Stalin

While maintaining the Marxist core of class struggle, the book offered a nationalist narrative of Russia’s “gathering of the lands”—from Kievan Rus, in the tenth century, through the Stalin Constitution of 1936—in the spirit of nineteenth-century historiography. “We love our country and we must know its wonderful history,” the book noted. “Those who know history understand present-day life better, are better able to fight the enemies of our country, and make Socialism stronger.”¹⁸⁴ In the last quarter of 1937, 6.5 million Russian-language copies were printed; it was simultaneously translated into the languages of the Soviet peoples.¹⁸⁵ Still, parents struggled to obtain copies.¹⁸⁶ The USSR counted some 30 million schoolchildren, and the Shestakov text was recommended beyond schools.¹⁸⁷ “Not only millions of children and young people will learn according to it,” enthused the party journal Bolshevik, “but so will millions of workers and peasants and hundreds of thousands of party activists, propagandists, and agitators.”¹⁸⁸ There were critics. “It has not turned out to be a history of the USSR at all,” Volodymyr Zatonsky, Ukraine’s commissar of enlightenment, wrote of the draft manuscript. “Basically, it is a history of the Russian state.”¹⁸⁹ In celebrating a great power, not its nationalities, the text gave a prominent place to personalities, a rebuke to abstract schema such as “feudal epoch.”¹⁹⁰ Shestakov portrayed Peter the Great not as an oppressor who built a baroque capital on the bones of the lower orders, but as a dynamic leader who had transformed Russia almost single-handedly by advancing technical training and military skills.¹⁹¹

Stalin had edited Shestakov’s text closely, inserting in the section on ancient Rus that “Christianity in its time was a step forward in the development of Russia in comparison to paganism.” Leafing through the page proofs of the manuscript, Stalin had struck out a reproduction of Ilya Repin’s painting Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son and inserted a laudatory passage on the dreaded oprichnina for strengthening “the autocratic power in the Russian state by destroying the privileges of the boyars.” This marked the Soviet despot’s rethinking of how to fit Ivan, too, into the grand statist narrative.¹⁹² Stalin deemed the centralizing Russian state as having been progressive in its time, allowing the Russian people to push forward on the road of capitalist development, while introducing enlightenment to backward regions, but the Soviets had rightly altered the state’s class basis, enabling Soviet propaganda to glorify both the imperial Russian state and the revolutionary movement against it.

In parallel, Vladimir Petrov’s film Peter the First, adapted from the popular novel by Aleksei Tolstoy, had premiered on September 1, 1937, the opening day of school.¹⁹³ It showed the tsar forging his new capital and cadres ruthlessly, decisively. “The epoch of Peter I was one of the greatest pages in the history of the Russian people,” Tolstoy told workers at the Skorokhod factory (September 11). “The boyars’ dark, uncultured Rus, with their backward technology and patriarchal beards, would have fallen to foreign invaders in no time. A revolution was necessary within the very life of the country, in order to lift Russia up to the level of the cultured European countries. Peter was able to accomplish this, and the Russian people were able to defend their independence.”¹⁹⁴ One Soviet inhabitant proudly recorded in her diary, “The content and superb execution of our films arouse admiration even abroad. If you take such films as Chapayev [and] Peter the First . . . you simply forget that you’re sitting in a movie theater, and not actually participating in what you are seeing.”¹⁹⁵

Stalin, like Peter (albeit without the extensive travels), had come to understand Europe as both a treasure trove of know-how and technology to be copied and a political and geopolitical threat to be kept at bay to protect Russia’s non-Western identity and nondemocratic system. His recorded comments on Peter had been intermittent (1926, 1928, 1931), but all had emphasized the class nature of the tsar’s rule. Now, too, incorporation of Peter in the Soviet pantheon did not vitiate the Marxist stance or class critique.¹⁹⁶ More broadly, Stalin did not reintroduce ritualized processionals accompanied by clergy. Instead of landed gentry and bureaucrats, the USSR had only functionaries; instead of peasant households and self-organized communes, it had statist collectives; instead of the Orthodox Church, Marxism-Leninism. Stalin did not elevate his children to be tsareviches. When he caught his son Vasily attempting to trade on his lineage, he exploded, “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no, not even me!”¹⁹⁷ In sum, notwithstanding superficial resemblances—a one-man autocracy, an overweening state, a functionary ethos, an obsession with security, a forced modernization drive—anyone who had lived under both systems, not only peasants and the pious, knew the differences.¹⁹⁸

The Soviet Union even lacked a requirement to study Russian, and most non-Russian schoolchildren were illiterate in the language. When the enlightenment commissar of the Russian republic suggested a far-reaching Russification of schooling, Stalin objected, insisting that Russian become only a subject, not the medium of all instruction, to the detriment of vernacular languages.¹⁹⁹ Still, a state imperative was felt. “There is one language in which all citizens of the USSR can more or less express themselves—that is Russian,” Stalin remarked at a Central Committee plenum (October 12, 1937). “So we concluded that it should be obligatory. It would be good if all citizens drafted into the army could express themselves in Russian just a little, so that if some division or other was transferred, say an Uzbek one to Samara, it could converse with the populace.”²⁰⁰

