The House of Government

24

THE ADMISSION OF GUILT

The search for Kirov’s assassins started at the top and aimed at the fallen angels. On December 3, the Politburo approved the “Central Executive Committee and Council of People’s Commissars Decree of December 1.” According to the decree, cases involving “terrorist organizations and terrorist acts” were to be completed within ten days and with no right to appeal. Death sentences were to be carried out immediately. As N. I. Ezhov, who was put in charge of the campaign, said two years later, “it was Comrade Stalin who started it. I remember very clearly how he summoned me and Kosarev and said: ‘Look for the murderers among the Zinovievites.’” And that is what they did. On December 16, Zinoviev and Kamenev (Lenin’s closest associates and, after Trotsky’s expulsion, the most prominent former Left Oppositionists) were arrested. On December 29, the assassin, Leonid Nikolaev, and thirteen other people, some of whom had worked under Zinoviev, were executed. On January 16, seventy-seven former oppositionists in Leningrad and nineteen in Moscow (including Kamenev and Zinoviev) were sentenced to various terms in prison and exile. According to one of the lead investigators, G. S. Liushkov, who escaped arrest by defecting to Japan in June 1938, “I can state with absolute confidence before the whole world that none of these conspiracies ever existed and that they were all deliberately fabricated. Nikolaev definitely never belonged to Zinoviev’s circle. He was an abnormal person who suffered from megalomania. He was determined to die in order to enter history as a hero. It is obvious from his diary.”¹

Kamenev and Zinoviev at first denied their guilt but then understood that the affair was, as Kamenev put it at the trial, “political, not legal.” Or, as Zinoviev realized by the end of the investigation, it was about the soul, not politics. Two days before the trial, he wrote a letter to his inquisitors (led by the veteran opposition expert, Yakov Agranov):

Comrade Agranov has pointed out to me that the testimony I have provided so far does not impress the investigation team as full and candid repentance and does not reveal everything about what took place.

The investigation is coming to an end. The confrontations with witnesses have also had an effect on me. I must tell the investigators everything without exception.

It is true that what I had to say in my previous testimony had more to do with what I could say in my defense than what I must say in full expiation of my guilt. There is much that I have truly forgotten, but there is much that I did not want to think through to the end, let alone tell the investigators.

Now I would like to disarm myself completely.

The point, he had finally realized, was not whether he had had anything to do with Kirov’s murder. The point was the continued existence of the other side of his heart:

I was sincere in my speech to the Seventeenth Party Congress, and I thought that I was “adapting myself” to the majority in the way in which I expressed myself. But, in fact, two different souls continued to live within me.

In the main group of former “Zinovievites,” there were stronger personalities than I. But the problem is that, because we were unable to properly submit to the Party, merge with it completely, become imbued with the same feelings of absolute acceptance toward Stalin that the Party and the whole country have become imbued with, but instead continued to look backward and to live our separate, stifling lives—because of all that, we were doomed to the kind of political dualism that produces double-dealing.

The reason he had not disarmed himself earlier was that he had been “afraid of history”—afraid of finding himself “in the position of a man who is, in effect, promoting terrorism against the leaders of the Party and the Soviet state.” Now he understood that the only way to stop promoting terrorism was to admit to having been its spiritual leader. “Let my sad example serve as a lesson to others, let them see what it means to stray from the Party’s path and where it may lead.”²

He was sentenced to ten years in the Verkhneuralsk Political Isolator (it had been a year since Tania Miagkova first arrived there). In a secret letter to Party organizations issued two days after the trial, the Central Committee reiterated that “the stronger the USSR becomes and the more hopeless the position of its enemies, the faster those enemies—precisely because of the hopelessness of their position—may sink into the swamp of terror.” The Zinovievites were the first Party members to have done so. They were, “in effect, a White Guard organization in disguise, worthy of being treated like White Guards.” Others might follow. “Party members must know not only how the Party fought and overcame the Kadets, SRs, Mensheviks, and Anarchists, but also how the Party fought and overcame the Trotskyites, “Democratic Centralists,” “Workers’ Opposition,” Zinovievites, Right deviationists, Rightist-Leftist freaks, etc.”³

Accordingly, 3,447 former oppositionists were arrested in 1935 and 23,279 in 1936. Between May and December 1935, a verification of Party documents, conducted jointly by the Party Control Commission (headed by Ezhov) and the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), resulted in the expulsion of about 250,000 Party members and the arrest of about 15,000. In spring 1935, an investigation of Kremlin guards, doormen, secretaries, librarians, and telephone operators began by suggesting that slanderous rumors (mostly regarding the suicide of Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, and the murder of Kirov) “might generate terrorist intentions against the leaders of the Party and government” and ended by uncovering a conspiracy to assassinate Stalin and other leaders of the Party and government. Two people were sentenced to death and 108 others, to various terms in prison and exile. Avel Enukidze, the secretary of the Central Executive Committee and the chief supervisor of the government (and the House of Government) patronage system, was accused of corruption and expelled from the Party.⁴

“Degeneracy” and treason within the Party were presumed to be connected to the survival of certain social groups that might feel threatened by the coming of socialism and heartened by the prospect of foreign intervention. In February–March 1935, 11,072 “remnants of the defeated bourgeoisie” (4,833 heads of families and 6,239 family members) were deported from Leningrad, mostly to “special settlements” in northern Russia. In the summer and fall, Soviet cities were “cleansed” of 122,726 “criminal and declassé elements” and 160,000 homeless children. About sixty-two thousand children were placed in NKVD “children’s reception points” and about ten thousand were transferred to the criminal justice system. On April 20, 1935, minors over twelve became eligible for the death penalty. These and similar operations (including screenings and firings of enterprise employees) were conducted on the basis of NKVD “watchlists,” which included people associated with former privileged classes, former members of non-Bolshevik political parties and Bolshevik oppositions, former kulaks, expelled Party members, and all those conducting “counterrevolutionary conversations” and engaging in acts “discrediting Party leadership.”⁵

Prominent on the watch lists were people with reported or presumed connections to foreign countries. The Kirov murder coincided with a growing hostility toward the Soviet Union on the part of Japan, Germany, and, as far as Stalin and his top associates were concerned, all those who attempted to appease, engage, or accommodate them (with Poland particularly prominent in the wake of the Polish-German nonaggression treaty of August 1934). In the winter and spring of 1935, the border regions of Ukraine, Karelia, and Leningrad Province were “cleansed” of thousands of ethnic Germans, Poles, Finns, Latvians, and Estonians. At the same time, thousands of kulaks and “anti-Soviet elements” were deported from Azerbaijan and the “national republics” of the North Caucasus. As the “enemy encirclement” continued to tighten and the watch lists of internal suspects continued to grow, all foreign citizens (including political émigrés and Comintern members) became potential spies, and all Soviet citizens with links (“subjective or objective”) to hostile states became potential traitors. It did not take long to realize that all states bordering the USSR were hostile, and all potential spies and traitors were, or could quickly become, real. The Soviet experience in the Spanish Civil War reinforced the foundational Bolshevik preoccupation with internal dissension and provided a new productive term to describe it. A significant, and rapidly growing, proportion of Soviets became “the Fifth Column” of the approaching invaders. In 1935–36, 9,965 people were arrested for spying (among them, 3,528 for Poland, 2,275 for Japan, and 1,322 for Germany). As Robespierre had said under similar circumstances, “is not this dreadful contest, which liberty maintains against tyranny, indivisible? Are not the internal enemies the allies of those in the exterior?”⁶

In early 1936, Ezhov—on Stalin’s instructions and with Agranov’s assistance—established that the Zinovievites had conspired with the Trotskyites and that both were guilty of “terror.” More former Zinovievites and 508 former Trotskyites were arrested and sent to remote camps, sentenced to death, or used as sources of further revelations. As the interrogator A. P. Radzivilovsky reported to Ezhov, “three weeks of exceptionally hard work with [the former Trotskyite E. A.] Dreitser and [the former Zinovievite R. V.] Pickel resulted in the fact that they have begun to testify.” “Hard work” included threats, sleep deprivation, and appeals to Party solidarity. As the former Trotskyite, V. P. Olberg, wrote to his interrogator, “after your most recent interrogation of January 25, I was, for some reason, gripped by a terrible, excruciating fear of death. But today I am a bit calmer. I am ready to incriminate myself and do anything in order to put an end to this torment.”⁷

Zinoviev was brought back for more interrogations. On April 14, 1936, he wrote to Stalin:

Whatever happens, I have very little time left to live: perhaps an inch or two of life, at most.

There is only one thing left for me to do: to make sure that people say about these few remaining inches that I understood the full horror of what happened, repented to the end, told the Soviet state absolutely everything I knew, turned my back on everyone and everything that was against the Party, and was ready to do anything and everything in order to prove my sincerity.

There is only one desire in my soul: to prove to you that I am not an enemy anymore. There is no demand that I would not fulfill in order to prove this…. I reached the point where I spend long periods of time looking intently at your portrait and the portraits of the other members of the Politburo in the newspapers with one thought only: my dear ones, please look into my soul, can it be that you do not see that I am not your enemy anymore, that I am yours body and soul, that I have understood everything, and that I am ready to do anything to deserve forgiveness and mercy?⁸

On July 29, 1936, the Central Committee of the Party sent out a secret letter to local Party committees. The letter, drafted by Ezhov and edited by Stalin, stated that “the Trotsky-Zinoviev Counterrevolutionary Center and its leaders, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev,” had “sunk definitively into the swamp of White Guardism” and “merged with the most notorious and embittered enemies of the Soviet state.” In the process, they had “not only become the organizing force behind the remnants of the defeated classes in the USSR, but also the vanguard of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie outside the Union, the transmitter of its wishes and expectations.” The lesson to be learned was clear: “Under current conditions, the most important quality of every Bolshevik ought to be his ability to recognize an enemy of the Party, no matter how well disguised he may be.”⁹

The public trial followed within three weeks. All sixteen defendants, including Zinoviev, Kamenev, Dreitser, Pickel, and Olberg, confessed to having engaged in terrorism and were sentenced to death. The sentences were carried out on August 25, one day after the verdicts were read. Trotsky and his son, Lev Sedov, were sentenced in absentia. Radek wrote in Izvestia: “Taking advantage of what was left of the Old Bolshevik trust in them, they feigned remorse and, counting on the Party’s nobility, created a system of lies and deceit unprecedented in the history of the world.… They became fascists, and they worked for Polish, German, and Japanese fascism. Such is the historic truth. And it would be a historic truth even if there were no proof of their links with fascist intelligence services.”¹⁰

