Among the aspects of the Great Purges in
the Soviet Union under I.V. Stalin that have most confused scholars, the purge
of the Red Army of some of its highest-ranking and most talented officers must
surely rank among the most baffling. The vast majority of scholars agree that
the USSR was poorly prepared for the Nazi invasion in 1941, and given the siege
mentality of the Soviet leadership during the 1920s and 1930s, a conscious
choice to eliminate the most component military leaders seems insane. However,
a closer examination of the geopolitical context of Europe in the 1930s and of
the historical evidence reveals a more calculated series of events than might
first appear to have occurred. Specifically, beginning in 1932 and through the
negotiation of the Hitler-Stalin pact in the summer of 1939, Stalin's actions
as leader of the USSR, including the 1937 purge of the army, reflected temporal
concerns about the rise of Hitler, Nazi German diplomacy in the mid-1930s, and
the Spanish Civil War.
When
the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) won pluralities in the
parliamentary elections of July and November 1932, culminating in the
appointment of Hitler as chancellor at the end of January 1933, the party was victorious
in part based on its platform from 1932. This platform’s position on communism
is clear: the NSDAP sought to "Eliminate the Marxist threat."[1] Moreover, in
Mein Kampf, Hitler is brutally explicit about his intentions for the
USSR: "Impossible as it is for the Russian by himself to shake off the
yoke of the Jew by his own resources, it is equally impossible for the Jew to
maintain the mighty empire forever […] And the end of Jewish rule in Russia
will also be the end of Russia as a state."[2]
In the same chapter, Hitler, addressing the Nazi ideology of Lebensraum,
writes, "If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in
mind only Russia and her vassal border states."[3]
Even
before the November election in Germany, however, the opposition to Stalin
within the Communist Party had begun to express concern about Germany's
direction. More importantly, the expression of this concern came in the context
of a scandal believed to play a significant role in the decision to launch the
Great Purges. Specifically, on September 23, 1932, M.N. Ryutin, an Old
Bolshevik, former party member, and sympathizer of the former Right Opposition,
was arrested for leading a group calling itself the Union of Marxist-Leninists
and for authoring calls to oust Stalin from power.
Two
documents were written by Ryutin's group: a brief call to action circulated
among oppositionists and a 200-page manifesto entitled "Stalin and the
Crisis of Proletarian Dictatorship," also known as the Ryutin Platform.
While the manifesto was primarily concerned with the damage done to Soviet
agriculture by the rapid collectivization of Soviet farms, it also criticized Stalin
on matters of foreign policy. References to the economic and political
situations in many countries, including China, the United Kingdom, and Poland,
appear several times, and in three places, the contemporaneous situation in
Germany is discussed.
The
first reference regards the combined efforts of the Communist Party of Germany
(KPD) and the NSDAP to dissolve the Reichstag in 1932; Ryutin states that
Stalin's sophistry is evidenced by his having said that the KPD "comes
'close' to the Fascists,"[4]
for cooperating thus. Near the end of the Platform, Ryutin also likens the
Stalin dictatorship and its destruction of party democracy to the failure of
"German Social Democracy,"[5]
which in the fall of 1932 seemed all but certain. Finally, and most importantly,
in analyzing Stalin's negative effects on the Communist International
(Comintern), Ryutin refers to the German parliamentary elections, as well as
the presidential election of March and April 1932, in which the KPD head Ernst
Thälmann finished a distant third, behind Hitler and the re-elected President
Paul von Hindenburg. Ryutin concedes that the KPD has grown in numbers, but its
failure to win executive office, he argues, is evidence of Stalin having
brought the Comintern to crisis.[6]
In short, the failure of democracy in Germany and the imminent seizure of power
by the NSDAP were hard evidence for Stalin's failed foreign policy.
Several
scholars[7]
have noted the importance of the Ryutin Platform to the next purported major
development in the planning for the Great Purges, i.e., the assassination in
December 1934 of S.M. Kirov, head of the Leningrad wing of the Communist Party.
As the story had it, Stalin had demanded the death penalty for Ryutin, but a
group of "moderates," led by Kirov, had intervened and prevented the
penalty from being passed. Ryutin was instead sentenced to a prison term. Among
scholars believing that Stalin had engaged in long-term term planning for the
Great Purges, several have suggested that Stalin had arranged Kirov's assassination
to remove the presence of a significant moderate who would oppose severe
repression.
