Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

CHAPTER 9 MISSING PIECE

Beria sat in the presidium. Some of the speakers praised him highly, and then everyone stood up and clapped. Beria clapped, too. . . . I was prepared for the applause at every mention of Stalin’s name and knew that if it came at the end of a speech, everyone rose to their feet. But now I was taken by surprise—who was this Beria?

ILYA EHRENBURG, Tbilisi, December 1937, 750th anniversary of Shota Rustaveli’s Georgian epic poem, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin¹

I exalted him for being unafraid to purge the party and thereby to unify it.

NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV on Stalin²

DICTATORIAL POWER IS NEVER EFFICIENT, all-knowing, and all-controlling; it shows its strength by violently suppressing any hint of alternatives but is otherwise brutally inefficient. Stalin’s conveyor-belt arrests and executions targeting enemies, however, generated not discipline and security, but disorder and insecurity. In the Kolyma gold-mining camps, productivity per prisoner, near the best in the Gulag, was dropping precipitously. Escapees from the bulging Karaganda camp complex were taking up residence in Alma-Ata, the Kazakhstan capital. Right in central Moscow, in April 1938, a mass protest broke out at the overflowing Taganka prison when thousands of inmates repudiated their torture-extracted testimony en masse; Yezhov and Frinovsky hurtled over to Moscow province NKVD offices to demand resolute countermeasures, deathly afraid that any bit of negative information might reach the Little Corner. (Rumors of the prison unrest were already sweeping Moscow.)³ Then there was the matter of the NKVD’s sheer sprawl. By spring 1938, despite mass arrests of police personnel, the ranks had swelled to a gargantuan 1 million. This included 54,000 in state security (GUGB) proper, both central and regional, which was more than double the number before the terror had started; 259,000 border guards and internal troops; 195,000 militia or ordinary police; 125,000 railroad and road police; and 132,000 who manned the far-flung points of the Gulag archipelago, with its 2 million inmates (even after all the executions).⁴ Simply directing this huge state within the state was an urgent imperative. An overwhelmed Yezhov, getting drunk in the daytime with top staffers in his Lubyanka office, would drive out to Lefortovo to beat up prisoners during “interrogations,” as Stalin knew.⁵ Everyone who came into contact with the secret police chief could see his physical deterioration. Yezhov’s sickly pallor, publicly attributed to an attempted poisoning, had been divulged at the March 1938 Bukharin-Rykov-Yagoda trial, which prompted naïve or careerist rank-and-file party loyalists to write to him “to take care.”

A flow of petitions warned Stalin that the NKVD was engaged in a vast liquidation of loyal Soviet people. His initial response to the NKVD’s faltering operations and legitimacy was to concurrently appoint Yezhov commissar of water transport, on April 8, 1938. The appointment made a certain sense, in that water transport, which stood second after railways in carrying freight, supplied a large number of the NKVD’s Gulag camps and was poorly performing and needed help.⁶ But Yezhov had never worked in water transport, and he was still supposed to be shouldering the responsibilities of a Central Committee secretary, on top of the NKVD. Stalin’s pressure on him to maintain the domestic terror at fever pitch did not abate.⁷ Such a workload would have crushed any official, let alone a neurasthenic and alcoholic. Stalin, therefore, could scarcely have expected Yezhov to set an additional commissariat right. Rather, the water appointment appears to have constituted a typically twisted maneuver in the despot’s final destruction of Yezhov, just as Yagoda’s final destruction had been preceded by his transfer to another commissariat—communications—where Yagoda had served another half a year before his arrest. The menacing moves against Yezhov were similarly ponderous, indirect.

On April 30, 1938, a top Yezhov deputy at the NKVD, Zakovsky, was arrested. He had been a Stalin favorite, the operative who had helped oversee Stalin’s rare trip to the interior of the country (Siberia, in 1928), and had been appointed to exact retribution in Leningrad in the aftermath of Kirov’s assassination. At the January 24, 1938, Moscow meeting of all top NKVD officials, Zakovsky’s maniacal work had been praised to the skies, especially his high percentage of extracted confessions, which had brought a promotion to the central NKVD in Moscow.⁸ (Zakovsky was said to have boasted that he could make Karl Marx confess to being Bismarck’s agent.)⁹ Yezhov, forced to explain Zakovsky’s arrest to other NKVD operatives, averred that his award-winning underling had manufactured “pumped-up cases” and set outrageously high arrest quotas in Leningrad. Of course, these were the very reasons Zakovsky had been named a deputy chief of the USSR NKVD. Yezhov, moreover, told the assembled operatives that the rabid arrests would continue, further reinforcing the impression that Zakovsky had been destroyed against Yezhov’s wishes.¹⁰ A sense of doom began to close in on the secret police. On the eve of Zakovsky’s removal, at Frinovsky’s dacha, Vasily Karutsky, an operative recently promoted to the central NKVD, had “called Zakovsky a traitor and spy and said that he would soon be arrested” to Zakovsky’s face, according to an eyewitness, who added that “Zakovsky, for his part, had called Karutsky a traitor and said that if he himself were arrested, it would only be after Karutsky.”¹¹ Karutsky proved correct: he succeeded Zakovsky at the Moscow NKVD. On the second day on the job, he shot himself.¹²

Clouds darkened over the core Yezhovite group in the NKVD, the “clan” of Yevdokimov, whose collective promotions had facilitated the annihilation of the Yagodaites. Already, back on October 19, 1937, the Yevdokimov loyalist Alexander Kaul had been arrested in the North Caucasus, and although Frinovsky managed to get him transferred to Moscow and placed in the internal prison (to sit quietly without being interrogated), in fall 1937, Pravda reported on the connections of Yevdokimov, then head of the Rostov provincial party machine, to “enemies of the people.” In November 1937, Stalin sent a valued top aide in his personal secretariat, Boris Dvinsky, to Rostov to serve as second secretary. Yezhov and Frinovsky had managed to get their person, Yakov Deich, appointed as NKVD chief in Rostov, but Deich shocked them, forwarding materials on Yevdokimov to Moscow. “Yezhov and Frinovsky . . . were so infuriated at Deich,” Alexander Uspensky, another close Yezhov associate, would testify, that “Frinovsky told me personally he would shoot Deich.”¹³ Yezhov ordered Deich recalled, but the latter’s replacement in the Rostov NKVD also chose to follow Dvinsky’s instructions, not Yezhov’s, and began to arrest more of Yevdokimov’s associates. (Deich was arrested March 29, 1938.) On May 3, Stalin had Yevdokimov transferred to Moscow as the new first deputy at water transport, belatedly fulfilling Yevdokimov’s dream of becoming Yezhov’s deputy, only not at the NKVD. Yevdokimov exhorted Yezhov to rehabilitate him in Stalin’s eyes, and Yezhov sent a “commission” to Rostov (headed by the trusted Litvin) that got the many Yevdokimov associates in prison to repudiate their fabricated testimony against their patron, for what that was worth.¹⁴

Yevdokimov’s removal to Moscow and the accompanying onslaught against his cadres back in Rostov—which betrayed Stalin’s hand—manifestly threatened Yezhov. Reasoning that even higher numbers of “enemies” could win back Stalin’s favor, Yezhov urged Frinovsky to notch up the terror, but even Frinovsky began to drag his feet in implementing Yezhov’s orders.¹⁵ From March through May 1938, Kaganovich, who had previously felt compelled to collude in the execution of most of his own subordinates, now did not even respond to NKVD materials sent to him about the need for further arrests in rail transport; when those arrests were force ordered, Kaganovich sabotaged the NKVD’s dirty work.¹⁶ Yezhov threatened Molotov with arrest, telling him, “In your shoes, Vyacheslav Ivanovich, I would not be posing such questions to the competent organs. Do not forget that a chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, A. I. Rykov, was already in my institution.” But Molotov went to Stalin, who advised him to demand an apology from Yezhov, which Molotov obtained.¹⁷ Yezhov appeared to be a wounded animal, and the other animals were acting accordingly. But a secret police boss without fangs is destabilizing for a regime.

Even a despot has to have someone at the end of the phone or telegraph line to implement directives. Stalin’s glaring need for elementary administrative capacity went well beyond the post of NKVD chief. At the top of the state’s now nineteen commissariats, alongside Molotov (the chairman), only five others had survived: Voroshilov (defense), Kaganovich (rail transport plus heavy industry), Mikoyan (trade), Yezhov (NKVD plus water transport), and Litvinov (foreign affairs). Among the five secretaries of the Central Committee—who were supposed to oversee the vast state—two (Kaganovich and Yezhov) concurrently held two government portfolios each, which left, besides Stalin, just Andrei Zhdanov and Andrei Andreyev to oversee the day-to-day work of personnel and propaganda. And Zhdanov ran the huge Leningrad party organization. A glaring indication of the need for capacity at the top was provided by the fact that at the January 1938 Central Committee plenum, Malenkov had been tasked with the main report, and he was not even a member of the Central Committee. As head of the party department overseeing republic and provincial party machines, he was besieged with requests for cadres to fill the gaping vacancies produced by the arrests. And yet, he himself had to be concerned for his life—after all, Malenkov was Yezhov’s former deputy in that same party department.

Given that Yezhov’s days appeared numbered, that Kaganovich was overcommitted and slightly out of favor (owing partly to his closeness to Orjonikidze), and that Voroshilov was both out of his depth and spiritually smashed, Stalin was in urgent need of another top lieutenant alongside the redoubtable Molotov. The choice would fall upon the despot’s Caucasus compatriot.

Lavrenti Beria had never served in Moscow. Still, he had a supreme achievement in the eyes of Stalin: Beria had crushed not just the Georgian Mensheviks but also the Georgian Bolsheviks. Moreover, he possessed none of the Union-wide standing of that other high-placed Georgian whom he displaced, Orjonikidze. Beria was quick to take offense and blame others, obsessive about perceived slights, and a keeper and settler of scores—just like Stalin. That similarity (or emulation) did not stem primarily from shared cultural proclivities, for although Stalin and Beria were both Georgians (in Beria’s case, a Mingrelian assimilated to Georgia), and both were Russified, countless other Russified Georgians, even among the Bolsheviks, behaved nothing like these two. Rather, both men were products and consummate practitioners of a particular dictatorial system. Each had cultivated patrons in the highest places—Lenin for Stalin; Stalin for Beria—and each had shown an audacity against rivals, evidence of a thirst for power and a profound sense of their own destiny. Beria, unlike almost every other provincial party boss, not only survived the terror in his domain, but ran the terror locally, dictating lines of interrogation, summoning NKVD bosses to party headquarters. No other Soviet region was so dominated by a single figure. “Beria was the absolute-power master of Georgia, and all organizations and agencies, including the NKVD, implemented his demands unquestioningly,” his closest minion, Bogdan “Bakhcho” Kobulov, would testify.¹⁸ Beria ran the Caucasus the way Stalin ran the entire Soviet Union.

Beria would turn out to be the missing piece. The now thirty-nine-year-old was not the only discovery who would fill a void in Stalin’s entourage and the inner regime; there was also a forty-four-year-old up-and-comer named Nikita Khrushchev, who became a core member of the inner circle and, as it turned out, best buddies with Beria. Still, no one encapsulated the evolution of Stalin’s order better than the man he would transfer from Georgia to the Soviet capital in August 1938. And the move would come not a moment too soon. Just before Beria’s transfer, on top of everything else, Stalin would experience his worst crisis since 1932: a very high-level defection from the Soviet Far East to Japan, which was armed to the teeth. In going back to trace Beria’s path upward from Georgia to Moscow during the terror, it will be necessary to visit Ukraine and the Soviet Far East, too. Beria’s move to the capital would reflect the profound changes to Stalin’s regime, and bring its own.

“TURN THE ENEMIES OF SOCIALISM TO ASHES!”

Beria ruled the three-republic South Caucasus Federation—Stalin’s homeland—like a Persian shah.¹⁹ At his well-appointed and beautifully maintained two-story villa in Krtsanisi, on a hilltop outside the Georgian capital, he served grand Sunday luncheons, in large company, of spicy Mingrelian and Georgian specialties for his favored police and party functionaries and their families, whom he invited over from their more modest cottages in the same dacha settlement. Another showcase for Beria’s gifts as host and patron, and a jumping-off point for his ingratiating visits to the southern villas of the shah of shahs (Stalin), was the dacha Beria had built for himself on a raised point above the Black Sea at Gagra. There, Beria was observed to practice photography, excel at volleyball, swim the farthest, and behave especially affably toward children. “Beria attracted everyone back then by his inner power, his ineffable magnetism, the charisma of his personality,” recalled a future daughter-in-law of Anastas Mikoyan, then a little girl, who observed a relaxed Beria at his dachas and his city apartment in 1935–36. “He was not handsome; he wore a pince-nez, which then was a rarity. His look was piercing, hawkish. His leadership, boldness, self-confidence, and pronounced Mingrelian accent stood out.”²⁰

Beria’s takeover of the Caucasus would have been impossible without Stalin’s patronage, but he was no mere satrap. He responded especially energetically to the summons to root out “Trotskyism.” In Georgia, 30 percent of arrested Communists during the 1935–36 party verifications and card exchanges were designated as Trotskyites; by contrast, in Tatarstan, it was 7 percent.²¹ He would make sure to satisfy Stalin, while clearing his own path.

Beria had removed Armenak Abulyan as Armenia’s NKVD chief by promoting him to second deputy commissar of the South Caucasus secret police; Abulyan was then said to have died in a car accident (early 1935).²² Mircafar Bagirov, party boss of Azerbaijan (since December 1933), was Beria’s man, but Aghasi Khanjyan, party boss in Armenia (since 1930), was not. Beria appointed Georgi Tsaturov deputy NKVD chief in Armenia and, at supper in his apartment, tasked him with gathering compromising materials. “It is necessary to remove Khanjyan, but whoever I’ve sent has failed; it’s necessary to do this skillfully,” Beria instructed. As Tsaturov and those he recruited in Yerevan collected and manufactured the slander, Beria duplicitously distanced himself from the efforts: once, when Khanjyan was in Beria’s office and Tsaturov came by, Beria made a show of cursing his minion for giving Khanjyan trouble. “He’s a big-time figure and he must be safeguarded,” Beria said, as if Tsaturov were a rogue.²³ At South Caucasus party meetings, too, Beria simulated magnanimity, pointing out that he preferred that Khanjyan correct his own mistakes (thereby reminding everyone that there were mistakes). These were ruses well known from Stalin’s repertoire, and indeed the repertoire of any practicing authoritarian, though Beria excelled at them.

