Jan Raczynski
(Русскоязычная версия статьи ниже)
Although the Great Terror is usually associated with the activities of the ‘NKVD troika’, its prelude was the so-called ‘death lists’. The main difference between the two killing mechanisms was the way in which they were controlled by the highest party organs. On the ‘death lists’, every name was verified, whereas in the case of the activities of the ‘NKVD troikas’, only the number of convicts was checked to ensure that it corresponded to the limits set.
The criminals are accusing
Almost 70 years ago, on February 25, 1956, in Khrushchev’s report to the XX Congress of the Communist Party it was said that “A vicious practice had developed when the NKVD compiled lists of persons whose cases were to be considered by the Military Collegium, and they were determined in advance the measure of punishment. These lists were sent by Yezhov to Stalin personally to authorize the proposed punishments. In 1937-1938, 383 such lists were sent to Stalin for many thousands of Party, Soviet, Komsomol, military and economic workers and his sanction was obtained.“
Behind Khrushchev, who is delivering a speech, sit people who not only knew about these lists, but signed them along with Stalin – Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov and Mikoyan. But this was not mentioned in the report.
The report was closed and was not published in the Soviet Union until perestroika. The text of the report was read out at party meetings in the USSR and the countries of the so-called People’s Democracy. Specially for this purpose brochures were issued, you can see their covers: the Soviet edition has a “strictly secret” stamp and the instruction “To be returned within three months”.
The lists themselves were not mentioned in the Soviet press; only twice were they mentioned in the course of the subsequent intra-party struggle. For example, Suslov, criticizing Molotov in 1964 at a plenum of the CPSU Central Committee, recalled that “in one of the documents authorizing a long term imprisonment …, Molotov wrote opposite one name on the list: “VMN, that is, capital punishment.”
After Khrushchev was removed, the lists were no longer remembered at all. Naturally, they were inaccessible to researchers. It was only in December 1988 that the lists kept in the Presidential Archive (former archive of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) were declassified and it became possible to start studying them. The lists, compiled into 11 volumes, were handed over to Khrushchev by Kruglov, the Minister of Internal Affairs on February 3, 1954. On the covers of the volumes with the lists kept in the party archives was written briefly – “Right-Trotskyist Bloc”. In 2002, Memorial, in cooperation with the presidential archive, published the lists on CD-ROM and then posted them on the Internet – stalin.memo.ru . Names from the lists have become known, but many documents necessary for researchers related to the preparation of these lists and the mechanisms of execution remain unavailable to this day. Nevertheless, much has been learned. Before getting directly to the topic – a few introductory remarks.
A sentence before the trial
Soviet power began with terror and was accompanied by terror for almost 70 years, until perestroika. The intensity of terror and its forms changed, the bloody terror of Lenin’s and Stalin’s time was replaced by conditionally milder ones – camps, psychiatric repressions, forced emigration, but the essence remained the same – the suppression of any dissent, any attempts at self-organization of society.
In the Leninist-Stalinist era, there were two parts to terror – the judicial part, at least partly limited by law and procedure, and the extrajudicial part, limited in fact only by the decisions of party organs. The old judicial system was abolished a month after the October coup, at the same time all previous laws that “contradict the revolutionary legal consciousness” were abolished. Revolutionary tribunals were established, unbound by any restrictions except one: they could not impose punishment lighter than that imposed by the decrees of the new government.
Gradually established so-called people’s courts were formed by the Soviets of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies. The organization of the courts, their activities and personnel were entirely under the control of the Communist Party. Control was not limited to determining the main areas of repression. In many cases, it was the central party organs that decided the fate of specific people.
Among the early examples of this kind are the Politburo’s discussion of the 1922 trials of the clergymen and the trials of the SRs in the same year. With Lenin’s active participation, the punishments for the defendants in these first show trials were determined – before the trial began, the outcome was already a foregone conclusion. This practice of dealing with individual specific cases continued later, even after Stalin’s death.
But party control was not limited to reviewing individual cases at Politburo meetings. Here on the screen is the decision of the Politburo, adopted in 1924, that all cases of social and political nature, in which the death penalty could be imposed, should be considered in the Central Committee of the Party before being submitted to the court. In the same year, the so-called Politburo Commission on Judicial Affairs was established, which actually prejudged court verdicts related to the death penalty decision. The commission’s decisions were necessarily approved at Politburo meetings, but they were rarely amended. From the early 1930s, the Commission began to approve sentences that had already been handed down, occasionally replacing execution by shooting with imprisonment in camps.
