven deposits had the potential to substantially reduce the cost of metal production by reducing-or eliminating-the need to import coal from Siberia. Senior geologists
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scoffed at the demands. M. S. Volkov, the technical director of UGGRU later described his senior colleagues as scholars with their own research agendas, unhappy being compelled to serve the immediate needs of industry. They were most offended by the demands for immediate results. They knew that surveying the requested areas would require much more financing, cadres, and time, than they were given. They were quick to call the new tasks “impossible” and “absurd.”36 The Obkom was equally quick to respond. It replaced the administration of UGGRU with party members, and encouraged the Soviet-trained geologists to criticise their bosses. Shortly thereafter, the new UGGRU administration removed senior geologist D. F. Murashev for submitting an article to the press suggesting that Urals copper reserves were “exaggerated.” Administration officials accused him of “attempting to discredit the Urals as a powerful base for the Soviet copper industry.” The Obkom had made it clear that giant new “finds” would be rewarded. Anything else would be viewed as an attempt to “reduce the Urals to the status of a second-rate mining centre in the USSR.”37 The Uralplatina affair was a turning point. In one sense, the regions were promoting Stalin’s line on class struggle. In another, they were deceiving Moscow about the real state of the local economy.
26 The “Uralplatina affair” was the most important, but not the only case used by members of the Obkom to put upward pressure on regional plans. In the fall, incidents of open resistance to tempos were the subjects of trials in many of the Urals main industrial districts, including Kushva, Bakal, Solikamsk and Zlatoust.38 Many of those who opposed existing efficiency targets or disputed the realism of targets for industrial growth were intimidated into silence. V. P. Krapivin, the technical director of the Urals Metallurgical Trust, promoted the plans of the Trust before central organs despite his firm conviction that the construction schedules and advances in efficiency were exaggerated.39
27 The aftershocks of the Shakhty affair appear to have had the same effect throughout the Soviet Union. M. A. Solovov, a prominent figure in the Urals Planning Commission, later recounted how he had “felt the general lack of faith in the tempos of the five-year plan in the corridors of the (April 1928) Gosplan Congress.40 At the end of September, Politbiuro member N. Bukharin published his “Notes of an economist” in Pravda, warning of the potential dangers to economic equilibrium presented by the control figures.41 Meanwhile, in the regions, there was a sense of desperation about the control figures. The figures for 1928-1929 were to constitute the first year of the five-year plan. Failure to establish a favourable relative share of investment in the 1928-1929 figures could undermine a region’s ambitions for a much longer period. Thus, tensions in the regions were also driven to a head.
28 By mid-October, probably on Stalin’s initiative, the press began to print articles warning of a “Right deviation” in the party. At the November 1928 Central Committee, Sovnarkom chairman A. I. Rykov attempted to smooth over differences of opinion in his speech opening the plenum. He admitted that the control figures had left a “huge mass of unsatisfied demands,” but he argued against “creating a fetish for tempos” -- the economy could not sustain a consistent growth of tempos, or even the maintenance of the existing rates of growth.42 Nevertheless, many delegates both from the regions and the centre insisted on both higher tempos and a much harder line on the “Right danger.” They took the podium with criticism of inadequate funding for projects under their jurisdiction : tempos had to be raised, and those who opposed them removed from
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the party.43 At the subsequent XVI Party Conference (April 1929), regional delegates specifically linked cuts to proposed projects with the leaders of the “Right opposition.” N. B. Riazanov of the Institute of Marx and Engels joked that “every speaker ends his presentation with ;Give us a factory in the Urals and to hell with the Right! ; ;Build us a power station and to hell with the Right! ;”44 Regional leaders not only accepted Stalin’s campaign against the Right, they encouraged it.
29 During the campaign, many regional party and economic officials still refused to accept cuts to their plans. When a new proposal was rejected, or financing to an existing project reduced, these officials commonly sought to overturn the decision by accusing its authors of “disorganising” the economy. In the spring of 1929, funding for the construction of the Uralmash plant was cut from 6.5 million to 2 million rubles, and then in May instructions were received by telegram from Glavmetall to suspend construction altogether. Upon receipt of the telegram, a meeting of the Uralmash party cell was convened. It resolved to “declare the instructions of Glavmetall incorrect and achieve their reversal.”45 The director of Uralmash, A. P. Bannikov, then headed to Moscow. He denounced the Glavmetall instructions in his meetings with party leaders, members of the VSNKh Presidium and the chairman of the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate S. Ordzhonikidze.46 According to S. A. Khrennikov, a member of the Collegium of Glavmetall, regional officials frequently presented exaggerated, excessively expensive, incomplete and unworkable plans to central organs and leapt to accusations of “wrecking and sabotage” if the plans were rejected.47 Beginning in the summer of 1929, the OGPU led a wave of arrests of economic officials accused of “wrecking.” In the process of its “investigations,” it received masses of denunciations of central officials from the regions.48 In this way, the work of the regional OGPU contributed directly to Stalin’s victory over the Right Opposition, and the last obstacle to the assumption of uncontested personal power, but not all of the work of the Urals political police would have won Stalin’s personal approval. The regional leadership was also using the local OGPU to mislead the centre and to manipulate central policy in its favour.
30 In the competition for the first five-year plan investment, the lack of local supplies of cokeable coal had been the single gravest argument against the development of the Urals as a metals and machine building centre. The importation of coke from the Kuznetsk basin in Western Siberia pleased neither Moscow nor the Urals given the high cost of transportation. Coking experiments on Urals coal had been conducted throughout the 1920s without producing clear results. By the late 1920s, when the Urals version of the first five-year plan was under consideration in central economic organs, regional party leaders exerted intense pressure on local geologists and metallurgists to produce favourable results. Urals leaders were concerned that new investment in coal production would go to the Moscow or Don basins.49 The pressure resulted in a split between senior specialists trained before the revolution and the new cadre of Soviet- trained specialists.50 The former resisted the pressure and the latter took the opportunity to discredit their bosses by exaggerating the success of their experiments. 51 In the summer of 1930, I. D. Kabakov, now oblast’ party first secretary, wrote in a letter to the head of the Urals Coal Trust : “The issue [of the coking of Urals coal] is not looking good. Not in the sense that Kizel [a Urals coal basin] coke can’t be used for metal production, but rather in the sense that people out there have tried to discredit (kakaia-to ruka sdelala vse dlia togo, chtoby diskreditirovat’) the coking of Kizel coal. The issue is being
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investigated, and at the present stage it’s clearly a criminal affair (prestuplenie na litso). In all probability it’s the work of specialists-of course those hostilely oriented towards us. It’s better not to raise a fuss. We’ll finish the investigation and everything will be clear. We can hope to extricate ourselves (ob etom dele vykruchivat’sia) and not permit the discreditation of Kizel coke.”52
31 Within a couple of months, a group of Urals metallurgists and geologists were arrested and charged with “criminally delaying the development” of the regional coal industry. 53 The affair was kept sufficiently quiet such that Moscow never saw fit to question the results of the coking experiments. In the next five years, hundreds of millions of rubles were spent developing mines in the Kizel basin and building coking plants-though Kizel coal never was cokeable.54
32 A similar scenario was played out in the Urals copper industry in 1931 when local officials were preparing the first version of the regional second five-year plan. Huge copper reserves were being discovered in Kazakhstan,55 and Urals officials were determined not to lose investment capital to their southern neighbour. Copper production was crucial to the production of alloys, construction materials and machine building and it promised the development of subsidiary chemical production based on by-products. The Urals was hoping for over a billion rubles of investment in its non- ferrous metals industry in the second five-year plan.56 Rather than admit that the regional geological surveying administration still had no clear data on ore reserves, local leaders directed the OGPU to pressure the administration to fake firm conclusions in a presentation to the government.57 Construction was approved (though not the full billion rubles requested) and when the plants were completed, the ores proved neither to be of the quantity nor of the quality promised in the plan.58 Now the pattern of deception was confirmed. In the early 1930s the OGPU was dually subordinated only in theory. In practice, it served the regional party and promoted its interests at the expense of those of the centre. The pattern only deepened in the following few years.
OGPU/NKVD and blameshifting
33 The fantastic ambitions of the first five-year plan drove the economy into a state of chaos. Almost no plan targets were fulfilled and the centre and regions bickered about who was at fault. Nevertheless, when by 1931 the attention of planning organs shifted to the second five-year plan, regional organs once again proposed vast programs of investment and construction.59 But this time, the centre refused to accept them. Three times the general plan was revised, each time reducing projected targets. Even more disturbing to the regions was the fact that these reduced targets would be enforced. No excuses would be accepted for anything less than 100 % fulfilment.
34 A more “moderate” plan was hardly of any solace to the regions. Targets for construction and production were reduced, but projected financing was reduced even further. Calls for “iron discipline before the budget of the proletarian state”60 contrasted sharply with the free spending of the first five-year plan. But the most serious problem was rooted in the region’s first five-year plan. Many of the key projects were dependent on the supplies of coal and ores that, as regional officials knew well, simply did not exist. As new plants were completed and were to account for an ever larger share of production, as ever greater efficiency was demanded of them, the plan
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became progressively more difficult to fulfil. Urals officials knew they were in trouble, that plan targets could not be fulfilled.
35 They responded by developing strategies of self-protection. Most important of these was the careful control of Moscow’s access to information on the state of the regional economy. Similarly, they cultivated an image of themselves as aggressively active in their loyalty to the central leadership and the “Central Committee line” while at the same time trying to reduce plan responsibilities and simplify tasks. A slush fund was run out of the economic administration of the Oblast’ Executive Committee which ensured that key members of the regional leadership would have a substantial income, a large apartment, a government car, a country home and so on.61 Their professional reputations were systematically promoted at state and party meetings, in public fora and in the press. According to Kabakov, all key positions in the oblast’ were under the control of the clique by 1935.62 This even included the local representative of the NKVD, Reshetov, who was very much in the inner circle of the clique, and a close personal friend of Kabakov.63 “What resulted was a ;wall ; which not even the most determined and brave could break through. In addition to which, the combined authority of the leading oblast’ organs under our control had been driven so deeply into the minds of the broad party masses, that it was impossible to expect that anyone would attempt to aggregate and draw conclusions from scattered evidence of wrong-doing and criminal activity [...]. This would mean casting suspicion on all elements of the party, state and economic leadership of the oblast’.”64
36 This state of affairs in which any attempt to criticise or discredit the leadership was likely to draw an overwhelming counterattack gave the members of the clique the confidence to believe that they were “untouchable.”65
37 Scapegoating was a key tactic of self-protection, and one in which the local NKVD played a central role. In cases of local scandals or problems of plan fulfilment which caught the attention of Moscow, the regional leadership conveniently found an “enemy of the people,” often a former oppositionist or some other vulnerable official to take the blame. The idea of internal enemies of the regime that appears to have excited Stalin’s mind was by no means discouraged in the regions. On the contrary, Sverdlovsk oblast’ and several other regions developed a reputation for holding large numbers of show trials. In 1936, the Commission for Party Control singled out Sverdlovsk and Saratov oblasti for having “completely baselessly arrested and convicted people and undertaken mass repression for minor problems.”66
38 For the factory director who was not given the option of explaining to his superiors why and how the plan was unrealistic, it was all too easy to find scapegoats, in the guise of “saboteurs” and “counter-revolutionaries,” who could take the fall for underfulfilment : construction engineers for faulty work, warehouse directors for the spoilage of inputs, railroad workers for shortages in supply. Similar tactics were employed throughout the oblast’ apparatus up to and including the Obkom bureau. For example, the Sverdlovsk Obkom had showed little enthusiasm for the Stakhanovite movement given that it raised production targets and increased administrative tasks without providing clear local benefits. But when the inaction came to the attention of the Politbiuro, and a purge of Obkom department heads was threatened, the Obkom bureau directed the regional legal organs to find cases of “sabotage and resistance” of Stakhanovism in the factory. In the spring of 1936, within Sverdlovsk oblast’ there were 236 trials relating to accusations of wrecking in the Stakhanovite movement.67 While
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the Sverdlovsk leadership claimed to be a “solid, monolithic, reliable pillar of the Stalinist Central Committee,” it worked with the local NKVD to deflect the pressures of the plan and of campaign politics.
39 The centre was not aware of the tactics employed by the regional leaders, but it did know that many of its directives were being resisted. In early 1934, Sergo Ordzhonikidze observed that “when we issue directives, we are uncertain whether they will be implemented.”68 Determined to put an end to such a situation, the central leadership created a new set of control organs to check on the fulfilment of decisions. In his speech announcing the establishment of the Commissions for Party and Soviet Control (Komissiia Partiinogo Kontrolia-KPK, Komissiia Sovetskogo Kontrolia-KSK), Stalin made it clear that these organs would be empowered to remove “any responsible official, including officials of the Central Committee” who refused to promptly implement central directives, or as Stalin put it, to remove “officials with well-known services in the past [...] who think that party and Soviet laws were written not for them, but for idiots.”69 The tide was turning against the regional clique, though it was not yet entirely clear. The threat to remove top officials followed in the aftermath of the disastrous grain collections campaigns of the previous two years in which many local officials had shown a lack of enthusiasm for central targets in the face of widespread famine. But when the Commissions were created, the worst of the famine was over and industrial production was beginning to surge forward. Moscow was less certain about attacking high officials once things had started to improve.
40 It was not the control organs that undermined the clique in the end, but rather the regional clique’s own tactic of scapegoating. The situation in the region was unstable. As production targets increased, it became more difficult to fulfil the plan and hide problems. Industrial accidents were common. Often, ill-trained workers damaged new and expensive equipment. Incomplete or low quality production was frequently shipped despite prohibitions. 1936 was a particularly difficult year. After three years of tolerating unplanned expenditures within industry, the centre imposed tough cost- cutting measures to deal with inter-enterprise debt. As well, the disastrous 1936 harvest put further strain on the economy.70 The increasingly desperate state of plan fulfilment accelerated the propensity to scapegoat. In response to the doubling of the accident rate in the Urals non-ferrous metals industry since 1935, Glavtsvetmet recommended educational measures for workers and engineers, but a local trust director insisted that only show trials would reduce the number of accidents.71
41 Cracks had begun to develop within the leadership group itself. The directors of mining enterprises resented the regional machine-builders for the shortage of mining equipment. Directors of the machine-building trusts were upset that they weren’t getting the metals they needed. Similarly, the directors of the metal works were angry at the mining enterprises for not supplying them with enough fuels and ores. Meanwhile, state and party leaders were not happy with the directors. The regional leadership was a tinderbox of tensions to which the centre set a spark in the summer of 1936 with the trial of the Trotsky-Zinoviev bloc. Associated with the trial was a central campaign designed to rout the “last remnants of the Trotskyist-Zinovievite band.” It uncovered far more “enemies” than anyone expected. The campaign provoked a firestorm of denunciations beyond the ability of the regional leadership to control. After the trial of the Trotskyist-Zinovievite bloc, tensions within the factory exploded as various groups accused others of “oppositionist activity” by way of assessing blame
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for poor economic performance. Workers denounced Stakhanovites ; Stakhanovites denounced engineers and technical specialists. District and factory party committees traded accusations that the other was protecting counter-revolutionaries.
42 Any hopes Kabakov had had for restraining the progress of mutual denunciations vanished in September, when the regional NKVD representative Reshetov was replaced : “[After the arrival of the new representative, Dmitriev,] the situation changed radically. The ground under our feet got so hot [sic], that I immediately understood that the unmasking of my colleagues and me was only a matter of time.”72
43 Kabakov was probably trying to flatter his interrogators, but he did have reason to be worried in September. Reshetov had been his friend and ally. He and others had relied on Reshetov to share information and to protect the clique.73 Dmitriev was not likely to do the same. According to K. G. Sedashev, the Eastern Steel Trust chairman, Kabakov was “horribly disturbed” by Reshetov’s removal.74 Fears about Dmitriev were quickly realised. It proved to be impossible to stop his investigations. By the end of May 1937, the almost entire Obkom leadership had been arrested.
Terror and after
44 Had Stalin and the central leadership been aware that many regional party organs had controlled the local OGPU/NKVD? It is hard to say, but at the time they created the KPK and KSK to check on the fulfilment of decisions (1934), they had also started to centralise control over the local NKVD. Since their inception, the local political police had been selected by regional organisations on the approval of the central organs. In connection with the formation of the NKVD in 1934, for the first time the central NKVD was to control appointments to highest ranks in the regions.75 If this was an attempt to break regional party control, it was not very successful. In Sverdlovsk oblast’, nothing changed. Reshetov remained in his favoured place within the Obkom clique, and the same seems to have applied with the NKVD chiefs in many other regions.76
45 This changed suddenly, in the autumn of 1936. After he took the reins of the NKVD, Ezhov initiated a purge of the regional political police.77 In Sverdlovsk oblast’, Dmitriev’s investigations quickly uncovered the great scale of collusion between the regional party and NKVD in the subversion of central directives. It would not be surprising if a very large proportion of regional political police had been purged (and arrested), and it was unlikely indeed that the centre would allow such collusion to re- emerge. In May 1939, a directive of the All-Union NKVD formalised a new administrative order in which all appointments to the local political police were controlled from the centre. Control over the fulfilment of NKVD decisions was to be checked by a new NKVD Secretariat.78
46 On the heels of the arrest and execution of the previous two Obkom first secretaries, the Sverdlovsk regional leadership was desperate to set a distance between itself and its predecessors. When faced with evidence of underfulfilment, the new first secretary V. M. Andrianov told his department heads and enterprise directors to “work twenty- four hours a day” if they had to, “but fulfil the directives of the Central Committee completely and unconditionally”.79 At the same time, the regional leadership was at pains to explain the shift in tasks from the “struggle against wrecking” to the “struggle against the consequences of wrecking.” In their speeches, the “consequences of
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wrecking” referred to the coping mechanisms of their predecessors. Passing incomplete or faulty production, cutting corners on production safety and other coping mechanisms had facilitated an impression of plan fulfilment while making stable advances in production more difficult. At an Obkom plenum in late 1939, directors and department were told not to look for wreckers, but to take more responsibility for the state of affairs where they worked. The message met with resistance. It was no easier to meet the plan now than it had been in the mid-1930s, and they still needed to cut corners. Accidents, breakdowns and other “suspicious” events were still very common. The spectre of wrecking still presented an invaluable opportunity to pass the blame for problems of production. At party and state meetings, factory directors and local party officials continued to assess accidents and breakdowns as the work of wreckers and saboteurs.80
47 Did they believe in an immanent threat from wreckers ? One local assistant plenipotentiary of the NKVD wrote to Beriia asking for clarification. On the one hand, he wrote, his bosses continued baselessly to arrest innocent people. On the other hand, many others “on whom there was weighty compromising material” were being set free. 81 No clarification was forthcoming. The centre discouraged mass arrests, but it continued to demand vigilance against wreckers, spies and saboteurs. While regional officials were responsible for total plan fulfilment in the absence of any input to the plan, or flexibility in the means by which they met plan targets, they continued to evade central directives and to scapegoat others for shortcomings in production.82
48 Such strategies fooled the centre for some time in the 1930s. They did not fool anyone now -- not merely because Moscow was better equipped to detect them, but also because the oblast’ level party “clique” did not have the same power to dominate politics in the region. The party was much larger now, with many more positions of independent authority. Officials were better educated and much less inclined to be in awe of the Obkom secretary and his membership on the Central Committee. And the local representative of the NKVD/MGB/MVD could no longer be relied upon to enforce the will of the regional party leaders. In place of a single, dominant, regional “clique,” or “family group” to provide patronage and protection, local officials were more likely to be a part of smaller, city, district or factory level “cliques” which managed their self- presentation to the outside world. Loyalties were much less clear. The political police at all levels found it difficult to work without some co-operation with corresponding party organs and some found a certain level of mutual back-scratching advantageous. There was, however, no dominant oblast’ level clique to keep a lid on local tensions, and the stronger, “vertical” checks on the fulfilment of decisions made those “horizontal” back-scratching relationships terribly unreliable.
49 All this made regional politics more tense and conflictual than they had been in the 1930s. When production problems deepened to the point where masking problems was impossible, there was no group that could prevent or control the process of scapegoating. For example, when the Uralmash plant was unable to hide serious plan underfulfilment in 1949, the Industry and Transport Department of the Sverdlovsk City Committee together with the local representatives of the MGB revealed the “anti-state practice of plan falsification” (pripiski k planu) at the factory.83 In that way, they would not have to answer for the mess. Similarly, when the regional coal industry was criticised from Moscow, the oblast’ leadership accused the party secretaries of the coal
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producing districts of suppressing local criticism and hiding production problems from them.84
50 The regular conflicts between the Obkom, on the one hand, and the district and city party committees, on the other, were particularly severe and consequential. In his tenure as Obkom first secretary (1946-1952), Viktor Nedosekin never managed to create the impression of plan fulfilment. While his reports to Moscow spoke of the great advances of Urals industry, there were other sources of information painting a far less flattering picture.85 In 1948, Nedosekin was hauled into the Orgbiuro and told that if he failed to turn things around he would be removed.86 In turn, he tried to lay the blame for problems on the district and city party committees and had them removed en masse. The annual rate of turnover of district and city party secretaries often exceeded 50 %.87 Like Andrianov before him, he had a reputation for destroying the careers of those who crossed him.88 And yet, Nedosekin succeeded only in building the ire of the local secretaries, who in turn relentlessly criticised the Obkom before central officials for failing to give them appropriate assistance. In the summer of 1951, the Central Committee apparatus began to transfer Obkom secretaries out of the oblast’. By September all mention of Nedosekin disappears from the local archives, though his replacement was named only in September of 1952.
51 On the eve of Stalin’s death, there were signs that scapegoating might lead to a new wave of terror against the regions. Many of the sorts of corruption and abuses of power revealed in the Mingrelian affair were common to all the regions.89 Certainly, Moscow was losing patience with regional organisations for misleading them about plan fulfilment and relying on “family groups” to protect their local authority.90 The new party statutes passed at the XIX Party Congress made it clear that “hiding and perverting the truth from the party [...] was incompatible with membership in its ranks” as was anything less than the “active struggle for the fulfilment of party decisions.”91 More seriously, a decree of the Council of Ministers earlier in the year had increased the punishment for some categories of plan falsification, equating them with wrecking.92 Prosecutions did follow -- on charges of counter-revolutionary crimes,93 but the signals from Moscow were not strong enough or consistent enough to incite a broader wave of denunciations as there had been in 1936-1938.
52 For nearly two decades, the regional organs of the political police were officially subordinated dually : to their central counterparts and to the regional party committee. Initially, dual subordination involved few contradictions. The local “organs” served both masters, both in the destruction of “oppositions” and in the promotion of ambitious economic plans. However, in the early 1930s, under the extraordinary demands of the five-year plans, many regional party leaders demonstrated that they had the stronger grip on the loyalties of the local political police. The local “organs” played a crucial role in the protection of regional cliques from the pressures of plan fulfilment. They would find and arrest “wreckers” and “saboteurs”: those who would take the blame for production problems. The blame shifting strategy collapsed in 1936 and contributed to the Great Terror. After that, the centre took care to prevent the regional party and political police to collude in the subversion of central directives. After 1939, the centre chose all local political police agents, and carefully monitored their activities. The results of the change were mixed at best. Not all collusion was eliminated, though the centre was much better informed about bureaucratic malfeasance. The information came not from a disciplined local
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political police, but from an almost uncontrolled tendency to scapegoat at all levels. The close relationship of the regional party and political police had done much to stabilise the local political order in the Soviet Union. And that stability was not restored until after Stalin’s death, when Khrushchev eased the pressures of plan fulfilment, restricted the powers of the political police and tolerated all but the most egregious forms of regional misbehaviour.
53 School of History
54 University of Leeds
55 Leeds LS2 9JT
56 UK
NOTES
1. George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s political police (Oxford, 1986): 100. Leggett suggests that in 1918 there were 9,000 cadres in the regions versus 1,300 in Moscow headquarters (not including border guards and troops). By 1944, there were 367,350 in the regions versus 7,450 in the centre. A further 400,462 worked in the Gulag system. B. A. Starkov, “Gosudarstvo v gosudarstve. Evoliutsiia OGPU-NKVD-MVD-KGB” (unpublished). 2. Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian dictatorship and autocracy (Cambridge, Mass., 1965): ch. 2; Ronald Hingley, The Russian secret police (London, 1970): 134; Boris Levytsky, The uses of terror : the Soviet secret service, 1917-1970 (London, 1971): 65; John J. Dziak, Chekisty : A history of the KGB (Lexington, Mass., 1988) : 52. Others go so far as to argue that the political police was determining the direction of state policy. See for example Robert Conquest, Inside Stalin’s secret police (Stanford, 1985): ix. 3. Merle Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet rule (Cambridge, Mass., 1958): 67, 158. 4. G. Leggett, op. cit.: 123-124, 351. 5. Technically, the head of the regional political police belonged in the Central Committee nomenklatura. At least in the Urals region, the appointment was made by the Obkom, and subsequently approved by the Central Committee. 6. T. H. Rigby, Communist party membership in the USSR, 1917-1967 (Princeton, N. J., 1968): 7-8, 52. 7. On the variety of conflicts in party organizations, see Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (RGASPI), f. 17, op. 34, d. 110 Materialy k XII s’’ezdu RKP(b) o sostoianii mestnykh partiinykh organizatsii, ll. 7-35, Svodki o sostoianii mestnykh partiinykh organizatsii. 8. Tsentr Dokumentatsii Obshchestvennykh Organizatsii Sverdlovskoi Oblasti (TsDOO SO), f. 41 Istpart, op. 1, d. 134 Obrashchenie Ekaterinburzhskoi organizatsii RKP(b) ko
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vsem organizatsiiam i kommunisticheskim iacheikam Urala s pryzyvom podderzhivat’ leninskuiu platformu i t. d. 1921 g., ll. 25-33. 9. TsDOO SO, f. 1494 Uralbiuro TsK, op. 1, d. 34 Tsirkuliary i telegrammy za podpisiami sekretarei TsK RKP(b) po voprosam partiinoi raboty i partiinym kadram, ll. 42-43. 10. TsDOO SO, f. 1494 Uralbiuro TsK, op. 1, d. 78 Politicheskii obzor i otchety o rabote Ural’skogo biuro TsK RKP(b) dekabr’ 1921-avgust 1922, l. 75. 11. The OGPU list of the 115 leaders of the Left Opposition in the Urals (1927) is found in TsDOO SO, f. 4 Obkom, op. 5 1927, d. 30 Spravki, dokladnye telegrammy, akty doprosov o bor’be Ural’skoi partiinoi organizatsii s oppozitsiei, ll. 130-132. 12. Ibid., ll. 67, 76. 13. See for example, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 67, d. 6 Protokoly i pis’ma Astrakhanskogo gubkoma VKP(b) i otvetstvennykh rabotnikov o vystupleniiakh oppozitsii, l. 16; d. 109 Vypiski protokolov zasedanii i zakrytye pis’ma Kostromskogo gubkoma RKP(b), ll. 168-169; d. 249 Perepiska s TsK KP(b)U i dokladnye zapiski, spravki i drugie dokumenty po voprosam sostava, sostoianiia i raboty partiinykh organizatsii, o vystupleniiakh oppozitsii, l. 68. 14. KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh s’’ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK (Moscow, 1984): 74, 99. The research of the Information department suggests that the regional secretaries were not shy about asserting those powers. RGASPI, f. 81 Lichnoe delo Lazara Moiseevich Kaganovicha, op. 3, d. 69 Dokladnye zapiski, spravki i drugie dokumenty orgraspredotdela TsK RKP(b) po voprosam organizatsionno-partiinoi raboty, ll. 189-191 Spravka Informatsionnogo otdela “O rukovodstve sovetskoi, khoziaistvennoi, kooperativnoi i professional’noi rabote so storony partkomov”. Kaganovich was the chairman of the Organisation-Distribution department at the time. 15. See Evgenii Preobrazhenskii’s speech to the XIII Party Congress. Trinadtsataia konferentsiia RKP(b). Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1924): 106-107. 16. Ibid.: 93, 100-101. 17. For such a statement from the Urals region see the resolution of the Obkom biuro on intra-party democracy (December 17, 1925) TsDOO SO, f. 4 Obkom, op. 4 1926, d. 47 Doklad, itogi obsuzhdeniia diskussii XIV s’’ezda VKP(b) v partiinykh organizatsiiakh Urala, l. 101. 18. See for example RGASPI, f. 17, op. 67, d. 249, l. 68 (Ukraine); d. 285 Zakrytye pis’ma i dokladnye zapiski Ural’skogo obkoma RKP(b), raikomov i okruzhkomov RKP(b) oblasti, orgraspredotdela i instruktorov TsK RKP(b) ob ekonomicheskom i politicheskom polozhenii oblasti, o sostoianii i deiatel’nosti partorganizatsii, perepiska po voprosam ucheta kommunistov i dr. sentiabr’ 1925-noiabria 1925, l. 102 (Urals); d. 378 Dokladnye zapiski, spravki informotdela, instruktorov TsK i Tverskogo gubkoma VKP(b) o sostoianii i rabote gubernskoi partiinoi organizatsii, o vypolnenii postanovlenii TsK po dokladu gubkoma, ob obsledovanii postanovki massovoi raboty na predpriiatiiakh Tverskogo khlebo-bulochnogo tresta, ob oppozitsionnykh vystupleniiakh i dr. oktiabr’ 1926- ianvaria 1928, l. 192 (Tver’); d. 193 Doklady i zakrytye pis’ma Irkutskogo gubkoma VKP(b) i drugie dokumenty ob ekonomicheskom i politicheskom polozhenii gubernii, o rabote partiinoi organizatsii, o fraktsionnoi deiatel’nosti oppozitsii, o vydvizhenii rabochikh i krest’ian i vovlechenii v obshchestvennuiu rabotu i drugie, l. 98. 19. TsDOO SO, f. 4 Obkom, op. 5 1927, d. 30 Spravki, dokladnye, telegrammy, akty dokladov o bor’be Ural’skoi partorganizatsii s oppozitsiei, ll. 77, 86-104.
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20. Ibid., ll. 133-135; Dva goda raboty : Materialy k otchetu Ural’skogo Obkoma VKP(b) k VIII oblastnoi partkonferentsii (dekabr’ 1925 g.-noiabr’ 1927 g.) (Sverdlovsk, 1927): 131. 21. James R. Harris, The Great Urals : Regionalism and the evolution of the Soviet system (Ithaca, NY, 1999): chs. 2-3. 22. TsDOO SO, f. 4 Obkom, op. 5 1927, d. 34 Perepiska s Tsentral’nym Komitetom o bor’be s oppozitsiei, l. 64. 23. The protocols of Central Committee organs, including the Politbiuro and the Secretariat, were not helpful in this regard. 25. TsDOO SO, f. 4 Obkom, op. 5 1927, d. 34 Perepiska s Tsentral’nym komitetom o bor’be s oppozitsiei, l. 55. 26. TsDOO SO, f. 4 Obkom, op. 5 1927, d. 10 Protokoly biuro Obkoma, ll. 9, 53, 107-109, 339, 364. These are all resolutions of the commission critical of okrug party committees for their failure to ensure reductions in production costs. 27. See for example Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sverdlovskoi Oblasti (GASO), f. 94-r Uralmet, op. 4 1926, d. 9 Perepiska predsedatelia Pravleniia Uralmeta s Glavmetallom i promyshlennymi predpriiatiiami o finansirovanii i stroitel’stve zavodov, ll. 3, 10, 13, 20, 38, 54, 80-87, 109, 112-116. 28. RGASPI, f. 17 Tsentral’nyi komitet, op. 3 Protokoly Politbiuro, d. 676 Protokol #14, 7 marta 1928, l. 22 Ob ekonomicheskoi kontrrevoliutsii v iuzhnykh raionakh ugol’noi promyshlennosti ; d. 677 Protokol #23, 15 marta 1928, same title. 29. Ibid., ll. 82-85 (Zhdanov), 133-138 (Andreev). 30. RGASPI, f. 17 Tsentral’nyi komitet, op. 2 Plenumy, d. 344 Stenogramma Plenuma TsK i TsKK, 6-11 aprelia 1928, t. 1, l. 21. 31. Ibid., l. 122. 32. RGASPI, f. 17 Tsentral’nyi komitet, op. 2 Plenumy, d. 347 Stenogramma Plenuma TsK i TsKK, 6-11 aprelia 1928, t. 4, ll. 34-35. Stalin was effusive in his praise of Andreev’s “truly revolutionary speech.” He insisted that “we must arm new specialists in such a way that they will be certainly victorious in a struggle with old specialists.” 33. The number of party members among economic managers was also to be rapidly increased. KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh, vol. 4 (Moscow, 1984): 328. 34. Torgovo-promyshlennaia gazeta (July 7, 1928). 35. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Administrativnykh Organov Sverdlovskoi Oblasti (GAAO SO), f. 1, op. 2 Lichnye dela, d. K-12238 O kontr-revoliutsionnoi vreditel’skoi organizatsii v zoloto-platinovoi promyshlennosti SSSR. All files from GAAO SO (the regional FSB archive) consist of transcripts of interrogations. Such a source must be approached with extreme caution. Given the brutality of secret police methods and the propensity to demand confessions to imaginary crimes, the initial impulse of the researcher is to assume that the transcripts represent the ideas of the interrogators rather than the interrogated. However, judging from a broad cross section of files, from the mid-1920s through the Great Terror, this seems to be much less true of interrogations that open a given investigation. For example, at the outset of the Uralplatina 36. RGASPI, f. 17 Tsentral’nyi komitet, op. 2 Plenumy, d. 385 Stenogramma plenuma Tsentral’nogo Komiteta, 16-24 noiabria 1928, t. 4, ll. 144-145. 37. GAAO SO, f. 1, op. 2 Lichnye dela, d. 43927 Delo Volkova, Mikhaila Semenovicha, l. 64.
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38. Ibid., ll. 7, 23-25, 64. 39. Ural’skii rabochii (September 1, October 23, 1928). 40. GAAO SO, f. 1, op. 2 Lichnye dela, d. 7504 Delo Solovova, Mikhaila Aleksandrovicha, ll. 66-67. 41. Ibid., ll. 19-20. 42. Pravda (September 30, 1928). 43. RGASPI, f. 17 Tsentral’nyi komitet, op. 2 Plenumy, d. 377 Stenogramma plenuma Tsentral’nogo komiteta, 16-24 noiabria 1928, ll. 23-24, 63-64. 44. RGASPI, f. 17 Tsentral’nyi komitet, op. 2 Plenumy, d. 381 Stenogramma plenuma Tsentral’nogo komiteta, 16-24 noiabria 1928. See for example the speeches of R. I. Eikhe (Siberia) ch. 1, l. 15; F. I. Goloshcheikin (Kazakhstan) ch. 1, ll. 25-26; V. Ia. Chubar’ (Ukraine) ch. 2, l. 54; S. I. Syrtsov (Siberia) ch. 2, l. 128; M. M. Khataevich (Middle Volga) ch. 2, l. 148. 45. Shestnadtsataia konferentsiia Vsesoiuznoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii (bol’shevikov). Stenograficheskii otchet, 23-29 aprelia 1929 g. (Moscow, 1929): 102. 46. A.I. Busygin, Pervyi direktor (Sverdlovsk, Sredne-ural’skoe knizhnoe izd., 1977): 64; G.A. Unpelev, Rozhdenie Uralmasha, 1928-1933 gg. (Moscow, Izd. sotsial’no- ekonomicheskoi literatury, 1960): 24. 47. A.I Busygin, op. cit.: 66. 48. Material k otchetu TsKK VKP(b) XVI s’’ezdu VKP(b), sostavlennyi OGPU (k dokladu tov. Ordzhonikidze) (Moscow, 1930): 50, 53. 49. GAAO SO, f. 1, op. 2 Lichnye dela, d. 43927 Delo Dunaeva, Borisa Sergeevicha (member of the Presidium of the Urals Oblsovnarkhoz), l. 157; d. 43927 Delo Girbasova, Petra Afanas’eva (technical director of the Urals Mining Trust), ll. 136-137; d. 7504 Delo Gassel’blata, Vitaliia Alekseevicha (technical director of Magnitostroi), l. 32; G.A. Unpelev, op. cit.: 24-26. 50. GAAO SO, f. 1, op. 2 Lichnye dela, d. 43927 Delo Girbasova, Petra Afanas’evicha, ll. 136-137. 51. GAAO SO, f. 1, op. 2 Lichnye dela, d. 43927 Delo Volkova, Mikhaila Semenovicha, ll. 62-64. The transcripts of the interrogations of Volkov, Girbasov and others are included in the same delo. 52. The process follows a pattern distinctly similar to that of other professions. See for example Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Cultural revolution as class war,” Susan Gross Solomon, “Rural scholars and the cultural revolution,” and George M. Enteen, “Marxist historians during the cultural revolution : A case study of professional in-fighting,” in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Bloomington, 1978). 53. TsDOO SO, f. 4 Obkom, op. 8 1930, d. 102 Spravki, protokoly rassledovaniia organov OGPU po Uralu, raikomov i gorkomov VKP(b) o faktakh klassovoi bor’by i vreditel’stva na predpriatiiakh oblasti, l. 54. One can assume that Shakhgil’dian, the head of the Urals Coal Trust, was a party to this affair. He and Kabakov were reputed to be very close friends until they were both arrested in 1937. GAAO SO, f. 1, op. 2 Lichnye dela, d. 22861 Delo Sedasheva, l. 39; d. 17368 Delo Kabakova, Ivana Dmitrievicha, l. 75. 54. Ibid., d. 43927 Delo Volkova ; d. 43935 Delo Anitova, Sergeia Ivanovicha.
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55. To this day, despite steady advances in coking technology, neither Kizel coal, nor any other Urals coal is considered efficiently cokeable. 56. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Ekonomiki (RGAE), f. 4372 Gosplan SSSR, op. 31 1933, d. 784 Stenogramma Vsesoiuznoi konferentsii po razmeshcheniiu proizvoditel’nykh sil v UKK [Uralo-Kuznetskii Kombinat], 7-11 aprelia 1932, l. 25. 57. RGAE, f.8034 Glavtsvetmet, op. 1, d. 453 Piatiletnii plan razvitiia tsvetnoi i zoloto- platinovoi promyshlennosti na Urale na 1933-1937 gg., ll. 170-181. The billion ruble figure excluded the costs of geological research and construction in the gold and platinum industries. 58. GAAO SO, f. 1, op. 2 Lichnye dela, d. 22861 Delo Sedasheva, l. 33. 59. Materials were also faked in the justification of the Sinara pipe factory project. Here too production could not physically meet plan targets because of the lack of ores. Ibid., d. 22329 Delo Davydova, Andreia Aleksandrovicha, l. 5. 60. For a statement of the Urals ambitions for the second five-year-plan, see GASO, f. 241-r Oblplan, op. 1 Sektsiia promyshlennaia, d.827 Perspektivnyi plan UKK (Ural’skoi chasti) na 1931-1937, ll. 33-35. Gosplan criticised the Urals region for pushing “fantastical tempos”, RGAE, f. 4372 Gosplan, op. 30 1932, d. 784 Pervaia konferentsiia po razmeshcheniiu proizvoditel’nykh sil v UKK, l. 3. 61. RGASPI, f. 17 Tsentral’nyi komitet, op. 2 Plenumy, d. 514 Ob’’edinennyi plenum TsK i TsKK VKP(b), 7-12 ianvaria 1933, l. 93. 62. GAAO SO, f. 1, op. 2 Lichnye dela, d. 17368 Delo Kabakova, Ivana Dmitrievicha, l. 68; d. 22861, Delo Sedasheva, ll. 63-64, 174. 63. Ibid., d. 17368 Delo Kabakova, ll. 50-51. 64. The NKVD shared with members of the clique materials it received which could have proved dangerous to its members. Ibid., d. 22861 Delo Sedasheva, ll. 36-37; d. 17368 Delo Kabakova, l. 64. 65. Ibid., d. 17368 Delo Kabakova, l. 64. 66. Kabakov used the term. Ibid., l. 69. 67. Tsentral’noe Khranenie Sovremennoi Dokumentatsii (TsKhSD), f. 6 KPK, op. 1 Protokoly, d. 59 Zasedanii biuro, 29 fevralia-3 marta 1936, ll. 184-186. 68. TsKhSD, f. 6, op. 1, d. 59, ll. 184-186. 69. The quotation is of Sergo Ordzhonikidze from early 1934. RGAE, f. 7297 NKTP, op. 38 Sekretariat, d. 104 Stenogramma vystupleniia t. S. Ordzhonikidze na zakrytom partiinom sobranii sotrudnikov NKTP SSSR ob itogakh raboty XVII s’’ezda VKP(b), l. 1. 70. XVII s’’ezd Vsesouznoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii (bol’shevikov). Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, Profizdat, 1934): 34-35. 71. Roberta Manning, “The Soviet economic crisis of 1936-1940 and the Great Purges,” Stalinist terror : New perspectives (Cambridge, 1993): 129-33. 72. RGAE, f. 8034 Glavtsvetmet, op. 1, d. 938 Stenogramma soveshchaniia aktiva trestov “Uraltsvetmet” i “Uralmed’ruda” po voprosam okhrany truda i tekhniki bezopasnosti na predpriiatiiakh trestov, 10 oktiabria 1936 g., l. 7. 73. GAAO SO, f. 1, op. 2 Lichnye dela, d. 17368 Delo Kabakova, t. 1, l. 59. 74. Ibid., d. 22861 Delo Sedasheva, ll. 36-37. 75. Ibid., l. 37.
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76. A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, Lubianka : VChK-OGPU-NKVD-MGB-MVD-KGB, 1917-1960. Spravochnik (Moscow, 1997): 167, 192. 77. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The road to terror : Stalin and the self- destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven, 1999): 266. 78. The dimensions and targets of the purge remain something of a mystery. Shortly before his execution, Ezhov claimed to have purged 14,000 but he does not specify who and over what period of time. Ibid.: 562. 79. A.I.Kokurin and N.V. Petrov, op. cit.: 235-236. 80. TsDOO SO, f. 4, op. 34 1939, d. 9 Stenogramma XI plenuma Sverdlovskogo oblastnogo komiteta VKP(b), 29 noiabria-2 dekabria 1939 g., ll. 249-250. 81. TsDOO SO, f. 4, op. 33 1938, d. 19 Stenogramma III plenuma Sverdlovskogo oblastnogo komiteta VKP(b), 15-18 dekabria 1938 g., ll. 30, 34; op. 34 1939, d. 151 Stenogrammy soveshchanii rabotnikov apparata obkoma, zaveduiushchikh otdelami, sekretarei gorkomov i raikomov partii po voprosu o perestroike partiinogo apparata, ll. 30-31. 82. TsDOO SO, f. 4, op. 35 1940, d. 300 Dokladnye zapiski, spravki o rabote s kadrami v oblastnoi prokurature, ob itogakh i nedostatkakh v rabote sudebno-prokuraturskikh organov i rukovoditelei predpriiatii po vypolneniiu ukaza Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR ot 26 iiulia 1940, ll. 47-51. 83. Local party leaders and enterprise directors continued to lie about the state of plan fulfilment. Reports on plan fulfilment almost invariably were set in ruble terms, which hid creative adjustments to the nomenclature of production and took advantage of inflation. Demands for inputs were exaggerated, and unused plant capacities went unmentioned. Overfulfilment in any given month was unreported and applied against subsequent shortfalls. See Joseph Berliner, Factory and manager in the USSR (Cambridge, Mass., 1957). 84. TsDOO SO, f. 4, op. 45 1949, d. 196 Dokladnye zapiski, spravki partiinykh rabotnikov, rukovoditelei khoziaistvennykh organisatsii v obkom partii o sostoianii i rabote predpriiatii tiazheloi i mashinostroitel’noi promyshlennosti oblasti, ianvar’-sentiabr’ 1949 g., ll. 47-56. 85. TsDOO SO, f. 4, op. 45 1949, d. 211 Spravki, informatsii rabotnikov obkoma, gorkomov, raikomov VKP(b) v obkom partii o rasmotrenii zhalob i zaiavlenii na nepravil’nye deistviia rukovoditelei, zazhime kritiki, aprel’-oktiabr’ 1949, ll. 26-29, 43-45. 86. The sources include district and city party committees, regional plenipotentiaries and the ministries. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 134 Otdel tiazheloi promyshlennosti TsK VKP(b), d. 8 Proekty postanovlenii Sovmina SSSR, podgotovlennye Sverdlovskim obkomom VKP(b), spravki po nim Otdela, zakliucheniia ministerstv i vedomstv, oktiabr’ 1948- ianvar’ 1949 g., ll. 55-58. 87. TsDOO SO, f. 4, op. 44 1948, d. 14 Stenogramma zasedaniia IV plenuma Sverdlovskogo obkoma VKP(b), 29-30 noiabria 1948 g., ll. 120-132 doklad tov. Prassa (inspektor TSK). 88. TsDOO SO, f. 4, op. 52 1954, d. 180 Statisticheskie otchety, spravki o podbore, podgotovke, rasstanovke i smeniaemosti rukovodiashchikh partiinykh, sovetskikh,
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komsomol’skikh i khoziaistvennykh kadrov oblasti, ianvar’ 1950-ianvar’ 1954 g., l. 64 Dannye o smeniaemosti sekretarei partorg i ikh zamestitelei po GK i RK. 89. TsDOO SO, f. 4, op. 55 1956, d. 105 Informatsii Obkoma v TsK KPSS o provedenii organizatsionno-partiinoi raboty v oblasti, l. 168. 90. Ultimately, however, “nationalism” was the most serious of the charges laid against Georgian party leaders. 91. See for example Khrushchev’s speech to the XIX Party Congress in October 1952, RGASPI, f. 592 XIX s’’ezd VKP(b) 5-14 oktiabria 1952 g., op. 1, d. 44 Stenogramma desiatogo zasedaniia 10-go oktiabria. Doklad sekretaria TSk Khrushcheva, N. S., ob izmeneniiakh v ustave VKP(b), ll. 16-19. 92. KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh..., op. cit., v. 8: 286. 93. TsDOO SO, f. 4, op. 52 1953, d. 112 Stenogramma soveshcvhaniia rabotnikov promyshlennosti, stroitel’nykh organizatsii i transporta Sverdlovskoi oblasti, 28-29 ianvaria 1953 g., l. 181.
RÉSUMÉS
Résumé Une double loyauté ? La police politique et le parti dans la région de l’Oural, 1918-1953. Pendant environ deux décennies, les organes régionaux de la police politique furent officiellement subordonnés à leur homologue central et au comité régional du parti. Au départ, cette situation engendra peu de conflits. Les « organes » locaux servaient deux maîtres en détruisant les « oppositions » et en favorisant la réalisation de projets économiques ambitieux. Cependant, au début des années 1930, face aux exigences extraordinaires des plans quinquennaux, de nombreux dirigeants régionaux du parti montrèrent qu’ils avaient plus d’emprise sur la police politique locale. Celle-ci joua un rôle décisif lorsqu’il fallut protéger les cliques régionales des pressions du plan en traquant et en arrêtant les « destructeurs » et les « saboteurs », c’est-à-dire ceux à qui on pouvait faire porter la responsabilité des problèmes liés à la production. Ce stratagème prit fin en 1936 et contribua à la Grande Terreur. Après cette date, le centre fit de son mieux pour prévenir toute connivence entre le parti régional et la police politique dans la subversion des directives du centre. À partir de 1939, c’est le centre qui sélectionna tous les agents de la police politique locale. Il surveilla leur activité avec vigilance. Le bilan de ce changement fut au mieux mitigé. Il existait encore une certaine connivence entre la police et le parti, mais le centre était toutefois bien mieux informé sur la criminalité bureaucratique. Ces renseignements ne provenaient pas d’une police politique locale disciplinée, mais étaient plutôt le fait d’une tendance quasiment incontrôlée à chercher un bouc émissaire et ceci, à tous les niveaux.
Abstract For nearly two decades, the regional organs of the political police were officially subordinated dually : to their central counterparts and to the regional party committee. Initially, dual subordination involved few contradictions. The local “organs” served both masters, both in the destruction of “oppositions” and in the promotion of ambitious economic plans. However, in the
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early 1930s, under the extraordinary demands of the five-year plans, many regional party leaders demonstrated that they had the stronger grip on the loyalties of the local political police. The local “organs” played a crucial role in the protection of regional cliques from the pressures of plan fulfilment. They would find and arrest “wreckers” and “saboteurs”: those who would take the blame for production problems. The blame shifting strategy collapsed in 1936 and contributed to the Great Terror. After that, the centre took care to prevent the regional party and political police to collude in the subversion of central directives. From 1939, the centre chose all local political police agents, and carefully monitored their activities. The results of the change were mixed at best. Not all collusion was eliminated, though the centre was much better informed about bureaucratic malfeasance. The information came not from a disciplined local political police, but from an almost uncontrolled tendency to scapegoat at all levels.
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“Chekist in essence, chekist in spirit”: regular and political police in THE 1930s
Paul M. HAGENLOH
1 This paper examines the working relationship between the regular police (the Raboche-krest´ianskaia militsiia, hereafter the militsiia) and the secret police1 from 1930 to 1937, focusing on the period between the takeover of the militsiia by the OGPU in late 1930 and the creation of the NKVD SSSR in July 1934. The party leadership unified regular and secret policing in the early 1930s by turning the militsiia over to the OGPU. The OGPU leadership, when provided with this opportunity, restructured the regular police, attempting to create an effective, modern militsiia that was distinct from the secret police yet was connected to OGPU administrations at operational levels. OGPU attempts to reform regular police work, however, faltered on the social and bureaucratic disarray caused by the first and second five-year plans. Failed reform attempts led central and local police officials to turn instead to ad-hoc solutions to problems of public disorder in the mid-1930s. These solutions vitiated the original intent of the OGPU reform plan, as they entailed substantial mixing of regular and secret police activity in ways that were not considered desirable by any of the leading police or party officials early in the decade. By the mid-1930s, secret police were heavily involved in policing regular crime and public disorder, while regular police participated in extra-judicial punishment in areas that were previously the prerogative of the secret police, including the cleansing cities of specific “undesirable” social groups. This blurring of lines between regular and political policing widened the scope of mass repression later in the 1930s, especially during the “mass operations of repression of anti-Soviet elements” carried out by regular and secret police alike during the Great Terror of 1937-1938.
2 Regular and political police were fundamentally separate for most of the early Soviet period. After the creation of the USSR in 1923, regular policing was coordinated by republican-level Commissariats of Internal Affairs (the most important of which was the NKVD RSFSR) while political policing was the responsibility of the OGPU. These two
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police systems were highly antagonistic bureaucracies throughout the 1920s, locked in a mortal struggle for control over Soviet policing in general. This political struggle was won in 1930 by the OGPU, resulting in the abolition of all republican-level Commissariats of Internal Affairs and the transfer of control over the regular police to the secret police at the central and local levels.
3 The OGPU’s victory in this struggle can be linked to the overall rise of pro-Stalin factions within the Soviet state, but it also was the result of high-level support within the party for the OGPU project of creating a new, modern, unified “Soviet” police. In support of this project, the OGPU leadership promulgated a concrete and highly utopian set of plans for restructuring the militsiia and for reforming the operational activities of the regular police. These reforms in some sense were an attempt to make the regular police more like the political police, but they were also an attempt by the secret police leadership to “modernize” (in their understanding of the word) the militsiia and bring it up to the standards of contemporary European police systems.2 When the political police took over the regular police in 1930, they did not attempt to create a single hierarchical, unified Soviet policing system in which the militsiia formed a simple bureaucratic subdivision of the OGPU. The political police expected to set policy and control the militsiia on an operational level, but they also expected militsiia to remain a separate bureaucratic system, both in terms of local administration and in terms of self-conception. The connections between the two organizations were initially secret, and the militsiia continued to have nominal working contact with local soviets and social organizations such as the Komsomol. The new Soviet policing system, as envisioned by OGPU officials in the early 1930s, was to be comprised of parallel but separate regular and political polices that worked in close contact with each other but fulfilled different roles and maintained distinct levels of contact with the population.
4 The OGPU leadership had a tremendously difficult time bringing these institutional and operational reforms to fruition. Most of the specific aspects of these reform plans failed by the mid-1930s, due in large part to the social and bureaucratic upheavals caused by the industrialization and collectivization campaigns. The entire range of modernizing, westernizing reforms promulgated by the OGPU was predicated on policing models that evolved in other European settings within situations of relatively stable contact between police and population, conditions that were notably absent in the Soviet 1930s. The OGPU leadership also found that they could do little to solve basic problems that plagued the regular police in the 1920s -- low qualifications of officers, high turnover, rampant corruption, and lack of accountability to central administrations. The secret police leadership did, however, succeed in improving the institutional and bureaucratic structure of the militsiia by the mid-1930s -- bringing local police under increasingly centralized control, decreasing labor turnover, and improving information flow between central and local police agencies. But the concrete operational reforms envisioned by the OGPU leadership in the early 1930s -- the specific ways that this “new Soviet police” was expected to prevent disorder and maintain contact with society -- failed completely.
5 The OGPU takeover of the militsiia did have the unintended effect of blurring the lines between political and regular policing and brought the secret police into areas of activity that were within the purview of the regular police in the 1920s. The OGPU leadership was confronted with several unexpected problems when it took over the
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militsiia. It was unprepared for the difficulties associated with controlling an under- paid, decentralized, poorly trained militsiia that was substantially larger than the OGPU itself and that more resembled traditional systems of local control than a modern police force. Central and local OGPU officials reacted to this combination of public disorder and bureaucratic disarray within the militsiia by attempting to centralize command and “Chekaize” the regular police. New policing tactics emerged in the mid-1930s that brought regular and secret police officers together on a daily basis. In particular, the tendency of central and local police alike to see the internal passport system as a way to prevent crime, rather than a method of controlling geographic mobility, expanded the extra-judicial sentencing activities of the militsiia and increased the extent to which the OGPU policed low-level public order crimes. Urban crime and policing most fundamentally influenced this evolution.3 The OPGU leadership concentrated most of its reform efforts on urban, rather than rural, policing in the early 1930s. The failure of these reforms led directly to the prevalence of mass checks of passport documents and expulsions as the fundamental method of dealing with all crime in urban areas by mid-decade.4 By the mid-1930s, the secret police were highly involved in the policing of public order, including the internal passport system, economic crime (especially speculation), violent hooliganism, and those recidivists termed “socially harmful elements.” The 1934 creation of the NKVD SSSR was in many ways the culmination of this trend as well as a curtailment of police powers by a temporarily ascendant USSR Procurator, Vyshinskii.5
6 Although the activities of regular and political police overlapped in the 1930s, the political police never managed to gain the level of direct, daily control of the regular police that they desired, especially in the countryside. OGPU control over local militsiia officers often relied on personal relationships, especially since local militsiia chiefs concurrently served as OGPU officers after 1930 (after 1934, as Assistant Chiefs of NKVD administrations (zamnachal´niki UNKVD)). The daily institutional control of the militsiia by central NKVD officials was surprisingly weak, especially in comparison to the levels of bureaucratic control over secret policemen enjoyed by central officials.6 The central leadership had an extremely difficult time directing, controlling, and cajoling the militsiia into fulfilling central directives in the years 1934-1936. Local police were able to substantially define the parameters of Soviet policing in this period. Though we still know little about the actual mechanics of the mass operations, there is no reason to believe that central police officials enjoyed a higher level of control over local police during the mass operations than they enjoyed in the preceding years.7 When the Politbiuro called for repressive campaigns against specific categories of the population, including the 1937-1938 campaign of “mass operations of repression of anti-Soviet elements,” the regular police maintained a substantial amount of bureaucratic leeway in terms of selecting targets. This is not to say that the mass operations were not carried out predominantly by Chekisty8; but the secret police leadership had to work with an extensive, decentralized police administration, both regular and political, in order to collect information, identify suspects, and select targets. Local regular police were highly involved in both the mass operations of 1937-1938 and in the creation and identification of categories of “undesirable” social elements in the years that preceded the Terror.
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NEP policing, the militsiia, and the OGPU
7 The basic set of problems and difficulties in the relationship between regular and secret police in the early 1930s was inherited from NEP- and tsarist-era policing. Lenin, in pre- revolutionary writings on police in a communist society, argued that a professional police force would be unnecessary in a proletarian state and that armed workers would maintain public order themselves. Following this precept, the new Bolshevik regime in 1917 ordered the dispersal of municipal police administrations and called into existence volunteer workers’ militias made up of Red Guards and existing factory militias.9 The Bolsheviks concurrently acceded to the slightly more practical need to coordinate policing by creating the Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the Russian Republic (NKVD RSFSR) on October 28 (November 10), 1917 as one of thirteen Commissariats in the RSFSR government.10 Relations between the NKVD and the secret police were confused and unstable in the years following the Revolution, but as the initial institutional chaos of the Civil War gave way to the consolidation of NEP, the Soviet policing system quickly settled into a two-tiered pattern of separate political and regular police forces similar to the old tsarist system it replaced. The evolution of the militsiia in the first several years after the Revolution is fundamentally unstudied, but by the beginning of NEP, the militsiia had evolved into a full-time, professional administrative agency under nominal control of local soviets but only loosely tied to the center.11 After the formation of the USSR, individual republics were constitutionally guaranteed the right to regulate their own regular police affairs, though this guarantee weakened in practice as the 1920s progressed.12 The NKVD RSFSR attempted to set policy (often unsuccessfully) for the Russian republic and, in contradiction of the formal requirements of the USSR constitution, for other republics as well throughout the 1920s.13 In practice, however, the militsiia was an extremely decentralized organization. Decentralization was only intensified by widespread budget crises in the late 1920s that forced the NKVD RSFSR to rely on local soviets for funding and that provided local police administrations with tremendous latitude in setting the parameters of police activity.14
8 Relations between the militsiia leadership and the political police in the 1920s were strained at best. After the creation of the OGPU, the two police administrations (NKVD RSFSR and OGPU SSSR) were openly hostile, though the breach was held together to some extent under the influence of Feliks Dzerzhinskii, who headed both the political police and the NKVD RSFSR in the early 1920s.15 By the late 1920s, however, the two organizations had diverged fundamentally, both in terms of personnel and self- conception. After Dzerzhinskii’s death in 1926, the OGPU and NKVD engaged in open conflict over competing claims to jurisdictions, authority to apprehend certain groups of criminals, and rights to set the direction of law enforcement for the nation. The Internal Affairs Commissariat was surprisingly resilient in the face of repeated calls from other bureaucracies involved in criminal justice, especially the OGPU, for its liquidation in the late 1920s.16 As Stalin consolidated power, however, the difficulties experienced by the NKVD RSFSR regarding basic policing functions made the organization increasingly vulnerable to attacks from the OGPU and the Commissariat of Justice (NKIu RSFSR). On February 12, 1930, the Sovnarkom RSFSR approved a draft resolution ordering the transfer of corrective-labor colonies from the NKVD to the OGPU and asking the Sovnarkom SSSR to approve the resolution.17 Once Stalin decided
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to transfer the labor colony system to the OGPU, the NKVD RSFSR lost much of its rationale for existence. After an as-yet unexplained delay of several months, Stalin acted decisively in late 1930, abolishing the NKVD of the RSFSR and of all Union republics, transferring the control of the militsiia and the Detective Department (Ugolovnyi rozysk) to the OGPU, and giving control over the NKVD’s network of labor colonies and places of confinement (GUMZ) to the Justice Commissariat.18 The Politbiuro ordered the liquidation of the NKVD RSFSR on November 5, effective January 1, 1931.19
9 Although institutional competition drove much of the conflict between the NKVD RSFSR and the OGPU in the late 1920s, differences of political principles and understandings of the role of police and coercion in modern society played a central role as well. As chief of the NKVD RSFSR, Aleksandr Beloborodov had consistently championed legal systematization over extra-judicial activity and argued that “the methods of 1918” would be harmful to the evolving relationship between the population and the police. OGPU officials, for their part, advocated expanded extra- judicial activity in the late 1920s at the expense of the fledgling Soviet legal system promoted by Nikolai Krylenko and Aaron Solts, among others.20 A highly prescient assessment of the change in Soviet policing that would result from the takeover came from Assistant Procurator of the RSFSR Bespalov during his service as a member of the committee charged with dismantling the Russian NKVD in 1930 and 1931: “I find it necessary to point out in writing that I considered and continue to consider inexpedient the transfer of the militsiia, places of confinement, and the administration of compulsory labor to the OGPU. The OGPU is an organization [dedicated to] the battle with particularly socially dangerous elements, with specific methods of battle, while the militsiia and the administrations of places of confinement are organs of the widest popular activity with completely different methods of work, the fundamental element of which is wide contact with society at large (shirokaia obshchestvennost´). The unification [of these two organizations] will result in the transformation of the nature of the OGPU or the spread of the methods of the OGPU to the activities of the other above-named organizations, a situation that benefits neither the former organization nor the latter.”21
10 Bespalov’s point accurately predicted the contours of the evolution of the Soviet policing system for the rest of the 1930s.
New working relations between the regular and secret police
11 The OGPU leadership, upon taking over the direction of militsiia activity, promoted a wide-ranging set of reforms in almost every area of policing practice. The OGPU attempted to change methods of patrolling city streets, to reorganize local militsiia administrations, to strengthen connections between police and soviet institutions and between police and Soviet citizens, and to restructure police use of informants to uncover and prevent crime. The secret police leadership based this set of reform efforts both on their own operative experience and on their understandings of contemporary European methods of policing. The bureaucratic restructuring that accompanied these reforms corresponded with the centralization occurring in other spheres of Soviet administration in the early 1930s. The OGPU leadership attempted to carefully define the hierarchical relations between the two police organizations, to prevent overlap
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between the investigative tasks of OGPU and the militsiia, and to increase the qualifications of several subdivisions of the militsiia to equal those of the OGPU. The goal of this set of bureaucratic reforms was to create two separate, parallel policing structures. The militsiia would mirror the OGPU in terms of operational methods but would concentrate on a fundamentally separate area of competence -- that of non- political crime. These reforms were not initially designed to unify the duties or the bureaucracies of the regular and political police but were an attempt to carefully delineate the connections and differences between the two organizations. None of the central police or party officials involved in the dismantling of the NKVD RSFSR in late 1930 foresaw an operational unification of the militsiia and the OGPU, and none promoted a complete obliteration of the differences between the two in terms of status, tasks, self-conception, and duties.
12 On December 15, 1930, the Soviet government approved the abolishment of the NKVD RSFSR, although it made no public announcement about the future of the militsiia. The Central Executive Committee and Sovnarkom SSSR, however, issued a secret order on December 21, 1930 that outlined an outward institutional structure of the new police system while secretly defining the real terms of the relationship between the militsiia and the OGPU. Officially, each republican Sovnarkom was put in charge of a “Central Administration of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Militsiia” that formulated policy and directed lower-level police administrations. Local militsiia administration continued to be nominally subordinate both to local soviets and to higher-level police administrations.22 In a strictly legal sense, this hierarchy was the only arrangement possible, since the USSR Constitution explicitly gave republics the right to control regular police activity within their borders.23
13 However, the Sovnarkom resolution also outlined the direct and secret subordination of the militsiia to the OGPU. The instructions created a Central Inspectorate of the militsiia under the OGPU SSSR to set policy for the nation. It also created Special Inspectorates (Osobye inspektsii) within local OGPU police administrations, which were charged with directing the corresponding local regular police administrations. The instructions only vaguely defined the working relations between the OGPU and the militsiia: “Local administrations of the militsiia and the Detective Department, which are subordinate on a general basis to corresponding [local] executive committees and city soviets, are to carry out their work under the control of corresponding local organs of the OGPU.” The exact details of the relationship were to be worked out in practice. The OGPU also gained the crucial right to hire and fire militsiia officials.24 Although this situation resembled the “dual subordination” of the militsiia in the 1920s, in which the police were subordinate to both local soviets and to the NKVD RSFSR, the true lines of authority were unambiguous. The OGPU set policy and directed local police, while the Central Militsiia Administrations (subordinate to republican Sovnarkom hierarchies) maintained an appearance of local soviet control to the population and formed a legal bureaucratic hierarchy for the militsiia.25
14 In the areas of provisioning, labor regulations, and disciplinary codes, the OGPU promulgated a series of regulations designed to bring the militsiia in line with OGPU practices and to solve personnel problems that had plagued the NKVD throughout the 1920s.26 Crimes of office and refusal to serve out the full two-year contract signed by all policemen became punishable by a military tribunal. The OGPU ordered a series of financial changes intended to reduce labor turnover, including standardization of pay
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between different localities and increased provisioning of militsiia officers to match that of the military.27 The OGPU leadership carried out a purge of the militsiia immediately after its takeover, charging that the police apparatus was infiltrated with “anti-Soviet, free-loading, trouble-making” elements with past criminal sentences and “kulak ideologies.”28 Although the total number of officers expelled during the purge, which continued through the end of 1931, is unavailable, dismissals were substantial : 300 policemen were purged from the militsiia of Bashkiria, or 10 % of the total staff ; 830 policemen were purged from the Lower Volga region, including ten chiefs of raion- level administrations ; 40 more raion chiefs were demoted but allowed to keep their jobs. In the Urals, 1,233 policemen were purged, including 220 members of the officer corps. The OGPU leadership actively recruited officers from OGPU border guards and internal OGPU troops to replace these “socially alien and criminal elements” that had managed to work as NEP-era policemen.29 By the end of 1931, the OGPU was, in theory at least, firmly in charge of militsiia activity.
Structural divisions : investigation and policing
15 The operational reforms promulgated by the OGPU leadership after it took over the militsiia were united by one overarching goal : the OGPU planned to create a policing system that would prevent crime by connecting the daily policing practices of the regular police, the Detective Department, and the OGPU. In particular, the new leadership believed that undercover policing tactics were the key to making the militsiia into a modernized and effective police force. OGPU officials based their ideas for preventative undercover policing on their own activities against political opponents and the organized criminal underworld in the 1920s, and they consciously attempted to transfer many of their own methods to the regular police, especially the Detective Department. Surprisingly, although OGPU officials carefully defined the spheres of activity of both police services, they did not always retain more prestigious duties for themselves. While they never entertained the idea that the regular police would investigate political crimes, they did attempt to extend “Chekist” methods to regular policing. What the OGPU leadership found, to its surprise, was that the militsiia, even the more elite Detective Department, was in no way capable of carrying out the reform programs to the satisfaction of central police officials.
16 The Detective Department was the most important branch of the regular police in this reform program, both in terms of its mediation between regular policing and the OGPU and in terms of its centrality to the idea of the “new” Soviet police. Relations between the Detective Department, the rest of the militsiia, and the OGPU had been confused and contentious during NEP. Categories of crime handled by the Detective Department, such as armed banditry that lacked an overtly anti-Soviet political stance, often mixed with crimes that were the responsibility of the OGPU. Immediately after it took over the militsiia, the OPGU leadership attempted to sort out the connections between the Detective Department and the remainder of the police system. The OGPU leadership abolished the Detective Department as a separate organization and subordinated it to local police administrations, returning to the situation that existed in the initial years after the October Revolution.30 The Detective Department was expected to work closely with the patrolling police to unify the tasks of investigation and policing of public order.31 OGPU officials hoped to turn the Detective Department into a highly
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specialized, “Chekaized” undercover regular police force that used the methods of the secret police to deal with threatening regular crimes not under the purview of the OGPU.32 This goal was in many ways the culmination of Dzerzhinskii’s attempts to “Chekaize” the Detective Department early in the 1920s, but it was also an attempt to bring the militsiia, or at least part of it, up to the standards of the OGPU.
17 Attempts to reintegrate the Detective Department with the militsiia and to delineate the duties of the regular and political police faltered immediately, especially in the countryside. Central police officials openly admitted that the Detective Department did not serve rural areas at all. One official referred to the single category of policeman that served in the countryside -- the rural precinct inspector -- as the “homeless children” (besprizorniki) of police work, noting that the only difference was that “the besprizornik is served and nurtured by a whole range of party-social organizations, and our precinct inspector isn’t helped by anyone.”33 Although the militsiia, including the Detective Department, was not supposed to take over any overtly political functions, militsiia officials in the countryside usually were the first Soviet organs to come into contact with certain types of anti-Soviet activity that fell under the jurisdiction of the OGPU. At a 1931 meeting of Detective Department chiefs, the head of the Central Militsiia Administration, Usov, expressed this distinction with regard to banditry : “[W]e, as the Operative Department [Detective Department] of the Militsiia, will not specifically deal with questions related to the struggle with political banditry. We know that in the countryside we will take part in this matter on an everyday basis, because our apparatus is much more developed in the periphery [than that of the GPU], and it is completely obvious that very often in the countryside officers of the militsiia will be the first to react when certain sorts of crimes are committed, like a murder carried out by a kulak for purely class goals (na klassovoi pochve). This sort of crime is the business of the GPU, and the militsiia in this case is only that initial force that will begin to investigate the situation. The OGPU does not have that sort of well-developed network [in the periphery] and some cases will therefore without question be investigated initially by the militsiia. Our general task in this matter is to make the organs of the militsiia into Chekist organs in essence, Chekist in spirit, in methods of work, in forms of work, but not in any sense to replace the organs of the GPU with the militsiia.”34
18 Although central officials were willing to allow some overlap between regular and secret police in the countryside, they were adamant about not allowing it in the cities, where the OGPU had a highly developed set of institutions. Even in urban areas, however, OGPU authorities could not immediately reform relations between the OGPU and the detectives along the lines they desired. Many local OGPU officials took the political victory over the NKVD as a sign that they should simply take over the militsiia wholesale, especially in the case of the Detective Department, notwithstanding repeated instructions from central officials to the contrary. The fact that the new oblast´-level Detective Department chiefs were OGPU officers transferred to the militsiia after December 1930 only strengthened this trend. Central police authorities noted with alarm that the new OGPU officers reorganized the local Detective Departments to duplicate their experiences in the OGPU, often treating the detectives as lower-level functionaries to help deal with the immense work load of the secret police.35 OGPU officials also used militsiia officers to conduct technical work such as bookkeeping or guarding prison cells in secret police administrations, usually without the approval or sometimes even the knowledge of higher-level militsiia officials.36
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19 For the most part, though, local OGPU administrations ignored the militsiia altogether. Even as late as 1932 oblast´-level OGPU administrations made little effort to supervise militsiia operations ; lower-level officials were even more remiss. Supervision of lower- level militsiia bodies by the Sovnarkom police hierarchy, furthermore, generally consisted of occasional visits to localities by touring inspectors or higher-level police chiefs. Oblast´ police chiefs, one report stated, simply arrived in localities, looked around for a bit, and then left.37 Detectives, for their part, continued to see themselves as separate from and superior to the rest of the militsiia. Although the restructuring specifically intended to eliminate this duality of local policing, local detectives often did not play along, preferring to see themselves as closer to the better-respected OGPU. 38 By mid-decade the Detective Department was insulated from the daily activity of the rest of the militsiia, and it again became more prestigious and better paid than the regular police. Local OGPU administrations paid little attention to the Detective Department and were uninterested in supervising and training the militsiia as a whole.
Policing, social disorder, and administrative collapse
20 As the OGPU attempted to transform the Soviet policing system, the militsiia faced problems of public disorder that were several orders of magnitude greater than those that existed during NEP. Collectivization, resumed in mid-1930, strained the Soviet administrative system beyond its limits, as did rapid urbanization and the resettlement of several hundreds thousand peasant families as part of the dekulakization campaign. All of these processes were extraordinarily taxing for the administrations charged with carrying them out.39 The expectation of the OGPU leadership that local police could reform their entire bureaucratic system and methods of policing in the midst of this chaos and disorder was highly misplaced. The carefully delineated system of parallel police forces promoted by the OGPU leadership proved unworkable almost immediately, leaving the OGPU, both at the center and in localities, with little daily control over militsiia activities. The OGPU takeover compounded problems of bureaucratic decentralization and induced a complete collapse of the modest hierarchies of command that existed before 1930. As the OGPU dismantled the centralized bureaucratic structure of the NKVD RSFSR in 1930, local police administrations gained a tremendous amount of latitude in policy creation and implementation. Local soviets in remote areas often continued to direct local police, making use of the still official (if disingenuous) laws about the rights of local soviets and the leadership of the Central Police Administration under Sovnarkom RSFSR. Even though secret instructions made the relationship between the OGPU and the militsiia clear, published laws gave Administrative Departments of local soviets nominal control over the activities of the militsiia as late as 1932. Although part of the rationale of abolishing the NKVD RSFSR had been to centralize funding of police activities, funding still took place at the local level until 1932 (in many areas until 1934). Even those administrations in which police were paid from the central budget often had to rely on local soviets for funding for operational matters. The OGPU, for its part, had little permanent representation in most localities in the early 1930s, and was unable to closely monitor regular police activity for most of the early 1930s.40
21 The criminal justice system as a whole was consumed by the task of supporting the party’s rural and industrial campaigns between 1929 and 1933. Soviet criminal justice,
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as Peter H. Solomon, Jr. has shown, largely collapsed during the first five-year plan. Justice officials ignored basic legal functions like trials, investigations, and supervision of the police, and concentrated instead on prosecution of property crimes related to collectivization, grain requisitioning, and theft of industrial property. Judges and investigators also participated directly in brigades sent to the countryside to assist in collectivization and dekulakization campaigns.41 The militsiia performed many of the same functions. Urban policemen were requisitioned for detachments sent to the countryside to quell peasant unrest, while rural militsiia officers were usually the first contact between the state and rebellious peasants. Local police were on the front lines of the collectivization campaign in 1930 and 1931 and spent most of their time responding to disturbances in the countryside. Although the regime set up mobile detachments of activists to assist in the mechanics of collectivization, the regular police were often the first Soviet administrative officials to confront insurrections once the detachments had left.42 Central police officials strongly condemned the tendency of local party and government authorities to requisition local police for collectivization and dekulakization campaigns.43 In reality, however, police at all levels could do little to halt this trend. Although the OGPU continued to press its plans to reform the police system after 1930, in practice the need to support the collectivization campaign was paramount. Police turned to other tasks when time permitted.
22 In some areas, especially major cities, the OGPU did manage to remove the militsiia from the purview of local soviets and strengthen vertical hierarchies of control. Police chiefs retained their positions as members of the soviet Executive Committees, but local soviets no longer had any right to direct personnel decisions or influence the daily activities of the police.44 However, lines of command from central OGPU officials to local police administrations, though carefully defined in numerous circulars, were largely non-existent in reality. Poor communications, lack of paper, and bureaucratic chaos at the center meant that directives often failed to reach localities at all. A Detective Department officer from the Georgian SSR, for example, complained that central leadership was completely absent : “Up to this point [May of 1931, five months after the OGPU takeover] we have not received any sort of directives [from the central leadership in Moscow]. We have received no instructions, no textbooks [...]. In general, guidance from the center for the krai and okrug has been very weak.”45
23 The OGPU leadership had little previous practice trying to direct and control local policemen with less experience, training and discipline than their own political policemen. As a result, they were unable to create a functional nation-wide police administration for several years after the takeover.
24 At the same time, bureaucratic centralization also faltered on poor information flow from local police to central authorities. Central officials complained bitterly and repeatedly in the early 1930s about their inability to obtain information from localities regarding crime trends, police work, and the make-up of local forces. A typical circular sent from the Central Militsiia Administration (Glavnoe Upravlenie Raboche-Krest ´ianskoi Militsii-GURKM pri Sovnarkom) to local police in August 1931 lamented that, despite specific orders sent to localities in May of that year requesting statistical summaries of operative work by August 1, not a single police administration had fulfilled the directive and sent the requested information to the center.46 Many local militsiia administrations failed to send required reports to the center for several months at a time.47 Central police officials could force compliance only through threats
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to fire local officials, a step they were reluctant to take because of the severe shortages of officers that plagued the militsiia throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s.
25 Central officials also complained that local police, even in areas that were not particularly remote, ignored their instructions and continued to work in ways to which they were accustomed before the OGPU takeover. In particular, local officials failed to devote much energy to reforms that required them to maintain close contact with social or government organizations. One of the OGPU’s goals was to promote close contact between police and state or social groups. Police administrations, however, remained cut off from local soviet and trade-union bodies after 1930, and connections with local Komsomol cells or rural executors (sel´skie ispolniteli) were largely non- existent. Local police chiefs and precinct inspectors in Moscow oblast´, for example, completely ignored requirements to report to workers’ meetings and plenums of village soviets : “Cases even exist where some Raion Militsiia Administrations have failed to deliver reports to the Presidiums of Raion Executive Committees [of the soviets] for a year or more, for example the chief of Communist Raion Militsiia Admin-istration has not delivered a report [to the soviet] for over a year and a half.”48
26 This total lack of police contact with local soviets was apparent in all localities, including central locations in which the central police administration in Moscow exercised some amount of direct control. Rural precinct inspectors, in particular, were completely independent after the OGPU takeover obliterated what little nominal control local soviets had over them during NEP. Precinct inspectors remained itinerant policemen, touring large areas of the countryside and meting out justice to their own standards.49
27 In addition to the obstacles to reshaping the structure of police administration, OGPU officials found it difficult to reshape the staff of the militsiia itself. The OGPU almost immediately ran into nearly insurmountable problems of funding and provisioning. These difficulties were endemic to the Soviet administrative system in the 1930s, but the OGPU leadership was surprisingly and somewhat naively unprepared to face shortages of material and manpower in the regular police system. Though financing was supposed to be centralized, the OGPU leadership quickly realized that they had little chance of successfully providing even the most basic provisions to local police -- uniforms, shoes, and even firearms. In 1931 some oblast´ and krai police administrations were so under-funded that they could provide arms to only 50 to 60 % of their policemen.50 As early as February 1931, financial planners in Moscow noted that the central militsiia hierarchy made no provisions for supplying local police with automobiles, leaving local police to search for funding from local soviets.51 Funding for the finer points of police work was almost non-existent. One officer of the Criminal Investigations Department complained that the organization’s meager budget did not allow for purchasing the imported microscopes necessary to investigate crime scenes.52 Uniforms were in short supply, a problem only exacerbated by the new OGPU leadership’s immediate and rather inexplicable decision to order a change of uniforms in May 1931.53 By September 1931 central police authorities realized that new uniforms were in extremely short supply and postponed the exchange until January 1, 1933. New uniforms, however, were distributed to urban police first, while rural police were instructed to continue using their old uniforms.54
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28 Difficulties in recruitment and training also hampered the creation of a new Soviet police.55 The incoming militsiia chief, Usov, described the dire problem of finding qualified personnel in 1931 as follows : “Recruits for the militsiia predominantly come from the countryside, individuals who have neither qualifications nor any military background, who are not particularly valuable for industry or construction trades ; and furthermore such people often join the militsiia while they are waiting for better work to appear.”56
29 The militsiia accepted recruits without any qualifications, yet remained chronically understaffed. At the beginning of 1931 in seven central regions of the RSFSR, for example, 2,650 positions remained vacant, positions for which police had funding but could hire no officers. Of the recruits that could be found, many were said to be “class- alien, decaying, unfit-for-work elements.”57 Shortage of cadres early in the decade was such a problem that police academies regularly graduated their students well before their already brief training schedule was complete.58
30 Labor turnover also compounded staffing difficulties. The OGPU found, to its surprise, it initially could do little to solve the problem. In 1929, yearly turnover rates for police in the RSFSR were 64 % for the regular militsiia and 53 % for the industrial (vedomstvennaia) militsiia. In 1930, rates were 64 % and almost 80 %, respectively. Turnover in certain areas was higher, often up to 100 %, meaning that a given police position was occupied by a different officer every year. Policemen often treated the position as seasonal labor, taking the job to bridge slow periods between planting and harvest in the countryside.59 Turnover remained a problem throughout the early 1930s, reaching levels as high as 50 % per year even in major cities like Moscow through 1935. 60
31 High turnover rates wrought havoc with the modest system of training maintained by central officials. Policemen often changed jobs once they received training because their bureaucratic experience made them prime candidates for better positions in the economic or state bureaucracies. In 1930, for example, in five kraii and oblasti of the RSFSR 1,015 policemen began work after receiving formal training while 899 policemen with previous training left for other jobs. Police officers often left the militsiia to work as security guards or consultants for the very same organizations, factories, or department stores at which they had been stationed as police officers. State and industrial organizations simply offered better pay for the same position.61 In a final affront, police who quit for better work usually took their precious uniforms with them, especially in the countryside.62
32 The militsiia under the OGPU also continued to suffer from the same disciplinary difficulties that plagued the NEP-era police. Police officers were often removed from their assigned guard posts for other administrative duties ; sometimes they left of their own accord or simply fell asleep. Central authorities complained that the majority of regular policemen did not know how to use the weapons issued to them. Many knew neither their specific duties nor the basic characteristics of the city around them.63
33 Central officials were particularly concerned about crime and disciplinary infractions within the militsiia and with an overall lack of “Chekist” spirit.64 Drunkenness, sleeping on the job, and rude behavior towards the population were widespread. One 1932 report from Moscow oblast´ maintained that “anti-Soviet moods” had become commonplace within the militsiia and that the militsiia was “infiltrated to a significant extent by class-alien and unfit elements.” The report provided a litany of examples. In
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Reutovskii raion ten former kulaks, traders, and other class-alien elements worked in the militsiia, including the position of politruk of the industrial militsiia. Local administration was characterized by nepotism, while police misappropriated public and private property for “mercenary-minded” purposes. Drunken policemen fired indiscriminately on workers, raped arrested women, and murdered drunks in local jails. In Ramenskii raion a “Trotskyite group” controlled the militsiia, openly promoting anti-Soviet agitation at rural meetings.65
34 In all areas, policemen abused their positions with impunity, seizing property from arrested individuals for their personal use and accepting bribes. As a result, many raiony witnessed extraordinarily high levels of administrative sanctions for crimes on duty. In Kuznetskii raion, 48 % of the entire militsiia staff was charged with some sort of malfeasance during 1932; in Esenovskii raion, 70 %; in Pushkin raion -- 80 %; in Shelkovskii raion -- 85 %; and in Kommunist raion - 96 %.66 Disciplinary infractions were often attributed to alcohol consumption on the job. One 1932 report noted that “drunkenness in the militsiia, notwithstanding a series of measures [against it], remains at a very high level -- 890 policemen disciplined [for drunkenness in Moscow in] April 1932, 1,131 in May, 1,041 in July 1932.”67
35 Poor performance of duties and disciplinary infractions were particularly pronounced in the industrial militsiia. The most common complaints were that the industrial militsiia, like the police in general, constantly left their guard posts, fell asleep, or failed to show up for work at all. An August 1931 circular from Moscow noted that such low-level performance problems made up 90 % of the total infractions committed by both the industrial and the regular militsiia. The 7,631 industrial police in Moscow oblast´ (with eighteen raiony not reporting)68 committed 7,804 disciplinary infractions in 1931 that resulted in some form of punishment ; 4,714 (60.3 %) were relatively minor infractions on duty, such as sleeping or leaving without authorization.69 Nonetheless, statistically every industrial policeman violated work-related ordinances at least once per year. Industrial police were particularly prone to leave their jobs without returning their official police identification, which they then used to commit crimes and pass themselves off as police officers.70
36 The lack of coordination and bureaucratic flux within the police system as a whole provided numerous possibilities for flagrant abuse of the system. The following example is somewhat unrepresentative due to the extended nature of the crime but not at all unique in the chaotic context of the early 1930s. In Moscow in 1931 the Detective Department reported that they had arrested a twenty-year old professional criminal from Kiev who made a living impersonating a member of the Moscow Soviet and an OGPU officer. The impostor appeared at marketplaces and, presenting his forged credentials, collected “special taxes” from private traders of up to 100 rubles. The impostor provided receipts for his “special taxes” complete with official-looking stamps from the Moscow Soviet and the local administration of the Commissariat of Finance. Local traders, accustomed to these sorts of shakedowns from real police officers and themselves often living at the border between legality and illegality, had little to gain by not paying. This “officer” threatened to arrest individuals in the name of the OGPU if they did not pay their “taxes” on the spot, and in several cases, according to the police report, actually “carried out arrests, escorting the ;arrested ; individuals to local police stations.”71 Even in Moscow, coordination between regular and secret police activity proved surprisingly weak.
