Stalin

by Edvard Radzinsky

  At about this time the eminent writer Kuprin returned from emigration. Prokofiev also opted to return to “Bolshevizia” for good. Shortly after his arrival he composed his ballet Romeo and Juliet and Peter and the Wolf. But terror soon teaches people how to behave. Before 1937 was over he was writing his Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October, on texts from Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. In 1939 Prokofiev met a young girl named Mira Mendelson, and married her after a whirlwind romance. The Boss was reassured. Now Prokofiev was securely hooked.

  Apart from ideological considerations, there was one other reason—simple and terrible—for approving the Terror. Voland, in Bulgakov’s novel, looks at the Moscow crowd and says with a sad smile, “Just ordinary people—only—the housing problem has corrupted them.”

  The population of Moscow huddled together in overcrowded rooms. With every arrest a little extra “living space” became vacant. Happily moving into a new home, people told themselves that the former occupants had deserved what they got. The actress Vera Yureneva remembered moving into an apartment where the kettle was still warm on the stove. The families of those arrested often had no time to collect their belongings before vacating their homes. Where the Boss was sending them, everything was provided by the government.

  RELATIVES OF “ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE”

  Stalin was constructing a homogeneous society of “contented” citizens. This meant solving the problem of what to do with the families of “enemies.” In the idyllic days of the first trials there was no difficulty: wife and children publicly branded husband and father as an enemy of the people and disowned him. But Stalin had been reared in the Caucasus, where the blood feud was a living tradition, and he was afraid that he might be rearing his own future assassins. As always, he found a revolutionary solution. At Yezhov’s (and not, of course, the Boss’s) suggestion, the Politburo adopted a secret resolution on July 5, 1937. I have read it in the President’s Archive. The wives of convicted enemies of the people were sent to prison camps for a term of five to eight years. Children under the age of fifteen were cared for by the state (that is, they were consigned to a dreadful state orphanage). As for children over fifteen, each case was “decided individually”—they too were sent to the camps.

  This was the beginning of a second destruction of the aristocracy: the first was the tsarist aristocracy after 1917; this time it was the Soviet aristocracy. In June 1937 after Gamarnik’s suicide his wife and daughter were banished to Astrakhan, together with the families of Tukhachevsky, Uborevich, and the other army commanders. Shortly afterward, their wives were all arrested, and their children sent to the Astrakhan orphanage. Mirra Uborevich, Veta Gamarnik, and Sveta Tukhachevskaya were only little children, and they had been used to quite a different life, with housekeepers and nannies. This was when P. Stukalov, Komsomol secretary in the Kursk oblast, called on the youth movement to expel children of enemies of the people from its ranks, urging his audience to “keep your hatred on the boil, let your hand not tremble.” We can easily imagine how these unfortunate children were treated in the orphanage.

  Adolescents whom both Lenin and Koba had once petted—the children of Lenin’s comrades-in-arms Zinoviev and Kamenev—were arrested, and all perished in prison.

  Molotov was once questioned about this period by an interviewer:

  Q. Khrushchev said this about you. They brought a list of women sentenced to ten years. Molotov crossed out the sentence next to one name and wrote “highest penalty.”

  A. There was such an occasion.

  Q. Who was the woman?

  A. That is unimportant.… They had to be isolated to some extent. As it was, they spread all sorts of complaints and unnecessary fuss and demoralization.

  We see indeed that the hand did not tremble.

  It was high time for the Boss to surrender his own kinsfolk.

