Stalin полностью

On August 21, 1938, the “politburo” officially appointed Beria as first deputy chief of the NKVD under Yezhov. Malenkov, for his part, had a lot to fear, having once been Yezhov’s deputy in the party apparatus and been close to him, visiting him at his apartment and dacha, and now Malenkov delivered a long, detailed denunciation of Yezhov to Poskryobyshev, marked FOR STALIN, PERSONALLY.²³⁶ Molotov, meanwhile, had been after Khrushchev to return from Ukraine, where he had just been posted, to serve as Molotov’s deputy chairman at the Council of People’s Commissars; Stalin had agreed, but Khrushchev had pleaded to remain in Ukraine, and Stalin had yielded to him. At the Near Dacha, Beria had brushed off Khrushchev: “What are you congratulating me for? You yourself did not want to be Molotov’s deputy. . . . I also did not want to transfer to Moscow. I’d be better off in Georgia.”²³⁷ One of Beria’s closest minions, Merkulov, would also testify (in a letter to Khrushchev) that Beria was distraught at being named Yezhov’s deputy.²³⁸

Neither Pravda nor Izvestiya reported the appointment. That same day, Stalin and Molotov signed the latest execution list (3,176 names). Yezhov received his new “deputy” in his Lubyanka office on the evening of August 22.²³⁹ It must have been stupendously awkward. Yezhov would write to Stalin that “Beria has a power-mongering character. He does not abide subordination. He will never forgive that Budu Mdivani was ‘broken’ in Moscow and not in Tbilisi. He will never forgive the destruction in Armenia [in September 1937], because it was not his initiative.” Yezhov also expressed regret for having allowed “many liberties for Georgia. It was suspicious that Beria wants to eliminate every Chekist who ever worked in Georgia.”

Beria immediately departed Moscow for Tbilisi to wind up affairs, while Yezhov again vanished to his dacha in Meshcherino, complaining of headaches and insomnia, heart pain, and lack of appetite and summoning a doctor, who wrote out a prescription for rest. When the prescribed rest elapsed, Yezhov repeated the summons for a doctor and remained at the dacha, not reporting to work, through the end of August. On August 25, 1938, the Supreme Soviet presidium met to discuss a proposal to continue allowing early release from the Gulag for exemplary labor performance, but Stalin asked them to consider using awards instead. “Would it not be possible to keep people in a camp?” he objected. “If we free them, they will return to their old ways. In the camp the atmosphere is different; there it is hard to be spoiled.” In time a decree would follow: “Convicts in USSR NKVD camps should serve their sentences in their entirety.”²⁴⁰

Also on August 25, Frinovsky returned from the Far East to Moscow. At a train station outside the capital, the head of NKVD transport, Boris Berman, entered Frinovsky’s carriage and told him he had been appointed naval commissar. Frinovsky responded that he already knew and that he would turn over the NKVD first deputy portfolio to Litvin. “I answered not to Litvin, but to Beria,” Berman recalled telling him. “Beria, what?” Frinovsky responded. Right from the Moscow train terminal, he made for Yezhov’s dacha. Yezhov greeted him with kisses on the cheek, something that had not happened before. “I had never seen Yezhov in such a depressed state,” Frinovsky would testify.²⁴¹ Yezhov fantasized about “reorganizing” the NKVD, so as to reduce the power of a first deputy. More prosaically, Yevdokimov, seeking to rehabilitate himself by working like a demon as Yezhov’s deputy at the water transport commissariat, warned Frinovsky that the NKVD operatives in prison who had not yet been shot could be reinterrogated, and their cases turned against the Yezhovites. A slew of hurried executions took place before Beria got back to Moscow.²⁴²

DILEMMAS