Stalin

CHAPTER 7 ENEMIES HUNTING ENEMIES

“I think, I think, and I can’t understand anything. What is happening?” Koltsov used to repeat, walking up and down in his office. . . . “These are people we have known for years, with whom we lived next door! . . . I feel I’m going crazy. I’m a member of the editorial board of Pravda, a well-known journalist . . . it would seem I should be able to explain to others the sense of what is happening, the reasons for so many unmaskings and arrests. But in fact, I, like the last terrified philistine, know nothing, understand nothing, I’m bewildered, wander in the dark.”

BORIS YEFIMOV, Soviet caricaturist, talking about his brother Mikhail Koltsov ¹

INTO 1937, the Soviet colossus would seem to have been at the height of its power, helping to stave off Franco’s seizure of Madrid with its military hardware and know-how, but the USSR itself had fallen under grim siege. The NKVD was suffering a massacre—and not after it had arrested at least 1.6 million people but all the while it was doing so. Between late 1936 and late 1938, arrests of NKVD personnel exceeded 20,000. The NKVD’s Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB), which directly perpetrated the wholesale bloodletting, was decimated: around 2,300 of the 22,000 state security operatives were arrested—269 in the center and 2,064 in locales—of whom the great bulk (1,862) were charged with “counterrevolution.”² All eighteen “commissars of state security” (the top ranks) who served under Yagoda would be shot, with a single exception (who would be poisoned). Stalin also decimated his top military commanders, while constantly reminding the public that an attack on the Soviet Union was imminent, indeed that a new imperialist war had already started over Spain.

Even following the executions of Kamenev, Zinoviev, Pyatakov, and others in the two public trials of August 1936 and late January 1937, massacres of NKVD state security and Red Army officers would come as a shock. One high official, though, did sense what was about to unfold. On January 11, Artur Artuzov, a onetime Stalin favorite, was sacked as deputy head of military intelligence, having been the target of relentless intrigue by military men as a person from the civilian side. Artuzov was transferred back to the NKVD, to a low-level position in the archives department, where he did all he could to return himself to favor, writing an overview of Soviet counterintelligence, which he had founded, and begging for an audience with Yezhov. Failing that, he wrote to Yezhov on January 25 that NKVD foreign intelligence possessed information from foreign sources, dating back many years but never forwarded to higher-ups, revealing a “Trotskyite organization” in the Red Army. Sensationally, the documents linked Marshal Tukhachevsky to foreign powers.³ Artuzov knew full well how such compromising materials had been planted in Europe in order to make their way back to Moscow: in the 1920s he had helped lead just such an operation (“The Trust”).⁴ Now, to these fabricated documents he appended a list of thirty-four “Trotskyites” in military intelligence. His cynical efforts at ingratiation and revenge would not save his own life, but Artuzov had guessed right about Stalin’s intentions.⁵

Explanations for Stalin’s rampage through his own officer corps have ranged from his unquenchable thirst for power to the existence of an actual conspiracy.⁶ Nearly every dictator lusts for power, and in this case there was no military conspiracy. Nor were the massacres a response to a pressing new international crisis in 1937–38. Even the potential fall of the Republic forces in Spain posed no direct threat to the Soviet Union or Stalin’s regime. Another interpretation asserts that he “misperceived” a threat of foreign infiltration into the Soviet officer corps, owing to the barrage of intelligence reports he received, and decided to root out what he wrongly concluded were foreign agents throughout the officer corps, and then, as denunciations arrived in a flood, the process “escaped” his control. But Stalin demanded those very intelligence reports that allegedly led to his “misperceptions,” issuing specific instructions and questions to intelligence officials, who came to understand what he wanted.⁷ A spiral of denunciations certainly took place; this again was something Stalin could have tamped down, but instead fomented at every turn.

A few scholars have argued that Stalin was “tricked” into executing his military men.⁸ Reinhard Heydrich, of the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (SD), would later boast of his clever work to decapitate the Red Army by manufacturing compromising materials, but such machinations, if they took place, were of no consequence.⁹ Soviet secret agents were tasked with spreading rumors in Europe of a pending military coup in Moscow, which other Soviet representatives abroad picked up and reported back to Moscow.¹⁰ Uritsky, chief of military intelligence (who had squeezed out Artuzov), informed Stalin and Voroshilov about chatter in German military circles in Berlin concerning political opposition among Red Army generals (which Uritsky discounted).¹¹ Paris may have been the liveliest echo chamber: Beria (for whom the city was a long-standing field of operations) sent a relative of his wife there to spread rumors among Georgian Menshevik émigré circles of a pending military coup in Moscow. This, or another channel, prompted French minister of war Édouard Daladier to convey official word to the Soviet ambassador, who in turn sent a coded telegram to Moscow about a plot “by German circles to promote a coup d’état in the Soviet Union with the assistance of persons from the command staff of the Red Army.”¹² Stalin—as the wily but doomed Artuzov surmised—was engaged in the very activity of which he accused the top army commanders: collaborating with foreign enemies.¹³ A “Tukhachevsky plot” did exist: Stalin’s, to smear and execute him.

