Stalin

Mironov lived in the Chekist world. Once upon a time, that had meant defending Soviet power against armed enemies; now it entailed a deceitful game of unmasking “Trotskyites” and “spies” on railroads and at factories. In private conversations with Agnessa, Mironov called the high-profile November 1936 Kemerovo wrecking case (which predated his arrival) “fabrication” (lipa). Torture was known as physical methods or sanctions, with a “scribe” writing up interrogation protocols, often in the absence of the person interrogated and with cynical instructions. (“In this interrogation protocol, it’d be good to add a few little bombs, a touch of terrorism, a rebellion, throw in some diversionary action, then it would be full fledged.”) A mass execution was known as a wedding. Chekists would joke that one of them had shot the wrong people but promised to “correct the mistake.”⁹³ A profound brittleness underlay the dark humor: Mironov could not shake the thought that he, too, would end up in Novosibirsk’s “bird house” (prison). In March 1937, he was promoted to commissar of state security (third rank), putting him in the elite of the elite. Once, playing billiards, he could see uniformed men approaching outside—and turned white. They proved to be just a rotation of the exterior guard. Mironov had served under the “enemy” Yagoda, and Mironov’s deputy, Alexander Uspensky, was closer to Yezhov and could earn a promotion by taking down his new boss. According to Agnessa, “Seryozha said that he [Uspensky] was not a person but mucus.”⁹⁴

Such animal fear prompted varied reactions. Some NKVD personnel became inert, some threw themselves out the window, some strove to reconfirm their worth with rabid arrests. Mironov felt impelled to do the latter. He was the one who had telegrammed Yezhov with a denunciation of Balytsky while the latter had been traveling toward his new assignment in the Soviet Far East. Back on June 17, 1937, on the eve of the Central Committee plenum at which Yezhov would unveil the “Center of Centers,” Mironov had “requested permission” to form a Western Siberian “troika,” comprising the regional NKVD chief, the procurator, and the party boss, to expedite death sentences. He wrote that thousands of exiles were lying in wait to form a counterrevolutionary army. Troikas had been widely used for dekulakization and, before that, in the 1920s antibanditry operations of the North Caucasus, so they were familiar to Mironov. Deich (of the NKVD secretariat) or Frinovsky, knowing how much Stalin prized requests “from below,” likely had suggested a troika revival to Mironov. Be that as it may, on June 22, Yezhov forwarded Mironov’s “request” to Stalin.

As a respite from the Central Committee plenum, on June 25, 1937, Stalin, with the retinue in tow, went to the Moscow aerodrome to greet the returning crew of the first-ever airborne polar expedition to set up a scientific station on drift ice. In the summer heat, an improvised banquet took place in the Kremlin. “The tables were set in a way I had never before seen, since I had never been in a restaurant,” observed a then twenty-five-year-old Sigurd Shmidt, whose father, Otto, was the head of the Arctic Institute.⁹⁵ Sergei Obraztsov, the Moscow Art Theater actor and puppeteer, debuted inventive verse about the explorers, which pleased Stalin no end. He invited Obraztsov to share some wine.⁹⁶

Mironov, during the June 1937 “Center of Centers” plenum, privately complained to Frinovsky that all the fabrication was making it impossible to pursue real cases. “What are you doing philosophizing?” Frinovsky snapped. “Now the tempo is such that you need to show results not within months or years, but in days.”⁹⁷ On June 28, even before the plenum had concluded, a sentencing troika was approved for Western Siberia. On July 2, Stalin authorized a resolution, “On Anti-Soviet Elements,” directing all regions to reintroduce troikas to pass sentences without courts.⁹⁸ (The resolution was issued in the politburo’s name, but formal meetings had ceased.)⁹⁹ It would become the most murderous single document of his regime. On July 3, a coded telegram in Yezhov’s name went to all sixty-five NKVD republic and regional offices, demanding a fast inventory of previously deported kulaks, ordinary criminals, and former convicts.¹⁰⁰ As the calculations were being tabulated, on July 5, a decree was issued to incarcerate wives of enemies in camps for five to eight years—for being their wives.¹⁰¹ The Uzbekistan leadership asked to be able to include “nationalist terrorists” (i.e., non-Uzbeks, especially Tajiks); Mironov’s Western Siberia asked to include former SRs, former Mensheviks, former Whites, former priests—indeed, all “formers.”¹⁰² Permission was granted.¹⁰³ For those who required extra motivation, the NKVD bosses in Chelyabinsk and Tataria were arrested, which would prompt a sleepless night for Mironov; he had once worked under the Tatar head.¹⁰⁴

