Stalin

Stalin had gotten lucky in the Far East: Japan had become bogged down. “The situation in China splendid,” Soviet deputy foreign affairs commissar Potyomkin remarked, as the French ambassador to Moscow Coulondre reported to Paris. Potyomkin “is counting on the resistance by this country for several years, after which Japan will be too enfeebled to be capable of attacking the USSR. This opinion appears to be shared by the Soviet leadership.”¹⁷³ Stalin himself told a Chinese special envoy (the son of Sun Yat-sen) that “China was fighting Russia’s battle as well as her own” and “that China would continue to receive all possible help from Russia in the form of munitions, airplanes, and other supplies.”¹⁷⁴ But he avoided direct confrontation with Japan, sternly warning (April 7, 1938) the party boss in Soviet Northern Sakhalin to quit harassing Japanese economic operations there, since any trouble over the foreign concessions could serve as a casus belli. Similarly, in connection with the Japanese ambassador in London, Stalin instructed his envoy Maisky “not to avoid a meeting with [Shigeru] Yoshida, and if you get such a meeting listen to him attentively. Ask him to outline concrete measures for improving relations between Japan and the Soviet Union. State that the USSR strives for improved relations. On these points, report to me.”¹⁷⁵

Predictably, though, Stalin was pursuing his own intrigues. On April 12, 1938, Moscow notified Blyukher of an imminent Japanese attack against Soviet positions, based on information from Chiang Kai-shek.¹⁷⁶ Stalin could not help but understand that such “intelligence” reflected Chiang’s indefatigable efforts to precipitate direct Soviet involvement in the war, but the despot could not resist using this Chinese provocation. Even as the Soviet Far Eastern Army was adding more than 100,000 troops from the Volga and Siberian military districts in 1938, as well as large numbers of planes and tanks, Stalin dispatched newly named deputy defense commissar Lev Mekhlis to Khabarovsk, with armed escorts and replacement military officers—referred to locally as the “Black Hundred” (like the vigilantes under tsarism).¹⁷⁷ It was the end of the line for the thirty-eight-year Soviet Far East NKVD boss, Lyushkov.

Lyushkov, however, failed to show up to greet Mekhlis. Yezhov had already formally relieved the loyal Lyushkov of his post (May 26, 1938), under the pretext of a future unspecified assignment in the central NKVD, but Lyushkov knew this constituted a death warrant and, taking advantage of his close relationship with Yezhov, managed to stall his return to Moscow. (Yezhov apparently sent an emissary to arrest him out in the Far East.) On June 9, Lyushkov told his deputy he had to travel to the frontier zone for a meeting with a very important agent. He went by train from Khabarovsk to Vladivostok, then by car to Posyet, inspected the local border guard detachments, and on June 12 went out to the purported agent-rendezvous spot. Leaving his one companion at a distance, and wearing “a disguise”—mufti and hunting cap, under which he wore his full dress NKVD uniform—Lyushkov got lost in the rain and darkness. Near the Hunchun River, however, he found two Manchukuo border guards and willingly gave himself up, revealing his officer’s garments underneath. Imagine the lowly guards’ frame of mind: in the middle of nowhere, out of the predawn morning mists, appeared not some wayward small-fry contraband trader, but a man wearing an NKVD uniform and carrying a party card, Supreme Soviet elected representative ID, and papers signed by Yezhov identifying him as commissar of state security, third rank, equivalent to a major general in the Imperial Japanese Army.

Moscow officialdom was shaken. Was there an explanatory note? Did the Japanese kidnap Lyushkov? Yezhov cried and cried, blurting out, “Now I’m lost.”¹⁷⁸ He informed Stalin, but omitted mention of the interrogation “testimonies” against Lyushkov and of how he had long shielded him from arrest.¹⁷⁹ On June 15, 1938, Lyushkov’s wife, Nina, was arrested in their Moscow apartment, and accused of having known about but failed to report her husband’s planned defection.¹⁸⁰ That evening, Blyukher showed up in Yezhov’s office to inquire about the Lyushkov situation and, no doubt, his own standing. Right at that moment, Yezhov was summoned to the Little Corner. Stalin decided to send the Lyushkov nemesis Frinovsky to Khabarovsk, more than 5,000 miles by train, to ascertain what had happened; he departed on June 17. Mekhlis, meanwhile, flew back from the Soviet Far East and, on June 20, gave a report in the Little Corner, after which Stalin immediately sent him eastward again, to further annihilate the cadres in the Siberian and Transbaikal military districts, on the way to renewed massacres of the Soviet Far Eastern Army.¹⁸¹

Whether by happenstance or calculation, the border point with Manchukuo that Lyushkov had crossed, some eighty miles southwest of Vladivostok, fell under the jurisdiction of the Japanese Korean Army, rather than the more rabid Kwantung Army, which might have refused to yield such a prize catch once they had determined his bona fides. The Korean Army’s Russian-language linguist on-site concluded that Lyushkov constituted “the escape of the century” and radioed headquarters in Seoul; despite suspicions that he was a plant, Lyushkov was whisked to Tokyo. A Japanese Kwantung Army intelligence officer, chafing at his lack of opportunity to interrogate Lyushkov, leaked word of the defection to the Chinese-language press in Manchukuo on June 24; Polish military intelligence picked up the obscure newspaper sensation immediately, even before Frinovsky had a chance to clarify in person what had happened. Nazi newspapers reported the defection on July 1, thereby alerting Japanese diplomats in Moscow.

