Stalin

Another remarkable anti-Nazi Soviet spy was in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, the offspring of a Russian mother and a German father, who, in preparation for assignment to Japan, had traveled to Germany and happened to meet the publisher of the Journal of Geopolitics, a zealous Nazi who gave him a contract as a stringer and a letter of introduction to the German embassy in Tokyo. Sorge, code-named “Ramsay,” joined the Nazi party, took with him a radio operator, and charmed the ambassador in Japan, Herbert von Dirksen. Other contacts gave Sorge entrée to Colonel Eugen Ott, who became the German military attaché (and would one day replace Dirksen). Sorge also had spectacular success penetrating Japanese officialdom, partly thanks to the esteem in which the Germans held him. German diplomats discovered that the journalist stringer Sorge had better information about Japan than they did, and they let him help compile embassy reports to Berlin, copies of which surreptitiously went to Moscow.¹⁹²

Soviet intelligence enjoyed gobsmacking success in the UK, too. Harold Philby, nicknamed “Kim” after the Rudyard Kipling character, had been born in British India (1912); his father was an adviser to the Saudi king, and the son aimed to join the foreign office. As a student at Cambridge University, Philby had been helped by Maurice Dobb, an economics lecturer and an early British Communist party member, to go abroad and work for the World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism. Aiding refugees from Nazism in Austria, Philby married a Hungarian-Jewish divorcée who belonged to the Austrian Communist party and came to the attention of Tivadar (Theodore) Maly, a Hungary-born Soviet intelligence operative who secretly recommended him for recruitment. Back in London, a friend of Philby’s wife set up a meeting in Regent’s Park with the Artuzov protégé Arnold Deutsch, a chemical engineer born in Habsburg Slovakia, of Jewish extraction, who had joined the Austrian Communist party and relocated to the Soviet Union, before being posted as station chief to the UK.¹⁹³ Deutsch transformed Philby, a budding journalist, into a playacting right-winger and reliable courier with a valuable British passport. Through Philby, Soviet intelligence recruited Guy Burgess (b. 1911), another Cambridge University student; Anthony Blunt, a Cambridge student and then tutor in art history; and the invaluable Donald Maclean, a fourth Cambridge University graduate who entered the British foreign office in 1935. Artuzov’s team would even penetrate MI6.¹⁹⁴

All the while, Soviet counterintelligence was spending as much or more time on its own diplomats and military officers as on foreign governments. NKVD special department operatives for watching the Red Army had ballooned to an all-time record of 3,769 by January 1935.¹⁹⁵ Mark Stokland, known as Gai, the head of the special department, received yet another phantasmagorical secret “report” from the informant Tatyana Zaionchkovskaya, who socialized with Tukhachevsky, among others, and asserted that the “counterrevolution” inside the USSR was counting on former officers to shoot Stalin. “This is complete rubbish of a stupid old woman who has lost her mind,” Gai wrote. But such “reports” kept coming.¹⁹⁶

What use Stalin and the Soviet regime would make of the intelligence windfall inadvertently delivered by Hitler and Nazism, meanwhile, remained to be seen. Hermann Göring, under the pretext of a hunting trip, was invited to undertake a diplomatic trip to Poland from January 26 to 31, 1935. He had just spent several days with Hitler in the Obersalzberg, and now, on the anniversary of the nonaggression declaration with Poland, he told Beck that Germany would not sign a broad Eastern Pact or any treaty with the Soviet Union, and that “the chancellor has decided to continue the policy of developing good neighborly relations with Poland.” Göring told Józef Lipski, the Polish envoy to Berlin, who was back in Warsaw for the occasion, that Germany would have to expand, but not at Polish expense, and that Poland might acquire more Lithuanian territory in any deal over the Polish Corridor. At a reception in his honor, Göring tried to prove a lack of aggression toward Poland by pointing out that, for Germany, creating a common border with the USSR would be “highly dangerous.” At the former tsarist family hunting grounds in the Białowieza (Belovezh) Forest, in the presence of two Polish generals, Göring “almost proposed an anti-Soviet alliance, and a joint march on Moscow,” according to the Polish record. “Ukraine would be a Polish sphere of influence, while northwestern Russia would go to Germany.” Göring conveyed something similar in his audience with President Piłsudski, even offering that the marshal could command a joint Polish-German attack on the USSR. The elderly president answered that Poland, having a 600-mile border with the Soviet Union, needed peace.¹⁹⁷

