Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

CHAPTER 4 TERRORISM

Yesterday I was at the NKVD. . . . I understood that, in order to demonstrate my loyalty, I need to work harder for the NKVD. He said that if I work well, everything will remain a secret, but otherwise I could be deported from Moscow. I was given three main tasks in my work . . . the October Revolution celebrations and conversations. Is an assassination attempt against Stalin not being prepared . . . By the way, in front of him lay a file two fingers high all about me.

Informant’s notes, November 1934¹

STALIN’S UNDERSTANDING OF WORLD markets remained amateurish, but he had a keen appreciation for technology. As of 1934, the Soviets possessed 3,500 tanks (T-26s, BTs, T-28s), as well as another 4,000 armored vehicles (T-27s). Fighter planes of Soviet make and mobile artillery were also coming off assembly lines in numbers. Even radios were beginning to spread widely in the armed forces (in 1930, there had been zero among the field units). Overall troop strength had grown from 586,000 in 1927 to nearly a million. The command staff was more educated, having completed courses at the many military academies.² From August 30 to September 4, 1934, the Red Army conducted its annual fall maneuvers in Ukraine, which the Polish consul in Kiev interpreted as “a demonstration against foreign countries, particularly Japan.” The exercises went badly, though. Mechanization presented underappreciated organizational and logistical challenges, raising the stakes for Soviet diplomacy.³

Much of Stalin’s holiday back-and-forth with Moscow, from Gagra and Sochi, in September 1934 concerned his customary pressure on the harvest collection but also foreign affairs.⁴ Over the summer, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania had conveyed their readiness to sign on to the Franco-Soviet proposal for a broad Eastern Pact, but Estonia and Latvia made their membership conditional on Germany’s and Poland’s. So did Britain, which also made its support for a parallel Franco-Soviet alliance conditional on Germany’s inclusion in that.⁵ On September 11, 1934, Hitler definitively rejected any Eastern Pact. Poland’s rejection would soon follow. Stalin was urged to grasp the French option without Germany, embracing an antifascist coalition.⁶ Negotiations for the large state credit from the German government, initiated at Berlin’s request, had bogged down. But Stalin reassured Kuibyshev (September 14), in a telegram, which, as usual, became a politburo decree, that “the Germans will not walk away from us, because they need a [trade] agreement with us more than we need one from them.”⁷ Nonetheless, on September 18, the Soviet Union formally joined the League of Nations, after intensive diplomacy to line up other countries’ votes.⁸ Many Communist party and Youth League members cringed at joining the Versailles imperialist order.⁹ Stalin himself had once denounced the League as “an anti-working-class comedy.”¹⁰

Soviet newspapers explained that some imperialist powers, although ill-disposed toward socialism, did not want to see an anti-Soviet military intervention, for fear it would spark a world war directed at themselves.¹¹ Joining the League was also a prerequisite to alliance with France or a broader regional security structure. Nonetheless, at Stalin’s urging, the politburo resolved (September 23), “Do not hurry with the initiative of an [Eastern] Pact without Germany and Poland.” France slowed for its own reasons.¹² It was courting Mussolini in a common front to guarantee Austria’s sovereignty against Nazi pressure, part of which involved France’s help in normalizing Italo-Yugoslav relations. On October 9, Yugoslavia’s King Alexander I landed on a state visit at the Marseilles harbor, where he was promptly assassinated. French foreign minister Louis Barthou was killed in the police cross fire. The assassin, beaten to death on the spot, was Macedonian and a member of the Croatian terrorist ring, the Ustaše, led by Ante Pavelić and protected by Mussolini.¹³ Soviet intelligence suspected the Nazi secret police of aiming to destabilize Yugoslavia and to liquidate a bulwark of friendly Franco-Soviet relations. Stalin wrote to Kaganovich and Molotov, “In my opinion, the murder of Barthou and Alexander is the work of the hand of German-Polish intelligence.”¹⁴

Inside the Comintern, Dimitrov, supported by Manuilsky, Kuusinen, Thorez, and Wilhelm Pieck, continued pushing for a shift to a popular front, while Pyatnitsky, Knorin, Kun, and others held to the anti–Social Democrat line. Dimitrov implored Stalin for assistance in changing the structure and personnel of the Comintern’s “leading organs.” Eventually Stalin got around to sending a handwritten note. “As you can see, I am late in replying, and I apologize for that,” he wrote. “Here on holiday, I do not sit in one place, but move from one location to another. . . . I entirely agree with you regarding the review of the methods of work of the Comintern organs, their reorganization and the changes in their composition. I have already mentioned this to you during our meeting at the Central Committee. . . . I hope to see you soon and to discuss all in detail. I have no doubt that the politburo will support you. Greetings!”¹⁵ The planned 7th Comintern Congress was postponed yet again.¹⁶

The zigs and zags were seen domestically, too. A group at the Stalin metallurgical factory in Novokuznetsk, Siberia, had been arrested, and Stalin instructed Kaganovich that “all those drawn into spying on behalf of Japan be shot.” Local party head Eihe was empowered to approve executions on his own from September through November.¹⁷ The same power was soon granted to party bosses in Chelyabinsk and in Central Asia, in connection with alleged sabotage of the cotton campaign.¹⁸ At the same time, petitions reached Stalin from people in the Gulag convicted in fabricated cases of wrecking and espionage on behalf of Japan, and the dictator (September 11, 1934) redirected the claims of confessions extracted under torture to Kuibyshev and Zhdanov, noting that “it is possible the content of both documents corresponds to reality,” and called for a commission to “cleanse the ranks of the secret police of bearers of certain ‘interrogation devices’ and punish the latter regardless of who it might be.” The commission upheld the two petitions and brought additional cases, detailing, in an October 1934 report, how NKVD operatives were detaining those accused in freezing cells for days on end, holding them in suffocating positions, and threatening to shoot them until they “confessed.” Stalin approved a suggestion to send plenipotentiaries to Azerbaijan for a “thorough investigation” of efforts to advance careers through sheer quantity of confessions extracted.¹⁹

A need for recovery and reconciliation following the famine had been evident, and in that regard the conciliatory “Congress of Victors” had been a success. But now a vague sense of a bigger shift—League of Nations membership, a less hectic second Five-Year Plan, a stress on legality—gained momentum. To be sure, reconciliation hardly suited Stalin’s character or his theory of rule: the sharpening of the class struggle as socialism became successful; the special danger of enemies with party cards.²⁰ Nonetheless, secret police arrests started declining precipitously.²¹ A relative relaxation was visible in culture as well, even beyond Stalin’s indulgence of non-party writers. “Not long ago a music critic, seeing in his dream a saxophone or [Leonid] Utyosov, would have awoken in a cold sweat and run to Soviet Art to confess his errors,” wrote the militant Komsomol Pravda (October 27, 1934) about the Soviet Union’s newly famous jazz band. “Now? Now there is no refuge from ‘My Masha.’ Wherever you go, she sits ‘At the Samovar.’”²²

Stalin finally returned to Moscow on October 29, 1934.²³ While he was away, 1,038 of that year’s 3,945 politburo agenda items had been decided, most with his approval; sixteen of the year’s forty-six politburo meetings had taken place in his absence.²⁴ Litvinov again wrote to Stalin and Molotov (November 1) insisting that Germany’s rebuilt military power would assuredly be used against the USSR, with the support of Poland, Finland, and Japan. The next day, Stalin relented: the politburo authorized negotiations for an Eastern Pact with just France and Czechoslovakia, or even France alone, an apparent concession to “collective security.”²⁵ Stalin remained attentive to his own security as well. Inside his suite at Old Square, in his wing in the Kremlin’s Imperial Senate, and at his Moscow and southern dachas, only NKVD personnel were permitted to carry weapons. Those whom Stalin received were supposed to check any weapons they had upon entering the premises. (Some were searched.)²⁶ Propaganda notwithstanding, the prospect of an assassination—akin to what had happened to the Yugoslav king in Marseilles—seemed utterly remote.

KIROV AND CHAPAYEV

Stalin’s return from southern holidays was still being marked by informal gatherings initiated by members of his extended family, who showed up at his apartment in the Imperial Senate at suppertime and played with the children, waiting, hoping to catch him. “Yesterday, after a three-month interval, I saw Iosif,” Maria Svanidze, his first wife’s sister-in-law, wrote in her diary (November 4, 1934). “He looked well, tanned, but he had lost weight. He suffered from flu there. . . . I[osif] joked with Zhenya, that she had again filled out, and he was very tender with her,” Svanidze added. “Now, when I know everything, I observed them.” Yevgeniya “Zhenya” Alliluyeva, an actress, was married to Pavel Alliluyev (the brother of Stalin’s second wife, Nadya), and a jealous Svanidze suspected an affair. Stalin had deeper interests. “After the meal Iosif was in a very good-natured mood,” she continued. “He took the Intercity vertushka and called Kirov, joking with him about the end of rationing and the price rise for bread. He advised Kirov to come to Moscow immediately, in order to defend the interests of Leningrad province against an even higher price rise than in other provinces. Evidently Kirov demurred, and Iosif gave the phone to Kaganovich, who urged Kirov to come for a day. Iosif loves Kirov and after returning from Sochi really wanted to see him, steam in a Russian bath together.”²⁷

The revolution’s seventeenth anniversary approached. At the Bolshoi on the evening before the November 7 parade, the ballerina Marina Semyonova (b. 1908) performed a Caucasus dance. “She danced in a light gray Circassian vest and light gray Astrakhan ‘Kubanka,’ and when, with the last gesture, she held back her Kubanka on her head, her blond hair sprayed down her shoulders,” Artyom recalled. “This made a colossal impression on the audience; everyone shouted ‘Bravo, encore.’” Semyonova went to curtsy at the left loge, where Stalin sat, over the orchestra, practically on the stage. He bent down to the ballerina and said something. “She nodded, gave the orchestra a signal, and repeated the dance.” After the concert, Stalin said to his entourage, “Semyonova is the best of all.”²⁸ She was the common-law wife of Karakhan, the former first deputy foreign affairs commissar, demoted by Stalin to ambassador to Turkey; rumors spread of her affair with Stalin.²⁹

Stalin’s bachelor life was not all rumors. Kirov did come, after the November holiday. In the evenings, now that Nadya was gone, Stalin had taken to watching films with his entourage.³⁰ On November 10 (and into the morning of the 11th), Boris Shumyatsky, head of the motion picture industry, screened the new film Chapayev for the dictator, Kirov, and Molotov.³¹ Shumyatsky had been born in Ulan Ude (1886) near Lake Baikal, was a former Soviet envoy to Iran and former rector of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, and had replaced Martemyan Ryutin as head of the film industry back when it was considered a backwater, but had built it up. At the Kremlin cinema soft chairs with ample armrests and high backs, concealing who was in them, were placed three across, in several rows. The floor was covered in a drab gray cloth, over which was placed a runner, muffling noise from movement. Stalin issued comments during the screenings, in the dark, and afterward when the lights were back on. Tables for Georgian mineral water and wines sat alongside each chair.³² “We used to go after dinner, about nine in the evening,” Svetlana recalled. “It was late for me, of course, but I begged so hard that my father couldn’t refuse. He’d push me to the front with a laugh: ‘You show us how to get there, House Mistress. Without you to guide us, we’d never find it!’” Stalin often watched more than one film, and Svetlana would go to bed sometimes after midnight, even on school nights. “I’d get out of the movie late and go racing home through the empty, quiet Kremlin. The next day at school, I could think of nothing but the heroes I’d seen on film the night before.”³³

Chapayev portrayed the civil war hero of that name as a real human being, warts and all, and the Whites as worthy foes. Stalin had already seen it twice and fallen in love with its down-home details. “You should be congratulated,” he had said to the always anxious Shumyatsky. “It’s done very well, cleverly and tactfully. Chapayev, Furmanov, and Petka are good. The film will have great educational significance. It’s a nice gift for the holiday.” Chapayev induced Stalin to push for construction of sound cinemas all across the Union (there were just 400 to 500 of them, out of some 30,000 film-showing installations).³⁴ “I will be taking a greater interest in this than previously,” he had told Shumyatsky on November 9–10.³⁵ At the November 10–11 screening, Stalin turned to Kirov and accused him of never visiting the film studio in Leningrad (Chapayev was their production). “You know, here people are speaking about your Leningrad films, and you don’t even know them. You don’t know the riches lurking there, probably you never even watch films.” Kirov, Stalin joked, had “bureaucratized.”³⁶

Stalin invited Shumyatsky to stay for supper. The film boss seized the moment to point out that the state planning commission was being tight with funding, allocating 50 million rubles for the next year instead of the “minimal” 92 million requested. “You hear that, Molotov? That’s not the way,” Stalin said. “Look into it.” Shumyatsky also mentioned that initial reviews of Chapayev were favorable but had stressed the wrong themes.³⁷ “Akh, those critics,” Stalin responded. “They disorient people.” The dictator phoned Mekhlis and ordered something more glowing, which Pravda published the next day (November 12). Stalin—now also joined by Kalinin and Molotov’s wife, Zhemchuzhina—decided to view Chapayev for a second time that night. “The more you watch it,” he said, “the better it seems, the more you find new aspects in it.” The evening lasted until 2:00 a.m.³⁸ On November 13, after work, Kirov accompanied Stalin to the Zubalovo dacha, where they played billiards and watched a puppet show put on by Svetlana and other children, before repairing to Stalin’s new Near Dacha for supper. At Zubalovo, the Stalin family dined on the smelt and whitefish Kirov had brought. “With Kirov,” Svanidze noted, Svetlana “has a great friendship, because I[osif] is especially close and good with him.”³⁹

UNDER THE GUN

Filipp Medved’s nerves were on edge. An ethnic Belorussian (b. 1889), he had joined the party in 1907 (one of his recommenders was Felix Dzierżyński) and had recently helped organize the White Sea–Baltic Canal construction. Now he headed the secret police in Leningrad, an international port and frontier city swimming with foreign consulates and military factories. Known to relish banquets, Medved had put on weight and taken to drink (Armenian brandy), while his wife, Raisa Kopylovskaya, came on to other men in public. (Rumors had Medved imprisoning the Leningrad torgsin shop manager after Raisa flirted with him; she might have been involved in self-enrichment schemes, too.) Whisperings about Medved’s supposed homosexuality (he had kissed the openly gay jazzman Utyosov on the mouth in public) further undermined his authority.⁴⁰ His first deputy, Ivan Zaporozhets, was widely seen as Yagoda’s “spy.”⁴¹ And those were the least of Medved’s worries.