Top military officers of any regime, in a war, could fall into enemy captivity or even choose to collaborate with foreign occupiers, and while it seems doubtful that Tukhachevsky or Iona Yakir or Jeronimas Uborevičius, the three most authoritative commanders in the Red Army, would have agreed to serve as puppets installed by foreign powers to control conquered Soviet territory, in theory they were among the very few who could have. Preemption of a replacement government could have been part of Stalin’s motivation in liquidating these men, but he went far, far beyond that aim: out of approximately 144,000 officers, some 33,000 were removed in 1937–38, and Stalin ordered or incited the irreversible arrest of around 9,500 and the execution of perhaps 7,000 of them.¹⁴ Of the 767 most high-ranking commanders, at least 503—and by some accounts more than 600—were executed or imprisoned. And among the highest rungs of 186 commanders of divisions, the carnage took 154, as well as 8 of the 9 admirals, 13 of the army’s 15 full generals, and 3 of its 5 marshals. What great power has ever executed 90 percent of its top military officers? What regime, in doing so, could expect to survive? An assault on such scale, and without regime collapse, could only happen within the structures of a one-party Leninist regime and, ultimately, the conspiratorial worldview and logic of Communism, a Manichean universe of two camps and pervasive enemies. The combination of Communist ways of thinking and political practice with Stalin’s demonic mind and political skill allowed for astonishing bloodletting.

BEDFELLOWS AND STRANGERS

Stalin’s attack on military and NKVD bigwigs consumed enormous time and energy but otherwise presented few difficulties for him. He could even make light of it all, as if peacocking his power, repeating such stories as the one about the professor who embarrassed an ignoramus Chekist for not knowing the author of Yevgeny Onegin (Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s national poet). The Chekist arrested the professor, then bragged, “I got the professor to confess! He wrote it!”¹⁵ During the week of February 10, 1937, the entire country commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the death of Pushkin. The poet underwent a metamorphosis from aristocratic serf owner who fathered a child by one serf and sold others to the army to a radical-democrat bard of the people. Pravda (February 10) declared that Pushkin was “entirely ours, entirely Soviet, insofar as it is Soviet power that has inherited all the best in our people.” Altogether, 13.4 million copies of Pushkin’s works were published in some form—said to be one of every five books in Soviet libraries.¹⁶ Before the year was out, the bitter joke would make the rounds that if Pushkin had been born in the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth, he still would have died in the year ’37.

That same month of February 1937, China’s Nationalist ruling group balked at approving the united front to which Chiang had agreed, proposing accommodation with the Japanese and suppression of the Communists, but Chiang overrode them, reconfirming the significance of Stalin’s refusal to allow him to be executed after he had been taken hostage. Chinese Communists, flush with foreign currency from both Nanking and Moscow, had purchased a fleet of American-made trucks, making them much more mobile, and did not take well to a renewed alliance with the generalissimo.¹⁷ The party leadership tried to quell the sentiment with a confidential communiqué to the ranks promising that the united front against the Japanese would allow the Communists to expand their influence a thousand times. Chiang was shown a copy.¹⁸ Here was an act of treason not invented by the NKVD.

China had been afforded none of the centrality in the Soviet public sphere that Spain had. Stalin’s bold projection of Soviet military power onto the Iberian Peninsula, in the name of international worker solidarity, had struck a chord. “The only thing that existed for us that year was Spain, the fight with the fascists,” Alexei Adzhubei, a schoolboy in 1937 (and the future son-in-law of Khrushchev), would recall. “Spanish caps—blue with red edging on the visor—then came into fashion, and also big berets, which we tilted at a rakish angle.”¹⁹ NKVD informants reported some bitter remarks (“One’s children don’t see chocolate and butter, and we are sending them to Spanish workers”) but found real solidarity.²⁰ Inside Spain, however, Soviet advisers appear not to have understood, or to have been willing to admit, that the Francoists had support among broad swaths of the Spanish population who were Catholic and conservative. Instead, the deputy chief of Soviet military intelligence in Spain contrasted the “overwhelming majority of the Spanish people” (“the working masses”) with the “German and Italian interventionists and the military-fascist clique of Franco.”

