While the country still basked in the warm spell, preparations for the offensive went on at full speed. On July 10, 1934, the GPU was renamed the NKVD—People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. This seemed to mean that the secret police was now detached from the Party and from the Politburo. As, of course, it had to be, with the destruction of the Party and of certain members of the Politburo imminent. Faithful Yagoda retained his post, now as People’s Commissar. He would lead the offensive. Yagoda had by then compiled a dossier on all those at the top of Lenin’s Party. The servants of important bureaucrats had to be approved by Yagoda’s department. Housemaids, chauffeurs, and other domestic staff reported several times a month. The amorous exploits of Kremlin boyars helped swell the dossiers. Jan Rudzutak, for instance, a candidate member of the Politburo, had raped the fifteen-year-old daughter of a Moscow Party official, and when in Paris had lavished money belonging to the state on prostitutes. Then there were the escapades of A. Enukidze, secretary of the Central Executive Committee, and of Karakhan, one of the senior officials in the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, among the ballerinas. This bawdy reading matter was sent regularly to the Boss. But what he evidently valued most was information on provocateurs. This must explain the fact that the obliging Yagoda inserted false accusations of collaboration with the tsarist security services in the dossiers of many old Bolsheviks.
A DANGEROUS HOUSE
Early in the thirties the architect B. Jofan designed a new building for high Party officials. It looked out on the Kremlin, across the Moscow River, and became known as the “House on the Embankment.” The most fashionable apartments were in Blocks 1 and 12. That was where N. Postyshev, a member of the Politburo, Marshal M. Tukhachevsky, Jan Berzin, head of military intelligence, and a number of other officeholders lived.
Jofan, the architect, took one secret to the grave with him. The building had one unusual entrance. It was shown on all the plans and in all the documentation, but in reality it was nonexistent. Instead, there was a “back stairway,” approached from the kitchens of the enormous apartments in fashionable Block 12. You could go down these stairs to an underground passage leading to the Kremlin. This tunnel under the Moscow River, which still exists, was bored in the time of Stalin’s favorite tsar, Ivan the Terrible. Yagoda’s men could use the backstairs to materialize suddenly in the rooms of high-ranking tenants.
The Soviet military intelligence chief, Jan Berzin, who had become famous under the name of General Grishin during the Spanish Civil War, was lying peacefully in bed one night with his Spanish wife, the beautiful Aurora, beside him. The Boss’s emissaries entered his bedroom from the backstairs.
That would be at the end of 1937. But we are still in 1934, and they are all living undisturbed in the house reserved for them. Armed guards kept watch not only at each entrance but on every landing. They were there only to protect tenants, but they noted every step taken, eavesdropped on every conversation.
O. Lepeshinskaya, daughter of one of Lenin’s comrades-in-arms, remembered when her family was moved into prestigious Block 1. The apartments had seven rooms, the balconies were two hundred feet long, there were solariums and double walls. That was where the eavesdropping devices stood. Stood is the right word: they were animate creatures. Lepeshinskaya recalled how she “once woke up at 3:00 A.M. and heard the silence broken with the words ‘that’s enough for today, let’s go home.’ ”
All was ready for the offensive. Time to begin. At the end of 1934, he waited only until his birthday celebrations were over, and … began.
15
THE BLOODBATH BEGINS
“REVOLUTIONARIES SHOULD BE SENT TO JOIN THEIR FOREFATHERS AT FIFTY”
The events of 1935–1938, which led to the total destruction of the Leninist Party, remain the greatest riddle of Stalin’s reign. Why did he destroy the Party, now completely subservient to him, with such inordinate cruelty? The most frequent explanation is mental disorder. Stalin, it is said, was a schizophrenic. The story usually told by way of proof is that when in 1927 the great Russian medical scientist Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev was called in to examine Stalin, whose withered arm was troubling him, he diagnosed advanced paranoia and recommended immediate retirement. Shortly afterward, Moscow witnessed the eminent scientists funeral.