LOOSE-TONGUED SELF-PORTRAIT

On November 6, 1937, the eve of the revolution’s twentieth anniversary, at the Bolshoi, which was resplendent in red velvet and gold trim and sported an expensive new curtain, Mikhail Romm’s Lenin in October premiered. This was the first feature film with Stalin as a lead character, played by Semyon Goldstab, a Jewish actor from Ukraine. The film depicted a likable, grandfatherly Lenin (played by Boris Shchukin) who relied on Stalin, while Kamenev and Zinoviev, Trotsky, the Mensheviks, and SRs were shown to be objects of Lenin’s hatred and treasonous opponents of the seizure of power. After the showing, Stalin would have Romm reshoot the scenes involving the storming of the Winter Palace and the arrest of the Provisional Government by Antonov-Ovseyenko (who had recently returned from Spain and himself been arrested).²⁰¹ The film’s message, like the press accounts of the anniversary, was that Stalin was Lenin’s equal.

On November 7, as elite units of the Red Army massed near Red Square, dignitaries assembled on the reviewing stand. To the right of the Mausoleum stood the foreign diplomatic corps, in fur hats and fur-lined coats; to the left, Soviet high officialdom; on the Mausoleum itself, at the last minute, Stalin emerged, accompanied by the retinue. When the Savior’s Tower chimes struck 10:00 a.m., Voroshilov, on a white horse, rode to the assembled troops and administered the oath of allegiance to each unit in turn. The formations, as they passed, turned sharply rightward toward the Mausoleum in unison. “It was extremely moving, regardless of where one stood politically,” remarked an American observer. “I had heard the most cynical diplomats admit that this was ‘stark drama.’”²⁰²

That night, in the privacy of Voroshilov’s Kremlin apartment, two dozen or so regime intimates gathered, as per custom. Some thirty-odd toasts had already been pronounced by the time Stalin rose, and he rambled at length. “The Russian tsars did a great deal that was bad,” he began his toast. “They robbed and enslaved the people. They waged wars and seized territories in the interests of landowners. But they did one thing that was good: they amassed an enormous state, all the way to Kamchatka. We have inherited that state.” Here was an awesome responsibility—and an evidently inebriated Stalin added a warning. “Whoever attempts to destroy that unity of the socialist state, whoever seeks the separation of any of its parts or nationalities—that man is an enemy. . . . And we will destroy each and every such enemy; even if he was an old Bolshevik, we shall destroy all his kin, his family.”²⁰³

Interrupted by shouts “To the great Stalin,” he continued impatiently (“I have not finished my toast”) and turned once more to the decisiveness of the middle cadres, over the objections of those present—try to stay silent—that his leadership was decisive: “A great deal is said about great leaders. But a cause is never won unless the right conditions exist. And the main thing here is the middle cadres—party, economic, military. They’re the ones who choose the leader, explain our positions to the masses, and ensure the success of our cause. They don’t try to climb above their station; you don’t even notice them.” Dimitrov again tried to object that Stalin was nonetheless more important, prompting him to insist yet again, “The fundamental thing is the middle cadres. That must be noted, and it must never be forgotten that, other conditions being equal, the middle cadres decide the outcome of our cause.”²⁰⁴

Stalin then broached the most taboo of subjects. “Why did we prevail over Trotsky and the rest?” he asked. “Trotsky, as we know, was the most popular man in our country after Lenin.” Trotsky—the number two! “Bukharin, Zinoviev, Rykov, Tomsky were all popular. We were little known—yours truly, Molotov, Voroshilov, and Kalinin—then.”²⁰⁵ Stalin went on to explain, however, that Trotsky had committed the fatal mistake of ignoring the middle cadres. “The party itself had wanted” the triumph of the lesser-knowns.

In yet another revealing gesture that tipsy night, Stalin indulged his man-of-the-borderlands persona, stating, “Comrade Dimitrov, I apologize for interrupting you; I am not a European, but a Russified Georgian-Asiatic.”²⁰⁶ We can only guess how émigré press portrayals of him rankled: a kinto (Georgian thug), a snitch for the tsarist okhranka, a nonentity, a usurper, an Asiatic.

Stalin in his toast referred to himself as just a “practical type” (praktik), unlike those famous personages. “Whom did we have?” he asked, answering, “Well, I led the organizational work in the Central Committee,” as if it were the most humdrum, shoulder-to-the-wheel post. “But what was I in comparison with Ilich [Lenin]? A feeble specimen.” He named his faction: “There were Molotov, Kalinin, Kaganovich, Voroshilov—all of whom were unknown. . . .” But, Stalin continued, “the people advance those who lead them to victory, personalities in history come and go, but the people remain, and the people do not make mistakes.” The unerring folk: that was how the hardworking faction of “feeble specimens” had triumphed over the famous personages like Trotsky. “I remind you of the following,” Stalin added, with evident pride. “In 1927, 700,000 party members voted for the Central Committee’s line; such was the core who voted for us feeble specimens. Some 4,000 to 6,000 voted for Trotsky, and 20,000 abstained.”²⁰⁷ In closing, he recalled Kirov’s death, a wake-up call: “Kirov, with his blood, opened the eyes of us idiots (excuse the blunt expression).”²⁰⁸ After the toasts ran their course, they repaired to the Kremlin cinema for another viewing of Romm’s Lenin in October.