Stalin had no confidence in him. The dictator continued to be frustrated over a perceived NKVD mishmash of promiscuous arrests and indolence against enemies.⁴² Yagoda (“in accordance with your instructions”) had sent a team of operatives to investigate the Leningrad and Siberian NKVD branches. “The facts that were uncovered,” he had reported to Stalin (September 1934), “convinced me that [Nikolai] Alekseyev (Western Siberian NKVD) and Medved are absolutely incapable of leading our work in the new conditions and providing that sharp turnabout in state security management methods now necessary.” Yagoda proposed sacking the two branch chiefs, to set examples, and recommended a chessboard of transfers, which would bring Henriks Štubis (b. 1894), an ethnic Latvian known as Leonid Zakovsky (“unquestionably a strong and capable operative”), from Belorussia to Leningrad, with Medved recalled to Moscow to determine “if he is still fit for work in the NKVD or utterly burned out.”⁴³

This was the second time Medved’s transfer had been bruited; the first, in 1931, Kirov had blocked. The Leningrad party boss socialized with him (the childless Kirov was especially fond of Medved’s boy Misha).⁴⁴ Kirov was also an infamous womanizer, whose carousing was a matter of citywide gossip. Kirov’s wife, Maria Markus (b. early 1880s), was Jewish (like the wives of Molotov, Voroshilov, Andreyev, Kuibyshev, and Poskryobyshev). They had met in Vladikavkaz in 1909, at the offices of the newspaper Terek, where she worked as a bookkeeper. She suffered from headaches, insomnia, and a hormonal disorder, frequently screamed, and threatened to kill herself; her windows had been barred. She’d had a few small strokes and was effectively confined to a state rest home in suburban Tolmachevo.⁴⁵ To what extent she knew of her husband’s extramarital affairs—ballerinas, young women in the apparatus—remains unclear, but they were certainly Medved’s worry: he had to help conceal them, even as he was under severe pressure from Pauker in Moscow to strengthen Kirov’s protection.⁴⁶ Kirov’s personal guard had ballooned from three to as many as fifteen men after Stalin’s visit to Leningrad in summer 1933, and Kirov’s office had been relocated to a less accessible location.⁴⁷

MONGOLS AND KIROV

On November 15, 1934, Stalin received a delegation led by Mongolian prime minister Genden, the latter’s third annual audience with Stalin, an unusual number for any foreign leader, but impoverished, landlocked Mongolia was the Soviet Union’s sole “ally.” As a result of purges and mass quitting, the Mongolian People’s Party, already severely outnumbered by lamas, had dropped to half its peak strength of 40,000.⁴⁸ Stalin, over the course of three hours, pressed Genden on the lamas: How numerous and powerful were the monks? Did the people follow them or the Communists? How did the monks finance their activities? These issues, Genden tried to answer, were “complex,” “subtle.” “In a war in which you cannot defeat the enemy by a frontal assault, you should use roundabout maneuvering,” Stalin advised. “Your first action should be to put your own teachers in the schools to battle the monks for influence among the youth. Teachers and activists must be the direct conduits of your policy. . . . The government must build more water wells to show the people that they, not the monks, are more concerned about their economic needs.” He also advised producing films and promoting theater in the Mongolian language and building a strong army of functionally and politically literate conscripts.

Stalin divulged his theory of rule. “In connection with the big lamas who commit this or that political crime, you need to punish them, bringing them to court for treason against the motherland, and not for general indictment of counterrevolutionary work,” he explained. “In such cases, you need open trials so that the commoners, the arats, understand that the lamas are linked to foreign enemies; they betrayed the motherland. But you can do this only from time to time at this point.” He added: “Foreign powers will not recognize you as long as it is unclear who is stronger, you or the monks. After you strengthen your government and army and raise the economic and cultural level of your people, the imperialist powers will acknowledge you. If they do not, now being strong, you can spit in their faces.”⁴⁹

This was how Stalin was ruling the Soviet Union.

Genden, the offspring of a poor nomad family who had learned to read and write, was a gifted politician with a feel for the masses, and full of guile. Trying to ingratiate himself, he announced that the illiterate Choibalsan (b. 1895), minister of livestock and agriculture, who had spent considerable time in Moscow being groomed by Voroshilov, would become first deputy prime minister. Choibalsan was already serving as a Soviet agent in the Mongolian leadership.⁵⁰

Agranov forwarded to Stalin a decrypted intercept of a telegram (November 17, 1934) from ambassador Joseph Grew, in Tokyo, to the U.S. State Department, concerning a conversation with Japanese foreign minister Kōki Hirota, who had stated that, given the various agreements among European powers, Japan could not remain isolated and would have to follow suit. “A decision was taken such that the foreign ministry would search for an ally,” Hirota was quoted as saying of the cabinet. “The chosen country should above all have no specific interests in Asia. In this category could be included Russia or England.” Stalin underlined that passage. “But the USSR is completely excluded as a potential ally because of its aggressive position toward Japan and its interests.” By contrast, Hirota thought a deal could be reached with Britain over weapons sales and trade, provided Japanese interests were recognized in China. The United States was also on Hirota’s potential ally list, and he concluded what Grew deemed an “unusual conversation” with a desire for friendly relations. Stalin wrote on the document, “And so it happens, it’s become tough for Hirota. Interesting.”⁵¹

On November 27, Stalin received the Mongols again, this time with Kirov in tow, even though he was not a member of the politburo’s Mongolia commission.Stalin began by noting that he was forgiving all of Mongolia’s debt as of January 1, 1934—30 million tugriks, the equivalent of almost 10 million gold rubles (at the official exchange rate)—and half the debt accumulated in the coming year: another 33 million tugriks, with the other half to be paid starting in 1941. “If you do not have a good army, the imperialists, Japan, will swallow you,” he said, pointing out that the Mongolian army numbered only 10,000. He said their army budget was 14 million tugriks but offered to pay 6 million a year for five years for expansion, and advised the Mongols to pay their portion with state monopolies on tobacco, salt, and matches, alongside alcohol. He also informed them that they needed to sign bilateral pacts of nonaggression and of mutual assistance, but that the second, for now, would not be published, a message for Japan, but not an overly provocative one.⁵² The nonpublic pact would allow the Red Army to defend the USSR by reassuming advance positions on Mongolian territory. “There should be a difference between Soviet assistance in wartime and in peacetime,” Demid, a graduate of the prestigious Officers’ Cavalry School in Tver, urged.⁵³ Resistance proved futile, however.⁵⁴ Soon, some 2,000 Red Army troops would reenter Mongolia.

Kirov had returned to Moscow because of a Central Committee plenum, the third and final of the year, from November 25 to 28, 1934. It dealt with the end of bread rationing, which involved some 50 million people, a costly subsidy and administrative expense amid financial challenges. Rye bread, which cost 50 kopecks per kilo in a state store with a ration coupon (and 1 ruble 50 kopecks at commercial shops), would now cost 1 ruble, a significant increase for workers.⁵⁵ “What is the idea of the policy of abolition of the rationing system?” Stalin remarked at the plenum. “The cash economy is one of the few bourgeois economic mechanisms that we socialists must make full use of. . . . It is very flexible, and we need it.”⁵⁶ Kirov said little, as usual. Afterward, Stalin took a small group, including Kirov, to the Kremlin cinema, where Shumyatsky showed Chapayev, which Stalin said he was seeing for the eleventh time. Orjonikidze, meanwhile, was suffering from heart palpitations and stomach pains. He had been the only member of the inner circle left out of that fall’s harvest mobilization, and had had his holiday extended. Stalin had compelled him to stay away from the capital until November 29. By the time Orjonikidze returned to Moscow, his friend Kirov had left.⁵⁷ Stalin saw Kirov off at the station.⁵⁸

A TERRORIST

Leonid Nikolayev (b. 1904) was a misfit. He had been born in Leningrad, the son of an alcoholic (who died when the boy was three or four), suffered from rickets as a toddler, and developed bowed legs. He left school around age twelve, when his mother, a night cleaning woman at a tram depot, apprenticed him to a watch repairman. But 1917 had revolutionized Nikolayev’s fortunes: he served as a village soviet chairman in 1919–20, while barely a teenager; became a candidate and, within a month, a full member of the party in 1924 (during the “levy” following Lenin’s death); and got appointed as a Communist Youth League functionary in Zinoviev’s Leningrad machine.⁵⁹ Nikolayev was sent to the nearby town of Luga, where he met and, in 1925, married Milda Draule (b. 1901), an ethnic Latvian and gymnasium graduate, petite, round-faced, with brown hair, who worked as a bookkeeper in the county party apparatus and was a zealot, too. She and Leonid moved in with his mother, grandmother, unmarried sister, married sister, and brother-in-law in Leningrad, and in 1927 the couple had their first child, whom they named Karl Marx (“Marx” for short). Milda quit working for a time. The Five-Year Plan had opened further horizons for working-class offspring such as Nikolayev, but matters went sour. He had a quarrelsome nature. In 1929, he was fired from his latest job (as a clerk at the Red Arsenal Factory), and then from another factory, and in spring 1930 he was mobilized by the party to Eastern Siberia for the sowing and harvest campaigns.

Milda got hired as a bookkeeper in the Leningrad provincial party apparatus, now under Kirov, and was soon promoted to the department for light industry personnel. Nikolayev returned from Siberia in 1931, and in April he got a position as an assessor in the provincial party apparatus. In November 1931, the couple had a second child, Leonid. They were able to obtain a three-room apartment in a fee-based cooperative. Her elderly, infirm parents lived with them.⁶⁰ But in the meantime he had been shifted to the Youth League’s Down with Illiteracy Society, his thirteenth place of work (as recorded in his official labor book).⁶¹ Acquaintances got him a post in the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate, but he was fired in October 1932. Draule had lost her provincial party sinecure, being transferred in August 1933 to the provincial heavy-industry bookkeeping squad, at first as a temporary worker, though she obtained regular status in January 1934 and was awarded prizes. Nikolayev signed on as an itinerant lecturer for the Institute of Party History, in the provincial party organization, but on March 31, 1934, he was summoned before a party commission for refusing “mobilization” to transport (to give lectures to railroad workers). A party meeting deemed him “rude, extremely unrestrained, hysterical.” After he spoke, one of the members asked, “Is Nikolayev’s psychological condition normal?”⁶²

Nikolayev was expelled from the party and fired, losing his ration coupons. On appeal, his expulsion was reversed in May 1934, and replaced by a severe reprimand—still a black mark in his file. Out of work, angry at perceived party slights, and reduced to living off his wife’s earnings, he petitioned like a demon to overturn his reprimand and secure what he regarded as suitable employment for a working-class Communist—as an apparatchik. In July 1934, he wrote to Kirov, and on August 25 to Stalin, only to have his letters rerouted to the perceived source of his troubles: the Leningrad party machine.⁶³ On October 9, with his family facing eviction from their cooperative apartment, a despairing Nikolayev wrote to the politburo, “I request that I be given in the first instance, in the shortest possible time, treatment at a sanatorium-resort, but if such a possibility does not exist, then I must give up belief and hope in a rescue.” This letter, too, was rerouted to the Leningrad party.⁶⁴ Nikolayev began stalking Kirov. On October 15, he trailed him on the long walk from the Uritsky (Tauride) Palace to the Trinity Bridge and on toward his residence, in the elite building at Red Dawn Street, 26–28. (Chekhov had lived there before the revolution.) The guard detained Nikolayev and took him to NKVD headquarters (“the House of Tears,” as he called it).

Nikolayev’s torn attaché case was found to contain newspapers and books. He had a party card and his old pass from when he had worked at party HQ. “He was a member of the party, had earlier worked in Smolny, and (only) tried to approach Kirov with a request for help in getting a job,” surmised the responsible operative Alexander Gubin, who, after a subordinate’s oral report, ordered Nikolayev’s release.⁶⁵ Like many civil war veterans, Nikolayev owned a Nagant revolver—1895 model, 1912 issue—which he had obtained in 1918 and reregistered in 1924 and 1930 (both times allowing the registration to lapse). But whether he was carrying the gun that day remains uncertain.⁶⁶ On October 19, 1934, Nikolayev was in Smolny but failed once more to obtain an audience with Kirov. He was increasingly incensed at the discrepancy between the workers’ state and the state of workers, as reflected in his own life.

Nikolayev had been keeping a notebook/diary about himself and Milda, devout Communists living through world-historical times, which originally was intended for their children’s edification but now became a place to ponder his options. His text contained grammatical errors, but Nikolayev read Aleksei Tolstoy and Gorky, imagining he could impart a literary quality to his writings.⁶⁷ He wrote of Milda as “my only true companion” but began to reproach her, too, recording, on October 26, “M., you could have prevented much, but you did not wish to,” evidently disappointed she had not used her connections to land him a position. “Wrote to everyone, no one left, wrote to Kirov, Stalin, politburo, party Control Commission, but no one pays attention,” he recorded, portraying himself as one of the few brave people ready to sacrifice himself “for the sake of (all of) humanity.”⁶⁸

Three days later, an entry averred that “the time for action has arrived” and evoked the organizer of Alexander II’s assassination, Andrei Zhelyabov of the People’s Will, who had been executed (Lenin had compared him to Robespierre). “As a soldier of the revolution, no death frightens me. I am ready for anything now, and no one has the power to preempt that.” Nikolayev appeared to be using his diary writing to steel his resolve, and contemplated going over the heads of the party bureaucracy to the working masses, to teach the party a lesson.⁶⁹

Nikolayev diagrammed Kirov’s routes, some possible shot angles and methods of assassination: “After first shot, run to his car: a) smash window and fire; b) open door.” He also continued to write plaintive letters seeking recourse, while underscoring the plight of workers stuck in queues versus the good life of speculators. On November 5, 1934, he glimpsed Kirov’s passing car but did not shoot through the glass.⁷⁰ On November 14, Nikolayev went to Leningrad’s Moscow Station yet again, looking for Kirov to arrive on the overnight train; this time Kirov did disembark, but Nikolayev could not get close. On November 21 he wrote another farewell to Milda (“My days are numbered, no one is coming to our aid. . . . Forgive me for everything”).⁷¹ After Kirov departed for the plenum in Moscow, Nikolayev stalked the station once more, but on November 29, when Kirov returned, he again could not get close. As it happened, however, Nikolayev read in that day’s Leningrad Pravda that at 6:00 p.m. on December 1, in the old Tauride Palace, Kirov would be reporting on the recent plenum in Moscow to the Leningrad “party active.”

