Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

355. Kasza, Conscription Society. See also Straus, Factory and Community. Generally, in U.S. social science, the effective organization of society has been viewed in terms of self-organization (nonstate), for example in the influential work of Robert Putnam, but as Sheri Berman points out, civic organizations served as an important vehicle for the spread and institutionalization of the Nazi movement, and did not cease to exist under the Nazis. Putnam, Bowling Alone; Sheri Berman, “Civil Society.” In his critique of the state’s utopian aspirations in so-called “high modernism,” which effectively places forced collectivization on the same plane as surveys of land use, James Scott writes about the failure of society to resist, rather than its thorough organization in state-led crusades. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 89.

356. Pre-1914 France had managed to get tsarist Russia to build strategic railroads to the border with imperial Germany in exchange for rolling over massive economic development loans. Rieber, “Persistent Factors,” 328.

357. Arnason, “Communism and Modernity.”

358. Tsarism’s executive branch was in theory autocratic but was moved—or not—by the operation of patronage networks. Only a strong-willed person at or near the top could impose direction and energy, and usually only for limited periods. Many tsarist loyalists had objected in principle to a strong government, detesting Witte and Stolypin; they wanted firm rule led only by the autocrat himself. But Nicholas II went into audiences with his ministers without seeking to be briefed beforehand, and, suspecting them of sabotage, worked to divide them. The tsar, one scholar has noted, “had his own interest in preserving the very confusion in government that was to be remedied.” Even an audience did not translate into effective action. Orlovsky, Limits of Reform, 125; Kuropatkin, Dnevnik A. N. Kuropatkina, 53 (conversation with Plehve); Yaney, “Some Aspects of the Imperial Russian Government,” 88–9; Khristoforov, Aristokraticheskaia oppozitsiia Veilkim reformam, 300.

359. The tsarist department of police had no more than 10,000 informants across its entire history, a scale the Soviets would dwarf. Lauchlan, Russian Hide and Seek, 133, 203. For perceptive comments on the Leninist revolutionary disposition and social engineering, see Massell, Surrogate Proletariat, 39–40.

360. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 198–237.

361. Pokrovsky in his 1927 Essays on the History of the October Revolution wrote that the revolution had been the only way to avoid “the colonization of Russia by Anglo-American capital.” Ocherki po istorii oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii, II, 447–8. See also Agursky, “The Bolshevik Revolution as a Revolution of National Liberation.”

362. Baynes, Speeches of Adolf Hitler, II: 1312–3 (March 20, 1936); Bullock, Hitler, 404.

363. Stalin also said to Howard that “public [obshchestvennye] organizations, which we have created, may be called Soviet, socialist organizations even though they are not yet completed, but they are the root of the socialist organization of the public.” Pravda, March 5, 1936. De Tocqueville had dismissed the authoritarians who, hiding behind constitutional facades, cherished “the illusion that they can combine the prerogatives of absolute power with the moral authority that comes from popular assent.” De Tocqueville, Old Regime and the French Revolution, 45. Mobilization of the masses lay behind the claim of Giovanni Gentile, the fascist ideologue, for the superiority of Italian fascism over a parliamentary liberal order. Gentile, “Philosophical Basis of Fascism.” In Lenin’s vision of the party, the militant vanguard became meaningful if linked to a militant people. Miliukov, in emigration, would pay Stalin a backhanded compliment: “If, contrary to the American saying, Stalin succeeded in cheating the whole people the whole time, it was because people wished to be deceived.” Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia, 39; P. N. Miliukov, “From Nicholas II to Stalin: Half a Century of Foreign Politics,” typescript (n.d.), 334, Hoover Institution Archives.

364. George Mosse argued that the massification of politics threatened anarchy, but that the masses were shaped into a manageable political body by nationalist symbols and liturgy, a key challenge for liberal orders, too. He went too far in asserting that “parliamentary republics were naturally unable to construct effective representations of themselves, just as they failed to create national festivals.’” Mosse, Nationalization of the Masses, 72.

365. A March 30, 1936, secret report for Maurice Gamelin warned bleakly of low morale and high Communist subversion among the French troops. Gamelin sent it to Daladier with a warning that France was coming to resemble Spain. Jackson, “French Strategy” (citing SHAT, 7N 4034–1, “Eta d’esprit de l’armée, April 1, 1936).

366. Rieber, “Persistent Factors,” 336–7.

367. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 93. In Odessa in 1934, a single Trotskyite “group” was unmasked; in 1935, suddenly, thirty-one such groups were found.

PART II. TERROR AS STATECRAFT

1. Kollontai added: “If I don’t fall ‘underneath the wheel,’ it will be almost a miracle.” Vaksberg, Alexandra Kollontai, 393; Farnsworth, “Conversing with Stalin,” 944 (citing RGASPI, f. 134, op. 3, d. 62, l. 6).

2. “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder,” Campbell wrote. “Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces, 30.

3. One of Bukharin’s works, “Toward a Theory of the Imperialist State” [1916], which influenced Lenin, had argued that a “militaristic state capitalism” would produce a “new Leviathan, in comparison with which the fantasy of Thomas Hobbes seems like child’s play.” He denied socialism could lead to this result because “socialism is the regulation of production directed by society, not by the state.” Needless to say, his new Leviathan (“absorbing within the domain of state management everyone and everything”) had turned out to fit the Soviet state. Bukharin, “K teorii imprialisticheskogo gosudarstva,” 5–32. See also Harding, “Authority, Power and the State,” 32–56. Daniels, “The State and Revolution”; and Cohen, Bukharin, 39–40.

4. A typical absolution of Marx from the Soviet outcome is Dalrymple, “Marx and Agriculture.” The distance between Stalin and Marx was one of time period and context. “Everyone who contradicted him, he treated with abject contempt,” one of Marx’s fellow radicals, Carl Schurz, a student radical from Bonn (later a U.S. senator), wrote of their first meeting in Cologne in 1848. “Every argument that he did not like he answered either with biting scorn at the unfathomable ignorance that had prompted it, or with opprobrious aspersions upon the motives of him who had advanced it.” McLellan, Karl Marx, 15 (1909 memoir).

5. Self-styled socialists in the nineteenth century, initially, had employed other terms—“the anti-social system,” “the system of bourgeois property”—but then hit upon this single all-encompassing notion whose essence (property relations, a mode of production), if replaced, would supposedly alter not merely the economy but the entire world, delivering abundance, social justice, and peace. The invention of “capitalism” was a stunning achievement for the socialists, in a way, but a tragedy for humanity, and ultimately, for the entire left, too. Unlike Leninists, Social Democrats were never sure whether this “capitalism” would implode on its own, could be peacefully overcome inside parliaments by large worker-majority parties, or in the end required revolutionary intervention, but it had to go. Those Social Democrats who came to believe that “capitalism” was amenable to becoming more humane—capitalism with a human face—opened themselves up to accusations of being accomplices to exploitation and imperialism.

6. Hegel stated in a series of lectures published posthumously (1837): “But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench [Schlachtbank] at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.” The answer was not Hegel’s Reason or World Spirit but misbegotten ideas. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Hegel’s lectures were published in Russian translation in 1932 as vols. IX and X of his Works by Partizdat.

7. In Marxism-Leninism, only one set of interests can be legitimate, the “proletariat’s,” the rest are ipso facto expressions of the “wrong” class interests, a stricture that effectively excludes lawful politics. But politics is how different groups, interests, and opinions are represented and allowed to compete via peaceful means, and with institutional restraint. Crick, In Defence of Politics, 28. More broadly, the idea that a self-appointed elite has the right, even the duty, to coerce a population for the latter’s benefit is beyond pernicious. That the destruction of whole “classes” can somehow produce freedom is beyond folly. Systemic prevarication and political murder in the name of some supposed higher humanity get institutionalized. Chamberlin, Evolution of a Conservative, 13.

8. Carr defended Stalin’s bloody revolution from above because it was the only way to build socialism (a system not based on private property and markets), which was true, but also because it enabled the socialist state to defend itself in the rapacious international order. A self-styled realist, Carr understood he was defending a morally repugnant system, but in his eyes capitalism had failed, while state planning and collectivization had appeared to succeed, against expectations. It also helped that socialism’s extreme violence and waste could be attributed to inevitable birth pangs that would pass, while capitalism’s crisis was seen as permanent. Wohlforth, “Russian-Soviet Empire,” at 226. See also Jonathan Haslam, “We Need a Faith,” 37.

9. Robert Caro has argued that Lyndon Johnson had a “hunger for power not to improve the lives of others but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will in a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself—or to anyone else—could stand before it.” Of course, Johnson was head of the Senate and then president in a constitutional order. Caro, Path to Power, xix.

10. Much escaped Stalin’s attention, obviously. And yet, nothing was too trivial to be brought to him by someone, or for him to involve himself. “People say that the square on the Arbat (where there used to be a church, in front of the cinema) has not yet been paved with blocks (or asphalt),” he wrote to Kaganovich (September 24, 1931) from Sochi. “Shameful! One of the busiest squares and it is full of potholes! Pressure them and make them finish up the square.” Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich, 117 (RGASPI, f. 81, op. 3, d. 99, l. 38).

11. Sometimes the underlining in documents was done by an aide. Sometimes the underlining could be absent-minded, without retention. Much is not underlined. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/i: 221, I/ii: 141, II/ii: 153; Khlevniuk, Stalin; Zhizn’, 144–5.

12. “He wrote everything himself,” Molotov would recall. “The staff never wrote for him. This was a Leninist tradition. Zinoviev wrote for himself, Kamenev, too, not to mention Trotsky.” Chuev, Molotov Remembers, 168. Stalin’s style borrowed from the catechism approach of his seminary training, and was well suited for agitation among the lower orders, including non-native speakers, where he had cut his teeth.

13. Brooks, “Thank You, Comrade Stalin!,” 83–105. “What more is there to ask when there is Soviet power; when exploitation, oppression, lack of rights, and slavery have been abolished forever; when there is the party of Lenin-Stalin, a worker-peasant government, which exists only to make an abundant, joyful, and happy life for millions of working people—the men and women of the new socialist society,” a group of female shock workers were quoted in Pravda (March 11, 1936). “We are obliged to you, our own dear Iosif Vissarionovich.” Pravda, March 11, 1936. “Our republic,” the writer Mikhail Prishvin had written in his diary in mid-1929, “resembles a photographic dark room, in which not a single ray of light is admitted from the outside, but inside everything is illuminated by a red lantern.” Prishvin, Dnevniki, VI: 432 (July 22, 1929).

14. Simonov, Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia, 65 (Feb. 27, 1979).

15. Rees, “Leader Cults,” at 22.

16. Goebbels intuited that “genius” was fine, but a leader needed to be in touch with the pulse of the people. Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 59. See also Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/ii: 308.

17. Lewin, Making of the Soviet System (1985, 1994).

18. In 1935 the regime had stepped up the deportations of certain ethnics and convicted criminals, increased the size of the NKVD border guards, and erected forbidden zones along the western border, sometimes more than ten miles wide, removing people and installing barbed wire, watch towers, and strips of raked land in which footprints could be spotted. Dullin, La frontière épaisse, 206. See also Erickson, Soviet High Command, 406–7; and Chandler, Institutions of Isolation, 55–66; and XVII s”ezd, 71–3.

19. “The Bolsheviks can satisfy the characteristic human striving for a purposeful and significant life, man’s natural craving to transcend the humdrum routine of daily life, to give his activities a purpose more than personal.” Gurian, Bolshevism. See also Stern, “National Socialism as Temptation,” 151.

20. Garros et al., Intimacy and Terror, 206 (Galina Shtange). See also Overy, Dictators, 54–5.

21. Jasny, Soviet Industrialization.

22. Vagts, “Capitalist Encirclement,” 506. See also Izvestiia, March 21, 1937: 2 (Zhdanov).

23. An entry on the “Inquisition” in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia that happened to appear in 1937 noted that “during just eighteen years under the principal Spanish Inquisitor Torquemada, more than 10,000 people were burned alive.” Bol’shaia Sovetskaia entsiklopediia (1937), XXVIII: 510–2.

24. Soviet terror statistics are suspect, of course, but still indicate orders of magnitude. We will never know how many of those beaten to death during interrogations were recorded as dying from heart attacks, for example. Officially, executions were almost evenly distributed between the horrific years of 1937 (353,074) and 1938 (328,618). The number included both political and common crimes. These two years accounted for 91 percent of all the death sentences for political crimes handed down between 1921 and 1940. GARF, f. 9041, op. 1, d. 4517, l. 201–5 (report of late 1953); Vinogradov, Genrikh Iagoda, 26; Lukianov, “Massovye represii opravdany byt’ ne mogut,” 120 (data presented by a commission in 1962–3); Popov, “Gosudarstvennyi terror”; Ellman, “Soviet Repression Statistics”; Khaustov, “Deiatel’nost’ organov,” 477–8 (TsA FSB, f. 8, op. 1, d. 80, l. 57–8, 61–2). The number 1.575 million does not include arrests by the regular police (militia).

25. Davies, “Soviet Economy,” 11–37.

26. Davies, Popular Opinion, 35.

27. Many Soviet collective farmers preferred bribing the capitalists, with grain or whatever it took, to avoid war, and some were reportedly even ready to pay double tax if that meant war could be avoided for sure. ‘Esli mir obrushitsia na nashu Respubliku,’ 125 (citing TsDOOSO, f. 4, op. 5, d. 87, l. 111).

28. Conquest, Stalin’s Purge. “The nature of the whole purge depends in the last analysis on the personal and political drives of Stalin.” Conquest, Reassessment, 33. “The Soviet Union one sees in the archives is perfectly recognizable to people who have tried to understand it from the open sources alone,” wrote Joseph Berliner. Gregory, Behind the Façade, 6.

29. Gerschenkron, “On Dictatorship.”

30. Rees, “Stalin as Leader, 1937–1953,” 202–3.

31. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 585. Volkgonov largely echoed Medvedev. Lars Lih argued that Stalin pursued an “anti-bureaucratic scenario,” but also that Stalin recognized the necessity of the state, an unresolved paradox. Lih, Introduction to Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 1–63.

32. Trotsky, Stalin; Tucker, Stalin in Power; Lewin, “Stalin in the Mirror of the Other,” 120. This represents a considerable improvement on the traditional Trotskyite formulation, whereby, in the misguided words of Deutscher, Stalin’s “own behaviour was now dictated by the moods, needs, and pressures of the vast political machine.” Deutscher, Stalin, 226–7.

33. Kuromiya, Stalin; Kuromiya, “Stalin in the Politburo Transcripts,” 41–56; Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror; van Ree, Political Thought; Rees, Political Thought from Machiavelli to Stalin. Harris depicted Stalin as a consummate misperceiver who never adequately understood that his own central policies were driving the phenomena he hated and struggled against—and so he murdered everyone. Harris, “Encircled by Enemies.” This misperception differs markedly from Harris’s earlier assertion that the terror arose “not because of the opposition to collectivization, high-tempo industrialization, or the leadership of Stalin,” but because regional officials, struggling to cope, had engaged in deception, blame-shifting, and scapegoating, which Stalin suddenly discovered—as if he had not known about inflated production reports before, and as if he needed such a pretext to attack. Harris, Great Urals, 189–90.

34. Ulam, “Price of Sanity,” 133.

35. Without embarrassment, Yuri Zhukov has asserted that the terror was forced upon a reluctant Stalin by regional officials, making Stalin a victim (meanwhile, all those who allegedly forced his hand were cremated). Zhukov, Inoi Stalin. J. Arch Getty has even suggested that the terror was provoked by “tensions” between the center and periphery, and fallout from genuine efforts to introduce democracy, a crackpot assertion he shares with Zhukov. “[I]t was a purely domestic event (the 1937 electoral campaign) that sparked the terror,” argued Getty, who added that the terror operations were “unplanned, ad hoc reactions to a perceived immediate political threat.” Getty, “‘Excesses are not permitted.’” See also Manning, “Government in the Soviet Countryside”; Getty, “State and Society.”

36. Kotkin, “Conspiracy So Immense.”

37. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 286.

38. According to the recollections of S. Yakubovsky, the phrase “Stalin is the Lenin of our day” arose at an editorial meeting of Pravda. Lel’chuk, “Beseda I. V. Stalina s angliiskim pisatelem G. Uellsom,” 345.

39. Scholars have identified a “dictator’s dilemma”: the more power the dictator has, the less sure he can be of the loyalty of subordinates. Wintrobe, Political Economy of Dictatorship, 20. In all authoritarian regimes, the ruler perceives the only path to securing his rule is an expansion of his power at the expense of elites (who, in theory, can remove him). That said, elite palace coups are hard, whereas the ruler enjoys greater opportunity to behave opportunistically, to cut back the degree of power-sharing or collective decision making, and, once his power passes a certain point, rebellion becomes near impossible and participation in decision making shrinks or even vanishes. Svolik, Politics of Authoritarian Rule. Machiavelli had argued that those who lead a country have more to fear from the scheming elites than from the populace, and therefore he advised a leader to form an alliance with the people against the aristocracy.

40. “The frenzy with which [Stalin] pursued the feud, making it the paramount preoccupation of international communism as well as of the Soviet Union and subordinating to it all political, tactical, intellectual, and other interests, beggars description,” Deutscher would write. “There is in the whole of history hardly another case in which such immense resources of power and propaganda were employed against a single individual.” Deutscher, Prophet Outcast, 125–6. See also Szamuely, “Elimination of Opposition,” 323.

CHAPTER 6. ON A BLUFF

1. Trotsky, Fourth International 2, no. 5 (1941): 150–4, reprinted in Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1936–1937.

2. Payne, Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 175–7. There would be some runoffs, reruns, and shifts in coalition allegiance, altering the totals.

3. On the problems of Spain’s democracy, some of them analogous to the situation in late Weimar Germany, see Payne, Spain’s First Democracy; and Preston, “Explosive Experiment.” Stalin might have received an intelligence warning about the Spanish generals’ plotting in April 1936. Mereshcheriakov, “SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii,” 84, no citation. Spanish conspirators had informed the British foreign office, in late May 1936, of an intention “to restore law and order,” that is, overthrow the Popular Front in favor of “a civilian, right-wing government.” The British cabinet, discussing Spain on July 6, knew a coup was imminent. Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, 143 (citing PRO FO 371, file 20522, documents W4919 and W5693; records of the cabinet office, minutes, file 85); Coverdale, Italian Intervention, 60.

4. Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 900; Preston, Spanish Holocaust.

5. This argument has been advanced by Khlevniuk and reinforced by Kuromiya, but rightly rejected by Rees. Khlevniuk, “Objectives of the Great Terror”; Khlevniuk, Master of the House, 173 (citing APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 223, l. 90, 141–2, 146); Khlevniuk, “Reasons for the ‘Great Terror’”; Kuromiya, “Accounting for the Great Terror”; Rees, “Stalin as Leader, 1937–1953.”

6. Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i VChK, 764–5 (APRF, f. 3, op. 24, d. 226, l. 159–61). The innermost circle—Kaganovich, Voroshilov—privately expressed their support to Stalin, at his prompting, for the annihilation of “lowlifes” such as Dreitser and Pikel. Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich, 627 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 743, l. 53: Kaganovich to Stalin, July 6, 1936); Kvashonkin, Sovetskoe rukovodstvo, 333–4 (RGASPI, f. 74, op. 2, d. 37, l. 104–6: Voroshilov to Stalin, July 9, 1936).

7. Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, 216. Publicly, Stalin did not comment much on Spain. Many military intelligence reports from Spain were addressed to Voroshilov. Radosh et al., Spain Betrayed, 58–63 (Sept. 25, 1936), 63–5 (Oct. 16, 1936), 66–70 (Oct. 16, 1936). A mass of documents regarding Spain in the so-called Politburo or Presidential Archive were addressed to Kaganovich (and sometimes Molotov) in Stalin’s absence, but Stalin’s voluminous holiday correspondence with Kaganovich does not elucidate his motives in Spain. Crucially, there is no Dimitrov diary from Jan. 31, 1935, to Aug. 19, 1936, or Sept. 21 to Nov. 22, 1936, when Dimitrov and his wife were on holiday.

8. Some scholars have asserted that Stalin followed all events in Spain closely and read every single document on the country. Mereshcheriakov, “SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii,” 87 (no citation); Novikov, SSSR, Komintern, II: 7; Sarin and Dvoretsky, Alien Wars, 3. In fact, as the Russian analyst Rybalkin noted, “Stalin’s position in relation to the Spanish Republic was unpredictable and changed depending on his mood and the situation on the fronts of the Iberian Peninsula and in the international arena.” He continued: “Gradually Stalin’s interest in country X [Spain] fell—on the contrary, hostility arose. From mid-1937 at politburo meetings it became more frequent to discuss aid not to Spain but to Mongolia and China (country Z), as well as the struggle against anti-state elements inside the country.” Rybalkin, Operatsiia “X,” 45. Another scholar refers to “improvisations and adaptations.” Roberts, “Soviet Foreign Policy and the Spanish Civil War.” Yet another noted that “a historian looking back over events encounters the danger of reading into facts future motives of which the participants were not yet aware.” Cattell, Soviet Diplomacy and the Spanish Civil War, 120.

9. Stalin had many decisions on Spain approved by the politburo, but almost always via “telephone poll,” so it is not clear whether any discussions took place. (No transcripts were made of politburo meetings between the end of 1932 and late 1938.) Many of the decisions regarding Spain—“Operation X”—were left out of the politburo protocols entirely, not even with oblique reference. These were recorded as OOP, which could have connoted “separate special file” [otdelnaia osobaia papka], and are found in the Presidential Archive. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 23. Compare Adibekov et al., Politbiuro TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i Evropa.

10. No politburo member, and no other people’s commissar except for Litvinov, had traveled across the ocean. In Jan. 1936, Mikoyan had been awarded the Order of Lenin for the food industry commissariat’s overfulfillment of the 1935 plan and introduction of machinery. Pavlov, Anastas Mikoian, 75–6 (citing RGASPI, f. 84, op. 3, d. 164, l. 603), 76–7 (l. 590). See also Mikoian, Pishchevaia promyshlennost Sovertskogo Soiuza, 9–10. In the United States during the course of two months, he visited more than 100 enterprises: bread and biscuits, canned meats, non-alcoholic drinks, refrigerators, as well as slaughterhouses. He saw the mass production of hamburger patties at Macy’s and bought machines for manufacturing meat cutlets. “We traveled across America from east to west and back, and nowhere did the police create any difficulties for us,” Mikoyan would later remember. Pavlov, “Iz zapisok narkoma,” 107. See also Medvedev, Blizhnyi krug Stalina, 173.

