Meanwhile, another rumored trial failed to take place. After the Bukharin Trial, it had been rumored that a special trial of diplomats, centering on AntonovOvseenko, would be held. But in fact they were dealt with seriatim.
Soviet diplomats had already suffered severely. For example, Tairov, Ambassador to Mongolia, had been shot in June 1937. Both Krestinsky and Sokolnikov had served as Deputy People’s Commissars for Foreign Affairs. Karakhan had been Ambassador in Berlin. Various lesser figures had been involved in the trials—for example, Chlenov,30 of whom it was said in the Bukharin Trial indictment that his case would be subject to special proceedings. Others implicated in the Bukharin Trial were Yurenev, Ambassador to Berlin; Bogomolov, Ambassador to China; and Sabanin, Director of the Legal Department of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.31 (Yurenev and Bekzadian, Ambassador to Hungary, were among the victims of the July 1938 massacre.)
At the Foreign Commissariat, an NKVD officer, Vasily Korzhenko, was appointed Chief of Personne1,32 and he and his family moved into Krestinsky’s Moscow house.33 The treatment of the Commissariat’s staff for comparatively minor offenses was interestingly described in a Soviet article of the Khrushchev period.
V. N. Barkov had long been Head of the Protocol Department:
On one occasion, on the instructions of Dekanozov, who was at the time a Deputy People’s of the most active members of the Beria gang, Barkov had to meet a foreign correspondent. Under the regulations in force, on the day of his talk with the correspondent, Barkov had to see Dekanozov without fail, but Dekanozov was nowhere to be found. Obeying the orders he had received, Barkov saw the correspondent.
On the following day Dekanozov summoned him.
“Who gave you direct permission for the interview?”
“I could not find you anywhere.”
“You could not have tried very hard.”
The dressing down went on for a long time. Barkov lost his temper and said:
“But on that day you could not be found!”
“Oh! It’s like that is it?” said Dekanozov menacingly, and closed the interview.
On that day Barkov never returned home. His relations only saw him eighteen years later.34
The People’s Commissar himself, Litvinov, beginning in 1937, and for the rest of his life, kept a revolver to hand, “so that if the bell rang in the night, he would not have to live through the consequences.”35 His Deputy People’s Cornmissar, V. S. Stomonyakov, attempted suicide on arrest, to die in the prison hospita1.36
Diplomats disappeared by the dozen. They had, indeed, had genuine contacts with foreigners, so that the presumption of their guilt was, by Yezhov’s standards, overwhelming. They were recalled and shot; in his memoirs, Ehrenburg says that few survived.37 He names nine that he knew personally whom Stalin liquidated.
But no trial took place. In particular, Antonov-Ovseenko simply went through a routine processing. He had been a Menshevik until 1917. He had led two local rebellions in 1905 and 1906 and had been sentenced to death in 1906. He had been arrested several times for underground activity afterward. (This record shows, incidentally, how mistaken is the notion that the Mensheviks were politically inactive because their views on party organization differed from Lenin’s.) Joining the Bolsheviks in 1917, he had led the attack on the Winter Palace which overthrew the Provisional Government.
It was he who had burst into the Government room, announcing, “In the name of the Military Revolutionary Committee, I declare you arrested.” He commanded on the Ukrainian front in the Civil War and later became Head of the Political Administration of the Army.38 Here he had supported Trotsky and was removed in favor of Bubnov. He remained a Trotskyite until 1928, when he submitted, like other oppositionists. He had since been employed in State and diplomatic posts, latterly in Spain.
