New history textbooks also appeared, propounding ideas which must have made earlier revolutionaries turn in their graves. All the conquests of the Russian tsars were said to have had a progressive significance and to have been in the best interests of the conquered peoples! For the first time since October 1917, textbooks contained a long list of progressive tsars, princes, and military leaders.
An empire was rising on the grave of the old Party. An atheist empire, without a god, but with a Boss.
Appropriately, Lenin’s widow died shortly before the Eighteenth Congress, the new Party’s first. During the Eighteenth Congress the Boss need see none but pleasant faces.
Krupskaya may in fact have been helped to die. The Party Archive holds the “history of Comrade Krupskaya’s illness,” which is now declassified. I read there that on January 13, 1939, “Comrade Krupskaya was examined by Prof. Gautier F. A. and an irregularity of pulse and shortage of breath were noted.… Digalen was prescribed, but Krupskaya refused to take it, stating that her bowels were too sensitive.”
It is likely that she was afraid by now to take any of their medicine. She had good reason. A little more than a month later Krupskaya was admitted to the Kremlin Clinic with a sudden attack of appendicitis. She died on February 27, 1939. The death certificate is very curious: “The illness began with severe pains throughout the abdomen, accompanied by repeated vomiting, a very fast pulse, and cyanosis of the nose and the extremities … cardiac arrest set in and Comrade Krupskaya died.”
As in Pavel Alliluyeva’s case, the doctors had to account directly to the Boss. He kept their final report in his personal archive: “Death followed a fall in the level of cardiac activity resulting from toxicosis caused by necrosis of part of the blind gut with consequent peritonitis.”
Members of the Politburo acted as her pallbearers, led by kind Joseph. Behind the coffin walked the old Bolsheviks.… the few members of Lenin’s Party whom Stalin had left as exhibits. He did permit himself an occasional weakness. Among the crowd escorting Lenin’s widow was Aron Solts, the same Aron Solts with whom Koba had once shared a bed in Petrograd. Some people called Solts the conscience of the Party. During the famine this asthmatic Jew had been responsible for distributing foodstuffs. One day, some workers, driven to despair by their miserable rations, went to his house to inspect his own stocks. All they found was two frozen potatoes. At the height of the purge in 1937 this same Solts had spoken out in public against Vyshinsky. He was dragged from the platform, but the Boss did not touch him. When a woman related to him was imprisoned, Solts wrote a sharp letter. Again the Boss gave orders that he was not to be touched: he was merely put in a psychiatric hospital for a month. Once, on the anniversary of the October Revolution, Solts was called on to give a talk at the Museum of the Revolution. He told his audience that “those were the days when we knew nothing about Stalin.” Once again, he was not touched—but those who had invited him were cruelly punished. His old acquaintance Koba allowed him to die his own death. Sick and demented, Solts wrote down endless columns of figures before he died. The writer Trifonov thought that he had been writing something important in underground code. Those pages vanished after his death. The Boss had still not forgotten him.
To go with the new Party, the country was given a new Party history. In 1938 the Short Course in the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Stalin’s New Testament, was published in millions of copies. It told the story of the advent of the God Stalin. It was also a thriller, in which the leaders of the vanished party were shown to have been secret traitors and spies: “These midges forgot that the master of the Soviet land is the Soviet people, and that Messrs. Rykov, Zinoviev, Kamenev & Co. were only temporary servants of the state.… The despicable lackeys of the fascists forgot that the Soviet government had only to raise its little finger for them to vanish without trace.” In this book we hear Stalin’s furious voice and feel the terrible energy of his hatred.
THE FIRST REHABILITATIONS
In April 1939 Yezhov disappeared. The rehabilitation of people unjustly condemned had already begun. The kind Boss freed 327,000 people, among them many military men. When Konstantin Rokossovsky, a future marshal, left prison, all his teeth had been knocked out. He, future army General Gorbatov, and a number of others who were to lead the Soviet armies in the Second World War, were the lucky beneficiaries of this “First Rehabilitation,” as it was popularly known. The aircraft designers Tupolev and Polikarpov, the microbiologist A. Zilber, and other eminent engineers and scientists were also released.