Public knowledge of Göring’s visit, combined with the secretiveness of its substance, sparked all manner of speculation.¹⁹⁸ On January 30, Stalin had Tukhachevsky—who had a sky-high profile abroad—deliver a policy speech to the 2,000 delegates of the 7th USSR Congress of Soviets. He declared that the Red Army was concentrating soldiers in the Far East and, in general, was a force not to be underestimated, revealing for the first time that the military budget had risen to more than 5 billion rubles—10 percent of total expenditures—and was projected to reach 6.5 billion in 1935. In fact, 1934 outlays had amounted to a gargantuan 5.8 billion (as compared with 417 million a decade before), and internal projections for 1935 were 7.5 billion.¹⁹⁹ But even the deliberately lowball figures were impressive. Tukhachevsky added, accurately, that troop strength had increased to 940,000. “We are working for the development of mobility and daring, for the development of initiative, independence, persistence—to put it crudely, ‘nerve,’” he explained of the new military doctrine, adding that commanders accustomed since the civil war to cavalry had had to “adjust to a new level, to be able to utilize the mobility of aviation and our mechanized troops and tanks. [It] is not so simple.” Both when he had first appeared on the dais and after he finished, the entire hall stood in applause for a good long time. “The ovation was marked out from others by its force and sincerity,” one attendee recalled. “Tukhachevsky was a good orator, and his speech stirred the audience to its depths.”²⁰⁰ The rousing account of Red Army might was published in Pravda (January 31) along with a photograph of Stalin, Voroshilov, and other politburo members listening to Tukhachevsky.²⁰¹

LITTLE BLACKBERRY

Nikolai Yezhov, along with Agranov, was the point man on the Kirov assassination fallout. Stalin convened a one-day Central Committee plenum on February 1, 1935, to formalize Yezhov’s appointment as a Central Committee secretary. Officially, he had been born (1895) to a working-class family in industrial St. Petersburg, but he hailed from Mariampol, in tsarist Lithuania, and his father was a musician, then a forest warden, brothel (“tearoom”) owner, and housepainter. His mother was the maid of the musical ensemble’s conductor and either an ethnic Lithuanian or a Russian who grew up in Lithuania. (Yezhov spoke Lithuanian and Polish, which he hid.) Having completed only first grade, he went to the imperial Russian capital at age eleven to apprentice to a tailor, before signing on to the Putilov Works and then being conscripted. He joined the Bolshevik party in 1917 (before October) and served as a military commissar during the civil war, after which his star rose as a regional party functionary in Tatarstan, then in Mari-El (east-central Russia), where he provoked anger for running roughshod over the local ethnics, and then in the Kazakh steppe (Semipalatinsk).²⁰² Yezhov enjoyed playing guitar, composing verse, reading—he had been dubbed Kolya the Book Lover—and building model ships.²⁰³ He was nervous and shy, and developed a reputation as mild-mannered, but he stood out for his uncommon energy.²⁰⁴ In 1927, Ivan Moskvin, the head of the Central Committee’s assignments and records department, had brought Yezhov into the central apparatus (they had met in the hotel at the 14th Party Congress). “I don’t know a more ideal worker, or rather executive,” Moskvin wrote to his son-in-law. “If you entrust him with anything, you need not check up: you can be sure, he will do it. Yezhov has only one fault, admittedly a fundamental one: he doesn’t know where to stop. . . . And sometimes one has to keep an eye on him in order to stop him in time.”²⁰⁵

Yezhov displaced his mentor Moskvin as head of assignments and records.The dictator had taken a shine to him, nicknaming him the Little Blackberry (Yezhevichka), and allowed him to attend politburo sessions, oversee personnel in the economy, and help run the orgburo.²⁰⁶ In late 1933, the émigré Socialist Herald had published a revealing essay on “the dictator’s inner circle” that ridiculed Yezhov. “Short in stature, nearly a dwarf, with thin curved legs, an asymmetric face, bearing the marks of his birth (his father was a hereditary alcoholic), with evil eyes, a thin squeaky voice, and a severely sarcastic tongue,” read the profile, calling him “a typical representative of the Petersburg lower-foreman type, whose determining character trait was rage against those born in better circumstances . . . enormous rage against the intelligentsia, including the party intelligentsia.”²⁰⁷ The ridicule confirmed Yezhov’s meteoric rise. Now a Central Committee secretary, he enjoyed a grand office on Old Square, on the top floor near the dictator’s, and use of a three-story villa with a private cinema, tennis court, nanny, and staff, in Meshcherino, the prerevolutionary artists’ and writers’ colony on the Pra River just outside Moscow. (Yezhov had divorced his first wife and married Yevgeniya Feigenberg Khayutina Gladun, a social climber whom he met at a government resort in Sochi—it was her third marriage—and she began to convene literary salons.)²⁰⁸

