Stalin

Voroshilov approved a long list of medals for service in Spain, but the grind there was taking its toll on Soviet personnel.¹⁹⁰ Meanwhile, attempts to use death squads to assassinate Franco came to naught.¹⁹¹ Still, Soviet intelligence officials in Moscow did not relinquish the fantasy. Theodore Maly, the Soviet spy chief in London, operating without diplomatic cover, had been instructed to send Kim Philby, the British-born Soviet agent, as a freelance war correspondent to Spain to infiltrate Franco’s entourage so as to assassinate him. Philby (code-named “Söhnchen,” “Little Sonny” in German) was to observe all details of Franco’s bodyguard retinue. He expressed enthusiasm, but after some three months in Spain he was recalled to London. “The fact is that Little Sonny has come back in low spirits,” Maly, who had doubted Moscow’s scheme from the start, reported on May 24, 1937. “He has not even managed to get near to the ‘interesting’ objective.” Maly added that even if Philby had somehow gotten near Franco, “he would not have been able to do what was required of him. Though devoted and ready to sacrifice himself, he does not possess the physical courage and other qualities necessary for this attempt.”¹⁹²

In the Barcelona cauldron, the assignments were more serious. The NKVD assassin Josifas “Juzik” Grigulevičius, known as Grigulevich, born in Wilno (Vilnius) in 1913 to a Russian mother and a Lithuanian-Jewish father and raised a Karaite, had assassinated police informers in his youth, been imprisoned in Poland in 1932–33 for Communist subversion, and then joined his émigré father in Argentina and picked up Spanish, to go with his native Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian, as well as French. “Max,” as he would be known in Spain, had flown into Barcelona from Toulouse back in the fall, then made his way to Madrid, where he trained saboteurs and arsonists for work behind Franco’s lines. He also liquidated “Trotskyites.”¹⁹³ Grigulevich had arrived in Barcelona with his death squad on May 3, 1937.¹⁹⁴ His primary target was Andreu Nin. The Soviet NKVD station chief Orlov forged a letter from a Nazi agent to Franco detailing Nin’s supposed “infiltration” of the POUM for the Nationalists. An agent for the Soviets persuaded a bookshop known to support the POUM to take custody of a suitcase for a few days; government police promptly arrived and found the suitcase, which contained the supposed secret documents—the Orlov forgery of a POUM conspiracy with the “fascists.” On May 23, Orlov pressed the case against the POUM, adducing the captured “document” he had fabricated, which was written in invisible ink and in code but was said to have been “deciphered” thanks to the capture of some of Franco’s codebooks. Koltsov played up the “evidence” of the POUM treachery in Pravda.¹⁹⁵ The POUM was soon outlawed, its headquarters at Barcelona’s Hotel Falcon converted into a house of detention.

After Nin was arrested, Orlov’s thugs kidnapped him from Spanish prison and took him to a secret place of confinement maintained by the NKVD at Alcalá de Henares, the birthplace of Cervantes. There, they tortured him to get him to confess he was a “fascist agent.” With much of the POUM leadership awaiting trial, such testimony was thought necessary to persuade the public to support death sentences. Nin refused to confess to treason, Trotskyism, or other crimes. He was executed in secret by Grigulevich’s death squad on the Alcalá de Henares highway and buried there.¹⁹⁶ When people continued to inquire about his whereabouts, the Soviets replied that he must have gone off with his fascist hirelings. Orlov wrote a pamphlet, attributed to Nin, denouncing Trotskyism.¹⁹⁷ The NKVD operative had worked extra hard to prove his bona fides to Stalin. In carrying out Stalin’s no-holds campaign against “Trotskyites” and “enemies” in Spain, the NKVD contingent there—which numbered no more than forty, and sometimes half that—gave the impression, wrongly, of attempted Sovietization.¹⁹⁸

Soviet annihilation of the POUM also sowed deep disillusionment among those who identified with the antifascist cause of Spain’s Republic. Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, who, before discovering the Lancashire miners in 1936, had been only intermittently interested in politics, had gone to Spain in early 1937 and joined a militia associated with the POUM. “It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle,” he would write in Homage to Catalonia. “Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. . . . Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivised and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. . . . In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist.” But Orwell was shocked to discover that the Communists were fighting tooth and nail against this grassroots revolution. On May 20, 1937, he was shot in the throat by a sniper. With the banning of the POUM, he would flee across the border to France.¹⁹⁹

In Paris, an International Exhibition opened on May 25 that would run for six months. In front of the Eiffel Tower, a neoclassical columned Nazi pavilion designed by Albert Speer and topped by an eagle faced a Soviet pavilion designed by Boris Yofan and topped by a statue designed by Vera Mukhina, of a male worker and a female peasant together thrusting a hammer and sickle. Nearby stood the Spanish pavilion, which, from summer 1937, would showcase Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.²⁰⁰ The besieged Basque country had surrendered.

STALIN’S TUKHACHEVSKY PLOT

Thanks to the endless purges and verifications, the Soviet armed forces counted just 150,000 party members among its 1.4 million men—half the number it had four years earlier. This spurred a move, in May 1937, to reintroduce political commissars and create three-person military soviets in units, to which local nonmilitary party secretaries were added.²⁰¹ But if Stalin was worried about a decline of party influence in the army, he himself was the cause.