The kind tsar had pardoned them all, the just tsar who saw and understood everything. He enjoyed that role. Sometimes. In the dangerous days when Koba was a terrorist, his friend Sergei Kavtaradze had risked his own life to help him hide from the security police. In the twenties Kavtaradze had been head of the Georgian government, and had then become a prominent oppositionist. After Kirov’s assassination he had been banished to Kazakhstan. From there he wrote a penitent letter to his friend Koba. It was returned to him. As might be expected, Kavtaradze and his wife were arrested in 1936. One of the charges against them was that they had planned to assassinate Comrade Stalin—whose life they had once saved. Kavtaradze was sentenced to be shot. His little daughter Maya, a Young Pioneer, wrote repeatedly to the Father of all Soviet Children, telling him that her father was innocent. More than a year went by, and Kavtaradze was still in the death cell. Suddenly, he was taken to Beria’s office. His wife, greatly changed by her spell in a prison camp, was waiting there for him. On the Boss’s orders they were both set free. Stalin made Kavtaradze a Vice-Commissar of Foreign Affairs. During the war he would take part in the Yalta and Potsdam conferences.
After the Boss’s death Kavtaradze started to tell a remarkable story. One day, after a meeting, Koba took him home to his dacha. It was a stuffy July evening. They strolled around the garden before dinner, with the Boss crooning in his light tenor a favorite Georgian song, “Suliko.” “I sought my sweetheart’s grave, but could not find it,” he sang. Kavtaradze was about to join in and harmonize quietly—the Boss loved that. But suddenly, the Boss broke off in the middle of a verse, and Kavtaradze distinctly heard him say, “Poor, poor Sergo.” Then he started singing again—“I sought my sweetheart’s grave.” And once again Kavtaradze heard him murmur, “Poor, poor Lado.” Kavtaradze broke into a sweat, but the Boss went on singing and murmuring … “Poor, poor Alyosha.…”
Kavtaradze walked behind him, numb with horror; these were the names of their Georgian friends, whom he had destroyed. The Boss gave an extended performance of “Suliko,” repeating the verses several times over to include all the names. Then he suddenly turned around and said, “They’ve gone … they’ve gone … not one of them left.” There were tears in his eyes. Kavtaradze couldn’t contain himself, he too burst into tears and collapsed on Koba’s breast. Instantly, Koba’s face was flushed with rage; his fleshy nose, his glaring yellow eyes came closer, closer, and he pushed Kavtaradze away, whispering, “They’ve gone! Not one of them left! You all wanted to kill Koba! But it didn’t come off, Koba killed all of you instead, sons of whores.” Then he rushed down the path, kicking his bodyguard, who didn’t jump out of his way quickly enough.
The Boss never invited his friend to the dacha again, but did not touch him. Kavtaradze died in 1971 at the age of eighty-six.
CASE 510: A PORTRAIT OF THE NEW MAN
Yezhov went to his grave quietly. His arrest was not announced in the press. Where the people’s favorite had been, now there was nothing. This gave rise to legends that the Boss had spared his loyal executioner and that he had died a natural death. The truth can be found in Case File 510, which is still there in the KGB Archive.
Yezhov’s file contains letters written to him by Stalin’s close associates. He carefully preserved the evidence of their ardent love for him. The whole country had been singing the praises of this marvelous Communist for years. We find in his file hymns to the “hero Yezhov” written by th
e Kazakh poet Dzhambul. A pun heard often in those days was “Yezhovye rukavitsy”—literally, “hedgehog’s gauntlets” (but also “Yezhov’s gauntlets”): to hold someone in hedgehog’s gauntlets is “to rule with a rod of iron.” Mikoyan urged Party members to “learn from Comrade Yezhov, as he has learned, and learns, from Comrade Stalin.” This “heroic figure”—a tiny man with a faint voice—was the holder of many Party offices and distinctions, at once Commissar for State Security, Secretary of the Central Committee, and head of the Party Control Commission, in spite of his “incomplete primary education.”
