Stalin

Beria’s letters to Stalin in 1937 were often preoccupied with economic troubles, thus putting him in the position of supplicant. He was working with Mikoyan to reorganize light industry locally to increase consumer goods, but this required bending the USSR finance commissariat and the state planning commission, as well as the formidable Molotov.⁸³ Beria had written to Stalin and Molotov complaining that only 22,346 of 61,705 allocated automotive tires had been supplied to Georgia, and more than a tenth of what arrived was either unusable or inappropriate for Georgian conditions. That same month, he requested flour and grain beyond his central allocation quotas, citing a failed corn harvest he attributed to unfavorable weather in western Georgia, Abkhazia, and Ajaria, which caused prices to jump. (Beria informed Stalin he had already appealed to Molotov.) Beria wrote to Stalin and Molotov anticipating failures to meet milk supply quotas (revealing that most households in western Georgia had a single cow) and asked that Abkhazia, Ajaria, and western Georgia be exempted from milk supply quotas in 1937–38. He repeated his request for food aid and soon reported long queues for bread in Kutaisi, Sukhumi, Batum, Samtredia, Zestafoni, Chiatura, and Poti.⁸⁴

Beria wrote to Stalin and Molotov about the Tkvib coal mines, which supplied industrial enterprises all across the South Caucasus and were supposed to produce 350,000 tons in 1937, but industrial growth was expected to raise local demand, while problems with the two main seams foreshadowed a decline in 1938 (and an end to all coal extraction by 1942). Back in 1935, the heavy industry commissariat had drawn up plans for exploiting new seams, which by 1939 were supposed to yield 800,000 tons, but neither blueprints nor financing existed even now. Beria asked for a commission to be sent immediately.⁸⁵ Similarly, the USSR Council of People’s Commissars had approved construction of a 12,000-kilowatt hydroelectric station in Tbilisi in 1936, to be up and running before the end of that year, but turbines and boilers had not been delivered. Planned capacity was reduced to 8,000 kilowatts. Leningrad’s Nevsky Factory was to deliver two turbines, but not until December 1937 and March 1938; boilers and other equipment had not been delivered, Beria reported, naming the negligent factory suppliers and predicting that if this continued, electricity shortages in 1937, as in 1936, would require occasional shutdowns of local factories. The completion of several new factories in 1937, moreover, would only exacerbate the energy problems.⁸⁶

Beria lobbied tirelessly over supply challenges. “The Georgian SSR and in particular Tbilisi city are experiencing a severe shortage of industrial goods in the planned assortment, especially cotton and wool fabrics and leather shoes,” he wrote to Stalin and Molotov on July 2, 1937, requesting that Tbilisi be raised to the supply category of Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Minsk and that the USSR light industry commissariat open specialized fabric and leather shops in his republic. On August 15, 1937, he requested extra seed stocks, reporting to Stalin and Molotov that, because of hail covering more than 10,000 hectares, the harvest had failed in west-central Georgia and that collective farmers lacked seeds for the next planting. In late August, floods devastated parts of Georgia, especially South Ossetia, damaging bridges and roads, including the Georgian Military Highway, inducing Beria to request extra emergency funding.⁸⁷

CARNAGE AND TRIUMPH

At some point during that summer of 1937, Beria traveled by car to Sukhumi, accompanied by his driver, a party functionary, and his bodyguard Boris Sokolov, as he did often, but this time they were accosted by three bandits with pistols. Sokolov was said to have covered Beria; the driver and functionary got out of the car. The bandits fled. Sokolov was taken to the hospital with bullet wounds in his hand. Beria’s star rose higher still.⁸⁸

Beria’s winning ways entailed indefatigably seeking, implementing, and reporting on Stalin’s directives (written, oral, or intuited). On July 20, 1937, he wrote to Stalin (“Dear Koba”), enumerating a long list of names of arrested officials, detailing supposed spying and wrecking and when they had established “ties” to the rightists Rykov and Bukharin. The litany encompassed just about every major figure since the mid-1920s in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—except Beria. He quoted the victims testifying against each other: “G. Mgaloblishvili and Sh. Eliava gave expansive testimony about the espionage work of David Kandelaki.” Stalin underlined that and other passages (“The scum and traitor Mamiya Orakhelashvili so far keeps silent. We are afraid to take him firmly in hand, since at every interrogation he faints”). Beria conveyed that 200 people had already been shot and that requests were pending with Yezhov to authorize 250 more arrests. “I think it will be necessary to execute not fewer than 1,000 people, including counterrevolutionary rightists, Trotskyites, spies, diversionaries, wreckers, and so on,” Beria added (Stalin underlined this, too). Nor did Beria forget about the need to arrest Lakoba’s wife and mother (“I ask for your directives”).⁸⁹