HISTORIC OPPORTUNITY

On the morning of Kirov’s speech, Nikolayev called Milda at work, twice, for assistance in getting a ticket. By 1:00 p.m. he had learned that she could not or would not deliver. He went to the ward party committee around 1:30 p.m. One official suggested he could get him a ticket by the end of the day. For insurance, Nikolayev went to Smolny to try his luck with former co-workers. Smolny was an entire complex of buildings where 1,829 people worked and thousands more came and went. Besides the province and city party machines, more than fifteen organizations had offices there, including a department for the disfranchised and the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate (on the second floor), where Nikolayev had worked. The inner courtyard connected to a residential building that housed 160 families, and there was a pigsty for supplying the cafeteria. The door to the building’s north wing, where top officials had offices on the third floor, required a special key, but it was given out freely: there was a hairdresser on the first floor, through the same entryway.⁷² Access to the third floor was governed by mere possession of a party card (for non-party members, a special pass). Nikolayev showed his party card and for an hour traipsed from office to office. His acquaintances rebuffed his pleadings for a ticket, but one promised to come through at the end of the day. Nikolayev exited and walked around. Close to 4:30 p.m., he returned and climbed to the third floor. He stopped off at the toilet, to relieve himself or hide (or both). He claimed that when he came out, he unexpectedly saw Kirov in the long corridor, coming toward him, fifteen to twenty paces away, unaccompanied.⁷³

Whether Kirov was expected at Smolny that day—a Saturday—before his speech remains uncertain. His purpose in stopping by also remains unclear. One story has it that he wanted to inquire about the preparations for the end of rationing, which was generating social anxiety. Mikhail Chudov, the second secretary, was chairing a meeting of some twenty apparatchiks at 3:00 p.m. to draft resolutions for a Leningrad party plenum on rationing that was scheduled for the day after Kirov’s ticketed speech. Or maybe Kirov wanted to touch up his speech one last time with his deputy.⁷⁴ Be that as it may, at 4:00 p.m. Kirov had exited his apartment building, walked toward the Trinity Bridge, and gotten into his chauffeured car. He was trailed by the usual escort car with two guards, but at what distance remains unclear: Kirov would hound Medved after he had spotted a trailing vehicle. The traveling guard was supposed to deliver Kirov to other members of the detail once at Smolny. Inside, Kirov’s head bodyguard, Mikhail Borisov—who had started in Kirov’s detail in the 1920s—was to accompany him everywhere and, when Kirov entered his office, to remain in the reception room with Kirov’s top aide, Nikolai Sveshnikov. But the guard detail had been complaining to superiors that Kirov interfered with their duties (their latest complaint had been on November 16, 1934, to Pauker).

Kirov—a politburo member—insisted that the guards stay back and not cross his vision.⁷⁵ On December 1, the fifty-three-year-old Borisov, who was not in good physical form, was maintaining a fair distance, as many as thirty paces. The corridor was L-shaped, and, after Kirov turned left onto the shorter part, where his office had been relocated for safety, Borisov could not see him.⁷⁶

Kirov’s two-room suite at the far end of the short corridor was near a special stairwell and elevator protected by a lockable glass door (many people had keys), but he refused to use this special side entrance established for him. His back room, accessible only from his front one, was used not just by him but also as a private lunch space by leaders of the provincial and city party committees and provincial and city soviets. Directly across the hall was a canteen that attracted traffic, too. Workmen were coming and going on the third floor that day. As Kirov approached Nikolayev in the long part of the L-corridor, Nikolayev turned his back. Kirov passed. The corridor was dim. (Kirov was farsighted yet refused to wear glasses in public, wary of resembling a member of the intelligentsia.)⁷⁷ Nikolayev looked around and, he claimed, saw no one else. “When he turned left toward his office, whose disposition I knew well, the entire half of the [short] corridor was empty—I rushed forward five steps, pulled the Nagant revolver out of my pocket on the run, brought the muzzle to Kirov’s head, and fired one shot into his forehead,” Nikolayev would testify. “Kirov immediately fell face first.” Nikolayev then tried to shoot himself but either was foiled by an electrician who had heard the first gunshot or lost consciousness and slid down the wall next to Kirov’s body, now in a pool of blood.⁷⁸

Medved was two miles from Smolny, at NKVD headquarters (Volodarsky, formerly Liteiny, Boulevard, no. 4), when the call came in. He threw down the receiver and exclaimed, “Kirov’s been shot.”⁷⁹ First deputy Zaporozhets was away (he had broken his leg by falling from a horse during an equestrian competition and, after his cast was removed, had been given a holiday on November 13 at an NKVD resort in Sochi).⁸⁰ Medved and second deputy Fyodor Fomin (an old Yevdokimov protégé) dashed over to Smolny. Kirov had been shot between 4:30 and 4:37 and found to have no pulse seconds later. Testimony suggests that he was carried into his office around seven or eight minutes later and laid on the conference table, where doctors vainly attempted to resuscitate him.⁸¹ Local security personnel, having heard the shot, claimed that they had secured Smolny’s third floor and that very soon the general alarm had been activated, a signal to seal the entire building. About twenty minutes after Medved had hastened out of the NKVD building, he ordered a contingent of thirty NKVD operatives dispatched to Smolny to detain and question everyone inside. But already, in Chudov’s office, adjacent to Kirov’s, the first interrogation was recorded as having commenced at 4:45, just minutes after the shooting—it was the questioning of Milda Draule. If this was accurate, she had to have been on-site when the shooting occurred.⁸²

Ten or so witnesses on the third floor that day—bodyguards, an electrician attending to circuit breakers after some lights went out, a stockman, the director of the circus awaiting a meeting, various functionaries, Nikolayev himself—all placed the shooting in the corridor outside Chudov’s office. Kirov was said to have been found on the floor facedown, head toward the back stairwell, Nikolayev on the floor faceup, head the other way.⁸³ But a special forensic analysis performed by a Russian defense ministry team in 2004 on the bullet hole in the rear of Kirov’s cap concluded, from the angle of entry, that either Nikolayev was lying on the floor when he fired the gun or Kirov was lying down. The forensic analysis also turned up large stains from dried semen on the underpants that Kirov had been wearing (on the front top, inside). In theory, NKVD interrogators could have arranged the testimony of even multiple witnesses to disguise the morally damaging circumstance that an esteemed leader had not been carried to the conference table in his office but was already on it, in flagrante delicto.^{84, 85} Crucially, however, there was no way to prove the exact position of the cap while it was on Kirov’s head.

Two shots had been fired. (All seven bullets in the gun were accounted for: five were still inside the revolver.) Kirov was hit by only one bullet (later extracted from his head), which was confirmed to have been fired from the Nagant registered to Nikolayev.⁸⁶ The second bullet was recovered from the floor (a ricochet mark was found on a cornice where wall and ceiling met). The upward angle of the bullet entry, fired from behind at close range, can likely be explained by the fact that although Kirov was short, Nikolayev was even shorter.⁸⁷

As for the semen, already on the night of December 1 rumors were circulating—tracked by the NKVD—of a liaison with Draule having caused Kirov’s demise. Despite arrests, this gossip persisted. At one enterprise, the non-party Khasanov was overheard to say, “Nikolayev killed comrade Kirov because he lived with his wife.” A candidate member of the party, Gubler, when asked why Nikolayev had killed Kirov, responded, “Because of tarts.” At the Leningrad timber company: “Rumors are circulating that Kirov was killed because of personal score-settling, since he lived with Nikolayev’s wife.” An employee of the Southern Water Station: “I know why they killed Kirov—I spoke with Kirov’s cook and she told me that it was because of a woman, because of jealousy.”⁸⁸ The pants semen does seem to indicate some sort of tryst the day of the assassination, but that would have been far easier to arrange and hide at Kirov’s residence, where he spent most of the day, with his wife away at Tolmachevo. (Kirov answered the door when a courier delivered documents.)⁸⁹ As we saw, Draule was in Smolny. The rumors seem to reflect a timeworn trope of the jealous husband and Kirov’s general reputation rather than specifics.⁹⁰ Of course, even if nothing happened that afternoon between Kirov and Draule, the pair could have been lovers. Draule, under interrogation, denied an affair with Kirov.⁹¹ But if she was lying, it is still striking that neither Nikolayev’s handwritten notebook/diary nor his testimony alluded to being cuckolded by Kirov.⁹²

Nikolayev had been bundled into a side office on the third floor, whence he was whisked to NKVD headquarters, where he alternated between wailing uncontrollably and falling silent while staring at a single point. He was carried on a stretcher to the NKVD’s internal clinic for examination at around 6:40 p.m.⁹³ Only around 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. could the NKVD interrogate him. Besides the gun, Nikolayev had been carrying his attaché case and was found to be in possession of a party card, a pass to the Smolny cafeteria (from his workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate days), which was how his identity was quickly established, and an address book, which is how his relatives were quickly found. At searches of his and his mother’s apartments, operatives found copies of his various letters to the authorities, the numerous notebooks comprising a diary, the sketch of Kirov’s routes, a fragmentary plan of assassination, secret letters to his wife about his plotting and willingness to die, and instructions on where to find these letters—the kind of treasure trove of documentary evidence never adduced at any of the countless fabricated trials.

“I prepared the whole thing myself,” Nikolayev was recorded as having told Medved, Fomin, and other Leningrad operatives the night of the assassination, “and I never let anyone know of my intentions.” He added: “There was a single reason—estrangement from the party, from which the events in the Leningrad Institute of Party History pushed me away, my unemployment, and the lack of material and, above all, moral assistance from the party organizations. My whole situation reverberated from the moment I was expelled from the party (eight months ago), which discredited me in the eyes of party organizations.” Nikolayev enumerated all his fruitless letters for redress, adding, “There was a single aim of the assassination: for it to become a political signal to the party that over the past eight to ten years on my path of life and work, there has accumulated the baggage of unjust treatment of a living person on the part of certain state persons. . . . This historic mission has been accomplished by me. I had to show the whole party where they had brought Nikolayev.”⁹⁴

CAVALCADE

Medved had the unenviable task of informing Yagoda, his superior. In the office of the second secretary of the Leningrad city party committee, he composed a telegram: “On December 1, 16:30 in Smolny, third floor, twenty paces from comrade Kirov’s office, Kirov was shot in the head by an unknown assailant who approached him and who, according to party documents, is Leonid Nikolayev, b. 1904, party member since 1924. Kirov is in his office. With him are professors of surgery . . . and other doctors.” The message mentioned that “several functionaries at Smolny recognized Nikolayev . . . as someone who had earlier worked” there, and that an arrest warrant had been issued for his wife, misnamed as Graule. Medved lied that Borisov “had accompanied Kirov to the point of the incident,” concealing NKVD negligence. Inexplicably, the message was stamped as sent at 6:20 p.m. and received and decoded in Moscow by 7:15 p.m.⁹⁵ Already just after 5:00 p.m., Chudov had called Stalin’s office number; Poskryobyshev picked up.⁹⁶

As Kirov lay dead, shot by an assassin at party headquarters in Leningrad, Stalin was in his office at party headquarters in Moscow. Members of the inner circle—Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Zhdanov—had entered the dictator’s suite on Old Square at 3:05 p.m. When the news from Leningrad arrived, according to Kaganovich, Stalin “was shocked at first.”⁹⁷ Yagoda appeared at 5:50 p.m. and called the Leningrad NKVD twice, likely from Stalin’s office, to inquire whether Nikolayev was wearing foreign clothing (he was not).⁹⁸ Molotov, later in life, recalled that Stalin had rebuked Medved over the phone (“Incompetents!”).⁹⁹ At 6:15, Pauker arrived with his deputy and the Kremlin commandant Rudolf Peterson; ten minutes later, they were dismissed to prepare a special train for that evening. Others began arriving: Kalinin, Mikoyan, and Orjonikidze at 6:20, Andreyev at 6:25, Chubar at 6:30, Yenukidze at 6:45. They all cleared out except for Yagoda, who stayed until 8:10, when Mekhlis (editor of Pravda), Bukharin (Izvestiya), Stetsky (culture and propaganda department), and Mikhail Suslov (a Control Commission functionary) entered, staying ten minutes. Stalin edited the text of a bulletin that would run in central newspapers under the names of all politburo members. “You were dear to us all, comrade Kirov, as a true friend, a true comrade, a dependable comrade-in-arms,” it stated, using the familiar ty (“thou”) inserted by Stalin. “You were always with us in the years of our hard struggles for the triumph of socialism in our country, you were always with us in the years of wavering and trouble inside our party, you lived through all the difficulties of the last years with us. . . . Farewell, our dear friend and comrade, Sergei!”¹⁰⁰

Stalin then held back Yagoda, alone, for twenty minutes, until 8:30 p.m.¹⁰¹ At some point the dictator had drafted a short, vaguely worded law stipulating expedited handling of terrorist cases, with immediate implementation of the death penalty and no right of appeal, which Yenukidze signed as secretary of the Soviet’s central executive committee (and which, subsequently, Kalinin signed as chairman of that body).¹⁰² Leningrad party officials, convening their own meeting in Smolny at 6:00 p.m., drafted their own announcement, formed their own funeral commission, and instructed lower-level party committees to call meetings at factories that very night.¹⁰³

Soviet radio announced Kirov’s murder at 11:30 p.m.; workers heard over factory loudspeakers. Newspaper editors around the country were called. Meanwhile, another coded telegram had arrived from Medved at 10:30 p.m., with a short record of Draule’s interrogation, which had only basic information about her, as if just her role as Nikolayev’s wife was of interest. She was quoted as stressing his sense of grievance. (“From the moment of his party expulsion, he descended into a down mood, waiting the whole time for rectification of his status and reprimand and not wanting to work anywhere.”) A third Medved telegram, forty minutes after midnight, indicating that the NKVD had started analysis of the materials seized in searches, quoted Nikolayev’s “political testament” (letter to the politburo) about his efforts to assassinate Kirov, and reported that his address book contained entries for the German consulate (Herzen Street, 43; telephone, 1-69-82) and the Latvian consulate (telephone, 5-50-63).¹⁰⁴ Yagoda was already on the train with Stalin.

Kaganovich had summoned Khrushchev to lead a Moscow delegation of some sixty party officials and workers. The grandson of a serf and the son of a coal miner, Khrushchev (b. 1894) had attended a village school for four years and become a skilled metalworker in the Donbass town of Yuzovka (the name was changed in 1924 to Stalino), where he had hankered after further study while rising in the apparatus, catching the eye of Kaganovich (then Ukraine party boss), who promoted him to the Ukrainian capital. At the 14th Party Congress, in Moscow in 1925, Khrushchev would later recall, he had encountered Stalin for the first time and was surprised to meet a general secretary with a modest demeanor, proletarian plainness, even abrasiveness—a stirring role model for working-class Communists such as the ambitious Khrushchev. “He dreamed of being a factory director,” one contemporary recalled of Khrushchev. “I’ll go to Moscow, I’ll try to get in the Industrial Academy, and if I do I’ll make a good factory manager.” Thanks to Kaganovich, he had been able to enroll, despite meager academic qualifications. In a mere year and a half, Khrushchev had leapt from the Donbass coal region to Kharkov to Kiev to Moscow. Now he was leading a train, in parallel to Stalin’s train, to Leningrad. Stalin made Kaganovich stay behind in Moscow. Khrushchev recalled tears in Kaganovich’s eyes.¹⁰⁵ Stalin also refused to allow Orjonikidze to go on the train (ostensibly over worries for his weak heart).

