Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

CHAPTER 7 ENEMIES HUNTING ENEMIES

“I think, I think, and I can’t understand anything. What is happening?” Koltsov used to repeat, walking up and down in his office. . . . “These are people we have known for years, with whom we lived next door! . . . I feel I’m going crazy. I’m a member of the editorial board of Pravda, a well-known journalist . . . it would seem I should be able to explain to others the sense of what is happening, the reasons for so many unmaskings and arrests. But in fact, I, like the last terrified philistine, know nothing, understand nothing, I’m bewildered, wander in the dark.”

BORIS YEFIMOV, Soviet caricaturist, talking about his brother Mikhail Koltsov ¹

INTO 1937, the Soviet colossus would seem to have been at the height of its power, helping to stave off Franco’s seizure of Madrid with its military hardware and know-how, but the USSR itself had fallen under grim siege. The NKVD was suffering a massacre—and not after it had arrested at least 1.6 million people but all the while it was doing so. Between late 1936 and late 1938, arrests of NKVD personnel exceeded 20,000. The NKVD’s Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB), which directly perpetrated the wholesale bloodletting, was decimated: around 2,300 of the 22,000 state security operatives were arrested—269 in the center and 2,064 in locales—of whom the great bulk (1,862) were charged with “counterrevolution.”² All eighteen “commissars of state security” (the top ranks) who served under Yagoda would be shot, with a single exception (who would be poisoned). Stalin also decimated his top military commanders, while constantly reminding the public that an attack on the Soviet Union was imminent, indeed that a new imperialist war had already started over Spain.

Even following the executions of Kamenev, Zinoviev, Pyatakov, and others in the two public trials of August 1936 and late January 1937, massacres of NKVD state security and Red Army officers would come as a shock. One high official, though, did sense what was about to unfold. On January 11, Artur Artuzov, a onetime Stalin favorite, was sacked as deputy head of military intelligence, having been the target of relentless intrigue by military men as a person from the civilian side. Artuzov was transferred back to the NKVD, to a low-level position in the archives department, where he did all he could to return himself to favor, writing an overview of Soviet counterintelligence, which he had founded, and begging for an audience with Yezhov. Failing that, he wrote to Yezhov on January 25 that NKVD foreign intelligence possessed information from foreign sources, dating back many years but never forwarded to higher-ups, revealing a “Trotskyite organization” in the Red Army. Sensationally, the documents linked Marshal Tukhachevsky to foreign powers.³ Artuzov knew full well how such compromising materials had been planted in Europe in order to make their way back to Moscow: in the 1920s he had helped lead just such an operation (“The Trust”).⁴ Now, to these fabricated documents he appended a list of thirty-four “Trotskyites” in military intelligence. His cynical efforts at ingratiation and revenge would not save his own life, but Artuzov had guessed right about Stalin’s intentions.⁵

Explanations for Stalin’s rampage through his own officer corps have ranged from his unquenchable thirst for power to the existence of an actual conspiracy.⁶ Nearly every dictator lusts for power, and in this case there was no military conspiracy. Nor were the massacres a response to a pressing new international crisis in 1937–38. Even the potential fall of the Republic forces in Spain posed no direct threat to the Soviet Union or Stalin’s regime. Another interpretation asserts that he “misperceived” a threat of foreign infiltration into the Soviet officer corps, owing to the barrage of intelligence reports he received, and decided to root out what he wrongly concluded were foreign agents throughout the officer corps, and then, as denunciations arrived in a flood, the process “escaped” his control. But Stalin demanded those very intelligence reports that allegedly led to his “misperceptions,” issuing specific instructions and questions to intelligence officials, who came to understand what he wanted.⁷ A spiral of denunciations certainly took place; this again was something Stalin could have tamped down, but instead fomented at every turn.

A few scholars have argued that Stalin was “tricked” into executing his military men.⁸ Reinhard Heydrich, of the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (SD), would later boast of his clever work to decapitate the Red Army by manufacturing compromising materials, but such machinations, if they took place, were of no consequence.⁹ Soviet secret agents were tasked with spreading rumors in Europe of a pending military coup in Moscow, which other Soviet representatives abroad picked up and reported back to Moscow.¹⁰ Uritsky, chief of military intelligence (who had squeezed out Artuzov), informed Stalin and Voroshilov about chatter in German military circles in Berlin concerning political opposition among Red Army generals (which Uritsky discounted).¹¹ Paris may have been the liveliest echo chamber: Beria (for whom the city was a long-standing field of operations) sent a relative of his wife there to spread rumors among Georgian Menshevik émigré circles of a pending military coup in Moscow. This, or another channel, prompted French minister of war Édouard Daladier to convey official word to the Soviet ambassador, who in turn sent a coded telegram to Moscow about a plot “by German circles to promote a coup d’état in the Soviet Union with the assistance of persons from the command staff of the Red Army.”¹² Stalin—as the wily but doomed Artuzov surmised—was engaged in the very activity of which he accused the top army commanders: collaborating with foreign enemies.¹³ A “Tukhachevsky plot” did exist: Stalin’s, to smear and execute him.

Top military officers of any regime, in a war, could fall into enemy captivity or even choose to collaborate with foreign occupiers, and while it seems doubtful that Tukhachevsky or Iona Yakir or Jeronimas Uborevičius, the three most authoritative commanders in the Red Army, would have agreed to serve as puppets installed by foreign powers to control conquered Soviet territory, in theory they were among the very few who could have. Preemption of a replacement government could have been part of Stalin’s motivation in liquidating these men, but he went far, far beyond that aim: out of approximately 144,000 officers, some 33,000 were removed in 1937–38, and Stalin ordered or incited the irreversible arrest of around 9,500 and the execution of perhaps 7,000 of them.¹⁴ Of the 767 most high-ranking commanders, at least 503—and by some accounts more than 600—were executed or imprisoned. And among the highest rungs of 186 commanders of divisions, the carnage took 154, as well as 8 of the 9 admirals, 13 of the army’s 15 full generals, and 3 of its 5 marshals. What great power has ever executed 90 percent of its top military officers? What regime, in doing so, could expect to survive? An assault on such scale, and without regime collapse, could only happen within the structures of a one-party Leninist regime and, ultimately, the conspiratorial worldview and logic of Communism, a Manichean universe of two camps and pervasive enemies. The combination of Communist ways of thinking and political practice with Stalin’s demonic mind and political skill allowed for astonishing bloodletting.

BEDFELLOWS AND STRANGERS

Stalin’s attack on military and NKVD bigwigs consumed enormous time and energy but otherwise presented few difficulties for him. He could even make light of it all, as if peacocking his power, repeating such stories as the one about the professor who embarrassed an ignoramus Chekist for not knowing the author of Yevgeny Onegin (Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s national poet). The Chekist arrested the professor, then bragged, “I got the professor to confess! He wrote it!”¹⁵ During the week of February 10, 1937, the entire country commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the death of Pushkin. The poet underwent a metamorphosis from aristocratic serf owner who fathered a child by one serf and sold others to the army to a radical-democrat bard of the people. Pravda (February 10) declared that Pushkin was “entirely ours, entirely Soviet, insofar as it is Soviet power that has inherited all the best in our people.” Altogether, 13.4 million copies of Pushkin’s works were published in some form—said to be one of every five books in Soviet libraries.¹⁶ Before the year was out, the bitter joke would make the rounds that if Pushkin had been born in the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth, he still would have died in the year ’37.

That same month of February 1937, China’s Nationalist ruling group balked at approving the united front to which Chiang had agreed, proposing accommodation with the Japanese and suppression of the Communists, but Chiang overrode them, reconfirming the significance of Stalin’s refusal to allow him to be executed after he had been taken hostage. Chinese Communists, flush with foreign currency from both Nanking and Moscow, had purchased a fleet of American-made trucks, making them much more mobile, and did not take well to a renewed alliance with the generalissimo.¹⁷ The party leadership tried to quell the sentiment with a confidential communiqué to the ranks promising that the united front against the Japanese would allow the Communists to expand their influence a thousand times. Chiang was shown a copy.¹⁸ Here was an act of treason not invented by the NKVD.

China had been afforded none of the centrality in the Soviet public sphere that Spain had. Stalin’s bold projection of Soviet military power onto the Iberian Peninsula, in the name of international worker solidarity, had struck a chord. “The only thing that existed for us that year was Spain, the fight with the fascists,” Alexei Adzhubei, a schoolboy in 1937 (and the future son-in-law of Khrushchev), would recall. “Spanish caps—blue with red edging on the visor—then came into fashion, and also big berets, which we tilted at a rakish angle.”¹⁹ NKVD informants reported some bitter remarks (“One’s children don’t see chocolate and butter, and we are sending them to Spanish workers”) but found real solidarity.²⁰ Inside Spain, however, Soviet advisers appear not to have understood, or to have been willing to admit, that the Francoists had support among broad swaths of the Spanish population who were Catholic and conservative. Instead, the deputy chief of Soviet military intelligence in Spain contrasted the “overwhelming majority of the Spanish people” (“the working masses”) with the “German and Italian interventionists and the military-fascist clique of Franco.”

Soviet class suspicions extended to Spanish military men fighting for the Republic. The same intelligence summary noted that, “up to now, officers and generals who are politically unreliable have had great influence in the bureaucracy of the war ministry and on the general staff and the staffs of the fronts. They are hindering and sabotaging measures for the organization and a more rational use of the Republic’s armed forces.”²¹ Complementing these class-politics suspicions was the Soviets’ low opinion of the Spaniards’ know-how.²² “In the Spanish army, the situation was so bad that our advisers were required to perform both organizational and operational combat tasks,” recalled Kirill Meretskov, a top Soviet military official in-country.²³ Of course, Soviet advisers knew little of Spanish history, mentalities, or language. Nikolai Kuznetsov, the chief naval adviser, had spent his first week wandering Madrid on his own, attempting to pick up a few words of the language, while evaluating the Republic’s military situation. Often, no interpreter was available, or only a terrible one. Officials in Moscow initially refused to accept “White Guard” émigré Russians who volunteered for the Republic. Even after Moscow relented, no more than one interpreter per ten Soviets was ever found.²⁴

Ignorance was only part of the challenge. Antonov-Ovseyenko nearly provoked the resignation of the Spanish finance minister, Negrín, who accused the Soviet representative in Barcelona of being “more Catalan than the Catalans.”²⁵ Many Soviet advisers were said to emulate feudal lords, keeping villas, Spanish wine caches, and concubines.²⁶ Ambassador Rosenberg projected imperiousness, being escorted everywhere by half a dozen bodyguards. “If he stepped into a pissoir on the Cuatro Caminos,” observed Louis Fischer, the fellow-traveling American journalist, “they surrounded its tin walls and waited.”²⁷ Rosenberg would visit Largo Caballero, with his sprawling entourage, and, like a proconsul, issue explicit instructions (“It would be expedient to dismiss X”).²⁸ The politburo, by telephone poll, had approved a directive that Rosenberg not force this or that decision on the Spanish government (“An ambassador is not a commissar, but at most an adviser”), but it was too late.²⁹ “Out you go! Go out!” Largo Caballero finally had shouted at Rosenberg, during a meeting in January 1937, loud enough for all those outside to hear. “You must learn, Señor Ambassador, that the Spaniards may be poor and need aid from abroad, but we are sufficiently proud not to accept that a foreign ambassador should try and impose his will on the head of the Spanish government.”³⁰

While Soviet condescension collided with local pride in Spain, in Moscow the Spanish Republic failed to finance its embassy during its first year or to keep its representative informed, even though Stalin afforded the ambassador, Dr. Marcelino Pascua—a medical statistician who spoke Russian—unusual access (as well as a two-story mansion, featuring eight bedrooms, four baths, two kitchens, and two salons). By protocol, Stalin did not receive foreign envoys, but in the Little Corner on February 3, 1937, he, along with Molotov and Voroshilov, received Pascua, who was carrying a personal letter from Largo Caballero (dated January 12).³¹ The Soviet trio warned the envoy that Spanish Republic codes were easy to break and urged him to use couriers instead of telegrams. (Eight months later, Voroshilov was still issuing the warning.) Pascua, for his part, indicated that Spain would like to sign a treaty of friendship. Stalin rebuffed him, disingenuously stating that “if Spain distanced itself somewhat from the USSR,” the Republic could “obtain aid from Britain.”³² The conversation lasted nearly five hours. Stalin asked Pascua to convey to the Spanish people his wishes “for a complete victory over the internal and external enemies of the Spanish Republic.”³³

The next day, Stalin convened an expansive internal gathering on the course of the war in Spain, summoning tankists, aviators, engineers, and others who had firsthand combat experience there. The conclusions reached remain unknown.³⁴ But later in the month of February, he had the politburo approve additional large sales of weapons to Spain, based upon lists submitted by Voroshilov and Uritsky. Stalin, at his tête-à-tête with Pascua, had spoken ill of his own diplomatic representatives in Spain. On February 9, the politburo voted by telephone poll to replace Rosenberg with his deputy Gaikis, who had been recalled for consultations and was on his way to Moscow; Gaikis, too, would vanish.³⁵ Just nine months after the appearance of a Soviet ambassador in Spain, Moscow would again be left without one. Spain, for its part, would withdraw and not replace its ambassador (the next year), leaving its Moscow embassy with more canines than Spanish nationals.³⁶ Republic Spain’s old-line Socialists deeply distrusted Communists and looked on the Soviet Union as never more than a means to an end.

Soviet advisers themselves were often at daggers drawn. Koltsov freelanced as an adviser and Soviet agent with the Soviet military’s connivance, thereby angering Comintern officials who denounced him to Moscow. Berzin complained to Voroshilov and Yezhov of the Spanish government’s dissatisfaction with the decorated NKVD operative Alexander Orlov and recommended his recall. Orlov, who had been promoted to NKVD station chief in Spain, wrote to Moscow, in late February 1937, that Soviet military attaché “Gorev has no military experience. In war affairs he is a child. [Berzin] is a good party member, but he is not an expert—and this is the pinnacle of our command.”³⁷ Gorev complained that “they all blame each other for thousands of mortal sins, gather facts, even the smallest ones, about each other, and accuse one another of interference.” Here was the pot calling the kettle black, for Gorev had written to Voroshilov complaining of the chief Soviet tank commander, General Semyon Krivoshein, that he “has still not learned what can be discussed over the telephone and what is not permitted.”³⁸ Soviet advisers, though, were often caught between a rock and a hard place. “Before my departure, comrade Voroshilov gave me a short directive on the work of our people,” Grigory Stern, promoted to the senior Soviet military official in-country, would report. “Do not in any circumstance issue an order, but . . . do everything necessary for victory.”³⁹

Predictably, Voroshilov violated his own strictures, issuing specific orders, down to the movement of tanks, as he tried to direct entire military operations from Moscow.⁴⁰

Whether because they came to understand what Stalin wanted to hear or themselves shared the conspiratorial worldview, Soviet military advisers increasingly wrote of treachery. “The fascist intervention in Spain and the Trotskyite-Bukharinite bands arming in our country are the link in a single chain,” one adviser reported to Moscow. Similarly, Stashevsky, the top Soviet political operative in Spain, wrote to Moscow, “I am sure there are provocations everywhere, and it is not excluded that a fascist organization exists among the [Republic’s] higher officers.” Some actual or would-be agents of Italian intelligence and the Gestapo were being uncovered and arrested behind Republic lines, but it was hard to know if this was what Stashevsky meant.⁴¹ Stalin demanded investigations, but he meant of treacherous Soviet advisers: “Check every cipher clerk, radio operator, and generally every employee in communications, and fill the headquarters with new people, loyal and fight-capable. . . . Without this radical measure the Republicans will certainly lose the war. This is our firm conviction.”⁴²

WAR OF ATTRITION

Stalin had scheduled the next Central Committee plenum for February 20. The agenda approved by the politburo on February 5 included a report on the Bukharin-Rykov case (Yezhov); three reports on wrecking and espionage in industry (Orjonikidze, Kaganovich, Yezhov); and a report on “the political education of party cadres and measures of the struggle against Trotskyism and other double-dealers in party organizations” (Stalin).⁴³ There would also be a report on elections to party organizations and to the new Supreme Soviet (Zhdanov), in line with the new constitution. Unbeknownst to the Central Committee members, in preparation for the gathering, Georgy Malenkov, a thirty-five-year-old apparatchik overseeing personnel, had secretly compiled inventories of “anti-Soviet elements.” These consisted of all “formers”: tsarist officials, military officers, police, merchants, and nobles; White officers and officials; SRs, Mensheviks, and kulaks—eighteen categories of people, all told, who were viewed as targets for recruitment by foreign adversaries. “It should be noted in particular,” Malenkov underscored in a cover note to Stalin (February 15), “that there are currently more than 1.5 million former members and candidates of the party who have been expelled or lost their membership card over the course of events at various times dating to 1922.” He designated more than 100,000 as “alien” or “socially harmful.” Stalin underlined Malenkov’s figures.⁴⁴

