Stalin полностью

Miron Korol, who went by the name Sergei Mironov, had been born in Kiev (1894) to Jewish parents (his grandmother had owned a dairy shop on fashionable Khreshchatyk Street). The young man graduated from a high school for commerce, fought in the tsarist army in the Great War, and, in the civil war, headed a unit of Budyonny’s famous 1st Calvary Army before joining the Cheka (age twenty-seven) and, four years later, the party. Mironov cut his teeth in the North Caucasus, yet another Yevdokimovite, especially in Chechnya, where “banditism” was no mere slogan of abuse, and counterinsurgency was for real. By 1930, Mironov had climbed to deputy secret police head in Kazakhstan, where he managed influxes of “special resettlers” (deported “kulaks”) and denomadization, which resulted in mass death and starvation. From September 1933 through 1936, he headed the OGPU-NKVD in industrial Dnepropetrovsk, living in a villa with a billiards room, cinema, and modernized bathhouse, emulating his superior, Ukraine NKVD chief Balytsky, who had an even more impressive villa on the Dnieper River, where in 1936 Mironov and his second wife, Agnessa, had their wedding, at state expense.⁹² Vodka, champagne, and nighttime card playing for large sums mixed with surveillance over the party elite, under the guise of providing security. Yezhov, spurred by Frinovsky, promoted Mironov to NKVD chief of Western Siberia, where he took over the villa of the former tsarist governor general and continued the grand style of sumptuous banquets and a household of servants.

Mironov lived in the Chekist world. Once upon a time, that had meant defending Soviet power against armed enemies; now it entailed a deceitful game of unmasking “Trotskyites” and “spies” on railroads and at factories. In private conversations with Agnessa, Mironov called the high-profile November 1936 Kemerovo wrecking case (which predated his arrival) “fabrication” (lipa). Torture was known as physical methods or sanctions, with a “scribe” writing up interrogation protocols, often in the absence of the person interrogated and with cynical instructions. (“In this interrogation protocol, it’d be good to add a few little bombs, a touch of terrorism, a rebellion, throw in some diversionary action, then it would be full fledged.”) A mass execution was known as a wedding. Chekists would joke that one of them had shot the wrong people but promised to “correct the mistake.”⁹³ A profound brittleness underlay the dark humor: Mironov could not shake the thought that he, too, would end up in Novosibirsk’s “bird house” (prison). In March 1937, he was promoted to commissar of state security (third rank), putting him in the elite of the elite. Once, playing billiards, he could see uniformed men approaching outside—and turned white. They proved to be just a rotation of the exterior guard. Mironov had served under the “enemy” Yagoda, and Mironov’s deputy, Alexander Uspensky, was closer to Yezhov and could earn a promotion by taking down his new boss. According to Agnessa, “Seryozha said that he [Uspensky] was not a person but mucus.”⁹⁴

Such animal fear prompted varied reactions. Some NKVD personnel became inert, some threw themselves out the window, some strove to reconfirm their worth with rabid arrests. Mironov felt impelled to do the latter. He was the one who had telegrammed Yezhov with a denunciation of Balytsky while the latter had been traveling toward his new assignment in the Soviet Far East. Back on June 17, 1937, on the eve of the Central Committee plenum at which Yezhov would unveil the “Center of Centers,” Mironov had “requested permission” to form a Western Siberian “troika,” comprising the regional NKVD chief, the procurator, and the party boss, to expedite death sentences. He wrote that thousands of exiles were lying in wait to form a counterrevolutionary army. Troikas had been widely used for dekulakization and, before that, in the 1920s antibanditry operations of the North Caucasus, so they were familiar to Mironov. Deich (of the NKVD secretariat) or Frinovsky, knowing how much Stalin prized requests “from below,” likely had suggested a troika revival to Mironov. Be that as it may, on June 22, Yezhov forwarded Mironov’s “request” to Stalin.

As a respite from the Central Committee plenum, on June 25, 1937, Stalin, with the retinue in tow, went to the Moscow aerodrome to greet the returning crew of the first-ever airborne polar expedition to set up a scientific station on drift ice. In the summer heat, an improvised banquet took place in the Kremlin. “The tables were set in a way I had never before seen, since I had never been in a restaurant,” observed a then twenty-five-year-old Sigurd Shmidt, whose father, Otto, was the head of the Arctic Institute.⁹⁵ Sergei Obraztsov, the Moscow Art Theater actor and puppeteer, debuted inventive verse about the explorers, which pleased Stalin no end. He invited Obraztsov to share some wine.⁹⁶