Stalin Vs The Deep State

The years of Stalinist terror endure in the historical memory as one of the most perplexing episodes of mass violence in modern history. It’s the single topic I’ve spent the most time researching, yet the deeper I dig into this historical episode, the more difficult it becomes to isolate any single cause, or even set of causes. What initially appears to be one historical phenomenon opens up into a series of interconnected processes, each with its own institutional dynamics. I cannot resolve the riddle of the Terror here, or perhaps ever for that matter, but I hope to illuminate a dimension of these events that has largely been neglected in Western scholarship. In this writing, I approach the Terror from a different angle, drawing primarily on the work of the Russian historian Leonid Naumov (2010), whose revisionist interpretation shifts attention away from the conventional focus on Stalin himself and towards the internal dynamics of the NKVD, which, he argues, put the Great Terror into motion.

Before Yezhov’s “mass operations” against entire segments of the population, Stalin initiated the purge of the political elite, removing officials he had come to see as unreliable, compromised, or as a threat. However, to disseminate violence on such a scale meant greatly empowering the NKVD. The NKVD’s influence grew in direct proportion to its perceived usefulness to the leadership. In other words, the political interests of its senior officials were served by Stalin’s heightened perception of internal threats. The greater the perceived danger of subversion, the greater the authority and political leverage the NKVD acquired. This gave the NKVD leadership a clear motive in inflating Stalin’s perception of threat.

As the scale of repression spiralled out of control, it eventually began threatening the very NKVD officials who had directed it. This gave them a powerful shared interest in resisting Stalin. Since these officials controlled much of the coercive apparatus and had established extensive personal-political networks within it, Naumov considers it plausible that they could have moved from factional self-preservation to a coordinated conspiracy against Stalin. Indeed, Yezhov’s top brass of the NKVD became dominated by a political faction known as the North Caucasian clan, a group consisting of experienced Chekists with a particularly brutal history of leading repression. Naumov explains how the USSR’s clan structure, with its various factions jockeying for influence, enabled political actors within the security apparatus to manoeuvre in ways that enhanced the power of their clan rather than fulfilling their mandate and, in the process, established greater autonomy from the centre. Eventually, Naumov argues, Stalin lost direct control over the NKVD as its repressive capacities became concentrated in the hands of this tight-knit group of individuals belonging to a single political network.

According to Naumov, Yezhov’s NKVD knew they would have little time left if Stalin concluded they were conspiring against him, making pre-emptive action a logical, if highly risky, course. Unlike other potential conspirators, moreover, the NKVD leadership possessed the coercive machinery capable of translating such ambitions into action. Ultimately, however, Naumov argues that they waited too long and were destroyed before they could act upon any potential conspiratorial aims.

In the world of conspiracy-thinking, the term “deep state” evokes a shadowy network of largely unknown state actors whose political interests diverge from those of the central government, allowing them to exert influence over the leadership. In some cases, the deep state attempts to remove or replace the visible leadership. As we shall see, this concept provides a useful framework for the NKVD of the 1930s. Indeed, the principal actor within this “NKVD deep state” was not even its formal leader, Yezhov, but rather a network of security figures, largely unknown today, centred around the enigmatic figure of Efim Evdokimov. We will revisit the significance Efim later in this piece.

Naumov is quite clear that the culpability of other actors does not absolve Stalin or shift responsibility, as is often argued by neo-Stalinist writers. He emphasizes that the Soviet leader signed off on no shortage of executions and did not have objections to the mass execution of those he saw as suspect. Stalin deliberately initiated and authorized a system of mass repression, however he notably did not exercise continuous operational control over everything that subsequently happened within it. Those leading the repressive campaign often escalated and directed the Terror in ways that went beyond what Stalin requested, ultimately bringing the NKVD into conflict with the central leadership. Stalin responded to this dangerous autonomy within the NKVD by annihilating its leadership and replacing it with a new, more dependable leadership coalition (Beria’s group).

Naumov is a scholar who situates himself within the “revisionist school” of Soviet historiography, which centers the internal dynamics of the Soviet political system and institutional conflict instead of treating Terror as the straightforward implementation of a centrally conceived plan dictated by Stalin. Naumov specifically names J. Arch Getty, who pioneered the revisionist current of Soviet historiography, as an influence on his work, and Getty (2013), in turn, has cited Naumov approvingly, particularly in Practicing Stalinism. Though Naumov goes further than Getty in many respects by drawing attention to what he sees as a plausible “conspiracy” against Stalin within the NKVD. Of course, any work arguing that there was a legitimate conspiracy against Stalin, a leader known for staging show trials on fantastical charges for his opponents, will understandably raise eyebrows. Yet, Naumov advances a serious historical argument, and I will evaluate both the evidence he presents and the conclusions he draws from it.