Soviet class suspicions extended to Spanish military men fighting for the Republic. The same intelligence summary noted that, “up to now, officers and generals who are politically unreliable have had great influence in the bureaucracy of the war ministry and on the general staff and the staffs of the fronts. They are hindering and sabotaging measures for the organization and a more rational use of the Republic’s armed forces.”²¹ Complementing these class-politics suspicions was the Soviets’ low opinion of the Spaniards’ know-how.²² “In the Spanish army, the situation was so bad that our advisers were required to perform both organizational and operational combat tasks,” recalled Kirill Meretskov, a top Soviet military official in-country.²³ Of course, Soviet advisers knew little of Spanish history, mentalities, or language. Nikolai Kuznetsov, the chief naval adviser, had spent his first week wandering Madrid on his own, attempting to pick up a few words of the language, while evaluating the Republic’s military situation. Often, no interpreter was available, or only a terrible one. Officials in Moscow initially refused to accept “White Guard” émigré Russians who volunteered for the Republic. Even after Moscow relented, no more than one interpreter per ten Soviets was ever found.²⁴

Ignorance was only part of the challenge. Antonov-Ovseyenko nearly provoked the resignation of the Spanish finance minister, Negrín, who accused the Soviet representative in Barcelona of being “more Catalan than the Catalans.”²⁵ Many Soviet advisers were said to emulate feudal lords, keeping villas, Spanish wine caches, and concubines.²⁶ Ambassador Rosenberg projected imperiousness, being escorted everywhere by half a dozen bodyguards. “If he stepped into a pissoir on the Cuatro Caminos,” observed Louis Fischer, the fellow-traveling American journalist, “they surrounded its tin walls and waited.”²⁷ Rosenberg would visit Largo Caballero, with his sprawling entourage, and, like a proconsul, issue explicit instructions (“It would be expedient to dismiss X”).²⁸ The politburo, by telephone poll, had approved a directive that Rosenberg not force this or that decision on the Spanish government (“An ambassador is not a commissar, but at most an adviser”), but it was too late.²⁹ “Out you go! Go out!” Largo Caballero finally had shouted at Rosenberg, during a meeting in January 1937, loud enough for all those outside to hear. “You must learn, Señor Ambassador, that the Spaniards may be poor and need aid from abroad, but we are sufficiently proud not to accept that a foreign ambassador should try and impose his will on the head of the Spanish government.”³⁰

While Soviet condescension collided with local pride in Spain, in Moscow the Spanish Republic failed to finance its embassy during its first year or to keep its representative informed, even though Stalin afforded the ambassador, Dr. Marcelino Pascua—a medical statistician who spoke Russian—unusual access (as well as a two-story mansion, featuring eight bedrooms, four baths, two kitchens, and two salons). By protocol, Stalin did not receive foreign envoys, but in the Little Corner on February 3, 1937, he, along with Molotov and Voroshilov, received Pascua, who was carrying a personal letter from Largo Caballero (dated January 12).³¹ The Soviet trio warned the envoy that Spanish Republic codes were easy to break and urged him to use couriers instead of telegrams. (Eight months later, Voroshilov was still issuing the warning.) Pascua, for his part, indicated that Spain would like to sign a treaty of friendship. Stalin rebuffed him, disingenuously stating that “if Spain distanced itself somewhat from the USSR,” the Republic could “obtain aid from Britain.”³² The conversation lasted nearly five hours. Stalin asked Pascua to convey to the Spanish people his wishes “for a complete victory over the internal and external enemies of the Spanish Republic.”³³

The next day, Stalin convened an expansive internal gathering on the course of the war in Spain, summoning tankists, aviators, engineers, and others who had firsthand combat experience there. The conclusions reached remain unknown.³⁴ But later in the month of February, he had the politburo approve additional large sales of weapons to Spain, based upon lists submitted by Voroshilov and Uritsky. Stalin, at his tête-à-tête with Pascua, had spoken ill of his own diplomatic representatives in Spain. On February 9, the politburo voted by telephone poll to replace Rosenberg with his deputy Gaikis, who had been recalled for consultations and was on his way to Moscow; Gaikis, too, would vanish.³⁵ Just nine months after the appearance of a Soviet ambassador in Spain, Moscow would again be left without one. Spain, for its part, would withdraw and not replace its ambassador (the next year), leaving its Moscow embassy with more canines than Spanish nationals.³⁶ Republic Spain’s old-line Socialists deeply distrusted Communists and looked on the Soviet Union as never more than a means to an end.

Soviet advisers themselves were often at daggers drawn. Koltsov freelanced as an adviser and Soviet agent with the Soviet military’s connivance, thereby angering Comintern officials who denounced him to Moscow. Berzin complained to Voroshilov and Yezhov of the Spanish government’s dissatisfaction with the decorated NKVD operative Alexander Orlov and recommended his recall. Orlov, who had been promoted to NKVD station chief in Spain, wrote to Moscow, in late February 1937, that Soviet military attaché “Gorev has no military experience. In war affairs he is a child. [Berzin] is a good party member, but he is not an expert—and this is the pinnacle of our command.”³⁷ Gorev complained that “they all blame each other for thousands of mortal sins, gather facts, even the smallest ones, about each other, and accuse one another of interference.” Here was the pot calling the kettle black, for Gorev had written to Voroshilov complaining of the chief Soviet tank commander, General Semyon Krivoshein, that he “has still not learned what can be discussed over the telephone and what is not permitted.”³⁸ Soviet advisers, though, were often caught between a rock and a hard place. “Before my departure, comrade Voroshilov gave me a short directive on the work of our people,” Grigory Stern, promoted to the senior Soviet military official in-country, would report. “Do not in any circumstance issue an order, but . . . do everything necessary for victory.”³⁹