11. Orjonikidze found out about the Soviet military intervention in Spain either by voting (via polling) for the politburo resolution on Sept. 29, 1936, or from Kaganovich’s letter to him the next day. Khlevniuk et al., Stalinskoe politbiuro, 149 (Sept. 30, 1936). See also Maisky, Spanish Notebooks, 20–1.

12. “Stalin’s position” in Spain, Daniel Kowalsky summarized, “was never one of strength, but rather one of weakness, incompetence, inexperience, and indecisiveness.” Kowalsky largely omits the Soviet domination of the Spanish Communist party. Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraphs 792–5.

13. Firsov, “Stalin i Komintern,” 8 (no citation); Volkogonov, Trotskii, II: 295–7. See also Preston, We Saw Spain Die, 3.

14. Preston, Franco, 16; Fusi, Franco, 18. The statement dates to Dec. 31, 1938.

15. In 1934, when leftists in Spain had seized power in the mining province of Asturias—thanks to solidarity among normally uncooperative Socialists, Communists, and anarchists—it had been Franco who was summoned to suppress the strikers; more than 1,000 people died. Ferran and Amago, Unearthing Franco’s Legacy, 61.

16. Preston, Franco, 114.

17. Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 243. See also Jackson, Spanish Republic; Preston, Concise History; Brouè, Civil War in Spain; Carr, Spanish Tragedy; Payne, Spanish Civil War; and Linz and Stepan, Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, 142–215.

18. Preston, Franco, 129–30, 134.

19. De Madariaga, “Intervention of Moroccan Troops,” 77.

20. “We have to create the impression of mastery, eliminating without scruples or hesitation those who do not think as we do,” General Mola boasted. Preston, Spanish Holocaust, 179.

21. Malefakis, “La revolución social,” 319–54.

22. Payne, Franco Regime, 176; Novikov, SSSR, Komintern, II: 73 (citing RGASPI, f. 495, op. 120, d. 245, l. 7, 11); Mezhdunarodnaia vstrecha, 201; Pertsov, Voina i revoliutsiia v Ispanii, I: 63. On July 6, 1936, the Popular Front government had imprisoned the Falange leader, Antonio Primo de Rivera. He would be sentenced to death on Nov. 20, 1936. Franco would not try to free him.

23. Edwards, British Government and the Spanish Civil War, 77; Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraph 791.

24. Spain had finally recognized the USSR in July 1933, but Madrid’s efforts to name an envoy were stymied by changes of government, while Moscow’s appointed representative, Anatoly Lunacharsky, had fallen ill in Paris en route to Madrid and died on the Cote d’Azur at age fifty-eight (Dec. 26, 1933), never taking up his post. Lunacharskaia-Rozenel’, Pamiat’ serdtsa, 15–6. Lunacharsky had written the play Don Quixote Liberated (1922), one of the few interesting books in Russian on Spanish culture.

25. Haslam, Struggle for Collective Security, 107–8; Alpert, New International History, 19–24.

26. British intelligence had been warning about Comintern “financing” and “overt and subterranean activities in Spain,” while advising its French counterparts that “the establishment of a Soviet regime in the Iberian Peninsula is hardly a happening which anyone can view with equanimity for military, political or economic reasons.” The British ambassador to Madrid, Sir Henry Chilton, had bluntly warned that “if the military coup d’état, which it is generally believed is being planned, does not succeed, things will turn pretty awful.” Jeffrey, MI6, 22; Little, Malevolent Neutrality, 196; Steiner, Triumph of the Dark, 202–3. On July 26, Baldwin instructed foreign secretary Eden “that on no account, French or other, must he bring us into the fight on the side of the Russians.” Jones, Diary with Letters, 213.

27. Churchill, Step by Step, 76; Moradiellos, “Origins of British Non-Intervention.”

28. “Non-Intervention,” Blum’s chef de cabinet would later assert, “was essentially an attempt to prevent others from doing what we were incapable of achieving.” Lacouture, Léon Blum, 370.

29. Abendroth, Hitler in der spanischen Arena.

30. Göring had objected to Franco’s request. Leitz, “Nazi Germany Intervention,” 53–85; Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936, 13–7; von Ribbentrop, Memoirs, 59; Preston, Franco, 158–60.

31. Fröhlich, Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, III/ii: 140 (July 27, 1936).

32. Mussolini added: “to found a parliamentary republic today [1931] means using an oil lamp in the era of electric lights.” Bosworth, Mussolini, 315; Coverdale, Italian Intervention.

33. Bosworth, Mussolini, 316–7.

34. Jackson, “French Strategy,” 55–80.

35. Coulondre, De Staline à Hitler, 20–2. See Ford and Schorske, “Voice in the Wilderness,” 556–61; and Jordan, Popular Front, 228.

36. “O tak nazyvaemom ‘antisovetskom ob”edinennom trotskistsko-zinov’ievskom tsentre,’” 94.

37. Il’inskii, Narkom Iagoda, 709–16; Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 89.

38. “My soul burns with one desire: to prove to you that I am no longer an enemy,” Zinoviev wrote to Stalin in 1935. “I am at the point where I sit for long periods and stare at your portrait in the newspapers and those of other members of the Politburo thinking: my dear ones, look into my heart and surely you will see that I’m no longer your enemy . . .” Iakovlev et al., Reabilitatsiia: politicheskie protsessy, 184–5. “There has been a distinct cooling in my relations with Zinoviev,” Kamenev told his interrogator. “I think it necessary to mention that living in one dacha in the summer of 1934 we led completely separate lives and met rarely. . . . At the time of the inner-party struggle, I never regarded Zinoviev as fit to run the party; the recent years have confirmed my conviction that he possesses no leadership qualities.” Volkogonov, Lenin, 286, citing Arkhiv Ministerstvo Bezaposnosti Rossiisskoi Federatsii no. R-33 834, t. 1, l. 107. See also Izvestiia, March 21, 1990 (Kamenev to his wife, T. Glebova, Nov. 12, 1935).

39. Profound insight into a despot’s psychology can be found in Canetti, Crowds and Power, esp. 231–4. Rogovin, 1937, 5–9.

40. Orlov, Tainaia istoriia, 135–6. Kaganovich confirmed the fact that Stalin and Voroshilov received Zinoviev and Kamenev: Chuev, Tak govoril Kaganovich, 140.

41. Trotskii, Prestuplenia Stalina, 72.

42. Yagoda was said to have written across the interrogation testimony of a link to Trotsky: “untrue,” “rubbish.” Iakovlev et al., Reabilitatsiia: politicheskie protsessy, 179; “Materialy marto-fevral’skogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda” (1994, no. 12), 18.

43. On July 21, 1936, for example, Manuilsky relayed to Stalin a note with a citation from a document received from the head of the Spanish Communist party to the effect that “the military uprising has been put down.” Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 28 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 221, l. 33). The British intercepted and decrypted the Spanish Communist party ciphered telegrams. Roberts, “Soviet Foreign Policy and the Spanish Civil War,” 100n11 (citing PRO HW/17/27).

44. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 28 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 221, l. 34).

45. RGASPI, f. 495, op. 18, d. 1101, l. 15, 21–3 (ECCI Protocol No. 60, July 23, 1936); Dallin and Firsov, Dimitrov and Stalin, 46–8 (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 74, d. 210, l. 2–3).

46. Meshcheriakov, “SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii,” 85 (citing AVP RF, f. 048 z, op. 14–6, d. 4, pap. 7, l. 69–106).

47. Steiner, Triumph of the Dark, 187. Stalin’s Kremlin office logbook shows few or no visitors July 25–27, 1936. Na prieme, 190.

48. Na prieme, 190–1.

49. VII Kongress Kommunisticheskogo Internatsionala, 10–1, 28–33.

50. Titarenko, VKP (b), komintern i kitai: dokumenty, IV/ii: 1055–60 (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 74, d. 249, l. 8–17: Dimitrov to Stalin, early July 1936); Dallin and Firsov, Dimitrov and Stalin, 96–100.

51. Titarenko, VKP (b), komintern i kitai: dokumenty, IV/ii: 1060–4 (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 18, d. 1101, l. 17–20: edited transcript). See also Braun, Comintern Agent in China; and Garver, “Origins of the Second United Front.”

52. Borkenau, who went to Spain in Sept. 1936, was describing the scene in Barcelona, and added: “Practically all the factory-owners, we were told, had either fled or been killed, and their factories taken over by the workers.” Borkenau, Spanish Cockpit, 70–1. In a 1936 biography of Vilfredo Pareto, Borkenau employed the latter’s “circulation of elites” theory to try to explain the rise of and affinities among Italian fascism, Nazism, and Soviet communism. Jones, “Toward a Theory of Totalitarianism,” 457.

53. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 29–31 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 221, l. 38–40).

54. Primakov, Ocherki, III: 84–5. Primakov names two Soviet agents in Trotsky’s inner circle, one code-named “Tomas,” the other “Tyulpan,” which is known to be Zborowski. Primakov, Ocherki, III: 82.

55. Høidal, Trotsky in Norway.

56. Zipperstein, “Underground Man.”

57. Volkogonov, Trotskii, II: 134–5 (citing Arkhiv INO OGPU, f. 31660, d. 9067, t. 1, l. 24–5). See also Antonov, “Kaznen i opravdan.”

58. In 1934, Stalin had quoted Trotsky’s Bulletin of the Opposition from the dais of the 17th Party Congress: XVII s”ezd, 32. In 1935, Yezhov quoted from Trotsky’s Bulletin at length at a Central Committee meeting. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 542, l. 73–6. In March 1937, Yezhov’s staff in the NKVD would give Stalin a very detailed compilation of all Trotskyite publications on every continent, with their contents outlined. Volkogonov, Trotskii, II: 141–2 (citing Arkhiv INO OGPU-NKVD, f. 17548, d. 0292, l. 17); Volkogonov, Trotsky, 347. At least one concrete example of draft articles forwarded before publication to Stalin (and Molotov), by Yezhov, has come to light. Volkogonov, Trotskii, II: 141 (citing Arkhiv INO OGPU-NKVD, f. 17548, d. 0292, t. 2, l. 160). See also Poretsky, Our Own People, 272–3.

59. Trotsky, “Lesson of Spain.”

60. Pozharskaia and Saplin, Komintern i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 9; Payne, Spanish Civil War, 124.

61. The official post-Soviet history of intelligence justifies Stalin’s assassination of Trotsky by referring to the latter’s responsibility for the fever pitch of anti-Sovietism abroad, the supposed role of Trotskyites in destabilizing the Spanish Republic, and the threat of the Fourth International. Primakov, Ocherki, III: 90. The forged Litvinov “diaries” that were handed to Carr and published in 1955 observed of Spain: “There was some confusion there. The Trotskyites have started a strong propaganda campaign against Iosif Vissarionovich calling him liquidator and traitor to the Spanish revolution, abettor of Hitler and Mussolini.” Litvinov, Notes for a Journal, 208, 211. The forger appears to have been Besedovsky, who figures prominently in them. Wolfe, “Adventures in Forged Sovietica”; Wolfe, “Case of the Litvinov Diary”; Wolfe, Strange Communists, 207–22. See also Agursky, “Soviet Disinformation,” 21. Litvinov’s actual diary is thought to have been destroyed by his American wife, Ivy’s, closest confidant, Joseph Freeman. Danielson, “Elusive Litvinov Memoirs.”

62. Pravda’s editorial (June 7, 1936) echoing Postyshev’s stance decried blanket accusations against the “majority of engineering and technical personnel.” Postyshev himself was criticized at the June 1936 plenum for a “high-handed” approach to the expulsions of rank and file party members.

63. Sovet pri narodnom komissare tiazheloi promyshlennosti SSSR, 25–29 iuniia 1936 g.: stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1936), 390; Khlevniuk, 1937–i, 116–20, 122; Khlevniuk, Stalin i Ordzhonikidze, 60–3; Benvenuti, “Stakhanovism and Stalinism,” 42–9; Davies, “Soviet Economy,” 20–1; Pravda, July 5, 1936. Zhdanov noted in a speech (July 16, 1936) that “it is not possible to declare that all engineers and technicians who do not lead the Stakhanovite movement are saboteurs.” Priestland, Politics of Mobilization, 347 (citing RGASPI, f. 77, op. 1, d. 600, l. 19).

64. Rybin, Kto otravil Stalina?, 23–4 (citing conversations with V. Tukov, one of Orjonikidze’s guards, responsible for his train carriage when he visited factories around the country).

65. Za industrializatsiiu, Feb. 20, 1937: 5 (S. Birman); Ordzhonikidze, O Sergo Ordzhonikidze, 259 (quoting I. I. Gudov); RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 978, l. 75.

66. Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich, 627 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 743, l. 53).

67. “Zakrytoe pis’mo Tsk VKP (b),” 100–15; Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 250–7. Stalin’s motives have been a matter of guesswork: Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 203–6. Getty and Naumov speculate that the secret circular was actually Yezhov’s initiative, in a careerist move. Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 578. Agranov divulged to a meeting of the NKVD “active” that the original trial of Zinovievites, in 1935, had resulted not from operational work, but from a command from the country’s leadership. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 90 (March 1937).

68. Harris, Great Urals, 178–9.

69. Rees, Stalinism and Soviet Rail Transport, 144–8 (citing Sotsialisticheskii transport, 1936, no. 5: 8, 150, 158–9); Pravda, July 31 and Aug. 2, 1936.

70. Izvestiia, Aug. 26, 27, 1936; Rees, Stalinism and Soviet Rail Transport, 150.

71. Izvestiia, Feb. 20, 1937.

72. Radek, “Dikhanie voiny.”

73. Vostryshev, Moskva Stalinskaia, 348.

74. “I am full of doubts,” Gide said in Pasternak’s oral account. “What I have seen in your country is not at all what I anticipated. Here state power is unbelievable. . . . While I was in France, it seemed that here there was personal freedom, but in reality I do not see it. This concerns me greatly, and I want to write about it in an essay and I came here to consult with you about it.” RGASPI, f. 57, op., 1, d. 64, l. 58–61 (Report to Molchanov). Christopher J. Barnes, Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography, vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University, 1998), 127–32. Gide took off for Soviet Georgia and Crimea, and would depart the USSR almost without notice.

75. Mikhail Kol’tsov, “Ispanskii dnevnik: kniga pervaia,” Novyi mir, 1938, no. 4: 5–125 (at 5), reprinted in Kol’tsov, Ispanskii dnevnik, 11–2.

76. Kirschenbaum, “Exile, Gender, and Communist Self-Fashioning,” 572. When We of Kronstadt (1936), Yefim Dzigan’s tale of an anarchist band’s transformation into disciplined Red Army men during Russia’s civil war, premiered in Spain, the entire Spanish Republic cabinet attended. Kowalsky, “Soviet Cinematic Offensive”; Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 51 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 221, l. 86).

77. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 32 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 221, l. 44); Pravda, Aug. 4 and 5, 1936; Izvestiia, Aug. 4 and 5, 1936; Trud, Aug. 4 and 5, 1936.

78. RGASPI, f. 495, op. 18, d. 1105, l. 1.

79. By the end of Oct., nearly 48 million rubles would be deducted from the pay of Soviet factory workers in solidarity with Spain. That was equivalent to £2 million sterling. Izvestiia, Oct. 27, 1936.

80. Pravda, Aug. 3, 1936; Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraphs 187–8. “The German and Italian fascists are preparing to intervene against the Spanish revolution to place in their hands the important trump cards for preparation of a world war and a new territorial distribution of the world,” Radek explained, outlining the case in Izvestiya (Aug. 4, 1936) for “humanitarian” aid by the USSR.

81. Haslam, Struggle for Collective Security, 111, citing FRUS, 1936, II: 461 (Henderson to Hull).

82. Pons, Stalin and the Inevitable War, 43.

83. DDF, 1e série, III: 97–8, 100–1.

84. Adibekov et al., Politbiuro TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i Evropa, 339n2 (RGASPI, f. 71, op. 25, d. 3663); DVP SSSR, XIX: 392–3 (Veinberg, head of the Western department, report on conversation with Payart); 393–4 (Krestinsky to Maisky); Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, III: 203; Haslam, Struggle for Collective Security, 112; Izvestiia, Aug. 6, 1936.

85. Volkogonov, Trotsky, 370 (citing Arkhiv INO OGPU-NKVD, f. 17548, d. 0292, t. 2, l. 130–2).

86. Volkogonov, who has little to say about Spain, noted that “Stalin’s determination to get rid of Trotsky stiffened when he learned in late 1936 that Trotsky was writing The Revolution Betrayed and continuing his biography of Stalin himself.” Volkogonov, Trotsky, 444.

87. See also MacNeal, “Trotskyist Interpretations of Stalinism.”

88. Pavliukov, Ezhov, 189 (RGASPI, f. 671, op. 1, d. 168, l. 202: testimony attributed to Pikel); Orlov, Tainaia istoriia, 81; Pravda, Aug. 20, 1936 (Reingold).

89. Haslam, “Spanish Problem,” 70–85 (citing PRO, HW17/26: British decryptions of Comintern telegrams). “Madrid’s not receiving substantial external assistance could have heavy consequences for the course of the struggle,” Soviet military intelligence concluded in Aug. 1936. Rybalkin, Operatsiia “X,” 20 (citing RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 845, l. 9). On Aug. 7, 1936, the politburo approved Krestinsky’s proposal to invite Blum of France’s Popular Front government to Moscow. No visit materialized. Adibekov et al., Politbiuro TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i Evropa, 338–9 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 20, l. 38); DVP SSSR, XXII: 49.

90. DVP SSSR, XIX: 394–6 (Stein); Haslam, Struggle for Collective Security, 112–3. See also Adibekov et al., Politbiuro TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i Evropa, 340 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 20, l. 58).

91. Moradiellos, “British Government and General Franco,” 44 (citing PRO FO371/20475, W11340, Sir Maurice Hankey, The Future of the League of Nations).

92. Krestinsky had written to Surits (Aug. 11) that “we recently discussed the so-called 500-million credit. It was rejected.” Abramov, “Osobaia missiia David Kandelaki,” 149 (citing AVP RF, f. 010, op. 11, pap. 68, d. 34, l. 130, 131).

93. Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 205 (citing Institut für Konjunkturforschung, Weekly Report, May 6, 1936).

94. DGFP, series C, V: 853–62 (unsigned; Hitler’s authorship established in a note by Speer, Aug. 1936).

95. According to an official then working in the Western military district: Samsonov, “Smysl ego zhizhi,” 217.

96. Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 219–24.

97. Titarenko, VKP (b), komintern i kitai: dokumenty, IV/ii: 1067 (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 74, d. 275, l. 1: Dimitrov to Stalin, July 27, 1936), 1067–71 (1. 5–9); Titarenko, Kommiunisticheskii internatsional, 262–6, 266–9; Dallin and Firsov, Dimitrov and Stalin, 101 (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 73, d. 48, 1. 54), 102–5.

98. Schram, Mao’s Road to Power, V: 232–32.

99. Meshcheriakov, “SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii,” 83–4 (citing AVP RF, f. 048 z, op. 14–6, pap. 4, d. 7, l. 194–5).

100. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 42 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 221, l. 66); Zuehilke, Gallant Cause, 35. See also Karmen, No Pasaran!; and Makaseev, “Iz khroniki geroicheskoi respubliki,” 158–64. Karmen would make the film Ispaniia (1939).

101. Litvinov instructed the Soviet chargé d’affaires in Paris to inform the Spanish ambassador that “the Soviet leadership does not consider it possible to comply with requests to supply arms on the grounds that Spain is far away from Russia, such deliveries are expensive, arms cargo can be intercepted, and because the USSR is bound by its declaration of nonintervention and cannot violate it.” DVP SSSR, XIX: 402–3; Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, III: 203–4.

102. Iakovlev et al., Reabilitatsiia: politicheskie protsessy, 219; “O tak nazyvaemom ‘parallel’nom antisovetskom trotskistom tsentre,’” 37. Pyatakov’s ex-wife Zina had been arrested in Dec. 1927 as a Trotskyite and internally exiled. See also Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 311. After Pyatakov, in bilateral negotiations, had unwittingly demonstrated too detailed knowledge of German metal industry, a Soviet undercover agent in Germany was arrested. Khaustov, “Deiatel’nost’ organov,” 157 (referencing uncited recollections of Spiegelglass).

103. Pravda, Aug. 15, 1936.

104. For Stalin’s role micromanaging the trial, see “O tak nazyvaemom ‘antisovetskom ob”edinennom trotskistsko-zinov’evskom tsentre’,” 92. See also “O tak nazyvaemom ‘parallel’nom antisovetskom trotskistskom tsentre’,” 42. The trial transcript was made available in foreign translations, including in English: The Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Center (New York, 1936). For a multisided analysis of how contemporaries saw the trial, including Trotsky’s misapprehensions, see Schrader, Der Moskauer Prozess 1936.

105. Kamenev’s Machiavelli volume was quoted against him at his trial in 1936. “You, Kamenev, transmitted the rules of Machiavelli and developed them to the height of unprincipled-ness and immorality,” thundered Vyshinsky, who deemed Machiavelli the “spiritual teacher” of the Trotskyites. Yet Vyshinsky also called the Italian “a bumpkin” and amateur compared with the Trotskyites. Vyshinskii, Sudebnye rechi, 403–4.

106. Testimony about a 1932 meeting that had allegedly taken place with Trotsky in Copenhagen’s Hotel Bristol ignored that the building had been torn down in 1917 (the NKVD fabricators confused two sites). Orlov, Tainaia istoriia, 70.

107. Iakovlev et al., Reabilitatsiia: politicheskie protsessy, 187–8.

108. Izvestiia, Aug. 21, 1936.

109. Dem’ian Bednyi, “Poshchady net!” Pravda, Aug. 21, 1936, reprinted in Literaturnaia gazeta, Aug. 27, and in Bednyi, Sobranie sochinenii, IV: 288–90. See also Horvath, “Poet of the Terror”; Artizov and Naumov, Vlast’, 415–6 (Sept. 9, 1938). On Aug. 13, 1936, in the presence of Molotov, Voroshilov, Orjonikidze, and Yezhov, Bedny spent an hour in the Little Corner, his one and only recorded visit to Stalin’s Kremlin office. Bedny’s abandoned wife, Vera Rufovna [Pridvorova], had written to Stalin indicating that she wanted to ask him for material help for her four children, possibly reminding the dictator of the poet’s existence. Maksimenkov, Bol’shaia tsenzura, 421–2 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 702, l. 109, 110–1); Na prieme, 191. Before the year was out, Bedny would be fearing arrest. He would somehow survive. Pridvorov, “Ob otse,” 219.

