Stalin полностью

Plenty of NKVD personnel came forward to enact the carnage on coworkers. A key cooperative group centered on Yevdokimov, party boss of the North Caucasus territory. He had first met Yezhov at the Communist Academy in the 1920s. Stalin, around the time he issued the Sochi telegram replacing Yagoda with Yezhov, had consulted with Yevdokimov.²²⁸ Yevdokimov had been among those who ripped into Yagoda at the February–March 1937 plenum.²²⁹ He aspired to be Yezhov’s new first deputy at the NKVD and head of the state security department (GB). Instead, Mikhail Frinovsky, whom Yezhov was consulting regularly over wet lunches, got the position.²³⁰ Frinovsky had worked under Yevdokimov in his early career in Ukraine and the North Caucasus, but was his own man. He became one of the few Chekists closely tied to Yagoda (as chief of the USSR border guards) who would flourish under Yezhov. Yezhov did promote a slew of Yevdokimov people in the NKVD, including Israel Dagin, Yakov Deich, Sergei Mironov, Nikolai Nikolayev-Zhurid, and Vladimir Kursky, who replaced Pauker as head of bodyguards. (Kursky would shoot himself six days after receiving the Order of Lenin; Dagin would replace him.) All in all, fourteen of the sixty-odd regional NKVD bosses in 1937 were linked by service in the North Caucasus under Yevdokimov.²³¹ Thus did the enemies of Yezhov’s enemy (Yagoda) become Yezhov’s new friends—and the zealous implementers of the slaughter in the NKVD itself.

Despite the upheaval, Yezhov’s NKVD, like Yagoda’s, was made up of people of roughly the same generation, with Cheka service dating to Dzierżyński, overwhelmingly white-collar rather than working-class or peasant backgrounds, and heavily Jewish or non-Russian.²³² Yezhov’s NKVD, similarly, was riven with distrust. When informing Frinovsky that he wanted to appoint him first deputy commissar, Yezhov asked him to recite his accumulated sins. “You have so many sins, you ought to be arrested right now,” Yezhov told him, adding, “Well, so what, you’ll work, and you’ll be my person 100 percent.”²³³ Frinovsky further testified that “Yezhov demanded that I find investigators who were utterly dependent on us or had sins on their records, and they knew they had sins, which could be held over them.”²³⁴

Stalin had more faith in his young protégé than he’d had in Yagoda, but Yezhov still had to clear NKVD personnel appointments with the despot. Yezhov wielded nearly unimaginable power and terrified a vast country, but he never felt at ease. “Coming to the NKVD organs, at first I found myself alone,” he would later explain. “I did not even have an aide.” This was a lie: Yezhov had imported loyalists from the party apparatus, including Mikhail Litvin, who got the critical post of head of NKVD personnel, and Isaak Shapiro, who became head of the NKVD secretariat. Still, Stalin would often compel him to destroy his own associates. And the chain-reaction arrests, including of many people Yezhov had newly promoted, did foster paranoia. “I tasked this or that NKVD department head with interrogating someone who had been arrested,” Yezhov noted, “while thinking to myself: ‘Today you interrogate him, tomorrow I’ll arrest you.’ All around were enemies of the people, my enemies.”²³⁵

WEST ON THE WANE

Stalin had invested considerable time wooing Western intellectual sympathizers. But just as Pasternak had told the secret police, André Gide, in his Return from the U.S.S.R. (December 1936), published something critical, which noted, among other things, that “one fully literate worker asked if we also had schools in France.”²³⁶ Gide had also written a private “Report for My Friends on My Trip to the USSR,” and, on a mimeographed copy of a Russian translation Zhdanov had written for Stalin, “Defender of homosexuals!”²³⁷ The politburo wanted Koltsov to publish a rebuttal of Gide’s book, but he was occupied in Spain, so the apparatchiks engaged Feuchtwanger, who answered with Moscow, 1937.²³⁸ It was rushed into print in Russian in a print run of 200,000, and contained excerpts of Feuchtwanger’s early 1937 conversation with Stalin. “In official portraits Stalin gives the impression of being a tall, wide-shouldered, imposing person,” Feuchtwanger wrote. “In real life he is not very tall, thinnish, and, in the expanse of his Kremlin room where I met him, he was not very noticeable.” He added: “Stalin speaks slowly, softly, in a bit of voiceless voice. During a conversation he paces back and forth in the room, then he suddenly comes upon his interlocutor and, directing the index finger of his handsome hand toward him, he clarifies, or expounds, while formulating thought-out phrases, draws patterns on a sheet of paper with a colored pencil.”²³⁹