In the wake of the trial, 160 people were executed on charges related to the “Anti-Soviet United Trotskyite-Zinovievite Center.” Thousands more former oppositionists were arrested. On September 26, 1936, Ezhov was appointed people’s commissar of internal affairs. Three days later, the Politburo issued a decree ordering “the annihilation of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite scoundrels” who had been arrested or sentenced earlier. On October 4, the Politburo (with Kaganovich, Molotov, Postyshev, Andreev, Voroshilov, and Ezhov present) voted to condemn “585 active members of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite counterrevolutionary terrorist organization as a single list” (that is, without considering individual cases). New arrests led to new confessions, which led to new arrests. Some of the former oppositionists were economic managers; their arrests led to the arrests of economic managers who were not former oppositionists.¹¹

■ ■ ■

During the August trial, Kamenev and Zinoviev had named Radek and the former Rightists (Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky) as their coconspirators. Tomsky shot himself at his dacha on August 22. Bukharin, who was hunting and painting in the Pamirs, heard the news on the 24th and sent Stalin a telegram: “Have just read scoundrels’ slanderous testimony. Utterly outraged. Leaving Tashkent by plane morning 25th.” Anna Larina, who had recently given birth to their son, Yuri, met him at the airport. “N. I. was sitting on a bench, huddled in the corner. He looked sick and lost. He had asked me to meet him, fearing that he might be arrested at the airport.” Two days later he wrote a long letter to the Politburo, in which he proclaimed his innocence and discussed the possible motives of his executed accusers. The letter ends with a plea:

I am shaken to the very core by the tragic absurdity of what is going on. After thirty years in the Party, and despite my most sincere devotion to it and so much work done (I have done some good things, after all), I am about to be added (and am already being added) to the enemy list. And what enemies they are! To end my biological life is to commit a political crime. Life after political death is not life. It is a complete dead end, unless the Central Committee exonerates me. I know how difficult it is to trust someone after the stinking, bloody abyss that opened up at the trial, when humans stopped being human. But here, too, there is a limit: not all former oppositionists are double-dealers.

I am writing to you, comrades, while I still have some emotional strength left. Do not cross the line in your distrust! And—please—do not drag out the case of the defendant Nikolai Bukharin. Right now, my life is a terrible, deadly torment; I cannot bear the fact that even passers-by are afraid of me—especially since I am not guilty.

It is excellent that the scoundrels were shot. It cleared the air immediately. The trial will have tremendous international importance. It will drive an ash stake through the corpse of a bloodstained peacock whose arrogance has led him into the fascist secret police. In fact, we tend to underestimate its international importance, it seems to me. In general, it is good to be alive, but not in my sitation now. In 1928–9 I was criminally foolish, not realizing the consequences of my mistakes or the high price I would have to pay.

My best to you all. Remember that there are people who have truly left their past sins behind and whose whole heart (while it still beats) and soul will always be with you, no matter what happens.¹²

On August 31, he wrote a separate letter to People’s Commissar of Defense Voroshilov, asking whether he and the others truly believed that he had been insincere in what he had written about Kirov. He was addressing the Politburo, and ultimately the Party as a whole (and using the second-person plural):

Nikolai Bukharin meeting with shock workers during a mountaneering trip to the Caucasus

You must face the question honestly. If I was insincere, I should be arrested and destroyed immediately, for such scoundrels must not be tolerated.

If you think I was insincere, but leave me at large, then you are cowards, unworthy of respect.

But if you yourselves do not believe the lies told by that cynical murderer, vilest of human beings, and human carrion Kamenev, then why do you allow resolutions (like the one in Kiev), where it is stated that I “knew” about the-devil-knows-what?

What, then, is the point of the investigation, the legality, and so on?¹³

The problem was that the point of the investigation and revolutionary legality was to determine whether he was sincere. And the only way for him to prove that he was sincere was to keep saying that he was. As his friend Tomsky had put it at the Sixteenth Party Congress in 1930, the penitents had nothing but words, and words, according to some comrades, were meaningless. “Repent, repent without end, do nothing but repent.” The Central Committee notice on Tomsky’s suicide, published in Pravda on August 23, 1936, stated that he had killed himself, “having become ensnared in his relationships with the counterrevolutionary Trotskyite-Zinovievist terrorists.” Bukharin did not want to commit suicide. His strategy was to produce more words: words addressed to the Party leadership as a whole and to particular individuals who were both Party leaders and intimate friends. The second half of his letter to Voroshilov is in the intimate—second-person singular—key:

It was good to be flying above the clouds the other day: the minus 8 degree (Celsius) temperature, the crystal clarity, the air of serene majesty.

Perhaps what I wrote to you made no sense. Please don’t be angry with me. In this climate, it might be unpleasant for you to receive a letter from me—God knows, anything is possible.

But, “just in case,” I assure you (as someone who has always been like a friend to me): your conscience can be completely clear; I have never let you down by betraying your trust in me; I truly am not guilty of anything, and sooner or later it will become clear, no matter how hard some people are trying to sully my name….

Take my advice: read Romain Rolland’s plays about the French Revolution some day.

Forgive me for such a confused letter. I have thousands of thoughts galloping like crazed horses, and no strong reins to hold them back.

I embace you, for I am pure.

Nikolai Bukharin

31 August, 1936.¹⁴

Three days later, the letter was returned.

To Comrade Bukharin:

I am returning your letter, in which you allowed yourself vile attacks against the Party leadership. If by writing this letter you wanted to convince me of your total innocence, you have convinced me of one thing only: that I should stay away from you irrespective of the outcome of the investigation into your case. If you do not retract in writing the foul epithets you directed at the Party leadership, I will also consider you a scoundrel.

K. Voroshilov

3 September, 1936

Bukharin wrote back immediately.

To Comrade Voroshilov:

I have received your terrible letter.

My letter ended with “embrace.”

Yours ends with “scoundrel.”

What can I possibly write after that?

But I would like to clear up one political misunderstanding.

My letter was a personal one (something I now deeply regret). Tormented and feeling persecuted, I simply wrote to a generous human being. I was losing my mind at the thought that someone might actually believe in my guilt.¹⁵

Bukharin made the same mistake that Osinsky had made in January 1928, when he attempted to distinguish between Stalin the person and Stalin the Party leader. Party leadership—and Party membership, in general—was not a job one could come home from.

Less than a week later, on September 8, Bukharin was summoned to the Central Committee building to participate in a direct confrontation with his childhood friend (and the father of his rival for the hand of Anna Larina), Grigory Sokolnikov. Sokolnikov had recently been arrested and was now claiming that the Rightists might have had secret dealings with Kamenev and Zinoviev. Kaganovich, who was present at the confrontation, wrote to Stalin (who was in Sochi): “After Sokolnikov’s departure, Bukharin shed a few tears and kept asking to be believed. I got the impression that even if they did not have a direct organizational connection to the Trotskyi-Zinoviev Bloc, they knew about Trotskyite activities in 1932–33, and possibly later…. In any case, it is necessary to keep looking for a Rightist underground organization. It definitely exists. It seems to me that the role of Rykov, Bukharin, and Tomsky is yet to be revealed.”¹⁶

In the meantime, the prosecutor general’s office announced that there was not enough evidence to proceed with the investigation of Rykov and Bukharin. There was no mention of the Radek investigation. According to Anna Larina, Radek called Bukharin and asked for a meeting (they were dacha neighbors). Bukharin refused, but Radek came anyway, assured Bukharin of his innocence, and asked him to write to Stalin in his behalf. “Before leaving, he said again: ‘Nikolai, please believe me! Whatever happens, I am not guilty of anything!’ Karl Berngardovich spoke with great emotion. He walked up to N. I. [Bukharin], said goodbye, kissed him on the forehead, and left the room.” Several days later Bukharin wrote to Stalin:

Radek’s wife rushed in to say that he had been arrested. I implore you, on his and my behalf, to become involved. She asked me to tell you that Radek is willing to shed all his blood to the last drop for our country.

I am also stunned by this unexpected development and, despite all the “buts,” my excessive trust in people, and my past mistakes in this regard, my Party conscience obliges me to say that my own impressions of Radek (on the big issues, not the minor ones) are only positive. I may be mistaken. But all the inner voices of my soul tell me that it is my duty to write to you about this. What a terrible business!¹⁷

The guarantors of Radek’s sincerity were the admittedly unreliable inner voices of Bukharin’s soul. The only guarantor of Bukharin’s own sincerity was Stalin, who was both “the personal embodiment of the mind and will of the Party” (as Bukharin had said at the Seventeenth Party Congress) and an old friend nicknamed Koba (as Bukharin kept stressing in his letters). “Only you can cure me,” he wrote to Stalin on September 24. “I did not ask you to receive me before the end of the investigation because I thought it would be politically awkward for you. But now I am asking you with my whole being. Do not refuse me. Interrogate me, turn my skin inside out, but dot the ‘i’ in such a way that no one will ever dare kick me and poison my existence, thereby driving me to the madhouse.”¹⁸

The Stalin/Koba distinction was based on the Lenin/Ulianov and Lenin/Ilich pairings that Bukharin had helped formulate. In Koltsov’s version, there was Ulianov, “who took care of those around him and was as nurturing as a father, as tender as a brother, and as simple and cheerful as a friend,” and then there was Lenin, “who caused unprecedented trouble to the Planet Earth and stood at the head of history’s most terrible, most devastatingly bloody struggle against oppression, ignorance, backwardness, and superstition.” Over time, “Ilich” had replaced “Ulianov” as Lenin’s human incarnation, but the two-in-one doctrine remained. Both “Lenin” and “Ilich” were public symbols used to name streets, cities, and collective farms, all of them ultimately connected to the mausoleum. According to Koltsov’s summary: “Two faces—and only one man; not a duality but a synthesis.”

