Stalin полностью

Tukhachevsky did himself few favors, stirring resentment (like Yagoda in the NKVD).²⁰⁶ The marshal was the army’s most brilliant military mind, and the first to let you know. Already in 1920, he had provoked the interest of the political police for willfulness as well as abuse of subordinates and funds.²⁰⁷ In his grand apartment in Moscow’s House on the Embankment, he hosted musicial evenings with the likes of Shostakovich and had the state military orchestra perform private parties at his state dacha, immodesties heightened by his aristocrat pedigree.²⁰⁸ A serial womanizer, he lived with Kuzmina without having divorced his third wife, while also carrying on an affair with Natalya Sats, director of the Central Children’s Theater. (He preferred intellectual beauties, not the youngish, buxom peasant girls who had once caught Stalin’s eye.) Stalin exploited these appetites: Tukhachevsky shared at least two lovers with Yagoda, who helped keep tabs on the marshal—Shura Skoblina, the niece of the émigré White Guard general, and Nadezhda “Timosha” Peshkova, the widow of Gorky’s son.²⁰⁹ Most Soviet officials were afraid of even limited intercourse with foreigners, but Tukhachevsky enjoyed high-level contact with the German and French militaries (he spoke both languages), which of course had been authorized but nonetheless endangered him.²¹⁰ Yezhov would relate a tale of how, during a visit to France, Tukhachevsky had supposedly cut off a piece of fabric at Napoleon’s grave and made himself an amulet. To all of this was added Voroshilov’s long-standing ill will.²¹¹

Stalin was also fixated on the authority of the commanders of the country’s two most strategic military districts on the western border: Yakir, who had headed the Kiev (Ukrainian) military district since 1926, and Uborevičius (b. 1896), the son of a Lithuanian peasant, who had commanded the western (Belorussian) since 1931 and had an extraordinary following among the officer corps.²¹² Together, these two commands accounted for 25 of the Soviet Union’s 90 infantry divisions and 12 of its 26 cavalry divisions. Only Blyukher, atop the Soviet Far Eastern Army, commanded comparable forces. Stalin had promoted the proletarian Blyukher to marshal while overlooking Yakir and Uborevičius, who were whispered to be jealous. Voroshilov, for his part, disliked Blyukher, perceiving a dangerous rival. (Amid rumors of Blyukher’s pending promotion to deputy defense commissar, Voroshilov preemptively promoted a Blyukher deputy to the post.)²¹³ Such jockeying by outsize egos could be found in any large institution, but in Stalin’s hands everyday tensions or indiscretions could become lethal. Through chauffeurs, bodyguards, cooks, maids, adjutants, secretarial staff, mistresses, and the NKVD special departments, the top military men were under a level of surveillance exceeding even that conducted on the foreign military attachés of Britain, Germany, Poland, Romania, or Japan.²¹⁴

Also in Stalin’s sights was Soviet military intelligence. Uritsky was out of his depth and bereft of talented people—such as Artuzov and Otto Steinbrück—whom he had forced out.²¹⁵ On May 20, Artuzov was arrested in his office (no. 201) on the second floor of Lubyanka and accused of being a rightist alongside Yagoda, as well as concealing material implicating Tukhachevsky (the very material he had forwarded to Yezhov). His interrogation protocols, which he signed with his own blood, would also assert that Yagoda had told him of widespread NKVD dissatisfaction with the Soviet leadership, “whose despotism stands in crying contradiction to declarations of Soviet democracy.”²¹⁶ On May 21, Stalin received the interrogation protocols of Semyon Firin-Pupko, a longtime military intelligence operative with experience in Poland, France, and Germany and, most recently, a deputy chief of the Gulag, responsible for forced labor construction sites. Accused of being a German spy, Firin painted in his “testimony” an incredible portrait of the complete capture of Soviet military attachés abroad by Polish intelligence, which he said was also directing Soviet counterintelligence in Moscow.²¹⁷