Corps commander Primakov, nine months in Lefortovo, had refused to admit his “guilt,” but finally on May 8, 1937, he “confessed” and implicated others.²⁰² On May 10, a politburo decree demoted Tukhachevsky from first deputy defense commissar to commander of the Volga military district. It also named Marshal Alexander Yegorov—Stalin’s crony from the civil war—as the new first deputy commissar, returned Shaposhnikov as chief of the general staff, and shifted Yakir from Kiev to the Leningrad military district.²⁰³ Stalin received Tukhachevsky in the Little Corner on May 13, in the presence of Voroshilov, Molotov, Yezhov, and Kaganovich, and reassured the marshal that everything would be sorted out, mentioning a problem with Tukhachevsky’s lover, Yulia Kuzmina, who supposedly was a foreign agent.²⁰⁴ Around this time, August Kork, head of the Frunze Military Academy, was arrested and beaten into testifying. On May 15, Boris Feldman, head of the Red Army cadres department, was arrested, and, under severe torture, he incriminated Tukhachevsky (who the next day departed for his new posting in the rear, the city of Kuibyshev).²⁰⁵ Yezhov was putting together the pieces in Stalin’s scenario.

Tukhachevsky did himself few favors, stirring resentment (like Yagoda in the NKVD).²⁰⁶ The marshal was the army’s most brilliant military mind, and the first to let you know. Already in 1920, he had provoked the interest of the political police for willfulness as well as abuse of subordinates and funds.²⁰⁷ In his grand apartment in Moscow’s House on the Embankment, he hosted musicial evenings with the likes of Shostakovich and had the state military orchestra perform private parties at his state dacha, immodesties heightened by his aristocrat pedigree.²⁰⁸ A serial womanizer, he lived with Kuzmina without having divorced his third wife, while also carrying on an affair with Natalya Sats, director of the Central Children’s Theater. (He preferred intellectual beauties, not the youngish, buxom peasant girls who had once caught Stalin’s eye.) Stalin exploited these appetites: Tukhachevsky shared at least two lovers with Yagoda, who helped keep tabs on the marshal—Shura Skoblina, the niece of the émigré White Guard general, and Nadezhda “Timosha” Peshkova, the widow of Gorky’s son.²⁰⁹ Most Soviet officials were afraid of even limited intercourse with foreigners, but Tukhachevsky enjoyed high-level contact with the German and French militaries (he spoke both languages), which of course had been authorized but nonetheless endangered him.²¹⁰ Yezhov would relate a tale of how, during a visit to France, Tukhachevsky had supposedly cut off a piece of fabric at Napoleon’s grave and made himself an amulet. To all of this was added Voroshilov’s long-standing ill will.²¹¹

Stalin was also fixated on the authority of the commanders of the country’s two most strategic military districts on the western border: Yakir, who had headed the Kiev (Ukrainian) military district since 1926, and Uborevičius (b. 1896), the son of a Lithuanian peasant, who had commanded the western (Belorussian) since 1931 and had an extraordinary following among the officer corps.²¹² Together, these two commands accounted for 25 of the Soviet Union’s 90 infantry divisions and 12 of its 26 cavalry divisions. Only Blyukher, atop the Soviet Far Eastern Army, commanded comparable forces. Stalin had promoted the proletarian Blyukher to marshal while overlooking Yakir and Uborevičius, who were whispered to be jealous. Voroshilov, for his part, disliked Blyukher, perceiving a dangerous rival. (Amid rumors of Blyukher’s pending promotion to deputy defense commissar, Voroshilov preemptively promoted a Blyukher deputy to the post.)²¹³ Such jockeying by outsize egos could be found in any large institution, but in Stalin’s hands everyday tensions or indiscretions could become lethal. Through chauffeurs, bodyguards, cooks, maids, adjutants, secretarial staff, mistresses, and the NKVD special departments, the top military men were under a level of surveillance exceeding even that conducted on the foreign military attachés of Britain, Germany, Poland, Romania, or Japan.²¹⁴

Also in Stalin’s sights was Soviet military intelligence. Uritsky was out of his depth and bereft of talented people—such as Artuzov and Otto Steinbrück—whom he had forced out.²¹⁵ On May 20, Artuzov was arrested in his office (no. 201) on the second floor of Lubyanka and accused of being a rightist alongside Yagoda, as well as concealing material implicating Tukhachevsky (the very material he had forwarded to Yezhov). His interrogation protocols, which he signed with his own blood, would also assert that Yagoda had told him of widespread NKVD dissatisfaction with the Soviet leadership, “whose despotism stands in crying contradiction to declarations of Soviet democracy.”²¹⁶ On May 21, Stalin received the interrogation protocols of Semyon Firin-Pupko, a longtime military intelligence operative with experience in Poland, France, and Germany and, most recently, a deputy chief of the Gulag, responsible for forced labor construction sites. Accused of being a German spy, Firin painted in his “testimony” an incredible portrait of the complete capture of Soviet military attachés abroad by Polish intelligence, which he said was also directing Soviet counterintelligence in Moscow.²¹⁷

