Slim with flashing eyes, Yevgenia Feigenberg, at twenty-six, was a seductive and lively Jewess from Gomel. This avid literary groupie was as promiscuous as her new husband: she possessed the amorous enthusiasm of Messalina but none of her guile. She had first married an official, Khayutin, then Gadun, who was posted to the Soviet Embassy in London. She went too but when he was sent home, she stayed abroad, typing in the Berlin legation. It was there that she met her first literary star, Isaac Babel, whom she seduced with the line of so many flirtatious groupies meeting their heroes: “You don’t know me but I know you well.” These words later assumed a dreadful significance.
Back in Moscow, she met “Kolya” Yezhov.12 Yevgenia yearned to hold a literary salon: henceforth Babel and the jazz star Leonid Utsesov were often chez Yezhov. It was she who asked the Mandelstams: “Pilniak comes to see us. Whom do you go to see?” But Yezhov was also obsessionally devoted to Stalin’s work—writers did not interest him. The only magnate who was a friend of both Yezhovs was Sergo, as was his wife Zina: photographs show the two couples at their dachas. Sergo’s daughter Eteri remembers how Yevgenia “was much better dressed than the other Bolshevik wives.” 13
By 1934, Yezhov was once again so weary that he almost collapsed, covered in boils. Stalin, on holiday with Kirov and Zhdanov, despatched Yezhov to enjoy the most luxurious medical care available in Mitteleuropa and ordered Poskrebyshev’s deputy, Dvinsky, to send the Berlin Embassy this coded note: “I ask you to pay very close attention to Yezhov. He’s seriously ill and I cannot estimate the gravity of the situation. Give him help and cherish him with care… He is a good man and a very precious worker. I will be grateful if you will inform the Central Committee regularly[83] on his treatment.”14
No one objected to Yezhov’s rise. On the contrary, Khrushchev thought him an admirable appointment. Bukharin respected his “good heart and clean conscience” though he noticed that he grovelled before Stalin—but that was hardly unique.15 “Blackberry” worked uneasily with Yagoda to force Zinoviev, Kamenev and their unfortunate allies to confess to being responsible for the murder of Kirov and all manner of other dastardly deeds.16
It was not long before Blackberry’s chain-mail fist reached out to crush one of Stalin’s oldest friends: Abel Yenukidze. That genial sybarite and seigneur of the Bolshoi flaunted his sexual affairs with ever younger girls, including teenage ballerinas. Girls filled his office, which came to resemble a sort of Bolshevik dating agency for future and cast-off mistresses.
Stalin’s circle was already abuzz with his antics: “Being dissolute and sensual,” Yenukidze left a “stench everywhere indulging himself to procure women, breaking up families, seducing girls,” wrote Maria Svanidze. “Having all the goodies of life in his hands… he used this for his own filthy personal purposes, buying girls and women.” She claimed Yenukidze was “sexually abnormal,” picking up younger and younger girls, sinking to children of nine to eleven years old. The mothers were paid off. Maria complained to Stalin who surely began to listen: Stalin had not trusted him as early as 1929.
Nadya’s godfather crossed the line between family and politics in Stalin’s life and this proved a dangerous fence to straddle. A generous friend to Left and Right, he may have objected to the 1st December Law but he also personified the decadence of the new nobility. Abel was not the only one: Stalin felt himself surrounded by pigs at the trough. Stalin was always alone even among his convivial entourage, convinced of his separateness and often lonely. As recently as 1933, he had begged Yenukidze to holiday with him. In Moscow, Stalin often asked Mikoyan and Alyosha Svanidze, who was like “a brother” to him, to stay overnight. Mikoyan stayed a few times but his wife was unhappy about it: “How could she check whether I was really at Stalin’s?” Svanidze stayed more often.17
The catalyst for Yenukidze’s fall was Stalin’s favourite subject: personal history for the Bolsheviks was what genealogy was for the medieval knights. When his book The Secret Bolshevik Printing Presses was published, it was eagerly sent to Stalin by his weasel-faced Pravda editor, Mekhlis, with a note that “some parts are… marked.” Stalin’s marginalia in his copy show his almost Blimpish irritation: “That’s false!”, “fibs” and “balderdash!” When Yenukidze wrote an article about his activities in Baku, Stalin distributed it to the Politburo peppered with “Ha-ha-ha!” Yenukidze made a grievous mistake in not lying about Stalin’s heroic exploits. This was understandable because the outstanding part in the creation of the Baku movement had been played by himself.
