Soviet borders were effectively closed (visas were required to exit). A privileged few were afforded occasional access to foreign newsreels. Juri Jelagin, a musician, recalled how members of his elite Vakhtangov Theater troupe were whisked to Mosfilm. “We watched American and German chronicles,” he wrote. “We saw horse jumping in Paris, President Roosevelt’s press conferences, Hitler’s nighttime torchlight processions, Davis Cup tennis matches, Mussolini speaking from the balcony of the palace in Rome, and sittings of the English Parliament.”261 A few organizations had authorized access to foreign publications. Some Soviet inhabitants had relatives abroad, and though their correspondence passed through censorship, the latter struggled to keep up.262 Information from foreign radio broadcasts such as the BBC was accessible, but only to the minority with dial radios in certain regions (even listening to foreign musical programs could get one denounced). The overwhelming majority of USSR inhabitants were cut off from the outside world, except for what the regime decided could be shown or heard.263 Even in the foreign affairs commissariat, department heads for various regions of the world were frequently in the dark about specific world events.264
On top of the enforced isolation, a swirl of dark forces and shadowy machinations suffused the mentality of the time. The opaque regime had originated as a conspiracy and had never ceased being one, while fighting against what one scholar has aptly called the “omnipresent conspiracy.”265 The plots could be so convoluted that many of those involved did not even know about them. (As Macduff says in Shakespeare’s
On June 11, 1937, Soviet newspapers and radio stunned the country, announcing a trial, later that day, for Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven other high-ranking Red Army officers, for complicity in a “Trotskyite Anti-Soviet Military Organization” on behalf of foreign powers: Yakir, Uborevičius, Eideman, Kork, Putna, Feldman, and Primakov. A ninth, the suicide Gamarnik, was posthumously named a Nazi spy and Gestapo agent as well. (Three of the nine “Gestapo agents” were Jews.)267 Right before and after announcement of the “trial,”
Everything had taken place behind the scenes. On June 8, prison wardens had presented the eight defendants with their formal indictments, and the next day Yakir had addressed a petition for mercy to “Our Own Close Comrade Stalin,” who wrote on it, “He is a scoundrel and a whore.” Other politburo members had to read it as well. (“A perfectly precise definition. K. Voroshilov.” “A scumbag and a whore, deserves only one kind of punishment, death. L. Kaganovich.” Molotov affixed his name without elaborating.) After collecting the signatures, Stalin wrote on the document, “My archive.”269 Also on June 8, 1937, he sacked Uritsky as military intelligence chief after the latter wrote confessing that he had visited Yakir, Uborevičius, and other arrested enemies in their homes but desperately insisting, “I was not friends with them.”270 He was replaced by his predecessor, the disgraced Berzin, who had returned from Spain and, after Stalin had sung his praises, been decorated with the Order of Lenin. The forty-seven-year-old triumphantly returned to his old office in the Chocolate House, following a tryst the same morning with his Spanish mistress, Aurora Sánchez, who would very soon celebrate her twentieth birthday.271
Among the charges leveled against Tukhachevsky were that he desired to force into being more tank and mechanized divisions at the expense of cavalry (which was true) and that he and others