At last Yagoda himself was arrested. The Boss had not forgotten that back in 1928 Bukharin, talking to Kamenev, numbered Yagoda among his supporters. Later, Yagoda had done a splendid job of betraying Bukharin. And in doing so had inspired a brilliant twist in the Boss’s plot. He would unite Bukharin and Yagoda in one and the same conspiracy. A role in the Boss’s thriller had been reserved for Yagoda long ago. An unexpected role. And a very useful one.
Yagoda’s arrest enabled the Boss to rid himself of the Leninist intake in the NKVD—the old Chekists. They had of course endured in silence the execution of old Party members. They had always carried out orders without a murmur. But they could not have approved. He saw the need for young personnel, with a contempt for all that outworn Party nonsense. People who did their jobs unthinkingly. That was why the old Cheka had to perish together with its creator, the old Party.
Yezhov carried out a general purge of the NKVD with feverish haste. The Boss’s sense of humor was at work again: a great number of the Cheka personnel from Lenin’s time now had to meet the same fate as the old Party members whom they had so recently written off. Some of them would encounter their recent victims in the camps. The majority would not get that far, but would meet their deaths against the old, familiar Lubvanka wall. The usual itinerary was to the wall to be shot, to the crematorium, then to the bottomless grave number 1 in the Donskoi cemetery, with the ashes of all the other victims. The Boss had another joke up his sleeve: Yagoda had to confess to the innumerable poisonings which he had loyally carried out for the Boss—the murders of Menzhinsky, Gorky, and others.
Yagoda is traditionally supposed to have said in prison, “God does exist after all. From the Boss I deserved nothing but gratitude for loyal service, from God I must have earned the severest possible punishment. Look where I am now, and judge for yourself whether there is a God.” He signed everything they put before him. Then he lapsed into a strange state of apathy. Occasionally he wept.
Yagoda’s words were reported to the Boss. He laughed. The former seminarist remembered his history, how Attila was called “God’s Scourge.”
A new constitution was adopted at the end of 1936. Bukharin, traveling abroad that year, took out his fountain pen and solemnly said, “This is the one the Constitution was written with,” adding that dear Karl (Radek) had helped him.
It was true. The Boss had entrusted the task to his two most gifted publicists. Their turn to take the stage came only when they had finished this work. The constitution they drafted, proclaiming freedom of speech, universal franchise and the usual civic rights could come into effect only when no one would even think of invoking it. The object of the Terror was to create just such a society. And of course there would be no place in it for those two oppositionists and demagogues.
They had to go. Radek had been first. Now it was Bukharin’s turn. Little Bukharin, favorite son of Lenin’s Party. Lenin’s vanishing Party.
17
THE FALL OF “THE PARTY’S FAVORITE”
All this bloodshed wearies the soul and crushes the heart with grief—I ask one favor of the reader: to permit me not to feel revulsion for these people who so basely allowed themselves to be destroyed.
—Tacitus on Nero’s reign of terror
BUKHARIN IS TRAPPED
The first warning bell rang on February 10, 1936, when Pravda published a harsh critique of Bukharin’s views. Yet two weeks later the Boss allowed Bukharin to take his wife abroad, to Paris. He went with a delegation sent to acquire the archives of the German Social Democratic Party, which Hitler had destroyed. They were in the keeping of an émigré Menshevik, B. Nikolaevsky.
In making this move the Boss risked nothing. Letting Bukharin leave the USSR together with his wife obviously made it possible for him to remain abroad. But if he did so, the leader of the rightists would become a “defector,” that is, a declared enemy of the USSR, and this would help to justify past and future criminal proceedings against old Leninists. Whereas if he did return, there could be great advantage in that too. Knowing what a peacock Bukharin was, the Boss felt sure that he would not be able to govern his tongue while he was abroad. He would be working with Nikolaevsky, and would not try to avoid meeting other Mensheviks. He and they had too much in common.
