Stalin полностью

261. “Sometimes he would stop for a few minutes and he would bring out his mouth organ and play arias from operas on it,” Korzhenko’s daughter Nora wrote of Nikolai, aged twenty-eight. “He was a brilliant player and if I closed my eyes I could imagine I was listening to an organ.” She added: “All the time we were living in the beautiful wooden house at Klyazma life was perilous and uncertain. Nearly every day men and women were being arrested, shot or sent into exile. You could never escape from the atmosphere of intrigue, misery and sudden death. It was a strange and sinister atmosphere for a young girl to live in, but somehow one just accepted these things as part of life.” Murray, I Spied for Stalin, 83–9, 112–3.126; Barmine, Memoirs of a Soviet Diplomat, 17. Nora, who had studied foreign languages and mingled with foreigners, would become an informant in that milieu for the organization that wrecked her family and the families of nearly everyone she knew—the NKVD.

262. Conquest, Reassessment, 423.

263. “Vospominaniia nachal’nika vneshnei razvedki P. M. Fitina,” in Primakov, Ocherki, IV: 19; Bondarenko, Fitin, 41–7. Of the six hundred or so students admitted to the NKVD Central School in Moscow (Bolshoi Kiselny Pereulok) in those years, just fifty were chosen for the separate spy school in Balashikha, just outside Moscow. Sinitsyn, Rezident svidetlet’stvuet, 5; Sergutov, “Organizatsionnye aspejty deiatel’nosti vneshnei razvedki,” III: 237. See also Pavlov, Tragediia Sovetskoi razvedki, 349.

264. Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, 66–8.

265. Trotsky speculated that Stalin was titillated by Kollontai’s love life. Trotsky, Stalin, 243–4.

266. In late 1938, Litvnov had written several times to Boris Stein in Rome, forbidding him to return to Moscow because he was “needed” abroad. Sheinis, “Sud’ba diplomata,” 301. Stalin would dispatch Stein to Finland, after which, in Feb. 1939, he did return to Moscow. He would be spared, demoted to the editorial board of the periodical Trud, along with Troyanovsky, who had been ambassador to Tokyo and Washington.

267. DVP SSSR, XXII/i: 10–12 (AVP RF f. 06, op. 1, p. 2, d. 11, l. 4–7: Jan. 3, 1939).

268. Molotov claims he was specifically tasked with removing the preponderance of Jews. Chuev, Sto sorok, 274.

269. “‘Avtobiograficheskie zametki’ V. N. Pavlova—perevodchika I. V. Stalina.” Pavlov turned over this unpublished short memoir to the Foreign Ministry in 1987, and was interviewed in 1989 to clarify certain points.

270. Bohlen, Witness to History, 65.

271. Chuev, Molotov Remembers, 68–9.

272. Seabury, Wilhelmstrasse, 31, citing Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche, 106. By 1940, 71 of the 120 highest officials in the German foreign ministry would belong to the Nazi party. Davidson, Trial of the Germans, 152.

273. Serge, “Litvinov,” 419. Litvinov’s inner circle included young people, such as Eduard Hershelman (head of his secretariat from age thirty), who was nevertheless arrested.

274. Even before the massacre-induced vacancies, half of the 1,000 personnel in the Soviet diplomatic corps at home and abroad were recruited right out of school at the beginning of the 1930s. Still, some 85 percent of Soviet diplomatic personnel active from 1940 to 1946 had begun a diplomatic career after 1936. Magerovsky, “The People’s Commissariat,” II: 345. “It happened that one made an appointment with a colleague but could not find him on the fixed day—he had been arrested,” recalled one high-level official in the commissariat. “Exchange of opinions and conversations were reduced to a minimum.” Roshchin, “People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs,” 110–11. The commissariat’s private apartments at Blacksmith Bridge were sealed in wax after the arrest of their occupants, and the new residents often witnessed the unsealing by the NKVD. Dullin, Men of Influence, 238.

275. Kordt, Wahn und Wirklichkeit, 153.

276. Gafencu, Last Days of Europe, 83. On June 13, 1939, Nazi Party organizations would be forbidden to use “Third” when referring to the Reich—a repudiation of the Holy Roman empire (800–1806) as the first Reich (Bismarck’s having then been the second). Wilson, Heart of Europe.

277. Butler, Mason-Mac, 74–5. Mason-Macfarlane’s drawing-room window overlooked the Charlottenburg Chausee, which ran from the Siegesäule gilded column commemorating the 1870–71 war of reunification eastward to the Brandenburg Gate.

278. Moorehouse, Killing Hitler, 190–1, citing DBFP, 3rd series, IV, appendix V, Mason-Macfarlane Memorandum, 626; Imperial War Museum Archive, Mason-Macfarlane papers, ref. MM40.

279. Kershaw, Hitler: 1936–1945, 183–5.

280. McKee, Tomorrow the World, 27.