Understanding Stalin’s Terror against Western Minorities: The National Operations of the NKVD in Contemporary Academic Research

Abstract

Soviet mass operations against a number of ethnic minorities were one of the most large-scale state-run terror campaigns in European history. The partial opening up of the formerly closed Soviet archives has had an enormous impact on the study of the Great Terror and its most secret part, ‘the national operations of the NKVD’ implemented in July 1937 to November 1938. The aim of this review is threefold. The first is to discuss the main approaches in the recent studies of the national operations of the NKVD with respect to the following topics: the role of Stalin in the dramatic turn of nationalities politics, the intent, implementation, and magnitude of the national operations; and dimensions for further research. The second aim is to examine contemporary academic discussions from the perspectives of the research project ‘Swedes, emotions, and moral diplomacy in the Great Terror. Foreign Office’s rescue operation in the Soviet Union, 1937–38’, in which the author took part. The third aim is to focus on the importance of the local context when accessing both the motives and the implementations of the national operations.

Soviet security police operations against a number of ethnic minorities were one of the most large-scale state-run terror campaigns in European history. However, this was unknown until the 1990s when scholars were given, for the first time, access to the previously classified internal records of the Soviet archives.² The partial opening up of the archives has had an enormous impact on the study of the Great Terror and its most secret part, ‘the national operations of the NKVD’ (национальные операции – the term of internal documentation used by the NKVD) implemented between July 1937 and November 1938.³ Recent developments in research on these national operations are remarkable. Access to archival records on this subject became almost impossible in Russia and Belarus. At the same time, due to the democratization of Ukraine and Georgia, large amounts of the NKVD’s previously classified internal records have recently become available for the researchers. Today, we know that the mass operation by the NKVD against ethnic minorities was one of the most extensive parts of Stalin’s Great Terror.

The aim of this review is: first, to provide a critical overview of the state of research on this topic; second, to discuss the motives of the national operations from the personal perspectives of Joseph Stalin and Nikolay Yezhov; third, to examine the role of ethnicity and citizenship as well as the security dilemma in the mass violence against the representatives of Western minorities using the recently discovered source material at the National Archives of Sweden.

I

The Soviet Union was one of the most pronounced multi-ethnic states in the world. The first census of 1926 counted 188 ethnic groups in the country. By 1926, the Eastern Slavs constituted the majority, or 77.5 per cent, of the total population of 146 million. The next largest ethnic groups in the Soviet Union were the Kazakhs (3,968,289 individuals), Uzbeks (3,904,622), Tatars (3,271,842), and Jews (2,672,499). Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, hundreds and thousands of foreigners had either moved to Russia or become subjects of the Russian empire. The 1926 census reported the presence of 1,238,549 Germans, 782,334 Poles, 398,998 Finns (including Karelians), 213,765 Greeks, 154,666 Estonians, 141,703 Latvians,and 111,296 Bulgarians in the Soviet Union. There were also 390,385 foreign citizens residing in the country.⁴

The early Soviet nationalities policy was totally different from that of tsarist Russia. The imperial government supported the soft cultural assimilation of ethnic minorities, especially Ukrainians and Belarusians, which were integral parts of the Great Russian nation.⁵ The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, declared their support for ethnic minorities, a policy known as Leninist nationalities policy. As Yuri Slezkine has pointed out, ethnicity was not at the core of the Marxist understanding of society. But for the Bolsheviks, inheriting a multi-ethnic empire with various ethnicities was a reality that they had to deal with, and Lenin took particular interest in the problems of ethnicity.⁶ In the 1920s, the Soviet nationalities policy was characterized by a striving for the so-called indigenization (коренизация) in which non-Russian populations were supposed to be actively involved in creating administrative autonomies on their own specific terms. Ethnic cultures were encouraged by the Soviet slogan ‘national [i.e. ethnic] in form and socialist in content’.⁷ The huge experiment of Soviet multiculturalism included the establishment of autonomous territories, the training of native cadres, the creation of written languages, the publishing of native-language textbooks, and the formation of native systems of education and the press. With the help of indigenization, the Bolsheviks tried to draw ethnic minorities over to their side.⁸ The enormous administrative rebuilding of the state according to ethnographical and linguistic borders was accomplished in 1923–36. By 1937, the Soviet Union consisted of eleven Soviet republics, twenty-three autonomous republics, eight autonomous oblasts, nine national districts as well as thousands of so-called national and indigenous village councils. The Leninist nationalities policy’s support of ethnic minorities had undergone significant changes when, in the summer of 1937, the Stalinist Politburo ordered the NKVD to begin mass operations against various ethnic minorities. The largest national operation was against the Polish, when 139,815 Soviet Poles were arrested and 111,071 were executed.⁹ In addition, 56,787 ethnic Germans were arrested in the course of the German operations, of which 41,898 individuals were shot by the decision of двойка, a two-person body made up of the NKVD chief and procurator. About a thousand of the victims were foreigners, citizens of Nazi Germany and Austria.¹⁰ A further 17,851 Soviet Latvians were arrested and 13,444 of them were executed. The next operation was against the Finnish with over 12,000 victims, of whom 9,078 were murdered. Several other ‘national operations’ were organized by the NKVD against Greek, Bulgarian, Afghan, Romanian, and Iranian descendants. A number of smaller so-called ‘national lines’ were carried out by the NKVD at the same time as the national operations. The NKVD records mention American, Estonian, Japanese, Italian, Swedish, and other lines. In sum, 335,513 individuals were arrested in July 1937 to November 1938 in the course of national operations. Of those arrested, more than 70 per cent (247,157) were executed.¹¹

