the EZHOVSHCHINA, or "GREAT TERROR", and the "POLISH OPERATION": WHAT REALLY HAPPENED
Snyder's fourth chapter relies upon a completely falsified account of this important topic.
...and the course of the Great Terror certainly confirmed Stalin's position of power. Having called a halt to the mass operations in November 1938, Stalin once again replaced his NKVD chief. Lavrenty Beria succeeded Yezhov, who was later executed. The same fate awaited many of the highest officers of the NKVD, blamed for the supposed excesses, which were in fact the substance of Stalin's policy. (107-8)
Snyder is wrong. We know now, from primary source evidence, that Ezhov acted directly against "Stalin's" - the Soviet leadership's - "policy", i.e. intentions. This information was available when Snyder was writing his book. Either he was ignorant of this research and evidence or he knew about it but suppressed any discussion of it from his book. If the former, Snyder is incompetent and had no business writing about the subject at all. If the latter, he has deliberately deceived his readers.
We now have the telegram sent on June 17, 1937, just prior to the June Central Committee plenum, in which Ezhov transmits the request of S.M. Mironov, NKVD chief in Western Siberia, reporting the threat of revolts by subversives in concert with Japanese intelligence. In it Mironov reports that Robert I. Eikhe, Party First Secretary of Western Siberia, will request the ability to form a "troika" to deal with this threat. (1) We also have at least one of the reports Mironov sent to Ezhov to justify this request. (2)
Apparently Eikhe, and then a number of other First Secretaries, approached Stalin and the Politburo after the Plenum and asked for these special powers to deal with conspiracies, rebellions, and revolts in their areas. This led to the Politburo Decree "On Anti-Soviet elements" of July 2, 1937, which authorized all First Secretaries to arrest "kulaks and criminals" who had returned to their areas, shoot the "most dangerous" of them, and exile the rest to other areas. (3)
This vision of organized internal revolts in conjunction with foreign powers (Japan, in the case of Western Siberia) occurred in the context of the Tukhachevsky Affair of less than a month earlier. In that case the top commanders of the Red Army were convicted of collaboration with foreign powers and a plot to overthrow the Soviet government. The loyalty of the military commanders was in grave doubt - rightly so, as we now know. The NKVD appeared to be the only force that Soviet power could rely upon. It did not become clear until much later that Ezhov himself was conspiring with foreign powers to overthrow the government and Party leadership, and was using massive executions of innocent people to stir up resentment.
The document authorizing the NKVD to proceed on a virtual war footing against the rebels is Order No. 00447 of July 30, 1937. It is available in Russian in many places, and (in excerpt) also in English. (4)
This document authorizes actions only against those involved in rebellions and criminal activities:
I. GROUPS SUBJECT TO PUNITIVE MEASURES.
1. Former kulaks who have returned home after having served their sentences and who continue to carry out anti-Soviet sabotage.
2. Former kulaks who have escaped from camps or from labor settlements, as well as kulaks who have been in hiding from dekulakization, who carry out anti-Soviet activities.
3. Former kulaks and socially dangerous elements who were members of insurrectionary, fascist, terroristic, and bandit formations, who have served their sentences, who have been in hiding from punishment, or who have escaped from places of confinement and renewed their anti-Soviet, criminal activities.
4. Members of anti-Soviet parties (SRs, Georgian Mensheviks, Dashnaks, Mussavatists, Ittihadists, etc.), former Whites, gendarmes, bureaucrats, members of punitive expeditions, bandits, gang abettors, transferees, re-emigres, who are in hiding from punishment, who have escaped from places of confinement, and who continue to carry out active anti-Soviet activities.
5. Persons unmasked by investigators and whose evidence is verified by materials obtained by investigative agencies and who are the most hostile and active members of Cossak-White Guard insurrectionary organizations slated for liquidation and fascist, terroristic, and espionage-saboteur counterrevolutionary formations. In addition, punitive measures are to be taken against elements of this category who are kept at the present under guard, whose cases have been fully investigated but not yet considered by the judicial organs.
6. The most active anti-Soviet elements from former kulaks, members of punitive expeditions, bandits, Whites, sectarian activists, church officials, and others, who are presently held in prisons, camps, labor settlements, and colonies and who continue to carry out in those places their active anti-Soviet sabotage.
