LITTLE BLACKBERRY
Nikolai Yezhov, along with Agranov, was the point man on the Kirov assassination fallout. Stalin convened a one-day Central Committee plenum on February 1, 1935, to formalize Yezhov’s appointment as a Central Committee secretary. Officially, he had been born (1895) to a working-class family in industrial St. Petersburg, but he hailed from Mariampol, in tsarist Lithuania, and his father was a musician, then a forest warden, brothel (“tearoom”) owner, and housepainter. His mother was the maid of the musical ensemble’s conductor and either an ethnic Lithuanian or a Russian who grew up in Lithuania. (Yezhov spoke Lithuanian and Polish, which he hid.) Having completed only first grade, he went to the imperial Russian capital at age eleven to apprentice to a tailor, before signing on to the Putilov Works and then being conscripted. He joined the Bolshevik party in 1917 (before October) and served as a military commissar during the civil war, after which his star rose as a regional party functionary in Tatarstan, then in Mari-El (east-central Russia), where he provoked anger for running roughshod over the local ethnics, and then in the Kazakh steppe (Semipalatinsk).202 Yezhov enjoyed playing guitar, composing verse, reading—he had been dubbed Kolya the Book Lover—and building model ships.203 He was nervous and shy, and developed a reputation as mild-mannered, but he stood out for his uncommon energy.204 In 1927, Ivan Moskvin, the head of the Central Committee’s assignments and records department, had brought Yezhov into the central apparatus (they had met in the hotel at the 14th Party Congress). “I don’t know a more ideal worker, or rather executive,” Moskvin wrote to his son-in-law. “If you entrust him with anything, you need not check up: you can be sure, he will do it. Yezhov has only one fault, admittedly a fundamental one: he doesn’t know where to stop. . . . And sometimes one has to keep an eye on him in order to stop him in time.”205
Yezhov displaced his mentor Moskvin as head of assignments and records.The dictator had taken a shine to him, nicknaming him the Little Blackberry (Yezhevichka), and allowed him to attend politburo sessions, oversee personnel in the economy, and help run the orgburo.206 In late 1933, the émigré Socialist Herald had published a revealing essay on “the dictator’s inner circle” that ridiculed Yezhov. “Short in stature, nearly a dwarf, with thin curved legs, an asymmetric face, bearing the marks of his birth (his father was a hereditary alcoholic), with evil eyes, a thin squeaky voice, and a severely sarcastic tongue,” read the profile, calling him “a typical representative of the Petersburg lower-foreman type, whose determining character trait was rage against those born in better circumstances . . . enormous rage against the intelligentsia, including the party intelligentsia.”207 The ridicule confirmed Yezhov’s meteoric rise. Now a Central Committee secretary, he enjoyed a grand office on Old Square, on the top floor near the dictator’s, and use of a three-story villa with a private cinema, tennis court, nanny, and staff, in Meshcherino, the prerevolutionary artists’ and writers’ colony on the Pra River just outside Moscow. (Yezhov had divorced his first wife and married Yevgeniya Feigenberg Khayutina Gladun, a social climber whom he met at a government resort in Sochi—it was her third marriage—and she began to convene literary salons.)208
Stalin also promoted Chubar and Mikoyan, longtime candidate members of the politburo, to full membership, giving them the voting slots of Kirov and Kuibyshev. Zhdanov and Eihe became candidate politburo members.209 On February 27, 1935, Kaganovich replaced Andreyev as transport commissar, who became a Central Committee secretary. The railways had long been a bottleneck, and others posted there had not fared well (including Andreyev). On February 28, Stalin convened another one-day Central Committee plenum to formalize Andreyev’s promotion. Khrushchev got Kaganovich’s post as head of the Moscow party. Yezhov was put in charge of party personnel and local party organizations and freed from overseeing industry and managing the orgburo (responsibilities transferred to Andreyev). Yezhov also took over chairmanship of the party Control Commission from his mentor Kaganovich.210 In a word, Kaganovich’s protégés in the apparatus became Stalin’s, and instead of the powerful post of de facto second secretary, held first by Molotov and then Kaganovich, Stalin now had a troika of three younger apparatchik deputies: Yezhov, Zhdanov, and Andreyev, of whom only Andreyev had met him before 1917.211 The most frequent visitors to Stalin’s Kremlin apartment for meals were now Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, and Andreyev.212 But the Little Blackberry spent more and more time in Stalin’s office.
SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT
Henri Barbusse’s Stalin: A New World Seen Through One Man came out in French in February 1935. The Frenchman was the sole foreign intellectual who had met Stalin both recently and in the past (1927, 1932, 1933, 1934), and at both his office and his apartment.213 His draft manuscript had been submitted for review to the Soviet functionary Stetsky, who faced a dilemma: the book not only mentioned Trotsky, but also portrayed him as a thinker, while not portraying Stalin as such.214 In a delicate dance to avoid alienating Barbusse, Stetsky managed to obtain changes. “Stalin is the Lenin of our day,” the final text felicitously stated. “Stalin is a person with a scholar’s mind, a worker’s figure, and a simple soldier’s dress.” Barbusse portrayed the cult, much maligned in Western Europe, as a natural phenomenon arising from the depths (“If Stalin believes in the masses, the masses believe in him”), and humanized the dictator. “It is not so much that his expression is a little wild as that there seems to be a perpetual twinkle in his eye,” Barbusse wrote. “He laughs like a child,” and “people who laugh like children love children.”215
Barbusse made his motivations plain, writing that “every state except one is moving through fascism towards ruin.” But his knowledge of Soviet realities was dim.
Collective farms had stabilized, and the size of the harvests improved, in part from belated mechanization, in part from fortunate weather, but also from regime concessions to the farmers, who had been allowed to maintain “household plots” and personal cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens (though not horses, a sore point). In the Grand Kremlin Palace from February 11 to 17, 1935, the regime convened a Second all-Union Congress of Collective Farm Shock Workers, attended by 1,433 delegates, the majority of whom were not party members. Crop growers, herders, and tractor drivers were given the floor.216 Maria Demchenko, of the Comintern Collective Farm in Kiev province, pledged to harvest 500 centners of sugar beets per hectare (“We must bombard the country with sugar”), which the regime made into a “movement” of 500ers (the average at her farm was 245). Stalin did not deliver a formal speech, but came and went all seven days. “Iosif Vissarionovich,” Demchenko told the delegates, “laughs with us, converses with us, shares his thoughts with us on how to work on the collective farm and how we can live better.”217 One Kazakh tractor driver, Beken Tankin, a former nomad whose Russian was shaky, had been put in the position of chairing one of the nine sessions and became bewildered when delegates started shouting “Hurrah!” The ovation persisted. Finally, someone came up from behind and turned Tankin around: Stalin had reentered the congress presidium. Smiling, the dictator pointed to a button on the table for Tankin to press for quiet. “I’ll go home to my collective farm,” he said to himself, “with something to talk about.”218