There were carrots for the NKVD, too: in a single month, 179 operatives received state awards, including no fewer than forty-six Orders of Lenin (Mironov got one). On July 17, 1937, Yezhov was awarded the Order of Lenin, “for outstanding successes in leading the organs of the NKVD in the fulfillment of government tasks.” That same day, the politburo formally approved substantial NKVD pay increases for state security personnel (GB) in Moscow, Leningrad, and Ukraine.¹⁰⁵ Rank-and-file operatives now got paid 500 to 800 rubles per month, while republic NKVD heads got 3,500 rubles per month, a jump of 300 percent. (By comparison, a provincial party boss got a salary of 2,000 rubles per month, not including the extra cash envelopes, and the head of the USSR Supreme Court got 1,200 rubles.) Additionally, while NKVD bosses had long enjoyed the use of villas with servants, like gentry, while their subordinates often lived in communal housing or dormitory beds, during the terror, many rank-and-file operatives acquired coveted apartments, as well as state dachas from arrested “enemies.”¹⁰⁶ Possessions confiscated from enemies of the people, including cash, were considered fair game (some Chekists were known to complain when arrestees turned out to be “poor peasants”). Some of the loot would be legally resold through what were called special trading centers, which had been set up to bring in revenue from confiscations, but much was pocketed. Bosses not on the scene expected a cut.¹⁰⁷

Once home from the Moscow gathering, Mironov instructed his subordinates (July 25) that the requirement of procuracy authorization for an arrest (Article 127 of the 1936 Constitution) had been “suspended,” and that they should go out and secretly “find a place where the sentences can be carried out and the bodies buried.”¹⁰⁸

On July 26, 1937, Stalin hosted a Kremlin reception for the aviators Chkalov, Baidukov, and Belyakov, who had returned from North America and a White House reception. They had ridden to the Kremlin in open-top cars garlanded with flowers. Stalin embraced and kissed them. The heroes requested that the evening’s concert program include jazz by Leonid Utyosov, whose band approached the stage singing “Heart,” from the smash film Jolly Fellows. Despite the absence of microphones, the acoustics proved splendid in the intimate Palace of Facets. The jazzmen also played the American melody “Reflection in Water,” with the verses in Russian, about a woman waiting for the return of her lover, which is said to have brought tears to Stalin’s eyes. The despot rose to applaud, leading a long ovation. Utyosov played the number again, and once again visible tears ran down Stalin’s cheeks; then a third encore. The supreme leader was moved to issue his own request, a manifesto of the criminal world called “From the Odessa Jail,” replete with argot that had been officially banned.¹⁰⁹

Frinovsky handled the dirty work, writing up NKVD Operational Order No. 00447 (dated July 31), which Stalin approved. (The 00 indicated supersecrecy.) “The organs of state security are faced with the task of mercilessly crushing this entire gang of anti-Soviet elements,” the order noted, demanding “an end once and for all to the foul subversion of the Soviet state’s foundations.”¹¹⁰ Every potential enemy—as determined by administrative fiat—was to be either executed (category 1) or sent to distant points of the Gulag (category 2). Regional and republic NKVD archivists updated their card catalogs of “anti-Soviet elements,” former “kulaks,” and “recidivist” criminals. Yezhov and Frinovsky used the submitted numbers to assign local arrest quotas totaling, Union-wide, 269,000 (76,000 to be shot, 193,000 to get eight to ten years in the Gulag).¹¹¹ Predictably, regional NKVD officials requested still higher quotas. Western Siberia had it easy, with among the densest concentration of exiled kulaks (more than 200,000), labor camps teeming with ordinary criminals, and large contingents of released inmates.¹¹² In Turkmenistan, the NKVD sent paddy wagons out to the bazaar to haul in people; in Sverdlovsk, in the office of an official arrested as a “counterrevolutionary,” the NKVD found a list of Stakhanovites, a handy group to help meet the quota.¹¹³ During just the first two weeks of August 1937, 100,000 people were arrested, far more than the number in the entire year since the Moscow public trial of August 1936.¹¹⁴

The NKVD sliced through the populace like a reaper through the wheat fields. Nothing fundamental had changed in “kulak sabotage,” crime rates, or Gulag labor needs. Locally, the kulak operation sometimes had little to do with former kulaks. In the Perm region of the Urals province (where former KGB archives have been accessible), the majority of the targets were workers and white-collar functionaries. Here, supersecret order 00447 extended carte blanche to local operatives for eradicating “conspiracies” they were already “unmasking,” as reflected in their mounting NKVD reports dating to fall 1936 and especially spring 1937 (following central plenums and directives). The local pattern resembled the spread of a virus—after one person got arrested, his or her associates got infected with their “guilt,” a reaction that was then repeated, in an ever-widening way.¹¹⁵

At the same time regional secret police officials could no more start massmurdering the populace without central directives than they could continue to do so after central directives instructed them to halt.¹¹⁶ What happened was that Stalin decided on mass murder, and he could count on Frinovsky at the center and the Mironovs in the locales to implement it.¹¹⁷

