STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR

BY

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

PART FOUR

SLAUGHTER: YEZHOV THE POISON DWARF 1937–1938

 

17. The Executioner: Beria’s Poison and Bukharin’s Dosage

Minutes before midnight, Stalin sent this laconic telegram: “Okay.”[1] During the first hour of 25 August, a number of limousines cruised through the gates of the Lubianka prison, containing the officials to witness the executions.

A dignified Kamenev and a feverish Zinoviev were led out of their cells and down the steps. Yezhov and Yagoda were accompanied by the ex-hairdresser, Pauker. Vyshinsky as Procurator-General was meant to attend important executions but was said to be so squeamish that he usually sent one of his chief investigators, Lev Sheinin. Mikoyan supposedly said that Voroshilov represented the Politburo.

Stalin never attended torture or execution (though he witnessed a hanging as a child and must have observed violent death in Tsaritsyn) but he respected his executioners. Execution was officially called the “Highest Measure of Punishment,” usually shortened to the terrible letters “VMN” or the acronym Vishka, but Stalin called it “black work,” which he regarded as noble Party service. The master of “black work” under Stalin presided over this sombre but brisk ritual: Blokhin, a pugnacious Chekist of forty-one with a stalwart face and black hair pushed back, was one of the most prolific executioners of the century, killing thousands personally, sometimes wearing his own leather butcher’s apron to protect his uniform. Yet the name of this monster has slipped through history’s fingers.[2] In the theatre of Stalin’s court, Blokhin henceforth lurks in the background, but is rarely offstage.[3]

Zinoviev shouted that this was a “Fascist coup” and begged the executioners: “Please, comrade, for God’s sake, call Joseph Vissarionovich! Joseph Vissarionovich promised to save our lives!” Some accounts have him actually hugging and licking the Chekist’s boots. Kamenev reportedly answered: “We deserve this because of our unworthy attitude at the trial” and told Zinoviev to be quiet and die with dignity. Zinoviev made such a noise that an NKVD lieutenant took him into a nearby cell and despatched him there and then. They were shot through the back of the head.

The bullets, with their noses crushed, were dug out of the skulls, wiped clean of blood and pearly brain matter, and handed to Yagoda, probably still warm. No wonder Vyshinsky found these events sickening. Yagoda labelled the bullets “Zinoviev” and “Kamenev” and treasured these macabre but sacred relics, taking them home to be kept proudly with his collection of erotica and ladies’ stockings.[4]The bodies were cremated.

Stalin was always fascinated by the conduct of his enemies at the supreme moment, enjoying their humiliation and destruction: “A man may be physically brave but a political coward,” he said. Weeks later, at a dinner to celebrate the founding of the Cheka, Pauker, Stalin’s comedian, acted the death and pleadings of Zinoviev. To the raucous guffaws of the Vozhd and Yezhov, plump, corseted and shiny-pated Pauker was dragged back into the room by two friends playing the role of guards. There he performed Zinoviev’s cries of “For God’s sake call Stalin” but improvised another ingredient. Pauker, a Jew himself, specialised in telling Stalin Jewish jokes in the appropriate accent with much rolling of “R”s and cringing. Now he combined the two, depicting Zinoviev raising his hands to the Heavens and weeping. “Hear oh Israel the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.”[5]Stalin laughed so much that Pauker repeated it. Stalin was almost sick with merriment and waved at Pauker to stop.[6]

Bukharin was hill climbing in the Pamirs when he read in the newspapers that he had been implicated in the Zinoviev trial. He frantically rushed back to Moscow. Bukharin had seemed forgiven for past sins. As the editor of Izvestiya, he had returned to prominence with frequent access to Stalin. In 1935, at a banquet, Stalin had even publicly toasted Bukharin: “Let’s drink to Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin. We all love . . . Bukharchik. May whoever remembers the past, lose an eye!” Whether to preserve Bukharin for his own trial (after Tomsky’s suicide), because of a lingering fondness or just feline sadism, Stalin proceeded to play with beloved Bukharchik who waited anxiously in his Kremlin apartment.

On 8 September, the Central Committee summoned Bukharin to a meeting with Kaganovich, where, along with Yezhov and Vyshinsky, he was amazed to encounter his childhood friend Grigory Sokolnikov, a venerable Old Bolshevik, who was delivered to the room by the NKVD. The “confrontation” was one of Stalin’s bizarre rituals in which, like an exorcism, Good was meant to confront and vanquish Evil. They were presumably designed to terrify the accused but also, and this may have been their main function, to convince the presiding Politburo members of the victim’s guilt. Kaganovich played impartial observer while Sokolnikov declared there was a Left-Right Centre, involving Bukharin, which was planning the murder of Stalin.

“Can you have lost your reason and not be responsible for your own words?” Bukharin “turned on the tears.” When the prisoner was led out, Kaganovich boomed: “He’s lying, the whore, from beginning to end! Go back to the newspaper, Nikolai Ivanovich, and work in peace.”

“But why is he lying, Lazar Moisevich?”

“We’ll find out,” replied an unconvinced Kaganovich who still “adored” Bukharin but told Stalin his “role will yet be uncovered.” Stalin’s antennae sensed that the time was not right: on 10 September, Vyshinsky announced that the investigation against Bukharin and Rykov had been closed due to lack of criminal culpability. Bukharin returned to work, safe again, while the investigators moved on to their next trial—but the cat did not stop caressing the mouse.[7]

Stalin remained on holiday, directing a series of parallel tragedies in his escalating campaign to eliminate his enemies while devoting much of his energy to the Spanish Civil War. On 15 October, Soviet tanks, planes and “advisers” started arriving in Spain to support the Republican government against General Francisco Franco, backed by Hitler and Mussolini. Stalin treated this less as a rehearsal for World War II and more as a replay of his own Civil War. The internecine struggle with the Trotskyites on his own side and the Fascists on the other created a war fever in Moscow, stoking up the Terror. Stalin’s real interest was to keep the war going as long as possible, embroiling Hitler without offending the Western powers, rather than helping the Republicans win. Furthermore, like an accomplished “barrow boy,” Stalin systematically swindled the Spanish of several hundred million dollars by rescuing their gold reserves and then tricking them into paying inflated prices for their arms.[8]

Gradually, instructing Voroshilov in military, Kaganovich in political, and Yezhov in security matters by telephone from Sochi, he presided over the effective NKVD takeover of the Republic itself, where he found himself in a genuine struggle with the Trotskyites. He set about the liquidation of Trotskyites along with his own men. The Soviet diplomats, journalists and soldiers serving in Spain spent as much time denouncing one another as fighting the Fascists.

After a short stay at the new little dacha built for him by Lakoba at Novy Afon (New Athos),[9] to the south in Abkhazia right beside Alexander III’s monastery, Stalin returned to Sochi where he was joined by Zhdanov and President Kalinin. Yezhov was expanding the lists of suspects to include the whole of the old oppositions but also entire nationalities, particularly the Poles. Simultaneously he was pushing for the role of NKVD chief, attacking Yagoda for “complacency, passivity, and bragging,” in a letter that may have been sent to Stalin in a shameless job application: “Without your intervention, things will come to no good.” Meanwhile Yagoda bugged Yezhov’s calls to Stalin, learning that Blackberry had been summoned to Sochi. Yagoda left immediately for Sochi, but when he arrived, Pauker turned him back from the gates of Stalin’s dacha.

On 25 September, Stalin, backed by Zhdanov, decided to remove Yagoda and promote Yezhov: “We consider it absolutely necessary and urgent to appoint Comrade Yezhov to the post of People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs. Yagoda is not up to the task of exposing the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Bloc . . . Stalin, Zhdanov.”

Sergo visited the dacha to discuss Yezhov’s appointment and his own battles with the NKVD. Stalin felt he needed to win over Sergo to Yezhov’s appointment, even though Blackberry and his wife were family friends of Sergo. “This remarkably wise decision by our father suits the attitude of the Party and country,” Kaganovich wrote cheerfully to Sergo after he had sacked Yagoda and appointed him to Rykov’s job as Communications Commissar.

There was relief at Yezhov’s appointment: many, including Bukharin, regarded it as the end of the Terror, not the beginning, but Kaganovich knew his protégé better: he praised Yezhov’s “superb . . . interrogations” to Stalin, suggesting his promotion to Commissar-General. “Comrade Yezhov is handling things well,” Kaganovich told Sergo. “He’s dispensed with the bandits of the counter-revolutionary Trotskyites in Bolshevik style.” The dwarfish Blackberry was now the second most powerful man in the USSR.[10]

Stalin was deeply dissatisfied with the “sickness” inside the NKVD, which he rightly regarded as the ultimate Bolshevik old-boy network, filled with dubious Poles, Jews and Letts. He needed an outsider to get control of this self-satisfied élite and make it his own. There is evidence that during the thirties, he discussed appointing both Kaganovich and Mikoyan to run the NKVD and he had recently offered the job to Lakoba.[11]

Lakoba refused to move to Moscow from his paradisaical fiefdom. Loyal as he was to Stalin, Lakoba was better suited to playing the magnanimous host in the resorts of Abkhazia than torturing innocents in the cellars of the Lubianka. But his refusal drew attention to the rule of Lakoba’s clan in Abkhazia, known as “Lakobistan,” which he wanted to be made into a full Soviet republic, a dangerous idea in the fragile multinational USSR. There was no greater “prince” than Lakoba. Stalin had already banned the use of Abkhazian names in Lakoba’s fiefdom and foiled his plan to raise Abkhazia’s constitutional status.

On 31 October, Stalin returned to Moscow where he dined with Lakoba. All seemed well. But it was not. When Lakoba returned to Abkhazia, Beria invited him to dinner in Tiflis. Lakoba refused until Beria’s mother telephoned to insist. They dined on 27 December and then went to the theatre where Lakoba was overcome with nausea. Returning to his hotel, he sat by the window groaning, “That snake Beria has killed me.” At 4:20 a.m., Lakoba died of a “heart attack,” aged forty-three. Beria saw off the coffin on its way back by train to Sukhumi. Lakoba’s doctors were convinced he had been poisoned but Beria had the organs removed, later exhuming and destroying the cadaver. Lakoba’s family were also killed. He was denounced as an Enemy of the People.

Lakoba was the first of Stalin’s circle to be killed. “Poison, poison,” as Stalin wrote. He had given Beria carte blanche to settle scores in the Caucasus. In Armenia, Beria had earlier visited the First Secretary, Aghasi Khanchian, who had either killed himself or been murdered. Across the Imperium, the regions began to expose conspiracies of “wreckers”[12] to justify the inefficiencies and corruption. The clock was ticking towards war with Hitler’s Germany. But as tension was mounting with aggressive Japan in the Far East, and Soviet “advisers” fought in Spain, the USSR was already at war.[13]

Shortly before Lakoba’s sinister death, Beria arrested Papulia Ordzhonikidze, Sergo’s elder brother, a railway official. Beria knew that his former patron, Sergo, had warned Stalin that he was a “scoundrel.” Sergo refused to shake hands with Beria and built a special fence between their dachas.

Beria’s vengeance was just one of the ways in which Stalin began to turn the heat on to the emotional Sergo, the industrial magnifico who supported the regime’s draconian policies but resisted the arrest of his own managers. The star of the next show trial was to be Sergo’s Deputy Commissar, Yury Pyatakov, an ex-Trotskyite and skilled manager. The two men were fond of one another and enjoyed working together.

In July, Pyatakov’s wife had been arrested for her links to Trotsky. Shortly before the Zinoviev trial, Yezhov summoned Pyatakov, read him all the affidavits implicating him in Trotskyite terrorism and informed him that he was relieved of his job as Deputy Commissar. Pyatakov offered to prove his innocence by asking to be “personally allowed to shoot all those sentenced to death at the trial, including his former wife, and to publish this in the press.” As a Bolshevik, he was willing even to execute his own wife.

“I pointed out to him the absurdity of his proposal,” Yezhov reported drily to Stalin. On 12 September, Pyatakov was arrested. Sergo, recuperating in Kislovodsk, voted for his expulsion from the Central Committee but he must have been deeply worried. A shadow of his former self, grey and exhausted, he was so ill that the Politburo restricted him to a three-day week. Now the NKVD began to arrest his specialist non-Bolshevik advisers and he appealed to Blackberry: “Comrade Yezhov, please look into this.” He was not alone. Kaganovich and Sergo, those “best friends,” not only shared the same swaggering dynamism but both headed giant industrial commissariats. Kaganovich’s railway experts were being arrested too. Meanwhile Stalin sent Sergo transcripts of Pyatakov’s interrogations in which his deputy confessed to being a “saboteur.”[14] The destruction of “experts” was a perennial Bolshevik sport but the arrest of Sergo’s brother revealed Stalin’s hand: “This couldn’t have been done without Stalin’s consent. But Stalin’s agreed to it without even calling me,” Sergo told Mikoyan. “We were such close friends! And suddenly he lets them do such a thing!” He blamed Beria.[15]

Sergo appealed to Stalin, doing all he could to save his brother. He did too much: the arrest of a man’s clan was a test of loyalty. Stalin was not alone in taking a dim view of this bourgeois emotionalism: Molotov himself attacked Sergo for being “guided only by emotions . . . thinking only of himself.”[16]

On 9 November, Sergo suffered another heart attack. Meanwhile, the third Ordzhonikidze brother, Valiko, was sacked from his job in the Tiflis Soviet for claiming that Papulia was innocent. Sergo swallowed his pride and called Beria, who replied: “Dear Comrade Sergo! After your call, I quickly summoned Valiko . . . Today Valiko was restored to his job. Yours, L. Beria.” This bears the pawprints of Stalin’s cat-and-mouse game, his meandering path to open destruction, perhaps his moments of nostalgic fondness, his supersensitive testing of limits.[17]

But Stalin now regarded Sergo as an enemy: his biography had just been published for his fiftieth birthday and Stalin studied it carefully, scribbling sarcastically next to the passages that acclaimed Sergo’s heroism: “What about the CC? The Party?”[18]

Stalin and Sergo returned separately to Moscow where fifty-six of the latter’s officials were in the toils of the NKVD. Sergo however remained a living restraint on Stalin, making brave little gestures towards the beleaguered Rightists. “My dear kind warmly blessed Sergo,” encouraged Bukharin: “Stand firm!” At the theatre, when Stalin and the Politburo filed into the front seats, Sergo spotted ex-Premier Rykov and his daughter Natalya (who tells the story), alone and ignored, twenty rows up the auditorium. Leaving Stalin, Sergo galloped up to kiss them. The Rykovs were moved to tears in gratitude.[19]

At the 7 November parade, Stalin, on the Mausoleum, spotted Bukharin in an ordinary seat and sent a Chekist to say, “Comrade Stalin has invited you on to the Mausoleum.” Bukharin thought he was being arrested but then gratefully climbed the steps.[20]

Bukharin, the enchanting but hysterical intellectual whom everyone adored, bombarded Stalin with increasingly frantic letters through which we can feel the screw tightening. When writers fear for their lives, they write and write: “Big child!” Stalin scribbled across one letter; “Crank!” on another[21].

Bukharin could not stop appealing to Stalin, about whom he was having dreams: “Everything connected with me is criticized,” he wrote on 19 October 1936. “Even for the birthday of Sergo, they did not propose me to write an article . . . Maybe I’m not honourable. To whom can I go, as a beloved person, without expecting a smash in the teeth? I see your intention but I write to you as I wrote to Illich [Lenin] as a really beloved man whom I even see in dreams as I did Illich. Maybe it’s strange but it’s so. It’s hard for me to live under suspicion and my nerves are already on edge. Finally, on a sleepless night, I wrote a poem,” an embarrassing hymn to “Great Stalin!”[22]

Bukharin’s other old friend was Voroshilov. The two had been so close that Bukharin called him his “honey seagull” and even wrote his speeches for him. Klim had presented him with a pistol engraved with his love and friendship. Voroshilov tried to avoid Bukharin’s letters: “Why do you hurt me so?” he asked Klim in one letter.

Now in real danger, Bukharin wrote a long plea to Klim in which he even announced that he was “delighted the dogs [Zinoviev and Kamenev] were shot . . . Forgive this confused letter: a thousand thoughts are rushing around inside my head like strong horses and I have no strong reins. I embrace you because I am clean. N Bukharin.” Voroshilov decided he had to end this ghost of a friendship so he ordered his adjutant to copy the letter to the Politburo and write: “I enclose herewith, on Comrade Voroshilov’s orders, Comrade Voroshilov’s reply to Bukharin.” Voroshilov’s reply was a study in amorality, cruelty, fear and cowardice:

To Comrade Bukharin, I return your letter in which you permit yourself to make vile attacks on the Party leadership. If you were hoping . . . to convince me of your complete innocence, all you have convinced me of is that henceforth I should distance myself from you . . . And if you do not repudiate in writing your foul epithets against the Party leadership, I shall even regard you as a scoundrel.

K Voroshilov 3 Sept 1936.

 

Bukharin was heartbroken by “your appalling letter. My letter ended with ‘I embrace you.’ Your letter ends with ‘scoundrel.’ ”[23]

Yezhov was creating the case against the so-called Leftists, Radek and Pyatakov, but by December, he had also managed to procure evidence against Bukharin and Rykov. The December Plenum was a sort of arraignment of these victims and, as always with Stalin, a test of the conditions necessary to destroy them. Stalin was the dominant will, but the Terror was not the work of one man. One can hear the evangelical enthusiasm of their blood-lust that sometimes totters on the edge of tragicomedy. Kaganovich even told a Stalinist shaggy-dog story.

Yezhov proudly listed the two hundred persons arrested in the Trotskyite Centre in the Azov–Black Sea organization, another three hundred in Georgia, four hundred in Leningrad. Molotov was not the only one who had avoided assassination: Kaganovich had just escaped death in the Urals. First Yezhov dealt with the Pyatakov–Radek trial that was about to begin. When he read out Pyatakov’s description of the workers as a “herd of sheep,” these frightened fanatics reacted as if at a nightmarish revivalist meeting.

“The swine!” shouted Beria. There was a “noise of indignation in the room.” Then the record reveals:

A voice: “The brutes!”

“That’s how low this vicious Fascist agent, this degenerate Communist, has sunk, God knows what else! These swine must be strangled!”

“What about Bukharin?” a voice called.

“We need to talk about them,” agreed Stalin.

“There’s a scoundrel for you,” snarled Beria.

“What swine!” exclaimed another comrade. Yezhov announced that Bukharin and Rykov were indeed members of the “back-up Centre.” They were actually terrorists yet these assassins were sitting there with them. Bukharin was now meant to confess his sins and implicate his friends. He did not.

“So you think I too aspired to power? Are you serious?” he asked Yezhov. “After all, there are many old comrades who know me well . . . my very soul, my inner life.”

“It’s hard to know someone’s soul,” sneered Beria.

“There isn’t a word of truth said against me . . . Kamenev stated at his trial that he met me every year up to 1936. I asked Yezhov to find out when and where so I could refute this lie. They told me Kamenev was not asked . . . and now it’s impossible to ask him.”

“They shot him,” added Rykov sadly. Few of the old leaders kicked Bukharin, but Kaganovich, Molotov and Beria hunted him zealously. Then, amid deadly allegations, Kaganovich remembered Zinoviev’s dog:

“In 1934, Zinoviev invited Tomsky to his dacha . . . After drinking tea, Tomsky and Zinoviev went in Tomsky’s car to pick out a dog for Zinoviev. You see what friendship, what help—they went together to pick out a dog.”

“What about this dog?” said Stalin. “Was it a hunting dog or a guard dog?”

“It was not possible to establish this,” Kaganovich went on with gleeful, if chilling, humour.

“Anyway, did they fetch the dog?” persisted Stalin.

“They got it,” boomed Kaganovich. “They were searching for a four-legged companion not unlike themselves.”

“Was it a good dog or a bad dog?” asked Stalin. “Anybody know?” There was “laughter in the hall.”

“It was hard to establish this at the confrontation,” replied Kaganovich.

Finally, Stalin, sensing how many of the older members were not joining in against Bukharin, summed up more in sadness than anger:

“We believed in you and we were mistaken . . . We believed in you . . . we moved you up the ladder and we were mistaken. Isn’t it true, Comrade Bukharin?” Yet Stalin ended the Plenum without a vote in support of Yezhov, just an ominous decision to consider “the matter of Bukharin and Rykov unfinished.” The regional “princes” realized that even such a giant could be destroyed.[24]

Stalin, assisted by Yezhov, shaped the febrile fears of war with Poland and Germany and the very real dangers of the Spanish Civil War, the inexplicable industrial failures caused by Soviet incompetence, and the resistance of the regional “princes,” into a web of conspiracies that dovetailed with the paranoic soul and glorious, nostalgic brutality of the Russian Civil War, and the personal feuds of the Bolsheviks. Stalin was particularly suspicious of the infiltration of spies across the porous border with Poland, traditional enemy of Russia’s western marches that had defeated Russia (and Stalin personally) in 1920.[25] At the Plenum, Khrushchev was denounced as a secret “Pole.” Chatting in the corridor to his friend Yezhov, Stalin walked over, pushing a finger into Khrushchev’s shoulder: “What’s your name?”

“Comrade Stalin, it’s Khrushchev.”

“No you’re not Khrushchev . . . So-and-so says you’re not.”

“How can you believe that? My mother’s still alive . . . Check.” Stalin cited Yezhov who denied it. Stalin let it pass but he was checking those around him.

