Stalin

CHAPTER 8 “WHAT WENT ON IN NO. 1’S BRAIN?”

We cannot say that these were the deeds of a giddy despot. He considered that this should be done in the interest of the party, of the working masses, in the name of the defense of the revolution’s gains. In this lies the whole tragedy!

NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV¹

Stalin thought very highly of Bukharin. Yes, he did. Bukharin was very educated and cultivated. But what should one do?

VYACHESLAV MOLOTOV²

HAD STALIN AIMED ONLY TO BREAK HIS INNER CIRCLE, utterly cow the wider elite, and make himself a despot, he might have ended the terror with the in-camera trial and executions of the military men and the arrests of Yagoda, Pauker, and other NKVD higher-ups. Mission accomplished. But he had much larger aims, with plans for more high-profile trials. In summer 1937, he vastly expanded the arrests and executions to nonelites. There was no “dynamic” forcing him to do so, no “factional” fighting, no heightened threat abroad. The terror was not spiraling out of his control. He just decided, himself, to approve quota-driven eradication of entire categories of people in a planned indiscriminate terror known as mass operations.³ This momentous decision was complemented by a widening of the annihilation of sitting elites, which was unveiled at yet another manic Central Committee plenum, this one from June 23 to 29, 1937. On the opening day, Yezhov (according to his notes) enlarged on what he had said at the inconclusive plenum of December 1936 and written up at length in his unpublished magnum opus, “From Factionalism to Open Counterrevolution,” submitted to his teacher Stalin in May 1935: namely, that the USSR was mortally threatened by an immense überconspiracy made up of innumerable intertwined conspiracies.

Yezhov, at the plenum, spelled out a military-fascist conspiracy, a rightist-fascist plot in the NKVD, a Kremlin rightist-fascist group of plotters, an espionage organization of the Polish military, Polish National Democrats in Belorussia, an anti-Soviet rightist-Trotskyite group in the Azov–Black Sea territory and another in Eastern Siberia, a rightist anti-Soviet group in the Urals, an anti-Soviet rightist-fascist group in Western Siberia, a rightist-Trotskyite espionage group in the Soviet Far East, an organization of rightists in Western Siberia united in a partisan-guerrilla uprising, an anti-Soviet Cossack organization in Orenburg, and a wrecking rightist-Trotskyite anti-Soviet group in the agriculture commissariat. “I enumerated only the most important,” he allowed, adding that each was “linked in the closest possible way” and together constituted a “Center of Centers,” which was colluding with “fascist government circles in Germany, Japan, and Poland, on the one hand, and, on the other, with representatives abroad of anti-Soviet parties of Trotskyites, Mensheviks, and SRs.” The shared aim of all these leftist revolutionaries was said to be restoring capitalism in the USSR by way of “a palace coup, an armed uprising supported by foreign interventionists, the preparation of a Soviet defeat in the event of a war with fascist countries, and the coming to power of themselves as a result of political and territorial concessions to the fascists.” Yezhov warned that the scale of the conspiracy emanating from “testimony” indicated that the USSR stood on the verge of civil war.⁴

What attendees said in response remains unknown—Yezhov’s report and the follow-up discussion were not transcribed—but we do know that Trotsky interceded from afar. He sent a telegram from Mexico to the central executive committee of the Soviet, formally the highest organ of the state, declaring that “Stalin’s policies are leading to a crushing defeat, both internally and externally. The only salvation is a turn in the direction of Soviet democracy, beginning with a public review of the last trials. I offer my full support in this endeavor.” This document went to the NKVD, which forwarded it to Stalin. “Mug of a spy!” he wrote on Trotsky’s text. “Brazen spy for Hitler!”⁵

Stalin’s expansion of long-standing party purge practices required a surprisingly small degree of manipulation, and yet his terror was a spectacular feat in its own way. He would manage to annihilate not only nearly the entire upper ranks of the Soviet military and the secret police—in a police-military dictatorship—but much of the industrial managerial class, the regional party machines, and the cultural beau monde.⁶ He also visited ruin upon Soviet military and civilian intelligence, military attachés and diplomats abroad, and foreign Communist parties, prime instruments that any dictatorship would cherish. What was he doing?

The only way into Stalin’s serpentine mind—or, as Arthur Koestler put it in Darkness at Noon, “what went on in No. 1’s brain?”—begins with public and private comments made by him and those he instructed.⁷ Hitler turned out to be a brilliant actor, and the same has been said of Stalin, who dissembled shamelessly and playacted skillfully. But also like Hitler, who incessantly talked of his intentions (most people just did not believe him), Stalin proved extraordinarily voluble as well.⁸ We can never know in the end what Stalin believed. We can, however, come to understand how his mind worked.

