Between October 1940 and February 1942, in spite of the ongoing German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Red Army, in particular the Soviet Air Force, as well as Soviet military-related industries were subjected to purges by Joseph Stalin.
The Great Purge ended in 1939. In October 1940 the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs), under its new chief Lavrentiy Beria, started a new purge that initially hit the People's Commissariat of Ammunition, People's Commissariat of Aviation Industry, and People's Commissariat of Armaments. High-level officials admitted guilt, typically under torture, then testified against others. Victims were arrested on fabricated[ citation needed ] charges of anti-Soviet activity, sabotage, and spying. The wave of arrests in the military-related industries continued well into 1941.
In April–May 1941, a Politburo inquiry into the high accident rate in the Air Force led to the dismissal of several commanders, including the head of the Air Force, Lieutenant General Pavel Rychagov. In May, a German Junkers Ju 52 landed in Moscow, undetected by the air defense forces beforehand, leading to mass arrests among the Air Force leadership. [1] The NKVD soon focused attention on them and began investigating an alleged anti-Soviet conspiracy of German spies in the military, centered around the Air Force and linked to the conspiracies of 1937–1938. Suspects were transferred in early June from the custody of the Military Counterintelligence to the NKVD. Further arrests continued well after the German attack on the Soviet Union, which started on 22 June 1941.
During the first months of the war, scores of commanders, most notably General Dmitry Pavlov, were made scapegoats for failures. Pavlov was arrested and executed after his forces were heavily defeated in the early days of the campaign. Only two of the accused were spared: People's Commissar of Armaments Boris Vannikov (released in July 1941) and Deputy People's Commissar of Defense General Kirill Meretskov (released in September 1941), although the latter had admitted guilt, under torture. [2]
About three hundred commanders, including Lieutenant General Nikolay Klich, Lieutenant General Robert Klyavinsh, and Major General Sergey Chernykh, were executed on 16 October 1941, during the Battle of Moscow. Others were sent to Kuybyshev, provisional capital of the Soviet Union, on 17 October. On 28 October 1941, twenty individuals were summarily shot near Kuybyshev on Lavrentiy Beria's personal order, including Colonel Generals Alexander Loktionov and Grigory Shtern, Lieutenant Generals Fyodor Arzhenukhin, Ivan Proskurov, Yakov Smushkevich, and Pavel Rychagov with his wife, as well as several individuals who had been previously arrested during the immediate aftermath of the Great Purge in 1939, prior to the Red Army Purge of 1941, including politicians Filipp Goloshchyokin and Mikhail Kedrov. [2]
In November 1941, Beria successfully lobbied Stalin to simplify the procedure for carrying out death sentences issued by local military courts so that they would no longer require approval of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court and Politburo, for the first time since the end of the Great Purge. The right to issue extrajudicial death sentences was granted to the Special Council of the NKVD.
On 29 January 1942, forty-six persons, including 17 generals, among them Lieutenant Generals Pyotr Pumpur, Pavel Alekseyev, Konstantin Gusev, Yevgeny Ptukhin, Nikolai Trubetskoy, Pyotr Klyonov, Ivan Selivanov, Major General Ernst Schacht, and People's Commissar of Ammunition Ivan Sergeyev, were sentenced to death by the Special Council. After the explicit approval of Stalin, they were executed on the Day of the Red Army, 23 February 1942.
On 4 February 1942 Beria and his ally Georgy Malenkov, both members of the State Defense Committee, were assigned to supervise production of aircraft, armaments, and ammunition.
Many victims were exonerated posthumously during de-Stalinization in the 1950s–1960s. In December 1953 a special secret session of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union, itself without due process, found Beria guilty of terrorism for the extrajudicial executions of October 1941 and other crimes, and was given the death penalty as his sentence.
SMERSH was an umbrella organization for three independent counter-intelligence agencies in the Red Army formed in late 1942 or even earlier, but officially announced only on 14 April 1943. The name SMERSH was coined by Joseph Stalin. The formal justification for its creation was to subvert the attempts by Nazi German forces to infiltrate the Red Army on the Eastern Front.
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin who was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, during the height of the Great Purge. Yezhov organized mass arrests, torture and executions during the Great Purge, but he fell from Stalin's favour and was arrested, subsequently admitting in a confession to a range of anti-Soviet activity including "unfounded arrests" during the Purge. He was executed in 1940 along with others who were blamed for the Purge.
Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov was a high-level Soviet security official from 1943 to 1946, the head of SMERSH in the USSR People's Commissariat of Defense, and from 1946 to 1951 Minister of State Security or MGB (ex-NKGB). He was removed from office and arrested in 1951 on fabricated charges of failing to investigate the Doctors' Plot. After the death of Joseph Stalin, Abakumov was tried for fabricating the Leningrad Affair, sentenced to death and executed in 1954.
There were a succession of Soviet secret police agencies over time. The first secret police after the October Revolution, created by Vladimir Lenin's decree on December 20, 1917, was called "Cheka" (ЧК). Officers were referred to as "chekists", a name that is still informally applied to people under the Federal Security Service of Russia, the KGB's successor in Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Vsevolod Nikolayevich (Boris) Merkulov was the head of NKGB from February to July 1941, and again from April 1943 to March 1946. He was a leading member of what was later derisively described as the "Beria gang".
The Main Directorate of State Security was the name of the Soviet Union's most important security body within the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) USSR. At the time of its existence, which was from July 10, 1934 to February 3, 1941, the GUGB reflected exactly the Secret Operational Directorate within OGPU under the Council of People's Commissars, which operated within OGPU structure from 1923 to 1931/32. An intelligence service and secret police from July 1934 to February 1941, it was run under the auspices of the Peoples Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). Its first head was first deputy of People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Commissioner 1st rank of State Security Yakov Agranov.
Boris Lvovich Vannikov was a Soviet government official and three-star general.
Aleksandr Dmitriyevich Loktionov – 28 October 1941) was a Soviet general.
Yakov Vladimirovich Smushkevich was the Commander of the Soviet Air Forces from 1939 to 1940 and the first Jewish Hero of the Soviet Union. Arrested shortly before the start of Operation Barbarossa on falsified charges of being part of an anti-Soviet conspiracy, he became the only person to receive the Hero of the Soviet Union twice and then be executed. The charges were posthumously dropped and he was rehabilitated in 1954.
Grigory Mikhailovich Shtern was a Soviet officer in the Red Army and military advisor during the Spanish Civil War. He also served with distinction during the Soviet-Japanese Border Wars and the Winter War. The Soviet authorities accused him of treason and had him shot during Stalin's military purge of 1941.
Komkor is the abbreviation for corps commander, and was a military rank in the Soviet Armed Forces of the USSR in the period from 1935 to 1940. It was also the designation for officers appointed to command a corps sized formation.
Pavel Fyodorovich Zhigarev was the commander-in-chief of the Soviet Air Forces (VVS) twice, and also served as the Chief Marshal of Aviation from 1955–1959.
Pavel Vasilievich Rychagov was the Commander of the Soviet Air Forces (VVS) for a brief time from 28 August 1940 to 14 April 1941. He was removed from that position shortly before Operation Barbarossa and the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, and was executed in a purge of the Red Army several months later.
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated NKVD, was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
Komandarm 2nd rank is the abbreviation to commanding officer of the army 2nd class, and was a military rank in the Soviet Armed Forces of the USSR in the period from 1935 to 1940. It was also the designation to military personnel appointed to command a field army sized formation (XXXX).
The Ministry of Armament was a government ministry in the Soviet Union. Before 1946 it was known as the People's Commissariat of Armament of the USSR.
Boris Veniaminovich Rodos was an officer of the OGPU, colonel of the NKVD and Ministry of State Security, deputy head of the Investigative Department of the Main Board of State Security and People's Commissariat of State Security who was notorious for torturing prisoners during interrogations. His victims came from a variety of high-ranking communists and military officials who fell victim to purges, including Yakov Smushkevich, Grigory Shtern, and Aleksandr Loktionov.
Mariya Petrivna Nesterenko was a Soviet pilot who rose to the rank of major in the Air Force and became a deputy regimental commander before she was executed for being the wife of Hero of the Soviet Union Pavel Rychagov, a victim of one of NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria's purges of the air force. She, her husband, and the other victims were posthumously rehabilitated after Stalin died.
Directorate of Special Departments within NKVD USSR. rus. Управление Особых Отделов при НКВД СССР, (UOO) was an organization created in 1941 to conduct military counterintelligence under one command. The UOO was created to take back control from the retreating Red Army after the German invasion of the USSR and to counter German espionage efforts in the Soviet Armed forces. The principle tactic used by the UOO on Red Army personnel was intimidation and terror.