Predictably, Voroshilov violated his own strictures, issuing specific orders, down to the movement of tanks, as he tried to direct entire military operations from Moscow.⁴⁰

Whether because they came to understand what Stalin wanted to hear or themselves shared the conspiratorial worldview, Soviet military advisers increasingly wrote of treachery. “The fascist intervention in Spain and the Trotskyite-Bukharinite bands arming in our country are the link in a single chain,” one adviser reported to Moscow. Similarly, Stashevsky, the top Soviet political operative in Spain, wrote to Moscow, “I am sure there are provocations everywhere, and it is not excluded that a fascist organization exists among the [Republic’s] higher officers.” Some actual or would-be agents of Italian intelligence and the Gestapo were being uncovered and arrested behind Republic lines, but it was hard to know if this was what Stashevsky meant.⁴¹ Stalin demanded investigations, but he meant of treacherous Soviet advisers: “Check every cipher clerk, radio operator, and generally every employee in communications, and fill the headquarters with new people, loyal and fight-capable. . . . Without this radical measure the Republicans will certainly lose the war. This is our firm conviction.”⁴²

WAR OF ATTRITION

Stalin had scheduled the next Central Committee plenum for February 20. The agenda approved by the politburo on February 5 included a report on the Bukharin-Rykov case (Yezhov); three reports on wrecking and espionage in industry (Orjonikidze, Kaganovich, Yezhov); and a report on “the political education of party cadres and measures of the struggle against Trotskyism and other double-dealers in party organizations” (Stalin).⁴³ There would also be a report on elections to party organizations and to the new Supreme Soviet (Zhdanov), in line with the new constitution. Unbeknownst to the Central Committee members, in preparation for the gathering, Georgy Malenkov, a thirty-five-year-old apparatchik overseeing personnel, had secretly compiled inventories of “anti-Soviet elements.” These consisted of all “formers”: tsarist officials, military officers, police, merchants, and nobles; White officers and officials; SRs, Mensheviks, and kulaks—eighteen categories of people, all told, who were viewed as targets for recruitment by foreign adversaries. “It should be noted in particular,” Malenkov underscored in a cover note to Stalin (February 15), “that there are currently more than 1.5 million former members and candidates of the party who have been expelled or lost their membership card over the course of events at various times dating to 1922.” He designated more than 100,000 as “alien” or “socially harmful.” Stalin underlined Malenkov’s figures.⁴⁴

Suddenly the number of putative enemies was colossal, and they were everywhere. At the Moscow Ball-Bearing Factory, for example, there were 1,084 expellees and only 452 current party members, an alarming picture that could be found at strategic enterprises all across the Union.⁴⁵ And it was in the big factories that the party was strongest. Of course, these were people who had been expelled by Stalin’s purges and party card exchanges, so if any had become disloyal, the dictator had a big hand in making them so. As per usual practice, Central Committee members received a package of preparatory documents, and in them Stalin included “testimonies” being extracted in Lubyanka cellars implicating sitting Central Committee members. But Malenkov’s inventories remained secret as the NKVD field couriers delivered the plenum packages to the Central Committee, the party Control Commission, and around fifty invited guests, including, unusually, some twenty operatives from the NKVD.⁴⁶

Stalin edited Orjonikidze’s draft report for the plenum, advising, “State with facts which branches are affected by sabotage and exactly how they are affected.”⁴⁷ That same evening, arriving considerably late, Orjonikidze addressed the central directorate of his heavy industry commissariat. He admonished officials that worker deaths on the job used to elicit reactions even under the “Black Hundred” Duma of tsarist days, while in the USSR, twenty workers could be killed and buried and officials would report the working class in good spirits. He lashed out at them for failing to see wrecking (“Do you tell me how you’ll end the wrecking and which measures you’ll adopt?”) while also employing Stalin’s language to condemn his recently executed deputy Pyatakov. Orjonikidze was as familiar as anyone with Stalin’s emotional bullying. During the first forty-seven days of 1937, he met Stalin in the Little Corner twenty-two times, for a total of almost seventy-two hours.⁴⁸ There were also phone calls, meals together, walks on the Kremlin grounds. The heavy industry commissar, careful to demonstrate his loyalty, was trying to soften the dictator’s rule. Orjonikidze indicated to his staff that alleged incidents of sabotage should be investigated objectively, and decided to send his own commissions to look into the NKVD’s three most sensational “wrecking cases,” evidently hoping to present fresh reports to the Central Committee plenum and disprove the blanket allegations.⁴⁹