Nerses (Nersik) Stepanyan (b. 1898), the director of Armenia’s Institute of Marxism-Leninism, and therefore Khanjyan’s subordinate, secretly wrote a memoir aimed at correcting the falsehoods of Beria’s claim to fame (his On the History of the Bolshevik Organization in the South Caucasus).²⁴ The NKVD arrested Stepanyan (May 21, 1936) as a “counterrevolutionary nationalist-Trotskyite,” and Beria summoned a meeting of the South Caucasus party bureau on July 9 in Tiflis, now officially called by its Georgian name, Tbilisi. Goglidze, followed by Bagirov and Beria, assailed the “Armenian Central Committee” (meaning Khanjyan) for shielding the enemy Stepanyan and his “group.”²⁵ When the session concluded, around 5:30 p.m., Khanjyan went to the offices maintained by the Armenian republic in Tbilisi. His two bodyguards testified that they found him in his room between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. with a bullet wound to the head. The Tbilisi ambulance service registered a call at 9:25 p.m. Khanjyan was delivered to the emergency room at 10:25. He underwent “an operation” around 1:30 a.m. (July 10) but was pronounced dead, with a death date of July 9.²⁶

Yet another official inconvenient to Beria was dead. Some Caucasus officials, as well as Armenian émigrés, many of whom viewed Khanjyan as a patriot, suspected that Beria, in his own office, had shot him in cold blood. But a visiting Moscow party Control Commission sat in the very next room and would have been able to hear and then observe such an incident. In fact, Khanjyan left suicide notes, at least one of which his wife accepted as her husband’s handwriting. Beria was unscrupulous, but more calculating than impulsive. Khanjyan’s removal as party boss of Armenia, in any case, was imminent. The relentless hounding and arrest preparations by Beria’s henchmen were enough to drive someone to shoot himself.²⁷

Beria informed Stalin on the high-frequency phone. The South Caucasus party bureau reassembled on July 10, for six hours, and resolved to telegram Stalin requesting a plenipotentiary to investigate. “The Central Committee,” Stalin replied, “considers it unnecessary to send its own representative to ascertain the circumstances of Khanjyan’s suicide, since in this matter everything is clear and no investigation is required.”²⁸ Beria went on the offensive. On July 11, 1936, Dawn of the East announced that Khanjyan had taken his own life and labeled the act “a manifestation of cowardice especially unworthy of a leader of a party organization,” while further noting that Khanjyan had “committed errors, demonstrating insufficient vigilance in the case of the discovery of nationalist, counterrevolutionary, and Trotskyite groups,” and suffered from “a severe form of tuberculosis.”²⁹ Khanjyan was buried without public ceremony under a cement grave in Yerevan; Armenian officials were swept up in arrests, some while allegedly trying to escape into Iran.³⁰ On July 20, Dawn of the East, under Beria’s byline, carried a vicious attack on Stepanyan that announced the unmasking of “Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorist groups” in Tbilisi, Baku, and Yerevan. “A Communist who shows conciliation and rotten liberalism in the face of double-dealing,” Beria wrote, “commits the greatest crime before the party, Soviet power, and our motherland.”³¹

On August 19, 1936, the opening day of the first public trial in Moscow of Trotskyites, Pravda reprinted Beria’s article—“Turn the Enemies of Socialism to Ashes!” This was a lightning-bolt Kremlinological signal of his standing. Between 1935 and 1938, Beria would have eight articles printed in Pravda, unheard of for a provincial party secretary.³²

Stalin’s anti-Trotskyite campaign arrived like a gift for Beria. In Armenia in September 1936, a Beria tool (Amatouni Amatouni) was duly advanced from second secretary to party boss. It was the next month that Beria, on Stalin’s orders, arrested Orjonikidze’s brother Papuliya in Tbilisi—sweet revenge: no more “Dear Sergo” groveling.³³ The Mingrelian could further consolidate his grip over the Caucasus. Of course, just about every local party boss interpreted the eruption of the enemy campaign self-servingly: scores to be settled, kudos to be won, apartments and dachas to be freed up and doled out as patronage. But across the Union, of the sixty-five top bosses, few would survive: Zhdanov (Leningrad), Khrushchev (Moscow, Ukraine), Beria (Georgia), and his patron turned client, Bagirov (Azerbaijan). Both of the latter were career secret police officials running party machines.

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

Stalin liked to needle Beria—who prided himself on being a sportsman—about how the diminutive “Deaf One,” Nestor Lakoba, was a superior rifle shot and billiards player. Stalin would take Lakoba in his car, for all to see, and make Beria ride separately. At a speech in 1936 in Sukhum, Lakoba could say, rightfully, “The Supreme Leader of our party, the Supreme Leader of the working masses of the whole world, this supreme person, this extraordinary comrade, the friend of all toilers, Comrade Stalin, visits us almost every year.”³⁴ Beria constantly connived to trip Lakoba up.³⁵ On a Sunday afternoon in spring 1936, Beria showed up unannounced at the Lakoba compound in Sukhum, 180 miles from Tbilisi, with his wife, Nino, as if it were a social visit, and started asking questions based on a denunciation from the father of a woman (Adile) who said she had been kidnapped, mountain style, as a teenage bride (she married one of the five brothers of Lakoba’s wife, Sarie).³⁶ Another time, when Stalin and Beria were guests in Lakoba’s native village and Sarie prepared the food, Beria switched his plate with Stalin’s at the last minute, as if she might try to poison the leader.³⁷

Lakoba had chased Alexei Agrba, secret police plenipotentiary, from Abkhazia, but Beria, using his power as head of the South Caucasus party committee, appointed Agrba first secretary of the Abkhazia provincial party committee, which gave Lakoba endless grief. During the summer of the anti-Trotskyite campaign and Spanish intervention in 1936, Stalin, on holiday in Sochi, visited his new dacha at Myussera, in Abkhazia, specially built by Lakoba, but the latter was nowhere to be seen. Stalin had his staff inquire, and Lakoba answered that Agrba had not granted him permission to exit the Abkhaz capital and that Stalin had instructed him (Lakoba) to submit to party discipline. Stalin granted permission, and directed Beria to recall Agrba to Tbilisi.³⁸ But on August 17, 1936, Beria managed to get Stalin to have the USSR central executive committee “Georgify” toponyms in Abkhazia: Sukhum officially became Sukhumi, a blow for Lakoba, who had refused even to distribute vehicle license plates in Abkhazia because they said “Georgia.”

Lakoba and Sarie attended the 8th Congress of Soviets in Moscow (November 25–December 5, 1936). Hearsay indicates that Stalin, as per usual, sent a car to the Metropole Hotel to fetch them for dinner and that, in connection with the new Soviet constitution, Lakoba lobbied Stalin to transfer Abkhazia to the Krasnodar region of the RSFSR, out of Georgia, while bitterly complaining, as ever, about Beria.³⁹ Be that as it may, Beria summoned Lakoba to stand before the Georgian “party active,” scheduled for December 28, 1936, and Lakoba set out from Sukhumi on December 26 and checked into Tbilisi’s Hotel Orient, on Rustaveli Prospect.⁴⁰ The next day, he shared a meal (either lunch or supper; the sources conflict) with Beria and Nino at Beria’s home or, according to Lakoba’s driver and bodyguard Davlet Kandalia, at the home of the founder of a Georgian dance ensemble (Sukhishvili). After the meal, Lakoba attended a December 27 performance of the first Georgian ballet, Mzechabuki (“Sun-Like Youth”), composed by Andria Balanchivadze (brother of George Balanchine), at the Tbilisi’s National Opera and Ballet Theater. Lakoba suddenly fell ill and, after the first act, returned just down the street to the Orient. There he died, at 4:20 a.m. (December 28).⁴¹

After Beria and his goons arrived on the scene, a doctor diagnosed a heart attack.⁴² Lakoba had blood problems and was thought to be taking anticoagulants. A year-old confidential medical report from the Kremlin hospital, in Moscow (Vozdvizhenka, 6), had diagnosed him with flu and inflamed erysipelas in the area of the left auricle, which had spread to the nearby parts of the ear and the upper part of the neck, with chronic festering leading to his severe hearing reduction. It also found arteriosclerosis and cardiosclerosis (induration of the heart).⁴³ Still, whispers about a poisoning emerged immediately. Lakoba was forty-three years old.

Beria buried Lakoba with full honors, doubtless after consultation with the Little Corner. The body was brought to Abkhazia on December 29, 1936, and lay in state in Sukhumi’s State Drama Theater. The Abkhaz provincial party committee bureau resolved to name the Sukhumi hydroelectric station, then under construction, after him and to establish ten student stipends in his name at the Sukhumi Pedagogical Institute, publishing word in the press, and to give his Lincoln automobile and a dacha under construction to his family.⁴⁴ Two days later, 13,000 people attended a state funeral; Beria served as a pallbearer. Lakoba was placed in a special crypt in the city’s botanical garden.⁴⁵ Stalin did not send condolences. An NKVD squad from Tbilisi was rifling the Abkhaz archives. Already in January 1937, Lakoba’s portraits began to be removed. His grave was moved outside the city proper, to the Mikhailov Cemetery; the prominent crypt was destroyed. Some whispered that Lakoba’s entire innards—stomach, kidneys, brains, and even larynx—had been removed, and his body burned.⁴⁶ Lakoba’s widow went to Moscow (staying with another recent widow, Zinaida Orjonikidze), but failed to gain an audience with Stalin.

Lakoba’s suspicious death, after Khanjyan’s suicide, enhanced Beria’s mystique and power. Lakoba had been Stalin’s close friend (and midwifed Beria’s introduction to him), but Stalin appears not to have investigated Beria’s plausible role in Lakoba’s death, instead colluding in Beria’s conversion of the genuinely popular Lakoba into a posthumous enemy of the people. He was accused of national deviation, having allowed Trotsky “to escape” into exile in Turkey in 1929, and of having plotted to kill Stalin and Beria. (A man who showed off his marksmanship in Stalin’s presence during target practice with his Brauning scarcely needed to “plot” an assassination.) Beria would now systematically annihilate Lakoba’s kin and associates.⁴⁷ Agrba, the Beria creature, was reinstalled as Abkhazia’s party boss.⁴⁸

POWERS OF EXTRADITION

Beria had to request Central Committee authorization not just for appointments of province, county, and city party officials, but also factory directors and candidates for local soviet elections.⁴⁹ Orgburo directives (of October 15 and December 26, 1936) now required regional party machines to submit six reports a year on their activities, an effort to enforce compliance with central directives, a Stalin obsession. Beria made sure that the Georgian party complied, submitting its full summary report for 1936 after making lower-level organizations do the same, but he used the occasion to point out to Stalin (February 17, 1937) that the new paper mandates had not released locals from submitting other required detailed reports or statistical summaries to the orgburo and various Central Committee departments. “The Central Committee of the Communist party of Georgia is not certain that such reporting requirements could bring any kind of benefit,” Beria wrote. “Instead of the utterly necessary permanent living link between lower and upper party organizations, a written paper link is established, which takes up a lot of party organizations’ time.” The businesslike critique and accompanying illustrations were spot-on, yet astonishing. Stalin chose not to discipline the impudence.⁵⁰

Beria incarnated the terror-facilitated ascendancy of the NKVD vis-à-vis the party, but he had achieved that status years before. During stays in Moscow, he had gotten his own apartment in the NKVD residences on Troitsk Alley (near Samotyochnaya Square), where raucous drinking, singing, dancing, and women were observed in abundance, and which he retained after switching to the party apparatus.⁵¹ Yagoda had continued to send a car from the central NKVD garage to pick up the Caucasus party boss. When Yagoda was arrested, Beria easily maneuvered the changeover to Yezhov.⁵² He had not worked for Yagoda over the course of many years, and when Yezhov had taken a holiday at Georgia’s Abastumani sanatorium, Beria had played the consummate host; Yezhov reciprocated on Beria’s visits to Moscow.⁵³ Yezhov knew that Beria received invitations to the Near Dacha. At the February–March 1937 plenum in Moscow, Beria had to wait until one of the last speaking slots (morning session on March 4). He followed his winning approach of stating, multiple times, how comrade Stalin was correct.⁵⁴

After the plenum, on March 20, Mekhlis, at Pravda, nipped at Beria’s heels with a front-page article, “A Serious Warning to the Southern Regions,” which mentioned Beria, among others, by name. In April 1937, the South Caucasus party committee was disbanded, which nominally sliced Beria’s bailiwick down to just Georgia. In fact, he would extend his reach even beyond the Caucasus.

Beria had long detested how old Caucasus party comrades who despised him would gather at Orjonikidze’s Kremlin apartment or dacha near Moscow (first in Volynskoe, then at Sosnovka) to badmouth him—another circumstance Beria shared with Stalin. But seizing the opportunity afforded by the terror, Beria had his Caucasus operative Vsevolod Merkulov go after the former Caucasus higher-ups now outside the region.⁵⁵ Levan Gogoberidze was arrested in the Azov region and extradited to Beria’s custody. Bogdan Kobulov, the Beria protégé who headed the Georgian NKVD, reported in November 1936 that Gogoberidze had confessed to disseminating “counterrevolutionary and slanderous fabrications about the past of Comrade Beria . . . on the basis of what he had heard from Comrade Orjonikidze.”⁵⁶ Mamiya Orakhelashvili, whom Beria had replaced as South Caucasus party boss and who had received sanctuary in Moscow as deputy director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, thanks to Orjonikidze, was exiled to Astrakhan in April 1937, several weeks after Orjonikidze’s suicide; then he was arrested (June 26, 1937) and extradited to Beria. “I learned,” Orakhelashvili was said to have testified, “that Sergo Orjonikidze had been joined by Levan Gogoberidze, Pyotr Anishvili, and Nestor Lakoba in waging the most active struggle against the secretary of the Communist party of Georgia, Lavrenti Beria, deliberately spreading slanderous and disturbing fabrications about him.”⁵⁷

Everywhere else, associates who had scattered to other provinces were rounded up and tortured to incriminate sitting provincial party bosses. Beria alone enjoyed powers of extradition, partly because of his own audacity, partly owing to the circumstance that his enemies were also Stalin’s enemies. Orjonikidze stood at the center of the Stalin-Beria bond. Orakhelashvili further testified that “I made slanderous remarks about Stalin as the party’s dictator and I considered his politics to be excessively harsh. In this regard, Sergo Orjonikidze exerted great influence on me; in 1936, when he was talking with me about Stalin’s attitude toward the leaders of the Leningrad opposition at that time (Zinoviev, Kamenev, . . .), he said that, with his extreme cruelty, Stalin was leading the party to a split and in the end would drive the country into a blind alley.”⁵⁸

Beria had even been able to win a tug-of-war with Yezhov. Beria had arrested Polikarp “Budu” Mdivani, an old Stalin nemesis, but “testimony” in Moscow had implicated Mdivani, so Yezhov had forced his extradition to the capital, where he was reinterrogated at Lubyanka and “confessed.”⁵⁹ But Beria evidently lobbied Stalin, for Mdivani was returned to Georgia. On April 12, 1937, Beria sent Stalin protocols of thirteen different interrogation sessions with Mdivani, extracted in Tbilisi’s Metekhi fortress prison (where Stalin had done time under the tsarist regime). The dossier totaled more than 200 pages, and Stalin underlined several passages, then sent copies to Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov.⁶⁰ At Georgia’s 10th Party Congress (May 15–21, 1937), Beria, under a portrait of himself, accused Mdivani and associates of having “chattered about a supposedly ‘unbearable regime,’ . . . about the use of some kind of ‘Chekist’ methods, about how the condition of the toilers in Georgia is worsening.”⁶¹

Beria attempted to draw boundaries around some of his people. “We should fight all forms of counterrevolution; we must at the same time act wisely, in order to avoid falling from one extreme into another,” he told Georgia’s 10th Congress. “A blanket approach to all former nationalists and Trotskyists, some of whom happened by chance to be in their ranks but abandoned Trotskyism a long time ago, can only damage the cause of fighting with real Trotskyites, wreckers and spies.” But pressure came from the redoubtable Mekhlis in the form of an article by Pravda’s Tbilisi correspondent following the last day of the Georgian congress (May 22, 1937), which reported “insufficient criticism and self-criticism” and “not a few Hallelujah speeches.” Again, Beria differentiated himself: on May 27, he telegrammed Stalin about the “incorrect and tendentious” article, insisting that self-criticism had been extensive not only at the Georgian congress but at the lead-up district and city party conferences, whose intent, he wrote, had been “to profoundly and correctly explain to the party masses the decisions of the March [1937] plenum of the Central Committee and the speech of comrade Stalin.”⁶²

Beria even informed Stalin how he had eavesdropped on the communication with editors in Moscow of the said Pravda correspondent, Mikhail Mezenin, as if he were a foreign agent on Georgian soil.⁶³ Branding Pravda’s reportage a concerted effort to “discredit the work of the congress of the Communist party (Bolsheviks) of Georgia,” Beria requested that the Central Committee direct the newspaper to familiarize itself with the materials of the Georgian congress and publish a correct report, enclosing transcripts for Stalin. It is hard to imagine another regional party boss engaging in, let alone getting away with, such pushback. Beria was permitted to publish his own article in Pravda (June 5, 1937) lauding the Georgian congress for its strict adherence to the party line against Trotskyists and other enemies. In the meantime, on May 31, the first of many enemy lists signed by Stalin and Molotov had arrived in Tbilisi, with 139 names under “first category” (execution) and 39 under “second category” (ten years).⁶⁴ This direct order Beria could not resist.