Japanese military intelligence released a statement by Lyushkov, which the Yomiuri Shimbun published on July 3, 1938. “Until recently, I committed great crimes against the people as I actively collaborated with Stalin in the conduct of his policy of deception and terror,” the statement read. “I am genuinely a traitor. But I am a traitor only to Stalin.” Lyushkov, from direct experience, called the Kirov murder investigation “fatal for the country, just as for the party,” and divulged that the interrogation protocols for Kamenev and Zinoviev were lies. (Lyushkov would tell his Japanese interrogators that the fabrications in connection with the Kirov murder had launched his doubts about the Soviet system.) “Nikolayev did not belong to Zinoviev’s group,” Lyushkov’s published statement read. “He was an abnormal person who suffered from megalomania. He decided to perish in order to become an historical hero. This is evident from his diary.” Lyushkov labeled all the trials of 1936 through 1938 “utterly fabricated,” a result of Stalin’s “hypersuspiciousness” and “his firm determination to rid himself of all Trotskyites and rightists who . . . could present political danger in the future.” And, Lyushkov added, hundreds of thousands of innocent people were being arrested. He further noted that Stalin had sought to provoke the war between China and Japan in order that each would weaken the other, with the ultimate aim of Bolshevizing China.¹⁸² Lyushkov asserted that the arrests of so many alleged saboteurs had provoked actual, if silent, sabotage: people were working indifferently or giving in to carelessness on the railways and in factories because of anger at the arrest of innocents.¹⁸³

WINDFALL FOR JAPANESE INTELLIGENCE

Stalin’s terror, allegedly aimed at eliminating foreign agents inside the USSR, had manufactured one in Genrikh Lyushkov, now an invaluable spy/informant for the Japanese. Nothing had ever happened before to Stalin that reached this level—not the case of his former aide Boris Bazhanov, who had escaped abroad in 1928, not even Trotsky’s foreign deportation in 1929. Lyushkov had carried with him a dramatic, damning letter addressed to the Central Committee from General Albert Lapin, a Far Eastern Air Force commander, who had committed suicide on September 21, 1937, in his cell at Khabarovsk prison. “I served the Soviet Government faithfully for 17 years,” Lapin wrote. “Do I deserve to be treated like this? I don’t have the strength to endure anymore.” Lapin’s note was written in blood.¹⁸⁴

Out of the public eye, Lyushkov gave the Japanese a detailed overview of the Soviet Far East, from the number of trucks and how many were out of commission to the condition of all railroads and airports, the training and use of Chinese and Korean agents, Soviet signals intelligence, and the exact numbers and locations of Red Army and NKVD troops east of Lake Baikal (400,000), along with the airplanes (nearly 2,000) and submarines (90). Lyushkov assessed the Soviet Far Eastern Army negatively, pointing to a lack of reserves and infrastructure, out-of-commission artillery and aviation, insufficient training, and dismal organization. He especially singled out an absence of senior command personnel, thanks to the rampages of Mekhlis. Lyushkov conceded that Blyukher believed these shortcomings could be remedied, but he attributed that to Blyukher’s fears of allowing Moscow to learn the real situation. In any case, Lyushkov told the Japanese that Stalin had already lost confidence in Blyukher. Provocatively, he also told his Japanese handlers that Blyukher and even Voroshilov had concluded that the Soviets should launch a preemptive strike, because war with Japan was inevitable and Japan was vulnerable, owing to its invasion of China. Hence, the Soviet buildup was far from defensive. Lyushkov even outlined what he said were contingency plans for a Soviet attack. He evidently aimed to precipitate a Japanese-Soviet war to dislodge the murderous despot.

Lyushkov had rare firsthand information about the man in the Kremlin and his “abnormal suspicion,” an assessment he said was widely shared among those who interacted with Stalin.¹⁸⁵ “In Stalin’s [mind], there was fear of the lack of preparedness for war and chiefly an acute fear of plotters, especially in the army,” Lyushkov surmised, adding that the despot feared that “a war might be utilized for revolution” against him. He stated that Stalin harbored little confidence in the stability of Chiang Kai-shek, and was worried about a possible attack in the west by Germany. Finally, Lyushkov said the Soviet leader suspected Japan was using second- and third-line divisions in China, saving its best for a fight against the USSR.¹⁸⁶

Richard Sorge, the Soviet military intelligence asset in Nazi Germany’s Tokyo embassy, confirmed the damage from the defection. Berlin had sent an intelligence officer to Tokyo to take part in debriefing Lyushkov, and Sorge obtained the German embassy’s copy of the classified report, which showed that Lyushkov had told the Japanese of deep internal dissatisfaction with Stalin, and asserted that the Red Army “might collapse in a day” if Japan attacked.¹⁸⁷ Sorge reported that Lyushkov was laying bare for the USSR’s mortal enemy how the Soviet system actually functioned, as well as what Soviet officials and ordinary folk actually thought—even what Stalin thought. Sorge concluded that “Lyushkov was an inexhaustible treasure trove of information about the Red Army, the NKVD, the party, and the dynamics of the Soviet people at large.”¹⁸⁸

