A TALENTED SCOUNDREL
The GPU was headed by Vyacheslav Menzhinsky. A sybarite and snob, born in a wealthy family, he had joined the revolutionary movement at an early age. In 1909 he had described Lenin, in a Socialist Revolutionary newspaper, as a “political Jesuit.” When Menzhinsky made friends with the Bolsheviks after the February Revolution Lenin had spoken just as warmly of him: “Our business will be extensive enough to find work for every scoundrel with talent.”
After October he was made People’s Commissar of Finance, but created such chaos that he was quickly removed. Then, in 1919, Lenin suddenly remembered that Menzhinsky was a lawyer and found a suitable place for him in the senior ranks of the Cheka. He had guessed correctly: the “scoundrel” proved invaluable in concocting bafflingly complicated provocations. It was a highly specialized intellectual game. Though Menzhinsky had a hand in all the dreadful deeds of the Red Terror, he fastidiously absented himself from the torture chamber and from executions. As soon as he was appointed Gensek, Stalin established a close relationship with this strange person. Since Dzherzhinsky, formally in charge of the Cheka, was also responsible for a multitude of other duties, Menzhinsky became the effective head of the Bolshevik secret service, and Stalin confirmed him in that post after Dzherzhinsky’s death.
Menzhinsky was faithfully served by Genrikh Yagoda. Yagoda helped the maestro to improve on his methods, and provocation became the regular modus operandi of the Cheka (GPU). Menzhinsky was responsible for setting the dizzying confidence game in motion. With the help of a spurious anti-Bolshevik organization created by the Cheka, Menzhinsky lured an old acquaintance of his, the legendary SR terrorist Boris Savinkov, back to Russia. Savinkov, who had assassinated an uncle of the Last Tsar and certain of his ministers, had become an implacable enemy of the Bolsheviks. But after lengthy discussions with Menzhinsky, he announced that he “now recognized the Soviet regime and no other.” For this sensational declaration Menzhinsky commuted his death sentence, and apparently promised a pardon at some time in the future. In 1926 it was announced that Savinkov had committed suicide—but shortly before this he had given this warning to his son: “If you hear that I have laid hands on myself, don’t believe it.” Menzhinsky knew the rule: you can forgive your enemy, but you must destroy him beforehand.
It was in Menzhinsky’s time that a large number of well-educated and foppish young men arrived in the GPU. Their past was anything but proletarian. They were ruthless careerists. The genuine fanatics, with their fevered dreams of world revolution, went on working side by side with these people, and hating them.
In 1927 Stalin organized a grandiose jubilee—the Party and the whole country celebrated the tenth birthday of the Cheka, now the GPU, the “punitive sword of the Revolution.” Most of those with whom Menzhinsky had shared the experience of October 1917, and who had helped to found his institution, had fallen from power. Now they themselves were under surveillance by the GPU. But Menzhinsky was still in place. Interminable speeches were delivered, earlier eulogies of the GPU were cited. Particularly pleasing were the words of the intellectuals’ intellectual Nikolai Bukharin: “The GPU has accomplished the greatest miracle of all time.… It has succeeded in changing the very nature of Russian man.”
He was right. For the first time in Russia informing on others was proclaimed a virtue, and the secret police became heroes. At the ceremonial meeting, instead of the speech expected of him, Menzhinsky spoke these few words: “The Cheka’s greatest merit is that it knows how to keep silent.” Then he laughed and left the stage.
But in 1928–1929, Menzhinsky sensed that the wind was changing. Not so long ago the official line was that all the main enemies had been eradicated, but now the Caucasian in the Kremlin was officially proclaiming that not only are our enemies not eradicated—there are millions of them. The Leader had obviously decided to resurrect the Red Terror, but the gigantic task ahead held no attraction for Menzhinsky. Since his wife’s death he had been sick with boredom. Stalin sensed his weariness, and lost interest in him. When the show trials began, Menzhinsky was his collaborator, but from the end of 1930 he worked more and more closely with the vice commissar, Yagoda.
