Stalin and His Hangmen (50 page)

Ezhov was moved in 1923 – by Kalinin, Rykov and three of Stalin’s satraps, Kaganovich, Kuibyshev and Andreev – to another ethnic hornets’ nest: Semipalatinsk, then a city in the vast Kazakh-Kirgiz republic. Ezhov, at most thirty years old, became the party chief of a province ravaged by starving Turkic nomads, bandits and deserters. He coped, and was moved to Orenburg, then capital of Kazakh-Kirgizia; by 1926 he was a senior party official and a delegate to the fourteenth congress of the All-Union party. The Kazakhstan archaeologist and writer Iuri Dombrovsky, who survived several spells in the camps, liked Ezhov. ‘Many of my contemporaries, especially party members, came across him personally or through their work. There wasn’t a single one who had anything bad to say about him. He was a responsive, humane, soft, tactful person. He would always try to sort out any unpleasant personal problem privately, to put the brakes on things.’ Another Kazakhstan party secretary, back from the GULAG, recalled that Ezhov ‘sang folk songs with feeling’.

At the end of 1925, at the party congress in Moscow, Ezhov stayed in a hotel with Ivan Mikhailovich Moskvin. As he was at daggers drawn with Zinoviev, Moskvin was the sole member of Leningrad’s administration whom Stalin promoted – to running the party’s organization and distribution section, headhunting administrators. Moskvin took to Ezhov as a fellow Leningrader. Ezhov wanted a Moscow posting, for Antonina had resumed her studies there in 1926, and in February 1927 Ezhov joined Moskvin’s section, where he amazed even the ascetic Moskvin by meeting every deadline and by his appetite for paperwork. After seven months, Ezhov became Moskvin’s deputy and almost an adopted son in the Moskvin family: Moskvin’s wife Sofia called him ‘sparrow’. Cuckoo would have been more appropriate, for ten years later Ivan and Sofia Moskvin would be shot, Ivan as a freemason, Sofia for no specific reason, on Ezhov’s orders. Moskvin’s son-in-law the writer Lev Razgon recalls Ezhov in 1927: ‘not at all like a vampire, he was a thin little man, always dressed in a cheap crumpled suit and a blue satin tunic. He would sit at the table, quiet, taciturn, a little shy, he drank little, did not interrupt, just listened, his head slightly inclined.’ What Moskvin told Lev Razgon about Ezhov was clairvoyant: ‘I don’t know a more ideal worker, or rather executive. If you entrust him with anything
you need not check up, you can be sure: he will do it all. Ezhov has only one fault, admittedly a fundamental one: he doesn’t know when to stop… And sometimes one has to keep an eye on him in order to stop him in time.’

Ezhov was a real talent. The Tatar party secretary, a Russian Jew, asked for Ezhov as ‘a tough lad… to sort out the Tatars’. Kaganovich picked Ezhov to help in the collectivization campaign of autumn 1929 when 25,000 party members were mobilized to intimidate the peasantry; as deputy commissar for agriculture, Ezhov was among the most intimidating. Antonina, absorbed in her research into sugar beet, saw less and less of her husband. Ezhov, his temper frayed by overwork, looked elsewhere for consolation. The Ezhovs were nevertheless observed together in 1930 in Sukhum by Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam; they were all staying, courtesy of Nestor Lakoba, at a villa near the Black Sea. Ezhov was to sanction Mandelstam’s last and fatal arrest; his widow would find it hard to believe that this ‘modest and rather pleasant man’ who had given them lifts to town in his car and who danced with a limp, had become the organizer of Stalin’s holocaust. In Sukhum the Mandelstams heard of Mayakovsky’s suicide, an event that reawakened Mandelstam’s lyric inspiration. Russian party officials went on dancing; Georgian guests remarked that
they
would never dance on the day their national poet had died. Nadezhda Mandelstam relayed this to Ezhov, who promptly stopped the party.
⁵
Ezhov played billiards with Lakoba, he danced, he sang – with perfect pitch and great feeling – he let his wife take Abkhaz peasant children for rides in his car, he obligingly took back with him to Moscow zoo a bear cub that Lakoba had been given. The amiable Antonina lounged in a deckchair, and Ezhov cut roses for more responsive women.

