Stalin and His Hangmen (85 page)

17.
Stalin i Kaganovich,
397–8

18.
Mikhail Geller and Aleksandr Nekrich,
Utopiia u vlasti,
Moscow: 2000, 270

19.
Stalin i Kaganovich,
569–70

20.
Valerii Shambarov,
Gosudarstvo i revoliutsii,
Moscow: 2001, 301

21.
Fascism was no bar to cooperation. In the 1920s the USSR bought minesweepers from Mussolini to rebuild its navy, which had been badly shrunk when the Whites used the Russian Black Sea fleet to evacuate their soldiers to Istanbul.

22.
To avoid publicity, handcuffs and rubber truncheons were bought from Germany via third countries.

23.
GASPI 558, 11, 85, 26

24.
Sergei Gorlov,
Alians Moskva-Berlin 1920–1933
Moscow, 2001, 315

25.
In 1934, the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs was the only Soviet ministry allowed two differing opinions. While Commissar Litvinov opted for joining France and Britain against Germany, the ambassador to Berlin, Surits, friendly with Hermann Goering’s cousin Herbert, shared Kandelaki’s Germanophilia.

26.
Dmitrii Volkogonov,
Stalin triumfi tragedia,
1990, I, 209

27.
Despite her demoralized compliance, Stalin laid into Krupskaia for encouraging Marinetta Shaginian to write a biography of Lenin revealing that his maternal grandfather was a Jew. The biography was banned.

28.
Krupskaia’s death in 1939, immediately after tasting a birthday cake sent from the Kremlin, may not have been of natural causes.

29.
In 1951 she submitted her diary pages for 1934, wherever Stalin was mentioned, for Stalin’s approval. See GASPI 558, 11, 750.

30.
GASPI 558, 11, 749, 14, 3 February 1935

31.
GASPI 558, 11, 749, 21, 10 October 1936

32.
Arkadii Vaksberg,
Valkiriia revoliutsii,
Smolensk, 1998, 393

33.
Iurii Druzhnikov,
Russkie mify: Donoschik 001 ili Voznesenie Pavlika Morozova,
Ekaterinburg: 2001

34.
Kartashov virtually confessed to Druzhnikov in the 1960s.

35.
GASPI 558, 11, 727, 38–57

36.
Stalin added his comments to Ezhov’s text, but the treatise was never published.

37.
Stalin i Kaganovich,
613–15

38.
Il’inskii, 2002, 236

39.
See V. A. Kovaliov,
Raspiatie dukhom,
Moscow, 1996, 151.

40.
A. Orlov,
Tainaia istoriia stalinskikh prestuplenii,
1953, 133

41.
Stalin i Kaganovich,
627

42.
I. Gorelov,
Tsugtzvang Mikhaila Tomskogo,
2000, 233–4

43.
L. Mlechin,
Ministry inostrannykh del
2001, 128

44.
Pauker had arrested both Kamenev and Zinoviev on Iagoda’s warrant. He ran the NKVD charity The Children’s Friend as well as managing the Dinamo football team of which Iagoda was patron. Pauker did not outlive Iagoda; he was shot in August 1937.

45.
Told to Sidney Hook; see
New Leader,
10 October 1960, 22–3.

46.
Stalin i Kaganovich, 665

47.
Voprosy istorii,
1995, 1, 8

48.
Khlevniuk, 1996, 203–04

49.
GASPI 17, 2, 575, 1–143; see also
Voprosy istorii
Moscow, 1995, 1.

50.
Extracts from Iagoda’s statements are to be found in Il’inskii, 2002, 150–54 and Sokolov, 2001, 764–6.

51.
Il’inskii, 2002, 404–11

52.
Sokolov, 2001, 76–8

53.
Il’inskii, 2002, 448–9

SEVEN * The Ezhov Bloodbath

1.
But in pre-revolution Russia eleven-year-old boys were not employed in major factories, and youths went into the army after their twentieth birthdays.

2.
An émigré recalled a St Petersburg concierge’s son called Ezhov who tormented cats and bullied smaller children.

3.
One of his sponsors was a certain Shifris; like nearly everyone who had recommended Ezhov, he was shot in 1938.

4.
Petrov would be charged in 1935 with ‘hindering Ezhov from carrying out Leninist-Stalinist policies’, and on 10 May 1938, after appealing to Ezhov for mercy, he was shot. A small Mari town was named Ezhov.

5.
Five years later, Ezhov, at Stalin’s behest, took great trouble to have Mayakovsky’s works published in an exemplary edition.