Sometimes his terror ruminations were extensive, such as at the June 2, 1937, closed session of the Main Military Council; other times they were brief. They emerged from his long-standing self-conception that those who opposed him were broadcasting disunity and weakness, thereby inviting foreign powers to attack—in other words, objectively supporting the USSR’s enemies—while he, a selfless servant of the cause, under siege from uncomprehending critics, had been placed on this earth to defend the socialist revolution and the Soviet state. Therefore, he was not merely justified, but dutybound, to eradicate oppositionists and anyone taken in by them. The incarceration or physical liquidation of more than a million and a half human beings apparently posed no moral dilemmas for him. On the contrary, to pity class enemies would be to indulge sentiment over the laws of objective historical development. Ignorance of history could be fatal, Stalin argued, and he spent a great deal of time during the terror midwifing an accessible history of the Russian state, from its origins to the present, as a tool of mass civic training.⁹ Stalin was a massacring pedagogue.

A TEACHER AND A PUPIL

In Boris Yefimov’s celebrated cartoons, Yezhov was depicted with an oversized gloved fist crushing shrunken enemies. In person, he stood a mere five feet tall (1.51 meters), had a prominent scar on his right cheek (a civil war injury) and yellowish teeth (something he shared with Stalin), and walked with a pronounced limp, a gait even worse than the despot’s. He was beset by a hacking cough from tuberculosis, myasthenia and neurasthenia, anemia, angina, sciatica, psoriasis, and even malnutrition, ailments of long standing. One old revolutionary said Yezhov reminded him of slum children whose favorite occupation was to tie paraffin-soaked paper to a cat’s tail and set fire to it.¹⁰ Around 1930, Yezhov had begun to indulge in drinking benders, to the point of losing consciousness. One of his drinking companions had been Fyodor Konar (Polashchuk), who used to bring along prostitutes. (Konar had been arrested in January 1933 as a Polish spy and executed two months later for “sabotage in agriculture.”) Another drinking buddy, Lev Maryasin, a former coworker in the personnel department of the central apparatus who had become head of the state bank and deputy finance commissar, used to compete with Yezhov in farting competitions. (Maryasin, too, was arrested, by Yezhov’s NKVD.)¹¹ Stalin allowed Yezhov various leaves, spending hard currency on treatments abroad, but the illnesses, along with Yezhov’s propensity for daytime drinking, took a toll. “Yezhov not only drank,” recalled Zinaida Glikina, a friend of Yezhov’s wife, Yevgeniya. “In addition, he deteriorated and lost the visage not only of a Communist but of a human being.”

As Yezhov fanatically prosecuted the terror, in early 1937 his teeth began to fall out. He suffered from appetite loss, dizziness, and insomnia. Doctors diagnosed overwork and ordered a long holiday, which Yezhov deemed out of the question.¹² In April 1937, one of his subordinates had suggested the cause might be meals at the NKVD canteen, where undiscovered enemies could be lurking. The Red Army’s chemical warfare academy was called in and “found” trace elements of mercury in Yezhov’s office. An NKVD employee was tortured and confessed, implicating Yagoda in an assassination attempt. Traces of mercury were suddenly found in Yezhov’s former apartment (on Bolshoi Kiselny), in his new one (in the Kremlin), and at his dacha (in Meshcherino); all were ventilated, and the mercury vanished. No one explained how the inaccessible residences had become contaminated. But Yezhov now had his urine checked regularly, and switched offices inside NKVD headquarters.¹³ He was reported to have created a circuitous, one-way route to his Lubyanka suite—up to the fifth floor, down to the first, then up to the third, as if he were under threat from the agency he commanded.¹⁴

Could this alcoholic, increasingly infirm, frightened Lilliputian creature have been responsible for Soviet state security? Yezhov, of course, was an instrument. It was not he—and not a rebellious military command, as in Spain—who originated the mass violence in the USSR.¹⁵ But Stalin goaded him relentlessly: “Comrade Yezhov. Very important. It is necessary to go through the Udmurt, Mari-El, Chuvash, and Mordovian republics, to go through with a whip.”¹⁶

Back in tsarist Russia, General Alexander Gerasimov, the head of the okhranka in St. Petersburg, met with Nicholas II just once during his entire career; political policing was viewed as necessary, but not necessarily honorable, work. That had changed: in 1935 and 1936, Yagoda had been in Stalin’s office every month, sometimes more than once. From January 1937 through August 1938, an interval during which Stalin received visitors on 333 days, Yezhov would make 288 appearances, second only to Molotov. How often they additionally met at the Near Dacha or spoke on the telephone remains unknown. Stalin sometimes played chess with him.¹⁷ The Bloody Dwarf, as Yezhov was known in whispers, cleansed enemies out of conviction, but also to please his master, just as Yezhov’s subordinates showed fanaticism in terror to please him. His three concurrent positions—NKVD chief, Central Committee secretary, chairman of the party Control Commission—rendered him as knowledgeable about Stalin’s thinking as anyone.¹⁸ “A teacher with a pupil, an eagle with an eaglet,” the Stalinist writer-enforcer Alexander Fadeyev wrote of the despot and his protégé. “Stalin tends to him lovingly, like a gardener tends to a beloved tree.”¹⁹ Yezhov returned Stalin’s favor with nonpareil zeal and brutality.²⁰

