The principal executioner was usually Vasily Blokhin (b. 1895). The son of a poor peasant from central Russia, he had risen to become the NKVD’s head executioner already in the mid-1920s and was known to insiders by his signature brown leather cap, brown leather gauntlets above the elbow, and brown leather apron. He had survived the transition from Yagoda to Yezhov, and then to Beria, although the latter had evidently tried to have him arrested as a Yezhovite, assembling the requisite compromising materials.205 To Blokhin fell the honor of executing Yezhov.206 In a last statement to the “court,” held in the prison warden’s office, Yezhov repudiated the espionage and terrorist charges and requested that his aging mother and adopted daughter not be touched. “I purged 14,000 Chekists,” he stated, “but my enormous guilt lies in the fact that I purged so few of them.” He was cremated at the Donskoi Monastery Crematorium, his ashes dumped into a mass pit, joining those of Tukhachevsky. Yezhov’s very last words were for the despot: “Let Stalin know that I shall die with his name on my lips.”207
“Yezhov was scum,” Stalin told the new deputy aviation commissar, Yakovlev. “A degenerated person. You call him at the commissariat, they say he’s left for the Central Committee. You call the Central Committee, they say he left for a job. You send someone to his residence, it turns out he’s lying in bed, dead drunk. He destroyed many innocents. We shot him for that.”208
Massive artillery barrages began to strike Finland, then, on February 11, in frosts reaching 31 degrees below zero (minus 35 Celsius), Timoshenko’s onslaught via escalating artillery barrages, known as a Wall of Fire, commenced on the Viipuri axis. Rather than attempt a war of maneuver through partially frozen swamp with dispersed forces, Timoshenko massed more than 450,000 Soviet troops, against perhaps 150,000 Finns, on a single point, in classic Napoleonic fashion. Within the week, the Red Army finally had pierced the Mannerheim Line, forcing the Finns to retreat. (Voroshilov at first refused to believe Meretskov’s phone report that the Red Army had broken through.) Soviet artillery tore the colossal Finnish concrete emplacements right out of the ground, as if trying to make up for their earlier humiliation.209 On February 15, a much-relieved yet feverish and nauseated Stalin was again examined by his doctor. “In front of Stalin on the table was a map of Finland,” the doctor recalled. “Stalin took a large, thick pencil and drew in the course of the war and then, tapping the pencil, said, ‘Any day Vyborg will be taken.’”210
On the same day that Timoshenko’s offensive began in Finland, Stalin deepened his bargain with Hitler, after difficult negotiations, with a new Commercial Agreement (February 11, 1940). The Soviet Union agreed to supply Germany with 650 million reichsmarks’ worth of raw materials during the next eighteen months, promising fully two thirds in the first twelve months, while Germany pledged to furnish the same amount of industrial goods, but over twenty-seven months—a significant Soviet concession.211 The cornucopia for Germany included Soviet feed grain and legumes (1 million tons), oil (900,000 tons), scrap and pig iron (800,000 tons), phosphates (500,000 tons), iron ore (500,000 tons), platinum, chromium ore, asbestos, iridium, and albumin. The earlier vague promises for German “industrial deliveries” were now, at Stalin’s insistence, enumerated in four lists covering forty-two pages: a fully equipped Panzer III, five Messerschmitt Bf 109 E and five Bf 100 C fighters, two Junkers 88 bombers, two Dornier 215 light bombers, and one Fa 226 helicopter, as well as extra engines, artillery pieces, armored vehicles, gun sights, and extensive spare parts (piston rings, spark plugs, propellers, submarine periscopes), and the massive naval ship the