Delegates “elected” a commission of 170 members to consider a new charter for collective farms drafted by the Central Committee agriculture department.219 At the commission, on February 16, Stalin went through the text point by point, grandly asserting that members were not taking into account the interests of collective farmers. Instead of the 0.10–0.12 hectare for household plots some people were recommending, he proposed 0.25 to 0.5, and even up to 1 hectare in some regions, depending on conditions, as well as up to one cow and two calves, one sow and its progeny, up to ten sheep and goats, unlimited poultry, and twenty bee-hives. “Comrade Stalin,” Kalinin objected, “we do not have enough land.” Voroshilov interjected that those getting 0.5 hectare would in any case be “a minority.” Stalin disagreed: “Our country is big, the conditions are very various.”220 He also recommended maternity leave of two months (at half average pay), a nod to the outsized role that ambitious women such as Demchenko played.221 The final charter, approved on February 17, granted the leave, personal livestock, and household plots of the size Stalin suggested, and the press let the rural laborers know who was responsible for the ostensible largesse.222 In fact, Stalin despised the household plots, and his regime strove to contain them.223
One contemporary émigré analyst deemed the 1935 household-plot-size concessions a “collective farm NEP,” but still likened the collective farms to the Gulag system, only larger.224 The state dominated the grain trade, imposing very heavy quotas and very low state prices, paying collective farmers subsistence wages, predominantly in kind, and forcing them to work in brigades—a demotion from peasant to laborer, which encouraged dependency and sloth.225 The regime also imposed unpaid obligations for roadwork, timber felling, and hauling, and required rural laborers (unlike urban workers) to deliver quotas of meat, milk, and eggs from their household plots, even if they did not own a cow or livestock. But after all the blood and tears of dekulakization, the new charter belatedly conceded legal entry into collective farms to former kulaks, albeit supposedly only “after a strict check to ensure that wolves in sheep’s clothing were not getting in on the pretext of being reformed characters.”226 The Soviet village ended up stratified, with rich and poor, based on bureaucratic position.227
“FORMERS”
Three women in their early twenties who worked as cleaning personnel in the Kremlin had sat down to “tea” and gossiped. One supposedly said, “Stalin has people do the work for him—that’s why he’s so fat. He has servants and luxuries.” The second: “Stalin killed his wife. He’s not Russian but Armenian, very evil, and never looks at anyone with a nice glance.” The third: “Comrade Stalin gets a lot of money and he misleads us, saying that he only makes 200 rubles [per month].” Rudolf Peterson, the Kremlin commandant—who had been one of the first to see Nadya’s body after she shot herself and was said to have given her vanished suicide note to Stalin—passed a report of these conversations to Yenukidze, who did nothing.228 But another denunciation came forward, and on January 20, 1935, the NKVD’s Pauker, Georgy Molchanov, and Genrikh Lyushkov, all of whom were involved in the investigation of Kirov’s murder on the NKVD’s watch, conducted interrogations. Yagoda sent Stalin a report that day about cleaning personnel who were said to belong to “a counterrevolutionary group” in the Kremlin.229
Yezhov, meanwhile, had invited the dictator to join him at a closed-door operational gathering of all NKVD central and provincial bosses on February 3; Stalin accepted, and delivered a speech on vigilance.230 At the gathering, Agranov contradicted the official line on the Kirov murder, stating, accurately, that “Nikolayev was gripped by ecstasy over fulfilling an historical mission, comparing himself to Zhelyabov and [Alexander] Radishchev.” Agranov went on to issue a mea culpa: “We did not succeed in proving that the ‘Moscow Center’ knew and prepared a terrorist act against comrade Kirov.”231
In the testimony of Kremlin employees, each person mentioned other names, leading to new arrests, and on February 5, Yagoda sent Stalin a report with interrogation protocols containing confessions of private complaints about daily life and a lack of democracy, as well as “Trotskyite interpretations of Lenin’s so-called Testament” and speculation about how Stalin’s wife had really died.232 While interrogating Kremlin janitors, the NKVD heard about some daughters of former nobles who worked as librarians in the Kremlin, transporting books back and forth from the private residences. Yagoda’s power ended at the Kremlin walls—inside, Yenukidze’s central executive committee apparatus and Voroshilov’s defense commissariat ruled—and the NKVD chief evidently made professions that he could not be responsible for the safety of the leadership with such women going about using special passes. Testimony was spun into the existence of an “aristocratic nest” around Nina Rozenfeld, an ethnic Armenian, educated at gymnasium, who was said to have boasted of her descent from an ancient Muscovy clan. (One arrested colleague defended her as “a Soviet-inclined person.”)233 Stalin read, numbered, and marked up the voluminous interrogation protocols with queries or comments. On one, where it was noted that the accused had initially been a cleaning lady before becoming a Kremlin librarian, he underlined the sentence and wrote, “Ha-ha, cleaner-librarian?”234
These were indeed small fry.235 Nonetheless, on February 14, the politburo substituted the NKVD for the central executive committee as the defense commissariat’s partner for oversight of the Kremlin.236 The NKVD took over the reconstruction of the Grand Kremlin Palace’s Andreyev and Alexandrov halls and of the Sverdlov Hall in the Imperial Senate. This looked like a triumph for Yagoda, but on February 22, the politburo directed Yezhov, not Yagoda, to conduct a verification of the central executive committee apparatus. NKVD interrogation protocols in the “Kremlin Affair” had to be sent to him.237 Zinoviev, meanwhile, had been hauled out of prison and re-interrogated in Moscow on February 19 in connection with the Kirov murder. “To Kamenev belongs the winged formulation on how ‘Marxism is now whatever is convenient for Stalin,’” he testified. “Kamenev and I did discuss Stalin’s removal, but we thought only in terms of his being replaced in the post of general secretary. . . . I did not hear declarations by Kamenev about a terrorist act in the struggle with the party leadership.”238 Yezhov had work to do. Soon the politburo would formally task him with reviewing the statutes governing the NKVD: further pressure on Yagoda.239