Stalin полностью

Many people who had been arrested under Yezhov were being released as victims of “enemies” who had infiltrated the NKVD. Also on April 7, the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky noted in his diary that “Yezhov’s portrait in the Lomonosov Institute was taken down.” He added: “They say [it has happened] everywhere. This is a person who destroyed thousands, if not tens of thousands, of innocents.”²⁰⁸ The interrogator-torturers, who before had followed orders from Frinovsky, had set to beating out of him testimony against Yezhov, including how the latter had ordered that suspects be beaten to provide false testimony. Within a week Beria would send Stalin a forty-three-page confession written by Frinovsky; Stalin made notes on it.²⁰⁹ On April 10, Yezhov himself finally was arrested, evidently in Malenkov’s office on Old Square, where Yezhov had been summoned as a precaution, perhaps so that he would not commit suicide. Stalin was eating supper in his Kremlin apartment, below the Little Corner, with Khrushchev, among others, when Beria’s call about the apprehension came through. Yezhov’s arrest went unmentioned in the Soviet press.²¹⁰ “Despite all the major shortcomings and failures in my work,” Yezhov would boast, in a letter to Stalin, “I must say that, with the daily guidance of the Central Committee, the NKVD really trounced the enemy.”²¹¹ Beria wanted Yezhov to confess to failing to cleanse the bodyguards of the enemy Karl Pauker’s people, thereby putting Stalin at risk, a convenient pretext for Beria to try to stuff the Kremlin guards, now led by Vlasik, with his own people, but Stalin mostly thwarted this power grab.²¹²

Beria personally oversaw Yezhov’s interrogation at night at Sukhanovka, the most feared prison in the system, where Beria kept an office.²¹³ Almost no light ever penetrated the darkness of the five-by-seven-foot cells, some of which were located far underground. Prisoners were often not permitted to sleep or sit, but instead forced to stand all night. In the worst and tiniest cells, it was, in any case, impossible to stand, and freezing water was run through constantly. Executions took place in the site’s former cathedral, where a crematorium had been set up. The Yagodaites and many thousands of others had been buried at Yagoda’s former dacha complex, near the Kommunarka state farm, but the Yezhovites would meet their deaths at Sukhanovka cathedral, as well as at the nearby Butovo killing field. Altogether, more than 100 of the highest-ranking Yezhovites were massacred—all of his deputies, almost all department heads in the center, almost all NKVD heads in Union republics and provinces.²¹⁴

Sukhanovka lay not far from Yezhov’s luxurious dacha at Meshcherino (which now went to the Comintern chief Dimitrov). A search of the dacha, Yezhov’s Lubyanka office, and his Kremlin apartment turned up juicy finds: an arsenal of guns, 115 books written by counterrevolutionaries and anti-Soviet émigrés—the kind of literature Stalin collected in abundance. “Behind the books in various places,” the investigator noted, “were discovered three half-bottles (full) of wheat vodka, one half-bottle of vodka, half emptied, and two empty half-bottles of vodka.” In the desk the NKVD investigator found four bullet casings, marked ZINOVIEV, KAMENEV, and SMIRNOV (two). Perhaps the greatest discovery was that in Yezhov’s apartment—and not in his Lubyanka safe—he had kept a cache of documents from the tsarist-era Tiflis gendarmerie on “Koba.” Whispers of a “file on Stalin” circulated throughout the upper ranks of the regime.²¹⁵ The nature of this file in Yezhov’s possession remains unknown. For Beria, it was unclear which was more dangerous: to turn the material over to Stalin, and thus indicate that he had seen it, or to not turn it over.²¹⁶ Stalin supposedly flashed the material Yezhov had gathered on him at a politburo meeting, as if Yezhov had been acting on his own in the terror’s excesses.²¹⁷