In 1930, yet another of Lenin’s old comrades-in-arms was driven out of office by Stalin. This was Chicherin, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and a friend of Menzhinsky. At once a Bolshevik and a scion of the Naryshkin clan, who were related to the Romanovs, Chicherin was a solitary, a strange person who liked to shut himself up in his apartment and play his beloved Mozart for days at a time. Stalin replaced Chicherin with an enemy of his, the energetic Litvinov. Having a Jew at the head of his Foreign Office also helped Stalin to avoid accusations of anti-Semitism abroad. Besides, he was already thinking of repairing relations with America.
Menzhinsky occasionally called on Chicherin. Chicherin would play Mozart, while Menzhinsky listened in silence. He knew that his department had ears everywhere. He was by then only a fleeting visitor to his place of work. Mostly, he stayed at home studying Old Persian, so that he could read Omar Khayam in the original.
Stalin stopped summoning him to the Kremlin, but could not allow him to retire. He knew too much. Menzhinsky was nominally head of the GPU until 1934, when Yagoda, apparently, poisoned this strange relic of the Leninist epoch.
Stalin now began working intensively with Yagoda.
Genrikh Yagoda owed his rise to the Sverdlov family. The older Sverdlov, a rich Nizhny Novgorod merchant, had believed in the Revolution and had helped revolutionaries by making seals for forged documents. His son Yakov had naturally joined the revolutionaries himself, and had become the first nominal head of government in Bolshevik Russia.
As a boy Yagoda ran errands for the older Sverdlov. The old man helped him get an education. He was trained as a pharmacist, and would make good use of his skills at a later date.
After the October Revolution Yagoda found himself working for the Cheka. He still clung to the powerful Sverdlov family: his wife was related to Yakov himself. In the twenties he was already one of the top men in the all-powerful GPU. It was Yagoda who enmeshed the country in a network of informers during those early years of the Soviet regime. Lenin’s formula “every Party member must be a Chekist” was expanded under Yagoda: now every citizen had to become a Chekist. An invitation to become an informer was proof of the Party’s confidence in you.
A UNIQUE SPECTACLE: THE SHOW TRIALS
In the year of the Cheka’s glorious anniversary, several dozens of engineers were arrested in the Donbass mines and charged with “wrecking.” The investigation, or rather the rehearsals for an incredible theatrical event, went on through 1927 and 1928. Yagoda’s interrogators were extremely frank with the bewildered detainees. Bewildered because they had naturally begun by denying the charges, but had been told that no one would believe them and that what was required was not protestations of innocence but cooperation. The unfortunate engineers were told that the false charges against them had a lofty ideological purpose. The building of socialism now in progress had no precedents, and an admission from the accused that they were saboteurs was calculated to excite the wrath of the people against capitalism, heighten their vigilance against real enemies, and increase the productivity of labor. In return they were promised their lives.
The premiere took place in Moscow on May 20, 1928—the public trial of the “Shakhtintsy”—“wreckers” in the mines of the Donbass. Fifty-three engineers were called before the court. The diplomatic corps’s box was full, newspaper reporters from all over the world were present. The show was a success: all the accused joined in enthusiastic self-flagellation, and even dissociated themselves from their overzealous defense counsel. They seemed to vie with the public prosecutor, N. Krylenko, in aggravating the charges against them. Worldly-wise intellectuals at once dubbed the trial of the Shakhtintsy “Prosecutor Krylenko’s Fables.” (I. A. Krylov (1769–1844) was the Russian Aesop.)
The public prosecutor called for twenty-two death se
ntences. But out of gratitude for the cooperation of the accused, only five executions were ordered. A mere five innocent people killed—what did they matter measured against the Party’s planetary goals? Stalin was able to draw the necessary conclusion at a plenary meeting of the Central Committee: “We are confronted with an obvious escalation of class warfare. Needless to say, things of this kind will happen again.” This was an order: in every factory the search for wreckers, for “our own Shakhtintsy,” was on.