It happened just as he had foreseen. Anyone who has lived in the USSR will remember that dangerous sensation of freedom when he finds himself abroad. Bukharin behaved like a free man. There was even an unscheduled meeting with the Menshevik leader F. Dan, during which Bukharin called Stalin “a vicious little man, not a man but a devil.” “So how did you come to trust him with your own fate, the fate of the Party, and the fate of the country?” Dan asked him. “It wasn’t entrusted to him, but to the man whom the Party trusted.… He is a sort of symbol of the Party … that’s why we all put our heads in his maw knowing that he will surely devour us.” “So why are you going back?” “I couldn’t live as an émigré, like you do … no, whatever happens … and perhaps nothing will happen anyway.”
Dan made a note of this conversation, and would certainly have told his friends about it. Bukharin prattled endlessly to Nikolaevsky, who recorded it all for future historians. He destroyed his notes after Bukharin’s arrest for fear of damaging him, but by then he was certainly not the only one who knew about them. While in Paris, Bukharin secretly met the U.S. ambassador to the USSR, William Bullitt, and told him about the strange, pro-Hitler sentiments which were getting more and more of a hold on Stalin.
Paris was flooded with Stalin’s agents: NKVD spies, French Comintern activists, former tsarist officers who had come to believe in the Bolsheviks. Stalin’s secret service continued to spirit former tsarist generals out of Paris in broad daylight, and it would be ridiculous to suppose that he would have let Bukharin off the leash without an attendant. He was, of course, watched closely. All in all, Bukharin’s trip to Paris supplied a great deal of additional material for his future trial, at which he would be reminded, among other things, of his conversations with Nikolaevsky.
Bukharin returned, and that autumn the Boss sent him on vacation for six whole weeks. While he was enjoying the mountains of Central Asia, his name and those of other rightists began to be heard in the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial. They were accused of complicity in terrorist acts, including Kirov’s murder. The state prosecutor, Vyshinsky, announced officially that an investigation was under way. Tomsky interpreted Caesar’s command correctly, and on August 22 he committed suicide. Pravda announced: “Tomsky, hopelessly entangled in his ties with the Trotskyist-Zinovievite terrorists, has committed suicide at his dacha.” Bukharin cut short his vacation and flew back to Moscow immediately.
THE GODS ARE ATHIRST
I am sitting in the President’s Archive reading letters written by Bukharin shortly before his death. They might be an epistolary novel, written in collaboration by Kafka and Dostoevsky. Everything else that has been written about the Stalinist trials—the most mysterious trials of the century, in which the victims consented to slander themselves in public and glorify their executioner—is no more than myth-mongering, mere guesswork.
In these letters the enigma of the century is unraveled completely.
As soon as he got back Bukharin addressed written statements to the Politburo and to the prosecutor Vyshinsky: “Not only am I not guilty of the crimes attributed to me, I can proudly claim that for the past several years I have defended the Party line and Stalin’s leadership with all the passion and sincerity I can command.… In this context I have to say that from 1933 I broke off all personal relations with M. Tomsky and A. Rykov, who formerly shared my ideas. This can be confirmed by questioning drivers, analyzing the journeys made by them, questioning sentries, NKVD agents, servants, etc.” It was true. Fear had prevented him from meeting old comrades. There had been only one or two meetings with oppositionists, and these he scrupulously listed. “Kamenev—once only … I asked him whether he would like to go back to editing the literary pages of Pravda, in which c
ase I would speak to Comrade Stalin about it.… [But Kamenev said] ‘I just want to be forgotten, I don’t want Stalin even to remember my name.’ (After this philistine declaration I withdrew my suggestion.)” He wrote also about the “Bukharin school”: “Stalin personally showed me a number of documents from which it was evident that I could no longer ‘keep these people in hand’ (as he put it). They had lost confidence in me long ago, and some of them called me a traitor.” No links, then, with his devoted pupils either. After this he enthused over the trial. “The trial will have en enormous international significance.… So the scoundrels have been shot—excellent: the air has immediately become cleaner.”
That is how he spoke of former close associates and friends. But his mind raced feverishly—had he forgotten this or that criminal meeting? He remembered a few more—one of them with a former leader of the Petrograd Bolsheviks. “Some additional facts. I tried as hard as I could to avoid a visit from A. Shlyapnikov, but he managed to catch me. [This was in 1936, shortly before his arrest.] He asked me, in the Izvestia office, to pass a letter to Stalin. I told my staff not to let him in again, because ‘politically he stinks.’ ” So much for Shlyapnikov.
