Yezhov proudly listed the two hundred persons arrested in the Trotskyite Centre in the Azov–Black Sea organization, another three hundred in Georgia, four hundred in Leningrad. Molotov was not the only one who had avoided assassination: Kaganovich had just escaped death in the Urals. First Yezhov dealt with the Pyatakov–Radek trial that was about to begin. When he read out Pyatakov’s description of the workers as a “herd of sheep,” these frightened fanatics reacted as if at a nightmarish revivalist meeting.
“The swine!” shouted Beria. There was a “noise of indignation in the room.” Then the record reveals:
A voice: “The brutes!”
“That’s how low this vicious Fascist agent, this degenerate Communist, has sunk, God knows what else! These swine must be strangled!”
“What about Bukharin?” a voice called.
“We need to talk about them,” agreed Stalin.
“There’s a scoundrel for you,” snarled Beria.
“What swine!” exclaimed another comrade. Yezhov announced that Bukharin and Rykov were indeed members of the “back-up Centre.” They were actually terrorists yet these assassins were sitting there with them. Bukharin was now meant to confess his sins and implicate his friends. He did not.
“So you think I too aspired to power? Are you serious?” he asked Yezhov. “After all, there are many old comrades who know me well… my very soul, my inner life.”
“It’s hard to know someone’s soul,” sneered Beria.
“There isn’t a word of truth said against me… Kamenev stated at his trial that he met me every year up to 1936. I asked Yezhov to find out when and where so I could refute this lie. They told me Kamenev was not asked… and now it’s impossible to ask him.”
“They shot him,” added Rykov sadly. Few of the old leaders kicked Bukharin, but Kaganovich, Molotov and Beria hunted him zealously. Then, amid deadly allegations, Kaganovich remembered Zinoviev’s dog:
“In 1934, Zinoviev invited Tomsky to his dacha… After drinking tea, Tomsky and Zinoviev went in Tomsky’s car to pick out a dog for Zinoviev. You see what friendship, what help—they went together to pick out a dog.”
“What about this dog?” said Stalin. “Was it a hunting dog or a guard dog?”
“It was not possible to establish this,” Kaganovich went on with gleeful, if chilling, humour.
“Anyway, did they fetch the dog?” persisted Stalin.
“They got it,” boomed Kaganovich. “They were searching for a four-legged companion not unlike themselves.”
“Was it a good dog or a bad dog?” asked Stalin. “Anybody know?” There was “laughter in the hall.”
“It was hard to establish this at the confrontation,” replied Kaganovich.
Finally, Stalin, sensing how many of the older members were not joining in against Bukharin, summed up more in sadness than anger:
“We believed in you and we were mistaken… We believed in you… we moved you up the ladder and we were mistaken. Isn’t it true, Comrade Bukharin?” Yet Stalin ended the Plenum without a vote in support of Yezhov, just an ominous decision to consider “the matter of Bukharin and Rykov unfinished.” The regional “princes” realized that even such a giant could be destroyed.15
Stalin, assisted by Yezhov, shaped the febrile fears of war with Poland and Germany and the very real dangers of the Spanish Civil War, the inexplicable industrial failures caused by Soviet incompetence, and the resistance of the regional “princes,” into a web of conspiracies that dovetailed with the paranoic soul and glorious, nostalgic brutality of the Russian Civil War, and the personal feuds of the Bolsheviks. Stalin was particularly suspicious of the infiltration of spies across the porous border with Poland, traditional enemy of Russia’s western marches that had defeated Russia (and Stalin personally) in 1920.[101] At the Plenum, Khrushchev was denounced as a secret “Pole.” Chatting in the corridor to his friend Yezhov, Stalin walked over, pushing a finger into Khrushchev’s shoulder: “What’s your name?”
“Comrade Stalin, it’s Khrushchev.”
“No you’re not Khrushchev… So-and-so says you’re not.”
“How can you believe that? My mother’s still alive… Check.” Stalin cited Yezhov who denied it. Stalin let it pass but he was checking those around him.