Sometimes, by a special decision of the Politburo, the right to approve sentences was given to “lower instances”. For example, from October 3, 1939 to January 17, 1940 such right was granted to the Military Councils of the fronts on the territory of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. The commission formally ceased to exist in 1947 when the death penalty was abolished for 3 years. However, after the reinstatement of the death penalty, a similar commission was created under the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and its decisions were also approved by the Politburo. However, both the tribunals and the courts, though controlled by the party, were still bound to publicity and some kind of procedure.
Killing without a trial
And the dictatorship of the proletariat needed informal, extrajudicial bodies to fight its enemies – and on December 20, 1917, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage was established. The day of the creation of this criminal organization is celebrated in Russia as Security Agency Worker’s Day of the Russian Federation.
Formally, the death penalty was abolished until June 1918, but from February 21, the VChK was given the right to shoot on the spot not only hooligans and thugs, but also, for example, counter-revolutionary agitators. Mass murders of hostages during the Red Terror (since September 5, 1918) were also executed by the VChK bodies.
In 1922 the VChK was abolished, and its powers were transferred to the GPU – State Political Department, which a year later, after the formation of the Soviet Union, was transformed into the United State Political Department under the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR. In 1924, a Special Conference under the OGPU was established. The Collegium of the OGPU was given the right to sentence, among other things, to execution by firing squad, while the Special Council was given the right to exile or imprisonment in a camp for up to three years.
The point of creating the VChK, the OGPU, the Special council and other extrajudicial bodies was not so much in the severity of punishment as in the way decisions were made. All sentences were handed down by these bodies in absentia, with no provision for defense participation or appeal to any other instances. This is why the state security agencies in the vast majority of cases preferred not to bring cases to court – sometimes for operational reasons, but more often simply because of the extreme weakness of the evidence, or even its complete absence.
In 1934, the OGPU was renamed the Main Directorate of State Security and incorporated into the NKVD – People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR. At the same time, it was stated that “the upcoming transfer to the judicial authorities of cases that were previously dealt with in extrajudicial proceedings”. Apparently, due to the termination of the activities of the OGPU Collegium and other extrajudicial bodies that had the right to sentence to execution, the number of death sentences in 1935-1936 was unprecedentedly low – “only” about 1200 per year. Here are the statistics of arrests in political cases, here is the diagram of completed cases and here are the statistics of executions by shooting on political charges – actually, from the last diagram it becomes clear why 1937 and 1938 were called the Great Terror. Here’s a chart of the ratio of in-court to out-of-court convictions. The vast majority of the victims of the Great Terror were shot by the NKVD troikas and the Yezhov and Vyshinsky Commission, but the Great Terror began with a different mechanism.
Killing according to the list
In 1934, the Chekists lost the ability to carry out executions without trial or investigation, which created an unusual inconvenience for them. The conditions for a new mechanism, almost as reliable as the extrajudicial bodies, were created by the Resolution of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR of December 1, 1934, issued immediately after Kirov’s assassination. Naturally, this resolution was also preliminarily approved by a decision of the Politburo. This decree provided for a ten-day investigation, trial without defense counsel or witnesses, no right of appeal, and immediate execution. For some time this law was used only sporadically and in relation to a small number of persons. The situation began to change in 1936, when, for the first time (as far as we know), a list of names was used as a basis for conviction. The initiators were then People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Yagoda and USSR Prosecutor Vyshinsky. On May 20, 1936, a resolution of the Politburo ordered: “583 persons Trotskyists in exile… as well as 23 persons in regime points, to be seized and by decision of the Special Conference of the NKVD to be imprisoned in remote concentration camps for a period of 3 to 5 years.” The indication of the exact number to be imprisoned in camps undoubtedly means that a list of these persons was also submitted to the Politburo. In fact, this was already a conviction by list – but unlike the convictions we will discuss later, it was carried out through a special meeting, and the penalties were much milder.
