Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Three doctors arrived, including a Georgian, Dzhanelidze. All declared Kirov dead but they still kept on giving him artificial respiration until almost 5:45 p.m. Doctors in totalitarian states are terrified of eminent dead patients—and with good reason. As the doctors surrendered, those present realized that someone would have to tell Stalin. Everyone remembered where they were when Kirov was assassinated: the Soviet JFK.29

  PART THREE

  On the Brink 1934–1936

  12

  “I’m Orphaned”: The Connoisseur of Funerals

  Poskrebyshev answered Stalin’s telephone in his office. Kirov’s deputy, Chudov, broke the terrible news from Leningrad. Poskrebyshev tried Stalin’s phone line but he could not get an answer, sending a secretary to find him. The Vozhd, according to his journal, was meeting with Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov and Zhdanov, but hurriedly called Leningrad, insisting on interrogating the Georgian doctor in his native language. Then he rang back to ask what the assassin was wearing. A cap? Were there foreign items on him? Yagoda, who had already called to demand whether any foreign objects had been found on the assassin, arrived at Stalin’s office at 5:50 p.m.

  Mikoyan, Sergo and Bukharin arrived quickly. Mikoyan specifically remembered that “Stalin announced that Kirov had been assassinated and on the spot, without any investigation, he said the supporters of Zinoviev [the former leader of Leningrad and the Left opposition to Stalin] had started a terror against the Party.” Sergo and Mikoyan, who were so close to Kirov, were particularly appalled since Sergo had missed seeing his friend for the last time. Kaganovich noticed that Stalin “was shocked at first.”1

  Stalin, now showing no emotion, ordered Yenukidze as Secretary of the Central Executive Committee to sign an emergency law that decreed the trial of accused terrorists within ten days and immediate execution without appeal after judgement. Stalin must have drafted it himself. This 1st December Law—or rather the two directives of that night—was the equivalent of Hitler’s Enabling Act because it laid the foundation for a random terror without even the pretence of a rule of law. Within three years, two million people had been sentenced to death or labour camps in its name. Mikoyan said there was no discussion and no objections. As easily as slipping the safety catch on their Mausers, the Politburo clicked into the military emergency mentality of the Civil War.

  If there was any opposition, it came from Yenukidze, that unusually benign figure among these amoral toughs, but it was he who ultimately signed it. The newspapers declared the laws were passed by a meeting of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee—which probably meant Stalin bullying Yenukidze in a smoky room after the meeting. It is also a mystery why the craven Kalinin, the President who was present, did not sign it. His signature had appeared by the time it was announced in the newspapers. Anyway the Politburo did not officially vote until a few days later.

  Stalin immediately decided that he would personally lead a delegation to Leningrad to investigate the murder. Sergo wanted to go but Stalin ordered him to remain behind because of his weak heart. Sergo had indeed collapsed with grief and may have suffered another heart attack. His daughter remembered that “this was the only time he wept openly.” His wife, Zina, travelled to Leningrad to comfort Kirov’s widow.

  Kaganovich also wanted to go but Stalin told him that someone had to run the country. He took Molotov, Voroshilov and Zhdanov with him along with Yagoda and Andrei Vyshinsky, the Deputy Procurator, who had crossed Sergo earlier that year. Naturally they were accompanied by a trainload of secret policemen and Stalin’s own myrmidons, Pauker and Vlasik. In retrospect, the most significant man Stalin chose to accompany him was Nikolai Yezhov, head of the CC’s Personnel Department. Yezhov was one of those special young men, like Zhdanov, on whom Stalin was coming to depend.2

  The local leaders gathered, shell-shocked, at the station. Stalin played his role, that of a Lancelot heartbroken and angry at the death of a beloved knight, with self-conscious and preplanned Thespianism. When he dismounted from the train, Stalin strode up to Medved, the Leningrad NKVD chief, and slapped his face with his gloved hand.