And then it happened again: on July 9, 1938, the NKVD’s Orlov, in Catalonia, received a coded telegram from Yezhov ordering him to a Soviet ship docked at Antwerp for a rendezvous with an unnamed person who would be known to him. Orlov removed $60,000 from the safe, a colossal sum in those days, and fled. According to one NKVD insider, Orlov had guessed wrong: he was being recalled not to be executed but to be named the latest head of NKVD foreign intelligence. Be that as it may, he stole away, with wife and daughter, to Canada and then the United States. Yezhov hesitated to inform Stalin of this second major terror-induced defection. Orlov knew a great deal, from the details of Soviet involvement in Spain, such as the murder of POUM leader Andreu Nin, to the identities of Soviet undercover agents in Europe.¹⁸⁹ But apparently he sent a personal letter to Yezhov about his desire merely to escape execution by his own side.¹⁹⁰ Orlov, a Jew and a dedicated leftist, defected not to Nazi Germany but to oblivion.¹⁹¹ This was a stroke of luck Stalin did not deserve.

Even the most damaging defection Stalin had ever suffered, an act caused by his terror, did not induce him to relent. On the contrary, back in the Soviet Far East, Frinovsky and Mekhlis went on a post-Lyushkov rampage. If in 1937, 2,969 military officers in the Soviet Far East had been dismissed, of whom 383 had been arrested, in 1938 another 2,272 would be dismissed, of whom 865 would be arrested.¹⁹² Frinovsky now also had the task of “reinforcing” Soviet borders in the east. The NKVD began evacuating every single inhabitant within two miles of the border and established a shoot-on-sight zone, rendering infiltration of would-be Japanese agents suicidal, which became equally true of further attempts at defection from the Soviet side.¹⁹³ But the Japanese already had the crown jewels. Sorge, in his reports with photographed documents to Moscow, underscored that, like German defectors from Nazism, Lyushkov exaggerated the extent to which the regime he deserted was ready to fall, but Sorge speculated that Japan and Germany, seizing upon the weaknesses that Lyushkov was spelling out, might take combined military action against the USSR.¹⁹⁴ That, of course, constituted the single most frightening scenario for Stalin, a possible outcome of his own wanton terror.

“THE INEVITABLE WAR” (NEARLY)

On July 6, 1938, Japanese Kwantung Army signal operators intercepted and were able to decode a message to Soviet Far Eastern Army headquarters in Khabarovsk from a frontier commander who recommended that Soviet border troops secure unoccupied high ground on the western edge of Lake Khasan. The Japanese government, already incensed at Soviet military aid to China, had its eye on the strategic heights.¹⁹⁵ The spot—near the confluence of the Soviet Union, Korea (a Japanese colony), and Manchukuo (a Japanese puppet state)—was known in Russian as Zaozernaya, meaning “Beyond the Lake” (in Chinese it was called Changkufeng, or “Tight Drum Peaks,” and in Japanese, Chōkohō). This ill-defined waste, ten miles inland from the Sea of Japan and perilously close to Vladivostok, comprised marsh and sandy hills and suffered daytime temperatures up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, with chilly nights. It was effectively uninhabited, but it overlooked the Korean port city of Rajin-Sonbong, as well as the strategic railways across northern Korea and into Manchukuo.¹⁹⁶ On July 9, in the name of “preventing the Japanese from taking the hilltop, given its advantageousness for surveillance over our territory,” about thirty NKVD border troops seized Beyond the Lake, dug trenches, and strung barbed wire.¹⁹⁷

Four days after the Soviet border action, Lyushkov gave an international press conference at the Sanno Hotel, in Tokyo, to refute the doubters of his bona fides, and further hammered at Stalin’s prestige. “What caused you to betray your country?” an English correspondent asked. Lyushkov replied, “We need to kill Stalin.”¹⁹⁸

On July 15, Japan’s military attaché and chargé d’affaires in Moscow demanded the removal of the new pillboxes on Beyond the Lake, claiming that they stood on Manchukuo territory (based on the Japanese interpretation of the 1860 Convention of Peking, between imperial Russia and the Qing empire). Blyukher sent his own army commission to the heights and, based on its findings, accused the NKVD’s Frinovsky of having violated the Manchukuo frontier, dissension that the Japanese picked up.¹⁹⁹ Blyukher suspected a provocation by Frinovsky and Mekhlis to trap and bring him down by precipitating a war. His suspicions were far from crazy. The Soviet Far Eastern Army had not been involved in the action: Frinovsky had avoided coordinating anything with a soon-to-be enemy of the people. Blyukher angrily telegraphed Frinovsky, with a copy to Yezhov, warning that “some bastard might create a military conflict” and demanding that “all suspicious people who might intentionally aggravate the situation” be removed. Frinovsky, in turn, sent damning reports on Blyukher to Moscow.²⁰⁰ On July 27, unbeknownst to Frinovsky or Mekhlis, Blyukher secretly telegrammed Voroshilov that the border violators were the NKVD, not the Japanese. But on July 28, Voroshilov strongly rebuffed Blyukher, insisting that the Japanese were the culprits, while pointedly addressing himself also to Frinovsky and Mekhlis, thereby revealing Blyukher’s private communication. Voroshilov, behind both Frinovsky’s and Blyukher’s backs, directed Mekhlis to “investigate this case” and report on Blyukher.²⁰¹ This was how a great power conducted itself in the face of a potent military foe.²⁰²

