Stalin полностью

Inside the Soviet police, first-class sadists were fewer than one might think. Boris Rodos, in that context, stood out, a “chopper” (kolun) who could reliably smash those under “interrogation” to near death. He would snap a whip across a prisoner’s legs, continuing after he collapsed to the floor, pour freezing water over him, then force him to scoop his diarrhea with his tin cup and swallow, then shout, “Sign! Sign!”²⁷² (“An insignificant man with the mental horizon of a chicken,” Khrushchev would later say.) Rodos’s children, who knew nothing of their father’s work, observed phone calls at all hours, prompting him to awake, shave, put on his uniform, and go downstairs for a waiting car; when he got home, sometimes only after several days, he would wash and wash his hands and arms up to his elbows, like a surgeon.²⁷³ Rodos was assigned to people like the arch-Stalinist Roberts Eihe, an early winner of the Order of Lenin (1935) and a politburo candidate member who, in Western Siberia, had signed execution lists with tens of thousands of names, before his own turn came. From prison Eihe wrote to Stalin how, “throughout the entire time of my work in Siberia, I decisively and mercilessly implemented the party line”—a statement of pristine truth.²⁷⁴ At the Sukhanovka prison, where Beria kept an office, Rodos beat Eihe senseless, not desisting even after Eihe crumbled into an unconscious heap. When Eihe was raised and again refused to admit to Beria, standing nearby, that he was a spy for Latvia, Rodos went after him again. One of Eihe’s eyes popped out.²⁷⁵

Many targets like Eihe were beaten not only in Beria’s presence but by Beria himself, something Stalin never did. “An intriguer, a careerist, a bloodthirsty, amoral debauchee,” observed one high-level NKVD operative in Georgia who was arrested and sent to the Gulag. “If he [Beria] had to eliminate someone from his path, he removed him. If he had to occupy someone’s place, he intrigued and compromised that person, achieving his removal.”²⁷⁶ Of course, such an unsavory reputation was a source of power: Who wanted to be on the wrong side of Beria? Minions gravitated toward a winner. They found Beria a severe, demanding boss, assigning tough tasks on strict deadlines and brooking no excuses. But for those who met the challenges, Beria afforded strong support and even some freedom of action, eliciting fierce loyalty. They feared but also admired him as a professional in police work and a patron. Beria got them apartments, the best provisions, and higher salaries and cash bonuses. He had no qualms about acting like a cold-blooded murderer, but, equally Stalin-like, he took care of his people.²⁷⁷ He was a hangman, but far more. “Beria was an industrious person, not a loafer [shaliai-valiai]; he was a big-time functionary,” recalled a member of the Egnatashvili clan—the clan of Stalin’s surrogate father—who hated and feared Beria. “It’s necessary to look truth in the eye: he was really capable of getting things done. It was another question at what price? But whatever was delegated to him, he carried it out.”²⁷⁸

On October 22, 1938, NKVD operatives appeared at Voroshilov’s dacha, where the thirty-nine-year-old Blyukher and his twenty-three-year-old wife were staying. They arrested the couple and took them to Moscow.²⁷⁹ Yezhov had signed the order, but Beria oversaw the interrogation in Lefortovo. Back in summer 1937, Stalin had said that Tukhachevsky and Gamarnik, on orders from the Japanese, had tried to remove Blyukher from command of the Soviet Far Eastern Army; now, in fall 1938, Stalin had Blyukher accused of being a spy for the Japanese since 1922. Under “interrogation,” Beria’s men reduced Blyukher’s face to a bloody pulp—he lost an eye—yet the marshal refused to confess. Blyukher would die under torture. Beria telephoned Stalin with the news, after which the marshal was cremated.²⁸⁰ His death was never announced.²⁸¹

Beria’s value, as well as Khrushchev’s, got magnified many times over by Stalin’s hectic quest for leading personnel caused by his annihilations. Stalin had assigned Alexander Shcherbakov, Zhdanov’s deputy in Leningrad, as party boss in Irkutsk, but in spring 1938 he received him again and appointed him party boss to the Donbass.²⁸² In fall 1938, Stalin would hand him the Moscow party organization, summoning Khrushchev from Ukraine to preside over the meeting to denounce the sitting Moscow party head as an enemy of the people and support Shcherbakov (who had once worked under Khrushchev in Ukraine). “There is also testimony against him,” Khrushchev recalled telling Stalin of Shcherbakov, whom he deemed “poisonous, snakelike.” Stalin resolved the matter by appointing a second secretary from Malenkov’s circle to watch over Shcherbakov.²⁸³