Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Stalin’s tonsillitis flared again. He lay on the dining room table so the professors could examine his throat. Then the Politburo joined Stalin and the doctors for dinner. There were toasts and after dinner, the doctors were amazed to see the leaders dancing. But Stalin’s mind was on the brutal tasks of that terrible year. He toasted Soviet medicine, then added that there were “Enemies among the doctors—you’ll find out soon!” He was ready to begin.20

  18

  Sergo: Death of a “Perfect Bolshevik”

  The legal melodrama opened on 23 January and immediately expanded the Terror to thousands of new potential victims. Radek, who may have been coached personally by Stalin, revelled in his black humour, joking that he was not tortured under interrogation; on the contrary, he had tortured his investigators for months by refusing to cooperate. Then he delivered what were probably Stalin’s own lines: “But there are in our country semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth Trotskyites, people who helped us [Trotskyites], not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us.” The message was clear and when it is combined with Vyshinsky’s own notes, the mystery of the crazy randomness of the Terror is solved. Those without blind faith were to die.

  At 7:13 p.m. on 29 January, the judges retired to confer and at 3:00 next morning, they returned. Thirteen of the defendants, including Pyatakov, were sentenced to death but Radek received ten years. Blokhin again supervised the executions. Yezhov was rewarded with the rank of Commissar-General of State Security, and a Kremlin apartment.

  In Moscow, 200,000 people, bedazzled by propaganda, massed in Red Square, despite temperatures of –27°C, bearing banners that read: “The court’s verdict is the people’s verdict.” Khrushchev addressed them, denouncing the “Judas-Trotsky,” a line that strongly implied that Stalin was the metaphorical Jesus. (We know from Yury Zhdanov that he jokily compared himself to Jesus.) “By raising their hand against Comrade Stalin,” Khrushchev told the crowds, “they raised their hand against all the best that humanity has, because Stalin is hope . . . Stalin is our banner. Stalin is our will, Stalin is our victory.” The country was swept by the emotional effervescence of hatred, fear and blood-lust. Maria Svanidze wrote in her diary that Radek’s “human baseness . . . exceeded all imagination. These moral monsters deserved their end . . . How could we so blindly trust this band of scoundrels?”

  Today it seems impossible that virtually every factory and railway line was being sabotaged by Trotskyite terrorists within their management, but Soviet industry was riddled with mistakes and cursed with thousands of accidents thanks to poor management and the breakneck speed of the Five-Year Plans: for example, in 1934 alone, there were 62,000 accidents on the railways! How could this happen in a perfect country? “Enemies” among the corrupt élite had surely caused the failures. The arrest of saboteurs and wreckers in the industrial factories and railways spread. The staffs of Sergo and Kaganovich were again hit hard.1

  Stalin carefully prepared for the Plenum that would formally open the Terror against the Party itself. On 31 January, the Politburo appointed the two industrial kingpins to speak about wrecking in their departments. Stalin reviewed their speeches. Sergo accepted that wreckers had to be stopped. But he wanted to say that now that they had been arrested, it was time to return to normality. Stalin angrily scribbled on Sergo’s speech: “State with facts which branches are affected by sabotage and exactly how they are affected.” When they met, Sergo seemed to agree but he quietly despatched trusted managers to the regions to investigate whether the NKVD was fabricating the cases: a direct challenge to Stalin.

  An ailing Sergo realized that the gap between them was widening. He faced a rupture with the Party to which he had devoted his life.

  “I don’t understand why Stalin doesn’t trust me,” he confided to Mikoyan, probably walking round the snowy Kremlin at night. “I’m completely loyal to him, don’t want to fight with him. Beria’s schemes play a large part in this—he gives Stalin the wrong information but Stalin trusts him.” Both were baffled, according to Mikoyan, “about what was happening to Stalin, how they could put honest men in prison and then shoot them for sabotage.”

  “Stalin’s started a bad business,” said Sergo. “I was always such a close friend of Stalin’s. I trusted him and he trusted me. And now I can’t work with him, I’ll commit suicide.” Mikoyan told him suicide never solved anything but there were now frequent suicides. On 17 February, Sergo and Stalin argued for several hours. Sergo then went to his office before returning at 3 p.m. for a Politburo meeting.