In August 1989, in the days of perestroika, a number of psychiatrists took part in an amusing roundtable discussion in the offices of the Literary Gazette. They were looking for an answer to the question: was Stalin mentally ill or not? One of those invited was academician N. Bekhtereva, daughter of the great Bekhterev. She said, among other things, “I myself do not know whether Vladimir Bekhterev decided that Stalin was paranoiac, but our family never heard anything to that effect.” That puts an end to a very popular legend.
A number of interesting points were made in the course of the discussion. Kornetov, for instance, said that “such an illness is hardly compatible with his skill in manipulating personnel, recruiting supporters, and accurately timing his attacks on opponents.” Dr. N. Levin asked, “When were Stalin’s ideas out of focus, or abnormally dominant in his consciousness, as is the case with paranoiacs? Stalin was a cruel man, incapable of pity … but a pragmatist.”
As Stalin contemplated the destruction of the old Party, he must surely have consulted the two men who had influenced him most—Lenin and Trotsky. He could have found in Trotsky’s works a complete answer, equally acceptable to Lenin: “Lenin often ridiculed so-called old Bolsheviks, and even said that at fifty revolutionaries should be sent to join their forefathers. This grim joke makes a serious point; at some critical stage every generation of revolutionaries becomes a hindrance to the further development of the idea which they have carried forward.”
The Seventeenth Congress had finally convinced Stalin that they would never let him create the country of his dreams—a military camp where unanimity and subservience to the Leader reigned. Only with such a country could the Great Dream be realized. The Great Secret Dream.
A tremendous task confronted him. The creation of a Party united in obedience to himself. Ilyich had seen the need for it, but experience showed that he had left the task unfinished. Now Stalin was resolved to complete it.
The bloody purge was also designed to solve another problem. In the system he had created, Party bosses were all-powerful. But these were professional revolutionaries, with little understanding of technology and management. The course of industrialization had demonstrated their incompetence.
In mid-February 1937, his protégé, the young engineer Malenkov, now a secretary of the Central Committee, wrote a report which revealed that seventy percent of oblast Party secretaries had only an elementary education, and that for district secretaries the figure was even higher—eighty percent. In the language of the Boss himself, “a very acute personnel problem has arisen.”
Moreover, after twenty years in power, Party functionaries were showing their age, and had accumulated families, in-laws, mistresses. Two expressions used by Molotov in his character sketches of Party functionaries stand out in my mind: they were “beginning to go to pieces” and “manifesting a desire to rest.” In these words you hear the mocking voice of the Boss himself.
The destruction of the semiliterate establishment, with its manifest “wish to rest,” would make room for a new, educated generation which had grown up under Stalin.
But how was he to get rid of their predecessors, painlessly and without wasting too much time? Retire them? That would mean creating an opposition. His handling of the kulaks supplied the answer. He would do it by the same revolutionary method. He would annihilate them. Too cruel? Well, had they been any less cruel? Weren’t they always parroting Lenin’s murderous words “You can’t make a revolution in white gloves”?
In the President’s Archive is Stalin’s visitors’ book, in which the duty officer meticulously noted the arrivals and departures of all the Boss’s visitors. “November 28, 1934. Kirov. Arrived 1500 hours, left 17.25.�
�� The Boss’s “friend and brother” spent over two hours with him in his study. The Boss suggested that Kirov should move to Moscow, where he would become number two in the Party. Kirov left, intending to go Leningrad to wind up his affairs there. On November 29 he was still in Moscow, but was not granted an audience.
Yagoda, however, was a daily visitor.
On the evening of the 29th Bulgakov’s wife, Stalin, and Kirov were together at the Arts Theater. The Boss took Kirov to the station, and kissed him on the platform: it is no easy thing to renounce a brother.
He would kiss Kirov once more—as he lay in his coffin.
On December 1, Kirov was walking along a corridor in the Smolny Institute. The onetime headquarters of the October coup had been the seat of the Bolshevik leadership in Leningrad ever since. As he turned into the narrow passage leading to his private office a young man detached himself from the wall. Strangely enough, there were no security guards around. The young man pulled a revolver out of his briefcase and fired. Chudov, a secretary of the Leningrad City Party Committee, ran out of the office and rushed up to Kirov. But Kirov was dead.