A DESPOT’S PREFERENCES

Beria’s checkered civil-war-era biography continued to incite whispers. Grigory Gofman (known as Kaminsky), the USSR commissar for health, who, in that capacity, had signed the false heart-attack death certificate for Orjonikidze, blurted out at the June 1937 Central Committee plenum, in Moscow, that Beria had served in the bourgeois nationalist Musavat counterintelligence during the occupation of Baku by the British, making Beria an English spy.⁶⁵ Kaminsky, alone among the attendees, had actually been at the Baku party meeting in 1920 at which Beria’s Musavat involvement had been formally discussed—Kaminsky was then the party secretary of Azerbaijan—so he also knew Beria had been exonerated. Some Central Committee members had not even known of the original accusations. The Sverdlov Hall was thunderstruck. “No one spoke up in refutation,” recalled Khrushchev, an eyewitness. “Even Beria did not speak to offer some kind of clarification. Silence.”⁶⁶ Stalin declared a break.

Kaminsky cut an extraordinary figure. Back in Tula, the original center of ancient Russia’s armaments industry, Kaminsky (b. 1895), then a young, gifted Jewish firebrand, had edited the Bolshevik newspaper Kommunar between 1918 and 1920—roughly the same period when Beria served in Musavat bourgeois counterintelligence. The Tula newspaper had begun life with a print run of 300, but Kaminsky raised it above 10,000 by addressing himself to workers and peasants.⁶⁷ “Kommunar with one hand will help toilers organize life, fix the economy, summon to discipline, labor, and public order,” he wrote in the very first issue (July 4, 1918), “and with the other hand it will mercilessly strangle the head of counterrevolution.” Nineteen years later at the plenum, he became the “counterrevolution.” Instead of allowing discussion of Beria’s past, Stalin had Kaminsky arrested and expelled that very day.⁶⁸ The NKVD ransacked his apartment in the grand House on the Embankment and his state dacha in elite Barvikha, carting away the gypsum busts of him made by the renowned sculptor Vera Mukhina, as well as every photograph and piece of paper, including his eleven-year-old daughter’s drawing of their dacha garden.⁶⁹ His two brothers were also arrested. His mother took to standing in the Alexander Garden, outside the Kremlin walls near closed-off Red Square, anticipating that “any minute Iosif Vissarionovich would come out and then she’d tell him her three sons had been arrested and he would take pity on her and release them.”⁷⁰ Kaminsky got “ten years without the right of correspondence,” which meant he was executed.⁷¹

Stalin was accepting “testimony” of fabricated events as real, but he chose to overlook actual deeds in Beria’s life that, in the case of others, were made retroactively fatal. Kaminsky’s outburst at the plenum appears to have precipitated a letter that same day (June 25) to Stalin from the former South Caucasus secret police chief, Ivan Pavlunovsky, whom Beria had pushed aside way back when. A candidate member of the Central Committee, Pavlunovsky (b. 1888) had served in the vital war mobilization department of the heavy industry commissariat (under Orjonikidze). His private letter to Stalin stated that when he had been named head of the South Caucasus GPU, back in 1926, Dzierżyński had called him in and told him that one of his new subordinates, Beria, had worked in Musavat counterintelligence, but that this should not be held against him, because he had done so on a party assignment. Pavlunovsky added that Orjonikidze had told him, “Comrade Stalin is aware of” Beria’s past and that “he [Orjonikidze] had discussed it with Comrade Stalin.”⁷² Pavlunovsky’s private defense of a Stalin favorite was an effort to save his own skin. It failed. He was arrested on June 28, part of Orjonikidze’s “clan” that Stalin was extirpating.⁷³

A MINI SUPREME LEADER

Yet another way Beria imitated Stalin was by setting himself up as sole “patron” of the arts in his domain. He was known to strut into rehearsals and summon actors and actresses for private audiences, and he made the intelligentsia understand that they existed for service to the state and panegyrics to the leadership.⁷⁴ This went fist in glove with a certain artistic preference. Whereas many Georgian Bolsheviks had argued that Shota Rustaveli was a “feudal,” and Ilya Chavchavadze a “bourgeois idealist,” Beria deemed them great national artists and had them published in new editions in huge print runs. He also made sure to assert his control over the Rustaveli Theater, his Bolshoi equivalent. (The Rustaveli’s rococo facility in the city’s heart had been completed in 1901, with money from the Armenian oil magnate Aleksandr Mantashov, at whose concern a young Jughashvili had stirred political trouble.) First, Beria chased the Meyerhold of Georgia, the Rustaveli’s high-handed, turbulent Sandro Akhmeteli (Akhmetelashvili), to Moscow (November 1935); then, when the anti-Trotskyite campaign afforded the opportunity, Beria had Akhmeteli arrested and extradited back to Georgia, charged with creating a terrorist organization in the Rustaveli. When Georgian culture took the spotlight for a ten-day festival, staged in both Leningrad and Moscow (January 4–13, 1937), Beria led the delegation and, at the Kremlin banquet (January 14), sat at the presidium table with Stalin.⁷⁵ Akhmeteli was tortured until paralyzed, and soon executed.⁷⁶

Intimidated intellectuals can be still further cowed. In Beria’s report to Georgia’s 10th Party Congress in May 1937, he had called the arrested Akhmeteli “a fascist wrecker” and warned others still at liberty. “It would not be superfluous for [Paolo] Yashvili, [Konstantin] Gamsakhurdia, [Mikheil] Javakhishvili, and [Nikolo] Mitsishvili and several others to think seriously about their activity,” Beria stated, adding that “Paolo is not being noble. . . . He is over forty now and it is time he came to his senses.”⁷⁷ (The journal Literary Georgia printed the text of Beria’s speech as if it were literature.) Beginning in late May, the Writers’ Union of Georgia held a series of presidium meetings to enforce Beria’s strictures upon itself. Long-standing animosities, jealousies, and infighting born of the intimacy of elite life in the shared courtyards off Tbilisi’s Lermontov and Griboyedov streets, and of fear, fed a mutual denunciation frenzy.⁷⁸ Davit Demetradze, a mediocre critic, excoriated the time before Beria’s reign when the Georgian classic authors Rustaveli and Chavchavadze had been banned, condemning the “leftist” extremism of the Russian and Georgian associations of proletarian writers, but also the European “bourgeois” decadence and carousing of the rightist Blue Horn symbolist poets (Yashvili and Titsian Tabidze) and the Academic Group of the novelist Gamsakhurdia. The latter, in response, noted, “I’ve committed every sin under the sun, but never with hooligans, thieves, and enemies of the people,” which induced laughter.

Stalin had sent Alexander Fadeyev, the writer-functionary, to bring back a personal report from Georgia’s 10th Party Congress. “We wrote what bothered us,” recalled Fadeyev (who had taken along an assistant). “What bothered us was that a bust of Beria already stood on the square, and the Congress members stood every time Lavrenti Pavlovich walked in.” Later, over supper at the Near Dacha, Stalin would broach with Beria the matter of the latter’s cult in Georgia. “Who’s raising the steam in my bath?” the experienced Beria was said to have asked. Stalin evidently hinted that he had gotten his information from writers. By Fadeyev’s account, Stalin let Beria read his personal letter.⁷⁹ If true, that action helped reinforce a permanent enmity between Beria and the head of the Union of Soviet Writers.

In Tbilisi on July 22, 1937, during yet another round called to deliberate Paolo Yashvili’s expulsion, Yashvili smuggled a hunting gun into the building, climbed to the top floor, and shot himself dead, emptying both barrels. Outside, it was raining, and the poet Javakhishvili, in deep shock, was said to have paced the foyer muttering about needing a car to take him home so that his white suit would not be ruined.⁸⁰ Javakhishvili perished, too, as did Tabidze, the translator of Pasternak into Georgian (whom the Russian writer deemed “brilliant, polished, cultured, an amusing talker, European, and good-looking”).⁸¹ The faithful hatchet man Demetradze went down, too, but Gamsakhurdia, the intellectual with perhaps the longest list of transgressions, would survive. University educated in St. Petersburg and Berlin, where he had obtained a doctorate—a distinction Beria craved—Gamsakhurdia was a fellow Mingrelian and shared Beria’s loathing of Orjonikidze and the cultural philistine Pilipe Makharadze. But Gamsakhurdia had been among those deported to Solovki in connection with the 1924 uprising, and after his release and return, Beria had had him rearrested for an affair with a young publishing executive arrested for Trotskyism. But then Beria pardoned him, observing that sexual intercourse with enemies of the people was permitted.⁸²

SUPPLICANT

Beria’s letters to Stalin in 1937 were often preoccupied with economic troubles, thus putting him in the position of supplicant. He was working with Mikoyan to reorganize light industry locally to increase consumer goods, but this required bending the USSR finance commissariat and the state planning commission, as well as the formidable Molotov.⁸³ Beria had written to Stalin and Molotov complaining that only 22,346 of 61,705 allocated automotive tires had been supplied to Georgia, and more than a tenth of what arrived was either unusable or inappropriate for Georgian conditions. That same month, he requested flour and grain beyond his central allocation quotas, citing a failed corn harvest he attributed to unfavorable weather in western Georgia, Abkhazia, and Ajaria, which caused prices to jump. (Beria informed Stalin he had already appealed to Molotov.) Beria wrote to Stalin and Molotov anticipating failures to meet milk supply quotas (revealing that most households in western Georgia had a single cow) and asked that Abkhazia, Ajaria, and western Georgia be exempted from milk supply quotas in 1937–38. He repeated his request for food aid and soon reported long queues for bread in Kutaisi, Sukhumi, Batum, Samtredia, Zestafoni, Chiatura, and Poti.⁸⁴

Beria wrote to Stalin and Molotov about the Tkvib coal mines, which supplied industrial enterprises all across the South Caucasus and were supposed to produce 350,000 tons in 1937, but industrial growth was expected to raise local demand, while problems with the two main seams foreshadowed a decline in 1938 (and an end to all coal extraction by 1942). Back in 1935, the heavy industry commissariat had drawn up plans for exploiting new seams, which by 1939 were supposed to yield 800,000 tons, but neither blueprints nor financing existed even now. Beria asked for a commission to be sent immediately.⁸⁵ Similarly, the USSR Council of People’s Commissars had approved construction of a 12,000-kilowatt hydroelectric station in Tbilisi in 1936, to be up and running before the end of that year, but turbines and boilers had not been delivered. Planned capacity was reduced to 8,000 kilowatts. Leningrad’s Nevsky Factory was to deliver two turbines, but not until December 1937 and March 1938; boilers and other equipment had not been delivered, Beria reported, naming the negligent factory suppliers and predicting that if this continued, electricity shortages in 1937, as in 1936, would require occasional shutdowns of local factories. The completion of several new factories in 1937, moreover, would only exacerbate the energy problems.⁸⁶

Beria lobbied tirelessly over supply challenges. “The Georgian SSR and in particular Tbilisi city are experiencing a severe shortage of industrial goods in the planned assortment, especially cotton and wool fabrics and leather shoes,” he wrote to Stalin and Molotov on July 2, 1937, requesting that Tbilisi be raised to the supply category of Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Minsk and that the USSR light industry commissariat open specialized fabric and leather shops in his republic. On August 15, 1937, he requested extra seed stocks, reporting to Stalin and Molotov that, because of hail covering more than 10,000 hectares, the harvest had failed in west-central Georgia and that collective farmers lacked seeds for the next planting. In late August, floods devastated parts of Georgia, especially South Ossetia, damaging bridges and roads, including the Georgian Military Highway, inducing Beria to request extra emergency funding.⁸⁷

CARNAGE AND TRIUMPH

At some point during that summer of 1937, Beria traveled by car to Sukhumi, accompanied by his driver, a party functionary, and his bodyguard Boris Sokolov, as he did often, but this time they were accosted by three bandits with pistols. Sokolov was said to have covered Beria; the driver and functionary got out of the car. The bandits fled. Sokolov was taken to the hospital with bullet wounds in his hand. Beria’s star rose higher still.⁸⁸

Beria’s winning ways entailed indefatigably seeking, implementing, and reporting on Stalin’s directives (written, oral, or intuited). On July 20, 1937, he wrote to Stalin (“Dear Koba”), enumerating a long list of names of arrested officials, detailing supposed spying and wrecking and when they had established “ties” to the rightists Rykov and Bukharin. The litany encompassed just about every major figure since the mid-1920s in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—except Beria. He quoted the victims testifying against each other: “G. Mgaloblishvili and Sh. Eliava gave expansive testimony about the espionage work of David Kandelaki.” Stalin underlined that and other passages (“The scum and traitor Mamiya Orakhelashvili so far keeps silent. We are afraid to take him firmly in hand, since at every interrogation he faints”). Beria conveyed that 200 people had already been shot and that requests were pending with Yezhov to authorize 250 more arrests. “I think it will be necessary to execute not fewer than 1,000 people, including counterrevolutionary rightists, Trotskyites, spies, diversionaries, wreckers, and so on,” Beria added (Stalin underlined this, too). Nor did Beria forget about the need to arrest Lakoba’s wife and mother (“I ask for your directives”).⁸⁹

