Stalin and His Hangmen (84 page)

2.
Stalin’s
office
was issued 6,000 cigarettes a month, while Kaganovich had 500; rations were issued to staff who worked after 11 p.m. See
Stalinskoe politbiuro v 1930-e gody,
Moscow: 1995, 28–9.

3.
Only one commissariat, foreign affairs, needed a less thuggish face, acceptable to the West. Stalin put up with Georgi Chicherin, a refined polyglot and long-standing friend of Menzhinsky and of decadent poets, an alcoholic and a notorious homosexual (thus perpetuating the traditions of the Tsars’ Foreign Ministry, which was under Baron Lamsdorf called ‘a male brothel’). As diabetes and multiple sclerosis disabled Chicherin, he handed over to Litvinov, whose English wife and Anglophilia grated on Stalin.

4.
It was small comfort that in his childhood a chunk had been torn out by a dog.

5.
See the apologia recorded from Molotov’s lips by Feliks Chuev, in
Molotov: poluderzhavnyi vlastelin,
Moscow, 2002. Chuev rarely put a pointed question to Molotov, who admitted even more rarely his supererogatory brutality.

6.
Iagoda registered himself as Jewish, and stressed his name the Polish-Jewish way Iagóda (Jehuda) not the Russian way, which Stalin preferred to tease him with: Iágoda (berry).

7.
The facts about Iagoda’s early life are to be found in Mikhail Il’inskii,
Narkom Iagoda,
2002.

8.
Ibid. 62

9.
lagoda told Stalin he had refused exit visas to three delegates to the Hague conference on June 1922 because they had counter-revolutionary records.

10.
See Robert Urch,
The Rabbit King of Russia,
London, 1939.

11.
See A. N. Pirozhkova and N. N. Iurgeneva,
Vospominaniia o Babele,
Moscow: 1989, 271, and
Minuvshee
10, Moscow, 1992, 70.

12.
Il’inskii, 2002, 13–17

13.
It was only mildly embarrassing that the doyen of Soviet realism was living in fascist Italy, for relations between Mussolini and Stalin were amicable.

14.
Stalin had no illusions about Gorky’s genius. On the last page of the juvenile poem ‘The Maiden and Death’ Stalin scrawled, ‘This thing is more powerful than Goethe’s
Faust.’
In 1951, the editors reproduced this page with Stalin’s inscription in Gorky’s
Collected Verse,
unaware that Stalin made the remark in drunken mockery. In Stalin’s copy of
Collected Verse
the facsimile is angrily crossed out in red pencil.

15.
In the end, Stalin cancelled Gorky’s commission to write his biography. Gorky’s American publisher had advertised it as containing revelations in which Stalin would say what he thought about Lenin and Trotsky.

16.
Novyi mir,
1997, 9, 168–92

17.
O.V. Khlevniuk,
Politbiuro,
1996, 98–9

18.
Zinovi Peshkov continued to rebel against his family by joining the French Foreign Legion. By 1927 he was a general attached to the Kuomintang, killing communists in Shanghai, a fact which did not stop his nephew Andrei Sverdlov becoming one of the NKVD’s most brutal interrogators.

19.
Il’inskii, 2002, 364

20.
The next canal project Iagoda supervised, the Moscow – Volga canal, was designed by free engineers, and the slaves were backed up by proper materials and machinery.

21.
Like the GULAG men and Iagoda who built the canal, those who celebrated it mostly perished as counter-revolutionaries. The book on the canal was three years later to be withdrawn from the market and from libraries. See the facsimile edition of
The Stalin White Sea – Baltic Canal,
Moscow: 1998.

22.
Stalin i Kaganovich,
2001, 224

23.
Two such encounters in autumn 1932 were documented by Korneli Zelinsky. See
Voprosy literatury,
1990, 1 and
Minuvshee
10, 1992, 88–120.

24.
Viktor Shklovsky’s memoir in Benedikt Sarnov,
Nash sovetskii novoiaz,
Moscow, 2002, 28

25.
See Vadim Baranov,
Bezzakonnaia kometa,
Moscow: 2001, 164–5.

26.
See
Minuvshee
10, 1992, 65–88; also G. S. Smith,
Dmitri Sviatopolk-Mirsky,
Cambridge, 2000.

27.
Bulgakov, Gorky told Stalin, was ‘no kith or kin to me, but a talented writer… There is no sense making martyrs for an idea out of [such people]. An enemy must be either annihilated or re-educated.
In this case
I vote for re-education.’ Gorky advised Stalin to meet Bulgakov personally.
(Novy mir,
1997, 9, 188–9)

28.
Both Gorky and Stalin liked Dostoevsky’s
Devils,
with its bloodthirsty, paranoiac and treacherous revolutionaries: in 1935,
The Devils
came out in a magnificent edition.

