Was it not plausible that these former party oppositionists—armed and, by their own admission, meeting to criticize Stalin—would in shadowy ways have taken part in the killing of Kirov, who, after all, had displaced their patron Zinoviev?135 Kotolynov, according to one interrogation protocol (December 12), would admit only that “our organization bears the political and moral responsibility for the murder of Kirov by Nikolayev, having reared Nikolayev in an atmosphere of embittered relations to the leaders of the Soviet Communist Party.” Here was one formula.136 On December 16, Zinoviev and Kamenev were arrested.137 Zinoviev confessed to a host of fictitious crimes, and agreed to name “all those I can and will remember as former participants in the anti-party struggle.”138 Pravda and Leningrad Pravda (December 17) ran the same front-page editorial asserting that Nikolayev had been directed by the former Leningrad opposition “Zinovievites” to kill Kirov. Here was a different formula.
FIRST TRIAL
Stalin sent Zhdanov to replace Kirov as first secretary. With the regime and much of the country in mourning, the dictator ordered that his official birthday, on December 21, 1934—his fifty-fifth—not be celebrated publicly. Nonetheless, the apparatchiks gathered the obligatory well-wishes.139 On the day itself, Agranov, Vyshinsky, and Akulov arrived from Leningrad and, along with Yagoda and Ulrich, were in Stalin’s office for an hour, until 8:30 p.m., evidently to go over the pending trial.140 Then a private celebration took place at the Near Dacha, in the company of the in-laws from both deceased wives and the inner circle. They had to add a second table. Stalin, Artyom would recall, “read the birthday congratulations in the newspapers, and commented on them humorously.” 141
Orjonikidze pronounced a toast for Kirov, which, according to Maria Svanidze’s diary, elicited tears and a moment of silence. Someone mentioned that Dora Khazan-Andreyeva had attended the Industrial Academy with Nadya. Stalin stood. “Since the Academy was mentioned,” he said, “permit me to drink to Nadya.” “All stood and silently approached Iosif to clink their glasses,” Svanidze wrote. Around 1:00 a.m., they got up from the table and Stalin put on the gramophone and people danced—the Caucasus lezginka or Cossack hopak—though there was not much room. Budyonny played the accordion, Zhdanov the piano. “The Caucasus people,” Svanidze recorded, “sang sad songs, polyphonic—the Master sang in a high tenor.”142
Newspapers announced the next morning that the NKVD had turned over the investigatory results for trial. But on December 23, Pravda, shockingly, announced that “the NKVD has established a lack of sufficient evidence to turn Zinoviev and Kamenev over to the courts.” Stalin also decided against a public trial of the remaining “Zinovievites,” perhaps because the extracted confessions were of anti-Stalin conversations, not plotting terrorism. The indictments published in Pravda and Leningrad Pravda of fourteen people headed by Nikolayev mentioned a connection to a foreign consulate but stopped short of naming it, as if afraid to have to prove it, or wary of involving Nazi Germany in discussions of Kirov’s murder.143
In Leningrad, Ulrich opened the closed trial on December 28 at 2:20 p.m., and read the guilty verdicts before dawn the next morning: death penalty. Not a single Smolny witness had been summoned to the trial. (Nearly fourscore of them—every witness to the events that day and many others—would soon be transferred to other work, expelled from the party, or exiled.) “Nikolayev shouted, ‘Severe,’” according to one of Agranov’s soft-pedaling telegrams to Stalin, which failed to report that Nikolayev and others recanted their testimony.144 The executions were carried out within an hour; the head executioner was said to have broken down in tears at memories of the fallen Kirov.145 Kotolynov was shot last. “This whole trial is rubbish,” he had told Agranov and Vyshinsky. “People have been executed. Now I’ll be executed, too. But all of us, with the exception of Nikolayev, are not guilty of anything.”146