Mdivani had refused to incriminate himself publicly and had to be convicted and executed at a one-day “trial” in camera (July 9, 1937).⁹⁰ But Beria vigorously fulfilled Stalin’s Union-wide instructions in summer–fall 1937 to stage public trials and engage “the toilers” with broadcasts on radio and agitators facilitating collective listening. One trial centered on Zekeri Lordkipanidze, an official in Georgia’s Ajarian autonomous republic, who was said to be “linked” to émigré mullahs and the Turkish consulate in Batum and plotting to break off Muslim Ajarisa on Turkey’s behalf.⁹¹ Another trial in Abkhazia’s State Drama Theater, which Beria himself attended, centered on relatives and associates of the deceased Lakoba, a “Trotskyite pygmy.”⁹² The prearranged death sentences were affirmed at collective farm assemblies, precisely in accordance with Stalin’s circular. Concerning another public trial of “rightists” accused of attempting to restore capitalism in eastern Georgia, Beria boasted to Stalin (August 29, 1937) that “the trial played an exceptionally important role in raising the awareness of the broad masses of workers about counterrevolution, sabotage, and subversion by enemies of the people.”⁹³

Stalin nonetheless saw fit to impart a lesson to Beria. On September 8, 1937, the despot sent a cipher to Armenia asserting that affairs were in an egregious state and Trotskyites were finding protection. Armenian party boss Amatouni Amatouni, the Beria creature, and Stepan Akopov, head of the Yerevan city party, had recently been reconfirmed in their posts, but there had been accusations against them of leniency toward enemies, which also raised questions about Armenia’s NKVD chief, Khachik Moughdousi (Astvatsaturov), another Beria creature.⁹⁴ On September 15, Mikoyan and Malenkov arrived in Yerevan with a brigade of Chekists who arrested and tortured Moughdousi and his deputies. That day, at a plenum of the Armenian Central Committee, Malenkov read out Stalin’s recent cipher to Armenia, spurring three days of circular-firing-squad “discussion.” On September 18, seven of the nine members of the Armenian politburo were removed. That same day, Beria issued an order for the arrest of his protégé in Abkhazia, Alexei Agrba, now made into a counterrevolutionary bourgeois nationalist, and arrived in Yerevan.⁹⁵ “To my complete surprise, Beria suddenly appeared,” Mikoyan recalled. “He entered the room as I was speaking at the podium. . . . I assumed Stalin had ordered him to come and arrest me there at the plenum. But I hope I was able to conceal my anxiety and he [Beria] did not notice.”⁹⁶

None of the sweeping expulsions at the Armenian party plenum, which continued to September 23, had been cleared with Beria. With the dissolution of the South Caucasus Federation, Armenia no longer fell under his jurisdiction. Still, he showed up to ensure that another protégé, the former head of the Tbilisi city party organization, Grigory Arutyunov, got named as the new party boss of Armenia. (He de-Russified his name back to Harutyunyan.)⁹⁷ In Sukhumi, too, where he sacrificed his Abkhaz plant, Agrba, Beria installed new clients.⁹⁸

On December 10, 1937, in the Georgian National Theater of Opera and Ballet, Beria delivered a Yezhov “Center of Centers” speech, detailing a vast plot in the Caucasus, linking poets, theater directors, engineers, and functionaries who aimed to spread typhoid in Kakhetia (eastern Georgia), sell off Ajarisa to Turkey, and assassinate him. Georgia’s intelligentsia responded with “prolonged applause.”⁹⁹ Ten days later, Beria celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Cheka, also in the Rustaveli, with his devoted gang (Merkulov, Goglidze, Kobulov, Vladimir Dekanozov, Solomon Milstein). The year culminated in celebrations of what Beria designated, with Stalin’s approval, the 750th anniversary of Shota Rustaveli and his twelfth-century Georgian epic The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, which brought a host of Moscow literati to Tbilisi, including Ilya Ehrenburg, who observed the Stalin-like ovations that Beria received.¹⁰⁰

THE RECKONING

Georgia’s population in 1937 was about 3.4 million, or 2 percent of the Soviet total, but of the approximately 40,000 names on the extant execution lists submitted by Yezhov and signed by Stalin, 3,485 names (9 percent) were from Georgia.¹⁰¹ But the extent to which those names reflected Beria’s input, versus Yezhov’s or Stalin’s, remains unclear. About 21,000 were sentenced by troika in the “mass operations” (three quarters were illiterate or barely literate), while another 3,165 were sentenced by the military collegium, numbers in line with the pattern of Soviet quotas.¹⁰² But Ukraine, with nine times the population of Georgia, had almost forty-five times more people arrested than Georgia did in the national operations (89,700 to 2,100).¹⁰³ Of the 644 Communist party delegates to Georgia’s 10th Party Congress, 425 would be arrested and sentenced either to death or the Gulag—66 percent, a figure in line with the destruction of the delegates to the USSR 17th Party Congress.¹⁰⁴ Scholars assert that one quarter of the Writers’ Union of Georgia was exterminated, a very rough estimate.¹⁰⁵ In a report (October 28, 1937) about the unmasking of a counterrevolutionary espionage group of writers centered around Javakhishvili, Beria noted that sixty-one local NKVD operatives had been arrested.¹⁰⁶ And there was still a year of the bloodbath to go.¹⁰⁷

This horrific picture was less sanguinary than in Armenia, which had one third the population of Georgia but suffered 4,530 executions in 1937–38, out of 8,837 arrests for counterrevolution. (Just one person had been executed in Soviet Armenia in 1936.)¹⁰⁸ Matters were bloodier still in Western Siberia, where at least 300,000 people were executed in 1937–38, about 4 percent of the adult male population there.¹⁰⁹ Proportionally, the slaughterhouse in the Soviet Far East was perhaps greater still.¹¹⁰ Overall, Georgia had neither the softest nor the hardest terror.¹¹¹

