Throughout 1937 the Boss was busy casting out veterans of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. M. Spiridonova, B. Kamkov, and other Left SRs, Right SRs, aged survivors of the People’s Will Party, anarchists. He brought irreconcilable foes together in the cells: Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, SRs, previously untouched aristocrats. They had fought each other for so many years, only to meet in the same prison. The story is told of a half-mad Kadet who rolled on the floor laughing when he saw this revolutionary Noah’s Ark. A bullet in the night would end all their troubles.
He liquidated the famous Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles, which was a rallying point for old Bolsheviks. The famous journal Prison and Exile was also suppressed. He gave members of the society and the staff of the journal an opportunity to study prison and exile at first hand in the state which he had founded, and to compare them with their tsarist counterparts.
Throughout 1937, the elevator in the House on the Embankment was busy every night, all night. Old Party members arrested included the People’s Commissars of Heavy Industry, Finance, Agriculture (two of these), Trade, Communications, War Industry, State Farms and Education, as well as the whole board of the State Bank. Molotov, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, lost all his vice-chairmen, Kaganovich lost all his railroad chiefs. Nameplates were wrenched off doors in the commissariats, waste paper littered office floors, and younger people were appointed to senior posts.
One of those arrested was Jan Rudzutak, who had tasted all the highest Party offices, including associate membership and full membership of the Politburo. He was tortured, but refused to slander himself and insisted on seeing members of the Politburo. A fascinating feature of the times was that though in the end law counted for nothing, the letter of the law was observed. Since the request had come from a candidate member of the Politburo, the Boss sent Molotov (his usual proxy) to see the battered Rudzutak, fresh from the torture chamber.
In old age, Molotov recalled in an interview that “Rudzutak admitted nothing. He showed strength of character. We—several members of the Politburo—went along to the headquarters of the security services. He complained about the Chekists, said they’d beaten him badly, and thoroughly tormented him.”
“Surely you could have spoken up for him—after all, you knew him well,” Molotov was asked.
“You couldn’t just go by personal impressions. They had proofs. He was one of my deputies. I used to meet him at work, he was pleasant and clever, but at the same time … he was always getting mixed up with somebody or other, hell, I mean with women. I couldn’t completely vouch for him. He was friends with Antipov and Chubar. We interrogated Chubar—also one of my deputies.… He had personal ties with Rykov. Antipov, another of my deputies, and a member of the Central Committee, testified against him.” They would both perish—the denouncer Antipov and Chubar, whom he denounced.
“Was Stalin told?”
“He was.” And was, we may be sure, told what he wanted to hear. Men fighting for their lives strained every nerve to condemn their former comrade. That was why Caesar had sent them to him.
LAST DAYS OF THE FUNCTIONARIES
Life in the night world was hectic. From dusk to dawn, enemies were flushed out. The following is from a letter written to his wife by E. Shchadenko, a member of the Special Commission for the Liquidation of the Consequences of Sabotage among the Troops of the Kiev Military District: “July 18, 1937. My dear, darling Marusyenka. I am writing to you from the ancient Russian capital, Kiev. I have so much work that I can’t away from headquarters before two or three in the morning. The swine have been up to their filthy tricks for years, and we have not only to clear up the results in a matter of weeks, or at most a month, but also to go on from there as quickly as we can.” That month Shchadenko personally sent tens of thousands to their deaths.
One doomed Party boss was P. Postyshev, candidate member of the Politburo, who had been so “irresistibly jolly” and “danced (with Molotov!) with such abandon” at the “infinitely kind Joseph’s birthday party,” as Maria Svanidze noted in her diary. We have recently learned about Postyshev’s last days from his son’s reminiscences. They enable us to imagine what former Kremlin officials went through on the eve of their destruction.
