Within half an hour, Stalin, Molotov and Zhdanov (that hypochondriac comically sporting an anti-headache bandanna around his head) arrived from the countryside to join Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Yezhov. When Mikoyan heard, he exclaimed, “I don’t believe it” and rushed over. Again the Kremlin family mourned its own but suicide left as much anger as grief.
Zinaida sat on the edge of the bed beside Sergo’s body. The leaders entered the room, looked at the corpse and sat down. Voroshilov, so soft-hearted in personal matters, consoled Zina.
“Why console me,” she snapped, “when you couldn’t save him for the Party?” Stalin caught Zina’s eye and nodded at her to follow him into the study. They stood facing each other. Stalin seemed crushed and pitiful, betrayed again.
“What shall we say to people now?” she asked.
“This must be reported in the press,” Stalin replied. “We’ll say he died of a heart attack.”
“No one will believe that,” snapped the widow. “Sergo loved the truth. The truth must be printed.”
“Why won’t they believe it? Everyone knew he had a bad heart and everyone will believe it,” concluded Stalin. The door to the death room was closed but Konstantin Ordzhonikidze peeped inside and observed Kaganovich and Yezhov in consultation, sitting at the foot of the body of their mutual friend. Suddenly Beria, in Moscow for the Plenum, appeared in the dining room. Zinaida charged at him, trying to slap him, and shrieked: “Rat!” Beria “disappeared right afterwards.”
They carried Sergo’s bulky body from the bedroom and laid him on the table. Molotov’s brother, a photographer, arrived with his camera. Stalin and the magnates posed with the body.2
On the 19th, the newspapers announced the death of Sergo by heart attack. A list of doctors signed the mendacious bulletin: “At 17:30, while he was having his afternoon rest, he suddenly felt ill and a few minutes later died of paralysis of the heart.” The Plenum was delayed by Sergo’s funeral, but Stalin’s obstacle had been removed. The death of “the perfect Bolshevik” shocked Maria Svanidze who described the lying-in-state in the Hall of Columns among “garlands, music, the scent of flowers, tears, honorary escorts. Thousands upon thousands passed” the open coffin. Sergo was sanctified by a cult. Some mourned him more than others. Bukharin penned a poem: “He cracked like lightning in foamy waves” but also wrote another pathetic letter to Stalin: “I wanted to write to Klim and Mikoyan. And if they hurt me too? Because the slanders have done their work. I am not me. I can’t even cry on the body of an old comrade… Koba, I can’t live in such a situation… I really love you passionately… I wish you quick and resolute victories.” The suicide remained a tight secret. Stalin and others like the Voroshilovs[102] believed Sergo was a self-indulgent disappointment. At the Plenum, Stalin attacked that Bolshevik nobleman for behaving like a “prince.”
Stalin was chief bearer of the urn of ashes that was placed near Kirov in the Kremlin Wall. But his antennae sensed other doubters who might follow Sergo’s line. During the funeral, he reminded Mikoyan about his escape from the shooting of Twenty-Six Commissars during the Civil War: “You were the only one to escape” in that “obscure and murky story. Anastas, don’t force us to try to clear it up.” Mikoyan must have decided not to rock the boat but he could hardly miss the warning and gathering darkness.3
“I cannot live like this anymore…” wrote Bukharin to Stalin days later. “I am in no physical or moral condition to come to the Plenum… I will begin a hunger strike until the accusations of betrayal, wrecking and terrorism are dropped.” But Bukharin’s agony was just starting: Anna, his wife, accompanied him to the first sitting during a snowstorm. It is striking that the main victims of the Plenum, Bukharin and Yagoda, both lived in the Kremlin just doors away from Stalin and the Politburo while simultaneously being accused of planning their murder. The Kremlin remained a village—but one of unsurpassed malevolence.