Parallel “national” operations did not use quotas, but a nationality itself was a kind of quota.¹¹⁸ Every person among Soviet nationalities with a corresponding nation-state outside the USSR became a potential NKVD target. To be sure, sweeping ethnic deportations had begun earlier.¹¹⁹ But such actions expanded exponentially: the entire population of ethnic Koreans in the Soviet Far East were deported to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where they would dig holes for “housing.” The sheer scale of the action against Soviet Koreans—135,000 deported by late October 1937 and as many as 185,000 eventually—gave rise to complications, which provoked Stalin’s ire. “People who sabotage the action, no matter who they might be, arrest forthwith and punish,” he wrote to the top officials in the Soviet Far East.¹²⁰ Regional NKVD offices also now put together “albums” of foreigners and ethnics in their localities, rating the personages by degree of suspicion. Soviet ethnic Poles were the main targets: 144,000 were arrested and 111,000 executed, nearly half of all the non-Russian nationals killed.^{121, 122} (There were around 636,000 ethnic Poles in the Soviet Union.) “Very good!” the ethnic Georgian Stalin wrote on a report by Yezhov, a closet part ethnic Lithuanian. “Dig down and cleanse this Polish-espionage filth. Destroy it in the interests of the USSR!”¹²³

Next were Soviet ethnic Germans: 55,000 arrested and nearly 42,000 executed.¹²⁴ Citizens of Germany were rounded up, too.¹²⁵ Frinovsky, on July 20, forwarded to Stalin a report from NKVD counterintelligence: “A crow was killed near Lake Ladoga. It had a ring with the number D-72291 and an inscription, ‘Germany.’ Simultaneously, a kite [a bird of prey] killed a crow near the village of Rusynya in the Batetsky area of the Leningrad region. This crow also had a ring with the number D-70398 with the same inscription, ‘Germany.’ Evidently, the Germans are studying wind directions by using crows, with the aim of using the winds for diversionary activity and bacteriological purposes (torching settlements, haystacks, and so on).”¹²⁶ What the NKVD had discovered was a research project of German ornithologists to study crow migration.

After Yezhov had posted Alexei Nasedkin to Smolensk as NKVD chief and advised him to “make arrests more boldly” of Soviet ethnic Poles and Germans, Nasedkin discovered, on-site, accumulated “testimony” on a “counterrevolutionary” Latvian cultural society. He rushed back to Moscow. “Yezhov livened up,” Nasedkin recalled, and he asked, “Are there a lot of Latvians in Smolensk?” Nasedkin answered: 5,000, of whom he estimated 450 to 500 could be arrested. “Drivel,” Yezhov said. “I’ll discuss it with the Central Committee and we’ll have to spill the blood of Latvians—arrest not fewer than 1,500–2,000. They are all nationalists.” Nasedkin himself was received in the Little Corner to report on the “Latvian conspiracy.” His “vigilance” helped spark the arrest of nearly every prominent Soviet Latvian: the talented head of the Red Air Force, Yakov Alksnis (Jēkabs Alksnis); the vexed chief of military intelligence, Jan Berzin (Pēteris Ķuzis); the celebrated Chekists Yakov Peters (Jēkabs Peterss) and Martin Latsis (Jānis Sudrabs); the first-ever Red Army supreme commander, Ioakim Vatsetis (Jukums Vācietis), who had saved the Bolshevik regime from the left SRs in 1918; Western Siberian party boss Roberts Eihe; politburo candidate member Jānis Rudzutaks.¹²⁷ All across the USSR, countless people suddenly became “Latvian,” in the interests of meeting quotas. Nasedkin, back in Smolensk, inquired whether he could arrest Latvians in the absence of compromising material on them. “Material,” answered Yezhov, “will arise in the course of interrogation.”¹²⁸

Yezhov would effectively take Rudzutaks’s slot on the politburo; Zhdanov would get Rudzutaks’s dacha.¹²⁹ “He did not admit anything!” Molotov recalled of his long-serving, loyal deputy Rudzutaks. “I think that he was not a conscious participant, but he liberalized with this fraternity, and believed that all this was nonsense, trifles. And that could not be forgiven. He did not understand the dangers. . . . A rather intelligent man, no question. He had a kind of non-Latvian flexibility. Latvians were not so much slow thinkers, but they simplified a bit. First-class thinkers in our party were not found among Latvians.”¹³⁰

ANNIHILATING MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Yezhov received a translation of an intercepted report from a Western European military attaché in Moscow, stating that nearly all foreign representatives in Moscow viewed the charges against Tukhachevsky and other military men as preposterous, an artifact of Stalin’s hypersuspiciousness, and concluded that the executions had damaged Soviet military might. Whether Yezhov had the courage to forward the document to Stalin remains unclear.¹³¹ But another case demonstrates Stalin’s disregard of consequences. In early 1937, Yezhov had sent him a detailed sketch of the German army’s troop positioning for 1935–36, reporting that the valuable material had been photographed from the safe of the German military attaché, Ernst Köstring, without the latter’s knowledge. Yezhov attributed the feat to the Soviet intelligence officer and ethnic Hungarian lieutenant Béla Bíró (b. 1891), whom he praised for “showing initiative, boldness, agility, and sangfroid.” Stalin had approved Yezhov’s recommendation that Bíró be awarded the Order of the Red Star “for special services.” But then, on July 2, 1937, Yezhov’s NKVD, with Stalin’s approval, arrested Bíró, and on September 2 it would have him executed at its state farm killing field, “Kommunarka,” for espionage.¹³² Bíró’s loss was repeated many times.^{133, 134}

