The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Eikhe himself came out to greet us. He was tall, lean, stern-looking, and said to be honest and well-educated, but too much of a courtier. He shook Mirosha’s hand, but barely glanced at me. I was beautifully and tastefully dressed, but all I got was a passing glance and a rather scornful greeting. I felt the scorn immediately, and still can’t quite forget it. In the hall, the table was set as it might have been in one of the Tsar’s palaces. There were several women there, all “bluestockings,” dressed very somberly and without a hint of makeup. Eikhe introduced us to them and to his wife, Elena Evseevna, who was wearing a conservative, but extremely well-tailored English suit. I already knew she was a highly educated woman with two academic degrees. And there I was in my lavender dress shot with gold, my neck and shoulders bare (I always thought a woman should not hide her body, but show as much as decency allowed—because it’s beautiful!), and in my high heels and tasteful makeup. My god, what a contrast! In their eyes, of course, I was just an empty-headed, dressed-up doll. No wonder Eikhe had looked at me with such scorn.

  At the table, though, he tried to be nice, handing me the menu first and asking what I would like to have. I had no idea, there were so many things to choose from. I admitted that I didn’t know … So he spoke to me as if to a child, indulgently, even tenderly:

  “But I do. Why don’t you order the veal shank fricassee? …

  At the table we talked about this and that—the usual banalities. How do you like Siberia? What do you think of our winter? It’s very dry here, so the cold is easier to take—all the things people usually say about Siberia.

  Then the men walked over to the next room to play billiards. Mirosha—thick-set, burly, broad-shouldered and Eikhe—tall, dry, and lean.4

  Robert Eikhe

  Several days later, Eikhe went on an inspection tour of Siberia’s industrial region. The new director of the Kuznetsk Steel Plant, Konstantin Butenko (whose wife, Sofia, had recently distinguished herself at the first nationwide conference of the women’s volunteer movement) reported that, “thanks to the direct assistance of Comrade Eikhe and the appropriate organs,” various previously undiscovered enemies of the people had finally been unmasked. Typical in this respect was the case of the Novosibirsk water supply system. As Eikhe explained, “When we asked the comrades who are supposed to be in charge of these things why the water supply was not working properly, they sent us piles of paper with all sorts of general explanations. I asked them to provide more detailed explanations. They explained once, twice, but it made no sense. They explained a third time. And it still made no sense. It made no sense because people look for general explanations instead of going to the heart of the matter…. And when we looked into the heart of the matter, it turned out that the water supply system had become infiltrated by our sworn enemies.”5

  In the logic of magic that dominates scapegoating campaigns, the general and the particular change places. Explanations having to do with the specifics of faulty pumps and rusty pipes become general, while general claims regarding enemy infiltration become specific. In West Siberia, the inquisitor-in-chief responsible for identifying masked witches was Mironov. Upon arrival in Novosibirsk, he accelerated his predecessor’s operation against the Trotskyites and extracted several important confessions. One former Red Partisan admitted that he was “a scoundrel” and a terrorist after interrogations conducted personally by both Mironov and Eikhe.6

  That was not good enough. The head of the Central NKVD Secretariat, Yakov Deich, kept telling Mironov about the “brilliant cases” that were being sent in by other regional chiefs and warning him about Ezhov’s growing impatience. According to Agnessa, Mironov “would come home late, exhausted, and I began to notice how tense he was. Up until then, he had been good at hiding his feelings about his problems at work, but now, something had started to give.”7

  At the February–March plenum, Mironov, according to his own later claim, complained to Ezhov about the large numbers of fictitious cases he had inherited from his predecessor, V. M. Kursky. Ezhov’s recommendation was to have “stronger nerves.” On the same occasion, Mironov’s old friend Frinovsky (now Ezhov’s first deputy) allegedly told him that Ezhov was “understandably unhappy” about the slow case turnover. Upon their return to Novosibirsk, Eikhe and Mironov spoke at the regional Party meeting, which took place on March 16–18. Eikhe said that it was a disgrace that none of the economic managers had informed the NKVD of specific acts of wrecking at their enterprises. (Konstantin Butenko shouted from his seat that he had, in fact, done so on one occasion.) Mironov admitted that, during the years of collectivization, his organization had gotten used to general, as opposed to particular, methods of repression. “In those days, we had a term ‘to trim,’ and so we kept ‘trimming’ the counterrevolution and neglecting, even back then, its deep roots.”8