II

Joseph Stalin personally initiated the first (German) national operation on 25 July 1937 and instructed the NKVD that it concerned ‘all Germans [meaning both ethnic Germans and citizens of Germany] working in our military and chemical factories, electrical stations and at construction sites in all regions’.¹² On 31 January 1938, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks confirmed Stalin’s approach and stressed that the mass operations against Poles, Latvians, Germans, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Iranians, Harbinites, and Chinese, as well as Romanians, must be applied to both foreign and Soviet citizens according to existing directives of the NKVD.¹³ These documents are important evidence regarding the discussion about the motives of the national operations. Stalin referred to all Germans in all regions and did not separate between German citizens and ethnic Germans. His first proposal was limited to Germans from urban centres; however, we know that during the operation, the rural German population suffered as well. Stalin personally explained the motives and aims of the totally new wave of terror. In his speech to the party leadership in March 1937, he introduced a term ‘uprooting’ (выкорчевывание). He borrowed this word from the forest industry dictionary. The technical meaning of uprooting is to remove the stumps and roots of trees and shrubs when clearing an area in preparation for road construction works. The political meaning of the term signified a complete extermination of the arrested people. The aim of the new vocabulary was also the dehumanization of people, even those who had working-class origins and were loyal to the Soviet system. Speaking to the top military and NKVD officers in June 1937, Stalin stressed that ‘We will kill every enemy. If he is an Old Bolshevik, we will destroy his relatives, his family. We will destroy anyone without mercy who with his deeds or thoughts strikes a blow against the unity of the socialist state.’¹⁴ Unlike the early Soviet concept of class enemy, a new broader term of ‘enemies of the people’ (враги народа) was introduced in the constitution of 1936 and established by the mass media. As Amir Weiner pointed out, the 1936 constitution proclaimed that socialism had triumphed in the country, which by the way meant that internal hostile social groups (nobility, kulaks, priests, etc.) had been totally vanquished.¹⁵ Therefore, the new concept of ‘enemies of the people’ enabled the arrest of any individual regardless of class origin and political affiliation and was to some extent a basis for the state-run terror against national minorities.¹⁶ The NKVD used a special language in order to dehumanize victims and hide mass crimes in documentation, like ‘the first category of people’ (первая категория – i.e. those who were murdered) and ‘the second category’ (вторая категория – i.e. those who were sent to the Gulag).

From the very beginning, the national operations were orchestrated by Stalin and Yezhov personally. From January 1937 to August 1938, Stalin received from the head of the NKVD Nikolay Yezhov about 15,000 top secret messages (c. 25 per day!) with information about the course of mass arrests, requests for new actions, and copies of interrogation reports. According to the Journal of Stalin’s visits, Yezhov visited Stalin about 290 times during this period and spent in total about 850 working hours in personal meetings with him. As Oleg Khlevnyiuk has pointed out, this means that the direct supervision of the Great Terror (including national operations) occupied a significant part of Stalin’s and Yezhov’s working time.¹⁷ How did the head of the NKVD explain the motives, target groups, and magnitude of the national operations? Being arrested in 1939, Yezhov explained the start of national operations for the following reasons. First, the official one, according to which ‘the aim of massive operations against people of foreign origin was to destroy the base of the foreign intelligences’. Second, the conspiracy one, according to which the national operations were an anti-Bolshevik complot inside the NKVD leadership aiming to ‘cause a rapid mass discontent with the Soviet power in ethnic borderlands and to create a negative public opinion about the Soviet regime in European countries’. The second reason seems fictitious, since being under arrest, Yezhov, to save his life, said what the investigators wanted to hear. However, he admitted that people arrested during the national operations were persecuted ‘only on ethnic grounds’. When asked by the investigator why in this case people of other nationalities suffered in the Polish and Finnish operations (for example, Belarusian and Ukrainian Catholics during the Polish operation and Karelians during the Finnish operation), he gave the following answer: ‘there were no limits for the arrests within these operations, which means that the NKVD could operate with an unlimited number of arrested people. Therefore, I gave the order to the local chiefs of the NKVD to arrest as many people as possible.’¹⁸ Some important information from Yezhov’s interrogation concerns international reactions to the national operations. According to Yezhov, ‘the most energetic reaction’ came from the Iranian government, which protested the repression of Soviet Persians. Teheran even raised this question in negotiations with representatives of other countries and proposed a joint diplomatic note. In addition, several retaliatory repressions were undertaken in Iran against Soviet citizens. The Greek government protested the repression and expulsion of Greek citizens. The Finnish government protested the arrests of Finns and demanded their release. The governments of Great Britain, Germany, Poland, and France did the same.¹⁹ Finally, according to Yezhov, the prominent French writer Romain Rolland sent a letter to Stalin, in which he asked to be informed as to whether it was true that repressions against foreigners had begun regardless of their attitudes to the Soviet Union. Rolland argued his request by the fact that a number of negative articles had appeared in the European press regarding the arrests of foreigners in the USSR.²⁰ It seems that unprecedented international pressure led to some changes in the NKVD tactics from the mass arrests of foreigners to their administrative expulsions from the USSR, especially those who came from neutral countries (e.g. Sweden) and did not represent nationalities, which were the main subject of national operations. However, this hypothesis needs further investigation.

