Stalin полностью

That same day, Stalin summoned Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Yezhov, Frinovsky, Slutsky (head of NKVD foreign intelligence), Yakov Serebryansky (head of NKVD agents abroad without diplomatic cover), Uritsky, Mikhail Alexandrovsky (deputy chief of military intelligence, who had replaced Artuzov), and Alexander Nikonov (another Uritsky deputy) to the Little Corner for a two-and-a-half-hour session.²¹⁸ In an internal memorandum that day, addressed to Yezhov and Voroshilov, the despot ordered that all Soviet agents abroad and their handlers be rechecked, because “military intelligence and its apparatus have fallen into German hands.” Stalin’s memo noted that “from the point of view of intelligence, we cannot have friends; there are immediate enemies and potential enemies,” and deemed the Czechoslovaks—with whom the Soviet Union had a mutual assistance pact—“the enemies of our enemies, nothing more.” He ordered Soviet personnel not to share intelligence secrets with Czechoslovakia or any other country, and “to fully assimilate the lesson of the cooperation with the Germans,” whereby “Rapallo, close ties, created the illusion of friendship. The Germans have remained our enemies, and they penetrated us and implanted their network.” He added, “We have had enormous victories, we are stronger than all politically, we are stronger economically, but in intelligence we have been smashed. Understand, they smashed us in intelligence.”²¹⁹

Civil defense followed. Its head, the ethnic Latvian Roberts Eidemanis (shortened to Eideman), was arrested on May 22 and, under torture, “incriminated” twenty others. Yezhov had the interrogation protocols on Stalin’s desk quickly. The despot wrote on them, “All those people named by Eideman in civil defense (center and periphery) immediately arrest”²²⁰—no verification of their specific spying activities and any damage caused.

Also on May 22, as if a putsch were imminent, troops of the Dzierżyński Regiment, guardians of the Kremlin, were brought to full alert and all Kremlin passes were invalidated. Out in Kuibyshev, Tukhachevsky was arrested and forced to remove his marshal’s uniform.²²¹ Stalin, as promised, had him returned to Moscow, but by convoy guard. On the post-facto Central Committee resolution proposing Tukhachevsky’s arrest, Marshal Budyonny wrote, “Unequivocally in favor. The scum should be executed.”²²² In the cellars on May 26, a mere four days after his arrest, Tukhachevsky began to sign whatever interrogators put in front of him. Zinovy Ushakov, who prided himself on obtaining confessions no other investigator could extract, mercilessly beat Tukhachevsky, whose blood dripped onto the pages of a confession to crimes he did not commit. By some accounts, Tukhachevsky’s teenage daughter, Svetlana, was brought to the prison, where the interrogators told him they would rape her.²²³

Even as he had the Soviet military brass tortured for being agents of fascism, on May 27, 1937, in the Little Corner, Stalin received Kandelaki, his erstwhile Berlin trade representative, who was trying to cut a deal with the German fascists.²²⁴ Germany’s military attaché in Moscow, General Ernst Köstring, was sending constant updates to Berlin, as Stalin knew. In Berlin’s diplomatic circles, German officials “confidentially” whispered how not all of their spies in the Soviet armed forces had yet been caught, egging Stalin on.²²⁵ He needed no such inducement, of course. On May 28–29, Yakir and Uborevičius were arrested. On May 30, eight days after Gamarnik had inscribed “in favor” on the post-facto arrest order for Tukhachevsky, he himself was dismissed. The next day he killed himself in his apartment on Bolshoi Rzhevsky Street.²²⁶ (Kulik, who lived in the same building, would soon join a second apartment to his own: eight rooms for a three-person family. Shaposhnikov would get Gamarnik’s dacha in Zubalovo.) Real and imagined associates, acquaintances, and relatives of the arrested men fell into the NKVD cellars. Stalin dictated, edited, and pored over the interrogation protocols, then circulated and referred to them as if they were factual.²²⁷

TERRORIZING THE NKVD