Moscow, 1937
Page 25
Comrade Ordzhonikidze suffered from sclerosis accompanied by serious sclerotic transformations of the cardiac muscle and cardiac vessels, and also from a chronic affection of the right kidney, the only one he possessed after the removal in 1929 of the left kidney owing to tuberculosis. For two years Ordzhonikidze, from time to time, suffered from attacks of stenocardia (angina pectoris) and cardiac asthma. The last such attack, which was a very serious one, occurred at the beginning of November 1936. On the morning of 18 February Ordzhonikidze made no complaint about his health, but at 17.30, while he was having his afternoon rest, he suddenly fell ill and a few minutes later died of paralysis of the heart.10
The bulletin was signed by doctors who were accused and sentenced to death in the following months.11
Escape into ritual
The first step towards a grand heroic narrative had been taken by changing a suicide into a heart attack. This was the premise of the death ritual that followed. Prominent figures had already died earlier on, and their deaths had provided the opportunity for rituals that had been stylistically refined over time. The process had started with Lenin’s lying in state, the Politburo’s vigil, the millions filing past the coffin, and the transfer of the body to the as yet provisional mausoleum in Red Square in 1925. This was followed by the funeral ceremonies for Sergei Kirov, Valerian Kuibyshev and, most recently, Maxim Gorky in June 1936. These had all died a natural death or, as in the case of Kirov, by the hand of an assassin. Ordzhonikidze, on the other hand, was supposed to have fallen victim to a heart attack, as opposed to being the People’s Commissar for whom suicide was the only way out. Thus the entire death ritual that unfolded in the following days was simply a fiction, camouflage. The front page of Pravda on 19 February 1937 was edged in a broad black strip. On the top right-hand side there was a picture of Ordzhonikidze lying in state, in the presence of Zinaida Gavrilovna Ordzhonikidze and Comrades Molotov, Yezhov, Stalin, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, Mikoian and Voroshilov.
The front page contained the official reactions of the Central Committee, the Politburo, the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, the Council of People’s Commissars, the medical report, and an announcement by the commission entrusted with the funeral arrangements. The official statement said: ‘On 18 February 1937 at 5.30 p.m., Comrade Grigorii Konstantinovich Ordzhonikidze, member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU (B), unexpectedly passed away in his apartment in the Kremlin in Moscow following a heart attack.’ The statement by the Central Committee contained an appreciation of the achievements of the People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry.
He took pleasure in training the cadres of gifted managers in heavy industry, who are ready to serve the cause of socialism with all their might and who have rallied to the Bolshevik Party. And now you, dear Comrade Sergo, are no longer among us. Your loss is irreplaceable. All the workers of this nation feel this pain. We have lost you at the moment when socialism has prevailed in our country. Your efforts, your energy, your boundless devotion to communism have greatly contributed to the victories that have been won in the course of the great struggle. Farewell, Sergo, dear friend and comrade!12
Ordzhonikidze’s body was laid out in the Hall of Pillars on 19 February and could be viewed by mourners from the public from 12 noon. The obituary revealed above all that Ordzhonikidze was a ‘model Bolshevik’, who had just turned fifty in October and who was celebrated throughout the Union. The obituaries in Pravda united the entire leadership: the Comintern, the editorial board of Pravda, the Commission of Party Control of the Central Committee of the CPSU (B), the Party Committee of the Moscow City and Region, the Ukrainian party leadership, the Leningrad party organization and all the People’s Commissariats.
