The House of Government

28

THE SUPREME PENALTY

The silence ended in prison. New cellmates would begin by asking each other questions about the reason for their arrest and would keep on talking, day after day, as if to make up for lost time (“first cell, first love,” Solzhenitsyn called it). They talked about themselves, others, prisons, and freedom, among many other things, but mostly they talked about what was going on. According to two former cellmates, Konstantin F. Shteppa and Fritz Houtermans, “there was no question that excited the prisoners so much as … ‘Why? What for?’ The question was endlessly argued in the wooden waiting-cells, the ‘dog kennels’ in which prisoners were put before and after interrogation. The words ‘Why? What for?’ were to be found scratched with smuggled bits of broken glass on the inside walls of the ‘black raven’ and the coaches of the prison trains. ‘Why? What for?’”¹

One answer was provided by their interrogators. They had been arrested because they were guilty, and they had no choice but to sign their confessions. The principal means of persuasion were torture (usually sleep deprivation, round-the-clock interrogations, and severe beatings) and, in the case of orthodox Bolsheviks, appeals to sectarian logic and Party discipline. Some orthodox Bolsheviks withstood both torture and persuasion and did not plead guilty at their trial: Anna Muklevich, after six months in prison; Ivan Gronsky, after eleven; Filipp Goloshchekin, after twenty-two. Goloshchekin was arrested on October 15, 1939, as part of the roundup of Ezhov’s close associates. (Ezhov testified that Goloshchekin “disagreed with the Party line” and that, in 1925 in Kazakhstan, they had lived together as homosexual lovers.) During the interrogation, Goloshchekin insisted that the idea of collectivization had been discredited among the Kazakh population because of “hostile agitation by the enemies of the Soviet state,” not deliberate sabotage on his part. On August 12, 1941, he wrote to the “Great Leader and Teacher” that he had been through “140–150 physically and morally excruciating interrogations,” but that he was innocent of all charges, committed to “living and struggling for the victory of the cause of Lenin-Stalin around the world and in our country,” and “fully convinced that Bolshevik truth would prevail.”²

The former Party secretary of West Siberia and Sergei Mironov’s troika colleague, Robert Eikhe, wrote his letter to Stalin ten days after Goloshchekin: “If I were guilty of even a hundredth of one single crime I am accused of, I would never have dared approach you with this deathbed appeal. But I have not committed any of these crimes and have never harbored any evil thoughts in my heart. I have never uttered even a half-word of untruth to you, and I am telling you the truth now, with both feet in the grave. My case is an example of entrapment, slander, and the violation of the elementary foundations of revolutionary legality.”³ His only crime against the Party and personally against Comrade Stalin, he wrote to Comrade Stalin, was his false confession of counterrevolutionary activity:

What happened is this. Unable to withstand the torture that Ushakov and Nikolaev inflicted on me, especially the former who skillfully used the fact that my vertebrae, which had not yet healed after the fracture, caused me unbearable pain, I slandered myself and other people….

I ask and beg you to have my case reconsidered—not because I wish to be spared, but in order to uncover the evil conspiracy that has, like a snake, ensnared many people, partly because of my own cowardice and criminal slander. I have never betrayed you or the Party. I know I am perishing because of the vile, treacherous work of the enemies of the Party and people, who have staged a provocation against me.⁴

At his pro forma trial, on February 2, 1940, Eikhe formally retracted his confession: “In all my supposed testimony there is not a single word of my own, except for my name under the transcripts, which I was forced to sign. The people from 1918 were named under duress, as a result of the pressure by the investigator, who started beating me from the moment of my arrest. After that I started writing all that rubbish…. I am awaiting my sentence and the most important thing to me is to tell the court, the Party, and Stalin that I am innocent. I have never participated in any conspiracy. I will die as firm in my faith in the correctness of Party policy as I was over the course of all my work.”⁵

He was sentenced to death. When the heads of the NKVD’s Commandants’ (executions) and Records departments, V. M. Blokhin and L. F. Bashtakov, arrived at the Sukhanovo Prison the next day to pick up the inmates slated for execution, they found Eikhe and two interrogators, A. A. Esaulov and B. V. Rodos, in Beria’s office. According to Bashtakov,

In my presence, Rodos and Esaulov, on Beria’s instructions, brutally beat Eikhe with rubber clubs. When Eikhe collapsed from the beatings, they would continue to beat him while he was on the floor. Then they would lift him up and Beria would ask him the same question: “Do you confess to being a spy?” Eikhe would answer: “No, I do not,” and Rodos and Esaulov would continue the beating. Just while I was there, this monstrous treatment of a man already sentenced to death was repeated at least five times. At one point one of Eikhe’s eyes was gouged out. Finally, when Beria realized that no confession was forthcoming, he ordered him taken away for execution.⁶

In early February 1937, when Voronsky was arrested, beatings were not commonly used, and his prison interrogations continued the logic of his purge and expulsion ordeals. Because he had maintained “domestic and literary” relations with the Trotskyites, and because domestic and literary relations were, at bottom, political, he was politically allied with the Trotskyites. And since the Trotskyites were, as it turned out, terrorists, so was he. For more than four months, Voronsky insisted on a distinction between the domestic and the literary on the one hand and the political, on the other. In June, he admitted that “Voronskyism” was the expression of Trotskyism in literature. A short time later, after being presented with several eyewitness accounts of his involvement in terrorism, he confessed his guilt. He was subjected to all-night “assembly-line” interrogations and to confrontations with his literary protégés, Boris Guber, Nikolai Zarudin, and Ivan Kataev, who had all accused him of planning to assassinate Ezhov. Faced with his accusers, he retracted his confession. At his trial, on August 13, he said that he was not guilty of terrorism, but that he could not prove that his accusers were lying. The trial lasted twenty minutes. He was shot several hours later. Guber, Zarudin, and Kataev were shot on the same night.⁷

Voronsky’s nemesis, Leopold Averbakh, accepted his interrogators’ logic as soon as he was arrested. Or rather, he had always shared it, but now he applied it to himself, his family, and friends. “I am in prison, not at home,” he wrote in one of his confessions, “and I need paper—not in order to indulge my old habit of talking to myself by writing at night, but to understand the reason for my arrest.” The reason, he concluded, was the “atmosphere of all-permissiveness and omnipotence” in which he had been living as Yagoda’s brother-in-law. “I am implicated in the Yagoda case because, over the course of several years, I, though not an NKVD employee, lived at NKVD dachas, received NKVD rations, and was often driven around in NKVD cars. The NKVD repaired my apartment and exchanged my old apartment for a new one. The furniture from my apartment was repaired at the NKVD furniture factory.” The swamp—“gentry-estate self-satisfaction”—had somehow swallowed him up even as he was fighting it. In the end, he accepted Voronsky’s characterization of him and his collaborators (“clever, successful, irrepressible, everywhere-at-once young men, self-confident and self-satisfied to the point of self-abandonment”). “I realized that narcissism, arrogance, intolerance of self-criticism, neurotic instability, flippancy, hollow wit, and other traits of mine are features of a certain nonproletarian social type. During my eighteen years in the Party, I could have developed into a true Bolshevik, but, not having first experienced proletarian education and having always occupied positions of power, I had too high an opinion of myself and got used to living, both politically and personally, in an atmosphere of all-permissiveness.”⁸

He was sentenced to death by Stalin and Molotov as part of a “special procedure” reserved for NKVD officials, without the formality of a trial. He was shot a few hours later, one day after Voronsky.⁹

■ ■ ■

Most orthodox Bolsheviks felt guilty by virtue of being Bolsheviks. In the words of Shteppa and Houtermans, “everyone at some time or other had had doubts about the Communist point of view and expressed them. Everyone had made slips and mistakes that could be regarded as crimes from the point of view of the system.” The orthodox Bolsheviks were different from everyone else because their point of view was the point of view of the system. Goloshchekin’s explanation for what had befallen him (“Why?” “How could all of this have happened, beginning with the fact of my arrest and so on?”) was the same as Eikhe’s: the enemies had penetrated the Party’s inner sanctum and staged a vile provocation that, like a snake, had ensnared many people. But Goloshchekin and Eikhe seemed to believe—or argue, against impossible odds—that their innocence was compatible with the Party’s (Stalin’s) infallibility. Most Bolsheviks knew better. They understood that, at some point or other, they had suffered from doubt and made slips and mistakes. They were all guilty of “gentry-estate self-satisfaction,” of allowing the swamp back into the House of Government, of being surrounded by beds, maids, carpets, nephews, and mothers-in-law. “In these matters it takes but one slip,” wrote Averbakh in his confession, “and you find yourself at the mercy of a kind of vicious logic whose vice-like grip it is very difficult to escape. In the way people related to me, I could see a blurring of the line between one’s own pocket and the state and a return of the bourgeois attitude to one’s material well-being.”¹⁰

