Orjonikidze worked long hours under phenomenal strain, which strained his weak heart. (One time when he suffered from heart palpitations he lost consciousness in his office, inducing his assistants to summon a doctor from the Kremlin hospital.) He also had just one kidney. Gossips said his wife, Zinaida, had a difficult personality, compounding his problems.64 On June 29, the culmination of the heavy industry gathering, the commissar’s poor health had become visible for all to see. A foreign doctor was brought in to examine him.65 Be that as it may, the key factor in exacerbating his health was his old friend and fellow Georgian, who was mercilessly, relentlessly driving the “saboteur” line. Kaganovich also did not see why manifestly loyal people needed to be arrested and executed. He had been defending top Ukrainian officials from Stalin’s wrath since famine days. But he knew Stalin all too well. In early July 1936, the dictator had sent Kaganovich—then vacationing in Kislovodsk—protocols of the Dreitser and Pikel “interrogations”; he took the unsubtle hint. “Although this was clear even earlier, they have now revealed the true bandit face of those murderers and provocateurs Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev,” he had responded to Stalin on July 6. “The main instigator of this gang is that venal scum Trotsky. It is time to declare him an outlaw and to execute the rest of the lowlifes we have in jail. Regards as ever, Yours, L. Kaganovich.”66
Stalin pressed for wider arrests, using the unique instruments only he commanded: he dispatched a secret circular (July 29, 1936)—drafted by Yezhov and edited by the dictator—to party organizations, which was to be read aloud to all party members and which quoted the “testimony” of the various accused “Trotskyites.” “Confronted with the completely irrefutable successes of socialist construction, they initially hoped our party could not cope with the difficulties,” the circular stated. “But seeing that the party was successfully overcoming difficulties, they wagered on the defeat of Soviet power in a forthcoming war, as a result of which they dreamed of seizing power.” Then, “not seeing any prospects, in despair, they resorted to the last means of struggle—terror.” The circular explained that the “Trotskyites” had colluded in terror with Zinoviev and Kamenev and that, after the imprisonment of the latter, “Trotsky had taken upon himself all direction of terrorist activity in the USSR.” The document exhorted that “the essential mark of every Bolshevik in the current situation should be the ability to recognize and identify enemies of the party no matter how well they are able to disguise themselves.” But who were these hidden enemies?67 How did the circular jibe with other signals conveyed by Postyshev and Orjonikidze in the authoritative Pravda?
NKVD operatives would “unmask” enemies to win raises, medals, and promotions; informants, queried about a “Trotskyite” underground, would become eager to please. Regional party officials, in order to protect themselves and their closest people, targeted as “Trotskyites” lower-level types as well as economic managers—precisely the people Orjonikidze sought to protect.68 But Kaganovich, responsible for rail transport—which had been suffering an inordinate number of accidents, driven by underinvestment and overexploitation—expressly rejected assertions of Trotskyites in his bailiwick. On July 30, 1936, the day after the secret party circular on hidden enemies, he presided over the country’s inaugural all-Union Day of Transport, where, before 25,000 railway employees assembled at the outdoor Green Theater, in Gorky Park, as well as a Union-wide audience listening on radio, he delivered a two-hour oration on the daily loading of 81,214 freight cars, exceeding Stalin’s directive to reach 80,000. “Here the way is not purging and repression,” Kaganovich stated, noting the multitudes of railway workers who had received state awards. “No, for 99 percent of railway employees are honest people, who are committed to their work, who love their motherland.”69 Soviet newspapers prominently published photographs of Kaganovich and Orjonikidze together that summer of 1936.70
Multiple incentives impel dictators to try to convert their rule into despotism. Some lack the necessary means or personal traits to crush close allies. Stalin, of course, possessed both the wherewithal and the personality. But would he break Orjonikidze, Kaganovich, and other members of his innermost circle? Kaganovich was indispensable, still running the linchpin party apparatus in his absence, while Orjonikidze, no less vital, ran the critical heavy industry portfolio. Both of them removed a great burden from the far too burdened Stalin. At the same time, Orjonikidze’s Union-wide fiefdom afforded him a political base second only to the dictator’s. Izvestiya (still edited by Bukharin) did not shy from calling Orjonikidze “the people’s favorite,” the expression in Lenin’s purported Testament for Bukharin.71 In fact, Orjonikidze was more accessible, and in many quarters more genuinely popular, than Stalin. And he enjoyed extremely warm relations with other core members of the ruling group, including defense commissar Voroshilov, as well as Kaganovich.
IMPROVISING A COURSE
Stalin maintained his nonresponse to Madrid’s request for arms, but in the meantime the pressure to do something did not abate. On August 1, 1936—the opening day of the Summer Olympics in Nazi Berlin, not to mention the anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War—Izvestiya published an essay by Radek, which Stalin had approved, characterizing the civil war in Spain as part of a “meticulously” planned global aggression by “European fascists.”72 That same day, Pravda published Spanish reportage under the headline “Fascism Means War; Socialism Means Peace.” August 2 in Moscow brought a temperature of 99 degrees Fahrenheit (37.2 Celsius), the highest in fifty-seven years.73 That day, Boris Pasternak met André Gide at his dacha in the writers’ colony of Peredelkino (where he had just moved in) and helped open the Frenchman’s eyes to Soviet realities; Pasternak also warned his NKVD minder that Gide was preparing a critical work on the USSR.74 The next day, which was not a Soviet holiday, a reported throng of more than 100,000 demonstrators assembled on Red Square. Adorned in summer whites in the suffocating heat, the dense crowd listened to songs and speeches calling for defense of the Spanish Republic. Six tanned sportswomen, holding hands, led chants of “Down with Franco! Down with Franco!” “Our hearts are with those who at this moment are giving up their lives in the mountains and streets of Spain, defending the liberty of their people,” a female worker from the Red Dawn factory declared from the dais. “We say, ‘Remember, you are not alone. We are with you.’”75
Soviet newspapers and radio placed Spain center stage, depicting Republic heroism against fascist aggression, and tying the Soviet Union to this cause.76 Pravda—“Hands off the Spanish people!” . . . “Down with the fascist rebels and their German and Italian inspirers!”—reported that workers had been massed in front of the Winter Palace in Leningrad (100,000) and in Tashkent (100,000), Gorky (60,000), Rostov-on-Don (35,000), Minsk (30,000), Sverdlovsk (20,000), and Tiflis (10,000).77 The Comintern resolved to “immediately undertake a wide campaign of solidarity for the fighters defending the Republic in Spain,” including “collections of medicines, foodstuffs, gold,” and enlistment of medical volunteers and purchases of ambulances.78 The regime also announced “voluntary” deductions from workers’ paychecks for humanitarian assistance to Spain.79 “We see how quickly fascists from different states will unite when the task is the asphyxiation of the working class,” one Soviet autoworker was quoted as stating in Pravda. “Through our relief aid . . . we will show the fascists that no country will be cut off from the workers of the rest of the world. The cause of Spain is our own cause.”80