110. Whereas since 1931 more than 40 percent of the correspondence had concerned economic matters (internal and external), especially grain collections, in 1936 these nearly vanished—despite the fact that a spring–summer drought in the Volga heartland and other difficulties resulted in a poor harvest in fall 1936. Davies, “Soviet Economy,” 22–3.

111. Stalin had afforded Bukharin an opportunity to defect: in Feb. 1936, he had appointed Bukharin to lead a commission to purchase a Marx-Engels archive in France, leaving the trip’s duration up to Bukharin and permitting the pregnant Larina to join him. But his father, brother, first wife, second wife, and daughter lived in Moscow, and the trip to France had taken place before Zinoviev and Kamenev had been executed. Cohen, Bukharin, 472; Liebich, “I Am the Last.” See also Dan, “Bukharin o Staline,” 181–2; and Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite.

112. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1935–1936, 389; Høidal, Trotsky in Norway, 133–4. In Dec. Trotsky would be expelled from Norway, and placed on a Norwegian oil tanker to Mexico; en route he would write in his journal that Zinoviev and Kamenev “lacked sufficient character.” Trotsky, “Zinoviev and Kamenev [Dec. 31, 1936],” in Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1936–1937, 48–55 (at 49).

113. “Samoubiistvo ne opravdanie: predsmertnoe pis’mo Tomskogo Stalinu,” Rodina, 1996, no. 2: 90–3; Gorelov, Tsugtsvang Mikhail Tomskogo, 234.

114. Pravda, Aug. 23, 1936. The Menshevik émigré newspaper eulogized Tomsky as a “most colorful and splendid figure among the Bolshevik leaders.” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, Aug. 30, 1936: 11.

115. Molchanov, dispatched to Tomsky’s dacha to investigate the scene, retrieved the note, which stated: “If you want to know who it was that pushed me onto the path of right deviation in May 1928, ask my wife personally. Only she will name them.” Tomsky’s widow told Yezhov that the person who had recruited Tomsky to the path of opposition was none other than NKVD chief Yagoda. Yezhov’s report to Stalin defended Yagoda. Iakovlev et al., Reabilitatsiia: politcheskie protesessy, 244–5; “O partiinosti lits, prokhodivshikh po delu tak nazyvaemogo ‘antisovetskogo pravotrotskistskogo bloka,’” 71. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 204–6 (no citation).

116. Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 16 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 5391, l. 3).

117. Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich, 642–3 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 93, l. 77–80).

118. Stalin forbade mention of the fact that there would be no appeal (“these words are superfluous and would give a bad impression”). Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich, 642 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 93, l. 62–4).

119. Vostryshev, Moskva stalinskaia, 349 (Alexander G. Solovyov).

120. Eduard Gol’tsman wrote a note that he would not seek clemency. Volkogonov, Lenin, 276 (citing AMBRF, archive no. R-33833, t. 41, l. 256).

121. Conquest, Great Terror: Reassessment, 71–108; Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 247–57.

122. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 44 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 217, l. 22); Izvestiia, Aug. 28, 1936.

123. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 43 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 217, l. 21), 44 (l. 20).

124. Antonov-Ovseyenko would take to the Spanish assignment energetically, writing pleading notes to Kaganovich suggesting resolute measures for organizing serious military resistance even before he had reached Barcelona (Oct. 1). Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 67 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 217, l. 23), 70 (d. 221, l. 141), 81–2 (l. 184–5); RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 981, l. 213; Izvestiia, Oct. 3, 1936; Ehrenburg, Sobranie sochinenii, IX: 114–9. Antonov-Ovseyenko wrote to Rosenberg (Oct. 6): “Our view of anarchism in Catalonia is a mistaken one . . . The government is genuinely willing to organize a defense and it is doing a lot in that direction.” Ehrenburg, who arrived in Spain from Paris in the latter part of August 1936 as a special correspondent for Izvestiya, had already written to Rosenberg, in letters sent on to Stalin, accusing the anarchists of not understanding the critical importance of heavy industry and discipline, being infiltrated by German agents and, under the guise of pressing for “revolution,” aiming to demoralize and defeat the Republic. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 259, l. 73–4; Radosh et al., Spain Betrayed, 23–32; Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 39 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 217, l. 19), 43 (l. 17), 110 (d. 222, l. 88), 113–14 (l. 87); Adibekov et al., Politbiuro TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i Evropa, 342–3 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 20, l. 162); Erenburg, Sobranie sochinenii, IX: 100. By Nov. 1936, Antonov-Ovseyenko was complaining of the anarchy caused by the anarchists: Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 142–3 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 222, l. 145–46ob.).

125. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 39 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 217, l. 11). See also Efimov, “Vernost’ prizvaniiu,” 29.

126. Koltsov had also composed profiles of Lenin (1920, 1923, 1924), Dzierżyński (1928), Gorky (1932, 1936), and Stakhanov (1935), and captured the boorishness of the new epoch in his short story “Ivan Vadimovich, A Person of a Certain Level.” Kol’tsov, Khochu letat’; Kol’tsov, Izbrannye proizvedeniia v trekh tomakh; Kol’tsov, Pisatel’ v gazete.

127. Cockburn, In Time of Trouble, 245.

128. Skorokhodov, Mikhail Kol’tsov, 158–9. On Koltsov’s links to Soviet military intelligence in Spain, see Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, 219, citing Paulina Abramson and Adelina Abramson, Mosaico Roto (Madrid: Compañía Literara, 1994), 64 (Emma Wolf, Vladimir Gorev’s interpreter and perhaps mistress). Ehrenburg would later call his rival Koltsov “the most important” Soviet representative in Spain, “more important than the official advisers.” Literaturnaia gazeta, June 15, 1988. A recommendation by Berzin and Gorev (Jan. 4, 1937) to award Koltsov the Order of Lenin would be downgraded by Stalin to an Order of the Red Banner. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 170 (APRF, f. 3, op. 53, d. 470, l. 124). On May 23, 1937, Koltsov would send a telegram directly to Stalin from Paris about preparations for an antifascist congress in Spain; it included a number of political observations about Largo Caballero and Negrín, as well as about Ehrenburg and Gide. Maksimenkov, Bol’shaia tsenzura, 468 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 214, l. 67–8). Koltsov’s archive seems not to have survived. Rubashkin, Mikhail Kol’tsov.

129. Trotsky, “The Treachery of the POUM,” New Militant, Feb. 15, 1936, and Trotsky, “The Tasks of the Fourth International in Spain,” New Militant, May 2, 1936, reprinted in Trotsky, Spanish Revolution, 207–11, 211–4. Trotsky similarly condemned Spain’s anarchists.

130. Rogovin, 1937, 341 (citing Trotsky archives, document no. 5020); Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 631; Biulleten’ oppoztisii, no. 56–7 (1937): 14–5. See also Trotsky, “Lessons of Spain,” 322.

131. Kennan, Russia and the West, 238.

132. Rogovin, 1937, 40–5, 8.

133. Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich, 664–5 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 94, l. 32–9).

134. Petrov and Jansen, Stalinskii pitomets, 249–52 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 729, l. 83–4). On Aug. 22, 1936, in connection with the Moscow trial, Budyonny had sent a letter to Voroshilov noting that the Trotskyite network had penetrated the army, which needed to be thoroughly checked; Voroshilov forwarded the letter to Stalin, Yezhov, and Andreyev (Sept. 1). Whitewood, Red Army, 202 (citing RGVA, f. 4, op. 19, d. 16, l. 262, 265).

135. Volkogonov, Lenin, 298 (Sept. 1, 1936).

136. Jansen and Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner, 58 (citing APRF, f. 57, op. 1, d. 176; RGASPI, f. 671, op. 1, d. 176, l. 66–74).

137. Davies et al., Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 357.

138. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 710, l. 164–5.

139. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 779, l. 99–107; Khlevniuk, Master of the House, 154.

140. Arkhiv MB r-3383, d. 3257, Volkogonov papers, Hoover Institution Archives, container 4.

141. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 779, l. 106. On Sept. 11, when Stalin had Pyatakov’s arrest submitted for post-facto politburo approval, Orjonikidze wrote: “I vote ‘Yes.’” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 94, l. 75, 84; Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 290–1 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 573, l. 33). The NKVD arrested Radek on Sept. 16. Radek’s mouth was a security risk: Lerner, Karl Radek, 163–4 (citing memo from Bullitt to Hull, Decimal Files, U.S. Department of State Archives, file no. 7600.61/692); Ken, “Karl Radek i Biuro,” 173–4.

142. Adibekov et al., Politbiuro TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i Evropa, 340 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 20, l. 62); DVP SSSR, XIX: 418 (to S. B. Kagan). Litvinov had written to Rosenberg (Aug. 30, 1936) in Madrid that “the question of assisting the Spanish government has been discussed by us several times, but we have come to the conclusion that it will be impossible to send anything from here.” Meshcheriakov, “SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii,” 85, citing AVP RF, f. 048 z, op. 14–16, pap. 4, d. 7, l. 88, 105–6. See also Pons, Stalin and the Inevitable War, 46 (citing AVP RF, f. 05, op. 16, pap. 114, d. 1, l. 195–8; Sept. 7).

143. Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraph 434, 441; Pravda, Sept. 4, 1936.

144. These developments were reported by Diaz, the Spanish Communist party head, via Comintern channels to Kaganovich as symptomatic of Popular Front internal tension. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 44–5 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 221, l. 74), 45 (l. 78).

145. Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich, 666 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 94, l. 53–4). Precisely when Stalin ordered and approved contingency planning for Soviet military assistance to Spain remains uncertain. On Aug. 13, he had received Vladimir Gorev and Semyon Uritsky together for twenty minutes. Na prieme, 191. Around the time of the Sept. 6 telegram, Stalin was also exchanging instructions with Kaganovich about Soviet protests to the Norwegian government about Trotsky’s political activities.

146. Meshcheriakov, “SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii,” 85.

147. Banac, Diary of Gerogi Dimitrov, 27 (Aug. 28, 1936); Richardson, Comintern Army, 30–46; Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 439–50; Eby, Comrades and Commissars; Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 115, 162 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 222, l. 90–1, 187). An international brigade training base was set up near Albacete, where the first 500 volunteers commenced their service on Oct. 14, 1936, and as many as 35,000 foreigners would be trained. Novikov, SSSR, Komintern, II: 100 (citing RGASPI, f. 495, op. 76, l. 33, l. 18).

148. Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service, 95.

149. On Aug. 21–22, 1936, with the trial in Moscow climaxing, the politburo had formally approved the dispatch of a group of military and intelligence personnel, as well as the diplomats, to Spain. Kowalsky, Stalin, chap. 2, note 21 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 980, l. 308; d. 981, l. 213), 65, d. 217, l. 20, 22).

150. Kuznetsov, Na dalekom meridian, 8–15. Kuznetsov got to Spain Sept. 5.

151. On Gorev in the United States, see Ulanovskaia and Ulanovskaia, Istoriiia odnoi sem’i, 101.

152. Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service, 96–9.

153. Pospelov, Istoriia Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, I: 113; Rybalkin, Operatsiia “X,” 11n6.

154. Primakov, Ocherki, III: 132; Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraph 462, citing Aleksandr Orlov, “Answers to the Questionnaire of Prof. S. G. Payne” (unpublished, 1968), 1–3.

155. Fischer, Men and Politics, 361.

156. Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, 45; Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, 349; Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, 129. The assistant was Galina Voitova.

157. Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, 153 (citing stamp in Orlov’s diplomatic passport, a copy of which is at LSE’s Cañada Blanch Centre).

158. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 48–50 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 221, l. 103–6).

159. Steiner, Triumph of the Dark, 215–6; Girard de Charbonnières, La plus evitable de toutes les guerres, 114–22; Gromyko and Ponomarev, Istoriia vneshnei politiki SSSR, I: 321.

160. Edwards, British Government and the Spanish Civil War, 137.

161. Isserson, “Zapiski sovremennika o M. N. Tukhachevskom,” 73–5.

162. Ovchinnikov et al., Krasnoznamennyi Belorusskii voennyi okrug, 119–20; Sovetskaia voennaia entsiklopediia, V: 121.

163. Martel, Russian Outlook, 21–4; Erickson, Soviet High Command, 436–7. See also Lukes, Czechoslovakia Between Stalin and Hitler, 91. Major General Archibald P. Wavell, head of the British delegation, spoke Russian.

164. DDF, 2e série, IV: 510–4 (Daladier to Delbos, Oct. 13, 1936, reference to Schweisguth report Oct. 5). Schweisguth had traveled to Czechoslovakia (Aug. 15–Sept. 1) on his way to the USSR (Sept. 5–23).

165. Colton, Leon Blum, 211; Young, In Command of France, 147–8, 288n50.

166. DDF, 2e série, III: 511–4 (“Rapport du General Schweisguth, Chef de la Mission française,” included in note from Daladier to foreign minister Delbos, Oct. 13, 1936); Dreifort, “French Popular Front,” 218–9; Young, In Command of France, 145. See also Ragsdale, Coming of World War II, 32–3.

167. Yakir had visited France (August 19–September 2, 1936) accompanied by the Soviet military and aviation attachés and the air force officer Khripin, flattered his hosts, but back in the USSR quietly offered a negative assessment. Le Temps, Aug. 21, 26, 29, and Sept. 4, 1936; Pravda, Aug. 21 and Sept. 9, 1936; Orlov, “V poiskakh soiuznikov,” 51.

168. Moravec added that soon enough the Soviets “made careful note of our experience with provincial newspapers, published in the smaller German towns, in which numerous indiscretions about military matters could still be found despite the severe Nazi censorship.” Moravec, Master of Spies, 48–57.

169. Even British intelligence, by fall 1936, conceded German rearmament might be unlimited and aiming for domination of the continent. Wark, Ultimate Enemy, 228–31.

170. “No army,” he wrote, “can manage without modern, well-organized and well-taught infantry.” Habeck, Storm of Steel, 242–3 (citing RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 838, I. 2–5: Uborevičius to Voroshilov and Yegorov, Sept. 7–10, 1936; f. 4, op. 18, d. 53, l. 23–25, 712–7: Oct. 13–19, 1936). Voroshilov, in 1934, had called the tank corps “a very far-fetched idea and therefore we should have nothing to do with it.” Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 15.

171. At the invitation of General Fritzsch, Uborevičius attended German maneuvers in fall 1936; Hitler became angry at German generals who “get drunk and go around with Communist generals.” Görlitz, German General Staff, 308; Hegner, Die Reichskanzlei, 255–6. Voroshilov tried to move Uborevičius to Moscow, out of his power base in the Belorussian military district. Fakel, II: 237–8 (RGASPI, f. 85, op. 1/s, d. 151, l. 2–4); Minakov, 1937, 236–7. Yakir, who ran the Ukraine (then Kiev) military district for twelve years, for his part declined a promotion to head the general staff, also preferring a command in the field. Iakir, Komandarm Iakir, 226–7; Istoriia Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, IV/ii: 301.

172. Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 32; Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 57–8 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 221, l. 109–11). On Sept. 13, 1936, Yagoda submitted a memorandum to Kaganovich and Molotov in reference to an unspecified decision in the name of the politburo six days earlier about the clandestine purchase through third parties in Europe of rifles and fighter planes for Spain, which had been occasioned by a letter from Stalin in Sochi. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 52–3 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 221, l. 92–6). The politburo had met on Sept. 11 in Stalin’s absence and, in part, discussed Spain, but what decision was reached or confirmed remains unclear. Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich, 666; Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 50–1 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, 221, l. 85).

173. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 54–6 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 221, l. 97–101). See also Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraphs 458–62 (citing Iurii E. Rybalkin, “Voennaia pomoshch’ Sovetskogo Soiuza ispanskomu narodu v natsional’no-revoliutsionnoi voine 1936–1939,” PhD diss, Institute of Military History [Moscow], 1992, 79). See also Novikov, SSSR, Komintern, II: 44.

174. Gorkii et al., Krakh germanskoi okkupatsii na Ukraine, 16.

175. Domarus, Hitler: Reden, II: 645 (editor’s note). See also Kerrl, Nürnberg 1936: Der Parteitag der Ehre.

176. Waddington, Hitler’s Crusade, 109 (citing National Archives, State Department decimal file, 761.62/395: Dodd to Hull, Sept. 11). The British embassy in Berlin reported that “the extent of the attacks and their violent and pointed, and in fact provocative, nature exceeded all expectations.” DBFP, 2nd series, XVII: 319–26 (Newton, Sept. 23, 1936).

177. Fröhlich, Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, III/ii: 178 (Sept. 9, 1936).

178. Pons, Stalin and the Inevitable War, 46–7 (citing AVP RF, f. 05, op. 16, papka, 114, d. 1, l. 213); RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 743, l. 56; DVP SSSR, XIX: 423, 762 n160; Adibekov et al., Politbiuro TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i Evropa, 341 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 20, l. 78).

179. Howson, Arms for Spain, 126.

180. Rybalkin, Operatsiia “X,” 26 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 266, l. 24; RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 845, l. 14, 17–18, 40; d. 848, l. 109).

181. Haslam, Struggle for Collective Security, 115 (citing German intelligence reports). For Spain, 274 million rubles would be collected from 1936–39. Komshukov, “Natsional’no-revoliutsionnaia voina ispanskogo naroda,” 179. On aid, see also Novikov, SSSR, Komintern, I: 152–63; and RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 274, l. 1–2, 4–5.

182. Vechernyi Cheliabinsk, Aug. 9, 2001.

183. DVP SSSR, XIX: 762; Sipols, “SSSR i problema mira,” 51.

184. Dimitrov, “Zashchishchat’ podlykh terroristov” (no. 14), 3–6, (no. 15), 17–8. In the same issue, Palmiro Togliatti presented Stalin’s retrospective criminalization of long-ago factional activity as “an act to defend democracy, peace, socialism, and the revolution.” Ercoli, “Uroki protsessa,” 37, 43. “The Moscow trial has had a catastrophic effect and has dreadfully compromised the policy of the Popular Front,” the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding had lamented in Aug. 1936. McDermott and Agnew, Comintern, 156.

185. Pavliukov, Ezhov, 209 (citing author’s archive); Petrov and Jansen, Stalinskii pitomets, 53 (citing APRF, f. 57, op. 1, d. 27, l. 1–26; f. 045, op. 1, d. 729, l. 86–9).

186. Petrov and Jansen, Stalinskii pitomets, 66–7; Jansen and Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner, 54.

187. Vinogradov, Genrikh Iagoda, 147.

188. Orjonikidze was also summoned to Sochi from Kislovodsk, a distance of 200 miles over the mountains. Khlevniuk, In Stalin’s Shadow, 104 (citing Kaganovich to Orjonikidze, Sept. 30, 1936: RGASPI, f. 85, op. 1/s. d. 136, l. 46).

189. Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich, 682–3 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 94, l. 124–7).

190. Tumshis and Papchinskii, 1937, bol’shaia chistka, 241–2.

191. RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 852, l. 138–41; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 981, l. 50. Agranov was retained as deputy NKVD commissar under Yezhov.

192. Starkov, “Narkom Ezhov,” 27.

193. Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich, 683n1 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 94, l. 131); Vinogradov, Genrikh Iagoda, 437–8 (TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 2, d. 9, l. 239–40: Vlasik).

194. Petrov and Jansen, Stalinskii pitomets, 66.

195. Khlevniuk et al., Stalinskoe politbiuro, 148; RGASPI, f. 85, op. 27, d. 93, l. 12–23.

196. Shreider, NKVD iznutri, 35. Shreider recalled a conversation in which a colleague “began to extol [Yezhov’s] democratism and simplicity, explaining that he visited the offices of all the investigators, personally acquainting himself how the work was going” (37). Those visits often entailed Yezhov’s demonstrations of how to extract testimony by beating the accused to a pulp.

197. “O tak nazyvaemom ‘parallel’nom antisovetskom trotskistom tsentre,’” 39; APRF, f. 3, op. 24, d. 241, l. 213. Also on Sept. 29, 1936, the politburo formally approved Operation X, which was well under way. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 75–7 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 221, 178–82), 78 (l. 173–7); Rybalkin, Operatsiia “X,” 28–9 (citing APRF, f. 3, op. 74, d. 20, l. 87); RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 20, l. 87.

198. Rybalkin, Operatsiia “X,” 42; Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraph 472 (citing RGAVMF, f. 1529, op. 1, d. 147, l. 56).

199. Grechko et al., Istoriia vtoroi mirovoi voiny, I: 54. Cf. Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraphs 491–2.

200. Rybalkin, Operatsiia “X,” 37 (RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 853, l. 45); Howson, Arms for Spain, 125–6.

201. DVP SSSR, XIX: 463–4; Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, III: 211–2. On Oct. 6, 1936, Litvinov sent a telegram to Stalin (from Geneva) indicating that Blum had asked him to inform Stalin that Schacht had asked Blum to speak with British P.M. Baldwin about a pan-European settlement with Germany. When Blum had inquired whether the USSR could be included, Schacht answered that Hitler was unlikely to go for any direct agreement between Germany and the USSR, but that such an agreement might be reached indirectly. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 95, l. 23.

202. Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich, 700 (RGASPi, f. 558, op. 11, d. 95, l. 97), 700 n2 (l. 96). Kaganovich told Stalin that the Spanish ambassador, Pascua, feared the fall of Madrid and was “not a genuine revolutionary-Bolshevik, but a Menshevik” (701–2: d. 743, op. 64–71: Oct. 11, 1936).

203. Rybalkin, Operatsiia “X,” 42 (RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 870, l. 341–3).

204. Gorev appended an eyewitness account: “the greatest impression, sometimes impossible to convey, was made by the tanks.” Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 105 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 222, l. 66–7: Oct. 16, 1936).

205. Rybalkin, Operatsiia “X,” 36–7, 43–5 (RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 870, l. 278–9); Grechko, Istoriia votori mirovoi voiny, I: 53; Howson, Arms for Spain, 138–42; Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraph 502.

206. Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraphs 503–14. When Kaganovich and Molotov reported (Sept. 5, 1936) on a proposed deal to sell England and Sweden petroleum products at a 5 percent discount to the world price, Stalin wrote back from Sochi, “Why . . . do we have so much oil? Stalin.” They informed him that that was standard international practice. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 94, l. 65–6. Stalin had just recommended selling oil to Republican Spain at well below world prices (d. 9, l. 28–30). The Nationalists got their oil from Standard Oil of New Jersey and the Texas Oil Company.

207. The regime discharged 22,000 soldiers for various reasons (including political ones) in 1936, worsening the housing shortage. RGVA, f. 33 987, op. 3, d. 1045, Volkogonov papers, Hoover, container 17.