Mdivani had refused to incriminate himself publicly and had to be convicted and executed at a one-day “trial” in camera (July 9, 1937).⁹⁰ But Beria vigorously fulfilled Stalin’s Union-wide instructions in summer–fall 1937 to stage public trials and engage “the toilers” with broadcasts on radio and agitators facilitating collective listening. One trial centered on Zekeri Lordkipanidze, an official in Georgia’s Ajarian autonomous republic, who was said to be “linked” to émigré mullahs and the Turkish consulate in Batum and plotting to break off Muslim Ajarisa on Turkey’s behalf.⁹¹ Another trial in Abkhazia’s State Drama Theater, which Beria himself attended, centered on relatives and associates of the deceased Lakoba, a “Trotskyite pygmy.”⁹² The prearranged death sentences were affirmed at collective farm assemblies, precisely in accordance with Stalin’s circular. Concerning another public trial of “rightists” accused of attempting to restore capitalism in eastern Georgia, Beria boasted to Stalin (August 29, 1937) that “the trial played an exceptionally important role in raising the awareness of the broad masses of workers about counterrevolution, sabotage, and subversion by enemies of the people.”⁹³

Stalin nonetheless saw fit to impart a lesson to Beria. On September 8, 1937, the despot sent a cipher to Armenia asserting that affairs were in an egregious state and Trotskyites were finding protection. Armenian party boss Amatouni Amatouni, the Beria creature, and Stepan Akopov, head of the Yerevan city party, had recently been reconfirmed in their posts, but there had been accusations against them of leniency toward enemies, which also raised questions about Armenia’s NKVD chief, Khachik Moughdousi (Astvatsaturov), another Beria creature.⁹⁴ On September 15, Mikoyan and Malenkov arrived in Yerevan with a brigade of Chekists who arrested and tortured Moughdousi and his deputies. That day, at a plenum of the Armenian Central Committee, Malenkov read out Stalin’s recent cipher to Armenia, spurring three days of circular-firing-squad “discussion.” On September 18, seven of the nine members of the Armenian politburo were removed. That same day, Beria issued an order for the arrest of his protégé in Abkhazia, Alexei Agrba, now made into a counterrevolutionary bourgeois nationalist, and arrived in Yerevan.⁹⁵ “To my complete surprise, Beria suddenly appeared,” Mikoyan recalled. “He entered the room as I was speaking at the podium. . . . I assumed Stalin had ordered him to come and arrest me there at the plenum. But I hope I was able to conceal my anxiety and he [Beria] did not notice.”⁹⁶

None of the sweeping expulsions at the Armenian party plenum, which continued to September 23, had been cleared with Beria. With the dissolution of the South Caucasus Federation, Armenia no longer fell under his jurisdiction. Still, he showed up to ensure that another protégé, the former head of the Tbilisi city party organization, Grigory Arutyunov, got named as the new party boss of Armenia. (He de-Russified his name back to Harutyunyan.)⁹⁷ In Sukhumi, too, where he sacrificed his Abkhaz plant, Agrba, Beria installed new clients.⁹⁸

On December 10, 1937, in the Georgian National Theater of Opera and Ballet, Beria delivered a Yezhov “Center of Centers” speech, detailing a vast plot in the Caucasus, linking poets, theater directors, engineers, and functionaries who aimed to spread typhoid in Kakhetia (eastern Georgia), sell off Ajarisa to Turkey, and assassinate him. Georgia’s intelligentsia responded with “prolonged applause.”⁹⁹ Ten days later, Beria celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Cheka, also in the Rustaveli, with his devoted gang (Merkulov, Goglidze, Kobulov, Vladimir Dekanozov, Solomon Milstein). The year culminated in celebrations of what Beria designated, with Stalin’s approval, the 750th anniversary of Shota Rustaveli and his twelfth-century Georgian epic The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, which brought a host of Moscow literati to Tbilisi, including Ilya Ehrenburg, who observed the Stalin-like ovations that Beria received.¹⁰⁰

THE RECKONING

Georgia’s population in 1937 was about 3.4 million, or 2 percent of the Soviet total, but of the approximately 40,000 names on the extant execution lists submitted by Yezhov and signed by Stalin, 3,485 names (9 percent) were from Georgia.¹⁰¹ But the extent to which those names reflected Beria’s input, versus Yezhov’s or Stalin’s, remains unclear. About 21,000 were sentenced by troika in the “mass operations” (three quarters were illiterate or barely literate), while another 3,165 were sentenced by the military collegium, numbers in line with the pattern of Soviet quotas.¹⁰² But Ukraine, with nine times the population of Georgia, had almost forty-five times more people arrested than Georgia did in the national operations (89,700 to 2,100).¹⁰³ Of the 644 Communist party delegates to Georgia’s 10th Party Congress, 425 would be arrested and sentenced either to death or the Gulag—66 percent, a figure in line with the destruction of the delegates to the USSR 17th Party Congress.¹⁰⁴ Scholars assert that one quarter of the Writers’ Union of Georgia was exterminated, a very rough estimate.¹⁰⁵ In a report (October 28, 1937) about the unmasking of a counterrevolutionary espionage group of writers centered around Javakhishvili, Beria noted that sixty-one local NKVD operatives had been arrested.¹⁰⁶ And there was still a year of the bloodbath to go.¹⁰⁷

This horrific picture was less sanguinary than in Armenia, which had one third the population of Georgia but suffered 4,530 executions in 1937–38, out of 8,837 arrests for counterrevolution. (Just one person had been executed in Soviet Armenia in 1936.)¹⁰⁸ Matters were bloodier still in Western Siberia, where at least 300,000 people were executed in 1937–38, about 4 percent of the adult male population there.¹⁰⁹ Proportionally, the slaughterhouse in the Soviet Far East was perhaps greater still.¹¹⁰ Overall, Georgia had neither the softest nor the hardest terror.¹¹¹

Abkhazia, the autonomous republic in Georgia where the ethnic Mingrelian Beria had been born, continued to be his special target.¹¹² Under him, the share of ethnic Abkhaz in the party declined from more than 21 percent to 15 percent. Ethnic Russians declined as well, from 29 to 16 percent, while ethnic Georgians in the Abkhaz party rose from 26 to 48 percent.¹¹³ In the autonomous republic’s overall population, ethnic Abkhaz would shrink from around 28 percent (in 1926) to 18 percent (by 1939), thanks to a state-sponsored mass influx of Georgians, especially Mingrelian settlers. In 1938, when the rest of the USSR’s minority nations were switching from Latin letters to Cyrillic, Beria forced the Abkhaz to switch to the Georgian alphabet.¹¹⁴ Beria had also written to Stalin complaining that the Muslim Ajarians had been designated a separate nation for the 1937 census, arguing that they “shared the same language, territory, economic life, and culture with Georgians” (omitting their Muslim religion) and requested a correcting directive.¹¹⁵ Such nationalization efforts by party bosses in other national republics could have provoked punishment for “national deviation.”

Besides Beria, one of the very few other regional party satraps to survive was his former patron, now protégé, in Azerbaijan, Bagirov, who also wrote to Stalin boasting of his arrests: Trotskyites and ethnic Iranians living in the frontier zones, not to mention anyone who had personally crossed him. More than 10,000 officials would be removed in Azerbaijan in 1937–38.¹¹⁶ Stalin evinced special interest in the arrests in Nakhichevan, an autonomous republic inside Azerbaijan, bordering both Iran and Turkey, calling it “the most dangerous point in the whole South Caucasus.” Bagirov obligingly bloodied it.¹¹⁷ Of course, alongside the party boss, the head of the NKVD in Azerbaijan, Yuvelyan Sumbatov-Topuridze, also a Beria protégé (and a Georgian), ordered his subordinates to overfulfill arrest quotas. At the same time, Bagirov himself looked to be in danger, as Azerbaijan figured in Malenkov’s report to the January 1938 party plenum on mistakes in the expulsions and arrests of Communists. An NKVD commission from Moscow, chaired by a high figure (Mikhail Litvin), came to Baku. But somehow, Bagirov managed to pin the blame on the local NKVD; Sumbatov-Topuridze was the one removed, on January 10, though not arrested (Beria managed to transfer him to the NKVD’s economic administration in Moscow).¹¹⁸ Bagirov, too, survived, likely thanks to Beria.

A FAVORITE FOR UKRAINE

Beria was not the only phenomenon to emerge. Just before Stalin switched Beria to the party from the secret police, Nikita Khrushchev in January 1932 became Kaganovich’s deputy, number two in the huge Moscow party organization, with Kaganovich’s guiding example of a superhuman work ethic to emulate. Khrushchev developed a reputation for bootlicking.¹¹⁹ In January 1934, he became Moscow city party boss, and, in early 1935, concurrently, Moscow provincial party boss, a region equivalent in physical size to England and Wales. One official who knew him explained that, like Kaganovich, Khrushchev “compensated (not always successfully) for gaps in education and cultural development with intuition, improvisation, boldness, and great natural gifts.”¹²⁰

During the terror, in fall 1937, the Moscow party active assembled in the city’s conservatory for a meeting presided over by Kaganovich (by then both heavy industry commissar and railroad commissar) and Khrushchev. Khrushchev spoke passionately, lost his place, mispronounced words, and made people laugh, epitomizing the lower-middle strata who had risen with the revolution and Stalin’s rule. “A large head, a high forehead, light-colored hair, a wide-open smile—all this conveyed the impression of simplicity and goodwill,” recalled one observer, seeing the golden boy for the first time. “And I, and my neighbors, glancing at Khrushchev, experienced not only satisfaction, but a kind of tender emotion: what a fellow, a regular miner, and he had become secretary of the Moscow party committee.”¹²¹

But Iona Yakir, the arrested military officer, had visited Khrushchev at his Moscow dacha, part of the manor house on the estate of the former Moscow governor general, in Novo-Ogaryovo; Yakir had been there on the very eve of his arrest. Yakir’s sister was married to Semyon Korytny, a close Khrushchev colleague in Moscow, who was also arrested in the hospital—the day after Khrushchev had visited him there. “I worried,” Khrushchev recalled. “First, I pitied him. Second, they could come after me, too.” Stalin ordered or allowed Yezhov to arrest two of Khrushchev’s top aides in Moscow, both of whom Khrushchev viewed as exceptionally trustworthy. Stalin divulged to Khrushchev that each had testified against him, claiming that “Khrushchev” was not his real name but a mask, and hinted that such arrests might be the work of enemies who had infiltrated the NKVD, hardly comforting for Khrushchev’s prospects.¹²²

And then there was the biggest black spot: Khrushchev divulged to Kaganovich that, during his student days back in 1923, he had sympathized with Trotsky, information likely to come forward in an anonymous denunciation. Kaganovich “blanched.” “Trotskyism” by his protégé threatened him, too, especially because Kaganovich himself had hints of Trotsky association: he had served in the civil war on the eastern front, among Trotsky supporters, not on the southern front, among Stalin supporters. He advised Khrushchev to inform Stalin immediately. Stalin, in response, told Khrushchev not to worry. The despot’s absolution, Khrushchev would recall, “further strengthened my confidence in Stalin, and gave rise to a feeling of certainty that those who were being arrested really were enemies of the people.”¹²³

Khrushchev was more of a “Trotskyite” than myriad officials who were destroyed for it. If Stalin had suddenly changed his mind, nothing Khrushchev did, or did not do, could have saved his life. Of the thirty-eight highest officials in the Moscow provincial party organization, three survived, two of whom were Kaganovich and Khrushchev. As party boss of Moscow, Khrushchev had to “authorize” arrests, and, in connection with the onset of “mass operations,” he’d had to submit a list of “criminal and kulak elements,” which in his case carried an expansive 41,305 names; he marked 8,500 of them “first category” (execution).¹²⁴

Stalin entrusted his star pupil with a big new assignment. In late January 1938, the Ukraine-born ethnic Russian Khrushchev replaced the ethnic Pole Stanisław Kosior as party boss of Ukraine.¹²⁵ He arrived in Kiev atop a mountain of corpses and took part in new arrest waves. By this time, the Communist party in Ukraine had been reduced by half, to 284,152 members (just 1 percent of the population), and the Ukrainian politburo and Central Committee had essentially ceased to function. Many provinces in Ukraine had no first or second secretaries, and none had a third secretary (with a single exception). Newspapers lacked editors. All eleven Ukrainian politburo members would perish without a trace. No one from the Ukrainian orgburo or the Ukrainian party Control Commission would survive, either. Just two of the sixty-two members and forty candidate members of the Ukrainian Central Committee would manage to escape execution or incarceration.¹²⁶ This state of affairs was not unique to Ukraine, but this was a strategic and industrial region roughly equal in size to France.

At least 160,000 victims, in Moscow and Ukraine, would be arrested under Khrushchev during the terror. Such rough figures should put to rest the notion that Beria was a singular monster, instead of an exceedingly ambitious figure, like Khrushchev, who developed ways to thrive in a monstrous system. It bears further remarking that Khrushchev, while working in Moscow, got along well with the party boss of the Caucasus. “I met Beria, it seems, in 1932,” Khrushchev would recall. “We met to discuss personnel issues. . . . He came with Bagirov” (whom Khrushchev already knew). They talked about an Armenian (Ruben Mkrtichyan, known as Rubenov) who was party boss of a Moscow ward but being recommended for a higher position. “After the first encounter with Beria, I got closer to him,” Khrushchev continued. “I liked Beria—a simple and sharp-witted person. Therefore, at Central Committee plenums, we often sat next to each other, exchanging opinions, scoffing at the orators. I liked Beria so much that in 1934, when I was on holiday in Sochi for the first time, I went to see him in Tiflis.”¹²⁷

Khrushchev, no less than Beria, albeit with a sunnier and more idealistic disposition, earnestly took to the role of pupil under the great teacher. Another Khrushchev subordinate, P. V. Lukashov, was arrested in Ukraine only a few weeks after Khrushchev had received Stalin’s approval to promote him. “For me it was a moral blow,” he recalled. “How could this be? I had seen this man, trusted him, respected him. But what could I do?” Lukashov, miraculously, was released, after which he described for Khrushchev the ways he had been tortured—to testify against Khrushchev. When Khrushchev mentioned Lukashov’s arrest to Stalin, the latter said, “Yes, there are perversions. On me, as well, they’re collecting material.”¹²⁸

During the terror of 1937–38, Khrushchev would turn out to be one of only two people promoted to candidate membership in the politburo, the other being Yezhov. And Khrushchev became the first person elevated to the politburo without prerevolutionary membership in the party.¹²⁹

NKVD DEGRADATION

Ukraine also got a new NKVD boss, Alexander Uspensky, whose overkill in Orenburg province had recommended him.¹³⁰ “In January 1938, I went to a session of the USSR Supreme Soviet in Moscow,” Uspensky testified. “Yezhov unexpectedly summoned me. . . . Yezhov was completely drunk. On the table next to him was a bottle of brandy. Yezhov said to me: Well, are you going to Ukraine?” The appointment took effect on January 25.¹³¹ Uspensky replaced Israel Leplyovsky, who had run the NKVD special department and been the main organizer of the case materials in the annihilation of Tukhachevsky and the Red Army high command, then was demoted to Kiev, where he had exceeded the already sky-high arrest quotas for the republic, but Yezhov complained anyway.¹³² Uspensky, for his part, also had a great deal to make up for: he had been deputy Kremlin commandant under Yagoda, back in fall 1937, when Stalin summoned him to the Little Corner, along with Yezhov, Molotov, and Zhdanov, for thirty minutes and asked point-blank, “Was he honest and not recruited by Yagoda?” Yezhov intervened and said that Uspensky had regularly reported to him at the party apparatus on irregularities in Kremlin security.¹³³ All the same, Yezhov, unsure how that visit to the Little Corner would turn, had instructed his secretariat to prepare a warrant for Uspensky’s arrest. After Stalin relented, Yezhov used Uspensky’s anxious ferocity in Orenburg to try to buttress his own standing.

