Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Stalin was deeply dissatisfied with the “sickness” inside the NKVD, which he rightly regarded as the ultimate Bolshevik old-boy network, filled with dubious Poles, Jews and Letts. He needed an outsider to get control of this self-satisfied élite and make it his own. There is evidence that during the thirties, he discussed appointing both Kaganovich and Mikoyan to run the NKVD and he had recently offered the job to Lakoba.98

  Lakoba refused to move to Moscow from his paradisaical fiefdom. Loyal as he was to Stalin, Lakoba was better suited to playing the magnanimous host in the resorts of Abkhazia than torturing innocents in the cellars of the Lubianka. But his refusal drew attention to the rule of Lakoba’s clan in Abkhazia, known as “Lakobistan,” which he wanted to be made into a full Soviet republic, a dangerous idea in the fragile multinational USSR. There was no greater “prince” than Lakoba. Stalin had already banned the use of Abkhazian names in Lakoba’s fiefdom and foiled his plan to raise Abkhazia’s constitutional status.

  On 31 October, Stalin returned to Moscow where he dined with Lakoba. All seemed well. But it was not. When Lakoba returned to Abkhazia, Beria invited him to dinner in Tiflis. Lakoba refused until Beria’s mother telephoned to insist. They dined on 27 December and then went to the theatre where Lakoba was overcome with nausea. Returning to his hotel, he sat by the window groaning, “That snake Beria has killed me.” At 4:20 a.m., Lakoba died of a “heart attack,” aged forty-three. Beria saw off the coffin on its way back by train to Sukhumi. Lakoba’s doctors were convinced he had been poisoned but Beria had the organs removed, later exhuming and destroying the cadaver. Lakoba’s family were also killed. He was denounced as an Enemy of the People.

  Lakoba was the first of Stalin’s circle to be killed. “Poison, poison,” as Stalin wrote. He had given Beria carte blanche to settle scores in the Caucasus. In Armenia, Beria had earlier visited the First Secretary, Aghasi Khanchian, who had either killed himself or been murdered. Across the Imperium, the regions began to expose conspiracies of “wreckers”99 to justify the inefficiencies and corruption. The clock was ticking towards war with Hitler’s Germany. But as tension was mounting with aggressive Japan in the Far East, and Soviet “advisers” fought in Spain, the USSR was already at war.7

  Shortly before Lakoba’s sinister death, Beria arrested Papulia Ordzhonikidze, Sergo’s elder brother, a railway official. Beria knew that his former patron, Sergo, had warned Stalin that he was a “scoundrel.” Sergo refused to shake hands with Beria and built a special fence between their dachas.

  Beria’s vengeance was just one of the ways in which Stalin began to turn the heat on to the emotional Sergo, the industrial magnifico who supported the regime’s draconian policies but resisted the arrest of his own managers. The star of the next show trial was to be Sergo’s Deputy Commissar, Yury Pyatakov, an ex-Trotskyite and skilled manager. The two men were fond of one another and enjoyed working together.

  In July, Pyatakov’s wife had been arrested for her links to Trotsky. Shortly before the Zinoviev trial, Yezhov summoned Pyatakov, read him all the affidavits implicating him in Trotskyite terrorism and informed him that he was relieved of his job as Deputy Commissar. Pyatakov offered to prove his innocence by asking to be “personally allowed to shoot all those sentenced to death at the trial, including his former wife, and to publish this in the press.” As a Bolshevik, he was willing even to execute his own wife.

  “I pointed out to him the absurdity of his proposal,” Yezhov reported drily to Stalin. On 12 September, Pyatakov was arrested. Sergo, recuperating in Kislovodsk, voted for his expulsion from the Central Committee but he must have been deeply worried. A shadow of his former self, grey and exhausted, he was so ill that the Politburo restricted him to a three-day week. Now the NKVD began to arrest his specialist non-Bolshevik advisers and he appealed to Blackberry: “Comrade Yezhov, please look into this.” He was not alone. Kaganovich and Sergo, those “best friends,” not only shared the same swaggering dynamism but both headed giant industrial commissariats. Kaganovich’s railway experts were being arrested too. Meanwhile Stalin sent Sergo transcripts of Pyatakov’s interrogations in which his deputy confessed to being a “saboteur.”8 The destruction of “experts” was a perennial Bolshevik sport but the arrest of Sergo’s brother revealed Stalin’s hand: “This couldn’t have been done without Stalin’s consent. But Stalin’s agreed to it without even calling me,” Sergo told Mikoyan. “We were such close friends! And suddenly he lets them do such a thing!” He blamed Beria.9

