Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  Molotov had advanced a similar argument at the plenum of December 1936. ‘Tomskii’s suicide, that’s a conspiracy, an action premeditated from the outset. And Tomskii did not just discuss committing suicide with one person, but with several people. The idea was to deal yet another blow to the Central Committee.’33

  At the plenum of the Party organization of Azov and the Black Sea on 6 January 1937, Andreev, a member of the Central Committee, came out with an interpretation of the suicide of Kolotilin, a party member.

  It is clear now that he was an enemy, a sworn enemy of the Party. And the fact that he committed suicide – he was given this opportunity to kill himself by the officials of the territorial committee – we let him out of our hands; he could have given us much valuable testimony which would have helped us to expose our enemies, which could have helped us to solve a thing here or there. The officials of the territorial committee, who had tolerated his presence in this very post for many years, decided that they could not wait for two days and decided to remove him from his post as secretary. And an hour later he blew his brains out. In doing this, in committing suicide, he fully confirmed his guilt. Because there is no reason for an innocent person to shoot himself … This is a peculiar tactic. It is now clear that this is a peculiar means of evading an investigation and avoiding disgrace.

  Lominadze shot himself dead. At first, certain people felt sorry for him, but he turned out to be a scoundrel of scoundrels. He shot himself because there was no place for him to turn to. Either way he would have been exposed. Tomskii shot himself dead, left behind a letter to the effect that he was innocent, that he had been unjustly slandered, that he couldn’t go on living, and so on. And yet, according to the testimonies, he has now turned out to be an organizer of rightist terrorists. Now these testimonies have been brought to light, fully and clearly. He committed suicide because he decided to avoid shame, public shame, and to evade the investigation. We would have surely convicted him … You can see what these suicides are really worth. We shall from now on consider them only as confirmation of these testimonies. We shall consider each and every suicide as confirmation that he is the enemy who has shot himself and no one else.34

  At the plenum of February–March it was formally resolved to condemn suicide as an ‘enemy weapon’. In a resolution arising from another suicide, suicide was condemned as ‘an anti-Party act, unworthy of a Party member’. ‘The Plenum resolutely condemns such action inasmuch as all of our experience in fighting and crushing Trotskyists and other double-dealers has demonstrated that suicide is a weapon utilized by [our] enemies to evade responsibility and avoid being unmasked.’35

  Cases are known from the purges in which Party members took their own lives if they felt they had been unjustly treated or wrongfully expelled from the Party. There are even instances of collective suicides – including entire families.36 In one case – according to Serge Prokofiev’s memoirs – homosexuality is given as the reason for a suicide.37

  A hopeless situation and protest

  By February 1937, Sergo Ordzhonikidze was in a difficult, even a hopeless situation. Threatening events were on the increase. Each one on its own would have justified a feeling of despair. Now they all came together. His brother Papuli was arrested in November 1936 and shot on 10 February 1937.38 On 30 January, his deputy Iuri' Piatakov and a large number of colleagues from his People’s Commissariat were sentenced and executed in the second show trial. He had known since early January that he was scheduled to give the report on wrecking activities and how to combat them at the Central Committee plenum planned for 20 February. Shortly before 18 February, his apartment in the Kremlin had been searched, evidently in the hope of uncovering incriminating evidence. Ordzhonikidze, who had referred to the unmasking of leading members of the People’s Commissariat as ‘nonsense’,39 now had a decision to take. He was indeed ready to distance himself from Piatakov, but he wished to defend his People’s Commissariat, whose officials he had trained during the previous decade and with whose assistance he had been able to realize his various industrialization projects. Five days after the end of the show trial, on 5 February 1937, at a meeting of the divisional heads of the People’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry, he spoke to the directors whom the workers in their factories were treating as if they were criminals:

  There must be an end to this. We must tell the directors quite frankly that they are not criminals but our cadres. The criminals have been seized and shot. If in future there are further criminals, they too will be arrested. Every swine we can catch will be shot. That is not the issue. The issue is the large number of our cadres, fantastic cadres whom we ourselves have trained. That is what we have to say …

  He spoke also about the forthcoming Central Committee plenum and asked for support.