7. Criminals (bandits, robbers, recidivist thieves, professional contraband smugglers, recidivist swindlers, cattle and horse thieves) who are carrying out criminal activities and who are associated with the criminal underworld. In addition, punitive measures are to be taken against elements of this category who are kept at the present under guard, whose cases have been fully investigated but not yet considered by the judicial organs. WEBEDITOR NOTE: The criminals list was pulled from Grover Furr's "Yezhov vs Stalin" as it appeared to be identical to this one in Blood Lies although the latter half of the sentence was missing in the printed copy of the book.
8. Criminal elements in camps and labor settlements who are carrying out criminal activities in them.
9. All of the groups enumerated above, to be found at present in the countryside - i.e., in kolkhozy, sovkhozy, on agricultural enterprises - as well as in the city - i.e., at industrial and trade enterprises, in transport, in Soviet institutions, and in construction - are subject to punitive measures. (G&N 474-5)
For the next year or more Stalin was flooded with reports of conspiracies and revolts from all over the USSR. A large number of these have been published (in Russian). Undoubtedly a great many more remain unpublished in former Soviet archives throughout the former Soviet Union. According to Khaustov, a very anti-Stalin researcher and one of the compilers of several of these invaluable document collections, Stalin believed these reports.
И самым страшным было то, что Сталин принимал решения, основываясь на показаниях, которые являлись результатом вымыслов конкретных сотрудников органов госбезопасности. Реакция Сталина свидетельствовала о том, что он воспринимал эти показания в полнй мере серьезно.(5)
Translated:
And the most frightening thing was that Stalin made his decisions on the basis of confessions that were the result of the inventions of certain employees of the organs of state security. Stalin's reactions attest to the fact that he took these confessions completely seriously.
It is important to ideologically anticommunist researchers that these mass murders be seen as Stalin's plan and intention. Khaustov is honest enough to admit that the evidence does not bear this out. Some, and no doubt many, of the confessional and investigative documents Ezhov sent on to Stalin and the Soviet leadership must have been falsifications. But in reality Khaustov has no idea which were fabrications and which were not.
What is important here is that Khaustov admits the existence of a major conspiracy by Ezhov and concedes that Stalin was deceived by him. Ezhov admits as much in the confessions of his that we now have. Khaustov admits that Stalin acted in good faith on the basis of evidence presented to him by Ezhov, much of which must have been false.
Russian historian Iurii Zhukov suggests that after Eikhe got these special powers for Western Siberia the other First Secretaries asked Stalin for the same powers, and received them. Evidently there was a connection between this campaign of repressions, carried out as a virtual war against rebellious anti-Soviet forces throughout the country, and the cancellation of the competitive elections that had been stipulated under the new 1936 Soviet Constitution. Stalin and his supporters in the central Soviet government and Party fought for such elections but failed to win the Central Committee to approve them. Zhukov has traced the final decision not to hold such elections to October 11, 1937. He also located a draft or sample ballot for contested elections - a ballot never used but preserved in a Soviet archive. (6)
Ezhov's Conspiracy Gradually Uncovered
Beginning perhaps at the January 1938 Central Committee Plenum Stalin and the Politburo began to uncover evidence of massive illegal repressions, first of all against Party members. Politburo member Pavel Postyshev was dismissed from his post on the grounds that he was killing off the Party infrastructure. (7) From what we can tell from the documents now published the suspicions continued to grow in the Politburo that massive, unauthorized repressions were going on. In August 1938 Ezhov's second-in-command, Mikhail Frinovskii, was replaced by Lavrentii Beria. Evidently Beria was chosen as a reliable person to keep watch over Ezhov, as Ezhov himself later stated.