Stalin was finally determined to bring the regional “princes” to heel: Ukraine was a special case, the grain store, the second republic with a strong sense of its own culture. Kosior and Chubar had demonstrated their weakness during the famine while the Second Secretary, Postyshev, behaved like a “prince” with his own entourage. On 13 January, Stalin struck with a telegram attacking Postyshev, for lacking the “most basic Party vigilance.” Kaganovich, already the scourge of the Ukraine which he had governed in the late twenties, descended on Kiev, where he soon managed to find a “little person” crushed by the local “prince.” A half-mad crone and Party busybody named Polia Nikolaenko had criticized Postyshev and his wife, also a high official. Mrs. Postyshev expelled the troublesome Nikolaenko from the Party. When Kaganovich informed Stalin of this “heroic denunciatrix,” he immediately grasped her usefulness.[26]

On 21 December, the family and magnates danced until dawn at Stalin’s birthday party. But the struggles and conspiracies took their toll on the actor-manager: Stalin often suffered from chronic tonsillitis when under pressure. Professor Valedinsky, the specialist from the Matsesta Baths, whom he had brought to Moscow, joined his personal physician, the distinguished Vladimir Vinogradov, who had been a fashionable doctor before the Revolution and still lived in an apartment filled with antiques and fine pictures. The patient lay on a sofa with a high temperature for five days, surrounded by professors and Politburo. The professors visited twice a day and kept vigil at night. By New Year’s Eve, he was well enough to attend the party where the whole family danced together for the last time. When the doctors visited him on New Year’s Day 1937, he reminisced about his first job as a meteorologist and his fishing exploits during his Siberian exiles. But Stalin’s duel with Sergo again took a toll on him as he prepared for his most reckless gamble since collectivization: the massacre of Lenin’s Party.[27]

Stalin arranged a “confrontation” between Bukharin and Pyatakov before the Politburo. Pyatakov, the abrasive industrial manager soon to star in his own show trial, testified to Bukharin’s terrorism but was now a walking testament to the methods of the NKVD. “Living remains,” Bukharin told his wife, “not of Pyatakov but of his shadow, a skeleton with its teeth knocked out.” He spoke with his head lowered, trying to cover his eyes with his hands. Sergo stared intensely at his former deputy and friend: “Is your testimony voluntary?” he asked.

“My testimony is voluntary,” retorted Pyatakov.

It seems absurd that Sergo even had to ask the question but to do more would be to go against the Politburo itself where men like Voroshilov were working themselves up into paroxysms of hatred: “Your deputy turned out to be a swine of the first class,” Klim told him. “You must know what he told us, the pig, the son of a bitch!” When Sergo read the signed pages of Pyatakov’s interrogation, he “believed it and came to hate him,” but it was not a happy time for him.[28]

Stalin was supervising Pyatakov’s coming trial of the “Parallel Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre” that was really an assault on Sergo’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry where ten of the seventeen defendants worked. Stalin’s intimate role in the famous trials has always been known but the archives reveal how he even dictated the words of Vyshinsky’s summing-up. Recovering from his tonsillitis, Stalin must have seen Vyshinsky at Kuntsevo. One can imagine Stalin pacing up and down, smoking, as the cringing Procurator scribbled in his notebook: “These villains don’t even have any sense of being citizens . . . they’re afraid of the nation, afraid of the people . . . Their agreements with Japan and Germany are the agreements of the hare with the wolf . . .” Vyshinsky noted down Stalin’s words: “While Lenin was alive, they were against Lenin.” He used exactly the same words in court on 28 January. But Stalin’s thoughts in 1937 reveal the broadest reason for the imminent murder of hundreds of thousands of people for little apparent reason: “Maybe it can be explained by the fact that you lost faith,” Stalin addressed the Old Bolsheviks. Here was the essence of the religious frenzy of the coming slaughter.[29]

Stalin’s tonsillitis flared again. He lay on the dining room table so the professors could examine his throat. Then the Politburo joined Stalin and the doctors for dinner. There were toasts and after dinner, the doctors were amazed to see the leaders dancing. But Stalin’s mind was on the brutal tasks of that terrible year. He toasted Soviet medicine, then added that there were “Enemies among the doctors—you’ll find out soon!” He was ready to begin.[30]

 

18. Sergo: Death of a “Perfect Bolshevik”

The legal melodrama opened on 23 January and immediately expanded the Terror to thousands of new potential victims. Radek, who may have been coached personally by Stalin, revelled in his black humour, joking that he was not tortured under interrogation; on the contrary, he had tortured his investigators for months by refusing to cooperate. Then he delivered what were probably Stalin’s own lines: “But there are in our country semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth Trotskyites, people who helped us [Trotskyites], not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us.” The message was clear and when it is combined with Vyshinsky’s own notes, the mystery of the crazy randomness of the Terror is solved. Those without blind faith were to die.

At 7:13 p.m. on 29 January, the judges retired to confer and at 3:00 next morning, they returned. Thirteen of the defendants, including Pyatakov, were sentenced to death but Radek received ten years. Blokhin again supervised the executions. Yezhov was rewarded with the rank of Commissar-General of State Security, and a Kremlin apartment.

In Moscow, 200,000 people, bedazzled by propaganda, massed in Red Square, despite temperatures of –27°C, bearing banners that read: “The court’s verdict is the people’s verdict.” Khrushchev addressed them, denouncing the “Judas-Trotsky,” a line that strongly implied that Stalin was the metaphorical Jesus. (We know from Yury Zhdanov that he jokily compared himself to Jesus.) “By raising their hand against Comrade Stalin,” Khrushchev told the crowds, “they raised their hand against all the best that humanity has, because Stalin is hope . . . Stalin is our banner. Stalin is our will, Stalin is our victory.” The country was swept by the emotional effervescence of hatred, fear and blood-lust. Maria Svanidze wrote in her diary that Radek’s “human baseness . . . exceeded all imagination. These moral monsters deserved their end . . . How could we so blindly trust this band of scoundrels?”

Today it seems impossible that virtually every factory and railway line was being sabotaged by Trotskyite terrorists within their management, but Soviet industry was riddled with mistakes and cursed with thousands of accidents thanks to poor management and the breakneck speed of the Five-Year Plans: for example, in 1934 alone, there were 62,000 accidents on the railways! How could this happen in a perfect country? “Enemies” among the corrupt élite had surely caused the failures. The arrest of saboteurs and wreckers in the industrial factories and railways spread. The staffs of Sergo and Kaganovich were again hit hard.[31]

Stalin carefully prepared for the Plenum that would formally open the Terror against the Party itself. On 31 January, the Politburo appointed the two industrial kingpins to speak about wrecking in their departments. Stalin reviewed their speeches. Sergo accepted that wreckers had to be stopped. But he wanted to say that now that they had been arrested, it was time to return to normality. Stalin angrily scribbled on Sergo’s speech: “State with facts which branches are affected by sabotage and exactly how they are affected.” When they met, Sergo seemed to agree but he quietly despatched trusted managers to the regions to investigate whether the NKVD was fabricating the cases: a direct challenge to Stalin.

An ailing Sergo realized that the gap between them was widening. He faced a rupture with the Party to which he had devoted his life.

“I don’t understand why Stalin doesn’t trust me,” he confided to Mikoyan, probably walking round the snowy Kremlin at night. “I’m completely loyal to him, don’t want to fight with him. Beria’s schemes play a large part in this—he gives Stalin the wrong information but Stalin trusts him.” Both were baffled, according to Mikoyan, “about what was happening to Stalin, how they could put honest men in prison and then shoot them for sabotage.”

“Stalin’s started a bad business,” said Sergo. “I was always such a close friend of Stalin’s. I trusted him and he trusted me. And now I can’t work with him, I’ll commit suicide.” Mikoyan told him suicide never solved anything but there were now frequent suicides. On 17 February, Sergo and Stalin argued for several hours. Sergo then went to his office before returning at 3 p.m. for a Politburo meeting.

Stalin approved Yezhov’s report but criticized Sergo and Kaganovich who retired to Poskrebyshev’s study, like schoolboys, to rewrite their essays. At seven, they too walked, talking, around the Kremlin: “he was ill, his nerves broken,” said Kaganovich.

Stalin deliberately turned the screw: the NKVD searched Sergo’s apartment. Only Stalin could have ordered such an outrage. Besides, the Ordzhonikidzes spent weekends with the Yezhovs, but friendship was dust compared to the orders of the Party. Sergo, as angry and humiliated as intended, telephoned Stalin.

“Sergo, why are you upset?” said Stalin. “This Organ can search my place at any moment too.” Stalin summoned Sergo who rushed out so fast, he forgot his coat. His wife Zina hurried after him with the coat and fur hat but he was already in Stalin’s apartment. Zina waited outside for an hour and a half. Stalin’s provocations only confirmed Sergo’s impotence, for he “sprang out of Stalin’s place in a very agitated state, did not put on his coat or hat, and ran home.” He started retyping his speech, then, according to his wife, rushed back to Stalin who taunted him more with his sneering marginalia: “Ha-ha!”

Sergo told Zina that he could not cope with Koba whom he loved. The next morning, he remained in bed, refusing breakfast. “I feel bad,” he said. He simply asked that no one should disturb him and worked in his room. At 5:30 p.m., Zinaida heard a dull sound and rushed into the bedroom.

Sergo lay bare-chested and dead on the bed. He had shot himself in the heart, his chest powder-burned. Zina kissed his hands, chest, lips fervently and called the doctor who certified he was dead. She then telephoned Stalin who was at Kuntsevo. The guards said he was taking a walk, but she shouted: “Tell Stalin it’s Zina. Tell him to come to the phone right away. I’ll wait on the line.”

“Why the big hurry?” Stalin asked.

Zina ordered him to come urgently: “Sergo’s done the same as Nadya!” Stalin banged down the phone at this grievous insult.

It happened that Konstantin Ordzhonikidze, one of Sergo’s brothers, arrived at the apartment at this moment. At the entrance, Sergo’s chauffeur told him to hurry. When he reached the front door, one of Sergo’s officials said simply: “Our Sergo’s no more.”

Within half an hour, Stalin, Molotov and Zhdanov (that hypochondriac comically sporting an anti-headache bandanna around his head) arrived from the countryside to join Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Yezhov. When Mikoyan heard, he exclaimed, “I don’t believe it” and rushed over. Again the Kremlin family mourned its own but suicide left as much anger as grief.

Zinaida sat on the edge of the bed beside Sergo’s body. The leaders entered the room, looked at the corpse and sat down. Voroshilov, so soft-hearted in personal matters, consoled Zina.

“Why console me,” she snapped, “when you couldn’t save him for the Party?” Stalin caught Zina’s eye and nodded at her to follow him into the study. They stood facing each other. Stalin seemed crushed and pitiful, betrayed again.

“What shall we say to people now?” she asked.

“This must be reported in the press,” Stalin replied. “We’ll say he died of a heart attack.”

“No one will believe that,” snapped the widow. “Sergo loved the truth. The truth must be printed.”

“Why won’t they believe it? Everyone knew he had a bad heart and everyone will believe it,” concluded Stalin. The door to the death room was closed but Konstantin Ordzhonikidze peeped inside and observed Kaganovich and Yezhov in consultation, sitting at the foot of the body of their mutual friend. Suddenly Beria, in Moscow for the Plenum, appeared in the dining room. Zinaida charged at him, trying to slap him, and shrieked: “Rat!” Beria “disappeared right afterwards.”

They carried Sergo’s bulky body from the bedroom and laid him on the table. Molotov’s brother, a photographer, arrived with his camera. Stalin and the magnates posed with the body.[32]

On the 19th, the newspapers announced the death of Sergo by heart attack. A list of doctors signed the mendacious bulletin: “At 17:30, while he was having his afternoon rest, he suddenly felt ill and a few minutes later died of paralysis of the heart.” The Plenum was delayed by Sergo’s funeral, but Stalin’s obstacle had been removed. The death of “the perfect Bolshevik” shocked Maria Svanidze who described the lying-in-state in the Hall of Columns among “garlands, music, the scent of flowers, tears, honorary escorts. Thousands upon thousands passed” the open coffin. Sergo was sanctified by a cult. Some mourned him more than others. Bukharin penned a poem: “He cracked like lightning in foamy waves” but also wrote another pathetic letter to Stalin: “I wanted to write to Klim and Mikoyan. And if they hurt me too? Because the slanders have done their work. I am not me. I can’t even cry on the body of an old comrade . . . Koba, I can’t live in such a situation . . . I really love you passionately . . . I wish you quick and resolute victories.” The suicide remained a tight secret. Stalin and others like the Voroshilovs[33] believed Sergo was a self-indulgent disappointment. At the Plenum, Stalin attacked that Bolshevik nobleman for behaving like a “prince.”

Stalin was chief bearer of the urn of ashes that was placed near Kirov in the Kremlin Wall. But his antennae sensed other doubters who might follow Sergo’s line. During the funeral, he reminded Mikoyan about his escape from the shooting of Twenty-Six Commissars during the Civil War: “You were the only one to escape” in that “obscure and murky story. Anastas, don’t force us to try to clear it up.” Mikoyan must have decided not to rock the boat but he could hardly miss the warning and gathering darkness.[34]

“I cannot live like this anymore . . .” wrote Bukharin to Stalin days later. “I am in no physical or moral condition to come to the Plenum . . . I will begin a hunger strike until the accusations of betrayal, wrecking and terrorism are dropped.” But Bukharin’s agony was just starting: Anna, his wife, accompanied him to the first sitting during a snowstorm. It is striking that the main victims of the Plenum, Bukharin and Yagoda, both lived in the Kremlin just doors away from Stalin and the Politburo while simultaneously being accused of planning their murder. The Kremlin remained a village—but one of unsurpassed malevolence.

At 6 p.m. on 23 February, this febrile, cruel Plenum opened under the pall of Sergo’s death, Pyatakov’s execution, the spreading arrests and the bloodthirsty public effervescence whipped up by the media. If there was any moment when Stalin emerged as dictator with power over life and death, it was now. Yezhov opened with a savage indictment of Bukharin and his hunger strike.

“I won’t shoot myself,” he replied, “because people will say I killed myself to harm the Party. But if I die, as it were, from an illness, what will you lose from it?”

“Blackmailer!” shouted several voices.

“You scoundrel,” shrieked Voroshilov at his ex-friend. “Keep your trap shut! How vile! How dare you speak like that!”

“It’s very hard for me to go on living.”

“And it’s easy for us?” asked Stalin. “You really babble a lot.”

“You abused the Party’s trust!” declaimed Andreyev. This venom encouraged less senior officials to prove their loyalty: “I’m not sure there’s any reason for us to go on debating this matter,” declared I. P. Zhukov (no relation of the Marshal). “These people . . . must be shot just as the [other] scoundrels were shot!” This was so rabid that the leaders hooted with laughter: in the midst of the witch hunt, it was perhaps a relief to be able to laugh. But there were more jokes.

Bukharin quipped that the testimonies against him were false: “Demand produces supply—that means that those who give testimony know the nature of the general atmosphere!” More laughter. But it was all to no avail: a commission of magnates, chaired by Mikoyan, met to decide the fate of Bukharin and Rykov, but when they returned after sleepless nights, no one would shake hands with them.

Even before Yezhov came in for the kill, Stalin taunted Bukharin: “Bukharin’s on hunger strike. Who is your ultimatum aimed at, Nikolai, the Central Committee?”

“You’re about to throw me out of the Party.”

“Ask the Central Committee for its forgiveness!”

“I’m not Zinoviev and Kamenev and I won’t lie about myself.”

“If you won’t confess,” replied Mikoyan, “you’re just proving you’re a Fascist hireling.”

The “hirelings” waited at home. In Stalin and Nadya’s old apartment in the Poteshny Palace, Bukharin worked frantically on a letter to a future Central Committee and Posterity, asking his beautiful wife Anna, just twenty-three, to memorize it. “Again and again Nikolai Ivanovich read his letter in a whisper to me and I had to repeat it after him,” she wrote. “Then I read and reread it myself, softly repeating the phrases aloud. Ah how he gripped [me] when I made a slip!”

Just across the river, in his apartment in the House on the Embankment, Rykov would only say: “They’ll send me to prison!” His wife suffered a stroke as the attacks on her husband became more deadly. His devoted 21-year-old daughter, Natalya, helped him dress each day for the Plenum—as her mother had done.

The commission voted on their fate. Many of Stalin’s devotees such as Khrushchev wanted a trial but “without application of the death penalty.” Yezhov, Budyonny and Postyshev, himself already under fire, voted for death. Molotov and Voroshilov slavishly supported “the suggestion of Comrade Stalin” which was enigmatic because his vote originally suggested “exile” but then was changed by hand to “Transfer their case to NKVD.”

Bukharin and Rykov were summoned. Both faced the anguished panic and sad regrets of last goodbyes. Rykov asked his daughter to phone Poskrebyshev to find out his fate.

“When I need him,” replied Poskrebyshev, “I’ll send a car.” At dusk, this usher of doom called: “I’m sending the car.” Natalya helped her beloved father dress in suit, tie, waistcoat and overcoat. He said nothing as they took the lift downstairs, walking out onto the Embankment. When they looked towards the Kremlin, they saw the black limousine. Father and daughter turned to one another on the pavement. They awkwardly shook hands then they kissed formally à la russe, three times on the cheek. Without a word, “my father climbed into the car that sped off towards the Kremlin.” Natalya never forgot that moment: “And I never saw him again—except in my dreams.”

When Poskrebyshev called Bukharin, Anna “began to say farewell,” in that heart-rending moment of eternal parting, which was to be shared by millions in the coming years. Poskrebyshev called again: the Plenum was waiting, but Bukharin was in no hurry. He fell to his knees before his young Anna: “With tears in his eyes, he begged forgiveness for my ruined life. But he begged me to raise our son as a Bolshevik—‘A Bolshevik without fail,’ he said twice.” He swore her to deliver the memorized letter to the Party: “You’re young and you’ll live to see it.” He then rose from the floor, hugged her, kissed her and said, “See you don’t get angry, Anyutka. There are irritating misprints in history but the truth will triumph.”

“We understood,” Anna wrote, “we were parting forever.” She could only say, “See that you don’t lie about yourself,” but this was much to ask. Pulling on his leather coat, he disappeared into the alleyways around the Great Kremlin Palace.

Moments later, Boris Berman, a fat, flashy old-fashioned Chekist in “a stylish suit” with big rings on his fingers and one elongated fingernail, arrived with the NKVD to search the apartment. Meanwhile, at the Plenum, Stalin proposed that they be “handed over to the NKVD.”

“Does anyone wish to speak?” Andreyev asked. “No. Are there any other proposals besides the one made by Comrade Stalin? No. Let’s vote . . . All those against? None. Any abstentions? Two. So the resolution carries with two abstentions—Bukharin and Rykov.” The two, who had once ruled Russia alongside Stalin, were arrested as they left the Plenum. Bukharin took that one step that was like falling a thousand miles: one minute, he was living in the Kremlin, with cars, dachas and servants. The next minute, he was passing through the gates of the Lubianka, handing over his possessions, being stripped, having his rectum checked, his clothes returned though without belt or shoelaces, and then being locked in a cell with the usual stool pigeon to provoke him. But Bukharin was not tortured.

Bukharin’s Anna and Rykov’s half-paralysed wife and daughter Natalya were arrested soon afterwards, serving almost two decades of slave labour.[35]

This ugly meeting dealt other blows too: Yezhov attacked Yagoda. Molotov, giving Sergo’s report, cited 585 wreckers in Heavy Industry; Kaganovich ranted about the “unmasking” of Enemies on the railways.

Stalin used the “heroic denunciatrix” of Kiev, Polia Nikolaenko, against the Ukrainian potentate, Postyshev. Stalin hailed her as a “simple member of the Party” treated by Postyshev like “an annoying fly . . . Sometimes the simple people are much closer to the truth than certain higher examples.” Postyshev was moved to another job, not arrested. The warning was clear: no Politburo “prince” and his “family group” were safe. “We old members of the Politburo, we’re soon leaving the scene,” Stalin explained ominously. “It’s the law of nature. We would like to have some teams of replacements.”

Stalin, politician and man, was brilliantly equipped for the constant intensification of struggle which he formulated into his creed of Terror: “The further we move forward, the more success we have, the more embittered will the remnants of the destroyed exploiter classes become, the sooner they will resort to extreme forms of struggle.”[36]

Blackberry set about converting the NKVD into a “secret sect” of sacred executioners. Yezhov despatched Yagoda’s officers to inspect the provinces and then arrested them on the train. Three thousand Chekists were to be executed. Security chief Pauker and Stalin’s brother-in-law Redens remained in their posts. Between 19 and 21 March, Yezhov summoned the surviving Chekists to the Officers’ Club. There, the diminutive Commissar-General announced that Yagoda had been a German spy since 1907 (when he joined the Party) and was also a corrupt thief. Yezhov referred absurdly to his own tininess: “I may be small in stature but my hands are strong—Stalin’s hands.” The killing would be deliberately random: “There will be some innocent victims in this fight against Fascist agents,” Yezhov told them. “We are launching a major attack on the Enemy; let there be no resentment if we bump someone with an elbow. Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. When you chop wood, chips fly.”[37]

 

 

19. The Massacre of Generals, Fall of Yagoda and Death of a Mother

Yezhov “discovered” that Yagoda had tried to poison him by spraying mercury onto the curtains of his office. It later emerged that Yezhov had faked this outrage. Nonetheless, Yagoda was arrested at his Kremlin apartment, even before the Politburo had formally given the order. The power of the Politburo was officially delegated to the so-called “Five”: Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Yezhov, even though the latter was not a member.[38]

The search of Yagoda’s residences—he had two apartments in central Moscow and the luxurious dacha—revealed the debauchery of the NKVD élite in the list of his possessions. His pornographic collection contained 3,904 photographs plus eleven early pornographic movies. His career as a womanizer was amply illustrated by the female clothing he kept in his apartment, which sounds as if he was running a lingerie store not a police force, but then the NKVD bosses could never resist exploiting their power. There were 9 foreign female coats, 4 squirrel coats, 3 sealskin cloaks, another in Astrakhan wool, 31 pairs of female shoes, 91 female berets, 22 female hats, 130 pairs of foreign silk stockings, 10 female belts, 13 bags, 11 female suits, 57 blouses, 69 nighties, 31 female jackets, another 70 pairs of silk tights, 4 silk shawls—plus a collection of 165 pornographic pipes and cigarette holders, and one rubber dildo.

Finally there was the macabre fetishism of the two labelled bullets that had been extracted from the brains of Zinoviev and Kamenev. Like holy relics in a depraved distortion of the apostolic succession, Yezhov inherited them, storing them in his office.[39]

Yagoda, accused of diamond-dealing and corruption, complaisantly implicated the next generation of victims, guided by Yezhov, who ensured that his own protégés were left out, before the testimonies were sent over to Stalin. Within three weeks of his interrogation, starting on 2 April, Yezhov was reporting that Yagoda admitted encouraging Rykov to resist the Party in the late twenties: “You act. I won’t touch you.” Then he denounced Pauker and confessed to the sprinkling of mercury around Blackberry’s office. More importantly, Yagoda implicated Abel Yenukidze for planning a coup along with Marshal Tukhachevsky, Stalin’s old enemy from the Civil War. By the time of his trial, along with Bukharin and Rykov, Yagoda had confessed to the medical murders of Gorky and his son and to the assassination of Kirov.