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37 At a very basic level, the OGPU’s attempt to restructure the regular police was derailed in the first years of the 1930s by problems of staffing, funding, and lack of local enthusiasm for the project. The administrative chaos of the first five-year plan made bureaucratic restructuring difficult if not impossible. The OGPU leadership, however, was unprepared for the extent to which the regular police was disorganized and unprofessional. As a result, the set of reforms promoted by the OGPU that were intended to create a new preventative police failed within the first few years of OGPU control over the militsiia. The unification of regular and political police that took place across the rest of the decade occurred in spite of these initial plans, and it occurred in ways neither planned nor expected by the central leadership.
The passport system and the OGPU/militsiia relationship
38 The abject failure of the OGPU to reform the militsiia in the first several years of the 1930s fundamentally shaped the evolution of Soviet policing for the rest of the decade. The failure of the police leadership to create a well-organized, hierarchical, “modern” policing system opened space for the promotion by local and central officials alike of other methods of policing in the mid-1930s. These methods differed substantially from those promoted by the OGPU when it took over the militsiia. The failure also drove the regular and secret police together in terms of everyday practice in ways that were not initially intended by the OGPU leadership. One of the most important outcomes of this co-mingling of regular and political policing was the general tendency of the police, both regular and secret, to view the internal passport system as a policing tactic by the mid-1930s rather than as a way to regulate population movements or as a way to strengthen the collective farm system (both of which were originally important issues in the creation of the passport system in 1932).72 Use of the passport system as a policing tactic increased the tendency of the OGPU to treat the militsiia as subordinate forces that could be called upon to carry out specific pressing tasks. It also increased the extent to which the OGPU was involved in issues of policing public disorder and social control.73
39 In 1932, the Politbiuro used the announcement of the new nation-wide internal passport system as an opportune moment to create an all-Union Central Inspectorate of the Militsiia under the OGPU’s overt jurisdiction. The regime abolished the Administrative Departments of local soviets, announced publicly that the OGPU had controlled the militsiia since 1930, and eliminated the façade of local soviet control over police completely.74 Police chiefs, who were now openly cross-appointed as OGPU assistants, continued to sit on the Executive Committee of local soviets and often had a spot on the local party Bureau as well. In bureaucratic terms, the passport system represented the first instance of OGPU officers directing the daily operations of the regular police. Chiefs of Passport Departments (stoly) in individual police stations were appointed directly from members of the Operative Department of the OGPU. While the militsiia carried out the outward work of passportization, the Operative Department of the OGPU coordinated the operations and processed the cases of individuals to be expelled from major cities. The instructions to OPGU officials regarding targets of the passport system mixed categories of regular and political criminals and were strikingly similar to those issued during the mass operations in 1937. In Moscow, local OGPU
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administrations compiled lists of “counter-revolutionary, kulak, criminal, and other anti-Soviet elements” that had come to the attention of the OGPU in previous work and forwarded the lists to the Operative Department of the Moscow oblast´ OGPU administration for further action. The Operative Department then instructed local militsiia officials to expel these individuals from the city.75
40 Sentencing procedure regarding the passport system also brought the militsiia and the GPU together in practical terms. The Special Board (Osoboe soveshchanie) of the OGPU had, since 1924, retained the right to sentence “socially harmful elements” to five years in a labor camp, but the passport system substantially extended the arena of routine extra-judicial sentencing by the OGPU. Local OGPU administrations were authorized to create “passport troiki” with the right to sentence offenders to up to three years in a labor camp.76 These troiki processed cases (within 48 hours in major cities) that were drawn up and sent to them in lists by the Passport Departments of local militsiia administrations. Punishments meted out by these troiki ranged from “Minus 30” (deprivation of the right to live in 30 major cities of the USSR) for first-time offenders who were unemployed or labor shirkers, to three years in a resettlement camp (spetsposelki) for “lishentsy, kulaks, and dekulakized peasants,” to three years in labor camp for “criminals and other anti-social elements.”77
41 By 1935 purges of cities, carried out increasingly by both militsiia and secret police officers under the auspices of the passport system, had become the basic method of Soviet policing. The police increasingly dealt with specific categories of crime, especially speculation and hooliganism, via the passport system rather than sending offenders through the court system. This mixing of regular and political police activity intensified the trend towards viewing public-order crimes such as hooliganism and speculation in terms of their “threat” to the Soviet system. It also increased the tendency of central and local officials alike to turn to purges of specific categories of criminals in order to address recurring problems of criminal activity and weak police administration. In the early 1930s, the police leadership did not expect to control crime through urban purges carried out by a unified regular and political police. The idea of two separate policing hierarchies proved unworkable by mid-decade, however, while at the same time the central party leadership began to increase pressure on the OGPU/ NKVD to reduce social disorder, especially in urban areas. The result was an increasing tendency among top police officials, especially Iagoda, to promote coordinated efforts by the OGPU and the militsiia to purge urban areas of all “criminal elements.”
Policing and political debates, 1934-1936
42 The 1934 creation of the Union-level NKVD represented a major step in the centralization of police bureaucracies. The creation of the NKVD is often seen as a point of moderation in Soviet criminal justice, especially regarding the restriction of the extra-judicial sentencing powers of the OGPU that accompanied the reorganization. Peter H. Solomon, Jr. has shown convincingly that the creation of the NKVD SSSR was connected to Vyshinskii’s attempt to increase the authority of the judicial system and reel in the bureaucratic disorder that permeated the activities of the secret police during the early 1930s.78 But the creation of the NKVD also completed several trends towards centralization within the policing system that had accelerated after 1932. Since the restrictions of the OGPU/NKVD sentencing powers were temporary at best, the
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more lasting effect of the creation of the NKVD SSSR was the centralization of the police and of the prison and colony systems.
43 The NKVD SSSR was created in the context of a series of commissions and debates about public order and the police that took place from early 1934 to mid-1935 and from which several major initiatives eventually emerged, including the 1935 laws on hooliganism and juvenile delinquency. These debates began in late 1933 at the center, although many of the issues discussed in them had been important parts of conflicts about policing in localities for several years. Politbiuro materials suggest that Stalin in particular was unhappy with the ability of the militsiia and the OGPU to maintain order in Moscow itself in late 1933 and early 1934. In December 1933, the Politbiuro, on Stalin’s request, demanded a concrete report from the OGPU regarding the tasks and responsibilities of the militsiia. At the same time the Politbiuro ordered the OGPU, on the personal responsibility of the head of the Moscow police, to “establish order in the streets of Moscow and purge them of filth.”79 This censure was followed by orders later in December to the OGPU to execute participants in armed robbery in Moscow, to exile individuals from Moscow and its oblast´ who had two or more sentences for theft or two or more arrests (privody) for hooliganism in the previous year, and to exile beggars and “declassed elements” to their former places of residence, to special resettlements, or to labor camps.80 Shortly afterwards, on January 3, 1934, Stalin removed Prokof´ev from the position of nachal´nik of the Central OGPU Inspectorate of the Militsiia (GURKM pri OGPU), replaced him with L. N. Bel´skii, and again ordered the OGPU to “present the Central Committee with a concrete program of activity for the GU Militsii and [its] Passport Departments for the year 1934.”81 The report prepared for the Politbiuro, signed by Iagoda and Bel´skii, was radical, even for Iagoda. It contained a range of recommendations regarding the militsiia, most of which centered on the idea of further use of the passport system as a policing tactic and further connections between the work of the militsiia and the OGPU. The report stressed the need to continue sentencing passport violators extra-judicially to labor camps, and suggested increasing punishments for certain violators, such as hooligans and “proprietors of and visitors to criminal dens (pritony)” to ten years of hard labor. Iagoda’s response to the Politbiuro censure also included a request to strengthen the militsiia by sending an additional 500 Chekists to work as militsiia functionaries in localities.82
44 The question of the plan of work for the militsiia (and, ultimately, the OGPU) was a major issue at the center in 1934 and 1935, and it spawned at least four sets of Sovnarkom SSSR commissions and debates dedicated to public order problems. One commission met under V. Chubar´, which was concerned primarily with the question of juvenile delinquency, while another met under Ia. Rudzutak and was concerned with the militsiia and in particular policies regarding hooliganism, speculation, and juvenile delinquency. In addition, vigorous debate continued throughout 1934 about penal populations and the relative proper distribution of inmates between labor camps of the OGPU and the colonies of the Commissariat of Justice. In 1933, Iagoda requested and was given the right to transfer to OGPU camps all inmates in the Soviet penal system sentenced to two years or more of deprivation of freedom.83 Top justice officials considered this policy a one-time transfer, while Iagoda argued that it was a permanent change. The acrimonious battle over this issue trailed on throughout 1934 without direct resolution. Within months, however, Iagoda and the OGPU/NKVD decisively won this conflict. All corrective labor institutions under the control of the Commissariat of
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Justice, including prisons, labor colonies, and compulsory labor bureaus, were transferred to the newly formed NKVD, making the question mute. The transfer took place in October 1934, after the creation of the NKVD SSSR but well before the Kirov murder, which is often seen as the turning point away from moderation in NKVD activity in the mid-1930s.84 The creation of the NKVD was thus not only a curtailment of police powers but, in this instance, a bureaucratic consolidation of its position in the Soviet penal system which effectively cemented its victory in an on-going conflict with other justice and police organizations.85
45 Finally, it is worth noting that the Politbiuro commission that considered the question of reformulating the NKVD, formed in February 1934, took place simultaneously with the above debates and shared members with all of them.86 The materials of this commission are not publicly available to researchers, but the timetable of deliberations alone is instructive. The original decision to consider reorganization of the NKVD took place in February 1934; on March 8, 1934, the commission charged with discussing the matter was widened to include sixteen of the leading figures in the criminal justice system ; Stalin and Ezhov were added to the committee on April 1; and in July 1934 the NKVD SSSR was formed, with substantial but not complete limitations on extra-judicial sentencing.87 These deliberations took place at the same time that the other commissions met to discuss issues of public order, policing, and the proper activities of the militsiia and OGPU. Although all of these commissions were concerned with improving policing practice and reducing social disorder, in none of them did the participants argue for serious reduction in the vigor of policing activity, the number of policemen, or the number of individuals arrested in general in the USSR. None of the top-level participants in these debates, furthermore, posited a strict division between “political” and “regular” crime, or between the overall tasks of the OGPU/UGB NKVD and the militsiia. The series of well-known laws and campaigns against hooliganism, speculation, and juvenile delinquency that appeared in 1935 were the product of this extended and often self-contradictory set of debates in 1934 and 1935. When those campaigns were launched, both the militsiia and the UGB were thoroughly implicated in the solutions favored by top-level police and party officials.
46 If, at the center, policy makers tended to mix their conceptions of political and regular policing by the mid-1930s, the tendency in local practice was even more pronounced, especially in the area of economic crime. Speculation became once again an increasingly important issue in late 1936 and early 1937, when difficulties associated with the abolishment of the rationing system drove a series of campaigns and structural changes in policing that continued the process of mixing of militsiia and UGB duties. A substantial portion of the duties of the Economic Department (EKO) NKVD at the oblast´ level was transferred to the Detective Department in 1935, after which Detectives were responsible for undercover surveillance of markets and bazaars to prevent theft and speculation. The heads of the EKO were instructed to coordinate the work of the Detective Department, while the detectives were to report on their work directly to the head of the EKO in their oblast´.88 This trend culminated in the creation of the Department for Battle with Theft of Socialist Property and Speculation (Otdel po Bor´be s Khishcheniiami Sotsialisticheskoi Osobennosti i Spekuliatsiei -- OBKhSS) in March 1937, which united parts of the Economic Department of the GUGB NKVD and parts of local Detective Department administrations that dealt with economic crime. The duties of OBKhSS, as defined in the circular that created it, mixed both the personnel of the regular and political police and categories of regular and political
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crime. It was charged with not only undercover surveillance of speculation and related crimes but also surveillance of “petty wrecking” (melkoe vreditel´stvo), a category that by nature upsets divisions between political and regular crime.89
47 The period from 1935 to 1937 saw further centralization of police activity, increasing control of the militsiia by the central leadership, and a large degree of success in terms of bureaucratic restructuring that had eluded the OGPU before 1935. The creation of the NKVD resulted in stricter formal subjugation of the militsiia to local NKVD administrations. The instructions issued by Iagoda outlining the new structure of the NKVD SSSR made the militsiia into a free-standing Administration (Upravlenie) of each oblast´- or krai-level NKVD administration and specifically stated that the nachal´nik of each local militsiia administration was directly subordinate to the nachal´nik of the NKVD of the corresponding city or raion.90 This centralization did not progress without difficulty ; central authorities did continue to report problems in 1935-1936 in forcing local police to work in the manner demanded of them. Local NKVD administrations were often quite unscrupulous about the extent to which they sent in false reports to the center about their activities and about staffing levels. In particular, local police continued to pay little attention to certain aspects of policing that were important to central officials but not so important in many localities, such as proper supervision of fining procedures and especially the maintenance of extensive lists and card catalogs associated with the passport system. Central officials also continued to complain in 1934 and 1935 that local NKVD chiefs undervalued the work of the militsiia and did little to control and direct its work. Overall, however, central authorities were relatively satisfied with the progress of centralization of the militsiia by roughly 1936 and early 1937, especially in comparison to the situation in the early 1930s. Of course, the exact implementation of central directives was always in question in the 1930s, and central police officials could never be sure if the campaigns they ordered into action would be carried out in the exact way they expected. However, although substantial deficiencies still existed, central police officials could expect by this point that local police would carry out central directives more or less within the parameters set by the center.
48 By 1936 and 1937, the UGB and the militsiia were firmly ensconced in areas of competence that had been separate at the beginning of the 1930s. One cause of this intermingling of tasks is undoubtedly the fact that Chekisty were increasingly busy in 1936-1937 with matters related to the hunt for internal political enemies, especially within the party but also in the population at large.91 As the UBG concentrated less on issues of public-order policing in 1936 and 1937 under direct pressure from Ezhov to turn to “enemies of the people,” the militsiia, already accustomed to working with Chekisty in many areas, filled the breach. By the time that the mass operations took place, the militsiia had expanded their activity to many areas that easily shaded over into “counter-revolutionary activity,” while the rest of the NKVD apparatus had substantial experience with policing public-order crimes like hooliganism, banditry, passport violations, and speculation. Thus, when the Politbiuro began ordering mass arrests of “kulak, criminal, and other active anti-social elements” in August 1937, both the UGB and the militsiia were poised to fulfill the quotas.92
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Conclusions
49 The failure of the reform program promoted by the OGPU in the early 1930s had two major consequences for the evolution of Soviet policing in the 1930s. First, it led to increasing unification of the regular and political police in terms of local structures and operational activity. The political police leadership in the mid-1930s centralized regular policing, subsumed the militsiia under local UGB administrations, and became involved in policing low-level manifestations of public disorder that were not seen as “political” in the 1920s. The militsiia and the OGPU/UGB also increasingly collaborated in identifying and expelling several crucial categories of “undesirable” urban residents, including speculators, violators of the internal passport system, and hooligans (a category that became closely connected with labor violations in the mid-1930s). The mixing of secret and regular policing was largely ad-hoc and did not correspond to any overall plan on the part of the police or party leadership. Rather, it was the result of a combination of local bureaucratic realities and increasing central concern with the effects of crime and public disorder on the emerging Stalinist economic and social systems. Second, this failure led to new set of policing tactics by 1934-1935, including passport checks and purges of cities, which contradicted the overtly systematized plans that the OGPU leadership had championed in the early 1930s. These massive and rather indiscriminate purges of urban areas in the mid-1930s compounded problems of marginal populations and administrative disorder, and they eventually formed a substantial part of the practices employed in the mass operations of 1937-1938.
50 The attempt to create a new Soviet policing system through introduction of policing practices understood as highly modern aspects of all European policing systems had little chance to succeed in the early 1930s for a range of reasons that were not unique to the sphere of policing. These “modern” policing innovations tend to require a reasonably stable population, not to mention a stable police force itself -- police work with informants, or daily contact between population and constables, require long- term cultivation of personal relationships between state and social actors rather than reliance on purely bureaucratic or structural relationships. Such policing reforms became most effective in modern European countries precisely when police officers became a stable and somewhat predictable part of the milieu that they were policing. This outcome was largely impossible in the USSR during a period of mass collectivization and forced industrialization in which both police and people were in complete flux. Instead, the failure to create a modern militsiia in the early 1930s increased the reliance of the regular police on extra-judicial repression as a policing tactic. Ultimately, the blurring of regular and political policing that emerged from the bureaucratic confusion of the early 1930s intensified and expanded the scope of Stalinist mass repression in the pre-war years.
51 Department of History
52 University of Alabama
53 202 Ten Hoor Hall
54 Box 870212
55 Tuscaloosa, AL 35487
56 e-mail : [email protected]
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NOTES
1. The secret police was known as the OGPU between 1923 and 1934, after which it was reorganized as a subdivision of the newly created People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR (NKVD SSSR) and named the GUGB NKVD SSSR (Glavnoe Upravlenie Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti-Central State Security Administration of the NKVD SSSR). Hence the term “the NKVD,” though in wide use to denote the political police, is incorrect in several ways. OGPU and GUGB refer to central administrations and will be used only when this meaning is intended, while GPU and UGB refer to local administrations or individual officers and will be used accordingly. 2. For more on these operational reforms and the OGPU’s attempt to create a “modern” Soviet police system, see Paul Hagenloh, “Police, crime, and public order in Stalin’s Russia, 1930-1941” (Dissertation, University of Texas, Austin, 1999), Chapters 1 and 2. 3. Bolshevik policy regarding the countryside was crucial in shaping the overall policy approach of the regime regarding the criminal justice system, but concrete strategies directed towards controlling disorder in cities had more influence on the evolution of the specific practices employed by the Soviet police. For the effects of the collectivization and dekulakization campaigns on Soviet criminal justice, see Peter H. Solomon, Jr., Soviet criminal justice under Stalin (Cambridge and New York : Cambridge University Press, 1996), Chapters 3 and 4. 4. For the importance of urban purges in the mid-1930s, see David R. Shearer’s contribution to this volume, and Paul Hagenloh, “Socially harmful elements and the Great Terror,” in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Stalinism. New directions (London and New York : Routledge, 2000). 5. For Vyshinskii’s position on strengthening the courts and the procuracy vis-à-vis the police in 1934 and 1935, see P.H. Solomon, Jr., op. cit.: 166-167. 6. It is quite possible that the GUGB enjoyed less control over local Chekisty than scholars have assumed, but in any case they exercised even less control over the daily activity of the militsiia. For a hint that the OGPU leadership often had difficulties controlling its own local officers, see N.V. Petrov and K.B. Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 1934-1941. Spravochnik (Moscow : Obshchestvo “Memorial,” RGASPI, GARF, Zven´ia, 1999), footnote 1, p. 36. 7. Instances of “mass operations” (both planned and unplanned) in the early and mid-1930s always led to increased disorder among police at the periphery and decreased central control. Therefore, central police officials often specifically instructed local police not to resort to “methods of mass operations” in the mid-1930s when carrying out specific policy initiatives. 8. Individual political police officers of all types were referred to throughout the Soviet period as “Chekisty”; this article will duplicate this usage. 9. A.V. Borisov, A.N. Dugin, A.Ia. Malygin, et al., Politsiia i militsiia Rossii : Stranitsy istorii (Moscow : Nauka, 1995): 95-96, and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, “Crime and police in revolutionary Petrograd, March 1917-March 1918: Social history of the Russian Revolution revisited,” Acta Slavica Iaponica, XIII (1995): 28-29.
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10. V.F. Nekrasov, et al., Organy i voiska MVD Rossii. Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk (Moscow : Ob´´edinennaia redaktsiia MVD Rossii, 1996): 183-185. 11. Little information exists on the transition to a professional militsiia in the early 1920s. Given the level of opposition to centralization expressed by local workers’ militias during the Provisional Government period, one would expect similar resistance to centralization under the Bolsheviks. Whether this was the case is open to research. 12. The NKVD RSFSR was also directly involved in the creation and coordination of local soviets in the first few years after the Revolution. NKVD representatives were sent to localities with the explicit task of setting up the some 12,000 local soviets that existed in the RSFSR by July 1918. Little research has been done on this important function of the NKVD in the first few years after 1917. V.F. Nekrasov, et al., op. cit.: 185-186. 13. Aleksandr Iakovlevich Malygin, “Gosudarstvenno-pravovoi status militsii RSFSR v period provedeniia Novoi Ekonomicheskoi Politiki (20-e gody),” Doktorskaia dissertatsiia (Moscow : Akademiia MVD RF, 1992): 295-325. 14. 2-i vserossiiskii S´´ezd administrativnykh rabotnikov. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow : Narodnyi kommissariat vnutrennikh del, 1929): 7. 15. Dzerzhinskii, head of the Cheka, GPU, and OGPU from 1917 until his death in 1926, also headed the NKVD RSFSR from March 1919 to August 1923. Aleksandr Georgievich Beloborodov, his replacement at the NKVD, gained the position on Dzerzhinskii’s personal recommendation, allowing the head of the OGPU continued to exert influence on both halves of the Soviet policing system until his death. V.F. Nekrasov, et al., op. cit.: 229-238. 16. Surprisingly, the NKVD survived the ousting of its chairman in 1927. Beloborodov was removed as People’s Commissar in November 1927 and replaced by Vladimir Nikolaevich Tolmachev. Tolmachev came to the NKVD after an undistinguished career in party service, including the position of deputy chairman of the North Caucuses krai Executive Committee. Beloborodov was subjected to internal exile from 1927 until 1930, after which his party membership was restored and he worked in low-level positions until he was arrested in 1936 and executed in 1938. Tolmachev was eventually purged from the party as part of the “Fractional Group of Smirnov, Tolmachev, and Eismont” and was shot in 1937. V.F. Nekrasov, et al., op. cit.: 460-461. 17. George Lin, “Fighting in vain : NKVD RFSFR in the 1920s” (Dissertation : Stanford University, 1997): 136-137. 18. Stalin expressed his annoyance with the NKVD leadership for fighting for retention of its inmates and his determination to side with the OGPU in a letter to Molotov dated September 7, 1930: “These [maneuvers of the NKVD] are the machinations of a thoroughly corrupted Tolmachev [...]. I think that it is necessary to carry out the decisions of the Politbiuro, and to close the NKVD.” Pis´ma I.V. Stalina V.M. Molotovu, 1925-1936 gg. (Moscow : Rossiia molodaia, 1995): 214-215. 19. A.V. Borisov, et al., op. cit.: 140-141. 20. A.I. Malygin, op. cit.: 273-294. For the positions of the leading criminal justice officials in the late 1920s, see P.H. Solomon, Jr., op. cit.: 60-65. 21. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter GARF), f. 374 (Narodnyi Komissariat Raboche-Krest´ianskoi Inspektsii (NK RKI)), op. 27, d. 1923, l. 40.
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22. GARF, f. 1235 (Vserossiiskii Tsentral´nyi Ispolnitel´nyi Komitet (VTsIK) RSFSR), op. 141, d. 418, ll. 1-3. The resolution also attempted to solve some of the funding and staffing problems of the old militsiia by requiring that high-level officers of the militsiia and the Detective Department be paid at the same level as corresponding OGPU officials. 23. Control of the militsiia by the OGPU, which was an all-Union organization, would absolutely contradict the USSR constitution. There is some indication that the Politbiuro consciously considered this problem when it created the republican-level militsiia administrations, and that it consciously attempted to maintain a facade of constitutionality for both domestic and international appearances. A.V. Borisov, et al., op. cit.: 140-142. 24. The relationship between the state (Sovnarkom) and OGPU central militsiia administrations was one of policy making versus simple publication and distribution of the policy. The state militsiia administrations were also charged with planning, funding, making sure that provisioning ran smoothly, and other mundane aspects of police administration. 25. The reasons for the center’s reluctance to turn over control of the police outright to the OGPU are unclear. Beyond the need to maintain some appearance of constitutionality, the party hierarchy may have understood that the population perceived the OPGU as more repressive than the militsiia. The NKVD RSFSR leadership in the 1920s argued that the population respected the militsiia but saw the OGPU as an instrument of oppression, though the high levels of corruption evident in the militsiia might temper that claim. 26. New official instructions for the militsiia were published on May 25, 1931 in “Instructions regarding the workers’ and peasants’ militsiia” (Polozhenie o RKM). Sobranie zakonov i rasporiazhenii raboche-krest´ianskogo pravitel´stva SSSR (hereafter SZ), 33 (31 May 1931), article 247, pp. 429-437. 27. For information on the implementation of the instructions, see GARF, f. 9415 (Glavnoe upravlenie Militsii MVD SSSR), op. 5, d. 476, ll. 248-250. 28. GARF, f. 9415, op. 5, d. 474, ll. 1-2. Local militsiia administrations began the purge beginning on January 18, 1931, which was to be carried out in complete secrecy so it would not weaken police morale. 29. GARF, f. 1235, op. 141, d. 910, ll. 22-21. Although transfers from the OGPU generally took place to the highest leadership positions of the militsiia, OGPU officers understandably tended to see the move as a step down the career ladder. 30. Detective Departments occupied an unstable bureaucratic position within local NKVD and soviet administrations throughout the early Soviet period. Like militsiia administrations in general, they were completely decentralized in the months following the Revolution. NKVD regulations in October 1918 attempted to normalize bureaucratic structures across the RSFSR, creating Detective Departments with the militsiia administrations at the guberniia level and in towns of over 40-45,000 residents. These local departments were, like the militsiia itself, nominally under control of local soviets but loosely directed from the center by a corresponding Department of the NKVD RSFSR. A.V. Borisov, et al., op. cit.: 101-102. In 1922 and 1923, as the result of direct pressure from Dzerzhinskii, Detective Departments were promoted to free- standing subdivisions at central and local levels, hierarchically equal to the regular
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militsiia instead of subordinate to it. This move was part of Dzerzhinskii’s longstanding attempts to subsume all police functions under the OGPU; he viewed it as a first step towards including local Detective Departments under local GPU administrations. A.I. Malygin, op. cit.: 282-285. Although after the reorganization in 1930-1931 the Ugolovnyi rozysk was re-named the Operativnyi otdel of local militsiia administrations to reflect its subordinate status, I will continue to call it the Detective Department in English, both for the sake of consistency and because the attempt to reintegrate it into the regular policing hierarchy failed quickly. 31. In a meeting of the heads of republican-level Detective Departments in late May 1931, Usov, the new Assistant Chief of the Central Inspectorate of the militsiia within the OGPU, compared the situation to that in the OGPU. No internal functional division existed with the OGPU between “outward order and operative questions,” he argued, and hence the militsiia should not have one either. Usov referred to the reorganization that was taking place as “operativization” and he argued for the need to thoroughly “operativize” the militsiia. GARF, f. 9415, op. 5, d. 475, ll. 3-5. 32. GARF, f. 9415, op. 5, d. 475, ll. 12, 21-23. Another participant in the 1931 Conference of Detective Department Chiefs carried the idea further, arguing that the precinct inspectors were purely operative functionaries and hence should be subsumed under the Detective Department of the militsiia. The militsiia, he argued, would then be divided into two main sections : a Detective Department, dealing with all investigation, and an outward department or “beat” department (Stroevoi otdel), which would be responsible for strictly overt functions like posts, guards, plus open surveillance and training of police. Ibid., ll. 30-31. 33. GARF, f. 9415, op. 5, d. 475, l. 56. 34. Ibid., l. 7. 35. Ibid., l. 12. 36. GARF, f. 9415, op. 3, d. 3, ll. 6ob-9. 37. The author of this particular report suggested that nachal´niki of oblast´-level administrations should spend no less than four months each year touring the periphery. This suggestion was rather impractical, both because of the incredibly high level of “touring” that would be required to maintain any sort of useful contact between localities and the center, and because it was completely impossible for the center to release top officials to tour the countryside for lengthy periods of time due to the manpower shortage facing the police as a whole. GARF, f. 9415, op. 3, d. 3, ll. 8ob-9. 38. No uniform division of authority existed within local police forces regarding investigation practices throughout the early 1930s. In some areas, the Detective Department carried out all investigations without exception, while in others it investigated only certain crimes, leaving others to the police patrols themselves (otdely sluzhby). GARF, f. 9415, op. 5, d. 474, l. 76. 39. See V.P Danilov, ed., et al., Spetspereselentsy v Zapadnoi Sibiri, 1930-vesna 1931 g. (Novosibirsk : Nauka, 1992), and N.A. Ivnitskii, “Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie v nachale 30-kh godov,” in Iu.N. Afanas´ev, ed., Sud´by rossiiskogo krest´ianstva (Moscow : RGGU, 1996): 249-295. 40. One of the most daunting tasks facing the OGPU when it took over the militsiia was simply gathering information about realities of policing in local areas. OGPU officials found that central knowledge was less complete than they expected. They had to
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request information on policing techniques, staff levels, and leadership structure from local police administrations themselves. See, for example, GARF, f. 9415 (Glavnoe upravlenie Militsii MVD SSSR, 1930-), op. 5. d. 474, l. 38 for a request for information on rural policemen. 41. P.H. Solomon, op. cit.: 81-110. 42. In a typical example, a rural precinct inspector in Moscow oblast´ responded in March 1930 to a group attack on a newly formed collective farm. Some 100 women gathered at the central barn of the new kolkhoz to demand the return of their cattle, which they claimed were poorly treated by the kolkhoz members in charge of them. Local Komsomol activists attempted to prevent the seizure of the cattle but were forcibly removed by the group of protesters. The local precinct inspector solved the situation by instructing the women to create a five-person delegation to discuss the problem with the Executive Committee of the raion soviet. Five women eventually did appear before the soviet, but once the potentially explosive situation had been defused, local authorities declined to acquiesce to their demands and transferred the matter to the OGPU for investigation. Tsentral´nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Moskovskoi Oblasti (TsGAMO), f. 267 (Administrativnyi otdel Moskovskogo okruzhnogo ispolkoma, 1929-1930), op. 1, d. 1, l. 477. 43. In March 1931 Kashirin, the head of the Central Administration of the militsiia under Sovnarkom RSFSR, wrote to local party and police officials requesting that local party organizations refrain from mobilizing policemen until the ongoing reorganization of the militsiia was complete and the organization was strengthened enough to withstand the use of higher-ranking officers for local campaigns. GARF, f. 9415, op. 5, d. 474, l. 16. 44. A final important structural change that happened in 1930-1931 was the decision to abolish all city-level police administrations in major oblast´ centers and to unify the oblast´ and city administrations. This decision was initially taken to reduce costs and staffing redundancy and to make city police directly responsible to the oblast´ leadership. An additional consideration, according to one report, was the “bolstering of militsiia authority vis-à-vis city organizations and the prevention of the situation which existed in the past of the transformation of the city militsiia into a technical assistant to local city, party, and soviet organizations.” The change only enhanced the independence of police administration in major cities. GARF, f. 9415, op. 3, d. 3, ll. 6-6ob. 45. GARF, f. 9415, op. 5, d. 475, l. 95. 46. The circular called the situation “impermissible” and ordered immediate forwarding of the requested information. GARF, f. 9415, op. 5, d. 474, l. 69. 47. GARF, f. 9415, op. 3, d. 3, l. 49. 48. GARF, f. 9415, op. 5, d. 491, ll. 6-8. 49. GARF, f. 1235, op. 72, d. 340, ll. 1-6. 50. GARF, f. 1235, op. 141, d. 910, l. 15. Another report on provisioning of the militsiia stated that the task had been fulfilled extremely poorly after the OGPU takeover. Control and inventory of weapons was reportedly weak, and in many locales the weapons themselves were in poor condition. GARF, f. 9415, op. 3, d. 3, ll. 78-79. 51. GARF, f. 9415, op. 1, d. 2, l. 11. 52. GARF, f. 9415, op. 5, d. 475, ll. 84-100, esp. 85.
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53. The order for new uniforms can be found in GARF, f. 9415, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 51-55ob, complete with a description of the uniforms and the rules for wearing them. The order, dated April 29, 1931, calls for new uniforms to be distributed beginning May 1, 1931. It is not surprising that outfitting all policemen in the USSR with new uniforms would be a problem in an economic system notorious for lack of light industrial goods. 54. GARF, f. 9415, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 149-150. One can only guess that the uniforms worn by rural police were in the poorest possible condition. 55. OGPU officials generally were satisfied with the social composition of the militsiia. One report noted that as of July 1, 1932, 23.3 % of policemen were party members, 6.2 % were Komsomol members, and 70.5 % were non-party. Most of the party members were the commanding officers, while very few rank-and-file police officers were party members. The report also outlined the social composition of the militsiia: 21.2 % workers, 64.9 % peasants of various social-economic categories, and 13.9 % white-collar workers (sluzhashchie). The worker contingent was relatively stable, having grown 1.5 % in 1931. GARF, f. 9415, op. 3, d. 3, ll. 26-27. 56. GARF, f. 1235, op. 141, d. 910, l. 40. 57. Ibid., ll. 40-39. 58. GARF, f. 9415, op. 1, d. 1, l. 55. 59. GARF, f. 1235, op. 141, d. 910, ll. 39-37. 60. GARF, f. 9401 (OGPU-NKVD-MVD SSSR), f. 12, op. 135, d. 26. 61. Usov, the police chief, was particularly bitter about the practice of inter- bureaucratic “headhunting” that drained the militsiia of the few qualified officers it had. See GARF, f. 1235, op. 141, d. 910, ll. 39-37. 62. GARF, f. 9415, op. 3, d. 3, ll. 66-77. 63. One 1932 circular chided local officers for their habit of working “by the book”: police failed to see themselves as a “master (khoziain) of the street” and instead resembled “passive watch-guards (budochniki) of the old times or, at best, blind executors of policy.” Ibid., l. 83. 64. Central officials were well aware of the tendency of local police to use physical force and violate norms of procedure when arresting citizens. A September 1931 Prikaz from Usov complained that local policemen often beat people they arrested to loss of consciousness, especially drunks. Usov strongly condemned such behavior, saying that those policemen who use physical methods during interrogation were “class-alien elements” and “holdovers from the tsarist period.” GARF, f. 9415, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 134-135. 65. GARF, f. 9415, op. 5, d. 491, ll. 8-9. 66. Ibid., p. 9. 67. This report, however, stated that overall levels of anti-Soviet opinion in the militsiia were acceptable and were the result of poor working and living conditions and low pay. GARF, f. 9415, op. 3, d. 3, ll. 26-28. 68. The fact that several areas would simply not report information to the center, even in Moscow, was a ubiquitous feature of police reports in the early 1930s. To some extent, the police leadership accepted this reality and drew conclusions based on the data that was in fact sent in. 69. GARF, f. 9415, op. 5, d. 474, ll. 79a-80.
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70. GARF, f. 9415, op. 3, d. 9, l. 48. OGPU officials deemed the industrial militsiia more prone to graft and theft than the regular militsiia, both because industrial policemen tended not to be career police officers and because they had close contact with valuable goods. The OGPU carried out a general purge of the membership of the industrial militsiia in October 1931. I have no information regarding the results of the purge. GARF, f. 9415, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 173-173ob. 71. GARF, f. 9415, op. 5, d. 476, l. 126. 72. The idea that the passport system became a policing system is becoming an accepted position among specialists. See Gijs Kessler’s contribution to this volume. 73. Since Kessler’s article examines the passport system in detail, I will only outline in general terms the effects of the passport system on OGPU/NKVD relations. 74. SZ, 84 (31 December 1932), articles 518-519, pp. 824-825. 75. GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 137, ll. 1-2. 76. These troiki consisted of the pomoshchnik PP OGPU po Militsii, the nachal´nik of the Passportnyi otdel, and the nachal´nik of the Operativnyi otdel of the given OGPU administration. 77. GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 137, ll. 202-204. The fact that criminals and other anti- socials, along with repeat offenders, were singled out for the harshest punishment is consistent with the general trend of repression in conjunction with the passport system. 78. P.H. Solomon, op. cit.: 153-173, especially 166-167. 79. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial´no-Politicheskoi Istorii (RGASPI), f. 17, op. 3, d. 937, l. 1. 80. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 15, l. 161. In the same spirit, the Politbiuro on January 7, 1934, authorized the OGPU to expel 2,000 “declassed elements” from Kharkov to labor colonies and camps, noting specifically that this expulsion should take place in small groups of 80-100 individuals rather than as a large-scale operation. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 15, l. 164. 81. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 937, l. 28. For the Sovnarkom SSSR version of this Postanovlenie, see GARF, f. 5446 (Sovet narodnykh komissarov SSSR), op. 15a, d. 1130, l. 11. 82. GARF, f. 5446, op. 15a, d. 1130, l. 1-10. The overall impression provided by this report is that Iagoda considered problems of hooliganism, child homelessness, and speculation the responsibility of both the militsiia and the OGPU. 83. GARF, f. 5446, op. 15a, d. 1172, ll. 1-4. OGPU camps, from their creation in mid-1929, had exercised the right to detain all individuals sentenced to three or more years of deprivation of freedom ; the lowering of this limit to two years was a major blow to NKIu. Iagoda initially requested in April 1934 that all penal populations be transferred to OGPU camps, and that NKIu bodies retain only individuals under investigation, cassation, or sentenced to resettlement. This proposal was rejected by Molotov (and presumably Stalin), but the two-year limit did gain the support of Molotov (and Stalin) and was defacto put into effect. This change entailed and was perceived as a major bureaucratic victory for the secret police in the long-standing inter-bureaucratic conflict over the right to administer Soviet penal populations. The Politbiuro authorized a commission consisting of Iagoda, Krylenko, and Akulov to be set up to
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discuss the matter and make a recommendation for legislative action. GARF, f. 5446, op. 15a, d. 1172, ll. 5-6. Akulov and Krylenko agreed with this proposal in principle, though they both resisted the idea of making it a permanent policy change, and Akulov requested that the issue be settled in conjunction with the impending reformulation of the NKVD. Ibid., l. 7. 84. RGASPI, f. 17 (Tsentral´nyi komitet), op. 3, d. 953, l. 100. 85. For a detailed examination of the 1934 reorganization of the NKVD SSSR, see Francesco Benvenuti, “The ‘Reform’ of the NKVD, 1934,” Europe-Asia Studies, 49, 6 (1997): 1037-1056. 86. Participants in the debate understood specifically that the question of the reorganization of the NKVD SSSR was directly related to Iagoda’s report and the work of the militsiia and the OGPU regarding crime. Akulov, for instance, in his response to Iagoda’s suggestions noted that at least one of them, the suggestion that the NKVD be accorded the right to sentence policemen internally who were accused of crimes of office, should be discussed and decided within the framework of the new law on the NKVD. GARF, f. 5446, op. 15a, d. 1130, ll. 12-12ob. 87. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 939, l. 2; d. 941, l. 12; d. 943, l. 10; d. 948, ll. 33, 92-94. 88. GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 126, ll. 304-305. 89. In localities the OBKhSS was initially an otdelenie of the URKM, subordinate in turn to the UNKVD -- in other words, the OBKhSS was initially set up as a militsiia sub- department rather than a department of the NKVD. The subordination of OBKhSS to the militsiia must have seemed quite a step down the career ladder for those officers of the Economic Department (EKO) of the NKVD, Chekisty in their own rights, who had to transfer down the ranks from the old Economic Department to the new OBKhSS and hence lost effective rank (even though the initial instructions regarding the creation of OBKhSS state specifically that such officers would retain all their perks). Perhaps for this reason, the NKVD issued a second circular two months later, which made the OBKhSS into a free-standing Otdel of local UNKVD administrations, hierarchically equal to the militsiia administrations instead of subordinate to them. GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 126, ll. 23-26, 28. 90. GARF, f. 9401, op. 1a, d. 5, ll. 1-3. 91. See, for example, V. Khaustov on the increasing tendency of the UGB after 1935 to focus on searching for spies within German populations. V. Khaustov, “Repressii protiv sovetskikh nemtsev do nachala massovoi operatsii 1937 gg.,” in I.L. Shcherbakova, ed., Nakazannyi narod. Repressii protiv rossiiskikh nemtsev (Moscow : Zven´ia, 1999). 92. The mass operations themselves are outside the scope of this paper. I will only note that evidence suggests that, though they varied from locality to locality, the entire police system, including the militsiia, was involved in the selection of targets. In the case of the militsiia, especially the OBKhSS and the passport otdely continued to be closely connected to the work of the UGB during these operations. One set of such examples comes from Mikhail Shreider’s memoirs. Even before the mass operations took place, the NKVD nachal´nik in Ivanovo pressured him to transfer serious criminal cases to the UGB. “You’ve got many bandits and murders to deal with [in the militsiia], Mikhail Pavlovich [Shreider] -- you must impart a political hue to important cases. I’m sure that there are many spies and terrorists among them who have been thrown at us [from abroad].” Shreider’s answer was negative (“Don’t say stupid things,” he retorts,
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“I don’t have any spies or terrorists [among militsiia arrestees]. All of our prisoners are gangsters and recidivists.” Mikhail Shreider, NKVD iznutri. Zapiski chekista (Moscow : Vozvrashchenie, 1995): 46. When the mass operations began in Ivanovo oblast´, the NKVD chief personally told him, as the militsiia oblast´ nachal´nik, to select serious criminal cases for consideration by the special troiki -- “repeat offenders guilty of banditism, murder, robbery, escape from places of confinement, etc.” (Ibid.: 71) Shreider also notes that he was personally drafted into the work of interrogation of one oblast´-level party official, even though he complained that such work distracted him from attention to militsiia affairs. (Ibid.: 73-74) Finally, Shreider stresses that his “real” work during the mass operations continued to be investigation and sentencing of “criminal elements” through the police (militseiskie) troiki, and he notes with some amount of regret that the maximum sentence these troiki could hand down was five years, the result of which was that “many dangerous criminals received punishment that was too mild.”(Ibid.: 74, fn. 1). Shreider throughout his memoir attempts to separate his work from that of the UGB (and, in the same way, the Ezhov period from the Iagoda period), but his narrative makes clear that, at the very least, the UNKVD chief in Ivanovo pressured him to transfer criminals to the “political” sentencing process and that, in 1937-1938, this in fact did happen. Shreider’s narrative is full of inconsistencies and mistakes, and one is struck by his repeated insistence that he kept his work in the militsiia separate from that of the UGB when, at the same time, the text relates many instances where he in fact did participate in such work. Shreider was somewhat unrepresentative in the extent to which he defended his militsiia work from incursions from the UGB, and he is somewhat inconsistent in his telling of this part of his past.
RÉSUMÉS
Résumé « D’essence tchékiste, d’esprit tchékiste » : la police ordinaire et la police politique pendant les années 1930. Au moment de la restructuration générale de l’État soviétique qui accompagna la prise du pouvoir par Stalin, la police secrète soviétique (OGPU) prit la police ordinaire (milicija) sous son autorité à la fin des années 1930. L’OGPU s’efforça de transformer celle-ci en un système policier ordinaire qui compléterait les fonctions de l’OGPU liées à la sécurité intérieure tout en restant séparée aux niveaux bureaucratique et opérationnel. Ces tentatives de réforme échouèrent lamentablement pendant la première moitié des années 1930. L’OGPU n’était pas préparée à faire face aux difficultés liées à la réforme de cette bureaucratie tentaculaire, décentralisée, corrompue et inefficace. L’OGPU (suivie plus tard du NKVD) réagit à ces échecs en éliminant progressivement les différences entre la police ordinaire et la police secrète : elle encouragea la milicija à utiliser des tactiques de maintien de l’ordre plus conformes aux pratiques extrajudiciaires de l’OGPU qu’aux méthodes ordinaires préconisées par le régime au début des années 1930. Cet effacement de la frontière entre les deux types de maintien de l’ordre a eu pour résultat l’expansion substantielle des catégories de criminels ciblées par les opérations de répression de masse de 1937 et 1938.
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Abstract As part of the general restructuring of the Soviet state that accompanied Stalin’s rise to power, the Soviet secret police (the OGPU) took control of the regular police (the militsiia) in late 1930. The OGPU attempted to create from the old militsiia an effective regular policing system that complemented the OGPU’s internal security functions but that remained separate in bureaucratic and operational terms. These reform efforts failed miserably in the first half of the 1930s. The OGPU was unprepared for the difficulties involved in reforming a bureaucracy that was as large, decentralized, corrupt, and inefficient as was the militsiia. In response to these failures, the OGPU (and later the NKVD) gradually eliminated distinctions between regular and secret police, encouraging the militsiia to utilize policing tactics that were more in line with the extra-judicial practice of the OGPU than with the particular vision of regular policing that the regime had promoted in the early 1930s. This blurring of boundaries between regular and political policing substantially expanded the categories of “criminals” targeted in the mass operations of 1937-1938.
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The passport system and state control over population flows in the Soviet Union, 1932-1940.
Gijs Kessler
1 One of the aspects of police control in the Soviet Union that the recent opening-up of the archives has shed new light on, is the restrictive system of internal passports and urban residence permits that was in existence from 1932 on. For the period this article is concerned with, i.e. the 1930s, part of the files of the Central Police Administration and the OGPU/NKVD, which administered the passport system from the moment of its creation on, has been made accessible to historians, and an important body of materials from the still closed Presidential Archive has been published in the journal Istochnik.1 Recent research, furthermore, has revealed the central role that the passport system fulfilled in policing the urban population during the 1930s, both in the years leading up to the Great Terror of 1937-1938 and afterwards.2 A number of publications with a regional focus have devoted attention to the actual process of what was called the “passportisation” of the towns in 1933-1934, i.e. the handing out of passports and residence permits and the widespread social cleansing that accompanied it.3 Also, it has been shown ever more clearly than before that, after this initial phase of outright passportisation, the passport system was in practice much less restrictive than has often been assumed, and that rural-urban migration was all but halted in 1932.4
2 With a few noteworthy exceptions, however, the standing interpretation on the origins of the passport system and the reasons why it was introduced in 1932, have not been questioned.5 Roughly speaking, the traditional view of the passport system is that it was introduced in 1932 to stop the influx of starving peasants to the towns, and to tie the peasantry more closely to the kolkhozy and the land, principally by withholding passports to the rural population. Often an analogy is noted to the system of internal passports that existed under the tsars, overlooking the fact that there was a marked difference in functionality between the two. Whereas the tsarist system of internal passports served to keep control over peasants that migrated to the towns, and to keep them embedded in and committed to rural society, the Soviet system was exclusively
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concerned with control over the urban and non-rural population.6 The aim of this article is to re-examine the origins and the aims of the passport system through a comprehensive analysis of the way in which the system really functioned during the 1930s, and of the changes in functionality that can be observed in the course of the decade. What I will argue is that the passport system had from the very outset been meant in the first place as an instrument of repression and police control, and in the short run even more crudely as a purging tool. To understand why the Bolshevik leadership deemed it necessary to resort to measures of this sort, it is essential to see the introduction of the passport system in close conjunction with the severe crisis of the years 1932-1933.
The crisis of 1932
3 The crisis of 1932-1933 was an almost direct result of the deliberate strategy of unequal development of the urban and rural sector of the economy that had lain at the heart of the industrialisation effort of preceding years. It was a policy of unequal development that aimed at exploiting the rural sector for the benefit of the urban industrial sector through what was called “primitive socialist accumulation in the countryside.” During the first five-year plan these exploitative policies had been pushed to such extremes that by 1932 a major rural crisis unfolded, which, in its turn, had an impact on the urban sector of the economy. The central issue around which the crisis of 1932-1933 revolved, was food, and with it, food-supply.
4 The collectivisation of agriculture, combined with the ensuing merciless extraction of grain and other crops for three years in a row, had undermined the productive capacity of the villages to the point, where, in 1932, the rural population could not and would no longer meet the delivery targets set out by the state.7 This led to a major confrontation between the Bolshevik regime and the peasantry. From the early spring of 1932 on, and following the announcement of the very high procurement plan for the 1932 harvest, unrest started to spread in the villages. Massive walk-outs from the kolkhozy were reported by the OGPU, as well as frequent work-stoppages, go-slow-strikes, and the disbanding of entire kolkhozy by peasants who decided to go “individual” again.8 The party leadership was not prepared to back down, though. To start with, it desperately needed the grain it had planned to collect, both for export that would enable it to repay foreign loans taken out at the end of 1930 and the start of 1931, and, secondly, to feed an urban population that had mushroomed over the three preceding years due to a rapid expansion of the industrial workforce. Yet, it was not just that the party and state leadership could not lower procurement targets ; it was also in no way whatsoever prepared to yield to what it called “peasant sabotage.” The Bolshevik resolution to push through the 1932 procurement plan, and to teach the peasantry the hard way that “state interests come first,” set the scene for the confiscation of too large a part of the 1932 harvest and the depletion of most other rural food reserves. The tragic results for the rural population are well known and speak for themselves.
5 What concerns us here is the fact that, even after collecting all possible grain reserves that could be scraped together, the party leadership still found themselves with an amount of grain that was considerably smaller than what they had counted on. Leaving aside the export plan, the state faced an acute problem in feeding the urban population, the workers and the army, in short, those groups in society that were
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essential for either the industrialisation effort or the survival of Bolshevik rule. This was not just an abstract, but instead a very real problem. Having introduced rationing in 1928-1930, the state had taken upon itself the task of supplying the urban population with food and other essentials.9 Even before the food crisis of 1932 this had already proven to be a daunting task, not in the last place because of the fact that the period of the first five-year plan had witnessed an increase of the urban population that surpassed all expectations. The constant exhortations to industry to produce more, regardless of increases in productivity, had led to a rapid expansion of the industrial and urban workforce as enterprises drew in more and more labour in order to compensate for shortfalls in productivity. From the supply side this process was fed by a constant stream of rural dwellers that sought to escape forced collectivisation and “dekulakisation,” in short that sought to escape a countryside in the throes of the violence and terror of “primitive socialist accumulation.”10 This largely unplanned and hence unaccounted for influx into the towns put a growing pressure on the system of urban rationing. By 1932, when the effects of the destruction of the productive capacity of the agricultural sector started to make themselves felt, the state had come to face increasing difficulties in providing even those meagre rations it had been handing out before. Thus, the strategy of unequal development of agriculture and industry had come to the point where the “squeezing” of the rural sector started to have a backlash on the urban and industrial sector in the form of a disruption of the supply links running from village to town.11
6 Typically for those days, the country’s leadership refused to acknowledge its responsibility for the growing crisis, and instead put the blame elsewhere ; in this case on enterprise managers who were “found” to be “squandering scarce food reserves,” as well as on “anti-social” and “kulak” elements that were making widespread misuse of the urban rationing system by cashing in double or even triple rations.12 The authorities’ response was twofold. To start with, they attempted to cast off part of their responsibility for urban food-supply. In the early spring of 1932 non-working family members were thrown out of the distribution system and the categories of foodstuffs that were subject to rationing were drastically reduced.13 Secondly, an effort was launched to tighten control over urban distribution in order to root out fraud with rationing cards as well as other forms of abuse of the system. In early October 1932 a decree was sent out to the localities that aimed at making access to rationing dependent upon official urban residence, and that called for increased efforts to enforce mandatory registration of urban residents for this purpose.14 A nation-wide inquiry into the reliability of the system of population registration in the towns brought to light, though, that there was little connection, both in terms of numbers and in terms of actual persons concerned, between those registered as residents and those actually being residents.15
7 Meanwhile, the crisis deepened. As the all-out confrontation between the state and the peasantry over the 1932 harvest began to yield its first tragic results, starving peasants started to flee from the areas affected by famine in ever larger numbers. Part of this exodus was directed towards the towns, most likely because that was where people expected the grain that had been requisitioned for years to be. In August 1932 large- scale mopping-up operations were reported from Moscow and Kharkov, with scores of homeless beggars and starving peasants being thrown out and denied further access at the risk of immediate, on-the-spot shooting.16 The violent nature of the regime’s response must be understood against the background of a growing and deepening
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unease about the outcome of the bitter struggle with the peasantry that was going on. After all, the massive unrest in the countryside of the spring of 1930, when an armed peasant regiment had been marching on the town of Kislovodsk, was less than three years ago, and with the recollections of that struggle still fresh in mind, many within the country’s leadership must have found a repetition of those events not entirely hypothetical, particularly given the fact that in the current conflict the stakes were much higher for the rural population.
8 What made the matter even worse in comparison with 1930, was that the “enemy” was now much more dispersed, and no longer confined to the countryside only. To start with, part of the rural population that had been labelled as “kulaks” had managed to escape dekulakization by fleeing from the villages and settling down elsewhere under assumed identities. Furthermore, three years of intensive urbanisation had brought hundreds of thousands, if not millions of peasants into the urban and industrial workforce, and the Bolshevik leaders were very much aware, because meticulously informed by the OGPU reports, that these migrants had come predominantly from the non-kolkhoz part of the population, in other words from that part of the peasantry that was either not allowed to or not willing to join the kolkhozy.17 This made them an a priori suspicious category in the eyes of the regime ; what else could a peasant that did not join the kolkhozy be but a “kulak,” a “podkulachnik,” or at least an “anti-Soviet” element ? Knowing that the towns and construction sites had thus been “infiltrated” by the “enemy” seems to have made the party leadership increasingly jittery at a time when they were engaged in a struggle for life and death with this same “enemy” in the Kuban, the Don area, the Ukraine, and all other areas where famine raged. How volatile the situation was in the towns was demonstrated by the cotton workers’ strikes that had broken out in the Ivanovo region in April 1932 and bread riots and other disturbances in the Byelorussian town of Borisovo. The disturbances in the Ivanovo region must have seemed particularly threatening to the Bolshevik leadership, because the strikes involved several towns, and provoked work-stoppages in the surrounding countryside in support of the strikers, thus reinforcing Bolshevik anxieties about a possible alliance between the “enemy outside” -- a seemingly united peasantry -- and the “enemy within.”18
“Passportisation”
9 At the end of 1932 the regime took to the offensive. In an attempt to safeguard the Bolsheviks’ main loci of power from the potential danger of further food riots growing into popular uprisings, a set of decrees was launched that aimed at ridding the main strategic towns of “unreliable” elements, at strengthening state control over population flows into these towns through an improved system of population registration, and, as an add-on effect, at relieving some of the pressure on the rationing system by reducing the number of mouths to feed.19 The introduction of a system of internal passports and urban residence permits played a central role in this. Its express aim, as formulated by the Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) on 15 November 1932, was to facilitate the cleansing of Moscow, Leningrad and other large cities of “superfluous [people -- G.K.], not involved in production or the work of institutions, as well as of kulak-, criminal and other anti-social elements hiding in the towns.”20 Thus, the passport system was specifically targeting both non-working mouths and “unreliable elements”
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that could form a risk for Bolshevik power.21 In addition, it was to serve the wider aim of improving urban population registration, which, as we recall, had been found to be unreliable. A special commission under the chairmanship of Balitskii, vice-head of the OGPU, was set up to work out the details of the operation.
10 On 27 December 1932, the decrees prepared by this commission were approved by the Politbiuro. They obliged all citizens over 16 years of age, permanently residing in towns, workers’ settlements, sovkhozy, and construction sites to take out a passport and register it with the police in order to obtain a residence permit for the locality they were living in (propiska). From then on, persons found without a valid passport and residence permit in localities where the passport system had been introduced, faced a fine of up to 100 rubles and expulsion by the police, and in cases of repeated offence, penal sanctions. Furthermore a passport had to be shown in order to take up a job in localities where the passport system was in place. The “passportisation” of the urban population had to be carried out in the first place in Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, Kiev, Minsk, Rostov and Vladivostok, and was only subsequently to be extended to other urban centres in the course of the year 1933.22
11 Over the first week of January 1933 the Central Police Department of the OGPU (GURKM) and a commission of the Council of People’s Commissars under Avel’ Enukidze worked out a detailed instruction that laid down the rules governing the issuing of passports and residence permits in the main cities of the first category, Moscow, Leningrad and Kharkov, as well as within a ring of 100 kilometres around Moscow and Leningrad, and 50 kilometres around Kharkov. The instruction consisted of two parts ; one part that was meant for publication, and a second, secret part that had to be sent down to the local police administrations.23 On January 14, the instruction entered into force.24 The secret part specified the categories of persons that were to be denied a passport and propiska, and that thus, in compliance with the stipulations of the published text, were deprived of the right to live in the areas concerned : “a) persons that are not involved in production or the work of institutions or schools, and that are not engaged in any other form of socially useful work (with the exception of the disabled and pensioners) b) kulaks or dekulakised persons that have fled from the countryside, even if they are employed at enterprises or soviet institutions c) persons that have arrived from other towns or from the countryside [...] after 1 January 1931 without a formal invitation to work at an institution or an enterprise, if they are currently without fixed work, or if they are working at an enterprise or institution, but are obvious flitters or have been fired [in the past] for disorganisation of production d) persons deprived of the right to vote e) all persons with a criminal record f) refugees from abroad, with the exception of political emigrants g) all family members of persons falling into one of the former categories in so far as they are part of the same household.”25
12 Exempted from these restrictions were specialists, priests of all religious denominations, as well as seasonal workers, the last of which could obtain a temporary residence permit for three months, subject to renewal upon request by the employer.26
13 Although initially limited to the towns of Moscow, Leningrad and Kharkov plus the 50/100 kilometre zones around them, this instruction would subsequently be applied to other towns as well, in so far as they were included in the category of what came to be called “regime towns.” On 3 and 5 February for example, the list of towns that had to be
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“passportised” with the highest priority, was extended with Magnitogorsk, Kuznetsk, Stalingrad, Baku, and others.27 On 28 April 1933, this procedure was formalised as part of a decree that extended the passport system to the entire territory of the Soviet Union, with the exception of areas with rural status. Mandatory “passportisation” was introduced for the population of all towns, workers’ settlements, raion-centres and a 100-kilometre zone inwards from the western border of the Soviet Union, as well as for those working or living at construction sites, industrial enterprises, in transport, on sovkhozy and in population centres that contained Machine and Tractor Stations (MTS). The issuing of passports and residence permits in these areas was to be carried out on the basis of articles 3-10 of the instruction of 14 January, which were those included in the published part of the decree, with the exception of the border-zone and a list of specified towns, where the workings of the entire decree were to be applied, meaning, including the secret part of the instruction.28
The cleansing of towns
14 In the cities and towns of the first, “regime”-category “passportisation” seems to have started even before the instruction of 14 January 1933 had been properly worked out, and the operation continued well into the late spring of 1933. The campaign was co- ordinated by the Central Police Department of the OGPU and carried out by its regional subdivisions. The OGPU regularly informed the main party and government leaders about the results of the cleansing operation. In Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, Magnitogorsk and other cities thousands of people were denied passports and propiska after having been “unmasked” as “flitters,” “disorganisers of production,” “spekulianty,” “former aristocracy,” “bandits,” “thieves,” “recidivists,” “white- guardists,” “former traders,” “baptists,” “mensheviks,” “zionists,” and, above all, “kulaks,” “kulaks,” and more “kulaks.”29 All in all, between January and August 1933, in Moscow alone 65,904 persons were denied a passport and subsequently evicted, and another 79,261 in Leningrad. In percentage terms the number of applications for a passport that were turned down varied considerably from town to town, from around 3 % in Moscow up to 10.2 % in Kiev and 10.9 % in Baku. Allegedly, large amounts of people did not even try to obtain a passport, and left on their own accord, or hid out in cellars, attics and basements, while the towns were in the grip of “passportisation.” In Moscow police-raids yielded 85,937 persons without a passport, who were sent off directly to labour camps and work settlements, without passing through court (“v poriadke vnesudebnoi repressii”). According to an OGPU report of 27 August 1933, passportisation reduced the Moscow population by 214,700 persons, and that of Leningrad by 476,182.30
15 Even before the purging of the “regime” cities of the first category had been concluded, passportisation was extended to all urban and semi-urban areas as specified in the decree of 28 April 1933. As pointed out above, these towns and settlements were not to be subjected to the rigid form of social cleansing provided for in the secret part of the instruction of 14 January 1933. Indeed, the police was supposed to hand out passports and residence permits to all persons residing there at the moment of passportisation, as well as to part of the population evicted from the regime localities. On 10 April 1933, the Politbiuro underscored once again that all persons who had been refused passports in the towns and zones of the first category had the full right to take up residence in
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any other town or locality of their choice that did not fall into this first category, and ordered the Central Police Department of the OGPU to instruct their regional and local subdivisions to this effect.31
16 However, this dual application of the passport rules sparked off protests from the non- regime areas. All through the late spring, summer and autumn of 1933 requests were coming in with the Council of People’s Commissars to include the one or the other town or settlement into the first, “regime”-category in order to allow for a more restrictive issuing of passports on the basis of the criteria laid down in the secret part of the instruction of 14 January 1933. Without any doubt part of these requests were above all attempts to show the sort of revolutionary zeal that was believed to be approved of by the party leadership, but others refer to problems that seem all too real. A good example is a request from the Ukrainian town of Vinnitsa, located at a distance of 100.5 kilometres from the Romanian border, and thus just outside the 100-kilometre border zone falling under the secret instructions of 14 January. This meant that in the town of Vinnitsa passports and residence permits were to be handed out to all persons that applied for one. Fifty-five out of the sixty-four raiony of the wider Vinnitsa-district were, however, located within the border-zone, and were, as a consequence, cleansed of all “unreliable elements.” The result was that a considerable part of the persons that were expelled from the border-zone flowed into the town of Vinnitsa itself to try and obtain a passport and residence permit there. The local authorities frowned upon this influx of “unreliable elements” and begged Sovnarkom to give Vinnitsa regime status, so that it would become possible to deny passports and residence permits to those that had been expelled from the border-zone. A similar situation was reported from the hinterland of Moscow, where the town of Tula saw itself confronted with the influx of considerable numbers of people expelled from Moscow and from the nearby 100- kilometer “regime”-zone around the capital. After consultation with the OGPU most of these requests were turned down, however, save for some exceptions, like that of Vinnitsa. This leads one to infer that the main scope of passportisation had, after all, been the purging of key towns and areas, rather than an all-encompassing social cleansing of the urban population.32
17 Nevertheless, it appears that even in the non-regime localities passportisation involved some purging of “anti-social” and “anti-Soviet elements.” When the NKVD presented the balance of the passportisation campaign in August 1934, the report listed a total of 423,438 “socially alien” and “fugitive elements” that had been “unmasked” in the non- regime areas in the course of the campaign. The total number of passports issued was 12,006,987 for the regime category, and 14,942,572 for the non-regime areas, which would bring the total population over 16 years of age of the passportised areas at around 27 million persons.33
Controlling population flows
18 A tenacious assumption about the passport system is that it was introduced in 1932 to close off the urban areas for peasant migrants, and to prevent further growth of the towns by imposing administrative limitations on population flows. The roots of this interpretation can be traced back to Soviet works of the 1970s and early 1980s, when the passport system did indeed function to this effect, following the imposition of limitations on settlement for over 70 cities and towns in 1956.34 What I argue in this
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article, however, is that as far as the passport system of the 1930s is concerned, this is a basic misconception.
19 To start with, from the very outset the passport system did not specifically target urban areas. Rather, the aim was to purge certain key areas, which were deemed to be of strategic importance to the Bolshevik regime in the circumstances of the 1932-1933 crisis. That these were largely urban areas merely reflects the position of the Bolshevik regime at the time of passportisation, operating as it was from an urban “bridgehead” to impose a programme of economic development on the country that was a largely urban vision with a distinct anti-rural flavour to it. As we saw, however, by April 1933, the passportised areas had also come to include a substantial rural element, ranging from the Machine Tractor Stations and the villages they were located in, to the strategic border-zones of the country. Especially in the latter case it comes out quite clearly that passportisation was everything but an exclusively urban operation. In the Far East, large tracts of countryside in the border-zones were passportised as regime areas, and they were cleansed with such zeal that it caused for a momentary upswing in the exodus from these areas to towns deeper into Soviet territory that fell into the non- regime category.35
20 But even if one adopts a more narrow perspective, focusing exclusively on the urban areas that were involved in the operation, passportisation imposed limits on migration only in so far as it aimed at tying the influx of people from the countryside more closely to urban industrial employment. Depending on the need for labour from urban-based industries, this could mean both growth and decline of the urban population. Thus, during the first wave of passportisation, which came at a time of scaled-down investment and economic contraction, people found without work seem to have formed the principal category of persons that was evicted from the regime-areas. This is suggested in any case by an August 1933 OGPU report on the passportisation in Moscow and Leningrad, which listed the category of “people having arrived after January 1931 and found without permanent work” as the single largest category among those evicted (41 %).36 In the non-regime areas on the other hand, which came up for passportisation only when the worst of the economic crisis had already passed, passports were to be issued to all inhabitants inclusively.
21 After the once-over of direct passportisation the passport system came to face a more dynamic task. On the one hand it had to allow for the necessary labour supply to urban employers, while on the other hand it had to prevent “undesirable elements” from entering the towns along with the “desirables” ones. As has been pointed out above, the instruction of 14 January 1933 already contained some clauses to prevent passportisation from disrupting the labour-supply to industry, by explicitly granting seasonal workers the right to obtain a temporary identity paper and a short-term residence permit, both of which were subject to renewal upon request of the employer. 37 When the passport system was extended to the entire territory of the Soviet Union with the decree of 28 April 1933, it was similarly made sure that the supply-lines of rural labour would remain open. Under the stipulations of the decree rural residents arriving for a long-term or permanent stay in a passportised area could take out a passport valid for one year at their former place of residence, and register for a residence permit in a passportised area on production of a document stating the reasons for their stay. After a year they could exchange their temporary passport for a full three-year passport issued at their new place of residence. The details as to who
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would (not) qualify for a residence permit were to be laid down in specific police instructions regulating propiska.38
22 Thus, in this first stage, the passport system envisaged a considerable degree of control over population flows into the passportised areas, and the police leadership appears to have had high expectations regarding the extent to which the passport administration would bolster the efficiency of police work.39 However, as soon as the priority aims of the system had been achieved, and the main strategic towns and areas had been purged of “hostile elements” and non-working mouths, the aspirations of the regime concerning the passport system seem to have been scaled down. By the time that the second round of passportisation started, which targeted the non-regime areas, the crisis in the country had abated somewhat ; production was on the rise again, and the urban population was decreasing of itself because of the strict limitations on hiring and state control over wages that had been established at the end of 1932.40 Food supply of course remained a bottleneck, but the first round of passportisation had undoubtedly reduced the claims on the supply system to some extent, and when it became clear that the next harvest would be good, the sense of outright emergency must have disappeared. Further passportisation was not called off, but where it concerned the non-regime areas it was carried through much more half-heartedly. No good legal basis for either the issuing of passports, or propiska in these towns was set up ; instead, part of the initially much more specific instruction of 14 January 1933 was declared to be applicable, and it was left at this for the rest of the 1930s, apart from the odd reminder that in these areas passports should be issued irrespective of social origin.41
23 As a result, the police and the OGPU were expected to run what was essentially a half- finished system of population registration. Whereas it was properly defined which persons were to be refused a passport in regime-towns during the phase of actual passportisation, this was not the case with the limitations on settlement that were to be in force in these areas afterwards. Although I have not been able to track down the central OGPU directive on the issue, the directive governing propiska in the regime- town of Sverdlovsk, which was obviously closely modelled on a central instruction, did not really hold any serious limitations in settlement, other than the requirements for arrivals to be in the possession of a passport, and to be able to document the purpose of their stay.42 This is not to say that there were no such limitations in practice. What seems to have been the case is that the instruction of 14 January 1933, governing the issuing of passports in regime-areas, was widely used by the OGPU and the police as the normative act concerning propiska as well, in the sense that those categories of persons listed as ineligible for a passport were also held to be ineligible for propiska.43 As we will see later on, this created some difficulties because the categories of the January 1933 instruction were not always equally well-tailored to the needs of screening persons that arrived from other areas.
24 The single largest problem, however, that the OGPU faced in running the half-finished passport system that was put in place in 1933, was how to separate the “desirable” from the “undesirable” among arrivals in the possession of a passport. The social cleansing of the regime-towns during the first phase of passportisation had been based primarily on withholding passports to those that were to be evicted, which made the distinction between the “desirable” and “undesirable” a rather clear-cut one. This changed after the second round of passportisation, in which passports were handed out to all residents of non-regime areas, regardless of social background, as well as to those
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persons that had been evicted from the regime-towns, but not arrested or deported by the OGPU. Thus, the possession of a passport was no longer automatic proof of “social reliability,” and this opened the way for persons that would not have been eligible for receiving a passport under the secret part of the instruction of 14 January 1933 to enter the regime-areas through what one could call “the backdoor,” i.e. by taking out a passport in a non-regime area and then moving on to a regime-town. Exactly in order to prevent this, it seems that the commission that had prepared the introduction of the passport system in 1932 had discussed the possibilities of noting down in all passports whether the bearer was eligible for settlement in a regime-area or not.44 For whatever reason, though, the idea was discarded at the time, and instead the eventual passport laws contained all sorts of clauses that aimed at preventing earmarking people by entering incriminating information directly into their passports.45 As a result, the great majority of passports in circulation must have contained few if any clues for the police to determine whether the passport-holder was entitled to settle in regime-areas or not. In view of this, the OGPU and the police relied on two other methods for screening arrivals in regime-areas, and filtering the “undesirable elements” from among them.
25 In the first place an elaborate system of card-catalogues was set up, which contained not only information on whom had been issued or refused a passport at which points in time and in which places, but also any incriminating information on the person that had come to light during the passportisation procedure, but that could not be entered in the passport itself.46 As far as the little available evidence permits us to say, the information in this card-catalogue appears to have been stored only locally, in the sense that it was not routinely circulated through the OGPU-apparatus, but supplied upon requests for information from police authorities elsewhere. Thus, in order to find out whether a certain person arriving in a regime area from a non-regime area did have any stains on his record, the police would have to send out a request for information to the locality where the passport of the person concerned had been first issued.
26 As a further instrument for filtering those that came to work in regime-areas, the OGPU also tried to channel the influx of labour recruits from the countryside as much as possible through the national scheme for the “organised recruitment of labour” (orgnabor), and refused propiska to those who arrived on their own accord, even if they were in the possession of a passport and a document from their kolkhozy stating their permission to leave. Asked upon to defend this position after a May 1934 complaint by the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic that the OGPU obstructed the labour supply to industry, Iagoda based his argument on the clause in the secret part of the instruction of 14 January 1933 that forbade the registration of persons that had arrived from other towns or the countryside after 1 January 1931, without a formal invitation from their future employer, and that were found to be “flitters” or “disorganisers of production.” Among those “collective farmers” arriving on their own accord, i.e. not through orgnabor, he argued, there are very few “real collective farmers,” and most of them are in fact “flitters,” if not outright “class-alien and criminal elements” who have been refused passports in regime-towns and now try to reenter with a passport procured in a non-regime area, where passports are issued regardless of social background. Therefore, the linking of propiska to orgnabor should not be abandoned, since it “allows for an on-the-spot check-up on the social characteristics of each and every recruited worker.”47
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27 Thus, once the first phase of actual passportisation was completed and the population of the regime-areas had been cleansed of “undesirable” and “socially harmful elements,” the OGPU and the police tried to keep these areas “clean” by screening new arrivals through an intricate system of registration, involving card-catalogues and orgnabor-contracts, that ran parallel to the actual passport system. This proved problematic, however, and the OGPU leadership saw control over population flows into the regime-areas they were supposed to protect, slowly slipping through their fingers. To start with, in September 1934 the protective screen that the OGPU had erected around the regime areas was punctured when a special decree was issued that authorised the propiska of kolkhozniki arriving in the towns on their own accord, if in the possession of a passport and a leave-permit from their kolkhoz, in other words, authorising exactly that which Iagoda had vehemently protested against only a couple of months earlier. This move was no doubt largely inspired by anxiety on the part of the authorities over the supply of rural labour to industry ; in spite of the fact that it had been approved under the ruling “secret,” the decree was published in full, which suggests that the party and state leadership specifically wanted to draw the population’s attention to it.48
28 This decree must have significantly undermined the efforts of the OGPU/NKVD leadership to systematically screen arrivals from the countryside on their social and political reliability, particularly so because there are some indications that the decree might have been interpreted much more liberally by local police authorities than had been intended. The crux of the problem was that there seems to have been considerable confusion within the police about the distinction between the issuing of passports on the one hand, and propiska on the other. Obviously, this confusion must have stemmed largely from the fact that the instruction of January 1933, technically speaking regarding exclusively the issuing of passports, was, as we have seen, widely used as the main normative act concerning propiska as well. The issue was, however, by no means a merely technical one. As becomes clear from a letter that the Dnepropetrovsk District Party Secretary Khataevich sent to Sovnarkom and the Central Committee in December 1935, the confusion between the issuing of passports and the registering of passports (propiska) could have rather far-reaching repercussions in practice.
29 The letter complained about the problems posed by the passport regulations for the recruitment of workers for industry in the regime-town of Dnepropetrovsk in the Donbass, quoting as examples the fact that no passports could be issued to family members that wanted to join workers already employed in Dnepropetrovsk, as well as to kolkhozniki that arrived on their own accord. Therefore Khataevich asked for permission to lift these restrictions. Asked for comments, Iagoda pointed out that existing instructions did not impose any limitations on the propiska of family members as long as they were in possession of passports issued at the place of former residence. But handing out passports to persons that arrived in Dnepropetrovsk without documents, should not be allowed, “as this contradicts the very essence of the passport law.” Similarly, he pointed out that the decree of 19 September 1934, that Khataevich was seemingly unacquainted with, already allowed for the propiska of kolkhozniki that arrived on their own accord. “As for persons that arrive without passports it speaks for itself, however, that such “kolkhozniki” should not be allowed access to regime areas, [...] but should be arrested in order to determine their identity.”49
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30 Thus, even in a major industrial centre and regime-town like Dnepropetrovsk the police obviously routinely confused the moments of propiska and that of the actual issuing of passports. In this case, Khataevich was informed of the exact regulations in existence, but it seems legitimate to assume that in other places the same confusion must have reigned, and that, consequently, the decree of 19 September 1934 might very well have been interpreted by local police authorities as an authorisation to hand out passports to arriving kolkhozniki, thus eliminating all possibilities to retrieve incriminating information on the persons concerned from their former places of residence. Indeed, to a large extent it was the insufficiently rigid, and at times even incorrect implementation of central instructions that undermined the efficiency of the passport system in screening the population flows into regime areas.50 Already during the passportisation of the first half of 1933, instances were reported in which local police authorities, in case of doubt as to the “social reliability” of particular persons, simply issued temporary identity papers, instead of taking the necessary steps to establish the identity of the persons concerned with more certainty.51 Much more importantly, it seems that, when registering new arrivals, local police authorities hardly if ever put out the requests for information from the card-catalogue at the place of residence that should have been more or less standard procedure.52 This was fundamental, because it touched at the very heart of the system of fil ´tratsiia that the passport system rested upon, and it effectively meant that, in a lot of cases, people must have been able to rid themselves of stains on their record by moving to another area, and thus circumvent the restrictions on settlement in regime-localities that existed for certain categories of people.
31 One of the consequences of this failure to implement the passports controls in a systematic way, was that the police resorted ever more often to ad-hoc sweeps and raids of urban areas to weed out “undesirable” and “socially harmful elements” that had slipped through the mazes of the net. As recent studies show, such purging campaigns of passportised areas in fact became the predominant policing tactic during the mid-1930s. What is interesting is that these sweeps primarily targeted all sorts of social marginals and criminals, rather than persons that had arrived for work without the necessary papers, “kulaks” or other suspicious rural dwellers, as had been the case during the initial phase of passportisation.53 A sample of the daily police reports on crime in the regime-city of Sverdlovsk for the year 1935 shows for example how the police was actively checking passports, singling out and arresting or evicting “thieves,” “bandits,” “alcoholics,” “homeless,” persons without a fixed job, “spekulianty,” and, particularly, ex-convicts or people that had escaped from labour camps, work settlements or other places of exile.54 In regime-areas these sweeps were facilitated by the existence of special OGPU, and later NKVD, extra-judicial passport troiki, in whose powers it was to withdraw passports that had been issued earlier on, and to sentence, deport and evict violators of the passport regime without going through court. But also in non-regime areas the police seems to have carried out sweeps and round-ups of social marginals, possibly on the basis of special decrees authorising such operations in specific areas.
32 Thus, amidst the failure to uphold the systematic application of controls over the influx into the passportised areas and widespread extra-judicial sentencing of passport violators, the passport system had become much more of a hands-on system of social cleansing than the systematic instrument of social control the police had initially
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envisaged. By 1935 this led to a renewed attempt by Iagoda and the NKVD to bring some order into the matter and to tighten and facilitate control over population flows into the regime-areas. In a letter to Sovnarkom of December 1935, Iagoda signals the fact that, because of the absence of any incriminating information in the passport itself, “socially alien” and “harmful elements,” as well as convicts having finished their terms, are able to worm their way into regime-areas by taking out “clean” passports in non- regime areas, where passports were issued to all applicants regardless of social background, and subsequently moving on to regime-areas. Therefore he proposes to put a special note, reading “for non-regime areas only” in the passports of all persons that, according to the instruction of 14 January 1933, were not allowed to live in regime-areas. Possibly, this attempt was also partly inspired by concern over the fact that, alongside the persons whose sentences had been commuted in the 1935 amnesty, in 1935-1936 the first “kulak” spetspereselentsy would reach the end of their terms and would try to find a place to settle down. Rather unexpectedly, however, the NKVD’s proposal met with fierce resistance from the Procuracy, partly backed up in this by Molotov in his capacity as chairman of Sovnarkom. Although the Procuracy agreed that the proposed measure would facilitate control over population flows into the regime- areas, it seems to have considered the earmarking of all persons falling under the secret clauses of the instruction of January 1933 too severe and too drastic a step, and argued that the police should just make a more concentrated effort at implementing existing instruments of control. In the end the NKVD was only able to secure a note in the passports of certain categories of ex-convicts that would bar them from taking up residence in regime-areas. In August 1936 the instruction of January 1933 was amended to this extent.55
33 This must have made it possible for the first time to really seal off the regime-areas for certain unwanted categories of persons, in this case ex-convicts, who could be identified instantly on the basis of their passports, without having to engage in the difficult and time-consuming procedure of putting out a request for information to the former place of residence or the place where the passport had been issued. In this sense the decree of August 1936 reflected the over-all hardening of the atmosphere in the country, which was by then already hovering on the brink of the Great Terror. A further measure to enhance the efficiency of the passport system was the introduction, in 1937, of photographs on passports, of which a copy was stored in the card-catalogue. 56
34 This phase of more rigorous control seems to have lasted until September 1940, when the passport laws were completely overhauled and a new Passport Statute was adopted that considerably reduced the restrictions on settlement that had existed under the previous legislation.57 These changes are not immediately apparent from the new law. The published part of the decree merely brought together the rulings of the various passport decrees of the years before into a single normative act. The secret part split up the regime-localities, which had grown considerably in numbers over the decade, into two categories with different restrictions on settlement. The areas falling into the first category were closed for persons that had been convicted for counter-revolutionary or criminal offences, refugees from abroad, people that had arrived without a formal invitation for work, persons that were not engaged in socially useful work (with the exception of pensioners, the disabled, and dependants of working people), and, finally people that had been convicted for hooliganism. The second category of regime- localities, to the contrary, were to be closed only to people convicted for counter-
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revolutionary and/or criminal offences. The true extent of this partial relaxation in settlement limitations becomes clear only if one has a closer look at which areas fell into which category. What turns out is that the strict settlement norms of the first category, which had been in force in all regime-towns before 1940, were now to be applied only in a small number of places. Apart from Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and other republican capitals, these consisted for almost half of kurorty and seaside resorts in the Crimea and the Northern Caucasus, plus the border-zones of the country. Most conspicuously absent in the first category were the main industrial towns and areas, which all fell into the second category that comprised the overwhelming majority of the, in total, 175 towns and 460 raiony that had acquired regime-status by 1940. Without going deeper into this here, this suggests that the relaxation in settlement limitations brought by the new passport statute of 1940, might have been at least partially an attempt to remove obstacles in the way of persons that were willing to go and work in industry, which was again screaming for manpower as the effects of war- preparations made themselves felt.58
Monitoring population flows
35 As we saw, one of the professed aims of the introduction of a system of internal passports and urban residence permits had been to improve population registration, and hence, population statistics. Both the investigations of the Balitskii commission, which prepared the passport laws of 1932, and the survey held by the Central Administration for Economic Accounting (Tsentral’noe Upravlenie Narodnokhoziaistvennogo Ucheta-TsUNKhU) in the same year revealed a considerable degree of inaccuracy in the existing system of population registration.59 This was confirmed during the passportisation campaign of 1933-1934, when it was found that scores of cities actually had far fewer inhabitants than had been expected on the basis of the available population data. Magnitogorsk, for example, was thought to have around 250,000 inhabitants, but passportisation revealed that in reality only 75,000 people were living at the site, and Sakhalin “yielded” only 60,000 persons, instead of the expected 120,000.60
36 In order to improve the situation a system of population registration was set up that relied on double registration vouchers (otryvnye talony) that had to be filled out by the police for every person taking up residence (propiska) in a passportised locality. One half of the voucher was filed at the local police station, and the other half was passed on to the TsUNKhU apparatus, which then processed the data into agglomerate population statistics for each town separately, for all the towns of a province (oblast’) taken together, and for the separate union-republics and the union as a whole. Apart from name, address, date and place of birth, the vouchers contained data on the social background of the person taking up residence and whether the person concerned arrived from the countryside or from another urban area. At the departure side this was matched by a similar set of vouchers that recorded the same data for every person annulling or changing residence (vypiska). After separating the vouchers of those persons who were merely changing residence within one locality from those who were arriving from elsewhere, this yielded a set of flow statistics on the ratio between urban arrivals and departures (mekhanicheskoe dvizhenie naseleniia), which, in combination with the data on urban births and deaths (estestvennoe dvizhenie naseleniia), would
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allow TsUNKhU to keep track of the fluctuations in the number of inhabitants of the passportised areas on a yearly basis, and, in the end, to calculate the size of the urban population from this.61
37 This system of population registration was first put to the test with the population census of 6 January 1937, and it turned out that it suffered from rather serious deficiencies. Polling revealed widespread discrepancies between the census results and the population forecasts that had been produced on the basis of the day-to-day registration of births, deaths, and internal migration, both for the size of the urban population as a whole and for the number of inhabitants of individual towns. To complicate things, the discrepancies did not show a uniform pattern. Whereas in aggregate terms the census yielded a smaller urban population than had been expected, the reverse was the case in, for example, Moscow, where 200,000 more people were counted than had been estimated beforehand.62 Obviously, there was something fundamentally wrong with the population registration data on which the forecasts had been based. What was wrong with them became the issue of a fierce debate as the tragic events surrounding the 1937 census unfolded. The story of this census has been carefully documented in recent publications.63 With the largely unregistered excess mortality related to the repression and famine of preceding years showing up clearly, the population count fell considerably short of Stalin’s forecasts, and “disappointment” with the figures led him to suppress the results and arrest the statisticians who had organised and carried out the census.
