Stalin

No public mention was made of the existence, let alone location, of Stalin’s private Moscow residence, even as the entire regime became organized around it. A team of chauffeurs remained on twenty-four-hour call at the special Kremlin garage, which was jammed with foreign makes. Stalin had acquired a 1929 Rolls-Royce but was usually driven in a Packard, a premier luxury brand he had come to love since the Tsaritsyn days (when he rode in a Packard Twin Six “touring car”).²³⁷ In 1933, the regime had purchased the new Packard Twelve in the United States (Stalin would travel with the top down, from Sochi to Abkhazia and back, just for the ride). He preferred the jump seat, facing forward, which he pulled down himself. One guard sat on the backseat, and another next to the driver. Stalin’s Packard drove right up to his entrance of the Imperial Senate; exiting the Kremlin, at the Borovitskaya Gates, he traveled west along Znamenka, then the Arbat, Smolensk Square, Borodino Bridge, Great Dorogomilov Street, and onto the old Mozhaisk Highway to a hidden sharp left turnoff at Volynskoe. Service personnel nicknamed the route “the Georgian Military Highway,” in reference to the actual road in the Caucasus.

Inside the dacha, Stalin and his guests, by custom, wore slippers (he tucked his trousers into his socks). An intercom connected all the rooms. The hot water heater was imported. A separate building, some 200 yards from the principal residence, housed a kitchen, which had a traditional Russian-style stove, which beckoned when his rheumatism acted up. The auxiliary structure contained a Russian-style bathhouse and billiard room, too. Master artisans from around the country fabricated much of the furniture, doors, and wall paneling at Moscow’s Lux Factory. A wooden bed that workmen had used became Stalin’s. Contrary to legend, he slept in the bedroom (some 200 square feet). The floors were also made of wood. The dining room, off to the right of the entrance, had a long table, an upright piano, and a gramophone. Stalin collected records, favoring the danceable light romances of Pyotr Leshchenko and especially the émigré Alexander Vertinsky.²³⁸ During and after meals, he convened regime meetings. According to Mikoyan, the dictator ate slowly but had a healthy appetite. “Stalin loved a variety of fish dishes,” he wrote. “Danube herring he loved very much. . . . He loved poultry: guinea fowl, duck, flattened young chicken. He loved thin rack of lamb cooked on a spit. . . . Thin bones, a little meat, dry-broiled.”²³⁹ Lakoba would bring racks of lamb from Abkhazia.

The Near Dacha was built with children’s bedrooms, but Vasily (age thirteen) and Svetlana (eight) continued to live in the Kremlin apartment below their father’s office and to spend weekends and summers at Zubalovo.²⁴⁰ (Yakov Jughashvili, age twenty-six, lived at Granovsky, 3.) Full-time care of the children fell to Til as well as Pauker, who had been born in Habsburg Lemberg (Lwów, Lviv, Lvov), of Jewish extraction, the son of a barber, from whom he had learned the trade.²⁴¹ Vasily, red haired like his mother, with a pimply face, initially was sent to School No. 20; Svetlana began at No. 25, a model school known for “very tough, strict discipline,” as Pauker reported to Stalin. (Vasily was transferred there.)²⁴² Their father’s portrait hung in the school, which offered radio and electrotechnology, airplane and automobile modeling, ballroom dancing, theater, a rifle team, parachute jumping, volleyball, hockey, excursions to the State Tretyakov Gallery, summer camps in Crimea. Perhaps 85 percent of the teaching staff did not belong to the party. Vasily’s closest friend was nicknamed “Collective Farm Boy” (his mother, from a village, scrubbed the school’s floors). But his friends could not visit him at home. Stalin would sometimes read aloud to Vasily and Artyom. “Once he almost laughed to the point of tears,” Artyom recalled of a reading of the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, “and then he said, ‘And here comrade Zoshchenko remembered about the GPU and changed the ending!’”²⁴³

Stalin’s own son was a rambunctious type, signing his letters “Red Vaska.” Perhaps he misbehaved, at least in part, to get his father’s attention. “With a reluctant heart,” the bodyguard Vlasik would recall, “we had to report his behavior to his father, ruining his mood.”²⁴⁴ Vasily observed how his father doted on his younger sister, with constant reminders that Svetlana was a good example.²⁴⁵ Svetlana studied hard under the guidance of her nanny, Bychkova.²⁴⁶ “Stalin, someone who absolutely lacked sentimentalism, expressed such untypical gentleness toward his daughter,” recalled Candide Charkviani, a Georgian official. “‘My Little Hostess,’ Stalin would say, and seat Svetlana on his lap and give her kisses. ‘Since she lost her mother, I have kept telling her that she is the mistress of the house,’ Stalin told us.”²⁴⁷ Stalin instructed her to issue orders, and she would address written commands to “Secretary No. 1,” and he would answer, “I submit.” She also recalled, however, that he was absent. “Once in a while,” she wrote, “he enjoyed the sounds of children playing.” Stalin would overnight at the Near Dacha. “Sometimes before he left, he’d come to my room in his overcoat to kiss me good night as I lay sleeping,” Svetlana added. “He liked kissing me while I was little, and I’ll never forget how tender he was to me.”²⁴⁸ She was heard to utter, “Let the whole world hate me, as long as Papa loves me. If Papa tells me to go to the moon, I’ll go.”^{249, 250}