As the ringleaders of the phantasmagorical “Center of Centers,” Yezhov named Bukharin (who was writing desperate, groveling letters to Stalin), Rykov (who had failed to act decisively when he had his chance back in 1928–29), Tomsky (who shot himself rather than his tormentors), Zinoviev (who had been writing his own groveling letters to Stalin), Kamenev (who could have smothered the Bolshevik monopoly in its cradle in 1917 but shrank from doing so), émigré SR, Menshevik, and White Guard organizations (which were infiltrated and in some cases established by the NKVD), and Pyatakov (who begged to be the executioner of all the others, an offer Stalin declined, reasoning out loud at the Central Committee that “no one would believe that you voluntarily decided to do this, without being coerced, and besides, we have never announced the names of the people who carry out sentences”).²¹ This was a pathetic register of coup leaders. As for the supposedly threatening anti-Soviet émigré organizations, Yezhov’s NKVD had thoroughly penetrated them. Some, such as the Helsinki branch of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), were actually led by Soviet agents, while the leaders of others, such as General Evgeny Miller of the Russian All-Military Union, had been kidnapped.²² “They present no value whatsoever,” Sergey Spigelglas, deputy director of NKVD foreign espionage, reported, “since they have neither money, nor international connections, nor organization, nor people.”²³

Ultimately, however, Yezhov was right in one crucial way: a conspiratorial “Center of Centers” threatening the Soviet Union did exist: the Little Corner itself.

COMMUNISM’S EASE OF MASS MURDER

Throughout 1937 and 1938, there were on average nearly 2,200 arrests and more than 1,000 executions per day.²⁴ The NKVD extracted testimony under torture even from people who would not be tried publicly, because that was one way they met quotas—gathering ever more names of accomplices—but also, more fundamentally, because Stalin craved this. Even when “confessions” had been edited by him, he treated them as if they were real, underlining passages, circulating them to the politburo, and referring to “testimony.” During the two frenzied, gruesome years of 1937 and 1938, Yezhov forwarded to him more than 15,000 written “special communications,” an average of 20 per day, many of which Stalin marked up and returned with further instructions.²⁵

The terror’s scale would become crushing. More than 1 million prisoners were convoyed by overloaded rail transport in 1938 alone.²⁶ The Lubyanka’s feared inner prison contained a mere 110 cells. (The building had been a hotel for visiting insurance executives and retained its parquet in the corridors. Most of the floors were aboveground, but the windows were bricked up; the cellars were reserved for priority prisoners and executions.)²⁷ But Butyrka, tsarist Russia’s former central transit prison—whence the Cheka founder Felix Dzierżyński had once escaped—filled with 20,000 inmates, six times capacity. And Butyrka was considered a resort compared with Lefortovo, while the most feared of all, Sukhanovka, located at a former monastery just outside Moscow and known as the dacha, was still more jammed.²⁸ Some arrest sweeps had to be delayed or put off because of overcrowding.²⁹ Urgent requests to Moscow for instructions began to sit without response (by summer 1938, more than 100,000 unattended cases would languish).³⁰ Stalin, for two years running, felt constrained to skip his much-beloved annual southern holiday—even he struggled to keep the pace, despite his inhuman capacity for work.

Given the numbers involved, the state’s violence against its own population inevitably was chaotic.³¹ Stalin lost track of people, writing next to names in interrogation protocols, “Arrest,” when they were already in custody, a point he came to recognize. (“Comrade Yezhov: The names identified by me in the text with the letters ‘ar’ are to be arrested, if they have not yet been arrested.”)³² Stalin would suddenly remember someone and inquire about his fate (some were dead, some not). People whose names sounded similar to someone else’s would suffer misdirected arrests. Not everyone on the hundreds of lengthy execution lists was shot.³³ But for all this messiness, the process was systematic, driven by continuous orders and codified in updated antiterrorist laws and procedures. Mass murder does not somehow “break out,” but must be set in motion, and then driven onward, as Stalin did, and be sustained by powerful drivers.

