Stalin полностью

The single-day trial of the military men took place in camera, near the Kremlin, on the second floor of the three-story military collegium building (October 25 Street).²⁷⁵ In the chamber, collegium members could avail themselves of sausages, black caviar, pastries, chocolates, fruit. Chief military judge Vasily Ulrich was known to enjoy a brandy.²⁷⁶ Seven high-ranking officers, including Marshals Blyukher and Budyonny (newly named commander of the Moscow military district), Pavel Dybenko (newly named commander of the Leningrad military district), Shaposhnikov, and others were added to the collegium for the trial.²⁷⁷ Except for Voroshilov, the entire top brass, some fifty people in all, was either in the dock or on the court.²⁷⁸ As specified under the December 1, 1934, anti-terrorist law, there were no witnesses and no defense counsel, and no right of appeal. At the “trial,” Yakir acknowledged the existence of the “center” but shifted blame onto Tukhachevsky. Feldman did the same. When Kork tried to absolve himself and attack the others, they incriminated him, calling him a liar and provocateur. Primakov had volunteered an additional handwritten denunciation of commanders not yet arrested. Dybenko pressed Tukhachevsky for details about his planned palace coup, and Blyukher pressed Yakir to elaborate on Gamarnik’s counterrevolutionary Trotskyite plotting.²⁷⁹

Budyonny reported that day to Voroshilov (“only personally”), in a nineteen-page memorandum, that “from the testimony of Tukhachevsky, Kork, Yakir, and Uborevičius it is evident that they decided to work out first on their own initiative the plan for the defeat of the Red Army during the war and only after that to clear it with the German general staff . . . [but] because of their arrest they did not finish.” Still, Budyonny concluded, “I consider that nonetheless they passed it on to German intelligence” (parroting Stalin’s closed-door speech of June 2).²⁸⁰

Ulrich, in the middle of the proceedings, pronounced a recess and rushed to the Little Corner, appearing at 4:00 p.m. and staying twenty minutes. At 4:50 p.m., Stalin sent a ciphered telegram to every Soviet locality to organize mass meetings of workers and peasants and Red Army garrisons to affirm the necessity of executions, informing them that the sentences would be published the next day.²⁸¹ Just before midnight, Ulrich sentenced all eight to death; the men were led down to the cellar, where the NKVD’s head executioner, Vasily Blokhin, used German Walther pistols to execute the fascist hirelings.²⁸² Yuri Levitan, now twenty-three and a familiar voice, read the Pravda trial report over Soviet radio. Vehement approvals of the death sentences appeared under the names of famous Soviet scientists, such as the world-renowned plant specialist Nikolai Vavilov, and cultural figures, such as actress Alla Tarasova, a USSR People’s Artist. Izvestiya on June 12 printed a collective letter from Soviet writers, led by Alexander Fadeyev, naming the eight Soviet commanders as fascist agents who “wore a mask for years” and decrying how “fascists destroy culture, they bring degeneration to humanity, rude, idiotic militarization. The fascists kill the world’s best people.”²⁸³

That same day, Maria Ulyanova, Lenin’s sister, died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age fifty-nine. Stalin had her ashes interred in the Kremlin Wall, adjacent to Gorky’s. This left Krupskaya, aged sixty-eight, alone in the Kremlin apartment they had shared with Lenin.²⁸⁴ Alexander G. Solovyov, by now head of educational institutions in the commissariat of military industry, found Krupskaya sitting by Ulyanova’s casket in the Council of People’s Commissars club. “I asked what lay behind such an early death,” Solovyov noted in his diary. “Krupskaya breathed heavily and said [Maria] could not survive the difficult conditions created around us. Look around more closely, she said: it is possible you do not notice our utterly abnormal situation, the poisoned life.”²⁸⁵

It was on June 15, 1937, that Republic Spain’s new prime minister had ordered the mass arrests of the POUM leadership in Barcelona. The final destruction of the Spanish “Trotskyites,” including the NKVD’s secret assassination of Andreu Nin, had become small potatoes, however satisfying to Stalin.