The Red Army & the Great Terror by Whitewood
Author:Whitewood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2015-07-04T00:00:00+00:00
Gamarnik acknowledged that the total number of expulsions from the proverka in the Belorussian Military District was in fact quite small: just 4 percent. Even though socially harmful elements comprised the bulk of these expulsions, he seemed more concerned that the more dangerous enemies—foreign agents and Trotskyists—had not been discovered before the proverka had taken place. This would be understood as evidence that standards of vigilance had not been improved despite Voroshilov’s frequent complaints. Indeed, it had taken an independent party purge to actually reveal hidden enemies still in the ranks. At precisely the time that Soviet leaders were showing growing concerns about foreign agents infiltrating the Soviet Union, and alongside the perceived threat embodied by the former opposition after the Kirov murder, this failure in army self-policing should have been concerning for Gamarnik as head of PUR. The Red Army was missing the enemies working within, and it is unlikely that this was going unnoticed by the ruling elite or the NKVD.
That Gamarnik pointed to a danger from foreign agents specifically in his speech in the Belorussian Military District corresponds with how they were beginning to be perceived as a much more serious threat to the state in broader terms. For example, Ezhov, the organizer of the proverka who later became head of the NKVD, reported to Stalin in the summer of 1935 that foreign agents had infiltrated the party. He later repeated this claim at a conference of regional party secretaries in September. Alongside this infiltration of foreign agents, Ezhov remarked, “Trotskyists undoubtedly have a center somewhere in the USSR.”144 As William Chase has noted, Ezhov spoke of Trotskyists and foreign spies in much the same terms. He saw little difference between them in either aims or methods.145 Ezhov would soon start joining the dots, making supposed connections between members of the former opposition and fascist states that would feature heavily in the charges against the many Soviet citizens arrested and executed during the Great Terror.
There were other clear signs in 1935 that the perceived spy threat and questions about the loyalty of non-Russians were moving up the regime’s agenda beyond Ezhov’s pronouncements. The regime began to strengthen the Soviet Union’s borders, and large numbers of national minority groups were deported from the border regions for fear they would turn against the regime in a future war. In early 1935, approximately 50,000 Poles, Germans, and Ukrainians were deported from the western Ukraine border.146 Hitler’s consolidation of power in early 1933 had also seen an increase in the number of German communists fleeing to the Soviet Union, bringing with them another potential security threat. Questions were raised about whether the communists arriving from Nazi Germany could be trusted, and a plenum of the Central Committee in December 1935 called for all political émigrés to be carefully checked.147 Notably, some of these new security measures were aimed directly at the Red Army. In 1935, the special departments began to register foreigners and political emigrants serving in the Red Army. There
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