The House of Government

25

THE VALLEY OF THE DEAD

The search for enemies started at the top and spread outward, from the former leaders of the world revolution to vaguely defined social and ethnic categories consisting of anonymous, interchangeable individuals. After the February–March plenum of 1937, the people’s commissars were given one month to draw up detailed plans for the “liquidation of the consequences of the destructive work of saboteurs, spies, and wreckers.” The people’s commissar of external trade (and Arosev’s former commander, from Apt. 237), Arkady Rozengolts, needed more time to “carefully consider and study the proposals concerning measures aimed at the unmasking and prevention of espionage activities.” The people’s commissar of internal trade (and Natalia Sats’s husband, from Apt. 159), Izrail Veitser, found that the enemies of the people were responsible for shortages and lines for bread, sugar, and salt. The chairman of the Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives (and Solts’s former son-in-law, from Apt. 54), Isaak Zelensky, discovered that the cooperatives he presided over had been causing supply problems and cheating customers in grocery stores. There was no longer such a thing as a mistake, accident, or natural disaster. According to the campaign’s logic, any deviation from virtue—not only in human thought and deed, but in the world at large—was the result of deliberate sabotage by well-organized agents of evil.

It was the logic of magic; the logic of “traditional societies,” in which misfortune is attributed to spirits or witches; the logic of all witch hunts, which return to tradition by promoting healing through acts of scapegoat sacrifice. Forces of darkness are, by definition, legion, and the darker the darkness and greater the fear, the more numerous, dangerous, and ubiquitous they are. As one of the principal promoters of the American ritual-abuse panic of the 1980s, the psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder, put it, “any position of societal power or influence should be seen as a target of infiltration.” All such infiltrators are connected to each other in what another prominent ritual-abuse doctor compared to a “communist cell structure.” In seventeenth-century Bamberg, the witches who had infiltrated every street and institution had the same structure. In April 1937, when the struggle against the consequences of the destructive work of saboteurs, spies, and wreckers was just beginning to gather strength, the director of the Lenin Museum and Kerzhentsev’s deputy in the Committee for the Arts, Naum Rabichev, wrote a programmatic article about the persistence of evil. “All mixed together in one dirty, bloody pile are the counterrevolutionary dregs of the Trotskyites, Rightists, SRs, professional spies, White Guardists, and fugitive kulaks. This frenzied gang of capital’s mercenaries tries to penetrate the most important, the most sensitive parts of the state organism of the Soviet land in order to spy, harm, and soil.” Rabichev (Zaidenshner) lived in Apt. 417 with his wife (the Party secretary of the Izvestia Publishing House), his mother (whom he had forbade to teach his son German because of her Yiddish accent), his son, Vladimir (who had been “difficult” until his friends persuaded him of the value of formal education), and their maid. He had six fingers on his left hand.¹

The Bamberg witches had served the she-devil and her associates. The Soviet wreckers worked for foreign intelligence services. “Their masters have given them the assignment to hide until the hour of the decisive battle,” wrote Rabichev. “Every so often, the fascist masters check on their hirelings’ whereabouts and test their ability to harm by ordering them to carry out exploratory acts of sabotage, wrecking, and murder, so that, undetected, they can continue to remain in hiding until the hour of decisive battle.” Accordingly, the main targets of the police investigations were foreigners, especially Poles, Germans, and Japanese, as well as all Soviet citizens who had spent time abroad, had ethnic links to foreign countries, or had reasons to harbor resentments against the Soviet order. By the time of the Central Committee Plenum of June 23–29, Ezhov had uncovered an enormous spy network that had been operating in several regional Party organizations and People’s Commissariats (including his own) and culminated in the “Center of Centers,” run by Rykov, Bukharin, and other former oppositionists.

By then, Rykov, who had been in prison for four months, had begun to name names. New arrests led to new confessions and more arrests. Stalin regularly read the interrogation transcripts sent to him by Ezhov and suggested new lines of investigation. Ezhov complied with Stalin’s requests and produced new suspects and new evidence. Stalin circulated some of the interrogation transcripts among the Central Committee members, including those accused of treason. On June 17, the people’s commissar of health and former head of the Kolkhoz Center, Grigory Kaminsky (Apt. 225), wrote to Stalin dismissing new testimony against him and describing the suspicious behavior of the deputy commissar of health of the Russian Federation, Valentin Kangelari (Apt. 141). Kangelari was arrested on June 17. On June 25, Stalin circled Kaminsky’s name (along with Khalatov’s and Zelensky’s) in the text of the interrogation of the deputy commissar of communications, Ivan Zhukov (who, at the February–March plenum, had called for the speedy execution of his former boss, Rykov). On the same day, Kaminsky spoke at the plenum, accusing Beria and Budenny. Later that day, Kaminsky was arrested. Khalatov and Zelensky were also arrested (but Beria and Budenny were not). By the end of the summer, most of the participants in the February–March Central Committee plenum had been jailed.²

The fate of arrested high officials was decided by Stalin and his closest associates. The NKVD prepared lists of those to be sentenced, dividing them into Category 1 (execution), Category 2 (ten years in prison), and Category 3 (five to eight years in prison). Category 3 disappeared after July 1937; Category 2 appeared infrequently. The lists were signed by a handful of Politburo members (who might move some names from one category to another, cross them out altogether, or make marginal comments or recommendations), returned to the NKVD, and then sent down to the Supreme Court’s Military Collegium, which staged five-to-ten-minute individual trials and issued formal sentences. This procedure had been pioneered in the fall of 1936, when 585 people were condemned as a single list in the wake of the Zinoviev trial, but it did not become a regular sentencing method until the opening day of the February–March plenum, when 479 people, including Aleksandr Tivel-Levit, Radek’s deputy in the Central Committee’s International Information Bureau and the official Comintern historian, were marked for execution. Altogether, in 1936–38, 43,768 individuals organized into 383 lists were sentenced in this fashion, most of them to death. Of these lists, 372 were signed by Molotov, 357 by Stalin, 188 by Kaganovich, 185 by Voroshilov, 176 by Zhdanov, 8 by Mikoyan, and 5 by Kosior. Kosior himself was executed in February 1939, when the lists had been mostly discontinued.