In November 1938 Ezhov was convinced to resign his position as Commissar of the NKVD. We are not sure exactly how everything happened. There is some evidence that Ezhov and his men planned one final desperate effort at seizure of power by assassinating Stalin and others at the November 1938 celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution but that timely arrests forestalled this. (8) Zhukov claims to have seen Ezhov's actual resignation and claims that it was done in a rushed way, on any scrap of paper available. Zhukov concludes from this that Ezhov was only persuaded to resign with difficulty. (9)
As soon as Ezhov resigned, to be replaced by Beria, orders were given to immediately stop all the repressions, to repeal all the NKVD Operational Orders that enabled them, to stop the work of the troikas, and to re-emphasize the need for oversight by the Prosecutor's Office of all cases of arrest. This document is available in English. (10)
After this there began a flood of reports to Beria and the central Party leadership concerning massive illegitimate repressions and shootings on the part of local NKVD groups. We have many of these documents now, and no doubt there are many more of them. The central Party leadership began to investigate.
On January 29, 1939 Beria, Andreev, and Malenkov signed a report about the massive abuses during Ezhov's tenure. (11) It begins as follows:
We consider it essential to report to you the following conclusions about the situation of cases in the NKVD USSR:
1. During the period of time that com. Ezhov headed the Narkomvnudel {People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the NKVD} of the USSR right up until the moment he left the duties of People’s Commissar a majority of the leading positions in the NKVD USSR and in the organs under its supervision (the NKVDs of union and autonomous republics, the UNKVDs of the krais and oblasts) – have been occupied by enemies of the people, conspirators, and spies.
2. Enemies of the people who penetrated the organs of the NKVD have consciously distorted the punitive policy of Soviet power, have carried out massive, unfounded arrests of completely innocent persons, while at the same time covering up real enemies of the people.
3. The methods of conducting investigations have been perverted in the most brutal manner. They had recourse to beatings of prisoners on a massive level in order to force them into false confessions and "admissions." The quantity of admissions that each investigator was supposed to obtain from prisoners in the course of 24 hours has been decided upon in advance. In addition, the quotas have often reached several dozen "admissions."
Investigators have widely made use of the practice of fully informing one another concerning the content of the confessions they obtained. This gave the investigators the ability, during interrogators of "their" prisoners, to suggest to them by one means or another facts, circumstances, and names of persons about whom confessions had earlier been given by other prisoners. As a result this kind of investigation very often led to organized false slanders against persons who were completely innocent.
In order to obtain a greater number of admissions in a number of organs of the NKVD had recourse to direct provocation: they convinced prisoners to give confessions about supposed espionage work for foreign intelligence services by explaining that these kinds of fabricated confessions were needed by the party and government in order to discredit foreign states. They also promised the prisoners that they would be liberated after they gave such "admissions."
The leadership of the NKVD in the person of com. Ezhov not only did not put a stop to this kind of arbitrariness and extremism in arrests and in the conduct of investigations, but sometimes itself abetted it.
The slightest attempts by Chekist party members to oppose this arbitrariness were stifled.
.....
Com. Ezhov concealed in every way from the Central Committee of the ACP(b) the situation of the work in the NKVD organs. Besides that he hid from the CC ACP(b) materials that compromised leading NKVD workers.
.....
In addition we believe it essential to note that all the above disgraceful actions, distortions and excesseswere carried out with the sanction and knowledge of the organs of the Procuracy of the USSR (coms. Vyshinsky and Roginsky). Assistant Procuror of the USSR Roginsky has been especially zealous in this matter. Roginsky’s practice of work raises serious doubts about this political honesty .
The report continues in this vein. Reports and investigations of NKVD abuses continued rapidly.
In April Mikhail Frinovskii, Ezhov's "zam", or deputy commissar, and Ezhov himself were arrested. They immediately began to confess. All the confessions published so far are now available online in both the Russian original and in English translation. (12) These confessions revealed the broad outlines of Ezhov's conspiracy against and deception of the Soviet leadership and of Stalin. During the next few years, up to beginning of the war, further investigations and prosecutions of guilty NKVD men proceeded. Over 100,000 persons were released from camps and prisons after reviews of their cases. (13)
The "Polish Operation"
The "Polish Operation" of the NKVD was enabled by NKVD Order No. 00485 of August 11, 1937. It has been published many times in Russian and is also online. (14) We have now made it available in English translation for the first time. (15)
The following are the major scholarly works on the Polish Operation. The second and fourth are cited by Snyder.
* James Morris. "The Polish Terror: Spy Mania and Ethnic Cleansing in the Great Terror." Europe-Asia Studies 56, 5 (July 2004), 751-766.