POSTSCRIPT

On November 11, 1937, Stalin received Dimitrov and Wang Ming, a young rival to Mao, and told them, “Trotskyites [in China] must be hunted down, shot, destroyed. They are international provocateurs, fascism’s most vicious agents!” Stalin also instructed them that “the main thing now is the war, not an agrarian revolution, not confiscation of land,” and concluded, “neither England nor America wants China to win. They fear a Chinese victory because of their own imperialist ambitions.” (Wang would immediately leave Moscow, where he had lived for six years, and, in China, insist on mounting a party congress, where he would deliver the political report.)²⁰⁹ With the Comintern types, Stalin underscored how waverers in the party had faltered at every difficult moment: in 1905, in October 1917, Brest-Litovsk in 1918, the civil war, “and especially collectivization, a completely novel, historically unprecedented event. Various weak elements fell away from the party . . . they went underground. Powerless themselves, they linked up with external enemies, promised Ukraine to the Germans, Belorussia to the Poles, the Far East to the Japanese. They hoped for war and were especially insistent that the German fascists launch a war against the USSR as soon as possible.” He continued: “They were planning an action for the beginning of this year. They lost their nerve. They were preparing in July [1937] to attack the politburo at the Kremlin. But they lost their nerve.”²¹⁰

Preposterous: longtime Communists had no such opportunity to “link up” with foreign enemies or attempt a coup. And yet, time and again, when volunteering thoughts on the mass arrests and executions, Stalin returned to the party opposition to collectivization in 1932, and the plots against him. Time magazine (November 15, 1937), of all places, mentioned alleged assassinaton attempts. “Our Sun!” the magazine wrote semifacetiously of the celebrations of Stalin not only in Moscow but also in Madrid and, in a lesser way, at Carnegie Hall in New York, in connection with the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, comparing Stalin to Louis XIV. Time highlighted Romm’s new film, in which “it is not Lenin and Trotsky who make the revolution of 1917 but Lenin and Stalin,” adding, “With Sun Stalin eclipsing Trotsky in Spain as well as in Russia, the Dictator felt strong enough to permit the bringing to light in court last week of two attempts to assassinate him years ago.” This was a reference to two incidents, in 1933 and 1935, both in the Caucasus, neither (as we have seen) an attempt on Stalin’s life, but both recently detailed as such in Dawn of the East, the Georgian party newspaper under Beria’s control.²¹¹

STICKING WITH CHIANG

Stalin and his intermediaries continued to rebuff China’s entreaties for the Soviets to declare war on Japan, but Moscow was shipping arms a great distance and at great difficulty, mostly through Xinjiang, to keep the fighting going.²¹² Japan had forced Chiang into all-out war, which won him strong domestic support, perhaps the most for a Chinese ruler since the mid–Qing dynasty, but Chiang took considerable time to find a workable strategy of resistance. His frontal military battles led to catastrophe. In November 1937, the Japanese captured Shanghai, followed, on December 13, by Nanking, the Chinese Nationalist capital, where the Imperial troops proceeded to massacre up to 300,000 civilians. The Nationalist government fled to Wuhan, in the interior. Only now, after the devastation of even his crack troops, did Chiang turn from frontal engagements to a long war of attrition.²¹³

Stalin stuck to his strategy of a Nationalist-led united front against Japan, reasoning that Japan could fight either China or the Soviet Union but not both, and using Dimitrov and Wang Ming to tamp down the Communists to the extent possible. Wang Ming went to Wuhan as the Chinese Communist liaison to the Nationalists; Mao stayed at Yan’an, where the Communist base would expand significantly, from perhaps 40,000 members in 1937 to 200,000 by the next year.²¹⁴ The desperate Long March to desolate Yan’an to escape Nationalist encirclement was proving to be a boon for survivors, now buffering the Communists from the brunt of the Imperial Japanese Army. Japan’s war in China was unintentionally reordering the balance of power between Chiang’s Nationalists and Mao’s Communists to the latter’s favor. In December 1937, Chiang—in yet another attempt to drag the Soviets directly into the war—publicly revealed that China was getting substantial Soviet military aid. “Chiang Kai-shek behaved not fully cautiously,” Stalin wrote to Molotov and Voroshilov. “Well, the devil take him.”²¹⁵ But Stalin held to him.