But the same ruling stated in the third paragraph: “All Trotskyists arrested by the NKVD and found guilty by the investigation of involvement in terrorism shall be brought before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court and, in accordance with the law of December 1, 1934, shall be sentenced to death by firing squad. To oblige the NKVD and the Prosecutor’s Office of the Union, at the end of the investigation, to submit a list of persons to be tried under the law of 1.XII.34.“ All elements of future list convictions were already in place here – the application of the law of December 1, 1934, the use of the Military Collegium as the sentencing body, and the submission to the Politburo of lists of persons to be brought to trial. In pursuance of this resolution of the Politburo, on June 19, 1936, Yagoda and Vyshinsky submitted a list of 82 names. No formal decision of the Politburo on this list has been found, but in the early days of October 1936, immediately after the removal of Yagoda and the appointment of Yezhov as Commissar of Internal Affairs, 72 people on the list were shot. Already on October 4, 1936, the Politburo adopted a resolution on new executions: “To agree with the proposal of comrades Yezhov and Vyshinsky on measures of judicial reprisals against active participants of the Trotskyist-Zinoviev counter-revolutionary terrorist organization on the first list in the number of 585 persons”.
Of this first list, only two fragments have been found to date. In the first of them – 114 people, convicted by the visiting session of the All-Union Supreme Court of Justice on October 10-11, 1936 in Leningrad, in the second – 33 people, of whom 29 were sentenced to execution on October 7, 1936 in Moscow, three more were shot later. This is, if I may say so, a test of the pen – there is not yet the design we see on later lists. List convictions became a system at the beginning of 1937.
A list of criminals
On February 4, 1937, Yezhov sent a note to Stalin, coordinated with Union Prosecutor Vyshinsky and Chairman of the Military Collegium Ulrich. Attached to the memo was a draft resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (b) “on the procedure for the judicial review of cases against members of treasonous, sabotage, espionage, and terrorist Trotskyist groups.” All members of Trotskyist groups should be tried under the Law of December 1, 1934, and comrades Yezhov, Vyshinsky and Ulrich were asked to “consider the lists of Trotskyists to be tried by the visiting sessions of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and to outline preliminary measures of punishment. To submit its conclusion on punitive measures to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (b) for approval”. The motion was passed.
From February 1937, lists with intended punishments began to arrive regularly for Stalin’s approval. It was Stalin, because the Politburo no longer made decisions regarding the lists. Stalin and several of his close associates reviewed and approved the lists with predetermined punishments and made changes. Their resolutions “in favor” and signatures on the lists themselves replaced the official decision. A total of 383 lists with resolutions and signatures have been preserved for the period 1936-1938. V.M. Molotov was in the lead in terms of frequency of signatures. – he signed 372 lists. Stalin’s handwritten resolutions “for” and signatures have been preserved on 357 lists, L.M. Kaganovich signed 188, K.E. Voroshilov – 185, A.A. Zhdanov – 176, A.I. Mikoyan – 8, and later shot S.V. Kosior – 5 lists. Eight lists bear Yezhov’s signature (apparently, here he acted not as People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, but as Secretary of the Central Committee).
Even before the start of mass operations (before August 1, 1937), Stalin and his closest associates in the Politburo had already managed to approve lists for 4500 people (3700 of them to be shot).
It is worth mentioning here that only recently it was possible to identify several more lists, definitely approved and executed, which were not included in the 11 volumes given to Khrushchev – because their covers lacked the signatures of Politburo members. A few words about how the lists were prepared, who was included in them, and what the procedure was for hearing cases.
Fictional accusations, real death
There are many hypotheses regarding the selection of cases for the Military Collegium. In the first lists, a notable part was made up of the names of prominent oppositionists who had long been imprisoned or exiled, as well as those who had recently been released. In all lists there are many leading party workers, People’s Commissars and their deputies, directors of major enterprises, prominent military officers. Many of them were arrested on Stalin’s direct orders. However, there are also a lot of quite ordinary Soviet citizens on the lists. The main basis for inclusion in the lists (for transferring cases to the Military Collegium) was that the accused belonged to fictitious anti-Soviet organizations (military, nationalist, Trotskyist) and conspiracies. The basis for such accusations could be military service in the Tsarist army or with the Whites, place of birth or having relatives abroad, and even Esperanto lessons.Without going into a detailed analysis of the biographies – especially since not all the information has been found yet – I would like to note that among the persons on Stalin’s lists there were at least 750 Poles, which is a lot, given that Poles accounted for 0.4% of the population of the USSR. Another 650 people are Polish natives of other nationalities. There are 47 natives of Bialystok and Bialystok district among the persons on Stalin’s lists.