In his private hell, he knew his family and friends faced destruction with him: the rule in Stalin’s world was that when a man fell, all those connected to him, whether friends, lovers or protégés, fell with him. His brother-in-law and father-in-law were soon shot, along with his salon of writers. Yagoda’s wife and sister were exiled. Yagoda’s father wrote to Stalin, disowning “our only surviving son” for “his grave crimes.” Two sons had given their lives for Bolshevism in earlier times. Now the 78-year-old jeweller of Nizhny Novgorod was losing the third. Both Yagoda’s parents died in the camps.

Yagoda seemed to undergo a Damascene conversion. “For the first time in my life, I’ll have to tell the whole truth about myself,” the world-weary Chekist sighed as if it was a relief. Vladimir Kirshon, the writer whom Stalin had advised on his plays and who was to be shot soon afterwards, was placed as the stool pigeon in his cell.

Yagoda asked what the town was saying about him, musing sadly: “I simply want to ask you about Ida [his wife] and Timosha [his mistress, Gorky’s daughter-in-law], the baby, my family, and to see some familiar faces before death.” He talked about death. “If I was sure to be allowed to live, I’d bear the burden of admitting murdering” Gorky and his son. “But it’s intolerably hard to declare it historically in front of all, especially Timosha.” Yagoda told his interrogator, “You can put down in your report to Yezhov that I said there must be a God after all. From Stalin I deserved nothing but gratitude for my faithful service; from God, I deserved the most severe punishment for having violated his commandments thousands of times. Now look where I am and judge for yourself: is there a God or not?”

Yagoda’s belladonna bore fatal fruit: the Hungarian hairdresser and favourite of Kremlin children, Pauker, forty-four, was arrested on 15 April, guilty of knowing too much and living too well: Stalin no longer trusted the old-fashioned Chekists with foreign connections. Pauker was shot quietly on 14 August 1937—the first courtier to die. Yenukidze was arrested too and executed on 20 December. The NKVD now belonged to Stalin, who turned to the army.[40]

On the evening of 1 May 1937, after the May Day Parade, there was the usual party at Voroshilov’s but the mood was effervescent with blood-lust and tension. Budyonny[41] recorded how Stalin talked openly about the imminent slaughter with his inner circle: it was time, he said, “to finish with our enemies because they are in the army, in the staff, even in the Kremlin.” It is often claimed that Stalin planned the Terror alone with Yezhov and Molotov: this proves that, even socially, he was open with his entire circle, from his doctors to the Politburo, that they were about to “finish with” their enemies across the whole regime. “We must finish with them, not looking at their faces.” Budyonny guessed that this meant Marshal Tukhachevsky and senior commanders like Jonah Yakir and Jan Garmarnik, all of whom had been standing on the Mausoleum with them earlier that day. Budyonny claimed that he hoped this was not so. Yet the archives show how Voroshilov and Budyonny had been urging Stalin to “destroy” Enemies within the Red Army for over a year. It is most likely that Voroshilov’s guests not only backed Stalin but wildly encouraged him: a year earlier, Voroshilov, for example, sent Stalin an intelligence intercept of the German Embassy’s reports to Berlin on how Tukhachevsky had suddenly ceased to be a “Francophile” and now displayed “big respect for the German Army.”[42]

Tukhachevsky, Stalin’s Civil War foe and probably his most talented general, was bound to be his main target. That “refined nobleman, handsome, clever and able,” as Kaganovich described him, did not suffer fools gladly which was why he was hated by Voroshilov and Budyonny. The dashing womanizer was so forceful and charismatic that Stalin nicknamed him “Napoleonchik,” while Kaganovich paraphrased Bonaparte’s dictum: “Tukhachevsky hid Napoleon’s baton in his rucksack.”

He was as ruthless as any Bolshevik, using poison gas on peasant rebels. In the late twenties and early thirties, this “entrepreneur of military ideas,” as a recent historian calls him, advocated a huge expansion of the Red Army and the creation of mechanized forces to be deployed in so-called “deep operations”: he understood the era of Panzers and air power which brought him into conflict with Stalin’s cronies, still living for cavalry charges and armoured trains. Stalin tried to indict Tukhachevsky for treason in 1930 but Sergo among others resisted and helped bring him back as Deputy Defence Commissar. But there was another row with the touchy, vindictive Voroshilov in May 1936. Voroshilov became so heated with Tukhachevsky’s justified criticism that he shouted “Fuck you!” They made up but it was just at that time that the first of the Red Army generals was arrested and interrogated to implicate Tukhachevsky. More generals were mentioned in the January trial. Yagoda, Yenukidze and the benighted generals delivered more kindling for this bonfire.

On 11 May, Tukhachevsky was sacked as Deputy Commissar and demoted to the Volga District. On the 13th, Stalin put his hand on Tukhachevsky’s shoulder and promised he would soon be back in Moscow. He was as good as his word, for on the 22nd, Tukhachevsky was arrested and returned to Moscow. Yezhov and Voroshilov orchestrated the arrest of virtually the whole high command.

Yezhov took personal control of the interrogations. At a meeting with Stalin, Vyshinsky curried favour by recommending the use of torture.

“See for yourself,” Stalin ordered his Blackberry, who rushed back to the Lubianka to supervise the Marshal’s agonies, “but Tukhachevsky should be forced to tell everything . . . It’s impossible he acted alone.” Tukhachevsky was tortured.[43]

Amid this drama, Stalin’s mother died on 13 May 1937, aged seventy-seven. Three professors and two doctors signed her death certificate, testifying to her cardiosclerosis. Poskrebyshev approved the official announcements.[44] Stalin himself wrote out his note for her wreath in Georgian, which read: “Dear and beloved mother from her son Joseph Djugashvili,” using his original name perhaps to signify the distance between Soso and Stalin. Embroiled in the Tukhachevsky plot, he did not attend the funeral: Beria, his wife and son Sergo presided in his stead but later Stalin asked about it as if guilty not to be there.[45]

A few days later, as Yezhov buzzed in and out of Stalin’s office, a broken Marshal Tukhachevsky confessed that Yenukidze had recruited him in 1928, that he was a German agent in cahoots with Bukharin to seize power. Tukhachevsky’s confession, which survives in the archives, is dappled with a brown spray that was found to be blood spattered by a body in motion.

Stalin had to convince the Politburo of the soldiers’ guilt. Yakir, one of the arrested commanders, was best friends with Kaganovich who was called into the Politburo and interrogated by Stalin about this friendship. Kaganovich reminded Stalin that it was he who had insisted on promoting Yakir, at which the Vozhd muttered, “Right, I remember . . . The matter’s closed.” Faced with the amazing confessions beaten out of the generals, Kaganovich believed “that there was a conspiracy of officers.” Mikoyan too was friends with many arrested. Stalin read him extracts from Uborevich’s confessions as a German spy.

“It’s incredible,” admitted Stalin, “but it’s a fact, they admit it.” They even signed on each page to avoid “falsification.”

“I know Uborevich very well,” said Mikoyan. “A most honest man.” So Stalin reassured him that the military themselves would judge the generals: “They know the case and they’ll figure out what’s true and what’s not.”[46]

Stalin tossed Deputy Premier Rudzutak into this broth perhaps pour encourager les autres, the first of the Politburo (a candidate member) to be arrested. “He indulged too much in partying with Philistine friends,” recalled Molotov, which in Bolshevik doublespeak meant cultured friends. Becoming something of a bon viveur, “he kept his distance from us.” Typical of Stalin’s allies in the twenties, he was unreliable, even accusing Stalin of slandering him just after Kirov’s assassination. “You’re wrong, Rudzutak,” Stalin had replied. He was arrested at dinner with some actors—it was said that the ladies were still wearing the rags of their ball gowns in the Lubianka weeks later. “He was entangled . . . mixed up with devil knows what kind of people, with women . . .” said Molotov, and, added Kaganovich, “young girls.” Perhaps he was shot for conviviality. Yet Molotov explained, “I think consciously he was not a participant [in a conspiracy],” but he was guilty nonetheless: “One must not act on personal impressions. After all, we had materials incriminating him.” The NKVD now began to arrest many of the Old Bolsheviks, especially those obstinate Georgian “old farts” who had crossed Stalin.

At first the leadership were actually canvassed on arrests, according to Party tradition: the signed votes in the archives capture the vile frenzy of this process. Usually the leaders just voted “For” or “Agreed” but sometimes in their desperation to show their bloodthirstyness, they added rabid exclamations:[47] “Unconditionally yes,” wrote Budyonny on the arrests of Tukhachevsky and Rudzutak. “It’s necessary to finish off this scum.”⁸ Marshal Yegorov, whose actress wife (Stalin’s flirtation at that dinner in November 1932) was already under investigation, wrote: “All these traitors to be wiped off the face of the earth as the most hostile enemies and disgusting scum.”[48]

On 1 June, Stalin, Voroshilov and Yezhov gathered over a hundred commanders in the Kremlin and broke the news that their High Command overwhelmingly consisted of German agents. Voroshilov unveiled this “counter-revolutionary conspiracy fascist organization,” admitting he himself was close to the conspirators. He was guilty of not wanting to believe it!

The next day, Stalin spoke, conjuring a miasma of mystery over the terrified meeting: “I hope no one doubts that a military–political conspiracy existed,” he threatened, explaining that Tukhachevsky had been suborned by Trotsky, Bukharin, Rykov, Yenukidze, Yagoda and Rudzutak. As in any good spy novel, Stalin sought to chercher la femme, playing on Tukhachevsky and Yenukidze’s womanizing. “There’s one experienced female spy in Germany, in Berlin . . . Josephine Heinze . . . she’s a beautiful woman . . . She recruited Yenukidze. She helped recruit Tukhachevsky.” Officers were actually arrested during the meeting so it was hardly surprising the survivors supported Stalin.[49]

Voroshilov revelled in his vengeance. “I never trusted Tukhachevsky, I never particularly trusted Uborevich . . . They were scoundrels . . .” he declared to the Defence Commissariat, embroidering Stalin’s tale of sexual depravity. “Comrades,” he said, “we have not purged everyone yet. I personally don’t doubt there are people who thought they were only talking, that’s all. They chattered: ‘It would be a good thing to kill Stalin and Voroshilov’ . . . Our government will exterminate such people.”

“Right,” shouted his applauding audience.

“They were degenerates,” said Voroshilov. “Filthy in their private lives!”[50]

On 9 June, Vyshinsky interviewed the accused and reported to Stalin twice, arriving at the Little Corner at 10:45 p.m. The Politburo reviewed the officers’ appeals, passing them round the table. On Yakir’s plea, Stalin wrote: “A scoundrel and a prostitute.”

“A completely precise description,” Voroshilov slavishly added. Molotov signed but Yakir’s best friend, Kaganovich, almost had to dance on his grave: “For this traitor, bastard and s—t, there is only one punishment— execution.”[51]

On the 11th, the Supreme Court convened a special military tribunal to try the “traitors.” The reptilian Ulrikh represented the Military Collegium but the key judges were the Marshals themselves. Budyonny was one of the most active, accusing them of “wrecking” by urging the formation of armoured divisions.

“I feel I’m dreaming,” Tukhachevsky remarked of the accusations. There was no mention of Josephine, the gorgeous German spy. Ominously, many of the generals were accused of serving a “second Motherland,” Yakir being a Bessarabian Jew. Most of the judges were terrified: “Tomorrow I’ll be put in the same place,” one of them, Corps Commander Belov, told his friends afterwards. (He was right.) All were sentenced to death at 23:35 that day. Ulrikh rushed over to report to Stalin who, waiting with Molotov, Kaganovich and Yezhov, did not examine the sentences. He just said: “Agreed.” Yezhov returned with Ulrikh to supervise the executions which took place within the hour early on the morning of 12 June. As ever, Stalin was sadistically curious.

“What were Tukhachevsky’s last words?” Stalin asked Yezhov.

“The snake said he was dedicated to the Motherland and Comrade Stalin. He asked for clemency. But it was obvious he was not being straight, he hadn’t laid down his arms.”

All the judges were later shot except Ulrikh, Budyonny and Shaposhnikov. If Budyonny had any doubts about supporting the Terror, the NKVD arrived to arrest him soon after the trial. He pulled out a pistol and threatened to kill the Chekists while he telephoned Stalin who cancelled the arrest. His wife was not so fortunate.

Voroshilov unleashed a massive purge of the army, personally demanding the arrests of three hundred officers in letters to the NKVD[52]: by 29 November 1938, Voroshilov boasted that 40,000 had been arrested and 100,000 new officers promoted. Three of the five marshals, fifteen of the sixteen commanders, sixty of the sixty-seven corps commanders, and all seventeen commissars were shot. Stalin earnestly encouraged the witch-hunt at informal meetings with officers.

“We don’t know up to now whether we can speak openly about Enemies of the People or not . . .” naval commander Laukhin asked.

“To speak in public?” responded Stalin.

“No, here, internally?”

“We must—it’s obligatory!” answered Stalin. The commanders discussed individual officers.

“Gorbatov is now worried,” reported Kulikov, a divisional commander in Ukraine.

“Why should he worry,” replied Stalin, “if he is an honest man?”

“I wouldn’t say he is pure. He was clearly connected,” said Kulikov.

“Is he scared?” asked Stalin.

The army had been the last force capable of stopping Stalin, reason enough for the destruction of its High Command. It is possible that the generals knew about Stalin’s record as an Okhrana double agent and had considered action. The usual explanation is that German disinformation persuaded Stalin that they were plotting a coup. Hitler’s spymaster, Heydrich, had concocted such evidence that was passed to Stalin by the well-meaning Czech President Beneš. But no German evidence was used at Tukhachevsky’s trial—nor was it necessary. Stalin needed neither Nazi disinformation nor mysterious Okhrana files to persuade him to destroy Tukhachevsky. After all, he had played with the idea as early as 1930, three years before Hitler took power. Furthermore, Stalin and his cronies were convinced that officers were to be distrusted and physically exterminated at the slightest suspicion. He reminisced to Voroshilov, in an undated note, about the officers arrested in the summer of 1918. “These officers,” he wrote, “we wanted to shoot en masse.” Nothing had changed.[53]

Voroshilov was assisted in this slaughter by one man who personified the tragedy that was to befall the Red Army. Stalin and Yezhov planned the publicity with the editor of Pravda, Lev Mekhlis, one of the most extraordinary of all his courtiers who now exploded onto the national stage, transformed from the scourge of the media to a military Mephistopheles, compared to a “shark” and a “gloomy demon.” Even Stalin called him a “fanatic,” found him hard to restrain, and enjoyed telling stories of his “ludicrous zeal.”

With a nimbus-like plumage of black hair and a pointed, bird-like face, Mekhlis played a part as large in his way as Molotov or Beria. Born in Odessa in 1889 of Jewish parents, leaving school at fourteen, he only joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 after working with the Jewish Social Democratic Party but he served as a ruthless commissar in the Crimea during the Civil War, executing thousands. He first met Stalin during the Polish campaign, becoming one of his assistants, learning all the secrets. Devoted to “my dear Comrade Stalin,” for whom he worked in a neurotic, blood-curdling frenzy, he was too energetic and talented to remain hidden in the back rooms like Poskrebyshev. Married to a Jewish doctor, he placed Lenin’s portrait with a red ribbon in his baby’s cot and recorded the reactions of this New Man in a special diary. In 1930, Stalin appointed him Pravda editor where his management of writers was impressively brutal.[54]

Mekhlis, who left the Tsarist army as a bombardier, was now promoted to Deputy Defence Commissar, Head of its Political Department, descending on the army like a galloping horse of the Apocalypse.[55] Stalin and his Five now devised an astonishing lottery of slaughter designed to kill a whole generation.

20. Blood Bath by Numbers

They did not even specify the names but simply assigned quotas of deaths by the thousands. On 2 July 1937, the Politburo ordered local Secretaries to arrest and shoot “the most hostile anti-Soviet elements” who were to be sentenced by troikas, three-man tribunals that usually included the local Party Secretary, Procurator and NKVD chief.

The aim was “to finish off once and for all” all Enemies and those impossible to educate in socialism, so as to accelerate the erasing of class barriers and therefore the bringing of paradise for the masses. This final solution was a slaughter that made sense in terms of the faith and idealism of Bolshevism which was a religion based on the systematic destruction of classes. The principle of ordering murder like industrial quotas in the Five-Year Plan was therefore natural. The details did not matter: if Hitler’s destruction of the Jews was genocide, then this was democide, the class struggle spinning into cannibalism. On 30 July, Yezhov and his deputy Mikhail Frinovsky proposed Order No. 00447 to the Politburo: that between 5 and 15 August, the regions were to receive quotas for two categories: Category One—to be shot. Category Two—to be deported. They suggested that 72,950 should be shot and 259,450 arrested, though they missed some regions. The regions could submit further lists. The families of these people should be deported too. The Politburo confirmed this order the next day.

Soon this “meat grinder” achieved such a momentum, as the witch hunt approached its peak and as the local jealousies and ambitions spurred it on, that more and more were fed into the machine. The quotas were soon fulfilled by the regions who therefore asked for bigger numbers, so between 28 August and 15 December, the Politburo agreed to the shooting of another 22,500 and then another 48,000. In this, the Terror differed most from Hitler’s crimes which systematically destroyed a limited target: Jews and Gypsies. Here, on the contrary, death was sometimes random: the long-forgotten comment, the flirtation with an opposition, envy of another man’s job, wife or house, vengeance or just plain coincidence brought the death and torture of entire families. This did not matter: “Better too far than not far enough,” Yezhov told his men as the original arrest quota ballooned to 767,397 arrests and 386,798 executions, families destroyed, children orphaned, under Order No. 00447.[56]

Simultaneously, Yezhov attacked “national contingents”—this was murder by nationality, against Poles and ethnic Germans among others. On 11 August, Yezhov signed Order No. 00485 to liquidate “Polish diversionists and espionage groups” which was to consume most of the Polish Communist Party, most Poles within the Bolshevik leadership, anyone with social or “consular contacts”—and of course their wives and children. A total of 350,000 (144,000 of them Poles) were arrested in this operation, with 247,157 shot (110,000 Poles)—a mini-genocide. As we will see, this hit Stalin’s own circle with especial force.[57] Altogether, the latest estimates, combining the quotas and national contingents, are that 1.5 million were arrested in these operations and about 700,000 shot.[58]

“Beat, destroy without sorting out,” Yezhov ordered his henchmen. Those who showed “operational inertness” in the arrests of “counter-revolutionary formations within and outside the Party . . . Poles, Germans and kulaks” would themselves be destroyed, but most now “tried to surpass each other with reports about gigantic numbers of people arrested.” Yezhov, clearly taking his cue from the Five, actually specified that “if during this operation, an extra thousand people will be shot, that is not such a big deal.” Since Stalin and Yezhov constantly pushed up the quotas, an extra thousand here and there was inevitable but the point was that they deliberately destroyed an entire “caste.” And, like Hitler’s Holocaust, this was a colossal feat of management. Yezhov even specified what bushes should be planted to cover mass graves.[59]

Once this massacre had started, Stalin almost disappeared from public view, appearing only to greet children and delegations. The rumour spread that he did not know what Yezhov was doing. Stalin spoke in public only twice in 1937 and once in 1938, cancelling all his holidays (he did not go southwards again until 1945). Molotov gave the 6 November addresses in both years. The writer Ilya Ehrenburg met Pasternak in the street: “He waved his arms around as he stood between the snowdrifts: ‘If only someone would tell Stalin about it.’ ” The theatrical director Meyerhold told Ehrenburg, “They conceal it from Stalin.” But their friend, Isaac Babel, lover of Yezhov’s wife, learned the “key to the puzzle”: “Of course Yezhov plays his part but he’s not at the bottom of it.”³

Stalin was the mastermind but he was far from alone. Indeed, it is neither accurate nor helpful to blame the Terror on one man because systematic murder started soon after Lenin took power in 1917 and never stopped until Stalin’s death. This “social system based on blood-letting” justified murder now with the prospect of happiness later. The Terror was not just a consequence of Stalin’s monstrosity but it was certainly formed, expanded and accelerated by his uniquely overpowering character, reflecting his malice and vindictiveness. “The greatest delight,” he told Kamenev, “is to mark one’s enemy, prepare everything, avenge oneself thoroughly and then go to sleep.” It would not have happened without Stalin. Yet it also reflected the village hatreds of the incestuous Bolshevik sect where jealousies had seethed from the years of exile and war.

Stalin and his faction regarded the Civil War as their finest hour: 1937 was a Tsaritsyn reunion, as Stalin even reminisced to a group of officers: “We were in Tsaritsyn with Voroshilov,” he began. “We exposed [Enemies] within a week, even though we didn’t know military affairs. We exposed them because we judged them by their work and if today’s political workers judge men by their actual work, we would soon expose the Enemies in our army.”[60]

The anti-Bolshevik resurgence of Germany was real enough, the Spanish War setting new standards for betrayal and brutality. Economic disasters were glaring: Molotov’s papers reveal there was still famine and cannibalism,[61] even in 1937.[62]

The corruption of grandees was notorious: Yagoda seemed to be running palaces and diamond deals out of official funds, Yakir renting out dachas like a landlord. The wives of marshals, such as Olga Budyonny and her friend Galina Yegorova, Stalin’s fancy at Nadya’s last supper, blossomed at embassies and “salons, reminiscent of glittering receptions . . . in aristocratic Russia” with “dazzling company, stylish clothes.”

“Why have the prices flown upwards 100% while nothing is in the shops,” Maria Svanidze asked her diary. “Where is the cotton, flax and wool when medals were won for beating the Plan? And the construction of private dachas . . . crazy money spent on magnificent houses and rest homes?”[63]

The responsibility lies with the hundreds of thousands of officials who ordered, or perpetrated, the murders. Stalin and the magnates enthusiastically, recklessly, almost joyfully, killed, and they usually killed many more than they were asked to kill. None were ever tried for these crimes.[64]

Stalin was surprisingly open with his circle about the aim to “finish off” all their Enemies. He could tell his cronies this quite openly at Voroshilov’s May Day party, as reported by Budyonny. He seems to have constantly compared his Terror to Ivan the Terrible’s massacre of the boyars. “Who’s going to remember all this riffraff in ten or twenty years’ time? No one. Who remembers the names now of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of?[65] No one . . . The people had to know he was getting rid of all of his enemies. In the end, they all got what they deserved.”