In the first half of 1938, the NKVD “mass operations” were specially prolonged for the USSR’s two most strategic territories. The Soviet Far East, facing Japan, received the highest new quota; Ukraine, facing Nazi Germany, the second highest.¹³⁴ Uspensky would send Moscow reams of reports about unmasked “plots,” besting the totals of all other regional NKVD chieftains.¹³⁵ First, though, Yezhov went in person to Khrushchev’s and Uspensky’s new bailiwick to ratchet up the carnage. Just before departing for Kiev, on February 12, 1938, he had summoned several operatives. “Yezhov asked us, ‘Who here speaks Ukrainian?’” one participant, Grigory Kobyzev, testified. “It turned out that those present knew almost no Ukrainian. Yezhov asked, ‘How are we going to converse there in Ukraine?’ Frinovsky laughed and loudly said, ‘Over there, there is not a single Ukrainian, just Jew after Jew.’” Yezhov laughed as well. Kobyzev was named head of NKVD personnel in Ukraine and tasked with purging it of Jews. The spectacular ascent, as a result of the Bolshevik revolution, of people from the former Pale of Settlement was entering eclipse. “Oh, cadres, cadres, this is not Ukraine but a whole Birobijan,” Yezhov further remarked, once he and Kobyzev were on-site, alluding to the special Soviet Jewish enclave in the Far East.

Yezhov went down the list of all Ukraine NKVD personnel, marking those for arrest or demotion (to tasks such as Gulag duty).¹³⁶ He also gave a speech lacerating the assembled NKVD men in Ukraine for allegedly having left large numbers of anti-Soviet elements at large. A cigarette dangled from his mouth the entire time he lectured; the scar on his face was starkly visible. “It was my first time at such a high-level gathering, and naturally I marveled at everything,” testified Mikhail Zhabokritsky, the Jewish NKVD chief of the Moldavian autonomous republic, in Ukraine, who would be arrested a few days later. “But what astonished me the most was Yezhov himself—not tall, even dwarfish, thin, frail. When he sat in the chair, from the table one could only see his head.” Although Yezhov was a general commissar of state security, equivalent to the rank of marshal, he dressed indifferently. “His self-confident pose, the independent tone of his speech, did not harmonize with his exterior and came across as ridiculous,” observed Zhabokritsky. At the farewell banquet in Kiev, Yezhov got so drunk that his bodyguards had to carry him out in front of everyone.¹³⁷ “This year was a special one for the Soviet country,” Khrushchev would summarize to the Ukrainian Communists at their next party congress, praising the mass arrests while adding that “after the trip to Ukraine by Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, and the arrival of comrade Uspensky in the Ukrainian SSR NKVD, a real rout of enemy nests began.”¹³⁸

While the wretched USSR NKVD chief was laying waste to Ukraine, morale, and his own reputation, on February 17, 1938, Frinovsky, in Moscow, summoned Abram Slutsky, head of NKVD foreign intelligence. The son of a Jewish railway worker from a Ukrainian village, Slutsky was the sole remaining central NKVD department head from Yagoda’s time. He’d had an illustrious career in industrial espionage, pilfering the designs for ball bearings from Sweden in the late 1920s, then spent the 1930s purloining Trotsky’s archives in Paris, infiltrating émigré groups, and overseeing assassinations on foreign soil.¹³⁹ But a torrent of denunciations had ramped up the pressure to take down the last Yagodaite. Yezhov and Frinovsky evidently worried that an arrest would induce NKVD operatives abroad to defect—before they could be recalled and executed—and so they had concocted an act worthy of a spy novel. As Slutsky and Frinovsky were talking in the latter’s office, another operative entered and, pretending to be awaiting his turn to report, snuck up from behind and put a chloroform mask over Slutsky’s face. Once he fell unconscious, a third operative emerged and injected Slutsky’s right arm with poison. Pravda, giving the cause of death as a heart attack, published a laudatory obituary on February 18: “Farewell, trusted friend and comrade!” That night, the intelligence chief’s body lay in state with an honor guard in the central NKVD club at Bolshaya Lubyanka, 14, the two-story eighteenth-century baroque palace that had been described in Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

A MAN ALONE

On February 19, a grandchild was born to Stalin: Galina, the daughter of Yakov Jughashvili and his wife, Yulia Meltzer. A previous granddaughter, Yelena, the offspring of Yakov’s first wife, had died not long after birth in 1929. A grandson, Yevgeny, had been born on January 10, 1936, in Uryupinsk, Stalingrad province, to Olga Golysheva, his former fiancée, and Yakov had not appeared for Yevgeny’s birth; the mother had given the boy her own surname. When Yakov found out, evidently in 1938, he had interceded with the authorities to get the boy officially registered as Jughashvili. Stalin never recognized Yevgeny as his grandson.¹⁴⁰ Slutsky, meanwhile, was cremated and interred at the prestigious Novodevichy Cemetery. Gossip reached Orlov, the NKVD station chief in Spain, to the effect that during the lying in state, colleagues noticed stains on Slutsky’s face from hydrocyanic acid.¹⁴¹ Whether this was true or not, they all understood that he had been killed. In any case, in April 1938, after the elaborate ruse concerning Slutsky’s death to avoid provoking defections abroad, Stalin threw caution to the wind and allowed Slutsky to be declared “an enemy of the people” anyway.¹⁴² He was playing with fire.

Stalin held no government position, did not attend diplomatic functions, and rarely met with foreigners.¹⁴³ He was largely inaccessible to most Soviet elites as well. He continued to reside at the Near Dacha, where he had helped plant an orchard of apple, cherry, linden, birch, pine, and maple trees, as well as grapevines, jasmine, viburnum, rose hips, petunias, lilies of the valley, lilacs, wallflowers, violets. But the hastily built structure, in its prefabricated original form, had not lasted even four years. It was replaced in spring 1938 by a building of bricks, which were stuccoed and painted the same dark green, evidently Stalin’s preferred color, although this could have been for camouflage purposes, to blend into the forest. (Many dachas in Moscow’s outskirts and down south were now painted green.) The rebuilt main building followed the same design: a single story with seven rooms and a solarium on the roof. A new, large auxiliary building, where the kitchen and staff operated, was connected to the main dacha by a long corridor. The grounds got a new canteen for the guards and staff, an office for the head bodyguard, rooms for medical personnel, and a cinema. The familiar small, cozy dining room—some 800 square feet, amply lit with tall windows, a fireplace in the corner, and seating for eight to ten—was where Stalin worked and took meals when alone or in small groups.

At his preferred seat, on the far left side of the table, there would be a generous collection of colored pencils and notebooks and a special deep ashtray of marble, where he could stand up his pipe. Stalin had an electric teapot that he operated himself. A round table, located between two of the four windows, held his multiple black telephones (made by Siemens) and a button to summon the staff. A high-frequency phone, the color of elephant tusk, allowed secure long-distance calls, especially for military and police purposes. Calls into the dacha were answered by a duty officer, who used an internal line to inform Stalin of the incoming call. The despot, if he so desired, would pick up, press the lever, and answer, “Stalin.” One of the phones was an ordinary city line, which Stalin might have installed so callers could bypass the staff to reach him (people from telephone booths sometimes got the dacha accidentally, and eventually the city line would be removed).¹⁴⁴ The small dining room, like all the others, had a couch, where he did his reading, as well as a small writing desk. A door led from this room to the glass-enclosed northern veranda, which also had a work/dining table. It was neither luxurious nor ostentatious.

Benito Mussolini, on a typical day in 1938, spent an hour or two every afternoon in the downstairs private apartment in the Palazzo Venezia of Claretta Petacci, whom he called little Walewska, after Napoleon’s mistress. The duce would have sex, nap, listen to music on the radio, eat some fruit, reminisce about his wild youth, complain about all the women vying for his attention (including his wife), and have Walewska dress him. Before and after the daily trysts—Mussolini had recently told his son-in-law that “genius lies in the genitals”—the duce would call Claretta a dozen times, to report on his travails and his ulcer. Claretta recorded his “thoughts” in her diary: Jews were “pigs . . . a people destined to be completely slaughtered”; the English were “a disgusting people . . . they think only with their asses”; the Spanish were “lazy, lethargic . . . eight centuries of Muslim domination, that’s why.” She also recorded their lovemaking and his reveries about her “delicious little body.” Mussolini was not just head of state but head of five different ministries, yet Italy had only very small tanks, a navy whose ships could not leave port for want of air cover, and just ten total army divisions. In August 1938, he was shocked to learn that the finance minister knew of major shortages of artillery while he, the war minister, did not. At such moments, when Mussolini’s inattention, inaccessibility, and incompetence were exposed, it was never his fault. Anyway, what was mere technology compared with spirit, character, will?¹⁴⁵

Stalin’s world was nothing like the virile Italian’s. Women in his life remained very few. (There were almost none in positions of power, either.) He still did not keep a harem, despite ample opportunities.¹⁴⁶ Inevitably, rumors circulated of affairs: the wife of a deceased politburo member, code-named “Z” (i.e., Zinaida Orjonikidze); the sister of Kaganovich, Roza, who did not exist; a Bolshoi ballerina or singer.¹⁴⁷ If Stalin had a mistress, she may have been a Georgian aviator, Rusudan Pachkoriya, a beauty some twenty years his junior, whom he observed at an exhibition at Tushino airfield. She lived in Tbilisi and, while in Moscow, stayed at a sports dormitory (later, she obtained a prominent Gorky Street apartment). Stalin might have met her occasionally in private quarters, under the pretext of conducting aviation “consultations,” according to one of his surviving bodyguards (the sole source on the matter).¹⁴⁸ But whatever pleasures Stalin occasionally took, he was married to Soviet state power. A widower twice over, he spent his time seeking succor not in the female body but in military technology and in cadres.

Karolina Til, the longtime Stalin family housekeeper, an ethnic German from Riga who had been the one to find Nadya’s dead body, went on pension in 1938. In the fall, Vasily (age seventeen) would leave home to attend the Kachinsk Higher Military Aviation School, in Kucha, Crimea, near Sevastopol. Artyom, Stalin’s informally adopted son, was in artillery school; Yakov Jughashvili was enrolled in the advanced Artillery Academy. Svetlana (age twelve) was still attending Moscow’s Lepeshinsky Experimental School-Commune, on Ostozhenka; she lived in the Kremlin apartment. Stalin adored but rarely saw his lonely daughter. Following the arrests of the heads of the bodyguard directorates—Pauker and then Kursky and Dagin—in quick succession, a new person would enter the Stalin household: Nikolai Vlasik (b. 1896), the son of Belorussian peasants who himself had completed just a few years of school before becoming an unskilled laborer.¹⁴⁹ His modest education, short stature, and doglike loyalty seem to have made him unthreatening to Stalin. Vlasik’s purview, like Pauker’s, included Stalin’s security, food, personal life, and children. Poskryobyshev continued to handle all regime matters and, inevitably, became close with Vlasik (who stood guard in the outer reception office). The promotion also put Vlasik in charge of the Bolshoi, as well as other top Moscow theaters (the Maly, the Arts, Vakhtangov), and he came to know many of the artists personally, especially the females.¹⁵⁰ Stalin saw more of Poskryobyshev and Vlasik than anyone else. Vlasik became Beria’s venomous rival.

Stalin was profoundly alone in the sulfuric aquifers of his being. But he hated to be alone. His awkward character exacerbated the isolation that inevitably befalls a tyrant upon whom everyone’s life depends. Not only had he driven his second wife to suicide, but most of his closest friends were gone: Kirov, Lakoba, Orjonikidze. Stalin was complicit in the death of the third, and perhaps of the second, while being blamed, in whispers, for the first. He had deliberately murdered almost all his comrades in arms, including those he had been genuinely fond of, such as Bukharin. The few who survived—Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan—had largely been reduced to minions. Beria would come into this group as a minion, too, but he would be more enterprising.

STALIN MANUFACTURES A TOP FOREIGN AGENT

Japan’s ambassador to Moscow complained to Tokyo that Soviet counterintelligence officials “steal suitcases from military attachés.”¹⁵¹ But Japanese reconnaissance aircraft were flying over Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, and Komsomolsk on cloudy days, then shutting down their engines and gliding noiselessly, photographing Soviet military installations with their Fairchild cameras. With the assistance of Finnish cryptographers, the Japanese had broken the codes used in the Soviet Far East. They also had dug underground cables into Soviet territory from Manchukuo to eavesdrop on Soviet telephone conversations. Japanese intelligence rightly regarded Polish intelligence as the world’s top anti-Soviet service and held joint military intelligence conferences with the Poles, in Harbin and Warsaw.¹⁵² Stalin had the Japanese consulates in Odessa, Novosibirsk, Khabarovsk, and Blagoveshchensk shuttered.¹⁵³ But four Japanese consulates remained in the Soviet Far East (Vladivostok, Petropavlovsk, Okha, and Aleksandrovsk), while Manchukuo, Japan’s puppet state, maintained consulates in Chita and Blagoveshchensk. Nonetheless, when Pravda characterized the Soviet Far East as riddled with spies (April 23 and 28, 1937), it meant Soviet military commanders.

Gamarnik, who had committed suicide just prior to his likely inclusion in the Tukhachevsky “trial,” had been a commander in the Soviet Far East, and his former subordinates were being arrested. Insinuations of spying on behalf of the Japanese also implicated the current commander of the Soviet Far Eastern Army, Blyukher, whose subordinates were being arrested.¹⁵⁴ But it was not Gamarnik, Blyukher, other Soviet officials, or former kulaks who served the Japanese cause, but Stalin himself. His orders for sweeping arrests of Japanese “spies” ended up delivering windfall details of Soviet military capabilities, dislocation, and war plans to Tokyo.