Postyshev, now fifty years old, had, as leader of the Communist Party of the Ukraine, supported Stalin against all those who had opposed him. But unfortunately for him he had been a member of the Party since 1904 and had connections with all the old Bolsheviks now on the way out. So Postyshev too had to depart into the night. In 1937 in an organized campaign Ukrainian Communists wrote to the Central Committee to inform it of the “unhealthy situation in the Party” and the “conceited” behavior of Postyshev. Postyshev was removed from the Ukraine and sent to run the Kuibyshev province. He did his best, carried out his duties diligently, but to no avail. The old Bolshevik Postyshev failed to realize that no amount of murderous zeal could save him. In fact, when the Boss decided that the time had come, this very zeal would be held against him.
At a plenary meeting of the Central Committee in January 1938 Postyshev’s subordinate, the second secretary of the Kuibyshev Provincial Committee, N. Ignatov, was put up to denounce him. His speech gives us an insight into the atmosphere of homicidal madness in the province during those years of terror.
“Comrade Postyshev,” said Ignatov, “has acquired a style of his own: he started saying everywhere and anywhere, at the top of his voice, that there are no decent people to be found, that there are enemies everywhere. Postyshev often summoned representatives of district Party committees, picked up a magnifying glass, and began examining schoolchildren’s exercise books. The covers were torn off all the exercise books, because Postyshev imagined that he could see a fascist swastika in the ornamental design. All the city and district Party secretaries armed themselves with magnifying glasses. Postyshev dissolved thirty district committees, declaring their members enemies of the people.”
Postyshev repented, but was accused by the Boss of “politically damaging and obviously provocative activities.” Summing up at the plenary meeting of the Central Committee, the Boss said that “some measures must be taken with regard to Comrade Postyshev. The prevalent opinion is that he should be removed from the panel of candidate members of the Politburo.” Postyshev was replaced in the Politburo, and in the Ukraine, by a new protégé of the Boss, Nikita Khrushchev.
There followed days of total isolation. And of waiting. Days during which the unfortunate Postyshev must have realized what his own recent victims had gone through, all those nameless district secretaries, as well as Kamenev, Bukharin, Zinoviev. At this stage, he was evidently summoned by the Party Control Commission and confronted with information about his wife’s activities: she had allegedly initiated gatherings of rightists at his apartment. Postyshev was called upon to betray his wife, but he preserved his dignity and defended her. He was expelled from the Party. Then—more waiting. In acknowledgment of his past services the Boss gave him the right to avoid further suffering. “They want me to commit suicide, shoot myself. But I’m not going to be their assistant,” Postyshev’s younger son recalled being told. The son, a test pilot, had arrived on a visit to his parents on February 21, 1938. “Look,” his father went on to say, “this meeting is most probably our last. We shall never see each other again. Your mother and I will be arrested, and there is no coming back. My well-wishers think I’ve made a mistake, that I shouldn’t have tried to save your mother from arrest … nor certain others. But a man who sends some other, completely innocent Bolshevik to his death just to save himself should not remain in the ranks of the Party.”
Thus spoke Postyshev, who had betrayed so many! That is how the unhappy man wanted his son to remember him. “My mother listened to this long monologue in silence,” the son recalled, “then said quietly: ‘If they try to make you disown us—disown us, and to hell with them. We won’t hold it against you.’ Only then did I look into her tear-filled eyes. ‘How can you talk l
ike that?’ was all I could say.”
They were arrested the following night. Postyshev said “I’m ready” and went as he was, in his slippers. He, his wife, and his older son were all shot. His younger son, author of the memoirs, got ten years.
At last it was the legendary P. Dybenko’s turn. A member of the first Soviet government, and now an army commander, Dybenko had obeyed the Boss’s every order. He had conscientiously betrayed everyone, taken part without demur in the trials of other military leaders who had been his friends, loyally exposed “wreckers,” but … But now he was accused of being an American spy! The semiliterate army commander tried to defend himself. “I don’t know the American language, Comrade Stalin. I beg you to look into it thoroughly,” he pleaded in a note to Stalin. But it was all over. This hero of the Revolution, now a craven, heavy-drinking, aging boyar, had not understood the situation. It was not just he who was leaving the scene—the Boss was consigning Dybenko’s whole world to oblivion. Marshals Yegorov and Blyukher, who had the misfortune to belong to that same world, were sent into the darkness with him.
