Yezhov had retreated to his dacha in Meshcherino and fallen into a near-perpetual bender. “I literally went out of my mind,” he would write of Lyushkov’s defection in a letter to Stalin. “I summoned Frinovsky and proposed that we together report to you. Alone I could not do it. At that time Frinovsky said, ‘Now they will punish us big-time.’”229 Frinovsky had been sent away from Moscow, leaving the NKVD without either a functioning commissar or a resident first deputy. Yezhov—resentful, even irate, at Stalin—schemed to name his own new first deputy, settling on Litvin, who by summer 1938 was running the Leningrad NKVD. Litvin had even come to Moscow a few times, expecting Yezhov to have the appointment finalized, but it never happened. Instead, Stalin had Malenkov, in the party apparatus’s personnel department, compile a list of candidates. Malenkov and his aides came up with Fyodor Kuznetsov (b. 1904), deputy head for political propaganda in the Red Army; Nikolai Gusarov (b. 1905), party secretary of Sverdlovsk city, in the Urals; Nikolai Pegov (b. 1905), a green apparatchik in Malenkov’s department; and Sergei Kruglov (b. 1907), an even greener functionary in Malenkov’s department.230 These names, many of whom were creatures of Malenkov, constituted a ridiculous attempt to assert control over the NKVD. But Malenkov’s otherwise self-serving list did include the one actual candidate.
Beria by now had seventeen years’ experience in the highest executive ranks of the secret police and the party, in a major region. Frinovsky had served as secret police head in Azerbaijan in the early 1930s, so he knew Beria’s abilities and character, and Frinovsky, with Yezhov, in their pathetic way, had been trying to assemble compromising materials on him, including a report (dated March 26, 1938) on abuses by Beria and his henchman Dekanozov in the Georgian party organization.231 In May 1938, Yezhov and Frinovsky had sought to use former Azerbaijan NKVD chief Sumbatov-Topuridze to prepare a case against Beria. On July 1, one of Yezhov’s department heads requested the files on the Menshevik government in Georgia, hoping to find evidence of Beria’s activities for the wrong side. Frinovsky urged Yezhov to pass these materials to Stalin; Yezhov evidently did so.232 Stalin could only have been grateful for additional compromising materials to hold over Beria’s head.
Matters came to a head in connection with another USSR Supreme Soviet session, which was to open on August 10. Yezhov learned from Israel Dagin, chief of bodyguards, that Beria, who was in town for the Supreme Soviet, had been summoned to the Near Dacha. “That very day,” Dagin would testify, “Yezhov phoned me incessantly and one time he started to ask, ‘Do you know what they’re talking about?’ I answered: ‘Nikolai Ivanovich, please!’ Yezhov stopped speaking on that issue.”233 Eavesdropping on Stalin was a suicidal temptation, but Yezhov was close to that point. The Yezhov favorite Uspensky, NKVD boss of Ukraine, who was also in Moscow for the Supreme Soviet, said he had heard from Isaak Shapiro that “Yezhov has big troubles, since the Central Committee does not trust him. Then Shapiro told me that there are rumors Yezhov was about to get a deputy (he did not name him) whom he needed to beware of.”234
On a recent occasion at the Near Dacha, according to Khrushchev, Stalin had already told those gathered, “It’s necessary to strengthen the NKVD, assist comrade Yezhov, select a deputy for him,” and he asked Yezhov for his preference. Yezhov requested Malenkov. “Stalin had the ability to pause in a conversation as if he were thinking over the answer, although he had long ago thought through each question,” Khrushchev would observe. “Sure,” Stalin finally replied, “Of course, Malenkov would be good, but we cannot give you Malenkov. Malenkov is at the Central Committee in charge of cadres, and then a new question would arise: who would we appoint there?” When Stalin asked for another recommendation, Yezhov said nothing. “So Stalin said, ‘What would you think if we gave you Beria for a deputy?’ Yezhov was severely startled, but he caught himself and said, ‘That’s a good candidate. Of course, comrade Beria can do the job, and not only as a deputy. He could be the commissar.’”235