By spring 1938, Japanese forces in Manchukuo numbered 300,000, which meant that, with a mobilization of reservists, the Japanese could now match the Soviet Far Eastern Army in numbers, if not in tanks and aircraft.²⁰³ Moreover, Stalin knew that Japanese troops were massing near Lake Khasan. How they would respond to the Soviet border “strengthening” remained unclear.²⁰⁴ Many officials in Tokyo viewed as inadvisable the launching of a second-front war against the Soviet Union before completing China’s conquest. But because Stalin had backed down over the Amur River border incident in June 1937 and had murdered so many Red Army officers as “foreign agents,” and because Lyushkov had just defected with a bonanza of information, others in Tokyo contemplated the benefits of testing Soviet resolve and reflexes.²⁰⁵ Lake Khasan fell within the jurisdiction of the Japanese Korean Army, but hawks in the Japanese Kwantung Army indicated that they would step in should their counterparts shrink from taking action. “We still were not particularly enthusiastic,” one Korean Army officer recalled, “but now the Kwantung Army came along and booted us in the ass.” This could have been it: the war Stalin feared, precipitated by minions following his orders to arrest and murder his own loyal military men.

Emperor Hirohito appeared to come to Stalin’s rescue: after a series of audiences in Tokyo on July 20, the emperor, finding himself unimpressed with the contradictory reports and wary of his military’s adventurism, withheld authorization for a full-scale war.²⁰⁶ Japanese soldiers were ordered to withdraw. Nonetheless, events spiraled: Soviet border guards occupied a second high point, referred to as “Nameless,” and on July 29 a local Japanese border unit commander—without formal approval from Japanese Korean Army headquarters (in Seoul) or supreme headquarters (in Tokyo), but with the connivance of his local division commander—used the pretext of these additional Soviet patrols to cross the Tumen River with three battalions. In a firefight, the Japanese units were repulsed.²⁰⁷ But citing this Soviet “provocation” and “buildup,” the local Japanese garrison launched a second frontal assault, called by them a “counterattack,” on the night of July 30–31, and this time they succeeded in driving off the NKVD border troops and capturing both Beyond the Lake and Nameless, with heavy losses on each side. Japanese headquarters accepted the fait accompli. Stalin perceived that Tokyo was deliberately testing his resolve and had Voroshilov issue an order, on July 31, to annihilate the enemy.²⁰⁸

Sorge apologized for having failed to forewarn Moscow that a Japanese action on the frontier was imminent (in fact, it had been an unforeseeable local initiative). In the same coded radio communication, on August 1, 1938, he conveyed that the German ambassador and military attaché had learned that the Japanese wanted to settle the dispute by diplomatic means, but only after seizing the heights.²⁰⁹ When Sorge’s communication reached Stalin, if at all, and what heed the despot might have paid to it remain unclear.²¹⁰ Stalin’s hypersuspiciousness and categorical judgments were a long-standing problem for Soviet intelligence. He had previously dismissed vouchsafed information supplied by Sorge as “disorientation emanating from German circles.”²¹¹ In any case, Stalin was determined to make up for his climbdown in summer 1937—when he had just launched the murders of Red Army commanders—and to erase doubts about the “purged” Red Army.

To unleash a concentrated assault, Blyukher had to import more troops to the remote frontier zone, which took time. He also had to contend with potentially deadly intrigues from the unprincipled Mekhlis, as well as Frinovsky, who exercised command over the NKVD border guard troops yet adamantly refused to coordinate; both were denouncing Blyukher behind his back to Stalin. On August 1, 1938, an accusatory Stalin called Blyukher on the high-frequency phone:

STALIN: Tell me, Blyukher, why is the order of the defense commissar for aerial bombardment of all our territory occupied by the Japanese including the Zaozernaya Heights not being implemented?

BLYUKHER: Reporting. The air force is ready to take off. The takeoff was delayed by adverse meteorological circumstances. This very minute [air force commander Pavel] Rychagov has ordered planes into the air to attack, not taking weather into account. . . . The aviation is taking off right now, but I fear that we will hit our own units and Korean settlements with this bombing.

STALIN: Tell me honestly, comrade Blyukher, do you wish to fight with the Japanese for real? If you do not have such a wish, tell me directly, as becomes a Communist; if you have such a desire, I would think you ought to go out to the site straightaway. I do not understand your fear that the bombing will hit the Korean population, and your fear that the air force cannot carry out its mission because of fog. . . . What do the Koreans matter to you, if the Japanese are hitting batches of our people? What does a little cloudiness mean for Bolshevik aviation if it is really going to defend the honor of its Motherland? I await an answer.