38 Feeling the heat, TsUNKhU desperately tried to account for the inaccuracy of its forecasts. As far as the migration data were concerned the statisticians knew very well where the problem lay, namely with a wildly inaccurate registration of urban arrivals and departures by the local police authorities, which had already been signalled in a survey of July 1936.64 Now, trying to document their case better in order to shift the blame for the “defective” census results to the police, TsUNKhU carried out further check-ups in the regions, which revealed that the accuracy with which the police handled both registration and the processing of the registration data, left much to be desired. The police was found to deploy little or no activities to check whether people were actually living at the place they were registered at, and many houses and barracks harboured scores of people without propiska. Besides, it turned out that large numbers of people, although being registered as such, did in fact not live there anymore, without having annulled their residence with the police. As a result, considerable discrepancies existed between registration data and actual numbers of residents.65
39 The fate of the statisticians had already been sealed, however ; over the late spring and summer of 1937 a wave of arrests swept through the TsUNKhU and UNKhU apparatuses, clearing out virtually all personnel that had somehow been involved with the 1937 census. A large number of them were shot--others served long terms in prisons and forced labour camps.66 The police leadership, whilst acknowledging the less serious deficiencies in their handling of urban population registration (no doubt they were about the only ones who could get away with this in the year 1937), obscured the graver ones. In a letter to the regional and local police authorities of September 1937 the Central Police Department of the NKVD seized upon non-annulment of residence at departure as the principal factor contributing to the inaccuracy of urban population registration data. In so far as the persons who did not annul their propiska when changing residence left the towns, it resulted in the inclusion of an unknown amount of
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“dead souls” in urban population statistics. In so far as it concerned persons who changed residence within one and the same town, or that moved to another town, it led to a certain degree of double-counting when these persons registered for a second time at their new place of residence. In both cases, inflated urban population figures were the net result. In order to remedy the problem and to avoid further double-counting the regional and local police authorities were instructed to demand proof of annulment of former residence from persons taking up propiska from then on. 67
40 Meanwhile, it was not at all clear to what extent non-annulment of propiska upon departure really was to blame for the inaccuracy of the urban population registration data. Check-ups usually also revealed persons without propiska in numbers almost just as large as, or in some cases even larger than those found to have departed without annulling residence.68 Unclear is whether this concerned people who were formally registered as residents elsewhere, or people who had arrived in the towns without ever taking up formal residence, and consequently whether these persons were accounted for at all in urban population statistics or not. In any case though, they could cause potentially large distortions in the accuracy of population statistics in relation to the actual number of people present. One may well wonder for example if the divergence between census results and forecasts in Moscow was not caused largely by the presence of people who were living in the city without ever having taken up residence there. In relative terms the 200,000 “extra” persons that were discovered at the time of the 1937 census represented around 5 % of the Moscow population of that time.69 And this figure does not even take into account yet those persons that were similarly living in Moscow without propiska, but that managed to evade the population count altogether. Indeed, it seems more than likely that the police authorities emphasised double-counting and non-annulment of residence so strongly in order to draw attention away from the fact that, apparently, they exercised a far from all-encompassing control over population influx into the passportised localities.
41 By and large, they seem to have got away with this. Although TsUNKhU carried out a second survey of the accuracy of registration procedures over the first quarter of 1938, and found that little had improved, it probably lacked the political clout after its falling from grace in 1937 to denounce the NKVD and the police for its lax application of the passport procedures.70 TsUNKhU inspectors faced active obstruction by police officials in carrying out check-ups on the application of registration procedures, and in October 1938 the Central Police Department (GURKM) of the NKVD decided unilaterally not to fill out registration vouchers any longer for persons arriving in the towns for short- term stays, because, allegedly, it was this category that accounted predominantly for the non-annulment of propiska when leaving or changing residence, and hence for the inaccuracy of urban population registration data.71 Gradually, control over the application of registration procedures was thus wrested from the statistical organs, and by 1939 TsUNKhU had come to the point where it had adopted the position of GURKM that non-annulment of propiska upon departure accounted for the inaccuracies of population statistics calculated on the basis of urban registration data, even if check- ups in the regions still revealed incomplete registration of both arrivals and departures.72
42 In view of this it seems appropriate then to wonder whether the figures procured from the passport and propiska-based system of population registration really provided the party and state leadership with much insight at all into population movements to and
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from the urban centres. After all, this had been one of the professed aims of the introduction of the passport system back in 1932. In answering this question, it is necessary to separate two sorts of inaccuracy in the information procured from these migration statistics ; on the one hand inaccuracies caused by deficiencies in the system of registration itself, and on the other hand inaccuracies in terms of the relation of registration figures to the actual situation. To start with the former, there was the problem of non-annulment of propiska upon departure. Sample check-ups by TsUNKhU on the accuracy of registration data in various regions and towns in 1938 give a rough indication of the order of magnitude of this phenomenon. A high of 16.5 % non- annulment of propiska by persons that had in reality departed was registered in the town of Kazan and a low of 1.8 % in the Kuybyshev district ; in the majority of the other regions involved in the check-ups the corresponding figure hovered around the 10 %.73
43 Apart from these systematic distortions, there is the question to what extent the registration data expressed the actual state of affairs. As we have seen, periodic check- ups also revealed considerable numbers of people living in the towns without a valid propiska for the place they were de facto residing at. The same survey of 1938 referred to above also allows us to get an indication of the magnitude of this phenomenon, with the percentage of illegal immigrants ranging from a low of 2.4 % of the people involved in the check-up in the Kursk district to a high of 15 % for the republic of Dagestan in the North Caucasus.74 Unfortunately, no clear trend is emerging from the corresponding figures for the other regions, but further evidence (as well as common sense) suggest that the major regional urban-industrial centres were harbouring the largest contingents of persons without propiska. When analysing the migration figures for 1939 TsUNKhU discovered that for a whole series of towns the number of people that had indicated to move to those towns upon departure from other urban centres was higher than the number of people who eventually registered as arrivals in those towns. For Moscow for example, there were almost two and a half times more “departures to Moscow” registered than the actual number of people who eventually registered their arrival in Moscow (on every 1,000 registered arrivals there were 2,396 registered indications of departure to Moscow). Similar divergences between departure and arrival data were observed for other cities and urban areas, like Leningrad (on every 1,000 registered arrivals, there were 1,655 registered indications of departure to Leningrad), and the Kiev district (1,327 indications of departure to the urban centres of the Kiev district for every 1,000 registered arrivals).75
44 TsUNKhU presumed that these discrepancies should be attributed to the fact that a certain part of those who had indicated to go to a particular town had in the end found it impossible to take up residence there because of limitations imposed on settlement by the passport regime, a lack of housing and other factors, and had therefore taken up residence in nearby rural areas. But it seems of course extremely likely -and TsUNKhU obviously understood this, but could not say it- that at least part of these people that had gone missing on the road, ended up in the towns they had indicated anyway, but as illegal immigrants. This means that, particularly in the larger urban centres, it could very well be that the actual number of urban arrivals was in fact higher than the registration data suggested. Thus, urban population registration data at the same time both over- and underestimated urban arrivals. Non-annulment of propiska upon departure inflated the number of residents and the net population shifts from village to town, while the limitations on propiska in some towns gave rise to an unknown number of illegal and unregistered arrivals that did not show up in the statistics. To some
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degree, these two factors of inaccuracy of course compensated for each other, in the sense that the place of people who had left without registering so was taken by people who had arrived without registering so, but particularly at the level of individual towns it must have been practically impossible to assess the degree to which such compensation occurred.76
45 Summarising, it can be concluded that the system of population registration that was set up could only to a limited extent provide the state and party leadership with the information on the size and fluctuation of the urban population that they had wished to obtain when introducing internal passports and urban residence permits back in 1932. The irony of the situation was that to some extent it was the restrictive character of the passport regime itself that caused for a certain degree of inaccuracy of urban population statistics, in the sense that it forced part of the migration flows into the illegal, and hence unaccounted for, sphere. On a more structural basis the system of population registration set up after 1932 suffered from the fact that it tried to track population flows in society with only one point of measurement ; in the end, the absence of a system of population registration in the countryside made it impossible to check the validity of the urban registration of arrivals and departures.77 All this seems to suggest that the improvement of population registration had not been one of the priority aims of the regime in introducing the passport system back in 1932. In any case the inaccuracies of the population statistics based on the urban registration data do not seem to have been a cause of great concern for the country’s leadership, with the exception of the period around the census of 1937. This means that they were either content with the sort of rough indication that the migration statistics could provide, or that they basically did not care.
Levers of control
46 One of the conclusions that can be drawn from the findings laid out in the preceding paragraphs, is that, whilst effective in achieving its short-term repressive aims, the passport system faced much larger difficulties in implementing the more systematic forms of control over population movements that had been envisaged at the outset. Both in monitoring and in filtering population flows initial attempts at achieving fairly pervasive forms of control floundered in the course of the decade, not in the last place due to a lax and incomplete application of established registration procedures by regional and local police authorities. Not only did part of the population movements into the passportised areas go unregistered and hence uncounted, they also often went unchecked for the presence of the very “socially unreliable elements” the regime sought to bar from the passportised areas. These findings might cause surprise, given the fact that the passport system was run by the all-powerful NKVD with its all- pervasive secret police activity. To some degree, however, the failure of the passport system to achieve systematic control was also related to the fact that it was run by the NKVD, as the secrecy surrounding all repressive activities of “the organs” did not always contribute to the effectiveness of the passport system. This is illustrated best by the fact that one of the main obstacles on the road to an effective screening of arrivals in regime-areas was the peculiar set-up in which incriminating information on the bearer was not entered into the passport itself, but in a secret shadow system of card- catalogs, which then failed to produce the desired results. In this sense the inefficiency
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of the passport system in the 1930s offers one more illustration of the difficulties of the Stalinist regime in this period with the full and undistorted implementation of the more complicated and complex of its policies at the lower levels of the state and party apparatus. But there are further conclusions to be drawn that tell us much more about the nature of state control in Stalinist society than the mere observation that it was not always equally effective or all-encompassing.
47 Harking back to the set of interlocking decrees adopted during the 1932-1933 crisis to purge certain areas of “unreliable elements,” the passport laws were designed to be an instrument of control that could be put in place whenever it was found expedient to rid the one area or the other of potential “enemies” or troublemakers, and to prevent people that could become so from settling there. The passport system was therefore from the very outset a system of selective, rather than all-encompassing control over population flows. As a system of population registration it only measured population movements to and from the urban areas. As a system of population control it only aimed at limiting access to areas that were considered to be of strategic importance -- the so-called “regime” areas. Meanwhile, the fact that the actual running of the system was put in the hands of the NKVD, subject only to a limited extent to legal constraints, warranted that it could be applied whenever and wherever deemed necessary. From this, the Stalinist leadership appears less concerned with achieving full control over access to regime areas when introducing the passport system, than with acquiring the possibility to deny rights of settlement in these areas to whatever category of persons it would find expedient to move against. It seems more than likely, for example, that it were these kind of considerations that lay at the root of the decision not to put any indications of settlement limitations in the passports themselves, because this would preclude the possibility to change the categories of persons not eligible for settlement in regime-areas according to future needs without re-issuing all passports. Similarly, the categories of persons concerned were never made public, so as to retain a free hand to change them as the needs of the moment dictated, without having to publicly explain for these changes.
48 This way, the introduction of the passport system appears more as a matter of putting into place levers of control, than of imposing control as such. And a formidable lever of control it was. The fact alone that the categories of people who were not eligible for propiska in the regime towns were never made public must have given the OGPU/ NKVD considerable leeway in deciding whom to evict from these areas, particularly during the early phase of outright passportisation, which targeted such broadly defined categories of people that they were potentially applicable to almost anyone. During later years, when the list of “unwanted elements” was narrowed down somewhat to more specific categories, such as persons with criminal records, the police must have lost some of its manoeuvring space in this respect, also because the Procuracy became increasingly active in dealing with police abuses of the passport laws.78 Nevertheless it is obvious that the passport system must have increased the power of the police over the public tremendously, if only because of the fact that nobody knew whether he or she fell into the secret categories that were forbidden to live in certain areas. Nobody would therefore for example ever be able to ascertain whether he or she was legitimately told to leave or not. Similarly, many people that were initially allowed to take up residence must have lived in constant uncertainty as to whether their
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passports and residence permits would not suddenly be withdrawn and they themselves be evicted as “undesirable elements.”
49 A glimpse of the psychological pressure stemming from the secrecy surrounding the existence of incriminating information on one’s person is provided by the recently unveiled diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, son of a dekulakised peasant that had managed to escape to Moscow with the help of forged documents and to build up a respectable existence as a worker there. When passportisation came, which Podlubnyi correctly interpreted as a purging campaign, he longed for the clearly identified and unquestioned social identity that the passport would bring him, but when he had finally received the document publicly marking him down as a worker, it failed to ease the fears of those stains on his record that were somewhere out there surfacing one day to bring to light his “undesirable” past.79 The story of Podlubnyi might be representative for many others during the 1930s. Whether deliberately so or not, the lax application of restrictions on propiska meant in practice that a considerable part of the urban population could at any given time be thrown out of certain areas for “violating” the passport laws, if the regime or the police would find this expedient. And it is here that we arrive at the very essence of Stalinist state control over the population, which was effective not because it achieved a total and constant degree of control over people’s affairs, but because the levers of control were in place to deeply influence people’s lives at decisive moments.
50 International Institute of Social History
51 Cruquiusweg 31
52 1019 AT, Amsterdam
53 The Netherlands
54 e-mail : [email protected]
NOTES
1. This concerns that part of the NKVD and police-archives that is stored in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), as opposed to the archive of the NKVD- successor organisation FSB. Surprisingly, the files of the Central Police Administration (GURKM -- Glavnoe Upravlenie Raboche-Krest’ianskoi Militsii, f. R-9415), that was strictly speaking responsible for the running of the passport system, seem to contain less materials on passport matters than the NKVD fond itself (f. R-9401). Unfortunately, I have not been able to use this latter fond, because it was temporarily inaccessible at the time of my archival research, but as the materials on passports it contains have been used by other authors, I have been able to use the main insights derived from them for the benefit of this article. For the materials on the passport system from the Presidential Archive, cf. “Izmeneniia pasportnoi sistemy nosiat printsipial’no vazhnyi kharakter. Kak sozdavalas’ i razvivalas’ pasportnaia sistema v strane,” Istochnik, 6 (1997): 101-121.
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2. P. Hagenloh, “ ;Socially harmful elements ; and the Great Terror,” in S. Fitzpatrick, ed., Stalinism. New directions (London, 2000): 286-308. 3. S. Yekelchyk, “The making of a ;proletarian capital ;: Patterns of Stalinist social policy in Kiev in the mid-1930s,” Europe-Asia Studies, 50, 7 (1998): 1232-1235; E.N. Chernolutskaia, “Pasportizatsiia dal’nevostochnogo naseleniia (1933-1934),” Revue des Études slaves, 71, 1 (1999): 17-33; K. Gerasimova, S. Chuikina, “Ot kapitalisticheskogo Peterburga k sotsialisticheskomu Leningradu : izmenenie sotsial’no-prostranstvennoi struktury goroda v 30-e gody,” in : T. Vikhavainen, ed., Normy i tsennosti povsednevnoi zhizni : Stanovlenie sotsialisticheskogo obraza zhizni v Rossii, 1920-1930e gody (SPb, 2000): 36-37. 4. S. Fitzpatrick, “The great departure. Rural-urban migration in the Soviet Union, 1929-1933,” in : W. Rosenberg, L. Siegelbaum, eds, Social dimensions of Soviet industrialisation (Bloomington, 1993): 15-40, and, in the same volume : S. Kotkin, “Peopling Magnitostroi. The politics of demography” (ibid.: 63-104). 5. The first and principal article challenging the existing interpretation on the introduction of the passport system is : Nathalie Moine, “Passeportisation, statistique des migrations et contrôle de l’identité sociale,” Cahiers du Monde russe, 38, 4 (octobre- décembre 1997): 587-600. 6. For a good analysis of the way in which the tsarist passport system served to keep peasant migrants committed to the rural world and the obshchina, cf. J. Burds, Peasant dreams and market politics, labor migration and the Russian village, 1861-1905 (Pittsburgh, 1998): 56-61 FF. 7. Traditionally, historiography has always stressed the inability of the rural population to meet the 1932 procurement plan. In a recent article, though, it is argued convincingly that the breakdown of agricultural production in 1932 was also caused at least partly by a refusal of the kolkhoz population to work for the state any longer. Cf. D’Ann R. Penner, “Stalin and the Ital’ianka of 1932-1933 in the Don region,” Cahiers du Monde russe, 39, 1-2 (janvier-juin 1998): 27-68. For an overall analysis of state-peasant relations in those years, cf. A. Graziosi, The great Soviet Peasant War. Bolsheviks and peasants, 1917-1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996). 8. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Ekonomiki (RGAE), f. 7486 (NKZ SSSR), op. 37s, d. 239, ll. 27-29, 46. 9. Cf. E. Osokina, Za fasadom “stalinskogo izobiliia” (Moscow, 1998): 37-85. 10. G. Kessler, “Krest’ianskaia migratsiia v Rossiiskoi imperii i Sovetskom Soiuze. Otkhodnichestvo i vykhod iz sela,” in : Sotsial’naia istoriia. Ezhegodnik 1998-1999 (Moscow : ROSSPEN, 1999): 323-324. 11. For illustrations of food-shortages and lack of rationed foodstuffs in the towns of various regions, cf. A. Graziosi, ed., Lettere da Kharkov. La carestia in Ucraina e nel Caucaso del Nord nei rapporti dei diplomatici italiani, 1932-1933 (Torino : Einaudi, 1991): 95, 109-110, 119, 127. 12. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sverdlovskoi Oblasti (GASO), f. R-277 (Uralobltruda), op. 2, d. 71, ll. 31, 53. 13. GASO, f. R-241 (Uralplan), op. 2, d. 2002, l. 89ob ; S. Schwarz, Labor in the Soviet Union (New York, 1951): 140. 14. S. Kotkin, art. cit.: 88.
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15. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. A-374 (TsSU RSFSR), op. 23, d. 198, ll. 1-227. 16. A. Graziosi, ed., Lettere..., op. cit.:109-110. 17. RGAE, f. 7486 (NKZ SSSR), op. 37s, d. 193, ll. 98-100; d. 236, l. 11; GARF, f. R-5515 (NKT SSSR), op. 17, d. 378, l. 83. 18. J. J. Rossmann, “The Teikovo cotton workers’ strike of April 1932: Class, gender and identity politics in Stalin’s Russia,” The Russian Review, 56 (January 1997): 44-69; O.V. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro. Mekhanizmy politicheskoi vlasti v 1930-e gody (Moscow, 1996): 57-58. The support from the Ivanovo countryside to the strikers was explained by the fact that most of the cotton workers were still connected to the village through an extensive network of family ties. In Borisovo 400-500 people broke open and plundered grain warehouses and organised a demonstration and a march of children and women to Red Army barracks. The demonstrators seemed to have received some support from the local authorities and from the police, as well as from some people in the army units. 19. As far as food supply to the major cities is concerned, this was supplemented by measures of the start of 1933 that set aside large stocks of grain for Moscow and Leningrad ; this at a time when the countryside was already in the throes of famine. Cf. A. Graziosi, The great Soviet Peasant War, op. cit.: 38. 20. Cf. Istochnik, 6 (1997): 104. The statement of intention contained in the preamble to the decree was quite summary. In several newspaper editorials over the first months of the year 1933 it was elaborated in more detail on the functions of the passport system in ridding the urban centres of all sorts of “undesirable elements” that were consuming the food meant for honest workers, and occupying scarce living quarters. Cf. S. Fitzpatrick, “The great departure...,” art. cit.: 29-30. 21. It should be noted here that the passportisation and the accompanying social cleansing of the towns were part of a wider purge of society, involving among others the party as well as kolkhoz- and other rural officials. Faced with the disruption and antagonism engendered by the famine-crisis the regime tried to safeguard its position by rounding up large numbers of real and perceived adversaries. At the January 1933 Plenum Stalin explicitly warned for the danger posed by “hidden” adversaries that had wormed their way into respectable jobs and positions and called for a new round of class-war to deal with this “hidden enemy.” Cf. the contribution by David Shearer to this issue. 22. Sobranie zakonov i rasporiazhenii raboche-krest’ianskogo pravitel’stva SSSR (hereafter SZ) , 84 (1932), arts. 516, 517. 23. GARF, f. R-5446 (SNK SSSR), op. 14a, d. 740, ll. 101-135. 24. SZ, 3 (1933), art. 22. 25. GASO, f. R-854 (URKM UNKVD po Sverdlovskoi oblasti), op. 3, d. 113, l. 11. 26. Ibid. The exemption for seasonal workers on the other hand, was listed in the published part of the decree ; Cf. SZ, 3 (1933), art. 22. 27. SZ, 11 (1933), arts. 60-61. 28. SZ, 28 (1933), art. 168. 29. GARF, f. R-5446 (SNK SSSR), op. 14a, d. 740, ll. 71-99. In this first phase fugitive “rural elements” seem to have been targeted most heavily.
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30. Istochnik, 6 (1997): 107-109. How the OGPU arrived at these figures remains unclear ; although both the number of passports issued and the number of persons evicted were apparently known, population registration before passportisation had been very inaccurate, so it must have been impossible to calculate the population decrease in such detail by subtracting the figures on passportisation-related departures from the population figures for a given city or town. Most likely therefore, these figures were not much more than rough estimates, but unfortunately there is no way of checking, given the absence of reliable population statistics for individual cities before passportisation. For the percentages of passport applications that were turned down, cf. N. Moine, art. cit.: 594. 31. Istochnik, 6 (1997): 106. 32. GARF, f. R-5446 (SNK SSSR), op. 14a, d. 740, ll. 154-156, 159, 161-164, 167-168, 169-172; d. 719, ll. 3-7; d. 761, ll. 1-4. 33. N. Werth, G. Moullec, Rapports secrets soviétiques. La société russe dans les documents confidentiels, 1921-1991(Paris : Gallimard, 1995): 27-34. 34. Cf. C. Buckley, “The myth of managed migration : Migration control and market in the Soviet period,” Slavic Review, 54, 4 (Winter 1995): 896-916. The work of the Soviet authors that this view is based on is listed in footnote 5. 35. E. N. Chernolutskaia, art. cit.: 30 36. Istochnik, 6 (1997): 108. 37. SZ, 3 (1933), art. 22. 38. SZ, 28 (1933), art. 168. 39. P. Hagenloh, art. cit.: 297. 40. Cf. R. W. Davies, Crisis and progress in the Soviet economy, 1931-1933 (Basingstoke : Macmillan, 1996): 370-377, 390-398, 409-419. 41. For the decree governing the application of the instruction of 14 January 1933, cf. SZ, 28 (1933), art. 168. As far as I have been able to ascertain, no public statements were made concerning the universal issuing of passports in non-regime areas, but in classified communications the OGPU leadership raised the issue repeatedly. Cf. Istochnik, 6 (1997): 106; GARF, f. R-5446 (SNK SSSR), op. 15a, d. 1094, l.4. 42. GASO, f. R-854 (URKM UNKVD po Sverdlovskoi oblasti), op. 3, d. 113, l. 89. 43. At least on one occasion this interpretation of the instruction of 14 January 1933 was also made explicitly by Iagoda, head of the OGPU, himself. Cf. GARF, f. R-5446 (SNK SSSR), op. 15a, d. 1175, ll. 8-9. 44. GARF, f. R-5446 (SNK SSSR), op. 18a, d. 845, l. 28. 45. Cf. N. Moine, art cit.: 595-596. Persons that were refused a passport in a regime- town were to be handed back the documents they had submitted in order to establish their identity intact, without these bearing any trace of the refusal of a passport. The same went for people that were refused propiska in a regime-area ; their passports were not supposed to show this. Some passports might have contained incriminating information concerning the bearer’s former social background (of the type “worker, former kulak ;) as by force of an instruction of May 1933, but it is unclear to what extent this decree was really implemented. 46. P. Hagenloh, art. cit.: 297.
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47. GARF, f. R-5446 (SNK SSSR), op. 15a, d. 1175, ll. 1-14; quote from l. 9. 48. The remarkable thing about this decree is that it was proposed to Sovnarkom by the OGPU itself, shortly after it had protested vehemently to a similar suggestion by Sovnarkom. Probably pressure had been brought on the OGPU after intervention by one or the other institution or party leader pushing for the interests of industry. Cf. GARF, f. R-5446 (SNK SSSR), op. 15a, d. 1175, ll. 1-14; published in : SZ, 49 (1934), art. 389. In July 1935, though, the NKVD was able to block a request by the Leningrad local authorities to extend the workings of this decree to non-kolkhoz peasants arriving in the towns for work, on the grounds that this would bring too many “socially alien” and “criminal elements” into the regime areas. Cf. GARF, f. R-5446 (SNK SSSR), op. 16a, d. 1332, ll. 1-6. 49. GARF, f. R-5446 (SNK SSSR), op. 18a, d. 894, ll. 3-6. 50. According to Paul Hagenloh, during the years 1934-1936 the central OGPU/NKVD leadership seems to have had in general a difficult time directing, controlling and cajoling the militsiia into fulfilling central directives, and the local police were able to substantially define the parameters of “Soviet policing” in this period. Cf. contribution of Paul Hagenloh to this issue. 51. Tsentr Dokumentatsii Obshchestvennykh Organizatsii Sverdlovskoi Oblasti (TsDOOSO), f. 161 (Sverdlovskii gorkom VKP (b)), op. 1, d. 244, l. 21. 52. Information of Paul Hagenloh, Paris, MSH, May 2000. 53. See the contributions of David Shearer and Paul Hagenloh to this issue, as well as P. Hagenloh, art. cit. 54. TsDOOSO, f. 161 (Sverdlovskii gorkom VKP (b)), op. 1, d. 453, ll. 1-320. 55. On Iagoda’s attempt to introduce earmarking of non-regime passports and the ensuing bureaucratic infighting, cf. GARF, f. R-5446 (SNK SSSR), op. 18a, d. 845, ll. 1-34. On the authorities’ concern over the imminent release of “kulaks” and other convicts, cf. O.V. Khlevniuk, op. cit.: 152. 56. SZ, 70 (1937), art. 328. 57. Sobranie postanovlenii i rasporiazhenii pravitel’stva SSSR, 24 (1940), art. 591. 58. The secret clauses of the law are rendered in the NKVD-instruction laying down the rules for the application of the new Passport Statute. Cf. GARF, f. R-9401 (NKVD SSSR), op. 12, d. 233, tom 1, ll. 1-65 (With thanks to Terry Martin for this reference), as well as in N. Moine, art. cit.: 597. For details on which areas were included in the two categories and for figures on the total number of regime-localities, cf. Istochnik, 6 (1997): 111-113. For comparison : the total number of towns in the Soviet Union as of July 1939 was 931, and the number of raiony --3,526. Cf. RGAE, f. 1562 (TsSU SSSR), op. 20, d. 171, l. 33. On the renewed labour shortages of 1938, cf. J.Barber, “The development of Soviet employment and labour policy, 1930-1941,” in : David Lane, ed., Labour and employment in the USSR (Sussex, 1986): 56; D. Filtzer, Soviet workers and Stalinist industrialization (London, 1986): 127-128. 59. Istochnik, 6 (1997): 104-105; GARF, f. A-374 (TsSU RSFSR), op. 23, d. 198, ll. 1-227. 60. Of course, these differences were also partly due to the fact that considerable numbers of people who could not reasonably expect to qualify for a passport and propiska avoided registration altogether and left the towns, but this alone could not have been enough to explain for the huge overestimates of the urban population size.
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For the city of Magnitogorsk, for example, the same report mentioned that around 35,000 persons had left on their own accord on the eve of passportisation. Unfortunately it remains unclear whether the NKVD had meant the figure of 75,000 inhabitants to include these persons, but even if it hadn’t, and the population of Magnitogorsk would thus have been 110,000 before passportisation, this figure still falls far short of expectations. Cf. N. Werth, G. Moullec, op. cit.: 45. 61. Cf. N. Moine, art. cit.: 590. For internal TsUNKHU instructions concerning the registration procedure, cf. RGAE, f. 1562 (TsSU SSSR), op. 20, d. 119, ll. 17-29, 71-72, 81, 86, 104. 62. RGAE, f. 1562 (TsSU SSSR), op. 329, d. 131, ll. 10-11. 63. V. B. Zhiromskaia, I. N. Kiselev, Iu. A. Poliakov, Polveka pod grifom “sekretno.” Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1937 goda (Moscow, 1996): 28-62; Alain Blum, “À l’origine des purges de 1937, l’exemple de l’administration de la statistique démographique,” Cahiers du Monde russe, 39, 1-2 (janvier-juin 1998): 169-196. 64. RGAE, f. 1562 (TsSU SSSR), op. 20, d. 119, l. 130; op. 329, d. 131, ll. 10-11. 65. RGAE, f. 1562 (TsSU SSSR), op. 329, d. 132, ll. 70-73. 66. V.B. Zhiromskaia et al, op. cit.: 138. 67. RGAE, f. 1562 (TsSU SSSR), op. 20, d. 119, l. 130. 68. Ibid., ll. 122-123. 69. Calculated on the basis of the population data for Moscow as listed in the 1937 census results. Cf. V.B. Zhiromskaia et al, op. cit.: 56. 70. GARF, f. A-374 (TsSU RSFSR), op. 23, d. 413, ll. 1-199. 71. RGAE, f. 1562 (TsSU SSSR), op. 20, d. 119. ll. 7, 7ob, 8. 72. GARF, f. A-374 (TsSU RSFSR), op. 23, d. 465, ll. 1-214. 73. GARF, f. A-374 (TsSU RSFSR), op. 23, d. 413, ll. 4-7, 14-15, 22, 47, 143-144, 154. These check-ups generally involved only a few hundred people in a couple of houses or barracks, so they themselves contain a potentially large margin of error, but at least they give a direct indication of the accuracy of the registration data at the grass-roots level. 74. GARF, f. A-374 (TsSU RSFSR), op. 23, d. 413, ll. 4-7, 14-15, 22, 47, 143-144, 154. 75. RGAE, f. 1562 (TsSU SSSR), op. 20, d. 171, ll. 3-4, 15. 76. The sample check-ups from the 1938 survey show that in some cities or regions the number of unregistered departures and unregistered arrivals kept each other more or less in balance, while in other towns this was not the case. In the sample for Kazan for example, 22 persons without propiska were found against a total of 109 persons that had left the town without registering their departure. The net effect was that instead of the expected 662 persons in fact only 575 persons were living in the buildings involved in the check-up. Cf. GARF, f. A-374 (TsSU RSFSR), op. 23, d. 413, l.154. 77. In view of this, Kraval’, head of TsUNKhU, proposed to Molotov, in March 1937 (i.e. shortly before his downfall), to extend the passport system to the rural areas in order to improve the system of population registration as a whole. Cf. N. Moine, art. cit.: 591. It would take until 1974 for this measure to be realised. Cf. Istochnik, 6 (1997): 119-121. 78. Earlier on, we already caught a glimpse of the constant struggle between the Procuracy and the OGPU-NKVD around the issue putting an indication of former
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conviction in passports. This struggle seems to have started immediately after the Procuracy had been created in 1934 with an attempt by Akulov, the Procurator of the USSR, to check-up on the validity of police decisions on the issuing of passports and residence permits to individual citizens. After prolonged bureaucratic infighting the Council of People’s Commissars, or Sovnarkom, resolved the matter in favour of the OGPU. Cf. GARF, f. R-5446 (SNK SSSR), op. 15a, d. 1094, ll. 1-18. 79. As rendered in J. Hellbeck, “Fashioning the Stalinist soul. The diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931-1939,” in : Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Stalinism..., op. cit.: 85-86.
RÉSUMÉS
Résumé Le système des passeports et le contrôle de l’État sur les déplacements de la population en URSS, 1932-1940. L’ouverture récente des archives a mis au jour un des aspects du contrôle policier soviétique, à savoir le système restrictif des passeports intérieurs et des permis de séjour urbains qui furent introduits en 1932. Notre article étudie les origines de ce système et suit son développement au cours des années 1930 jusqu’à la révision majeure des règlements en 1940. Le système des passeports servait à surveiller et à enregistrer les déplacements de la population vers des centres urbains et ruraux sélectionnés et hors de ces centres, et à débarrasser les centres les plus importants d’un point de vue stratégique des personnes considérées « peu fiables socialement ». Sa mise en œuvre entraîna au départ le « nettoyage social » et des expulsions massives des villes les plus grandes et des régions frontalières. Pendant les années qui suivirent, il servit de moyen de répression chaque fois qu’il fallait débarrasser une région d’« ennemis » ou de fauteurs de trouble potentiels et empêcher ce type d’individus de s’y installer. Les catégories de personnes soumises à ces restrictions changèrent avec le temps en fonction des besoins sécuritaires du régime. Le nombre de régions auxquelles ces restrictions s’appliquaient augmenta considérablement au cours des années 1930. Bien que le système des passeports eût réalisé ses objectifs d’un point de vue répressif, il eut plus de difficultés à mettre en œuvre les formes de contrôle des mouvements de population plus systématiques qui avaient été envisagées au départ. En ceci, c’était un instrument de contrôle stalinien typique -- rudimentaire et sélectif, mais catégorique.
Abstract One of the aspects of police control in the Soviet Union that the recent opening-up of the archives has shed new light on is the restrictive system of internal passports and urban residence permits that was introduced in 1932. The article examines the origins of this system and traces its subsequent development during the 1930s, up until a major overhaul of the regulations in force in September 1940. The passport system served as an instrument for monitoring, counting and registering population flows in and out of urban and selected non-urban areas, and for keeping the strategically more important of these areas free of persons that were held to be “socially undesirable”. Its initial implementation involved the “social cleansing” of the larger towns and the border-zone and large-scale expulsions from these areas. In subsequent years it served as a lever of control that was put in place whenever it was found expedient to rid one area
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or another of potential “enemies” or troublemakers, and to prevent people that could become so from settling there. The categories of people that were subject to settlement restrictions changed over time, depending on the regime’s security concerns. The number of areas where settlement restrictions were in force increased significantly in the course of the 1930s. Whilst effective in achieving its repressive aims, the passport system faced much larger difficulties in implementing the more systematic forms of control over population movements that had been envisaged at the outset. This made it the typical Stalinist instrument of control -- crude and selective, but decisive.
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Social disorder, mass repression, and the NKVD during the 1930s.
DAVID R. SHEARER
Introduction
1 This paper examines the origins of mass repression during the 1930s by focusing on the evolving policies of the People's Commissariat of Internal affairs, the NKVD (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del). The NKVD included both the regular police -- the militsiia -- and the organs of state security, the Glavnoe upravlenie gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti -- GUGB. The predecessor to the GUGB was the Ob''edinennoe gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie, or OGPU. Although administratively linked throughout the 1930s, the police and the OGPU/GUGB were supposed to have different functions. The police were charged to fight crime and to maintain social order. The OGPU/GUGB was charged to protect the Soviet state and its leaders from the country’s political enemies. I will show that, early in the 1930s, these two functions merged in the policies of the police and the OGPU. Solving problems of mass social disorder became synonymous with the political protection of the state and defined a major priority for political leaders and high officials of the OGPU/NKVD. That priority was reflected in the primacy given to operational policies of social cleansing and mass social re- organization. Throughout the mid-1930s, especially, wide-scale police operations targeted criminals and other marginal social groups, which officials perceived not just as socially harmful but as politically dangerous, a threat to the Soviet state and to the construction of socialism in the USSR. I will examine the reasons why the functions of social order and state security became linked in the 1930s and I will explore the consequences of this linkage in the changing character of the state’s policies of repression.
2 Campaigns of mass repression targeted different groups at different times and were not all directed against criminal or socially marginal populations. The largest mass operations, of course, were those associated with dekulakization in the early 1930s, the state’s attempt to destroy organized class resistance in the countryside. Party and
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police officials focused dekulakization campaigns on property confiscation and execution, imprisonment, or exile of supposedly rich peasants -- kulaks -- and other rural anti-Soviet elements. After 1933, police shifted attention away from class war in the rural areas to cleanse the country’s major cities, as well as other strategic regions -- borderlands, new industrial centers, and even resort areas of the political elite. Yet even as the criterion of class became less prominent in the state’s campaigns of social repression, the range of groups which police and security organs regarded as potentially dangerous broadened. During the course of the decade, police applied methods of mass repression against an increasing number of ethnic and national minorities, as well as against criminal and other socially marginal categories. The state’s policies of mass repression reached their apogee in 1937 and 1938. Operations associated with the Great Purges of those years encompassed nearly every group that had, at one time or another, become marginalized or politically suspect during the 1930s : so-called kulaks, criminals and socially marginal populations, and national minorities, including large numbers of political refugees. I will focus attention primarily on the background to the 1937 and 1938 repressions, but it should be noted that mass operations did not end with the repressions of those years. Campaigns, especially against certain national minorities and ethnic populations, continued well into the 1940s.1
3 I believe that resolving problems of social order provided a major motivation for the mass repressions at the end of the decade, but so was the increasing threat of war during the late 1930s. I will explore how the threat of war shaped leaders’ perception of politically suspect populations as the social basis for a potential uprising in case of invasion. I agree with those who argue that the mass repressions of the late 1930s were a prophylactic response to this potential threat rather than the reaction of the regime to an ongoing crisis of social chaos. In making this argument, I am revising my own earlier assessment of the mass repressions as a response to an ongoing crisis of social order.2
4 Throughout this paper, I will examine the politics of policy formation at high levels of the NKVD, the party, and the Soviet state, but I will also explore the problems of implementing policies at local levels and the social consequences of state policies. While I rely largely on information from central state and party archives, I will focus parts of my paper on the Western Siberia district, or krai. I have chosen Western Siberia because that area exemplified, in some ways in the extreme, many of the trends that occurred in other parts of the country. Records from the administrative center of the district in Novosibirsk reflect well how central policies worked, or did not work, in practice. I will argue that, by the late 1930s, party and state leaders believed that policies of mass repression and re-organization of the country’s population had resolved many of the problems of social disorder, which they had perceived as so threatening. The increasing possibility of war, however, aroused fears, not of social disorder, but of organized uprisings by disaffected and marginal segments of the population. Party and NKVD records reveal the mechanism, social context, and motivation for the mass repression of 1937 and 1938.
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The February-March 1937 plenary sessions
5 In late February and early March 1937, several hundred leading functionaries of the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union gathered in Moscow for a plenary session of the party’s executive body, the Central Committee. N. I. Ezhov, one of the party’s leading secretaries and head of the People’s Commissariat of the Interior, the NKVD, delivered one of the major speeches at the session. Ezhov’s remarks are worth recalling. Although highly politicized, Ezhov’s speech provides one of the few candid overviews of the NKVD’s work for the previous years of the 1930s.3
6 Ezhov’s remarks amounted to a harsh indictment of NKVD policies and a damning criticism of the previous head of the Commissariat, Genrikh Iagoda. Ezhov charged Iagoda and the NKVD with having failed to protect the party and the country from the threat of political sabotage by opposition organizations inside the country and enemy intelligence services working from outside the Soviet Union. Instead of using its resources to expose underground political organizations and agents of foreign governments, the GUGB, Ezhov charged, had dissipated its energies in chasing criminals and fighting social disorder. This was the business of the police, the militsiia, chided Ezhov, not the work of the organs of state security. Ezhov cited figures from 1935 and 1936, acknowledging that the NKVD, in particular the GUGB, had arrested a “significant number” of people, “but when we analyze the crimes for which these people were arrested,” Ezhov continued, “it turns out that eighty percent [of those crimes] had no connection to [the function of] the UGB.” According to Ezhov, the great majority of people arrested by the UGB were arrested for offenses such as “professional-white collar crimes, for petty crimes, for hooliganism, petty theft, etc.; that is, people who should have been arrested by the civil police or the procuracy organs, but who were arrested by the UGB.” By paying so much attention to fighting ordinary crime, the UGB had “fettered” itself ; the state security organs had neglected their agent work and investigations of serious political crimes.4
7 If the overall direction of NKVD policies was wrong, so were its methods of work. Ezhov summarized the campaigns of mass repression against anti-Soviet kulak peasants in the early 1930s as a peculiarity of that period of large-scale, open class war. Such methods were justified then, according to Ezhov, when the party fought an all out struggle for dekulakization of the countryside and collectivization of agriculture. By 1933, however, the major struggle for collectivization had been won. Kulaks had been defeated as a class. As Ezhov reminded his audience, however, the victory of socialism in the USSR did not mean the end of class war. Class enemies were no longer able to defeat Soviet power through direct confrontation, and so the party’s enemies changed tactics to wage a war of underground sabotage. This change in tactics by the enemies of socialism required, in turn, a change in tactics by the party, by Soviet institutions, and most of all by the organs of state security, the UGB. Ezhov recalled the directives of the party and the government, and speeches by party leaders, including Stalin, about the sharpening of class war, about the “quiet sabotage” (tikhii zapoi) of enemies, and about how to meet this new challenge. New methods of class war required new methods of operation, Ezhov said, but the NKVD had failed to reorient itself. “It is one thing,” Ezhov declared, “to route mass kulak organizations in the earlier period, but another to uncover diversionaries and spies who hide behind the mask of loyalty to Soviet power.”5 Ezhov charged that the UGB had failed to give priority to development of an effective agent
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and investigative apparatus. Instead, the organs of state security continued “automaton-like” to employ the “mass work” and “campaign-style methods” of the past.6
8 Ezhov tailored his speech to discredit Iagoda and to justify the purge of the NKVD, which had already started in late 1936.7 Yet if Ezhov tailored his facts to fit his political ends, he nonetheless gave to plenary delegates a roughly accurate account of NKVD policies and methods during the previous years. Throughout most of the 1930s, OGPU and then NKVD policies had been directed toward combating crime and social disorder. And given the inadequacies of regular policing methods in the country, OGPU and NKVD officials resorted to large-scale campaigns to arrest, remove, or otherwise contain what leaders regarded as socially harmful or politically suspect populations. These campaigns grew out of the mass repressions, which the OGPU used during dekulakization and collectivization of the countryside during the early 1930s, and they resembled the campaigns that the GUGB and police used during the mass repressions of 1937 and 1938. Ezhov denounced these policies and methods in 1937 as a grievous political mistake, and even worse as part of a plan of counter-revolutionary sabotage. Yet what Ezhov described as political error in 1937 was party and state policy during much of the decade. Throughout the early and middle years of the 1930s, party and state leaders perceived social disorder as the primary threat to the stability of the Soviet state and to the construction of socialism. And rightly so. Police, party, and state agencies struggled to cope with massive social and economic dislocation caused by the state’s crash industrialization program and by the social war of collectivization in the countryside. Leaders gave to social disorder political overtones that arose out of the chaos and class war of the first years of the decade. The political cast that authorities gave to the social chaos of the early 1930s may or may not have had a basis in social reality, but the chaos was real.
The civil police and the OGPU
9 A NKVD report from April 1930 addressed the problem of social disorder bluntly. The report stated that police numbers were “entirely inadequate” for the tasks forced upon them by the state’s socialist offensive. The state could count on only 90,000 regular police officers in the whole of the RSFSR in 1930. This included 33,563 regular or state police, nearly 53,000 police hired specifically to protect enterprises (vedmilitsiia), and 4,441 special investigative detectives (ugolovnyi rozysk). This number, reduced by 1,000 from the previous year, constituted a force some four times smaller than that which maintained order in 1913, the last peace-time year of the old regime.8 Moreover, most of these police were concentrated in cities and industrial centers, leaving only 12,887 policemen to protect state interests and to keep public order in rural areas of the RSFSR. In the early 1930s, rural police were nearly bereft of transport, which included horses, let alone automobiles. Many regional police forces were lucky if they had one horse for the whole region. In the Trotsk region of Leningrad oblast', the police apparatus could rely on two horses, if available, stabled and owned by a local medical clinic and a village soviet. Instead of a minimum of two special police undercover agents per village, most rural regional police organization had to make do with just one agent per region, or raion. Many regional police forces had no special investigative agents.9
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10 In a 1932 report to the highest government council, Sovnarkom, Genrikh Iagoda, assistant head of the OGPU, lamented that, at its current strength, the police could not, “in a single republic, krai, or oblast',” fulfill the tasks of maintaining revolutionary order in the country. Iagoda described as “especially strained” regions of new industrial and transportation construction “where populations grow at a rapid tempo and draw an influx of criminal elements.”10 The largest accumulations of kulak and anti-Soviet elements were also to be found, logically, in areas of the country designated for exile and special settlements. With its penal settlements in the north and new industrial centers in the southwest, the Western Siberian district fit Iagoda’s description as an “especially strained” area. He singled out the district as one of several areas severely understaffed by police and “not well defended.”11
11 Reports from Western Siberian police and OGPU officials confirmed Iagoda’s laconic assessment. As the numbers and proportion of socially dangerous populations rose rapidly in Western Siberia, the number of police in fact dropped in the very early years of the decade. Reorganization and purging of police ranks in 1930 and 1931 resulted in a reduction of civil police in the district from 2,736 to 2,327. In Novosibirsk, the number of police dropped from 276 to 197 as the population grew from 146,000 to 180,000. In the provincial center of Bisk, in the industrial and agricultural lands west of Novosibirsk, only 69 police officers served a city of 53,000 in 1932. In Novo-Kuznetsk, the number of police officials actually increased in 1930 and 1931 from 24 to 38, but the population during the same year soared from 28,000 to 170,000.12 In Novosibirsk, police ranks were stretched so thin and jails so overcrowded that prison officials allowed prisoners to “guard” themselves. Prisoners came and went, “as they please, individually and in groups.”13 In rural areas, the lack of police and OGPU units required one chief inspector, along with two to three officers, to cover approximately forty to forty-five square kilometers and 10,000 or more inhabitants. In non-Russian areas of the krai, Soviet police authority hardly existed.14
12 If the numbers of police were low, so were the qualifications of police personnel. In the early 1930s, the police in Western Siberia, as in many other regions of the country, were an ill-trained, ill-equipped, and low-paid lot. Although reorganization in late 1929 and early 1930 placed the RKM (Raboche-Krest'ianskaia Militsiia) under OGPU administration, police forces were still funded out of the budgets of district- and local- level soviets. Local governments were also supposed to supply police with apartments allocated out of their living funds. Yet, a 1932 police report condemned the “total indifference” of local soviet governments to the needs of the police.15 Despite their obligations, krai and raion-level executive committees constantly paid wage sums late, mostly because the money was siphoned off to other priorities. A 1933 letter from the district’s police chief, M. Domarev, to the head of district Soviet Executive Committee, Fedor Griadinskii, complained that failure of the krai and raion-level soviets to provide adequate food supplies for local police was resulting in widespread corruption. This kind of corruption included outright theft and speculation in food and meat supplies, extortion of produce and meat from collective and state farms, and other forms of activity by official agencies that tied them to local criminal elements.16
13 Housing shortages for police were chronic. In the Western Siberian district, which reflected trends in the rest of the country, only 5 % of the police force lived in state- allocated apartments. Most paid rent out of their meager salaries for rooms or small apartments in private houses. The situation in Novosibirsk was “especially extreme.”
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Half the police force in that city was forced to rent private dwellings, while 6 % were registered as homeless.17 The average monthly pay even for an investigative inspector was only 110-130 rubles in 1932, although this was supposed to be raised to 120-130 rubles in 1933. This was lower than the average monthly salary of an unskilled worker in the non-priority consumer sectors of the economy. The head of a local police station earned 60 to 70 rubles monthly, about as much as a sales clerk, and a rank and file policeman drew only 50 to 60 rubles monthly.18 By mid-decade, the militsiia received pay and ration cards and training equal to that of troops of the political police. In 1932, however, most police officers were still on the second-tier ration list with access to fewer goods and goods of lower quality than groups on the state’s first ration list.
14 Police work, even at the investigative and operational level, attracted few young and vigorous workers. The 1932 police report cited above declared that only 20 to 25 % of the district’s police officers were physically fit enough to carry out their full range of duties. This was especially true of the higher ranks, above the level of a patrol officer. Due to low pay and poor housing priorities, noted the report, the police profession seemed to attract “right and left (splosh’ i riadom) [...] physical invalids or people in very weak health.”19 Only 34 % of the district’s police force was equipped with weapons in working order, few patrol officers had proper uniforms, and local governments denied the RKM adequate office space in scarce city buildings. Most outlying police stations had no telephone contact with their central police headquarters, and very few police forces possessed adequate mechanized transportation for prisoner exchange, operational activities, or even to drive to meetings.20
15 If police networks were stretched thin across the Soviet territories in the early 1930s, so were networks of the OGPU, at least according to the agency’s own assessments. Before the formation of OGPU units in the system of machine tractor stations in 1932, total OGPU staff in the country varied from about 25,000 to 28,000 officers. This number included about 2,000 officials in the central apparatus and another 3,000 in OGPU school and prison administrative positions. Slightly fewer than 6,000 officers staffed regional bureaus of the OGPU or worked as special plenipotentiaries in regions. Another 700 to 800 officers worked in OGPU bureaus in “population centers” outside of the major capital cities of the country. Another 3,283 officers made up special operational “sectors.” These operational “sectors” were formed in each oblast' and krai (75 in all) and each was staffed with 20 to 30 officers. These were to be used for special operations and to supplement the staff of regional offices. Regional bureaus were supposed to be staffed with up to three officers, yet in the early 1930s, only 20 % of the country’s rural regions were fully staffed. Most regions had at least two officers, but nearly one-third of all regions had only one OGPU officer.21 According to one OGPU official in 1931, GPU networks were spread so thin across the countryside that the police had a more thoroughly developed system of information and policing than did the OGPU.22
16 During the dekulakization and collectivization campaigns, of course, OGPU numbers in the countryside increased and were supplemented by special OGPU forces, party plenipotentiaries, and by the famous urban factory gangs and other activists sent to the countryside to help with collectivization. Yet, as the party and police scaled back dekulakization and collectivization campaigns, OGPU special units and other groups withdrew from the countryside. This withdrawal left the new state vulnerable to sabotage and criminal activity. By 1932, OGPU troops had withdrawn their protection
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from agricultural warehouses, farms, and other rural sites, as well as from many state industrial sites. OGPU numbers were also depleted as the result of the transfer of hundreds, if not thousands, of OGPU officers to work in the understaffed judicial and procuracy systems, the police, and other state organs. OGPU troops continued to maintain guard of railroad lines, key junctions, some major roads, and industrial enterprises of significance. Yet, even these forces were overburdened. In late 1931, A. A. Andreev, the transportation commissar, warned Stalin in a letter that the numbers of OGPU troops within the railroad system were “obviously insufficient” in order to keep the roads cleaned of kulak elements and to pressure rail administrators to fulfill their tasks.23 A November 1933 report from the Western Siberian Executive Committee to the Russian Federation Sovnarkom requested immediate and extraordinary funding for 300 new police officer positions. The request arose as a result of OGPU cutbacks. Storage warehouses, timbering sites, and machine and tractor stations in the region's major collective farms (kolkhozy) were no longer guarded by troops of the state’s political police, the OGPU, nor even by regular police. Hired security guards -- usually pensioners or demobilized Red Army soldiers -- patrolled these and the region's other major industrial facilities.24
Reform and expansion of the militsiia and OGPU
17 Party and police authorities took serious steps to professionalize and expand both the regular and political police organizations. Throughout the Soviet Union, OGPU plenipotentiaries purged socially “alien” elements from the police, as well as those with criminal backgrounds. By mid-decade, police numbers had been expanded considerably, and many of the new police officers were either de-mobilized army veterans or had been transferred from work in the OGPU. If in 1930, total police forces in the country numbered about 87,000, by late 1932, Iagoda reported a total force of 98,000 officers.25 Figures for mid-decade are scarce, but by late 1934, Iagoda counted 124,000 police in a report to Sovnarkom.26 By 1937, RKM forces had grown to a strength of 138,000. With the formation of the railroad police in 1937 and the expansion of special economic crime units, overall police numbers jumped, reaching 182,000 in 1938 and 213,439 officers by 1940.27
18 In 1932, in accordance with subordination of the police to the OGPU, financing of the RKM was transferred from impoverished local soviet budgets to the all-union budget of the country’s chief political administration. As a result, work and living conditions of the police improved considerably from their low point at the beginning of the decade. By mid-1935, all police had been integrated into the same rationing and rank system as the political police units of the NKVD, the administrative successor to the OGPU. In an attempt to professionalize the militsiia, Genrikh Iagoda, the head of both the political and civil police -- the OGPU and the RKM -- applied the same disciplinary system to the civil police that governed the OGPU and later the NKVD. RKM budgets rose considerably year to year, though never enough for Iagoda, and much of the money went to hire more police and to train and equip them to a level comparable to the OGPU. Soviet authorities also spent money on political training courses to raise the level of political reliability of militsiia functionaries.
19 From the beginning of the 1930s, the RKM and OGPU were administratively intertwined. They became increasingly interrelated as the decade wore on. Iagoda’s
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reform of the RKM in 1930 and 1931 brought it under effective if not formal administrative control of the OGPU at all levels. Officials working in the central apparatus were OGPU officers and were appointed through Iagoda. At the oblast' level and below, the RKM continued to operate as a supposedly independent organization subordinate to local soviet councils. In fact, OGPU plenipotentiaries and inspectors oversaw cadre selection, accounting, and other administrative functions. As police began to expand the number of precincts in cities and regions, the head of each uchastkovyi (precinct) was supposed to be both an RKM and an OGPU officer. Formation of a central all-union police administration in 1932 further increased OGPU administrative control over the RKM, and the formation of the NKVD in summer of 1934 brought the RKM under complete control of the organs of state security.28
20 Instructions to police in the early 1930s made clear their new role, which differed significantly from their previous functions. Previously, police acted as a constabulary force. They had many duties, vaguely defined, but they had limited investigative and arrest powers, and in the area of crime fighting acted primarily to make initial inquiries. Criminal investigations were conducted by procuracy officials or, in the case of more serious and especially organized crimes, by the branches of the state’s ugolovnyi rozysk, or special criminal investigation units. Police subordination to the OGPU required them now to take a more active role in the fight against crime, social disorder, and anti-Soviet activities. With the promulgation of a new “polozhenie” in 1931, police were to have greatly expanded investigative and arrest powers. In addition to these new powers, police were also supposed to become an active part of the state’s system of social surveillance. Local precinct officers, for example, were required to establish a surveillance system of their neighborhoods that relied on regular information gathering from doormen, shop keepers, shoe-shine men, waiters and other service personnel. Using the passport card index that was supposed to be kept in every precinct, the uchastkovyi inspector was responsible for keeping track of all people coming in and out of the areas under his authority.29
21 Reforms of the RKM made clear Iagoda’s intention to turn the police into an organ of social control subordinate but equal in preparedness to the organs of state security. By placing the police under the administrative control of the OGPU, Iagoda intended to “militarize” or to “chekaize” (chekaizatsiia) the police, but he did not intend for administrative merger to lead to operational merger. Officials attempted to keep police and the OGPU activities separate since they believed, at least still in the early 1930s, that there was an ideological as well as an operational difference between the functions of social control and state security. The police were to work as an auxiliary force to the OGPU in the establishment of social discipline and the protection of state interests and property, but the fight against counter-revolutionary activities was to remain a prerogative of the OGPU, the organs of state security.
22 The distinction between social control and state security soon broke down. The most significant overlap occurred at first between operational sectors of the OGPU and the police criminal investigative forces, the ugolovnyi rozysk. At times these groups either overlapped in their work or even stumbled into each other’s operations, since both organs ran agent and informant networks and conducted special operations against organized crime. The OGPU, and Soviet officials in general, regarded organized criminal activity as more than a problem of social deviancy or even as an economic threat to the state. As one OGPU official declared, agents saw the hand of counter-
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revolution behind all forms of organized criminal activity.30 As a result, officials regarded organized economic crime -- banditry, for example, and even some forms of group hooliganism -- to be anti-state as well as socially harmful crimes. The definition of these types of crimes as both politically and socially dangerous led to operational overlap between the OGPU and the forces of the ugolovnyi rozysk, and this operational overlap led some officials to recommend a formal merging of the ugolovnyi rozysk and the OGPU.31 The two organs never formally merged, and neither did the regular police and the OGPU. However, the operational and “ideological” distinction between the police and OGPU broke down almost from the beginning of the 1930s as officials conflated economic and social control with state security.
23 If civil police investigators encroached on the operational territory of the political police, OGPU officers in turn soon found themselves unexpectedly involved in the business of social control and the maintenance of public order. Political police involvement on the railroads provides a good example of how this process occurred. Ostensibly, the OGPU’s transport forces were charged to “defend” the railroads against counter-revolutionary sabotage, that is, against the enemies of the state. In practice, OGPU officers brought order to the railroads by providing protection to passenger trains from robbery and gang violence. In the absence of regular police, OGPU operational groups routinely cleared yards, depots, stations, and facilities of gangs and drifters. OGPU units spent much of their time engaged in operations against the organized transportation of stolen or contraband goods and the organizations that used the railroads for criminal purposes. At times, OGPU officers even checked passenger tickets and commercial train manifests. During periods of severe breakdown, OGPU forces were given authority to place certain lines under OGPU martial law, taking over the actual administration of the road. Such was the case on the Omsk and Tomsk lines in Western Siberia in 1935 and 1936. For a period of six months spanning those two years, Lazar Kaganovich, then transport commissar, requested the OGPU to oversee the administration and operation of the road.32 OGPU forces did much to bring discipline to the railroad system, but their efforts resulted in a militarization of social order and a conflation of social discipline with political defense of the state.
24 The merging of social control and political defense of the state became a cornerstone of OGPU and NKVD policies during the mid-1930s. Yet this conflation was not just the result of organizational “drift” or colonization of authority by the political police. Stalin set the tone for this shift in policy as early as January 1933 in his remarks to the party’s Central Committee plenary meetings. In his speech, Stalin emphasized that open class war had ended with the victory of collectivization and the successful dekulakization of the countryside. Stalin cautioned, however, that enemies of the Soviet state would continue their opposition to Soviet power. They would do so not through open organized opposition, but through more subtle forms of sabotage and subversion -- the infamous tikhii zapoi -- and, because of their weakness as a social force, would seek alliance with other socially alien populations, such as criminals and other marginals. Criminality and lack of social discipline, said Stalin, now posed the greatest single danger to the construction of socialism in the USSR. The state needed to use all its measures of repression against laxness and this new kind of class war.
25 This new understanding deeply influenced police and OGPU policies in the mid-1930s and turned the fight against crime, social deviancy -- indeed, any kind of social disorder -- from a matter of social control into a political priority in defense of the
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state. Socially harmful elements, sotsial’no-vrednye elementy, were now to be regarded as also politically dangerous. With this pronouncement, OGPU officials saw their suspicions confirmed by the country’s political leaders. Behind any criminal activity lay the hand of counter-revolution. Now, suddenly, petty and big criminals, alike, hooligans, and other socially marginal groups became the business not just of the civil authorities, but of the OGPU.
26 Following Stalin’s lead, high officials in all branches of the state’s punitive and judicial organs adopted the argument that social deviance was a major, perhaps the primary, political threat to the existence of the state.33 Iagoda, the head of the OGPU/NKVD, gave one of the clearest statements about the political danger of social disorder in an April 1935 speech to a gathering of senior police officials. “For us,” declared Iagoda, “the highest honor is in the struggle against counter-revolution. But in the current situation, a hooligan, a robber, a bandit -- is he not the real counter-revolutionary ? [...] In our country [...] where the construction of socialism has been victorious [...]any criminal act, by its nature, is nothing other than an expression of class struggle.”34 We might assume that Iagoda exaggerated the significance of policing functions in order to inflate the morale of his audience of policemen. Yet Iagoda emphasized the same priorities in his regular reports to Sovnarkom and, according to his critics, the NKVD chief emphasized similar priorities even in his communications with the GUGB. According to Leonid Zakovskii, a senior OGPU/GUGB official under Iagoda, the latter stressed protection of state property as the foremost concern for OGPU operational and territorial organs in the struggle against counter-revolution. According to Zakovskii, Iagoda laid out this priority in one of his first directives as head of the NKVD in August 1934. Zakovskii, as well as other critics such as Iakov Agranov, Iagoda’s assistant chief, claimed that Iagoda maintained this emphasis in his operational administration of the GUGB, even after the murder of Leningrad party head, Sergei Kirov in December 1934.35 By and large, Iagoda’s critics were correct about his policy priorities. Throughout the 1930s, Iagoda understood that the maintenance of social and economic order was the primary task of the NKVD in defending the political interests of the Soviet state.
The mid-1930s : Social order and state security
27 By the early months of 1936, Iagoda was able to paint a generally favorable picture of the NKVD’s efforts to fight crime and to establish social order. His March 1936 report to Sovnarkom stood in sharp contrast to the dire outlines he had presented earlier in the decade.36 As the result of reforms, reorganizations, significant increases in personnel, and increased professionalism, Iagoda declared in his 1936 report, police had made significant advances toward the goal of securing social order and a reduction of criminality. Most violent crimes had been reduced to insignificant levels in the country. He boasted that there were fewer murders in the whole of the USSR in 1935 than in the city of Chicago. At the same time, Iagoda noted that certain types of crimes continued to be a problem, including simple robbery, organized forms of hooliganism, speculation, and theft of socialist property. While not as widespread as in the early 1930s, these types of crimes persisted, according to Iagoda, despite efforts of police to eradicate them. Lack of supervision of homeless children also continued to be a problem, and in 1934 and 1935 incidents of armed banditry also rose. According to Iagoda, professional qualifications and educational levels of the police had risen, as well
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as police discipline. Cases of corruption and crimes committed by police officers had fallen off considerably in the previous years, but Iagoda noted that still much had to be accomplished to raise the professional and “cultural” levels of the country’s police force.37
28 Iagoda’s internal NKVD report in early 1936 echoed the positive tone of his report to Sovnarkom. Overall, according to Iagoda, the police had secured order in the country and had achieved “notable successes” in the struggle to reduce crime.38 Yet whatever success the NKVD achieved in fighting crime and establishing social order was not due to the establishment of regularized policing methods in the country. Even by the middle 1930s, the country still had no effective constabulary system for the daily maintenance of order. Despite the growth in numbers, the number of police in the country in 1935 was still half what it had been before the 1914-1918 war.39 Police in most cities, even major urban centers, had yet to establish a police post system for daily patrols in neighborhoods. In provincial cities such as Novosibirsk, the large working- class neighborhoods in the city had no regular police patrol system. In Barnaul, an industrial pit five hours south of Novosibirsk by train, few police ventured out at all into the outlying shantytown districts of the city.40 Attempts to establish night patrols, even in large cities, had largely failed and had been abandoned, and citizen vigilante groups continued to grow in areas that lacked effective police forces. Rural areas, according to Iagoda, remained outside the effective range of policing abilities.41
29 In the absence of regular policing, large-scale campaigns of mass repression continued to be the most effective means by which the NKVD fought crime and maintained social order. Throughout the middle 1930s, many tens of thousands of people were swept up in large-scale arrests and deportations, which did not end with dekulakization in the early 1930s. While mass arrests and deportations in rural areas tapered off after 1933, they increased in intensity and scope in urban areas and border zones as police attempted to purge these areas of criminals, marginal elements, potentially disloyal national minorities, and other undesirable or suspect social groups. GUGB and police operational groups continued to investigate large-scale organized crimes, but crimes of small-scale speculation burgeoned out of control and were most effectively handled by mass police sweeps of markets, train stations, flophouse districts, and other areas where such people operated. The NKVD handled the single most troubling problem of social disorder during the middle 1930s -- homeless youth and juvenile crime -- in the same way. The other major problem that threatened social order during the 1930s stemmed from the various categories of “socially dangerous elements,” and the regime handled this problem in the same manner.
Passportization and mass repression
30 The internal passport and registration system, initiated in early 1933, became the primary instrument that police and the OGPU/NKVD used to protect the country against what were considered criminal and socially harmful elements. Initiation of the passport system was also the occasion for the first real administrative and operational meshing of the police and state security organs. Initially, the passport system was designed to deal with the consequences of mass dispossession and forced migration out of the countryside during dekulakization and collectivization. It was established specifically to seal off major “socialist” spaces (major cities, industrial zones, and
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border areas) from contamination by “superfluous people, those not tied to productive labor, kulaks fleeing to cities, criminals, and other anti-social elements.” In other and later variations, anti-social became interchangeable with anti-Soviet.42 By August 1934, initial passportization of major cities in the Russian republic, and in the Moscow and Leningrad oblasti resulted in the issuing of 27,009,559 passports. Police issued about 12 million passports to citizens living in so-called “regime” cities, that is, cities on privileged supply lists and of special significance, either political or economic. Nearly 15 million passports were issued to citizens living in non-regime cities.43
31 Passportization allowed police officials to quantify what they believed were the number of socially alien elements in the country. Passportization also allowed the regime to locate, at least initially, the areas of the country most saturated with marginal and dangerous populations. In an August 1934 report to the Russian Federation Soviet Executive Council, Fokin, the head of the police passport department, counted 384,922 individuals who had been refused passports. This figure amounted to slightly more than 3 % of the overall number of citizens who had been granted passports. In the border regions of Eastern Siberia, nearly 11 % of the population had been denied passports, while 1.5 % of the population of Leningrad oblast' and the western border areas of the country were denied passports.44 After initial passportization of Moscow, Leningrad, Khar’kov, Magnitogorsk and several other cities, authorities could count about 70,000 alien elements -- fleeing kulaks, individuals under judicial conviction, escaped convicts, individuals deprived of voting rights (lishentsy), and those with no socially useful employment. This number amounted to 3.4 % out of a population of 2,088,422 who received passports.45
32 The process of passportization set the country’s marginal populations in motion. Hundreds of thousands of people fled the regime cities and industrial areas, either as a consequence of being denied a passport or in advance of the passport campaign. Officials estimated that, in the course of the two to three months of the passport campaign, about 60,000 individuals migrated out of Moscow, 54,000 fled Leningrad, and 35,000 left Magnitogorsk.46 Overall, during the first half of 1933, Soviet cities experienced a total out-migration of nearly 400,000 people. This was the only period since the civil war years in which the population of cities actually declined, and it was exceptional for the period of rapid industrialization and urbanization during the 1930s. 47
33 Anticipating a large population movement, police and OGPU officials set in motion their own populations, not only to count but to round up the country’s alien and dangerous populations during the period of passportization. Throughout 1933 and 1934, the OGPU mounted a number of operations in various cities and in particular border and industrial areas. Some of these operations, while they coincided with passportization, seemed not to be connected directly to passportization, and required politbiuro approval.48 Most operations, however, were related to the passportization campaign and were conducted on the basis of specific OGPU operational orders. In preparation for these operations, OGPU leaders ordered police and OGPU units to compile lists of undesirables in their districts, even before the issuing of passports. These lists were to be based on many sources of “compromising” information, but in particular on the basis of agent and informant operational work. This work was to be conducted by both police and OGPU operational groups.49 Police completed initial passportization of Moscow, Leningrad, Khar’kov, Magnitogorsk and several other cities
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by the end of March 1933, and the OGPU launched individual operations to sweep these cities of particular groups.50 Special operations followed in other cities, but by late summer of 1933, the OGPU attempted to organize a systematic set of procedures to process the repression of undesirables. This was in keeping with the Central Committee’s 8 May 1933 directive to cease campaign-style measures of repression and Iagoda’s instructions to use the passport and registration system as a regular method of protecting cities. On August 13, Iagoda issued a circular, number 96, outlining the rules for the “non-judicial repression of citizens violating laws relating to the passportization of the population.” This order established special passport troiki at the republic, krai, and oblast' level to review and sentence violators of passport laws. The troiki were to be chaired by the OGPU plenipotentiary who exercised control over the police, and its members were to include the head of the police passport department and the OGPU operational department, with participation of the local procuror. These troiki reviewed the cases of passport violators according to the lists sent to them from localities in their jurisdictions, and they were empowered to pass sentence on violators, subject to review by the OGPU Osoboe Soveshchanie, in Moscow. In his circular, Iagoda specified the kinds of sentences to be given for four categories of individuals : those with no useful employment and disorganizers of industry ; lishentsy and kulaks, people who had been released from prison or sentences of exile (but who did not have the right to live in the city from which they had been exiled -- DRS); and “criminals and other anti-social elements.” The latter were to be sent to labor camps for up to three years, while those in the other categories were to be sent to penal re-settlement colonies (spetsposelki), or exiled to live outside a thirty-kilometer circumference from a passportized city. The order was especially hard on repeat violators (recidivists) in any category, who were to be sent to camps for up to three years.51
34 The work of the passport troiki yielded considerable results, which in turn reflected the extensive work of police and OGPU operational groups. In the last five months of 1933, the troiki for the RSFSR adjudicated the cases of 24,369 individuals who had been arrested under one of the above categories. Interestingly, nearly 17,000 of those arrested were freed, apparently convincing police that they were, indeed, upstanding citizens. In all, passport troiki convicted about 7,000 individuals, about 1,300 of which were sentenced to camps (konstlager’), 3,300 to labor or other “special” colonies, and another 2,000 to “near” exile under the category “minus 30.”52
35 High police and state authorities intended the passport system to provide a daily means by which police could protect cities and other vital areas from penetration by socially harmful and anti-Soviet elements. Yet local police and OGPU officials continued to operate in the old ways, using campaign-style methods to clear their cities of undesirable and marginal populations. They did so very likely for several reasons. As Iagoda noted in his numerous reprimands of local organs, police did not appreciate the importance of daily maintenance of their passport offices as a way to combat the in- migration of undesirable populations. Moreover, most local authorities did not have the material resources and manpower to keep a constant registry of whom was coming and going in their precincts. And in the absence of these kinds of resources, police, especially under the influence of the OGPU/UGB, reverted to the methods of periodic campaigns or sweeps of their cities. Most OGPU/UGB operatives in the 1930s were veterans of the old ChK of the 1920s and early 1930s and were used to traditional chekist ways. Thus, Iagoda found himself constantly chiding local organs for neglecting
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daily passport control and then resorting to campaign-style methods, clearing cities of socially dangerous elements “in fits and starts.”53
36 The special powers of all OGPU troiki ended in summer of 1934 with the reorganization of the OGPU and the police into the NKVD SSSR. With this reorganization, all cases that had been adjudicated in non-judicial or administrative fashion were transferred for review within the country’s restructured court system. This included all cases that had passed through the passport troiki as well as cases of counter-revolutionary and other state crimes that had been under the jurisdiction of other OGPU troiki. The only non- judicial body that was supposed to remain in operation after the 1934 reforms was the NKVD’s Osoboe Soveshchanie, the special council in Moscow that adjudicated cases of counter-revolution and state crimes. Yet, the country’s fledgling court system could not handle the crush of cases that passed through it, and soon the attempt to pass from administrative to judicial repression broke down.
37 Already in early January 1935, Iagoda and A. Vyshinskii, the procurator general of the USSR, gave instructions to re-establish special troiki to handle cases of passport violations by “criminal and déclassé elements.” These special “police” (militseiskie) troiki were similar in makeup and function to the recently disbanded OGPU passport troiki. They were to operate at the republic, krai, or oblast' level, and included the appropriate head of the UNKVD (who was the administrative head of the UGB), the head of the corresponding level URKM, and the corresponding procurator. In a letter to Stalin from April 20, Vyshinskii explained that the formation of these troiki had been necessary due to the significantly large number of passport cases of socially harmful elements. These cases had clogged the judicial system and the Osoboe Soveshchanie. They had led to overcrowding of preliminary holding cells and the consequent violation of Soviet law for holding individuals without indictment. Vyshinskii was writing to Stalin for approval of a draft Central Committee directive that would give approval to the continuation of these troiki for operations that would “achieve the quickest clearing (bystreishaia ochistka) of cities of criminal and déclassé elements.”54
38 Vyshinskii’s draft was short, but in that draft, he stated, interestingly, that one of the primary functions of the troiki was to hear cases of criminal and déclassé elements “for which there is no foundation for transfer to a court.” In other words, the troiki were designed to simplify the process of repression of undesirable populations by bypassing the judicial system’s normal requirements for submission of evidence. Thus, the troiki could convict and pass sentence on an individual whose case might be quashed (prekrashcheno) by a regular court for lack of evidence. In order to preserve legal sanction, according to Vyshinskii, sentences for these types of cases were to be confirmed by the Osoboe Soveshchanie on condition that there was no objection from the procuracy at any level.55 In a note at the top of Vyshinskii’s letter, Stalin replied that a “quick clearing is dangerous.” Stalin recommended that clearing the cities should be accomplished “gradually, without jolts and shocks (bez tolchkov),” and “without superfluous administrative enthusiasm (bez...izlishnego administrativnogo vostorga),” that is, without administrative excesses. Stalin recommended that operations based on the directive last one year. With the rest of the draft, Stalin agreed. 56
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Order 00192 and other operations
39 The actual Central Committee directive is not yet available in declassified archive materials, but it became the basis for some of the largest NKVD campaigns of mass repression during the mid-1930s. On May 9, 1935, Iagoda and Vyshinskii sent a joint set of operational instructions, order number 00192, to all republic, oblast' and krai level NKVD administrations detailing the work of the new troiki. The substance of these instructions is worth noting since they show the extent to which the definition of socially harmful elements had broadened. In the 1920s, police defined socially dangerous elements narrowly as people with a criminal record. While they were suspect, they were generally not subject to summary arrest simply because of their socially deviant or marginal background. According to the new decree, however, socially harmful elements fell into one of several categories : persons with previous criminal convictions and (my italics) “continuing uncorrected ties” to the criminal world, and persons with no criminal convictions, but with no definite place of work and ties with the criminal world. The category also included “professional” beggars, persons caught repeatedly in urban areas without proper residence permits, persons who returned to places where they were forbidden to live, and children over the age of twelve caught in a criminal act. All of these types of people were to be regarded as socially harmful. They were now subject to summary arrest and sentencing by the extra-judicial troiki of the NKVD for up to five years in corrective labor camps.57
40 Operations based on the 9 May 1935 directive continued at least through the early months of 1936. Sweeps by police and UGB units targeted particular city areas, especially flop-house districts, where large numbers of itinerant workers and vagabonds slept ; they focused on shanty towns in industrial districts, market places, train stations and other urban public places, and on particular farms and villages. By the end of the year, operations by the police, alone, netted close to 266,000 people classified under the rubric socially harmful elements (sotsial'no-vrednye elementy). Approximately 85,000 of these individuals came under the jurisdiction of NKVD troiki, while the cases of another 98,000 were sent for hearing within the regular court system. In October, alone, police in the capital, Moscow, and in the Moscow oblast', detained nearly 6,300 people for not having proper residence and work documents, or for other reasons that defined them as socially dangerous types. By November, police had brought in 26,530 people in Leningrad, and in Moscow city by the same month, 38,356.58
41 Operations against socially dangerous elements in Western Siberia mirrored trends in the rest of the country. The numbers of people swept up in these operations in that district were not as high as in oblasti of major cities such as Moscow, Leningrad, or Sverdlovsk, nor as high as the numbers in the Far Eastern district and in the always troublesome Black Sea district, but operations in Western Siberia ranked among the most extensive. Police pulled in close to 9,000 individuals by November 1935. NKVD troiki convicted about half that number, while the cases of the rest were sent through regular courts. Close to 1,800 individuals were eventually freed.59
42 The chief prosecutor of Western Siberia, I. I. Barkov followed the general line laid down by Vyshinskii. As interpreted by Barkov, the decree on socially dangerous elements provided the NKVD with a powerful weapon in the fight against criminals and other enemies of Soviet order. He declared that the new authority given officials under this
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decree allowed “a maximization of effort to sweep away criminal-déclassé and itinerant (brodiachie) elements, to reduce crime significantly, and to liquidate especially aggravated assault and armed robbery.”60 Regardless of what he may have thought privately, Barkov publicly saw no contradiction between the principles of socialist legality and the use of such extra-judicial police methods against harmful populations. When it came to cases processed through the judicial system under statutes of the criminal code, Barkov hounded militsiia and UGB officials constantly for their investigative sloppiness, violations of procedure, and abuse of rights. Yet he only rarely criticized police activities related to these administrative forms of repression.61 In keeping with the language of the 9 May instructions, Barkov recommend that police avoid “campaign-like mass operations,” but in the same sentence he urged an increase in “daily sweeps of criminal-déclassé elements.”62
43 Police and UGB groups framed other operations against populations the regime perceived as harmful or politically dangerous. By May 1935, even before the formal establishment of the police troiki, NKVD sweeps of Leningrad oblast' and the Karelia border regions led to the deportation of 23,217 “kulak and anti-Soviet elements” to special labor colonies in Western Siberia and Uzbekistan.63 UGB units, using police and local party activists, also began large-scale deportations of suspect national minorities to Siberia and Central Asia, especially from the Western and Far Eastern border zones. In the two years, 1935 and 1936, UGB operations targeted tens of thousands of Finnish, Polish, German, Korean, and Ukrainian populations living in border areas whom the regime suspected of cross-border loyalties.64 In 1935, Iagoda also recommended the removal of several thousand Soviet citizens of Greek origin living in the Black Sea border regions.65
44 The regime regarded these populations with suspicion, especially within the context of rising international tensions during the mid-1930s, and party and state leaders regarded it as entirely within the authority of the state to remove these populations as a precautionary measure. Yet officials did not regard these populations as ipso-facto anti-Soviet. Even the populations that were to be resettled were not supposed to be deprived of their rights as Soviet citizens. Vyshinskii insisted, for example, that the “Greeks” to be moved from the Black Sea areas were to be compensated for their dislocation. Party, police, and UGB officials were supposed to distinguish carefully between those who were to retain their rights and those who should be categorized as socially dangerous or anti-Soviet. The latter were to be arrested, or if not arrested, processed and sentenced through special troiki to camps or labor colonies. In some instances, high GUGB officials provided operational officers with approximate figures of how many individuals to arrest or detain as dangerous.66
45 The mass operations against sotsvredelementy and national minorities worked so well that the regime applied the same methods to resolve a number of other major problems. Sweeps of orphan children became the primary method, for example, to resolve the problem of juvenile homelessness and gang crime. Over the course of the two years 1934 and 1935, Iagoda and the NKVD won out over more moderate solutions to these problems, and by spring 1935, police were engaged in mass roundups of street children, who were then sent to NKVD labor colonies. In effect, the takeover of the orphan problem by the NKVD criminalized this group in the same way that the law on harmful elements criminalized the unemployed and other socially marginal populations.67 Likewise, in July 1936, the Central Committee and Sovnarkom responded
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to problems of deficit goods and long lines by ordering police and UGB units to organize a campaign of sweeps against small-time speculators. The joint government- party order took the form of a directive, dated 19 July 1936, signed by Molotov and Stalin. This directive ordered the police and UGB to submit a plan for a one-time sweeping operation, “using administrative procedures” in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Minsk. The directive provided a guide figure of 5,000 speculators to be arrested and processed through specially authorized troiki.68 By the end of August, according to Vyshinskii, troiki had convicted 4,000 individuals in the cities marked for special operations, while regular courts had convicted 1,635 individuals as part of the anti- speculators’ campaign. The latter, however, represented figures from only 25 reporting oblasti and krai from around the country.69
46 In the absence of a regular policing system, the clearing or iz”iatie campaigns became the primary method for the regime to fight criminality and other forms of social disorder, and to protect cities and other vital spaces, such as border regions and state resorts. Iagoda emphasized how well these methods had worked by noting in his March 1936 report to Sovnarkom that crime rates in the rural areas were not declining as rapidly as in urban areas. One of the main reasons, apart from fewer numbers of police, Iagoda emphasized, was that the government and party directives to clear cities of “parasitic and itinerant elements” had not been extended to cover operations in rural areas.70 In fact, because of the success of sweep operations, Iagoda recommended in his March report that Sovnarkom grant continuation of the work of the NKVD troiki to sweep déclassé elements from cities and workers’ settlements. When queried for his reaction to this request, Vyshinskii replied that he had no objections in principle. He noted only that the matter needed to be discussed in a special commission, since there existed “special directives” governing the work of these troiki.71
47 Sovnarkom approved Iagoda’s request. Lists compiled by the MVD in 1953 showed a total of 119,159 individuals sentenced by troiki in 1935 and 141,318 individuals in 1936. 72 Nearly three quarters of those sentenced by troiki in 1935 had been caught up in sweeps as sotsvredelementy under the NKVD order 00192. The next most significant category was very likely the category of national minorities, followed by groups caught up in smaller operations -- speculators, thieves, rural agricultural disorganizers, and other criminal elements. No breakdowns of sweeps exist for 1936 in open archives, but the relative weights of categories probably remained about the same as in 1935. Interestingly, these numbers far outweigh the numbers of individuals who were sentenced specifically for counter-revolutionary crimes through the NKVD’s Osoboe Soveshchanie (29,452 in 1935 and 18,969 in 1936.).73 About the same number of individuals were sentenced for major state crimes in 1935 as were sentenced by troiki (118,465 and 119,159 respectively). Yet, while the number of those convicted for high state crimes declined in 1936 to 114,383, the number of individuals sentenced through troiki rose sharply in that year to 141,318.
48 Much has been written about numbers. They are the source of much historical contention. Figures for any category of arrest or repression can vary by the thousands, depending on which source one uses. Yet the figures above, combined with a close reading of operational orders and policy directives, show a clear trend. The Stalinist regime, the NKVD in particular, continued the policies of mass social repression, using administrative means, throughout the 1930s. The regime moderated policies of repression only in the sense that it curtailed the political repression of individuals
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under specific legal statutes of counter-revolution. Iagoda fell into line with the moderating tendencies of the mid-1930s over use of political terror against the party and state apparatus.74 Yet, the NKVD under Iagoda, including the GUGB as well as the police, continued to use administrative methods of mass repression to achieve social order. In the middle years of the decade, the NKVD did not direct its campaigns of mass repression against peasants, but against a range of different and undesirable populations. Indeed, for Iagoda and for the NKVD, the struggle against social disorder was not only a social priority but also a political one. Iagoda, like many leaders, believed that, after the victories of de-kulakization and collectivization, social disorder posed the greatest political danger to the state. Thus, the struggle against social disorder became, for him, the equivalent of political struggle against counter- revolution. While Stalin and other leaders supported this policy line at first, it became problematic after the murder of Kirov, and by late 1936, Stalin was ready to oust Iagoda for continuing this line in the operational policies of the NKVD. Ezhov’s criticisms of the NKVD at the 1937 party plenum meeting reflected this turnabout. Ezhov’s reforms of the NKVD after the February-March 1937 plenum reflected his attempt to separate the social order functions of the police from the functions of state security, which were supposed to belong to the GUGB. Administratively and operationally, Ezhov sought to re-orient the GUGB toward the fight against political opposition, understood not as social disorder but as direct, organized political subversion and spying. Thus, Ezhov jettisoned the economic crimes sector of the GUGB, which had drained so much operational time and energy. He placed responsibility for the fight against organized crime in the hands of a newly organized and strengthened police department, the OBKhSS (Otdel bor’by s khishcheniem sotsialisticheskoi sobstvennosti). In a major reorganization, and as a direct result of the February-March plenum, Ezhov also created a new railroad police department within the structure of the GURKM. He clearly distinguished its functions from those of the newly reformed transport department of the GUGB. In a draft directive for the Central Committee, Ezhov outlined the functions of the new eleventh department of the GUGB. “The transport department of the GUGB,” wrote Ezhov, “will be freed from functions of securing social order on railroad lines, maintaining public order in train stations, fighting against theft of socialist property, hooliganism and child homelessness. These functions are to be transferred to the newly formed railroad police, which will be subordinated to the GURKM NKVD.” According to Ezhov, officers of the railroad department of the GUGB were to engage themselves exclusively in the fight against counter-revolutionary sabotage of the country’s vital rail systems. Whatever this meant in practice is not entirely clear, but whatever Ezhov intended, it is clear that he wanted to get the GUGB -- the organ of state security -- out of the business of guarding mail cars, rounding up hooligans from train yards, chasing itinerant kids, robbers, and hobos riding on trains, patrolling train stations, and checking for ticket violations.75
49 Whatever other reorganizations Ezhov carried out is a matter of speculation. It is not known whether he streamlined and reoriented the work of the NKVD’s agent informant networks, which he claimed needed to be done. Neither is it clear to what extent he purged the NKVD apparatus and fundamentally reorganized it. Despite his initial reforms, Ezhov never entirely separated the police from the GUGB. The government separated the two organs only in 1940, after Ezhov’s brief but bloody tenure, and after the leadership of the NKVD passed to Lavrenti Beria. Yet, the separation of internal
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policing functions from the functions of state security began under Ezhov, immediately following the February-March 1937 meeting of the Central Committee plenum.
