Page 134 - The Chief Culprit

e Cleansing y 95

Let’s allow that 40,000 out of 206,000 were executed. is is less than 20 percent. e ques-
tion is the same, only seen from a different perspective: how did it happen that less than
20 percent were executed, but in 1941 the majority of commanders did not have a year of
experience at their occupied post?
We see that the legends about the year 1937 are quite vulnerable. It is enough to ask
the simplest questions—and not one Communist historian will be able to give a reasonable
answer.
July 29, 1938, was the peak of the terror. After this, the intensity dropped drastically.
On September 19, 1938, the chief of the 6th (Manpower) Department of the command staff
of the Red Army, Colonel Shiryaev, presented to the Deputy People’s Commissar of Defense
E. A. Shchyadenko a document that specified the number of commanders dismissed from
the ranks of the Red Army during the period starting in 1937 through September 1938. e
document is kept in the Russian State Military Archive, fund 37837, index 10, case 142,
sheet 93. Here it is—a primary source. e numbers are as follows: in 1937, 20,643 men
were dismissed; in 1938, 16,118, for a total of 36,761.
Let’s turn our attention to one small detail: in the document, the numbers refer not to
“executed” but to “dismissed” men.
For fifty-four years, this document was secret, and only a very limited number of ex-
tremely dishonest men had access to it. ese men committed a crime against history. ey
reported the number—36,761. From this everyone made a seemingly logical deduction: if
the person was fired, he was arrested, and if he was arrested, he was executed.
But this was not the case. Dismissed did not always mean arrested. And arrested did
not always mean executed.
e document gives additional information: out of the number of people dismissed in
1937, 5,811 were arrested, and 5,057 in 1938. In total, 10,868 people were arrested.
We were told of 40,000 executed, but in reality there were 10,868 arrested, and of them
1,654 were executed or died in prison before their trials started. 3
ere is a difference between arrest and execution. Some of those arrested were execut-
ed, but not all of them. I will use an example to explain the difference. In 1937, Commander
of the 5th Cavalry Corps Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovskii was dismissed from the
ranks of the Red Army. He was not just dismissed, but also arrested. But this is not yet an ex-
ecution. He was imprisoned, and then let out. He fought through the entire war. He finished
the war with the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union and commanded the victory parade at
the Red Square. He was not alone among the 10,868 arrested commanders; many of them
were set free.
is is an example of Kremlin propaganda. If the document had been published fully
at the time, stating that so many people were dismissed, so many out of them arrested, but
not all of them executed, this mess would never have arisen. But the people who had access to
the documents purposefully published only fragments of information. e explanations were
omitted, which created the necessary conditions for rumors and legends.
Later on, when thousands of historians and agitators wrote into their works the infor-
mation about forty thousand executed troop commanders, when hundreds of millions of
people remembered this number, the document was fully published, but by then it could not
change anything. Who would pay attention to a small article in a journal for specialists?