Stalin also promoted Chubar and Mikoyan, longtime candidate members of the politburo, to full membership, giving them the voting slots of Kirov and Kuibyshev. Zhdanov and Eihe became candidate politburo members.²⁰⁹ On February 27, 1935, Kaganovich replaced Andreyev as transport commissar, who became a Central Committee secretary. The railways had long been a bottleneck, and others posted there had not fared well (including Andreyev). On February 28, Stalin convened another one-day Central Committee plenum to formalize Andreyev’s promotion. Khrushchev got Kaganovich’s post as head of the Moscow party. Yezhov was put in charge of party personnel and local party organizations and freed from overseeing industry and managing the orgburo (responsibilities transferred to Andreyev). Yezhov also took over chairmanship of the party Control Commission from his mentor Kaganovich.²¹⁰ In a word, Kaganovich’s protégés in the apparatus became Stalin’s, and instead of the powerful post of de facto second secretary, held first by Molotov and then Kaganovich, Stalin now had a troika of three younger apparatchik deputies: Yezhov, Zhdanov, and Andreyev, of whom only Andreyev had met him before 1917.²¹¹ The most frequent visitors to Stalin’s Kremlin apartment for meals were now Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, and Andreyev.²¹² But the Little Blackberry spent more and more time in Stalin’s office.

SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT

Henri Barbusse’s Stalin: A New World Seen Through One Man came out in French in February 1935. The Frenchman was the sole foreign intellectual who had met Stalin both recently and in the past (1927, 1932, 1933, 1934), and at both his office and his apartment.²¹³ His draft manuscript had been submitted for review to the Soviet functionary Stetsky, who faced a dilemma: the book not only mentioned Trotsky, but also portrayed him as a thinker, while not portraying Stalin as such.²¹⁴ In a delicate dance to avoid alienating Barbusse, Stetsky managed to obtain changes. “Stalin is the Lenin of our day,” the final text felicitously stated. “Stalin is a person with a scholar’s mind, a worker’s figure, and a simple soldier’s dress.” Barbusse portrayed the cult, much maligned in Western Europe, as a natural phenomenon arising from the depths (“If Stalin believes in the masses, the masses believe in him”), and humanized the dictator. “It is not so much that his expression is a little wild as that there seems to be a perpetual twinkle in his eye,” Barbusse wrote. “He laughs like a child,” and “people who laugh like children love children.”²¹⁵

Barbusse made his motivations plain, writing that “every state except one is moving through fascism towards ruin.” But his knowledge of Soviet realities was dim.

Collective farms had stabilized, and the size of the harvests improved, in part from belated mechanization, in part from fortunate weather, but also from regime concessions to the farmers, who had been allowed to maintain “household plots” and personal cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens (though not horses, a sore point). In the Grand Kremlin Palace from February 11 to 17, 1935, the regime convened a Second all-Union Congress of Collective Farm Shock Workers, attended by 1,433 delegates, the majority of whom were not party members. Crop growers, herders, and tractor drivers were given the floor.²¹⁶ Maria Demchenko, of the Comintern Collective Farm in Kiev province, pledged to harvest 500 centners of sugar beets per hectare (“We must bombard the country with sugar”), which the regime made into a “movement” of 500ers (the average at her farm was 245). Stalin did not deliver a formal speech, but came and went all seven days. “Iosif Vissarionovich,” Demchenko told the delegates, “laughs with us, converses with us, shares his thoughts with us on how to work on the collective farm and how we can live better.”²¹⁷ One Kazakh tractor driver, Beken Tankin, a former nomad whose Russian was shaky, had been put in the position of chairing one of the nine sessions and became bewildered when delegates started shouting “Hurrah!” The ovation persisted. Finally, someone came up from behind and turned Tankin around: Stalin had reentered the congress presidium. Smiling, the dictator pointed to a button on the table for Tankin to press for quiet. “I’ll go home to my collective farm,” he said to himself, “with something to talk about.”²¹⁸

Delegates “elected” a commission of 170 members to consider a new charter for collective farms drafted by the Central Committee agriculture department.²¹⁹ At the commission, on February 16, Stalin went through the text point by point, grandly asserting that members were not taking into account the interests of collective farmers. Instead of the 0.10–0.12 hectare for household plots some people were recommending, he proposed 0.25 to 0.5, and even up to 1 hectare in some regions, depending on conditions, as well as up to one cow and two calves, one sow and its progeny, up to ten sheep and goats, unlimited poultry, and twenty bee-hives. “Comrade Stalin,” Kalinin objected, “we do not have enough land.” Voroshilov interjected that those getting 0.5 hectare would in any case be “a minority.” Stalin disagreed: “Our country is big, the conditions are very various.”²²⁰ He also recommended maternity leave of two months (at half average pay), a nod to the outsized role that ambitious women such as Demchenko played.²²¹ The final charter, approved on February 17, granted the leave, personal livestock, and household plots of the size Stalin suggested, and the press let the rural laborers know who was responsible for the ostensible largesse.²²² In fact, Stalin despised the household plots, and his regime strove to contain them.²²³