Abkhazia, the autonomous republic in Georgia where the ethnic Mingrelian Beria had been born, continued to be his special target.¹¹² Under him, the share of ethnic Abkhaz in the party declined from more than 21 percent to 15 percent. Ethnic Russians declined as well, from 29 to 16 percent, while ethnic Georgians in the Abkhaz party rose from 26 to 48 percent.¹¹³ In the autonomous republic’s overall population, ethnic Abkhaz would shrink from around 28 percent (in 1926) to 18 percent (by 1939), thanks to a state-sponsored mass influx of Georgians, especially Mingrelian settlers. In 1938, when the rest of the USSR’s minority nations were switching from Latin letters to Cyrillic, Beria forced the Abkhaz to switch to the Georgian alphabet.¹¹⁴ Beria had also written to Stalin complaining that the Muslim Ajarians had been designated a separate nation for the 1937 census, arguing that they “shared the same language, territory, economic life, and culture with Georgians” (omitting their Muslim religion) and requested a correcting directive.¹¹⁵ Such nationalization efforts by party bosses in other national republics could have provoked punishment for “national deviation.”

Besides Beria, one of the very few other regional party satraps to survive was his former patron, now protégé, in Azerbaijan, Bagirov, who also wrote to Stalin boasting of his arrests: Trotskyites and ethnic Iranians living in the frontier zones, not to mention anyone who had personally crossed him. More than 10,000 officials would be removed in Azerbaijan in 1937–38.¹¹⁶ Stalin evinced special interest in the arrests in Nakhichevan, an autonomous republic inside Azerbaijan, bordering both Iran and Turkey, calling it “the most dangerous point in the whole South Caucasus.” Bagirov obligingly bloodied it.¹¹⁷ Of course, alongside the party boss, the head of the NKVD in Azerbaijan, Yuvelyan Sumbatov-Topuridze, also a Beria protégé (and a Georgian), ordered his subordinates to overfulfill arrest quotas. At the same time, Bagirov himself looked to be in danger, as Azerbaijan figured in Malenkov’s report to the January 1938 party plenum on mistakes in the expulsions and arrests of Communists. An NKVD commission from Moscow, chaired by a high figure (Mikhail Litvin), came to Baku. But somehow, Bagirov managed to pin the blame on the local NKVD; Sumbatov-Topuridze was the one removed, on January 10, though not arrested (Beria managed to transfer him to the NKVD’s economic administration in Moscow).¹¹⁸ Bagirov, too, survived, likely thanks to Beria.

A FAVORITE FOR UKRAINE

Beria was not the only phenomenon to emerge. Just before Stalin switched Beria to the party from the secret police, Nikita Khrushchev in January 1932 became Kaganovich’s deputy, number two in the huge Moscow party organization, with Kaganovich’s guiding example of a superhuman work ethic to emulate. Khrushchev developed a reputation for bootlicking.¹¹⁹ In January 1934, he became Moscow city party boss, and, in early 1935, concurrently, Moscow provincial party boss, a region equivalent in physical size to England and Wales. One official who knew him explained that, like Kaganovich, Khrushchev “compensated (not always successfully) for gaps in education and cultural development with intuition, improvisation, boldness, and great natural gifts.”¹²⁰

During the terror, in fall 1937, the Moscow party active assembled in the city’s conservatory for a meeting presided over by Kaganovich (by then both heavy industry commissar and railroad commissar) and Khrushchev. Khrushchev spoke passionately, lost his place, mispronounced words, and made people laugh, epitomizing the lower-middle strata who had risen with the revolution and Stalin’s rule. “A large head, a high forehead, light-colored hair, a wide-open smile—all this conveyed the impression of simplicity and goodwill,” recalled one observer, seeing the golden boy for the first time. “And I, and my neighbors, glancing at Khrushchev, experienced not only satisfaction, but a kind of tender emotion: what a fellow, a regular miner, and he had become secretary of the Moscow party committee.”¹²¹

But Iona Yakir, the arrested military officer, had visited Khrushchev at his Moscow dacha, part of the manor house on the estate of the former Moscow governor general, in Novo-Ogaryovo; Yakir had been there on the very eve of his arrest. Yakir’s sister was married to Semyon Korytny, a close Khrushchev colleague in Moscow, who was also arrested in the hospital—the day after Khrushchev had visited him there. “I worried,” Khrushchev recalled. “First, I pitied him. Second, they could come after me, too.” Stalin ordered or allowed Yezhov to arrest two of Khrushchev’s top aides in Moscow, both of whom Khrushchev viewed as exceptionally trustworthy. Stalin divulged to Khrushchev that each had testified against him, claiming that “Khrushchev” was not his real name but a mask, and hinted that such arrests might be the work of enemies who had infiltrated the NKVD, hardly comforting for Khrushchev’s prospects.¹²²