Stalin was finally determined to bring the regional “princes” to heeclass="underline" Ukraine was a special case, the grain store, the second republic with a strong sense of its own culture. Kosior and Chubar had demonstrated their weakness during the famine while the Second Secretary, Postyshev, behaved like a “prince” with his own entourage. On 13 January, Stalin struck with a telegram attacking Postyshev, for lacking the “most basic Party vigilance.” Kaganovich, already the scourge of the Ukraine which he had governed in the late twenties, descended on Kiev, where he soon managed to find a “little person” crushed by the local “prince.” A half-mad crone and Party busybody named Polia Nikolaenko had criticized Postyshev and his wife, also a high official. Mrs. Postyshev expelled the troublesome Nikolaenko from the Party. When Kaganovich informed Stalin of this “heroic denunciatrix,” he immediately grasped her usefulness.16
On 21 December, the family and magnates danced until dawn at Stalin’s birthday party. But the struggles and conspiracies took their toll on the actor-manager: Stalin often suffered from chronic tonsillitis when under pressure. Professor Valedinsky, the specialist from the Matsesta Baths, whom he had brought to Moscow, joined his personal physician, the distinguished Vladimir Vinogradov, who had been a fashionable doctor before the Revolution and still lived in an apartment filled with antiques and fine pictures. The patient lay on a sofa with a high temperature for five days, surrounded by professors and Politburo. The professors visited twice a day and kept vigil at night. By New Year’s Eve, he was well enough to attend the party where the whole family danced together for the last time. When the doctors visited him on New Year’s Day 1937, he reminisced about his first job as a meteorologist and his fishing exploits during his Siberian exiles. But Stalin’s duel with Sergo again took a toll on him as he prepared for his most reckless gamble since collectivization: the massacre of Lenin’s Party.17
Stalin arranged a “confrontation” between Bukharin and Pyatakov before the Politburo. Pyatakov, the abrasive industrial manager soon to star in his own show trial, testified to Bukharin’s terrorism but was now a walking testament to the methods of the NKVD. “Living remains,” Bukharin told his wife, “not of Pyatakov but of his shadow, a skeleton with its teeth knocked out.” He spoke with his head lowered, trying to cover his eyes with his hands. Sergo stared intensely at his former deputy and friend: “Is your testimony voluntary?” he asked.
“My testimony is voluntary,” retorted Pyatakov.
It seems absurd that Sergo even had to ask the question but to do more would be to go against the Politburo itself where men like Voroshilov were working themselves up into paroxysms of hatred: “Your deputy turned out to be a swine of the first class,” Klim told him. “You must know what he told us, the pig, the son of a bitch!” When Sergo read the signed pages of Pyatakov’s interrogation, he “believed it and came to hate him,” but it was not a happy time for him.18
Stalin was supervising Pyatakov’s coming trial of the “Parallel Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre” that was really an assault on Sergo’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry where ten of the seventeen defendants worked. Stalin’s intimate role in the famous trials has always been known but the archives reveal how he even dictated the words of Vyshinsky’s summing-up. Recovering from his tonsillitis, Stalin must have seen Vyshinsky at Kuntsevo. One can imagine Stalin pacing up and down, smoking, as the cringing Procurator scribbled in his notebook: “These villains don’t even have any sense of being citizens… they’re afraid of the nation, afraid of the people… Their agreements with Japan and Germany are the agreements of the hare with the wolf…” Vyshinsky noted down Stalin’s words: “While Lenin was alive, they were against Lenin.” He used exactly the same words in court on 28 January. But Stalin’s thoughts in 1937 reveal the broadest reason for the imminent murder of hundreds of thousands of people for little apparent reason: “Maybe it can be explained by the fact that you lost faith,” Stalin addressed the Old Bolsheviks. Here was the essence of the religious frenzy of the coming slaughter. 19
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Stalin’s political and personal obsessions often found a parallel in his favourite operas: he constantly attended performances of the opera