The Great Purge of Josef Stalin began in early 1937 and continued, with a pause for the Great Patriotic Fatherland War in 1941, until his death in 1953. Many biographers of the Georgian dictator and historians of the era have offered various motivations for this terribly bloody side of Stalin’s nature, a series of increasingly psychotic acts that claimed the lives of at least twenty million of his fellow Party comrades. Here is a different view of the motivations ofJosef Stalin and somewhat more believable reasons for his savage bloodbaths.
M: You ask me if the Soviet society has stabilized since the late ‘30s and I would have to say that it certainly would like to, but I seriously doubt if Stalin will allow it to do so. I do have some knowledge of his private demons after all, and I doubt if Comrade Josef has entirely finished with his bloodlettings.
Q: Why so? He did kill off his enemies in the last purge, didn’t he? Wiped the slate clean?
M: Oh, he killed millions of people then, but I doubt if he has finished.
Q: So you think he might be crazy? A bloodthirsty and irrational man?
M: Mad in one sense, but certainly not irrational. Stalin is an extremely pragmatic and logical man...at least according to his way of thinking, which is the way of the biologist studying a disease. There is no sentiment involved, only deadly pragmatism
Q: It’s felt that the big purge was something he did to rid himself of any encumbrances from Lenin’s time. Do you agree?
M: Oh, certainly, to a degree, but the savagery has its roots in a number of factors. These were his small and brutalized beginnings as a very poor and physically abused Georgian, one of the many minorities in Soviet Russia and certainly not a dominant one. And, of course, the Soviet society was once very much oriented to the historical Bolshevik. A man might be brilliant, as I think Stalin is in many areas, but if his pedigree relating to the revolution is not particularly strong, he would have been held in contempt by those like Trotsky who fought the Whites in the front lines. Stalin is like Bormann; a very hard working bureaucrat who played no particular role in the bloody upheavals in Russia after the beginning of the October revolt, and certainly not before. And this inferiority complex was triggered by the perception that not only was he held in contempt by the senior members of the club of revolutionaries, but that they were engaged in denigrating him as well, and terrible to relate, plotting to overthrow him. Stalin, who was essentially a terrorist and a plotter, was absolutely frightened of others doing to him what he had done so often and so successfully. And consider this, almost all of the top leaders of the Bolshevik movement, to include Lenin himself, were either Jewish or part Jewish in origin or had married Jewesses. And make no mistake, as a Georgian, Stalin loathed the Jews, though I must say he made use of their services in breaking the back of the middle class.
Setting him in motion was not difficult in the end. I ought to know about this setting in motion because I am the one who did it.
Q: You?
M: Are you talking to the stenographer by any chance? Yes, of course, me. The groundwork for the big purge was already laid in Stalin’s mind, but I was the one who gave him the gentle shove over the cliff.
And he’s still falling, even today.
Q: I sincerely hope you will honor us with a much fuller account. Though I have heard that Heydrich supplied several faked letters by General Tukhachevsky indicating some kind of dissatisfaction with Stalin, and as I read it, indicating a Putsch might be in the offing., but no one now feels that Stalin believed these crude forgeries and had planned to clean out the high command of the Soviet military early on.
M: He may well have viewed them as potentially dangerous to him, but let me say right away that Heydrich did not supply several fake letters...there were hundreds of documents involved by the way, and Stalin certainly did believe them because I made certain that they directly addressed his private concerns. You have the time before we finish for today and we have to dress for dinner. Shall we discuss the American election or shall we discuss Comrade Josef?
Q: One is in the future and the other the past. Why not the latter?
M: Why not indeed. More pencils, my dear, because you will certainly need them. Let me enlighten you here about my first, and probably my very best, operation against the communists. And I am very proud of the results although as a member of a civilized society, I have to admit in private that even I was shocked at the results. It is like kicking a small rock down the side of a mountain and discovering that this starts an enormous avalanche which buries two towns, a railroad station, sixteen beer gardens and a convent under thirty feet of rocks.
Very well. All beginnings are difficult so I will not give you a long history of the radical movement in Imperial Russia, but get down to fairly current history and my own actions.
