Stalin полностью

In December 1937, the USSR held elections for the new bicameral Supreme Soviet, a permanent body to replace the Congress of Soviets. There were 569 seats in the soviet of the Union and 574 in the soviet of nationalities, both elected on the basis of universal suffrage.²¹⁶ The provision for multiple candidates had been unceremoniously dropped.²¹⁷ Stalin, too, ran for election, choosing to represent Moscow city’s “Stalin ward,” and delivered candidate remarks from the imperial box at the Bolshoi on December 11, 1937. (“Comrades, to tell you the truth, I had no intention of making a speech. But our respected Nikita Sergeyevich [Khrushchev] dragged me, so to speak, to this meeting. ‘Make a good speech,’ he said.”) The next day, the uncontested balloting took place as the regime laid on food, drink, music, and dancing.²¹⁸ The process reached into every village, and no-show voters were monitored. The press reported that more than 91 million votes were cast—96.8 percent of those eligible—and that every candidate running was duly “elected.”²¹⁹

On December 20, the NKVD celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Sergei Mironov traveled from blood-soaked Mongolia, finding portraits of Dzierżyński and Yezhov adorning all Soviet newspapers and Young Pioneers competing for the honor of having their scout groups bear these names.²²⁰ At the Bolshoi, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Dimitrov, and others sat in the presidium. Kaganovich arrived late and was greeted by an ovation. So did Molotov (for him the hall stood while applauding). Mikoyan chaired the festivities and praised NKVD head Yezhov as “a talented and faithful pupil of Stalin . . . beloved by the Soviet people.”²²¹ In Pravda that morning, Frinovsky had denounced the swine and fascist bandits inside the NKVD who had been arrested; Mikoyan’s speech closed with praise for their replacements. “The NKVD has worked gloriously during this time,” he noted. “Let us wish that the workers of the NKVD in future will work as gloriously as they have this year.”²²² Another ten Orders of Lenin were awarded to NKVD operatives, to go with the forty-six from the summer.²²³ Stalin joined for the post-speech concert.²²⁴

The next night, Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony premiered in Leningrad, in the white auditorium of the former Chamber Music Association. “Writers, poets, musicians, scientists, and army officers filled every seat,” Jelagin recalled. “The younger people stood in the aisles along the walls. . . . The audience refused to leave, and the applause continued unabated. Shostakovich came out and took dozens of bows.” He was no longer the “formalist.”²²⁵ This was also Stalin’s official fifty-ninth birthday. He received Molotov, Yezhov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan for three hours, until 1:00 a.m. In media res, he summoned Pyotr Pumpur, head of aviation training in the Red Air Force, and Yakov Smushkevich, a thirty-five-year-old fighter pilot, both of them decorated Spanish civil war veterans who now oversaw the dispatch of Soviet pilots to China.²²⁶ The NKVD was reporting devastating shortcomings in the air forces of the Red Army: not just egregious rations, loss of valuable equipment, alcoholism, and hazing, but a colossal number of aviation crashes. Stalin received interrogation protocols indicating that in the Soviet Far East, new aerodromes, poorly built, flooded in the rain and became unusable, forcing planes to be kept under an open sky. “Very important,” Stalin wrote back to Yezhov.²²⁷ The response, for now, would be more arrests, more executions.^{228, 229, 230}