And then there was the biggest black spot: Khrushchev divulged to Kaganovich that, during his student days back in 1923, he had sympathized with Trotsky, information likely to come forward in an anonymous denunciation. Kaganovich “blanched.” “Trotskyism” by his protégé threatened him, too, especially because Kaganovich himself had hints of Trotsky association: he had served in the civil war on the eastern front, among Trotsky supporters, not on the southern front, among Stalin supporters. He advised Khrushchev to inform Stalin immediately. Stalin, in response, told Khrushchev not to worry. The despot’s absolution, Khrushchev would recall, “further strengthened my confidence in Stalin, and gave rise to a feeling of certainty that those who were being arrested really were enemies of the people.”¹²³

Khrushchev was more of a “Trotskyite” than myriad officials who were destroyed for it. If Stalin had suddenly changed his mind, nothing Khrushchev did, or did not do, could have saved his life. Of the thirty-eight highest officials in the Moscow provincial party organization, three survived, two of whom were Kaganovich and Khrushchev. As party boss of Moscow, Khrushchev had to “authorize” arrests, and, in connection with the onset of “mass operations,” he’d had to submit a list of “criminal and kulak elements,” which in his case carried an expansive 41,305 names; he marked 8,500 of them “first category” (execution).¹²⁴

Stalin entrusted his star pupil with a big new assignment. In late January 1938, the Ukraine-born ethnic Russian Khrushchev replaced the ethnic Pole Stanisław Kosior as party boss of Ukraine.¹²⁵ He arrived in Kiev atop a mountain of corpses and took part in new arrest waves. By this time, the Communist party in Ukraine had been reduced by half, to 284,152 members (just 1 percent of the population), and the Ukrainian politburo and Central Committee had essentially ceased to function. Many provinces in Ukraine had no first or second secretaries, and none had a third secretary (with a single exception). Newspapers lacked editors. All eleven Ukrainian politburo members would perish without a trace. No one from the Ukrainian orgburo or the Ukrainian party Control Commission would survive, either. Just two of the sixty-two members and forty candidate members of the Ukrainian Central Committee would manage to escape execution or incarceration.¹²⁶ This state of affairs was not unique to Ukraine, but this was a strategic and industrial region roughly equal in size to France.

At least 160,000 victims, in Moscow and Ukraine, would be arrested under Khrushchev during the terror. Such rough figures should put to rest the notion that Beria was a singular monster, instead of an exceedingly ambitious figure, like Khrushchev, who developed ways to thrive in a monstrous system. It bears further remarking that Khrushchev, while working in Moscow, got along well with the party boss of the Caucasus. “I met Beria, it seems, in 1932,” Khrushchev would recall. “We met to discuss personnel issues. . . . He came with Bagirov” (whom Khrushchev already knew). They talked about an Armenian (Ruben Mkrtichyan, known as Rubenov) who was party boss of a Moscow ward but being recommended for a higher position. “After the first encounter with Beria, I got closer to him,” Khrushchev continued. “I liked Beria—a simple and sharp-witted person. Therefore, at Central Committee plenums, we often sat next to each other, exchanging opinions, scoffing at the orators. I liked Beria so much that in 1934, when I was on holiday in Sochi for the first time, I went to see him in Tiflis.”¹²⁷

Khrushchev, no less than Beria, albeit with a sunnier and more idealistic disposition, earnestly took to the role of pupil under the great teacher. Another Khrushchev subordinate, P. V. Lukashov, was arrested in Ukraine only a few weeks after Khrushchev had received Stalin’s approval to promote him. “For me it was a moral blow,” he recalled. “How could this be? I had seen this man, trusted him, respected him. But what could I do?” Lukashov, miraculously, was released, after which he described for Khrushchev the ways he had been tortured—to testify against Khrushchev. When Khrushchev mentioned Lukashov’s arrest to Stalin, the latter said, “Yes, there are perversions. On me, as well, they’re collecting material.”¹²⁸

During the terror of 1937–38, Khrushchev would turn out to be one of only two people promoted to candidate membership in the politburo, the other being Yezhov. And Khrushchev became the first person elevated to the politburo without prerevolutionary membership in the party.¹²⁹

NKVD DEGRADATION

Ukraine also got a new NKVD boss, Alexander Uspensky, whose overkill in Orenburg province had recommended him.¹³⁰ “In January 1938, I went to a session of the USSR Supreme Soviet in Moscow,” Uspensky testified. “Yezhov unexpectedly summoned me. . . . Yezhov was completely drunk. On the table next to him was a bottle of brandy. Yezhov said to me: Well, are you going to Ukraine?” The appointment took effect on January 25.¹³¹ Uspensky replaced Israel Leplyovsky, who had run the NKVD special department and been the main organizer of the case materials in the annihilation of Tukhachevsky and the Red Army high command, then was demoted to Kiev, where he had exceeded the already sky-high arrest quotas for the republic, but Yezhov complained anyway.¹³² Uspensky, for his part, also had a great deal to make up for: he had been deputy Kremlin commandant under Yagoda, back in fall 1937, when Stalin summoned him to the Little Corner, along with Yezhov, Molotov, and Zhdanov, for thirty minutes and asked point-blank, “Was he honest and not recruited by Yagoda?” Yezhov intervened and said that Uspensky had regularly reported to him at the party apparatus on irregularities in Kremlin security.¹³³ All the same, Yezhov, unsure how that visit to the Little Corner would turn, had instructed his secretariat to prepare a warrant for Uspensky’s arrest. After Stalin relented, Yezhov used Uspensky’s anxious ferocity in Orenburg to try to buttress his own standing.

