On the whole, Yagoda’s initial evidence seems to have been true, or as true as was possible in the circumstances, on most other matters. His account of the Kirov murder seems quite authentic, except on the point of who instructed him to carry it out, and even that is hinted at in his remarks that “it was not quite like that,” when describing the relevant meetings; for this can best be taken as implying that someone’s name has been left out or wrongly reported. Again, he pleaded not guilty to the charge of espionage, and there is no doubt that this was the truth. So when we come to his anomalous pleas on the four medical murders, there is at least some ground for paying attention to what he is saying.
On the Menzhinsky case, we have the added detail of Kazakov’s last-minute retraction of the whole essence of his evidence. This seems decisive. Menzhinsky was almost certainly not murdered by his doctors. (He may, of course, have been killed in some other fashion.)
On Peshkov, on the face of it the whole idea of his murder seems almost pointless. Yagoda justly remarked, “I see no sense in his murder.” That Peshkova was Yagoda’s mistress really adds little to his motive. He did not propose to marry her; he was married already and made no attempt to murder or divorce his wife over the following three years. Moreover, the murder method (reflected in the death of the loyal old sheep in
With Kuibyshev and Gorky, though—that is, precisely the two killings Yagoda freely admitted to—we have cases in which Stalin had definite and pressing political motives for murder.
This does not prove that he killed them. In Kuibyshev’s case, all we can say is that he is now named as one of Stalin’s three main opponents of the purge in the Politburo, and that Stalin procured the death of both the others (Kirov and Ordzhonikidze) by devious, though differing, means—the latter by a faked heart attack. So Kuibyshev’s “heart attack” is not by any means to be accepted simply at face value. Moreover, his survival through 1935 might have constituted a severe obstacle to Stalin’s plans, and he died at precisely the time Stalin was turning against the other main opponents of the killing of Zinoviev and Kamenev.
But as against that, we have no positive evidence of murder. We can, indeed, exculpate the doctors. If Kuibyshev was murdered, it was not done by them. On Kuibyshev’s death, documents now published in the Soviet Union show that he did indeed suffer from heart trouble and that, “feeling very poorly,” he asked to be excused from a session of Gosplan, on which the writer comments, “It is probable that this was a regular heart attack.”180 (But it has recently been speculated in a Soviet periodical that Stalin may indeed have killed Kuibyshev.)181
Gorky’s death is the most interesting and important. For here we have a case where the survival of a sick man for a few months might have gravely hampered Stalin’s plans for the August 1936 Trial, whose postponement until after the holidays could perhaps have led to resistance in the Politburo and Central Committee. But how could Gorky be silenced, apart from the international scandal of arrest? As Vyshinsky put it, though with different intent, in his concluding speech: “How in our country, in the conditions that exist in the Soviet State, could it be made impossible for Gorky to display political activity except by taking his life?”182
But again, it is clear that the doctors, or at any rate those tried, were innocent. Even such credulous observers as Walter Duranty strongly doubted their guilt.
A possible alternative is perhaps that Gorky was indeed murdered, but not by Pletnev and Levin, now long since rehabilitated.
As I write, in 1989, opinion is still current in Moscow that Stalin procured Gorky’s death. Such talk goes back a long way; for example, a “Gorkyist” doctor in one of the Vorkuta camps, wrongly identified as Pletnev, told a confidante in the early 1950s that Gorky had been given poisoned sweetmeats, which also killed one of his attendants.183 As evidence, this does not amount to much. However, there is one piece of more cogent testimony. In the summer of 1963, an old American acquaintance of Gorky visited his eighty-six-year-old widow, Ekaterina Peshkova, in Moscow. Of her son’s death, she said quite calmly that she had no doubt that it was natural. When the visitor remarked that people now said that Gorky’s, too, had been natural, she became very agitated and exclaimed: “It’s not quite so, but don’t ask me to tell you about it! I won’t be able to sleep a wink for three days and nights if I tell you.”184