Genrikh Lyushkov—described as “stout, black-haired, black-eyed, with a Charlie Chaplin mustache and a strongly Jewish cast of countenance”—was among the small number of NKVD bigwigs to enjoy an audience in the Little Corner during the terror.¹⁵⁵ Born in Odessa in 1900, the son of a Jewish tailor, he had joined the Cheka in 1920, learned good German, and conducted industrial espionage in Germany. He was also one of the few top Chekists with a higher degree in jurisprudence. He was, however, not a star (one colleague in Moscow recalled “a modest person and decent functionary”) and had no major awards.¹⁵⁶ But in December 1934, in the wake of the Kirov assassination, Lyushkov, as deputy chief of the NKVD’s secret-political department in Moscow, had arrived with Stalin’s entourage in Leningrad and participated in the “interrogations,” catching the eye of Yezhov (then still in the party apparatus). In August 1936, Yagoda had appointed Lyushkov NKVD boss of the Azov–Black Sea territory to produce compromising material on the party boss (and Yagoda nemesis) there, Yevdokimov. In September, Yagoda was cashiered. All the same, Lyushkov went on a murderous rampage of trumped-up charges against the Yevdokimov clan, gaining a reputation with underlings as an arrogant bully. Frinovsky and Yezhov tried to rein him in, but Lyushkov had instructions directly from Stalin.¹⁵⁷

During the flurry of prizes for those prosecuting the terror, on July 3, 1937, Lyushkov received the Order of Lenin.¹⁵⁸ He was transferred out of Rostov to take up the big terror assignment in the Soviet Far East that had been given (a few weeks earlier) to Balytsky.¹⁵⁹ On July 28, Lyushkov had a fifteen-minute audience in the Little Corner, and three days later he set out by train for Khabarovsk with a heavy entourage, arriving August 9.¹⁶⁰ He boasted in telegrams to Moscow about one unmasked “plot” after another; Stalin devoured the interrogation protocols, especially after Terenty Deribas (Balytsky’s long-serving predecessor) was denounced for embezzling gold in a machination during which an NKVD officer fell under a train. (Stalin: “To Yezhov. Important. It’s possible that Deribas, beyond everything already, was a serious ordinary criminal. This must be investigated.”)¹⁶¹ It was Lyushkov, in late summer–fall 1937, who conducted the deportation of some 170,000 Soviet Koreans; Pravda announced his award for implementing an important assignment “in the field of transport.”¹⁶² In December 1937, Stalin let him become one of the “elected” to the new USSR Supreme Soviet. “I’m fortunate,” Lyushkov told the toilers who formally nominated him, “that I belong to the caste of functionaries of the punitive organs.”¹⁶³

Lyushkov was just beginning. Between December 1937 and May 1938, he imprisoned or deported 19,000 of the 25,000 ethnic Chinese in the Soviet Far East, including every last one in Vladivostok.¹⁶⁴ As a result of his “vigilance,” he had to beg for translators in Asian languages, requesting the transfer to the NKVD of eight students by name from Far Eastern University.¹⁶⁵ He also begged Moscow for new operatives: thirty-seven NKVD officers were locked up in the local prison as foreign “spies.” But Lyushkov had problems far bigger than lack of personnel: he had served in the organs under Yagoda. Of the forty-one NKVD officers under Yagoda who had held the title of commissar of state security (first, second, or third rank)—equivalent to general—only ten, including Lyushkov, remained alive and at liberty. One (Slutsky) had been poisoned, three had committed suicide, and the rest had been arrested and for the most part executed.¹⁶⁶ Lyushkov, in the capital for the January 1938 Supreme Soviet convocation, complained to Frinovsky that he was being tailed upon exiting his Moscow hotel. Frinovsky replied that Yezhov was just trying to safeguard him, which was true. The arrested Georgian Lordkipanidze had incriminated Lyushkov.

Instead of passing the Lordkipanidze interrogation protocols to Stalin, Yezhov had had Frinovsky reinterrogate Yagoda. The latter complied: Lyushkov had not been part of the “plot.” Testimony against Lyushkov kept coming, however, and Frinovsky pressured Yezhov, asking why they were protecting this “Yagodaite,” especially since, on the inside, people already knew of the “testimony” accumulated against him. Yezhov was in a bind. If Lyushkov were belatedly arrested, Yezhov would have to explain to Stalin why he had failed to forward the interrogation protocols earlier. Nonetheless, the pressure against Lyushkov built, and on April 16, 1938, Frinovsky ordered Lyushkov to send his deputy, Moisei Kagan, to Moscow, ostensibly to be assigned to another post. Lyushkov had secretly agreed with Kagan that the latter, upon arrival, would let him know everything was okay. Lyushkov heard nothing. (Kagan was arrested.)¹⁶⁷

Another of Lyushkov’s outsized problems was a man against whom he was supposed to be gathering compromising materials: Marshal Blyukher. Despite the German-sounding name (Blücher), evidently a nickname for his grandfather, Blyukher was an ethnic Russian, born to a peasant family, who had commanded the Soviet Far Eastern Army since its inception (1930), held the rank of marshal since its introduction (1935), and earned no fewer than five Orders of the Red Banner and two Orders of Lenin.¹⁶⁸ Following his complicity on the panel of judges in the 1937 in-camera trial and execution of Tukhachevsky and the other commanders, Blyukher had taken to drink, starting that very night in his room at the Hotel Moskva. Back in the Soviet Far East, his own top people were being arrested.¹⁶⁹ “Vasily Konstantinovich became more and more closed,” Blyukher’s young second wife, Glafira, would recall, “but he still believed Stalin would defend him, although, thinking out loud at home, he not infrequently said that the Master was too severe, idiosyncratic, at times wacky, and yet he believed in his party conscience.”¹⁷⁰ In January 1938, Blyukher had led the Far Eastern delegation to the USSR Supreme Soviet in Moscow and, furthermore, was among the select few elected to the body’s presidium. Lyushkov, for his part, knew that Stalin had lost confidence in Blyukher. “Blyukher is very ambitious for power,” Lyushkov would later observe. “His role in the Far East does not satisfy him; he wants more. He considers himself above Voroshilov. Politically, it is doubtful whether he is satisfied with the general situation, although he is very careful. In the army he is more popular than Voroshilov.”¹⁷¹

Blyukher, of course, knew that Lyushkov was gunning for him, and he went on the offensive, spreading rumors that Moscow had lost “political confidence” in Lyushkov.¹⁷² Thus did each man’s vulnerability contribute to the other’s.

Stalin had gotten lucky in the Far East: Japan had become bogged down. “The situation in China splendid,” Soviet deputy foreign affairs commissar Potyomkin remarked, as the French ambassador to Moscow Coulondre reported to Paris. Potyomkin “is counting on the resistance by this country for several years, after which Japan will be too enfeebled to be capable of attacking the USSR. This opinion appears to be shared by the Soviet leadership.”¹⁷³ Stalin himself told a Chinese special envoy (the son of Sun Yat-sen) that “China was fighting Russia’s battle as well as her own” and “that China would continue to receive all possible help from Russia in the form of munitions, airplanes, and other supplies.”¹⁷⁴ But he avoided direct confrontation with Japan, sternly warning (April 7, 1938) the party boss in Soviet Northern Sakhalin to quit harassing Japanese economic operations there, since any trouble over the foreign concessions could serve as a casus belli. Similarly, in connection with the Japanese ambassador in London, Stalin instructed his envoy Maisky “not to avoid a meeting with [Shigeru] Yoshida, and if you get such a meeting listen to him attentively. Ask him to outline concrete measures for improving relations between Japan and the Soviet Union. State that the USSR strives for improved relations. On these points, report to me.”¹⁷⁵

Predictably, though, Stalin was pursuing his own intrigues. On April 12, 1938, Moscow notified Blyukher of an imminent Japanese attack against Soviet positions, based on information from Chiang Kai-shek.¹⁷⁶ Stalin could not help but understand that such “intelligence” reflected Chiang’s indefatigable efforts to precipitate direct Soviet involvement in the war, but the despot could not resist using this Chinese provocation. Even as the Soviet Far Eastern Army was adding more than 100,000 troops from the Volga and Siberian military districts in 1938, as well as large numbers of planes and tanks, Stalin dispatched newly named deputy defense commissar Lev Mekhlis to Khabarovsk, with armed escorts and replacement military officers—referred to locally as the “Black Hundred” (like the vigilantes under tsarism).¹⁷⁷ It was the end of the line for the thirty-eight-year Soviet Far East NKVD boss, Lyushkov.

Lyushkov, however, failed to show up to greet Mekhlis. Yezhov had already formally relieved the loyal Lyushkov of his post (May 26, 1938), under the pretext of a future unspecified assignment in the central NKVD, but Lyushkov knew this constituted a death warrant and, taking advantage of his close relationship with Yezhov, managed to stall his return to Moscow. (Yezhov apparently sent an emissary to arrest him out in the Far East.) On June 9, Lyushkov told his deputy he had to travel to the frontier zone for a meeting with a very important agent. He went by train from Khabarovsk to Vladivostok, then by car to Posyet, inspected the local border guard detachments, and on June 12 went out to the purported agent-rendezvous spot. Leaving his one companion at a distance, and wearing “a disguise”—mufti and hunting cap, under which he wore his full dress NKVD uniform—Lyushkov got lost in the rain and darkness. Near the Hunchun River, however, he found two Manchukuo border guards and willingly gave himself up, revealing his officer’s garments underneath. Imagine the lowly guards’ frame of mind: in the middle of nowhere, out of the predawn morning mists, appeared not some wayward small-fry contraband trader, but a man wearing an NKVD uniform and carrying a party card, Supreme Soviet elected representative ID, and papers signed by Yezhov identifying him as commissar of state security, third rank, equivalent to a major general in the Imperial Japanese Army.

Moscow officialdom was shaken. Was there an explanatory note? Did the Japanese kidnap Lyushkov? Yezhov cried and cried, blurting out, “Now I’m lost.”¹⁷⁸ He informed Stalin, but omitted mention of the interrogation “testimonies” against Lyushkov and of how he had long shielded him from arrest.¹⁷⁹ On June 15, 1938, Lyushkov’s wife, Nina, was arrested in their Moscow apartment, and accused of having known about but failed to report her husband’s planned defection.¹⁸⁰ That evening, Blyukher showed up in Yezhov’s office to inquire about the Lyushkov situation and, no doubt, his own standing. Right at that moment, Yezhov was summoned to the Little Corner. Stalin decided to send the Lyushkov nemesis Frinovsky to Khabarovsk, more than 5,000 miles by train, to ascertain what had happened; he departed on June 17. Mekhlis, meanwhile, flew back from the Soviet Far East and, on June 20, gave a report in the Little Corner, after which Stalin immediately sent him eastward again, to further annihilate the cadres in the Siberian and Transbaikal military districts, on the way to renewed massacres of the Soviet Far Eastern Army.¹⁸¹

Whether by happenstance or calculation, the border point with Manchukuo that Lyushkov had crossed, some eighty miles southwest of Vladivostok, fell under the jurisdiction of the Japanese Korean Army, rather than the more rabid Kwantung Army, which might have refused to yield such a prize catch once they had determined his bona fides. The Korean Army’s Russian-language linguist on-site concluded that Lyushkov constituted “the escape of the century” and radioed headquarters in Seoul; despite suspicions that he was a plant, Lyushkov was whisked to Tokyo. A Japanese Kwantung Army intelligence officer, chafing at his lack of opportunity to interrogate Lyushkov, leaked word of the defection to the Chinese-language press in Manchukuo on June 24; Polish military intelligence picked up the obscure newspaper sensation immediately, even before Frinovsky had a chance to clarify in person what had happened. Nazi newspapers reported the defection on July 1, thereby alerting Japanese diplomats in Moscow.

Japanese military intelligence released a statement by Lyushkov, which the Yomiuri Shimbun published on July 3, 1938. “Until recently, I committed great crimes against the people as I actively collaborated with Stalin in the conduct of his policy of deception and terror,” the statement read. “I am genuinely a traitor. But I am a traitor only to Stalin.” Lyushkov, from direct experience, called the Kirov murder investigation “fatal for the country, just as for the party,” and divulged that the interrogation protocols for Kamenev and Zinoviev were lies. (Lyushkov would tell his Japanese interrogators that the fabrications in connection with the Kirov murder had launched his doubts about the Soviet system.) “Nikolayev did not belong to Zinoviev’s group,” Lyushkov’s published statement read. “He was an abnormal person who suffered from megalomania. He decided to perish in order to become an historical hero. This is evident from his diary.” Lyushkov labeled all the trials of 1936 through 1938 “utterly fabricated,” a result of Stalin’s “hypersuspiciousness” and “his firm determination to rid himself of all Trotskyites and rightists who . . . could present political danger in the future.” And, Lyushkov added, hundreds of thousands of innocent people were being arrested. He further noted that Stalin had sought to provoke the war between China and Japan in order that each would weaken the other, with the ultimate aim of Bolshevizing China.¹⁸² Lyushkov asserted that the arrests of so many alleged saboteurs had provoked actual, if silent, sabotage: people were working indifferently or giving in to carelessness on the railways and in factories because of anger at the arrest of innocents.¹⁸³

WINDFALL FOR JAPANESE INTELLIGENCE

Stalin’s terror, allegedly aimed at eliminating foreign agents inside the USSR, had manufactured one in Genrikh Lyushkov, now an invaluable spy/informant for the Japanese. Nothing had ever happened before to Stalin that reached this level—not the case of his former aide Boris Bazhanov, who had escaped abroad in 1928, not even Trotsky’s foreign deportation in 1929. Lyushkov had carried with him a dramatic, damning letter addressed to the Central Committee from General Albert Lapin, a Far Eastern Air Force commander, who had committed suicide on September 21, 1937, in his cell at Khabarovsk prison. “I served the Soviet Government faithfully for 17 years,” Lapin wrote. “Do I deserve to be treated like this? I don’t have the strength to endure anymore.” Lapin’s note was written in blood.¹⁸⁴

Out of the public eye, Lyushkov gave the Japanese a detailed overview of the Soviet Far East, from the number of trucks and how many were out of commission to the condition of all railroads and airports, the training and use of Chinese and Korean agents, Soviet signals intelligence, and the exact numbers and locations of Red Army and NKVD troops east of Lake Baikal (400,000), along with the airplanes (nearly 2,000) and submarines (90). Lyushkov assessed the Soviet Far Eastern Army negatively, pointing to a lack of reserves and infrastructure, out-of-commission artillery and aviation, insufficient training, and dismal organization. He especially singled out an absence of senior command personnel, thanks to the rampages of Mekhlis. Lyushkov conceded that Blyukher believed these shortcomings could be remedied, but he attributed that to Blyukher’s fears of allowing Moscow to learn the real situation. In any case, Lyushkov told the Japanese that Stalin had already lost confidence in Blyukher. Provocatively, he also told his Japanese handlers that Blyukher and even Voroshilov had concluded that the Soviets should launch a preemptive strike, because war with Japan was inevitable and Japan was vulnerable, owing to its invasion of China. Hence, the Soviet buildup was far from defensive. Lyushkov even outlined what he said were contingency plans for a Soviet attack. He evidently aimed to precipitate a Japanese-Soviet war to dislodge the murderous despot.