That same day, Stalin summoned Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Yezhov, Frinovsky, Slutsky (head of NKVD foreign intelligence), Yakov Serebryansky (head of NKVD agents abroad without diplomatic cover), Uritsky, Mikhail Alexandrovsky (deputy chief of military intelligence, who had replaced Artuzov), and Alexander Nikonov (another Uritsky deputy) to the Little Corner for a two-and-a-half-hour session.²¹⁸ In an internal memorandum that day, addressed to Yezhov and Voroshilov, the despot ordered that all Soviet agents abroad and their handlers be rechecked, because “military intelligence and its apparatus have fallen into German hands.” Stalin’s memo noted that “from the point of view of intelligence, we cannot have friends; there are immediate enemies and potential enemies,” and deemed the Czechoslovaks—with whom the Soviet Union had a mutual assistance pact—“the enemies of our enemies, nothing more.” He ordered Soviet personnel not to share intelligence secrets with Czechoslovakia or any other country, and “to fully assimilate the lesson of the cooperation with the Germans,” whereby “Rapallo, close ties, created the illusion of friendship. The Germans have remained our enemies, and they penetrated us and implanted their network.” He added, “We have had enormous victories, we are stronger than all politically, we are stronger economically, but in intelligence we have been smashed. Understand, they smashed us in intelligence.”²¹⁹

Civil defense followed. Its head, the ethnic Latvian Roberts Eidemanis (shortened to Eideman), was arrested on May 22 and, under torture, “incriminated” twenty others. Yezhov had the interrogation protocols on Stalin’s desk quickly. The despot wrote on them, “All those people named by Eideman in civil defense (center and periphery) immediately arrest”²²⁰—no verification of their specific spying activities and any damage caused.

Also on May 22, as if a putsch were imminent, troops of the Dzierżyński Regiment, guardians of the Kremlin, were brought to full alert and all Kremlin passes were invalidated. Out in Kuibyshev, Tukhachevsky was arrested and forced to remove his marshal’s uniform.²²¹ Stalin, as promised, had him returned to Moscow, but by convoy guard. On the post-facto Central Committee resolution proposing Tukhachevsky’s arrest, Marshal Budyonny wrote, “Unequivocally in favor. The scum should be executed.”²²² In the cellars on May 26, a mere four days after his arrest, Tukhachevsky began to sign whatever interrogators put in front of him. Zinovy Ushakov, who prided himself on obtaining confessions no other investigator could extract, mercilessly beat Tukhachevsky, whose blood dripped onto the pages of a confession to crimes he did not commit. By some accounts, Tukhachevsky’s teenage daughter, Svetlana, was brought to the prison, where the interrogators told him they would rape her.²²³

Even as he had the Soviet military brass tortured for being agents of fascism, on May 27, 1937, in the Little Corner, Stalin received Kandelaki, his erstwhile Berlin trade representative, who was trying to cut a deal with the German fascists.²²⁴ Germany’s military attaché in Moscow, General Ernst Köstring, was sending constant updates to Berlin, as Stalin knew. In Berlin’s diplomatic circles, German officials “confidentially” whispered how not all of their spies in the Soviet armed forces had yet been caught, egging Stalin on.²²⁵ He needed no such inducement, of course. On May 28–29, Yakir and Uborevičius were arrested. On May 30, eight days after Gamarnik had inscribed “in favor” on the post-facto arrest order for Tukhachevsky, he himself was dismissed. The next day he killed himself in his apartment on Bolshoi Rzhevsky Street.²²⁶ (Kulik, who lived in the same building, would soon join a second apartment to his own: eight rooms for a three-person family. Shaposhnikov would get Gamarnik’s dacha in Zubalovo.) Real and imagined associates, acquaintances, and relatives of the arrested men fell into the NKVD cellars. Stalin dictated, edited, and pored over the interrogation protocols, then circulated and referred to them as if they were factual.²²⁷

TERRORIZING THE NKVD

Plenty of NKVD personnel came forward to enact the carnage on coworkers. A key cooperative group centered on Yevdokimov, party boss of the North Caucasus territory. He had first met Yezhov at the Communist Academy in the 1920s. Stalin, around the time he issued the Sochi telegram replacing Yagoda with Yezhov, had consulted with Yevdokimov.²²⁸ Yevdokimov had been among those who ripped into Yagoda at the February–March 1937 plenum.²²⁹ He aspired to be Yezhov’s new first deputy at the NKVD and head of the state security department (GB). Instead, Mikhail Frinovsky, whom Yezhov was consulting regularly over wet lunches, got the position.²³⁰ Frinovsky had worked under Yevdokimov in his early career in Ukraine and the North Caucasus, but was his own man. He became one of the few Chekists closely tied to Yagoda (as chief of the USSR border guards) who would flourish under Yezhov. Yezhov did promote a slew of Yevdokimov people in the NKVD, including Israel Dagin, Yakov Deich, Sergei Mironov, Nikolai Nikolayev-Zhurid, and Vladimir Kursky, who replaced Pauker as head of bodyguards. (Kursky would shoot himself six days after receiving the Order of Lenin; Dagin would replace him.) All in all, fourteen of the sixty-odd regional NKVD bosses in 1937 were linked by service in the North Caucasus under Yevdokimov.²³¹ Thus did the enemies of Yezhov’s enemy (Yagoda) become Yezhov’s new friends—and the zealous implementers of the slaughter in the NKVD itself.