A number of factors made such a terror possible. The Communist party underwent periodic “purges” to root out those deemed unworthy—because of background, beliefs, or inability to carry out responsibilities—and these long-standing practices that normally led to expulsion and possible arrest were ramped up to certain arrest and likely execution. Moreover, the very fact of the long history of party expulsions, even without arrest, had created a multitude of individuals who could be seen as potentially dangerous. The terror was also propelled by the bureaucratic imperatives and careerism of a formidable repressive apparatus that had been built up over many years, especially as a result of collectivization-dekulakization, as well as a pervasive fear in the ranks of the NKVD for their own lives. Additionally, the highly organized monopoly public sphere could be—and now was—ordered to disseminate charges of mass sabotage and spying. Even in the largest cities, tiny numbers of correspondents and editors—local Mekhlis equivalents—could fan mass hysteria. Public receptiveness to the charges, in turn, was facilitated by the widely shared tenet that building socialism constituted an adversarial crusade against myriad “enemies” at home and abroad, and by the circumstance that the system was not supposed to have a new elite, but did. The new elite’s apartments, cars, servants, concubines, and imported luxuries were often visible, while workers and farmers lived in hovels and went hungry. This did not mean that every ordinary Soviet inhabitant was eager for the blood of bigwigs, but few tears were shed.

The terror, like every aspect of Soviet reality, also depended upon isolation. Foreigners were kept from Soviet inhabitants, and the number permitted to go abroad, even on official business, shrank to the point that Stalin could examine delegation lists for approval (or not).³⁴ But the key to it all lay in the nature of Communism as a conspiracy to seize and hold power. Everywhere the mechanism for the terror was the same: a secret party circular from Stalin ordering a still more vigilant hunt for “enemies,” a local party meeting, a summons to Bolshevik “criticism,” further denunciations, pandemonium. Just a handful of “activists,” who understood the vocabulary of invective or insinuation to tear down rivals and protect themselves, could precipitate chain reactions of annihilation in which millions became complicit in additional meetings in factories, farms, schools. This was intentional, to achieve scale. The frenzy never escaped Stalin’s ability to shape and ultimately stop it. Still, often the denouncers were denounced right back by those they had aimed at, in a circular firing squad. And if a person defended someone accused of being an enemy of the people, well, then, that was proof that he or she, too, was an enemy.³⁵ Even if one merely inquired about a coworker who had suddenly stopped showing up, one could be accused of harboring “ties” or “sympathies.”³⁶ Party and state officials, in other words, became trapped in the twisted logic of the system they had helped create. They accepted that foreign capitalist powers would never accept the success of the Soviet Union, that “dying classes” could not be expected to go quietly, that socialism had myriad enemies, but now these loyal Soviet officials were themselves the enemy.

STALIN AND THE STATE

The party’s monopoly went hand in hand with administrative dysfunction. This was a state with awesome power, one that had the capacity to build competitive tanks and artillery in big batches, confiscate much of a harvest, deliver a coordinated propaganda message at every factory and farm, and internally deport whole nations but was largely unable to execute subtle tasks (except when functionaries knowingly behaved illegally).³⁷ The Soviet party-state was clumsy and pervasive, at its strongest in mobilization, suppression, and surveillance. The system gathered incredible quantities of information yet was often poorly informed.³⁸ Stalin expressed frustration at local officials’ supposed narrow horizons and imagined that he alone upheld the interests of the revolution and state tout court, as against specific institutional or sectoral interests. He was cognizant of some limits on his freedom of action—great distances, primitive communication, low levels of education, the bureaucratism and self-dealing—but he nonetheless tried to force his way past them and often did so. He presumed the efficacy of administration and administrative methods and spent considerable time and energy in reorganizations of agencies and work flow.³⁹ But he frequently obviated those same agencies by calling in a plenipotentiary, delivering a pep talk, and having that person go out and bang heads to get things done, then report solely to him. He had come to understand that the ever-growing system of monitoring decision making was achieving less and less.⁴⁰ Still, he did not understand that organizations, particularly overly large ones, develop an often perverse dynamic beyond functionaries’ self-interest.

Far from everything began with Stalin. The politburo adjudicated some 3,000 items per year in the 1930s.⁴¹ Stalin did not really delegate, but the work flow exceeded his capacity to oversee every issue.⁴² Some decisions under his signature (affixed by his staff) he never read. Molotov recalled that Stalin would approach the pile and ask which were the important ones.⁴³ Stalin could ask for guidance: “What to do?” he would sometimes write on documents. (Who knew if it was genuine or a test?) Others in the leadership and throughout the labyrinthine apparatus had no choice but to try to address issues that confronted them day in and day out. But he concentrated information and decision making at the top, which overwhelmed him and his top aides, drowned the central agencies in paperwork, and created massive logjams. The system was in constant pressure against itself—in information gathering and reporting, in coordination or refusal thereof, in pushing responsibility off and back on.⁴⁴ Stalin’s interventions were perforce episodic, sometimes preceded by careful study, sometimes not. He unwittingly created bottlenecks, and narrowed the exchange of information even at the top of the regime. Coordination did take place across agencies in the Little Corner. But when he assigned spheres to individual plenipotentiaries, he sometimes did not inform them of one another’s work. Everything rested upon the people Stalin chose to summon, or not, the reports he solicited and decided to read, or not, the decisions he rendered and how he did or even did not communicate them, and, ultimately, his ability to understand the country and the world.