Into the public vacuum about Stalin’s personal life stepped Kyrill Kakabadze, a Soviet trade representative in Berlin for Georgia’s manganese mines, who had defected and published a defamatory essay in the British Sunday Express (April 8, 1934) that purported to describe Stalin’s “orgies” at a “personal estate” in Zubalovo of 300,000 acres. “Stalin lives like a tsar,” he wrote, supposedly costing the state ₤300,000 a year and 1,000 lives a day. “Stalin took for himself huge apartments that had once been inhabited by Ivan the Terrible.” Soviet representatives in London begged for compromising material on Kakabadze for release to the British press (the OGPU went to work, discovering that he was from a merchant family), then the German press republished the Kakabadze articles.²⁵¹ Stalin took it out on Beria, his minion for all things Georgian, writing (April 14) that, “besides the Georgian carousers and scamps arrested in Moscow hotels, there is another large group in Leningrad. The dissoluteness of so-called representatives of Georgian economic organizations has placed shame on the South Caucasus organizations. We oblige you to take immediate measures to liquidate the unseemliness, if you do not want the South Caucasus to end up in the court of the Central Committee.”²⁵²

COMMON ENEMIES

Stalin had fixed a covetous eye on Chinese Turkestan, or Xinjiang (“New Territory”). From January through April 1934, he fought a small war there. Renewal of a mass Muslim rebellion had spurred Comintern operatives to contemplate pushing for a socialist revolution, but Soviet military intelligence had pointed out that, even though the rebels commanded the loyalty of almost the entire Muslim population (90 percent), a successful Muslim independence struggle in Chinese Turkestan could inspire the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz in Soviet Turkestan or even the Mongols. Stalin had decided to send about 7,000 OGPU and Red Army soldiers, as well as airplanes, artillery, mustard gas, and Soviet Uzbek Communists, to defend the Chinese warlord. Remarkably, he allowed Soviet forces to combine with former White Army soldiers abroad, who were promised amnesty and Soviet citizenship. A possible Muslim rebel victory turned into a defeat. Unlike the Japanese in Manchuria, Stalin did not set up an independent state, but he solidified his informal hold on Xinjiang, setting up military bases, sending advisers, and gaining coal, oil, tungsten, and tin concessions. Some 85 percent of Xinjiang’s trade was with the USSR.²⁵³ British and Japanese observers and Chinese newspapers railed against Soviet “imperialism.”²⁵⁴ Chiang Kai-shek became dependent on Soviet goodwill to communicate with Xinjiang’s capital, Ürümqi.²⁵⁵

Ambassador Bullitt, who had returned to the United States after his brief December whirlwind in Moscow, came back. “The honeymoon atmosphere had evaporated completely before I arrived,” he wrote to Roosevelt (April 13, 1934).²⁵⁶ That very day, the U.S. Congress passed the Johnson Act, which prohibited foreign nations in default from marketing bonds in the United States, effectively preempting Roosevelt’s government from underwriting loans to the Soviet Union as negotiations proceeded for belated repayment of tsarist and Provisional Government debt.²⁵⁷

For Stalin, in any case, the threat of an immediate Japanese attack had receded.²⁵⁸ Hitler’s Germany was the greater puzzle.²⁵⁹ On April 19, Stalin’s spies delivered a copy of a secret document sent by the British ambassador in Berlin, Eric Phipps, to London, quoting Hitler to the effect that “it’s better to be respected and unloved than weak and loved.” Phipps asserted that “in relation to Russia, however, Hitler is ready to leave personal feelings aside and conduct a policy of realism.”²⁶⁰ A follow-up intercepted assessment from Phipps stated, in Russian translation, “The [Nazi] regime is solid, and the storm troopers are so disciplined that [Hitler] can be endangered only as a result of a serious uprising or a slow process of internal decay.” Stalin underlined this passage.²⁶¹ Balytsky, OGPU chief in Soviet Ukraine, sent Stalin a report on the German consulates in Kharkov, Kiev, and Odessa, which were now run by Nazi party members who were said to be recruiting Nazi youth and storm troopers on Soviet territory among the half million ethnic Germans in Soviet Ukraine. Balytsky initiated arrests of Soviet “fascists.”²⁶²

On May 5, 1934, Polish foreign minister Beck, as promised, signed an early renewal of the nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union.²⁶³ But Stalin took talk of Poland trying to maintain neutrality vis-à-vis both its giant neighbors as disinformation, and behind Poland—indeed, behind every Soviet foe—he saw Britain. Stalin could not or would not grasp that “imperialist” Britain had the same enemies as the USSR: Nazi Germany in Europe and militaristic Japan in Asia.²⁶⁴ British-Soviet relations were poor.²⁶⁵ The British embassy official Sir William Strang had reported from Moscow that Pravda was calling the Nazi ideologue Rosenberg “a lackey of British imperialism.”²⁶⁶ Officials in London were also incredulous at Soviet assertions that the British were “the real force behind German and Japanese fascism,” as the Comintern’s Dmytro Manuilsky had put it at the 17th Party Congress. The son of an Orthodox priest from Ukraine, he had charged, in typical contradictions-of-capitalism fashion, that Britain was instigating these two powers against the Soviet Union to avoid a new intra-imperialist war over colonies.²⁶⁷ Even the tsarist-era military men Alexander Svechin and Boris Shaposhnikov wrote that Poland, Romania, and other limitrophe states were ultimately subordinated to the will of London and Paris.²⁶⁸

