Stalin

Of course, some people survived for abundantly clear reasons: Stalin deliberately spared the tarnished Khrushchev and Beria, among others, because he liked them. Stalin had allowed the writer Aleksei Tolstoy to be elected as a Supreme Soviet delegate from Leningrad.²⁵⁹ Hundreds of Soviet inhabitants poured their hearts out to Tolstoy in his capacity as a deputy, and, for whatever reason, he held on to their acts of bravery. “Can it really be that there is no defense from careerists, toadies, and cowards who earn their bread on each slogan, yesterday for collectivization, today for vigilance?” wrote an architect whose brother had been arrested. “Can it really be that you, deputies, are created only in order to shout hurrah for Stalin and to applaud Yezhov?” The letter writer asked Tolstoy to pass his signed letter to Stalin. “I am not mad,” he added. “I have a family, a son, work that I love. . . . But right now the feeling of truth is stronger than the fear of ten years in the camps.” A woman wrote to pillory Tolstoy’s story “Grain” for its mendacities and glorification of Stalin. “The best people, who are devoted to Lenin’s ideas, honest and unbought, are sitting behind bars, arrested by the thousands, being executed,” she told him, withholding her name. “They cannot bear the grandiose Baseness triumphing throughout the land. . . . And you, an engineer of the human soul, are cowardly turned inside out, and we saw the unseemly inside of a purchasable hack. . . . Fear: that’s the dominant feeling that has seized citizens of the USSR. And you do not see that? . . . Where is the majestic pathos that in October [1917] moved millions to fight to the death? Overcome by the fetid breath of Stalin and of yes-men like you.”²⁶⁰

Some targets of the terror had come to understand how the epoch stamped them. Theodore Maly, the Soviet spy, had been born in Temesvár (Timişoara), in the Austro-Hungarian empire, in 1894, studied to become a Catholic priest, got conscripted during the Great War, was imprisoned in a series of tsarist POW camps, and ended up in Siberia, where he joined the Cheka. The tall, urbane ethnic Hungarian was able to pose as an Austrian, German, Swiss, or Brit. In July 1937, when he received a summons to return to Moscow, he knew its import—execution—but he went back. Before doing so, he attempted to explain this decision to Elisabeth Poretsky, whose husband, Ignace Reiss (Ignace Poretsky), also worked in Soviet intelligence and would defect. “I saw all the horrors, young men with frozen limbs dying in the trenches” during the Great War, Maly told her. “We were all covered with vermin and many were dying of typhus. I lost my faith in God and when the revolution broke out I joined the Bolsheviks.” During the civil war, Maly continued, “we would pass burning villages which had changed hands several times in a day. . . . Our Red detachments would ‘clean up’ villages exactly the way the Whites did. What was left of the inhabitants, old men, women, children, were machine-gunned for having given assistance to the enemy. I could not stand the wailing of women. I simply could not.” Then came collectivization: “I knew what we were doing to the peasants, how many were deported, how many were shot.”²⁶¹ Maly also had to know that the NKVD could easily kill him abroad (as would happen to Reiss, in Lausanne, Switzerland). After Maly returned to Moscow, he was duly arrested, “convicted” of spying for Germany, and executed (September 20, 1938).²⁶² Maly was among legions of functionaries who carried baggage.²⁶³

BERIA MEETS BLYUKHER

In Georgia, Beria tried to implant his protégé Valerian Bakradze as his successor, but Stalin blocked him. Instead, on August 31, 1938, he was replaced by Candide Charkviani, the third secretary, who was thirty-one years old and would try to erect his own local machine.²⁶⁴ On August 31 in Moscow, Blyukher appeared before the Main Military Council, chaired by Voroshilov, with Budyonny, Kulik, and two other high military officers, as well as Molotov and Stalin. Frinovsky attended, too. The group roundly castigated the marshal for Lake Khasan’s high casualties and disorganization, and for false reporting. Voroshilov and Frinovsky accused him of gross incompetence “bordering on conscious defeatism.” Stalin removed Blyukher from the Far Eastern command.²⁶⁵ Voroshilov recommended Blyukher take a holiday and await his next assignment and gave him his own dacha at Bocharov Ruchei, near Lake Ritsa.²⁶⁶ On September 4, 1938, the semi-autonomous Far Eastern Army was divided into three separate armies, each subordinated directly to Voroshilov.²⁶⁷ On September 8, Stalin officially named Frinovsky naval commissar. On September 13, Beria spent nearly two hours in the Little Corner with Molotov, Zhdanov, and Yezhov, beginning past midnight.²⁶⁸ He got an office in Lubyanka on the third floor, next to Yezhov’s. On September 29, Beria would officially be named head of the NKVD Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB), the secret police within the secret police.