At 6 p.m. on 23 February, this febrile, cruel Plenum opened under the pall of Sergo’s death, Pyatakov’s execution, the spreading arrests and the bloodthirsty public effervescence whipped up by the media. If there was any moment when Stalin emerged as dictator with power over life and death, it was now. Yezhov opened with a savage indictment of Bukharin and his hunger strike.
“I won’t shoot myself,” he replied, “because people will say I killed myself to harm the Party. But if I die, as it were, from an illness, what will you lose from it?”
“Blackmailer!” shouted several voices.
“You scoundrel,” shrieked Voroshilov at his ex-friend. “Keep your trap shut! How vile! How dare you speak like that!”
“It’s very hard for me to go on living.”
“And it’s easy for us?” asked Stalin. “You really babble a lot.”
“You abused the Party’s trust!” declaimed Andreyev. This venom encouraged less senior officials to prove their loyalty: “I’m not sure there’s any reason for us to go on debating this matter,” declared I. P. Zhukov (no relation of the Marshal). “These people… must be shot just as the [other] scoundrels were shot!” This was so rabid that the leaders hooted with laughter: in the midst of the witch hunt, it was perhaps a relief to be able to laugh. But there were more jokes.
Bukharin quipped that the testimonies against him were false: “Demand produces supply—that means that those who give testimony know the nature of the general atmosphere!” More laughter. But it was all to no avaiclass="underline" a commission of magnates, chaired by Mikoyan, met to decide the fate of Bukharin and Rykov, but when they returned after sleepless nights, no one would shake hands with them.
Even before Yezhov came in for the kill, Stalin taunted Bukharin: “Bukharin’s on hunger strike. Who is your ultimatum aimed at, Nikolai, the Central Committee?”
“You’re about to throw me out of the Party.”
“Ask the Central Committee for its forgiveness!”
“I’m not Zinoviev and Kamenev and I won’t lie about myself.”
“If you won’t confess,” replied Mikoyan, “you’re just proving you’re a Fascist hireling.”
The “hirelings” waited at home. In Stalin and Nadya’s old apartment in the Poteshny Palace, Bukharin worked frantically on a letter to a future Central Committee and Posterity, asking his beautiful wife Anna, just twenty-three, to memorize it. “Again and again Nikolai Ivanovich read his letter in a whisper to me and I had to repeat it after him,” she wrote. “Then I read and reread it myself, softly repeating the phrases aloud. Ah how he gripped [me] when I made a slip!”
Just across the river, in his apartment in the House on the Embankment, Rykov would only say: “They’ll send me to prison!” His wife suffered a stroke as the attacks on her husband became more deadly. His devoted 21-year-old daughter, Natalya, helped him dress each day for the Plenum—as her mother had done.
The commission voted on their fate. Many of Stalin’s devotees such as Khrushchev wanted a trial but “without application of the death penalty.” Yezhov, Budyonny and Postyshev, himself already under fire, voted for death. Molotov and Voroshilov slavishly supported “the suggestion of Comrade Stalin” which was enigmatic because his vote originally suggested “exile” but then was changed by hand to “Transfer their case to NKVD.”
Bukharin and Rykov were summoned. Both faced the anguished panic and sad regrets of last goodbyes. Rykov asked his daughter to phone Poskrebyshev to find out his fate.
102
Ekaterina Voroshilova wrote twenty years later in her diaries: maybe Zinaida “was right that Ordzhonikidze was a man of great soul but on this I have my own opinion.” Sergo’s daughter Eteri recalled how Stalin called a couple of times to comfort the widow and then no one called them. Only Kaganovich still visited them. Years later, Khrushchev praised Sergo at Kuntsevo. Beria was insulting about him. Stalin said nothing. But when they left, Malenkov pulled Khrushchev aside: “Listen, why did you speak so carelessly about Sergo? He shot himself… Didn’t you know? Didn’t you notice how awkward it was after you said his name?” Nonetheless the city of Vladikavkaz, in the Caucasus, was renamed Ordzhonikidze.