The chairman of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court, Vasily Ulrikh, did not live in the House of Government, but he knew many of the people he formally sentenced. His former wife’s sister, Marta (Matla) Dimanshtein, an Old Bolshevik and chief editor of Moscow’s Radio Committee, lived in Apt. 279, next door to the Podvoiskys, with her two children and maid. Her former husband, Semen Dimanshtein, had served as chairman of the Central Committee’s Nationalities Section, director of the Institute of Nationalities, and head of the Committee for the Settlement of Toiling Jews on the Land. Both couples had separated in the 1920s but remained close and saw each other regularly. Semen was arrested on February 21, 1938, included in the “List of Individuals to Be Tried by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court” (313 names, all Category 1) by the head of the NKVD’s First Special Section, Isaak Shapiro; approved for execution by Stalin and Molotov on August 20, 1938; sentenced by Ulrikh’s Collegium on August 25, 1938; and shot on the same day.³

■ ■ ■

Sergei Mironov (Korol) had taken up his new job as head of the NKVD Directorate of West Siberia in late December 1936, two months after Frinovsky’s appointment as Ezhov’s deputy. He and Agnessa were accompanied by her sister Elena, her nephew Boria (Elena’s son), and her niece Agulia (her brother’s daughter), whom they had adopted and were raising as their own. They moved into what Agnessa described as the former governor-general’s mansion. Their first visit was to West Siberian Party Secretary Robert Eikhe.

And now, picture this: Siberia, dead of winter, minus forty, and forest all around—spruces, pines, and larches. It’s the middle of nowhere, the taiga, and suddenly, in the midst of all this cold and snow, a clearing, a gate, and behind it, glittering with lights from top to bottom—a palace!

We mount the stairs, are met by the doorman, who bows respectfully and opens the door for us, and then dive straight from the cold into tropical warmth. The “lackeys”—I beg your pardon—the “attendants” help us take off our coats, and it’s warm, as warm as summer. We are in a huge, brightly lit antechamber. Before us is a staircase covered with soft carpet; on the left and right of each stair are vases of fresh blooming lilies. I had never seen such luxury before! Even our governor’s mansion could not compare.

We walk into the hall. The walls are covered in reddish-brown silk, and then there are drapes and a table … Just like in a fairytale!

Eikhe himself came out to greet us. He was tall, lean, stern-looking, and said to be honest and well-educated, but too much of a courtier. He shook Mirosha’s hand, but barely glanced at me. I was beautifully and tastefully dressed, but all I got was a passing glance and a rather scornful greeting. I felt the scorn immediately, and still can’t quite forget it. In the hall, the table was set as it might have been in one of the Tsar’s palaces. There were several women there, all “bluestockings,” dressed very somberly and without a hint of makeup. Eikhe introduced us to them and to his wife, Elena Evseevna, who was wearing a conservative, but extremely well-tailored English suit. I already knew she was a highly educated woman with two academic degrees. And there I was in my lavender dress shot with gold, my neck and shoulders bare (I always thought a woman should not hide her body, but show as much as decency allowed—because it’s beautiful!), and in my high heels and tasteful makeup. My god, what a contrast! In their eyes, of course, I was just an empty-headed, dressed-up doll. No wonder Eikhe had looked at me with such scorn.

At the table, though, he tried to be nice, handing me the menu first and asking what I would like to have. I had no idea, there were so many things to choose from. I admitted that I didn’t know … So he spoke to me as if to a child, indulgently, even tenderly:

“But I do. Why don’t you order the veal shank fricassee? …

At the table we talked about this and that—the usual banalities. How do you like Siberia? What do you think of our winter? It’s very dry here, so the cold is easier to take—all the things people usually say about Siberia.

Then the men walked over to the next room to play billiards. Mirosha—thick-set, burly, broad-shouldered and Eikhe—tall, dry, and lean.⁴

Robert Eikhe

Several days later, Eikhe went on an inspection tour of Siberia’s industrial region. The new director of the Kuznetsk Steel Plant, Konstantin Butenko (whose wife, Sofia, had recently distinguished herself at the first nationwide conference of the women’s volunteer movement) reported that, “thanks to the direct assistance of Comrade Eikhe and the appropriate organs,” various previously undiscovered enemies of the people had finally been unmasked. Typical in this respect was the case of the Novosibirsk water supply system. As Eikhe explained, “When we asked the comrades who are supposed to be in charge of these things why the water supply was not working properly, they sent us piles of paper with all sorts of general explanations. I asked them to provide more detailed explanations. They explained once, twice, but it made no sense. They explained a third time. And it still made no sense. It made no sense because people look for general explanations instead of going to the heart of the matter…. And when we looked into the heart of the matter, it turned out that the water supply system had become infiltrated by our sworn enemies.”⁵

In the logic of magic that dominates scapegoating campaigns, the general and the particular change places. Explanations having to do with the specifics of faulty pumps and rusty pipes become general, while general claims regarding enemy infiltration become specific. In West Siberia, the inquisitor-in-chief responsible for identifying masked witches was Mironov. Upon arrival in Novosibirsk, he accelerated his predecessor’s operation against the Trotskyites and extracted several important confessions. One former Red Partisan admitted that he was “a scoundrel” and a terrorist after interrogations conducted personally by both Mironov and Eikhe.⁶