Despite the upheaval, Yezhov’s NKVD, like Yagoda’s, was made up of people of roughly the same generation, with Cheka service dating to Dzierżyński, overwhelmingly white-collar rather than working-class or peasant backgrounds, and heavily Jewish or non-Russian.²³² Yezhov’s NKVD, similarly, was riven with distrust. When informing Frinovsky that he wanted to appoint him first deputy commissar, Yezhov asked him to recite his accumulated sins. “You have so many sins, you ought to be arrested right now,” Yezhov told him, adding, “Well, so what, you’ll work, and you’ll be my person 100 percent.”²³³ Frinovsky further testified that “Yezhov demanded that I find investigators who were utterly dependent on us or had sins on their records, and they knew they had sins, which could be held over them.”²³⁴

Stalin had more faith in his young protégé than he’d had in Yagoda, but Yezhov still had to clear NKVD personnel appointments with the despot. Yezhov wielded nearly unimaginable power and terrified a vast country, but he never felt at ease. “Coming to the NKVD organs, at first I found myself alone,” he would later explain. “I did not even have an aide.” This was a lie: Yezhov had imported loyalists from the party apparatus, including Mikhail Litvin, who got the critical post of head of NKVD personnel, and Isaak Shapiro, who became head of the NKVD secretariat. Still, Stalin would often compel him to destroy his own associates. And the chain-reaction arrests, including of many people Yezhov had newly promoted, did foster paranoia. “I tasked this or that NKVD department head with interrogating someone who had been arrested,” Yezhov noted, “while thinking to myself: ‘Today you interrogate him, tomorrow I’ll arrest you.’ All around were enemies of the people, my enemies.”²³⁵

WEST ON THE WANE

Stalin had invested considerable time wooing Western intellectual sympathizers. But just as Pasternak had told the secret police, André Gide, in his Return from the U.S.S.R. (December 1936), published something critical, which noted, among other things, that “one fully literate worker asked if we also had schools in France.”²³⁶ Gide had also written a private “Report for My Friends on My Trip to the USSR,” and, on a mimeographed copy of a Russian translation Zhdanov had written for Stalin, “Defender of homosexuals!”²³⁷ The politburo wanted Koltsov to publish a rebuttal of Gide’s book, but he was occupied in Spain, so the apparatchiks engaged Feuchtwanger, who answered with Moscow, 1937.²³⁸ It was rushed into print in Russian in a print run of 200,000, and contained excerpts of Feuchtwanger’s early 1937 conversation with Stalin. “In official portraits Stalin gives the impression of being a tall, wide-shouldered, imposing person,” Feuchtwanger wrote. “In real life he is not very tall, thinnish, and, in the expanse of his Kremlin room where I met him, he was not very noticeable.” He added: “Stalin speaks slowly, softly, in a bit of voiceless voice. During a conversation he paces back and forth in the room, then he suddenly comes upon his interlocutor and, directing the index finger of his handsome hand toward him, he clarifies, or expounds, while formulating thought-out phrases, draws patterns on a sheet of paper with a colored pencil.”²³⁹

Simplicity—Stalin’s beloved self-characterization—was the leitmotif. “Stalin speaks unpretentiously and is able to express complicated thoughts simply,” Feuchtwanger continued. “Sometimes he speaks too simply, like a person who is used to formulating his thoughts so that they are understood from Moscow to Vladivostok. . . . He feels himself quite free in many areas [of knowledge] and cites by memory without preparation names, dates, facts always exactly.” Feuchtwanger wrote that “of all the men I know who have power, Stalin is the most unpretentious.” This was the cue to discuss the cult: “I spoke frankly to him about the vulgar and excessive cult made of him, and he replied with equal candor. . . . He thinks it is possible even that ‘wreckers’ may be behind it in an attempt to discredit him.” The German sympathizer was bothered by the showcase trials and put into print the heresy that “it seemed the bullets which tore into Zinoviev and Kamenev killed not only them, but the new world.” And yet, in the end, he ended up justifying the trials he knew to be falsified, on the basis of cultural snobbery (Russia was backward) and the political imperative to close ranks against fascism.²⁴⁰

Vsevolod Vishnevsky, the Soviet writer, found “a lot of European arrogance” in Feuchtwanger’s text. “Neither Malraux nor all these Western ‘public figures’ are of any use to us,” Vishnevsky wrote to Sergei Eisenstein (May 24, 1937). “Their historical value is much smaller than ours. . . . Let everything be ours. Let the law begin with us.”²⁴¹

