What happened to the middle ranks in Stalin’s purges?
Stalin’s Red Army
We know what happened to the top. The highest organ of the Soviet Communist Party, the Politburo, had seven members in 1924 when Lenin died. They were: Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Rykov, Tomskii, Bukharin. Some time later, only one remained alive. The other six were dead — and not by natural causes. The situation was not very different in the armed forces. The victims were three out of five Marshals, 14 out of 16 Army Commanders, eight out of eight Admirals. The top was decapitated.
What happened to those lower down the scale: the second rank, the third rank? Who died? Who survived? Was it a random process? Apparently, all you needed was a denunciation by a neighbour who thought he would thereby save himself, and you were tried, sentenced and shot. How many died altogether? According to the statistics collected for Stalin’s successors, in the period 1937-38 about 1.4 million people were arrested, and about half of them were executed.
These numbers are horrific, but they don’t tell the individual stories. A chance to learn more is given by encyclopaedias, by Soviet Encyclopaedias. I have three of them on my desk. (A) Velikaya Oktyabrsckaya Sotsialisticheskaya Revolutsiya (The Great October Socialist Revolution, 1977); (B) Grazhdanskaya Voyna i Voennaya Interventsia v SSSR (Civil War and Military Intervention in the USSR, 1983); and (C), having the same title as (A), but published in 1987. They all appeared after Khruschev’s revelations and before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
These Encyclopaedias are not much different from those published in the West. They discuss, at some length, some events and give brief biographies of the persons involved, about 100 words each. Where they are different from their Western counterparts is in the selection of those included. Obviously, none of the six purged Politburo members mentioned above can be found there. They became non-persons. So, I was wondering, who was in and who was out. As a first attempt I looked at Nikolay Ivanovich Muralov, who was tried as a Trotskyist in 1937 and was duly executed after the trial. Not surprisingly, he also became a non-person. I looked then at some others. I chose Alexander Ivanovich Muralov — presumably, Nikolay’s brother. He has an entry in Encyclopaedia C that tells us that he was “one of the leaders in the fights for Soviet power in the region of Alexine. Communist Party member since 1905. Participant in the 1905-7 revolution.” And then the article gives the illustrious positions he occupied in the various provinces of Russia, and in the Red Army from 1917 up to 1937. The only conclusion one could draw from this brief biography is that Alexander Muralov was one of the main pillars of Soviet power. Are there indications otherwise, that he might not have always been a favourite son of his country? Just one. The date of his birth and death. They are 1886 and 1937. He died at the age of 51. A bit early, but some people die earlier than others. A sudden chill in the cold Russian climate is certainly a possibility. Still, the year 1937 sounds a little ominous. Did he possibly die in the Gulag? Was he executed? No, was my first reaction. He would then be a non-person. However, I argued further, he can’t be a non-person. He is in Encyclopaedia C — in fact, in Encyclopaedia A as well.
So I became more selective. I looked only at the date of death. It turned out that 1937 and 1938 appeared indeed somewhat different. I looked then at each entry. Quite obviously, the years of the Civil War took a heavy toll. In Encyclopaedia A the number of deaths between 1917 and 1920 amounts to 23.9 per cent of 670, the total number of entries. A further 129 (an average of about 8 a year) died in the 16 years up to 1936. Presumably they died natural deaths. But then there was a sudden surge. The next four years preceding the German invasion were unusual. The death rate went up. Not less than 193, i.e. 50.6% of those who were still alive at the beginning of 1937, died between 1937 and 1940.
The picture emerging from Encyclopaedia B is not very different, although the number of entries there is much higher, 1021. Of these, 179 died in the period 1918-1920, and, on average, 13 for every year between 1921 and 1936. 39.7 percent of those still alive at the beginning of 1937 expired in the period 1937-1940. Some more detailed information is given in Table 1 based on Encyclopaedias A and B. I also looked at Encyclopaedia C in which some of the entries differ from those in Encyclopaedia A. However, the figures are very similar, so there is no point giving the statistics based on Encyclopaedia C.
What conclusions can we draw? Firstly, that a high death rate in a certain period is unlikely to be a coincidence. The large majority of those who died in the period 1937-1940 must have been victims of repression. It is a little surprising that the date of death is given but not the circumstances of the death — a little surprising but not too surprising. There must have been a decision from higher authorities that some of those in the lower ranks can be included in the Encyclopaedias with the correct date for their deaths.
Does this apply to all those who were in the second rank? Perhaps not. Ilyin-Zhenevski, who was Commissar of the Directorate of Universal Military Training in 1918, appears a number of times in a book by the editor of TheArticle, Daniel Johnson: White King and Red Queen. Apart from being an organiser of the Red Army, Ilyin-Zhenevsky was also a chess-player of note. Among other feats he defeated Capablanca, then world champion and considered unbeatable, in the 1925 Moscow chess tournament. Interestingly, all three Encyclopaedias include his name, giving his date of death as 1941 but not the circumstances. Some other sources claim that he was killed by a German bomb on Lake Ladoga in 1941. According to other sources he was a non-person for a considerable time.
Can we draw any conclusions? It looks to me that since the Encyclopaedias are not shy of giving the correct date of death, 1941 is probably correct. It seems also likely that he was a victim of the purges. The death on Lake Ladoga might have been invented by Mikhail Botvinnik, chess world champion for quite some time in the middle of the 20th century.