Suddenly the number of putative enemies was colossal, and they were everywhere. At the Moscow Ball-Bearing Factory, for example, there were 1,084 expellees and only 452 current party members, an alarming picture that could be found at strategic enterprises all across the Union.⁴⁵ And it was in the big factories that the party was strongest. Of course, these were people who had been expelled by Stalin’s purges and party card exchanges, so if any had become disloyal, the dictator had a big hand in making them so. As per usual practice, Central Committee members received a package of preparatory documents, and in them Stalin included “testimonies” being extracted in Lubyanka cellars implicating sitting Central Committee members. But Malenkov’s inventories remained secret as the NKVD field couriers delivered the plenum packages to the Central Committee, the party Control Commission, and around fifty invited guests, including, unusually, some twenty operatives from the NKVD.⁴⁶

Stalin edited Orjonikidze’s draft report for the plenum, advising, “State with facts which branches are affected by sabotage and exactly how they are affected.”⁴⁷ That same evening, arriving considerably late, Orjonikidze addressed the central directorate of his heavy industry commissariat. He admonished officials that worker deaths on the job used to elicit reactions even under the “Black Hundred” Duma of tsarist days, while in the USSR, twenty workers could be killed and buried and officials would report the working class in good spirits. He lashed out at them for failing to see wrecking (“Do you tell me how you’ll end the wrecking and which measures you’ll adopt?”) while also employing Stalin’s language to condemn his recently executed deputy Pyatakov. Orjonikidze was as familiar as anyone with Stalin’s emotional bullying. During the first forty-seven days of 1937, he met Stalin in the Little Corner twenty-two times, for a total of almost seventy-two hours.⁴⁸ There were also phone calls, meals together, walks on the Kremlin grounds. The heavy industry commissar, careful to demonstrate his loyalty, was trying to soften the dictator’s rule. Orjonikidze indicated to his staff that alleged incidents of sabotage should be investigated objectively, and decided to send his own commissions to look into the NKVD’s three most sensational “wrecking cases,” evidently hoping to present fresh reports to the Central Committee plenum and disprove the blanket allegations.⁴⁹

On February 17, 1937, Orjonikidze arrived at his commissariat, across the way from Old Square, at 12:10 p.m., two hours later than usual; he seems to have gone over to talk to Stalin, being one of the few people who could enter the dictator’s Kremlin apartment.⁵⁰ Upon returning to his own Kremlin apartment, in the same Amusement Palace, Orjonikidze evidently had a shouting match over the telephone with Stalin, with profanities in Russian and Georgian.⁵¹ The NKVD had been searching Orjonikidze’s apartment, an obvious provocation.⁵² The remainder of Orjonikidze’s day was occupied with meetings, including a politburo meeting at 3:00 p.m. to go over the plenum reports. Stalin hand-corrected Orjonikidze’s draft resolution on sabotage, inserting passages about “Trotskyite wreckers.” In the early evening, Orjonikidze made his way back to the commissariat for more meetings, leaving for home at 12:20 a.m. (February 18). Later that morning, he did not emerge from his bedroom to take breakfast. When one of his subordinates came by in the afternoon, he refused to receive him. At around dusk, his wife, Zinaida, heard a gunshot in the bedroom. Orjonikidze was dead.⁵³

Informed on the apartment’s Kremlin line by Zinaida, Stalin summoned the cronies to the Little Corner, whence they walked to Orjonikidze’s apartment. Then, at 8:55 p.m., Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Mikoyan, Postyshev (recently sacked as Kiev party boss), and Yezhov—in essence, the inner regime at this point—assembled again in the Little Corner. Doctor Levin was summoned at 9:40, for five minutes. The group remained until 12:25 a.m. (February 19).⁵⁴ Stalin chose not to use the death to further his allegations of ubiquitous enemy agents. Instead, public accounts gave the cause as “heart failure,” said to have occurred at 5:30 p.m. on February 18, during Orjonikidze’s daily nap.

The opening of the plenum was delayed for three days. Out-of-town members had begun to arrive at the Metropole, Moskva, and National hotels only to discover Orjonikidze’s untimely death, reported in Soviet newspapers (February 19). The country went into grief-stricken shock. Orjonikidze had been a mere fifty years old. “The Hall of Columns [in the House of Trade Unions], wreaths, music, the scent of flowers, tears, honor guards, thousands and thousands of people passing by the open casket,” recalled one eyewitness.⁵⁵ Stalin stood in the honor guard. On February 21, following an extravagant state funeral, the urn with Orjonikidze’s ashes was interred in the Kremlin Wall (adjacent to his friend Kirov). “Comrades, we have lost one of the best leaders of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet state,” Molotov stated in the main eulogy, blaming “the Trotskyite degenerates,” the “Pyatakovs,” for hastening Orjonikidze’s death.⁵⁶ But rumors spread in Moscow, picked up by the Menshevik Socialist Herald in Paris, that Stalin had either killed him or driven him to suicide.⁵⁷

Probably the best chance to stop Stalin was gone. Orjonikidze had been beholden to the principle of party unity, and he had no independent access to the press or radio, and no levers over the NKVD or the army.⁵⁸ Still, he possessed colossal authority, having worked closely with Lenin, beginning before the revolution, with service as a courier between the European emigration and Russia, and for years supervising heavy industry, the regime’s crowning achievement.⁵⁹ He could have tried to use this standing to force a showdown at the plenum over fabricated wrecking charges.⁶⁰ But even had he done so, only collective action could have succeeded, requiring Orjonikidze to possess resolve and cunning to organize all or most of the other top Stalinists—not only Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan, who had been close to Orjonikidze, but also Molotov, who was not—in unified action against Stalin. For any of them individually, broaching the subject of moving against Stalin would have been tantamount to political, and perhaps physical, death. Moreover, even if troubled by Stalin’s gathering homicidal behavior, they all, including Orjonikidze, still recognized him as the leader. It was Stalin who shouldered such complex matters as Spain, China, Nazi Germany, Britain and France, the party machine, ideology.

Orjonikidze had confided thoughts of suicide to Kaganovich and Mikoyan.⁶¹ In published photographs taken near the body, Kaganovich was seen expressing visibly strong emotions: grief, anger. He had lost his soul mate, and he knew Stalin had been sadistically pressuring the infirm Orjonikidze. Kaganovich—tough as nails, explosive—was spiritually broken. Stalin went on to break Mikoyan, summoning him in 1937 to discuss the arrest of his subordinate in the food industry commissariat, Mark Belenky, then, after Mikoyan supposedly protested and Stalin called him blind in matters of personnel, summoning him again to show him protocols of Belenky’s “confession.” “Have a look: he confessed to wrecking,” Stalin said. “You vouched for him. Go and read it!” Mikoyan called it “a blow against me.”⁶² Members of the inner circle were no longer comrades of the ruler. Stalin was no longer first among peers, but a despot.⁶³

EXTIRPATION

Molotov opened the delayed Central Committee plenum on February 23 in the Sverdlov rotunda of Catherine the Great’s Imperial Senate, and in the shadow of Orjonikidze’s death. The sessions would last an unusual eleven days, longer than any other plenum.⁶⁴ NKVD officials from all around the country, most of them not members of the Central Committee, were conspicuous. Stalin set a tone of menace in his opening remarks, calling top officials who had been arrested “empty chatterboxes, lacking technical training,” whose only claim to fame was “possession of a party card.” He added that “current wreckers have no technical advantages over our people. On the contrary, in technical terms our people are better prepared.” Sounding a cherished theme, he boasted that “we have tens of thousands of capable people, talented people. We need only to know them and promote them, so that they do not get stuck in the old place and begin to rot.”⁶⁵

The first order of business at the choreographed gathering, though, was Bukharin and Rykov. On the opening evening, Yezhov reported on the accusations of treason. Mikoyan reliably reinforced his points. Bukharin had written a long rebuttal of the press slander against him to the politburo and announced a hunger strike. Now, in a debilitated state, unshaven, wearing a rumpled suit, he was given the floor. He denied the charges but was mercilessly heckled. “Trotsky and his disciples Zinoviev and Kamenev once worked with Lenin, and now these people have reached an agreement with Hitler,” Stalin interrupted. “After all that has happened with these men, these former comrades who have reached an agreement with Hitler in order to sell out the USSR, there are no more surprises in human life. You must prove everything. . . .”⁶⁶ Three days before the plenum, Bukharin had again abased himself in a letter to Stalin. “I really love you now dearly and with belated love,” he wrote, praising Stalin’s mistrust as a sign of “wisdom.” Bukharin predicted that a still greater age would dawn, with Stalin as the very “world spirit” Hegel had imagined.⁶⁷

Turar Ryskulov, an ethnic Kazakh candidate member of the Central Committee and the long-standing deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars for the Russian republic, quietly tried to persuade some plenum attendees to come to the defense of Rykov and Bukharin, but he could not manage to do so.⁶⁸

At the plenum (February 24), Rykov denied the scurrilous accusations and called the mockery of him “a savage thing,” given that he was already effectively condemned to death (he pointed out that others had confessed and been shot anyway). During Rykov’s and Bukharin’s speeches, nearly 1,000 interruptions were recorded. Not one was supportive. Stalin made the greatest number (100), followed by Molotov (82) and Postyshev (88).⁶⁹ More than half of those present never interjected, but for two more days (February 25–26), speakers took the dais to rip into the rightists. “Bukharin writes in his statement to the Central Committee that Ilich [Lenin] died in his arms,” Yezhov shouted. “Rubbish! You’re lying! Utterly false!” Bukharin responded that “those present when Ilich died were Maria Ilinichna [Ulyanova], Nadezhda Konstantinovna [Krupskaya], and myself”—and turned toward them for confirmation. Neither Lenin’s wife nor his sister said anything. Bukharin continued: “Did I take Ilich’s dead body in my arms, and kiss his feet?” Both women stayed silent.

Stalin intervened at the plenum (February 27) to recommend a seeming middle ground whereby Bukharin and Rykov would not be immediately put on trial, but turned over to the NKVD for further “investigation.” Secret police operatives took Bukharin and Rykov away, the first time anyone had been arrested at a party plenum.⁷⁰ The pair spent the remainder of the proceedings at the Lubyanka inner prison while Stalin formed a special commission of the plenum to adjudicate their fate.⁷¹ Bukharin’s expulsion from the Central Committee and his disposition to the NKVD were duly upheld by the commission, whose members included Mikoyan (chairman), Maria Ulyanova, and Krupskaya.⁷²

Perhaps Stalin might now be satiated? “It must be hoped,” the Stalinist propagandist Yaroslavsky told the plenum, “that we are discussing in the Central Committee of our party the question of betrayal by members and candidate members of the Central Committee for the last time.”⁷³ Such was the naïveté.

With Stalin’s primary aim accomplished, the plenum switched gears. Zhdanov had reported (February 26) on the upcoming elections by secret ballot to party posts (for May), a way to mobilize pressure from below against sitting officials, as well as elections to soviets. “We lack the habits of direct elections and secret ballots,” he admitted. One plenum attendee, trying to convey the immensity of the organizational undertaking, reminded the plenum of the 1917 vote for the Constituent Assembly. Stalin pointed out that the class enemy could be elected, especially given that some collective farms had no Communist party members. “Keep in mind that our country has two million Communists and a ‘bit more’ non-party people,” Zhdanov noted of the scores of millions of non-party adults.⁷⁴ He even alluded to the days when Bolshevism had had to survive in the underground.⁷⁵ It was a surreal discussion: no one was forcing the monopoly regime to stage competitive elections by secret ballot.

On the morning of February 28, Molotov, in place of Orjonikidze, delivered the report on sabotage in industry, and ridiculed Orjonikidze’s counterinvestigations that minimized wrecking. Kaganovich, falling in line, presented similar tales of sabotage, though he continued to try to push back ever so gently. “As you can see,” he summarized, “we have had a rather serious cleansing of the ranks of politically dangerous people.”⁷⁶

February 28 also happened to be Svetlana Stalin’s eleventh birthday. The relatives gathered in the Kremlin apartment without the despot. In her diary, Maria Svanidze, the sister-in-law of Stalin’s first wife, Kato, bad-mouthed the “half-wit” and “idiot” relatives of Stalin’s second wife, Nadya, and the couple’s “lazy” son Vasily, concluding that “the only normal people present” were her, her husband (Alyosha Svanidze), Nadya’s sister-in-law Zhenya, and “Little Svetlana, who makes up for all the rest.” Maria also recorded that Stalin’s elder son, Yakov, from his marriage to Kato, had arrived with his new wife, Judith “Yulia” Meltzer (b. 1911). “She is pretty, older than Yasha—he’s her fifth husband, not counting other relationships—none too bright, little cultured. She trapped him, of course. . . . Too bad for I[osif].”⁷⁷ (In fact, Stalin’s elder son was her third husband.⁷⁸) Yakov was now studying at Moscow’s Artillery Academy, but he could never manage to please his father. Be that as it may, two sons whom Stalin deemed disappointing and two dead wives were not the main factors keeping him away from the family scene, despite his fondness for Svetlana. His dislike for busybodies like Svanidze had grown. In any case, he was busy, forcing extirpation of “enemies and spies who had a party card in their pocket.”⁷⁹

“TRULY A HISTORIC PLENUM!”

Back at the interminable plenum, after a further flogging of industrial wrecking, Yezhov was at the dais again (March 2). He would speak a total of five times. (Molotov spoke thrice.) Now, Yezhov suddenly laced into Yagoda for sheltering spies and traitors at the NKVD, prompting Yagoda to shout denials (“Not true!”). But in the discussion that day and the next, numerous NKVD officials rose to condemn Yagoda, including his old nemesis Yevdokimov. The latter had three turns at the rostrum, and helpfully linked Yagoda to the rightists Bukharin and Rykov. That was precisely the testimony being beaten out of Georgy Molchanov, who until recently had headed the NKVD’s secret-political department and who had been arrested in Minsk (following a demotion to the Belorussian NKVD). “I think,” Yevdokimov thundered, “that matters are not limited to Molchanov alone.” Yagoda: “What, have you gone out of your mind?” Yevdokimov: “We must put Yagoda on trial.”⁸⁰ One participant asked why Yagoda had not already been arrested. “(Noise in the hall.)”⁸¹ This is what a slaughterhouse would sound like if the pigs, cows, and sheep could talk.

Stalin, after innumerable interjections, finally delivered his own full address on March 3. “The more we advance, the more successes we have, the more embittered the remnants of the defeated and exploiting classes will become, the more rapidly they will go over to sharper forms of struggle, the more they will inflict damage on the Soviet state, the more they will seize on the most desperate means of struggle as the last resort of the doomed,” he asserted, repeating his long-standing theory.⁸² He chastised party and state officials—like the ones sitting there in the Sverdlov Hall—for “political blindness” on this score. “Some of our leading cadres, both in the center and locally, not only failed to discern the real countenance of these wreckers, diversionists, spies, and murderers,” he stated, “but proved so unconcerned, complacent, and naïve that at times they themselves assisted in promoting the agents of foreign states to one or another responsible post.” To anyone who might object, Stalin mockingly added, “Capitalist encirclement? Rubbish! What significance can some kind of capitalist encirclement have if we fulfill and surpass our economic plans? New forms of wrecking, the struggle with Trotskyism? Trifle! What significance can these trifles have if we fulfill and overfulfill our plan? . . . Our party’s not shabby, the party’s Central Committee is also not bad—what the hell more do we need? Strange people sit there in Moscow, in the Central Committee of the party: they think up all sorts of questions, instigate about some kind of wrecking. They themselves don’t sleep and don’t allow others to.”⁸³

Inside the sarcasm, Stalin had blurted out confirmation of the real driver behind the mass arrests and executions: it was him.

