Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

CHAPTER 8 “WHAT WENT ON IN NO. 1’S BRAIN?”

We cannot say that these were the deeds of a giddy despot. He considered that this should be done in the interest of the party, of the working masses, in the name of the defense of the revolution’s gains. In this lies the whole tragedy!

NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV¹

Stalin thought very highly of Bukharin. Yes, he did. Bukharin was very educated and cultivated. But what should one do?

VYACHESLAV MOLOTOV²

HAD STALIN AIMED ONLY TO BREAK HIS INNER CIRCLE, utterly cow the wider elite, and make himself a despot, he might have ended the terror with the in-camera trial and executions of the military men and the arrests of Yagoda, Pauker, and other NKVD higher-ups. Mission accomplished. But he had much larger aims, with plans for more high-profile trials. In summer 1937, he vastly expanded the arrests and executions to nonelites. There was no “dynamic” forcing him to do so, no “factional” fighting, no heightened threat abroad. The terror was not spiraling out of his control. He just decided, himself, to approve quota-driven eradication of entire categories of people in a planned indiscriminate terror known as mass operations.³ This momentous decision was complemented by a widening of the annihilation of sitting elites, which was unveiled at yet another manic Central Committee plenum, this one from June 23 to 29, 1937. On the opening day, Yezhov (according to his notes) enlarged on what he had said at the inconclusive plenum of December 1936 and written up at length in his unpublished magnum opus, “From Factionalism to Open Counterrevolution,” submitted to his teacher Stalin in May 1935: namely, that the USSR was mortally threatened by an immense überconspiracy made up of innumerable intertwined conspiracies.

Yezhov, at the plenum, spelled out a military-fascist conspiracy, a rightist-fascist plot in the NKVD, a Kremlin rightist-fascist group of plotters, an espionage organization of the Polish military, Polish National Democrats in Belorussia, an anti-Soviet rightist-Trotskyite group in the Azov–Black Sea territory and another in Eastern Siberia, a rightist anti-Soviet group in the Urals, an anti-Soviet rightist-fascist group in Western Siberia, a rightist-Trotskyite espionage group in the Soviet Far East, an organization of rightists in Western Siberia united in a partisan-guerrilla uprising, an anti-Soviet Cossack organization in Orenburg, and a wrecking rightist-Trotskyite anti-Soviet group in the agriculture commissariat. “I enumerated only the most important,” he allowed, adding that each was “linked in the closest possible way” and together constituted a “Center of Centers,” which was colluding with “fascist government circles in Germany, Japan, and Poland, on the one hand, and, on the other, with representatives abroad of anti-Soviet parties of Trotskyites, Mensheviks, and SRs.” The shared aim of all these leftist revolutionaries was said to be restoring capitalism in the USSR by way of “a palace coup, an armed uprising supported by foreign interventionists, the preparation of a Soviet defeat in the event of a war with fascist countries, and the coming to power of themselves as a result of political and territorial concessions to the fascists.” Yezhov warned that the scale of the conspiracy emanating from “testimony” indicated that the USSR stood on the verge of civil war.⁴

What attendees said in response remains unknown—Yezhov’s report and the follow-up discussion were not transcribed—but we do know that Trotsky interceded from afar. He sent a telegram from Mexico to the central executive committee of the Soviet, formally the highest organ of the state, declaring that “Stalin’s policies are leading to a crushing defeat, both internally and externally. The only salvation is a turn in the direction of Soviet democracy, beginning with a public review of the last trials. I offer my full support in this endeavor.” This document went to the NKVD, which forwarded it to Stalin. “Mug of a spy!” he wrote on Trotsky’s text. “Brazen spy for Hitler!”⁵

Stalin’s expansion of long-standing party purge practices required a surprisingly small degree of manipulation, and yet his terror was a spectacular feat in its own way. He would manage to annihilate not only nearly the entire upper ranks of the Soviet military and the secret police—in a police-military dictatorship—but much of the industrial managerial class, the regional party machines, and the cultural beau monde.⁶ He also visited ruin upon Soviet military and civilian intelligence, military attachés and diplomats abroad, and foreign Communist parties, prime instruments that any dictatorship would cherish. What was he doing?

The only way into Stalin’s serpentine mind—or, as Arthur Koestler put it in Darkness at Noon, “what went on in No. 1’s brain?”—begins with public and private comments made by him and those he instructed.⁷ Hitler turned out to be a brilliant actor, and the same has been said of Stalin, who dissembled shamelessly and playacted skillfully. But also like Hitler, who incessantly talked of his intentions (most people just did not believe him), Stalin proved extraordinarily voluble as well.⁸ We can never know in the end what Stalin believed. We can, however, come to understand how his mind worked.

Sometimes his terror ruminations were extensive, such as at the June 2, 1937, closed session of the Main Military Council; other times they were brief. They emerged from his long-standing self-conception that those who opposed him were broadcasting disunity and weakness, thereby inviting foreign powers to attack—in other words, objectively supporting the USSR’s enemies—while he, a selfless servant of the cause, under siege from uncomprehending critics, had been placed on this earth to defend the socialist revolution and the Soviet state. Therefore, he was not merely justified, but dutybound, to eradicate oppositionists and anyone taken in by them. The incarceration or physical liquidation of more than a million and a half human beings apparently posed no moral dilemmas for him. On the contrary, to pity class enemies would be to indulge sentiment over the laws of objective historical development. Ignorance of history could be fatal, Stalin argued, and he spent a great deal of time during the terror midwifing an accessible history of the Russian state, from its origins to the present, as a tool of mass civic training.⁹ Stalin was a massacring pedagogue.

A TEACHER AND A PUPIL

In Boris Yefimov’s celebrated cartoons, Yezhov was depicted with an oversized gloved fist crushing shrunken enemies. In person, he stood a mere five feet tall (1.51 meters), had a prominent scar on his right cheek (a civil war injury) and yellowish teeth (something he shared with Stalin), and walked with a pronounced limp, a gait even worse than the despot’s. He was beset by a hacking cough from tuberculosis, myasthenia and neurasthenia, anemia, angina, sciatica, psoriasis, and even malnutrition, ailments of long standing. One old revolutionary said Yezhov reminded him of slum children whose favorite occupation was to tie paraffin-soaked paper to a cat’s tail and set fire to it.¹⁰ Around 1930, Yezhov had begun to indulge in drinking benders, to the point of losing consciousness. One of his drinking companions had been Fyodor Konar (Polashchuk), who used to bring along prostitutes. (Konar had been arrested in January 1933 as a Polish spy and executed two months later for “sabotage in agriculture.”) Another drinking buddy, Lev Maryasin, a former coworker in the personnel department of the central apparatus who had become head of the state bank and deputy finance commissar, used to compete with Yezhov in farting competitions. (Maryasin, too, was arrested, by Yezhov’s NKVD.)¹¹ Stalin allowed Yezhov various leaves, spending hard currency on treatments abroad, but the illnesses, along with Yezhov’s propensity for daytime drinking, took a toll. “Yezhov not only drank,” recalled Zinaida Glikina, a friend of Yezhov’s wife, Yevgeniya. “In addition, he deteriorated and lost the visage not only of a Communist but of a human being.”

As Yezhov fanatically prosecuted the terror, in early 1937 his teeth began to fall out. He suffered from appetite loss, dizziness, and insomnia. Doctors diagnosed overwork and ordered a long holiday, which Yezhov deemed out of the question.¹² In April 1937, one of his subordinates had suggested the cause might be meals at the NKVD canteen, where undiscovered enemies could be lurking. The Red Army’s chemical warfare academy was called in and “found” trace elements of mercury in Yezhov’s office. An NKVD employee was tortured and confessed, implicating Yagoda in an assassination attempt. Traces of mercury were suddenly found in Yezhov’s former apartment (on Bolshoi Kiselny), in his new one (in the Kremlin), and at his dacha (in Meshcherino); all were ventilated, and the mercury vanished. No one explained how the inaccessible residences had become contaminated. But Yezhov now had his urine checked regularly, and switched offices inside NKVD headquarters.¹³ He was reported to have created a circuitous, one-way route to his Lubyanka suite—up to the fifth floor, down to the first, then up to the third, as if he were under threat from the agency he commanded.¹⁴

Could this alcoholic, increasingly infirm, frightened Lilliputian creature have been responsible for Soviet state security? Yezhov, of course, was an instrument. It was not he—and not a rebellious military command, as in Spain—who originated the mass violence in the USSR.¹⁵ But Stalin goaded him relentlessly: “Comrade Yezhov. Very important. It is necessary to go through the Udmurt, Mari-El, Chuvash, and Mordovian republics, to go through with a whip.”¹⁶

Back in tsarist Russia, General Alexander Gerasimov, the head of the okhranka in St. Petersburg, met with Nicholas II just once during his entire career; political policing was viewed as necessary, but not necessarily honorable, work. That had changed: in 1935 and 1936, Yagoda had been in Stalin’s office every month, sometimes more than once. From January 1937 through August 1938, an interval during which Stalin received visitors on 333 days, Yezhov would make 288 appearances, second only to Molotov. How often they additionally met at the Near Dacha or spoke on the telephone remains unknown. Stalin sometimes played chess with him.¹⁷ The Bloody Dwarf, as Yezhov was known in whispers, cleansed enemies out of conviction, but also to please his master, just as Yezhov’s subordinates showed fanaticism in terror to please him. His three concurrent positions—NKVD chief, Central Committee secretary, chairman of the party Control Commission—rendered him as knowledgeable about Stalin’s thinking as anyone.¹⁸ “A teacher with a pupil, an eagle with an eaglet,” the Stalinist writer-enforcer Alexander Fadeyev wrote of the despot and his protégé. “Stalin tends to him lovingly, like a gardener tends to a beloved tree.”¹⁹ Yezhov returned Stalin’s favor with nonpareil zeal and brutality.²⁰

As the ringleaders of the phantasmagorical “Center of Centers,” Yezhov named Bukharin (who was writing desperate, groveling letters to Stalin), Rykov (who had failed to act decisively when he had his chance back in 1928–29), Tomsky (who shot himself rather than his tormentors), Zinoviev (who had been writing his own groveling letters to Stalin), Kamenev (who could have smothered the Bolshevik monopoly in its cradle in 1917 but shrank from doing so), émigré SR, Menshevik, and White Guard organizations (which were infiltrated and in some cases established by the NKVD), and Pyatakov (who begged to be the executioner of all the others, an offer Stalin declined, reasoning out loud at the Central Committee that “no one would believe that you voluntarily decided to do this, without being coerced, and besides, we have never announced the names of the people who carry out sentences”).²¹ This was a pathetic register of coup leaders. As for the supposedly threatening anti-Soviet émigré organizations, Yezhov’s NKVD had thoroughly penetrated them. Some, such as the Helsinki branch of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), were actually led by Soviet agents, while the leaders of others, such as General Evgeny Miller of the Russian All-Military Union, had been kidnapped.²² “They present no value whatsoever,” Sergey Spigelglas, deputy director of NKVD foreign espionage, reported, “since they have neither money, nor international connections, nor organization, nor people.”²³

Ultimately, however, Yezhov was right in one crucial way: a conspiratorial “Center of Centers” threatening the Soviet Union did exist: the Little Corner itself.

COMMUNISM’S EASE OF MASS MURDER

Throughout 1937 and 1938, there were on average nearly 2,200 arrests and more than 1,000 executions per day.²⁴ The NKVD extracted testimony under torture even from people who would not be tried publicly, because that was one way they met quotas—gathering ever more names of accomplices—but also, more fundamentally, because Stalin craved this. Even when “confessions” had been edited by him, he treated them as if they were real, underlining passages, circulating them to the politburo, and referring to “testimony.” During the two frenzied, gruesome years of 1937 and 1938, Yezhov forwarded to him more than 15,000 written “special communications,” an average of 20 per day, many of which Stalin marked up and returned with further instructions.²⁵

The terror’s scale would become crushing. More than 1 million prisoners were convoyed by overloaded rail transport in 1938 alone.²⁶ The Lubyanka’s feared inner prison contained a mere 110 cells. (The building had been a hotel for visiting insurance executives and retained its parquet in the corridors. Most of the floors were aboveground, but the windows were bricked up; the cellars were reserved for priority prisoners and executions.)²⁷ But Butyrka, tsarist Russia’s former central transit prison—whence the Cheka founder Felix Dzierżyński had once escaped—filled with 20,000 inmates, six times capacity. And Butyrka was considered a resort compared with Lefortovo, while the most feared of all, Sukhanovka, located at a former monastery just outside Moscow and known as the dacha, was still more jammed.²⁸ Some arrest sweeps had to be delayed or put off because of overcrowding.²⁹ Urgent requests to Moscow for instructions began to sit without response (by summer 1938, more than 100,000 unattended cases would languish).³⁰ Stalin, for two years running, felt constrained to skip his much-beloved annual southern holiday—even he struggled to keep the pace, despite his inhuman capacity for work.

Given the numbers involved, the state’s violence against its own population inevitably was chaotic.³¹ Stalin lost track of people, writing next to names in interrogation protocols, “Arrest,” when they were already in custody, a point he came to recognize. (“Comrade Yezhov: The names identified by me in the text with the letters ‘ar’ are to be arrested, if they have not yet been arrested.”)³² Stalin would suddenly remember someone and inquire about his fate (some were dead, some not). People whose names sounded similar to someone else’s would suffer misdirected arrests. Not everyone on the hundreds of lengthy execution lists was shot.³³ But for all this messiness, the process was systematic, driven by continuous orders and codified in updated antiterrorist laws and procedures. Mass murder does not somehow “break out,” but must be set in motion, and then driven onward, as Stalin did, and be sustained by powerful drivers.

A number of factors made such a terror possible. The Communist party underwent periodic “purges” to root out those deemed unworthy—because of background, beliefs, or inability to carry out responsibilities—and these long-standing practices that normally led to expulsion and possible arrest were ramped up to certain arrest and likely execution. Moreover, the very fact of the long history of party expulsions, even without arrest, had created a multitude of individuals who could be seen as potentially dangerous. The terror was also propelled by the bureaucratic imperatives and careerism of a formidable repressive apparatus that had been built up over many years, especially as a result of collectivization-dekulakization, as well as a pervasive fear in the ranks of the NKVD for their own lives. Additionally, the highly organized monopoly public sphere could be—and now was—ordered to disseminate charges of mass sabotage and spying. Even in the largest cities, tiny numbers of correspondents and editors—local Mekhlis equivalents—could fan mass hysteria. Public receptiveness to the charges, in turn, was facilitated by the widely shared tenet that building socialism constituted an adversarial crusade against myriad “enemies” at home and abroad, and by the circumstance that the system was not supposed to have a new elite, but did. The new elite’s apartments, cars, servants, concubines, and imported luxuries were often visible, while workers and farmers lived in hovels and went hungry. This did not mean that every ordinary Soviet inhabitant was eager for the blood of bigwigs, but few tears were shed.

The terror, like every aspect of Soviet reality, also depended upon isolation. Foreigners were kept from Soviet inhabitants, and the number permitted to go abroad, even on official business, shrank to the point that Stalin could examine delegation lists for approval (or not).³⁴ But the key to it all lay in the nature of Communism as a conspiracy to seize and hold power. Everywhere the mechanism for the terror was the same: a secret party circular from Stalin ordering a still more vigilant hunt for “enemies,” a local party meeting, a summons to Bolshevik “criticism,” further denunciations, pandemonium. Just a handful of “activists,” who understood the vocabulary of invective or insinuation to tear down rivals and protect themselves, could precipitate chain reactions of annihilation in which millions became complicit in additional meetings in factories, farms, schools. This was intentional, to achieve scale. The frenzy never escaped Stalin’s ability to shape and ultimately stop it. Still, often the denouncers were denounced right back by those they had aimed at, in a circular firing squad. And if a person defended someone accused of being an enemy of the people, well, then, that was proof that he or she, too, was an enemy.³⁵ Even if one merely inquired about a coworker who had suddenly stopped showing up, one could be accused of harboring “ties” or “sympathies.”³⁶ Party and state officials, in other words, became trapped in the twisted logic of the system they had helped create. They accepted that foreign capitalist powers would never accept the success of the Soviet Union, that “dying classes” could not be expected to go quietly, that socialism had myriad enemies, but now these loyal Soviet officials were themselves the enemy.

STALIN AND THE STATE

The party’s monopoly went hand in hand with administrative dysfunction. This was a state with awesome power, one that had the capacity to build competitive tanks and artillery in big batches, confiscate much of a harvest, deliver a coordinated propaganda message at every factory and farm, and internally deport whole nations but was largely unable to execute subtle tasks (except when functionaries knowingly behaved illegally).³⁷ The Soviet party-state was clumsy and pervasive, at its strongest in mobilization, suppression, and surveillance. The system gathered incredible quantities of information yet was often poorly informed.³⁸ Stalin expressed frustration at local officials’ supposed narrow horizons and imagined that he alone upheld the interests of the revolution and state tout court, as against specific institutional or sectoral interests. He was cognizant of some limits on his freedom of action—great distances, primitive communication, low levels of education, the bureaucratism and self-dealing—but he nonetheless tried to force his way past them and often did so. He presumed the efficacy of administration and administrative methods and spent considerable time and energy in reorganizations of agencies and work flow.³⁹ But he frequently obviated those same agencies by calling in a plenipotentiary, delivering a pep talk, and having that person go out and bang heads to get things done, then report solely to him. He had come to understand that the ever-growing system of monitoring decision making was achieving less and less.⁴⁰ Still, he did not understand that organizations, particularly overly large ones, develop an often perverse dynamic beyond functionaries’ self-interest.

Far from everything began with Stalin. The politburo adjudicated some 3,000 items per year in the 1930s.⁴¹ Stalin did not really delegate, but the work flow exceeded his capacity to oversee every issue.⁴² Some decisions under his signature (affixed by his staff) he never read. Molotov recalled that Stalin would approach the pile and ask which were the important ones.⁴³ Stalin could ask for guidance: “What to do?” he would sometimes write on documents. (Who knew if it was genuine or a test?) Others in the leadership and throughout the labyrinthine apparatus had no choice but to try to address issues that confronted them day in and day out. But he concentrated information and decision making at the top, which overwhelmed him and his top aides, drowned the central agencies in paperwork, and created massive logjams. The system was in constant pressure against itself—in information gathering and reporting, in coordination or refusal thereof, in pushing responsibility off and back on.⁴⁴ Stalin’s interventions were perforce episodic, sometimes preceded by careful study, sometimes not. He unwittingly created bottlenecks, and narrowed the exchange of information even at the top of the regime. Coordination did take place across agencies in the Little Corner. But when he assigned spheres to individual plenipotentiaries, he sometimes did not inform them of one another’s work. Everything rested upon the people Stalin chose to summon, or not, the reports he solicited and decided to read, or not, the decisions he rendered and how he did or even did not communicate them, and, ultimately, his ability to understand the country and the world.