The founder of Bolshevism was a Moses equidistant from God (history) and the people. His successor was much closer to history because history was now much closer to its final fulfillment. After the victory proclaimed at the Seventeenth Party Congress, that victory’s architect (as Radek called him) became wholly indivisible. Nothing could be named after “Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili,” in any combination, and “Koba” (which had never been public) was no longer in use. Since all oppositions disappeared and all enemies became invisible, heresy was replaced by insincerity and the two-in-one leader was replaced by one Comrade Stalin. Only Bukharin kept trying to prove himself to history by appealing to an old personal connection. “Dear Koba,” he wrote on October 19:

Forgive me once more for daring to write to you. I know how busy you are, as well as what and who you are. But, heaven knows, you are the only one I can write to, as a dear friend, whom I can appeal to, knowing that I won’t get a kick in the teeth for it. In the name of all that is holy, please do not think that I am trying to be familiar with you. I believe I understand your significance better than most people. But I am writing to you the way I used to write to Ilich, as a truly dear person, whom I see even in my dreams, the way I used to see Ilich. It may seem strange, but that’s the way it is…. If only you possessed an instrument that would allow you to see what was going on inside my poor head.¹⁹

On December 4, 1936, Bukharin and Rykov were summoned to a Central Committee plenum devoted in part to their case (the other part concerned the approval of the new constitution, which Bukharin had helped draft). Ezhov made a speech accusing the former Rightists of involvement in terrorist activity. Bukharin maintained his innocence by countering specific claims made by imprisoned oppositionists and appealing to the Central Committee for trust and understanding. Stalin explained the difficulty. “Bukharin has no idea what is happening here. None whatsoever. He does not understand the position he is in, or why the plenum is discussing his case. He does not understand anything. He talks about sincerity and demands trust. Okay then, let’s talk about sincerity and trust.” Kamenev and Zinoviev, said Stalin, had claimed sincerity and then betrayed the Party’s trust. Other former oppositionists had claimed sincerity and then betrayed the Party’s trust. The recently arrested first deputy of the people’s commissar of heavy industry, Georgy Piatakov, had offered to prove his sincerity by personally executing the convicted terrorists, including his own wife, and then betrayed the Party’s trust.

Nikolai Bukharin

So you see what a hellish situation we find ourselves in. Just try believing in the sincerity of the former oppositionists after this! We cannot believe what the former oppositionists say even when they volunteer to personally execute their friends.

… So, that’s the situation we’re in, Comrade Bukharin. (Bukharin: I will never admit to anything—not today, or tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. Noise in the hall.) I am not saying anything about you personally. You may be right—and you may not. But you cannot stand here and complain that people do not trust or have faith in your, Bukharin’s, sincerity. That is old hat. The events of the last two years have demonstrated convincingly that sincerity is a relative concept.²⁰

Tomsky had been right: words were meaningless. But Tomsky had drawn the wrong conclusion: suicide, according to Stalin, was “a means used by former oppositionists, the Party’s enemies, to confuse the Party, to evade its vigilance, to deceive it one last time by means of suicide and to put it in an awkward position.” Suicide was worse than meaningless: it was proof of insincerity. “I would urge you, Comrade Bukharin, to think about why Tomsky resorted to suicide and left behind a letter saying that he was ‘pure.’ You can see clearly that he was far from being pure. Indeed, if I were clean, then—as a man, a human being, and not a weakling, let alone as a Communist—I would shout at the top of my voice that I was right.”²¹

Bukharin kept shouting, but words were meaningless. And so, in the end, were facts. Bukharin’s and Rykov’s attempts to point to contradictions and absurdities in the accusations were dismissed by their Central Committee comrades as irrelevant. What mattered was not whether they had done or said certain things; what mattered was that they had betrayed the Party once before and were, therefore, likely to do it again. And if they were likely to do it, they probably had. And the more loudly Bukharin shouted, the more entangled he seemed to become. What was the most important task on the eve of the last war? To make sure (as he admitted in his speech at the plenum) “that all the Party members from top to bottom become imbued with a sense of vigilance and help the appropriate services exterminate the scum that engages in acts of sabotage and so on.” Where was the scum to be found? Among the nine targets of “concentrated violence” that he had identified sixteen years ago plus those former oppositionists who had turned out to be scum. Could Kamenev and Zinoviev be trusted? No, they could not (their execution had “cleared the air”). Could Bukharin be trusted?²²

This question was obviously important to Bukharin and possibly interesting to Koba, but it was irrelevant to history and to Comrade Stalin. As Bukharin wrote in his letter to Voroshilov, “it sometimes happens in history that remarkable people and excellent politicians make fateful mistakes in ‘particular cases’: what I will become is a mathematical coefficient of your particular mistake. Sub specie historiae (from the point of view of history), this is a trifle, a mere literary detail.” The general principle was shared by all; whether Bukharin’s particular case was a mistake remained an open question. The plenum resolved “to accept Comrade Stalin’s suggestion to consider the case of Rykov and Bukharin unfinished, continue the investigation, and postpone the solution until the next Central Committee plenum.”²³

■ ■ ■

The Rykovs—Rykov himself; his wife, Nina Semenovna Marshak (formerly married to Piatnitsky); their twenty-year-old daughter Natalia, who taught literature at the Border Guard Academy; and their companion of many years, Glikeria Flegontovna Rodiukova, or “Lusha” (a native of Narym, where they had been in exile when Natalia was born)—were told to move from the Kremlin to the House of Government. They moved into Apt. 18, which had been vacant since Radek’s arrest (Radek and Gronsky had recently exchanged apartments: Gronsky had moved to the eleventh floor, and Radek, who did not need as much room, had moved down to the tenth, next to Kuusinen). It had been exactly ten years since Rykov formed the Commission for the Construction of the House of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars (of which he was then chairman) and appointed Boris Iofan as head architect. According to Natalia, the only people who visited them in the House of Government were Nina Semenovna’s sister and one of Rykov’s nieces. The near-complete isolation, she wrote, “broke Rykov morally.” “He became withdrawn, stopped talking, ate almost nothing, and paced silently from one corner of the room to the other. Or he lay in bed for hours, thinking just as intensely. Strange as it may seem, he smoked less than usual during those days. He seemed almost to forget about that old habit of his. He had aged a great deal, his hair had thinned and was always disheveled looking, and his face was haggard with dark bluish circles under his eyes. I don’t think he ever slept. He never talked. He just kept thinking and thinking.”²⁴

Aleksei Rykov and Nina Marshak

Bukharin, Anna Larina, their son Yuri, Bukharin’s father, Ivan Gavrilovich, and Bukharin’s disabled first wife, Nadezhda Mikhailovna Lukina, all continued to live in Stalin’s old apartment in the Kremlin. (They had switched apartments at Stalin’s request after the suicide of his wife.) According to Larina,

The furniture in our room was more than modest: two beds with a bedside table between them, a rickety couch with springs showing through the dirty upholstery, and a small table. A dark gray radio speaker was hanging on the wall. N.I. liked this room because it had a sink with a faucet and, next to it, a door leading into the toilet. So N.I. installed himself in this room and rarely left it….

He became isolated even within the family. He did not want his father to come in and see him suffering. “Go away, Pops,” he would say in a weak voice. Once Nadezhda Mikhailovna literally crawled in to see the latest testimony and then barely made it back to her bed, with my help.

N.I. grew thin and aged, and his red goatee turned gray. (It was my job to serve as barber; otherwise N.I. would have grown a huge beard over the course of six months).²⁵

On December 15, Pravda published an article accusing the former Rightists of working hand in hand with “Trotskyite-Zinovievite spies, murderers, and saboteurs, as well as Gestapo agents.” Bukharin wrote a formal letter of complaint to the Politburo and a personal one to Stalin. “What am I to do? I am hiding in my room, can’t see anyone, never go out. My family is desperate. I am desperate, too, for I am powerless against the slander that is suffocating me. I was counting on the fact that you had the extra advantage of knowing me well. I thought you knew me better than the others and that, despite the correctness of the general mood of distrust, that circumstance would have been an important component in your overall assessment.” Stalin sent a memo to Pravda’s editor in chief, Lev Mekhlis: “The case of the former Rightists (Rykov, Bukharin) has been postponed until the next Plenum of the Central Committee. Consequently, attacks against Bukharin (and Rykov) must be stopped until the matter has been resolved. It does not take great intelligence to understand such a basic truth.”²⁶

Meanwhile, Ezhov, on Stalin’s instructions, was working on the resolution. Former oppositionists and their associates were being arrested or brought back from the camps and forced to incriminate Rykov and Bukharin (as well as themselves and others). According to M. N. Riutin’s letter to Stalin, “at each interrogation, they threaten me, yell at me, as if I were an animal, insult me, and don’t even allow me to submit a reasoned refusal to testify.” According to L. A. Shatskin’s letter to Stalin, false testimony was being demanded “in the interests of the Party.” Those who wrote to complain wrote to Stalin, who stood for the interests of the Party. Stalin—in the interests of the Party (sub specie historiae)—supervised the operation, edited the confessions, and suggested new names and general directions.²⁷

After three months of interrogations by Boris Berman (the brother of the head of the Gulag, Matvei Berman, and the brother-in-law of the Middle Volga collectivizer and currently deputy head of the Moscow Province NKVD, Boris Bak), Radek began to incriminate Bukharin. On January 13, 1937, they confronted each other at a hearing attended by Stalin, Voroshilov, Ezhov, Kaganovich, Molotov, and Ordzhonikidze. Radek accused Bukharin of involvement in terrorist activity. Bukharin asked him why he was lying. Radek said that he would explain. Several minutes later, he did. “I would like to say that no one physically coerced me into testifying. No one threatened me with anything before I began testifying. Comrade Berman told me: ‘I am not telling you that you will be shot if you refuse, and I am not telling you that you will not be shot if you provide the testimony we consider correct.’ Besides, I am old enough not to believe any promises made when you are in prison.”

He was not out to save his skin, he claimed, because he had given up on it long ago. The hardest part was testifying against Bukharin, “as comrades will confirm.” “At first I did not consider the overall political significance of this whole thing at the trial and so on, but then I said to myself: any attempt to deny this thing at the trial will only serve to reinforce it, so it is necessary to put an end to all this, primarily because there is a war going on. And then I said to myself that personal friendship should not be allowed to prevent me from revealing the fact that, in addition to the Zinovievite-Trotskyite organization, there is an organization of Rightists.” Radek’s statements combined the needed confessions with an explanation of why they were needed. Some seemed preliminary and needed to be reformulated. In the typed minutes of the confrontation, Stalin crossed out the self-reflexive introduction up to the colon and substituted “will only serve to reinforce the terrorist organizations” for “will only serve to reinforce it.”²⁸

Three days later Bukharin wrote to “dear Koba,” asking whether it might be possible that some nameless group within the Party “understands its Party duty in such a way that I need to be destroyed a priori.” He was willing to die for the Party, but not as the Party’s enemy. “I can’t think of a more monstrously tragic situation than my own. It is a profound tragedy, and I am crumbling from exhaustion. Comrade Ezhov says, in all innocence: Radek also protested at first, and then … and so on. But I am not Radek: I know I am innocent. And nothing and no one will ever force me to say ‘yes’ if the truth is actually ‘no.’”