In the first half of 1938, the NKVD “mass operations” were specially prolonged for the USSR’s two most strategic territories. The Soviet Far East, facing Japan, received the highest new quota; Ukraine, facing Nazi Germany, the second highest.¹³⁴ Uspensky would send Moscow reams of reports about unmasked “plots,” besting the totals of all other regional NKVD chieftains.¹³⁵ First, though, Yezhov went in person to Khrushchev’s and Uspensky’s new bailiwick to ratchet up the carnage. Just before departing for Kiev, on February 12, 1938, he had summoned several operatives. “Yezhov asked us, ‘Who here speaks Ukrainian?’” one participant, Grigory Kobyzev, testified. “It turned out that those present knew almost no Ukrainian. Yezhov asked, ‘How are we going to converse there in Ukraine?’ Frinovsky laughed and loudly said, ‘Over there, there is not a single Ukrainian, just Jew after Jew.’” Yezhov laughed as well. Kobyzev was named head of NKVD personnel in Ukraine and tasked with purging it of Jews. The spectacular ascent, as a result of the Bolshevik revolution, of people from the former Pale of Settlement was entering eclipse. “Oh, cadres, cadres, this is not Ukraine but a whole Birobijan,” Yezhov further remarked, once he and Kobyzev were on-site, alluding to the special Soviet Jewish enclave in the Far East.

Yezhov went down the list of all Ukraine NKVD personnel, marking those for arrest or demotion (to tasks such as Gulag duty).¹³⁶ He also gave a speech lacerating the assembled NKVD men in Ukraine for allegedly having left large numbers of anti-Soviet elements at large. A cigarette dangled from his mouth the entire time he lectured; the scar on his face was starkly visible. “It was my first time at such a high-level gathering, and naturally I marveled at everything,” testified Mikhail Zhabokritsky, the Jewish NKVD chief of the Moldavian autonomous republic, in Ukraine, who would be arrested a few days later. “But what astonished me the most was Yezhov himself—not tall, even dwarfish, thin, frail. When he sat in the chair, from the table one could only see his head.” Although Yezhov was a general commissar of state security, equivalent to the rank of marshal, he dressed indifferently. “His self-confident pose, the independent tone of his speech, did not harmonize with his exterior and came across as ridiculous,” observed Zhabokritsky. At the farewell banquet in Kiev, Yezhov got so drunk that his bodyguards had to carry him out in front of everyone.¹³⁷ “This year was a special one for the Soviet country,” Khrushchev would summarize to the Ukrainian Communists at their next party congress, praising the mass arrests while adding that “after the trip to Ukraine by Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, and the arrival of comrade Uspensky in the Ukrainian SSR NKVD, a real rout of enemy nests began.”¹³⁸

While the wretched USSR NKVD chief was laying waste to Ukraine, morale, and his own reputation, on February 17, 1938, Frinovsky, in Moscow, summoned Abram Slutsky, head of NKVD foreign intelligence. The son of a Jewish railway worker from a Ukrainian village, Slutsky was the sole remaining central NKVD department head from Yagoda’s time. He’d had an illustrious career in industrial espionage, pilfering the designs for ball bearings from Sweden in the late 1920s, then spent the 1930s purloining Trotsky’s archives in Paris, infiltrating émigré groups, and overseeing assassinations on foreign soil.¹³⁹ But a torrent of denunciations had ramped up the pressure to take down the last Yagodaite. Yezhov and Frinovsky evidently worried that an arrest would induce NKVD operatives abroad to defect—before they could be recalled and executed—and so they had concocted an act worthy of a spy novel. As Slutsky and Frinovsky were talking in the latter’s office, another operative entered and, pretending to be awaiting his turn to report, snuck up from behind and put a chloroform mask over Slutsky’s face. Once he fell unconscious, a third operative emerged and injected Slutsky’s right arm with poison. Pravda, giving the cause of death as a heart attack, published a laudatory obituary on February 18: “Farewell, trusted friend and comrade!” That night, the intelligence chief’s body lay in state with an honor guard in the central NKVD club at Bolshaya Lubyanka, 14, the two-story eighteenth-century baroque palace that had been described in Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

A MAN ALONE

On February 19, a grandchild was born to Stalin: Galina, the daughter of Yakov Jughashvili and his wife, Yulia Meltzer. A previous granddaughter, Yelena, the offspring of Yakov’s first wife, had died not long after birth in 1929. A grandson, Yevgeny, had been born on January 10, 1936, in Uryupinsk, Stalingrad province, to Olga Golysheva, his former fiancée, and Yakov had not appeared for Yevgeny’s birth; the mother had given the boy her own surname. When Yakov found out, evidently in 1938, he had interceded with the authorities to get the boy officially registered as Jughashvili. Stalin never recognized Yevgeny as his grandson.¹⁴⁰ Slutsky, meanwhile, was cremated and interred at the prestigious Novodevichy Cemetery. Gossip reached Orlov, the NKVD station chief in Spain, to the effect that during the lying in state, colleagues noticed stains on Slutsky’s face from hydrocyanic acid.¹⁴¹ Whether this was true or not, they all understood that he had been killed. In any case, in April 1938, after the elaborate ruse concerning Slutsky’s death to avoid provoking defections abroad, Stalin threw caution to the wind and allowed Slutsky to be declared “an enemy of the people” anyway.¹⁴² He was playing with fire.