“The people understand, Joseph Vissarionovich, they understand and they support you,” replied Molotov. Similarly, he told Mikoyan, “Ivan killed too few boyars. He should have killed them all, to create a strong state.” The magnates were not as oblivious of Stalin’s nature as they later claimed.[66]

While the regions fulfilled their nameless quotas, Stalin was also killing thousands whom he knew well. Yezhov visited Stalin virtually every day. Within a year and a half, 5 of the 15 Politburo members, 98 of the 139 Central Committee members and 1,108 of the 1,966 delegates from the Seventeenth Congress had been arrested. Yezhov delivered 383 lists of names—which were known as “albums” since they often contained photographs and potted biographies of the proposed victims—and proposed: “I request sanction to condemn them all under the First Category.”

Most of the death lists were signed by Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov but many were also signed by Zhdanov and Mikoyan. On some days, for example 12 November 1938, Stalin and Molotov signed 3,167 executions. Usually they simply wrote: “For,” VMN or Vishka. Molotov admitted: “I signed most—in fact almost all—the arrest lists. We debated and made a decision. Haste ruled the day. Could one go into all the details? . . . Innocent people were sometimes caught. Obviously one or two out of ten were wrongly caught, but the rest rightly.” As Stalin had put it, “Better an innocent head less, than hesitations in the war.” They ordered the deaths of 39,000 on these lists of names. Stalin marked lists with notes to Yezhov: “Comrade Yezhov, those whose names I’ve marked ‘arr’ should be arrested if not already.” Sometimes Stalin simply wrote: “Shoot all 138 of them.” When Molotov received regional death lists, he simply underlined the numbers, never the names. Kaganovich remembered the frenzy of that time: “What emotions!” They were “all responsible” and perhaps “guilty of going too far.”[67]

Stalin declared that the son should not suffer for the sins of the father but then carefully targeted the families of Enemies: this may have reflected his Caucasian mentality or merely the incestuous labyrinth of Bolshevik connections. “They had to be isolated,” explained Molotov, “otherwise they’d have spread all kinds of complaints.” On 5 July 1937, the Politburo ordered the NKVD to “confine all wives of condemned traitors . . . in camps for 5–8 years” and to take under State protection children under fifteen: 18,000 wives and 25,000 children were taken away. But this was not enough: on 15 August, Yezhov decreed that children between one and three were to be confined in orphanages but “socially dangerous children between three and fifteen” could be imprisoned “depending on the degree of danger.” Almost a million of these children were raised in orphanages and often did not see their mothers for twenty years.[68]-

Stalin was the engine of this murderous machine. “Now everything will be fine,” he wrote on 7 May 1937 to one of his killers who complained that he had not “lost his teeth” but had become somewhat dazed: “The sharper the teeth the better. J.St.” This is just one of the many notes in the newly opened archives that show not merely Stalin’s bureaucratic orders but his personal involvement in encouraging even junior officials to slaughter their comrades. The teeth were never sharp enough.[69]

While all the leaders could save some of their friends—and not others—Stalin himself could protect whoever he wished: his whims only added to his mystique. When his old friend from Georgia, Sergo Kavtaradze, was arrested, Stalin did not approve his death but put a dash next to Kavtaradze’s name. This tiny crayon line saved his life. Another old friend, Ambassador Troyanovsky, appeared on a list: “Do not touch,” wrote Stalin.[70] However much someone was denounced, Stalin’s favour could be well nigh impregnable, but once his trust was shattered, damnation was final though it might take years to come. The best way to survive was to be invisible because sometimes ghastly coincidences brought people into fatal contact with Stalin: Polish Communist Kostyrzewa was tending her roses near Kuntsevo when she found Stalin looking over her fence: “What beautiful roses,” he said. She was arrested that night—though this was at the time of the anti-Polish spy mania and perhaps she was on the lists anyway.

Stalin often forgot—or pretended to forget—what had happened to certain comrades and years later assumed an air of disappointment when he heard they had been shot. “You used to have such nice people,” he later remarked to Polish comrades. “Vera Kostyrzewa for example, do you know what’s become of her?” Even his remarkable Rolodex of a memory could not remember all his victims.[71]

Stalin enjoyed rattling his colleagues: one such was Stetsky, formerly in Bukharin’s kindergarten of young protégés who had successfully joined Stalin’s CC Cultural Department. Now Bukharin, at one of his “confrontations” with his accusers, gave Stalin an old letter Stetsky had written criticizing him: “Comrade Bukharin,” Stalin wrote to Stetsky, “gave me your letter to him [from 1926–27] with the hint that everything about Stetsky is not always clean. I have not read the letter. I’m giving it back to you. With Communist greetings, Stalin.”

Imagine Stetsky’s terror on receiving this handwritten note. He wrote back immediately: “Comrade Stalin, I’ve received your letter and thank you for your trust. On my letter . . . written when I was not clean . . . I belonged to the Bukharin group. Now I’m ashamed to remember it . . .” He was arrested and shot.[72]

Stalin played games even with his closest comrades: Budyonny, for example, had performed well at the trial but when the arrests reached his own staff, he went to Voroshilov to complain with a list of innocent men under investigation. Voroshilov was terrified: “Speak to Stalin yourself.”

Budyonny confronted Stalin: “If these are the Enemy, who made the Revolution? It means we must be jailed too!”

“What are you saying, Semyon Mikhailovich?” Stalin laughed. “Are you crazy?” He called in Yezhov: “Budyonny here claims it’s time to arrest us.” Budyonny claimed that he gave his list to Yezhov who released some of the officers.[73]

Stalin himself specialized in reassuring his victims and then arresting them. Early in the year, the wife of one of Ordzhonikidze’s deputies at Heavy Industry was called by Stalin himself: “I hear you’re going about on foot. That’s no good . . . I’ll send you a car.” Next morning, the limousine was there. Two days later, her husband was arrested.

The generals, diplomats, spies and writers, who had served in the Spanish War, sunk in a quagmire of betrayals, assassinations, defeats, Trotskyite intrigues and denunciations, were decimated even when they had apparently done little wrong[74]. Stalin’s Ambassador to Madrid, Antonov-Ovseenko, an ex-Trotskyite, entangled himself by trying to prove his loyalty; he was recalled, affably promoted by Stalin, and arrested the next day. When Stalin received the journalist Mikhail Koltsov, he teased him about his adventures in the Spanish Civil War, calling him “Don Miguel,” but then asked: “You don’t intend to shoot yourself? So long, Don Miguel.” But Koltsov had played a deadly game in Spain, denouncing others to Stalin and Voroshilov. The “Don” was arrested.[75]

Stalin’s office was bombarded with notes of execution from the regions: a typical one on 21 October 1937[76], listed eleven shot in Saratov, eight in Leningrad then another twelve, then six in Minsk then another five . . . a total of 82. There are hundreds of such lists, addressed to Stalin and Molotov.[77]

On the other hand, Stalin received a stream of miserable cries for help. Bonch-Bruevich whose daughter was married into Yagoda’s circle, insisted: “Believe me, dear Joseph Vissarionovich, I’d bring a son or daughter to the NKVD myself if they were against the Party...”[78] Stalin’s own secretary from the twenties, Kanner, who had been in charge of his dirty tricks against Trotsky and others, was arrested. “Kanner cannot be a villain,” wrote a certain Makarova, perhaps his wife. “He was friends with Yagoda but who could think the Narkom of Security could be such scum? Believe, Comrade Stalin, that Kanner deserved your trust!” Kanner was shot[79].

Often the appeals were from Old Bolsheviks who had been close friends, such as Viano Djaparidze whose tragic letter read: “My daughter’s been arrested. I cannot imagine what she could have done. I ask you dear Joseph Vissarionovich to ease the terrible fate of my daughter...”[80]

Then he received letters from doomed leaders desperate to save themselves: “I am unable to work, it’s not a question of Party-mindedness, but it’s impossible for me not to react to the situation around me and to clear the air and understand the reason for it . . . Please give me a moment of your time to receive me . . .” wrote Nikolai Krylenko, the People’s Commissar of Justice no less and signer of many a death sentence. He too was shot.[81]

Yezhov was the chief organizer of the Terror, with Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov as enthusiastic accomplices. But all the magnates had the power over life and death: years later Khrushchev remembered his power over a junior agronomist who crossed him: “Well of course I could have done anything I wanted with him, I could have destroyed him, I could have arranged it so that, you know, he would disappear from the face of the earth.”[82]

 

 

21. The Blackberry at Work and Play

Stalin received Yezhov 1,100 times during the Terror, second only to Molotov in frequency—and this only counted formal appointments in the Little Corner. There must have been many meetings at the dacha. The archives show how Stalin noted down those to be arrested in little lists to discuss with the Blackberry: on 2 April 1937, for example, he writes in his blue and red pencils to Yezhov a list of six points, many ominous, such as “Purge State Bank.”[83] Sometimes Stalin gave him a lift home to his dacha.[84]

Yezhov followed a punishing schedule of work, intensified by the terrible deeds he supervised and the pressure, from both above and below, to arrest and kill more: he lived the Stalinist nocturnal existence and was constantly exhausted, becoming paler and nervier. We now know how he worked: he tended to sleep in the morning, dine at home with his wife, meet his deputy Frinovsky for a drink at their dachas—and then drive to Butyrki or Lubianka to supervise the interrogations and tortures.[85] Since Yezhov had been in the top echelons of the Party for about seven years, he often knew his victims personally. In June 1937, he signed off on the arrest of his “godfather” Moskvin and his wife, whose house he had often visited. Both were shot. He could be brutal. When Bulatov, who had run a CC Department alongside Yezhov and had visited his home, was being interrogated for the fifth time, the Commissar-General appeared through a door in the wall: “Well, is Bulatov testifying?”

“Not at all, Comrade Commissar-General!” replied the interrogator.

“Then lay it on him good!” he snapped and departed. But sometimes he clearly found his job difficult: when he had to witness the execution of a friend, he looked distressed. “I see in your eyes that you feel sorry for me!” said the friend. Yezhov was flustered but ordered the executioners to fire. When another old buddy was arrested, Yezhov seemed moved but drunkenly ordered his men “to cut off his ears and nose, put out his eyes, cut him to pieces,” yet this was for show: he then chatted to his friend late into the night but he too was shot. The Politburo greatly admired Yezhov who, thought Molotov, “wasn’t spotless but he was a good Party worker.”[86]

Sometimes, amid all the murder and thuggery, Yezhov showed his old side. When he received Stalin’s doctor, Vinogradov, who had to testify in the upcoming Bukharin trial against his own teacher, Yezhov tipsily advised him: “You’re a good person but you talk too much. Bear in mind that every third person is my person and informs me of everything. I recommend you talk less.”[87]

The Commissar-General was at his peak. On holidays, Yezhov was filmed strolling through the Kremlin, laughing with Stalin while absurdly smoking what appears to be a very big cigarette. During the long November 6th speeches at the Bolshoi Theatre, US Ambassador Davies watched “Stalin, Voroshilov and Yezhov obviously whispering and joking among themselves.” Pravda hailed him as “an unyielding Bolshevik who without getting up from his desk, night and day, is unravelling and cutting the threads of the Fascist conspiracy.” Towns and stadiums were named after him.[88] For the Kazakh “bard” Dzhambul Dzhabaev, he was “a flame, burning the serpents’ nests.”[89]

He and Yevgenia now lived luxuriously in a dacha, with the usual cinema, tennis court and staff, at Meshcherino near Leninsky Gorky where many leaders had their homes. They had adopted a daughter, Natasha, an orphan from a children’s home. Yezhov was tender, teaching her to play tennis, skate and bicycle. In the photographs, he stands next to his friends, hugging Natasha like any other father. He spoiled her with presents and played with her on his return from work.

When Yezhov began to feed foreign Communists and returned émigrés into the meat grinder, he received an appeal from an anxious, pretty and very pregnant Russian émigré named Vera Trail, who was the daughter of Alexander Guchkov, the pre-revolutionary moderate conservative. She received a call after midnight.

“Kremlin speaking. The Comrade Commissar will see you now.” A limousine took her into the Kremlin where she was led into his long, dimly lit study with a green lampshade. The aphrodisiac of power working its wonders, she immediately admired his “finely chiselled face,” his “brown wavy hair and blue eyes—the deepest blue I’d ever seen” and his “small graceful slender hands.” She mentioned a list of friends, mainly writers, who had been arrested. He was acutely perceptive, “a marvellous listener.” Blackberry dismissed his guards to receive her: “I certainly don’t make the habit of receiving total strangers unprotected.”

“I’m not even carrying a handbag,” she flirted back at him.

“No, only Belomor cigarettes. But you said you were pregnant.”

“Said? Can’t you see?” Her belly was enormous.

“I see a bulge,” joked Yezhov, “but how am I to know it’s not a time bomb cleverly wrapped in a pillow? You weren’t searched . . . were you?”

Yezhov stood up and walked around the desk as if he was about to feel her belly but halfway he stopped and sat down, laughing: “Of course you’re pregnant. I was only joking.” Here was an authentic Yezhovian moment in which the Commissar displayed his clunkingly puerile humour (though thankfully, an improvement on the farting contests), the swagger of menace—and his paranoia. He promised to review her case and receive her again, kindly suggesting that she must go straight to bed.

The next night, Yezhov’s office called again: “Leave for Paris at once.” She left on the train the next morning and was convinced that he had, for whatever reason, gone out of his way to save her life. Every one of the friends on her list were destroyed—but he saved her.[90]

Yet personal attraction was rarely a reason to save the life of an Enemy: Blackberry had enjoyed a love affair with another Yevgenia, the wife of the Ambassador to Poland, throughout the thirties, offering to maintain her in Moscow. However, Yevgenia Podoskaya refused, was arrested in November 1936 and shot on 10 March 1937.[91]

Yezhov bombarded Molotov with reports of the conspiracies he had discovered.[92] He and Kaganovich were enthusiasts: “I’ve always considered that those chiefly responsible were Stalin and we who encouraged it, who were active. I was always active, I’d always supported the measures taken,” said Molotov. “Stalin was right—‘better an innocent head less . . .’ ” Kaganovich agreed: “Otherwise we’d never have won the war!” Molotov notoriously reviewed one list of arrests and personally wrote “VMN” next to a woman’s name. It was Molotov who signed and apparently added names to the list of wives of Enemies such as Kosior and Postyshev, who were all shot. Of the twenty-eight Commissars under Premier Molotov in early 1938, twenty were killed. When he found the name of a Bolshevik named G. I. Lomov on a list, Stalin asked: “What about this?”

“In favour of immediate arrest of that bastard Lomov,” wrote Molotov. In the case of some unfortunate professor, Molotov asked Yezhov: “Why is this professor still in the Foreign Ministry and not in the NKVD?”[93]⁹ When some books by Stalin and Lenin were burned by mistake, Molotov ordered Yezhov to accelerate the case.[94] When Molotov heard that a regional Procurator had grumbled about the Purge and joked, quite understandably, that it was amazing Stalin and Molotov were still alive when there were so many terrorists trying to kill them, he ordered the NKVD: “Investigate, having agreed with Vyshinsky [the official’s boss in Moscow]. Molotov.” Kaganovich boasted there was not one railway “without Trotskyite/Japanese wreckers,” writing at least thirty-two letters to the NKVD demanding eighty-three arrests—and signing death lists for 36,000. So many railwaymen were shot that an official telephoned Poskrebyshev to warn that one line was entirely unmanned.

Yet all the leaders also knew that they themselves were constantly being tested: both Molotov’s secretaries were arrested.

“I sensed danger gathering around me,” he said as they collected testimony against him. “My first assistant threw himself down the liftshaft at the NKVD.”[95] No one was safe: they had their families to consider. Stalin had made it amply clear that the Enemies had to be destroyed “without looking at their faces.” If they had hoped that their rank would protect them, the arrests of Politburo members like Rudzutak had corrected that impression. Testimonies were prepared against all, including Molotov, Voroshilov and Kaganovich. Their chauffeurs were arrested so frequently that Khrushchev grumbled to Stalin, who said: “They’re gathering evidence against me too.” All of them must have thought like Khrushchev who asked: “Do you think I’m confident . . . that tomorrow won’t transfer me from this office to a prison cell?”

The case of Marshal Budyonny surely concentrated their minds: on 20 June 1937 soon after the execution of Tukhachevsky, Stalin told the cavalryman: “Yezhov says your wife’s conducting herself dishonourably and bear in mind we won’t let anyone, even a wife, compromise you in the Party and the State. Talk to Yezhov about it and decide what to do if it’s necessary. You missed an Enemy near you. Why do you feel sorry for her?”

“A bad wife is family, not political business, Comrade Stalin,” replied Budyonny. “I’ll look into it myself.”

“You must be brave,” said Stalin. “Do you think I don’t feel sorry when my closest circle turn out to be Enemies of the People?” Budyonny’s wife, Olga, was a Bolshoi singer, who was best friends with the actress wife of Marshal Yegorov. It seems Olga was cuckolding Budyonny with a Bolshoi tenor and flirting with Polish diplomats. Budyonny went to Yezhov who told him that his wife “along with Yegorova, visits foreign embassies . . .” When he was inspecting the troops, his wife was arrested in the street, interrogated and sentenced to eight years and then another three. Budyonny sobbed, “the tears pouring down his cheeks.” Olga went mad in solitary confinement. There used to be a legend that Stalin was more merciful to women: certainly female CC members were more likely to survive.[96] But Galina Yegorova, forty, was shot even before her Marshal husband. No chivalry there. Her flirtation with Stalin on the night of Nadya’s suicide cannot have helped her case but he was always more pitiless if there was a hint of sexual debauchery.[97]

The Terror was, among many more important things, the triumph of prissy Bolshevik morality over the sexual freedom of the twenties. The destruction of Yenukidze, Tukhachevsky and Rudzutak involved what Molotov called that “weak spot . . . women!” The scent of actresses, the whirl of diplomatic balls and the glow of foreign decadence were sometimes enough to convince the lonely Stalin and the priggish Molotov, both reeking of Puritanical envy, that treason and duplicity lurked. But debauchery was never the real reason their victims were destroyed. That was always political. The accusations of sexual deviance were deployed to dehumanize them among their former colleagues. Yenukidze and Rudzutak were both said to seduce what Kaganovich called “little girls.” Since it is unlikely that the Central Committee contained a cell of paedophiles, as well as a web of terrorists and spies, it seems more likely these hedonistic grandees just “protected” ballerinas like millionaires past and present. Nonetheless Stalin had tolerated (and probably enjoyed) Yenukidze’s parties for years. Womanizers, such as Bulganin and Beria, continued to prosper, providing they were loyal and competent politically, but no one could say this was mere tittle-tattle at Stalin’s court.[98] People died of gossip.

Stalin was an awkward man of the nineteenth century: flirtatious with, and appreciative of, the well-dressed women of his circle, strictly prudish about his own daughter, shocked at the feminism and free love of the early twenties, yet crudely macho among his male friends. His prudishness was thoroughly “Victorian”: the appearance of Svetlana’s knees, even her bold stare in a photograph, provoked absurd crises. Stalin disapproved of the “first kiss” in Alexandrov’s Volga, Volga, which was too passionate, with the result that not only was the kiss cut, but all kissing was almost banned from all Soviet films by over-zealous officials. In Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part Two, Stalin, who identified so closely with the Tsar, was embarrassed by Ivan’s kiss which he said went on much too long and had to be cut. When Tatiana appeared in the opera Onegin wearing a sheer gown, Stalin exclaimed: “How can a woman appear before a man dressed like that?” The director immediately restored “Bolshevik modesty” to Pushkin’s worldliness. In old age, seeing a Georgian cigarette packet illustrated with a racy girl, Stalin furiously ordered the entire brand to be redesigned: “Where would she learn to sit like that? Paris?”

He encouraged bourgeois morality among his magnates: Zhdanov’s wife wanted to leave him for his alcoholism but just as Hitler insisted Goebbels return to his wife, so Stalin ordered, “You must stay together.” It was the same with Pavel Alliluyev. When Stalin heard that Kuibyshev mistreated his wife, he exclaimed: “If I’d known about it, I’d have put an end to such beastliness.”

However, if an old friend needed help in an embarrassing situation, Stalin was amused to oblige, as a fascinating letter from his archives shows. Alexander Troyanovsky, probably the diplomat, asked for his help with a mistress (one F. M. Gratsanova) who worked for the NKVD and had been given a job by Yagoda. Now if they both left their jobs simultaneously, “there’ll be gossip. So can I leave earlier than her . . . Please solve this for me as an old comrade,” he wrote to Stalin who helped with a snigger, writing: “Comrade Yagoda, arrange this business of Troyanovsky. He’s entangled, the devil, and we are responsible [for helping him out]. Oh to God, or to the Devil, with him! Arrange this business and make him a calm bloke [muzhik]. Stalin.” In 1938, Troyanovsky again wrote to ask Stalin to get Yezhov to let the lady keep her apartment. Stalin helped again.[99]

One of the mysteries of the Terror was Stalin’s obsession with forcing his victims to sign elaborate confessions of unlikely crimes before they died. It was only with the slaughter of the NKVD and military brass between March and July 1937 that Stalin emerged as the absolute dictator. Even then, he still had to convince his magnates to do his bidding. How did he do it?

There was the character of Stalin himself: the cult of personality was so pervasive in the country that “Stalin’s word was law,” said Khrushchev. “He could do no wrong. Stalin could see it all clearly.” Mikoyan thought that the cult was the reason no one could challenge Stalin.[100] But the Terror was not merely Stalin’s will: he may have inspired much of it, and it may have reflected his own hatreds and complexes, but his magnates were constantly urging him to purge more Enemies. Nonetheless when they knew the victim, they required proof. That was the reason Stalin paid such attention to the written words of confession, signed by the victims.

As soon as he received testimonies from Yezhov, Stalin distributed them to the Politburo who found this deluge of self-incrimination and denunciation hard to refute: in March 1937, Stalin typically sent a cover note to Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Mikoyan: “I ask you to recognize the testimony of Polish-German spies Alexandra (mother) and Tamara (daughter) Litzinskaya and Minervina, former secretary of A. Yenukidze.”

