Stalin полностью

Yezhov could have schemed to flee abroad, dealing a blow to the Soviet state and paying Stalin back for mistreatment, but instead he retreated to his dacha. On November 19, 1938, the “politburo” summoned the NKVD commissar to the Little Corner, where, from 11:10 p.m. until 4:20 a.m., they discussed a denunciation of him that Beria had orchestrated from a provincial NKVD boss (Viktor Zhuravlyov).³¹ Yezhov wrote a letter to Stalin, which he likely ended up not sending, saying that “the past two years of tense, highly strung work have acutely strained my whole nervous system.”³² He was accused of having permitted foreign spies to capture Soviet espionage. On November 23, Yezhov was again in Stalin’s office, where he had logged nearly 900 hours over the previous two years, but these three and a half would be his last: Stalin edited Yezhov’s resignation.³³ On November 25, the despot sent a telegram to all regional party secretaries referring to Zhuravlyov’s denunciation of NKVD errors and noting that “the Central Committee had granted Yezhov’s request to resign.”³⁴ Pravda printed a delayed announcement, on its back page (December 8). Executing the NKVD chief could throw into doubt the mass arrests and executions. For now, Stalin retained Yezhov as a Central Committee secretary, chairman of the party Control Commission, and water transport commissar.

Beria, even as deputy NKVD chief, had arrested 332 NKVD leadership personnel between September and December 1938, including 140 in the central apparatus and 18 of the NKVD commissars in Union and autonomous republics. NKVD operatives still on the job became disoriented.³⁵ So did military men. “Now, if you notice or unmask an enemy, there’s no one to inform about it, because the higher the boss, the more likely he’s an enemy of the people,” one Red Army political worker complained. “You have to ask: Who can you believe, and to whom do you report?” Another asked who the enemy was: the person who got arrested or the person who did the arresting?³⁶ At the same time, hopeful letters poured in as people logically assumed that their cases—which had been falsified—would be overturned. At the defense commissariat alone, nearly 2,000 such letters were being received every day.

As NKVD chief, Beria insinuated himself deeply into the regime. Initially, he had brought just a handful of his gang to Moscow, including Vsevolod Merkulov, a graduate of St. Petersburg University and the son of an aristocrat tsarist officer, and son-in-law of a tsarist general (who had served as war minister in the Provisional Government). Merkulov was the only ethnic Russian among Beria’s Caucasus subordinates, and Beria named him first deputy in Moscow. Another was Bogdan Kobulov (b. 1904), a Tbilisi Armenian who had been expelled from the Communist Youth League and arrested for rape in 1921, but became an informant for, and then an operative in, the secret police; Kobulov became deputy chief of the investigation department. But when annihilation of Yezhovites opened up expansive vistas for Beria’s people, he summoned many others from the Caucasus: Lavrenti Janjava, known as Tsanava (b. 1900), who had been expelled from the party in 1922 for abducting a bride (he was reinstated the next year) and became NKVD chief in Belorussia; Goglidze (b. 1901), who would be given the Leningrad NKVD; Solomon Milstein (b. 1898), descended from a wealthy trading family of Vilnius Jews (most of whom had fled abroad after the revolution), who began as deputy head of investigation but would get the new NKVD rail transport department; and Vladimir Dekanozov (b. 1898), who would get a series of high posts.³⁷

Georgians in the NKVD in Moscow would jump from 3.13 percent (January 1938)—already nearly double their weight in the overall population—to 7.84 percent (July 1939).³⁸ Georgians aside, Beria’s NKVD saw a dramatic reduction in minorities, especially Jews, and promotion of ethnic Russians.³⁹ Regime officials who had once looked to Yezhov as someone who would clean up the antiparty actions and mistakes of his predecessor viewed Beria as someone who would do the same. Releases of some people arrested under Yezhov reinforced such illusions. Stalin got credit for correcting his mistaken trust in Yezhov, and for a new, vigorous, loyal top official.⁴⁰ Beria’s power came to exist on a completely different plane from Yezhov’s or Yagoda’s. Stalin, however, made sure to have non-Beriaites inserted into key positions (Sergei Kruglov, who had been on Malenkov’s list of possible NKVD first deputy chiefs, got the critical post of head of NKVD personnel).⁴¹ Stalin also directed Beria to turn in the documents regarding his role in the Musavat; Beria had Merkulov collect and deliver them.⁴²

BUCK-PASSING