The previous year, at a sanatorium in Sochi, Ezhov had met a woman any man working for Stalin should have avoided like the plague. Evgenia Feigenberg was not just Jewish and twice married; her present husband Aleksei Gladun, a Moscow editor, had lived in America until 1920, and the couple had worked in the London embassy in 1927. Evgenia was only a typist but she had literary connections that fascinated Nick the Bookman: she had been and would be again Isaak Babel’s mistress. Gladun later testified: ‘He was hopelessly infatuated with her and wouldn’t leave her room… My wife explained to me that Ezhov was a
rising star and that it was to her advantage to be with him, not me…’ The Ezhovs divorced and Nikolai married Evgenia in 1931. The divorce saved Antonina’s life – she died at the age of 91 – but not Gladun’s. Evgenia became editor of
The USSR on the Building Site
, and in Moscow the new couple moved to Strastnoi (Passion) Boulevard.

In November 1930 Ezhov got Moskvin’s job and was for the first time closeted with Stalin. In autumn 1932 he had six such meetings; by 1933 they were occurring at roughly fortnightly intervals. Stalin directed Ezhov ‘to take a special interest in strengthening and increasing the personnel of OGPU’s regional apparatus as part of the drive to consolidate collective farms and drive out the kulaks’.
⁶
By then Ezhov ran the commission for purging the party, organizing checks on documents and past records, which threw out nearly half a million members or one eighth of the party. He combined many functions in the party’s Orgbiuro, supervising OGPU and heavy industry, and placing party cadres. The more Stalin railed at old Bolsheviks for their ‘arrogance as grandees who have grown too big for their boots’, the more he promoted younger acolytes whose indebtedness to him compensated for their lack of Bolshevik credentials.

By the early 1930s Stalin was expressing avuncular concern for his young protégé; he called Ezhov Ezhevichka (little blackberry). Lavrenti Beria, taking Stalin’s cue, called Ezhov Iozhik (little hedgehog). In August 1934 Ezhov’s health worsened. Stalin sent him first to Berlin, then to an Austrian spa for treatment. The Austrian doctors diagnosed a stomach disease and Stalin had Kaganovich send them a telegram asking them ‘to refrain from operating on Ezhov unless there is an urgent need to’.
⁷
Stalin telegraphed the Soviet embassy in Berlin: ‘I ask you very much to pay attention to Ezhov: he is seriously ill, he underestimates the seriousness of his situation. Give him help and surround him with care. Bear in mind that he is a good man and a most valuable worker. I shall be grateful if you regularly inform the Central Committee of the progress of his treatment. Stalin.’ Ezhov’s symptoms persisted, and in 1935 Stalin wrote to him, ‘You must take leave as soon as possible – to one of the spas in the USSR or abroad, as you wish, or as the doctors say. Go on leave as soon as possible, if you don’t want me to raise a scandal about it.’ As a result the Politbiuro allowed Ezhov and Evgenia two months’ leave and 3,000 gold roubles for treatment abroad.
⁸
Ezhov was treated,
as were several of the Soviet elite, by Dr Carl von Noorden, who had only recently fled from Germany to Vienna. Nobody else in Stalin’s circle, not even Molotov, caused Stalin so much concern as Ezhov.

After 10 May 1934, with Menzhinsky dead and Iagoda in sole charge of OGPU, Stalin considered it imperative to subordinate OGPU and then the NKVD to his own men. Kaganovich and Ezhov found fault with Iagoda’s every action and, worse, his every failure to act. Ezhov went behind Iagoda’s back to his underlings Iakov Agranov and Efim Evdokimov, and reported in withering terms to the Politbiuro on the state of the NKVD. Ezhov’s devastating reports doomed Iagoda. They ensured that within months Ezhov would move from overseeing the NKVD to full control, with a remit to purge it as no Soviet institution had yet been purged.

Purging of the Guard

The white bread is spread thick with caviar,

The tears are hotter than boiling water.

Hangmen also get sad.

People, have pity for hangmen!

Hangmen have a very bad time at night,

If hangmen dream of hangmen, and as in real life, but even harder

Hangmen hit hangmen across their mugs.