  Sergei Mironov (Courtesy of Rose Glickman)

  As a place of exile, West Siberia was, by definition, filled with former enemies. Former enemies were, by definition, present-day terrorists. Over the course of the spring, Mironov uncovered several large terrorist networks, including the “Rightist-Trotskyite” conspiracy within the Party apparatus, the “Military-Fascist” conspiracy within the Siberian Military District, the “Russian All-Military Union” involving the remaining representatives of the tsarist privileged classes, and secret organizations among former Red Partisans, Christian “sectarians,” and Menshevik and SR exiles. Some of the prisoners were interrogated by Mironov himself. One of them, the head of construction of the Turkestan-Siberia Railway, Vladimir Shatov, had known Mironov and Agnessa well from their days in Kazakhstan. According to Agnessa, “Once some prisoners had arrived, and he was informed that one of them had asked for a meeting with ‘Mironov.’ Mironov agreed to see him. Shatov never let on that they were acquainted. Mirosha didn’t tell me what they talked about, but afterwards he was terribly upset and nervous. He couldn’t sleep, kept smoking and thinking, and wouldn’t answer any of my questions.” Shatov had been accused of being a Japanese spy, but he persisted in denying his guilt and was not executed until October.9

  On May 14, one day before launching a massive campaign of arrests among military commanders, Mironov addressed the members of the Fifth (Special) Section of his department:

  Our task is to purge the Army of all those under our investigation. There will be more than 50 of them, maybe 100–150, or maybe more.… It will be a hard fight. You’ll have almost no time for lunch. And when we arrest these 50–100 people, you will have to sit in your offices day and night. You will have to forget about your families, drop everything personal. There will be some whose nerves will prove too weak. Everyone will be tested. This is a battlefield. Any hesitation is tantamount to treason….

  I am sure we will get it done quickly…. Comrades, your life as a true Chekist is about to begin.10

  By the end of 1937, the number of arrested “members of counterrevolutionary units within the Siberian Military District” had exceeded 1,100. The nerves of some of the employees of the Special Section, including its head, did prove too weak, and most of the work had to be done by the Secret Political Section. Some investigators were expelled for questionable social origins and “moral corruption” (mostly drunkenness), and some were arrested as spies and “double-dealers.” Meanwhile, in Moscow and across the country, top NKVD officials who had worked under Yagoda were being exposed as traitors and replaced by Ezhov appointees. On June 6, Mironov’s former boss and the sponsor and organizer of his wedding, V. A. Balitsky, received a secret order to arrest the head of the NKVD’s Counterintelligence Department, Lev Mironov (Kagan), who was touring Siberia and the Far East. Within days, Balitsky and Lev Mironov arrived in Novosibirsk. According to Agnessa,

  He arrived with a whole retinue: charming officers who kissed all the ladies’ hands and danced beautifully. Mirosha threw a party for them. It was winter, but we had fresh vegetables from special greenhouses in Novosibirsk. They could not get enough of those vegetables—or the
fruits, of course.

  Mironov-the-Guest had been placed in the seat of honor. He caught sight of our Agulia (she was four at the time) and could not keep his eyes off her. He took her on his lap, gently stroked her head, and spoke softly to her as she nestled up against him. It seemed strange to me somehow: rather than flirting with the women or drinking and talking with the men, he’d turned to the child for some tenderness.

  Later I said to Mirosha:

  “This Mironov of yours seemed sad.”

  Mirosha started and said angrily:

  “What gave you that idea? Why would he be sad? He was received with great respect.11

  Several days later Lev Mironov and his entire delegation were arrested, put on a special train, and sent to Moscow. Balitsky, who had presided over the operation, had a long conversation with Eikhe and Sergei Mironov (who had helped stage it). Soon afterward, Mironov wrote to Ezhov that in the course of that conversation, Balitsky had expressed surprise at the arrest of the former head of the Kiev Military District (and one of the main proponents of the “extermination of a certain percentage” of the Cossack population in 1919), Iona Yakir, and had then gone on to say that, in the prevailing atmosphere, anyone could be arrested for any reason and confess to anything at all. On June 19, Ezhov sent Balitsky excerpts from Mironov’s letter and ordered him to report to Moscow immediately. Balitsky appealed to Stalin (“I have no feelings of pity for the enemy and have personally used the most acute forms of repression efficiently and on more than one occasion”), but complied with the order and was arrested on July 7 and shot four months later.12