  Stalin immediately headed across town to the hospital to inspect the body, then set up a headquarters in Kirov’s office where he began his own strange investigation, ignoring any evidence that did not point to a terrorist plot by Zinoviev and the Left opposition. Poor Medved, the cheerful Chekist slapped by Stalin, was interrogated first and criticized for not preventing the murder. Then the “small and shabby” murderer himself, Nikolaev, was dragged in. Nikolaev was one of those tragic, simple victims of history, like the Dutchman who lit the Reichstag fire with which this case shares many resemblances. This frail dwarf of thirty had been expelled from, and reinstated in, the Party but had written to Kirov and Stalin complaining of his plight. He was apparently in a daze and did not even recognize Stalin until they showed him a photograph. Falling to his knees before the jackbooted Leader, he sobbed, “What have I done, what have I done?” Khrushchev, who was not in the room, claimed that Nikolaev kneeled and said he had done it on assignment from the Party. A source close to Voroshilov has Nikolaev stammering, “But you yourself told me . . .” Some accounts claim that he was punched and kicked by the Chekists present.

  “Take him away!” ordered Stalin.

  The well-informed NKVD defector, Orlov, wrote that Nikolaev pointed at Zaporozhets, Leningrad’s deputy NKVD boss, and said, “Why are you asking me? Ask him.”

  Zaporozhets had been imposed on Kirov and Leningrad in 1932, Stalin and Yagoda’s man in Kirov’s fiefdom. The reason to ask Zaporozhets was that Nikolaev had already been detained in October loitering with suspicious intent outside Kirov’s house, carrying a revolver, but had been freed without even being searched. Another time, the bodyguards had prevented him taking a shot. But four years later, when Yagoda was tried, he confessed, in testimony filled with both lies and truths, to having ordered Zaporozhets “not to place any obstacles in the way of the terrorist act against Kirov.”

  Then the assassin’s wife, Milda Draul, was brought in. The NKVD spread the story that Nikolaev’s shot was a crime passionnel following her affair with Kirov. Draul was a plain-looking woman. Kirov liked elfin ballerinas but his wife was not pretty either: it is impossible to divine the impenetrable mystery of sexual taste but those who knew both believed they were an unlikely couple. Draul claimed she knew nothing. Stalin strode out into the anteroom and ordered that Nikolaev be brought round with medical attention.

  “To me it’s already clear that a well-organized counter-revolutionary terrorist organization is active in Leningrad . . . A painstaking investigation must be made.” There was no real attempt to analyse the murder forensically. Stalin certainly did not wish to find out whether the NKVD had encouraged Nikolaev to kill Kirov.

  It is said that Stalin later visited the “prick” in his cell and spent an hour with him alone, offering him his life in return for testifying against Zinoviev at a trial. Afterwards Nikolaev wondered if he would be double-crossed.3

  The murkiness now thickens into a deliberately blind fog. There was a delay. Kirov’s bodyguard, Borisov, was brought over to be interrogated by Stalin. He alone could reveal whether he was delayed at the Smolny entrance and what he knew of the NKVD’s machinations. Borisov rode in the back of an NKVD Black Crow. As the driver headed towards the Smolny, the front-seat passenger reached over and seized the wheel so that the Black Crow swerved and grazed its side against a building. Somehow in this dubious car crash, Borisov was killed. The “shaken” Pauker arrived in the anteroom to announce the crash. Such ham-handed “car crashes” were soon to become an occupational hazard for eminent Bolsheviks. Certainly anyone who wanted to cover up a plot might have wished Borisov dead. When Stalin was informed of this reekingly suspicious death, he denounced the local Cheka: “They couldn’t even do that properly.”4

  The mystery will never now be conclusively solved. Did Stalin order Kirov’s assassination? There is no evidence that he did,
yet the whiff of his complicity still hangs in the air. Khrushchev, who arrived in Leningrad on a separate train as a Moscow delegate, claimed years later that Stalin ordered the murder. Mikoyan, a more trustworthy witness in many ways than Khrushchev and with less to prove, came to believe that Stalin was somehow involved in the death.

  Stalin certainly no longer trusted Kirov whose murder served as a pretext to destroy the Old Bolshevik cliques. His drafting of the 1st December Law minutes after the death seems to stink as much as his decision to blame the murder on Zinoviev. Stalin had indeed tried to replace Kirov’s friend Medved and he knew the suspicious Zaporozhets who, shortly before the murder, had gone on leave without Moscow’s permission, perhaps to absent himself from the scene. Nikolaev was a pathetic bundle of suspicious circumstances. Then there were the strange events of the day of the murder: why was Borisov delayed at the door and why were there already Moscow NKVD officers in the Smolny so soon after the assassination? Borisov’s death is highly suspect. And Stalin, often so cautious, was also capable of such a reckless gamble, particularly after admiring Hitler’s reaction to the Reichstag fire and his purge.