On February 17, 1937, Orjonikidze arrived at his commissariat, across the way from Old Square, at 12:10 p.m., two hours later than usual; he seems to have gone over to talk to Stalin, being one of the few people who could enter the dictator’s Kremlin apartment.⁵⁰ Upon returning to his own Kremlin apartment, in the same Amusement Palace, Orjonikidze evidently had a shouting match over the telephone with Stalin, with profanities in Russian and Georgian.⁵¹ The NKVD had been searching Orjonikidze’s apartment, an obvious provocation.⁵² The remainder of Orjonikidze’s day was occupied with meetings, including a politburo meeting at 3:00 p.m. to go over the plenum reports. Stalin hand-corrected Orjonikidze’s draft resolution on sabotage, inserting passages about “Trotskyite wreckers.” In the early evening, Orjonikidze made his way back to the commissariat for more meetings, leaving for home at 12:20 a.m. (February 18). Later that morning, he did not emerge from his bedroom to take breakfast. When one of his subordinates came by in the afternoon, he refused to receive him. At around dusk, his wife, Zinaida, heard a gunshot in the bedroom. Orjonikidze was dead.⁵³

Informed on the apartment’s Kremlin line by Zinaida, Stalin summoned the cronies to the Little Corner, whence they walked to Orjonikidze’s apartment. Then, at 8:55 p.m., Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Mikoyan, Postyshev (recently sacked as Kiev party boss), and Yezhov—in essence, the inner regime at this point—assembled again in the Little Corner. Doctor Levin was summoned at 9:40, for five minutes. The group remained until 12:25 a.m. (February 19).⁵⁴ Stalin chose not to use the death to further his allegations of ubiquitous enemy agents. Instead, public accounts gave the cause as “heart failure,” said to have occurred at 5:30 p.m. on February 18, during Orjonikidze’s daily nap.

The opening of the plenum was delayed for three days. Out-of-town members had begun to arrive at the Metropole, Moskva, and National hotels only to discover Orjonikidze’s untimely death, reported in Soviet newspapers (February 19). The country went into grief-stricken shock. Orjonikidze had been a mere fifty years old. “The Hall of Columns [in the House of Trade Unions], wreaths, music, the scent of flowers, tears, honor guards, thousands and thousands of people passing by the open casket,” recalled one eyewitness.⁵⁵ Stalin stood in the honor guard. On February 21, following an extravagant state funeral, the urn with Orjonikidze’s ashes was interred in the Kremlin Wall (adjacent to his friend Kirov). “Comrades, we have lost one of the best leaders of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet state,” Molotov stated in the main eulogy, blaming “the Trotskyite degenerates,” the “Pyatakovs,” for hastening Orjonikidze’s death.⁵⁶ But rumors spread in Moscow, picked up by the Menshevik Socialist Herald in Paris, that Stalin had either killed him or driven him to suicide.⁵⁷

Probably the best chance to stop Stalin was gone. Orjonikidze had been beholden to the principle of party unity, and he had no independent access to the press or radio, and no levers over the NKVD or the army.⁵⁸ Still, he possessed colossal authority, having worked closely with Lenin, beginning before the revolution, with service as a courier between the European emigration and Russia, and for years supervising heavy industry, the regime’s crowning achievement.⁵⁹ He could have tried to use this standing to force a showdown at the plenum over fabricated wrecking charges.⁶⁰ But even had he done so, only collective action could have succeeded, requiring Orjonikidze to possess resolve and cunning to organize all or most of the other top Stalinists—not only Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan, who had been close to Orjonikidze, but also Molotov, who was not—in unified action against Stalin. For any of them individually, broaching the subject of moving against Stalin would have been tantamount to political, and perhaps physical, death. Moreover, even if troubled by Stalin’s gathering homicidal behavior, they all, including Orjonikidze, still recognized him as the leader. It was Stalin who shouldered such complex matters as Spain, China, Nazi Germany, Britain and France, the party machine, ideology.

Orjonikidze had confided thoughts of suicide to Kaganovich and Mikoyan.⁶¹ In published photographs taken near the body, Kaganovich was seen expressing visibly strong emotions: grief, anger. He had lost his soul mate, and he knew Stalin had been sadistically pressuring the infirm Orjonikidze. Kaganovich—tough as nails, explosive—was spiritually broken. Stalin went on to break Mikoyan, summoning him in 1937 to discuss the arrest of his subordinate in the food industry commissariat, Mark Belenky, then, after Mikoyan supposedly protested and Stalin called him blind in matters of personnel, summoning him again to show him protocols of Belenky’s “confession.” “Have a look: he confessed to wrecking,” Stalin said. “You vouched for him. Go and read it!” Mikoyan called it “a blow against me.”⁶² Members of the inner circle were no longer comrades of the ruler. Stalin was no longer first among peers, but a despot.⁶³