The mass operations of 1937 and 1938
50 Ezhov’s criticism of Iagoda and NKVD policies was sharp and unequivocal. No one could have misunderstood his intent to change the previous policies of the NKVD. Just five months after the February-March plenum, in late July 1937, however, Ezhov issued the now infamous operational order 00447. That order began the mass operations of 1937 and 1938. By decree of the Politbiuro, the NKVD was charged to begin mass shooting or imprisonment of several categories of socially harmful elements. Leaders regarded former kulaks, bandits, and recidivist criminals among the most dangerous of these groups, alongside members of anti-Soviet parties, white guardists, returned émigrés, churchmen and sectarians, and gendarmes and former officials of the tsarist government.76 By the end of November 1938, when leaders stopped the operations, nearly 766,000 individuals had been caught up in the police and GUGB sweeps. Nearly 385,000 of those individuals had been arrested as category I enemies. Those who fell into this category were scheduled to be shot, while the remaining arrestees, in category II, were to receive labor camp sentences from five to ten years.77
51 How are we to understand these operations and the order that initiated them ? The mass operations of 1937-1938 seem to have been a direct contradiction of Ezhov’s new turn in the NKVD. Except for the scale and the level of violence, the mass operations of 1937-1938 were similar in almost every detail to the kinds of campaigns that Iagoda had conducted against marginal populations and criminal elements. The mass repressions involved the same kind of operational procedures -- procedures that Ezhov had condemned -- and were directed against similar kinds of social groups -- groups that Ezhov had declared were not the affair of the organs of state security. Once again, GUGB officers and units, in addition to the police, found themselves in the business of large-scale social purging. In campaign style, they rounded up criminals, itinerants, beggars, gypsies, so-called kulaks, and a host of other categories of suspect people.
52 The return to mass social repression also seemed to belie the success of Iagoda’s policies. In his March 1936 report on crime, Iagoda informed Sovnarkom that, with a few exceptions, the problem of social disorder had been resolved. Rates for nearly every major crime had declined, and although he recommended extension of campaigns against socially harmful elements, Iagoda looked forward to an increasingly stable social situation. Finally, there seems to have been no warning or discussion within the ranks of the party elites about the need for mass purging. In previous campaigns, whether against kulaks, national minorities, or deviant populations, party leaders had prepared the groundwork with widespread propaganda campaigns. No such groundwork was laid for the mass operations of 1937 and 1938. The Politbiuro resolution of July 2, on which order 00447 was based, seemed to arise out of nowhere. Certainly, mid-level party officials, such as Robert Eikhe in Western Siberia, were aware of the continuing problems in their districts, and Eikhe, for example, communicated those difficulties to higher party authorities. Discussions at the level of the Central Committee and in the Politbiuro show that concern existed at the top of the party hierarchy about continuing problems of social and economic disorder. Yet there is nothing to indicate that officials perceived a growing threat from social disorder, or a
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threat in any significant way greater than in previous years. Neither does there appear to be any discussion at higher party levels that would have led to the decision to engage in mass operations against such large numbers of people.
53 Still, the language that officials used in describing marginal and undesirable populations changed suddenly in the summer of 1937, and the change in language is indicative of the origins of the mass operations. NKVD and party authorities had long seen a link between criminal and other marginal populations on the one hand, and anti-Soviet, even counter-revolutionary elements, on the other hand. In the early summer of 1937, however, NKVD and party authorities began to perceive what they believed were active organizing efforts for fifth column activities in case of war with Japan and Germany. I believe Oleg Khlevniuk is correct in his argument that the decision to engage in mass operations against suspect populations was tied to Stalin’s reading in early 1937 of rear-guard uprisings against the Republican regime in Spain during that country’s civil war. As Khlevniuk argues, Stalin feared that enemy states might attempt to organize the same kind of rear-guard uprisings, which would threaten the country, should war break out and hostile powers such as Germany and Japan invade.78
54 In fact, this is the language that appeared in NKVD reports about suspect populations in Western Siberia in the early summer of 1937. It is the language of “rebellious moods” and fifth-column activities by foreign-directed agents and organizations. Thus, in a report to Robert Eikhe from June 1937, Sergei Mironov, head of the Western Siberian UNKVD, described operations to root out “kadet-monarchist and SR organizations.” These underground organizations, according to Mironov, had united under orders from the Japanese intelligence service into an overall organizational front called the “Russian General Military Union” (Russkii Obshchevoinskii Soiuz-ROVS). The organizations in this union were preparing a “revolt and a seizure of power” in Siberia to coincide with an invasion by the Japanese army. Mironov described the various branches of this union, which the NKVD had uncovered through its investigative operational work, and then he made the connection between the work of these groups and the problem of marginal and other suspect populations. “Consider,” wrote Mironov, “that in the Narym and Kuzbass areas there are 208,400 exiled kulaks ; another 5,350 live under administrative exile and include white officers, active bandits and convicts, and former [tsarist] police officials [...] This is the social base for their organizing work [i.e., organizing work of the ROVS] -- kulaks and penal settlers (spetspereselentsev) scattered across the Narym and in the cities of the Kuzbass [...] It is clear then the kind of a broad base that exists on which to build an insurgent rebellion.”79
55 This kind of language was different from the language of the mass operations to clear cities of harmful elements during the mid-1930s. It is a language that tied socially suspect populations to active military uprisings. This was a threat more dangerous than the threat of social disorder. Mironov’s warning was not about the threat of social chaos, but about the formation of organized opposition. Mironov’s language was a language consistent with Stalin’s rising concern about the prospects of war and the domestic consequences of war. Mironov’s assessment of the danger to the country from harmful populations also applied to rural as well as to urban areas. This rural aspect also distinguished the discussion about harmful elements in 1937 from previous assessments. The discussion about anti-Soviet elements in early summer of 1937 was
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not just about making cities safe for socialism ; it was about the organized military threat that marginal populations posed throughout the entire country, and specifically in rural areas. In fact, Ezhov began order 00447 with reference to the countryside. He noted that “...a significant number of former kulaks, those previously repressed, those hiding from repression, and escapees from camps, exile, and labor colonies have settled in rural areas.” He wrote further that significant numbers of anti-Soviet elements -- including sectarians, members of previous anti-Soviet parties, bandits, repatriated White officers, and others -- “have remained abroad in rural areas, nearly untouched.” These, along with a “significant cadre of criminals” -- including livestock rustlers, recidivist thieves, armed robbers, escapees, and others -- posed a significant danger to the country as the source of “all sorts of anti-Soviet and diversionary crimes...”80
56 Ezhov’s assessment of the situation in the country reflected the paranoia of the day, but his description of the social dynamics of Soviet repressive policies during the 1930s was, for the most part, accurate. Previous mass operations had cleared the cities of suspect populations. Through passportization and clearing operations in the mid-1930s, groups which the regime deemed anti-Soviet had been sent into exile or had been driven out of regime cities and border areas and had taken refuge in non-regime towns and in the countryside. There they had stayed, while many others had fled exile and camps, or had been released. The latter contingent was a sizable one, and included a significant proportion of those who had been de-kulakized in the early 1930s and had served their five-year exile terms or had been released under the amnesty campaigns of 1934 and 1935. These groups were not allowed legally to return to their cities or regions of origin, and so many were, by the late 1930s, also living in rural areas and “unprotected” towns and cities. Thus, while the NKVD had secured the cities as “model socialist places” they had lacked the resources and, as Iagoda noted in March 1936, the authority, to extend that control to rural areas of the country. According to Ezhov, insufficient policing measures against these groups had, by 1937, permitted anti-Soviet elements that populated rural areas to begin to filter back into regime cities, industrial sites, into the transport and trade system, and into collective and state farms. Order 00447, then, can be seen as an attempt to extend and finish the job begun with the campaigns against harmful elements in cities from 1933 through 1936. The difference, of course, was the context of immanent war in which order 00447 was to be carried out. That context was missing in previous campaigns, and it gave to the mass operations of 1937 and 1938 their particular ruthlessness. Mass operations under order 00447 were to be mounted in rural areas as well as in towns and cities. These operations were to rid the entire country “once and for all,” in Ezhov’s words, of anti-Soviet elements.
Conclusions
57 The Soviet state’s response to social disorder during the early and middle years of the 1930s provided the infrastructure that was eventually used for mass repression and surveillance of the population in the latter part of the decade. The dramatic increase in NKVD numbers and activities during the course of the 1930s, the establishment of widespread informant and agent networks and the change in police functions and methods from crime solving to social repression, the growing operational and administrative interaction between the militsiia and the OGPU/GUGB, the social purging of cities and formation of the internal passport system -- all this was created by
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the state in order to deal with the perceived threat of social disorder. Certainly, many officials hesitated to carry out political repression. Oleg Khlevniuk, among others, has documented this reluctance, even within the party structure, to use repressive measures during the middle 1930s. And as Khlevniuk, among others, has demonstrated, Genrikh Iagoda was very likely removed from his position in late 1936 for his slowness to respond to Stalin's perceived political enemies. Yet, whatever his faults in the sphere of party politics, Iagoda created the infrastructure of social repression that was used to its fullest in 1937 and 1938.
58 As in the early 1930s, the regime turned on peasants during the Ezhovshchina, at least in Western Siberia. Collective and state farmers, as well as individual farmers (kolkhozniki, sovkhozniki, and edinolichniki) were “de-sovietized,” which opened the way for their arrest in the tens of thousands. Yet, the mass repressions of the late 1930s were more than a second dekulakization. Criminal elements, former convicts, sectarians, and a host of other marginal populations, along with farm workers, local Soviet officials, and free-holder peasants, became targets of the state’s campaigns of mass repression. As Terry Martin and others have shown, the repressions of 1937 and 1938 also encompassed significant numbers of national minorities. If the campaigns of mass repression began as a purge of socially suspect groups, they turned into a campaign of ethnic cleansing against “enemy” nations.81
59 Indeed, the threat of war introduced a national and ethnic element into Soviet policies of repression and gave to those policies a sense of political urgency. Soviet leaders had, for some years, feared the potential danger posed by populations that had national or ethnic ties beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. Large-scale deportation of certain ethnic populations started in 1935 and 1936 and coincided with the campaigns to clear cities of anti-Soviet and socially harmful elements. Deportations of national minorities continued under special orders throughout the late 1930s, but these operations also merged with mass repressions under order 00447. The repressions of the late 1930s combined an emerging xenophobia among Soviet leaders with traditional fears of political opposition and social disorder.
60 Here, then were the elements that gave the Great Purge its particular characteristics and virulence. The dekulakization and social order campaigns of the early part of the decade formed the background for the mass repressions of the late 1930s. The conflation of social disorder with counter-revolution, especially, influenced state and NKVD policies and methods : the mechanisms employed during the repressions of 1937 and 1938 were similar to those used earlier to dispose of undesirable populations and, in 1937 and 1938, the NKVD targeted many of the same social groups. Yet it was not the threat of social disorder, alone, that generated the mass repressions of the late 1930s. The fear of opposition political organizations -- Trotskyists, Zinovievists, et al -- revived after the murder of Sergei Kirov and merged with leaders’ concern over control of marginal and other undesirable social elements. By 1937, leaders were convinced that oppositionists, working with foreign agents, were actively organizing socially disaffected populations into a fifth-column force. Authorities worried that invasion, which seemed increasingly likely in the late 1930s, would be the signal for armed uprisings by these groups. Each of these concerns -- over social disorder, political opposition, and national contamination -- had generated separate political responses and operational policies throughout the previous years, but they coalesced in 1937. The various fears of Soviet leaders combined in a deadly way within the context of
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immanent war and invasion. Ezhov launched the massive purge of Soviet society in 1937 and 1938 in order to destroy what Stalinist leaders believed was the social base for armed overthrow of the Soviet government.
61 The changing character of repression during the 1930s reflected the changing character of the Soviet state. In the early 1930s, party and OGPU officials directed campaigns of mass repression against what were considered hostile social classes, especially small-holding rural inhabitants. During collectivization and de-kulakization mass repression was employed as part of a class war to establish Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Ironically, the “victory” of socialism in 1933 and 1934 not only marked the end of class war ; it also ended any pretense to class-specific forms of repression. Increasingly, officials justified repression in defense of the state, the gosudarstvo. With class no longer a primary criterion, repression encompassed an increasingly broad range of social and then ethnic groups. Soviet leaders believed that, in one way or another, these groups threatened social and political stability or the territorial integrity of the state. Having developed methods of mass repression early in the decade, the regime continued to employ and to systematize the use of these methods. Mass repression became the primary way authorities dealt with social disorder. In the process, mass repression became one of the main ways the regime redistributed the Soviet population, constructed politically acceptable national identities, protected the country’s borders, and imposed social and economic discipline on Soviet society. Mass repression was more than a means to fight the state’s enemies. Under Stalin, mass repression became a constitutive part of Soviet nation building.
62 University of Delaware
63 Department of History
64 Munroe Hall
65 Newark, DE 19716-2547
NOTES
1. See, for example, A. E. Gur’ianov, ed., Represii protiv Poliakova i pol’skikh grazhdan (Moscow, 1997); Terry Martin, “The origins of Soviet ethnic cleansing,” Journal of Modern History, 70 (December 1998): 813-861, especially 847-850; Aleksandr Nekrich, The punished peoples: The deportation and fate of Soviet minorities at the end of the Second World War (New York, 1978); I. L. Shcherbakova, ed., Nakazannyi narod: repressii protiv rossiiskikh nemtsev (Moscow, 1999); V. N. Zemskov, “Prinuditel’nye migratsii iz Pribaltiki v 1940-1950-kh godakh,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1 (1992): 4-19. 2. David R. Shearer, “Crime and social disorder in Stalin’s Russia : A reassessment of the Great Retreat and the origins of mass repression,” Cahiers du Monde russe, 39, 1-2 (1998): 119-148.
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3. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (RGASPI), f. 17, op. 2, d. 597, ll. 1-68. 4. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 597, l. 10. The UGB was the regional administrative system of the Chief Administration of State Security, the GUGB. 5. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 597, l. 15. 6. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 597, l. 8-9. 7. In September 1936, Ezhov, upon Stalin’s recommendation, replaced Iagoda as chief of the NKVD. Iagoda was not yet under arrest. At the time of the plenary session, he was head of the communications commissariat. Iagoda took part in the plenary session. He acknowledged his failure to understand and follow the proper political line in directing the work of the GUGB. He claimed that if he had not been so preoccupied with administration of the NKVD as a whole, he could have given more attention to the GUGB in particular. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 596, l. 40. 8. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 393, op. 84, d. 24, l. 10. A. V. Borisov, A. N. Dugin, A. Ia. Malygin et al., Politsiia i militsiia Rossii : stranitsy istorii (Moscow, 1995); V. M. Kuritsyn, Istoriia gosudarstva i prava Rossii, 1929-1940 (Moscow, 1998); L. P. Rasskazov, Karatel’nye organy v protsesse formirovaniia i funktsionirovaniia administrativno-komandnoi sistemy v sovetskom gosudarstve, 1917-1941 (Ufa, 1994). 9. GARF, f. 393, op. 84, d. 24, l. 14. See also the description of police activities and problems in the Trotsk rural region of Leningrad oblast', 1928-1929. GARF, f. 393, op. 78, d. 21. 10. Iagoda reported a total police force in 1932 of 98,292, which included cadets as well as street officers and command staff. GARF, f. 5446, op. 13a, d. 1320, l. 5. See also TsIK (RSFSR) report on police in GARF, f. 1235, op. 141, d. 910, ll. 24-40. 11. GARF, f. 5446, op. 13a, d. 1320, l. 6. 12. These figures are included in the police report from January 1932. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Novosibirskoi Oblasti (GANO), I, f. 47, op. 5, d. 160, ll.6-7. 13. GANO, I, f. 47, op. 5, d. 160, l. 44. 14. GARF, f. 5446, op. 14a, d. 762, l. 7. The average ratio of police to inhabitants for the whole of the RSFSR, including both cities and rural areas, in 1930 was 1: 5,371, with one policeman per 916 square km. GARF, f. 393, op. 84, d. 24, l. 13ob. In 1932, according to Iagoda, in Moscow and other major urban areas, there was one policeman on the average for every 750-1,000 inhabitants, although even in these centers, peripheral or poor working-class neighborhoods were poorly policed. GARF, f. 5446, op. 13a, d. 1320, l. 6. David Hoffman, Peasant metropolis : Social identities in Moscow, 1928-1941 (Ithaca, 1994). 15. GANO, I, f. 47, op. 5, d. 160, l. 32. 16. GANO, I, f. 47, op. 5, d. 160, ll. 26, 29, 32, 36-37. 17. GANO, I, f. 47, op. 5, d. 160, l. 28. 18. GANO, I, f. 47, op. 5, d. 160, l. 31. 19. GANO, I, f. 47, op. 5, d. 160, l. 24. 20. GANO, I, f. 47, op. 5, d. 160, l. Poor service and living conditions and corruption described above for police in Western Siberia reflected a national pattern. For similar
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descriptions for the whole of the RSFSR and USSR, see GARF, f. 393, op. 1, d. 24, ll. 12-15; GARF, f. 1235, op. 141, d. 910, ll. 24-40; GARF, f. 5446, op. 15a, d. 1130, ll. 8-9. See also Iagoda’s 1934 critical review of poor performance and corruption in the Western Siberian police administration in GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 135, document 13. 21. N. V. Petrov and K. V. Skorkin, Spravochnik. Kto rukovodil NKVD, 1934-1941 (Moscow, 1999): 35-36. 22. GARF, f. 9415, op. 5, d. 475, l. 7. 23. A. V. Kvashonkin et al, eds, Sovetskoe rukovodstvo. Perepiska, 1928-1941 (Moscow, 1999): 165-166, 24. GARF, f. 5446, op. 14a, d. 762, ll. 7-8. Apart from the OGPU and the militsiia, two other types of police forces operated. The vedomstvennaia militsiia, or vedmilitsiia, were employed by enterprises as guards and patrol police. At times, the vedmilitsiia also patrolled the neighborhoods bordering on the enterprise if, as was often the case, there was no regular police presence in the area. Within the RSFSR in the summer of 1931, according to a VTsIK report, vedmilitsiia numbered close to 57,000 while regular police numbered 44,433. GARF, f. 1235, op. 141, d. 910, l. 40. A large number of vigilante police organizations also operated throughout the country. The RKM classified these under the rubric of voluntary associations for cooperation with the police, or obshchestva sodeistviia militsii (osodmil). The osodmil movement grew rapidly in the early 1930s for various reasons, but often in the absence of organized police protection. In early 1930, some 2,500 osodmil cells had organized spontaneously, involving 26,177 individuals, but by spring of 1935, over 325,000 cells existed. Most, 245,000 operated in rural areas. GARF, f. 393, op. 84, d. 24, l. 21; GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 135, doc. 21. 25. GARF, f. 5446, op. 13a, d. 1320, l. 5. 26. GARF, f. 5446, op. 16a, d. 1270, l. 28. 27. GARF, f. 5446, op. 22a, d. 130, l. 22 and GARF f. 9401, op. 8, d. 58, l. 1, respectively. 28. A similar process of subordination occurred with the state’s border forces, internal security forces, and forces for convoying prisoners. See A.V. Borisov et al, Politsiia i militsiia Rossii, op. cit.: 142-143 and L.P. Rasskazov, Karatel’nye organy, op. cit., especially part III, “Karatel’nye organy v protsesse ukrepleniia administrativno- komandnoi systemy,” 231-306. 29. See Iagoda’s instructions to police in GARF, f. 5446, op. 15a, d. 1130, l. 2. 30. GARF, f. 9415, op. 5, d. 475, l. 6-7. 31. GARF, f. 9415, op. 5, d. 475, l. 12. 32. On the Tomsk line, for example, during 10 months of 1935, there were 5,972 “incidents” (proisshestviia) which resulted in the breakdown of 166 locomotives, 38 passenger cars, and 1,256 freight cars. These crashes resulted in 59 deaths and 119 injuries, 62 kilometers of rail lines were torn up, and movement was halted for a total of 686 hours. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 158, ll. 232-238. For reports by the OGPU plenipotentiary in temporary charge of the line, see ibid., ll. 154-187. 33. See, for example, N. Krylenko’s comments in N. Krylenko, “Proekt ugolovnogo kodeksa Soiuza SSR,” Problemy ugolovnoi politiki, kniga 1 (Moscow, 1935): 21, 23; G. Volkov, “Nakazanie v sovetskom ugolovnom prave,” Problemy ugolovnoi politiki, kniga 1 (Moscow, 1935): 74; A. Vyshinskii, “K reforme ugolovno-protsessual'nogo kodeksa,” Problemy ugolovnoi politiki, kniga 1 (Moscow, 1935): 35.
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34. GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 135, document 119, l. 2. I am grateful to Paul Hagenloh for help in reconstructing Iagoda’s speech. For a more complete description of this speech, see Paul Hagenloh, “‘Socially harmful elements’ and the Great Terror,” in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Stalinism : New directions (New York, 2000): 286-308. 35. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 598, l. 12 and 41-43, respectively. These remarks were made at the February-March 1937 plenum. Again, given the highly politicized and scripted nature of that session, we should approach these comments with caution. Still, in substance, they seem to be an apt description of political police policy during the mid-1930s. See also Iagoda’s directive to operational departments of the UGB, as well as the police, in March 1936 to free themselves from unnecessary tasks and to “focus on priorities of aggravated robbery, murder, and theft of socialist property.” GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 135, doc. 31, l. 4. 36. GARF, f. 5446, op. 15a, d. 1130, ll. 2-10. 37. GARF, f. 5446, op. 18a, d. 904, ll. 2-14. 38. GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 135, doc. 31, ll. 1-5. 39. Iagoda’s assessment. GARF, f. 5446, op. 18a, d. 904, l. 2. 40. GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 137, l. 24; and doc. 14, ll. 1-2. 41. GARF, f. 5446, op. 18a, d. 904, l. 3. 42. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 907, l. 10.. 43. GARF, f. 1235, op. 141, d. 1650, l. 31. 44. GARF, f. 1235, op. 141, d. 1650, l. 30. 45. GARF, f. 5446, op. 71, d. 154, l. 78. 46. GARF, f. 1235, op. 141, d. 1650, l. 30. 47. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Ekonomiki (RGAE), f. 1562, op. 329, d. 131, l. 3. 48. See for example, politbiuro approval in February 1933 of an OGPU operation to sweep Magnitogorsk of criminal elements, and approval in January 1934 of an OGPU operation, to last three months, to sweep Khar’kov of déclassé elements. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 914, l. 3 and RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 15, l. 164. 49. See for example the order for collecting information for sweeps of Moscow in GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 137, doc. 1, l. 1. 50. See reports on operations in June and July to clear Moscow of gypsies, and in the same summer, to clear the city of déclassé elements. GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 19, ll. 7,9. 51. GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 137, doc. 48, ll. 202-204. 52. GARF, f. 1235, op. 141, d. 1650, l. 19. 53. GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 135, doc. 14, l. 2. Iagoda singled out Western Siberian officials for particular though by no means unique criticism, noting that police in March 1934 had launched operations that led to the arrest of 4,000 undesirables, but had only arrested 300 the following month. In December of the same year, the district’s party secretariat reprimanded M. Domarev, head of the district’s militsiia, for failing to step up passport sweeps in the district. The party’s reprimand instructed the police chief to intensify his efforts and to present a plan for 1935 “to purge the most important cities of Western Siberia of déclassé elements.” GANO, II, f. 3, op. 1, d. 550, l. 18. See also GARF, f. 5446, op. 16a, d. 1270; GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 137, l. 24. 54. RGASPI, f. 588, op. 2, d. 155, ll. 66-67.
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55. RGASPI, f. 588, op. 2, d. 155, l. 67. 56. RGASPI, f. 588, op. 2, d. 155, l. 66. 57. GARF, f. 8131, op. 38, d. 6, l. 61. See also summary of the decree contained in the records of the Western Siberian Procurator's office. GANO, I, f. 20, op. 1, d. 220, ll. 32-33. For further work on passportization and socially dangerous elements, see P. Hagenloh, art. cit.; Nathalie Moine, “Passeportisation, statistique des migrations et contrôle de l’identité sociale,” Cahiers du Monde russe, 38, 4 (1997): 587-600; Gabor Rittersporn, “The impossible change : Soviet legal practice and extra-legal jurisdiction in the pre- war years.” Paper given at the University of Toronto, March 1995; D.R. Shearer, “Crime and social disorder,” art. cit. 58. GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 135, l. 148. 59. GARF, f. 9401, op. 12, d. 135, l. 148. 60. GANO, I, f. 20, op. 1, d. 220, l. 32. 61. See, for example, GANO, I, f. 20, op. 1, d. 220, ll. 1-1ob. 62. GANO, I, f. 20, op. 1, d. 220, l. 32. 63. GARF, f. 9479, op. 1s, d. 30, ll. 13-14b. I am grateful to Lynne Viola for this and other references to f. 9479. 64. T. Martin, art. cit., especially 847-850. 65. See the exchange of opinion about this proposal in GARF, f. 8131, op. 37, d. 59, ll. 183-98. 66. GARF, f. 8131, op. 37, d. 59, ll. 187-187ob. 67. D. R. Shearer, “Crime and social disorder,” art. cit.: 128-130. See, for example, the police summary of expenses and other resources needed for mass operations against homeless and unsupervised children from July 1934 in GARF, f. 5446, op. 26, d. 18, l. 2 See also the Politbiuro-Sovnarkom commission recommendation for mass operations in summer 1934 in GARF, f. 5446, op. 71, d. 176, l. 23. According to Iagoda, territorial and railroad police detained (zaderzhano) nearly 160,000 juveniles in 1935 as a result of sweeps. Of these, 62,000 were sent to NKVD camps or colonies. GARF, f. 5446, op. 18a, d. 904, l. 6. According to VTsIK reports, police and UGB operations rounded up close to 62,000 children in the last half of 1935 and slightly over 92,000 children during 1936. Close to 14,000 of these children were deported to NKVD youth labor colonies in 1935 and about 17,000 in 1936. GARF, f. 1235, op. 2, d. 2032, ll. 21-22. 68. GARF, f. 5446, op. 57 (1936), doc. 1285, ll. 124-128, 164. 69. GARF, f 8131, op. 37, d. 73, l. 19. In all of 1935, according to Iagoda, 104,645 individuals had been apprehended on charges or suspicion of speculation. GARF, f. 5446, op. 18a, d. 904, l. 4. 70. GARF, f. 5446, op. 18a, d. 904, l. 3. 71. GARF, f. 5446, op. 18a, d. 904, l. 16. 72. GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 4157, l. 203. 73. GARF, f. 9401, op. 1, d. 4157, l. 203. In a letter to Stalin in March 1936, Krylenko cited a total of 24,737 individuals convicted for counter-revolutionary crimes in 1935, about 4,000 less than the figures compiled in 1953. GARF, f. 8131 op. 37, d. 73, l. 228. 74. On trends to reduce political terror against party and state officials, see Oleg Khlevniuk, Politbiuro : mekhanizmy politicheskoi vlasti v 1930-ye gody (Moscow, 1996).
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75. GARF, f. 5446, op. 20a, d. 479, l. 36. 76. Izvestiia TsK KPSS,10 (1989): 81-82; Trud, (June 4, 1992): 4. 77. Marc Junge and Rolf Binner, “Tabelle zum Befehl 00447,”, p. 595-614. 78. Oleg Khlevniuk, “Prichiny ‘Bol’shogo Terrora’: Vneshnepoliticheskii aspekt.” Unpublished paper. 79. GANO, II, f. 4, op. 34, d. 26, l. 2. 80. See republication of this order in Iu. M. Zolotov, ed., Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii (Ulianovsk, 1996): 766-780. References are to p. 766. 81. T. Martin, art. cit.
RÉSUMÉS
Résumé Le désordre social, la répression de masse et le NKVD pendant les années 1930. Dans cet article, nous étudions l’évolution de la politique soviétique de répression de masse pendant les années 1930. Au début de la décennie, les dirigeants du parti et de l’OGPU menèrent des campagnes de répression de masse contre des classes jugées hostiles, en particulier les petits propriétaires terriens. Pendant la collectivisation et la dékoulakisation, la répression de masse fit partie d’une guerre de classes dont le but était d’asseoir le pouvoir soviétique et d’installer la dictature du prolétariat. Ironiquement, la « victoire » du socialisme en 1933 et 1934 marqua non seulement la fin de la guerre des classes mais aussi la fin de toute prétention à une forme de répression de classe. Au milieu de la décennie, les autorités se servirent de la répression de masse pour gérer la criminalité et le désordre social et, plus tard, les dangers que semblait représenter la contamination ethnique et nationale. La répression de masse servit alors principalement à redistribuer la population, à former des identités nationales politiquement acceptables, à protéger les frontières et à imposer une discipline sociale et économique sur la société soviétique. Avec la peur d’une opposition politique intérieure et l’imminence de la guerre, la brutalité de cette répression augmenta en 1937 et 1938, conférant aux grandes purges de ces années leur caractère particulier et leur virulence.
Abstract This paper examines the evolution of Soviet policies of mass repression during the 1930s. In the early 1930s, party and OGPU officials directed campaigns of mass repression against what were considered hostile social classes, especially small-holding rural inhabitants. During collectivization and dekulakization mass repression was employed as part of a class war to establish Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Ironically, the “victory” of socialism in 1933 and 1934 not only marked the end of class war ; it also ended any pretense to class-specific forms of repression. During the middle years of the decade, mass repression became the primary way authorities dealt with problems of crime and social disorder, and then the perceived dangers of ethnic and national contamination. In the process, mass repression became one of the main ways the regime redistributed the Soviet population, constructed politically acceptable national identities, protected the country’s borders, and imposed social and economic discipline on Soviet society. These various aspects of mass repression policies coalesced
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in 1937 and 1938 and, fueled by fear of internal political opposition and coming war, gave the Great Purges of those years their peculiar character and virulence.
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Stalin i organy gosudarstvennoj bezopasnosti v poslevoennyj period.
Oleg HLEVNJUK
1
RÉSUMÉS
Résumé Stalin et les organes de sécurité d’État pendant l’après-guerre. Notre article étudie les principales méthodes que Stalin utilisait pour garder la haute main sur les organes de sécurité pendant ses dernières années au pouvoir (1945-1953). Notre recherche sur cette question nous a mené à examiner les remplacements effectués à la direction du MGB en 1946 et 1951, les purges au sein du MGB en 1951 ayant trait à l’« affaire Abakumov » et celles de 1952-1953 ayant trait à l’affaire des « Blouses blanches ». Nous montrons comment Stalin a manipulé les deux plus importants piliers du régime -- l’appareil du parti et les organes de sécurité. Nous pensons que les faits que nous relatons ne permettent pas de souscrire au point de vue courant chez nos collègues selon lequel Stalin n’avait plus d’autorité sur les leviers du pouvoir pendant les derniers mois de sa vie.
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Abstract Stalin and state security organs after World War II. Our article analyzes the basic methods used by Stalin to exert control over state security organs during his final decade (1945-1953). We study the circumstances surrounding the replacement of leaders at the Ministry of State Security in 1946 and 1951, the 1951 purges in the Ministry related to the “Abakumov affair” and the purges of 1952-1953 related to the “Doctors’ plot affair”. We show how Stalin manipulated the two most influential supports of the regime -- the party apparatus and state security organs. We think that the facts described in this article lead us to disagree with versions found in the literature that Stalin lost control over the main levers of power during the last months of his life.
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Les documents du Ministère public de l’URSS comme sources de l’histoire du Goulag, 1945-1953.
Dina N. NOHOTOVIČ
1 Le Ministère public (Prokuratura) et le ministère des Affaires intérieures d’URSS (MVD) apparaissaient, dans le système punitif soviétique, comme deux structures concurrentes. En tant qu’organe de contrôle, le Ministère public a, dans de nombreux cas, empiété sur le champ d’activité du MVD. Ces ingérences avaient souvent pour but de faire apparaître des défaillances dans l’activité de certaines structures du MVD et de ses collaborateurs. Aussi des conflits liés aux intérêts opposés des deux ministères n’ont pas manqué de se produire lorsqu’ils ont dû coopérer. Pour les historiens, les documents qui reflètent ces conflits constituent une source d’étude très importante. Ce sont précisément ces matériaux qui leur permettent de remédier au caractère limité de l’information émanant d’une source restreinte (en l’occurrence, l’information du MVD) et de présenter plus objectivement la situation réelle.
2 La coopération entre le MVD et le Ministère public constitue un problème complexe, aux aspects multiples et requiert une étude spécifique. Cet article présente des observations liées à la surveillance exercée par le Ministère public sur le système des camps de détention dont la gestion dépendait du MVD. Il se fonde sur les matériaux provenant du Secrétariat du MVD, de la Direction centrale des camps (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerej -- GULAG), du Département pénitentiaire du MVD, des départements de surveillance des lieux de détention et des affaires concernant les mineurs du Ministère public. Aujourd’hui, l’interdiction d’accès aux fonds du Ministère public a été levée, et concerne notamment les documents des deux derniers départements mentionnés ci-dessus. Les documents concernant le Goulag et le Département pénitentiaire sont aussi presque totalement accessibles, les documents du Secrétariat du MVD le sont partiellement. En fait, sont accessibles les normes qui réglementent l’organisation des répressions politiques et également ce que l’on appelle « le dossier spécial de Stalin », c’est-à-dire les copies des documents que le MVD remettait à Stalin.
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3 On peut classer en quatre groupes les documents du Ministère public concernant la situation dans les prisons et les camps, répartis dans de nombreux fonds : le premier comprend les rapports des procureurs des camps de rééducation par le travail concernant la façon dont étaient menées et contrôlées les enquêtes et les procédures judiciaires ; le deuxième les rapports concernant les travaux des Ministères publics des directions des camps de rééducation par le travail ; le troisième les notes rédigées par les procureurs des républiques et des régions (oblasti) sur les résultats des contrôles des conditions de détention et d’exploitation du travail des prisonniers ; le quatrième la correspondance entre le Ministère public et les organes du MVD concernant les camps et les prisons.
4 Chaque groupe avait, dans le système bureaucratique, sa propre sphère de diffusion. Il était de règle d’adresser les rapports émis par les procureurs des camps au responsable du Département de surveillance des lieux de détention du Ministère public d’URSS. L’information provenant des procureurs des républiques et des régions était envoyée au procureur général d’URSS ou à ses adjoints. Si les trois premiers groupes étaient surtout constitués de documents provenant des services internes des parquets, le quatrième témoignait de l’interaction entre le Ministère public et le MVD sur les questions posées par le Ministère public. La correspondance avec le MVD provenant du fonds du Ministère public d’URSS est comparativement peu volumineuse. Toutefois, un ensemble important de documents, portant sur la période 1945-1953, a été déposé dans le fonds documentaire du Secrétariat du MVD sous l’intitulé « Correspondance du MVD avec le Ministère public ». Dans l’ensemble, tous les documents transférés constituent une source précieuse pour la recherche sur différents aspects de la politique de répression de l’État stalinien.
5 Ces sources contiennent tout d’abord des informations importantes sur la situation dans les camps, les colonies et les prisons. À la différence des documents établis par les départements du MVD (le Goulag et le Département des prisons), qui tendaient à atténuer la gravité de nombreux problèmes, les matériaux fournis par les services du contrôle du Ministère public étaient généralement plus sincères et contenaient des informations sur des sujets qui n’étaient pas traités dans les comptes rendus des services du MVD. La direction du Ministère public d’URSS présentait régulièrement des plaintes de toutes sortes au sujet d’abus constatés au MVD. C’est ainsi que, le 25 décembre 1946, le procureur général d’URSS, K. P. Goršenin, a adressé au ministre de l’Intérieur, S.N. Kruglov, des informations détaillées qui prenaient en compte les résultats des contrôles des conditions de détention et d’exploitation du travail des détenus dans les colonies de rééducation par le travail. Les faits rapportés dressaient un tableau effrayant des conditions de vie des détenus. Au lieu de disposer d’une surface habitable de 2m2 conformément aux instructions de la norme en vigueur, les détenus se contentaient d’environ 0,7- 0,8 m2, ils n’avaient ni vêtements ni chaussures aussi ne les envoyait-on pas au travail ou alors les y envoyait-on nu-pieds, etc. Kruglov chargea ses adjoints Černišev et Nasedkin d’examiner ces faits1.
6 Cependant, les comptes rendus du procureur irritaient les responsables du MVD qui estimaient qu’il était beaucoup plus facile d’attirer l’attention sur les problèmes que de les résoudre. Dans le cadre de la mission dont l’avait chargé Kruglov, Černišev prépara le projet de réponse suivant à Goršenin : « Afin de réduire des correspondances superflues, et qui ne sont utiles à personne, entre le MVD et le Ministère public, nous estimons indispensable que les procureurs locaux participent aux réunions opérationnelles auprès du ministre et du
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responsable de la Direction du MVD où l’on débat des bilans des tournées d’inspections mensuelles dans les prisons et les colonies [...]. Ainsi, les procureurs locaux, à l’aide de leurs documents, pourraient faire en sorte que ces réunions stratégiques soient plus efficaces que de longs échanges de correspondance au sujet des défauts constatés dans le semestre écoulé. »2
7 Bien que la réponse de Kruglov envoyée en fin de compte ne fût pas aussi catégorique, on pouvait cependant y percevoir son mécontentement et l’accent y était porté sur les performances du MVD.
8 Cette réaction des dirigeants du MVD à l’ingérence des procureurs, à en juger d’après les documents disponibles, était tout à fait typique. Quelques mois plus tard à peine, en février 1947, le nouveau procureur général d’URSS, G.N. Safonov, informa le MVD des violations du règlement concernant l’envoi de détenus au camp de Pétchora du Nord (Severo-Pečora), et plus spécialement de l’envoi dans ce camp de détenus en mauvaise santé, qui ne pouvaient être employés dans les camps où les conditions de travail étaient particulièrement pénibles. La réponse de Černišev fut cette fois encore très vive : « La question du travail de ceux qui se trouvent dans les camps de rééducation est certainement un élément très important dans l’activité économique des camps, mais en même temps elle n’apparaît pas comme essentielle dans le contrôle du Ministère public sur les lieux de détention. »3
9 De leur côté les dirigeants du MVD attaquaient périodiquement le Ministère public, exploitant les aspects les plus vulnérables de son activité, c’est-à-dire la violation des délais d’enquêtes par les procureurs. Ainsi, en mai 1946, le vice-ministre de l’Intérieur, V.S. Rjasnoj, envoya une lettre au Ministère public dans laquelle il réclamait l’accélération de l’examen des affaires qui devaient être étudiées lors d’une Assemblée extraordinaire du MVD, motivant sa demande par le fait que le Ministère Public avait par-devers lui 1 020 dossiers, envoyés par les organes périphériques à l’Assemblée extraordinaire. En août de la même année, Kruglov, dans une note à Goršenin, attira l’attention sur le fait que, sur les 8 400 détenus dans les prisons relevant du Ministère public, 2 951 étaient détenus en violation des délais accordés par la loi pour la conduite de l’enquête4. On n’a pas trouvé de documents qui auraient permis de connaître la réaction des procureurs à ces interventions. Cependant, tous ces exemples témoignent bien des relations conflictuelles qui existaient entre les deux administrations dans la première période de l’après-guerre.
10 Par ailleurs, certains faits démontrent que le MVD et le Ministère public ont progressivement instauré un style de relations basé sur le compromis, préférant éviter des conflits qui, en fin de compte, pouvaient être préjudiciables aux deux ministères. On peut considérer comme un signe de cet « armistice » bureaucratique le fait que le procureur général n’adressait pas systématiquement au MVD les rapports, préparés par le Ministère public, concernant l’activité du MVD. La comparaison des archives du Ministère public et du MVD en témoigne. Dans plusieurs cas, la direction du Ministère public n’a donné aucune suite aux propositions de ses fonctionnaires lorsqu’elles traitaient de problèmes très généraux ne relevant pas vraiment de l’action des services du MVD mais plus largement de la politique gouvernementale. On peut citer à titre d’exemple le rapport du 3 octobre 1947 du responsable de la Direction des lieux de détention du Ministère public d’URSS consacré aux conditions de vie et au régime de détention des condamnés aux travaux forcés5. Ce rapport soulevait un problème très important : seuls 7 % des bagnards étaient reconnus aptes aux travaux forcés les plus pénibles physiquement, 39 % pouvaient effectuer des travaux légers et plus de 26 %
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étaient considérés comme inaptes. Ces chiffres remettaient évidemment en question la raison d’être de l’institution des travaux forcés elle-même, ce qui sortait du cadre des compétences du MVD et du Ministère public. Le rapport, à en juger d’après les documents que nous avons étudiés, ne fut pas pris en considération.
11 Comme en témoignent les documents du Secrétariat du MVD, le Ministère public se montra particulièrement actif dans le domaine du contrôle des camps entre 1948 et 1950. Cela ne signifie pas que l’opposition entre ces deux administrations se soit renforcée. Dans de nombreux cas, il s’agissait d’exécuter des mesures dont la responsabilité incombait à la fois au MVD et au Ministère public, ce qui présupposait qu’ils agissent de façon conjointe et concertée. Ce fut le cas par exemple lors de la promulgation du décret du Présidium du Soviet Suprême d’URSS le 22 avril 1949 : « De la levée des peines des femmes enceintes et des femmes ayant de jeunes enfants ». Le MVD et le Ministère public qui étaient chargés de l’application pratique du décret travaillèrent en bonne intelligence à la prorogation des délais de sa mise en œuvre6. Le fait qu’ils soient responsables conjointement de la réduction de la criminalité à l’intérieur des camps a prédéterminé le caractère non conflictuel des contrôles exercés par le Ministère public lors de l’éclatement de troubles généralisés dans les camps, d’actes de banditisme, de meurtres de détenus, etc.
12 Dans de nombreux cas, les positions du MVD et du Ministère public quant aux questions-clés de la politique pénitentiaire coïncidaient pleinement. Il en fut ainsi par exemple lorsqu’ils réglementèrent le « décompte des jours de travail ». Suivant ce système, le temps de détention des condamnés, quelle que fût leur catégorie, pouvait être substantiellement abrégé (par exemple, si on faisait du bon travail, trois journées de détention dans le camp comptaient pour quatre, diminuant ainsi le temps de détention d’un quart). Bien que le décompte des jours de travail eût été supprimé en 1939 à la demande de Berija, alors commissaire du peuple aux Affaires intérieures, on commença, à la fin de la guerre, à remettre ces décomptes en vigueur dans des sites prioritaires pour le MVD. Le système des décomptes constituait en effet le facteur le plus efficace et le plus réaliste pour accroître le niveau de productivité du travail des condamnés. Tout en l’admettant, la direction du MVD voyait sans enthousiasme le rétablissement du système des décomptes, elle craignait une libération anticipée massive de détenus et un abaissement du niveau du volume de la main-d’œuvre dans l’économie relevant des travaux forcés. Le MVD reçut toutefois sur cette question le soutien total du Ministère public. En juin 1950, Safonov envoya à Kruglov un courrier spécial selon lequel le Ministère public jugeait nécessaire d’arrêter toute nouvelle extension de la liste des camps où s’appliquait le décompte des jours de travail. Le 7 juillet 1950, lors d’une réunion de la direction du MVD où ce courrier fut examiné, il fut déclaré que le MVD « estimait lui aussi qu’il n’était pas rationnel de soutenir les requêtes des organisations revendiquant l’extension du nombre de camps appliquant les décomptes des jours de travail des détenus ». Très vite, un courrier dans ce sens, signé de Serov, fut adressé à Safonov7.
13 Des tendances marquées « de compréhension mutuelle » ont prévalu également lors de l’examen du fonctionnement des camps spéciaux créés pour la détention des « détenus particulièrement dangereux » sur la base d’une résolution du Conseil des ministres du 21 février 1948. Le contrôle de ces camps constituait l’un des principaux axes de l’activité du Ministère public dans les années 1950-1952. Les documents du Ministère
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apparaissent à cet égard comme une source importante pour l’étude des camps spéciaux considérés comme une subdivision du système des camps.
14 Ainsi, le 23 mai 1950, le procureur général Safonov adressa au ministre de l’Intérieur, Kruglov, une note circonstanciée établie à partir des documents de contrôle de 56 procureurs en charge des camps de rééducation par le travail. Cette information, de façon générale, faisait état de violations des règles d’isolation des détenus, condamnés « comme criminels particulièrement dangereux ». Il en ressortait que, peu de temps après la création des camps spéciaux, 3636 détenus y furent inculpés de banditisme, brigandage ou meurtres avec préméditation accomplis à l’intérieur même des camps8. Étant donné que la direction du MVD elle-même reconnaissait l’état critique dans lequel se trouvaient les camps spéciaux et la lenteur de leur mise en place, la réponse du vice-ministre de l’Intérieur, I.A. Serov, se présenta sous la forme d’une note analytique détaillée qui reprenait point par point les remarques du Ministère public9.
15 Les contrôles effectués par les procureurs en 1951-1952 dans les camps de Noril´sk, de Vorkuta, de Pétchora du Nord, d’Ivdel´, de Bodajbo, de Sibir´, de Kuneevo firent l’objet d’examens tout aussi impartiaux. Les bilans des contrôles effectués dans le camp de Bodajbo, dont les détenus exploitaient les mines d’or, furent même transmis à Stalin. En 1952, plusieurs contrôles effectués au camp de Vorkuta furent soumis à la direction du MVD pour y être examinés par ses membres10.
16 Si l’on se fonde sur les documents appartenant aux fonds du MVD et du Ministère public d’URSS, on peut dire que les rapports qui se sont instaurés entre ces deux administrations lors de l’examen des questions liées au développement du système pénitentiaire à la fin des années 40 relèvent davantage de la coopération que de la rivalité. Le MVD s’est accommodé des prétentions du Ministère public dans le contrôle des camps. Toutefois les procureurs eux-mêmes, lorsqu’ils rendaient leur jugement, mesuraient leurs critiques, limitant leurs remarques et leurs propositions au strict minimum. En dépit de la conduite correcte des procureurs, la direction du MVD appréciait peu leurs efforts pour élargir le système déjà suffisamment complexe de contrôle des camps par le Ministère public. Le jugement porté en 1950-1951 sur le projet d’instruction : « Du contrôle par le Ministère public du respect de la légalité dans les lieux de détention », élaboré par ce même ministère,en témoigne. La grande innovation de ce projet était la disposition selon laquelle on conférait aux procureurs des villes et des arrondissements (rajony) le droit de contrôler les lieux de détention du MVD. Dans les instances du MVD où le projet d’instruction fut envoyé pour accord, les réponses furent catégoriquement négatives, sous prétexte que l’extension des droits des procureurs des villes et des arrondissements affaiblirait le régime du secret, entraînerait la diffusion des données concernant le nombre et la composition des détenus, ainsi que d’autres renseignements relevant du secret d’État11. Le bannissement au secret était un procédé auquel la direction du MVD recourait dans les cas où elle cherchait à limiter le droit d’accès des contrôleurs dans les camps. La véritable cause du refus n’était pas, dans ce cadre, de préserver le secret puisque, en fin de compte, celui- ci reposait sur les procureurs, mais de tenter d’empêcher l’élargissement des fonctions de contrôle du Ministère public.
17 Cette étude montre que, en marge des documents du NKVD-MVD largement exploités par les historiens depuis quelques années, les matériaux provenant du Ministère public d’URSS constituent une source importante pour l’étude de la politique répressive et du système carcéral et pénitentiaire. Bien que le Ministère public n’ait pas exercé une
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influence déterminante sur les processus fondamentaux dans ce domaine, les matériaux résultant des contrôles des procureurs et les expertises préalables aux actes normatifs contiennent des données précieuses qui témoignent de la situation des détenus et des mécanismes de la politique de répression.
18 (Traduit du russe par Françoise Cordes-Baudrillard et Jacqueline Tordjman)
19 Gosudarstvennyj Arhiv Rossijskoj Federacii
20 ul. Bol´šaja Pirogovskaja, 17
21 119817 Moscou
NOTES
1. Gosudarstvennyj Arhiv Rossijskoj Federacii (GARF), collection de documents 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. GARF, f. R-8131, op. 37, d. 3817, ll. 9-26. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid.
RÉSUMÉS
Résumé Cette étude montre que, en marge des documents des NKVD-MVD largement exploités par les historiens depuis quelques années, les matériaux provenant du Ministère public d’URSS constituent une source importante pour l’étude de la politique répressive et du système carcéral et pénitentiaire. Bien que le Ministère public n’ait pas exercé une influence déterminante sur les processus fondamentaux dans ce domaine, les matériaux résultant des contrôles des procureurs et les expertises préalables aux actes normatifs contiennent des données précieuses qui témoignent de la situation des détenus et des mécanismes de la politique de répression.
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Abstract The documents of the Soviet Ministry of Public Affairs as a source for the history of the Gulag, 1945-1953. Next to the largely exploited documents of the NKVD-MVD, materials from the Soviet Ministry of Public Affairs represent an important source for the study of repression and of the prison and penitentiary system. Even though the Ministry had no decisive influence in these areas, the documents generated by procurators’ inspections of camps and preliminary expert reports on normative acts contain precious data which reflect the plight of inmates and the mechanisms of repression.
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Terreur et Goulag
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Wie Dder terror “Gross” wurde: Massenmord und Lagerhaft nach Befehl 00447
Rolf BINNER et Marc JUNGE
1 Mehr als 750.000 Menschen wurden getötet oder in Lager eingewiesen. Dennoch gab es über diese monströse Operation, die vom höchsten Gremium der Kommunistischen Partei der Sowjetunion, dem Politbüro, befohlen und unter seiner Kontrolle durchgeführt wurde, bis zur Archivrevolution in Rußland nur rudimentäre und fragmentarische Informationen. Der Entscheidungsprozeß im Politbüro, die Planung der Aktion durch die Geheimpolizei und ihre flächendeckende Durchführung geschahen unter strikter Beachtung aller Regeln der Geheimhaltung, so daß kein offizielles Schriftstück bekannt wurde, in dem auch nur Spuren der Aktion zu finden waren. Das blieb so bis zum Ende der Sowjetunion. In den Erinnerungen von Zeitzeugen finden sich bisweilen bruchstückhafte Nachrichten über die Operation. So wird in der Memoirenliteratur öfters über Trojki berichtet : “Most prisoners were sentenced [1937-1938], in their own absence, by NKVD judicial comittees -- either the so-called troika, a committee of three which met in the provincial cities, or by a ‘special NKVD council’ in Moscow.”1 Ein sowjetischer Strafverteidiger, der im November 1939 im Prozeß gegen zwei Untersuchungsführer des Staatssicherheitsdienstes vor dem Militärtribunal des Militärbezirks Kalinin auftrat, berichtet von seinen vergeblichen Nachforschungen, in den Gesetzessammlungen, Verordnungen der Regierung und der juristischen Spezialliteratur auch nur eine Zeile über die rechtliche Grundlage und die Funktion der Dreiergremien in Erfahrung zu bringen.2 Obwohl also die Existenz der Trojki, der zentralen Terroragenturen des Stalinismus, seit fast einem halben Jahrhundert bekannt war, blieb der Kenntnisstand bis 1989 nahezu unverändert dürftig.3 Dadurch stieß jeder Versuch, über “die hinreißende Geschichte dieses Organs zu schreiben”,4 auf allergrößte Schwierigkeiten. Es schien, als hätten diese “Erschießungskommissionen” mit den Menschen -- uns sind keine Gulagerinnerungen bekannt, deren Autoren von den Trojki verurteilt wurden und die Lager überlebten -- auch alle Spuren ihrer eigenen Tätigkeit beseitigt.
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2 Eine Ausnahme in der Erinnerungsliteratur bilden die Publikationen von Abdurachman G. Avtorchanov,5 der die Geschichte der Trojki der Jahre 1937-1938 in einen breiten Kontext stellte : 1937 habe der NKVD einen ungeheuerlichen Plan vorgelegt, in dem den Gebieten, Regionen und Republiken der Sowjetunion Sollziffern für Massenhinrichtungen vorgegeben wurden. Eine detaillierte “table of specification” habe sieben Repressionskategorien festgelegt. Da die Zahl der geplanten Hinrichtungen in die Millionen ging, “there was no way of dealing with them through normal legal channels. It was therefore decided to set op a special tribunal under the Central NKVD and extraordinary three-man tribunals in republics, oblasts, and districts to try in absentia persons held under arrest.”6 Auch wenn Avtorchanovs Bericht die für das Genre “Sowjetmemoiren” kennzeichnenden Verzerrungen, Übertreibungen und Lücken aufweist, dürfte außer Zweifel stehen, daß seine Skizze zentrale Aspekte des größten Repressionsprojekts der Jahre 1937-1938 getreu wiedergibt.7 Vor allem der sehr detaillierte Feindkatalog liest sich wie die offizielle Liste der Volksfeinde, allerdings fehlt bei ihm die Kategorie der Kriminellen. Avtorchanov bescheinigt dem zögerlichen Entstalinisierer Chruščev, alles getan zu haben, “damit die Außenwelt nichts über sie [die Trojki] erfahre”. Denn die Todesurteile hätten neben den NKVD- Repräsentanten auch die regionalen Parteisekretäre wie Chruščev selbst unterschrieben.8 1989 veröffentlichte die führende Zeitschrift der historiographischen glasnost’, Izvestija CK KPSS, den viel zitierten Artikel “Über die außergerichtlichen Organe”9 von der Oktoberrevolution bis zum 1. September 1953. Als Autoren sind Staatsanwaltschaft und KGB der Sowjetunion genannt. Hier wird zum erstenmal auf eine am 30. Juli 1937 ergangene Direktive des NKVD hingewiesen, die “bei der Durchführung der Massenoperationen” von kardinaler Bedeutung gewesen sei : Das Dokument habe festgelegt, welche Bevölkerungsgruppen von außergerichtlichen Organen (Trojki) abgeurteilt werden sollten, und Zusammensetzung sowie Strafkompetenz dieser Tribunale geregelt. 1992 wurde dieses Dokument, “prikaz 00447” -- die beiden Nullen signalisieren die höchste Geheimhaltungsstufe -- mit kleinen Auslassungen in der Tageszeitung Trud veröffentlicht, und zwar im Zuge der Vorbereitung des Prozesses gegen die KPdSU. “One of the most chilling documents in modern history”10 hat der amerikanische Historiker Getty den Befehl genannt. Nach diesem Schlüsseltext zum Großen Terror wurden weitere Dokumente zu dieser Operation publiziert und Archivmaterialien zugänglich gemacht -- z. B. die Politbüroakten --, so daß heute Entschlußbildung, Planung, Ingangsetzung, Durchführung und Beendigung der größten Repressionskampagne des Großen Terrors in groben Umrissen dokumentiert sind. Wahrscheinlich gibt es in der an ungeheuerlichen Staatsverbrechen reichen Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts keine andere Verfolgungsmaßnahme dieser Größenordnung, über die so viele dokumentarische Belege vorliegen : zudem Dokumente einer besonderen Qualität, da sie das höchste Machtorgan des Regimes, das Politbüro, und die faktisch höchsten Repräsentanten von Partei und Staat, Stalin und Molotov, als Urheber und Initiatoren des massenhaften Mordens und der Lagereinweisungen denunzieren.11 Probleme, wie sie die Holocaustforschung kennt, die seit Jahrzehnten vergeblich nach Hitlers Befehl zur “Endlösung der Judenfrage” sucht,12 hat die neuere Stalinismusforschung nicht, obwohl auch in der Sowjetunion mehrfach systematisch Archivmaterialien vernichtet wurden.13
3 Unsere Publikation ist in zwei Teile aufgeteilt. Teil eins ist eine, angesichts des Forschungsstandes, noch immer provisorische Übersicht über Genese, Bestimmungen
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und Durchführung von Befehl 00447 zwischen August 1937 und November 1938. Die beigefügte Tabelle wurde anhand der Politbüroakten, anderer Quellenpublikationen und Angaben in der Literatur erstellt. Einen Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit können die kalten Zahlen dieser Buchhaltung des Grauens nicht erheben, da die Festlegung der regionalen Repressionsziffern nicht in jedem Falle über Politbürobeschluß erfolgte.14 Trotzdem dürfte die Tabelle die chronologische Abfolge bzw. die Schübe und die regionale Streuung der Terrormaßnahmen illustrieren. Da die regionalen Opferziffern häufig nicht mit den entsprechenden Bevölkerungsstatistiken korrelieren (vgl. Repressionsgrad), läge es nahe, strukturelle Faktoren (ökonomische, sozialdemographische dazu die geographische Lage) und situative (Einstellung der lokalen Machthaber) näher zu untersuchen. Im folgenden Band der Cahiers erscheint Teil zwei unserer Publikation. Er enthält eine Analyse der wichtigsten Zielgruppen des Befehls 00447 und eine abschließende Auswertung der gesamten Publikation.
4 Wir danken herzlich Wladislaw Hedeler (Berlin), Paul Hagenloh (Austin/Texas), Barry McLoughlin (Wien), Gábor Rittersporn (Berlin), David Shearer (Newark/Delaware), Stephen Wheatcroft (Melbourne) und Jaroslav Leont´ev (Moskau), die uns großzügig Materialien und ihre unpublizierten Arbeiten zur Verfügung gestellt haben. Ganz besonders hervorheben möchten wir die freundliche Unterstützung durch Jurij Markovin (Memorial-Jaroslavl´) und Michail Erin, Dekan der historischen Fakultät der Staatlichen Universität Jaroslavl´.
5 Auch der Familie S.G. Račinskijs möchten wir für ihr Vertrauen und die Erlaubnis danken, seine persönliche Akte beim NKVD einsehen zu dürfen. Nicht Zuletzt gebührt Emely Nobis ein großes Lob für die Datenautobahn Amsterdam -- Bochum.
Der Mordbefehl
1. Auftakt
6 Einen viel zitierten Satz aus Jewgenia Ginsburgs Memoiren15 variierend, darf man heute sagen, daß das Jahr 1937 doch nicht am 1. Dezember 1934, dem Tag der Ermordung Kirovs, begann. Viel eher bietet sich der 2. Juli 1937 als Auftakt des annus horribilis an. An diesem Tag beschloß das Politbüro der VKP(b), landesweit die genannte Operation durchzuführen. Der Politbürobeschluß vom 2. Juli 193716 macht zwei Bevölkerungsgruppen zur Zielscheibe repressiver Maßnahmen, die bei Anbruch des neuen Terrorzyklus im August 1936 von der sowjetischen Propaganda noch nicht vorrangig als Regimefeinde stigmatisiert worden waren. Das höchste Parteigremium forderte die Parteisekretäre auf, mit Hilfe der Dienststellen des NKVD die in den letzten Jahren aus der Verbannung zurückgekehrten ehemaligen Kulaken und Kriminellen in den Gebieten (oblasti), Regionen (krai) und Republiken zu registrieren. Denn diese seien als Hauptanstifter zahlreicher Verbrechen und Diversionsakte in Landwirtschaft und Industrie identifiziert worden. Nach dem Grad ihrer Gefährlichkeit für den Sowjetstaat seien beide Gruppen in die Kategorien 1 (Erschießung) und 2 (Verbannung) einzuordnen. Das Ergebnis dieser Erhebungen sollte innerhalb von fünf Tagen an die Moskauer Zentrale gemeldet werden. In einem für die Durchführung der Operation folgenreichen Punkt legte sich das Politbüro bereits fest : Zur endgültigen Entscheidung über Leben oder Tod der registrierten ehemaligen Kulaken und Kriminellen befahl das Politbüro, außergerichtliche Organe einzurichten, denen in der
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Regel der jeweilige NKVD-Chef, Erste Parteisekretär und Oberste Staatsanwalt angehören sollten. Vorschläge aus der Provinz zur personellen Besetzung dieser Schnellgerichte sollten ebenfalls innerhalb von fünf Tagen an das Zentralkomitee gerichtet werden.
7 Der Politbürobeschluß setzte den von R. Hilberg beschriebenen und seiner bahnbrechenden Studie über die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden als Ordnungsprinzip zugrundeliegenden Mechanismus der Definition, Registrierung, Konzentration und Vernichtung bzw. Lagereinweisung der Opferkategorien in Gang.17 Bei der Erfassung konnten die Dienststellen des NKVD auf bei ihnen geführte Listen “verdächtiger antisowjetischer Elemente” -- im NKVD-Jargon “antisovetčiki ” genannt -- zurückgreifen. Diese wurden seit Anfang der zwanziger Jahren auch anhand von Agentenmeldungen immer wieder aktualisiert. Der Kazaner Historiker A.F. Stepanov hat, gestützt auf Untersuchungen in lokalen Archiven Tatarstans, den umfassenden Feindkatalog dieser Proskriptionslisten rekonstruiert : Neben ehemaligen Kulaken sind registriert : Angehörige der zarischen Administration, ehemalige Weißgardisten, Teilnehmer an Bauernaufständen im Bürgerkrieg, Remigranten, in die Sowjetunion geflohene Politemigranten, aus deutscher und österreichischer Gefangenschaft entlassene Kriegsgefangene des Ersten Weltkriegs, Mitglieder antibolschewistischer politischer Parteien, lišency (Personen, denen das Wahlrecht entzogen worden war), aus der VKP(b) Ausgeschlossene usw.18 Daten über ugolovniki (Kriminelle) waren bei den lokalen Polizeibehörden (URKM -- Upravlenie Raboče-Krest'janskoi Milicii) des Volkskommissariats des Inneren gesammelt.19 Bis zum 11. Juli 1937 lagen dem Politbüro aus den meisten der 64 angeschriebenen administrativen Einheiten die angeforderten Angaben zur Vernichtung und Verbannung von Kulaken und Kriminellen sowie die Empfehlungen für die personelle Besetzung der Trojki vor. Soweit bisher bekannt, hat das Politbüro die aus der Provinz vorgeschlagenen Repressionsziffern kaum modifiziert. (Vgl. Tabelle). Auch nicht im Falle von Stadt und Gebiet Moskau, von wo geradezu ungeheure Erschießungs- und Verbannungsziffern am 10. Juli 1937 angefordert wurden. Nicht weniger als 8.500 Personen sollten erschossen und 32.805 verbannt werden.20 Der Gebietssekretär beabsichtigte offensichtlich, die Operation im Gebiet Moskau vorrangig als Feldzug gegen die Kriminalität zu führen (Relation Kulaken : Kriminelle ca. 1:4). Der gleiche Gebietssekretär, der auch als Mitglied der Trojka vorgesehen war, konnte sich 20 Jahre später an nichts mehr erinnern, versuchte aber auf dem ZK-Plenum vom Juni 1957 mit windigen Argumenten nachzuweisen, daß die ganze Operation gegen Kulaken und Kriminelle von Kaganovič, Molotov und Malenkov initiiert worden sei.21 Die Rede ist von N.S. Chruščev. Einige Antworten aus der Provinz, in denen die Repressionskategorien aufgeschlüsselt sind, lassen andere Prioritäten erkennen : In Territorien, aus denen bzw. in die 1930-1933 eine hohe Anzahl Kulakenfamilien deportiert worden war (West-Sibirische Region, Gor'kij, Sverdlovsk, Azov-Černomorskij), sind die Exkulaken das primäre Repressionsziel. Das Politbüro akzeptierte aber auch “Sonderwünsche” und Initiativen aus der Provinz, die über die im Beschluß vom 2. Juli 1937 vorgegebenen Zielgruppen und Strafmaßnahmen weit hinausgingen : Es billigte die Anfrage der Azerbajdžanischen SSR, Mitglieder konterrevolutionärer Aufständischenorganisationen zum Tode zu verurteilen bzw. in die Verbannung zu schicken sowie Familienangehörige von Bandenmitgliedern in die Lager des NKVD einzuweisen ; der Trojka im Fernen Osten gestatte es, Lagerinsassen, die sich feindlich betätigten, zu verurteilen, der Trojka des Gebiets Orenburg erlaubte es, Familienangehörige von verurteilten Kulaken und Kriminellen zu verbannen. Der
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Trojka Turkmenistans genehmigte das Politbüro, Mitglieder einer konterrevolutionären nationalistischen Organisation, die ihre Gefängnisstrafen verbüßt hatten, sowie islamische Geistliche “und dergleichen mehr” zu verfolgen. Auch die Anfrage der Kazachischen SSR, die Repression “auf Kulaken in Sonderansiedlungen auszuweiten”, wurde gebilligt.22 Auch gegen das Ersuchen der Uzbekischen Republik, neben Kulaken und Kriminellen “nationalistische Terroristen” abzuurteilen,23 hatte das Politbüro keine Einwände. Haben diese “schöpferischen” Initiativen aus der Provinz das Politbüro und die NKVD-Zentrale bewogen, die Liste der zu verfolgenden Feinde auszuweiten ?
8 In den Instruktionen der Leningrader NKVD-Leitung werden die lokalen Dienststellen bereits am 16. Juli angewiesen, nicht nur nach Exkulaken und Kriminellen zu fahnden, sondern auch “nach den anderen feindlichen Elementen, die aktive, subversive antisowjetische Arbeit verrichten.” Daß eine Operation gegen interne Feinde der Sowjetunion, die “dem aktiver auftretenden konterrevolutionären Element den entscheidenden Schlag” versetzen wollte (so der Chef des Leningrader UNKVD Zakovskij am 22. Juli 1937), sich nicht auf Repressalien gegen Exkulaken und Kriminelle beschränken konnte, impliziert die stalinistische Vorstellung vom Universum der die Sowjetunion bedrohenden internen Feinde : Dieses wird als geschlossene, vereinte Gegenwelt gesehen, in der alle “antisovetčiki ” sich zu einer großen Koalition zusammengefunden haben : “Die Trotzkisten, Zinov'evisten, Bucharinisten, Rykovisten, die bourgeoisen Nationalisten, die Men'ševiki, die Sozialrevolutionäre, die weißgardistischen Generäle.”24 “Zu einer schmutzigen, bluttriefenden Masse hat sich der konterrevolutionäre Abschaum der Trotzkisten, Rechten, Sozialrevolutionäre, professionellen Spione, Weißgardisten und flüchtigen Kulaken vereinigt.”25
9 Wahrscheinlich haben Ežov und sein Stellvertreter Michail P. Frinovskij das Führungspersonal der regionalen Verwaltungen des NKVD, das sie am 16. Juli 1937 in Moskau zusammengerufen hatten, bereits im Sinne dieses erweiterten Feindbildes instruiert.26 Spätestens hier wurde diesen auch mitgeteilt, daß die Moskauer Zentrale in Kürze einen Plan mit detaillierten Anweisungen zur Durchführung der Aktion vorlegen werde.
10 Auch auf der Republik-, Gebiets- und Regionsebene des NKVD wurden in der zweiten Julihälfte Besprechungen und Konferenzen einberufen, um die Leiter der Stadt- und Rayonabteilungen auf ihre Aufgaben bei der Aktion vorzubereiten.27 In Novosibirsk skizzierte der NKVD-Chef der westsibirischen Region Sergej N. Mironov am 25. Juli bereits die Umrisse der geplanten Massenoperation : Er verpflichtete seine Zuhörer zu absolutem Stillschweigen über die Operation, vor allem über die Repressionsquoten (“Staatsgeheimnis”), unterrichtet sie, daß die von der Verfassung garantierten Prärogativen der Staantswaltschaft (Verhaftung an ihre Zustimmung gebunden, Artikel 127 der neuen Verfassung) suspendiert seien und gibt Anweisungen, wie das Ermittlungsverfahren zu vereinfachen sei (Gegenüberstellungen nur bei Gruppenverfahren, bei Geständnis genüge ein Verhörprotokoll). Um nicht in die Situation zu kommen, “daß unsere Quote aufgebraucht ist”, empfiehlt Mironov, sofort Verhaftungen in großem Maßstab durchzuführen (“Sie müssen bis zum 28. Juli 11.000 Personen verhaften”), bis zu 20.000 ingesamt, um eine “Reserve” zu haben bei der Aufteilung nach Kategorien.28 Wichtigstes Ziel der Kampagne sei, “den organisierten Untergrund zu entlarven.” Den Chefs der Sicherheitspolizei seiner Region empfiehlt er, nach ihrer Rückkehr abgelegene Erschießungs-und Beerdigungsplätze auszuwählen.29
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Moralische Skrupel an der Mordoperation scheinen die Čekisten nicht gekannt zu haben, im Bericht eines Teilnehmers an der Versammlung heißt es, daß Mironovs Referat mit “stürmischer Zustimmung” aufgenommen worden sei.30 Dieser Eindruck deckt sich mit Aussagen 1938-1939 verhafteter NKVD-Kader, die keinen Zweifel an der Legitimität der Kampagne aufkommen ließen.31
11 Am 30. Juli 1937 legte Frinovskij dem Leiter des Sekretariats des Generalsekretärs Poskrybyšev den 15 Seiten langen Befehl “Über die Operation zur Repression ehemaliger Kulaken, Krimineller und anderer antisowjetischer Elemente” vor. Ežovs Stellvertreter war maßgeblich an der Ausarbeitung des Projekts beteiligt gewesen und hatte Stalin sowie andere Politbüromitglieder über den Fortgang der Planung auf dem laufenden gehalten bzw. von ihnen Instruktionen eingeholt. Darauf verweist, daß Frinovskij im Juli 1937 dreimal im Besucherbuch von Stalins Kremlkabinet notiert steht.32 Frinovskij wurde dann auch die allgemeine Leitung der Operation übertragen.
12 Am 31. Juli wurde der Operationsplan vom Politbüro gebilligt33 und noch am selben Tag als Prikaz (Befehl) 00447 den NKVD-Leitern der Republiken, Regionen und Gebiete zugestellt.
2. Befehl 00447
13 Der Text des Dokuments wurde 1992 in Trud (4. Juni 1992) unter dem Titel “Rasstrel po raznarjadke, ili Kak eto delali bol'ševiki” (Erschießung nach Kontingenten oder Wie haben die Bol'ševiki das erledigt) erstmals publiziert, allerdings mit Auslassungen. Danach folgten zahlreiche Texteditionen, die fast immer auf dieser unvollständigen Ausgabe beruhten. Ohne Kürzungen erschien der Prikaz 1996 im Gedenkbuch für die Opfer der politischen Repression des Gebiets Ul' janovsk34 und 2000 in einem Dokumentenband über den GULAG.35
14 Eine kurze Analyse der wichtigsten Punkte dieses Dokuments, das für mehr als ein Jahr der Geschichte der Sowjetunion seinen Stempel aufdrückte. In der Präambel wird hervorgehoben, daß die Aktion nicht mehr und nicht weniger als die endgültige Lösung des Problems der internen Feinde der Sowjetunion anstrebt : “Vor den Sicherheitsorganen steht die Aufgabe, diese ganze Bande antisowjetischer Elemente ohne die geringste Schonung zu zerschlagen [...] und schließlich ihrem niederträchtigen, zersetzenden Treiben [...] ein für allemal ein Ende zu setzen.” Das war keine leere Rhetorik. In den “Organen” interpretierte man die Direktive als Appell zum letzen Gefecht, “zur direkten physischen Liquidierung der ganzen Konterrevolution”.36 Und selbst der in der Gefängniszelle isolierte Bucharin glaubte im Dezember 1937 zu erkennen, daß sich im Lande “Großes” ereignete : “Es existiert irgendeine große und kühne politische Idee einer generellen Säuberung a) im Zusammenhang mit einer Vorkriegszeit, b) im Zusammenhang mit dem Übergang zur Demokratie.”37
15 Im Text folgt eine sehr detaillierte Liste derjenigen Bevölkerungsgruppen, die Zielscheibe der Operation sein sollen (Zu den Zielgruppen des Befehls 00447, vgl. die folgende Nummer der Cahiers du Monde russe).
16 Abschnitt 2 regelt zunächst das Strafmaß, das die Trojki zu verhängen haben : “Die äußerst feindlich gesinnten Elemente” (erste Kategorie) sollen erschossen, die “weniger aktiven, aber dennoch feindlichen” (zweite Kategorie) werden für 8 bis 10 Jahre in Lager bzw. Gefängnisse eingewiesen.” Gegenüber der im Politbürobeschluß
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vom 2. Juli vorgeschlagenen “Verbannung” war dies eine drastische Verschärfung des Strafmaßes. Daran schließt sich die Verteilung der Repressionsquoten auf Gebiete, Regionen und Republiken an, aufgeschlüsselt in 1. und 2. Kategorie (insgesamt 64 territoriale Einheiten : 40 Gebiete38, Regionen und Autonome Sowjetrepubliken der RSFSR, je acht Gebiete in der Ukraine und in Kazachstan39 und acht Sozialistische Sowjetrepubliken, vgl. Tabelle). Diese Regelung, die von der Zentrale festgelegten Tötungs- und Gulagquoten, unterscheidet Prikaz 00447 von der anderen zentralen Repressionskampagne des Großen Terrors ; der Operation gegen die “konterrevolutionären nationalen Kontingente”. Bei der Verfolgung der nationalen Minoritäten gab es keinen “rasstrel po raznarjadke” (Erschießung nach Kontingenten), die regionalen Machthaber, NKVD-Chef und Oberster Staatsanwalt (Dvojka = Zweiergremium) sanktionierten die von der Sicherheitspolizei zusammengestellten Verhaftungslisten und sandten diese per Kurrier nach Moskau, wo die “vysšaja (oberste) dvojka” (Volkskommissar des Innern Ežov und Staatsanwalt der UdSSR Vyšinskij) das endgültige Verdikt aussprachen.
17 Die Liste der administrativen territorialen Einheiten und der ihnen zugewiesenen Opferziffern dürfte entgegen immer wieder geäußerten Zweifeln keine wesentlichen Lücken aufweisen. Es fehlt die ASSR Jakutien, in der zwar per Politbürobeschluß vom 11. Juli 1937 eine Trojka eingesetzt worden war,40 die jedoch die Operation 00447 nicht durchführte. Der NKVD-Chef I.A. Dorofeev legitimierte das gegenüber der Moskauer Zentrale mit dem Hinweis, es gebe keine Kulaken in Jakutien, zudem sei die Republik “für einen ausländischen Nachrichtendienst nicht von Interesse, weil es hier keine Industrie, Armee oder andere kriegswichtige Objekte gibt.”41 Dorofeev überlebte den Großen Terror als Volkskommissar des Innern und wurde erst im Februar 1939 verhaftet. Im Politbürobeschluß vom 11. Juli 1937 war auch festgelegt worden, kein spezielles Dreiertribunal für die Karakalpakische ASSR (Uzbekistan) ins Leben zu rufen. Trojki wurden also nur in den Autonomen Sozialistischen Sowjetrepubliken der Russischen Sozialistischen Föderativen Sowjetrepublik,42 nicht der anderen Republiken eingesetzt. Die im Prikaz 00447 zugewiesenen Kontingente weisen neben Auf- und Abrundungen einige gravierende Abweichungen von den im Politbüro im Juli festgelegten Quoten auf. So sind im Befehl Chruščevs monströse Planziffern für das Gebiet Moskau um fast 20 % nach unten korrigiert, ebenso sind mehrfach Vernichtungsziffern erheblich herabgesetzt (z.B. für Mari, Kujbyšev, die Fernöstliche Region, Zapsibkraj, Čeljabinsk); die Liste enthält jedoch auch gravierende Korrekturen in die andere Richtung (Karelien, Omsk, Udmurtien, Saratov), so daß es schwer fällt, eine eindeutige Tendenz zu erkennen. Bei den im September 1937 durchgeführten Gebietsreformen -- mehrere Großregionen und -gebiete wurden aufgeteilt -- dürften den meisten neuen Territorien auch neue Kontingente (Tabelle Nr. 27, 30, 46) zugewiesen worden sein, da zu diesem Zeitpunkt die Erstquote bereits “aufgebraucht” war.
18 Der Prikaz 00447 sah die Erschießung von 75.950 Menschen, darunter 10.000 Gulaghäftlinge, und die Einweisung von 193.000 Personen in Lager und Gefängnisse vor, das gesamte Repressionskontingent umfaßte 268.950 “antisowjetische Elemente”. Diese Zahlen galten als Richtwerte : Sie konnten, allerdings nur auf Antrag beim Volkskommissar des Inneren, erhöht, durften aber ohne Zustimmung Moskaus gesenkt werden. Die Umschichtung von Personen zwischen den beiden Kategorien war erlaubt. Die Operation sollte am 5. August beginnen (in den zentralasiatischen Republiken am 10. und in Ostsibirien, Krasnojarsk und der Fernöstlichen Region am 15.) und innerhalb
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von vier Monaten abgeschlossen werden.43 In der ersten Phase sollten sich die Repressionsmaßnahmen nur gegen die “äußerst feindlich Gesinnten” (erste Kategorie) richten,44 wodurch wohl eine Überfüllung der Haftorte vermieden werden sollte. Möglicherweise spielte aber auch eine Rolle, daß erst Mitte August die vorgesehene Einweisung in Lager der nach der zweiten Kategorie Verurteilten konkrete Formen annahm (vgl. unten). Den Übergang zur zweiten Phase sollte eine Direktive Ežovs anordnen, er konnte aber auch früher nach Zustimmung der Moskauer NKVD-Zentrale erfolgen. Jedes Territorium war in operative Sektoren einzuteilen, innerhalb derer operative Gruppen unter Leitung eines erfahrenen Čekisten die Verhaftungslisten zusammenstellten, die Arretierungen nach Bestätigung der Listen durch den NKVD- Chef vornahmen und das Untersuchungsverfahren durchführten. Dies sollte “auf beschleunigte und vereinfachte Weise” geschehen, d.h. ohne Rechtsbeistand, Zeugengegenüberstellung, Sachverständigenbefragung und Beschaffung und Überprüfung von Beweismaterial. Vyšinskij, laut Verfassung Hüter der sozialistischen Gesetzlichkeit und von 1934 bis Mitte 1937 bemüht, die außergerichtlichen Ansprüche der Staatssicherheit abzuwehren, instruierte die ihm unterstellten Staatsanwälte, “daß die Beachtung prozessualer Normen und die vorherige Genehmigung von Verhaftungen [durch die Staatsanwaltschaft], nicht erforderlich” seien. Daneben verlangte er von seinen Untergebenen “aktive Mitarbeit an der erfolgreichen Durchführung der Aktion”.45 Im März 1937 hatte er, gleichsam Carl Schmitt paraphrasierend, erklärt, “daß es im Leben der Gesellschaft und speziell in unserer Momente und Perioden gibt, wo sich die Gesetze als veraltet erweisen und man sie zur Seite schieben muß.”46 Stalin selbst hat im Januar 1939 in einem Brief an die Parteileiter mitgeteilt, daß das Zentralkomitee 1937 die Folter beim Verhör gestattet habe.47 Über die Erzwingung von Geständnissen auf diesem Weg, über Manipulation und Fälschung im Untersuchungsverfahren liegt heute viel Material vor, vor allem zahlreiche Aussagen von an der Aktion beteiligten NKVD-Mitarbeitern.48 1938 wendeten die Čekisten mit der “stojka” oder “vystojka”, die den Massenrepressionen adäquate Verhörmethode an, die weite Verbreitung fand : Man stellte Dutzende von Häftlingen in einem speziellen Raum nebeneinander vor die Wand, verbot ihnen zu schlafen oder sich hinzulegen und prügelte sie periodisch, bis sie gestanden. Nichts vermag die Grausamkeit der Methoden besser zu charakterisieren, als der Umstand, daß allein in Turkmenistan während der Verhöre über 20 Häftlinge getötet wurden.49 Als folgenschwer erwies sich die Instruktion des Befehls, “alle verbrecherischen Beziehungen der Verhafteten aufzudecken”; sie wurde zum Anlaß genommen, gigantische konspirative Netzwerke zu entlarven, an denen angeblich Tausende Verschwörer beteiligt waren.
19 Punkt V. des Befehls regelt Zusammensetzung und Kompetenz der Trojki, der Terrorinstanz par excellence in der Geschichte der sowjetischen Massenrepressionen, vom Bürgerkrieg bis zu den Morden von Katyn. Vielmehr als die immer wieder apostrophierten Schauprozesse können sie als ein spezifisches Merkmal der Repression des Stalinismus gelten. Die Geschichte der Trojki der dreißiger Jahre liegt noch weitgehend im Dunkeln, ihre Existenz wurde erst durch die Publikation von Archivalien der neunziger Jahre wieder in Erinnerung gerufen. Von den durch Befehl 44/21 der OGPU vom 2. Februar 193050 eingerichteten Trojki bei den Bevollmächtigten Vertretungen der OGPU waren im Rahmen der Entkulakisierung zwischen 1930-1933 392.524 Personen wegen politischer Vergehen, meist Artikel 58 des Strafgesetzbuches der RFSSR, verurteilt worden.51 Zwischen den Trojki der Entkulakisierungsperiode und
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des Großen Terrors bestehen personelle (man denke an Namen wie Redens, Zakovskij, Evdokimov, Karuckij, Bak, Ejche usw.) und funktionale Kontinuitäten. Auch aus der Perspektive der Opfer ergeben sich Verknüpfungen : Viele Kulaken, die 1930-1934 von den Dreiergremien in konclagerja eingewiesen wurden, verloren 1937-1938 durch den Spruch der Trojki ihr Leben. Auch wenn das Politbüro am 7. Mai 1933 den Trojki der OGPU das Recht, die Todesstrafe zu verhängen, entzog, hat es danach dieses Instruments des Ausnahmezustands immer wieder eingesetzt, wenn es galt, schnell und geräuschlos vermeintlich gefährliche “antisovetčiki ” zu liquidieren.52 Zum letzten Mal übrigens am Vorabend der Massenoperationen : Am 28. Juni 1937 kam es zu einer Neuauflage der Trojka der Entkulakisierungsperiode : Das Politbüro beschloß, in der Westsibirischen Region eine Trojka einzusetzen, welcher der Leiter des UNKVD, der Erste Parteisekretär und der Staatsanwalt der Region Westsibirien angehören sollten ; ihre Aufgabe war, Mitglieder einer konterrevolutionären Organisation, die unter verbannten Exkulaken einen Aufstand vorbereitet hätten, im beschleunigten Verfahren zum Tode zu verurteilen.53 Diese Trojka kann zu Recht als “direkter Vorbote” der Dreiergremien von Prikaz 00447 bezeichnet werden,54 ging sie doch nahtlos in diese über.55
20 Der Umstand, daß es in den Quellen der Jahre 1937-1938 keine einheitliche Bezeichnung für das von Befehl 00447 geschaffene Schnelltribunal gibt, hat zu einiger Konfusion in der Literatur geführt.56 Selbst der Omsker Historiker V.M. Samosudov, der in seiner Studie über den Großen Terror im Gebiet Omsk detaillierte Regesten aller Trojkaprotokolle vom 5. August 1937 bis 23. Oktober 1938 vorlegt, sieht in diesem Zeitraum nur das durch Prikaz 00447 installierte Dreiergremium, das er “osobaja trojka” (Sondertrojka) nennt, in Funktion. Daß ab Protokoll Nr. 64 vom September 1938 Diskontinuitäten im Strafmaß (fünf Jahre ITL), in den Anklagepunkten (überwiegend 58.6, Spionage) sowie der ethnischen Herkunft der Beschuldigten (nahezu ausschließlich Angehörige der nationalen Minoritäten) auftreten, bleibt bei ihm ohne Kommentar und Konsequenz. Urteilt man nach den vielen Faksimilereproduktionen von Akten der im Rahmen von Befehl 00447 eingesetzten Dreiergremien, dann war die Selbstbezeichnung “trojka pri UNKVD SSSR po [Kalininskoj/Moskovskoj/Omskoj oblasti” usw.] die gebräuchlichste. Es sind jedoch zumindest zwei Abweichungen bekannt : In Leningrad nannte sich das Dreiergremium “Osobaja trojka UNKVD LO” 57 und in Jaroslavl' prangt über den Trojkaprotokollen der Kopf : trojka “pri Upravlenii NKVD Jaroslavskoj oblasti po vnesudebnomu rassmotrenija del” (Trojka des UNKVD des Gebiets Jaroslavl' zur außergerichtlichen Untersuchung von Fällen).58 In Dokumenten der Regierung, der Parteizentrale oder in der Korrespondenz von NKVD-Dienststellen finden sich neben “osobaja trojka” auch die euphemistische Bezeichnung “sudebnaja trojka” (Gerichtstrojka) oder “spectrojka”59 Trotz dieses Sprachgebrauchs in den Quellen sollte der Terminus “osobaja trojka” dem im September 1938 geschaffenen Dreiergremium reserviert bleiben, das nicht mehr im Rahmen von 00447, sondern der Verfolgung der “nationalen Minderheiten” operierte (vgl. unten); neben der durch Befehl 00447 und der im September 1938 eingesetzten Trojka gab es im Großen Terror noch eine dritte außergerichtliche Instanz, die sich trojka nannte, die sog. Miliz- oder Paßtrojka,60 die Freiheitsstrafen bis zu fünf Jahren verhängen konnte.