Mekhlis, in Pravda the next day, obediently ripped into the heretofore de rigueur toadying, ridiculing the rituals as “boot-licking therapy” and condemning the “supreme leaderism” of specific local party bosses.⁸⁴ The far-flung operations of Stalin’s regime were riddled with cross-purposes, self-dealing, underfulfillment of economic targets, poor record keeping, reports of faked successes, pervasive misappropriation of state funds, and victimization of the weakest officials as scapegoats. The “system” was an unwieldy amalgam of competing clans and impossible rules, vast webs of relationships and red-tape procedures overlaid with a tableau of powerful myths (including the myth of the system itself). Stalin returned to the dais for a menacing summation (March 5). “People are sometimes selected based not on a political or business principle but on personal acquaintance, personal allegiance, friendships,” he warned, citing the example of Levon Mirzoyan, who was said to have brought thirty people to Kazakhstan from postings in Azerbaijan and the Urals. “What does it mean to drag a whole group of cronies with you? . . . It means you have acquired a certain independence from local organizations and, if you will, a certain independence from the Central Committee.”

Stalin would know: forming a political clan was precisely how he had built his personal dictatorship inside the Bolshevik dictatorship, and gained his own independence. Never mind. “Some comrades among us think that if they are a people’s commissar, then they know everything,” he added. “They believe that rank, in and of itself, affords very great, almost inexhaustible knowledge. Or they think: If I am a Central Committee member, then I am not one by accident, then I must know everything. This is not the case.” He maligned even Orjonikidze, praising the fallen industry commissar as “one of the first and best politburo members among us,” but accusing him of “wasting time and effort” defending enemies.⁸⁵ “Truly a historic plenum!” the Comintern’s Dimitrov noted in his diary.⁸⁶

SELF-SLAUGHTERHOUSE

The decisive question—what, precisely, would be the scope of the high-level arrests—remained unclear. Stalin, in his plenum summation, estimated the number of Trotskyites and Zinovievites, as well as rightists, at 30,000, of whom he said 12,000 had already been arrested. But of course, some officials were being arrested not for an opposition past but for insufficient vigilance against the opposition. And “testimony” never failed to produce more names. Already, large numbers of “rightists” were being subjected to torture at Lubyanka’s internal prison (many declared hunger strikes, and not a few attempted suicide).⁸⁷ Most ominously, Stalin had alluded at the plenum to the inventories compiled by Malenkov: the 1.5 million former party members, expellees whom Stalin now called “grist for the mill of our enemies.”⁸⁸

Those who had sat in the Sverdlov Hall through the jaw-dropping plenum did not yet know, but “testimony” being compiled in NKVD cellars painted a scenario of a Red Army/NKVD plot to seize power in the Soviet Union, Franco style.⁸⁹ The NKVD, in a March 1937 draft document in connection with the plenum, asserted that foreign intelligence services had established a gigantic number of spy centers in the USSR, while conceding, “We do not know where they are or who belongs to the counterrevolutionary organizations created by foreign intelligence agencies, and as a result we cannot liquidate them at the necessary moment.”⁹⁰ They could have been inside the NKVD itself.

Stalin’s weapon against his own NKVD leadership was, as in all other institutions, the party. Following the despot’s call to ramp up enemy hunting at the plenum, Yezhov, as per usual practice, convened a meeting of the NKVD “party active” at Lubyanka (March 19–21) to discuss the lessons. All top NKVD operatives were party members. Yezhov set the tone by lacerating Yagoda, then invited those present to speak up, a devastatingly simple way to elicit denunciations.⁹¹ Gleeful revenge against Yagoda and others poured forth, but it was mixed with terrified self-preservation: how could the operatives denounce Yagoda, under whom they had all worked, without somehow implicating themselves? On March 29, Mikhail Frinovsky—who had a lot to prove, having been a top operative under Yagoda—led a team that arrested his former boss, and beat Yagoda demonstratively in the process.⁹²

Yagoda’s arrest was stunning.^{93, 94} He knew that “Stalin treated [him] coolly and met with him just for official business” (as one of Stalin’s top bodyguards would later put it).^{95, 96} Still, Yagoda could be forgiven if he imagined himself to be indispensable, given his services to Stalin: millions of kulaks deported, countless priority construction objects completed, comprehensive surveillance imposed on the army, the party-state, cultural elites. Yagoda held the rank of “general commissar of state security” (equivalent to marshal), which he had retained even after being shunted over to the communications commissariat. Some NKVD operatives had taken to referring to the party apparatchik as Yezhov’s “temporary posting” to the NKVD, as Kaganovich had informed Stalin.⁹⁷ But Yezhov finally had been named to that rank, which Yagoda lost. After seventeen years at the very top of the secret police, he was reduced to waiting for the despot to return him to favor.

Yagoda’s passivity was not a given. He had controlled assassination squads, a poison laboratory, a plethora of safe houses (at home and abroad), even an ability to eavesdrop on Stalin. Because of the length of his service in the organs (from 1919), he had a network whose mutual loyalties predated Stalin’s full power.⁹⁸ But Yagoda turned out to be a mere minion, while Stalin studied, fostered, and used the NKVD’s natural rivalries and animosities to control him even before appointing Yezhov to supervise NKVD business on behalf of the unchallengeable party. Now Stalin used these internal antagonisms, as well as Yezhov, to annihilate Yagoda. Once the invitation came down from on high, score settling proved irresistible and self-preservation instincts kicked in.⁹⁹ In denunciations, Yagoda’s subordinates revealed that they viewed him not as a Dzierżyński-like sword and shield of the revolution but as unprincipled, a cruel boss, a shady wheeler and dealer (commerçant).¹⁰⁰

When Frinovsky’s squad raked over Yagoda’s Kremlin apartment (Miliutinsky Lane, 9) and his sumptuous dacha (Ozerki), they found 1,229 bottles of wine (the majority of foreign origin and dating to as early as 1897), 11,075 cigarettes of foreign make (Turkish and Egyptian), along with 8 boxes of foreign tobacco, 3,904 pornographic photos and 11 pornographic films, 21 men’s overcoats, mostly foreign made, plus 4 fur coats and 4 leather overcoats, 11 foreign-made leather jackets, 22 men’s suits, 31 pairs of imported women’s shoes, and 22,997 rubles. The list went on (and on): 399 foreign music records, 101 imported children’s games, 37 pairs of imported gloves, 17 large carpets, 7 medium-size carpets, 5 animal skin carpets (bear, leopard, wolf), a collection of 165 pipes (including some made of elephant tusks), 95 bottles of imported perfume, 542 examples of Trotskyite and fascist literature.¹⁰¹ Only the infamous foreign jewelry Yagoda and his minion Alexander Lurye used to entrap foreigners and enrich themselves had failed to turn up. Word of the eye-popping inventory advanced through the rumor mill, further discrediting Yagoda and his closest associates.¹⁰²

Yagoda was charged with embezzlement and leading a conspiracy on behalf of Nazi Germany to assassinate Stalin. Had Yagoda been a long-standing foreign agent, he let pass countless opportunities to have Stalin and entourage killed (such as the night of the Kirov assassination, when, as Yagoda knew, Stalin and his clique were all together on a train to Leningrad).

No one in Stalin’s inner circle would defend Yagoda, who had relentlessly intruded into their commissariats and persecuted their personnel. “I repeat: I knew Voroshilov hated me,” Yagoda would soon be quoted as testifying, when asked why he supposedly felt compelled to eavesdrop on Stalin’s telephone conversations. “Molotov and Kaganovich held me in the same hostile regard.”¹⁰³ The cronies were not so naïve as to imagine Yagoda had launched these proctology exams on their institutions of his own accord, but they could imagine that he had lobbied Stalin for his own initiatives to make their lives miserable. Kaganovich compared Yagoda with Joseph Fouché, the French Revolution’s unscrupulous secret policeman who managed to survive four regimes (Jacobins, Directory, Napoleon, the Restoration) and became associated with counterrevolution.¹⁰⁴ Yagoda lacked a prerevolutionary Bolshevik underground past. “My whole life I went about with a mask,” Yagoda was recorded as confessing, in interrogation protocols, “making myself out to be a staunch Bolshevik. In fact, in its real understanding, I was never a Bolshevik.” Stalin underlined this passage, among others.¹⁰⁵ (An interrogation transcript of Avel Yenukidze arrived the same day as Yagoda’s.) It is almost as if the endless hours of interrogations, and the lengthy written and signed protocols, were for him.

Other stunning arrests followed: the head of the NKVD special department for security in the military, Mark Gai, and the head of Stalin’s bodyguards, Pauker.¹⁰⁶ They and many more were “unmasked” as fascist spies plotting to assassinate the leadership. Pauker could have withdrawn the Kremlin guard, leaving Stalin exposed. But he did not have to go to that trouble: Pauker shaved Stalin and could have slit his throat. Back when Yagoda had been sacked from the NKVD, Pauker had been the one to block his access to Stalin’s dacha in Sochi, and now, just a few months later, he was supposed to have been been in a conspiracy with Yagoda against Stalin all along? Yezhov went further still, asserting to the NKVD bosses that “[Zakhar] Volovich, Pauker’s deputy, specially planted an engineer, a German spy, as the head of the secret government telephone station. In such a way did the enemy learn of the telephone conversations between Stalin and Molotov.”¹⁰⁷

The fabrications and the beating of people to unconsciousness to extract pre-scripted testimony of assassination “plots” did, for some Chekists, violate professional pride. But the problem for them was not that, or not that alone; rather, they had all worked with Yagoda. Why had they not spoken earlier? Were they secretly in league with him? Operatives who initially survived Yagoda’s sacking now became still more “vigilant”: that is, they attempted to ward off their own arrests, magnifying the slaughterhouse. Back in February 1937, Yakov Agranov—the first deputy NKVD chief, who had taken over state security (GB) from the arrested Molchanov—had asked regional NKVD branches for lists of operatives and other staff who had been Trotskyites, Zinovievites, and rightists.¹⁰⁸ But in spring 1937, Agranov would be demoted to Saratov province. There, he proceeded to extract “confessions” left and right, including from his immediate local predecessor, Roman Pilar von Pilhau, who confessed to trying to organize Yezhov’s assassination, the ultimate extracted accusation for someone like Agranov, seeking to ingratiate himself with the new boss. But with so many “Yagodaites” giving “testimony” under torture, denunciations against Agranov flowed like lava, and soon he, too, would be arrested.¹⁰⁹

Through it all, the NKVD never broke down, let alone rebelled. The ease with which Yagoda was destroyed proved that there was no threat whatsoever to Stalin’s rule. The secret police, even under assault, remained an utterly reliable instrument of his will, a testament to both the limits of the feared yet despised Yagoda’s authority and the strength of Stalin’s as supreme leader.

DEFT MANEUVERS

During the plenum of February 23–March 5, 1937, Voroshilov was given the floor at the March 2 morning session. Yezhov and Molotov had already delivered their reports on ubiquitous enemies. Stalin had considered assigning a separate report on the army but demurred. (“We had in mind the importance of the matter,” according to Molotov, meaning the possible consequences.) Instead, Voroshilov spoke during discussion of Kaganovich’s report, which covered sabotage on the railroads.¹¹⁰ The defense commissar was one of Stalin’s two most important minions.¹¹¹ He stood far closer to Stalin than any other military man or security official, having first met him in 1906 and having fought together with him during the civil war. But his position atop the massive Soviet military had hardly been foreordained. Back in November 1921, following bitter internal battles during the civil war over the shape of the military, he had begged Stalin to be released. “In Moscow I already told you of my intention to alter my field of play, and now I have firmly decided: I have grown tired of work in the military institution, and the center of gravity is not there now either,” a then thirty-year-old Voroshilov had written. “I submit that I would be more useful in the civilian sphere. I await approval and friendly support from you at the Central Committee for my transfer. I’d like to work in the Donbass, where I ask the Central Committee to send me. I’ll take any kind of work and I hope to buck up again, otherwise I’ll start to decay (spiritually) here. You should pity me. A strong embrace, your Voroshilov.”¹¹² Instead, within four years Stalin had named Voroshilov defense commissar.

As of June 21, 1935, the arrest of any officer from platoon level up required the approval of the defense commissar, which put Voroshilov front and center in Stalin’s terror.

Stalin prized Voroshilov’s canine fealty and avuncular sociability. A connoisseur of the opera, Voroshilov discovered a fondness for posing for oil portraits, too, sitting for long periods in the studio of Alexander Gerasimov. Gossip made the rounds that Voroshilov had acquired yet another villa (his third), at state expense, expressly for a ballerina, even as he reprimanded those below for doing the same.¹¹³ The erstwhile metalworker and his wife, Golda Gorbman, a convert from Judaism who went by the name Yekaterina Voroshilova, had turned their apartment in the Grand Kremlin Palace into the regime’s social epicenter.¹¹⁴ Voroshilov was stormy and sentimental, given to tears even more readily than Franco, but, like the Spanish general, he had never acquired genuine military training. He had not served in the tsarist army, despite being the right age. Unlike the standouts Tukhachevsky, Yakir, and Uborevičius, Voroshilov had not been sent to study in Germany (although he had visited and met with top German officers). He usually chastised commanders as if their mistakes surprised him, and doled out praise, while marking milestones and awards with personal letters. Still, Voroshilov could not stanch the chitchat about his military incompetence.

Ivan Kutyakov, a party member since 1917 and the person who had taken command of the famous Chapayev’s unit when the latter fell in 1919, recorded in his diary in 1937 that, “as long as ‘the iron one’ is in charge, we will have misconception, bootlicking, and everything stupid will be valued, everything smart will be devalued.”¹¹⁵ Kutyakov was too far from the center of power to understand that Voroshilov was a shrewd political operator who had developed a certain bureaucratic-procedural mastery, with which he had often kept the wolves of the NKVD’s special department at bay, dismissing requests for arrest authorization with phrases like “It’s not obligatory to arrest every fool; one can simply toss them from the Red Army.”¹¹⁶ But Kutyakov did understand that the fate not just of the top officers who looked down on Voroshilov but of the entire Red Army lay in the commissar’s hands.

At the plenum, Voroshilov once more demonstrated his skillfulness as a crowd-pleasing orator. “Lazar Moiseyevich [Kaganovich], before I took the podium, said, ‘Let’s see how you will criticize yourself—that’ll be interesting.’ (General laughter.),” Voroshilov noted, before proceeding to sharply distinguish his area of responsibility from transport. “In the Worker-Peasant Red Army at the current moment, fortunately or unfortunately, and, I think, to grand fortune, we have not so far uncovered especially many enemies of the people,” he asserted. He did not deny their presence but spent a great deal of time on the past, especially how Trotsky in the early 1920s had supposedly tried but failed to rally the army against the party and how, “without noise, and that was not necessary, we threw out a large number of unfit elements, including the Trotskyite-Zinovievite tail, including all manner of dubious riffraff.” Specifically, he noted, “we cleaned out some 47,000 over the course of 12 to 13 years,” almost half of them (22,000) just in the years 1934–36, including 5,000 “oppositionists.” Around 10,000 of the discharges had been arrested, but few had been higher-ups. And tens of thousands of new officers, graduates of twelve military academies, as well as engineers, doctors, and political workers, were newly promoted. “The country gives it its best sons,” Voroshilov concluded, and it “constitutes an armed force ready to fight and loyal to the party and state.” He also reminded everyone of the army’s singular importance (“the whole world is against us”).¹¹⁷

Voroshilov’s was a command performance. His assertion that there were few foreign agents or saboteurs in his bailiwick was precisely what his close friend Orjonikidze had been saying about heavy industry before his suicide. Like Orjonikidze (and others), Voroshilov fully shared Stalin’s worldview but lacked the paranoiac bent or iron willingness to murder loyalists for some purported larger political end. And, despite Orjonikidze’s manifest failure to protect industry, Voroshilov had not relinquished his delusion that he might deflect the guillotine from the Red Army. But he was subjected to intense pressure. Molotov had interjected, “If you think that situation in your area is fine and dandy, you’re profoundly misguided.”¹¹⁸ Also, a contingent of military men was in attendance (Tukhachevsky, oddly, was absent, rumored to be on holiday in Sochi), and several railed against enemies, looking to save their own skins.¹¹⁹ Nor could Voroshilov avoid having to convoke a follow-up meeting of the commanders to discuss the “lessons” of the plenum. He dared to tell them that “our main enemy is there, in the West, . . . the capitalists, the imperialists”—not in the hall where he was speaking. But as Voroshilov hesitated to denounce his own officer corps, others rushed in.¹²⁰

