STRENGTHENING SOCIALIST LEGALITY
On July 10, 1934, after six months of internal back-and-forth, the regime announced the replacement of the OGPU by the NKVD (the people’s commissariat of internal affairs).324 Mężyński had appealed to Stalin yet again in early 1934 to be allowed to resign. (“No activities. Only lying down 24 hours a day,” he had written in his notebook in Kislovodsk. “This is death. You lie all day in the hammock, and death sits across from you.”)325 Stalin proposed that Kaganovich confer with him and possibly accept his request. Then, on May 10, Mężyński’s heart had stopped. Four days later, his ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall, with an artillery salute.326 Rumors had Stalin set to appoint Mikoyan, which frightened Yagoda’s gang and brightened other Chekists who appreciated Mikoyan’s sly humor and lectures at their club.327 But Stalin named Yagoda commissar and Yankel Sorenson, known as Yakov Agranov, his first deputy.328 The regime had just expanded Article 58 of the RSFSR criminal code (regarding counterrevolutionary activities) with new subarticles (2–13) to cover attempts to seize power, espionage, anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation, and Trotskyism.329 As Stalin had proposed, military desertion was now punished as treason, with sentences of execution or, in extenuating circumstances, ten years in confinement.330 Nonetheless, the formation of the NKVD was conceived as a genuine legal reform.331 The politburo would soon decree a parallel expansion in the number of judges and procuracy personnel, with pay raises.332 Kaganovich explained that “the reorganization of the OGPU means that, as we are in more normal times, we can punish through the court and not resort to extrajudicial repression, as we have until now.”333
This new mandate had to be explained to police operatives.334 “In capitalist countries, instead of the ‘celebrated’ bourgeois order, there is chaos, a sea of blood, extrajudicial executions, gas, machine guns and armored cars on the streets,” Yagoda told them in a speech at the NKVD’s founding. “If now, in the village, we do not have expansive kulak formations that we had previously, if in the city the counterrevolution does not have the character it had before, the question arises: What guises, what forms are possible for the activities of counterrevolutionary agents?” He answered that former parties (SRs, Mensheviks, bourgeois nationalists) could reanimate and link up with Communist oppositionist elements (Trotskyites, rightists) for espionage and sabotage, requiring the NKVD to abjure mass arrests in favor of “subtle, painstaking, and probing investigations.”335 Investigations had to be conducted with greater observance of procedural rules.336 Ultimately, the reform was aimed at better coherence of the state, under the slogan “strengthening revolutionary legality.”337 But none of this meant imposing limits on Stalin’s power, whose extralegal operation caused many of the very problems of arbitrariness about which he complained.338
ARTISTS AND THE STATE
Technically, the Union of Soviet Writers was a civic organization, but it was blatantly an arm of the state.339 It was spending almost no time on aesthetics.340 Its main activity, in the run-up to the anticipated founding congress, consisted of endless meetings of its governing board and manifold committees, and entertainment. The union’s headquarters occupied a nineteenth-century mansion on Vorovsky (formerly Cooks’) Street, in what had been Moscow’s most aristocratic neighborhood, part of the ancient Dolgorukov estate. (This figured in Tolstoy’s War and Peace as the Rostov estate.) Known as the “Central House of the Writers,” the HQ had a library with newspapers and journals, a restaurant, a competitive billiards team, sport groups for tennis, chess, and horseback riding, and study sections for thematic subjects and foreign languages. It also took over a fledgling dacha colony, at Peredelkino, which, like the Moscow HQ, would afford a certain degree of self-organized intellectual life (circles, house visits), although this was shadowed by willing and blackmailed informants.341
Two years after the politburo decree announcing it, the writers’ union’s founding congress had still not met, having been postponed several times. Gorky had been set to deliver the keynote, but on May 11, 1934, his son Maxim Peshkov passed away, at age thirty-eight. He had taken part in a drinking binge with some secret police operatives at a May Day picnic, been left to sleep it off outside on a bench, and been diagnosed with influenza. He was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery on May 12 (the day before Mężyński’s body was placed on view at the House of Trade Unions). Gorky was shattered. “He no longer belonged to himself, and seemed that he was not a person but an institution,” obliged to carry on, noted one close friend.342 Gossips speculated that the regime had killed Gorky’s son to intimidate him.343 But as the congress’s new opening date approached, Gorky would write a forceful letter to Stalin, asking to be relieved of his role as chairman, and would submit a heated article for Pravda lashing out at party hacks trying to control literature (which Kaganovich authorized Mekhlis to hold back). “Literary affairs are sharpening,” Kaganovich would write to Stalin, who, preoccupied with other matters on which Kaganovich sought guidance (Japan, grain procurements), would answer, three days later, “It must be explained to all Communist writers that the Master in literature, as in all other areas, is only the Central Committee, and that they are obliged to subordinate themselves unconditionally to the latter.”344
A Literary Fund was established on July 28, 1934, with the aim of subsidizing cultural figures in need, including up-and-coming writers, formalizing an ad hoc practice whereby they were granted shoes or winter coats. The money came from 10 percent deductions in the honoraria paid by publishing houses, as well as 0.5 to 2 percent of the fees for live performances. Additionally, the state budget contributed 25 percent of the Literary Fund’s resources. Soon, about 100,000 requests for aid accumulated (many writers submitted multiple petitions).345 Behind closed doors, writers disagreed vehemently on whether such subsidies enhanced productivity or blocked it by removing hunger.346 The Literary Fund obtained permission to build more dachas at Peredelkino as well. Of the three dozen writers’ families initially granted residency, few were Communist party members. Most writers failed to pay the nominal rent.347
WRITING HISTORY
On July 23, 1934, Stalin received the British writer H. G. Wells—who had interviewed Lenin—and they argued the world.348 (Radek would send Stalin a translation of passages about the dictator in Wells’s autobiography, published the same year, noting, “We didn’t manage to seduce the girl.”)349 Stalin’s last meeting in Moscow was July 29. Vlasik arranged for their special train to stop at Sochi’s remote freight yard for security reasons, but Stalin—for all his security anxieties—detested having to hide and insisted on detraining at the regular passenger station. His black Rolls-Royce awaited him, but he enjoyed walking a bit on foot, startling onlookers.350 That summer, he planned to work on a new history textbook. A few years back, in a letter to the journal Proletarian Revolution, he had exploded in fury at one historian’s criticisms of Lenin for supposedly having insufficiently criticized the danger of centrism in German Social Democracy before the Great War. Stalin, right on the facts, had tendentiously exaggerated the author’s argument, and called the article “anti-party and semi-Trotskyite.” Stalin also rejected the author’s claim that more documents remained to be uncovered. “Who besides hopeless bureaucrats would rely only on paper documents?” he wrote. “Who besides archival rats do not understand that the party and its leaders need to be assessed above all by their actions, and not only by their declarations?”351