There was a former Czarist officer in Paris named Skoblin. This gentleman supplied Heydrich’s SD, and others, with various bits of interesting information from his former country...and of course, supplied the NKVD with interesting information about us. We paid him and they paid him. Now Skoblin did not work for me. He was Heydrich’s man and Heydrich was incompetent in matters of practical counter-intelligence. In mid-1936, Heydrich talked to me at length about this man and his information because he knew nothing about the communists and I did. Initially the Chief, as he loved to be called, just wanted any background I could give him, but in the end he was so far out of his depth that I simply took the project over, although I was more than respectful to him at the time.
The Russian had reported that certain top Soviet generals were dissatisfied with Stalin and might be encouraged to overthrow him. As Hitler for one, and myself for another, viewed Russia as our absolutely most dangerous enemy, naturally this talk was something to listen to. Given Skoblin’s duality, and Heydrich indicated that he knew the creature worked both sides of the table, I felt that we ought not to trust him. Very possibly there was such a plan and equally, it was possible that Stalin, or those around him, wanted to get confirming material about such a plot so they could use it to attack a segment of their society they wanted to get rid of. Both valid points of view.
The Russian had not asked for anything from us nor made any suggestions, but in our talks, both Heydrich and myself wondered what would happen if somehow Stalin got it into his suspicious head that there really was some kind of a plot? The old-line Bolsheviks we were not concerned with, but the military was another matter. And Marshal Tukhachevsky was a very formidable character and a brilliant military leader. It was he who led the fight to regain lost Polish territory and although the Poles beat him outside Warsaw in 1920, it was more a case of Russian incompetence rather than any lack of ability on Tuchachevsky’s part. Stalin, by the way, was involved in this campaign and performed very badly, at least in the eyes of the military.
So, I thought about this for a few days and then got back to Heydrich with my own idea. Rather than get involved directly with double agents, why not use them as a source of mischief? I suggested that we might prepare a large file concerning anti-Stalin activities, a file which would convince him that it was a vast conspiracy indeed, and one in which he would entirely believe. Heydrich listened carefully and then wondered what, if any, effect it would have on Stalin or the growing menace of the Red Army. I pointed out that it certainly was worth trying and we couldn’t lose anything substantive by doing this, and in the end he suggested that I proceed with the project, under his supervision, of course.
This meant that if it was successful, he wanted the credit with Himmler and Hitler. At that point in my career, which had just begun, I had very little choice, but to defer to his ambition and his ego. I must say here that I am certainly ambitious, but my ego does not get in the way of success. It never has.
Q: Such a modest person you are! I feel very humble sometimes.
M: I can understand why. To go on, I decided that we would not just prepare a few incriminating papers and give them to Stalin’s men. That is far too simplistic and someone as shrewd as Stalin simply would not accept this. My plan was to create a thick and impressive file which would be full of interlocking and entirely believable papers, most of which had to either be completely authentic or unassailable in construction. I began to assemble files of papers dealing with information and observations from our military and diplomatic intelligence services, interviews with those who had knowledge of the inner workings of Stalin’s system, statements from such one-time communists as Albrecht, newspaper cuttings, actual correspondence from Soviets in our various archives and so on. Keeping a central theme in mind, these papers had to reflect not only a Putsch against Stalin, but to undermine and eventually destroy his confidence in his senior military commanders.
Having assembled a great pile of papers, I went through them, moving them around and putting slips of yellow paper between documents where a created work could go. On a separate page, I listed each marked place and indicated what was needed. I should say that it didn’t take very many additives and every one had to fit right into the whole and not appear to be merely stuck in. Let me tell you, my friend, that this was a most difficult task, but in the end, I had my file.
The Gestapo had a number of excellent forgers on its staff and I made full use of them. They used original Russian typewriters, paper and copies of official stamps and perfect signatures that could pass any test. There were, after all, only a few such papers...perhaps ten or eleven...but along with the other material
Taken as a whole, absolutely explosive. When I finished with the file...and we even added German translations of Russian papers...I took the lot to Heydrich to approve.
He and I sat side by side at a table in his office and worked over these for nearly six hours, and finally he declared that he was entirely satisfied and paid me several compliments. The next person to see the file was Hitler himself and Heydrich told me that the Fuhrer was immensely impressed, especially when Heydrich pointed out that most of the papers were original.
