That same day, Stalin attended the ceremony at the Bolshoi where, for the first time, state awards were handed out to film workers. He had edited the proposed awards list: Orders of Lenin were given to the Leningrad Film Studio, Shumyatsky, Pavel Tager (who had helped introduce sound to Soviet films), and numerous directors. Eisenstein had been proposed for the lesser Order of the Red Banner, which Stalin crossed out, substituting something lesser stilclass="underline" “honored artist.”175 After this humiliation, Eisenstein had to offer the closing remarks. “No one here has had to listen to so many compliments about highbrow wisdom as I,” he stated. “The crux—and this you know—is that I have not been engaged in film production for several years, and I consider the [awards] decision a signal from the party and government that I must enter production.”176 The gathering concluded with a performance of the third act of Swan Lake.177
Shumyatsky did not speak at the ceremony or at the conference, but Pravda (January 11) published an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Cinema for the Millions. “The victorious class wants to laugh with joy,” he wrote. “That is its right, and Soviet cinema must provide its audiences with this joyful Soviet laughter.” He admitted, however, that “we have no common view on such fundamental and decisive problems of our art as the interrelationship between form and content, as plot, as the pace and rhythm of a film, the role of the script, the techniques of cinema.”178 In fact, all he and other film people had to go on was Stalin’s utterances or their own intuition about what might please him.
THE SECOND TRIAL
On January 13, 1935, a plebiscite took place in a small region on the western side of the Rhine known as the Saar, which the Versailles Treaty had taken from Germany and put under the League of Nations, stipulating such a vote after fifteen years. Some 445,000 Saarlanders, 90.35 percent, freely voted to join Germany under Nazi dictatorship rather than France or remain under the League. The French and British expected this removal of a German grievance to be followed by German compliance. Hitler perceived only a removal of restraint, and would exult that “blood is stronger than any document or mere paper. What ink has written will one day be blotted out in blood.” Large ethnic German populations resided in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and even the Soviet Union.179
The Kirov documentary opened publicly on January 14.180 The NKVD had been planning a second public trial of eight “Zinovievites” willing to incriminate themselves, with Draule testifying about their links to Nikolayev. In the event, she would be tried in camera, while several high-profile Zinovievites were added to the eight unknowns for a public trial, which took place January 15–16. The nineteen defendants, now headlined by Zinoviev himself, Kamenev, and Grigory Yevdokimov, were charged with fostering a “moral atmosphere” conducive to the terrorism that had resulted in Kirov’s death. They had been promised their lives if they fulfilled their party duty and publicly confessed. Zinoviev admitted that he’d had conversations with people whom the NKVD called the Leningrad Center, for example with Vladimir Levin back in 1932, during his work in livestock requisitions. Kamenev at first refused to go along with the canard that his private conversations signified participation in a so-called Moscow Center or had somehow inspired acts of terrorism.181 Yevdokimov confessed to having suggested that collectivization was a mad adventure, that the tempos of industrialization would turn the working class against the party, and that there was no party anymore, since Stalin had usurped its role.182 Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years, Yevdokimov to eight, Kamenev to five.183
Pravda’s trial report (January 18, 1935) acknowledged that incitement of the Kirov murder by the Moscow Center had not been proven, but insisted that the Moscow Center had known about the “terrorist sentiments” of Nikolayev and his Leningrad Center. That same day, Stalin sent an explanatory letter to all party organizations, which accused the former Zinoviev opposition of “two-facedness,” equated them with “White Guard wreckers, spies, and provocateurs,” and deemed expulsion from the party insufficient: they needed to be imprisoned so they could no longer pursue sabotage. The circular excoriated the Zinoviev opposition’s concealment of its views in professions of loyalty, and blamed the NKVD for complacency. (“Is it that difficult for a Chekist to understand that a party card can be forged or stolen from its owner?”) The circular called for better teaching of party history, especially the foul deeds of the various oppositions, and instructed local party organizations to seek enemies among any party members who had ever expressed criticism of Stalin and his ruling group.184 The NKVD distributed its own secret circular to branches explaining that Nikolayev’s long-existing “center” for terrorism had eluded the Leningrad NKVD because of the latter’s failure to heed Yagoda’s instructions to strengthen Kirov’s guard.185
Three days later, regime favorites assembled for the anniversary of Lenin’s death.186 Shumyatsky showed a new documentary about Lenin, to which was added the speaking footage from the Kirov documentary—the first time a recorded speech had been heard at the Bolshoi. “The whole hall at first went silent,” the cinema boss wrote, “then people could not contain themselves, and stormy applause, from the heart, eclipsed the inspiring speech of Mironych about the significance of Marxist-Leninist rearing.” When the sound parts ended and the silent parts resumed, the orchestra started playing but could not be heard. “The end of the film, with the appearance of I. V. Stalin, was drowned out in a stormy ovation.” Stalin had Shumyatsky summoned to the imperial box and “again reiterated the exceptional power of film.”187
The regime held a closed trial of the Leningrad NKVD on January 23, 1935. Borisov’s death was ruled an accident, and four operatives were released. Twelve others were convicted, including Medved and Zaporozhets (three years each), as well as Gubin and Fomin (two years). Almost all ended up serving their time as commandants at the Dalstroi gold camps in the far northeast.188 Three days later, 663 former Zinovievites in Leningrad were exiled to Siberia, and 325 others transferred to jobs in other regions. In the meantime, on January 25, Valerian Kuibyshev died of heart failure, at age forty-six. The autopsy would find arteriosclerosis and blood clots. His heavy drinking had resulted in unpredictable work absences, a constant refrain in Stalin’s correspondence.189 He was cremated, and the urn with his ashes interred in the Kremlin Wall, adjacent to Kirov’s.190
NAZISM’S WINDFALL
Soviet military intelligence, for all its blowups and failures, amassed a breathtaking network in Warsaw—thanks to Hitler. Rudolf Herrnstadt, born in the Silesian town of Gleiwitz (1903), a correspondent for the left-wing Berliner Tageblatt and a Jew, had joined the German Communist party as Rudolf Arbin, began working for Soviet intelligence around 1931, and fled the Nazis to Warsaw in 1933 with his lover, also a Soviet agent. He maintained journalist cover and recruited Gerhard Kegel (“X”), a junior banker and journalist (b. 1907) also from Upper Silesia, who had joined the German Socialist Party and then the Communists and now worked in the trade department of Germany’s embassy in Warsaw. Herrnstadt’s lover, the angular-faced Ilse Stöbe (b. 1911), code-named “Alta,” the daughter of working-class parents in Berlin, had worked for the same newspaper as Herrnstadt. She had been directed to join the Nazi party and, in mid-1934, was named a cultural attaché of the Nazi party’s foreign office in Poland. Stöbe would recruit the Silesia-born (1897) Rudolf von Scheliha (“Aryan”), the son of a Prussian squire, who joined the Nazi party at the suggestion of Soviet intelligence and in late 1934 had gotten himself named as the top aide in Warsaw to German ambassador Hans-Adolf von Moltke. Other recruits included the radioman Kurt Schulze (“Berg,” b. 1894), Kurt Welkisch (“ABC,” b. 1910), a German journalist and diplomat, and his wife, Margarita Welkisch (“LCL,” b. 1913).191 They were linked in their anti-Nazism.