Stalin полностью

Beria’s checkered civil-war-era biography continued to incite whispers. Grigory Gofman (known as Kaminsky), the USSR commissar for health, who, in that capacity, had signed the false heart-attack death certificate for Orjonikidze, blurted out at the June 1937 Central Committee plenum, in Moscow, that Beria had served in the bourgeois nationalist Musavat counterintelligence during the occupation of Baku by the British, making Beria an English spy.⁶⁵ Kaminsky, alone among the attendees, had actually been at the Baku party meeting in 1920 at which Beria’s Musavat involvement had been formally discussed—Kaminsky was then the party secretary of Azerbaijan—so he also knew Beria had been exonerated. Some Central Committee members had not even known of the original accusations. The Sverdlov Hall was thunderstruck. “No one spoke up in refutation,” recalled Khrushchev, an eyewitness. “Even Beria did not speak to offer some kind of clarification. Silence.”⁶⁶ Stalin declared a break.

Kaminsky cut an extraordinary figure. Back in Tula, the original center of ancient Russia’s armaments industry, Kaminsky (b. 1895), then a young, gifted Jewish firebrand, had edited the Bolshevik newspaper Kommunar between 1918 and 1920—roughly the same period when Beria served in Musavat bourgeois counterintelligence. The Tula newspaper had begun life with a print run of 300, but Kaminsky raised it above 10,000 by addressing himself to workers and peasants.⁶⁷ “Kommunar with one hand will help toilers organize life, fix the economy, summon to discipline, labor, and public order,” he wrote in the very first issue (July 4, 1918), “and with the other hand it will mercilessly strangle the head of counterrevolution.” Nineteen years later at the plenum, he became the “counterrevolution.” Instead of allowing discussion of Beria’s past, Stalin had Kaminsky arrested and expelled that very day.⁶⁸ The NKVD ransacked his apartment in the grand House on the Embankment and his state dacha in elite Barvikha, carting away the gypsum busts of him made by the renowned sculptor Vera Mukhina, as well as every photograph and piece of paper, including his eleven-year-old daughter’s drawing of their dacha garden.⁶⁹ His two brothers were also arrested. His mother took to standing in the Alexander Garden, outside the Kremlin walls near closed-off Red Square, anticipating that “any minute Iosif Vissarionovich would come out and then she’d tell him her three sons had been arrested and he would take pity on her and release them.”⁷⁰ Kaminsky got “ten years without the right of correspondence,” which meant he was executed.⁷¹

Stalin was accepting “testimony” of fabricated events as real, but he chose to overlook actual deeds in Beria’s life that, in the case of others, were made retroactively fatal. Kaminsky’s outburst at the plenum appears to have precipitated a letter that same day (June 25) to Stalin from the former South Caucasus secret police chief, Ivan Pavlunovsky, whom Beria had pushed aside way back when. A candidate member of the Central Committee, Pavlunovsky (b. 1888) had served in the vital war mobilization department of the heavy industry commissariat (under Orjonikidze). His private letter to Stalin stated that when he had been named head of the South Caucasus GPU, back in 1926, Dzierżyński had called him in and told him that one of his new subordinates, Beria, had worked in Musavat counterintelligence, but that this should not be held against him, because he had done so on a party assignment. Pavlunovsky added that Orjonikidze had told him, “Comrade Stalin is aware of” Beria’s past and that “he [Orjonikidze] had discussed it with Comrade Stalin.”⁷² Pavlunovsky’s private defense of a Stalin favorite was an effort to save his own skin. It failed. He was arrested on June 28, part of Orjonikidze’s “clan” that Stalin was extirpating.⁷³

A MINI SUPREME LEADER