  Maria Svanidze was still keeping her diary. But with gaps. By now her husband’s colleagues in the State Bank had all been imprisoned. Old acquaintances—Budu Mdivani, Orkhelashvili, Eliava—had also been sent out into the night. But Maria was still full of praise for the vigilance of kind Joseph: “27.8.37. No letup in the removal of well-known people.… I often walk along the street, look into people’s faces, and think ‘where are they hiding?’ Millions of people whose social position, upbringing, and psychology made it impossible for them to accept the Soviet system, somehow managed to disguise themselves.… Now, twenty years after the revolution, these chameleons have been exposed in all their falsity.” She had to edit her diary, crossing out the names of vanished acquaintances and noting in the margin “swine lie beneath these crosses.” For whom was this intended? For them, of course. If she should be arrested she could prove that she had disowned people she once knew. One of her last entries was such a disavowal. The final pages of the diary have been torn out. Perhaps kind Joseph was given the diary after her arrest, and did a little work on it, or perhaps she censored it herself, when she saw that arrest was inevitable. I found traces of the final pages in a little scratch pad she kept with the diary. There, she had ventured to note that on November 21 Alyosha had waited in vain for an audience in the Kremlin, and that on the 22nd he had “been seen,” but that it had been “unpleasant.” Evidently, kind Joseph had turned him away on the 21st, and on the following day given him the unpleasant news that it was getting more difficult all the time to defend him, when so many of his acquaintances had been arrested. A cryptic note by Maria dated December 7 reads: “evening, Kremlin discussed work.” Evidently Alyosha had asked to be transferred, since all his colleagues had been removed. On the 12th she was “in the country with Zhenya [Alliluyeva, Stalin’s mistress, his wife Nadyn’s sister-in-law].” She believed that Zhenya had some influence on her terrible lover, and of course asked her to “put in a word.” The 21st was Joseph’s birthday. She went to the hairdresser’s—but for the first time she was not invited to the party. After that, we find nothing but blank pages in her diary.

  INSTEAD OF KIND JOSEPH’S BIRTHDAY PARTY

  Kira Alliluyeva-Politkovskaya, the niece of Stalin’s wife Nadya, wrote in her memoirs: “In 1937 we moved to another apartment in the House on the Embankment. [So many splendid apartments there were then becoming vacant.] We had a housewarming party. Alyosha Svanidze and his wife, Maria Anisimovna came. Our entrances were next to each other. After the housewarming she put on an overcoat over her velvet dress and they went home. Two or three hours later their son Tolik ran in, white in the face, and said ‘Evgenia Alexandrovna, did you know Mama’s been arrested? They came and took Mama, and Papa.’ … The search went on till morning … they sealed the apartment, there was nobody there, they’d taken them all to prison. We were shattered, Papa was stunned.”

  According to records in the President’s Archive Alyosha was sentenced to death by shooting on December 4, 1940. The sentence was commuted to fifteen years’ imprisonment in January 1941. That was the Boss’s decision. But on August 20, 1941, shortly after Hitler invaded, Alyosha Svanidze was shot. Maria Svanidze herself was shot on March 3, 1942.

  Why? We shall return to this story later.

  The inoffensive Pavel’s turn had come. His daughter Alliluyeva-Politkovskaya tells us: “When they started arresting people Papa was very upset, because so many friends, people he had worked with, were jailed. He would speak to Stalin, they would be released. Stalin obviously got tired of this. We have always suspected that Papa was killed … I came home from school one day and saw Mama, Grandpa, and all of them in tears. Grandpa put his arms around me and said, ‘Kira, we have a great sorrow—your papa has died.’ I was petrified. Papa was only forty-four. He had died so suddenly. He had got home the night before from his holiday in Sochi, had drunk coffee and eaten a hardboiled egg the next morning, and—at two o’clock there was a call from his office: ‘What did you give your husband to eat? He’s feeling sick.’ Mama wanted to go to him, but was told not to—‘We’ll get him to the Kremlyovka [Kremlin Clinic] right away,’ and by the t
ime they telephoned to say that she could come Papa was already dead. The doctor said, ‘He kept asking why Zhenya didn’t come.’ They obviously didn’t want her there, they were afraid he might tell her something. Mama felt that there was something suspicious about it.”

  In his private archive the Boss kept a most curious postmortem report on Pavel: “2.11.38. P. Alliluyev’s death was caused by paralysis of a diseased heart. According to those around him Comrade Alliluyev felt well when he returned from Sochi on 1.11.38, and was lively and cheerful. On the morning of November 2 he arrived at work in the same good mood. At 1100 hours he suddenly felt ill, vomited, and was in a semiconscious state. At 1300 hours a doctor on the staff of the Kremlin Clinic was called, and she had him taken there. When he was admitted he was unconscious, cyanotic, and apparently dying. The patient did not recover consciousness, and death occurred twenty minutes later.” The same “cyanosis” and vomiting would be observed when Nadezhda Krupskaya died just a few months later.