BLYUKHER: The air force has been ordered into the air. . . . Your directives are being implemented and will be implemented with Bolshevik precision.²¹²

Not a hint of humanity: pitiless raison d’état.

Blyukher, without waiting for the full contingent of reinforcements, responded to Stalin’s prompt: he assigned Grigory Stern, his new chief of staff and a veteran of the Spanish civil war whom Stalin esteemed, to evict the Japanese. But on August 2–3, 1938, the Japanese troops, holding the heights, forced the Soviets to advance through heavily exposed corridors, which, in addition, were inhospitable to tanks, and repelled Stern’s assault. Stalin’s insistence on immediate engagement had produced a Soviet bloodbath.

The Soviets rebuffed a Japanese proffer on August 4 of a cease-fire.²¹³ On August 7, Blyukher was ordered out of the combat zone. That same day and the next, Stern led a renewed air and land assault, this time massive. A total of more than 30,000 troops were deployed, counting both sides. But because of the Japanese emperor’s refusal to countenance a possible wider war, even as the Soviet air force conducted large-scale bombing of Japanese rear positions in Korea, the Japanese did not employ air power or artillery even on the front lines. Still, on August 8, Sorge radioed from his sources out of Tokyo that “advocates of strong military action against the USSR are increasing.”²¹⁴ The emperor was coming around to urgent pleas to allow stronger engagement, if only in self-defense. After the Japanese advanced more Kwantung Army units to the frontier—forces that could attack from the rear and trap Soviet forces on the heights “like a rat in a sack”—Stalin finally agreed to a cease-fire on August 11. Litvinov boasted to Soviet representatives abroad that “Japan has received a lesson, assured of our firmness and will to resist, and of the illusory nature of aid from Germany.”²¹⁵ In fact, matters had gotten very close to full escalation. And what Nazi Germany might have done in those circumstances remains an open question.²¹⁶

Be that as it may, Stalin and the Red Army were ultimately spared not by Soviet resolve or Japanese circumspection but by China. Soviet-Japanese hostilities took place concurrently with the titanic Battle of Wuhan (June–October 1938), where the Chinese government had shifted its military industries and where more than 1 million Chinese troops, commanded by Chiang himself, massed against Japanese forces who aimed for a decisive showdown. In the event, the Imperial Japanese Army would manage to seize Wuhan, China’s second-largest city, but at a staggering cost of 100,000 Japanese casualties.²¹⁷ Tokyo, which militarily was now both mired in China and engaged with the Soviet Union, continued to beseech Berlin for conversion of the Anti-Comintern Pact into a formal military alliance directed against Moscow. Hitler was interested insofar as such an alliance would apply to Britain and France as well, thereby bringing them to heel in Europe by threatening their colonial empires in Asia. Stalin was privy to these talks from Sorge, in detail, including the many sticking points.²¹⁸

Stalin’s wager on Chiang had returned dividends. The Chinese leader had managed to stalemate Japan’s land army. Chiang had also firmly rebuffed the Chinese Communists’ demands to arm the workers for “revolutionary war” against the Japanese.²¹⁹ It is easy to see why. “The seizure of power by armed force, the settlement of the issue of war, is the central task and the highest form of revolution,” Mao averred to a China Communist party plenum in the second half of 1938, adding that Chiang, whom the Communist leader deemed a counterrevolutionary, “has held firmly to the vital point that whoever has an army has power, that war decides everything. In this respect we ought to learn from him.”²²⁰ Stalin had no desire to see Chiang’s Nationalists fall to the Japanese because of Chinese Communist treason behind the lines. Nor did he want to provoke Tokyo and Berlin into overcoming their differences. Still, he proved unyielding with Japan over the disputed border at Lake Khasan, insisting on the status quo antebellum, and, for now, got his way. The Japanese political leadership took a step back. At the same time, Japanese military hawks of a self-fashioned “north strike” school became more emboldened in their zeal to test the Red Army.²²¹ They would be back.

As Stalin well knew, it had taken the Red Army nearly ten days of ferocious combat to dislodge a limited number of Japanese troops, who, additionally, were fighting with their hands partly tied by their emperor. The Soviets lost 792 killed, 3,279 wounded; Japanese casualties amounted to 526 killed and 913 wounded—2,600 fewer.²²² “We were not sufficiently quick in our tactics, and particularly in combined operations, in dealing the enemy a concentrated blow,” Voroshilov would observe, taking no responsibility himself. He added, again with no personal liability, “It was discovered that the Far Eastern theater was poorly prepared for war (roads, bridges, communications).”²²³ Voroshilov could have noted further that the Soviet officer corps, including almost every one of Blyukher’s deputies and aides, had been massacred and terrorized, and that Blyukher himself had been sandbagged and sidelined by his own side. Still, whether Blyukher, any more than those sitting in judgment of him, really was up to the challenges of modern warfare remained unclear.²²⁴ On August 16, 1938, Voroshilov summoned the marshal to Moscow for an accounting. Six days later, Lavrenti Beria was named to a new post in the capital. Beria’s and Blyukher’s paths would soon cross.