  Yet much of this appears less sinister on closer analysis. The lax security around Kirov proves nothing, since even Stalin often only had one or two guards. The gun is less suspicious when one realizes that all Party members carried them. Stalin’s deteriorating relationship with Kirov was typical of the friction within his entourage. Stalin’s swift reaction to the murder, and his surreal investigation, did not mean that he arranged it. When, on 27 June 1927, Voikov, Soviet Ambassador to Poland, was assassinated, Stalin had reacted with the same speed and uninterest in the real culprits. In that case, he told Molotov that he “sensed the hand of Britain” and immediately ordered the shooting of scores of so-called “monarchists.” The Bolsheviks always regarded justice as a political tool. The local NKVD, desperate to conceal their incompetence, may well have arranged Borisov’s murder. So much can be explained by the habitual clumsiness of totalitarian panic.

  However, it is surely naïve to expect written evidence of the crime of the century. We know that in other murders, Stalin gave verbal orders in the name of the Instantsiya, an almost magical euphemism for the Highest Authority, with which we will become very familiar.74 The direct involvement of Yagoda seems unlikely because he was not particularly close to Stalin but there were many Chekists, from Agranov to Zaporozhets, who were both personally trusted and amoral enough to do anything the Party asked of them. It is unlikely to have been a Henrician “Rid me of this turbulent priest”: Stalin had to micromanage everything. So he may have read Nikolaev’s letter to him and exploited his loser’s resentment against Kirov.5

  Stalin’s friendship with Kirov was one-sided and flimsy but there is no doubt that “Stalin simply loved him,” according to “Iron Lazar,” who added that “he treated everyone politically.” His friendships, like teenage infatuations, meandered between love, admiration and venomous jealousy. He was an extreme example of Gore Vidal’s epigram that “Every time a friend succeeds, a little bit of me dies.” He had adored Bukharin whose widow explains that Stalin could love and hate the same person “because love and hate born of envy . . . fought with each other in the same breast.” Perhaps Kirov’s betrayal of his sincere friendship provoked a rage like a woman scorned, followed by terrible guilt after the murder. But even with his “friends,” Stalin cultivated his privacy and detachment: he wanted to be supremely elusive.6

  Stalin was always a more loyal friend to those he knew much less well. When a schoolboy of sixteen wrote to him, Stalin sent him a present of ten roubles and the boy wrote a thank-you letter. He was always indulging in bursts of sentimentality for the friends of his youth: “I’m sending you 2000 roubles,” he wrote in December 1933 to Peter Kapanadze, his friend from the Seminary who became a priest, then a teacher. “I haven’t got more now . . . Your needs are a special occasion for me so I send my [book] royalties to you. You’ll [also] be given 3000 roubles as a loan . . . Live long and be happy” and he signed the letter with his father’s name, “Beso.”

  One strange unpublished letter illustrates this distant warmth: during 1930, Stalin received a request from the head of a collective farm in distant Siberia as to whether to admit a Tsarist policeman who claimed to have known Stalin. This old gendarme had actually been Stalin’s guard in exile. But Stalin wrote a long, handwritten recommendation: “During my exile in Kureika 1914–16, Mikhail Merzlikov was my guard/police constable. At that time he had one order—to guard me . . . It’s clear that I could not be in ‘friendly’ relations with Merzlikov. Yet I must testify that while not being friendly, our relations were not as hostile as they usually were between exile and guard. It must be explained why, it seems to me, Merzlikov carried out his duties without the usual police zeal, did not spy on me or persecute me, overlooked my often going away and often scolded police officers for barring his ‘orders’ . . . It’s my duty to testify to all this. It was so in 1914–16 when Merzlikov was my guard, differing from other policemen for the better. I don’t know what he did under Kolchak and Soviet power, I don’t know how he is now.”