  Sergo appealed to Stalin, doing all he could to save his brother. He did too much: the arrest of a man’s clan was a test of loyalty. Stalin was not alone in taking a dim view of this bourgeois emotionalism: Molotov himself attacked Sergo for being “guided only by emotions . . . thinking only of himself.”10

  On 9 November, Sergo suffered another heart attack. Meanwhile, the third Ordzhonikidze brother, Valiko, was sacked from his job in the Tiflis Soviet for claiming that Papulia was innocent. Sergo swallowed his pride and called Beria, who replied: “Dear Comrade Sergo! After your call, I quickly summoned Valiko . . . Today Valiko was restored to his job. Yours, L. Beria.” This bears the pawprints of Stalin’s cat-and-mouse game, his meandering path to open destruction, perhaps his moments of nostalgic fondness, his supersensitive testing of limits.

  But Stalin now regarded Sergo as an enemy: his biography had just been published for his fiftieth birthday and Stalin studied it carefully, scribbling sarcastically next to the passages that acclaimed Sergo’s heroism: “What about the CC? The Party?”11

  Stalin and Sergo returned separately to Moscow where fifty-six of the latter’s officials were in the toils of the NKVD. Sergo however remained a living restraint on Stalin, making brave little gestures towards the beleaguered Rightists. “My dear kind warmly blessed Sergo,” encouraged Bukharin: “Stand firm!” At the theatre, when Stalin and the Politburo filed into the front seats, Sergo spotted ex-Premier Rykov and his daughter Natalya (who tells the story), alone and ignored, twenty rows up the auditorium. Leaving Stalin, Sergo galloped up to kiss them. The Rykovs were moved to tears in gratitude.100

  At the 7 November parade, Stalin, on the Mausoleum, spotted Bukharin in an ordinary seat and sent a Chekist to say, “Comrade Stalin has invited you on to the Mausoleum.” Bukharin thought he was being arrested but then gratefully climbed the steps.12

  Bukharin, the enchanting but hysterical intellectual whom everyone adored, bombarded Stalin with increasingly frantic letters through which we can feel the screw tightening. When writers fear for their lives, they write and write: “Big child!” Stalin scribbled across one letter; “Crank!” on another.

  Bukharin could not stop appealing to Stalin, about whom he was having dreams: “Everything connected with me is criticized,” he wrote on 19 October 1936. “Even for the birthday of Sergo, they did not propose me to write an article . . . Maybe I’m not honourable. To whom can I go, as a beloved person, without expecting a smash in the teeth? I see your intention but I write to you as I wrote to Illich [Lenin] as a really beloved man whom I even see in dreams as I did Illich. Maybe it’s strange but it’s so. It’s hard for me to live under suspicion and my nerves are already on edge. Finally, on a sleepless night, I wrote a poem,” an embarrassing hymn to “Great Stalin!”13

  Bukharin’s other old friend was Voroshilov. The two had been so close that Bukharin called him his “honey seagull” and even wrote his speeches for him. Klim had presented him with a pistol engraved with his love and friendship. Voroshilov tried to avoid Bukharin’s letters: “Why do you hurt me so?” he asked Klim in one letter.

  Now in real danger, Bukharin wrote a long plea to Klim in which he even announced that he was “delighted the dogs [Zinoviev and Kamenev] were shot . . . Forgive this confused letter: a thousand thoughts are rushing around inside my head like strong horses and I have no strong reins. I embrace you because I am clean. N Bukharin.” Voroshilov decided he had to end this ghost of a friendship so he ordered his adjutant
to copy the letter to the Politburo and write: “I enclose herewith, on Comrade Voroshilov’s orders, Comrade Voroshilov’s reply to Bukharin.” Voroshilov’s reply was a study in amorality, cruelty, fear and cowardice:

  To Comrade Bukharin, I return your letter in which you permit yourself to make vile attacks on the Party leadership. If you were hoping . . . to convince me of your complete innocence, all you have convinced me of is that henceforth I should distance myself from you . . . And if you do not repudiate in writing your foul epithets against the Party leadership, I shall even regard you as a scoundrel.