Grigory Kulik, a peasant-born cavalry officer resentful of the noble-born Tukhachevsky and his ilk, had just returned from Spain and wrote to Voroshilov (April 29, 1937) demanding that enemies in the military be rooted out because “as a Bolshevik I do not wish that the precious blood of our people is spilled in a future war in excess because of careerists, hidden traitors, and talentless commanders.” This was a self-characterization, albeit unintentionally so. But Kulik’s vicious ambition ratcheted up the pressure on Voroshilov. (Kulik very soon attained his first audience in the Little Corner; Stalin promoted him to chief of artillery administration.)¹²¹ Another immense point of pressure was that the Red Army personnel department required autobiographies, on which had been introduced a new question (in 1936): “With whom have you worked?” Trotsky had headed the army until January 1925—and who had not “worked” with him? Almost none of these men had been personally close to him, but they had the fatal association. Even those lucky enough to have joined after Trotsky’s dismissal could still be brought low by the required autobiography in their own hand: all of a sudden, some person they knew would be arrested, and they would be liable for their association with an “enemy” and for having failed to report such an enemy, which was a capital crime.¹²²

Above all, Voroshilov had no control over Yezhov, who hungered for Stalin’s approval. In the Little Corner, the despot tutored Yezhov on portraying a conspiracy with a shadow government, ready to take over: Yagoda as head of the Council of People’s Commissars, Tukhachevsky as defense commissar, Bukharin as general secretary of the party. (One wonders what went through the minds of those present at official discussions of such a prospect.) Their palace coup, on behalf of foreign powers, was said to involve Pauker, assisted by former Kremlin commandant Rudolf Peterson (sacked back in the Yenukidze affair), who were collectively going to help cut the Kremlin lights and toss grenades into the special cinema during a politburo viewing. (Another variant had them smushing poison onto Kremlin telephone receivers.)¹²³ Voroshilov was not going to defend the manifestly more talented Tukhachevsky, whom he despised, against Stalin’s machinations, but what the defense commissar might not have fully understood was how indulging Tukhachevsky’s annihilation could break open the bloodgates on the beloved army he was trying to protect.¹²⁴

POPULAR FRONT ON THE RIGHT, CIVIL WAR ON THE LEFT

No general war had broken out over Spain because none of the major powers wanted one. Spain might have been the world’s great cause, on one side or the other, but it was no outside country’s principal concern. The global morality play, in fact, was deceiving. “I know that there are some people who believe that as the outcome of this civil war Spain inevitably must have a government either fascist or Communist,” Anthony Eden, then Britain’s foreign secretary, had told a Foreign Press Association dinner in early 1937. “That is not our belief. On the contrary, we believe that neither of these forms of government being indigenous to Spain, neither is likely to endure. Spain will in time evolve her own Spanish form of government.” These self-serving remarks had a certain prescience.¹²⁵

Nor were the often lurid rumors accurate. Nationalist agents had learned and leaked word of the Spanish Republic gold transfer to the “Reds” in Moscow, provoking an international scandal, as well as a steep drop in the peseta’s value, which raised the costs of imports, but the holdings in Moscow were being used to pay down the Republic’s imports of expensive weaponry.¹²⁶ Moscow gouged the Spaniards on the prices charged for some weapons (and charged for shipment). Even as the ruble held steady against the dollar, at 5.3 to $1, in transactions with Spain the Soviets converted the ruble at anywhere from 2.0 to 3.95 to $1, after which they then made the conversion of the ruble prices into pesetas; the Spaniards never saw the original ruble conversion rate. This chicanery probably added at least 25 percent to the prices Spain paid for Soviet weaponry. Still, the value of the Soviet weapons delivered did reach a substantial approximation of the value of gold the Soviets took in.¹²⁷

Hitler, following Franco’s failure to capture Madrid, had decided neither to increase nor to decrease his circumscribed commitment, but Mussolini had expanded the already expansive Italian contribution, thereby perhaps helping to prevent a Nationalist collapse. In February 1937, when Italy had nearly 50,000 troops on the ground in Spain, Mussolini had also dispatched Roberto Farinacci as a personal envoy. Farinacci tried to talk Franco into creating a fascist-style monopoly party and perhaps name a House of Savoy prince as king of Spain. But the more Farinacci saw, the more he was put off by the infighting and corruption. He judged Franco to be “timid,” and characterized his massacres of political prisoners as “politically senseless.” The Nationalists’ secret police overheard Farinacci concluding that Mussolini would have to take over Spain and appoint him as proconsul.¹²⁸ Franco did adopt the slogan “Una Patria, Un Estado, Un Caudillo” (evoking “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer”), but there would be no Spanish fascist regime. When King Vittorio Emanuele had made Mussolini prime minister, back in 1922, the Italian fascist party counted 320,000 members, ten times the number of Spanish Falangists in 1936. Spain’s homegrown fascists would lose 60 percent of this not very robust membership in civil war combat.¹²⁹

Farinacci complained further to Rome that Franco “has no idea of what the Spain of tomorrow should be like,” an utterly mistaken assessment. Farinacci also wrote that Franco “is only interested in winning the war, and then for a long period after, in how to impose an authoritarian, or, better, dictatorial government to purge the nation of all those who have had any contact, direct or indirect, with the Reds,” an observation that was spot-on. Franco understood the civil war not solely as a military endeavor but as a political project. During his counterinsurgency in Morocco, he had learned how to massacre a populace into submission and how to manipulate tribal leaders, pitting them against one another or finding their price, making them dependent on him. Now, in a similar battlefield gradualism in the homeland—refusing all entreaties for a mediated peace, killing or chasing out implacable elements in the Spanish population en masse, training a keen eye on rival rebel officers—the caudillo baffled and infuriated his foreign fascist supporters. Yet the cuco Franco had a ready answer. “I will occupy Spain town by town, village by village, railway by railway,” he snapped at an impatient Italian ambassador. “Nothing will make me abandon this gradual program. It will bring me less glory but internal peace. . . . I can assure you that I am not interested in territory but in inhabitants. . . . I must have the certainty of being able to found a regime.”¹³⁰

Such a statement could be taken as excuse making for Franco’s mediocrity in the new conditions of modern combat, which required combined use of air, armor, and infantry (in German-style warfare, which Soviet advisers also knew). But a quick military conquest of Spain would not have been easy.¹³¹ Among the Soviet-sponsored International Brigades, casualty rates would be high, up to 75 percent in some units, while home leave was denied and desertion would become prevalent. But Spain’s regular Republic’s People’s Army had become formidable, the majority of its field commands held by regular officers, many of them accomplished. Franco, however, would win the grinding civil war not only because he attained a unified military command. On the political battlefield, as it were, he forged a loose but effective coalition, an integrative strategy of no enemies to the right, co-opting Spanish fascists, who were more housebroken than their Italian counterparts.¹³² Thus, whereas in Italy and then Germany the traditional right, fearing the left, had invited the radical right to power, in Spain Franco built a successful popular front—on the right.

Franco re-created the ancien régime court, with processions to church under a canopy surrounded by bishops.¹³³ Beneath this powerful symbolism, he also forced into being a single legal political organization, relying on his young brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Súñer, who had escaped from a Republic prison, to oversee the political amalgam.¹³⁴ This was no simple feat: the monarchists alone were split, with more than one presumptive heir waiting in the wings.¹³⁵ But the Francoist political party managed to bring into coalition seemingly incompatible groupings of Alfonso monarchists and the Carlist monarchists, along with Catholics, upper officer corps, and the Falange Blueshirts. Fissures remained, but they were not enough to split the coalition, while being just enough to facilitate Franco’s staying power.

This contrasted starkly with the Republic. Many Spaniards suspected both indigenous Communists and Moscow of the worst, but with Communists working against broad nationalization of private industry, many of Spain’s shopkeepers, farmers, and lesser civil servants cooperated with them in defense of the Republic. Yet the Republic could not take full advantage. It lacked not only a vigorous parliamentary life during the civil war but unified leadership, comprising as it did three governments in three capitals: Valencia (after evacuation from Madrid), Bilbao (Basques), and Barcelona (the Catalan Generalitat). Anarchists, who were concentrated in Barcelona, pursued a strategy of winning the war via grassroots revolution, but in areas where revolution had been effected, the Nationalist rebel forces sliced through the lines with ease.¹³⁶ Even if the Nationalists had disintegrated, it is hard to see how the leftist victors could have avoided a civil war, which simmered and occasionally boiled on the left nearly the entire time they were battling Franco.¹³⁷

The Spanish left was irreparably divided against itself. Beyond the usual tableau of anarchist leaders and many anarchist rank and file splintering over issues, or the factions within the Communist movement treating one another as enemies, the Communists and the POUM wanted to eliminate each other, as did the Communists and the anarchists. No less an unbridgeable gulf existed between the Communists and the Socialists, who stood ready to kill each other (and not just in Spain). That and the other divisions help explain why Spain’s Republic would not win, despite holding the strategic interior, coasts, and many ports. Stalin did not initiate these profound mutual enmities. He contributed to them, but he also struggled to overcome them, refusing to indulge the calls for a Communist coup and insisting on upholding the Popular Front under the Socialist party prime minister.¹³⁸ But Communism was ultimately an either-or proposition. Put another way, Socialists could give up anticapitalism and become “meliorists” (or redistributionists) within a parliamentary market system; Communists could never do so and remain Communists. Thus, despite the soaring passion of the antifascist crusade, the leftist Popular Front was doomed.

As for Franco’s techniques of war (insurgency-cum-counterinsurgency) and his vicious yet relatively adroit authoritarian rule, Stalin paid no special mind. The despot understood himself not as just another caudillo, but as an ideas-based leader. In practical terms, Spain’s strong interest groups, and the need for Franco to not just manipulate but accommodate them, provided a stark contrast with the political terrain under the Soviet despot, who had crushed even the quasi-independence of his inner circle.¹³⁹ Franco, therefore, had nothing to teach him, except that a military-led putsch, assisted externally by fascists, could try to seize a whole country, a scenario that Stalin was manipulating to justify his own savage domestic counterinsurgency against an imaginary insurgency.

ELUSIVE GERMANY

In Moscow, the German Communist Wilhelm Pieck, at a meeting of the German commission of the Comintern secretariat on February 11, 1937, had contradicted Stalin’s adviser Jenő Varga, a Hungarian Communist. Pieck argued that “the German bourgeoisie will not decide to go to war, and has grave doubts about Hitler’s provocations, which he needs to raise his prestige.” Varga interjected: “You think the German bourgeoisie does not want war?” Pieck: “No, not now. . . . We have information that the German army generals are against the provocational policy conducted by Hitler.” Varga: “That means that the current fascist regime in Germany is not a regime of the haute bourgeoisie, the finance oligarchy, but Hitler’s regime?” Pieck answered that “finance capital had understood that it could not dominate the masses with the help of Weimar democracy, but that did not mean fascism was merely an instrument. It is a force unto itself; we need to evaluate it as an independent force.” Pieck claimed that he was not denying “finance capital’s” power, but arguing that it had everything to lose from war, and thus that the Hitler regime was not reducible to finance capital. Varga was incredulous.¹⁴⁰

In Berlin, Kandelaki’s efforts to jump-start talks for bilateral political rapprochement had gone nowhere, and Stalin, through Litvinov, had tried to shift channels to the German foreign ministry. The Germans had raised questions about the Soviet request for absolute confidentiality; Litvinov, who loathed the idea of talks with Nazi Germany, smelled a rat, suspecting that, because of its economic straits, Germany was trying to simulate talks with Moscow to interest London and Paris in economic negotiations. But German foreign minister Neurath informed Schacht of similar suspicions: “Yesterday, during a personal report to the Führer, I spoke to him about your discussions with Mr. Kandelaki and especially about the declaration he made to you in the name of Stalin and Molotov. . . . I am in agreement with the Führer that at present these [talks] could lead to no result at all, and rather would be used by them to reach their desired goal of a military alliance with France and, if possible, a further rapprochement with England.” He added that any Soviet declaration about reining in Comintern propaganda would be worth nothing, as had been shown by earlier Soviet promises to Britain. The only thing that would move the Führer would be a regime change away from Bolshevism toward military dictatorship in Moscow. “Heil Hitler! Your Neurath.”¹⁴¹

Kandelaki, on his own initiative, approached Herbert Göring, an industrial adviser, SS officer, and cousin of the famous Luftwaffe head, and Herbert expressed delight at Moscow’s willingness to enter direct talks and promised to inform his cousin, as if the same information conveyed by official channels weeks earlier would not have reached Hermann Göring. These talks also went nowhere. “Schacht managed only to whisper to me (literally whisper) that he does not see any possibility right now for altering our relations,” Surits wrote Litvinov. “The young Göring also hinted not a word about our matters.”¹⁴² Stalin sent a ciphered telegram to Berlin (March 19, 1937) asking Kandelaki if he would agree to take over as ambassador to Germany in place of Surits—deemed by the American ambassador to Berlin “the brightest head among the diplomats here”—who was being transferred to Paris.¹⁴³ But on April 2, the Soviets announced that Kandelaki was being recalled from Berlin and promoted to deputy trade commissar.¹⁴⁴

On April 1, 1937, the second Five-Year Plan had been pronounced complete—in just four years and three months, just like the first. (Ten days later, the third Five-Year Plan would be officially approved.) On April 5, Surits left Berlin for consultations in Moscow; on April 7, he was officially transferred to Paris, but he returned to Germany to await his successor. On April 16, he wrote to Litvinov from Berlin: “Without exception, all the members of the diplomatic corps are fixed on the question of possible changes in Soviet-German relations. The rumors about the possibility of a rapprochement between Germany and the USSR have become widespread in Berlin’s diplomatic circles, despite being refuted. Some even suggested that the relevant negotiations have already begun, which the Soviet side is keeping in strict confidence.”¹⁴⁵ Litvinov’s suspicions had been correct. Germany leaked the “negotiations,” trying to drive a wedge between the USSR and France. On April 17, Litvinov telegrammed the Soviet chargé in Paris (Yevgeny Hirschfeld) and the envoy in Czechoslovakia (Alexandrovsky): “Inform the foreign ministry that the rumors circulating abroad about our rapprochement with Germany are without foundation. We did not conduct and are not conducting negotiations with the Germans, which should be clear if only from the simultaneous recall of our ambassador and trade representative.”¹⁴⁶

Hitler had unilaterally terminated the back-channel contacts with Soviet personnel. Stalin had the German nationals in the Soviet Union who had been arrested deported.¹⁴⁷ Also in April, on his initiative, the politburo formed two parallel quintets, which were dubbed permanent commissions: one for foreign policy and other top-secret matters (Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Yezhov) and one for urgent economic affairs (Molotov, Stalin, Chubar, Mikoyan, Kaganovich).¹⁴⁸ This institutionalized the narrower decision making in the name of the politburo that was already prevalent.

A DESPOT’S REALM

Terror had seized the privileged precincts of society—the postmidnight knock, the search and confiscations in the presence of summoned neighbors (“witnesses” were required by law), the wailing of spouses and children, the disappearances without trace, the fruitless pleading for information at NKVD reception windows, the desperate queues outside transit prisons and unheard screams inside, the bribes to guards for scraps of information on whereabouts.¹⁴⁹ But ordinary Soviet inhabitants mostly did not feel an immediate threat of arrest.¹⁵⁰ As the morbid joke had it, when uniformed men arrived and said “NKVD,” people answered, “You’ve got the wrong apartment—the Communists live upstairs.”¹⁵¹ Newspaper editorials complained that collective farmers were illegally enlarging household plots, reducing compulsory deliveries, and avoiding tax payments after the arrests of all their supervisors.¹⁵² Pravda criticized workers, too, for supposedly taking advantage of the destruction of enemies by failing to show up on the job.¹⁵³ One provincial factory worker, the landlord to the exiled poet Osip Mandelstam and his wife, told the poet that the trials were an elite affair, “a fight for power among themselves.”¹⁵⁴

Soviet life proceeded on its course. Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov published their entertaining One-Story America, about their travels to that far-off land, and the Bolshoi premiered Mikhail Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila (April 14, 1937). A week later the Moscow Art Theater premiered Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, in a staging by Nemirovich-Danchenko. Stalin attended, along with Molotov, Voroshilov, and Zhdanov. It depicted how the passionate love of Anna (played by Alla Tarasova) for Vronsky led to her suicide. The show concluded with a life-size train bearing down on the audience as Anna lay on the tracks.¹⁵⁵ Earlier that same day, Stalin had Yezhov invent the “discovery,” via intelligence sources, of a foreign plot against Tukhachevsky’s life, which prevented the marshal from accepting an invitation to the upcoming coronation in London of George VI. The Soviets announced that Tukhachevsky had a cold.¹⁵⁶

On April 22, Stalin paid his third visit to a part of the eighty-mile canal linking the Moscow and Volga rivers; newsreels and newspapers showered the visit with publicity (several of the people captured on film would soon be arrested and erased).¹⁵⁷ For the canal’s official opening, in summer, a flotilla of forty-four ships would deliver the supposed builder-Stakhanovites to the embankment at Moscow’s Gorky Park, where a celebration took place.¹⁵⁸ The canal was built by Gulag laborers, more than 20,000 of whom likely perished. Agitators celebrated the achievement that Moscow was now linked to five seas: White, Black, Baltic, Caspian, and Azov.