Now, with Hitler’s consent, it was up to me to feed this poison to Stalin in a way in which he would accept it without reservations.
Q: I understand you used the Czechs for this.
M: No, but that country played a part. Firstly, I had the SD man who acted as liaison with Skoblin to go to Paris and have a talk with him about another matter. During the course of this conversation, he was instructed to work into it the fact that there was a significant file of papers in Gestapo headquarters in Berlin about a projected internal Putsch aimed at liquidating Comrade Stalin. The SD man was ordered under no circumstances to draw special attention to this file, nor to elaborate on it, but merely to drop it into the conversation only if he could without appearing obvious, and then go on to other matters. This he did, and he reported to me that the General appeared to be genuinely interested at the time, but that our man avoided any continued discussion of the matter. So much for that beginning.
Now, down in Czechoslovakia, I had a Gestapo man working with the anti-Hitler Germans who had fled there after 1933. The Strasser people for one. This man was posing as a refugee German communist and was very valuable to us in keeping a close eye on our enemies as well as watching as much of the activities of the Czech communists as he conveniently could.
The point was that this man had the ear of Soviet agents in Prague and so I instructed him to be more specific there, than our man in Paris was. He told the Russians that he had specific knowledge, through a friend, that this file existed and reported bits and pieces of the contents.
Then one had to sit back and wait for the big fish to take the bait. Given the slowness of bureaucracies, and especially in Russia, it took a full month to hear back and believe me, we did. Paris and Prague were snapping at the bait like hungry fish, so the next act of my little drama began. First off, there was a special room in Gestapo headquarters where we kept very sensitive material. Only a few trusted persons had any access whatever to it. Now there was a clerk in the Prinz Albrecht building who we had been watching for a time. He was a socialist from the pre-1933 times and we suspected that he was in touch with the Soviets or they with him. We redoubled our watch on him, his mail and his telephones, and after about two weeks, we were rewarded when contact was made with him. He met a suspected Polish communist at a beer garden where they talked for some time. It was not surprising to me to hear that this man, our dubious member, soon wanted to see about a transfer to the file rooms and away from the typist pool. I immediately arranged for him to be turned loose in the special vault room where he had access to the files, but because of the constant presence of others, could never copy a word.
Sure enough, he got into the doctored files and read everything in them, rushing off to report his findings to Pavel the spy. Pavel had to talk to his superior, whom we located by following Pavel, and the superior had to contact Moscow. Immediately, and this took two more weeks, our Soviet friend asked to work in the evenings so he could go to school in the daytime, a practice I liked to encourage. Now I was beginning to move closer to my goal. We put him into the room at night with only one other man present.
This one knew something, but not everything, but his being there made it impossible for the spy to copy or steal anything. Then we instructed the second man to tell the spy that he had a new girl friend and wanted to sneak off twice a week to meet his lady love at his apartment. Would our spy be willing to sign out for him?
Of course the spy would, because it meant he would be alone in the vault for six hours, twice a week, and while he couldn’t take anything out, he could bring something in, such as a camera. So for a number of weeks, this worthy fellow photographed the entire contents of the special file. We had a key to his apartment and when he was at work, our men watched the progress of the filming. A few rolls ruined by bad exposures, but in the end, the wonderful spy got the whole file.
Then, with all this material so badly wanted by the NKVD and Stalin, he went to the usual rendezvous with his Polish friend and they negotiated the sum he would be paid for his treason. We had a neighboring table and the waiter on our payroll so we knew everything.
Another week went by and the Pole showed up with a cardboard suitcase full of what turned out to be authentic Mark notes. Several hundred thousand German Marks.
Q: You say original notes. We were told by Hottl that these were fake notes and rubles.
M: Hottl is fake and a crook on top of it. I tell you it was two hundred thousand Marks and the notes were all good. Our spy stuffed some of this into his pockets in the cafe lavatory and took the rest out in the paper suitcase. How providential that we had two lowlife characters rob him while he was crossing the park to the tram stop. The money did come in handy to pay for certain matters we did not want to have on our books. I am sure you know about such underhanded, but practical matters. At any rate, our spy never reported the theft of his treasure to the police and contented himself with the money in his pocket, and the knowledge that the Worker’s and Peasants Paradise had been warned about the evil wreckers, as Stalin called them.
