Stalin opened Parks of Culture and Rest all over the country. There, under the guidance of specially trained leisure organizers, people could enjoy themselves—as always—collectively. At the height of the Terror, in 1938, there were carnivals for workers’ collectives in the Moscow Central Park of Culture and Rest. One hundred thousand happy, carefree people joined in the revels. He was right when he spoke the words afterward quoted on millions of billboards: “Life has become easier, life has become more joyful.” In making each park a center for collective amusement, he personally took care that it was furnished with “visual propaganda.” Every avenue was lined with quotations from himself and the God Lenin and with current Party slogans. Statues of his new saints and martyrs—Pavlik Morozov, the Young Pioneer murdered by kulaks, and Sergei Kirov, murdered by Trotskyist-Zinovievites—shone white among the foliage. On the central square of each park were statues of the God Lenin and the God Stalin. Along remoter paths were plaster gymnasts with swelling thighs, buttocks, and bosoms. Like Hitler in Germany, the Boss wanted the next generation to grow up strong. On his orders, shooting galleries and parachute towers were set up in the parks for mass target practice and mass parachute jumping. He was already preparing a new generation to make the Great Dream a reality. This constant emphasis on the mass—mass congresses, mass holidays—this dissolution of the individual in the mass produced something which he prized above all else: a collective conscience. Personal responsibility died; there was only collective responsibility: “the Party has ordered it,” “the country has ordered it.” This collective conscience enabled people to enjoy life unconcernedly when the Terror was at its most cruel. Woe to anyone troubled by a conscience of his own. The writer A. Gaidar found himself in a psychiatric hospital. He wrote to a writer friend, Ruvim Fraerman, “I’m troubled by my thoughts.… I no longer know whether I’m telling the truth or not … sometimes I come very close to it … then sometimes … just as the truth is about to slip off my tongue I seem to hear a voice peremptorily warning me—beware! Don’t say it! Or you’re done for!” He wasn’t done for. The psychiatric hospital helped him. The truth stopped “troubling” him so acutely. His private conscience happily fell asleep.
The most popular holiday from everyday life was football. It was, incidentally, the favorite entertainment of the intelligentsia. At a football match, the anger and resentment normally suppressed by fear spilled out in noisy displays of emotion. At the stadium you could find relief from the suppressed terror in your unconscious. The main rivalry in the football world was between the NKVD’s club, Dynamo, and the Trades Union team, Spartak. All the intelligentsia were fanatical supporters of Spartak. It was a tolerated form of dissent.
When these two teams met, the head of the NKVD was always in the government box at the stadium. At first it was Yagoda. Yagoda was shot, and Yezhov appeared in the box. When Yezhov was shot, a third People’s Commissar, Beria, would be seen there. They all hated Nikolai Starostin, founder and manager of Spartak.
The whole country knew Starostin. After Lenin’s and Stalin’s, his was the most popular name. The brothers Starostin were the country’s four most famous footballers. When the oldest, Nikolai, gave up playing, he founded Spartak. It was he who started the great Spartak-Dynamo rivalry. His three famous brothers played for his team. Nikolai’s inventiveness as an organizer of sport was inexhaustible. When in 1936 the annual gymnasts’ parade was due to take place on Red Square, Alexander Kosarev, the head of the Young Communist League and organizer of this ceremony, decided that it should include a demonstration of football skills right there on the square. Spartak was chosen to provide it. Dynamo’s devotees were indescribably jealous. In the course of the parade Kosarev gave a signal and a gigantic carpet was thrown over the whole of Red Square: it was meant to represent an emerald-green field with a cinder path around it. Spartak’s players raced onto the field and began demonstrating their skills. Kosarev stood next to Stalin, who was clasping a white handkerchief. It had been agreed that if the game was not to the Boss’s taste a wave of the handkerchief would put a stop to it immediately. The Boss did not like football: perhaps he was jealous of its popularity as a spectacle. But that day he chose to like it. His comrades-in-arms up on the Mausoleum were insanely enthusiastic. Voroshilov jumped up and down and even shouted.
Below their feet lay the unburied God Lenin.
