At the same time, Hitler’s intelligence service, taking advantage of the atmosphere created by the purges, had set out to weaken the Soviet army by forging a letter in which Tukhachevsky announced his intention of carrying out a Napoleonic coup. Whether this occurred to German intelligence spontaneously or was inspired by Stalin’s agents is a matter for conjecture. V. Krivitsky, a high official of the NKVD who later defected, claimed that the scheme originated with the Boss himself. The forged letter reached him in January 1937, but by then it was superfluous. V. Primakov, second in command of the Leningrad military district, and V. Putna, Soviet military attaché in the United Kingdom, both arrested in autumn 1936, had already provided the necessary evidence against the “German spy Tukhachevsky.”
A. Kork, head of the Military Academy, was arrested first, in May 1937. Tukhachevsky himself was arrested on May 27. By the 29th, as his case record shows, the hero had confessed to all the false charges brought against him. There are reddish-brown marks on some pages of his deposition. Forensic examination has shown that they are bloodstains. When he introduced torture, the Boss had been thinking ahead. Since the military were bound to be a bit tougher than civilians, torture should prove useful. It did.
On May 29 I. Uborevich was arrested at a railway station. Marshal I. Yakir was arrested next.
The arrested officers had to be tried quickly. Marshal Blyukher arrived, and asked Gamarnik, head of the army’s Political Administration, to help with the trial. But Gamarnik never got there. Next day when he was expecting Blyukher, NKVD men arrived to seal his safe, and ordered him to stay at home. In “in-depth language” this was an invitation to take a certain action. Gamarnik went into the next room and shot himself. The Boss liked to allow his victims this alternative.
In May 1937, the journalist Mikhail Koltsov, who had fought heroically in Spain, spent three hours with the Boss. When he got home he told his brother, “Stalin stood near me, put his hand on his heart, and bowed. ‘What should one call you in Spanish, Mig-u-el?’ ‘Mig-el, Comrade Stalin.’ ‘Right then, Don Mig-el. We noble Spaniards heartily thank you for your interesting report. Goodbye for now, Don Mig-el.’ ” But when he reached the door the Boss called to him and a strange conversation followed:
“Have you a revolver, Comrade Koltsov?”
“Yes, Comrade Stalin.”
“But you aren’t planning to shoot yourself with it?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, that’s just fine. Thank you again, Comrade Koltsov, goodbye for now, Don Mig-el.”
On December 17, 1938, Koltsov was arrested, and later shot.
The Army Council met in the People’s Commissariat of War from June 1 to 4. Stalin arrived with the Politburo. More than a hundred military chiefs had been called in from the provinces because the ranks of the Military Council itself had by then been thinned out catastrophically: a quarter of its members had been arrested as conspirators.
Before the council began work, folders containing documents were distributed to the participants. Their comrades of yesterday, the army’s idols—Tukhachevsky, Kork, Uborevich, Yakir, and the rest of them—had confessed that they were spies for Hitler’s intelligence service. Voroshilov reported to the council on the discovery of an extensive counterrevolutionary conspiracy by the NKVD: “I am very greatly to blame. I did not detect these base traitors. But I cannot point to a single warning signal from you.” His audience realized that they were being accused of complicity. After this, what was left of the council, and all the others in the hall, eagerly denounced their former friends and superiors.
The Boss himself spoke on June 2. He never published this terrible, tense speech, but the stenographic report is in the President’s Archive. He spoke of spies, of the skillful way in which German intelligence had “recruited malcontents,” who had become “slaves in the hands of the Reichswehr.” This speech added one lurid touch to his thriller. “A certain woman” made her appearance, a perfidious beauty by the name of Jozefina Genzi. “She is a beautiful woman. A spy. She recruited people with her woman’s wiles. She recruited Karakhan [onetime Vice-Commissar for Foreign Affairs]. She was also the one who recruited Enukidze. She had Rudzutak in her clutches.” The names were those of Party members well known for their amorous exploits. Yagoda’s dossiers had proved helpful.
Stalin called the unmasked military chiefs “spies,” contemptuously denying them the appellation “counterrevolutionary.” He explained the distinction: “If, for instance, the suicide Gamarnik had been a committed counterrevolutionary—in his place I would have asked to see Stalin, bumped him off first, and then killed myself.” The former terrorist could never forget how easy it is to kill people.
A summary trial took place on June 11. Stalin staged his favorite show: friends sent friends to their deaths. Tukhachevsky, Uborevich, Yakir, Primakov, and the others were tried by their army comrades—Dybenko, Blyukher, Belov, Alksnis. The sentence, of course, was death. Stalin knew that the judges who passed sentence ultimately would also perish. All those old commanders were part of the old Party, and must therefore disappear.
The destruction of the old command went on throughout 1937 and 1938. This wholesale massacre left the army weak. That at least is the generally accepted view. But Marshal Konyev, one of the heroes of the Second World War, was of a different opinion. He wrote in his memoirs: “Of the commanders destroyed—Tukhachevsky, Yegorov, Yakir, Kork, Uborevich, Blyukher, Dybenko—only Tukhachevsky and Uborevich can be regarded as modern military leaders.… Most of them were on a level with Voroshilov and Budenny. Those heroes of the Civil War, cavalry army men, living on their past. Blyukher bungled the Khasan operation, Voroshilov would bungle the war with Finland. If they had remained at the top the war would have turned out quite differently.” The Boss, indeed, knew that the repressions would weaken the army for the present but strengthen it in the long run. It was another example of his favorite, murderous method of selecting personnel. The mass murder of former officers meant that on the eve of war, command passed to men much more up-to-date in their training and their thinking, men for whom the Civil War was just a heroic myth.
Bukharin, then, while in jail, became one of the leaders of a military-political conspiracy. All that remained was to obtain his consent. For, unlike the soldiers, who were tried in camera, Bukharin was to be granted the favor of a magnificent public trial. There are many legends about the tortures which induced him to take part in this ignominious farce. It is a pity to debunk a good legend, but let Bukharin’s letters speak for themselves.
Night of April 15, 37. Koba!… I have been meaning to write to you for several nights now. Simply because I want to write to you, cannot help writing to you, since I now feel you to be someone so close to me (let those who want to laugh up their sleeves).… Everything that is most sacred has been turned into a game by me (so it was said at the plenum). In my despair I swore by Ilyich’s dying hour. And I was told that I was trading on his name, and even that I was lying when I said that I had been present when he died.… I could barely stand on my feet and they accused me of clowning and play-acting. [His thoughts wandered. He seemed now to be remembering his visit to Koba, when Koba said “I’ll kill you” and he decided that Koba was jealous of him and Nadezhda.] I want to tell you honestly and openly about my private life. Let me say that I have known only four women intimately. [There follows a minutely detailed account of his excruciating disputes with them.] You were wrong in thinking that I had “ten wives.” I never lived with more than one at a time. [“He’s lying again,” Koba might have told himself. “He’s settled down now that he’s got a young beauty for a wife. But earlier on.…” Every step he took, every one of the “womanizer” Bukharin’s women had been accounted for by the NKVD.] All my dreams recently have come down to one thing—to stick closely to the leadership, and to you in particular … to work with all my strength, subordinating myself completely to your advice, instructions, and requirements. I have seen the spirit of Ilyich rest up
on you. Who else could have resolved upon Comintern’s new tactics? The resolute implementation of the Second Five-Year Plan, the arming of the Far East,… the organization of reform, the new constitution? No one … I had an unusual feeling when I was fortunate enough to be with you.… Even fortunate enough to touch you.… I began to feel toward you as I felt toward Ilyich—a feeling of close kinship, of tremendous love, unbounded trust, the feeling you have for someone to whom you can say anything, write anything, complain of anything.… Is it at all surprising that in recent years I have even forgotten the times when I fought against you, when I was embittered.… [I can imagine Stalin reading this and remembering all that Bukharin had so recently said about him abroad. Stalin was too down-to-earth to understand that Bukharin did now really love him, with the love of a hysterical intellectual, the love of a victim for the executioner, of weakness for strength. How Russians love these Dostoevskyan perversities!]
