Stalin полностью

Incarcerated Red Army men inundated the defense commissar with desperate letters about their torture, begging—begging—for his help. “Kliment Yefremovich! You must check how the cases against the commanders of the Red Army are being handled,” a group of civil war comrades wrote to him. “You will find that materials are extracted from the arrested by means of force, threats, and turning men into limp rags.”²⁹⁸ Whether Voroshilov read these painful letters, which came in the many thousands, is unknown.²⁹⁹ In a pathetic note to himself, he wrote, “It is possible to fall into an unpleasant situation: you defend someone and he turns out to be a true enemy, a fascist.”³⁰⁰ But Voroshilov told Kuznetsov, the naval commander, that he did not believe in the guilt of the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, who had been arrested. Kuznetsov wondered, “How is it possible to sleep, when hundreds and thousands of your subordinates are arrested, and you know this is wrong?” He added, “The longer things went on, the more he [Voroshilov] lost face.”³⁰¹ In fact, evidence indicates that Voroshilov knew full well the charges were a lie.³⁰² He also comprehended the incalculable damage and dishonor wrought upon so many dedicated, patriotic military men as uniforms, chevrons, and medals were torn off and bullets fired into the backs of necks. “The authority of the army in the country is shaken,” Voroshilov wrote, again in notes to himself. “The authority of the commanding group has been shaken. . . . This means that the methods of our work, the whole system of governing the army, my work as commissar, has suffered a shattering crash.”³⁰³

Sixteen years after Voroshilov had implored Stalin, in vain, to move him to a civilian post, the former metalworker had come to cherish the Red Army, but his forced complicity in the massacre of loyal officers on the basis of fabricated charges and torture-extracted testimony psychologically pulverized him.³⁰⁴ When Alexandra Kollontai returned from her ambassadorial post to Moscow in 1937, accompanying the Swedish foreign minister, she found the normally buoyant Voroshilov “sweating from suffering; he was unaccustomedly hunched over.” She commiserated, telling him of the “terrible sorrow” that resulted from “losing faith” in the moral fiber of close friends. “You understand this?” he responded. “Terrible grief, yes, yes.”³⁰⁵

People were at a loss. “Could Voroshilov really have been indifferent to the fate of these cadres, colleagues from the civil war?” wondered Colonel Ilya Dubinsky, a Soviet tank commander demoted to deputy head of a school in Kazan. “With whom did he intend to smash the arrogant Hitler?”³⁰⁶ Trotsky, from afar, called Voroshilov “hopelessly compromised among all the thoughtful elements of the army.”³⁰⁷ Voroshilov carried a pistol and was an expert marksman. He lacked Orjonikidze’s courage, however—if suicide can be called courage. Whether the defense commissar contemplated shooting Stalin, we shall never know. Voroshilov had to know he was no substitute leader.

FIFTH COLUMN STORY LINE

Stalin had one of the most exhilarating periods in his life in May–June 1937. He had plotted and carried out a conspiracy to invent a conspiracy, ridding himself of the few plausible alternate leaders, compelled the rest of the upper officer corps to take part, and broken Voroshilov like a dog, while having his handiwork relentlessly acclaimed in newspapers and on radio. But did Stalin understand the price? Unlike Voroshilov, he appreciated Tukhachevsky’s exceptional talent. Stalin did not need Machiavelli to understand that a celebrated military man posed the gravest threat to a prince. (The Florentine had advised that such a commander should either be killed or discredited in the eyes of the army and the people.)³⁰⁸ Molotov said late in life, apropos of Tukhachevsky, “We were not sure whether he would stay firmly on our side at a difficult moment, because he was a rightist” and, unlike Trotskyites, rightists concealed their views. Molotov added, “Had he [Tukhachevsky] not been caught, he would have been very dangerous. He was the most authoritative.”³⁰⁹ True enough, but Stalin could have just had the commander quietly exiled or shot. But the despot had deliberately cut a very wide swath. And he had insisted that the men’s bodies be lacerated until they confessed to being foreign agents.