CELEBRATION AMID DEATH

In December 1937, the USSR held elections for the new bicameral Supreme Soviet, a permanent body to replace the Congress of Soviets. There were 569 seats in the soviet of the Union and 574 in the soviet of nationalities, both elected on the basis of universal suffrage.²¹⁶ The provision for multiple candidates had been unceremoniously dropped.²¹⁷ Stalin, too, ran for election, choosing to represent Moscow city’s “Stalin ward,” and delivered candidate remarks from the imperial box at the Bolshoi on December 11, 1937. (“Comrades, to tell you the truth, I had no intention of making a speech. But our respected Nikita Sergeyevich [Khrushchev] dragged me, so to speak, to this meeting. ‘Make a good speech,’ he said.”) The next day, the uncontested balloting took place as the regime laid on food, drink, music, and dancing.²¹⁸ The process reached into every village, and no-show voters were monitored. The press reported that more than 91 million votes were cast—96.8 percent of those eligible—and that every candidate running was duly “elected.”²¹⁹

On December 20, the NKVD celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Sergei Mironov traveled from blood-soaked Mongolia, finding portraits of Dzierżyński and Yezhov adorning all Soviet newspapers and Young Pioneers competing for the honor of having their scout groups bear these names.²²⁰ At the Bolshoi, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Dimitrov, and others sat in the presidium. Kaganovich arrived late and was greeted by an ovation. So did Molotov (for him the hall stood while applauding). Mikoyan chaired the festivities and praised NKVD head Yezhov as “a talented and faithful pupil of Stalin . . . beloved by the Soviet people.”²²¹ In Pravda that morning, Frinovsky had denounced the swine and fascist bandits inside the NKVD who had been arrested; Mikoyan’s speech closed with praise for their replacements. “The NKVD has worked gloriously during this time,” he noted. “Let us wish that the workers of the NKVD in future will work as gloriously as they have this year.”²²² Another ten Orders of Lenin were awarded to NKVD operatives, to go with the forty-six from the summer.²²³ Stalin joined for the post-speech concert.²²⁴

The next night, Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony premiered in Leningrad, in the white auditorium of the former Chamber Music Association. “Writers, poets, musicians, scientists, and army officers filled every seat,” Jelagin recalled. “The younger people stood in the aisles along the walls. . . . The audience refused to leave, and the applause continued unabated. Shostakovich came out and took dozens of bows.” He was no longer the “formalist.”²²⁵ This was also Stalin’s official fifty-ninth birthday. He received Molotov, Yezhov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan for three hours, until 1:00 a.m. In media res, he summoned Pyotr Pumpur, head of aviation training in the Red Air Force, and Yakov Smushkevich, a thirty-five-year-old fighter pilot, both of them decorated Spanish civil war veterans who now oversaw the dispatch of Soviet pilots to China.²²⁶ The NKVD was reporting devastating shortcomings in the air forces of the Red Army: not just egregious rations, loss of valuable equipment, alcoholism, and hazing, but a colossal number of aviation crashes. Stalin received interrogation protocols indicating that in the Soviet Far East, new aerodromes, poorly built, flooded in the rain and became unusable, forcing planes to be kept under an open sky. “Very important,” Stalin wrote back to Yezhov.²²⁷ The response, for now, would be more arrests, more executions.^{228, 229, 230}

Stalin’s last office visitors on the evening of December 23, members of the inner circle, departed at 10:05 p.m. Whether they accompanied him for supper at the Near Dacha remains unknown. At 5:00 a.m., he awoke with a temperature of 102 degrees Fahrenheit (38.9 Celsius), which had not fallen as of 12:20 p.m., ten minutes before he received Yezhov. An entry made that day in his medical record by Professor Valedinsky and Kremlin hospital chief Pyotr Mandryka noted “general weakness, slightly hyperemic nostrils, and conjunctiva. Not severe exterior pallor, some puffiness of the face. A heavy head. . . . A slight pain on the right when swallowing, serious congestion in the back on the right. Posterior wall of the pharynx is covered with mucus, slightly hyperemic.” Their diagnosis was “follicular angina” (inflammation of the lymphoid ring in the throat) and “myasthenia” (chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disease). The illness proved to be prolonged. Stalin slept poorly. On December 30, for example, he awoke at 12:40 a.m., after four hours’ rest. A urine sample was taken at 1:45 a.m. (these were frequent). He requested warm milk at 2:25 a.m. At 3:45 a.m. he requested a glass of hot water to shave. He brushed his teeth, went to the toilet. At 5:40 a.m. he fell back asleep, rising three hours later and asking for tea and breakfast. At 4:00 p.m. he fell back asleep until 8:20 p.m., drank some tea, and fell back asleep at 11:15 p.m. for twenty-five minutes, then had supper. He was further diagnosed with streptococcus. No visits were recorded in his office logbook from December 24 through January 6.