  On the 20th of this month, the Plenum of the Central Committee of our Party will hold its session. The agenda will include the results and the lessons of this filthy business. I shall represent the People’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry. Should I take the rap for all of you? If sabotage is going on at the factories, then Ordzhonikidze is to blame and no one else. And have you given me evidence showing how you are trying to put an end to the sabotage, what sort of measures you are undertaking? You dump the responsibility on the chemical division, on the coal-mining division. Let them take the rap! This is of no concern to us! No, comrades, you must dig deep, surely there must be big or small cells everywhere in our organization that have committed filthy deeds. Look at Barinov. Several of his derricks have collapsed. It could have happened that a scoundrel overturned several derricks by himself and said they were knocked over in the snowstorm …

  The question that kept nagging at Ordzhonikidze was:

  How could this have happened? You and I have been working together for so many years, we have done a fairly good job, the results have been fairly satisfactory. We even completed the Five-Year Plan in four years. So how could it have happened that Piatakov was on our staff and yet no one, by God, saw through him? You’ll say to me: ‘He was your deputy, but you didn’t see through him. So what do you want from us?’ It’s not right. If some worker in Kemerovo had said this, he would be right, but if you are saying this, then it’s not right …

  Why? Because many of you have worked with him for a longer period of time than me, and many of you had an apparent liking for him. I am not saying this as a reproach. I am only saying this because here was a man who seemed to be helping us. That’s what happened. Why did this take place? Could it really be that this happened because we had become so blind?

  We must pose this question to ourselves. If we are not hauled into court, then we ought to present ourselves at court ourselves, that is, at the court of our conscience, and raise the question as to how this could have happened. Because we evidently did not sufficiently monitor what was happening around us. Because many of us evidently had rested on our laurels, on our successes. So what happens? There is an accident at the mine and ten or twelve men have died. Well, so they are dead. So what? Technical defects …

  What does this say? It says we have a callous attitude. Whether ten persons have perished or only one, everyone should feel his insides turning and twisting. They are, after all, not strangers, these people. They are our brothers. But is this our attitude? No, our feelings have become blunted. This is the rust that has begun to engulf us at every point. This rust is extremely dangerous. It is a clear sign of bureaucratism, when a high official or bureaucrat feels himself so cut off from the masses. I am not saying that you have failed to attend [Party] meetings. It is possible to attend Party meetings and still be cut off from people – that is, not to share the life of the masses.

  This damned Piatakov, this damned Rataichak and others! They have played such filthy tricks on us. But their ruin, that is, the fact that they were caught, thrown into prison and forced to tell all that has really happened, this fact ought to open our eyes. We could put it this way: We couldn’t have guessed, no one could have gue
ssed – why are you dumping (responsibility) on us? But now we must answer for it. That’s what we shall have to reflect on very seriously. It is obvious that we are entering upon a period when it will be necessary once again to reorganize our ranks, our leadership, when it will be necessary, evidently, to govern anew. The hell with it! Unless there is a shake-up, we’ll all rust.40

  Ordzhonikidze knew full well that his staff were irreplaceable, but also that they were vulnerable. His managers and specialists were notable for their qualifications, competence and independence of judgement, but also for the fact that their ranks included an unusually high proportion of so-called former people and nonconformists. On 1 December 1936, his People’s Commissariat contained 743 Party members and candidates, of whom forty-two had been given Party punishments, among them twelve for involvement with the Trotskyist opposition, while eighty had been members of other parties, such as the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. In addition, the organization numbered 160 people expelled from the Party, 169 non-Party people who had once belonged to other parties, seventy-one former White Army officers, and ninety-four people who had appeared in court at least once on a charge of counterrevolutionary activity – in short, ‘wrecker’ descendants of commercial and industrial families, noble families or officers of the tsarist army.41

  Stalin and the Politburo undoubtedly expected Ordzhonikidze to use his speech at the plenum to expose and denounce Trotskyist wrecking activities in heavy industry and elsewhere. This would have amounted to yet another attack on the efficiency of the central organization of industry that he had built up. Ordzhonikidze was evidently unwilling to take this further step, and he was fully aware of the dilemma he found himself in. He had already, in January 1935, been shown the letter left by Vissarion Lominadze, who had sought to escape arrest by taking his own life. The letter said, inter alia,

  Please hand this to Comrade Ordzhonikidze. I have long since resolved to choose this way out if people were unwilling to believe me. It is obvious that I have been slandered … I should have exposed the entire nonsense and the lack of seriousness in these allegations, and even then no one would have believed me. I would not have been able to bear all that. I am facing a procedure that I shall not be able to withstand in the long run. Despite all the mistakes I have made, I have put my entire conscious life at the service of communism and the Party. The only thing clear to me is that I shall not live to see the last battle in the international arena. But that cannot be far away. I shall die with my belief in the victory of our cause still intact … I would ask you to help my family.42

  Ordzhonikidze arranged for Lominadze’s widow to be given a pension.

