Stalin полностью

People’s fates were often random, and not because Stalin intentionally sought to sow still greater dread by arbitrariness, but with little apparent rhyme or reason.²⁵³ Jenő Varga courageously wrote to the despot (March 28, 1938), with copies to Dimitrov and Yezhov, about the “dangerous atmosphere of panic” among foreigners whose children were cursed at school as fascists. “This demoralization is enveloping the majority of Comintern workers and is spreading even to individual members of the Executive Committee Secretariat,” Varga wrote of the Hotel Lux. “Many foreigners gather up their belongings every evening in expectation of arrest. Many are half mad and incapable of working because of constant fear.” Varga had served under Béla Kun in the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Kun was arrested and executed (August 29, 1938); Varga survived.²⁵⁴ Similarly, while one Red Army commander extremely close to Stalin, the civil war crony Marshal Yegorov, was executed, another, Marshal Budyonny, was spared, even though both had been subjects of a torrent of denunciations (the Red Army men not shot had essentially identical files to those who were shot, often from the same “testimony”).²⁵⁵ Among regime literati, Mikhail Koltsov was arrested and executed (“Remember,” he had instructed Louis Aragon, the leftist French writer, in Paris, “Stalin is always right”).²⁵⁶ But Ilya Ehrenburg, who, like Koltsov, had been in Spain and was secretly denounced by all and sundry, survived. “May I ask you something?” a young writer (who had been five years old in 1938) would later inquire of Ehrenburg. “How was it that you survived?” Ehrenburg answered, “I shall never know.”²⁵⁷

Yet another person inexplicably not arrested was Demyan Bedny. The NKVD had produced a devastating overview of his “anti-Sovietism” on September 9, 1938, a few months after the poet was expelled from the party and the Union of Soviet Writers. “D. Bedny systematically expressed his resentment against comrades Stalin, Molotov, and other leaders. . . . ‘I adhered to the party, 99.9 percent of which comprised spies and provocateurs. Stalin is a horrible person and often guided by personal accounts. All great leaders have always surrounded themselves with a galaxy of brilliant companions; who has Stalin created? He has annihilated everyone, there is no one, all destroyed. Such a situation occurred only under Ivan the Terrible.’” Bedny was said to have called the mass accusations baseless. “The army has been utterly destroyed; trust and command have been undermined; it is impossible to fight with such an army. Myself, under these conditions, I would concede half of Ukraine just to keep from being attacked. Such a talented strategist as Tukhachevsky has been destroyed.” Bedny called the new constitution a “fiction,” and the elections to the Supreme Soviet a sham. He even criticized Stalin’s holy of holies, the collective farms, for their absence of incentives. The NKVD concluded that “several times he expressed his intention to commit suicide.” That Bedny said all these things was plausible, although the NKVD material did not need to be actually true in order for Stalin to act on it. For whatever reason, he refrained from ordering or authorizing an arrest.²⁵⁸