  K Voroshilov 3 Sept 1936.

  Bukharin was heartbroken by “your appalling letter. My letter ended with ‘I embrace you.’ Your letter ends with ‘scoundrel.’ ”14

  Yezhov was creating the case against the so-called Leftists, Radek and Pyatakov, but by December, he had also managed to procure evidence against Bukharin and Rykov. The December Plenum was a sort of arraignment of these victims and, as always with Stalin, a test of the conditions necessary to destroy them. Stalin was the dominant will, but the Terror was not the work of one man. One can hear the evangelical enthusiasm of their blood-lust that sometimes totters on the edge of tragicomedy. Kaganovich even told a Stalinist shaggy-dog story.

  Yezhov proudly listed the two hundred persons arrested in the Trotskyite Centre in the Azov–Black Sea organization, another three hundred in Georgia, four hundred in Leningrad. Molotov was not the only one who had avoided assassination: Kaganovich had just escaped death in the Urals. First Yezhov dealt with the Pyatakov–Radek trial that was about to begin. When he read out Pyatakov’s description of the workers as a “herd of sheep,” these frightened fanatics reacted as if at a nightmarish revivalist meeting.

  “The swine!” shouted Beria. There was a “noise of indignation in the room.” Then the record reveals:

  A voice: “The brutes!”

  “That’s how low this vicious Fascist agent, this degenerate Communist, has sunk, God knows what else! These swine must be strangled!”

  “What about Bukharin?” a voice called.

  “We need to talk about them,” agreed Stalin.

  “There’s a scoundrel for you,” snarled Beria.

  “What swine!” exclaimed another comrade. Yezhov announced that Bukharin and Rykov were indeed members of the “back-up Centre.” They were actually terrorists yet these assassins were sitting there with them. Bukharin was now meant to confess his sins and implicate his friends. He did not.

  “So you think I too aspired to power? Are you serious?” he asked Yezhov. “After all, there are many old comrades who know me well . . . my very soul, my inner life.”

  “It’s hard to know someone’s soul,” sneered Beria.

  “There isn’t a word of truth said against me . . . Kamenev stated at his trial that he met me every year up to 1936. I asked Yezhov to find out when and where so I could refute this lie. They told me Kamenev was not asked . . . and now it’s impossible to ask him.”

  “They shot him,” added Rykov sadly. Few of the old leaders kicked Bukharin, but Kaganovich, Molotov and Beria hunted him zealously. Then, amid deadly allegations, Kaganovich remembered Zinoviev’s dog:

  “In 1934, Zinoviev invited Tomsky to his dacha . . . After drinking tea, Tomsky and Zinoviev went in Tomsky’s car to pick out a dog for Zinoviev. You see what friendship, what help—they went together to pick out a dog.”

  “What about this dog?” said Stalin. “Was it a hunting dog or a guard dog?”

  “It was not possible to establish this,” Kaganovich went on with gleeful, if chilling, humour.

  “Anyway, did they fetch the dog?” persisted Stalin.

  “They got it,” boomed Kaganovich. “They were searching for a four-legged companion not unlike themselves.”

  “Was it a good dog or a bad dog?” asked Stalin. “Anybody know?” There was “laughter in the hall.”

  “It was hard to establish this at the confrontation,” replied Kaganovich.

  Finally, Stalin, sensing how many of the older members were not joining in against Bukharin, summed up more in sadness than anger:

  “We believed in you and we were mistaken . . . We believed in you . . . we moved you up the ladder and we were mistaken. Isn’t it true, Comrade Bukharin?” Yet Stalin ended the Plenum without a vote in support of Yezhov, just an ominous decision to consider “the matter of Bukharin and Rykov unfinished.” The regional “princes” realized that even such a giant could be destroyed.15

  Stalin, assisted by Yezhov, shaped the febrile fears of war with Poland and Germany and the very real dangers of the Spanish Civil War, the inexplicable industrial failures caused by Soviet incompetence, and the resistance of the regional “princes,” into a web of conspiracies that dovetailed with the paranoic soul and glorious, nostalgic brutality of the Russian Civil War, and the personal feuds of the Bolsheviks. Stalin was particularly suspicious of the infiltration of spies across the porous border with Poland, traditional enemy of Russia’s western marches that had defeated Russia (and Stalin personally) in 1920.101 At the Plenum, Khrushchev was denounced as a secret “Pole.” Chatting in the corridor to his friend Yezhov, Stalin walked over, pushing a finger into Khrushchev’s shoulder: “What’s your name?”