All the magnates knew Yenukidze well so Stalin made sure they saw all the evidence.[101] When Mikoyan doubted the confessions, Stalin accused him of weakness but then called him back and showed him the signed testimonies: “He writes it himself . . . signs every page.” These preposterous confessions were enough to convince Kaganovich: “How could you not sign it [the death sentence] if according to the investigation . . . this man was an Enemy?” Zhdanov, according to his son, “did trust the denunciations from Yezhov . . . For some time, my father did believe there were Tsarist agents among the Leningrad leadership.” But when his parents knew the victims personally as friends, then his mother would say, “If he’s an Enemy of the People, I am one too!” Again and again, in whispered conversations, the leaders and their wives used these same words to express their doubts about one or two of the arrests although they believed in the guilt of most of the victims.

The magnates were being disingenuous in their shock. When they knew the person, they naturally took a special interest in the proof, but all of them understood and accepted that the details of the accusations and confessions did not matter. So why were they all killed? Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote that they were killed “for nothing” while Maya Kavtaradze, whose parents were arrested, simply says: “Don’t ask why!” They were killed not because of what they had done but because of what they mightdo. As Molotov explained, “The main thing was, that at the decisive moment, they could not be depended on.” Indeed, some, such as Rudzutak, were not even “consciously” disloyal. It was the potential nature of this betrayal which meant that Stalin could still admire the work or even personality of his victims: after Tukhachevsky and Uborevich’s shootings, he could still lecture the Politburo about the talent of the former and encourage soldiers to “Train your troops as Uborevich did.”[102] But there was also a peculiarly religious aspect.

When Stalin briefed Vyshinsky on the January 1937 trial, he addressed the accused thus: “You lost faith”—and they must die for losing it. He told Beria: “An Enemy of the People is not only one who does sabotage but one who doubts the rightness of the Party line. And there are a lot of them and we must liquidate them.” Stalin himself implied this when he told a desperate comrade, who asked if he was still trusted, “I trust you politically, but I’m not so positive in the sphere of the future perspectives of Party activities,” which seems to mean that he trusted him now but not necessarily in the coming war.

“There is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge,” Bukharin, who understood Stalin so well, wrote to him from prison, because it would “arouse an everlasting distrust . . . In this way, the leadership is bringing about a full guarantee for itself.” The stronger the Enemies of the State, the stronger the State (and Stalin) had to be. This circle of “everlasting distrust” was his natural habitat. Did he believe every case? Not forensically, but this flint-hearted politician believed only in the sanctity of his own political necessity, sometimes fused with personal vengeance.

At the lunch after the seventh November parade, held as usual at Voroshilov’s flat and attended by the magnates, including Yezhov, Khrushchev, and Redens, Mikoyan played the toastmaster, proposing “witty toasts for everyone in turn.” Then “once more [a toast] to the great Stalin,” who then stood up to explain the Terror: anyone who dared to weaken the power of the Soviet State “in their thoughts, yes even their thoughts” would be considered an Enemy and “we will destroy them as a clan.” Then he actually toasted the massacre: “To the complete destruction of all Enemies, them and their kin!” at which the magnates gave “approving exclamations: To the great Stalin!” These might have been the words of a medieval Caucasian chieftain, “a brilliant politician of the Italian Renaissance”—or Ivan. He explained that he, no great orator and an unimpressive fellow, had succeeded the “eagle” Lenin because that was what the Party wanted. He and his men were driven by “holy fear” of not justifying the trust of the masses. Thus, Stalin went on to explain, this was truly a holy terror that stemmed from Bolshevism’s Messianic nature. No wonder Yezhov called the NKVD his “secret sect.”[103]

The squalidity of this sacred thuggery beggars belief: the distance from the torture chambers of the Lubianka to Stalin’s Little Corner is about a mile, but it was much closer then.

 

 

22. Bloody Shirtsleeves: The Intimate Circle of Murder

In the mornings, Blackberry visited the Politburo and attended meetings, coming straight from the torture chambers. Khrushchev one day noticed spots of clotted blood on the hem and cuffs of Yezhov’s peasant blouse. Khrushchev, who himself was no angel, asked Yezhov what the spots were. Yezhov replied, with a flash of his blue eyes, that one should take pride in such specks because they were the blood of the Enemies of the Revolution.

Stalin often wrote instructions beside the names. In December 1937, he added the order “Beat, beat!” next to a name. “Isn’t it time to squeeze this gentleman and force him to report on his dirty little business,” Stalin wrote beside another. “Where is he—in a prison or a hotel?” The Politburo specified officially in 1937 that torture should be used. As Stalin later asserted, “The NKVD practice of the use of physical pressure . . . permitted by the Central Committee” was a “totally correct and expedient method.”

Yezhov supervised his torturers who had their own jargon for their work: they called the process of destroying an innocent human “French wrestling”—“frantsuskaya borba.” When some of them were interrogated themselves years later, they revealed how they used the zhguti, the special club, and the dubinka, the truncheon, as well as the more traditional prevention of sleep and constant interrogation that they called the “conveyor belt.” The Cheka had long had a cult of torture: indeed Leonid Zakovsky, one of Yagoda’s men, had written a guide to torture.

Frequently, the Politburo, such as Molotov and Mikoyan, would go over to interrogate their comrades in Yezhov’s grand office at the Lubianka: “Rudzutak had been badly beaten and tortured,” said Molotov about one such session. “It was necessary to act mercilessly.” Kaganovich thought “it was very difficult not to be cruel” but “one must take into consideration that they were experienced Old Bolsheviks; how could they give testimonies voluntarily?” This may make it sound as if “the Politburo was filled with gangsters,” in Molotov’s words. They may not have been Mafia hit men— few except Yezhov and later Beria personally tortured or killed their victims, and no Mafia hit man would be foolish enough to spend so much time on tedious cod-ideology—but it is sometimes hard to tell the difference.

Stalin and his magnates often laughed about the NKVD’s ability to get people to confess. Stalin told this joke to someone who had actually been tortured: “They arrested a boy and accused him of writing Eugene Onegin,” Stalin joked. “The boy tried to deny it . . . A few days later, the NKVD interrogator bumped into the boy’s parents: ‘Congratulations!’ he said. ‘Your son wrote Eugene Onegin.’ ”[104] Many of the prisoners were beaten so hard that their eyes were literally popped out of their heads. They were routinely beaten to death, which was registered as a heart attack.

Yezhov himself devised the system of execution. Instead of using the cellars of the Lubianka or the other prisons, as his predecessors had done, he created a special abattoir. Slightly behind and to the left of Lubianka, he used another NKVD building on Varsonofyevsky Lane. The prisoners were driven in Black Crows across the road from the Lubianka (there was no tunnel) and into the courtyard where a low squarish building had been specially constructed with a concrete floor sloping towards a far wall built of logs, to absorb the bullets, and hosing facilities to wash away the fluids. After a shot to the back of the head, the victims were placed in metal boxes and driven to one of the crematoria in Moscow. The ashes were usually dumped into a mass grave such as the one at the Donskoi Cemetery.[105]

The road that ended in the Donskoi often began in a note on Stalin’s desk. Stalin received not only pleas for life but denunciations demanding death. Once the Terror was unleashed, denunciations worked like kerosene on a fire, keeping it flaring up. These denunciations were already a vital part of the Stalinist system: everyone was expected to denounce everyone else. In the Bolshevik universe, there were only two ways for mistakes to come to the notice of the leaders: accidents—and denunciations. Denunciations poured into Stalin’s office: some were valid. “If we lived in a capitalist state, they’d be talking about us in the Parliament and newspapers,” said Voroshilov.

Some denunciations were the Stalinist equivalent of awkward Parliamentary questions or the work of investigative reporters: “You probably find it unpleasant that such letters are written, but I’m glad,” Stalin explained. “It would be a bad thing if no one complained. Don’t be afraid of quarrelling...This is better than friendship at the government’s expense.” But usually these poison letters were the result of witch-hunting mania, cannibalistic malice and amoral ambition.

Stalin relished the decision on how to treat the denunciations. If he did not like the person, the letters went to the NKVD with a note “Check!” and death probably followed. If he wished to “preserve” the person, he would file it and he might reactivate it years later. Hence his papers overflow with denunciations, some from ordinary people, others from top officials: a typical one, from a Comintern official, denounced Enemies in the Foreign Commissariat.[106] One can only guess at the atmosphere of fear and intrigue within the Kremlin: Ordzhonikidze’s ex-secretary, surely trying to save his skin, wrote to Stalin to denounce Sergo’s widow, Zinaida[107], who had “said several times she can’t live without Sergo and I’m worried she’ll do something silly . . . She’s often telephoned by the wives of traitors to our Party. These wives turn to her with requests (to give to Comrade Yezhov). It’s not right and she must be told not to do it . . . I ask for your instructions. Every order will be fulfilled to the last drop of blood. Devoted to you, Semyushkin.”[108] Sometimes farce turned swiftly to tragedy, like the story of how Stalin’s voice[109] was sabotaged by wreckers.[110]

A typical denunciation which Stalin read and marked came from a certain Krylov in distant Saratov, who told his leader that “Enemies have friends inside the NKVD and the Procuracy and are hiding Enemies.”[111] The military were as avid as anyone else: “I ask you to dismiss Commander . . . Osipov,” wrote an officer from Tiflis, “who is a very suspicious person.” Stalin underlined “suspicious” with his blue pen.[112]

The lightning of this Muscovite Zeus struck the regions in different ways: in July 1937, Liushkov, a ruthless Chekist who had already ravaged Rostov, was summoned to the Kremlin and ordered to the Far East. Stalin talked about the lives of men as if they were old clothes—some we keep, some we throw away: the Far Eastern First Secretary Vareikis was “not completely reliable,” having his own clique, but “it was necessary to keep” Marshal Blyukher. Liushkov obediently arrested Vareikis.

A less reliable way was to harness a local tool such as Polia Nikolaenko, the “heroic denunciatrix of Kiev,” championed by Stalin. The speciality of this terrifying crone, responsible for the deaths of as many as 8,000 people, was to stand up at meetings and shriek accusations: Khrushchev saw how she “pointed her finger and said, ‘I don’t know that man over there but I can tell by the look in his eyes that he’s an Enemy of the People.’ ” This talk of the “look in the eyes” was another sign of the Terror’s religious frenzy. The only way to rebut this was to answer quickly: “I don’t know this woman who’s just denounced me but I can tell from the look in her eyes, she’s a prostitute.” Now Polia Nikolaenko appealed to Stalin. Her cover note catches her simplicity: “To the anteroom of Comrade Stalin. I ask you to give this declaration personally to Comrade Stalin. Comrade Stalin talked about me at the February Plenum.”

Her letter did reach Stalin, with devastating consequences for her enemies: “Dear Leader, Comrade Stalin,” she wrote on 17 September 1937, cunningly exposing how the local bosses were ignoring Stalin’s orders. “I ask for your intervention in Kiev matters . . . Enemies here again gather unbeatable power . . . sitting in their apparatdoing bad deeds. Starting from the Plenum when you spoke about Kiev and my case as a ‘little person,’ they have actively organized my discrediting to destroy me politically.” Senior officials treated her as an “Enemy” and once again used the language of witchcraft against the witch herself: “One connected to Enemies of the People cried, ‘It’s in her eyes, she’s two-faced!’ ” Kosior, the Ukrainian leader, and others ridiculed her “amid noisy laughter.” “I was, am and will be devoted to the Party and the Great Leader. You helped me to find Truth. STALIN’S TRUTH IS STRONG! This time I again ask you to do all you can to the Kiev organization . . .”

Ten days later, Stalin swooped to her aid, telling the Ukrainian bosses: “Pay attention to Comrade Nikolaenko (look at her letter). Can you protect her from this audience of hooligans? According to my information, Glaz and Timofeev really are not especially trustworthy. Stalin.” Those two men were presumably arrested while Kosior survived for the moment.[113]

The regions were soon killing too many, too quickly: Khrushchev,[114] Moscow leader, effectively ordered the shooting of 55,741 officials which more than fulfilled the original Politburo quota of 50,000. On 10 July 1937, Khrushchev wrote to Stalin to request shooting 2,000 ex-kulaks to fulfill the quota. The NKVD archives show him initialling many documents proposing arrests. By spring 1938, he had overseen the arrest of thirty-five of the thirty-eight provincial and city Secretaries, which gives some idea of this fever. Since he was based in Moscow, he brought death lists directly to Stalin and Molotov.

“There can’t be so many!” exclaimed Stalin.

“There are in fact more,” replied Khrushchev, according to Molotov. “You can’t imagine how many there are.” The city of Stalinabad (Askabad) was given a quota of 6,277 to shoot but actually executed 13,259.[115]

But mostly, they were killing the wrong people. The regional bosses selected the victims, finding it irresistible to liquidate their opponents and preserve their friends. Yet it was precisely these “princes” with their entourages that Stalin wished to destroy. Thus the First Secretaries’ initial blood-letting not only did not save them: it provided an excuse for their own eradication. It was only a matter of time before the centre unleashed a second wave of terror to eradicate the “princes” themselves.

Only Stalin’s personal viceroys, Zhdanov in Leningrad and Beria in Transcaucasia, did not require this “help.” Zhdanov was another enthusiastic believer that Trotskyites had infiltrated Leningrad, though he sometimes mused on cases: “You know I never thought Viktorov would turn out to be an Enemy of the People,” said Zhdanov to Admiral Kuznetsov, who “heard no doubt in his voice, only surprise . . . We spoke . . . as of men who had passed beyond the grave.” He oversaw the arrest of 68,000 in Leningrad. As for Beria, this professional Chekist oversaw his initial quota of 268,950 arrests and 75,950 executions. The quota was later raised. Ten percent of the Georgian Party, which was particularly well known to Stalin, were killed. Beria distinguished himself by personally performing the torture of Lakoba’s family, driving his widow mad by placing a snake in her cell and beating his teenage children to death.[116]

The solution was the despatch of Stalin’s favourites to destroy the “princes”; also a useful test of a magnate’s loyalty. There was no better blooding than a trip to the regions. Like the warlords of the Civil War they set off riding shotgun in armoured trains packed with NKVD thugs. Mikoyan, Foreign Trade and Food Supply Commissar, enjoys the reputation of one of the more decent leaders: he certainly helped the victims later and worked hard to undo Stalin’s rule after the Leader’s death. In 1936, however, Mikoyan praised the executions of Zinoviev and Kamenev— “how just the verdict!” he enthused to Kaganovich—and in 1937, he too signed death lists and proposed the arrest of hundreds of his officials. Throughout Stalin’s reign, Mikoyan was shrewd enough to avoid intrigues, eschew ambition for the highest offices, and with his sharp intelligence and prodigious capacity for work, concentrate on his responsibilities: he knew how to play the game and do just enough.

The magnates saved friends but they mainly saved them in 1939 in a different environment. Andreyev’s anteroom, his daughter claimed, “was full of those he helped” but Kaganovich honestly admitted that “it was impossible to save friends and relatives” because of “the public mood.” They had to kill a lot to save a few. Mikoyan probably did more than most, appealing to Stalin about his friend Andreasian who had been accused of being a French agent by the moronic investigators because his first name was “Napoleon.”

“He’s as French as you!” joked Mikoyan. Stalin burst out laughing.[117] Voroshilov, who was responsible for so many deaths, passed on the appeal of a friend’s arrested daughter to Stalin himself who wrote on it as usual: “To Comrade Yezhov, check this out!” Her father was released and called to thank Voroshilov, who asked: “Was it terrible?”

“Yes, very terrible.” The two friends never discussed it again.

Stalin was so besieged with requests that he passed a Politburo decree banning appeals. If a leader intervened to save a friend, the vital thing was to avoid him falling into the hands of another bloodthirsty grandee. Mikoyan managed to save one comrade and begged him to leave Moscow immediately but the Old Bolshevik, with all the punctiliousness of a knight who must have his sword returned, insisted on getting his Party card back. He called Andreyev who had him rearrested.

Perhaps Mikoyan’s kindnesses reached Stalin’s ears for he suddenly cooled towards him. In late 1937, he tested Mikoyan’s commitment by despatching him to Armenia with a list of three hundred victims to be arrested. Mikoyan signed it but he crossed off one friend. The man was arrested anyway. Just as he was speaking to the Yerevan Party meeting, Beria arrived in the room, to watch him as much as to terrorize the locals. A thousand people were arrested, including seven out of nine Armenian Politburo members. When Mikoyan returned to Moscow, Stalin warmed to him again.[118]

All the magnates set off on bloody tours of the country. Zhdanov purged the Urals and Middle Volga. Ukraine was unfortunate enough to welcome Kaganovich, Molotov and Yezhov. Kaganovich visited Kazakhstan, Cheliabinsk, Ivanovo and other places, spreading terror: “First study . . . shows the Obkom Secretary Epanchikev must be arrested at once . . .” began his first telegram from Ivanovo in August 1937, which continued: “Right-Trotskyite wrecking has assumed broad dimensions here, in industry, agriculture, supply, healthcare, trade, education and political work . . . exceptionally infested.” ¹¹ But this was nothing compared to the killing frenzy of the two most prolific monsters on tour.

Andrei Andreyev, now forty-two, small, moustachioed and hangdog of countenance, had failed to rise to the challenge of the Soviet railways but he came into his own running the CC Secretariat with Yezhov. One of the rare proletarians among the leadership, this quiet Tchaikovsky addict, mountaineer and nature photographer, married to Dora Khazan, to whom he wrote loving postcards about their children, became the unchallengeable master of these murderous road shows.

On 20 July, he arrived in Saratov to ravage the Volga German Republic:[119] “All means are necessary to purge Saratov,” he told Stalin in the first of a stream of excited, fanatical telegrams. “The Saratov organization meets all decisions of CC with great pleasure.” This was hard to believe. Everywhere he discovered how the local bosses “did not want to discover the terrorist group” and had “pardoned exposed Enemies.” By the next day, Andreyev was frantically arresting suspects: “we had to arrest the Second Secretary . . . On Freshier, we have evidence he was a member of a Rightist-Trotskyite organization. We ask permission to arrest.” One group consisted of “twenty, very obstructively working in the Machine Tractor Station. We decided to arrest and prosecute two of the directors” who turned out to be part of a “Right-kulak organization” that had “wrecked tractors” or rather they had worked slowly since “only 14 out of 74 were ready.” At 11:38 that night, Stalin replied in his blue pencil: “Central Committee agrees with your proposals about prosecution and shooting of former MTS workers.” Twenty were shot. Three days later, Andreyev boasted to Stalin that he had found “a Fascist organization—we plan to arrest at once the first group of 50–60 people . . . We had to arrest the Premier of the Republic, Luf, for proven membership of Right-Trotskyites.” He proceeded to Kuibyshev and then to Central Asia where he removed all the leaderships since Stalin had told him: “Generally, you can act as you consider.” The result was that in Stalinabad, “I have arrested 7 Narkoms, 55 CC chiefs, 3 CC Secretaries” and returning to Voronezh, he declared cheerfully: “There is no Buro here. All arrested as Enemies. Off to Rostov now!”[120]

Andreyev was accompanied on these manic trips by a plump young man of thirty-five, Georgi Malenkov, the killer bureaucrat whose career benefited the most from the Purges but who hailed from the provincial intelligentsia, a scion of Tsarist civil servants, and a nobleman.[121] He travelled with Mikoyan to Armenia and Yezhov to Belorussia. One historian estimates that Malenkov was responsible for 150,000 deaths.

Small, flabby, pale and moon-faced with a hairless chin, freckles across his nose and dark, slightly Mongol eyes, his black hair hanging across his forehead, Malenkov had broad, female hips, a pear shape and a high voice. It is no wonder that Zhdanov nicknamed him “Malanya” or Melanie. “It seemed that under the layers and rolls of fat,” a lean and hungry man was trying to get out. His great-great-grandfather had come from Macedonia during the reign of Nicholas I but, as Beria joked, he was hardly Alexander the Great. Malenkov’s ancestors had governed Orenburg for the Tsars. Descended from generals and admirals, he saw himself in the tradition of a posadnik, an elected administrator of old Novgorod, or a chinovnik like his forefathers. Unlike Stalinist bullies such as Kaganovich, who shouted and punched officials, Malenkov stood when subordinates entered his room and spoke quietly in fine Russian without swearing, though what he said was often chilling.

Malenkov’s father had shocked the family by marrying a formidable blacksmith’s daughter who had three sons. Georgi, who loved his dominant mother, was the youngest. He studied at the local classical Gymnasium, learning Latin and French. Malenkov, like Zhdanov, passed among cobblers and joiners for an educated man, qualifying as an electrical engineer. Like many other ambitious youngsters, he joined the Party during the Civil War: his family unconvincingly claim that he rode in the cavalry but he was soon on safer ground on the propaganda trains where he met his domineering wife, Valeria Golubseva, who came from a similar background.

Happily married, Malenkov was known as a wonderful father to his highly educated children, teaching them himself and reading them poetry even when he was exhausted at the height of the war. His wife helped get him a job in the Central Committee where he was noticed by Molotov, joined Stalin’s Secretariat and became secretary of the Politburo during the early thirties, one of those keen young men like Yezhov who won first Kaganovich’s, then Stalin’s notice, for their devotion and efficiency. Yet in company, he had a light sense of humour.

This cunning but “eunuch-like” magnate never spoke unless necessary and always listened to Stalin, scribbling in a notebook headed “Comrade Stalin’s Instructions.” He succeeded Yezhov as head of the CC Personnel Registration department that selected cadres for jobs. In 1937, Mikoyan said, he played a “special role.” He was the bureaucratic maestro of the Terror. One note in Stalin’s papers laconically illustrates their relationship:

“Comrade Malenkov—Moskvin must be arrested. J.St.” The young stars Malenkov, Khrushchev and Yezhov were such close friends, they were called “the Inseparables.” Yet in this paranoic lottery, even a Malenkov could be destroyed. In 1937, he was accused at a Moscow Party Conference of being an Enemy himself. He was talking about joining the Red Army in Orenburg during the Civil War when a voice cried out: “Were there Whites in Orenburg at the time?”

“Yes—”

“That means you were with them.”