Stalin, then, did not wave his handkerchief and the footballers interpreted this to mean that they had found favor. They were mistaken. The Boss was simply allowing these pathetic, puny creatures to amuse themselves. For the last time. Kosarev, Chubar, Postyshev, Rudzutak, and most of those who had so childishly enjoyed the football game would vanish together with the old Party.
He exploited his fellow citizens’ foolish weakness. The national sensation of 1938 was not the trials: the country had no thought for anything except the visit of the Basque footballers. Yet another holiday for his people: he himself had sent for these famous footballers, at that time the best in the world. The country was overjoyed. The Basques played Dynamo and thrashed the NKVD’s team twice. The country was plunged into mourning. The Boss turned nasty, and ordered a win. Yezhov then recommended letting Spartak take the field. His thought was that losing to the Basques would be the end of them.
The Spartak players were driven into Moscow with ceremony, in open Lincolns. On the way tires started bursting: the NKVD had not been asleep on the job. If Spartak arrived late, they were finished. They arrived just in time. As the referee ran onto the field, they changed on the spot, in the cars, watched by delighted fans, and hurried onto the field. For the Basques it was just a game of football, for Spartak it was a matter of life and death. When the match ended, the incredible figures on the scoreboard were Spartak 6, Basques 2.
The country went wild, people kissed each other in the streets, Starostin became the country’s idol, and the NKVD gnashed its teeth.
In 1937, 1938, and 1939 Spartak did the impossible: they won both the championship and the cup. They had gone too far.
After shooting Yezhov, Beria began occupying himself with Dynamo in earnest. He had been a footballer himself in his youth, had even played for a major Georgian team, and was fanatically devoted to the game. From that moment Starostin was doomed. But he was too popular, and the Boss at first said no.
It would happen during the war, when football was unimportant. On May 20, 1942, Starostin was awakened by a bright light, a pistol was held to his face, and a harsh voice ordered him to get up. He was taken outside, shoved into a car, and driven to the Lubyanka. There they confronted him with depositions made by Kosarev, who had already been shot. He had been forced to confess that he was planning to liquidate the Party and government leaders at the next athletes’ parade, and that for this purpose he had organized a hit squad headed by Nikolai Starostin. The three other Starostin brothers were arrested on the same night. They were all given ten years in the camps—a very lenient sentence by the standards of the time.
19
NIGHT LIFE
From that moment Starostin had entered that other life—the Life after Dark—which everyone tried not to talk about or even think about.
Those black cars used to drive out onto the streets of Moscow after midnight. Everything to do with that other life existed in the dark, and was secret. If someone was arrested in a communal apartment, the neighbors would pretend not to hear, however much noise was made, and would not leave their rooms. Next morning, standing in line for the lavatory, they would avert their eyes from the family of the man who had vanished in the night, and his family would avert their own tearful eyes. They were like plague victims. The whole apartment waited expectantly. They did not have long to wait. As a rule the whole family vanished soon afterward, and a new resident appeared in the communal apartment, humming as happily as the rest as he stood in line for the communal lavatory.
There were no communal apartments in the government House on the Embankment. This was where the new elite—old B
olsheviks, high-ranking officers, Comintern leaders, and not least the Boss’s in-laws, the Alliluyevs and Svanidzes—lived in enormous self-contained flats. But fresh blobs of sealing wax now began to appear every morning on the high doors of those magnificent dwellings. The population of the house was dwindling from day to day.
This hectic Night Life went on throughout 1937. Prosecutors signed blank forms, on which NKVD investigators could enter any name they pleased. The prisons were overfull, but the Boss found a solution for the problem. From July 1937 “troikas” began operating in all major NKVD directorates. These three-man boards comprised the head of the local branch of the NKVD, the head of the local Party organization, and either the head of the local Soviet or the district public prosecutor. The troikas had the right to pronounce sentence of death without observing the normal rules of legal procedure. The accused was not present to hear sentence passed. The deadly conveyor belt began its work. A ten-minute trial was followed by execution. The trial of the Boss’s friend Enukidze was one of the longest: it lasted fifteen minutes. The Boss urged the troikas on with telegram after telegram: “The established practice is that sentences passed by the three-man boards are final. Stalin.” He was always in such a hurry.
