Stalin полностью

Stalin received from Yezhov daily summaries of reactions to the trial, assembled from NKVD branches around the Union, and some local secret police officials dared to convey comments about how unpersuasive the proceedings were.²⁶¹ In Pravda, and in equally vicious commentary on Soviet radio, Mikhail Koltsov, who had been recalled from Spain, fluently conveyed the party line on the trial, cursing the treasonous snakes, praising Yezhov to the skies. Privately, though, Koltsov was said to have told a fellow writer who had wanted to witness the spectacle live, “Don’t go! . . . What is being done there the mind cannot conceive. . . . Very strange trial. Very strange.”²⁶² The New York Times captured some of the insanity. “It is as if twenty years after Yorktown somebody in power at Washington found it necessary for the safety of the State to send to the scaffold Thomas Jefferson, Madison, John Adams, Hamilton, Jay and most of their associates,” the paper wrote. “The charge against them would be that they conspired to hand over the United States to George III.”²⁶³

Under the klieg lights in the wee hours on March 13, Vasily Ulrich read out the sentences individually. Three were for long Gulag terms. The other sentences—“to be shot”—echoed in the hall eighteen times. “I experienced profound shame, especially here in court, when I learned and understood the full counterrevolutionary infamy of the crimes of the Right-Trotskyite Bloc, in which I served as an assassin,” Pyotr Kryuchkov, Gorky’s former secretary (assigned to him by Yagoda), stated in his last word. He added, “I ask you, citizen judges, for a reduced sentence.” On March 15, the condemned were executed one by one, with Yagoda and Bukharin rumored to have been last so as to have to witness the others’ deaths.²⁶⁴

Yagoda had never risen higher than nonvoting candidate member of the Central Committee, and had never been much of a public face for the regime, absent from prominent public photographs (an exception was the White Sea–Baltic Canal book, which, however, was withdrawn). But his corpse was said to have been displayed on the grounds of his legendary dacha, located outside Moscow on the Kaluga highway, the site of a prerevolutionary estate that he had occupied in 1927. The complex had become part of the Kommunarka state farm and had served as a well-stocked country club for Yagoda’s use, but then it became a killing field. Kommunarka shared that function with nearby Butovo, also just outside Moscow, a former stud farm that the NKVD had seized from its owner. Mass burials of ashes also took place at the former Donskoi Monastery (1591), whose crematorium (completed in October 1927) was the first in Russia or the Soviet Union. Tukhachevsky’s ashes had been dumped here in a mass grave. Initially, victims’ ashes were buried in the common graves using a shovel, but soon the NKVD brought in an excavator and a bulldozer. At Kommunarka, up to 14,000 executions would take place, primarily of political, military, scientific, and cultural figures, whose bones were sometimes seen in the jaws of prowling dogs.²⁶⁵

FAILURES OF CONTEMPORARY KREMLINOLOGY

Contemporaries could not fathom what was going on. “Something incomprehensible is happening,” the secretary of the party organization in the Novosibirsk NKVD, Sergei Plestsov, told an NKVD department chief in Ukraine who had returned briefly to Novosibirsk, his former place of employment, in fall 1937.²⁶⁶ Orlov, NKVD station chief in Spain, also deemed the mass arrests unfathamoble.²⁶⁷ “What for?” the deputy railways commissar, Livshits, had exclaimed when taken away, according to rumors in upper party circles.²⁶⁸ This unanswered question was etched all across the Soviet space, into the walls of teeming prisons and labor camps, stamped on the souls of the children carted off to orphanages, heard echoing through the execution cellars, and repeated throughout society as people wondered if they would be next.²⁶⁹ Victims who had had frequent contact with Stalin did no better. Stalin had included Rosenholz, the long-serving commissar of foreign trade (1930–37), in the March 1938 trial of the Trotskyite-rightist bloc. Rosenholz had told his interrogator-torturer that years earlier, when he had brought Stalin documents, the latter had asked just two or three questions before affixing his signature, trusting Rosenholz, but more recently Stalin’s “suspiciousness had reached lunacy.” He could only surmise that Stalin “was in a fit, a crazy fit of rage against treason, against baseness.”²⁷⁰ “Explaining the present regime in terms of Stalin’s personal lust for power is too superficial,” Trotsky wrote in May 1938. True enough, but he could not explain why such a terror annihilated the very apparatus in whose “class interest” it had supposedly been launched.²⁷¹