Stalin held no government position, did not attend diplomatic functions, and rarely met with foreigners.¹⁴³ He was largely inaccessible to most Soviet elites as well. He continued to reside at the Near Dacha, where he had helped plant an orchard of apple, cherry, linden, birch, pine, and maple trees, as well as grapevines, jasmine, viburnum, rose hips, petunias, lilies of the valley, lilacs, wallflowers, violets. But the hastily built structure, in its prefabricated original form, had not lasted even four years. It was replaced in spring 1938 by a building of bricks, which were stuccoed and painted the same dark green, evidently Stalin’s preferred color, although this could have been for camouflage purposes, to blend into the forest. (Many dachas in Moscow’s outskirts and down south were now painted green.) The rebuilt main building followed the same design: a single story with seven rooms and a solarium on the roof. A new, large auxiliary building, where the kitchen and staff operated, was connected to the main dacha by a long corridor. The grounds got a new canteen for the guards and staff, an office for the head bodyguard, rooms for medical personnel, and a cinema. The familiar small, cozy dining room—some 800 square feet, amply lit with tall windows, a fireplace in the corner, and seating for eight to ten—was where Stalin worked and took meals when alone or in small groups.

At his preferred seat, on the far left side of the table, there would be a generous collection of colored pencils and notebooks and a special deep ashtray of marble, where he could stand up his pipe. Stalin had an electric teapot that he operated himself. A round table, located between two of the four windows, held his multiple black telephones (made by Siemens) and a button to summon the staff. A high-frequency phone, the color of elephant tusk, allowed secure long-distance calls, especially for military and police purposes. Calls into the dacha were answered by a duty officer, who used an internal line to inform Stalin of the incoming call. The despot, if he so desired, would pick up, press the lever, and answer, “Stalin.” One of the phones was an ordinary city line, which Stalin might have installed so callers could bypass the staff to reach him (people from telephone booths sometimes got the dacha accidentally, and eventually the city line would be removed).¹⁴⁴ The small dining room, like all the others, had a couch, where he did his reading, as well as a small writing desk. A door led from this room to the glass-enclosed northern veranda, which also had a work/dining table. It was neither luxurious nor ostentatious.

Benito Mussolini, on a typical day in 1938, spent an hour or two every afternoon in the downstairs private apartment in the Palazzo Venezia of Claretta Petacci, whom he called little Walewska, after Napoleon’s mistress. The duce would have sex, nap, listen to music on the radio, eat some fruit, reminisce about his wild youth, complain about all the women vying for his attention (including his wife), and have Walewska dress him. Before and after the daily trysts—Mussolini had recently told his son-in-law that “genius lies in the genitals”—the duce would call Claretta a dozen times, to report on his travails and his ulcer. Claretta recorded his “thoughts” in her diary: Jews were “pigs . . . a people destined to be completely slaughtered”; the English were “a disgusting people . . . they think only with their asses”; the Spanish were “lazy, lethargic . . . eight centuries of Muslim domination, that’s why.” She also recorded their lovemaking and his reveries about her “delicious little body.” Mussolini was not just head of state but head of five different ministries, yet Italy had only very small tanks, a navy whose ships could not leave port for want of air cover, and just ten total army divisions. In August 1938, he was shocked to learn that the finance minister knew of major shortages of artillery while he, the war minister, did not. At such moments, when Mussolini’s inattention, inaccessibility, and incompetence were exposed, it was never his fault. Anyway, what was mere technology compared with spirit, character, will?¹⁴⁵

Stalin’s world was nothing like the virile Italian’s. Women in his life remained very few. (There were almost none in positions of power, either.) He still did not keep a harem, despite ample opportunities.¹⁴⁶ Inevitably, rumors circulated of affairs: the wife of a deceased politburo member, code-named “Z” (i.e., Zinaida Orjonikidze); the sister of Kaganovich, Roza, who did not exist; a Bolshoi ballerina or singer.¹⁴⁷ If Stalin had a mistress, she may have been a Georgian aviator, Rusudan Pachkoriya, a beauty some twenty years his junior, whom he observed at an exhibition at Tushino airfield. She lived in Tbilisi and, while in Moscow, stayed at a sports dormitory (later, she obtained a prominent Gorky Street apartment). Stalin might have met her occasionally in private quarters, under the pretext of conducting aviation “consultations,” according to one of his surviving bodyguards (the sole source on the matter).¹⁴⁸ But whatever pleasures Stalin occasionally took, he was married to Soviet state power. A widower twice over, he spent his time seeking succor not in the female body but in military technology and in cadres.