“What more does he want?” Yenukidze complained. “I am doing everything he has asked me to do but it is not enough for him. He wants me to admit he is a genius.”18
Others were not so proud. In 1934, Lakoba published a sycophantic history of Stalin’s heroic role in Batumi. Not to be outdone, Beria mobilized an array of historians to falsify his On the History of the Bolshevik Organizations in the Transcaucasus which was published later in the year under his own name.
“To my dear, adored master,” Beria inscribed his book, “to the Great Stalin!”19
Now Nadya’s death caught up with Yenukidze: a terrorist cell was “uncovered” by Yezhov in the Kremlin, which Abel ran. Kaganovich raged, Shakespearean style, “There was something rotten there.” The NKVD arrested 110 of Yenukidze’s employees, librarians and maids, for terrorism. Stalinist plots always featured a wicked beauty: sure enough, there was a “Countess,” said to have poisoned book pages to kill Stalin. Two were sentenced to death and the rest from five to ten years in the camps. Like everything that happened around Stalin, this “Kremlin Case” had various angles: it was partly aimed at Yenukidze, partly at clearing the Kremlin of possibly disloyal elements, but it was also somehow connected to Nadya. A maid, whose appeal to President Kalinin is in the archives, was arrested for gossiping with her friends about Nadya’s suicide. Stalin had surely not forgotten that Yenukidze had “swayed” Nadya politically, and been the first to see the body.
Yenukidze was sacked, made to publish a “Correction of Errors,” demoted to run a Caucasian sanatorium and viciously attacked by Yezhov (and Beria) at a Plenum. Blackberry first raised the stakes: Zinoviev and Kamenev were not just morally responsible for Kirov’s murder—they planned it. Then he turned to poor “Uncle Abel” whom he accused of political blindness and criminal complacency in letting the “counter-revolutionary Zinoviev-Kamenev and Trotskyite terrorists” feather their nests inside the Kremlin while plotting to kill Stalin. “This nearly cost Comrade Stalin his life,” he alleged. Yenukidze was “the most typical representative of the corrupt and self-complacent Communists, playing the ‘liberal’ gentleman at the expense of the Party and State.” Yenukidze defended himself by blaming Yagoda: “No one was hired for work without security clearance!”
“Not true!” retorted Yagoda.
“Yes it is!… I—more than anyone else—can find a host of blunders. These may be indignantly characterized—as treason and duplicity.”
“Just the same,” intervened Beria, attacking Yenukidze for his generous habit of helping fallen comrades, “why did you give out loans and assistance?”
83
As Stalin wrote his history books with his dear friends Zhdanov and Kirov, he was receiving detailed reports on the health of his “precious” comrade. The Yezhov case is a classic illustration of the Party’s obsessive control over every detail of its leaders. “The radioactive baths of Badgastein” had improved Yezhov’s health, the embassy reported after five days. A few days later, the patient was feeling energyless after the baths, he was following a diet but he was still chain smoking—and the sores on his thighs and legs had almost disappeared. The CC voted to send him the huge sum of 1,000 roubles. Next he had pains in his appendix, but having consulted Moscow doctors, Kaganovich sent an order that he was not to undergo surgery “unless absolutely necessary.” After another rest in an Italian sanatorium, the Yezhovs returned that autumn.