END OF THE RIGHT
Battles with Bukharin and the rightists went on throughout 1929. One right-wing member of the Central Committee, Ryutin, subsequently gave this character sketch of his leader: “As a political leader Bukharin is beneath criticism … clever but shortsighted. Honest, but weak, he quickly lapses into lethargy, is incapable of long struggle with a serious enemy … panics easily, cannot provide leadership to the masses, needs to be led himself.” Nonetheless, Bukharin took hold of himself and fought back. Stalin guessed the main reason for this stubbornness. The GPU had informed him that young Marxists from the Institute of Red Professors regularly met Bukharin in the apartment of Postyshev, a secretary of the Central Committee. These young people called themselves the “Bukharin school.” While Postyshev himself was away from Moscow, his wife, who worked at the Marx-Engels Institute, put the apartment at their disposal. Bukharin went straight there after Politburo meetings to tell them about his daring deeds and speeches. Softhearted Bukharin reveled in the adoration of these young Marxists, particularly the young female Marxists. Let him carry on with it, Stalin decided. Bukharin’s resistance was now grist for his mill: he aimed thunderbolt after thunderbolt at the right, intensifying an atmosphere of terror. At every plenum he set out to annihilate Bukharin. And, of course, it worked: Bukharin took fright. Attempts at a reconciliation followed. Bukharin and Tomsky, who just a little while ago had called him “Genghis Khan,” now spoke of their friendship with Comrade Stalin. At a subsequent plenum Stalin recalled how Bukharin had gone to see Kamenev, and how that “irreproachable and loyal member of the Party” had suggested that the two of them should “change the composition of the Politburo.”
In November 1929 the rightists publicly capitulated. Rykov spoke for all of them: they were now for the general line of the Party, for the destruction of the kulak, for the policy which Bukharin only yesterday had called “the military-feudal exploitation of the peasantry.” Stalin “deemed their declaration unsatisfactory.” They would have to go on crawling in public for a long time to come. Meanwhile he booted Bukharin out of the Politburo. Rightists were pilloried all over the country, condemned at staff meetings in factories, in learned institutes, in kindergartens, and even at cemeteries.
Rightists and wreckers were anathematized by turns. From morning till evening the radio never paused in its imprecations. Trials now followed each other without a break. A group of people belonging to the old aristocracy were arrested at the Monastery of the Trinity and St. Sergius, the most important in Russia. Evicted from their homes and denied work elsewhere, they had sought refuge in the monastery, where they worked in the museum and taught in the seminary. Now they were denounced as wreckers and arrested.
THE FATE OF RELIGION
From the very beginning of the Bolshevik regime religion had been under attack. T. Samsonov, head of a secret department of the Cheka, wrote to Dzherzhinsky on December 4, 1920, that “communism and religion are mutually exclusive.… No machinery can destroy religion except that of the [Cheka]. In its plans to demoralize the church the Cheka has recently focused its attention on the rank and file of the priesthood. Only through them, by long, intensive, and painstaking work, shall we succeed in destroying and dismantling the church completely.” In building a new society with a new religion the onetime seminarist followed the behests of Ilyich. He kept a careful eye on the personnel of the church. The GPU was always at the church’s side. And Stalin was physically destroying church buildings, as Lenin had willed.
The famous seventeenth-century church of St. Paraskevi on Okhotny Ryad was destroyed. Curious crowds stared wild-eyed as the great bell, nine tons in weight, was hurled to the ground. Five thousand people joined enthusiastically in demolishing the Monastery of St. Simon. But the high point of the campaign was the collective destruction by a crowd many thousands strong of the Church of Christ the Savior, the largest place of worship in Moscow. As a symbol, Stalin decided to erect on the site of this Christian temple the greatest temple of the new regime—the Palace of the Soviets, to be crowned with a gigantic statue of the God Lenin.