Pravda (October 3, 1938) published a photo of Mikheil Gelovani playing Stalin in The Man with the Gun, a film adaptation of the play about soldiers in the October Revolution. (Maxim Strauch played Lenin.) Gelovani (b. 1893), who worked at the Rustaveli, in Tbilisi, was descended from an ancient Georgian princely house. He had first played Stalin in They Wanted Peace, which also premiered in 1938 and was set in 1917, and displaced Semyon Goldstab, whom Stalin had not especially liked.²⁶⁹ With makeup and fake mustache, Gelovani resembled Stalin closely, except for his height and his thin neck (which had to be hidden), and managed to mimic Stalin’s Georgian accent to perfection. He brought the despot to life. Mikheil Chiaureli, the Georgian director and screenwriter, who had cast Gelovani, kept him from Stalin, trying to monopolize his own access. Chiaureli recalled the film’s screening in the Kremlin cinema. Stalin sat in the front row; behind him were Molotov and Voroshilov, film boss Semyon Dukelsky, and the director. After the lights came on, a long, awkward silence ensued. Stalin, silently, got up to exit. At the door, he suddenly turned and said, “I didn’t know—it turns out that I’m so charming. Well done!”²⁷⁰

Beria’s appointment to Moscow invited conversations about Stalin’s own Georgian origins. Whispers had long ago spread of a “Caucasus group” atop the regime: Stalin, Orjonikidze, Yenukidze, Mikoyan. In effect, Beria was taking Orjonikidze’s place in the inner circle. “At that time I thought that Stalin wanted a Georgian in the NKVD,” Khrushchev would recall. “We thought at the time that the whole matter was that he was from the Caucasus, a Georgian, closer to Stalin not only as a party member but as a person of the same ethnicity.”²⁷¹ In fact, Stalin detested reminders of his Georgianness, and yet he was willing to incur this risk, demonstrating just how much he prized Gelovani—and valued and needed Beria.

Inside the Soviet police, first-class sadists were fewer than one might think. Boris Rodos, in that context, stood out, a “chopper” (kolun) who could reliably smash those under “interrogation” to near death. He would snap a whip across a prisoner’s legs, continuing after he collapsed to the floor, pour freezing water over him, then force him to scoop his diarrhea with his tin cup and swallow, then shout, “Sign! Sign!”²⁷² (“An insignificant man with the mental horizon of a chicken,” Khrushchev would later say.) Rodos’s children, who knew nothing of their father’s work, observed phone calls at all hours, prompting him to awake, shave, put on his uniform, and go downstairs for a waiting car; when he got home, sometimes only after several days, he would wash and wash his hands and arms up to his elbows, like a surgeon.²⁷³ Rodos was assigned to people like the arch-Stalinist Roberts Eihe, an early winner of the Order of Lenin (1935) and a politburo candidate member who, in Western Siberia, had signed execution lists with tens of thousands of names, before his own turn came. From prison Eihe wrote to Stalin how, “throughout the entire time of my work in Siberia, I decisively and mercilessly implemented the party line”—a statement of pristine truth.²⁷⁴ At the Sukhanovka prison, where Beria kept an office, Rodos beat Eihe senseless, not desisting even after Eihe crumbled into an unconscious heap. When Eihe was raised and again refused to admit to Beria, standing nearby, that he was a spy for Latvia, Rodos went after him again. One of Eihe’s eyes popped out.²⁷⁵

Many targets like Eihe were beaten not only in Beria’s presence but by Beria himself, something Stalin never did. “An intriguer, a careerist, a bloodthirsty, amoral debauchee,” observed one high-level NKVD operative in Georgia who was arrested and sent to the Gulag. “If he [Beria] had to eliminate someone from his path, he removed him. If he had to occupy someone’s place, he intrigued and compromised that person, achieving his removal.”²⁷⁶ Of course, such an unsavory reputation was a source of power: Who wanted to be on the wrong side of Beria? Minions gravitated toward a winner. They found Beria a severe, demanding boss, assigning tough tasks on strict deadlines and brooking no excuses. But for those who met the challenges, Beria afforded strong support and even some freedom of action, eliciting fierce loyalty. They feared but also admired him as a professional in police work and a patron. Beria got them apartments, the best provisions, and higher salaries and cash bonuses. He had no qualms about acting like a cold-blooded murderer, but, equally Stalin-like, he took care of his people.²⁷⁷ He was a hangman, but far more. “Beria was an industrious person, not a loafer [shaliai-valiai]; he was a big-time functionary,” recalled a member of the Egnatashvili clan—the clan of Stalin’s surrogate father—who hated and feared Beria. “It’s necessary to look truth in the eye: he was really capable of getting things done. It was another question at what price? But whatever was delegated to him, he carried it out.”²⁷⁸