6.
Stalin i Kaganovich
, 244

7.
Ibid. 432

8.
Ibid. 572

9.
These talks were minuted by Lakoba and the minutes kept in the Lakoba museum in Sukhum, which was destroyed totally by the Georgian ‘army’ in 1992.

10.
Lakoba archive: Stalin to Lakoba and Meladze, 19 October 1929

11.
He begged Lakoba to help a GPU men who’d gone too far: ‘Do what you have to for his rehabilitation, everything he is charged with is rubbish, he would never have done that and he won’t, and if he did do it, it was in the interests of the cause.’

12.
In 1937 Beria shot Mikhail Lakoba dead in Sukhum NKVD headquarters.

13.
There is ironic justice in Lakoba’s fate. In 1822 his ancestor Urus Lakoba had poisoned at dinner a Georgian vassal, the hereditary prince of Abkhazia.

14.
Trilisser was moved to the Comintern and given the surname Moskvin.

15.
See N. V. Petrov and K. V. Skorkin,
Kto rukovodil NKVD 1934–1941
, Moscow: 1999, 492–500.

16.
Stalin’s authorization of torture was at this point given by encrypted telegram; in 1939 it was stated openly, as a measure to be used against ‘enemies who refuse to disarm’.

17.
See A. G. Tepliakov, ‘Personal i povsednevnost’ novosibirskogo NKVD…’ in
Minuvshee
, Moscow/St Petersburg, 1997, 240–95.

18.
A. A. Papchinskii and M. A. Tumshis,
Shchit, raskolotyi mechom: NKVD protiv VChK
, Moscow, 2001, 188

19.
These figures omit people rounded up and shot in outlying regions without notifying the centre.

20.
A. Ia. Razumov (ed.)
Leningradskii martirolog
, vols 1–4 (more to appear), St Petersburg, 1995–9

21.
Butovskii poligon 1937–1938 gg.
, Moscow, 1999, III, 344

22.
Il’inskii, 2002, 256–7

23.
Ibid. 258

24.
Bukharin’s letters to Stalin are in GASPI 558, 11, 710, 3–184. See also Bukharin’s letters in
Istoricheskii arkhiv
, 1999, 1, 48–78.

25.
The proceedings are summarized in V. Rogovin,
1937
, Moscow, 1996, 201–11.

26.
The 1,000 pages of political history, fiction and poetry, as well as desperate letters to Stalin, that Bukharin composed in prison all ended up in Stalin’s personal archive.

27.
See N. I. Bukharin,
Tiuremnye tetradi
, Moscow, 1994;
Istochnik
, Moscow, 1993, 1, 23–5; V. Rogovin,
Partiia rasstreliannykh
, Moscow, 1997, 40–42.

28.
Romain Rolland tried once more. In August 1937 he begged Stalin to spare Aleksandr Arosev, formerly Soviet ambassador to Lithuania and one of Molotov’s closest friends. Arosev was shot a few months later.

29.
Enukidze was notorious as a womanizer with a penchant, like Stalin, for pubescent girls; as an old friend of Stalin he knew far too much to be trusted with a public appearance.

30.
GASPI 558, 3, 231, 302

31.
Orjonikidze’s brother was arrested on capital charges and his widow Zinaida spent many years in psychiatric wards; her only influential friend was Dzierżyński’s widow. She insisted that the NKVD had killed her husband. Officially, he died of a heart attack and towns and railways were named after him; Stalin would not, however, let statues be put up to him.

32.
Voroshilov had a collection of silk embroidery given to him by the wives of his commanders. The collection was destroyed along with all Voroshilov’s possessions in 1953, when his grandson set fire to a Christmas tree and the Voroshilov dacha burnt down.

33.
This theory was not touched on when Red Army commanders were interrogated in 1937. In 1945 German officers, questioned by Soviet intelligence, said that they had recruited nobody but one NKVD disinformation officer.

34.
Budionny proved his loyalty in summer 1937 by taking his second wife, the opera contralto Olga Mikhailova, in his own car to imprisonment in the Lubianka; she had refused to bear him children and was friendly to foreigners. Budionny then married his housekeeper. When after Tukhachevsky’s execution arrests continued, Voroshilov is said to have calmed Budionny’s nerves by saying that Stalin was liquidating ‘only the clever marshals’.

