Simon Montefiore - Stalin

When Poskrebyshev called Bukharin, Anna “began to say farewell,” in that heart-rending moment of eternal parting, which was to be shared by millions in the coming years. Poskrebyshev called again: the Plenum was waiting, but Bukharin was in no hurry. He fell to his knees before his young Anna: “With tears in his eyes, he begged forgiveness for my ruined life. But he begged me to raise our son as a Bolshevik—‘A Bolshevik without fail,’ he said twice.” He swore her to deliver the memorized letter to the Party: “You’re young and you’ll live to see it.” He then rose from the floor, hugged her, kissed her and said, “See you don’t get angry, Anyutka. There are irritating misprints in history but the truth will triumph.”

“We understood,” Anna wrote, “we were parting forever.” She could only say, “See that you don’t lie about yourself,” but this was much to ask. Pulling on his leather coat, he disappeared into the alleyways around the Great Kremlin Palace.

Moments later, Boris Berman, a fat, flashy old-fashioned Chekist in “a stylish suit” with big rings on his fingers and one elongated fingernail, arrived with the NKVD to search the apartment. Meanwhile, at the Plenum, Stalin proposed that they be “handed over to the NKVD.”

“Does anyone wish to speak?” Andreyev asked. “No. Are there any other proposals besides the one made by Comrade Stalin? No. Let’s vote… All those against? None. Any abstentions? Two. So the resolution carries with two abstentions—Bukharin and Rykov.” The two, who had once ruled Russia alongside Stalin, were arrested as they left the Plenum. Bukharin took that one step that was like falling a thousand miles: one minute, he was living in the Kremlin, with cars, dachas and servants. The next minute, he was passing through the gates of the Lubianka, handing over his possessions, being stripped, having his rectum checked, his clothes returned though without belt or shoelaces, and then being locked in a cell with the usual stool pigeon to provoke him. But Bukharin was not tortured.

Bukharin’s Anna and Rykov’s half-paralysed wife and daughter Natalya were arrested soon afterwards, serving almost two decades of slave labour. [103] Natalya Rykova survived fifteen years of slave labour on the White Sea because “of the beauty of nature that I saw every day in the forests and the kindness of people for there were more kind people than bad people.” The author thanks Natalya Rykova, aged eighty-five, indomitable and alive today in Moscow, who generously told her story without bitterness, but with tears running down her cheeks. Anna Larina was parted from her and Bukharin’s baby son. But she too survived and wrote her memoirs.

This ugly meeting dealt other blows too: Yezhov attacked Yagoda. Molotov, giving Sergo’s report, cited 585 wreckers in Heavy Industry; Kaganovich ranted about the “unmasking” of Enemies on the railways.

Stalin used the “heroic denunciatrix” of Kiev, Polia Nikolaenko, against the Ukrainian potentate, Postyshev. Stalin hailed her as a “simple member of the Party” treated by Postyshev like “an annoying fly… Sometimes the simple people are much closer to the truth than certain higher examples.” Postyshev was moved to another job, not arrested. The warning was clear: no Politburo “prince” and his “family group” were safe. “We old members of the Politburo, we’re soon leaving the scene,” Stalin explained ominously. “It’s the law of nature. We would like to have some teams of replacements.”

Stalin, politician and man, was brilliantly equipped for the constant intensification of struggle which he formulated into his creed of Terror: “The further we move forward, the more success we have, the more embittered will the remnants of the destroyed exploiter classes become, the sooner they will resort to extreme forms of struggle.” 4

Blackberry set about converting the NKVD into a “secret sect” of sacred executioners. Yezhov despatched Yagoda’s officers to inspect the provinces and then arrested them on the train. Three thousand Chekists were to be executed. Security chief Pauker and Stalin’s brother-in-law Redens remained in their posts. Between 19 and 21 March, Yezhov summoned the surviving Chekists to the Officers’ Club. There, the diminutive Commissar-General announced that Yagoda had been a German spy since 1907 (when he joined the Party) and was also a corrupt thief. Yezhov referred absurdly to his own tininess: “I may be small in stature but my hands are strong—Stalin’s hands.” The killing would be deliberately random: “There will be some innocent victims in this fight against Fascist agents,” Yezhov told them. “We are launching a major attack on the Enemy; let there be no resentment if we bump someone with an elbow. Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. When you chop wood, chips fly.” 5

Yezhov “discovered” that Yagoda had tried to poison him by spraying mercury onto the curtains of his office. It later emerged that Yezhov had faked this outrage. Nonetheless, Yagoda was arrested at his Kremlin apartment, even before the Politburo had formally given the order. The power of the Politburo was officially delegated to the so-called “Five”: Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Yezhov, even though the latter was not a member. 1

The search of Yagoda’s residences—he had two apartments in central Moscow and the luxurious dacha—revealed the debauchery of the NKVD élite in the list of his possessions. His pornographic collection contained 3,904 photographs plus eleven early pornographic movies. His career as a womanizer was amply illustrated by the female clothing he kept in his apartment, which sounds as if he was running a lingerie store not a police force, but then the NKVD bosses could never resist exploiting their power. There were 9 foreign female coats, 4 squirrel coats, 3 sealskin cloaks, another in Astrakhan wool, 31 pairs of female shoes, 91 female berets, 22 female hats, 130 pairs of foreign silk stockings, 10 female belts, 13 bags, 11 female suits, 57 blouses, 69 nighties, 31 female jackets, another 70 pairs of silk tights, 4 silk shawls—plus a collection of 165 pornographic pipes and cigarette holders, and one rubber dildo.

Finally there was the macabre fetishism of the two labelled bullets that had been extracted from the brains of Zinoviev and Kamenev. Like holy relics in a depraved distortion of the apostolic succession, Yezhov inherited them, storing them in his office. 2

Yagoda, accused of diamond-dealing and corruption, complaisantly implicated the next generation of victims, guided by Yezhov, who ensured that his own protégés were left out, before the testimonies were sent over to Stalin. Within three weeks of his interrogation, starting on 2 April, Yezhov was reporting that Yagoda admitted encouraging Rykov to resist the Party in the late twenties: “You act. I won’t touch you.” Then he denounced Pauker and confessed to the sprinkling of mercury around Blackberry’s office. More importantly, Yagoda implicated Abel Yenukidze for planning a coup along with Marshal Tukhachevsky, Stalin’s old enemy from the Civil War. By the time of his trial, along with Bukharin and Rykov, Yagoda had confessed to the medical murders of Gorky and his son and to the assassination of Kirov.

In his private hell, he knew his family and friends faced destruction with him: the rule in Stalin’s world was that when a man fell, all those connected to him, whether friends, lovers or protégés, fell with him. His brother-in-law and father-in-law were soon shot, along with his salon of writers. Yagoda’s wife and sister were exiled. Yagoda’s father wrote to Stalin, disowning “our only surviving son” for “his grave crimes.” Two sons had given their lives for Bolshevism in earlier times. Now the 78-year-old jeweller of Nizhny Novgorod was losing the third. Both Yagoda’s parents died in the camps.