With a nimbus-like plumage of black hair and a pointed, bird-like face, Mekhlis played a part as large in his way as Molotov or Beria. Born in Odessa in 1889 of Jewish parents, leaving school at fourteen, he only joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 after working with the Jewish Social Democratic Party but he served as a ruthless commissar in the Crimea during the Civil War, executing thousands. He first met Stalin during the Polish campaign, becoming one of his assistants, learning all the secrets. Devoted to “my dear Comrade Stalin,” for whom he worked in a neurotic, blood-curdling frenzy, he was too energetic and talented to remain hidden in the back rooms like Poskrebyshev. Married to a Jewish doctor, he placed Lenin’s portrait with a red ribbon in his baby’s cot and recorded the reactions of this New Man in a special diary. In 1930, Stalin appointed him Pravda editor where his management of writers was impressively brutal.[108]
Mekhlis, who left the Tsarist army as a bombardier, was now promoted to Deputy Defence Commissar, Head of its Political Department, descending on the army like a galloping horse of the Apocalypse.14 Stalin and his Five now devised an astonishing lottery of slaughter designed to kill a whole generation.
20. BLOOD BATH BY NUMBERS
They did not even specify the names but simply assigned quotas of deaths by the thousands. On 2 July 1937, the Politburo ordered local Secretaries to arrest and shoot “the most hostile anti-Soviet elements” who were to be sentenced by troikas, three-man tribunals that usually included the local Party Secretary, Procurator and NKVD chief.
The aim was “to finish off once and for all” all Enemies and those impossible to educate in socialism, so as to accelerate the erasing of class barriers and therefore the bringing of paradise for the masses. This final solution was a slaughter that made sense in terms of the faith and idealism of Bolshevism which was a religion based on the systematic destruction of classes. The principle of ordering murder like industrial quotas in the Five-Year Plan was therefore natural. The details did not matter: if Hitler’s destruction of the Jews was genocide, then this was democide, the class struggle spinning into cannibalism. On 30 July, Yezhov and his deputy Mikhail Frinovsky proposed Order No. 00447 to the Politburo: that between 5 and 15 August, the regions were to receive quotas for two categories: Category One—to be shot. Category Two—to be deported. They suggested that 72,950 should be shot and 259,450 arrested, though they missed some regions. The regions could submit further lists. The families of these people should be deported too. The Politburo confirmed this order the next day.
Soon this “meat grinder” achieved such a momentum, as the witch hunt approached its peak and as the local jealousies and ambitions spurred it on, that more and more were fed into the machine. The quotas were soon fulfilled by the regions who therefore asked for bigger numbers, so between 28 August and 15 December, the Politburo agreed to the shooting of another 22,500 and then another 48,000. In this, the Terror differed most from Hitler’s crimes which systematically destroyed a limited target: Jews and Gypsies. Here, on the contrary, death was sometimes random: the long-forgotten comment, the flirtation with an opposition, envy of another man’s job, wife or house, vengeance or just plain coincidence brought the death and torture of entire families. This did not matter: “Better too far than not far enough,” Yezhov told his men as the original arrest quota ballooned to 767,397 arrests and 386,798 executions, families destroyed, children orphaned, under Order No. 00447.[109]
Simultaneously, Yezhov attacked “national contingents”—this was murder by nationality, against Poles and ethnic Germans among others. On 11 August, Yezhov signed Order No. 00485 to liquidate “Polish diversionists and espionage groups” which was to consume most of the Polish Communist Party, most Poles within the Bolshevik leadership, anyone with social or “consular contacts”—and of course their wives and children. A total of 350,000 (144,000 of them Poles) were arrested in this operation, with 247,157 shot (110,000 Poles)—a mini-genocide. As we will see, this hit Stalin’s own circle with especial force.[110] Altogether, the latest estimates, combining the quotas and national contingents, are that 1.5 million were arrested in these operations and about 700,000 shot.1
“Beat, destroy without sorting out,” Yezhov ordered his henchmen. Those who showed “operational inertness” in the arrests of “counter-revolutionary formations within and outside the Party… Poles, Germans and kulaks” would themselves be destroyed, but most now “tried to surpass each other with reports about gigantic numbers of people arrested.” Yezhov, clearly taking his cue from the Five, actually specified that “if during this operation, an extra thousand people will be shot, that is not such a big deal.” Since Stalin and Yezhov constantly pushed up the quotas, an extra thousand here and there was inevitable but the point was that they deliberately destroyed an entire “caste.” And, like Hitler’s Holocaust, this was a colossal feat of management. Yezhov even specified what bushes should be planted to cover mass graves.2
Once this massacre had started, Stalin almost disappeared from public view, appearing only to greet children and delegations. The rumour spread that he did not know what Yezhov was doing. Stalin spoke in public only twice in 1937 and once in 1938, cancelling all his holidays (he did not go southwards again until 1945). Molotov gave the 6 November addresses in both years. The writer Ilya Ehrenburg met Pasternak in the street: “He waved his arms around as he stood between the snowdrifts: ‘If only someone would tell Stalin about it.’” The theatrical director Meyerhold told Ehrenburg, “They conceal it from Stalin.” But their friend, Isaac Babel, lover of Yezhov’s wife, learned the “key to the puzzle”: “Of course Yezhov plays his part but he’s not at the bottom of it.”3
Stalin was the mastermind but he was far from alone. Indeed, it is neither accurate nor helpful to blame the Terror on one man because systematic murder started soon after Lenin took power in 1917 and never stopped until Stalin’s death. This “social system based on blood-letting” justified murder now with the prospect of happiness later. The Terror was not just a consequence of Stalin’s monstrosity but it was certainly formed, expanded and accelerated by his uniquely overpowering character, reflecting his malice and vindictiveness. “The greatest delight,” he told Kamenev, “is to mark one’s enemy, prepare everything, avenge oneself thoroughly and then go to sleep.” It would not have happened without Stalin. Yet it also reflected the village hatreds of the incestuous Bolshevik sect where jealousies had seethed from the years of exile and war.