Very early on in his rule, proper leadership had emerged as one of Stalin’s most recurrent themes. For him it meant not declarations of decrees, but their implementation.⁴⁵ Stalin derived his sense of the country and the world predominantly from documents, as well as intuition.⁴⁶ But without irony he castigated “paper leadership” and “office leadership,” functionaries who sat in their big suites and issued orders without familiarizing themselves with the situation in the factory shops or fields, who failed to inquire about people’s experiences and difficulties in order to lend practical help in the tasks at hand. He had complained early and often of needing to “break through the wall of bureaucratism and improve the slipshod performance of our bureaucracies.”⁴⁷ He had stressed the work of “checking up by punching people in the face” (September 2, 1930).⁴⁸ His view of power was deceptively simple: indicate the correct line, assign individuals to implement it, and goad and watch them. Less than 100 percent fulfillment meant rotten liberals showing leniency, playing into the hands of enemies, becoming enemies themselves. But even as his regime demanded unwavering implementation of central directives, it often provided little guidance in the rationales for policies as recorded in the minimalist politburo minutes that were circulated. This left officials poring over Pravda, especially the speeches of Stalin. He appears to have assumed that he was being crystal clear, leaving no room for ambiguity, so that misinterpretations had to be deliberate. He also does not appear to have appreciated the negative consequences of coercion.

Policy to Stalin was reduced to an exercise in obedience and resolve. But by constantly pushing to tighten the system and render it more hierarchical, Stalin had empowered the gatekeeping officials not only in his secretariat but also in the regions, whom he instinctively did not trust. Even allowing for secret police exaggeration, the provincial nomenklatura certainly dragged their feet over directives, failed to cope with the (impossible) demands placed upon them (as would their successors), covered their failures with deception, and brazenly feathered their own nests. Stalin closely followed the reports of self-dealing and local collusion (“family-ness”), flouting of central directives, scapegoating of rivals or underlings who had dared to heed the exhortations in the party press to criticize bosses.⁴⁹ He detested officials making excuses or covering up their failures and pretending they were succeeding, behavior he denounced as double-dealing. Stalin likely understood but would not admit that his own relentless pressure and exorbitant demands made the evasions and coping mechanisms pervasive. He wanted officials to perform well but to be constantly looking over their shoulders. He worked to identify or assign agents inside locales and institutions to report directly to him, bypassing administrative hierarchies, and empowered the secret police to stand above other institutions, yet he feared that the police might conspire against him, so he worked to trip them up, too.

Evasive, self-serving behavior by officialdom is endemic to every authoritarian state.⁵⁰ What was atypical—to put it mildly—was their mass extermination by their own regime. Stalin faced no imperative to murder them. He could sack or transfer any local satrap at will.⁵¹ Instead, he not only put Soviet officials to death or had them deported to slave labor camps en masse, but, in a huge expenditure of state resources, had them tortured to confess and, incredibly, had these Communists confess not to being corrupt or incompetent, but to plotting to assassinate him and restore capitalism on behalf of foreign powers. And that was not all. In the Marxist worldview, entire classes—feudal lords, the bourgeoisie—had outlived their usefulness and become “fetters” on humanity’s further development. (“Everyone is against us who has outlived the epoch allotted to him by history,” Maxim Gorky had written in Pravda in November 1930.)⁵² But Stalin took to applying notions of epochal obsolescence, not just presumptive disloyalty, to the body of experienced Soviet functionaries, as if they, too, were people of a bygone epoch and needed to make way. He would promote the young, to fix the pathologies of the state.

WE ARE THE ENEMY

As each phase of the seemingly endless party cleanings had unfolded, the focus of attack had moved ever closer to the centers of power. Whereas the 1933–34 party purge (expulsions largely without arrest) had targeted the rank and file, and the 1935 verification and exchange of party cards had affected to a great degree lower-level apparatchiks sacrificed by their superiors, the 1936–38 terror, which involved arrest as well as expulsion, consumed the big fish, those who had earlier implemented the expulsions of others, and decimated the Stalinist Central Committee.⁵³ Central Committee membership had always been a mark of the highest prestige and privilege. True, its members had long ago ceased to demonstrate any capacity for, let alone inclination toward, collective action.⁵⁴ They met only when summoned, and even then were ultracareful to avoid the appearance of gathering in subgroups. After they received the June 1937 plenum materials in advance (as per normal procedure), which included interrogation protocols of already arrested high officials, Central Committee members wrote to Stalin swearing their fealty, even if their own names were not (yet) mentioned in “testimonies.” None wrote or spoke up to question the frame-ups.⁵⁵

Upon the opening of the June plenum, of the seventy-one members and sixty-eight candidates for membership formally elected to the Central Committee at the previous party congress (1934), thirteen had been arrested (including Pyatakov, Bukharin, and Rykov), three had committed suicide (Tomsky, Orjonikidze, and Gamarnik), four had died of natural causes (Mężyński, Kuibyshev, Tovstukha, and Alexander Steinhart), and one had been assassinated (Kirov). During the plenum, Stalin sanctioned the destruction of at least another thirty-one, so that more than fifty of the 139 did not take part in or finish the sessions; several more would be arrested right after.⁵⁶ Altogether, around 100 of the 139 Central Committee members would not survive to the next party congress. The vast majority of them had not been Stalin’s opponents in the oppositions of the 1920s. Nor had they run afoul of him subsequently. To be sure, a few, such as Sergei Syrtsov, party boss of Siberia during Stalin’s 1928 visit, had been expelled from the Central Committee in 1930 for private criticism of him.⁵⁷ But most of those arrested now were stalwarts who had been loyal right through the fire of dekulakization-collectivization and beyond.⁵⁸ Their subordinates and associates were also destroyed—followed, in many cases, by their replacements.

Most astonishingly, sitting provincial party bosses were forced to organize their own annihilation by summoning party meetings and encouraging denunciations.⁵⁹ When, predictably, they tried to protect themselves and their associates by sacrificing other, often rival, officials, Stalin accused them of suppressing criticism. He had sent a ciphered telegram around the Union expressly warning that “some party secretaries of provinces, apparently wishing to escape blame, very eagerly give authorization to the NKVD organs to arrest certain leaders, directors, technical directors, engineers and technicians, mid-managers of factories and transport, and other sectors. The Central Committee reminds you that neither secretaries of a province or territory, nor secretaries of national parties, nor party-soviet leaders in locales have the right to authorize such arrests.”⁶⁰ Such decisions were Stalin’s alone and, to ensure compliance, he dispatched “Central Committee” plenipotentiaries: Kaganovich to Chelyabinsk, Yaroslavl, Ivanovo, and Ukraine; Zhdanov to Bashkiria, Tataria, and Orenburg; Malenkov to Belorussia, Armenia, Kazan, Tula, Omsk, and Tambov; Andreyev to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Saratov, and the North Caucasus; Shkiryatov to the Soviet Far East. In Kiev, chairing an assembly of the “party active,” Kaganovich began, “Well, come on up and report whatever anyone knows about enemies of the people.”⁶¹

There was no way to ensure one’s survival, but people felt they could not just sit there and wait for the others to denounce them. Chain reactions spread—once triggered via these party meetings, rabid newspaper articles that vilified people by name, and Stalin’s plenipotentiaries (who had to please him). Kaganovich had arrived in Ivanovo like the head of a foreign occupation, with a bodyguard detail of thirty, and been greeted by local NKVD bosses; the party machine had not even been apprised in advance. He phoned Stalin repeatedly to detail his impressive results: the arrest of nearly every leader in the local party (he had brought an entire replacement leadership with him). But Stalin demanded still more pressure “to stop liberalizing.”⁶² (At the train station, as Kaganovich was seen off, he made a point to thank all service personnel and handed out tips of 50 to 100 rubles each, identifying with the proletarians.)⁶³ In Kazakhstan, the entire party bureau—the republic equivalent of the politburo—was arrested. In Turkmenistan, no bureau existed for months.⁶⁴ Many party machines would be wiped out two and even three times. This could hardly render the provincial apparatus more responsive.⁶⁵ Rather than make examples of some disobedient regional functionaries in order to frighten the rest, the terror effectively paralyzed the entire, sprawling regional apparatus. “During the purges hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats shook in their boots,” wrote the American eyewitness John Scott, who worked in provincial Magnitogorsk. “Many people reacted by shunning responsibility. . . . Still other people became exasperated and bitter.”⁶⁶

A good number of upper-level functionaries had been working sixteen- to eighteen-hour shifts, often through the night, under tremendous strain. The commissar for domestic trade, Israel Veitser, was suffering from impaired health, according to the Kremlin medical team, partly because he usually arrived at the office around noon and departed between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m., taking papers home with him. (The Council of People’s Commissars decreed that he should finish work by midnight.)⁶⁷ Veitser’s deputies, advisers, and secretaries all worked similar hours. Veitser, who happened to be married to the theater director Natalya Sats (the onetime mistress of Tukhachevsky), was sacked and arrested. Twenty of twenty-eight members of the Council of People’s Commissars would be arrested.⁶⁸ Soviet industrial production, the supposed lifeblood of the regime, took a hit. In the strategic coal industry, output in 1936 had stagnated; in the first quarter of 1937, the plan went unfulfilled. Almost the entire provincial Donbass party that was appointed in May 1937, seventy-six people, would be slaughtered.⁶⁹

Sarkis Sarkisov (Danielyan), an ethnic Armenian who served as party boss in the Donetsk coal basin, had worked in Leningrad under Zinoviev. When attacked by the NKVD, he went on the offensive, becoming complicit in the sweeping arrests of his colleagues in the provincial machine, until he, too, was arrested and executed.⁷⁰ Eduards Prāmnieks, an ethnic Latvian stonemason who had succeeded Zhdanov as party boss in Nizhny Novgorod/Gorky, succeeded Sarkisov. “Many people cannot understand why the Donbass, which was always a fortress of Bolshevism, has become infiltrated by enemies and scum,” Prāmnieks pontificated. “One must remember that, as an extremely important center, the Donbass will always be a target for enemies and spies.”⁷¹ His work was paralyzed. “With whom to work?” he confided to the writer Avdeyenko. “All the first and second secretaries of the city have turned out to be enemies of the people. . . . The directors of factories have turned out to be wreckers or spies. The chief engineers, chief technicians, even the chief doctors of some hospitals, are also from the ranks of scum.”⁷² Then, another wholesale liquidation struck the Donbass—at least 140 factory and mine directors, chief engineers, and party officials—and Prāmnieks, too, turned out to be “scum.”⁷³ Kaganovich, at a Kremlin reception for the coal and metallurgy sectors, would state that as a result of the “wrecking by Trotskyite-Bukharinite hirelings,” the coal industry had fallen into difficult straits. Stalin softened this dire verdict in the coal industry report that was published.⁷⁴ Still, he evidently deemed the production losses a price worth paying.

NESTS OF SPIES

There were some 10,000 foreign Communists in residence in the Soviet Union.⁷⁵ They and their counterparts abroad were feared the world over as subversives of bourgeois order, but in Stalin’s mind they were a mortal danger to the Soviet Union. Back during the centennial celebration of Pushkin’s death at the Bolshoi, he had blurted out to Dimitrov, “All of you there in the Comintern are playing into the enemy’s hands.” He called the Comintern a “nest of spies.”⁷⁶ Foreign Communists talked. They could not fail to observe the abject subordination of all Communist parties to Moscow, the embourgeoisement of Soviet upper echelons, the opacity of decision making, the lack of commitment to world revolution (as opposed to Soviet state interests). But the overwhelming majority of foreign Communists had little to nothing of value to divulge to foreign governments. Formal structure in the Comintern had been abandoned: it was just the Little Corner, and just when Stalin got around to summoning or corresponding with Dimitrov. Dimitrov, who had stood up to Göring and Goebbels in a Leipzig courtroom, received foreign Communists’ interrogation protocols containing ever new names and had to issue telegrams summoning some of these people from abroad to Moscow, where, he knew, they would be executed.⁷⁷

The 400 rooms of the isolating Comintern residence, the perversely named Hotel Lux, were cleared out multiple times during the terror. None of it appears to have been policy driven. Pyatnitsky, Lozovsky, Knorin, and Kun had all supported the “social fascism” thesis close to Stalin’s heart and they all perished; Dimitrov, Manuilsky, and Kuusinen had supported the broad leftist front, and they survived.

British, American, French, and Czechoslovak Communists largely escaped death or the Gulag; they belonged to legal parties and did not require refuge in the Soviet Union. Chinese Communists, in the deep interior of their country, also mostly escaped Stalin’s cellars. But of the sixty-eight German Communists who managed to obtain refuge in the USSR after Hitler had come to power, Stalin had forty-one put to death. More members of the pre-1933 German Communist politburo were killed in the Stalinist terror (seven) than under Hitler (five).⁷⁸ Polish Communists in Soviet exile suffered the worst: an estimated 5,000 arrests just in spring–summer 1937. Stalin had the Polish Communist party formally dissolved, “owing to its saturation with spies and provocateurs.” He wrote across Dimitrov’s draft resolution, “The dissolution is about two years late.”⁷⁹ (Many Polish Communists would hear of the dissolution of their party by Moscow while wallowing in prisons in Poland.)⁸⁰ To be sure, Stalin was hardly alone in his suspicion of political émigrés: verification campaigns directed at foreigners living in the Soviet Union were long-standing and accepted as necessary, given the tense international situation and the shadowy nature of politics under Communism.⁸¹ But the verifications did not establish facts. They began with presumed guilt and snowballed via all manner of slander and innuendo.

Planning went forward for a public trial of “Trotskyite-fascists” in the Comintern, and the tentative list of “Trotskyites” seems to have included Mao.⁸² The trial never materialized. It was supposed to center on Pyatnitsky, an original member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (1898) who had never joined any opposition but was expelled from the Central Committee and placed “under investigation” during the June 1937 plenum. Despite being beaten to a pulp over the course of a full year, Pyatnitsky refused to slander himself.⁸³

Stalin had Soviet diplomacy put up against the wall, too. On July 1, 1937, Vasily Korzhenko, deputy chief of the Stalingrad NKVD, was named business manager of the foreign affairs commissariat, which ushered him into a world of secret privilege. The commissariat building at Blacksmith Bridge comprised two wings. One was for amenities, such as a nursery for diplomats’ children, a clinic for staff and foreign embassy officials, a library, hairdressing salon, tailor’s shop, gastronome, and recreational facility. The other wing contained the office suites and private apartments of the higher officials. Korzhenko’s office had four comfortable chairs, a divan, a Persian rug, and an ample mahogany working desk. Five telephones sat atop the desk, once a sign of status but now points of life-and-death pressure. The one with a red button was a direct line to Stalin’s office. Pushing that with the receiver lifted elicited an immediate response from the Little Corner—and vice versa. Another, with a white button, was connected to the NKVD. Korzhenko, as he spoke, could see the secret police building across the way at Lubyanka Square through his office’s three expansive French windows. Goaded by Yezhov and Frinovsky, Korzhenko acted much like a Gestapo officer who had been infiltrated into the Soviet foreign affairs commissariat. His daughter explained that her father “was not concerned with diplomacy but had absolute power over foreign [commissariat] employees from cipher clerks to ambassadors . . . not only in Moscow but throughout the world.”⁸⁴

Among the first to have been targeted were Nikolai Krestinsky and Lev Karakhan.⁸⁵ Because nearly everyone in foreign affairs had worked with these “enemies of the people,” no one was safe from guilt by association. Vulnerability to arrest depended less on what people had done than on the sometimes random flow of denunciations, the caprice of Korzhenko and NKVD officials, and, ultimately, the authorization (or not) of Stalin. Personnel files with mandatory autobiographies were fatal: if you wrote out all of your associations, you were a goner; if you concealed even a single piece of information, you were a goner. When the NKVD station chief in Lithuania complained to Yezhov about the ambassador, Yezhov forwarded to Stalin material on the expenses of the embassy, two thirds of which went to refurbishing the ambassador’s office. Yezhov further noted that the ambassador had left abruptly for a three-month “holiday,” attempting to escape the arrest wave.⁸⁶ Litvinov at times tried to blunt the murderous rampage, but he, too, feared for his life.⁸⁷ Soviet embassies were emptied of personnel, and to the extent that dispatches were still being sent to Moscow, the paperwork often went unanswered from lack of personnel. Surviving officials, meanwhile, were “so patently in abject terror, that one must pity them,” one American diplomat wrote to Washington. “They fear to talk on any subject and apparently dread meeting foreign visitors.”⁸⁸

“ANTI-SOVIET ELEMENTS”

Violence against the population was a hallmark of the Soviet state nearly from its inception, of course, and had reached its apogee in the collectivization-dekulakization. In that sense, the 1937–38 campaign against “anti-Soviet elements” afforded grisly continuity. But these new “mass operations” entailed not just large-scale deportations with some executions, but a preponderance of extrajudicial killing. They would account for 1.1 million of the 1.58 million arrests in 1937–38, and 634,000 of the 682,000 executions.⁸⁹ Unlike the state murders in the military, secret police, state agencies, and party, these sweeps captured almost none of Stalin’s attention. Still, he relentlessly drove the astronomical numbers with memoranda, telephone directives, and quotas.⁹⁰ Local NKVD bosses, predictably, would petition to have their quotas raised, which the “Central Committee” invariably granted. Yezhov was now constantly in the Little Corner, sometimes remaining even after Molotov had departed, and often with his first deputy, Frinovsky. The quota method afforded wide scope to the pair as well as to local NKVD bosses in determining life or death.⁹¹

Miron Korol, who went by the name Sergei Mironov, had been born in Kiev (1894) to Jewish parents (his grandmother had owned a dairy shop on fashionable Khreshchatyk Street). The young man graduated from a high school for commerce, fought in the tsarist army in the Great War, and, in the civil war, headed a unit of Budyonny’s famous 1st Calvary Army before joining the Cheka (age twenty-seven) and, four years later, the party. Mironov cut his teeth in the North Caucasus, yet another Yevdokimovite, especially in Chechnya, where “banditism” was no mere slogan of abuse, and counterinsurgency was for real. By 1930, Mironov had climbed to deputy secret police head in Kazakhstan, where he managed influxes of “special resettlers” (deported “kulaks”) and denomadization, which resulted in mass death and starvation. From September 1933 through 1936, he headed the OGPU-NKVD in industrial Dnepropetrovsk, living in a villa with a billiards room, cinema, and modernized bathhouse, emulating his superior, Ukraine NKVD chief Balytsky, who had an even more impressive villa on the Dnieper River, where in 1936 Mironov and his second wife, Agnessa, had their wedding, at state expense.⁹² Vodka, champagne, and nighttime card playing for large sums mixed with surveillance over the party elite, under the guise of providing security. Yezhov, spurred by Frinovsky, promoted Mironov to NKVD chief of Western Siberia, where he took over the villa of the former tsarist governor general and continued the grand style of sumptuous banquets and a household of servants.