But most of all, they were guilty of inner doubt and impure thoughts. Three days after his arrest, before the interrogations got under way, Aron Gaister wrote a letter to Ezhov:

I admit that I am guilty before the Party of having concealed my Trotskyite vacillations in 1923 and of not having reported (or revealed until now) the fact that when I worked in the State Planning Agency, several leading officials (Rozental, Ronin, Gen. Smirnov, Kapitonov, Kaplinsky, Kraval) formed a caucus, which they talked me into joining for a short period of time, and that Rozental, who presided over that caucus, conducted a de facto Rightist-wrecking policy. In addition to this direct provocation, he treacherously submitted to Kuibyshev a proposal concerning the production of sixty million tons of cast iron during the second Five-Year Plan. This caucus, which often convened in the guise of informal dinners, discussed and criticized the Party line concerning industrialization and the policy in the countryside. I admit that, although I attended these gatherings infrequently and soon stopped altogether, I should have reported that fact to the Central Committee and the NKVD promptly or, in any case, after the unmasking of so many double-dealers and scoundrels. I am profoundly guilty of having done so only after my arrest, and not when I should have. I am ready to inform the investigation about all the relevant facts, including my own guilt.¹¹

The same, he wrote, was true of his work as deputy commissar of agriculture. He had done well in firing several bad employees, but he had been guilty of mistaking “facts of wrecking” for sloppy work and for not reporting those facts to the Central Committee and the NKVD. Secret doubts had led to criminal inaction, which had led to facts of wrecking. Only a full confession could achieve reconciliation. “I urgently ask you, Nikolai Ivanovich, to interrogate me personally, so I can tell you, without embellishment, everything I know about all the individuals involved and about myself.”¹²

A week later, he wrote another letter to Ezhov, in which he acknowledged that criminal inaction was indistinguishable from criminal action:

I readily admit that I am guilty of the fact that, not having overcome my Trotskyite vacillations of 1923, I continued, in subsequent years, to maintain contacts with the Trotskyites known to me from our days as fellow students at the Institute of Red Professors, and that, having transferred to the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, I, de facto, aided, and participated in, counterrevolutionary wrecking activities of the Rightist center in the commissariat.

I stand ready to provide the investigation with a full confession of all the facts of counterrevolutionary wrecking activity by all the individuals known to me, as well as my own actions.¹³

All he had to realize, in the course of his interrogations, was that de facto abetting counterrevolutionary activity was indistinguishable from actually engaging in counterrevolutionary activity. The Bolshevik conception of sin was identical to St. Augustine’s (“a thought, words and deed against the Eternal Law”). When it came to crimes against the Party, which stood for the Eternal Law, thoughts were not radically different from words, and words were not radically different from deeds. And when it came to the Party’s Inquisition, sins were not radically different from crimes. After four months of interrogations, he fully admitted his guilt, actual as well as de facto. He was sentenced to death on October 21, 1937, by Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov, as part of a list of sixty-eight individuals, including twenty-four of his House of Government neighbors. The sentence was formally announced on October 29, at a trial presided over by Vasily Ulrikh. In his last word, Gaister said that his crimes were great and asked the court to allow him to expiate his guilt through honest work. He was shot the next day, on October 30, 1937.¹⁴

Aron Gaister’s arrest photographs (Courtesy of Inna Gaister)

Osinsky, like Gaister and his former friend, Bukharin, wanted his confession of guilt to be part of the sacrament of penance, with the inquisitor as confessor. The record of his interrogation may or may not have been revised and abridged, but his voice is recognizable, and all of the themes are familiar:

QUESTION: You, Osinsky, have been unmasked as an enemy of the people. Do you admit your guilt?

ANSWER: I am surprised to even hear such accusations. Where do such monstrous accusations against me come from? It is simply a misunderstanding. I am an honest person, I fought for Soviet power for many years.

QUESTION: Our advice to you, Osinsky, is to stop juggling terms like “honest person,” which are inapplicable to you. Tell us without equivocation: do you intend to supply frank testimony about your crimes?

ANSWER: I would like to talk to you. After all, I am Osinsky. I am known inside and outside the country.

QUESTION: It is good that you are beginning to understand that.

ANSWER: I have made many mistakes, but a betrayal of the Party in the literal sense is out of the question. I am an unusual person, and that means a lot. I am an intelligentsia member of the old formation, with all the individualism characteristic of people of that category. I may disagree with much that is being done in our country, but I have nurtured this disagreement within myself. Can my personal views be considered treason? I have never been a Bolshevik in the full sense of the term. I have always wandered from one opposition to another. In recent years, I have had some innermost thoughts that were anti-Party in nature, but that is not quite struggle. I was doing scholarly work, withdrew into myself. I wanted to leave political work.

QUESTION: Come on, Osinsky, stop posturing! We assure you that Soviet counterintelligence will be able to make you, an enemy of the people, tell us everything about the crimes you have committed. We suggest that you stop this equivocation.

ANSWER: Good. I will provide truthful testimony about my work against the Party.¹⁵

The rest was a matter of time and blinding bright light. According to one of his cellmates, after one of the interrogations, he walked into the cell, “lay down on his bunk, covered his eyes with a wet handkerchief, lay silently for a while, and suddenly cried out: ‘What are they doing to my eyes? What do they want from my eyes?’”¹⁶

QUESTION: Osinsky, are you a traitor to the Motherland?

ANSWER: Yes, it is true. I admit my guilt.

QUESTION: Did you use the trust of the Party and the Soviet government for the purpose of betrayal?

ANSWER: That is also true. I acted as a member of a political organization that had the goal of taking power in the Soviet Union.

QUESTION: You acted not as member of a political organization, but as a traitor and agent provocateur.

ANSWER: Well, that is overdoing it. You must understand that I am a person of certain political views. I carried out the instructions of like-minded people as an envoy of the Rightist Center.

QUESTION: You, Osinsky, are the envoy of a gang of murderers. Are you not the one who tried to drown the working people of our country in blood? Are you not the one who sold our republics’ and our country’s wealth, lock, stock, and barrel?¹⁷

He was first sentenced to death (by Molotov, Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Zhdanov) on November 1, 1937, along with 291 other high officials, but was left alive as a possible participant in the Bukharin trial. As in the case of the February–March plenum, he appeared as a witness, not a defendant. On April 19, 1938, several days after the end of that trial, he was included in another Category 1 list, but someone (Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, or Zhdanov) crossed his name out. Four months later, on August 20, 1938, Stalin and Molotov signed his death sentence (along with those of 311 other people, including Boris Ivanov’s neighbor, N. A. Bazovsky; the former director of the Berezniki Chemical works, M. A. Granovsky; the former head of the Party’s Jewish Section, S. M. Dimanshtein; the former leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Béla Kun; and a trade representative by the name of Iosif-Samuil Genrikhovich Winzer-Weinzer-Marzelli). Osinsky was executed ten days later, on September 1, 1938. One of his cellmates told his daughter, Svetlana, that he was so weak toward the end that he was allowed to bring a stool to the Lubyanka prison yard. “I picture them beating him—tall, slim, in his gold-rimmed pince-nez, always well groomed, clean shaven, fond of light suits…. Of course, it’s terrible when anyone is beaten, but this was my father.”¹⁸

■ ■ ■

Bukharin had done most of the inner work needed for a full confession in his letters to Stalin in late 1936, but he had not been able to “disarm” completely. “Interrogate me, turn my skin inside out,” he had written to dear Koba on September 24, “but dot the ‘i’ in such a way that no one will ever dare kick me.” The attached condition—“but dot the ‘i’”—had demonstrated clearly that he, as Stalin put it at the December plenum, “had no idea what was happening.” Bukharin’s job—like that of Osinsky, Gaister, Voronsky, and every other Bolshevik, arrested or not—was the same as Job’s. It was not to demonstrate guilt or innocence or confess to particular transgressions—it was to submit unconditionally to the eternal truth. It took about three months in prison for him to complete his confession. No bright lights or “assembly-line interrogations” seem to have been required. The “real reason,” he said in his last plea at the trial, was the final overcoming of the “split consciousness” in “his own soul.” (The transcript of his speech was censored before publication; the deleted words are underlined.)