STALIN’S ATTEMPT AT EXPLANATION

Stalin directed Voroshilov to summon an extraordinary session of the USSR’s Main Military Council, which customarily met once annually, in November or December, but now convened June 1 to 4, 1937. Its 85 members were top army and fleet commanders and heads of military academies, many of whom had been arrested or discharged, leaving 53 to attend, but 116 nonmembers were invited, along with Yezhov, Frinovsky, and others of the NKVD.²⁴² Some invitees arrived from as far away as Vladivostok (a week’s journey by train), while Kirill Meretskov had only just returned from Spain and, a naïf, expected to be asked to report on its key military lessons.²⁴³ Instead, attendees were compelled to spend the first day reading interrogation protocols about a fantastic homegrown fascist military plot. “The testimonies were typed carbon copies on normal paper, some contained numeration, some not,” one participant recalled. “The print on them was not always sharp, and reading them was difficult.” Readings were hurried, and new pages kept coming, with insufficient copies to go around, forcing people to wait as sections were freed up (and to read them out of order). Some of the protocols implicated attendees in the hall. Finally, the formal session opened, not in the House of the Red Army, as previously stipulated, but in the Sverdlov Hall of the Kremlin’s Imperial Senate building.²⁴⁴ The mood was cemeterylike.

Stalin attended all four days. (He would not become a member of the Military Council until the next year, so the sessions were officially designated a joint meeting of the council and “the politburo.”) Voroshilov had to deliver a report in the same room used for the February–March 1937 Central Committee plenum, but since then his deputy defense commissars (Tukhachevsky, Gamarnik) had turned out to be foreign agents: where had he been looking? In the presidium, Stalin “looked over the hall with interest, seeking familiar faces, and fixing his gaze on some,” while Voroshilov “seemed to have shrunk in height,” the participant recalled. “His hair had turned even grayer, wrinkles had appeared, and his voice, normally muffled, became completely hoarse.”²⁴⁵ Voroshilov complained that, back during the 1936 May Day celebrations, in a discussion in his apartment that devolved into recriminations over the 1920 Soviet-Polish War debacle, “Tukhachevsky said in the presence of comrades Stalin, Molotov, and many others that I and Budyonny had supposedly created a small clique of people around myself that controls policy. Two days later, Tukhachevsky took his words back.” Voroshilov then tried to downplay his grudge-drenched remarks as merely “the usual squabbles,” and to put distance between himself and the accused: “I, as you know, did not especially like, did not love Tukhachevsky. I had strained relations with him.”²⁴⁶

Voroshilov’s comments were almost beside the point. Stalin, on the second day (June 2), to a prolonged standing ovation, would deliver his most revealing remarks during his terror.

“Comrades, I hope no one doubts now that a military-political plot against Soviet power existed,” he began. “Such an abundance of testimony by the criminals themselves and observations by comrades who work there, such a mass of them, that, indubitably, here we have a military-political plot against Soviet power, stimulated and financed by German fascists.” The mere fact that he had to address possible doubts spoke volumes. Moreover, the usually systematic Stalin meandered, losing his train of thought. He denied that Tukhachevsky had been arrested because of noble lineage, reminding the audience that Engels was the son of a factory owner and asking if they knew that Lenin was from the nobility. Also disingenuously, Stalin asserted that no one was being arrested for having long ago voted with Trotsky. But then the despot contradicted himself. “Dzierżyński voted for Trotsky, and not only voted, but openly supported Trotsky, during Lenin’s time, against Lenin,” he told the military men. “This was a very active Trotskyite, and he wanted to bring the whole GPU to the defense of Trotsky. In this he did not succeed.”²⁴⁷ Dzierżyński a Trotskyite? Well, in fall 1925, Dzierżyński had very briefly flirted with joining Kamenev in opposition, before quickly repudiating Kamenev’s initiative to recruit him. Almost no one knew besides Stalin.

With this outburst, Stalin was trying to underscore not social origins (Dzierżyński, too, had been gentry), but deeds. “Did you read his testimony?” he asked of Tukhachevsky. “He passed on our operational plans—our operational plans, the holy of holies—to the German army. He had dealings with representatives of the German Reichswehr. A spy? A spy.” Stalin put out the idea that Tukhachevsky, as well as Yakir and others, had been entrapped by a seductress and blackmailed with threats of exposure. “There is an experienced agent in Germany, in Berlin . . . Josephine Heinze; maybe one of you knows her,” Stalin said threateningly. “She is a beautiful woman. An old agent. She recruited Karakhan. She recruited him with the ways of a woman. She recruited Yenukidze. She helped recruit Tukhachevsky. She also had Rudzutaks in her hands. This Josephine Heinze is a very experienced agent. She is probably Danish and works for the German Reichswehr. A beautiful woman, who likes to cater to all men’s desires.”

A lot of work for one chanteuse. Stalin further explained to the closed-door gathering that foreign powers sought to conquer the Soviet Union because its successes had increased its value, while those same successes had induced Soviet officials to let down their guard.²⁴⁸ As a result, he said, the top ranks of Soviet military intelligence actually worked for German, Japanese, and Polish intelligence.