Lyushkov had rare firsthand information about the man in the Kremlin and his “abnormal suspicion,” an assessment he said was widely shared among those who interacted with Stalin.¹⁸⁵ “In Stalin’s [mind], there was fear of the lack of preparedness for war and chiefly an acute fear of plotters, especially in the army,” Lyushkov surmised, adding that the despot feared that “a war might be utilized for revolution” against him. He stated that Stalin harbored little confidence in the stability of Chiang Kai-shek, and was worried about a possible attack in the west by Germany. Finally, Lyushkov said the Soviet leader suspected Japan was using second- and third-line divisions in China, saving its best for a fight against the USSR.¹⁸⁶

Richard Sorge, the Soviet military intelligence asset in Nazi Germany’s Tokyo embassy, confirmed the damage from the defection. Berlin had sent an intelligence officer to Tokyo to take part in debriefing Lyushkov, and Sorge obtained the German embassy’s copy of the classified report, which showed that Lyushkov had told the Japanese of deep internal dissatisfaction with Stalin, and asserted that the Red Army “might collapse in a day” if Japan attacked.¹⁸⁷ Sorge reported that Lyushkov was laying bare for the USSR’s mortal enemy how the Soviet system actually functioned, as well as what Soviet officials and ordinary folk actually thought—even what Stalin thought. Sorge concluded that “Lyushkov was an inexhaustible treasure trove of information about the Red Army, the NKVD, the party, and the dynamics of the Soviet people at large.”¹⁸⁸

And then it happened again: on July 9, 1938, the NKVD’s Orlov, in Catalonia, received a coded telegram from Yezhov ordering him to a Soviet ship docked at Antwerp for a rendezvous with an unnamed person who would be known to him. Orlov removed $60,000 from the safe, a colossal sum in those days, and fled. According to one NKVD insider, Orlov had guessed wrong: he was being recalled not to be executed but to be named the latest head of NKVD foreign intelligence. Be that as it may, he stole away, with wife and daughter, to Canada and then the United States. Yezhov hesitated to inform Stalin of this second major terror-induced defection. Orlov knew a great deal, from the details of Soviet involvement in Spain, such as the murder of POUM leader Andreu Nin, to the identities of Soviet undercover agents in Europe.¹⁸⁹ But apparently he sent a personal letter to Yezhov about his desire merely to escape execution by his own side.¹⁹⁰ Orlov, a Jew and a dedicated leftist, defected not to Nazi Germany but to oblivion.¹⁹¹ This was a stroke of luck Stalin did not deserve.

Even the most damaging defection Stalin had ever suffered, an act caused by his terror, did not induce him to relent. On the contrary, back in the Soviet Far East, Frinovsky and Mekhlis went on a post-Lyushkov rampage. If in 1937, 2,969 military officers in the Soviet Far East had been dismissed, of whom 383 had been arrested, in 1938 another 2,272 would be dismissed, of whom 865 would be arrested.¹⁹² Frinovsky now also had the task of “reinforcing” Soviet borders in the east. The NKVD began evacuating every single inhabitant within two miles of the border and established a shoot-on-sight zone, rendering infiltration of would-be Japanese agents suicidal, which became equally true of further attempts at defection from the Soviet side.¹⁹³ But the Japanese already had the crown jewels. Sorge, in his reports with photographed documents to Moscow, underscored that, like German defectors from Nazism, Lyushkov exaggerated the extent to which the regime he deserted was ready to fall, but Sorge speculated that Japan and Germany, seizing upon the weaknesses that Lyushkov was spelling out, might take combined military action against the USSR.¹⁹⁴ That, of course, constituted the single most frightening scenario for Stalin, a possible outcome of his own wanton terror.

“THE INEVITABLE WAR” (NEARLY)

On July 6, 1938, Japanese Kwantung Army signal operators intercepted and were able to decode a message to Soviet Far Eastern Army headquarters in Khabarovsk from a frontier commander who recommended that Soviet border troops secure unoccupied high ground on the western edge of Lake Khasan. The Japanese government, already incensed at Soviet military aid to China, had its eye on the strategic heights.¹⁹⁵ The spot—near the confluence of the Soviet Union, Korea (a Japanese colony), and Manchukuo (a Japanese puppet state)—was known in Russian as Zaozernaya, meaning “Beyond the Lake” (in Chinese it was called Changkufeng, or “Tight Drum Peaks,” and in Japanese, Chōkohō). This ill-defined waste, ten miles inland from the Sea of Japan and perilously close to Vladivostok, comprised marsh and sandy hills and suffered daytime temperatures up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, with chilly nights. It was effectively uninhabited, but it overlooked the Korean port city of Rajin-Sonbong, as well as the strategic railways across northern Korea and into Manchukuo.¹⁹⁶ On July 9, in the name of “preventing the Japanese from taking the hilltop, given its advantageousness for surveillance over our territory,” about thirty NKVD border troops seized Beyond the Lake, dug trenches, and strung barbed wire.¹⁹⁷

Four days after the Soviet border action, Lyushkov gave an international press conference at the Sanno Hotel, in Tokyo, to refute the doubters of his bona fides, and further hammered at Stalin’s prestige. “What caused you to betray your country?” an English correspondent asked. Lyushkov replied, “We need to kill Stalin.”¹⁹⁸

On July 15, Japan’s military attaché and chargé d’affaires in Moscow demanded the removal of the new pillboxes on Beyond the Lake, claiming that they stood on Manchukuo territory (based on the Japanese interpretation of the 1860 Convention of Peking, between imperial Russia and the Qing empire). Blyukher sent his own army commission to the heights and, based on its findings, accused the NKVD’s Frinovsky of having violated the Manchukuo frontier, dissension that the Japanese picked up.¹⁹⁹ Blyukher suspected a provocation by Frinovsky and Mekhlis to trap and bring him down by precipitating a war. His suspicions were far from crazy. The Soviet Far Eastern Army had not been involved in the action: Frinovsky had avoided coordinating anything with a soon-to-be enemy of the people. Blyukher angrily telegraphed Frinovsky, with a copy to Yezhov, warning that “some bastard might create a military conflict” and demanding that “all suspicious people who might intentionally aggravate the situation” be removed. Frinovsky, in turn, sent damning reports on Blyukher to Moscow.²⁰⁰ On July 27, unbeknownst to Frinovsky or Mekhlis, Blyukher secretly telegrammed Voroshilov that the border violators were the NKVD, not the Japanese. But on July 28, Voroshilov strongly rebuffed Blyukher, insisting that the Japanese were the culprits, while pointedly addressing himself also to Frinovsky and Mekhlis, thereby revealing Blyukher’s private communication. Voroshilov, behind both Frinovsky’s and Blyukher’s backs, directed Mekhlis to “investigate this case” and report on Blyukher.²⁰¹ This was how a great power conducted itself in the face of a potent military foe.²⁰²

By spring 1938, Japanese forces in Manchukuo numbered 300,000, which meant that, with a mobilization of reservists, the Japanese could now match the Soviet Far Eastern Army in numbers, if not in tanks and aircraft.²⁰³ Moreover, Stalin knew that Japanese troops were massing near Lake Khasan. How they would respond to the Soviet border “strengthening” remained unclear.²⁰⁴ Many officials in Tokyo viewed as inadvisable the launching of a second-front war against the Soviet Union before completing China’s conquest. But because Stalin had backed down over the Amur River border incident in June 1937 and had murdered so many Red Army officers as “foreign agents,” and because Lyushkov had just defected with a bonanza of information, others in Tokyo contemplated the benefits of testing Soviet resolve and reflexes.²⁰⁵ Lake Khasan fell within the jurisdiction of the Japanese Korean Army, but hawks in the Japanese Kwantung Army indicated that they would step in should their counterparts shrink from taking action. “We still were not particularly enthusiastic,” one Korean Army officer recalled, “but now the Kwantung Army came along and booted us in the ass.” This could have been it: the war Stalin feared, precipitated by minions following his orders to arrest and murder his own loyal military men.

Emperor Hirohito appeared to come to Stalin’s rescue: after a series of audiences in Tokyo on July 20, the emperor, finding himself unimpressed with the contradictory reports and wary of his military’s adventurism, withheld authorization for a full-scale war.²⁰⁶ Japanese soldiers were ordered to withdraw. Nonetheless, events spiraled: Soviet border guards occupied a second high point, referred to as “Nameless,” and on July 29 a local Japanese border unit commander—without formal approval from Japanese Korean Army headquarters (in Seoul) or supreme headquarters (in Tokyo), but with the connivance of his local division commander—used the pretext of these additional Soviet patrols to cross the Tumen River with three battalions. In a firefight, the Japanese units were repulsed.²⁰⁷ But citing this Soviet “provocation” and “buildup,” the local Japanese garrison launched a second frontal assault, called by them a “counterattack,” on the night of July 30–31, and this time they succeeded in driving off the NKVD border troops and capturing both Beyond the Lake and Nameless, with heavy losses on each side. Japanese headquarters accepted the fait accompli. Stalin perceived that Tokyo was deliberately testing his resolve and had Voroshilov issue an order, on July 31, to annihilate the enemy.²⁰⁸

Sorge apologized for having failed to forewarn Moscow that a Japanese action on the frontier was imminent (in fact, it had been an unforeseeable local initiative). In the same coded radio communication, on August 1, 1938, he conveyed that the German ambassador and military attaché had learned that the Japanese wanted to settle the dispute by diplomatic means, but only after seizing the heights.²⁰⁹ When Sorge’s communication reached Stalin, if at all, and what heed the despot might have paid to it remain unclear.²¹⁰ Stalin’s hypersuspiciousness and categorical judgments were a long-standing problem for Soviet intelligence. He had previously dismissed vouchsafed information supplied by Sorge as “disorientation emanating from German circles.”²¹¹ In any case, Stalin was determined to make up for his climbdown in summer 1937—when he had just launched the murders of Red Army commanders—and to erase doubts about the “purged” Red Army.

To unleash a concentrated assault, Blyukher had to import more troops to the remote frontier zone, which took time. He also had to contend with potentially deadly intrigues from the unprincipled Mekhlis, as well as Frinovsky, who exercised command over the NKVD border guard troops yet adamantly refused to coordinate; both were denouncing Blyukher behind his back to Stalin. On August 1, 1938, an accusatory Stalin called Blyukher on the high-frequency phone:

STALIN: Tell me, Blyukher, why is the order of the defense commissar for aerial bombardment of all our territory occupied by the Japanese including the Zaozernaya Heights not being implemented?

BLYUKHER: Reporting. The air force is ready to take off. The takeoff was delayed by adverse meteorological circumstances. This very minute [air force commander Pavel] Rychagov has ordered planes into the air to attack, not taking weather into account. . . . The aviation is taking off right now, but I fear that we will hit our own units and Korean settlements with this bombing.

STALIN: Tell me honestly, comrade Blyukher, do you wish to fight with the Japanese for real? If you do not have such a wish, tell me directly, as becomes a Communist; if you have such a desire, I would think you ought to go out to the site straightaway. I do not understand your fear that the bombing will hit the Korean population, and your fear that the air force cannot carry out its mission because of fog. . . . What do the Koreans matter to you, if the Japanese are hitting batches of our people? What does a little cloudiness mean for Bolshevik aviation if it is really going to defend the honor of its Motherland? I await an answer.

BLYUKHER: The air force has been ordered into the air. . . . Your directives are being implemented and will be implemented with Bolshevik precision.²¹²

Not a hint of humanity: pitiless raison d’état.

Blyukher, without waiting for the full contingent of reinforcements, responded to Stalin’s prompt: he assigned Grigory Stern, his new chief of staff and a veteran of the Spanish civil war whom Stalin esteemed, to evict the Japanese. But on August 2–3, 1938, the Japanese troops, holding the heights, forced the Soviets to advance through heavily exposed corridors, which, in addition, were inhospitable to tanks, and repelled Stern’s assault. Stalin’s insistence on immediate engagement had produced a Soviet bloodbath.

The Soviets rebuffed a Japanese proffer on August 4 of a cease-fire.²¹³ On August 7, Blyukher was ordered out of the combat zone. That same day and the next, Stern led a renewed air and land assault, this time massive. A total of more than 30,000 troops were deployed, counting both sides. But because of the Japanese emperor’s refusal to countenance a possible wider war, even as the Soviet air force conducted large-scale bombing of Japanese rear positions in Korea, the Japanese did not employ air power or artillery even on the front lines. Still, on August 8, Sorge radioed from his sources out of Tokyo that “advocates of strong military action against the USSR are increasing.”²¹⁴ The emperor was coming around to urgent pleas to allow stronger engagement, if only in self-defense. After the Japanese advanced more Kwantung Army units to the frontier—forces that could attack from the rear and trap Soviet forces on the heights “like a rat in a sack”—Stalin finally agreed to a cease-fire on August 11. Litvinov boasted to Soviet representatives abroad that “Japan has received a lesson, assured of our firmness and will to resist, and of the illusory nature of aid from Germany.”²¹⁵ In fact, matters had gotten very close to full escalation. And what Nazi Germany might have done in those circumstances remains an open question.²¹⁶

Be that as it may, Stalin and the Red Army were ultimately spared not by Soviet resolve or Japanese circumspection but by China. Soviet-Japanese hostilities took place concurrently with the titanic Battle of Wuhan (June–October 1938), where the Chinese government had shifted its military industries and where more than 1 million Chinese troops, commanded by Chiang himself, massed against Japanese forces who aimed for a decisive showdown. In the event, the Imperial Japanese Army would manage to seize Wuhan, China’s second-largest city, but at a staggering cost of 100,000 Japanese casualties.²¹⁷ Tokyo, which militarily was now both mired in China and engaged with the Soviet Union, continued to beseech Berlin for conversion of the Anti-Comintern Pact into a formal military alliance directed against Moscow. Hitler was interested insofar as such an alliance would apply to Britain and France as well, thereby bringing them to heel in Europe by threatening their colonial empires in Asia. Stalin was privy to these talks from Sorge, in detail, including the many sticking points.²¹⁸

Stalin’s wager on Chiang had returned dividends. The Chinese leader had managed to stalemate Japan’s land army. Chiang had also firmly rebuffed the Chinese Communists’ demands to arm the workers for “revolutionary war” against the Japanese.²¹⁹ It is easy to see why. “The seizure of power by armed force, the settlement of the issue of war, is the central task and the highest form of revolution,” Mao averred to a China Communist party plenum in the second half of 1938, adding that Chiang, whom the Communist leader deemed a counterrevolutionary, “has held firmly to the vital point that whoever has an army has power, that war decides everything. In this respect we ought to learn from him.”²²⁰ Stalin had no desire to see Chiang’s Nationalists fall to the Japanese because of Chinese Communist treason behind the lines. Nor did he want to provoke Tokyo and Berlin into overcoming their differences. Still, he proved unyielding with Japan over the disputed border at Lake Khasan, insisting on the status quo antebellum, and, for now, got his way. The Japanese political leadership took a step back. At the same time, Japanese military hawks of a self-fashioned “north strike” school became more emboldened in their zeal to test the Red Army.²²¹ They would be back.

As Stalin well knew, it had taken the Red Army nearly ten days of ferocious combat to dislodge a limited number of Japanese troops, who, additionally, were fighting with their hands partly tied by their emperor. The Soviets lost 792 killed, 3,279 wounded; Japanese casualties amounted to 526 killed and 913 wounded—2,600 fewer.²²² “We were not sufficiently quick in our tactics, and particularly in combined operations, in dealing the enemy a concentrated blow,” Voroshilov would observe, taking no responsibility himself. He added, again with no personal liability, “It was discovered that the Far Eastern theater was poorly prepared for war (roads, bridges, communications).”²²³ Voroshilov could have noted further that the Soviet officer corps, including almost every one of Blyukher’s deputies and aides, had been massacred and terrorized, and that Blyukher himself had been sandbagged and sidelined by his own side. Still, whether Blyukher, any more than those sitting in judgment of him, really was up to the challenges of modern warfare remained unclear.²²⁴ On August 16, 1938, Voroshilov summoned the marshal to Moscow for an accounting. Six days later, Lavrenti Beria was named to a new post in the capital. Beria’s and Blyukher’s paths would soon cross.