I have it in my mind to write a book. I should like to dedicate it to you and to ask you to write a short foreword, to show everyone that I consider myself entirely yours. How horribly contradictory my situation here is. I regard every warder, every Chekist in the prison as one of my own people while he looks upon me as a criminal, though he treats me correctly. I think of the prison as “my own.” … Sometimes I find myself dreaming, why can’t they plant me somewhere outside Moscow, in a little cottage, give me a different passport and two Chekists to watch over me, let me live with my family, make myself useful to society by working on my books, on translations (using a pen name, or anonymously), let me dig the ground so as not to disintegrate physically (never going farther than my own backyard). And then, one fine day, X or Y will confess that he has slandered me. [Poor romantic!]
As it is I am perishing here. The rules are very strict, you can’t even talk loudly in your cell, or play checkers or chess, when you go out into the corridor you aren’t allowed to talk at all, you can’t feed the pigeons at your window, can’t do anything at all. On the other hand, the warders, even the very junior ones, are always polite, reserved, correct. We are well fed. But the cells are dark. Yet the lights are on day and night. I swab floors, clean my slop pail. Nothing new in that. But it breaks my heart that this is in a Soviet prison. My grief and anguish know no bounds.
With the letter went a request that “no one should read it before J. V. Stalin.” But Stalin wrote on it “circulate,” and sent it by special messenger to all members of the Politburo. It was as if the benevolent Boss was asking, “Ought we to pardon him in spite of everything?” His henchmen could be under no misapprehension. Heads were falling daily. They did their duty, vied with each other in ruthlessness:
“Read it. In my view written by a con man”—Molotov.
“Con man’s spiel”—Chubar.
“I’m not me and the horse isn’t mine!”—Kaganovich, Kalinin.
“Undoubtedly a con man’s letter”—Chuba.
Once again, the Boss was forced to bow to the collective.
Little Bukharin went on writing to him, forty-three letters, forty-three unanswered declarations of love.
Greetings, Joseph Vissarionovich! [The familiar “Koba” had vanished.] … I have been talking to you for hours in a hallucinatory state—I have spells like that. (You were sitting on my bunk, so close I could touch you.) Unfortunately, it was just my delirium.… I wanted to tell you that I would be willing to carry out any demand of yours without the least hesitation or reservations. I have already written (besides an academic book) a large volume of verse. All in all, it is an apotheosis of the USSR.… Byron said that to become a poet you either have to fall in love or be a pauper. (Both are true of me.) My first efforts now seem infantile (but I am rewriting them, except for my “Poem on Stalin”).… I have seen neither my wife nor my child in the past seven months. I have made several requests, but without success. I have lost my sight twice because of nerve trouble, and have had two or three attacks of hallucinatory delirium … J. V.! Give them permission to visit me! Let me see Anyuta and my little boy! Anything may happen! So let me see my dear ones.… Or if that is impossible at least let Anyushka bring a photograph of herself and our child for me. I know that it may seem ludicrous to you when I say that I love you with all my soul but I can’t help that. You must think what you will of me.
So the prison regime was strict, but they were perfectly polite, and the food was good. No, there was no torture. And it seems unlikely that the delicate and hysterical Bukharin would have written so many literary works in the intervals of torture. He tortured himself—with his despair, his fear of being shot, the anguish he felt for his family. His was too delicate an organism for prison life. He was a poet, not a politician. Nervous strain gave him hallucinations and caused him to lose his sight. He knew already that he could not hold out, that he would consent, as Kamenev had, to “lie about himself,” even without being tortured. “I wanted to tell you that I would be willing to carry out any demand of yours without the least hesitation or reservation.” Almost word for word what that other unfortunate, Zinoviev, had said.