The victims are gone- they are shot
The lists were prepared in the NKVD of the USSR in Moscow, both on materials from the central NKVD apparatus and on materials sent from the regional NKVD-UNKVD. Cases for the Military Collegium were prepared more thoroughly in the NKVD than for extrajudicial bodies (troikas, the Commission of the NKVD and the USSR Prosecutor, the Special Meeting). Carefulness, of course, concerned not the content of the charges (as absurd as in the case of out-of-court hearing), but the formal side of the case – the presence in the cases of witness statements and protocols of confrontations, documents on the extension of the investigation period, and so on. But the formal side was not always handled on the ground either. Here, for example, the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of Karelia S.T. Matusenko complains in his letter that in November 1937, the cases we presented were included in the list, but in December, during a visiting session of the Military Collegium, these cases were removed from consideration due to the lack of face-to-face confrontations and the defendants’ refusal to testify. What worries the commissar is not that the defendants have recanted their testimony; he hopes to fix that. He knows how to extract confessions. But it won’t be possible to hold a face-to-face confrontation because all the witnesses have already been shot.
Semenov.m7. he obelisk in the place of the rememberance of the victims of Great Terror in Karella. Photo:
Semenov.m7. Wikimedia Commons, licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 T
Central to the preparation of the lists was a commission, formally consisting of People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Yezhov, USSR Prosecutor A.Ya. Vyshinsky and Chairman of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court V.V. Ulrich. In the NKVD it was called the “grand commission”. In reality, instead of Yezhov, one of his deputies – most often Frinovsky, in whose office the commission met, and instead of Vyshinsky, as a rule, his deputy G.K. Roginsky participated in the work.
The “grand commission” had to be presented with both the cases themselves and brief reports on those arrested. However, for distant regions, the procedure was sometimes changed and it was permitted to limit the dispatch to Moscow to telegraph references only. However, it had no practical significance – even if the cases were sent to Moscow, it is absolutely impossible to assume that this Commission actually reviewed the investigative cases. Of course, there may have been isolated exceptions, but those were the exceptions. In reality, the Commission reviewed reports that were printed on horizontal sheets and bound into albums. This is where the expression “consideration in landscape order” came from. This is how all national operations, including the Polish one, were subsequently dealt with. It was the “grand commission” that determined the content of the lists, which were then sent to Stalin for approval.
The machine of death
What did the lists themselves look like?
The first sheet usually had a header: “List of Persons Subject to Trial by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR”; above the title were the names of the regions (sometimes structures) that submitted the lists; on the second page was a note on the number of people on the list, broken down by territorial affiliation and categories. The first category of conviction meant firing squad, the second – imprisonment in a camp for 10 years, the third – almost never used – 8 years of imprisonment.
The lists themselves contained only the surname, first name, and patronymic; the only exceptions were foreign nationals, for whom a separate sheet of information was attached.
Sometimes the lists were accompanied by notes from Yezhov – here is one example. Usually Stalin was the first to put his signature, and the others signed after him. But there were exceptions, when Stalin’s signature was not present, and the first signature was Molotov’s or even Zhdanov’s. The markings on the lists are not too numerous. They could both toughen and soften the punishment, more often soften, simply because most were proposed to be shot anyway. Here is Stalin’s mark next to the name of Abel Enukidze, his longtime friend: “Wait for now”-but that was exactly the “for now.” Here’s Vera Kostsheva on the list – and Stalin commuted her sentence from execution to 10 years in prison.
The approved lists were transmitted from the NKVD to the Military Collegium. Regional NKVD-UNKVDs were sent copies of the approved lists, and the results were reported to distant regions by telegraph.
This is precisely the order given by Frinovsky to the heads of the NKVD in Khabarovsk and Irkutsk on August 7, 1937: “After the lists have been approved, we telegraph to you the names of the accused, indicating to which category he is placed. Upon receipt of the approved lists, you refer the cases to the Military Collegium, which reviews them based on the approved category.”
We see that the Military Collegium plays a completely subordinate role here, starting work only after the approval of the lists and guided by Stalin’s instructions. Another example is Frinovsky’s telegram to Yezhov in August 1938: “In view of the remoteness, overcrowding of prisons, and the need to use the stay of the Military Collegium’s visiting session to consider the maximum number of cases, I request authorization for the preliminary consideration of completed cases to be transferred to the Military Collegium, the head of the UNKVD for the Far Eastern District, comrade GORBACH and the prosecutor of the visiting session of the Military Collegium, comrade LIPOV, who will determine the categories, transferring their cases for execution to the chairman of the session, comrade CANDYBIN”. Yezhov redirected the question to Stalin, who authorized it.