He remembered yet another criminal meeting—with the man who had once been number two in the Bolshevik Party. “On one occasion I met Zinoviev in Radek’s apartment.… He had come to collect a book.… We made him drink to Stalin’s health. He complained of heart trouble. Zinoviev then sang Stalin’s praises (the two-faced rogue!). Let me add that people like Radek and myself sometimes find it difficult to throw out uninvited callers.” He was clean. He had betrayed them all, as the Boss required. At the same time, he wrote a hysterical letter to Voroshilov: “As I write I have a feeling of unreality. Is it a dream, a mirage, am I in a lunatic asylum, hallucinating.… Poor Tomsky may have got involved in something, I don’t know. I don’t rule it out, he lived by himself. [He was perfectly ready to regard even his dead friend as a traitor.] I’m terribly glad that those dogs have been shot. The trial means political death for Trotsky, and that will soon become clear.… I advise you to read Romain Rolland’s play about the French Revolution. I embrace you, for I am clean.”
At the end of his letter he couldn’t resist an oblique reference to the way in which the Jacobins had exterminated each other. When they picked off Zinoviev and Kamenev, when they gave short shrift to Smirnov, Shlyapnikov, and other former colleagues, he had not been thinking of Rolland’s plays. Now it was too late. He himself was a character in a banal revolutionary drama bearing the hoary epigraph “Revolution, like Saturn, kills its children. Beware! The Gods are a-thirst.”
The semiliterate Voroshilov, once a metalworker and now a member of the Politburo, had not read Rolland’s plays, but he did know the Boss’s ways. And just as Bukharin feared the plague-stricken Shlyapnikov and his own pupils, so Voroshilov now feared Bukharin. And was just as eager to throw him out. His reply was atrociously rude. Bukharin had branded his own former friends, now Voroshilov branded Bukharin. In the best tradition of the time he promised his onetime friend to “keep as far away from you as I can, irrespective of the outcome of your case” and added that he would henceforth consider Bukharin “a scoundrel.” Nevertheless, the “scoundrel” was so terrified that he wrote again: “I got your dreadful letter. My letter ended ‘I embrace you,’ yours ends with the word ‘scoundrel.’ Every man has, or rather should have, his own self-esteem. But I should like to remove one political misunderstanding. I wrote a letter of a personal nature (and now regret it) in a state of distress … like a beast at bay.… I was going out of my mind at the mere thought that someone might genuinely believe in my guilt.… I am in an extremely anxious state. That was the reason for my letter. However, I must await the end of the investigation as calmly as I can, since it will, I am sure, prove that I have nothing whatsoever to do with those gangsters.” Hunters will recognize the squeal of the hare cornered by dogs and about to die.
The Boss decided that it was too early for the kill. It was as though the second act in the spectacular trial of Pyatakov, Radek, and others was still in rehearsal, and Bukharin’s entrance was not due until Act Three. The Boss knew, of course, the reasons for Bukharin’s hysterical fear. As soon as he got back to reality, to the USSR, he would have realized how much damage he had done himself abroad. Now he was in agonies at the thought that his friend Koba might know the things he had been saying. The Boss, of course, did know, but he pretended not to. Back from Sochi, he magnanimously and of his own accord halted the investigation, thereby condemning Bukharin to the worst torment of all: waiting for inevitable imprisonment is worse than prison itself. The Boss knew that waiting would crush the spirit of this intellectual. On September 10, 1936, Pravda announced that “the investigation has established that there are no grounds for prosecuting Bukharin and Rykov.”
Meanwhile, the investigation which was supposed to have been closed was collecting more and more damning evidence against Bukharin and the rightists. “24.9.36. Bukharin to Stalin. I did not ask to be seen before the investigation ended, because I thought it politically awkward. But now I beg you with my whole being not to refuse me.… Interrogate me! Turn me inside out! But dot the ‘i’s so that nobody can put the boot in anymore and generally poison my life.” Poor Bukharin even spent one of his sleepless nights writing a “poem about Stalin” which he submitted to his hero for comment. His hero modestly advised against publication.
