The Myth that Jews were the Ethnic Group most Persecuted by the Soviet Regime. Part One: The Great Terror and National Operations

Somewhere along the line the myth that there were never any Jewish communists in the USSR grew into the additional claim that Jews were the most persecuted group by the Soviet regime and the only one ever subjected to racial discrimination. While concrete information was difficult to get on Soviet history before the partial opening of the archives these claims should have been completely discredited by the limited data that was released from the archives. Aside from the famine deaths in Ukraine and Kazakhstan where Jews were underrepresented among deaths due to higher rates of urbanization and party membership there is the fact that they were neither targeted in the 1937-1938 national operations nor the 1937-1944 forced resettlement of entire nationalities. These two subsets of Soviet repression during the Stalin regime will be emphasized in this essay since they are the two subsets of Soviet repression that specifically targeted groups primarily on the basis of their natsional’nost’ rather than any other factors.

The Great Terror of 1937-1938 had several components and represented the vast majority of executions carried out by the Soviet regime. From 1921 to 1953 the Soviet security organs recorded sentencing 799,455 people to death. A full 681,692 occurred in the two years of 1937-1938 (J. Otto Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997, 7-9).  The largest portion of these death sentences were during the “Kulak Operation” which sought to cleanse the USSR of its last remaining class enemies. The second largest component were the national operations aimed at the espionage services of foreign states and falling heavily on the various diaspora communities in the USSR. There was a “Polish Operation”, a “German Operation”, a “Latvian Operation”, a “Finnish Operation”, a “Greek Operation”, a “Chinese Operation”, an “Estonian Operation”, a “Kharbin Operation”, and others. In total all the national operations during 1937-1938 accounted for a total of 247,157 death sentences even though these diaspora nationalities only accounted for 1.7% of the Soviet population (Terry Martin, An Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union. London: Cornell University Press, 2001, 338-339). Not among the diaspora groups targeted were Jews, Assyrians, and Roma.

The specific targeting of European diasporas in the USSR during the national operations resulted in them having a very high proportion of their population arrested and sentenced to death as compared to other nationalities in the USSR. Of course not everybody arrested in a particular national operation was a member of that nationality, but a majority of them were. Likewise, many members of the diasporas targeted by national operations arrested and sentenced to death during 1937-1938 were victims of the “Kulak Operation.” Nonetheless, looking at the data on total NKVD arrests and from 1 January 1936 to 1 July 1938 we can make some generalizations. The total number of arrests by the NKVD during these two and half years was 1,420,711. The largest number were ethnic Russians with 657,799 arrests or 43.6% of the total. Ethnic Russians made up 58.4% of the Soviet population and thus were considerably under represented among victims of the Great Terror. Similarly Ukrainians with 189,410 arrests or 13.3% of the total were also under represented since they made up 16.5% of the population. In contrast Poles with 105,485 arrests or 7.4% only made up 0.4% of the population and were over represented by a factor of 18.5. Latvians with 21,395 arrests or 1.5% were the next most over represented. They made up only 0.1% of the Soviet population and were over represented among arrests by a factor 15. Finns with 10,678 arrests came in next with 0.7% of arrests and 0.1% of the population or an over representation by a factor of 7. Germans with 75,331 arrests made up 5.33% of arrests and 0.8% of the Soviet population for an over representation of 6.625 times. In contrast Jews were just slightly over represented in the total arrests. The had 30,545 arrests or 2.1% of the total and made up 1.8% of the population of the USSR (Viktor Krieger, Hans Kampen, and Nina Paulson, Deutsche aus Russland gestern und heute: Volk auf dem Weg. Bundesministerium des Innern und Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russland, Stuttgart, 2006, 16). The mass arrests and executions of the Great Terror in 1937-1938 thus did not disproportionately target Jews. It did directly target and disproportionately repress Poles, Latvians, Finns, and Germans.

In terms of absolute numbers the Polish and German operations were the largest two national operations during the Great Terror. The Polish Operation resulted in 111,091 death sentences. Of these some 78,000 were ethnic Poles, more than twice as many people as the number of Jews arrested out of a much larger population. Another 11,000 or so Poles were sentenced to death in other operations during this time. Thus the NKVD carried out close to 89,000 executions of ethnic Poles during 1937-1938. The German Operation resulted in 55,005 convictions of which 41,898 were to death. Ethnic Germans accounted for around 38,000 of these convictions of which about 29,000 received death sentences. Another 17,000 Germans received death sentences in other operations during 1937-1938 for around 46,000 executions (J. Otto Pohl, The Years of Great Silence:The Deportation, Special Settlement, and Mobilization into the Labor Army of Ethnic Germans in the USSR, 1941-1955, Stuttgart, Ibidem, 2022, 69-71). There is no such comparable mass killings of Jews in the USSR by the NKVD or MVD. Indeed fewer Jews were arrested than Germans shot during the Great Terror despite having more than twice the population.

The national operations of 1937-1938 along with the the wholesale forced resettlement of ethnic Koreans from the Russian Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan at this time represents a key turning point in Soviet policy. Class based repression against “Kulaks” and “Former People” became replaced by ethnic based repression against internal enemy nations. Aside from the ethnic Koreans deported to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan the chief victims of the NKVD during this time were Poles, Germans, Latvians, Finns, Estonians, Greeks, Chinese, and other diasporas with an independent homeland outside the USSR. Jews, Assyrians, and Roma were for the most part spared this state violence. Indeed they still held a number of high ranking positions in the Soviet regime even after 1939 including the presence of Kaganovich in the politburo until 1957. Presenting them as the greatest victims of the Stalin regime greatly distorts the existing evidence that has been released from the Soviet archives in the last 30 years. Poles, Germans, Latvians, Finns, Estonians, Greeks, Chinese, and Koreans among others were all treated considerably worse by the Soviet government than Jews.