Around 10:00 or so that morning of December 2, Stalin and entourage—Molotov, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Yezhov, Alexander Kosaryov, a large contingent of NKVD operatives, and at least 200 armed men (the Dzierżyński regiment)—alighted at Leningrad’s Moscow Station. Enveloped by the massive security force, the group proceeded to the Sverdlov Hospital morgue, then to Smolny, where they took over Kirov’s office. “I saw a group approaching,” one Communist Youth League functionary recalled. “I saw Stalin in the middle; in front of him was Genrikh Yagoda with a revolver in his raised hand. The latter gave an order: ‘Everyone, faces to the wall! Hands on your trouser seams!’”¹⁰⁶

Agranov ordered Fomin to accompany him to Leningrad NKVD HQ, where he commandeered Medved’s office and all the case materials.¹⁰⁷ A shattered Borisov, the bodyguard—who had been interrogated the previous night but proved nearly unable to speak (his service revolver had been discovered still unloaded in its holster)—was summoned in the opposite direction, to Smolny.¹⁰⁸ As he was being driven, his head smashed into the wall of a building at around 10:50 a.m. and he died almost instantly. Neither the driver nor the three NKVD operatives accompanying him were hurt. The NKVD had used a one-and-a-half-ton Ford truck to transport Borisov, who was placed in the truck bed. Apparently, no other vehicles were available at the garage because of the cavalcade that had descended from Moscow. A spring on the truck’s front suspension was known to be defective and jerry-rigged, although deemed safe to drive at slow speeds. The driver might have been speeding—the summons was urgent—when he crossed tram tracks in the road. The truck swerved rightward violently. The driver tried to compensate by steering left. A tire blew. The truck ran a sidewalk and struck a building on the side where Borisov happened to be. A piece of his overcoat was caught by a metal clamp holding a drainpipe.¹⁰⁹ It is conceivable that he smashed his own head against the wall once the vehicle swung. It is also possible, though even less likely, that the Leningrad NKVD killed Borisov to hide evidence of incompetence—which was what Stalin suspected.¹¹⁰

Nikolayev was brought before Stalin.¹¹¹ The dictator had a hard time accepting that anyone ever acted alone.¹¹² But it was especially difficult to believe the pathetic Nikolayev could have carried out such a momentous assassination by himself. He stood a hair over five feet (1.53 meters), with “simian arms” down to his knees and very short legs, and, though he was only thirty years old, was a physical and emotional wreck. By then he was also severely sleep deprived. “An unprepossessing appearance. A clerk. Not tall. Scraggly,” recalled Molotov. “I think he was, it seems, angry with something, expelled from the party, aggrieved.”¹¹³ What Stalin managed to extract from the petulant, megalomanical, delirious Nikolayev remains unclear. (A rumor in Smolny suggested that Nikolayev had failed to recognize Stalin until he was shown an official portrait alongside the person before him.) Taken to a waiting vehicle on the street, where people were going about their business, Nikolayev was said to have shouted, “Remember me—I am the assassin. Let the people know who killed Kirov!”¹¹⁴

FAREWELL

Kirov’s open casket was placed for public viewing in the vestibule of the former Tauride Palace on December 2 for two days. His widow, Leningrad and Moscow officials, and delegations of workers from the two capitals paid their respects, many through tears. Initially, Pravda (December 2) accused “enemies of the working class and Soviet power, White Guards.” The next day, the newspaper identified the assassin as Nikolayev, labeling him a former employee of the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate, omitting his employment in the party committee and his party membership.¹¹⁵ The NKVD was investigating foreign involvement: Nikolayev had visited the German consulate a few times and the Latvian once. He testified that he had found their numbers in the phone book and hoped to be introduced to foreign journalists, but had been brushed off by the German consul while trying to sell anti-Soviet documents (his writings) for money.¹¹⁶ Nikolayev might have sought a visa to Latvia for escape. Also on December 3, at a detached house in Leningrad’s Stone Island neighborhood that Stalin and his entourage were using, the dictator dressed down Medved and Fomin. (Yagoda that day issued an indictment of them and six other Leningrad NKVD operatives.) “The murder of Kirov is the hand of an organization,” Stalin told Medved and Fomin, “but which organization is difficult to say right now.”¹¹⁷

Around 10:00 p.m. on December 3, Stalin claimed Kirov’s casket and led a processional to the station, where his special train departed after midnight. It was met in Moscow by an air force squadron overhead. On December 4 and 5, Kirov’s casket was placed for viewing in Moscow’s Columned Hall of the House of Trade Unions. That afternoon and evening, Stalin received a large number of officials in his office and, among other business, appointed a new trade representative to Hitler’s Berlin, David Kandelaki. Normally, Soviet trade representatives never met with Stalin, but Kandelaki, who was Georgia born and Germany educated, would be received an inordinate number of times in the Little Corner starting in late 1934.¹¹⁸ “Kandelaki,” noted the Soviet press officer at the Berlin embassy, “clearly gave us the impression that he had confidential instructions from Stalin personally, and the power to go beyond economic subjects in talks with the Germans.”¹¹⁹

Departing his office that night of December 5 at 10:00, Stalin arrived at the House of Trade Unions for a final farewell as the Bolshoi Orchestra played Chopin’s funeral march. He evidently kissed the dead Kirov on the lips and stated, “Farewell, dear friend.”¹²⁰ The body was taken to be cremated. Back at the Kremlin, Shumyatsky showed Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov, Orjonikidze, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, and Zhdanov clips from a documentary by Yakov Bliokh of Kirov’s life and death. “Koba especially tensely watched those parts depicting the deceased Kirov in motion,” Shumyatsky noted, using Stalin’s nickname. “When they showed the episodes of the population reading the sad news, everyone noted that the reaction to the event was depicted powerfully and clearly. . . . Koba and the others watched especially tensely the parts in Leningrad—in the Tauride Palace, at the casket, and the accompanying of the casket with the body to the train station.” It was silent footage, but Shumyatsky had also brought film of two of Kirov’s speeches. Stalin liked Kirov’s speech at the last Leningrad provincial party conference, where he had spoken about Marxist-Leninist education.¹²¹

On Red Square the next day, a full military funeral took place. A devastated Orjonikidze was afforded the honor of interring the urn in the Kremlin Wall. Stalin also allowed Orjonikidze’s signature to be placed second under Kirov’s obituary in Pravda, after the dictator’s, out of the usual hierarchy.¹²² Molotov delivered a eulogy (Stalin complimented him on it). Stalin had the orchestra play a Kirov favorite, Shatrov’s “On the Hills of Manchuria,” which dated to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5: “The crosses for magnificent bygone heroes show their whiteness, and the shades of the past circle about, hardening us about those who fell in vain. . . . But believe me, we will avenge you and celebrate a bloody funeral feast.”¹²³ Pravda that morning (December 6) had already announced that seventy persons were being tried in other cases on charges of “preparing terrorist actions against Soviet authorities.” The inner circle repaired to Stalin’s apartment in the Imperial Senate for a luncheon. The dictator, full of grief, according to Artyom, said Kirov had been an optimist, a lover of life, so if anyone was to cry, to “let out snot,” they would be dishonoring his memory. He played songs on the gramophone Kirov loved. “Everyone there was in a crushed mood.” Stalin requested that they watch the Kirov documentary footage again and invited Vasily and Svetlana, calling her the Mistress of the House and asking her to direct the viewing. Stalin again reminded Shumyatsky to insert footage of the liveliness of the streets and squares as Kirov’s casket was brought to the capital. Postyshev said Shumyatsky needed to include a speech by Stalin, whose voice had not yet appeared in sound footage. “Film is a powerful instrument for propaganda and agitation,” Stalin intoned. Then they watched Chapayev until 1:00 a.m.¹²⁴

Unlike the pioneer Mussolini, the Soviet dictator chose not to speak directly on radio. The twenty-year-old Yuri Levitan had become Stalin’s voice from around the time of the 17th Party Congress, when he had read the five-hour congress speech over the radio. On December 6, 1934, Levitan was on the air when Kirov’s ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall: “Farewell, pupil of Lenin and friend of Stalin, leader of the Leningrad proletariat, farewell!”¹²⁵ That night, after the film screening, Pavel Alliluyev stayed at the Near Dacha to keep an eye on his brother-in-law. “I’m an utter orphan,” the dictator supposedly told him, putting his head in his hands. Stalin also said Kirov had looked after him as one does for a child.¹²⁶

THE INVESTIGATION

At Stalin’s suggestion, to get Nikolayev to admit complicity in a “group,” he was plied with food, cigarettes, and the usual promises to spare his own and his family members’ lives. Interrogators lied that Milda had not (yet) been arrested. Agranov and his team were making suggestions to him about “ties,” and Nikolayev began to go along, admitting that he did belong to a “group.” He also tried to jump out the window. The interrogators were now interested in his acquaintances Ivan Kotolynov and Nikolai Shatsky, both at one time expelled from the party and figures in Nikolayev’s notebook/diary. Kotolynov was being called a Trotskyite, but, as it happened, he and others had been Communist Youth League functionaries when Zinoviev was party boss.¹²⁷ Voilà. The names of Zinoviev as well as Kamenev started to crop up in the interrogation protocols, which Agranov was forwarding to Stalin.¹²⁸ (In the Kirov case, the dictator would receive at least 260 interrogation protocols, a new genre of belles lettres.)¹²⁹

The NKVD drafted a scenario, which Stalin edited, of parallel terrorist organizations, a “Leningrad Center” and a “Moscow Center.” None of this had been part of the interrogations before December 4, 1934, when Stalin had summoned a large group to his office, including prosecutors, court officials, secret police operatives, and Agranov, who came from Leningrad.¹³⁰ During discussions over the next several days, Stalin shifted Zinoviev and Kamenev from the Leningrad to the guiding Moscow Center. The Leningrad Center was now said to be led by Nikolayev, Kotolynov, and their associates.¹³¹

Amid a mood for bloodthirsty revenge, the ethnic Pole party boss of Ukraine, Kosior, wanted to respond to the assassination with directives for mass relocations of Soviet ethnic Poles from the frontier. But a calculating Stalin softened a secret circular sent by party channels (December 7, 1934) to both Ukraine and Belorussia regarding their ethnic Polish border populations, evidently to avoid complications in Soviet-Polish and Soviet-German relations. By contrast, in response to a plan to deport 5,000 “socially alien” families from the Karelian autonomous republic and Leningrad province—both near the Finnish border, where geopolitical complications were largely absent—Stalin wrote, “Why not more?”¹³²

On December 9, after meetings in his office with the prosecutors, judges, and NKVD officials, among many others, until 7:30 p.m., Stalin suppered one floor below at his Kremlin apartment with Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Orjonikidze, and Molotov, a practice that was becoming increasingly routine. The relatives had come over on the pretext of giving Svetlana, said to be distraught over Kirov’s death, some gifts to cheer her up. “It broke my heart to look at him,” Maria Svanidze wrote in her diary of Stalin at the table. “He is suffering greatly.”¹³³

In Leningrad, fourteen people—all save Shatsky—testified that they had participated in an underground Zinovievite “group,” but all denied complicity in the assassination except Nikolayev. Interrogators had tried to get him to admit that his working-class father had hired laborers, making him the offspring of a class alien, but he refused. Nonetheless, Nikolayev, a working-class Communist of conviction—precisely why he had killed Kirov—somehow had to be turned into a “class enemy.” Over time, the wily Agranov seems to have persuaded him that he could realize one more great deed: the destruction of the Zinovievites. Nikolayev apparently would not fully realize until later that this task on behalf of the cause required retrospectively making him a member of the 1920s Zinoviev opposition.

Accused Zinovievites were arrested in waves, and one turned out to be hiding the archives of the Zinoviev opposition. (All told, 843 “former Zinovievites” would be arrested by the NKVD in the ten weeks after the murder; thousands would be exiled administratively.) The few core genuine supporters of Zinoviev did not hide their critical feelings toward Stalin and his policies: they believed, for example, that Hitler’s rise in Germany had resulted from Comintern passivity.¹³⁴ They also freely admitted that they occasionally met and discussed these views. And so it was “an organization” and “anti-party.” They were also found to have copies of Lenin’s Testament and the Ryutin appeal calling for Stalin’s removal, and almost every one of them turned out to have a gun at home, sometimes more than one, usually acquired and held legally since civil war days. And so it was “terrorism,” too.

Was it not plausible that these former party oppositionists—armed and, by their own admission, meeting to criticize Stalin—would in shadowy ways have taken part in the killing of Kirov, who, after all, had displaced their patron Zinoviev?¹³⁵ Kotolynov, according to one interrogation protocol (December 12), would admit only that “our organization bears the political and moral responsibility for the murder of Kirov by Nikolayev, having reared Nikolayev in an atmosphere of embittered relations to the leaders of the Soviet Communist Party.” Here was one formula.¹³⁶ On December 16, Zinoviev and Kamenev were arrested.¹³⁷ Zinoviev confessed to a host of fictitious crimes, and agreed to name “all those I can and will remember as former participants in the anti-party struggle.”¹³⁸ Pravda and Leningrad Pravda (December 17) ran the same front-page editorial asserting that Nikolayev had been directed by the former Leningrad opposition “Zinovievites” to kill Kirov. Here was a different formula.