Viktor Galich, ‘Dance Song’

Ezhov may not have been first choice to replace Iagoda; Stalin had considered someone very different, his Abkhaz friend Nestor Lakoba, who had very little blood on his hands and genuine popularity among his people. In the summers of the early 1930s Stalin, Beria, Lakoba, their wives and children played together in villas and on beaches at Sukhum or in shepherds’ huts on the shores of Lake Ritsa. Stalin trusted Lakoba enough to go hunting wild boar with him. Lakoba was a crack shot, whose party trick was shooting a raw egg off his cook’s head. It was on one such occasion that Stalin made his famous quip, ‘Me Koba, you Lakoba.’ Lakoba sent Stalin hundreds of lemons and planted mandarin
trees around his villa. Nadezhda Allilueva gave Sarie, Lakoba’s wife, the gift traditional for the highest ranks of OGPU, a gold-plated pistol.

Stalin talked at greater length to Lakoba than to anybody else.
⁹
In 1930, Stalin had exempted Abkhazia from collectivization, criticizing officials who did not ‘take account of the specific peculiarities of Abkhaz social structure and made the mistake of mechanically transferring Russian models of social engineering to Abkhaz soil’. Nevertheless, Stalin did gently note Lakoba’s errors: ‘despite his old Bolshevik experience, he mistakenly lets his policies rely on
all
layers of the Abkhaz population (that is not a Bolshevik policy) and finds it possible not to submit to the provincial committee’s decisions… I think that Comrade Lakoba
can
and
must
free himself from this mistake.’
¹⁰
Although not the idyll of Fazil Iskander’s novel
Uncle Sandro from Chegem
, Abkhazia under Lakoba was cunningly steered between Stalinism and its ancient pagan traditions.

Surviving relatives say that when Stalin asked Lakoba to take on the NKVD in Moscow Lakoba refused. Why did Stalin ask? Lakoba, like Sergo Orjonikidze, was as personal a friend as Stalin could have and, as a fellow Caucasian, Stalin could judge his intonations and responses with certainty. But it was inconceivable that Lakoba would turn the NKVD into the slaughterhouse that Stalin wanted. Certainly, Stalin’s behaviour in autumn 1936, when Lakoba last saw him, just before Ezhov’s appointment was announced, was grim; hell had no fury like Stalin spurned.

The blots in Lakoba’s copybook would have damned others long before. In 1924 he had guarded Trotsky, another crack shot, and come to like him. Even in 1926 the Lakobas had sent affectionate letters to Lev Davidovich. A Caucasian vendetta, hidden behind smiles, raged between Lakoba and Lavrenti Beria, who wanted Abkhazia back under Georgian rule. Beria showed his duplicitous character in letters to Lakoba.
¹¹
Beria’s servility wore thin in 1935 when Lakoba’s half-brother Mikhail put a Brauning revolver to his temple after Beria had uttered an obscenity in the presence of women.
¹²

On 20 November 1936 Lakoba went to Moscow with Orjonikidze to see Stalin. They resurrected the long-standing suspicion that Beria had in 1920 been a genuine, not a double, Azeri nationalist agent.

But by this time Stalin’s trust in Lakoba had evaporated. Lakoba found it hard to grasp that his position had changed and that he was no more exempt from Beria’s control than any local Caucasian leader. On
26 December Beria summoned Lakoba to Tbilisi where his wife pressed Lakoba to come to their apartment for dinner. Lakoba was reluctant; a few months earlier a girl had been found dead in Lakoba’s villa, shot with his handgun, and Beria’s inquest implied that she had been Lakoba’s mistress. Beria’s wife and mother cooked Lakoba a trout. Two hours later at the opera, Lakoba doubled up and died in convulsions.
¹³
The body, minus its vital organs, was returned to Sukhum, where Beria and his wife were chief mourners, and Lakoba was ceremoniously buried in the botanical gardens.

The doctors who autopsied the victim were arrested. A month later Lakoba’s tomb was flattened and the body exhumed. Lakoba was declared an enemy of the people; Sarie, his widow, was charged with plotting to kill Stalin with the pistol Allilueva had given her and tortured for two years until she died. Lakoba’s mother was bludgeoned to death by Beria’s hangman Razhden Gangia. Beria slaughtered almost the entire Lakoba clan, keeping the children in prison until they were old enough to execute. Lakoba’s young son Rauf was tortured in Moscow by the notorious Khvat, sentenced to death by Ulrikh and shot in 1941. One brother-in-law and two nieces survived. Most of the Abkhaz intelligentsia perished; Georgians and Mingrelians colonized southern Abkhazia. Beria’s revenge was directly sanctioned by Stalin without Ezhov’s signature. After Lakoba’s murder Stalin stayed away from the Caucasus for nine years.