Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Yezhov followed a punishing schedule of work, intensified by the terrible deeds he supervised and the pressure, from both above and below, to arrest and kill more: he lived the Stalinist nocturnal existence and was constantly exhausted, becoming paler and nervier. We now know how he worked: he tended to sleep in the morning, dine at home with his wife, meet his deputy Frinovsky for a drink at their dachas—and then drive to Butyrki or Lubianka to supervise the interrogations and tortures. 2Since Yezhov had been in the top echelons of the Party for about seven years, he often knew his victims personally. In June 1937, he signed off on the arrest of his “godfather” Moskvin and his wife, whose house he had often visited. Both were shot. He could be brutal. When Bulatov, who had run a CC Department alongside Yezhov and had visited his home, was being interrogated for the fifth time, the Commissar-General appeared through a door in the wall: “Well, is Bulatov testifying?”

“Not at all, Comrade Commissar-General!” replied the interrogator.

“Then lay it on him good!” he snapped and departed. But sometimes he clearly found his job difficult: when he had to witness the execution of a friend, he looked distressed. “I see in your eyes that you feel sorry for me!” said the friend. Yezhov was flustered but ordered the executioners to fire. When another old buddy was arrested, Yezhov seemed moved but drunkenly ordered his men “to cut off his ears and nose, put out his eyes, cut him to pieces,” yet this was for show: he then chatted to his friend late into the night but he too was shot. The Politburo greatly admired Yezhov who, thought Molotov, “wasn’t spotless but he was a good Party worker.” 3

Sometimes, amid all the murder and thuggery, Yezhov showed his old side. When he received Stalin’s doctor, Vinogradov, who had to testify in the upcoming Bukharin trial against his own teacher, Yezhov tipsily advised him: “You’re a good person but you talk too much. Bear in mind that every third person is my person and informs me of everything. I recommend you talk less.” 4

The Commissar-General was at his peak. On holidays, Yezhov was filmed strolling through the Kremlin, laughing with Stalin while absurdly smoking what appears to be a very big cigarette. During the long November 6th speeches at the Bolshoi Theatre, US Ambassador Davies watched “Stalin, Voroshilov and Yezhov obviously whispering and joking among themselves.” Pravda hailed him as “an unyielding Bolshevik who without getting up from his desk, night and day, is unravelling and cutting the threads of the Fascist conspiracy.” Towns and stadiums were named after him. [116] His huge portraits were borne past the Mausoleum on all the State holidays. The pun on the resemblance of his name to the “steel gauntlet” had now spawned vast posters showing his iron grip “strangling the snakes” with the heads of Trotsky, Rykov and Bukharin. The other Yezhovite slogan read: “ Yezhovy rukavitsy —rule with an iron rod!” For the Kazakh “bard” Dzhambul Dzhabaev, he was “a flame, burning the serpents’ nests.” 5

He and Yevgenia now lived luxuriously in a dacha, with the usual cinema, tennis court and staff, at Meshcherino near Leninsky Gorky where many leaders had their homes. They had adopted a daughter, Natasha, an orphan from a children’s home. Yezhov was tender, teaching her to play tennis, skate and bicycle. In the photographs, he stands next to his friends, hugging Natasha like any other father. He spoiled her with presents and played with her on his return from work.

When Yezhov began to feed foreign Communists and returned émigrés into the meat grinder, he received an appeal from an anxious, pretty and very pregnant Russian émigré named Vera Trail, who was the daughter of Alexander Guchkov, the pre-revolutionary moderate conservative. She received a call after midnight.

“Kremlin speaking. The Comrade Commissar will see you now.” A limousine took her into the Kremlin where she was led into his long, dimly lit study with a green lampshade. The aphrodisiac of power working its wonders, she immediately admired his “finely chiselled face,” his “brown wavy hair and blue eyes—the deepest blue I’d ever seen” and his “small graceful slender hands.” She mentioned a list of friends, mainly writers, who had been arrested. He was acutely perceptive, “a marvellous listener.” Blackberry dismissed his guards to receive her: “I certainly don’t make the habit of receiving total strangers unprotected.”

“I’m not even carrying a handbag,” she flirted back at him.

“No, only Belomor cigarettes. But you said you were pregnant.”

“Said? Can’t you see?” Her belly was enormous.

“I see a bulge,” joked Yezhov, “but how am I to know it’s not a time bomb cleverly wrapped in a pillow? You weren’t searched… were you?”

Yezhov stood up and walked around the desk as if he was about to feel her belly but halfway he stopped and sat down, laughing: “Of course you’re pregnant. I was only joking.” Here was an authentic Yezhovian moment in which the Commissar displayed his clunkingly puerile humour (though thankfully, an improvement on the farting contests), the swagger of menace—and his paranoia. He promised to review her case and receive her again, kindly suggesting that she must go straight to bed.

The next night, Yezhov’s office called again: “Leave for Paris at once.” She left on the train the next morning and was convinced that he had, for whatever reason, gone out of his way to save her life. Every one of the friends on her list were destroyed—but he saved her. 6

Yet personal attraction was rarely a reason to save the life of an Enemy: Blackberry had enjoyed a love affair with another Yevgenia, the wife of the Ambassador to Poland, throughout the thirties, offering to maintain her in Moscow. However, Yevgenia Podoskaya refused, was arrested in November 1936 and shot on 10 March 1937. 7

Yezhov bombarded Molotov with reports of the conspiracies he had discovered. 8He and Kaganovich were enthusiasts: “I’ve always considered that those chiefly responsible were Stalin and we who encouraged it, who were active. I was always active, I’d always supported the measures taken,” said Molotov. “Stalin was right—‘better an innocent head less…’” Kaganovich agreed: “Otherwise we’d never have won the war!” Molotov notoriously reviewed one list of arrests and personally wrote “VMN” next to a woman’s name. It was Molotov who signed and apparently added names to the list of wives of Enemies such as Kosior and Postyshev, who were all shot. Of the twenty-eight Commissars under Premier Molotov in early 1938, twenty were killed. When he found the name of a Bolshevik named G. I. Lomov on a list, Stalin asked: “What about this?”

“In favour of immediate arrest of that bastard Lomov,” wrote Molotov. In the case of some unfortunate professor, Molotov asked Yezhov: “Why is this professor still in the Foreign Ministry and not in the NKVD?” 9When some books by Stalin and Lenin were burned by mistake, Molotov ordered Yezhov to accelerate the case. 10When Molotov heard that a regional Procurator had grumbled about the Purge and joked, quite understandably, that it was amazing Stalin and Molotov were still alive when there were so many terrorists trying to kill them, he ordered the NKVD: “Investigate, having agreed with Vyshinsky [the official’s boss in Moscow]. Molotov.” Kaganovich boasted there was not one railway “without Trotskyite/Japanese wreckers,” writing at least thirty-two letters to the NKVD demanding eighty-three arrests—and signing death lists for 36,000. So many railwaymen were shot that an official telephoned Poskrebyshev to warn that one line was entirely unmanned.