  Meanwhile, Mironov, encouraged by Ezhov and Frinovsky, had been rapidly expanding the case of the Russian All-Military Union. On June 9, he reported that Japanese agents in Mongolia were stockpiling weapons and arming Buddhist lamas as part of preparations for a military rebellion centered in Siberia. On June 17, three days after the arrest of Lev Mironov, he sent Ezhov (with a copy to Eikhe) a memo describing a vast conspiracy that brought together former SRs, White officers, “and Kadet-Monarchist elements from among old regime people and reactionary circles within the professoriate and research scholars.” An elaborate network of terrorist cells based in several West Siberian cities had, according to Mironov, been organized into a giant army commanded by White émigrés in Prague and Harbin and Japanese diplomats stationed in the Soviet Union. The manpower was being provided by exiled kulaks. “If one bears in mind that, on the territory of Narym District and Kuznetsk Basin, there are 280,400 exiled kulaks and 5,350 former White officers, members of punitive expeditions, and active bandits, it becomes clear how broad the foundation was upon which the insurgent work was based.” So far, the arrest of 382 people had resulted in the unmasking of 1,317 members of the organization, but there was little doubt that the overall number of potential targets was going to “exceed significantly the number of participants identified up to this point.” Prisons were full, the transportation of prisoners difficult, and access to Narym by boat impossible after September. The only solution, according to Mironov, was for Moscow to send down a special delegation of the military tribunal or “to give us the right to issue death sentences on SR and All-Military-Union cases by means of a simplified procedure through a special collegium of the provincial court or a special troika.” (“Troikas” were the extrajudicial three-member tribunals first instituted in 1918 and widely used during collectivization for issuing death sentences to kulaks.)13

  On June 22, Ezhov forwarded Mironov’s memo to Stalin, proposing the creation, in West Siberia, of a “troika charged with the extrajudicial adjudication of cases involving liquidated anti-Soviet insurgent organizations.” Six days later, the Politburo issued a decree ordering the execution of “all activists of the insurgent organization among exiled kulaks” and announcing the creation of a troika consisting of Mironov (chair), Eikhe, and the West Siberian prosecutor, I. I. Barkov. The next day, on June 29, the head of the NKVD Secretariat, Yakov Deich, sent Mironov a telegram informing him of the Politburo’s decision.14

  On July 2, the Politburo applied Mironov’s West Siberian model to the Soviet Union as a whole (and launched what would become known as the Great Terror) by issuing the resolution “On Anti-Soviet Elements.” On July 3, it was sent to all the local Party secretaries and NKVD chiefs:

  It has been observed that a large number of former kulaks and criminals who were deported at one time from various regions to the North and to Siberian districts and then, at the expiration of their period of exile, returned to their native provinces are the chief instigators of all sorts of anti-Soviet crimes, including sabotage, in both kolkhozes and sovkhozes, as well as in transportation and in certain branches of industry.

  The Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) directs all secretaries of provincial and territorial Party committees and all provincial and republican NKVD representatives to register all kulaks and criminals who have returned home, so that the most hostile of them may be arrested without delay and executed pursuant to an administrative decision by a troika, while the remaining, less active but nevertheless hostile elements may be listed and exiled to districts as indicated by the NKVD.15

  On the same day, Ezhov sent a telegram to the local NKVD chiefs ordering them to divide the registered kulaks and criminals into Category 1 (execution) and Category 2 (exile) and to submit the results by July 8. Mironov was ready. On the appointed day, he reported that in 110 towns and 20 stations of his territory, the NKVD had registered 25,960 people, consisting of 6,642 kulaks and 4,282 criminals marked for execution and 8,201 kulaks and 6,835 criminals marked for exile. “Despite the large number of people subject to extraction,” he wrote, “we guarantee the operational and political success of the operation.” The preparations included the opening of ten new prisons for nine thousand people. (Two weeks earlier, the head of the Gulag, Matvei Berman, had ordered the clearing out of prisons by means of transferring prisoners to camps; Berman’s brother-in-law, House of Government neighbor, and, since March, the NKVD chief of the Northern Province, Boris Bak, proposed to solve the problem of prison availability by registering large numbers of prisoners as enemies subject to “extraction”). Two days later, Mironov asked Ezhov for permission to pass sentences “not only on kulaks but also on all the old regime people and White Guardist and SR activists.”16