FIRST TRIAL

Stalin sent Zhdanov to replace Kirov as first secretary. With the regime and much of the country in mourning, the dictator ordered that his official birthday, on December 21, 1934—his fifty-fifth—not be celebrated publicly. Nonetheless, the apparatchiks gathered the obligatory well-wishes.¹³⁹ On the day itself, Agranov, Vyshinsky, and Akulov arrived from Leningrad and, along with Yagoda and Ulrich, were in Stalin’s office for an hour, until 8:30 p.m., evidently to go over the pending trial.¹⁴⁰ Then a private celebration took place at the Near Dacha, in the company of the in-laws from both deceased wives and the inner circle. They had to add a second table. Stalin, Artyom would recall, “read the birthday congratulations in the newspapers, and commented on them humorously.” ¹⁴¹

Orjonikidze pronounced a toast for Kirov, which, according to Maria Svanidze’s diary, elicited tears and a moment of silence. Someone mentioned that Dora Khazan-Andreyeva had attended the Industrial Academy with Nadya. Stalin stood. “Since the Academy was mentioned,” he said, “permit me to drink to Nadya.” “All stood and silently approached Iosif to clink their glasses,” Svanidze wrote. Around 1:00 a.m., they got up from the table and Stalin put on the gramophone and people danced—the Caucasus lezginka or Cossack hopak—though there was not much room. Budyonny played the accordion, Zhdanov the piano. “The Caucasus people,” Svanidze recorded, “sang sad songs, polyphonic—the Master sang in a high tenor.”¹⁴²

Newspapers announced the next morning that the NKVD had turned over the investigatory results for trial. But on December 23, Pravda, shockingly, announced that “the NKVD has established a lack of sufficient evidence to turn Zinoviev and Kamenev over to the courts.” Stalin also decided against a public trial of the remaining “Zinovievites,” perhaps because the extracted confessions were of anti-Stalin conversations, not plotting terrorism. The indictments published in Pravda and Leningrad Pravda of fourteen people headed by Nikolayev mentioned a connection to a foreign consulate but stopped short of naming it, as if afraid to have to prove it, or wary of involving Nazi Germany in discussions of Kirov’s murder.¹⁴³

In Leningrad, Ulrich opened the closed trial on December 28 at 2:20 p.m., and read the guilty verdicts before dawn the next morning: death penalty. Not a single Smolny witness had been summoned to the trial. (Nearly fourscore of them—every witness to the events that day and many others—would soon be transferred to other work, expelled from the party, or exiled.) “Nikolayev shouted, ‘Severe,’” according to one of Agranov’s soft-pedaling telegrams to Stalin, which failed to report that Nikolayev and others recanted their testimony.¹⁴⁴ The executions were carried out within an hour; the head executioner was said to have broken down in tears at memories of the fallen Kirov.¹⁴⁵ Kotolynov was shot last. “This whole trial is rubbish,” he had told Agranov and Vyshinsky. “People have been executed. Now I’ll be executed, too. But all of us, with the exception of Nikolayev, are not guilty of anything.”¹⁴⁶

Hundreds more would be shot, none of whom had any link to the murder. (Union-wide, as many as 6,500 people might have been arrested and charged under the December 1 antiterror law in the first month alone.)¹⁴⁷ “It’s hard to believe that in the twentieth century there is a corner of Europe where medieval barbarians have taken up residence, where savage concepts are accompanied so strangely by science, art, and culture,” Nina Lugovskaya, an atypical fifteen-year-old student in Moscow, the daughter of a persecuted “bourgeois” economist, recorded in her diary (December 30). “To call Nikolayev a coward! He went willingly to his death for what he believed in, he was better than all those so-called leaders of the working class put together!”¹⁴⁸

REWRITING THE CAUCASUS

Beria had been pressing his minions in Tiflis to produce a Stalin hagiography. He had ordered systematic gathering of “recollections” of Stalin in the underground years and appointed Toroshelidze, chairman of the Writers’ Union of Georgia, Tiflis University rector, and director of the Stalin Institute, to galvanize the work. The “reminiscences” were assembled, but the “scholarly” biography did not materialize.¹⁴⁹ Lakoba, meanwhile, had been active, too. Hashim Smyrba, an old brigand, had once hidden Stalin in his hut a few miles outside Batum, in the Muslim region of Ajaristan, in 1901–2, when Stalin and his accomplices, disguised with veils to look like Muslim women, transported illegal leaflets to Batum in fruit baskets. Hashim had died in 1922, at age eighty-one. Lakoba had an ethnographer collect material and forwarded to Stalin a pamphlet, Stalin and Hashim, the Years 1901–1902: Episodes from the Batum Underground. “Comrade Lakoba!” he wrote back. “Your Caucasus essay makes a good impression. And Hashim, as in life, is simple, naïve, but honest and devoted. Such helpmates were not few in the revolution; with their hearts they felt the truth.”¹⁵⁰ Lakoba published the pamphlet in Abkhazia, in a print run of 20,000. (Kaganovich sent the paper.) It called Stalin “a person such as history gives to humanity just once in a hundred or two hundred years.”

Playfully, the pamphlet noted that Hashim and other villagers had surmised that “Soso” was counterfeiting money and asked for some, but the business turned out to be revolutionary leaflets. Hashim: “You’re a good man, Soso. Only it’s a pity that you are not a Muslim.” Stalin: “And what would happen if I were a Muslim?” Hashim: “If you converted to Islam, I would give you in marriage seven beauties the likes of which you probably never, ever saw. Do you want to be a Muslim?” “Comrade Stalin answered with a smile, ‘OK!’ and shook Hashim’s hand.” (Stalin ended up being imprisoned.)¹⁵¹

Lakoba wrote the preface to the Hashim pamphlet, emphasizing that Stalin, too, was simple, close to the masses—a winning formula.¹⁵² By contrast, Beria had a far more ambitious and difficult aim—not two years in Batum, but the entire Caucasus before 1917, and falsification of a past that many people knew firsthand.¹⁵³ One of those people was Yenukidze, who was the godfather of the deceased Nadya by virtue of his acquaintance with her father, the worker-revolutionary Sergei Alliluyev. Yenukidze was also a founding member of the Baku group of the party (spring 1901) and had established the illegal printing press in the Caucasus—code-named “Nino” (Nina in Russian), with his cousin Trifon—that had reprinted the exiled Lenin’s illegal Iskra newspaper. Known in the underground as the Little Golden Fish, Yenukidze had serialized his autobiographical Our Underground Printing Presses in the Caucasus in a journal in 1923 and had not artificially magnified Stalin’s role.¹⁵⁴ As business manager of regime affairs from early on, he had served Stalin faithfully.¹⁵⁵ But Mekhlis, writing to Stalin (January 4, 1935), listed a number of “mistakes” in a Yenukidze Pravda article (December 29, 1934) on the thirtieth anniversary of the 1904 Baku strike, and criticized his book on the illegal printing press, whose third edition had just been published. Stalin had Mekhlis’s denunciation of Yenukidze circulated to the politburo, and marked up the text himself: When was the Baku party committee established? Who created the printing press? Yenukidze seemed to be placing himself above the martyr Lado Ketskhoveli, the youth who had introduced Stalin to Marxism.¹⁵⁶

LAUGHTER

Long focused on the impact of live theater, Stalin had not grasped the full power of film immediately.¹⁵⁷ But Shumyatsky had persisted, and goaded the party to issue a directive to film all major events in the USSR, design handheld cameras to be put into wide production, and have regional officials treat newsreels the way they treated the press. Stalin began to review the newsreels at the Kremlin cinema sessions.¹⁵⁸ But it had really been Chapayev that transformed him—a person accustomed to working with written texts—from someone who occasionally viewed films for diversion to their executive producer, from the backgrounds of scenes to the dialogue and score. The dictator played a decisive role in supporting not just subjects of political import but also farce. In that regard, an enormous breakthrough was wrought by a young assistant to the virtuoso Sergei Eisenstein, after the latter’s scandalous failure to finish a film in Mexico.¹⁵⁹ Shumyatsky had suggested that Eisenstein next make a Soviet comedy, but the director showed little interest. But his assistant, Grigory Alexandrov, using every Hollywood trick he had learned in their travels, cowrote and directed Jolly Fellows, which became a smash hit.¹⁶⁰

Stalin’s inner circle had divided over the appropriateness of comedy. When Shumyatsky was set to premiere Jolly Fellows in the Kremlin, Voroshilov, who had seen it, stated, “It’s an interesting, jolly, thoroughly musical film featuring Utyosov and his jazz.” Kaganovich objected that Utyosov had no voice; Zhdanov complained that Utyosov was a master only of criminal underworld songs. “You’ll see,” Voroshilov countered, “he’s a very gifted actor, an extraordinary humorist, and sings delightfully in the film.” He was right. “Brilliantly conceived,” Stalin said to Voroshilov after viewing one scene with a jazz orchestra rehearsal that devolves into a hilarious fight, and another with collective farm livestock run amok. “The film allows you to relax in an interesting, entertaining fashion. We experienced the exact feeling one has after a day off. It’s the first time I have experienced such a feeling from viewing our films, among which have been very good ones.” After watching another film, Stalin returned to discussion of Jolly Fellows, lauding the bold acting of the female lead, Lyubov Orlova, and male lead, Utyosov, as well as the excellent jazz. “He talked about the songs,” Shumyatsky wrote. “Turning to comrade Voroshilov, he pointed out that the march would go to the masses, and began to recall the melody and ask about the words.”¹⁶¹

A new genre, the Soviet musical comedy, was born.¹⁶² Shumyatsky’s determination had paid off.¹⁶³ He had witnessed a live performance of Utyosov’s band—whose musicians sang, danced, and acted—and had suggested they team up with the director Alexandrov. Utyosov, for his part, had insisted on music by Isaac Dunayevsky (b. 1900), a graduate of the Kharkov Conservatory who had made a name for himself at the Moscow Satire Theater and more recently the Leningrad Music Hall. Vasily Lebedev-Kumach (b. 1898), the son of a Moscow cobbler and himself a writer at the satirical periodical Crocodile, composed the lyrics. When ideologues attacked the resulting work, Shumyatsky galvanized Stalin’s support.¹⁶⁴ Jolly Fellows had gone into final editing, following the dictator’s suggestions, but its public opening was delayed by Kirov’s assassination. It premiered publicly on December 25, at Moscow’s Shock Worker cinema, where Orlova, Utyosov, and Alexandrov were in the audience. A banquet followed at the Metropole. General release took place in January 1935, and soon an astonishing 6,000 copies of the film were in circulation Union-wide. The publicity campaign, unprecedented for the Soviet Union, borrowed American techniques, with postcards of scenes from the film and phonographic records of the songs. Shumyatsky even had sheet music of the score published with an attractive cover, and there were tie-in cookies from the baking trust and cigarettes from the tobacco trust. The film’s stars featured in radio appearances.

Many cultural figures collaborated with the Soviet party-state precisely for its wherewithal to deliver mass audiences.¹⁶⁵ To be sure, whereas listeners in Britain or Germany could tune in to several stations, including some that originated from abroad, the Soviets invested in cable (wire) radio, which was inexpensive and durable, enabling mass production, and imposed far stricter state control over content, since the wires delivered just the two official stations.¹⁶⁶ Only the privileged had hard-to-procure wireless receivers with tuners. Wire radios were installed in outdoor public spaces, factories, meeting halls, clubs, and dormitories.The Soviet Union had 2.5 million radio reception points already by 1934.¹⁶⁷ Radio Moscow and Radio Comintern were broadcasting approximately eighteen hours per day, creating an ambient Sovietness.¹⁶⁸

“Boring agitation is counter-agitation,” one Soviet film critic argued.¹⁶⁹ Surveys of radio listeners’ letters showed that they wanted fewer symphonies and more humor, information about the outside world, advice on childrearing, medical issues, and other daily life concerns, and entertainment, such as folk music, Gypsy romances, jazz, operettas (not operas), and songs from the latest films.¹⁷⁰ While Germany had Marlene Dietrich, and America Greta Garbo, the Soviets had Orlova, promoted in the press, books, and fan postcards.¹⁷¹ (She and Alexandrov would begin a love affair and later marry.) The songs proved to be easily and widely memorized. From streets to shop, almost the entire USSR was singing “Such a Lot of Nice Girls” (or the tango version, “Heart,” released by Pyotr Leshchenko) and the march (“A happy song lightens your heart”). Even in profoundly anti-Soviet Poland Jolly Fellows would find popularity. The comic master Chaplin would praise the film as better propaganda for the Soviet cause than executions.¹⁷²

Stalin authorized an all-Union Creative Conference of Workers in Soviet Cinema (January 8–13, 1935), albeit without formation of a formal union such as the writers had. Eisenstein was awarded the task of delivering the keynote. “When I heard Eisenstein’s report, I was afraid that he knows so much, and his head is so clear that, it is obvious, he’ll never make another film,” director Oleksandr Dovzhenko said in his follow-up speech. “If I knew as much as he does, I would literally die. (Laughter, applause.)”¹⁷³ Pravda (January 11) published a congratulatory note from Stalin to Shumyatsky. “Greetings and best wishes to the workers of Soviet cinema on the day of its glorious fifteenth anniversary,” the note stated. “Soviet power expects from you new successes—new films that, like Chapayev, proclaim the greatness of the historic cause of the struggle for power of the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, mobilize for the attainment of new tasks, and remind us of both the achievements and difficulties of socialist construction.”¹⁷⁴

That same day, Stalin attended the ceremony at the Bolshoi where, for the first time, state awards were handed out to film workers. He had edited the proposed awards list: Orders of Lenin were given to the Leningrad Film Studio, Shumyatsky, Pavel Tager (who had helped introduce sound to Soviet films), and numerous directors. Eisenstein had been proposed for the lesser Order of the Red Banner, which Stalin crossed out, substituting something lesser still: “honored artist.”¹⁷⁵ After this humiliation, Eisenstein had to offer the closing remarks. “No one here has had to listen to so many compliments about highbrow wisdom as I,” he stated. “The crux—and this you know—is that I have not been engaged in film production for several years, and I consider the [awards] decision a signal from the party and government that I must enter production.”¹⁷⁶ The gathering concluded with a performance of the third act of Swan Lake.¹⁷⁷

Shumyatsky did not speak at the ceremony or at the conference, but Pravda (January 11) published an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Cinema for the Millions. “The victorious class wants to laugh with joy,” he wrote. “That is its right, and Soviet cinema must provide its audiences with this joyful Soviet laughter.” He admitted, however, that “we have no common view on such fundamental and decisive problems of our art as the interrelationship between form and content, as plot, as the pace and rhythm of a film, the role of the script, the techniques of cinema.”¹⁷⁸ In fact, all he and other film people had to go on was Stalin’s utterances or their own intuition about what might please him.