Mironov lived in the Chekist world. Once upon a time, that had meant defending Soviet power against armed enemies; now it entailed a deceitful game of unmasking “Trotskyites” and “spies” on railroads and at factories. In private conversations with Agnessa, Mironov called the high-profile November 1936 Kemerovo wrecking case (which predated his arrival) “fabrication” (lipa). Torture was known as physical methods or sanctions, with a “scribe” writing up interrogation protocols, often in the absence of the person interrogated and with cynical instructions. (“In this interrogation protocol, it’d be good to add a few little bombs, a touch of terrorism, a rebellion, throw in some diversionary action, then it would be full fledged.”) A mass execution was known as a wedding. Chekists would joke that one of them had shot the wrong people but promised to “correct the mistake.”⁹³ A profound brittleness underlay the dark humor: Mironov could not shake the thought that he, too, would end up in Novosibirsk’s “bird house” (prison). In March 1937, he was promoted to commissar of state security (third rank), putting him in the elite of the elite. Once, playing billiards, he could see uniformed men approaching outside—and turned white. They proved to be just a rotation of the exterior guard. Mironov had served under the “enemy” Yagoda, and Mironov’s deputy, Alexander Uspensky, was closer to Yezhov and could earn a promotion by taking down his new boss. According to Agnessa, “Seryozha said that he [Uspensky] was not a person but mucus.”⁹⁴

Such animal fear prompted varied reactions. Some NKVD personnel became inert, some threw themselves out the window, some strove to reconfirm their worth with rabid arrests. Mironov felt impelled to do the latter. He was the one who had telegrammed Yezhov with a denunciation of Balytsky while the latter had been traveling toward his new assignment in the Soviet Far East. Back on June 17, 1937, on the eve of the Central Committee plenum at which Yezhov would unveil the “Center of Centers,” Mironov had “requested permission” to form a Western Siberian “troika,” comprising the regional NKVD chief, the procurator, and the party boss, to expedite death sentences. He wrote that thousands of exiles were lying in wait to form a counterrevolutionary army. Troikas had been widely used for dekulakization and, before that, in the 1920s antibanditry operations of the North Caucasus, so they were familiar to Mironov. Deich (of the NKVD secretariat) or Frinovsky, knowing how much Stalin prized requests “from below,” likely had suggested a troika revival to Mironov. Be that as it may, on June 22, Yezhov forwarded Mironov’s “request” to Stalin.

As a respite from the Central Committee plenum, on June 25, 1937, Stalin, with the retinue in tow, went to the Moscow aerodrome to greet the returning crew of the first-ever airborne polar expedition to set up a scientific station on drift ice. In the summer heat, an improvised banquet took place in the Kremlin. “The tables were set in a way I had never before seen, since I had never been in a restaurant,” observed a then twenty-five-year-old Sigurd Shmidt, whose father, Otto, was the head of the Arctic Institute.⁹⁵ Sergei Obraztsov, the Moscow Art Theater actor and puppeteer, debuted inventive verse about the explorers, which pleased Stalin no end. He invited Obraztsov to share some wine.⁹⁶

Mironov, during the June 1937 “Center of Centers” plenum, privately complained to Frinovsky that all the fabrication was making it impossible to pursue real cases. “What are you doing philosophizing?” Frinovsky snapped. “Now the tempo is such that you need to show results not within months or years, but in days.”⁹⁷ On June 28, even before the plenum had concluded, a sentencing troika was approved for Western Siberia. On July 2, Stalin authorized a resolution, “On Anti-Soviet Elements,” directing all regions to reintroduce troikas to pass sentences without courts.⁹⁸ (The resolution was issued in the politburo’s name, but formal meetings had ceased.)⁹⁹ It would become the most murderous single document of his regime. On July 3, a coded telegram in Yezhov’s name went to all sixty-five NKVD republic and regional offices, demanding a fast inventory of previously deported kulaks, ordinary criminals, and former convicts.¹⁰⁰ As the calculations were being tabulated, on July 5, a decree was issued to incarcerate wives of enemies in camps for five to eight years—for being their wives.¹⁰¹ The Uzbekistan leadership asked to be able to include “nationalist terrorists” (i.e., non-Uzbeks, especially Tajiks); Mironov’s Western Siberia asked to include former SRs, former Mensheviks, former Whites, former priests—indeed, all “formers.”¹⁰² Permission was granted.¹⁰³ For those who required extra motivation, the NKVD bosses in Chelyabinsk and Tataria were arrested, which would prompt a sleepless night for Mironov; he had once worked under the Tatar head.¹⁰⁴

There were carrots for the NKVD, too: in a single month, 179 operatives received state awards, including no fewer than forty-six Orders of Lenin (Mironov got one). On July 17, 1937, Yezhov was awarded the Order of Lenin, “for outstanding successes in leading the organs of the NKVD in the fulfillment of government tasks.” That same day, the politburo formally approved substantial NKVD pay increases for state security personnel (GB) in Moscow, Leningrad, and Ukraine.¹⁰⁵ Rank-and-file operatives now got paid 500 to 800 rubles per month, while republic NKVD heads got 3,500 rubles per month, a jump of 300 percent. (By comparison, a provincial party boss got a salary of 2,000 rubles per month, not including the extra cash envelopes, and the head of the USSR Supreme Court got 1,200 rubles.) Additionally, while NKVD bosses had long enjoyed the use of villas with servants, like gentry, while their subordinates often lived in communal housing or dormitory beds, during the terror, many rank-and-file operatives acquired coveted apartments, as well as state dachas from arrested “enemies.”¹⁰⁶ Possessions confiscated from enemies of the people, including cash, were considered fair game (some Chekists were known to complain when arrestees turned out to be “poor peasants”). Some of the loot would be legally resold through what were called special trading centers, which had been set up to bring in revenue from confiscations, but much was pocketed. Bosses not on the scene expected a cut.¹⁰⁷

Once home from the Moscow gathering, Mironov instructed his subordinates (July 25) that the requirement of procuracy authorization for an arrest (Article 127 of the 1936 Constitution) had been “suspended,” and that they should go out and secretly “find a place where the sentences can be carried out and the bodies buried.”¹⁰⁸

On July 26, 1937, Stalin hosted a Kremlin reception for the aviators Chkalov, Baidukov, and Belyakov, who had returned from North America and a White House reception. They had ridden to the Kremlin in open-top cars garlanded with flowers. Stalin embraced and kissed them. The heroes requested that the evening’s concert program include jazz by Leonid Utyosov, whose band approached the stage singing “Heart,” from the smash film Jolly Fellows. Despite the absence of microphones, the acoustics proved splendid in the intimate Palace of Facets. The jazzmen also played the American melody “Reflection in Water,” with the verses in Russian, about a woman waiting for the return of her lover, which is said to have brought tears to Stalin’s eyes. The despot rose to applaud, leading a long ovation. Utyosov played the number again, and once again visible tears ran down Stalin’s cheeks; then a third encore. The supreme leader was moved to issue his own request, a manifesto of the criminal world called “From the Odessa Jail,” replete with argot that had been officially banned.¹⁰⁹

Frinovsky handled the dirty work, writing up NKVD Operational Order No. 00447 (dated July 31), which Stalin approved. (The 00 indicated supersecrecy.) “The organs of state security are faced with the task of mercilessly crushing this entire gang of anti-Soviet elements,” the order noted, demanding “an end once and for all to the foul subversion of the Soviet state’s foundations.”¹¹⁰ Every potential enemy—as determined by administrative fiat—was to be either executed (category 1) or sent to distant points of the Gulag (category 2). Regional and republic NKVD archivists updated their card catalogs of “anti-Soviet elements,” former “kulaks,” and “recidivist” criminals. Yezhov and Frinovsky used the submitted numbers to assign local arrest quotas totaling, Union-wide, 269,000 (76,000 to be shot, 193,000 to get eight to ten years in the Gulag).¹¹¹ Predictably, regional NKVD officials requested still higher quotas. Western Siberia had it easy, with among the densest concentration of exiled kulaks (more than 200,000), labor camps teeming with ordinary criminals, and large contingents of released inmates.¹¹² In Turkmenistan, the NKVD sent paddy wagons out to the bazaar to haul in people; in Sverdlovsk, in the office of an official arrested as a “counterrevolutionary,” the NKVD found a list of Stakhanovites, a handy group to help meet the quota.¹¹³ During just the first two weeks of August 1937, 100,000 people were arrested, far more than the number in the entire year since the Moscow public trial of August 1936.¹¹⁴

The NKVD sliced through the populace like a reaper through the wheat fields. Nothing fundamental had changed in “kulak sabotage,” crime rates, or Gulag labor needs. Locally, the kulak operation sometimes had little to do with former kulaks. In the Perm region of the Urals province (where former KGB archives have been accessible), the majority of the targets were workers and white-collar functionaries. Here, supersecret order 00447 extended carte blanche to local operatives for eradicating “conspiracies” they were already “unmasking,” as reflected in their mounting NKVD reports dating to fall 1936 and especially spring 1937 (following central plenums and directives). The local pattern resembled the spread of a virus—after one person got arrested, his or her associates got infected with their “guilt,” a reaction that was then repeated, in an ever-widening way.¹¹⁵

At the same time regional secret police officials could no more start massmurdering the populace without central directives than they could continue to do so after central directives instructed them to halt.¹¹⁶ What happened was that Stalin decided on mass murder, and he could count on Frinovsky at the center and the Mironovs in the locales to implement it.¹¹⁷

Parallel “national” operations did not use quotas, but a nationality itself was a kind of quota.¹¹⁸ Every person among Soviet nationalities with a corresponding nation-state outside the USSR became a potential NKVD target. To be sure, sweeping ethnic deportations had begun earlier.¹¹⁹ But such actions expanded exponentially: the entire population of ethnic Koreans in the Soviet Far East were deported to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where they would dig holes for “housing.” The sheer scale of the action against Soviet Koreans—135,000 deported by late October 1937 and as many as 185,000 eventually—gave rise to complications, which provoked Stalin’s ire. “People who sabotage the action, no matter who they might be, arrest forthwith and punish,” he wrote to the top officials in the Soviet Far East.¹²⁰ Regional NKVD offices also now put together “albums” of foreigners and ethnics in their localities, rating the personages by degree of suspicion. Soviet ethnic Poles were the main targets: 144,000 were arrested and 111,000 executed, nearly half of all the non-Russian nationals killed.^{121, 122} (There were around 636,000 ethnic Poles in the Soviet Union.) “Very good!” the ethnic Georgian Stalin wrote on a report by Yezhov, a closet part ethnic Lithuanian. “Dig down and cleanse this Polish-espionage filth. Destroy it in the interests of the USSR!”¹²³

Next were Soviet ethnic Germans: 55,000 arrested and nearly 42,000 executed.¹²⁴ Citizens of Germany were rounded up, too.¹²⁵ Frinovsky, on July 20, forwarded to Stalin a report from NKVD counterintelligence: “A crow was killed near Lake Ladoga. It had a ring with the number D-72291 and an inscription, ‘Germany.’ Simultaneously, a kite [a bird of prey] killed a crow near the village of Rusynya in the Batetsky area of the Leningrad region. This crow also had a ring with the number D-70398 with the same inscription, ‘Germany.’ Evidently, the Germans are studying wind directions by using crows, with the aim of using the winds for diversionary activity and bacteriological purposes (torching settlements, haystacks, and so on).”¹²⁶ What the NKVD had discovered was a research project of German ornithologists to study crow migration.

After Yezhov had posted Alexei Nasedkin to Smolensk as NKVD chief and advised him to “make arrests more boldly” of Soviet ethnic Poles and Germans, Nasedkin discovered, on-site, accumulated “testimony” on a “counterrevolutionary” Latvian cultural society. He rushed back to Moscow. “Yezhov livened up,” Nasedkin recalled, and he asked, “Are there a lot of Latvians in Smolensk?” Nasedkin answered: 5,000, of whom he estimated 450 to 500 could be arrested. “Drivel,” Yezhov said. “I’ll discuss it with the Central Committee and we’ll have to spill the blood of Latvians—arrest not fewer than 1,500–2,000. They are all nationalists.” Nasedkin himself was received in the Little Corner to report on the “Latvian conspiracy.” His “vigilance” helped spark the arrest of nearly every prominent Soviet Latvian: the talented head of the Red Air Force, Yakov Alksnis (Jēkabs Alksnis); the vexed chief of military intelligence, Jan Berzin (Pēteris Ķuzis); the celebrated Chekists Yakov Peters (Jēkabs Peterss) and Martin Latsis (Jānis Sudrabs); the first-ever Red Army supreme commander, Ioakim Vatsetis (Jukums Vācietis), who had saved the Bolshevik regime from the left SRs in 1918; Western Siberian party boss Roberts Eihe; politburo candidate member Jānis Rudzutaks.¹²⁷ All across the USSR, countless people suddenly became “Latvian,” in the interests of meeting quotas. Nasedkin, back in Smolensk, inquired whether he could arrest Latvians in the absence of compromising material on them. “Material,” answered Yezhov, “will arise in the course of interrogation.”¹²⁸

Yezhov would effectively take Rudzutaks’s slot on the politburo; Zhdanov would get Rudzutaks’s dacha.¹²⁹ “He did not admit anything!” Molotov recalled of his long-serving, loyal deputy Rudzutaks. “I think that he was not a conscious participant, but he liberalized with this fraternity, and believed that all this was nonsense, trifles. And that could not be forgiven. He did not understand the dangers. . . . A rather intelligent man, no question. He had a kind of non-Latvian flexibility. Latvians were not so much slow thinkers, but they simplified a bit. First-class thinkers in our party were not found among Latvians.”¹³⁰

ANNIHILATING MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Yezhov received a translation of an intercepted report from a Western European military attaché in Moscow, stating that nearly all foreign representatives in Moscow viewed the charges against Tukhachevsky and other military men as preposterous, an artifact of Stalin’s hypersuspiciousness, and concluded that the executions had damaged Soviet military might. Whether Yezhov had the courage to forward the document to Stalin remains unclear.¹³¹ But another case demonstrates Stalin’s disregard of consequences. In early 1937, Yezhov had sent him a detailed sketch of the German army’s troop positioning for 1935–36, reporting that the valuable material had been photographed from the safe of the German military attaché, Ernst Köstring, without the latter’s knowledge. Yezhov attributed the feat to the Soviet intelligence officer and ethnic Hungarian lieutenant Béla Bíró (b. 1891), whom he praised for “showing initiative, boldness, agility, and sangfroid.” Stalin had approved Yezhov’s recommendation that Bíró be awarded the Order of the Red Star “for special services.” But then, on July 2, 1937, Yezhov’s NKVD, with Stalin’s approval, arrested Bíró, and on September 2 it would have him executed at its state farm killing field, “Kommunarka,” for espionage.¹³² Bíró’s loss was repeated many times.^{133, 134}

Mikhail Alexandrovsky, the just-named deputy of military intelligence, was arrested in July 1937. On August 1, Berzin—less than two months after Stalin had returned him as military intelligence chief—was replaced by his other deputy, Alexander Nikonov. Nikonov lasted a few days before his arrest. Under torture, each confessed and named more names. Stalin could have had their interrogations conducted to find out who (if anyone) had actually recruited them, what damage (if any) they had inflicted. Alternately, he could have kept them in place and had them shadowed to see what (if any) foreign contacts they had. None of that was done.¹³⁵ Military intelligence was handed to an NKVD counterintelligence operative beholden to Yezhov, as if the main task at hand were a police operation against the country’s own intelligence.¹³⁶ Altogether, at least 300 military intelligence officers would be arrested in Moscow alone.¹³⁷ The head of personnel in military intelligence reported that half the allotted positions had become vacant. Maria Polyakova, an undercover operative in Switzerland who returned to Moscow in fall 1937, found no one to report to. “I could not understand what was going on, and I did not know whom to ask about it,” she recalled. “I met the department staff, who were primarily [recent] graduates of the military academy and did not know languages or the work of our agency.”¹³⁸

Stalin explicitly rejected the notion that the arrests were cynical. In August 1937, at a gathering he attended of political functionaries in the military, the head of the Far Eastern Army’s political department complained. “We cannot tell the party mass, the commanding staff, or the Red Army men what [specific] wrecking activities these wreckers committed,” the man stated. “And by the way, the interest in this matter is enormous,” having been incited by the NKVD’s reading of excerpts of the interrogation protocols at Red Army party meetings. One official at the meeting interjected: “Would it not be sufficient just to say that they worked to restore capitalism?” Stalin: “All the same, the testimonies have significance.”¹³⁹

FAR EASTERN “IMPERIALIST WAR”

Japanese ground and air forces in the Manchukuo puppet state had violated the Soviet border more than 150 times in 1935 and again in 1936.¹⁴⁰ In 1937, a major incident took place over strategic islets in the Amur River.¹⁴¹ Islands along a river boundary were normally adjudicated by their positioning relative to the channel of the main current. But since the Russo-Chinese border treaties of 1858 and 1860, storms and other natural causes had caused a shift in the Amur’s main channel, so that a pair of small islets some sixty and fifty miles downstream from Blagoveshchensk, respectively, had moved to the Manchukuo side of the Amur’s main current. The Soviets argued that the border marker should now be the river’s deepest channel, which would put the islets back in Soviet territory. On June 19, 1937, the Japanese had reported that some twenty Soviet soldiers had landed at one of the two islets—known as Kanchazu in Manchu—on motorboats, removed buoys, and evicted Manchukuo gold panners, actions repeated at other Amur islets. Manchukuo government protests brought no resolution. The Japanese Kwantung Army was inclined to clear the Soviet troops by force, but Tokyo military brass decided, on June 28, 1937, that “the problem of these islands located so remotely did not warrant risking a major commitment of the national strength.” That very day, however, a high Japanese military intelligence officer recently returned from Moscow published a report in an Osaka newspaper suggesting that the Soviet Union’s executions of its own top military commanders threatened the Red Army with disintegration, meaning Japan had nothing to fear.¹⁴²

Stalin’s terror—proclaimed as vital in the face of a coming “inevitable war”—was potentially inviting that very war. With Tukhachevsky and the others dead a mere few weeks and the Red Army in turmoil, on June 29, Soviet diplomats informed the Japanese that Moscow would remove the troops from the Amur islets.