  But with his suicide there fell another, perhaps the last, bastion that might have held out against the further wave of violence to be unleashed at the plenum that was due to be held on 20 February but that was now postponed for three days by his death.

  Death as a group experience: speaking of death in times of mass murder

  How close state mourning is to state terror can be seen in the newspapers edged in black announcing Ordzhonikidze’s death. The prominent people featured there, the signatories of letters of condolence, are all prospective candidates for death. Their families escaped with their lives, although some were arrested and spent years in the camps.43 Eleven of the twenty signatories of the Central Committee’s declaration on Ordzhonikidze’s death on the front page of Pravda on 19 February 1937 were murdered: Chubar', Kozior, Petrovskii, Eikhe, Rudzutak, Postyshev, Yezhov, Mezhlauk, Akulov, Shkiriatov and Iakovlev. Three of the four signatories of the doctor’s certificate lost their lives in the purges: Grigorii Kaminskii, the People’s Commissar for Health, Iosif Khodorovskii, the director of the Kremlin Hospital, and his adviser, Lev Levin. The members of the committee responsible for organizing the funeral ceremonies included future victims of the purges and one man, Ian Gamarnik, who escaped arrest by taking his own life. Of the Ukrainian Party leaders who had signed the letter of condolence, there were many who would soon no longer be alive: Kozior, Petrovskii, Postyshev, Liubchenko, Balitskii, Iakir, Popov, Satonskii, Selekhes, Kudriavchev, Khataievich, Sarkisov, Gikalo, Sukhomlin, Shlikhter, Veger and Cherniavskii. Arkadii Rozengol'ts, from the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade, was to be tried and executed in the third show trial early in 1938. Of the military personnel who had contributed to the Pravda edition devoted to the official act of mourning, Uborevich, Tukhachevskii, Iakir, Bliukher and Yegorov were among those doomed to perish in the military purge of June 1937. Of the employees of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, Krestinskii, Karakhan and Stomoniakov were indicted and executed. Of the NKVD personnel to have played a significant part in the death ceremonial – the Moscow NKVD boss, Stanislav Redens, but also the new head, Nikolai Yezhov himself, would be the victims of a later wave of repression and lose their lives. Most of those who shared the honour of taking part in the vigil for ‘Comrade Sergo’ fell victim to the purges in the following months; they included Alksnis, Unshlikht and Piatnitskii.

  Ordzhonikidze’s death was the start of a veritable wave of suicides. Statisticians have counted 1,690 suicides in the European part of Russia, the majority of them – 698 – in Moscow.44 According to Oleg Suvenirov, there were 782 suicides in 1937 in the Red Army alone, and in 1938 there were 832 – not counting suicides in the navy.45 Even child suicides increased after Yezhov ruled that children should be separated from their arrested or murdered parents. Thus the son of the director of TASS, the state news agency, who had been arrested and executed, and the son of the director of the Cheliabinsk Tractor Works both hanged themselves in the Danilov monastery, which had been transformed into a children’s detention centre.46

  The wave of suicides did not stop at the NKVD.

  When the press was informed of Iagoda’s arrest on 4 April 1937, Matvei Pogrebinskii, commissar of state security of the third rank and head of the NKVD regional administration in Gorky, shot himself. He was very close to Iagoda and was responsible for the reeducation of criminals in labour colonies. After Iagoda’s arrest he felt that his life no longer had a future. His was not the only suicide in the NKVD in spring 1937. On 17 April, I. Chertok, a worker in the third division of the Central Administration of State Security, hurled himself from a window.47

  At the end of May 1938, Vasilii Karutskii, head of the Moscow NKVD, committed suicide.48 Mikhail Frinovskii, People’s Commissar of the Navy, even recommended suicide to one of his colleagues, Genrikh Liushkov, if he were to be arrested, and discussed a prearranged signal with him – a telegram about his dismissal. Liushkov, however, preferred to escape over the frontier to Japan, where he was later executed as a Soviet spy.49 The machinery of terror devoured its own employees. Many NKVD workers were unable to endure the stress of the arrests and executions and made their escape into death.