  Alliluyeva-Politkovskaya wrote that “Papa was buried with great ceremony. His coffin stood where Nadezhda Sergeevna’s [Stalin’s wife] had once stood. He was so beautiful. He had just returned from Sochi, and was sunburned. His eyelashes were so long.”

  The unhappy Zhenya understood the meaning behind her husband’s death only too well. That was evidently why she remarried in such a hurry—to escape her frightening admirer. How she must have reproached herself!

  Next it was Redens’s turn—the husband of Nadya’s older sister Anna. He had worked with Yagoda, and had been one of Yezhov’s deputies. When those two ceased to exist, he was posted to Kazakhstan, where he was a paragon of ferocity in the hunt for “enemies.” His fate, however, had been decided. The Boss intended to pick off this family one at a time. They were too closely connected with the exterminated Party, and with the life of the long-vanished Koba.

  Vasily Stalin wrote in a letter to Khrushchev: “When Beria spoke of arresting Redens, Comrade Stalin protested sharply.… But Beria was supported by Malenkov. And Comrade Stalin said, ‘look into it very carefully … I don’t believe Redens is an enemy.’ ” Stalin’s son completely missed the point. Beria, like all those around Vasya’s father, had only one duty—to understand what the Boss really wanted. If they hadn’t understood they would never have dared arrest Redens. But kind Stalin could not consent immediately. Their duty was to persist. They did—playing their part in this theater of the absurd, working hard to convince the Leader that his close relative was a spy!

  Redens was shortly recalled to Moscow and arrested. His wife, Anna Alliluyeva, asked kind Joseph to see her. But he told Vasya, who brought the message, “I was mistaken in Redens. I won’t see Anna Sergeevna. Don’t ask me.” And Redens was shot.

  21

  TOWARD THE GREAT DREAM

  THE TURN

  As 1937 drew to a close Stalin could look back to the beginning, a mere twenty years before, when the Promised Land of Socialism had seemed so near. A few years later it had seemed unattainable. Now he had set foot in that land. He had realized all the dreams of the God Lenin. In the economy, the private sector had been abolished, capitalism was finished forever, the countryside was collectivized. He had manhandled a miserable agrarian country into industrialization. Modern mills and factories had been built. He had concentrated unprecedented productive forces in the hands of the new state. He had a mighty army. A young and united army. An army of unquestionable loyalty. At the head of the state stood the Party, sole ruler and utterly unopposed. In this tamed country, no one would dare challenge its rule. And with all this, he had given his docile people the feeling that they were victors. His society was united as no other had ever been. Now he could concentrate on realizing the Great Dream. If those whom he had liquidated were true Leninists, they would soon have to forgive him for their deaths.

  In talking to the makers of the film Ivan the Terrible, Stalin said to Eisenstein, “One of Tsar Ivan the Terrible’s mistakes was that he did not finish off the five great feudal families.” Stalin would not repeat his favorite tsar’s mistake. He would kill as many as necessary. But the Keeper of the Sacred Flame of Terror knew that it was time for a pause. The country could stand no more. It might burn itself out.

  All this time the NKVD had been cultivating the myth that Stalin knew nothing about Night Life. Innumerable spies who had insinuated themselves into the NKVD concealed the Terror from Stalin. The intelligentsia tried hard to believe this fable, to ease their consciences. They fawned on him and flattered him, but did not want to lose their self-respect. Pasternak, for instance, said to Ehrenburg, “If only somebody would tell Stalin about this,” and Meyerhold often said, “They keep all this from Stalin.”

  A number of similar remarks are on record in the Party Archive. Here is People’s Commissar F. Stebnev: “It looks as if they are deliberately destroying the Party cadres. I’m willing to bet my life Joseph Vissarionovich doesn’t know about it.”