Stalin and his faction regarded the Civil War as their finest hour: 1937 was a Tsaritsyn reunion, as Stalin even reminisced to a group of officers: “We were in Tsaritsyn with Voroshilov,” he began. “We exposed [Enemies] within a week, even though we didn’t know military affairs. We exposed them because we judged them by their work and if today’s political workers judge men by their actual work, we would soon expose the Enemies in our army.” 4
The anti-Bolshevik resurgence of Germany was real enough, the Spanish War setting new standards for betrayal and brutality. Economic disasters were glaring: Molotov’s papers reveal there was still famine and cannibalism,[111] even in 1937.5
The corruption of grandees was notorious: Yagoda seemed to be running palaces and diamond deals out of official funds, Yakir renting out dachas like a landlord. The wives of marshals, such as Olga Budyonny and her friend Galina Yegorova, Stalin’s fancy at Nadya’s last supper, blossomed at embassies and “salons, reminiscent of glittering receptions… in aristocratic Russia” with “dazzling company, stylish clothes.”
108
Just after the announcement of the shooting of the generals, Mekhlis discovered that the “Proletarian Poet” Demian Bedny was resisting orders and secretly writing Dantean verses under the pseudonym Conrad Rotkehempfer. But Mekhlis immediately wrote to Stalin: “What should I do? He explained it was his own literary method.” Stalin replied with dripping sarcasm: “I’m answering with a letter you can read to Demian. To the new apparent Dante, alias Conrad, oh actually to Demian Bedny, the fable or poem ‘Fight or Die’ is mediocre. As a criticism of Fascism, it’s unoriginal and faded. As a criticism of Soviet construction (not joking), it’s silly but transparent. It’s junk but since we [Soviet people] have a lot of junk around, we must increase the supply of other kinds of literature with another fable… I understand that I must say sorry to Demian-Dante for my frankness.” Mekhlis locked Stalin’s letters in his safe whence he extracted them to impress journalists whom he asked if they recognized the handwriting. “In the middle of the night of 21 July,” he reported urgently to Stalin, “I invited Bedny to criticize his poem” and to hear Stalin’s damning letter. Bedny just said, “I’m crazy… maybe I’m too old. Maybe I should go to the country and grow cabbages.” Even this comment struck Mekhlis as suspicious and he floated the idea of arresting Bedny: “Maybe he’s implicated.” Stalin did not rise. Bedny was cut from Stalin’s circle but remained free, dying in 1945.
109
There has been a debate between those such as Robert Conquest who insisted that Stalin himself initiated and ran the Terror, and the so-called Revisionists who argued that the Terror was created by pressure from ambitious young bureaucrats and by the tensions between centre and regions. The archives have now proved Conquest right, though it is true that the regions outperformed their quotas, showing that the Revisionists were right, too, though missing the complete picture. The two views therefore are completely complementary.
110
170,000 Koreans were also deported. Bulgarians and Macedonians were soon added. Stalin was delighted by the Polish operation, writing on Yezhov’s report: “Very good! Dig up and purge this Polish espionage mud in the future as well. Destroy it in the interest of the USSR!” If Poles and Germans took the brunt of this operation, other nationalities deported included Kurds, Greeks, Finns, Estonians, Iranians, Latvians, Chinese, returnees from the Harbin railway and Romanians. Most exotically, the NKVD shot 6,311 priests, lords and Communist officials, about 4 percent of the population in the satellite state of Mongolia where the Mongoloid parody of Stalin, Marshal Choibalsang, also arrested and shot his own Tukhachevsky, Marshal Demid.
111
On 14 April 1937, Procurator-General Vyshinsky wrote to the Premier to inform him of a cluster of cases of cannibalism in Cheliabinsk in the Urals in which one woman ate a four-month-old child, another ate an eight-year-old with her thirteen-year-old, while yet another consumed her three-month-old baby.