SELF-DESTRUCTION OF THE PARTY
The troikas showed such zeal that in 1938–1939 they were ready, to the last man, to share the fate of their victims.
The minutes of the 1957 Central Committee plenum contain the following exchange:
Khrushchev: Every single member of these troikas was shot.
Kaganovich: Not every one.
Khrushchev: The great majority.
In his haste to build a monolithic society Stalin inaugurated a self-service system of elimination: each victim killed his predecessor, and was killed by his successor. Thousands of senior Party officials were members of troikas which passed sentence. But Stalin wanted to involve as many people as possible in the work of destruction. At hundreds of public meetings, millions of citizens welcomed the orgy of arrests and voted for death sentences for “enemies of people.” Newspapers printed daily appeals from workers demanding the execution of Trotskyist-Zinovievite-Bukharinite murderers. In 1937 he involved hundreds of thousands of others with the powers of darkness: warrants for the arrest of senior officials now had to be countersigned by the heads of their departments.
The irony of history! In 1937 the Cheka, pioneer of Night Life, celebrated its twentieth anniversary. The Boss turned the occasion into a great national occasion. Poets sang of the people’s love for the secret police. The panegyrics went on all through the year, in tandem with the savage destruction of the heroes of the occasion, the old Chekists who had worked with Yagoda. There were mass arrests every night in the luxurious homes of the NKVD. A ring at the door—the occupant is awakened and the man who only yesterday was master of other people’s destinies is led out of his apartment. Knowing what their institution was capable of, many did not open up: the nocturnal ring at the door was answered by a shot within. Gorky’s friend Pogrebinsky head of the NKVD in the city of Gorky, and founder of labor communes for criminals, shot himself, and was followed soon afterward by Kozelsky, a well-known Ukrainian Chekist. Such a listing could be prolonged endlessly. There were innovators in the art of escape. The Moscow Chekist F. Gurov threw himself out of his office window, and jumping was soon all the rage: Chertok, Kamenev’s inquisitor, jumped from a twelfth-story balcony as soon as they came for him.
They fell into the street by night, in full view of the occasional dumbfounded passerby. Dying like flies: a pandemic. Many of them must have echoed their chief Yagoda’s words: God does exist after all!
The Boss forbade Yezhov to touch Yagoda’s prize executioners … for the time being. Pending their disappearance, these outstandingly competent executioners were sent, on the Boss’s orders, to work for a while in the republics. The Chekist M. Berman (whose brother was in charge of Gulag) had worked for years in Germany, and had tried to organize a revolution there on orders from the Comintern. This Cheka romantic hated Stalin but nonetheless brought back from the West material compromising to Bukharin, whom he loved. Berman was one of the team of investigators who had prepared the case against Zinoviev and Kamenev, and he had played a part in the Ryutin case. Early in 1937 the Boss promoted him to the post of People’s Commissar for the Interior in Belorussia. Berman saw danger looming, and exerted himself to “repress” some 85,000 oppositionists, together with their families. But his time had come—“the Moor has done his work”—and the powerful Berman, who possessed all the secrets of the Kremlin trials, went home to the Lyubanka, this time as a prisoner. He had shown particular zeal in destroying rightists. The Boss, whose sense of humor was intact, had Berman shot as a member of a “conspiratorial organization of rightists in the NKVD.”
Berman too had discovered that God does exist after all.
It was now the turn of another nocturnal star: the Boss’s chief bodyguard, Pauker. Pauker had done a lot to strengthen the Boss’s security. Stalin’s bodyguard now resembled an army. The route to his nearer dacha was guarded by more than three thousand agents, as well as patrol cars. Whenever his car left the Kremlin the whole twenty-mile route was on a war footing. Pauker sat beside him in the car, ready to take an assassin’s bullet in his breast. The Politburo had decided, on Pauker’s suggestion, that the Boss should be forbidden even to walk around the Kremlin unguarded. And Stalin, of course, always bowed to Party decisions without a murmur. But the buffoon and lickspittle Pauker was unfortunately a Chekist of the old school. Besides which, crafty Pauker had served all members of the Politburo, including those who had now begun to disappear. He had supplied them with cars, dogs, clothes for their wives, toys for their children, and, unfortunately for him, had become their friend. Pauker, tightly corseted and with the Order of Lenin on his chest, still rode around in his Lincoln, a present from the Boss, but his fate had been decided. He vanished into the darkness quietly and without a trace, following his friends, the mighty Chekists of Dzherzhinsky’s day.