By now, though, three small Soviet gunboats had arrived on the scene, and on June 30 Japanese Kwantung Army forces opened fire, sinking one boat and damaging another; thirty-seven Soviet sailors died. Disgust at Tokyo’s “timidity” and an urge to respond to the Soviet “buildup” were strong. Stalin had a diplomatic protest lodged, but he refrained from military retaliation. Japanese intelligence intercepted Blyukher’s order from Khabarovsk to the Amur flotilla commander to withdraw. On July 3—the same day Yezhov’s NKVD order went out to branches to prepare for “mass operations” against the USSR’s own population—Soviet troops began to evacuate the islets. Manchukuo filled the vacuum on July 6, occupying the now evacuated (and until recently unoccupied) islets and converting Kanchazu into de facto Manchukuo territory, which still drew no Soviet response. Japanese intelligence could scarcely believe the near hysteria in intercepted Soviet military communications: a few artillery rounds seemed to have frightened the Red Army away, despite its three-to-one troop advantage in theater. “I think it was a really good ‘reconnaissance’ in force,” a Japanese intelligence officer concluded of the unplanned skirmish. Thus, while the Amur incident had persuaded much of the Kwantung Army of Tokyo’s timidity, the general staff in Tokyo had begun to discuss the hollowness of the Red Army.¹⁴³

Japanese troops (numbering between 5,000 and 7,000) also controlled all the areas of China immediately north, east, and west of Peking—areas that faced the USSR and the Soviet satellite of Mongolia. On July 7, 1937, about 135 of those troops were engaged in night maneuvers ten miles west of Peking at the Marco Polo Bridge, an 800-year-old ancient granite structure once restored by the great Qing emperor Kangxi. The bridge, near a railway choke point, had long been coveted by Japan, because it served as the sole link between Peking and the rest of Nationalist-controlled China. Unusually, these Japanese night maneuvers took place without prior courtesy notice, and around 10:30 p.m., Chinese troops, perhaps fearing that an actual attack had commenced, fired some rifle shots. The Japanese returned fire. After mutual apologies for the minor firefight by the two sides’ liaison officers on duty, as well as some bellicose statements, the Japanese brigade commander refused to back down and ordered an artillery barrage. The Chinese shelled the Japanese in return. Then, on July 9, the Japanese and Chinese commanders in the Marco Polo Bridge area agreed to a cease-fire and mutual pullback.

Chiang Kai-shek was at Lushan for a military conference and, on the basis of radio reports, could not judge whether the gunfire and shelling had been unplanned or constituted a Japanese provocation, on the order of the Mukden incident that had preceded the seizure of Manchuria. He felt constrained to deploy some of his best divisions, institute martial law, and order a general mobilization. Japan’s government, now headed by prime minister Prince Fumimaro Konoe, deemed the incident a Chinese “provocation” and dispatched three divisions. When the Japanese troops arrived at Tientsin, on July 12, Chiang telegrammed his military in the field: “I am now determined to declare war on Japan.”¹⁴⁴ On July 22, the Japanese commander at the Marco Polo Bridge announced a deadline for Chinese troop withdrawal; Chiang ordered his men to attack. Few in the Konoe cabinet were for all-out war, but few were against it. Tokyo announced, to popular acclamation, that it had been “forced to resort to resolute action.”¹⁴⁵ With Emperor Hirohito’s approval, the Japanese bombarded and seized Peking (July 28) and nearby Tientsin (July 30).¹⁴⁶

Stalin was saved. His insistence on a “united front,” instead of an attempted Communist takeover, now looked prescient, but he had to weigh continuing support for the anti-Japanese resistance in China against possibly provoking Japan into war against the Soviet Union. The Soviet department in Japanese military intelligence had correctly surmised that Moscow would not intervene in the event of a Japanese expedition to Peking.¹⁴⁷

Japan’s occupation of northern China was swift. Whether the war would spread beyond northern China remained uncertain. But Zhang Zhizhong, commander of the Shanghai-Nanking garrison and a former teacher at the Soviet-funded Whampoa Military Academy, who had been urging Chiang Kai-shek to attack vulnerable Japanese positions in Shanghai, staged his own incident: on August 9, 1937, a Chinese army unit shot and killed a Japanese lieutenant and private just outside the Shanghai airport. To make it seem as if the Japanese had fired first, a Chinese prisoner on death row was dressed in military uniform and executed at the airport gate. Zhang renewed his pressure on Chiang to engage in an all-out war with Japan, not just protect the north; Chiang demurred. Zhang staged bombing runs on Japanese ships, grounding aircraft and troops. Japanese reinforcements began to make their way to Shanghai. Chiang approached Moscow for a mutual assistance treaty. Stalin, wanting to prevent a Japanese conquest of China but not to entangle the Soviets in a direct war with Japan, agreed only to a nonaggression pact, which was signed in Nanking on August 21.¹⁴⁸ (This was the same day a joint decree of the Council of People’s Commissars and the politburo ordered the deportation of all ethnic Koreans from the Soviet Far East.)¹⁴⁹ On August 22, Japanese forces arrived in Shanghai.

America’s ambassador in Moscow reported to Washington that Litvinov had told Léon Blum that “he and the Soviet Union were perfectly delighted that Japan had attacked China,” and that “the Soviet Union hoped that war between China and Japan would continue just as long as possible.”¹⁵⁰ Some suggested that Zhang Zhizhong was a Soviet agent who had provoked war on Moscow’s orders.¹⁵¹ (Chiang would force Zhang to resign in September 1937, but would not accuse him of being a foreign agent.) On September 14, the Soviets and Chiang signed an additional accord for the supply of Soviet weapons on $50 million in credits, with the proviso that one quarter to one fifth would go to the Chinese Red Army.¹⁵²

After his release from the hostage-taking incident, Chiang had conceded the legality of the Chinese Communist forces, but now they would not be subordinated to his orders. The Communist army in the north, centered on Yan’an and numbering 46,000, was renamed the Eighth Route Army. On September 23, Chiang acknowledged a public declaration of the Chinese Communists, published in the Nationalist press the day before—a form of legalization. Mao, while paying lip service to the united front, planned a guerrilla war in the north independently of the Nationalists, effectively keeping his army out of the main brunt of the fighting.

Stalin, too, took advantage. He had already sent 5,000 Soviet troops, dressed in Chinese uniforms, to Xinjiang, provoking a rebellion against the pro-Soviet local puppet but also increasing the Soviet foothold.¹⁵³ Chiang feared a Soviet pact with Japan to divide China—after all, the Soviets had already broken off Outer Mongolia from China—but he was more obliged than ever to tolerate Soviet encroachment.¹⁵⁴ That’s because Stalin now agreed to sell desperately needed combat aircraft and to help with training, as in Spain, although in China’s case he did so on credit (altogether extending three separate loans to the Chinese government, totaling $250 million, to cover the costs).¹⁵⁵ In the wake of Stalin’s military pullback from the ongoing civil war in Spain (Operation X), at least 450 Soviet pilots would be in China before the year was out (Operation Z).¹⁵⁶ During the last few months of 1937, the USSR flew 297 fighter planes and bombers into Chinese airfields, while trucks and ships (via Canton) delivered nearly 300 cannons, 82 tanks, 400 vehicles, and a mass supply of arms and ammunition. Stalin also lent support to Chinese partisan units, to further tie down the Japanese, and ordered Comintern head Dimitrov, again, to rein in the revolutionary impulses of the Chinese Communist party.

Some 400 Uighur students, future Soviet agents for Chinese Xinjiang, were being schooled in Tashkent, but then the Uighurs were all executed in a single night. After murdering his own Xinjiang fifth column, Stalin blinded himself, recalling and executing his diplomats from half a dozen consulates across China’s western interior, including Ürümqi and Kashgar. Still, his position in Xinjiang strengthened as the Soviets oversaw construction of a nearly 2,000-mile road, completed in just months with Chinese coolie labor, from Sary-Ozek, Kazakhstan, through Ürümqi to Lanzhou, to transport war supplies to China’s anti-Japanese resistance.¹⁵⁷

THE OTHER FRONT

Spain was still on fire. “The front stretches very far,” Pravda’s Koltsov had lyricized in his Spanish diary (July 7, 1937). “It goes from Madrid’s trenches, across Europe, across the entire world. It crosses countries, villages, cities, it crosses boisterous meeting halls, it courses quietly through the shelves of bookstores.”¹⁵⁸ And apartments: Malenkov informed Stalin (August 16) of a denunciation from a Soviet official in Spain, who had written, “I do not know if it is known in Moscow that in Madrid Koltsov lives with his two wives with completely equal status (at least by outward appearance). There are very many conversations and troubling questions about this, including in Madrid. The matter does not just concern giving an answer to our Spanish friends whether polygamy is legal for Soviet writers, but also, for example, the apartment of Koltsov’s [common-law] wife, Maria Osten, has been turned into a salon where high-profile comrades of various nationalities gather and where they discuss delicate questions in the presence of not fully verified comrades.”¹⁵⁹

Soviet advisers were trying to stave off defeat, reorganizing the International Brigades. In September 1937, Victorio Codovilla (b. 1894), an Italian-Argentine Comintern representative in Spain, was recalled to Moscow. Dimitrov forwarded to Stalin (September 8) a letter from Codovilla asking “what tactics should we advise the Comintern” for victory in Spain. Stalin wrote in the margin: “Together with the Socialists, without looking away from them, expose and smash the enemies of the united front.” Where Codovilla noted that the parliament was not meeting, Stalin wrote, “Restore the parliament, the municipal governments.” Where Codovilla re-proposed a merger of the Spanish Socialist and Communist parties, suggesting both names be used, Stalin wrote in the margin, “United Worker Party.”¹⁶⁰

FRONTLINE DEFENSE

Chiang Kai-shek did not capitulate to Japan. Still, Stalin might have been chastened at the prospect that China would fall, which would allow Japan to pivot toward the Soviet Union. A Japanese advance beyond Peking toward Kalgan in August 1937, on the old caravan route to Mongolia, threatened the Soviet satellite, a potential springboard for invading Eastern Siberia and cutting off the Soviet Far East. But Stalin pressed ahead with his destabilizing decapitation of the Red Army on trumped-up charges, including in the Soviet Far East. He also allowed his murderous “mass operations” to continue, which consumed vast industrial and transport resources. Most strikingly, he unleashed a rampage in Mongolia.¹⁶¹

On August 13, Stalin met in the Little Corner for four hours with Molotov, Voroshilov, Yezhov, Frinovsky, and Pyotr Smirnov, a newly minted deputy defense commissar; chief of staff Shaposhnikov joined the meeting late.¹⁶² Yezhov reported on a pending “Japanese-sponsored” coup d’état in the Mongolian capital. (Genden, Mongolia’s prime minister, who was suspected of being pro-Japanese, had already been arrested in Sochi.) Stalin decided to send a clandestine delegation headed by Frinovsky. He also named Mironov, the Western Siberian NKVD boss, plenipotentiary for Mongolia, in place of the Soviet ambassador (who was a Soviet intelligence operative but was arrested by the NKVD for being a Japanese spy). “As soon as his promotion occurred,” Mironov’s wife, Agnessa, noted, “Mirosha became manifestly cheerful, and his former self-confidence returned immediately.” And yet, as Frinovsky and his armed gang traveled by train to pick him up on the way at Novosibirsk, Mironov started to fear that his promotion might be a ruse to effect his arrest.¹⁶³ Not this time. In Irkutsk, Eastern Siberia, Frinovsky beat a local official in the greeting party to a pulp in front of the rest of the local leadership, demonstrating how “enemies” were dealt with.¹⁶⁴ He and Mironov disembarked in Ulan Ude (Soviet Buryatia) and went the final 350 miles by car to Ulan Bator, which they reached on August 24, unannounced. It was not the Japanese but the Soviets who launched a coup d’état.

Marshal Demid, Mongolia’s popular defense minister, untouchable inside his country, had been summoned for talks in Moscow and, en route, had stopped briefly in Irkutsk on August 20, around the same time that Frinovsky had arrived in the city. On August 22, near Taiga Station (close to Novosibirsk), Demid died of “food poisoning” from Soviet-supplied canned goods. His corpse continued all the way to Moscow, where it was met at Kazan Station by an honor guard, then dispatched to a crematorium.¹⁶⁵ Demid had played a key role in Genden’s removal, at Moscow’s bidding.¹⁶⁶ Stalin evidently did not expect Demid to acquiesce in the wholesale slaughter of the Mongolian officer corps he had appointed for being “Japanese agents.” Demid’s rival, the other Mongolian marshal, Interior Minister Khorloogiin Choibalsan, had staged five public trials between April 1936 and May 1937, of lamas as “Japanese and Chinese spies.” “We fulfilled the advice of comrade Stalin,” he had reported to Yezhov. But now, Frinovsky told Choibalsan of more spies and plots, and insisted that he invite in more Soviet troops. A formal invitation was issued on August 25; two days later, Molotov and Voroshilov telegrammed an affirmative response.¹⁶⁷ A Soviet army commanded by Ivan Konev, from the Transbaikal military district, had already crossed the frontier—nearly 30,000 well-equipped troops. Their mission was to deter Japan and prepare Mongolia as a supply hub for the Nationalists in China. (The Gobi Desert dunes, belatedly studied, would be revealed to be untraversable.)

Following Demid’s funeral, Choibalsan became defense minister and supreme commander (September 2, 1937). With him, Frinovsky compiled a list of 115 “spies,” reporting every detail to Yezhov. Demid, who held a Soviet Order of the Red Banner and numerous Mongolian military medals, became a Japanese spy posthumously. On September 10, sixty-five people on the list were rounded up. The next day, Mongolia’s top brass were summoned to appear at Choibalsan’s office in full regalia and, one by one, were arrested, transported to prison, and tortured to confess.¹⁶⁸ Frinovsky set up an “extraordinary commission,” like a troika, to expedite sentencing-shootings, then departed for home.¹⁶⁹ The “diplomat” Mironov remained.

A public trial (October 4–7, 1937) of “reactionary lamas” charged with spying for Japan was staged in Ulan Bator’s State Central Theater (which also functioned as the national parliament’s building).¹⁷⁰ The theater overflowed with 1,323 people (against a capacity of 1,200), while public loudspeakers broadcast the proceedings and expansive coverage was given in the party newspaper Ünen (Truth). All twenty-three defendants, who had been burned with hot iron rods and promised their lives if they confessed, did so; four were sentenced to the Gulag, nineteen to death. They were shot in front of the theater. On October 18, in the same venue, a second public trial was staged, of fourteen high officials said to belong to a Genden-Demid “organization.” Two days later, all fourteen were pronounced guilty; one was sent to a camp, and thirteen were taken to a valley outside the capital, where, with truck and car headlights illuminating the darkness, they were executed. Those Mongolian leaders who were not executed were forced to observe. Choibalsan, drunk, waved his pistol and shouted revolutionary slogans.¹⁷¹

LEADERS COME AND GO

Reveries of finding vast numbers of capable “new people” had periodically gripped Stalin, and now many young people, capable or otherwise, were vaulted into high places. Of the 12,500 graduates of higher-education institutions in the fourth quarter of 1937, 2,127 went directly to senior positions, including 278 promoted to directors or deputy directors of factories; another 22 became directors, deputy directors, heads, or deputy heads of departments in trusts; 294 became heads or deputy heads of departments or sectors in the Council of People’s Commissars.Many were promoted again, quickly. In September 1937, M. S. Lazarev went from chief of a shop at the Gorky Automobile Plant to director of the Yaroslavl Electric Machine-Building Factory. “I literally had to go onto the site unprepared, because the management had been arrested and the apparatus was completely new,” he would tell a Central Committee conference for the recently promoted. But then, on October 1, he was promoted again, becoming head of the tractor and motor industry in the machine building commissariat.¹⁷² Not all of these newly promoted people could cope. “I want to say, honestly, that, despite nine months of work, I have failed to get into the rhythm of things and to develop appropriate economic skills,” admitted S. M. Dobrokhotov, the deputy head and chief engineer of the strategic rubber industry, also in the machine building commissariat.

Even with such promotions, the Soviet system was not producing nearly enough young people to fill all the vacated positions, in the center or the locales, because right through the terror and beyond, the apparatus was ballooning.¹⁷³ In fall 1937, a floodlike 130,000 students were admitted to higher-education institutions.¹⁷⁴ On October 23, 1937, the politburo established a commission for assigning graduates of higher education directly via the Central Committee.¹⁷⁵

On the evening of October 29, Stalin hosted a reception in the Kremlin’s Palace of Facets, culminating a four-day conference of some 400 representatives of the metals-and-coal industry. He had already explicitly identified his rule with the expansive ranks of middling “cadres” in his resounding slogan “Cadres decide everything” (1935), but by 1937 he was singling out the up-and-coming generation more and more, receiving them in the magical inner sanctum, the Little Corner, or, as now, in the lustrous reception halls of the Kremlin.¹⁷⁶ “Leaders come and go, but the people remain,” he told the coal-and-metals gathering. “Only the people are immortal. All the rest is transient. Therefore, it is necessary to be able to value the confidence of the people.” He could not help divulging, “I am not sure, I apologize again, that there are not people among you who, although they work for the Soviet government, are not also taking care of themselves in the West by also working for some foreign intelligence services: Japanese, German, or Polish.” (These lines were edited out of his remarks published in Pravda.) But he went on to accentuate the positive. “Comrades! My toast will be original and unusual,” he continued. “We are accustomed to pronounce toasts for the health of leaders, bosses, vozhdi, people’s commissars. This, of course, is not bad. But besides the big leaders, there are middling and lesser leaders. We have tens of thousands of these leaders, the middling and lesser ones. They are modest people, they do not push themselves out front, they are almost unnoticeable. But one would be blind not to notice them. Because the fate of production in our entire economy depends on them. . . . To the health of our middle and smaller economic leaders! (Ovation, shouts of Hurrah.)”¹⁷⁷

Stalin’s populism was addressed not to the workers but to the middle and lower-level functionaries, people he christened the “Soviet intelligentsia.” He showed an uncanny knack for winning over people who, like himself, had risen from humble backgrounds, thanks to education. He identified with these up-and-comers, claiming them as his own, sentiments they keenly reciprocated. To be sure, Stalin bullied and dominated others, demanded unquestioning obedience, whose manifestation (or not) he alone judged. And yet, cruel and capricious though he was, Stalin could also be highly personable. “All his life he was very good at finding people and promoting them,” recalled Svetlana, “and that is why so many remained devoted to him, often young people whom he would pull out and promote over the heads of the old guard. That was quite a part of him: his sociability and being with people.”¹⁷⁸

Galvanizing and molding young strivers fit Stalin’s personality as much as pathological suspicion and wholesale murder. Ryutin, in his 1932 “Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship,” had called for “new forces” from within the party and the working class to “destroy Stalin’s dictatorship,” but Stalin himself was conjuring these new forces to replace destroyed functionaries of his dictatorship.¹⁷⁹ Of course, if he felt he needed to clear space to promote a hard-charging younger generation, he could have forced sitting functionaries into retirement.¹⁸⁰ By having the new people take the place of the wantonly tortured and executed, he compromised them all.