That was not good enough. The head of the Central NKVD Secretariat, Yakov Deich, kept telling Mironov about the “brilliant cases” that were being sent in by other regional chiefs and warning him about Ezhov’s growing impatience. According to Agnessa, Mironov “would come home late, exhausted, and I began to notice how tense he was. Up until then, he had been good at hiding his feelings about his problems at work, but now, something had started to give.”⁷

At the February–March plenum, Mironov, according to his own later claim, complained to Ezhov about the large numbers of fictitious cases he had inherited from his predecessor, V. M. Kursky. Ezhov’s recommendation was to have “stronger nerves.” On the same occasion, Mironov’s old friend Frinovsky (now Ezhov’s first deputy) allegedly told him that Ezhov was “understandably unhappy” about the slow case turnover. Upon their return to Novosibirsk, Eikhe and Mironov spoke at the regional Party meeting, which took place on March 16–18. Eikhe said that it was a disgrace that none of the economic managers had informed the NKVD of specific acts of wrecking at their enterprises. (Konstantin Butenko shouted from his seat that he had, in fact, done so on one occasion.) Mironov admitted that, during the years of collectivization, his organization had gotten used to general, as opposed to particular, methods of repression. “In those days, we had a term ‘to trim,’ and so we kept ‘trimming’ the counterrevolution and neglecting, even back then, its deep roots.”⁸

Sergei Mironov (Courtesy of Rose Glickman)

As a place of exile, West Siberia was, by definition, filled with former enemies. Former enemies were, by definition, present-day terrorists. Over the course of the spring, Mironov uncovered several large terrorist networks, including the “Rightist-Trotskyite” conspiracy within the Party apparatus, the “Military-Fascist” conspiracy within the Siberian Military District, the “Russian All-Military Union” involving the remaining representatives of the tsarist privileged classes, and secret organizations among former Red Partisans, Christian “sectarians,” and Menshevik and SR exiles. Some of the prisoners were interrogated by Mironov himself. One of them, the head of construction of the Turkestan-Siberia Railway, Vladimir Shatov, had known Mironov and Agnessa well from their days in Kazakhstan. According to Agnessa, “Once some prisoners had arrived, and he was informed that one of them had asked for a meeting with ‘Mironov.’ Mironov agreed to see him. Shatov never let on that they were acquainted. Mirosha didn’t tell me what they talked about, but afterwards he was terribly upset and nervous. He couldn’t sleep, kept smoking and thinking, and wouldn’t answer any of my questions.” Shatov had been accused of being a Japanese spy, but he persisted in denying his guilt and was not executed until October.⁹

On May 14, one day before launching a massive campaign of arrests among military commanders, Mironov addressed the members of the Fifth (Special) Section of his department:

Our task is to purge the Army of all those under our investigation. There will be more than 50 of them, maybe 100–150, or maybe more.… It will be a hard fight. You’ll have almost no time for lunch. And when we arrest these 50–100 people, you will have to sit in your offices day and night. You will have to forget about your families, drop everything personal. There will be some whose nerves will prove too weak. Everyone will be tested. This is a battlefield. Any hesitation is tantamount to treason….

I am sure we will get it done quickly…. Comrades, your life as a true Chekist is about to begin.¹⁰

By the end of 1937, the number of arrested “members of counterrevolutionary units within the Siberian Military District” had exceeded 1,100. The nerves of some of the employees of the Special Section, including its head, did prove too weak, and most of the work had to be done by the Secret Political Section. Some investigators were expelled for questionable social origins and “moral corruption” (mostly drunkenness), and some were arrested as spies and “double-dealers.” Meanwhile, in Moscow and across the country, top NKVD officials who had worked under Yagoda were being exposed as traitors and replaced by Ezhov appointees. On June 6, Mironov’s former boss and the sponsor and organizer of his wedding, V. A. Balitsky, received a secret order to arrest the head of the NKVD’s Counterintelligence Department, Lev Mironov (Kagan), who was touring Siberia and the Far East. Within days, Balitsky and Lev Mironov arrived in Novosibirsk. According to Agnessa,

He arrived with a whole retinue: charming officers who kissed all the ladies’ hands and danced beautifully. Mirosha threw a party for them. It was winter, but we had fresh vegetables from special greenhouses in Novosibirsk. They could not get enough of those vegetables—or the fruits, of course.

Mironov-the-Guest had been placed in the seat of honor. He caught sight of our Agulia (she was four at the time) and could not keep his eyes off her. He took her on his lap, gently stroked her head, and spoke softly to her as she nestled up against him. It seemed strange to me somehow: rather than flirting with the women or drinking and talking with the men, he’d turned to the child for some tenderness.

Later I said to Mirosha:

“This Mironov of yours seemed sad.”

Mirosha started and said angrily:

“What gave you that idea? Why would he be sad? He was received with great respect.¹¹

Several days later Lev Mironov and his entire delegation were arrested, put on a special train, and sent to Moscow. Balitsky, who had presided over the operation, had a long conversation with Eikhe and Sergei Mironov (who had helped stage it). Soon afterward, Mironov wrote to Ezhov that in the course of that conversation, Balitsky had expressed surprise at the arrest of the former head of the Kiev Military District (and one of the main proponents of the “extermination of a certain percentage” of the Cossack population in 1919), Iona Yakir, and had then gone on to say that, in the prevailing atmosphere, anyone could be arrested for any reason and confess to anything at all. On June 19, Ezhov sent Balitsky excerpts from Mironov’s letter and ordered him to report to Moscow immediately. Balitsky appealed to Stalin (“I have no feelings of pity for the enemy and have personally used the most acute forms of repression efficiently and on more than one occasion”), but complied with the order and was arrested on July 7 and shot four months later.¹²

