Of course, some people survived for abundantly clear reasons: Stalin deliberately spared the tarnished Khrushchev and Beria, among others, because he liked them. Stalin had allowed the writer Aleksei Tolstoy to be elected as a Supreme Soviet delegate from Leningrad.259 Hundreds of Soviet inhabitants poured their hearts out to Tolstoy in his capacity as a deputy, and, for whatever reason, he held on to their acts of bravery. “Can it really be that there is no defense from careerists, toadies, and cowards who earn their bread on each slogan, yesterday for collectivization, today for vigilance?” wrote an architect whose brother had been arrested. “Can it really be that you, deputies, are created only in order to shout hurrah for Stalin and to applaud Yezhov?” The letter writer asked Tolstoy to pass his signed letter to Stalin. “I am not mad,” he added. “I have a family, a son, work that I love. . . . But right now the feeling of truth is stronger than the fear of ten years in the camps.” A woman wrote to pillory Tolstoy’s story “Grain” for its mendacities and glorification of Stalin. “The best people, who are devoted to Lenin’s ideas, honest and unbought, are sitting behind bars, arrested by the thousands, being executed,” she told him, withholding her name. “They cannot bear the grandiose Baseness triumphing throughout the land. . . . And you, an engineer of the human soul, are cowardly turned inside out, and we saw the unseemly inside of a purchasable hack. . . . Fear: that’s the dominant feeling that has seized citizens of the USSR. And you do not see that? . . . Where is the majestic pathos that in October [1917] moved millions to fight to the death? Overcome by the fetid breath of Stalin and of yes-men like you.”260
Some targets of the terror had come to understand how the epoch stamped them. Theodore Maly, the Soviet spy, had been born in Temesvár (Timişoara), in the Austro-Hungarian empire, in 1894, studied to become a Catholic priest, got conscripted during the Great War, was imprisoned in a series of tsarist POW camps, and ended up in Siberia, where he joined the Cheka. The tall, urbane ethnic Hungarian was able to pose as an Austrian, German, Swiss, or Brit. In July 1937, when he received a summons to return to Moscow, he knew its import—execution—but he went back. Before doing so, he attempted to explain this decision to Elisabeth Poretsky, whose husband, Ignace Reiss (Ignace Poretsky), also worked in Soviet intelligence and would defect. “I saw all the horrors, young men with frozen limbs dying in the trenches” during the Great War, Maly told her. “We were all covered with vermin and many were dying of typhus. I lost my faith in God and when the revolution broke out I joined the Bolsheviks.” During the civil war, Maly continued, “we would pass burning villages which had changed hands several times in a day. . . . Our Red detachments would ‘clean up’ villages exactly the way the Whites did. What was left of the inhabitants, old men, women, children, were machine-gunned for having given assistance to the enemy. I could not stand the wailing of women. I simply could not.” Then came collectivization: “I knew what we were doing to the peasants, how many were deported, how many were shot.”261 Maly also had to know that the NKVD could easily kill him abroad (as would happen to Reiss, in Lausanne, Switzerland). After Maly returned to Moscow, he was duly arrested, “convicted” of spying for Germany, and executed (September 20, 1938).262 Maly was among legions of functionaries who carried baggage.263
BERIA MEETS BLYUKHER