Khrushchev intervened: “The Whites may have been in Orenburg at the time but Comrade Malenkov was not one of them.” It was a time when hesitation could lead to arrest.[122] Simultaneously, Khrushchev saved his own skin by going to Stalin personally and confessing a spell of Trotskyism during the early twenties.[123]

The entourage rabidly encouraged the Terror. Even decades later, these “fanatics” still defended their mass murder: “I bear responsibility for the repression and consider it correct,” said Molotov. “All Politburo members bear responsibility . . . But 1937 was necessary.” Mikoyan agreed that “everyone who worked with Stalin . . . bears a share of responsibility.” It was bad enough to kill so many but their complete awareness that many were innocent even by their own arcane standards is the hardest to take: “We’re guilty of going too far,” said Kaganovich. “We all made mistakes . . . But we won WWII.”[124] Those who knew these mass murderers later reflected that Malenkov or Khrushchev were “not wicked by nature,” not “what they eventually became.” They were men of their time.[125]

In October, another Plenum approved the arrest of yet more members of the Central Committee. “It happened gradually,” said Molotov. “Seventy expelled 1–15 people then sixty expelled another 15.” When a terrified local leader appealed to Stalin “to receive me for just ten minutes on personal matters—I’m accused in a terrible lie,” he scribbled in green to Poskrebyshev: “Say I’m on holiday.”[126]

 

 

23. Social Life in the Terror: The Wives and Children of the Magnates

Yet all of this tragedy took place in a public atmosphere of jubilation, a never-ending fiesta of triumphs and anniversaries. Here is a scene from the years of the Terror that might have taken place anywhere and any time between a daughter, her best friend and her embarrassing papa. Stalin met his daughter Svetlana in his apartment for dinner daily. At the height of the Terror, Stalin dined with Svetlana, then eleven, and her best friend, Martha Peshkova, whose grandfather, Gorky, and father had both supposedly been murdered by Yagoda, her mother’s lover. Stalin wanted Svetlana to be friends with Martha, introducing them especially. Now the girls were playing in Svetlana’s room when the housekeeper came and told them Stalin was home and at table. Stalin was alone but in a very cheerful mood—he clearly adored coming home to see Svetlana for he would often appear shouting, “Where’s my khozyaika!” and then sit down and help her do her homework. Outsiders were amazed at how this harsh creature “was so gentle with his daughter.” He sat her on his knee and told one visitor: “Since her mother died, I always tell her she’s the khozyaika but she so believed it herself that she tried to give orders in the kitchen but was made to leave immediately. She was in tears but I managed to calm her down.”

That night, he teased Martha, who was very pretty but with a tendency to blush like a beetroot.

“So Marfochka, I hear you are being chased by all the boys?” Martha was so embarrassed she could not swallow her soup or answer. “So many boys are chasing you!” Stalin persisted. Svetlana came to her rescue: “Come on, Papa, leave her alone.” Stalin laughed and agreed, saying he always obeyed his darling khozyaika.

Dinner, recalled Martha, “was miserable for me,” but she was not afraid of Stalin because she had known him since childhood. Yet nothing was quite what it seemed for these children: so many of Svetlana’s parents’ friends had disappeared. Martha had just seen[127] her mother’s new lover arrested.[128]

For the children of the leaders who were not arrested, there had never been a time of greater joy and energy. The jazz craze was still sweeping the country: Alexandrov’s latest musical, Volga, Volga, came out in 1938 and its tunes were played over and over again in the dance halls. At parties for the diplomatic corps, the killers danced to the new sounds: Kaganovich hailed jazz as “above all the friend of the jolly, the musical organizer of our high-spirited youth.” Kaganovich wrote a jazz guide leaflet with his friend Leonid Utesov, the jazz millionaire, entitled How to Organize Railway Ensembles of Song and Dance and Jazz Orchestras in which “The Locomotive” commanded that there should be a “dzhaz” band at every Soviet station. They certainly needed cheering up.

“It was truly a time of huge hope and joy for the future,” remembers Stepan Mikoyan. “We were perpetually excited and happy—the new Metro opened with its chandeliers, the giant Moskva Hotel, the new city of Magnitogorsk, and all sorts of other triumphs.” The propaganda machine sung of heroes of labour like the super-miner Stakhanov, of aviation, of exploration. Voroshilov and Yezhov were hailed as “knights” in ballads. The movies had names like Tales of Aviation Heroes. “Yes, it was an age of heroes!” reminisces Andreyev’s daughter Natasha. “We were not afraid then. Life was full—I remember smiling faces and climbing mountains, heroic pilots. Not everyone was living under oppression. We knew as children the first thing to be done was to make people strong, to make a New Man, and educate the people. At school, we learned how to use different tools, we went into the countryside to help with the harvest. No one paid us—it was our duty.”

The NKVD were heroes too: on 21 December, the “Organs” celebrated their twentieth anniversary at a Bolshoi gala. Beneath flowers and banners of Stalin and Yezhov, Mikoyan, in a Party tunic, declared: “Learn the Stalinist style of work from Comrade Yezhov just as he learned it from Comrade Stalin.” But the crux of his speech was: “Every citizen of the USSR should be an NKVD agent.”

The country celebrated the anniversary of Pushkin’s death as well as the anniversary of the Georgian poet Rustaveli which was organized by Beria and attended by Voroshilov and Mikoyan. Stalin was deliberately fusing traditional Russian culture with Bolshevism as Europe lurched closer to war. The Soviets were now fighting the Fascists by proxy in the Spanish Civil War, sparking a craze for Spanish songs and Spanish caps, “blue with red edging on the visor,” and big berets, “tilted at a rakish angle.” Women wore Spanish blouses. “If Tomorrow Brings War” was one of the most popular tunes. All the children of the leaders wanted to be pilots or soldiers.

“Even we children knew that war was coming,” recalls Stalin’s adopted son Artyom, “and we had to be strong not to be destroyed. One day, Uncle Stalin called we boys and said, ‘What would you like to do with your life?’ ” Artyom wanted to be an engineer. “No, we need men who understand the artillery.” Artyom and Yakov, already an engineer, both joined the artillery. “This was the only privilege I ever received from my Uncle Stalin,” says Artyom. But aviators were the élite: more magnates’ children joined “Stalin’s falcons” than any other service: Vasily trained as a pilot, alongside Stepan Mikoyan and Leonid Khrushchev.[129]

Yet the families of the leaders endured a special experience during that time. For the parents, it was a daily torment of depression, uncertainty, exhilaration, anxiety as friends, colleagues and relatives were arrested. Yet to read Western histories and Soviet memoirs, one might believe that this new Bolshevik élite were convinced that all those arrested were innocent. This reflects the postdated guilt of those whose fathers took part in the slaughter.

The truth was different. Zhdanov told his son Yury that Yezhov was right even in the most unlikely cases: “The devil knows! I’ve known him many years but then there was Malinovsky!” he said, referring to the notorious Tsarist spy. Andreyev knew there were Enemies but thought they had to be “thoroughly checked” before they were arrested. Mikoyan had his reservations on many arrests but his son Sergo knew his father was, in his words, a “Communist fanatic.” The wives were if anything more fanatical than the husbands: Mikoyan recalled how his wife utterly believed in Stalin and was least likely to question his actions. “My father,” says Natasha Andreyeva, “believed wreckers and Fifth Columnists were destroying our State and had to be destroyed. My mother was utterly convinced. We prepared for war.”

The magnates never discussed the Terror before the children who lived in a world of lies and murder. The “reluctance to reveal one’s thoughts even to one’s son was the most haunting sign of these times,” remembered Andrei Sakharov the physicist. Yet the children naturally noticed when their uncles and family friends disappeared, leaving unspeakable and unaskable voids in their lives. The Mikoyan children heard their parents and uncles whispering about the arrests in Armenia, but their father sometimes could not stop himself exclaiming, “I don’t believe it!” Andreyev “never mentioned it to us—it was our parents’ business,” recalls Natasha Andreyeva. “But if someone important was arrested, my father would call to Mama, ‘Dorochka, can you speak with me for a minute.’ ” Indeed, Dora told her family she could identify Enemies by looking into their eyes. They whispered behind the kitchen door. Whenever his wife asked him something dangerous, Mikoyan replied: “Shut up.” Before his death, Ordzhonikidze quietened his wife with a firm “Not now!” Parents were constantly going for walks in the woods or round the Kremlin.[130]

The inhabitants of the House on the Embankment, the hideous luxury building for younger leaders including the Khrushchevs, most of the People’s Commissars and Stalin’s cousinhood, like the Svanidzes and Redens, waited each night for the groan of the elevators, the knock on the doors, as the NKVD arrived to arrest their suspects[131] As Trifonov relates in his novel House on the Embankment, every morning the uniformed doorman told the other inhabitants who had been arrested during the night. Soon the building was filled with empty apartments, doors ominously sealed by the NKVD. Khrushchev worried about the gossiping women in his family, furious when his peasant mother-in-law spent her time chattering downstairs, knowing well how loose talk cost lives.

Parents kept bags packed for prison and Mauser and Chagan pistols under their pillows, ready to commit suicide. The cleverer ones arranged a schedule for their children in case they were arrested: the mother of Zoya Zarubina, the stepdaughter of a Chekist, showed her how to gather warm clothes and take her little sister, aged eight, to a distant relative in the countryside.[132]

The children noticed frequent house-moving because every execution created a vacant apartment and dacha which were eagerly occupied by survivors and their aspirational Party housewives, ambitious for grander accommodation. Stalin exploited this way of binding the leaders to the slaughter. Yezhov’s family moved into Yagoda’s apartments. Zhdanov received Rudzutak’s dacha, Molotov acquired Yagoda’s and later Rykov’s. Vyshinsky was the most morbidly avaricious of all: he had always coveted the dacha of Leonid Serebryakov: “I can’t take my eyes off it . . . You’re a lucky man, Leonid,” he used to say. Days after Serebryakov’s arrest on 17 August 1936, the Procurator demanded the dacha for himself, even managing to get reimbursed for his old house and then receive 600,000 roubles to rebuild the new one. This vast sum was approved on 24 January 1937, the very day Vyshinsky cross-examined Serebryakov in the Radek trial.[133] Woe betide anyone who refused these ill-starred gifts: Marshal Yegorov unwisely rejected the dacha of a shot comrade. “The souls of former owners,” wrote Svetlana Stalin, “seemed to linger within those walls.”[134] “We were never afraid in 1937,” explains Natasha Andreyev, because she believed absolutely that the NKVD only arrested Enemies. Therefore she and their parents would never be arrested. Stepan Mikoyan “wasn’t worried but only later did I realize my parents lived in constant apprehension.” Furthermore, Politburo members were sent all the interrogation records. Stepan used to creep in and peep at the extraordinary revelations of their own family friends who turned out to be Enemies. Every household had its “expunger”: in the Mikoyan household, Sergei Shaumian, adopted son of a late Old Bolshevik, went through all the family photograph albums erasing the faces of Enemies as they were arrested and shot, a horrible distortion of the colouring-in books that most children so enjoy.[135]

Even if they did not grasp the randomness of death, they were aware that it was ever present and they accepted that the coming of war meant Enemies had to be killed. The children talked about it among themselves: Vasily Stalin gleefully told Artyom Sergeev and his Redens cousins about arrests. Protected by whispers and mysteries at home, it was at school that the children learned more. Most of the leaders’ children were at Schools No. 175 (or 110), driven there by their fathers’ chauffeurs in their Packards and Buicks which could be as embarrassing as a Rolls-Royce at the school gates in the West. The Mikoyans insisted on the car dropping them off so they could walk the last half kilometre. At this élite school, the teachers (who included the English-teaching wife of Nikolai Bulganin, a rising leader) pretended nothing was happening, while the danger was just dawning on the children, who saw their friends being repressed: Stepan Mikoyan’s best friend was Serezha Metalikov, son of the senior Kremlevka doctor and nephew of Poskrebyshev, who saw both of his parents arrested during 1937.

Svetlana was treated like a Tsarevna at school by the cringing teachers. A schoolgirl there recalled how Svetlana’s desk gleamed like a mirror, the only one to be polished. Whenever a parent was arrested, their children were removed mysteriously from Svetlana’s class so this Tsarevna did not have to rub shoulders with the kin of Enemies.

Sometimes friends were actually arrested at teenage parties in front of all the others. Vasily Stalin and Stepan Mikoyan were carousing at a party given by one of their friends at the Military Academy when the doorbell rang. A man in plain clothes asked to speak to Vasily Stalin who came to the door where he was told, as a sign of almost feudal respect, that the NKVD had arrived to arrest a boy at the party. Vasily returned and told his friend to go to the door while whispering to Stepan that the boy was being arrested. They watched from the window as the Chekists put the boy into a black car as a “member of a teenage anti-Soviet group.” He was never seen again.

Parents carefully vetted their children’s friends: “My stepfather was very cautious about my boyfriends,” remembered Zoya Zarubina. “He always wanted to know who their parents were . . .” and would check them out at the Lubianka. The Voroshilovs were stricter than the Mikoyans who were stricter than the Zhdanovs: when one of the Voroshilov children was phoned by a boy whose father had just been arrested, Ekaterina Voroshilova ordered him to break off relations. Zhdanov’s son Yury claims that his parents let him bring the children of Enemies home. “My parents made no objections.” But it was all a matter of timing: in the frenzy of 1937–38, this is hard to believe. After Stepan Mikoyan started going out with a girl called Katya, he found an NKVD report that mentioned her friendship with the son of an Enemy. “I was waiting for my father to say something to me . . . but he never did.” However when some families close to Mikoyan fell under suspicion, he cut off all contact with them.[136]

During early 1937, the arrival of Poskrebyshev’s and Yezhov’s glamorous young wives meant that the entourage had never been more colourful and cosmopolitan. Out at Zubalovo, Stalin still took the family out for picnics, bringing chocolates for his daughter and Martha Peshkova. As the country shivered from the depredations of the NKVD, Stalin was solicitous to the children: once Leonid Redens, who was nine, got lost at Kuntsevo and finally galloped up to some adults who all laughed except Stalin. “Have you got lost?” he asked. “Come with me, I’ll show you the way.”[137] However, the old familiarity with Stalin was gradually freezing into fear.

---

[1] RGASPI 558.11.93.89, Stalin to Kaganovich and PB 24 Aug. 1936. Mikoyan in America: Mikoyan, pp. 300–315. Mikoyan to Kaganovich, letter 17 Sept. 1936, quoted in Miklos Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait , pp. 295–6.

[2] There were many Chekists who sometimes doubled as executioners but Blokhin himself, assisted by two murderous brothers,Vasily and Ivan Zhigarev, handled important cases. V. M. Blokhin, a veteran of the Tsarist army in the First World War and a Chekist since March 1921, had risen to head the Kommandatura Branch that was attached to the Administrative Executive Department. This meant he was in charge of the internal prison at Lubianka; among other things, he was responsible for executions. Major-General Blokhin was retired after Stalin’s death and praised for his “irreproachable service” by Beria himself. After Beria’s fall, he was stripped of rank in November 1954 and died on 3 February 1955.

[3] Sudoplatov, p. 165. Michael Parrish, “Downfall of the Iron Commissar NI Yezhov 1938–1940,” Slavic Military Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, June 2001, p. 87. Blokhin, “black work”: Petrov and Scorkin.

[4] When he was arrested they were found among his belongings and passed on to Yezhov who also kept them until his downfall.

[5] Zinoviev seems unlikely to have recited the Shema prayer, the holiest in Jewish faith, since he, like all the Jews among these internationalist Bolsheviks, despised religion, but equally he would have remembered it from his childhood.

[6] Tucker, Power, p. 373. Vaksberg, Stalin Against the Jews, p. 42. Conquest, Terror, p. 117. Victor Serge, From Lenin to Stalin, p. 146. Orlov, pp. 350–1. Vaksberg, p.

[7] Political coward: W. Taubman, Khrushchev, Man and Era, p. 266.

[8] On the subject of Stalin’s “barrow boy” tendencies, he was always interested in discounts in his foreign dealings: “How much was the purchase of the Italian warship?” he wrote to Voroshilov. “If we buy two warships, what discount can they give us? Stalin.”

[9] Stalin had started to use this charmingly small house, a picturesque yellow bungalow on the hillside at Novy Afon, in 1935. There were walks up the hill to a summerhouse where Stalin held barbecues. Later he would build another house next to the first that would become one of his favourite residences in old age. Now used by the President of Abkhazia, it is fully staffed. When the author visited in 2002, the manageress invited him to stay and offered to hold a banquet in his honour in Stalin’s dining room.

[10] Larina, pp. 47–8, 294–5. Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, A Political Biography 1888–1938, pp. 368–72. Kaganovich, p. 74. Kaganovich Perepiska, p. 678. Medvedev, p. 333.

[11] Interestingly, none of these candidates are ethnic Russians but a Jew, an Armenian and an Abkhazian. Some historians believe there had always been a secret policy of placing Poles, Balts and Jews and other minorities to perform the unsavoury roles in the NKVD. This is credible but it is true that Stalin desperately needed NKVD officials he trusted: he was often closest to his fellow Caucasians. He had no interest in provoking Russian resentment of Georgians in high positions. Besides, three of his secret-police chiefs were Russians (including Yezhov).

[12] In West Siberia, there was a regional show trial of “wreckers” accused of trying to murder the local leader Eikhe—and of trying to assassinate Molotov during his earlier trip there. His driver testified that he planned to sacrifice himself and kill Molotov by driving over a precipice but he lost his nerve and only managed to capsize the car in a muddy rut. No doubt this cock-and-bull story consoled Molotov for being left off the list for the Zinoviev trial.

[13] Lakoba, pp. 120–3: Stalin offered the job in December 1935. CC banned use of Abkhazian names, 17 Aug. 1936. Beria, pp. 70–5. Grand Dukes/appanage princes, Stalin at Seventeenth Congress: Getty, pp. 205, 265. Molotov: Tucker, Power, p. 389.

[14] Khlevniuk, Ordzhonikidze, pp. 103–5, 158–9, 178, 190–4. Rees, pp. 118. Friendship of Kaganovich and Sergo, Kaganovich, pp. 62–3. Eteri Ordzhonikidze. Izvestiya TsK KPSS, no. 9, 1989, pp. 36–7. Jansen-Petrov, pp. 45–51.

[15] Mikoyan, p. 328.

[16] MR, pp. 114–5. Mikoyan, p. 328.

[17] Kaganovich Perepiska, pp. 682–3 and pp. 701–2. Khlevniuk, Ordzhonikidze, pp. 104–5. Khlevniuk, Stalinskoe Politburo, pp. 148, 152. Jansen-Petrov, pp. 53–5.

[18] Khlevniuk, Ordzhonikidze, pp. 105–10.

[19] “Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that,” wrote Oscar Wilde in De Profundis about Robbie Ross waiting among the crowd at Reading Station and being the only one to step forward and raise his hat as the disgraced writer travelled to Reading Gaol. The stakes were even higher for Sergo.

[20] Natalya Rykova. Larina, pp. 293–5, 139–42. Khlevniuk, Ordzhonikidze, pp. 113–4, 139–40.

[21]  “Crank”: RGASPI 558.11.710.48–76, Bukharin to Stalin and Stalin’s note 2 July 1935. “Big child”: RGASPI 558.11.710.91, Bukharin to Stalin and reply. When Bukharin complained of dismissals among his staff at Izvestiya, Stalin sent the appeal to Yezhov who scrawled in favourite red pencil back to Stalin: “All is done—Bukharin doesn’t complain anymore.” RGASPI 558.11.710.78, Bukharin to Stalin to Yezhov to Stalin 13 Jan. 1936 (cc Yezhov section). Radek: RGASPI 558.11.710.163 Bukharin to Stalin 17 Sept. 1936. Bukharin in dreams: RGASPI 558.11.710.164–6, Bukharin to Stalin 24 Sept. 1936. RGASPI 558.11.710.172–8, Bukharin to Stalin and poem.

[22] Jansen-Petrov pp. 49–50. Days later, Yezhov was informing Stalin that Yagoda had known of a Trotskyite Centre in 1933 and done nothing about it (p. 53). Yagoda later admitted in his own interrogations that he had bugged Stalin’s calls with Yezhov (p. 226) using the Frinovsky interrogations (Frinovsky N-15301). Spain: this account is completely based on the new archival research in R. Radosh, MR Habeck and G. Sevostianov (eds.), Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War. Stalin barrow boy, NKVD takeover of Republic and aim not to win but to keep Hitler bogged down: see Introduction, pp. xv–xxv and quotations from Paul Preston, Walter Krivitsky and Gerald Howson. For reports on Soviet personnel sent to Voroshilov, see pp. 58–70. Kaganovich and Sergo were involved in economic planning there, see pp. 89–91. For security matters, see Yezhov to Voroshilov, pp. 100–1. Voroshilov sends reports to Stalin: “Read it, it’s worth it,” pp. 145–7. Denunciations to Stalin and Voroshilov by journalist M. Koltsov, pp. 267, 521. Stalin seeks discounts on warships: RGASPI 74.2.38.55, Stalin to Voroshilov 10 Jan. 1932. Jansen-Petrov, p. 54, and F. S. B. Pauker testimony. Kaganovich Perepiska, p. 678.

 

[23] “Honey seagull” and pistol: Larina, p. 310. RGASPI 74.2.40.138.1, Bukharin to Voroshilov: “Why hurt me so?” RGASPI 74.2.40.137, Bukharin to Voroshilov 3 Jan. 1935. Bukharin to Voroshilov 1 Sept. 1936. Volkogonov, pp. 295–6.

[24] My narrative here uses closely the accounts of Getty and Khlevniuk. Plenum: Getty, pp. 304–8, 311–12, 315–29. Khlevniuk, Ordzhonikidze, pp. 100, 140.

[25] Stalin’s political and personal obsessions often found a parallel in his favourite operas: he constantly attended performances of the opera Ivan Susanin by Glinka but only waited until the scene when the Poles are lured into a forest by a Russian and freeze to death there. He would then leave the theatre and go home.

[26] Khrushchev, Glasnost, pp. 36–8. Poland: William J. Chase, Enemies Within the Gates?, pp. 234–5, 239, 265. Stalin and Glinka opera, Ivan Susanin, see Svetlana OOY, p. 337. Getty, pp. 333–59.

[27] Svanidze diary, 5 Mar. 1937. I. Valedinsky, “Vospominaniya,” p. 124.

[28] Khlevniuk, Ordzhonikidze, p. 101. Rodina, 1995, no. 10, pp. 63–4. Istochnik, no. 1, 2001, pp. 63–77. Sergo believed Pyatakov’s confession: Zinaida Ordzhonikidze in Mikoyan, p. 331.

[29] RGASPI 588.2.155.104–7, Vyshinsky’s notes of meeting with Stalin. Vyshinsky’s words on 28 Jan. from Conquest, Terror, p. 179.

[30] Valedinsky, “Vospominaniya,” p. 124.