Such churches as survived were converted into storehouses. Children were told at school to bring icons for a public bonfire, and were given posters of Lenin to hang in their place. Newspapers published letters to the editor announcing that some former priest had broken with religion forever. The slogan “religion is the opium of the people” was displayed everywhere and anywhere.
THE GREAT CHANGE BEGINS
Throughout 1929 the country was preparing for Stalin’s fiftieth birthday, in December. Or, to be precise, for the fictitious birthday which he had chosen for himself. Thousands upon thousands of articles were written about the beloved Leader. In honor of the Great Jubilee mills and factories reported unprecedented successes. The radio blared frenzied congratulations. In a Moscow psychiatric hospital, A. Kochin, a fifty-three-year-old professor of mathematics who had lost his mind, shouted the praises of the Leader incessantly, interrupting them only to heap recherché imprecations on the wreckers.
On his fiftieth birthday he could pause to sum up his achievements. The last of Lenin’s comrades-in-arms had been driven out of the leadership. It was now, during these birthday celebrations, that the absolute character of his power became obvious for all to see. His coronation was to come at the next Congress. I. Schutz noted in his diary that “everybody expects sensations at the Congress.… The Leader will dominate everything.”
He composed a modest reply “to all the organizations and comrades who have congratulated me … I regard your greetings as addressed to the great Party of the working class which bore me and reared me in its own image and likeness.”
The use of biblical language—“in its own image and likeness”—was deliberate. So was the statement that he was born not of woman, but of the Party. As he became tsar he resolved also to become a god. A Bolshevik Trinity, a triune godhead, was emerging. Marx, Lenin, and himself. Gods of the earth.
The shattered leaders of the right tried to make their peace with him. On the night of January 1, 1930, Bukharin and Tomsky arrived at Stalin’s apartment with bottles of wine to see the New Year in. The reconciliation took place: he still needed “little Bukharin.” He had no comparable theoretician of his own. And after all, they were both “Himalayas.”
He chose his anniversary to initiate the Great Change.
While he was celebrating the New Year with his family, his humiliated foes, and his servile henchmen, preparations were being made out on the boundless frozen expanses of Russia. Special freight cars stood ready on the rail tracks. Previously used to transport cattle they were waiting now to transport human beings.
Toward the end of 1929, shortly before his birthday, he had published an article entitled “The Year of the Great Turn.” In it he defined the task ahead as “the liquidation of the kulak as a class.” A twentieth-century state was planning the organized destruction of fellow citizens who worked on the land. Together with the kulak, the old Russian village was to be destroyed. The Revolution had endowed the peasants with land. Now they were required to give it back, and to surrender their cattle for communal use. Instead of “my own”—so dear to the peasant heart—they must learn to say “ours.” The better-off peasants, the kulaks, would naturally not want any of this and would be obstructive. Therefore, to economize on time, he decided to proceed in revolutionary fashion and simply destroy them. He put faithful Molotov at the head of a commission to finalize the solution. Molotov labored diligently. And bloodily.
In a very short time the commission had drawn up a plan for the total extermination of the kulak. Kulaks were deported to the far North, to the Urals, Kazakhstan, and Siberia. Kondratiev, Yurovsky, and Chayanov, economists of note in their day, suggested using kulaks—often the ablest and hardest-working peasants—to till the virgin lands. Let them have on long-term lease the uncultivated open spaces abandoned by Kazakh nomads. They did not realize that his present concern was not with economics. His objective was political: the complete and utter destruction of a class. The revolutionary Tkachev’s formula—“We must ask ourselves how many people we need to keep”—had prevailed.
In February, Molotov and his commission divided the kulaks into groups. First, the counterrevolutionary kulak activists. They would be sent to the camps, or shot, and their families deported to the remotest regions. Second, whatever was left of the wealthiest kulaks. They would be deported to remote and infertile areas. Third, those with less prosperous holdings. They would be evicted and put down outside the boundaries of the collective farms.
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