EXTIRPATION

Molotov opened the delayed Central Committee plenum on February 23 in the Sverdlov rotunda of Catherine the Great’s Imperial Senate, and in the shadow of Orjonikidze’s death. The sessions would last an unusual eleven days, longer than any other plenum.⁶⁴ NKVD officials from all around the country, most of them not members of the Central Committee, were conspicuous. Stalin set a tone of menace in his opening remarks, calling top officials who had been arrested “empty chatterboxes, lacking technical training,” whose only claim to fame was “possession of a party card.” He added that “current wreckers have no technical advantages over our people. On the contrary, in technical terms our people are better prepared.” Sounding a cherished theme, he boasted that “we have tens of thousands of capable people, talented people. We need only to know them and promote them, so that they do not get stuck in the old place and begin to rot.”⁶⁵

The first order of business at the choreographed gathering, though, was Bukharin and Rykov. On the opening evening, Yezhov reported on the accusations of treason. Mikoyan reliably reinforced his points. Bukharin had written a long rebuttal of the press slander against him to the politburo and announced a hunger strike. Now, in a debilitated state, unshaven, wearing a rumpled suit, he was given the floor. He denied the charges but was mercilessly heckled. “Trotsky and his disciples Zinoviev and Kamenev once worked with Lenin, and now these people have reached an agreement with Hitler,” Stalin interrupted. “After all that has happened with these men, these former comrades who have reached an agreement with Hitler in order to sell out the USSR, there are no more surprises in human life. You must prove everything. . . .”⁶⁶ Three days before the plenum, Bukharin had again abased himself in a letter to Stalin. “I really love you now dearly and with belated love,” he wrote, praising Stalin’s mistrust as a sign of “wisdom.” Bukharin predicted that a still greater age would dawn, with Stalin as the very “world spirit” Hegel had imagined.⁶⁷

Turar Ryskulov, an ethnic Kazakh candidate member of the Central Committee and the long-standing deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars for the Russian republic, quietly tried to persuade some plenum attendees to come to the defense of Rykov and Bukharin, but he could not manage to do so.⁶⁸

At the plenum (February 24), Rykov denied the scurrilous accusations and called the mockery of him “a savage thing,” given that he was already effectively condemned to death (he pointed out that others had confessed and been shot anyway). During Rykov’s and Bukharin’s speeches, nearly 1,000 interruptions were recorded. Not one was supportive. Stalin made the greatest number (100), followed by Molotov (82) and Postyshev (88).⁶⁹ More than half of those present never interjected, but for two more days (February 25–26), speakers took the dais to rip into the rightists. “Bukharin writes in his statement to the Central Committee that Ilich [Lenin] died in his arms,” Yezhov shouted. “Rubbish! You’re lying! Utterly false!” Bukharin responded that “those present when Ilich died were Maria Ilinichna [Ulyanova], Nadezhda Konstantinovna [Krupskaya], and myself”—and turned toward them for confirmation. Neither Lenin’s wife nor his sister said anything. Bukharin continued: “Did I take Ilich’s dead body in my arms, and kiss his feet?” Both women stayed silent.

Stalin intervened at the plenum (February 27) to recommend a seeming middle ground whereby Bukharin and Rykov would not be immediately put on trial, but turned over to the NKVD for further “investigation.” Secret police operatives took Bukharin and Rykov away, the first time anyone had been arrested at a party plenum.⁷⁰ The pair spent the remainder of the proceedings at the Lubyanka inner prison while Stalin formed a special commission of the plenum to adjudicate their fate.⁷¹ Bukharin’s expulsion from the Central Committee and his disposition to the NKVD were duly upheld by the commission, whose members included Mikoyan (chairman), Maria Ulyanova, and Krupskaya.⁷²

Perhaps Stalin might now be satiated? “It must be hoped,” the Stalinist propagandist Yaroslavsky told the plenum, “that we are discussing in the Central Committee of our party the question of betrayal by members and candidate members of the Central Committee for the last time.”⁷³ Such was the naïveté.

With Stalin’s primary aim accomplished, the plenum switched gears. Zhdanov had reported (February 26) on the upcoming elections by secret ballot to party posts (for May), a way to mobilize pressure from below against sitting officials, as well as elections to soviets. “We lack the habits of direct elections and secret ballots,” he admitted. One plenum attendee, trying to convey the immensity of the organizational undertaking, reminded the plenum of the 1917 vote for the Constituent Assembly. Stalin pointed out that the class enemy could be elected, especially given that some collective farms had no Communist party members. “Keep in mind that our country has two million Communists and a ‘bit more’ non-party people,” Zhdanov noted of the scores of millions of non-party adults.⁷⁴ He even alluded to the days when Bolshevism had had to survive in the underground.⁷⁵ It was a surreal discussion: no one was forcing the monopoly regime to stage competitive elections by secret ballot.