One contemporary émigré analyst deemed the 1935 household-plot-size concessions a “collective farm NEP,” but still likened the collective farms to the Gulag system, only larger.²²⁴ The state dominated the grain trade, imposing very heavy quotas and very low state prices, paying collective farmers subsistence wages, predominantly in kind, and forcing them to work in brigades—a demotion from peasant to laborer, which encouraged dependency and sloth.²²⁵ The regime also imposed unpaid obligations for roadwork, timber felling, and hauling, and required rural laborers (unlike urban workers) to deliver quotas of meat, milk, and eggs from their household plots, even if they did not own a cow or livestock. But after all the blood and tears of dekulakization, the new charter belatedly conceded legal entry into collective farms to former kulaks, albeit supposedly only “after a strict check to ensure that wolves in sheep’s clothing were not getting in on the pretext of being reformed characters.”²²⁶ The Soviet village ended up stratified, with rich and poor, based on bureaucratic position.²²⁷

“FORMERS”

Three women in their early twenties who worked as cleaning personnel in the Kremlin had sat down to “tea” and gossiped. One supposedly said, “Stalin has people do the work for him—that’s why he’s so fat. He has servants and luxuries.” The second: “Stalin killed his wife. He’s not Russian but Armenian, very evil, and never looks at anyone with a nice glance.” The third: “Comrade Stalin gets a lot of money and he misleads us, saying that he only makes 200 rubles [per month].” Rudolf Peterson, the Kremlin commandant—who had been one of the first to see Nadya’s body after she shot herself and was said to have given her vanished suicide note to Stalin—passed a report of these conversations to Yenukidze, who did nothing.²²⁸ But another denunciation came forward, and on January 20, 1935, the NKVD’s Pauker, Georgy Molchanov, and Genrikh Lyushkov, all of whom were involved in the investigation of Kirov’s murder on the NKVD’s watch, conducted interrogations. Yagoda sent Stalin a report that day about cleaning personnel who were said to belong to “a counterrevolutionary group” in the Kremlin.²²⁹

Yezhov, meanwhile, had invited the dictator to join him at a closed-door operational gathering of all NKVD central and provincial bosses on February 3; Stalin accepted, and delivered a speech on vigilance.²³⁰ At the gathering, Agranov contradicted the official line on the Kirov murder, stating, accurately, that “Nikolayev was gripped by ecstasy over fulfilling an historical mission, comparing himself to Zhelyabov and [Alexander] Radishchev.” Agranov went on to issue a mea culpa: “We did not succeed in proving that the ‘Moscow Center’ knew and prepared a terrorist act against comrade Kirov.”²³¹

In the testimony of Kremlin employees, each person mentioned other names, leading to new arrests, and on February 5, Yagoda sent Stalin a report with interrogation protocols containing confessions of private complaints about daily life and a lack of democracy, as well as “Trotskyite interpretations of Lenin’s so-called Testament” and speculation about how Stalin’s wife had really died.²³² While interrogating Kremlin janitors, the NKVD heard about some daughters of former nobles who worked as librarians in the Kremlin, transporting books back and forth from the private residences. Yagoda’s power ended at the Kremlin walls—inside, Yenukidze’s central executive committee apparatus and Voroshilov’s defense commissariat ruled—and the NKVD chief evidently made professions that he could not be responsible for the safety of the leadership with such women going about using special passes. Testimony was spun into the existence of an “aristocratic nest” around Nina Rozenfeld, an ethnic Armenian, educated at gymnasium, who was said to have boasted of her descent from an ancient Muscovy clan. (One arrested colleague defended her as “a Soviet-inclined person.”)²³³ Stalin read, numbered, and marked up the voluminous interrogation protocols with queries or comments. On one, where it was noted that the accused had initially been a cleaning lady before becoming a Kremlin librarian, he underlined the sentence and wrote, “Ha-ha, cleaner-librarian?”²³⁴

These were indeed small fry.²³⁵ Nonetheless, on February 14, the politburo substituted the NKVD for the central executive committee as the defense commissariat’s partner for oversight of the Kremlin.²³⁶ The NKVD took over the reconstruction of the Grand Kremlin Palace’s Andreyev and Alexandrov halls and of the Sverdlov Hall in the Imperial Senate. This looked like a triumph for Yagoda, but on February 22, the politburo directed Yezhov, not Yagoda, to conduct a verification of the central executive committee apparatus. NKVD interrogation protocols in the “Kremlin Affair” had to be sent to him.²³⁷ Zinoviev, meanwhile, had been hauled out of prison and re-interrogated in Moscow on February 19 in connection with the Kirov murder. “To Kamenev belongs the winged formulation on how ‘Marxism is now whatever is convenient for Stalin,’” he testified. “Kamenev and I did discuss Stalin’s removal, but we thought only in terms of his being replaced in the post of general secretary. . . . I did not hear declarations by Kamenev about a terrorist act in the struggle with the party leadership.”²³⁸ Yezhov had work to do. Soon the politburo would formally task him with reviewing the statutes governing the NKVD: further pressure on Yagoda.²³⁹