Hundreds more would be shot, none of whom had any link to the murder. (Union-wide, as many as 6,500 people might have been arrested and charged under the December 1 antiterror law in the first month alone.)147 “It’s hard to believe that in the twentieth century there is a corner of Europe where medieval barbarians have taken up residence, where savage concepts are accompanied so strangely by science, art, and culture,” Nina Lugovskaya, an atypical fifteen-year-old student in Moscow, the daughter of a persecuted “bourgeois” economist, recorded in her diary (December 30). “To call Nikolayev a coward! He went willingly to his death for what he believed in, he was better than all those so-called leaders of the working class put together!”148
REWRITING THE CAUCASUS
Beria had been pressing his minions in Tiflis to produce a Stalin hagiography. He had ordered systematic gathering of “recollections” of Stalin in the underground years and appointed Toroshelidze, chairman of the Writers’ Union of Georgia, Tiflis University rector, and director of the Stalin Institute, to galvanize the work. The “reminiscences” were assembled, but the “scholarly” biography did not materialize.149 Lakoba, meanwhile, had been active, too. Hashim Smyrba, an old brigand, had once hidden Stalin in his hut a few miles outside Batum, in the Muslim region of Ajaristan, in 1901–2, when Stalin and his accomplices, disguised with veils to look like Muslim women, transported illegal leaflets to Batum in fruit baskets. Hashim had died in 1922, at age eighty-one. Lakoba had an ethnographer collect material and forwarded to Stalin a pamphlet, Stalin and Hashim, the Years 1901–1902: Episodes from the Batum Underground. “Comrade Lakoba!” he wrote back. “Your Caucasus essay makes a good impression. And Hashim, as in life, is simple, naïve, but honest and devoted. Such helpmates were not few in the revolution; with their hearts they felt the truth.”150 Lakoba published the pamphlet in Abkhazia, in a print run of 20,000. (Kaganovich sent the paper.) It called Stalin “a person such as history gives to humanity just once in a hundred or two hundred years.”
Playfully, the pamphlet noted that Hashim and other villagers had surmised that “Soso” was counterfeiting money and asked for some, but the business turned out to be revolutionary leaflets. Hashim: “You’re a good man, Soso. Only it’s a pity that you are not a Muslim.” Stalin: “And what would happen if I were a Muslim?” Hashim: “If you converted to Islam, I would give you in marriage seven beauties the likes of which you probably never, ever saw. Do you want to be a Muslim?” “Comrade Stalin answered with a smile, ‘OK!’ and shook Hashim’s hand.” (Stalin ended up being imprisoned.)151
Lakoba wrote the preface to the Hashim pamphlet, emphasizing that Stalin, too, was simple, close to the masses—a winning formula.152 By contrast, Beria had a far more ambitious and difficult aim—not two years in Batum, but the entire Caucasus before 1917, and falsification of a past that many people knew firsthand.153 One of those people was Yenukidze, who was the godfather of the deceased Nadya by virtue of his acquaintance with her father, the worker-revolutionary Sergei Alliluyev. Yenukidze was also a founding member of the Baku group of the party (spring 1901) and had established the illegal printing press in the Caucasus—code-named “Nino” (Nina in Russian), with his cousin Trifon—that had reprinted the exiled Lenin’s illegal Iskra newspaper. Known in the underground as the Little Golden Fish, Yenukidze had serialized his autobiographical Our Underground Printing Presses in the Caucasus in a journal in 1923 and had not artificially magnified Stalin’s role.154 As business manager of regime affairs from early on, he had served Stalin faithfully.155 But Mekhlis, writing to Stalin (January 4, 1935), listed a number of “mistakes” in a Yenukidze Pravda article (December 29, 1934) on the thirtieth anniversary of the 1904 Baku strike, and criticized his book on the illegal printing press, whose third edition had just been published. Stalin had Mekhlis’s denunciation of Yenukidze circulated to the politburo, and marked up the text himself: When was the Baku party committee established? Who created the printing press? Yenukidze seemed to be placing himself above the martyr Lado Ketskhoveli, the youth who had introduced Stalin to Marxism.156