Stalin

by Edvard Radzinsky

  MOURNING DRESS

  The year 1936 was nearing its end. Maria Svanidze recorded in her diary for December 21: “The big event was that we celebrated J.’s [Joseph’s] birthday. Lots of guests, all dressed up, noisy, dancing to the radio, went home at 7:00 A.M.” He had granted them the happiness of looking upon their god twice. And for the last time. Maria Svanidze: “On the 31st we saw the New Year in at J.’s. Members of the Politburo with wives, and ourselves—relatives. Flat and boring. I was overdressed (long, black frock) and didn’t feel quite well.… It was all more modest than on the 21st, I thought it would be the other way round.” This was their farewell party. They had fun, or tried to, but their god knew their future. For most of his guests, that New Year would be their last. Maria Svanidze’s funeral dress was quite appropriate: 1937 was to be the most terrible year in Russia’s history.

  He sent little Bukharin a New Year’s gift: “1 January 37. Bukharin to Stalin. Late in the evening of December 30 I received a whole series of depositions made by Trotskyist-Zinovievite gangsters (Pyatakov, Sokolnikov, Radek, Muralov, etc.).” There follows a long and desperate attempt to defend himself: villains are trying to blacken him because of his devotion to Koba, etc. This time there was no answer. But little Bukharin went on writing: “I am becoming a martyr to myself and making martyrs of all my family. None of us can sleep, we are all so exhausted that we are sick of life.… Tell me what to do, send for me!”

  He was not sent for. On January 16 Bukharin was dismissed from Izvestia. Yet still he went on sending interminable letters to his tormentor: “24.1.37. The whole world has now heard me defamed as a criminal. What am I to do, how can I go on?”

  The newspapers stepped up their persecution, and his friend Koba was suddenly helpless, quite unable to stop Mekhlis. Rightists were arrested daily On the Boss’s orders, the “evidence” beaten out of them was sent directly to Bukharin’s apartment. He was deluged with accusations against himself. On February 16 he received twenty such statements. And still he wrote and wrote interminable replies, to the Politburo and to friend Koba. When they started evicting little Bukharin from the Kremlin he rang the Boss: “Now they’ve come to turn me out of the Kremlin.” “You tell them to go the Devil,” his friend said, and let him stay. For the time being.

  Preparations for a plenum of the Central Committee—Bukharin’s last—were in hand. The time was drawing near for the friends to part. Bukharin lost his head and said that he would not attend the plenum until the charges of espionage and sabotage were withdrawn, and began a hunger strike in protest shortly afterwards. “7.2.37. I have received the agenda for the plenum of the C.C. Originally it read ‘the case of Comrades Rykov and Bukharin.’ The word ‘Comrades’ has been omitted. What does this mean?”

  ABRAHAM’S SACRIFICE: ORDZHONIKIDZE’S SECRET

  The plenum, however, was postponed. Sergo Ordzhonikidze had died.

  The noose had been tightening round his neck for some time. Yezhov had arrested his deputy, Pyatakov, and all his immediate entourage, and had ended by arresting Sergo’s brother Pavel (Papulya). Ordzhonikidze rang the Boss in a rage, but the only answer he got to his angry shouting was a sigh and “the way that organization is, they might come and search my place.” Ordzhonikidze still didn’t get the point. He began shouting and raging again. Why had Pyatakov been shot, when he had been promised his life in return for a confession?

  What happened on Ordzhonikidze’s last day, February 17, has now come to light, thanks to information supplied by his secretary and recently discovered in the Party Archive. Sergo discussed matters with the Boss that morning. They talked for hours, just the two of them, and their meeting seemed to have ended amicably: it would not have been like the Boss to risk a breakdown of relations with one of the main speakers on the eve of the plenum. After that, Ordzhonikidze’s workday went smoothly, with no sign of nervous tension. He met Molotov and lunched at home. He left the Commissariat around midnight, after signing a routine telegram expressing his anxiety about a shipment of piping. A man contemplating suicide would hardly get worked up about a few pipes. As soon as he got home he went to lie down. Soon afterward a shot was heard from his bedroom. His wife ran in and found him dead, in his underwear, which was covered with blood. Had he killed himself? Or was the bullet the result of his meeting with the Boss? Had the Boss realized that the ungovernable Ordzhonikidze might spring some unpleasant surprise on him at the plenum? Perhaps Yezhov had taken care of things: perhaps when Ordzhonikidze went to bed his own bodyguard had crept into his apartment through the back entrance.