Yezhov praised Zakovsky, whose Leningrad Chekists were poring over prerevolutionary archives, address lists, and phone books, stringing together people like beads to form counterrevolutionary “organizations” of former nobles, merchants, factory owners, rentiers, old regime functionaries, priests, and family members.²⁴⁰ Zakovsky had been a Red Guard protecting Smolny during the October Revolution, and his Cheka service dated from its founding, in December 1917 (he was said to have been invited to join by Dzierżyński). He had completed just two years of schooling, yet he was credited with compiling the internal NKVD training textbook. He had reported to Yagoda on the more than 11,000 “former people” employed in the city’s party and government institutions.²⁴¹ Yagoda, in a note to Stalin (February 26), objected to indiscriminate roundups of “formers,” unless they were proven counterrevolutionaries, because of the potential for a negative press campaign abroad, but Stalin brushed the memo aside (“to the archive”).²⁴² Beginning on February 28, Zakovsky and his minions began “cleansing” the former people, the universities, and the border zones, requesting authorization for ever more arrests in “unmasked” conspiracies and boasting of preventing terrorist acts against the new Leningrad party boss, Zhdanov.²⁴³

FOREIGN MODELS

Bulgakov’s The Days of the Turbins had been returned to theaters, partly as a result of Gorky’s determination and political weight.²⁴⁴ By some accounts, Stalin saw it fifteen times.²⁴⁵ In 1935, he sent the fourteen-year-olds Vasily and Artyom to see it. Artyom recalled not comprehending the play, because it showed no Reds, only Whites, and the latter fought among themselves. Stalin explained that “between the Reds and the Whites there was a spectrum from almost Red to almost White, so that the people who fight in the play, some are very White, others a bit pink, but not Red. They could not get along, so they fought. Never think that you can divide people between purely Red and purely White. That is only leaders, the more literate, conscious people. The masses follow these or those, frequently confusing them, and do not go where they are supposed to go.”²⁴⁶

Stalin approved an International Film Festival in Moscow (February 21–March 2, 1935) and allowed the world-renowned Eisenstein to chair the jury. Captions under photographs of the Soviet participants read “director,” while Eisenstein’s read “Extraordinary World-Class Director,” but speakers pointedly asked why he had not made a film in six years, accusing him of silence about Soviet achievements.²⁴⁷ Walt Disney animations—Three Little Pigs, Peculiar Penguins—were featured (and, before the year was out, shown to the Soviet public).²⁴⁸ An American film about Mexico called Viva, Villa! was also screened, prompting the poet Alexander Bezymensky to accuse Jolly Fellows of having plagiarized its music from this film. This spurred renewed ideological attacks against mere laughter. “Jolly Fellows creates the impression that some bourgeois directors sneaked into the studios at night and secretly shot the film using a Soviet stage set,” a French critic remarked, as quoted in the Soviet press.²⁴⁹ Stalin ordered Mekhlis at Pravda to defend Shumyatsky, and the attack dog editorialized, without irony, that “both editors [of Izvestiya and Literary Newspaper] have apparently forgotten the elementary rules of decency essential to Soviet newspapers.”²⁵⁰

At the concluding ceremony in the Columned Hall of the House of Trade Unions, Leningrad Film took first prize, primarily for Chapayev; The Last Billionaire by the French-born René-Lucien Chomette, known as René Clair, took second; and Disney third.²⁵¹ Clair’s film, a commercial flop in France, portrays a nearly bankrupt fictional European kingdom (“Casinaria”) that begs for help from the earth’s richest man (“Monsieur Banco”), who, upon arrival, is accidentally hit in the head and awakens a babbling imbecile. Casinaria soon becomes a dictatorship.²⁵²

Certain types of foreign literature were being translated, and, once in Russian (or another Soviet language), they could be incorporated, alongside Lev Tolstoy, into the Soviet canon as “classics of world literature.” This included Cervantes, Molière, Balzac, Goethe, and especially Shakespeare, all of whom were often translated freely, rather than literally.²⁵³ “Shakespearize More!” (an exhortation credited to Marx) had been revived, with propagandists characterizing him as a “people’s bard.”²⁵⁴ For a March 1935 international theater festival in Moscow—Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Eisler, and Edward Gordon Craig participated—the featured Soviet entrant was Shakespeare’s King Lear, which had premiered at the Moscow State Jewish Theater in Yiddish, with Solomon Mikhoels playing Lear.²⁵⁵ Of course, Lear had lost all his territory and descended into insanity.²⁵⁶

