Stalin had displayed less than a full command of key military terms and issues, and he misstated people’s names.251 What the attendees, their lives on the line, made of his rambling remains unclear. Following a break, discussion ensued. Marshal Blyukher stated that in the units, “they are not speaking the way they should be. In a word, we’ll have to explain to the troops what this is about.” Stalin jumped on him: “You mean reconsider who has been arrested?” Blyukher tried to recover: “Not exactly that.” Some back-and-forth ensued over a list that had been compiled, of 150 people to be promoted, and Voroshilov stated, “The list is somewhere.” (The Red Army personnel chief who had compiled the list had been arrested.) Stalin interjected: “There’s no need to look at the list, since half of those on it had been arrested.”252
Throughout the four days of the Main Military Council gathering in the Kremlin, forty-two military men would take the floor; thirty-four of them would be arrested. All told, just ten of the eighty-five members as of 1937 would survive, the rest falling to “friendly fire.”253 (Sergei Kamenev, the civil-war-era commander in chief, had managed to cheat Stalin, dying of natural causes at age fifty-five, but he would be made a foreign agent posthumously.) Not a single speaker defended his arrested colleagues. On the contrary, they called them fascists and scum. Budyonny interrupted often, brutishly remarking that the civil war heroes Yakir and Uborevičius had been cowards back then. Shaposhnikov—wearing old-fashioned spectacles, his hair parted down the middle, unfailingly correct in manner—spoke only of his own shortcomings, an elegant stance, which did not spread and did nothing to halt the pandemonium.254 None of the military officers, most of whom had battlefield experience, would try to stop Stalin’s insanity. They were locked in Bolshevik ways of looking at the world, their own fear, and the grip of his person.
The day after Stalin’s speech and the initial discussion, on June 3, 1937, General Emilio Mola—of “fifth column” fame—died when his plane hit a hillside in fog. Mola’s crash (three months after Sanjurjo’s) induced Franco to stop traveling by air. (He would tour the front by car.)255 Franco attended Mola’s funeral, where, in front of onlookers, the caudillo’s uniform split at the armpit, a sign of his weight gain. But Franco, whose ambitions and pitilessness were evident, had not even murdered Mola, a genuine rival, let alone the bulk of Spain’s upper officer corps.
On June 4, the final day, a diminished Voroshilov offered concluding remarks. Stalin interrupted, demanding to know why the Communist party members he had personally sent to the Red Army were not leading tank units. “They cannot be commanders right away,” Voroshilov responded defensively. “We need to teach them.” Stalin: “What, are you not teaching them?” Voroshilov: “We’re teaching them, but in order to grow into a brigade commander, you must put in a rather significant amount of time.”256
Late on the concluding evening, a telegram arrived reporting that Keke Geladze, Stalin’s mother, had died in the Georgian capital. The cause was heart failure, according to the medical report; she was probably in her seventy-seventh year. (The morbid joke, whispered in Tiflis, that the guard outside her apartment was there to ensure she did not give birth to another Stalin, lost its topicality.)257 Stalin did not interrupt his terror against his own army to attend the funeral, a terrible breach of custom for a Georgian; Beria represented him at the ceremony.
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