The NKVD defector Alexander Orlov left the best account of how Yezhov rigged up this trial, promising the “witnesses” their lives in return for testifying against Zinoviev and Kamenev who refused to cooperate. Stalin’s office phoned hourly for news.
“You think Kamenev may not confess?” Stalin asked Mironov, one of Yagoda’s Chekists.
“I don’t know,” replied Mironov.
“You don’t know?” said Stalin. “Do you know how much our State weighs with all the factories, machines, the army with all the armaments and the navy?” Mironov thought he was joking but Stalin was not smiling. “Think it over and tell me?” Stalin kept staring at him.
“Nobody can know that, Joseph Vissarionovich; it is the realm of astronomical figures.”
“Well, and can one man withstand the pressure of that astronomical weight?”
“No,” replied Mironov.
“Well then… Don’t come to report to me until you have in this briefcase the confession of Kamenev.” Even though they were not physically tortured, the regime of threats and sleeplessness demoralized Zinoviev, suffering from asthma, and Kamenev. The heating was turned up in their cells in midsummer. Yezhov threatened that Kamenev’s son would be shot. 4
While the interrogators worked on Zinoviev and Kamenev, Maxim Gorky was dying of influenza and bronchial pneumonia. The old writer was now thoroughly disillusioned. The dangers of his Chekist companions became obvious when Gorky’s son Maxim died mysteriously of influenza. Later, Yagoda would be accused, with the family doctors, of killing him. After his death, Maxim’s daughter Martha remembers how Yagoda would visit the Gorky household every morning for a cup of coffee and a flirtation with her mother, on his way to the Lubianka: “he was in love with Timosha and wanted her to return his affection,” said Alexei Tolstoy’s wife.
“You still don’t know me, I can do anything,” he threatened the distraught Timosha: the writer Alexander Tikhonov claimed they began an affair; her daughter denies it. When Stalin visited, Yagoda lingered, still in love with Timosha and increasingly worried about himself. After the Politburo had left, he asked Gorky’s secretary: “Did they come? They’ve left now? What did they talk about?… Did they say anything about us…?” 5
Stalin had asked Gorky to write his biography, but the novelist recoiled from the task. Instead he bombarded Stalin and the Politburo with crazy proposals such as a project to commission Socialist Realist writers to “rewrite the world’s books anew.” Stalin’s apologies for late replies became ever more extreme: “I’m as lazy as a pig on things marked ‘correspondence,’” confessed Stalin to Gorky. “How do you feel? Healthy? How’s your work? Me and my friends are fine.” The NKVD actually printed false issues of Pravda especially for Gorky, to conceal the persecution of his friend, Kamenev.[89] Gorky himself realized that he was now under house arrest: “I’m surrounded,” he muttered, “trapped.”
In the first week of June, Gorky slept much of the days as his condition worsened. He was supervised by the best doctors but he was failing.
“Let them come if they can get here in time,” said Gorky. Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov were pleased to see that he had recovered—after a camphor injection. Stalin took control of the sickroom: “Why are there so many people here?” he asked. “Who’s that sitting beside Alexei Maximovich dressed in black? A nun, is she? All she lacks is a candle in her hands.” This was Baroness Moura Budberg, the mistress Gorky shared with H. G. Wells. “Get them all out of here except for that woman, the one in white, who’s looking after him… Why’s there such a funereal mood here? A healthy person might die in such an atmosphere.” Stalin stopped Gorky discussing literature but called for wine and they toasted him and then embraced.
Days later, Stalin arrived only to be told that Gorky was too ill to see him: “Alexei Mikhailovich, we visited you at two in the morning,” he wrote. “Your pulse was they say 82. The doctors did not allow us to come in to you. We submitted. Hello from all of us, a big hello. Stalin.” Molotov and Voroshilov signed underneath.
Gorky started to spit blood and died on 18 June, of TB, pneumonia and heart failure. Later it was claimed that his doctors and Yagoda had murdered him deliberately: they certainly confessed to his murder. His death was convenient before Zinoviev’s trial but his medical records in the NKVD archives suggest that he died naturally.6
Yagoda was skulking in the dining room at Gorky’s house but Stalin had already turned against him. “And what’s that creature hanging around here for? Get rid of him.”7
Finally in July, Zinoviev asked to be able to talk to Kamenev on his own. Then they demanded to speak to the Politburo: if the Party would guarantee there would be no executions, they would confess. Voroshilov was itching to get at the “scum”: when he received some of the testimonies against them, he wrote to Stalin that “these bad people… all typical representatives of petit bourgeois with the face of Trotsky… are finished people. There’s no place for them in our country and no place among the millions ready to die for the Motherland. This scum must be liquidated absolutely… we need to be sure the NKVD starts the purge properly…” Here, then, was one leader who genuinely seemed to approve of a terror and the liquidation of the former oppositions. On 3 July, Stalin replied to “dear Klim, did you read the testimonies… ? How do you like the bourgeois puppies of Trotsky… ? They wanted to wipe out all the members of the Politburo… Isn’t it weird? How low people can sink? J.St.”
Yagoda accompanied these two broken men on the short drive from the Lubianka to the Kremlin, where they had both once lived. When they arrived in the room where Kamenev had chaired so many Politburo meetings, they discovered that only Stalin, Voroshilov and Yezhov were present. Where was the rest of the Politburo?
Stalin replied that he and Voroshilov were a commission of the Politburo. Given Klim’s venom, it is easy to see why he was there, but where was Molotov? Perhaps the punctilious Iron-Arse was worried about the etiquette of lying to Old Bolsheviks: he certainly did not object to killing people.
Kamenev begged the Politburo for a guarantee of their lives.
“A guarantee?” replied Stalin, according to Orlov’s version. “What guarantee can there be? It’s simply ridiculous! Maybe you want an official treaty certified by the League of Nations? Zinoviev and Kamenev forget they’re not in a market-place haggling over a stolen horse but at the Politburo of the Bolshevik Communist Party. If an assurance by the Politburo is not enough, I don’t see any point in talking further.”
“Zinoviev and Kamenev behave as if they’re in a position to make conditions to the Politburo,” exclaimed Voroshilov. “If they had any common sense, they’d fall to their knees before Stalin…”
Stalin proposed three reasons why they would not be executed—it was really a trial of Trotsky; if he had not shot them when they were opposing the Party, then why shoot them when they were helping it; and finally, “the comrades forget that we are Bolsheviks, disciples and followers of Lenin, and we don’t want to shed the blood of Old Bolsheviks, no matter how grave their past sins…”
Zinoviev and Kamenev wearily agreed to plead guilty, provided there were no shootings and their families were protected.
“That goes without saying,” Stalin finished the meeting. 8
89
An old trick: Kuibyshev had suggested printing false issues of Pravda to deceive the dying Lenin.