This
story of Kirov's opposition to the death penalty for Ryutin originated from the
"Letter of an Old Bolshevik," which originally purported to be a
missive sent from within the USSR by a dissident party member. In fact, the
author of the letter was B.I. Nicolaevsky, a Menshevik who fled the USSR for
Germany after the Civil War, thus casting doubt on the letter's veracity.
However, Nicolaevsky's subsequent claim was that he had met Right Opposition
leader N.I. Bukharin in Paris and that Bukharin had told him the information in
the letter. Since the fall of the USSR, Stalin biographer Robert Tucker has
argued convincingly that Nicolaevsky's version of events is true.[8]
The
"Letter" is also useful for the information it provides about
repression following the Ryutin Affair but before the Kirov murder,
specifically with regard to the rise of National Socialism in Germany.
Nicolaevsky writes that the rise of Hitler in Germany was initially greeted as
a "passing phase" that would last perhaps a few months.
"Gradually, however," he writes, "we began to realize that the
situation was far more serious than we had thought, that no preventive measures
against Hitler by the Western Powers could be expected, and that preparations
for a campaign against Russia were in full swing."[9] A major
turning point was reached when a scandal erupted:
A big stir was
produced by the investigations into and the disclosures regarding German
propaganda in the Ukraine, and particularly with regard to the so-called
"homosexual conspiracy." The particulars of that conspiracy, which
was discovered at the end of 1933, were as follows: An assistant of the German
military attache, a friend and follower of the notorious Captain Roehm, managed
to enter the homosexual circles in Moscow, and, under cover of a homosexual
"organization" (homosexuality was still legal in Russia at that time)
started a whole network of National-Socialist propaganda. Its threads extended
into the provinces to Leningrad, Kharkov, Kiev, etc. […] These connections were
utilized by the Germans not only to procure military information, but also to
sow disintegration in government and party circles. The aims of those directing
this conspiracy were so far-reaching that the leaders of Soviet policy were
compelled to intervene.[10]
Among
the changes made by the Soviet leadership were accession to the League of
Nations and agreement to allow the forming of popular fronts between socialist
parties in Europe and Comintern-aligned communist parties.[11]
Although
Nicolaevsky specifically names Ernst Röhm, the head of the Sturmabteilung party
militia, he remains coy regarding the identities of other people involved.
Although only guesses can be made about who was involved in these scandals, Dan
Healey of Oxford University has argued that repression of homosexuals in late
1933 and early 1934 was the direct result of the demonization of fascism as
having a homosexual core.
In Russia, the
decision to recriminalise muzhelozhestvo [sodomy] was preceded by a
period of déstabilisation in German-Soviet relations. Military co-operation,
based on the Rapallo Treaty, had abruptly ceased in June 1933. By autumn,
rumours were circulating in Moscow that Soviet homosexual circles were being
infiltrated to acquire military intelligence, by German agents under the
command of the homosexual leader of the SA, Captain Ernst Röhm. Such rumours
may have been of dubious veracity. Their flimsiness did not stop the crackdown
on male homosexuals which was the consequence of the decree of 17 December
1933.[12]
Importantly,
both Nicolaevsky, a few years after this anti-gay repression, and Healey both
cite the military impact of this alleged homosexual infiltration. As we will
see, this notion of German infiltration of the military would remain, although
the idea that the infiltration was primarily homosexual in nature seems to have
been swept aside.
If
the anti-gay repression of 1933 and 1934 was an early indication of Stalin's
concerns about the Nazis, international events only served to increase this
concern. After the abrogation of the Rapallo Treaty by Germany, as noted by
Healey, the next serious diplomatic challenge to the USSR posed by Nazi Germany
came in June 1934, with the conclusion of a German-Polish non-aggression
treaty. Because of the loss by the Soviets of the Polish-Soviet war in 1922 and
the rigid anti-communism of Polish leader Josef Pilsudski, Soviet leaders,
including Stalin, had viewed the Polish Republic as a major security threat.