The Boss forgot no one, even the legendary organizers of the original Red Terror who had retired from the Cheka: Peters, Latsis, and the famous Latvian riflemen, Lenin’s faithful bodyguard, all would be shot.
Into the night went Nikolai Krylenko, the first Bolshevik commander-in-chief, and later the dread state prosecutor who had sent so many to execution—gentlefolk, SRs, and Bolsheviks alike. Krylenko first lost his post as People’s Commissar for Justice. But the Boss wanted everyone to know that he was fighting for the life of the faithful commissar who had unflinchingly betrayed so many of his old friends. Stalin therefore telephoned the dacha in which Krylenko was living in fear to say a few kind words. Happy Krylenko slept peacefully, until on one peaceful night he was arrested. Now they could all say God does exist after all.
Krylenko’s place as state prosecutor was taken by A. Vyshinsky. This was another of history’s jokes. This former enemy of the Bolsheviks, a man who had called for Lenin’s arrest in 1917 as a traitor and a German spy, was now accusing the victorious leaders of the Bolshevik Party of betraying Lenin and of spying. This time the charges stuck and all the accused were executed. At the trials Vyshinsky showered insults on the former Bolshevik leaders in a sort of sadistic ecstasy: “stinking heap of human garbage,” “wild beasts in human form,” “degenerate specimens of the human race,” “mad dogs,” etc. Vyshinsky’s own career to some extent explains his bloodthirsty frenzies and his sinister personality. He had been a Menshevik, but became a Bolshevik in 1920 because only by doing so could an ambitious young man make a career. Orlov (the previously mentioned NKVD general who decided to remain in the West) described in his memoirs his experience of working with Vyshinsky in the public prosecutor’s department in the 1920s. Orlov, who hated the man, obviously relished the contempt with which Vyshinsky’s old Bolshevik colleagues treated the ex-Menshevik. They despised everything about him, even his “polite manners, recalling those of tsarist officers.” Vyshinsky w
as, however, as Orlov acknowledged, “one of the ablest and best-educated prosecutors.”
Throughout the twenties the former Menshevik lived under constant threat of exclusion from the Party. Orlov tells us how Vyshinsky wept in his office on one of several occasions when he was in danger of losing his Party card. Expulsion from the Party would mean the end of his career, and perhaps of his life. We can, then, easily imagine how he hated old Bolsheviks, and what dark passions festered in that ambitious soul. The Boss had, in his own words, “found the man he needed for the job he needed done.”
Orlov, in his memoirs, contrasted Lenin’s public prosecutor, the honest old Bolshevik N. Krylenko, with Stalin’s man, the unprincipled careerist Vyshinsky. The former NKVD general forgot that all the great public trials of the twenties—the wreckers’ trials and the trial of the “Industrial Party”—were conducted jointly by Vyshinsky, as presiding judge, and Krylenko as leader for the prosecution. It was from those same old Bolsheviks that Vyshinsky had learned to hold human life cheap.
The dread prosecutor Vyshinsky lived all his life in a torment of fear. He knew that if ever he lost the Boss’s favor, his past would be held against him. At every turn he saw reminders of the doom which might be in store for him. Even the dacha in which he lived had belonged to one of those whom the Boss had sent to his death—A. Serebryakov, a member of Lenin’s Central Committee. So he served his master slavishly, like a devoted dog.
Stalin gave Vyshinsky the task of formulating new principles of Bolshevik legal procedure. Dzherzhinsky had asked, back in 1918, “What better proof can there be than the accused’s confession?” In semiliterate Russia, unaccustomed to the rule of law, the fact that “he admitted it himself” was conclusive. The Boss understood this very well, and all his show trials were based on this “popular principle.” Vyshinsky’s numerous works are a scholarly exposition of the Boss’s ideas: “the confession of the accused is the basis of the case for the prosecution,” “the confession of the accused is the empress of proofs.” Such were the terms in which Vyshinsky formulated the principles of legal procedure in the “land of socialism.”
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