But what if a yes was required by the Party? Could he still say no? “If I am to be removed from the Central Committee, a political motive will have to be given. In any Party cell, I will have to admit my guilt in a way that I refused to do in front of you. That is impossible. The consequence is expulsion from the Party, which means death.” The only way out was to convince the Party, or at least Koba, that the whole thing was a deliberate campaign by the “Trotskyite protobeasts.” “When Radek was shedding tears and lying about me, I looked into his clouded, depraved eyes and saw all that Dostoyevskian perversion and depth of human vileness that has left me half dead, wounded by his slander.”²⁹

He never mailed that letter to Koba. Instead, he wrote one to Comrade Stalin, with copies to the other participants in the confrontation. It made the same points in a less confessional mode and ended with the words: “I am for the Party, for the USSR, and for our victory, whatever they may say about me on the basis of slander spread by wicked and cunning people. This is not a newspaper article ending, but my profoundest conviction and the very core of my existence.”³⁰

At the trial of the “Anti-Soviet Trotskyite center,” which opened on January 23 (one week after Bukharin mailed his letter), Radek said that it had taken him two and a half months to understand what was required of him. “In case someone has raised the question of whether we were tortured during the investigation, I must state that it was not the investigators who tortured me, but I who tortured my investigators.”³¹ The passage about Bukharin had been revised in accordance with Stalin’s suggestions:

I knew that Bukharin’s situation was as hopeless as my own, because our guilt—if not de jure, then de facto—was the same. But he and I are close friends, and intellectual friendships are closer than other kinds of friendship. I knew that Bukharin was in the same state of shock as I was, and I was convinced that he would provide honest testimony to the Soviet state. For that reason, I did not want to have him brought in handcuffs to the Commissariat of Internal Affairs. I wanted him to do what I wanted our other associates to do: to disarm himself. This explains why it was only at the very end, when the trial was upon us, that I realized that I could not appear in court, having concealed the existence of another terrorist organization.³²

He could now do publicly what he had rehearsed in his confrontation with Bukharin: incriminate himself and others and explain his reasons for doing so. The prosecution’s entire case, he said in his last word, was based on his testimony and the testimony of his co-defendant, Piatakov (“all the other testimony by all the accused rests on our testimony”). He did not have to admit his guilt, but he did, anyway: “I admitted my guilt and testified exhaustively about it not from a simple need to repent—repentance may be an inner realization that does not have to be shared or demonstrated—and not from a general love of truth—the truth in my case is very bitter and, as I said before, I would rather be shot three times over than admit it. I must admit my guilt because of how I understand the general benefit that would be produced by that truth.”³³

That benefit was the realization by all those whose hearts were not wholly devoted to the Party that, on the eve of the last war, even the slightest doubt meant siding with the beast. Active terrorists could easily be handled by the police (“on that score we, based on our own fate, have not the slightest doubt”). The real danger came from the “half-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, and one-eighth-Trotskyites,” who might, through pride, carelessness, or “liberalism,” encourage the active terrorists. “We find ourselves in a period of utmost tension, on the brink of war. Speaking before the court and facing our hour of judgment, we say to those people: if there is the slightest crack in your relationship with the Party, be forewarned that tomorrow you may become a saboteur and a traitor, unless you carefully repair that crack by means of full sincerity before the Party.”³⁴

Lion Feuchtwanger, who was present at the trial, wrote that he would not “easily forget” Radek’s performance:

How he sat there in his brown suit, his ugly fleshless face framed by a chestnut-colored old-fashioned beard; how he looked over to the public, a great many of whom he knew, or at the other prisoners, often smiling, very composed, often studiedly ironical; how he laid his arm with a light and easy gesture round the shoulders of this or that prisoner as he came in; how, when he spoke, he would pose a little, laugh a little at the other prisoners, show his superiority; arrogant, skeptical, adroit, literary. Somewhat brusquely, he pushed Piatakov away from the microphone and himself took up his position there; often he smote the barrier with his newspaper, or took up his glass of tea, threw a piece of lemon in, stirred it up, and, whilst he uttered the most atrocious things, drank it in little sips. Nevertheless, he was quite free from pose whilst he spoke his concluding words, in which he admitted why he had confessed, and, despite his apparent imperturbability and the finished perfection of his wording, this admission gave the impression of being the self-revelation of a man in great distress, and it was very affecting. But most startling of all, and difficult to explain, was the gesture with which Radek left the court after the conclusion of the proceedings. It was towards four o’clock in the morning, and everyone—judges, accused, and public—was exhausted. Of the seventeen prisoners, thirteen, amongst whom were close friends of Radek, had been condemned to death, while he himself and three others had been sentenced only to imprisonment. The judge had read the verdict, and all of us had listened to it standing up—prisoners and public motionless, in deep silence. Immediately after the reading the judges retired and soldiers appeared, and first of all approached the four who had not been condemned to death. One of them laid his hand on Radek’s shoulder, evidently with an order to follow him. And Radek followed him. He turned round, raised a hand in greeting, shrugged his shoulders very slightly, nodded to the others, his friends who were condemned to death, and smiled. Yes, he smiled.³⁵

Radek offered himself—along with Bukharin, among other friends—as a scapegoat, a metaphor of unopposed temptation, the embodiment of forbidden thought. He may not have murdered anybody, or even conspired with any murderers, but in Bolshevism, as in Christianity or any other ideology of undivided devotion, it was the thought that counted. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” The interchangeability of acts and thoughts was the main theme of Radek’s exchange with the state prosecutor, A. Ia. Vyshinsky. The fact of having had sinful thoughts was proof of the reality of criminal actions, whether they occurred or not. All criminal actions were emanations of sinful thoughts—and, therefore, premeditated:

Karl Radek

VYSHINSKY: Were you for the defeat or victory of the USSR?

RADEK: All my actions during those years testify to the fact that I was helping to bring about its defeat.

VYSHINSKY: Were they conscious actions on your part?

RADEK: I have never committed an unconscious act in my life, except for sleeping (laughter). ³⁶

Bukharin, who had discovered the world without God by reading The Adolescent, was not the only one to think of Dostoevsky. The following morning, Pravda published an article by the head of its arts and literature section, I. Lezhnev (Isai Altshuler), titled “Smerdiakovs”: “Sitting in the dock are the monstrous offspring of fascism, traitors to the motherland, wreckers, spies, and saboteurs—the most evil and perfidious enemies of the people. They appeared before the court in all their loathsome nakedness, and we saw a new edition of Smerdiakov, a disgusting image become flesh and blood. The Smerdiakovs of our day provoke combined feelings of indignation and revulsion. They are not just the ideologues of the restoration of capitalism, they are the moral incarnation of the fascist bourgeoisie, the product of its senile dementia, mad ravings, and creeping putrefaction.”³⁷

The image of nakedness was borrowed from Radek’s article about the previous show trial. As Vyshinsky said in the courtroom: “Radek thought that he was writing about Kamenev and Zinoviev. But he made a slight miscalculation! This trial will correct this mistake of his: he was writing about himself!” What the nakedness revealed was that Radek, like the traitors he had helped expose, was the incarnation of a disgusting image that was the incarnation of Ivan Karamazov’s thoughts. He was not what he appeared to be because he was a metaphor, a thought become flesh and blood, Mephistopheles who had betrayed himself even as he was trying to betray others. As Vyshinsky said at the trial, “he puffed away on his pipe everywhere, blowing smoke in the faces of not only his interlocutors.” And as Lezhnev wrote in his Pravda article,

How this Jesuit, this puny, sanctimonious hypocrite with his theatrically affected Onegin persona must have been cackling to himself as he let loose his verbal fireworks and bravely fenced on the newspaper stage with his cardboard sword!

This foul, prostituted creature, spat upon and soiled by the dregs of imperialist kitchens, reeking of the stench of the diplomatic backstage—this male courtesan actually had the gall to lecture Soviet journalists and writers about high morals and class loyalty. How many millions of false words this creature has uttered, how often he has inveighed against venal bourgeois journalists! How many false praises this vilest of vile traitors has sung as he offered up his loose, streetwalker’s lips for a kiss! Before the ink on his articles had a chance to dry, he would scurry over to diplomatic receptions at foreign embassies, where he had his second, real job as a lackey to his imperialist masters, and would whisper in their ears about the best way to ruin the very socialist democracy he had been praising an hour earlier.

But if, shocked by all this, you were to stop and ask yourself if such duplicity and such depth of moral depravity were indeed possible, Dostoevsky would answer you in the words of Smerdiakov:

“Pretending, sir, is not very difficult for an experienced person.”³⁸

Was Radek pretending during his trial? According to Lion Feuchtwanger, many of his friends in the West thought so:

And to me also, as long as I was in Western Europe, the indictment of the Zinoviev trial seemed utterly incredible. The hysterical confessions of the accused seemed to have been extorted by some mysterious means, and the whole proceedings appeared like a play staged with consummate, strange, and frightful artistry.

But when I attended the second trial in Moscow, when I saw Piatakov, Radek, and his friends, and heard what they said and how they said it, I was forced to accept the evidence of my senses, and my doubts melted away as naturally as salt dissolves in water. If that was lying or prearranged, then I don’t know what truth is.³⁹

Two days after Radek’s verdict was announced, A. K. Voronsky, the foremost theorist of the Bolshevik as an underground man, was arrested in his House of Government apartment.⁴⁰

■ ■ ■

On February 18, People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry Sergo Ordzhonikidze committed suicide (the official announcement described the cause of death as “heart failure”). On February 20, Bukharin wrote to the Politburo announcing a hunger strike until all the accusations were lifted. “I swear to you one more time on the last breath of Ilich, who died in my arms, on my ardent love for Sergo, on everything that I hold sacred, that all this terrorism, wrecking, and alliances with Trotskyites, etc., is, in my case, vile, unprecedented slander.” On the same day, he sent a letter to “dear Koba,” asking him not to be angry and apologizing for having disagreed with him in the past:

As I have written before, I am guilty before you for the past. But I have expiated my guilt many times over. I truly love you now, belatedly, but deeply. I know that you are suspicious and that you are often wise in being suspicious. I also know that events have demonstrated that the level of suspicion must be increased considerably. But what about me? I am, after all, a flesh-and-blood person, entombed alive and spat on from all sides.

