Soviet military intelligence, meanwhile, had suffered another self-inflicted disaster by violating tradecraft yet again, recruiting agents among Communists under police surveillance—this time in Denmark, which ran the Soviet agents in Nazi Germany. Danish police had gone looking for a suspected spy on charges of raping a chambermaid (possibly an invented pretext) and netted the current and former station chiefs for Germany, as well as cash, fake passports, and codes. In early May, over several sessions in the Little Corner with Voroshilov, among others, Stalin promoted Semyon Uritsky from deputy head of the tank armor directorate to chief of military intelligence, retaining Artuzov as deputy head. (Artuzov would be replaced on May 21 as concurrent head of NKVD espionage by his deputy, Abram Slutsky.) Stalin told the Jewish Uritsky to recruit operatives and agents among ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Latvians, and Jews, but to avoid Poles, Finns, Estonians, Hungarians, and Austrians. As spies in the field risked their lives to combat fascism, Uritsky went to war to force out Artuzov, seething that he “would be the idiot with the genius deputy.”80
CONNECTING THE DOTS
All this while, Stalin was reading interrogation protocols about elaborate terrorist “centers” of cleaning ladies and librarians plotting his assassination. By now, only nine persons hired by Yenukidze remained on the Kremlin staff.81 On May 12, 1935, Yagoda had sent Stalin proposals for punishment of the 112 people who had been arrested in the Kremlin Affair. Yagoda left blank Lev Kamenev’s sentence; Stalin wrote in ten years for him, and execution instead of ten years for Nina Rozenfeld.82 The next day, Yenukidze was named central executive committee plenipotentiary for the resorts group in the North Caucasus, which included elite Kislovodsk, second after Sochi.83 Stalin also dispatched a secret circular to all party organizations announcing a party card verification campaign to “introduce Bolshevik order in our house.”84 Over the years, 200,000 duplicate cards had been issued for those reported lost or stolen. Nearly 15,000 party cards in the Donbass and 13,000 in Central Asia were still unaccounted for. (Several months later, the verification campaign would miss its completion deadline, inciting Stalin to irate charges of “family-ness,” or self-protection, by colluding local elites.)85
Yezhov had drafted the circular and was overseeing the verification. In parallel, he was demanding stronger oversight of foreigners in the USSR, calling them spies.86 He also asked Stalin to read his ambitious theoretical manuscript, “From Factional Activity to Open Counterrevolution (On the Zinovievite Counterrevolutionary Organization).” It set out how the Zinovievites, right deviationists, and Trotskyites were working together for a coup.87 Stalin received the draft on May 17 and underlined various passages (“The Zinovievite counterrevolutionary band definitively chooses terror as its weapon in this battle against the party and working class”). Whether he had instigated the work remains unknown; Yezhov had pretensions and had absorbed Stalin’s worldview. “There is no doubt that the Trotskyites were also informed about the terrorist side of the activity conducted by the Zinoviev organization,” Yezhov’s text asserted, concluding that “from testimony . . . we have established that [the Trotskyites] had also embarked on the path of terrorist groups.”88
Trotsky had predicted, almost immediately after his expulsion from the territory of the Soviet Union, that “there remains only one thing for Stalin: to try to draw a line of blood between the official party and the opposition. He absolutely must connect the opposition with assassination attempts, and preparations for armed insurrections.”89