Stalin had no confidence in him. The dictator continued to be frustrated over a perceived NKVD mishmash of promiscuous arrests and indolence against enemies.42 Yagoda (“in accordance with your instructions”) had sent a team of operatives to investigate the Leningrad and Siberian NKVD branches. “The facts that were uncovered,” he had reported to Stalin (September 1934), “convinced me that [Nikolai] Alekseyev (Western Siberian NKVD) and Medved are absolutely incapable of leading our work in the new conditions and providing that sharp turnabout in state security management methods now necessary.” Yagoda proposed sacking the two branch chiefs, to set examples, and recommended a chessboard of transfers, which would bring Henriks Štubis (b. 1894), an ethnic Latvian known as Leonid Zakovsky (“unquestionably a strong and capable operative”), from Belorussia to Leningrad, with Medved recalled to Moscow to determine “if he is still fit for work in the NKVD or utterly burned out.”43
This was the second time Medved’s transfer had been bruited; the first, in 1931, Kirov had blocked. The Leningrad party boss socialized with him (the childless Kirov was especially fond of Medved’s boy Misha).44 Kirov was also an infamous womanizer, whose carousing was a matter of citywide gossip. Kirov’s wife, Maria Markus (b. early 1880s), was Jewish (like the wives of Molotov, Voroshilov, Andreyev, Kuibyshev, and Poskryobyshev). They had met in Vladikavkaz in 1909, at the offices of the newspaper Terek, where she worked as a bookkeeper. She suffered from headaches, insomnia, and a hormonal disorder, frequently screamed, and threatened to kill herself; her windows had been barred. She’d had a few small strokes and was effectively confined to a state rest home in suburban Tolmachevo.45 To what extent she knew of her husband’s extramarital affairs—ballerinas, young women in the apparatus—remains unclear, but they were certainly Medved’s worry: he had to help conceal them, even as he was under severe pressure from Pauker in Moscow to strengthen Kirov’s protection.46 Kirov’s personal guard had ballooned from three to as many as fifteen men after Stalin’s visit to Leningrad in summer 1933, and Kirov’s office had been relocated to a less accessible location.47
MONGOLS AND KIROV
On November 15, 1934, Stalin received a delegation led by Mongolian prime minister Genden, the latter’s third annual audience with Stalin, an unusual number for any foreign leader, but impoverished, landlocked Mongolia was the Soviet Union’s sole “ally.” As a result of purges and mass quitting, the Mongolian People’s Party, already severely outnumbered by lamas, had dropped to half its peak strength of 40,000.48 Stalin, over the course of three hours, pressed Genden on the lamas: How numerous and powerful were the monks? Did the people follow them or the Communists? How did the monks finance their activities? These issues, Genden tried to answer, were “complex,” “subtle.” “In a war in which you cannot defeat the enemy by a frontal assault, you should use roundabout maneuvering,” Stalin advised. “Your first action should be to put your own teachers in the schools to battle the monks for influence among the youth. Teachers and activists must be the direct conduits of your policy. . . . The government must build more water wells to show the people that they, not the monks, are more concerned about their economic needs.” He also advised producing films and promoting theater in the Mongolian language and building a strong army of functionally and politically literate conscripts.
Stalin divulged his theory of rule. “In connection with the big lamas who commit this or that political crime, you need to punish them, bringing them to court for treason against the motherland, and not for general indictment of counterrevolutionary work,” he explained. “In such cases, you need open trials so that the commoners, the arats, understand that the lamas are linked to foreign enemies; they betrayed the motherland. But you can do this only from time to time at this point.” He added: “Foreign powers will not recognize you as long as it is unclear who is stronger, you or the monks. After you strengthen your government and army and raise the economic and cultural level of your people, the imperialist powers will acknowledge you. If they do not, now being strong, you can spit in their faces.”49
This was how Stalin was ruling the Soviet Union.
Genden, the offspring of a poor nomad family who had learned to read and write, was a gifted politician with a feel for the masses, and full of guile. Trying to ingratiate himself, he announced that the illiterate Choibalsan (b. 1895), minister of livestock and agriculture, who had spent considerable time in Moscow being groomed by Voroshilov, would become first deputy prime minister. Choibalsan was already serving as a Soviet agent in the Mongolian leadership.50
Agranov forwarded to Stalin a decrypted intercept of a telegram (November 17, 1934) from ambassador Joseph Grew, in Tokyo, to the U.S. State Department, concerning a conversation with Japanese foreign minister Kōki Hirota, who had stated that, given the various agreements among European powers, Japan could not remain isolated and would have to follow suit. “A decision was taken such that the foreign ministry would search for an ally,” Hirota was quoted as saying of the cabinet. “The chosen country should above all have no specific interests in Asia. In this category could be included Russia or England.” Stalin underlined that passage. “But the USSR is completely excluded as a potential ally because of its aggressive position toward Japan and its interests.” By contrast, Hirota thought a deal could be reached with Britain over weapons sales and trade, provided Japanese interests were recognized in China. The United States was also on Hirota’s potential ally list, and he concluded what Grew deemed an “unusual conversation” with a desire for friendly relations. Stalin wrote on the document, “And so it happens, it’s become tough for Hirota. Interesting.”51
On November 27, Stalin received the Mongols again, this time with Kirov in tow, even though he was not a member of the politburo’s Mongolia commission.Stalin began by noting that he was forgiving all of Mongolia’s debt as of January 1, 1934—30 million tugriks, the equivalent of almost 10 million gold rubles (at the official exchange rate)—and half the debt accumulated in the coming year: another 33 million tugriks, with the other half to be paid starting in 1941. “If you do not have a good army, the imperialists, Japan, will swallow you,” he said, pointing out that the Mongolian army numbered only 10,000. He said their army budget was 14 million tugriks but offered to pay 6 million a year for five years for expansion, and advised the Mongols to pay their portion with state monopolies on tobacco, salt, and matches, alongside alcohol. He also informed them that they needed to sign bilateral pacts of nonaggression and of mutual assistance, but that the second, for now, would not be published, a message for Japan, but not an overly provocative one.52 The nonpublic pact would allow the Red Army to defend the USSR by reassuming advance positions on Mongolian territory. “There should be a difference between Soviet assistance in wartime and in peacetime,” Demid, a graduate of the prestigious Officers’ Cavalry School in Tver, urged.53 Resistance proved futile, however.54 Soon, some 2,000 Red Army troops would reenter Mongolia.
Kirov had returned to Moscow because of a Central Committee plenum, the third and final of the year, from November 25 to 28, 1934. It dealt with the end of bread rationing, which involved some 50 million people, a costly subsidy and administrative expense amid financial challenges. Rye bread, which cost 50 kopecks per kilo in a state store with a ration coupon (and 1 ruble 50 kopecks at commercial shops), would now cost 1 ruble, a significant increase for workers.55 “What is the idea of the policy of abolition of the rationing system?” Stalin remarked at the plenum. “The cash economy is one of the few bourgeois economic mechanisms that we socialists must make full use of. . . . It is very flexible, and we need it.”56 Kirov said little, as usual. Afterward, Stalin took a small group, including Kirov, to the Kremlin cinema, where Shumyatsky showed Chapayev, which Stalin said he was seeing for the eleventh time. Orjonikidze, meanwhile, was suffering from heart palpitations and stomach pains. He had been the only member of the inner circle left out of that fall’s harvest mobilization, and had had his holiday extended. Stalin had compelled him to stay away from the capital until November 29. By the time Orjonikidze returned to Moscow, his friend Kirov had left.57 Stalin saw Kirov off at the station.58