During the plenum of February 23–March 5, 1937, Voroshilov was given the floor at the March 2 morning session. Yezhov and Molotov had already delivered their reports on ubiquitous enemies. Stalin had considered assigning a separate report on the army but demurred. (“We had in mind the importance of the matter,” according to Molotov, meaning the possible consequences.) Instead, Voroshilov spoke during discussion of Kaganovich’s report, which covered sabotage on the railroads.110 The defense commissar was one of Stalin’s two most important minions.111 He stood far closer to Stalin than any other military man or security official, having first met him in 1906 and having fought together with him during the civil war. But his position atop the massive Soviet military had hardly been foreordained. Back in November 1921, following bitter internal battles during the civil war over the shape of the military, he had begged Stalin to be released. “In Moscow I already told you of my intention to alter my field of play, and now I have firmly decided: I have grown tired of work in the military institution, and the center of gravity is not there now either,” a then thirty-year-old Voroshilov had written. “I submit that I would be more useful in the civilian sphere. I await approval and friendly support from you at the Central Committee for my transfer. I’d like to work in the Donbass, where I ask the Central Committee to send me. I’ll take any kind of work and I hope to buck up again, otherwise I’ll start to decay (spiritually) here. You should pity me. A strong embrace, your Voroshilov.”112 Instead, within four years Stalin had named Voroshilov defense commissar.
As of June 21, 1935, the arrest of any officer from platoon level up required the approval of the defense commissar, which put Voroshilov front and center in Stalin’s terror.
Stalin prized Voroshilov’s canine fealty and avuncular sociability. A connoisseur of the opera, Voroshilov discovered a fondness for posing for oil portraits, too, sitting for long periods in the studio of Alexander Gerasimov. Gossip made the rounds that Voroshilov had acquired yet another villa (his third), at state expense, expressly for a ballerina, even as he reprimanded those below for doing the same.113 The erstwhile metalworker and his wife, Golda Gorbman, a convert from Judaism who went by the name Yekaterina Voroshilova, had turned their apartment in the Grand Kremlin Palace into the regime’s social epicenter.114 Voroshilov was stormy and sentimental, given to tears even more readily than Franco, but, like the Spanish general, he had never acquired genuine military training. He had not served in the tsarist army, despite being the right age. Unlike the standouts Tukhachevsky, Yakir, and Uborevičius, Voroshilov had not been sent to study in Germany (although he had visited and met with top German officers). He usually chastised commanders as if their mistakes surprised him, and doled out praise, while marking milestones and awards with personal letters. Still, Voroshilov could not stanch the chitchat about his military incompetence.
Ivan Kutyakov, a party member since 1917 and the person who had taken command of the famous Chapayev’s unit when the latter fell in 1919, recorded in his diary in 1937 that, “as long as ‘the iron one’ is in charge, we will have misconception, bootlicking, and everything stupid will be valued, everything smart will be devalued.”115 Kutyakov was too far from the center of power to understand that Voroshilov was a shrewd political operator who had developed a certain bureaucratic-procedural mastery, with which he had often kept the wolves of the NKVD’s special department at bay, dismissing requests for arrest authorization with phrases like “It’s not obligatory to arrest every fool; one can simply toss them from the Red Army.”116 But Kutyakov did understand that the fate not just of the top officers who looked down on Voroshilov but of the entire Red Army lay in the commissar’s hands.