Simon Montefiore - Stalin

“I pointed out to him the absurdity of his proposal,” Yezhov reported drily to Stalin. On 12 September, Pyatakov was arrested. Sergo, recuperating in Kislovodsk, voted for his expulsion from the Central Committee but he must have been deeply worried. A shadow of his former self, grey and exhausted, he was so ill that the Politburo restricted him to a three-day week. Now the NKVD began to arrest his specialist non-Bolshevik advisers and he appealed to Blackberry: “Comrade Yezhov, please look into this.” He was not alone. Kaganovich and Sergo, those “best friends,” not only shared the same swaggering dynamism but both headed giant industrial commissariats. Kaganovich’s railway experts were being arrested too. Meanwhile Stalin sent Sergo transcripts of Pyatakov’s interrogations in which his deputy confessed to being a “saboteur.” 8The destruction of “experts” was a perennial Bolshevik sport but the arrest of Sergo’s brother revealed Stalin’s hand: “This couldn’t have been done without Stalin’s consent. But Stalin’s agreed to it without even calling me,” Sergo told Mikoyan. “We were such close friends! And suddenly he lets them do such a thing!” He blamed Beria. 9

Sergo appealed to Stalin, doing all he could to save his brother. He did too much: the arrest of a man’s clan was a test of loyalty. Stalin was not alone in taking a dim view of this bourgeois emotionalism: Molotov himself attacked Sergo for being “guided only by emotions… thinking only of himself.” 10

On 9 November, Sergo suffered another heart attack. Meanwhile, the third Ordzhonikidze brother, Valiko, was sacked from his job in the Tiflis Soviet for claiming that Papulia was innocent. Sergo swallowed his pride and called Beria, who replied: “Dear Comrade Sergo! After your call, I quickly summoned Valiko… Today Valiko was restored to his job. Yours, L. Beria.” This bears the pawprints of Stalin’s cat-and-mouse game, his meandering path to open destruction, perhaps his moments of nostalgic fondness, his supersensitive testing of limits.

But Stalin now regarded Sergo as an enemy: his biography had just been published for his fiftieth birthday and Stalin studied it carefully, scribbling sarcastically next to the passages that acclaimed Sergo’s heroism: “What about the CC? The Party?” 11

Stalin and Sergo returned separately to Moscow where fifty-six of the latter’s officials were in the toils of the NKVD. Sergo however remained a living restraint on Stalin, making brave little gestures towards the beleaguered Rightists. “My dear kind warmly blessed Sergo,” encouraged Bukharin: “Stand firm!” At the theatre, when Stalin and the Politburo filed into the front seats, Sergo spotted ex-Premier Rykov and his daughter Natalya (who tells the story), alone and ignored, twenty rows up the auditorium. Leaving Stalin, Sergo galloped up to kiss them. The Rykovs were moved to tears in gratitude. [100] “Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that,” wrote Oscar Wilde in De Profundis about Robbie Ross waiting among the crowd at Reading Station and being the only one to step forward and raise his hat as the disgraced writer travelled to Reading Gaol. The stakes were even higher for Sergo.

At the 7 November parade, Stalin, on the Mausoleum, spotted Bukharin in an ordinary seat and sent a Chekist to say, “Comrade Stalin has invited you on to the Mausoleum.” Bukharin thought he was being arrested but then gratefully climbed the steps. 12

Bukharin, the enchanting but hysterical intellectual whom everyone adored, bombarded Stalin with increasingly frantic letters through which we can feel the screw tightening. When writers fear for their lives, they write and write: “Big child!” Stalin scribbled across one letter; “Crank!” on another.

Bukharin could not stop appealing to Stalin, about whom he was having dreams: “Everything connected with me is criticized,” he wrote on 19 October 1936. “Even for the birthday of Sergo, they did not propose me to write an article… Maybe I’m not honourable. To whom can I go, as a beloved person, without expecting a smash in the teeth? I see your intention but I write to you as I wrote to Illich [Lenin] as a really beloved man whom I even see in dreams as I did Illich. Maybe it’s strange but it’s so. It’s hard for me to live under suspicion and my nerves are already on edge. Finally, on a sleepless night, I wrote a poem,” an embarrassing hymn to “Great Stalin!” 13

Bukharin’s other old friend was Voroshilov. The two had been so close that Bukharin called him his “honey seagull” and even wrote his speeches for him. Klim had presented him with a pistol engraved with his love and friendship. Voroshilov tried to avoid Bukharin’s letters: “Why do you hurt me so?” he asked Klim in one letter.

Now in real danger, Bukharin wrote a long plea to Klim in which he even announced that he was “delighted the dogs [Zinoviev and Kamenev] were shot… Forgive this confused letter: a thousand thoughts are rushing around inside my head like strong horses and I have no strong reins. I embrace you because I am clean. N Bukharin.” Voroshilov decided he had to end this ghost of a friendship so he ordered his adjutant to copy the letter to the Politburo and write: “I enclose herewith, on Comrade Voroshilov’s orders, Comrade Voroshilov’s reply to Bukharin.” Voroshilov’s reply was a study in amorality, cruelty, fear and cowardice:

To Comrade Bukharin,

I return your letter in which you permit yourself to make vile attacks on the Party leadership. If you were hoping… to convince me of your complete innocence, all you have convinced me of is that henceforth I should distance myself from you… And if you do not repudiate in writing your foul epithets against the Party leadership, I shall even regard you as a scoundrel.

Bukharin was heartbroken by “your appalling letter. My letter ended with ‘I embrace you.’ Your letter ends with ‘scoundrel.’” 14

Yezhov was creating the case against the so-called Leftists, Radek and Pyatakov, but by December, he had also managed to procure evidence against Bukharin and Rykov. The December Plenum was a sort of arraignment of these victims and, as always with Stalin, a test of the conditions necessary to destroy them. Stalin was the dominant will, but the Terror was not the work of one man. One can hear the evangelical enthusiasm of their blood-lust that sometimes totters on the edge of tragicomedy. Kaganovich even told a Stalinist shaggy-dog story.

Yezhov proudly listed the two hundred persons arrested in the Trotskyite Centre in the Azov–Black Sea organization, another three hundred in Georgia, four hundred in Leningrad. Molotov was not the only one who had avoided assassination: Kaganovich had just escaped death in the Urals. First Yezhov dealt with the Pyatakov–Radek trial that was about to begin. When he read out Pyatakov’s description of the workers as a “herd of sheep,” these frightened fanatics reacted as if at a nightmarish revivalist meeting.

“The swine!” shouted Beria. There was a “noise of indignation in the room.” Then the record reveals:

A voice: “The brutes!”

“That’s how low this vicious Fascist agent, this degenerate Communist, has sunk, God knows what else! These swine must be strangled!”

“What about Bukharin?” a voice called.

“We need to talk about them,” agreed Stalin.

“There’s a scoundrel for you,” snarled Beria.

“What swine!” exclaimed another comrade. Yezhov announced that Bukharin and Rykov were indeed members of the “back-up Centre.” They were actually terrorists yet these assassins were sitting there with them. Bukharin was now meant to confess his sins and implicate his friends. He did not.