Next were Soviet ethnic Germans: 55,000 arrested and nearly 42,000 executed.124 Citizens of Germany were rounded up, too.125 Frinovsky, on July 20, forwarded to Stalin a report from NKVD counterintelligence: “A crow was killed near Lake Ladoga. It had a ring with the number D-72291 and an inscription, ‘Germany.’ Simultaneously, a kite [a bird of prey] killed a crow near the village of Rusynya in the Batetsky area of the Leningrad region. This crow also had a ring with the number D-70398 with the same inscription, ‘Germany.’ Evidently, the Germans are studying wind directions by using crows, with the aim of using the winds for diversionary activity and bacteriological purposes (torching settlements, haystacks, and so on).”126 What the NKVD had discovered was a research project of German ornithologists to study crow migration.
After Yezhov had posted Alexei Nasedkin to Smolensk as NKVD chief and advised him to “make arrests more boldly” of Soviet ethnic Poles and Germans, Nasedkin discovered, on-site, accumulated “testimony” on a “counterrevolutionary” Latvian cultural society. He rushed back to Moscow. “Yezhov livened up,” Nasedkin recalled, and he asked, “Are there a lot of Latvians in Smolensk?” Nasedkin answered: 5,000, of whom he estimated 450 to 500 could be arrested. “Drivel,” Yezhov said. “I’ll discuss it with the Central Committee and we’ll have to spill the blood of Latvians—arrest not fewer than 1,500–2,000. They are all nationalists.” Nasedkin himself was received in the Little Corner to report on the “Latvian conspiracy.” His “vigilance” helped spark the arrest of nearly every prominent Soviet Latvian: the talented head of the Red Air Force, Yakov Alksnis (Jēkabs Alksnis); the vexed chief of military intelligence, Jan Berzin (Pēteris Ķuzis); the celebrated Chekists Yakov Peters (Jēkabs Peterss) and Martin Latsis (Jānis Sudrabs); the first-ever Red Army supreme commander, Ioakim Vatsetis (Jukums Vācietis), who had saved the Bolshevik regime from the left SRs in 1918; Western Siberian party boss Roberts Eihe; politburo candidate member Jānis Rudzutaks.127 All across the USSR, countless people suddenly became “Latvian,” in the interests of meeting quotas. Nasedkin, back in Smolensk, inquired whether he could arrest Latvians in the absence of compromising material on them. “Material,” answered Yezhov, “will arise in the course of interrogation.”128
Yezhov would effectively take Rudzutaks’s slot on the politburo; Zhdanov would get Rudzutaks’s dacha.129 “He did not admit anything!” Molotov recalled of his long-serving, loyal deputy Rudzutaks. “I think that he was not a conscious participant, but he liberalized with this fraternity, and believed that all this was nonsense, trifles. And that could not be forgiven. He did not understand the dangers. . . . A rather intelligent man, no question. He had a kind of non-Latvian flexibility. Latvians were not so much slow thinkers, but they simplified a bit. First-class thinkers in our party were not found among Latvians.”130
ANNIHILATING MILITARY INTELLIGENCE
Yezhov received a translation of an intercepted report from a Western European military attaché in Moscow, stating that nearly all foreign representatives in Moscow viewed the charges against Tukhachevsky and other military men as preposterous, an artifact of Stalin’s hypersuspiciousness, and concluded that the executions had damaged Soviet military might. Whether Yezhov had the courage to forward the document to Stalin remains unclear.131 But another case demonstrates Stalin’s disregard of consequences. In early 1937, Yezhov had sent him a detailed sketch of the German army’s troop positioning for 1935–36, reporting that the valuable material had been photographed from the safe of the German military attaché, Ernst Köstring, without the latter’s knowledge. Yezhov attributed the feat to the Soviet intelligence officer and ethnic Hungarian lieutenant Béla Bíró (b. 1891), whom he praised for “showing initiative, boldness, agility, and sangfroid.” Stalin had approved Yezhov’s recommendation that Bíró be awarded the Order of the Red Star “for special services.” But then, on July 2, 1937, Yezhov’s NKVD, with Stalin’s approval, arrested Bíró, and on September 2 it would have him executed at its state farm killing field, “Kommunarka,” for espionage.132 Bíró’s loss was repeated many times.133, 134