Internally, Tukhachevsky urged that, since Poland or Romania was sure to attack at some point, the Red Army ought to take advantage of the poor state of these implacable enemies’ railways to deliver a knockout blow before they could fully mobilize. The appeal of such preemptive war had been enhanced by a perceived shift toward military attacks without formal war declarations.²⁶⁹ But for all the talk about the inevitability of war, Stalin was not looking to fight one.²⁷⁰

Neither was Britain. Although Japan eyed British-controlled parts of Southeast and South Asia, it was preoccupied with China, but Germany under Hitler looked less contained—and British credibility was on the line.²⁷¹ British society, however, was overwhelmingly desirous of avoiding another catastrophic war and mostly sympathetic to Germany’s grievances against the Versailles Treaty. Added to this was the political-ideological challenge of the Comintern and, behind it, the Soviet Union, whose industrialization—contrary to British expectations—had seemed to succeed. For London, no less than for Stalin, some sort of accommodation with Nazi Germany seemed the path to security.

POET TO POET

The poet Osip Mandelstam, outraged over the famine, had composed sixteen lines that blamed Stalin. The verses, which he read to a handful of intimates, did not mention the dictator by name, but mocked a “Kremlin highlander” with oily fingers, a criminal underworld past, and part Ossetian descent. In April 1934, Mandelstam saw fellow poet Boris Pasternak on the street—the two had known each other since 1922—and he recited the rhymed invective to him. Hearsay has Pasternak deeming the lines an act of suicide, responding, “I didn’t hear this; you didn’t recite it to me.”²⁷² On the night of May 16–17, Mandelstam was arrested at his apartment, where the police confiscated manuscripts, letters, and his address book. The poet was allowed to take a few personal items and books. He was said to have selected Dante’s Inferno.²⁷³

The admission process to the new union of writers had commenced, and on May 15, Fadeyev, Bedny, Pasternak, and others were inducted.²⁷⁴ A devastated Pasternak now learned of Mandelstam’s arrest from Anna Gorenko (b. 1889), known as Akhmatova, who had arrived from Leningrad that evening. He went to see Mandelstam’s wife, Nadezhda, and they evidently tried to call Bedny, who had once promised to defend Mandelstam if necessary, but had ceased to have contact with Stalin and deemed intervention useless.²⁷⁵ Nadezhda managed to get into the Kremlin to see Yenukidze, but also with no results. It seems Pasternak went to Izvestiya and implored Bukharin to intercede. (Pasternak was doing literary translations for the newspaper as a source of income.)²⁷⁶ According to the woman who later would become Pasternak’s lover, he “raced frantically all over town, telling everybody that he was not to blame and denying responsibility for Mandelstam’s disappearance.” In fact, Pasternak did not know but Mandelstam, under interrogation, had not named all the people to whom he had recited the poem—only those already known to the interrogator—and omitted Pasternak.²⁷⁷ At the other extreme, the short-story writer Pyotr Pavlenko boasted to acquaintances that he’d been allowed to listen secretly to Mandelstam’s interrogation at Lubyanka, evidently from behind a door in an adjacent room.²⁷⁸

In a surprise, Mandelstam was sentenced not to death or even a Gulag camp, but exile in Cherdyn (northern Urals), and allowed to take his wife. In early June 1934, he attempted suicide, jumping out a window. Bukharin wrote to Stalin about the poet’s frail psychology, noting that “Boris Pasternak is utterly at a loss over Mandelstam’s arrest and no one knows anything.”²⁷⁹ Then, on June 13, Pasternak was summoned to the phone at his communal apartment on Volkhonka Street. The caller said Stalin would be getting on the line, but Pasternak, like Bulgakov some years earlier, thought it a prank and hung up. The phone rang again, the same voice stating the call was from Stalin’s office and, to eliminate disbelief, dictated a special number to call. Pasternak dialed it and soon heard, “Stalin speaking.”