208. The Soviets also unloaded on Spain some 280 British-, French-, and Japanese-made artillery pieces. Rybalkin, Operatsiia “X,” 30 (citing TsAMO, f. 119, op. 663, d. 1, l. 22: Nov. 2, 1936).

209. Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraph 604 (citing RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 961, l. 158).

210. Meshcheriakov, “Sovetskii Soiuz i antifashistskaia voina ispanskogo naroda,” 29; Radosh et al., Spain Betrayed, 147 (RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 1010, l. 295: Krivoshein to Voroshilov, undated, probably early 1937); Rybalkin, Operatisiia “X,” 25.

211. Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, 255–6 (citing ASVRR, file 17679, operational correspondence, Spain, I: 20). On the mixed performance of Soviet military advisers, see Payne, Spanish Civil War, 166–72.

212. Pons, Global Revolution, 81 (citing RGASPI, f. 495, op. 18, d. 1135).

213. Pravda, Oct. 16, 1936; Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, III: 212.

214. De Mayo, Last Optimist, 281, 285–6. It is possible other Soviet officials knew of the secret gold stash earlier than Rosenberg. The Spanish government made the request official on Oct. 15. Four days later, Krestinsky telegrammed Soviet assent and conditions to Rosenberg. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 89 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 234, l. 1), 99 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 234, l. 2: Krestinsky to Rosenberg, Oct. 13, 1936), 102 (l.3), 106 (l. 5), 107–9 (l. 9–10, 6, 11); Rybalkin, Operatsiia “X,” 92–3 (citing APRF, f. 3, op. 74, d. 20, l. 104).

215. Kuznetsov worked with the Spanish navy, which had arrived at Cartagena around Oct. 18, to provide a secure escort. Possibly because of an enemy air raid, departure was delayed until the next night. Rybalkin, Operatsiia “X,” 93 (APRF, f. 3, op. 74, d. 20, l. 104–5; RGVA f. 33987, op. 3, d. 912, l. 84); Bolloten, Spanish Civil War, 150; Kuznetsov, “S ispanskimi moriakami,” 241–4.

216. Rybalkin, Operatisia “X,” 31 (citing AVP RF, f. 010, op. 11, d. 53, pap. 71, l. 141: early Nov. 1936). See also Haslam, Struggle for Collective Security, 115; Pons, “Papers on Foreign and International Policy.” Litvinov wrote on a report by the Soviet delegate Stein from the League of Nations in Geneva that “France has given striking evidence of her weakness and indecision.” Dullin, Men of Influence, 127 (citing AVP RF, f. 5, op. 17, d. 128, pap. 15).

217. DVP SSSR, XIX: 463–4, 513–4.

218. DBFP, 2nd series, XVII: 475–6.

219. That Oct. 1936, a new French ambassador, Robert Coulondre, assumed his duties in Moscow and conveyed that French participation in any “preventive” war was unthinkable and instructed his hosts that Soviet interference in French domestic affairs was impermissible. Coulondre, De Staline a Hitler, 30–46.

220. DGFP, series C, V: 1066–8 (Oct. 12, 1936).

221. The memo by Schnurre called for trade to be “rendered completely non-political.” DGFP, series C, V: 1115–8; Hilger and Meyer, Incompatible Allies, 284.

222. Surits wrote to Litvinov (Oct. 27, 1936) that “the initiative for revitalizing and strengthening economic relations in recent years has come from Göring and his entourage.” Abramov, “Osobaia missiia Davida Kandelaki,” 149 (citing AVP RF, f. 082, op. 19, pap. 83, d. 4, l. 110). In late Oct. 1936, Göring received Kandelaki (accompanied by Friedrichson), but would then push further contact into the hands of his cousin Herbert, who lacked the authority to make the decisions. Kandelaki would go back to Schacht, whose power had waned. Göring would pull together aluminum plants, oil refineries, ironworks, and manufacturing of synthetic oil and rubber (made from coal) and synthetic textiles (made from pulped wood). He also requisitioned foreign currency from the populace. Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 214 (citing BAI R2501 6446, 13–9), 219–24.

223. Khlevniuk, Stalin i Ordzhonikidze, 88–9; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 71, d. 43, l. 3, 26, 28–9, 31–2.

224. Izvestiia, Nov. 22, 1963.

225. Knight, Beria, 73–4; Vaksberg, Neraskrytye tainy, 123.

226. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 981, l. 384. His arrest was publicly announced on Nov. 14, 1936.

227. Ordzhonikidze, O Sergo Ordzhonikidze, 272 (Zinaida). Beria was preparing a volume of reminiscences on the occasion of Orjonikidze’s fiftieth birthday. Kvashonkin, Sovetskoe rukovodstvo, 336 (RGASPI, f. 85, op. 29, d. 418, l. 1).

228. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 173 (citation without specifics).

229. Leushin,” ‘Ia davno uzhe ostavil sei greshnyi mir’: pis’ma Stalina s togo sveta,” Istochnik, 2003, no. 2: 33–5 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11. d, 1160, l. 102–3, 98, 105, 107, 106). The AP bureau chief was Charles P. Nutter.

230. Rybalkin, Operatsiia “X,” 94–5; Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 126 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 234, l. 34), 134–5 (l. 52–4). See also Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 124–5 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 234, l. 23–24), 126–7 (l. 36–7). Orlov received the Order of Lenin for the gold transfer, though his award was announced in Pravda under his former pseudonym (Nikolsky).

231. Karmen, No Pasarán!, 261; Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, 172 and photographic plates (crediting Adelina Abramson-Kondraytyeva, one of the attendees, LSE Cañada Blanch Centre).

232. Larina, This I Cannot Forget, 299; Cohen, Bukharin, 369; Volobuev and Kuleshov, Ochishchenie, 155. Rykov was evicted at this time from his Kremlin apartment and moved to the House on the Embankment.

233. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 108 (APRF, f. 3, op. 24, d. 252, l. 99); Whitewood, Red Army, 206–10 (citing RGVA, f. 9, op. 29, d. 285, l. 22, 232–42); Cherushev, 1937 god, 70, 97. Arrests in the Red Army for Jan.–March 1937 kept the same pace: 125, including 43 officers. Whitewood, Red Army, 209 (f. 33837, op. 21, d. 107, l. 14).

234. The longer-term goal was to turn Spain into an economic colony. Harper, German Economic Policy; Leitz, Economic Relations; Barbieri, Hitler’s Shadow Empire.

235. Ernest Hemingway, a war correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance living in Madrid’s Florida Hotel, would complete Fifth Column, his first and only play, the next year. Kale, “Fifth Column.”

236. Soviet personnel viewed foreign embassy compounds and residences as storehouses for weapons to be used by fifth columnists, justifying raids and sweeping roundups. Primakov, Ocherki, III: 152–3; Kol’tsov, Ispaniia v ogne, I/ii: 227.

237. Kol’tsov, Ispanskii dnevnik, 233–45.

238. Preston, Last Stalinist, 70–88.

239. Bollinger, “Fifth Column Marches On.”

240. V. A. Suiazin, “V boi vstupaiut istrebiteli,” in My internatsionalisty: vospominaniia sovetskikh dobrovol’tsev-uchatsnikov natsional’noirevoliutsionnoi voiny v Ispanii (Moscow: Politizdat, 1975), 52. Airplane losses from accidents were high: 147 for the Republic, versus a mere 13 for the putschists. Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraph 677.

241. Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraph 724.

242. Medvedev, Nikolai Bukharin, 130; Conquest, Reassessment, 143–4, citing Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Arkhipelago, I: 415.

243. Preston, Franco, 205–6.

244. “Our great friend and parent,” Kaganovich wrote to Orjonikidze, “does not want to facilitate the nasty work of smothering the Spanish Republic, on the contrary he wants to help the Spanish Republic smother the fascists.” Khlevniuk et al., Stalinskoe politbiuro, 151 (RGASPI, f. 85, op. 29, d. 435, l. 1–12; Oct. 12, 1936). Stalin told Spain’s ambassador in Jan. 1937 that “in opposing the triumph of Italy and Germany, they are trying to prevent any weakening in France’s power or military situation.” Smyth, “Soviet Policy,” 99.

245. DBFP, 2nd series, XVII: 30.

246. Pravda, Nov. 26, 1936; Chukovskii, Dnevnik, 149.

247. At the 7th Congress of Soviets, Pravda had announced a possible constitutional revision, including the prospect of direct, secret elections. Pravda, Feb. 7 and 8, 1935.

248. Bukharin and Radek, commission members, undertook analyses of the constitutions of Germany and of France; the commission also examined the Provisional Government’s 1917 electoral law. On holiday in fall 1935, Stalin, working on a draft, asked Kaganovich for a copy of Switzerland’s constitution (Kaganovich had it translated by Radek). RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 83, l. 92; d. 90, l. 121, 126; d. 53, l. 122; Pravda, July 8, 1935. An editorial subcommittee—Akulov, Krylenko, Vyshinsky, Stalin—drafted the text of the constitution.

249. Trotsky, “New Constitution.” Whether Trotsky’s article influenced Stalin is unknown. Before it was published (May 9), but not necessarily before Stalin read it (it was finished April 16), Yakov Yakovlev, Stetsky, and Tal were summoned to the Little Corner (April 17, 18, 19, and 22, 1936) to go over the draft text of the constitution with Stalin. On May 15, the draft was discussed and further revised at a meeting.

250. Siegelbaum and Sokolov, Stalinism as a Way of Life, 158–206 (at 159–60).

251. Schapiro, Communist Party of the Soviet Union (2nd ed.), 410–1.

252. Translated in Field, Three French Writers, 29. See also Unger, Constitutional Development in the USSR.

253. For example: Petr Garvi, “Novaia Sovetskaia konstituttsiia,” Sotsialisticheskii vetsnik, July 10, 1936. See also Liebich, From the Other Shore, 249–51.

254. Kozlov, Neizvestnaia Rossiia, II: 272–80. “Everybody thanks Soviet rule for the fact that the government took all the enterprises away from the landowners, and everybody thanks it for saying that there should be no war,” stated a letter from Voronezh province to Peasant Newspaper. “But people on the collective farm are not happy and everybody is hungry and are quietly saying, but obviously afraid to say, that because the whole enterprise belongs to the state, the peasant does all this work and has to give a certain amount from each hectare to the state, so that there will be no war.” She added that farmers wanted to quit the collectives, but newspapers made no mention of this. Siegelbaum and Sokolov, Stalinism as a Way of Life, 175 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 232, l. 83); 176 (l. 80–2).

255. In a few cases leaflets were printed and posted. Vasil’ev, “30-e gody na Ukraine.”

256. Many comments entailed demands to guarantee pensions, social insurance, and access to sanatoriums for collective farmers (the benefits accorded to workers). Siegelbaum and Sokolov, Stalinism as a Way of Life, 158–206; Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, 184–202. See also intelligentsia speculation about Stalin not trusting the party and instead wanting to be a president or emperor: Davies, Popular Opinion, 172 (citing TsGAIPD SPb, f. 24, op. 2b, d. 185, l. 50-2).

257. Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed, chap. 10 (“The Soviet Union in the Mirror of the New Constitution”). See also Hoffmann, Stalinist Values.

258. Chuev, Sto sorok, 289. Stalin had once said that “the dictatorship of the proletariat is the sharpest form of class struggle.” Danilov and Khlevniuk, Kak lomali NEP, IV: 654 (politburo meeting, uncorrected transcript, April 22, 1929).

259. Pravda, Nov. 26, 1936.

260. Krasnaia zvezda, Nov. 28, 1936. The order to print Stalin’s speech in 20 million brochure copies also ordered 5 million phonographic records. Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, 178 (citing RGALI, f. 962, op. 3, d. 293, l. 35, SSSR na ekrane, 1936, no. 10), 181–2 (TsMAM, f. 528, op. 1, d. 409, l. 7; f. 150, op. 5, d. 26. L. 163; TsAODM, f. 63, op. 1, d. 716, l. 4), 184–5. For the film of the speech: RGAKFD, 1–3470. Between 1921 and 1935, Stalin’s publications amounted to 160 separate items, in 75 languages, and nearly 116 million copies.

261. International Military Tribunal, X: 239–41. The negotiations had been conducted with Lieutenant-Colonel Hiroshi Ōshima, the military attaché to Berlin. Tokushirō, “Anti-Comintern Pact.”

262. Wheeler-Bennett, Documents on International Affairs, 299–300; Shirer, Berlin Diary, 69–70; DVP SSSR, XIX: 779 (Surits in Berlin to Moscow, Nov. 27, 1936). See also Beloff, Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, I: 103.

263. Quoted in Chamberlain, Japan over Asia, 163–4. See also Presseisen, Germany and Japan, 115–6.

264. Presseisen, Germany and Japan, 190, citing International Military Tribunal for the Far East, Documents Presented in Evidence, exhibits 487, 3508; Jones, Japan’s New Order, 99n2.

265. Muggeridge, Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, 58 (October 24, 1936). Alfred Rosenberg, the ideologue, had stated at a Nuremberg rally, “We acknowledge the destiny of the Yellow race and wish it in its own Lebensraum the development of its culture which originated from its racial soul.” Presseisen, Germany and Japan, 90; Baynes, Speeches of Adolf Hitler, II: 1258–9; Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 384–5n3; Rosenberg, Blut und Ehre, 347.

266. The Soviets undercut their own accusations that the pact was directed at the USSR by their long-standing pretense that the Comintern was an independent organization not controlled from Moscow.

267. “Well informed people refuse to believe that for the drawing up of the two scantly published articles of the German-Japanese agreement it was necessary to conduct negotiations for fifteen months, and that on the Japanese side it was necessary to entrust these negotiations to an Army general, and on the German side to an important diplomat,” Litvinov huffed to the Congress of Soviets (Nov. 28, 1936). Wheeler-Bennett, Documents on International Affairs, 1936, 302. The Soviet Union suspended the agreed but not yet signed bilateral fisheries convention with Japan. Grew, Ten Years in Japan, 196; Iklé, German-Japanese Relations, 41–2 (citing U.S. Govt., Dept. of State, Files 762.94/108: U.S. embassy in France to secretary of state).

268. Khaustov, “Deiatel’nost’ organov,” 240; Volkov, “Legendy i desitvitel’nost’ o Rikharde Zorge,” 100; Korol’kov, Chelovek, dlia kotorogo ne bylo tain, 108; DGFP, series C, VI: 208 (Dirksen in Tokyo to Berlin, Dec. 23, 1936).

269. Peace and War—United States Foreign Policy, 340–2; Documents on International Affairs, I: 4–5. A Soviet diplomat in Tokyo would even inform his German counterparts that they had read the actual text. FRUS, Japan, 1931–1941, II, 153.

270. Chrezvychainyi VIII Vsesoiuznyi s”ezd Sovetov.

271. Waddington, Hitler’s Crusade, 110 (citing BK, ZSg. 101/14, Presseanweisung, Nov. 28, 1931). Following a discussion with Hitler, Goebbels had recently written in his diary: “The showdown with Bolshevism is coming . . . The army is completely won over by us. Führer untouchable . . . Dominance in Europe is as good as certain.” Fröhlich, Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, III/ii: 251–2 (Nov. 15, 1936). In fact, German planning was directed at a war in the West, an aim for which the Hitler regime anticipated subordinating Poland and Hungary. Weinberg, Hitler’s Foreign Policy, 13–4.

272. Fröhlich, Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, II: 272–3 (Dec. 2, 1936).

273. Moradiellos, “British Government and General Franco,” 44 (citing PRO FO371/20470, W15925, minute by Gladwyn Jebb: Nov. 25, 1936).

274. Dullin, Men of Influence, 124–5 (citing RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 1027, l. 148: Potyomkin to Krestinsky, Nov. 12, 1936; AVP RF, f. 010, op. 11, d. 77, l. 113: Litvinov to Potyomkin, Nov. 19).

275. Litvinov had made the same point. Pons, Stalin and the Inevitable War, 60, 68. See also Haslam, Struggle for Collective Security, 122, citing Pravda, Nov. 29, 1936 (Litvinov speech to the Congress of Soviets).

276. Petrov and Jansen, Stalinskii pitomets, 254–89 (at 269, citing TsA FSB, f. 3–os, op. 4, d. 6, l. 1–61).

277. Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 304–8 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 575, l. 11–9, 40–5, 49–53, 57–60, 66–7); “Fragmenty stenogrammy dekabr’skogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1936 goda,” 6; APRF, f. 3, op. 24, d. 256, l. 12.

278. Kaganovich differentiated party guilt from juridical guilt. Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 309–12 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 575, l. 69–74, 82–6).

279. Mikoyan chimed in with other names (Skrypnyk, Khanjyan). RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1119, l. 63.

280. How many attendees (besides the stool pigeon Khrushchev) understood this targeting of Kaganovich remains unclear. Khrushchev, Vospominaniia, I: 156–8; Khrushchev, Memoirs, I: 150–3; http://www.gorlovka360.dn.ua/sport-i-zdorovie/stadion-shahter-virtualnyiy-tur; http://www.memo.ru/history/1937/dec_1936/VI9501.htm; Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 312 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 576, l. 67–70); Rogovin, Stalin’s Terror, 143. Shortly thereafter, Andreyev condemned Furer at a party meeting in Rostov. Khlevniuk, In Stalin’s Shadow, 161.

281. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 132, l. 132; Khlevniuk, Khoziain, 277.

282. Jansen and Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner, 58 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 575, l. 6–68); “Fragmenty stenogrammy dekabr’skogo plenuma TsK KPSS (b) 1936 goda,” 4 (APRF, op. 76, d. 20, l. 129 -133); Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 303–22 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 575, l. 69–74, 82–6, 94–7, 100–4, 122–6, 134–7, 1159–62, 165–7, 169–72; d. 576, 67–70); “O partiinosti lits, prokhodivshikh po delu tak nazyvaemogo ‘antisovetskogo pravotrotskistskogo bloka,’” 75–6; Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 38–9. No transcript appears to exist of Stalin’s full speech to the plenum, just excerpts.

283. Rogovin, 1937, 179–80. Bukharin ceased to be listed as editor from Jan. 16, 1937.

284. Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 40 (Dec. 9, 1936). See also the entry for Nov. 26, 1936 (37).

285. Dmitri Bogomolov, the Soviet consul in China, told Dimitrov in Moscow (Dec. 9) that “Chiang Kai-shek will decide on an agreement with the Communists only on the brink of war with Japan and in connection with an agreement with the Soviet Union.” Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 40.

286. Wai Chor, “Making of the Guomindang’s Japan Policy.”

287. Bertram, Crisis in China, 108.

288. Titarenko, VKP (b), komintern i kitai: dokumenty, IV/ii: 1068 (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 74, d. 275, l. 5–9).

289. Taylor, Generalissimo, 122, 124–5 (Zhang Xueliang, Columbia Interviews, XXXVII: 25–189).

290. Taylor, Generalissimo, 124 (Chiang Diaries, Hoover Institution Archives, box 39, folder 4: Nov. 24, 1936).

291. Zhang may have divulged to Mao’s secret liaison in Xi’an that he intended to “stage a coup d’état.” Guotao, Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, II: 478–9; Chang and Halliday, Mao, 181–2.

292. On Dec. 9, 1936, as a light snow fell, students marked the one-year anniversary of a nationwide anti-Japanese protest and headed out to confront Chiang; upon reaching Lintong they were fired upon; there were casualties. Taylor, Generalissimo, 126–7 (Zhang Xueliang, Columbia Interviews, XXXVII: 25–1901).

293. Li-fu, Storm Clouds, 119–20; Kai-shek, Soviet Russia in China, 73. Chinese Communists had repeatedly tried to solicit the help of the Young Marshal and, despite Moscow’s warnings about his unreliability, preferred Zhang to the Nationalists. Many Chinese Communists were champing at the bit to eliminate Chiang by any means. See also Snow, Random Notes, 1–3.

294. Pantsov and Levine, Mao, 299, citing Ye Zilong, Ye Zilong huiyilu (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chbanshe, 2000), 38–9; Chang and Halliday, Mao, 183. See also Guotao, Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, II: 480.

295. Kai-shek, “A Fortnight,” 58–63.

296. Peter H. L. and Edith Chang Papers, 1930s–2001, Columbia University, box 7.

297. Selle, Donald of China, 324. William Henry Donald, a journalist and assistant to Chiang, arrived in Xi’an on Dec. 14, sent by the wife, Soong Mayling, and brother T. V. Soong. Donald, once an adviser to Zhang (until 1933), was allowed to see Chiang, and pleaded with him to compromise on a united front and turn against the Japanese. Mayling, Sian.

298. Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 41 (Dec. 13, 1936); RGASPI, f. 146, op. 2, d. 3, l. 29.

299. Krymov, Istoriko-memuarnye zapiski, 288–90.

300. Wu, Sian Incident, 101. Otto Braun, a Comintern official, recalled that word of the arrest “produced a genuine rapture, for Chiang Kai-shek was the most hated man in the CCP and the Chinese Red Army.” At an open air meeting, Mao declared it time to settle accounts with the traitor and “bring him before a people’s court.” Those assembled adopted a resolution for a “mass trial” of Chiang Kai-shek. Braun, Comintern Agent in China, 183; Snow, Random Notes, 1; Short, Mao, 347; Guotao, Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, II: 481. Another account has Mao urging Zhou Enlai to make haste to Xi’an, several days away by horseback, to persuade Zhang “to carry out the final measure.” Chang and Halliday, Mao, 184, citing Central Archive, 1997, 213, and Zhang Xueliang nianpo (Beijing, 1996), 1124.

301. Guotao, Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, II: 479–82; Taylor, Generalissimo, 128–9, citing Zhongguo gongchandang guanyu Xi’an shibian dangan shiliao xuanbian (Peking: Zhunguo dangan chubanshe, 1997), 213.

302. Dallin and Firsov, Dimitrov and Stalin, 106 (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 74, d. 294, l. 6); Titarenko, VKP (b), komintern i kitai: dokumenty, IV/ii: 1084–5.

303. Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 42; RGASPI, f. 146, op. 2, d. 3, l. 30.

304. Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 41–2; RGASPI, f. 146, op. 2, d. 3, l. 29–30.

305. Na prieme, 195.

306. Titarenko, VKP (b), komintern i kitai: dokumenty, IV/ii: 1085–7 (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 74, d. 281, l. 11); Titarenko, Kommunisticheskii internatsional, 270 (abridged).

307. Shai, Zhang Xueliang, 77.

308. Gibson, “Chiang Kai-shek’s Central Army,” 333–4. See also van Slyke, Enemies and Friends, chapter 4; Wu, Sian Incident; Braun, Comintern Agent in China, 182–90; Sheng and Garver, “New Light on the Second United Front”; Garver, “Soviet Union and the Xi’an Incident.”

309. Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 42–3.

310. Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 44 (Dec. 18, 1936); Radzinsky, Stalin, 352 (citing D. Karavkina, employee of VOKS, Dec. 19, 1936).

311. Snow, Random Notes, 1–3. Mao supposedly kept the telegram secret from Zhou, who was en route to persuade Zhang to execute Chiang; in any case Zhang had not moved to eliminate Chiang.

312. Pantsov and Levine, Mao, 302, citing Jin, Mao Zedong zhuan (1893–1949) (Beijing: Zhongyang Wenxian Chubanshe, 2003), 431–2.

313. Zhang had sent his personal Boeing for Zhou. Leonard, I Flew for China, 99. On Dec. 20, Zhang greeted T. V. Soong at the Xi’an airport and took him to Chiang; upon seeing his brother, a surprised Chiang wept. Chiang’s wife, Mayling, arrived in Xi’an, too. Taylor, Generalissimo, 132 (T. V. Soong papers, box 60, folder 3), 133 (citing interview in 1995 with Wang Chi, who cited a conversation with Zhang; and T. V. Soong Papers, box 60, folder 3, pp. 6–7); Kai-shek, “Fortnight,” 97; Mayling, Sian, 54–5.

314. Taylor, Generalissimo, 130 (citing Zhang Xueliang Interviews, Columbia University, XXIX: 25–1928); Suyin, Eldest Son, 153–4; Guotao, Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, II: 479–87.

315. Germany had its own naval technology (which the Soviets also sought). Maiolo, “Anglo-Soviet Naval Armaments Diplomacy.” See also Adibekov et al., Politbiuro TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i Evropa, 336 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 19, l. 185: May 27, 1936), 337 (l. 202: June 27); DVP SSSR, XIX: 272, 376. In London on July 17, 1937, Anglo-Soviet and Anglo-German naval treaties were signed, but Stalin’s large fleet construction appetites had only grown by then.

316. Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 38–40; Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, 209 (citing PRO HW 17/27, mask traffic Moscow-Madrid-Moscow); Haslam, Struggle for Collective Security, 116; Communist International 142 (Feb. 1937): 136–8.

317. Kol’tsov, “Podlye manevry ispanskikh trotskistov,” 5; “Gnusnye manevry trotskistov v Katalonii,” Pravda, Dec. 17, 1936.

318. Also on December 17, an article appeared in the émigré press based on an interview with Noe Jordania, the exiled elder statesman of Georgian Marxism. “For him unacceptable methods do not exist . . . He is vindictive, ruthless, relentless. He is capable of any actions for the sake of power. The spirit of despotism of old times lives in him.” Vakar, “Stalin,” 2.

319. Kol’tsov, “Agentura trotskistov v Ispanii.” See also “Ispanskii dnevnik,” Novyi mir, no. 4 (1938): 5 (Jan. 21, 1937).

320. Valedinskii, “Organizm Stalina vpolne zdorovyi.”

321. Murin, Stalin v ob”iatiakh, 190–1. “Stalin’s children not there,” observed Dimitrov. “Till 5:30 in the morning!” Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 47 (Dec. 21, 1936).

322. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 156–7 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 222, l. 172–5); Pertsov, Voina i revoliutsiia v Ispanii, I: 419–21; Carr, Comintern and the Spanish Civil War, 86–8. See also VII kongress Kommunisticheskogo Internatsionala, 452 (Dec. 27, 1936, Comintern decree). Stalin would reiterate to Pascua in person on Feb. 3, 1937, that there would be no Soviet model for Spain, which was called “a democratic republic of a new type.”

323. Ercoli, “Ob osobennostiakh ispanskoi revoliutsii.” “Kautsky” was also the code name used for Diaz, the leader of the Spanish Communist party.

324. Göring had extended the invitation on Dec. 6; Litvinov had telegrammed permission to accept. Abramov, “Osobaia missiia Davida Kandelaki,” 150 (citing AVP RF, f. 05, op. 16, pap. 118, d. 46, l. 157–9; op. 17, pap. 130, d. 42, l. 7: Surits to Krestinsky: Jan. 27, 1937); Adibekov et al., Politbiuro TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i Evropa, 346–7n1 (RGASPI, f. 71, op. 25, d. 3646).

325. RGANI, f. 89, op. 63, d. 22, l. 1–5 (Stomonyakov, Nov. 10, 1936); RGANI, f. 89, op. 63, d. 23, l. 1–9 (Dec. 24). Stalin and entourage received the Mongols again on Jan. 4, 1937, this time with trade and economics officials. The meeting ended with supper and toasts. Stalin told the story of his escape from Buryat Novaya Uda in 1903. RGANI, f. 89, op. 63, d. 24, l. 1–12.

326. Taylor, Generalissimo, 134–6.

327. Zhang was kept in indefinite house arrest. Taylor, Generalissimo, 135 (citing T. V. Soong Papers, box 60, folder 3, p. 15); Gibson, “Chiang Kai-shek’s Central Army,” 336.

328. “Chiang had left for Xian a popular leader,” his biographer writes, “but returned a national hero.” Taylor, Generalissimo, 135–6.

329. “The terrific personal shock Chiang had suffered might have embittered and unbalanced a man less gifted with foresight and hastened him into precipitate actions of revenge—which, in fact, Chiang’s angry followers in Nanking demanded,” wrote Edgar Snow. Snow, Red Star over China, 465.

330. Chiang Ching-kuo would return via Vladivostok to China on April 19, 1937.

331. In Dec. 1936, Wang Jingwei had an audience with Hitler, discussing China’s entry into the Pact and Germany’s reciprocation with greatly expanded aid. (The German foreign ministry dismissed reports of the meeting as “hearsay.”) Taylor, Generalissimo, 622n142. See also Wai Chor, “Making of the Guomindang’s Japan Policy,” 244. In late 1938, Wang would depart Chongqing for Hanoi, French Indochina, and announce his support for a negotiated settlement with the Japanese; he would fly to Shanghai and enter into negotiations with Japan, defecting to the Japanese side.

332. Larina, This I Cannot Forget, 324, 304.

333. Valedinskii, “Organizm Stalina vpolne zdorovyi.”

334. Kommunisticheskii Internatsional, 1937, no. 1: 8–9.

335. AVP RF, f. 05, op. 17, d. 49, p. 131, l. 59–60 (La Batalla, Jan. 21, 1937). Orlov seems to have pushed in Jan. 1937 for approval for an armed uprising in the Nationalist rear, in Spanish Morocco, but the Spanish Republican government did not support the idea, wary of overly antagonizing France given the proximity to French Morocco. Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, 274, 467n21 (citing ASVRR file 17679, I: 54). Orlov finally became official NKVD station chief in Spain in late Feb. 1937.

336. It seems that in Nov. 1936, one POUM activist who traveled to Mexico as head of a sports delegation transmitted a request from the POUM leadership to the Mexican president to grant Trotsky political asylum there. The next year, this same man, Bartolome Costa-Amik, met three times with Trotsky. The two men argued over the desirability and feasibility of POUM carrying out a socialist revolution in Spain, as in Russia. Rogovin, 1937, 355 (citing Trud, Feb. 22, 1994).

337. L. Trotskii, “V Meksike,” Hoover Institution Archives, Nicolaevsky Collection, box 354, folder 37, pp. 124–5. Trotsky was under surveillance by the Mexican police, the Mexican Communist party (on behalf of Moscow), the NKVD, and the U.S. Government. Hoover Institution Archives, Joseph Hansen Papers, box 70, folder 8, pp. 1–15.

338. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1120, l. 1–20. On Jan. 6, 1937, the USSR conducted a population census (it had been delayed twice), the first since 1926. The enumeration encompassed Gulag camps, too, but it returned only 162 million people, versus an expectation of more than 170 million. The census further showed that 57 percent of inhabitants above the age of sixteen identified themselves as religious. That was more than 55 million people. The census results were suppressed. Zhiromskaia et al., Polveka pod grifom “sekretno,” 98, 100. See also Merridale, “1937 Census.”

339. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1120, l. 7–8, 11–12.

340. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1120, l. 8–10. Stalin had supposedly said much the same, more colorfully, to the Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov (“What can you do? People need a little god”). Gromov, Stalin, 160, citing M. M. Sholokhov, “Razgovor o otsom,” Literaturnaia gazeta, May 23, 1990. See also Feuchtwanger, Moskva 1937 goda, 65. Kolakowski asserted that “Stalin as a despot was much more the party’s creation than its creator,” but he got right that Stalin “was the personification of a system which irresistibly sought to be personified.” Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, III: 2, 5. See also Ennker, “‘Struggling for Stalin’s Soul.’”

341. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1120, l. 14–7. What Stalin did not divulge was that while the number of people arrested for terrorist acts and statements had dropped in 1936, to 3,388 people (from 8,988 in 1935 and 6,504 in 1934), the number of those rounded up for belonging to an opposition had jumped to 23,279 (from 3,447 in 1935 and 631 in 1934). Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 93 (citing TsA FSB, f. 8os., op. 1, d. 79).

342. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1120, l. 7–8, 11–12.

343. Stalin could be ingratiating in these circumstances, but this statement about fascism was not at all what the antifascist crusader Feuchtwanger wanted to hear. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1120, l. 18–9.

344. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 983, l.14–15, 110–1. On Jan. 16, 1937, Postyshev was removed as Kiev province party secretary for having allowed “an extraordinarily great level of contamination by Trotskyites.” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 5023, l. 1–17 (Jan. 13, 1937); Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 353–7; Na prieme, 198–9; Khlevniuk, 1937–i, 90–114.

345. Larina, This I Cannot Forget, 312.

346. Titarenko, VKP (b), komintern i kitai: dokumenty, IV/ii: 1090–1 (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 74, d. 281, l. 17–18); Titarenko, Kommunisticheskii internatsional, 271–2.

347. Titarenko, VKP (b), komintern i kitai: dokumenty, IV/ii: 1098 (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 74, d. 281, l. 28: March 2, 1937).

348. Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i glavnoe upravlneie, 9–19 (APRF, f. 3, op. 24, d. 269, l. 38–58, 80).

349. Khlevniuk, Stalin i Ordzhonkidze, 88–97.

350. Report of Court Proceedings, 54; “O tak nazyvaemom ‘parallel’nom antisovetskom trotskistom tsentre’”: 30–50.

351. Yagoda belatedly lost this rank. Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie, 60 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 983, l. 50); Kokurin and Petrov, Lubianka, 1917–1960, 14. In 1937, chief of the Gorky [Nizhny Novgorod] NKVD Lavrushin wrote a note to Moscow about Yagoda’s supposed past as an okhranka agent, with testimony from a witness about the removal on July 15, 1935, by former local NKVD boss Matvei Pogrebinsky of Yagoda’s tsarist police file from the local archives. Il’inskii, Narkom Iagoda, 51–2; Vinogradov, Genrikh Iagoda, 83–4 (testimony of Alexander Yevstifeyev, 1937). See also Orlov, Tainaia istoriia, 209–10. Yagoda’s supposed okhranka past would not be used against him at trial, perhaps because it was too evocative of whispers about Stalin. Pogrebinsky would commit suicide on April 4, 1937.

352. Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 585. Some years earlier a German count had likened Radek to “something between Puck and Wolf, a bit of a street Arab, a cheeky, amusing, and terrifying Mephisto physiognomy.” Kessler, Tagebücher, 354 (1922).

353. Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 51 (Feb. 2, 1937). The émigré Miliukov fantasized that Russia was being reborn, on the analogy of the French Revolution’s counterrevolution. Poslednie novosti, Jan. 23, 1937: 1. See also Nielsen, Miliukov i Stalin.

354. Broué, “Trotsky”; Broué, “Party Opposition to Stalin,” 166; Rogovin, 1937, 60–6.

355. In public, Smirnov alone retracted his confession. Rogovin, 1937, 23.

356. Trotskii, “Otkrytoe pis’ma.”

357. Ingratiatingly, the NKVD agent Zborowski managed to report that, on Jan. 22, Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov had told him apropos of the accusations, “now there is no longer vacillation, Stalin should be killed.” Volkogonov, Trotskii, II: 197 (citing Arkhiv INO OGPU-NKVD, f. 31660, d. 9067, t. 1, l. 98). Although, in an article (Oct. 1933), Trotsky had written that “the only way to compel the bureaucracy to hand over power to the proletariat is by force,” in a subsequent article on the Kirov murder he wrote that assassinating Stalin would accomplish nothing, because he would just be replaced by “one of those Kaganoviches.” “Klassovaia priroda sovetskogo gosudarstva (problemy chetvertogo internatsionala),” Biulleten’ oppozitsii, no. 36–7 (October 1933): 1–12 (at 9–10); Trotskii, “Stalinskaia biurokratiia i ubiistvo Kirova”; Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, II/i: 270.

358. Maksimenkov, Kremlevskii kinoteatr, 366 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1082, l. 1–2), 1051–3 (d. 829, l. 107–8).

359. Artizov and Naumov, Vlast’, 350–1 (RGASPI, f. 71, op. 10, d. 127, l. 188–9; f. 558, op. 1, d. 5324, l. 33). Arrests at Lenfilm continued throughout the film’s shooting. Mar’iamov, Kremlevskii tsenzor, 35. See also Latyshev, “Stalin i kino,” 495–6.

360. Artizov and Naumov, Vlast’, 350–1 (RGASPI, f. 71, op. 10, d. 127, l. 188–9); Latyshev, “Stalin i kino,” 494–6; Milovidov, “Velikii grazhdanin,” 6.

361. Titarenko, VKP (b), komintern i kitai: dokumenty, IV/ii: 1094–6 (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 74, d. 281, l. 22–3).

362. Yezhov’s pretrial instructions to Ulrich specified execution for all defendants, so Stalin had changed his mind and rewarded Radek. “‘Vse, chto govorit Radek—eto’ absoliutno zlostnaia kleveta . . .’”

363. Pravda, Jan. 31, 1937.

364. Dullin, Men of Influence, 138, citing AVP RF, f. 5, op. 17, pap. 126, d. 1 (Jan. 8, 1937, draft). Soviet-German efforts at contact were convoluted. Abramov, “Osobaia missiia Davida Kandelaki,” 150 (citing AVP RF, f. 05, op. 17, pap. 126, d. 1, l. 17), 150–1 (citing AVP RF, f. 17, pap. 130, d. 41, l. 3), 151 (citing AVP RF, f. 011, op. 1а, pap. 1, d. 2, l. 5; f. 059, op. 1, pap. 244, d. 1717, l. 10), 151 (citing AVP RF, f. 05, op. 17, pap. 130, d. 42, l. 6, 17); Fischer, Russia’s Road, 241.

365. Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service. Maisky (in London), writing to Litvinov, surmised that “Hitler is not yet ready for a large-scale war and it is unlikely that Mussolini ever will be.” DVP SSSR, XIX: 673 (Dec. 17, 1936).

366. Radosh et al., Spain Betrayed. Stalin’s refusal to permit a Spanish Communist takeover was manifest well before access to Soviet archives. Cattell, Communism and the Spanish Civil War. See also Schauff, Der verspielte Sieg.

367. Kowalsky, Stalin.

368. On Soviet motivations as given in the contemporary Soviet press, see Allen, “Soviet Union and the Spanish Civil War.”

369. DBFP, 2nd series, XVII: 754–6 (Jan. 2, 1937); “The Anglo-American Agreement,” Bulletin of International News 15/8 (1938): 11–3.

370. Izvestiia, Jan. 5, 1937. Hitler sent Göring to Italy to shore up relations; Mussolini received him on January 15. When Göring brought up Germany’s desire to annex Austria, a development he insisted Italy had no choice but to accept, Mussolini became visibly displeased. Kershaw, Hitler: 1936–1945, 68.

371. Khaustov, “Deiatel’nost’ organov,” 235 (APRF, f. 45, op. 1, d. 188 l. 100).

372. Andrew and Elkner, “Stalin and Foreign Intelligence,” 85.

373. “The Communists have got into the habit of denouncing as a Trotskyist everybody who disagrees with them about anything,” the Austrian Borkenau would note. “For in Communist mentality, every disagreement in political matters is a major crime, and every political criminal is a Trotskyist.” Borkenau, Spanish Cockpit, 240.

CHAPTER 7. ENEMIES HUNTING ENEMIES

1. Boris Yefimov, in Beliaev, Mikhail Koltsov, 71 (1989 ed.), 103.

2. Arrests in the NKVD included incarcerations of border guards and regular police (the militia), who accounted for the overwhelming majority of NKVD personnel (around 400,000), as well as of Gulag camp guards and administrators and fire brigades, who were not directly involved in the mass arrests. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 258; Khaustov, “Deiatel’nost’ organov,” 150 (TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 5, d. 996, l. 187–9); Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 501. Different figures are given in Luk’ianov, “Massovye repressii opravdany byt’ ne mogut,” 121.

3. Lebedev, “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistskii zagovor,’” 7–20, 255; Voennye arkhivy Rossii, 111; Khaustov, “Deiatel’nost’ organov,” 188–9.

4. Mlechin, KGB, 162–3.

5. Radek at his public trial on Jan. 24, 1937, had mentioned Tukhachevsky’s name as a co-conspirator. Radek then tried to retract, but the deed had been done. Report of Court Proceedings, 105, 146. After the first Moscow trial, Werner von Tippelskirch, a German military attaché in Moscow, had reported to Berlin (Sept. 28, 1936) the speculation about a pending trial of Red Army commanders. Erickson, Soviet High Command, 427 (citing Serial 6487/E486016–120: Report A/2037).

6. Wollenberg, Red Army, 224; Erickson, Soviet High Command, 465; Conquest, Great Terror: Reassessment, 201–35; Ulam, Stalin, 457–8; Tucker, Stalin in Power; Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. Assertions of a real plot go back to the time and have persisted: Duranty, USSR, 222; Davies, Mission to Moscow, I: 111. The claptrap persists: Prudnikova and Kolpakidi, Dvoinoi zagovor.

7. Whitewood, Red Army. This is a variant on Harris, “Encircled by Enemies.”

8. Khrushchev had blamed German intelligence for inciting Stalin’s suspicious personality. For the fables, see Höttl, Secret Front, 77–85 (Höttl was an Austrian intelligence officer swept into the German S.D. in 1938); Reitlinger, SS, 93–6. See also Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service, 213–43, and Erickson, Soviet High Command, 433–6. No such Tukhachevsky dossier obtained from abroad was ever mentioned by Stalin in the many discussions he held that have been transcribed; no reference to such a dossier appears in Tukhachevsky’s secret case files.

9. Spalcke, “Der Fall Tuchatschewski”; Sluch, “‘Delo Tukhachevskogo.’” The archive fire took place on the night of March 1–2, 1937. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/ii: 258 (quoting a Yezhov report to Stalin, no citation). The Gestapo had long been trying to set up the talented Red Marshal Tukhachevsky, echoing the Russian emigration’s fantasies about a Russian Bonaparte. RGVA, f. 33 987, op. 3, d. 864, l. 60–7, Volkogonov papers, Hoover, container 17; Golubev et al., Rossiia i zapad, 186 (citing GARF, f. 5853, op. 1, d. 8, l. 126; d. 9, l. 125; d. 14, l. 85); Voennye arkhivy Rossii, 99; Il’in, “Zapiski.”

10. Pravda’s Berlin correspondent wrote home that Wehrmacht circles were abuzz about their secret links to the Red Army, especially to Tukhachevsky. Mekhlis excerpted the letter for Stalin (Jan. 16, 1937). Lebedev, “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistskii zagovor,’” 15.

11. Uritsky discounted the possibility of such clandestine collaboration, but reported the rumors anyway. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/ii: 255, citing TsGASA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 1036, l. 270–4 (April 9, 1937).

12. Lebedev, “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistskii zagovor,’” 20–2 (Daladier warning, Potyomkin to Moscow, March 16, 1937); Artizov et al., Reabilitatsiia: kak eto bylo, II: 601. Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš supposedly was informed of secret negotiations between Berlin and Moscow for a rapprochement, as well as of a military coup to topple the Soviet regime, and passed word or documents to the Soviet regime, but there is no such information in records of conversations by Alexandrovsky in Prague. No documents from Heydrich via Beneš have ever been found in Soviet or German archives, either. Nor were the alleged documents ever mentioned in the innumerable internal interrogation protocols or at the trial. Stalin had no need for such documents: if they had existed and he had used them, the Gestapo could have crowed about its handiwork, fooling Stalin into executing one of his best military men. Polišenská and Kvaček, “Archivní dokumenty hovoří,” 29; TsRGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 1028, l. 107–14; Lebedev, “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistskii zagovor,’” 5–6, 23–9; Lukes, Czechoslovakia Between Stalin and Hitler, 91–112. See also Watt, “Who Plotted against Whom?,” 49 (citing PRO, FO 371/21104, N 3287/461/38, Newton, June 21, 1937); Les Événements Survenues en France de 1933 à 1945, I: 129. There is a grievous mistake in the annotations to Stalin’s office logbooks connected to the myth of the Beneš role in passing on a Nazi file implicating Tukhachevsky: on May 21, Stalin received Mikhail K. Alexandrovsky, not the Soviet representative to Czechoslovakia (Sergei S. Alexandrovsky). Gorbunov, “Voennaia razvedka v 1934–1939 godakh” (no. 8), 93; Plimak and Antonov, “Nakanune strashnoi daty,” 151; Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 120–1 (citing RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 175, l. 82); Na prieme, 208; Naumov, Stalin i NKVD, 344.

13. Lebedev, “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistskii zagovor,’” 10–1 (citing the interrogation of I. M. Kedrov, May 25, 1939).

14. Reese, Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers, 134–46. From 1937 to 1938, 34,501 Red Army officers, air force officers, and military political personnel were discharged, either because of expulsion from the party or arrest; 11,596 would be reinstated by 1940. As Voroshilov noted, some 47,000 officers had been discharged in the years following the civil war, almost half of them (22,000) in the years 1934–36; around 10,000 of these discharged were arrested. Few were higher-ups, however. Confusingly, sometimes the totals include the Red Air Force, and sometimes not. “Nakanune voiny (dokumenty 1935–1940 gg.),” 188; Suvenirov, Tragediia RKKA, 137. In 1939, when Stalin turned off the pandemonium, 73 Red Army personnel would be arrested.

15. Alliluyeva, Tol’ko odin god, 334.

16. Pravda, Feb. 11, 1937: 3 (N. Tikhonov). See also the satire by Mikhail Zoshchenko, “V pushkinskie dni,” originally in Krokodil, 1937, nos. 3 and 5, reprinted in Zoshchenko, Sobranie sochinenii, II: 416–21. In the restored apartment at Moika, 12, in Leningrad, busts of Pushkin and Stalin appeared side by side. Mastenitsa, “Iz istroii muzeinoi pushkiniany,” 116; Tkhorzhevskii, “Cherez sto let,” 9–10. See also Sandler, Commemorating Pushkin, 107–16; and Molok, Pushkin v 1937 g.