The real reason is that in prison, where you have to spend a long time permanently suspended between life and death, certain questions appear in a different dimension, and are resolved in a different dimension, compared to the way things are in ordinary, practical life. For, when you ask yourself: if you must die, what are you dying for, particularly at the current stage of the development of the USSR, when it is marching in close formation into the international arena of proletarian struggle? And suddenly, if your consciousness is split, you see with startling vividness the totally black void that opens up before you. There is nothing to die for, if you want to die unrepentant. And, on the other hand, everything positive that shines in the Soviet Union acquires new dimensions in your mind. In the end, this disarms you completely, leads you and forces you to bend your knees before the Party and the country. And when you ask yourself: all right, if you don’t die, if, by some miracle, you are allowed to live, then, once again, for the sake of what? As an ostracized enemy of the people, in an inhuman situation, completely separated from everything that makes up the meaning of life? And the answer is the same. At such moments, Citizen Judges, everything personal, everything superfluous and mundane, all the remaining bitterness, pride, and a number of other things, fall away and disappear.¹⁹

In prison, Bukharin wrote two theoretical works: Philosophical Arabesques and Socialism and Its Culture. The former was about escaping the black void of individualism; the latter, about everything positive that shines. In the Arabesques, the narrator chases away Mephistopheles, “the devil of solipsism,” and tells him to hold his “dissolute tongue.” The story of Faust—the highest of the Pamirs and the model for socialist realism—is interpreted as the defeat of the “insane abstraction” of the lone individual and the rise of the reality of the “socialized man.” In late 1937, when Bukharin was in his cell writing the Arabesques, that reality consisted of the final unfolding of the last days. The apocalypse, he conceded, had been prophesied before: “Various ‘sects’ and movements (the Taborites, Moravian Brothers, Herrnhuters, Bogomils, Cathars, et al.) were, in effect, different political factions of the working people, and their leaders, including the executed Thomas Müntzer, John of Leiden, and others deserve the grateful memory of self-emancipating humanity.” The peasant warriors had been followed by “the great martyr Campanella,” Thomas More, and, in particular, Saint-Simon and Fourier, who had “identified socialism as the goal.” Now, in late 1937, that goal had been reached. “All the principal vital functions have been synthesized in the victorious completion of Stalin’s five-year plans, with theory and practice becoming one on the scale of the entire society and in every single cell of the social organism.” The time had been fulfilled. The real real day—“the birth of the new world for mankind”—had arrived.²⁰

That new world, according to Socialism and Its Culture, was not an abstract socialism theorized by uninformed well-wishers, but the Soviet state as currently constituted. “For that reason, the world-historical task at the moment is not the preaching of universal love, but the preaching of ardent patriotism toward the USSR, which represents the most powerful force of the international socialist movement.” This was all the more urgent because of the rise of fascism and the attendant division of the world into two irreconcilable camps (a prerequisite for every apocalypse, including the one chronicled by Bukharin in the summer and early fall of 1917). Fascists deceived the nations by uttering proud words “about totality (i.e., wholeness),” but rather than healing “the rupture of human social existence and the coming apart of man,” they “reinforced and institutionalized” them. Fascist totalitarianism was a myth. “Socialism in the USSR, on the other hand, is true totalitarianism, i.e. wholeness and unity, whose dynamic is the self-generating growth of that same unity.” The USSR was a “monoideocracy” in the sense that it had created an “ideological unity of the masses” that had no use for the nonsocialized man. The task of socialism was “to overcome the split between will and intelligence” and lead Faust into a world in which “everyone will understand the basic principles of managing things and perform any number of functions.” “The directives of the central governing organs, staffed by people who will transfer there for reasons of aptitude and inclination, will be obeyed not as orders issued by superiors, but the way one follows doctors’ recommendations or orchestra conductors’ instructions. The sins and vices of the old individualistic and authoritarian-hierarchical world will gradually disappear: envy, perfidy, backstabbing will no longer be conceivable as innermost desires or motivations for human behavior; lust for power, vanity, pride, and the desire to subordinate people and rule over them will all disappear.”²¹

The “whole society” would be made up of “whole human beings.” Whole human beings were inconceivable without a whole society:

This thesis is in no way contradicted by the fact of the existence of the “harmonious individuals” of the Renaissance or ancient Greece or such phenomena as Goethe or our Pushkin, the universal geniuses of their time, because we are talking about the average type, not a small sample taken from the “elite.” Renaissance humanists were a negligibly small top layer of society; the “ideal human beings” in ancient Greece (idealized to an extraordinary degree in later times) relied on slave labor (as clearly demonstrated in Plato’s Republic); Goethe was an exception in the whole of Germany (and not only Germany).²²

Socialist society would be the definitive answer to the call issued by the first Congress of Soviet Writers—a fraternal family of giants “who think and act at the same time,” an international constellation of redeemed Faust’s remaking the world:

One of the greatest geniuses of humanity, Goethe, said that he was a “collective being” because in his work he expressed the experience of a huge number of his fellow humans [Mitmenschen]. In socialist society the lives of fellow humans will be immeasurably richer and more varied, and its geniuses will stand on shoulders immeasurably more powerful. Whereas Goethe, unlike the modern philistines of capitalism, had a sense of social connection, the geniuses of the socialist period of human history will find the idea of opposing themselves to their comrades and contemporaries totally inconceivable. Human relations will be entirely different because all traces of individualism will disappear.²³

This future was near, but it had not yet arrived. Socialism was still being shaped, and Bukharin was still in prison, trying to outwit Mephistopheles. The last and decisive battle was still to be fought, and violent coercion—against both Bukharin and Mephistopheles—was still needed.

The more acute the struggle against the still powerful capitalist enemy, the more necessary this element of “authoritarianism,” strict discipline, promptness, cohesion, urgency, etc. From an ahistorical point of view, from the point of view of ideal absolutes and empty phraseology one can attack Soviet “authoritarianism” and “hierarchy” as much as one wishes. But such a point of view is itself empty, abstract, and meaningless. The only possible approach in this regard is the historic one, which bases the criteria of rationality on the specific historic circumstances and the common goal as defined by the “giant steps” of the historical process.²⁴

After nine and a half months in prison, he had completed his confession and was ready to sacrifice himself to the giant steps of the historical process. On December 19, 1937, he wrote a letter to Stalin:

I’ve come to the last page of my drama and perhaps of my very life. I agonized over whether I should pick up pen and paper—as I write this, I am shuddering all over from disquiet and from a thousand emotions stirring within me, and I can hardly control myself. But precisely because I have so little time left, I want to take my leave of you in advance, before it’s too late, before my hand ceases to write, before my eyes close, while my brain somehow still functions.

In order to avoid any misunderstandings, I will say to you from the outset that, as far as the world at large (society) is concerned: (a) I have no intention of recanting anything I’ve written down [confessed]; (b) In this sense (or in connection with this), I have no intention of asking you or of pleading with you for anything that might derail my case from the direction in which it is heading. But I am writing to you for your personal information. I cannot leave this life without writing to you these last lines because I am in the grip of torments which you should know about.²⁵

He still did not understand, still distinguished between his private and public selves, still believed that there was a Koba separate from Comrade Stalin. He was willing to play his role in the upcoming scapegoating ritual, but he was giving his “graveside word of honor” that he was innocent of the crimes he was confessing and that the reason he had admitted his guilt was to avoid the impression that he had not fully disarmed. He had, in fact, not fully disarmed: he continued to insist, like Job before the Lord spoke, that guilt and innocence with regard to specific actions must be relevant to the giant steps of the historical process.

There is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge. It is (a) connected with the prewar situation and (b) connected with the transition to democracy. This purge encompasses (1) the guilty; (2) persons under suspicion; and (3) persons potentially under suspicion. This business could not have been managed without me. Some are neutralized one way, others in another way, and a third group in yet another way. What serves as a guarantee for all this is the fact that people inescapably talk about each other and in doing so arouse an everlasting distrust in each other. (I’m judging from my own experience. How I raged against Radek, who had smeared me, and then I myself followed in his wake….) In this way, the leadership is bringing about a full guarantee for itself.

For God’s sake, don’t think that I am engaging here in reproaches, even in my inner thoughts. I wasn’t born yesterday. I know all too well that great plans, great ideas, and great interests take precedence over everything, and I know that it would be petty for me to place the question of my own person on a par with the universal-historical tasks resting, first and foremost, on your shoulders. But it is here that I feel my deepest agony and find myself facing my chief, agonizing paradox.