Food hardships returned. Around 100 million rural folk, 97 percent of all rural households, were confined to 237,000 collective farms and compelled to supply the fruits of their labor—grain, meat, milk, eggs—to the state at prices that were more than ten times below those at “peasant” markets. At the same time, more than 38 percent of the country’s vegetables and potatoes and 68 percent of its meat and dairy products in 1937 were produced on their small household plots for sale at those markets.¹⁵⁹ The state store network had grown considerably, but it still had fewer outlets and was more poorly managed than NEP-era retail.¹⁶⁰ Urban per capita consumption in 1937 was higher than it had been in 1928.¹⁶¹ But the priority on heavy industry and the military depressed living standards.¹⁶² Decent housing was especially scarce.¹⁶³ The effects of the poor 1936 harvest were being felt. Local newspapers referred to the queues for bread, indirectly acknowledging the shortages. Secret NKVD reports in 1937 noted “food difficulties”—collective farmers fleeing the most affected areas for the cities to try to get the food they had grown that had been confiscated from them, and spreading typhus.¹⁶⁴ Vyshinsky, the USSR procurator general, reported to Stalin in spring 1937 about peasants stealing the corpses of collapsed livestock, eating offal, potato roots, and fellow humans.¹⁶⁵

The first Soviet rockets using liquid fuel were launched, traveling eight miles.¹⁶⁶ At the same time, in heavy industry and the defense industry, 585 people had been arrested. There were also arrests in the enlightenment commissariat (288), light industry (141), transport (137), agricultural commissariat (102), food commissariat (100), and the Academy of Sciences (77).¹⁶⁷ The forestry commissariat had, instead of the budgeted 2,480 personnel, just 1,024.¹⁶⁸ Meanwhile, provincial and republic NKVD “party actives” were being forced to follow the suicidal ritual of mutual denunciation. Stalin read an anonymous letter sent to him that claimed that many operatives in the NKVD feared arrest and could not comprehend how the entire NKVD leadership had consisted of thieves and traitors, imploring Stalin to check into the situation and stop the extermination of people.¹⁶⁹

HINTS

Semyon Krivoshein, the tank commander in Spain, had written to Voroshilov urging that the Spanish Communists be allowed to seize power, in order to prosecute the war effectively. “Revolutionary Spain needs a strong government that is able to organize and guarantee the victory of the revolution,” he stressed. “The Communist party ought to come to power even by force, if necessary.” Voroshilov had passed Krivoshein’s report to Stalin on March 10, 1937.¹⁷⁰ But on March 14, in the Little Corner, Stalin met with Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Dimitrov, André Marty, and Togliatti and again expressed support for the Socialist trade unionist Largo Caballero as prime minister. The despot did agree it was best to have Largo Caballero relinquish the war minister portfolio.¹⁷¹ Voroshilov wrote to Berzin and Gaikis on March 15, that, to overcome the tensions between the Spanish Socialists and Communists, Moscow would not object to a merger of the two in a united Socialist Workers’ Party. The next day, Voroshilov instructed Berzin and Stern that the Pravda journalist Koltsov was to refrain from mocking Mussolini, so as not to provoke expanded Italian involvement in the war.¹⁷² Dimitrov, for his part, had been imploring Stalin for another meeting before Marty left Moscow for Spain on March 16, and, that day, the Comintern chief, Togliatti, and Marty were received, along with the cronies, at the Near Dacha, “until 2:30 in the morning.” Stalin cracked wise at Dimitrov’s expense, unnerving him. The despot would not budge on the matter of Communist revolution in Spain.¹⁷³

A Communist takeover had become entirely realistic. By spring 1937, Spain’s Communist party—long one of Europe’s smallest—reached 250,000 members, on its way to perhaps 400,000.¹⁷⁴ (French Communist party membership peaked at 330,000 in 1937; the British Communist party numbered fewer than 20,000.) Spain’s Communists, moreover, were a fighting force: perhaps 130,000 of the 360,000 troops in the Republic’s People’s Army were Communists.¹⁷⁵ The entire POUM may have been 60,000 members, the anarchist groups 100,000, and the Socialist party 160,000. Civil war had made the Communists Republic Spain’s dominant force. Indeed, Largo Caballero, a courageous if vain man, regretted this ever-growing influence of the Spanish Communists and of Moscow, and during the early-winter months of 1937 and into the spring, he floated versions of a war settlement through the Spanish ambassador in Paris. France would obtain the part of Morocco it did not control, Germany would be offered mines and other economic concessions, and Italy a naval base on Menorca, while the Soviets would be forced out.¹⁷⁶ Stalin would likely have known of such a proposal. He told Dimitrov that “if there is a decision for foreign forces to leave Spain, the International Brigades are to be disbanded.”¹⁷⁷

Stalin was reading his briefs closely, writing to Voroshilov (April 13, 1937) that Berzin, in Spain, “is mistaken in his assessment of the failed offensive of the blues [Republic forces] in the area of Casa de Campo [west of Madrid]. The cause of the failure above all consists in the circumstance that when the blues attacked Casa de Campo, the blue troops at Jarama [east of Madrid] remained silent, not even undertaking demonstration acts and giving the whites [Nationalists] the opportunity to throw in their reserves from Jarama against the blues in Casa de Campo. The blue troops are making analogous tactical mistakes constantly.”¹⁷⁸ Right or wrong, it was a battlefield analysis not reliant on invocations of treason and conspiracy.

Franco had felt constrained to abandon, for now, the attempt to capture Madrid, but forces under Mola were being massed to conquer Spain’s Basque country. On April 26, 1937, the German Condor Legion, assisted by Italian aircraft, attacked Guernica, the ancient capital of the Basques, at the behest of the Nationalists, aiming to sow terror in the Republic’s rear. The attack came on a Monday, market day. Not only was the civilian population of some 5,000 to 7,000 (including refugees) carpet-bombed, but as they tried to escape, they were strafed with machine guns mounted on Heinkel He-51s. Hundreds were killed. George Steer, a British journalist in the vicinity, stirred worldwide anger over the atrocities and German culpability with firsthand reportage (Times, April 28, 1937), which was reprinted in France. Nationalists muddied the waters, introducing the lie, propagated by British friends of Franco, that the Basques had blown up their own symbolic capital to discredit Nationalist forces.¹⁷⁹

Also in April 1937, the NKVD intercepted and photographed a communication from the Japanese military attaché in Warsaw to the general staff in Tokyo. NKVD foreign intelligence could not read the Japanese and had to go to Lefortovo prison for assistance from R. N. Kim, a Soviet counterintelligence agent on Japan who had been arrested as a foreign spy. The document was composed in the hand of the Japanese attaché’s aide—handwriting well known to Kim—and conveyed that “contact had been established with an emissary of Marshal Tukhachevsky.” This secret message for Tokyo had been sent not by ciphered telegram but by diplomatic pouch, which traveled from Poland to Japan through the Soviet Union. Japanese intelligence appears to have intended the “secret” document to be “intercepted.”¹⁸⁰

MAY DAYS

A convoluted action also took place on May Day 1937, a holiday marked by a military parade through the seat of power. “Infantry, cavalry, tanks would sweep past while fighters and bombers roared overhead,” one foreign observer noted. “Every now and then he [Stalin] would raise his hand, palm outstretched, with a little gesture that was at once a friendly wave, a benediction, and a salute.”¹⁸¹ Still, the regime undertook unprecedented precautions, even by Stalinist standards, enveloping Red Square in NKVD troops and plainclothes officers—as if a putsch were imminent. It was: Stalin’s putsch. Right after the parade, in the normally convivial setting of the Voroshilovs’ apartment, the despot warned the many military men present that unexposed enemies were in their midst.¹⁸²

In Catalonia by this time, tensions were boiling over, because food prices had nearly doubled since the onset of civil war, many factories were operating far below capacity, and tit-for-tat political murders were taking place. The governing Socialists, not to mention the Communists, had long been eager to crush the anarchists, as well as the POUM and, along with them, Catalan regional autonomy. On May 2, when the civilian president of the Republic’s government called the civilian president of the Catalan Generalitat, an operator at the anarchist-controlled main telephone station said the line needed to be kept open for more important business. The next day, government police seized the station. Workers in Barcelona laid down their tools, barricades went up, and, within hours, all political forces had mustered their militias. Later, Franco would boast that his agents had provoked the Barcelona anarchist uprising so as to disorganize the Republic’s rear. No doubt his agents did try. The NKVD, too, had infiltrated the POUM to instigate an attempted “seizure of power”—as a pretext to crush it.¹⁸³ In fact, no one needed to instigate the events. The crackdown was brutal. On May 7, a special assault guard arrived from Valencia, some 6,000 men. The street combat left around 500 dead and 1,000 wounded.¹⁸⁴ On May 15, amid calls for harsh reprisals against “anarchist” violence, Largo Caballero resigned as prime minister.

During Barcelona’s violent May Days, Koltsov was on a six-week trip back home. He had dug in with soldiers in trenches, witnessing the heroism and death of a real war. “There was something new in him, he became older, more severe, appeared pensive,” one acquaintance recalled. “He had gotten thinner, his skin was tanned, the flame of war had literally burned him, charred him.”¹⁸⁵ Koltsov’s longtime coworkers at Pravda were being accused of monstrous crimes and being arrested. Around his luxury apartment at Government House (the House on the Embankment), the doors to his neighbors’ apartments were sealed with wax, indicating that the residents had been hauled off by the NKVD.¹⁸⁶

Stalin, joined by Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Yezhov, had granted Koltsov an audience in the Little Corner, his second. “He sincerely, profoundly, . . . fanatically believed in the wisdom of Stalin,” Koltsov’s brother Boris Yefimov would recall. “How many times, after meeting the Master, my brother would regale me in minute detail about his way of conversing, about his specific observations, phrases, jokes. He liked everything about Stalin.”¹⁸⁷ Now the despot mocked Koltsov. “Stalin stood near me, put his hand on his heart, and bowed: ‘What should one call you in Spanish, Mig-u-el?’” Koltsov told his brother after the audience. “Mig-el, Comrade Stalin.” Stalin: “Right, then, Don Mig-el. We, noble Spaniards, heartily thank you for your interesting report. Goodbye for now, Don Mig-el.” As Koltsov reached the door, Stalin called after him: “Have you a revolver, Comrade Koltsov?” “Yes, Comrade Stalin.” “But you aren’t planning to shoot yourself with it?” “Of course not.” “Well, excellent! Excellent! Thank you again, Comrade Koltsov, goodbye, Don Mig-el.”¹⁸⁸

After Moscow’s May Day, the Pravda correspondent made his way back to Spain. A new NKVD courier for the diplomatic pouch arrived from Moscow and casually told fellow operatives in Spain that Koltsov “had sold himself to the English.”¹⁸⁹

ASSASSINATIONS

Voroshilov approved a long list of medals for service in Spain, but the grind there was taking its toll on Soviet personnel.¹⁹⁰ Meanwhile, attempts to use death squads to assassinate Franco came to naught.¹⁹¹ Still, Soviet intelligence officials in Moscow did not relinquish the fantasy. Theodore Maly, the Soviet spy chief in London, operating without diplomatic cover, had been instructed to send Kim Philby, the British-born Soviet agent, as a freelance war correspondent to Spain to infiltrate Franco’s entourage so as to assassinate him. Philby (code-named “Söhnchen,” “Little Sonny” in German) was to observe all details of Franco’s bodyguard retinue. He expressed enthusiasm, but after some three months in Spain he was recalled to London. “The fact is that Little Sonny has come back in low spirits,” Maly, who had doubted Moscow’s scheme from the start, reported on May 24, 1937. “He has not even managed to get near to the ‘interesting’ objective.” Maly added that even if Philby had somehow gotten near Franco, “he would not have been able to do what was required of him. Though devoted and ready to sacrifice himself, he does not possess the physical courage and other qualities necessary for this attempt.”¹⁹²

In the Barcelona cauldron, the assignments were more serious. The NKVD assassin Josifas “Juzik” Grigulevičius, known as Grigulevich, born in Wilno (Vilnius) in 1913 to a Russian mother and a Lithuanian-Jewish father and raised a Karaite, had assassinated police informers in his youth, been imprisoned in Poland in 1932–33 for Communist subversion, and then joined his émigré father in Argentina and picked up Spanish, to go with his native Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian, as well as French. “Max,” as he would be known in Spain, had flown into Barcelona from Toulouse back in the fall, then made his way to Madrid, where he trained saboteurs and arsonists for work behind Franco’s lines. He also liquidated “Trotskyites.”¹⁹³ Grigulevich had arrived in Barcelona with his death squad on May 3, 1937.¹⁹⁴ His primary target was Andreu Nin. The Soviet NKVD station chief Orlov forged a letter from a Nazi agent to Franco detailing Nin’s supposed “infiltration” of the POUM for the Nationalists. An agent for the Soviets persuaded a bookshop known to support the POUM to take custody of a suitcase for a few days; government police promptly arrived and found the suitcase, which contained the supposed secret documents—the Orlov forgery of a POUM conspiracy with the “fascists.” On May 23, Orlov pressed the case against the POUM, adducing the captured “document” he had fabricated, which was written in invisible ink and in code but was said to have been “deciphered” thanks to the capture of some of Franco’s codebooks. Koltsov played up the “evidence” of the POUM treachery in Pravda.¹⁹⁵ The POUM was soon outlawed, its headquarters at Barcelona’s Hotel Falcon converted into a house of detention.

After Nin was arrested, Orlov’s thugs kidnapped him from Spanish prison and took him to a secret place of confinement maintained by the NKVD at Alcalá de Henares, the birthplace of Cervantes. There, they tortured him to get him to confess he was a “fascist agent.” With much of the POUM leadership awaiting trial, such testimony was thought necessary to persuade the public to support death sentences. Nin refused to confess to treason, Trotskyism, or other crimes. He was executed in secret by Grigulevich’s death squad on the Alcalá de Henares highway and buried there.¹⁹⁶ When people continued to inquire about his whereabouts, the Soviets replied that he must have gone off with his fascist hirelings. Orlov wrote a pamphlet, attributed to Nin, denouncing Trotskyism.¹⁹⁷ The NKVD operative had worked extra hard to prove his bona fides to Stalin. In carrying out Stalin’s no-holds campaign against “Trotskyites” and “enemies” in Spain, the NKVD contingent there—which numbered no more than forty, and sometimes half that—gave the impression, wrongly, of attempted Sovietization.¹⁹⁸

Soviet annihilation of the POUM also sowed deep disillusionment among those who identified with the antifascist cause of Spain’s Republic. Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, who, before discovering the Lancashire miners in 1936, had been only intermittently interested in politics, had gone to Spain in early 1937 and joined a militia associated with the POUM. “It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle,” he would write in Homage to Catalonia. “Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. . . . Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivised and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. . . . In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist.” But Orwell was shocked to discover that the Communists were fighting tooth and nail against this grassroots revolution. On May 20, 1937, he was shot in the throat by a sniper. With the banning of the POUM, he would flee across the border to France.¹⁹⁹

In Paris, an International Exhibition opened on May 25 that would run for six months. In front of the Eiffel Tower, a neoclassical columned Nazi pavilion designed by Albert Speer and topped by an eagle faced a Soviet pavilion designed by Boris Yofan and topped by a statue designed by Vera Mukhina, of a male worker and a female peasant together thrusting a hammer and sickle. Nearby stood the Spanish pavilion, which, from summer 1937, would showcase Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.²⁰⁰ The besieged Basque country had surrendered.

STALIN’S TUKHACHEVSKY PLOT

Thanks to the endless purges and verifications, the Soviet armed forces counted just 150,000 party members among its 1.4 million men—half the number it had four years earlier. This spurred a move, in May 1937, to reintroduce political commissars and create three-person military soviets in units, to which local nonmilitary party secretaries were added.²⁰¹ But if Stalin was worried about a decline of party influence in the army, he himself was the cause.