TAKE CARE

Local officials all around the Union were reporting to Stalin on steel, chemicals, military hardware. Beria was reporting on Baku oil and Georgian rare metals, the boost in manganese output at Chiatura, the performance of the Tiflis railway shops now named for Stalin, and the output of new plants: the Tiflis machine-tool factory, now named for Kirov; Zestafoni Ferroalloy Plant; Inguri Pulp and Paper.²⁵⁷ Lakoba’s reports concerned tea, citrus, tobacco, and geraniums. He sent crates of tangerines and lemons to Stalin and Orjonikidze in Moscow. But Abkhazia’s resorts left a lot to be desired. “Authority, comrades, does not arise by itself; it needs to be won. It arises where living people get things done, not from books, not from formulas,” he had told the 7th Congress of Soviets of the Abkhaz autonomous republic in March 1935. “You know, comrades, in resort construction we still look very weak.. . . . We have not managed to reestablish our old resorts fully.”²⁵⁸ Nonetheless, the Abkhaz autonomous republic was awarded the Order of Lenin, partly for tobacco production (which was largely the work of family farms, not collectives).²⁵⁹

As the NKVD interrogated ever more Kremlin personnel, Yenukidze’s name inevitably came up.²⁶⁰ Well liked, he ran a regime of favors, doling out unique state resources and using his status as Stalin’s intimate to take care of old friends and solve sticky matters involving elite households.²⁶¹ The fifty-eight-year-old had never married and had not himself moved into the Kremlin, continuing to live in the Metropole, where the central executive committee had had its original offices, but if he was trying to keep his bedding of underage females out of sight, he failed. During testimony, some arrested Kremlin employees mentioned Yenukidze’s “girls.” Irina Gogua, another Kremlin employee who fell into the NKVD’s net, was the daughter of an old Menshevik who had gone to school with Yenukidze in Tiflis. “He was a fantastic guy, very charming, a flaming redhead who, thanks to graying, had become such a soft blond,” she would recall of Yenukidze. “True, his face was pockmarked, even more so than Iosif Vissarionovich’s. . . . You see, it was a paradox. He was accused of debauchery, devil knows what. But he was a very warm person. He had one quality: he hated to say no, he helped people, independent of who they were. He had one weakness: girls who married his closest friends with whom he would fall in love.”²⁶²

What really got Yenukidze into trouble was his quiet disbursal of state funds to help the often destitute families of non-Bolshevik revolutionaries from the underground years, former Communist party oppositionists (Kamenev’s relatives), even former nobles (like himself) for whom he found jobs in the sprawling central executive committee. Kirov’s assassination had made such actions especially sinister but, protected by Voroshilov, Yenukidze was merely demoted on March 3, 1935, to a position in the central executive committee of the South Caucasus.²⁶³ Ivan Akulov, USSR procurator general, became secretary of the central executive committee; Andrei Vyshinsky took over as USSR procurator general.

The Kirov and Kremlin Affair investigations were now running in parallel. In Leningrad on March 10, Draule was tried and executed, along with her sister and brother-in-law; there was no public announcement.²⁶⁴ The next day, a secret NKVD circular observed that enemies had been smashed mercilessly but as a result had “gone deep underground,” so operatives had to dig deeper to find them.²⁶⁵ In Moscow, in further testimony (March 11), Nina Rozenfeld was said to have attributed Nadya Alliluyeva’s death to differences over party policy, while complaining about the removal of Zinoviev and Kamenev and a lack of democracy. Rozenfeld happened to be the former wife of Lev Kamenev’s brother Nikolai, and their son, Boris N. Rozenfeld, was labeled a Trotskyite.²⁶⁶ Nikolai Kamenev had been arrested, and found to have painted watercolors of Stalin. Finally, Lev Kamenev was interrogated (March 21) and asked about his brother, who Lev was told had confessed to planning to kill Stalin. Lev Kamenev said that after the arrests of the Zinoviev followers Ivan Bakayev and Grigory Yevdokimov in the wake of the Kirov murder, an agitated Zinoviev had come to him expressing fears of an action like Germany’s Night of the Long Knives against him and others. Stalin circulated the document to Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Yezhov, writing, “Idiotic interrogation of Kamenev.”²⁶⁷

Stalin had the politburo approve by telephone poll a secret party circular absolving Yenukidze of knowing of plans to assassinate the dictator, but deeming him to have been used by the class enemy. His demotion to the South Caucasus was judged too light a punishment.²⁶⁸ Gorky was following press accounts of the Kremlin Affair. “What is striking is not so much the behavior of Yenukidze, but the shameful indifference to this behavior of the party-ites,” he wrote ingratiatingly to Stalin (March 23, 1935). “Even the non-party people long ago knew and spoke about how the old man was surrounded by nobles, Mensheviks, and, in general, shitty flies.” Gorky asserted that the strangely well-informed émigré Socialist Herald got its inside information from Yenukidze’s staff. “The closer we get to war, the stronger will be the efforts of these jokers of all suits to try to assassinate you, in order to decapitate the Union,” Gorky stated in his letter, which Stalin circulated to the politburo. “This is natural, for the enemies see well: there is no one who could take your place. With your colossal and wise work, you have inculcated in millions of people trust and love to you—that’s a fact. . . . Take care of yourself.”²⁶⁹