17. Snow, Red Star over China, 474.

18. Taylor, Generalissimo, 143 (citing Chiang Diaries, Hoover Institution Archives, box 39, folder 8: Feb. 18, 1937). An analysis by Varga (April 20, 1937) began with the premise that “recent years in China, undoubtedly, are characterized by the process of the transition to a bourgeois social system,” but he called the conditions of transition unique (a combination of pre-capitalist agrarian relations, partial colonialism, and strong revolutionary forces). And although he noted an imperative to transcend feudalism, for the creation of a bourgeois economic and military superstructure on the feudally exploited peasantry would only worsen their exploitation, he cautioned that if a Japanese aggression was coming soon against China and/or the USSR, the Soviet Union would have to work to delay China’s agrarian revolution. Titarenko, VKP (b), komintern i kitai: dokumenty, IV/ii: 1105–13 (RGASPI, f. 514, op. 1, d. 868, l. 20–32).

19. Adzhubei, Te desiat’ let, 194–5. Similarly, Nikolai Leonov, the future chief analyst of the KGB, nine years old in 1937, would later choose to study the Spanish language under the lingering influence of the Spanish civil war. Leonov, Likholet’e, 7–13, 18–21. “Moscow lived Spain,” wrote Louis Fischer. Fischer, Men and Politics, 403. For typical Soviet press accounts, see International Solidarity with the Spanish Republic. But see also Davies, Popular Opinion, 96.

20. Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraph 224; Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 171. Helen Grant, a British woman traveling in Catalonia in 1937, noted that at a film screening, there were “great cheers from the gallery when Stalin’s photo appeared on the screen, but only from the gallery [her emphasis].” Among the higher-paying middle class part of the audience (where she sat) “people kept quiet.” Jackson, British Women, 117.

21. Radosh et al., Spain Betrayed, 129–33 (RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 960, l. 251–77: Nikonov, Feb. 20, 1937).

22. Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraph 591.

23. He added that Soviet advisers “often led Spanish brigades in combat, especially in their first combat operations to show the officers how to command their units.” Meretskov, Serving the People, 147–8.

24. Altogether, 204 interpreters, mostly women, served in Spain. On the White Guard émigrés in Spain, see Yezhov’s note to Stalin (Jan. 19, 1937): Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 179–81 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 223, l. 33–39).

25. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 263, l. 32; Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 163–4 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 223, l. 3–4: Gaikis, Dec. 31, 1936), 165 (l. 2: Litvinov to Stalin, Jan. 2, 1937), 166 (l. 1: politburo decision).

26. Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraph 742, citing a memorandum of Colonel Sverchevskii, undated [1938], in RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 1149, l. 237, 233.

27. Fischer, Men and Politics, 361.

28. Broué, Staline et la révolution, 102–3 (citing Luis Araquistain); Bolloten, Spanish Civil War, 319. Writing to Voroshilov in mid-October 1936, the military attaché Gorev reported that the Soviet ambassador possessed an “unhealthy self-esteem. He is terribly afraid for his authority.” Radosh et al., Spain Betrayed, 94 (RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 832, l. 239).

29. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 157–8 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 222, l. 164–64ob.: Dec. 21, 1936).

30. Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 517. Largo Caballero had tried to tamp down any tensions: “we are all satisfied with his [Rosenberg’s] behavior and activities with us. Here everyone loves him.” Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 173–4 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 223, l. 17–19: Jan. 12, 1937).

31. The request to be received, relayed by Krestinsky to Stalin, was dated the same day as the audience was granted (Feb. 3). Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 189–90 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 223, l. 80), 190 (l. 87); Na prieme, 201. On Feb. 4, Krestinsky had Gaikis summoned to Moscow: Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 190 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 223, l. 80), 190 (l. 88).

32. Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraph 64 (reconstruction from Pascua’s notes of the meeting: AHN-Madrid. Diversos. M. Pascua, leg. 2, exp. 6, 12), paragraph 99.

33. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 191 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 223, l. 86: letter to Largo Caballero, Feb. 4, 1937).

34. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 191–5 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 223, l. 81, 82, 85). Stalin seems to have discussed them in the Little Corner on Feb. 5, 1937: Na prieme, 201.

35. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 197 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 217, l.54).

36. Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraphs 145, 789. Rosenberg’s replacement was Gaikis.

37. Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, 265–6 (citing file 17697, I: 28).

38. Radosh et al., Spain Betrayed, 456–8 (Gorev report, March 23, 1937, secret archive 15), 69 (Gorev, code-named Sancho, Oct. 16, 1936). On the unreliability of communications, see Rees, “The Highpoint of Comintern Influence? The Communist Party and the Civil War in Spain,” 150.

39. Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraph 582, citing RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 961, l. 171.

40. Voroshilov sent telegrams white-hot with accusations about “not putting into practice” his directives and threatening “severe penalties for all of you.” Rybalkin, “Voennaia pomoshch,’” 108 (citing TsAMO, f. 132, op. 2642, d. 173, l. 23–24; d. 192, l. 1–3); Rybalkin, Operatsiia “X,” 56 (citing TsAMO, f. 132, op. 2642, d. 192, l. 32), 56 (d. 182, l. 22–3: Dec. 4, 1936).

41. Rybalkin, Operatsiia “X,” 82–83 (citing RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 1082, l. 206: A. Agaltsov). Dimitrov wrote to Stalin that “the foe has the advantage that he has many spies in the Government camp.” Khlevniuk, Khoziain, 293 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 221, l. 38–40, Dec. 14, 1936); Sharapov, Naum Eitingon, 53.

42. Khlevniuk, “Prichiny ‘bol’shogo terrora,’” 10.

43. Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie, 83 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 983, l. 64). Two days later Blyukher and Deribas sent a telegram from Khabarovsk asking to be excused from having to travel to the plenum, a request Stalin approved. Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie, 83 (citing RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 65, l. 25).

44. Khaustov, “Razvitie sovetskikh organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti”; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 71, d. 43, 44, 45, 46. Malenkov’s lists further specified that a mere 15.7 percent of provincial party bosses had any higher education, and that 70.4 percent had just elementary education. Similar percentages obtained for the next rungs down, county and city party bosses.

45. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 773, l. 115.

46. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 114, d. 622, l. 13; Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 421. See also Conquest, Reassessment, 33; and Kvashonkin, Sovetskoe rukovodstvo, 364–5, 393–7.

47. Only a draft resolution in Orjonikidze’s hand survives: RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 3350, l. 1; Kommunist, 1991, no. 13: 59–60.

48. Khlevniuk, Master of the House, 165.

49. Khlevniuk, In Stalin’s Shadow, 128–31 (citing RGASPI, f. 85, op. 29, d. 156, l. 12, 14); Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror, 221 (d. 156, l. 10–2). S. Z. Ginzburg, head of the construction industry, investigated the Ural Train Carriage Construction Factory in Nizhny Tagil, returned to Moscow February 18, 1936—the same day the Popular Front won its electoral victory in Spain—and Poskryobyshev called him that same day to relay that Stalin had requested a copy of his report. Ginzburg, O proshlom, 195.

50. Za industrializatsiiu, Feb. 21, 1937: 6 (A. P. Zaveniagin); Orjonikidze bumped into Bukharin’s wife, Anna, on Kremlin grounds returning to his apartment. Larina, Nezabyvaemoe, 333.

51. Dubinskii-Mukharadze, Ordzhonikidze, 6. Orjonikidze had lived in the so-called children’s section of the Grand Kremlin Palace (Krestinsky lived here, too, as did Sverdlov’s widow Klavdiya and her son Andrei, an NKVD operative), but when the palace was being reconstructed, Orjonikidze and others moved into the Amusement Palace, near the Trinity Gate, where Stalin had lived until the 1932 suicide of Nadya and where Bukharin lived.

52. Izvestiia, Nov. 22, 1963; Dubinskii-Mukhadze, Ordzhonikidze, 6. The evening before, Yezhov was received alone in the Little Corner. Na prieme, 202. Alternately, the apartment search may have occurred on Feb. 16, prompting Orjonikidze’s tête-à-tête with Stalin on the morning of Feb. 17.

53. Khlevniuk, In Stalin’s Shadow, 143–9; Medvedev, Let History Judge, 402–3. Around midnight, Orjonikidze had met with his deputy for the chemical industry to discuss Donbass coke plant sabotage. After leaving the commissariat, Orjonikidze might have spoken again with Stalin. Dubinskii-Mukhadze, Ordzhonikidze, 6.

54. Chubar, Mekhlis, Andreev, and Kalinin joined at that point. Levin was called back at 9:55 p.m. for another five minutes; he was among the four people who signed the official medical bulletin. (Levin would be tried and executed the next year.) Pravda, Feb. 19, 1937; Na prieme, 202–3.

55. Murin, Stalin v ob”iatiakh, 154–96 (at 191). Amayak Nazaretyan wrote on the back of a photograph of his close friend Orjonikidze: “Every one of us who sees with his own eyes the enormous achievements of the Soviet regime in the field of socialist construction cannot and must not forget the people who gave their lives that we might build the world’s first socialist state, marching toward communism.” Pravda, Nov. 17, 1964: 4.

56. Pravda, Feb. 22, 1937. Molotov, later in life, would make Orjonikidze out to be the villain, harming Stalin with his suicide. Chuev, Sto sorok, 191–2. Khrushchev had blamed Pyatakov already: Pravda, Feb. 19, 1937.

57. Sotsialisticheskii vetsnik, 1937, no. 5: 16; Pil’niak, Rasplesnutoe vremia, 582 (quoting the Georgian poet Titian Tabidze); Conquest, Reassessment, 170.

58. Khlevniuk, Khoziain, 284–5.

59. Lenin, PSS, XLV: 361.

60. Tucker, Stalin in Power, 418.

61. Mikoian, Tak bylo, 327–33.

62. Mikoyan was in Stalin’s office on Nov. 2 and 14, 1937, both times with Yezhov. Mikoian, Tak bylo, 318–9; Na prieme, 224.

63. As one scholar explained, “Up to 1936, the leading group was held together by shared convictions in a shared project, but after 1937 the nature of the group changed.” Rees, “Stalin as Leader, 1937–1953,” 207. Mikoyan and Beria, assigned to comb through Orjonikidze’s personal archive, discovered two sealed folders (received back when he headed the Central Control Commission), which held compromising tsarist police materials on politburo members Kalinin and Rudzutaks. Orjonikidze had marked the folders “Do not open without me.” Kvashonkin, Sovetskoe rukovodstvo, 9–10 (RGASPI, f. 85, d. 2, l. 1–30).

64. The Feb.–March 1937 plenum is one of the few in the 1930s whose materials have been published in detail. Another was June 1935: Plenum Tsentral’nogo Komiteta VKP (b) 5–7 iiunia 1935 g. (Moscow: Partizdat, 1935).

65. Kosheleva et al., “Materialy fevral’-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda,” (1995, no. 3): 8, 14; Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 470. This was an old theme of his. Back on Sept. 19, 1931, for example, expressing disapproval of then transport commissar Moisei Rukhimovich, Stalin had vented to Kaganovich, “New people who believe in our cause and who can successfully replace the bureaucracy can always be found in our party, if one searches seriously.” Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich, 109–10 (RGASPI, f. 81, op. 3, d. 99, l. 35–6). See also Fitzpatrick, Cultural Front, 180, and Khlevniuk, Master of the House, 172.

66. Kosheleva et al., “Materialy fevral’-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda,” (1992, nos. 4–5): 36.

67. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 710, l. 180–1.

68. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 143.

69. Rogovin, 1937, 221–2.

70. “Materialy marto-fevral’skogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda” (no. 2), 13, 17, 18, 20, 26, 27 (1994, no. 1), 12–3; Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 412–5.

71. Kosheleva et al., “Materialy fevral’-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda,” (1994, no. 1): 12–3. Stalin’s recommendation was fixed in a formal plenum resolution on March 3: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 577, l. 4 (l. 30–3 draft with corrections).

72. “O partiinosti lits, prokhodivshikh po delu tak nazyvaemogo ‘antisovetskogo pravotrotskitskogo bloka,’” 82–3; Stranitsy istorii (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1990), 18; Galumov, Neizvestnye “Izvestiia,” 185.

73. Kosheleva et al., “Materialy fevral’-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda,” (1992, no. 11–12), 10.

74. Kosheleva et al., “Materialy fevral’-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda,” (1993, no. 5: 3–5, 6, no. 7: 3, A. S. Kalygina).

75. Schlögel, Terror und Traum, 250–3.

76. Kosheleva et al., “Materialy fevral’-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda,” (1993, no. 8): 3–26 (Molotov), (no. 9): 3–32 (Kaganovich). Stalin marked up the draft of Molotov’s plenum speech. Where Molotov wrote that Trotsky had instructed his supporters inside the Soviet Union “to save their strength for a more important moment—for the beginning of the war—and at that moment strike decisively at the most sensitive areas of our economy”—Stalin underlined it. In the margin beside Molotov’s words about the party having been deserted by those who did not have the stomach to fight and “cast their lots with the bourgeoisie, and not with the working class,” Stalin wrote: “This is good. It would be worse if they had left during wartime.” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 772, l. 14, 88.

77. Svanidze surmised that Stalin did not come to Svetlana’s party “on purpose.” Murin, Stalin v ob”iatiakh sem’i, 191–2. Svanidze would be arrested December 29, 1939, and sentenced to eight years for “concealing the anti-Soviet actions of her husband” (Alexander Svanidze, the brother of Stalin’s first wife). She would be executed in March 1942.

78. Yakov met Meltzer when she was married to Nikolai Bessarab, an aide to the head of the Moscow province NKVD, Stanisław Redens, Stalin’s brother-in-law. She gave her birth year as 1911, but was likely born in 1906. She and Yakov would legalize their marriage on Feb. 18, 1938 (the day before she would give birth to a daughter, whom they named Galina, the same as Yakov’s first child, who had died in infancy in 1929). The family lived in a four-room apartment on elite Granovsky Street while keeping the Zubalovo dacha. Meltzer had a child from her first marriage. Alliluev, Khronika odnoi sem’i, 118; Zen’kovich, Samye sekretnye rodsvtvenniki, 372–3.

79. Kosheleva et al., “Materialy fevral’-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda” (1994, no. 3), 4.

80. Kosheleva et al., “Materialy fevral’-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda” (1995, no. 2), 7. Molchanov had been arrested Feb. 2–3, 1937.

81. Kosheleva et al., “Materialy fevral’-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda” (1995, no. 2), 21 (Ivan Zhukov).

82. Kosheleva et al., “Materialy fevral’-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda” (1995, no. 3), 13–4. The theory went back to Lenin: “O diktature proletariata,” PSS, XXXIX: 261–3.

83. Sochineniia, XIV: 207–8.

84. Kosheleva et al., “Materialy fevral’-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda” (1995, no. 7), 11–3; Pravda, March 4, 1937.

85. Kosheleva et al., “Materialy fevral’-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda” (1995, no. 11–12), 13, 14, 16. Stalin’s March 5 concluding speech was belatedly published in Pravda (April 1, 1937) and as a pamphlet (Moscow: OGIZ, 1938) with translations into foreign languages. See also Sochineniia, XIV: 225–47, and Zhukov, Inoi Stalin, 360–1. None of the references to Orjonikidze’s sheltering of enemies appeared in Pravda’s version of Stalin’s speech, but plenum attendees once back home could orally convey Stalin’s remarks.

86. Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 56 (March 4, 1937: misdated, should be March 5).

87. “O Partiinosti lits, prokhodivshikh po delu tak nazyvaemogo ‘antisovetskogo pravotrotskistskogo bloka,’” 74. One operative stated that the oppositionists in prison were able to hold debates, read newspapers and books, meet with friends and relatives, and drink brandy, and that during their volleyball games in the yard, if the ball were knocked far, NKVD personnel would run and retrieve it. Vinogradov, Genrikh iagoda, 6–7.

88. Kosheleva et al., “Materialy fevral’-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda” (1995, no. 11–12), 21; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 773, l. 115; Khlevniuk, Kohoziain, 309–10.

89. Pavliukov, Ezhov, 266–8. At a plenum of the Spanish Communist party, also on March 5, 1937, José Diaz asked, “Who are the enemies of the people? The enemies of the people are the fascists, Trotskyites and uncontrolled elements.” Diaz called Trotsky “a direct agent of the Gestapo.” Novikov, SSSR, Komintern, II: 95. At a Nov. 1937 plenum of the Spanish Communist party, Diaz said of “Trotskyites” in Spain: “You need to eliminate them with the same mercilessness with which we eliminate fascists.” Bolshevik, 1937, no. 23–24 (1937): 86–7.

90. Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie, 639–40n18 (TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 4, d. 13, l. 54–67: Lev Mironov).

91. Afanas’ev, Oni ne molchali, 217; Starkov, “Narkon Ezhov”; Ivanova, Gulag, 152; Jansen and Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner, 61–2; Petrov and Jansen, Stalinskii pitomets, 73–4; Conquest, Reassessment, 39–40. Krivitsky refers to a Yezhov speech on March 18 to the NKVD party active, and Pavliukov a Yezhov speech on March 19 to the NKVD higher-ups. Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service, 167; Pavliukov, Ezhov, 264–5 (citing TsA FSB stenogram of a Yezhov speech of March 19).

92. Il’inskii, Narkom Iagoda, 17–18. See also Shreider, NKVD iznutri, 39.

93. On March 31, 1937, Central Committee members were informed that “in view of the danger of leaving Yagoda at liberty for even a single day,” he had been arrested, a formulation by which Stalin could justify violating the regulation of having the Central Committee vote to expel him first. The 65 remaining full members of the Central Committee, down from 71, then “voted” in writing to expel Yagoda post-facto. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 614, l. 94–105; op. 3, d. 985, l. 34; Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie, 124–5 (APRF, f. 3, op. 24, d. 299, l. 188–9), 126; Pravda, April 4, 1937.

94. Agabekov, ChK za rabotoi, 134, 178.

95. Shreider, NKVD iznutri, 17, 36.

96. Koenker et al., Revelations, 77 (Vlasik interviewed in 1965).

97. Kaganovich had written to Stalin that “some of the apparatus, even though it has quieted down, will not be loyal to him [Yezhov] . . . There is talk that Yagoda remains general commissar [of state security], while Yezhov, they say, will not be given that rank and so on.” Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich, 683 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 95, l. 132), 701–2 (Oct. 12, 1936).

98. Conquest, Inside Stalin’s Secret Police, 13.

99. In April 1937, Yezhov and the new chief of the NKVD Special Department monitoring the army, Israel Leplyovsky, pressured Balytsky (his former superior) in Ukraine to uncover a gigantic military conspiracy there; Balytsky evidently complained to military district chief Iona Yakir on the telephone about this directive, an implicit warning to Yakir about the gathering danger. Leplyovsky, who had been chased from Ukraine in 1933, was returned to Ukraine, now as republic NKVD chief, on June 14, 1937, and carried out a pogrom against the republic NKVD. Tumshis, VChK: voina klanov, 391. Leplyovsky would be arrested on April 26, 1938, and shot in July.

100. One NKVD operative acknowledged Yagoda as a gifted organizer, but vainglorious. Shreider, NKVD iznutri, 17, 36. Another who had defected abroad judged Yagoda “an adventurist, murderer, and sadist.” Agabekov, ChK za rabotoi, 134, 178. “He was a pragmatic type, a do-er, lacking any foundation in ideas,” recalled Boris Gudz, an NKVD foreign intelligence station chief in Tokyo (who would survive the terror). “In his relations with subordinates, he sought the negative moments, in order to use these moments to pressure this or that subordinate.” http://www.fsb.ru/fsb/history/author/single.ht m!id%3D10318010@fsbPublication.html. Gudz was expelled from the party and kicked out of the secret police in April 1937, after the arrest of his sister. He got a job as a bus driver and worked his way up to director of the bus company. He would retire in 1962 and die in 2006, at age 104. His sister was married to Varlam Shalamov, who claimed that Gudz wrote the denunciation that got the writer arrested in Jan. 1937. http://shalamov.ru/library/27/#t10.

101. Vinogradov, Genrikh Iagoda, 89–93 (TsA FSB, f. N-13614, t.2, l. 15–20).

102. On Yagoda’s relations with other NKVD personnel: http://tortuga.angarsk.su/fb2/abramv02/Evrei_v_KGB.fb2_4.html.

103. Il’inskii, Narkom Iagoda, 96.

104. Stefan Zweig’s German-language biography Joseph Fouché (1929) was translated into Russian in 1932 (Leningrad: Vremia). Vyshinsky would quote from the Zweig biography at Yagoda’s trial, equating the Soviet secret police chief with “the old, treacherous, double-dealing school of the political careerist and dishonest scoundrel . . . Joseph Fouché.” Protsess pravo-trotskistskogo bloka (Moscow: Iuridicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1938), 610.

105. Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie, 135–44 (APRF, f. 3, op. 24, d. 302, l. 125–44).

106. Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 139–40; Artizov et al., Reabilitatsiia: kak eto bylo, II: 674 (Ans Zalpeter); Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie, 135–44 (at 136: APRF, f. 3, op. 24, d. 302, l. 125–44).

107. Yezhov even went so far as to attack the sacred founder of the Cheka (“Yes, comrades, everyone must grasp that Felix Edmundovich Dzierżyński vacillated in 1925–1926”). Afanas’ev, Oni ne Molchali, 217 (this speech appears to have taken place in April). Mark Gai (Stokland) was arrested on April 1, and Pauker on April 19. Between April 22 and 25, Georgy Prokofyev and Gai, under torture, linked Yagoda to Tukhachevsky in the plot for a military palace coup. Vinogradov, Genrikh Iagoda, 522.

108. Jansen and Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner, 60 (citing TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 4, d, 147, l. 34).

109. Agranov would be arrested on July 20, 1937, a fact not publicized. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 232 (APRF, f. 3, op. 24, d. 313, l. 37); Pavliukov, Ezhov, 271–3.

110. Kosheleva et al., “Materialy fevral’-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda” (1994, no. 8), 25 (Molotov).

111. When Pravda (Jan. 8, 1936) had reported on an assembly of so-called leading workers of machine tractor stations and agricultural agencies, Stalin had added Voroshilov’s name to the conclusion of the text as an object, along with himself and Molotov, of the panegyrics. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1479, l. 34–5.

112. “‘Cherkni . . . desiatok slov,’” 406.