Arkadii Rozengol'ts wrote of the ‘passionate tribune’, Andrei Vishinskii of the ‘unyielding fighter for the cause of communism’, Ieronim Uborevich of the ‘outstanding organizer and leader of the masses’. A letter of condolence to Zinaida Gavrilovna was signed by Stanislav Redens, Polina Zhemchuzhina, Orakhelashvili, Kaganovich and Yezhov. The poet Dem'ian Bednyi contributed a poem about immortality. Iosif Vareikis wrote about the ‘Party favourite’. In addition to Litvinov, there were notices from the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs by Krestinskii and Stomoniakov. Mikhail Kaganovich praised Ordzhonikidze as the ‘creator of the Soviet engineering industry’ and the ‘iron commander of heavy industry’. Poets, too, took their leave. ‘Farewell, dear Sergo!’, wrote Vsevolod Vishnevski, Petr Pavlenko, Vladimir Kirshon, Vladimir Stavskii, Vsevolod Ivanov, Nikolai Tikhonov, Aleksei Tolstoi and Aleksandr Bezymenskii. The pioneering shock-worker Alexei Stakhanov sent a message of condolence. Directors of the big enterprises, led by Ivan Likhachev, the head of the Stalin automobile plant (ZIS), which Ordzhonikidze had visited shortly before his death, bore witness to the indefatigable energy of their supreme leader. The military praised him. Mikhail Tukhachevskii sent a telephone message from Sochi with the title ‘Commander of Heavy Industry’, in which he praised the modernization of the Red Army and recalled their joint action on the Kuban front in the Civil War. There were telegrams of condolence from the Academy of Sciences and the German Communist Party. A message from the blast furnace workers of Dnepropetrovsk swore on Ordzhonikidze’s ashes that they would raise production and remain vigilant. Telegrams poured in from Soviet dependencies the world over – from Helsinki, Budapest, Vienna, Copenhagen and Tientsin. Messages of condolence arrived from statesmen such as Édouard Herriot and Léon Blum and diplomatic envoys such as Lord Chilston, von der Schulenburg, Coulondre, Joseph Davies and Baltrušaitis.13 The women in the Kremlin attempted to console Zinaida Gavrilovna. Mikhail Kol'tsov sent a report on a memorial ceremony in Madrid.
Figure 10.1 The commemorative edition of Pravda: Sergo Ordzhonikidze’s deathbed, with Zinaida Ordzhonikidze, Molotov, Yezhov, Stalin, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, Mikoian and Voroshilov
‘The first step towards a grand heroic narrative had been taken by changing a suicide into a heart attack.’
What everyone emphasized was their incredulity.
It is difficult to believe that this has happened. Despite all the indications that his health was affected, we believed that Sergo still had a long, long life ahead of him, and that his voice, full of zest for life and of belief in the Bolshevik cause, would bid us to keep on advancing. We could not, and still cannot, believe that Sergo can be mortal. Death and Sergo are ideas that simply do not go together. Yet the improbable and ineluctable thing has happened. Sergo is no more.14
The chorus of messages of condolence was augmented by illustrations that were lavish by Pravda standards: Ordzhonikidze on his deathbed with a noble profile and folded hands, Ordzhonikidze with a death mask taken by the sculptor Sergei Merkunov, photos of vast crowds listening to the announcements everywhere in the city and the factories, photos from the vigil, the transporting of the urn to Red Square, carried by Molotov, Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Andreev, Postyshev and Zhdanov. A death ritual was crystallized that had assumed its first sketchy form with the lying in state of Lenin and Kirov. Over 250,000 Muscovites paid their respects to ‘the great son and citizen’.15 The photo shows the sarcophagus surrounded by a sea of flowers. Voroshilov, Stalin, Kalinin and Molotov (the last in a suit and tie) are prominent at the vigil. The chandeliers in the Hall of Pillars are covered in black crêpe, the coffin is decorated with red velvet, and above it a banner reads ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ According to the journalist, Sergo was lying there, looking as if he might arise at any moment. Moscow workers filed past in two columns. At 16.55 Stalin, Molotov and others entered the Hall of Pillars; they paused for five minutes while Samuil Samosud conducted the orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre. There was a procession of mourners. The Comintern representatives were followed by Yezhov and representatives of the Foreign Commissariat; Stalin and members of the Politburo came later, then Marshall Budyonny, members of the Academy of Sciences and a squad of artists, among them Igor' Grabar' and Konstantin Iuon. The mourners includ