Stalin spared only two of them—Voroshilov and Budenny. Budenny, however, encountered serious problems. In July 1937 Yezhov told the Marshal that his wife, the beautiful Mikhailova, a singer at the Bolshoi Theater, faced arrest. The charges against her were typical of that mad time: she was accused of visiting foreign embassies, which put her under suspicion of being a spy. Budenny knew what he had to do. The only way in which he might earn the right to live was by betraying his wife. The intrepid cavalryman, holder of the St. George Cross in the tsar’s army, participant in all the wars of the twentieth century, obediently took his wife for questioning to the Lubyanka, from which she was not released. Only after Stalin’s death did Budenny write to the public prosecutor’s office pleading for his wife’s rehabilitation and demonstrating how nonsensical the case against her had been. She returned, and told how she had been the victim of gang rape in the camp. Budenny called her stories crazy.
At the top, the Boss was working tirelessly, looking through endless “lists,” with recommended sentences alongside the names of people who had once run the country, or won fame in the world of the arts. I saw these lists when I worked in the President’s Archive. Such lists were regularly submitted to the Central Committee for confirmation by Yezhov. The Boss scrupulously observed Party rules. He examined the lists in consultation with his comrades-in-arms. Molotov was his most frequent cosignatory.
He never got tired, reading those thousands of names, and even sometimes added comments of his own. He had a truly diabolical memory. “Comrade Yezhov. Pay attention to pages 9–11. About Vardanyan. He is at present secretary of the Taganrog district Party committee. He is undoubtedly a crypto-Trotskyist.” Attention was duly paid, and Vardanyan vanished. He remembered his enemies. Every one of them. But while he mercilessly stepped up the repressions, it was Yezhov who always had to supply proof of the treachery of old Party members. The Boss’s role was to resist the evidence, to show surprise that people could sink so low, to call for further inquiry.
One should not make the mistake of taking the Boss seriously, though. In one of his memos, reporting the arrest of yet another batch of Party officials, Yezhov writes that “information on another group of suspects is being checked.” This is peremptorily rebuked by the Boss: “You should be arresting, not checking.”
Only he, only the Boss, was allowed to play at legality. His servant Yezhov had a job to do: quickly and efficiently destroy the old Party. He was trying his hardest.
On November 12, 1938, Yezhov, writing in haste on scraps of dirty paper (he was short of time—shootings were going on night and day), sent Stalin a list of people arrested on capital charges. It is marked “all 3,167 persons to be shot,” and signed by Stalin and Molotov. Occasionally, but not very often, he crossed names off these terrible lists—those of Pasternak and Sholokov, among others. They might still be useful to the Party.
His signature appears on 366 such lists, totaling 44,000 names.
They went meekly to the scaffold, and died fervently praising the Leader. The old Bolshevik Eikhe, who had taken such an enthusiastic part in the repressions himself, accepted all the false accusations leveled at him, and died shouting “Long live Stalin!” Yakir, a Civil War hero denounced as a German spy, wrote in his last letter: “My dear, my own Comrade Stalin!… I am dying with words of love for you, the Party, and the country on my lips, and fervently believing in the victory of communism.” On this declaration of love, the Boss wrote, “villain and prostitute. Stalin.” Afterward he circulated the letter among his associates: “A completely accurate description. Molotov.” “For this scum, bastard, and whore there’s only one punishment: the death penalty. Kaganovich.” (Kaganovich had to show special indignation. Yakir was his friend.)
MADNESS BORN OF BLOOD
At the beginning of 1938 the Bolshoi Theater was making preparations for a state concert. No one slept—the rehearsals went on through the night.
A. Rybin, who had been transferred from Stalin’s bodyguard to guard the government box, later wrote that “half of the officers of the government guard were arrested in the theater on the eve of the concert.” Rybin lay down for a doze in the course of the nocturnal rehearsal and “woke up to find that more than half of my superior officers were already behind bars. So I became overnight military commandant of the Bolshoi Theater.”