Karolina Til, the longtime Stalin family housekeeper, an ethnic German from Riga who had been the one to find Nadya’s dead body, went on pension in 1938. In the fall, Vasily (age seventeen) would leave home to attend the Kachinsk Higher Military Aviation School, in Kucha, Crimea, near Sevastopol. Artyom, Stalin’s informally adopted son, was in artillery school; Yakov Jughashvili was enrolled in the advanced Artillery Academy. Svetlana (age twelve) was still attending Moscow’s Lepeshinsky Experimental School-Commune, on Ostozhenka; she lived in the Kremlin apartment. Stalin adored but rarely saw his lonely daughter. Following the arrests of the heads of the bodyguard directorates—Pauker and then Kursky and Dagin—in quick succession, a new person would enter the Stalin household: Nikolai Vlasik (b. 1896), the son of Belorussian peasants who himself had completed just a few years of school before becoming an unskilled laborer.¹⁴⁹ His modest education, short stature, and doglike loyalty seem to have made him unthreatening to Stalin. Vlasik’s purview, like Pauker’s, included Stalin’s security, food, personal life, and children. Poskryobyshev continued to handle all regime matters and, inevitably, became close with Vlasik (who stood guard in the outer reception office). The promotion also put Vlasik in charge of the Bolshoi, as well as other top Moscow theaters (the Maly, the Arts, Vakhtangov), and he came to know many of the artists personally, especially the females.¹⁵⁰ Stalin saw more of Poskryobyshev and Vlasik than anyone else. Vlasik became Beria’s venomous rival.

Stalin was profoundly alone in the sulfuric aquifers of his being. But he hated to be alone. His awkward character exacerbated the isolation that inevitably befalls a tyrant upon whom everyone’s life depends. Not only had he driven his second wife to suicide, but most of his closest friends were gone: Kirov, Lakoba, Orjonikidze. Stalin was complicit in the death of the third, and perhaps of the second, while being blamed, in whispers, for the first. He had deliberately murdered almost all his comrades in arms, including those he had been genuinely fond of, such as Bukharin. The few who survived—Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan—had largely been reduced to minions. Beria would come into this group as a minion, too, but he would be more enterprising.

STALIN MANUFACTURES A TOP FOREIGN AGENT

Japan’s ambassador to Moscow complained to Tokyo that Soviet counterintelligence officials “steal suitcases from military attachés.”¹⁵¹ But Japanese reconnaissance aircraft were flying over Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, and Komsomolsk on cloudy days, then shutting down their engines and gliding noiselessly, photographing Soviet military installations with their Fairchild cameras. With the assistance of Finnish cryptographers, the Japanese had broken the codes used in the Soviet Far East. They also had dug underground cables into Soviet territory from Manchukuo to eavesdrop on Soviet telephone conversations. Japanese intelligence rightly regarded Polish intelligence as the world’s top anti-Soviet service and held joint military intelligence conferences with the Poles, in Harbin and Warsaw.¹⁵² Stalin had the Japanese consulates in Odessa, Novosibirsk, Khabarovsk, and Blagoveshchensk shuttered.¹⁵³ But four Japanese consulates remained in the Soviet Far East (Vladivostok, Petropavlovsk, Okha, and Aleksandrovsk), while Manchukuo, Japan’s puppet state, maintained consulates in Chita and Blagoveshchensk. Nonetheless, when Pravda characterized the Soviet Far East as riddled with spies (April 23 and 28, 1937), it meant Soviet military commanders.

Gamarnik, who had committed suicide just prior to his likely inclusion in the Tukhachevsky “trial,” had been a commander in the Soviet Far East, and his former subordinates were being arrested. Insinuations of spying on behalf of the Japanese also implicated the current commander of the Soviet Far Eastern Army, Blyukher, whose subordinates were being arrested.¹⁵⁴ But it was not Gamarnik, Blyukher, other Soviet officials, or former kulaks who served the Japanese cause, but Stalin himself. His orders for sweeping arrests of Japanese “spies” ended up delivering windfall details of Soviet military capabilities, dislocation, and war plans to Tokyo.

Genrikh Lyushkov—described as “stout, black-haired, black-eyed, with a Charlie Chaplin mustache and a strongly Jewish cast of countenance”—was among the small number of NKVD bigwigs to enjoy an audience in the Little Corner during the terror.¹⁵⁵ Born in Odessa in 1900, the son of a Jewish tailor, he had joined the Cheka in 1920, learned good German, and conducted industrial espionage in Germany. He was also one of the few top Chekists with a higher degree in jurisprudence. He was, however, not a star (one colleague in Moscow recalled “a modest person and decent functionary”) and had no major awards.¹⁵⁶ But in December 1934, in the wake of the Kirov assassination, Lyushkov, as deputy chief of the NKVD’s secret-political department in Moscow, had arrived with Stalin’s entourage in Leningrad and participated in the “interrogations,” catching the eye of Yezhov (then still in the party apparatus). In August 1936, Yagoda had appointed Lyushkov NKVD boss of the Azov–Black Sea territory to produce compromising material on the party boss (and Yagoda nemesis) there, Yevdokimov. In September, Yagoda was cashiered. All the same, Lyushkov went on a murderous rampage of trumped-up charges against the Yevdokimov clan, gaining a reputation with underlings as an arrogant bully. Frinovsky and Yezhov tried to rein him in, but Lyushkov had instructions directly from Stalin.¹⁵⁷