On the morning of February 28, Molotov, in place of Orjonikidze, delivered the report on sabotage in industry, and ridiculed Orjonikidze’s counterinvestigations that minimized wrecking. Kaganovich, falling in line, presented similar tales of sabotage, though he continued to try to push back ever so gently. “As you can see,” he summarized, “we have had a rather serious cleansing of the ranks of politically dangerous people.”⁷⁶

February 28 also happened to be Svetlana Stalin’s eleventh birthday. The relatives gathered in the Kremlin apartment without the despot. In her diary, Maria Svanidze, the sister-in-law of Stalin’s first wife, Kato, bad-mouthed the “half-wit” and “idiot” relatives of Stalin’s second wife, Nadya, and the couple’s “lazy” son Vasily, concluding that “the only normal people present” were her, her husband (Alyosha Svanidze), Nadya’s sister-in-law Zhenya, and “Little Svetlana, who makes up for all the rest.” Maria also recorded that Stalin’s elder son, Yakov, from his marriage to Kato, had arrived with his new wife, Judith “Yulia” Meltzer (b. 1911). “She is pretty, older than Yasha—he’s her fifth husband, not counting other relationships—none too bright, little cultured. She trapped him, of course. . . . Too bad for I[osif].”⁷⁷ (In fact, Stalin’s elder son was her third husband.⁷⁸) Yakov was now studying at Moscow’s Artillery Academy, but he could never manage to please his father. Be that as it may, two sons whom Stalin deemed disappointing and two dead wives were not the main factors keeping him away from the family scene, despite his fondness for Svetlana. His dislike for busybodies like Svanidze had grown. In any case, he was busy, forcing extirpation of “enemies and spies who had a party card in their pocket.”⁷⁹

“TRULY A HISTORIC PLENUM!”

Back at the interminable plenum, after a further flogging of industrial wrecking, Yezhov was at the dais again (March 2). He would speak a total of five times. (Molotov spoke thrice.) Now, Yezhov suddenly laced into Yagoda for sheltering spies and traitors at the NKVD, prompting Yagoda to shout denials (“Not true!”). But in the discussion that day and the next, numerous NKVD officials rose to condemn Yagoda, including his old nemesis Yevdokimov. The latter had three turns at the rostrum, and helpfully linked Yagoda to the rightists Bukharin and Rykov. That was precisely the testimony being beaten out of Georgy Molchanov, who until recently had headed the NKVD’s secret-political department and who had been arrested in Minsk (following a demotion to the Belorussian NKVD). “I think,” Yevdokimov thundered, “that matters are not limited to Molchanov alone.” Yagoda: “What, have you gone out of your mind?” Yevdokimov: “We must put Yagoda on trial.”⁸⁰ One participant asked why Yagoda had not already been arrested. “(Noise in the hall.)”⁸¹ This is what a slaughterhouse would sound like if the pigs, cows, and sheep could talk.

Stalin, after innumerable interjections, finally delivered his own full address on March 3. “The more we advance, the more successes we have, the more embittered the remnants of the defeated and exploiting classes will become, the more rapidly they will go over to sharper forms of struggle, the more they will inflict damage on the Soviet state, the more they will seize on the most desperate means of struggle as the last resort of the doomed,” he asserted, repeating his long-standing theory.⁸² He chastised party and state officials—like the ones sitting there in the Sverdlov Hall—for “political blindness” on this score. “Some of our leading cadres, both in the center and locally, not only failed to discern the real countenance of these wreckers, diversionists, spies, and murderers,” he stated, “but proved so unconcerned, complacent, and naïve that at times they themselves assisted in promoting the agents of foreign states to one or another responsible post.” To anyone who might object, Stalin mockingly added, “Capitalist encirclement? Rubbish! What significance can some kind of capitalist encirclement have if we fulfill and surpass our economic plans? New forms of wrecking, the struggle with Trotskyism? Trifle! What significance can these trifles have if we fulfill and overfulfill our plan? . . . Our party’s not shabby, the party’s Central Committee is also not bad—what the hell more do we need? Strange people sit there in Moscow, in the Central Committee of the party: they think up all sorts of questions, instigate about some kind of wrecking. They themselves don’t sleep and don’t allow others to.”⁸³

Inside the sarcasm, Stalin had blurted out confirmation of the real driver behind the mass arrests and executions: it was him.

Mekhlis, in Pravda the next day, obediently ripped into the heretofore de rigueur toadying, ridiculing the rituals as “boot-licking therapy” and condemning the “supreme leaderism” of specific local party bosses.⁸⁴ The far-flung operations of Stalin’s regime were riddled with cross-purposes, self-dealing, underfulfillment of economic targets, poor record keeping, reports of faked successes, pervasive misappropriation of state funds, and victimization of the weakest officials as scapegoats. The “system” was an unwieldy amalgam of competing clans and impossible rules, vast webs of relationships and red-tape procedures overlaid with a tableau of powerful myths (including the myth of the system itself). Stalin returned to the dais for a menacing summation (March 5). “People are sometimes selected based not on a political or business principle but on personal acquaintance, personal allegiance, friendships,” he warned, citing the example of Levon Mirzoyan, who was said to have brought thirty people to Kazakhstan from postings in Azerbaijan and the Urals. “What does it mean to drag a whole group of cronies with you? . . . It means you have acquired a certain independence from local organizations and, if you will, a certain independence from the Central Committee.”