Mikhail Alexandrovsky, the just-named deputy of military intelligence, was arrested in July 1937. On August 1, Berzin—less than two months after Stalin had returned him as military intelligence chief—was replaced by his other deputy, Alexander Nikonov. Nikonov lasted a few days before his arrest. Under torture, each confessed and named more names. Stalin could have had their interrogations conducted to find out who (if anyone) had actually recruited them, what damage (if any) they had inflicted. Alternately, he could have kept them in place and had them shadowed to see what (if any) foreign contacts they had. None of that was done.¹³⁵ Military intelligence was handed to an NKVD counterintelligence operative beholden to Yezhov, as if the main task at hand were a police operation against the country’s own intelligence.¹³⁶ Altogether, at least 300 military intelligence officers would be arrested in Moscow alone.¹³⁷ The head of personnel in military intelligence reported that half the allotted positions had become vacant. Maria Polyakova, an undercover operative in Switzerland who returned to Moscow in fall 1937, found no one to report to. “I could not understand what was going on, and I did not know whom to ask about it,” she recalled. “I met the department staff, who were primarily [recent] graduates of the military academy and did not know languages or the work of our agency.”¹³⁸

Stalin explicitly rejected the notion that the arrests were cynical. In August 1937, at a gathering he attended of political functionaries in the military, the head of the Far Eastern Army’s political department complained. “We cannot tell the party mass, the commanding staff, or the Red Army men what [specific] wrecking activities these wreckers committed,” the man stated. “And by the way, the interest in this matter is enormous,” having been incited by the NKVD’s reading of excerpts of the interrogation protocols at Red Army party meetings. One official at the meeting interjected: “Would it not be sufficient just to say that they worked to restore capitalism?” Stalin: “All the same, the testimonies have significance.”¹³⁹

FAR EASTERN “IMPERIALIST WAR”

Japanese ground and air forces in the Manchukuo puppet state had violated the Soviet border more than 150 times in 1935 and again in 1936.¹⁴⁰ In 1937, a major incident took place over strategic islets in the Amur River.¹⁴¹ Islands along a river boundary were normally adjudicated by their positioning relative to the channel of the main current. But since the Russo-Chinese border treaties of 1858 and 1860, storms and other natural causes had caused a shift in the Amur’s main channel, so that a pair of small islets some sixty and fifty miles downstream from Blagoveshchensk, respectively, had moved to the Manchukuo side of the Amur’s main current. The Soviets argued that the border marker should now be the river’s deepest channel, which would put the islets back in Soviet territory. On June 19, 1937, the Japanese had reported that some twenty Soviet soldiers had landed at one of the two islets—known as Kanchazu in Manchu—on motorboats, removed buoys, and evicted Manchukuo gold panners, actions repeated at other Amur islets. Manchukuo government protests brought no resolution. The Japanese Kwantung Army was inclined to clear the Soviet troops by force, but Tokyo military brass decided, on June 28, 1937, that “the problem of these islands located so remotely did not warrant risking a major commitment of the national strength.” That very day, however, a high Japanese military intelligence officer recently returned from Moscow published a report in an Osaka newspaper suggesting that the Soviet Union’s executions of its own top military commanders threatened the Red Army with disintegration, meaning Japan had nothing to fear.¹⁴²

Stalin’s terror—proclaimed as vital in the face of a coming “inevitable war”—was potentially inviting that very war. With Tukhachevsky and the others dead a mere few weeks and the Red Army in turmoil, on June 29, Soviet diplomats informed the Japanese that Moscow would remove the troops from the Amur islets.

By now, though, three small Soviet gunboats had arrived on the scene, and on June 30 Japanese Kwantung Army forces opened fire, sinking one boat and damaging another; thirty-seven Soviet sailors died. Disgust at Tokyo’s “timidity” and an urge to respond to the Soviet “buildup” were strong. Stalin had a diplomatic protest lodged, but he refrained from military retaliation. Japanese intelligence intercepted Blyukher’s order from Khabarovsk to the Amur flotilla commander to withdraw. On July 3—the same day Yezhov’s NKVD order went out to branches to prepare for “mass operations” against the USSR’s own population—Soviet troops began to evacuate the islets. Manchukuo filled the vacuum on July 6, occupying the now evacuated (and until recently unoccupied) islets and converting Kanchazu into de facto Manchukuo territory, which still drew no Soviet response. Japanese intelligence could scarcely believe the near hysteria in intercepted Soviet military communications: a few artillery rounds seemed to have frightened the Red Army away, despite its three-to-one troop advantage in theater. “I think it was a really good ‘reconnaissance’ in force,” a Japanese intelligence officer concluded of the unplanned skirmish. Thus, while the Amur incident had persuaded much of the Kwantung Army of Tokyo’s timidity, the general staff in Tokyo had begun to discuss the hollowness of the Red Army.¹⁴³