  Stalin approved Yezhov’s report but criticized Sergo and Kaganovich who retired to Poskrebyshev’s study, like schoolboys, to rewrite their essays. At seven, they too walked, talking, around the Kremlin: “he was ill, his nerves broken,” said Kaganovich.

  Stalin deliberately turned the screw: the NKVD searched Sergo’s apartment. Only Stalin could have ordered such an outrage. Besides, the Ordzhonikidzes spent weekends with the Yezhovs, but friendship was dust compared to the orders of the Party. Sergo, as angry and humiliated as intended, telephoned Stalin.

  “Sergo, why are you upset?” said Stalin. “This Organ can search my place at any moment too.” Stalin summoned Sergo who rushed out so fast, he forgot his coat. His wife Zina hurried after him with the coat and fur hat but he was already in Stalin’s apartment. Zina waited outside for an hour and a half. Stalin’s provocations only confirmed Sergo’s impotence, for he “sprang out of Stalin’s place in a very agitated state, did not put on his coat or hat, and ran home.” He started retyping his speech, then, according to his wife, rushed back to Stalin who taunted him more with his sneering marginalia: “Ha-ha!”

  Sergo told Zina that he could not cope with Koba whom he loved. The next morning, he remained in bed, refusing breakfast. “I feel bad,” he said. He simply asked that no one should disturb him and worked in his room. At 5:30 p.m., Zinaida heard a dull sound and rushed into the bedroom.

  Sergo lay bare-chested and dead on the bed. He had shot himself in the heart, his chest powder-burned. Zina kissed his hands, chest, lips fervently and called the doctor who certified he was dead. She then telephoned Stalin who was at Kuntsevo. The guards said he was taking a walk, but she shouted: “Tell Stalin it’s Zina. Tell him to come to the phone right away. I’ll wait on the line.”

  “Why the big hurry?” Stalin asked.

  Zina ordered him to come urgently: “Sergo’s done the same as Nadya!” Stalin banged down the phone at this grievous insult.

  It happened that Konstantin Ordzhonikidze, one of Sergo’s brothers, arrived at the apartment at this moment. At the entrance, Sergo’s chauffeur told him to hurry. When he reached the front door, one of Sergo’s officials said simply: “Our Sergo’s no more.”

  Within half an hour, Stalin, Molotov and Zhdanov (that hypochondriac comically sporting an anti-headache bandanna around his head) arrived from the countryside to join Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Yezhov. When Mikoyan heard, he exclaimed, “I don’t believe it” and rushed over. Again the Kremlin family mourned its own but suicide left as much anger as grief.

  Zinaida sat on the edge of the bed beside Sergo’s body. The leaders entered the room, looked at the corpse and sat down. Voroshilov, so soft-hearted in personal matters, consoled Zina.

  “Why console me,” she snapped, “when you couldn’t save him for the Party?” Stalin caught Zina’s eye and nodded at her to follow him into the study. They stood facing each other. Stalin seemed crushed and pitiful, betrayed again.

  “What shall we say to people now?” she asked.

  “This must be reported in the press,” Stalin replied. “We’ll say he died of a heart attack.”

  “No one will believe that,” snapped the widow. “Sergo loved the truth. The truth must be printed.”

  “Why won’t they believe it? Everyone knew he had a bad heart and everyone will believe it,” concluded Stalin. The door to the death room was closed but Konstantin Ordzhonikidze peeped inside
and observed Kaganovich and Yezhov in consultation, sitting at the foot of the body of their mutual friend. Suddenly Beria, in Moscow for the Plenum, appeared in the dining room. Zinaida charged at him, trying to slap him, and shrieked: “Rat!” Beria “disappeared right afterwards.”

  They carried Sergo’s bulky body from the bedroom and laid him on the table. Molotov’s brother, a photographer, arrived with his camera. Stalin and the magnates posed with the body.2

  On the 19th, the newspapers announced the death of Sergo by heart attack. A list of doctors signed the mendacious bulletin: “At 17:30, while he was having his afternoon rest, he suddenly felt ill and a few minutes later died of paralysis of the heart.” The Plenum was delayed by Sergo’s funeral, but Stalin’s obstacle had been removed. The death of “the perfect Bolshevik” shocked Maria Svanidze who described the lying-in-state in the Hall of Columns among “garlands, music, the scent of flowers, tears, honorary escorts. Thousands upon thousands passed” the open coffin. Sergo was sanctified by a cult. Some mourned him more than others. Bukharin penned a poem: “He cracked like lightning in foamy waves” but also wrote another pathetic letter to Stalin: “I wanted to write to Klim and Mikoyan. And if they hurt me too? Because the slanders have done their work. I am not me. I can’t even cry on the body of an old comrade . . . Koba, I can’t live in such a situation . . . I really love you passionately . . . I wish you quick and resolute victories.” The suicide remained a tight secret. Stalin and others like the Voroshilovs102 believed Sergo was a self-indulgent disappointment. At the Plenum, Stalin attacked that Bolshevik nobleman for behaving like a “prince.”

