The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (68 page)

Stalin also turned his attention to the army, culling 43,000 officers and executing 3 out of 5 marshals, 15 out of 16 army commanders, 60 out of 67 corps commanders, and 136 out of 199 division commanders. In all, one-third of all officers were taken away and shot, more than the number of officers who would die in the upcoming world war.
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The purge also took out the head of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda. A former pharmacist, his specialty was quietly poisoning highly visible Soviets whom Stalin needed to disappear without a big fuss. In 1936 Stalin fired Yagoda for failing to uncover enough evidence to convict Nikolai Bukharin—and how incompetent do you have to be to
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get a conviction in a totalitarian show trial? Regardless, he and his staff were arrested and shot at the same time as Bukharin’s retrial.

Yagoda was replaced by Nikolai Yezhov, who became synonymous with the Great Purge, or as it is sometimes called in Russia, Yezhovshchina. A tiny, genial, and hardworking bureaucrat, Yezhov was probably responsible for 7 million arrests, 1 million executions, and 2 million deaths in prison camps in just a couple of years. He fell out of favor with Stalin and was replaced by Lavrenty Beria in 1938. Beria executed Yezhov in 1940 and outlived Stalin as a likely successor, but he was arrested and shot shortly after Stalin’s death.
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The Great Purge spread into all segments of society. In forests near all of the big cities, the NKVD established massive secret graveyards that would begin to yield their secrets fifty years later. In the forest of Bykivnia, near Kiev, as many as 200,000 bodies have been discovered in mass graves.
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Outside Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), 30,000 victims were buried at Rzhevsky and 25,000 at Levashevo. At Butovo, near Moscow, investigators have found the remains of 25,000 victims.
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Skeletons have even been discovered under the Moscow zoo.
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At Kurapaty, near Minsk, scores of burial pits have been found containing around 100,000 bodies. Old-timers report that between 1937 and 1941, gunfire was heard every day and every night coming from the woods. Enemies of the people were lined up along freshly dug ditches, gagged, and killed with a pistol shot to the back of the head.
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The Great Purge wasn’t all ideology and power struggles. Beria used his position as head of the NKVD to have young—often underage—girls who caught his eye kidnapped, then brought to his house for him to rape.

Great Patriotic War

By 1938, it was obvious that Germany was cranking up for a war of conquest. The First World War had shown that it took at least three great powers to keep Germany in line, but France and Britain couldn’t bring themselves to deal with Communist Russia, and the United States wasn’t interested, so Hitler did whatever he wanted while the French and British railed impotently.

Stalin took the snubbing by the West personally. When France, Britain, Germany, and Italy signed the Munich Agreement whittling down Czechoslovakia without even consulting him, he took it as a sign that the West would sell him out in a heartbeat. He had to beat them to it. The next year, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a secret agreement partitioning eastern Europe between them. A couple of weeks after Hitler invaded Poland, Stalin’s soldiers moved in and took half of the country as their payoff. Polish leaders were rounded up and stashed in the Gulag until the next spring, when 15,000 Polish military officers and 7,000 prominent civilians were taken out to local forests and shot.

In 1940, Stalin seized the three Baltic republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and the Soviets immediately arrested anyone who might give them trouble; 85,000 Balts were deported, of which 55,000 were killed or died.
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Then Stalin tried to bully the Finns into adjusting their shared border to his advantage, and when they refused, he invaded. This war showed just how badly the Soviet army had deteriorated when Stalin purged its officer class. The Finns held against the full might of Russia and even scored a successful counteroffensive. In the end, however, sheer size won the day, and the Soviets hammered the border back a few dozen miles. The whole war had cost at least 127,000 Soviet lives versus only 23,000 Finnish lives.
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Finland kept its independence but nursed a grudge that made it the only democracy in the world to join Hitler in the subsequent world war.

The German invasion of Russia on June 21, 1941, caught the Soviets entirely off guard. In battle after battle, Russian armies were annihilated. Stalin himself fell numbly into shock for the first week of the war, too shaken to even address the nation by radio until July. Eventually he regained his grip and reemerged to rally his people and issue orders allowing no retreat and no surrender. Every position had to be defended, and he routinely executed any officers suspected of wavering, complaining, or incompetence. In just a few months of war, the Soviets lost millions of soldiers, killed, wounded, or captured. Soviet factories in the path of the Germans were hurriedly dismantled and shipped east, beyond the Ural Mountains, to resume production of war materiel.

Among the prisoners of war taken in the first rush was Stalin’s son, Yakov Dzhugashvili. Hitler offered to trade him back for a German general but Stalin refused. Yakov eventually died in German custody, running into an electric fence while attempting either an unsuccessful escape or a successful suicide.

Eventually, the endless space, resources, and manpower of Russia turned the tide and crushed the Germans, but the cost was staggering. Men and women
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were thrown against German positions with little training, few weapons, and minimal planning. Some 8.7 million Soviet soldiers died stopping the Nazi invasion.

It’s hard to argue that 8.7 million deaths isn’t a monumental waste of life, but history is never simple. “One awkward fact makes it difficult to accept that the Soviet system as such squandered its manpower in war: the Tsarist armies between 1914 and 1917 averaged 7,000 casualties a day, compared with 7,950 a day between 1941 and 1945. . . . This strongly suggests that the explanation lies not in Soviet system, but in the traditions of Russian life, military life in particular.”
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Stalin pushed his people without mercy. Official records show that over the course of the war, 158,000 Soviet soldiers were sentenced to be executed for cowardice, desertion, or similar failings.
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Another 442,000 offenders were forced to serve in penal battalions, which were assigned suicidally dangerous tasks such as marching through minefields ahead of the far more valuable tanks. The most likely way out of a penal unit was death or wounds, but a few regained their freedom by acts of special heroism.
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Ultimately, it wasn’t Stalin’s leadership that drove the Soviets to fight with such tenacity. It was the knowledge that living under Hitler would be—you won’t believe this—even worse. The Germans massacred hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews, allowed millions of Soviet prisoners of war to die of neglect, shot thousands of hostages in revenge for partisan attacks, and confiscated so much food, livestock, vehicles, and farm equipment that the local peasantry starved. Some 18 million Soviet civilians died in the German invasion.