Meanwhile, Mironov, encouraged by Ezhov and Frinovsky, had been rapidly expanding the case of the Russian All-Military Union. On June 9, he reported that Japanese agents in Mongolia were stockpiling weapons and arming Buddhist lamas as part of preparations for a military rebellion centered in Siberia. On June 17, three days after the arrest of Lev Mironov, he sent Ezhov (with a copy to Eikhe) a memo describing a vast conspiracy that brought together former SRs, White officers, “and Kadet-Monarchist elements from among old regime people and reactionary circles within the professoriate and research scholars.” An elaborate network of terrorist cells based in several West Siberian cities had, according to Mironov, been organized into a giant army commanded by White émigrés in Prague and Harbin and Japanese diplomats stationed in the Soviet Union. The manpower was being provided by exiled kulaks. “If one bears in mind that, on the territory of Narym District and Kuznetsk Basin, there are 280,400 exiled kulaks and 5,350 former White officers, members of punitive expeditions, and active bandits, it becomes clear how broad the foundation was upon which the insurgent work was based.” So far, the arrest of 382 people had resulted in the unmasking of 1,317 members of the organization, but there was little doubt that the overall number of potential targets was going to “exceed significantly the number of participants identified up to this point.” Prisons were full, the transportation of prisoners difficult, and access to Narym by boat impossible after September. The only solution, according to Mironov, was for Moscow to send down a special delegation of the military tribunal or “to give us the right to issue death sentences on SR and All-Military-Union cases by means of a simplified procedure through a special collegium of the provincial court or a special troika.” (“Troikas” were the extrajudicial three-member tribunals first instituted in 1918 and widely used during collectivization for issuing death sentences to kulaks.)¹³

On June 22, Ezhov forwarded Mironov’s memo to Stalin, proposing the creation, in West Siberia, of a “troika charged with the extrajudicial adjudication of cases involving liquidated anti-Soviet insurgent organizations.” Six days later, the Politburo issued a decree ordering the execution of “all activists of the insurgent organization among exiled kulaks” and announcing the creation of a troika consisting of Mironov (chair), Eikhe, and the West Siberian prosecutor, I. I. Barkov. The next day, on June 29, the head of the NKVD Secretariat, Yakov Deich, sent Mironov a telegram informing him of the Politburo’s decision.¹⁴

On July 2, the Politburo applied Mironov’s West Siberian model to the Soviet Union as a whole (and launched what would become known as the Great Terror) by issuing the resolution “On Anti-Soviet Elements.” On July 3, it was sent to all the local Party secretaries and NKVD chiefs:

It has been observed that a large number of former kulaks and criminals who were deported at one time from various regions to the North and to Siberian districts and then, at the expiration of their period of exile, returned to their native provinces are the chief instigators of all sorts of anti-Soviet crimes, including sabotage, in both kolkhozes and sovkhozes, as well as in transportation and in certain branches of industry.

The Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) directs all secretaries of provincial and territorial Party committees and all provincial and republican NKVD representatives to register all kulaks and criminals who have returned home, so that the most hostile of them may be arrested without delay and executed pursuant to an administrative decision by a troika, while the remaining, less active but nevertheless hostile elements may be listed and exiled to districts as indicated by the NKVD.¹⁵

On the same day, Ezhov sent a telegram to the local NKVD chiefs ordering them to divide the registered kulaks and criminals into Category 1 (execution) and Category 2 (exile) and to submit the results by July 8. Mironov was ready. On the appointed day, he reported that in 110 towns and 20 stations of his territory, the NKVD had registered 25,960 people, consisting of 6,642 kulaks and 4,282 criminals marked for execution and 8,201 kulaks and 6,835 criminals marked for exile. “Despite the large number of people subject to extraction,” he wrote, “we guarantee the operational and political success of the operation.” The preparations included the opening of ten new prisons for nine thousand people. (Two weeks earlier, the head of the Gulag, Matvei Berman, had ordered the clearing out of prisons by means of transferring prisoners to camps; Berman’s brother-in-law, House of Government neighbor, and, since March, the NKVD chief of the Northern Province, Boris Bak, proposed to solve the problem of prison availability by registering large numbers of prisoners as enemies subject to “extraction”). Two days later, Mironov asked Ezhov for permission to pass sentences “not only on kulaks but also on all the old regime people and White Guardist and SR activists.”¹⁶

On July 16, the local NKVD chiefs were summoned to Moscow for instructions. According to Mironov, “Ezhov gave a general political and operational directive, and Frinovsky elaborated on it and worked with each head of directorate on operational quotas.” The “operational quotas” referred to the Category 1 and Category 2 targets assigned to each area. Mironov later claimed that he had told Ezhov that some prisoners were providing “highly unconvincing” testimony about their accomplices and that Ezhov had responded by saying: “Arrest them and then see; those against whom there is no evidence can be weeded out later.” He also, according to Mironov, authorized the use of “physical interrogation techniques.”¹⁷

Back in Novosibirsk, Mironov convened a meeting of the regional NKVD commanders of West Siberia and issued instructions concerning the conduct of the operation: “This operation should be considered a state secret with all the consequences that entails. As I acquaint you with the plan for the territory as a whole, any numbers you hear must, as far as possible, perish inside your head. Those who can must banish those numbers from their minds, while those who cannot must force themselves to do it anyway because anyone found guilty of divulging the overall numbers will be subject to a military tribunal.”

There was no need for more than two or three interrogations per person. Confrontations with witnesses could be dispensed with. All that was required was a confession (“a single record should suffice”). The goal was “to send the troika a ready draft of the troika’s resolution.” The choice of particular enemies and the decision on whether to execute or imprison them was up to the regional offices: “For the first operation, the quota is 11,000 people, which means that on July 28 you must arrest 11,000 people. Or you can arrest 12,000 or 13,000, or even 15,000. Don’t worry, I’m not holding you to that number. You can even arrest 20,000 under Category 1, so that later you can select the ones that are appropriate for Category 1 and the ones that need to be moved to Category 2. For Category 1 the quota we have been given is 10,800. I repeat, you can arrest as many as 20,000, so that later you can select the ones that are of particular interest.”