Stalin’s idea about the existence of massive internal espionage networks became a basis for the propaganda campaign. Dozens of booklets and thousands of articles were published in 1937–8 describing espionage activities against the Soviet Union and arrests of hundreds of foreign agents across the country. The booklets addressed different groups in the society: Party and Soviet officials, NKVD officers, kolkhoz leaders, and children.²¹ Stalin personally edited the contents of some articles before they were published by leading central newspapers.²² Mass media was a main tool for the explanation of the aims of national operations and its target groups. Newspapers which were published in ethnic borderlands are of special interest. The local newspapers not only reprinted the central media’s material but also adopted the plot of articles for different regions and the representatives of specific minorities. In Ukraine, the authorities paid attention to Polish and German minorities. In the Leningrad region and in Karelia, it was the Finns. For example, the Murmansk press explained the reasons for the on-going arrests of officials in the Finnish national district as follows: ‘the enemies of the people, hangdog bourgeois nationalists, occupied the leading positions in the district and, following the orders of their fascist masters, started to disorganize the kolkhoz system and to destroy the Navy’.²³ The local opinion-makers brainwashed the readers into believing that the mass arrests of Finnish-speaking officials and the total elimination of Finnish-language schools were ‘in fact’ for the good of Soviet Finns:

It was the people’s enemies, nationalists Peterson, Lahdenperä, and Salo, who implemented the Finnization of our district, claiming that everything must be in Finnish, even though only 20 per cent of the population of Murmansk are Finns. They fought hard against the Russian language, tried to preserve the isolation of the Finnish population and despised everything Russian, that is, the Soviet [sic!]. Their politics achieved some success and we now have Finns living in the Soviet Union who do not know the Russian language and do not want to study it. Our young people who graduate from the seven-year [Finnish] school do not speak Russian at all. As a result, these people’s enemies have built on the Kola Peninsula a Chinese wall between the Finnish and Russian peoples…In fact the Finnish language does not allow our Finns to grow culturally together with all the Soviet people and take part in the development of the socialist culture. On the contrary, it paves the way for the development of a bourgeois culture in the spirit of nationalism. Ignorance of the Russian language puts Finns below Russians. Finnish literature in the Soviet Union is extremely poor, and lack of a knowledge of the Russian language results in a loss of all perspectives. Universities work in Russian. Therefore, the resolution [On the elimination of native-language schools] is timely and politically correct. The Russian language is the language of Lenin and Stalin [sic!], the language of Revolution that opens a wide road for our youth.²⁴

On the one hand, the national operations were secret; their dates, progress, and concrete results were not reported in the mass media. On the other hand, in the remote borderlands (like the Murmansk region) it was quite necessary for the authorities to explain what was going on in order to calm the bystanders and to call the kolkhoz leadership for assistance to the NKVD flying squads. The source demonstrates a new course of the Soviet nationalities policy, which emerged during the national operations. The previous politics of the indigenization in which non-Russian minorities were encouraged to develop their native culture in form and socialist in content (национальное по форме, социалистическое по содержанию) was proclaimed wrong and Russification was described as the only way out for the Soviet Finns living in the border area to Finland. However, the ideology of internationalism, as we see from the quotation, was not totally rejected, and the propagandists did not accuse entire nationalities of treason.²⁵ This made the issue of ethnicity and security one of the most interesting topics in the discussion on the motives and nature of national operations.

III

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, historians have gained access to previously unavailable archival records.²⁶ They have brought to light the mass operations of the NKVD against ethnic minorities, the less known part of the Great Terror. The first academic publications on the national operations were published in the 1990s. These publications presented a basic empirical approach to the study of national operations.²⁷ The next important step was the publication of archival sources from Ukraine, which in the beginning of this century has opened formerly closed archives of the KGB for scholars.²⁸ Today, we know that the national operations were one of the Great Terror’s largest campaigns. They also had the highest death rate of the arrested people and in many ways are like ethnic cleansing. These facts have led to further academic discussion. How can the motives and goals of the national operations be explained? The first group of scholars argues that the national operations could be characterized as crimes against humanity based on ethnic criteria. The main task for scholars who support this concept is to identify in the sources the intent to destroy an entire ethnic group in the course of the national operations.²⁹ Other scholars focus on the security dilemma in the border area, suggesting the need to secure the ethnic integrity of Soviet areas bordering on non-socialist enemy states. They stress the role of international factors and believe that representatives of ethnic minorities were not executed owing to ethnicity but rather their relation to countries of their origin, which were hostile to the Bolshevik regime. In short, it involved the prevention of potential military aggression.³⁰

Eva Toulouze represents those scholars who pay attention to the issue of ethnicity in the case of national operations. In her micro-historical study of the Finno-Ugric intelligentsia in the Volga region, she totally rejects the concept of a security dilemma as being a main factor behind the national operations. She points out that the mass arrest of Finno-Ugric cultural activists took place in the remote Volga region and shows that the Kremlin’s attitudes toward ethnic minorities had already changed by the end of the 1920s. The unity of Soviet culture modelled after Russian language and culture was now favoured. She concludes that the repression that struck the Finno-Ugric intellectuals was not primarily motivated by the fact that the Finno-Ugric peoples had sister nations in Finland and Hungary. Loyalty to purportedly hostile foreign nations was used by the NKVD as a cause for suspicion, but the Stalinist leadership feared ethnicity as such, and the purpose of the state-run mass violence was to control and subjugate local nationalism.³¹ As we mentioned before, the national question was very much part of the Bolshevik political landscape. At the same time, the Kremlin saw the growing nationalism as a threat to the construction of the socialist society based on internationalism.³² Peter Blitstein explains how the eradication of the native schools, as well as the increased Russification of the educational sphere, which was implemented during the national operations, illustrate Stalin’s concept of nation-building.³³ More research is necessary on the connection between the national operations and the destruction of non-Russian religious organizations. For example, the purges of Soviet Germans, Finns, Latvians, and Estonians included arrests of Lutheran pastors across the country. At the end of 1938, all Lutheran priests in the Soviet Union were shot or sent to the Gulag. This led to the collapse of Lutheran religious institutions in the Soviet Union. The elimination of clergy, schools, and cultural institutions in 1937–8 accelerated the forced Russification of ‘Western minorities’.³⁴

Valentina Zhiromskaya discovers that, from the very beginning, the NKVD was also involved in the mapping of ethnic minorities. The chief of staff at the Central Statistical Office was approved by the secret police, and each local branch of the office had a police officer posted for duty who collected and analysed the statistical and ethnographic reports and publications. The Central Statistical Office regularly sent statistical data to the NKVD.³⁵ In Ukraine, the department of statistics at the NKVD continuously counted members of different ‘suspicious’ social groups among foreign citizens and re-emigrants.³⁶ As Peter Holquist notes regarding this issue, ‘with macabre precision the Soviet state indicated region-by-region target victims’.³⁷ The micro-historical approach reveals how the enormous amounts of ethnic data collected in the 1920s to early 1930s were used by the NKVD. For example, in 1929, the Murmansk branch of the Central Statistical Office prepared a statistical report of the region. It contained details on the ethnicity of the population of the Kola Peninsula, with data for Finnish, Norwegian, and Sami villages. During the national operations, this data was used by the Murmansk NKVD to identify suspicious individuals from Finnish, Norwegian, and Sami communities.³⁸

In 2002, the Slavic Review published a discussion between two prominent scholars, Eric D. Weitz and Francine Hirsch. Weitz believes that the Soviet regime had a developed concept of ‘race’, and its nationalities policy, especially during the national operations, could be compared with Nazi racial politics, despite the fact that the Stalinist leadership did not practise what contemporaries thought of as ‘racial politics’.³⁹ Hirsch argues that the Soviet regime and its experts did have an overt concept of race and an ideological position on race, but this is very different from upholding a racist ideology. According to Hirsch, the mass violence against targeted nationalities was premised on the conviction that nationalities (like classes) were socio-historical groups with a shared consciousness and not racial-biological groups.⁴⁰ She examines the role of ethnographers and other experts in the formation of the Soviet state in the 1920s. As known, the Bolsheviks integrated the national idea into the administrative-territorial structure of the new state. Hirsch shows how the scholars and local authorities provided the Soviet regime with ethnographic knowledge and how the detailed mapping of ethnic minorities shaped the new administrative formation of the Soviet Union.⁴¹ The primary way for the implementation of the national operations in 1937 was the mass arrests and large-scale killing of thousands of representatives of certain minorities, not mass deportations. However, there is an exception here, namely the mass deportation of Soviet Koreans from the Far East’s borderland of Manchuria to the inland regions of Central Asia, which was justified with reference to the security risks of Japanese espionage and did not include mass executions.⁴²