113. Orlov, Tainaia istoriia, 325 (according to NKVD functionary L. L. Nikolsky).

114. Montefiore, Court of the Red Tsar, 9–10.

115. Lebedev, “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistskii zagovor,’” 228 (Kutyakov diary entry for March 15, 1937; he was arrested May 15).

116. Khaustov, “Deiatel’nost’ organov,” 348 (TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 4, d. 87, l. 292); Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 106.

117. Kosheleva et al., “Materialy fevral’-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda,” (1994, no. 8): 15; Lebedev, “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistskii zagovor,’” 1: 164–5. In notes for his remarks made prior to the plenum, Voroshilov had written, “It is not excluded, on the contrary it is likely, that in the Red Army ranks there are not a few unrevealed, not unmasked Japanese-German, Trotskyite-Zinovievite spies, diversionaries, and terrorists”—a point he omitted at the plenum. Suvenirov, “Narkomat oborony,” at 28, citing TsGASA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 1022, l. 267, 281. Voroshilov made only grammatical corrections to the plenum stenogram (film 2.2726, reel 78).

118. “Delo o tak nazyvaemoi ‘antisovetskoi trotskistskoi organizatsii’ v Krasnoi Armii,” 45; Suvenirov, “Narkomat oborony,” 28 (citing RGVA, f. 9, op. 36, d. 2376, l. 28). On March 29, 1937, Stalin had all party expellees in Red Army commanding ranks discharged and redirected to economic commissariats—where the grim reaper would come for them. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 189–227.

119. Suvenirov, Tragediia RKKA, 57. On Tukhachevsky’s holiday, see Bourne and Watt, British Documents on Foreign Affairs, XIV: 52–4. (Chilston report Feb. 23, 1937, PRO, FO 371/21099, N 1082/250/3); DDF, 2e série, IV: 42 (Coulondre, Feb. 10, 1937).

120. Voroshilov’s formal report, stretching to eighty pages, stated: “I repeat, we have arrested [in the army] 15 or 20 so far, but that does not mean, comrades, that we have cleansed all the enemies. . . . We need to cleanse completely. We in the Worker Peasant Red Army have no right to tolerate even one enemy.” Suvenirov, Tragediia RKKA, 58 (citing RGVA, f. 4, op. 14, d. 1820, l. 58). Voroshilov’s report to the party active in the Red Army, in mid-March, was far sharper about Trotskyite-fascist penetration and the need for a complete cleansing, indicating his succumbing to Stalin’s pressure. Budyonny and Gamarnik at the same gathering reinforced the pressure. Whitewood, Red Army, 226–7 (citing RGASPI, f. 74, op. 2, d. 117, l. 42, 47, 51, 51–3, 58, 95–7).

121. Rybalkin, Operatsiia “X,” 85 (citing RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 961, l. 123). Kulik appeared in the Little Corner, for the first time, on May 23, 1937, along with Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Yezhov, arriving after them, and departing before. Na prieme, 210. See also “Beria protiv Kulika,” in Bobrenev and Riazantsev, Palachi i zhertvy, 197–264 (esp. 203–4).

122. Suvenirov, Tragediia RKKA, 56 (citing RGVA, f. 9., op. 39, d. 69, l. 13).

123. Khaustov, “Razvitie sovetskikh organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti,” 362 (citing TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 45, d. 29, l. 246). Peterson would be shot on Aug. 21, 1937.

124. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/ii: 261 (citing TsGASA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 400, l. 137–9).

125. Eden, Foreign Affairs, 182–3 (Jan. 12, 1937).

126. Evidently, it was not until Feb. 16, 1937, that Largo Caballero would issue the first order to convert some gold ($51 million worth) to pay off the Spanish debt to the Soviets for the military supplies. Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraph 539. Some of Spain’s gold reserves would be drawn upon in convertible currency via the Spanish Republic’s Eurobank account in Paris ($256 million of expenditures in 1937 alone) to pay for purchases of weapons and military supplies. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 137 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 234, l. 56).

127. Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraphs 532–48; Howson, Arms for Spain, 151. On gold see also Viñas, “Financing the Spanish Civil War,” 266–83. In summer 1938, Stalin would receive a denunciation that some of the gold had been embezzled before shipment to the Soviet Union, and he had Beria investigate. Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, 42–3. The total mobilization of Soviet war matériel was something on the order of 600,000 tons. Grechko et al., Istoriia vtoroi mirovoi voiny, II: 54, 137.

128. Payne, Fascism in Spain, 262–3; Bosworth, Mussolini, 319; Preston, Franco, 228.

129. Payne, Falange, 212.

130. Preston, Franco, 242.

131. By the time Franco would finally advance on the Catalan front, in spring 1938, the Republic’s defenders would melt away, rendering his move more a military parade than an offensive. Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 852.

132. In Portugal and Greece, too, traditional authoritarian conservatism blunted indigenous fascist movements. Blinkhorn, Fascists and Conservatives.

133. Preston, Franco, 175–87; Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, chapter 5.

134. Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 905–6.

135. The Carlists supported the claim to the throne of Alfonso Carlos I de Borbón y Austria, but after he died in late Sept. 1936 without an heir, they had splintered, with some supporting Alfonso Carlos’s appointed regent (Prince Xavier of Bourbon-Parma) and others supporting Alfonso XIII (in exile at Rome’s Grand Hotel).

136. Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 907.

137. Bolloten, Spanish Revolution.

138. Before the putsch, on May 20, 1936, Dimitrov had informed Manuilsky that he had a discussion with Stalin about the Spanish question, and that Stalin had approved the Comintern line: support for the Spanish Republic government rather than the Spanish Communist party or revolution. Meshcheriakov, “SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii,” 88 (citing RGASPI, f. 495, op. 74, d. 208, l. 31; f. 17, op. 120, d. 439, l. 266). After the putsch, Stalin would still not support a Communist takeover or putsch, despite being urged to do so by Soviet military men who craved political unity in Spain. Sadly, some scholars continue to insist—against a wealth of evidence—that the “moderate” policies of the Comintern as well as the Spanish Communist party in the civil war were mere “temporary tactical adjustments.” Payne, Spanish Civil War, 293. Payne’s book is dedicated to Bolloten, his mentor, who called the Popular Front a “grand camouflage” for Communist penetration. Bolloten, Grand Camouflage. This is the same Bolloten mentioned in Soviet intelligence documents from the Spanish civil war as “our source.” Costello and Tsraev, Deadly Illusions, 237 (citing ASVRR, file 17679, I: 15 [or 161]; Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, 237.

139. The Soviet Union had interest groups—regional, institutional, personal—that formed over struggles for resources and influence, but they competed for Stalin’s favor, trying to anticipate his preferences and to destroy their rivals—jockeying that made them ultimately dependent on him.

140. Solomon Dridzo, known as Lozovsky, the general secretary of the Red Trade Union International, was just as incredulous: “And so, Hitler does not express the interests of finance capital in Germany?” Manuilsky felt compelled to interject: “Comrade Varga, it is clear to the [Comintern] secretariat that Germany is ruled by finance capital. Comrade Pieck is not denying that fact.” Komolova, Komintern protiv fashizma: dokumenty, 445–8 (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 18, d. 1171, l. 24–9)

141. Fischer, Russia’s Road, 242 (Feb. 11, 1937); Abramov, “Osobaia missiia Davida Kandelaki,” 151–2 (citing AVP RF f. 05, op. 17, pap. 126, d. 1, l. 22; f. 059, op. 1, pap. 244, d. 1717, l. 15), 152 (pap. 244, d. 1715 (Surits to Litvinov, March 21, 1937).

142. Abramov, “Osobaia missiia Davida Kandelaki,” 152 (citing AVP RF, f. 05, op. 17, pap. 130, d. 42, l. 28, 29, 34; f. 059, op. 1, pap. 244, d. 1715, l. 28–9, 45: March 21, 1937).

143. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 56, l. 29.

144. Izvestiia, April 2, 1937. Rosenholz would be removed as foreign trade commissar on July 14, 1937, and replaced by Yevgeny Chvyalev.

145. Abramov, “Osobaia missiia Davida Kandelaki,” 152 (citing AVP RF, f. 5, op. 17, pap. 1304, d. 42, l. 77).

146. DVP SSSR, XX: 174–5.

147. Khaustov, “Deiatel’nost’ organov,” 299–300 (TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 58, d. 249, l. 158); Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 45–6 (APRF, f. 3, op. 58, d. 249, l. 142–3; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 21, l. 29), 286 (APRF, f. 3, op. 58, d. 254a, l. 82).

148. Khlevniuk et al., Stalinskoe politbiuro, 55; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 229–30.

149. Well described by Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators, 3–25. Her husband, Heinz, was arrested in April 1937; she was arrested the next year and sent to a camp in Karaganda as “the wife of an enemy of the people.”

150. Thurston, Life and Terror.

151. Medvedev, On Stalin, 102. See also Beck and Gordin, Russian Purge, 146 (“He’s not a party member and he’s not a Jew, so why has he been arrested?”).

152. Pravda, April 17 and Aug. 12, 1938. See also Vlast’ sovetov, 1938, no. 10: 52–3.

153. Pravda, April 29, May 11, June 24, Aug. 14 and 25, 1937.

154. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, 336.

155. Muza, “Tragedy of a Russian Woman,” 495; “Iz stenogrammy repetitsii spektaklia ‘Anna Karenina,’” in V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, o tvorchestve aktera: khrestomatiia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1984), 338. The play was featured at the Paris Exposition of 1937.

156. The coronation was scheduled for May 12, 1937. Between April 1 and June 10, 1937, 4,370 people would be discharged from the Red Army for political reasons, compared with 577 during the first three months of that year. Suvenirov, “Narkomat oborony,” 29 (citing, RGVA, f. 9, op. 29, d. 340).

157. Izvestiia, April 23, 1937; Pravda, April 23, 1937.

158. Sovetskoe foto, 1973, no. 9; Ogonek, 1937, no. 16–7; Lopatin, Volga idet v Moskvu; Shein, Kanal Moskva-Volga; Fedenko, Kanal Moskva-Volga. Stalin had visited sections of the canal on June 4, 1934, June 14, 1936, and April 22, 1937: http://moskva-volga.ru/trete-prishestvie-stalina.

159. Davies et al., Economic Transformation, 127.

160. Osokina, “Economic Disobedience,” 180.

161. Ellman, Socialist Planning, 107; Harrison, “National Income,” 52–3.

162. “What is there to say about the success of Soviet power,” one worker complained. “It is lies. The newspapers cover up the real state of things. I am a worker, wear torn clothes, my four children go to school half-starving, in rags. I, an honest worker, am a visible example of what Soviet power has given the workers in the last twenty years.” Davies, Popular Opinion, 135 (citing TsGAIPD, f. 24, op. 2v, d. 2282, l. 109).

163. Thurston, Life and Terror, 166–8.

164. Danilov et al., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, V/i: docs. 71, 76, 81, 93, 94, 98, 106, 125, 127; Berelowitch and Danilov, Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK-OGPU-NKVD, IV: 273–450.

165. Khlevniuk, Stalin: Zhizn’, 221 (citing RGASPI, f. 82, op. 2, d. 887, l. 17, 32, 41–2: March 2, 1937, and April 14 and 21, 1937).

166. Semyon Firin-Pupko later alleged that in 1937 Stalin raised the question of a canal from Moscow to Vladivostok, cutting a west-east waterway across the entire continent to link the northern flowing Siberian rivers, a gargantuan task unprecedented in recorded history. Sokolov, Obshchestvo i vlast’, 163–4.

167. Kosheleva et al., “Materialy fevral’-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP (b) 1937 goda” (1994, no. 8), 18; Davies, “Soviet Economy,” 26–7.

168. Khlevniuk, “Economic Officials in the Great Terror,” 58. Semyon Lobov (b. 1888), a former steelworker and forestry industry commissar until Oct. 1936 (when he was shifted to the food industry), had stated, “is it really normal that if I, the commissar, need to obtain a pair of traincars with sheet steel or equipment for papermaking, I need to get the authorization of the Central Committee.” Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 144 (TsA FSB, ASD P-4879, t. 2, s. 109). Lobov would be arrested June 21, 1937, and executed Oct. 30 of that year.

169. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 128 (APRF, f. 3, op. 58, d. 405, l. 64–5).

170. Radosh et al., Spain Betrayed, 146–8 (RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 1010, l. 295–300). Krivoshein appears to have returned from Spain at this time.

171. Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 43 (Dec. 16, 1936), 58 (March 14, 1937).

172. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 212 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 223, l. 141–2), 213 (l. 146). “We are well aware of the scale of Soviet assistance, the steamships with Russian weapons all the while are passing by our shores,” Leonardo Vitetti, director of European Affairs in the Italian foreign ministry, told the Soviet embassy in Rome in April 1937. “We have not touched them, not wanting to complicate the already extremely sharp and awful Italo-Soviet relations.” Meshcheriakov, “SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii,” 86 (citing AVP RF, f. 048 z, op. 14–16, pap. 4, d. 8, l. 195); and Tournier, Les archives secretes de la Wilhelmstrasse III, 88, 91–2. On March 24, 1937, Mekhlis wrote to Stalin that “according to the information we have, comrade M. E. Koltsov is severely exhausted and completely physically worn down,” and was requesting permission to recall him to Moscow, a request Stalin approved. On Nov. 22, 1937, Mekhlis would write to Stalin that “Koltsov is in a bad mood now and, it seems, he has lost his bearings and could commit mistakes. He has been away from Moscow and party influence for a long time.” Mekhlis would again propose his recall, which Stalin would approve. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 215 (APRF [transferred to RGANI), f. 3, op. 34, d. 127, l. 27), 312 (l. 33–4). Mekhlis appears to have been angry that Koltsov wrote to him complaining he had been left out of the candidates approved for the Dec. 12, 1937, elections to the Supreme Soviet.

173. Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 59 (March 16, 1937). Four days later, in the presence of Dimitrov, Stalin told the Spanish writers Rafael Alberti and María-Teresa Léonon that “the people and the whole world must be told the truth—the Spanish people are in no condition now to bring about a proletarian revolution—the internal and especially the international situation do not favor it.” Stalin added that “victory in Spain will loosen fascism’s hold in Italy and Germany. Communist and socialist forces must join forces—they now share the same basic aims—a democratic republic.” Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 60–1 (March 20, 1937). Dimitrov did not relent: On March 23, he provided Stalin with a report by a Bulgarian Comintern official who had spent two months in Spain. “The ability of the government to govern is very limited . . . Everyone, the broad popular masses, feels the need for a strong government, a government capable of ruling . . . The fundamental source of weakness of the government is that it lacks . . . a state apparatus.” Stalin may well have agreed with this assessment, but he still refrained from having the Communists in Spain seize power. Dallin and Firsov, Dimitrov and Stalin, 51–8.

174. Kaganovich to Orjonikidze, Sept. 30, 1936: Khlevniuk et al., Stalinskoe politburo, 149.

175. Spain’s Communist party is alleged to have grown to 400,000 at its peak. Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 506–7.

176. Communist agents could not fail to learn of these probes. Payne, Spanish Revolution, 271–2. On April 15, 1937, a Comintern representative in the Republican camp wrote to Stalin urging him to break completely with Largo Caballero. Radosh et al., Spain Betrayed, 184–95.

177. Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 58 (March 14, 1937).

178. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 221 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 223, l. 151), versus Berzin’s report: 219 (l. 152). Berzin blamed the weak artillery support and weak offensive capabilities of the blue infantry, and the recent strengthening of the whites as well as the advantageous geography seized by them.

179. Southworth, Guernica, Guernica. Preston, Franco, 243–7. The article was by George Steer, South African born, who had written authoritatively about the Italian atrocities in the Abyssinian War. Steer would be killed in Burma in 1945. A Pablo Picasso canvas, an 11 x 25 foot mural commissioned by the Republican government for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition, was completed already by mid-June and exhibited in July; it depicts the intense suffering of people, animals, and buildings subjected to violence.

180. Lebedev, “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistskii zagovor,’” 30–3. Stalin could have had the “information” delivered into the hands of the Japanese in Warsaw, in order to have it “leaked” back through foreign channels, perhaps to persuade Voroshilov.

181. Maclean, Escape to Adventure, 15; Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service, 227–8; Conquest, Reassessment, 214. Unusually, on April 28, 1937, Izvestiya issued a correction to a photo caption published the previous day: “Comrade Stalin the organizer of the strike of Tiflis railroad workers in 1902.” The newspaper had to admit that at the time Stalin was imprisoned in Batum. It seems Stalin himself, or his aide, conveyed to the newspaper editor that the caption was “an utter misunderstanding from the point of view of historical truth.” Izvestiia, April 27 and April 28, 1937.

182. Lebedev, “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistskii zagovor,’” 178; “Delo on tak nazyvaemoi ‘antisovetskoi trotskistskoi organizatsii’ v Krasno armii,” 46–7 (S. P. Uritsky); Cristiani and Mikhaleva, Le repressioni, 254, 256 (RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 1047, l. 70). Stalin canceled the annual reception at the Kremlin Grand Palace for graduates of military academies.

183. Sharapov, Naum Eitingon, 57.

184. Thomas, Spanish Civil War, 628–45.

185. Tatiana Tess, in Efimov, Mikhail Koltsov, 325.

186. S. Prokofeva and N. Godon, in Efimov, Mikhail Kol’tsov, 285, 384. The Embankment was officially known as Bersenevskaya. Koltsov previously lived on Bolshaya Dmitrovka. Of the fifty-six or so Central Committee members and candidates who had apartments in the House on the Embankment, forty-five would be arrested. Many residents, like Koltsov, were not Central Committee members.

187. Efimov, Mikhail Koltsov, 26–135 (at 103, 94–5). Koltsov had been in the Little Corner on Dec. 9, 1935, for twenty minutes, one-on-one. Na prieme, 174.

188. The Kremlin audience took place on April 15, after which Koltsov received a coveted invitation to the 1937 May Day reception at the St. George’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Place, where he was toasted by Voroshilov. On May 14, Stalin again received Koltsov in the Little Corner for one hour, alone. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 215 (APRF, f. 3, op. 34, d. 127, l. 27); Na prieme, 207, 209. Koltsov’s Spanish Diary picks up again on May 23, on a train from Italy to Bilbao.

189. Orlov, the Soviet station chief in Spain, who was close to Koltsov, would comment, “The NKVD is like a gigantic mailbox, into which any irresponsible person may drop an irresponsible invention.” Orlov, Tainaia istoriia, 187–8; Orlov, Secret History, 187–8.

190. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 233 (APRF, f. 3, op. 53, d. 471, l. 73–4), 241 (op. 65, d. 224, l. 32), 242 (l. 30), 268, 276 (l. 115, 117–9), 249–52 (op. 53, d. 471, l. 3–4, 5, 75), 298–9 (d. 472, l. 3–4).

191. Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, 205.

192. Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, 165–8, 454n73, 454n75 (citing ASVRR, file 5581, I: 38, 45). See also Philby’s obfuscatory memoir: Silent War, 17.

193. Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive, 114. (Later Grigulevich would be one of many tapped to assassinate Trotsky in Mexico.) Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, 193; “V Madride ia rukovodil gruppoi” (Grigulevich interview); Primakov, Ocherki, III: 148–54.

194. Primakov, Ocherki, III: 153. With Orlov, Girgulevich participated in the kidnapping and murder of Nin.

195. Kol’tsov, “Fashistsko-shpionskaia rabota ispanskikh trotskistov.” On the forgery: Izvestiia, Nov. 26, 1992.

196. Sharapov, Naum Eitingon, 53. See also Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, 291–2.

197. “It was a successful piece of disinformation reported directly to Stalin by Yezhov.” Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, 44–5.

198. A Soviet military intelligence report had concluded that the “Trotskyite” and anarchist strongholds in Spain had to be broken. Radosh et al., Spain Betrayed, 129–33 (RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 960, l. 251–77: Nikonov, Feb. 20, 1937).

199. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 9. Orwell would complete his Homage to Catalonia in Jan. 1938, but his publisher, Victor Gollancz, who controlled the Left Book Club, would reject it—unseen. (The Left Book Club instead published pro-Soviet material on Spain.) But Frederic Warburg published Homage to Catalonia in a print run of 1,500, and managed to sell 800. Warburg also published Souvarine’s Stalin and Gide’s Back from the USSR. Arthur Koestler, who went to Spain in 1936 as a correspondent for Münzenberg media, recalls how the latter shouted at him concerning his manuscript about Spain, “Too weak. Too objective. Hit them! Tell the world how they run over their prisoners with tanks, how they pour petrol over them and burn them alive. Make the world gasp with horror. Hammer it into their heads. Make them wake up.” Koestler wrote in the published book: “If those who have at their command printing machines and printer’s ink for the expression of their opinions, remain neutral and objective in the face of such bestiality, then Europe is lost.” Koestler, Spanish Testament, 177; Koestler, Invisible Writing, 333.

200. Herbert, Paris 1937. Both Speer and Yofan won gold medals; Kaplan, Red City, Blue Period, 179–87.

201. Petrov, Stroitel’stvo politorganov, 224, 237–8; Petrov, Partiinoe stroitel’stvo, 298; Erickson, Soviet High Command (3rd ed.), 460.

202. “Delo o tak nazyvaemoi ‘antisovetskoi trotskistskoi organizatsii’ v Krasnoi armii,” 47–8; Artizov et al., Reabilitatsiia: kak eto bylo, II: 678 (Aleksandr Avseevich, 1962); Pravda, April 29, 1988 (B. Viktorov). Primakov (a Bolshevik since 1914) had served as military attaché in Afghanistan (1927–29) and then Japan (1930); in 1928 he had been forced to declare a break with the Trotskyites. Zdanovich, Organy, 320 (citing TsA FSB, delo R-9000, t. 4, l. 53).

203. “Delo o tak nazyvaemoi ‘antisovetskoi trotskistskoi organizatsii’ v Krasnoi armii,” 46; Zolotarev, Russkii arkhiv: Velikaia Otechestvennaia, XIII (2–1): 12. Also on May 10, 1937, the office of political commissar was reinstated (it had been abolished in 1934).

204. Voennye arkhivy Rossii, 41; Lebedev, “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistskii zagovor,’” 182; Na prieme, 209; Viktor A. Aleksandrov, Delo Tukhachevskogo.

205. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 115–6 (TsA FSB, ASD P-4615, l. 258–61; ASD N. 15301, tom 2: 37–8); Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i VChk, 170–6.