Mironov concluded with “some technical matters.” Killing large numbers of people and disposing of their bodies required careful preparation. Some “operational sectors” had to be prepared to carry out “about 1,000 and in some cases 2,000 death sentences each. So what must each operational sector head do as soon as he returns? He must find one place for carrying out the death sentence and another for burying the corpses. If it is in the forest, the turf must be cut in advance and then put back over the spot so that the place where the death sentences are carried out remains secret and does not become a place of religious fanaticism for various counterrevolutionaries and priests.”¹⁸

According to one NKVD officer present at the meeting, Mironov’s speech was met “with noisy approval from everyone in attendance, because those measures were long overdue, since our organs had not done anything substantial up to that point because of the enemy sabotage on the part of Yagoda and his accomplices.” Any surprise or bewilderment would have been reflected in subsequent conversations in the hall, “the way it usually happens when something new is introduced in the way people work, but there were no such conversations.”¹⁹

■ ■ ■

On July 30, Ezhov issued the “Operational Order of the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR No. 00447 Concerning the Repression of Former Kulaks, Criminals, and Other Anti-Soviet Elements.” The next day it was approved by the Politburo and sent out to local NKVD chiefs. Partly in response to input from local officials, including Mironov, the list of “contingents subject to repression” had been expanded beyond “former kulaks and criminals” to include members of non-Bolshevik political parties, Whites, priests, and active believers. Those placed in Category 1 were “subject to immediate arrest and, upon consideration of their cases by troikas, execution”; those placed in Category 2 were to be sentenced to eight to ten years in camps or (“the most persistent and socially dangerous among them”) in prison. The troikas, modeled on the original one in West Siberia, were to consist of the local NKVD chief, Party secretary, and prosecutor. The highest quotas were assigned to Redens’s Moscow Province (five thousand under Category 1; thirty thousand under Category 2) and Mironov’s West Siberian Territory (five thousand under Category 1; twelve thousand under Category 2). The NKVD camps were to execute ten thousand inmates. The total for arrests was 268,950 people, 75,950 of them under Category 1. The official in charge of the operation was Mironov’s old friend, the former seminarian Mikhail Frinovsky. On August 8, he sent out a special addendum to Order No. 00447: “The troikas’ sentences should be announced only to Category 2 prisoners. Sentences to Category 1 prisoners are not to be announced. I repeat—not to be announced.”²⁰

Quotas could only be raised by permission from Ezhov. According to one campaign participant, they were “the subject of a kind of competition among many of the local NKVD commanders. The atmosphere in the commissariat was such that those regional commanders who had been able to quickly exhaust their quotas and receive new quotas from the people’s commissar were considered top performers.” Mironov seems to have performed well. By October 5, 1937, the West Siberian troika had sentenced 19,421 people, 13,216 of them to death. Another top performer, the head of the Moscow Province NKVD directorate (and Stalin’s brother-in-law), Stanislav Redens, reported to Ezhov in mid-August that the “extraction of kulak and criminal elements” had greatly improved labor discipline and productivity in rural districts.²¹

According to Order No. 00447, the operation’s purpose was “to destroy the whole gang of anti-Soviet elements in the most ruthless manner, defend the working people of the Soviet Union from their counterrevolutionary schemes, and put an end, once and for all, to their vile work of sabotage against the foundations of the Soviet state.” According to Frinovsky, who knew about the importance of referring to Don Quixote but had not had a chance to read it, “without such an operation, any talk about being able to prevail over this counterrevolutionary work would have been like tilting at watermills.”²²

Kulaks, “old regime people,” and various former oppositionists were not the only potential saboteurs. Simultaneously with the “anti-kulak” campaign, the NKVD, following Stalin’s orders, conducted a series of “national operations” directed at individuals with links to hostile neighboring states. Most neighboring states were hostile: accordingly—and reflecting Stalin’s foreign policy preoccupations—the national operations began, on July 25, with the German operation; continued, on August 11, with the Polish one, and went on to include, over the course of 1937 and 1938, Romanian, Latvian, Greek, Estonian, Lithuanian, Finnish, Iranian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Afghan, and Chinese operations, as well as a related one against the employees of the Chinese Eastern Railway (“Harbiners”), who had returned to the Soviet Union after the railway’s sale to the Manchukuo government.

Candidates for arrest were selected on the basis of ethnic belonging (determined, in the absence of formal ascription, by a variety of means) or any other sign of susceptibility to enticements from abroad (fluency in the language, history of travel, correspondence with foreigners). There were no quotas, but the lists of Category 1 and 2 prisoners (known as “albums”) were subject to approval by Ezhov and Vyshinsky or their deputies. On March 21, 1938, Frinovsky complained to the head of the Sverdlovsk Provincial NKVD that, according to the albums received by Moscow, the 4,142 people arrested in Sverdlovsk as part of the German operation included only 390 Germans, and that the same was true of the other national operations: 390 Poles out of a total of 4,218 arrested Polish spies; 12 Latvians out of a total of 237 arrested Latvian spies; 42 Harbin returnees out of a total of 1,249 arrested “Harbiners”; 1 Romanian and 96 Russians as part of the Romanian operation; and, “with regard to the Finnish operation, not one single Finn, but five Russians, eight Jews, and two others.” The Polish operation was the largest (with 139,835 people sentenced, 111,091 executed); the Finnish, one of the most lethal (with an execution rate of more than 80 percent); and the Latvian, the most politically and operationally sensitive because of the large number of ethnic Latvians in the security apparatus. At the same time, all borderland populations considered unreliable were deported to the interior. The largest such operation involved the deportation of more than 170,000 Koreans from the Far East to Kazakhstan and central Asia in September and October 1937.²³

