In Spain, the NKVD oversaw purges of anti-Stalinist elements of the Republican forces (including Trotskyist and anarchist factions).[101] Notable were the execution of Andreu Nin, Spanish POUM and former government minister, Jose Robles, a left-wing academic and translator, and many members of the POUM.[102][103][104]
Of six members of the original Politburo during the October Revolution who lived until the Great Purge, Stalin was the only one who survived in the Soviet Union.[40] Four of the other five were executed; the fifth, Trotsky, was forced into exile in 1929 and was assassinated in Mexico by Soviet agent Ramón Mercader in 1940.
The victims were convicted in absentia and in camera by extrajudicial bodies. NKVD troikas sentenced indigenous "enemies" under NKVD Order No. 00447, and a two-man dvoiki (NKVD Commissar Yezhov and main state prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky or their deputies) sentenced those arrested for national reasons.[105]
Victims were executed at night in prisons, in the cellars of NKVD headquarters or in a secluded area, usually a forest. NKVD officers shot prisoners in the head with pistols.[70][106] Other methods of killing were used on an experimental basis; in Moscow, the use of gas vans to kill victims during transportation to the Butovo firing range has been documented.[107]
Astronomers
About 10-20% of Soviet astronomers fell victim to the Great Purge, with a number of these being executed. Others were imprisoned, some of which disappeared in the Soviet prison system with their ultimate fate being unknown. Most surviving astronomers persecuted during the purges did not return to astronomy.[108] The purges of astronomers were spearheaded by Vartan Ter-Oganezov, an anti-relativity Soviet pseudoscientist who attacked the theory of general relativity and the theory of cosmic expansion on the grounds that they were inconsistent with dialectical materialism. Ter-Oganezov was widely known for being combative and cantankerous towards those he ideologically disagreed with and liberally using invective, and he accused astronomers of various political and philosophical crimes at sessions of the Astronomy Council of the Academy of Sciences. He also was since 1930 the editor in chief for the amateur astronomy journal Mirovedenie, which he used to disseminate denunciations of astronomers whose cosmological theories conflicted with dialectical materialism.[109]
On the night of 6-7 November 1936, numerous researchers at Pulkovo Observatory in Leningrad were detained in a mass arrest, followed by further arrests in December 1936 and throughout 1937. The pretext for these arrests was a fabricated confession from the Pulkovo astronomer Boris Numerov of collaboration with Germany and espionage, who had been arrested and interrogated in October of that year after a disgruntled graduate student had denounced Numerov to the NKVD. Numerous committees investigated Pulkovo, on which Ter-Oganezov served and consistently was the sole member recommending the committees to officially publish negative findings about Pulkovo. Ter-Oganezov denounced the director of Pulkovo, Boris Gerasimovich, for alleged sabotage at multiple sessions of the Astronomy Council of the Academy of Sciences in 1937, along with Numerov and other Pulkovo astronomers who had been arrested earlier. Ter-Oganezov also published further vitriolic denunciations of Gerasimovich and others in Mirovedenie.[108] Gerasimovich was executed following a show trial on 30 November 1937.[110] Numerov died in prison in 1941.[108]
Ter-Oganezov saw less success in his attacks on Shternberg State Astronomical Institute (GAISh) in Moscow. Despite personally denouncing the director of GAISh, Vasiliy Grigorievich Fesenkov, as a “wrecker”, Fesenkov was never arrested. Although GAISh had a “red graduate student body” composed of ideological communists, most staff at GAISh refused to partake in their denunciations, and accusations by these graduate students against GAISh researchers like Fesenkov and S. N. Blazhko when they failed graduate examinations were generally promptly dismissed.[110]
Ter-Oganezov’s standing waned in the years after 1937, having made many enemies in the professional and amateur astronomical community. Ter-Oganezov’s reputation had also become tainted because of his past association with Mikhail Pokrovsky, who had died in 1932 and had been posthumously denounced as an anti-Marxist during the Purge. Though he regained some influence after World War II during the Zhdanovshchina, he never again achieved the same institutional and ideological power he wielded during the Purge.[109]
Biologists
The Purge also engineered a hostile intellectual climate in the biological sciences, with about 5% of biologists in the USSR being purged.[108] The 1930s saw a rise in the influence of Trofim Lysenko in Soviet science, making topics such as human biological variation and natural selection in human populations politically incorrect and dangerous topics. Researchers such as Georgy Gause self-censored and moved away from ecological and evolutionary theory towards less controversial practical subjects like antibiotics development.[111]
Western émigré victims
Victims of the purge included American immigrants to the Soviet Union who had emigrated from the U.S. at the height of the Great Depression to find work. At the height of the purge, American immigrants begged the U.S. embassy for passports to leave the Soviet Union. Turned away by embassy officials, they were arrested outside by the NKVD. Several were shot dead at the Butovo firing range.[112] One hundred forty-one American Communists of Finnish origin were executed and buried at Sandarmokh,[113] and 127 Finnish Canadians were shot and buried there.[114]
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