Even so, picking sides was a tough call. As the Germans penetrated into Soviet territory, they began to uncover evidence of Stalin’s cruelty. Outside Smolensk, in the Katyn forest, the Germans unearthed a mass grave containing 4,000 of the Polish officers captured in 1939. At Vinnitsa, they discovered pits with 10,000 dead Ukrainians. It might have given them a valuable propaganda point to justify their invasion of Russia, except the Nazis had spread so many lies that no one believed them anymore.

As many as 1 million Soviet nationals, including a quarter-million Cossacks, served with the German army.
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Most of these Hiwis (from Hilfswillige, “volunteers”) were released from POW camps to perform servile duties such as supply and support. Up to 50,000 Hiwis were trapped with the German Sixth Army in the Stalingrad Pocket. Records are scanty, but it’s unlikely that many survived. Any who were recaptured by the Russians were sure to be executed.

Perhaps a quarter-million Soviet nationals were recruited as Osttruppen, fully accepted combat soldiers. How did the Nazis square this with their racial bigotry? The easiest way was to not tell Hitler about it.
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Enemy soldiers captured by the Red Army were shoveled into the Gulag system as slave labor. Most of them were not released and repatriated until after Stalin died in 1953. Of the approximately 4.1 million prisoners taken by the Soviets, some 580,000 died in captivity.
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As soon as the Soviets began to retake their lost territory, Stalin turned his attention to the people who had collaborated with the conquerors. Actually, collaboration wasn’t necessary to earn his mistrust. Merely surviving the German occupation tainted millions in the eyes of Stalin. What kind of deals had they made with the fascists? What dangerous ideas had they been contaminated by? Obviously, even Stalin couldn’t kill every person polluted by contact with the enemy, but some of the smaller nationalities could be punished as an example to the rest. In 1943, the Chechens and several other Caucasus peoples were shipped en masse to Siberia, and they weren’t allowed to return until after Stalin was posthumously denounced in 1957. Approximately 231,000 of these exiles died of their hardships.
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Stalin punished any of his people who had fallen into German hands. As part of a wartime deal among the Allies, all Soviet nationals discovered in German custody—exiles, refugees, prisoners of war, and slave laborers—were repatriated, whether they wanted to be or not. The Western Allies forced tens of thousands to go back at gunpoint to almost certain death, especially those who were suspected of collaboration with the Germans, although countless innocent laborers and exiles were caught in the same net and shipped off. Perhaps 1.5 million liberated Soviet POWs—all that remained of the more than 5 million taken by the Germans—were not welcomed back to their homes; instead they were sent to the Gulag to be punished for failure and to be cleansed of dangerous ideas. They were accompanied into the camps by 2.7 million Soviet civilians who had been taken away by the Germans as slave labor. Many would not be freed until well after Stalin was gone.
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Iron Curtain

After World War II ended in 1945, Stalin was determined to control all of the buffer states between Russia and Germany to prevent another attack from the West. The war had left the Soviets occupying eastern Europe and the northern zones of China, Korea, and Iran, where they set about installing their own puppets. Stalin purged moderates from the local Communist parties, tolerated no half measures, and installed the most brutal local protégés he could find as the nominal leaders of the conquered countries.

Germany and Austria were partitioned among the winning powers, with Soviet garrisons remaining in the eastern quadrants for the rest of Stalin’s life. All across their occupation zone in East Germany, the Soviets rounded up new political prisoners—both former Nazis and likely anti-Stalinists—65,000 of whom would die in Soviet hands over the next five years. The old Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald remained open a while longer, now as a Soviet concentration camp, where 8,000 to 13,000 new political prisoners died.
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Stalin’s solution to disputed borders under Soviet control was brutally simple—draw the borders and move the people to fit them. Italians were expelled from Yugoslavia. Poles were expelled from the Soviet Union, and Turks from Bulgaria. Magyars living in Romania were deported into Hungary.

Soviet control of the occupied countries was not always a foregone conclusion. Czechoslovakia had deep democratic traditions that tried to reemerge in peacetime. In the 1946 elections, the Communists polled a minority, but they got control of the police courtesy of the occupying Soviet army. Strikes destabilized the non-Communist coalition government. Riots endangered the moderates. Many Czech politicians fled; most were forced to resign. One of the last holdouts, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, mysteriously plummeted to his death from a high window in 1948. Similar struggles accompanied Communist takeovers in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, but Communist power plays in Greece, Italy, and Finland failed, mostly because these countries were outside the Soviet occupation zone and the Red Army wasn’t on hand to tip the balance.

The full reach of Soviet influence was in flux during much of the postwar era as Stalin continued to test the limits of what he could get away with. The Soviets and British had occupied neutral Iran in 1941, deposing the pro-German shah in favor of his more cooperative son, but in 1946, when Stalin tried to organize his occupation zone into a pair of independent Communist states, the United States pressured him into returning these provinces to Iranian control. In 1949, Stalin tried to block the West’s access to its occupation zones in Berlin, but a determined Allied airlift of supplies kept West Berlin in operation long enough for Stalin to give up. The stakes in this East-West rivalry were raised when the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in 1949. The next year, Stalin approved and supplied the North Korean invasion of South Korea. It took a major commitment of Western troops and 3 million lives, but in the end, South Korea survived.