Litvinov was put under investigation for high treason, partly based upon “testimony” from Yezhov, delivered to Stalin on April 27, to the effect that, while on holiday at Merano, Italy, Litvinov, while dancing a foxtrot, had told Yezhov that “our statesmen have absolutely no culture at all.” Litvinov lost his Moscow apartment but kept his state dacha outside the city, which Beria had surrounded with NKVD troops. The story goes that Litvinov, finding his government phone disconnected, used a city line to call Beria, who “joked” that the goons were stationed there for his “protection.”259 Litvinov’s house arrest reverberated throughout the foreign affairs commissariat as his closest associates still at large were arrested and tortured to build a “case” against their boss. “Beria and Kobulov put me on a chair and sat on either side and punched me in the head, playing ‘swings,’” recalled Yevgeny Gnedin, the press officer of the foreign affairs commissariat. “They beat me horribly, with the full force of their arms, demanding I give testimony against Litvinov.”260 One foreign affairs commissariat insider who might not have been displeased at Litvinov’s removal was Vasily Korzhenko. When he heard of Molotov’s appointment as commissar, he anticipated a promotion; after all, Korzhenko had been helping direct carnage from the inside. But the Korzhenko family driver had been arrested as a Polish spy; his replacement, too, was arrested as a trumped-up spy.261 The loyal hatchet man himself, rather than being given the expected promotion, was asked for his keys, and, back out in the corridor, NKVD operatives arrested him. He disappeared, now a victim as well as perpetrator.
Soviet diplomacy’s image abroad was being devastated by the widely discussed disappearances. As in the case of the NKVD, however, a planned separate trial of foreign commissariat personnel would never take place.262 The wet work of mopping up the remaining Litvinovites fell to the Beriaite Dekanozov, who had only recently been named head of NKVD foreign espionage but now became first deputy commissar of foreign affairs. Dekanozov’s place was taken by Pavel Fitin (b. 1907), the son of Russian peasants in Siberia, who had attended a village middle school, then graduated as an agricultural engineer from the Tirmiryazev Academy, in Moscow, and became an editor at the state agricultural publisher. In March 1938, the party had him mobilized to the NKVD Central School, in Moscow, but not the newly opened NKVD School of Special Designation for training spies, outside the capital in the woods (he lacked knowledge of a foreign language). Nonethless, by August 1938 he was an intern in the NKVD’s espionage directorate, in the department for Trotskyites and rightists abroad. In January 1939, Fitin was named deputy head of Soviet civilian espionage, and on May 13, 1939, he would be promoted to the top position (while holding the rank of major).263 Sudoplatov would be advanced to deputy chief under Fitin and given a grand office at Lubyanka HQ, on the seventh floor—the old office of Abram Slutsky, the former NKVD foreign intelligence chief who had been killed with poison by his own agency.264
Not everyone in foreign affairs was arrested. Alexandra Kollontai, a former member of the old Workers’ Opposition and one of the world’s first female ambassadors, survived. Why remains mysterious, though she did constantly seek out Stalin’s guidance, allowing him to explain geopolitics to her, flattering his self-conception as the Lenin of our day, while also sucking up to Voroshilov, playing on his infamous sentimentality.265 Equally remarkable, the Litvinovite Maisky, a former Menshevik who during the civil war had been a member of the anti-Bolshevik government in Samara, was not recalled. A few diplomatic personnel, when summoned home, escaped. Raskolnikov, Soviet envoy to Bulgaria, had received a telegram from Litvinov ordering him to Moscow in connection with an unspecified new appointment, but he dragged out his departure from Sofia and, en route to the Soviet Union, managed to switch trains and abscond to Paris. (In summer 1939, Raskolnikov would be convicted in absentia.) How often Litvinov had tried to protect people, versus how often he became complicit in their destruction, remains unclear.266 He had written to Stalin that he was worried about nine ambassadorial vacancies (including Warsaw, Bucharest, Tokyo, and Washington), with more vacancies looming, and he underscored that “in some of these capitals there has not been an ambassador for a year.”267 NKVD station chiefs had been assigned to the ambassadorial positions in China and Mongolia—and they asked Lubyanka headquarters if they could inform the foreign affairs commissariat of their diplomatic activities.