The most speculative and weakest part of Naumov’s argument is the leap from demonstrating that the NKVD possessed political interests distinct from, and in conflict with, the central leadership to the stronger claim that its leaders may have explicitly conspired to kill Stalin. Yet Naumov’s evidence for an actual assassination plot is considerably weaker, as he essentially reconstructs a motive through an inferential argument based on an accumulation of informal clues and circumstantial evidence.

The real strength of Naumov’s argument lies elsewhere: in demonstrating how the institutional dynamics of the NKVD and the clan structure of Soviet politics produced a semi-autonomous security apparatus capable of pursuing interests of its own. In this way, the semi-autonomy of the NKVD can be seen as a major factor in the origins and escalation of the Terror. Overall, this is a hugely important contribution to the literature that is worthy of greater reception in the West.

Stalin and the NKVD

Before embarking on our explication of Naumov’s account, it is necessary to delineate certain events and clarify our terminology, as Naumov himself does. Notably, we must distinguish between the Great Purge and the Great Terror, which are two distinct, albeit overlapping, processes that are often construed as interchangeable in the popular understanding of the Terror.

Robert W. Davies (2018) distinguishes between an initial “nomenklatura purge,” directed against officials and political elites, and the subsequent “mass purges” of “anti-Soviet elements” and “counter-revolutionary nationalist groups.” The latter involved the mass repression of entire segments of the population considered suspect. While the explanation for either of these strands of repression depends on the historian being cited, the nomenklatura purge is typically understood as Stalin’s effort to destroy perceived political opponents or unreliable elements within the officialdom and then reshape the Soviet ruling elite. In contrast, the Great Terror, according to historians such as Khlevniuk (2009), is better understood as a campaign to identify and eliminate a potential “fifth column” through “mass operations” amid growing fears of war and internal subversion.

While the causes of these two strands of repression were interrelated and mutually reinforcing, it makes little sense to treat them as a single process, given their staggered chronology and distinct mechanisms of repression. The purge began in 1936 with the prosecution of senior political figures and prominent officials, while the mass operations of the Great Terror began the following year, in the summer of 1937, and continued into 1938. Whereas the Great Purges remained principally a political campaign that emanated from the centre, with the central leadership retaining ultimate political authority, the Great Terror extended repression through mass operations whose implementation was far more decentralized and increasingly shaped by regional NKVD initiative. While the Great Purges had populist and “bottom-up” dimensions that I’ve addressed in my other writing (see here and here), one cannot understate their principally centralized character.

Naumov distinguishes these two strands of repression and tries to show that the second grew out of the former by looking at the clan politics of the NKVD. Central to our story is Yagoda, Yezhov’s less notorious predecessor. While Yagoda has hardly endured in historical memory as some kind of moderate, he was a relative moderate compared to his successor. This brings us to William Chase’s (2024) reassessment of the 1936 political trials: the case against Ivan Smirnov and other former Left Oppositionists who were put on trial by Stalin on charges of conspiratorial plotting. (I go over this case in greater detail in my two-part series, “The Conspiracy Against Stalin.”)

Chase argues that, while the many lurid charges of Stalin’s show trials go well beyond what the surviving evidence can substantiate, there was nevertheless a genuine clandestine opposition network that formed the basis of the investigation in this 1936 case. Smirnov and others had maintained covert contacts with Trotskyist figures abroad and participated in efforts to coordinate the various anti-Stalinist opposition currents into a broader bloc. The significance of this is that Yagoda’s investigation had a genuine evidentiary basis, in contrast to the weakly grounded conspiratorial narratives "revealed" by Yezhov. Thus, the transition from Yagoda to Yezhov must be seen as a crucial phase in the radicalization of repression and in the transition from the Great Purge to the Great Terror.

Yagoda belonged to the first generation of senior Chekists, whose careers had been formed in the early Cheka and OGPU. This old security elite was far from unified, however, and consisted of competing personnel networks built around longstanding patronage ties. As the political purges intensified in 1936, these rivalries became increasingly antagonistic. Eventually, some members of the old generation were destroyed, while others advanced their own careers by participating in the repression of former colleagues. Yezhov seized upon the increasingly charged political atmosphere to undermine Yagoda’s credibility, presenting himself as the more resolute prosecutor of terror.

A major event of the 1930s was the assassination of Kirov, which rapidly escalated fears of subversion and infiltration. This investigation was re-opened in 1936. Yagoda was at the head of the investigation, yet Yezhov was “attached as a watchdog” (Getty 1987, 122). This was done because Stalin’s inner circle didn't fully trust Yagoda to run the investigation the way they wanted. With the uncovering of the Trotskyist Left Oppositionist group in 1936, which was formed in 1932, Stalin believed they were now “four years behind,” a testament to his dissatisfaction with Yagoda's work. Ironically, Yagoda's caution and relatively liberal attitude made him a comparatively more reliable evaluator of threats. All this only benefited Yezhov's career ambitions. Petrov and Jansen (2002, 53-54) write: