Stalin had Soviet diplomacy put up against the wall, too. On July 1, 1937, Vasily Korzhenko, deputy chief of the Stalingrad NKVD, was named business manager of the foreign affairs commissariat, which ushered him into a world of secret privilege. The commissariat building at Blacksmith Bridge comprised two wings. One was for amenities, such as a nursery for diplomats’ children, a clinic for staff and foreign embassy officials, a library, hairdressing salon, tailor’s shop, gastronome, and recreational facility. The other wing contained the office suites and private apartments of the higher officials. Korzhenko’s office had four comfortable chairs, a divan, a Persian rug, and an ample mahogany working desk. Five telephones sat atop the desk, once a sign of status but now points of life-and-death pressure. The one with a red button was a direct line to Stalin’s office. Pushing that with the receiver lifted elicited an immediate response from the Little Corner—and vice versa. Another, with a white button, was connected to the NKVD. Korzhenko, as he spoke, could see the secret police building across the way at Lubyanka Square through his office’s three expansive French windows. Goaded by Yezhov and Frinovsky, Korzhenko acted much like a Gestapo officer who had been infiltrated into the Soviet foreign affairs commissariat. His daughter explained that her father “was not concerned with diplomacy but had absolute power over foreign [commissariat] employees from cipher clerks to ambassadors . . . not only in Moscow but throughout the world.”84
Among the first to have been targeted were Nikolai Krestinsky and Lev Karakhan.85 Because nearly everyone in foreign affairs had worked with these “enemies of the people,” no one was safe from guilt by association. Vulnerability to arrest depended less on what people had done than on the sometimes random flow of denunciations, the caprice of Korzhenko and NKVD officials, and, ultimately, the authorization (or not) of Stalin. Personnel files with mandatory autobiographies were fatal: if you wrote out all of your associations, you were a goner; if you concealed even a single piece of information, you were a goner. When the NKVD station chief in Lithuania complained to Yezhov about the ambassador, Yezhov forwarded to Stalin material on the expenses of the embassy, two thirds of which went to refurbishing the ambassador’s office. Yezhov further noted that the ambassador had left abruptly for a three-month “holiday,” attempting to escape the arrest wave.86 Litvinov at times tried to blunt the murderous rampage, but he, too, feared for his life.87 Soviet embassies were emptied of personnel, and to the extent that dispatches were still being sent to Moscow, the paperwork often went unanswered from lack of personnel. Surviving officials, meanwhile, were “so patently in abject terror, that one must pity them,” one American diplomat wrote to Washington. “They fear to talk on any subject and apparently dread meeting foreign visitors.”88
“ANTI-SOVIET ELEMENTS”
Violence against the population was a hallmark of the Soviet state nearly from its inception, of course, and had reached its apogee in the collectivization-dekulakization. In that sense, the 1937–38 campaign against “anti-Soviet elements” afforded grisly continuity. But these new “mass operations” entailed not just large-scale deportations with some executions, but a preponderance of extrajudicial killing. They would account for 1.1 million of the 1.58 million arrests in 1937–38, and 634,000 of the 682,000 executions.89 Unlike the state murders in the military, secret police, state agencies, and party, these sweeps captured almost none of Stalin’s attention. Still, he relentlessly drove the astronomical numbers with memoranda, telephone directives, and quotas.90 Local NKVD bosses, predictably, would petition to have their quotas raised, which the “Central Committee” invariably granted. Yezhov was now constantly in the Little Corner, sometimes remaining even after Molotov had departed, and often with his first deputy, Frinovsky. The quota method afforded wide scope to the pair as well as to local NKVD bosses in determining life or death.91