What he needed was some sign of recognition that what he was offering was not utter self-abasement but an act of conscious self-sacrifice for the sake of great plans, great ideas, and great interests. What he needed was a nod from the historical process, a blessing from Koba on behalf of Comrade Stalin:

If I were absolutely sure that your thoughts ran precisely along this path, then I would feel so much more at peace with myself. Well, so what! If it must be so, then so be it! But believe me, my heart boils over when I think that you might believe that I am guilty of these crimes and that in your heart of hearts you yourself think that I am really guilty of all of these horrors. In that case, what would it mean? Would it turn out that I have been helping to deprive [the Party] of many people (beginning with myself!)—that is, that I am wittingly committing an evil?! In that case, such action could never be justified. My head is giddy with confusion, and I feel like yelling at the top of my voice. I feel like pounding my head against the wall: for, in that case, I have become a cause for the death of others. What am I to do? What am I to do?²⁶

In the rest of the letter, he described how difficult it would be for him to go through with the trial; asked for poison, so he would be able to spend his last moments alone; begged to be allowed to see Anna and their son; and suggested various ways in which he might be useful if left alive. He ended his letter with a farewell to Koba.

But I am preparing myself mentally to depart from this vale of tears, and there is nothing in me toward all of you, toward the Party and the cause, but a great and boundless love. I am doing everything that is humanly possible and impossible. I have written to you about all this. I have crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s. I have done all this in advance, since I have no idea at all what condition I shall be in tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, etc. Being a neurasthenic, I shall perhaps feel such universal apathy that I won’t be able even so much as to move my finger.

But now, in spite of a headache and with tears in my eyes, I am writing. My conscience is clear before you now, Koba. I ask you one final time for your forgiveness (only in your heart, not otherwise). For that reason I embrace you in my mind. Farewell forever and remember kindly your wretched

N. Bukharin

10 December 1937²⁷

Koba never responded. Stalin’s response was the public Trial of the Anti-Soviet Rightist-Trotskyite Bloc, which took place on March 2–13, 1938. Bukharin confessed to “betraying the socialist Motherland, the gravest crime there is, organizing kulak uprisings, preparing terrorist acts, and belonging to an anti-Soviet underground organization,” but rejected most of the specific accusations, including the murder of Kirov and Gorky. He was bending his knees before the giant steps of the historical process, but the remaining bitterness and pride did not fall away completely. Or, as he would have it, the remaining bitterness and pride did not fall away completely, but he was bending his knees before the giant steps of the historical process. At the end of his last plea, he said:

I am kneeling before the country, before the Party, before the whole people. The monstrousness of my crimes is immeasurable especially in the new stage of the struggle of the USSR. May this trial be the last severe lesson, and may the great might of the USSR become clear to all. Let it be clear to all that the counterrevolutionary thesis of the national limitedness of the USSR has remained suspended in the air like a wretched rag. Everybody perceives the wise leadership of the country that is ensured by Stalin.

It is in the consciousness of this that I await the verdict. What matters is not the personal feelings of a repentant enemy, but the flourishing progress of the USSR and its international importance.²⁸

He was sentenced to death the next day, along with seventeen other defendants, including Rykov, Yagoda, Zelensky, and Rozengolts. The sentence was carried out two days later, on March 15, 1938. “Their disgraceful, vile blood” wrote Yulia Piatnitskaia in her diary, “is too small a price for all the grief felt by the Party.” And as Koltsov wrote in his Pravda article (which may have influenced Piatnitskaia), “The pitiful attempt by the duplicitous, villainous murderer, Bukharin, to paint himself as an ‘ideologist,’ a creature lost in theoretical mistakes, is hopeless. He will not succeed in separating himself from his gang of accomplices. He will not be able to deflect full responsibility for a series of monstrous crimes. He won’t be able to wash his little academic hands. Those little hands are covered in blood. They are the hands of a murderer.”²⁹

Aleksei Rykov and Nikolai Bukharin at the trial

■ ■ ■

Over the course of several months following the Bukharin trial, Koltsov was elected to the Supreme Soviet and to the Academy of Sciences (as a corresponding member), awarded the Order of Red Banner, and praised (by Stalin and everyone else) for The Spanish Diary, which was published as a book. On December 12, he delivered a lecture “On the Short Course of the History of the Communist Party” at the Writers’ Club. The event was described by the Pravda correspondent, Aleksandr Avdeenko:

The oak hall was full of people. Instead of making a speech, Koltsov spoke informally about how our country would gradually move from socialism to communism. First, public transportation would become free, then bread. All other food items would begin to be distributed according to need, in exchange for conscientious labor, as opposed to money, which would lose its current role and turn to dust.

Mikhail Koltsov welcomed at the Belorussky railway station on his arrival from Spain, 1937. Next to him is his nephew, Mikhail. (Courtesy of M. B. Efimov)

After his presentation Koltsov hosted a modest dinner for his friends in an adjacent room. I saw him there. He was in a good mood, joked and laughed a lot, made ironic comments, and told stories about Spain that had not made it into the newspapers. The dinner ended at midnight, if not later. A whole crowd of us walked out to say goodbye to Koltsov as he was getting into his car.³⁰

The next morning Koltsov’s secretary, Nina Gordon, went over to his apartment to take dictation:

When I arrived at the House of Government around 10 a.m. and went into the entryway, I noted subconsciously that the guard, who had always been very friendly and courteous and had even caused me, a young girl, some embarrassment by holding the elevator door for me, did not move and remained seated at his desk with the phone. I said hello to him, as usual. When he did not respond, I was a little surprised, but decided he was in a bad mood and calmly went up to the eighth floor and rang the bell.

The door was opened by Elizaveta Nikolaevna’s niece, Lyulia. Elizaveta Nikolaevna [Koltsov’s wife] was in Paris at the time.

I entered and noticed that the entrance to Koltsov’s study was barred by a white wicker couch, and that the rest of the hallway furniture had been moved, too.

“Are the floor polishers here?” I asked with surprise.

“What,” asked Lyulia, amazed, “you haven’t heard? Misha was arrested last night. The search has just ended—see, the doors are sealed.”³¹

He spent two and a half weeks in a cell before his interrogations began. At first he denied his guilt, but, twenty interrogations later, on February 21, he mentioned several anti-Bolshevik articles he had published in the Kiev newspapers in 1918. A month later, he wrote a long confession about the many “perversions” that had resulted from his secret doubts about Party policy. Most of the perversions concerned his work at Pravda and Ogonyok, but the problem went deeper: “I also had anti-Party doubts in 1923–27, concerning the struggle against the oppositionists, whom I, for the longest time, considered to be merely ideological opponents, not recognizing their transformation into an anti-Soviet gang, an advance detachment of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie. I experienced similar doubts and unhappiness at the end of 1937, when, having returned from Spain, I was shocked by the scale of the repressions against the enemies of the people. I thought it was exaggerated and unneeded.”³²

Similar doubts and unhappiness were shared by many of his friends and colleagues, whose views and traits he went on to describe in his testimony. (Natalia Sats, for example, was “a crafty careerist, who knew how to promote her interests by using her connections to high officials.”) Maria Osten was not among those he exposed. He claimed to have maintained an “intimate, familylike relationship” with her until the summer of 1937, when he discovered her affair with the singer of revolutionary songs, Ernst Busch. They had remained close friends, however, and he “continued to help her and support her.”³³

While in Moscow throughout 1938, up to the moment of my arrest, I remained in contact with Maria Osten. She wrote to me several times about her wish to return to Moscow and settle here again. I was in favor of a temporary stay, but was against her moving here permanently because I did not think she could get a job, there were people living in her apartment, and our personal relationship had come to an end earlier.

