“Why have the prices flown upwards 100% while nothing is in the shops,” Maria Svanidze asked her diary. “Where is the cotton, flax and wool when medals were won for beating the Plan? And the construction of private dachas… crazy money spent on magnificent houses and rest homes?”6
The responsibility lies with the hundreds of thousands of officials who ordered, or perpetrated, the murders. Stalin and the magnates enthusiastically, recklessly, almost joyfully, killed, and they usually killed many more than they were asked to kill. None were ever tried for these crimes.7
Stalin was surprisingly open with his circle about the aim to “finish off” all their Enemies. He could tell his cronies this quite openly at Voroshilov’s May Day party, as reported by Budyonny. He seems to have constantly compared his Terror to Ivan the Terrible’s massacre of the boyars. “Who’s going to remember all this riffraff in ten or twenty years’ time? No one. Who remembers the names now of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of?[112] No one… The people had to know he was getting rid of all of his enemies. In the end, they all got what they deserved.”
“The people understand, Joseph Vissarionovich, they understand and they support you,” replied Molotov. Similarly, he told Mikoyan, “Ivan killed too few boyars. He should have killed them all, to create a strong state.” The magnates were not as oblivious of Stalin’s nature as they later claimed.8
While the regions fulfilled their nameless quotas, Stalin was also killing thousands whom he knew well. Yezhov visited Stalin virtually every day. Within a year and a half, 5 of the 15 Politburo members, 98 of the 139 Central Committee members and 1,108 of the 1,966 delegates from the Seventeenth Congress had been arrested. Yezhov delivered 383 lists of names—which were known as “albums” since they often contained photographs and potted biographies of the proposed victims—and proposed: “I request sanction to condemn them all under the First Category.”
Most of the death lists were signed by Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov but many were also signed by Zhdanov and Mikoyan. On some days, for example 12 November 1938, Stalin and Molotov signed 3,167 executions. Usually they simply wrote: “For,” VMN or Vishka. Molotov admitted: “I signed most—in fact almost all—the arrest lists. We debated and made a decision. Haste ruled the day. Could one go into all the details?… Innocent people were sometimes caught. Obviously one or two out of ten were wrongly caught, but the rest rightly.” As Stalin had put it, “Better an innocent head less, than hesitations in the war.” They ordered the deaths of 39,000 on these lists of names. Stalin marked lists with notes to Yezhov: “Comrade Yezhov, those whose names I’ve marked ‘arr’ should be arrested if not already.” Sometimes Stalin simply wrote: “Shoot all 138 of them.” When Molotov received regional death lists, he simply underlined the numbers, never the names. Kaganovich remembered the frenzy of that time: “What emotions!” They were “all responsible” and perhaps “guilty of going too far.”9
Stalin declared that the son should not suffer for the sins of the father but then carefully targeted the families of Enemies: this may have reflected his Caucasian mentality or merely the incestuous labyrinth of Bolshevik connections. “They had to be isolated,” explained Molotov, “otherwise they’d have spread all kinds of complaints.” On 5 July 1937, the Politburo ordered the NKVD to “confine all wives of condemned traitors… in camps for 5–8 years” and to take under State protection children under fifteen: 18,000 wives and 25,000 children were taken away. But this was not enough: on 15 August, Yezhov decreed that children between one and three were to be confined in orphanages but “socially dangerous children between three and fifteen” could be imprisoned “depending on the degree of danger.” Almost a million of these children were raised in orphanages and often did not see their mothers for twenty years.[113]10
Stalin was the engine of this murderous machine. “Now everything will be fine,” he wrote on 7 May 1937 to one of his killers who complained that he had not “lost his teeth” but had become somewhat dazed: “The sharper the teeth the better. J.St.” This is just one of the many notes in the newly opened archives that show not merely Stalin’s bureaucratic orders but his personal involvement in encouraging even junior officials to slaughter their comrades. The teeth were never sharp enough.11
While all the leaders could save some of their friends—and not others—Stalin himself could protect whoever he wished: his whims only added to his mystique. When his old friend from Georgia, Sergo Kavtaradze, was arrested, Stalin did not approve his death but put a dash next to Kavtaradze’s name. This tiny crayon line saved his life. Another old friend, Ambassador Troyanovsky, appeared on a list: “Do not touch,” wrote Stalin.[114] However much someone was denounced, Stalin’s favour could be well nigh impregnable, but once his trust was shattered, damnation was final though it might take years to come. The best way to survive was to be invisible because sometimes ghastly coincidences brought people into fatal contact with Stalin: Polish Communist Kostyrzewa was tending her roses near Kuntsevo when she found Stalin looking over her fence: “What beautiful roses,” he said. She was arrested that night—though this was at the time of the anti-Polish spy mania and perhaps she was on the lists anyway.
Stalin often forgot—or pretended to forget—what had happened to certain comrades and years later assumed an air of disappointment when he heard they had been shot. “You used to have such nice people,” he later remarked to Polish comrades. “Vera Kostyrzewa for example, do you know what’s become of her?” Even his remarkable Rolodex of a memory could not remember all his victims.12
Stalin enjoyed rattling his colleagues: one such was Stetsky, formerly in Bukharin’s kindergarten of young protégés who had successfully joined Stalin’s CC Cultural Department. Now Bukharin, at one of his “confrontations” with his accusers, gave Stalin an old letter Stetsky had written criticizing him: “Comrade Bukharin,” Stalin wrote to Stetsky, “gave me your letter to him [from 1926–27] with the hint that everything about Stetsky is not always clean. I have not read the letter. I’m giving it back to you. With Communist greetings, Stalin.”
Imagine Stetsky’s terror on receiving this handwritten note. He wrote back immediately: “Comrade Stalin, I’ve received your letter and thank you for your trust. On my letter… written when I was not clean… I belonged to the Bukharin group. Now I’m ashamed to remember it…” He was arrested and shot. 13
Stalin played games even with his closest comrades: Budyonny, for example, had performed well at the trial but when the arrests reached his own staff, he went to Voroshilov to complain with a list of innocent men under investigation. Voroshilov was terrified: “Speak to Stalin yourself.”
Budyonny confronted Stalin: “If these are the Enemy, who made the Revolution? It means we must be jailed too!”
“What are you saying, Semyon Mikhailovich?” Stalin laughed. “Are you crazy?” He called in Yezhov: “Budyonny here claims it’s time to arrest us.” Budyonny claimed that he gave his list to Yezhov who released some of the officers.14
112
This is eerily like Hitler’s comment on the genocide of the Jews, referring to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians in 1915: “After all, who today speaks of the massacre of the Armenians?”
113
This reached its climax when sixty children aged between ten and twelve were accused of forming “a terrorist counter-revolutionary group” in Leninsk-Kuznetsk and were imprisoned for eight months, until the NKVD themselves were arrested and the children released.
114
Stalin’s papers contain fascinating glimpses of his interventions: a father denounced his son to the police for having too many outrageous parties but the boy was arrested and embroiled in a case against Tomsky. The father appealed to Stalin who wrote on his note: “It’s necessary to change the punishment!” The father wrote to thank Stalin.