A micro-historical approach provides a useful contribution to the discussion of the role of the ethnicity and security dilemma.⁴³ German historians Marc Junge and Daniel Müller look at the role of the ethnic factor in the Great Terror in Georgia. They interpret the Soviet terror in Georgia in terms of regional inter-ethnic conflict. Based on newly obtained access to extensive archival material in Tbilisi, they examine which ethnic groups suffered the most during 1937–8 in Georgia in absolute and relative terms and why. According to the authors, Georgian interests, as opposed to general all-Union interests, seem to be an indispensable basis for understanding the inter-ethnic conflict behind the national operations, because the local (mainly ethnic Georgian) leadership used the national operations initiated by Moscow to diminish ethnic minorities. They show how the regional leadership of Soviet Georgia used the national operations as systematic and violent disciplining, subjecting and marginalizing local ethnic minorities, especially Abkhazians.⁴⁴ The tiny minority of Russian Sami in the border area to Finland were subjects of the Finnish operation of the Murmansk NKVD. The secret police accused the Sami people of being members of a fictitious underground paramilitary organization. The ‘aim’ of the rebel organization was said to be to destroy the Soviet regime and establish a Sami republic as a Finnish protectorate. In 1937–8, the Sami population of Russia decreased owing to mass arrests. A significant proportion of victims (11.5 per cent) belonged to the native intelligentsia created by the Bolsheviks during the previous decade of indigenization.⁴⁵ The state-run terror against Sami people had long-term consequences and resulted in the present-day vulnerability of this indigenous people of Russia.⁴⁶

Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala discuss the importance of geographical factors and the ethnic composition of local population for the direction of national operations. Like in the Murmansk region, the line of national operations in Karelia was determined by the proximity of Finland to the Soviet Union and by the significant number of Finnish immigrants living in the Karelian autonomous republic.⁴⁷ The primary targets of the national operations in Karelia were the so-called Finnish deserters (финские перебежчики). About 800 of the c. 6,500 North American Finns were arrested during the national operations. The brunt of repression in this group was against men in the age group of 40–50 years. This can be explained by the fact that, in the eyes of the NKVD, people who had been mature citizens of Western countries were potential spies.⁴⁸ The epicentre of the Finnish operation of the NKVD was Karelia. Here, the Finns, whose population share in the mid-1930s barely exceeded 3 per cent, comprised 41 per cent of all the victims of the Great Terror. However, many Vepsians (the representatives of Finno-Ugric peoples), as well as Swedes, were also arrested and executed in the Finnish operation.⁴⁹ The term Finnish was defined by the authorities in a very broad sense. The NKVD had cleansed Karelian society from people of Finnish descent who immigrated to the Soviet Union not only from Finland, but from Sweden, Norway, the USA, and Canada. Many of them kept their non-Finnish citizenship; however, the NKVD defined them as ‘the Finns’. Why among the Finnish victims of national operations can we find many citizens of Sweden? We will discuss this issue in the next section.

Vladimir Khaustov and Lennart Samuelson represent the school dealing with the security dilemma behind the national operations. They discuss the erroneous exaggeration of the foreign policy factor and state that many victims of the national operations came from the easily controlled semi-literate and poor groups of the population, not from the well-educated strata. This means that the terror was directed against individuals who in Soviet imaginary do not belong to class enemies. Referring to the internal documents of the NKVD, these scholars note that the regional branches of the NKVD realized that the national operations did not have solid grounds for accusations of espionage and anti-Soviet activity but simply performed a social mandate and order of the Kremlin and worked according to the plan orchestrated by the central leadership.⁵⁰ Victor Dönninghaus shows how Stalin’s idea of the state-and-military confrontation directed the national operations against everyone, which in some way was related to the states comprising the ‘hostile capitalist encirclement’ (враждебное капиталистическое окружение). He believes that the selective criterion for the national operations was not ethnicity but a security dilemma. Potential ties with the hostile country (Nazi Germany) were taken as the primary reason for repression against the Germans. The epicentre of the German national operation was the borderlands of the Soviet Union, not the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in the centre of the country.⁵¹

