July 26, 1938
Head of the NKVD Nikolai Yezhov He sent Stalin a execution list of 139 "Red" commanders. He crossed out only one name and added the following sentence: "For the execution of all 138 people."
By 1938, the terror machine was in full swing in the USSR: Yezhov sent Stalin around 20 "special messages" daily with reports of arrests, punitive operations, interrogation protocols, and requests for new repressions.
After the marshals and high-ranking army commissars, they reached the division and brigade commanders.
I am sending a list of those arrested and subject to trial by the Military Collegium of the first category.
(Yezhov's note to Stalin, classified "Top Secret")
The list includes nine commanders of military districts, heads of the naval and air forces, five people's commissars and several of their deputies, directors of aircraft factories, two chairmen of the State Planning Committee, heads of departments of the Central Committee, first secretaries of the Communist Parties and secretaries of regional committees.
There were no untouchables: even the head of Stalin's personal security was on the list Karl Pauker.
After reviewing the document, Stalin changed the original list from "139 people" to "138." He deleted (for the time being) one name—that of the marshal. Alexandra Egorova, former First Deputy People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR. But six months later, he, too, was executed on charges of military conspiracy and espionage.
Along with Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov also issued a resolution to “execute” (as written in red ink in the original document) the 138 remaining on the list.
The executioners moved quickly down the list: 45 people were shot within two days, another 67 the next day, and another 14 on August 1. The rest were shot in August, one in September, and another only in March 1939. Only their fate remained unknown. Trofim Chubar, brother of a Politburo member.
In just less than a year and a half, from May 1937 to September 1938, the army was repressed 36,761 people, in the navy - more than three thousand. The command and political staff of the Red Army and Navy was purged by a quarter.
Without a war, almost the entire magnificent officer corps, the backbone of the Red Army, perished in the dungeons and camps of the NKVD.
(historian Vladimir Koval)
Yezhov himself had two months left before his resignation – he was “cleaning up” after him Lavrenty Beria. But he also dropped charges against some commanders—those for whom the "troikas" had not yet reached verdicts. Among them were a future marshal and a front commander. Konstantin Rokossovsky and the first commandant of Berlin, General of the Army Nikolay Berzarin.
Yezhov was arrested in 1939 with the participation of Beria. He was accused of plotting an anti-Soviet coup and of sodomy "for anti-Soviet and selfish purposes." He was executed in February 1940. During the investigation and trial, he denied his guilt and believed he had made only one mistake: he had not "cleaned up" the KGB officers themselves enough.
I cleaned out 14 thousand Chekists, but my great fault is that I didn’t clean out enough of them.
I worked like a dog. Tell Stalin that I will die with his name on my lips.
(from the court testimony)
Despite all these major shortcomings and mistakes in my work, I must say that under the day-to-day leadership of the NKVD Central Committee I crushed the enemies greatly.
(from Stalin's resignation letter, November 1938)
After Stalin's death, all but three of Yezhov's "execution" list members were posthumously rehabilitated—Chekists and accomplices to Stalin's crimes: Yakov Agranova, Peter Bulakh и Israel Leplevskiy.