James Harris of the University of Leeds, summarizing Soviet intelligence in the
1930s, notes that, in the summer of 1934, Stalin received intelligence
indicating coordinated efforts for war against the USSR by Poland, Germany, and
Japan, the last of which had invaded Manchuria in September 1931-- a point
Ryutin used in his platform as another example of Stalin's failure of
leadership in the Comintern.[13]
Worry
over Germany's pact with Poland was further compounded by intelligence reports
of rapprochement between Germany and France.[14]
This increased tension was followed the subsequent year not only by the public
announcement by Germany that it was rearming, but also by the German-British
naval treaty negotiated the following year. Hitler's seemingly systematic
diplomatic overtures to capitalist powers in Europe increased concerns of the
Soviet Union's encirclement. Harris writes, "There was little reason to
assume that Germany (or Poland, or Japan) had given up their ambitions for
territorial expansion at the expense of the Soviet Union."[15]
In
the end, however, diplomacy is only diplomacy, and Hitler had already begun to
show that he was willing to violate treaties. When an actual shooting war broke
out in Spain in the summer of 1936, the situation took on a decidedly different
tone. By the time the Spanish Civil War began in July, planning for the first
major trial of the Great Purges -- that of the "Trotskyite-Zinovievite
Terrorist Center" -- was already under way. Therefore, it is perhaps
counterintuitive to see the war in Spain as a factor expediting the undertaking
of the purges. However, this argument becomes more coherent if we consider the
Great Purges less from the perspective of an overarching plan beginning with
Stalin and extending to all levels of Society and more from that of a process
begun at the upper levels of Soviet leadership that took on a life of its own
once it began.[16]
Oleg
Khlevniuk, a senior researcher at the State Archive of the Russian Federation,
has written that the Spanish Civil War likely affected Stalin and therefore the
progression of the Great Purges in two manners: first, particularly with German
intervention, the war convinced Stalin that the Western powers would not be
able to contain Nazi Germany militarily; and second, the intrigues between the
Moscow-aligned Communist Party of Spain (PCE), led by José Díaz, and the
Trotskyist Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, led by Andreu Nin, convinced
Stalin that a reckoning with the Trotskyist movement was necessary.[17] Khlevniuk
writes, "the increase in tension in Spain and in the USSR proceeded
simultaneously and in parallel."[18]
Moreover, once the Spanish war had begun, Stalin began to undertake actions
more clearly linked to wider repression. For instance, as Khlevniuk notes, in
September, N.I. Yezhov was appointed head of the USSR's security apparatus,
replacing G.G. Yagoda. Yezhov would go on to head up the deadliest phase of the
Great Purges.
For
Stalin, however, the international situation only worsened. On November 26,
1936, Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, pledging mutual
assistance in opposing communism and taking the first step in forming the Axis.
With the threats to the USSR's east and west now unified militarily, the
repression took on greater speed and magnitude. The second major trial (of K.B.
Radek and G.L. Pyatakov, among others) was held in January 1937, and planning
began almost immediately for the third major trial, of Bukharin, A.I. Rykov,
and other so-called Rightists. Most importantly, on March 29, the purge of the
military began in earnest with the dismissal of all officers who were not party
members.
