255. The indictment was presented for an international audience by Yaroslavsky, Meaning of the Soviet Trials. The defendants’ biographies had been rewritten to make them descendants of capitalists and priests.
256. On Yagoda’s attempt to negotiate for his life, see the prison snitch’s report: Vinogradov, Genrikh Iagoda, 233–5 (TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 5, d. 318, l. 113–4: V. Kirshon).
257. Conquest, Reassessment, 341–98; Maclean, Escape to Adventure, 59–83; Hedeler, “Ezhov’s Scenario,” 34–55.
258. Sokolov, “N. N. Krestinskii,” 120–42; Trud, May 26, 1988.
259. Conquest, Reassessment, 352; Popov, “Byl i ostaius’ kommunistom,” 244–51.
260. Trial of the Anti-Soviet “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites,” 675.
261. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 173–6 (TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 5, d. 42, l. 29–33; d. 40, l. 128, 347; d. 41, l. 51–70; APRF, f. 3, op. 24, d. 338, l. 59).
262. Avdeenko, “Otluchenie” (no. 4), 90–1. Avdeenko did not get in to the trial.
263. New York Times, March 1, 1938.
264. Besides Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda, Krestinsky, and Ravovsky (former ambassador to Great Britain and France), the defendants were: Arkady Rosenholtz, Vladimir Ivanov (former People’s Commissar for Timber Industry), Mikhail Chernov (former People’s Commissar for Agriculture), Grigori Grinko (former People’s Commissar for Finance), Isaac Zelensky (former Central Committee Secretary), Akmal Ikramov and Fayzulla Khodzhayev (Uzbek leaders), Vasily Sharangovich (former party boss in Belorussia), Prokopy Zubarev, Pavel Bulanov (NKVD operative), Venyamin Maximov-Dikovsky, Pyotr Kryuchkov (Gorky’s secretary), Sergei Bessonov (a trade representative), and three Kremlin doctors: Lev Levin, Dmitry Pletnev, and Ignaty Kazakov. Levin and Kazakov were sentenced to execution; Pletnev, like Rakovsky and Bessonov, was given a long sentence, but, after being remanded to Orlov prison, he would be shot without retrial in 1941. Borodulin and Topolianskii, “Dmitrii Dmitrievich Pletnev,” 51. On the NKVD’s toxicology lab, see Sudoplatov, Spetsoperatsii, 441. The executioner was Pyotr Maggo.
265. http://www.memo.ru/memory/commu narka/index.htm; Golovkova, Butovskii Poligon. Among those whose cremated remains were dumped at Kommunarka were Bukharin, Rykov, Béla Kun, Abram Belenky (Lenin’s former bodyguard), Peters of the Cheka, Yakov Agranov, Trilliser, Leonid Zakovsky, Grigory Kaminsky, Krestinsky, Pyatnitsky, Postyshev, and Pauker.
266. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 238 (TsA FSB, ASD H-13706, l. 55–6: Grigory Vyatkin). Plestsov would survive and prosper; Vyatkin, already infamous in 1934 in Novosibirsk for having knocked out someone’s teeth with a whip, would be arrested in Nov. 1938, charged with having destroyed more than 4,000 people in Ukraine, and executed in 1939. Tepliakov, Mashina terrora, 252, 263, 478, 516.
267. Orlov, Tainaia istoriia, 188; Orlov, Secret History, 188. “If the purges were bewildering to a person in my privileged position in Moscow,” a secret police defector observed, “they must have been absolutely incomprehensible to the toiling officials and loyal party workers in remote provinces, who suddenly found themselves denounced as secret enemies of the cause they served.” Petrov and Petrov, Empire of Fear, 78.
268. Iakir and Geller, Komandarm Iakir, 211.
269. Petrov and Petrov, Empire of Fear, 78.
270. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 138–9 (citing TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 5, d. 591, l. 31–3). Rosenholtz (b. 1889) had met with Stalin often over many years as the Soviet representative to the secret negotiations for cooperation with the German military in 1922, a member of the central control commission from 1927, and foreign trade commissar. Na prieme, 694.
271. “Agoniia kapitalizma i zadachi Chetvertogo Internatsionala,” Biulleten’ oppozitsii, no. 66 (May–June 1938): 19.
272. Bohlen, Witness to History, 51.
273. Ullman, “Davies Mission,” 265.
274. Simonov, Glazami cheloveka, 54–5.
275. Maria Joffe, the widow of the Soviet diplomat, recounted a story, said to have been told to her by the inventive Radek, about how at the beginning of the 1920s Stalin, in a relaxed state, supposedly said, “The sweetest thing is to devise a plan, then, being on alert, waiting in ambush for a good long time, finding out where the person is hiding. Then catch the person and take revenge!” Another version of this story appears in the memoirs of the widow of Grigory Sokolnikov Joffe, Odna noch’, 33–4; Serebriakova, “Iz vospominanii,” 241–2.