FIRST DEPUTY NKVD USSR

Why Stalin let Yezhov remain at the helm for so long remains mysterious. By summer 1938, the insanity in the NKVD had gotten to the point that at least one newly appointed provincial NKVD chief released large numbers of prisoners and wrote to Lubyanka about the outrageous falsifications.²²⁵ Vlas Chubar, the government deputy head, in a memo to Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov dated June 16, 1938, pointed out the glaring discrepancies between Soviet mobilization plans for war and the resources at hand.²²⁶ That same day, Chubar was expelled from the politburo (the resolution cited “testimony” of arrested politburo candidate members).²²⁷ The next day, he was demoted to the directorship of a pulp-and-paper factory construction site in Solikamsk, a Gulag camp. On June 25, Malenkov informed Stalin that Chubar, through the Central Committee book-ordering service, had requested copies of Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution, as well as his Stalin School of Falsification and My Life, and several issues of the Menshevik émigré Socialist Herald.²²⁸

Yezhov had retreated to his dacha in Meshcherino and fallen into a near-perpetual bender. “I literally went out of my mind,” he would write of Lyushkov’s defection in a letter to Stalin. “I summoned Frinovsky and proposed that we together report to you. Alone I could not do it. At that time Frinovsky said, ‘Now they will punish us big-time.’”²²⁹ Frinovsky had been sent away from Moscow, leaving the NKVD without either a functioning commissar or a resident first deputy. Yezhov—resentful, even irate, at Stalin—schemed to name his own new first deputy, settling on Litvin, who by summer 1938 was running the Leningrad NKVD. Litvin had even come to Moscow a few times, expecting Yezhov to have the appointment finalized, but it never happened. Instead, Stalin had Malenkov, in the party apparatus’s personnel department, compile a list of candidates. Malenkov and his aides came up with Fyodor Kuznetsov (b. 1904), deputy head for political propaganda in the Red Army; Nikolai Gusarov (b. 1905), party secretary of Sverdlovsk city, in the Urals; Nikolai Pegov (b. 1905), a green apparatchik in Malenkov’s department; and Sergei Kruglov (b. 1907), an even greener functionary in Malenkov’s department.²³⁰ These names, many of whom were creatures of Malenkov, constituted a ridiculous attempt to assert control over the NKVD. But Malenkov’s otherwise self-serving list did include the one actual candidate.

Beria by now had seventeen years’ experience in the highest executive ranks of the secret police and the party, in a major region. Frinovsky had served as secret police head in Azerbaijan in the early 1930s, so he knew Beria’s abilities and character, and Frinovsky, with Yezhov, in their pathetic way, had been trying to assemble compromising materials on him, including a report (dated March 26, 1938) on abuses by Beria and his henchman Dekanozov in the Georgian party organization.²³¹ In May 1938, Yezhov and Frinovsky had sought to use former Azerbaijan NKVD chief Sumbatov-Topuridze to prepare a case against Beria. On July 1, one of Yezhov’s department heads requested the files on the Menshevik government in Georgia, hoping to find evidence of Beria’s activities for the wrong side. Frinovsky urged Yezhov to pass these materials to Stalin; Yezhov evidently did so.²³² Stalin could only have been grateful for additional compromising materials to hold over Beria’s head.

Matters came to a head in connection with another USSR Supreme Soviet session, which was to open on August 10. Yezhov learned from Israel Dagin, chief of bodyguards, that Beria, who was in town for the Supreme Soviet, had been summoned to the Near Dacha. “That very day,” Dagin would testify, “Yezhov phoned me incessantly and one time he started to ask, ‘Do you know what they’re talking about?’ I answered: ‘Nikolai Ivanovich, please!’ Yezhov stopped speaking on that issue.”²³³ Eavesdropping on Stalin was a suicidal temptation, but Yezhov was close to that point. The Yezhov favorite Uspensky, NKVD boss of Ukraine, who was also in Moscow for the Supreme Soviet, said he had heard from Isaak Shapiro that “Yezhov has big troubles, since the Central Committee does not trust him. Then Shapiro told me that there are rumors Yezhov was about to get a deputy (he did not name him) whom he needed to beware of.”²³⁴

On a recent occasion at the Near Dacha, according to Khrushchev, Stalin had already told those gathered, “It’s necessary to strengthen the NKVD, assist comrade Yezhov, select a deputy for him,” and he asked Yezhov for his preference. Yezhov requested Malenkov. “Stalin had the ability to pause in a conversation as if he were thinking over the answer, although he had long ago thought through each question,” Khrushchev would observe. “Sure,” Stalin finally replied, “Of course, Malenkov would be good, but we cannot give you Malenkov. Malenkov is at the Central Committee in charge of cadres, and then a new question would arise: who would we appoint there?” When Stalin asked for another recommendation, Yezhov said nothing. “So Stalin said, ‘What would you think if we gave you Beria for a deputy?’ Yezhov was severely startled, but he caught himself and said, ‘That’s a good candidate. Of course, comrade Beria can do the job, and not only as a deputy. He could be the commissar.’”²³⁵