A sentence in 10 minutes
Unlike extrajudicial bodies, which decided everything in absentia, the Military Collegium passed sentences in the presence of the accused. The defendant at least saw his judges and had something to say in his defense. In extremely rare cases, this had an effect and the case was sent for further investigation. But at least the statement of the accused could have been recorded in the minutes of the hearing. However, the sessions themselves usually lasted 10-20 minutes – during this time they allegedly had time to “explain to the defendant his rights, read the indictment, explain the essence of the charge, find out the defendant’s attitude to the “committed crimes”, listen to his testimony and last word, go to the deliberation room, write the verdict there and, returning to the courtroom, announce it …”.
The judicial procedure of conviction according to the lists, simplified to the extreme, was only a formalityand the sentence was passed in accordance with the previously approved category (changes were extremely rare and additionally agreed upon with Moscow). The cases were tried in the manner of the Act dated 01.12.1934, without defense or right of appeal.
The Judicial Affairs Commission did not consider these sentences because they had been approved in advance by the Politburo. In essence, it resembled the military field trials of 1906-1907 – with the difference that in 1937 there was no revolution at all, and at least 10 times as many people were shot under the sentences of the Military Collegium.
An even more “simplified” procedure of conviction was applied to a significant part of former NKVD officers. The lists on them, as a rule, were submitted for Stalin’s signature separately and, unlike the others, were either entitled simply “List” or “List of Persons”, without indicating that the persons named therein were subject to trial by the Military Collegium, and even their belonging to the NKVD was not always specified. (Here in the list is the name of Pakalna – Lenin’s chief of security and, concurrently, the staff executioner in the Cheka-OGPU). In total, there are 540 people on such lists. After the approval of such lists, the cases were no longer considered by the Military Collegium – these people were simply shot. Ulrich usually handwrote the execution orders in such cases, and, although the order referred to the verdict of the Military Collegium, the date of the verdict – unlike in the case of actual sentences – was not specified.
Since it was physically impossible for the visiting sessions of the Military Collegium to work simultaneously in many regions or to visit the same region often enough, the issuance (in fact, the execution) of sentences on the already approved lists was often delayed, sometimes for many months.
But there have also been opposite situations – when the visiting session has already arrived in the region, but the list has not yet been approved in Moscow. In a number of such cases, sentences on lists awaiting Stalin’s authorization were handed down “in advance.” At the same time, orders for execution were drawn up and signed by the chairman of the visiting session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court, but with a mandatory reservation: “The sentences against the above convicts can only be carried out upon receipt of a special order signed by chairman of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court V.V. Ulrich “. This is precisely how, for example, on August 10–13, 1938, sentences were handed down according to the Stalingrad list, which was approved by Stalin, Molotov, and Zhdanov only on September 12. The sentences were carried out on September 16 – on the basis of Ulrich’s telegram of 15.09.1938. Such examples are not isolated; they convincingly confirm the decisive role of the party leadership in state terror.
The history of list convictions in Georgia stands apart. Because the visiting sessions could not come often enough to ensure that the huge number of cases would be considered, Beria, then head of the Communist Party of Georgia, secured permission to refer these cases to the Troika under the NKVD. Of the 3,600 people included in the lists for Georgia, three quarters were convicted by a troika.
Executions without accusations
Another special story is related to the Far East. Due to the remoteness of the region, when the visiting session reached Khabarovsk in April 1938, it was granted the right to review 750 cases of members of the right-Trotskyist organization without prior approval from Moscow (in addition to the 1,500 already on the lists).
But apart from that, by April 17 it turned out that the field session had no time to get to Sakhalin, Kamchatka and Nikolaevsk-on-Amur. And then, on April 22, 1938, an order was sent from Moscow by Frinovsky, Ulrich and Vyshinsky, in execution of which 168 people were sentenced in absentia to be shot. It later emerged that in Kamchatka, “in all cases involving 40 people, there were no indictments, which, according to the Kamchatka NKVD, had not been drawn up at all and were not available at the time the sentences were carried out.”
The chairman of the Military Collegium, Vasily Ulrich, regularly reported to Yezhov on the results achieved, addressing him as secretary of the Central Committee, not as the Minister of Internal Affairs The starting point for these reports was October 1, 1936, the day Yezhov took office as People’s Commissar and the executions based on the lists began. During the 2 years from October 1, 1936 to September 30, 1938, the military collegium sentenced 30514 people to execution by shooting and 5643 to imprisonment – an average of one and a half thousand per month. During October and half of November, while the list convictions continued, the numbers went up further.