RED ARMY VERSUS WEHRMACHT

At the annual year-end gathering of the Main Military Council—which happened before Stalin took ill, but which he did not attend—the recently named commander of the South Caucasus military district (a strategic border area), Nikolai Kuibyshev, had pointed out that new commanders of divisions had never before led even a battalion. Voroshilov, who had to formally approve such appointments, feigned shock. “I assure you, Comrade People’s Commissar, that we could not find anyone better,” Kuibyshev stated, adding that everyone else was in the hands of the NKVD. It was a searing moment of truth. But it passed. Voroshilov, in his closing speech, noted that “the gangrene” had not been fully cut out. Kuibyshev soon fell among the victims.²³¹ To be sure, some Soviet military officers who were framed and shot had been more skilled at embezzling state funds than at commanding troops.²³² Still, their replacements—to the extent that vacant officer positions could even be filled—were not always more honest or competent.²³³ The Red Army had problems before the terror; the massacres created more.

Hitler presented a stark contrast. German army officers swore their service oath to him personally, an innovation instituted by the war minister, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, but even so, Hitler, unlike Stalin, experienced significant loyalty issues with the brass. Behind the Führer’s back, Wehrmacht officers did not shrink from discussing how his approach to matters of war was irresponsible and dilettantist. On November 5, 1937, Hitler convened a meeting in the Chancellery to discuss the jockeying over steel supplies between the Luftwaffe (Göring) and the navy (Erich Raeder); army chief Colonel General Werner von Fritsch and Foreign Minister Neurath were also invited. Instead of adjudicating the dispute, Hitler used the occasion to hold forth on Germany’s position in the world, its need for raw materials, and Lebensraum. “The aim of German policy was to make secure and to preserve the racial community and to enlarge it,” he said. “It was therefore a question of space.” But this need for more space ran up against “two hate-inspired antagonists, Britain and France, to whom a German colossus in the center of Europe was a thorn in the flesh.” The Führer outlined scenarios of when—not if—Germany would have to fight a general European war: not later than 1943–45, and possibly before. In the meantime, Hitler said he had “to settle the Czech and Austrian questions” through small wars of plunder, which, he predicted, Britain and France would not oppose militarily.

Two exceedingly noteworthy things happened during the four-hour harangue. First, Hitler mentioned the Soviet Union merely in passing, and he made no reference to “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Second, Blomberg and Fritsch had the temerity to object to the Führer. They “repeatedly emphasized the necessity that Britain and France must not appear in the role of our enemies” (as Blomberg’s adjutant recorded in his notes).²³⁴ Within three months, both Blomberg and Fritsch would be removed, and the army, navy, and air force chiefs would be reporting directly to Hitler.²³⁵ This turnabout was long in coming, but oddly triggered.

The sixty-year-old Blomberg, a widower with five children, got remarried on January 12, 1938; Göring served as best man and Hitler as witness. Shortly thereafter, the police revealed that the twenty-five-year-old bride had been under longtime “morals” surveillance, posed for pornographic photographs, and had a criminal record for prostitution; she was out on parole. Blomberg was afforded a chance to save his situation by annulling the marriage, but he refused, and on January 27 he was relieved of his post. “Worst crisis for the regime since the Röhm Affair,” Goebbels recorded in his diary. “The Führer looks like a corpse.”²³⁶ Fritsch appeared to be next in line to succeed Blomberg, but Hitler became concerned about further scandal: there was a file from summer 1936, collected by SD chief Heydrich, on the bachelor Fritsch’s alleged homosexuality. Hitler’s military adjutant, who smelled a rat, disobeyed the Führer and showed the file to Fritsch. Hitler took his adjutant’s disobedience in stride and summoned Fritsch’s dubious accuser from an internment camp to the Chancellery’s private library, where Fritsch (in cilivian clothes) confronted him. The Gestapo judged the accusations inconsistent. Still, Fritsch was forced to resign on February 3. (At trial, he would be exonerated on the basis of mistaken identity: Frisch instead of Fritsch.) Some figured that Heydrich had set Fritsch up, but if so, the SD had gained nothing; others surmised that Göring had been intriguing to subordinate the army to himself, but again, if that were true, he failed.

On February 4, 1938, a moody Hitler, heeding the advice of Goebbels, abolished the German war ministry and made himself de facto war minister, while appointing the “true as a dog” Wilhelm Keitel as chief of staff. Twelve German generals were removed, but, far from having them arrested and forced under torture to confess to treason on behalf of foreign enemies, Hitler gave them pensions. He sent Blomberg into exile for a year in Italy, with a golden handshake of 50,000 reichsmarks. The Führer was supreme in the military sphere, and the SS was now allowed to create its own armed force of up to 600,000 men—but without mass hysteria, let alone mass murder. Hitler had been concerned throughout about not just commander loyalties but also public perceptions and the standing of the German armed forces.²³⁷