206. Tukhachevsky managed to clash not only with the partisan-war types of the civil war (Voroshilov, Budyonny, Kulik), but also old-line professionals, such as Shaposhnikov, whom Tukhachevsky derided as “cautious” and “an office Napoleon.” Koritskii et al., Tukhachevskii, 17. That said, Shaposhnikov’s earlier appointment to the general staff might have been on Tukhachevsky’s recommendation. Ken, Mobilizatsionnoe planirovanie, 198–9 (RGASPI, f. 134, op. 3, d. 17, l. 65: Kollontai diary); Nord, “Marshal Tukhachevskii,” 114.

207. Zdanovich, Organy, 282–4 (citing TsA FSB, delo R-9000, t. 24, l. 1, l. 210, l. 48ob, l. 72.).

208. Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, 89–90.

209. German intelligence purportedly sought to exploit these appetites, too, sending the blond, blue-eyed singer Josephine Heinze Tukhachevsky’s way. Leskov, Stalin i zagovor Tukhachevskogo, 222–47.

210. Kantor, Zakliataia drzuhba, 295. German general Blomberg had described Tukhachevsky as “youthfully fresh, sociable, sympatisch . . . He withheld himself from conversations about any political themes, but was a talkative and purposeful conversationalist when touching upon the operational and tactical areas. A very winning persona.” Kantor, Voina i mir, 296–7, 300 (citing Blomberg’s private archive, “Reise des Chefs des Truppenamts nach Russland,” Aug.–Sept. 1928, 2–3, 14–16, 46).

211. Not long after Stalin had absolved Tukhachevsky, back in fall 1930, of plotting a seizure of power with the rightists, Voroshilov had forwarded two letters incriminating him, commenting that one “gave a brilliant and damning characterization.” The letters to Voroshilov were from Verkhovsky and Bergavinov, and forwarded to Stalin in Jan. 1931. Ken, Mobilizatsionnoe planirovanie, 132. For hearsay about Tukhachevsky’s criticisms of Voroshilov for incompetence, including in front of others, see Nord, Marshal Tukhachevsky, 102; and Simonov, Glazami chloveka moeogo pokoleniia, 383 (Zhukov).

212. Uborevičius, known for his tactical and operational insight, mentored an extraordinary group of officers, including Semyon Timoshenko (b. 1895), Alexander Vasilevsky (b. 1895), Georgy Zhukov (b. 1896), Kirill Meretskov (b. 1897), Dmitry Pavlov (b. 1897), Ivan Konev (b, 1897), and Matvei Zakharov (b. 1898).

213. Svetlanin, Dal’nevostochnyi zagovor, 101 (the deputy was I. F. Fedko). In Sept. and Dec. 1936, the NKVD had received information that Blyukher was planning a military putsch. “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistkii zagovor,’” 10.

214. This went far down the chain of command. “I feel that my every step is under observation,” remarked K. I. Sokolov-Strakhov, editor of the Military-Historical Bulletin, in comments that helped provoke his arrest. “It is hard and even frightening now to work on the literary-historical front.” (Sokolov-Strakhov was married to the niece of a former chief of the gendarmes.) Suvenirov, “Narkomat oborny,” 33, 56 (citing RGVA, f. 9, op. 39, d. 29, l. 5).

215. “The causes behind why I came to military intelligence are known to all,” Uritsky told the group’s “party active” on May 19, 1937. “The causes were a breach . . . I arrived here and there were people who did not help me much. You and I are bad intelligence agents.” Gorbunov, “Voennaia razvedka v 1934–1939 godakh” (no. 3), 57 (citing RGVA, f. 9, op. 30, d. 54, l. 26).

216. Rodina, 1995, no. 2: 87; Pogonii, Lubianka, 2, 203; Tumshis and Papchinskii, 1937, bol’shaia chistka, 404–6, 445–51. Artuzov would be executed on Aug. 21, 1937.

217. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 299, 304, 307–10. Firin had helped supervise Stalin’s visit to the Moscow-Volga Canal on April 22, 1937, before being arrested on May 9 as a German spy. Kokurin and Petrov, “Gulag,” 114.

218. Sever and Kolpakidi, GRU, 358.

219. Stalin also underscored the need to portray Soviet spies as “genuine patriots, heroes, of their country,” in order “to attract youth, talented people, girls, scientists” to intelligence work, but warned that “the enemy’s strong intelligence and our weakness are a provocation to war.” Petrov and Jansen, Stalinskii pitomets, 290–3 (TsA FSB, f. 6, op. 5, d, 25, l. 208–10). See also Vinogradov, “Tret’ia reform organov bezopasnosti,” II: 76–96, esp. 93. One account has Stalin going in person, on May 22, 1937, to military intelligence HQ: Gorbunov, “Voennaia razvedka v 1934–1939 godakh” (no 3.), 57. On the consequences, see also Alekseev et al., Entsiklopediia voennoi razvedki, 508–9.

220. Voennye arkhivy Rossii, 44; Lebedev, “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistskii zagovor,’” 188. See also Pankov, Komkor Eideman, 103. Voroshilov had recommended promoting Eideman to head of antiaircraft, arguing that it needed someone of “major authority.” Whitewood, Red Army, 212 (citing RGVA, f. 4, op. 19, d. 18, l. 176).

221. Some say the arrest occurred in the office of the provincial party secretary, others in his train coach (he had not yet moved into an apartment). Nikulin, Tukhachevskii, 190; Sokolov, Tukhachevskii, 310–1, (citing P. A. Ermolin); Kantor, Voina i mir, 370 (citing letter of N. I. Shishikin, in the personal archives of Iu. V. Khitrovo); Koritskii et al., Tukhachevskii, 128–9; Zen’kovich, Marshaly i genseki, 488.

222. Pechenkin, “1937 god,” 43, citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d, 615, l. 8, 10, 14.

223. Kantor, Voina i mir, 386–7; Svetlana Tukhachevsky’s statement in Yuliya Kantor, Mikhail Nikolaevich Tukhachevsky: www.pseudology.org/colonels/Tukhachevsky.htm. The Central Committee, without a plenun, expelled Tukhachevsky as well as Rudzutaks from the party and handed them over to the NKVD. Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie, 190 (APRF, f. 3, op. 24, d. 304, l. 112); Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 448. Ushakov would be executed in Jan. 1940.

224. Na prieme, 210. Kandelaki would be arrested Sept. 11, 1937.

225. Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service, 234.

226. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/ii: 263; Krasnaia zvezda, June 4, Aug. 13, 1964. Pravda announced his suicide on June 1, 1937. There were nearly 800 suicides in the Red Army in 1937, and more than 800 the next year. Khlevniuk, 1937–i, 207. Gamarnik had been parroting the Stalin line, telling a party meeting in the military (March 13, 1937), for ex.: “Comrades, the Japanese-German Trotskyist agents, spies, and wreckers are in a full range of our army organization, in the staffs, the institutions, the academies, the military-training institutions.” He repeated this in more speeches before his arrest for being the phenomenon he was warning against. Whitewood, “Purge of the Red Army,” 296, citing RGVA, f. 9, op. 29, d. 319, l. 2.

227. Мinakov, Za otvorotom marshal’skoi shineli, 249–358.

228. Davies et al., Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 556–7. The Azov–Black Sea Territory was divided in Sept. 1937; Yevdokimov became party chief of the new Rostov province.

229. Rumors circulated that when a preeminent sadist (Anatoly Yesaulov) had failed to beat a confession out of Yagoda for espionage, Stalin had assigned the task to Yevdokimov. The rumor was false yet indicative. Vinogradov, Genrikh Iagoda, 95–243.

230. Pavliukov, Ezhov, 270–1.

231. Pavliukov, Ezhov, 274–5; Petrov and Jansen, Stalinskii pitomets, 67–8. See also Wheatcroft, “Agency and Terror.” Kursky shot himself on July 8, 1937.

232. Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD; Naumov, Stalin i NKVD, 173–88.

233. http://www.hrono.ru/dokum/193_dok/19390413beria.php (APRF, f. 3, op. 24, d. 373, l. 3–44: protocol of Frinovsky interrogation, Beria to Stalin April 11, 1939). Frinovsky and Yezhov were not close. “I had multiple clashes at work with him,” Yezhov would later observe of Frinovsky. “I cursed him out, and called him a fool to his face, because no sooner would he arrest someone among the NKVD operatives then he would run to me and shout that it was all fabrication [lipa], that the person was wrongly arrested.” “Poslednee slovo Nikolai Ezhova.”

234. http://www.hrono.ru/dokum/193_dok/19390413beria.php (APRF, f. 3, op. 24, d. 373, l. 3–44: protocol of Frinovsky interrogation, sent by Beria to Stalin April 11, 1939); Afanas’ev, Oni ne molchali, 218.

235. “Poslednee slovo Nikolai Ezhova”; Petrov and Jansen, Stalinskii pitomets, 536 (citing TsA FSB, sledstvennoe delo No. N-15302, t. 1, l. 184–6); Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 560–2.

236. Gide, Vozvrashchenie iz SSSR (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1990), 80. On the Soviet response to the Gide book, see Fleishman, Pasternak v tridtsatye gody, 378–83.

237. RGASPI, f. 77, op. 3–e, d. 117, l. 33.

238. Koltsov, who was cohabitating with Feuchtwanger’s wife, Maria Osten, had lobbied for Feuchtwanger to be received in the Soviet Union. RGASPI, f. 17, op., 114, d. 952, l. 48 (Angarov to Ezhov, Nov. 2, 1936; note from Mikhail Apletin, deputy head of the writers’ union foreign commission, to Angarov).

239. Feuchtwanger, Moskva 1937, 68. See also Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, 238.

240. Feuchtwanger, Moskva 1937, 64–5, 91. See also Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, 93–5. Feuchtwanger visited Moscow Dec. 1, 1936, to Feb. 5, 1937. Stalin received him on Jan. 8. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 820, l. 3–22; Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, 152–3. Feuchtwanger’s book would be withdrawn from Soviet libraries in 1938. One scholar noted that he “was the last in the line of the celebrated fellow-travelers of the interwar period to turn his journey into an eyewitness’ public endorsement of Stalinism; he was the last European intellectual sympathizer to be received on the grand scale of Rolland and Gide.” David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment, 270. Orwell conceded that he would support Communism over fascism if forced to choose. Davison, George Orwell.

241. Vishnevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, VI: 410–1.

242. Anderson, Voennyi sovet, 40–1, 57; “Delo o tak nazyvaemoi ‘antisovetskoi trotskistskoi voennoi organizatsii’ v krasnoi armii,” Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 4: 52.

243. Meretskov, Na sluzhbe narodu, 166–7.

244. Na prieme, 211; Pechenkin, “1937 god,” 51.

245. Polishchuk, “Zasedanie RVS 1–3 iuinia 1937 goda.” Polishchuk was then the head of the Military Electrical-Technology Academy. He is listed as having received the interrogation protocols to read: Anderson, Voennyi sovet, 41.

246. Anderson, Voennyi sovet, 66–70, 74–5. See also Sokolov, Mikhail Tukhachevskii, 378.

247. “‘Nevol’niki v rukakh germanskogo reiskhvera,’” 74 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1120, l. 28–57 at 31–2). See also “Sovetskaia razvedka i russkaia voennaia emigratsiia 20–40x gg.,” 119. On Nov. 14, 1932, Mężyński sent a letter to Stalin proposing Dzierżyński for a medal; Stalin wrote on it “Opposed.” He had still not forgiven Dzierżyński’s brief wavering. But Stalin had authorized a Dzierżyński statue to be erected in front of the NKVD headquarters, on Dzierżyński Square, on the tenth anniversary of his death, in July 1936. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 5284, l. 1–3; Plekhanov and Plekhanov, F. E. Dzerzhinskii, 671 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 279, l. 41).

248. Anderson, Voennyi sovet, 128–43 (esp. 128, 131, 134–5); “‘Nevol’niki v rukakh germanskogo reikhsvera,’” 74 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1120, l. 28–57 at 31–2). See also Gorbatov, Gody i voiny, 122–3. In Jan. 1938, Stalin would take to arguing, unpersuasively, that skill in the military arts was not so crucial for military success and that what mattered were the social origins of military leaders and the overall correct government policy of the workers-peasants state. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1120, l. 104–5, 109.

249. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1120, l. 28–57 (at 46–7).

250. Pechenkin, “1937 god.” The 1961 commission on Stalin’s military repressions was published in two places: Voennye arkhivy Rossii, 29–113 (incomplete); and Voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv, 1997, no. 1: 173–255, no. 2: 3–81. See also the illuminating testimony about opposition to collectivization extracted from or written for Pavel Bulanov about Yagoda: Il’inskii, Narkom Iagoda, 500–8 (at 500: TsA FSB, N-13614, tom 2: 211–21: April 30, 1937).

251. Pechenkin, “1937 god,” 50–1.

252. “‘Nevol’niki v rukakh germanskogo reikhsvera,’” 75–6.

253. The ten were Voroshilov, Budyonny, Shaposhnikov, Timoshenko, Kulik, Apanasenko, Gorodovikov, Shchadenko, Khrulyov, and Meretskov (arrested but released). The majority had been members of the First Cavalry Army in the civil war. Pavliukov, Ezhov, 288. Pechenkin gives eight not arrested. Pechenkin, “1937 god,” 52.

254. Anderson, Voennyi sovet, 250–6, 243–5.

255. Preston, Franco, 278–9.

256. Anderson, Voennyi sovet, 340–1. Already on May 10, 1937, in a detailed report to Stalin and Molotov, Voroshilov had parroted the new Stalin line. The mass arrests of the highest commanders had followed almost immediately. Whitewood, “Purge of the Red Army,” 300, citing RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 965, l. 65.

257. Ulam, Stalin, 18 (attributing the line to Budu Mdivani).

258. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1549. Keke had taken ill on May 13, 1937.

259. The inventory of her belongings: RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1549; Ilizarov, Tainaia zhizn’ Stalina, 281–2. The effects went to Maria Kvinkadze.

260. Memuary freiliny imperatritsy, 204–5 (Tatuli Gviniashvili).

261. Elagin, Ukroshchenie iskusstv, 55; Jelagin, Taming of the Arts, 51–2.

262. “You’re wrong to talk about famine and penury abroad, because they write to me that everything there is cheaper than here and they send money,” one woman in Vologda, Stalin’s former place of internal exile, observed in 1937 in response to party agitation. Golubev, “Esli mir obrushitsia na nashu Respubliku,” 68–9 (citing BOANPI, f. 1858, op. 2, d. 940, l. 56). A Sept. 1938 secret directive confirmed the institutions that could receive foreign literature, dividing them into three categories. Only those in the first category—the secretariat of the Council of People’s Commissars, the Central Committee, the Supreme Soviet, Pravda and Izvestiya editorial boards, the foreign affairs commissariat, the NKVD foreign department, TASS, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, leading members of foreign Communist parties, and foreign embassies—enjoyed unlimited privileges. Blium, Tsenzura v Sovetskom Soiuze, 279–80. Despite the tight control, the censor still ended up pulping 10 percent of the purchased foreign periodicals (which cost the state a quarter million gold rubles). In 1939, the USSR would import 2.36 million individual foreign publications (books, pamphlets, issues of periodicals); the censorship examined about one-quarter of the total, and 10 percent were again destroyed. Goriaeva, Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi tsenzury, 311, 326.

263. “The window to the world can be covered by a newspaper,” in the ironic words of Stanisław Jerzy Lec, Polish poet and aphorist, who had been born de Tusch-Letz in Habsburg Lemberg (Lwów) in 1909. Lec, Unkempt Thoughts.

264. Meerovich, “V narkomindele, 1922–1939: interv’iu s E. A. Gnedinym,” Pamiat’: istoricheskii sbornik [Paris], 1981, vyp. 5: 381.

265. Rittersporn, “Omnipresent Conspiracy,” 101–20; also found in Getty and Manning, Stalinist Terror, 99–115. See also Rittersporn, Anguish.

266. He added that “we junior officers knew that personally we ran no hazards.” Akhmedov, In and Out of Stalin’s GRU, 104.

267. For a detailed account of how the NKVD fabricated the case, see Cherushev, 1937 god. Stalin edited the copy, drafted by Mekhlis, following sessions in the Little Corner. Na prieme, 211–2; Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie, 217–19 (APRF, f. 3. op. 24. d. 308. l. 78–83). Józef Unszlicht, although long out of the military, was arrested that day but not included in the military trial. He would be executed on July 28, 1938.

268. Pravda, June 9–13, 1937. An abridged Soviet version appeared as Razvedka i kontrrazvedka (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1938).

269. Voennye arkhivy Rossii, 50; Lebedev, “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistskii zagovor,’” 194; Artizov et al., Reabilitatsiia: kak eto bylo, II: 688.

270. Suvenirov, Tragediia RKKA, 103 (citing RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d 1038, l. 188–9: letter, June 5).

271. Gorchakov, Ian Berzin, 113. Berzin would only last until Aug. 1, 1937.

272. One author has alleged that there was a “plot” by these military men, not to seize power, but to have Voroshilov removed, which provoked Stalin’s actions. Minakov, 1937. There is no evidence whatsoever for such a “plot” (as opposed to a wish). Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 17.

273. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/ii: 264–5. A facsimile of Tukhachevsky’s “confession” and a copy of the “plan of defeat” are in: “Pokazaniia marshala Tukhachevskogo.”

274. Trotsky had condemned Tukhachevsky’s idea of a Red-Army-led “revolution from abroad” (which the latter had applied unsuccessfully to Poland in 1920). See also Tukhachevsky’s militant contribution to Der bewaffnete Aufstand, 21, 23.

275. Rapoport and Alexeev, High Treason, 5–8. The street where Tukhachevsky met his death, formerly known as Nikolskaya, had been the location of his original Moscow apartment.

276. Jansen and Petrov, “Mass Terror and the Court.”

277. Lebedev, “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistskii zagovor,’” 199.

278. Verevkin-Rakhal’skii, Moi 90 let, 193. Voroshilov’s diary for June 7 indicates that Stalin went back and forth on precisely who of those already arrested would be put on trial, and who would sit in the panel of judges. Deputy Commander of the Far Eastern Army Mikhail Sangursky, who was arrested June 1–2, 1937, appeared in Voroshilov’s June 7 order on the trial, but before June 11 was removed. Voroshilov had Berzin and Smirnov originally listed as judges but crossed them off. Kun, Stalin, 400–1 (facsimiles of the pages from Voroshilkov’s diary); “Prikaz narodnogo komissara oborony Soiuza SSR no. 072 (7 iiunia 1937 g.),” 46; Suvenirov, Tragediia RKKA, 91, 379.

279. Zen’kovich, Marshaly i genseki, 510–1 (citing the eleven-page trial transcript). Five of the seven military men sitting as judges with Ulrich would soon be executed themselves, except for Budyonny and Shaposhnikov.

280. RGVA, f. 33 987, op. 3s, d. 828, Volkogonov papers, Hoover, container 17. In his account for Stalin (June 26), Budyonny noted that although Tukhachevsky had shaken his head “no” during the reading of the charges and testimony, and denied passing any classified documents to the Germans, in the end he pronounced himself guilty. Voennye arkhivy Rossii, 55–6; Lebedev, “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistskii zagovor,’” 199–200; APRF, f. 3, op. 24, d. 310, l. 170–83. See also the report of another “judge,” I. P. Belov, in Cristiani and Mikhaleva, Le repressioni, 192–8.

281. “Delo o tak nazyvaemoi ‘antisovetskoi trotskistskoi organizatsii’ v Krasnoi Armii,” 57.

282. Blokhin was assisted by Ignatev. Lebedev, “M. N. Tukhachevskii i ‘voenno-fashistskii zagovor,’” 199. Just after Ulrich had pronounced sentences, Stalin received Timoshenko, alone, for half an hour (June 12). He would be posted to Ukraine, to replace Yakir as commander of the Kiev military district. Na prieme, 212.

283. “World fascism this time, too, has discovered that its loyal agents, the Gamarniks and the Tukhachevskys, the Yakirs and the Uboreviches, as well as similar treasonous offal, lackeys serving capitalism, have been wiped from the face of the earth,” wrote Voroshilov, in a directive to all Red Army servicemen printed in Pravda (June 13). “Their memory will be cursed and forgotten.” Tukhachevsky was equated with “playing the same role as Franco.”

284. Pravda, June 13, 1937 (Krupskaya). See also Komsomol’skaia pravda, Jan. 18, 2013.

285. Vostryshev, Moskva stalinskaia, 361–2; Kommersant vlast’, July 9, 2012.

286. Bailes, Technology and Society, 387; Egorov and Kliucharev, Grazhdanskaia aviatsiia SSSR, 98–9, 101; Karpov, Aviatsiia strany sotsializma, 60–2. Stalin sometimes summoned these flight crews to the Little Corner before their flights, going over their plans, and occasionally saw them off at the airfield. Chkalov (with Baidukov) was recorded in the Little Corner twice: July 14, 1936, and May 25, 1937 (before the Pacific Coast flight). Na prieme, 189, 210.

287. Velikii letchik nashego vremeni, 315.

288. Bailes, Technology and Society, 381–406.

289. Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, 332.

290. Kumanev, Riadom so Stalinym, 435–6 (Chadaev). See also Rubtsov, Alter ego Stalina; Rubtsov, Iz-za spiny vozhdia.

291. Volkogonov papers, Hoover, container 4, telegrams to and from the military districts from TsAMO; Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 160–4. Mekhlis soon replaced Gamarnik as chief of the political department in the military (from Dec. 1937), a post he would hold until Sept. 1940. “The more ‘enemies of the people’ Stalin exterminates, rising upward on their corpses,” Trotsky acidly wrote of Mekhlis after his promotion to deputy defense commissar, “the greater the void that forms around him.” “Voroshilov Is Next in Line,” Biulleten’ oppozitsii, no. 62–3 (1938): 23.

292. A contemporary Soviet diplomat, who defected and survived, well understood the impossibility, physically and psychologically, of a Red Army plot in cahoots with Nazism. Barmine, One Who Survived, 223.

293. Volkogonov, “Marshal Voroshilov,” 163.

294. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 321 (TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 5, d. 343, l. 84); Khaustov, “Razvitie sovetskikh organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti,” 362. Khrulyov was demoted to the Kiev military district in 1938, but Stalin would bring him back to Moscow in Sept. 1939. Voroshilov evidently also managed to save Mikhail Lukin, who became a lieutenant general. Muratov and Gorodetskaia, Komandarm Lukin, 262. See also Voroshilov’s appeal to Stalin (July 11, 1937) for a member of the military council of the Ural Military District. (The file contains no answer.) Volkogonov papers, Hoover, container 17.

295. Suvenirov, Tragediia RKKA, 64; Volkogonov papers, Hoover, container 4, telegrams to and from the military districts from TsAMO (this one dated Oct. 2, 1937). See also Cristiani and Mikhaleva, Le repressioni, 66.