Corps commander Primakov, nine months in Lefortovo, had refused to admit his “guilt,” but finally on May 8, 1937, he “confessed” and implicated others.²⁰² On May 10, a politburo decree demoted Tukhachevsky from first deputy defense commissar to commander of the Volga military district. It also named Marshal Alexander Yegorov—Stalin’s crony from the civil war—as the new first deputy commissar, returned Shaposhnikov as chief of the general staff, and shifted Yakir from Kiev to the Leningrad military district.²⁰³ Stalin received Tukhachevsky in the Little Corner on May 13, in the presence of Voroshilov, Molotov, Yezhov, and Kaganovich, and reassured the marshal that everything would be sorted out, mentioning a problem with Tukhachevsky’s lover, Yulia Kuzmina, who supposedly was a foreign agent.²⁰⁴ Around this time, August Kork, head of the Frunze Military Academy, was arrested and beaten into testifying. On May 15, Boris Feldman, head of the Red Army cadres department, was arrested, and, under severe torture, he incriminated Tukhachevsky (who the next day departed for his new posting in the rear, the city of Kuibyshev).²⁰⁵ Yezhov was putting together the pieces in Stalin’s scenario.

Tukhachevsky did himself few favors, stirring resentment (like Yagoda in the NKVD).²⁰⁶ The marshal was the army’s most brilliant military mind, and the first to let you know. Already in 1920, he had provoked the interest of the political police for willfulness as well as abuse of subordinates and funds.²⁰⁷ In his grand apartment in Moscow’s House on the Embankment, he hosted musicial evenings with the likes of Shostakovich and had the state military orchestra perform private parties at his state dacha, immodesties heightened by his aristocrat pedigree.²⁰⁸ A serial womanizer, he lived with Kuzmina without having divorced his third wife, while also carrying on an affair with Natalya Sats, director of the Central Children’s Theater. (He preferred intellectual beauties, not the youngish, buxom peasant girls who had once caught Stalin’s eye.) Stalin exploited these appetites: Tukhachevsky shared at least two lovers with Yagoda, who helped keep tabs on the marshal—Shura Skoblina, the niece of the émigré White Guard general, and Nadezhda “Timosha” Peshkova, the widow of Gorky’s son.²⁰⁹ Most Soviet officials were afraid of even limited intercourse with foreigners, but Tukhachevsky enjoyed high-level contact with the German and French militaries (he spoke both languages), which of course had been authorized but nonetheless endangered him.²¹⁰ Yezhov would relate a tale of how, during a visit to France, Tukhachevsky had supposedly cut off a piece of fabric at Napoleon’s grave and made himself an amulet. To all of this was added Voroshilov’s long-standing ill will.²¹¹

Stalin was also fixated on the authority of the commanders of the country’s two most strategic military districts on the western border: Yakir, who had headed the Kiev (Ukrainian) military district since 1926, and Uborevičius (b. 1896), the son of a Lithuanian peasant, who had commanded the western (Belorussian) since 1931 and had an extraordinary following among the officer corps.²¹² Together, these two commands accounted for 25 of the Soviet Union’s 90 infantry divisions and 12 of its 26 cavalry divisions. Only Blyukher, atop the Soviet Far Eastern Army, commanded comparable forces. Stalin had promoted the proletarian Blyukher to marshal while overlooking Yakir and Uborevičius, who were whispered to be jealous. Voroshilov, for his part, disliked Blyukher, perceiving a dangerous rival. (Amid rumors of Blyukher’s pending promotion to deputy defense commissar, Voroshilov preemptively promoted a Blyukher deputy to the post.)²¹³ Such jockeying by outsize egos could be found in any large institution, but in Stalin’s hands everyday tensions or indiscretions could become lethal. Through chauffeurs, bodyguards, cooks, maids, adjutants, secretarial staff, mistresses, and the NKVD special departments, the top military men were under a level of surveillance exceeding even that conducted on the foreign military attachés of Britain, Germany, Poland, Romania, or Japan.²¹⁴

Also in Stalin’s sights was Soviet military intelligence. Uritsky was out of his depth and bereft of talented people—such as Artuzov and Otto Steinbrück—whom he had forced out.²¹⁵ On May 20, Artuzov was arrested in his office (no. 201) on the second floor of Lubyanka and accused of being a rightist alongside Yagoda, as well as concealing material implicating Tukhachevsky (the very material he had forwarded to Yezhov). His interrogation protocols, which he signed with his own blood, would also assert that Yagoda had told him of widespread NKVD dissatisfaction with the Soviet leadership, “whose despotism stands in crying contradiction to declarations of Soviet democracy.”²¹⁶ On May 21, Stalin received the interrogation protocols of Semyon Firin-Pupko, a longtime military intelligence operative with experience in Poland, France, and Germany and, most recently, a deputy chief of the Gulag, responsible for forced labor construction sites. Accused of being a German spy, Firin painted in his “testimony” an incredible portrait of the complete capture of Soviet military attachés abroad by Polish intelligence, which he said was also directing Soviet counterintelligence in Moscow.²¹⁷

That same day, Stalin summoned Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Yezhov, Frinovsky, Slutsky (head of NKVD foreign intelligence), Yakov Serebryansky (head of NKVD agents abroad without diplomatic cover), Uritsky, Mikhail Alexandrovsky (deputy chief of military intelligence, who had replaced Artuzov), and Alexander Nikonov (another Uritsky deputy) to the Little Corner for a two-and-a-half-hour session.²¹⁸ In an internal memorandum that day, addressed to Yezhov and Voroshilov, the despot ordered that all Soviet agents abroad and their handlers be rechecked, because “military intelligence and its apparatus have fallen into German hands.” Stalin’s memo noted that “from the point of view of intelligence, we cannot have friends; there are immediate enemies and potential enemies,” and deemed the Czechoslovaks—with whom the Soviet Union had a mutual assistance pact—“the enemies of our enemies, nothing more.” He ordered Soviet personnel not to share intelligence secrets with Czechoslovakia or any other country, and “to fully assimilate the lesson of the cooperation with the Germans,” whereby “Rapallo, close ties, created the illusion of friendship. The Germans have remained our enemies, and they penetrated us and implanted their network.” He added, “We have had enormous victories, we are stronger than all politically, we are stronger economically, but in intelligence we have been smashed. Understand, they smashed us in intelligence.”²¹⁹

Civil defense followed. Its head, the ethnic Latvian Roberts Eidemanis (shortened to Eideman), was arrested on May 22 and, under torture, “incriminated” twenty others. Yezhov had the interrogation protocols on Stalin’s desk quickly. The despot wrote on them, “All those people named by Eideman in civil defense (center and periphery) immediately arrest”²²⁰—no verification of their specific spying activities and any damage caused.

Also on May 22, as if a putsch were imminent, troops of the Dzierżyński Regiment, guardians of the Kremlin, were brought to full alert and all Kremlin passes were invalidated. Out in Kuibyshev, Tukhachevsky was arrested and forced to remove his marshal’s uniform.²²¹ Stalin, as promised, had him returned to Moscow, but by convoy guard. On the post-facto Central Committee resolution proposing Tukhachevsky’s arrest, Marshal Budyonny wrote, “Unequivocally in favor. The scum should be executed.”²²² In the cellars on May 26, a mere four days after his arrest, Tukhachevsky began to sign whatever interrogators put in front of him. Zinovy Ushakov, who prided himself on obtaining confessions no other investigator could extract, mercilessly beat Tukhachevsky, whose blood dripped onto the pages of a confession to crimes he did not commit. By some accounts, Tukhachevsky’s teenage daughter, Svetlana, was brought to the prison, where the interrogators told him they would rape her.²²³

Even as he had the Soviet military brass tortured for being agents of fascism, on May 27, 1937, in the Little Corner, Stalin received Kandelaki, his erstwhile Berlin trade representative, who was trying to cut a deal with the German fascists.²²⁴ Germany’s military attaché in Moscow, General Ernst Köstring, was sending constant updates to Berlin, as Stalin knew. In Berlin’s diplomatic circles, German officials “confidentially” whispered how not all of their spies in the Soviet armed forces had yet been caught, egging Stalin on.²²⁵ He needed no such inducement, of course. On May 28–29, Yakir and Uborevičius were arrested. On May 30, eight days after Gamarnik had inscribed “in favor” on the post-facto arrest order for Tukhachevsky, he himself was dismissed. The next day he killed himself in his apartment on Bolshoi Rzhevsky Street.²²⁶ (Kulik, who lived in the same building, would soon join a second apartment to his own: eight rooms for a three-person family. Shaposhnikov would get Gamarnik’s dacha in Zubalovo.) Real and imagined associates, acquaintances, and relatives of the arrested men fell into the NKVD cellars. Stalin dictated, edited, and pored over the interrogation protocols, then circulated and referred to them as if they were factual.²²⁷

TERRORIZING THE NKVD

Plenty of NKVD personnel came forward to enact the carnage on coworkers. A key cooperative group centered on Yevdokimov, party boss of the North Caucasus territory. He had first met Yezhov at the Communist Academy in the 1920s. Stalin, around the time he issued the Sochi telegram replacing Yagoda with Yezhov, had consulted with Yevdokimov.²²⁸ Yevdokimov had been among those who ripped into Yagoda at the February–March 1937 plenum.²²⁹ He aspired to be Yezhov’s new first deputy at the NKVD and head of the state security department (GB). Instead, Mikhail Frinovsky, whom Yezhov was consulting regularly over wet lunches, got the position.²³⁰ Frinovsky had worked under Yevdokimov in his early career in Ukraine and the North Caucasus, but was his own man. He became one of the few Chekists closely tied to Yagoda (as chief of the USSR border guards) who would flourish under Yezhov. Yezhov did promote a slew of Yevdokimov people in the NKVD, including Israel Dagin, Yakov Deich, Sergei Mironov, Nikolai Nikolayev-Zhurid, and Vladimir Kursky, who replaced Pauker as head of bodyguards. (Kursky would shoot himself six days after receiving the Order of Lenin; Dagin would replace him.) All in all, fourteen of the sixty-odd regional NKVD bosses in 1937 were linked by service in the North Caucasus under Yevdokimov.²³¹ Thus did the enemies of Yezhov’s enemy (Yagoda) become Yezhov’s new friends—and the zealous implementers of the slaughter in the NKVD itself.

Despite the upheaval, Yezhov’s NKVD, like Yagoda’s, was made up of people of roughly the same generation, with Cheka service dating to Dzierżyński, overwhelmingly white-collar rather than working-class or peasant backgrounds, and heavily Jewish or non-Russian.²³² Yezhov’s NKVD, similarly, was riven with distrust. When informing Frinovsky that he wanted to appoint him first deputy commissar, Yezhov asked him to recite his accumulated sins. “You have so many sins, you ought to be arrested right now,” Yezhov told him, adding, “Well, so what, you’ll work, and you’ll be my person 100 percent.”²³³ Frinovsky further testified that “Yezhov demanded that I find investigators who were utterly dependent on us or had sins on their records, and they knew they had sins, which could be held over them.”²³⁴

Stalin had more faith in his young protégé than he’d had in Yagoda, but Yezhov still had to clear NKVD personnel appointments with the despot. Yezhov wielded nearly unimaginable power and terrified a vast country, but he never felt at ease. “Coming to the NKVD organs, at first I found myself alone,” he would later explain. “I did not even have an aide.” This was a lie: Yezhov had imported loyalists from the party apparatus, including Mikhail Litvin, who got the critical post of head of NKVD personnel, and Isaak Shapiro, who became head of the NKVD secretariat. Still, Stalin would often compel him to destroy his own associates. And the chain-reaction arrests, including of many people Yezhov had newly promoted, did foster paranoia. “I tasked this or that NKVD department head with interrogating someone who had been arrested,” Yezhov noted, “while thinking to myself: ‘Today you interrogate him, tomorrow I’ll arrest you.’ All around were enemies of the people, my enemies.”²³⁵

WEST ON THE WANE

Stalin had invested considerable time wooing Western intellectual sympathizers. But just as Pasternak had told the secret police, André Gide, in his Return from the U.S.S.R. (December 1936), published something critical, which noted, among other things, that “one fully literate worker asked if we also had schools in France.”²³⁶ Gide had also written a private “Report for My Friends on My Trip to the USSR,” and, on a mimeographed copy of a Russian translation Zhdanov had written for Stalin, “Defender of homosexuals!”²³⁷ The politburo wanted Koltsov to publish a rebuttal of Gide’s book, but he was occupied in Spain, so the apparatchiks engaged Feuchtwanger, who answered with Moscow, 1937.²³⁸ It was rushed into print in Russian in a print run of 200,000, and contained excerpts of Feuchtwanger’s early 1937 conversation with Stalin. “In official portraits Stalin gives the impression of being a tall, wide-shouldered, imposing person,” Feuchtwanger wrote. “In real life he is not very tall, thinnish, and, in the expanse of his Kremlin room where I met him, he was not very noticeable.” He added: “Stalin speaks slowly, softly, in a bit of voiceless voice. During a conversation he paces back and forth in the room, then he suddenly comes upon his interlocutor and, directing the index finger of his handsome hand toward him, he clarifies, or expounds, while formulating thought-out phrases, draws patterns on a sheet of paper with a colored pencil.”²³⁹

Simplicity—Stalin’s beloved self-characterization—was the leitmotif. “Stalin speaks unpretentiously and is able to express complicated thoughts simply,” Feuchtwanger continued. “Sometimes he speaks too simply, like a person who is used to formulating his thoughts so that they are understood from Moscow to Vladivostok. . . . He feels himself quite free in many areas [of knowledge] and cites by memory without preparation names, dates, facts always exactly.” Feuchtwanger wrote that “of all the men I know who have power, Stalin is the most unpretentious.” This was the cue to discuss the cult: “I spoke frankly to him about the vulgar and excessive cult made of him, and he replied with equal candor. . . . He thinks it is possible even that ‘wreckers’ may be behind it in an attempt to discredit him.” The German sympathizer was bothered by the showcase trials and put into print the heresy that “it seemed the bullets which tore into Zinoviev and Kamenev killed not only them, but the new world.” And yet, in the end, he ended up justifying the trials he knew to be falsified, on the basis of cultural snobbery (Russia was backward) and the political imperative to close ranks against fascism.²⁴⁰

Vsevolod Vishnevsky, the Soviet writer, found “a lot of European arrogance” in Feuchtwanger’s text. “Neither Malraux nor all these Western ‘public figures’ are of any use to us,” Vishnevsky wrote to Sergei Eisenstein (May 24, 1937). “Their historical value is much smaller than ours. . . . Let everything be ours. Let the law begin with us.”²⁴¹

STALIN’S ATTEMPT AT EXPLANATION

Stalin directed Voroshilov to summon an extraordinary session of the USSR’s Main Military Council, which customarily met once annually, in November or December, but now convened June 1 to 4, 1937. Its 85 members were top army and fleet commanders and heads of military academies, many of whom had been arrested or discharged, leaving 53 to attend, but 116 nonmembers were invited, along with Yezhov, Frinovsky, and others of the NKVD.²⁴² Some invitees arrived from as far away as Vladivostok (a week’s journey by train), while Kirill Meretskov had only just returned from Spain and, a naïf, expected to be asked to report on its key military lessons.²⁴³ Instead, attendees were compelled to spend the first day reading interrogation protocols about a fantastic homegrown fascist military plot. “The testimonies were typed carbon copies on normal paper, some contained numeration, some not,” one participant recalled. “The print on them was not always sharp, and reading them was difficult.” Readings were hurried, and new pages kept coming, with insufficient copies to go around, forcing people to wait as sections were freed up (and to read them out of order). Some of the protocols implicated attendees in the hall. Finally, the formal session opened, not in the House of the Red Army, as previously stipulated, but in the Sverdlov Hall of the Kremlin’s Imperial Senate building.²⁴⁴ The mood was cemeterylike.

Stalin attended all four days. (He would not become a member of the Military Council until the next year, so the sessions were officially designated a joint meeting of the council and “the politburo.”) Voroshilov had to deliver a report in the same room used for the February–March 1937 Central Committee plenum, but since then his deputy defense commissars (Tukhachevsky, Gamarnik) had turned out to be foreign agents: where had he been looking? In the presidium, Stalin “looked over the hall with interest, seeking familiar faces, and fixing his gaze on some,” while Voroshilov “seemed to have shrunk in height,” the participant recalled. “His hair had turned even grayer, wrinkles had appeared, and his voice, normally muffled, became completely hoarse.”²⁴⁵ Voroshilov complained that, back during the 1936 May Day celebrations, in a discussion in his apartment that devolved into recriminations over the 1920 Soviet-Polish War debacle, “Tukhachevsky said in the presence of comrades Stalin, Molotov, and many others that I and Budyonny had supposedly created a small clique of people around myself that controls policy. Two days later, Tukhachevsky took his words back.” Voroshilov then tried to downplay his grudge-drenched remarks as merely “the usual squabbles,” and to put distance between himself and the accused: “I, as you know, did not especially like, did not love Tukhachevsky. I had strained relations with him.”²⁴⁶

Voroshilov’s comments were almost beside the point. Stalin, on the second day (June 2), to a prolonged standing ovation, would deliver his most revealing remarks during his terror.