On October 22, 1938, NKVD operatives appeared at Voroshilov’s dacha, where the thirty-nine-year-old Blyukher and his twenty-three-year-old wife were staying. They arrested the couple and took them to Moscow.²⁷⁹ Yezhov had signed the order, but Beria oversaw the interrogation in Lefortovo. Back in summer 1937, Stalin had said that Tukhachevsky and Gamarnik, on orders from the Japanese, had tried to remove Blyukher from command of the Soviet Far Eastern Army; now, in fall 1938, Stalin had Blyukher accused of being a spy for the Japanese since 1922. Under “interrogation,” Beria’s men reduced Blyukher’s face to a bloody pulp—he lost an eye—yet the marshal refused to confess. Blyukher would die under torture. Beria telephoned Stalin with the news, after which the marshal was cremated.²⁸⁰ His death was never announced.²⁸¹

Beria’s value, as well as Khrushchev’s, got magnified many times over by Stalin’s hectic quest for leading personnel caused by his annihilations. Stalin had assigned Alexander Shcherbakov, Zhdanov’s deputy in Leningrad, as party boss in Irkutsk, but in spring 1938 he received him again and appointed him party boss to the Donbass.²⁸² In fall 1938, Stalin would hand him the Moscow party organization, summoning Khrushchev from Ukraine to preside over the meeting to denounce the sitting Moscow party head as an enemy of the people and support Shcherbakov (who had once worked under Khrushchev in Ukraine). “There is also testimony against him,” Khrushchev recalled telling Stalin of Shcherbakov, whom he deemed “poisonous, snakelike.” Stalin resolved the matter by appointing a second secretary from Malenkov’s circle to watch over Shcherbakov.²⁸³

Stalin’s most important minion, Molotov, showed little ambition to cultivate his own power base.²⁸⁴ Orjonikidze, by contrast, had built an immense semi-autonomous fiefdom in heavy industry, which Stalin had broken up into numerous economic commissariats. But now Stalin found himself constrained to facilitate the establishment of another fiefdom: Beria at the NKVD. A rivalry between Molotov and Beria for Stalin’s favor assisted the despot in keeping an eye on both.²⁸⁵ Still, Beria challenged him to stay on his toes, and Stalin would strive to institute all manner of checks on Beria, a process that had begun before his transfer to Moscow.²⁸⁶ Unlike in the case of Voroshilov at the Red Army, Stalin had appointed not merely a loyalist, but a man exceptionally suited for his post. Beria would come to exercise immense power by dint of the organization he now headed de facto and his undeniable operational skill.

• • •

“TYRANTS DESTROYED,” a short story published in Russian in 1936 by the émigré Vladimir Nabokov (the son of a Provisional Government scribe), imagined an egomaniac with the power to drive his subjects mad, in a kind of infectious psychosis.²⁸⁷ Stalin knew the state of the country and the consequences of his actions. Compared with anyone else inside the USSR, he was exceptionally well informed, served by an information-gathering system that stretched across the vast country and, to an extent, the entire globe.²⁸⁸ Still, it took intense effort on his part to ferret out information that officials did not want him to know. He sought accurate information, but for him that meant Marxist-Leninist ways of thinking refracted through a jaundiced view of people. Stalin exhibited a proclivity to depict the world as he wanted to see it, indeed, as he could and did shape it. He elicited intelligence about enemies, treason, vulnerabilities. It would be going too far to call him, or the Soviet system, a victim of its own trap.²⁸⁹ An echo chamber effect shapes surveillance and reporting mechanisms in any authoritarian regime. Still, in the Soviet case the revolution was encircled, and Stalin’s worldview reinforced that structural paranoia.

The USSR faced genuine foreign threats, and the terror was conducted in the name of state security, but mass arrests in the Red Army further emboldened foreign enemies, including Hitler and proponents of war in the Nazi regime, while rendering the USSR’s already wary potential allies more wary. The vastly expanded hunt to root out enemies in 1936–38 helped unify the country around threats but spread deep fear and made many otherwise loyal Soviet people anti-Soviet. The mass annihilation of party and state functionaries, and the heightened dread among survivors, did nothing to alter the political system’s inbuilt malperformance. Stalin smashed nearly every provincial party machine in 1937–38, but they would reappear.²⁹⁰ He killed off heads of state bodies, too, and the state fiefdoms reappeared. Industry had been suffering genuine problems, but the mass arrests that were attributed to wrecking only lowered output further. Complicity in the mass murder of Red Army officers and loyal officials compromised all those who took part or benefited, including large numbers of new young people.