Q: What happened to the spy? Dare I ask? Another walk in the woods?
M: No, nothing like that. After all, he was a provable and useful source for the NKVD who might well require his services later on. Shall we make it easy for them by keeping the man on the rolls, albeit under strict supervision, or shoot him and let the Russians know we uncovered him? The answer is obvious. We merely promoted him and moved him to an area where he could do nothing more of damage. Unless, of course, the Russians wanted to activate him again at which time we could transfer him back to the vault because of his wonderful performance there the last time.
Q: If you scratch a cynic, you find an idealist, General.
M: Not always.
Q: From what happened after this, in 1937 onwards, it seems that Stalin took the bait.
M: Yes, and you see, I took the trouble to incriminate the old time Bolsheviks in the business just for entertainment, and because I knew Comrade Stalin detested them. I found out much later that the game had a much bigger effect than even I thought it would. When the NKVD tortured the suspects, all of them not only admitted to the alleged and often entirely fictional crimes, they implicated everyone else; their wives, their friends, their doctors, dentists, the local street sweepers, and so on. At first Stalin was furious, but when he read the interrogations of the suspects, he became terrified at the degree and extent of the hatred for him and he simply did what I had hoped he would do: He killed everybody, even the wives and small children of his enemies.
Q: That’s genuinely horrible.
M: Oh don’t be such a weakling. Nits make lice after all, and they didn’t grow up to fight in the Red Army. If you can’t look at it this way, let us discuss other matters. In the end I was responsible, directly I am delighted to say, for the destruction of the entire Soviet High Command.
The final, butcher’s bill included nearly 90 percent of all Soviet Generals and Marshals, nearly all of the army commanders, over half of the corps commanders, nearly all of the divisional commanders and about half of the brigade commanders. And, as you know, almost all of the old line Bolsheviks and the surviving Lenin workers. All of them, with very few exceptions were liquidated, and hundreds of thousands of the more radical communists were packed into cattle cars and shipped off to the slave camps in Siberia to work themselves into a very quick death. They say the rivers around these camps were filled to the banks with the bleaching bones of the dead. And the only reason this stopped, or at least slowed down, was the war.
Now you watch things in Russia. Josef will be back again with more purges because he was completely convinced that he had broken the back of a huge conspiracy against him. Yes, to refer back to your earlier statement, Stalin is mad, at least in one area. The alienists would say he was a paranoid and he really became one. My faked papers triggered corroborating confessions from my victims that totally convinced the great Georgian that he was indeed a few centimeters away from assassination. Fear makes a man so rational and responsive to pity, doesn’t it?
Q: I suppose you have copies of some of your handiwork?
M: Certainly, but it wouldn’t do your Mr. Wisner any good after all. They’re all dead and rotten in their graves now and only Stalin and his next batch of probable victims are still alive to bedevil the world with their lunatic religion. Eventually, when God has ceased having fun with their posings, he will kill them all off and we will all be living in a much better world.
Q: Does anyone know how many died in these purges?
M: No one. Millions, probably twenty million or more died, and when Josef gets the wind up again, millions more will die. Pray that someone doesn’t give him a file showing the United States is planning to attack him or you will find out firsthand what Stalin’s rage is like.
Q: I am so pleased that you have decided to work for us, General.
M: I wouldn’t quote my last comment to anyone else.
Q: Just out of curiosity, if Heydrich took the credit for all this...
M: And he did.
Q: Yes, well what was to prevent him from somehow removing you as a dangerous person? One who had knowledge that could discredit him?
M: Quite simple. Heydrich badly needed my expertise, very badly. He had no experience with the game of counter-intelligence and besides, I told the entire story to Himmler and later, when I had much more power, to Hitler himself. Of course by that time, Heydrich was dead, but I did finesse the violist’s hand.
Q: You refer to Heydrich’s musical accomplishments, no doubt.
M: Certainly. He was as good on the violin as I am on the piano and once we had a lovely afternoon of music with the wife of Admiral Canaries who also played the viola. Isn’t culture such an uplifting thing?
World History