21 Das Politbüro hat seine eigenen Entscheidungen über die Besetzung der Trojki vom 5.-11. Juli 1937 bereits in der zweiten Hälfte des Monats mehrfach korrigiert. Eklatantestes Beispiel hierfür sind die am 23. und 28. Juli vorgenommenen kompletten Umbesetzungen der Dreierkommissionen der Gebiete Saratov,61 Omsk und Ivanovo. 62
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Als Angehörige der regionalen Parteiführung, NKVD-Leitung und Staatsanwaltschaft gehörten die Herren über Leben und Tod selbst zu den Risikogruppen, die seit Juni 1937 zunehmend ins Visier der Verfolger gerieten. Allen voran die regionalen Parteisekretäre,63 aber auch NKVD-Leiter 64 und leitende Staatsanwälte. 65 Unter den Trojkamitgliedern gab es bis zum Ende der Operation eine starke Fluktuation, die vom Moskauer Machtzentrum gesteuert wurde. Daß in den Politbüroakten nicht alle Ernennungen festgehalten sind, düfte auf die Einschränkung der Kompetenzen zugunsten der beiden Fünferkommissionen im höchsten Parteigremium zurückzuführen sein.
22 Prikaz 0047 enthält die Namensliste der Mitglieder der 64 Dreierkommissionen, wobei angegeben ist, wer der Vorsitzende (der lokale NKVD-Chef) und die beiden Mitglieder sind (Parteisekretär und in der Regel der leitende Staatsanwalt).66 Daß der NKVD, genauer die Hauptverwaltung Staatssicherheit, den Trojkavorsitzenden stellte, nachdem ihrem Apparat bereits Erfassung, Verhaftung, Ermittlung und Untersuchung übertragen worden waren, sicherte die dominante Position der “Organe” bei der Durchführung der Operation. Eine flüchtige Analyse der Liste der Trojkamitglieder bestärkt diese These noch. Nahezu alle prominenten NKVD-Leiter stehen auf der Liste, während die Parteileitungen häufig durch zweite Sekretäre repräsentiert sind, z.B. in Leningrad, Moskau, in der Fernöstlichen Region, in Kujbyšev, auf der Krim, in Voronež, Jaroslavl' etc.
23 Wie haben wir uns eine Sitzung dieses Gremiums vorzustellen ?: Neben den drei “Schnellrichtern” waren der protokollierende Sekretär und der Vertreter der Behörde, die den Fall untersucht hatte (Geheimpolizei oder Miliz), anwesend. Nach einem kurzen Bericht des dokladčik und anhand der schriftlich vorliegenden Fallbeschreibungen, in denen die Zuordnung zu Kategorie 1 oder 2 vorgeschlagen war, fällte die Trojka ihr Urteil. In den Protokollen ist bisweilen (so in Jaroslavl') nicht einmal der ihrem Spruch zugrundeliegende Paragraph des Strafgesetzbuches angegeben (meist 58. 1-14).67 Diese Fließband-Justiz verurteilte pro Sitzung Hunderte “antisovetčiki ”.
24 Die Trojki fällten ihre Urteile meist nachts, hinter verschlossenen Türen, ohne die Angeklagten jemals gesehen oder gehört zu haben, ohne ihnen die geringste Möglichkeit zur Verteidigung einzuräumen, allein aufgrund der von den Untersuchungsführern präparierten Unterlagen und ihrem Vortrag.68 Revision gegen ihren Spruch, der im Gegensatz zu den Urteilen der Dvojki keiner Autorisierung durch eine andere Instanz bedurfte, sah der Text von Prikaz 00447 nicht vor, so daß die Urteile von den Leitern der operativen Gruppen schnell vollstreckt werden konnten. Die von der Trojka zum Tode Verurteilten starben, ohne daß ihnen das Urteil mitgeteilt wurde, die von Frinovskij gezeichnete NKVD-Direktive Nr. 424 vom 8. August 1937 untersagte das.69
25 Die Weisung im Prikaz 00447, “völliges Stillschweigen über den Zeitpunkt und den Ort der Urteilsvollstreckung zu bewahren” wurde lange befolgt. Über das Schicksal der “von außergerichtlichen Organen” zum Tode Verurteilten breitete der NKVD einen dichten Schleier von Lügen ; über ein halbes Jahrhundert hielt er an dieser Täuschungsstrategie fest. Der 1939 erlassene Prikaz 00515 befahl, auf die Nachfrage von Angehörigen die berühmt-berüchtigte Antwort “Desjat' let ITL bez prava perepiski” (10 Jahre ITL ohne Recht auf Briefwechsel) zu geben.70 1945 wurde ihnen schließlich mitgeteilt, der zu 10 Jahren ITL verurteilte Angehörige sei in der Haft gestorben.71 Erst im Rahmen der Rehabilitierung nach 1989 erfuhren Generationen von Sowjetbürgern
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die wirkliche Todesursache und das wahre Sterbedatum ihrer Kinder, Eltern und Freunde. Hinrichtungsorte und Massengräber sind ebenfalls erst in den neunziger Jahren entdeckt worden.72
26 In Abschnitt VII. des Textes ist die Berichterstattung gegenüber dem Zentrum geregelt : Über den Gang und die Ergebnisse der Operation soll die NKVD-Zentrale alle fünf Tage informiert werden.
3. Bürokratische Planung
27 Am 31. Juli, als vom Politbüro der Befehl 00447, wahrscheinlich im Umlaufverfahren, gebilligt wurde, fielen auch wichtige Entscheidungen über die Durchführung der Operation : Auf 75 Millionen Rubel bezifferte das Politbüro deren Kosten, allein für den Transport der Häftlinge mit der Eisenbahn wurden 25 Millionen und für den Bau neuer Lager 10 Millionen Rubel angesetzt ; der Kreis der bürokratischen Mittäter an der Aktion weitete sich aus : Beteiligt wurden der Rat der Volkskommissare, die Volkskommisariate für Verkehrswesen, Verteidigung (Leitungspersonal für die Lagerwache), Holzwirtschaft und Gesundheitswesen (Ärzte und Pflegepersonal) sowie die Parteiorganisationen und der Komsomol der Gebiete, in denen die Lager errichtet wurden. (Personal für Lagerverwaltung und -wache). Das Politbüro legte fest, daß ein Teil der nach der zweiten Kategorie verurteilten “antisowjetischen Elemente” im Rahmen der laufenden Großbauprojekte des Gulag, die Mehrzahl aber in der chronisch rückständigen Holzwirtschaft eingesetzt werden sollte. Zu diesem Zweck wurden im August 1937 sieben73 und im Februar 1938 sechs neue Holzfällerlager eingerichtet, so daß am 15. Februar 1939 276.485 Sträflinge in diesen im Kontext der “Massenoperationen” eingerichteten 13 Lagern registriert waren.74 Das waren mehr als 60 % der nach Befehl 00447 zu Freiheitsstrafen verurteilten “Kulaken, Kriminellen und anderen antisowjetischen Elemente.”
4. Durchführung der Operation
28 Diese Untersuchung hat gerade erst begonnen, so daß zur Zeit eine Reihe ganz elementarer Fragen noch nicht geklärt ist : Z.B. die Dauer der Operation in den verschiedenen Republiken, Regionen und Gebieten, die vorrangigen lokalen Opferkategorien, die endgültigen Opferzahlen. Da die im Prikaz 00447 vorgegebenen Quoten in der Provinz offenbar wie Planziffern einer beliebigen Kampagne aufgenommen wurden, wäre es interessant zu wissen, ob es regionale Machthaber gab, die es wagten, unter den zugewiesenen Repressionsquoten zu bleiben, was der Text des Befehls zuließ. Auch über Mentalität und Motivation dieser Personengruppe wissen wir bisher nur wenig : Handelten sie aus Karrieregründen, ideologischer Überzeugung, Parteitreue ? Wie beeinflußten lokale Umstände ihre Entscheidungen ? Wie kooperierten Parteiführung und NKVD vor Ort ? Weiterführen können hier vor allem Recherchen auf regionaler Ebene. Diese finden bereits statt, allein bereitet die Unübersichtlichkeit der Literaturproduktion in den Staaten der ehemaligen Sowjetunion ausländischen Interessierten -- aber auch russischen Forschern -- größte Schwierigkeiten, Schritt zu halten. Das gilt für Bücher und Zeitschriften, die von kleinen Verlagen, von Forschungsinstitution der Peripherie und von privaten Organisationen herausgebracht werden ; ebenso für schmale Schriften, die Autoren in einer Art postsowjetischem samizdat drucken. In noch höherem Maße trifft es auf die
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Artikel zu, die in Zeitungen der Hauptstadt,75 noch mehr aber in der Presse “loin de Moscou”76 publiziert wurden.
29 In welch extremen Maße die Operation 00447 eine Zäsur in der Geschichte des Katastrophenjahres 1937 markiert, belegt die folgende Statistik der Verhaftungen und Verurteilungen in Tomsk,77 dessen NKVD-Chef I.V. Ovčinnikov einer der furchtbaren Čekisten des Großen Terrors war. Die sibirische Stadt, die 1937 134.500 Einwohner zählte, gehörte bis Ende September 1937 zur Westsibirischen Region, nach deren Teilung zum Gebiet Novosibirsk. Die Tabelle registriert nur Verhaftungen und Verurteilungen, die aufgrund von Straftaten nach Artikel 58 (konterrevolutionäre Verbrechen) erfolgten :
30 Die Tabelle zeigt die lawinenartige Zunahme der Verhaftungen und Verurteilungen, darunter insbesondere der Todesurteile, ab Juli/ August 1937. Höchst wahrscheinlich handelt es sich hier um eine Entwicklung, die auf die gesamte Sowjetunion zutrifft.78 Da dieses Datum der Beginn der Massenoperation nach Prikaz 00447 ist, darf angenommen werden, daß hier nicht nur eine chronologische Koinzidenz, sondern ein kausaler Zusammenhang vorliegt.
31 Daß die Verhaftungsziffer in Tomsk in der Westsibirischen Region bereits im Juli 1937 signifikant stieg, könnte die mehrfach geäußerte Hypothese bestätigen, daß in manchen Regionen und Gebieten bereits vor der Zustellung des Befehls die Repressionsmaschinerie in Gang gesetzt worden war. Zwischen dem 31. Juli und dem 5. August, dem Beginn der Aktion in den meisten Territorien, wurde fieberhaft an deren Vorbereitung gearbeitet : Verhaftungslisten wurden angelegt, zusätzliche Räume für die Unterbringung der Verhafteten und zur Durchführung der Untersuchung gesucht, abgelegene Plätze, meist in Wäldern, als Erschießungsstätten präpariert, Exekutionskommandos zusammengestellt und Gruben zur “Entsorgung” der Leichen ausgehoben.79
32 Die ersten Sitzungen von Trojki sind für den 5. August 1937 bezeugt.80 Auffällig ist der hohe Anteil von ugolovniki (Kriminelle) unter den von den Trojki zu Beginn der Aktion Verurteilten. Das gilt für Karelien, Tatarstan,81 aber ganz besonders für Jaroslavl', wo das Dreiergremium in den ersten acht Sitzungen (5. August - 13. September 1937) 635
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Personen verurteilte (davon 634 zu VMN -- Vysšaja mera nakazanija): Von diesen sind 246 als ugolovniki (Kriminelle), 167 als ehemalige Kulaken und 222 als “andere konterrevolutionäre Elemente” (Geistliche, Kirchenmitglieder, SRi usw.) angegeben.82 Neben programmatischen Zielsetzungen könnten auch sehr praktische Überlegungen das Motiv für dieses Verfahren gewesen sein : Nach Prikaz 00447 Punkt I.7 konnten vor dem 30. Juli 1937 verhaftete Kriminelle (ebenso nach I.5 verhaftete Konterrevolutionäre), deren Fall bereits untersucht, aber noch nicht von Gerichten entschieden worden war, vor die Trojka gestellt werden. Im OUR URKM lagen offenbar viele solcher Fälle vor, die schnell der Trojka übergeben werden konnten. Eines erreichte man sicher durch dieses Procedere : Die schnellere Entlastung der bereits überfüllten83 Gefängnisse und Haftorte.84 Zu dieser Beschleunigung trug auch bei, daß die zum Tod Verurteilten in der Regel unmittelbar nach dem Trojkaspruch erschossen wurden, Gnadengesuche waren ja ausgeschlossen. In Jaroslavl' geschah das nach ein bis zwei Tagen, in Karelien nach drei bis 4 Tagen,85 in Leningrad nach ca. einer Woche,86 ebenso in Moskau. Die Zeitspanne zwischen Verhaftung, Verurteilung und Hinrichtung betrug etwa zwei bis sechs Wochen, konnte aber auch extrem verkürzt werden, wenn die Moskauer Zentrale zur Eile drängte. So im November und vor allem Dezember 1937, als Ežov entsprechende Anweisungen verschickte. Im Gedenkbuch von Moskau ist dokumentiert, daß der Leidensweg zwischen Arretierung, Trojkaurteil und Erschießung oft nur eine Woche dauerte, bisweilen selbst noch weniger,87 so im Falle von Aleksej Karpovič Bykov, Häftling des Dmitlag, der am 15. November verhaftet, noch am selben Tag von der Trojka verurteilt und noch am 16. November erschossen wurde. 88
33 Die Trojki haben bereits im August 1937 ihrer Aufgabe, im Eilverfahren Urteile zu fällen, in hohem Maße erfüllt : Um die Monatsmitte waren bereits 100.990 Menschen verhaftet, gegen Monatsende war die Zahl auf 150.000 gestiegen, und waren bereits über 30.000 erschossen.89 Die Trojka in Moskau war so mit “Arbeit” überhäuft, möglicherweise auch weil ab Anfang September 1937 die Häftlinge des Dmitlag in ihren Kompetenzbereich fielen, daß das Politbüro am 3. September 1937 beschloß, in der Hauptstadt ein zweites Dreiergremium “zur Beschleunigung der Abhandlung der Straftsachen” einzusetzen.90 Für die “judikatorische” Qualität der Trojka-Praxis dürften einige quantitative Daten aufschlußreich sein : Laut Protokoll 81, 82 und 83 hat die Leningrader Trojka an einem Tag (9. Oktober 1937) 658 Häftlinge des Sondergefängnisses auf den Solovekkij-Inseln zum Tode verurteilt.91 Hinsichtlich der Dreierkommission der Tatarischen ASSR hat Stepanov ermittelt : “Über 200 Personen am Tag abzuurteilen, war für die Tattrojka eine alltägliche Angelegenheit.” Für die Sitzungen vom 28. Oktober 1937 und 6. Januar 1938 sind 256 bzw. 202 Todesurteile bezeugt.92 Von der karelischen Trojka wurden am 20. November 1937 705 Personen verurteilt, davon 629 zum Tode.93 Lokale Untersuchungen in Krasnodar haben ergeben, daß die Trojka der Region am 20. November 1937 1.252 Personen verurteilte.94 Überboten wurde dieser “justizielle” Terror noch von der Omsker Trojka, die am 10. Oktober 1937 1.301 und am 15. März 1938 1.014 Menschen verurteilte, davon 937 bzw. 354 zum höchsten Strafmaß.95 Unter diesen Umständen war eine Überprüfung des Einzelfalles auf den Trojkasitzungen absolut ausgeschlossen ; die Mitglieder waren völlig von den Ermittlungsergebnissen der Untersuchungsleiter des NKVD abhängig, sie konnten einen flüchtigen Blick auf die langen Namenslisten und die kurzen Fallbeschreibungen werfen und diese durch ihre Unterschrift gutheißen ; zu mehr reichten weder Absicht noch Zeit. Bisher spricht nichts dagegen, daß die Pseudorichter
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der Trojki bereitwillige Vollstrecker der Intentionen der Autoren von Prikaz 00447 waren. Der bereits zitierte anonyme NKVD-Funktionär, der in Tjumen' an der Operation beteiligt war, berichtet : “In die Entscheidung ‘der Trojka’ wurde aufgenommen, worauf wir in unseren Berichten hingewiesen hatten. Eine Untersuchung des Tatbestands wurde auf den Trojkasitzungen nicht vorgenommen. An einzelnen Tagen berichtete ich ‘der Trojka’ innerhalb einer Stunde über die Fälle von 50-60 Personen.”96 Erleichtert wurde diese Fließbandjustiz der Trojki durch den von der offiziellen Propaganda geschürten Verdacht,97 daß überall im Lande konspirative Organisationen am Werk waren ; deren Entlarvung, vor allem die Aufdeckung “der Führungsstäbe dieser Organisationen”, befahl die NKVD-Führung den lokalen Untersuchungsführern. Einer von ihnen berichtet darüber : “Die verhafteten konterrevolutionären Einzelpersonen, die disparaten Gruppen und Organisationen begannen sich während der Bearbeitung durch uns zu festen Organisationen mit riesigen Filialen zusammenzufügen.”98 So entstanden in den Folterkammern des NKVD fiktive konspirative Gruppen von 30 bis 40 Personen, aber auch regionale und nationale Untergrundorganisationen gewaltigen Ausmaßes, als deren Mitglieder die verhafteten “antisowjetischen Elemente” im Verlauf der Untersuchung identifiziert wurden. Damit war der vom Prikaz 00447 geforderte Nachweis der “antisowjetischen Tätigkeit” erbracht.
34 Für die Westsibirische Region hat Papkov aufgrund eines Berichts des UNKVD ermittelt, daß 1937 34.872 Personen “repressiert” wurden, die sich auf 11 solcher Megaorganisationen verteilten : Als Kontingente für den Befehl 00447 dürften die folgenden fiktiven Organisationen in Frage gekommen sein : “Die weißgardistisch- monarchistische Organisation ROVS” (20.731 angebliche Mitglieder),99 die sibirische Filiale der “Werktätigen Bauernpartei” (3.617), “die kirchlich-monarchistische Organisation von Aufständischen” (1.562), “die Spionage-Diversions Organisation unter den Sektenangehörigen des Westsibirischen Kreises” (793), “die terroristische Spionage-und Diversionsorganisation der Sozialrevolutionäre” (617).100 Der NKVD- Leiter des Gebiets Poltava O. Volkov meldete im April 1938 dem Volkskommissar für Inneres der Ukraine die Entlarvung einer Untergrundorganisation ehemaliger Petljura- Anhänger, die nicht weniger als fünf Regimenter, ein Bataillon, 14 Kompanien und 15 Abteilungen umfaßte.101 Alle Dimensionen sprengt die von dem ehemaligen Čekisten S.N. Mironov -- er war bis August 1937 Leiter des UNKVD der Westsibirischen Region -- aufgedeckte Konspiration. Als Botschafter in der Mongolischen Volksrepublik organisiert er offenbar den Großen Terror in diesem sowjetischen Satellitenstaat. Am 18. Oktober 1937 meldet er “die Entdeckung einer großen konterrevolutionären Organisation” nach Moskau ; am 3. April 1938 informiert er die Moskauer NKVD- Zentrale, daß im Falle des vereinigten Zentrums der Verschwörung 10.728 Personen verhaftet worden seien, darunter 7.814 Lamas, und daß die Verhaftung weiterer 7.000 Personen, darunter 6.000 Lamas, bevorstehe.102 Die Verfahren gegen die Lamas sollten von Trojki (!!!) durchgeführt werden. Das hatte das Politbüro auf Antrag Frinovskijs im September 1937 beschlossen.103
35 Dieser Befund einer von den Trojki ausgeübten Fließband-Justiz dürfte auch auf die Dreiertribunale der Gebiete und Regionen zutreffen, für die bisher die entsprechenden Daten noch nicht vorliegen.
36 Befehl 00447 hatte den territorialen Einheiten die Möglichkeit eingeräumt, bei der NKVD-Zentrale in Moskau eine Erhöhung der Repressionsquoten zu beantragen.
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Zumindest von zwei Gebieten wissen wir bis jetzt, daß sie noch vor dem offiziellen Beginn der Kampagne, dem 5. August 1937, entsprechende Gesuche nach Moskau richteten : Vor allem am Beispiel Omsk, einem der klassischen Deportationszentren für Kulaken und andere “antisovetčiki ”, läßt sich eine Art “Gesetzmäßigkeit” demonstrieren, die man umschreiben kann als “Intensivierung des Terrors durch Abberufung zögerlicher Repressionsagenten”. Die am 9. Juli 1937 vom Politbüro bestätigte Trojka für das Gebiet Omsk war noch vor Beginn der Operation am 28. Juli durch eine ganz neu besetzte Dreierkommission ersetzt worden ; es gibt Anzeichen dafür, daß Stalin selbst diese Umbesetzung veranlaßte, weil die Omsker Partei-und NKVD-Leitung zu wenig Engagement im Kampf gegen die Feinde zeigte und zu niedrige Repressionsziffern angefordert hatte.104 Der neue Trojkavorsitzende Grigorij Fedorovič Gorbač galt als einer der skrupellosesten Čekisten des Großen Terrors. Er stellte seine “bolschewistische Wachsamkeit” sofort unter Beweis, indem er in Omsk Massenverhaftungen anordnete und in der NKVD-Zentrale in Moskau am 1. August 1937 um höhere Repressionszahlen nachsuchte, “da wir inzwischen auf Grund unserer Stachanov-Arbeit 3.008 Personen für die erste Kategorie verhaftet haben.”105 Zwei Wochen später, als die Zahl seiner Verhaftungen bereits auf über 5.000 gestiegen war, richtete Gorbač ein Schreiben an die NKVD-Zentrale, in dem er darum nachsuchte, die Obergrenze für die erste Kategorie in seinem Gebiet auf 8.000 zu erhöhen. Auf dem linken Briefrand des Originals ist handschriftlich vermerkt : “Genosse Ežov, ich bin für die Erhöhung des Limits auf 8 Tausend. I. Stalin.”106 Auch aus Smolensk, wo seit 15. April 1937 V.A. Karuckij neuer NKVD-Leiter war und Mitte Juni 1937 das ZK-Mitglied I.P. Rumjancev als langjähriger Erster Parteisekretär von dem aus Moskau importierten D.S. Korotčenkov abgelöst worden war, wurde Ežov bedrängt, die im Prikaz 00447 festgelegten Kontingente auf 3.000 und 6.000 zu erhöhen (vgl. Tabelle). Der auf Rehabilitierung bedachte Karuckij -- Jagoda hatte ihn 1936 wegen exzessiven Alkoholismus als NKVD-Chef der Westsibirischen Region abgesetzt -- hatte bereits Ende Juli 1937 2.000 zur Erschießung vorgesehene Exkulaken verhaftet und berichtete Ežov am 1. August von weiteren 11.000 “konterrevolutionären” und “kriminellen Elementen”, denen “die Organe” auf die Spur gekommen seien. Um die zugewiesenen Quoten nicht zu überschreiten, übergebe der NKVD Kriminelle, die für die zweite Kategorie bestimmt seien, der Miliztrojka. Karuckij führt zwei “lokale” Gründe für die enorme Anzahl Feinde in dem Gebiet an : Der abgesetzte Parteichef habe die Entkulakisierung nur halbherzig durchgeführt und 1931 von 22.000 Kulaken nur 5.000 deportieren lassen. Dazu sei in den letzten Jahren eine hohe Zahl verurteilter Krimineller, denen Moskau, Leningrad und Kiev die Aufenthaltsgenehmigung verweigere, ins Westliche Gebiet ausgewiesen worden. Der neue Parteichef Korotčenkov unterstützte in seinem Brief an Ežov vom 3. August Forderung und Argumentation seines NKVD-Chefs -- beide hatten sich offenbar abgesprochen --, betonte jedoch noch, daß die große Schar der Konterrevolutionäre, Kulaken und Kriminellen “im Falle eines Krieges angesichts der Nähe der Front zum Problem werden könnte.”107 Wie Gorbač und Karuckij gingen viele NKVD-Leiter vor : Sie organisierten Massenverhaftungen, bis die Gefängnisse zu klein wurden, anschließend wandten sie sich hilfesuchend an Moskau, um eine Erhöhung der Tötungs- und Lagerquote zu erreichen. So meldet Berija, der Erste Sekretär der gruzinischen Parteiorganisation, am 30. Oktober 1937 der Moskauer Parteizentrale, daß von über 12.000 in Gruzinien verhafteten Personen 7.374 verurteilt worden seien, davon 5.236 durch die Trojka. Was solle mit den restlichen 5.000 geschehen, die “unter anormalen [schwer
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kontrollierbaren] Haftbedingungen” gehalten würden ? Berija favorisiert die Einschaltung der Trojka.108 Die beigefügte, keineswegs vollständige Tabelle enthält Belege dafür, daß bis Mitte Dezember 1937 neben dem Westlichen Gebiet, Georgien und Omsk noch 16 andere Gebiete, Regionen, Republiken um Erhöhung der zugewiesenen Repressionsquote nachsuchten, einige selbst mehrere Male. Stalin, das Politbüro und die NKVD-Zentrale unter Ežov scheinen diese Initiativen 1937 nie abgewiesen, sondern eher durch Abrundungen nach oben ermutigt zu haben. So wurde auf Initiative Stalins und Molotovs die Vernichtungsquote für die Region Krasnojarsk,109 wahrscheinlich bereits im August 1937, um 6.600 erhöht. (vgl. Tabelle Nr. 28), was gegenüber den Ziffern von Prikaz 00447 eine Steigerung um den Faktor 8.8 darstellt. Bis Ende des Jahres hatte so mehr als ein Drittel der Territorien das ihnen im Befehl 00447 zugeteilte Kontingent beträchtlich erhöht, einige gar weit mehr als verdoppelt. (Vgl. Tabelle Nr. 2, 7, 10, 11, 12, 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 27, 28, 33, 35, 38, 39, 41, 42, 48, Kazachische SSR und Ukraine mit Gebieten). Nach einer auf der Grundlage der Politbüroprotokolle vorgenommenen Kalkulation von Oleg Chlevnjuk war dadurch die Repressionsziffer gegenüber den am 30. Juli 1937 festgelegten Planziffern um ca. 40.000 erhöht worden. Die tatsächliche Zahl der (zusätzlichen) Erschießungen und Einweisungen in Lager liegt jedoch noch weit höher. Denn ein Teil der Anfragen aus der Provinz -- Chlevnjuk belegt dies am Beispiel Turkmenistans -- wurde nicht vom Politbüro beantwortet, sondern auf dem kurzen Dienstweg zwischen lokalem NKVD, der Moskauer Zentrale und Stalin als Repräsentanten des Politbüros erledigt (vgl. Tabelle, Endrechnung). Über die in diesem Verfahren bewilligten Eingaben enthalten die Politbüroprotokolle keine Angaben. Chlevnjuk scheint jedoch darüber hinaus zu vermuten, daß NKVD-Leiter vor Ort in der Endphase der Operation 1938 ihre “Initiativen” überhaupt verschwiegen, also auch gegenüber ihrem Moskauer Dienstherrn.110
37 Im Prikaz 00447 war festgelegt, daß die Operation vier Monate dauern, also etwa in der zweiten Dezemberwoche enden sollte. Am 3. November 1937 erreichte die Dienstellen des NKVD in den Republiken, Regionen und Gebieten ein Telegramm Ežovs, das kritisierte, daß die Repressionskampagne gegen die “antisowjetischen Elemente” und die nationalen Minderheiten -- genannt werden Deutsche, Polen, Charbiner -- “in einigen Gebieten äußerst langsam vorankomme.” Der NKVD-Chef befahl : Die Durchführung der Operation zu forcieren und bis zum 10. Dezember 1937 abzuschließen. “Bis zu diesem Datum sollten alle Verhaftungen durchgeführt, die Untersuchungen abgeschlossen und alle Fälle behandelt sein.”111 Noch am 10. Dezember 1937 glaubte der Leiter des UNKVD des Gebiets Omsk, K.N. Valuchin, die Operation werde am selben Tag beendet : Seinen Rapport an Ežov leitet er mit der Feststellung ein, daß “die aufgrund Ihres Befehls durchgeführte Operation heute beendet wurde.”112 Offensichtlich wurde dieser Plan aber in letzter Minute umgestoßen, und die Operation bis Anfang Januar 1938 verlängert.113 Anhand des Kemerover Gedenkbuches läßt sich nachweisen, daß die Trojka des Gebiets Novosibirsk in der zweiten Dezemberhälfte nicht weniger als 11 mal zusammentrat, zum letzten mal am 29. Dezember, und daß die Frist zwischen Verhaftung und Verurteilung in der zweiten Dezemberhälfte extrem kurz war, häufig nur wenige Tage. In der Tatarischen ASSR verurteilte die Trojka im Dezember 1937 2.561 Personen, weitaus mehr als in jedem anderen Monat.114 Das gilt auch für Moskau, wo selbst an dem mit viel Pomb gefeierten 20. Jahrestag von VČK/ OGPU/NKVD (20. Dezember 1937) die Trojka zusammentrat, und für Karelien, wo das Dreiergremium allein vom 18. bis 31. Dezember, über 1.200 Todesurteile fällte.115 Zu
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Anfang des Jahres 1938 waren so im Rahmen von Prikaz 00447 ca. 500.000 Menschen verhaftet worden.116
38 “Anfang 1938 gingen von Moskau Signale aus, die auf eine mögliche Beendigung der Säuberungen hinzudeuten schienen.”117 Von diesen Überlegungen scheint die Arbeit der Trojki nur am Rande tangiert worden zu sein. Die Dreierkommissionen wurden im Januar 1938 nicht im nationalen Maßstab aufgelöst, wohl aber stellten sie in einigen Territorien ihre Arbeit ein. So in der Tatarischen ASSR, wo die Trojka am 6. Januar zum letzten Mal tagte.118 Kurzfristig scheint Unsicherheit bestanden zu haben, ob die Operation fortgesetzt werde. Wahrscheinlich hat die Arbeit der Trojki -- im Gegensatz zu den im Rahmen der Verfolgung der nationalen Minderheiten wirkenden Zweierkommissionen (dvojki) -- in vielen Territorien im Januar weitgehend still gelegen, die Kampagne kam ins Stocken. In der oblast' Moskau scheinen die Herren über Leben und Tod des Schnellgerichts am 10., 20., 21. und 26. Januar 1938 vorrangig Lagerhäftlinge vor die Erschießungskommandos geschickt zu haben. Gleiches gilt für Karelien. Erst gegen Ende der Tagung des ZK-Plenums (11., 14., 18., 20. Januar), das sicher nicht, wie lange angenommen, eine Abschwächung der Massenrepressalien beschloß,119 setzen die Trojki in Moskau (am 20.)120, Novosibirsk (26.), Petrozavodsk (17. Januar) ihren mörderischen Auftrag fort, während in Omsk vom 3. Januar bis 4. März und in Jaroslavl' zwischen 13. Januar und 13. Februar keine Sitzungen stattfanden.121 Der karelische Historiker Ivan Čuchin hat eruiert, daß die NKVD-Leitung am 14. Januar 1938 allen Dienststellen im Chiffretelegramm 109 mitteilen ließ, daß die Arbeit der Trojki bis auf weiteres verlängert worden sei.122 Am 31. Januar 1938 brachte ein Beschluß des Politbüros123 Klarheit über die Fortsetzung der Operation gegen “ehemalige Kulaken, Kriminelle und das aktive antisowjetische Element.”124 22 administrativen Einheiten (neun Unionsrepubliken,125 zwei autonomen Sowjetrepubliken und elf Regionen und Gebieten der RSFSR) wurden neue Kontingente zugewiesen : 48.000 für die erste und 9.200 für die zweite Kategorie. Das Politbüro gab den Čekisten anderthalb (im Fernen Osten zwei) Monate Zeit zur Durchführung der Aktion, die also am 1. April 1938 zu Ende gehen sollte. In allen in der Liste nicht genannten Territorien sollten die Dreiergremien spätestens am 15. Februar 1938 ihre Arbeit einstellen. Pauschal kann gesagt werden, daß den 22 Territorien bereits nach Prikaz 00447 die höchsten Kontingente “antisowjetischer Elemente” zugewiesen worden waren. Die meisten von ihnen hatten auch Nachfragen um Erhöhung der Quoten nach Moskau gerichtet. Vergleicht man die Summe der Vernichtungsziffern vom 31. Januar 1938 mit den entsprechenden von Prikaz 00447, so liegen die neuen Quoten für die erste Kategorie (48.000) um 7.600 höher als die alten. Diese Tendenz zur Verschärfung der Strafmaßnahmen durch die Trojki (Ansteigen der Todesurteile, 48.000, gegenüber Lager- und Gefängnisstrafen, 9.200) hält sich das ganze Jahr hindurch. “1938 hingegen brannte die Obrigkeit aufs Erschießen”, notiert Solchenizyn. 126 Auffällig ist ferner, daß das Politbüro zu noch größerer Eile drängt : In der Fernöstlichen Republik sollten in zwei Monaten nicht weniger als 8.000 Todesurteile verhängt werden -- wohlgemerkt ohne die am 1. Februar 1938 dort angeordneten Massenhinrichtungen in den Lagern (vgl. Tabelle). Ob an der Festlegung der neuen Sollzahlen die betroffenen Regionen beteiligt waren, etwa analog dem Verfahren vom Juli 1937, ist nicht bekannt. Es liegt aber nahe, daß die NKVD-Leitung die Dienststellen der Peripherie vor Vorlage der Liste im Politbüro hörte. Wahrscheinlich geschah das auf einer Konferenz regionaler NKVD-Leiter, die Ende Januar 1938 in Moskau stattfand. Man darf annehmen, daß die NKVD-Leitung über die Einstellung der NKVD-Leiter aus
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der Provinz zur Fortsetzung der “Kulakenaktion” bereits informiert war, u.a. auf Grund der im Januar nach Moskau geschickten Rechenschaftsberichte über ihre Amtsführung im Jahre 1937.127 Möglicherweise wurden auf dieser Versammlung die neuen Sollziffern für die Regionen festgelegt, die dann “als Antrag des NKVD” dem Politbüro bei seiner Entscheidung am 31. Januar vorlagen. Glaubt man den Aussagen des an der Konferenz beteiligten NKVD-Chefs von Altaj, S. P. Popov, -- “Ich erinnere mich an keinen NKVD- Leiter einer Region oder eines Gebiets, der gesagt hätte, daß man die Massenoperation als beendet ansehen könne”128 -- dann standen Ežov und Frinovskij vor dem Problem, den Repressionseifer der Leiter “des bewaffneten Vortrupps unserer Partei” zu zügeln. Das geschah ganz sicher im Falle des Volkskommissars des Inneren der Tatarischen ASSR: Vasilij Ivanovič Michajlov (1901-1940) hatte seinem langen, mit vielen interessanten Statistiken untermauerten Bericht über den erfolgreichen Feldzug gegen Kulaken, Kriminelle und andere antisovetčiki einige kritische Schlußfolgerungen (vyvody) beigefügt, die plausibel machen sollten, warum der Kampf noch immer nicht gewonnen war. Der seit August 1937 amtierende NKVD-Chef greift zur Standarderklärung : Hauptschuldiger sei die alte Partei- und Sowjetführung in Kazan, die nicht gegen, sondern im Bündnis mit den Feinden gekämpft und den Aufbau mächtiger Netzwerke in allen politisch-ökonomischen Sektoren unterstützt habe. “Die durchgeführten Massenoperationen erwiesen sich unter diesen Bedingungen als unzureichend.” Die auf Grund dieser Konstellation zwingend notwendige “gründliche Säuberung Tatarstans von den aktiv antisowjetischen und konterrevolutionär nationalistischen Elementen” werde lange Zeit in Anspruch nehmen, versuche man es “auf dem normalen Weg” (v obyčnom porjadke). Michajlov empfiehlt die Straftaten des “aufständischen Fußvolks” (povstančeskoj nizovki) von der Trojka, nicht von Gerichten verhandeln zu lassen. Die Essenz seines langen Diskurses bringt der letzte Satz : “Ich bitte, die Frist für die Tätigkeit der Trojka bis zum 1. April zu verlängern und ein Limit von nicht weniger als 5.000 Menschen zu gewähren.”129 Aus welchen Gründen Michajlovs Eingabe von der NKVD-Leitung (vom Politbüro ?) abgewiesen wurde, ist unbekannt. Ebenso wissen wir nicht, ob es im Januar 1938 mehrere solcher Ablehnungen für regionale NKVD-Chefs gegeben hat. Diese Absage dürfte der erste bisher bekannte Fall sein, wo die Moskauer-Zentrale als Bremser der Repressionsdynamik auftritt. Die von Stepanov vorgelegte Dokumentation macht jedoch deutlich, daß mit der Auflösung der Trojka der Terror in Tatarstan keineswegs abstarb.
39 Es muß festgehalten werden, daß das Politbüro sich an keine der am 31. Januar beschlossenen Richtlinien für den weiteren Verlauf der Operation gehalten hat. Schon im Februar 1938 bewilligte es über die im Januar-Beschluß festgelegten Quoten neue Opferkontingente und verlängerte die Fristen für die Dauer der Operation : So wurde den ukrainischen Gebieten am 17. Februar ein Repressionskontingent von 30.000 Menschen zugewiesen, wobei nicht nach Kategorien differenziert war. Dies geschah das als Antwort auf eine entsprechende Anfrage in Moskau130: Anträge auf Fortsetzung der Mordoperationen gingen in Moskau bis Ende Okkober 1938 ein.131 Vom 1. Februar 1938 bis zum Ende der Operation am 15. November haben das Leitungsgremium der Partei bzw. die NKVD-Zentrale mehr als der Hälfte der im Politbürobeschluß vom 31. Januar genannten Gebiete, Regionen und Republiken zumindest noch einmal neue, z. T. drastisch erhöhte Repressionsziffern zugewiesen (vgl. Tabelle Nr. 3, 4, 7, 10, 12, 26, 27/ Novosibirsk, 28132, 30/Čita/Irkutsk, 39, 40, 41, 45). Damit verbunden war jeweils eine Verlängerung der Funktionsfrist der Trojki um anderthalb bis zwei Monate. Noch am
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29. August 1938 hat das Politbüro beschlossen, “der Bitte des Gebietskomitees der VKP (b) Čitas über die Fortsetzung der Arbeit der Trojka zu entsprechen.”133 Buchstäblich bis zum letzten Tag der Operation hat das höchste Parteigremium Umbesetzungen in den Trojki vorgenommen und selbst noch neue Dreierkommissionen eingesetzt. So für die Regionen Chabarovsk und Primor'e, die am 20. Oktober 1938 durch die Teilung der Fernöstlichen Region entstanden waren.134
40 In der Resolution vom 31. Januar 1938 war dekretiert, daß in allen Republiken, Regionen und Gebieten, denen keine neuen Kontingente zugeteilt waren, die Trojki ihre Tätigkeit spätestens am 15. Februar 1938 beenden sollten. Auch diese Order wurde nicht eingehalten ; in wenigstens drei dieser Territorien fungierten die Schnelltribunale über diesen Termin hinaus (vgl. Tabelle, 25/Rostov, 32, 48). In der ASSR der Čečenen und Ingušen, wo die Operation 00447 am 15. Februar abgeschlossen worden war, versuchte der neu ernannte Parteisekretär F.P. Bykov, die Trojka zu reanimieren : Am 13. Juli 1938 bat er das Zentralkomitee in Moskau, zur Bekämpfung “konterrevolutionär-terroristischer Gruppen der Einrichtung einer besonderen Trojka mit Sondervollmachten für 4-5 Monate, nach dem Beispiel der zuvor durchgeführten Operation, zuzustimmen.”135 In diesem Falle hielt sich das Politbüro an seinen Beschluß vom 31.Januar 1938. Die Ziffer der Erschießungen und Lagereinweisungen nach Befehl 00447 stieg zwischen dem 1. Februar und dem 29. August 1938 nochmals um 90000 (erste und zweite Kategorie).136 Bis zum 1. Februar 1938 waren von den Trojki ca. 600.000 Personen verurteilt worden.137
41 Die Zahl der noch fungierenden Trojki war ab März 1938 stark rückläufig. Leider liegt bisher keine Übersicht darüber vor, wann die Tribunale in den einzelnen Republiken, Regionen und Gebieten ihre Tätigkeit einstellten. Ab Frühjahr 1938 wurden die Repressalien gegen die “konterrevolutionären” ethnischen Minoritäten zur Hauptstoßrichtung in der Tätigkeit des NKVD,138 und im Sommer 1938 scheinen die wenigen noch bestehenden Dreiergremien ihre monatlichen Sitzungen erheblich reduziert zu haben ; z.B. in Moskau auf 3 im Juli und August, in Novosibirsk auf 0/1/ im selben Zeitraum, in Karelien fanden von Mai bis November nur noch 4 Sitzungen statt, 139 in Omsk nach dem 15. März noch 5. 140 Weitaus höher war die Frequenz der Trojkasitzungen im Sommer 1938 in den Ostsibirischen Gebieten, in der oblast' Sverdlovsk und in der Fernöstlichen Region. In Irkutsk tagte das Gremium im Juli ca. 12 und im August ca. 6 mal, vgl. Tabelle, FN 70.
5. Sonderaktionen
42 Im Rahmen von Prikaz 00447 fanden zumindest zwei “kleinere” Aktionen statt, die Tötungsaktionen in den “Gefängnissen zur besonderen Verwendung” (tjurmy osobogo naznačenija -- TON) des GUGB141 und in den Arbeitsbesserungslagern (ITL). Besondere Instruktionen der NKVD-Leitung regelten die Durchführung. Beide Maßnahmen richteten sich gegen spezielle Opfergruppen und kannten nur ein Strafmaß (VMN), die NKVD-Leitung bestimmte zudem die Dauer der Aktion und die Zahl der Erschießungen pro Gefängnis und Lager. Beide Aktionen erweisen sich besonders hinsichtlich der beiden letzten Punkte als getreue Abbilder der großen Aktion. Zur Erschießung der Häftlinge in den Sondergefängnissen der 10. Abteilung (tjuremnyj otdel) des GUGB wurde von der NKVD-Leitung am 16. August 1937 die Direktive Nr. 59190 ausgegeben.142 Sie sah vor, die Operation am 25. August zu beginnen und innerhalb von zwei Monate abzuschließen. Wegen antisowjetischer Aktivität im Gefängnis sollten von der Trojka
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belangt werden : Die “aktivsten konterrevolutionären Elemente, die wegen Spionage, Diversion, terroristischer, aufständischer und Banditenaktivitäten verurteilt waren, aber auch verurteilte Mitglieder antisowjetischer Parteien”; unter ihnen werden auch die im Prikaz 00447 nicht genannten Trotzkisten angeführt, die laut offizieller Feindpropaganda der sowjetischen Presse im Herbst 1937 immer noch der Feind Nr. 1 waren, meist in der Kombination mit den Bucharinisten (“Trockistsko-bucharinskoe ochvost'e”, Izvestija, 22. November 1937, S. 1). Auch ugolovniki, die sich im Gefängnis “verbrecherisch” betätigten, sollten erschossen werden. Die Zusammenstellung der Erschießungslisten, auf Grund derer die Trojka entschied, oblag der Gefängnisleitung. Neue Verhöre, Zeugenbefragungen, Gegenüberstellungen oder Überprüfung von Beweismitteln gab es nicht. Über die “nach der Gefängnislinie” (NKVD-Jargon) Erschossenen wurde getrennt Buch geführt, sie wurden also nicht über das der Republik, Region oder dem Gebiet zugewiesene Kontingent “abgerechnet”.
43 Am intensivsten erforscht ist das Massaker an den Häftlingen des 1937 eingerichteten Gefängnisses auf der Insel Solovki (STON),143 auf dem Boden des berüchtigten “Soloveckij ITL”, der Mutter des sowjetischen Lagersystems. Ežovs Direktive vom 16. August 1937 hatte dem Gefängnis ein Vernichtungskontingent von 1.200 Häftlingen zugewiesen. Die Leningrader Trojka verurteilte am 9., 10., 14. Oktober 1.116 Häftlinge, 144 am 10., 25. November 1937 509 145 und am 14. Februar 1938 200, insgesamt 1.825 Häftlinge, jeweils in gesonderten Sitzungen zum Tode.146 In den Trojkaprotokollen sind die “Angeklagten” nach dela (Strafsachen) zu großen Gruppen von bis zu 200 Häftlingen zusammengefaßt. Während die Vorstrafen für jeden individuell angegeben sind (ca. fünf bis sieben Zeilen), wird die aktuelle “Straftat”, derentwegen Anklage erhoben wird, nur noch kollektiv für die ganze Gruppe angeführt (zwei bis vier Zeilen): “Delo Nr. 100307-37 g. [...] gegen 182 Personen, die wegen konterrevolutionärer trotzkistischer, terroristischer Spionage-Tätigkeit zu unterschiedlichen Haftzeiten verurteilt sind. Diese Personen halten an ihren früheren konterrevolutionären Positionen fest, betreiben weiterhin unter den Häftlingen konterrevolutionäre trotzkistische Arbeit und äußern terroristische Absichten.”147
44 Der NKVD sah in diesen Häftlingen nicht besserungsfähige politische Regimegegner, die zudem durch kollektive Protestaktionen, mit dem Hungerstreik als schärfster Waffe, die Gefängnisordnung zu verändern suchten. In dem Protokoll der Sitzung der Jaroslavl'er Trojka vom 3. September 1937, auf der 28 Häftlinge mit politischer Vergangenheit des Spezialgefängnisses des GUGB in den Tod geschickt wurden, tritt das deutlich zu Tage : Als todeswürdige Vergehen werden genannt : “Kollektive Proteste, Verbreitung von Flugblättern, Verletzung der Gefängnisordnung, Fortsetzung des politischen Kampfes, Organisation von Hungerstreiks, Selbstmordversuch.”148
45 Die Tötungsaktion in den Arbeitsbesserungslagern des GULAG ist bisher nur unzureichend erforscht. Sie war bereits im Befehl 00447 angekündigt, so daß man Ežovs kurze Direktive Nr. 409 vom 5. August 1937 als Ausführungsbestimmung zu Abschnitt I (Von den Repressionsmaßnahmen betroffene Kontingente), Punkt 6 des Befehls 00447 lesen darf. Der Text ist bisher nur unvollständig publiziert.149 Die Vernichtungsaktion sollte am 10. August 1937 beginnen und zwei Monate dauern. Als Zielgruppe der Verfolgung sind genannt : “Ehemalige Kulaken, Mitglieder zarischer Straforgane (karateli), Banditen, Weiße, Anhänger von Sekten und Kirchenmitglieder sowie andere Konterrevolutionäre, die sich in den Lagern aktiv und subversiv antisowjetisch betätigen.” Und natürlich gehören auch “die kriminellen Elemente, die in den Lagern
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ihre verbrecherische Tätigkeit ausüben”, dazu. Der Befehl 00447 hatte für die Lager des NKVD eine Tötungsquote von 10.000 festgelegt ; in Ežovs Direktive, die an die Leitung der regionalen NKVD-Dienstellen und der Lager auf ihrem Territorium adressiert war, wird das Vernichtungsoll für die einzelnen Lager zugeteilt.150 Die Listen der Todeskandidaten, die in den Lagern von der dritten (operativ-čekistischen) Abteilung zusammengestellt wurden,151 wurden ebenfalls ohne neue Untersuchungen den Trojki zugestellt.
46 Die ersten Lagerhäftlinge wurden im August 1937 von den Schnelltribunalen verurteilt, so in Karelien ;152 die Operation dürfte zwischen Februar und April 1938 ihren Höhepunkt erreicht haben (vgl. auch Tabelle : Lager des NKVD) und erst im November 1938 zu Ende gegangen sein. In mehreren Territorien war die Kampagne gegen die Gulaghäftlinge 1938 noch im Gang, als die Repressalien (nach 00447) außerhalb der durch Stacheldraht abgetrennten Welt bereits eingestellt worden waren. So im Gebiet Archangel'sk, wo die Trojka von Oktober 1937 bis April 1938 2.755 Häftlinge des Uchtpečlag zur Exekution befahl153 oder in Karelien, wo die Operation 00447 am 15. April 1938 auslief, danach aber noch vier Trojkasitzungen stattfanden -- die letzte am 10. November 1938 -- auf denen ausschließlich Häftlinge des Belbaltlag abgeurteilt wurden.154 In dem sich über Stadt und Gebiet Moskau erstreckenden Dmitlag -- Mitte der dreißiger Jahre mit 192.000 Insassen das größte Lager im Archipel Gulag -, dessen Häftlinge den Moskau-Wolga Kanal bauten, begannen die Verhaftungen unmittelbar nach der Eröffnung der Wasserstraße (14. Juli 1937). Vom 2. September 1937 bis zum 5. Juni 1938 verurteilte die Trojka beim UNKVD der oblast' Moskau Lagerinsassen zum Tode ; die meisten wahrscheinlich im März 1938, als auf 9 von 14 Trojkasitzungen Todesstrafen gegen zeki verhängt wurden.155 Die blutigste Aktion im Rahmen der Direktive 409 fand 1938 in der Fernöstlichen Region statt : Im Rahmen der Säuberung der Grenzgebiete von “antisowjetischen Elementen” billigte das Politbüro am 1. Februar 1938 unter dem Punkt “Maßnahmen zur Verminderung der Häftlingspopulation der fernöstlichen Lager”, den folgenden Vorschlag des NKVD: In der Fernöstlichen Republik sollten bis zum 1. April 1938 zusätzlich156 12.000 Häftlinge, die wegen schwerer Delikte (Spionage, Terror, Landesverrat, kriminelle Vergehen) bestraft worden waren, durch die Trojka zum Tode verurteilt werden. (vgl. Tabelle, Lager des NKVD). Nach den Angaben von Stanislav Kuz'min, 1993 Professor an der Akademie des MVD, der NKVD-Archivalien ausgewertet hat, wurden im Rahmen der Aktion in den Lagern des NKVD 30.178 Menschen getötet.157
47 Ob es auch eine besondere Anweisung zur Säuberung der Arbeitsbesserungskolonien gegeben hat, ist bisher nicht bekannt, wohl aber, daß Insassen der ITK von Trojki zur Höchststrafe verurteilt wurden.158 Wahrscheinlich gab es auch keine spezielle Direktive zur Durchführung von Befehl 00447 in den “Arbeitssiedlungen” der deportierten Kulaken. Wir wissen aber, daß Tausende trudposelency der Operation zum Opfer fielen. 159
48 In diesem Kontext soll noch kurz auf zwei lokale Aktionen eingegangen werden, die vielleicht nur deshalb als singulär erscheinen, weil wir bisher über die Umsetzung von Befehl 00447 noch wenig wissen :
49 In der Tatarischen Republik geschah am 1. November 1937 Außergewöhnliches : Die “Organe” übergaben dem Gericht 19 alte (über 60 Jahre) und kranke Menschen, die sie festgenommen hatten, als Anfang Oktober befohlen wurde, mit den Verhaftungen für die zweite Kategorie (Gulag-bzw. Gefängniseinweisungen) zu beginnen. Der Kazaner
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Historiker Stepanov, der den Vorfall berichtet, scheint der Ansicht zu sein, daß die Sicherheitspolizei den für die harte Arbeit in den Lagern nicht geeigneten Personen zu milderen Strafen verhelfen wollte.160 In Moskau stand die Staatssicherheit Anfang 1938 vor einem ähnlichen “Problem”, sie entschied sich für die brutalste Lösung. Von der Trojka waren Ende 1937 einige Hundert Invaliden und “begrenzt Arbeitsfähige” zu unterschiedlichen Lagerstrafen verurteilt worden. Da es nicht gelang, alle Verurteilten in konclagerja einzuweisen -- die Hauptverwaltung der Lager sperrte sich gegen die Aufnahme161 -- befahl der berüchtigte NKVD-Funktionär L.M. Zakovskij, seit 20. Januar 1938 NKVD-Chef von Moskau und Stellvetreter Ežovs, sie erneut vor das Dreiergremium zu bringen. Er instruierte den Vorsitzenden der Trojka, M.I Semenov, daß alle zum “höchsten Strafmaß” (VMN) zu verurteilen seien, was im Februar 1938 auch geschah : 170 Invaliden (Arm- und Beinamputierte), Blinde, Tuberkulose- und Herzkranke wurden in den Tod geschickt,162 weil in den Moskauer Gefängnissen Platz für neue Häftlinge geschaffen werden sollte und die GULAG-Leitung sie als “Ausschuß” (brak)163 betrachtete, der in der Gulagökonomie nicht eingesetzt werden konnte.
50 Auf den ersten Blick haben auch die Repressionsmaßnahmen gegen die Taubstummengemeinde in Leningrad Ähnlichkeit mit gewissen NS-Operationen (Aktion T 4): Im August 1937 hatte die Polizei bei einer Hausdurchsuchung in der Wohnung eines Taubstummen einige Hitler-Bildchen gefunden. Diese waren deutschen Zigarettenpakkungen beigelegt, die dem ebenfalls taubstummen, im selben Hause wohnenden deutschen Politemigranten Albert Blüm gehörten. Der die Untersuchung leitende Polizeichef konstruierte aus diesen für einen Verschwörungsarchitekten verlockenden Ingredienzen die “Strafsache der antisowjetischen, faschistischen Terrororganisation des Gestapoagenten A. Blüm”, die auch noch mit dem deutschen Konsul in Leningrand in Verbindung stand. 54 Taubstumme, unter ihnen die kulturelle Elite der großen Leningrader Taubstummengemeinde, wurden verhaftet. Nach der üblichen Manipulation bei der Abfassung der Verhörprotokolle wurden sie am 17. Dezember 1937 von der Trojka verurteilt : 34 zur Höchstrafe, 19 zu 10 Jahren Lager.164 Der naheliegende Vergleich mit der Verfolgung Geisteskranker und Behinderter im NS- Regime verbietet sich jedoch wahrscheinlich in diesem Fall, weil nach unserem aktuellen Kenntnisstand diese Behinderung in der Sowjetunion der dreißiger Jahre keine Ursache für Diskriminierung war. Gerade die Taubstummen, die gut in die Arbeitswelt integriert waren, wurden vom Regime gefördert.165 Ein Indiz für zunehmende Brutalisierung der Operation 00447 sind die beiden Aktionen in jedem Fall. Noch eine letzte Bemerkung in diesem Zusammenhang : Bei der Durchsicht der Gedenkbücher fällt auf, daß viele Menschen über 60 Jahre unter den Ermordeten sind, 70-80jährige sind keine Seltenheit, besonders unter den “byvšie ljudi”.166 Unter den 3.859 im November 1937 in Leningrad erschossenen Personen waren 418 (11,1 %) über 60 Jahre alt, im Dezember waren es 413 (9,2 %).167 Hing dieser hohe Anteil alter Menschen damit zusammen, daß die furchtbaren “Richter” der Dreier- und Zweiergremien wußten, daß eine Verurteilung der Alten zu Lagerhaft nicht erwünscht war, da sie “keiner nützlichen Arbeit” mehr nachgehen konnten ?168
6. Auslaufen der Operation
51 Ein Indiz für das allmähliche Auslaufen der Operation 00447 ist der Politbürobeschluß 169 vom 15. September 1938 der ein neues System der Verurteilung der “konterrevolutionären nationalen Kontingente” schuf. Das alte Verfahren, nach dem
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die regionale Dvojka, NKVD-Chef und Oberster Staatsanwalt, der “Komissija NKVD i Prokuratury SSSR” in Moskau, auch “vysšaja dvojka” (Oberste Dvojka) genannt, Listen (die sog. “Alben”) mit kurzer Fallbeschreibung und Vorschlägen für das Strafmaß (Todesstrafe oder 5-10 Jahre Haftstrafe) zur Bestätigung zusandten, hatte sich als ineffizient erwiesen : Ežov bzw. die zuständigen Abteilungen der Sicherheitspolizei und Vyšinskijs Staatanwaltschaft der UdSSR gerieten 1938 mit der Erledigung dieser Aufgabe in erheblichen Rückstand. Zwischen Absendung und Rückerhalt der “Alben” lagen oft mehrere Monate, was sich auch anhand der Kurzbiographien in den Gedenkbüchern belegen läßt.170 Anfang September 1938 hatten sich in Moskau mehr als 126.000 unbearbeitete Strafakten angesammelt. Diese Trägheit des Zentrums führte zu überfüllten Gefängnissen in der Provinz und provozierte Beschwerdebriefe der betroffenen Machhaber.171 Daher verfügte das Politbüro, daß in den Gebieten, Regionen und Republiken “osobye trojki ” (Sondertrojki) zu bilden seien, welche die von den Dvojki nicht erledigten Strafsachen gegen vor dem 1. August 1938172 verhaftete Angehörige der Diaspora-Nationalitäten entscheiden sollten. Auch die Sondertrojki erhielten die Vollmacht, Todesstrafen sowie Lager- und Gefängnishaft von 5 bis 10 Jahren zu verhängen, waren aber auch befugt, Untersuchungsverfahren neu zu eröffnen und Verhaftete bei Mangel an Beweisen freizusprechen. Der Text von Prikaz 00447 sah solches nicht vor. Näheres regelte der Prikaz 00606 des NKVD vom 17. September 1938.173 Die personelle Zusammensetzung der traditionellen Dreierkommission und der Sondertrojka war identisch ; in einigen wenigen Regionen und Gebieten gab es somit im September/Oktober 1938 zwei identisch besetzte Dreiertribunale, die jedoch unterschiedliche Kompetenzen und Zuständigkeiten hatten.
7. Ende der Massenrepressionen
52 Anfang November 1938 hatten sich die Anzeichen für einen Kurswechsel in der sowjetischen Repressionspolitik so sehr verdichtet, daß in Moskau bereits Gerüchte über das Ausscheiden Ežovs aus dem Amt die Runde machten ; vielen galt er als die treibende Kraft des Massenterrors.174 Am 15. November 1938 war es dann soweit : Das Politbüro billigte auf Anfrage der Staatsanwaltschaft der Sowjetunion den Entwurf einer Direktive, die vom Rat der Volkskommissare und dem Zentralkomitee der Partei verabschiedet werden sollte und deren Kernsatz lautete : “Wir erteilen die strengste Anweisung : Ab dem 16. November dieses Jahres sind bis auf weiteres alle Verhandlungen von Strafsachen durch die Trojki einzustellen.”175 Einen Tag später wurde der Beschluß des Rats der Volkskommissare und des Zentralkomites “Über Verhaftungen, staatsanwaltliche Aufsicht und Durchführung des Untersuchungsvefahrens”176 von Molotov und Stalin unterzeichnet und den Leitern des NKVD, den Parteisekretären und leitenden Staatsanwälten der Republiken, Regionen, Gebiete, Stadt- und Rajonabteilungen zugestellt : insgesamt also einem Kreis von ca. 14.000 Personen, was angibt, daß die Partei- und Staatsführung der Direktive weite Verbreitung wünschte. Der Textentwurf war von einer durch das Politbüro am 8. Oktober 1938 eingesetzten Kommission ausgearbeitet worden, der Ežov, Berija, Vyšinskij, Malenkov und N.M. Ryčkov, Vorsitzender des Obersten Gerichts der UdSSR, angehörten.177 Stalin und Molotov ziehen zunächst eine positive Bilanz der Repressionskampagne gegen die ehemalige Parteiopposition (Trotzkisten- Bucharinisten) und der Massenoperationen gegen Kulaken, Kriminelle und andere sowjetfeindliche “Elemente” sowie gegen die “nationalen konterrevolutionären
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Kontingente”; sie üben jedoch schärfste Kritik an den vom NKVD und der Staatsanwaltschaft in diesem Kontext gemachten “Fehlern” und verursachten “Enstellungen der revolutionären Gesetzlichkeit”, die letztlich auch den Endsieg über die Feinde verhindert hätten. Angeprangert werden Verzicht auf Beschaffung von Beweismaterial zur Überführung der Volksfeinde (durch die agentura), unbegründete und gesetzwidrige Massenverhaftungen und massive Verletzungen elementarster Normen beim Untersuchungsverfahren. Über die 1937/1938 gängige Praxis der Erpressung von Geständnissen durch die Folter hüllt sich die Resolution der Partei- und Staatsführung aus guten Gründen in Schweigen. Nach Stalins und Molotovs Lesart wurden die genannten Exzesse letztendlich durch in den NKVD und die Staatsanwaltschaft eingedrungene Feinde verursacht, ein im stalinistischen Diskurs der dreißiger Jahre immer wieder auftauchender Mechanismus der Schuldzuschreibung. Und diesen sei es auch gelungen, Geheimpolizei und Staatsanwaltschaft der Kontrolle der Partei zu entziehen. Mit dem Verbot, weiterhin Massenverhaftungen und Deportationen durchzuführen, und der Anordnung, die Trojka, die zentrale Repressionsinstitution des Großen Terrors, und gleichzeitig die im Mai 1935 geschaffenen Polizeitrojki aufzulösen, erklärten Partei- und Staatsführung den Großen Terror für beendet. Verhaftungen sollten in Zukunft, so wie in Artikel 127 der Verfassung festgelegt, nur noch auf Beschluß des Gerichts oder mit Genehmigung des Staatsanwalts erfolgen ; Strafsachen sollten, entsprechend den gesetzlichen Normen, den ordentlichen Gerichten und dem Osoboe Soveščanie des NKVD übergeben werden ; ein langer Katalog von Bestimmungen sollte Verhaftete vor Willkürmaßnahmen der Untersuchungsleiter schützen. Ganz neu waren diese Forderungen nicht ; in den im Text genannten Direktiven vom Mai 1933 und Juni 1935 hatten der Vorsitzende des Rats der Volkskommissare (Molotov) und der Erste Sekretär des Zentralkomitees (Stalin) das Ende von Massendeportationen und -verhaftungen verkündet und Verhaftungen an die Genehmigung der Staatsanwaltschaft gebunden. 1937/1938 finden sich die Namen beider unter allen Dokumenten, die den Massenterror in Gang setzten. Die dem Text der Resolution immanente Deutung der Ereignisse der Jahre 1937-1938 tendiert dazu, diese Tatsache zu verschleiern und die Führung von Partei und Staat von der Verantwortung für die Massenoperationen zu entlasten ; so zum Beispiel für die im Politbürobeschluß vom 2. Juli 1937 initiierte, am 31. Juli sanktionierte und darauf in Dutzenden von Politbürobeschlüssen gebilligte quotenregulierte Vernichtung von Feinden. Die schon sehr früh für den Großen Terror gebrauchte Bezeichnung “ežovščina”178 kam dieser Deutung der Ereignisse entgegen. Ihr war ein langes Leben beschieden : Bei Stalinapologeten179 wie bei Historikern.180 In diesen Kontext paßte es, daß der NKVD-Chef wenige Tage nach der Resolution, am 23. November 1938, dem Politbüro sein Rücktrittsgesuch unterbreitete, das von diesem am 24. November angenommen wurde. In einer langen Erklärung vom 26. November 1938 (Prikaz 00762) übte der neue Volkskommissar des Inneren Berija im Namen seiner Behörde Selbstkritik und versprach, die in der Resolution vom 17. November postulierte Rückkehr in die sowjetische Legalität. Nicht weniger als 18 zwischen Juli 1937 und September 1938 ergangene Befehle, Zirkulare und Verordnungen des NKVD, in denen Repressalien gegen bestimmte Zielgruppen angeordnet und die Modalitäten ihrer Umsetzung geregelt waren, wurden außer Kraft gesetzt bzw. aufgehoben. Darunter auch der Befehl 00447. Ohne Zweifel war jeder dieser “podzakonnye akty” (quasigesetzlichen Akte) durch einen Politbürobeschluß legitimiert worden.
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53 Punkt 16 von Prikaz 00762 forderte, allen operativen Mitarbeitern des NKVD der Zentrale und der Provinz ein Exemplar des Strafgesetzbuches und der Strafprozeßordnung zuzustellen.181
54 Rolf Binner Marc Junge
55 Iepenplein 80b Lehrstuhl für Osteuropäische Geschichte
56 1091 JR Amsterdam Ruhr-Universität -- Bochum
57
58 e-mail : [email protected] e-mail : [email protected]
Tabelle zum Operativen Befehl 00447
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NOTES
1. Vgl. F. Beck, W. Godin, Russian purge and the extraction of confession, New York, 1951, S. 75. 2. B.G. Men' šagin, Vospominanija. Smolensk... Katyn'... Vladimirskaja tjurma..., Paris, 1988, S. 60ff. 3. Vgl. dazu Åak Rossi [Jacques Rossi], Spravočnik po GULagu. Istoričeskij slovar' sovetskich penitentarnych institucij i terminov, svjazannych s prinuditel'nym trudom, London, 1987, S. 412 mit Verweisen. 4. A. Solschenizyn, Der Archipel GULAG, Bd 1, Reinbek, 1983, S. 267. Auch Solschenizyn muß der von ihm selbst beschriebenen Anonymität der Trojki Tribut zollen, denn er läßt ihre Geschichte noch vor 1937 in die der “OSO”, eines anderen außergerichtlichen Organs (vgl. unten), übergehen. 5. Der 1908 geborene Autor studierte 1933-1937 am Institut der Roten Professur in Moskau, arbeitete im Gebietskomitee der VKP(b) der Autonomen Sowjetrepublik der Čečenen und Ingušen und leitete deren Parteiverlag. Zwischen 1937 und 1942 wurde er zweimal verhaftet und wieder freigelassen. 1943 wurde er nach Deutschland deportiert, wo er nach 1945 blieb und für das Münchener Institut zur Erforschung der UdSSR arbeitete. 6. A. Avtorkhanov, Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party. A study in the technology of power, München, 1959, S. 219-221. 7. In seinen Erinnerungen gibt Avtorchanov an, er habe 1937 in Groznyj im Gebietskomitee der Partei entsprechende von Stalin, Ežov und Vyšinskij unterzeichnete “Instruktionen” gesehen, vgl. A. Avtorkhanov, Memuary, Frankfurt, 1984, S. 546-547. 8. Ebenda, S. 546. In der 1990-1992 veröffentlichten Version der Memoiren erwähnt Chruščev die Trojki, will jedoch den Anschein erwecken, als wären an ihnen nur die Sicherheitsorgane beteiligt gewesen. “Diese Leute [die Lagerhäftlinge] verhaftete die Staatssicherheit, die Untersuchung führte ebenfalls die Staatssicherheit und die Staatssicherheit fällte auch die Urteile. Die ‘Trojki’, die bei der Staatssicherheit errichtet wurden, machten, was sie wollten.” “Memuary Nikity Sergeeviča Chruščeva”, Voprosy istorii, 2-3, 1992, S. 94. 9. “O vnesudebnych organach”, Izvestija CK KPSS, 10, 1989, S. 80-82. 10. J.Arch Getty, Oleg V. Naumov, The road to terror. Stalin and the self-destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, New Haven, 1999, S. 471. 11. Die von Getty und Naumov vorgelegte Quellensammlung enthält zahlreiche von Stalin unterzeichnete Mordbefehle, darunter einige in Faksimile. Vgl. auch die bisher nicht publizierten 383 Listen, auf denen 44.000 Angehörige der sowjetischen politischen, militärischen, wirtschaftlichen und intellektuellen Elite zum Tode (39.000) oder zu Haftstrafen von 8 bis 25 Jahren (5.000) verurteilt wurden. 372 bzw. 362 dieser Listen tragen die Unterschriften von Molotov und Stalin. “Massovye repressii opravdany byt’ ne mogut”, Vestnik, 1, 1995, S. 124. 12. Vgl. Ch. Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord. Forschungen zur deutschen Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Hamburg, 1998. Nach Joachim Fest ist ein einziger, von Hitler unterzeichneter Mordbefehl überliefert : Der im Oktober 1939
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unterschriebene Auftrag zur Tötung von “unheilbar Kranken”, vgl. Der Spiegel, 43, 1999, S. 192. 13. Vgl. A. Graziosi, “The new Soviet archival sources. Hypotheses for a critical assessment”, Cahiers du Monde russe, 40, 1-2, 1999, S. 30-31 und O. Hlevnjuk, “L’historien et le document. Remarques sur l’utilisation des archives”, ebenda, S. 110-111. N.S. Chruščev gilt heute als der größte Quellenvernichter. 14. Zuden Konnten wir nur einen Teil der als “osobaja papka” qualifizierten Politbürobesclüsse einsehen. 15. “Das Jahr 1937 begann, genaugenommen, schon Ende 1934. Genauer gesagt -- am ersten Dezember 1934.” Vgl. J. Ginsburg, Marschroute eines Lebens, München, 1989, S. 9. 16. P51/94 Ob antisovetskich elementach, in : Rossijskij Gosudarstvennyj Archiv Social'no-Političeskoj Istorii (RGASPI), f. 17, op. 162, d. 21, l. 89. Erstmals veröffentlicht in : “Rasstrel po raznarjadke, ili Kak eto delali bol’ševiki”, Trud, 4. Juni 1992, S. 1, 4. 17. R. Hilberg, Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden, Bd 1-3, Frankfurt, 1990. 18. A.F. Stepanov, Rasstrel po limitu. Iz istorii političeskich repressij v TASSR v gody “ežovščiny”, Kazan, 1999, S. 8, 34 FN 12. 19. Vgl. N. Petrov, “Die Rolle der Organe der Staatssicherheit (OGPU-NKVD) in der UdSSR”, in : D. Dahlmann, G. Hirschfeld (Hrsg.), Lager, Zwangsarbeit, Vertreibung und Deportation. Dimensionen der Massenverbrechen in der Sowjetunion und in Deutschland 1933 bis 1945, Essen, 1999, S. 187-205, hier S. 192. Daneben waren die Exkulaken auch in den Listen der lišency bei den Rayonsowjets registriert. 20. Vgl. Tabelle Nr. 40/Moskau. Der Brief ist publiziert in : “Rasstrel po raznarjadke...”, art. cit., S. 1. 21. Vgl. die Diskussion über die Rolle von Kaganovič, Molotov, Malenkov und Chruščev im Großen Terror auf dem Juni-Plenum des Zentralkomitees im Jahre 1957, in : Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovič. 1957. Stenogramma ijun'skogo plenuma CK KPSS i drugie dokumenty. Sost.: N.Kovaleva, A.Korotkin u.a., Moskau, 1998, S. 68-69, 159-204, 488-489. 22. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 21, ll. 95-99. 23. Ebenda, l. 99. 24. Izvestija, 20.12.1937, S. 1. 25. N. Rabič, “Gnilaja i opasnaja teorija prevraščenija klassovych vragov v ručnych”, Bol'ševik, 7, 1. April 1937, S. 55. 26. Vgl. dazu das auf der Hamburger Arbeitstagung “Stalinistischer Terror, Massenrepressalien, Gulag” (21.-22. Februar 1998) gehaltene Referat von N. Petrov, “Tod nach Plansoll : Der operative NKWD-Befehl Nr. 00447”, S. 3. 27. Für das Gebiet Omsk vgl. das Interview mit dem an der Operation 00447 beteiligten NKVD-Funktionär von Tjumen', der auch 1998 seine Anonymität nicht preisgeben wollte, in : R. Gol'dberg, “Slovo i delo po-sovetski. Poslednyj iz NKVD”, Rodina, 9, 1998, S. 85-87. 28. Mironov geht von der Annahme aus, daß die beantragte und vom Politbüro gebilligte Erschießungsquote für Westsibirien (10.800) endgültig sei.
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29. Von Mironovs Rede ist ein Stenogramm überliefert. Auszüge daraus sind publiziert in : Bol' ljudskaja. Kniga pamjati Tomičej, repressirovannych v 30-40-e i načale 50-ch godov, Tom 5. Sost. V.N. Ujmanov, Tomsk, 1999, S. 102-103, 110-111. 30. S.A. Papkov, Stalinskij terror v Sibiri 1928-1941, Novosibirsk, 1997, S. 211. 31. G. Stankovskaja, “Kak delali ‘vragov naroda’”, in : Gody terrora. Kniga pamjati žertv političeskich repressii. Sost. A.B. Suslov, N. Gaševa, Perm', 1998, S. 92-108, S. 107: “Ich bin absolut davon überzeugt, daß die Augustkampagne zur Verhaftung der Kulaken richtig war.” 32. “Posetiteli Kremlevskogo Kabineta I.V. Stalina”, Istoričeskij archiv, 4, 1995, S. 58-62. 33. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 21, l. 161. 34. Kniga pamjati žertv političeskich repressij. [Ul'janovskaja oblast']. Sost. Ju.M. Zolotov, Ul'janovsk, 1996, S. 766-780. 35. GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei). 1917-1960. Sost. A.I. Kokurin, N.V. Petrov, Moskau, 2000, S. 96-104. 36. Vgl. dazu den häufig zitierten Brief des zu fünf Jahren ITL (Ispravitel'no-Trudovoj Lager') verurteiten Čekisten P.A. Egorov vom Dezember 1938 an Stalin, zitiert bei : V.N. Ujmanov, Repressii. Kak eto bylo... (Zapadnaja Sibir' v konce 20-ch - načale 50-ch godov), Tomsk, 1995, S. 95-96. 37. W. Hedeler, R. Stoljarowa, “R. N. Bucharin an Stalin”, Sozialismus, 3, 1993, S. 59. 38. Bei der Liste der Territorien ist den Autoren des Befehls ein Fehler unterlaufen : Nr. 30 “Vostočno-Sibirskij kraj” muß sein “Vostočno-Sibirskaja oblast'” (Umwandlung am 5. Dezember 1936). 39. Das Politbüro hatte zwar am 10. Juli 1937 eine Trojka für die gesamte Republik Kazachstan etabliert (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 21, l. 96.), beschloß dann aber noch am selben Tag, in jeder oblast' der Republik Dreiergremien einzusetzten. 40. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 21, l. 99. 41. Zitiert nach N. Petrov, “Tod nach Plansoll...”, op. cit., S. 8, der keine Quelle für dieses Zitat anführt. 42. Am 3. August 1937 wurde vom Politbüro zusätzlich in der Westsibirischen Region in der Ojrotskaja avtonomnaja oblast' eine Trojka eingerichtet, vgl. P51/684 in : Rossijskij Gosudarstvennyj Archiv Novejšej Istorii (RGANI), f. 89, op. 73, d. 67, l.1. 43. Da später der 10. Dezember 1937 als Abschlußtermin festgesetzt wurde und zwei Tage später die Wahlen zum Obersten Sowjet stattfanden, wurde der ganzen Operation auch eine wichtige Funktion in der Absicherung dieser Wahlen zugeschrieben. Auf dem Februar-März Plenum 1937 waren in der Tat Befürchtungen geäußert worden, daß “die Feinde” einige Wahlbezirke erobern könnten, u.a. von Stalin selbst, vgl. “Materialy fevral'sko-martovskogo plenuma CK VKP(b) 1937 goda”, Voprosy istorii, 7, 1993, S. 5. Dieses Motiv dürfte aber von nur sekundärer Bedeutung gewesen sein. 44. Soweit uns bis jetzt bekannt, haben sich nur die NKVD-Dienststellen in Kazan und Jaroslavl' an diese Bestimmung gehalten. 45. Auszüge aus diesem Telegramm sind zitiert in : B.B. Brjuchanov, E.N. Šoškov, Opravdaniju ne podležit. Ežov i ežovščina 1936-1938 gg., Sankt-Petersburg, 1998, S. 76. Verhaftungen sollten nur mit Zustimmung des Staatsanwalts erfolgen, hatten der Rat der Volkskommissare und das Zentrakomitee am 17. Juni 1935 verfügt. Vgl. auch
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Artikel 127 der Verfassung von 1936: “Niemand kann anders als auf Gerichtsbeschluß oder mit Genehmigung des Staatsanwaltes verhaftet werden.” 46. Zitiert nach N.R. Mironov, “Vosstavnovlenie i razvitie leninskich principov socialističeskoj zakonnosti (1953-1963 gg.)”, Voprosy istorii KPSS, 2, 1964, S. 19. 47. Memorial-Aspekt. Special'nyj vypusk informacionnogo bjulletenja Moskovskogo Memoriala, 1, 1993, S. 1. 48. Bol' ljudskaja, op. cit., Tom 5, S. 176-177, 224-225; V.N. Ujmanov, Repressii..., op. cit.; G. Stankovskaja, “Kak delali ‘vragov naroda’”, art. cit., S. 95-105. 49. O. Hlevnjuk, “Les mécanismes de la ’Grande Terreur’ des années 1937-1938 au Turkménistan”, Cahiers du Monde russe, 39, 1-2, 1998, S. 202-205. 50. Publiziert in : Neizvestnaja Rossija XX VEK, Bd 1, 1994, S. 237-245. 51. Vgl. V.P. Popov, “Gosudarstvennyj terror v sovetskoj Rossii. 1923-1953 gg. (istočniki i ich interpretacija)”, Otečestvennye archivy, 2, 1992, S. 28. 52. Vgl. Stalinskoe Politbjuro v 30-e gody. Sbornik dokumentov. Sost. O.V. Chlevnjuk, A.V. Kvašonkin u.a., Moskau, 1995, S. 63-65. 53. Der Text des Politbürobeschlusses ist veröffentlicht bei M. Vylcan, V. Danilov, “Primenenie VMN ‘nami garantiruetsja’”, Nauka i žizn', 9, 1997, S. 68-72. 54. O. W. Chlewnjuk, Das Politbüro. Mechanismen der politischen Macht in der Sowjetunion der dreißiger Jahre, Hamburg, 1998, S. 272. 55. Vgl. Kniga pamjati žertv političeskich repressij Kemerovskoj oblasti, Bd 2. Sost. L.I. Gvozdkova, Kemerovo, 1996. Den Angaben läßt sich entnehmen, daß diese Trojka der Westsibirischen Region am 9., 25., 29. Juli und am 1., 3., 4. August 1937 tagte und allein über 30 Personen der Stadt Kemerovo und Umgebung zum Tode verurteilte. 56. Vgl. z.B. O.F. Suvenirov, Tragedija RKKA 1937-1938, Moskau, 1998, S. 231; M. Ilic, “The Great Terror in Leningrad. A quantitative analysis”, Europe-Asia Studies, 52, 8, 2000, S. 1533. 57. Vgl. Leningradskij martirolog 1937-1938. Sost. A.Ia. Razumov u.a., Bd 1-4, Sankt Petersburg, 1995-1999. In den Bänden 2-4 sind zahlreiche Dokumente reproduziert, die “Osobaja trojka” im Kopf haben. In Bd 4 gibt es einen etwas kryptischen Hinweis der Herausgeber, daß von ihnen erstmals gesichtete Trojkaprotokolle aus der zweiten Augusthälfte 1937 über die Aburteilung von “Kriminellen und sozialgefährlichen Elementen” als “Sitzungen der Trojka (im Unterschied zu der Osobaja trojka) UNKVD L[eningradskoj O[blasti] überschrieben sind.” (S. 576). 58. Archiv FSB Jaroslavskoj oblasti (ohne Archivsignatur). 59. M. Vylcan, V. Danilov, “Primenenie VMN...”, art. cit., S. 69-70 (osobaja und spectrojka); ebenso M. Šrejder, NKVD iznutri. Zapiski čekista, Moskau, 1995, S. 70, 74, 76, 86, 103; Postanovlenie SNK SSSR i CK VKP(b) vom 17. November 1938 in Istoričeskij archiv, 1, 1992, S. 127 hat “sudebnaja trojka”. 60. Dieser am 27. Mai 1935 in den Republiken, Regionen und Gebieten geschaffenen Instanz gehörten der entsprechende Leiter des NKVD, der Polizei und der Leiter der Abteilung des NKVD, in dessen Kompetenzbereich die behandelte Strafsache fiel, sowie der Staatsanwalt an. Die Miliztrojka behandelte keine politischen Strafsachen, sondern Verstöße gegen das Paßsys-tem, sie verurteilte berufsmäßige Bettler, rückfällige Kleinkriminelle, sowie Arbeits- und Obdachlose bis zu fünf Jahren ITL, vgl. G.T. Rittersporn, “Extra-judicial repression and the Courts : Their relationship in the 1930s”,
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in : P.H. Solomon (Hrsg.), Reforming justice in Russia, 1864-1996. Power, culture, and the limits of legal order, New York, 1997, S. 207-227. 61. Zur Absetzung der Partei- und NKVD-Führung Saratovs in der zweiten Julihälfte 1937 vgl. den Brief (19. Juli) von A.A. Andreev und G.M. Malenkov, den Exekutoren der Säuberung, an Stalin, in : Sovetskoe rukovodstvo. Perepiska 1928-1941, Moskau, 1999, S. 364-365. 62. Vgl. Postanovlenie Politbjuro CK ob antisovetskich elementach, P51/187 vom 9. Juli 1937, P 51/199 und 206 vom 10. Juli 1937, P 51/351 vom 23. Juli 1937, P 51/409 vom 28. Juli 1937. in : RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 21, ll. 95-99, 108, 119. Die endgültige Liste der Trojkamitglieder, wie sie in den Prikaz 00447 aufgenommen wurde, ist veröffentlicht in : N. Gevorkjan, “Vstrečnye plany po uničtoženiju sobstvennogo naroda”, Moskovskie novosti, 25, 21. Juni 1992, S. 18-19. 63. Starkovs Befund “On average, party and state leaders in the provinces changed five to six times between 1937 and 1938” -- B.A. Starkov, “Narkom Ezhov”, in : J.A. Getty, R.T. Manning (Hrsg.), Stalinist Terror. New perspectives, Cambridge, MA., 1993, S. 34 -- dürfte etwas übertrieben sein. 64. Vgl. N.V. Petrov, K.V. Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD 1934-1941. Spravočnik, Moskau, 1999, S. 492-500. Die Säuberung der führenden NKVD-Kader hatte im Juli/August 1937 einen kurzen Höhepunkt (mit 8 bzw. 17 Verhaftungen) und erreichte von September 1938 bis Januar 1939 (12, 15, 20, 23, 19) ihre Klimax. 65. Vgl. hierzu P.H. Solomon, Jr., Soviet criminal justice under Stalin, Cambridge, 1996, S. 244-247. 1937-1938 “...90 % of regional procurators were purged.” In manchen Gebieten war das Amt des Obersten Staatsanwalts im Frühjahr 1938 gar nicht besetzt, ebenda, S. 245. 66. In einigen wenigen Territorien gehörte nicht der Staatsanwalt, sondern der Vorsitzende des Gebietsexekutivkomitees der Trojka an, z.B. in Omsk (vgl. V.M. Samosudov, Bol'šoj terror v Omskom Priirtyš'e 1937-1938, Omsk, 1998, S. 47), ebenso in Tatarstan, wo der Staatsanwalt der Republik E.M. Lejbovič an den Sitzungen als “Gast” teilnahm, vgl. A.F. Stepanov, Rasstrel po limitu, op. cit., S. 56. 67. Vgl. hierzu die Statistiken in : Leningradskij martirolog 1937-1938, op. cit., Bd 3: Nojabr' 1937 goda, S. 589; Bd 4: Dekabr' 1937 goda, S. 689. 68. Vgl. dazu R. Gol'dberg, “Slovo i delo...”, art. cit., S. 85-87. 69. A.F. Stepanov, Rasstrel po limitu, op. cit., S. 30. 70. Der Schriftsteller Michail Prišvin notierte am 10. Oktober 1938 voll düsterer Vorahnungen in sein Tagebuch : “Die Grausamkeit (’ohne Recht auf Briefwechsel’) der Macht ist grenzenlos, unerträglich -- dies ist ein schwarzer Fleck in unserer Union ; alles für das Volk, der Tod für das Individuum.” Vgl. M. Prišvin, “Dnevnik 1938 goda (hrsg. von L.A. Rjazanova)”, Oktjabr', 1, 1997, S. 133. 71. 1955 wurde ihnen ein fiktives Sterbedatum und eine frei erfundene “natürliche” Todesursache mitgeteilt ; über den Sterbeort wurden keine Angaben gemacht, vgl. die faksimilierten Sterbeurkunden in Leningradskij martirolog 1937-1938, op. cit., Bd 2, Illustrationen 52-54. Zur bis 1989 verschleiernden Behandlung der Sterbedaten vgl. die Anweisung des Vorsitzenden des KGB V. Semičastnyj vom 26. Dezember 1962 und den Kommentar dazu von A.B. Roginskij in : Memorial-Aspekt. Special'nyj vypusk informacionnogo bjulletenja Moskovskogo Memoriala, 1, 1993, S. 2.