The case file tells us that “Yezhov N. I. was arrested on April 10, 1939, and is held under guard in the Sukhanov Prison” (the most terrible of prisons, in which he had tortured his own victims). The formal indictment against Yezhov, dated February 1, 1940, reads in part: “Yezhov has been detected in treasonable espionage contacts with the Polish and German intelligence services, and with the ruling circles of Poland, Germany, England, and Japan, countries hostile to the USSR, and has headed a conspiracy in the NKVD.” The Boss generously bestowed on Yezhov all the standard foreign contacts which he usually wished upon his victims. Nor did he forget the “conspiracy against the Leader,” one of Yezhov’s favorite weapons: “Yezhov and his confederates were in effect planning a putsch for November 7, 1938,” the report continues.
Yezhov had to admit it all. But in court he said, “I was always by nature unable to stand violence against my person. For that reason I wrote all sorts of rubbish.… I was subjected to the severest beating.” The torturer had been given what he had done to others. But there were points in the indictment which he did not care to deny: “I had sexual relations with men and women, taking advantage of my official position.… In October or November 38 I had an intimate liaison with the wife of a subordinate and with her husband with whom I had a pederastic affair.” So stated the main guardian of the puritanical Bolshevik regime.
Yezhov’s insatiable blood lust had finally unhinged him. He really believed that the enemy was everywhere. He suspected everybody. He tormented his wife beyond endurance with his suspicions, and was on the verge of arresting her. There are letters from her in the file: “Kolya darling, I earnestly beg you to check up on my whole life, everything about me. I cannot reconcile myself to the thought that I am suspected of duplicity.” He ended up poisoning her. This was the “firm and modest Party worker” of whom Molotov spoke.
The last item in the file is the record of a closed session on February 3, 1940, of the military panel of the Supreme Court. His feeble, confused mumblings are there preserved: “I purged 14,000 Chekists, but my enormous fault is that I did not purge enough of them. My position was that I would give instructions to this or that department head to conduct the interrogation of a prisoner and all the while I was thinking, ‘You’ve been interrogating him today, but tomorrow I’ll arrest you.’ There were enemies of the people all around me … enemies everywhere.… As far as Slutsky is concerned, I had instructions from the directing organs—don’t arrest Slutsky, get rid of him some other way.… Otherwise our own agents abroad would have run for safety. So Slutsky was poisoned.” The “directing organ” issuing orders to the almighty Yezhov is not hard to identify. The Puppet Master was always in control.
Nikolai Yezhov was a product of the society created by the Boss, a perfect example of the Stalinist senior executive.
Reading the poet Chuyev’s account of a conversation with Molotov, I remembered my one meeting with him. I could not get over my impression that this dull man, with the intellect of an ordinary bookkeeper, had never in his life made a witty remark or a single profound observation. “File 510: The Yezhov Case” confirms what we already knew: that Molotov, Yezhov, and all the rest of them were faceless slaves, obedient tools, pathetic puppets in the hands of the Puppet Master. Stalin pulled their strings, and when they had played their part he pitilessly removed them from the scene, replacing them with other puppets, equally pathetic. A joke current at the time was very much to the point: “Stalin is a great chemist. He can turn any prominent government figure into a lump of shit, and any lump of shit into a leading government figure.”
Yezhov’s last request was: “Tell Stalin that I shall die with his name on my lips.” A note in the file tells us that “the sentence of death by shooting on Yezhov, Nikolai Ivanovich, has been carried out in the city of Moscow, February 4, 1940.”
A LUXURIOUS OFFICE
The Boss now gave the bloody swing a push in the other direction. Whereas earlier the NKVD had destroyed the Party, the new Party founded by Stalin now destroyed the old Yezhov personnel of the NKVD. The Central Committee adopted resolutions on Party control of the NKVD. Party commissions began weeding out NKVD agencies. The heads of yesterday’s executioners rolled. The recoil from terror was just as bloody, just as fearful, as the Terror itself.
We are in the office of the Moscow NKVD chief: a molded ceiling, walls with beautiful bas-reliefs, Venetian windows. In the mid-thirties the imposing, gray-haired occupant of this office was Redens. He was shot. His seat was taken by the purple-nosed, mad-eyed inveterate drunkard Zakovsky, who had never heard of any punitive measure other than shooting. He was shot. At the beginning of 1939 the sadist N. Petrovsky moved in, and shot himself three weeks later. He was replaced by Yakubovich, who was arrested the very next day. And shot. P. Karutsky appeared for two days: introduced himself on the first and shot himself on the second. Korovin, appointed next, soon vanished, as did his successor Zhuvralev, who was sent for by Beria and never returned.