During the enemy mania of 1937 and 1938, no military graduation banquets took place (eleven of the fourteen military academy directors suffered arrest).²⁹¹ Still, the graduations themselves did take place. So did at least fifteen Kremlin banquets for other occasions, which eclipsed party gatherings in ceremony and—alongside the parades on Red Square for May Day, Revolution Day, and Physical Culture Day—became the principal staging ground of Stalin’s rule.²⁹² He held banquets (large and small) for managers, engineers, and high-profile workers in various industrial branches; women; athletes; aviators; representatives of the Union republics. Marina Raskova, the aviator, was bundled along with the rest of the Motherland airplane crew to the Kremlin’s Palace of Facets immediately upon their return to Moscow (October 27, 1938). When she encountered Stalin, she erupted in tears, unable to control herself; he comforted her, taking her by the shoulders, patting her head, seating her next to him. When Stalin rose to speak, the hall hushed, straining to hear his soft voice. He talked about the need to take special care of aviators, and about matriarchy back in the mists of time.²⁹³ That same evening, he managed an appearance at the fortieth anniversary of the Moscow Art Theater, arriving with nearly his entire suite: Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Andreyev, Mikoyan, Zhdanov, Yezhov, and Khrushchev, all of whom were photographed in the company of the leading actresses and actors. Medals were handed out liberally.²⁹⁴ The ineffaceable evil was mixed with a grandeur that was celebrated with pride in the Grand Kremlin Palace and in localities alike.

Genius and madness may be two sides of the same coin (as Aristotle wrote), but Stalin was neither. He showed himself capable of immense foresight but also blindness. He was astonishingly hardworking yet often self-defeating, uncannily shrewd yet often narrow-minded and mulish. He possessed an inordinately strong will that brooked little or no challenge to his views.²⁹⁵ This ferocious willpower emanated from a transcendent sense of personal destiny and of historical necessity. Stalin, too, intrigued ceaselessly, but he was utterly absorbed in the matter of Soviet statehood and statecraft. Moreover, he had authority, not just power. He inhabited the Kremlin—he filled the offices and the parade halls built by Catherine the Great and Alexander I. Combining the majesty of imperial Russian power with the seeming sureties of Marxism-Leninism, a great state with socialism, proved to be his masterwork.²⁹⁶ Its expression was the new people, his people, not those of a bygone epoch destined to be crushed like whole classes under the wheels of history. It was a vision in which terror could make sense. And yet, what transpired in 1936–38 cannot be made wholly rational any more than absolute evil can.²⁹⁷

Stalin murdered from the Little Corner. He was a distant murderer. He took no part in the bloody rituals. He was not an assassin, nor a witness to assassinations, although he did sometimes witness the results of torture when the accused were brought before him and others of the politburo in so-called confrontations with their accusers. He wrote the execution directives and signed the lists of names. He did not allow the public to know of his signatures but made sure his inner circle, too, were implicated. He spoke to them all the time about the accusations in the same way as the propaganda related them in public—in terms of legions of hidden spies everywhere, traitors, and confessions to these crimes that he referred to literally—and instructed his police minions to employ torture, frequently using euphemisms, though sometimes being explicit (“Beat Ryabinin all over for not implicating Vareikis”).²⁹⁸

Letters detailing torture, abuses, and injustices continued to reach Stalin.²⁹⁹ Few grasped the depth of his malice.³⁰⁰ Molotov came to see it and, further, to understand that it was not solely personal but rooted in a sense of raison d’état and core political convictions. Was showing pity to enemies and double-dealers Marxist? Did alleged Marxists not understand capitalist encirclement? Did they not understand class struggle? Who would be responsible if pity were shown and Soviet power were defeated in war and overthrown? Stalin would be responsible. A light tenor, he continued to sing romantic songs such as the Georgian “Suliko” (“I sought my sweetheart’s grave, but could not find it”), but running the Soviet state did not afford him much scope for sentimentality. His ruthlessness was dictated, in his own mind, by the laws of history and social development. Nonetheless, Stalin’s terror went beyond reckless. And soon, he himself would indirectly recognize as much.