Maria was moved to a harsher prison. Zhenya sensed the danger for her and her children of being so close to Stalin, although she adored him until the end of her days, despite her terrible misfortunes. She drew back from Stalin while nagging Pavel to speak to him about their arrested friends. Apparently he did so: “They’re my friends—so put me in jail too!” Some were released.
The other Alliluyevs also did their bit: grandmother Olga, living a grande dame’s life in the Kremlin, said little. While the others believed that Stalin did not know the details and was being tricked by the NKVD, she alone of this ship of fools understood: “nothing happens that he does not know about.” But her estranged husband, the respected Sergei, appealed repeatedly to Stalin, waiting for him on the sofa in his apartment. Oftentimes he fell asleep there and awoke in the early hours to find Stalin arriving from dinner. There and then he begged for someone’s life. Stalin teased his father-in-law by repeating his favourite expression: “Exactly exactly”: “So you came to see me, ‘Exactly Exactly,’” Stalin joked.
Just after Svanidze’s arrest, Mikoyan arrived as normal at Kuntsevo for dinner with Stalin who, knowing how close he was to Alyosha, walked straight up to him and said: “Did you hear we’ve arrested Svanidze?”
“Yes… but how could it happen?”
“He’s a German spy,” replied Stalin.
“How can it be?” replied Mikoyan. “There’s no evidence of his sabotage. What’s the benefit of a spy who does nothing?”
Stalin explained that Svanidze was a “special sort of spy,” recruited when he was a German prisoner during the Great War, whose job was simply to provide information. Presumably, after this revelation, dinner at Stalin’s continued as usual.5
Once a leader was under attack, the Terror followed its own momentum. Just demoted, Postyshev, the tough, sallow-faced and arrogant “prince” of the Ukraine, who had so entertained Stalin by slow-dancing with Molotov, frantically proved his ferocity by eliminating virtually the entire bureaucracy in the Volga town of Kuibyshev.[129] Now, at the Plenum in January 1938, he was to be destroyed for killing the wrong people.
“The Soviet and Party leaderships were in Enemy hands,” claimed Postyshev.
“All of it? From top to bottom?” interrupted Mikoyan.
“Weren’t there any honest people?” asked Bulganin.
“Aren’t you exaggerating, Comrade Postyshev?” added Molotov.
“But there were errors,” Kaganovich declared, a cue to Postyshev to say:
“I shall talk about my personal errors.”
“I want you to tell the truth,” said Beria.
“Please permit me to finish and explain the whole business to the best of my ability,” Postyshev pleaded at which Kaganovich boomed: “You’re not very good at explaining it—that’s the whole point.”
Postyshev got up to defend himself but Andreyev snapped: “Comrade Postyshev, take your seat. This is no place for strolling around.” Postyshev’s strolling days were over: Malenkov attacked him. Stalin proposed his demotion from the Politburo: Khrushchev, who was soon appointed to run the Ukraine, replaced him as candidate member, stepping into the front rank. But the attacks on Postyshev contained a warning for Yezhov whose arrests were increasingly frenzied. Meanwhile Stalin seemed undecided about Postyshev:[130] his high-handedness attracted enemies who perhaps persuaded Stalin to destroy him. His last hope was a personal appeal to Stalin, probably written after a confrontation with his accusers: “Comrade Stalin, I ask you to receive me after the meeting.”
“I cannot receive you today,” Stalin wrote back. “Talk to Comrade Molotov.” Within days, he had been arrested.6 Stalin signed another order for 48,000 executions by quota while Marshal Yegorov followed his “beautiful” wife into the “meat grinder.” But Yezhov was already so exhausted that on 1 December 1937, Stalin was commissioned to supervise his week-long holiday.7
In early February, a drunken Blackberry led an expedition to purge Kiev where, aided by the new Ukrainian viceroy Khrushchev,[131] another 30,000 were arrested. Arriving to find that virtually the whole Ukrainian Politburo had been purged under his predecessor Kosior, Khrushchev went on to arrest several commissars and their deputies. The Politburo approved 2,140 victims on Khrushchev’s lists for shooting. Here again, he over-fulfilled his quota. In 1938, 106,119 people were arrested in Khrushchev’s Ukrainian Terror. Yezhov’s visit accelerated the bloodbath: “After Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov’s trip to Ukraine… the real destruction of hidden Enemies began,” announced Khrushchev, hailed as an “unswerving Stalinist” for his “merciless uprooting of Enemies.” The NKVD unveiled a conspiracy to poison horses and arrested two professors as Nazi agents. Khrushchev tested the so-called poison and discovered that it did not kill horses. Only after three different commissions had been appointed did he prove this particular conspiracy to be false—but one suspects that Khrushchev only questioned the NKVD’s work when Stalin had signalled his displeasure.8
In his cups in Kiev, Yezhov displayed alarming recklessness, boasting that the Politburo was “in his hands.” He could arrest anyone he wanted, even the leaders. One night he was literally carried home from a banquet. It could not be long before Stalin heard of his excesses, if not his dangerous boasting.9
Yezhov returned in time for the third and last show trial of the “Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites” which opened on 2 March, starring Bukharin, Rykov and Yagoda, who admitted killing Kirov and Gorky among others. Bukharin scored his own private triumph in a confession of guilt, laced with oblique Aesopian mockery of Stalin and Yezhov’s infantile plots. But this changed nothing. Yezhov attended the executions. He is said to have ordered Yagoda to be beaten: “Come on, hit him for all of us.”
But there was a hint of humanity when it came to the death of his old drinking companion, Yagoda’s ex-secretary Bulanov: he had him given some brandy.10
When it was over, Yezhov proposed a fourth super-trial against the Polish spies in the Comintern, which he had been preparing for months. But Stalin cancelled the trial. He rarely pursued one policy to the exclusion of all others: Stalin’s antennae sensed that the massacre was exhausting his own lieutenants, especially the louche Blackberry himself.
25. BERIA AND THE WEARINESS OF HANGMEN
On 4 April, Yezhov was appointed Commissar of Water Transport which made some sense since the building of canals was the task of the NKVD’s slave labour. But there was a worrying symmetry because Yagoda had been appointed to a similar Commissariat on his dismissal. Meanwhile Yezhov ravaged even the Politburo: Postyshev was being interrogated; Eikhe of West Siberia was arrested. Stalin promoted Kosior from Kiev to Moscow as Soviet Deputy Premier. However, in April 1938, Kosior’s brother was arrested. His one hope was to denounce his kin.
130
Did Stalin recall Postyshev’s slight cheekiness in 1931? When Stalin wrote to him to complain about the list of those to receive the Order of Lenin: “We give the Order of Lenin to any old shitters.” Postyshev replied cheerfully that the “shitters” were all approved by Stalin himself.
131
Khrushchev, like other regional bosses such as Beria and Zhdanov, became the object of an extravagant local cult: a “Song of Khrushchev” soon joined the “Song for Beria” and odes to Yezhov in the Soviet songbook.