THE SECOND TRIAL

On January 13, 1935, a plebiscite took place in a small region on the western side of the Rhine known as the Saar, which the Versailles Treaty had taken from Germany and put under the League of Nations, stipulating such a vote after fifteen years. Some 445,000 Saarlanders, 90.35 percent, freely voted to join Germany under Nazi dictatorship rather than France or remain under the League. The French and British expected this removal of a German grievance to be followed by German compliance. Hitler perceived only a removal of restraint, and would exult that “blood is stronger than any document or mere paper. What ink has written will one day be blotted out in blood.” Large ethnic German populations resided in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and even the Soviet Union.¹⁷⁹

The Kirov documentary opened publicly on January 14.¹⁸⁰ The NKVD had been planning a second public trial of eight “Zinovievites” willing to incriminate themselves, with Draule testifying about their links to Nikolayev. In the event, she would be tried in camera, while several high-profile Zinovievites were added to the eight unknowns for a public trial, which took place January 15–16. The nineteen defendants, now headlined by Zinoviev himself, Kamenev, and Grigory Yevdokimov, were charged with fostering a “moral atmosphere” conducive to the terrorism that had resulted in Kirov’s death. They had been promised their lives if they fulfilled their party duty and publicly confessed. Zinoviev admitted that he’d had conversations with people whom the NKVD called the Leningrad Center, for example with Vladimir Levin back in 1932, during his work in livestock requisitions. Kamenev at first refused to go along with the canard that his private conversations signified participation in a so-called Moscow Center or had somehow inspired acts of terrorism.¹⁸¹ Yevdokimov confessed to having suggested that collectivization was a mad adventure, that the tempos of industrialization would turn the working class against the party, and that there was no party anymore, since Stalin had usurped its role.¹⁸² Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years, Yevdokimov to eight, Kamenev to five.¹⁸³

Pravda’s trial report (January 18, 1935) acknowledged that incitement of the Kirov murder by the Moscow Center had not been proven, but insisted that the Moscow Center had known about the “terrorist sentiments” of Nikolayev and his Leningrad Center. That same day, Stalin sent an explanatory letter to all party organizations, which accused the former Zinoviev opposition of “two-facedness,” equated them with “White Guard wreckers, spies, and provocateurs,” and deemed expulsion from the party insufficient: they needed to be imprisoned so they could no longer pursue sabotage. The circular excoriated the Zinoviev opposition’s concealment of its views in professions of loyalty, and blamed the NKVD for complacency. (“Is it that difficult for a Chekist to understand that a party card can be forged or stolen from its owner?”) The circular called for better teaching of party history, especially the foul deeds of the various oppositions, and instructed local party organizations to seek enemies among any party members who had ever expressed criticism of Stalin and his ruling group.¹⁸⁴ The NKVD distributed its own secret circular to branches explaining that Nikolayev’s long-existing “center” for terrorism had eluded the Leningrad NKVD because of the latter’s failure to heed Yagoda’s instructions to strengthen Kirov’s guard.¹⁸⁵

Three days later, regime favorites assembled for the anniversary of Lenin’s death.¹⁸⁶ Shumyatsky showed a new documentary about Lenin, to which was added the speaking footage from the Kirov documentary—the first time a recorded speech had been heard at the Bolshoi. “The whole hall at first went silent,” the cinema boss wrote, “then people could not contain themselves, and stormy applause, from the heart, eclipsed the inspiring speech of Mironych about the significance of Marxist-Leninist rearing.” When the sound parts ended and the silent parts resumed, the orchestra started playing but could not be heard. “The end of the film, with the appearance of I. V. Stalin, was drowned out in a stormy ovation.” Stalin had Shumyatsky summoned to the imperial box and “again reiterated the exceptional power of film.”¹⁸⁷

The regime held a closed trial of the Leningrad NKVD on January 23, 1935. Borisov’s death was ruled an accident, and four operatives were released. Twelve others were convicted, including Medved and Zaporozhets (three years each), as well as Gubin and Fomin (two years). Almost all ended up serving their time as commandants at the Dalstroi gold camps in the far northeast.¹⁸⁸ Three days later, 663 former Zinovievites in Leningrad were exiled to Siberia, and 325 others transferred to jobs in other regions. In the meantime, on January 25, Valerian Kuibyshev died of heart failure, at age forty-six. The autopsy would find arteriosclerosis and blood clots. His heavy drinking had resulted in unpredictable work absences, a constant refrain in Stalin’s correspondence.¹⁸⁹ He was cremated, and the urn with his ashes interred in the Kremlin Wall, adjacent to Kirov’s.¹⁹⁰

NAZISM’S WINDFALL

Soviet military intelligence, for all its blowups and failures, amassed a breathtaking network in Warsaw—thanks to Hitler. Rudolf Herrnstadt, born in the Silesian town of Gleiwitz (1903), a correspondent for the left-wing Berliner Tageblatt and a Jew, had joined the German Communist party as Rudolf Arbin, began working for Soviet intelligence around 1931, and fled the Nazis to Warsaw in 1933 with his lover, also a Soviet agent. He maintained journalist cover and recruited Gerhard Kegel (“X”), a junior banker and journalist (b. 1907) also from Upper Silesia, who had joined the German Socialist Party and then the Communists and now worked in the trade department of Germany’s embassy in Warsaw. Herrnstadt’s lover, the angular-faced Ilse Stöbe (b. 1911), code-named “Alta,” the daughter of working-class parents in Berlin, had worked for the same newspaper as Herrnstadt. She had been directed to join the Nazi party and, in mid-1934, was named a cultural attaché of the Nazi party’s foreign office in Poland. Stöbe would recruit the Silesia-born (1897) Rudolf von Scheliha (“Aryan”), the son of a Prussian squire, who joined the Nazi party at the suggestion of Soviet intelligence and in late 1934 had gotten himself named as the top aide in Warsaw to German ambassador Hans-Adolf von Moltke. Other recruits included the radioman Kurt Schulze (“Berg,” b. 1894), Kurt Welkisch (“ABC,” b. 1910), a German journalist and diplomat, and his wife, Margarita Welkisch (“LCL,” b. 1913).¹⁹¹ They were linked in their anti-Nazism.

Inside Nazi Germany, Wilhelm “Willy” Lehmann (b. 1884), code-named “Breitenbach,” a long-serving Berlin policeman, had been secretly recruited even before the Nazis came to power, then moved into the Gestapo, where he was assigned to nothing less than counterintelligence against the Soviet Union. (He had been tasked with summary executions during the Night of the Long Knives, which helped solidify his bona fides.) Lehmann passed to Moscow details of German intelligence’s organizational structure and forthcoming operations and, in 1935, of early German rocket tests. That same year, Harro Schulze-Boysen (b. 1909), a Prussian aristocrat officer at Göring’s Luftwaffe, contacted the Soviet embassy offering his services; he was given the code name “Elder.” Not long thereafter, Arvid Harnack (b. 1901), a senior official in the Nazi economics ministry and onetime leftist youth organizer, also made contact with the Soviet embassy; he was advised to join the Nazi party and given the code name “Corsican.” No other country would field such an undercover network in the halls of the Third Reich.

Another remarkable anti-Nazi Soviet spy was in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, the offspring of a Russian mother and a German father, who, in preparation for assignment to Japan, had traveled to Germany and happened to meet the publisher of the Journal of Geopolitics, a zealous Nazi who gave him a contract as a stringer and a letter of introduction to the German embassy in Tokyo. Sorge, code-named “Ramsay,” joined the Nazi party, took with him a radio operator, and charmed the ambassador in Japan, Herbert von Dirksen. Other contacts gave Sorge entrée to Colonel Eugen Ott, who became the German military attaché (and would one day replace Dirksen). Sorge also had spectacular success penetrating Japanese officialdom, partly thanks to the esteem in which the Germans held him. German diplomats discovered that the journalist stringer Sorge had better information about Japan than they did, and they let him help compile embassy reports to Berlin, copies of which surreptitiously went to Moscow.¹⁹²

Soviet intelligence enjoyed gobsmacking success in the UK, too. Harold Philby, nicknamed “Kim” after the Rudyard Kipling character, had been born in British India (1912); his father was an adviser to the Saudi king, and the son aimed to join the foreign office. As a student at Cambridge University, Philby had been helped by Maurice Dobb, an economics lecturer and an early British Communist party member, to go abroad and work for the World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism. Aiding refugees from Nazism in Austria, Philby married a Hungarian-Jewish divorcée who belonged to the Austrian Communist party and came to the attention of Tivadar (Theodore) Maly, a Hungary-born Soviet intelligence operative who secretly recommended him for recruitment. Back in London, a friend of Philby’s wife set up a meeting in Regent’s Park with the Artuzov protégé Arnold Deutsch, a chemical engineer born in Habsburg Slovakia, of Jewish extraction, who had joined the Austrian Communist party and relocated to the Soviet Union, before being posted as station chief to the UK.¹⁹³ Deutsch transformed Philby, a budding journalist, into a playacting right-winger and reliable courier with a valuable British passport. Through Philby, Soviet intelligence recruited Guy Burgess (b. 1911), another Cambridge University student; Anthony Blunt, a Cambridge student and then tutor in art history; and the invaluable Donald Maclean, a fourth Cambridge University graduate who entered the British foreign office in 1935. Artuzov’s team would even penetrate MI6.¹⁹⁴

All the while, Soviet counterintelligence was spending as much or more time on its own diplomats and military officers as on foreign governments. NKVD special department operatives for watching the Red Army had ballooned to an all-time record of 3,769 by January 1935.¹⁹⁵ Mark Stokland, known as Gai, the head of the special department, received yet another phantasmagorical secret “report” from the informant Tatyana Zaionchkovskaya, who socialized with Tukhachevsky, among others, and asserted that the “counterrevolution” inside the USSR was counting on former officers to shoot Stalin. “This is complete rubbish of a stupid old woman who has lost her mind,” Gai wrote. But such “reports” kept coming.¹⁹⁶

What use Stalin and the Soviet regime would make of the intelligence windfall inadvertently delivered by Hitler and Nazism, meanwhile, remained to be seen. Hermann Göring, under the pretext of a hunting trip, was invited to undertake a diplomatic trip to Poland from January 26 to 31, 1935. He had just spent several days with Hitler in the Obersalzberg, and now, on the anniversary of the nonaggression declaration with Poland, he told Beck that Germany would not sign a broad Eastern Pact or any treaty with the Soviet Union, and that “the chancellor has decided to continue the policy of developing good neighborly relations with Poland.” Göring told Józef Lipski, the Polish envoy to Berlin, who was back in Warsaw for the occasion, that Germany would have to expand, but not at Polish expense, and that Poland might acquire more Lithuanian territory in any deal over the Polish Corridor. At a reception in his honor, Göring tried to prove a lack of aggression toward Poland by pointing out that, for Germany, creating a common border with the USSR would be “highly dangerous.” At the former tsarist family hunting grounds in the Białowieza (Belovezh) Forest, in the presence of two Polish generals, Göring “almost proposed an anti-Soviet alliance, and a joint march on Moscow,” according to the Polish record. “Ukraine would be a Polish sphere of influence, while northwestern Russia would go to Germany.” Göring conveyed something similar in his audience with President Piłsudski, even offering that the marshal could command a joint Polish-German attack on the USSR. The elderly president answered that Poland, having a 600-mile border with the Soviet Union, needed peace.¹⁹⁷

Public knowledge of Göring’s visit, combined with the secretiveness of its substance, sparked all manner of speculation.¹⁹⁸ On January 30, Stalin had Tukhachevsky—who had a sky-high profile abroad—deliver a policy speech to the 2,000 delegates of the 7th USSR Congress of Soviets. He declared that the Red Army was concentrating soldiers in the Far East and, in general, was a force not to be underestimated, revealing for the first time that the military budget had risen to more than 5 billion rubles—10 percent of total expenditures—and was projected to reach 6.5 billion in 1935. In fact, 1934 outlays had amounted to a gargantuan 5.8 billion (as compared with 417 million a decade before), and internal projections for 1935 were 7.5 billion.¹⁹⁹ But even the deliberately lowball figures were impressive. Tukhachevsky added, accurately, that troop strength had increased to 940,000. “We are working for the development of mobility and daring, for the development of initiative, independence, persistence—to put it crudely, ‘nerve,’” he explained of the new military doctrine, adding that commanders accustomed since the civil war to cavalry had had to “adjust to a new level, to be able to utilize the mobility of aviation and our mechanized troops and tanks. [It] is not so simple.” Both when he had first appeared on the dais and after he finished, the entire hall stood in applause for a good long time. “The ovation was marked out from others by its force and sincerity,” one attendee recalled. “Tukhachevsky was a good orator, and his speech stirred the audience to its depths.”²⁰⁰ The rousing account of Red Army might was published in Pravda (January 31) along with a photograph of Stalin, Voroshilov, and other politburo members listening to Tukhachevsky.²⁰¹

LITTLE BLACKBERRY

Nikolai Yezhov, along with Agranov, was the point man on the Kirov assassination fallout. Stalin convened a one-day Central Committee plenum on February 1, 1935, to formalize Yezhov’s appointment as a Central Committee secretary. Officially, he had been born (1895) to a working-class family in industrial St. Petersburg, but he hailed from Mariampol, in tsarist Lithuania, and his father was a musician, then a forest warden, brothel (“tearoom”) owner, and housepainter. His mother was the maid of the musical ensemble’s conductor and either an ethnic Lithuanian or a Russian who grew up in Lithuania. (Yezhov spoke Lithuanian and Polish, which he hid.) Having completed only first grade, he went to the imperial Russian capital at age eleven to apprentice to a tailor, before signing on to the Putilov Works and then being conscripted. He joined the Bolshevik party in 1917 (before October) and served as a military commissar during the civil war, after which his star rose as a regional party functionary in Tatarstan, then in Mari-El (east-central Russia), where he provoked anger for running roughshod over the local ethnics, and then in the Kazakh steppe (Semipalatinsk).²⁰² Yezhov enjoyed playing guitar, composing verse, reading—he had been dubbed Kolya the Book Lover—and building model ships.²⁰³ He was nervous and shy, and developed a reputation as mild-mannered, but he stood out for his uncommon energy.²⁰⁴ In 1927, Ivan Moskvin, the head of the Central Committee’s assignments and records department, had brought Yezhov into the central apparatus (they had met in the hotel at the 14th Party Congress). “I don’t know a more ideal worker, or rather executive,” Moskvin wrote to his son-in-law. “If you entrust him with anything, you need not check up: you can be sure, he will do it. Yezhov has only one fault, admittedly a fundamental one: he doesn’t know where to stop. . . . And sometimes one has to keep an eye on him in order to stop him in time.”²⁰⁵

Yezhov displaced his mentor Moskvin as head of assignments and records.The dictator had taken a shine to him, nicknaming him the Little Blackberry (Yezhevichka), and allowed him to attend politburo sessions, oversee personnel in the economy, and help run the orgburo.²⁰⁶ In late 1933, the émigré Socialist Herald had published a revealing essay on “the dictator’s inner circle” that ridiculed Yezhov. “Short in stature, nearly a dwarf, with thin curved legs, an asymmetric face, bearing the marks of his birth (his father was a hereditary alcoholic), with evil eyes, a thin squeaky voice, and a severely sarcastic tongue,” read the profile, calling him “a typical representative of the Petersburg lower-foreman type, whose determining character trait was rage against those born in better circumstances . . . enormous rage against the intelligentsia, including the party intelligentsia.”²⁰⁷ The ridicule confirmed Yezhov’s meteoric rise. Now a Central Committee secretary, he enjoyed a grand office on Old Square, on the top floor near the dictator’s, and use of a three-story villa with a private cinema, tennis court, nanny, and staff, in Meshcherino, the prerevolutionary artists’ and writers’ colony on the Pra River just outside Moscow. (Yezhov had divorced his first wife and married Yevgeniya Feigenberg Khayutina Gladun, a social climber whom he met at a government resort in Sochi—it was her third marriage—and she began to convene literary salons.)²⁰⁸

Stalin also promoted Chubar and Mikoyan, longtime candidate members of the politburo, to full membership, giving them the voting slots of Kirov and Kuibyshev. Zhdanov and Eihe became candidate politburo members.²⁰⁹ On February 27, 1935, Kaganovich replaced Andreyev as transport commissar, who became a Central Committee secretary. The railways had long been a bottleneck, and others posted there had not fared well (including Andreyev). On February 28, Stalin convened another one-day Central Committee plenum to formalize Andreyev’s promotion. Khrushchev got Kaganovich’s post as head of the Moscow party. Yezhov was put in charge of party personnel and local party organizations and freed from overseeing industry and managing the orgburo (responsibilities transferred to Andreyev). Yezhov also took over chairmanship of the party Control Commission from his mentor Kaganovich.²¹⁰ In a word, Kaganovich’s protégés in the apparatus became Stalin’s, and instead of the powerful post of de facto second secretary, held first by Molotov and then Kaganovich, Stalin now had a troika of three younger apparatchik deputies: Yezhov, Zhdanov, and Andreyev, of whom only Andreyev had met him before 1917.²¹¹ The most frequent visitors to Stalin’s Kremlin apartment for meals were now Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, and Andreyev.²¹² But the Little Blackberry spent more and more time in Stalin’s office.

SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT

Henri Barbusse’s Stalin: A New World Seen Through One Man came out in French in February 1935. The Frenchman was the sole foreign intellectual who had met Stalin both recently and in the past (1927, 1932, 1933, 1934), and at both his office and his apartment.²¹³ His draft manuscript had been submitted for review to the Soviet functionary Stetsky, who faced a dilemma: the book not only mentioned Trotsky, but also portrayed him as a thinker, while not portraying Stalin as such.²¹⁴ In a delicate dance to avoid alienating Barbusse, Stetsky managed to obtain changes. “Stalin is the Lenin of our day,” the final text felicitously stated. “Stalin is a person with a scholar’s mind, a worker’s figure, and a simple soldier’s dress.” Barbusse portrayed the cult, much maligned in Western Europe, as a natural phenomenon arising from the depths (“If Stalin believes in the masses, the masses believe in him”), and humanized the dictator. “It is not so much that his expression is a little wild as that there seems to be a perpetual twinkle in his eye,” Barbusse wrote. “He laughs like a child,” and “people who laugh like children love children.”²¹⁵

Barbusse made his motivations plain, writing that “every state except one is moving through fascism towards ruin.” But his knowledge of Soviet realities was dim.

Collective farms had stabilized, and the size of the harvests improved, in part from belated mechanization, in part from fortunate weather, but also from regime concessions to the farmers, who had been allowed to maintain “household plots” and personal cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens (though not horses, a sore point). In the Grand Kremlin Palace from February 11 to 17, 1935, the regime convened a Second all-Union Congress of Collective Farm Shock Workers, attended by 1,433 delegates, the majority of whom were not party members. Crop growers, herders, and tractor drivers were given the floor.²¹⁶ Maria Demchenko, of the Comintern Collective Farm in Kiev province, pledged to harvest 500 centners of sugar beets per hectare (“We must bombard the country with sugar”), which the regime made into a “movement” of 500ers (the average at her farm was 245). Stalin did not deliver a formal speech, but came and went all seven days. “Iosif Vissarionovich,” Demchenko told the delegates, “laughs with us, converses with us, shares his thoughts with us on how to work on the collective farm and how we can live better.”²¹⁷ One Kazakh tractor driver, Beken Tankin, a former nomad whose Russian was shaky, had been put in the position of chairing one of the nine sessions and became bewildered when delegates started shouting “Hurrah!” The ovation persisted. Finally, someone came up from behind and turned Tankin around: Stalin had reentered the congress presidium. Smiling, the dictator pointed to a button on the table for Tankin to press for quiet. “I’ll go home to my collective farm,” he said to himself, “with something to talk about.”²¹⁸

Delegates “elected” a commission of 170 members to consider a new charter for collective farms drafted by the Central Committee agriculture department.²¹⁹ At the commission, on February 16, Stalin went through the text point by point, grandly asserting that members were not taking into account the interests of collective farmers. Instead of the 0.10–0.12 hectare for household plots some people were recommending, he proposed 0.25 to 0.5, and even up to 1 hectare in some regions, depending on conditions, as well as up to one cow and two calves, one sow and its progeny, up to ten sheep and goats, unlimited poultry, and twenty bee-hives. “Comrade Stalin,” Kalinin objected, “we do not have enough land.” Voroshilov interjected that those getting 0.5 hectare would in any case be “a minority.” Stalin disagreed: “Our country is big, the conditions are very various.”²²⁰ He also recommended maternity leave of two months (at half average pay), a nod to the outsized role that ambitious women such as Demchenko played.²²¹ The final charter, approved on February 17, granted the leave, personal livestock, and household plots of the size Stalin suggested, and the press let the rural laborers know who was responsible for the ostensible largesse.²²² In fact, Stalin despised the household plots, and his regime strove to contain them.²²³

One contemporary émigré analyst deemed the 1935 household-plot-size concessions a “collective farm NEP,” but still likened the collective farms to the Gulag system, only larger.²²⁴ The state dominated the grain trade, imposing very heavy quotas and very low state prices, paying collective farmers subsistence wages, predominantly in kind, and forcing them to work in brigades—a demotion from peasant to laborer, which encouraged dependency and sloth.²²⁵ The regime also imposed unpaid obligations for roadwork, timber felling, and hauling, and required rural laborers (unlike urban workers) to deliver quotas of meat, milk, and eggs from their household plots, even if they did not own a cow or livestock. But after all the blood and tears of dekulakization, the new charter belatedly conceded legal entry into collective farms to former kulaks, albeit supposedly only “after a strict check to ensure that wolves in sheep’s clothing were not getting in on the pretext of being reformed characters.”²²⁶ The Soviet village ended up stratified, with rich and poor, based on bureaucratic position.²²⁷

“FORMERS”

Three women in their early twenties who worked as cleaning personnel in the Kremlin had sat down to “tea” and gossiped. One supposedly said, “Stalin has people do the work for him—that’s why he’s so fat. He has servants and luxuries.” The second: “Stalin killed his wife. He’s not Russian but Armenian, very evil, and never looks at anyone with a nice glance.” The third: “Comrade Stalin gets a lot of money and he misleads us, saying that he only makes 200 rubles [per month].” Rudolf Peterson, the Kremlin commandant—who had been one of the first to see Nadya’s body after she shot herself and was said to have given her vanished suicide note to Stalin—passed a report of these conversations to Yenukidze, who did nothing.²²⁸ But another denunciation came forward, and on January 20, 1935, the NKVD’s Pauker, Georgy Molchanov, and Genrikh Lyushkov, all of whom were involved in the investigation of Kirov’s murder on the NKVD’s watch, conducted interrogations. Yagoda sent Stalin a report that day about cleaning personnel who were said to belong to “a counterrevolutionary group” in the Kremlin.²²⁹

Yezhov, meanwhile, had invited the dictator to join him at a closed-door operational gathering of all NKVD central and provincial bosses on February 3; Stalin accepted, and delivered a speech on vigilance.²³⁰ At the gathering, Agranov contradicted the official line on the Kirov murder, stating, accurately, that “Nikolayev was gripped by ecstasy over fulfilling an historical mission, comparing himself to Zhelyabov and [Alexander] Radishchev.” Agranov went on to issue a mea culpa: “We did not succeed in proving that the ‘Moscow Center’ knew and prepared a terrorist act against comrade Kirov.”²³¹

In the testimony of Kremlin employees, each person mentioned other names, leading to new arrests, and on February 5, Yagoda sent Stalin a report with interrogation protocols containing confessions of private complaints about daily life and a lack of democracy, as well as “Trotskyite interpretations of Lenin’s so-called Testament” and speculation about how Stalin’s wife had really died.²³² While interrogating Kremlin janitors, the NKVD heard about some daughters of former nobles who worked as librarians in the Kremlin, transporting books back and forth from the private residences. Yagoda’s power ended at the Kremlin walls—inside, Yenukidze’s central executive committee apparatus and Voroshilov’s defense commissariat ruled—and the NKVD chief evidently made professions that he could not be responsible for the safety of the leadership with such women going about using special passes. Testimony was spun into the existence of an “aristocratic nest” around Nina Rozenfeld, an ethnic Armenian, educated at gymnasium, who was said to have boasted of her descent from an ancient Muscovy clan. (One arrested colleague defended her as “a Soviet-inclined person.”)²³³ Stalin read, numbered, and marked up the voluminous interrogation protocols with queries or comments. On one, where it was noted that the accused had initially been a cleaning lady before becoming a Kremlin librarian, he underlined the sentence and wrote, “Ha-ha, cleaner-librarian?”²³⁴

These were indeed small fry.²³⁵ Nonetheless, on February 14, the politburo substituted the NKVD for the central executive committee as the defense commissariat’s partner for oversight of the Kremlin.²³⁶ The NKVD took over the reconstruction of the Grand Kremlin Palace’s Andreyev and Alexandrov halls and of the Sverdlov Hall in the Imperial Senate. This looked like a triumph for Yagoda, but on February 22, the politburo directed Yezhov, not Yagoda, to conduct a verification of the central executive committee apparatus. NKVD interrogation protocols in the “Kremlin Affair” had to be sent to him.²³⁷ Zinoviev, meanwhile, had been hauled out of prison and re-interrogated in Moscow on February 19 in connection with the Kirov murder. “To Kamenev belongs the winged formulation on how ‘Marxism is now whatever is convenient for Stalin,’” he testified. “Kamenev and I did discuss Stalin’s removal, but we thought only in terms of his being replaced in the post of general secretary. . . . I did not hear declarations by Kamenev about a terrorist act in the struggle with the party leadership.”²³⁸ Yezhov had work to do. Soon the politburo would formally task him with reviewing the statutes governing the NKVD: further pressure on Yagoda.²³⁹

Yezhov praised Zakovsky, whose Leningrad Chekists were poring over prerevolutionary archives, address lists, and phone books, stringing together people like beads to form counterrevolutionary “organizations” of former nobles, merchants, factory owners, rentiers, old regime functionaries, priests, and family members.²⁴⁰ Zakovsky had been a Red Guard protecting Smolny during the October Revolution, and his Cheka service dated from its founding, in December 1917 (he was said to have been invited to join by Dzierżyński). He had completed just two years of schooling, yet he was credited with compiling the internal NKVD training textbook. He had reported to Yagoda on the more than 11,000 “former people” employed in the city’s party and government institutions.²⁴¹ Yagoda, in a note to Stalin (February 26), objected to indiscriminate roundups of “formers,” unless they were proven counterrevolutionaries, because of the potential for a negative press campaign abroad, but Stalin brushed the memo aside (“to the archive”).²⁴² Beginning on February 28, Zakovsky and his minions began “cleansing” the former people, the universities, and the border zones, requesting authorization for ever more arrests in “unmasked” conspiracies and boasting of preventing terrorist acts against the new Leningrad party boss, Zhdanov.²⁴³

FOREIGN MODELS

Bulgakov’s The Days of the Turbins had been returned to theaters, partly as a result of Gorky’s determination and political weight.²⁴⁴ By some accounts, Stalin saw it fifteen times.²⁴⁵ In 1935, he sent the fourteen-year-olds Vasily and Artyom to see it. Artyom recalled not comprehending the play, because it showed no Reds, only Whites, and the latter fought among themselves. Stalin explained that “between the Reds and the Whites there was a spectrum from almost Red to almost White, so that the people who fight in the play, some are very White, others a bit pink, but not Red. They could not get along, so they fought. Never think that you can divide people between purely Red and purely White. That is only leaders, the more literate, conscious people. The masses follow these or those, frequently confusing them, and do not go where they are supposed to go.”²⁴⁶

Stalin approved an International Film Festival in Moscow (February 21–March 2, 1935) and allowed the world-renowned Eisenstein to chair the jury. Captions under photographs of the Soviet participants read “director,” while Eisenstein’s read “Extraordinary World-Class Director,” but speakers pointedly asked why he had not made a film in six years, accusing him of silence about Soviet achievements.²⁴⁷ Walt Disney animations—Three Little Pigs, Peculiar Penguins—were featured (and, before the year was out, shown to the Soviet public).²⁴⁸ An American film about Mexico called Viva, Villa! was also screened, prompting the poet Alexander Bezymensky to accuse Jolly Fellows of having plagiarized its music from this film. This spurred renewed ideological attacks against mere laughter. “Jolly Fellows creates the impression that some bourgeois directors sneaked into the studios at night and secretly shot the film using a Soviet stage set,” a French critic remarked, as quoted in the Soviet press.²⁴⁹ Stalin ordered Mekhlis at Pravda to defend Shumyatsky, and the attack dog editorialized, without irony, that “both editors [of Izvestiya and Literary Newspaper] have apparently forgotten the elementary rules of decency essential to Soviet newspapers.”²⁵⁰

At the concluding ceremony in the Columned Hall of the House of Trade Unions, Leningrad Film took first prize, primarily for Chapayev; The Last Billionaire by the French-born René-Lucien Chomette, known as René Clair, took second; and Disney third.²⁵¹ Clair’s film, a commercial flop in France, portrays a nearly bankrupt fictional European kingdom (“Casinaria”) that begs for help from the earth’s richest man (“Monsieur Banco”), who, upon arrival, is accidentally hit in the head and awakens a babbling imbecile. Casinaria soon becomes a dictatorship.²⁵²

Certain types of foreign literature were being translated, and, once in Russian (or another Soviet language), they could be incorporated, alongside Lev Tolstoy, into the Soviet canon as “classics of world literature.” This included Cervantes, Molière, Balzac, Goethe, and especially Shakespeare, all of whom were often translated freely, rather than literally.²⁵³ “Shakespearize More!” (an exhortation credited to Marx) had been revived, with propagandists characterizing him as a “people’s bard.”²⁵⁴ For a March 1935 international theater festival in Moscow—Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Eisler, and Edward Gordon Craig participated—the featured Soviet entrant was Shakespeare’s King Lear, which had premiered at the Moscow State Jewish Theater in Yiddish, with Solomon Mikhoels playing Lear.²⁵⁵ Of course, Lear had lost all his territory and descended into insanity.²⁵⁶