Hiroaki Kuromiya and Andrzej Pepłoński examine the political goals of the national operations. They point out that hampered access to Russian archives tends to result in the neglect of factors concerning intelligence and counter-intelligence. These kinds of sources remain classified in Russia. However, the lack of Russian records should not obscure our understanding of the national operations. In the 1930s, Germany, Poland, and Japan were among the countries most actively engaged in undercover activities against the Soviet Union. Their methods were known as ‘total espionage’. Stalin took no chances, turning the tables on these countries by practising the same method. Thus, according to Kuromiya and Pepłoński, the national operations should be seen as the culmination of Stalin’s idea of total counter-espionage – the total elimination of any possible foreign penetration into the Soviet state apparatus and society.⁵² In another study, Volodymyr Semystyaha and Igor Tatarinov explore the implementation and outcome of the mass operation against the German minority in Ukraine. People of German descent amounted to 10 per cent of the victims of the Great Terror in Ukraine, whereas among the entire republic population, ethnic Germans in 1937 amounted to only 1.5 per cent, or c. 408,000 individuals. The authors show that the main objective of the mass violence targeting Germans was to cleanse the public administration and the spheres directly associated with the country’s defensive capabilities. The high concentration of Germans alongside the western border caused a Soviet fear of potential future military conflict with Germany. Therefore, the security dilemma played, according to these authors, a key role in the German operation.⁵³

Francine Hirsch pointed out that the Soviet regime determined that Germans within its borders posed a danger, largely in response to Hitler’s claim (supported by the League of Nations) that it was entitled to intervene in the affairs of ‘ethnic Germans’ in the Soviet Union. In a period of international conflict, Stalin and his NKVD began to characterize all nationalities that other states could attempt to claim based on ethnic-national ties, like Germans and Poles, as suspect.⁵⁴ Andrey Savin proposed to look at the national operations as an interplay between the ethnicity and security dilemma. To explain the phenomena of national operations, he developed the new conceptual term the ethnicization of Great Terror. On one hand, he pointed out that the Stalinist leadership classified certain national minorities as hostile and counter-revolutionary as early as the 1920s. He also argued that the NKVD directives described sweeping mass arrests of members of foreign minorities without any evidence of any crimes. In 1937, this concept became the ideological basis for the national operations. On the other hand, his study on the implementation of the German operation in Siberia cast doubt on the unambiguity of ethnicity as the main and only criterion for the national operations. At the same time, according to Savin, the security dilemma was not significant since the large-scale terror against Siberian Germans occurred in the very remote and inland region of the USSR.⁵⁵

Nicolas Werth was one of the first to draw attention to the fact that it was not just ethnic Poles who were arrested in the Polish operation orchestrated by Stalin and Yezhov. The findings in Ukrainian archives confirm this thesis. For example, during only a two-week span in September–October 1938, the troika of the Stalino region in Ukraine reviewed 76 cases within the German operations. A total of 69 individuals were sentenced to death, and 7 persons were sent to the long-term prison in the Gulag. The death rate in this case was 90.8 per cent. All the victims were men. However, only 80.2 per cent of the sentenced were ethnic German, that is, 14 individuals were non-German (8 Ukrainians, 5 Russians and 1 of Polish origin). Why and how did persons of non-German origin become victims of the German operation? Ukrainian Konstantin Knysh served during the First World War in the Russian imperial army and was in German captivity. Moreover, he had a German wife. Ukrainian Iosif Tigera was counted as ‘Austrian’ because he was born in Galicia, a former province of the Habsburg empire. In these cases, ‘a connection’ to a foreign country was a criterion for arrest, not suspicious ethnicity. However, the same list of victims includes some people without any connection to Germany or Austria. Moreover, according to the local NKVD, one of them was ‘a Polish agent’, while another was classified as ‘a Ukrainian nationalist’.⁵⁶ The implementation of the Great Terror on the local level raises a question about the effectiveness of the Soviet secret police. John A. Getty has pointed out that the ambiguous targets, unrealistic plan, and short deadlines assigned from Moscow in combination with the lack of human and material resources of local branches of the NKVD created the most appalling organizational chaos.⁵⁷ As a result, the local policemen sometimes were simply arbitrary, casting a net that caught many people without any reason whatsoever.

IV

The examination of local archival material raises more new questions. Returning to the 2002 discussion between Hirsch and Weitz, we can note that both authors agreed on one thing: it is imperative to analyse the Soviet definitions of ‘nation’, ‘nationality’, ‘citizenship’, and other conceptual categories before we can draw our conclusions on the nature of the Soviet mass violence against ethnic minorities and diaspora nationalities. It seems that the national operations were to a high degree accomplished on ethnic grounds. However, ethnicity was not the only criterion for mass arrests. To understand the targets, motives, and implementation of the national operations, we need to look more deeply at the so-called kulak operation (by the order 00447 from the 30 July of 1937). Known as ‘Operation to repress former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements’, this was the largest mass operation of the NKVD during the Great Terror. By the end of 1938, the NKVD had executed 386,798 Soviet citizens to fulfil order 00447.⁵⁸ As Lynne Viola has pointed out, this top-secret operation ‘demonstrated a striking continuity with the repressive campaigns against the kulaks’ during the collectivization in the early 1930s. At the same time, both the kulak and national operations demonstrated a new direction of the Soviet terror. The subjects of these operations were not the representatives of the party elite or the so-called бывшие люди (former people, the members of the old tsarist establishment), but the ordinary people who often had peasant or/and non-Russian background.⁵⁹ To understand better who and how became the victims of the national operations and who were rescued and returned to the historical fatherland, let us discuss the case of the Swedish diaspora in the USSR. Swedes were not the subjects of a specific national operation; however, they were mentioned sometimes as the targets of ‘a Swedish line’ of the Finnish operation.