PETER AND SOVIET PATRIOTISM

Not a single member of Stalin’s politburo, going back to 1930, had completed university, the despot included, but he adhered ferociously to the transformative power of education, and for him Russian history was among the greatest pedagogical instruments. But his commission to produce a new history textbook for elementary schools had yielded only vague instructions, finalized and signed by him, Zhdanov, and Kirov at his Sochi dacha back in summer 1934; they were published only after significant delay in Pravda (January 27, 1936), which was followed by an open competition. On August 22, 1937, a second-place winner was announced (there was no first-place winner). It was a humble collective at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute, led by Andrei Shestakov.¹⁸¹ Shestakov (b. 1877) had grown up one of nine children, the son of a peasant and a fisherman on the White Sea littoral, and finished only the local five-year school before being hired on at the woodcutting factory, but he studied at night.¹⁸² He had relocated to Moscow in 1921, by then a skilled mechanic, and took up the study of agrarian history, at age forty-four, at the Institute of Red Professors. By the 1930s, he had become deputy director and then director of the Museum of the Revolution.¹⁸³ His team worked on their manuscript, A Short Course on the History of the USSR: A Textbook for the Third and Fourth Grades, from March 1936 through July 1937, and, after political vetting, had it published in September 1937 for the start of the new school year and the run-up to the twentieth anniversary of the revolution.

While maintaining the Marxist core of class struggle, the book offered a nationalist narrative of Russia’s “gathering of the lands”—from Kievan Rus, in the tenth century, through the Stalin Constitution of 1936—in the spirit of nineteenth-century historiography. “We love our country and we must know its wonderful history,” the book noted. “Those who know history understand present-day life better, are better able to fight the enemies of our country, and make Socialism stronger.”¹⁸⁴ In the last quarter of 1937, 6.5 million Russian-language copies were printed; it was simultaneously translated into the languages of the Soviet peoples.¹⁸⁵ Still, parents struggled to obtain copies.¹⁸⁶ The USSR counted some 30 million schoolchildren, and the Shestakov text was recommended beyond schools.¹⁸⁷ “Not only millions of children and young people will learn according to it,” enthused the party journal Bolshevik, “but so will millions of workers and peasants and hundreds of thousands of party activists, propagandists, and agitators.”¹⁸⁸ There were critics. “It has not turned out to be a history of the USSR at all,” Volodymyr Zatonsky, Ukraine’s commissar of enlightenment, wrote of the draft manuscript. “Basically, it is a history of the Russian state.”¹⁸⁹ In celebrating a great power, not its nationalities, the text gave a prominent place to personalities, a rebuke to abstract schema such as “feudal epoch.”¹⁹⁰ Shestakov portrayed Peter the Great not as an oppressor who built a baroque capital on the bones of the lower orders, but as a dynamic leader who had transformed Russia almost single-handedly by advancing technical training and military skills.¹⁹¹

Stalin had edited Shestakov’s text closely, inserting in the section on ancient Rus that “Christianity in its time was a step forward in the development of Russia in comparison to paganism.” Leafing through the page proofs of the manuscript, Stalin had struck out a reproduction of Ilya Repin’s painting Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son and inserted a laudatory passage on the dreaded oprichnina for strengthening “the autocratic power in the Russian state by destroying the privileges of the boyars.” This marked the Soviet despot’s rethinking of how to fit Ivan, too, into the grand statist narrative.¹⁹² Stalin deemed the centralizing Russian state as having been progressive in its time, allowing the Russian people to push forward on the road of capitalist development, while introducing enlightenment to backward regions, but the Soviets had rightly altered the state’s class basis, enabling Soviet propaganda to glorify both the imperial Russian state and the revolutionary movement against it.

In parallel, Vladimir Petrov’s film Peter the First, adapted from the popular novel by Aleksei Tolstoy, had premiered on September 1, 1937, the opening day of school.¹⁹³ It showed the tsar forging his new capital and cadres ruthlessly, decisively. “The epoch of Peter I was one of the greatest pages in the history of the Russian people,” Tolstoy told workers at the Skorokhod factory (September 11). “The boyars’ dark, uncultured Rus, with their backward technology and patriarchal beards, would have fallen to foreign invaders in no time. A revolution was necessary within the very life of the country, in order to lift Russia up to the level of the cultured European countries. Peter was able to accomplish this, and the Russian people were able to defend their independence.”¹⁹⁴ One Soviet inhabitant proudly recorded in her diary, “The content and superb execution of our films arouse admiration even abroad. If you take such films as Chapayev [and] Peter the First . . . you simply forget that you’re sitting in a movie theater, and not actually participating in what you are seeing.”¹⁹⁵

Stalin, like Peter (albeit without the extensive travels), had come to understand Europe as both a treasure trove of know-how and technology to be copied and a political and geopolitical threat to be kept at bay to protect Russia’s non-Western identity and nondemocratic system. His recorded comments on Peter had been intermittent (1926, 1928, 1931), but all had emphasized the class nature of the tsar’s rule. Now, too, incorporation of Peter in the Soviet pantheon did not vitiate the Marxist stance or class critique.¹⁹⁶ More broadly, Stalin did not reintroduce ritualized processionals accompanied by clergy. Instead of landed gentry and bureaucrats, the USSR had only functionaries; instead of peasant households and self-organized communes, it had statist collectives; instead of the Orthodox Church, Marxism-Leninism. Stalin did not elevate his children to be tsareviches. When he caught his son Vasily attempting to trade on his lineage, he exploded, “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no, not even me!”¹⁹⁷ In sum, notwithstanding superficial resemblances—a one-man autocracy, an overweening state, a functionary ethos, an obsession with security, a forced modernization drive—anyone who had lived under both systems, not only peasants and the pious, knew the differences.¹⁹⁸

The Soviet Union even lacked a requirement to study Russian, and most non-Russian schoolchildren were illiterate in the language. When the enlightenment commissar of the Russian republic suggested a far-reaching Russification of schooling, Stalin objected, insisting that Russian become only a subject, not the medium of all instruction, to the detriment of vernacular languages.¹⁹⁹ Still, a state imperative was felt. “There is one language in which all citizens of the USSR can more or less express themselves—that is Russian,” Stalin remarked at a Central Committee plenum (October 12, 1937). “So we concluded that it should be obligatory. It would be good if all citizens drafted into the army could express themselves in Russian just a little, so that if some division or other was transferred, say an Uzbek one to Samara, it could converse with the populace.”²⁰⁰

LOOSE-TONGUED SELF-PORTRAIT

On November 6, 1937, the eve of the revolution’s twentieth anniversary, at the Bolshoi, which was resplendent in red velvet and gold trim and sported an expensive new curtain, Mikhail Romm’s Lenin in October premiered. This was the first feature film with Stalin as a lead character, played by Semyon Goldstab, a Jewish actor from Ukraine. The film depicted a likable, grandfatherly Lenin (played by Boris Shchukin) who relied on Stalin, while Kamenev and Zinoviev, Trotsky, the Mensheviks, and SRs were shown to be objects of Lenin’s hatred and treasonous opponents of the seizure of power. After the showing, Stalin would have Romm reshoot the scenes involving the storming of the Winter Palace and the arrest of the Provisional Government by Antonov-Ovseyenko (who had recently returned from Spain and himself been arrested).²⁰¹ The film’s message, like the press accounts of the anniversary, was that Stalin was Lenin’s equal.

On November 7, as elite units of the Red Army massed near Red Square, dignitaries assembled on the reviewing stand. To the right of the Mausoleum stood the foreign diplomatic corps, in fur hats and fur-lined coats; to the left, Soviet high officialdom; on the Mausoleum itself, at the last minute, Stalin emerged, accompanied by the retinue. When the Savior’s Tower chimes struck 10:00 a.m., Voroshilov, on a white horse, rode to the assembled troops and administered the oath of allegiance to each unit in turn. The formations, as they passed, turned sharply rightward toward the Mausoleum in unison. “It was extremely moving, regardless of where one stood politically,” remarked an American observer. “I had heard the most cynical diplomats admit that this was ‘stark drama.’”²⁰²

That night, in the privacy of Voroshilov’s Kremlin apartment, two dozen or so regime intimates gathered, as per custom. Some thirty-odd toasts had already been pronounced by the time Stalin rose, and he rambled at length. “The Russian tsars did a great deal that was bad,” he began his toast. “They robbed and enslaved the people. They waged wars and seized territories in the interests of landowners. But they did one thing that was good: they amassed an enormous state, all the way to Kamchatka. We have inherited that state.” Here was an awesome responsibility—and an evidently inebriated Stalin added a warning. “Whoever attempts to destroy that unity of the socialist state, whoever seeks the separation of any of its parts or nationalities—that man is an enemy. . . . And we will destroy each and every such enemy; even if he was an old Bolshevik, we shall destroy all his kin, his family.”²⁰³

Interrupted by shouts “To the great Stalin,” he continued impatiently (“I have not finished my toast”) and turned once more to the decisiveness of the middle cadres, over the objections of those present—try to stay silent—that his leadership was decisive: “A great deal is said about great leaders. But a cause is never won unless the right conditions exist. And the main thing here is the middle cadres—party, economic, military. They’re the ones who choose the leader, explain our positions to the masses, and ensure the success of our cause. They don’t try to climb above their station; you don’t even notice them.” Dimitrov again tried to object that Stalin was nonetheless more important, prompting him to insist yet again, “The fundamental thing is the middle cadres. That must be noted, and it must never be forgotten that, other conditions being equal, the middle cadres decide the outcome of our cause.”²⁰⁴

Stalin then broached the most taboo of subjects. “Why did we prevail over Trotsky and the rest?” he asked. “Trotsky, as we know, was the most popular man in our country after Lenin.” Trotsky—the number two! “Bukharin, Zinoviev, Rykov, Tomsky were all popular. We were little known—yours truly, Molotov, Voroshilov, and Kalinin—then.”²⁰⁵ Stalin went on to explain, however, that Trotsky had committed the fatal mistake of ignoring the middle cadres. “The party itself had wanted” the triumph of the lesser-knowns.

In yet another revealing gesture that tipsy night, Stalin indulged his man-of-the-borderlands persona, stating, “Comrade Dimitrov, I apologize for interrupting you; I am not a European, but a Russified Georgian-Asiatic.”²⁰⁶ We can only guess how émigré press portrayals of him rankled: a kinto (Georgian thug), a snitch for the tsarist okhranka, a nonentity, a usurper, an Asiatic.

Stalin in his toast referred to himself as just a “practical type” (praktik), unlike those famous personages. “Whom did we have?” he asked, answering, “Well, I led the organizational work in the Central Committee,” as if it were the most humdrum, shoulder-to-the-wheel post. “But what was I in comparison with Ilich [Lenin]? A feeble specimen.” He named his faction: “There were Molotov, Kalinin, Kaganovich, Voroshilov—all of whom were unknown. . . .” But, Stalin continued, “the people advance those who lead them to victory, personalities in history come and go, but the people remain, and the people do not make mistakes.” The unerring folk: that was how the hardworking faction of “feeble specimens” had triumphed over the famous personages like Trotsky. “I remind you of the following,” Stalin added, with evident pride. “In 1927, 700,000 party members voted for the Central Committee’s line; such was the core who voted for us feeble specimens. Some 4,000 to 6,000 voted for Trotsky, and 20,000 abstained.”²⁰⁷ In closing, he recalled Kirov’s death, a wake-up call: “Kirov, with his blood, opened the eyes of us idiots (excuse the blunt expression).”²⁰⁸ After the toasts ran their course, they repaired to the Kremlin cinema for another viewing of Romm’s Lenin in October.

POSTSCRIPT

On November 11, 1937, Stalin received Dimitrov and Wang Ming, a young rival to Mao, and told them, “Trotskyites [in China] must be hunted down, shot, destroyed. They are international provocateurs, fascism’s most vicious agents!” Stalin also instructed them that “the main thing now is the war, not an agrarian revolution, not confiscation of land,” and concluded, “neither England nor America wants China to win. They fear a Chinese victory because of their own imperialist ambitions.” (Wang would immediately leave Moscow, where he had lived for six years, and, in China, insist on mounting a party congress, where he would deliver the political report.)²⁰⁹ With the Comintern types, Stalin underscored how waverers in the party had faltered at every difficult moment: in 1905, in October 1917, Brest-Litovsk in 1918, the civil war, “and especially collectivization, a completely novel, historically unprecedented event. Various weak elements fell away from the party . . . they went underground. Powerless themselves, they linked up with external enemies, promised Ukraine to the Germans, Belorussia to the Poles, the Far East to the Japanese. They hoped for war and were especially insistent that the German fascists launch a war against the USSR as soon as possible.” He continued: “They were planning an action for the beginning of this year. They lost their nerve. They were preparing in July [1937] to attack the politburo at the Kremlin. But they lost their nerve.”²¹⁰

Preposterous: longtime Communists had no such opportunity to “link up” with foreign enemies or attempt a coup. And yet, time and again, when volunteering thoughts on the mass arrests and executions, Stalin returned to the party opposition to collectivization in 1932, and the plots against him. Time magazine (November 15, 1937), of all places, mentioned alleged assassinaton attempts. “Our Sun!” the magazine wrote semifacetiously of the celebrations of Stalin not only in Moscow but also in Madrid and, in a lesser way, at Carnegie Hall in New York, in connection with the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, comparing Stalin to Louis XIV. Time highlighted Romm’s new film, in which “it is not Lenin and Trotsky who make the revolution of 1917 but Lenin and Stalin,” adding, “With Sun Stalin eclipsing Trotsky in Spain as well as in Russia, the Dictator felt strong enough to permit the bringing to light in court last week of two attempts to assassinate him years ago.” This was a reference to two incidents, in 1933 and 1935, both in the Caucasus, neither (as we have seen) an attempt on Stalin’s life, but both recently detailed as such in Dawn of the East, the Georgian party newspaper under Beria’s control.²¹¹

STICKING WITH CHIANG

Stalin and his intermediaries continued to rebuff China’s entreaties for the Soviets to declare war on Japan, but Moscow was shipping arms a great distance and at great difficulty, mostly through Xinjiang, to keep the fighting going.²¹² Japan had forced Chiang into all-out war, which won him strong domestic support, perhaps the most for a Chinese ruler since the mid–Qing dynasty, but Chiang took considerable time to find a workable strategy of resistance. His frontal military battles led to catastrophe. In November 1937, the Japanese captured Shanghai, followed, on December 13, by Nanking, the Chinese Nationalist capital, where the Imperial troops proceeded to massacre up to 300,000 civilians. The Nationalist government fled to Wuhan, in the interior. Only now, after the devastation of even his crack troops, did Chiang turn from frontal engagements to a long war of attrition.²¹³

Stalin stuck to his strategy of a Nationalist-led united front against Japan, reasoning that Japan could fight either China or the Soviet Union but not both, and using Dimitrov and Wang Ming to tamp down the Communists to the extent possible. Wang Ming went to Wuhan as the Chinese Communist liaison to the Nationalists; Mao stayed at Yan’an, where the Communist base would expand significantly, from perhaps 40,000 members in 1937 to 200,000 by the next year.²¹⁴ The desperate Long March to desolate Yan’an to escape Nationalist encirclement was proving to be a boon for survivors, now buffering the Communists from the brunt of the Imperial Japanese Army. Japan’s war in China was unintentionally reordering the balance of power between Chiang’s Nationalists and Mao’s Communists to the latter’s favor. In December 1937, Chiang—in yet another attempt to drag the Soviets directly into the war—publicly revealed that China was getting substantial Soviet military aid. “Chiang Kai-shek behaved not fully cautiously,” Stalin wrote to Molotov and Voroshilov. “Well, the devil take him.”²¹⁵ But Stalin held to him.

CELEBRATION AMID DEATH

In December 1937, the USSR held elections for the new bicameral Supreme Soviet, a permanent body to replace the Congress of Soviets. There were 569 seats in the soviet of the Union and 574 in the soviet of nationalities, both elected on the basis of universal suffrage.²¹⁶ The provision for multiple candidates had been unceremoniously dropped.²¹⁷ Stalin, too, ran for election, choosing to represent Moscow city’s “Stalin ward,” and delivered candidate remarks from the imperial box at the Bolshoi on December 11, 1937. (“Comrades, to tell you the truth, I had no intention of making a speech. But our respected Nikita Sergeyevich [Khrushchev] dragged me, so to speak, to this meeting. ‘Make a good speech,’ he said.”) The next day, the uncontested balloting took place as the regime laid on food, drink, music, and dancing.²¹⁸ The process reached into every village, and no-show voters were monitored. The press reported that more than 91 million votes were cast—96.8 percent of those eligible—and that every candidate running was duly “elected.”²¹⁹

On December 20, the NKVD celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Sergei Mironov traveled from blood-soaked Mongolia, finding portraits of Dzierżyński and Yezhov adorning all Soviet newspapers and Young Pioneers competing for the honor of having their scout groups bear these names.²²⁰ At the Bolshoi, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Dimitrov, and others sat in the presidium. Kaganovich arrived late and was greeted by an ovation. So did Molotov (for him the hall stood while applauding). Mikoyan chaired the festivities and praised NKVD head Yezhov as “a talented and faithful pupil of Stalin . . . beloved by the Soviet people.”²²¹ In Pravda that morning, Frinovsky had denounced the swine and fascist bandits inside the NKVD who had been arrested; Mikoyan’s speech closed with praise for their replacements. “The NKVD has worked gloriously during this time,” he noted. “Let us wish that the workers of the NKVD in future will work as gloriously as they have this year.”²²² Another ten Orders of Lenin were awarded to NKVD operatives, to go with the forty-six from the summer.²²³ Stalin joined for the post-speech concert.²²⁴

The next night, Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony premiered in Leningrad, in the white auditorium of the former Chamber Music Association. “Writers, poets, musicians, scientists, and army officers filled every seat,” Jelagin recalled. “The younger people stood in the aisles along the walls. . . . The audience refused to leave, and the applause continued unabated. Shostakovich came out and took dozens of bows.” He was no longer the “formalist.”²²⁵ This was also Stalin’s official fifty-ninth birthday. He received Molotov, Yezhov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan for three hours, until 1:00 a.m. In media res, he summoned Pyotr Pumpur, head of aviation training in the Red Air Force, and Yakov Smushkevich, a thirty-five-year-old fighter pilot, both of them decorated Spanish civil war veterans who now oversaw the dispatch of Soviet pilots to China.²²⁶ The NKVD was reporting devastating shortcomings in the air forces of the Red Army: not just egregious rations, loss of valuable equipment, alcoholism, and hazing, but a colossal number of aviation crashes. Stalin received interrogation protocols indicating that in the Soviet Far East, new aerodromes, poorly built, flooded in the rain and became unusable, forcing planes to be kept under an open sky. “Very important,” Stalin wrote back to Yezhov.²²⁷ The response, for now, would be more arrests, more executions.^{228, 229, 230}

Stalin’s last office visitors on the evening of December 23, members of the inner circle, departed at 10:05 p.m. Whether they accompanied him for supper at the Near Dacha remains unknown. At 5:00 a.m., he awoke with a temperature of 102 degrees Fahrenheit (38.9 Celsius), which had not fallen as of 12:20 p.m., ten minutes before he received Yezhov. An entry made that day in his medical record by Professor Valedinsky and Kremlin hospital chief Pyotr Mandryka noted “general weakness, slightly hyperemic nostrils, and conjunctiva. Not severe exterior pallor, some puffiness of the face. A heavy head. . . . A slight pain on the right when swallowing, serious congestion in the back on the right. Posterior wall of the pharynx is covered with mucus, slightly hyperemic.” Their diagnosis was “follicular angina” (inflammation of the lymphoid ring in the throat) and “myasthenia” (chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disease). The illness proved to be prolonged. Stalin slept poorly. On December 30, for example, he awoke at 12:40 a.m., after four hours’ rest. A urine sample was taken at 1:45 a.m. (these were frequent). He requested warm milk at 2:25 a.m. At 3:45 a.m. he requested a glass of hot water to shave. He brushed his teeth, went to the toilet. At 5:40 a.m. he fell back asleep, rising three hours later and asking for tea and breakfast. At 4:00 p.m. he fell back asleep until 8:20 p.m., drank some tea, and fell back asleep at 11:15 p.m. for twenty-five minutes, then had supper. He was further diagnosed with streptococcus. No visits were recorded in his office logbook from December 24 through January 6.