Stalin told Pasternak that Mandelstam’s case had been reexamined and the result would be favorable. (The sentence was commuted to mere banishment from the largest cities; he and his wife moved to Voronezh.) Stalin asked if Mandelstam was Pasternak’s friend—a tricky question. If Pasternak said yes, he could be implicated; if he said no, he was betraying Mandelstam. “Poets rarely make friends,” he answered. “They envy each other.” Stalin told him that if something terrible had befallen one of his friends, he would go to the wall to aid him. Then Stalin asked if Mandelstam was genuinely a “master.” Again, tricky: this could have referred to the verses about the “Kremlin highlander.” What Pasternak answered remains a matter of dispute. He seems to have suggested that they meet face-to-face. Stalin hung up. Pasternak dialed the number again, asking Poskryobyshev to reconnect him, but Stalin’s aide said the dictator was busy. Pasternak asked whether he could tell others of the call; Poskryobyshev said he would leave it to him.²⁸⁰ That very day, Pasternak told Ilya Ehrenburg (who was living in Paris with a Soviet passport but had just arrived in Moscow with André Malraux). Ehrenburg spread the sensational news to select other writers.²⁸¹ For Pasternak, the call had happened extremely quickly, but it would reverberate in his head for a lifetime.

A NEW AUTHORITY

Georgi Dimitrov, the acquitted but still imprisoned Bulgarian Comintern operative, had finally been deported from Germany. He arrived in Moscow by plane (February 27, 1934), and Stalin afforded him a hero’s welcome and Soviet citizenship.²⁸² “It is difficult to imagine,” Dimitrov recorded in his diary, “a more grandiose reception or more sympathy and love.”²⁸³ He had become the best-known Communist internationally after Stalin.²⁸⁴ Dimitrov was given an apartment at the Comintern’s Hotel Lux, which also housed a young Yugoslav named Josip Broz Tito and a Vietnamese named Nguyen Ai Cuoc, later known as Ho Chi Minh.²⁸⁵ (Dimitrov would soon obtain one of the 550 grand apartments in the new Government House, an elite complex colloquially known as the House on the Embankment, designed by Boris Yofan and built by Yagoda, on the site of wine warehouses along the Moscow River, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin walls.)²⁸⁶ Stalin took to phoning him. Convalescing outside Moscow at a dacha in Arkhangelskoe, on the former estates of Princes Golitsyn and Yusupov, Dimitrov requested an audience. On April 6, Stalin had him named to the Comintern executive committee, and the next day he received him in the Little Corner, one on one.²⁸⁷

Some Communists, including Germans who had managed to escape into exile from Nazi terror, were lobbying for a shift toward cooperation with other parties on the left.²⁸⁸ But Stalin stressed the need to win over European workers from parliamentarism, whose absence had allowed Russian workers to be revolutionary in 1917. “In all countries, the bourgeoisie will proceed to fascism,” he told Dimitrov, which he presented as an opportunity for Communists to win workers’ allegiance, provided the latter were made to understand that the era of parliamentarism was ending, meaning Social Democrats could be outmaneuvered. Still, he concluded that “we cannot immediately and easily win millions of workers in Europe.” In the meantime, he encouraged Dimitrov to seize leadership inside the Comintern: “Kuusinen is good, but an academic; Manuilsky—agitator; [Wilhelm] Knorin—propagandist! [Osip] Pyatnitsky—narrow . . . Who says that this ‘foursome’ must remain [in charge]?” Molotov chimed in: “You have looked the enemy in the face. And after prison, you now take the work into your hands.”²⁸⁹

At the 1934 May Day parade, Stalin motioned Dimitrov to come up to the dictator’s side on the Mausoleum, a Kremlinological sign for all. Dimitrov seized the moment, asking to be received again privately when convenient; Stalin agreed to an audience the next day. “Select yourself where and how to appear and what to write,” he instructed him in the Little Corner. “Don’t let yourself be talked into anything.”²⁹⁰ Dimitrov drew inspiration from recent events in France, where workers, in response to antiparliamentary riots by far right, monarchist, and fascist leagues, had ignored party divisions on the left and united in a general strike to prevent France from following Germany’s path.²⁹¹ “The wall between Communist workers and Social Democrats should be demolished,” Dimitrov told the visiting Maurice Thorez, the French Communist party leader, on May 11. But this was a call not to cooperate with Social Democrat party leaders but to redouble efforts to reclaim their rank and file.²⁹² Additional urgency arrived on May 19, when a fascist-inflected coup succeeded in Dimitrov’s native Bulgaria. And yet, not only Stalin but also Pyatnitsky (real surname Tarshis), Béla Kun, Wilhelm Knorin, Solomon Lozovsky (Dridzo), and Jenő Varga detested Social Democrats and opposed a broad leftist front to combat fascism.

BUNGLING

Stalin summoned Artuzov, who had predicted Poland’s behavior, to a series of discussions in the Little Corner. (Litvinov exited when the intelligence officials entered.)²⁹³ Soviet military intelligence in Europe had suffered a string of catastrophic exposures several years running, as a result of violating elementary tradecraft: recruiting agents among local Communist party members (who were under police surveillance).²⁹⁴ A list compiled by Yagoda for Stalin and Voroshilov of every agent exposure with names, dates, and causes, covered ten pages and highlighted “infestation by traitors,” “recruitment of foreign cadres among dubious elements,” and “non-observance of the rules of conspiracy,” all of which had resulted in the USSR being fed “a mass of disinformation.”²⁹⁵ On May 26, 1934, Stalin appointed Artuzov deputy chief of military intelligence, concurrent with his post as head of OGPU foreign intelligence, an unprecedented combination.²⁹⁶