Overall, according to the incomplete and continually revised statistics, between August 1937 and November 1938, when the mass operations were halted, the operation against kulaks and anti-Soviet elements resulted in 767,397 sentences, 386,798 of them under Category 1 (as compared to the original quotas of 268,950 and 75,950, respectively). The national operations resulted in 335,513 sentences, 247,157 of them under Category 1.²⁴

The key to good work on the part of NKVD officials was “ruthlessness toward the enemy.” Mironov’s predecessor as head of the West Siberian NKVD, V. M. Kursky, declared that what a Chekist needed was “Bolshevik fury against the Zinovievite-Kamenevist scoundrels.” The head of Mironov’s Secret Political Department reported that every one of his employees was “imbued with fury and hatred for the counterrevolutionary Trotskyite-Zinovievite gang.” Mironov himself set the example by conducting interrogations, attending executions, arresting unreliable Chekists, and continuing to unmask enemies among high-ranking Party officials (including Eikhe’s second-in-command, V. P. Shubrikov, and the chairman of the West Siberian territorial Executive Committee, F. P. Griadinsky). When, on July 31, 1937, the deputy chairman of the Secret Political Department proved insufficiently imbued with fury and shot himself in his office, an emergency Party meeting approved Mironov’s report expressing “contempt for this treacherous and foul deed.” And when one of the interrogators proved unable to obtain the required number of confessions, Mironov said (at a special Party meeting): “Did Kuznetsov fight against the enemies of the people? Yes, he did, but in this struggle, his legs were shaky. When an enemy makes himself out to be an innocent lamb, Kuznetsov, who is unsteady on his feet, begins to vacillate.” Kuznetsov received a reprimand for “opportunist vacillation, which manifested itself in a relative lack of faith in the guilt of the enemies of the people,” and was asked to retire on account of ill health.²⁵

Mironov’s fury was occasionally accompanied by another key Chekist trait: “Party sensitivity.” Kuznetsov’s mild punishment was the result of his past achievements and a sincere willingness to overcome his vacillations. And when another employee of the Secret Political Department, K. K. Pastanogov, was denounced by his colleagues for having refrained, back in 1930, from participating in the execution of his uncle, Mironov told the Party meeting: “Not every Chekist can carry out a death sentence—sometimes for health reasons, for example. Therefore, citing this episode as a reason for a direct political accusation is not quite correct, it seems to me, especially considering the fact that Pastanogov was not assigned to that firing squad. Comrade Pastanogov is the one who provided the first information about his uncle’s counterrevolutionary activity. And even if Pastanogov had stated that it would be awkward for him to execute his uncle, it would not have been a violation of Party ethics, it seems to me.” The Party meeting proclaimed Pastanogov “rehabilitated” and noted that, in this case, his comrades had lacked Party sensitivity.²⁶

In Mironov’s own case, the only person in a position to show sensitivity was his wife, Agnessa:

He had a huge billiard room at work. Sometimes I would go to his office, and if he had a free hour, we would play a game or two. Once, we were playing, and it was his turn, but he suddenly froze with the cue in his hand and turned pale. I followed his gaze. Through the enormous window of the billiard room, I could see three soldiers in service caps with red bands.

“Mirosha,” I whispered. “What’s wrong?”

And then I understood. “Mirosha, it’s only the changing of the guard.”

And, sure enough, the corporal of the guard had brought two soldiers to replace the ones in the sentry box. It was just that, for some reason, they had momentarily entered the courtyard.²⁷

One of Mironov’s concerns was Eikhe. The conduct of the mass operations was their joint responsibility, but the Party and NKVD jurisdictions were not clearly differentiated, and the two men’s survival strategies did not always coincide. Mironov complained about Eikhe’s unauthorized arrest orders, while Eikhe lobbied in behalf of his close associates, whose arrests by Mironov seemed to expose his lack of vigilance. Mironov controlled the content of the confessions produced by his office (including a number of alleged assassination attempts against Eikhe), but Eikhe had the last word on all important decisions and a direct line to Stalin. Ezhov’s response when Mironov complained was that Eikhe knew what he was doing and that maintaining a good relationship with him was part of Mironov’s job. Eikhe seemed to agree. The two men regularly met outside of work, sometimes in the company of their wives.²⁸ According to Agnessa, the Eikhes also had a smaller dacha, as “luxurious” as the palace they had first received them in, “but cozier and nicer”:

Once, Mirosha and I went there, just the two of us. Eikhe and his wife were alone at the dacha (not counting the servants). She had on bright pink lounging pajamas, very informal. (I also wore pajamas at home, only they were light blue.) We had a great time, the four of us. They were a close couple, and Mirosha and I were, too.

It was not at all like the first time—very simple, unpretentious—although Eikhe’s attitude toward me hadn’t changed. He was probably saying to himself, “All she cares about are her outfits, unlike my wife, who has two degrees and does important Party work.” He was very proud of her….

They gave us a luxurious room on the second floor. True, it was a bit cold, but there were some bearskins, and we piled them on top of the covers and could have slept beautifully—it’s so nice to sleep in a cold room under warm covers … But I woke at dawn sensing that Mirosha was awake. I was right. It was very quiet, but I listened to his breathing, and sure enough, he was awake.

“What’s the matter?”

He whispered: “You know, I think my secretary is spying on me.”

“Osipov? What nonsense!”

“He must have been assigned to spy on me …”

“Oh, Mirosha, there you go again, just like that time with the guard commander!”

I tried to cheer him up and distract him with caresses.²⁹

He continued to do his job well. By August 9, he and Eikhe, assisted by the prosecutor Barkov, had sentenced 1,487 people, 1,254 of them to death. By mid-August—within three weeks of the beginning of the operation—Mironov’s directorate had arrested 13,650 people. Ezhov praised West Siberia for being second in the countrywide race for the speediest destruction of the enemy underground. (The first was probably Redens’s Moscow Province.) On August 15, Mironov was appointed Soviet ambassador to Mongolia.³⁰

Eikhe was impossible to recognize. This was not the same man who had received us with such pomp and circumstance in his country palace or so informally, with such affectionate condescension, in the intimate atmosphere of his forest retreat. I saw an obsequious, ingratiating man stripped of all his pride. He became extremely attentive and courteous to me. He sat beside me at the table and started talking to me about politics, China, and Chiang Kai-shek. When I confessed to him that all those Chinese-Japanese names sounded the same to me (thereby admitting my total ignorance), there was no hint of contempt or condescension in his face. He immediately changed the subject and began asking my opinion of a film he knew I’d seen. He was desperate to find some point of contact or common ground with me and, hoping I would tell Mirosha, kept repeating how sorry he was to see us go, how we had become such dear friends, how he and Mirosha had worked so well together.³¹

■ ■ ■

Three days after hearing of the new appointment, the Mironovs joined Frinovsky on a special train bound for Ulan Ude. (The rest of the journey to Ulaanbaatar had to be made by car.) The Eikhes came to the railway station to say goodbye, but Mironov, according to Agnessa, was busy talking to Frinovsky and did not even bother to respond:

Mirosha had cheered up visibly as soon as he got wind of his coming promotion. Now all his old ambition, self-confidence, proud bearing, and reckless decisiveness were back. His eyes seemed different: they sparkled with the light of success, as if he were back in the days of his youth doing “real work” in the struggle against counterrevolutionaries in Rostov.

All the way to Mongolia, Mirosha and Frinovsky, both former border guards, spent hours poring over maps, thinking and planning. Here’s Outer Mongolia, there’s Inner Mongolia, and over there is Manchuria, now occupied by the Japanese, whose goal is to pounce on Lake Baikal and separate the Far East from the rest of the Soviet Union. The Japanese had already shown their true colors: after the execution of Tukhachevsky and other high-ranking officers, they had provoked a skirmish on the Amur and occupied the Bolshoi Island.

Meanwhile, I had completely forgotten all my fears and begun to breathe more easily and to have fun again. I eagerly studied the Rules of Behavior for Soviet Plenipotentiaries Abroad, about how to dress for receptions: tuxedos, shirt fronts, cuff links made of mother-of-pearl as opposed to imitation pearl. The foreign diplomats wore diamonds; we couldn’t, of course—they were too expensive—but fake pearls were tasteless and vulgar, and bound to provoke ridicule. Mother-of-pearl, now that is elegant and modest.³²

During a stop in Irkutsk, Mironov and Frinovsky visited the local NKVD office. According to Agnessa, Mironov came back very upset. She asked him what happened:

So he told me. He and Frinovsky walked into the office of the local NKVD boss and saw a man being interrogated. He didn’t say who. They were interrogating him, but he wouldn’t confess. Suddenly Frinovsky punched him hard in the ear! And then started beating him! He knocked him to the floor and kicked him over and over again. Mirosha couldn’t believe his eyes. As they were leaving, Frinovsky was red in the face and breathing heavily, and could barely pull himself together. Seeing Mirosha’s amazement, he grinned:

“What, you don’t know yet? There’s been a secret order from Comrade Stalin—if the bastard doesn’t confess, beat him till he does.”

Remember I told you once that I sometimes ask myself: was Mirosha really an executioner? Of course, I want to believe that he was not. The incident I’ve just described—the impression that brutal beating made on him—that speaks in his favor, doesn’t it? That must mean that up to that point, he had not used torture himself, right?³³

It is possible that Mironov did not participate in the beatings of prisoners—or had not, up to that point. The fact of the beating in Irkutsk is confirmed by the local interrogator, I. F. Kotin, who described the scene a year and a half later: “In Irkutsk, Frinovsky listened to the reports of the department heads about the cases under investigation—and then offered to interrogate the prisoner Korshunov. In my presence and in the presence of S. N. Mironov, he began to reinterrogate him about his testimony concerning Zirnis and the other NKVD officials. Korshunov confirmed it, but then began wavering. Frinovsky started beating him—and Korshunov stated that he had falsely accused Zirnis and the other officials.” Yan (Jānis) Zirnis had been the head of the East Siberian NKVD and a close colleague of Mironov’s. The news of his fate may have contributed to Mironov’s distress.³⁴

The same fate (at about the same time) had befallen Mironov’s predecessor as Soviet ambassador to Mongolia, Vladimir Tairov (Vagarshak Ter-Grigorian). Agnessa knew that Mironov owed his promotion to Tairov’s arrest:

Once, when the train stopped, Agulia and I went for a walk along the platform. We were both wearing our blue fox stoles, and I had on a wonderful little hat. It was completely empty with no one around, just one little building off to the side. Suddenly we heard a bloodcurdling shriek, a terrifying, almost inhuman howl of anguish and despair. And then, utter silence.

“Agulia, did you hear that? Where did it come from?”

Agulia started fantasizing about how an airplane had just flown by and how the howl must have come from there.

In the train I asked Mirosha about it.

“It must have been Tairov,” he said, stone-faced.³⁵

On August 24, 1937, Mironov and Frinovsky arrived in Ulaanbaatar. Their mission was to secure an official invitation for the Soviet Army (which had already entered the country) and to supervise the extermination of the enemies of the Mongolian people. The invitation was issued the following day. The extermination campaign began on September 10 with the arrest of sixty-five top state, Party, and military officials. On October 2, Frinovsky formed a troika chaired by Mongolian Minister of Internal Affairs Khorloogiin Choibalsan. On October 18–20, a show trial of fourteen top officials was held in Ulaanbaatar’s Central Theater. Thirteen of them were sentenced to death. According to the historian Baabar, “before the sentences were pronounced, the accused were bathed and fed.” Over the course of the campaign, thirty-six of the fifty-one Central Committee members elected at the most recent Party Congress were executed. Choibalsan was the only member of the Central Committee Presidium to survive Mironov’s scrutiny.³⁶

In accordance with the Soviet model, the purge of top officials was followed by two mass operations: the national one, directed at the Buriats, Barga Mongols, Kazakhs, and Chinese, and the social one, directed at the “feudals” and, above all, “counterrevolutionary Buddhist lamas.” In 1932, Fedor Fedotov, Lyova Fedotov’s father, had written a book for children about Mongolia:

Puntsuk the Mongol hunter,

Puntsuk the Mongol hunter,

Puntsuk the Mongol hunter

Got himself a gun.