Japanese troops (numbering between 5,000 and 7,000) also controlled all the areas of China immediately north, east, and west of Peking—areas that faced the USSR and the Soviet satellite of Mongolia. On July 7, 1937, about 135 of those troops were engaged in night maneuvers ten miles west of Peking at the Marco Polo Bridge, an 800-year-old ancient granite structure once restored by the great Qing emperor Kangxi. The bridge, near a railway choke point, had long been coveted by Japan, because it served as the sole link between Peking and the rest of Nationalist-controlled China. Unusually, these Japanese night maneuvers took place without prior courtesy notice, and around 10:30 p.m., Chinese troops, perhaps fearing that an actual attack had commenced, fired some rifle shots. The Japanese returned fire. After mutual apologies for the minor firefight by the two sides’ liaison officers on duty, as well as some bellicose statements, the Japanese brigade commander refused to back down and ordered an artillery barrage. The Chinese shelled the Japanese in return. Then, on July 9, the Japanese and Chinese commanders in the Marco Polo Bridge area agreed to a cease-fire and mutual pullback.

Chiang Kai-shek was at Lushan for a military conference and, on the basis of radio reports, could not judge whether the gunfire and shelling had been unplanned or constituted a Japanese provocation, on the order of the Mukden incident that had preceded the seizure of Manchuria. He felt constrained to deploy some of his best divisions, institute martial law, and order a general mobilization. Japan’s government, now headed by prime minister Prince Fumimaro Konoe, deemed the incident a Chinese “provocation” and dispatched three divisions. When the Japanese troops arrived at Tientsin, on July 12, Chiang telegrammed his military in the field: “I am now determined to declare war on Japan.”¹⁴⁴ On July 22, the Japanese commander at the Marco Polo Bridge announced a deadline for Chinese troop withdrawal; Chiang ordered his men to attack. Few in the Konoe cabinet were for all-out war, but few were against it. Tokyo announced, to popular acclamation, that it had been “forced to resort to resolute action.”¹⁴⁵ With Emperor Hirohito’s approval, the Japanese bombarded and seized Peking (July 28) and nearby Tientsin (July 30).¹⁴⁶

Stalin was saved. His insistence on a “united front,” instead of an attempted Communist takeover, now looked prescient, but he had to weigh continuing support for the anti-Japanese resistance in China against possibly provoking Japan into war against the Soviet Union. The Soviet department in Japanese military intelligence had correctly surmised that Moscow would not intervene in the event of a Japanese expedition to Peking.¹⁴⁷

Japan’s occupation of northern China was swift. Whether the war would spread beyond northern China remained uncertain. But Zhang Zhizhong, commander of the Shanghai-Nanking garrison and a former teacher at the Soviet-funded Whampoa Military Academy, who had been urging Chiang Kai-shek to attack vulnerable Japanese positions in Shanghai, staged his own incident: on August 9, 1937, a Chinese army unit shot and killed a Japanese lieutenant and private just outside the Shanghai airport. To make it seem as if the Japanese had fired first, a Chinese prisoner on death row was dressed in military uniform and executed at the airport gate. Zhang renewed his pressure on Chiang to engage in an all-out war with Japan, not just protect the north; Chiang demurred. Zhang staged bombing runs on Japanese ships, grounding aircraft and troops. Japanese reinforcements began to make their way to Shanghai. Chiang approached Moscow for a mutual assistance treaty. Stalin, wanting to prevent a Japanese conquest of China but not to entangle the Soviets in a direct war with Japan, agreed only to a nonaggression pact, which was signed in Nanking on August 21.¹⁴⁸ (This was the same day a joint decree of the Council of People’s Commissars and the politburo ordered the deportation of all ethnic Koreans from the Soviet Far East.)¹⁴⁹ On August 22, Japanese forces arrived in Shanghai.

America’s ambassador in Moscow reported to Washington that Litvinov had told Léon Blum that “he and the Soviet Union were perfectly delighted that Japan had attacked China,” and that “the Soviet Union hoped that war between China and Japan would continue just as long as possible.”¹⁵⁰ Some suggested that Zhang Zhizhong was a Soviet agent who had provoked war on Moscow’s orders.¹⁵¹ (Chiang would force Zhang to resign in September 1937, but would not accuse him of being a foreign agent.) On September 14, the Soviets and Chiang signed an additional accord for the supply of Soviet weapons on $50 million in credits, with the proviso that one quarter to one fifth would go to the Chinese Red Army.¹⁵²

After his release from the hostage-taking incident, Chiang had conceded the legality of the Chinese Communist forces, but now they would not be subordinated to his orders. The Communist army in the north, centered on Yan’an and numbering 46,000, was renamed the Eighth Route Army. On September 23, Chiang acknowledged a public declaration of the Chinese Communists, published in the Nationalist press the day before—a form of legalization. Mao, while paying lip service to the united front, planned a guerrilla war in the north independently of the Nationalists, effectively keeping his army out of the main brunt of the fighting.

