Stalin could have seized on the intrigues to promote a favorite, such as Yevdokimov. The latter knew Stalin had no fondness for Yagoda, but he had miscalculated the dictator’s appetite for disorder in the organs, and for having Chekists force personnel decisions on him. On July 15, 1931, Stalin had Yevdokimov sent on holiday to the spa town of Kislovodsk and, ten days later, installed Ivan Akulov (a deputy head of the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate) as first deputy chief of the OGPU. Yagoda nominally fell to second deputy. Stalin also advanced Balytsky to third deputy, a new post.78 Akulov’s appointment from outside was Stalin’s response to the criticisms of OGPU illegalities.79 Balytsky’s spot in Ukraine was given to Stanisław Redens, Stalin’s brother-in-law (through his first wife). Yevdokimov was assigned to run the OGPU in Leningrad in place of Filipp Medved (who was reassigned to Belorussia), but then the politburo reversed itself.80 Medved stayed; Yevdokimov ended up in Central Asia.81 The regime warned those transferred not “to bring along any functionary at all close to him from the regions they were leaving when transferring from one place to another,” an entrenched practice of cliques that no decree could halt.82 A clique was how Stalin had achieved and exercised power.
Global financial shocks were spiraling, but how much Stalin understood or paid attention remains uncertain. France and the United States together held two thirds of the world’s gold, but their monetary authorities intervened to hold down the money supply, thereby failing to check the inflows of gold and causing global deflation. On July 6, 1931, France reluctantly accepted Herbert Hoover’s proposal for a one-year moratorium on intergovernmental payments, including Germany’s reparations. Hoover was concerned that Germany would default after the failure, in spring 1931, of Creditanstalt, Austria’s largest bank, founded by the Rothschilds and considered impregnable (but lacking liquidity because of efforts to sustain the country’s old industrial structure). That, in turn, had provoked bank runs in Hungary and Germany, too, and attacks on sterling. On July 8, strict controls were imposed on all German foreign exchange transactions, but five days later, one German bank collapsed. British officials fumed over France’s perceived intransigence vis-à-vis Germany’s hardship. “Again and again be it said,” British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald confided to his diary (July 22), “France is the enemy.”83 British recognition of the need to “fix” the Versailles Treaty had only become more acute.
Despite the intense pressure on him, Stalin’s flashes of anger were rarely seen, although at the politburo on August 5, 1931, he exploded in full view at a fellow Caucasus comrade for not removing a skullcap.84 The next day, evidently his last in Moscow, he convoked an ad hoc politburo “commission” to draft a party circular on the OGPU events. It explained that the dismissed operatives had “conducted a completely intolerable group struggle against the leadership of the OGPU” by spreading rumors that “the wrecking case in the military was artificially ‘inflated.’”85 New rumors spread about what had really transpired.86 Yagoda dispatched his own secret circular, approved by Stalin, admitting that “some individual operatives” had “forced the accused to give untrue testimony,” but Yagoda denounced accusations of systematic falsification as slander by “our class and political enemies.”87
HOLIDAY MAILBAG
Voroshilov traveled for more than two months in the summer of 1931, stopping in Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Blagoveshchensk, Ulan Ude, Chita, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, and Magnitogorsk, and writing to Stalin about the benefits. “You are right: we do not always take into account the colossal significance of personal travel and firsthand familiarization with people, with business,” Stalin answered. “We would gain a lot (and the cause would especially gain a lot) if we traveled more frequently to locales and got acquainted with people at work.” But the dictator did not follow his own advice, leaving Moscow only for Sochi: “I did not want to leave on holiday, but then I surrendered (I got tired).”88
Stalin took full advantage of his southern holiday, writing to Yenukidze about having spent ten days in Tsqaltubo, in central-western Georgia, twelve miles from Kutaisi, where he had once sat in a tsarist prison. Its radon-carbonate springs boasted a natural temperature of 91 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. “I took twenty baths,” he observed. “The water was marvelous.”89 But field couriers delivered regime business in staggering volume: OGPU reports about Japan’s aggressive behavior, fuel problems, foreign currency expenditures, forestry, nonferrous metals, politburo minutes.90 Functionaries often sat paralyzed until he responded. His mailbag was the nexus of what normally would be called the policy-making process. He chose what to read (or not), and his preferences and habits profoundly shaped state behavior. He tended to go on holiday during harvest season and inquired often about grain procurements while paying little attention to the cultivation of crops or animal husbandry.91 Stalin’s non-holiday mail was also voluminous. In the six months leading up to August 1931, the apparatus processed 13,000 private letters in his name—enumerating each writer’s identity, social origins, and employment and appending summaries of every letter, transferring most to the archives, sending some to government agencies for response, and forwarding 314 of them to Stalin.92 His aides tended to pass him letters purporting to be from former acquaintances (requesting material aid or seeking the status of association with him); any that took up Marxist-Leninist theory; and those proposing scientific inventions (one letter from Egypt was forwarded with the annotation “not particularly trustworthy proposal for invention of ‘death rays’”).93 Another type concerned allegations of abuse by officials. Stalin usually forwarded this filtered correspondence to responsible functionaries, expecting an answer. (In May 1931, a member of the Young Pioneers scouts group had written back to report that local officials had finally come through with a pair of boots, making school attendance possible, thanks to Stalin’s intervention.)94 “You are now all-powerful,” wrote one correspondent. “Your word determines not only the life but even the freedom of a person.”95
The holiday correspondence revealed that Stalin knew of the terrible food situation. “Now it is clear to me that Kartvelishvili and the Georgian Central Committee secretariat, with their reckless ‘policy of harvest gathering,’ have brought a number of regions in western Georgia to famine,” he wrote to Kaganovich (August 17, 1931), using a word the regime would not publicly allow. “They do not understand that the Ukraine methods of harvest gathering, necessary and expedient in grain-growing regions, are not expedient and harmful in non-grain-growing regions that in addition lack any industrial proletariat. They’re arresting people by the hundreds, including party members openly sympathizing with those dissatisfied and not sympathizing with the ‘policy’ of the Georgian Central Committee.”96 Stalin directed Mikoyan to send emergency grain to western Georgia.97 One could never know which denunciation might catch Stalin’s eye.98 He could even rise to officials’ defense when he perceived them to be victims of a vendetta.99 Word reached him that one of his old Tiflis Theological Seminary teachers, seventy-three-year-old Nikolai Makhatadze, was imprisoned. “I know him from the seminary and I think he cannot present a danger for Soviet power,” Stalin wrote to Kartvelishvili in Tiflis. “I request that the old man be released and that I be informed of the result.”100