  “Comrade Stalin, it’s Khrushchev.”

  “No you’re not Khrushchev . . . So-and-so says you’re not.”

  “How can you believe that? My mother’s still alive . . . Check.” Stalin cited Yezhov who denied it. Stalin let it pass but he was checking those around him.

  Stalin was finally determined to bring the regional “princes” to heel: Ukraine was a special case, the grain store, the second republic with a strong sense of its own culture. Kosior and Chubar had demonstrated their weakness during the famine while the Second Secretary, Postyshev, behaved like a “prince” with his own entourage. On 13 January, Stalin struck with a telegram attacking Postyshev, for lacking the “most basic Party vigilance.” Kaganovich, already the scourge of the Ukraine which he had governed in the late twenties, descended on Kiev, where he soon managed to find a “little person” crushed by the local “prince.” A half-mad crone and Party busybody named Polia Nikolaenko had criticized Postyshev and his wife, also a high official. Mrs. Postyshev expelled the troublesome Nikolaenko from the Party. When Kaganovich informed Stalin of this “heroic denunciatrix,” he immediately grasped her usefulness.16

  On 21 December, the family and magnates danced until dawn at Stalin’s birthday party. But the struggles and conspiracies took their toll on the actor-manager: Stalin often suffered from chronic tonsillitis when under pressure. Professor Valedinsky, the specialist from the Matsesta Baths, whom he had brought to Moscow, joined his personal physician, the distinguished Vladimir Vinogradov, who had been a fashionable doctor before the Revolution and still lived in an apartment filled with antiques and fine pictures. The patient lay on a sofa with a high temperature for five days, surrounded by professors and Politburo. The professors visited twice a day and kept vigil at night. By New Year’s Eve, he was well enough to attend the party where the whole family danced together for the last time. When the doctors visited him on New Year’s Day 1937, he reminisced about his first job as a meteorologist and his fishing exploits during his Siberian exiles. But Stalin’s duel with Sergo again took a toll on him as he prepared for his most reckless gamble since collectivization: the massacre of Lenin’s Party.17

  Stalin arranged a “confrontation” between Bukharin and Pyatakov before the Politburo. Pyatakov, the abrasive industrial manager soon to star in his own show trial, testified to Bukharin’s terrorism but was now a walking testament to the methods of the NKVD. “Living remains,” Bukharin told his wife, “not of Pyatakov but of his shadow, a skeleton with its teeth knocked out.” He spoke with his head lowered, trying to cover his eyes with his hands. Sergo stared intensely at his former deputy and friend: “Is your testimony voluntary?” he asked.

  “My testimony is voluntary,” retorted Py
atakov.

  It seems absurd that Sergo even had to ask the question but to do more would be to go against the Politburo itself where men like Voroshilov were working themselves up into paroxysms of hatred: “Your deputy turned out to be a swine of the first class,” Klim told him. “You must know what he told us, the pig, the son of a bitch!” When Sergo read the signed pages of Pyatakov’s interrogation, he “believed it and came to hate him,” but it was not a happy time for him.18

  Stalin was supervising Pyatakov’s coming trial of the “Parallel Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre” that was really an assault on Sergo’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry where ten of the seventeen defendants worked. Stalin’s intimate role in the famous trials has always been known but the archives reveal how he even dictated the words of Vyshinsky’s summing-up. Recovering from his tonsillitis, Stalin must have seen Vyshinsky at Kuntsevo. One can imagine Stalin pacing up and down, smoking, as the cringing Procurator scribbled in his notebook: “These villains don’t even have any sense of being citizens . . . they’re afraid of the nation, afraid of the people . . . Their agreements with Japan and Germany are the agreements of the hare with the wolf . . .” Vyshinsky noted down Stalin’s words: “While Lenin was alive, they were against Lenin.” He used exactly the same words in court on 28 January. But Stalin’s thoughts in 1937 reveal the broadest reason for the imminent murder of hundreds of thousands of people for little apparent reason: “Maybe it can be explained by the fact that you lost faith,” Stalin addressed the Old Bolsheviks. Here was the essence of the religious frenzy of the coming slaughter. 19