At an interrogation after my arrest, I was informed that M. Osten had links with spies and was herself under investigation for espionage. Personally, I trusted her and considered her an honest person, but I am not trying to excuse myself and admit my guilt in maintaining this relationship.³⁴

After several more months, he had admitted that he, Maria, and most of his friends and colleagues had spent most of their lives working for foreign intelligence services. On December 13, 1939, one year after his arrest, the investigation was completed. “The accused, M. E. Koltsov, has familiarized himself with the materials of the investigation, in two volumes, and stated that he has nothing to add.” On January 17, 1940, Stalin signed his death sentence, along with those of 345 other people. At the closed trial two weeks later, Koltsov pleaded not guilty and claimed—as quoted in the official record—that he had never engaged in anti-Soviet work and that “his testimony had been coerced while he was being beaten in the face, in the teeth, and all over his body. The investigator, Kuzminov, had reduced him to such a state that he was ready to provide testimony about working for any number of intelligence services.” After withdrawing for deliberation, the court, chaired by Vasily Ulrikh, pronounced the defendant guilty and sentenced him to death. He was shot the following day (probably sometime after midnight, a few hours after the trial).³⁵

Having heard about Koltsov’s arrest, Maria picked up her four-year-old son, whom she had adopted in Spain in the fall of 1936, and rushed to Moscow. According to Boris Efimov, she went straight to her apartment, but her other adopted son, Hubert, who had turned sixteen and was living there with his girlfriend, did not let her in. “Hubert in Wonderland, indeed,” she is supposed to have said. She checked into the Metropole Hotel and applied for Soviet citizenship. Her attempts to contact Koltsov remained unsuccessful. Her friends from the German Communist community in Moscow shunned her. In July 1939, a special committee chaired by Walter Ulbricht expelled her from the Party for an unauthorized relationship with Koltsov and insufficient engagement with “the policy of the Party and the theory of Marxism-Leninism.” On June 24, 1941, two days after the German invasion, she was arrested. A month later she was transferred to Saratov. On September 16, 1942, two days after the German troops reached the center of Stalingrad, she was shot. Soon after Maria’s arrest, Hubert was exiled to Kazakhstan as part of the deportation of ethnic Germans from European Russia.³⁶

Mikhail Koltsov’s arrest photograph (Courtesy of M. B. Efimov)

Maria Osten’s arrest photograph (Courtesy of M. B. Efimov)

■ ■ ■

Tania Miagkova was thirty-nine when she was sent to the labor camp. “I seem to have ‘settled,’” she wrote to her mother on August 9, 1936, about a month after her arrival in Magadan. “And although sometimes when I think about everything that has happened to me, I do rebel inside, those are but echoes of the way I felt before. Life around me and its demands are beginning to absorb me…. When people tell me ‘you’ll forget you are a prisoner,’ I still smile warily, but the thought that things may actually work out that way does not seem completely crazy anymore. And of course Kolyma is, in its own right, an extremely interesting place that is making seven-league strides in its development (oh what an antediluvian image—please, dear, industrialize it yourself).” The main source of both redemption and despair was her family. To safeguard the happy childhood of her daughter, to keep her bond with her Party-minded mother, to maintain the hope of being reunited with her husband, and possibly to heal what she, like Bukharin, called her “split consciousness,” she had to love Kolyma and forget she was a prisoner. And the only way she could love Kolyma and forget she was a prisoner was to stay close to her family and be certain of her daughter’s happy childhood. “If I continue to hear that everything is okay with you, then I will not be afraid of anything: I’ll keep on building Kolyma—even with pleasure, and even enjoy it, by god, in spite of everything. Well, my dear mommy, I’ll just have to muster more patience—for how many years? So I don’t make any more mistakes until the end of my life. In the meantime, I’ll be waiting patiently for a line from you and from Mikhas.”³⁷

Tania’s mother, Feoktista Yakovlevna, and daughter, Rada, wrote regularly, but there was nothing from her husband, Mikhail (“Mikhas”). Soon after mailing the August 9 letter, Tania went on a partial hunger strike. Her demands were “contact with my husband, the right to leave camp territory, and improved living conditions.” Her letters never mentioned the hunger strike, while continuing to describe a split consciousness striving for wholeness. “What can I do? A turn for the better just keeps not happening for me. Still, I continue to believe that the question of who will win (me or my fate) will finally be resolved in my favor.” The news of the Kamenev-Zinoviev trial seemed to explain the reason for the latest blow:

You can imagine how that trial has affected me. I would never have believed it was possible, but how can I not believe what they themselves are saying? I was in utter shock. But now the shock is gone, and I’m left with political lessons and conclusions. The fact of their physical execution made little impression on me: after all, what was executed were their political corpses. In general, however, this is a very difficult and painful phase for me. Life has not been easy for me in recent years, my dear, but don’t worry about me, my darling: you know that I, like you, can live not only for myself and through my own emotions, and that, whatever my personal circumstances, I remain interested in my environment, which, in the case of Kolyma, is changing as rapidly and excitingly as everywhere else in the USSR.³⁸

The environment kept changing. Magadan looked lovely at night when seen from above (“then the lights on the shore remind me of Yalta”), and the colleagues in the planning department and the atmosphere at work were “very good,” but hope and comfort came less from Kolyma and the entire USSR than from the simple things of life. “I am beginning to live again,” she wrote on October 10, 1936:

I will probably never rid myself of this particular bad habit. Of course, I cannot claim that I am “in seventh heaven,” but I have been living on earth for a long time now, and I still endorse life as it is. Or rather, I don’t quite feel like endorsing the way I live right now, but, to be honest with you, I am beginning to derive pleasure from certain processes and phenomena, sometimes on the most unlikely occasions—like when I am chopping wood or even doing my wash. It is a joy to swing the axe and watch the log crack, or see the earth covered with frost, or feel that I am alive, doing something. You understand that everything is okay, don’t you, and that this feeling is a sure sign of returning spiritual health?³⁹

The link to the entire USSR was still a prerequisite for spiritual health, at least in the letters meant for Rada, Feoktista Yakovlevna, and the NKVD censors (on November 7, 1936, Tania sent Rada a telegram congratulating her on “the day of the great holiday”), but the link to the family—the part of it that was still within reach—kept growing in importance. On November 26, she sent one of her shortest letters since the day of her arrest: “My dear little girl: I only have a few minutes, and I want to give you a big, big kiss. My life is still the same. I am in good health, think a lot about you, and love you very much. Kiss everyone for me. Mommy.” Her next letter, addressed to her mother and not much longer than the previous one, ended with the words: “My dear, please forgive me for this hasty and slight little note. Oh how I wish you could all feel my huge, ardent love and immeasurable gratitude, especially you, my darling mother! I hug you all very, very tight. To rest a bit, I’ll lay my head on your shoulder, the way I did that time on the train to Chelkar, remember? It is so good to rest close to you, my darling. Your Tania.”⁴⁰

In late February or early March 1937, Tania stopped her partial hunger strike (her personnel file does not specify what it consisted of). In August, she was transported from Magadan to a remote camp in the settlement of Yagodnoe (“Berrytown”). On September 2, 1937, she wrote to Rada that she was feeling a little sad. “I haven’t gotten used to the new place or fallen into a particular routine yet. My job is less interesting, the library is much smaller, and I have no friends. On the other hand, the nature here is much more beautiful, and the weather has been warm, so I have been going for walks. But I am still a little out of sorts. I know I’ll be fine soon, but still, I am pining a bit. I don’t show it, of course, except that I laugh a lot less often and tend to walk around looking serious. It’s a perfect time to remember: ‘Smile, Captain, smile.’ Okay, I’ll start tomorrow.”⁴¹

The injunction to smile came from the film The Children of Captain Grant, which also featured “The Jolly Wind” (“those who seek will always find”). The refrain was “Smile, Captain, smile, for a smile is the flag of a ship; be strong, captain, be strong, for only the strong can conquer the seas.” Tania’s camp was surrounded by water.

My roommate and I go for walks together. Around here, if you get off the path, you end up in a swamp. It’s not scary—it won’t suck you in—but it is very, very wet! You hop from one clump of grass to the next, and, before you know it, you slip and there’s water in your shoe. There are creeks and ditches everywhere, and you have to cross them on narrow logs. All around are dense bushes and trees. Some trees are large and beautiful, but it is very difficult for them to grow here, probably because of the permafrost and the cold, wet earth. Their roots stretch along the surface and are often rotten inside. As a result, the forests here are filled with bare, dried-out trees, and it makes you sad to look at them.⁴²

Her next letter to Rada, sent on September 18, began with a description of the nearby Debin River:

This river, with its banks covered with bushes, trees, and pebbles and the perpetual sound of running water, is very good for my mood. Sometimes I sit or lie down on a fallen tree trunk and think to myself: “If my little Rada were here, we would be crossing this river and launching little boats together.”