We estimate the total number of people on the 1937-1938 lists to be 43,630. It should be borne in mind, however, that in reality the Military Collegium did not manage to consider all cases.
10 days short…
The sentencing of those on the lists ended simultaneously with the mass operations on November 15, 1938. Those whom the Military Collegium did not have time to convict were relatively lucky – their cases were transferred to other bodies and some of those scheduled for execution were even released. Others were not so lucky – for example, the father of the famous writer Chingiz Aitmatov. He was on the list for Kyrgyzstan, which was approved in April 1938. The Military Collegium only reached Kyrgyzstan on November 5, ten days before the end of the mass operations. If it had been 10 days later, there would have been a chance of rescue.
As it became clear from materials discovered last year, the NKVD had no intention of ending the list-based convictions. The minutes of the Grand Commission meetings in October 1938, at which lists of another 1,800 people were considered, have been preserved. These lists simply did not have time to be submitted to Stalin for approval. The father of Arseny Borisovich Roginsky, the longtime leader of the Memorial, was among those included in these lists in category 1, i.e., for execution.
There are several known cases of convictions based on lists after September 1938, but their scale was significantly smaller, and some of them were approved by a formal decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (VKP(b)).
On February 16, 1939, the Politburo decided to refer the cases of 469 people to the Military Collegium for consideration, of whom the majority (413) were shot; on April 8, 1939, a list of 931 people was approved (of whom 198 were to be shot); on January 17, 1940, a list of 457 people was approved (346 of whom were to be shot). Here is the first page of the 1940 list – among other names here is the writer Isaac Babel.
The next two lists, prepared by the NKVD and submitted to Stalin in September 1940 (537 people) and April 1941 (513 people), were not approved.
Killed twice
Two lists were approved by Stalin during the war years. On September 6, 1941, he signed GKO Decision No. 634ss, authorizing the execution of 170 prisoners in the Oryol prison. This decision was immediately enforced by the Military Collegium, which passed sentence in absentia and without any examination of the cases. Among those shot were many well-known figures, including the famous Socialist Revolutionary Maria Spiridonova. The same list includes Olga Kameneva, wife of Lev Kamenev and sister of Trotsky. She had already been included in the lists of those to be shot, but Stalin commuted her sentence to 25 years in prison.
On January 29, 1942, Beria sent Stalin a list of 46 “arrested persons registered with the NKVD of the USSR.” This time the issue was resolved less formally. No ordinances were passed, only a resolution was imposed: “Shoot all those named in the note. I. Stalin.” This list includes many generals – commanders of military district air forces, the former People’s Commissar for Armaments, and others.
From May 1947 to January 1950, the death penalty was abolished in the USSR. On April 11, 1950, a list of 35 people to be shot was approved, followed by another list on July 22, 1950 (47 people to be executed) and October 24, 1950 (38 people, including 19 to be executed). The last list known to us was submitted to Stalin on July 7, 1951 (53 people, including 47 for the death penalty), but it was not approved.
With Stalin’s death, list convictions became a thing of the past. To summarize the story. Although the Great Terror is usually associated with the activities of extrajudicial bodies, it was preceded and accompanied by mass denunciations. The main difference between these two mechanisms was the way in which they were controlled by the higher party organs. Conviction by lists was controlled by name, the activity of NKVD troikas was controlled only by the number of convicts – by the allocated limits. The least control was over national operations – only the directions of repression were determined there. Here is a summary of what is known today about Stalin’s lists. Their study continues, but unfortunately, it must be reiterated that a great many documents remain classified.
Jan Raczynski is the president of the International “Memorial” – a Russian association for the defence of human rights and investigating Stalinist crimes, which has been banned by the Russian state. His grandfather Zygmunt Raczynski was a Polish exile to Siberia (he was sent to hard labour in Siberia in 1905 and later exiled to Barguzin). In 2022 ‘Memorial’ received the Nobel Peace Prize, together with the Belarusian oppositionist Ales Bialiatski and the Ukrainian Centre for Civil Liberties.
This article is a transcript of a lecture by Jan Raczynski, presented at the Sybir Memorial Museum on 14 May 2024.
Published with the permission of the Author.
The article translated from Russian by Wieńczysław Czułowski
A Russian-language version of the article/Русскоязычная версия статьи: