Simplicity—Stalin’s beloved self-characterization—was the leitmotif. “Stalin speaks unpretentiously and is able to express complicated thoughts simply,” Feuchtwanger continued. “Sometimes he speaks too simply, like a person who is used to formulating his thoughts so that they are understood from Moscow to Vladivostok. . . . He feels himself quite free in many areas [of knowledge] and cites by memory without preparation names, dates, facts always exactly.” Feuchtwanger wrote that “of all the men I know who have power, Stalin is the most unpretentious.” This was the cue to discuss the cult: “I spoke frankly to him about the vulgar and excessive cult made of him, and he replied with equal candor. . . . He thinks it is possible even that ‘wreckers’ may be behind it in an attempt to discredit him.” The German sympathizer was bothered by the showcase trials and put into print the heresy that “it seemed the bullets which tore into Zinoviev and Kamenev killed not only them, but the new world.” And yet, in the end, he ended up justifying the trials he knew to be falsified, on the basis of cultural snobbery (Russia was backward) and the political imperative to close ranks against fascism.240
Vsevolod Vishnevsky, the Soviet writer, found “a lot of European arrogance” in Feuchtwanger’s text. “Neither Malraux nor all these Western ‘public figures’ are of any use to us,” Vishnevsky wrote to Sergei Eisenstein (May 24, 1937). “Their historical value is much smaller than ours. . . . Let everything be ours. Let the law begin with us.”241
STALIN’S ATTEMPT AT EXPLANATION
Stalin directed Voroshilov to summon an extraordinary session of the USSR’s Main Military Council, which customarily met once annually, in November or December, but now convened June 1 to 4, 1937. Its 85 members were top army and fleet commanders and heads of military academies, many of whom had been arrested or discharged, leaving 53 to attend, but 116 nonmembers were invited, along with Yezhov, Frinovsky, and others of the NKVD.242 Some invitees arrived from as far away as Vladivostok (a week’s journey by train), while Kirill Meretskov had only just returned from Spain and, a naïf, expected to be asked to report on its key military lessons.243 Instead, attendees were compelled to spend the first day reading interrogation protocols about a fantastic homegrown fascist military plot. “The testimonies were typed carbon copies on normal paper, some contained numeration, some not,” one participant recalled. “The print on them was not always sharp, and reading them was difficult.” Readings were hurried, and new pages kept coming, with insufficient copies to go around, forcing people to wait as sections were freed up (and to read them out of order). Some of the protocols implicated attendees in the hall. Finally, the formal session opened, not in the House of the Red Army, as previously stipulated, but in the Sverdlov Hall of the Kremlin’s Imperial Senate building.244 The mood was cemeterylike.
Stalin attended all four days. (He would not become a member of the Military Council until the next year, so the sessions were officially designated a joint meeting of the council and “the politburo.”) Voroshilov had to deliver a report in the same room used for the February–March 1937 Central Committee plenum, but since then his deputy defense commissars (Tukhachevsky, Gamarnik) had turned out to be foreign agents: where had he been looking? In the presidium, Stalin “looked over the hall with interest, seeking familiar faces, and fixing his gaze on some,” while Voroshilov “seemed to have shrunk in height,” the participant recalled. “His hair had turned even grayer, wrinkles had appeared, and his voice, normally muffled, became completely hoarse.”245 Voroshilov complained that, back during the 1936 May Day celebrations, in a discussion in his apartment that devolved into recriminations over the 1920 Soviet-Polish War debacle, “Tukhachevsky said in the presence of comrades Stalin, Molotov, and many others that I and Budyonny had supposedly created a small clique of people around myself that controls policy. Two days later, Tukhachevsky took his words back.” Voroshilov then tried to downplay his grudge-drenched remarks as merely “the usual squabbles,” and to put distance between himself and the accused: “I, as you know, did not especially like, did not love Tukhachevsky. I had strained relations with him.”246
Voroshilov’s comments were almost beside the point. Stalin, on the second day (June 2), to a prolonged standing ovation, would deliver his most revealing remarks during his terror.