“Comrades, I hope no one doubts now that a military-political plot against Soviet power existed,” he began. “Such an abundance of testimony by the criminals themselves and observations by comrades who work there, such a mass of them, that, indubitably, here we have a military-political plot against Soviet power, stimulated and financed by German fascists.” The mere fact that he had to address possible doubts spoke volumes. Moreover, the usually systematic Stalin meandered, losing his train of thought. He denied that Tukhachevsky had been arrested because of noble lineage, reminding the audience that Engels was the son of a factory owner and asking if they knew that Lenin was from the nobility. Also disingenuously, Stalin asserted that no one was being arrested for having long ago voted with Trotsky. But then the despot contradicted himself. “Dzierżyński voted for Trotsky, and not only voted, but openly supported Trotsky, during Lenin’s time, against Lenin,” he told the military men. “This was a very active Trotskyite, and he wanted to bring the whole GPU to the defense of Trotsky. In this he did not succeed.”²⁴⁷ Dzierżyński a Trotskyite? Well, in fall 1925, Dzierżyński had very briefly flirted with joining Kamenev in opposition, before quickly repudiating Kamenev’s initiative to recruit him. Almost no one knew besides Stalin.

With this outburst, Stalin was trying to underscore not social origins (Dzierżyński, too, had been gentry), but deeds. “Did you read his testimony?” he asked of Tukhachevsky. “He passed on our operational plans—our operational plans, the holy of holies—to the German army. He had dealings with representatives of the German Reichswehr. A spy? A spy.” Stalin put out the idea that Tukhachevsky, as well as Yakir and others, had been entrapped by a seductress and blackmailed with threats of exposure. “There is an experienced agent in Germany, in Berlin . . . Josephine Heinze; maybe one of you knows her,” Stalin said threateningly. “She is a beautiful woman. An old agent. She recruited Karakhan. She recruited him with the ways of a woman. She recruited Yenukidze. She helped recruit Tukhachevsky. She also had Rudzutaks in her hands. This Josephine Heinze is a very experienced agent. She is probably Danish and works for the German Reichswehr. A beautiful woman, who likes to cater to all men’s desires.”

A lot of work for one chanteuse. Stalin further explained to the closed-door gathering that foreign powers sought to conquer the Soviet Union because its successes had increased its value, while those same successes had induced Soviet officials to let down their guard.²⁴⁸ As a result, he said, the top ranks of Soviet military intelligence actually worked for German, Japanese, and Polish intelligence.

“Collective farms,” Stalin suddenly exclaimed. “What in the world do they [the arrested military brass] have to do with collective farms?” Indeed. In his rambling answer, he again contradicted himself. He told a story of aristocratic types (Yenukidze, Tukhachevsky) who supposedly preferred a gentry economy and opposed socialism in the village.²⁴⁹ Here he revealed the centrality in his terror scenario of the right deviation, which in some ways was more important even than perfidious Trotskyism, because the right signified the possible class degeneration of the revolution: the political attitudes of the former tsarist officers, bourgeois specialists in industry, and the peasant mass—real social groups, for whom capitalism was not anathema but preferred. The right, therefore, was a structural threat, a false (or petit bourgeois) class consciousness.

Straining to persuade the attendees of the improbable charges, Stalin also appealed to current events, asserting that the Wehrmacht “wanted to make the USSR into a second Spain.” This supposedly explained the vast scale of the Kremlin’s response. All the same, the scale of arrests was unnerving. “People are saying that a mass of the military command structure is being taken out of commission,” Stalin admitted. “I see some are perplexed about how we will replace them. . . . Our army has a wealth of talent. In our country, in our party, in our army there is a wealth of talent.” After these assurances, he enjoined them to have the courage to promote these young people “more boldly; don’t be afraid. (Prolonged applause.)”²⁵⁰

DIGESTING THE UNDIGESTIBLE

Stalin had displayed less than a full command of key military terms and issues, and he misstated people’s names.²⁵¹ What the attendees, their lives on the line, made of his rambling remains unclear. Following a break, discussion ensued. Marshal Blyukher stated that in the units, “they are not speaking the way they should be. In a word, we’ll have to explain to the troops what this is about.” Stalin jumped on him: “You mean reconsider who has been arrested?” Blyukher tried to recover: “Not exactly that.” Some back-and-forth ensued over a list that had been compiled, of 150 people to be promoted, and Voroshilov stated, “The list is somewhere.” (The Red Army personnel chief who had compiled the list had been arrested.) Stalin interjected: “There’s no need to look at the list, since half of those on it had been arrested.”²⁵²

Throughout the four days of the Main Military Council gathering in the Kremlin, forty-two military men would take the floor; thirty-four of them would be arrested. All told, just ten of the eighty-five members as of 1937 would survive, the rest falling to “friendly fire.”²⁵³ (Sergei Kamenev, the civil-war-era commander in chief, had managed to cheat Stalin, dying of natural causes at age fifty-five, but he would be made a foreign agent posthumously.) Not a single speaker defended his arrested colleagues. On the contrary, they called them fascists and scum. Budyonny interrupted often, brutishly remarking that the civil war heroes Yakir and Uborevičius had been cowards back then. Shaposhnikov—wearing old-fashioned spectacles, his hair parted down the middle, unfailingly correct in manner—spoke only of his own shortcomings, an elegant stance, which did not spread and did nothing to halt the pandemonium.²⁵⁴ None of the military officers, most of whom had battlefield experience, would try to stop Stalin’s insanity. They were locked in Bolshevik ways of looking at the world, their own fear, and the grip of his person.

The day after Stalin’s speech and the initial discussion, on June 3, 1937, General Emilio Mola—of “fifth column” fame—died when his plane hit a hillside in fog. Mola’s crash (three months after Sanjurjo’s) induced Franco to stop traveling by air. (He would tour the front by car.)²⁵⁵ Franco attended Mola’s funeral, where, in front of onlookers, the caudillo’s uniform split at the armpit, a sign of his weight gain. But Franco, whose ambitions and pitilessness were evident, had not even murdered Mola, a genuine rival, let alone the bulk of Spain’s upper officer corps.

On June 4, the final day, a diminished Voroshilov offered concluding remarks. Stalin interrupted, demanding to know why the Communist party members he had personally sent to the Red Army were not leading tank units. “They cannot be commanders right away,” Voroshilov responded defensively. “We need to teach them.” Stalin: “What, are you not teaching them?” Voroshilov: “We’re teaching them, but in order to grow into a brigade commander, you must put in a rather significant amount of time.”²⁵⁶

Late on the concluding evening, a telegram arrived reporting that Keke Geladze, Stalin’s mother, had died in the Georgian capital. The cause was heart failure, according to the medical report; she was probably in her seventy-seventh year. (The morbid joke, whispered in Tiflis, that the guard outside her apartment was there to ensure she did not give birth to another Stalin, lost its topicality.)²⁵⁷ Stalin did not interrupt his terror against his own army to attend the funeral, a terrible breach of custom for a Georgian; Beria represented him at the ceremony. Pravda reported that a wreath had been sent with the inscription, in Russian and Georgian, TO A DEAR AND BELOVED MOTHER, FROM YOUR SON IOSIF JUGHASHVILI (STALIN).²⁵⁸ Keke’s few personal effects went to one of her two female peasant companions who had known her in Gori; a tag on her iron bed bore the notation PROPERTY OF THE NKVD.²⁵⁹ The funeral procession gave off the sound of stomping jackboots as nearly the entire Georgian secret police marched with her coffin.²⁶⁰ A washerwoman and seamstress, she would be buried in Georgia’s Mtatsminda (Holy Mountain) Pantheon of Writers and Public Figures.

IN CAMERA

Soviet borders were effectively closed (visas were required to exit). A privileged few were afforded occasional access to foreign newsreels. Juri Jelagin, a musician, recalled how members of his elite Vakhtangov Theater troupe were whisked to Mosfilm. “We watched American and German chronicles,” he wrote. “We saw horse jumping in Paris, President Roosevelt’s press conferences, Hitler’s nighttime torchlight processions, Davis Cup tennis matches, Mussolini speaking from the balcony of the palace in Rome, and sittings of the English Parliament.”²⁶¹ A few organizations had authorized access to foreign publications. Some Soviet inhabitants had relatives abroad, and though their correspondence passed through censorship, the latter struggled to keep up.²⁶² Information from foreign radio broadcasts such as the BBC was accessible, but only to the minority with dial radios in certain regions (even listening to foreign musical programs could get one denounced). The overwhelming majority of USSR inhabitants were cut off from the outside world, except for what the regime decided could be shown or heard.²⁶³ Even in the foreign affairs commissariat, department heads for various regions of the world were frequently in the dark about specific world events.²⁶⁴

On top of the enforced isolation, a swirl of dark forces and shadowy machinations suffused the mentality of the time. The opaque regime had originated as a conspiracy and had never ceased being one, while fighting against what one scholar has aptly called the “omnipresent conspiracy.”²⁶⁵ The plots could be so convoluted that many of those involved did not even know about them. (As Macduff says in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “Cruel are the times when we are traitors / And do not know ourselves.”) Some Soviet inhabitants saw through the smoke and mirrors. “Even the simplest fool knew that all those thousands were not ‘traitors,’ ‘enemies of the people,’ or ‘spies,’” insisted Ismail Akhmedov, then a junior military intelligence officer (who would later defect).²⁶⁶ But, in fact, the vast majority did not know.

On June 11, 1937, Soviet newspapers and radio stunned the country, announcing a trial, later that day, for Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven other high-ranking Red Army officers, for complicity in a “Trotskyite Anti-Soviet Military Organization” on behalf of foreign powers: Yakir, Uborevičius, Eideman, Kork, Putna, Feldman, and Primakov. A ninth, the suicide Gamarnik, was posthumously named a Nazi spy and Gestapo agent as well. (Three of the nine “Gestapo agents” were Jews.)²⁶⁷ Right before and after announcement of the “trial,” Pravda serialized a Russian translation of Charles Russell’s short Espionage and Counter-Espionage, M.I-4 (1926), for study by party cadres.²⁶⁸ Still, the Soviet populace had not been prepared by way of a long campaign culminating in a public trial.

Everything had taken place behind the scenes. On June 8, prison wardens had presented the eight defendants with their formal indictments, and the next day Yakir had addressed a petition for mercy to “Our Own Close Comrade Stalin,” who wrote on it, “He is a scoundrel and a whore.” Other politburo members had to read it as well. (“A perfectly precise definition. K. Voroshilov.” “A scumbag and a whore, deserves only one kind of punishment, death. L. Kaganovich.” Molotov affixed his name without elaborating.) After collecting the signatures, Stalin wrote on the document, “My archive.”²⁶⁹ Also on June 8, 1937, he sacked Uritsky as military intelligence chief after the latter wrote confessing that he had visited Yakir, Uborevičius, and other arrested enemies in their homes but desperately insisting, “I was not friends with them.”²⁷⁰ He was replaced by his predecessor, the disgraced Berzin, who had returned from Spain and, after Stalin had sung his praises, been decorated with the Order of Lenin. The forty-seven-year-old triumphantly returned to his old office in the Chocolate House, following a tryst the same morning with his Spanish mistress, Aurora Sánchez, who would very soon celebrate her twentieth birthday.²⁷¹

Among the charges leveled against Tukhachevsky were that he desired to force into being more tank and mechanized divisions at the expense of cavalry (which was true) and that he and others wished to replace Voroshilov as defense commissar with a professional military man, a point the men did not deny.²⁷² NKVD interrogator-torturers had compelled Tukhachevsky to compose a post-facto war “plan of defeat,” which amounted to a version of the sophisticated doctrines he had been advancing for years and the Soviets had been successfully practicing at maneuvers.²⁷³ Not that anyone noticed, but the “Trotskyite” charge brimmed with irony: Tukhachevsky had repeatedly contradicted Trotsky, arguing that revolution had changed war fundamentally.²⁷⁴

The single-day trial of the military men took place in camera, near the Kremlin, on the second floor of the three-story military collegium building (October 25 Street).²⁷⁵ In the chamber, collegium members could avail themselves of sausages, black caviar, pastries, chocolates, fruit. Chief military judge Vasily Ulrich was known to enjoy a brandy.²⁷⁶ Seven high-ranking officers, including Marshals Blyukher and Budyonny (newly named commander of the Moscow military district), Pavel Dybenko (newly named commander of the Leningrad military district), Shaposhnikov, and others were added to the collegium for the trial.²⁷⁷ Except for Voroshilov, the entire top brass, some fifty people in all, was either in the dock or on the court.²⁷⁸ As specified under the December 1, 1934, anti-terrorist law, there were no witnesses and no defense counsel, and no right of appeal. At the “trial,” Yakir acknowledged the existence of the “center” but shifted blame onto Tukhachevsky. Feldman did the same. When Kork tried to absolve himself and attack the others, they incriminated him, calling him a liar and provocateur. Primakov had volunteered an additional handwritten denunciation of commanders not yet arrested. Dybenko pressed Tukhachevsky for details about his planned palace coup, and Blyukher pressed Yakir to elaborate on Gamarnik’s counterrevolutionary Trotskyite plotting.²⁷⁹

Budyonny reported that day to Voroshilov (“only personally”), in a nineteen-page memorandum, that “from the testimony of Tukhachevsky, Kork, Yakir, and Uborevičius it is evident that they decided to work out first on their own initiative the plan for the defeat of the Red Army during the war and only after that to clear it with the German general staff . . . [but] because of their arrest they did not finish.” Still, Budyonny concluded, “I consider that nonetheless they passed it on to German intelligence” (parroting Stalin’s closed-door speech of June 2).²⁸⁰

Ulrich, in the middle of the proceedings, pronounced a recess and rushed to the Little Corner, appearing at 4:00 p.m. and staying twenty minutes. At 4:50 p.m., Stalin sent a ciphered telegram to every Soviet locality to organize mass meetings of workers and peasants and Red Army garrisons to affirm the necessity of executions, informing them that the sentences would be published the next day.²⁸¹ Just before midnight, Ulrich sentenced all eight to death; the men were led down to the cellar, where the NKVD’s head executioner, Vasily Blokhin, used German Walther pistols to execute the fascist hirelings.²⁸² Yuri Levitan, now twenty-three and a familiar voice, read the Pravda trial report over Soviet radio. Vehement approvals of the death sentences appeared under the names of famous Soviet scientists, such as the world-renowned plant specialist Nikolai Vavilov, and cultural figures, such as actress Alla Tarasova, a USSR People’s Artist. Izvestiya on June 12 printed a collective letter from Soviet writers, led by Alexander Fadeyev, naming the eight Soviet commanders as fascist agents who “wore a mask for years” and decrying how “fascists destroy culture, they bring degeneration to humanity, rude, idiotic militarization. The fascists kill the world’s best people.”²⁸³

That same day, Maria Ulyanova, Lenin’s sister, died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age fifty-nine. Stalin had her ashes interred in the Kremlin Wall, adjacent to Gorky’s. This left Krupskaya, aged sixty-eight, alone in the Kremlin apartment they had shared with Lenin.²⁸⁴ Alexander G. Solovyov, by now head of educational institutions in the commissariat of military industry, found Krupskaya sitting by Ulyanova’s casket in the Council of People’s Commissars club. “I asked what lay behind such an early death,” Solovyov noted in his diary. “Krupskaya breathed heavily and said [Maria] could not survive the difficult conditions created around us. Look around more closely, she said: it is possible you do not notice our utterly abnormal situation, the poisoned life.”²⁸⁵

It was on June 15, 1937, that Republic Spain’s new prime minister had ordered the mass arrests of the POUM leadership in Barcelona. The final destruction of the Spanish “Trotskyites,” including the NKVD’s secret assassination of Andreu Nin, had become small potatoes, however satisfying to Stalin.