During the flurry of prizes for those prosecuting the terror, on July 3, 1937, Lyushkov received the Order of Lenin.¹⁵⁸ He was transferred out of Rostov to take up the big terror assignment in the Soviet Far East that had been given (a few weeks earlier) to Balytsky.¹⁵⁹ On July 28, Lyushkov had a fifteen-minute audience in the Little Corner, and three days later he set out by train for Khabarovsk with a heavy entourage, arriving August 9.¹⁶⁰ He boasted in telegrams to Moscow about one unmasked “plot” after another; Stalin devoured the interrogation protocols, especially after Terenty Deribas (Balytsky’s long-serving predecessor) was denounced for embezzling gold in a machination during which an NKVD officer fell under a train. (Stalin: “To Yezhov. Important. It’s possible that Deribas, beyond everything already, was a serious ordinary criminal. This must be investigated.”)¹⁶¹ It was Lyushkov, in late summer–fall 1937, who conducted the deportation of some 170,000 Soviet Koreans; Pravda announced his award for implementing an important assignment “in the field of transport.”¹⁶² In December 1937, Stalin let him become one of the “elected” to the new USSR Supreme Soviet. “I’m fortunate,” Lyushkov told the toilers who formally nominated him, “that I belong to the caste of functionaries of the punitive organs.”¹⁶³

Lyushkov was just beginning. Between December 1937 and May 1938, he imprisoned or deported 19,000 of the 25,000 ethnic Chinese in the Soviet Far East, including every last one in Vladivostok.¹⁶⁴ As a result of his “vigilance,” he had to beg for translators in Asian languages, requesting the transfer to the NKVD of eight students by name from Far Eastern University.¹⁶⁵ He also begged Moscow for new operatives: thirty-seven NKVD officers were locked up in the local prison as foreign “spies.” But Lyushkov had problems far bigger than lack of personnel: he had served in the organs under Yagoda. Of the forty-one NKVD officers under Yagoda who had held the title of commissar of state security (first, second, or third rank)—equivalent to general—only ten, including Lyushkov, remained alive and at liberty. One (Slutsky) had been poisoned, three had committed suicide, and the rest had been arrested and for the most part executed.¹⁶⁶ Lyushkov, in the capital for the January 1938 Supreme Soviet convocation, complained to Frinovsky that he was being tailed upon exiting his Moscow hotel. Frinovsky replied that Yezhov was just trying to safeguard him, which was true. The arrested Georgian Lordkipanidze had incriminated Lyushkov.

Instead of passing the Lordkipanidze interrogation protocols to Stalin, Yezhov had had Frinovsky reinterrogate Yagoda. The latter complied: Lyushkov had not been part of the “plot.” Testimony against Lyushkov kept coming, however, and Frinovsky pressured Yezhov, asking why they were protecting this “Yagodaite,” especially since, on the inside, people already knew of the “testimony” accumulated against him. Yezhov was in a bind. If Lyushkov were belatedly arrested, Yezhov would have to explain to Stalin why he had failed to forward the interrogation protocols earlier. Nonetheless, the pressure against Lyushkov built, and on April 16, 1938, Frinovsky ordered Lyushkov to send his deputy, Moisei Kagan, to Moscow, ostensibly to be assigned to another post. Lyushkov had secretly agreed with Kagan that the latter, upon arrival, would let him know everything was okay. Lyushkov heard nothing. (Kagan was arrested.)¹⁶⁷

Another of Lyushkov’s outsized problems was a man against whom he was supposed to be gathering compromising materials: Marshal Blyukher. Despite the German-sounding name (Blücher), evidently a nickname for his grandfather, Blyukher was an ethnic Russian, born to a peasant family, who had commanded the Soviet Far Eastern Army since its inception (1930), held the rank of marshal since its introduction (1935), and earned no fewer than five Orders of the Red Banner and two Orders of Lenin.¹⁶⁸ Following his complicity on the panel of judges in the 1937 in-camera trial and execution of Tukhachevsky and the other commanders, Blyukher had taken to drink, starting that very night in his room at the Hotel Moskva. Back in the Soviet Far East, his own top people were being arrested.¹⁶⁹ “Vasily Konstantinovich became more and more closed,” Blyukher’s young second wife, Glafira, would recall, “but he still believed Stalin would defend him, although, thinking out loud at home, he not infrequently said that the Master was too severe, idiosyncratic, at times wacky, and yet he believed in his party conscience.”¹⁷⁰ In January 1938, Blyukher had led the Far Eastern delegation to the USSR Supreme Soviet in Moscow and, furthermore, was among the select few elected to the body’s presidium. Lyushkov, for his part, knew that Stalin had lost confidence in Blyukher. “Blyukher is very ambitious for power,” Lyushkov would later observe. “His role in the Far East does not satisfy him; he wants more. He considers himself above Voroshilov. Politically, it is doubtful whether he is satisfied with the general situation, although he is very careful. In the army he is more popular than Voroshilov.”¹⁷¹

Blyukher, of course, knew that Lyushkov was gunning for him, and he went on the offensive, spreading rumors that Moscow had lost “political confidence” in Lyushkov.¹⁷² Thus did each man’s vulnerability contribute to the other’s.