The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (15 page)

Together they worked on the lists of those about to be destroyed. In the Lubyanka, Yezhov would create the lists of names, which Stalin would read and sign, and afterward watch a movie for relaxation. At one Central Committee meeting, Stalin presented lists for Molotov, Kaganovich, and Georgy Malenkov to cosign that sentenced 230,000 people to their executions. During 1937 and 1938, Yezhov faithfully brought Stalin 383 lists for his examination.
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Unlike Hitler, the Soviet dictator never had any qualms about adding his personal signature to genocide, scanning thousands of names into the night, occasionally marking off a famous writer, such as Boris Pasternak, as “not to be touched.” Such dispensations were, of course, extremely rare. On one of the lists Yezhov claimed to be checking, Stalin wrote: “No need to check. Arrest them.”
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Telegrams were sent by Yezhov from Moscow to regional districts across the USSR. The messages conveyed succinct instructions:
“You are charged with the task of exterminating ten thousand enemies of the people. Report results by signal.”
And the replies from the local NKVD chiefs would be swiftly telegraphed back to the Center:
“The following enemies have been shot . . .”
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In their haste, the NKVD provincial chiefs often attempted to outperform one another, and as they struggled to overfulfill their execution norms, the wave of judicially sanctioned murders escalated still further. Unprecedented in its scale, the same measures were simultaneously applied in every city, town, and village of the Soviet Union. There was no recourse to an appeal.

One NKVD deputy commander, Iakubovich, attempted to increase the number of arrest warrants he could sign in one minute, timing himself as he furiously initialed sheaves of papers with a red pencil.
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When the western Siberian NKVD were informed they had achieved second place in the killing spree, the mood, according to one operative, Tepliakov, “reached ecstasy.”
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On July 23, 1938, an NKVD chief named Gorbach wired Moscow from the city of Omsk asking for an increased quota of thousands more executions, since his men had already fulfilled their plan. The request was approved by Stalin personally, who promoted Gorbach to a larger district, where he overfulfilled the quota once again. Meanwhile, Yezhov sent out threatening telegrams of encouragement to the others:
“Beat destroy without sorting out . . . A certain number of innocent people will be annihilated too . . . Act more boldly, I have already told you repeatedly.”
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On August 4, 1937, Popashenko, the NKVD chief of the Kuibyshev region, issued a detailed set of instructions to one of his underlings, a Captain Korobitsin, on how to proceed with the executions:

 
Similar instructions were ordered in other districts, supporting the conclusion that this was the universal method. In Novosibirsk, in July 1937, the NKVD chief, Mironov, charged his local operational chiefs with the task of
“finding a place where the sentences will be executed and a place where you can bury the corpses. If this is in a wood, the turf should be cut off beforehand so that for full secrecy’s sake the place can be covered with this turf afterward.”
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And with exacting premeditation, the turf was cut and the graves were dug, ready to conceal their victims. By the autumn of 1937, the pressure to achieve arrests was so great that the NKVD interrogators began picking out names from the telephone directory.
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THE VICTIMS WERE killed with a shot to the back of the head. From a mass grave at Vinnytsia in the Ukraine, 9,432 bodies were taken for examination, of whom two thirds had required a second shot to end their lives. Seventy-eight people were shot three times, and two victims were shot four times.
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Others had their skulls staved in by the force of a blunt object. The victims were buried in a pear orchard, which the NKVD surrounded with a high fence for secrecy. Nevertheless, curious locals had peered through holes in the fence or climbed trees to look into the orchard, where they had seen the bodies stacked up awaiting burial. Most of the victims were male, but the bodies of a number of women were found in the graves also, some of whom were buried naked.
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In the mass graves of Kuropaty, near Minsk in Byelorussia, it was reported that sand thrown over each layer of victims was seen to be moving some time afterward.
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Here the graves extended across acres of woodland, the victims executed on the edge of the pits. At Kuropaty the executions continued for four and a half years, as pit after pit was dug and filled with bodies. Just as in the Ukraine, around the execution grounds, the NKVD had built a fence ten feet high. This time the local villagers heard the pleas of the victims echoing across the night air. Even in the final stages of the Terror, when the Nazis were bombing Minsk in July 1941, the executions continued, and by the outbreak of World War II, a quarter of a million people lay buried in one of eight killing fields located around Minsk.
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The victims’ families were not informed of the executions. Instead they were told their relatives had been given ten-year sentences in the camps “without the right of correspondence.” Outside prisons across the Soviet Union, long queues formed of women and children seeking word of their disappeared loved ones. Under the Soviet criminal code, political prisoners not yet convicted were allowed to receive fifty rubles while in prison. Waiting in line for news of her husband, the German communist Margarete Buber noticed a little girl about ten years old join the queue behind them. In her hand the girl was clutching several ruble notes. “Who are you paying in for, dear?” a voice from the queue asked gently. “Mummy and Daddy,” the ten-year-old girl replied.
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As an organization, the NKVD was expanding so rapidly the agents making the arrests were often little more than teenagers themselves. When confronted by any unforeseen obstacle, they had to telephone back to base for instructions. Edmund Stevens, an American reporter living in a Moscow building that had already been visited several times, remembered one night when the NKVD arrived just after two o’clock. The teenage agents wore the caps of cornflower blue with red piping marked with the badge of the hammer and sickle, the faces of their victims reflecting back at them from the shining visors. Years later, Stevens could still not rid himself of the screams of hysteria as a young mother was torn away from her two-month-old baby and she and her husband were dragged down into the van waiting for them on the street below.
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In Moscow at the height of the Terror, it was if the whole city was waiting to be arrested. Another American reporter, Louis Fischer, watched a Soviet official sitting on a balcony with his little suitcase packed ready, killing time before the night, when the visitors would arrive. Fischer watched the official for three weeks that summer before the NKVD finally took him. More than half of the 160 apartments of his eight-story building had already been subjected to the nocturnal arrests. The rest were waiting, and the apprehension itself became part of the repression. At night, feigning sleep, the Soviet citizens listened for the sound of the brakes on the wheels of the van and the crunch of boots as the NKVD agents leaped down onto the pavement and began pounding up the stairs.
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In Leningrad another sleepless witness, Lyobov Shaporina, the fifty-eight-year-old wife of a composer, noticed how people would repeat the news of the disappearance of an acquaintance as calmly as saying “He went to the theater.” Shaporina wrote in her diary that the atmosphere was “like walking through a cemetery pitted with freshly dug graves. Who will fall in next, will it be you?” At three o’clock in the morning of October 22, 1937, she had woken suddenly. Outside, the night air was still and there were no trams or cars to break the silence when she heard a burst of gunfire. The noise was repeated ten minutes later, and then at intervals through the night until five o’clock in the morning, when the city of Leningrad gradually awoke to its normal routine. Walking to her window, Shaporina concluded the shooting had come from the fortress of St. Peter and Paul, used as a jail by the NKVD. And then calmly she realized that she had spent the night listening to executions.
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During the “Yezhov days” people shrank away from one another in fear, unsure if a casual acquaintance was an informer or, worse yet, an “enemy” who might implicate them by association. With denunciations reaching saturation point, friends stopped recognizing one another on the street, fearing the consequence of unnecessary social contact. And thus, ironically, Soviet Russia became transformed into a nation of fearful individualists, their eyes flicking across and then swiftly away, as each citizen reminded himself not to speak unless it was strictly necessary, to remain silent at all times, except when silence itself gave cause for suspicion. Then they would applaud with all the energy a threatened life could muster, until their hands shook white, and still they dared not stop. At a party rally or a factory meeting, if an ovation for a speech made by Comrade Stalin lasted twenty minutes, or thirty minutes, then so what? Everyone sensed they could not be the first to stop when “the angels” were watching. The first to break the applause would be arrested. So the crowds kept pounding their hands together, shouting out their praise for Comrade Stalin, sensing rightly that their lives depended on it. And so it continued, day after day, and night after night.
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IN THE AUTUMN OF 1937, writers and journalists were disappearing so quickly their names were no longer painted on the doors of publishing companies or newspapers such as
Izvestiya.
The response of the frightened writers was to shout their chorus of approval still louder, putting forward sincere proposals to rename the Volga River after Stalin, or the city of Moscow, or even the moon. Of the seven hundred writers who had attended the First Congress of Soviet Writers three years earlier, only fifty survived the Terror. Their past work was there for all to scrutinize, their fate a lesson to others:
“If you think don’t speak! If you speak don’t write! If you write don’t publish! If you publish recant immediately!”
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In such an atmosphere, famous cultural figures were shot without fanfare. The writer Isaac Babel was arrested at his dacha. His subsequent trial lasted twenty minutes, and he was shot the next morning. The internationally renowned theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold was arrested and executed in similar circumstances. Weeks after his arrest, his wife, Zinaida, was discovered in her apartment murdered. The poet Osip Mandelstam suffered an ignominious death in a transit camp in Far East Russia. Once he had joked: “Russia is the only place where poetry is really important. They’ll kill people for it here.” After Stalin closed his opera
Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk,
Dmitry Shostakovich took to sleeping in the corridor outside his apartment so that his arrest would not disturb his family. Shostakovich was ordered to appear before his NKVD inquisitor Zanchevsky in the spring of 1937, accused of involvement in a plot to assassinate Stalin. The shocked composer denied the charges but was given the weekend to think it over:
“I can give you until Monday. By that day you will without fail remember everything. You must recall every detail of the discussion regarding the plot.”
Returning to the Lubyanka on Monday morning, Shostakovich was told, “Zanchevksy is not coming in today.” On this occasion it was the inquisitor, not his victim, who was taken.
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Since “enemies of the people” were being discovered everywhere else, then why not within the NKVD itself? There was an old saying from the 1920s:
“A Chekist who has shot fifty prisoners, he deserves to be shot as the fifty-first.”
And thus the Terror began to consume both its “enemies” and the minds of those who had imagined them, fueled by Stalin’s ever-present desire to rid himself of the witnesses of his crimes. Several NKVD officers committed suicide in anticipation. It was reported that a knock on the door of an NKVD residential building in central Moscow triggered a multitude of gunshots within adjacent apartments. Others threw themselves from the top-floor windows in a rash of suicides, their bodies hurtling to the ground in full view of passersby. Rumors of the news spread rapidly over Moscow, panicking the population still further.
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In a totalitarian and paranoid state, nothing was beyond the reach of politics. Professor Kalmonson of Moscow Zoo was arrested for “wrecking” activities, after the zoo’s monkeys died of tuberculosis. In jail, the professor was thankful to have only been arrested as a “wrecker” and not a “spy,” which carried a greater certainty of death. In December 1937, fifty-three members of a deaf-mutes association were arrested in Leningrad, and thirty-three were sentenced to death for conducting “conspiracies” in their private language. Philatelists and Esperantists were arrested for their past dealings with foreigners. Anyone who had been outside the borders of the USSR in any capacity whatsoever became an immediate suspect. With the prisons filled beyond capacity, two- or three-man NKVD committees—the dread
dvoiki
or
troiki
—began handing out death sentences after ten-minute trials. Willingly the NKVD pursued their nightly task as a bleakly efficient killing machine, immune to reason or restraint, which in the morning left behind only the red seals on the apartment doors of their victims as evidence of their presence, like the aftermath of a plague.
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