Pravda reported on a spectacular sixty-three-hour flight (June 18–20, 1937) by Valery Chkalov, copilot Georgy Baidukov, and navigator Alexander Belyakov, from Moscow to the Pacific coast of the United States. The trio landed in Vancouver, Washington, after a daring nonstop flight that covered a distance of more than 5,500 miles and pioneered the polar air route.²⁸⁶ “He is our father,” Chkalov said of Stalin after landing. “The aviators of the Soviet Union call Soviet aviation Stalinist aviation. He teaches us, nurtures us, warns us about risks like children who are close to his heart; he sets us on the right path, takes joy in our success.”²⁸⁷ The exploit showcased the airmen and the airplane: the wide wingspan on the Soviet-designed ANT-25, the work of A. N. Tupolev, had enabled great range and fuel efficiency. The risk of failure had been immense, but so was the reward: domestic and international acclaim. Tupolev was soon imprisoned on trumped-up charges.²⁸⁸

BREAKING KLIM

Pravda, unrelenting, urged ever more naming of names; Stalin was forwarding to the newspaper selections from the investigatory materials Yezhov was providing. The editor, forty-eight-year-old Lev Mekhlis, a former Menshevik, high strung, with a yellowish face, never took his cigarette from his mouth and was known behind his back as the Gloomy Demon.²⁸⁹ “I never met someone with a more complex and contradictory character,” one Soviet official wrote. “I also never heard any kind words about him or praise for his work”—except from the despot: “In Stalin’s eyes Mekhlis was daring, insistent, diligent, and true.”²⁹⁰ Stalin soon named him head of the Red Army’s political administration, which carried promotion to deputy defense commissar. Mekhlis would travel the many military districts, demanding arrests and executions. “The defense commissariat became like a kennel of mad dogs,” Khrushchev would recall. “Mekhlis was one of the worst.”²⁹¹

To try to halt the savagery and save themselves, the top brass would have needed to be in a real conspiracy, but to them the idea of a military coup, such as in Spain, was anathema: they were Communists, and conscious of party discipline. Anyway, organizing a coup was an utterly remote proposition in the webs of surveillance and mutual denunciation.²⁹² Stalin wielded monopoly control over communications, the party cells and political administration in army units, the NKVD special departments for the army, and the public story in all newspapers and on the radio, which received ostensible confirmation of his narrative in real-life events in Spain. He also had a plethora of “vigilant” types in pursuit of reward or survival: the Kuliks and Budyonnys, the Little Blackberry Yezhov, the Gloomy Demon Mekhlis, and, in the end, Voroshilov, too.

On June 14, 1937, Voroshilov had sent a telegram to Novosibirsk reminding the locals that “only I personally sanction arrests of Trotskyites, double-dealers, and such.”²⁹³ He did not accede in every instance, especially when he was bucking Yezhov or Mekhlis rather than Stalin. Twice Yezhov sought Voroshilov’s permission to arrest one of the latter’s deputies, Andrei Khrulyov, head of military construction, but Voroshilov refused; the third time, Yezhov asked Stalin, who also refused.²⁹⁴ But Soviet military archives contain nearly thirty volumes of lists with the names of military men charged with crimes that the special department sent to the defense commissar for approval. Voroshilov affixed his signature to each name or to the whole list: “I do not object” . . . “I agree” . . . “Arrest him.” Sometimes he added vicious remarks: “Take all the scoundrels out” . . . “Round up the vermin.”²⁹⁵ Military officials dutifully conveyed to him the indignation that was supposedly emanating from the ranks over the revelations of treason (“These bastards should be chopped up alive, like pigs”). But their reports noted that “a few individuals have expressed panicked views that the fascist band that gave away many secrets to the Germans struck a blow against the fortress of the Red Army which will lead to defeat.”²⁹⁶ In fact, confusion broke out. One air brigade deputy commander destroyed all the portraits of top marshals and generals, and wanted to do the same for the portraits of the country’s political leaders, because no one could now be trusted.²⁹⁷

Incarcerated Red Army men inundated the defense commissar with desperate letters about their torture, begging—begging—for his help. “Kliment Yefremovich! You must check how the cases against the commanders of the Red Army are being handled,” a group of civil war comrades wrote to him. “You will find that materials are extracted from the arrested by means of force, threats, and turning men into limp rags.”²⁹⁸ Whether Voroshilov read these painful letters, which came in the many thousands, is unknown.²⁹⁹ In a pathetic note to himself, he wrote, “It is possible to fall into an unpleasant situation: you defend someone and he turns out to be a true enemy, a fascist.”³⁰⁰ But Voroshilov told Kuznetsov, the naval commander, that he did not believe in the guilt of the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, who had been arrested. Kuznetsov wondered, “How is it possible to sleep, when hundreds and thousands of your subordinates are arrested, and you know this is wrong?” He added, “The longer things went on, the more he [Voroshilov] lost face.”³⁰¹ In fact, evidence indicates that Voroshilov knew full well the charges were a lie.³⁰² He also comprehended the incalculable damage and dishonor wrought upon so many dedicated, patriotic military men as uniforms, chevrons, and medals were torn off and bullets fired into the backs of necks. “The authority of the army in the country is shaken,” Voroshilov wrote, again in notes to himself. “The authority of the commanding group has been shaken. . . . This means that the methods of our work, the whole system of governing the army, my work as commissar, has suffered a shattering crash.”³⁰³

Sixteen years after Voroshilov had implored Stalin, in vain, to move him to a civilian post, the former metalworker had come to cherish the Red Army, but his forced complicity in the massacre of loyal officers on the basis of fabricated charges and torture-extracted testimony psychologically pulverized him.³⁰⁴ When Alexandra Kollontai returned from her ambassadorial post to Moscow in 1937, accompanying the Swedish foreign minister, she found the normally buoyant Voroshilov “sweating from suffering; he was unaccustomedly hunched over.” She commiserated, telling him of the “terrible sorrow” that resulted from “losing faith” in the moral fiber of close friends. “You understand this?” he responded. “Terrible grief, yes, yes.”³⁰⁵

People were at a loss. “Could Voroshilov really have been indifferent to the fate of these cadres, colleagues from the civil war?” wondered Colonel Ilya Dubinsky, a Soviet tank commander demoted to deputy head of a school in Kazan. “With whom did he intend to smash the arrogant Hitler?”³⁰⁶ Trotsky, from afar, called Voroshilov “hopelessly compromised among all the thoughtful elements of the army.”³⁰⁷ Voroshilov carried a pistol and was an expert marksman. He lacked Orjonikidze’s courage, however—if suicide can be called courage. Whether the defense commissar contemplated shooting Stalin, we shall never know. Voroshilov had to know he was no substitute leader.

FIFTH COLUMN STORY LINE

Stalin had one of the most exhilarating periods in his life in May–June 1937. He had plotted and carried out a conspiracy to invent a conspiracy, ridding himself of the few plausible alternate leaders, compelled the rest of the upper officer corps to take part, and broken Voroshilov like a dog, while having his handiwork relentlessly acclaimed in newspapers and on radio. But did Stalin understand the price? Unlike Voroshilov, he appreciated Tukhachevsky’s exceptional talent. Stalin did not need Machiavelli to understand that a celebrated military man posed the gravest threat to a prince. (The Florentine had advised that such a commander should either be killed or discredited in the eyes of the army and the people.)³⁰⁸ Molotov said late in life, apropos of Tukhachevsky, “We were not sure whether he would stay firmly on our side at a difficult moment, because he was a rightist” and, unlike Trotskyites, rightists concealed their views. Molotov added, “Had he [Tukhachevsky] not been caught, he would have been very dangerous. He was the most authoritative.”³⁰⁹ True enough, but Stalin could have just had the commander quietly exiled or shot. But the despot had deliberately cut a very wide swath. And he had insisted that the men’s bodies be lacerated until they confessed to being foreign agents.

Mola’s “fifth column” bon mot emerged as the main public justification for the terror offered by representatives of the Soviet regime: a prophylactic action, with inevitable excesses, against potential enemies lying in wait for a foreign aggression. “Is it not clear that as long as capitalist encirclement exists, there will continue to exist among us wreckers, spies, saboteurs, and murderers, sent into our hinterland by the agents of foreign states?” Stalin had asked rhetorically at the February–March 1937 plenum.³¹⁰ He had underlined a similar passage in the draft notes of Molotov’s speech for the plenum, and interrupted Yezhov’s speech with the instruction, about one accused enemy, “And he will save up his strength until the moment of war, when he will really do us a lot of harm.”³¹¹ Mikoyan, a quick learner, mentioned a “fifth column” explicitly in his second speech at the same plenum. Molotov, fifty years later, would explain that Stalin “took no chances. He pitied no one. . . . It was hard to determine the limit where to stop.”³¹²

This way of thinking went beyond Stalin and his henchmen. “I am happy that all this has been uncovered and that our agencies are in a position to expose so much rottenness before the outbreak of war so that we can emerge victorious,” Bukharin, under vicious attack, had stated back at the December 1936 Central Committee plenum, in relation to terror against others, “because had we missed it at the outset and caught it only in the midst of war, that could have led to an extraordinary and terrible defeat for the entire socialist cause.”³¹³ Foreign observers of the Soviet terror also picked up the fifth column rationale.³¹⁴ Many victims, too, linked their annihilation to a pending war (as well as to the “democratic” elections announced with the new constitution).³¹⁵ But Stalin’s butchery was not triggered by the July 1936 military coup and the ensuing civil war in Spain.³¹⁶ Stalin himself almost never used Mola’s piquant “fifth column” phrase. (Bukharin in December 1936 had not actually used the term, either.)

Insiders’ treachery and the “foreign hand” had been core parts of Stalin’s worldview and governing style since his warlord days in Tsaritsyn, his first real exercise of state power, when, in August 1918, he had twenty-one “class enemies” executed for allegedly plotting to assist, from within, the Whites’ capture of the city from without, a bald attempt to galvanize the workers to fight to defend the city. He had explained this technique to the delegation from Mongolia in 1934 and again in 1935. Events in Spain in 1936 provided a dramatic story line, manipulated by him, for the ever greater scale of a domestic offensive against Zinovievites, Trotskyites, and rightists that predated Spain. Stalin acquired an additional way to justify arresting any official in heavy industry and completely unhinging weapons production: actually, he was improving Soviet security, because they wanted to turn the Soviet Union into a second Spain. He could eviscerate Soviet intelligence and diplomacy, but he was making the country more secure. Soviet borders were being penetrated, so he could shoot the border guards to make the country safer.³¹⁷ Stalin could murder anyone on the flimsiest of pretexts, or even without a pretext, and in doing so he could assert that he was fighting tooth and nail to defend socialism and the Soviet state against the kind of rightist military putsch he had been warning about for years, and that Spain concretized.

Spain was convenient but unnecessary for Stalin’s terror. The ideas of capitalist encirclement and the enemy within had been born with the Bolshevik coup itself and become the basis of all Bolshevik propaganda in the 1920s. Stalin had been contemplating the destruction of Bukharin and Tukhachevsky in the precise scenario deployed in 1937 for years. “Is it possible?” he had written to Orjonikidze about interrogation protocols implicating Tukhachevsky in a coup plot with Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky. “Of course it is possible.” Stalin had answered his own question: “It seems the rightists are prepared to take the path of military dictatorship if only to escape from the Central Committee, collective and state farms, Bolshevik tempos of industrialization.” Here was the nub of 1937—but the letter had been sent September 24, 1930.³¹⁸

• • •

PERCEIVED SECURITY IMPERATIVES and a need for absolute unity once again turned the quest in Russia to build a strong state into personal rule. The Soviet regime presented multiple paradoxes: gigantic administrative structures and their frequent abolition, re-creation, and reorganization; ponderous proceduralism and pervasive violation of those procedures. Some of this was by design: overlapping jurisdictions was one way Stalin tried to keep minions in check and himself abreast of information. But much of it was unintentional—dictatorship hamstringing itself. Bureaucracies came alive, or failed to do so, on the basis of their boss’s personal dynamism and ability to build and galvanize a personal following. This was true at every level, and especially at the pinnacle.

Tyranny has a circular logic: once a dictator has achieved supreme power, he becomes keener still to hold it, driving him to weed his own ranks of even potential challengers. At the same time, plots linking domestic and foreign foes—who are supposedly caught in the nick of time—constitute one of the oldest devices in the authoritarian handbook. The content of the trumped-up plots is always specific to the culture in question, but the result is always some form of emergency rule, whereby political rivals and opponents are summarily eliminated. Under the interwar Romanian dictatorship, it was the ethnic Hungarian minority and their purported paymasters in Budapest, as well as the Gypsies; in the interwar Polish dictatorsip, it was the Ukrainians and their paymasters in Moscow and Kiev; and everywhere it was the Jews, the ultimate international conspiracy, especially for Hitler, who saw them as ready to engage in internal subversion, in league with Germany’s foreign enemies. The ratcheting up of tensions to fever pitch over subversion scenarios helps galvanize and recruit supporters, burnish regime legitimacy, and tighten central control. Scapegoats promote solidarity. A sacrificial lamb can be a kind of gift from a ruler to followers. But the breathtaking scope, as well as the participation of the targeted, set Stalin’s actions apart.

The Red Army was immense, and the self-inflicted losses—90 percent of the top ranks—represented just 0.5 percent of the whole. But a dearth of good officers to discipline, train, and lead conscripts was precisely its chief vulnerability. Conscripts, for their part, could not be sure who among their commanders would soon be unmasked as a foreign agent. Moreover, all of the Soviet Union’s foreign enemies were watching. On June 24, 1937, the organ of the Wehrmacht (Deutsche Wehr) wrote that in “shooting these well-known military brass of the Soviet Union, they self-consciously sacrificed fighting ability and leadership of the Red Army to politics. Tukhachevsky, unquestionably, was the most outstanding of all Red commanders and cannot be replaced. . . . Supposed espionage, of course, is just made up. If the Bolsheviks maintain that the ‘accused’ have confessed, that is, of course, a lie.” The Nazi party organ, Völkischer Beobachter, wrote of the USSR that “a country with such a system of murder is still included in the group of ‘civilized states.’” The Polish press gleefully pointed out that in light of the espionage charges in Moscow, the French general staff could expect that any secret military plans it might develop with the Soviets would be passed to the Germans.³¹⁹

The Soviet general staff documented the foreign reactions. The damage was severe, but Stalin, far from being deterred, was just beginning.³²⁰ By contrast, his involvement in Spain had effectively peaked as of May–June 1937. Despite the accusatory exaggerations against both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Stalin, even more than Hitler, had deliberately kept his intervention on the Iberian Peninsula within limits. Altogether, between 1,150 and 1,500 Soviet combat personnel would see duty, including 772 pilots and 351 tank operators, a paltry number compared with the 19,000 Germans, let alone the 80,000 Italians who would fight.³²¹ Another 500 or so Soviet military advisers would also serve, but only 9 Soviet political workers were sent to Spain during the entire war.³²² Soviet deaths would be recorded at 125, plus another 43 missing in action.³²³ German dead would be estimated at 300. Italy would suffer 16,650 dead, wounded, and missing in action and would expend at least 6.1 billion lira supporting Franco.³²⁴ (The economic advantages anticipated for Italian support fell largely to Germany.)³²⁵ Stalin’s expenses would be significant (in the form of loans that would not be repaid) but contained.³²⁶ Especially with the “Trotskyite” POUM crushed by spring–summer 1937, Stalin appears to have lost much of his interest.³²⁷ After summer 1937, little new Soviet equipment would be sent or upgrades made, while Soviet pilots and tank crews would be withdrawn, diplomatic ties downgraded, and the heady cultural exchanges terminated.³²⁸

Propaganda on Spain did not disappear, but in Soviet newsreels, China gained ascendancy.³²⁹ On this front as well, Stalin was annihilating his officers. NKVD bigwig Vsevolod Balytsky had been transferred from Ukraine to fabricate a Trotskyite-fascist conspiracy in the Soviet Far Eastern Army, the country’s critical line of defense against Japan; within a few weeks, on July 7, 1937, Balytsky himself was arrested as a Polish agent. He had been in Stalin’s Little Corner more than twenty times in the 1930s. En route eastward, at a Siberian train station, he had unburdened himself of complaints about the terror to a fellow Chekist, who promptly denounced him to Yezhov. The assignment of eviscerating the Soviet Far Eastern Army fell to another butcher.³³⁰ On the country’s southern border, Georgia’s Beria reported to Stalin (July 9) that he had uncovered his own “military conspiracy” in the South Caucasus military district. The next day, Joseph Goebbels recorded in his diary that Hitler judged Stalin “likely diseased in the brain. Otherwise one cannot explain his bloody rule.”³³¹