Simon Montefiore - Stalin

When they were shown into the office, Stalin was smiling at them: “You’re Professor Nutsibidze?” he said. “You’ve been offended a bit but let’s not rake up the past,” and then he started to rave about the “magnificent translation of Rustaveli.” Sitting the two men down, Stalin handed the astounded professor a leather-bound draft of the translation, adding, “I’ve translated one couplet. Let’s see how you like it.” Stalin recited it. “If you really do like it, I give it to you as a present. Use it in your translation, but don’t mention my name. I take great pleasure in being your editor.” He then invited the two to dinner where they reminisced about the old days in Georgia.

After many horns of wine, Nutsibidze recalled the political meeting where he had first met Stalin, declaiming his speech from memory. Stalin was delighted: “Extraordinary talent goes hand in hand with extraordinary memory!” [162] For the rest of his career, whenever Nutsibidze was challenged, he would point to his forehead and say, “Stalin kissed me here.” The Rustaveli edition was expensively published and Stalin’s name was never mentioned. Stalin ensured that Nutsibidze was allowed to live for the rest of his life in a large mansion in Tiflis still owned by the family. The author is most grateful to the Professor’s stepson Zakro Megrelishvili for the extracts from his mother’s autobiography. He came round the table and kissed Nutsibidze on the forehead. 3

They were particularly fortunate “stiffs” because after the Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin liquidated the backlog of Yezhov cases, including Blackberry himself who confessed to being an English, Japanese and Polish spy. But he also denounced his wife’s literary lovers. Thus the indelible mark of Yevgenia’s kisses proved fatal long after her own exit. Sholokhov was protected by the penumbra of Stalin himself but Isaac Babel was arrested, telling his young wife: “Please see our girl grows up happy.”

On 16 January 1940, Stalin signed 346 death sentences, a list of the tragic flotsam of Terror that combined monsters with innocents, including some of the outstanding talents of the arts, such as Babel, theatre director Meyerhold, and Yezhova’s lover, the journalist Koltsov (on whom Karpov in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is based), as well as Yezhov himself with his innocent brother, nephews and socialite mistress, Glikina, and the fallen magnate Eikhe. Most (though not Yezhov) were mercilessly tortured with the relish that Beria and Kobulov brought to their work at Sukhanov prison, Beria’s special realm which, ironically, had once been the St. Catherine’s Nunnery.

“The investigators began to use force on me, a sick sixty-five-year-old man,” Meyerhold wrote to Molotov. “I was made to lie face down and then beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap. They sat me on a chair and beat my feet from above… For the next few days when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal haemorrhaging, they again beat the red, blue and yellow bruises and the pain was so intense it felt as if boiling water was poured on… I howled and wept from pain. They beat my back… punched my face, swinging their fists from a great height… The intolerable physical and emotional pain caused my eyes to weep unending streams of tears…”

Over the next few days, Stalin’s hanging judge Ulrikh sentenced all to “the highest measure of punishment” in perfunctory trials at Lefortovo prison before attending a Kremlin gala, starring the tenor Kozlovsky and the ballerina Lepeshinskaya. Babel was condemned as an “agent of French and Austrian intelligence… linked to the wife of Enemy of the People Yezhov.” At 1:30 a.m. on 27 January 1940, Babel was shot and cremated.

Eikhe was subjected to one last session of “French wrestling” at Sukhanov prison. Beria and Rodos “brutally beat Eikhe with rubber rods; he fell but they picked him up and went on beating him. Beria kept asking him, “Will you confess to being a spy?” Eikhe refused. “One of Eikhe’s eyes had been gouged out and blood was streaming out of it but he went on repeating ‘I won’t confess.’ When Beria had convinced himself he could not get a confession… he ordered them to lead him away to be shot.”

It was now Yezhov’s turn. On 1 February, Beria called his predecessor to his office at the Sukhanovka to propose that if he confessed at his trial, Stalin would spare him. To his meagre credit, Yezhov refused: “It’s better to leave this earth as an honourable man.”

On 2 February, Ulrikh tried him in Beria’s office. Yezhov read out his last statement to Stalin, dedicated to the sacred order of Bolshevik chivalry. He denied all charges of spying for what he called “Polish landowners… English lords and Japanese samurai” but “I do not deny I drank heavily but I worked like a horse. My fate is obvious,” but he asked “one thing: shoot me quietly, without putting me through any agony.” Then he requested that his mother be looked after, “my daughter taken care of” and his innocent nephews spared. He finished with the sort of flourish that one might expect to find from a knight to his king at the time of the Round Table: “Tell Stalin that I shall die with his name on my lips.”

He faced the Vishka less courageously than many of his victims. When Ulrikh pronounced the sentence, Yezhov toppled over but was caught by his guards, loaded into a Black Crow in the early hours of 3 February and driven to his special execution yard with the sloping floor and hosing facilities at Varsonofyevsky Lane. There Beria, the Deputy Procurator (N. P. Afanasev) and executioner, Blokhin, awaited him. Yezhov, according to Afanasev, hiccuped and wept. Finally his legs collapsed and they dragged him by the hands. That day, Stalin met Beria and Mikoyan for three hours, probably discussing economic matters, but there is no doubt that he would have wished to know the details of Blackberry’s conduct at the supreme moment.

The ashes of these men, Yezhov the criminal, Babel the genius, were dumped into a pit marked “Common Grave Number One—unclaimed ashes 1930–42 inclusive” at old Donskoi Cemetery. Just twenty paces away there is a gravestone that reads: “Khayutina, Yevgenia Solomonovna 1904–1938.” 4Yezhov, Yevgenia and Babel lie close. [163] In the nineties, a monument was raised there that reads: “Here lie buried the remains of the innocent, tortured and executed victims of political repressions. May they never be forgotten.” Antonina Babel did not find out that her husband had been executed until 1954 when he was rehabilitated. She spent many years living in America. Her heart-rending memoirs stand with those of Nadezhda Mandelstam and Anna Larina as classics.

Yezhov’s eminence was eradicated from the memories of the time. Henceforth he was portrayed as a blood-crazed renegade killing innocents against Stalin’s wishes. The era was named the Yezhovshchina , Yezhov’s time, a word that Stalin probably coined for he was soon using it himself. Yagoda and Yezhov were both “scum,” thought Stalin. Yezhov was “a rat who killed many innocent people,” Stalin told Yakovlev, the aircraft designer. “We had to shoot him,” he confided to Kavtaradze. But after the war, Stalin admitted: “One can’t believe a lot of the evidence from 1937. Yezhov couldn’t run the NKVD properly and anti-Soviet elements penetrated it. They destroyed some honest people, our best cadres.”

Looking back, he also questioned Beria’s Terror: “Beria runs too many cases and everyone confesses.” But Stalin was always aware that the NKVD invented evidence: he jested and grumbled about it but often he chose to believe it because he had already decided who was an Enemy. More often, he had created it himself. “Meyerhold was a huge talent,” Stalin reflected in 1950, but “our Chekists don’t understand artists who all have faults. The Chekists collect them and then destroy good people. I doubt Meyerhold was an Enemy of the People.” He protested too much. Stalin had carefully followed their careers. He disapproved of “frivolous” Babel and his Red Cavalry “of which he knows nothing”—and he signed the death lists: no ruler has supervised his secret police as intimately as he.