At a Central Committee meeting in December 1936 Yezhov was allowed to accuse Bukharin outright of counterrevolutionary activity. But the Boss played the part which he had written for himself—that of the Trusting Leader—to the end: “We must not jump to conclusions. The investigation goes on.”
This was when Bukharin’s life really became hell. Between sessions at the Central Committee, Bukharin and Rykov were confronted with Pyatakov, Radek, and other convicts who had once been comrades of Lenin, brought from their prison cells for the purpose. In the presence of members of the Politburo Bukharin’s closest friend, Radek, among others, obediently accused him of complicity in their conspiracy He hysterically contradicted their statements. But fresh evidence was always obtainable.
“TO SEE HIM, SIMPLY TO SEE HIM, MADE US ALL HAPPY”
Immediately before the new year Stalin managed a great holiday for his people: at the Extraordinary Eighth Congress of the Soviets, he promulgated the constitution drafted by poor Bukharin. The newspapers each devoted a special section to letters from delegates to the Congress. A. Sukov, a worker, wrote: “Amid a storm of enthusiastic applause for the creator of the constitution, the great Stalin, the … Congress … unanimously resolved … to accept the draft as the basis for discussion. It is difficult to describe what happened in the Kremlin hall. Everybody rose and hailed the Leader with prolonged applause. Comrade Stalin, standing on the platform, raised his hand, calling for silence. He invited us several times to be seated. It was no good. We sang the ‘Internationale,’ and the ovation started all over again. Comrade Stalin turned to those on the platform, no doubt asking them to call us to order.… He took out his watch and showed it to us, but we had lost count of time.”
These letters had little enough to say about the constitution itself, but a worker named P. Kalinin spoke of the “unforgettable moments when I saw the bright face of our beloved Leader, the genius who has created the constitution.” N. Lozhechnikova, a textile worker, hastened “to share with you my immense joy. In the Kremlin palace I saw the man dearest to us of all on earth. I sat as though bewitched, and could not take my eyes off Comrade Stalin’s face.” Another textile worker, A. Kareva, confided that when “Dusaya and I were told that Comrade Stalin would talk to us next day, I don’t know what I looked like, but Dusaya turned bright red, her face lit up, her eyes literally glowed.” It wasn’t just propaganda, or the ravings of the obtuse crowd. To see him, a god on earth, had become a tremendous event, and not just for deluded workers.
This is how the popular children’s writer Ko
rnei Chukovsky described Stalin’s appearance at a Komsomol Congress: “Something extraordinary had happened to the audience! I looked round … every face was full of love and tenderness, inspired.… For all of us, to see him, simply to see him, made us all happy.… We reacted to every movement of his with reverence, I had never supposed myself capable of such feelings.… Pasternak kept whispering rapturous words in my ear. Pasternak and I went home together, both reveling in our own happiness.” This was written in his diary by one of Russia’s cleverest and most highly educated men!
Stalin had by now created a unique image of himself: he was Tsar and God in one. He was the Boss. So what he was about to destroy in 1937 was not Lenin’s Party, but all those miserable degenerates who had cherished sacrilegious designs against their Tsar and God. Their Boss.
Living in that deafening medley of panegyrics for the Leader and anathemas for the traitors, in that all-pervading atmosphere of insane idolatry and equally insane fear, the highly strung Bukharin felt that he himself was losing his mind. On the threshold of the new year fresh blows were aimed at him. He wrote at once to his friend Koba: “15.12.36.… An article in Pravda today [stated] that ‘the rightists’ … ‘were hand in glove with Trotskyists, the saboteurs, and the Gestapo.’ ”
The kindly Boss responded, and angrily rebuked the editor of Pravda: “To Comrade Mekhlis. The question of the former rightists (Rykov, Bukharin) has been postponed till the next plenum. Vilification of Bukharin (Rykov) should therefore cease. It does not take great intelligence to understand this elementary truth.”
Mekhlis, however, was not only intelligent but familiar with “in-depth language.” He knew that what the Boss wrote and what the Boss wanted were not the same thing. So Pravda went on baiting Bukharin.
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