Stalin полностью

Marshal Demid, Mongolia’s popular defense minister, untouchable inside his country, had been summoned for talks in Moscow and, en route, had stopped briefly in Irkutsk on August 20, around the same time that Frinovsky had arrived in the city. On August 22, near Taiga Station (close to Novosibirsk), Demid died of “food poisoning” from Soviet-supplied canned goods. His corpse continued all the way to Moscow, where it was met at Kazan Station by an honor guard, then dispatched to a crematorium.¹⁶⁵ Demid had played a key role in Genden’s removal, at Moscow’s bidding.¹⁶⁶ Stalin evidently did not expect Demid to acquiesce in the wholesale slaughter of the Mongolian officer corps he had appointed for being “Japanese agents.” Demid’s rival, the other Mongolian marshal, Interior Minister Khorloogiin Choibalsan, had staged five public trials between April 1936 and May 1937, of lamas as “Japanese and Chinese spies.” “We fulfilled the advice of comrade Stalin,” he had reported to Yezhov. But now, Frinovsky told Choibalsan of more spies and plots, and insisted that he invite in more Soviet troops. A formal invitation was issued on August 25; two days later, Molotov and Voroshilov telegrammed an affirmative response.¹⁶⁷ A Soviet army commanded by Ivan Konev, from the Transbaikal military district, had already crossed the frontier—nearly 30,000 well-equipped troops. Their mission was to deter Japan and prepare Mongolia as a supply hub for the Nationalists in China. (The Gobi Desert dunes, belatedly studied, would be revealed to be untraversable.)

Following Demid’s funeral, Choibalsan became defense minister and supreme commander (September 2, 1937). With him, Frinovsky compiled a list of 115 “spies,” reporting every detail to Yezhov. Demid, who held a Soviet Order of the Red Banner and numerous Mongolian military medals, became a Japanese spy posthumously. On September 10, sixty-five people on the list were rounded up. The next day, Mongolia’s top brass were summoned to appear at Choibalsan’s office in full regalia and, one by one, were arrested, transported to prison, and tortured to confess.¹⁶⁸ Frinovsky set up an “extraordinary commission,” like a troika, to expedite sentencing-shootings, then departed for home.¹⁶⁹ The “diplomat” Mironov remained.

A public trial (October 4–7, 1937) of “reactionary lamas” charged with spying for Japan was staged in Ulan Bator’s State Central Theater (which also functioned as the national parliament’s building).¹⁷⁰ The theater overflowed with 1,323 people (against a capacity of 1,200), while public loudspeakers broadcast the proceedings and expansive coverage was given in the party newspaper Ünen (Truth). All twenty-three defendants, who had been burned with hot iron rods and promised their lives if they confessed, did so; four were sentenced to the Gulag, nineteen to death. They were shot in front of the theater. On October 18, in the same venue, a second public trial was staged, of fourteen high officials said to belong to a Genden-Demid “organization.” Two days later, all fourteen were pronounced guilty; one was sent to a camp, and thirteen were taken to a valley outside the capital, where, with truck and car headlights illuminating the darkness, they were executed. Those Mongolian leaders who were not executed were forced to observe. Choibalsan, drunk, waved his pistol and shouted revolutionary slogans.¹⁷¹

LEADERS COME AND GO

Reveries of finding vast numbers of capable “new people” had periodically gripped Stalin, and now many young people, capable or otherwise, were vaulted into high places. Of the 12,500 graduates of higher-education institutions in the fourth quarter of 1937, 2,127 went directly to senior positions, including 278 promoted to directors or deputy directors of factories; another 22 became directors, deputy directors, heads, or deputy heads of departments in trusts; 294 became heads or deputy heads of departments or sectors in the Council of People’s Commissars.Many were promoted again, quickly. In September 1937, M. S. Lazarev went from chief of a shop at the Gorky Automobile Plant to director of the Yaroslavl Electric Machine-Building Factory. “I literally had to go onto the site unprepared, because the management had been arrested and the apparatus was completely new,” he would tell a Central Committee conference for the recently promoted. But then, on October 1, he was promoted again, becoming head of the tractor and motor industry in the machine building commissariat.¹⁷² Not all of these newly promoted people could cope. “I want to say, honestly, that, despite nine months of work, I have failed to get into the rhythm of things and to develop appropriate economic skills,” admitted S. M. Dobrokhotov, the deputy head and chief engineer of the strategic rubber industry, also in the machine building commissariat.