Beginning in March, several key military
leaders were arrested, primary among them Marshal M.N. Tukhachevsky, who had
originally risen to prominence in the Civil War and had served as chief of
staff. Stalin and the intelligence chiefs had been keeping a dossier on
Tukhachevsky for years, but Peter Whitewood of York St. John University
identifies as a key event Tukhachevsky's trip abroad in early 1936. Whitewood
writes,
In
December 1935, a supposed secret connection between German officers and the Red
Army high command was reported by the head of Soviet military
intelligence."[19]
While abroad, among the people with whom Tukhachevsky was said to have met were
German Reichsmarshall Herman Göring: "Göring said he had met with
Tukhachevskii [sic] when the latter stopped in Berlin on his way back
from George V’s funeral. Tukhachevskii had apparently raised the possibility of
resuming the military collaboration between Germany and the Soviet Union."[20]
It
bears mention that there is no proof of these allegations. By all accounts,
Tukhachevsky had personal disputes with some officers in the military but was
otherwise loyal. That the charges of military subversion were packaged with
allegations about Trotskyist or Rightist conspiracy only makes them less
believable. Here, two points should be made. First, Khlevniuk notes that
reports received by Stalin during the Spanish Civil War as early as December 1936
had indicated that German intelligence had infiltrated the PCE.[21] While the
"knowledge" of Tukhachevsky's liaison with Göring had been learned a
year earlier, learning that German intelligence agents were successful
infiltrating a member of the Comintern might have led Stalin to decide to purge
the military in an attempt to clear the decks of any possible traitors. The
second point is ably made by Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov in their book The
Road to Terror:
although
the threat from the opposition seems negligible to us, the elite at the time
obviously felt a continuing crisis in the wake of collectivization and with the
rise of German fascism: a "new situation" in which economic and
social stability was still a hope and in which the final success of the Stalinist
line was by no means assured."[22]
Presumably,
with Tukhachevsky and other "pro-German" military men neutralized,
Stalin believed the threat had been contained. Yezhov was purged and replaced
with L.P. Beria and the repression slowed. The resolution of the Munich Crisis
and Neville Chamberlain's declaration of "peace in our time" might
have temporarily assuaged Soviet fears of German aggression, but Hitler's
occupation of Prague in March 1939 would have reversed any optimism. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, only a month later, the first feelers for a Soviet-Nazi
non-aggression were put out. That these negotiations were conducted and
concluded while the USSR was fighting an extended border skirmish with Japan,
Germany's Axis ally, likely added to what proved to be a false sense of
security. Two days after Japan agreed to a ceasefire, the USSR occupied eastern
Poland.
In
conclusion, the National Socialist seizure of power in Germany, that country’s
rearmament and diplomatic overtures in the mid-1930s, and its intervention in
the Spanish Civil War were all key factors that motivated and accelerated the
Great Purges in the Soviet Union. While numerous other factors undoubtedly
played essential roles, the move by Stalin against the Red Army in early 1937
seems closely related to security threats related to Germany and its ally
Japan. The culmination of Soviet strategic thinking on Germany was the
Hitler-Stalin Pact, and while the calculations that resulted in the purge of
Tukhachevksy and his colleagues might now be more easily understood, the
reasons for Stalin’s trust in assurances from Hitler evoke an entirely
different series of questions. Those questions, however, lie outside the scope
of this study.
[1] “Party
Platforms,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed March 1, 2016, https://www.ushmm.org/educators/lesson-plans/why-did-germans-vote-for-the-nazi-party/resources/party-platforms
[2] Adolf Hitler, Mein
Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 655.
[3] Ibid, 654.
[4] Sobhanlal Datta
Gupta, ed., The Ryutin Platform: Stalin and the Crisis of Proletarian
Dictatorship, trans. Pranab Ghosh and Susmita Bhattacharya (Kolkata, India:
Seribaan Books, 2010), 13.
[5] Ibid, 133.
[6] Ibid, 91-92.
[7] This point of
view typifies the more conventional interpretation of the Great Purges, as seen
in Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford
UP, 2007).
[8] Robert C.
Tucker, “On the ‘Letter of an Old Bolshevik’ as an Historical Document,” Slavic
Review 51, no. 4 (1992): 782-85.
[9] Y.Z. [B.I.
Nicolaevsky], Letter of an Old Bolshevik: The Key to the Moscow Trials
(New York: Rand School Press, 1937), 15.
[10] Ibid, 16.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Daniel Healey,
“The Russian Revolution and the Decriminalisation of Homosexuality,” Revolutionary
Russia 6, no. 1 (1993): 43.
[13] James Harris,
“Encircled by Enemies: Stalin’s Perceptions of the Capitalist World,
1918-1941,” Journal of Strategic Studies 30, no. 3 (2007): 537-38; Gupta,
ibid, 90.
[14] Harris, ibid,
538.
[15] Ibid, 541.
[16] This is the key
“revisionist” argument about the Great Purges, strongly presented in J. Arch
Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction
of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 2010).
[17] Oleg Khlevniuk,
“The Reasons for the ‘Great Terror’: the Foreign-Political Aspect,” in Silvio
Pons and Andrea Romano, eds., Russia in the Age of Wars, 1914-1945
(Milan, Italy: Feltrinelli, 2000), 163.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Peter
Whitewood, The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Military
(Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 188-89.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Khlevniuk,
ibid, 164.
[22] Getty and
Naumov, ibid, 141.
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