Simon Montefiore - Stalin

The executioners survived by drinking. Even the sober purgers were dizzy with death. The official investigating the Belorussian Military District admitted to Stalin that “I didn’t lose my teeth but I must confess… I became disorientated for a while.” Stalin reassured him. Even dread Mekhlis almost had a breakdown at the beginning of the Terror when he still ran Pravda , writing an extraordinary letter to Stalin that gives a fascinating window onto the pressures of being a Stalinist potentate in the whirlwind of terror:

Dear Comrade Stalin,

My nerves did not stand up. I did not comport myself as a Bolshevik; especially I feel the pain of my words in our “personal talk” when I personally owed my whole life and my Partiinost to you. I feel absolutely crushed. These years take away from us a lot of people… I must run Pravda in a situation when there is no secretary and no editor, when we have not approved a theme, when I found myself finally in the role of “persecuted editor.” This is organized bedlam which can eat up everybody. And it has eaten up people! In the last days, I’ve felt ill without sleep and only able to get to sleep at eleven or twelve in the morning… I’m all the more frantic in my apartment after sleepless nights at the newspaper. It’s time to relieve me [of this job]. I can’t be chief of Pravda when I’m sick and sleepless, incapable of following what is happening in the country, economics, art and literature, never getting the chance to go to the theatre. I had to tell you this personally but it was silly, lying. Forgive me my dear Comrade Stalin for that unpleasant minute I gave you. For me it’s very hard to experience such a trauma!

The Procurator-General Vyshinsky also felt the pressure, finding this on his desk: “Everyone knows you’re a Menshevik. After using you, Stalin will sentence you to Vishka… Run away… Remember Yagoda. That’s your destiny. The Moor has done his duty. The Moor can go.”

Constantly drunk, Yezhov sensed Stalin was, as he later wrote to his master, “dissatisfied with the NKVD work which deteriorated my mood still further.” 3He made frantic attempts to prove his worth: he was said to have suggested renaming Moscow as “Stalinodar.” This was laughed off. Instead Yezhov was called upon to kill his own NKVD appointees whom he had protected. In early 1938, Stalin and Yezhov decided to liquidate the veteran Chekist Abram Slutsky, but since he headed the Foreign Department, they devised a plan so as not to scare their foreign agents. On 17 February, Frinovsky invited Slutsky to his office where another of Yezhov’s deputies came up behind him and drew a mask of chloroform over his face. He was then injected with poison and died right there in the office. It was officially announced that he had died of a heart attack. [132] His splendid gravestone in the Novodevichy Cemetery not far from Nadya Stalin’s grave gives no hint of his sinister end. Soon the purge began to threaten those closer to Yezhov. 4When his protégé Liushkov was recalled from the Far East, Yezhov tipped him off. Liushkov defected to the Japanese. Yezhov was so rattled by this fiasco that he asked Frinovsky to go with him to tell Stalin: “On my own I did not have the strength.” Yezhov “literally went mad.” Stalin rightly suspected Yezhov of warning Liushkov. 5

Sensing his rising doubts, Stalin’s magnates, who had proved their readiness to kill, began to denounce Yezhov’s degeneracy and lies. Zhdanov in particular was said to oppose Yezhov’s Terror. Zhdanov’s son Yury claims his father had wanted to talk to Stalin alone but Yezhov was always present: “Father finally managed to see Stalin tête-à-tête and said, ‘Political provocation is going on…’” This is convincing because Zhdanov was closest to Stalin personally but Malenkov’s children tell a similar story. Molotov and Yezhov had a row in the Politburo in mid-1938. Stalin ordered the latter to apologize. When another NKVD agent, Alexander Orlov, the resident agent in Spain, defected, Yezhov was so scared of Stalin that he tried to withhold this information.

On 29 July, Stalin signed another death list that included more of Yezhov’s protégés. Yezhov was so distraught with fear and foreboding that he started shooting prisoners who might incriminate him. Uspensky, the Ukrainian NKVD chief, was in Moscow and discovered that a thousand people were going to be shot in the next five days. “The tracks should be covered,” Yezhov warned him. “All investigation cases should be finished in an accelerated procedure so it’ll be impossible to make sense of it.” 6

Stalin gently told Yezhov that he needed some help in running the NKVD and asked him to choose someone. Yezhov requested Malenkov but Stalin wanted to keep him in the Central Committee so someone, probably Kaganovich, proposed Beria. Stalin may have wanted a Caucasian, perhaps convinced that the cut-throat traditions of the mountains—blood feuds, vendettas and secret murders—suited the position. Beria was a natural, the only First Secretary who personally tortured his victims. The blackjack—the zhguti —and the truncheon—the dubenka —were his favourite toys. He was hated by many of the Old Bolsheviks and family members around the Leader. With the whispering, plotting and vengeful Beria at his side, Stalin felt able to destroy his own polluted, intimate world.

Yezhov probably tried to arrest Beria, but it was too late. Stalin had already seen Beria during the Supreme Soviet on 10 August. Beria was coming to Moscow. 7

He had come a long way since 1931. Beria, now thirty-six, was complex and talented with a first-class brain. He was witty, a font of irreverent jokes, mischievous anecdotes and withering put-downs. He managed to be a sadistic torturer as well as a loving husband and warm father but he was already a priapic womanizer whom power would distort into a sexual predator. A skilled manager, he was the only Soviet leader whom “one could imagine becoming Chairman of General Motors,” as his daughter-in-law put it later. He could run vast enterprises with a mixture of villainous threats—“I’ll grind you to powder”—and meticulous precision. “Everything that depended on Beria had to function with the precision… of a clock” while “the two things he could not bear were wordiness and vagueness of expression.” [133] He usually signed documents in tiny neat writing in a distinctive turquoise ink or on a turquoise typewriter that did not clash with Stalin’s blue or red crayons. He was “a good organizer, businesslike and capable,” Stalin had told Kaganovich as early as 1932, possessing the “bull nerves” and indefatigability that were necessary for survival at Stalin’s court. He was a “most clever man,” admitted Molotov, “inhumanly energetic—he could work a week without sleep.” 8

Beria had the “singular ability to inspire both fear and enthusiasm.” “Idolized” by his own henchmen even though he was often harsh and rude, he would shout: “We’ll arrest you and let you rot in the camps… we’ll turn you into camp dust.” A young man like Alyosha Mirtskhulava, whom Beria promoted in the Georgian Party, was still praising Beria for his “humanity, strength, efficiency and patriotism” when he was interviewed for this book in 2002. [134] The author is grateful to Alyosha Mirtskhulava, Beria’s Georgian Komsomol boss, and later Georgian First Secretary, for his interview in Tbilisi. Yet Beria liked to boast about his victims: “Let me have one night with him and I’ll have him confessing he’s the King of England.” His favourite movies were Westerns but he identified with the Mexican bandits. Beria was well-educated for a Bolshevik magnate. Nevertheless, Stalin teased this architect manqué that his pince-nez were made of clear glass, worn to give an impression of intellectual gravitas.