This assassination was the beginning of an enormous catastrophe which was to destroy millions of people.
The evening of Kirov’s murder, the Boss dictated a decree of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR “on the procedure to be followed in dealing with terrorist acts against officials of the Soviet regime.” Investigation of such cases was to be completed in not more than ten days, cases were to be tried without a public prosecutor or counsel, and appeals and petitions for pardon were not allowed. The death sentence must be carried out immediately.
That same night he set off for eternally rebellious Leningrad, together with faithful Molotov and the high executioners Yezhov and Yagoda. Medved, the head of the security police in Leningrad, met them at the station. Without a word Stalin struck him in the face—as much as to say “You should have looked after Kirov properly.” He then took over the investigation.
A whole floor of the Smolny and a suite of rooms in the NKVD building were put at his disposal. He conducted the interrogations personally. Certain details began to emerge. According to the deposition of L. Nikolaev, Kirov’s assassin, he had been put up to the murder. Asked where he obtained the revolver he pointed to Zaporozhets, the deputy head of the Leningrad branch of the NKVD and said, “Why are you asking me? Ask him.”
“Take him away,” Stalin commanded. And as soon as the door closed he barked at Yagoda, “That prick!”
That is how the defector Orlov, an ex-general in the NKVD, described the scene.
Stalin banished the Leningrad NKVD chiefs, Medved and Zaporozhets, to the Far East for “negligence.” There they would live in comfort until their turn came to play a part in the thriller Stalin was concocting.
The preliminary examination of Kirov’s assassin was concluded in twenty-seven days. The findings were signed by the Assistant State Prosecutor, A. Vyshinsky, and L. Sheinin, an investigating officer in especially important cases.
I talked to Lev Romanovich Sheinin in the seventies. Fat Sheinin, who had sent so many people to their deaths in the years of terror, looked like a benevolent Mr. Pickwick. In retirement he had started writing plays, so he was a colleague of sorts. He liked showing off his knowledge of secrets, and was quite delighted when I asked him whether Stalin had ordered Kirov’s murder. He smiled, and answered amiably, “Stalin was the Leader, not a thug, my dear fellow.”
During Khrushchev’s Thaw a commission was set up to decide once and for all whether Stalin really did order Yagoda to kill Kirov. They hoped to find documents—and of course found none. Not because they had been destroyed. I am convinced that they never existed. What Sheinin said was not untrue: Stalin gave Yagoda no direct instructions. He could not do so. True, he personally had asked for “evidence” everyone knew was false to be beaten out of unfortunate engineers and scientists. But that was different. For the good of the Party you could do whatever you liked to “non-Party scum,” as intellectuals were often called. Non-Party people were not regarded as human beings; they were the manure on which the society of the future could be grown. But Party members, those who were not criminal oppositionists of some kind, were quite a different matter. Lenin’s heir could not call on the head of the NKVD to murder a loyal Leninist. On the contrary—he summoned the head of the NKVD on a number of occasions and asked him to watch over Kirov as carefully as possible. Yagoda’s task could not have been simpler: he had only to translate the Boss’s wish from “in-depth language,” and then carry it out.
Kirov’s assassin, Nikolaev, was a young Party member. He turned out to have a military background. He had gone to the front at the age of sixteen, when Yudenich and the whites were attacking, and had joined the Communist Youth Organization at the front. After working in the GPU he had moved to Murmansk, where he had held some minor post. Since then he had been a disappointed man, haunted by a sense of failure. He dreamed up an imaginary romantic period in the Party’s past. He wrote in his diary about the betrayal of former Party traditions, and said that someone must sacrifice himself to draw attention to the deadly dangers of the present situation. He interwove political and personal themes. Unnamed friends informed Nikolaev that his former wife was having an affair with Kirov. Yet another proof of the Party’s degeneration!