* A. Ie. Gur'ianov, "Obzor sovetskikh reressivnykh kampanii protiv poliakov i pol'skikh grazhdan," in A. V. Lipatov and I. O. Shaitanov, eds., Poliaki i russkie: Vzaimoponimanie i vzaimoneponimanie, Moscow: Indrik, 2000, 199-207.
* A. Ie. Gur'ianov, "Obzor sovetskikh reressivnykh kampanii protiv poliakov i pol'skikh grazhdan," in Massovye repressii protiv poliakov. Memorial Society. At http://www.memo.ru/history/polacy/vved/index.htm {This is a brief summary of Gur'ianov's longer article above.}
* N. V. Petrov and A. B. Roginskii, "Pol'skaia operatsiia' NKVD 1937-1938 gg.," in A. Ie. Gur'ianov, ed., Repressii protiv poliakov i pol'skikh grazhdan, Moscow: Zven'ia, 1997, 22-43.
All these studies agree in the following conclusions:
* The "Polish Operation" was aimed at Polish spies only, not at Poles as such. This can of course be seen from the text of Operational Order No. 00485 itself.
The intention of the regime was not to terrorize or murder minority populations... (Morris 759)
... it {NKVD Order No. 00485, the "Polish Operation" order} did not concern Poles as such, but Polish spies... (Petrov & Roginskii)
Least of all was the massive nature of the repression "along Polish lines" the result of some kind of special personal hatred by Stalin of Poles. It was not a matter of Poles as such, but of Poland.
...their nationality was not a criterion of "criminal guilt" (prestupnosti) ...
...to equate the concept of "Poles" and "Polish operation" would be a mistake. (Petrov & Roginskii)
* Many of those arrested and either executed or imprisoned were not Poles or of Polish background at all.
These numbers show that many of the victims were not ethnic Poles. (Morris 762)
* Petrov and Roginskii stress repeatedly that nationality itself was not a criterion for arrest or execution. The central NKVD did not keep records of the nationality of those arrested.
* Ezhov confessed that he and his men had arrested people who were not Poles on the pretext that they were Poles:
As a result of this pressure the practice of repressions without any incriminating evidence whatsoever on the sole basis of one criterion alone, that the person repressed belonged to such-and-such a nationality (Pole, German, Latvian, Greek, etc.), was broadly expanded.
However, that was not enough. The practice of including Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, et al. in the category of Poles, Finns, Germans, et al., became a rather mass phenomenon, especially in certain oblasts.
Of those who especially distinguished themselves in this manner were the People's Commissars of Internal Affairs of such republics as: the Ukraine, Belorussia, Turkmenia, and the heads of the UNKVDs of such oblasts as the Sverdlovsk, Leningrad, and Moscow.
So for example Dmitriev, former head of the NKVD of the Sverdlovsk oblast included a great many Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and even Russians under the category of repressed Polish refugees. In any case for every arrested Pole there were no fewer than ten Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians.
There were many cases in which Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians generally were made into Poles with falsified documents.
The practice in Leningrad was the same. Instead of Finns Zakovsky arrested many native inhabitants of the USSR - Karelians, and "transformed" them into Finns.
Uspensky, under the pretence of their being Poles, arrested many Ukrainian Uniates, that is, selected them not on the basis of national origin but according to their religion. I could multiply many times examples of this kind. They are characteristic for the majority of oblasts.
(Ezhov interrogation of August 4, 1939. Emphasis added (16))
* There were few guidelines from Stalin and the Politburo - if, indeed, there were any at all. The whole operation was run by Ezhov and his men, who themselves gave little specific guidance to the local NKVD men. (Petrov & Roginskii)
Through neglect of his responsibilities the Soviet Prosecutor (Prokurator) Vyshinskii was partly responsible for the fact that Ezhov and his men were able to get away with these immense crimes. In his 1939 confessions Ezhov claimed that the Prosecutor's Office failed to conduct the oversight it was supposed to, and Ezhov and his men could shoot and imprison people with virtually no hindrance from Vyshinskii's office. This passage from Ezhov's interrogation of August 4, 1939 illustrates this negligence of Vyshinskii's office:
Question: Confess in what manner you managed to deceive the organs of prosecutorial oversight in implementing this clear, obvious, and criminal practice of repression?