“Collective farms,” Stalin suddenly exclaimed. “What in the world do they [the arrested military brass] have to do with collective farms?” Indeed. In his rambling answer, he again contradicted himself. He told a story of aristocratic types (Yenukidze, Tukhachevsky) who supposedly preferred a gentry economy and opposed socialism in the village.²⁴⁹ Here he revealed the centrality in his terror scenario of the right deviation, which in some ways was more important even than perfidious Trotskyism, because the right signified the possible class degeneration of the revolution: the political attitudes of the former tsarist officers, bourgeois specialists in industry, and the peasant mass—real social groups, for whom capitalism was not anathema but preferred. The right, therefore, was a structural threat, a false (or petit bourgeois) class consciousness.

Straining to persuade the attendees of the improbable charges, Stalin also appealed to current events, asserting that the Wehrmacht “wanted to make the USSR into a second Spain.” This supposedly explained the vast scale of the Kremlin’s response. All the same, the scale of arrests was unnerving. “People are saying that a mass of the military command structure is being taken out of commission,” Stalin admitted. “I see some are perplexed about how we will replace them. . . . Our army has a wealth of talent. In our country, in our party, in our army there is a wealth of talent.” After these assurances, he enjoined them to have the courage to promote these young people “more boldly; don’t be afraid. (Prolonged applause.)”²⁵⁰

DIGESTING THE UNDIGESTIBLE

Stalin had displayed less than a full command of key military terms and issues, and he misstated people’s names.²⁵¹ What the attendees, their lives on the line, made of his rambling remains unclear. Following a break, discussion ensued. Marshal Blyukher stated that in the units, “they are not speaking the way they should be. In a word, we’ll have to explain to the troops what this is about.” Stalin jumped on him: “You mean reconsider who has been arrested?” Blyukher tried to recover: “Not exactly that.” Some back-and-forth ensued over a list that had been compiled, of 150 people to be promoted, and Voroshilov stated, “The list is somewhere.” (The Red Army personnel chief who had compiled the list had been arrested.) Stalin interjected: “There’s no need to look at the list, since half of those on it had been arrested.”²⁵²

Throughout the four days of the Main Military Council gathering in the Kremlin, forty-two military men would take the floor; thirty-four of them would be arrested. All told, just ten of the eighty-five members as of 1937 would survive, the rest falling to “friendly fire.”²⁵³ (Sergei Kamenev, the civil-war-era commander in chief, had managed to cheat Stalin, dying of natural causes at age fifty-five, but he would be made a foreign agent posthumously.) Not a single speaker defended his arrested colleagues. On the contrary, they called them fascists and scum. Budyonny interrupted often, brutishly remarking that the civil war heroes Yakir and Uborevičius had been cowards back then. Shaposhnikov—wearing old-fashioned spectacles, his hair parted down the middle, unfailingly correct in manner—spoke only of his own shortcomings, an elegant stance, which did not spread and did nothing to halt the pandemonium.²⁵⁴ None of the military officers, most of whom had battlefield experience, would try to stop Stalin’s insanity. They were locked in Bolshevik ways of looking at the world, their own fear, and the grip of his person.

The day after Stalin’s speech and the initial discussion, on June 3, 1937, General Emilio Mola—of “fifth column” fame—died when his plane hit a hillside in fog. Mola’s crash (three months after Sanjurjo’s) induced Franco to stop traveling by air. (He would tour the front by car.)²⁵⁵ Franco attended Mola’s funeral, where, in front of onlookers, the caudillo’s uniform split at the armpit, a sign of his weight gain. But Franco, whose ambitions and pitilessness were evident, had not even murdered Mola, a genuine rival, let alone the bulk of Spain’s upper officer corps.

On June 4, the final day, a diminished Voroshilov offered concluding remarks. Stalin interrupted, demanding to know why the Communist party members he had personally sent to the Red Army were not leading tank units. “They cannot be commanders right away,” Voroshilov responded defensively. “We need to teach them.” Stalin: “What, are you not teaching them?” Voroshilov: “We’re teaching them, but in order to grow into a brigade commander, you must put in a rather significant amount of time.”²⁵⁶

Late on the concluding evening, a telegram arrived reporting that Keke Geladze, Stalin’s mother, had died in the Georgian capital. The cause was heart failure, according to the medical report; she was probably in her seventy-seventh year. (The morbid joke, whispered in Tiflis, that the guard outside her apartment was there to ensure she did not give birth to another Stalin, lost its topicality.)²⁵⁷ Stalin did not interrupt his terror against his own army to attend the funeral, a terrible breach of custom for a Georgian; Beria represented him at the ceremony. Pravda reported that a wreath had been sent with the inscription, in Russian and Georgian, TO A DEAR AND BELOVED MOTHER, FROM YOUR SON IOSIF JUGHASHVILI (STALIN).²⁵⁸ Keke’s few personal effects went to one of her two female peasant companions who had known her in Gori; a tag on her iron bed bore the notation PROPERTY OF THE NKVD.²⁵⁹ The funeral procession gave off the sound of stomping jackboots as nearly the entire Georgian secret police marched with her coffin.²⁶⁰ A washerwoman and seamstress, she would be buried in Georgia’s Mtatsminda (Holy Mountain) Pantheon of Writers and Public Figures.