Very early on in his rule, proper leadership had emerged as one of Stalin’s most recurrent themes. For him it meant not declarations of decrees, but their implementation.⁴⁵ Stalin derived his sense of the country and the world predominantly from documents, as well as intuition.⁴⁶ But without irony he castigated “paper leadership” and “office leadership,” functionaries who sat in their big suites and issued orders without familiarizing themselves with the situation in the factory shops or fields, who failed to inquire about people’s experiences and difficulties in order to lend practical help in the tasks at hand. He had complained early and often of needing to “break through the wall of bureaucratism and improve the slipshod performance of our bureaucracies.”⁴⁷ He had stressed the work of “checking up by punching people in the face” (September 2, 1930).⁴⁸ His view of power was deceptively simple: indicate the correct line, assign individuals to implement it, and goad and watch them. Less than 100 percent fulfillment meant rotten liberals showing leniency, playing into the hands of enemies, becoming enemies themselves. But even as his regime demanded unwavering implementation of central directives, it often provided little guidance in the rationales for policies as recorded in the minimalist politburo minutes that were circulated. This left officials poring over Pravda, especially the speeches of Stalin. He appears to have assumed that he was being crystal clear, leaving no room for ambiguity, so that misinterpretations had to be deliberate. He also does not appear to have appreciated the negative consequences of coercion.

Policy to Stalin was reduced to an exercise in obedience and resolve. But by constantly pushing to tighten the system and render it more hierarchical, Stalin had empowered the gatekeeping officials not only in his secretariat but also in the regions, whom he instinctively did not trust. Even allowing for secret police exaggeration, the provincial nomenklatura certainly dragged their feet over directives, failed to cope with the (impossible) demands placed upon them (as would their successors), covered their failures with deception, and brazenly feathered their own nests. Stalin closely followed the reports of self-dealing and local collusion (“family-ness”), flouting of central directives, scapegoating of rivals or underlings who had dared to heed the exhortations in the party press to criticize bosses.⁴⁹ He detested officials making excuses or covering up their failures and pretending they were succeeding, behavior he denounced as double-dealing. Stalin likely understood but would not admit that his own relentless pressure and exorbitant demands made the evasions and coping mechanisms pervasive. He wanted officials to perform well but to be constantly looking over their shoulders. He worked to identify or assign agents inside locales and institutions to report directly to him, bypassing administrative hierarchies, and empowered the secret police to stand above other institutions, yet he feared that the police might conspire against him, so he worked to trip them up, too.

Evasive, self-serving behavior by officialdom is endemic to every authoritarian state.⁵⁰ What was atypical—to put it mildly—was their mass extermination by their own regime. Stalin faced no imperative to murder them. He could sack or transfer any local satrap at will.⁵¹ Instead, he not only put Soviet officials to death or had them deported to slave labor camps en masse, but, in a huge expenditure of state resources, had them tortured to confess and, incredibly, had these Communists confess not to being corrupt or incompetent, but to plotting to assassinate him and restore capitalism on behalf of foreign powers. And that was not all. In the Marxist worldview, entire classes—feudal lords, the bourgeoisie—had outlived their usefulness and become “fetters” on humanity’s further development. (“Everyone is against us who has outlived the epoch allotted to him by history,” Maxim Gorky had written in Pravda in November 1930.)⁵² But Stalin took to applying notions of epochal obsolescence, not just presumptive disloyalty, to the body of experienced Soviet functionaries, as if they, too, were people of a bygone epoch and needed to make way. He would promote the young, to fix the pathologies of the state.

WE ARE THE ENEMY

As each phase of the seemingly endless party cleanings had unfolded, the focus of attack had moved ever closer to the centers of power. Whereas the 1933–34 party purge (expulsions largely without arrest) had targeted the rank and file, and the 1935 verification and exchange of party cards had affected to a great degree lower-level apparatchiks sacrificed by their superiors, the 1936–38 terror, which involved arrest as well as expulsion, consumed the big fish, those who had earlier implemented the expulsions of others, and decimated the Stalinist Central Committee.⁵³ Central Committee membership had always been a mark of the highest prestige and privilege. True, its members had long ago ceased to demonstrate any capacity for, let alone inclination toward, collective action.⁵⁴ They met only when summoned, and even then were ultracareful to avoid the appearance of gathering in subgroups. After they received the June 1937 plenum materials in advance (as per normal procedure), which included interrogation protocols of already arrested high officials, Central Committee members wrote to Stalin swearing their fealty, even if their own names were not (yet) mentioned in “testimonies.” None wrote or spoke up to question the frame-ups.⁵⁵