Above all, I wish you health. You do not age. You have iron self-control. You are a born general, destined to play the role of the victorious leader of our armies. Those will be even greater times. I wish you, dear Koba, quick and decisive victories. Hegel says somewhere that philistines judge great men based on trivialities. But even their passions are the instruments of what he calls the “World Spirit.” Napoleon was the “World Spirit” on horseback. Let people see world events that are even more interesting.

Accept my greetings, my handshake, my “forgive me.” In my heart I am with you all, with the Party, with my dear comrades. In my mind, I am at the graveside of Sergo, who was a marvelous, true human being.⁴¹

Bukharin’s last hope was to reconcile the laws of history with the “flesh-and-blood person” by addressing the World Spirit as “dear Koba.” According to Larina, he sat “trapped” in his room, refusing to bathe and avoiding being seen by his father. “His birds—two African lovebirds—lay dead in their cage. The ivy he planted had wilted; the stuffed birds and pictures on the walls were covered with dust.” As he was writing his two letters, or perhaps soon after he finished writing them, three men walked into the apartment and ordered the family to move out of the Kremlin. At just that moment, according to Larina, the telephone rang. It was Stalin, who lived nearby.

“What’s going on over there, Nikolai?” asked Koba.

“Some people are telling me to move out of the Kremlin. I don’t care about staying in the Kremlin, I am only asking for some place where I could fit my library.”

“Tell them to go to the devil,” said Stalin and hung up.

The three man were standing near the phone, heard Stalin’s words, and ran off “to the devil.”⁴²

Meanwhile, Rykov, according to his daughter, “kept thinking and thinking”: “One day I entered the room and was startled by my father’s appearance. He was sitting by the window, his back to it, in a strange, unnatural pose—with his head tilted back, his hands crossed and pressed between his crossed legs, and a tear rolling down his cheek. I don’t think he even saw me, he was so engrossed in his thoughts. I could hear him saying, in a kind of drawn-out half whisper: ‘Surely Nikolai couldn’t really be mixed up with them, could he?’ I knew that ‘Nikolai’ stood for ‘Bukharin,’ and ‘they,’ for those whose trial had recently ended.”⁴³

On February 21, Bukharin stopped eating. According to Larina, within two days he had “turned pale and gaunt, with hollow cheeks and huge dark circles under his eyes.”

Finally, he gave up and asked for a sip of water. This was a great moral blow to him: a full hunger strike meant abstaining not only from food, but also from water. I was so worried about N.I.’s condition that, to give him some strength, I secretly squeezed some orange juice into the water. N.I. took the glass from my hand, got a whiff of the orange juice, and flew into a rage. The glass with the life-giving liquid flew into the corner and broke.

“You are trying to make me deceive the plenum! I won’t deceive the Party!” he shouted furiously. He had never talked to me that way.

I poured him another glass of water, this time without the juice, but N.I. flatly refused to drink it.

“I want to die! Let me die here, beside you!” he added in a weak voice.⁴⁴

He composed a letter “To the Future Generation of Party Leaders,” asked Anna to memorize it, and tested her several times to make sure she had it right. He was “lowering his head,” he wrote, “not before the proletarian sword, which must be ruthless but chaste,” but before “an infernal machine, which, probably employing medieval methods, had acquired enormous power.” The NKVD had become degenerate and could transform any Party member into a traitor. “If Stalin doubted himself for a second, the confirmation would follow immediately.” History, however, was on his side. Sooner or later, it was going to “wash the dirt” off his head. “Know, comrades, that on the banner that you will be carrying on your victorious march toward Communism, there is a drop of my blood!”⁴⁵

On the evening of February, 23 Bukharin and Rykov arrived at the Central Committee plenum devoted, in part, to the discussion of their case. According to Larina, Bukharin felt dizzy when he entered the room and sat down on the floor in the aisle. Ezhov opened the proceedings by announcing that Bukharin’s and Rykov’s participation in the counterrevolutionary terrorist conspiracy had been confirmed. The discussion that followed was a four-day scapegoating (pharmakos) ritual, in which the participants jeered, taunted, and ridiculed the selected victims, shouted and pointed fingers at them, called them “scum,” “fiends,” “beasts,” “snakes,” “vipers,” “fascists,” “renegades,” “vile cowards,” “spiteful cats,” and “puffed-up little frogs,” and demanded their immediate destruction and the cutting off of their “tentacles.” (In Russian, vreditel’, or “wrecker,” refers to pests and vermin, as well as saboteurs.) As the chairman of the Bashkirian Party Committee, Yakov Bykin (Berkovich), put it, “They must receive the same retribution as their accomplices, their friends from the first and second trials of the Trotskyites and Zinovievites. They must be destroyed in the same way as the Trotskyites, and those who are left alive should be kept in cages under lock and key rather than sent into exile. (Voice from the floor: That’s right.)”⁴⁶

Bukharin and Rykov responded in two different ways. One was to refute specific charges by providing alibis, pointing to inconsistencies, and denying knowledge of certain events and individuals. Such arguments—analogous to Bukharin’s “Comrade Stalin” letters—were rejected as irrelevant: the Central Committee plenum was not a tribunal and “lawyerly behavior” was not appropriate. “But what does it mean that this is not a tribunal?” asked Bukharin. “What is the meaning of such a statement? Aren’t people interpreting specific facts? Haven’t eyewitness accounts and factual testimonies been circulated? Yes, they have. Aren’t these factual testimonies influencing the minds of the comrades entrusted with judging and drawing conclusions? Yes, they are. (Voice from the floor: This is not a tribunal, this is the Party’s Central Committee.) I know that this is the Party’s Central Committee and not a revolutionary tribunal. But if the difference is only in name, then this is a tautology. What is the difference?” The difference, his judges told him, over and over again, was that his guilt was assumed and his job was to confess and repent, not to argue.⁴⁷

The second line of defense was the “dear Koba” appeal to the accusers’ humanity. As Bukharin said by way of explaining his hunger strike and his letter to the Politburo,

Of course, if I am not a human being, then there is nothing to understand. But I believe that I am a human being, and I believe that I have the right to my psychological state, at this extremely difficult and painful moment in my life (Voices from the floor: What else did you expect?), at this extremely difficult time, of which I wrote. So there was no element of intimidation or ultimatum on my part. (Stalin: And your hunger strike?) I have not eaten (anything) for four days. I told you and wrote to you why, in desperation, I had resorted to this. I wrote to a narrow circle of people because, with such accusations as these being leveled at me, I cannot go on living.

I cannot shoot myself with a revolver—because then people will say that I have killed myself in order to harm the Party, but if I die as if from a disease, then what do you have to lose? (Laughter. Voices from the floor: That’s blackmail! Voroshilov: What disgusting behavior! How can you say such a thing? It’s disgusting. Think about what you are saying.) But you must understand—it is hard for me to go on living. (Stalin: And for us, it’s easy? And it’s easy for us? Voroshilov: How do you like that: “I won’t shoot myself, but I’ll die”?) It is easy for you to talk about me this way. What do you have to lose? Because, if I am a wrecker, a son of a bitch, and so on, then why feel sorry for me? I am not asking for anything; I am simply giving you an idea of what I am thinking and feeling. If this causes any political harm, however miniscule, I will, of course, do whatever you tell me to (laughter). Why are you laughing? There is absolutely nothing funny about any of this.⁴⁸

According to Larina, “he came down from the podium and sat down on the floor again, this time not because he felt weak, but because he felt like an outcast.” When he came home that evening, he ate dinner—“out of respect for the plenum.”⁴⁹

The next session began with a special request from Bukharin:

BUKHARIN. Comrades, I have a very short statement to make of the following nature. I would like to apologize to the Central Committee plenum for my ill-considered and politically harmful act of declaring a hunger strike.

STALIN. That’s not enough!

BUKHARIN. I can explain. I ask the plenum of the Central Committee to accept my apology because it is true that I did, in effect, present the Central Committee with a kind of ultimatum, and that ultimatum took the shape of this unusual step.

KAGANOVICH. An anti-Soviet step.

BUKHARIN. By doing this, I committed a very serious political error, which can only partially be mitigated by the fact that I found myself in an extremely agitated state. I am asking the Central Committee to excuse me and apologize sincerely for this truly unacceptable political step.

STALIN. Excuse and forgive.

BUKHARIN. Yes, yes, and forgive.

STALIN. That’s better!

MOLOTOV. Don’t you think that your so-called hunger strike may be seen by some comrades as an anti-Soviet act?

KAMINSKY. That’s right, Bukharin, it has to be said.