INDISTINGUISHABLE ENEMIES

Stalin was being inundated by petitions about the NKVD’s “illegal” arrests of party members. On January 7, 1938, he announced a Central Committee plenum, to begin four days hence, which would piggyback on the previously scheduled first-ever session of the USSR Supreme Soviet. (All Central Committee members had been “elected” to the pseudo-parliament.) The agenda for the plenum, which met January 11, 14, 18, and 20, was “mistakes committed by party organizations during the expulsion of Communists.”²³⁸ Party officials, given the chance, proved eager to claw back against the NKVD, a matter of (their) life and death. Malenkov divulged that 65,000 of the 100,000 members expelled in the last six months of 1937 had appealed.²³⁹ Stalin allowed the wildness to be reined in: during the first six months of 1938, there would be “only” 37,000 expulsions of party members. In addition, in 1938, 77,000 Communists would be reinstated and 148,000 new members allowed to join (as compared with 32,000 the year before).²⁴⁰ That said, there was no real reprieve. “The SR line (both left and right) has not been fully uncovered,” Stalin wrote to Yezhov (January 17). “Can the NKVD account for the SRs (‘formers’) in the army? I would like to see a report promptly. Can the NKVD account for the ‘former’ SRs outside the army (in civil institutions)? I would also like a report in two-three weeks. . . . What has been done to expose and arrest all Iranians in Baku and Azerbaijan? . . . We must act more swiftly and intelligently.”²⁴¹

The new Supreme Soviet had opened to incredible fanfare on January 12, and three days later it announced an enlarged naval program and a measure authorizing its presidium, formally chaired by Kalinin, to declare a state of war (martial law) if necessary. Yezhov related a “request by the toilers” that Moscow be renamed Stalinodar; Stalin rejected it.²⁴² On January 17, Zhdanov gave a speech condemning spying by foreign consulates in Leningrad, approving the arrests of ethnic groups with compatriots abroad (Poles, Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Germans), hammering at the water transport commissariat under Rykov, and going after Kerzhentsev, head of the committee on artistic affairs, for permitting “alien” culture (such as Meyerhold’s theater).²⁴³ On January 20, at the Kremlin wrap-up reception for delegates, Stalin, during the course of five toasts, called Bukharin and Rykov “foreign agents” and members of a “rightist-Trotskyite anti-Soviet bloc.”²⁴⁴ The next night at the Bolshoi, on the fourteenth anniversary of Lenin’s death, Moscow’s Vakhtangov Theater performed the last act of The Man with a Gun, a play by Nikolai Pogodin about the October Revolution. The accomplished actor Ruben Simonov, an ethnic Armenian, played Stalin in his youthful days. Conscious of the occasion and audience, he had not been able to eat for days and lost control of his nerves. Nonetheless, Jelagin, playing in the orchestra pit, observed Stalin in the imperial box enthusiastically applauding Simonov as himself.²⁴⁵

A Great Citizen, based on the assassination of Kirov, premiered on February 13, 1938, after Stalin’s edits. The Communist character (Katz) was given the last word at the hero’s grave: “The party of Bolsheviks is building a new life, realizing the centuries’ dream of humanity! And those who stand in the way, who try to prohibit this work, the people will destroy!” Pravda’s critic enthused that “A Great Citizen teaches vigilance and the ability to differentiate enemy from friend and friend from enemy.” Besides Katz, nearly every party member who appeared in the film came across as a likely foreign agent.²⁴⁶

Also in mid-February, Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov suffered an acute appendicitis attack and died after treatment in a private Paris clinic run by White Russian émigrés who had NKVD connections. Whether Sedov (b. 1906) could have died of natural causes remains unclear. Trotsky lost his most important follower and the main coordinator of his work, and the NKVD lost its nearly effortless total surveillance over Trotsky’s operations.²⁴⁷

In late February 1938, after all the Spanish gold removed to the Soviet Union had been spent ($550 million) on weapons, an emissary from the Republic arrived to plead for Soviet credits to buy more. Stalin had already withdrawn his military advisers and tankists. Dimitrov, with Stalin’s authorization, had had Spanish Communists nondemonstratively quit the Popular Front government, partly to blunt Franco’s propaganda line.²⁴⁸ But Stalin extended the credits (which would never be repaid) to continue forestalling a Franco victory, even as he showed impatience. “You neither take seriously nor have a deep interest in your own production,” he admonished the Spanish envoy, underscoring the economic benefits of military industry. “You could be doing much more. We’ll give you the motorized equipment, since that is the most difficult. But you must develop your military industry.”²⁴⁹ Soviet military industry, despite investment 2.8 times as high as in 1933, was in disarray from Stalin’s annihilations.

THIRD (AND FINAL) PUBLIC TRIAL

Stalin constantly urged more public trials. Dozens had been staged in fall 1937 throughout the provinces, following an express order by the despot, who complained that “liquidation of wreckers is being undertaken in secret by the NKVD, and collective farmers are not being mobilized in the struggle.” He had dictated sentences by telegram (“shoot”), though a few local judges refused to impose the death penalty on their former party colleagues; prosecutors appealed the judges’ displays of mercy (i.e., ten-year Gulag sentences).²⁵⁰ Some Communists, despite brutalization in the NKVD cellars and threats to family members, refused to incriminate themselves. That included Martemyan Ryutin, author of the devastating internal condemnation of forced collectivization and Stalin’s dictatorship. Back in October 1936, while serving a ten-year sentence, he had been rearrested in solitary confinement and transferred to Lubyanka to furnish “testimony” for a planned trial of right deviationists. (His condemnation of collectivization made him a “rightist” in Stalin’s mind.) But Ryutin steadfastly denied the new charges of “terrorism,” and his “retrial” had taken place in camera in the military collegium (January 10, 1937). It had lasted forty minutes, after which he was executed in the basement.²⁵¹ Ryutin had written to the central executive committee of the Soviet—not to the degenerated party—that “I do not intend to and will not confess things about myself that are untrue, whatever it will cost me.”²⁵²