Stalin, too, took advantage. He had already sent 5,000 Soviet troops, dressed in Chinese uniforms, to Xinjiang, provoking a rebellion against the pro-Soviet local puppet but also increasing the Soviet foothold.¹⁵³ Chiang feared a Soviet pact with Japan to divide China—after all, the Soviets had already broken off Outer Mongolia from China—but he was more obliged than ever to tolerate Soviet encroachment.¹⁵⁴ That’s because Stalin now agreed to sell desperately needed combat aircraft and to help with training, as in Spain, although in China’s case he did so on credit (altogether extending three separate loans to the Chinese government, totaling $250 million, to cover the costs).¹⁵⁵ In the wake of Stalin’s military pullback from the ongoing civil war in Spain (Operation X), at least 450 Soviet pilots would be in China before the year was out (Operation Z).¹⁵⁶ During the last few months of 1937, the USSR flew 297 fighter planes and bombers into Chinese airfields, while trucks and ships (via Canton) delivered nearly 300 cannons, 82 tanks, 400 vehicles, and a mass supply of arms and ammunition. Stalin also lent support to Chinese partisan units, to further tie down the Japanese, and ordered Comintern head Dimitrov, again, to rein in the revolutionary impulses of the Chinese Communist party.

Some 400 Uighur students, future Soviet agents for Chinese Xinjiang, were being schooled in Tashkent, but then the Uighurs were all executed in a single night. After murdering his own Xinjiang fifth column, Stalin blinded himself, recalling and executing his diplomats from half a dozen consulates across China’s western interior, including Ürümqi and Kashgar. Still, his position in Xinjiang strengthened as the Soviets oversaw construction of a nearly 2,000-mile road, completed in just months with Chinese coolie labor, from Sary-Ozek, Kazakhstan, through Ürümqi to Lanzhou, to transport war supplies to China’s anti-Japanese resistance.¹⁵⁷

THE OTHER FRONT

Spain was still on fire. “The front stretches very far,” Pravda’s Koltsov had lyricized in his Spanish diary (July 7, 1937). “It goes from Madrid’s trenches, across Europe, across the entire world. It crosses countries, villages, cities, it crosses boisterous meeting halls, it courses quietly through the shelves of bookstores.”¹⁵⁸ And apartments: Malenkov informed Stalin (August 16) of a denunciation from a Soviet official in Spain, who had written, “I do not know if it is known in Moscow that in Madrid Koltsov lives with his two wives with completely equal status (at least by outward appearance). There are very many conversations and troubling questions about this, including in Madrid. The matter does not just concern giving an answer to our Spanish friends whether polygamy is legal for Soviet writers, but also, for example, the apartment of Koltsov’s [common-law] wife, Maria Osten, has been turned into a salon where high-profile comrades of various nationalities gather and where they discuss delicate questions in the presence of not fully verified comrades.”¹⁵⁹

Soviet advisers were trying to stave off defeat, reorganizing the International Brigades. In September 1937, Victorio Codovilla (b. 1894), an Italian-Argentine Comintern representative in Spain, was recalled to Moscow. Dimitrov forwarded to Stalin (September 8) a letter from Codovilla asking “what tactics should we advise the Comintern” for victory in Spain. Stalin wrote in the margin: “Together with the Socialists, without looking away from them, expose and smash the enemies of the united front.” Where Codovilla noted that the parliament was not meeting, Stalin wrote, “Restore the parliament, the municipal governments.” Where Codovilla re-proposed a merger of the Spanish Socialist and Communist parties, suggesting both names be used, Stalin wrote in the margin, “United Worker Party.”¹⁶⁰

FRONTLINE DEFENSE

Chiang Kai-shek did not capitulate to Japan. Still, Stalin might have been chastened at the prospect that China would fall, which would allow Japan to pivot toward the Soviet Union. A Japanese advance beyond Peking toward Kalgan in August 1937, on the old caravan route to Mongolia, threatened the Soviet satellite, a potential springboard for invading Eastern Siberia and cutting off the Soviet Far East. But Stalin pressed ahead with his destabilizing decapitation of the Red Army on trumped-up charges, including in the Soviet Far East. He also allowed his murderous “mass operations” to continue, which consumed vast industrial and transport resources. Most strikingly, he unleashed a rampage in Mongolia.¹⁶¹