Within a month, Artuzov had written a detailed analysis—one copy to Stalin, one to Voroshilov, and none to Jan Berzin, the nominal military intelligence chief—detailing that the Soviets now had essentially no military intelligence operations in Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, France, or Italy. His solution was to prohibit, once again, recruitment of foreign Communists as spies and to improve the pay and housing of operatives abroad. Fatefully, Stalin also accepted Artuzov’s recommendation to liquidate military intelligence’s department for analysis, the one central clearinghouse for assessing the mass of all incoming information. Artuzov pointed out that there was no such all-knowing and therefore risky department of analysis in the OGPU foreign directorate (which was one of its weaknesses).²⁹⁷ Military intelligence was subordinated directly to the defense commissar, who emerged with enhanced powers.²⁹⁸

In terms of counterintelligence, the secret police claimed that a Soviet spy in Chinese Harbin was a double agent who had helped Japan roll up part of the Soviet espionage network in the Far East.²⁹⁹ Stalin demanded to know from Yagoda which Soviet operative had recruited the spy.³⁰⁰ A far more important case remains confounding. The OGPU had put the head of Red Army external relations, Colonel Vasily Smagin, under observation on the basis of intercepted deciphered telegrams from the Japanese military attaché Torashirō Kawabe. “We have precisely established that Smagin in January 1934, using the possibilities in his position, took from a rank-and-file operative in the Fourth Department [military intelligence] fifty-seven file cards of secret agent material about Japan and twenty-nine about China to his home for three days,” Yagoda wrote. “This had nothing in common with his official duties.” Stalin underlined this passage, and another about Smagin’s closeness to Kawabe. Smagin, however, was only sacked and left unemployed—and eventually given a teaching position.³⁰¹

LONG KNIVES

Hitler’s renunciation of the League of Nations had begun to lift the postwar taboo in France on the idea of any “alliance.”³⁰² Since Hitler’s takeover, Litvinov had been urging a regional pact against him, borrowing the phrase “collective security” from the League and arguing that “peace is indivisible” (i.e., either every country had peace or none had it). Lenin had sized up Litvinov as “the most crocodile-like of our diplomats,” who tore into and held on to people.³⁰³ Stalin, however, was not keen on a regional pact that, without Germany, would come across as anti-German while not even guaranteeing Soviet border security on the Baltic Sea. He also wanted to avoid giving a pretext for a Polish-German bloc on his immediate border.³⁰⁴ Still, he viewed talks with Paris as a useful instrument for his talks with Berlin, exactly as the French did.³⁰⁵

The USSR won diplomatic recognition on June 9, 1934, from Czechoslovakia and Romania, members of the Little Entente, and by the 27th the draft of a comprehensive Eastern Pact—France, the Soviet Union, the Little Entente, the Baltic states, Germany, Poland, Finland—was being circulated alongside a separate Franco-Soviet agreement.³⁰⁶ On June 29, Stalin received an OGPU intelligence report (“from a serious Polish source”) asserting that, by having invited Goebbels to Warsaw, Piłsudski was showing Paris he had options to discourage the latter’s bruited alliance with Moscow.³⁰⁷

The counterpart to a Soviet security deal centered on France was a Comintern shift toward a united front with Social Democrats against fascism. Dimitrov wrote cryptically in his diary (June 29), “Stalin: I never answered you. I had no time. On this question, there is still nothing in my head. Something must be prepared!” (Dimitrov also wrote to himself, “So lonely and personally unhappy! It’s almost more difficult for me now than last year in prison.” But then Dimitrov, despite being married to the cause, addressed his personal loneliness, resuming correspondence with Rosa Fleischmann, a Jewish Communist from Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland whom he had met in Vienna years earlier, and who would soon become his second wife and companion, something Stalin did not have.)³⁰⁸

The Central Committee was holding a plenum, the first such full meeting since the party congress, devoted to meat supply and livestock.³⁰⁹ Early on the morning of June 30, 1934, Hitler arrested Captain Ernst Röhm, chief of staff of the street-fighting SA (Sturmabteilung), in a Bavarian resort town; as many as 2,000 more arrests ensued. Surly and overweight, with a prominent scar on his left cheek, and openly homosexual, Röhm was one of the few who used the familiar du (“thou”) with Hitler. He led some 3 million SA members, poorly armed and disorganized, but more than were in the Nazi party, and nearly thirty times the size of the Reichswehr (limited by the Versailles Treaty).³¹⁰ His Brownshirt militia sought a permanent place in the Nazi order as a reward for helping bring Hitler to power and targeting Nazi enemies (leftists, Jews), but he had toned down his rhetoric of a continuing revolution and accepted Hitler’s request to go on medical leave and send the Brownshirts on leave as well (most were due to return in August). But Reichswehr generals—who reported to Hindenburg, not the chancellor Hitler—were adamant that the paramilitary SA be neutered. The Nazi Schutzstaffel, or SS (Heinrich Himmler), Sicherheitsdienst, or SD (Reinhard Heydrich), and Gestapo (also Heydrich) had no love for their SA rivals, either. Rumors of a pending crackdown against the SA had spurred the latter to yet another drunken rampage in Munich on the evening of June 29.³¹¹ At the same time, Hitler had been told that President Hindenburg was ready to declare martial law and receive the former conservative prime minister Franz von Papen on June 30. In the end, after much stalling, the Führer felt compelled to move against both the SA and the traditional conservatives.

