Stalin's Genocides by Norman M. Naimark

administrative and even genocidal actions.1
    Like the attack on the kulaks, the assault on selected nationalities took place in waves, some more extreme in their scale and violence, some less so. The initial victims of these attacks were the peoples who could be considered diaspora populations of states beyond the borders of the Soviet Union: Germans, Poles, and Koreans. Under 82
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    Stalin, the regime began to draw sharp distinctions between “Soviet” nations and “foreign” nations, designat-ing the latter as “unreliable elements.”2 Members of these nationalities were considered particularly dangerous in the 1930s with fears of an approaching war: the Soviet Germans were a potential fifth column for Nazi Germany; the Soviet Koreans would support Japanese imperialism in eastern Siberia, where they lived; and the Soviet Poles were instruments of the intrigues of Pilsudski’s Poland against the Soviets. But it would miss the essence of the attacks on these peoples to exaggerate the real threats that they posed to Stalin and Soviet power. Not only were the number of spies among these peoples very limited, but there was no reason to think they would be any less loyal during a war than the Russians, Uzbeks, or Belorussians, who were not attacked at all in the same way.
    The vulnerability of the Soviet borders is a matter of historical dispute. But one might suggest that in an environment in which railway accidents, shortfalls in mining production, and grain spoilage were routinely attributed to Trotskyite subversion and Japanese-German spies, resulting in tens of thousands of arrests, torture and forced confessions, and thousands of executions, the war scares and spy mania in the borderlands were part of the same process of inventing enemies and destroying people ultimately for no other reason except to maintain the suspicious and vengeful dictator in power. Of course, the dictator could not separate his own interests from those of the party and state, and highly exaggerated foreign threats became an essential part of both the rhetoric and content removing nations 83
    of Soviet policy making. As we have seen, the threat of war and invasion had been used to justify the First Five-Year Plan, collectivization, and dekulakization at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, even before Hitler had come to power and the Japanese had invaded Man-chukuo. Moreover, the campaign against the nationalities was suspended precisely in 1938–39, when the war was indeed imminent! Much like Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology itself, the threat of foreign invasion became an aspect of the lenses through which Stalin and his lieutenants viewed the world around them. It both justified and motivated their actions independent of the social reality faced by them or of the actual threat of war from abroad.
    Certainly there were signs of the coming of European war on the continent, and Japanese aggression was a fact in East Asia at the end of the 1930s. The events of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) heightened Stalin’s paranoia about subversion and hidden enemies. The Polish intelligence services did indeed send spies to infiltrate the borderlands and Soviet interior, as did the Japanese and the Third Reich. However, it was hardly the case, as Kaganovich asserted at the February 28, 1937, plenum of the Central Committee (in connection with the issue of the alleged “Japanization” of the Soviet railway system), that
    “Japanese-German-Trotskyite agents” had engaged in widespread “wrecking, diversion, spying” on the railways and that they were in cahoots with Soviet bureaucrats and workers at all levels of the state railway administration.
    It also made no sense that, as Stalin asserted, these spies were ready to jump at the throat of Soviet power once the 84
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    war began.3 It should come as no surprise that the railway administration was purged at every level, perhaps more than any other single state