Beyond the river is a swamp. You can’t see the water except for a few spots here and there. It is completely covered with an extremely thick layer of very beautiful, colorful moss. Your feet sink into it. It’s like walking on springs. There are berries in the swamp. When we first saw them, we couldn’t tell what they were: tiny red berries hanging on very thin threads. Actually, both the berry and the thread were lying on top of the moss. There were almost no leaves. We ate them and wondered if they were poisonous or not. They didn’t taste good: they were sour, and obviously green. Finally, one of us realized: “These are cranberries!” “If so, I’ll have some more. They taste better already.” But if you go up into the hills a little, you can find some lingonberries. There aren’t many of them, but today they were so beautiful and delicious: really ripe and a tiny bit frozen. I got a wonderful little posy. I wanted to take it home and draw it for you, but you can’t paint on this paper: first, because it gets smeared and, second, because, on the way home, I ate them without thinking.⁴³

The letter ended with an urgent request to write more often and send new photographs. “My life is not very easy these days, my little one, because I am so far away from you and all alone.”⁴⁴

Several days later she was moved back to Magadan. According to her old Chelkar roommate, Sonia Smirnova, “it was a time of new accusations and new sentences for political prisoners in Kolyma. They were being brought from faraway camps, to be informed of their new guilt and new sentences in labor camps without the right of correspondence. Those with new sentences were put in large barracks with two rows of bunks. Tania and I found ourselves in one of them.”⁴⁵

Tania was interrogated on September 26, 1937. According to a guard named Artemy Mikhailovich Kadochnikov, on September 14, when a group of prisoners being escorted to another camp had stopped by the Yagodnoe “isolator,” she had engaged in conversation with one of them, Mikhail Alekseevich (Moiseevich) Poliakov. “She did not obey my order to move away. She wanted to hand something to him. When I threatened to open fire, she started screaming at the top of her voice: ‘Fascists! Fascist lackeys! They spare neither women nor children! Soon it will be the end of you and your lawlessness!’ To which Poliakov shouted: ‘That’s right, Tania!’ Finally, she left. I knew her from before. On numerous occasions during my shift, Miagkova attempted to leave the zone at unauthorized times. When I did not let her, she would shout: ‘Fascists! Next you’ll forbid fresh air! All they know is the zone. That’s all they understand.’”⁴⁶

Assuming Kadochnikov’s story is true, it is impossible to know whether Tania’s protest was Job’s rebellion against God or a version of Eikhe’s and Goloshchekin’s true-believer theory that the NKVD had been penetrated by fascist saboteurs (itself a version of Job’s tale, since the idea of testing the righteous was suggested to God by Satan). At the interrogation, Tania denied the truth of Kadochnikov’s acount. “I learned of the passing party of Trotskyites two minutes before its arrival. I did not hear any orders from the guards. Among the new arrivals was my friend, Veniamin Alekseevich Poliakov. I talked to him for exactly two minutes. I have nothing to add.” The second of two witnesses was Tania’s “roommate” from Yagodnoe, perhaps the one she went berry-picking with, who testified that T. I. Miagkova was an “unreformed Trotskyite … bitterly hostile to the regime.”⁴⁷

On November 3, the NKVD troika of the Far Eastern Territory sentenced her to death for “maintaining regular contact with convicted Trotskyites, holding a six-month-long hunger strike, and expressing counterrevolutionary, defeatist ideas.” According to Sonia Smirnova’s account, recorded by Tania’s daughter, Rada Poloz, “A group of guards would often walk in at night. Their commander would read out yet another list of the convicted, with the order to get ready ‘with your possessions.’ As we thought then, they were being taken to faraway camps. On one of those nights, they called out your mother’s name. I jumped up and helped her pack. We kissed. ‘I’ll be joining you soon,’ I said as she was leaving. But I never saw her again.”⁴⁸

The sentence was carried out on November 17, 1937. Tania’s husband, Mikhail Poloz, had been executed two weeks earlier. In late October, he had been taken from Solovki to Medvezhyegorsk as part of a group of 1,111 prisoners slated for execution by the NKVD troika of Leningrad Province. One of the accusations against him was “maintaining correspondence with his wife, a Trotskyite.” On November 3, he and 264 other prisoners, three of them women, were stripped to their underwear, driven to a place in the woods about nineteen kilometers from town, and told to dig trenches and lie face down inside them. They were shot, one at a time at close range, by the deputy head of the Housekeeping Department of the NKVD Directorate of Leningrad Province, Captain Mikhail Rodionovich Matveev, and his assistant, Deputy Commandant Georgy Leongardovich Alafer. According to Matveev’s later deposition, some of the prisoners were beaten before being shot.⁴⁹

Also among the 1,111 was Ivar Smilga’s wife, Nadezhda Smilga-Poluian, and her closest friend, Nina Delibash, who had lived with the Smilgas in the House of Government. Delibash was shot one day earlier than Poloz; Smilga-Poluian, one day later.⁵⁰

■ ■ ■

Ivar Smilga and most other arrested leaseholders from the House of Government were shot in or around Moscow, after a formal sentencing by Vasily Ulrikh’s Military Collegium of the Supreme Court. One such trial was described by the former overseer of “the Soviet and foreign intelligentsia” and editor of Izvestia and Novyi mir, Ivan Gronsky:

There are three men sitting behind a desk. You are brought in.

“Last name, first name, patronymic? You have received the indictment. There is a letter in the file? Okay, the court will consider it.”

They take you out. Three or five minutes later, they bring you back in. They read out the sentence. That’s it!

At my trial, they let me talk (most unusual). I spoke for one hour and twenty minutes. I ridiculed the testimony used against me, made fun of the investigation, argued that I was completely innocent before my country and my Party. Nobody mentioned any accusations against me. The judges were silent throughout. Only once one of the judges said:

“Didn’t you print Bukharin’s ‘Notes by an Economist’”?

But the presiding judge, Ulrikh, interrupted him:

“Not only did he not print them, he criticized them in print the very next day.”

When I finished, I was escorted out. “Now,” I thought, “the whole thing will collapse, and I will be set free. After all, no one accused me of anything, and the presiding judge even supported me.”

I was brought before the judges again. The same Ulrikh read out the sentence: fifteen years in a camp and five years deprivation of rights.

Although I was very weak then, I flew into a rage:

“Please tell me where I am! What is this, a court or a comedy theater?”

At that moment the soldiers put my arms behind my back and took me down the stairs to the ground floor.

“Death sentence?” somebody asked.

“No, fifteen years.”

“To the left.”⁵¹

Most House of Government leaseholders were taken to the right. Most of the approximately twenty-nine thousand people sentenced to death in Moscow in 1937–38 were executed at one of two wooded “special sites” disguised as military shooting ranges: Butovo, used by the Moscow Region NKVD Directory (presided over by Stanislav Redens, who headed the sentencing troika and signed off on all the execution orders), and Kommunarka (Yagoda’s former dacha), used by the NKVD’s central organs to execute top state and Party officials sentenced by the Supreme Court’s Military Collegium. In the case of Butovo, the procedure has been reconstructed on the basis of archival documents and interviews with retired executioners, and described by the historian Lydia Golovkova:⁵²

The people sentenced to death were taken to Butovo without being told where they were going or why….

Trucks with twenty to thirty, and sometimes up to fifty people inside approached the area from the direction of the forest at around 1 or 2 a.m. Today’s wooden fence did not exist then. The zone was surrounded by barbed wire. The trucks pulled up to an improvised observation tower, in a tree. Nearby were two buildings: a small stone house and a very long barrack, about eighty meters long. The people were taken inside the barrack, supposedly for “sanitary treatment.” Immediately before the execution the decision was announced and personal data verified. This was done very thoroughly. Along with reports on executions, archival documents contain letters requesting confirmation of the place of birth, and often the name and patronymic of one of the condemned.…

In Butovo, the executions were carried out by one of several so-called execution crews, which, according to a former acting commandant, usually included three or four men. On days with large numbers of executions the crews might be bigger. According to one local resident who worked in the NKVD garage …, the entire “special unit” consisted of twelve men, who worked in both Butovo and Kommunarka, as well as in Moscow, in Varsonofiev Alley and Lefortovo Prison.

At first the condemned were buried in small single graves. They were scattered throughout the grounds. But starting in August 1937, executions in Butovo reached such a volume that the “procedure” had to be modified. A bulldozer-excavator dug out several large pits, about 500 meters long, 3 meters wide, and 3 meters deep….

The roll-call, ID verification, and the filtering out of those whose files raised questions appears to have continued until dawn. According to the former acting commandant, the executioners had nothing to do with the verification process and waited, in isolation, in the nearby stone building….