As a capitalist country, Sweden, nevertheless, was not perceived prior to the Winter War as a state hostile to the USSR. The strong left-wing working movement, the neutral status, early diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia, good economic relations, and the absence of a common border after 1917, as well as the peaceful foreign policy – all these factors gave Sweden a special status in the Soviet imagination. In July 1937, the delegation of Sweden led by Foreign Minister Rickard Sandler visited Moscow. The leading party newspaper Pravda described the visit in very positive terms and presented Mr Sandler as a true Marxist.⁶⁰ We already mentioned that unlike Finns or Latvians, the Swedes did not become a target of the special operation of the NKVD. Moreover, hundreds of Swedes successfully returned home in 1938–9 with the assistance of the Swedish embassy in Moscow. This previously unknown event gives a new perspective on the national operations of the NKVD. Among the questions raised are as follows. How did the international factor affect the fate of Soviet Swedes? Who was saved and why? Who became the victims and why? How did the political activity, class, gender, personal background, and geographical location affect the individual trajectories of Swedish citizens in the Soviet Union? How important was the issue of citizenship for the survival? What role did ethnicity and mother tongue play?

To answer these questions, we need to start with the mapping of the Swedish diaspora in the Soviet Union. The 1926 census had registered 2,495 Swedes living in the country. By ‘Swedes’, the statistical surveys meant persons with Swedish as their mother tongue.⁶¹ Accordingly, many Swedes were classified by Soviet authorities as Finns, and Swedes from Finland as Swedes. Nearly 700 names of adult Swedish citizens can be found in our source material from the National Archives of Sweden, inhabitants in the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1939.⁶² A rough estimation is that only about 20 per cent of them were political emigrants and leftist workers who came to Russia after the 1917 revolution. Based on the archival material, the Swedish population in the mid-1930s USSR can be divided into seven groups according to the background, time of emigration, and fate during the Great Terror:

1. 1. The leftist workers. Not all of them were members of Swedish communist parties and other socialist organizations. At least 150 leftist workers can be found in the material. Many of them came to the Karelian–Finnish Republic in the 1920s and were involved in its cultural and political life. Some of them returned to Sweden, other suffered in the Great Terror.

2. 2. The members of the Swedish Communist party under the auspices of the Communist International (about sixty-five individuals). Most of them ‘freely’ accepted Soviet citizenship due to the fact that they had studied and worked for a long time in the USSR, the possibility to use social benefits, or pressure from the NKVD not to renew their residence permits. At the same time, they were deprived of Swedish citizenship since double citizenship was not recognized by Soviet authorities. This group is over-represented among the Swedish victims of the Great Terror and the embassy of Sweden could not help them.

3. 3. A rather extensive group comprising engineers (about fifty persons). Some of them were born of Swedish parents in Russia or had emigrated to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s when technical specialists from various Western countries were called to work as engineers in heavy industry and plant construction. As a rule, they kept their Swedish citizenship. Most of them returned to Sweden.

4. 4. The largest group (about 300 names) consists of Swedes born in tsarist Russia, who together with their non-Swedish partners and children kept their Swedish passports. Most of them returned to Sweden.

5. 5. Russian widows of deceased Swedish men, or divorcées. At least twenty of them are represented in our source material. Most of them received regular economic support from the embassy of Sweden. They did not suffer in the Great Terror due to natural death or a ‘return’ to Sweden.

6. 6. Baku-Swedes can be classified as a special group of about forty individuals. The families consisted mostly of male, Swedish-born, technical workers in Alfred Nobel Oil Factory and females born in imperial Russia as well as their children born in Azerbaijan. The Baku-Swedes contacted the Swedish embassy in Moscow at the end of 1937 as a group and left the USSR together with their Russian, Azeri, and Georgian partners who were the first to apply to refuse Soviet citizenship, as only then could they accept Swedish citizenship. This group is well represented in the source material and, with an exception of one individual, they all survived the Great Terror.

