Stalin полностью

Was it not plausible that these former party oppositionists—armed and, by their own admission, meeting to criticize Stalin—would in shadowy ways have taken part in the killing of Kirov, who, after all, had displaced their patron Zinoviev?¹³⁵ Kotolynov, according to one interrogation protocol (December 12), would admit only that “our organization bears the political and moral responsibility for the murder of Kirov by Nikolayev, having reared Nikolayev in an atmosphere of embittered relations to the leaders of the Soviet Communist Party.” Here was one formula.¹³⁶ On December 16, Zinoviev and Kamenev were arrested.¹³⁷ Zinoviev confessed to a host of fictitious crimes, and agreed to name “all those I can and will remember as former participants in the anti-party struggle.”¹³⁸ Pravda and Leningrad Pravda (December 17) ran the same front-page editorial asserting that Nikolayev had been directed by the former Leningrad opposition “Zinovievites” to kill Kirov. Here was a different formula.

FIRST TRIAL

Stalin sent Zhdanov to replace Kirov as first secretary. With the regime and much of the country in mourning, the dictator ordered that his official birthday, on December 21, 1934—his fifty-fifth—not be celebrated publicly. Nonetheless, the apparatchiks gathered the obligatory well-wishes.¹³⁹ On the day itself, Agranov, Vyshinsky, and Akulov arrived from Leningrad and, along with Yagoda and Ulrich, were in Stalin’s office for an hour, until 8:30 p.m., evidently to go over the pending trial.¹⁴⁰ Then a private celebration took place at the Near Dacha, in the company of the in-laws from both deceased wives and the inner circle. They had to add a second table. Stalin, Artyom would recall, “read the birthday congratulations in the newspapers, and commented on them humorously.” ¹⁴¹

Orjonikidze pronounced a toast for Kirov, which, according to Maria Svanidze’s diary, elicited tears and a moment of silence. Someone mentioned that Dora Khazan-Andreyeva had attended the Industrial Academy with Nadya. Stalin stood. “Since the Academy was mentioned,” he said, “permit me to drink to Nadya.” “All stood and silently approached Iosif to clink their glasses,” Svanidze wrote. Around 1:00 a.m., they got up from the table and Stalin put on the gramophone and people danced—the Caucasus lezginka or Cossack hopak—though there was not much room. Budyonny played the accordion, Zhdanov the piano. “The Caucasus people,” Svanidze recorded, “sang sad songs, polyphonic—the Master sang in a high tenor.”¹⁴²

Newspapers announced the next morning that the NKVD had turned over the investigatory results for trial. But on December 23, Pravda, shockingly, announced that “the NKVD has established a lack of sufficient evidence to turn Zinoviev and Kamenev over to the courts.” Stalin also decided against a public trial of the remaining “Zinovievites,” perhaps because the extracted confessions were of anti-Stalin conversations, not plotting terrorism. The indictments published in Pravda and Leningrad Pravda of fourteen people headed by Nikolayev mentioned a connection to a foreign consulate but stopped short of naming it, as if afraid to have to prove it, or wary of involving Nazi Germany in discussions of Kirov’s murder.¹⁴³

In Leningrad, Ulrich opened the closed trial on December 28 at 2:20 p.m., and read the guilty verdicts before dawn the next morning: death penalty. Not a single Smolny witness had been summoned to the trial. (Nearly fourscore of them—every witness to the events that day and many others—would soon be transferred to other work, expelled from the party, or exiled.) “Nikolayev shouted, ‘Severe,’” according to one of Agranov’s soft-pedaling telegrams to Stalin, which failed to report that Nikolayev and others recanted their testimony.¹⁴⁴ The executions were carried out within an hour; the head executioner was said to have broken down in tears at memories of the fallen Kirov.¹⁴⁵ Kotolynov was shot last. “This whole trial is rubbish,” he had told Agranov and Vyshinsky. “People have been executed. Now I’ll be executed, too. But all of us, with the exception of Nikolayev, are not guilty of anything.”¹⁴⁶