BUKHARIN. If some comrades see it that way … (Noise in the room. Voices from the floor: How else can it be seen? That’s the only way to see it.) But, comrades, this was not my subjective intention … …

KAGANOVICH. According to Marxism, there is no wall separating the subjective from the objective.⁵⁰

Kaganovich was right, and Bukharin knew it (and had argued the same point himself many times before). A sinful thought was a criminal act, and a criminal act was the embodiment of a sinful thought. Bukharin did not question that; what he was trying to do (because of his exceptionally difficult situation) was to preserve a distinction between himself as a human being and himself as a politician who had committed some very serious political errors—a distinction that corresponded to the one between Comrade Stalin and dear Koba:

I was told that I was using some kind of cunning maneuver when I wrote to the Politburo and then to Comrade Stalin, in order to appeal to his kindness. (Stalin. I am not complaining.) I am saying this because this question has been raised and because I have heard many reproaches or semi-reproaches about the fact that I write to Comrade Stalin a little differently from the way I write to the Politburo. But, comrades, I do not think that it is a legitimate reproach and that I should be suspected of any particular cunning…. It seems to me that this practice began under Lenin. Whenever one of us wrote to Ilich, he would ask certain questions that he would not address to the Politburo, write about his doubts and hesitations, and so on. And no one ever saw this as any kind of clever ruse.⁵¹

They did now. Lenin had been a two-in-one “synthesis,” and the person Bukharin used to share his hesitations with had been “Ilich,” not “Lenin.” Comrade Stalin was indivisible, and Bukharin admitted as much by not publicly mentioning the true addressee of his personal letters. There was no “Koba” anymore, and no “human understanding” distinct from Party vigilance. As Kaganovich put it, “at first glance it may appear simple: these are just people trying to defend themselves, Bukharin and Rykov are appealing to our human understanding—‘you must understand, as human beings, the position we are in,’ and so on, and so forth, but in fact, comrades, this constitutes—and I would like to stress this, in particular—this constitutes a new move by the enemy. (Voices from the floor: Exactly!)”⁵²

The chairman of the Sverdlovsk Party Committee, Ivan Kabakov, addressed Bukharin and Rykov directly:

You have committed vile counterrevolutionary acts. You should have been in the dock answering for those acts long ago. And yet you come here with your soft little voices and tears in your eyes, weeping. For example, last night, Bukharin kept making comments and squeaking just like a mouse caught in a trap (laughter). His voice changed, and his expression changed, too, as if he had just emerged from a cave. Take a good look at him, members of the Central Committee, and see what a miserable person he is. (Postyshev: They really did live in caves at one point. Like some kind of monks!)⁵³

The plenum was not a tribunal. It was a ritual performance, and Bukharin was playing the wrong part—badly. As Molotov put it,

He knows that Tomsky’s last card has been played (and lost), that everyone has understood the meaning of his suicide, and that no one feels sorry about Tomsky’s suicide. He sees that this isn’t going to work, so he comes up with a new trick. He’s like a tiny Jesus. Just look at him bobbing his head up and down, but then he forgets, and quits bobbing. He kept forgetting, and then he’d quit bobbing and be just fine, but whenever he’d remember, he’d start bobbing away again. (Postyshev. Like some kind of martyr.) …

Two days had passed since he declared a hunger strike, but he gave a speech here saying: “I have been fasting for four days.” Didn’t he even read his own letter? What a comedian he is! Bukharin, the actor. A small-time provincial actor. Who is he trying to impress? It’s just a petty acting ploy. A comedy of a hunger strike. Is this the way real revolutionaries fast? This is the counterrevolutionary, Bukharin, after all. (Stalin. Do we have a record of how long he fasted?) They say he fasted for forty days and forty nights on the first day, for forty days and forty nights on the second day, and for forty days and forty nights on each day after that. This is the comedy of Bukharin’s hunger strike. We were all terrified, in complete despair. And now his hunger strike is over. He is not a hunger striker at all, but simply an actor, a small-time bit player, certainly, but an actor for all that. (Stalin. Why did he begin his hunger strike at midnight?) I think it’s because no one eats before bedtime: doctors don’t recommend it.

Comrades, this whole hunger strike is a comical episode in our Party. Afterward, people will say: “That was a funny episode in the Party with Bukharin’s hunger strike.” Such is Bukharin’s role, a role to which he has sunk. But this is not art for art’s sake; this is part of the struggle against the Party. (Voices from the floor: Exactly!)⁵⁴

Anything that Bukharin and Rykov said or did short of a full confession was a struggle against the Party. As Yagoda, who had stage-managed the Zinoviev trial (and who used to be Rykov’s close friend), told them, “You have no more than two minutes to realize that you have been unmasked and that the only way out for you is to tell the plenum—right here, right now, and in great detail—about all of your criminal terrorist activity against the Party. But you cannot do this, since you continue to fight against us as enemies of the Party.”⁵⁵

They could not do it because they did not consider themselves guilty of criminal terrorist activity against the Party. Or rather, they considered themselves guilty objectively, in the sense of being politically responsible for the criminal terrorist activity carried out against the Party, but not subjectively, in the sense of participating in an attempt on the life of Comrade Stalin or the sale of Ukraine to Germany. One reason this line of defense did not work was that there was no wall separating the objective from the subjective. The other was that, according to the logic everyone seems to have accepted, Bukharin and Rykov had to be lying. They were not fighting for their lives yet (that would happen later, in the NKVD interrogation rooms); they were fighting for their Party membership. Party membership entailed the unconditional acceptance of Party decrees. The Party had decreed that the testimony of convicted terrorists was truthful:

MOLOTOV. Is the testimony of the Trotskyites plausible? …

BUKHARIN. When it comes to their accusations against me, it is not (laughter, noise in the hall). Why are you laughing, there is nothing funny about this.

MOLOTOV, When it comes to their testimony against themselves, is it plausible?

BUKHARIN. Yes, it is.⁵⁶

If all the testimony was truthful by definition, how could Bukharin and Rykov be the only exception? Or, as Rykov put it, “How can I prove anything? It is clear that my political confession cannot be relied upon. How else, by what other means, can I prove anything?”⁵⁷

The answer was that the plenum was not a tribunal. The choice, as Stalin presented it, was clear. “There are people who give truthful testimony, even when it is terrible testimony, in order to completely wash off the dirt that has stuck to them. And then there are those people who do not give truthful testimony because they have become attached to the dirt that has stuck to them and do not want to part with it.” Did this mean that Rykov had no choice but to confess to something he had not done? “It is completely clear to me now,” he said, “that I will be treated better if I just confess, it is clear to me, and that all my sufferings will be over, at whatever cost, as long as there is some sort of resolution.”⁵⁸

No, he did not have that choice. “What is clear?” asked Postyshev from the floor. “What sufferings? He is posing as a martyr now.” The real martyrs were the people who had to put up with Bukharin’s and Rykov’s recalcitrance. “Radek, that scum of the earth,” said the Gosplan chairman, Valery Mezhlauk, “had found the courage to say that it was he who was torturing his interrogator, not the other way around. I would like to say that no one is torturing you, but you are torturing us in the most unacceptable, despicable way. (Voices from the floor: That’s right! That’s right!) For many, many years, you have been torturing the Party, and it is only because of Comrade Stalin’s angelic patience that we have not torn you apart politically for your vile terrorist activity.” Comrade Stalin had been wise to let the investigation run its course, but now that there was no doubt about Bukharin’s and Rykov’s guilt, all they had to say was: “I am a viper, and I ask the Soviet state to destroy me as a viper. (Voice from the floor: That’s right!)”⁵⁹

■ ■ ■

How many more vipers were there in the Central Committee? The peculiar feature of the plenum’s logic was that it applied to everyone. As Bukharin had written in his “Letter to the Future Generation of Party Leaders,” “if Stalin doubted himself for a second, confirmation would follow immediately.” He was wrong about Stalin: Stalin was the sacred foundation on which the entire logic was built. He was also wrong about “immediately”: Bykin, Postyshev, and Mezhlauk, among others, would not be revealed as vipers for almost a year. But he was right about the connection between self-doubt and confirmation: the fact that everyone, except for Comrade Stalin, had sinned against the Party at some point, in thought or in deed, meant that everyone, except for Comrade Stalin, was objectively responsible for the criminal terrorist activity against the Party (and doomed irreparably as a result of any publicly issued accusation). One of the most prominent accusers, the former NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda, became the accused four days later, as part of the fifth item on the plenum’s agenda (“The Lessons of the Wrecking, Sabotage, and Espionage of the Japanese-German-Trotskyite Agents within the NKVD”). Another person who found himself drifting from one category to the other was Osinsky. Toward the end of the evening session on February 25, Molotov, who chaired the event, was introducing the next speaker when he was suddenly interrupted by First Secretary of Ukraine Stanislav Kosior:

MOLOTOV. The next speaker is Comrade Zhukov.

KOSIOR. Hasn’t Osinsky signed up to speak?

VOICES FROM THE FLOOR. Is Osinsky going to speak?

KOSIOR. Comrade Molotov, people would like to know. Is Osinsky going to speak?

MOLOTOV. He hasn’t signed up yet.

POSTYSHEV. He has been silent for a long time.

KOSIOR. Yes, for many years.⁶⁰

The next morning, Osinsky was the first to take the floor. He had turned fifty the previous day.

OSINSKY. Comrades, I was not going to speak on this question for the following two reasons … (Voices from the floor: You’re speaking now. We’ll see why soon enough.) that I would like to elaborate on at the outset. (Voices from the floor: Interesting.) In general, I tend to speak on questions that, as it were, inspire and captivate me (Voice from the floor: And the struggle against the Rightists does not captivate you? Laughter, noise) and to which I can add something that has not been said before, something that is new to the listeners and contains something that may be significant and useful, at least from my perspective, for the Central Committee (noise, laughter). My dear comrades, surely you do not consider me a Rightist? Why do you start interrupting me right away? (Shkiriatov: Can’t we simply ask you some things? Kosior: We don’t hear from you very often.) And if you don’t hear from me very often, then allow me to add that the third reason I was not going to speak is that, at the previous plenum, I was the thirteenth person to sign up to speak on the agricultural question, which interests me, but my turn never came, even though thirty people spoke. (Voices from the floor: He feels hurt, mistreated. Noise, laughter.)

Anyway, this particular question not only does not inspire or captivate me, it provokes in me a feeling of utter revulsion. (Voice from the floor: Toward whom?) The case that is being considered is, to put it mildly, extremely unappetizing and, therefore, difficult and unpleasant to talk about, so that I have very few subjective incentives to speak on this question…. But since I was, so to speak, called up to the podium on the initiative of Comrades Beria, Postyshev, and others, and since I am flattered by such attention from the Central Committee, I have decided to speak. Perhaps it will be of some use.⁶¹

Valerian Osinsky (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

Osinsky was called up to the podium because he and Bukharin had once opposed Lenin as leaders of Left Communism. He had apologized for opposing Lenin many times before. Now he needed to apologize for doing so jointly with Bukharin:

Bukharin and I ended up as leaders of Left Communism because we had been great friends since before the Revolution. We started our Party work at the same time, did a lot together within the Party (Voice from the floor: Was that the only reason?), spent time in prison together, and, by the way, were very close in our political views, because, before the Revolution, I was, to use the term that has recently come into use, a Leftist, and so was Bukharin. Then, when the Revolution happened, and after a fairly long break in our relationship (Bukharin had been living in emigration, and I had been wandering around Russian provinces, in various exiles), we met again, and our friendship was renewed. Indeed, at first I had great hopes for it. It interested me and I thought that something good might come of it. But what did come of it, during the first year and a half, was our common participation in Left Communism: nothing good, in other words, as I can state now quite clearly and very sincerely (laughter). It was, as Lenin charitably put it in those days, “a childhood disease within Communism.” For me, it was Childhood Disease No. 1, because my Childhood Disease No. 2 was Democratic Centralism.