[31] Tucker, Power, pp. 405–7. Conquest, Terror, pp. 179–85. RGASPI 588.2.155. 104–7, Vyshinsky’s notes of meeting with Stalin. Yury Zhdanov on Stalin joke on apostles. Svanidze diary, Jan.–Feb. 1937. Emotional effervescence in Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich, A New History, p. 7. Yezhov in Kremlin; Jansen-Petrov, p. 121. Khlevniuk, Ordzhonikidze, pp. 190–4. Railways: Rees, p. 118.

[32] This account of Sergo’s last days is based on Khlevniuk, Ordzhonikidze , pp. 119, 126–42, 145. Mikoyan, p. 329. Also Beria A fair, p. 110. The account of his death is based on the version of Zinaida Ordzhonikidze told to Mikoyan, pp. 331–3, and that of Konstantin Ordzhonikidze, brother, in Medvedev, pp. 195–6. Stepan Mikoyan, p. 38. Eteri Ordzhonikidze.

[33] Ekaterina Voroshilova wrote twenty years later in her diaries: maybe Zinaida “was right that Ordzhonikidze was a man of great soul but on this I have my own opinion.” Sergo’s daughter Eteri recalled how Stalin called a couple of times to comfort the widow and then no one called them. Only Kaganovich still visited them. Years later, Khrushchev praised Sergo at Kuntsevo. Beria was insulting about him. Stalin said nothing. But when they left, Malenkov pulled Khrushchev aside: “Listen, why did you speak so carelessly about Sergo? He shot himself . . . Didn’t you know? Didn’t you notice how awkward it was after you said his name?” Nonetheless the city of Vladikavkaz, in the Caucasus, was renamed Ordzhonikidze.

[34] Poem: Larina, pp. 328. RGASPI 558.11.710.180–1, Bukharin to Stalin 20 Feb. 1937. Natalya Rykova. Eteri Ordzhonikidze. RGASPI 74.1.429.79, E. D. Voroshilova diary, 1956. KR I, p. 174. Khlevniuk, Circle , p. 261.

[35] Natalya Rykova survived fifteen years of slave labour on the White Sea because “of the beauty of nature that I saw every day in the forests and the kindness of people for there were more kind people than bad people.” The author thanks Natalya Rykova, aged eighty-five, indomitable and alive today in Moscow, who generously told her story without bitterness, but with tears running down her cheeks. Anna Larina was parted from her and Bukharin’s baby son. But she too survived and wrote her memoirs.

[36] The Plenum is mainly based on Getty, pp. 373–97, 413–9. Larina, pp. 64–5, 146, 330, 334–9. Natalya Rykova. Molotov reading out Voroshilov’s cruel reply to Bukharin’s letter: Volkogonov, pp. 280–6. Railways: Rees, p. 169. Conquest, Terror, p. 193. Postyshev was not yet arrested but was demoted to run the Kuibyshev (Samara) Party: Khlevniuk, Circle, pp. 233–4, 262, and Khlevniuk, Ordzhonikidze , p. 171. Tucker, Power, p. 423, 426, 429.

[37] Walter Krivitsky, I Was Stalin’s Agent, p. 197. Orlov, pp. 147, 221. Tucker, Power, p. 432. E. P. Frolov quoted in Medvedev, p. 339.

[38] Jansen-Petrov, pp. 71–2.

[39] Yagoda, p. 20 and p. 89 for the search, 28 Mar.–4 Apr. 1937.

[40] Yagoda, pp. 115–61, 171, 95–118, 109–17, 234, 255–7, 450. Jansen-Petrov, p. 63. Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations, p. 203. Orlov, p. 264.

[41] Semyon Budyonny published his conventional, cautious memoirs long after Stalin’s death but his personal notes, seventy-six mainly unpublished pages preserved by his daughter, provide fascinating glimpses of the time. I am grateful to Nina Budyonny for allowing me to use them.

[42] Stalin’s view of Tukhachevsky’s plans, 1930: RGASPI 74.2.38.59, Stalin to Voroshilov. Jansen-Petrov, pp. 69–70. Timoshenko in Kumanev (ed.), p. 270. Shimon Naveh, Tukhachevsky: Harold Shukman (ed.) Stalin’s Generals, p. 266. “Napoleonchik” in Larina, p. 198. Spahr, pp. 169, 171 (Tukh’s sister’s testimony). Slavic Military Studies , vol. 11, no. 4, Dec. 1998. Book review by John Erickson of Forging Stalin’s Army: M. Tukhachevsky and the Politics of Military Innovation by Sally Stoecker, Boulder, CO, 1998. The phrase “military entrepreneur” is hers. IA, 1998. Kaganovich, p. 100. S. Ushakov and A. A. Stukakov, Front Voennykh Prokurorov, p. 71. Bloodstains: Izvestiya TsK KPSS, no. 4, p. 50, 1989. R. R. Reese, Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers, A Social History of the Red Army, pp. 131–4.

[43] Budyonny Notes, p. 25. RGVA 4.19.16.265, Budyonny to Voroshilov 22 Aug. 1936; plus Kaganovich and Voroshilov to Stalin, see earlier. Voroshilov forwards Red Army intelligence intercept from German Embassy to Berlin on Red Army officers including Yegorov, Budyonny and Tukhachevsky: RGVA 4.19.1.170–4, 20 Apr. 1936. See also Voroshilov to Stalin on interview of Comrade Tukhachevsky to Polish newspapers: RGVA 4.19.71.52–60, Jan. 1936.

[44] Her apartment contained busts of Stalin and portraits of Lenin and Stalin. She owned 505 roubles in bonds but left 42 roubles and 20 kopeks in cash and 4,533 roubles to her lady friends plus lottery tickets worth 3 roubles. In her bedroom, there were a few packs of cigarettes, and more portraits of Stalin and, tellingly, Beria.

[45] Kaganovich, pp. 45–6, 100. Mikoyan, p. 552. Stepan M., p. 39.

[46] Rudzutak: Larina, p. 173. MR, p. 273. Kaganovich, p. 89. RGASPI 558.11. 800.113, Rudzutak to Stalin and Stalin’s reply 5 Dec. 1934. Polls: RGASPI 17.2.615.68. Izvestiya TsK KPSS, no. 4, 1989, p. 50. Getty, p. 448. Farts: RGASPI 81.3.100.91–4.

[47] Sometimes they realized they had not been vicious enough, hence Veinberg wrote: “Today when I voted for the expulsion of Rudzutak and Tukhachevsky from the Central Committee, I remembered that in voting for the expulsion of . . . Eliava and Orakhelashvili, I accidentally forgot to add the words ‘and removal of their files to the NKVD’ so I inform you I’m voting for the expulsion of all these traitors but also the removal of their files to the NKVD.”

[48] RGASPI 17.2.630.56, Plenum: Yegorov, 4 Dec. 1937. RGASPI 17.2.614.377, Veinberg, 26 May 1937.

[49] Izvestiya TsK KPSS, no. 4, 1989, pp. 52–4. Spahr, p. 172. Istochnik, no. 3, 1994, pp. 72–88. Arrest and Testimony of M. Tukhachevsky May–June 1937 by Steven J. Main, Slavic Military Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, Mar. 1997, pp. 151–95. VIZh, nos. 8 and 9, 1991. Molodaya gvardiya, nos. 9 and 10, 1994. For the latest research, see O. F. Suvenirov, Tragediya RKKA 1937/8.

[50] RGVA 4.18.61.7–66, Voroshilov at NKO 9–10 June 1937.

 

 

[51] Medvedev, p. 345. Vaksberg, Vyshinsky, pp. 104–5.

[52] A typically sinister note from Voroshilov to Yezhov read like this: “N[ikolai] I[vanovich]! Nikolayev inquired whether Uritsky should be arrested. When can you take him in? You’ve already managed to take in Slavin and Bazenkov. It would be good if you could take in Todorsky . . . KV.” All named, except Todorovsky, were shot.

[53] RGVA 4.18.62.1–357. Stalin meets army commanders 3–4 Aug. 1937. Voroshilov’s role: Voroshilov to Yezhov note quoted in Miklos Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, p. 285. Yakovlev, Century, p. 18. Vaksberg, Vyshinksy, pp. 104–5. Volkogonov, pp. 323–4. Tucker, Power, p. 437. Spahr, pp. 158–65. Ilya Ehrenburg, Eve of War, p. 197. Tukhachevsky’s wife and two brothers were shot while his mother and sisters were exiled. Izvestiya TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 4, p. 59. Budyonny: Vaksberg, p. 104. Tukhachevsky Case in 1930: RGASPI 558.11./ 78.43, Stalin to Ordzhonikidze 24 Sept. 1930. RGASPI 558.11.778.38, Menzhinsky to Stalin 10 Sept. 1930. For the story of Stalin, Okhrana file and the generals, see Orlov’s account in Edward P. Gazur, Secret Assignment: The FBI’s KGB General, pp. 441–73. Shooting officers en masse: RGASPI 74.2.38.130, Stalin to Voroshilov, n.d.

[54] Just after the announcement of the shooting of the generals, Mekhlis discovered that the “Proletarian Poet” Demian Bedny was resisting orders and secretly writing Dantean verses under the pseudonym Conrad Rotkehempfer. But Mekhlis immediately wrote to Stalin: “What should I do? He explained it was his own literary method.” Stalin replied with dripping sarcasm: “I’m answering with a letter you can read to Demian. To the new apparent Dante, alias Conrad, oh actually to Demian Bedny, the fable or poem ‘Fight or Die’ is mediocre. As a criticism of Fascism, it’s unoriginal and faded. As a criticism of Soviet construction (not joking), it’s silly but transparent. It’s junk but since we [Soviet people] have a lot of junk around, we must increase the supply of other kinds of literature with another fable . . . I understand that I must say sorry to Demian-Dante for my frankness.” Mekhlis locked Stalin’s letters in his safe whence he extracted them to impress journalists whom he asked if they recognized the handwriting. “In the middle of the night of 21 July,” he reported urgently to Stalin, “I invited Bedny to criticize his poem” and to hear Stalin’s damning letter. Bedny just said, “I’m crazy . . . maybe I’m too old. Maybe I should go to the country and grow cabbages.” Even this comment struck Mekhlis as suspicious and he floated the idea of arresting Bedny: “Maybe he’s implicated.” Stalin did not rise. Bedny was cut from Stalin’s circle but remained free, dying in 1945.

[55] Mekhlis as Stalin’s secretary: Stalin’s orders RGASPI 558.11.68, Stalin to Mekhlis 17 July 1925. RGASPI 558.11.773.92, Stalin on Congress of Writers’ Union to Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Stetsky and Mekhlis 24 Aug. 1934; RGASPI 558.11.773.95, Stalin to Mekhlis criticizing Pravda, 17 Dec. 1936. RGASPI 558.11.773.93, Mekhlis to Stalin 4 Dec 1935. Mekhlis supports Gorky’s request for Stalin to meet Pravdawriters. RGASPI 558.11.723.119, Mekhlis to Stalin and Stalin to Mekhlis 27 May 1936. “Comrade Stalin, Gorky has sent us an article . . . which contains philosophical problems . . . I’d like you to read it. L. Mekhlis.” Stalin read it and wrote straight back: “Comrade Mekhlis: Publish without changes.” His days as a literary bully were not quite over. In December, Stalin sent the ex-Pravda editor to purge Kiev and “take all necessary measures” to strengthen “editorial persons on the Ukrainian newspapers.” Henceforth it was the unfortunate military that were to feel the stinging blows of Mekhlis’s “necessary measures.” He joined the CC on 12 Oct. 1937 and became Chief Commissar of the Red Army on 30 Dec. 1937. RGASPI 558.11.702.112, Mekhlis to Stalin, Molotov, Yezhov 19 June 1937, and Stalin’s reply, 20 July, and Mekhlis’s reply, 21 July 1937. RGASPI 558.11.702.99–100, Stalin to Mekhlis 8 Dec. 1937. Stalin laughs at Mekhlis’s “ludicrous zeal”: Charkviani, pp. 30–1. Mekhlis: youth and early career: Y. Rubtsov, Alter Ego Stalina: Stranitsy politicheskoi biografi LZ Mekhlisa (henceforth Mekhlis), pp. 1–100.

[56] There has been a debate between those such as Robert Conquest who insisted that Stalin himself initiated and ran the Terror, and the so-called Revisionists who argued that the Terror was created by pressure from ambitious young bureaucrats and by the tensions between centre and regions. The archives have now proved Conquest right, though it is true that the regions outperformed their quotas, showing that the Revisionists were right, too, though missing the complete picture. The two views therefore are completely complementary.

[57] 170,000 Koreans were also deported. Bulgarians and Macedonians were soon added. Stalin was delighted by the Polish operation, writing on Yezhov’s report: “Very good! Dig up and purge this Polish espionage mud in the future as well. Destroy it in the interest of the USSR!” If Poles and Germans took the brunt of this operation, other nationalities deported included Kurds, Greeks, Finns, Estonians, Iranians, Latvians, Chinese, returnees from the Harbin railway and Romanians. Most exotically, the NKVD shot 6,311 priests, lords and Communist officials, about 4 percent of the population in the satellite state of Mongolia where the Mongoloid parody of Stalin, Marshal Choibalsang, also arrested and shot his own Tukhachevsky, Marshal Demid.

[58] The quotas: RGASPI 17.162.21.189. Getty, pp. 468–81. Jansen-Petrov, pp. 82–91. Statistics: Jansen-Petrov, p. 91. “To finish off once and for all”—Order No. 00447. Trud, 4 June 1922, 2 Aug. and 17 Oct. 1997. Khlevniuk, Circle, pp. 254–6, 210–21: on Yezhov see Voroshilov, 2 Sept.: “Yesterday Comrade Yezhov received Comrade Gribov. I then discussed this with Comrade Yezhov who declared on the telephone he had neither a file nor a case against Comrade Gribov. I judge it possible to appoint Comrade Gribov CO of the North Causasus.” “Better too far”—Jansen-Petrov, p. 89, from Frinovsky testimony FSB N15301.5.110–11. National contingents: Jansen-Petrov, pp. 93–101, quoting NKVD Order No. 00439, 25 July 1937, N. Okhotin and A. Roginskii, pp. 54–71; FSB Order No. 00485; consular contacts: FSB 3.4.104. Statistics of nationals: Jansen-Petrov, p. 99, quoting N. Petrov and A. Roginskii, Polskaya operatsiya, pp. 30, 31, 33. Mongolia: Jansen-Petrov, p. 101. Numbers of PB/CC arrests: Khrushchev quoted in Jansen-Petrov, p. 103. Total arrests and executions: Jansen-Petrov, p. 104. Rees, p. 169.

[59]  “Surpass each other”: Yezhov, in testimony of Frinovsky FSB 3-os.6.3, quoted in Jansen-Petrov, p. 85. “An extra thousand”: testimony of N. V. Kondakov, Armenian NKVD chief, May 1939, in FSB 3-os.6.4, in Jansen-Petrov, pp. 85–235.

[60] RGVA 4.18.62.1–357, Stalin meets army commanders, 3–4 Aug. 1937.

[61] On 14 April 1937, Procurator-General Vyshinsky wrote to the Premier to inform him of a cluster of cases of cannibalism in Cheliabinsk in the Urals in which one woman ate a four-month-old child, another ate an eight-year-old with her thirteen-year-old, while yet another consumed her three-month-old baby.

[62] Cannibals: RGASPI 82.2.887.32, Vyshinsky to Stalin and Molotov 14 Apr. 1937.

[63] Svanidze diary, Jan–Feb 1937. Yagoda’s diamonds: Yagoda, pp. 115–61, p. 171, 95–118, 109–17. Yakir’s villas: Shadenko at RKKA meeting, 3–4 August 1937: RGVA 4.18.61.7–66: Stalin commented: “He traded, he couldn’t be without trading.” Voroshilov at NKO, 9–10 June 1937. Glittering receptions: Galina Yegorova’s interrogation, account of the good life at Embassy parties etc. in Vasilieva, Kremlin Wives, pp. 108–9.

[64] Ehrenburg, Eve of War, p. 197. Mandelstam, p. 321. Tucker, Power, p. 447. Holidays: Jansen-Petrov, p. 79.

[65] This is eerily like Hitler’s comment on the genocide of the Jews, referring to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians in 1915: “After all, who today speaks of the massacre of the Armenians?”

[66] Molotov: on Ivan the Terrible in Volkogonov, p. 310. Mikoyan: on Ivan the Terrible, p. 534. “Stalin Molotov i Zhdanov o vtoroy serii filma Ivan Grozny” in Moskovskie Novosti, no. 37, 7 Aug. 1988, p. 8. Budyonny Notes, 8. Teacher and Ivan: RGASPI 558.3.350. Bukharin as “Shuisky” inKaganovich, p. 74.

[67] Yakovlev, Century, pp. 8, 15, 20.

[68] This reached its climax when sixty children aged between ten and twelve were accused of forming “a terrorist counter-revolutionary group” in Leninsk-Kuznetsk and were imprisoned for eight months, until the NKVD themselves were arrested and the children released.

[69]

[70] Stalin’s papers contain fascinating glimpses of his interventions: a father denounced his son to the police for having too many outrageous parties but the boy was arrested and embroiled in a case against Tomsky. The father appealed to Stalin who wrote on his note: “It’s necessary to change the punishment!” The father wrote to thank Stalin.

[71] MR, p. 254. Kaganovich agreed with this analysis, Kaganovich , pp. 35, 37. Tucker, Power, p. 445. Also G. A. Kumanev, “Dve besedy s LM Kaganovichem,” Novaya i Noveishaya Istoriia, no. 2, 1999, pp. 101–16. Molotov received lists of executions sentenced by tribunals of the Military Collegium almost every day: a typical sample during early 1937 showed that 32 were shot on the Amur railway, 36 on another for being Trotskyite wreckers while a further 20 were shot for “planning terroristic acts against Comrade Kaganovich on his journey to the East.” Molotov underlined the numbers of the executed with his red pen, but never the names. They simply did not matter. IA 1998 p. 17. Death lists: RGASPI 82.2.887.66–9, 70, 133, 163, samples of lists of executions, 26–27 Mar., 3 June, 16 Aug. All Vyshinsky to Molotov, Volkogonov, p. 339.

[72] Children and families: PR 5 July 1937. Jansen-Petrov, p. 100. Trud, 17 Oct. 1997. Memorial-Aspekt nos. 2–3, 1993. Okhotin and Roginskii, Iz Istorii, pp. 56–7. Yakovlev, Century, pp. 39–45. MR, p. 415. Yezhov order Aug. 1937 from Sbornik zakonodatelnykh i normativnykh actov o repressiyakh i reabilitatsii, pp. 8–93. In 1954, there were still 884,057 “specially resettled” children. Clan: Jansen-Petrov quotes Dmitrov, p. 111.

[73] RGASPI 558.11.698.33, Aronstam to Stalin and Stalin’s reply, 7 May 1937.

[74] Father appeals to Stalin and son is spared: RGASPI 558.11.712.11–13, Polish rosegrower: Oni, Roman Werfel, p. 104, and Berman, pp. 235–7. Sergo Kavtaradze. Oleg Troyanovsky. Pasternak and Ehrenburg were protected despite appearing in the confessions of many arrested writers. The Egnatashvili brothers were also protected.

[75] RGASPI 558.11.805.75, Stalin to Stetsky 17 Jan. 1937, and reply.

[76] Budyonny Notes, pp. 28–32.

[77] Tucker, Power, p. 446. The Spanish connection: Vladimir Antonov Ovseenko, Medvedev, pp. 188, 291. See Radosh et al. (eds.), Spain Betrayed, pp. 150–3; Koltsov, p. 267, and denunciation to Stalin and Voroshilov, p. 521, no. 60.

[78] RGASPI 82.2.896.71–5.

[79] RGASPI 558.11.712.65, V. Bonch-Bruevich to Stalin 15 June 1937.

[80] On Kanner. RGASPI 558.11.775.100, E. Makarova to Stalin 2 June 1937. RGASPI 558.11.55.822, Stalin to Khitarov 11 May 1937. RGASPI 558.11.726.22, Varo Djaparidze to Stalin 11 Mar. 1937.

RGASPI 558.11.756.118, N. Krylenko to Stalin 4 Nov. 1937.

[81] RGASPI 82.2.896.71–5.

[82] Khrushchev to Stefan Staszewski, Oni, p. 158.

 

[83] Yezhov replied in black: “In addition to the copy of Uzakovsky’s report sent to you, I sent another one of the 7th Division of GUGB [State Security] about the activities of Chinese-Trotskyites. Yezhov.”

[84] RGASPI 558.11.27.129.

[85] FSB Frinovsky interrogation N-15301.2.32–5, quoted in Jansen-Petrov, p. 110.

[86] Jansen-Petrov, pp. 200–1. Razgon, p. 104. Medvedev, p. 241.

[87] Kostyrchenko, p. 269.

[88] His huge portraits were borne past the Mausoleum on all the State holidays. The pun on the resemblance of his name to the “steel gauntlet” had now spawned vast posters showing his iron grip “strangling the snakes” with the heads of Trotsky, Rykov and Bukharin. The other Yezhovite slogan read: “Yezhovy rukavitsy —rule with an iron rod!”

[89] Jansen-Petrov, pp. 117–9. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism , p. 24. Jansen-Petrov, pp. 114–5. Larina, p. 151. Davies, pp. 138, 155.

[90] Jansen-Petrov, pp. 121–3, 199. G. Zhavoronkov, “I suitsa nochiu den,” Sintaksis, no. 32, 192, pp. 46–65; B. B. Briukhanov and E. N. Shoshkov, Opravdaniiu ne podlezhit: Ezhov i ezhovschina, p. 124; B. Starkov, “Narkom Yezhov” in J. A. Getty and R. T. Manning (eds.), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, pp. 34–5. B. Kamov, “Smert Nikolaia Yezhova,” in Iunost, no. 8, 1993, pp. 41–3. Vasily Grossman, “Mama,” in Znamya, no. 5, 1989, pp. 8–15. Vera Trail, pp. 4–11.

[91] Jansen-Petrov, pp. 123–4. Execution lists: Memorial Archives No. 32D-1355. V. Shentalinsky, “Okhota v revzapovednike” in Novy Mir, no. 12, 1998, pp. 170–96. FSB 3-0s.6.4.238–41.

[92] RGASPI 82.2.904.60, Yezhov to Molotov 12 Mar. 1938.