35.
Feldman’s interrogator Zinovi Ushakov was not normally so humane; he was shot a year later.

36.
On the contradictory behaviour of Voroshilov, see Vadim Rogovin, 1997, 160–69.

37.
Kaminsky was doomed after a clash with Stalin, which began with Kaminsky’s remark, ‘If we go like this we’ll shoot the whole party!’ to which Stalin retorted, ‘You wouldn’t by chance be friends of these enemies?… Well, then, you’re birds of a feather.’

38.
Vladimir Osipovich Piatnitskii,
Zagovor protiv Stalina
, Moscow: 1998

39.
Vlast’ i intelligentsia
, 1999, 317

40.
Ibid. 348

41.
Ibid. 365–7

42.
Vitali Shentalinskii,
Raby svobody
, Moscow: 1995, 242–3

43.
Vlast’ i intelligentsia
, 365–7

44.
See Iurii Murin,
Pisatel’ i vozhd’
, Moscow: 1997 for the Sholokhov – Stalin correspondence.

45.
See Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov,
Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: Ezhov
, Hoover, 2002.

46.
For Russian diaries of the 1930s see Véronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya and Thomas Lahusen,
Intimacy and Terror
, New York: 1995

47.
See B. I. Ilizarov, 2002, 284–6.

48.
Stalin had Trotsky’s other son, Sergei, killed in the USSR. Both Trotsky’s daughters had died, one of suicide, the other of tuberculosis.

49.
In 1956 Rodos was the last KGB man shot on Khrushchiov’s orders for excessive cruelty.

50.
Aleksei Polianskii,
Ezhov
, Moscow, 2001, 304–05

EIGHT * The Rise of Lavrenti Beria

1.
The Berias’ first son died in infancy of smallpox and their daughter Tamara, or Eteri, became deaf-mute after measles. There was no contact with two children from Marta’s previous marriage. A cousin, Gerasime Beria, was to be an intelligence officer in the Soviet army which invaded Georgia in 1921.

2.
The dossiers (some thirty volumes) of Beria’s 1953 interrogation are locked in FSB archives. An unsuccessful attempt to steal them was made in 2003.

3.
Anastas Mikoyan probably knew the truth, but he was the only Baku commissar to escape the bullets fired by Azeri nationalist police on British orders in 1918 that killed the other twenty-six, and Baku was a sore point for him. Beria’s ally, Mir-Jafar Bagirov, led the Azeri party, and had likewise worked for the Musavat and therefore kept quiet.

4.
At some point Beria also learnt French. In the 1930s he impressed Svetlana Allilueva’s teacher, Mlle Lavranche, with his fluency (and his manners).

5.
A. Antonov-Ovseenko,
Beria
, 1999, 31.

6.
In 1932 Beria had Kaganovich halve grain requisitions from Georgia and divert trucks and buses from Moscow’s depots to Tbilisi.

7.
Beria got his closest aide Bogdan Kobulov to beat Mamia Orakhelashvili to death.

8.
V. F. Nekrasov (ed.)
Beria: konets kar’ery
, Moscow, 1991, 354

9.
Lakoba archive, Hoover Institute

10.
Lakoba archive

11.
Minuvshee 7
, Moscow, 1992, 472

12.
GASPI 558, 11, 722, 63

13.
Khanjian’s body was wrapped in a bloodstained carpet and delivered to his hotel in the boot of Beria’s car. He was reported to have committed suicide.

14.
Robakidze later won notoriety with his essays ‘Adolf Hitler, Seen by a Foreign Poet’ and ‘Mussolini: Visions on Capri’.

15.
Galaktion, despite his Baudelairean poetics, was declared
persona grata
by Beria in 1935. He kept his distance from other poets and Russian sympathizers and feigned alcoholism. His notebooks include lines declaring himself ‘too tired to go near the writers’ palace / Where Beria’s wolves growl.’ Galaktion’s wife was exiled to northern Russia and murdered in 1944. The very popular Grishashvili, now more bibliophile than poet, was indiscreet enough, even in 1937, to mock Lenin in verse.

16.
For a full account, see D. Rayfield, ‘The Death of Paolo Iashvili’,
Slavonic & East European Review
68, London: October 1990, 631–64. For Georgian Union of Writers sessions see
fond
8,
opis
1, file 2 in the Georgian Central State Archive for Literature and Art. In 1991 Zviad Gamsakhurdia had some files destroyed.

17.
The defiant Geronti Kikodze survived.

18.
Under his real name Janjghava, too difficult for Russians to articulate, he had supervised the draining of Georgia’s marshes.