Did a little jumping,

Did a little shouting,

Made the greedy lamas

Turn around and run.

Sergei Mironov’s job was to finish what Puntsuk and Fedotov had started. On October 18, 1937, he wrote to Frinovsky (who had left for Moscow once Mironov was firmly installed and the troika had begun to function) about the “discovery of a large counterrevolutionary organization in the Ministry of Internal Affairs”; on February 13, 1938, he asked Ezhov for permission to arrest the Mongolian Trotskyites and the “Japanophile wing of the Panmongols” (among others); and on February 22, he reported on the confessions of highly placed “Khalkha nationalists” involved in the creation of a “Japanophile Altai State.” By March 30, he had ordered the arrest of 10,728 people (including 7,814 lamas, 1,555 Buriats, 408 Chinese, 322 feudals, 300 ministerial officials, and 180 top military commanders) and the execution of 6,311 of them. Next on the agenda was the arrest of 6,000 lamas, 900 Buriats, 200 Chinese, and 86 ministerial officials. By April 1939, Choibalsan’s troika had sentenced 20,099 people to death.³⁷

As in Novosibirsk, the territory’s two top officials socialized outside of work. Agnessa was a regular participant:

As head of the government, Choibalsan had a European house, where he held receptions. But in the courtyard there were two yurts, where he and his wife lived.

At one reception, I remember, they served sausage. I was trying to watch my weight and not eat any fat, so I was picking out the bits of fat and eating only the meat. Suddenly, I noticed that all the Mongolian women had started picking out their bits of fat, too. Good heavens, I thought: that’s just because I’m doing it!

Choibolsan’s wife was very young. I gave the hem of her robe a slight tug, shook my head, and pointed to myself, as if to say: why are you in a robe—you ought to be in a dress. So she pulled back the sleeve of her robe and stuck out her wrist, as if to say: see how thin my arms are—much too thin, and I told her: but that’s a good thing—and looks pretty!

My hair was cut in the latest style that evening, and I was wearing a long cornflower blue dress. Choibalsan’s wife had a gorgeous braid, with real strings of pearl woven in.

Then, at the very next reception, she shows up with her hair cut exactly like mine, in a blue evening gown! True, not of Crêpe-Georgette—you couldn’t get it there—but silk. And all the other ladies had on the same blue dresses.³⁸

Choibalsan personally directed the executions that followed the October show trial. Agnessa, who “was trying to introduce culture” by promoting the use of outhouses and other hygienic practices, went on an excursion to the local “Valley of the Dead”:

The Mongols are Buddhists. Buddha forbade them to dig in the earth. They are herders, so they don’t need to till the soil for food. Fish and dogs are holy animals to them. They are allowed to eat sheep and cows. They do not bury their dead. They wrap them in shrouds and take them to the Valley of the Dead. The sun and wind dry out the bodies. I went there once in a car with Mirosha and Frinovsky.

It was a large valley, and the field there was littered with skulls and bones. Savage wild dogs, with brightly-colored bits of cloth hanging all over them, lived on the edge of the field. When people came to dispose of a corpse, they would call these dogs (already trained for the purpose) and hang strips of cloth from their necks. Some had too many of these strips to count—which meant that they had eaten a lot of corpses….

The Russians had decreed that the dead be buried in the ground. They had even dug some deep pits in the valley. But no one followed the decree.³⁹

Mironov did not get a chance to finish arresting six thousand lamas (his successor, Mikhail Iosifovich Golubchik, whom he brought from Novosibirsk, did). Soon after he wrote his April 3 report on the arrests and executions, he was summoned to Moscow. Agulia had scarlet fever at the time, so she and Agnessa had to join him later:

We arrived at the Yaroslavl Station in Moscow. Agulia saw Mirosha from the window and started jumping up and down, yelling “Papa, Papa.” When he entered the train, she threw herself into his arms. She was such a pale little thing, her skin looking almost transparent after her illness.

Mirosha had these wonderfully expressive, large, light-brown eyes. I had learned to read most of his feelings in them. So when our eyes met that day, I could see that he was happy, and not only because we were together again. I was dying to know what it was about, but he didn’t say a word and kept smiling mysteriously. I did notice that he was wearing a beautiful, imported Chesterfield coat instead of his NKVD uniform.

There was a lot of bustle over how to unload and deliver our luggage, but none of it concerned us: it was the “lackeys’” job. We came out of the station to find a huge, luxurious car waiting for us. We got in and were whisked off through the streets of Moscow. After Ulaanbaatar, it felt like the Tower of Babel. First we passed Myasnitskaya (already renamed Kirov Street), then Dzerzhinsky Square, then Sverdlov Square. I was sure we would turn into a hotel, but no! We kept going—past Okhotny Ryad, Mokhovaia, the university, the Manege, the Big Stone Bridge … Where could we be going?

At last we drove into the courtyard of the House of Government, where we took an elevator to the seventh floor to a fabulous six-room apartment—and with such furnishings! Fresh flowers and fresh fruit! I looked at Mirosha, who, laughing and happy that he had pulled off the surprise, hugged me and whispered in my ear:

“Are you surprised? Don’t be. I am now the Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs for the Far East. Take a closer look at me!”

I did, and there it was—the Lenin Medal on his chest. His eyes were shining. How well I knew that sparkle of success!⁴⁰