Upon the opening of the June plenum, of the seventy-one members and sixty-eight candidates for membership formally elected to the Central Committee at the previous party congress (1934), thirteen had been arrested (including Pyatakov, Bukharin, and Rykov), three had committed suicide (Tomsky, Orjonikidze, and Gamarnik), four had died of natural causes (Mężyński, Kuibyshev, Tovstukha, and Alexander Steinhart), and one had been assassinated (Kirov). During the plenum, Stalin sanctioned the destruction of at least another thirty-one, so that more than fifty of the 139 did not take part in or finish the sessions; several more would be arrested right after.⁵⁶ Altogether, around 100 of the 139 Central Committee members would not survive to the next party congress. The vast majority of them had not been Stalin’s opponents in the oppositions of the 1920s. Nor had they run afoul of him subsequently. To be sure, a few, such as Sergei Syrtsov, party boss of Siberia during Stalin’s 1928 visit, had been expelled from the Central Committee in 1930 for private criticism of him.⁵⁷ But most of those arrested now were stalwarts who had been loyal right through the fire of dekulakization-collectivization and beyond.⁵⁸ Their subordinates and associates were also destroyed—followed, in many cases, by their replacements.

Most astonishingly, sitting provincial party bosses were forced to organize their own annihilation by summoning party meetings and encouraging denunciations.⁵⁹ When, predictably, they tried to protect themselves and their associates by sacrificing other, often rival, officials, Stalin accused them of suppressing criticism. He had sent a ciphered telegram around the Union expressly warning that “some party secretaries of provinces, apparently wishing to escape blame, very eagerly give authorization to the NKVD organs to arrest certain leaders, directors, technical directors, engineers and technicians, mid-managers of factories and transport, and other sectors. The Central Committee reminds you that neither secretaries of a province or territory, nor secretaries of national parties, nor party-soviet leaders in locales have the right to authorize such arrests.”⁶⁰ Such decisions were Stalin’s alone and, to ensure compliance, he dispatched “Central Committee” plenipotentiaries: Kaganovich to Chelyabinsk, Yaroslavl, Ivanovo, and Ukraine; Zhdanov to Bashkiria, Tataria, and Orenburg; Malenkov to Belorussia, Armenia, Kazan, Tula, Omsk, and Tambov; Andreyev to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Saratov, and the North Caucasus; Shkiryatov to the Soviet Far East. In Kiev, chairing an assembly of the “party active,” Kaganovich began, “Well, come on up and report whatever anyone knows about enemies of the people.”⁶¹

There was no way to ensure one’s survival, but people felt they could not just sit there and wait for the others to denounce them. Chain reactions spread—once triggered via these party meetings, rabid newspaper articles that vilified people by name, and Stalin’s plenipotentiaries (who had to please him). Kaganovich had arrived in Ivanovo like the head of a foreign occupation, with a bodyguard detail of thirty, and been greeted by local NKVD bosses; the party machine had not even been apprised in advance. He phoned Stalin repeatedly to detail his impressive results: the arrest of nearly every leader in the local party (he had brought an entire replacement leadership with him). But Stalin demanded still more pressure “to stop liberalizing.”⁶² (At the train station, as Kaganovich was seen off, he made a point to thank all service personnel and handed out tips of 50 to 100 rubles each, identifying with the proletarians.)⁶³ In Kazakhstan, the entire party bureau—the republic equivalent of the politburo—was arrested. In Turkmenistan, no bureau existed for months.⁶⁴ Many party machines would be wiped out two and even three times. This could hardly render the provincial apparatus more responsive.⁶⁵ Rather than make examples of some disobedient regional functionaries in order to frighten the rest, the terror effectively paralyzed the entire, sprawling regional apparatus. “During the purges hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats shook in their boots,” wrote the American eyewitness John Scott, who worked in provincial Magnitogorsk. “Many people reacted by shunning responsibility. . . . Still other people became exasperated and bitter.”⁶⁶

A good number of upper-level functionaries had been working sixteen- to eighteen-hour shifts, often through the night, under tremendous strain. The commissar for domestic trade, Israel Veitser, was suffering from impaired health, according to the Kremlin medical team, partly because he usually arrived at the office around noon and departed between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m., taking papers home with him. (The Council of People’s Commissars decreed that he should finish work by midnight.)⁶⁷ Veitser’s deputies, advisers, and secretaries all worked similar hours. Veitser, who happened to be married to the theater director Natalya Sats (the onetime mistress of Tukhachevsky), was sacked and arrested. Twenty of twenty-eight members of the Council of People’s Commissars would be arrested.⁶⁸ Soviet industrial production, the supposed lifeblood of the regime, took a hit. In the strategic coal industry, output in 1936 had stagnated; in the first quarter of 1937, the plan went unfulfilled. Almost the entire provincial Donbass party that was appointed in May 1937, seventy-six people, would be slaughtered.⁶⁹