  Stalin was chief bearer of the urn of ashes that was placed near Kirov in the Kremlin Wall. But his antennae sensed other doubters who might follow Sergo’s line. During the funeral, he reminded Mikoyan about his escape from the shooting of Twenty-Six Commissars during the Civil War: “You were the only one to escape” in that “obscure and murky story. Anastas, don’t force us to try to clear it up.” Mikoyan must have decided not to rock the boat but he could hardly miss the warning and gathering darkness.3

  “I cannot live like this anymore . . .” wrote Bukharin to Stalin days later. “I am in no physical or moral condition to come to the Plenum . . . I will begin a hunger strike until the accusations of betrayal, wrecking and terrorism are dropped.” But Bukharin’s agony was just starting: Anna, his wife, accompanied him to the first sitting during a snowstorm. It is striking that the main victims of the Plenum, Bukharin and Yagoda, both lived in the Kremlin just doors away from Stalin and the Politburo while simultaneously being accused of planning their murder. The Kremlin remained a village—but one of unsurpassed malevolence.

  At 6 p.m. on 23 February, this febrile, cruel Plenum opened under the pall of Sergo’s death, Pyatakov’s execution, the spreading arrests and the bloodthirsty public effervescence whipped up by the media. If there was any moment when Stalin emerged as dictator with power over life and death, it was now. Yezhov opened with a savage indictment of Bukharin and his hunger strike.

  “I won’t shoot myself,” he replied, “because people will say I killed myself to harm the Party. But if I die, as it were, from an illness, what will you lose from it?”

  “Blackmailer!” shouted several voices.

  “You scoundrel,” shrieked Voroshilov at his ex-friend. “Keep your trap shut! How vile! How dare you speak like that!”

  “It’s very hard for me to go on living.”

  “And it’s easy for us?” asked Stalin. “You really babble a lot.”

  “You abused the Party’s trust!” declaimed Andreyev. This venom encouraged less senior officials to prove their loyalty: “I’m not sure there’s any reason for us to go on debating this matter,” declared I. P. Zhukov (no relation of the Marshal). “These people . . . must be shot just as the [other] scoundrels were shot!” This was so rabid that the leaders hooted with laughter: in the midst of the witch hunt, it was perhaps a relief to be able to laugh. But there were more jokes.

  Bukharin quipped that the testimonies against him were false: “Demand produces supply—that means that those who give testimony know the nature of the general atmosphere!” More laughter. But it was all to no avail: a commission of magnates, chaired by Mikoyan, met to decide the fate of Bukharin and Rykov, but when they returned after sleepless nights, no one would shake hands with them.

  Even before Yezhov came in for the kill, Stalin taunted Bukharin: “Bukharin’s on hunger strike. Who is your ultimatum aimed at, Nikolai, the Central Committee?”

  “You’re about to throw me out of the Party.”

  “Ask the Central Committee for its forgiveness!”

  “I’m not Zinoviev and Kamenev and I won’t lie about myself.”

  “If you won’t confess,” replied Mikoyan, “you’re just proving you’re a Fascist hireling.”

  The “hirelings” waited at home. In Stalin and Nadya’s old apartment in the Poteshny Palace, Bukharin worked frantically on a letter to a future Central Committee and Posterity, asking his beautiful wife Anna, just twenty-three, to memorize it. “Again and again Nikolai Ivanovich read his letter in a whisper to me and I had to repeat it after him,” she wrote. “Then I read and reread it myself, softly repeating the phrases aloud. Ah how he gripped [me] when I made a slip!”

  Just across the river, in his apartment in the House on the Embankment, Rykov would only say: “They’ll send me to prison!” His wife suffered a stroke as the attacks on her husband became more deadly. His devoted 21-year-old daughter, Natalya, helped him dress each day for the Plenum—as her mother had done.