Answer: I can't say that we had any special thought-out plan to consciously deceive the organs of the Procuracy.
The prosecutors of the oblasts, krais, and republics, and also the Procuracy of the USSR could not have been unaware of such a blatant criminal practice of mass provocational arrests and falsification of investigative facts, since they bore responsibility, together with the NKVD, for the review of such cases.
This inactivity of prosecutorial supervision can only be explained by the fact that in charge of the Procuracy in many oblasts, krais, and republics were members of various anti-Soviet organizations who often practiced even more widespread provocational repressions among the population.
Another group of the prosecutors, those who were not involved in participation in anti-Soviet groupings, simply feared to argue with the heads of the UNKVDs on these questions, all the more so since they did not have any directives on these matters from the center, where all the falsified investigative reports that had been mechanically signed by themselves, i.e. the prosecutors, went through without any kind of restraint or remarks.
Question: You are talking about the local organs of the Procuracy. But didn't they see these criminal machinations in the Procuracy of the USSR?
Answer: The Procuracy of the USSR could not, of course, have failed to notice all these perversions.
I explain the behavior of the Procuracy of the USSR and, in particular, of Prosecutor of the USSR Vyshinsky by that same fear of quarreling with the NKVD and by {the desire} to prove themselves no less "revolutionary" in the sense of conducting mass repressions.
I have come to this conclusion also because Vyshinsky often spoke to me personally about the tens of thousands of complaints coming in to the Procuracy and to which he was paying no attention. Likewise, during the whole period of the conduct of the operations I do not recall a single instance of a protest by Vyshinsky concerning the mass operations, while there were instances when he insisted on more severe sentences in relation to some persons or other.
This is the only way I can explain the virtual absence of any prosecutorial supervision at all during the mass operations and the absence of any protests from them to the government against the acts of the NKVD. I repeat, we the conspirators and specifically, I myself did not have any kind of thought-out plans.
The first document issued after Ezhov had been induced to resign from office stressed the lack of Prosecutorial oversight. In 1939 Vyshinskii was replaced as Prosecutor. It seems likely that this was because he had failed to do his duty during the Ezhovshchina.
* The notion that the Ezhovshchina and the "Polish Operation" of which it was a part were undertaken to forestall a potential "fifth column" is false. This theory was evidently first state by Oleg Khlevniuk in 1996 (17) and has been uncritically repeated ever since, including by Snyder.
Bukharin, Not Stalin, Was To Blame for the Massive Repressions
One interesting fact that emerges from the primary sources now available - and, we note, available during the time Snyder was writing Bloodlands - is that Nikolai Bukharin, leading name among the Rightists and one of its leaders, knew about the Ezhovshchina as it was happening, and praised it in a letter to Stalin that he wrote from prison.
Bukharin knew that Ezhov was a member of the Rightist conspiracy, as he himself was. No doubt that is why he welcomed Ezhov's appointment as head of the NKVD - a view recorded by his widow in her memoirs. (18)
In his first confession, in his now-famous letter to Stalin of December 10, 1937, and at his trial in March 1938 Bukharin claimed he had completely "disarmed" and had told everything he knew. But now we can prove that this was a lie. Bukharin knew that Ezhov was a leading member of the Rightist conspiracy - but did not inform on him. According to Mikhail Frinovsky, Ezhov's right-hand man, Ezhov probably promised to see that he would not be executed if he did not mention his own, Ezhov's, participation. This is documented in Mikhail Frinovskii's confession of April 11, 1939. Frinovskii was Ezhov's second-in-command.
An active participant in investigations generally, Ezhov kept himself aloof from the preparation of this trial. Before the trial the face-to-face confrontations of the suspects, interrogations, and refining, in which Ezhov did not participate. He spoke for a long time with Yagoda, and that talk concerned, in the main, of assuring Yagodo that he would not be shot.
Ezhov had conversations several times with Bukharin and Rykov and also in order to calm them assured them that under no circumstances would they be shot.(19)
If Bukharin had told the truth - if he had, in fact, informed on Ezhov - Ezhov's mass murders could have been stopped in their tracks. The lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people could have been saved.