Sarkis Sarkisov (Danielyan), an ethnic Armenian who served as party boss in the Donetsk coal basin, had worked in Leningrad under Zinoviev. When attacked by the NKVD, he went on the offensive, becoming complicit in the sweeping arrests of his colleagues in the provincial machine, until he, too, was arrested and executed.⁷⁰ Eduards Prāmnieks, an ethnic Latvian stonemason who had succeeded Zhdanov as party boss in Nizhny Novgorod/Gorky, succeeded Sarkisov. “Many people cannot understand why the Donbass, which was always a fortress of Bolshevism, has become infiltrated by enemies and scum,” Prāmnieks pontificated. “One must remember that, as an extremely important center, the Donbass will always be a target for enemies and spies.”⁷¹ His work was paralyzed. “With whom to work?” he confided to the writer Avdeyenko. “All the first and second secretaries of the city have turned out to be enemies of the people. . . . The directors of factories have turned out to be wreckers or spies. The chief engineers, chief technicians, even the chief doctors of some hospitals, are also from the ranks of scum.”⁷² Then, another wholesale liquidation struck the Donbass—at least 140 factory and mine directors, chief engineers, and party officials—and Prāmnieks, too, turned out to be “scum.”⁷³ Kaganovich, at a Kremlin reception for the coal and metallurgy sectors, would state that as a result of the “wrecking by Trotskyite-Bukharinite hirelings,” the coal industry had fallen into difficult straits. Stalin softened this dire verdict in the coal industry report that was published.⁷⁴ Still, he evidently deemed the production losses a price worth paying.

NESTS OF SPIES

There were some 10,000 foreign Communists in residence in the Soviet Union.⁷⁵ They and their counterparts abroad were feared the world over as subversives of bourgeois order, but in Stalin’s mind they were a mortal danger to the Soviet Union. Back during the centennial celebration of Pushkin’s death at the Bolshoi, he had blurted out to Dimitrov, “All of you there in the Comintern are playing into the enemy’s hands.” He called the Comintern a “nest of spies.”⁷⁶ Foreign Communists talked. They could not fail to observe the abject subordination of all Communist parties to Moscow, the embourgeoisement of Soviet upper echelons, the opacity of decision making, the lack of commitment to world revolution (as opposed to Soviet state interests). But the overwhelming majority of foreign Communists had little to nothing of value to divulge to foreign governments. Formal structure in the Comintern had been abandoned: it was just the Little Corner, and just when Stalin got around to summoning or corresponding with Dimitrov. Dimitrov, who had stood up to Göring and Goebbels in a Leipzig courtroom, received foreign Communists’ interrogation protocols containing ever new names and had to issue telegrams summoning some of these people from abroad to Moscow, where, he knew, they would be executed.⁷⁷

The 400 rooms of the isolating Comintern residence, the perversely named Hotel Lux, were cleared out multiple times during the terror. None of it appears to have been policy driven. Pyatnitsky, Lozovsky, Knorin, and Kun had all supported the “social fascism” thesis close to Stalin’s heart and they all perished; Dimitrov, Manuilsky, and Kuusinen had supported the broad leftist front, and they survived.

British, American, French, and Czechoslovak Communists largely escaped death or the Gulag; they belonged to legal parties and did not require refuge in the Soviet Union. Chinese Communists, in the deep interior of their country, also mostly escaped Stalin’s cellars. But of the sixty-eight German Communists who managed to obtain refuge in the USSR after Hitler had come to power, Stalin had forty-one put to death. More members of the pre-1933 German Communist politburo were killed in the Stalinist terror (seven) than under Hitler (five).⁷⁸ Polish Communists in Soviet exile suffered the worst: an estimated 5,000 arrests just in spring–summer 1937. Stalin had the Polish Communist party formally dissolved, “owing to its saturation with spies and provocateurs.” He wrote across Dimitrov’s draft resolution, “The dissolution is about two years late.”⁷⁹ (Many Polish Communists would hear of the dissolution of their party by Moscow while wallowing in prisons in Poland.)⁸⁰ To be sure, Stalin was hardly alone in his suspicion of political émigrés: verification campaigns directed at foreigners living in the Soviet Union were long-standing and accepted as necessary, given the tense international situation and the shadowy nature of politics under Communism.⁸¹ But the verifications did not establish facts. They began with presumed guilt and snowballed via all manner of slander and innuendo.

