Stalin полностью

THE SOVIET POLITICAL landscape resembled a huge forest full of charred stumps as a wildfire raged on ahead, but Stalin, who had set that fire, was still heaping oil on it long after its catastrophic consequences had become manifest. Finally, however, with the September–October 1938 rollout of the Short Course, the training manual for those who had been chosen to go forward (or just got lucky), the mass terror was, in an important sense, complete—and not a moment too soon. Stalin had been barefacedly manipulating the threat of war and foreign intervention to impose and justify this terror, but his murders had shaken the Red Army to its core.¹³⁷ And now Munich: not the threat of some abstract war at some point, but right here, right now.¹³⁸ The danger to the USSR evidently was grave enough that on October 8, 1938, not long after having demonstrably mobilized the Red Army for possible use against Poland, Stalin had Potyomkin tell the ambassador from Poland—which had just seized a piece of Czechoslovakia in the teeth of Moscow’s warnings not to do so—that “no hand extended to the Soviets would be left hanging in the air.”¹³⁹ So much for Stalin’s threat to invalidate the Soviet-Polish nonaggression pact.¹⁴⁰ Poland, too, had been excluded from the deliberations at Munich, but Berlin and Warsaw were in talks.

Supplication of Poland was not Stalin’s only conspicuous immediate post-Munich action: a mere eight days after the pact had slapped him across the face, he had also quietly formed a “commission” to investigate arrests by the NKVD. It was made up of the party functionaries Andreyev and Malenkov, as well as Beria and Vyshinsky, and nominally chaired by Yezhov.¹⁴¹ This heralded the beginning of the end of the mass terror.

Yezhov’s men understood that Stalin was moving to bring the Yezhov era at the NKVD to a close. On November 12, 1938, the same week as Marshal Blyukher’s death at Beria’s hands in Lefortovo prison, Mikhail Litvin, Yezhov’s right hand, shot himself. Two days later, the Ukraine NKVD chief, Uspensky—who was also close to Yezhov—composed a suicide note, had his wife purchase him a train ticket eastward to Voronezh, deposited some clothes on the banks of the Dnieper, and fled to Moscow, bringing wads of rubles, to hide at his mistress’s apartment. When the money ran out, she kicked him out, and Uspensky headed north to Arkhangelsk, hoping to sign up for logging work, anonymously. Stalin told Khrushchev in Kiev, over the phone, that Yezhov, taking advantage of the NKVD’s responsibility for the security of the government communication system, must have listened in on the despot’s previous call to Khrushchev about arresting Uspensky and then tipped him off.¹⁴² The day after Uspensky’s flight, Stalin, receiving his minions in the Little Corner, had a decree approved disbanding the assembly-line death sentence troikas.¹⁴³ On November 17, he summoned Vyshinsky for a “report,” after which the despot issued another decree in the politburo’s name, justifying the terror but blaming the NKVD for “a host of major deficiencies and distortions.”¹⁴⁴

Just like that, without public acknowledgment, with a few pieces of paper in the Little Corner, the mass terror was halted. Coincidence? The terror supposedly was aimed at rooting out enemies lying in wait for a war, but then, at what would appear to be maximum international war danger for the USSR, Stalin suddenly moved to end the mass arrests. Had he become less paranoid? Was it just that he had been waiting for completion of a Short Course? Or was he jolted by events portending actual danger?¹⁴⁵ We cannot definitively establish his motivations. But in the wake of Munich, the despot, in his sixty-first year, had reached a crossroads.

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