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Between October 1940 and February 1942, in spite of theAxis attack on the Soviet Union from June 1941, theRed Army, in particular theSoviet Air Force, as well asSoviet military-related industries were subjected to purges byJoseph Stalin.
TheGreat Purge ended in 1939. In October 1940 theNKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs), under its new chiefLavrentiy 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 ofanti-Soviet activity,sabotage, and spying. The wave of arrests in the military-related industries continued well into 1941.
In April–May 1941, aPolitburo 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 GeneralPavel Rychagov. In May, a GermanJunkers Ju 52 landed inMoscow, 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 theconspiracies of 1937–1938. Suspects were transferred in early June from the custody of theMilitary Counterintelligence to the NKVD. Further arrests continued well after the Axis attack on the Soviet Union started on 22 June 1941.
During the first months of the war, scores of commanders, most notably GeneralDmitry Pavlov, were madescapegoats 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 ArmamentsBoris Vannikov (released in July 1941) and Deputy People's Commissar of Defense GeneralKirill 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 GeneralSergey Chernykh, were executed on 16 October 1941, during theBattle of Moscow. Others were sent toKuybyshev, provisional capital of the Soviet Union, on 17 October. On 28 October 1941, twenty individuals were summarily shot near Kuybyshev onLavrentiy Beria's personal order, including Colonel GeneralsAlexander Loktionov andGrigory Shtern, Lieutenant GeneralsFyodor Arzhenukhin,Ivan Proskurov,Yakov Smushkevich, andPavel 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 politiciansFilipp Goloshchyokin andMikhail 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 theMilitary 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 theSpecial Council of the NKVD.
On 29 January 1942, forty-six persons, including 17 generals, among them Lieutenant GeneralsPyotr Pumpur, Pavel Alekseyev, Konstantin Gusev,Yevgeny Ptukhin, Nikolai Trubetskoy, Pyotr Klyonov, Ivan Selivanov, Major GeneralErnst 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 theDay of the Red Army, 23 February 1942.
On 4 February 1942 Beria and his allyGeorgy Malenkov, both members of theState Defense Committee, were assigned to supervise production of aircraft, armaments, and ammunition.
Many victims were exonerated posthumously duringde-Stalinization in the 1950s–1960s. In December 1953 a special secret session of theSupreme Court of the Soviet Union, itself withoutdue process, found Beria guilty of terrorism for theextrajudicial executions of October 1941 and other crimes, and was given the death penalty as his sentence.