  Despite all the Bolshevik toughness, the employees were frequently unable to withstand the psychological and physical pressure emanating from the conveyor belt of death. On 28 February [1938] Boris Smirnov shot himself in his office. On 7 March, Solov'ev broke down and had to be relieved of his duties for a while. The others gritted their teeth and went on with their work, while Kuznetsov kept up the pressure, called on his staff to over-fulfil their norm and demanded that they surpass their neighbours, as if it were a sowing competition or a harvest campaign.50

  In October 1938, an NKVD worker, Rafail Listengurt, terrified that he was going to be arrested, attempted suicide but failed.51

  It is a macabre detail, but one that shows that the fear of death and escape into suicide had become a fact of life for the top echelons of Stalinist high society. The head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, had even persuaded his 34-year-old wife, Evgenia, to sacrifice herself for him by taking an overdose of luminal: ‘I’ll send her a medicine that will make her fall asleep so profoundly that she won’t ever wake up again.’52 Evgenia Yezhova, the publisher of the avant-garde journal The USSR in Construction, which appeared in four languages, the host
ess of a salon visited by many famous writers and artists, addressed a farewell letter to Stalin:

  Dear, beloved Comrade Stalin, oh yes, I may be defamed, slandered, but you are dear and beloved to me, as you are to all people in whom you have faith … How unbearably hard it is for me, Comrade Stalin! What doctors can cure these nerves, strained after so many years of insomnia, this sore brain, this deep mental pain you don’t know how to escape from? But I don’t have the right to die. So I live only on the idea that I am honest toward the country and you. I feel like a living corpse. What am I to do? Forgive me for my letter, written in bed. Forgive me, I could not keep silence anymore.53

  The bullet which ended Ordzhonikidze’s life did away with a man who was not entirely predictable in the approaching debate about the future direction to be taken. The Party leadership was deeply affected by the way in which one of the innermost circle of power had taken his leave without notice or explanation, that he had in effect ‘made his escape’. It must have come as a great shock. But the leadership’s reaction was the same as always. Without pausing for breath, it took the bull by the horns and transformed the suicide, which was a crime against the Party, into a heart attack, which was more appropriate for a captain of heavy industry. The public reaction was to find all of this rather mystifying and even in some ways satisfying, as we can see from a contemporary diary entry: ‘19 February. Another significant event. Ordzhonikidze has died. Further details are as yet unknown … Ordzhonikidze is in my view not so very important, a replacement will soon be found. And the country has not suffered a great loss, though, to be sure, it has not gained much either. One man more or less does not really change the picture.’54 State-organized mourning was a kind of substitute for the articulation of a feeling that was genuine, but could not be expressed. The greatest square in the city, normally a site for public tirades of hatred, was transformed by the black and red draperies into a space of mourning in which the impressive ceremonies of Holy Russia and the traditions of the international workers’ movement could achieve a synthesis, thanks to the tried and tested techniques of state artists, which would amount to a style that endured until the demise of the Soviet system. The hysterical cries of the hundreds of thousands of people who, as recently as 30 January 1937, had called for the execution of ‘fascist spies and wreckers’ were now transformed into muted funeral dirges. The shot that had triggered a brief moment of shock and panic faded away in a sustained and powerfully orchestrated death ritual. Mourning took place not just in public squares but in factories, canteens, clubs, palaces of culture and schools. Hardly any of the events that took place during those days were spontaneous or improvised. Events were shaped by a sophisticated choreography and an elaborate iconography. The product was a death ritual embracing the entire Soviet leadership, the workforce of the great factories and the city of Moscow. A sombre and yet festive mood came together in pompes funèbres disseminated in millions of images and over the radio. They combined to create a collective space for mourning in which the entire nation could be united in shock and sadness. The nation, which in recent years had witnessed the deaths of millions and had now experienced two great show trials, in which the most monstrous crimes had been confessed to and the accused had been cursed a thousand times over – this same nation now had a place where it could give free rein to its grief at the death of a single man. In these funeral rites state-organized mourning could join forces with a movement in which the people’s sorrow could be displayed. The terrorist state could attempt to assert its right to control not just the victims but also the manner in which the people as a whole came to terms with death.