The condemned were led out of the barrack one at a time. At this point, the executioners would appear. The condemned would be handed over to them and they would lead them, each his own victim, to the back of the grounds, toward the pit. The condemned were shot at the edge of the pit, in the back of the head, at point-blank range. The bodies were thrown to the bottom of the pit, until they covered it more or less evenly. Nights with fewer than 100 executions were rare. There were cases of 300, 400, or even over 500 executions in one night. On February 28, 1937, 562 individuals were executed. According to the acting commandant, the executioners used their own Civil War weapons, usually Nagan revolvers, which they considered accurate, convenient, and reliable. Executions were supposed to be witnessed by a doctor and a public prosecutor, but that was not always the case. There was plenty of vodka, however, which was brought to Butovo especially for the executioners. After the shootings forms were filled out and signed, and the executioners, usually completely drunk, were taken to Moscow. In the evening, a local resident whose house stood on the grounds until the 1950s showed up, turned on the bulldozer, and covered the bodies with a thin layer of earth.⁵³

It is not known whether the House of Government neighbors executed on the same nights—Kraval, Mikhailov, and Khalatov on September 26, 1937, Gaister and Demchenko on October 30, 1937, Muklevich, Kaminsky, and Serebrovsky, on February 10, 1938, Piatnitsky and Shumiatsky on July 29, 1938, or the accused at the Bukharin trial, who had their sentences publicly announced to them—had a chance or the wish to talk to each other before being shot. As the Cossack corps commander Filipp Mironov had written after his own conviction by Smilga and Poluian, “in battle, death is not frightening: one moment and it’s over. What is terrible for the human soul is the awareness of an imminent, inescapable death, when there is no hope for another chance and when you know that nothing in the world can stop the approaching end, when there is less and less time before the terrible moment, and when finally they tell you: ‘your grave is ready.’” For most condemned residents of the House of Government, the time of full awareness varied from a few minutes to at least two nights and a day in the case of Bukharin and his codefendants.⁵⁴

■ ■ ■

Witch hunts begin abruptly, as violent reactions to particular events, and die down gradually, for no apparent reason. Participants have difficulty remembering and explaining what has happened and try to avoid talking or thinking about it.

In the second half of November 1938, without a formal announcement or explanation, the mass operations were discontinued, the troikas disbanded, and Ezhov fired. Arrests and killings became sporadic and more carefully targeted. The shootings of some of those arrested earlier, including Postyshev, Eikhe, and Bogachev, can mostly be attributed to the force of inertia. Radek and Sokolnikov, who had been spared after the trial of the “Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center,” were murdered in prison on Stalin’s orders, as part of a mopping-up operation. The first assassin planted in Radek’s cell in the Verkhneuralsk political isolator provoked a fight but failed to kill Radek. The second one was more successful. According to the report issued by the prison administration on May 19, 1939, “The examination of the body of inmate K. B. Radek revealed bruises around the neck and bleeding from one ear and the throat, which resulted from the forceful impact of the head against the floor. Death resulted from the beatings and strangling inflicted by inmate Varezhnikov, a Trotskyite.” The killer’s real name was I. I. Stepanov; he was the former commandant (officer in charge of executions) of the Checheno-Ingush NKVD office, who had been arrested three months earlier for official misconduct. Six months later, he was released for performing “a special assignment of particular importance to the state.”⁵⁵

The last act of the mass operations was the liquidation of their organizers. Having woken up after the orgy, Stalin and the surviving members of the inner circle needed to get rid of those who had administered it.

The head of the NKVD’s First Special (Bookkeeping) Section, Isaak Shapiro, from Apt. 453, who signed the “lists of individuals to be tried by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court” before they were sent up to the Politburo, was arrested on November 13, 1938. The former head of the Moscow Province NKVD Directorate and the undisputed champion among regional exterminators of the enemies of the people, Stanislav Redens, from Apt. 200, was arrested on November 21, 1938 (one day after being urgently summoned to Moscow from Kazakhstan, where he had been serving as the people’s commissar of internal affairs since late January). The former head of the Gulag and, most recently, people’s commissar of communications, Matvei Berman, from Apt. 141, was arrested on December 24, 1938 (ten days after his upstairs neighbor from Apt. 143, Mikhail Koltsov, and three months after his brother, Boris Berman, who had been Radek’s and Bukharin’s interrogator and later head of Belorussian NKVD). The two men who had directed the conduct of the operations were among the last ones to be arrested: Frinovsky, on April 6, 1939, and Ezhov, on April 10. At his trial before Vasily Ulrikh’s Collegium, Ezhov said: “During the preliminary investigation, I said that I was not a spy and not a terrorist, but they did not believe me and subjected me to the most violent beatings. During my twenty-five years of Party work I honestly fought and exterminated our enemies. I have committed crimes for which I may deserve to be executed, and I will talk about them shortly, but I have not committed the crimes listed in my indictment and am not guilty of them.”

Bukharin had claimed that he was innocent of the crimes listed in his indictment, but guilty of endowing them with moral and intellectual legitimacy. Ezhov argued that he was innocent of the crimes listed in his indictment but guilty of not neutralizing their perpetrators:

I purged 14,000 Chekists. But my true guilt consists of the fact that I did not purge enough of them. My practice was as follows: directing this or that department head to interrogate an arrested person, I would think to myself: “Today you are doing the interrogating, and tomorrow I’ll have you arrested.” I was surrounded by enemies of the people, my enemies. I purged Chekists everywhere. It was only in Moscow, Leningrad, and the North Caucasus that I did not purge them. I thought they were honest, but it turned out that I had been harboring saboteurs, wreckers, spies, and enemies of the people of other stripes.

Ezhov, like Bukharin, attempted to justify himself by appealing to Stalin. Bukharin, as the ideologue of what he called “the political idea of a general purge,” had hoped for an acknowledgment that he was not a monster in human form but a scapegoat randomly selected for redemptive sacrifice. Ezhov, as the purge’s executioner in chief, was hoping for an acknowledgment that the people who were about to execute him were the same enemies he should have had executed as part of the general purge. “I request that Stalin be informed that I have never in my life deceived the Party politically, a fact known to thousands of people who know my honesty and modesty. I request that Stalin be informed that I am a victim of circumstances and that it is possible that some enemies I have missed may have had something to do with this. Tell Stalin that I will die with his name on my lips.”⁵⁶

Sergei Mironov, who had spearheaded the implementation of mass operations and proposed the creation of the first “execution troika,” was happy in his new apartment and in his new job in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. According to Agnessa, “The arrests continued. We knew about them, of course. In our House of Government, not a night passed without someone being taken away. At night the ‘Black Ravens’ still prowled around. But the fear that had closed in on us in Novosibirsk seemed to recede and give us a little breathing room. Not that it disappeared completely—it just subsided, retreated.”

For the first time in their life together, Mironov and Agnessa were living as a family surrounded by other families. As Agnessa put it, “We had landed on a safe, lucky island”:

We were so happy! Mirosha loved his new job. He would sometimes even tell me funny stories about his work: about the “Japs,” “Chinks,” or others he happened to be dealing with. He was often in a good mood and spent a lot of time with the family. Our apartment was always full of children, and he would dream up all kinds of amusements for them, clowning around and joking, and spoiling them terribly.

Once he announced:

“Today is International Women’s Day. I am going to do everything myself so the women can relax.”