  The Boss, I believe, genuinely grieved for Sergo, just as before he had grieved for Kirov. This was a horrifying trait in his character—he could sincerely grieve for those whom he murdered. (We shall find him grieving again when we come to the story of another of his friends, Kavtaradze.) How indeed could he fail to grieve for loyal Sergo? So many of his memories were associated with Sergo. So many of his best memories. Unfortunately, however, Sergo was part of that Party which had to disappear. Significantly, Sergo had interceded for Pyatakov. The Boss would tell the plenum how Sergo had felt honor-bound not to show his letters from “the vicious oppositionist Lominadze.” Could he afford the luxury of such a noble knight, who kept his enemies’ secrets? Determined as he was to create a unified society, subject to a single will? For only such a society could carry out the great tasks known to him alone. It was for this great cause that he had to sacrifice his friend. Once again “as Abraham sacrificed his son Isaac.”

  Maria Svanidze noted in her diary, “I went to see Zina, she has borne her husband’s death heroically.… She herself took charge of the funeral arrangements, she stood by the coffin throughout.” Poor Zina, she was afraid to show her suspicions. But Sergo’s relatives showed less restraint, and almost all the Ordzhonikidzes were arrested as a result.

  On February 28, 1937, the Boss’s relatives were all together in the Kremlin for the last time, at Svetlana’s birthday party. Maria Svanidze observed: “Yasha [Stalin’s son Yakov] was there with his wife for the first time. She is quite pretty, older than Yasha. He is her fifth husband, not counting other relationships. She trapped him, of course. J. [Joseph] didn’t come. Stayed away, on purpose, I think. I’m sorry for J.” Maria then detailed a list of “half-wit” and “stupid” relatives of Stalin’s late wife Nadya and his own “lazy” and “weak-willed” sons, saying that “the only normal people present” were Alyosha, Maria’s husband; Zhenya, Nadya’s sister-in-law; and Maria herself. “And Svetochka [Svetlana] who makes up for all the rest.” Stalin did not turn up because he was busy at the plenum. The terrible plenum at which he would bid farewell to yet another friend, little Bukharin. Bukharin and Rykov attended the plenum, and were arrested on the spot.

  BUKHARIN’S LAST LOVE

  Before the plenum Bukharin went on writing Stalin hysterical letters, full of love: “20.2.37. Sergo’s death has shaken me to the depths of my soul. I sobbed and howled for hours. I loved that man very much. I wanted to go to Zina, but what if she said, ‘No, you are our enemy now.’ I really do love you ardently now, though my love is belated. I know that you are suspicious and that you are often wise to be suspicious. I know that events have shown that the level of suspicion should be many times higher than it is.” The Boss was not simply torturing him by making him wait for the end. The Boss was being supremely merciful, giving him time to commit suicide. But Bukharin wanted to live. He had a beautiful wife, who had recently borne him a child. Well, the choice was his own.

  The plenum opened. Yezhov made a statement on the criminal activity of the rightists. Legend had it that some speakers tried to defend Rykov and Bukharin. This, of course, was untrue. They spoke with one voice, furiously calling for severe punishment. The faithful Molotov was at the fore: “Refusal to confess will prove that you are a fascist hireling.… They are the ones who say that our trials are rigged.” Mikoyan also invited Bukharin and Rykov to confess at once to activity against the state, and provoked
an angry outburst from Bukharin: “I am neither Zinoviev nor Kamenev, and I will not slander myself.” (Little Bukharin knew all along, then, that those he had labeled “gangsters” were in fact innocent.)

  The most tolerant person present, doing his best to keep the heat down, was of course the Boss. A commission was set up to draft a resolution. Its thirty members included some whom the Boss would allow to live (Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov) and others whom he had marked for a speedy end (Yezhov, Gamarnik, Peters, Eikhe, Chubar, Kosarev). These future victims were particularly cruel, particularly violent, in their insistence that Bukharin and Rykov must be shot. Again, it was the Boss who made the most moderate proposal, to “expel them from the Central Committee and the CPSU, but instead of committing them for trial pass the case to the NKVD for investigation.” This moderation meant certain but slow death. And torture in the meantime. He had made Lenin’s widow, Krupskaya, and sister, Maria Ulyanova, members of the commission: both supported his proposals, and joined in sending Lenin’s favorite to Golgotha.