  The commission voted on their fate. Many of Stalin’s devotees such as Khrushchev wanted a trial but “without application of the death penalty.” Yezhov, Budyonny and Postyshev, himself already under fire, voted for death. Molotov and Voroshilov slavishly supported “the suggestion of Comrade Stalin” which was enigmatic because his vote originally suggested “exile” but then was changed by hand to “Transfer their case to NKVD.”

  Bukharin and Rykov were summoned. Both faced the anguished panic and sad regrets of last goodbyes. Rykov asked his daughter to phone Poskrebyshev to find out his fate.

  “When I need him,” replied Poskrebyshev, “I’ll send a car.” At dusk, this usher of doom called: “I’m sending the car.” Natalya helped her beloved father dress in suit, tie, waistcoat and overcoat. He said nothing as they took the lift downstairs, walking out onto the Embankment. When they looked towards the Kremlin, they saw the black limousine. Father and daughter turned to one another on the pavement. They awkwardly shook hands then they kissed formally à la russe, three times on the cheek. Without a word, “my father climbed into the car that sped off towards the Kremlin.” Natalya never forgot that moment: “And I never saw him again—except in my dreams.”

  When Poskrebyshev called Bukharin, Anna “began to say farewell,” in that heart-rending moment of eternal parting, which was to be shared by millions in the coming years. Poskrebyshev called again: the Plenum was waiting, but Bukharin was in no hurry. He fell to his knees before his young Anna: “With tears in his eyes, he begged forgiveness for my ruined life. But he begged me to raise our son as a Bolshevik—‘A Bolshevik without fail,’ he said twice.” He swore her to deliver the memorized letter to the Party: “You’re young and you’ll live to see it.” He then rose from the floor, hugged her, kissed her and said, “See you don’t get angry, Anyutka. There are irritating misprints in history but the truth will triumph.”

  “We understood,” Anna wrote, “we were parting forever.” She could only say, “See that you don’t lie about yourself,” but this was much to ask. Pulling on his leather coat, he disappeared into the alleyways around the Great Kremlin Palace.

  Moments later, Boris Berman, a fat, flashy old-fashioned Chekist in “a stylish suit” with big rings on his fingers and one elongated fingernail, arrived with the NKVD to search the apartment. Meanwhile, at the Plenum, Stalin proposed that they be “handed over to the NKV
D.”

  “Does anyone wish to speak?” Andreyev asked. “No. Are there any other proposals besides the one made by Comrade Stalin? No. Let’s vote . . . All those against? None. Any abstentions? Two. So the resolution carries with two abstentions—Bukharin and Rykov.” The two, who had once ruled Russia alongside Stalin, were arrested as they left the Plenum. Bukharin took that one step that was like falling a thousand miles: one minute, he was living in the Kremlin, with cars, dachas and servants. The next minute, he was passing through the gates of the Lubianka, handing over his possessions, being stripped, having his rectum checked, his clothes returned though without belt or shoelaces, and then being locked in a cell with the usual stool pigeon to provoke him. But Bukharin was not tortured.

  Bukharin’s Anna and Rykov’s half-paralysed wife and daughter Natalya were arrested soon afterwards, serving almost two decades of slave labour.103

  This ugly meeting dealt other blows too: Yezhov attacked Yagoda. Molotov, giving Sergo’s report, cited 585 wreckers in Heavy Industry; Kaganovich ranted about the “unmasking” of Enemies on the railways.

  Stalin used the “heroic denunciatrix” of Kiev, Polia Nikolaenko, against the Ukrainian potentate, Postyshev. Stalin hailed her as a “simple member of the Party” treated by Postyshev like “an annoying fly . . . Sometimes the simple people are much closer to the truth than certain higher examples.” Postyshev was moved to another job, not arrested. The warning was clear: no Politburo “prince” and his “family group” were safe. “We old members of the Politburo, we’re soon leaving the scene,” Stalin explained ominously. “It’s the law of nature. We would like to have some teams of replacements.”

  Stalin, politician and man, was brilliantly equipped for the constant intensification of struggle which he formulated into his creed of Terror: “The further we move forward, the more success we have, the more embittered will the remnants of the destroyed exploiter classes become, the sooner they will resort to extreme forms of struggle.”4