Also on March 23, after protracted negotiations, the Soviets sold the Chinese Eastern Railway to Manchukuo for the convertible currency equivalent of 140 million yen, a fraction of its market (let alone strategic) value.²⁷⁰ (Stalin’s regime left behind a network of undercover agents.) On the same day, the politburo decreed that the payment would be used for more equipment purchases in the United States, Britain, and Germany for Moscow’s ZIS Factory, which manufactured heavy trucks and, soon, luxury sedans.²⁷¹ Chinese patriots said the railroad was not the Soviets’ to sell, and the Nationalist government in Nanking lodged an official protest. Chiang Kai-shek had opened semiofficial negotiations for a friendship treaty with Japan’s representative, who proposed a Sino-Japanese alliance. As a dedicated anti-Communist, Chiang would have been a natural ally of Japan (as well as Germany) against the Soviet Union.²⁷² But “Chiang Kai-shek did not go for this,” the Soviet chargé d’affaires in China had reported of the alliance proposal. Chiang did raise the Japanese legation to the status of an embassy, and the two countries announced an exchange of ambassadors. This provoked anti-Japanese protests in Tientsin and Peking. Japan, leaping on the “insult” of the protests, had its garrison in Tientsin expel the Chinese Nationalist authorities and soldiers from Hebei province, and then from the Chahar province of Inner Mongolia, as it spread its control over northern China. Japan would also ramp up pressure on the Soviet satellite Outer Mongolia.²⁷³ The Soviet chargé d’affaires, in the same report about Chiang, warned that another faction in the Nanking government “favors an alliance” with Japan.²⁷⁴

JOYRIDE

On April 22, 1935, after concluding meetings in the Little Corner at 7:00 p.m., Stalin went downstairs to his apartment for supper. It was the birthday of Svetlana’s governess, and the relatives had come by. Stalin was said to be in a good mood. During the toasts, Svetlana said she wanted to ride on the new Moscow metro. Her governess, Maria Svanidze, and others were to accompany her and Vasily; Kaganovich sent the party with his deputy. Suddenly Stalin said he wanted to go, too. Molotov was phoned to join. “Everybody was terribly concerned,” Svanidze wrote in her diary. “There was a lot of whispering about the danger of such an outing without proper preparation.”

A now pale Kaganovich suggested that they wait until midnight, when the metro shut down. Stalin insisted they go immediately. They drove in three cars to Moscow’s Crimea Square and descended into the station, waiting for what turned out to be twenty minutes; a train arrived already packed. Workers decoupled the car with the motor and Stalin’s group was off, to Hunters’ Row, the station closest to the Kremlin, where he inspected the station and the escalator; onlookers erupted. Stalin ended up surrounded by well-wishers. Bodyguards and police had arrived and tried to bring order. The crowd smashed an enormous metal lamp. Svanidze was nearly smothered against a column. Vasily was scared for his life. Svetlana was so frightened, she stayed in the train car. We “were intimidated by the uninhibited ecstasy of the crowd,” Svanidze wrote. “Iosif was merry.”

This was an unstaged moment catalyzed by his daughter. Stalin reboarded, traveling to the end of the line, Sokolniki, where he was supposed to get into a waiting automobile, but he decided to stay on board and return to Smolensk Square, where no vehicles were waiting (the train beat them). He and his entourage went on foot toward the Arbat as rain descended and puddles formed. A car finally arrived. Svetlana and Vasily were taken to the Kremlin apartment, where Vasily “threw himself on the bed and cried hysterically.” Stalin headed to the Near Dacha. Evidently, his obsession with possible assassination was in abeyance that evening: regular passengers had been allowed to ride in the train carriage with him from Hunters’ Row.²⁷⁵ “Iosif smiled affectionately the whole time,” Svanidze wrote in her diary. “I think that, despite all his sobriety, he was touched by the people’s love and attention to their Supreme Leader. . . . He once said about the ovations offered to him that people need a tsar, that is, someone to revere and in whose name to live and labor.”²⁷⁶

• • •

COULD STALIN HAVE MURDERED HIS CLOSEST FRIEND? He was capable of anything.²⁷⁷ But who, precisely, would have carried out that mission for him? Medved, who was incompetent, and would himself go to his grave suspecting that Yagoda had organized the murder on Stalin’s behalf?²⁷⁸ Zaporozhets, who broke his leg, took no part in any operational matters after September 1934, and had left town on an extended holiday in the weeks leading up to the critical deed? Borisov, a near invalid who had gotten his bodyguard job only because he was of working-class origin and, for a time, had been a night watchman and was a faithful dog to Kirov? A mystery second gunman in the corridor, who eluded every single witness, as well as the lockdown imposed after the shots were heard? There is no evidence whatsoever that Stalin killed Kirov (despite the work of several commissions under Khrushchev aimed at discrediting the dictator). And there is copious evidence, recorded right before and after the assassination, that Nikolayev did it, and managed to pull it off because of his determination and shoddy NKVD security practices that were, ultimately, traceable to Kirov himself.²⁷⁹ Nikolayev had motive, and opportunity.²⁸⁰ He roiled with grievance and summoned resolve from revolutionary terrorist history and Soviet ideals of a workers’ state and social justice. He plotted out numerous attempts, all of which failed, until finally a combination of planning and luck gave him the chance to fulfill a wish to exact revenge and make history.