RED ARMY VERSUS WEHRMACHT

At the annual year-end gathering of the Main Military Council—which happened before Stalin took ill, but which he did not attend—the recently named commander of the South Caucasus military district (a strategic border area), Nikolai Kuibyshev, had pointed out that new commanders of divisions had never before led even a battalion. Voroshilov, who had to formally approve such appointments, feigned shock. “I assure you, Comrade People’s Commissar, that we could not find anyone better,” Kuibyshev stated, adding that everyone else was in the hands of the NKVD. It was a searing moment of truth. But it passed. Voroshilov, in his closing speech, noted that “the gangrene” had not been fully cut out. Kuibyshev soon fell among the victims.²³¹ To be sure, some Soviet military officers who were framed and shot had been more skilled at embezzling state funds than at commanding troops.²³² Still, their replacements—to the extent that vacant officer positions could even be filled—were not always more honest or competent.²³³ The Red Army had problems before the terror; the massacres created more.

Hitler presented a stark contrast. German army officers swore their service oath to him personally, an innovation instituted by the war minister, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, but even so, Hitler, unlike Stalin, experienced significant loyalty issues with the brass. Behind the Führer’s back, Wehrmacht officers did not shrink from discussing how his approach to matters of war was irresponsible and dilettantist. On November 5, 1937, Hitler convened a meeting in the Chancellery to discuss the jockeying over steel supplies between the Luftwaffe (Göring) and the navy (Erich Raeder); army chief Colonel General Werner von Fritsch and Foreign Minister Neurath were also invited. Instead of adjudicating the dispute, Hitler used the occasion to hold forth on Germany’s position in the world, its need for raw materials, and Lebensraum. “The aim of German policy was to make secure and to preserve the racial community and to enlarge it,” he said. “It was therefore a question of space.” But this need for more space ran up against “two hate-inspired antagonists, Britain and France, to whom a German colossus in the center of Europe was a thorn in the flesh.” The Führer outlined scenarios of when—not if—Germany would have to fight a general European war: not later than 1943–45, and possibly before. In the meantime, Hitler said he had “to settle the Czech and Austrian questions” through small wars of plunder, which, he predicted, Britain and France would not oppose militarily.

Two exceedingly noteworthy things happened during the four-hour harangue. First, Hitler mentioned the Soviet Union merely in passing, and he made no reference to “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Second, Blomberg and Fritsch had the temerity to object to the Führer. They “repeatedly emphasized the necessity that Britain and France must not appear in the role of our enemies” (as Blomberg’s adjutant recorded in his notes).²³⁴ Within three months, both Blomberg and Fritsch would be removed, and the army, navy, and air force chiefs would be reporting directly to Hitler.²³⁵ This turnabout was long in coming, but oddly triggered.

The sixty-year-old Blomberg, a widower with five children, got remarried on January 12, 1938; Göring served as best man and Hitler as witness. Shortly thereafter, the police revealed that the twenty-five-year-old bride had been under longtime “morals” surveillance, posed for pornographic photographs, and had a criminal record for prostitution; she was out on parole. Blomberg was afforded a chance to save his situation by annulling the marriage, but he refused, and on January 27 he was relieved of his post. “Worst crisis for the regime since the Röhm Affair,” Goebbels recorded in his diary. “The Führer looks like a corpse.”²³⁶ Fritsch appeared to be next in line to succeed Blomberg, but Hitler became concerned about further scandal: there was a file from summer 1936, collected by SD chief Heydrich, on the bachelor Fritsch’s alleged homosexuality. Hitler’s military adjutant, who smelled a rat, disobeyed the Führer and showed the file to Fritsch. Hitler took his adjutant’s disobedience in stride and summoned Fritsch’s dubious accuser from an internment camp to the Chancellery’s private library, where Fritsch (in cilivian clothes) confronted him. The Gestapo judged the accusations inconsistent. Still, Fritsch was forced to resign on February 3. (At trial, he would be exonerated on the basis of mistaken identity: Frisch instead of Fritsch.) Some figured that Heydrich had set Fritsch up, but if so, the SD had gained nothing; others surmised that Göring had been intriguing to subordinate the army to himself, but again, if that were true, he failed.

On February 4, 1938, a moody Hitler, heeding the advice of Goebbels, abolished the German war ministry and made himself de facto war minister, while appointing the “true as a dog” Wilhelm Keitel as chief of staff. Twelve German generals were removed, but, far from having them arrested and forced under torture to confess to treason on behalf of foreign enemies, Hitler gave them pensions. He sent Blomberg into exile for a year in Italy, with a golden handshake of 50,000 reichsmarks. The Führer was supreme in the military sphere, and the SS was now allowed to create its own armed force of up to 600,000 men—but without mass hysteria, let alone mass murder. Hitler had been concerned throughout about not just commander loyalties but also public perceptions and the standing of the German armed forces.²³⁷

INDISTINGUISHABLE ENEMIES

Stalin was being inundated by petitions about the NKVD’s “illegal” arrests of party members. On January 7, 1938, he announced a Central Committee plenum, to begin four days hence, which would piggyback on the previously scheduled first-ever session of the USSR Supreme Soviet. (All Central Committee members had been “elected” to the pseudo-parliament.) The agenda for the plenum, which met January 11, 14, 18, and 20, was “mistakes committed by party organizations during the expulsion of Communists.”²³⁸ Party officials, given the chance, proved eager to claw back against the NKVD, a matter of (their) life and death. Malenkov divulged that 65,000 of the 100,000 members expelled in the last six months of 1937 had appealed.²³⁹ Stalin allowed the wildness to be reined in: during the first six months of 1938, there would be “only” 37,000 expulsions of party members. In addition, in 1938, 77,000 Communists would be reinstated and 148,000 new members allowed to join (as compared with 32,000 the year before).²⁴⁰ That said, there was no real reprieve. “The SR line (both left and right) has not been fully uncovered,” Stalin wrote to Yezhov (January 17). “Can the NKVD account for the SRs (‘formers’) in the army? I would like to see a report promptly. Can the NKVD account for the ‘former’ SRs outside the army (in civil institutions)? I would also like a report in two-three weeks. . . . What has been done to expose and arrest all Iranians in Baku and Azerbaijan? . . . We must act more swiftly and intelligently.”²⁴¹

The new Supreme Soviet had opened to incredible fanfare on January 12, and three days later it announced an enlarged naval program and a measure authorizing its presidium, formally chaired by Kalinin, to declare a state of war (martial law) if necessary. Yezhov related a “request by the toilers” that Moscow be renamed Stalinodar; Stalin rejected it.²⁴² On January 17, Zhdanov gave a speech condemning spying by foreign consulates in Leningrad, approving the arrests of ethnic groups with compatriots abroad (Poles, Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Germans), hammering at the water transport commissariat under Rykov, and going after Kerzhentsev, head of the committee on artistic affairs, for permitting “alien” culture (such as Meyerhold’s theater).²⁴³ On January 20, at the Kremlin wrap-up reception for delegates, Stalin, during the course of five toasts, called Bukharin and Rykov “foreign agents” and members of a “rightist-Trotskyite anti-Soviet bloc.”²⁴⁴ The next night at the Bolshoi, on the fourteenth anniversary of Lenin’s death, Moscow’s Vakhtangov Theater performed the last act of The Man with a Gun, a play by Nikolai Pogodin about the October Revolution. The accomplished actor Ruben Simonov, an ethnic Armenian, played Stalin in his youthful days. Conscious of the occasion and audience, he had not been able to eat for days and lost control of his nerves. Nonetheless, Jelagin, playing in the orchestra pit, observed Stalin in the imperial box enthusiastically applauding Simonov as himself.²⁴⁵

A Great Citizen, based on the assassination of Kirov, premiered on February 13, 1938, after Stalin’s edits. The Communist character (Katz) was given the last word at the hero’s grave: “The party of Bolsheviks is building a new life, realizing the centuries’ dream of humanity! And those who stand in the way, who try to prohibit this work, the people will destroy!” Pravda’s critic enthused that “A Great Citizen teaches vigilance and the ability to differentiate enemy from friend and friend from enemy.” Besides Katz, nearly every party member who appeared in the film came across as a likely foreign agent.²⁴⁶

Also in mid-February, Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov suffered an acute appendicitis attack and died after treatment in a private Paris clinic run by White Russian émigrés who had NKVD connections. Whether Sedov (b. 1906) could have died of natural causes remains unclear. Trotsky lost his most important follower and the main coordinator of his work, and the NKVD lost its nearly effortless total surveillance over Trotsky’s operations.²⁴⁷

In late February 1938, after all the Spanish gold removed to the Soviet Union had been spent ($550 million) on weapons, an emissary from the Republic arrived to plead for Soviet credits to buy more. Stalin had already withdrawn his military advisers and tankists. Dimitrov, with Stalin’s authorization, had had Spanish Communists nondemonstratively quit the Popular Front government, partly to blunt Franco’s propaganda line.²⁴⁸ But Stalin extended the credits (which would never be repaid) to continue forestalling a Franco victory, even as he showed impatience. “You neither take seriously nor have a deep interest in your own production,” he admonished the Spanish envoy, underscoring the economic benefits of military industry. “You could be doing much more. We’ll give you the motorized equipment, since that is the most difficult. But you must develop your military industry.”²⁴⁹ Soviet military industry, despite investment 2.8 times as high as in 1933, was in disarray from Stalin’s annihilations.

THIRD (AND FINAL) PUBLIC TRIAL

Stalin constantly urged more public trials. Dozens had been staged in fall 1937 throughout the provinces, following an express order by the despot, who complained that “liquidation of wreckers is being undertaken in secret by the NKVD, and collective farmers are not being mobilized in the struggle.” He had dictated sentences by telegram (“shoot”), though a few local judges refused to impose the death penalty on their former party colleagues; prosecutors appealed the judges’ displays of mercy (i.e., ten-year Gulag sentences).²⁵⁰ Some Communists, despite brutalization in the NKVD cellars and threats to family members, refused to incriminate themselves. That included Martemyan Ryutin, author of the devastating internal condemnation of forced collectivization and Stalin’s dictatorship. Back in October 1936, while serving a ten-year sentence, he had been rearrested in solitary confinement and transferred to Lubyanka to furnish “testimony” for a planned trial of right deviationists. (His condemnation of collectivization made him a “rightist” in Stalin’s mind.) But Ryutin steadfastly denied the new charges of “terrorism,” and his “retrial” had taken place in camera in the military collegium (January 10, 1937). It had lasted forty minutes, after which he was executed in the basement.²⁵¹ Ryutin had written to the central executive committee of the Soviet—not to the degenerated party—that “I do not intend to and will not confess things about myself that are untrue, whatever it will cost me.”²⁵²

The Ryutin Platform had come up at the second Moscow trial in late January 1937, but it had not been a central aspect.²⁵³ Bukharin, who was being blackmailed with threats against his wife and daughter, cooperated and was afforded the highest possible profile in Stalin’s terror scenario. He had been in prison for almost a year, and at the prime of life (fifty years of age). During that period (February 1937–March 1938), he wrote an autobiographical novel (How It All Began), a philosophical treatise, a collection of poems, and several rambling “Dear Koba” letters pleading for his life and asking why Stalin needed him to die. It was an excellent question, but one with a ready answer. Whereas Ryutin had been the actual implacable opponent and Bukharin had never joined a party opposition, Bukharin was the preeminent symbol.²⁵⁴ Stalin’s invention of the “right deviation”—a tacit admission that it was not an opponent per se—and his attacks that twisted their policy positions involved a structural threat, a false or petit bourgeois class consciousness. Ultimately, this made Bukharin and the rightists central to Stalin’s terror scenario.

On March 2, 1938, the third Moscow trial finally commenced, like the first two, in the October Hall of the House of Trade Unions, in front of nearly 200 spectators, including the usual handpicked foreign journalists and diplomats. It lasted eighteen sittings. A total of twenty-one defendants, nine of whom had sat in the Central Committee, were in the dock. Three were doctors of the Kremlin medical staff. Stalin had edited chief procurator Vyshinsky’s script. (Vyshinsky would also edit the transcript, removing remarks exculpating the accused and discussions of the law by the defense lawyers.) The accused had spent long hours memorizing their testimony. Bukharin, Krestinsky, Rykov, Cristian Rakovski—staunch Bolsheviks—confessed that they had plotted to assassinate Lenin and Stalin since 1918; had murdered Kirov, Mężyński, Kuibyshev, Gorky, Gorky’s son Maxim; had conspired with Nazi Germany, Japan, and Great Britain to partition the Soviet Union, hand over territory (Ukraine, Belorussia), and abolish collective farms.²⁵⁵ Yezhov had falsely promised at least some defendants their lives in exchange for self-incrimination.²⁵⁶ NKVD interrogators sat in the first row, a reminder that “re-interrogation” could take place between sessions.²⁵⁷ Krestinsky had been “beaten horribly,” according to the head of the Lefortovo prison’s hygiene department. “His entire back was a wound.”²⁵⁸ Still, on the first day, Krestinsky repudiated his confession and pleaded not guilty, causing a sensation. That night he was re-interrogated—he had a wife and children—and on the second day he nodded his assent when asked if he was guilty.²⁵⁹ “It is now clear why there are interruptions of supplies here and there, why, with our riches and abundance of products, there is a shortage first of one thing, then of another,” Vyshinsky thundered. “It is these traitors who are responsible for it.”²⁶⁰

Stalin received from Yezhov daily summaries of reactions to the trial, assembled from NKVD branches around the Union, and some local secret police officials dared to convey comments about how unpersuasive the proceedings were.²⁶¹ In Pravda, and in equally vicious commentary on Soviet radio, Mikhail Koltsov, who had been recalled from Spain, fluently conveyed the party line on the trial, cursing the treasonous snakes, praising Yezhov to the skies. Privately, though, Koltsov was said to have told a fellow writer who had wanted to witness the spectacle live, “Don’t go! . . . What is being done there the mind cannot conceive. . . . Very strange trial. Very strange.”²⁶² The New York Times captured some of the insanity. “It is as if twenty years after Yorktown somebody in power at Washington found it necessary for the safety of the State to send to the scaffold Thomas Jefferson, Madison, John Adams, Hamilton, Jay and most of their associates,” the paper wrote. “The charge against them would be that they conspired to hand over the United States to George III.”²⁶³

Under the klieg lights in the wee hours on March 13, Vasily Ulrich read out the sentences individually. Three were for long Gulag terms. The other sentences—“to be shot”—echoed in the hall eighteen times. “I experienced profound shame, especially here in court, when I learned and understood the full counterrevolutionary infamy of the crimes of the Right-Trotskyite Bloc, in which I served as an assassin,” Pyotr Kryuchkov, Gorky’s former secretary (assigned to him by Yagoda), stated in his last word. He added, “I ask you, citizen judges, for a reduced sentence.” On March 15, the condemned were executed one by one, with Yagoda and Bukharin rumored to have been last so as to have to witness the others’ deaths.²⁶⁴

Yagoda had never risen higher than nonvoting candidate member of the Central Committee, and had never been much of a public face for the regime, absent from prominent public photographs (an exception was the White Sea–Baltic Canal book, which, however, was withdrawn). But his corpse was said to have been displayed on the grounds of his legendary dacha, located outside Moscow on the Kaluga highway, the site of a prerevolutionary estate that he had occupied in 1927. The complex had become part of the Kommunarka state farm and had served as a well-stocked country club for Yagoda’s use, but then it became a killing field. Kommunarka shared that function with nearby Butovo, also just outside Moscow, a former stud farm that the NKVD had seized from its owner. Mass burials of ashes also took place at the former Donskoi Monastery (1591), whose crematorium (completed in October 1927) was the first in Russia or the Soviet Union. Tukhachevsky’s ashes had been dumped here in a mass grave. Initially, victims’ ashes were buried in the common graves using a shovel, but soon the NKVD brought in an excavator and a bulldozer. At Kommunarka, up to 14,000 executions would take place, primarily of political, military, scientific, and cultural figures, whose bones were sometimes seen in the jaws of prowling dogs.²⁶⁵

FAILURES OF CONTEMPORARY KREMLINOLOGY

Contemporaries could not fathom what was going on. “Something incomprehensible is happening,” the secretary of the party organization in the Novosibirsk NKVD, Sergei Plestsov, told an NKVD department chief in Ukraine who had returned briefly to Novosibirsk, his former place of employment, in fall 1937.²⁶⁶ Orlov, NKVD station chief in Spain, also deemed the mass arrests unfathamoble.²⁶⁷ “What for?” the deputy railways commissar, Livshits, had exclaimed when taken away, according to rumors in upper party circles.²⁶⁸ This unanswered question was etched all across the Soviet space, into the walls of teeming prisons and labor camps, stamped on the souls of the children carted off to orphanages, heard echoing through the execution cellars, and repeated throughout society as people wondered if they would be next.²⁶⁹ Victims who had had frequent contact with Stalin did no better. Stalin had included Rosenholz, the long-serving commissar of foreign trade (1930–37), in the March 1938 trial of the Trotskyite-rightist bloc. Rosenholz had told his interrogator-torturer that years earlier, when he had brought Stalin documents, the latter had asked just two or three questions before affixing his signature, trusting Rosenholz, but more recently Stalin’s “suspiciousness had reached lunacy.” He could only surmise that Stalin “was in a fit, a crazy fit of rage against treason, against baseness.”²⁷⁰ “Explaining the present regime in terms of Stalin’s personal lust for power is too superficial,” Trotsky wrote in May 1938. True enough, but he could not explain why such a terror annihilated the very apparatus in whose “class interest” it had supposedly been launched.²⁷¹