 

[93] MR, pp. 277–8. Kaganovich, p. 75. Nina Khrushchev quoted in Sergei Khrushchev, Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, p. 18. Yakovlev, Century, pp. 15–7. Tucker, Power, p. 448. Medvedev, p. 346. Molotov’s mask: Mikoyan, pp. 321–7.

[94] RGASPI 82.2.897.12–13, Vyshinsky to Stalin and Molotov and Molotov to Yezhov. When Molotov’s bust was smashed, Andrei Sakharov, the physicist, recalled how it became a dangerous political incident, p. 35, while a boy who knocked over a portrait of Stalin and blundered onto his face was arrested. Volkogonov, p. 269.

[95] Rees, p. 153. Volkogonov, p. 306. RGASPI 588.2.155.111–3, Molotov to NKVD 7 Apr. 1938. Stalin personally kept up the pressure on the Premier: “To comrade Molotov,” he wrote on 28 Jan. 1938, “Why was it impossible to predict this business by studying the financial situation? That escaped you? It is necessary to discuss at the Politburo.” Khlevniuk, Circle, p. 258. Execution lists: Memorial Archives no. 32D-1355.

[96] Alexandra Kollontai, at that time sixty-five and Ambassador to Sweden, was a beautiful Bolshevik noblewoman who wrote the manifesto of feminism and free love, her novel Love of Worker Bees. Her scandalous sex life shocked and amused Stalin and Molotov. Several of her famous Bolshevik lovers were shot in the Great Terror. Yet she herself survived. Perhaps her letters to Stalin, always addressed to “highly respected Joseph Vissarionovich” with “friendly greetings from an open heart” with the flirtatious romanticism of a once beautiful woman, appealed to his chivalry. Similarly, Stalin muttered to Dmitrov about the veteran Bolshevik Yelena Stasova that “we shall probably arrest Stasova. Turned out she’s scum.” Yet she was allowed to survive and continued to write Stalin warm letters of gratitude into honourable old age. In the Stalin family too, the women usually survived (though they were arrested) but the men were decimated.

[97] Tucker, Power, p. 447. Kaganovich, p. 46. Medvedev, p. 312. Budyonny Notes, p. 47. Testimony of Galina Yegorova in FSB archives quoted in full in Vasilieva, Kremlin Wives, pp. 105–11. RGASPI 558.11.749.15/15 and 23, A. Kollontai to Stalin. Stasova: Dmitrov diary, 11 Nov. 1937.

[98] In their generation, the proud exception to this narrow-minded hypocrisy were those rare Bolsheviks who combined Party discipline with European Bohemianism, the Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov and his English wife Ivy. She sneered openly at humbugs like Molotov and flaunted her promiscuity with a parade of Germanic lovers: “I don’t care a pin what anyone says . . . for I feel head and shoulders taller than anyone who can gloat on such outworn topics of scandal as who sleeps with whom.” Meanwhile Commissar Litvinov, the plump, rumpled and tough Jewish intellectual who had known Stalin a long time but was never close to him, started an affair with a “very pretty, decidedly vulgar and very sexy indeed” girl who lodged with them. She even accompanied him to diplomatic receptions and arrived at the office in tight riding breeches.

[99] Thanks to Dr. Dan Healey for his advice on age of consent and morals. Bolshevik modesty: MR, pp. 273–4; Kaganovich, pp. 88–9. Primness: MR, pp. 111, 145, 149. Divorces: Khrushchev, Superpower, p. 29. Kaganovich does not write the word “slut,” just “s. . .t”: Tucker, Power, p 437. Absurd comment on naked girls in Paris by Zhdanov’s wife: Svetlana, OOY, p. 360. Tukhachevsky’s filthy morals: RGVA 4.18.61.7–77, Voroshilov, NKO, 9–10 June 1937. Kira Alliluyeva: Svetlana’s knees and Stalin’s note, OOY, p. 318. Volga kiss: Kenez, p. 166. “Stalin Molotov i Zhdanov o vtoroy serii filma Ivan Grozny,” Moskovskie Novosti, vol. 37, 7 Aug. 1988, p. 8. Galina, p. 96. Georgian cigarettes: Charkviani, pp. 45–9. Kisses at Kulik’s birthday party, Karpov, Rastrelyanniye Marshaly, p. 343. Zhdanov marriage: Sergo B, p. 139. Kuibyshev: Troyanovsky, p. 162. During the war, when Stalin learned that the publisher Tikhonov was having an affair, he had his wife flown out of the Siege of Leningrad to put a stop to it. Lesser Terror, p. 113. RGASPI 558.11.818.23–27, A. A. Troyanovsky to Stalin 24 July 1934, and Stalin to Yagoda, n.d. Troyanovsky to Stalin 11 Sept. 1938. Beria and sex: GARF 8131sj.32.3289.41, Rudenko to Khrushchev on Sarkisov’s denunciation to Abakumov. Dekanozov was also said to have a sexual addiction to young girls, though he too was happily married: Vaksberg, Vyshinsky, pp. 290, 353. Rape: Djilas, pp. 93, 108–9; Djilas, Wartime, pp. 428–9. Maxim and Ivy Litvinov: see John Carswell, The Exile: The Life of Ivy Litvinov, pp. 130–7.

[100] Khrushchev, Glasnost, p. 28. Mikoyan, p. 318.

[101] RGASPI 558.11.769.173, Stalin to Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan 31 Mar. 1937. Tucker, Power, p. 416. Stepan Mikoyan.

[102] MR, p. 254. Mikoyan, pp. 318, 552. Kaganovich, pp. 27, 28, 30, 45–7. Yury Zhdanov. Maya Kavtaradze. Medvedev, p. 325.

[103] Faith and thought: Vyshinsky and “You lost faith”: RGASPI 558.2.155.104–7. “Holy fear” death for thoughts and the clans: Getty, pp. 486–7. Holy Fear: Tucker, Power, pp. 482–4. Toasts/kin/Mikoyan wit: Dmitrov diary, 7 Nov. 1937. Beria to A. A. Yepishev, quoted in Volkogonov, p. 279. RGASPI 558.11.725.1–2, K. Gai to Stalin and reply 25 Mar. 1937. Colonel Starinov learned during an NKVD interrogation that many of the arrested soldiers were accused of “lack of faith in the power of the socialist state.” Starinov in Bialer (ed.), p. 71. Killing sect: Jansen-Petrov, p. 65. “Brilliant politician of Italian . . .”: Ehrenburg, Eve of War, p. 306. Bukharin to Stalin, 10 Dec. 1937, Getty, p. 557.

[104] The primitive interrogators tried to suit the crime to the criminal with often absurd results: on his arrest, the First Secretary of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Birobizhan was appropriately accused of poisoning Kaganovich’s gefilte fish during his visit there. Presumably, throughout the many republics of the USSR, the poison was secreted in the national dishes—from the sausages of the Baltics to the spicy soups of the Buriats and the lamb stews of the Tajiks.

[105] Torture: Jansen-Petrov, p. 111, citing APRF 3.24.413.5.122, “Beat, beat,” M. I. Baranov. “Prison or hotel,” Jansen-Petrov, p. 111, citing Reabilitatsiya, p. 258. Blood specks: Shepilov, “Vospominaniia,” Voprosy Istorii, no. 4, 1998, p. 6. Order to torture: Petrov-Jansen, pp. 10–11. Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 19 Apr. 1996. IA, 1998. Order on torture: 20 Jan. 1939, Conquest, Terror, p. 206. Tucker, Power, p. 467. Kaganovich told Khrushchev “we signed everything.” Khrushchev, Glasnost , p. 136. GARF 8131.32.3289.117–8, the investigations by Rudenko into methods of interrogators Vlodzirmirsky, Rodos, Shvartsman, Goglidze etc., 22 Mar. 1955. Since the Yezhov generation did not describe their tortures, this account is based on Beria’s men. Execution place and burial: Nikita Petrov. Jansen-Petrov, p. 188. Account of Yezhov’s execution by N. P. Afanesev in Ushakov and Stukalov, pp. 74–5. On torture of Old Bolsheviks: Kaganovich, pp. 138–9. Molotov on Rudzutak’s torture, MR, pp. 274–5, and “Politburo gangsters,” MR, p. 240. Stalin told many jokes about torture and interrogations: this is from Sergo Kavtaradze’s unpublished memoirs, p. 74. Another version, Svetlana, OOY, p. 333. Molotov’s mask: Mikoyan, pp. 321–7.

[106] RGASPI 558.11.756.109–6, Krilov to Stalin 26 May 1937. Another the same month denounces spies and Enemies in the Foreign Commissariat. RGASPI 558.11.727.86, Dmitrov to Stalin 15 May 1937. “Group faithful to himself”: Stalin to Liushkov on Vareikis’s clique in Far East: Alvin D. Coox, “The Lesser of Two Hells: NKVD General GS Lyushkov’s Defection to Japan 1938–45,” Slavic Military Studies; vol. 11, no. 3, Sept. 1998, pp. 145–86.

[107] RGASPI 558.11.806.122, Semyushkin to Stalin 28 May 1937. Stalin usually ordered Yezhov “Check” or “Look into it.” Denunciations: Voroshilov at RGVA 4.19.14.1–74. Meeting of Supreme Military Council, 16 May 1939. Yakovlev in Bialer (ed.), pp. 88, 102.

[108] Gramophone scandal: RGASPI 558.11.1082.1–18.

[109] At the end of 1936, when Stalin inaugurated the new Constitution, Shumiatsky, the film boss, asked Molotov if he could record Stalin’s speech. On 20 November, Molotov gave permission. Maltsev, the chief of the All-Union Committee of Radiofication and Radiosound, reported joyfully to Stalin that the speech had been successfully recorded and approved. Now he wanted permission to make it into a gramophone record “for you to hear it personally.” Stalin agreed. But on 29 April 1937, when the terrified officials of the Gramophone Trust Factory listened to the gramophone, something was wrong with Stalin’s voice. They immediately reported to Poskrebyshev that there were: “1. Big noises. 2. Big intervals. 3. The absence of whole phrases. 4. Closed grooves. And 5. Jumps and lack of clarity.” The file also contained a nervous analysis of the sibilance of Stalin’s voice and how hard it was to render on gramophone. Worse, a thousand of these records had been manufactured. Some officials wanted to recall the discs but, typically for the period, the chief attacked this suggestion for its disrespect to Comrade Stalin’s voice. He thought it more respectful to distribute them regardless of the gaps, noises, jumps. The file ends with a report from Komsomolskaya Pravda that suggested that something very sinister had happened to Comrade Stalin’s voice at the Gramophone Factory where the insistence of Comrade Straik to “distribute the discs more speedily” was a “strange position.” He was obviously a wrecker and all the guilty wreckers at the factory “must be harshly punished.” No doubt the NKVD came to listen to Comrade Straik’s record collection.

[110] RGASPI 558.11.756.109–16, Krilov to Stalin 26 May 1937. Another the same month denounces spies and Enemies in the Foreign Commissariat. RGASPI 558.11.727.86, Dmitrov to Stalin 15 May 1937.

[111] RGASPI 558.11.818.35–43, P. V. Tiulenev to Stalin 30 Mar. 1938.

[112] RGASPI 558.11.132.137–40, P. T. Nikolaenko to Stalin 17 Sept. 1937. RGASPI 558.11.132.36, Stalin to Comrade Kudriavtsev 27 Sept. 1937. Tucker, Power, pp. 459–61. KR I, pp. 114–5; Khrushchev, Glasnost, p. 32.

 

[113] Khrushchev terror: KR I, pp. 113, 129–36. MR, pp. 295–7. Izvestiya TsK KPSS, 2, 1989. Istochnik, 1, 1995. Vladimir Naumov in Taubman, pp. 88–90; Yury Shapoval in Taubman, pp. 19–25.

[114] Khrushchev was as fanatical a Stalinist terrorist as it was possible to be during the thirties yet his ability to destroy incriminating documents, and his memoirs, have shrouded his real conduct in mystery. A. N. Shelepin, ex-KGB boss, testified in 1988 that Khrushchev’s death lists had been removed by the secret policeman I.V. Serov. Two hundred and sixty-one pages of Khrushchev’s papers were burned between 2 and 9 July 1954.

[115] Zhdanov on Enemies: A. S. Yakovlev, Tsel zhizni, p. 17. On Komsomol Case: Mgeladze, pp. 170–3. Kuznetsov in Bialer (ed.), p. 96. Khlevniuk, Circle, pp. 210–11; Tucker, Power, pp. 470–9. Beria, pp. 80–5. Lakoba family tortured: see S. Lakoba, Ocherki po politicheskoy istorii Abkhazii. Beria’s personal use of torture: GARF 8131.32.3289.117–8. The investigations by Rudenko into methods of interrogators Vlodzirmirsky, Rodos, Shvartsman, Goglidze, Tsanava etc., 22 March 1955. Djafar Bagirov in Azerbaijan also did not require replacement. Arresting the wrong people: see Andreyev: RGASPI 73.2.19.27, Andreyev to Stalin 18 Aug. 1937. Plus Malenkov denounced: Khrushchev defends Malenkov: Elena Zubkova in Taubman, p. 75.

[116] Yakovlev, Tsel zhizni, p. 18: letter to Yezhov, 15 June 1937, on arrests of members of All-Union Scientific Research Institute and officials in Vneshtorg (Foreign Trade Commissariat). Arrests in Vneshtorg: Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, p. 45. See Katyn later. Mikoyan on purges: p. 583. Stepan M. p. 197. Mikoyan to Kaganovich letter: 17 Sept. 1936, quoted in Miklos Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, pp. 295–6. Mikoyan in Armenia: Tucker, Power, p. 488. Beria, p. 84. Mikoyan was accompanied by Malenkov. “My father saved people”: Natalya Andreyeva. Natasha Lopatina: story of her grandfather, Ivan Konstantinovich Mikhailov and K. E. Voroshilov. Kaganovich, p. 89.

[117] Such absurdities abounded: in her terrible labour camp, Bukharin’s widow encountered this spirit when another prisoner informed on her because she owned a book named Dangerous Liaisons that was presumed to be a deadly espionage guide.

[118] On tour: Medvedev, p. 248. More examples of Kaganovich: RGASPI 17.21.3966–4092. Easter, p. 157. Yakovlev, Century, p. 18, Mikoyan to Yezhov 15 June on pp. 15–19.

[119] After interviewing Andreyev and Dora Khazan’s daughter Natasha and hearing of his innocence of all crimes, the author came upon this damning file. Andreyev’s notes and letters have survived because unlike his fellow criminals, such as Kaganovich, Malenkov and Khrushchev, he was out of power after Stalin’s death when the others managed to destroy so many incriminating documents.

[120] Andreyev’s epic slaughter: RGASPI 73.3.45, 138, notes Oct. 1937. 73.2.19, Andreyev to Zhdanov 6 Jan. 1937. 73.2.19.2, Andreyev to Stalin 12 Apr. 1937, Voronezh. 73.2.19, Andreyev to Stalin 20 July 1937, Saratov. 73.2.19.3, Andreyev to Stalin 4 June 1937, Cheliabinsk. 73.2.19.12, Andreyev to Stalin 21 July 1937, Saratov. 73.2.19.16, Andreyev to Stalin and Stalin orders shooting of MTS workers, 28 July 1937. 73.2.19.19, Andreyev to Stalin 1 Aug. 1937. 73.2.19.22, Andreyev to Stalin 1 Aug. 1937, Saratov. 73.2.19.27, Andreyev to Stalin 18 Aug. 1937, Kuibyshev. 73.2.19.34–36, Andreyev to Stalin 17–18 Sept. 1937, Tashkent. 73.2.19.44, Stalin, Molotov to Andreyev 20 Sept. 1937: “You can arrest him.” 73.2.45.54, Andreyev to Stalin: “Ikramov arrested,” 21–22 Sept. 1937, Tashkent, 73.2.45.58, Stalin and Molotov to Andreyev 22 Sept. 1937. 73.2.45.72 and 73, Stalin to Andreyev: “Act according to your consideration and situation,” 26 Sept. 1937 and (74) Andreyev’s reply to Stalin 27 Sept. 1937; Bokhara (79–84). 73.2.45.86, Stalin to Andreyev in Stalinabad, 29 Sept. 1937. 73.2.45.101, Stalin to Andreyev on NKVD officer, 4 Oct. 1937. 73.3.45.87–101, Andreyev to Stalin and Stalin orders: “Remove Ashurov,” 2–4 Oct. 1937, Stalinabad. 73.2.45.105, Andreyev to Stalin, 5 Nov. 1937, Archangel and Voronezh: “Going to Rostov.” 73.2.45.113, Andreyev to Stalin 15 Nov. 1937, Rostov. 73.2.45.119–26, Andreyev to Stalin and Malenkov 18 Nov. 1937, Krasnodar, Kuban. “I’m heading to Ordzhonikidze Region.”

[121] Lenin, Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky, and the Foreign Commissar until 1930, Chicherin, were hereditary noblemen, as were Molotov, Zhdanov, Sergo and Tukhachevsky, according to Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks which decreed rank until 1917. None were titled nobility.

[122] Malenkov: Chadaev in Kumanev (ed.), p. 429. Interviews Igor Malenkov and Volya Malenkova. Zubok, pp. 141–3. Svetlana OOY, p. 358. Mikoyan, pp. 566, 586. Sergo B, p. 161. Malenkov-type: Kaganovich Perepiska, p. 609. RGASPI 558.11.762, 1a, Stalin to Malenkov 22 Nov. 1938: arrest. His role as a secret persecutor emerges in the appeal to Stalin of Lenin’s old secretary, Stasova, who told how Malenkov had accused her of giving money to Trotskyites but ignored evidence of her innocence. Stalin protected her. RGASPI 558.11.805.11, Stasova to Stalin 17 May 1938. On Malenkov in the Purge: Parrish, “Yezhov,” p. 90. Beria, p. 85. Khlevniuk, Circle, pp. 264–6. Mikoyan, p. 320. Leonid Redens tells of Vasily Stalin’s testimony of Malenkov’s role. D. N. Sukhanov, Memoirs. Inseparables: Sergo B, p. 36. Khrushchev defends Malenkov: Zubkova in Taubman, p. 75. Humour: Sergo B, p. 162, and see also Parrott, Serpent and Nightingale, p. 65. Djilas, p. 108: “under rolls . . . moved another man, lively and adept.”

[123] Yuri Shapoval in Taubman, pp. 12–13. Kaganovich advised him to keep quiet, then told Stalin.

[124] MR, p. 254; Russian version, pp. 393, 413–4. Mikoyan, p. 556. Sergo Mikoyan: father fanatic. Kaganovich: “Did we permit distortions, outrages, crimes? We did . . . I am responsible politically”: Kaganovich at June 1957 Plenum: RGASPI 17.3.153; see Kaganovich, pp. 35–7.

[125] Sergo B, p. 157.

[126] RGASPI 558.11.737.86, I. Ivanov, ex-Secretary Kursk Obkom to Stalin 21 Feb. 1937. On CC arrests, 70 arrested 15: Molotov in Getty, p. 467.

[127] Martha and her mother had been invited to Tiflis for the celebration of the poet Rustaveli’s 750th anniversary by Timosha’s new lover, Academician Lupel. There, through a slit in the door, she had seen him arrested at the dead of night: “I saw five men take him away,” she remembered. Timosha’s later affair with Stalin’s court architect, Merzhanov, also ended in his arrest. “I’m cursed,” Timosha Peshkova exclaimed. “Everyone I touch is ruined.”

[128] Martha Peshkova. “Svetlana khozyaika but I calmed her”: Stalin in Charkviani, pp. 55–7.

[129] Natalya Andreyeva. Martha Peshkova. Voroshilov knight—Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, pp. 71–3. Stepan and Sergo Mikoyan. Artyom Sergeev. Davies, pp. 119, 193, 26 Mar. 1938. Kaganovich and the jazz: Starr, Red and Hot, pp. 126–9, 178. Thanks to Mariana Haseldine for this. Rustaveli: Beria, p. 84. Pushkin cult: Figes, Natasha, p. 482. Spanish blouses: A. Adzhubei— Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, p. 69. Song words: Fitzpatrick, p. 71. Cheka anniversary: G. D. Raanan, International Policy Formation, p. 171. Pravda, 21 Dec. 1937. Parrish, “Yezhov,” p. 159. My Uncle Stalin: Artyom Sergeev.

[130] Zarubina, pp. 29–31. Natalya Andreyeva. Sergo and Stepan Mikoyan. Eteri Ordzhonikidze. Sakharov, p. 93. The most sensitive work on the presence and effects of death is Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone, Death and Memory in Russia, pp. 253–63.

[131] Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote beautifully of how she and her husband had lain awake in the Writers’ Union building until the lift had passed their floor.

[132] Mikoyan’s pistol: Stepan Mikoyan. Zarubina, p. 32. Yury Trifinov, House on the Embankment.

[133] After Stalin’s death, the Serebryakovs managed to get half the property returned to them but the Vyshinskys kept the other half. Thus today, sixty years after their father was shot by their neighbour, the Serebryakovs spend each weekend next to the Vyshinskys.

[134] Dachas of dead men: Vaksberg, Vyshinsky, pp. 87–93. Svetlana, OOY, p 355. Sudoplatov, p. 103. S. Khrushchev, Superpower, p. 16. Gamarnik’s Zubalovo dacha passed to Stalin’s favourite officer Shaposhnikov after the former’s suicide, while another favourite, Kulik, got his apartment.

[135] Expunging: Stepan M., p. 25. Leonid Redens.

[136] School in Terror: Stepan M., p. 37. Richardson, Long Shadow , p. 207. At the NKVD School, No. 50, the arrests were even more intense: Zarubina, p. 32. Svetlana’s desk: Julia Gorshkova. Children and families: PB, 5 July 1937. Jansen-Petrov, p. 100. Trud, 17 Oct. 1997. Memorial-Aspekt, 1993, nos. 2–3. Okhotin and Roginskii, Iz Istorii, pp. 56–7. Young witnesses to arrests: Stepan M., p. 47: the boy in question was Oleg Frinovsky, the tall, handsome son of Yezhov’s deputy at the NKVD. This took place in 1939. Parents vetting friends: Stepan M., p. 47. Igor Boytsov telephoned Voroshilov’s adopted son Timur Frunze. Mikoyan cut relations with the Alliluyevs: Kira Alliluyeva. Yury Zhdanov.

[137] Leonid Redens. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 56–7. Martha Peshkova.