  On July 16, the local NKVD chiefs were summoned to Moscow for instructions. According to Mironov, “Ezhov gave a general political and operational directive, and Frinovsky elaborated on it and worked with each head of directorate on operational quotas.” The “operational quotas” referred to the Category 1 and Category 2 targets assigned to each area. Mironov later claimed that he had told Ezhov that some prisoners were providing “highly unconvincing” testimony about their accomplices and that Ezhov had responded by saying: “Arrest them and then see; those against whom there is no evidence can be weeded out later.” He also, according to Mironov, authorized the use of “physical interrogation techniques.”17

  Back in Novosibirsk, Mironov convened a meeting of the regional NKVD commanders of West Siberia and issued instructions concerning the conduct of the operation: “This operation should be considered a state secret with all the consequences that entails. As I acquaint you with the plan for the territory as a whole, any numbers you hear must, as far as possible, perish inside your head. Those who can must banish those numbers from their minds, while those who cannot must force themselves to do it anyway because anyone found guilty of divulging the overall numbers will be subject to a military tribunal.”

  There was no need for more than two or three interrogations per person. Confrontations with witnesses could be dispensed with. All that was required was a confession (“a single record should suffice”). The goal was “to send the troika a ready draft of the troika’s resolution.” The choice of particular enemies and the decision on whether to execute or imprison them was up to the regional offices: “For the first operation, the quota is 11,000 people, whi
ch means that on July 28 you must arrest 11,000 people. Or you can arrest 12,000 or 13,000, or even 15,000. Don’t worry, I’m not holding you to that number. You can even arrest 20,000 under Category 1, so that later you can select the ones that are appropriate for Category 1 and the ones that need to be moved to Category 2. For Category 1 the quota we have been given is 10,800. I repeat, you can arrest as many as 20,000, so that later you can select the ones that are of particular interest.”

  Mironov concluded with “some technical matters.” Killing large numbers of people and disposing of their bodies required careful preparation. Some “operational sectors” had to be prepared to carry out “about 1,000 and in some cases 2,000 death sentences each. So what must each operational sector head do as soon as he returns? He must find one place for carrying out the death sentence and another for burying the corpses. If it is in the forest, the turf must be cut in advance and then put back over the spot so that the place where the death sentences are carried out remains secret and does not become a place of religious fanaticism for various counterrevolutionaries and priests.”18

  According to one NKVD officer present at the meeting, Mironov’s speech was met “with noisy approval from everyone in attendance, because those measures were long overdue, since our organs had not done anything substantial up to that point because of the enemy sabotage on the part of Yagoda and his accomplices.” Any surprise or bewilderment would have been reflected in subsequent conversations in the hall, “the way it usually happens when something new is introduced in the way people work, but there were no such conversations.”19

  ■ ■ ■

  On July 30, Ezhov issued the “Operational Order of the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR No. 00447 Concerning the Repression of Former Kulaks, Criminals, and Other Anti-Soviet Elements.” The next day it was approved by the Politburo and sent out to local NKVD chiefs. Partly in response to input from local officials, including Mironov, the list of “contingents subject to repression” had been expanded beyond “former kulaks and criminals” to include members of non-Bolshevik political parties, Whites, priests, and active believers. Those placed in Category 1 were “subject to immediate arrest and, upon consideration of their cases by troikas, execution”; those placed in Category 2 were to be sentenced to eight to ten years in camps or (“the most persistent and socially dangerous among them”) in prison. The troikas, modeled on the original one in West Siberia, were to consist of the local NKVD chief, Party secretary, and prosecutor. The highest quotas were assigned to Redens’s Moscow Province (five thousand under Category 1; thirty thousand under Category 2) and Mironov’s West Siberian Territory (five thousand under Category 1; twelve thousand under Category 2). The NKVD camps were to execute ten thousand inmates. The total for arrests was 268,950 people, 75,950 of them under Category 1. The official in charge of the operation was Mironov’s old friend, the former seminarian Mikhail Frinovsky. On August 8, he sent out a special addendum to Order No. 00447: “The troikas’ sentences should be announced only to Category 2 prisoners. Sentences to Category 1 prisoners are not to be announced. I repeat—not to be announced.”20