Kremlinologists of all stripes absorbed every rumor and strained every nerve to decipher the puzzle. “Every bit of testimony at the [March 1938] Bukharin-Rykov trial was the subject of endless discussion in the Embassy,” recalled Charles Bohlen, who attended as an interpreter for the new American ambassador, Joseph Davies. “There was speculation over the reason the purges were started, what they were trying to accomplish, whether Stalin was mad, whether he had some other sinister plan, how much truth there was in the accusations.”²⁷² Few were as naïve as Davies, who accepted the trials at face value (and believed that the Soviet Union was wending its way in the right direction and eager for cooperation with the capitalists). Bohlen, along with George Kennan, thought Marxism-Leninism had exacerbated whatever obscure power politics lay behind the trials. Most other foreign ambassadors—Werner von der Schulenburg (Germany), Robert Coulondre (France), and Viscount Chilston (Britain)—attributed the bizarre episode to power politics alone.²⁷³ Davies’s approach—to accept the accusations and confessions—was found in Soviet society. “Who would have benefited from sentencing and executing such people . . . if they were not guilty?” recalled the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov of Tukhachevsky and other top officers. “Either they were guilty or what was happening was incomprehensible.”²⁷⁴

Lifelong revolutionaries, who had been beaten by tsarist police for working on behalf of the revolution, were now being beaten with whips, blackjacks, and poles to confess to lifelong conspiracies against the revolution. Inside the party and among party widows, hearsay circulated about Stalin’s special thirst for revenge and his vendetta against the “old Bolsheviks” (those who had joined the party before 1917), because they knew the real story of his past and Lenin’s call for his removal.²⁷⁵ Old Bolsheviks numbered 182,000 in 1934 and would number 125,000 in 1939, a decline of one third, which was roughly the annihilation ratio for all officials.²⁷⁶ Another conjecture involved apparatchik fears of a supposed “transition to democracy,” since the draft constitution had restored the right to vote to former kulaks and called for multicandidate elections.²⁷⁷ Stalin had contemptuously dismissed any concerns, then threw out the multicandidate idea anyway.Probably the most widespread contemporary supposition about the terror involved a belief—or a desire to believe—that Stalin remained unaware. “We thought that Stalin did not know about the insane retribution against Communists, and the Soviet intelligentsia,” the writer Ehrenburg recalled. Meyerhold said, “They hide it from Stalin.” Pasternak said, “If only someone told all this to Stalin!”²⁷⁸

Functionaries inside the police harbored similar delusions. Israel Shreider, who went by Mikhail, a top official in the militia (the regular police), which was subordinated to the NKVD, observed that “at that time, I saw Stalin as a god and blindly believed that he did not know what was going on in the organs of the NKVD.” Arrested himself, he was taken to Moscow’s Butyrka prison, whose cells were crammed with big shots. They were beaten senseless during “interrogations.” None wanted to speak to the others, suspecting that their cell mates were stool pigeons, and each demanded paper so they could write petitions to Stalin to profess their innocence. “Everyone wrote to Stalin,” Shreider explained. “Naturally, in perpetually thinking of Stalin, we frequently saw him in our dreams, spoke with him, proved to him our innocence, complained about the torturer-interrogators.” The next day, Shreider added, they noticed that those who had dreamed of Stalin were summoned to “interrogation” and beaten. “When someone began to report that he had seen Stalin in his dream,” he noted, “the whole cell expressed sympathy.” They noticed that their interrogators would place their petitions to Stalin on the desk during interrogations. “Does Stalin know?” they asked themselves again. “The petitions and complaints are not reaching him!”²⁷⁹

A corollary to the Stalin-did-not-know delusion was the legend of infiltration of the NKVD by enemies aiming to destroy good people. “Everyone more and more talks about the sickness or wrecking by the NKVD leaders,” professor Vladimir Vernadsky (b. 1863), a renowned geochemist and member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, wrote in his diary (January 25, 1938). “More and more heard about Yezhov’s wrecking. Again unnecessary, infuriating severity all around. Again discussion of deliberate wrecking” (February 20).²⁸⁰ A political commissar in the army in Vyazma, near Smolensk, told a military associate, “It looks like party cadres are being destroyed deliberately.”²⁸¹

These and other conjectures—which would echo in the subsequent scholarly literature—offer insight into Soviet mentalities of the time, but no explanation for the terror.²⁸² In Mongolia, there was no old Bolshevism or faux transition to democracy. Mironov had gone back to Ulan Bator, where he would personally help force the arrest of at least 10,000 Mongols in the sparsely populated country, including 300 ministerial officials and 180 military leaders, by the time he returned to Moscow for good in April 1938.²⁸³ A onetime lowly ensign of the tsarist army and then a Soviet border guard, Mironov was promoted to deputy foreign affairs commissar responsible for the strategic Far East, moved into the House on the Embankment, obtaining a high-floor six-room apartment with a view to the Kremlin’s onion domes, and fantasized about becoming foreign affairs commissar. His days were numbered.²⁸⁴

Altogether, at least 20,000 Mongols would be executed over the course of 1937–38. Much of its officialdom—Choibalsan excepted—was obliterated.²⁸⁵ (In Spain, the Soviet terror was infinitesimal in comparison.) More than half of Mongolia’s state budget was now being spent on the military, but the Soviets were forcing annihilation of the small number of Mongolian officers. And even after the massive destruction and replacement, Soviet personnel did not trust the Mongolian army—then again, the executions and lies aroused strong anti-Russian feelings.²⁸⁶ The rampage seemed utterly senseless, insanity.

THE LOGIC OF A WARPED MIND

Back at the February–March 1937 plenum, Stalin had referred to “about 12,000 party members who sympathized with Trotsky to some extent or other [in 1927]. Here you see the total forces of the Trotskyite gentlemen.”²⁸⁷ Accurate or not, he presented this number in a way that was dismissive, not alarmist. Similarly, in his November 1936 opening of the 8th Congress of Soviets, apropos of allowing former kulaks to vote in the elections to the new Supreme Soviet, he had said, “Some say this is dangerous, because elements hostile to Soviet power could sneak into the highest offices, some of the former White Guardists, kulaks, priests, and so on. But really, what is there to fear? . . . For one thing, not all former kulaks, White Guardists, and priests are hostile to Soviet power.”²⁸⁸ Half a year later, he approved orders for mass executions of former kulaks because of the mortal danger they posed. “We have become convinced,” Malenkov had revealingly explained on a trip to annihilate the leadership of the autonomous republic of Tatarstan, inside the Russian republic, “that where the tasks of the party and government are not being fulfilled, we must seek enemies.”²⁸⁹

It sounded like complete cynicism: “seek” (or fabricate) enemies. But in Stalin’s world, which his minions came to share, every allegation derived from a kernel of truth, no matter how minuscule. Tukhachevsky did have meetings with the German military brass (which were fully authorized). Republic and provincial party bosses did fail to implement central directives (which bordered on the impossible). Poland, Germany, and Japan did try to recruit spies on Soviet territory among non-Russian nationalities (standard international practice). Dekulakized peasants did have grievances against Soviet power (they had been dispossessed and deported to frozen wastes). Hostile powers did funnel disinformation into Soviet military intelligence (Stalin was proactively doing the same). Pro-Japanese sentiment did emerge in Mongolia (thanks to inhuman Soviet overlordship). “Bukharin met with Kamenev, they talked, they discussed the policies of the Central Committee and other things,” Kaganovich, late in life, parroting Stalin, reasoned of their ill-advised July 1928 meeting. “Trotsky, who was a good organizer, could have headed a rebellion. . . . Who after all could believe that old, experienced conspirators, using all the experience of Bolshevik conspiratorial methods and Bolshevik organization, that these people would not establish ties among themselves and would not create an organization?”²⁹⁰

Above all, opposition to collectivization had taken place. Stalin seems to have been haunted not by the millions of peasants and nomads who had starved but by the Communist officials who had dared to criticize his rule because of it.²⁹¹ He repeatedly voiced his venom against them, charging that they had lacked the stomach to see through what was necessary. Opposition to collectivization became the leitmotif of the interrogation protocols he demanded and underlined, and of his private and public utterances. Stalin, interrupting Yezhov, had blurted out at the December 1936 plenum about the rightists, “They denied that they had any platform. They had a platform. What did it call for? For the restoration of private enterprise in industry, for the opening of our gates to foreign capital, especially to English capital. . . . For the restoration of private enterprise in agriculture, for the curtailment of the collective farms, for the restoration of the kulaks, for moving the Comintern out of the USSR.”²⁹² It remained only to add a sense of the means for an internal putsch—the Red Army command (around Tukhachevsky), the NKVD leadership (around Yagoda), the Kremlin commandant and bodyguard directorate—to complete the narrative arc from criticism of collectivization to espionage, sabotage, coup.

Stalin presumed that the socialist system’s survival depended on him and that his former comrades desperately wanted to get rid of him. If, additionally, one assumed—as he did—that a foreign military attack was inevitable, and that in the event of war his former comrades could become eager collaborators with the fascists and other foreign enemies—not just out of spite, revenge, or ambition but because only his removal could undo collectivization—then all these people, and anyone who sympathized with or thought like them, had to be eliminated before war broke out. Did critics not understand that all opposition was objectively serving foreign enemies? Who could deny that the Soviet Union faced enemies? Who could deny that the capitalists had intervened against the USSR in the civil war and would do so again? Who could deny that imperialism was aggressive and would stop at nothing? In Spain, “fascists” had risen up in a putsch, and they were being assisted by the foreign fascist powers, and not opposed by the “democratic” ones. What more did anyone need to know? If counterrevolution supported by aggressive foreign intervention could take place in Spain, was it not still more likely to be attempted against the Soviet Union, a strategic country with a fully socialist system? His critics either failed elementary logic or had “lost their minds.”²⁹³

“SPIES”

Pravda had underscored, accurately, that both Japan and Germany were “anti-status-quo powers” and could attain their aims solely through a new world war, a flanking threat Stalin did not invent.²⁹⁴ Soviet intelligence reported that Japan and Germany shared intelligence information about Soviet military capabilities with each other as well as with Poland, which was true. Finland was sharing intelligence with the Japanese about Soviet military capabilities, too. Japan had sent military observer missions to countries encircling the USSR—Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Poland, Latvia—and Stalin regularly received reports, culled from decoded Japanese military attaché communications, of a possible Japanese attack on the USSR. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, of the Abwehr (German military intelligence), had met the Japanese military attaché to Berlin (Hiroshi Ōshima) in 1936, and the next year he met an intelligence official of the Finnish general staff (Antero Svensson). The Abwehr also extended financial assistance to Estonian intelligence.²⁹⁵ Of course, all the powers in the interwar period were targeted by foreign espionage. The international situation in the 1930s posed a threat to every great power, but only one embarked on a wholesale domestic slaughter. Nazi Germany was crawling with spies, especially spies working on behalf of the Soviet Union, but again, Hitler did not put to death his own officials and intelligence officers.²⁹⁶ Stalin had even his policy critics charged as “spies.”

Stalin did not invent the hoary trope of the “foreign hand” (externally assisted conspiracy to undermine the state). Allegations of a foreign hand at court had contributed mightily to the erosion of Nicholas II’s legitimacy during the Great War; Kerensky, nearly successfully, had leveled the foreign hand charge against Lenin and the Bolsheviks. It was a device straight out of the authoritarian handbook, playing to patriotic stirrings and insecurities—in Russia’s case, of a complex geography—and it was powerfully reinforced by the Bolshevik division of the world into two hostile camps, socialism and capitalism. For years, Stalin had been driving Soviet propagandists and the NKVD to find the foreign hand behind everything: in the 1928 Shakhty trial (French and German agents), in Ukrainian resistance to collectivization (Polish agents, relying on the British and the French), in the 1932 rebellion in the satellite Mongolia (Japanese agents), in the Kirov murder (German agents, even as he had discouraged investigation of the actual leads to the Latvian and German consulates). But 1937–38 was different.

Nothing had prepared the Soviet populace for the explosion of spy mania that now engulfed the country.²⁹⁷ Although Stalin’s November 1934 instructions to the Mongols had stated that critics needed to be charged as spies, and his politburo resolution of September 29, 1936, had insisted that the Zinoviev-Trotskyite conspirators be seen as “intelligence agents, spies, subversives, and wreckers of the fascist bourgeoisie,” in the second half of 1936—during the outbreak of the Spanish civil war and Stalin’s decision to intervene there militarily—there had been no full-throated public campaign of mass charges of spying. Then, under Stalin’s tutelage, Pravda carried a sensational article (May 4, 1937) across three pages, “On Certain Cunning Techniques of Recruitment by Foreign Intelligence,” which Stalin had edited and which was widely reprinted and assigned for discussion at meetings throughout the country. It asserted that inside the USSR, Nazi Germany possessed “a reserve that could be called upon for espionage work.”²⁹⁸ Stalin had inserted a page of material into the draft about an alleged incident concerning a Soviet employee in Japan who had met a female “aristocrat” in a restaurant. Once, during their rendezvous, a Japanese in military uniform arrived to announce he was the woman’s husband. Another Japanese man appeared and proposed that he could quiet the scandal by having the Soviet man sign a document promising to inform the Japanese about internal Soviet affairs. The truce maker, Stalin explained, was a Japanese intelligence operative. The Soviet man had unwittingly been recruited to spy for Japan. It could happen.²⁹⁹

But the number of accused spies was just too large for such a person-by-person recruitment. In 1935–36, the NKVD had arrested 9,965 foreign “spies.” (By comparison, in France, 300 foreign passport holders and 48 French nationals were noted as suspected enemy agents in 1936.) Then, in 1937–38, the NKVD arrested 265,039 spies.³⁰⁰ This included nearly 19,000 just for Latvia and 7,800 just for Romania. Who exactly could be running more than a quarter million spies among the Soviet populace? Who gave them their directives? To whom did they report? Stalin did not publicly address this issue of spy handlers, and it is easy to see why.

The small number of ordinary citizen foreign passport holders who remained resident in the USSR were registered and monitored.³⁰¹ As for accredited representatives of foreign governments, they numbered 1,129 at embassies in Moscow and some 400 at twenty-four consulates.³⁰² This foreign diplomatic community—as Stalin knew better than anyone—was under the most intense surveillance. The sixty-two employees of the German embassy in Moscow (as of 1938) were kept under unrelenting watch and nearly total isolation from the Soviet public.³⁰³ Even leaving aside the fact that every Soviet inhabitant knew the inevitable consequences of any contact with foreigners, let alone with foreign diplomatic personnel, the idea that these few German employees could have recruited and handled 39,000 accused German spies among the Soviet populace in 1937–38 beggars belief. True, Germany also had a few foreign consulates, but Stalin, in a tit for tat, had forced one German mission after another to close: Leningrad, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, Novosibirsk.³⁰⁴ By spring 1938, not just Germany, but Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Britain, and Afghanistan had all lost their consulates in the Soviet Union.

Not surprisingly, internal German foreign ministry records indicate that of the approximately 1,100 German nationals who would be arrested for intelligence operations in the USSR from 1936 to 1941, just two had any such involvement, and one vanished without trace.³⁰⁵ The head of the security agency for the Wehrmacht admitted internally in 1938 that he lacked a firm idea of how Soviet military intelligence worked.³⁰⁶

The number of accused Polish spies was even greater than the number of German ones. In fact, Polish sabotage activities on Soviet territory had not suddenly increased; they had been going on, closely watched and interdicted, for a long time. Until 1937, Poland maintained consulates in Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, Kiev, Minsk, and Tiflis, but Poland managed to hold on to just two (Kiev, Minsk), in exchange for which the Soviet Union kept one in Poland (Lwów) and one in the Free City of Danzig (Gdańsk).³⁰⁷ Stalin’s counterintelligence measures apparently induced the Polish embassy and consulates on Soviet territory to desist from recruiting agents among Soviet ethnic Poles (who mostly did not live in Moscow, Kiev, or Minsk in any case).³⁰⁸ But the arrest of Polish “spies” among Soviet inhabitants continued, exceeding 101,000 by the end of 1938, a spectacularly improbable workload for one embassy and two consulates.

Despite the mass arrests, Stalin had no idea whether he was catching any real foreign spies or, if he was, what harm they might have caused—and what is more, he made virtually no effort to find out. Japanese army intelligence did send small numbers of White Russian émigrés and Koreans across the barely marked frontiers to recruit or bribe the disaffected among the Soviet population.³⁰⁹ But the NKVD arrested nearly 53,000 Soviet inhabitants as agents of Japan in 1937–38. All “testimony” about their espionage and sabotage was either suggested or outright written by their interrogators, in the pursuit of arrest quotas. “Spies” and “terrorists” captured at or near border crossings were lumped together with contrabandists (ordinary people engaged in petty trade).³¹⁰ Dubiously, the country for which an arrested Soviet inhabitant was allegedly engaged in acts of espionage and sabotage was often altered at the very last minute. If a person had an ethnic Polish wife or relative, he or she would usually be charged as a Polish spy, unless all of a sudden the accused was needed for a “case” involving German spies (or Japanese, or Romanian, and so on).³¹¹ To be sure, an excuse for such sloppiness was at the ready: better to chop off some innocent heads than to let even one spy go free. War was coming. But then, as we shall see, in 1939 and 1940—after a new world war had commenced—the NKVD would arrest a measly 7,620 spies, a quarter million fewer than in 1937–38.³¹²

The NKVD’s egregious violation of elementary rules of counterintelligence craft in the treatment of alleged spies in 1937–38 mattered only if Stalin was primarily pursuing foreign agents in the conventional sense, meaning people who committed specific acts. But he had called every foreigner in the Soviet Union ipso facto a spy, beginning with humanitarian relief workers during the first Soviet famine of 1921–23.³¹³ For him, “spying” seems to have encompassed an extraordinarily wide variety of activities, including clipping newspapers.³¹⁴ At closed party meetings and sessions in the Little Corner, he mostly insisted that those arrested were actual spies engaged in specific acts.³¹⁵ He would tell minions that penetration by foreign spies was increasing, such information would then duly appear in intelligence reports sent to him, and he would cite the reports. At meetings, he scribbled notes about saboteurs, spies, and the like.³¹⁶ Did Stalin, at some level, convince himself that the USSR was crawling with spies and would-be spies ready to act when the opportunity presented itself? Perhaps he did, but his charges of espionage were based not on facts but on a political equation. Kaganovich absorbed Stalin’s way of thinking, remarking at the February–March 1937 plenum that “if they stand for defeat [of the Soviet Union], it’s clear they are spies.”³¹⁷

SYNOPSIS

World history had never before seen such carnage by a regime against itself, as well as its own people—not in the French Revolution, not under Italian fascism or Nazism. Although it was clear to no one at the time, the future bloodbath was latent in Stalin’s policy battles with what he called the right deviation in 1928 and especially 1929, when he took evident pleasure in humiliating Bukharin. It was also manifest in Stalin’s toying with the arrest of Tukhachevsky in 1930, and propelled by the opposition in the party during collectivization and the famine in 1932. It was facilitated by Stalin’s promotion of Yezhov inside the party apparatus, to oversee the NKVD and the reopening of the Kirov assassination case in 1935, followed by arrest waves of Trotskyites in late 1935 and early 1936.³¹⁸ Unsatisfied with the convictions of Zinoviev and Kamenev for creating a “moral atmosphere” conducive to Kirov’s murder, Stalin had insisted that they be directly implicated in the actual deed, and that Trotsky, in foreign exile, be directly implicated, too. From here it was a short step to the incited public hysteria of the first Moscow showcase trial, staged in August 1936, of Zinovievites and Trotskyites, which fixated on a meeting in 1932 when the two tiny, pathetic groupings had attempted to coordinate, and resulted in the executions of Zinoviev and Kamenev.