Early in June Bukharin did accept, and put his name to, all the charges made against him. His wife, Anna Larina, was convinced, and later wrote, that in return the Boss promised him his life and then went back on his word. She did not know that there exists a letter in which the hapless Bukharin told the whole story himself.
It is Bukharin’s forty-third, and final, letter to Stalin.
Top Secret, Personal, Please do not read without permission from J. V. Stalin.
10.12.37. I am writing what may be my last letter before I die. Let me therefore write it without formalities, especially as I am writing to you alone … the last page of my drama, and perhaps of my physical life, is about to be turned. [“Perhaps” shows that he still had some hope, remembering that at the previous trial neither Radek nor Sokolnikov had been sentenced to death.] I am trembling all over in agitation, and from a thousand emotions. I can scarcely control myself. But precisely because the end may be near I want to say goodbye to you before it is too late.… To avoid all misunderstandings let me tell you right away that for the sake of peace (social peace) (1) I am not going to retract any of the things to which I have signed (2) I do not intend to ask you for anything, to beg you for anything that might throw the whole affair off the rails along which it is rolling. I write only for your personal information. I cannot leave this life without writing these last lines to you, because I am a prey to torments of which you should know. I give you my word of honor that I am innocent of the crimes which I acknowledged under interrogation.
Why then did he acknowledge them? As it happens he was the first of all those self-slanderers to explain in detail why.
I had no recourse except to confirm the accusations and depositions of others: if I had not done so it would have meant that “I was not laying down my arms.” I thought over what was happening and reached roughly the following conclusion: that there is some great and bold political idea behind the general purge, that because of (a) the fact that we are in a prewar period and (b) the transition to democracy—the purge embraces (a) the guilty, (b) the suspect, and (c) the potentially suspect. I could not hope to be left out. Some of the above are rendered harmless by one means, others by another, others still by yet another.… For heaven’s sake do not think that this is a roundabout reproach. I have been out of diapers long enough to recognize, even in my private thoughts, that great plans, great ideas, and great interests overshadow all else. It would be petty of me to put the fortunes of my own person on the same level as those tasks of world-historical importance, which rest above all on your shoulders.
So then, it was all in the name of the higher expediency, of a world-historical task. What had once been the excuse for killing outsiders was now an excuse for killing one another. Now that he had discovered the great idea Bukharin calmed down. It was no longer anything as petty as fear for his life and for his family that had made him betray himself. It was the great
idea! In the world of ideas he felt at home. He was no longer a coward, but almost a hero: sacrificing his honor, going to his death for the sake of something great. Enraptured, he soared above the real world. He longed now to do penance.
I am not a Christian. But I have some peculiar notions … and one of them is a belief that I am paying for the years when I really was fighting against you … that is what weighs on me most heavily. When I was with you once in summer 1928 you said to me, “Do you know why I am friends with you? It’s because you are incapable of intrigue, aren’t you?” I said yes. And that was the very time when I was running to Kamenev. That fact haunts me as original sin haunts an observant Jew. God, how infantile and idiotic I was, and now I’m paying for it with my honor and my life. For that—forgive me, Koba. I weep as I write, I have no more need of anything. When I was hallucinating I saw you several times, and on one occasion Nadezhda Sergeevna. She came up to me and said, “What have they done to you, Nikolai Ivanovich? I’ve told Joseph to get bail for you.” It was so real that I nearly jumped up to write and ask you to get bail for me. I know that N.S. would never believe that I ever meant you any harm, and it’s not surprising that my subconscious self produced this hallucination.
He hopes against hope that Koba will forgive him! If only he had known how it would infuriate Koba to see words put into his dead wife’s mouth in a letter from her “murderer.”
With you I converse for hours on end. Lord—if only there was some instrument with which you could look into my lacerated and tormented soul! If only you could see how devoted I am to you … but all that is just psychology, forgive me. There is no angel now to deflect Abraham’s sword, and what is fated will come to pass. Permit me finally to turn to my last small requests.
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