The Ryutin Platform had come up at the second Moscow trial in late January 1937, but it had not been a central aspect.²⁵³ Bukharin, who was being blackmailed with threats against his wife and daughter, cooperated and was afforded the highest possible profile in Stalin’s terror scenario. He had been in prison for almost a year, and at the prime of life (fifty years of age). During that period (February 1937–March 1938), he wrote an autobiographical novel (How It All Began), a philosophical treatise, a collection of poems, and several rambling “Dear Koba” letters pleading for his life and asking why Stalin needed him to die. It was an excellent question, but one with a ready answer. Whereas Ryutin had been the actual implacable opponent and Bukharin had never joined a party opposition, Bukharin was the preeminent symbol.²⁵⁴ Stalin’s invention of the “right deviation”—a tacit admission that it was not an opponent per se—and his attacks that twisted their policy positions involved a structural threat, a false or petit bourgeois class consciousness. Ultimately, this made Bukharin and the rightists central to Stalin’s terror scenario.

On March 2, 1938, the third Moscow trial finally commenced, like the first two, in the October Hall of the House of Trade Unions, in front of nearly 200 spectators, including the usual handpicked foreign journalists and diplomats. It lasted eighteen sittings. A total of twenty-one defendants, nine of whom had sat in the Central Committee, were in the dock. Three were doctors of the Kremlin medical staff. Stalin had edited chief procurator Vyshinsky’s script. (Vyshinsky would also edit the transcript, removing remarks exculpating the accused and discussions of the law by the defense lawyers.) The accused had spent long hours memorizing their testimony. Bukharin, Krestinsky, Rykov, Cristian Rakovski—staunch Bolsheviks—confessed that they had plotted to assassinate Lenin and Stalin since 1918; had murdered Kirov, Mężyński, Kuibyshev, Gorky, Gorky’s son Maxim; had conspired with Nazi Germany, Japan, and Great Britain to partition the Soviet Union, hand over territory (Ukraine, Belorussia), and abolish collective farms.²⁵⁵ Yezhov had falsely promised at least some defendants their lives in exchange for self-incrimination.²⁵⁶ NKVD interrogators sat in the first row, a reminder that “re-interrogation” could take place between sessions.²⁵⁷ Krestinsky had been “beaten horribly,” according to the head of the Lefortovo prison’s hygiene department. “His entire back was a wound.”²⁵⁸ Still, on the first day, Krestinsky repudiated his confession and pleaded not guilty, causing a sensation. That night he was re-interrogated—he had a wife and children—and on the second day he nodded his assent when asked if he was guilty.²⁵⁹ “It is now clear why there are interruptions of supplies here and there, why, with our riches and abundance of products, there is a shortage first of one thing, then of another,” Vyshinsky thundered. “It is these traitors who are responsible for it.”²⁶⁰

Stalin received from Yezhov daily summaries of reactions to the trial, assembled from NKVD branches around the Union, and some local secret police officials dared to convey comments about how unpersuasive the proceedings were.²⁶¹ In Pravda, and in equally vicious commentary on Soviet radio, Mikhail Koltsov, who had been recalled from Spain, fluently conveyed the party line on the trial, cursing the treasonous snakes, praising Yezhov to the skies. Privately, though, Koltsov was said to have told a fellow writer who had wanted to witness the spectacle live, “Don’t go! . . . What is being done there the mind cannot conceive. . . . Very strange trial. Very strange.”²⁶² The New York Times captured some of the insanity. “It is as if twenty years after Yorktown somebody in power at Washington found it necessary for the safety of the State to send to the scaffold Thomas Jefferson, Madison, John Adams, Hamilton, Jay and most of their associates,” the paper wrote. “The charge against them would be that they conspired to hand over the United States to George III.”²⁶³

Under the klieg lights in the wee hours on March 13, Vasily Ulrich read out the sentences individually. Three were for long Gulag terms. The other sentences—“to be shot”—echoed in the hall eighteen times. “I experienced profound shame, especially here in court, when I learned and understood the full counterrevolutionary infamy of the crimes of the Right-Trotskyite Bloc, in which I served as an assassin,” Pyotr Kryuchkov, Gorky’s former secretary (assigned to him by Yagoda), stated in his last word. He added, “I ask you, citizen judges, for a reduced sentence.” On March 15, the condemned were executed one by one, with Yagoda and Bukharin rumored to have been last so as to have to witness the others’ deaths.²⁶⁴