29.
Stalin i Kaganovich,
2001, 436–7

30.
Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia,
Moscow, 1999, 227–8. It is conceivable that OGPU fabricated the document just to see who would fail to report it or even dare to circulate it.

31.
Extracts from the Gorky – Iagoda correspondence are to be found in Il’inskii, 2002, 361–82.

32.
See Aleksandr Afinogenov’s diary, quoted in Vadim Baranov,
Bezzakonnaia kometa,
Moscow, 2001, 148.

33.
For a full consideration of the evidence that Stalin wanted, and had, Gorky (and other writers) killed, see Vadim Baranov,
Gor’kii bez grima: taina smerti,
Moscow: Agraf, 2001.

34.
The ‘Gorky of the Balkans’, the Romanian Panait Istrati, unable to stomach show trials, collectivization or purges, ‘turned Trotskyist’. In the Soviet Union, Istrati ‘saw the broken eggs but couldn’t see the omelette’. He died unexpectedly in Bucharest in 1935. Barbusse, apparently in fine health, died in Moscow in August 1935 after his hagiography of Stalin appeared. ‘That teaches us to be careful,’ Rolland wrote to Gorky. Eugène Dabit, a healthy young proletarian accompanying André Gide (and sharing his disquiet) on a tour of the USSR, died, poisoned, at the age of thirty-eight in a Sevastopol hotel in July 1936.

35.
Quoted from Roi Medvedev, ‘Pisateli Evropy na priiome u Stalina’,
Mos-kovskienovosti, 2002,
28, 17.

36.
H. G. Wells,
Experiment in Autobiography,
1934. The interview took place on 23 July 1934.

37.
Terentiev was so intrigued by his interrogators’ fantasies that he helped them make the charges even more ludicrous. See
Minuvshee
18, Moscow, 1995, 533–608.

38.
Kuniaev and Kuniaev, 1995, 82

39.
For a full account, based on surviving records in St Petersburg, see A. V. Blium,
Sovetskaia tsenzura v èpokhu total’nogo terrora 1929–1953,
St Petersburg, 2000.

40.
In 1800 Tsar Paul had forbidden naming cats or goats Masha, to prevent
lèse-majesté
against the Tsaritsa Mariia Fiodorovna.

41.
Khlevniuk, 1996, 36

42.
Voennye arkhivy Rossii,
1993, I, 103; Khlevniuk, 1996, 36

43.
A. Afanasiev (ed.)
Oni ne molchali,
Moscow, 1991, 136

44.
See B. A. Starkov, ‘Pravo-levye fraktsionery’ in A. Afanasiev (ed.)
Oni ne molchali,
Moscow: 1991, 125–44; also O. V. Khlevniuk, 1993, 21–9.

45.
Lominadze, according to Avdeev’s memoir, said the meeting took place just before dawn, and that he was alone with Stalin. See Afanasiev, 1991, 136–7.

46.
Afanasiev, 1991, 139

47.
This blew up in OGPU’s face, for it was widely rumoured that Riutin’s Platform had been fabricated by Menzhinsky.

48.
From there he continued the struggle in letters to his children. Five years later Riutin was required to incriminate himself and his associates as terrorists. He went on hunger strike and attempted suicide, but this time resisted torture. He was shot on 10 January 1937.

49.
Two days before, at a Red Square parade, Nadezhda had marched with other students at her academy and joined party leaders on the tribune. She told Nikita Khrushchiov (a fellow student) she was worried that Stalin was standing in the cold with his coat unbuttoned.

50.
Iu. G. Murin,
Iosif Stalin v ob’iatiiakh sem”i,
Moscow, 1993, 29–42

51.
L. Vasil’eva in
Kremliovskie zhiony,
Moscow: 1995, 170, cites hearsay that Nadezhda was driven to despair when she came to believe that Stalin had slept with her mother and was perhaps her father. See also Eremei Parnov,
Skelety v seife,
Moscow, 2000, I, 65–104.

52.
The matter could be settled by exhuming the body. Dr Vladimir Rozanov twice operated on famous revolutionaries who died on the operating table: Nogin in 1924, Frunze in 1925. He removed Stalin’s appendix in 1921.