While Nikolayev reclaimed a sense of higher purpose from his despair, Stalin’s regime made the Kirov assassination into an epoch-defining event. Most people in Leningrad and elsewhere, living in communal apartments, barracks, and mud huts, were preoccupied with material hardship. Apparatchiks complained that the discussions they were ordered to oversee of Kirov’s murder were overtaken by the pending end of bread rationing and threatened price increases.²⁸¹ The end of rationing had generated significant anxiety and resentment.²⁸² All the while, conspiracy theories flourished: Medved had slipped Nikolayev a pass to Smolny; Chudov had ordered a hit to take Kirov’s place; foreign agents had penetrated the building; it was Stalin’s doing (a rumor that grew over time). Police informants hastened to capture or invent such gossip. In Leningrad: “I like brave men like Nikolayev who must have gone to a certain death.” “It’s clear not all the Zhelyabovs have disappeared in Rus; the struggle for freedom goes on.” “The murderer wanted good for the people, that’s why he killed Kirov.” In the miners’ region of Donetsk: “Kirov was killed; it’s not enough; Stalin should have also been killed.”²⁸³

Speculation that the affable provincial party leader constituted a threatening political rival to Stalin is without foundation.²⁸⁴ Similarly, the regime folklore that Yagoda’s NKVD had “resisted” the direction of the investigation was largely invented. Yagoda had no issues with framing Zinoviev and “Zinovievites,” a scenario that Stalin, in any case, did not come to immediately. The dictator drove an overkill response to the murder, relying not just on the hyper-ingratiating Yezhov, Agranov, and Zakovsky, but also on Yagoda. Yagoda had suggested the foreign angle—textbook Stalinist practice—calling from Stalin’s office the first night.²⁸⁵ It was Stalin who had chosen not to investigate Nikolayev’s visits and telephone calls to the German and Latvian consulates. The fabrications, moreover, exacerbated the professional degradation of the secret police, which enraged Stalin, and for which he had recently abolished the OGPU in favor of the NKVD. The fabrications also hurt the USSR’s reputation internationally, to which Stalin had become more sensitive. At the same time, it is wrong to assert that Stalin “took advantage” of the Kirov assassination. He needed no such pretext to act as he chose. He pushed for fierce revenge against “enemies” and prevention of recurrences out of anger, and loss.

One of Stalin’s prime fixations was confirmed: the NKVD was asleep on the job. In a city teeming with foreigners and presumed foreign agents, with innumerable “former people” and other presumed class enemies, with even much of the lower orders disaffected by the sacrifices of building socialism, Leningrad’s secret-operative department had only a short, pathetic list of potential terrorists—and did not even share that list with the bodyguard department.²⁸⁶ A parallel obsession of Stalin’s was also confirmed: an enemy terrorist in possession of a party card, taking advantage of ties to party members, had penetrated security with ease and assassinated a top leader.²⁸⁷ In fact, Nikolayev had been purged, for a time, but the episode had only rendered him more dangerous, just as Stalin was warning (the “class struggle” sharpened). But Stalin chose not to make this the object of the investigation and trials. Nikolayev’s individual terrorism—which had grown from his violated sense of worker empowerment and Communist justice—was altered, at Stalin’s behest, into the mythology that Zinoviev and Kamenev, both powerless, were somehow behind the assassination. Then Stalin remained bothered by their sentencing for creating a “moral atmosphere” conducive to terrorism, because it had fallen short of convictions for direct preparation in terrorist acts by his old critics or direct links to his arch-nemesis Trotsky, who remained out of reach in foreign exile.²⁸⁸

Stalin increasingly was alone. Not only had both of his wives died, but now his closest friend was gone. Henceforth he went to the steam bath alone. Relations with Orjonikidze had become strained, and Stalin’s ardor for Lakoba was cooling, partly as a result of Beria’s intrigues. Stalin’s newer associates, Andreyev, Yezhov, and Zhdanov, were minions, not social peers, and he was not socially close to the unlettered Kaganovich or the stiff Molotov. But Stalin had the Soviet state, which he had helped build into a major military power.²⁸⁹ Still, despite joining the League of Nations, the Soviet state was also to a considerable extent alone. And, more and more, the militarized state and its ruler were being stalked from afar by a nemesis the likes of which, inside the party, Stalin had never faced: Adolf Hitler.