TAKE CARE

Local officials all around the Union were reporting to Stalin on steel, chemicals, military hardware. Beria was reporting on Baku oil and Georgian rare metals, the boost in manganese output at Chiatura, the performance of the Tiflis railway shops now named for Stalin, and the output of new plants: the Tiflis machine-tool factory, now named for Kirov; Zestafoni Ferroalloy Plant; Inguri Pulp and Paper.²⁵⁷ Lakoba’s reports concerned tea, citrus, tobacco, and geraniums. He sent crates of tangerines and lemons to Stalin and Orjonikidze in Moscow. But Abkhazia’s resorts left a lot to be desired. “Authority, comrades, does not arise by itself; it needs to be won. It arises where living people get things done, not from books, not from formulas,” he had told the 7th Congress of Soviets of the Abkhaz autonomous republic in March 1935. “You know, comrades, in resort construction we still look very weak.. . . . We have not managed to reestablish our old resorts fully.”²⁵⁸ Nonetheless, the Abkhaz autonomous republic was awarded the Order of Lenin, partly for tobacco production (which was largely the work of family farms, not collectives).²⁵⁹

As the NKVD interrogated ever more Kremlin personnel, Yenukidze’s name inevitably came up.²⁶⁰ Well liked, he ran a regime of favors, doling out unique state resources and using his status as Stalin’s intimate to take care of old friends and solve sticky matters involving elite households.²⁶¹ The fifty-eight-year-old had never married and had not himself moved into the Kremlin, continuing to live in the Metropole, where the central executive committee had had its original offices, but if he was trying to keep his bedding of underage females out of sight, he failed. During testimony, some arrested Kremlin employees mentioned Yenukidze’s “girls.” Irina Gogua, another Kremlin employee who fell into the NKVD’s net, was the daughter of an old Menshevik who had gone to school with Yenukidze in Tiflis. “He was a fantastic guy, very charming, a flaming redhead who, thanks to graying, had become such a soft blond,” she would recall of Yenukidze. “True, his face was pockmarked, even more so than Iosif Vissarionovich’s. . . . You see, it was a paradox. He was accused of debauchery, devil knows what. But he was a very warm person. He had one quality: he hated to say no, he helped people, independent of who they were. He had one weakness: girls who married his closest friends with whom he would fall in love.”²⁶²

What really got Yenukidze into trouble was his quiet disbursal of state funds to help the often destitute families of non-Bolshevik revolutionaries from the underground years, former Communist party oppositionists (Kamenev’s relatives), even former nobles (like himself) for whom he found jobs in the sprawling central executive committee. Kirov’s assassination had made such actions especially sinister but, protected by Voroshilov, Yenukidze was merely demoted on March 3, 1935, to a position in the central executive committee of the South Caucasus.²⁶³ Ivan Akulov, USSR procurator general, became secretary of the central executive committee; Andrei Vyshinsky took over as USSR procurator general.

The Kirov and Kremlin Affair investigations were now running in parallel. In Leningrad on March 10, Draule was tried and executed, along with her sister and brother-in-law; there was no public announcement.²⁶⁴ The next day, a secret NKVD circular observed that enemies had been smashed mercilessly but as a result had “gone deep underground,” so operatives had to dig deeper to find them.²⁶⁵ In Moscow, in further testimony (March 11), Nina Rozenfeld was said to have attributed Nadya Alliluyeva’s death to differences over party policy, while complaining about the removal of Zinoviev and Kamenev and a lack of democracy. Rozenfeld happened to be the former wife of Lev Kamenev’s brother Nikolai, and their son, Boris N. Rozenfeld, was labeled a Trotskyite.²⁶⁶ Nikolai Kamenev had been arrested, and found to have painted watercolors of Stalin. Finally, Lev Kamenev was interrogated (March 21) and asked about his brother, who Lev was told had confessed to planning to kill Stalin. Lev Kamenev said that after the arrests of the Zinoviev followers Ivan Bakayev and Grigory Yevdokimov in the wake of the Kirov murder, an agitated Zinoviev had come to him expressing fears of an action like Germany’s Night of the Long Knives against him and others. Stalin circulated the document to Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Yezhov, writing, “Idiotic interrogation of Kamenev.”²⁶⁷

Stalin had the politburo approve by telephone poll a secret party circular absolving Yenukidze of knowing of plans to assassinate the dictator, but deeming him to have been used by the class enemy. His demotion to the South Caucasus was judged too light a punishment.²⁶⁸ Gorky was following press accounts of the Kremlin Affair. “What is striking is not so much the behavior of Yenukidze, but the shameful indifference to this behavior of the party-ites,” he wrote ingratiatingly to Stalin (March 23, 1935). “Even the non-party people long ago knew and spoke about how the old man was surrounded by nobles, Mensheviks, and, in general, shitty flies.” Gorky asserted that the strangely well-informed émigré Socialist Herald got its inside information from Yenukidze’s staff. “The closer we get to war, the stronger will be the efforts of these jokers of all suits to try to assassinate you, in order to decapitate the Union,” Gorky stated in his letter, which Stalin circulated to the politburo. “This is natural, for the enemies see well: there is no one who could take your place. With your colossal and wise work, you have inculcated in millions of people trust and love to you—that’s a fact. . . . Take care of yourself.”²⁶⁹

Also on March 23, after protracted negotiations, the Soviets sold the Chinese Eastern Railway to Manchukuo for the convertible currency equivalent of 140 million yen, a fraction of its market (let alone strategic) value.²⁷⁰ (Stalin’s regime left behind a network of undercover agents.) On the same day, the politburo decreed that the payment would be used for more equipment purchases in the United States, Britain, and Germany for Moscow’s ZIS Factory, which manufactured heavy trucks and, soon, luxury sedans.²⁷¹ Chinese patriots said the railroad was not the Soviets’ to sell, and the Nationalist government in Nanking lodged an official protest. Chiang Kai-shek had opened semiofficial negotiations for a friendship treaty with Japan’s representative, who proposed a Sino-Japanese alliance. As a dedicated anti-Communist, Chiang would have been a natural ally of Japan (as well as Germany) against the Soviet Union.²⁷² But “Chiang Kai-shek did not go for this,” the Soviet chargé d’affaires in China had reported of the alliance proposal. Chiang did raise the Japanese legation to the status of an embassy, and the two countries announced an exchange of ambassadors. This provoked anti-Japanese protests in Tientsin and Peking. Japan, leaping on the “insult” of the protests, had its garrison in Tientsin expel the Chinese Nationalist authorities and soldiers from Hebei province, and then from the Chahar province of Inner Mongolia, as it spread its control over northern China. Japan would also ramp up pressure on the Soviet satellite Outer Mongolia.²⁷³ The Soviet chargé d’affaires, in the same report about Chiang, warned that another faction in the Nanking government “favors an alliance” with Japan.²⁷⁴

JOYRIDE

On April 22, 1935, after concluding meetings in the Little Corner at 7:00 p.m., Stalin went downstairs to his apartment for supper. It was the birthday of Svetlana’s governess, and the relatives had come by. Stalin was said to be in a good mood. During the toasts, Svetlana said she wanted to ride on the new Moscow metro. Her governess, Maria Svanidze, and others were to accompany her and Vasily; Kaganovich sent the party with his deputy. Suddenly Stalin said he wanted to go, too. Molotov was phoned to join. “Everybody was terribly concerned,” Svanidze wrote in her diary. “There was a lot of whispering about the danger of such an outing without proper preparation.”

A now pale Kaganovich suggested that they wait until midnight, when the metro shut down. Stalin insisted they go immediately. They drove in three cars to Moscow’s Crimea Square and descended into the station, waiting for what turned out to be twenty minutes; a train arrived already packed. Workers decoupled the car with the motor and Stalin’s group was off, to Hunters’ Row, the station closest to the Kremlin, where he inspected the station and the escalator; onlookers erupted. Stalin ended up surrounded by well-wishers. Bodyguards and police had arrived and tried to bring order. The crowd smashed an enormous metal lamp. Svanidze was nearly smothered against a column. Vasily was scared for his life. Svetlana was so frightened, she stayed in the train car. We “were intimidated by the uninhibited ecstasy of the crowd,” Svanidze wrote. “Iosif was merry.”

This was an unstaged moment catalyzed by his daughter. Stalin reboarded, traveling to the end of the line, Sokolniki, where he was supposed to get into a waiting automobile, but he decided to stay on board and return to Smolensk Square, where no vehicles were waiting (the train beat them). He and his entourage went on foot toward the Arbat as rain descended and puddles formed. A car finally arrived. Svetlana and Vasily were taken to the Kremlin apartment, where Vasily “threw himself on the bed and cried hysterically.” Stalin headed to the Near Dacha. Evidently, his obsession with possible assassination was in abeyance that evening: regular passengers had been allowed to ride in the train carriage with him from Hunters’ Row.²⁷⁵ “Iosif smiled affectionately the whole time,” Svanidze wrote in her diary. “I think that, despite all his sobriety, he was touched by the people’s love and attention to their Supreme Leader. . . . He once said about the ovations offered to him that people need a tsar, that is, someone to revere and in whose name to live and labor.”²⁷⁶

• • •

COULD STALIN HAVE MURDERED HIS CLOSEST FRIEND? He was capable of anything.²⁷⁷ But who, precisely, would have carried out that mission for him? Medved, who was incompetent, and would himself go to his grave suspecting that Yagoda had organized the murder on Stalin’s behalf?²⁷⁸ Zaporozhets, who broke his leg, took no part in any operational matters after September 1934, and had left town on an extended holiday in the weeks leading up to the critical deed? Borisov, a near invalid who had gotten his bodyguard job only because he was of working-class origin and, for a time, had been a night watchman and was a faithful dog to Kirov? A mystery second gunman in the corridor, who eluded every single witness, as well as the lockdown imposed after the shots were heard? There is no evidence whatsoever that Stalin killed Kirov (despite the work of several commissions under Khrushchev aimed at discrediting the dictator). And there is copious evidence, recorded right before and after the assassination, that Nikolayev did it, and managed to pull it off because of his determination and shoddy NKVD security practices that were, ultimately, traceable to Kirov himself.²⁷⁹ Nikolayev had motive, and opportunity.²⁸⁰ He roiled with grievance and summoned resolve from revolutionary terrorist history and Soviet ideals of a workers’ state and social justice. He plotted out numerous attempts, all of which failed, until finally a combination of planning and luck gave him the chance to fulfill a wish to exact revenge and make history.

While Nikolayev reclaimed a sense of higher purpose from his despair, Stalin’s regime made the Kirov assassination into an epoch-defining event. Most people in Leningrad and elsewhere, living in communal apartments, barracks, and mud huts, were preoccupied with material hardship. Apparatchiks complained that the discussions they were ordered to oversee of Kirov’s murder were overtaken by the pending end of bread rationing and threatened price increases.²⁸¹ The end of rationing had generated significant anxiety and resentment.²⁸² All the while, conspiracy theories flourished: Medved had slipped Nikolayev a pass to Smolny; Chudov had ordered a hit to take Kirov’s place; foreign agents had penetrated the building; it was Stalin’s doing (a rumor that grew over time). Police informants hastened to capture or invent such gossip. In Leningrad: “I like brave men like Nikolayev who must have gone to a certain death.” “It’s clear not all the Zhelyabovs have disappeared in Rus; the struggle for freedom goes on.” “The murderer wanted good for the people, that’s why he killed Kirov.” In the miners’ region of Donetsk: “Kirov was killed; it’s not enough; Stalin should have also been killed.”²⁸³

Speculation that the affable provincial party leader constituted a threatening political rival to Stalin is without foundation.²⁸⁴ Similarly, the regime folklore that Yagoda’s NKVD had “resisted” the direction of the investigation was largely invented. Yagoda had no issues with framing Zinoviev and “Zinovievites,” a scenario that Stalin, in any case, did not come to immediately. The dictator drove an overkill response to the murder, relying not just on the hyper-ingratiating Yezhov, Agranov, and Zakovsky, but also on Yagoda. Yagoda had suggested the foreign angle—textbook Stalinist practice—calling from Stalin’s office the first night.²⁸⁵ It was Stalin who had chosen not to investigate Nikolayev’s visits and telephone calls to the German and Latvian consulates. The fabrications, moreover, exacerbated the professional degradation of the secret police, which enraged Stalin, and for which he had recently abolished the OGPU in favor of the NKVD. The fabrications also hurt the USSR’s reputation internationally, to which Stalin had become more sensitive. At the same time, it is wrong to assert that Stalin “took advantage” of the Kirov assassination. He needed no such pretext to act as he chose. He pushed for fierce revenge against “enemies” and prevention of recurrences out of anger, and loss.

One of Stalin’s prime fixations was confirmed: the NKVD was asleep on the job. In a city teeming with foreigners and presumed foreign agents, with innumerable “former people” and other presumed class enemies, with even much of the lower orders disaffected by the sacrifices of building socialism, Leningrad’s secret-operative department had only a short, pathetic list of potential terrorists—and did not even share that list with the bodyguard department.²⁸⁶ A parallel obsession of Stalin’s was also confirmed: an enemy terrorist in possession of a party card, taking advantage of ties to party members, had penetrated security with ease and assassinated a top leader.²⁸⁷ In fact, Nikolayev had been purged, for a time, but the episode had only rendered him more dangerous, just as Stalin was warning (the “class struggle” sharpened). But Stalin chose not to make this the object of the investigation and trials. Nikolayev’s individual terrorism—which had grown from his violated sense of worker empowerment and Communist justice—was altered, at Stalin’s behest, into the mythology that Zinoviev and Kamenev, both powerless, were somehow behind the assassination. Then Stalin remained bothered by their sentencing for creating a “moral atmosphere” conducive to terrorism, because it had fallen short of convictions for direct preparation in terrorist acts by his old critics or direct links to his arch-nemesis Trotsky, who remained out of reach in foreign exile.²⁸⁸

Stalin increasingly was alone. Not only had both of his wives died, but now his closest friend was gone. Henceforth he went to the steam bath alone. Relations with Orjonikidze had become strained, and Stalin’s ardor for Lakoba was cooling, partly as a result of Beria’s intrigues. Stalin’s newer associates, Andreyev, Yezhov, and Zhdanov, were minions, not social peers, and he was not socially close to the unlettered Kaganovich or the stiff Molotov. But Stalin had the Soviet state, which he had helped build into a major military power.²⁸⁹ Still, despite joining the League of Nations, the Soviet state was also to a considerable extent alone. And, more and more, the militarized state and its ruler were being stalked from afar by a nemesis the likes of which, inside the party, Stalin had never faced: Adolf Hitler.