FIRST DEPUTY NKVD USSR

Why Stalin let Yezhov remain at the helm for so long remains mysterious. By summer 1938, the insanity in the NKVD had gotten to the point that at least one newly appointed provincial NKVD chief released large numbers of prisoners and wrote to Lubyanka about the outrageous falsifications.²²⁵ Vlas Chubar, the government deputy head, in a memo to Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov dated June 16, 1938, pointed out the glaring discrepancies between Soviet mobilization plans for war and the resources at hand.²²⁶ That same day, Chubar was expelled from the politburo (the resolution cited “testimony” of arrested politburo candidate members).²²⁷ The next day, he was demoted to the directorship of a pulp-and-paper factory construction site in Solikamsk, a Gulag camp. On June 25, Malenkov informed Stalin that Chubar, through the Central Committee book-ordering service, had requested copies of Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution, as well as his Stalin School of Falsification and My Life, and several issues of the Menshevik émigré Socialist Herald.²²⁸

Yezhov had retreated to his dacha in Meshcherino and fallen into a near-perpetual bender. “I literally went out of my mind,” he would write of Lyushkov’s defection in a letter to Stalin. “I summoned Frinovsky and proposed that we together report to you. Alone I could not do it. At that time Frinovsky said, ‘Now they will punish us big-time.’”²²⁹ Frinovsky had been sent away from Moscow, leaving the NKVD without either a functioning commissar or a resident first deputy. Yezhov—resentful, even irate, at Stalin—schemed to name his own new first deputy, settling on Litvin, who by summer 1938 was running the Leningrad NKVD. Litvin had even come to Moscow a few times, expecting Yezhov to have the appointment finalized, but it never happened. Instead, Stalin had Malenkov, in the party apparatus’s personnel department, compile a list of candidates. Malenkov and his aides came up with Fyodor Kuznetsov (b. 1904), deputy head for political propaganda in the Red Army; Nikolai Gusarov (b. 1905), party secretary of Sverdlovsk city, in the Urals; Nikolai Pegov (b. 1905), a green apparatchik in Malenkov’s department; and Sergei Kruglov (b. 1907), an even greener functionary in Malenkov’s department.²³⁰ These names, many of whom were creatures of Malenkov, constituted a ridiculous attempt to assert control over the NKVD. But Malenkov’s otherwise self-serving list did include the one actual candidate.

Beria by now had seventeen years’ experience in the highest executive ranks of the secret police and the party, in a major region. Frinovsky had served as secret police head in Azerbaijan in the early 1930s, so he knew Beria’s abilities and character, and Frinovsky, with Yezhov, in their pathetic way, had been trying to assemble compromising materials on him, including a report (dated March 26, 1938) on abuses by Beria and his henchman Dekanozov in the Georgian party organization.²³¹ In May 1938, Yezhov and Frinovsky had sought to use former Azerbaijan NKVD chief Sumbatov-Topuridze to prepare a case against Beria. On July 1, one of Yezhov’s department heads requested the files on the Menshevik government in Georgia, hoping to find evidence of Beria’s activities for the wrong side. Frinovsky urged Yezhov to pass these materials to Stalin; Yezhov evidently did so.²³² Stalin could only have been grateful for additional compromising materials to hold over Beria’s head.

Matters came to a head in connection with another USSR Supreme Soviet session, which was to open on August 10. Yezhov learned from Israel Dagin, chief of bodyguards, that Beria, who was in town for the Supreme Soviet, had been summoned to the Near Dacha. “That very day,” Dagin would testify, “Yezhov phoned me incessantly and one time he started to ask, ‘Do you know what they’re talking about?’ I answered: ‘Nikolai Ivanovich, please!’ Yezhov stopped speaking on that issue.”²³³ Eavesdropping on Stalin was a suicidal temptation, but Yezhov was close to that point. The Yezhov favorite Uspensky, NKVD boss of Ukraine, who was also in Moscow for the Supreme Soviet, said he had heard from Isaak Shapiro that “Yezhov has big troubles, since the Central Committee does not trust him. Then Shapiro told me that there are rumors Yezhov was about to get a deputy (he did not name him) whom he needed to beware of.”²³⁴

On a recent occasion at the Near Dacha, according to Khrushchev, Stalin had already told those gathered, “It’s necessary to strengthen the NKVD, assist comrade Yezhov, select a deputy for him,” and he asked Yezhov for his preference. Yezhov requested Malenkov. “Stalin had the ability to pause in a conversation as if he were thinking over the answer, although he had long ago thought through each question,” Khrushchev would observe. “Sure,” Stalin finally replied, “Of course, Malenkov would be good, but we cannot give you Malenkov. Malenkov is at the Central Committee in charge of cadres, and then a new question would arise: who would we appoint there?” When Stalin asked for another recommendation, Yezhov said nothing. “So Stalin said, ‘What would you think if we gave you Beria for a deputy?’ Yezhov was severely startled, but he caught himself and said, ‘That’s a good candidate. Of course, comrade Beria can do the job, and not only as a deputy. He could be the commissar.’”²³⁵

On August 21, 1938, the “politburo” officially appointed Beria as first deputy chief of the NKVD under Yezhov. Malenkov, for his part, had a lot to fear, having once been Yezhov’s deputy in the party apparatus and been close to him, visiting him at his apartment and dacha, and now Malenkov delivered a long, detailed denunciation of Yezhov to Poskryobyshev, marked FOR STALIN, PERSONALLY.²³⁶ Molotov, meanwhile, had been after Khrushchev to return from Ukraine, where he had just been posted, to serve as Molotov’s deputy chairman at the Council of People’s Commissars; Stalin had agreed, but Khrushchev had pleaded to remain in Ukraine, and Stalin had yielded to him. At the Near Dacha, Beria had brushed off Khrushchev: “What are you congratulating me for? You yourself did not want to be Molotov’s deputy. . . . I also did not want to transfer to Moscow. I’d be better off in Georgia.”²³⁷ One of Beria’s closest minions, Merkulov, would also testify (in a letter to Khrushchev) that Beria was distraught at being named Yezhov’s deputy.²³⁸

Neither Pravda nor Izvestiya reported the appointment. That same day, Stalin and Molotov signed the latest execution list (3,176 names). Yezhov received his new “deputy” in his Lubyanka office on the evening of August 22.²³⁹ It must have been stupendously awkward. Yezhov would write to Stalin that “Beria has a power-mongering character. He does not abide subordination. He will never forgive that Budu Mdivani was ‘broken’ in Moscow and not in Tbilisi. He will never forgive the destruction in Armenia [in September 1937], because it was not his initiative.” Yezhov also expressed regret for having allowed “many liberties for Georgia. It was suspicious that Beria wants to eliminate every Chekist who ever worked in Georgia.”

Beria immediately departed Moscow for Tbilisi to wind up affairs, while Yezhov again vanished to his dacha in Meshcherino, complaining of headaches and insomnia, heart pain, and lack of appetite and summoning a doctor, who wrote out a prescription for rest. When the prescribed rest elapsed, Yezhov repeated the summons for a doctor and remained at the dacha, not reporting to work, through the end of August. On August 25, 1938, the Supreme Soviet presidium met to discuss a proposal to continue allowing early release from the Gulag for exemplary labor performance, but Stalin asked them to consider using awards instead. “Would it not be possible to keep people in a camp?” he objected. “If we free them, they will return to their old ways. In the camp the atmosphere is different; there it is hard to be spoiled.” In time a decree would follow: “Convicts in USSR NKVD camps should serve their sentences in their entirety.”²⁴⁰

Also on August 25, Frinovsky returned from the Far East to Moscow. At a train station outside the capital, the head of NKVD transport, Boris Berman, entered Frinovsky’s carriage and told him he had been appointed naval commissar. Frinovsky responded that he already knew and that he would turn over the NKVD first deputy portfolio to Litvin. “I answered not to Litvin, but to Beria,” Berman recalled telling him. “Beria, what?” Frinovsky responded. Right from the Moscow train terminal, he made for Yezhov’s dacha. Yezhov greeted him with kisses on the cheek, something that had not happened before. “I had never seen Yezhov in such a depressed state,” Frinovsky would testify.²⁴¹ Yezhov fantasized about “reorganizing” the NKVD, so as to reduce the power of a first deputy. More prosaically, Yevdokimov, seeking to rehabilitate himself by working like a demon as Yezhov’s deputy at the water transport commissariat, warned Frinovsky that the NKVD operatives in prison who had not yet been shot could be reinterrogated, and their cases turned against the Yezhovites. A slew of hurried executions took place before Beria got back to Moscow.²⁴²

DILEMMAS

Peasants had rebelled en masse against the violence of forced collectivization and dekulakization, and even some party officials had protested. But the terror? A group of Kremlin bodyguards had been carrying loaded pistols on Red Square during the 1937 May Day festivities, within shooting distance of Stalin and the entire leadership; within a few months, they went meekly to their deaths, liquidated as an alleged “assassin corps” working for foreign agents.²⁴³ This seeming passivity confounds to this day.²⁴⁴ “Isn’t it time we started thinking about what is happening in our country?” Pyotr Smorodin, the second secretary of the Leningrad provincial party committee, stated in company during a group lunch at a day resort for party activists. “We have to act before they take us all one at a time, like chickens from their roost!” Everyone present was stupefied. They began to get up and leave, except for a single old friend and the latter’s stepdaughter.²⁴⁵ Many tried to keep a low profile, hoping it would pass. “We all took the easy way out,” Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the poet and a Gulag survivor, would observe, “by keeping silent in the hope that not we but our neighbors would be killed.”²⁴⁶

In fact, many people took an active part, cynically or earnestly.²⁴⁷ A Soviet worker needed to labor for sixty-two hours to purchase a loaf of bread, versus about seventeen minutes for an American—data that Soviet workers did not have, of course, but they all knew their bosses helped themselves to the best supplies and apartments and escaped prosecution for embezzlement or tyrannical comportment. Until now. “You’re a wrecker yourself,” workers jeered at higher-ups during the terror. “Tomorrow they’ll come and arrest you. All you engineers and technicians are wreckers.”²⁴⁸ To be sure, many ordinary people were disgusted by the arrests and executions, and some felt the victims were targeted precisely because they wanted to help workers and peasants. But not a few reasoned that officials, whether or not they were foreign agents, deserved their comeuppance.²⁴⁹ In 1938, the regime decreed a limit on the size of dacha that an official could have, “in light of the fact that . . . a number of arrested conspirators (Rudzutaks, Rosenholz, Antipov, Mezhlauk, Karakhan, Yagoda, and others) built themselves grandiose dacha-palaces with fifteen–twenty rooms or more, where they lived in luxury and spent the people’s money.”²⁵⁰ Fatalism, too, abounded. Iosif Ostrovsky, who, as head of the NKVD administration-organization directorate, supervised construction (hospitals, the Hotel Moskva, the Council of People’s Commissars building), was arrested. “You know I never would have thought that I would be incarcerated in the prison whose construction I directed,” Ostrovsky was said to have mused in Lefortovo (originally erected in 1881 but expanded). “But the prison is very well constructed; you can’t complain.”²⁵¹ He was shot.

Part of what looks like passivity was ideological. The writer Alexander Afinogenov, expelled from the party and awaiting arrest at his dacha in the privileged Peredelkino writers’ colony in Moscow’s outskirts, his plays now banned, had recorded in his diary (December 25, 1937) that he “turned to the radio, for the latest news, and a strange thing happened: ordinary news about life in our country, our people, their words and aspirations, lifted me up immediately; it was as if I had washed in cold water after a day of exhausting reflections.” He claimed that his sense of profound isolation was broken when he “engaged with the life of the whole country, again felt the grandeur of this life and understood the insignificance of my own minor difficulties.”²⁵² As of 1938, the USSR had 1,838 sanatoriums, 1,270 recreational facilities, and 12,000 pioneer camps for children, and they were all in heavy usage. That year, Afinogenov was reinstated in the party.

People’s fates were often random, and not because Stalin intentionally sought to sow still greater dread by arbitrariness, but with little apparent rhyme or reason.²⁵³ Jenő Varga courageously wrote to the despot (March 28, 1938), with copies to Dimitrov and Yezhov, about the “dangerous atmosphere of panic” among foreigners whose children were cursed at school as fascists. “This demoralization is enveloping the majority of Comintern workers and is spreading even to individual members of the Executive Committee Secretariat,” Varga wrote of the Hotel Lux. “Many foreigners gather up their belongings every evening in expectation of arrest. Many are half mad and incapable of working because of constant fear.” Varga had served under Béla Kun in the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Kun was arrested and executed (August 29, 1938); Varga survived.²⁵⁴ Similarly, while one Red Army commander extremely close to Stalin, the civil war crony Marshal Yegorov, was executed, another, Marshal Budyonny, was spared, even though both had been subjects of a torrent of denunciations (the Red Army men not shot had essentially identical files to those who were shot, often from the same “testimony”).²⁵⁵ Among regime literati, Mikhail Koltsov was arrested and executed (“Remember,” he had instructed Louis Aragon, the leftist French writer, in Paris, “Stalin is always right”).²⁵⁶ But Ilya Ehrenburg, who, like Koltsov, had been in Spain and was secretly denounced by all and sundry, survived. “May I ask you something?” a young writer (who had been five years old in 1938) would later inquire of Ehrenburg. “How was it that you survived?” Ehrenburg answered, “I shall never know.”²⁵⁷

Yet another person inexplicably not arrested was Demyan Bedny. The NKVD had produced a devastating overview of his “anti-Sovietism” on September 9, 1938, a few months after the poet was expelled from the party and the Union of Soviet Writers. “D. Bedny systematically expressed his resentment against comrades Stalin, Molotov, and other leaders. . . . ‘I adhered to the party, 99.9 percent of which comprised spies and provocateurs. Stalin is a horrible person and often guided by personal accounts. All great leaders have always surrounded themselves with a galaxy of brilliant companions; who has Stalin created? He has annihilated everyone, there is no one, all destroyed. Such a situation occurred only under Ivan the Terrible.’” Bedny was said to have called the mass accusations baseless. “The army has been utterly destroyed; trust and command have been undermined; it is impossible to fight with such an army. Myself, under these conditions, I would concede half of Ukraine just to keep from being attacked. Such a talented strategist as Tukhachevsky has been destroyed.” Bedny called the new constitution a “fiction,” and the elections to the Supreme Soviet a sham. He even criticized Stalin’s holy of holies, the collective farms, for their absence of incentives. The NKVD concluded that “several times he expressed his intention to commit suicide.” That Bedny said all these things was plausible, although the NKVD material did not need to be actually true in order for Stalin to act on it. For whatever reason, he refrained from ordering or authorizing an arrest.²⁵⁸

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

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

BERIA MEETS BLYUKHER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

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