Stalin would know: forming a political clan was precisely how he had built his personal dictatorship inside the Bolshevik dictatorship, and gained his own independence. Never mind. “Some comrades among us think that if they are a people’s commissar, then they know everything,” he added. “They believe that rank, in and of itself, affords very great, almost inexhaustible knowledge. Or they think: If I am a Central Committee member, then I am not one by accident, then I must know everything. This is not the case.” He maligned even Orjonikidze, praising the fallen industry commissar as “one of the first and best politburo members among us,” but accusing him of “wasting time and effort” defending enemies.⁸⁵ “Truly a historic plenum!” the Comintern’s Dimitrov noted in his diary.⁸⁶

SELF-SLAUGHTERHOUSE

The decisive question—what, precisely, would be the scope of the high-level arrests—remained unclear. Stalin, in his plenum summation, estimated the number of Trotskyites and Zinovievites, as well as rightists, at 30,000, of whom he said 12,000 had already been arrested. But of course, some officials were being arrested not for an opposition past but for insufficient vigilance against the opposition. And “testimony” never failed to produce more names. Already, large numbers of “rightists” were being subjected to torture at Lubyanka’s internal prison (many declared hunger strikes, and not a few attempted suicide).⁸⁷ Most ominously, Stalin had alluded at the plenum to the inventories compiled by Malenkov: the 1.5 million former party members, expellees whom Stalin now called “grist for the mill of our enemies.”⁸⁸

Those who had sat in the Sverdlov Hall through the jaw-dropping plenum did not yet know, but “testimony” being compiled in NKVD cellars painted a scenario of a Red Army/NKVD plot to seize power in the Soviet Union, Franco style.⁸⁹ The NKVD, in a March 1937 draft document in connection with the plenum, asserted that foreign intelligence services had established a gigantic number of spy centers in the USSR, while conceding, “We do not know where they are or who belongs to the counterrevolutionary organizations created by foreign intelligence agencies, and as a result we cannot liquidate them at the necessary moment.”⁹⁰ They could have been inside the NKVD itself.

Stalin’s weapon against his own NKVD leadership was, as in all other institutions, the party. Following the despot’s call to ramp up enemy hunting at the plenum, Yezhov, as per usual practice, convened a meeting of the NKVD “party active” at Lubyanka (March 19–21) to discuss the lessons. All top NKVD operatives were party members. Yezhov set the tone by lacerating Yagoda, then invited those present to speak up, a devastatingly simple way to elicit denunciations.⁹¹ Gleeful revenge against Yagoda and others poured forth, but it was mixed with terrified self-preservation: how could the operatives denounce Yagoda, under whom they had all worked, without somehow implicating themselves? On March 29, Mikhail Frinovsky—who had a lot to prove, having been a top operative under Yagoda—led a team that arrested his former boss, and beat Yagoda demonstratively in the process.⁹²

Yagoda’s arrest was stunning.^{93, 94} He knew that “Stalin treated [him] coolly and met with him just for official business” (as one of Stalin’s top bodyguards would later put it).^{95, 96} Still, Yagoda could be forgiven if he imagined himself to be indispensable, given his services to Stalin: millions of kulaks deported, countless priority construction objects completed, comprehensive surveillance imposed on the army, the party-state, cultural elites. Yagoda held the rank of “general commissar of state security” (equivalent to marshal), which he had retained even after being shunted over to the communications commissariat. Some NKVD operatives had taken to referring to the party apparatchik as Yezhov’s “temporary posting” to the NKVD, as Kaganovich had informed Stalin.⁹⁷ But Yezhov finally had been named to that rank, which Yagoda lost. After seventeen years at the very top of the secret police, he was reduced to waiting for the despot to return him to favor.

Yagoda’s passivity was not a given. He had controlled assassination squads, a poison laboratory, a plethora of safe houses (at home and abroad), even an ability to eavesdrop on Stalin. Because of the length of his service in the organs (from 1919), he had a network whose mutual loyalties predated Stalin’s full power.⁹⁸ But Yagoda turned out to be a mere minion, while Stalin studied, fostered, and used the NKVD’s natural rivalries and animosities to control him even before appointing Yezhov to supervise NKVD business on behalf of the unchallengeable party. Now Stalin used these internal antagonisms, as well as Yezhov, to annihilate Yagoda. Once the invitation came down from on high, score settling proved irresistible and self-preservation instincts kicked in.⁹⁹ In denunciations, Yagoda’s subordinates revealed that they viewed him not as a Dzierżyński-like sword and shield of the revolution but as unprincipled, a cruel boss, a shady wheeler and dealer (commerçant).¹⁰⁰