During Stalin’s “Great Terror”, millions of people died. Most were blameless-they just happened to be put on a list of political enemies…and after a kangaroo trial, these people were either shipped to Siberia or “liquidated” (murdered).
Suppose you were a fairly high level government or military guy-was there any way you could avoid becoming a victim?
I have read that people were so scared, that after the liquidation of somebody they knew, they would go through their photo albums and recors, and burn any photos, letters, etc., that showed any association with the deceased.
Was there any way you could declare/prove your loyalty, so that you wouldn’t get a bullet in the head? Or was there no safety for anybody?
Stalin must have ahd a cadre of underlings that he trusted-or else he wouldn’t be able to run his purge. Take a guy like Kruschev-he survived the 1930’s handily-and actuaqlly got promoted-ho0w did he do it?
He did have a cadre of underlings which carried out his purge. Then he purged them and blamed them for his excesses.
I’m surprised there wasn’t a fair amount of defection back then. The defectors could provide useful information to Western countries scared of the USSR. Perhaps there was and I’m just ignorant of it?
But hey, big purge= fast promotions.
Do unto others before they can do unto you?
…I may not have thought this through very well.
Tell him how sexy his mustache looked?
first of all, a key point - people are not “put on the list” just magically. You see, people put people on the list. Similarly, guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
Well, so the appropriate behavior would depend on who you were and what you did. E.g. if you worked for the secret police, then it’s essentially no hope for you. It wasn’t even necessary to have any big “purge”, over there getting a co-worker convicted and killed was standard organizational politics. You couldn’t accuse them of sexual harassment and racism, but you could accuse them of subversion and trotskyism… And of course these people were much more immoral and willing to kill than national average.
For the military officers the key was not to “confess” under torture. Officers who confessed to being spies, traitors and similar would get shot, while those who withstood torture and kept quiet were kept in prison and then released to fight in the war. Many of them subsequently died in battle 
For officials in government and corporate bureaucracies there would probably be separate rules by various categories. Probably the single most important general rule would be not to make enemies of the sort of people who are immoral enough to denounce you. Because, as noted above, you don’t just magically get on that list, somebody has to put you there.
For relatively low key people it was also a good idea to move out of town during a local purge. If you found out that there is big likelihood of getting arrested, it was a good idea to pack up and move far, far away. In the pre-computer era the secret police usually wouldn’t bother hunting you down. Of course, moving can be a hard thing (you had to find a place to live and a job etc) but then when there is a will there is a way. Plus, back the jobs were fairly plentiful in urban areas.
For high level people, like a real underling of Stalin or another bigshot, once you were on the list it was all over. Some managed to defect abroad, but very few. Some committed suicide before arrest.
Sorry for the double post.
One thing I remember from The fog of war was McNamara saying that in WWII, the casualty rate for bombers was about 4% per sortie. A tour was 25 sorties. I may have calculated it wrong, but I reckon that gave a bomber airman a 36% chance of surviving a tour. That was in a free world military with people used to not being treated as expendable.
Even when facing great odds of dying, people can fall to the It-can’t-happen-to-me syndrome. A lot of people must have thought that the purge couldn’t happen to them, until it did, in which case, that was it unless they were lucky.
Define “underling.” What some of us think of as Stalin’s underlings had a good chance of surviving: Kaganovich, Malenkov, Khrushchev, Molotov, Voroshilov, Bulganin, Beria: all these outnumbered Yezov and Yagoda.
They all had blood on their hands, but Yezov and Yagoda knew the empty center behind all the killings, and had to die. Beria simply outlived Stalin.
Non-toadies whose careers were not created by Stalin: those tainted with Menshevikism, people who’d had dealings with Trotsky, Old Bolsheviks like Bukharin, Zinoviev, etc. faced pretty long odds. Among these, Mikhail Kalinin was a rarity, in that Stalin kept him around as a figurehead.
I’ve heard it claimed that due to misunderstanding one of Stalin’s orders, the security apparatus was under the impression that they were supposed to meet a quota of “spies” and “traitors” uncovered. If that’s so, survival was pretty much a crapshoot.
P.S. MichaelEmouse, yeah I get ~ 36% too. (chance of survival = .96^[sup]25[/sup])
You simply have to prove that your are worth more alive than dead.
Of the 1800 delegates to the Communist Party Congress of 1934, less than one in ten were delegates to the Party Congress of 1939.
Of Lenin’s lieutenants, only Stalin and Trotsky remained by the late 1930s.
So the lesson was to stay out of the upper levels of the Communist Party.
Do you know what happened to those who refused a promotion? Was it possible to refuse one? If so, I imagine some people might have said “No thanks, I’m good where I am” rather than played the world’s worst lottery.
I think the key factor was that Stalin didn’t want anyone around who was a threat. The worst thing you could do was look like you were somebody who might replace him.
So being popular or respected was a bad idea. Being competent and intelligent was bad. Having friends and allies was bad. Having some power base was bad.
The safest thing to be was somebody who everyone hated and distrusted and who everybody thought was only marginally competent and had been promoted over his abilities. That way you were not a credible candidate to take over so you were mostly safe. Unless somebody needed a fallguy and you were picked as being replaceable.
I’m a Trotskyist. I doubt I would have made it out of the 1920s, but only because I’d have probably been working to oppose Stalin’s policies in the first place.
Stalin was nothing close to a ‘lieutenant’ of Lenin, or even someone who enjoyed his trust all that much. In 1922, at the very end of his political career, Lenin wrote a series of short notes to the Central Committee and had this to say about Stalin:
(Emphasis mine. -O.) The lesson here is not to stay out of the upper echelons of the Communist Party, but to listen to the voice of experience.
Can I become suddenly ill and unable to fill my official position, then retire for prolonged convalescence in some datcha, not doing anything even remotely related to politics?
I think being seen as moderately incompetent was good (for your survival). Take Marshall Byudyenny-a man who should never have been promoted past the rank of major. Budyenny was a friend of Stalin (and almost lost the war for him). Budyenny got through the 1930’s purges unscathed-while a lot of good and capable general officers died in prison (or were shot).
become competent professional yes-man ass-kisser.
I think you’re spot on from what I’ve read.
Stalin always had a great vision for Siberia and considered it the Soviet Union’s future. If you left to settle in Siberia voluntarily you’d have been out of the way and more importantly you’d be were Stalin wanted you.
Possibly the most famous of these was Marshall Roskossovsky, who was one of the commanders responsible for Soviet victory at the Battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, and was the man responsible for Operation Bagration. The man had a complete set of steel teeth, having lost almost all of his teeth to NKVD torturers before the war.