Stalin полностью

The Kirov and Kremlin Affair investigations were now running in parallel. In Leningrad on March 10, Draule was tried and executed, along with her sister and brother-in-law; there was no public announcement.²⁶⁴ The next day, a secret NKVD circular observed that enemies had been smashed mercilessly but as a result had “gone deep underground,” so operatives had to dig deeper to find them.²⁶⁵ In Moscow, in further testimony (March 11), Nina Rozenfeld was said to have attributed Nadya Alliluyeva’s death to differences over party policy, while complaining about the removal of Zinoviev and Kamenev and a lack of democracy. Rozenfeld happened to be the former wife of Lev Kamenev’s brother Nikolai, and their son, Boris N. Rozenfeld, was labeled a Trotskyite.²⁶⁶ Nikolai Kamenev had been arrested, and found to have painted watercolors of Stalin. Finally, Lev Kamenev was interrogated (March 21) and asked about his brother, who Lev was told had confessed to planning to kill Stalin. Lev Kamenev said that after the arrests of the Zinoviev followers Ivan Bakayev and Grigory Yevdokimov in the wake of the Kirov murder, an agitated Zinoviev had come to him expressing fears of an action like Germany’s Night of the Long Knives against him and others. Stalin circulated the document to Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Yezhov, writing, “Idiotic interrogation of Kamenev.”²⁶⁷

Stalin had the politburo approve by telephone poll a secret party circular absolving Yenukidze of knowing of plans to assassinate the dictator, but deeming him to have been used by the class enemy. His demotion to the South Caucasus was judged too light a punishment.²⁶⁸ Gorky was following press accounts of the Kremlin Affair. “What is striking is not so much the behavior of Yenukidze, but the shameful indifference to this behavior of the party-ites,” he wrote ingratiatingly to Stalin (March 23, 1935). “Even the non-party people long ago knew and spoke about how the old man was surrounded by nobles, Mensheviks, and, in general, shitty flies.” Gorky asserted that the strangely well-informed émigré Socialist Herald got its inside information from Yenukidze’s staff. “The closer we get to war, the stronger will be the efforts of these jokers of all suits to try to assassinate you, in order to decapitate the Union,” Gorky stated in his letter, which Stalin circulated to the politburo. “This is natural, for the enemies see well: there is no one who could take your place. With your colossal and wise work, you have inculcated in millions of people trust and love to you—that’s a fact. . . . Take care of yourself.”²⁶⁹

Also on March 23, after protracted negotiations, the Soviets sold the Chinese Eastern Railway to Manchukuo for the convertible currency equivalent of 140 million yen, a fraction of its market (let alone strategic) value.²⁷⁰ (Stalin’s regime left behind a network of undercover agents.) On the same day, the politburo decreed that the payment would be used for more equipment purchases in the United States, Britain, and Germany for Moscow’s ZIS Factory, which manufactured heavy trucks and, soon, luxury sedans.²⁷¹ Chinese patriots said the railroad was not the Soviets’ to sell, and the Nationalist government in Nanking lodged an official protest. Chiang Kai-shek had opened semiofficial negotiations for a friendship treaty with Japan’s representative, who proposed a Sino-Japanese alliance. As a dedicated anti-Communist, Chiang would have been a natural ally of Japan (as well as Germany) against the Soviet Union.²⁷² But “Chiang Kai-shek did not go for this,” the Soviet chargé d’affaires in China had reported of the alliance proposal. Chiang did raise the Japanese legation to the status of an embassy, and the two countries announced an exchange of ambassadors. This provoked anti-Japanese protests in Tientsin and Peking. Japan, leaping on the “insult” of the protests, had its garrison in Tientsin expel the Chinese Nationalist authorities and soldiers from Hebei province, and then from the Chahar province of Inner Mongolia, as it spread its control over northern China. Japan would also ramp up pressure on the Soviet satellite Outer Mongolia.²⁷³ The Soviet chargé d’affaires, in the same report about Chiang, warned that another faction in the Nanking government “favors an alliance” with Japan.²⁷⁴

JOYRIDE