On August 13, Stalin met in the Little Corner for four hours with Molotov, Voroshilov, Yezhov, Frinovsky, and Pyotr Smirnov, a newly minted deputy defense commissar; chief of staff Shaposhnikov joined the meeting late.¹⁶² Yezhov reported on a pending “Japanese-sponsored” coup d’état in the Mongolian capital. (Genden, Mongolia’s prime minister, who was suspected of being pro-Japanese, had already been arrested in Sochi.) Stalin decided to send a clandestine delegation headed by Frinovsky. He also named Mironov, the Western Siberian NKVD boss, plenipotentiary for Mongolia, in place of the Soviet ambassador (who was a Soviet intelligence operative but was arrested by the NKVD for being a Japanese spy). “As soon as his promotion occurred,” Mironov’s wife, Agnessa, noted, “Mirosha became manifestly cheerful, and his former self-confidence returned immediately.” And yet, as Frinovsky and his armed gang traveled by train to pick him up on the way at Novosibirsk, Mironov started to fear that his promotion might be a ruse to effect his arrest.¹⁶³ Not this time. In Irkutsk, Eastern Siberia, Frinovsky beat a local official in the greeting party to a pulp in front of the rest of the local leadership, demonstrating how “enemies” were dealt with.¹⁶⁴ He and Mironov disembarked in Ulan Ude (Soviet Buryatia) and went the final 350 miles by car to Ulan Bator, which they reached on August 24, unannounced. It was not the Japanese but the Soviets who launched a coup d’état.

Marshal Demid, Mongolia’s popular defense minister, untouchable inside his country, had been summoned for talks in Moscow and, en route, had stopped briefly in Irkutsk on August 20, around the same time that Frinovsky had arrived in the city. On August 22, near Taiga Station (close to Novosibirsk), Demid died of “food poisoning” from Soviet-supplied canned goods. His corpse continued all the way to Moscow, where it was met at Kazan Station by an honor guard, then dispatched to a crematorium.¹⁶⁵ Demid had played a key role in Genden’s removal, at Moscow’s bidding.¹⁶⁶ Stalin evidently did not expect Demid to acquiesce in the wholesale slaughter of the Mongolian officer corps he had appointed for being “Japanese agents.” Demid’s rival, the other Mongolian marshal, Interior Minister Khorloogiin Choibalsan, had staged five public trials between April 1936 and May 1937, of lamas as “Japanese and Chinese spies.” “We fulfilled the advice of comrade Stalin,” he had reported to Yezhov. But now, Frinovsky told Choibalsan of more spies and plots, and insisted that he invite in more Soviet troops. A formal invitation was issued on August 25; two days later, Molotov and Voroshilov telegrammed an affirmative response.¹⁶⁷ A Soviet army commanded by Ivan Konev, from the Transbaikal military district, had already crossed the frontier—nearly 30,000 well-equipped troops. Their mission was to deter Japan and prepare Mongolia as a supply hub for the Nationalists in China. (The Gobi Desert dunes, belatedly studied, would be revealed to be untraversable.)

Following Demid’s funeral, Choibalsan became defense minister and supreme commander (September 2, 1937). With him, Frinovsky compiled a list of 115 “spies,” reporting every detail to Yezhov. Demid, who held a Soviet Order of the Red Banner and numerous Mongolian military medals, became a Japanese spy posthumously. On September 10, sixty-five people on the list were rounded up. The next day, Mongolia’s top brass were summoned to appear at Choibalsan’s office in full regalia and, one by one, were arrested, transported to prison, and tortured to confess.¹⁶⁸ Frinovsky set up an “extraordinary commission,” like a troika, to expedite sentencing-shootings, then departed for home.¹⁶⁹ The “diplomat” Mironov remained.

A public trial (October 4–7, 1937) of “reactionary lamas” charged with spying for Japan was staged in Ulan Bator’s State Central Theater (which also functioned as the national parliament’s building).¹⁷⁰ The theater overflowed with 1,323 people (against a capacity of 1,200), while public loudspeakers broadcast the proceedings and expansive coverage was given in the party newspaper Ünen (Truth). All twenty-three defendants, who had been burned with hot iron rods and promised their lives if they confessed, did so; four were sentenced to the Gulag, nineteen to death. They were shot in front of the theater. On October 18, in the same venue, a second public trial was staged, of fourteen high officials said to belong to a Genden-Demid “organization.” Two days later, all fourteen were pronounced guilty; one was sent to a camp, and thirteen were taken to a valley outside the capital, where, with truck and car headlights illuminating the darkness, they were executed. Those Mongolian leaders who were not executed were forced to observe. Choibalsan, drunk, waved his pistol and shouted revolutionary slogans.¹⁷¹

LEADERS COME AND GO

Reveries of finding vast numbers of capable “new people” had periodically gripped Stalin, and now many young people, capable or otherwise, were vaulted into high places. Of the 12,500 graduates of higher-education institutions in the fourth quarter of 1937, 2,127 went directly to senior positions, including 278 promoted to directors or deputy directors of factories; another 22 became directors, deputy directors, heads, or deputy heads of departments in trusts; 294 became heads or deputy heads of departments or sectors in the Council of People’s Commissars.Many were promoted again, quickly. In September 1937, M. S. Lazarev went from chief of a shop at the Gorky Automobile Plant to director of the Yaroslavl Electric Machine-Building Factory. “I literally had to go onto the site unprepared, because the management had been arrested and the apparatus was completely new,” he would tell a Central Committee conference for the recently promoted. But then, on October 1, he was promoted again, becoming head of the tractor and motor industry in the machine building commissariat.¹⁷² Not all of these newly promoted people could cope. “I want to say, honestly, that, despite nine months of work, I have failed to get into the rhythm of things and to develop appropriate economic skills,” admitted S. M. Dobrokhotov, the deputy head and chief engineer of the strategic rubber industry, also in the machine building commissariat.

