Simon Montefiore - Stalin

The magnates steered cautiously between Yezhov and Beria. When Yezhov arrested one commissar, Stalin sent Molotov and Mikoyan to investigate. Back at the Kremlin, Mikoyan acclaimed the man’s innocence and Beria attacked Yezhov’s case. “Yezhov displayed an ambiguous smile,” wrote Mikoyan, “Beria looked pleased” but “Molotov’s face was like a mask.” The Commissar [136] In this case, Stalin backed Beria’s dismissal of the case against Shipping Commissar Tevosian but told Mikoyan: “Tell him the CC knows he was recruited by Krupp as a German agent. Everyone understands a person gets trapped… If he confesses it honestly… the CC will forgive him.” Mikoyan called Tevosian into his office to offer him Stalin’s trick but the Commissar refused to confess, which Stalin accepted. Tevosian was to be one of the major industrial managers of WWII. became what Mikoyan called a “lucky stiff,” back from the dead. Stalin released him. 2

When one NKVD officer needed the chief’s signature, Yezhov was nowhere to be found. Beria told him to drive out to Yezhov’s dacha and get his signature. There he found a man who was either “fatally ill or had spent the night drinking heavily.” Regional NKVD bosses started to denounce Yezhov. 3

The darkness began to descend on Yezhov’s family where his silly, sensual wife was unwittingly to play the terrible role of black widow spider: most of her lovers were to die. She herself was too sensitive a flower for Yezhov’s world. Both she and Yezhov were promiscuous but then they lived in a world of high tension, dizzy power over life and death, and dynamic turmoil where men rose and fell around them. If there was justice in Yezhov’s fall, it was a tragedy for Yevgenia and little Natasha, to whom he was a kind father. A pall fell on Yevgenia’s literary salon. When a friend walked her home to the Kremlin after a party, she herself reflected that Babel was in danger because he had been friends with arrested Trotskyite generals: “Only his European fame could save him…” She herself was in greater peril. 4

Yezhov learned that Beria was going to use Yevgenia, an “English spy” from her time in London, against him so he asked for a divorce in September. The divorce was sensible: in other cases, it actually saved the life of the divorcée. But the tension almost broke the nervy Yevgenia, who went on holiday to the Crimea with Zinaida to recover. It seems that Yezhov was trying to protect his wife from arrest, hence her loving and grateful letter to him.

“Kolyushenka!” she wrote to her beleaguered husband. “I really ask you—I insist that I remain in control of my life. Kolya darling! I earnestly beg you to check up on my whole life, everything about me… I cannot reconcile myself to the thought that I am under suspicion of committing crimes I never committed…”

Their world was shrinking daily: Yezhov had managed to have her ex-husband Gladun shot before Beria took control of the NKVD, but another ex-lover, the publisher Uritsky, was being interrogated. He revealed her affair with Babel. Yezhov’s secretary and friends were arrested too. Yezhov summoned Yevgenia back to Moscow.

Yevgenia waited at the dacha with her daughter Natasha and her friend Zinaida. She was desperately worried about the family—and who can blame her? Her nerves cracked. In hospital, they diagnosed an “asthenic-depressive condition perhaps cyclothymia,” sending her to a sanatorium near Moscow.

When Zinaida was arrested, Yevgenia wrote to Stalin: “I beg you Comrade Stalin to read this letter… I am treated by professors but what sense does it make if I am burned by the thought that you distrust me?… You are dear and beloved to me.” Swearing on her daughter’s life that she was honest, she admitted that “in my personal life, there have been mistakes about which I could tell you, and all of it because of jealousy.” Stalin doubtless already knew all her Messalinian exploits. She made the sacrificial offer: “Let them take away my freedom, my life… but I will not give up the right to love you as everybody does who loves the country and the Party.” She signed off: “I feel like a living corpse. What am I to do? Forgive my letter written in bed.” Stalin did not reply.

The trap was swinging shut on Yevgenia and her Kolyushenka. On 8 October, Kaganovich drafted a Politburo resolution on the NKVD. On 17 November, a Politburo commission denounced “very serious faults in the work of the Organs of NKVD.” The deadly troikas were dissolved. Stalin and Molotov signed a report, disassociating themselves from the Terror. 5

At the 7 November parade, Yezhov appeared on the Mausoleum but lingered behind Stalin. Then he disappeared and was replaced by Beria in the blue cap and uniform of a Commissar First Class of State Security. When Stalin ordered the arrest of Yezhov’s friend, Uspensky, Ukrainian NKVD chief, the dwarf forewarned him. Uspensky faked suicide and went on the run. Stalin (probably rightly) suspected that Yezhov was bugging his phones.

In her own way, Yevgenia loved Yezhov, despite all their infidelities, and adored their daughter Natasha, because she was willing to sacrifice herself to save them. Her friend Zinaida Ordzhonikidze, Sergo’s widow, visited her in hospital, a heroic act of loyalty. Yevgenia gave her a letter for Yezhov in which she offered to commit suicide and asked for a sleeping draught. She suggested that he send a little statuette of a gnome when the time came. He sent Luminal, then, a little later, he ordered the maid to take his wife the statuette. Given Yezhov’s dwarfish stature, this deadly gnome seems farcical: perhaps the statuette was an old keepsake representing “darling Kolya” himself from the early days of their romance. When Glikina’s arrest made her own inevitable, Yevgenia sent a note bidding Yezhov goodbye. On 19 November, she took the Luminal.

At 11 p.m., as Yevgenia sank into unconsciousness, Yezhov arrived at the Little Corner, where he found the Politburo with Beria and Malenkov, who attacked him for five hours. Yevgenia died two days later. Yezhov himself reflected that he had been “compelled to sacrifice her to save himself.” She had married a monster but died young to save their daughter which, in its way, was a maternal end to a life devoted to innocent fun. Babel heard that “Stalin can’t understand her death. His own nerves are made of steel so he just can’t understand how, in other people, they give out.” The Yezhovs’ adopted daughter [137] Her name was changed to that of Yevgenia’s first husband, Khayutin—but she remained loyal to her adoptive father into the next millennium. Natasha Yezhova survived after enduring terrible sufferings on her stepfather’s behalf. Vasily Grossman, the author of the classic novel Life and Fate , who knew the family, attending the salons with Babel and others, wrote a short story about Natasha’s tragic childhood. She became a musician in Penza and Magadan. In May 1998, she applied for Yezhov’s rehabilitation. Ironically she had a case since he was certainly not guilty of the espionage for which he was executed. Her appeal was denied. At the time of writing, she is alive. Natasha, nine, was taken in by his ex-wife’s sister and then sent to one of those grim orphanages for the children of Enemies. 6

Two days after Yevgenia’s death, on 23 November, Yezhov returned for another four hours of criticism from Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov, after which he resigned from the NKVD. But he remained in limbo as CC Secretary, Commissar of Water Transport, and a candidate Politburo member, living in the Kremlin like a tiny ghost for a little longer, experiencing what his victims had known before him. His friends “turned their back upon me as if I was plague-ridden… I never realized the depth of meanness of all these people.” He blamed the Terror on the Vozhd , using a Russian idiom: “God’s will—the Tsar’s trial” with himself as the Tsar and Stalin as God.