Notes to Pages 149–153 233- Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You Comrade Stalin: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution
to Cold War (Prince ton, NJ: Prince ton University Press, 2000), 5, which states: “Stalin began
to oversee the central press personally at this time.... From the late 1920s any initiative by
Pravda or Izvestiia required the Central Committee’s clearance.” - Barry McLoughlin, “Mass Operations of the NKVD, 1937–8: A Survey,” in
Stalin’s Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union, ed. Barry McLoughlin
and Kevin McDermott (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 121.
CHAPTER 7 : THE KOREAN DEPORTATION AND LIFE
IN CENTRAL ASIA, 1937 – EA R LY 1940 S
- Li and Kim, Belaia kniga, 111.
- Freeze, Rus sia, 474–475.
- Coox, Nomonhan, 84.
- Wada, “Koreans in the Soviet Far East,” 45.
- Examples of “socially harmful ele ments” are religious leaders (priests, Buddhist
monks), kulaks, and criminals. - The order to deport all Poles was not given until October 1937; see Martin, “Ori-
gins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” 854. The Resolutions 1428–326ss and 1647–377ss (the
two combined to deport all Koreans from the RFE) were issued by September 28, 1937; see
Li and Kim, Belaia kniga, 64–65, 80. - Regarding the Kwantung Army group, see Suturin, Delo kraevogo masshtaba, 188.
For the PMO, see Snyder, Sketches, 121. The rationale for the deportations of the Soviet
Germans, Finns, and Latvians was also to prevent Finnish and Latvian intelligence, the
Gestapo, the German General Staff, and Latvian counterrevolutionary groups from con-
ducting further operations on Soviet soil. These anti- Soviet groups were specifically named.
See McLoughlin, “Mass Operations,” 122. - Khlevniuk, “Objectives of the Great Terror,” 172–173. McLoughlin disagreed with
Molotov’s assessment, stating, “The victims of the latter campaigns... were ‘objective enemies’
in v en ted to fit a pos si ble crime in the anticipation of ‘objective developments’ (war) and re-
gardless of whether it had been committed or not.” See McLoughlin, “Mass Operations,” 144. - Martin, “Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” 855.
- However, the aims of the Terror in Mongolia were diff er ent. The three main
goals w ere to eliminate Choibalsan’s po liti cal enemies and rivals (Choibalsan was the
Mongol CP’s general secretary), the Buriats, and Buddhist religious leaders and lamas.
See Baabar, Twentieth Century Mongolia, 361. See also pages 325–364 for the complete
history of the Terror in Mongolia. - “In the final analy sis, both the Politburo and the Bureau functioned as consulta-
tive structures under Stalin, who himself constituted the supreme authority. Decisions
on key questions of military strategy and foreign policy were his exclusive domain.” See
Khlevniuk, Master of the House, 243. - Stalin began to oversee the central press personally at this time. Ivan Gronskii, a
member of Izvestiia’s editorial staff and editor of the paper from 1931 through 1934, re-
called meeting with him almost daily in 1927; see Brooks, Thank You Comrade Stalin, 5.
Also, Gorlizki and Mommsen stated, “... the purges were initiated by a small central lead-
ership u nder Stalin.” See Yoram Gorlizki and Hans Mommsen, “The Po liti cal (Dis) Orders
of Stalinism and National Socialism,” in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism