Stalin and His Hangmen (86 page)

19.
Kirill Stoliarov,
Igry v pravosudie
, Moscow, 2000, 289–90

20.
Shvartsman’s sexual proclivities appealed to Beria. Shvartsman liked to make love with a female colleague in an office where they could hear tortured prisoners screaming. For details of Ezhov’s hangmen whom Beria kept, see Arkadii Vaksberg,
Neraskrytye tainy
, Moscow, 1993, 107–54.

21.
Its theme song ‘Fragrant flower of the prairie, Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria’ never got past rehearsal.

22.
Bulgakov had written to Stalin asking for Erdman to be forgiven. Erdman was, however, aghast at his new job: ‘Would you expect to have a Gestapo song and dance ensemble?’ he exclaimed. Erdman’s plays had to wait until the 1990s to be performed, but Beria saved him physically.

23.
This story was filmed by Evgeni Tsymbal in
Zashchitnik Sedov
(1986).

24.
See A. G. Zviagintsev and Iu. G. Orlov,
Prigovorionnye vremenem: rossiiskie i sovetskie prokurory 1937–1953
, Moscow, 2001, 118–24.

25.
Roginsky’s legal and personal talents were best shown in his own defence. He resisted two years of interrogation by feigning madness and insisting on better prison conditions. Although he was moved to Sukhanovka where Ezhov was broken, Roginsky confessed only to lesser crimes and delayed his trial until after war began. He forced the judges to spend not twenty minutes but two hours trying him. He escaped execution but died in the camps. See Zviagintsev and Orlov, 2001, 190–94.

26.
See
Voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv
, 1997, 107–14.

27.
The details of these murders emerged in the interrogation of Beria’s subordinates in 1953. See Stoliarov, 2000, 240–48. Kulik himself was shot in 1950.

28.
Koltsov’s brother Boris Efimov was
Pravda
’s cartoonist and compensated for his conformist ideology with grotesque draughtsmanship.

29.
Stalin sent Babel and Pasternak, both mute with shock, to the congress’s last session.

30.
Vladimir Stavsky, general secretary of the writers’ union, was a hated apparatchik; Fadeev’s sanction carried more weight with the intelligentsia.

31.
Antonov-Ovseenko, 1999, 251

32.
Eisenstein’s tireless enemy Boris Shumiatsky, head of Soviet cinematography, once refused to drink a toast to Stalin; born in Buriat-Mongolia, he was shot as a Japanese agent. Eisenstein then became a favourite of Stalin’s.

33.
Vlast’ i intelligentsiia
, 1999, 456

34.
Text cited from GARF in
Izvestiia
, 5 June 2002, ‘Nauka’ section, II.

35.
In the early 1970s, Lysenko was interviewed by young Soviet geneticists. He suddenly screamed three times, ‘I didn’t kill Vavilov!’ In the 1990s the KGB pensioner Aleksandr Khvat proudly told television cameras that he had done his duty by torturing Vavilov.

36.
In 1950 it was Stalin himself, not Beria nor even Soviet linguists, who demolished Marrism.

37.
Even the few hundred Eskimos on the Soviet side of the Bering Straits were now forbidden from canoeing across to visit their cousins in Alaska.

38.
In northern Korea the Japanese deported Koreans as potential Soviet spies.

39.
For this and other detailed reminiscences of the deportations, see Svetlana Alieva (ed.)
Tak èto bylo
, 3 vols, Moscow, 1993.

40.
Certain categories, including 8,000 prostitutes, were sent to Kazakhstan.

41.
These are the best attested figures, based on the NKVD’s own unashamed documentation. Other estimates, extrapolated from lists of missing persons or from later censuses, are very much higher. See Pavel Polian,
Ne po svoei vole
, Moscow, 2001, 98–102.

42.
The fullest collection of primary materials is in Polish:
Katyń. Dokumenty
zbrodni
, 4 vols Warsaw: 1998. The most important original Russian documents are in
Katyń: plenniki neob” iavlennoi voiny
, Moscow, 1999 and
Katyń: mart 1940 g. – sentiabr’ 2000 g.
, Moscow, 2001.

43.
It was ironic that Polish officers of the 1920 campaign were rewarded with landholdings in the newly acquired eastern provinces, which ensured that they would be captured by the Soviets in 1939.

44.
This was convenient when the crime was later blamed on the Nazis, but Blokhin brought Walther revolvers simply because they did not jam in continuous use.

45.
Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov (eds)
Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsia
, 1999, 445–6

46.
Naum Eitingon’s brother Max dealt with Trotsky, and made a fortune out of the Soviet fur trade, then managed by Trotsky. Max Eitingon spent his money subsidizing the Berlin Institute for Psychiatry, another of Trotsky’s hobbies. See Aleksandr È tkind,
Èros nevozmozhnogo
, St Petersburg, 1993, 269–310.

47.
Siqueiros escaped to Chile, helped by the poet Pablo Neruda; years later Siqueiros apologized for his crime. Grigulevich had Sheldon Harte shot dead.

48.
The promise was broken in 1951: Eitingon and other Jewish MVD officers were arrested.

49.
Artizov and Naumov, 1999, 451

NINE * Hangmen at War

1.
Sorge, under cover as a German businessman in Tokyo, was providing the German ambassador, as well as the NKVD, with information on Japanese intentions, and the NKVD with information on German intentions. His assurances that the Japanese would not attack the Soviet Union in the east were believed, his warnings that Hitler would attack in the west were discarded.

2.
Two months before the invasion Golikov stopped assuring Stalin of the Germans’ peaceful intentions: he noted troop movements towards the border, but desisted from comments that might irritate Stalin.

3.
Merkulov often blundered: when the Americans retrieved from the Finns a half-burnt book of Soviet codes, he failed to change the ciphers and as a result from 1944 all traffic between the NKVD and Soviet missions in the USA was intercepted. Merkulov also failed to assassinate General Vlasov when the latter organized a small army out of millions of Soviet POWs to fight alongside the Germans. By 1946 Merkulov had outlived his usefulness and Stalin attacked him for not pursuing Trotskyists during the war.
Merciful or forgetful, Stalin allowed Merkulov life and liberty; he stayed in the Central Committee of the party and became responsible for Soviet property abroad.

4.
If he was born in 1908, then he was a child when he joined Dzierżyński’s special purpose units. His decrepit health at the end of his life, discounting the effects of torture, also suggests he was much older.

5.
See Iakov Aizenshtat,
Zapiski sekretaria voennogo tribunala
, London: 1991.

6.
Zemliachka, until her death in 1947, and her sister, were among the very few persons whom Mekhlis could call friends.

7.
In the skirmishes with the Japanese at Khasan, where Bliukher distinguished himself, Mekhlis countermanded Bliukher’s orders. Bliukher said of Mekhlis and Ezhov’s deputy Frinovsky, ‘Sharks have come to gobble me up; I don’t know if they’ll eat me or I them – the latter is unlikely.’

8.
Iu. Rubtsov,
Alter ègo Stalina
, Moscow, 1999, 226

9.
Ibid. 262

10.
See V. K. Abarinov,
Katynskii labirint
Moscow: 1991.

11.
The story is widespread but undocumented. The fullest documentation on this deportation is to be found in N. Bugai, «
Ikh nado deportirovat’
», Moscow: 1992, 36–83; statistics are collated in Pavel Polian,
Ne po svoei vole
, Moscow: 2001, 102–10.

12.
When the moment came, the military would denounce Beria for nearly losing them the Caucasus, but in November 1952, when Stalin, paranoiacally jealous, disliked public praise of Beria, General Ivan Maslennikov stuck his neck out by printing in
Military Thinking
a tribute to Beria’s leadership on the Caucasian front. Maslennikov had helped Beria tame the military in 1939, instituted the dreaded blocking squads behind the front line, and had commanded an army in the Caucasus.

13.
See Alieva, 1993, vol. 2, 42.

14.
Gvishiani escaped punishment when Beria’s men were arrested as he was the son-in-law of Aleksei Kosygin, future co-ruler with Brezhnev.

15.
The German Foreign Ministry was sympathetic to the lobbying of the Turkish ambassador, Nuri Pasha, to establish an autonomous republic of Caucasian peoples and a free Tatar state in the Crimea, but the Germans nevertheless exterminated large numbers of Crimean Tatars, burning villages they suspected of sheltering partisans, and sending thousands as forced labour to Germany. See Bugai, 1992, 151.

16.
The most convincing demographic statistics are to be found in V. B. Zhiromskaia,
Naselenie Rossii v XX veke
, Moscow, 2001, vol. 2. They are nevertheless conservative, as they are based on extant documentation. It is likely that actual deaths were higher, but few demographers allow more than 10 per cent for undocumented mortality.

17.
In early 1942, 3,000 died of starvation every day in Leningrad; the NKVD killed another twenty or so daily for such crimes as wishing aloud for the Germans to enter the city and finish the siege. See Nikita Lomagin,
Neizvestnaia blokada
, Moscow: Olma, 2002.

18.
Of a total of 3,486,206 prisoners taken by the Soviets on the western front, 2,388,443 were Germans; the other large contingents were Hungarians (half a million), Romanians and Austrians (each over 150,000). Statistics and information come from Stefan Karner,
Arkhipelag GUPVI
, Moscow/Vienna: 2002 (Russian version of 1995 German edition).

19.
The NKVD allowed senior German officers better rations and freedom from work. In March 1943 General von Paulus even ordered winter shoes, socks, a sweater and a new suitcase from the German military attaché in Ankara, the bill to be sent to his wife in Berlin. Ibid. 74.

20.
The memoirs of Pavel Sudoplatov (
Spetsoperatsii: Lubianka i Kreml’ 1930–1950 gody
, Moscow, 1997, 432–49) are mendacious, but his account of Wallenberg’s fate is not contradicted by other evidence.

21.
One can be sure that if a writer said anything dissident it would be reported, less sure that it would be reported accurately. See
Vlast’ i intelligentsia
487–99 and 522–33

TEN * The Gratification of Cruelty

1.
Iu. G. Murin,
Iosif Stalin v ob”atiiakh sem’i
, Moscow, 1993, 95

2.
Politbiuro CK VKP(b) i sovet ministrov SSSR 1945–1953
, Moscow: 2002, 195–200

3.
Ibid. 25–6

4.
Ibid. 205–06

5.
Malenkov had reason to fear worse; he knew that he had been named in Ezhov’s confessions. In 1954 Malenkov got hold of Ezhov’s statements and destroyed them.

6.
The exception was the deputy minister of geology Academician Iosif Grigoriev, who was beaten to death in 1949 by Beria’s henchman Shvartsman. See Arkadii Vaksberg,
Neraskrytye tainy
, Moscow, 1993, 112.

7.
In 1947, however, the Politbiuro forbade the publication of
The Journal of Physics in the USSR
in Western languages on the grounds that this ‘makes the work of foreign intelligence much easier’.

8.
For reports of these proceedings see Artizov and Naumov (eds.) Moscow, 1999, 549–603.

9.
But Chaplin’s anti-fascist film
The Great Dictator
remained banned in the USSR.

10.
Eisenstein and Cherkasov reconstructed this conversation from memory. See Artizov and Naumov (eds.) 612–19.

11.
Aleksei Kuznetsov had temporarily taken over the government of Leningrad when Zhdanov’s nerve broke. He rallied the city’s population, taking his twelve-year-old son everywhere and sleeping in dugouts not bunkers.

12.
B. Kostyrchenko,
Tainaia politika Stalina
, Moscow: 2001, 229. This is the authoritative work on Stalin and the Jews: for a vivid account of the fate of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee, see also Vaksberg, 1993, 222–302.

13.
Kostyrchenko, 2001, 234

14.
Ibid. 514

15.
Vaksberg, 1993, 261–5

16.
Grigulevich became ambassador to the Vatican and wrote a history of the Spanish Inquisition.

17.
Stalin was intrigued by group sex, to judge by his marginal comments on polygamy in Engels’ book on the origin of the family.

18.
Once again, Ogoltsov evaded the hot ministerial seat, but he became Ignatiev and Riumin’s loyal assistant.

19.
For an account of Abakumov’s fate, see K. A. Stoliarov,
Palachi i zhertvy
, Moscow, 1997, 11–148.

20.
This device, a denunciation from an obscure underling, had last been used by Stalin to unseat Ezhov on a similar accusation of inadequate zeal. Viktor Zhuravliov, a major from Ivanovo, was credited in November 1938 with unmasking Ezhov to the Politbiuro. Mediocrities like Zhuravliov and Riumin would not have risked, unprompted, such suicidal initiatives. Zhuravliov’s fate (he died mysteriously, aged forty-two, in December 1946) should have given Riumin pause for thought. Sukhanov got his come-uppance in 1956, when it was discovered that he had stolen 100,000 roubles from Beria’s safe on the date of his arrest. See K. A. Stoliarov,
Igry v pravosudie
, Moscow, 2000, 284–6.