Stalin полностью

The mass murderer was able to differentiate, within his conventional tastes, a sublime performance from a merely good one. He loved opera, and selections were invariably included from the prerevolutionary repertoire (Rimsky-Korsakov, Glinka, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Tchaikovsky) and the better-known Western classics (Carmen, Faust, and Aida). But his greatest passion was for Russian, Ukrainian, and Georgian folk songs.⁷⁴ After the jazz band had concluded its six approved numbers—among them Tchaikovsky’s “Sentimental Waltz” and Stalin’s sentimental favorite, “Suliko”—the Presidium table, according to Jelagin, “applauded long and vigorously.” Only now, after exiting and storing their instruments, were the musicians invited to dine—in a separate hall for performers, one floor below, loaded with “caviar, hams, salads, fish, fresh vegetables [in winter], decanters of vodka, red and white wine, and fine Armenian brandy. There were about four hundred of us, but the tables could seat at least a thousand.” Here, the Chekist servers wore their police uniforms. The musicians were addressed by the latest chairman of the committee on artistic affairs, Alexei Nazarov (b. 1905), who toasted Stalin as well as some of the most famous performers, such as the singer Ivan Kozlovsky.⁷⁵

Kozlovsky (b. 1900), the virtuoso soloist at the Bolshoi (since 1926), would receive the Order of Lenin in 1939. (The next year, Stalin would make him a USSR People’s Artist.) He possessed a transparent, even voice, with a beautiful and gentle timbre in the upper register, which was not particularly powerful yet filled the largest spaces. He hailed from a Ukrainian village and had a brother who had emigrated at the end of the civil war and ended up in the United States, which alone would have been enough to doom the tenor. Zealous Chekists went to Kozlovsky’s native village to dig up dirt, but when Poskryobyshev handed Stalin thick files of compromising material, the despot was said to have observed, “Fine, we’ll imprison comrade Kozlovsky—and who’ll sing, you?”⁷⁶ Apocryphal or not, the despot was known to keep track of the schedule for the Bolshoi and to terminate meetings in the Little Corner to catch an aria sung by Kozlovsky, Maxim Mikhailov (a bass), or Mark Reizen (also a bass), the lyrical tenor Sergei Lemeshev, the lyrical sopranos Spiller and Yelena Kruglikova, or the mezzo-soprano Vera Davydova.⁷⁷ At the New Year’s gala, Kozlovsky, who acquired the reputation of being an unbearable person, sang “La Donna è Mobile,” from Rigoletto, at Stalin’s request.⁷⁸

Two days later, Stalin informed USSR procurator general Vyshinsky that he wanted a public trial of those arrested in the NKVD.⁷⁹ “The enemies of the people who penetrated the organs of the NKVD,” the commission on the secret police internally reported to Stalin—as if the secret police rampage had somehow occurred without his directives—“consciously distorted the punitive policy of Soviet power, conducting a mass of baseless arrests of people guilty of nothing, and at the same time protecting the activities of enemies of the people. . . . They urged that prisoners offer testimony about their supposed espionage activity for foreign intelligence, explaining that such invented testimony was necessary for the party and the government in order to discredit foreign states.” The despot circulated the report to the inner circle: they needed to know how to interpret the terror, as the result of the infiltration of “spies in literally every [NKVD] department.”⁸⁰ But for whatever reason, a public trial of the NKVD never took place. “I am very busy with work,” Stalin wrote (January 6, 1939) to Afinogenov, the reprieved writer, who had sent a copy of his latest play to read. “I beg forgiveness.”⁸¹

Beria issued a secret directive calling for NKVD branches to cease recruiting informants for surveillance of party and factory bosses, and to destroy, in their presence, the files compiled against them.⁸² Provincial party bosses were even invited to scrutinize the dossiers of all NKVD personnel in their domains.⁸³ But Stalin had some second thoughts. “The Central Committee has learned,” he wrote in a telegram to all locales (January 10, 1939), “that the secretaries of provinces and territories, checking on the work of the local NKVD, have charged them with using physical means of interrogation against those arrested as if it were a crime.” He informed them that the “physical methods” had been approved by “the Central Committee” and agreed to by “the Communist parties of all the republics” (whose leaders had almost all been shot as foreign agents and wreckers). “It is known that all bourgeois intelligence services apply physical coercion with regard to representatives of the socialist proletariat, and in the ugliest forms,” he stressed. “One might ask why the socialist intelligence service must be more humane with regard to inveterate agents of the bourgeoisie.”⁸⁴