Also on January 13, Mao moved from his hideout in the caves near Bao’an back to the town of Yan’an (pop. 3,000), the now legally acknowledged Red capital, where, in a mountain valley surrounded by fortress walls and towers, the Communists occupied the former residences of landowners and merchants. In the Little Corner on January 19, two directives were finalized. One criticized the Chinese Communists for working to split the Nationalists. The second ordered them to reorganize governance in the areas under their control from “soviets” to a “national revolutionary” front of all “democratic” forces, renounce land confiscations, and “direct serious attention to the machinations of Trotskyite elements, who in Xi’an, as in all of China, try to undermine the cause of the united anti-Japanese front with their provocational activities and are servants of the Japanese aggressors.”346 Mao would slow-walk any second united front. The Comintern gave the Chinese Communists more than $800,000 and promised a similar sum to come.347
On January 23, 1937, a second trial in Moscow of a parallel “Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center” opened, like the first, in the October Hall, after Stalin had hand-edited the charges.348 Ten of the seventeen defendants worked in Orjonikidze’s heavy industry commissariat.349 “And here I stand before you in filth, crushed by my own crimes,” Pyatakov publicly confessed, “bereft of everything through my own fault, a man who has lost his party, who has no friends, who has lost his family, who has lost his very self.” Yezhov had personally forced his erstwhile drinking buddy, in thirty-three days of torture, to capitulate to accusations of Trotskyism and plotting with Germany.350 (Yezhov was finally named to the highest rank, “general commissar of state security.”)351 Radek, in court, delivered a tour de force fabricated history of Trotskyism. His “features,” an American correspondent observed, “seemed curiously out of focus, his teeth charred and uneven, his eyes very much alive behind thick glasses.”352 Soviet newspapers and radio afforded wire-to-wire coverage, accompanied by orchestrated meetings at factories and farms. “Why such a great fuss over the trial?” Feuchtwanger would ask Dimitrov. “Incomprehensible. An atmosphere has been created of extreme unrest among the population, mutual suspicion, denunciations, and so forth. Trotskyism has been killed—why such a campaign?”353
Feuchtwanger found the allegations preposterous. And yet the oppositionists had organized a conspiratorial meeting, in summer 1932, at Zinoviev’s dacha, where expelled party members of the Leningrad opposition had discussed reviving their old links to Trotsky. A message from Trotsky to join forces had been carried into the Soviet Union. Stalin was also correct that the NKVD (then the OGPU) had missed these contacts, which was evidently part of the basis for his statement, in the September 1936 dismissal of Yagoda, that the NKVD was four years behind.354 Of course, this was a pathetic “bloc” incapable of consequential action (Smirnov, a supposed organizer of the conspiracy to murder Kirov in 1934, had been in prison since 1933).355 But the meeting was not an invention. The “terror” charges, too, contained the minutest kernel of truth. After a decree had rescinded Trotsky’s Soviet citizenship, he had written a spirited open letter to the central executive committee of the Soviet (which had nominal jurisdiction over citizenship) asserting that “Stalin has led us to a cul-de-sac. . . . It is necessary, at last, to carry out Lenin’s last insistent advice: remove Stalin.”356 Trotsky had not written “remove by assassination,” but how else could it be done?357
In the middle of the trial, on January 26, Shumyatsky showed Stalin and the inner circle a special newsreel of the dictator’s speech on the new constitution at the recent Eighth all-Union Extraordinary Congress of Soviets. The film depicted the Spassky Tower with its clock, the Grand Kremlin Palace interior, the congress delegates, Stalin’s appearance and the resulting ovation with shouts of hurrah, and then his entire speech, accompanied by documentary footage of Soviet achievements—factories, collective farms, the military, culture. This was the first time Stalin had been filmed in sound. “After it ended they applauded for a long time,” Shumyatsky noted. “I[osif] V[issarionovich] said: ‘It turned out to be good stuff, and you know, I had wanted to burn the negative when you previewed the fragments.’”358
Stalin was also reading the screenplay for A Great Citizen, by Friedrich Ermler (in collaboration with Manuel Bolshintsov and Mikhail Bleiman), based on the life and assassination of Kirov, who in the film was known as Pyotr Shakhov, the party secretary of an unspecified region. Stalin (January 27, 1937) praised the screenplay to Shumyatsky—“it is politically literate, no question. The literary achievements are also indisputable”—but wanted changes, complaining that the party opposition seemed to have a longer party membership than the members of the Central Committee (“reality gives the opposite picture”). Stalin also wrote that “references to Stalin must be eliminated” in favor of “the Central Committee.” The film’s assassin (Bryantsev) was depicted as a former Trotskyite who, after the defeat of the opposition, wormed his way into the position of director of the Museum of the Revolution. Stalin proposed that the suspense be shifted from Shakhov’s assassination to the larger forces behind it, instructing that “the struggle between the Trotskyites and the Soviet government should not resemble a struggle between two coteries for power, one of which ‘got lucky’ in the fight, the other ‘did not,’” but a struggle between two programs: the socialist program, supported by the people, versus a Trotskyite program “for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR,” at the behest of fascism that was “repudiated by the people.”359 He further demanded that the murder scene itself be excised (Ermler would instead shoot a dark corridor, with the sound of the gun going off).360
On January 28, 1937, Dimitrov had sent yet another telegram to Mao, reporting on the new trial in Moscow and concluding, “We await information on your concrete measures in the struggle against Trotskyites.”361 On the evening of the 29th, Orjonikidze visited his former first deputy Pyatakov in prison for the last time and observed his utterly smashed face. Several hours later, at 3:00 a.m. on the 30th, Vasily Ulrich read out the prearranged verdict at the triaclass="underline" thirteen death sentences, including Pyatakov; four others convicted but not to be executed, including Radek (ten years of penal labor).362 The party machine turned out a crowd on Red Square, reported at 200,000, in temperatures of 16 degrees below zero (27 below Celsius), for speeches by Khrushchev and Shvernik. The masses carried banners demanding immediate executions, which had already been implemented.363
In Berlin on the 29th, Kandelaki had passed to Schacht a proposal in Litvinov’s name for political negotiations between diplomatic representatives, agreeing to treat them “as confidential and not to divulge anything, . . . if this is what the German government demands.”364 But Hitler’s speeches more and more resembled declarations of war. “Any further treaty connections with the present Bolshevist Russia would be completely worthless for us,” he told the Reichstag on the fourth anniversary of his chancellorship, on January 30. “It is out of the question that National Socialist Germany could ever be bound to protect Bolshevism or that we, on our side, could ever agree to accept the assistance of a Bolshevist state. For I fear that the moment any nation agreed to accept such assistance, it would thereby seal its own doom.”
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