Planning went forward for a public trial of “Trotskyite-fascists” in the Comintern, and the tentative list of “Trotskyites” seems to have included Mao.⁸² The trial never materialized. It was supposed to center on Pyatnitsky, an original member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (1898) who had never joined any opposition but was expelled from the Central Committee and placed “under investigation” during the June 1937 plenum. Despite being beaten to a pulp over the course of a full year, Pyatnitsky refused to slander himself.⁸³

Stalin had Soviet diplomacy put up against the wall, too. On July 1, 1937, Vasily Korzhenko, deputy chief of the Stalingrad NKVD, was named business manager of the foreign affairs commissariat, which ushered him into a world of secret privilege. The commissariat building at Blacksmith Bridge comprised two wings. One was for amenities, such as a nursery for diplomats’ children, a clinic for staff and foreign embassy officials, a library, hairdressing salon, tailor’s shop, gastronome, and recreational facility. The other wing contained the office suites and private apartments of the higher officials. Korzhenko’s office had four comfortable chairs, a divan, a Persian rug, and an ample mahogany working desk. Five telephones sat atop the desk, once a sign of status but now points of life-and-death pressure. The one with a red button was a direct line to Stalin’s office. Pushing that with the receiver lifted elicited an immediate response from the Little Corner—and vice versa. Another, with a white button, was connected to the NKVD. Korzhenko, as he spoke, could see the secret police building across the way at Lubyanka Square through his office’s three expansive French windows. Goaded by Yezhov and Frinovsky, Korzhenko acted much like a Gestapo officer who had been infiltrated into the Soviet foreign affairs commissariat. His daughter explained that her father “was not concerned with diplomacy but had absolute power over foreign [commissariat] employees from cipher clerks to ambassadors . . . not only in Moscow but throughout the world.”⁸⁴

Among the first to have been targeted were Nikolai Krestinsky and Lev Karakhan.⁸⁵ Because nearly everyone in foreign affairs had worked with these “enemies of the people,” no one was safe from guilt by association. Vulnerability to arrest depended less on what people had done than on the sometimes random flow of denunciations, the caprice of Korzhenko and NKVD officials, and, ultimately, the authorization (or not) of Stalin. Personnel files with mandatory autobiographies were fatal: if you wrote out all of your associations, you were a goner; if you concealed even a single piece of information, you were a goner. When the NKVD station chief in Lithuania complained to Yezhov about the ambassador, Yezhov forwarded to Stalin material on the expenses of the embassy, two thirds of which went to refurbishing the ambassador’s office. Yezhov further noted that the ambassador had left abruptly for a three-month “holiday,” attempting to escape the arrest wave.⁸⁶ Litvinov at times tried to blunt the murderous rampage, but he, too, feared for his life.⁸⁷ Soviet embassies were emptied of personnel, and to the extent that dispatches were still being sent to Moscow, the paperwork often went unanswered from lack of personnel. Surviving officials, meanwhile, were “so patently in abject terror, that one must pity them,” one American diplomat wrote to Washington. “They fear to talk on any subject and apparently dread meeting foreign visitors.”⁸⁸

“ANTI-SOVIET ELEMENTS”

Violence against the population was a hallmark of the Soviet state nearly from its inception, of course, and had reached its apogee in the collectivization-dekulakization. In that sense, the 1937–38 campaign against “anti-Soviet elements” afforded grisly continuity. But these new “mass operations” entailed not just large-scale deportations with some executions, but a preponderance of extrajudicial killing. They would account for 1.1 million of the 1.58 million arrests in 1937–38, and 634,000 of the 682,000 executions.⁸⁹ Unlike the state murders in the military, secret police, state agencies, and party, these sweeps captured almost none of Stalin’s attention. Still, he relentlessly drove the astronomical numbers with memoranda, telephone directives, and quotas.⁹⁰ Local NKVD bosses, predictably, would petition to have their quotas raised, which the “Central Committee” invariably granted. Yezhov was now constantly in the Little Corner, sometimes remaining even after Molotov had departed, and often with his first deputy, Frinovsky. The quota method afforded wide scope to the pair as well as to local NKVD bosses in determining life or death.⁹¹

Miron Korol, who went by the name Sergei Mironov, had been born in Kiev (1894) to Jewish parents (his grandmother had owned a dairy shop on fashionable Khreshchatyk Street). The young man graduated from a high school for commerce, fought in the tsarist army in the Great War, and, in the civil war, headed a unit of Budyonny’s famous 1st Calvary Army before joining the Cheka (age twenty-seven) and, four years later, the party. Mironov cut his teeth in the North Caucasus, yet another Yevdokimovite, especially in Chechnya, where “banditism” was no mere slogan of abuse, and counterinsurgency was for real. By 1930, Mironov had climbed to deputy secret police head in Kazakhstan, where he managed influxes of “special resettlers” (deported “kulaks”) and denomadization, which resulted in mass death and starvation. From September 1933 through 1936, he headed the OGPU-NKVD in industrial Dnepropetrovsk, living in a villa with a billiards room, cinema, and modernized bathhouse, emulating his superior, Ukraine NKVD chief Balytsky, who had an even more impressive villa on the Dnieper River, where in 1936 Mironov and his second wife, Agnessa, had their wedding, at state expense.⁹² Vodka, champagne, and nighttime card playing for large sums mixed with surveillance over the party elite, under the guise of providing security. Yezhov, spurred by Frinovsky, promoted Mironov to NKVD chief of Western Siberia, where he took over the villa of the former tsarist governor general and continued the grand style of sumptuous banquets and a household of servants.