Stalin полностью

Orjonikidze’s poor health was deteriorating further, and his autumn rest away from Moscow was proving relentlessly stressful, thanks to Stalin. Whereas a mere 11 of the 823 highest officials of the heavy industry commissariat who belonged to the nomenklatura (those officials who could not be removed without Central Committtee approval) had been fired during the party card verification campaign of spring–summer 1936—with just 9 of them suffering arrest—during the last four months of 1936, 44 senior officials would be fired, 37 of whom would lose their party cards and, with three exceptions, be arrested.²²³ In October 1936, Stalin had Orjonikidze’s elder brother Papuliya arrested, a first for a relative of a sitting politburo member. Orjonikidze demanded to see his brother, but Lavrenti Beria, the policeman turned party boss in Georgia, where Papuliya worked, said he could allow that only after concluding the investigation.²²⁴ Orjonikidze understood that it was not Beria but Stalin who was behind the incarceration.²²⁵ On October 8, Stalin had Kaganovich’s deputy Yakov Livshits removed as deputy commissar of railways and, six days later, arrested.²²⁶

On October 24, the country effusively celebrated “Comrade Sergo’s” fiftieth birthday in a Union-wide extravaganza. But the industry commissar did not attend the gala, staged near his holiday dacha in Kislovodsk. (His wife went on his behalf.)²²⁷ Stalin ordered the arrests of Orjonikidze’s former Caucasus associates Stepan Vardanyan, now party boss in Taganrog and the former leader of reconquered Bolshevik Georgia, and Levan Gogoberidze, party secretary at a factory in the Azov–Black Sea territory and a former party boss of Georgia.²²⁸ Happy birthday, Sergo.

How far Stalin would go remained to be seen. On October 25—after two and a half months away—he returned to Moscow to discover an inquiry from the Associated Press in Moscow about rumors that he was ill or perhaps dead. Normally very touchy about discussions of his health, that very day he responded playfully. “As far as I know from the foreign press, I long ago left this sinful world and moved on to the next,” Stalin wrote to the correspondent. “As it is impossible not to trust the foreign press, if one does not want to be crossed out of the list of civilized people, I ask you to believe this report and not to disturb my peace in the silence of that other world.” The delighted AP man dispatched a telegram to the United States on October 26, to the effect that “Stalin refused to deny the rumors of his death.”²²⁹

The bulk of Spain’s gold, reaching Odessa by November 2, went by train to Moscow, accompanied by Orlov’s cousin, Ukraine NKVD operative Zinovy Katznelson. Another $155 million (some 2,000 crates) was shipped to Marseilles, as an advance for weapons the Spaniards hoped to purchase from France. A small remainder was taken to a cave in southern Spain. Some of the lot that arrived in the USSR was evidently deposited in the finance commissariat’s precious metal vaults on Nastasinsky Lane on November 6, 1936, in time for Revolution Day.²³⁰ Orlov, having accompanied the shipment to Soviet shores, was back in Spain already and, on November 7, celebrated the Bolshevik anniversary in the company of, among others, Koltsov and Gorev, in the latter’s suite at Madrid’s Palace Hotel.²³¹ In parallel, Trotsky had ordered his son in Paris to transfer his archives to the International Institute of Social History, on Rue Michelet in Amsterdam, headed by the Menshevik émigré Boris Nicolaevsky, but Zborowski tipped off the Soviets, and a few days later, on the night of November 6–7, the papers were stolen (cash was left untouched)—another Revolution Day gift for Stalin.

On November 6, Stalin took in the customary Revolution Day performance at the Bolshoi in the imperial box, and the next day he presided over the parade atop the Mausoleum. Bukharin, with his lover, the twenty-three-year-old Anna Larina, was living in Stalin’s old Kremlin apartment, where Nadya had killed herself. He possessed a gun—given to him by Voroshilov, with the ironic inscription TO THE LEADER OF THE GREAT PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION—but did not attempt suicide. He was still listed on the masthead of Izvestiya as editor, so he received a pass to the Revolution Day celebration, in his case for the lowest level of the reviewing stand. Stalin caught sight of him and sent a guard to invite him and Larina up to the Mausoleum, a gesture for all to see—and misread as reconciliation. Not long thereafter, another story has it, Bukharin was being served with an eviction notice for the Kremlin apartment when, suddenly, the apartment’s special Kremlin line rang: it was Stalin, just inquiring how things were going. Bukharin informed him of the eviction, and Stalin appeared to react angrily; the eviction was halted. Stalin was torturing him psychologically.²³²