The army brass put its resources in SS hands, and left the latter to fabricate the damning evidence of a supposed SA “putsch” with the aid of an unnamed foreign country.³¹² Still, it was awkward: the SA had been just as crucial (and just as dispensable) to the Nazi revolution as the Kronstadt sailors had been to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. In a two-hour, radio-broadcast speech to the Reichstag (twelve of whose members would be among those to be executed), Hitler highlighted storm trooper moral laxity and Röhm’s homosexuality and declared that he had acted patriotically to preempt a planned SA “Night of the Long Knives.”³¹³ Stalin was said to have badgered his newly arrived envoy in Berlin for details of the “bloodbath.”³¹⁴ Izvestiya dedicated four columns on its front page to Hitler’s Reichstag speech about the Night of the Long Knives.³¹⁵ “What a guy [molodets],” Stalin exclaimed to his inner circle, according to Mikoyan’s later recollections. “Well done. Knows how to act!”³¹⁶ A Comintern instant analysis, clueless about the dynamics of the Nazi regime, wrote that the “monopolist big bourgeoisie” had crushed the “petit-bourgeois strata.”³¹⁷ Pravda (July 2, 1934) editorialized that “German fascism once again revealed itself as the agent of finance capital.” British intelligence did little better, misperceiving a triumph of the Reichswehr over the party and a “return of the Rapallo line” of closeness to the Soviet Union.³¹⁸ In fact, the episode solidified a Nazi accord with the army and large-scale industry on Hitler’s terms, while clearing the way for him to merge the chancellorship with the presidency upon Hindenburg’s passing. The SS would be even more radical, ideologically, than the SA.

If the hearsay about Stalin’s enthusiastic reaction is correct, he was also wrong. This was the first (and would be the sole) violent regime purge of Hitler’s rule. The Führer had agreed to dispatch Röhm only under pressure from Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich, yet he still hoped Röhm could be persuaded to do the deed himself. (The Brownshirt fighter did not touch the pistol left for him in his prison cell and had to be executed.)³¹⁹ For all the sensation, a mere eighty-five known people were summarily executed without legal proceedings, and just fifty of them even belonged to the SA. Some individual scores were settled.³²⁰ What Stalin and British intelligence most failed to grasp was the consolidation of the Nazi regime’s anti-Bolshevism.³²¹

Stalin, however, was not ready to surrender on winning over Nazi Germany. On July 1, 1934, following the conclusion of the Central Committee plenum, Dimitrov sent him a draft of his political report for a proposed 7th Comintern Congress (scheduled for the fall). Dimitrov could defy Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels, but he remained inordinately deferential toward the Soviet dictator. Stalin, in turn, asked that Dimitrov “consider” his suggestions, and his marginal comments indicate that he was far from letting go of his thesis on Social Democracy as the left wing of fascism. Dimitrov’s text asked “whether it is correct to refer to Social Democracy indiscriminately as social fascism,” and “Are Social Democrats always and everywhere the main social bulwark of the bourgeoisie?” Stalin wrote in the margins, “As to the leadership—yes, but not ‘indiscriminate.’” Beyond this tiny concession, where Dimitrov gently tried to rehabilitate some Social Democrats as a basis for cooperation in the struggle against fascism, Stalin pointedly inserted, “Against whom is this thesis?”³²² On July 5, the politburo was informed that Germany, still suffering the effects of the Depression, had raised the prospect of a 200-million-mark credit for the purchase of German machinery.³²³ Dimitrov, suffering from latent malaria, chronic gastritis, and other illnesses, departed for two months to Georgia on medical leave.

STRENGTHENING SOCIALIST LEGALITY

On July 10, 1934, after six months of internal back-and-forth, the regime announced the replacement of the OGPU by the NKVD (the people’s commissariat of internal affairs).³²⁴ Mężyński had appealed to Stalin yet again in early 1934 to be allowed to resign. (“No activities. Only lying down 24 hours a day,” he had written in his notebook in Kislovodsk. “This is death. You lie all day in the hammock, and death sits across from you.”)³²⁵ Stalin proposed that Kaganovich confer with him and possibly accept his request. Then, on May 10, Mężyński’s heart had stopped. Four days later, his ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall, with an artillery salute.³²⁶ Rumors had Stalin set to appoint Mikoyan, which frightened Yagoda’s gang and brightened other Chekists who appreciated Mikoyan’s sly humor and lectures at their club.³²⁷ But Stalin named Yagoda commissar and Yankel Sorenson, known as Yakov Agranov, his first deputy.³²⁸ The regime had just expanded Article 58 of the RSFSR criminal code (regarding counterrevolutionary activities) with new subarticles (2–13) to cover attempts to seize power, espionage, anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation, and Trotskyism.³²⁹ As Stalin had proposed, military desertion was now punished as treason, with sentences of execution or, in extenuating circumstances, ten years in confinement.³³⁰ Nonetheless, the formation of the NKVD was conceived as a genuine legal reform.³³¹ The politburo would soon decree a parallel expansion in the number of judges and procuracy personnel, with pay raises.³³² Kaganovich explained that “the reorganization of the OGPU means that, as we are in more normal times, we can punish through the court and not resort to extrajudicial repression, as we have until now.”³³³