But Bukharin remained true to his fellow conspirators. He went to execution - an execution that Bukharin himself swore in his appeal for clemency that he deserved "ten times over" - without revealing Ezhov's participation in the conspiracy.
This point cannot be stressed too much: the blood of the hundreds of thousands of innocent persons slaughtered by Ezhov and his men during 1937-1938, is on Bukharin's hands.
Bukharin's two appeals for clemency, both dated March 13, 1938, were reprinted in Izvestiia on September 2, 1992. They were rejected, and Bukharin was executed on March 15, 1938. I have translated them and put them online in English"(20)
Ezhov's Confessions
All ideologically anticommunist accounts suppress the evidence of Ezhov's conspiracy against the Soviet government. None of them refer to the confessions of Ezhov and his men, though these confessions were all available to them.
The apparent reason for the failure to discuss Ezhov's conspiracy is the desire on the part of ideologically anticommunist researchers to falsely accuse the Soviet leadership, Stalin most of all, of having ordered all the huge number of executions carried out by Ezhov. However, Ezhov explicitly states many times that his repressions and executions were carried out in pursuit of his own private conspiratorial goals and that he had deceived the Soviet government. Thus Ezhov's own confessions are evidence that Stalin and the central Soviet leadership were not responsible for his massive executions.
Ezhov's confessions that he deceived the government for his conspiratorial purposes are not contradicted by any other evidence. In addition, we now have the judgment of Khaustov, an anticommunist researcher himself, who concludes on the basis of massive evidence at his disposal that Stalin believed the false reports Ezhov was sending him.
Thus, the only conclusion supported by the evidence contradicts the "anti-Stalin" ideological aims of these anticommunist researchers. It is important to them that Stalin and the Soviet leadership be "guilty" of "mass murders." By omitting evidence that tends to disprove this conclusion - Ezhov's confessions - their assertions may be accepted by their readers.
All of the confessions of Ezhov that the Russian government has seen fit to make public to date, plus one of Ezhov's "zam" or Deputy Commissar Mikhail Frinovskii, are available online in both Russian and English.(21)
In his confession of August 4, 1939 Ezhov specifically states that he deceived the Soviet government about the extent and nature of espionage:
Question: Did you succeed in obtaining a government decision to prolong the mass operations?
Answer: Yes. We did obtain the decision of the government to prolong the mass operation and to increase the number of those to be repressed.
Question: What did you do, deceive the government?
Answer: It was unquestionably essential for us to prolong the mass operation and increase the number of persons repressed.
However, it was necessary to extend the time period for these measures and to set up a real and accurate account so that once we had prepared ourselves, we could strike our blow directly on the most dangerous part, the organizational leadership of the counterrevolutionary elements.
The government, understandably, had no conception of our conspiratorial plans and in the present case proceeded solely on the basis of the necessity to prolong the operation without going into the essence of how it was carried out.
In this sense, of course, we were deceiving the government in the most blatant manner.
(Emphasis added.)
Was Ezhov a Polish Spy?
Of the sources on the Polish Operation only Morris mentions this fact:
Ironically, Ezhov was accused of being a Polish spy when he was arrested a short time later. (763)
Morris cites no evidence or source at all here. He may well have taken it from Jansen & Petrov (2000, p. 187), where it is briefly stated as one of the charges against Ezhov at trial on February 1, 1940. But we now know somewhat more about this. Pavliukov had access to some of Ezhov's confessions including those of April 18-20, 1939, shortly after his arrest. After a brief verbatim quote Pavliukov (520-521) summarizes thus:
Ezhov related that he was drawn into espionage work by his friend F.M. Konar, who had long been a Polish agent. Konar learned political news from Ezhov and gave them to his bosses in Poland and on one occasion told Ezhov about this and proposed that he volunteer to begin working for the Poles. Since Ezhov had in fact already become an informant of Polish intelligence, since he had transmitted to them via Konar many significant party and state secrets, he supposedly had no other choice than to agree with this proposal.
The Poles supposedly shared a part of the intelligence received from Ezhov with their allies the Germans, and so after a time an offer of collaboration from the latter was also made.
