Stalin полностью

While Nikolayev reclaimed a sense of higher purpose from his despair, Stalin’s regime made the Kirov assassination into an epoch-defining event. Most people in Leningrad and elsewhere, living in communal apartments, barracks, and mud huts, were preoccupied with material hardship. Apparatchiks complained that the discussions they were ordered to oversee of Kirov’s murder were overtaken by the pending end of bread rationing and threatened price increases.²⁸¹ The end of rationing had generated significant anxiety and resentment.²⁸² All the while, conspiracy theories flourished: Medved had slipped Nikolayev a pass to Smolny; Chudov had ordered a hit to take Kirov’s place; foreign agents had penetrated the building; it was Stalin’s doing (a rumor that grew over time). Police informants hastened to capture or invent such gossip. In Leningrad: “I like brave men like Nikolayev who must have gone to a certain death.” “It’s clear not all the Zhelyabovs have disappeared in Rus; the struggle for freedom goes on.” “The murderer wanted good for the people, that’s why he killed Kirov.” In the miners’ region of Donetsk: “Kirov was killed; it’s not enough; Stalin should have also been killed.”²⁸³

Speculation that the affable provincial party leader constituted a threatening political rival to Stalin is without foundation.²⁸⁴ Similarly, the regime folklore that Yagoda’s NKVD had “resisted” the direction of the investigation was largely invented. Yagoda had no issues with framing Zinoviev and “Zinovievites,” a scenario that Stalin, in any case, did not come to immediately. The dictator drove an overkill response to the murder, relying not just on the hyper-ingratiating Yezhov, Agranov, and Zakovsky, but also on Yagoda. Yagoda had suggested the foreign angle—textbook Stalinist practice—calling from Stalin’s office the first night.²⁸⁵ It was Stalin who had chosen not to investigate Nikolayev’s visits and telephone calls to the German and Latvian consulates. The fabrications, moreover, exacerbated the professional degradation of the secret police, which enraged Stalin, and for which he had recently abolished the OGPU in favor of the NKVD. The fabrications also hurt the USSR’s reputation internationally, to which Stalin had become more sensitive. At the same time, it is wrong to assert that Stalin “took advantage” of the Kirov assassination. He needed no such pretext to act as he chose. He pushed for fierce revenge against “enemies” and prevention of recurrences out of anger, and loss.

One of Stalin’s prime fixations was confirmed: the NKVD was asleep on the job. In a city teeming with foreigners and presumed foreign agents, with innumerable “former people” and other presumed class enemies, with even much of the lower orders disaffected by the sacrifices of building socialism, Leningrad’s secret-operative department had only a short, pathetic list of potential terrorists—and did not even share that list with the bodyguard department.²⁸⁶ A parallel obsession of Stalin’s was also confirmed: an enemy terrorist in possession of a party card, taking advantage of ties to party members, had penetrated security with ease and assassinated a top leader.²⁸⁷ In fact, Nikolayev had been purged, for a time, but the episode had only rendered him more dangerous, just as Stalin was warning (the “class struggle” sharpened). But Stalin chose not to make this the object of the investigation and trials. Nikolayev’s individual terrorism—which had grown from his violated sense of worker empowerment and Communist justice—was altered, at Stalin’s behest, into the mythology that Zinoviev and Kamenev, both powerless, were somehow behind the assassination. Then Stalin remained bothered by their sentencing for creating a “moral atmosphere” conducive to terrorism, because it had fallen short of convictions for direct preparation in terrorist acts by his old critics or direct links to his arch-nemesis Trotsky, who remained out of reach in foreign exile.²⁸⁸

Stalin increasingly was alone. Not only had both of his wives died, but now his closest friend was gone. Henceforth he went to the steam bath alone. Relations with Orjonikidze had become strained, and Stalin’s ardor for Lakoba was cooling, partly as a result of Beria’s intrigues. Stalin’s newer associates, Andreyev, Yezhov, and Zhdanov, were minions, not social peers, and he was not socially close to the unlettered Kaganovich or the stiff Molotov. But Stalin had the Soviet state, which he had helped build into a major military power.²⁸⁹ Still, despite joining the League of Nations, the Soviet state was also to a considerable extent alone. And, more and more, the militarized state and its ruler were being stalked from afar by a nemesis the likes of which, inside the party, Stalin had never faced: Adolf Hitler.

CHAPTER 5A GREAT POWER