ed the Bulgakovs: ‘Went into town with Sergei and M.A.; we hoped we could get into the Hall of Pillars but that proved impossible. We would have had a long wait in the queue, which stretched to Tverskaia and then came round in a circle past Dmitrovka.’16
Mikhail Bulgakov was able to jump the queue and enter the Hall of Pillars with a ticket for the Bolshoi. ‘He said the people were crammed together in long columns (the group from the Bolshoi Theatre slipped into the crowd from down on Dmitrovka). Said he could hardly see anything because the procession just rushed past. Lights with black crêpe, masses of flowers in the hall, harsh lighting and a symphony orchestra on a platform. He had only an unclear view of the dead man’s face.’17 The scenery won’t have differed greatly from what Gide had observed in the Hall of Pillars at Gorky’s death:
I had seen the Red Square a few days previously on the occasion of Gorky’s funeral. I had seen the same people, the same and yet how different! – more like, I imagine, the Russians of the time of the tsars. They filed past the catafalque in the great Hall of Pillars, uninterruptedly, interminably. This time they did not consist of the handsomest, the strongest, the most joyful representatives of the Soviet peoples, but of an indiscriminate concourse of suffering humanity – women, children, children especially, old people sometimes, nearly all of them badly dressed and some looking in the depths of poverty. A silent, dreary, respectful and perfectly orderly procession which seemed to have come up out of the past – a procession which lasted certainly much longer than the other (and glorious) one.18
At half past midnight, the procession of mourners had come to an end. Muscovites were able to take their leave of the dead man up to midnight on 20 February 1937. The cremation took place in the crematorium; the urn was put on display once again in the Hall of Pillars at 2 p.m. and was then taken from there and transported in a blue bus to Red Square, where the funeral ceremony took place at 3 p.m. Entry to Red Square was stopped from 2 p.m. onwards. Special permission was needed to enter the stands. Access was granted only to members of the Central Committee, the Party Committees of the City and the Region of Moscow, members of the Council of People’s Commissars (the SNK), the executive Committee of the Comintern, the Party Commission and Soviet Control. Speeches were given by Molotov, Rukhimovich, Voroshilov, Khrushchev, Beria and Kosarev.19
As if at a word of command, the reports that had filled the papers from 19 to 22 February broke off on 23 February.
Suicide as a weapon
The decision to reinterpret a suicide as straightforward heart failure was fixed from the outset, as Stalin’s brutal remarks to Ordzhonikidze’s wife and the activities of the leadership on the spot demonstrate. Ordzhonikidze’s previous heart attacks made this explanation all the more plausible.20
The Bolshevik Party had something like a general line on suicide. On the one hand, there was the belief that went back to the tradition of the Enlightenment and the radical movement in general that human beings can make their own decisions about their fate and can end their lives if they think it right. This belief was not only current in Russian radicalism of the late nineteenth century; it was also practised. It was part of the ideological canon of Russian radicalism to assert that there was an inalienable right to self-determination even on the frontiers of life and death. One could almost speak of an intellectual fashion or even a suicide epidemic in those years. And it was revived again in the aftermath of the failed revolution of 1905.21 Something of this attitude still resonates in a conversation from a diary of an adolescent girl from a family belonging to the intelligentsia: ‘On the way home, she talked about herself. She said that she had no will of her own, that she didn’t care whether she lived or died. Finally, she even claimed a right to take her own life. I was shocked and said that I too was sometimes depressed.’22
On the other hand, the Marxist tradition treats suicide as an act of despair on the part of individuals unable to withstand the pressures of the class struggle. It was understandable, but had to be rejected. Suicide was an individual, individualistic reaction, while the true path was to be found in the organized struggle for freedom, above all in the ranks of a revolutionary party. To an extent, then, here was an emotional understanding, accompanied by sharp rejection of an attitude that was denounced as capitulation. There might be rational reasons for suicide, such as, for example, when a man or woman fighter was unable to keep on serving the revolution for particular reasons – such as serious illness – and could ‘no longer make himself or herself useful’; or, again, if one could escape torture or the revelation of secrets only in this way. This was what had happened in the case of Evgenia Bosch, an Old Bolshevik and a long-term émigré who, after her return to Russia as a member of the Cheka, had taken her own life because she was prevented by a heart defect from playing any further part in the revolutionary struggle. Bukharin had written an obituary, full of appreciation for her and her action.23