53.
Parnov,
Skelety v seife I,
2000, 97

54.
Feliks Chuev,
Takgovoril Kaganovich,
Moscow, 1992, 154

55.
Probably 1932. See A. Kirilina,
Neizvestnyi Kirov,
St Petersburg, 2001, 341.

56.
Beria and Molotov ensured that Menzhinsky’s widow kept her three-room dacha and received special rations, while his sickly young son Rudolf, his first wife Iulia Ivanovna (thought by Beria to be his mother), his surviving sister and his nephew and niece were all on the NKVD’s payroll. See GARF 9401, 2, 105 and 206; T. Gladkov et al.,
Menzhinskii,
Moscow, 1969, 340–43.

SIX * Murdering the Old Guard

1.
Compare Bernard Gui,
Procedures of the Office of the Inquisition for Trying Heretics, c.
1310, which also dispenses with lawyers, witnesses and appeals. Stalin and Molotov had in September 1934 authorized Robert Eikhe, the satrap of western Siberia, to set up troikas that sentenced victims to death without formalities, but only for the six weeks of grain procurement.

2.
The testimony of some NKVD men including the defector Orlov, Iagoda’s ambiguous remarks at his trial in 1938, Trotsky’s speculations and Nikita Khrushchiov’s accusations in his destalinization speech in 1956 have persuaded many historians that, on Stalin’s orders, Nikolaev was manipulated by Iagoda’s men into killing Kirov.

3.
The best documented account of Kirov’s murder is Kirilina, 2001.

4.
Orjonikidze, as close to Kirov as either was to Stalin but a person who might not have agreed to falsification, was told not to come to Leningrad: Stalin claimed it might be ‘bad for his heart’. See Rogovin, 1994, 83.

5.
The suspicious death of the sole eyewitness to Kirov’s murder has further fuelled conspiracy theories, but the condition of the truck and the shocked reactions of the driver and guard are well attested.

6.
Stalin i Kaganovich,
2001, 411–12, 425

7.
Ibid. 419

8.
V. V. Sapov (ed.),
Makiavelli: pro i contra,
St Petersburg: 2002, 502–06

9.
The only justifiable arrests and trials – apart from Nikolaev’s – were of the NKVD men answerable for Kirov’s safety. Filipp Medved was arrested; on 7 December his deputy and likely successor Ivan Zaporozhets was detained, although he had been nursing a broken leg in the Caucasus at the time of the murder and had not worked since summer. Eleven
chekisty
were convicted of ‘criminal neglect of duty’. For the time being, they served short spells of imprisonment. Medved and Ivan Zaporozhets were sent to the furthest part of the USSR, Kolyma. Here, the GULAG chief Jan Berzin treated them as colleagues; they were joined by their wives and children and began redeeming themselves by hard work. They were shot only when Berzin fell from grace.

10.
Vadim Rogovin,
Stalinskii nèonèp,
1994, 89

11.
Enukidze had been a confidant of Stalin’s second wife and the second person, after the nanny, to find her dead body. He got on well enough with Stalin to intercede for petitioners. He was notorious for womanizing and his aristocratic lifestyle.

12.
The diary, with Stalin’s and Iagoda’s annotations, is in GASPI 558, 11, 69. Extracts in B. V. Sokolov,
Narkomy strakha,
Moscow, 2001, 24–37.

13.
When in October 1934 a Soviet sailor jumped ship in Poland, Stalin rounded on Iagoda: ‘Tell me without delay: have the members of this sailor’s family been arrested… If not, then who is responsible for the inertia of the authorities, and has this new criminal been punished?’ GASPI 558, 11, 69. The sailor turned out to have no relatives to punish.

14.
Akulov, his friends recalled, loved life, nature, music, family and friends, and was unfitted for judicial killing: He fell seriously ill in 1936. Akulov’s successor Andrei Vyshinsky and his former deputy Grigori Roginsky both sent their best wishes. A year later, under torture, Akulov confessed he was a Trotskyist. On 31 October 1937, as he was led out to be shot, Akulov turned to Roginsky, now his prosecutor, and said, ‘You know I’m not guilty.’ Roginsky responded with virulent abuse. See A. G. Zviagintsev and Iu. G. Orlov,
Raspiatye revoliutsiei: rossiiskie i sovetskie prokurory 1922–1936,
Moscow, 1998, 256.

15.
See Il’inskii, 2002, 241.

16.
Hitler had them arrested, so Stalin detained several German citizens. Molotov and Kaganovich reported to Stalin on 21 October 1933 that, ‘Hitler has personally given an order to allow our journalists… to the trial. He expressed his certainty that our journalists will be objective… The person responsible for arresting them will be punished.’