And then he began to set the table, deliberately doing everything wrong. Little Agulia danced around him in delight, choking with laughter. “No, Daddy, not like that. Not like that, Daddy.”⁵⁷

Agnessa found a good dressmaker. At the first reception for foreign diplomats to which Mironov was invited, she wore “a strapless brocade evening gown with A-line skirt and train,” dress shoes with gold braid trimming, and her hair “piled high.” Everyone noticed them, according to Agnessa. “Later I heard that many people at the reception had asked, ‘What country are that new ambassador and his wife from?’”⁵⁸

After the transfers of Frinovsky (to the People’s Commissariat of the Navy) and Ezhov (to the People’s Commissariat of Water Transport) and the intensification of the purge of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, the mood changed. Most of Mironov’s closest colleagues had been arrested. One night, he got out of bed, told Agnessa that he did not want to be taken by surprise, and barricaded the kitchen elevator door with a chest of drawers. “Suddenly he began to sob hysterically, and cried out in despair, ‘They’re arresting the wives, too. The wives!’” Agnessa gave him some valerian drops and kept talking to him until he went back to sleep. Before he did, they agreed that if he was arrested, he would try to send her a note. “I kiss you tenderly” would mean he was fine; “I kiss you” would mean “okay”; and “regards to everyone” would mean things were bad. Several days later, he was the only Commissariat of Foreign Affairs official besides Litvinov to be invited to the New Year’s Eve banquet in the Kremlin. Agnessa chose to wear a “severe dress suit” rather than the new black evening gown with the train and a rose at the waist that she had had sewn for another occasion. From their table, they could see Stalin and Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina. “After that New Year’s invitation, all our fears and worries evaporated, and we spent six calm, blissful days, completely reassured.”⁵⁹

January 6, 1939, was a day off. After the maid had straightened the room and made the bed, Agnessa took Mironov’s revolver, which he kept under his pillow, and hid it in her closet. Then they took the children to Gorky Park. “Mirosha horsed around with the children, as if he were a kid himself. To Agulia’s delight, he would stumble around on his skates and deliberately fall down (though he was a good skater), and slide downhill on a tiny sled and tumble over on his side.” Afterward, Mironov, Agnessa, and Agulia went over to the apartment of Mironov’s colleague from the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, Anatoly Kolesnikov. The plan was for both families to take their children to the circus that evening:

We were all having a good time. Suddenly the telephone rang. It was for Mirosha.

He picked up the phone and listened. I could see the puzzled look on his face.

“But everything has already been agreed upon,” he said.

The person on the other end seemed to be insisting. Mirosha looked even more puzzled and said,

“All right, I’m on my way.”

He slowly put down the receiver, but remained standing by the telephone, staring at it and thinking.

I asked him, “Mirosha, who was that?”

“They asked me to come down to the Commissariat right away—something to do with the fishing concessions with Japan. There’s some kind of problem…. I don’t understand, everything was already settled.”

Then he whispered to me, “Maybe it’s an arrest?”

I had been dealing with this paranoia of his for quite a while before New Year’s, and I was already used to it. So I brushed it aside cheerfully, and said:

“Don’t be silly, Mirosha! Just come back quickly, we’ll be waiting for you. And try not to be late for the circus.”

He put on his coat, still looking anxious. He asked Kolesnikov for the use of his car to take him there and then bring him back afterward. I accompanied him to the stairs.

“Call me as soon as you get to the Commissariat, okay?”

He promised.

It was a very cold day, but Mirosha never wore a scarf, even when it was freezing. I had a nice wool scarf from abroad.

“It’s so cold,” I said, “and you’ve been coughing. Take my scarf.”

To my surprise, he agreed. Under normal circumstances he would never have agreed, but this time he took it right away. He gazed at the scarf, stroking it gently and tenderly, and then put it around his neck. Now, looking back, I understand: it was something of mine—perhaps the only thing he would have left of me.

He was silent for a few seconds. Then he looked into my eyes, hugged me, kissed me very, very hard, gently pushed me away, and, quickly, without looking back, started running down the stairs. I stood watching as he appeared on one landing, then another, lower and lower. He never once looked back. The door to the outside slammed shut. Everything was still.⁶⁰

Twenty minutes later, someone called on the phone and asked for Mironov. Another twenty minutes later, the same person called again. Two hours later, the doorbell rang. A man wearing white felt boots introduced himself as an employee of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, apologized for the intrusion, and asked where Mironov was. After he left, Kolesnikov said that he knew everyone who worked at the commissariat and that this man was not one of them. When the telephone rang again, it was the Mironovs’ maid asking Agnessa to come back home. When she did, she found several NKVD agents ready to start a search. The man in the white felt boots accused Agnessa of lying about her husband’s whereabouts, demanded her address book, and started calling Mironov’s relatives. Finally, at 2 a.m., someone called to say that Mironov had been found and taken into custody.

Three weeks later, Agnessa was told to come to the NKVD reception office. From there, she was taken to the main building, where an investigator by the name of Meshik gave her a note from Mironov. The note said: “My darling wife and friend. Only now have I understood the depth of my love for you. I had never realized that it was this strong. Everything will turn out all right, please don’t worry. They’ll sort things out soon and I’ll come back home to you. I kiss you tenderly. Mirosha.”⁶¹

The question that preoccupied Agnessa for the rest of her life was what Mironov had been doing in snowbound Moscow, on a dark and very cold January night, between 5:00 p.m., when he left the Kolesnikovs’ apartment, and 2:00 a.m., when he arrived in his office at the commissariat:

I learned from the Kolesnikovs’ driver that from their place Mirosha had gone home, and not to the Commissariat. Before reaching the gate, he asked the chauffeur to stop. He got out, thanked the chauffeur, and disappeared from sight.

I thought a lot about what must have happened. The letter that Meshik gave me to read provided some possible clues.

He must have gone home first to get the revolver that he kept under his pillow. He knew, despite all my assurances, that this strange call could mean only one thing—arrest. He had resolved a long time ago not to give himself up. But as soon as he entered the courtyard, his experienced eyes must have spotted the secret agents in the entryway, so he walked out into the still bustling streets of a Moscow winter’s evening. He didn’t go to see anyone. If he had, I would have been told. What was he hoping to do? Travel to some unknown destination? Run away? Escape? But could he really escape? Wouldn’t they find him sooner or later? And what about me? And Agulia?

Should he kill himself some other way, without his Mauser? Throw himself down the stairwell of a tall building or under a bus, or a trolleybus, or a street car?

There were many ways to end one’s life. And for him, that would have been easier than what lay ahead. He didn’t believe that they would let him go. The list of executed friends and acquaintances that passed before his eyes was too long, all the executed bosses, underlings … Balitskii, who, they said, screamed terribly when he was being led out to be shot; Bliukher, who was shot by Ezhov; Uborevich, who was executed immediately after he was sentenced …

Should he kill himself? If he did, they would say: aha, you shot yourself, or threw yourself down a stairwell, or under a bus—that means you are guilty, you are an enemy, you know you did something wrong. When Gamarnik killed himself, they denounced him as an “enemy of the people” and arrested his family. The same would happen to Agulia and me if he killed himself.

And so, trying to save his family, he was prepared to submit to physical and moral torture, and that’s what he’d meant by that sentence, “Only now have I understood the depth of my love for you.”

What must he have suffered that night before he gave himself up?

I have thought and thought about that sentence he wrote about his love for me. Did he sacrifice himself for my sake? I don’t mean to say that he didn’t love me. He loved me as much as it was possible for him to love another human being—passionately, fiercely. Of course he loved me! But was that the real reason he did not commit suicide? I don’t think it was the only one. He must have convinced himself that it was the reason, the only reason. But, in fact, he simply loved life too much and couldn’t bring himself to just end it, to do away with himself—so healthy, so full of life and strength—to do away with himself, to take his own life….

And maybe it also helped that, when I was trying to talk him out of killing himself, I said that even if he was arrested, he could still hope to prove his innocence and have justice prevail. He’d been so lucky all his life, after all. Was he hoping to win this last game, too? The chances were slim, but still, there was a chance.⁶²

It is not known what Mironov did or thought during those nine hours in snowbound Moscow, or how he understood innocence and justice. He spent a year in prison before being sentenced to death. His sentence was signed by Stalin as part of a list of 346 “active members of a counterrevolutionary, Rightist-Trotskyite, conspiratorial, and espionage organization,” submitted by Beria on the previous day. Also on the list were Redens and Shapiro; Ezhov and his brother, Ivan; Frinovsky, his wife, and his older son; Mironov’s West Siberian troika colleague, Robert Eikhe; Mironov’s deputy in Novosibirsk and later in Mongolia, Mikhail Golubchik; Boris Berman’s brother-in-law and the onetime people’s commissar of internal affairs of Bashkiria, Solomon Bak; and the NKVD official who directed the executions of about three thousand Trotskyites at the “old brick factory” in Vorkuta in the spring of 1934, Efim Kashketin-Skomorovsky. Included on the same list as the administrators of the great purge were Kerzhentsev’s deputy at the Committee for the Arts and director of the Moscow Art Theater, Yakov Boiarsky-Shimshelevich; Bukharin’s first wife (an immobile invalid), Nadezhda Lukina-Bukharina; the former Central Committee stenographer and Anna Larina-Bukharina’s cellmate, Valentina Ostroumova; the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold; the writer Isaak Babel; and the chief chronicler of the February Revolution, October Revolution, and socialist construction, Mikhail Koltsov.⁶³

Car at the gate of Courtyard No. 1