  It was time to buttress the myth with solid “proof.” This meant that Yezhov’s turn had come. At the end of 1939 A. Zhuralev, head of one of the NKVD’s main departments, put it on record that he had frequently reported to Yezhov the suspicious behavior of NKVD personnel who persecuted innocent people, and that Yezhov had ignored him. Zhuralev’s statement was immediately discussed by the Politburo. Kind Joseph was, of course, indignant. A Politburo commission was set up, and Yezhov was severely criticized in its report. In the Boss’s office his former favorite wrote a contrite letter: “I give my word as a Bolshevik that I will give due attention to my errors.” But the inspection of the NKVD was already well under way. Just as Yezhov had once assessed the performance of the doomed Yagoda, so now Lavrenti Beria, summoned for the purpose from Georgia, would look into Yezhov.

  YET ANOTHER “DOUBLE AGENT”

  As a humble official in the Baku Soviet, Beria had caught the eye of Bagirov, head of the Cheka in Azerbaijan, who invited him to join that organization. On the Cheka’s orders Beria made contact with the intelligence services of the Azerbaijani nationalists. He became a “double agent” and carried out important assignments. Molotov wrote that he saw the young Beria in Lenin’s office. Under the Boss, Beria rose rapidly. He became head of the GPU in Georgia, and then, in 1931, First Secretary of the Georgian Central Committee. In December 1938 the Boss appointed him head of the NKVD. But Stalin was in no hurry to declare the Terror at an end. Yezhov was slow-marched to the grave. For some time he remained secretary of the Central Committee and chairman of the Commission of Party Control, while his assistants were arrested one after another. Once the Boss’s most publicized comrade-in-arms, he was no longer mentioned in the newspapers. Nowadays Yezhov stole quietly into his office and sat at his desk all day long in a state of prostration. His portrait still hung in every institution, even in the Central Committee building, but no one now entered his office. He was shunned like the plague, one of the living dead. It was his turn now to learn that God does exist.

  In March 1939, the Party held its Eighteenth Congress. The kind Boss spoke candidly about “serious mistakes” on the part of the NKVD—more mistakes, he said, than should have been expected. The country rejoiced, celebrating this latest warm spell. Stalin’s new aide Zhdanov made the Congress laugh with examples of the insane things done during the Terror: “A doctor was asked for a certificate. ‘Because of the state of his health Comrade So-and-so is not to be utilized by any class enemy for his own ends.’ ” The Congress laughed merrily. Madmen laughing at madness.

  At the Congress the new Party paraded for inspection, the Party he had created. The Boss announced the results of the Terror. Half a million new appointments had been made to responsible posts in the state and the Party. In the higher ranks of the Party 293 out of 333 regional Party leaders were new appointments. Ninety percent of leading personnel were under forty years of age. The Boss’s new comrades moved up to replace Ilyich’s exterminated comrades. Two short, fat men had been elevated: forty-three-year-old Andrei Zhdano
v, son of a tsarist inspector of public schools and Kirov’s successor in Leningrad, and forty-five-year-old Nikita Khrushchev, who had replaced Postyshev in the Ukraine. But Molotov remained the Boss’s most trusted aide.

  The new Party broke previous records in homage to their God on earth. “The genius of the modern era,” “the wisest man of the epoch,” as he was called at the Congress, was henceforward always greeted by an audience on its feet. There was now a prescribed ritual for the Boss’s entrances. One stenographic record of the Congress is typical: “All the delegates, standing, greet Comrade Stalin, with a prolonged ovation. Shouts of ‘Hurrah,’ ‘Long live Comrade Stalin,’ ‘Hurrah for the great Stalin,’ ‘Hurrah for our beloved Stalin,’ etc.”

  Stalin began openly introducing more of the trappings of the old empire. Those attending a GPU anniversary celebration in the Bolshoi Theater were startled to see a group of Cossack headmen in a box. What astonished the audience was that their uniform was that worn in tsarist times, with gold and silver aiguillettes. The reappearance of the Cossacks, a major symbol of the overthrown empire, was significant. One of the old Party members who had miraculously survived said to his neighbor, “This is their handiwork,” and bent his head so that everyone could see the scar made by a Cossack saber.