Stalin drove the process with his desire to break psychologically the loyalists in his inner circle, above all Orjonikidze but also Kaganovich and Voroshilov, and he further intensified it with his desire to counter Trotsky’s condemnatory writings about his betrayal of the revolution and interdict the possibility of a Trotskyite beachhead in Spain under a dissident (non-Stalinist) Marxist party, the POUM, some of whose members had once been associated with Trotsky or continued to admire him. A second trial of “Trotskyites,” in January 1937, was followed by Orjonikidze’s suicide and an unprecedented eleven-day February–March 1937 Central Committee plenum, which included fatal smearing of Bukharin and Yagoda and Stalin’s threat to replace sitting elites wholesale; an early June 1937 special session of the Main Military Council and a mid-June in-camera trial resulting in executions of Tukhachevsky and the military brass; a late June 1937 party plenum outlining a phantasmagorical “Center of Centers”; the launching, in July–August 1937, of “mass operations” with ever-expanding quotas; the annihilation of republic and provincial party machines, of the Comintern, foreign affairs commissariat, foreign intelligence, and military intelligence; the disruption of the industrial economy, including military industry; the August 1937 coup-rampage in Mongolia; some forty provincial showcase trials, mostly in fall 1937, ordered up by central directive; a January 1938 plenum’s concessions to party wailings about NKVD savagery, accompanied by extensions of the mass operations. The third Moscow trial, in March 1938, seemed to mark a public culmination of sorts, but the carnage was far from over.

Mass terror by the regime against its own elites and masses, like collectivization, was both an inherent possibility within the Bolshevik revolutionary project and a choice Stalin alone made—and saw through. Collectivization (a violent conscription of the peasantry to serve the state) and its attendant horrors were necessary to consolidate the Bolshevik project of a political monopoly hell-bent on a noncapitalist modernity (collectivization would not be repudiated after Stalin’s death). The mass terror constituted a gratuitous infliction of phenomenal violence, although for Stalin, in many ways, the party’s recoil at the costs of collectivization precipitated his terror. The best indication that the terror inhered in Bolshevism was the relative ease with which Stalin could foist the bloodbath upon the political police, army, party-state, cultural elites, and indeed the entire country. The best indication of his singular role in doing so was the fact that it blindsided even his intimates. Molotov, no softie, did not see the mass arrests and executions coming (he was still vouching for some former repentant Trotskyites in fall 1936).³¹⁹ “Gradually,” Molotov would explain later in life, “things came to light in a sharp struggle in various areas.”³²⁰ Stalin would have Molotov’s top aides arrested in 1937–38. Orjonikidze, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov—Stalinists all—not only failed to foresee but resisted the wholesale expansion into their spheres of the wrecking-espionage mania, publicly stating that wreckers and spies were few.

There could have been no such terror without the Communist party and its ideology, but there would have been no such terror without Stalin, and his profoundly dark personality, immense strength of will, and political skill.³²¹ At least 383 execution lists signed by him have survived, containing the names of more than 43,000 “enemies of the people,” mostly the highest-level officials and officers. The terror was centrally implemented by Nikolai Yezhov and Mikhail Frinovsky of the NKVD.³²² Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Zhdanov, Andreyev, and Malenkov cosigned the mass sentencing lists prepared for the “politburo,” and traveled as emissaries to multiple locales to pour oil on the flames. Pravda, under the frenzied editorship of Lev Mekhlis—whose deeply tortured soul even Stalin remarked upon—served as an indispensable fulcrum of public direction of the terror. Of those who implemented the terror regionally, among the most rabid proved to be such NKVD operatives as Sergei Mironov (Western Siberia and Mongolia) and Leonid Zakovsky (Leningrad and Moscow). But Stalin relentlessly drove them.³²³ Had he wanted only to break the will of his own inner circle, he could have accomplished that without mass graves. Had he, despite his dictatorial grip, felt a need to subjugate even more the secret police and the military brass, he could have done that with a surgical strike. Had he wanted to force supposedly noncompliant elites to become more obedient, he did not need to have so many sitting officials killed—and then, often, their replacements as well.

Stalin showed no sign that he was in the least tormented by the slaughter—he received an outpouring of furious or grief-stricken letters from wives, mothers, daughters, sons, brothers of the arrested, begging for his intercession to stop the madness, and he ignored them—but he did show awareness of the security consequences of what he was doing.³²⁴ In August 1937, at a large gathering of political workers in the Red Army, he had asked the rapporteur “how Red Army soldiers were reacting to the fact that there were commanders who were trusted, and suddenly criticized, and arrested?” The rapporteur was put on the spot—was the question a provocation? In response, he gently admitted the obvious: doubts were being expressed about the guilt of accused Red Army commanders. Stalin shot back: “Are there facts here of a loss of authority of the party, the authority of the military leadership?” Was it a rhetorical question, even a kind of confession? The despot continued: “Like this: One tries to parse this out, today one turns in so and so, and then they arrest him. God parse it out, whom to believe?” The rapporteur responded: “Comrade Stalin here put the question about whether the authority of the party, the authority of the army, has been undermined. I must say, no.” Stalin interjected: “A little undermined.”³²⁵ He knew.

NONCAUSES

Very few people had come to know Stalin well, and those who did, he confounded. “Speaking about myself, I can say that I knew two Stalins,” Mikoyan would write. “The first, whom I valued a great deal and respected as an old comrade, for the first ten years, and then a completely different person in the later period. . . . I was able to grasp the full measure of Stalin’s dictatorial tendencies and actions only when it was already too late to struggle against him. Orjonikidze and Kirov, with whom I was very close and whose attitudes I understood, ended up in the same position of being deceived by the ‘first’ guise of Stalin.” However self-exculpatory, Mikoyan’s assessment rings true. Kaganovich, late in life, said much the same. “The postwar was a different Stalin,” he remarked. “The prewar, different. Between ’32 and the ’40s, different. Until ’32, completely different. He changed. I saw no fewer than five-six different Stalins.” Khrushchev, too, differentiated an earlier from a later ruler. “In the early 1930s, Stalin was very simple and accessible,” he recalled, but then Stalin changed, for reasons that Khrushchev, who continued to worship him, never figured out.³²⁶

Stalin’s darkening mental disposition has often been attributed to the 1932 protest-suicide of his second wife, Nadya. Some have also pointed to the December 1934 assassination and loss of his rare close friend Sergei Kirov in Leningrad (for which Stalin was blamed). That these events had an outsized emotional impact on him is plausible. One of his bodyguards recalled late in life that Stalin would sit for long periods at Nadya’s grave, in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery. Svetlana, who was six at the time of her mother’s death and kept away from the funeral, asserted that her father never visited the grave, but she, too, insisted that her father never got over Nadya’s death.³²⁷ That said, direct evidence regarding the evolution of Stalin’s psychology remains extremely thin. Moreover, much of the core terror scenario in Stalin’s mind predated 1932, while the mass murders did not follow closely after the 1932 or 1934 events. So, although the assertion that he snapped in 1932 (or 1934) might well be true, it does not solve the riddle of why he launched and saw through such a mass killing several years later.

By far the simplest of all explanations would be to attribute the terror to paranoia, a kind of hallucinatory aria.³²⁸ Stalin suspected the worst of people, and he received an endless stream of reports confirming his suspicions.³²⁹ Never mind that he was the arch-plotter: They were out to get him. Never mind that he was an inveterate liar: They were lying to him, sabotaging his directives, covering up their mistakes. He suspected that the effusive affirmations of his leadership were two-faced, and that officials were privately thinking critical thoughts. Yezhov, like Yagoda before him, dutifully assembled overheard remarks (real or invented), and the despot read them.³³⁰ The prisons, too, were eavesdropped on, and the transcripts delivered to Stalin.³³¹ Stalin was compulsively eager for denunciations (and therefore susceptible to people’s efforts to annihilate rivals), and once he had read a denunciation about someone, he found it difficult to put it out of mind: suspicions had been raised. When informed that someone had bad-mouthed him behind his back, Stalin would undergo a “psychological metamorphosis,” according to Svetlana. “At this point—and this was where his cruel, implacable nature showed itself—the past ceased to exist for him. Years of friendship and fighting side by side in a common cause might as well never have been. . . . ‘So you’ve betrayed me,’ some inner demon would whisper. ‘I don’t even know you anymore.’”³³²

Distrust is the disease of the tyrant. Stalin’s “maniacal suspiciousness” was extreme even by those standards, something he himself would occasionally acknowledge.³³³ And yet, even beyond the fact that none of the psychological diagnoses of him have been based upon direct medical evidence, the emphasis on his paranoia can be overdone. He showed tremendous self-control, rarely raised his voice, rarely displayed anger (and if so, usually with his eyes).³³⁴ At the parades on Red Square, he did not wear a bulletproof vest under his overcoat.³³⁵ He did not employ a double. His chief bodyguard would recall not only that “Stalin did not like it when he was accompanied by security,” but that he would walk the streets of Sochi and greet the crowds, shaking hands. (We have already noted similar behavior in his one joyride on the metro.) Stalin’s obsession over poison and assassination ran deep. But if he was paranoiac, he was also lucidly strategic. The evidence for an extremely high degree of calculation behind the terror is overwhelming.³³⁶

A THEORY AND PRACTICE OF RULE

The terror was not about some imagined Georgian national proclivity to violence, Stalin’s supposed criminal energy, an outgrowth of beatings by his father, a result of the authoritarian snitch culture of the Tiflis seminary, feelings of inadequacy and shame before genuine Bolsheviks, the suicide of his wife, the death of Kirov, or Stalin’s paranoiac streak. It was an outgrowth of his rule.

Stalin’s great conundrum was the state. He studied the art of rule via books rather than contemporary examples, and was conversant with German philosophy (Fichte, Hegel), Russia’s revolutionary tradition (nihilism, the People’s Will, Plekhanov), and the French Revolution (Jacobinism, Robespierre, Thermidor).³³⁷ Machiavelli was known to him via the socialist revolutionary tradition in a way that the Florentine was not for the Nazis. Stalin underlined a variety of passages in his 1869 Russian translation of The Prince (“It is unnatural that the armed should submit to the unarmed”; “Princes may, without dread, be severe in wartime”).³³⁸ He also underlined a passage noting that “Chinggis Khan killed many people, saying, ‘The deaths of the vanquished are necessary for the conquerors’ peace of mind.’”³³⁹ But Stalin never extolled the Mongolian khan, except privately to Mongols, and he had discovered his saying in Vasily Klyuchevsky’s Course of Russian History (1916). Stalin systematically studied works on autocratic rule, such as Vatslav Vorovsky’s On the Nature of Absolutism, in volume 1 of his Works (1933) and Mikhail Olminsky’s The State, Bureaucracy, and Absolutism in the History of Russia, third edition (1925).³⁴⁰ He had become passionately devoted to the study of ancient Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome, marking up Robert Vipper’s Essays on the History of the Roman Empire (originally Berlin, 1923), especially passages on Augustus.³⁴¹ Stalin had taken to studying up on how to be a despot.

Even as his reading had widened, it remained anchored in Marx and Lenin.³⁴² But of the many gaping holes in Marx’s oeuvre, by far the greatest was the relative inattention to the state, and not just in the transition period from capitalism to socialism (and on to communism), but in general—a gap Lenin did not fill.³⁴³ To the extent that Stalin allowed himself rare criticisms of Lenin, it was on the question of the state.³⁴⁴ In his copy of a 1935 reissue of Lenin’s State and Revolution, for example, Stalin had marked the passage about the survival (rather than withering) of the state in the initial stage of a classless society—so on that, Lenin was correct—but when Lenin quoted Engels about the class-oppressive nature of all states, including socialist ones, Stalin wrote in the margin, “No!”³⁴⁵ In his copy of a 1937 reissue of Marx’s The Civil War in France, next to the passage about how all states had a “class character,” Stalin would write, “Not only.”³⁴⁶ But what else, exactly? And what to say about the issue of his personal dictatorship, which was not anticipated in Marxist theory, to put it mildly? In the ideologized Communist context, these questions demanded an answer. Marxism-Leninism did not explain the operation of “bureaucracy,” except as an inherent degeneration that should not have existed in the first place.

Not coincidentally, the Soviet state and its functionaries happened to be the grand theme of Trotsky’s anti-Stalin Marxist writings. Stalin was made to wonder: should he proactively prevent the consolidation of a bureaucratic “class” by deliberately upending it? If so, how would that help the Soviet state manage the economy or the country’s defense? Should he ensure that the revolutionary regime not “degenerate,” as revolutionaries turned into bureaucrats, and instead remove them so that new, younger leaders could come to the fore to regenerate the revolution?³⁴⁷ In the event, Stalin decided to force a radical reinvention of the Soviet elite, in the mold of the young striver he had once been, executing or incarcerating those he deemed to be of a bygone epoch while promoting and nurturing hundreds of thousands of new people.³⁴⁸

Stalin’s carnage made him more preoccupied than ever with identifying and promoting people, to fill the vacant positions in the mammoth and still growing apparatus.³⁴⁹ He blended incited pandemonium and mass murder with an ambitious, people-centric exercise in statecraft. Statecraft may seem a bizarrely incongruous framework for understanding the mass murder of one’s own people. To be clear, the challenges of running and conceptualizing the state under socialism did not cause the terror. His obsessions with criticism of collectivization, Trotsky, and the independence of his own inner circle were the key drivers. Still, the challenges of the state’s operation and personnel were the context in which Stalin acted. He apparently hoped that younger, more energetic, and—ultimately—better-educated functionaries would better spur economic development, because of dynamism and superior political consciousness. Those who had been through the trials of revolution, collectivization, and industrialization were exhausted, morally and politically, susceptible to temptation, whether through blandishments proffered by foreign agents or the indulgence of the high life. Their replacements, no less significantly, would all be beholden to Stalin utterly.³⁵⁰

This went far beyond patronage. Instinctively didactic, Stalin was at heart a pedagogue. A critical core of his inner being consisted of an ethos and practice of self-improvement, a result of his initial leap at the Gori school, studies at the seminary, discovery of Marxism, path into punditry, and triumph over the intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals atop the party. Stalin “worked very hard to improve himself,” Molotov, the longest close observer, would later recall.³⁵¹ In turn, the advancement of new people to high positions, and their personal growth while in those positions, became defining elements in his self-conception as the leader who opened opportunity to them. Young cadres, he argued, could lead by mastering Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy and the ins and outs of technology. He latched on to younger people, those who represented the future, products of the soil and the shop floor, as well as of the evening technical and party courses, bootstrapping just as he had and in need of mentoring. The terror enabled him to play the role of teacher to a populous new generation of functionaries, a fundamental trait of his persona and of his conception of rule. He directed showcase trials, the content of confessions extracted even in the absence of trials, and newspaper reportage to tell stories and teach lessons.

All the while, Stalin purposefully ratcheted up fear to strengthen political control and mobilize the entire country to a state of high tension, a technique of rule undergirded by his connect-the-dots theory of party opposition to forced collectivization leading inexorably to a putsch on behalf of foreign powers—it was at once ludicrous and logical, and he repeated it over and over again, in public and in private. “In the face of the danger of military attack,” he was quoted as saying in a 1938 book on “defense dramaturgy,” by the theater critic Zinaida Chalaya, “our entire people must be kept in the condition of mobilization readiness, so that no ‘accident’ or tricks by our external enemies could catch us off guard.”³⁵² Stalin worked tirelessly to put the country in the grip of fear, supposedly for its own benefit.

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NO ONE HAD TALKED more about the coming war than Stalin, as he drove the country’s military buildup, but then he attacked all the institutions critical for a war effort, and not just the armed forces. In the foreign affairs commissariat, at least one third of all staff would be either executed or imprisoned, including nearly two thirds of the upper echelons.³⁵³ Soviet trade representatives abroad were also destroyed en masse, absurdly accused of embezzling and funneling hundreds of thousands of rubles to Trotsky and Sedov, even as NKVD foreign intelligence’s agent in Paris lent Trotsky’s son in Paris sums of 10 to 15 francs that he had trouble paying back.³⁵⁴ In NKVD foreign intelligence, there would be nearly 100 arrests in 1937–38, including at least a dozen station chiefs abroad; in Berlin, Stalin cleaned house, arresting nearly every NKVD operative there. Military intelligence fared still worse, losing 182 operational staff to arrests in 1937–38. “You are aware that, in essence, there is no intelligence gathering,” the head of the political administration in Soviet military intelligence reported to Mekhlis in 1938. “We have no military attaché in America, Japan, England, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Finland, Iran, Turkey, that is, in almost every major country.”^{355, 356} For 127 consecutive days in 1938, Stalin did not receive any information whatsoever from NKVD foreign intelligence.

Stalin’s terror, not born of any fundamental crisis, caused multiple crises. Many officials who remained at large yearned for an end to the mass arrests, because they feared not just for themselves but for the country.³⁵⁷ People at home and abroad who had not questioned Stalin’s rule before now did so.³⁵⁸ Would he come to see the scope of his damage? Would the “Center of Centers” operating out of the Little Corner just keep framing and murdering people indefinitely?