Stalin and His Hangmen (39 page)

The Politbiuro dictated the congress’s final resolutions: the writers’ mission was to glorify the crushing of class enemies and the leadership of Stalin, and the union’s ‘leading organs’ were to improve and increase production of ‘works of art of high artistic standard, imbued with the spirit of socialism’.

Nobody at the congress spoke of the two suicides that had shaken the Russian literary world. Esenin had hanged himself from a heating pipe in December 1926, and Mayakovsky, who had reproached Esenin for ‘taking the easy way out’, had in spring 1930 shot himself, an act that Pasternak daringly called ‘Mount Etna surrounded by cowardly hillocks’. Just as Tsar Nicholas I had been blamed for the fatal duels of Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, so OGPU was implicated in both suicides. Esenin had been led astray by Iakov Bliumkin, and Mayakovsky by Iakov Agranov, who gave him the fatal revolver. Esenin and Mayakovsky had felt themselves rejected. By 1926 peasant poets like Esenin were being condemned as the voice of the kulak. Mayakovsky, in his late play
The Bedbug,
depicted a future puritanical communist society in which poets are as undesirable as bedbugs.

For letting Bukharin speak freely at the congress, as well as earlier blunders, Stalin sent Iagoda a signal in June 1931 by temporarily demoting him from first to second deputy head of OGPU. Now Iagoda needed Gorky’s advocacy if he was to succeed Menzhinsky as head of OGPU.

Iagoda made strenuous efforts. He manipulated Gorky into praising show trials. It is said that Gorky accused Iagoda of murdering innocents when he heard that forty-eight officials accused of sabotaging food supplies were shot, but archive documents show Gorky approving such reprisals. Gorky did not read exposes in the Western press that proved OGPU’s falsifications. Gorky’s letters to Iagoda, ‘Dear Friend and Fellow-countryman’, ooze sadism, sycophancy and, worse, sincerity: ‘I’d very much like to come to the trial and look at the ugly mugs of these “people
come down in the world”… at these crushed villains… I have been reading the statements of these sons of bitches about organizing terror and was extremely astounded. If they hadn’t been such vile cowards they might have shot at Stalin. And you [Iagoda], I hear, walk quite carefree down the streets. You walk and drive about. An odd attitude to your life…’

Iagoda, knowing that Stalin would read copies of these letters, wrote pathetically to Gorky:

Like a dog on a chain, I lie by the gates of the republic and chew through the throat of anyone who raises a hand against the peace of the Union… Do you know, Aleksei, what pride stirs one when one knows and believes the party’s strength and how enormous the party’s strength is when if falls like lava on any fortress; add to this the leadership of a million-strong party by such an exceptional leader as Stalin. True, I have something to live for, to struggle for. I am very tired, but my nerves are so tensed that you don’t feel the tiredness. Now, I think, the kulak has been finished off, and the peasant has realized, and thoroughly so, that if he doesn’t sow, if he doesn’t work, he’ll die, and there is nothing more to be hoped for from counter-revolution… I’m almost alone now, Viacheslav [Menzhinsky] is ill…
³¹

The events in Russia during Gorky’s winters on Capri – the roundups of Trotskyists, the deportation of kulaks, the suicide of Nadezhda Allilueva – were conveyed to him by Iagoda as acceptable if unfortunate events in a heroic war. Gorky kept Iagoda’s letters with pride. He, his son and his daughter-in-law Timosha were caught in Iagoda’s web. Gorky became devoted to his captor: ‘I have got very “used” to you, you have become “one of the family”, and I have learnt to value you. I very much love people like you. There aren’t many of them, by the way. Please give a cordial greeting to Menzhinsky…’

Timosha became Iagoda’s mistress. (Max was complaisant.) Stalin was assured that Gorky would settle permanently in the USSR, organize writers into ‘engineers of the soul’, and create an international chorus to praise the leader. But when Gorky asked Stalin to spare Shostakovich the vicious tirades in
Pravda
which he had commissioned, he had gone too far. Moreover, he was disparaging the cult of Stalin in his diary, which his secretary Kriuchkov was certainly leaking to Iagoda. Gorky
would now pay for his golden cage. On n May 1934 his son Max died of pneumonia after lying outside all night on the grass. He had been drinking
iorsh –
beer and vodka – with Piotr Kriuchkov, Gorky’s secretary. Iagoda was later accused of murdering Max. It is true that Iagoda, in love with Timosha, had an interest in Max’s death, and neither he nor Dr Leonid Levin, appointed by OGPU to look after Gorky’s family, discouraged his drinking. Iagoda and Stalin tried to comfort the inconsolable father; the latest giant passenger aircraft was named
Maxim Gorky.
It crashed.