On August 21, 1938, the “politburo” officially appointed Beria as first deputy chief of the NKVD under Yezhov. Malenkov, for his part, had a lot to fear, having once been Yezhov’s deputy in the party apparatus and been close to him, visiting him at his apartment and dacha, and now Malenkov delivered a long, detailed denunciation of Yezhov to Poskryobyshev, marked FOR STALIN, PERSONALLY.²³⁶ Molotov, meanwhile, had been after Khrushchev to return from Ukraine, where he had just been posted, to serve as Molotov’s deputy chairman at the Council of People’s Commissars; Stalin had agreed, but Khrushchev had pleaded to remain in Ukraine, and Stalin had yielded to him. At the Near Dacha, Beria had brushed off Khrushchev: “What are you congratulating me for? You yourself did not want to be Molotov’s deputy. . . . I also did not want to transfer to Moscow. I’d be better off in Georgia.”²³⁷ One of Beria’s closest minions, Merkulov, would also testify (in a letter to Khrushchev) that Beria was distraught at being named Yezhov’s deputy.²³⁸

Neither Pravda nor Izvestiya reported the appointment. That same day, Stalin and Molotov signed the latest execution list (3,176 names). Yezhov received his new “deputy” in his Lubyanka office on the evening of August 22.²³⁹ It must have been stupendously awkward. Yezhov would write to Stalin that “Beria has a power-mongering character. He does not abide subordination. He will never forgive that Budu Mdivani was ‘broken’ in Moscow and not in Tbilisi. He will never forgive the destruction in Armenia [in September 1937], because it was not his initiative.” Yezhov also expressed regret for having allowed “many liberties for Georgia. It was suspicious that Beria wants to eliminate every Chekist who ever worked in Georgia.”

Beria immediately departed Moscow for Tbilisi to wind up affairs, while Yezhov again vanished to his dacha in Meshcherino, complaining of headaches and insomnia, heart pain, and lack of appetite and summoning a doctor, who wrote out a prescription for rest. When the prescribed rest elapsed, Yezhov repeated the summons for a doctor and remained at the dacha, not reporting to work, through the end of August. On August 25, 1938, the Supreme Soviet presidium met to discuss a proposal to continue allowing early release from the Gulag for exemplary labor performance, but Stalin asked them to consider using awards instead. “Would it not be possible to keep people in a camp?” he objected. “If we free them, they will return to their old ways. In the camp the atmosphere is different; there it is hard to be spoiled.” In time a decree would follow: “Convicts in USSR NKVD camps should serve their sentences in their entirety.”²⁴⁰

Also on August 25, Frinovsky returned from the Far East to Moscow. At a train station outside the capital, the head of NKVD transport, Boris Berman, entered Frinovsky’s carriage and told him he had been appointed naval commissar. Frinovsky responded that he already knew and that he would turn over the NKVD first deputy portfolio to Litvin. “I answered not to Litvin, but to Beria,” Berman recalled telling him. “Beria, what?” Frinovsky responded. Right from the Moscow train terminal, he made for Yezhov’s dacha. Yezhov greeted him with kisses on the cheek, something that had not happened before. “I had never seen Yezhov in such a depressed state,” Frinovsky would testify.²⁴¹ Yezhov fantasized about “reorganizing” the NKVD, so as to reduce the power of a first deputy. More prosaically, Yevdokimov, seeking to rehabilitate himself by working like a demon as Yezhov’s deputy at the water transport commissariat, warned Frinovsky that the NKVD operatives in prison who had not yet been shot could be reinterrogated, and their cases turned against the Yezhovites. A slew of hurried executions took place before Beria got back to Moscow.²⁴²

DILEMMAS

Peasants had rebelled en masse against the violence of forced collectivization and dekulakization, and even some party officials had protested. But the terror? A group of Kremlin bodyguards had been carrying loaded pistols on Red Square during the 1937 May Day festivities, within shooting distance of Stalin and the entire leadership; within a few months, they went meekly to their deaths, liquidated as an alleged “assassin corps” working for foreign agents.²⁴³ This seeming passivity confounds to this day.²⁴⁴ “Isn’t it time we started thinking about what is happening in our country?” Pyotr Smorodin, the second secretary of the Leningrad provincial party committee, stated in company during a group lunch at a day resort for party activists. “We have to act before they take us all one at a time, like chickens from their roost!” Everyone present was stupefied. They began to get up and leave, except for a single old friend and the latter’s stepdaughter.²⁴⁵ Many tried to keep a low profile, hoping it would pass. “We all took the easy way out,” Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the poet and a Gulag survivor, would observe, “by keeping silent in the hope that not we but our neighbors would be killed.”²⁴⁶