In these years of terror, the NKVD went completely mad. Junior officials, seeing their comrades destroyed, decided that their best hope of survival was active involvement. In an excess of zeal they arrested even children as spies. They discovered Trotskyist agents in the most unlikely professions. In Leningrad, for instance, they arrested all the eminent astronomers—almost the whole staff of the Pulkovo Observatory, among them the brilliant young astronomer Nikolai Kozyrev. In the terrible Dmitrov jail, and in the cattle truck that took him to the prison camp, Kozyrev continued his work. He was preoccupied with lunar volcanoes. He was sent to hell—to the camps in the Turukhansk region where “kind Joseph” had once lived in exile. Even in that hell Kozyrev went on thinking and talking about science. One night, in conversation with another prisoner, also an intellectual, he casually remarked that he completely disagreed with Engels’s description of Newton as “an inductive ass.” Alas, the other intellectual was a stool pigeon, Kozyrev was sent for by the prison authorities, and after a brief ideological debate he was sentenced to death for insulting a classic Marxist. The firing squad was overworked at the time, and he had to take his place in the queue. While he was waiting, Moscow canceled the order to shoot him and contented itself with an extension of his sentence. He continued meditating on lunar volcanoes and after his release became famous for his work on the subject.
Meanwhile, something rather comic but also rather frightening happened to those of the astronomers who were still at liberty. The Boss had finally transformed day into night. He himself did all his work at night, and so the heads of all institutions had to stay awake with him. Late one night the Moscow Planetarium got a telephone call from the Boss’s dacha, where the usual midnight junketing was in progress. Comrade Molotov and Comrade Kaganovich had got into an argument. Molotov asserted that the star over the dacha was Orion, Kaganovich identified it as Cassiopeia, and the Boss in his wisdom ordered them to ring the planetarium. Unfortunately, the director, who was keeping vigil, was, unlike his disgraced predecessor, not himself an astronomer, but an NKVD officer. He begged for a little time to ask the astronomers—those of them still left—about the star. To avoid discussing a matter of such moment on the telephone, he sent someone to fetch the eminent astronomer A. Now A. was a friend of the recently arrested Leningrad astronomer Numerov, and while he waited his turn he no longer slept at night. When he heard a car pull up outside he thought the end had come. There was a ring at the door. A terrifying, peremptory ring. A. went to open up—and died of a heart attack in the doorway. The car had to be sent for a second eminent su
rvivor. Astronomer B. heard the car drive up at 2:30 A.M.—the hour at which night life was in full swing. He looked through the window and saw it: the same black car. When they rang the doorbell he had already made up his mind. He was sixty years old, and had no wish to be tortured. He opened the window, and flew toward his beloved stars. Only downward, not upward. It was 5:00 A.M., and they had lost yet another astronomer, when the director discovered the name of the star. He rang the dacha: “Please tell Comrades Molotov and Kaganovich …” “There’s nobody to tell, they all went to bed long ago,” the duty officer said. A writer named Kapler told me this story, laughing heartily He himself had spent several years in the camps because Stalin’s daughter had fallen in love with him.
Many people denounced each other in writing, sometimes simply out of fear, to affirm their loyalty, and not get involved with the night people. Informing became synonymous with good citizenship. Mikoyan, in a speech at a meeting held in the Bolshoi Theater to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Cheka, put it like this: “In our country every worker is on the staff of the NKVD.”
This was the time when serious consideration was given to the erection on Red Square of a gigantic statue of Pavlik Morozov, the Young Pioneer who had denounced his kulak father. The former seminarist, however, knew the story of Ham, and limited himself to erecting a monument in every park. An enormous number of Pavlik statues were required, and the demand resulted in tragicomedy. The frame used by the sculptor, Viktoria Solomonovich, who specialized in Pavliks, proved unreliable. One of the plaster Morozovs collapsed and killed her with its plaster bugle.
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