Suddenly the number of putative enemies was colossal, and they were everywhere. At the Moscow Ball-Bearing Factory, for example, there were 1,084 expellees and only 452 current party members, an alarming picture that could be found at strategic enterprises all across the Union.45 And it was in the big factories that the party was strongest. Of course, these were people who had been expelled by Stalin’s purges and party card exchanges, so if any had become disloyal, the dictator had a big hand in making them so. As per usual practice, Central Committee members received a package of preparatory documents, and in them Stalin included “testimonies” being extracted in Lubyanka cellars implicating sitting Central Committee members. But Malenkov’s inventories remained secret as the NKVD field couriers delivered the plenum packages to the Central Committee, the party Control Commission, and around fifty invited guests, including, unusually, some twenty operatives from the NKVD.46
Stalin edited Orjonikidze’s draft report for the plenum, advising, “State with facts which branches are affected by sabotage and exactly how they are affected.”47 That same evening, arriving considerably late, Orjonikidze addressed the central directorate of his heavy industry commissariat. He admonished officials that worker deaths on the job used to elicit reactions even under the “Black Hundred” Duma of tsarist days, while in the USSR, twenty workers could be killed and buried and officials would report the working class in good spirits. He lashed out at them for failing to see wrecking (“Do you tell me how you’ll end the wrecking and which measures you’ll adopt?”) while also employing Stalin’s language to condemn his recently executed deputy Pyatakov. Orjonikidze was as familiar as anyone with Stalin’s emotional bullying. During the first forty-seven days of 1937, he met Stalin in the Little Corner twenty-two times, for a total of almost seventy-two hours.48 There were also phone calls, meals together, walks on the Kremlin grounds. The heavy industry commissar, careful to demonstrate his loyalty, was trying to soften the dictator’s rule. Orjonikidze indicated to his staff that alleged incidents of sabotage should be investigated objectively, and decided to send his own commissions to look into the NKVD’s three most sensational “wrecking cases,” evidently hoping to present fresh reports to the Central Committee plenum and disprove the blanket allegations.49
On February 17, 1937, Orjonikidze arrived at his commissariat, across the way from Old Square, at 12:10 p.m., two hours later than usual; he seems to have gone over to talk to Stalin, being one of the few people who could enter the dictator’s Kremlin apartment.50 Upon returning to his own Kremlin apartment, in the same Amusement Palace, Orjonikidze evidently had a shouting match over the telephone with Stalin, with profanities in Russian and Georgian.51 The NKVD had been searching Orjonikidze’s apartment, an obvious provocation.52 The remainder of Orjonikidze’s day was occupied with meetings, including a politburo meeting at 3:00 p.m. to go over the plenum reports. Stalin hand-corrected Orjonikidze’s draft resolution on sabotage, inserting passages about “Trotskyite wreckers.” In the early evening, Orjonikidze made his way back to the commissariat for more meetings, leaving for home at 12:20 a.m. (February 18). Later that morning, he did not emerge from his bedroom to take breakfast. When one of his subordinates came by in the afternoon, he refused to receive him. At around dusk, his wife, Zinaida, heard a gunshot in the bedroom. Orjonikidze was dead.53
Informed on the apartment’s Kremlin line by Zinaida, Stalin summoned the cronies to the Little Corner, whence they walked to Orjonikidze’s apartment. Then, at 8:55 p.m., Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Mikoyan, Postyshev (recently sacked as Kiev party boss), and Yezhov—in essence, the inner regime at this point—assembled again in the Little Corner. Doctor Levin was summoned at 9:40, for five minutes. The group remained until 12:25 a.m. (February 19).54 Stalin chose not to use the death to further his allegations of ubiquitous enemy agents. Instead, public accounts gave the cause as “heart failure,” said to have occurred at 5:30 p.m. on February 18, during Orjonikidze’s daily nap.
The opening of the plenum was delayed for three days. Out-of-town members had begun to arrive at the Metropole, Moskva, and National hotels only to discover Orjonikidze’s untimely death, reported in Soviet newspapers (February 19). The country went into grief-stricken shock. Orjonikidze had been a mere fifty years old. “The Hall of Columns [in the House of Trade Unions], wreaths, music, the scent of flowers, tears, honor guards, thousands and thousands of people passing by the open casket,” recalled one eyewitness.55 Stalin stood in the honor guard. On February 21, following an extravagant state funeral, the urn with Orjonikidze’s ashes was interred in the Kremlin Wall (adjacent to his friend Kirov). “Comrades, we have lost one of the best leaders of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet state,” Molotov stated in the main eulogy, blaming “the Trotskyite degenerates,” the “Pyatakovs,” for hastening Orjonikidze’s death.56 But rumors spread in Moscow, picked up by the Menshevik Socialist Herald in Paris, that Stalin had either killed him or driven him to suicide.57
Probably the best chance to stop Stalin was gone. Orjonikidze had been beholden to the principle of party unity, and he had no independent access to the press or radio, and no levers over the NKVD or the army.58 Still, he possessed colossal authority, having worked closely with Lenin, beginning before the revolution, with service as a courier between the European emigration and Russia, and for years supervising heavy industry, the regime’s crowning achievement.59 He could have tried to use this standing to force a showdown at the plenum over fabricated wrecking charges.60 But even had he done so, only collective action could have succeeded, requiring Orjonikidze to possess resolve and cunning to organize all or most of the other top Stalinists—not only Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan, who had been close to Orjonikidze, but also Molotov, who was not—in unified action against Stalin. For any of them individually, broaching the subject of moving against Stalin would have been tantamount to political, and perhaps physical, death. Moreover, even if troubled by Stalin’s gathering homicidal behavior, they all, including Orjonikidze, still recognized him as the leader. It was Stalin who shouldered such complex matters as Spain, China, Nazi Germany, Britain and France, the party machine, ideology.
Orjonikidze had confided thoughts of suicide to Kaganovich and Mikoyan.61 In published photographs taken near the body, Kaganovich was seen expressing visibly strong emotions: grief, anger. He had lost his soul mate, and he knew Stalin had been sadistically pressuring the infirm Orjonikidze. Kaganovich—tough as nails, explosive—was spiritually broken. Stalin went on to break Mikoyan, summoning him in 1937 to discuss the arrest of his subordinate in the food industry commissariat, Mark Belenky, then, after Mikoyan supposedly protested and Stalin called him blind in matters of personnel, summoning him again to show him protocols of Belenky’s “confession.” “Have a look: he confessed to wrecking,” Stalin said. “You vouched for him. Go and read it!” Mikoyan called it “a blow against me.”62 Members of the inner circle were no longer comrades of the ruler. Stalin was no longer first among peers, but a despot.63
EXTIRPATION
Molotov opened the delayed Central Committee plenum on February 23 in the Sverdlov rotunda of Catherine the Great’s Imperial Senate, and in the shadow of Orjonikidze’s death. The sessions would last an unusual eleven days, longer than any other plenum.64 NKVD officials from all around the country, most of them not members of the Central Committee, were conspicuous. Stalin set a tone of menace in his opening remarks, calling top officials who had been arrested “empty chatterboxes, lacking technical training,” whose only claim to fame was “possession of a party card.” He added that “current wreckers have no technical advantages over our people. On the contrary, in technical terms our people are better prepared.” Sounding a cherished theme, he boasted that “we have tens of thousands of capable people, talented people. We need only to know them and promote them, so that they do not get stuck in the old place and begin to rot.”65