According to Ezhov Marshal A.I. Egorov, first assistant Commissar for Defense, acted as the middleman {between Ezhov and the Germans}. He met with Ezhov in the summer of 1937 and told him that he knew about the latter's ties with the Poles, that he himself was a German spy who on orders from the German authorities had organized a group of conspirators in the Red Army, and that he had been given a directive to establish close working contact between his group and Ezhov.
Ezhov agreed with this proposal and promised to protect Egorov's men from arrest.
This corresponds generally to other evidence we have about the military conspiracies and the charges against Egorov.
Objectivity and Evidence
I agree with historian Geoffrey Roberts when he says:
In the last 15 years or so an enormous amount of new material on Stalin ... has become available from Russian archives. I should make clear that as a historian I have a strong orientation to telling the truth about the past, no matter how uncomfortable or unpalatable the conclusions may be. ... I don't think there is a dilemma: you just tell the truth as you see it.(22)
The conclusions about the Ezhovshchina outlined here will be unacceptable to persons motivated not by the pursuit of the objective truth bsions (sic) out of any desire to "apologize" for the policies of Stalin or the Soviet government but because they are the only objective conclusions possible based on the available evidence.
Footnotes
(1) Vl. Khaustov, Lennart Samuelson. Stalin, NKVD, I repressii 1937-1938 gg. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009, 332-333. (Вл. Хаустов, Леннарт Самузльсон. Сталин, НКВД, и репрессии 1937-1938 гг. М.: РОССПЭН, 2009). Online at: http://istmat.info/node/24544 (2) Danilov, et al., eds. Tragediia sovetskoi derevni t. 5,1, pp. 256-7. (3) At: widely reprinted in Russian. Available in English in Getty & Naumov Doc. 169 pp. 470-471. (4) English translation in Getty & Naumov, Doc. 170 pp. 473-478 (in excerpt). Hereafter G&N. (5) Lubianka golgofa, p. 6. (6) See Grover Furr, "Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform, Part One", in Cultural Logic 2005, paragraphs 60 - end. At: http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html Much of this material is summarized from IUrii N. Zhukov, Inoi Stalin. Politicheskie Reformy v SSSR v 1933-1937 gg. Moscow: Vagrius, 2003. (7) On Postyshev see Furr, Khrushchev Lied, 45ff; 282-288. (8) See "transcript of the interrogation of the arrested person Ezhov Nikolai Ivanovich of April 26 1939," Lubianka 1939-1946 at pp. 68 ff. English translation at: http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/ezhov042639eng.html (9) IU.N. Zhukov, "Zhupel Stalina", Komsomolskaia Pravda 20 November 2002. (10) Getty & Naumov Doc. 190 pp. 532-537. (11) Nikita Petrov, Marc Jansen. "Stalinskii pitomets" - Nikolai Ezhov. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008, pp. 359-363. Russian text online at: http://istmat.info/node/24582 English translation at: http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/beria_andreev_malenkov012939eng.html (12) See "Additional Bibliography - Documents" at the bottom of the following page: http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/trials_Ezhovshchina_update0710.html (13) Okhotin and Roginskii of the "Memorial Society", both highly anticommunist and anti-Stalin researchers, estimate "about 110,000 persons formerly accused of counterrevolutionary crimes" were freed during 1939 as a result of Beria's investigation of NKVD crimes under Ezhov. Tragedia sovetskoi derevni t. 5, 2 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006), p. 571 (14) One site is: http://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/Приказ_НКВД_от_11.08.1937_№_00485 (15) At: http://msuweb.montclair.edu/%7Efurrg/research/no00485.html (16) This was published for the first time in Nikita Petrov, Marc Jansen. "Stalinskii pitomets - Nikolai Ezhov. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008, pp. 367-379. Russian original online at: ; English translation at: (17) Note 14 in Petrov & Roginskii states this as fact. Khlevniuk's only evidence is an off-the-cuff statement by an aged Molotov to his biographer Felix Chuev. (18) Anna Larina (Bukharina), Nezabyvaemoe. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo APN, 1989, 269-70. (19) See the English translation at: http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/frinovskyeng.html (20) At: http://msuweb.montclair.edu/%7Efurrg/research/bukharinappeals.html (21) See the following web page, under "Additional Bibliography" "Documents": http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/35305.html (22) "Stalin's War", February 12, 2007. At: