Stalin полностью

Testifying to these fixations, Stalin’s holiday correspondence changed. It remained laconic and often ill-humored, sometimes downright scolding, with almost no personal information—just directives and responses to initiatives by Kaganovich (or Molotov). But content-wise, of the more than 140 letters and ciphered telegrams he exchanged during this holiday, a mere half dozen concerned the industrial economy, and most of those involved the dictator approving others’ proposals, without comment.¹¹⁰ Now the mailbag also included the transcript of a Tomsky speech, interrogation “protocols” of Kamenev, draft protocols of Sokolnikov’s interrogation. (Stalin: “Did he not inform [the British journalist] of the plans for the assassination of Soviet leaders? Of course he did.”) Such documents were pointing to a vast, phantasmagoric conspiracy, from party officials to military men. Bukharin, hiking the Pamirs in Central Asia, had hurried back to Moscow to find Stalin away on holiday, and would write the dictator a letter, which also found its way into the holiday mailbag, rabidly endorsing all the fabricated charges of the trial, except those about himself (“I embrace you, for I’m clean”).¹¹¹ Trotsky, who hurriedly returned to Oslo from his fishing holiday, told the New York Times that the trial was fraudulent and “puts the Dreyfus scandal and the Reichstag fire trial in the shadow.”¹¹²

As for Tomsky, when his driver arrived at his dacha outside Moscow to pick him up for his job as head of the state publishing house—bearing a copy of that morning’s Pravda (August 22), which reported an investigation into Tomsky for counterrevolution—he shot himself. Tomsky prepared a suicide note (“Dear Comrade Stalin”), expressing his despair while protesting his innocence, and beseeching the dictator, whom he called his “old fighting comrade,” not to believe Zinoviev’s slander against him. Tomsky apologized, yet again, for his comment one evening in 1928 that someone would shoot Stalin. “Do not take seriously what I blurted out then—I have deeply regretted this always.”¹¹³ Pravda reported the suicide the next day as an admission of guilt.¹¹⁴ In an act of attempted posthumous revenge that played on Stalin’s conspiratorial bent, Tomsky cleverly implicated NKVD chief Yagoda as a rightist coconspirator, having his wife convey orally the “secret” that Yagoda was the person who had “recruited” Tomsky.¹¹⁵

Kamenev and Stalin had known each other for more than three decades. “Greetings, friend! I kiss you on the nose, Eskimo-style,” Stalin had written to him in December 1912, evoking their Siberian exile. “For hell’s sake! I miss you devilishly. I miss you—I swear by my dog. I have no one, no one to chat with, heart to heart, may the devil run you over.”¹¹⁶ On the eve of Kamenev’s execution, Stalin wrote to Kaganovich that Kamenev, through his wife, had sounded out the French ambassador about supporting a possible Trotskyite-Zinovievite government. “I believe Kamenev also sounded out the English, German, and American ambassadors,” Stalin added. “This means Kamenev was supposed to reveal to these foreigners the plans for the conspiracy and the murder of the leaders of the party. This also means Kamenev had already revealed the plans to them, for otherwise the foreigners would not have begun talking about the future Trotskyite-Zinovievite ‘government’ with him.”¹¹⁷ Did Stalin believe this? Was he straining to justify his political murders to Kaganovich? These questions remain unanswerable.

Stalin supervised the trial from afar, sternly instructing Kaganovich that the sentences had to mention Trotsky and Sedov. (“This carries enormous significance for Europe, both for the bourgeoisie and for the workers.”)¹¹⁸ A few hours after the court had adjourned on August 24, Ulrich, at 2:30 a.m., pronounced the defendants guilty and condemned all but one to death. Later that day, the regime staged a grand aviation display at Moscow’s Tushinsky Aerodrome (“Glory to Stalinist aviation and the Stalinist falcons”). Planes flew difficult maneuvers. Parachutists dropped from the sky. “The enemies’ schemes,” a teacher in the Institute of World Economy and International Relations recorded in his diary, “cannot stop our enormous successes.”¹¹⁹ Kamenev and the others wrote appeals for mercy in the predawn hours. (Only one defendant expressly refused to do so.) Perhaps, as would be rumored, Stalin had promised them their lives in exchange for public “confessions” to crimes they had not committed.¹²⁰ But well before the end of the seventy-two-hour period for appeals specified in Soviet law, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and the rest were executed in the cellars.¹²¹ Yezhov retrieved the bullet casings as souvenirs.

FORCING MASS HYSTERIA