  Incidentally, Krupskaya was at the center of a bizarre episode in the course of the plenum. Yezhov declared, “Bukharin writes in his statement to the Central Committee that Ilyich died in his arms. That is rubbish! You’re lying! It’s utterly false!” “Well, those present when Ilyich died were Maria Ilyinichna, Nadezhda Konstantinovna [Krupskaya], and myself,” Bukharin responded. “Is that correct, Nadezhda Konstantinovna?” Neither woman said anything. Bukharin continued: “Did I take Ilyich’s dead body in my arms, and kiss his feet?” Both women remained silent, and the audience guffawed at the “liar.” Poor Bukharin appealed in vain to the women. Like Bukharin before them, they had lost their voices. Everybody wanted to earn the right to live. It was no time for principles.

  In accordance with the plenum’s decision, Bukharin and Rykov were arrested. They turned up for one session, and were handing in their overcoats at the cloakroom, when a number of young men surrounded them. The plenum ruled that Bukharin and Rykov had at the very least known about the terrorist activities of the Trotskyist-Zinovievites and that all their letters to the Central Committee were “slanderous.” By then they were already in the Lubyanka, undergoing their first interrogation.

  At this bloodstained plenum the Boss delivered a famous and terrifying speech, with a typically uninspiring title: “On Defects in Party Work and Measures for the Liquidation of Trotskyists and Other Double-Dealers.” It contained in fact his last-minute instructions to the inquisition.

  LIQUIDATION: REVOLUTION’S FAVORITE WORD

  “We must remember that no successes can cancel the fact of capitalist encirclement, that while there is capitalist encirclement there will be sabotage, terrorism, diversions, and spies infiltrated behind Soviet lines. We must smash and jettison the rotten theory that with every advance we make, the class struggle in our country will grow less acute.… We lack the will to liquidate our own laxity, our own complacency.… Surely we can shake off this ridiculous, this idiotic, malady—we, who have overthrown capitalism, completed the foundations of socialism, and raised high the banner of world communism.”

  This is from the stenographic record of this plenum and remained hidden in the President’s Archive for many years. Throughout the proceedings participants eagerly competed in exposing “wreckers.” Fear had now become insanity. One delegate, T. Bogushevsky exposed a group of saboteurs in the broadcasting service: “On a day of mourning, the anniversary of Lenin’s death, they broadcast gypsy love songs, pretending that it was for testing purposes … and on January 23, the day when the verdict of guilty against the Trotskyists was broadcast, they played Chopin’s Funeral March.”

  One after another they spoke to the same effect. Yezhov himself spoke of his successes in hunting down human beings and enumerated those arrested in the People’s Commissariats. “Those condemned in recent months include 141 from the People’s Commissariat for Light Industry, 228 from the People’s Commissariat for Education.” His audience was indignant that so few Light Industry officials had been arrested. Molotov, called upon to lead the attack, said sarcastically, “Comrade Lyubimov sits there saying nothing. I wonder why.”

  Yezhov replied: “As far as the Commissariat of Light Industry is concerned we’ve only just got going. But we have already obtained the conviction of 141 active wreckers and saboteurs. A quite significant number of them have been shot.” His audience noisily rejoiced to hear it. Not out of bloodlust—from fear. Fear compelled them to demonstrate their zeal.

  R.I. Eikhe boasted: “We have exposed many wreckers in Western Siberia. We exposed wrecking activities earlier than other regions did.” The trusty Eikhe had indeed understood the Boss’s instructions. But he had not understood their purpose. For Eikhe, who joined with such zeal in exterminating his oppositionist comrades, had been in the Party since 1905 and was doomed to perish with the rest of the old Party. He would do so a little later, in 1940. Two members of the Politburo who spoke, Kosior and Postyshev, were themselves to die shortly. Maria Ulyanova also spoke. They all joined in the general chorus: crucify them!