It was a very charitable definition because there is no doubt that those “infantile disorders” of ours caused considerable damage to the working class. Our “childhood diseases” had incurred some very serious costs. In addition, they gave support to such people as Trotsky and reinforced and promoted petit bourgeois elements within the working class. (Vareikis: Lenin called you a petit bourgeois gone mad.) That is true, but didn’t he call you the same thing, Comrade Vareikis? (laughter). (Vareikis: I was not one of them at that time. In any case, everyone knows that I was for the Brest Treaty, the whole of Ukraine knows that.) Okay, then you went mad a little later, during Democratic Centralism (laughter).⁶²

Everyone had suffered from one or more childhood diseases, and each disease had caused considerable damage to the working class. Everyone was objectively responsible for criminal terrorist activity against the Party. Who still belonged in the Party (and why)? Osinsky had held various administrative posts in his career as a Bolshevik, but his heart “lay then, and lies now, in scholarly pursuits, and not in such work (laughter).” Accordingly, his defense at the plenum focused on his disagreements with Bukharin on theological matters. Once, around 1931–32, or perhaps 1933, he was walking in the Kremlin and ran into Bukharin, who asked him what he had been up to lately. When he responded that he had been studying philosophy, Bukharin told him that he had been studying philosophy, too, and that he was having difficulty understanding the concepts “objective contradiction” and “quantity becoming quality.” Osinsky found Bukharin’s difficulty to be “bourgeois-positivist” in nature and, when he got home that night, wrote an essay on the subject. He was going to send it to Bukharin, but then he changed his mind. “I thought to myself: ‘Should I really send it if the man has such a profound and persistent misunderstanding of the most basic things about the dialectical method? After all, our views on the subject have nothing in common, so there is no point in talking, especially since we don’t have anything in common in political matters, either. And someone might even think: they started by talking about theoretical matters and then moved on to joint political activities.’”⁶³

The speech ended with the words: “All logical and legal prerequisites for bringing Bukharin and Rykov to trial have been met.” The implication seemed to be that what had started out as a misunderstanding of Marxist dialectics had inevitably led to terrorism. Did this mean that Marxist dialectic was more important than Left Communism, so that Osinsky’s and Bukharin’s childhood diseases were trivial cases of measles compared to Bukharin’s bourgeois-positivist cancer? Or did this mean that one did not have to be an open oppositionist to cause significant damage to the Party, so that everyone who had ever had difficulty with Marxist dialectics, which is to say, everyone with the exception of Comrade Stalin, could be brought to trial? The plenum did not rule on the matter.

On February 26, during the morning session, Bukharin and Rykov were allowed to respond. Both argued that they were human beings, as well as former oppositionists, and that there was, in fact, a wall separating the subjective from the objective:

RYKOV. I don’t know—of course it’s okay to mock me. I’m finished, no doubt about it, but why mock me for no good reason? (Postyshev. We are not mocking you, but we do need to establish the facts.) It’s terrible. (Postyshev. There’s no need to mock you. You have yourself to blame.) I am about to finish, and I fully understand that this is my last speech at a Central Committee plenum and possibly in my whole life. But I will say once more that to confess to something I did not do or represent myself as the kind of scoundrel people here say I am, for my own or someone else’s benefit, this I will never do.

STALIN. Who’s asking you to?

RYKOV. But for God’s sake, that is surely what follows? I have never been a member of any bloc, never belonged to any Rightist Center, and never engaged in any wrecking, espionage, sabotage, terror, or any other filth. And I will keep saying this for as long as I live.⁶⁴

The mockery was not gratuitous. The point of the ritual was to prepare the victims for sacrifice. Laughter was the most effective way of making sure that the former oppositionist was no longer a human being:

BUKHARIN. My sins before the Party are very grave. My sins were particularly grave during socialism’s decisive offensive, when our group became a de facto brake and caused a great deal of damage. I confessed those sins: I confessed that between 1930 and 1932 I still had some unresolved issues that I have since recognized. But with the same force with which I admit my real guilt I deny the guilt that is being imposed on me. I will always deny it—not only because it is important to me personally, but also because I believe that one should never take on extra responsibilities, especially if neither the Party, nor the country, nor I personally need it (noise in the room, laughter).…

The tragedy of my situation is that Piatakov and the rest have poisoned the atmosphere to such an extent that no one believes human emotions any more: feelings, passions, tears (laughter). Human behaviors that used to serve as proof, and there was nothing shameful about it, have lost their power. (Kaganovich: There’s been too much hypocrisy!)⁶⁵

Human emotions had always been at the heart of Bolshevism. For Sverdlov, the real day arrived when he kissed Kira Egon-Besser; for Mayakovsky, the world ended when his Gioconda was stolen; and for Postyshev and Voronsky (as well as for Sverdlov and Mayakovsky), the key to “the gates of a new kingdom” was the sheer power of hatred. For Osinsky, Hamsun’s Victoria brought together his luminous faith, his love for Anna Shaternikova, and his friendship with Nikolai Bukharin. For Bukharin, it stood for his sacrifice for the Revolution, his love for Anna Larina, and his friendship with Aleksei Rykov. For Rykov, the “dignity” with which he conducted himself at the Sixteenth Party Congress (where the Rightists were being pilloried while Bukharin was in Crimea with Anna) had something to do with the fact that he loved Bukharin “the way even a woman who was passionately in love with [him] never could.” The telephone call on December 1, 1934, changed everything. No one believed human emotions any more. Words were as powerless at expressing feelings as they were at making legal arguments.

At home in the House of Government, Rykov stopped talking almost completely. His wife had a stroke the day she heard about the death of Ordzhonikidze (whom she considered their protector) and lay in bed motionless, unable to speak. Natalia was fired from her job at the Border Guard Academy in early January and rarely left the apartment. According to her memoirs,

During the last days of the plenum, my father would come home and walk straight into my mother’s room because she was sick in bed. I remember him once saying (I remember it well—he was taking off his shoes, his face turned up, tense, the skin bluish and hanging in folds, his hands untying and loosening the shoelaces: “They want to lock me up.” And then, on another occasion, “They’re going to lock me up. They’re going to lock me up.” But this was not addressed to those present (my mother and me), the way people usually speak, but into space, without looking at us directly. In those days, he did not seem to live on Earth, among other human beings, but in some world of his own, from which a few words and thoughts would occasionally reach us.⁶⁶

He had stopped seeing his two closest associates, Tomsky and Bukharin, after the fall of the Right Opposition. In his speech at the plenum, he said that he now believed in Tomsky’s guilt. He had asked his other friend, Boris Iofan (who had recently renovated his dacha for him), not to call or come by anymore. Another friend, Yagoda, had stopped coming himself.⁶⁷ On his last day at the plenum, Rykov came home while it was still light outside:

This time he walked straight to his room without answering any of my questions. I remember asking if the session was over or if he had left early, but he did not answer. At a loss and realizing that he was not quite himself and therefore capable of doing the wrong thing, I called Poskrebyshev, told him that my father had come home, and asked if he was needed and if I should send him back. Poskrebyshev told me not for now, but, if necessary, he’d call. At dusk he called and said: “Go ahead and send him over now.” I helped my father dress and walked him to his car, although I did not think then that he would never return. He did not go in to see my mother and did not utter a single sound the whole time. He got dressed and walked mechanically.

We spent several hours anxiously awaiting his return. At eleven the doorbell rang, and I opened the door, but it was not my father, but instead, about ten NKVD men, who spread out through the apartment and began their search. We realized that my father had been arrested. It was February 27, 1937.⁶⁸

Bukharin, Anna, their nine-month-old son Yuri, and Bukharin’s father and first wife were waiting in their Kremlin apartment. In the evening, Stalin’s secretary, Poskrebyshev, called and told Bukharin that he must report to the plenum.

We said our farewells.

It is difficult to describe Ivan Gavrilovich’s state. Exhausted with worry for his son, the old man had mostly kept to his bed. When the time came to say goodbye, he started having convulsions: his legs kept flying up uncontrollably and then falling back on the bed, his hands shook, and his face turned blue. He seemed on the verge of death. But then the attack passed, and he asked his son in a weak voice:

“What’s happening, Nikolai? What’s happening? Please explain to me!”

Before N.I. had a chance to answer, the phone rang again.

“You are delaying the plenum,” said Poskrebyshev, at his Master’s bidding. “Everyone is waiting for you.”

I cannot say that N.I. was in a particular hurry. He said goodbye to Nadezhda Mikhailovna. Then my turn came.

It is impossible to describe the tragic moment of that terrible farewell or the pain that still lives on in my soul. N.I. fell on his knees before me and, with tears in his eyes, asked me to forgive him for ruining my life, to raise our son a Bolshevik (“definitely a Bolshevik!”), to fight for his exoneration, not to forget a single line of his letter, and to hand the text to the Central Committee when the situation improves. “Because it will definitely improve,” he said. “You are young and will live to see that day. Swear to me that you will do it!” And I swore.

He rose from his knees, hugged and kissed me, and said, with great emotion:

“Whatever, you do, don’t hold a grudge, Anna dear. History has occasional misprints, but truth will prevail!”

I started shaking with emotion, and I could feel my lips trembling. We knew that we were parting forever.

N.I. put on his leather jacket and his fur hat with the ear flaps, and headed for the door.

“Make sure you don’t tell any lies about yourself, Nikolai!” was all I could say in farewell.