Even with such promotions, the Soviet system was not producing nearly enough young people to fill all the vacated positions, in the center or the locales, because right through the terror and beyond, the apparatus was ballooning.¹⁷³ In fall 1937, a floodlike 130,000 students were admitted to higher-education institutions.¹⁷⁴ On October 23, 1937, the politburo established a commission for assigning graduates of higher education directly via the Central Committee.¹⁷⁵

On the evening of October 29, Stalin hosted a reception in the Kremlin’s Palace of Facets, culminating a four-day conference of some 400 representatives of the metals-and-coal industry. He had already explicitly identified his rule with the expansive ranks of middling “cadres” in his resounding slogan “Cadres decide everything” (1935), but by 1937 he was singling out the up-and-coming generation more and more, receiving them in the magical inner sanctum, the Little Corner, or, as now, in the lustrous reception halls of the Kremlin.¹⁷⁶ “Leaders come and go, but the people remain,” he told the coal-and-metals gathering. “Only the people are immortal. All the rest is transient. Therefore, it is necessary to be able to value the confidence of the people.” He could not help divulging, “I am not sure, I apologize again, that there are not people among you who, although they work for the Soviet government, are not also taking care of themselves in the West by also working for some foreign intelligence services: Japanese, German, or Polish.” (These lines were edited out of his remarks published in Pravda.) But he went on to accentuate the positive. “Comrades! My toast will be original and unusual,” he continued. “We are accustomed to pronounce toasts for the health of leaders, bosses, vozhdi, people’s commissars. This, of course, is not bad. But besides the big leaders, there are middling and lesser leaders. We have tens of thousands of these leaders, the middling and lesser ones. They are modest people, they do not push themselves out front, they are almost unnoticeable. But one would be blind not to notice them. Because the fate of production in our entire economy depends on them. . . . To the health of our middle and smaller economic leaders! (Ovation, shouts of Hurrah.)”¹⁷⁷

Stalin’s populism was addressed not to the workers but to the middle and lower-level functionaries, people he christened the “Soviet intelligentsia.” He showed an uncanny knack for winning over people who, like himself, had risen from humble backgrounds, thanks to education. He identified with these up-and-comers, claiming them as his own, sentiments they keenly reciprocated. To be sure, Stalin bullied and dominated others, demanded unquestioning obedience, whose manifestation (or not) he alone judged. And yet, cruel and capricious though he was, Stalin could also be highly personable. “All his life he was very good at finding people and promoting them,” recalled Svetlana, “and that is why so many remained devoted to him, often young people whom he would pull out and promote over the heads of the old guard. That was quite a part of him: his sociability and being with people.”¹⁷⁸

Galvanizing and molding young strivers fit Stalin’s personality as much as pathological suspicion and wholesale murder. Ryutin, in his 1932 “Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship,” had called for “new forces” from within the party and the working class to “destroy Stalin’s dictatorship,” but Stalin himself was conjuring these new forces to replace destroyed functionaries of his dictatorship.¹⁷⁹ Of course, if he felt he needed to clear space to promote a hard-charging younger generation, he could have forced sitting functionaries into retirement.¹⁸⁰ By having the new people take the place of the wantonly tortured and executed, he compromised them all.

PETER AND SOVIET PATRIOTISM

Not a single member of Stalin’s politburo, going back to 1930, had completed university, the despot included, but he adhered ferociously to the transformative power of education, and for him Russian history was among the greatest pedagogical instruments. But his commission to produce a new history textbook for elementary schools had yielded only vague instructions, finalized and signed by him, Zhdanov, and Kirov at his Sochi dacha back in summer 1934; they were published only after significant delay in Pravda (January 27, 1936), which was followed by an open competition. On August 22, 1937, a second-place winner was announced (there was no first-place winner). It was a humble collective at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute, led by Andrei Shestakov.¹⁸¹ Shestakov (b. 1877) had grown up one of nine children, the son of a peasant and a fisherman on the White Sea littoral, and finished only the local five-year school before being hired on at the woodcutting factory, but he studied at night.¹⁸² He had relocated to Moscow in 1921, by then a skilled mechanic, and took up the study of agrarian history, at age forty-four, at the Institute of Red Professors. By the 1930s, he had become deputy director and then director of the Museum of the Revolution.¹⁸³ His team worked on their manuscript, A Short Course on the History of the USSR: A Textbook for the Third and Fourth Grades, from March 1936 through July 1937, and, after political vetting, had it published in September 1937 for the start of the new school year and the run-up to the twentieth anniversary of the revolution.