This new mandate had to be explained to police operatives.³³⁴ “In capitalist countries, instead of the ‘celebrated’ bourgeois order, there is chaos, a sea of blood, extrajudicial executions, gas, machine guns and armored cars on the streets,” Yagoda told them in a speech at the NKVD’s founding. “If now, in the village, we do not have expansive kulak formations that we had previously, if in the city the counterrevolution does not have the character it had before, the question arises: What guises, what forms are possible for the activities of counterrevolutionary agents?” He answered that former parties (SRs, Mensheviks, bourgeois nationalists) could reanimate and link up with Communist oppositionist elements (Trotskyites, rightists) for espionage and sabotage, requiring the NKVD to abjure mass arrests in favor of “subtle, painstaking, and probing investigations.”³³⁵ Investigations had to be conducted with greater observance of procedural rules.³³⁶ Ultimately, the reform was aimed at better coherence of the state, under the slogan “strengthening revolutionary legality.”³³⁷ But none of this meant imposing limits on Stalin’s power, whose extralegal operation caused many of the very problems of arbitrariness about which he complained.³³⁸

ARTISTS AND THE STATE

Technically, the Union of Soviet Writers was a civic organization, but it was blatantly an arm of the state.³³⁹ It was spending almost no time on aesthetics.³⁴⁰ Its main activity, in the run-up to the anticipated founding congress, consisted of endless meetings of its governing board and manifold committees, and entertainment. The union’s headquarters occupied a nineteenth-century mansion on Vorovsky (formerly Cooks’) Street, in what had been Moscow’s most aristocratic neighborhood, part of the ancient Dolgorukov estate. (This figured in Tolstoy’s War and Peace as the Rostov estate.) Known as the “Central House of the Writers,” the HQ had a library with newspapers and journals, a restaurant, a competitive billiards team, sport groups for tennis, chess, and horseback riding, and study sections for thematic subjects and foreign languages. It also took over a fledgling dacha colony, at Peredelkino, which, like the Moscow HQ, would afford a certain degree of self-organized intellectual life (circles, house visits), although this was shadowed by willing and blackmailed informants.³⁴¹

Two years after the politburo decree announcing it, the writers’ union’s founding congress had still not met, having been postponed several times. Gorky had been set to deliver the keynote, but on May 11, 1934, his son Maxim Peshkov passed away, at age thirty-eight. He had taken part in a drinking binge with some secret police operatives at a May Day picnic, been left to sleep it off outside on a bench, and been diagnosed with influenza. He was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery on May 12 (the day before Mężyński’s body was placed on view at the House of Trade Unions). Gorky was shattered. “He no longer belonged to himself, and seemed that he was not a person but an institution,” obliged to carry on, noted one close friend.³⁴² Gossips speculated that the regime had killed Gorky’s son to intimidate him.³⁴³ But as the congress’s new opening date approached, Gorky would write a forceful letter to Stalin, asking to be relieved of his role as chairman, and would submit a heated article for Pravda lashing out at party hacks trying to control literature (which Kaganovich authorized Mekhlis to hold back). “Literary affairs are sharpening,” Kaganovich would write to Stalin, who, preoccupied with other matters on which Kaganovich sought guidance (Japan, grain procurements), would answer, three days later, “It must be explained to all Communist writers that the Master in literature, as in all other areas, is only the Central Committee, and that they are obliged to subordinate themselves unconditionally to the latter.”³⁴⁴

A Literary Fund was established on July 28, 1934, with the aim of subsidizing cultural figures in need, including up-and-coming writers, formalizing an ad hoc practice whereby they were granted shoes or winter coats. The money came from 10 percent deductions in the honoraria paid by publishing houses, as well as 0.5 to 2 percent of the fees for live performances. Additionally, the state budget contributed 25 percent of the Literary Fund’s resources. Soon, about 100,000 requests for aid accumulated (many writers submitted multiple petitions).³⁴⁵ Behind closed doors, writers disagreed vehemently on whether such subsidies enhanced productivity or blocked it by removing hunger.³⁴⁶ The Literary Fund obtained permission to build more dachas at Peredelkino as well. Of the three dozen writers’ families initially granted residency, few were Communist party members. Most writers failed to pay the nominal rent.³⁴⁷