Yagoda had never risen higher than nonvoting candidate member of the Central Committee, and had never been much of a public face for the regime, absent from prominent public photographs (an exception was the White Sea–Baltic Canal book, which, however, was withdrawn). But his corpse was said to have been displayed on the grounds of his legendary dacha, located outside Moscow on the Kaluga highway, the site of a prerevolutionary estate that he had occupied in 1927. The complex had become part of the Kommunarka state farm and had served as a well-stocked country club for Yagoda’s use, but then it became a killing field. Kommunarka shared that function with nearby Butovo, also just outside Moscow, a former stud farm that the NKVD had seized from its owner. Mass burials of ashes also took place at the former Donskoi Monastery (1591), whose crematorium (completed in October 1927) was the first in Russia or the Soviet Union. Tukhachevsky’s ashes had been dumped here in a mass grave. Initially, victims’ ashes were buried in the common graves using a shovel, but soon the NKVD brought in an excavator and a bulldozer. At Kommunarka, up to 14,000 executions would take place, primarily of political, military, scientific, and cultural figures, whose bones were sometimes seen in the jaws of prowling dogs.²⁶⁵

FAILURES OF CONTEMPORARY KREMLINOLOGY

Contemporaries could not fathom what was going on. “Something incomprehensible is happening,” the secretary of the party organization in the Novosibirsk NKVD, Sergei Plestsov, told an NKVD department chief in Ukraine who had returned briefly to Novosibirsk, his former place of employment, in fall 1937.²⁶⁶ Orlov, NKVD station chief in Spain, also deemed the mass arrests unfathamoble.²⁶⁷ “What for?” the deputy railways commissar, Livshits, had exclaimed when taken away, according to rumors in upper party circles.²⁶⁸ This unanswered question was etched all across the Soviet space, into the walls of teeming prisons and labor camps, stamped on the souls of the children carted off to orphanages, heard echoing through the execution cellars, and repeated throughout society as people wondered if they would be next.²⁶⁹ Victims who had had frequent contact with Stalin did no better. Stalin had included Rosenholz, the long-serving commissar of foreign trade (1930–37), in the March 1938 trial of the Trotskyite-rightist bloc. Rosenholz had told his interrogator-torturer that years earlier, when he had brought Stalin documents, the latter had asked just two or three questions before affixing his signature, trusting Rosenholz, but more recently Stalin’s “suspiciousness had reached lunacy.” He could only surmise that Stalin “was in a fit, a crazy fit of rage against treason, against baseness.”²⁷⁰ “Explaining the present regime in terms of Stalin’s personal lust for power is too superficial,” Trotsky wrote in May 1938. True enough, but he could not explain why such a terror annihilated the very apparatus in whose “class interest” it had supposedly been launched.²⁷¹

Kremlinologists of all stripes absorbed every rumor and strained every nerve to decipher the puzzle. “Every bit of testimony at the [March 1938] Bukharin-Rykov trial was the subject of endless discussion in the Embassy,” recalled Charles Bohlen, who attended as an interpreter for the new American ambassador, Joseph Davies. “There was speculation over the reason the purges were started, what they were trying to accomplish, whether Stalin was mad, whether he had some other sinister plan, how much truth there was in the accusations.”²⁷² Few were as naïve as Davies, who accepted the trials at face value (and believed that the Soviet Union was wending its way in the right direction and eager for cooperation with the capitalists). Bohlen, along with George Kennan, thought Marxism-Leninism had exacerbated whatever obscure power politics lay behind the trials. Most other foreign ambassadors—Werner von der Schulenburg (Germany), Robert Coulondre (France), and Viscount Chilston (Britain)—attributed the bizarre episode to power politics alone.²⁷³ Davies’s approach—to accept the accusations and confessions—was found in Soviet society. “Who would have benefited from sentencing and executing such people . . . if they were not guilty?” recalled the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov of Tukhachevsky and other top officers. “Either they were guilty or what was happening was incomprehensible.”²⁷⁴

Lifelong revolutionaries, who had been beaten by tsarist police for working on behalf of the revolution, were now being beaten with whips, blackjacks, and poles to confess to lifelong conspiracies against the revolution. Inside the party and among party widows, hearsay circulated about Stalin’s special thirst for revenge and his vendetta against the “old Bolsheviks” (those who had joined the party before 1917), because they knew the real story of his past and Lenin’s call for his removal.²⁷⁵ Old Bolsheviks numbered 182,000 in 1934 and would number 125,000 in 1939, a decline of one third, which was roughly the annihilation ratio for all officials.²⁷⁶ Another conjecture involved apparatchik fears of a supposed “transition to democracy,” since the draft constitution had restored the right to vote to former kulaks and called for multicandidate elections.²⁷⁷ Stalin had contemptuously dismissed any concerns, then threw out the multicandidate idea anyway.Probably the most widespread contemporary supposition about the terror involved a belief—or a desire to believe—that Stalin remained unaware. “We thought that Stalin did not know about the insane retribution against Communists, and the Soviet intelligentsia,” the writer Ehrenburg recalled. Meyerhold said, “They hide it from Stalin.” Pasternak said, “If only someone told all this to Stalin!”²⁷⁸