But that was the exception. The rule was that suicide is ‘merely’ an individual, individualistic response, a capitulation in the face of the tasks of the class struggle, an expression of weakness. Even worse, in the internal Party discussions of the late 1920s, suicide was regarded as a confession of guilt. ‘From the vantage point of the state and the Party, suicide was an especially sensitive irritant, since it not only cast a shadow over the youthful mood of euphoria about the future but might also form a focal point for the growth of collective dissatisfaction.’24 To commit suicide is to forestall being unmasked and to escape responsibility. We can even speak of a discourse about suicide in those years. This was intensified by the suicides of Adolph Joffe, who had protested against the persecution of Trotsky, in 1927, and of the poets Sergei Esenin and Vladimir Maiakovskii.25
During the period in which ‘bourgeois scholars and experts’ were being harassed, a number of those affected sought escape through death. One instance is that of Vasilii Orlov (1890–1931), the geologist who was one of the accused in the so-called Industrialists’ trial. He hanged himself in his prison cell in Rostov because he was unable to bear the torture.26 Similarly, the philosopher Abram Deborin attempted suicide at the height of the intimidation of historians and philosophers in 1931.27 As is well known, suicide even penetrated to the Kremlin when Nadezhda Allilueva, Stalin’s first wife, killed herself on 9 November 1932.28
We can speak of a real wave of suicides in the years 1936–8. Vissarion Lominadze, head of the Party leadership in Magnitogorsk, had taken his own life as early as January 1935.29 Mikhail Tomskii, who had been a member of the Social Democratic Labour Party of Russia since 1904, was chairman of the Central Council of Soviet Trade Unions and a candidate for the Central Committee of the CPSU, took his own life on 22 August 1936, when his name was mentioned in connection with the first show trial. Another who thought of suicide was Dmitri Shostakovich. Despite his calm exterior he was in a state of great tension, and many people believed he was close to suicide.30
Suicides had become increasingly common by the end of 1936, so much so that it came to be an important topic at the December plenum of the Central Committee. Aleksei Rykov raised the question of Tomskii:
Personally, when I learned about his suicide, I was more inclined to think that this was a result of his nervous condition, because earlier, when seriously ill, he time and time again contemplated suicide. From what has been made public here and from the fact that Tomskii had conducted himself toward me in the past year in a way unlike ever before – and from the fact that I found out about his death the next afternoon – this convinces me that somehow, as far as I know, he had participated in this affair. Now from all that has been said here, it seems to be absolutely beyond doubt.31
In other words, suicide was regarded as an admission of guilt, as emerges clearly also from the discussion of the suicide of the Moscow party leader Veniamin Furer. At the meeting of the plenum Stalin reproached Bukharin:
Have you seen the letter Furer left after his suicide?! Tears well up in your eyes as you read it …
It takes little political experience to understand that here we are dealing with something else. We know about Furer. We know what he was capable of. So what do you think happened? ‘I am right, I love the Party, I am pure, but my nerves are shot. I cannot bear the thought that someone in the Party may think that I, Furer, had once been associated with Trotskyists. My honor does not allow me to go on living.’ And what happened? What happened was worse than one could ever imagine … The man took his life because he was afraid that everything would be revealed. He didn’t want to be a witness to his own universal shame. This was true of Furer and Lominadze … Here you see one of the ultimate and most cunning and easiest means by which one can spit at and deceive the Party one last time before dying, before leaving the world. That, Comrade Bukharin, is the underlying reason for these last suicides. And you …, Comrade Bukharin, do you want us to take you at your word?32