WRITING HISTORY

On July 23, 1934, Stalin received the British writer H. G. Wells—who had interviewed Lenin—and they argued the world.³⁴⁸ (Radek would send Stalin a translation of passages about the dictator in Wells’s autobiography, published the same year, noting, “We didn’t manage to seduce the girl.”)³⁴⁹ Stalin’s last meeting in Moscow was July 29. Vlasik arranged for their special train to stop at Sochi’s remote freight yard for security reasons, but Stalin—for all his security anxieties—detested having to hide and insisted on detraining at the regular passenger station. His black Rolls-Royce awaited him, but he enjoyed walking a bit on foot, startling onlookers.³⁵⁰ That summer, he planned to work on a new history textbook. A few years back, in a letter to the journal Proletarian Revolution, he had exploded in fury at one historian’s criticisms of Lenin for supposedly having insufficiently criticized the danger of centrism in German Social Democracy before the Great War. Stalin, right on the facts, had tendentiously exaggerated the author’s argument, and called the article “anti-party and semi-Trotskyite.” Stalin also rejected the author’s claim that more documents remained to be uncovered. “Who besides hopeless bureaucrats would rely only on paper documents?” he wrote. “Who besides archival rats do not understand that the party and its leaders need to be assessed above all by their actions, and not only by their declarations?”³⁵¹

Not long thereafter, the politburo had formed a commission to write a new history of the party. But even the textbook drafted by the lapdog Yaroslavsky had been rejected, for lacking vivid individual heroes.³⁵² Stalin had his minions force the issue.³⁵³ Functionaries assembled a large group of historians. “We went into the hall like geese,” Sergei Piontkovsky recorded in his diary. “In all, there were about 100 people in the room. . . . Stalin stood up frequently, puffed on his pipe, and wandered between the tables.” He interrupted the main speaker and finally just took the floor. “Stalin spoke very quietly. He held the secondary school textbooks in his hand and spoke with a slight accent, striking the textbooks with his hand, proclaiming, ‘These textbooks are good for nothing. What the heck is the “feudal epoch,” “the epoch of industrial capitalism,” “the epoch of formations”—it’s all epochs and no facts, no events, no people, no concrete information, no names, no titles, no content.’” Piontkovsky’s diary continued: “Stalin said what we need are textbooks with facts, events, names. History should be history.”³⁵⁴

Of course, behind closed doors, Stalin was using just such a schematic vocabulary: feudal epoch, capitalist mode of production, bourgeois democracy.³⁵⁵

In Sochi, the dictator summoned Kirov, who arrived in early August and stayed at the Zenzinovka dacha (where Rykov used to stay). Writing history was not exactly Kirov’s forte. But Stalin also summoned Zhdanov, the dictator’s youngest favorite. Speaking to Alexandra Kollontai, Soviet envoy to Sweden, before departing Moscow, Stalin had playfully posed as a “right deviationist,” contrasting himself with Zhdanov, a “left deviationist,” a statement less about Stalin’s politics than Zhdanov’s extremism.³⁵⁶ Vasily and Artyom were also in Sochi all July and August, and Stalin gave them the draft history to test it. Zhdanov’s fifteen-year-old son, Yuri, invited to join the group for lunch, recalls that Stalin, to general laughter, observed that historians divided history into three successive schemata: matriarchate, patriarchate, and secretariat.³⁵⁷

After work, Stalin and Kirov grilled kebabs, sang old songs (“There’s a Cliff on the Volga”), and worked the garden with shovels, while Kirov chased the ducks and guinea fowl. Stalin did not like to swim (he was from the mountains), but Kirov did, and Stalin would wait for him at the shore. Stalin even permitted Kirov to go with him to the Russian steam bath, where they pounded each other with birch leaves.³⁵⁸ The dictator permitted no mistresses or prostitutes. Kirov got bored. “I am devilishly sick of this place,” he wrote to his wife back in Leningrad, complaining that they could not even play skittles. “We had intense heat, then six days and nights of intense rain. . . . Now, again, tedious heat has struck.”³⁵⁹ Stalin could not be torn from his beloved Sochi, but Kirov was back in Leningrad already by August 30, 1934, having departed in a train with Andrei Andreyev’s family. “He had a strong suntan,” recalled Natalya Andreyeva, the functionary’s daughter. “His teeth were white; he smiled often.”³⁶⁰

Grain procurements were severely lagging, despite the comparatively good harvest, and Kaganovich and Molotov wrote to Stalin about easing the burden on transport by purchasing 100,000 tons of Argentine and Australian wheat for the Soviet Far East. “Wheat imports now, when abroad they are shouting about the lack of wheat in the USSR, can only be a political minus,” he objected.³⁶¹ Instead he proposed they apply “maximum pressure.” Molotov was deployed to Siberia, Kaganovich to Ukraine, Mikoyan to Kursk and Voronezh, Chubar to the Middle Volga, and Zhdanov to Stalingrad province. Voroshilov, on fall maneuvers, was instructed to look into harvest gathering in Belorussia and the western province.³⁶² Kirov was sent to Kazakhstan to ensure harvest collection under his former protégé, local party boss Levon Mirzoyan. Stalin was now taking a restrained approach to the Kazakhs. Kirov got the head procurator for East Kazakhstan fired for abuses and asked Yagoda to remove police operatives for mistreating collective farmers.³⁶³ But when Kaganovich wrote to Stalin requesting a reduced procurement quota for Ukraine, Stalin warned him and the inner circle of a slippery slope.³⁶⁴

EXTRAVAGANZA