7. 7. Ukrainian Swedes from the colony of Gammalsvenskby (literally Old Swedish village). They were farmers from the only Swedish colony in Ukraine, founded in 1782. In 1929, the whole village (888 persons) emigrated to the historic fatherland after the agreement between Sweden and the USSR. All of them were granted Swedish citizenship. However, around 250 persons returned to the USSR and in 1931 the village was renamed Röd Svenskby (Red Swedish village). There in the village under the auspices of the Communist International and the supervision of the Swedish Communist party, the experiment implementing the first Swedish kolkhoz took place. In 1937–8, twenty-two villagers were arrested by the NKVD as members of a fictitious espionage organization and shot in Kherson. The Swedish embassy could not help them due the fact that Moscow regarded them as Soviet subjects. Only a couple of local girls, who married Swedish communists, were mentioned in our sources. They were able in the mid-1930s to leave the USSR for Sweden again. Another (large) group of Ukrainian Swedes returned to Sweden through Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

Altogether, about 500 Swedes were saved from the Great Terror and about 200 persons (mostly those who accepted the Soviet citizenship) were arrested by the NKVD, murdered, or sent to the Gulag. The mapping of the Soviet–Swedish diaspora is important since it could help us to understand who the subjects of Soviet terror were, who were not, and why. The mapping also helps us to understand the correlation between the ethnicity and citizenship. As we see, the fate of different categories of Soviet Swedes during the Great Terror was different. The results of our research show that the bilingual (Swedish–Finnish) immigrants from the northern part of Sweden belonged to the group at risk of being arrested by the NKVD. Most of them emigrated from the Kiruna region to Soviet Karelia, where under the auspices of the Communist International the formation of Finno-Karelian autonomy took place. Edvard Gylling (1881–1938), the leader of Soviet Karelia and prominent Finnish leftist politician, was ethnic Swede by origin. The Swedes in Karelia became the victims of the Finnish operation of the NKVD, even though they were not citizens of Finland and had never resided in this country. This paradox could be explained by Stalin’s concept of nationality based primarily on mother tongue and culture, not on citizenship.⁶³ The NKVD officials used Stalin’s concept and saw the Finnish-speaking citizens of Sweden in Karelia as Finns.⁶⁴ The other side of the coin was an absence of any limits on the number of those arrested during the Finnish operation, which led (according to Yezhov) to the detention of the widest possible range of people who in any way fitted the description of the order. At the same time, due to the special status of Sweden, most Swedes in other regions of the Soviet Union survived the Great Terror and returned home with the assistance of the Swedish embassy. This was also possible because of the NKVD directive on the administrative expulsion of foreign nationals.

Alexander Vatlin shows that the administrative expulsion of German citizens that took place at the same time was an interplay between the German embassy, the NKID (Soviet Foreign Office), and the NKVD. He discusses the implementation of German rescue efforts and related legal and ethical norms. Many Germans had emigrated illegally to the Soviet Union after the 1917 revolution. Therefore, identification of individuals and obtaining proof of citizenship – which surely affected the chances of being saved from the terror – were lengthy and complicated. Therefore, many political emigrants from Germany became the victims of the Great Terror. The study shows that the Nazi diplomats would not provide help to the German citizens of ‘alien race’ (i.e. Jewish origin) and to the communists.⁶⁵ The position of the Swedish diplomatic mission, which represented the democratic state and society, was totally different. When the national operations started, the Swedish embassy in Moscow followed the rule of law and democratic values and tried to help every Swede who asked for assistance regardless of the political background, mother tongue, class or gender profile, or geographic remoteness. Moreover, the diplomats never discussed the non-Swedish ethnicity of fellow nationals (i.e. Finnish, Jewish, or German). Regarding the Swedish communists, the diplomats just noted once that due to the acceptance of Soviet citizenship by many of them, these people belonged to the group at risk and the Foreign Office had very limited options to help them.

In the case of the citizens of neutral and social-democratic Sweden in the USSR, the NKVD preferred to push them out of the country, not to arrest and kill them. Administrative expulsion concerns first the technical specialists and those ‘old immigrants’ who went to Russia before the revolution, not Swedish communists who went to the Soviet Union after 1922 to take part in socialist construction. Unlike thousands of Finns or Latvians who suffered in the specific Finnish and Latvian national operations, most Swedes were rescued from the terror and returned home. This happened due to the low profile of Sweden on the Soviet list of the so-called hostile capitalist encirclement. However, two groups of Swedes were at risk: the communists from Sweden who accepted Soviet citizenship or came illegally to the USSR and were unable to rely on diplomatic protection; and Swedish colonists in Ukraine who after a couple years in Sweden returned to the USSR and lost the recently gained Swedish citizenship. As we can see, there is a clear fault-line in the previous literature between those scholars who identify security fears about the existence of Western minorities in border regions (which often border with their compatriots in a foreign country) as the main driver of the repressions and those who see a deeper logic in ethnic cleansing based on biological and cultural origin. This review shows that the most productive way is to analyse the national operations through the prism of a combination of both these approaches and pay more attention to individual cases and specific groups within the diasporas. The role of ethnicity in the national operations of the NKVD is still a key topic for academic discussion on the nature of Soviet terror. Many scholars argue that suspicious ethnic origin was the main cause of the national operations, therefore making them similar to ethnic cleansing. Other scholars believe that actual ethnicity is not a major component of the national operations, and that political and geographical aspects instead played a leading role, in particular, in the contacts with foreign countries and cleansing operations in frontier areas. Further research will shed more light on the nature of Soviet terror against Western minorities, one of the largest crimes against humanity in interwar Europe.