IN CAMERA

Soviet borders were effectively closed (visas were required to exit). A privileged few were afforded occasional access to foreign newsreels. Juri Jelagin, a musician, recalled how members of his elite Vakhtangov Theater troupe were whisked to Mosfilm. “We watched American and German chronicles,” he wrote. “We saw horse jumping in Paris, President Roosevelt’s press conferences, Hitler’s nighttime torchlight processions, Davis Cup tennis matches, Mussolini speaking from the balcony of the palace in Rome, and sittings of the English Parliament.”²⁶¹ A few organizations had authorized access to foreign publications. Some Soviet inhabitants had relatives abroad, and though their correspondence passed through censorship, the latter struggled to keep up.²⁶² Information from foreign radio broadcasts such as the BBC was accessible, but only to the minority with dial radios in certain regions (even listening to foreign musical programs could get one denounced). The overwhelming majority of USSR inhabitants were cut off from the outside world, except for what the regime decided could be shown or heard.²⁶³ Even in the foreign affairs commissariat, department heads for various regions of the world were frequently in the dark about specific world events.²⁶⁴

On top of the enforced isolation, a swirl of dark forces and shadowy machinations suffused the mentality of the time. The opaque regime had originated as a conspiracy and had never ceased being one, while fighting against what one scholar has aptly called the “omnipresent conspiracy.”²⁶⁵ The plots could be so convoluted that many of those involved did not even know about them. (As Macduff says in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “Cruel are the times when we are traitors / And do not know ourselves.”) Some Soviet inhabitants saw through the smoke and mirrors. “Even the simplest fool knew that all those thousands were not ‘traitors,’ ‘enemies of the people,’ or ‘spies,’” insisted Ismail Akhmedov, then a junior military intelligence officer (who would later defect).²⁶⁶ But, in fact, the vast majority did not know.

On June 11, 1937, Soviet newspapers and radio stunned the country, announcing a trial, later that day, for Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven other high-ranking Red Army officers, for complicity in a “Trotskyite Anti-Soviet Military Organization” on behalf of foreign powers: Yakir, Uborevičius, Eideman, Kork, Putna, Feldman, and Primakov. A ninth, the suicide Gamarnik, was posthumously named a Nazi spy and Gestapo agent as well. (Three of the nine “Gestapo agents” were Jews.)²⁶⁷ Right before and after announcement of the “trial,” Pravda serialized a Russian translation of Charles Russell’s short Espionage and Counter-Espionage, M.I-4 (1926), for study by party cadres.²⁶⁸ Still, the Soviet populace had not been prepared by way of a long campaign culminating in a public trial.

Everything had taken place behind the scenes. On June 8, prison wardens had presented the eight defendants with their formal indictments, and the next day Yakir had addressed a petition for mercy to “Our Own Close Comrade Stalin,” who wrote on it, “He is a scoundrel and a whore.” Other politburo members had to read it as well. (“A perfectly precise definition. K. Voroshilov.” “A scumbag and a whore, deserves only one kind of punishment, death. L. Kaganovich.” Molotov affixed his name without elaborating.) After collecting the signatures, Stalin wrote on the document, “My archive.”²⁶⁹ Also on June 8, 1937, he sacked Uritsky as military intelligence chief after the latter wrote confessing that he had visited Yakir, Uborevičius, and other arrested enemies in their homes but desperately insisting, “I was not friends with them.”²⁷⁰ He was replaced by his predecessor, the disgraced Berzin, who had returned from Spain and, after Stalin had sung his praises, been decorated with the Order of Lenin. The forty-seven-year-old triumphantly returned to his old office in the Chocolate House, following a tryst the same morning with his Spanish mistress, Aurora Sánchez, who would very soon celebrate her twentieth birthday.²⁷¹

Among the charges leveled against Tukhachevsky were that he desired to force into being more tank and mechanized divisions at the expense of cavalry (which was true) and that he and others wished to replace Voroshilov as defense commissar with a professional military man, a point the men did not deny.²⁷² NKVD interrogator-torturers had compelled Tukhachevsky to compose a post-facto war “plan of defeat,” which amounted to a version of the sophisticated doctrines he had been advancing for years and the Soviets had been successfully practicing at maneuvers.²⁷³ Not that anyone noticed, but the “Trotskyite” charge brimmed with irony: Tukhachevsky had repeatedly contradicted Trotsky, arguing that revolution had changed war fundamentally.²⁷⁴

The single-day trial of the military men took place in camera, near the Kremlin, on the second floor of the three-story military collegium building (October 25 Street).²⁷⁵ In the chamber, collegium members could avail themselves of sausages, black caviar, pastries, chocolates, fruit. Chief military judge Vasily Ulrich was known to enjoy a brandy.²⁷⁶ Seven high-ranking officers, including Marshals Blyukher and Budyonny (newly named commander of the Moscow military district), Pavel Dybenko (newly named commander of the Leningrad military district), Shaposhnikov, and others were added to the collegium for the trial.²⁷⁷ Except for Voroshilov, the entire top brass, some fifty people in all, was either in the dock or on the court.²⁷⁸ As specified under the December 1, 1934, anti-terrorist law, there were no witnesses and no defense counsel, and no right of appeal. At the “trial,” Yakir acknowledged the existence of the “center” but shifted blame onto Tukhachevsky. Feldman did the same. When Kork tried to absolve himself and attack the others, they incriminated him, calling him a liar and provocateur. Primakov had volunteered an additional handwritten denunciation of commanders not yet arrested. Dybenko pressed Tukhachevsky for details about his planned palace coup, and Blyukher pressed Yakir to elaborate on Gamarnik’s counterrevolutionary Trotskyite plotting.²⁷⁹

