The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  The same was true of history, which took its time while economic and social preconditions sorted themselves out and Volodia Ivanov and Lyova Fedotov “worked on themselves.” The enemy was still at the gate, and hen-and-rooster problems continued to get in the way, but, in the annus mirabilis of 1934, most signs seemed to indicate that the Bolsheviks were going to heed Peter’s warning and be steadfast and patient lest they be led away with the error of the wicked. And then, on December 1, the telephone rang.

  ■ ■ ■

  There are two reasons why the assassination of a prominent but undistinguished Party official resulted in a vast moral panic that “changed everything.”

  The first was domestic. The House of Government was as much a besieged fortress inside the Soviet Union as the Soviet Union was in the wider world. The assumption that most Soviets were now converts to Communism implied that some open enemies were now hidden; that coercive discipline might require additional scrutiny; and that Fedor Kaverin’s production of The Other Side of the Heart (which had suggested that friend and foe might be twin brothers) may have been correct, after all. At the same time, Party officials were as much under siege in their House of Government apartments as the House of Government was inside the Soviet Union. While Volodia Ivanov and Lyova Fedotov were working on themselves, hens and roosters were doing what hens and roosters do—at a pace that the builders of eternal houses could only dream of. The saints were reigning over a swamp.

  The second reason was international. The Soviet Union had always been a besieged fortress, but just as victory was being proclaimed at the Seventeenth Party Congress, an effective metaphor was becoming geopolitical reality. In the east, Japan had occupied Manchuria and approached the Soviet border. In the west, the birthplace of Marxism and Russia’s traditional model and antipode had been taken over by a hostile apocalyptic sect. Fascism, long seen by the Bolsheviks as the ultimate expression of capitalist aggression, was a modern version of nativist ressentiment of the Old Testament variety. The scorned chosen tribes of a degraded Europe were to rise up against Babylon and restore their wholeness, one at a time. Some were trying, with varying degrees of conviction, but only in Germany would the movement reach millenarian proportions, take over the state, proclaim the third and final Reich, and set out to fulfill its own prophecy by preparing for one final battle. What Edom and the “tall Sabeans” had been to the biblical Hebrews and what the white people were to Enoch Mgijima’s and Ras Tafari’s Israelites, the international Jewry was to the German Führer. As Hitler would say to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, “Should the international Jewry of finance succeed, both within and beyond Europe, in plunging mankind into yet another world war, then the result will not be a bolshevization of the earth and the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”38

  Like the Bolsheviks (but unlike most millenarians), Hitler was in a position to bring about what he had prophesied. Like the Bolsheviks (and many other millenarians), he led his people against an enemy whose power was largely esoteric. It was the same enemy—but whereas the Bolsheviks thought of it as a class, the Nazis thought of it as a tribe. Each considered the other a blind instrument in the service of Babylon. Both followed Marx, but Hitler did not know it (and the Bolsheviks did not know it about Hitler and did not usually read Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and “On the Jewish Question”). The final battle (Endkampf, or the poslednii i reshitel’nyi boi of the “Internationale”) would reveal who was the beast and who treaded the winepress of divine wrath. The key to victory was the draining of the swamp.

  24

  THE ADMISSION OF GUILT

  The search for Kirov’s assassins started at the top and aimed at the fallen angels. On December 3, the Politburo approved the “Central Executive Committee and Council of People’s Commissars Decree of December 1.” According to the decree, cases involving “terrorist organizations and terrorist acts” were to be completed within ten days and with no right to appeal. Death sentences were to be carried out immediately. As N. I. Ezhov, who was put in charge of the campaign, said two years later, “it was Comrade Stalin who started it. I remember very clearly how he summoned me and Kosarev and said: ‘Look for the murderers among the Zinovievites.’” And that is what they did. On December 16, Zinoviev and Kamenev (Lenin’s closest associates and, after Trotsky’s expulsion, the most prominent former Left Oppositionists) were arrested. On December 29, the assassin, Leonid Nikolaev, and thirteen other people, some of whom had worked under Zinoviev, were executed. On January 16, seventy-seven former oppositionists in Leningrad and nineteen in Moscow (including Kamenev and Zinoviev) were sentenced to various terms in prison and exile. According to one of the lead investigators, G. S. Liushkov, who escaped arrest by defecting to Japan in June 1938, “I can state with absolute confidence before the whole world that none of these conspiracies ever existed and that they were all deliberately fabricated. Nikolaev definitely never belonged to Zinoviev’s circle. He was an abnormal person who suffered from megalomania. He was determined to die in order to enter history as a hero. It is obvious from his diary.”1

  Kamenev and Zinoviev at first denied their guilt but then understood that the affair was, as Kamenev put it at the trial, “political, not legal.” Or, as Zinoviev realized by the end of the investigation, it was about the soul, not politics. Two days before the trial, he wrote a letter to his inquisitors (led by the veteran opposition expert, Yakov Agranov):

  Comrade Agranov has pointed out to me that the testimony I have provided so far does not impress the investigation team as full and candid repentance and does not reveal everything about what took place.

  The investigation is coming to an end. The confrontations with witnesses have also had an effect on me. I must tell the investigators everything without exception.