You can see slapstick comedians running like that in silent films. They appeared, flickered briefly, vanished. They were doing the killing—and they were being killed.
Was this reversal of policy genuine? It is true that after Yezhov’s removal the NKVD seemed to arrest selected individuals rather than whole categories of people. But what individuals they were! The years 1939–1940 saw the arrest of several men of genius: the producer Meyerhold, the brilliant writer Isaac Babel, the eminent scientist Nikolai Vavilov, the brilliant avant-garde poet Danil Kharms. Was this a random selection of names? With the Boss nothing was ever random. The records of the Babel case have now become available, and they throw some light on the story.
Babel was forced to confess that he was a member of an underground Trotskyist espionage ring, to which he had been recruited by the writer Ilya Ehrenburg. The list of underground terrorists included some of the most eminent people in the world of the arts: L. Leonov, Katayev, Olesha, Eisenstein, Alexandrov, academician Shmidt, Mikhoels, Utesov, and so on. A new spectacular trial was evidently in the making. Plans had been laid in Yezhov’s time. But when the Boss decided to get rid of that faithful servant he remembered one of his well-tried schemes: he would include Yezhov in the last act of the thriller. As he had once included Yagoda. He liked linking trials: novels with a sequel appealed to him. What made it more attractive was that Babel knew Yezhov well.
Plans for the trial included the arrest of Vsevolod Meyerhold. On the evening of his arrest in Leningrad, Meyerhold had spent some hours with an artist friend of his called Garin. When Meyerhold went out into one of Leningrad’s white nights, Garin looked through the window and saw in the half-light three rats run across his path.
We have the testimony of witnesses present at Meyerhold’s interrogations. One of the twentieth century’s greatest theatrical producers lay on the floor with a fractured hip and blood streaming down his battered face while an interrogator urinated on him. He was accused of belonging to a Trotskyist organization and of engaging in espionage on behalf of four countries: Japan, England, France, and Lithuania. Pasternak, Shostakovich, Olesha, and Ehrenburg all made their appearance in the stenographic record of Meyerhold’s interrogation, the dramatis personae in what was meant to be a unique spectacle.
It had never been his intention to stop at Yezhov.
But as he observed the course of the interrogations, he lost faith in the possibility of getting Babel, Mey
erhold, and the others to play their part in the trial as planned. He could no longer rely on these strange people. Babel, for instance, admitted everything, and then, on October 10, 1939, retracted his deposition. The Boss realized that these excitable artists were dangerously unpredictable—they were too quick to agree, and just as quick to go back on their word.
He was disappointed in his cast. Babel, Meyerhold, and Koltsov were all quietly shot, after the required statements had been obtained. The search went on for worthy performers in the last act of the thriller. But it was interrupted by the war.
While Meyerhold was under investigation, his wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, wrote letters to Stalin and went around Moscow talking about the injustice of it all. This was rebellion, and the Boss reacted accordingly. Assassins broke into her apartment through the balcony door. They murdered her slowly and sadistically, inflicting seventeen knife wounds. She screamed wildly but no one came to her aid. Cries in the night frightened people in those days.
Beria’s sixteen-year-old mistress and his chauffeur moved into Meyerhold’s flat. A Satanic finale, in the spirit of Voland.
Very soon afterward a miracle happened. Strange rumors were heard—that the famous people supposedly shot were still alive and simply denied the right to correspond. They were secretly held in special and perfectly decent places of detention. The Boss had not permitted the NKVD to extinguish these talents. Mikhail Koltsov’s brother, the artist B. Efimov, was visited by people “recently released from the camps,” where they had often seen Koltsov alive and flourishing. Babel’s wife, A. Pirozhkova, told the same story: she had been informed by a number of different people that Babel was alive. One of Meyerhold’s friends had actually had in his hands a postcard from Vsevolod Emilievich. These games ended abruptly after the Boss’s death. They were intended in their day to authenticate his favorite image of himself—as the very kind Boss.
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