Budyonny reported that day to Voroshilov (“only personally”), in a nineteen-page memorandum, that “from the testimony of Tukhachevsky, Kork, Yakir, and Uborevičius it is evident that they decided to work out first on their own initiative the plan for the defeat of the Red Army during the war and only after that to clear it with the German general staff . . . [but] because of their arrest they did not finish.” Still, Budyonny concluded, “I consider that nonetheless they passed it on to German intelligence” (parroting Stalin’s closed-door speech of June 2).²⁸⁰

Ulrich, in the middle of the proceedings, pronounced a recess and rushed to the Little Corner, appearing at 4:00 p.m. and staying twenty minutes. At 4:50 p.m., Stalin sent a ciphered telegram to every Soviet locality to organize mass meetings of workers and peasants and Red Army garrisons to affirm the necessity of executions, informing them that the sentences would be published the next day.²⁸¹ Just before midnight, Ulrich sentenced all eight to death; the men were led down to the cellar, where the NKVD’s head executioner, Vasily Blokhin, used German Walther pistols to execute the fascist hirelings.²⁸² Yuri Levitan, now twenty-three and a familiar voice, read the Pravda trial report over Soviet radio. Vehement approvals of the death sentences appeared under the names of famous Soviet scientists, such as the world-renowned plant specialist Nikolai Vavilov, and cultural figures, such as actress Alla Tarasova, a USSR People’s Artist. Izvestiya on June 12 printed a collective letter from Soviet writers, led by Alexander Fadeyev, naming the eight Soviet commanders as fascist agents who “wore a mask for years” and decrying how “fascists destroy culture, they bring degeneration to humanity, rude, idiotic militarization. The fascists kill the world’s best people.”²⁸³

That same day, Maria Ulyanova, Lenin’s sister, died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age fifty-nine. Stalin had her ashes interred in the Kremlin Wall, adjacent to Gorky’s. This left Krupskaya, aged sixty-eight, alone in the Kremlin apartment they had shared with Lenin.²⁸⁴ Alexander G. Solovyov, by now head of educational institutions in the commissariat of military industry, found Krupskaya sitting by Ulyanova’s casket in the Council of People’s Commissars club. “I asked what lay behind such an early death,” Solovyov noted in his diary. “Krupskaya breathed heavily and said [Maria] could not survive the difficult conditions created around us. Look around more closely, she said: it is possible you do not notice our utterly abnormal situation, the poisoned life.”²⁸⁵

It was on June 15, 1937, that Republic Spain’s new prime minister had ordered the mass arrests of the POUM leadership in Barcelona. The final destruction of the Spanish “Trotskyites,” including the NKVD’s secret assassination of Andreu Nin, had become small potatoes, however satisfying to Stalin.

Pravda reported on a spectacular sixty-three-hour flight (June 18–20, 1937) by Valery Chkalov, copilot Georgy Baidukov, and navigator Alexander Belyakov, from Moscow to the Pacific coast of the United States. The trio landed in Vancouver, Washington, after a daring nonstop flight that covered a distance of more than 5,500 miles and pioneered the polar air route.²⁸⁶ “He is our father,” Chkalov said of Stalin after landing. “The aviators of the Soviet Union call Soviet aviation Stalinist aviation. He teaches us, nurtures us, warns us about risks like children who are close to his heart; he sets us on the right path, takes joy in our success.”²⁸⁷ The exploit showcased the airmen and the airplane: the wide wingspan on the Soviet-designed ANT-25, the work of A. N. Tupolev, had enabled great range and fuel efficiency. The risk of failure had been immense, but so was the reward: domestic and international acclaim. Tupolev was soon imprisoned on trumped-up charges.²⁸⁸

BREAKING KLIM

Pravda, unrelenting, urged ever more naming of names; Stalin was forwarding to the newspaper selections from the investigatory materials Yezhov was providing. The editor, forty-eight-year-old Lev Mekhlis, a former Menshevik, high strung, with a yellowish face, never took his cigarette from his mouth and was known behind his back as the Gloomy Demon.²⁸⁹ “I never met someone with a more complex and contradictory character,” one Soviet official wrote. “I also never heard any kind words about him or praise for his work”—except from the despot: “In Stalin’s eyes Mekhlis was daring, insistent, diligent, and true.”²⁹⁰ Stalin soon named him head of the Red Army’s political administration, which carried promotion to deputy defense commissar. Mekhlis would travel the many military districts, demanding arrests and executions. “The defense commissariat became like a kennel of mad dogs,” Khrushchev would recall. “Mekhlis was one of the worst.”²⁹¹