  The Boss could view this contest with satisfaction. And when one speaker mounted the platform and began “angrily” reporting (one couldn’t just speak, one had to speak “with uncontrollable anger”) progress in the liquidation of enemies, the Boss interrupted him with a joke: “So how are things at your place? Have you driven all our enemies out? Or are there still a few left?” They laughed heartily. With relief. Believing that since he was in such a good mood, perhaps it was all over? They laughed. And the Boss must have laughed with them. For he knew their fate.

  The heads of all the branches of the economy reported on their success to date in liquidating enemies, confessed that they had been insufficiently vigilant (this was called “self-criticism”), and fulsomely praised the Boss’s speech. After this it was Voroshilov’s turn. The People’s Commissar for War told them that “happily, we have not as yet discovered many enemies in the army. I say happily in the hope that there are not very many enemies in the Red army. That is how it should be. For the Party sends its best cadres into the army.” No, People’s Commissar Voroshilov, not a very clever man, had not understood the situation. Molotov, one of the initiated, and leader of the offensive, spoke up sharply: “If we have wreckers in every branch of the economy, can we imagine that in one place alone, the War Department, there are none? It would be absurd to do so.” His next words were ominous: “The War Department is a very large affair, and its work will be checked not now but a little later. And it will be examined very rigorously.”

  “… EXAMINED VERY RIGOROUSLY”

  After the Party, the army was Stalin’s main concern. And his main target. Trotsky had controlled the army for several years. When he had replaced Trotsky with Voroshilov he had ruthlessly dismissed former commanders. He had resumed the process in the early thirties, and 47,000 were dismissed. But there were several who could not be touched: Yakir, Uborevich, Shmidt, Blyukher, Kork. Volumes had been written about them, their names were in history textbooks. Yakir, the youngest of his marshals, son of a Jewish pharmacist, was renowned for his bravery and his obscene language. The bearded giant Uborevich who had, together with Frunze, conquered the supposedly impregnable Crimea, was now in command of the Belorussian military district. Shmidt, the son of a Jewish shoemaker, had taken part in the bloody massacres of the Civil War from the age of fifteen. He was monstrously ugly, but famous for his amorous conquests. Marshal Blyukher had smashed the White armies in the South and the East, was the first to be awarded the Order of the Red Banner, and now commanded the Far Eastern army. Kork, whose head was as bald as a billiard ball, had defended Petrograd together with Trotsky, had completed the destruction of Wrangel in the Crimea, and was head of the Military Academy. They despised him. They remembered what a poor figure Koba had cut in the Polish campaign. Informers let him know what they said about him. Could he rely fully on the army while they and their associates were still arou
nd? The biggest worry was that as they saw the Party being destroyed they would unite against him. Out of fear. Could stupid Voroshilov read Tukhachevsky’s mind? Time was getting short. He must act. So, in the Boss’s thriller, the high command had to form part of a military-political conspiracy. Yagoda and the NKVD could be thrown in for good measure. Plus his old friend Enukidze, onetime keeper of the Kremlin. The leader of this whole gang was of course Trotsky. And behind them all, needless to say, stood Hitler. The army, the Kremlin, the Party, the NKVD were all accomplices of Hitler and Trotsky. This was as good as anything he had written so far. It was not difficult to find proof of espionage, since the army had previously had close connections with the Reichswehr. To arrest a few senior commanders and force them to supply the necessary testimony was a mere “technicality.” So while little Bukharin was in jail the Boss’s thriller provided him with new comrades-in-arms—the military chiefs, German spies, and minions of Trotsky.

  Extermination of the former commanders had, of course, to begin with the most dangerous of them, Tukhachevsky.

  A typical tsarist officer, well groomed and self-possessed, Tukhachevsky had some sort of mysterious power. He was born to command. During the Civil War his appearance on the scene was enough to pacify mutinous units. His thunderous command of “Attention!” brought insubordinate soldiers to their senses. He was as cruel as the bloody times he lived through.

  Voroshilov hated Tukhachevsky, who despised him in return. He was fond of telling stories which showed Voroshilov—“our Klim, the Lugansk metalworker, as Kliment Efremovich Voroshilov likes to call himself”—in a ridiculous light. During the First World War Tukhachevsky was for some time in a German POW camp. In the period of military cooperation between the USSR and Germany after the war, and before Hitler came to power, he had often sung the Reichswehr’s praises. The impending investigation would have no difficulty in producing compromising material.