“Quantity has a quality all its own.”
-Stalin
The aphoristic Uncle Joe doomed Soviet officers in both quantity and quality on this date in 1941, shooting 20 Soviet officers at the very moment when Mother Russia could have used them most.
This wouldn’t seem like the ideal time for a purge, but old habits are hard to break.
As the Wehrmacht closed in on Moscow, these prisoners had been evacuated to the Volga city of Kuybyshev (today, Samara). In this, they were already treated more courteously than some.
But any semblance of consideration for these fallen brass — to say nothing of bourgeois indulgences like due process — went out the window when an order arrived from Lavrenty Beria:
“Investigation to be stopped, all to be executed by firing squad without delay.”
They were.
Those “all” included:
-
Fighter ace Lt. Gen. Pavel Rychagov, who had sealed his fate by undiplomatically characterizing Soviet planes as “coffins.” (His wife was shot, too.)
Lithuanian pilot Yakov Smushkevich, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and the Battle of Khalkhin Gol. Smushkevich’s daughter talks about him in this interview.
Gen. Grigori Shtern, who commanded the Battle of Khalkhin Gol.
Baltic commander Aleksandr Loktionov
Ivan Proskurov, an air force officer who’d forewarned of the impending German invasion, without effect. (He had good company.)
Many of this day’s victims were rehabilitated after Stalin fell.
Cold comfort, perhaps, but for their survivors there was bloodier satisfaction: the personal order Beria gave to execute them was in turn used against Beria when he was purged.
It’s a bit tangential, but here‘s an interesting interview with one of their contemporaries in Soviet combat aviation, who managed to survive those terrible years (despite being “taken out to be shot on three occasions” while a POW in Spain). There are some pictures of the planes these men would have used in this thread of a Spanish-language military forum.
On this day..
- 1790: Samuel Hadlock, Mount Desert Island murderer
- 1985: Joachim Knychala, the Vampire of Bytom
- 1949: Nicolae Dabija, anti-communist partisan
- 1784: Dirick Grout and Francis Coven, Boston burglars
- 1996: Arshad Jameel, military man
- 1859: Thomas Ferguson, but not on a Sunday
- 1816: Francisco Jose de Caldas, wise person
- Sometime around 19 AD: Some wicked priests of Isis (... allegedly)
- Feast Day of St. Jude
- 1628: John Felton, assassin of the Duke of Buckingham
- 2008: Michitoshi Kuma, "It can't be undone now"
- 1839: Sebastien-Benoit Peytel, notwithstanding Balzac