  It is true that what I had to say in my previous testimony had more to do with what I could say in my defense than what I must say in full expiation of my guilt. There is much that I have truly forgotten, but there is much that I did not want to think through to the end, let alone tell the investigators.

  Now I would like to disarm myself completely.

  The point, he had finally realized, was not whether he had had anything to do with Kirov’s murder. The point was the continued existence of the other side of his heart:

  I was sincere in my speech to the Seventeenth Party Congress, and I thought that I was “adapting myself” to the majority in the way in which I expressed myself. But, in fact, two different souls continued to live within me.

  In the main group of former “Zinovievites,” there were stronger personalities than I. But the problem is that, because we were unable to properly submit to the Party, merge with it completely, become imbued with the same feelings of absolute acceptance toward Stalin that the Party and the whole country have become imbued with, but instead continued to look backward and to live our separate, stifling lives—because of all that, we were doomed to the kind of political dualism that produces double-dealing.

  The reason he had not disarmed himself earlier was that he had been “afraid of history”—afraid of finding himself “in the position of a man who is, in effect, promoting terrorism against the leaders of the Party and the Soviet state.” Now he understood that the only way to stop promoting terrorism was to admit to having been its spiritual leader. “Let my sad example serve as a lesson to others, let them see what it means to stray from the Party’s path and where it may lead.”2

  He was sentenced to ten years in the Verkhneuralsk Political Isolator (it had been a year since Tania Miagkova first arrived there). In a secret letter to Party organizations issued two days after the trial, the Central Committee reiterated that “the stronger the USSR becomes and the more hopeless the position of its enemies, the faster those enemies—precisely because of the hopelessness of their position—may sink into the swamp of terror.” The Zinovievites were the first Party members to have done so. They were, �
�in effect, a White Guard organization in disguise, worthy of being treated like White Guards.” Others might follow. “Party members must know not only how the Party fought and overcame the Kadets, SRs, Mensheviks, and Anarchists, but also how the Party fought and overcame the Trotskyites, “Democratic Centralists,” “Workers’ Opposition,” Zinovievites, Right deviationists, Rightist-Leftist freaks, etc.”3

  Accordingly, 3,447 former oppositionists were arrested in 1935 and 23,279 in 1936. Between May and December 1935, a verification of Party documents, conducted jointly by the Party Control Commission (headed by Ezhov) and the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), resulted in the expulsion of about 250,000 Party members and the arrest of about 15,000. In spring 1935, an investigation of Kremlin guards, doormen, secretaries, librarians, and telephone operators began by suggesting that slanderous rumors (mostly regarding the suicide of Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, and the murder of Kirov) “might generate terrorist intentions against the leaders of the Party and government” and ended by uncovering a conspiracy to assassinate Stalin and other leaders of the Party and government. Two people were sentenced to death and 108 others, to various terms in prison and exile. Avel Enukidze, the secretary of the Central Executive Committee and the chief supervisor of the government (and the House of Government) patronage system, was accused of corruption and expelled from the Party.4

  “Degeneracy” and treason within the Party were presumed to be connected to the survival of certain social groups that might feel threatened by the coming of socialism and heartened by the prospect of foreign intervention. In February–March 1935, 11,072 “remnants of the defeated bourgeoisie” (4,833 heads of families and 6,239 family members) were deported from Leningrad, mostly to “special settlements” in northern Russia. In the summer and fall, Soviet cities were “cleansed” of 122,726 “criminal and declassé elements” and 160,000 homeless children. About sixty-two thousand children were placed in NKVD “children’s reception points” and about ten thousand were transferred to the criminal justice system. On April 20, 1935, minors over twelve became eligible for the death penalty. These and similar operations (including screenings and firings of enterprise employees) were conducted on the basis of NKVD “watchlists,” which included people associated with former privileged classes, former members of non-Bolshevik political parties and Bolshevik oppositions, former kulaks, expelled Party members, and all those conducting “counterrevolutionary conversations” and engaging in acts “discrediting Party leadership.”5

  Prominent on the watch lists were people with reported or presumed connections to foreign countries. The Kirov murder coincided with a growing hostility toward the Soviet Union on the part of Japan, Germany, and, as far as Stalin and his top associates were concerned, all those who attempted to appease, engage, or accommodate them (with Poland particularly prominent in the wake of the Polish-German nonaggression treaty of August 1934). In the winter and spring of 1935, the border regions of Ukraine, Karelia, and Leningrad Province were “cleansed” of thousands of ethnic Germans, Poles, Finns, Latvians, and Estonians. At the same time, thousands of kulaks and “anti-Soviet elements” were deported from Azerbaijan and the “national republics” of the North Caucasus. As the “enemy encirclement” continued to tighten and the watch lists of internal suspects continued to grow, all foreign citizens (including political émigrés and Comintern members) became potential spies, and all Soviet citizens with links (“subjective or objective”) to hostile states became potential traitors. It did not take long to realize that all states bordering the USSR were hostile, and all potential spies and traitors were, or could quickly become, real. The Soviet experience in the Spanish Civil War reinforced the foundational Bolshevik preoccupation with internal dissension and provided a new productive term to describe it. A significant, and rapidly growing, proportion of Soviets became “the Fifth Column” of the approaching invaders. In 1935–36, 9,965 people were arrested for spying (among them, 3,528 for Poland, 2,275 for Japan, and 1,322 for Germany). As Robespierre had said under similar circumstances, “is not this dreadful contest, which liberty maintains against tyranny, indivisible? Are not the internal enemies the allies of those in the exterior?”6

