Stalin полностью

Beria also obtained twenty pages of testimony from Yezhov that compromised his former party deputy Malenkov, which Beria evidently passed on to Stalin, but the despot chose not to allow Malenkov’s destruction.²¹⁸ Still, Beria delivered still more pleasing news: on April 13, 1939, Merkulov, his first deputy, finally managed to produce testimony with the signature of the stout Yefim Yevdokimov. Beria had personally gone to arrest him at his apartment on Grand Kisel Lane, 5, off Great Lubyanka, but Yevdokimov had held out for seven months, through broken legs and unceasing torture, which had continued in the prison hospital.²¹⁹ When confronted by former colleagues, he shouted them down for confessing to fabricated crimes; investigators were compelled to cease such confrontations, for Yevdokimov sometimes convinced others to retract their statements. When the NKVD put one former colleague in his cell to cajole him into confessing, Yevdokimov cursed him as a lowlife and the supposed plot inside the NKVD as “fabrication.” Another coaxer-informant reported that “during my stay together with Yevdokimov . . . he said that all he wanted was a bomb to blow up the investigative unit of the NKVD and fly with it up in the air, and that an apparatus that so cripples and destroys innocent people can only be called fascist.”²²⁰

But after the arrests of Frinovsky and Yezhov, Yevdokimov evidently agreed to incriminate himself, along with them. Beria was on a roll: on April 16, his minions managed to track down former Ukrainian NKVD chief Alexander Uspensky, who, after having staged his own suicide, had evaded an all-Union manhunt for five months (in Arkhangelsk, Moscow, Kaluga, Kazan, Sverdlovsk). He was apprehended outside the luggage area of the train station at Miass, in the Urals.²²¹ The interrogation of Yezhov, meanwhile, would result in twenty fat volumes. He was charged with heading a “counterrevolutionary organization”—while heading the NKVD.

Stalin’s former NKVD chief confessed to working for a veritable world gazetteer of enemy intelligence services: Germany, Britain, France, Japan, Poland. (Yezhov had in fact liquidated the Polish Communist party, on Stalin’s orders.) On April 24, 1939, Yezhov “testified” about his “pederasty,” meaning homosexual relations. As recorded in the protocols, he recounted that his first such experience dated to age fifteen or sixteen, when, along with other male youths, he was a tailor’s apprentice. Yezhov named various Soviet officials, from the army and elsewhere, with whom he claimed to have cohabitated for months; many of his male partners were married but, conveniently, for service reasons, happened to be without their wives. Among the latter category, Yezhov named Filipp Goloshchokin, at the time party secretary in Kazakhstan. More recently, Yezhov had been on a long, alcohol-soaked debauch with Vladimir Konstantinov, one of his longtime lovers (along with Ivan Dementyev). Yezhov characterized his homosexual liaisons as “mutually active.”²²² How much of this Beria embellished cannot be known. History does not record the prudish Stalin’s reaction.

TRIPLE ALLIANCE PROPOSAL

Back on April 3, 1939, Poland’s Beck had arrived in London, seeking recourse. That same day, Hitler ordered plans developed for a military attack on Poland that could begin no later than the early fall. On April 11, the Wehrmacht issued clarifying instructions that a war against Poland was to be avoided, if possible, but preparations would go forward.²²³ On April 14, the British and French governments—separately—approached the Soviets. Foreign secretary Halifax asked Maisky whether the Soviet Union would make a public declaration to the effect that it would support countries that were “victims of aggression” if they resisted such an act, by providing aid “if desired . . . and in such a manner as would be found most convenient.”²²⁴ It was a small move in the direction of the Soviets by the British government.