He encouraged bourgeois morality among his magnates: Zhdanov’s wife wanted to leave him for his alcoholism but just as Hitler insisted Goebbels return to his wife, so Stalin ordered, “You must stay together.” It was the same with Pavel Alliluyev. When Stalin heard that Kuibyshev mistreated his wife, he exclaimed: “If I’d known about it, I’d have put an end to such beastliness.”
However, if an old friend needed help in an embarrassing situation, Stalin was amused to oblige, as a fascinating letter from his archives shows. Alexander Troyanovsky, probably the diplomat, asked for his help with a mistress (one F. M. Gratsanova) who worked for the NKVD and had been given a job by Yagoda. Now if they both left their jobs simultaneously, “there’ll be gossip. So can I leave earlier than her… Please solve this for me as an old comrade,” he wrote to Stalin who helped with a snigger, writing: “Comrade Yagoda, arrange this business of Troyanovsky. He’s entangled, the devil, and we are responsible [for helping him out]. Oh to God, or to the Devil, with him! Arrange this business and make him a calm bloke [muzhik]. Stalin.” In 1938, Troyanovsky again wrote to ask Stalin to get Yezhov to let the lady keep her apartment. Stalin helped again.13
One of the mysteries of the Terror was Stalin’s obsession with forcing his victims to sign elaborate confessions of unlikely crimes before they died. It was only with the slaughter of the NKVD and military brass between March and July 1937 that Stalin emerged as the absolute dictator. Even then, he still had to convince his magnates to do his bidding. How did he do it?
There was the character of Stalin himself: the cult of personality was so pervasive in the country that “Stalin’s word was law,” said Khrushchev. “He could do no wrong. Stalin could see it all clearly.” Mikoyan thought that the cult was the reason no one could challenge Stalin. 14 But the Terror was not merely Stalin’s wilclass="underline" he may have inspired much of it, and it may have reflected his own hatreds and complexes, but his magnates were constantly urging him to purge more Enemies. Nonetheless when they knew the victim, they required proof. That was the reason Stalin paid such attention to the written words of confession, signed by the victims.
As soon as he received testimonies from Yezhov, Stalin distributed them to the Politburo who found this deluge of self-incrimination and denunciation hard to refute: in March 1937, Stalin typically sent a cover note to Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Mikoyan: “I ask you to recognize the testimony of Polish-German spies Alexandra (mother) and Tamara (daughter) Litzinskaya and Minervina, former secretary of A. Yenukidze.”
All the magnates knew Yenukidze well so Stalin made sure they saw all the evidence.15 When Mikoyan doubted the confessions, Stalin accused him of weakness but then called him back and showed him the signed testimonies: “He writes it himself… signs every page.” These preposterous confessions were enough to convince Kaganovich: “How could you not sign it [the death sentence] if according to the investigation… this man was an Enemy?” Zhdanov, according to his son, “did trust the denunciations from Yezhov… For some time, my father did believe there were Tsarist agents among the Leningrad leadership.” But when his parents knew the victims personally as friends, then his mother would say, “If he’s an Enemy of the People, I am one too!” Again and again, in whispered conversations, the leaders and their wives used these same words to express their doubts about one or two of the arrests although they believed in the guilt of most of the victims.
The magnates were being disingenuous in their shock. When they knew the person, they naturally took a special interest in the proof, but all of them understood and accepted that the details of the accusations and confessions did not matter. So why were they all killed? Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote that they were killed “for nothing” while Maya Kavtaradze, whose parents were arrested, simply says: “Don’t ask why!” They were killed not because of what they had done but because of what they might do. As Molotov explained, “The main thing was, that at the decisive moment, they could not be depended on.” Indeed, some, such as Rudzutak, were not even “consciously” disloyal. It was the potential nature of this betrayal which meant that Stalin could still admire the work or even personality of his victims: after Tukhachevsky and Uborevich’s shootings, he could still lecture the Politburo about the talent of the former and encourage soldiers to “Train your troops as Uborevich did.”16 But there was also a peculiarly religious aspect.
When Stalin briefed Vyshinsky on the January 1937 trial, he addressed the accused thus: “You lost faith”—and they must die for losing it. He told Beria: “An Enemy of the People is not only one who does sabotage but one who doubts the rightness of the Party line. And there are a lot of them and we must liquidate them.” Stalin himself implied this when he told a desperate comrade, who asked if he was still trusted, “I trust you politically, but I’m not so positive in the sphere of the future perspectives of Party activities,” which seems to mean that he trusted him now but not necessarily in the coming war.
“There is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge,” Bukharin, who understood Stalin so well, wrote to him from prison, because it would “arouse an everlasting distrust… In this way, the leadership is bringing about a full guarantee for itself.” The stronger the Enemies of the State, the stronger the State (and Stalin) had to be. This circle of “everlasting distrust” was his natural habitat. Did he believe every case? Not forensically, but this flint-hearted politician believed only in the sanctity of his own political necessity, sometimes fused with personal vengeance.
At the lunch after the seventh November parade, held as usual at Voroshilov’s flat and attended by the magnates, including Yezhov, Khrushchev, and Redens, Mikoyan played the toastmaster, proposing “witty toasts for everyone in turn.” Then “once more [a toast] to the great Stalin,” who then stood up to explain the Terror: anyone who dared to weaken the power of the Soviet State “in their thoughts, yes even their thoughts” would be considered an Enemy and “we will destroy them as a clan.” Then he actually toasted the massacre: “To the complete destruction of all Enemies, them and their kin!” at which the magnates gave “approving exclamations: To the great Stalin!” These might have been the words of a medieval Caucasian chieftain, “a brilliant politician of the Italian Renaissance”—or Ivan. He explained that he, no great orator and an unimpressive fellow, had succeeded the “eagle” Lenin because that was what the Party wanted. He and his men were driven by “holy fear” of not justifying the trust of the masses. Thus, Stalin went on to explain, this was truly a holy terror that stemmed from Bolshevism’s Messianic nature. No wonder Yezhov called the NKVD his “secret sect.”17
The squalidity of this sacred thuggery beggars belief: the distance from the torture chambers of the Lubianka to Stalin’s Little Corner is about a mile, but it was much closer then.