  In early 1936, Ezhov—on Stalin’s instructions and with Agranov’s assistance—established that the Zinovievites had conspired with the Trotskyites and that both were guilty of “terror.” More former Zinovievites and 508 former Trotskyites were arrested and sent to remote camps, sentenced to death, or used as sources of further revelations. As the interrogator A. P. Radzivilovsky reported to Ezhov, “three weeks of exceptionally hard work with [the former Trotskyite E. A.] Dreitser and [the former Zinovievite R. V.] Pickel resulted in the fact that they have begun to testify.” “Hard work” included threats, sleep deprivation, and appeals to Party solidarity. As the former Trotskyite, V. P. Olberg, wrote to his interrogator, “after your most recent interrogation of January 25, I was, for some reason, gripped by a terrible, excruciating fear of death. But today I am a bit calmer. I am ready to incriminate myself and do anything in order to put an end to this torment.”7

  Zinoviev was brought back for more interrogations. On April 14, 1936, he wrote to Stalin:

  Whatever happens, I have very little time left to live: perhaps an inch or two of life, at most.

  There is only one thing left for me to do: to make sure that people say about these few remaining inches that I understood the full horror of what happened, repented to the end, told the Soviet state absolutely everything I knew, turned my back on everyone and everything that was against the Party, and was ready to do anything and everything in order to prove my sincerity.

  There is only one desire in my soul: to prove to you that I am not an enemy anymore. There is no demand that I would not fulfill in order to prove this…. I reached the point where I spend long periods of time looking intently at your portrait and the portraits of the other members of the Politburo in the newspapers with one thought only: my dear ones, please look into my soul, can it be that you do not see that I am not your enemy anymore, that I am yours body and soul, that I have understood everything, and that I am ready to do anything to deserve forgiveness and mercy?8

  On July 29, 1936, the Central Committee of the Party sent out a secret letter to local Party committees. The letter, drafted by Ezhov and edited by Stalin, stated that “the Trotsky-Zinoviev Counterrevolutionary Center and its leaders, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev,” had “sunk definitively into the swamp of White Guardism” and “merged with the most notorious and embittered enemies of the Soviet state.” In the process, they had “not only become the organizing force behind the remnants of the defeated classes in the USSR, but also the vanguard of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie outside the Union, the transmitter of its wishes and expectations.” The lesson to be learned was clear: “Under current conditions, the most important quality of every Bolshevik ought to be his ability to recognize an enemy of the Party, no matter how well disguised he may be.”9

  The public trial followed within three weeks. All sixteen defendants, including Zinoviev, Kamenev, Dreitser, Pickel, and Olberg, confessed to having engaged in terrorism and were sentenced to death. The sentences were carried out on August 25, one day after the verdicts were read. Trotsky and his son, Lev Sedov, were sentenced in absentia. Radek wrote in Izvestia: “Taking advantage of what was left of the Old Bolshevik trust in them, they feigned remorse and, counting on the Party’s nobility, created a system of lies and deceit unprecedented in the history of the world.… They became fascists, and they worked for Polish, German, and Japanese fascism. Such is the historic truth. And it would be a historic truth even if there were no proof of their links with fascist intelligence services.”10

  In the wake of the trial, 160 people were executed on charges related to the “Anti-Soviet United Trotskyite-Zinovievite Center.” Thousands more former oppositionists were arrested. On September 26, 1936, Ezhov was appointed people’s commissar of internal affai
rs. Three days later, the Politburo issued a decree ordering “the annihilation of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite scoundrels” who had been arrested or sentenced earlier. On October 4, the Politburo (with Kaganovich, Molotov, Postyshev, Andreev, Voroshilov, and Ezhov present) voted to condemn “585 active members of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite counterrevolutionary terrorist organization as a single list” (that is, without considering individual cases). New arrests led to new confessions, which led to new arrests. Some of the former oppositionists were economic managers; their arrests led to the arrests of economic managers who were not former oppositionists.11

  ■ ■ ■

  During the August trial, Kamenev and Zinoviev had named Radek and the former Rightists (Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky) as their coconspirators. Tomsky shot himself at his dacha on August 22. Bukharin, who was hunting and painting in the Pamirs, heard the news on the 24th and sent Stalin a telegram: “Have just read scoundrels’ slanderous testimony. Utterly outraged. Leaving Tashkent by plane morning 25th.” Anna Larina, who had recently given birth to their son, Yuri, met him at the airport. “N. I. was sitting on a bench, huddled in the corner. He looked sick and lost. He had asked me to meet him, fearing that he might be arrested at the airport.” Two days later he wrote a long letter to the Politburo, in which he proclaimed his innocence and discussed the possible motives of his executed accusers. The letter ends with a plea: