Chapayev portrayed the civil war hero of that name as a real human being, warts and all, and the Whites as worthy foes. Stalin had already seen it twice and fallen in love with its down-home details. “You should be congratulated,” he had said to the always anxious Shumyatsky. “It’s done very well, cleverly and tactfully. Chapayev, Furmanov, and Petka are good. The film will have great educational significance. It’s a nice gift for the holiday.” Chapayev induced Stalin to push for construction of sound cinemas all across the Union (there were just 400 to 500 of them, out of some 30,000 film-showing installations).34 “I will be taking a greater interest in this than previously,” he had told Shumyatsky on November 9–10.35 At the November 10–11 screening, Stalin turned to Kirov and accused him of never visiting the film studio in Leningrad (Chapayev was their production). “You know, here people are speaking about your Leningrad films, and you don’t even know them. You don’t know the riches lurking there, probably you never even watch films.” Kirov, Stalin joked, had “bureaucratized.”36
Stalin invited Shumyatsky to stay for supper. The film boss seized the moment to point out that the state planning commission was being tight with funding, allocating 50 million rubles for the next year instead of the “minimal” 92 million requested. “You hear that, Molotov? That’s not the way,” Stalin said. “Look into it.” Shumyatsky also mentioned that initial reviews of Chapayev were favorable but had stressed the wrong themes.37 “Akh, those critics,” Stalin responded. “They disorient people.” The dictator phoned Mekhlis and ordered something more glowing, which Pravda published the next day (November 12). Stalin—now also joined by Kalinin and Molotov’s wife, Zhemchuzhina—decided to view Chapayev for a second time that night. “The more you watch it,” he said, “the better it seems, the more you find new aspects in it.” The evening lasted until 2:00 a.m.38 On November 13, after work, Kirov accompanied Stalin to the Zubalovo dacha, where they played billiards and watched a puppet show put on by Svetlana and other children, before repairing to Stalin’s new Near Dacha for supper. At Zubalovo, the Stalin family dined on the smelt and whitefish Kirov had brought. “With Kirov,” Svanidze noted, Svetlana “has a great friendship, because I[osif] is especially close and good with him.”39
UNDER THE GUN
Filipp Medved’s nerves were on edge. An ethnic Belorussian (b. 1889), he had joined the party in 1907 (one of his recommenders was Felix Dzierżyński) and had recently helped organize the White Sea–Baltic Canal construction. Now he headed the secret police in Leningrad, an international port and frontier city swimming with foreign consulates and military factories. Known to relish banquets, Medved had put on weight and taken to drink (Armenian brandy), while his wife, Raisa Kopylovskaya, came on to other men in public. (Rumors had Medved imprisoning the Leningrad torgsin shop manager after Raisa flirted with him; she might have been involved in self-enrichment schemes, too.) Whisperings about Medved’s supposed homosexuality (he had kissed the openly gay jazzman Utyosov on the mouth in public) further undermined his authority.40 His first deputy, Ivan Zaporozhets, was widely seen as Yagoda’s “spy.”41 And those were the least of Medved’s worries.
Stalin had no confidence in him. The dictator continued to be frustrated over a perceived NKVD mishmash of promiscuous arrests and indolence against enemies.42 Yagoda (“in accordance with your instructions”) had sent a team of operatives to investigate the Leningrad and Siberian NKVD branches. “The facts that were uncovered,” he had reported to Stalin (September 1934), “convinced me that [Nikolai] Alekseyev (Western Siberian NKVD) and Medved are absolutely incapable of leading our work in the new conditions and providing that sharp turnabout in state security management methods now necessary.” Yagoda proposed sacking the two branch chiefs, to set examples, and recommended a chessboard of transfers, which would bring Henriks Štubis (b. 1894), an ethnic Latvian known as Leonid Zakovsky (“unquestionably a strong and capable operative”), from Belorussia to Leningrad, with Medved recalled to Moscow to determine “if he is still fit for work in the NKVD or utterly burned out.”43
