In Stalin's Prisons-Reminiscences. II

Abstract

M EANWHILE the wave of purges and processings throughout the country was culninating in a wave of mass arrests which affected all circles of the population, but primarily the top leadership of the party, the army, the administrative and economic bureaucracy, the higher educational and scientific institutions. The mass arrests began in 1936, but only in midsummer 1937 did they reach their climax. What distinguished these arrests from similar actions in the past was precisely the fact that this time they involved the staunchest Bolsheviks, the leaders, the grandees of the party, occupying the most responsible posts within the political and economic apparatus. And the principal charge brought against them, as far as could be gathered, was espionage in favor of one of the capitalist What was the reason for this? Stalin, not long before, in a speech calling for class vigilance, had asserted that the capitalists were sending thousands of agents and into the Soviet Union, and that a single spy was able to cause greater harm than a whole enemy army corps. This was enough to send the Soviet authorities off on a hunt for foreign spies; and the NKVD could think of no better pretext for reprisals than a charge of espionage. And so it came to pass that millions of Soviet citizens of various social position, nationality, age, and sex-party members and non-Communists, army men and civilians, educated and uneducated-were exposed as hired or voluntary agents of foreign powers. Not one but many army corps could have been formed from these spies who