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72. Vgl. Butovskij poligon. 1937-1938 gg. Kniga pamjati žertv političeskich repressij, Bd 1, Moskau, 1997, S. 6, 17-30; Leningradskij martirolog 1937-1938, op. cit., Bd 1, S. 48-51. 73. Vgl. P51/442, in : RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 21, ll. 116-117. 74. GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei). 1917-1960, op. cit., S. 422. 75. Selbst den Archiven nahe Autoren sind auf das in Zeitungen der Hauptstadt publizierte Material angewiesen. 76. T. Lahusen, “Loin de Moscou. Nouveaux écrits sur l’Extrême-Orient russe de l’ère stalinienne”, Revue des Études slaves, 71, 1, 1999, S. 7-10. 77. Die Daten beziehen sich auf das Territorium des erst 1944 gebildeten Gebiets Tomsk. Statistiken, welche die Repressionen des Großen Terrors von Januar 1937 bis Dezember 1938 nach Monaten aufschlüsseln, gibt es inzwischen für mehrere Territorien, vgl. z. B. für Prikam'e bei G. Stankovskaja, “Kak delali ‘vragov naroda’”, art. cit., S. 107; für Nižnij Tagil V.M. Kirillov, Istorija repressij v Nižnetagil'skom regione Urala. 1920-e- načalo 50-ch gg. Bd 2: Tagillag 1940-e - nač. 50-ch gg., Nižnij Tagil, 1996, S. 210; für Leningrad, M. Ilic, “The Great Terror in Leningrad”, art. cit., S. 1525-1526. 78. In die gleiche Richtung weist ein Rapport des Leiters des NKVD des Kreises Pskov vom Mai 1938: In der ersten Jahreshälfte 1937 seien 45, in der zweiten 3.655 Personen aus politischen Gründen verhaftet worden, vgl. Ne predat' zabveniju. Kniga pamjati žertv političeskich repressij, Bd 1, Pskov, 1996, S. 33. 79. Vgl. hierzu die Anweisungen (Faksimileabdruck) des Chefs des UNKVD des Gebiets Kujbyšev I.P. Popašenko an den Leiter der Stadtabteilung von Ul'janovsk vom 4. August 1937 in : Kniga pamjati žertv političeskich repressij, op. cit., S. 797-798; am 1. August hatte Popašenko dem Kapitän des UGB die für seine Arbeit relevanten Punkte des Befehls 00447 resümiert und ihm die Repressionsziffern (100/199) für die Stadt Ul'janovsk mitgeteilt, ebenda, S. 799-800. Popašenko spricht davon, daß die erste Phase der Aktion (Verhaftung und Verurteilung der ersten Kategorie) bis zum 20. August beendet sein solle! Ferner : “Die Existenz der Trojka beim UNKVD und die Überweisung von Strafsachen zur Behandlung durch sie müssen strengster Geheimhaltung unterliegen sowohl gegenüber den Repressierten wie gegenüber den nicht-operativen Mitarbeitern der Organe des NKVD.” (S. 800). 80. In Jaroslavl' und Omsk ; in Karelien und in der Westsibirischen Region fand die erste Sitzung am 7., in Leningrad am 9., in Moskau (laut Butovskij poligon) am 14., in Tatarstan erst am 23. August statt. Zu Jaroslavl' vgl. Archiv FSB Jaroslavskoj oblasti. 81. I. Čuchin, Karelija-37: Ideologija i praktika terrora, Petrozavodsk, 1999, S. 76; A.F. Stepanov, Rasstrel po limitu, op. cit., S. 64; vgl. auch die Angaben für Leningrad in der Tabelle. 82. Zu Jaroslavl' vgl. Kopija doklada [A.M. Eršova] narkomu [N.I. Ežovu] o vypolnenii prikazov 00485, 00447, 00429, 00593, 00486, 941-386 (1937 g.), in : Archiv FSB Jaroslavskoj oblasti, f. 22, op. 4, d. 3, ll. 1-18. 83. So M. Šrejder, NKVD iznutri, op. cit., S. 69. 84. Ein Blick in den ersten Band des Leningrader Gedenkbuches macht deutlich, daß auch hier auf den ersten Sitzungen vom August 1937 eine hohe Zahl Häftlinge verurteilt wurde, die seit Monaten in Haft saßen, einige seit November 1936, vgl. Leningradskij martirolog 1937-1938, op. cit., Bd 1, S. 576.
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85. Vgl. für Karelien das Verzeichnis der Trojkasitzungen mit den Urteilen sowie die Listen der Erschießungen mit Datum, Ort und Namen der Täter bei I. Čuchin, Karelija-37, op. cit., S. 146-147, 153-156. 86. Vgl. dazu Leningradskij martirolog 1937-1938, op. cit., Bd 1-4. Hier sind Datum der Verhaftung, Verurteilung und Hinrichtung der von August bis Dezember 1937 im Gebiet Leningrad Erschossenen angegeben. Vgl. auch M. Ilic, “The Great Terror in Leningrad”, art. cit., S. 1527: “Nearly 88 % of all victims were executed within one week of their trial.” 87. Vgl. Butovskij poligon. 1937-1938 gg., op. cit., Bd 2. Sost. L.A. Golovkova u.a., Moskau, 1998, S. 169, 173, 174, 175, 182, 192, 199, 229, usw. Für Leningrad vgl. Leningradskij martirolog 1937-1938, op. cit., Bd 4, S. 27, 52, 69, 76, 444 usw. 88. Butovskij poligon. 1937-1938 gg., op. cit., Bd 2, S. 298. 89. Vgl. “Rešenija Osobych troek privodit' v ispolnenie nemedlenno”, Istočnik, 5, 1999, S. 85 und N. Ochotin, A. Roginskij, “Iz istorii ‘nemeckoj operacii’ NKVD 1937-1938 gg.” in : I.L. Ščerbakova (Hrsg.), Nakazannyj narod. Repressii protiv rossijskich nemcev, Moskau, 1999, S. 35-75, hier S. 38. 90. P51/872, in : RGANI, f. 68, op. 73, d. 76, l.1. 91. Leningradskij martirolog 1937-1938, op. cit., Bd 2, Illustration 82, Bd 3, S. 590-591. 92. A. Stepanov,“Rasstrel po limitu”, Volja, 6-7, 1997, S. 106. 93. I. Čuchin, Karelija-37, op. cit., S. 146. 94. S. Kropačev, Chronika kommunističeskogo terrora. Tragičeskie fragmenty novejšej istorii Otečestva. Sobytija. Masštaby. Kommentary, Bd 1, 1917-1940, Krasnodar, 1995, S. 47. 95. V.M. Samosudov, op. cit., S. 161, 241. 96. R. Gol'dberg, “Slovo i delo...”, art. cit., S. 86. 97. Vgl. z.B. L. Zakovskij, Špionov, diversantov i vreditelej uničtožim do konca! Moskau, 1937 (Auflage 500.000); Id., O nekotorych metodach i priemach razvedyvatel'nych organov i ich trockistsko-bucharinskoj agentury, Moskau, 1937 (Auflage 800.000). Der Autor war der Leiter des Leningrader NKVD. 98. Zitiert nach V.N. Ujmanov, Repressii..., op. cit., S. 96. 99. Zur angeblichen Tätigkeit und Entlarvung des ROVS (Russkij Obščevoinskij Sojuz) im Ural und in Westsibirien vgl. die Berichte der Trojka-Vorsitzenden/NKVD-Leiter der Gebiete Sverdlovsk (D.M. Dmitriev) vom 25. Oktober 1937 und Novosibirsk (Gorbač) vom 10. Dezember 1937 an Ežov, in : Istočnik, 1, 1994, S. 94-105. Wahrscheinlich beschuldigte man auch Soldaten und Offiziere der russischen Armee des Ersten Weltkrieges, die in deutsche Kriegsgefangenschaft geraten waren, der Zugehörigkeit zum ROVS. Ihre Erschießung empörte den Čekisten-Memoirenschreiber Šrejder vor allem, weil unter ihnen viele Rotarmisten aus dem Bürgerkrieg gewesen seien, vgl. M. Šrejder, NKVD iznutri, op. cit., S. 92-93. 100. S.A. Papkov, Stalinskij terror, op. cit., S. 219-220 101. J. Šapoval, “NKVD-Terror in der Ukraine”, S. 12 (Referat auf der Hamburger Arbeitstagung “Stalinistischer Terror, Massenrepressalien, Gulag” vom 21.-22. Februar 1998).
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102. Archivy kremlja i staroj ploščadi. Dokumenty po “delu KPSS”. Annotirovannyj spravočnik dokumentov, predstavlennych v konstitucionnyj sud Rossijskoj Federacii po “delu KPSS”, Novosibirsk, 1995, S. 20. 103. J.Arch Getty, O.V. Naumov, The road to terror, op. cit., S. 481. 104. Vgl. V.M. Samosudov, op. cit., S. 42-43, 52-53, 101-107. 105. A.A. Petrušin, “My ne znaem poščady...” Izvestnye, maloizvestnye i neizvestnye sobytija iz istorii Tjumenskogo kraja po materialam VČK-GPU-NKVD-KGB, Tjumen', 1999, S. 137. 106. Ju. Feofanov, “Rasstrel po 1-j kategorii”, Izvestija, 3. April 1996, S. 1, 5. 107. R. Manning, “Massovaja operacija protiv ‘kulakov i prestupnych elementov’: apogej Velikoj Čistki na Smolenščine”, in : Stalinizm v rossijskoj provincii. Smolenskie archivnye dokumenty v pročtenii zarubežnych i rossijskich istorikov. Sost. E.V. Kodin, Smolensk, 1999, S. 230-254, hier 239-241. 108. M. Vylcan, “Garantiruetsja vysšaja mera”, Trud, 2. August 1997, S. 5. 109. Das Politbüro hatte der Region Krasnojarsk und der Tatarischen ASSR am 9. Juli 1937 zugestanden, ihre Repressionsdaten erst im August vorzulegen, vgl. P51/187, in : RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 21, l. 95. Wir nehmen an, daß die von Stalin geschriebene undatierte Notiz die Reaktion auf den nachgereichten Repressionsplan aus Krasnojarsk ist. 110. O. Hlevnjuk, “Les mécanismes de la ‘Grande Terreur’...”, art. cit., S. 197-208. 111. Auszüge des Telegramms in : N. Ochotin, A. Roginskij, “Iz istorii ‘nemeckoj operacii’ NKVD...”, art. cit., S. 43. 112. R. Gol'dberg, “Slovo i delo...”, art. cit., S. 87. 113. Der bereits genannte inhaftierte NKVD-Funktionär Egorov erwähnt in seinem Brief an Stalin, der stellvertretende Leiter des UNKVD von Novosibirsk, I.A. Mal'cev, sei am 10. Dezember 1937 nach Tomsk gekommen und habe mitgeteilt : “Partei und Regierung haben die Frist für die Arbeit der Trojka bis zum 1. Januar 1938 verlängert.”. Insgesamt sollten bis 1. Januar 2.000 Fälle der Dvojka und Trojka von Novosibirsk vorgelegt werden. V.N. Ujmanov, Repressii..., op. cit., S. 98. 114. A.F. Stepanov, Rasstrel po limitu, op. cit., S. 93. 115. L. Takala, “Nacional'nye operacii OGPU/NKVD v Karelii”, in : V sem'e edinoj. Nacional'naja politika partii bol'ševikov i ee osuščestvlenie na Severo-Zapade Rossii v 1920-1950-e gody. (Pod redakciej T. Vichavajnena i I. Takala), Petrozavodsk, 1998, S. 189; I. Čuchin, Karelija-37, op. cit., S. 146. Čuchins Studie enthält in der Beilage eine Tabellle, welche die relevanten Daten über die Trojka der KASSR reproduziert (Datum der Sitzungen, Mitglieder, Urteile nach beiden Kategorien). 116. N. Petrov, A. Roginskij, “‘Pol'skaja operacija’ NKVD 1937-1938”, in : Repressii protiv poljakov i pol'skich graždan, Moskau, 1997, S. 30. 117. O. W. Chlewnjuk, Das Politbüro, op. cit., S. 277. 118. Vgl. A. Stepanov, Rasstrel po limitu, op. cit., S. 105-106. 119. Das hatte man in der “alten” Sowjetologie, gestützt auf die Resolution des Plenums, angenommen. Diese postuliert in der Tat ein Ende der “massenhaften, wahllosen” Repressionen, beschränkt die Forderung jedoch eindeutig auf Parteimitglieder, fordert aber gleichzeitig eine Verschärfung des Kampfes gegen die “in
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den Parteiapparat eingedrungenen maskierten Feinde der Partei”, vgl. Chrestomatija po istorii KPSS, Bd 2, Moskau, 1989, S. 255-263. 120. Vgl. hierzu Butovskij poligon. 1937-1938 gg., op. cit., Bd 1 und 2. 121. L. Takala, “Nacional'nye operacii OGPU/NKVD v Karelii”, art. cit., S. 190-191. 122. I. Čuchin, Karelija-37, op. cit., S. 18. 123. Veröffentlicht als Faksimilenachdruck in : Ju. Feofanov, “Rasstrel po 1-j kategorii”, art. cit., S. 5. 124. Am selben Tag wurde vom Politbüro beschlossen, die Operation gegen die “nationalen Kontingente” -- genannt sind 12 “Diasporanationalitäten” (Polen, Letten, Deutsche, Esten, Finnen, Griechen, Iranier, Chinesen, Rumänen, Bulgaren, Makedonier und die Charbiner -- bis zum 15. April fortzusetzen, vgl. N. Gevorkjan, “Vstrečnye plany...”, art. cit., S. 19. Auch hier hatte man die ursprünglich gesetzten Fristen nicht eingehalten, die größte Aktion (gegen die Polen) sollte am 20. November 1937 abgeschlossen sein, wurde dann aber zusammen mit anderen bis zum 10. Dezember und 1. Januar verlängert, vgl. N. Petrov, A. Roginskij, “‘Pol'skaja operacija’ NKVD...”, art. cit., S. 22-43. 125. Es fehlt die Kazachische SSR, deren Kennziffern in der ersten Phase der Operation nicht weniger als viermal erhöht worden waren (vgl. Tabelle). Im Nord-Kazachischen und Süd-Kazachischen Gebiet fanden noch am 5. und 8. Februar 1938 Trojkasitzungen statt, vgl. Političeskie repressii v Kazachstane v 1937-1938 gg. Sbornik dokumentov. Sost. I.N. Buchanova u.a., Alma-Ata, 1998, S. 263/309. 126. A. Solschenizyn, Der Archipel GULAG, op. cit., Bd 3, Reinbek, 1982, S. 353. 127. Vgl. z. B. “Dokladnaja zapiska ob itogach massovych operacij, provedennych po linii UGB Tatarskoj ASSR”, in : A.F. Stepanov, Rasstrel po limitu, op. cit., S. 86-117; bzw. Doklad Narkomu o vypolnenii prikazov 00485, 00447, 00429. 00593, 00486, 941-386 (1937 goda) [vom 14. Januar 1938]: Archiv FSB Jaroslavskoj oblasti, f. 22, op. 4, d. 3, ll. 1-18. 128. Zitiert nach V. Grišaev, Reabilitirovany posmertno. (K istorii stalinskich repressij na Altae), Barnaul, 1995, S. 39. 129. “Dokladnaja zapiska...”, art. cit., S. 117. 130. Vgl. Tabelle Ukrainische SSR, FN 123. 131. Der letzte kam möglicherweise am 28. Oktober 1938 aus der Burjato-Mongolischen ASSR, vgl. M. Vylcan, V. Danilov, “Primenenie VMN...”, art. cit., S. 70. 132. Den fettgedruckten Gebieten/Regionen zweimal. 133. Postanovlenie Politbjuro CK vom 29. August 1938, P68/168 in : RGANI, f. 68, op. 73, d. 151, l.1. In Moskau scheint die Dreierkommission bis Anfang Juli noch “regelmäßig” (10-12 mal per Monat) zusammengetreten zu sein (im April nur zweimal). Ermittelt anhand von Butovskij poligon. 1937-1938 gg., op. cit., Bd 1-4. 134. Vgl. Politbürobeschluß vom 15. November 1938, in : N. Gevorkjan, “Vstrečnye plany...”, art. cit., S. 19. 135. Vgl. zapiska Bykova, in : RGANI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 147, l. 7. 136. O. W. Chlewnjuk, Das Politbüro, op. cit., S. 278. Das Politbüro gab häufig eine Gesamtzahl für beide Kategorien vor, die heute nicht mehr differenziert werden kann. 137. N. Ochotin, A. Roginskij, “Iz istorii ‘nemeckoj operacii’ NKVD...”, art. cit., S. 74. 138. N. Petrov, A. Roginskij, “‘Pol'skaja operacija’ NKVD...”, art. cit., S. 30.
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139. Ermittelt anhand der Angaben in Butovskij poligon. 1937-1938 gg., op. cit., Bd 1 und 4. Für Karelien vgl. I. Čuchin, Karelija-37, op. cit., S. 147. 140. Vgl. V.M. Samosudov, op. cit., S. 241. Wir nehmen auf Grund der S. 14 angegebenen Kriterien an, daß die Sitzung vom 13. September 1938 die letzte im Rahmen von Prikaz 00447 war. Die vom Autor resümierten Sitzungsprotokolle vom 28. September bis 23. Oktober betreffen die vom Politbüro am 15. September 1938 eingesetzte Osobaja trojka. 141. In ihnen befanden sich “die gefährlichsten politischen Gegner der damals in der Sowjetunion Herrschenden”, aber auch Schwerverbrecher mit langen Haftstrafen. Am 1. März 1939 gab es in der Sowjetunion noch 15 solcher Gefängnisse mit 6.733 Häftlingen, vgl. V.N. Zemskov, “Zaključennye v 1930-e gody : social'no-demografičeskie problemy”, Otečestvennaja istorija, 4, 1997, S. 75. 142. Faksimile-Abdruck der an L.M. Zakovskij, den Leiter des UNKVD des Leningrader Gebiets, adressierten Anweisung in : Leningradskij martirolog 1937-1938, op. cit., Bd 2, Illustration 78-79. 143. Vgl. dazu die Übersicht in : Leningradskij martirolog 1937-1938, op. cit., Bd 4, S. 665-668. 144. Vgl. ebenda, Bd 2, Illustrationen 81-124 (Trojkasitzung vom 9. Oktober 1937/ Protokoll Nr. 81 mit 210 Todesurteilen), Bd 3, Illustrationen 87-291 (Sitzungen vom 9., 10., 14. Oktober 1937 /Protokolle 82-85 mit 907 Todesurteilen). 145. In Leningradskij martirolog 1937-1938, op. cit., Bd 4 sind die Namen dieser 509 zeki des Solovki-Gefängnisses nicht mehr gesondert, sondern zusammen mit den anderen im Dezember 1937 erschossenen Personen aufgeführt. Es gibt auch die durchaus sinnvolle getrennte Statistik, wie in Band 3, nicht mehr. 146. Unter den 1.116 Häftlingen des Solovki Gefängnisses, die im Oktober 1937 von der Troj-ka zum Tode verurteilt wurden, befand sich ein Großteil (vor allem im Dezember) 1936 verurteilter Trotzkisten, ukrainischer und kaukasischer “bürgerlicher Nationalisten” und wegen “konterrevolutionärer bourgeois-nationalistischer Tätigkeit” verhafteter Anhänger von M.Ch. Sultan-Galiev ; dazu ehemalige Offiziere der zarischen und Weißen Armeen, kriminelle Wiederholungstäter, die wegen der Bildung bewaffneter Banden (Art. 59.3), Hooliganismus (Art. 74), Flucht aus Haft, Lager und Verbannung (82), Diebstahl (62) und Erpressung (174) verurteilt waren. Viele Insassen des Sondergefängnisses waren bereits 1932-1934 von den Trojki der Entkulakisierungsperiode zum Tode verurteilt worden, wurden dann aber zu längjährigen Haftstrafen begnadigt. Unter ihnen waren nur wenige Bauern (1,8 %), mehr Arbeiter (18,2 %), es dominierten Wissenschaftler, Lehrer, Studenten und Angestellte (70 %); mit 60 % war der Anteil der Parteimitglieder außergewöhnlich hoch, was auch darauf verweist, daß es sich hier um Angehörige der technischen und administrativen Intelligenz handelt, vgl. die Statistik in Leningradskij martirolog 1937-1938, op. cit., Bd 3, S. 590-591. Nach der in Bd 4 publizierten Statistik wurden von den 1.627 im Jahre 1937 hingerichteten Solovki-Häftlingen 1.448 wegen politischer Delikite (Paragraph 58), darunter 780 wegen “trotzkistischer Tätigkeit”, und 179 wegen krimineller Vergehen verurteilt (S. 664). Unter den Erschossenen war auch der berühmte russische Religionsphilosoph P.A. Florenskij. 147. Leningradskij martirolog 1937-1938, op. cit., Bd 4, Illustration 87. 148. Archiv FSB Jaroslavskoj oblasti (ohne Archivsignatur). 149. Vgl. I. Čuchin, Karelija-37, op. cit., S. 123 und S. 160 (Faksimileabdruck).
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150. Im konkreten Fall 800 zeki für das Belomoro-Baltijskij ITL/Belbaltlag/BBL, I. Čuchin, Karelija-37, op. cit., S. 123, 160. 151. Für die Lagerleitungen war Ežovs Prikaz 409 ein willkommenes Instrument, um die Disziplin im Lager zu stabilisieren. Der Leiter der Dritten Abteilung der Lagerverwaltung des Uchtinsko-Pečorskij ITL (Komi ASSR) gab am 30. August 1937 die Anweisung, vorrangig “die Organisatoren von Hungerstreiks und Arbeitsverweigerer sowie Insassen, die konterrevolutionäre Agitation betrieben und Häftlinge und Ausreißer korrumpierten”, für die Trojka zu selektieren, zitiert nach S. Kuz'min, “Lagerniki. GULAG bez retuši”, Molodaja gvardija, 4, 1993, S. 170-212, hier S. 201. 152. Vgl. die Liste der Trojkasitzungen bei I. Čuchin, Karelija-37, op. cit., S. 146-147. Sitzungen, auf denen nur Todesurteile verhängt wurden, dürften “Verhandlungen” gegen Gulaghäftlinge sein. 153. Vgl. hierzu S. Kuz'min, “Lagerniki”, art. cit., S. 211. 154. I. Čuchin, Karelija-37, op. cit., S. 77/147. Der Autor schätzt, daß circa 3.000 Häftlinge des Belbaltlag im Rahmen der Operation 409 erschossen wurden, S. 125. 155. Ermittelt anhand der in Butovskij poligon. 1937-1938 gg., op. cit., Bd 2, S. 291-344, Bd 3, S. 269-340 und Bd 4, S. 275-330 abgedruckten Kurzbiographien verurteilter Lagerhäftlinge. 156. Also über die den Lagern der Region im Rahmen der Direktive 409 bereits zugeteilten (bisher nicht bekannten) Quote. 157. S. Kuz'min, “Lagerniki”, art. cit., S. 211. 158. Butovskij poligon. 1937-1938 gg., op. cit., Bd 2, S. 75, Bd 4, S. 47, 51, 54, 153. 159. Vgl. z. B. V.M. Kirillov, Åertvy repressii. Nižnij Tagil 1920-1980-e gody, Ekaterinburg, 1999, S. 94; G. Stankovskaja, “Kak delali ‘vragov naroda’”, art. cit., S. 97/99. 160. A.F. Stepanov, Rasstrel po limitu, op. cit ., S. 14. 161. Ein Prikaz Jagodas vom 12. Dezember 1934 verbot die Einweisung von Kranken und Invaliden in Lager (ITL), es sei denn, sie waren nach Paragraph 58 und 59.3 (Banditentum) verurteilt, vgl. A. Kokurin, N. Petrov, “Gulag : Struktura i kadry”, Svobodnaja mysl’-XXI. Teoretičeskij i političeskij žurnal, 9, 1999, S. 114, 117, 119. 162. Unsere Ausführungen zu diesem Fall beruhen auf dem Artikel von I. Osipova, “Pjat' del”, in : Soprotivlenie v Gulage. Vospominanija. Pis'ma. Dokumenty. Sost. S.S. Vilenskij, Moskau 1992, S. 114-127. Der Beitrag enhält eine Reihe von Ungenauigkeiten und Widersprüchlichkeiten, so wird nicht zwischen Miliztrojka und Trojka nach 00447 unterschieden. 163. So K.A. Pavlov, Direktor von Dal'stroj, in einem Brief an den Stellverteter Ežovs am 19. September 1938, in : 30 Oktjabrja, 10, 2000, S.12. 164. Vgl D.L. Ginzburg, “Pomnju tragičeskij 1937-j”, in : Leningradskij martirolog 1937-1938, op. cit., Bd 4, S. 675-678 und A. Razumov, Ju. Gruzdev, “Delo Leningradskogo obščestva gluchonemych”, ebenda, S. 678-681. 165. Vgl. dazu S. Burch, “Transcending revolutions : The tsars, the Soviets and deaf culture”, Journal of Social History, 34, 2, 2000, S. 393-401. 166. Samosudov berichtet von einem 1840 geborenen Oberst der zarischen Armee, der am 17. September 1937 von der Trojka zum Tode verurteilt wurde ; mit ihm der 74- jährige Weltkriegsinvalide A.P. Bykov (V.M. Samosudov, op. cit., S. 109). Seine Frau, die
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noch zwei Jahre später nichts über das Schicksal ihres Mannes weiß, schreibt 1939 an Berija, die Verhaftung müsse auf einem Mißverständnis beruhen, da ihr Mann wegen Krankheit und geistigen Verfalls ein totaler Pflegefall war. Unter den älteren Erschossenen in Leninrad (im September 1937) sind V.A. Prus (1874 in Warschau geb.) “Mitglied der VKP(b) seit 1899, 1937 im Zusammenhang mit der Verhaftung ausgeschlossen, in der Vergangheit Mitarbeiter des UNKVD LO”. Daneben A.A. Bibiksarov (1859 geb.), “ohne feste Arbeit und ohne festen Wohnsitz”. Die ältesten in Leningrad 1937 hingerichteten Frauen dürften die 1859 geborene Äbtissin A.J. Koževnikova und die im gleichen Jahr geborene Blumenverkäuferin (”ehemalige Baronesse”) S.I. Mengden-Turovskaja sein ; der älteste Mann der 1852 geborene Hirte F.V. Solov’ev. Vgl. Leningradskij martirolog 1937-1938, op. cit., Bd 1, S. 480/110, Bd 4, S. 211/303, Bd 3, S. 384. 167. Ebenda, Bd 3, S. 587, Bd 4, S. 686. 168. Leider wissen wir nicht, wie hoch der Anteil der Alten an den zu Lagerstrafen Verurteilten in Leningrad war, weil im martirolog nur Erschossene registriert sind. 169. Text bei Ju. Feofanov, “Rasstrel po 1-j kategorii”, art. cit., S. 5. 170. Vgl. Butovskij poligon. 1937-1938 gg., op. cit., Bd 4, S. 56: A.A. Gajdenak, Sowjetbürger ungarischer Nationalität, wurde am 8. März 1938 verhaftet und am 10. Oktober 1938 von der Osobaja Trojka der oblast' Moskau zum Tode verurteilt. 171. N. Ochotin, A. Roginskij, “Iz istorii ’nemeckoj operacii’ NKVD...”, art. cit., S. 61; N. Petrov, A. Roginskij, “‘Pol'skaja operacija’ NKVD...”, art. cit., S. 30. 172. Das Politbüro hatte am 26. Mai 1938 die Operation gegen die “konterrevolutionären nationalen Kontingente” zum viertenmal verlängert, diesmal bis zum 1. August 1938. Neben den im Politbürobeschluß vom 31. Januar 1938 aufgeführten 12 ethnischen Minoritäten sind hier zusäzlich die Afghanen genannt, vgl. P63/243 vom 26. Mai 1938, in : RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 29, l. 32. 173. Vgl. Pamiat´: Åertvy polititičeskich repressij. Rossijskaja Federacija. Respublika Mordovija. Sost. P.E. Sen´kin, F.P. Saraev, Saransk, 2000, S. 748-749. Eine vom stellvertretenden Volkskommissar des Inneren, Berija, gezeichnete Erläuterung (21.09.1938) zur Durchführung von Prikaz 00606 präzisiert den Personenkreis, der von den Sondertrojki abgeurteilt werden sollte. Angehörige der technischen, militärischen Elite sowie des NKVD fielen nicht in ihre Zuständigkeit. Daneben legte die Direktive fest, daß die Sondertrojki -- anders als im Politbürobeschluß vom 15.09.1938 und im Prikaz 00606 dekretiert -- auch Lagerstrafen “bis zum 5 Jahren” verhängen dürften, vgl. Ot ČK do FSB. Dokumenty i materialy po istorii organov gosbezopasnosti Tverskogo kraja. 1918-1998. Sost. V.A. Smirnov, A. V. Borisov, M. V. Cvetkova, Tver´, 1998, S. 168-170. Die Mitglieder der Sondertrojki bedurften keiner Bestätigung durch das Politbüro. In den knapp zwei Monaten ihres Bestehens verurteilten sie 105.032 Angehörige nationaler Minderheiten (keine Ausländer), darunter 72.254 zum Tode, N. Petrov, A. Roginskij, “‘Pol´skaja operacija’ NKVD...”, art. cit., S. 30.. 174. Tagebucheintrag V.I. Vernadskijs vom 5. November 1938. Vgl. “Dnevnik 1938 goda”, Družba narodov, 3, 1991, S. 260. 175. Veröffentlicht in : N. Gevorkjan, “Vstrečnye plany...”, art. cit., S. 19. 176. Veröffentlicht in : Istoričeslij archiv, 1, 1992, S.125-128. 177. Vgl. J.Arch Getty, O.V. Naumov, The road to terror, op. cit., S. 529-530 und O. W. Chlewnjuk, Das Politbüro, op. cit., S. 299.
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178. Tagebucheintrag V.I. Vernadskijs vom 4. Januar 1939: “An allen Orten und im ganzen Land ist offensichtlich, daß der Ruin Folge der ežovščina ist.”, vgl. “Dnevnik 1939 goda”, Družba narodov, 11-12, 1992, S. 8. 179. Molotov stellt in seinen “Memoiren” einen Zusammenhang zwischen dem Ežov zugeschriebenen System der Repression nach Quoten und seiner Absetzung her : “Man fing an, Ežov zu beschuldigen, er habe den Gebieten Quoten zugeteilt und von den Gebieten ausgehend den Bezirken Ziffern ; ein bestimmtes Gebiet hatte nicht weniger als 2.000 Personen zu liquidieren und ein bestimmter Bezirk nicht weniger als 50... Und dafür wurde er erschossen. Eine Kontrolle darüber gab es allerdings bereits nicht mehr.” Sto sorok besed s Molotovym. Iz dnevnika F. Čueva, Moskau, 1991, S. 399. 180. Der Petersburger Historiker Boris Starkov strickt an der Legende vom hintergangenen Stalin, wenn er 1993 Ežov nicht als willigen Exekutor der Aufträge Stalins, sondern als eigenmächtigen, autonomen Akteur im Großen Terror zeichnet : “Ezhov’s primary crime, however, consisted in the fact that he had not informed Stalin of his actions”, vgl. B.A. Starkov, “Narkom Ezhov”, art. cit., S. 38. 181. Organy Gosudarstvennoj Bezopasnosti SSSR v Velikoj Otečestvennoj Vojne. Sbornik dokumentov, Bd 1 Nakanune. Kniga pervaja (nojabr' 1938 g. -- dekabr' 1940 g.), Moskau, 1995, S. 16-21.
RÉSUMÉS
Résumé Comment la Terreur est devenue « grande » : étude des exécutions de masse et des condamnations à l’incarcération en camp sur la base du Prikaz N° 00447. Le 31 juillet 1937, le Politbjuro du VKP(b) approuva l’avant-projet du NKVD « sur la persécution des anciens koulaks, des criminels et des autres éléments antisoviétiques ». Ce texte, généralement connu sous le nom de Prikaz n° 00447 et qui porte la signature de Ežov, fut publié pour la première fois en 1992. Cet ordre déclencha un tourbillon de terreur de masse dirigé par l’État qui n’affecta généralement pas les fonctionnaires de l’État et du parti mais frappa les citoyens ordinaires de plein fouet. C’est un des éléments les plus importants du phénomène connu à l’Est comme à l’Ouest sous l’appellation de « Grande Terreur ».
Abstract How the Terror became “Great”: Mass execution and camp sentences on the basis of Order 00447. On 31 July 1937 the Politbiuro of the VKP(b) approved the draft drawn up by the NKVD “about the operation to persecute former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements”. This text, traditionally known as Prikaz no. 00447 and signed by Ezhov, was first published in 1992. The order unleashed a maelstrom of State-inspired mass terror that, in the main, did not affect party or state functionaries, but hit ordinary Soviet citizens hardest. It is one of the key elements of what has become known in East and West as the “Great Terror.”
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Conflict and complicity : The expansion of the Karelian Gulag, 1923-1933.
Nick BARON
1. Introduction
1 During the early morning of 8 February 1928, 21 year old Dmitrii Sergeevich Likhachev was arrested in his parents’ flat on Oranienbaumskaia Street in Leningrad. After nearly a year in ‘investigative detention’ he was sent, together with student friends from a religious discussion group, to serve a five-year sentence in the prison camp on Solovetskii Island in the White Sea. Nearly sixty years later, interviewed during Gorbachev’s glasnost’ for a documentary film on the camp, Academician Likhachev recalled the words with which camp guards at the Kem´ transfer point in central Karelia welcomed the newly arrived inmates descending from railway carriages : “There’s no Soviet power here, only Solovetskii power!”1 This first encounter with the ‘special’ camp system2 evidently impressed itself deeply in his memory, for he recalled it also in his last published memoir : “I will not describe in detail the first days at Kem, on Popov island and in no. 13 company at Solovki ... there is no need to repeat everything. I will merely observe that as I got out of the car one of the escort drew blood from my face with his boot, and they all did their utmost to humiliate us. They shouted at us “Zdes´ vlast´ ne sovetskaia, zdes´ vlast´ solovetskaia.” 3
2 Officials of the Unified State Political Administration (the OGPU, informally known as the Chekists), who not only guarded the perimeters of camps, but also the external borders and internal social ‘frontiers’ of the state, cultivated the camp system in isolation from centres of formal political authority. Other Solovetskii memoir evidence also emphasises the Chekists’ assertion of autonomy from central civil authority.4 One former prisoner described A. P. Nogtev, commandant of the Solovetskii camp, as “an absolutely abnormal person, a maniac, which does not prevent him from being the ‘tsar
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and god’ over 5,000 prisoners.”5 Although there is already a large and increasing body of secondary historiography on the Soviet Gulag6 and a canon of memoir literature which offers insights into life and death in individual camps, there have been few attempts to investigate historically the structures and behaviour of the Gulag at regional level, or the politics of the Gulag between centre and periphery.7
3 The present paper attempts to explore these questions by addressing the development in the 1920s and early 1930s of ‘special’ institutions of forced labour in the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Karelian ASSR): the Solovetskii Camp of Special Designation (Solovetskii Lager´ Osobogo Naznacheniia, SLON, 1923-1931) and the Belomorsko-Baltiiskii Canal construction and camp complex (Belomorstroi and Belbaltlag, 1931-1933).8 It draws primarily on recently released archival documents to substantiate and supplement the bare outline of the story already known from published memoir sources. I trace the subsequent history of the Belomorsko-Baltiiskii Kombinat (BBK, 1933-1941), from 1934 under the authority of the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD SSSR), in a sequel paper.9 Here, the central concern is to investigate the complex, evolving configurations of conflict and complicity among Soviet political, economic and security interests, both in the centre and locally, and the consequences of their policy decisions for both Karelia and the regional ‘special’ camp system. That I dedicate relatively little space to describing the prisoners themselves, their social origins, their struggles to survive and the remarkable resilience and achievements of many in the face of the most brutal repression, is not to depreciate the tragedy or dignity of their stories : the reader is urged to consult the many memoir and biographical sources on the Solovetskii camp.10
2. The Solovetskii camp, 1923-1931: Exigencies, expediencies and expansion
4 Soviet Karelia comprised the eastern section of the larger region of Karelia, which was divided from north to south in the fourteenth century, and remained divided between Russia in the east and Sweden (later, Finland) in the west. On gaining independence in 1918, Finland pressed for a revision of the state border with Soviet Russia to unite the two halves of Karelia within the new Finnish state. Partly to pre-empt such demands, partly to establish a model national territory for propaganda purposes, in 1920 Soviet Russia granted extensive economic and administrative autonomy to eastern Karelia within the Soviet border. Edvard Gylling, an exiled Finnish social democrat, was appointed to lead the new territory, initially the Karelian Labour Commune (Karel ´skaia Trudovaia Kommuna -- KTK), from 1923 the Karelian ASSR. His desire to develop Soviet Karelia as a viable autonomous territory, which could act as a model of socialist inter-ethnic fraternity and mutual aid and as a beacon of revolution to the Finnish and Scandinavian working classes, dictated the imperative of building a strong, self- regulating and self-sufficient economy. However, local labour resources, further depleted by civil war population displacement, were sorely insufficient to implement his ambitious plans for post-war reconstruction, timber export and industrial development. In response, E. Gylling embarked on numerous projects to stimulate the resettlement of Karelians and Finns in the autonomous republic and to recruit a permanent workforce for its incipient industry.
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5 In addition, the Karelian government during the first year of autonomy turned to the use of prison labour, in line with central penal labour policies and the increasing militarization of the Soviet economy.11 This decision inevitably resulted in conflict with its rival regional authority. During 1920 and 1921, the administration of Olonets Guberniia (government, pre-revolutionary territorial unit), which before the creation of the KTK had exercised jurisdiction over the southern half of Russian Karelia, fought to retain authority over Petrozavodsk, capital at this time of both autonomous Karelia (where it was located) and of the residual territory of Olonets Guberniia which survived outside the borders of the Karelian commune. For a while, both authorities were reluctantly forced to share institutions, personnel and premises in the town. E. Gylling, however, was determined that Karelia should have full control over an integrated, contiguous and coherent territory, and over the resources contained within the borders of that space. One of the resources that E. Gylling now fought to wrest out of the hands of the Olonets administration was a kontsentratsionnyi lager´ (concentration camp) located on the outskirts of Petrozavodsk. In June 1921, he submitted a petition to the NKVD of the Russian Republic (RSFSR) arguing for a transfer of the Neglinka saw- mill to the jurisdiction of the camp, and the camp itself to the authority of the Karelian Economic Council, since its “workforce can be used not only in the saw-mill but in other production, the development of which is delayed by lack of workforce to such an extent that it is impossible to fulfil even the most urgent tasks, for example, for export.” Only if Karelia took over the concentration camp, E. Gylling asserted, would it be able “bravely and confidently to set to the task of fulfilling its economic programme.” He concluded, indeed, that Karelia’s special economic and administrative rights required the transfer, since the “principle of autonomy is irreconcilable with alternative authorities within an autonomous territory.”12
2.1. The establishment of SLON, 1923
“Somewhere at the end of the white world, on the shores of the icebound sea, where eight months in the year winter reigns, where for months the sun does not appear, there stands the God- protected convent of Zosimo-Savvatievo.”13
6 From the start, therefore, the Karelian authorities were ready to engage forced labour in the regional economy, so long as it furthered rather than compromised their spatial integrity and national autonomy. Consequently, it was with trepidation that they heard rumours in August 1923 that the OGPU was setting up a prison camp on the Island of the Revolution (formerly, Popov Island) in the bay of Kem´ in central Karelia. This was worse than mere trespass, since Karelia had just won control over a saw-mill on the island and needed space there to accommodate a civil workforce, without the worrisome presence of either Chekists or their prisoners.14
7 In fact, a far greater threat to their autonomy was looming. In 1919 the OGPU’s predecessor, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counter- Revolution and Sabotage (VChK, or Cheka) had set up a number of forced labour camps to operate on their own resources in the Arkhangelsk region of northern European Russia (at Pertominsk, Kholmogory and near the regional capital itself). In 1921, this network became known as the Northern Camps of Special Designation (SLON).15 To facilitate the organisation of “efficiently productive work among the especially socially
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dangerous element,” the camps had been freed from all taxes.16 In early 1923, the OGPU proposed massively to expand the northern system by establishing a new camp located on the Solovetskii archipelago, initially to house 8,000 prisoners, with a new transfer point on the Karelian mainland at Kem´, which together with the existing Pertominskii camp and the Arkhangelsk transfer point (which at this time housed 1,200 prisoners) would form a new Solovetskii Forced Labour Camp of Special Designation (Solovetskii Lager´ Prinuditel´nykh Rabot Osobogo Naznacheniia, SLON). According to the OGPU draft decree presented to the Russian Sovnarkom on 18 August 1923, this camp would hold “political and criminal prisoners sentenced by extra-judicial GPU organs, by the former VChK and by the NKVD Special Board (Soveshchanie) for Administrative Exile” plus prisoners sentenced in regular courts if the GPU gave express permission.17 The Russian People’s Commissariat of Justice (Narkomiust RSFSR) and the NKVD had already accepted an earlier draft, although the latter had demanded that a clear division of penal functions and funding should be established between institutions under its own Chief Prison Administration (Glavnoe Upravlenie Mest Zakliucheniia, GUMZ) and those under the OGPU.18 Inevitably, the Russian People’s Commissariat of Finance (Narkomfin RSFSR) had expressed reservations about the plan, on the grounds that it required a substantial transfer of “property and productive value” to the OGPU and involved considerably increased central budgetary funding.19
8 At this moment, the Karelian authorities intervened to protest at what they thought was a new OGPU camp on the Island of the Revolution in Kem´ bay. They claimed that it was impermissible “to flood with criminal elements parts of Karelia bordering on Finland [as it would] cause undoubted political harm and [would] paralyse all work of the economic organs to restore the region’s economic life.”20 In a petition to the NKVD dated 1 August 1923, the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Karelian ASSR, N. V. Arkhipov, complained that because criminals on the island were poorly guarded they frequently escaped into the thick mainland forests and spread fear and mayhem among the local population.21 In reply, Head of the Administration of the Northern Camps (USLAG) A. P. Nogtev pointed out that Karelia only controlled the saw-mill on the island, while the territory itself and its timber resources belonged to the People’s Commissariat of Transport (Narkomput´). This administration had therefore acted within its rights when it agreed to transfer several empty barracks to USLAG to serve not as a separate camp, he emphasised, but as a transit point between the Kem´ railway station and the new camp on Solovetskii Island (which was, in fact, located within the maritime borders of the Northern krai, later Arkhangelsk Region, or oblast´, not within Karelian territorial jurisdiction).22 Ignoring Karelian protests, Sovnarkom on 2 October 1923 issued a decree establishing the new Solovetskii camp with two transit points at Arkhangelsk and Kem´, and transferring to it all the goods, buildings and “living and dead” inventory of the former Solovetskii monastery, the Pertominskii camp (which was subsequently closed) and the Arkhangelsk camp. The OGPU was instructed immediately to organise work for the prisoners in agriculture, fishing, timber and other enterprises. The camp was to be self-sufficient, and was freed from state and local taxes.23 The first contingents of prisoners had already sailed from Arkhangelsk to Solovetskii in July.24
9 The Karelian authorities, having sent petitions against the Solovetskii camp to the Head of the OGPU F. E. Dzerzhinskii, to the Council of Labour and Defence (STO), to the All- Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) and to the NKVD, but to no avail, were understandably dissatisfied with this decision. On 21 December 1923, the Presidium of
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the Karelian Regional Party Committee (Obkom) heard a report that prisoners in the “concentration camp” on the Island of the Revolution enjoyed “extreme freedom” (sic), some even travelling at will to Moscow, and resolved to petition the Party Central Committee (TsK) on the “abnormal situation” in the “forced labour camp” in Kem´.25 A few months later, the First Obkom Secretary J. E. Järvisalo wrote to Moscow to reiterate the regional protest.26 When navigation between the mainland and Solovetskii Island had closed the previous year, he claimed, over one thousand prisoners were stranded on the Island of the Revolution, and Karelia had been unable to find space to house its own workers for the saw-mill. Moreover, in the absence of a sufficient guard, prisoners could freely make the brief crossing from the transit camp to the mainland. From Kem´, some were escaping westwards, where they were making contact with Finnish agents, he inferred, since reports of the Solovetskii camp were already being published in Finnish newspapers. Other prisoners were handing themselves in to the Kem´ militia, since the town’s prison was considerably more comfortable than the OGPU barracks.
2.2. The expansion of SLON, 1923-1929
10 The centre paid no heed to Karelia’s vigorous protests. The SLON transit point remained on the Island of the Revolution, and the Solovetskii camp itself continued to grow and expand its economic activities. However, the camp’s productive output and trading activities were insufficient to enable it to achieve self-sufficiency. During the following years, the Solovetskii camp inexorably expanded in pursuit of this objective.
11 During the 1924/1925 financial year, the SLON Administration (USLON) received a subsidy of 500,000 rubles from the government towards the cost of its 3,500 prisoners (equivalent to a subsidy of 143 rubles per head).27 In March 1925, OGPU Collegium member G. G. Iagoda, together with the Head of the OGPU Special Department (responsible for the camps at this time) G. I. Bokii and OGPU’s Head of Finance L. I. Berenzon (later Head of Finance for Belomorstroi), submitted a request to the Union Sovnarkom’s Administrative-Financial Commission for a further subsidy of 600,000 rubles to cover USLON’s deficit for the following financial year (starting in June). They justified this appeal by noting that in 1925/1926 they planned to maintain 5,000 prisoners in the Solovetskii camp at a reduced cost to the state’s reserve funds of 110 rubles per prisoner, whereas civil prisons the previous year had cost the budget 201 rubles for each inmate.28 For the sake of comparison, it should be noted that the average annual wage in the civilian economy in 1925/1926 was 571 rubles.29 The Commission sent the OGPU’s request to the Military and Naval Department of the Narkomfin Budgetary Administration for comment. The latter advised that USLON’s expenditures should be covered wholly by the OGPU’s own budget, and observed that the agency was only demanding subsidies because it had “artificially” inflated its costs. 30 Nevertheless, the Sovnarkom Commission, after meeting to hear reports from L. I. Berenzon, A. P. Nogtev (now head of USLON) and Narkomfin official Shaturin (no first names identified), agreed in a secret protocol to grant the desired 600,000 rubles for the second half of 1925. A session of the STO chaired by L. V. Kamenev confirmed this decision on 15 April 1925.31
12 Such requests became an annual item on the agendas of central administrations responsible for extra-budgetary funding. In May 1926, the Finance Department of the OGPU requested 1,200,000 rubles to cover USLON’s envisaged deficit for the
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forthcoming financial year, calculated on a projected average of 10,000 prisoners. This year, they noted, the state would only pay 153 rubles towards the maintenance of prisoners in the Solovetskii camp (whereas prisoners in civil institutions cost 220 rubles). Not only were OGPU prisoners cheaper, they could also be recruited more easily and worked harder : “After careful consideration of our estimates, and with regard for the difficult situation of the state budget,” continued the appeal, “[we] have recognised the possibility of expanding the camp’s productive enterprises above the limits envisaged in the plan.” By increasing output, USLON could raise its income from the current projected level of 1,700,000 rubles by 350,000 rubles. However, to do this would require a substantial initial investment in technology.32 The response from Narkomfin SSSR was severe : the economists considered that USLON could cut 270,000 rubles from its expenditures by reducing the cost of purchasing food, clothing, medical and other supplies.33 Seeking a compromise, the OGPU lowered its request to 1,060,000 rubles, which was accepted by the STO in July. It was also agreed that the OGPU would cover 500,000 rubles of this sum from its current inventory of confiscated property and money, with the remainder taken ‘on credit’ from the Sovnarkom 1925/1926 reserve fund (which would deduct an equivalent amount from future sales by the OGPU of confiscated property).34
13 In a further communication a few months later, Narkomfin berated USLON for increasing its camp population from 5,000 to 10,000 within the course of only one year. This excessively rapid growth, the economists noted, had “rendered the principle of self-sufficiency (samookupaemost´ ) of the camps less viable.”35 The OGPU evidently believed to the contrary that expanding USLON’s productive population would in time enable the camp to achieve economic autonomy. Indeed, G. G. Iagoda claimed that USLON had only been forced into deficit because in late 1925 it had established a Colony for the Malicious Poor (Koloniia dlia zlostnykh nishchikh) to accommodate a large contingent of beggars, who had been expelled from Moscow as “social parasites” and among whom there were a disproportionate number of “cripples.”36
14 Certainly, the Solovetskii camp continued to grow in population and to increase both sides of its balance sheet, although not proportionately. According to OGPU figures, USLON expanded in 1927/1928 to 13,323 prisoners and received 1,589,000 rubles from the state budget (equivalent to 120 rubles per prisoner).37 As of May 1928, USLON envisaged an increase in population during the following financial year to 17,000 prisoners and a corresponding increase in its deficit to 2,100,000 rubles. However, Narkomfin as usual raised objections and G. G. Iagoda agreed that USLON could make do with a subsidy of 1,600,000 rubles by lowering expenditure per prisoner to a mere 94 rubles (in contrast to 240 rubles in civil prisons), and by raising higher revenues from expanded contractual operations on the Karelian mainland (since the camp had already achieved capacity output on the islands).38 In joint session, the STO and Sovnarkom agreed to this sum, offering one million rubles from the SNK reserve fund and deducting the remainder from future OGPU earnings.39
15 In this way, the OGPU steadily expanded the USLON camp population and its use of prisoners’ forced labour with the aim of increasing revenues and reducing its stubbornly persistent dependence upon funding from central government. However, the total costs incurred by the camp’s disproportionately rapid expansion and increasingly complex economy each year exceeded the new levels of income, forcing the camp to seek even greater inputs from the centre, in the form of both higher
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subsidies and new supplies of labour. An additional and not incidental consequence of these developments was the incremental reduction of expenditure per prisoner and corresponding debasement of living conditions. As early as October 1924, Deputy Head of the OGPU V. R. Menzhinskii wrote to the STO requesting sufficient strong spirit for prisoners working in lumbering and fishing enterprises in harsh climatic conditions.40 The “minimum” ration required --presumably meaning to prevent death by freezing in the sub-Arctic Solovetskii winter -- was just over one millilitre of 96° spirit per convict per day. There is as yet no systematic statistical evidence of living standards in the 1920s, but for abundant and horrifying testimony of the heavy human and spiritual cost of such brutally banal calculations, we need only turn to the abundant memoir literature on the Solovetskii camp.41
2.3. Relations between USLON and the Karelian authorities, 1923-1929
16 Having fought bitterly but unsuccessfully in 1923 to prevent the OGPU from establishing the Solovetskii prison camp, the Karelian leadership throughout the mid-1920s strove to resist the expanding employment of SLON forced labour on Karelian territory. However, the Murmansk Railway timber administration (Zhelles), to which the STO had transferred large swathes of central and northern Karelian forest in May 1923, willingly accepted the supply of SLON contract labour to fulfil its own separate production and export plans.42 In an attempt to halt this practice, the Karelian Central Executive Committee (TsIK) passed a resolution in early 1925 forbidding the employment of Solovetskii camp prisoners inside the republic. When the OGPU protested against this resolution to the Union TsIK in Moscow, E. Gylling hurried to submit a statement to this body’s Presidium (of which he was a member) defending the autonomous republic’s prerogative to regulate the use of labour within its own borders, regardless of the immediate territorial or productive jurisdiction within which the workforce operated. The Presidium of the Union TsIK, caught between loyalty to its own member and the impulse to uphold his civic authority on the one hand, and the daunting ‘special’ powers of the OGPU on the other, resolved on a compromise in April 1925, whereby they warily “proposed to the OGPU that in future it should first agree questions of using its concentration camp [sic] workforce within Karelian borders with the TsIK of the Karelian SSR [sic].”43
17 Neither Karelia nor the OGPU could be satisfied with this ambiguous directive, which hardly promised to resolve the continuing conflict between the two authorities. When the Northern Timber Organisation Severoles contracted a contingent of SLON prisoners for felling within Karelian territory in late summer of the same year without first obtaining permission from the republican government, the Karelian Obkom established a committee, chaired by E. Gylling and comprising two Karelian representatives plus delegates from Narkomput´, Severoles and USLON, to reach a definitive settlement of this question.44 When agreement proved impossible, E. Gylling issued a terse reprimand to the administration of Severoles and set off to USLON headquarters on Solovetskii Island to negotiate a deal. However, pragmatism overtook his purpose. On 31 August 1925, the Presidium of the Obkom passed a resolution conceding that the northern Karelian workforce was not sufficient to fulfil local felling plans for 1925/1926, so USLON should be granted temporary timber felling quotas in these districts. In return for permission to use forced labour, Severoles should supply the local civil population
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with food and alternative felling work (in other words, not in the vicinity of prisoners). 45 The Karelians also decided that although USLON labour could be used on the construction of the Kem´-Uhkta highway, the entire project should not be transferred to USLON but should remain under Karelian administration. At the same time, the regional party submitted the first of many petitions to the centre for the transfer of the Solovetskii islands to Karelian territory, and the latest of many requests to move the OGPU transit point off the Island of the Revolution -- none of these appeals was granted. In the meantime, Zhelles simply continued to ignore the ban on Solovetskii labour.46
18 Karelia’s production targets, especially for timber felling, increased sharply in the late 1920s as its economy was brought under the control of central planning authorities. However, neither central resettlement initiatives nor the republican government’s colonisation and recruitment strategies, designed to boost the region’s ethnic Finnish and Karelian population, succeeded in sufficiently augmenting the local population or attracting seasonal workers to the region. On the other hand, the Solovetskii camp offered a local, readily available and growing reserve of labour. Increased local demand was conveniently met with expanding USLON supply, itself a result of economic imperatives within the camp system, as we have seen above. Almost every year until the end of the decade, the Karelian authorities grudgingly issued emergency governmental or party decrees permitting local economic agencies to hire contingents of OGPU prisoners for felling or specific construction projects. Incrementally, therefore, the camp extended its hinterland sphere of operations on the mainland outwards from Kem´ on the coast as far north as Murmansk (after 1928, part of Leningrad oblast´) and into the south and east of the autonomous republic.
19 Naturally, the republican authorities lamented this development and its consequences as much as they relied upon it. At a meeting of the Karelian Obkom Bureau in June 1928, the head of the Karelian State Political Administration (the political police, GPU), who reported to the Moscow OGPU centre independently of the ‘special’ camp authorities, noted that 176 SLON prisoners had escaped on the mainland during 1927 and the first half of 1928, often in groups which roamed the countryside terrorising local populations. Another local official voiced his concern about the increased incidence of murder and rape in the vicinity of forced labour operations. J. E. Järvisalo replied that he had protested in the centre against SLON’s growing encroachment onto the mainland, but had been informed that Solovetskii Island was now too small to accommodate the entire camp population (this, of course, was untrue : in fact, the archipelago had adequate space, but insufficient resources or productive potential to meet the camp’s self-sufficiency targets). Nevertheless, the Obkom Bureau passed a resolution stating, with a hint of despairing resignation, that if the Karelian timber organisation (Karelles) had “the slightest possibility of not using prisoners for its felling workforce, then it should not.” Nor should the Murmansk railway use OGPU contingents if it could manage without ; the only project that absolutely required prison labour was the Kem´ to Ukhta highway construction, and the number and quality of guards along that tract should be strengthened.47
20 During the First Five-Year Plan, the Karelian authorities finally gave up resisting the encroachment by USLON onto mainland territory. The total collapse of the free labour supply as a result of collectivisation and increased competition for workers among regions, sectors and enterprises, together with miserable levels of local kolkhoz
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mobilisation -- despite the attempt to introduce obligatory felling and road-building service (corvée) -- necessitated increasing recourse to the employment on contract of OGPU forced labour. In any case, the centralisation of economic decision-making, budgetary control and labour resource allocation during 1929/1930 rendered Karelia’s special autonomous rights increasingly meaningless in practice, even if they survived in principle. Moscow commissariats and agencies had few compunctions about compromising the territorial and national integrity of the autonomous republic by encouraging the import of a huge non-national convict population, and they continued to ignore Karelian protests concerning the strategic and political dangers of locating large numbers of prisoners close to the border zone, as well as complaints about criminality and disorder in central districts (raiony) and the dangers of mixing free and prison workforces.48
2.4. The origins of the Gulag empire, 1929-1931
21 Russia had long traditions of political and religious deportation and convict transportation, sometimes combined with forced labour (katorga, first introduced as a penal measure in the late 1600s). The motives behind sustaining this policy were complex. In the words of a Russian jurist of the late nineteenth century, “Russia, in fact, has never considered [transportation] merely as a punishment, but has used it as a means to resolve problems of internal and external politics [...] it is one of those rare creations of Russian penal law, born entirely of the needs and conditions of Russian life.”49
22 After the Revolution, there was renewed interest in penal transportation as a means to meet, in the first instance, the political exigencies of the embattled revolutionary regime. As we have seen, as early as 1919 the Soviets had established concentration camps in Arkhangelsk oblast´ to isolate antagonistic groups and nefarious individuals extracted from the centre. Since the early 1920s, however, certain interests had also considered reviving the use of penal resettlement as a means to colonise remote regions and to exploit their resources (penal exile having been abolished by the tsarist regime in 1900). Head of the OGPU Dzherzhinskii wrote in 1923: “The republic cannot be merciful towards criminals and cannot waste resources on them ; they must cover the costs associated with their care with their own labor ; they must be used to settle undeveloped areas in Pechora, in Obdorsk (Salekhard) [...] We will have to work to organise forced labour (penal servitude) at camps for colonising undeveloped areas that will be run with iron discipline. We have sufficient locations and space.”50
23 The idea that forced labour could offer both self-sufficiency on the periphery and potential economic gain for the centre also appealed to economic interests. In November 1925, Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy of the SSSR (VSNKh) G. L. Piatakov sent a report to his superior, who also happened to be Dzherzhinskii (in his role as the Chairman of VSNKh). The memorandum stated : “My study of geographical factors affecting industrial issues has convinced me that in order to create the most elementary conditions for a work culture, compulsory labor settlements will have to be established in certain regions. Such settlements could also relieve overcrowding in places of incarceration. The GPU should be instructed to explore these issues.”51
24 In the late 1920s, as it became evident that ambitious Soviet schemes, initiated both centrally and locally, to promote the voluntary settlement of remote regions of the
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North had failed, the OGPU undertook to assume the leading role in resettlement. In 1929, G. G. Iagoda proposed a programme for the penal colonisation of vast territorial expanses, initially in Ukhta and Pechora, but ultimately stretching from Karelia and the Kola peninsula, where USLON was already actively expanding, to the Far East. The immediate objective of this strategy, as stated in the Politbiuro decree ‘On the use of the labour of criminal prisoners’ of 27 June 1929, was to “colonise these areas and exploit their natural resources by means of the use of prisoner labour.”52
25 OGPU’s experience of running the Solovetskii camp had demonstrated at least two things. Firstly, the centre was willing to subsidise the continuous expansion of forced labour and thereby to underwrite the increased involvement of the OGPU in the economy. Secondly, the agency’s growing economic significance further enhanced its prestige and power in the centre and boosted its ability to secure higher inputs in capital and labour investment to compensate for its higher costs. The OGPU, for example, was able to secure a decision, despite the opposition of Narkomiust and the republican interior ministries, that all prisoners sentenced to over three years were to be transferred to its jurisdiction and employed in the ‘special’ camps, so long as they were suited to physical labour.53
26 In the longer term, G. G. Iagoda envisaged that this expanded network of corrective labour camps (Ispravitel´no-Trudovye Lageria, ITL, as concentration camps would henceforth be known) would develop into settlements of free workers populating and assimilating the vast empty northern territories.54 To encourage settlement, prisoners demonstrating exemplary work or behaviour could look forward to pre-term release from captivity, on condition they remain in these inhospitable areas. Other prisoners who had served their full terms but had been deprived of the right to free choice of residence, as well as those who volunteered to remain, would benefit from allocations of land in these peripheral regions and cash grants or equipment. In addition to these measures, the republican interior ministries were directed by the same decree to ensure all prisoners judicially sentenced to terms of between one and three years should be organised for optimal productive output into special agricultural and industrial colonies and to reduce to a minimum the number of institutions of incarceration.55
27 The Karelian Obkom Bureau saw both opportunities and dangers in this policy. Among the perceived benefits were the increased regional capital investment that a powerful agency in the centre could secure, a steady supply of labour for felling and construction enterprises and, in the longer term, a means of colonising the remote northern areas of the autonomous republic. In the late summer of 1929, the Karelian party passed a resolution acknowledging that it was necessary to ensure “the maximum use of the USLON workforce on Karelian territory,” especially in felling, and to use prisoners to establish agricultural and stock rearing kholkhozy in the exiguously populated northern districts. The USLON party organisation was directed to conclude a contract with Karelles to supply sufficient labour to achieve a doubling of the republic’s felling output. For this purpose, the Karelian Obkom also directed the republican government to draw up a plan to transfer several forest areas directly to USLON jurisdiction.56
28 Increasingly desperate for labour resources, the Karelian authorities also directed the GPU to enforce the corvée more harshly, introduced severe penalties for ‘desertion’ from felling duties and increased the use of ‘forced labour without deprivation of liberty.’57 They also turned to the civil penal agencies. In November 1929, the Karelian
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Obkom permitted Karelles to sign a contract with GUMZ for the employment of its prison labour in felling, and directed the party fraction in the republican government to help organise NKVD prison colonies.58 In May 1930, the Karelian Obkom resolved temporarily to increase the number of GUMZ prisoners in Karelia from five to six thousand : their extra labour was to be employed on road construction, recently decreed a priority for strategic reasons. It also directed the Karelian Sovnarkom to discuss transferring administration of GUMZ prison colonies on its territory from the Russian federal authorities to the Karelian NKVD. Finally, the Karelian party undertook, in line with the Politbiuro and SNK decrees of June 1929, to despatch all local GUMZ prisoners with terms of over three years to USLON.59
29 At the same time as permitting this massive increase in Gulag activity on their territory, the Karelian leadership attempted to curb local Chekist independence and ensure co-ordination of activity between civil and camp authorities. In March 1929, the Karelian party requested the TsK to subordinate the Solovetskii party collective to the Karelian Obkom and to establish an USLON party committee to rank alongside Karelian raion party committees (raikomy).60 The Karelians argued that three factors necessitated this measure. Firstly, the camps were geographically dispersed among Karelia, the Northern krai and Murmansk okrug without any unified party leadership. Secondly, the dispersal of OGPU party members among different districts (twenty in Kandalaksha raion, fifteen in Soroka, thirty in Medvezh´ia Gora in Karelia, and fifty on Solovetskii Island in Arkhangelsk oblast´) undermined the centralised administration of the camps in Kem´ (where there were one hundred Chekist party members) -- with this, the Karelians were evidently seeking to establish under their control a unified party leadership in the camp system as a rival to the existing unified OGPU camp leadership. Thirdly, as a result of the lack of clarity concerning the role of district party committees in relation to the camps located within their territorial jurisdiction, “abnormal relations” had developed between raion leaderships and local camp administrations.61
30 However, the TsK Organisational-Distribution Department refused either to establish an USLON party committee or to subordinate the scattered Chekist party collectives to the Karelian Obkom. Firstly, they argued, the transfer of the USLON headquarters to Kem´ in August 1929 meant that the camp system would be concentrated predominantly within Karelia. Secondly, the proposed measure would do nothing to improve the relationship of the dispersed cells of OGPU party members to the central USLON leadership (thus the TsK defended the Chekist line of command from party intervention). Thirdly, the Karelian Obkom could improve relations between raion officials and local camp administrations by improving its leadership of the district committees.62 As a concession to Karelia, the TsK Organisational Bureau (Orgbiuro) in June had proposed that, once the Karelians had secured the approval of the VTsIK Administrative-Territorial Commission and the OGPU, they could submit another petition to the Presidium of VTsIK requesting the transfer of the Solovetskii islands to Karelian territory.63
31 Minor adjustments of the administrative map were, in fact, by now irrelevant. With a view to implementing G. G. Iagoda’s ambitious schemes for OGPU expansion and ensuring that the Solovetskii camp consolidated its position as the centre of productive forced labour activities in the North, A. P. Nogtev presented the OGPU centre in April 1930 with a plan for the comprehensive restructuring of the regional camp system, in
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accordance with the new ‘Statute on ITL’ published at the beginning of the month.64 This plan envisaged a streamlined central administration organised according to productive branches and an extensive territorial network of twelve self-supporting camp sections, each with sub-departments of the central branch administrations, across the Karelian and Kola mainland. The project was designed specifically to maximise the productive efficiency of forced labour organised in remote regions on a mass scale : “[i]n carrying out the division [of USLON] into [territorial] Sections, economic considerations were given priority (i.e. the concentration of individual industrial branch functions) but at the same time, it was impossible not to consider the special conditions of work of USLON and geographical peculiarities.”65
32 A. P. Nogtev envisaged that in the USLON centre the new branch structure would preclude further conflicts between the camp’s economic and administrative leadership. The plan is clearly based on the party’s 1929 organisational reforms, which had been designed to increase the effectiveness of its interventions in the civil economy during the upheaval of the First Five-Year Plan. A. P. Nogtev now sought to promote these administrative structures and productive objectives as the core principles of the camp’s purpose : “The central [USLON] function is carried out by the Planning-Control Department, as the organ which [...] works out the control figures, gives all USLON Departments and Sections directives on compiling industrial-financial plans, analyses plans submitted to it and co-ordinates them with projected perspectival plans, supervises execution of plans, enters required modifications, compiles summary reports and draws corresponding conclusions and directs all statistical work carried out in USLON and its Sections.”66
33 In the territorial sections, the new branch sub-structure, dually subordinated to central branch departments and the unified territorial economic-administrative leadership, was intended to promote more autonomous and focussed economic management. Formerly, A. P. Nogtev stated, central departments had “overcentralised the work of the subordinate periphery and frequently, not having the opportunity sufficiently to learn the needs of the periphery, had turned their own leadership into petty tutelage (melochnuiu opeku), tying the hands and feet of the latter.”67
34 Because of this, the periphery had endured heavy responsibility without enjoying any independent rights and had become “a blind executive of the directives of the Centre.” Under the new plan, territorial sections would operate on their own balance sheets, in accordance -- noted A. P. Nogtev -- with the resolutions of the Sixteenth Party Conference and the TsK.
35 According to its author, this reform would enable the camp to triple both its working population (to over 50,000) and its production plan during the subsequent year. To complement these organisational measures, during 1929 and early 1930 a new system of production incentives for the prisoners was introduced, and discipline was strengthened among the guards and camp officials. At this same time, a former prisoner later testified : “Beatings stopped, as did overtime work [...] prisoners were grouped into various categories according to their physical fitness and given a certain norm of work to complete. If not completed, his bread ration was simply reduced in proportion to the amount done, which automatically forced prisoners to exert themselves since otherwise they were likely to starve.”68
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36 As A. P. Nogtev’s plan was implemented, the population of SLON grew from 21,900 in 1928/1929 to 65,000 in 1929/1930 and 71,800 at the start of 1931 (see Figure 1), largely as a result of the OGPU’s own brutal campaigns against the kulaks throughout the Soviet Union, as well as the assault on industrial specialists and entrepreneurs, many of whom found themselves on the main island archipelago.69 Alongside its demographic expansion, the camp experienced a continuing rapid growth in output that seemed fully to vindicate A. P. Nogtev´s confidence in the new system. By 1931, as well as timber felling and sawing and road and railway construction work on the mainland, prisoners were involved in fishing, agriculture, brick-making and various manufacturing activities, such as the production of leather goods. In 1930, the official Solovetskii camp journal boasted that whereas in 1926 USLON had fulfilled orders for Zhelles and Karelles worth 63,000 rubles, by 1929 the value of these operations had grown to 2,355,000 rubles ; similarly, USLON’s participation in road construction had grown from 105,000 rubles in 1926 to six million rubles in 1930.70 The publication, naturally, omitted to account for the human costs of this expansion : according to a leading Russian historian of the camps, the mortality rate in SLON in 1931 was 6.2 %,71 which would imply a total number of nearly 4,500 deaths during that year.72 Although the establishment of Belomorstroi later in 1931 meant that A. P. Nogtev’s plan for USLON was never fully realised, his project for a giant regional camp complex would be the model for the future BBK and for the organisation and expansion of Gulag forced labour throughout the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
2.5. Karelian relations with USLON, 1930-1931
37 An USLON party representative, D. V. Uspenskii, articulated the OGPU’s new commitment to complex regional development at the Tenth Conference of the Karelian Party Organisation in May 1930. The SLON prison workforce, he declared, must be used more widely in felling, road construction, fishing, and agriculture in order that Karelia could achieve regional self-sufficiency. The USLON official had chosen his words artfully : Karelian autarky, of course, had long been the holy grail of E. Gylling’s republican leadership, although since the late 1920s it had become an increasingly fantastical aspiration. D. V. Uspenskii promised that henceforth USLON would direct all its resources towards the development of Karelia. He also declared candidly that the OGPU’s economic potential was in direct proportion to its repressive efficiency :
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“We have grandiose possibilities to use those scrap materials (util´syrs´e), that flotsam of the October storm (otbrosov oktiabr´skogo shkvala), those shards of the social structure (oskolkov sotsial´noi stroiki) which come under our authority in greater and greater numbers the more successfully the struggle progresses for the definitive extirpation of the remnants of capitalism.”73
38 The conference’s immediate priority, however, was to ensure an improvement in relations between USLON and Karelia’s raion party organisations, among whom, he continued ominously, there had been recent mutterings that “USLON was a class enemy, that it slows down party development, that it spreads dissolution.” This was untrue, he responded. Firstly, the Karelians should not confuse the prisoners with their Chekist masters. Secondly, there was no need to panic about the prisoners, since they “are wax in our hands and we remould them in our own way.” This, he concluded, was USLON’s “creative work,” leaving the audience to imagine the forms and methods of Chekist “creativity.”74
39 Less than a month later, on 18 June 1930, the Karelian Obkom Secretariat passed a resolution designed to harness the OGPU’s new commitment to regional development. The resolution ‘On new tasks of OGPU camps of special designation in colonisation activity,’ based on a report by the new head of USLON A. A. Ivanchenko (who had replaced A. P. Nogtev on 19 May), declared : “1. In connection with the shortage of workforce in the Karelian ASSR, consider it necessary to use USLON workforce in the economic development of Karelia by means of concluding contracts between USLON and Karelian economic organisations on a long-term basis ; at the same time to provide USLON with its own economic base for the development of its industrial-economic enterprises. 2. In principle agree to colonisation of specific territories by groups of USLON prisoners, having made provisions for the political aspects of the question, and in agreement with Karelian governmental plans. 3. With regard to the Karelian ASSR’s border position, consider that the population in USLON camps in Karelia is already at a maximum (predel´noe) and must not be increased.” 75
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40 In accordance with this decision, a few weeks later USLON submitted a proposal to construct a large paper and pulp enterprise in Pon´gomskii, in the north of Kem´ raion, and for this purpose asked the Karelian authorities to transfer this district to its jurisdiction for “long-term autonomous use.” At the same time, the Solovetskii authorities protested that Karelles had included USLON’s felling programme in the civilian timber plan for this district. The camp authorities, however committed they were to regional development, were determined to assert both territorial and operational independence from the Karelian organisations.76
41 Cooperation between the Solovetskii camp administration and the civil authorities was further hampered by persisting conflicts over costs. In May 1930, Karelles protested to the new Obkom First Secretary Kustaa Rovio that USLON had demanded an extortionate seven rubles and six kopecks per cubic metre for timber cut and transported from the Kem´ Lespromkhoz (timber-industrial enterprise, LPKh), when the standard rate was slightly over three rubles. After negotiations, the Chekists accepted a rate of six rubles and 36 kopecks, which Karelles was compelled to pay. The civil organisation, however, could not stretch to the sum USLON insisted on charging for timber floating. In anger and desperation, Karelles requested that the TsK should direct USLON to participate in the regional economic plan by providing labour at the same rates as set for civil enterprises. If USLON refused, the timber agency threatened vainly, Karelia would in future refuse to accept its workforce.77 On the same day as Karelles protested via the party line, E. Gylling wrote to the regional representative of the State Timber Export Trust (Leseksport) and to the People’s Commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Narodnyi Komissariat Raboche-Krest´ianskoi Inspektsii, NKRKI) G. K. Ordzhonikidze, requesting they intervene to “rectify USLON’s incorrect attitude” in view of the fact that “Karelian organisations are not capable of influencing USLON on this issue.”78
42 There were also persisting tensions between raion soviet and party authorities and the local camp administrations. In July 1930, the Secretariat of the Karelian Obkom passed another resolution calling for the TsK to establish an USLON party organisation subordinated to the Obkom. In the meantime, the Karelian raikomy should exercise leadership over USLON party cells located on the mainland for internal party matters, the “everyday economic activity of the camps,” and education and propaganda among the free workforce. They would also be responsible for ensuring that local populations were not ideologically contaminated by their contact with prisoners. Local party officials should not, however, interfere in the OGPU’s operative work, the resolution concluded confidently, as if its other clauses stood any chance of acceptance by the camp administrators.79 In reality, raion officials felt impotent in the face of Chekist arrogance and intimidated by the presence of large prisoner populations in their localities. In August 1930, for example, the Medvezh´egorsk raikom requested a delivery of 250 revolvers to enable local party and soviet workers to protect themselves. Their report to the Obkom on “the disgraceful conduct of USLON prisoners” stated that prisoners were roaming freely throughout the district, wreaking havoc and terrifying the local population to such an extent that citizens were too frightened even to collect berries and mushrooms in the forest (in Karelia in 1930, these foods would have been staple sources of nutrition for the malnourished peasantry). The report demanded that USLON increase the number of guards and curtail the prisoners’ “freedom” (sic). What caused the local officials most anxiety, however, were unconfirmed rumours that huge
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numbers of prisoners were about to arrive to start construction of a canal on their territory.80
3. The Belomor Canal, 1931-1933
43 English explorers in the 1560s were the first to propose constructing an artificial canal connecting the White Sea to Lake Onega, with a view to opening up the Muscovite interior to the northern trade routes.81 The implementation of this scheme, however, awaited, in the words of the official OGPU history of the construction, “the unified will of the party and the armed theory of Lenin and Stalin.”82 Equally necessary preconditions were the utopian spatial visions of Bolshevik planning in the late 1920s ; the need to create demand to meet an explosion in the supply of forced labour resulting from collectivisation ; and the ambition of the OGPU to carry out a prestigious project to prove the economic efficiency and political value of using its own special methods to open up, colonise and develop remote regions.
44 The Soviet Navy reviewed pre-revolutionary plans to build a canal immediately after the Revolution, but it was not until the late 1920s that the military and political leadership finally agreed to its construction. Their immediate motivation in making this decision was strategic : building the canal would enable the Baltic fleet to be transferred to the ice-free port of Murmansk, constructed in 1916, from where its ships could gain access westwards to the Atlantic, and via the newly opened Great Northern Sea Route also to the Far East, where the Japanese threat to Soviet territory became the regime’s foremost international concern. The other purpose of the canal, of course, was economic. It would enable the Soviet economy to draw on new sources of wealth from the Far North, in particular timber, coal, metals and minerals. Once linked by the Belomor Canal via the Mariinksii water route, which was already undergoing reconstruction at this time, to the Russian interior and via the Svir-Ladoga-Neva canals to Leningrad, the Northern Sea Route could also provide a cheap transport route between Russia’s industrial centres and the Far East, obviating the need to circumnavigate Scandinavia, and easing congestion on the railways.83
45 From the perspective of Karelian and OGPU regional interests, this project also opened up the possibility of developing the autonomous republic as a major industrial centre for processing both timber felled locally by prisoners and raw materials extracted by forced labour in the camps of the Far North and Far East. The OGPU also claimed that the construction of a canal would serve to transmit Soviet civilisation to the frontier. This ‘cultural’ purpose had two aspects. Firstly, the canal would stimulate economic activity in the North, which in turn would bring the benefits of the Soviet way of life. The following poem by a Belomor prisoner, invoking a panoply of prefigurative synecdoche -- factories, cities, chimneys, electric light, reading rooms, club and theatres -- exemplifies this Soviet vision of development : Gde mshistye skaly i vody Dremali, tam siloi truda Postroeny budut zavody I vyrastut tam goroda. Vzov´iutsia fabrichnye truby Pod severnye nebesa, Chitalen, teatrov i klubov Ogniami blesnut korpusa.84
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46 Secondly, the construction project would serve to rehabilitate ‘anti-Soviet’ and ‘socially alien’ elements through purposeful forced labour. Maxim Gorky later wrote that on the “pedagogical experience of the White Sea-Baltic Canal [...] and other colonies of that type, we, literary figures, must understand what fantastic results our system of education with the truth provides and how great the power of this single revolutionary truth is.”85 The canal construction, both by reconfiguring Soviet ‘natural’ space and by demonstrating the solution of the “greatest scientific-psychological and philosophical problem of the remaking of people”86 could be appropriated through propaganda to vindicate Marxist-Leninist ideology and ‘reforge’ society accordingly both on the periphery and in the centre. In the OGPU’s published history of the construction, the association between ‘natural’ space, human intervention and the transformation of human ‘nature’ is made explicit : two chapters in sequence are introduced by full-page illustrations captioned, firstly : “The canal passed here -- a new nature has been created” and, secondly : “By changing nature, man changes himself.”87 The OGPU would be the instrument of this revolutionary human engineering. In the words of a contemporary, “it is no accident, but deeply symptomatic, that precisely the keenest weapon of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the ‘guarding sword’ of the proletariat -- the GPU -- is not only the weapon of repression, but... the organ of the education and re- education of people.”88
47 To what extent the camp officials themselves believed in this ‘higher’ justification of their activities remains an open question. As we have already heard, USLON officials too spoke -- with ominous ambiguity -- of their “creative work.” Certainly, there were reading rooms, a theatre and clubs for Belomorstroi workers, and much of the propaganda of the construction project projected narratives of prisoners finding new meaning in their labour as a result of cultural enlightenment. Even if the administrators were sincere about this aspect of their work, however, it was clearly at most incidental to their priorities, which were to build the passage in the quickest time and at the lowest capital cost, regardless of the suffering involved.
3.1. Belomorstroi : The construction of the canal
48 On 5 May 1930, the Politbiuro passed a resolution entitled “On the canal” which set out the main objectives of the construction project : the southern section was to be started in 1931, and to be finished it within two years, to a depth to permit the passage of ships of 18-foot displacement, and to a cost of below sixty million rubles ; the northern section (between Lake Onega and the White Sea through central Karelia) was to be explored by Narkomput´, the military authorities and the OGPU, and costs were to be minimised by taking into account the possible use of prison labour.89 On 15 May 1930, a Special Committee for Belomorstroi was established under the chairmanship of the People’s Commissar of Transport Ia. E. Rudzutak, including among its members G. G. Iagoda from the OGPU and representatives from the military.90 On 26 May, Narkomput´ set up an Administration for the Construction of the Belomorsko-Baltiiskii Water Route (BBVP) under its own Deputy Commissar G. I. Blagonravov.91 This became the operational administration of Belomorstroi. On the last day of the month, the Special Committee agreed that the southern section of the canal should accommodate vessels of 28-foot displacement and that the OGPU should provide the construction workforce.
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92 However, a resolution of the STO of 3 June confirmed the earlier Politbiuro resolution, which had envisaged a depth of 18 feet.93
49 In February the following year, the Politbiuro agreed that the OGPU would be responsible for the canal construction, replacing Rudzutak as Chaiman of the Special Committee for Belomorstroi with G. G. Iagoda, and confirmed a final construction plan which, amongst other things, further reduced the maximum depth of the canal to twelve feet, scarcely sufficient to permit the passage of most naval vessels. This revision, however, enabled the agency to guarantee it would spend no more than sixty to seventy million rubles on the construction, including “not one kopeck of hard currency,” and would finish the project by the opening of navigation in 1933.94 In April 1931, OGPU personnel took over most of the top posts of Belomorstroi, frustrated with the interference of their Narkomput´ civilian counterparts.95 On 16 November 1931, full responsibility for the northern section was transferred from Narkomput´ to the OGPU. On the same day, the OGPU established the Belomorsko-Baltiiskii ITL to replace the Solovetskii ITL, since most of the prisoners in Karelia had by now been transferred from the islands to the mainland.96 These moves confirmed and strengthened the OGPU’s role as a powerful economic organisation in its own right, and laid the basis for its future expansion.