A luxury river cruiser, also named
Maxim Gorky,
staffed with an OGPU crew, took Gorky down the Volga and away from human contact. He saw nothing of the famine that had depopulated the Volga the previous year. The journey must have been unbearable for Iagoda, who had secured adjacent cabins on the boat with Timosha and had an intercommunicating door knocked through between them. Timosha however was still in shock from her husband’s mysterious death and very likely overcome by revulsion for her lover. Iagoda, grim and silent, left the cruise at the first stop. He remained as infatuated with Timosha as he was hypnotized by Stalin, but from that summer of 193 4 he became even more of a cornered rat than before. He sensed that he would be compelled to frame and murder the people to whom he was drawn: the intellectuals of the party and the professionals. They could not be called his friends – Iagoda had no friends – but they provided respite from his dark, hangman’s life and offered him the comforts of wine, beautiful women, poetry, witty conversation. Always a stranger at the feast of life, at least he could be a spectator. As Stalin’s policies grew grimmer and Iagoda was directed to repress those closest to him, and as those closest to him – Gorky’s family – began to sense the degree to which he was their gaoler not their protector, Iagoda became more withdrawn, sluggish and melancholy, less and less capable of taking any measures that would avert Stalin’s wrath.

Gorky died on 18 June 1936. In 1938 Iagoda, together with three doctors – Leonid Levin (who had attended Dzierżyński), Dmitri Pletniov (Russia’s leading cardiologist) and Ignati Kazakov (an unorthodox therapist patronized by Menzhinsky) – would be accused of killing him. Like Chekhov, Gorky had worn out his heart, pumping blood
through lungs ravaged by tuberculosis. On 8 June he was semi-conscious; given a massive dose of camphor he then had an impassioned discussion with Stalin on his future plans.
³²
For nine days Gorky read and wrote. A witness (the testimony is third hand) claims that on 17 June Iagoda’s car brought Moura Budberg to the dacha, and that Gorky then died.

The circumstances of Gorky’s death repay study.
³³
First, Dr Levin was an NKVD doctor whose diagnoses were often suspiciously at odds with autopsy reports; Stalin had foisted him on Gorky, even sending him at Christmas 1930 to Capri for six weeks. Second, Stalin’s office diary for 17 June 1936 mentions no visitors to his office except for a stenographer. Third, Stalin was now about to try Kamenev and Zinoviev for their lives and Gorky would have protested. Fourth, there were four sudden deaths of writers who had displeased Stalin – Panait Istrati, Barbusse, Gorky and Eugène Dabit.
³⁴
Fifth, Moura Budberg vanished to London after Gorky’s funeral. Budberg, Timosha and Ekaterina Peshkova refused all their lives to discuss his last days.

At Gorky’s funeral Iagoda stood in the guard of honour, Stalin bent over the coffin and his brother-in-law Stanislav Redens controlled the crowds outside.

Fellow-Travellers Abroad and Dissent at Home

General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.

William Blake

Why did Soviet writers let themselves be penned in like sheep by the party shepherds and OGPU dogs? Some, a decade earlier, had proved their indomitable courage. Isaak Babel, a bespectacled Jew, had ridden with, and then written about, Cossack cavalry attacking Ukrainian gentry, Polish invaders, White Guards and the Jews of western Russia. But even he adopted the ‘genre of silence’.

In 1934 a mass protest against Stalin’s apparatchiks might still have made an impact; when the survivors saw what came of their acquiescence
in 1937 they must have regretted their falling in line behind Gorky and the party minions. They had betrayed the Russian peasantry, for whom the major classic Russian writers, from Pushkin to Chekhov, had made a stand. With just a few exceptions – Zabolotsky, Mandelstam – they had disowned the truth and applauded lies about the society whose conscience they were supposed to guard. Excuses can be made: the tour of the White Sea canal had confronted the conformists with writers whose integrity had made them doomed slaves digging frozen bogs. After 1929 exile was not an option. A German writer protesting against Hitler might do so from the safety of asylum in the USA; a Soviet writer against Stalin could not.

But there can be no excuse for the Western observers who attended Soviet Union of Writers’ banquets in 1934. A few quibbled, like Malraux, but none disseminated the truth about collectivization, famine, arrests and executions. If Louis Aragon, Romain Rolland, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bertolt Brecht, George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells had chosen to be honest, what risk would they have run? They chose to fawn on Stalin and lie with impunity. Iagoda had no trouble assembling a chorus of Stalinist flatterers from the left wing of Western writers.

For French writers, as for Gorky, Iagoda found beautiful, polyglot women. In France Romain Rolland’s fame was waning after
Jean Christophe
, his
roman-fleuve,
so Iagoda commissioned a twenty-volume Russian edition of his works and recruited the enchanting Maria Kudasheva to translate them. Rolland married Kudasheva but found Iagoda hard to like. ‘An enigmatic personality. A man who looks as if he is refined and cultured… But his police functions inspire horror. He speaks softly to you as he calls black white and white black, and his honest eyes look at you with amazement if you begin to doubt his word,’ he wrote in his diary. But he was bewitched by Stalin. Rolland’s conversations with Stalin in 1935 are on record, and the respective gullibility and cynicism are breathtaking.

ROLLAND: Why are twelve-year-old children now subject to adult criminal penalties?

STALIN: We discovered in our schools groups often to fifteen boys and girls who aimed to kill or to debauch the best pupils, the prize scholars. They drowned them in wells, inflicted stab wounds on them, terrorized them in every way… We have in the Kremlin women librarians who visit the apartments of our executive comrades in the Kremlin to keep their libraries in order. It turns out that some of these librarians had been recruited by our enemies for carrying out terror. We found that these women were carrying poison, intending to poison some of our executive comrades. Of course we have arrested them, we don’t intend to shoot them, we are isolating them…
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Henri Barbusse, a nobler figure than Rolland, had won fame with novels on the First World War and in old age took part in the Congress of Friends of the USSR in Cologne in 1928. Barbusse interviewed Stalin three times in his Kremlin office and wrote an adulatory short biography. But Barbusse’s admiration for Trotsky worried Iagoda and for this reason on his 1932 visit to Moscow he was not even met at the station. But when celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of Gorky’s literary debut began, Stalin rose from his seat on the stage, had Barbusse brought up from the stalls and surrendered his seat to the Frenchman.

The communist poet Louis Aragon married Elza Triolet, the sister of Lili Brik, a known OGPU agent and the inamorata of Mayakovsky. Other Frenchmen were more elusive: Malraux and Gide ultimately double-crossed Stalin.

Rolland, Barbusse and Aragon were the decoys for Europe’s intellectuals. Warier luminaries like George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells asked more awkward questions. Stalin declared that handling Shaw had proved ‘rather more complicated’ but gained his fatuous approval, which carried more weight than Rolland’s or Barbusse’s. Wells entered Stalin’s study a wise man – ‘This lonely, overbearing man, I thought, may be damned disagreeable, but anyhow he must have an intelligence far beyond dogmatism’ – and came out three hours later none the wiser.
³⁶
Stalin discovered that inviting established writers for mutual flattery was even more effective than direct propaganda.

Just a few dogs did not bark in the Soviet night. Two of Russia’s greatest poets, Mandelstam and Akhmatova, did not join the union. When Mayakovsky, who had supported the revolution so vociferously, preferred death to life in the USSR, the shock was profound. Pasternak and Mandelstam felt liberated from lies: they both wrote lyric verse again,
Pasternak’s
Second Birth,
Mandelstam’s
Armenian Cycle.
To paraphrase John Cleese’s character in
Clockwise,
‘The despair they could take; it’s the hope they couldn’t stand.’

Mandelstam sensed that in the stillness of a Moscow midnight a typewriter was always writing out denunciations. OGPU had been building up dossiers in which painters and poets with any avant-garde interests – once the darlings of the revolution – were linked to former White officers, emigres, former gendarmes. Hitler’s views on ‘degenerate art’ coincided with Stalin’s. The Ukrainian GPU had a dossier of 3,000 volumes named ‘Spring’; one of their first victims was Igor Terentiev, sent to dig the White Sea canal.
³⁷
As the son of a gendarme and the brother of an émigré, he could have easily been shot. Terentiev later became a free worker on the Moscow – Volga canal; not until 1937 were capital charges pressed against him.