In fact, many people took an active part, cynically or earnestly.²⁴⁷ A Soviet worker needed to labor for sixty-two hours to purchase a loaf of bread, versus about seventeen minutes for an American—data that Soviet workers did not have, of course, but they all knew their bosses helped themselves to the best supplies and apartments and escaped prosecution for embezzlement or tyrannical comportment. Until now. “You’re a wrecker yourself,” workers jeered at higher-ups during the terror. “Tomorrow they’ll come and arrest you. All you engineers and technicians are wreckers.”²⁴⁸ To be sure, many ordinary people were disgusted by the arrests and executions, and some felt the victims were targeted precisely because they wanted to help workers and peasants. But not a few reasoned that officials, whether or not they were foreign agents, deserved their comeuppance.²⁴⁹ In 1938, the regime decreed a limit on the size of dacha that an official could have, “in light of the fact that . . . a number of arrested conspirators (Rudzutaks, Rosenholz, Antipov, Mezhlauk, Karakhan, Yagoda, and others) built themselves grandiose dacha-palaces with fifteen–twenty rooms or more, where they lived in luxury and spent the people’s money.”²⁵⁰ Fatalism, too, abounded. Iosif Ostrovsky, who, as head of the NKVD administration-organization directorate, supervised construction (hospitals, the Hotel Moskva, the Council of People’s Commissars building), was arrested. “You know I never would have thought that I would be incarcerated in the prison whose construction I directed,” Ostrovsky was said to have mused in Lefortovo (originally erected in 1881 but expanded). “But the prison is very well constructed; you can’t complain.”²⁵¹ He was shot.

Part of what looks like passivity was ideological. The writer Alexander Afinogenov, expelled from the party and awaiting arrest at his dacha in the privileged Peredelkino writers’ colony in Moscow’s outskirts, his plays now banned, had recorded in his diary (December 25, 1937) that he “turned to the radio, for the latest news, and a strange thing happened: ordinary news about life in our country, our people, their words and aspirations, lifted me up immediately; it was as if I had washed in cold water after a day of exhausting reflections.” He claimed that his sense of profound isolation was broken when he “engaged with the life of the whole country, again felt the grandeur of this life and understood the insignificance of my own minor difficulties.”²⁵² As of 1938, the USSR had 1,838 sanatoriums, 1,270 recreational facilities, and 12,000 pioneer camps for children, and they were all in heavy usage. That year, Afinogenov was reinstated in the party.

People’s fates were often random, and not because Stalin intentionally sought to sow still greater dread by arbitrariness, but with little apparent rhyme or reason.²⁵³ Jenő Varga courageously wrote to the despot (March 28, 1938), with copies to Dimitrov and Yezhov, about the “dangerous atmosphere of panic” among foreigners whose children were cursed at school as fascists. “This demoralization is enveloping the majority of Comintern workers and is spreading even to individual members of the Executive Committee Secretariat,” Varga wrote of the Hotel Lux. “Many foreigners gather up their belongings every evening in expectation of arrest. Many are half mad and incapable of working because of constant fear.” Varga had served under Béla Kun in the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Kun was arrested and executed (August 29, 1938); Varga survived.²⁵⁴ Similarly, while one Red Army commander extremely close to Stalin, the civil war crony Marshal Yegorov, was executed, another, Marshal Budyonny, was spared, even though both had been subjects of a torrent of denunciations (the Red Army men not shot had essentially identical files to those who were shot, often from the same “testimony”).²⁵⁵ Among regime literati, Mikhail Koltsov was arrested and executed (“Remember,” he had instructed Louis Aragon, the leftist French writer, in Paris, “Stalin is always right”).²⁵⁶ But Ilya Ehrenburg, who, like Koltsov, had been in Spain and was secretly denounced by all and sundry, survived. “May I ask you something?” a young writer (who had been five years old in 1938) would later inquire of Ehrenburg. “How was it that you survived?” Ehrenburg answered, “I shall never know.”²⁵⁷

Yet another person inexplicably not arrested was Demyan Bedny. The NKVD had produced a devastating overview of his “anti-Sovietism” on September 9, 1938, a few months after the poet was expelled from the party and the Union of Soviet Writers. “D. Bedny systematically expressed his resentment against comrades Stalin, Molotov, and other leaders. . . . ‘I adhered to the party, 99.9 percent of which comprised spies and provocateurs. Stalin is a horrible person and often guided by personal accounts. All great leaders have always surrounded themselves with a galaxy of brilliant companions; who has Stalin created? He has annihilated everyone, there is no one, all destroyed. Such a situation occurred only under Ivan the Terrible.’” Bedny was said to have called the mass accusations baseless. “The army has been utterly destroyed; trust and command have been undermined; it is impossible to fight with such an army. Myself, under these conditions, I would concede half of Ukraine just to keep from being attacked. Such a talented strategist as Tukhachevsky has been destroyed.” Bedny called the new constitution a “fiction,” and the elections to the Supreme Soviet a sham. He even criticized Stalin’s holy of holies, the collective farms, for their absence of incentives. The NKVD concluded that “several times he expressed his intention to commit suicide.” That Bedny said all these things was plausible, although the NKVD material did not need to be actually true in order for Stalin to act on it. For whatever reason, he refrained from ordering or authorizing an arrest.²⁵⁸