  There, in a man who killed his best friends, was true friendship. Whether or not he killed Kirov, Stalin certainly exploited the murder to destroy not only his opponents but the less radical among his own allies. 7

  Kirov lay in state in an open casket, wearing a dark tunic and surrounded by the red banners, inscribed wreaths and tropical palms of the Bolshevik funeral amid the Potemkinian neoclassical grandeur of the Taurida Palace.75 At 9:30 p.m. on 3 December, Stalin and the Politburo formed the honour guard, another part of Bolshevik necro-ritual. Voroshilov and Zhdanov appeared upset but Molotov was stony. “Astonishingly calm and impenetrable was the face of JV Stalin,” noted Khrushchev, “giving the impression that he was lost in thought, his eyes glazing over Kirov’s bullet-struck corpse.” Before departing, Stalin appointed Zhdanov as Leningrad boss while remaining a CC Secretary. Yezhov also stayed behind to oversee the investigation.

  At ten, Stalin and the others bore Kirov’s coffin to a gun carriage. The body travelled slowly through the streets to the station where it was loaded onto the train that was to take Stalin back to Moscow. Draped in garlands, this death train shunted into the darkness after midnight, leaving behind Kirov’s brain which was to be studied for signs of revolutionary brilliance in the Leningrad Institute.76

  Even before the train arrived in Moscow, Agranov, the Chekist running the investigation, interrogated the assassin: “Stubborn as a mule,” he reported to Stalin.

  “Nourish Nikolaev well, buy him a chicken,” replied Stalin, who so enjoyed chicken himself. “Nourish him so he will be strong, then he’ll tell us who was leading him. And if he doesn’t talk, we’ll give it to him and he’ll tell . . . everything.”8

  At Moscow’s October Station, the casket was again transferred to a gun carriage and deposited in the Hall of Columns for the funeral next day. Soon afterwards, Stalin briefed the Politburo on his unconvincing investigation. Mikoyan, who had loved Kirov, was so upset that he asked how Nikolaev had twice escaped arrest with a pistol and how Borisov had been killed.

  “How could it happen?” Stalin agreed indignantly.

  “Someone should answer for this, shouldn’t they?” exclaimed Mikoyan, focusing on the strange behaviour of the NKVD. “Isn’t the OGPU Chairman [Yagoda] responsible for Politburo security? He should be called to account.” But Stalin protected Yagoda, concentrating on his real targets, the Old Bolsheviks like Zinoviev. Afterwards, Sergo, Kuibyshev and Mikoyan were deeply suspicious: Mikoyan discussed Stalin’s “unclear behaviour” with Sergo, probably on their walks around the Kremlin, the traditional place for such forbidden chats. Both were “surprised and amazed and could not understand it.” Sergo lost his voice with grief. Kuibyshev is said to have proposed a CC investigation to check the one being carried out by the NKVD. It is surely doubtful that Mikoyan, who still fervently admired Stalin and served
him loyally until his death, believed at that time that his Leader was responsible. These Bolsheviks were accustomed to self-delude and double-think their way out of such nagging doubts.9

  That night, Pavel Alliluyev replayed his role after Nadya’s death by staying with Stalin at Kuntsevo. Leaning on his hand, Stalin murmured that after Kirov’s death, “I am absolutely an orphan.” He said it so touchingly that Pavel hugged him. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his anguish that someone had done this to Kirov—or that they had needed to do it.

  At 10 a.m. on the 5th, with Gorky Street closed and tight security under the command of Pauker (as at Nadya’s funeral), Stalin’s entourage gathered in the Hall of Columns. The funeral was an extravaganza of Bolshevik sentimental kitsch—with burning torches, scarlet velvet curtains and banners hanging all the way from the ceiling and more palm trees— and modern media frenzy, with a press pack snapping their cameras and arc lights illuminating the body as if it was a prop in a neon-lit theatre. The orchestra of the Bolshoi played the funeral marches. It was not only the Nazis who could lay on a brilliant funeral for their fallen knights; even the colours were the same: everything was red and black. Stalin had already declared Kirov his closest martyred comrade: his home town, Viatka, Leningrad’s Mariinsky Ballet and hundreds of streets were renamed “Kirov.”