The really surprising thing is that Nikolaev spoke openly about these fevered imaginings. The ears of Yagoda’s establishment missed nothing, and must have heard. Yagoda must have known, too, of Nikolaev’s mysterious friends, who aggravated the neurotic young man’s delusions. It is difficult not to suspect that someone encouraged the hysterical Nicolaev to make his mad decision. And then enabled him to act on it unhindered. It emerged in the course of the investigation that the Smolny guard had detained Nikolaev on a previous occasion and had found him armed. In spite of this, he was allowed into the Smolny again on the day of the assassination.
The Museum of the Revolution contains the unpublished memoirs of Alex Rybin, a member of Stalin’s bodyguard in the thirties. Regarding Kirov’s assassination he wrote: “As someone who knows all the fine detail of the security arrangements for members of the Politburo … I can see what must have happened. Who could have allowed Nikolaev to sit for some considerable time on a window ledge in the corridor? Why was Kirov not accompanied by a personal aide, waiting to receive orders? Why was Nikolaev released on a previous occasion, although he had a weapon?”
The public asked similar questions. Hence the mischievous ditty “Stalin murdered Comrade Kirov/in his office corridor.”
The Boss was in no hurry to answer all the people’s questions. His mind was on the long and bloody crime in which millions would take part—and millions would perish. And, as in any good detective story, the questions would all be answered, but only at the very end.
But the drama was only just beginning, and the dramatis personae, marked down by him to die, were eating, drinking, worrying, and pitying the man who had lost a “brother.” Maria Svanidze wrote in her diary, “I got back from the dacha at 9:00 P.M. and heard the shocking news. Everyone is terribly sad. Especially for J. [Joseph]. Kirov has been killed by an evil man.… It was a staggering blow for me. J. is strong, he bore the pain of losing Nadya heroically. But two such trials in such a short time.… A terrorist act of any sort is terrible enough.… This White Fascist terrorism is frightening in the hatred it shows.”
It was undoubtedly painful to him—two such shocks, two such losses! Now he had neither wife nor friend. They, his enemies, had deprived him of everything. Now he would rid himself of them. His faithful brother would serve him still, even in death.
When Yagoda contrived Kirov’s death he had not realized that the Leader was thinking on the grand scale. He had envisaged no more than the removal of a single dangerous figure around whom hostile forces were beginning to rally. The Leader had not initiated him into his cosmic plan. As a result, Yagoda hurried to arrest priests, ex-landowners, a
nd so on, intending to lay Kirov’s murder at the door of the usual culprits, the class enemy. Even the astute Radek missed the point, and started writing about the hand of the Gestapo killing a loyal Stalinist.
The Boss had to point out to Yagoda precisely where the main blow should fall: among the Zinovievites. Yagoda was too set in his ways and remained unconvinced. The Boss saw that he would never overcome his pious inhibitions when faced with the Leninist old guard. So he harnessed him to a diminutive fellow with a quiet voice, one Nikolai Yezhov, the chairman of the Party Control Commission.
Molotov described Yezhov as “Bolshevik from before the Revolution, worker by origin, never in any of the oppositions, Central Committee Secretary for some years, good reputation.”
Secret file 510, in the archive of the former KGB, contains a curriculum vitae of this person of “good reputation”: “Yezhov, Nikolai Ivanovich. Born May 1, 1895. Resident in Moscow, Kremlin. Social origin—worker. Education—incomplete primary.… In 1919 tried by military tribunal and sentenced to imprisonment for one year.”
The Boss had first seen Yezhov during his excursion to Siberia to speed up grain deliveries and had subsequently introduced him into the apparatus of the Central Committee. By the beginning of the thirties Yezhov was already head of its Cadres Department. At the Seventeenth Congress he was elected to the Central Committee and to the vice-chairmanship of the Central Control Commission. In 1935 he became chairman of that body, and a secretary of the Central Committee.
Yezhov was typical of those who rose from nowhere to high positions in this period: semiliterate, obedient, and hardworking. His dubious past made him particularly eager to shine. Most important of all—he had made his career after the overthrow of the October leaders. Yagoda now served Stalin, but until recently had been the servant of the Party. Yezhov had served no one but Stalin. He was the man to implement the second half of Stalin’s scheme. For him there were no taboos.
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