Stalin полностью

Public knowledge of Göring’s visit, combined with the secretiveness of its substance, sparked all manner of speculation.¹⁹⁸ On January 30, Stalin had Tukhachevsky—who had a sky-high profile abroad—deliver a policy speech to the 2,000 delegates of the 7th USSR Congress of Soviets. He declared that the Red Army was concentrating soldiers in the Far East and, in general, was a force not to be underestimated, revealing for the first time that the military budget had risen to more than 5 billion rubles—10 percent of total expenditures—and was projected to reach 6.5 billion in 1935. In fact, 1934 outlays had amounted to a gargantuan 5.8 billion (as compared with 417 million a decade before), and internal projections for 1935 were 7.5 billion.¹⁹⁹ But even the deliberately lowball figures were impressive. Tukhachevsky added, accurately, that troop strength had increased to 940,000. “We are working for the development of mobility and daring, for the development of initiative, independence, persistence—to put it crudely, ‘nerve,’” he explained of the new military doctrine, adding that commanders accustomed since the civil war to cavalry had had to “adjust to a new level, to be able to utilize the mobility of aviation and our mechanized troops and tanks. [It] is not so simple.” Both when he had first appeared on the dais and after he finished, the entire hall stood in applause for a good long time. “The ovation was marked out from others by its force and sincerity,” one attendee recalled. “Tukhachevsky was a good orator, and his speech stirred the audience to its depths.”²⁰⁰ The rousing account of Red Army might was published in Pravda (January 31) along with a photograph of Stalin, Voroshilov, and other politburo members listening to Tukhachevsky.²⁰¹

LITTLE BLACKBERRY

Nikolai Yezhov, along with Agranov, was the point man on the Kirov assassination fallout. Stalin convened a one-day Central Committee plenum on February 1, 1935, to formalize Yezhov’s appointment as a Central Committee secretary. Officially, he had been born (1895) to a working-class family in industrial St. Petersburg, but he hailed from Mariampol, in tsarist Lithuania, and his father was a musician, then a forest warden, brothel (“tearoom”) owner, and housepainter. His mother was the maid of the musical ensemble’s conductor and either an ethnic Lithuanian or a Russian who grew up in Lithuania. (Yezhov spoke Lithuanian and Polish, which he hid.) Having completed only first grade, he went to the imperial Russian capital at age eleven to apprentice to a tailor, before signing on to the Putilov Works and then being conscripted. He joined the Bolshevik party in 1917 (before October) and served as a military commissar during the civil war, after which his star rose as a regional party functionary in Tatarstan, then in Mari-El (east-central Russia), where he provoked anger for running roughshod over the local ethnics, and then in the Kazakh steppe (Semipalatinsk).²⁰² Yezhov enjoyed playing guitar, composing verse, reading—he had been dubbed Kolya the Book Lover—and building model ships.²⁰³ He was nervous and shy, and developed a reputation as mild-mannered, but he stood out for his uncommon energy.²⁰⁴ In 1927, Ivan Moskvin, the head of the Central Committee’s assignments and records department, had brought Yezhov into the central apparatus (they had met in the hotel at the 14th Party Congress). “I don’t know a more ideal worker, or rather executive,” Moskvin wrote to his son-in-law. “If you entrust him with anything, you need not check up: you can be sure, he will do it. Yezhov has only one fault, admittedly a fundamental one: he doesn’t know where to stop. . . . And sometimes one has to keep an eye on him in order to stop him in time.”²⁰⁵