No sooner had I seen him off to purgatory and lain down for a bit than they came to search the apartment. There was no longer any doubt: N.I. had been arrested.⁶⁹

The group of about a dozen NKVD men was led by Boris Berman, who, according to Larina, “came dressed as if to a banquet, wearing an expensive black suit and white shirt with a ring and a long nail on his little finger.” The procedure, including body searches, lasted a long time. “Closer to midnight, I heard some noise coming from the kitchen and went to see what was going on. The picture I witnessed startled me. The agents had gotten hungry and were having a feast. There was not enough room around the kitchen table, so they were sitting on the floor. On the newspaper that was serving as a tablecloth, I saw a huge piece of ham and some sausage. Eggs were frying on the stove. I could hear their merry laughter.”⁷⁰

■ ■ ■

Two months later, Anna, Yuri, Ivan Gavrilovich, Nadezhda Mikhailovna, and their maid Pasha (Praskovia Ivanovna Ivanova) moved to the House of Government. They did not have to pay rent, and Pasha worked for free. Ivan Gavrilovich, who had taught math at a women’s gymnasium before the Revolution, spent his days “filling sheet after sheet with algebraic formulas.”⁷¹

Natalia Rykova, her mother, Nina Semenovna Marshak, and Glikeria Flegontovna (Lusha) Rodiukova stayed on in their large apartment (Apt. 18) on the tenth floor of Entryway 1. Since their move from the Kremlin in late fall, they had not had a chance to hang up curtains or unpack most of their books. After Rykov’s arrest, Nina Semenovna regained her ability to speak and asked Natalia to read The Brothers Karamazov to her. Soon afterward, she went back to work in the People’s Commissariat of Health (the people’s commissar, Grigory Kaminsky, from Apt. 225, had been one of Rykov’s accusers at the February–March Plenum). In July, two NKVD agents came with a warrant for Nina Semenovna’s arrest. Natalia took out the little suitcase she used for carrying her skates and wool socks to the Gorky Park skating rink and packed her mother’s nightshirt, a toothbrush, some soap, an extra summer dress (“white, with black dots”), and probably a change of underwear (she was not sure many years later). Before leaving, Nina Semenovna stopped at the door “and told me, really firmly: ‘Go on living …’ She probably wanted to say ‘honestly,’ that’s what seemed to be coming, but stopped short and said ‘the best you can.’ We said goodbye and kissed. And then she left. Not a tear was shed, of course…. It was just the two of us, Lusha and I, left. We talked a little. I said: ‘What are we going to do, Glikeria Flegontovna?’ And she said: ‘What are the two of us going to do here?’”⁷²

They asked for permission to move and were given a room in an apartment above the Shock Worker movie theater, at the opposite end of the building. The former renter had been arrested, but his wife and two small children were still living there. Natalia and Lusha brought with them some sheets and pillowcases, a few dishes, and a small cupboard. Before leaving their old apartment, Natalia broke a plaster bust of her father and smashed it into little pieces, so strangers would not desecrate it. The carpet with her father’s portrait (a present from some textile workers) was too large and heavy, so she left it behind.⁷³

The Rykovs’ old apartment on the tenth floor was then occupied by the Osinskys. In June 1937, Osinsky had been removed from the Central Committee and asked to move from the Kremlin to the House of Government. Following the arrests of a group of top Red Army commanders in April and May, many apartments had become vacant. The Osinskys first moved into the apartment of the commander and commissar of the Military Academy, August Kork, and then, after Natalia’s and Lusha’s departure, into the much bigger Rykov (formerly Radek, formerly Gronsky) apartment. When they arrived, they found Rykov’s study still sealed with brown sealing wax. On the kitchen table stood a teapot with the inscription: “To Dear Aleksei Ivanovich Rykov from the Workers of Lysva.”⁷⁴

Unlike Rykov, Osinsky had all his books unpacked, sorted, and shelved. Since there was not enough space for them all, he had additional bookcases built in the middle of the room, perpendicular to one of the walls. His wife, Ekaterina Mikhailovna Smirnova, moved into a small walk-through room. The children’s former nanny, Anna Petrovna, got a room of her own. Another bedroom was given over to the children—Svetlana, who was twelve, and Valia and Rem, who were fourteen. Svetlana slept on Kork’s mahogany bed, which they had brought from their previous apartment. The maid, Nastia, slept in the children’s room. (Rem’s father and Ekaterina’s brother, the former “Democratic Centralist” Vladimir Smirnov, had been brought back from exile after Kirov’s murder, sentenced to three years in prison, retried on May 26, 1937, and executed later that day, about the same time the Osinskys moved into the House of Government.) The sixth and final room—counting Rykov’s sealed study—belonged to the Osinskys’ eldest son, Vadim (“Dima”), and his pregnant wife, Dina. Dima was a military engineer. “He loved my mother and was very close to her,” wrote Svetlana, who was thirteen years younger. “As for me, I remember very little about him, except how he would half-jokingly, half-seriously call me a little bourgeois girl, rock me on his knee, where I would get a delicious whiff of his military boot, and scare me by talking about how much I loved going to the Bolshoi and how the Bolshoi chandelier had once fallen straight into the audience and probably would again.⁷⁵

Dima Osinsky (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

Dima Osinsky (left) and Andrei Sverdlov (right) with friends (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

Osinsky’s favorite pastime, when Dima’s friends came over, was to conduct them in the singing of “In Chains” and “Martyred by Hard Servitude.” One of Dima’s closest friends and most frequent guests was Yakov Sverdlov’s son, Andrei. Dima and Andrei had grown up as next-door neighbors in the Kremlin and studied together at the Academy. In March 1935, when Dima was twenty-three and Andrei was twenty-four, both had been arrested as part of the “Kremlin affair” investigation (after one of the suspects, D. S. Azbel, had testified that, following a 1930 meeting between Bukharin and some of his youthful supporters, Andrei had said, in Dima’s and Azbel’s presence: “Koba must be bumped off”). Osinsky had written to Stalin vouching for Dima; Bukharin had called Stalin pleading on behalf of Andrei (for his father’s sake). Both had been promptly released.⁷⁶

On February 2, three weeks before the February–March plenum, Osinsky had mailed his last letter to Anna Mikhailovna Shaternikova (“A.M.”). Their relationship had been deteriorating along with his position within the Party leadership (which had begun to slide after Dima’s arrest in March 1935). The reason, in both cases, was the apparent loss of the original wholeness, the persistent search for the guilty party, and the growing inability to trust words and feelings:

You’re a strange person, A.M, above all, in the sense that we cannot have a single conversation. And the strangest thing is that you don’t understand that this is, in fact, the main reason why things have not worked out between us….

All our conversations invariably turn to how I am guilty before you for one reason or another. But this whole approach is beside the point. Human closeness is based—and can only be based—on mutual affection, on the fact that it (human closeness) brings joy and satisfaction, that people, together, do something positive for each other. This is precisely what has not been working.

Why has it not been working? Probably because both you and I have been badly damaged by adversity. For myself, I can say that, when it comes to personal relations with people, I have become a recluse. I live by myself, slave away at higher mathematics and think mostly about getting through it as quickly as possible (the end is in sight—only a month to a month and a half left), then getting through Hegel, and finally starting to write books again. You, too, have been damaged, by your relationship with me, among other things. But you don’t seem to realize that that is not the only reason, and that much else has contributed to the damage. As a result, you have been taking out all of your bitterness on me and keep presenting me with demands for a reckoning.⁷⁷

Human closeness—between lovers, as well as among Party comrades—was not a matter of moral accounting. Human closeness was a prerequisite for “insatiable utopia,” which still—twenty years after he had first written to Anna—stood for “tenderness without shame” and “charity without embellishment.” The problem was that twenty years earlier, it had seemed to come naturally, and now it was a matter of duty and, increasingly, guilt and innocence:

I consider mutual help among friends not a duty, but a natural thing. There is really nothing to discuss here, it is perfectly obvious. There is no such thing, nor can there be, as psychological duty, or duty in the realm of emotion, otherwise there is nothing left but boredom and frustration. In fact, the main difference between the old and the new type of marriage is that the former was a constraining duty, whereas the latter is a free union (obviously, accompanied by material obligations associated with the birth of children). But when the latter reverts to the former, it becomes clear that things are not working, and the situation is truly bad.⁷⁸

The answer was to withdraw. In his personal life, he had become a recluse. In his Party work, he had managed to relinquish most of his administrative duties. “My continued employment in a position for which I feel an irresistible, profound, and ever growing revulsion,” he wrote to Molotov on May 15, 1935, in regard to his job as head of the Main Directory of Statistics, “may have bad consequences not only for me personally, but also for the institutions in which I work.” Molotov gave in, and Osinsky was transferred to the much less demanding and, for him, much more congenial directorship of the Institute of the History of Science and Technology of the Academy of Sciences.⁷⁹

He could not hide, however, and he did not seem to want to. The “luminous faith” he had described in his 1917 letter to Anna was still there, and the reason he was studying Hegel and higher mathematics was to grasp the inner dialectic of the “insatiable utopia.” He still thought of Soviet construction projects as his own children and tried to raise his children as conscious participants in the great work of construction. In the Central Committee, he voiced and defended his views about agriculture, the car industry, and other subjects that inspired and captivated him. And if Anna wanted to know why he had not broken off their relationship if he thought things were not working (or why he had not really become a recluse), he would give two answers:

First, I kept thinking that things would work out in the end, when things got easier for you; second, because you are a good person, the kind one does not meet often in this world, and so one tries, in spite of oneself, to prolong the relationship in some form.

It is really quite simple. I am not a bad person either; the problem is that I have a very difficult personality. It hasn’t always been difficult—on the contrary, it used to be cheerful, sociable, and lively. But because of the circumstances, it has become difficult and unpleasant—I know it myself. But do bear in mind: your personality is just as bad. You probably weren’t born this way either, but have, in fact, become this way. This is something you would do well to remember. And yet, in spite of this, you are—I am saying this truthfully and sincerely—a decent, interesting person.

And since it is generally natural to want to maintain a relationship with a good, albeit difficult, person, I kept “procrastinating and muddling through,” as you, I suppose, would choose to call it. But if, as we can see now, nothing is working, then, alas, nothing can be done.⁸⁰

Nothing was working because of their difficult personalities, and their personalities had become difficult because of the times. The times—for unexplained reasons—were bad, and the worst thing about them was that conversations had become impossible.

But as soon as I point that out, you immediately begin to ask: “Whose fault is it?” Why can’t you understand the obvious—that nothing shows more clearly that things are bad, that they’re not working, than that very question? Against this background, every conversation becomes a legal battle—something I prefer not to engage in. In the course of this litigation, I could also argue that it’s your fault, but I don’t want to, and I’m not going to because that’s not the point, and who needs it anyway. So should I try to argue that it’s not my fault? I don’t want to do that either because it would mean going back to the old, boring, “it’s-your-duty” routine. The only thing left is to stop talking altogether.⁸¹

The letter ended with a plea to Anna not to return the money he had given her for her Marxist-Leninist education:

First become a professor of philosophy and then you can return it. And even then, there’s no need. I have always felt that any money that leaves my hands is no longer mine; I live day to day; I have no use for any kind of savings, reserves, or accumulation: I am truly a Communist.

I suppose that is all. I wish you all the best possible.