The purge of the NKVD, the physical elimination of all cadres who knew the inner workings of the Moscow trials, was nothing less than a major campaign, the “battle plan” of which was elaborated by Stalin together with Yezhov. As early as October 1936, the confused Yagoda was replaced by Stalin’s favorite, Yerov. As soon as he arrived at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the newly appointed People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs dispersed more than 300 people he had brought from the Central Committee to serve as deputy chiefs of the ministry’s subdivisions and local subdivisions. The Politburo gave a grand explanation for this “sand-mixing”: “In order to bring the work of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to a higher level”. But in reality, it was to replace those who were destined to be purged from the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
In the first few months of his tenure, Yerev appeared to be working quite well with the leading cadres under Yagoda. In any case, these people were indispensable to Yerev, knowing that the second Moscow trial was being prepared, and the “sand” that had been brought in needed to learn and master the business of interrogation.
The large-scale purge of the Cheka began only after the second trial. In the course of the operation, in order to eliminate the roots, not only those Cheka cadres who did know about Stalin’s crimes were eliminated, but also many staff members who might have known about these crimes. The first to be arrested were the upper echelons of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
One evening in March 1937, Yezhov called an emergency meeting. The meeting was attended by, among others, several deputy people’s commissars from the Yagoda period and the heads of several major subdivisions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. These people were told that the Central Committee had entrusted them to go separately to the states and cities to examine the political performance of the leading cadres of the state and municipal party committees. Yerev explained to them in detail the requirements of this task, distributed on the spot the appointment letters of the Central Committee, and then ordered them to go to the designated cities on the same day. There were only four heads of subdivisions who were not assigned to this task: Slutsky, the head of the Foreign Service Bureau, Paul Paul, the commander of the border guards and the head of Stalin’s personal guard, and Stanislav Lenkens, the head of the Moscow Region Internal Affairs subdivision (the latter was Stalin’s brother-in-law).
The next morning all the appointed chiefs left Moscow. However, none of them reached their assigned city: as soon as the train arrived at the first station outside Moscow, they were secretly arrested in their compartments, put into cars and taken to a prison in the suburbs. Two days later, Yerev repeated the same trick, summoning the deputy chiefs of the main subdivisions and ordering them to leave immediately for the same task.
The news of the disappearance of the leaders of the subdivisions did not “reach” the remaining NKVD staff until several weeks later. By this Time, Yerev had promptly replaced the NKVD guards and removed the commanders of the NKVD units located throughout Moscow and its suburbs. The vast majority of the newly appointed commanders were Georgians drawn from the Transcaucasian internal affairs subdivision.
To prevent the former staff of the NKVD from fleeing abroad, Yerev ordered the Foreign Service to stop issuing documents for leaving the country and to take this authority into his own secretariat. At the same time, he dismissed the former commander of the MVD aviation unit, thus eliminating the possibility of Cheka personnel fleeing the country by air in desperation.
Fearing the desperation of the NKVD personnel, Yezhov built fortifications on the side of the NKVD building and created a large guard for himself. Everyone who wanted to enter his office had to take an elevator to the fifth floor, then walk down a long corridor to another stairway, descend a ladder to the first floor, and cross another corridor before ascending by auxiliary elevator to the third floor and entering Yezhov’s reception room. In this labyrinth, visitors will be stopped three or four times by guards to check their documents. Anyone had to be checked, whether an insider or an official from an outside unit who came to see Yezhov on business.
With these precautions completed, Yezhov began to cleanse the Cheka with impunity. Almost all the interrogators who had taken part in the pre-trial work of the Moscow trials, as well as other staff members who knew or could have known about Stalin’s plot, were thrown into prison. The arrests were carried out separately, during the day at these people’s workplaces and at their homes at night. The arrest of Chertok (who became famous for his severe torture of Kamenev) took place in the early hours of the morning. When the action team burst into his bedroom, he shouted, “Don’t you dare catch me!” At the same time stepped onto the windowsill and jumped from the twelfth floor. He fell to his death instantly.
Foreign Service officer Felix Gursky, who had been awarded a Red Star for “unselfish work” only a few weeks earlier, also jumped to his death from his office on the ninth floor. Two other staff members of the secret political bureau took this route.
Some people from the Foreign Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of the Interior, who came to Spain and France on business, also told me about many horrific atrocities. For example, heavily armed operatives suddenly surrounded a Ministry of the Interior dormitory building at night and went from house to house, arresting people like hair. And as soon as the doorbell rang, shots were often fired from inside the house – another Cheka had put a bullet into his head. Many of the brutal persecution maniacs in the NKVD, who not long ago had frightened the hearts of Stalin’s political enemies, were now themselves swallowed up in a wave of barbaric terror and became victims of Stalin.
The NKVD complex was located in the center of Moscow, so that when people inside committed suicide by jumping out of windows from high buildings, they were often seen by pedestrians. As a result, rumors of suicides in the NKVD spread, causing panic in Moscow, but no one in the general population could figure out what was going on there.
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