50 Alongside the OGPU, the Karelian leadership also energetically promoted the canal project while striving without great success to gain a say in development decisions.97 At the end of August, E. Gylling secured a seat on the Special Committee. The protocols of the Committee, however, indicate that he rarely attended its meetings in Moscow. Indeed, in April 1931, he wrote to Rudzutak (in the latter’s role as Deputy Chairman of the Sovnarkom) complaining that although he was a member of the Special Committee on Belomorstroi, he had as yet received no information from the OGPU concerning the projected route of the canal. The Administration of Solovetskii Camp (USLAG)98 had even started felling trees across a swathe of central Karelia due to be flooded,99 without giving the republican government notice to make arrangements for evacuating nearly 4,000 local inhabitants,100 for integrating this intensive activity into regional timber plans or for drawing up revised plans for local industrial development. Rudzutak forwarded this note to the Co-chairman of the Special Committee, People’s Commissar for Water Transport (Narkomvod) N. M. Ianson, who sent it on to G. G. Iagoda, with a query scribbled in blue pencil across the top of the page : “Is E. Gylling really a member of the Committee ? No one told me! If so, we should invite him to future meetings of the Committee.” G. G. Iagoda tersely confirmed that E. Gylling was a member, and a month later sent the Karelian government a report on the canal, with a note that the republican People’s Commissariat of Agriculture should liaise with the Belomorstroi administration (located in Moscow, conveniently just behind the Lubianka) on questions of evacuating local inhabitants from villages marked for flooding.101
51 From this point, E. Gylling took a more active role. In December 1931, he travelled to Moscow to argue that the centre should subsidise the estimated six million rubles cost to Karelia of evacuations from the flooding zone. He was not present, however, when in April 1932 the military protested at projected work on the Svir section of the canal (on the southern border of Karelia), which would reduce the canal’s depth to a mere six feet. This, declared the Revolutionary-Military Council (Revvoensovet) representative, would “completely negate the purpose of work finished between Onega and the White Sea.”102 The fact that the canal would be useless for military purposes did nothing to
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discourage the OGPU, however, whose only concerns now were to finish the project cheaply, by the promised deadline and with appropriate publicity. For this purpose, as soon as navigation opened in spring 1931 they transferred most of the remaining Solovetskii workforce onto the mainland, as the Medvezh´egorsk raion party officials had earlier feared.103
52 In a speech to the Communist Academy and the Institute of Soviet Construction in October 1933, the chief of Belbaltlag S. Firin stated that 140,000 prisoners had been employed on the canal project.104 Historians since have offered widely differing estimates of the numbers of prisoners engaged on Belomorstroi (between 100,000 and 500,000), and of the total number of deaths on the construction project (between 50,000 and 250,000).105 Archival sources now permit us to calculate more accurate figures. According to OGPU estimates of 2 July 1931, Belomorstroi would require thirty million working days to complete the canal by the end of 1932 (over the projected 18 months, this meant an average 55,000 workers on the construction at any time). In summer 1931, an average 65,000 prisoners were active on the construction sites each day (plus about 13,000 prisoners in subsidiary functions). However, the report complained that this workforce was poorly qualified, equipped only with manual tools, and yielded low productivity. Optimally the OGPU required a daily workforce of 100,000, but as there was insufficient accommodation and too few tools for this number, it agreed to make do with 75,000, although these -- noted the memorandum -- would have to be worked very intensively. To raise numbers to and maintain them at this level, the report requested the central Gulag administration to supply an extra 15,000 prisoners immediately, and up to 43,000 by the end of July (these figures give an impression of the expected rate of labour turnover). Forward projections for 1932 considered 75,000 workers to be the minimum required, with an optimal number of 90,000, to enable the project to be completed by deadline.106 In fact, a May 1932 report by N. M. Ianson stated that the workforce already totalled 100,000 and would be raised to 125,000 during July and August (although there were only barracks for 60,000, and the remainder was accommodated in tents).107
53 One other document offers a glimpse of the Belomorstroi labour force. In 1936, the editor of an anthology of articles on Karelia, Vsia Kareliia, submitted a draft chapter on the Belomor Canal to D. V. Uspenskii, now head of the BBK, for approval to publish. The draft was returned with the acerbic comment : “I consider that the publication of this article is senseless if not harmful.” The NKVD official had been upset by several statements in the paper. First of all, the author had written in consecutive phrases that the canal was built by “the hands of over 100,000 prisoners in OGPU camps” in harsh northern conditions and that “against an estimated cost of 400 million rubles, a total of only about 100 million had been spent.” “This,” wrote D. V. Uspenskii, “is undoubtedly a reference to the fact that we drove the prisoners as hard as was possible (iz zaklyuchennykh vyzhali vse).” The author had also included a discussion of the canal’s strategic significance for the defence of Leningrad -- such considerations were not supposed to be made public (especially, we suspect, as the completed canal was strategically useless). Two pages later, the author consummated his error by noting that the completion of Belomorstroi had in fact required ninety million working days. 108 From this disclosure, we can calculate that over the 21-month construction period the average number of prisoners working on the site was approximately 143,000. This
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corroborates the total given by S.Firin in 1933, but it does not allow for turnover of workforce, which we surmise was largely accounted for by injury and mortality.
54 According to figures published by the Russian historian V.N.Zemskov, annual mortality in the Belbaltlag in 1933 amounted to 10 %.109 This would imply (given an average population of 143,000) that there were 25,025 deaths on the canal over the 21-month period of construction. This estimate is considerably greater than the separate figures V. N. Zemskov offers for total deaths in the Belbaltlag in 1932-1933 (10,936), but almost identical to the total deaths in Belbaltlag, Solovetskii and Svirlag (which constructed the southern section of the canal) during the three years 1931-1933 (25,019).110 If this calculation seems far lower than previous estimates of mortality on the canal, it should be remembered that this accounts only for immediate deaths ; we can assume that numbers who died subsequently as a result of having been invalided or debilitated by canal work exceed this amount by a high factor. Even assuming a rate of turnover due to injury at 2 % (only a fifth of the rate of mortality), the total number of prisoners employed on Belomorstroi would have approached 175,000.111 This was equivalent to over half of the average Soviet prison camp population in the years 1931-1933.112
55 As the OGPU indicated, the quality of the workforce presented a problem, but this was a challenge that Chekist ‘creativity’ could overcome. On 29 November 1930, the deputy head of the OGPU Transport Department V. A. Kishkin and the deputy head of the Administration of Camps (ULAG) Ia. D. Rapoport (future chief of the BBK, 1933-1935) wrote to G. G. Iagoda complaining that the general (valovaia) labour force under ULAG’s authority could not carry out technically more demanding tasks in the southern (Svir) sector of the Belomor Canal. The solution, they proposed, would be for the Transport Department to send ULAG a number of recently arrested wreckers, including two major experts in the deepening of river beds, eight to ten other engineers and ten to fifteen middle-ranking technicians. It is likely that they are referring to specialists arrested in connection with the Industrial Party trial, which had opened in Moscow only four days earlier.113 Although there were only eight defendants at the trial, they were charged with recruiting over two thousand other specialists as saboteurs, including -- as luck would have it -- the entire Central Asian Hydrology Department.114 These captive experts, Rapoport and Kishkin proposed, would be accommodated in a special camp to be opened near Leningrad. The Belomorstroi Special Construction Bureau (Osoboe Konstruktorskoe Biuro, OKB) -- perhaps the first ‘official’ camp sharashka115 -- was in fact established in Moscow and moved to Medvezh´ia Gora in November 1931 (this office evolved into the BBK’s research and planning bureau, which was located in Leningrad). The letter concluded with a promise which offers some insight into the priorities and working practices of the OGPU at this time : “Additionally, in the course of the investigation, several other suitable persons will be arrested, as planned (budet doarestovano).”116 Indeed, the Industrial Party case was accompanied by a renewed and intensified wave of arrests of engineers and specialists accused of wrecking, many of whom found themselves working in the Belomorstroi OKB.117 The relationship between cause and effect remains more fully to be explored.
56 Thanks to its cost-cutting revision of the canal’s blueprints and its ruthless exploitation of the workforce, the OGPU completed the canal’s northern section, linking the White Sea and Lake Onega, in June 1933, only one month over its deadline and within the revised project budget. In July 1933, Stalin directed G. G. Iagoda to present proposals on awards and amnesties to be given to officials and prisoners on completion of the canal.
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118 In early August, the canal was officially opened and a Politbiuro commission headed by Kuibyshev agreed on 15 August to commence the construction of an industrial complex, the BBK, on territory adjoining the canal.119
57 The Sovnarkom SSSR decree of 17 August which confirmed the creation of the BBK and -- to E. Gylling’s inevitable disappointment120 -- placed it under OGPU authority, gave the new institution the task of developing the economy of the recently constructed canal and its adjacent forests.121 This prompted politicians and planners, in Karelia, in Leningrad and in Union and Russian institutions in the centre, fundamentally to reconsider their visions of regional development. This also brought about an increasing coincidence of interests between the Karelian civil authorities and the OGPU-NKVD. In a subsequent paper, I look at the development of the Combine in the period 1933-1939, considering in particular its relations with the Karelian and Leningrad authorities ; its visions of spatial development ; its economic planning and performance ; the camp population, living conditions and mortality ; discipline, the administration of camp ‘justice’ and the agencies, procedures and statistics of camp repressions. 122
4. Conclusion
58 The ‘special’ camp system originated as a means of isolating those perceived to be hostile to the Soviet system, both political adversaries and recalcitrant criminals, in remote sites where they could neither attack nor contaminate the centre. Established in 1923, the Solovetskii camp evolved in the course of the decade into a powerful regional economic organisation. Each year, the OGPU sent more prisoners to Solovetskii and expanded the camp’s productive activities with the aim of reducing its annual deficit and reliance on central funding. However, each year the growth in population and the increasingly complex camp economy incurred costs higher than the extra revenue they generated, and the camp continued to depend on central subsidies to underwrite its further expansion. The Karelian government strongly opposed the establishment of the camp and strove to resist its progressive encroachment onto the mainland, but it could do nothing to prevent other economic organisations, in particular the Murmansk railway, from exploiting the supply of camp labour to meet the growing needs of their operations within Karelian territory. At the end of the decade, Karelian organisations also turned to USLON as a means of overcoming the critical regional labour shortage.
59 As demand grew, so did supply. In 1929, G. G. Iagoda defined colonisation and the economic development of the unpopulated frontiers of Soviet territory as the primary objectives of the camp system. USLON reformed both its administrative structure and organisation of labour with a view to increasing its productive efficiency, and the new system formed the model for other camps established at this time and later. At the same time, the OGPU received huge numbers of new prisoners as a result of its terror campaigns in the Soviet countryside, and deployed these in the newly reformed camp system to further promote its geographic and economic expansion. The Belomor Canal construction was devised as a showcase project to demonstrate the economic advantages of forced labour, as well as its potential to ‘reforge’ criminals and political enemies into loyal, industrious citizens. This is not to suggest that ‘re-education’ was ever a primary concern of the ‘special’ camp system, but it played an important subsidiary role in rhetorically justifying the enterprise.
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60 The reality of forced labour, of course, was brutal. Mass killing was never a primary purpose of the ‘special’ camp system in the period under survey, but arbitrary brutality and ‘incidental’ death from extreme hardship were defining characteristics of the OGPU’s camp regime and organisation of production. Forced labour was also, in the long term, economically counter-productive. The fact that USLON required annual subsidies from the centre to support its economic activities and to underwrite its expansion points to the inefficiency of its prison workforce. More significantly, the fact that the same agency was responsible for conducting arrests and exploiting the labour of prisoners could not fail to induce its planners to assume a potentially open-ended labour supply, and to devise expansionary schemes without due consideration of total costs, including the costs of human labour transferred from the free to the unfree economy, and the costs incurred in undertaking projects which would not offer viable economic returns in the long term, such as the development of the Far North.
61 In the late 1920s, however, the OGPU persuaded central authorities of the advantages of using prison labour on a mass scale as an efficient means of allocating and utilising human resources during a period of accelerated economic development and (not coincidentally) of expanding repression. The OGPU’s interests in promoting Karelian regional development also coincided with the interests of the republican authorities, who by this stage could find no alternative way of recruiting sufficient labour to fulfil their plan targets and acceded to the inevitable further growth of the ‘special’ camp system within their territory.
62 During the period under survey in this paper, the OGPU ‘special’ camp system in Karelia expanded as a semi-autonomous institution, fulfilling the state’s security policy, but also defining its own economic role and the direction and shape of its own development in response to both central and regional opportunities. The Karelian camp system established structures, methods and objectives which formed a basis for the further expansion of the Gulag throughout the Soviet Union. The sequel paper will trace how, from 1933 onwards, the Stalinist centre increasingly asserted political control and planning discipline over the Karelian Gulag, dismantling the BBK’s grand vision of regional development and defining its primary tasks of production and repression.
63 Department of History
64 The University of Manchester
65 Oxford Road
66 Manchester M13 9PL
67 United Kingdom
68 e-mail : [email protected]
NOTES
1. From Marina Goldovskaia, Vlast´ solovetskaia, Mosfil´m, 1989.
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2. In this paper I use the term ‘special’ camp system to refer to the OGPU-NKVD network of prison camps, commonly known as the Gulag, as opposed to the camps and colonies at various times under the authority of the People’s Commissariat of Justice or republican People’s Commissariats of Internal Affairs. For the development of camp administrative structures and 3. Dmitry S. Likhachev, Reflections on the Russian soul. A memoir (Budapest and New York : CEU Press, 2000): 87. 4. See, among memoir sources on Solovetskii, D. S. Likhachev, Reflections on the Russian soul..., op. cit.; S. A. Malsagov, An island hell. A Soviet prison in the Far North (London : Philpot, 1926); J. D. Bessonov, My twenty-six prisons and my escape from Solovetsky (London : Jonathan Cape, 1929); Mikhail Rozanov, Solovetskii kontslager´ v monastyre, 1922-1939 gg. Fakty. Domysly. “Parashi”. Obzor vospominanii solovchan solovchanami v dvukh tomakh (author’s publication : 1979); Ivan Solonevich, Russia in chains (London : Unwin, 1938); International Committee for Political Prisoners, ed., Letters from Russian prisons (London : C. W. Daniel, 1925): 159-221. See also the memoirs of a timber administrator in Karelia who visited this camp, Karl Albrecht, Der verratene Sozialismus (Berlin and Leipzig : Nibelungen-Verlag, 1939); and also Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag archipelago, 1918-1956. An experiment in literary investigation. Part III (London : Collins/Harvill, 1975); and Ivan Chukhin, Kanaloarmeitsy : istoriia stroitel´stva Belomorkanala v dokumentakh, tsifrakh, faktakh, fotografiiakh, svidetel´stvakh uchastnikov i ochevidtsev (Petrozavodsk : Kareliia, 1990). 5. Anonymous author, in Letters from Russian prisons, op. cit.: 170. 6. Among the most recently published works, see especially the handbook by M.B. Smirnov, ed., Sistema ispravitel´no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR..., op. cit.; monographs by M. Jakobson, Origins of the Gulag..., op. cit.; and Galina Ivanova, Labor camp socialism. The Gulag in the Soviet totalitarian system (Armonk and New York : M. E. Sharpe, 2000); a collection of essays and photographs, Marcello Flores, Francesca Gori, eds, GULag. Il sistema dei lager in URSS (Milan : Mazzotta, 1999); and the dauntingly comprehensive literature survey by Ralf Stettner, Archipel GULag : Stalins Zwangslager -- Terrorinstrument und Wirtschaftsgigant (Paderborn : Schöningh, 1996). See also the document collection A. I. Kokurin, N. V. Petrov, eds, GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 1917-1960 (Moscow : Materik, 2000). 7. For a few recent examples of regional Gulag studies, see David J. Nordlander, “Origins of a Gulag capital : Magadan and Stalinist control in the early 1930s,” Slavic Review, 57, 4 (Winter 1998): 791-812; James Harris, “The growth of the Gulag : forced l abour in the Urals Region, 8. For details on these camps’ administrations, see M. B. Smirnov, ed., Sistema ispravitel´no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR..., op. cit., : 162-164, 394-397. 9. Nick Baron, “Production and terror : The operation of the Karelian Gulag, 1933-1939,” to be published in the next issue of the Cahiers du Monde russe, 43, 1 (January-March 2002). 10. See footnote 4. 11. On early Soviet penal labour policy, see M. Jakobson, Origins of the Gulag..., op. cit.: chapter 1. On war communism, see Alec Nove, An economic history of the USSR, 1917-1991 (London : Penguin, 1992): chapter 3.
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12. GARF, f. 1318 (People’s Commissariat of Nationalities, Narkomnats), op. 10, d. 6, l. 101. 13. In Letters from Russian prisons..., op. cit.: 162. 14. The saw-mill was transferred by decree of the Council of Labour and Defence (STO) on 30 May 1923. See letter from the Karelian Labour Commune (KTK) Executive Committee, signed by E. Gylling and Iushiev, to the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, dated 14 August 1923, in GARF, f. 5446, op. 5a, d. 1 (“On organisation of northern forced labour camps”), l. 11. 15. M. Jakobson, Origins of the Gulag..., op. cit.: 39; see also “Explanatory notes” to second OGPU draft of decree “On the organisation of northern forced labour camps,” dated 18 August 1923, GARF, f. 5446, op. 5a, d. 1, l. 24. 16. GARF, f. 5446, op. 5a, d. 1, l. 24. 17. Second OGPU draft of decree “On the organisation of northern forced labour camps,” dated 18 August 1923, GARF, f. 5446, op. 5a, d. 1, l. 2. 18. Letter of A. G. Beloborodov (GUMZ) to Unshlikht (GPU), dated 14 June 1923, GARF, f. 5446, op. 5a, d. 1, ll. 3-6. 19. At that date, central funding was limited to only a small number of penal institutions, housing in total fewer than 15,000 prisoners sentenced by civil organs and 17,300 prisoners sentenced by the GPU. See letter from Budgetary Administration of Narkomfin to GPU, dated 17 June 1923, GARF, f. 5446, op. 5a, d. 1, l. 9. 20. GARF, f. 5446, op. 5a, d. 1, l. 11. 21. Letter from Regional Administrative Department of the Karelian Labour Commune, signed by N. V. Arkhipov, to the NKVD, dated 1 August 1922 [sic, probably 1923], in GARF, f. 5446, op. 5a, d. 1, l. 21. 22. Letter from A. P. Nogtev to the Executive Committee of Arkhangelsk oblast´, dated 19 July 1923, in GARF, f. 5446, op. 5a, d. 1, l. 15. 23. Decree in GARF, f. 5446, op. 5a, d.1, l. 1. 24. See the account in Letters from Russian prisons..., op. cit.: 165. 25. GAOPDF RK, f. 3, op. 1, d. 216, l. 182ob. 26. Letter to TsK dated 11 March 1923, “On location of transit point for Solovki concentration camp on the Island of the Revolution, Kem´ uezd, Karelian Republic,” in RGASPI, f. 17 (Central Committee), op. 33 (Secret Department), d. 218, ll. 84-86. 27. Letter from G. G. Iagoda, G. I. Bokii and L. I. Berenzon to Union Sovnarkom’s Administrative-Financial Commission, dated 25 March 1925, in GARF, f. 5446, op. 5a, d. 720, l. 2. 28. Ibid. 29. According to Trud v SSSR, 16-17 (1936). I am very grateful to Bob Davies for indicating this source to me. 30. Letter to Sovnarkom SSSR Administrative-Financial Commission, dated 30 March 1925, in GARF, f. 5446, op. 5a, d. 720, l. 3. 31. Protocol 168 of Sovnarkom SSSR Administrative-Financial Commission, dated 8 April 1925, in GARF, f. 5446, op. 5a, d. 720, ll. 4, 5; Secret supplement to protocol 170, dated 8 April 1925, in ibid., l. 6; Protocol 144-6 of STO, in ibid., l. 7. 32. Letter to Sovnarkom SSSR, dated 29 May 1926, in GARF, f. 5446, op. 7a, d. 537, ll. 1-6.
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33. Letter of Narkomfin SSSR to Sovnarkom SSSR, dated 11 June 1926, in GARF, f. 5446, op. 7a, d. 537, l. 7. 34. Letter of OGPU to Sovnarkom SSSR, dated 3 July 1926, in GARF, f. 5446, op. 7a, d. 537, l. 7; Resolution of STO, dated 28 July 1926, in ibid., l. 24. 35. Letter of Narkomfin SSSR Budgetary Administration of the Army and Navy Department, dated 23 October 1926, in GARF, f. 5446, op. 7a, d. 113, l. 2. 36. Letter from the OGPU Financial Department, signed G. G. Iagoda, to Sovnarkom SSSR, dated 30 September 1926, in GARF, f. 5446, op. 7a, d. 113, l. 1. 37. Letter from the OGPU, signed by G. G. Iagoda, to Sovnarkom SSSR, dated 7 May 1928, in GARF, f. 5446, op. 9a, d. 444, l. 2. 38. Ibid. 39. GARF, f. 5446, op. 9a, d. 444, l. 1. 40. Letter dated 13 October 1924, in GARF, f. 5446, op. 5a, d. 558. STO allocated the requisite volume of spirit on 22 October, ll. 1-4. 41. See footnote 4. 42. Secret protocol of the Presidium of the Karelian Central Executive Committee (TsIK), dated 17 July 1927, in TsGARK, f. 690, op. 1, d. 6-27, l. 65. 43. Protocol 52 of the Presidium of the SSSR Central Executive Committee (TsIK), dated 24 April 1925, in GARF, f. 3316, op. 16a, d. 178, l. 17. 44. Protocol of Presidium of Karelian Obkom, dated 11 August 1925, in GAOPDF RK, f. 3, op. 1, d. 585, l. 105. 45. Protocol of Presidium of Karelian Obkom, dated 31 August 1925, in GAOPDF RK, f. 3, op. 1, d. 585, l. 114. 46. A representative of the Murmansk railway admitted to the Presidium of Karelian TsIK in July 1927 that his administration had contracts for USLON labour in force until October, but promised not to renew them after that date. E. Gylling acerbically reminded him that the use of USLON labour had been banned two years previously. See Secret Protocol of Presidium of Karelian TsIK, dated on 17 July 1927, in TsGARK, f. 690, op. 1, d. 6-27, l. 65. 47. GAOPDF RK, f. 3, op. 2, d. 236, l. 67. 48. For example, in a report to the Information Department of the OGPU Administration of the Leningrad Military Okrug of 10 February 1929, the head of the Karelian GPU Nel´ke noted that the Karelles saw-mill No. 40 in Kem´ (on the Island of the Revolution) in 1927-1928 employed 698 permanent free workers and 347 USLON prisoners. Because the free workers were politically reliable, claimed Nel´ke, the prisoners’ attempts to spread anti-Soviet and anti-semitic agitation failed, but their presence did cause resentment among the free workers who feared they would be replaced with forced labour, and who saw that the prisoners received better supplies through corruption at USLON than they did through civil channels. This report evidently emphasises both central policy priorities of the time and Karelian preoccupations, and exemplifies the problems of using such sources. GAOPDF RK, f. 3, op. 2, d. 80-365, ll. 22-37. 49. Ivan Foinitski in I. Foinitski and Georges Bonet-Maury, La transportation russe et anglaise avec une étude historique sur la transportation (Paris : Lecène, Oudin et Co., 1895): 150. I. Foinitskii opposed transportation, although he conceded that “elle a eu ses
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défenseurs comme peine, comme mesure de sûreté à l’intérieur ou comme moyen d’expansion coloniale,” in ibid.: 257. 50. “F. E. Dzerzhinksii o revoliutsionnoi zakonnosti,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, 1 (1958): 19, 21, cited in G. Ivanova, Labor camp socialism..., op. cit.: 186. 51. G. L. Piatakov had in mind, in the first instance, the northern reaches of the Enisei river, Sakhalin, the Kirgiz steppe and the Nerchinsk district. Cited in G. Ivanova, Labor camp socialism..., op. cit.: 70. 52. Politbiuro resolution of 27 June 1929, in RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 746, l. 11. 53. Politbiuro resolutions of 16 May and 27 June 1929 ‘On the use of the labour of criminal prisoners,’ RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 740, l. 6 and d. 746, l. 11. 54. Politbiuro resolution of 27 June 1929 ‘On the use of the labour of criminal prisoners,’ RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 746, l. 11. 55. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 746, l. 11. See also Sovnarkom SSSR decree ‘On the use of the labour of criminal prisoners,’ 11 July 1929, reprinted in M. I. Khlusov, ed., Ekonomika GULAGa i ee rol´ v razvitii strany. 1930-e gody. Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow : Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1998): 19-20. 56. Protocol of Karelian Obkom Bureau, dated 28 September 1929, in GAOPDF RK, f. 3, op. 2, d. 329, l. 57. 57. For a general description of party and security measures to mobilise the rural workforce to felling, see F. Pottoev, “Sovetskoe stroitel´stvo AKSSR,” in G. S. Rovio, N. A. Iushchev, E. A. Gylling, et al., eds, Sovetskaia Kareliia. Ocherki partiinogo, sovetskogo i kul´turnogo stroitel´stva AKSSR (Moscow and Leningrad : OGIZ, 1933): 120-146. 58. Karelian Obkom Bureau, 18 November 1929, GAOPDF RK, f. 3, op. 2, d. 331, l. 54. 59. Karelian Obkom Secretariat, 20 May 1930, GAOPDF RK, f. 2, op. 2, d. 434, ll. 72-73. 60. The appeal to the TsK of 28 March 1929 is cited in a letter of OrgRasPred TsK to Karelian Obkom, Leningrad Obkom and Severnyi krai Obkom, dated 18 June 1929, in RGASPI, f. 17, op. 33, d. 437, l. 71. The Karelians lodged a second appeal on 28 August, see Memo to Secretariat TsK, no date (soon after 28 August, 1929), RGASPI, f. 17, op. 33, d. 437, ll. 80, 98, and requested Leningrad’s support for this petition in September, see Protocol of Karelian Obkom Bureau, 28 September 1929, GAOPDF RK, f. 3, op. 2, d. 329, l. 57. 61. As summarised by the TsK’s rapporteur, in RGASPI, f. 17, op. 33, d. 437, ll. 80, 98. 62. Ibid., l. 80. 63. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 33, d. 437, l. 71. 64. Sobranie zakonov i rasporiazhenii raboche-krest´ianskogo pravitel´stva SSSR, 22 (1930): 686. 65. Memorandum of April 1930, signed by USLON Chief A. P. Nogtev, in TsGARK, f. 865, op. 32, d. 1, ll. 2-4, 30-35. 66. Ibid., ll. 2-4. 67. Ibid. 68. Interview with SLON escapee Reverand Deinas, United States Consulate, Kaunas, Lithuania, 31 October 1933, in US State Department, Records relating to internal Soviet affairs, 1930-1939 (T1429), 861.5017 - Living Conditions/726. Solzhenitsyn, on anecdotal evidence, has attributed the inspiration for this reform of working practices to N.A.
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Frenkel´, a prisoner in SLON since 1927, who allegedly was flown to Moscow in 1929 for an interview with Stalin and high OGPU officials in which he outlined his vision for the expansion and efficient utilisation of forced labour, see Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag archipelago, 1918-1956, op. cit.: 73-75. This account of Frenkel´’s role is corroborated, though with modifications, by several survivor memoirs (although there is a danger of circularity, since Solzhenitsyn might have used these in his investigations). See, for example, Ivan Chukhin’s interview with S. L. Moiseev and note on L. M. Khoruzhik, who recalled an USLON official using the term “frenkelevizatsiia”, in Kanaloarmeitsy, op. cit.: 30-32; and also Chapter 7, “Frenkel´, frenkelizatsiia i pridurki,’ in M. Rozanov, Solovetskii kontslager´ v monastyre..., op. cit.: 174-191. 69. Details of the camps’ population growth from M. B. Smirnov, ed., Sistema ispravitel ´no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR..., op. cit.: 395. 70. It is unclear whether these figures take ruble inflation into consideration. Solovetskie Ostrova, 2-3 (1930): 56-57, cited in A.Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag archipelago, op. cit.: 51. 71. Zemskov in V. B. Zhiromskaia, ed., Naselenie Rossii v XX veke. Istoricheskie ocherki. Tom 1. 1900-1939 (Moscow : Rosspen, 2000): 320. Note, however, that the same source gives a figure of 1,438 death in the Solovetskii camp for 1931, ibid.: 319. 72. This is born out by the memoir evidence, see for example, David J. Dallin, Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Forced labor in Soviet Russia (New York : Octagon Books, 1974): 188-190. 73. Dated 28 May 1930, Stenogram, in RGASPI, f. 17, op. 21, d. 1910, ll. 41-50. 74. Ibid. 75. Karelian Obkom Secretariat, 18 June 1930, GAOPDF RK, f. 2, op. 2, d. 434, l. 100. 76. Letter from USLON Timber Felling Section to Karelles, dated 12 August 1930, in GAOPDF RK, f. 3, op. 2, d. 85-447, l. 29. 77. GAOPDF RK, f. 3, op. 2, d. 85-447, l. 25. 78. Ibid., l. 26. 79. Protocol of Secretariat of Karelian Obkom, dated 23 July 1930, in RGASPI, f. 17, op. 21, d. 1986, l. 6. 80. Report of 22 August 1930, in GAOPDF RK, f. 2, op. 2., d. 436, ll. 3, 16. 81. For the prehistory of the Belomor scheme, see M. Gorkii, L. Averbakh, S. Firin, eds, Belomorsko-Baltiiskii Kanal imeni Stalina. Istoriia stroitel´stva, 1931-1934 gg. (Moscow : OGIZ, 1934, reprinted 1998): 97-99; and Iurii Kilin, “BBK kak faktor voennoi strategii,” in Sever, 7 (1995): 102, 108. 82. M. Gorkii et al., Belomorsko-Baltiiskii Kanal imeni Stalina..., op. cit.: 25. 83. See Narkomput´ report on the White Sea -- Baltic Waterway (Belomorsko-Baltiiskii Vodnyi Put´, BBVP), no date (mid-1930), in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1806, ll. 1-3, which offers a comprehensive list of perceived advantages, lending important insights also into strategic and foreign policy priorities of the time. 84. “Where mossy cliffs and waters/Slumbered, there by the strength of labour/ Factories will be built/And towns will grow./Factory chimneys will rise up/Under the northern skies./Buldings will shine with the lights/Of reading rooms, theatres and clubs.” Poem by kanaloarmeets Medvedkov, cited in Petr Karelin, “The first anniversary of the Belomor-Baltiiskii Combine,” Karelo-Murmanksii Krai, 7-8 (1934): 1. For more Belomorstroi poetry and songs, see for example, M. Gorkii et al., Belomorsko-
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Baltiiskii Kanal imeni Stalina..., op. cit.: 475-478; I. Chukhin, Kanaloarmeitsy, op. cit.: 109, 111, 130-131; Cynthia A. Ruder, Making history for Stalin. The story of the Belomor Canal (Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 1998): 12-13, 138-139, 173-185. 85. M. Gorkii, “O kochke i o tochke,” in O literature (Moscow : Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1935): 175, cited in C. A. Ruder, Making history..., op. cit.: 98. 86. Iogann Al´tmann, “Kniga o bol´shoi pobede,” Literaturnyi kritik, 6 (1934): 255, in C. A. Ruder, Making history..., op. cit.: 151. 87. The second caption is a quotation from Marx. In M. Gorkii et al., Belomorsko- Baltiiskii Kanal imeni Stalina..., op. cit.: 280, 318. 88. Italics in the original. I. Al´tmann, “Kniga o bol´shoi pobede,” art. cit.: 255-256, in C. A. Ruder, Making history..., op. cit.: 151. 89. Politbiuro Protocol 125, 5 May 1930, in RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 784, l. 2. This resolution has been published in Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov, Oleg V. Khlevniuk, eds, Stalin’s letters to Molotov (New Haven and London : Yale University Press, 1995): 212, n. 1. 90. Protocol 1 of Special Committee, in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1806, l. 5. 91. Instruction of Narkomput´, dated 26 May 1930, in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1806, l. 10. 92. Protocol 2 of Special Committee, in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1806, l. 8. 93. STO resolution “On the construction of the Belomorsko-Baltiiskii Canal,” 3 June 1930, in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1806, l. 4. The Politbiuro confirmed its decree of 5 May 1930 with a further resolution “On the Belomorsko-Baltiiskii Canal,” dated 20 June 1930, Protocol 129, p. 13, in RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 788, l. 3. Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov, Oleg V. Khlevniuk, eds, Stalin’s letters to Molotov, op. cit.: 212, n. 1. 94. Politbiuro meeting of 10 February 1931, see Protocol 26, dated 15 October, in RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 813, l. 11. 95. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1806, ll. 24-5. Although Blagonravov was replaced by senior OGPU official G. E. Prokof´ev as Head of Belomorstroi (until August 1931, when Prokof ´ev was replaced by L. I. Kogan), the chairmanship of the Special Committee in fact alternated between G. G. Iagoda and N. M. Ianson, head of the new People’s Commissar of Water Transport (Narkomvod), established on 30 January 1931, which remained responsible for the construction of a port at Soroka, at the mouth of the canal into the White Sea. 96. M. B. Smirnov, ed., Sistema ispravitel´no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR..., op. cit.: 162, 394, 396. The Solovetskii ITL was not definitively dissolved until 1 November 1933. 97. In this connection, it is interesting to note that E. Gylling later refused to co- operate with the OGPU writers’ collective composing a history of the construction, believing -- doubtless correctly -- that it would only represent the OGPU’s point of view, see Letter of Engineer Lunev to the Chief Editor of the BBVP edition, dated October 1932, in TsGARK, f. 520, op. 2, d. 3/18, ll. 115. 98. For the change of name from USLON to USLAG, probably at the establishment of ULAG OGPU in May 1930, see M. B. Smirnov, Sistema ispravitel´no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR, op. cit.: 395, n. 1. For a brief period, the camp was subordinated to the Karelian GPU, at which time it was known as Solovetskie i Karelo-Murmanskie lageria OGPU (SKM ITL).
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99. In fact, the felling was carried out by Belbaltlag in the Murmansk railway zone under contract to Narkomput´, for which it charged three million rubles, see GARF, f. 5446, op. 13, d. 519. 100. GARF, f. 5446, op. 15, d. 1404. 101. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1805, ll. 81-84. 102. Special opinion of R. A. Muklevich, member of the Revvoensovet, attached to Protocol 7 of Special Committee, dated 26 April 1932, in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1806, l. 44. For more detail on this controversy and its consequences, see Iurii Kilin, “BBK kak faktor voennoi strategii,” in Sever, 7 (1995): 109-112. 103. Likhachev was transferred at this time from Solovetskii Island to a village near Medvezh´ia Gora, see D. S. Likhachev, Reflections on the Russian soul..., op. cit.: 178-187. 104. Published in Krasnaia Kareliia, 11 March 1934, and in Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi Akademii, 5 (1933): 90-91 (I am very grateful to Bob Davies for alerting me to the latter source). Note that in this speech, Firin also stated that only 37 professional Chekists were employed on the construction site, an improbable figure which might cast doubt on the credibility of his testimony. 105. These ranges adapted from R. Stettner’s survey of secondary sources, Archipel GULag, op. cit.: 231, 234. D. J. Dallin and B. I. Nicolaevsky state that the workforce “reached almost 300,000 at its peak,” in Forced labor in Soviet Russia, op. cit.: 212-213; C. A. Ruder states that during 1931-1933 over 126,000 prisoners worked on the canal, in Making history..., op. cit.: 25, after I. Chukhin, Kanaloarmeitsy, op. cit.: 209, A. Solzhenitsyn reports that at least 100,000 died during the winter of 1931-1932, and up to 250,000 in total, in The Gulag archipelago..., op. cit.: 90-91, 94. Tuominen reports an average workforce of 60,000 and estimates deaths between 60-200,000, Arvo Tuominen, in The bells of the Kremlin. An experience in communism (Hanover and London : University Press of New England, 1983): 67, 74. M. B. Smirnov gives the following archival figures for the average annual Belbaltlag population : 1931-64,000; 1932-99,095; 1933-84,504, in Sistema ispravitel´no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR..., op. cit.: 162. See also footnote 112. 106. “Explanatory notes to operative estimates, July-December 1931,” dated 2 July 1931, in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1805, ll. 102ob-103. 107. Report on State of Construction of BBVP, dated 1 May 1932, in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1806, l. 45-55. 108. Letter from D. V. Uspenskii to Karelian First Obkom Secretary P. A. Irklis, dated 24 February 1936, in GAOPDF RK, f. 3, op. 4, d. 165/159, l. 36; see also the offending article by I. V. Pervozvantsev, “Belomorsko-Baltiiskii Kombinat,” ll. 37-66. 109. In V. B. Zhiromskaia, ed., Naselenie Rossii v XX veke..., op. cit.: 320. He does not give figures for 1931 or 1932, and it should be noted that the 1933 death rate was likely to have been particularly high owing to the famine. Note also that in 1933 mortality in the Solovetskii camp, dissolved in that year, amounted to 18.1 %, in ibid. 110. V. B. Zhiromskaia, ed., Naselenie Rossii v XX veke..., op. cit.: 119. 111. There are no available figures for prisoners incapacitated by injury. A recent Gulag history states that on 1 January 1931, of the total Gulag population 1.8 % were “non- working” (no source indicated), M. B. Smirnov, S. P. Sigachev, D. V. Skapov, “Il sistema
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dei luoghi di reclusione in Unione Sovietica, 1929-1960,” in M. Flores and F. Gori, eds, GULag. Il sistema dei lager in URSS, op. cit.: 61. 112. The following figures are given by V. N. Zemskov for total Soviet special camp populations, with mortality (in brackets): 1931-240,350 (7,283); 1932 - 301,500 (13,267); 1933-422,304 (67,297), in V. N. Zemskov, “GULAG (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt),” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 6 (1991): 14-15. 113. For the Industrial Party case, and its consequences for Soviet professionals, see Roy Medvedev, Let history judge. The origins and consequences of Stalinism, revised ed. (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1989): 263-289; R. W. Davies, The Soviet economy in turmoil, 1929-1930 (Basingstoke : Macmillan, 1989): 406-411. 114. According to Michel Heller, Stacheldraht der Revolution. Die Welt der Konzentratsionslager in der sowjetischen Literatur (Stuttgart : Seewald, 1975): 130, 134, 137, cited in R. Stettner, Archipel GULag, op. cit.: 231, n. 223. 115. On sharashki, see Zhak [Jacques] Rossi, Spravochnik po GULAGu (Moscow : Prosvet, 1991): 452-453. 116. It is not clear whether they already had specific people in mind for arrest, or just the functions that needed fulfilling, GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1805, l. 66. 117. For pen portraits of Industrial Party ‘wreckers’ employed in Belomorstroi, see Chapter 3 of M. Gorkii et al., Belomorsko-Baltiiskii Kanal imeni Stalina..., op. cit.: especially 77-97. 118. Stalin also warned newspaper editors to ensure they published no “boastful comparisons” with the Suez and Panama canals. Politbiuro Protocol 140, dated 1 July 1933, p. 3, in RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 925, l. 2. 119. In the Politbiuro meeting of 15 August, it was agreed to consider deepening and widening the canal to permit full military usage, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 928, l. 24. This project was superseded by the more feasible and cheaper project of building a second canal, running alongside the first. This, however, was never implemented. See Iu. Kilin, “BBK kak faktor voennoi strategii,” art. cit.: 111-112; Id., Kareliia i zimniaia voina. Kareliia v 1920-1941 gg.: diplomatiia, strategiia, ekonomika, politika, unpublished MS, pp. 35-36. 120. With a rare sense of realism, the Karelian Obkom Bureau on 21 June 1933 decided not to petition to take over control of the Belomor Canal and the industrial combine planned for its territory, see Protocol 50, in GAOPDF RK, f. 3, op. 3, d. 12. 121. TsGARK f. 865, op. 36, d. 1, ll. 35-36. 122. Nick Baron, “Production and terror : The operation of the Karelian Gulag, 1933-1939,” to be published in the next issue of the Cahiers du Monde russe..
RÉSUMÉS
Résumé Conflit et complicité : l’expansion du Goulag carélien, 1923-1933.
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Notre article, qui se base sur des documents d’archives récemment déclassifiés, retrace l’expansion du système « spécial » des camps en Carélie depuis l’installation du camp de désignation spéciale des îles Solovki en 1923 jusqu’à l’achèvement du canal Belomor en 1933. Les camps « spéciaux » furent placés sous l’autorité de la police politique soviétique et non sous celle des organes civils ou judiciaires de Carélie et eurent pour mission initiale d’isoler les prisonniers politiques les plus dangereux et les criminels réfractaires. Cependant, au cours de la décennie en question, le camp des îles Solovki se transforma en une organisation économique puissante qui faisait travailler ses détenus dans de nombreux secteurs de la région. Le gouvernement de Carélie tenta de s’opposer à l’expansion progressive du camp sur son territoire, mais ne put mettre fin à l’utilisation contractuelle croissante de la main-d’œuvre du camp dans l’économie locale, qui manquait cruellement de travailleurs non détenus. Après 1929, le gouvernement carélien et la direction du camp finirent bon gré mal gré par faire cause commune en faisant campagne pour le développement régional. L’intérêt de la police politique pour la Carélie atteignit son point culminant avec la construction du canal Belomor pour laquelle le « camp spécial » mobilisa plus de 175000 détenus. Notre article examine aussi les fluctuations de la relation entre le gouvernement carélien et l’administration du « camp spécial », relation qui alternait entre conflit et complicité.
Abstract Using recently declassified archival documents, this paper traces the expansion of the Soviet ‘special’ camp system in Karelia from the establishment of the Solovetskii Camp of Special Designation in 1923 to the completion of the Belomor Canal in 1933. The ‘special’ camps came under the authority of the Soviet political police, rather than the Karelian civil or judicial organs, and were initially intended to isolate the most dangerous political prisoners and recalcitrant criminals. However, the Solovetskii camp evolved in the course of the decade into a powerful economic organisation which employed its prisoners in many sectors throughout the region. The Karelian government strove to resist the camp’s progressive expansion throughout its territory, but could do nothing to halt the growing use of the prisoner workforce under contract in the regional economy, which suffered from an intense shortage of free labour. After 1929, the Karelian and Solovetskii camp authorities came reluctantly to find common cause in the promotion of regional development. The political police’s interest in Karelia culminated with the construction of the Belomor Canal, for which the ‘special’ camp mobilised over 175,000 prisoners. As well as describing the expansion of the Karelian Gulag, this paper focuses on the changing relationship, at times conflictual and at times complicitous, between the Karelian authorities and the ‘special’ camp administration in this process.
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Magadan and the evolution of the Dal´stroi bosses in the 1930s.
David J. NORDLANDER
1 Far more than a place of incarceration, the prison assumed a transcendent significance throughout the Stalin era. The Gulag in particular became a summation of the period, for events behind the barbed wire in many respects encapsulated the key realities of Stalinism. Among a plethora of topics, the legacy of specific camp regions across Siberia and other northern realms provides one of the most compelling lines of inquiry to elucidate the modus operandi of the Soviet 1930s. This essay will focus upon the history of Dal´stroi, the prison fiefdom in the Soviet Far East that in time became the largest entity within the nation-wide network of labor camps. An acronym signifying the euphemistic title of Far Northern Construction Trust, Dal´stroi proved itself a brutal institution over the years that fully reflected the impact of the Stalin Terror. In reference to the infamous archipelago of prison camps, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn remarked that Dal´stroi and its capital of Magadan formed “the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag.”1
2 Such a regional investigation can be useful on a number of levels, for the focus of scholarship in Soviet history until recently remained on Moscow and the top party leadership under Stalin. Local government has for the most part been overlooked, even though it can reveal much about the nature of power and rule in the USSR. My emphasis here will be an explication of the chief Dal´stroi bosses, including an analysis of their backgrounds, motivations, and career paths as well as generational shifts they represented within the NKVD. In many respects, such an investigation involves the politics of personnel and the mutable nature of Soviet officialdom. Rather than representing a static nomenklatura that became ossified in place, the party and state bureaucracies in the early Stalin era evolved under seismic shifts that witnessed enormous political turmoil. Events in Magadan paralleled national developments, and can serve to highlight the nature of such changes in Stalinist provincial administration. 2
3 Lacking any regional antecedents, both Dal´stroi and its capital of Magadan came to life only in the early Stalin era and indeed stood as a quintessential reflection of Stalinism.
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Upon order of the Politbiuro, the Council of Labor and Defense (Sovet truda i oborony- STO) created the state trust Dal´stroi on 13 November 1931. As the chairman of STO, V. M. Molotov drafted a resolution defining the parameters and financing of this new organization. Dal´stroi would concentrate on highway and industrial construction in the valley of the upper Kolyma River, with a particular emphasis on mineral excavation in the region ; it would control every enterprise and settlement within its venue, stretching down to Magadan and the Sea of Okhotsk ; the Soviet government would initially capitalize Dal´stroi at twenty million rubles, a sum to be augmented annually by request of the trust leadership ; STO would name a director, who was then to appoint deputies and assistants in several branches of economic and political operations ; and finally, Dal´stroi would be freed from all local taxes and levies, and would stand above other regional institutions in terms of seniority.3
4 There should be no surprise that Stalin tapped a veteran chekist as the first director of prison operations in Magadan. One day following the creation of Dal´stroi, Molotov named Eduard Petrovich Berzin as its chief. Berzin, a Latvian Communist from a peasant family near Riga, enjoyed a high profile in the Soviet Union going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. A veteran of World War I, he had been a member and then leader of a Latvian regiment that in 1918 became the First Latvian Rifle Division, one of the units that guarded Lenin and other party leaders in the days after October. Berzin later helped liquidate the Left-SR uprising in Moscow and purportedly uncovered an international conspiracy known as the “Lockhart Affair.” He joined the Cheka in 1922, after which he rose through the ranks of the OGPU to become the head of a major labor camp in the northern Ural Mountains, Vishlag, from 1926 to 1931. As director of this site, Berzin had proven himself an able and competent administrator who could be trusted with the most vital missions. Considering the importance of the burgeoning gold industry in the north-eastern region, there is little wonder that Stalin selected a man of wide experience to run Dal´stroi.4
5 By 1932, the outlines of Dal´stroi’s character became clear as Gulag activities began to transform Magadan. Having arrived in February of that year, Berzin established a two- story wooden headquarters on the river Magadanka at the edge of town. Since Dal´stroi was nominally under the command of the Council of Labor and Defense, the OGPU created a separate regional organization in April 1932 known as Sevvostlag, or North- eastern Camp Administration, as an official arm of the Gulag providing the labor requirements of Dal´stroi. In terms of institutional oversight, a parallel Sevvostlag boss oversaw the growing number of labor camps in the area on behalf of the trust director. No duality of power ever arose in Magadan, however, for the Dal´stroi boss remained the local arbiter of events. Such an arrangement came about in part for propaganda purposes, for it allowed the Soviet state to refer to the vital functions of the “state trust” while concealing the actual nature of regional camp operations.5
6 Aside from its motivation, however, state rhetoric found ready adherents within this distant camp fiefdom. Many Gulag bosses, and even some inmates, placed at least some currency in the promises of official ideology. The idealistic framework of rehabilitation programs became the intellectual foundation for all endeavors in the region and gave meaning to several players caught in this bizarre yet tragic drama. Without question, the Gulag in Magadan comprised a repressive organization in the early Stalin era responsible for the suffering and deaths of many prisoners. One key difference from later years, however, was that Soviet goals at this time did not aim to destroy prisoners
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as political or ideological enemies of the state. While later generations of camp bosses regarded the “reforging” campaign as a useful pretense, the language of correctional labor resonated widely for the first wave of Dal´stroi administrators. For them, labor competition between brigades of Gulag captives became a motivational tool wrapped in the revolutionary ideals of Bolshevism.
7 Such sentiments reflected the philosophical outlook of the original camp bosses in Magadan. By definition of their punitive roles as agents of the secret police, both Berzin and his assistants played a substantial part in the evolution of the Stalin Terror. But as representatives of state security in the period following the Bolshevik Revolution, they cannot be easily categorized. Many such officials perpetrated callous and inhumane acts at various points of their careers. Along with acknowledging the repression with which they became involved, however, it should be understood that Berzin’s circle reflected the more temperate values seen in the generation of Old Bolsheviks who had served the party from the days of October. The initial Dal´stroi administrators were all quite different from subsequent and far more sadistic Stalinist henchmen who came to the territory in the late 1930s. Although they had worked within the secret police for years, the experience of Dal´stroi’s first managerial generation came largely from the pre-Stalinist era, when more moderate figures could be found in high positions of the Cheka or OGPU. Until the Kirov assassination late in 1934, and for a short time thereafter, it was not unusual to find agents like Eduard Berzin within the ranks of the secret police.
8 Berzin’s manner as the Gulag chief in Magadan reflected his extensive education and cosmopolitanism. Having attended art school in Berlin before World War I, he had imbibed the revolutionary idealism of his formative years before 1920 and was an intellectual peer of leading thinkers in the party. For Berzin, the reshaping of those arrested and fallen from official grace constituted an important element in the Soviet experiment. While an acknowledged economic tool for the Soviet state, the Gulag for him remained a venue of remedial hope to prisoners through the concepts of “reforging” (perekovka) and “reeducation through labor” (perevospitanie trudom). Even though less-educated, many of his subordinates in Magadan were sympathetic as well to earlier Soviet attitudes far more benign than those of later Stalinists. As assistants to Berzin at his first Gulag administrative stop at Vishera in the Northern Urals, a number of Dal´stroi aides retained a long-term friendship with him built upon the shared utopian values of an earlier epoch.6
9 Although Berzin embodied the profile of a “Little Stalin” from the period, he never exemplified the image of a tyrannical or vainglorious party boss. While subsequent Dal ´stroi administrators more closely matched the despotic persona reminiscent of the Derzhimorda character of Gogolian fame, Berzin and his associates functioned in a more subdued manner. They could be ruthless and uncompromising, but otherwise comported themselves simply and without distinctions separating them from their subordinates. An example of this can be seen in the work of Rodion Ivanovich Vas´kov, the titular head of Sevvostlag for its first two years of operation from 1932-1934 and one of Berzin’s closest assistants. Vas´kov had a notorious but overblown reputation among the prisoners, in later years embellished by the reminiscences of Varlam Shalamov, as an arbitrary official who epitomized the suffering in the north-eastern camps. While this depiction would have been appropriate for later police administrators in the region, its application to Vas´kov obscured the differences
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between his generation and the one that followed. The infamous main stone prison in Magadan, which had functioned from the earliest times of Dal´stroi’s existence and had entrapped famous inmates such as Evgeniia Ginzburg and others, became known in camp slang until the 1950s as “Vas´kov’s House” even though neither its namesake nor Berzin approached the sadism and depravity of their successors who imparted the unfortunate legend to this structure in subsequent years.7
10 Like Berzin and many of his aides, Vas´kov had been born a peasant and raised in the rural poverty of late Imperial Russia. He served as a soldier in World War I, labored in the Ukraine under German occupation, and joined with Red forces following the October Revolution. Throughout the Civil War and after, Vas´kov worked in both the Cheka and OGPU, spending his entire Soviet career with the secret police as low-level agent, researcher, department head, and finally labor camp administrator. As with most of his original comrades in Magadan, Vas´kov found himself implementing increasingly harsh policies with the same vision that had guided him from the earliest days of Soviet rule. The ensuing conflicts would ensnare and then pass by many officials such as him and Berzin, but should not hide the fact that these men had followed ideals spawned in their youth, forged in the heat of revolution, and then engulfed by the onset of a harsher reality during the Stalin era.8
11 The brutal transformation in Soviet politics that undermined Berzin and his assistants came by the end of 1937, when the Great Purges hit Magadan with full force as had happened earlier throughout the country. From 1936 to 1938, the USSR endured a scale of state-sponsored violence unprecedented in either tsarist or Soviet times. Opening in standard chronologies with Ezhov’s ascension to power as NKVD commissar in September 1936, the Terror lasted for two years amidst a sequence of show trials, widespread arrests, and a notable expansion of the Gulag. Catapulted by Stalin to a dominant position within state and society, the secret police oversaw all these developments and became the most significant institution in the Soviet Union. More powerful at this time than even the party, the NKVD offered Stalin an essential tool in shaping his authoritarian command. In particular, it helped him entrench a Stalinist elite while simultaneously destroying the generation of Old Bolsheviks who could never abide his apotheosis. As such, the Ezhovshchina became a defining episode in the final establishment of Stalin’s rule.
12 Prior to the NKVD assault on the party and society-at-large, Ezhov instituted a purge within the Lubianka aimed at establishing his own authority. Although his predecessor, Iagoda, had already been removed and arrested before Ezhov’s assumption of power, the purge of “Iagoda men” from across the USSR formed a top priority for the new commissar in the well-established tradition of “cleansing” the security apparatus upon a change of its leadership. From late 1936 through all of 1937, the current NKVD boss pursued a methodical elimination of agents from the Iagoda regime, replacing them with “Ezhov men.” Unlike many other regions, Magadan for a time weathered this purge from above. Although representative of an earlier generation of chekists, and thus no longer in favor among the ascendant Stalinist hierarchy, Berzin remained in charge of Dal´stroi for more than a year after these alterations in the Soviet power structure. Other than some changes in local camp operations which reflected national trends, the Gulag in Magadan had yet to feel the full effects of the Ezhovshchina.9
13 All this changed abruptly in December 1937, when a host of new NKVD agents arrived in Magadan on Ezhov’s orders. Although assigned as “deputies” to Berzin, the new
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security personnel left no doubt as to their actual status. The Kremlin simultaneously summoned Berzin back to Moscow, an unscheduled trip packaged in part as a vacation but laden with forebodings. Berzin likely knew the import of his travel plans as well as the recent flurry of administrative appointments, but nevertheless worked for several days to show the new staff various aspects of camp activities. As a sign of their secret mandate from Stalin and Ezhov, however, the new “assistants” evinced little regard for the Dal´stroi boss and all but ignored him in their quest to overtake the state trust. Although Berzin technically remained in office, he was in effect the victim of a coup d’état choreographed from the Kremlin. In the space of a few hours, Berzin had become a “former person” in the city he ran unrivaled for almost six years.10
14 Ominous coincidences accompanied these power shifts in Magadan, for events began with the third anniversary of the Kirov assassination. On the night of 1 December 1937, a steamer pulled into Nagaevo Bay on one of the last runs of the navigation calendar with a fresh complement of prisoners and the Dal´stroi administrators recently appointed by Ezhov. According to protocol in Magadan, Berzin greeted his new team at the docks with the usual fanfare of pageantry and brass bands. As the senior official of the group sent from Moscow, Karp Aleksandrovich Pavlov shook hands with Berzin as his first deputy and introduced the remaining crew. Although he probably knew details of Berzin’s imminent fate, Pavlov said nothing on the subject during the brief municipal tour and familiarization at regional Gulag headquarters. The only hint was Pavlov’s rank, for he was a “senior major of state security” (starshii maior gosbezopasnosti) and thus higher on the career ladder than the presiding Dal´stroi boss. But the most perilous sign lay at anchor just off the coast, for the S. S. Nikolai Ezhov that had brought the new chekists to Magadan would soon carry Berzin on the first leg of his journey back to meet the infamous namesake of the ship at central NKVD offices in Moscow.11
15 After a short time familiarizing the new staff members, Berzin sailed for Vladivostok to begin a purported “vacation” that included a stop in the Kremlin. He traveled in the same relative comfort to which he had grown accustomed, and no aspect of the journey would have struck him as unusual. Following a rough winter passage on the Sea of Okhotsk, Berzin took the Trans-Siberian Railroad westward to Moscow as he had done numerous times in the past. Nothing extraordinary happened until the train arrived in the ancient Russian town of Aleksandrov, just seventy kilometers north-east of the Soviet capital. On Ezhov’s personal order, Berzin was arrested there on the station platform the night of 19 December, and subsequently taken by one of the “black raven” cars of the secret police to the infamous Lubianka prison for interrogation.12 For fear of causing commotion on downtown streets in Moscow, particularly when prominent figures were to be apprehended, the NKVD often struck in outlying regions under the cover of darkness. Berzin thus spent his last moments of freedom in Aleksandrov, a location not devoid of historical irony. Steeped in the painful legacy of Ivan the Terrible and the oprichniki, this tiny municipality had been a temporary headquarters for the tsar during his intemperate flights from the Kremlin in the 1560s and thereafter.13
16 Almost four centuries later, this town and its traditions came back to haunt Berzin near the close of 1937. The Ezhovshchina had finally hit Magadan and claimed one of its first victims from the top of the Gulag elite. Although the dramatic events of Berzin’s arrest occurred in late December, the die had been cast for Berzin in the Kremlin long before
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his actual removal from power.14 In concert with the national hysteria that had overtaken the rest of the country, the NKVD accused Berzin of being a major figure in a Japanese spy ring from the Soviet Far East : “Berzin, Eduard Petrovich, party card no. 0629023, served at the head of a counter- revolutionary spy-diversionist Trotskyist organization in Kolyma. For counter- revolutionary sabotage-wrecking activities, he has been arrested by the organs of the NKVD. Be it resolved that Berzin, Eduard Petrovich be expelled from the Communist Party as an enemy of the people.”15
17 Convicted of high treason on 1 August 1938, Berzin was shot in the Lubianka immediately thereafter.16
18 Aside from heralding the dramatic changes in store for the regional Gulag, the elimination of Berzin and his staff allowed Stalin to revamp Dal´stroi management with the pursuit of more radical policies in mind. As a representative of an earlier generation of officialdom that maintained sympathies for more utopian goals, Berzin presented an impediment to Soviet “progress” by the time of the Great Purges. The appointment of a new administrative team offered Stalin a chance to install policy changes in Magadan from his seat in the Kremlin. At the very time Stalin cabled Berzin with “Bolshevik greetings” in October 1937 for a job well done at the helm of the local camps, the Soviet leader surreptitiously authorized the imminent removal of the decorated NKVD veteran. Having decided to overhaul the trust structure in Magadan long before Berzin’s actual ouster, Stalin simultaneously instructed Ezhov to hire new Dal´stroi officials as imminent replacements.17
19 Steeled by the brutal circumstances of the era, the new camp elite proved far more ruthless than Berzin. Armed with the more repressive training then current in the secret police, which by 1937 accentuated novel methods of torture and prisoner abuse, most of the NKVD agents just named by Ezhov to the Dal´stroi hierarchy had taken part in the onset of the Terror in other regions of the USSR. Given clear instructions from Moscow, these camp bosses came to Magadan with a distinct mandate to align regional affairs with those across the nation. As head of the state trust, Stalin assigned a seasoned official with a long service record in the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD security agencies, K. A. Pavlov. Starting as an investigator for the Cheka in Kazan after joining the Bolshevik party in 1918, he had risen to a number of leadership posts within the OGPU and NKVD in Krasnoiarsk, the Crimea, and the Azov-Black Sea regions. As a “jewel” of the Gulag, however, Dal´stroi came as a promotion for this veteran chekist.18
20 As the foremost aide who signed off on many Gulag orders, A. A. Khodyrev became Pavlov’s chief deputy. The secret police named S. N. Garanin, a notorious character from Belorussia, as the new boss of Sevvostlag. Iu. M. Gaupshtein became head of the Dal´stroi Political Section, a position that served as a regional liaison between atrophied party structures and the secret police in Magadan. L. P. Metelev and V. M. Speranskii soon filled two posts that had risen in importance due to the events of the Great Purges : chief procurator and head of the regional NKVD office, respectively. When the Stalin Terror reached full swing, local procurators became especially important since they had to “review” all cases for execution and imprisonment within their jurisdiction even though final disposition often depended upon the authorization of Moscow. Alongside these personnel shifts, Dal´stroi’s official title and affiliation changed as well. In April 1938 it became known as the “Main Administration for the Construction of the Far North” (Glavnoe upravlenie stroitel´stva Dal´nego Severa NKVD SSSR) as the result of a transfer to the secret police from its prior status as a state trust
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under the purview of the Council of Labor and Defense. Even though such alteration on paper only reaffirmed the effective control which the NKVD had wielded over Dal´stroi for years, it marked a symbolic confirmation of the metamorphosis in the local Gulag from Berzin’s time.19
21 Aside from these administrative and institutional changes, Dal´stroi became transformed as well by the intensification of the Ezhovshchina throughout the Soviet Union. Higher arrest rates across the USSR soon resulted in a notable expansion of the labor camps by the end of the 1930s, with Dal´stroi being one of the foremost recipients. In short, the state trust could avail itself of a much larger inmate pool thanks to the bursting prisons in Moscow and other Soviet cities that fed the Gulag pipeline. By comparison to the 62,703 prisoners within the Dal´stroi system at the conclusion of 1936, there were 80,258 by the end of 1937 and 93,978 at the close of 1938. Statistics from 1939 unveil the “latent bulge” caused by the Great Purges, since the Gulag in Magadan by that year had nearly doubled its inmate population to 163,475. As a result of the Stalin Terror, industrial operations throughout the north-eastern territory finally had an adequate supply of manpower even if it suffered from a depleted store of expertise lost with the annihilation of many specialists.20
22 Fortified by this veritable army of prison laborers, the new camp bosses approached their tasks with a perverse vigor. One administrative change in particular became noteworthy. As a means of streamlining decision-making in criminal cases across the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, Stalin had resuscitated a peculiar bureaucratic form known as the troika that had begun as emergency tribunals at the time of the Civil War. Formed under his instruction in 1937, these extralegal panels held unrivaled local power during the Great Purges. The troiki became a regional stand-in for the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court and the “Special Council” (Osoboe soveshchanie) of the NKVD that oversaw sentencing procedures in Moscow. In Magadan, the local troika regulated all arrests and interrogations in the north-eastern territory from the lengthening of Gulag terms to impositioning of the death penalty. In 1937-1938, this unofficial yet infamous panel in Magadan comprised Pavlov, Metelev, and Speranskii. While most troiki nation-wide contained the regional party first secretary along with the local NKVD chief and municipal procurator, the head of Dal´stroi served in place of a party secretary non-existent in Magadan.21
23 In comparison with the Berzin administration, the new Dal´stroi management proved far more ruthless and uncompromising. Younger than Berzin, most of Pavlov’s staff were members of a different generation within the secret police that had been forged by the “Revolution from Above.” Few of the officials who first came to Magadan in December 1937 held top positions in the pre-Stalinist era, and thus formed a cadre socialized by the harshening policies of the 1930s. They belonged to the “new class” of managers described by Sheila Fitzpatrick, men who had risen from the working class and peasantry to assume major positions during the Stalin era.22 While Berzin had been tainted by his association with Old Bolsheviks as well as by a career that had formed long before Stalin came to power, the current elite at the helm of Dal´stroi represented a more reliable base of support from the perspective of the Kremlin. As some scholars have noted, these new Gulag bosses in Magadan proved more cynical, less reflective, and more pliable than the Berzin administration due to their notions of bureaucratic discipline ingrained by their political upbringing.23
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24 Just as Stalin insisted on creating his own hand-picked Politbiuro by the mid-1930s, he also favored regional officials from the “new elite” who had an acceptable social provenance in the lower classes and likely greater fealty toward him.24 The new Dal ´stroi administrators fit such prescriptions. Unlike Berzin and many of his assistants, they were poorly educated and decidedly uncosmopolitan. Even the lofty ideals of the October Revolution, little of which could be seen from the perspective of the Gulag, went beyond their limited comprehension about the goals of Soviet power. Never the type to ask probing questions on policy, they took their marching orders from the bureaucratic chain of command. Although some of them had proven administrative competence, many were chosen for personal characteristics at a premium during the Great Purges : brutality and intemperance. Garanin in particular offered these qualities, for he had emerged from an aimless youth as a man of great vindictiveness. In all respects, the new Sevvostlag boss fit the mold of the classic NKVD henchman from the late 1930s.25
25 As Sevvostlag boss, Garanin had official jurisdiction over the actual functioning of the labor camps. In that role, he acted with a vengeance unseen in Magadan prior to Berzin’s arrest. Under broad guidelines established by his Dal´stroi overlords, Garanin routinely signed execution orders for prisoners who had been accused within the camps of lesser charges such as embezzlement of “socialist property,” refusal to work, “counter-revolutionary sabotage in production,” escape attempts, or “camp banditry.” On 23 December 1937, for instance, he authorized the shooting of twenty-one inmates for the aforementioned infractions.26 At times, Garanin appeared unconstrained by the bureaucratic niceties of condemnation procedures. According to camp tales, he occasionally drew his revolver and shot prisoners on the spur of the moment for minor offenses.27
26 Given some license by the Magadan troika, Garanin seemed to dictate a summary justice in this remote prison realm. Known to roam Gulag zones with a swaggering authority that terrorized inmates, he played to the hilt his role as the visible arbiter of Soviet law throughout the subarctic frontier. Unlike his supervisors in either Magadan or the Lubianka, Garanin was an important NKVD official whom the prisoners might glimpse with some regularity. As the most apparent and hated symbol of state retribution in the territory for most of the Terror, he became the regional namesake of the Great Purges. In Magadan, the Ezhovshchina has therefore been referred to for years as the Garaninshchina. The term, however, became somewhat of a misnomer. In spite of such a moniker, which evolved from the limited viewpoint of camp inmates, Garanin controlled neither the formulation of key Gulag policy nor the evolution of local events. Fully subservient to the Soviet chain of command, he existed at the mercy of the Magadan troika and ultimately Ezhov and Stalin.28
27 By the spring of 1939, the extreme political violence of the Great Purges came to a halt in Magadan as it had months earlier throughout most of the Soviet Union. As a precursor to this denouement, Stalin had issued a signal at the November 1938 party plenum in Moscow that the “excesses from below” (peregiby snizu), purportedly at fault for the Great Purges and a reiteration of excuses long used by the Kremlin, must be stamped out across the USSR. More important, Stalin’s contemporaneous removal of Ezhov from power intimated that the Terror had drawn to a close. Extricating the country from the grip of this mayhem, however, proved to be a complicated task. Dal ´stroi endured still more effects of the Garaninshchina following the plenary session in
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Moscow. Although Garanin himself had been removed in October 1938, after which local police measures faded in severity, Pavlov and Khodyrev remained in power through the first half of 1939. NKVD activities subsided across the region by May of that year, when the Kremlin transferred the Dal´stroi chief back to Moscow for reassignment at the Lubianka while arresting or otherwise removing most of his assistants. Just as Evgeniia Ginzburg and Sergei Korolev arrived as prisoners in Nagaevo Bay in the summer of 1939, Magadan underwent a major transition.
28 In the wake of yet another overhaul in the administration of Dal´stroi, the territory again experienced a change in priorities. The pendulum began to swing back toward the goals of the period before 1937, as Gulag administrators regained their previous focus upon gold production. Spurred once more by the financial necessities of the Soviet government, the state trust reclaimed its economic raison d’être. While this signified a return to Berzin’s industrial emphasis, it did not imply the reintroduction of the more “benevolent” attitudes of that era. The Stalin Terror left an indelible mark upon Magadan that transcended the events of 1937-1938. Having survived the Ezhovshchina, Magadan had to traverse a path between the competing legacies of Berzin’s economic record and the searing impact of the Great Purges.
29 The end of the Stalin Terror in Magadan signalled a number of dramatic changes in the region. Reassigned to secret police work in Moscow, Pavlov left his deputy Khodyrev at the helm of Dal´stroi until a new management team could be formed on Kremlin instructions. Several lesser camp officials from the Garaninshchina took the blame for the “excesses from below.” Speranskii was arrested and shot “for falsification of investigatory materials,” while Garanin received a long term in the Gulag.29 Imprisoned by order of a Special Council (Osoboe soveshchanie) of the NKVD in Moscow, the former Sevvostlag chief was sentenced to eight years “for participation in a counter- revolutionary organization.”30 The circle of political irrationality had closed, for Garanin became an inmate on the same charge from Article 58 as had many of those whom he once persecuted. After several years in the Gulag, he died from exhaustion in the Pechora region. The secret police incarcerated other notorious figures from the era as well.31 Most important, Stalin brought the curtain down on the Garaninshchina just as he had raised it : by naming a new administrative team for Dal´stroi.32
30 As in December 1937, Stalin sought management for the state trust in a cohort of officials trained largely since the late 1920s. Unlike Berzin, they were not tainted by pre-Stalinist experiences and ideals. One such figure, Ivan Fedorovich Nikishov, became the new Dal´stroi boss at the end of 1939. While serving in various areas of the Soviet Union, Nikishov had risen slowly within the ranks of the secret police. He studied in 1928-1929 at the Higher Border Patrol School, an NKVD institution in Moscow, from where he graduated to work in Kaluga and other locations throughout the early 1930s. In 1934, Nikishov became a supervisor of the NKVD Administration for Internal Troops in central regions near Voronezh, whereafter he went to the Caucasus as chief of the NKVD Administration for Border and Internal Troops in Azerbaijan by 1937. Nikishov transferred after one year to Leningrad where, as the overseer of a similar detachment, he rose in visibility due to the importance of the city. In November 1938, Ezhov promoted him to be presiding head of the NKVD in Khabarovsk, a position that he held for ten months. Summoning him thereupon to Moscow, Stalin met with Nikishov in the Kremlin before appointing him to the top post at Dal´stroi in October 1939.33
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31 Nikishov’s assignment to Magadan came as no surprise, for he had already served a similar role as secret police chief in Khabarovsk. More critical, his rise to these key positions dovetailed with Beria’s assumption of power, an association which saved him from the purge of Ezhov and his closest assistants after November 1938. As a result of fortuitous timing, Nikishov entered into the ranks of “Beria’s men” just as they began to consolidate power across the USSR. Following the removal of Ezhov and his aides, Beria formed a “family circle” of Georgian associates in the top hierarchy of the secret police. Among others, Beria appointed Mikhail Gvishiani to be chief of the secret police in the Soviet Far East with immediate supervision over all regional labor camps. Perhaps on account of his previous work in the Caucasus in 1937, Nikishov may have established tight bonds with a number of these officials now serving in senior positions. Such connections likely ensured him the lengthy nine-year career he would enjoy at the helm of Dal´stroi.34
32 Under Beria’s oversight, Nikishov assembled a new staff upon his arrival in Magadan on 12 December 1939.35 G. A. Korsakov became deputy director of the state trust, the position formerly held by Khodyrev. In place of Speranskii, Nikishov assigned G. F. Okunev as the operational head of the NKVD office in Magadan. Another important official of the restructured crew, I. K. Sidorov, assumed leadership of the Dal´stroi political department. A host of other personnel filled in the secondary positions within the local Gulag hierarchy.36 While transcripts of Nikishov’s October meeting with Stalin in the Kremlin are not available, this administrative overhaul in Magadan assuredly came from instructions by the Soviet leader. Chastened by the fate of his two predecessors at Dal´stroi, one of whom had been arrested and shot while the other was summarily removed upon the orders of Moscow, Nikishov would not likely have made any move without a blessing from above.37
33 Stalin even instituted a number of changes in Magadan that predated Nikishov’s arrival, after which they became marching orders for the new Dal´stroi chief. On 25 June 1939, Beria reorganized the NKVD apparatus in Magadan to match his “reforms” at the national level which had been focused upon strengthening bureaucratic lines of authority.38 Before that, on 11 June, his assistant Vsevolod Merkulov had enumerated new regulations concerning the registration of prisoner deaths that would augment record-keeping and refine central knowledge and control over the inmate population.39 On 13 July, another Beria subordinate, Sergei Kruglov, communicated to Nikishov revamped standards for Sevvostlag prisons.40 While reflecting Beria’s attempt to reconstitute the apparatus of the secret police so as to bolster his own position, such changes also embodied the refinement of central control over far-flung camp enterprises.
34 Taking cues from Moscow, the new Dal´stroi chief proved savvy enough even to replicate the imagery and style of his Lubianka superiors. Consistent with Beria’s official persona as a reformer out to mitigate the effects of the Great Purges, Nikishov cultivated the impression of a regional boss striving to curtail the lawlessness of the preceding epoch. As Beria had done in the center, Nikishov presented himself in Magadan as a sober administrator who would provide sensible leadership in the wake of such irrational violence. The so-called “Beria thaw” proved to be a mirage in the long run, however, for the main purpose of Beria and subordinates like Nikishov was to establish efficiency and order in place of earlier policies that had caused obvious administrative dysfunction throughout the Soviet bureaucracy at the time of the
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Ezhovshchina. Aiming less to repudiate the Stalin Terror than to correct its imbalance, the new NKVD bosses streamlined police measures so as not to harm other state activities such as industrial production. Moreover, the overt repression of the Great Purges had already played its role from the viewpoint of political control and did not have to be repeated under Beria.41
35 The “reformist” course charted by Beria and his subalterns like Nikishov revealed that public image mattered in the USSR, even in the subarctic desolation of Magadan. Untarnished by participation in the Garaninshchina, Nikishov and his staff offered a clean break for a camp management eager to dispel the memory of 1937-1938. In order to distance themselves from the atrocities of their predecessors, the new Gulag elite in Magadan began to deplore in public the “provocative attacks” and “slander” hurled against party members by Ezhov’s minions in 1937-1938. In agreement with Stalin’s official line on correcting the “exaggerations from below,” Dal´stroi officials also inveighed against the “unlawful” accusations and policies that had spun out of control throughout the territory. The Nikishov administration furthermore elicited a mea culpa from many former Dal´stroi employees during the Great Purges, such as N. A. Abramovich, which helped to separate the present era from the one that had preceded it : “Fate cast for me, a man, to play a shameful and accursed role in that difficult time. This now brings only bitter regrets over our wasted strength, health, and energy. For no purpose, we chekists faithfully met our assigned tasks with the sincere belief that what we were doing was right.”42
36 Coupled with the regretful paeans of similar NKVD agents who had been active in Magadan throughout the Stalin Terror, these “confessions” became standard fare in the Gulag well into the early 1940s. As part of a political show scripted from the Kremlin, this and other statements aimed to mollify a population traumatized by recent events.
37 Such repentful tones for a time dominated public discussions in Magadan. Serving as a muted catharsis for the Soviet system, the confessional mood revealed Nikishov’s intentions to clear the ground for policy changes. While not atoning for the “errors” of their predecessors, the new Dal´stroi administrators interpreted such public apology as a breakwater for their own rule. After a brief period of disclaimers, Nikishov would turn his full attention toward economic goals mandated by the Soviet government. The reorientation of the regional Gulag as an important “shop” for the country demanded at least a partial repudiation of the Great Purges. Alongside this came a curtailment of the incendiary rhetoric from the Ezhovshchina, which appeared striking in comparison with the more sober party rhetoric now trumpeting the attainment of record mining quotas as the overarching objective in the upcoming period.43
38 In conjunction with this industrial re-emphasis, Nikishov also had to stifle the ideological attack against Berzin. Since the first Dal´stroi boss had presided over the most successful economic achievements of the state trust, it became imperative for Nikishov to claim Berzin’s mantle as an efficient manager. The rampant vilification of him thus came to an end along with the Terror. Regardless of the political crimes charged against Berzin, insights into his managerial acumen provided a key for recapturing the record pace of the early-to-mid 1930s. Leaning upon the proven usefulness of Berzin’s material incentives as well as his campaigns of “socialist competition” and Stakhanovism within the camps, themes being reaccentuated by
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Moscow in these more pragmatic times, Nikishov hoped to find the right mix of initiatives to revive prison enterprises. By invoking the programmatic successes and productive ethos of the Berzin era, Nikishov sought to reproduce the proportionally higher output figures attained before 1937.44
39 On account of Berzin’s unrehabilitated status as a “nonperson,” however, Nikishov’s accent upon Dal´stroi’s initial achievements mandated a tightrope act of interpretation. 45 The new camp boss and his staff therefore invoked Magadan’s earliest history with utmost caution, an official prudence which had other roots as well. As specious as the charges against Berzin had been during the Garaninshchina, the basic storyline of Japanese espionage in the region could not be dropped altogether from public reference. In particular, Soviet border clashes with the Japanese in 1938 and 1939 resuscitated tensions. The specter of further international conflict at this time, dramatically evident in Germany’s recent invasion of Poland as well as Japan’s activities in both China and Korea, only bolstered paranoid views that the USSR was under siege from external enemies. As a purported spy ringleader, Berzin had to remain a suspect figure if only to maintain the plausibility of Stalinist scenarios. Eventual hostilities with the Axis powers entrenched this viewpoint, making Nikishov’s task of historical revisionism an even more selective one. As the war effort deepened, however, the need to resuscitate the productive capacity of state enterprises meant that figures like Berzin could not entirely be forgotten.46
40 Over the course of the 1930s, the transformation of camp life in the territory found reflection in the personages who ran the state trust. Appointed by order of Stalin, the Dal´stroi bosses reflected shifting Soviet priorities. A pre-Stalinist official with vivid memories of 1917, Berzin proved a relative idealist as a camp official who took seriously at least some of the utopian protestations of Marxism-Leninism. Although the Gulag remained a hostile environment for prisoners during his tenure, Berzin ran a far more moderate regime than his successors. The onset of the Great Purges in Magadan, as across the USSR, proved a turning point. Transformed by the repressive ethos of the Garaninshchina, Dal´stroi shed the pretense of any benign role after Berzin’s ouster. Aligning himself with national trends, Pavlov repudiated most of his predecessor’s temperate initiatives while stiffening camp practices to the great detriment of inmates. Nikishov followed suit, even though his professed role was to resuscitate industrial growth in the Magadan camps while modifying the impact of the Terror.
41 Socialized by the harsh experiences of the Stalin era, which by then had already included the collectivization campaign and repeated acts of political terror, Dal´stroi officials after Berzin behaved with a wanton attitude toward higher party ideals. In contrast to the first local Gulag boss, who had come of political age at the dawn of Soviet power, most administrators in Magadan by the late 1930s and early 1940s formed a younger cohort with little practical memory even of NEP. Whether in policy or practice, they were neither utopian nor liberal. While some were outright sadists, such as Garanin, most were simply pragmatists who had few illusions about their positions or Stalin’s expectations. Sent directly from Moscow, they arrived in Magadan armed with the economic and political mandates given them in the Kremlin. Aside from focusing upon the industrial mission of the state trust, they maintained an unyielding camp regimen not to be dismantled until the mid-1950s.
42 Davis Center For Russian Studies
43 Harvard University
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44 Cambridge, MA 02138
45 e-mail : [email protected]
NOTES
1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956; An experiment in literary investigation (New York: Harper and Row, 1974) I:ix. 2. For an excellent guidebook on secret police personnel during this time period, see N. V. Petrov and K. V. Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD: Spravochnik (Moscow : “Zven´ia,” 1999). 3. For more particulars on the birth of Dal´stroi, see GAMO (Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Magadanskoi Oblasti--State Archive of the Magadan Region), f. r-23ss, op. 1, d. 1, l. 1. 4. See “Luchshii chekist-tverdyi bol´shevik,” Kolymskaia pravda (7 November 1934): 2. For a modern assessment that more objectively reveals the conundrums facing Berzin’s career in Magadan, see A.G. Kozlov, “Pervyi direktor,” Politicheskaia agitatsiia, 17 (September 1988): 28-31. For Berzin’s official appointment as director of Dal´stroi, see GAMO, f. r-23ss, op. 1, d. 1, l. 2. 5. Such a balancing act of propaganda and misleading explanation continued throughout the history of Dal´stroi, reflecting both standard practice in the Stalin era as well as the pretense of continuity with an earlier emphasis on the heroic “opening” of northern territories to Soviet power. See A.G. Kozlov, “Svetloe nachalo Magadana,” Reklamnaia gazeta (7 March 1989): 8. 6. A.G. Kozlov, “Vernulsia k sem´e,” Reklamnaia gazeta (4 April 1989): 8. 7. See Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma tales, trans. John Glad (New York : Penguin, 1994): 152. For a description of the subsequent and depressing realities to be found in “Vas´kov’s House,” which still stands in central Magadan, see Evgeniia Ginzburg, Within the whirlwind (New York : Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1981): 290-304. 8. “Stoikii borets na fronte perekovki,” Vernyi put´ (7 November 1934): 3. 9. Some authors contend that this situation in Magadan, clearly not on par with the violent upheaval already taking place elsewhere in the Soviet Union, reflected Berzin’s more moderate political sentiments and proclivities. See A.G. Kozlov, “Iz istorii Kolymskikh lagerei (1932-1937 gg.), in S.G. Bekarevich, ed., Kraevedcheskie zapiski (1991): 87. 10. For Berzin’s last prikazy as the head of Dal´stroi, in which he appointed Pavlov as a “temporary” director during his own absence, see GAMO, f. r-23, op. 1, d. 26, l. 137. These events in Magadan represented a typical Stalinist phenomenon in which security personnel assigned as “deputies” soon assumed control of operations, thus offering a smooth transfer of power. Appointed as a deputy to Ezhov in July 1938, Beria himself assumed command of the NKVD after his predecessor’s ouster in December of that year. For more on Beria’s appointment and Ezhov’s downfall, see Robert Conquest, The Great
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Terror : A reassessment (New York : Oxford University Press, 1990): 431-432, and Inside Stalin’s secret police : NKVD politics, 1936-1939 (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1985): 76-99. 11. A.G. Kozlov, “Iz istorii kolymskikh lagerei (konets 1937-1938 gg.),” in S.G. Bekarevich, ed., Kraevedcheskie zapiski (1993): 121. See also id., “Tiazhelye gody,” Magadanskaia pravda (18 June 1989): 4. 12. Berzin’s status as an important regional official merited the direct participation of Ezhov, who signed the arrest warrant to apprehend the Dal´stroi boss in the outskirts of Moscow. See A.G. Kozlov, “Pervyi direktor,” art. cit.: 29. 13. For more on the role of Aleksandrov during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, particularly in regard to the official formation of the oprichnina, see Ruslan G. Skrynnikov, Ivan the Terrible, ed. and trans. Hugh F. Graham (Gulf Breeze, Fl.: Academic International Press, 1981): 83-87. 14. See A.G. Kozlov, “Iz istorii Kolymskikh lagerei (1932-1937 gg.),” art. cit.: 87. 15. AOSVZ (Arkhivnoe Otdelenie Severovostokzoloto--Archival Department for the Association of North-eastern Gold--formerly Dal´stroi institutional archive), d. 3418, l. 25. 16. See A.G. Kozlov, Magadan : Konspekt proshlogo (Magadan : Magadanskoe knizhnoe izdatel´stvo, 1989): 33. For more on Berzin’s downfall, see Roy Medvedev, Let history judge : The origins and consequences of Stalinism, ed. and trans. George Shriver (New York : Columbia University Press, 1989): 427. 17. For some of these contracts, see AOSVZ, d. 13484, l. 1. 18. A.G. Kozlov, “Iz istorii kolymskikh lagerei (konets 1937-1938 gg.),” art. cit.: 121-22. 19. GARF (Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii--State Archive of the Russian Federation), f. 9401s, op. 1a, d. 22, ll. 62-63. 20. GAMO, f. r-23ss, op. 1, d. 6, l. 55. 21. For more on the troiki, see R. Medvedev, op. cit.: 622, and R. Conquest, The Great Terror, op. cit.: 286. 22. See S. Fitzpatrick, “Stalin and the making of a new elite, 1928-1939,” Slavic Review, 38, 3 (September 1979): 399-402. 23. A.I. Shirokov and M.M. Etlis, Sovetskii period istorii Severo-Vostoka Rossii (Magadan : Mezhdunarodnyi pedagogicheskii institut, 1993): 7-8. 24. This emphasis ended by 1939, when overt Soviet discrimination in favor of workers and peasants lessened across the USSR. See S. Fitzpatrick, Education and social mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-1934 (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1979): 234-254. 25. The legends of Garanin, which percolated into the camp memoirs of Ginzburg and others, accurately reflected the personality of the Sevvostlag boss while overplaying his role. See A.G. Kozlov, “Iz istorii kolymskikh lagerei (konets 1937-1938 gg.),” art. cit.: 136-138. 26. OSF ITs UVD (Otdelenie Spetsial´nykh Fondov, Informatsionnyi Tsentr Upravleniia Vnutrennykh Del--Department of Special Fonds, Information Center for the Administration of Internal Affairs), f. 12-u, op. 1, d. 4, l. 127. 27. Some of this has been recounted in R. Medvedev, op. cit.: 512.
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28. In spite of lending his name to the era in Magadan, Garanin indeed remained secondary to the troika. See A.G. Kozlov, “Iz istorii kolymskikh lagerei (konets 1937-1938 gg.),” art. cit.: 130. 29. See T.S. Smolina, “ Kolyma-god 1939,” Magadanskii komsomolets (10 September 1988): 4. 30. A.G. Kozlov, “Garanin : Legendy i dokumenty,” Magadanskaia pravda (14 October 1993): 3. 31. For examples, see T.S. Smolina, “Kolyma-god 1938,” Magadanskii komsomolets (3 September 1988): 4. 32. Ibid. While occurring several months after Ezhov’s ouster, these events in Magadan dovetailed with the earlier NKVD “housecleaning” in Moscow that resulted in Beria’s appointment before the end of 1938. For more on this, see Amy Knight, Beria : Stalin’s first lieutenant (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1993): 90-93, and R. Conquest, The Great Terror, op. cit.: 431-435. 33. For more on Nikishov’s career, see S.P. Efimov, “Nachal´nik Dal´stroia I. F. Nikishov,” Kolyma, 11 (1991): 34. For reference to the Kremlin meeting between Stalin and Nikishov, see A.G. Kozlov, Magadan, op. cit.: 92. 34. On Beria’s rise to power and his installment of the Georgian “family circle” at NKVD headquarters, see again A. Knight, op. cit.: 90-93. See also R. Conquest, The Great Terror, op. cit.: 627. 35. Following the Kremlin meetings with Stalin and the lengthy trip across Siberia, Nikishov arrived to begin work in Magadan on this date. See Sovetskaia Kolyma (14 December 1939): 4. 36. T.S. Smolina, “ Kolyma-god 1939,”art. cit.: 4-5. 37. Using previous events as a guide, Nikishov’s meeting with Stalin in the Kremlin in October 1939 presumably dealt with fine details of policy governing the activities of the new Gulag administration in Magadan. For further information, see again A.G. Kozlov, Magadan, op. cit.: 92. 38. GARF, f. 9401s, op. 1a, d. 34, l. 59. 39. Ibid., ll. 35-36. 40. Ibid., l. 153. 41. See A. Knight, op. cit.: 92-93. Solzhenitsyn has argued that the concomitant release of prisoners during the “Beria thaw,” the rare “reverse wave” in his description, came only as a political move to enhance the reputation of Beria while heaping all the blame upon Ezhov for the atrocities of the Great Purges. See A. Solzhenitsyn, op. cit.: 76. 42. Quoted in T.S. Smolina, “ Kolyma-god 1939,” art. cit.: 4-5. 43. This emphasis upon production became a constant refrain in local newspapers. For example, see Sovetskaia Kolyma (5 December 1940): 3. 44. On the flip side, Nikishov never embraced Berzin’s “idealism” as Dal´stroi remained a more cynical institution after 1937. See A.S. Navasardov, “Iz istorii stroitel´stva Kolymskoi trassy (1928-1940 gg.),” in S.G. Bekarevich, ed., Kraevedcheskie zapiski (1991): 25. 45. Berzin remained a “nonperson” in the USSR for eighteen years, from his death in 1938 until his posthumous rehabilitation following Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in
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1956. See K.B. Nikolaev, “Pervyi direktor tresta ’Dal´stroi’,” Magadanskaia pravda (2 August 1988). 46. Tangible reasons prevented Nikishov from ignoring Berzin’s legacy entirely. Aside from the industrial achievements attained by the first Dal´stroi chief in the Magadan region, most of the infrastructure of camps, roads, power stations, and state farms throughout the territory had been built by Berzin. See ibid., as well as A.G. Kozlov, “Pervyi direktor,” art. cit.: 31.
RÉSUMÉS
Résumé Magadan et l’évolution des directeurs du Dal´stroj dans les années 1930. Bien qu’elle doive son importance à sa position centrale au sein du Goulag, Magadan est longtemps restée invisible dans l’histoire de l’URSS. Cependant, cette capitale du monde carcéral peut nous fournir un grand nombre de renseignements sur la nature et les rouages du pouvoir stalinien. Notre article traite des changements survenus dans l’administration provinciale de cette métropole subarctique pendant les années 1930, étude qui s’appuie sur des documents d’archives centrales et régionales. Bien que Magadan ait toujours tablé sur la répression, on observe des variations visibles dans sa politique qui reflètent les époques et les tendances nationales plus larges. La première génération de directeurs de camps, qui avait en partie fait ses classes sur les objectifs utopiques de la révolution bolchevique, apparaît rétrospectivement comme un groupe assez modéré qui prenait au sérieux les objectifs officiels de réhabilitation et de réinsertion sociale des détenus. C’étaient aussi des gestionnaires relativement compétents capables d’atteindre les objectifs industriels fixés par le Kremlin. Tout ceci fut transformé en 1937, année décisive, lorsque la ežovščina s’abattit de plein fouet sur Magadan, altérant définitivement sa culture bureaucratique. La production économique chuta de façon spectaculaire au fur et à mesure que la violence politique augmenta, tout ceci sous la houlette d’une équipe adaptée aux dures réalités du moment. Il y eut un difficile moment de répit en 1939 lorsque Moscou mit en place une autre hiérarchie locale qui devait relancer la production, mais qui fit preuve du même cynisme politique. Soumis aux psittacismes des discours officiels pendant les années qui suivirent, les grands idéaux d’Octobre perdirent leur sens et disparurent dans le cataclysme des grandes purges.
Abstract Although significant as the focal point of the infamous Gulag, Magadan and its environs have long remained one of the “blank spots” of Soviet history. Yet this prison capital can tell us much about the nature and mechanism of Stalinist rule. Based upon a number of central and regional archives, this article concerns the changes in provincial administration in this subarctic metropolis throughout the Soviet 1930s. While the political calculus of Magadan always involved repression, there were obvious variations in policy that reflected both the times and larger national trends. The initial generation of camp bosses, raised at least in part on the more utopian goals of the Bolshevik Revolution, proved in retrospect to be a somewhat moderate cohort that took seriously the official goals of inmate rehabilitation and social restitution. At the same time, they were relatively competent economic managers capable of fulfilling key industrial targets set
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by the Kremlin. All this changed in the watershed year of 1937, when the full force of the Ezhovshchina hit Magadan and forever altered its bureaucratic culture. Economic output fell dramatically as political violence rose, all under the auspices of a new camp management team socialized by the harshening realities of the time. An uneasy truce came in 1939 with the establishment by Moscow of yet another local hierarchy, formed to reemphasize production but nevertheless cynical in its political outlook. Parroted in public discourse for years thereafter, the lofty ideals of October had lost all content and fallen victim to the earthquake of the Great Purges.
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Alliés ou ennemis ? Le GUPVI-NKVD, le Komintern et les « Malgré-nous ». Le destin des prisonniers de guerre français en URSS (1942-1955). Le destin des prisonniers de guerre français en URSS (1942-1955)
Gaël MOULLEC
1 Pour les Alsaciens-Lorrains, la Seconde Guerre mondiale débute plus tôt que pour les « Français de l’intérieur ». Le 1er septembre 1939, alors que les troupes allemandes entrent en Pologne, le gouvernement français donne l’ordre d’évacuer les populations de la zone frontalière. En quelques jours, des milliers d’Alsaciens-Lorrains quittent tout pour se retrouver sur les routes et dans les gares dans une sorte de répétition générale, l’ordre en plus, du grand exode de 1940. Répartis dans plusieurs régions françaises, 600 000 Alsaciens-Lorrains passeront la drôle de guerre loin de chez eux, s’interrogeant perpétuellement sur la date de leur retour au pays. Le 10 mai 1940, les troupes allemandes attaquent par la Belgique. La France s’effondre. À l’Est, les villes de Metz et de Strasbourg résistent respectivement jusqu’au 17 et 19 juin.
2 Immédiatement après l’entrée des troupes allemandes, les rues et les communes d’Alsace perdent leur nom français et se voient attribuer des toponymes plus « germaniques ». Dès le 10 juillet, les préfets et les sous-préfets français en poste en Alsace-Lorraine sont arrêtés et expulsés vers Paris. Durant les premières semaines de l’Occupation, l’Alsace-Lorraine subit une politique de « regermanisation » qui se traduit par la nomination de deux Gauleiters : Robert Wagner en Alsace et Joseph Bürckel en Lorraine. Les deux territoires français perdent leur identité administrative : la Lorraine est intégrée, avec la Sarre et le Palatinat, dans la région de la Westmark, tandis que l’Alsace se trouve réunie au Pays de Bade.
3 Rapidement, l’usage de la langue française est interdit dans l’administration et les écoles, puis à l’église. Les services administratifs sont intégrés à ceux du Reich (Postes, Chemins de fer, Douanes...) alors que le gouvernement de Vichy reste sans réaction
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notable. Par un système d’interdiction de retour, de déportation ou d’expulsion vers la France, les Allemands tentent de casser toute résistance à la germanisation forcée en épurant les deux régions des familles qui ne sont pas de « race allemande » ou qui sont jugées trop proches de la France. À la suite des premiers actes de résistance, un camp de « rééducation », réservé aux opposants les plus décidés, est même créé à Schirmeck.
4 Poursuivant leur politique de germanisation, les autorités d’occupation publient à l’été 1942 des décrets attribuant de droit la nationalité du Reich aux personnes « de souche allemande ». Une telle définition s’appliquait aux personnes ayant au moins deux grand-parents nés en Alsace-Lorraine, au Luxembourg ou en Allemagne. À l’époque, la majorité de la population de ces deux régions correspondait à cette définition. Désormais les Alsaciens-Lorrains pouvaient ainsi être « légalement » enrôlés dans la Wehrmacht.
5 Le drame des Malgré-nous - ces Français d’Alsace-Lorraine incorporés de force dans la Wehrmacht - débute donc à l’été 1942 quand, pour faire face aux pertes subies sur le front russe depuis juin 1941, les autorités d’occupation instaurent pour les jeunes gens des deux régions françaises un « service obligatoire dans l’armée allemande ».
6 Toutefois, les officiers allemands ne se font aucune illusion quant à la loyauté de ces nouvelles recrues envers le Reich. Des mesures sont prises pour limiter la proportion des Alsaciens-Lorrains présents dans une même unité, jamais plus de 5 % des effectifs. Il est interdit de les affecter dans les services de reconnaissance, de renseignement, dans l’aviation, ou sur les navires de guerre. Enfin ils ne peuvent servir en France occupée, en Belgique ou au Luxembourg.
7 Dès les premiers jours de l’incorporation, les actes de résistance et d’insoumission se multiplient. Beaucoup de jeunes sont arrêtés et leur famille déportée au cœur de l’Allemagne. D’autres sont abattus en essayant de fuir par la frontière suisse, ou sont internés au camp de Schirmeck. Enfin certains tentent par tous les moyens - automutilation ou mutilation volontaire médicalisée - d’échapper à la conscription. Au total 130 000 Alsaciens-Lorrains des classes 1928 à 1947 sont incorporés de force dans l’armée allemande. Près de 90 % d’entre eux combattront sur le front de l’Est.
8 Dans la première moitié de 1943, le renseignement militaire soviétique fait état d’un nombre important de désertions chez les Alsaciens-Lorrains. Les transfuges sont interrogés et certains de leurs propos rapportés dans des bulletins confidentiels publiés par la VIIe section de la Direction politique centrale de l’Armée rouge2.
9 Ainsi Louis Dirheimer, incorporé en octobre 1942, déserte quelques jours après son arrivée sur le front de l’Est en avril 1943 : « Je suis Lorrain. Mon frère a été tué en France durant les affrontements contre les Allemands. Alors à quoi bon combattre pour les Allemands contre les Russes. L’idée de me rendre m’est venue dès le premier jour de la mobilisation à l’armée allemande [...] D’ailleurs la radio anglaise l’a dit, tous les Lorrains mobilisés de force par Hitler pour faire la guerre contre la Russie doivent passer chez les Russes. Ils quitteront les camps de prisonniers pour l’Angleterre où ils auront la possibilité de s’enrôler dans les troupes de De Gaulle et de Giraud pour combattre l’Allemagne. »3
10 Paul Kele, né a Sarreguemines, se rend en mai 1943 et témoigne du même état d’esprit : « Personne ne croit ce que racontent les officiers allemands sur les atrocités commises par les Russes. Cependant beaucoup craignent des représailles contre leur famille. On craint également d’être tué par les Allemands si nous tentons de nous rendre. Quand je suis parti pour l’armée, mes parents m’ont dit de me rendre dès que je serai sur le front. Ma mère m’a conseillé d’avoir toujours sur moi un
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mouchoir blanc et de l’employer comme signal pour me rendre. Avec mes camarades, nous avions aussi discuté de l’éventualité de passer chez les Russes à la première occasion. Avec le soldat Philippe Krez, nous avions même convenu de passer chez les Russes ensemble ; mais sur le front nous avons été mis dans des unités différentes. »
11 Mobilisé en janvier 1943, Aloïs Eger se rend en mai 1943 : « Les Alsaciens sont contre Hitler, ils veulent se rendre aux Russes pour gagner l’armée de De Gaulle. Maintenant il est impossible de passer car nous sommes très surveillés par nos officiers. Les Alsaciens espèrent que les Russes déclencheront rapidement l’offensive car ainsi, cachés dans une tranchée, nous pourrons nous rendre avec moins de risques. »
12 Passés à l’Armée rouge en juin 1943, Albert Heinel et Marcel Schmidt rappellent que « seul un nombre infime d’Alsaciens a un état d’esprit conciliateur, 99,5 % sont contre les hitlériens, tandis que seuls 0,5 % sont pour la collaboration avec les Allemands ».
13 Tous témoignent de leur attachement à la France et nombre d’entre eux se rendent aux Soviétiques dans l’espoir de rejoindre les troupes de la France libre. Influencés par la propagande gaulliste, ils n’imaginent jamais que leur route vers l’Angleterre se terminera dans les camps de prisonniers de guerre dépendants de la Direction centrale des prisonniers de guerre et des internés du commissariat du peuple aux Affaires intérieures (Glavnoe upravlenie NKVD SSSR po delam voennoplennyh i internirovannyh - GUPVI-NKVD)4.
14 La création du GUPVI-NKVD remonte à l’invasion de la Pologne orientale par les troupes soviétiques. Par un décret du 19 septembre 1939, L. P. Berija, commissaire du peuple aux Affaires intérieures, met en place les premiers camps de prisonniers. Cette nouvelle organisation est intégrée au commissariat du peuple à l’Intérieur au niveau de l’Union comme dans les républiques et les régions pour les questions liées au contre- espionnage et à la logistique (nourriture, soins médicaux).
15 Dans un premier temps, la tâche du GUPVI est de prendre en charge les prisonniers dans des camps temporaires, proches du front, et de les transférer dans les camps d’internement définitif, puis de les enregistrer et de les mettre au travail le plus rapidement possible. Tout change avec l’attaque allemande contre l’Union soviétique. Immédiatement, 30 nouveaux camps sont créés dans la zone s’étendant entre le front et la Russie centrale et plus particulièrement en Ukraine et en Carélie. Un mois après le début des hostilités, suite à l’avancée allemande, seuls 19 camps restaient en activité. Ainsi durant les premiers mois du conflit, le GUPVI n’a qu’une existence virtuelle, ses principales fonctions sont remplies par les structures du GULag pour la logistique, et par les structures de la Seconde direction du NKVD pour le contre-espionnage. À l’époque, l’administration centrale du GUPVI ne compte que 39 personnes.
16 Nouveau remaniement à partir de décembre 1941 et de l’arrêt de l'offensive allemande sur Moscou : le 27 décembre 1941, le GOKO (Gosudarstvennyj komitet oborony - Comité d'État à la défense) adopte un décret autorisant le GUPVI à prendre en charge 26 nouveaux camps pour faire face à l’afflux de nouveaux prisonniers. Les revers de l’armée allemande à la suite de la bataille de Stalingrad conduisent à l’ouverture de nouveaux camps et à la mise en place d’hôpitaux spéciaux pour traiter les prisonniers les plus gravement touchés.
17 À la fin de 1943, le GUPVI compte déjà plus d’une cinquantaine de camps. Un an plus tard, il contrôle 156 camps d’une capacité totale de 905 000 personnes. Durant les
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derniers mois du conflit, il doit faire face à un afflux toujours plus massif de prisonniers et déploie plus de 102 nouveaux camps de réception et de filtrage dans les arrières immédiats du front. Au total près de 4 000 points (camps fixes et itinérants, hôpitaux, bataillons de travail) dépendant du GUPVI recevront près de 3 500 000 prisonniers de guerre entre 1941 et 1945, dont un peu plus de 20 000 Français. Dans leur cas, le Komintern eut une influence presque égale à celle du GUPVI sur leur destin.
18 André Marty tient une place prépondérante dans le destin des « Malgré-nous ». Il est chargé, dans le cadre de ses activités au sein du Komintern, de la surveillance des Français présents en URSS. Mutin de la Mer Noire en 1919, communiste de la première heure, dirigeant des Brigades internationales en Espagne, Marty n’en est pas moins un Français, formé sur les bancs de la communale, pour qui les Alsaciens-Lorrains - même revêtus de l’uniforme allemand - sont des compatriotes et doivent, si possible, être traités comme tels.
19 Début 1943, André Marty tente de recueillir, par l’intermédiaire de plusieurs responsables du Komintern et d’officiers du NKVD, les quelques bribes d’informations disponibles sur les « Français incorporés de force dans l’armée allemande ». Le 19 avril 1943, une responsable d’Inoradio, station soviétique émettant vers les pays occupés, lui annonce que plusieurs Alsaciens-Lorrains ont déserté l’armée allemande et se sont rendus à l’Armée rouge sur le front de Leningrad. Le 6 mai, Walter Ulbricht5, lui aussi présent à Moscou, l’informe qu’il a relevé la présence de quatre Français dans les listes de prisonniers qui lui ont été transmises. Le 16 mai, Marty note la publication dans le bulletin d’information de la VIIe section de la Direction politique centrale de l’Armée rouge de l’interrogatoire d’un transfuge français, l’Alsacien André Imbs, qui s’est rendu le 10 avril aux troupes soviétiques. Toujours en mai 1943, Marty attire l’attention du général Petrov, responsable du GUPVI-NKVD, sur le sort de trois Alsaciens récemment capturés6.
20 Fort de ces informations, André Marty adresse le 3 juin 1943 un rapport au Bulgare Georgij Dimitrov, secrétaire général du Komintern7, lui demandant d’intercéder auprès des autorités soviétiques pour que les prisonniers de guerre français, à l’exception des membres de la LVF, puissent être réunis dans un même camp de prisonniers car « il ne serait pas juste de les considérer comme des ennemis de l’Union soviétique »8. Mais au- delà de l’attribution d’un régime de détention particulier - le terme de privilégié serait ici déplacé - cette séparation des Français du reste des prisonniers de la Wehrmacht devait permettre, dans l’esprit de Marty, une sélection politique de ces hommes en vue de leur utilisation ultérieure par le « PCF ou en tout cas par les forces militaires françaises »9. Conséquence immédiate de cette note, le 10 juillet 1943, la Pravda publie sous le titre « La voix de la France » un article d’Ilya Ehrenbourg, écrivain et fidèle propagandiste du régime soviétique, retraçant l’équipée d’un déserteur alsacien de la Wehrmacht. Pour la première fois le régime soviétique reconnaissait officiellement la singularité du cas des « Malgré-nous ».
21 Bien qu’il soit impossible de reconstruire le cheminement du rapport de Marty dans le dédale de la bureaucratie du Komintern et de l’administration du GUPVI-NKVD, son influence directe est indéniable dans la création d’un centre de rassemblement des prisonniers français : le camp n° 188, situé près du village de Rada, dans la région de Tambov. Ouvert en 1942, ce camp de prisonniers ne comptait que trois Français en juin 194310, le mois où Marty rédige son rapport. Une fois prise la décision de rassembler les prisonniers français dans ce camp, les effectifs augmentent rapidement : 42 en août
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194311, 394 en octobre12 et 412 en novembre de la même année 13. En janvier 1944, le camp de Tambov compte 1 039 Français sur les 2 751 prisonniers14 de plus de 15 nationalités différentes qui y sont internés. Les effectifs du camp culminent au début du mois de septembre 1945 avec près de 11 000 prisonniers français.
22 Capturés sur le front ou passés aux lignes soviétiques, les prisonniers étaient immédiatement soumis à un interrogatoire. Les transfuges se voyaient remettre un « certificat », témoignant de leur désertion, les autres, au gré des circonstances, étaient insultés, voire frappés plus ou moins violemment. Une fois en captivité le sort des uns et des autres ne fut guère différent. Les certificats établis au front furent repris par la suite et ils perdirent toute valeur pour ceux qui avaient réussi à les garder sur eux.
23 Avant tout, il importe de souligner que, pour rejoindre Tambov, nombre de captifs passaient d’abord dans plusieurs autres camps de transit, souvent plus meurtriers que Tambov même. Au total la présence d’Alsaciens-Lorrains a été attestée, grâce à des documents soviétiques de l’époque, dans plus d’une centaines de camps du GUPVI répartis sur l’ensemble du territoire de l’URSS15.
24 Au gré des diverses fouilles, les prisonniers perdaient le peu d’effets personnels qui étaient encore en leur possession : photos, montres, bottes. Une fois arrivés à destination, ils étaient mis en quarantaine, soignés, puis répartis dans des baraques. Outre la faim, c’est le souvenir de ces baraques, enfoncées de deux à trois mètres sous la terre de sorte que seules les lucarnes des toits laissaient pénétrer l’air et la lumière, qui a marqué le plus profondément les prisonniers de Tambov.
25 Au quotidien, la vie dans le camp était rythmée par les périodes de travail, un maigre repas et l’éducation politique. Au-delà des activités liées à l’entretien normal du camp, des gardiens et des prisonniers, les Malgré-nous étaient astreints à des travaux physiques particulièrement durs : coupe et transport du bois dans les forêts entourant le camp, construction d’une écluse, extraction de la tourbe. Ces travaux, exécutés quelles que fussent les conditions climatiques, étaient d’autant plus exténuants que l’organisme des prisonniers se trouvait affaibli par la maladie et la médiocrité des rations alimentaires.
26 Les rapports sanitaires établis par les autorités françaises au retour des prisonniers sont accablants. Un quart des détenus étaient atteints du typhus, 15 % de la tuberculose. La dysenterie infectieuse, la pneumonie et la pleurésie firent aussi des ravages. Enfin, tous les prisonniers accusaient d’importantes pertes de poids. À leur retour, le poids moyen des prisonniers, calculé sur un échantillon de 1 400 personnes, était de 42 kilos.
27 Selon les témoignages des anciens de Tambov, « la ration journalière comprenait 600 grammes de pain noir, trois soupes, une portion de bouillie de céréales » pour les prisonniers de la première catégorie, physiquement aptes au travail. Ainsi de l’été 1944 à l’été 1945, chaque détenu ne recevait que l’équivalent de 1 340 calories par jour16. Des rations « améliorées » étaient servies aux malades, mais les prisonniers mis au cachot, souvent pour une faute bénigne, ne recevaient que 400 grammes de pain et une demi- portion de soupe.
28 La lecture publique de la presse tenait une place importante dans l’emploi du temps. Réunis dans leur totalité sur la place centrale du camp ou, plus souvent, par groupes dans le « club » réservé à l’éducation politique, les prisonniers prenaient connaissance des discours des dirigeants soviétiques ou des articles des journaux russes concernant
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la situation en France. Leurs réactions faisaient immédiatement l’objet d’un rapport de la part des responsables politiques du camp. Ainsi en octobre 1943, l’un de ces rapports note que « l’annonce de la libération de la Corse a été accueillie par une ovation des prisonniers [...] de Gaulle est particulièrement populaire parmi eux [...] tous portent sur la poitrine un petit morceau de ruban tricolore. »17
29 Les principes de sélection politique prônés par Marty, mais en fait issus de la guerre civile russe où Blancs comme Rouges tentaient de recruter dans leurs rangs les soldats étrangers faits prisonniers, correspondent parfaitement à la vision soviétique et seront appliqués aux prisonniers de guerre de toutes nationalités.
30 En novembre 1943, le chef du camp de Tambov rédige un « rapport politique » attirant l’attention de sa hiérarchie sur la qualité de la formation idéologique à laquelle sont soumis les Français. « [...] Par exemple, parmi les prisonniers de guerre français, nous comptons un groupe antifasciste fort de 26 activistes »18. Il revient une nouvelle fois sur cette question en janvier 1944 pour noter qu’au total le camp compte 600 antifascistes, dont 31 activistes, plus de 40 prisonniers ayant déjà été dirigés vers « l’école des activistes »19 au cours des mois précédents. L’idée de créer une telle école revient à G. Dimitrov. Durant la Seconde guerre mondiale, le rôle du Komintern, outre la coordination de l’action des partis communistes des pays occupés, est de former les étrangers présents en URSS, y compris les prisonniers de guerre, afin d’utiliser les plus compétents pour mener des opérations de renseignement derrière les lignes allemandes.
31 En juillet 1942, Dimitrov note ainsi dans son journal : « École du temps de guerre. Notre mission, compte tenu de ce qui va se passer après le conflit, est de préparer, dans les délais les plus courts, des fonctionnaires pour les partis et les organisations de jeunesse à l’étranger. Dans cet enseignement, l’étude des événements journaliers de la Guerre, des relations internationales et de la situation politique particulière au pays du stagiaire doit tenir une place centrale. Les cours doivent se construire autour de l’étude des principes marxistes-léninistes, de la formation militaire et en particulier de la lutte clandestine et du soulèvement armé. Un entraînement physique approprié, une bonne conscience politique et morale devront permettre [au stagiaire] de combattre dans les dures conditions de la clandestinité [...]. »20
32 Peu à peu une nouvelle hiérarchie s’instaure dans le camp de Tambov ; basée sur un conformisme idéologique apparent, elle prend la place de la hiérarchie basée sur le grade. L’encadrement des prisonniers est transféré à ces « antifascistes » qui deviennent chefs de baraquement ou responsables du contrôle des cuisines. Les témoignages réunis par Pierre Rigoulot auprès des anciens de Tambov sont sans appel : « Les Russes leur ont laissé toute liberté pour nous emmerder. La journée, ils étaient dans les cuisines pour manger dans les marmites. L’un d’eux se vantait même d’avaler cinq rations de soupe. Ils étaient tous bien en forme. »
33 Plus grave encore, ces « antifascistes » en charge de la discipline interne du camp infligent aux prisonniers, au travers d’une « police » principalement composée de Français, des sanctions outrancières pour toute infraction, réelle ou supposée, au règlement. Un ancien de Tambov témoigne : « Après avoir peiné toute la journée à décharger de la farine à la gare et n’en étant revenu que très tard dans la nuit, je refusais de travailler la journée suivante. Cela me valut huit jours de corvée de w.-c. Alors que la louche à purin était tombée dans la fosse, le chef de la police [...] exigea de moi que je me déshabille pour chercher
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l’instrument noyé dans cette fosse de trois mètres de profondeur. Ayant refusé, je fus puni de quatorze jours de corvée supplémentaires. »21
34 En fait, un véritable système de passe-droit, de marché noir et de combines avait été mis en place pour le seul profit de quelques petits chefs et de leurs sbires. Le tout sous l’œil désabusé des responsables soviétiques du camp, trop contents de « faire du chiffre » en communiquant à leur hiérarchie d’impressionnantes listes nominatives de « sympathisants ».
35 Croyant servir la France en se rendant à l’Armée rouge, les Malgré-nous se retrouvent confrontés à la dure réalité des camps soviétiques. Les mois passant, ils perdent tout espoir de pouvoir rejoindre les troupes du général de Gaulle. De cette période naît le sentiment - encore vivace aujourd’hui chez certains anciens de Tambov - d’avoir été oubliés par la France. La réalité est toutefois plus complexe.
36 Dès la fin 1943, ces prisonniers français deviennent des pions dans le jeu d’une diplomatie qui prépare déjà l’après-guerre. Un rapport de Berija, chef du NKVD, adressé à Stalin le 8 janvier 1944 montre comment les dirigeants soviétiques hésitent quant à la politique à suivre envers les Malgré-nous22.
37 Deux solutions sont proposées. La première est de former au sein de l’Armée rouge une brigade « Alsace-Lorraine », utile dans le cas (envisageable avant le 6 juin 1944) où les troupes soviétiques parviendraient jusqu’en France. Plus simplement, la seconde solution prévoyait la remise des prisonniers aux autorités gaullistes pour les engager dans les combats d’Italie.
38 Le débarquement du 6 juin 1944 met définitivement fin aux hésitations soviétiques et, un mois plus tard, un premier convoi de 1 500 hommes quitte le camp de Tambov pour rejoindre l’Afrique du Nord après un long périple.
39 Ces quelques centaines d’élus, conscients de leur chance ou plus certainement soucieux de ne pas mécontenter les cadres politiques du camp, tout-puissants dans l’établissement de la liste des prisonniers libérables, adoptent, à l’unanimité, une dernière motion pleine d’un enthousiasme appris : « [...] et nous quittons l’URSS aux cris de : “Vive l’amitié franco-soviétique, garantie de la paix européenne. Vivent le peuple soviétique, sa glorieuse Armée rouge, son Grand Chef, le Généralissime Stalin”. » 23
40 Cependant, en dépit d’une telle bonne volonté, ces 1 500 prisonniers français seront les seuls à être libérés avant la capitulation allemande. Avec la fin prévisible du second conflit mondial, ces prisonniers deviennent une monnaie d’échange permettant à tout moment aux Soviétiques de faire pression sur le gouvernement français. De leur côté, soucieuses de ne pas compromettre les relations avec l’URSS, les autorités françaises - du général de Gaulle aux ministres communistes - ne feront jamais du sort des Malgré- nous une question de principe24.
41 Cependant il serait faux de dire que rien n’a été tenté. À de nombreuses reprises, le général Keller, responsable de la mission française de rapatriement présente à Moscou, interroge les Soviétiques sur le destin des Alsaciens-Lorrains - y compris ceux qui servaient dans les troupes SS25 -, localisés par ses services. Ces demandes, traitées au cas par cas par les fonctionnaires du GUPVI-NKVD, aboutissent parfois à un rapatriement anticipé des prisonniers concernés.
42 À l’été 1945, l’Ambassade de France à Moscou adresse une note officielle au ministère soviétique des Affaires étrangères critiquant le « mauvais état de santé des prisonniers
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arrivant d’URSS ». L’affaire remonte jusqu’à Berija qui couvre immédiatement ses services en adressant à Stalin et à Vyšinskij un rapport détaillé, mais bien loin de la réalité décrite par les survivants. « Le camp de Tambov [...] est constitué de baraquements confortables réservés aux prisonniers français. Le chef de la mission militaire française, le général Petit, a, lui- même, remercié le Service des relations extérieures du commissariat du peuple à la Défense à la suite de la visite de juillet 1944 durant laquelle il a pu prendre connaissance des conditions de vie des Français. Toutefois, en dépit de bonnes conditions de détention des prisonniers dans les camps du NKVD, l’état physique d’un grand nombre de Français est dégradé, en particulier de ceux qui ont été fait prisonniers dans les dernières semaines de la guerre. »26
43 Plus largement, l’attention, même limitée, que la France porte à l’époque au destin des Malgré-nous donne des résultats, comme le prouvent des documents soviétiques récemment déclassifiés. En septembre 1945, sur les 15 139 prisonniers de guerre français recensés à cette date par les autorités soviétiques, 12 146 ont déjà quitté l’Union soviétique en direction de la France27.
44 En décembre 1945, le gouvernement soviétique décide de libérer la plus grande partie des prisonniers de guerre, à l’exception de ceux des puissances vaincues (Allemagne, Italie, Japon), toujours internés dans les camps. Les Français encore détenus en URSS, y compris ceux qui avaient servi dans les troupes SS ou les services de renseignements du Reich28, sont peu à peu libérés et convoyés vers le camp 186, près d’Odessa, en vue de leur embarquement pour la France. Les années passant, le flux des retours diminue, 19 Alsaciens-Lorrains rentrent en France en 1948, 12 en 1949, 1 seul en 1950, 18 en 1951, 4 en 1952, 7 en 1953, aucun en 1954. En 1955, seul Jean-Jacques Remetter revient en France, il sera officiellement le dernier Malgré-nous à être libéré des camps soviétiques.
45 Les fonds du GUPVI-NKVD, conservés aux Archives spéciales de Moscou, nous donnent une première approximation du nombre total des prisonniers français passés par les camps soviétiques. Toutefois, loin de rendre compte du nombre de prisonniers tombés au mains de l’Armée rouge, les chiffres présentés ici ne reflètent que le nombre de prisonniers arrivés vivants dans un camp permanent d’internement, souvent plusieurs mois après leur capture sur le front.
46 En effet, bien que les premiers textes réglementaires soviétiques sur les « conditions de détention et de comptage des prisonniers de guerre » aient été promulgués dès août 194129, il faudra attendre novembre 1944 pour que des mesures soient prises afin de « mettre en place un comptage individuel des prisonniers dès leur arrivée dans un camp d’internement. »30
47 Ainsi selon les documents disponibles aux Archives spéciales de Moscou (dossiers personnels et cartes individuelles d’enregistrement), 23 136 prisonniers de guerre français ont été comptabilisés, 1 325 sont morts en captivité et 21 811 ont été remis aux autorités de leur pays d’origine. Ces chiffres doivent donc être maniés avec précaution, mais peuvent toutefois être comparés avec ceux des prisonniers d’autres nationalités dont le comptage a été effectué dans conditions identiques.
48 Avec un taux de perte dans les camps de l’ordre de 5,7 % les Français - tout comme les Hollandais (4,2 %), les Luxembourgeois (5,6), les Yougoslaves (6,2 %), les Danois (7,7 %) et les Belges (8,8 %) - apparaissent comme ayant été les prisonniers les moins maltraités. Le taux des pertes allemandes s’élève à 15 % et reflète la moyenne générale. Enfin, les Roumains et surtout les Italiens (avec des taux de perte de 29,1 % et de 56 %
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respectivement) semblent avoir été soumis à des conditions de captivité particulièrement dures.
49 Plus rapidement libérés que les autres prisonniers, la grande majorité des Malgré-nous ne sera pas confrontée aux conditions d’internement des années 1946-1947 quand, face à la crise alimentaire qui touche l’ensemble du pays, la direction du GUPVI décide de diminuer encore les rations alimentaires31 et d'interrompre la distribution de repas chauds dans les camps de prisonniers32.
50 Toutefois, plus de cinquante ans après la fin de la guerre, le sort de 11 000 Alsaciens- Lorrains (20 000 selon d’autres estimations) reste inconnu. Ont-ils été tués au front lors des derniers mois du conflit sans que leur mort ait été enregistrée par une armée allemande en déroute ? Ont-ils été exécutés alors qu’il se rendaient à des troupes soviétiques encore sous le choc des atrocités commises contre les civils russes par d’autres Français, ceux de la LVF ? Plus sûrement, on peut estimer qu’ils ont disparu lors des interminables transferts d’un camp de transit à l’autre, entre leur capture sur le front et leur enregistrement dans un camp permanent d’internement.
51 Il n’est pas exclu qu’une part minime, mais non négligeable, de ces « disparus » ait en fait été jugée sous l’accusation, réelle ou imaginaire, de crime de guerre et soit décédée dans les camps d’internement bien après la fin des hostilités.
52 En fin de compte, les incertitudes quant au nombre et au destin de ces 11 000 prisonniers de guerre français disparus ne pourront être levées que par une étude approfondie, en Russie, des archives du fameux SMER· (Smert´ špionam - Mort aux espions) - le renseignement militaire étant la seule administration soviétique à comptabiliser les prisonniers immédiatement après leur capture - et des archives centrales du ministère de l’Intérieur qui conservent les dossiers personnels des prisonniers de guerre étrangers condamnés par des tribunaux soviétiques pour crime de guerre. Mais une telle recherche pourrait soulever bien des questions. En effet, en juillet 1955, au moment où officiellement le dernier Malgré-nous rentre en France, un document du secrétariat du MVD adressé au Comité central du parti atteste que 28 prisonniers de guerre français sont encore détenus dans les camps soviétiques33.
53 Fondation Robert Schuman
54 29, boulevard Raspail
55 75007 Paris
56 e-mail : [email protected]
NOTES
2. VII otdel glavnogo političeskogo upravlenija raboče-krestjan´skoj Krasnoj Armii. 3. Bulletin d’information de la VIIe section de la Direction politique centrale de l’Armée rouge, 9 août 1943, Rossijskij Gosudarstvennyj Arhiv Social´no-Političeskoj Istorii (RGASPI), 517/1/1947/50-56.
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4. Les travaux les plus complets sur cette administration soviétique ont été menés par le chercheur autrichien Stefan Karner. Voir en particulier : S. Karner, Im Archipel GUPVI, Kriegsgefangenschaft und Internierung in der Sowjetunion 1941-1956, Vienne- Munich, 1995 (Kriegsfolgen-Forschung, Bd I) ; Id., « Die sowjetische Hauptverwaltung für Kriegsgefangene und Internierte. Ein Zwischenbericht », Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 3, 1994 ; Id., « Deutsche Kriegsgefangene und Internierte in der Sowjetunion, 1941-1956 », in Problemy voennogo plena. Istorija i sovremenost´, Vologda, 1997. La meilleure somme documentaire sur cette Direction centrale est le volume publié par M. M. Zagorul´ ko, Voennoplennye v SSSR 1939-1956. Dokumenty i materialy, Moscou, Logos, 2000, 1 120 p. 5. Walter Ulbricht (1893-1973), membre de l’Union spartakiste, Kominternien, premier secrétaire du PC d’Allemagne de l’Est de 1950 à 1971. 6. RGASPI, 517/1/1947/12. 7. Bien que le Komintern ait été officiellement dissous en mai 1943, sa structure administrative reste en place et continue de coordonner l’action des partis communistes européens jusqu’à la fin de la guerre. 8. RGASPI, 517/1/1947/16. 9. Ibid. 10. Les chiffres cités sont issus des rapports politiques (Politdonesenija) mensuels rédigés par la direction du camp à l’intention de l’administration centrale du GUPVI, Centr Hranenija Istoriko-Dokumental´nyh Kollekcii (CHIDK), 52/5/3/86. 11. CHIDK, 52/5/3/112. 12. CHIDK, 52/5/3/139. 13. CHIDK, 52/5/3/152. 14. CHIDK, 52/5/11/5. 15. Pour plus de détails voir : G. Moullec, Les Prisonniers de guerre français en URSS, Catalogue des Fonds russes, Paris, 1998, 322 p. Rapport remis au Secrétariat d’État aux Anciens combattants et aux victimes de guerre. 16. La norme officielle adoptée par le GUVPI-NKVD en octobre 1944 (Položenie o voennoplennyh) prévoyait pour les prisonniers aptes au travail la ration journalière suivante : pain de seigle : 600 grammes, céréales : 70 g., viande : 30 g., poisson : 50 g., lard : 10 g., sucre : 17 g., pommes de terre : 400 g., choux : 200 g. (Gosudarstvennyj Arhiv Rossijskoj Federacii - GARF, R-9401/205/12/21-23). Soit un total journalier de plus de 2 400 calories. Une telle différence entre la norme et la ration réellement servie aux prisonniers indique l’ampleur des détournements. 17. CHIDK, 52/5/3/139v. 18. CHIDK, 52/5/3/153v. 19. L’école de Krasnogorsk, située aux environs de Moscou, devait former, sous la responsabilité commune du Komintern et des services de renseignement soviétiques, des propagandistes professionnels. Cette formation constituait un préalable indispensable avant que ces activistes ne soient - pour les meilleurs - définitivement recrutés par les services soviétiques pour mener des actions de renseignement sur le territoire français (en France occupée ou en Algérie). 20. G. Dimitrov, Dnevnik, Sofia, Sv. Kliment Okhdinski, 1997, p. 124.
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21. P. Rigoulot, op. cit., p. 24 22. GARF, R-9401/2/64/34. 23. CHIDK, 52/4m/27/3. 24. Le livre coordonné par Catherine Klein-Gousseff, Retours d’URSS. Les prisonniers de guerre français et les internés français dans les archives soviétiques, 1945-1951 (Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2001, 428 p.) donne, en dépit du fait que les documents utilisés ne proviennent que d’un seul centre d’archives, un bon éclairage des tractations diplomatiques entre la France et l’Union soviétique. 25. GARF, R-9526/1/207/131. 26. GARF, R-9401/2/99/181-182. 27. GARF, R-9401/2/99/182. 28. Directive n° 15 du NKVD en date du 8 janvier 1946 in Velikaja Otečestvennaja, T. 13 : Inostrannye voennoplennye Vtoroj mirovoj vojny v SSSR, Moscou, Terra, 1996, p. 281. 29. Directive n° 1067 du NKVD en date du 7 août 1941. GARF, R-9041/12/205-12/313-321. 30. Directive n° 254 du NKVD en date du 16 novembre 1944. GARF, R-9401/12/205-12/112-112v. 31. Directive n° 244 du MVD en date du 1er octobre 1946. GARF, R-9401/12/205-12/389. 32. Télégramme n° 274 du MVD en date du 14 octobre 1946. GARF, R-9401/12/205-17/256-256v. 33. GARF, R-9401/2/465/167a/. Ce document est issu d’un dossier concernant plus largement le rapatriement des prisonniers de guerre allemands et japonais encore présents en URSS en juin 1955.
RÉSUMÉS
Résumé Il est encore très difficile d’établir un bilan chiffré du sort des 130000Alsaciens-Lorrains incorporés de force dans l’armée allemande durant le second conflit mondial et dont plus de 21000 reviendront des camps de prisonniers en URSS. Aujourd’hui -- aux travers de documents conservés dans divers centres d’archives russes -- il devient clair que leur destin à été modelé à la fois par les autorités soviétiques, mais aussi par les responsables du mouvement communiste international présents à Moscou. Comparativement moins maltraités, les « malgré-nous » rentreront chez eux plus tôt que les autres prisonniers de guerre étrangers internés en URSS. Toutefois, ces même archives russes gardent la trace de la présence de 28 prisonniers de guerre français en URSS en 1955.
Abstract Friends or foes ? The GUPVI-NKVD, the Comintern and the fate of the former French prisoners of war in the Soviet Union (1942-1955). It is as yet very difficult to assess the fate of the 130,000 natives of Alsace-Lorraine who were
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forcibly drafted in the German army during World War II, and out of whom more than 21,000 came back from Soviet prison camps. A study of documents preserved in various Russian archives makes clear that their fate was shaped both by Soviet authorities and by leaders of the international communist movement who were then in Moscow. They were comparatively better treated and came back home earlier than the other foreign prisoners of war held captive in the USSR. However, the Russian archives under study mention the presence of 28 French prisoners of war on Soviet soil in 1955.
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The Great terror in the provinces of the USSR, 1937-1938 A cooperative bibliography
Rolf BINNER, Marc JUNG et Terry MARTIN
Introduction
1 The goal of this bibliography is simple : to draw the attention of specialists to a large body of scattered publications related to the mass operations of the Great Terror in the Soviet provinces. We are professional historians, not bibliographers, and we make no claim to have tracked down every single relevant work. Our major effort was devoted to finding primary documentary sources. The section on secondary sources is much more haphazard. We tried to include primarily works related to the provinces and those based on new archival materials. If your own work does not appear in the list, this is certainly due to an oversight on our part, rather than any calculated slight.
2 We call this a “cooperative bibliography” because we put it together by asking friends and colleagues in the field of Soviet history to send us citations. We are grateful to the following individuals for their assistance : J. Baberowski (Tubingen), V. Birger (Krasnoiarsk), J. Bone (Chicago), J. Burds (Boston), R. W. Davies (Birmingham), M. Ellmann (Amsterdam), A. Getty (Los Angeles), A. Graziosi (Rome), L. Gvozdkova (Kemerovo), W. Hedeler (Berlin), M. Jansen (Amsterdam), B. Lvin (Washington), R. Manning (Boston), B. McLoughlin (Vienna), N. Okhotin (Moscow), S. Papkov (Novosibirsk), G. Rittersporn (Berlin), N. Rytsk (Moscow), Y. Shapoval (Kyiv), A. Stepanov (Kazan´), E. Topinka (L´viv), V. Vasil´ev (Kyiv), S. Vatlin (Moscow), L. Viola (Toronto), S. Wheatcroft (Melbourne).
3 We would like to continue to up-date this bibliography. Please send further citations to [email protected]
4 We begin with a list of the major NKVD decrees related to the mass operations of the Great Terror and continue with a list of primary and secondary sources. We have used the transliteration system of the U.S. Library of Congress throughout.
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I NKVD decrees, circulars and instructions governing the mass operations of the Great Terror, 1937-1938
5 The following is a list of the major NKVD decrees, circulars and instructions that governed the mass operations of the Great Terror. It is almost certainly incomplete since access to the former KGB archive in Moscow is severely limited. We have included those decrees that have been published or referred to in published works. The two most important decrees were prikaz 00447, that governed the campaign targeting former kulaks, criminals and numerous other “former peoples,” and prikaz 00485 that served as the paradigm for the various “national operations” of the Great Terror.1
6 Prikaz 00698 (28.10.1937), O konsul´skikh sviaziakh.
7 Memorandum 49990 (30.11.1937),Latyshskaia operatsiia.
8 Prikaz 50215 (11.12.1937) Operatsiia po arestam grekov [unpublished].
9 Tsirkuliar 52691 (22.12.37) O repressiiakh sredi kitaitsev [unpublished].
10 Direktiva 17089 (18.01.1938) Ob operativnykh meropriiatiiakh po eseram [unpublished].
11 Prikaz 202 (29.01.1938) Ob arestakh irantsev [unpublished].
12 Direktiva 17231 (14.02.1938) [Ob operativnykh meropriiatiiach po men´shevikam i anarkhistam] [unpublished].
13 Tsirkuliar 326 (16.02.1938) O repressiiakh sredi afgantsev [unpublished].
14 Prikaz 00606 (17.09.1938) Ob obrazovanii osobykh troek dlia rassmotreniia del na arestovannykh v poriadke prikazov NKVD SSSR Nr. 00485 i dr[ugikh] prikaz concerns exclusively the national operations, not
15 prikaz 00447].
16 Tsirkuliar (21.09.1938) zamestitelia narodnogo komissara vnutrennikh del L. Berii o raz´´iasnenii primeneniia prikaza 00606.
17 Postanovlenie P4387 (17.11.1938) Soveta Narodnykh Komissarov SSSR i Tsentral ´nogo Komiteta SSSR VKP(b) Ob arestakh, prokurorskom nadzore i vedenii sledstviia.
18 Prikaz 00762 (26.11.1938) O poriadke osushchestvleniia postanovleniia SNK SSSR i TsK VKP(b) ot 17 noiabria 1938 g.
19 Direktiva 2709 (26.12.1938) NKVD i Prokurora SSSR Ob otmene reshenii byv. troek NKVD.
20 In the bibliography we note in bold works where the complete text of NKVD decrees have been published.
II Documentary publications
21 We have included in our list of documentary publications numerous “memorial books” (knigi pamiati). These books owe their existence to the persistent efforts of relatives and human rights organizations, above all Memorial, to memorialize the victims of the Great Terror (or of Soviet repression more generally). These books list standard biographical data concerning the victims (birth date and place, profession, nationality,
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place of residence). Others also provide information concerning social origin, education, Party membership, previous convictions as well as the date of arrest, sentencing (including the article of the criminal code, the sentence itself and the sentencing body) and execution. A drawback of these books is that they almost never include those convicted as ordinary criminals. Many of the memorial books also include extensive valuable documentary materials from local and central KGB archives, as well as autobiographical memoirs from survivors. A nearly complete collection of these memorial books can be found in the library of Memorial-Moscow (Malyi Karetnyi pereulok 12, phone : 200-6506) or in the library of the Sakharov Fund (ul. Semlianoi val. 57, stroenie 6, phone : 923-4401). The adresses of local web sites of Memorial can be found in A. Iutkin, “Sluchainye nakhodki v nesluchainom puteshestvii,” Russkaia mysl´ (02-08.11.2000), p. 11. The web site for Memorial-Moscow also has an extensive list of memorial books : www.memo.ru
22 “Belaia kniga.“ O deportatsii koreiskogo naseleniia Rossii v 30-40-kh godakh. T. 1. Sost. LI U.Khe. and KIM En Un. (Moscow, 1992).
23 Belaia kniga. O zhertvakh politicheskikh repressii: Samarskaia oblast´ . T. 1-14. Preds. red. soveta POPKOV N.E. (Samara, 1993-2000).
24 Bol´ liudskaia. Kniga pamiati tomichei, repressirovannykh v 30-40-e i nachale 50-kh godov. T. 1 (1991), t. 2 (1992), t. 3 (1992), t. 4 (1994), t. 5 (1999). Sost. UIMANOV V.N. (Tomsk, 1991-1999).
25 Bol´ proshedshaia skvoz´ gody. Sost. PAVLOV S.M. (Kemerovo, 2000).
26 Butovskii poligon. 1937-1938 gg. Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii. T. 1-5. Sost. GOLOVKOVA L.A, LIUBIMOVA K.F. et al. (Moscow, 1997-2001) [ Prikazy 00485, 00593 in t. 1].
27 Chas “chornoho vorona.” Narisi (Kirovohrad, 1995). FEOFANOV IU., “Rasstrel po 1-i kategorii,”
28 Izvestiia (03.04.1996): 1, 5 [ Politbiuro resolutions “Ob antisovetskikh elementakh” of 24.09.1937, 03.12.1937, 31.01.1938, 17.02.1938, 15.09.1938 and letters from provincial Party and NKVD leaders to TsK, Stalin, and Ezhov asking for higher quotas for repression]. GARROS V., KORENEVSKAIA N. and LAHUSEN T., eds,
29 Intimacy and terror. Soviet diaries of the 1930s (New York, 1995). GETTY J.A. and NAUMOV O.V.,
30 The road to terror. Stalin and the self-destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven, 1999). GEVORKIIAN N., “Vstrechnye plany po unichtozheniiu sobstvennogo naroda,”
31 Mos-kovskie novosti , 25 (21.06.1992): 18-19 [List of troika members “po prikazu 00447 ,” Politbiuro resolutions “Ob antisovetskikh elementakh” of 1937/1938, and letters from provincial Party and NKVD leaders to TsK, Stalin, and Ezhov asking for higher quotas for repression].
32 Gody terrora. Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii. T. 1-2. Sost. SUSLOV A. and GASHEVA N. (Perm´, 1998-2000).
33 GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei). 1917-1960. Sost. KOKURIN A.I. and PETROV N.V. (Moscow, 2000) [ Prikazy 00447, 00485 and 00486 ].
34 GULag v Karelii. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov 1930-1941. Sost. ZHUKOV A.IU., MAKUROV V.G. and PETUKHOVA I.G. (Petrozavodsk, 1992).
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35 GULag v Komi krae, 1929-1956 . Sost. MOROZOV N.A. (Syktyvkar, 1997).
36 GVOZDKOVA L., Prinuditel´nyi trud. Ispravitel´no-trudovye lageria v Kuzbasse (30-50-e gg.) . T. 1-2 (Kemerovo, 1994).
37 Iz bezdny nebytiia. Kniga pamiati repressirovannykh kaluzhan . T. 1-3:
38 A-IA . Sost. KALINICHENKO IU.I., LISIANSKII V.IU. and MONIKOVSKAIA N.P. (Kaluga, 1993-1994).
39 Iz istorii zemli Tomskoi. 1937. Sibirskii Belostok. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov . Sost. KHANEVICH V.A. (Tomsk, 1998) [Great Terror in a Siberian village with Polish population].
40 Iz istorii zemli Tomskoi. God 1937. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov. Sost. BONDARENKO A.A., MARKOV V.I. and TRENIN B.P. (Tomsk, 1998) [Includes statistics].
41 Iz t´my zabveniia: Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii. 1918-1954. T. 1:
42 Rossii-skaia Federatsiia. Astrakhanskaia oblast´: A-IA. Sost. VOLODIN E.M. et al. (Astrakhan ´, 2000).
43 Khotelos´ by vsekh poimenno nazvat´. Kniga-martirolog . T. 1:
44 A-K. [Khabarovskii krai] . Sost. LAVRENTSOV A. P, TARAN M. M. and BESPALOVA T. G. (n.p. n.d.).
45 Khotelos´ by vsekh poimenno nazvat´... Po materialam sledstvennykh del i lagernykh otchetov GULAGa . Sost. OSIPOVA I. (Moscow, 1993).
46 Kniga pamiati. Martirolog katolicheskoi tserkvi v SSSR . Sost. CHAPLITSKII B. and OSIPOVA I. (Moscow, 2000).
47 Kniga pamiati. Posviashchaetsia tagil´chanam -- zhertvam repressii 1917-1980-kh godov. Sost. KIRILLOV V.M. (Ekaterinburg, 1994).
48 Kniga pamiati zheleznodorozhnikov -- zhertv politicheskikh repressii 1937-1938 gg., zakhoronennykh na Levashovskom memorial´nom kladbishche. T. 1. Sost. VOL´SKII E.V. (SPb, 2000).
49 Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii (20-50-e gg.) . Sost. DASHINSKII S.N., VORONIN V.V. and NECHUSHKIN V.A. (Murmansk, 1997).
50 Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii Kalininskoi oblasti. Martirolog 1937-1938. T. 1. Sost. KRAVTSOVA E.I. (Tver´, 2000).
51 Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii Kemerovskoi oblasti . T. 1-2. Sost. GVOZDKOVA L.I. (Kemerovo, 1995-1996).
52 Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii Kirovskoi oblasti. T. 1-3. Sost. LEGOTIN V.V. et al. (Kirov, 2000).
53 Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii Kurskoi oblasti . T. 1-3. Sost. VLASOVA L.T., SATALKIN N.V., SOSNOVA L.I. et al. (Kursk, 1996-2000).
54 Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii v Nizhegorodskoi oblasti. T. 1-2. Sost. GOLUBINOVA A.N., GUSEV M.IU., ZHILTSOV V.I. et al. (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1997-2001).
55 Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii Novgorodskoi oblasti . T. 1-7. Sost. IVANOV S.A., MAZANKINA N.A. and TRABER N.N. (Novgorod, 1993-1997).
56 Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii v Orenburgskoi oblasti . Sost. ERMAKOV G.V. (Kaluga, 1998).
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57 Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii. “Osuzhdeny po 58-i...” [ Kurganskaia oblast´ ] T. 1 (Kurgan, 2000).
58 Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii [Respubliki Altai] . T. 1-2. Sost. CHEPKIN P.I., VRAZOVSKAIA O.N. and BURAK T.A. (Gorno-Altaisk, 1996-1998).
59 Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii Respubliki Bashkortostan. T. 1: A-V , t. 2: G-I , t. 3: K-M . Sost. VALEEV R.A. et al. (Ufa, 1997, 1999, 2001).
60 Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii Respubliki Khakasiia . T. 1-2. Sost. ABDIN N.S. (Abakan, 1999-2000).
61 Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii. Respublika Tatarstan . T. 1: A. Sost. IVANOV A.A. (Kazan´, 2000).
62 Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii Stavropol´skogo kraia. T. 1-11. Sost. KOZUB A.L., USTINOVA M.A. et al. (Stavropol´, 1996-2001).
63 Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressi. Sverdlovskaia oblast´ . T. 1-2: A-D . Sost. BOCHKAREV M.A. et al. (Ekaterinburg, 1999-2000).
64 Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii. [Udmurtskoi Respubliki] . Sost. ZHUIKOVA R.A., GASHEV A.I. and LEBEDEV L.M. (Izhevsk, 2001).
65 Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii. [Ul´ianovskaia oblast´] . T. 1-2. Sost. ZOLOTOV IU.M. (Ul´ianovsk, 1996-2001) [Prikaz 00447 , t. 1, p. 766-780].
66 Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii v Vostochnom Zabaikal´e . T. 1. Sost. VASILEVSKII V.I. (Chita, 2000).
67 Kniga rasstreliannykh. Martirolog pogibshikh ot ruki NKVD v gody bol´shogo terrora (Tiumenskaia oblast´) . T. 1-2. Sost. GOL´DBERG R.S. (Tiumen´, 1999).
68 Kniga skorbi. Rasstrel´nye spiski. T. 1. Sost. BOLTINA V.D. and SHELEVA L.B. (Pavlodar, 1999). KOKIN S. and PSHENNIKOV O., “Bez stroku davnosti. 'Vikryttia' orhanami NKVD 'Viis´kovo-fashysts´koi zmovi u Chervonii Armii',”
69 Z arkhiviv VUChK-GPU-NKVD-KGB, 1/2 (1997); 1/2 (1998); 1/2 (1999); 2/4 (2000).
70 Koreitsy -- zhertvy politicheskikh repressii v SSSR 1934-1938 gg. T. 1. Sost. KU S. (Moscow, 2000).
71 Krasnodarskii krai v 1937-1941 gg. Dokumenty i materialy. Sost. BELIAEV A.M. et al. (Krasnodar, 1997).
72 “Krasnoe koleso” pereekhalo i cherez “Rostsel´mash” (khronika terrora 30-kh godov). Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii rabotnikov “Rostsel´masha.” Sost. VESEL´NITSKII I.M. (Rostov, 1999).
73 Kyiv: zhertvy represii. T. 1-2. Sost. ABRAMENKO L. (Kyiv, 1997-1999).
74 Leningradskii martirolog 1937-1938 . T. 1:
75 Avgust -- sentiabr´ 1937g. ; t. 2:
76 0ktiabr´ 1937 goda ; t. 3: Noiabr´ 1937 goda ; t. 4: Dekabr´ 1937 goda . Sost. RAZUMOV A.IA. et al. (SPb, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999) [Résumé of tsirkuliar 61 (t. 1, p. 47-48), prikaz 00439 and 00485 (t. 2), tsirkuliar 59190 (t. 2, facsimile reproduction, Illustration 78-79), prikaz 00593 (t. 3)] “Limity terroru,”
77 Karta , 11 (1993): 8-15 [ Prikaz 00447 in Polish translation]. LOSHYTS´KYI O., “'Laboratoriia'. Novi dokumenty i svidchennia pro masovi represii 1937-1938 rokiv na Vinnychchyni,”
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78 Z arkhiviv VUChK-GPU-NKVD-KGB , 1-2 (1998). LOSHYTS´KYI O., “'Laboratoriia' - 2: Poltava. Dokumental´ni materialy pro masovi represii v Poltavs´koi oblasti u 1937-1938 rr.,”
79 Z arkhiviv VUChK-GPU-NKVD-KGB , 2/4 (2000): 129-178.
80 Martirolog rasstreliannykh i zakhoronennykh na poligone NKVD “Ob´´ekt Butovo” 08.08. 1937-19.10. 1938 . Sost. GROIAN T.I., PEREDERIA V.A., EVDOKIMOVA S.I. et al. (Moscow- Butovo, 1997). “Massovye repressii opravdany byt´ ne mogut,”
81 Istochnik , 1 (1995): 117-131. “Materialy fevral´sko-martovskogo plenuma CK VKP(b) 1937 goda,”
82 Voprosy istorii , 2-12, 1992; 2, 5-9, 1993; 2, 6, 8, 10, 12, 1994; 2, 4-8, 10, 1995.
83 Memorial-Aspekt , 1 (1993) [ Prikaz 00593 , p. 2].
84 Memorial-Aspekt , 2-3 (1993) [ Prikaz 00486 , p. 9].
85 Narymskaia khronika 1930-1945. Tragediia spetspereselentsev. Dokumenty i vospominaniia. Sost. MAKSHEEVA V.N. (Moscow, 1997).
86 Ne predat´ zabveniiu. Kniga pamiati repressirovannykh v 30-40-e i nachale 50-kh godov, sviazannykh sud´bami s Iaroslavskoi oblast´iu. T. 1-5. Sost. GOLIKOV V.P., KONOPLIN A.V. and ZHOKHOVA G.A. (Iaroslavl´, 1993-1998) [T. 2-5 with a new subtitle: Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii, sviazannykh sud´bami s Iaroslavskoi oblast´iu . T. 4 has Politbiuro resolutions from 1937-1938].
87 Ne predat´ zabveniiu: Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii. T.1-10. Sost. KORNEEV N.P. (Pskov, 1996-2000).
88 Neizvestnaia Kareliia, 1921-1940. Dokumenty spetsorganov o zhizni respubliki . Sost. KLIMOVA A.V., MAKUROV V.G. and FILATOVA A.T. (Petrozavodsk, 1997).
89 Nimtsi v Ukraini 20-30-ti rr. XX st. Zbirnyk dokumentiv derzhavnykh arkhiviv Ukrainy (Kyiv, 1994).
90 Odesskii martirolog. Dannye o repressirovannykh Odessy i Odesskoi oblasti za gody sovetskoi vlasti. T. 1-2. Sost. KOVAL´CHUK L.V. and RAZUMOV G.A. (Odessa, 1997-1999) [Includes statistical charts]. OKHOTIN N. and ROGINSKII A., “'Latyshskaia operatsiia' 1937-1938 godov. Arkhivnye kommentarii,”
91 “30 Oktiabria” , 4 (2000): 5 [ Memorandum 49990 ].
92 Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine. Sbornik dokumentov. T. 1:
93 Nakanune .
94 Kniga pervaia (noiabr´ 1938 g. -- dekabr´ 1940 g.) . Sost. IAMPOL´SKII V.P. (Moscow, 1995) [ Postanovlenie SNK/TsK P4387 and prikaz 00762 ]
95 OSIPOVA I., Martirolog katolicheskoi tserkvi v SSSR. Kniga pamiati (Moscow, 2000).
96 Ostannia adresa. Do 60-richchia solovetskoi tragedii . T. 1-3. Sost. DRACH I., PRYSTAIKO V., PSHENNIKOV O. et al. (Kyiv, 1997-1999).
97 Ot ChK do FSB. Dokumenty i materialy po istorii organov gosbezopasnosti Tverskogo kraia. 1918-1998 . Sost. SMIRNOV V.A., BORISOV A.V. and TSVETKOVA M.V. (Tver´, 1998) [ Tsirkuliar ot 21.09.1938 o raz ´´ iasnenii primeneniia prikaza 00606 , p. 168-170]
98 Pam´iat´ Bikivni. Dokumenty ta materialy (Kyiv, 2000).
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99 Pamiat´. Zhertvy politicheskikh repressii. Rossiiskaia Federatsiia. Respublika Mordoviia. Sost. SEN´KIN P.E. and SARAEV F.P. (Saransk, 2000) [ Prikazy 00439, 00447, 00485, 00593, 00693, 00606, 00762 ].
100 Pokaianie: Komi respublikanskii martirolog zhertv massovykh politicheskikh repressii . T. 1-4. Sost. NEVSKII G.V. (Syktyvkar, 1998-2001).
101 Politicheskie repressii v Kazakhstane v 1937-1938 gg. Sbornik dokumentov . Sost. DEGITAEVA L.D. (Alma-Ata, 1998).
102 Pomorskii memorial. Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii. T. 1:
103 A-K . Otv. red. SHPERLING IU.M. (Arkhangel´sk, 1999).
104 Povernuni imena (pro reabilitovani zhertvi politychnykh represii u Zaporiz´kii oblasti). Statti, narysy, portrety, biohrafychni dovidki . Kniha 1 (Kyiv, 1998).
105 Pravda cherez gody. Stat´i, vospominania, dokumenty . Vyp. 2-4. Sost. BUT O.M., NIKOL ´SKYI V.M. and SABINA A.M. (Donetsk, 1998-2000).
106 Pravda cherez roki. Statti, spohady, dokumenty . Sost. KLIUIEV A.P. et al. (Donetsk, 1995). “Prikazy NKVD SSSR 1934-1941 gg. Katalog rassekrechennykh dokumentov GARFa.” Sost. ZLATKIS IA.M. in:
107 Arkhiv noveishei istorii Rossii. Seriia “Katalogi” , T. 5 (Novosibirsk, 1999).
108 “Rasstrel po raznariadke, ili Kak eto delali bol´sheviki,” Trud (04.06.1992): 1/4 [First but incomplete publication of prikaz 00447 with Politbiuro resolution “Ob anti-sovetskikh elementakh” from July 1937].
109 Rasstrel´nye spiski. Moskva 1937-1941. “Kommunarka”, Butovo. Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii . Sost. ERIMINA L.S. and ROGINSKII A.B. (Moscow, 2000).
110 Rasstrel´nye spiski. T. 1: Alma-Ata, Alma-Atinskaia oblast´ . T.2: Almaty, Almatinskaia, Zhamylskaia oblasti . T. 3: Mangistauskaia oblast´ . Sost. ALDANIIAZOVA M., ZHOVTIS A. and IALYMOV N. (Alma-Ata, 1996-1998).
111 Rasstrel´nye spiski. Vyp. 1: Donskoe kladbishche, 1934-1940 . Vyp. 2: Vagan´kovskoe kladbishche, 1926-1936 . Sost. TIKHANOVA V.A. (Moscow, 1993-1995).
112 Reabilitatsiia: Kak eto bylo. Dokumenty Prezidiuma TsK KPSS i drugie materialy . T. 1: Mart 1953-fevral´ 1956 . Sost. ARTIZOV A.N., SIGACHEV IU.V., KHLOPOV V.G. et al. (Moscow, 2000).
113 Rekviem: Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii na Orlovshchine . T.1-4. Sost. MOSIAKIN I.IA., ALESHIN A.N. and KABANOV V.V. et al. (Orel, 1994-1998).
114 Repressii 30-kh godov v Dagestane. Dokumenty i materialy. Sost. OSMANOV A.I. (Makhachkala, 1997).
115 Repressii v Arkhangel´ske 1937-1938. Dokumenty i materialy . Sost. MITIN V.A., RADISHEVSKAIA V.A., TITOVA T.V. et al. (Arkhangel´sk, 1999).
116 “Resheniia osobykh troek privodit´ v ispolnenie nemedlenno,” Istochnik, 5 (1999): 81-85.
117 ROZHENKO M. and BOHATS´KA E., Sosni Bikivnia svidchat´. Zlochyn proty liudstva . T. 1 (Kyiv, 1999).
118 SHAPOVAL IU., PRISTAIKO V., ZOLOTAR´OV V., ChK-GPU-NKVD v Ukraini: osoby, fakty, dokumenty (Kyiv, 1997). Shifrotelegramma sekretaria TsK KP(b) Turkmenistana o kontrrevoliutsionnoi deiatel´nosti afganskikh poddannykh na nashei territorii ot 23
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iiulia 1937, RGANI, f. 89, op. 48, d. 8 [This document is available on microfilm through the Chadwyck-Healey/Hoover microfilming project].
119 SHREIDER M.P., NKVD iznutri. Zapiski chekista (Moscow, 1995) [Memoir of the Militia Chief, 1937-1938, from Ivanovo, Novosibirsk and Kazakhstan].
120 Sistema ispravitel´no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR, 1923-1960. Spravochnik . Sost. SMIRNOV M.B. (Moscow, 1998).
121 Soprotivlenie v GULAGe. Vospominaniia. Pis´ma. Dokumenty. Sost. VILENSKII S.S. (Moscow, 1992).
122 Sovetskoe rukovodstvo. Perepiska 1928-1941 . Sost. KVASHONKIN A.V., KOSHELEVA L.P., ROGOVAIA L.A. et al. (Moscow, 1999).
123 Spisok rasstreliannykh v gorode Borovichi po resheniiam Osoboi Troiki, avg. 1937 -- mart 1938 g. ([Borovichi], 1995).
124 STEPANOV A.F., Rasstrel po limitu. Iz istorii politicheskikh repressii v TASSR v gody “ezhovshchiny” (Kazan´, 1999) [Rich documentation about the repression in Tatarstan 1937-1938, especially about the implementation of prikaz 00447] .
125 STETSOVSKII IU., Istoriia sovetskikh repressii . T. 1-2 (Moscow, 1997).
126 SUDOPLATOV A. P., Tainaia zhizn´ generala Sudoplatova. Pravda i vymysly o moem ottse . T. 1 (Moscow, 1998): 363-393 [ Prikaz 00485 with covering letter from Ezhov “O fashistsko- povstancheskoi, shpionskoi, diversionnoi, porazhencheskoi i terroristicheskoi deiatel ´nosti pol´skoi razvedki v SSSR”].
127 Tak eto bylo. Natsional´nye repressii v SSSR 1919-1952 gody. T. 1-3. Sost. ALIEVA S. (Moscow, 1993) [T. 1, p. 253 includes the Politbiuro resolution on continuation of the national operations of 31.01.1938].
128 Tragediia naroda. Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii Respubliki Marii El . T. 1-2. Sost. KALININ N.M., MITRAKOV A. A. and TOKTAROV N.I. (Ioshkar-Ola, 1996-1997).
129 Udmurtiia: massovye repressii 1930-1950 godov. Issledovaniia, dokumenty . Sost. MARTYNOVA R.F. and VEDERNIKOVA G.I. (Moscow, 1993).
130 VASIL´EV, V. IU., KALYTKO S.L., KRAVCHENKO P.M. et al., Politychni represii na Podilli (20-30-i rr. XX st.) (Vinnytsia, 1999).
131 Velykyi teror na Khmel´nychchyni. Istoriko-kraieznavchyi zbirnyk (svidchennia ta dokumenty) (Khmel´nits´kii, 1997).
132 Vidomosti pro hromadian, shcho zaznaly politychnykh represii (Mykolaiv, 1993). Vnutrenniaia opis´ dela “Ob antisovetskikh elementakh i sozdanii troek” 09.02.1933 -- 25.05.1943 gg., Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii (RGANI), f. 89, op. 73, d. 41 [This document is available on microfilm through the Chadwyck-Healey/Hoover microfilming project].
133 Vozvrashchenie k pravde. (Iz istorii politicheskikh repressii v Tverskom krae v 20-40-e i nachale 50-kh godov). Dokumenty i materialy. Sost. SMIRNOV V.A. and FEOKTISTOV V.A. (Tver´, 1995).
134 VYLTSAN M., “Garantiruetsia vysshaia mera,” Trud (02.08.1997): 5 [Documentation on implementation of prikaz 00447 ].
135 VYLTSAN M. and DANILOV V., “Primenenie VMN 'nami garantiruetsia'”, Nauka i zhizn´ , 9 (1997): 68-72 [Documents on the implementation of prikaz 00447 ].
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136 Za nami pridut korabli. Spisok reabilitirovannykh lits, smertnye prigovory v otnoshenii kotorykh privedeny v ispolnenie na territorii Magadanskoi oblasti ... Otv. red. ABRAMOV S.V. (Magadan, 1999).
137 Zabuttiu ne pidliahae. Narysy, spohady, opovidannia (Kherson, 1994).
138 Zabveniiu ne podlezhit. Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii Omskoi oblasti . T.1: A-B . Sost. ORLOV G.N., SBITNEVA M.A. and CHETVERIKOVA T.G. (Omsk, 2000).
139 Zabveniiu ne podlezhit. Neizvestnye stranitsy Nizhegorodskoi istorii (1918-1984 gody) . T. 2. Sost. GORDEEVA L.P., KAZAKOV V.A. and SMIRNOV V.V. (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1994).
140 Zabveniiu ne podlezhit. O repressiiakh 30-kh -- nachala 50-kh godov v Nizhegorodskoi oblasti . T. 1. Sost. GORDEEVA L.P., KAZAKOV V. A. and SMIRNOV V.V. (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1993). Zapiska Bykova (Checheno-Ingushskii obkom partii) ob organizatsii troiki v Checheno- Ingushskoi ASSR, N° 115 ot 10 iiulia 1938 g., RGANI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 147, ll. 1-8 [This document is available on microfilm through the Chadwyck-Healey/Hoover microfilming project].
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321 CHLEWNJUK O., “Partei und NKWD. Die Machtverhältnisse des 'Großen Terrors'” (Referat auf der Hamburger Arbeitstagung “Stalinistischer Terror, Massenrepressalien, Gulag” vom 21.-22. Februar 1998).
322 CHLEWNJUK O.W., Das Politbüro. Mechanismen der Macht in der Sowjetunion der dreißiger Jahre (Hamburg, 1998).
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324 CHUKHIN I., Kareliia-37: ideologiia i praktika terrora (Petrozavodsk, 1999) [Exhaustive study about the mass operations in Karelia with statistics on the implementation of prikaz 00447 and the “national operations.” On page 160 is tsirkuliar 409 ].
325 CONQUEST R., The Great Terror. A reassessment (London, 1990).
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328 FITZPATRICK Sh., “How the mice buried the cat. Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian provinces,” Russian Review , 52, 3 (1993): 299-320.
329 FOIGT L. I., Stalinsk v gody repressii. Vospominaniia. Pis´ma. Dokumenty (Novokuznetsk, 1995).
330 FREEZE G.L., “The Stalinist assault on the parish, 1929-1941,” in: HILDERMEIER, M., ed., Stalinismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Neue Wege der Forschung (Munich, 1998): 209-232.
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332 GAVRILENKO V.K., Kazn´ prokurora (Abakan, 2000).
333 GETTY J.A., Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge, 1985).
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339 HARRIS J.H., “The purging of local cliques in the Urals region, 1936-1937,” in: FITZPATRICK Sh., ed., Stalinism. New directions (London, 1999): 262-285.
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343 IL´KEVICH N., “Rasstreliany v Viaz´me: novoe o M.N. Goretskom,” Krai Smolenskii , 1-2 (1994): 129-144.
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344 IL´KEVICH N., “Delo Makedonova.” Iz istorii repressii protiv Smolenskoi pisatel´skoi organizatsii, 1937-1938 g.g. (Smolensk, 1996).
345 IUNUSOVA A.B., Islam v Bashkirii, 1917-1994 (Ufa, 1994).
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347 IVANOVA G.M., Gulag v sisteme totalitarnogo gosudarstva (Moscow, 1997).
348 IVANOVA T.S., Iz istorii politicheskikh repressii v Iakutii, konets 20-kh-30-e gg. (Novosibirsk, 1998).
349 Iz istorii spetssluzhb Buriatii. Sost. KHALANOV V.I. and BAZAROV B.V. (Ulan-Ude, 1997).
350 KANGAS R.D., “Faizulla Khodzhaev: National communism in Bukhara and Soviet Uzbekistan, 1896-1938,” Ph.D. Diss., Indiana University, 1992.
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352 KHLEVNIUK O., “Izdaniia 'Memoriala',” Svobodnaia mysl´ , 7 (1992): 123-132.
353 KHLEVNIUK O.V., “The reasons for the 'Great Terror': The foreign-political aspect,” in: PONS S. and ROMANO A., eds, Russia in the age of wars, 1914-1945 (Milan, 2000): 159-169.
354 KHLEVNJUK O., Stalin e la società sovietica negli anni del terrore (Perugia, 1997) [This book exists only in Italian].
355 KHLEVNYUK O., “The objectives of the Great Terror, 1937-1938,” in: COOPER J., PERRIE M. and REES E.A., eds, Soviet history, 1917-1953. Essays in honour of R. W. Davies (London, 1995): 158-176.
356 KIPROV I.A., “Sledstvennoe delo Smolenskoi terroristicheskoi gruppy ob´´edinennogo biuro P.S.R. 1937-1938 gg. (ugolovno-protsessual´nyi aspekt),” in: Stalinizm v rossiiskoi provintsii: Smolenskie arkhivnye dokumenty v prochtenii zarubezhnykh i rossiiskikh istorikov . Sost. KODIN E.V. (Smolensk, 1999): 264-275.
357 KIR´IANOVA E.A., “Sotsial´no-ekonomicheskie i politicheskie protsessy v derevne v 1933 -- 1937 godakh (po materialam Moskovskoi, Riazanskoi i Tul´skoi oblastei),” Diss. kand. ist. nauk, Riazan´, 1994.
358 KIRILLOV V.M. and PORSHNEVA O.S., “Istoriia repressii na Urale: Ideologiia, politika, praktika (1917-1980-gg.). Zametki s nauchnoi konferentsii [ot 10-12.11.1997],” Otechestvennaia istoriia , 4 (1998): 210-212.
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360 KIRILLOV V.M., Istoriia repressii v Nizhnetagil´skom regione Urala. 1920-e -- nachalo 50-kh gg. T. 1: Repressii 1920 -- 1930-kh gg. , t. 2: Tagillag. 1940-e -- nach. 50-kh gg. (Nizhnii Tagil, 1996) [Well-documented study].
361 KOKURIN A. and PETROV N., “Gulag: Struktura i kadry,” Svobodnaia mysl´-XXI. Teoreticheskii i politicheskii zhurnal, 8 , 9, 11, 12 (1999), 1-6 (2000).
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363 KOTKIN S., Magnetic mountain. Stalinism as a civilization (Berkeley, 1995).
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364 KROPACHEV S., Khronika kommunisticheskogo terrora. Tragicheskie fragmenty noveishei istorii Otechestva. Sobytiia. Masshtaby. Kommentarii . T. 1: 1917-1940 (Krasnodar, 1995).
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366 KUROMIYA H., Freedom and terror in the Donbas : A Ukrainian-Russian borderland, 1870s-1990s (Cambridge, 1998).
367 KUZ´MIN S., “Lagerniki (GULAG bez retushi),” Molodaia gvardiia , 4 (1993): 170-212.
368 LAHUSEN T., “Loin de Moscou. Nouveaux écrits sur l'Extrême-Orient russe de l'ère stalinienne,” Revue des Études slaves, 71, 1 (1999): 7-10.
369 LIKHOLOBOVA Z.G., Stalins´kyi totalitarnyi rezhym ta politychni represii kintsia 30-kh rokiv v Ukraini (perevazhno na materialakh Donbasu) (Donets´k, 1996).
370 Lubianka. VChK-OGPU-NKVD-MGB-MVD-KGB 1917-1960. Spravochnik. Sost. KOKURIN A.I. and PETROV N.V. (Moscow, 1997).
371 MANNING R., Bel´skii raion. 1937 god (Smolensk, 1998).
372 MANNING R., “Massovaia operatsiia protiv 'kulakov i prestupnykh elementov': apogei Velikoi Chistki na Smolenshchine,” in: Stalinizm v rossiiskoi provintsii. Smolenskie arkhivnye dokumenty v prochtenii zarubezhnykh i rossiiskikh istorikov. Sost. KODIN E.V. (Smolensk, 1999): 230-254.
373 MANNING R.T., “The Great Purges in a rural district: Belyi raion revisited,” in: GETTY J.A. and MANNING, R.T., eds, Stalinist terror. New perspectives (Cambridge, 1993): 168-197.
374 MARTIANOV V.E., “Organy NKVD Krasnodarskogo kraia nakanune i v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny 1937-1945 gg.,” Diss. kand. ist. nauk, Krasnodar, 1998.
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377 MARTIN T., “The origins of Soviet ethnic cleansing,” The Journal of Modern History , 70 (1998): 813-861.
378 McLOUGHLIN B., “'Vernichtung des Fremden': Der 'Große Terror' in der UdSSR 1937/38,” Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung (2000/2001): 50-88.
379 MIRONENKO A.N. and BEN´KO A.P., Zhertvy stalinskogo terrora predvoennogo piati-letiia na Ukraine (Kyiv- Dniprodzerzhynsk, 1994).
380 NIKOL´SKYI V., “Ukraintsi Donechchyny, repressirovani v 1937-1938 rr.: sotsiolohychnyi analiz statystyky,” Skhid , 3 (1995): 37-45.
381 NIKOL´ SKYI V., “Statystyka politychnykh represii 1937 r. v Ukrains´kyi RSR,” Z arkhiviv VUChK-GPU-NKVD-KGB , 2/4 (2000): 103-112.
382 NORTHRUP D.T., “Languages of loyalty: Gender, politics and party supervision in Uzbekistan, 1927-1941,” Russian Review , 59 (2000): 179-200.
383 NORTHRUP D.T., “Uzbek women and the veil: Gender and power in Stalinist Central Asia,” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1999.
384 OKHOTIN N. and ROGINSKII A., “Iz istorii 'nemetskoi operatsii' NKVD 1937-1938 gg.” in: Nakazannyi narod.
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385 Repressii protiv rossiiskikh nemtsev. Red.-sost. SHCHERBAKOVA I.L. (Moscow, 1999): 35-75 [ Tsirkuliar 68 “Ob inostran-tsakh” of 22.08.1937 and prikaz 00698 “O konsul´skikh sviaziakh”].
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387 PAL´VANOVA B.P., Tragicheskie 30-e (Ashkhabad, 1991).
388 PAPKOV S.A., “Lagernaia sistema i prinuditel´nyi trud v Sibiri i na Dal´nem vostoke 1929-1941 gg.,” in: Vozvrashchenie pamiati. Istoriko-publitsisticheskii al´manakh . Vyp. 3 (Novosibirsk, 1997): 37-67.
389 PAPKOV S.A., Stalinskii terror v Sibiri 1928-1941 (Novosibirsk, 1997).
390 PECHERINA V.F., “Russkie emigranty iz Kitaia i stalinskie repressii v SSSR (1920-1940-e gg.),” in: Politicheskie repressii na Dal´nem Vostoke SSSR v 1920-1950-e gody. Materialy pervoi Dal´nevostochnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii (Vladivostok, 1997): 172-188.
391 PETROV N., “Tod nach Plansoll: Der operative NKWD-Befehl Nr. 00447” (Referat auf der Hamburger Arbeitstagung “Stalinistischer Terror, Massenrepressalien, Gulag” vom 21.-22. Februar 1998).
392 PETROV N.V. and ROGINSKII A.B., “'Pol´skaia operatsiia' NKVD 1937-1938,” in: Repressii protiv poliakov i pol´skikh grazhdan. Istoricheskie sborniki “Memoriala.” Vyp. 1 (Moscow, 1997): 22-43.
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394 PETRUSHIN A.A., “My ne znaem poshchady...” Izvestnye, maloizvestnye i neizvestnye sobytiia iz istorii Tiumenskogo kraia po materialam VChK-GPU-NKVD-KGB (Tiumen´, 1999).
395 PLAGGENBORG S., “Gewalt im Stalinismus. Skizzen zu einer Tätergeschichte,” in: HILDERMEIER M., ed., Stalinismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Neue Wege der Forschung (Munich, 1998): 193-208.
396 PLATONAU R. and STASHKEVICH M., “Dzve aperatsyi suprats´ ‘vorahav naroda’,” Belaruski histarchny chasopis , 1 (1993) [Statistics on the national operations].
397 POHL D., “Stalinistische Massenverbrechen in der Ukraine 1936-1953. Ein Überblick,” Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung (1997): 325-337.
398 POHL J.O., The Stalinist penal system. A statistical history of Soviet repression and terror, 1930-1953 (Jefferson, NC, 1997).
399 POHL O., Ethnic cleansing in the USSR, 1937-1949 (Westport, CT, 1999).
400 POLESHCHIKOV V.M., Za sem´iu pechatiami: Iz arkhiva KGB [O politicheskikh presledovaniiakh deiatelei Komy kul´tury, sud´bakh politicheskikh zakliuchennykh v lageriakh Komi ASSR] (Syktyvkar, 1995).
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403 Pravda i tol´ko pravda. “Belye piatna” nashei istorii (Baku, 1991).
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404 Problemy istorii repressivnoi politiki na evropeiskom Severe Rossii 1917-1956: Vserossii-skaia nauchnaia konferentsiia 8-11 noiabria 1993 g. Otv. red. MOROZOV N.A. (Syktyvkar, 1993).
405 Problemy sozdaniia edinogo elektronnogo banka dannykh zhertv politicheskikh repressii v predelakh SSSR. Sbornik dokladov uchastnikov mezhdunarodnoi nauchno- prakticheskoi konferentsii (Nizhnii Tagil, 2000).
406 Provintsial´naia Cheka. Sbornik statei i materialov (Khar´kov, 1994).
407 RASSKAZOV L.P., “VChK-GPU-OGPU-NKVD v mekhanizme formirovaniia i funk- tsionirovaniia politicheskoi sistemy sovetskogo obshchestva (1917-1941),” Diss. dokt. iuridicheskikh nauk, SPb, 1994.
408 RAZUMOV A.IA., “Kniga pamiati 'Leningradskii martirolog. 1937-1938' kak istochnik dlia sinodika Vologodskoi eparkhii,” in: Regional´nye aspekty istoricheskogo puti pravoslaviia: arkhivy, istochniki, metodologiia issledovanii. Istoricheskoe kraevedenie i arkhivy. Vyp. 7 (Vologda, 2001): 454-460.
409 Reabilitovani istoriieiu (Kyiv-Poltava, 1992).
410 RITTERSPORN G.T., Stalinist simplifications and Soviet complications: Social tensions and political conflicts in the USSR, 1933-1953 (Chur, 1991).
411 RITTERSPORN G.T., “'Vrednye elementy', 'opasnye men´shinstva' i bol´shevistskie trevogi: massovye operatsii 1937-1938 gg. i etnicheskii vopros v SSSR,” in: V sem´e edinoi. Natsional´naia politika partii bol´shevikov i ee osushchestvlenie na Severo-Zapade Rossii v 1920-1950-e gody . Red. VIKHAVAINEN T. and TAKALA I. (Petrozavodsk, 1998): 99-122.
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NOTES
1. Prikaz 00447 is discussed in the essay by Junge and Binner in this volume. Prikaz 00485 has been brilliantly analyzed in N. V. Petrov and A. B. Roginskii, “‘Pol´skaia operatsiia’ NKVD, 1937-1938 gg.,” in Repressii protiv poliakov (Moscow, 1997): 22-43.
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