Çeviri
THE SECRET FILE OF JOSEPH STALIN
THE SECRET FILE OF JOSEPH
STALIN
A HIDDEN LIFE
ROMAN BRACKMAN
FRANK CASS
LONDON · PORTLAND, OR
Brackman, Roman The secret
file of Joseph Stalin: a hidden life 1. Stalin, I. (Iosif), 1879–1953 2.
Heads of state—Soviet Union—Biography 3. Secret service—Soviet Union—History 4.
Soviet
Union—Politics and government—1936–1953 I.
List
of Illustrations vii
Foreword
by Harold Shukman x
Preface xiv
Acknowledgements xvii
1
The Roots of Evil 1
2
‘Samedov Disease’ 13
3
Meeting the ‘Mountain
Eagle’ 24
4
The Murder of Vissarion 31
5
The Betrayal of the
Avlabar Press 38
6
The Hotel Bristol 41
7
The Great Tiflis Bank
Robbery 47
8
Colonel Eremin 54
9 Koba and Malinovsky 63
10 The ‘Great State Scandal’ 78
11 ‘Iosif Dzhu…? We’ve Forgotten. Very
Important!’ 92
12 ‘Vasily…So Far Unidentified’ 100
13 ‘The Gray Blur’ 114
14 Red Terror 125
15 ‘The Old Man Wants Poison’ 134
16 ‘Jewish Origin’ 164
17 Stalin’s Okhrana File Found in 1926 168
18 ‘Castrated Forces’ 175
19 Blumkin’s Failed Mission 182
|
20 |
The ‘Kutepov Documents’ |
188 |
|
21 |
‘I Know What Kind of Revolutionary
You Are!’ |
197 |
|
22 |
‘Why Did You Kill Such a Nice Man?’ |
204 |
|
23 |
The Stalin Institute |
209 |
|
24 |
‘Old Bear with a Ring in His Nose’ |
214 |
|
25 |
They’ll Swallow It’ |
219 |
|
26 |
The Fatal Find in Menzhinsky’s
Office |
226 |
|
27 |
The ‘Tukhachevsky Dossier’ |
229 |
|
28 |
The Forgery that Tells the Truth |
240 |
|
29 |
The Staged ‘Trifle’ |
255 |
|
30 |
The Mysterious ‘Worker Vasily’ |
265 |
|
31 |
Inhaling ‘Poison Gas’ |
268 |
|
32 |
The Murder of Trotsky |
275 |
|
33 |
‘Ivan Susanin’ and the ‘Eastern
Question’ |
281 |
|
34 |
The War and the October 1941
Massacre |
294 |
|
35 |
Generalissimo with a Crippled Arm |
303 |
|
36 |
‘Murderers in White Gowns’ |
314 |
|
37 |
The Murder of ‘Dr Moreau’ |
333 |
|
38 |
‘You Can’t Whitewash a Black Dog’ |
341 |
|
|
Afterword |
352 |
|
|
Select Bibliography |
356 |
|
|
Index |
371 |
Between pages 172 and 173
1.
House of the Dzhugashvili family, where Stalin was born.
2.
Stalin’s mother, Ekaterina Georgievna Dzhugashvili (née Geladze).
3.
Kamo being delivered from Germany in shackles to the Tiflis prison
in 1909.
4.
Prison photographs of Stalin at the time of his last arrest in 1913.
5.
The ‘Eremin Letter’.
6.
Copy of the original Okhrana document, dated 31 March 1911.
7.
Ekaterina Svanidze, first wife of Stalin.
8.
Fabricated photograph of Lenin sitting next to Stalin.
9.
Roman Malinovsky.
10.
Nadezhda Allilueva, Stalin’s second wife, shortly before her suicide
in 1932.
11.
Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky.
12.
Prison camp inmates building the White Sea-Baltic Canal.
13.
Stalin with Yezhov, Molotov and Voroshilov at the opening of the
White Sea-Baltic Canal.
14.
People’s demonstration in Red Square in 1938.
15.
Chief prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky at the Moscow show trial.
16.
Stalin’s son Yakov Dzhugashvili, captured by the Nazis.
17.
Stalin and Ribbentrop watch as Molotov signs the Nazi-Soviet Pact in
August 1939.
18.
Lev Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova arrive in Mexico in 1937.
19.
A Mexican policeman holds up the axe that killed Trotsky.
20.
Funeral procession in March 1953 with the coffin of Stalin.
Acknowledgements:
Figures 1, 4, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 reproduced by
permission of David King. Figure 5 reproduced by permission of Life magazine.
Figure 6 reproduced by permission of the Hoover Institution, Stanford
University. While attempts have been made to obtain permissions from all other
copyright holders, the publisher apologizes for any omissions; these can be
rectified in later editions.
Of all the dictators the
world endured in the twentieth century, Joseph Stalin was unquestionably the
mightiest. His image acquired superhuman proportions, and any serious study of
Soviet history must take full account of his personality, his personal
attitudes and his personal involvement in all spheres of activity during the
period of his rule. In this book, Roman Brackman focuses on the most intensely
personal aspects of Stalin’s character, and connects them with events in his
life that have never before been so comprehensively examined.
Succeeding Lenin in 1924,
Stalin took over a state that was still recovering from the ravages of the
First World War, three years of civil war and six of communist depredations. In
a country populated overwhelmingly by peasants, the Soviet leaders saw the
future in terms of a state founded on industrial power. But they also had to
find a way to feed the expanding workforce and to do it with the help of a
resentful agrarian population. Yet by the late 1930s, only some 15 years after
Stalin had become the new leader, the Soviet Union was an industrial power on
an international scale. On vast construction sites, armies of workers had been
mobilized to fulfil Stalin’s ambitious Five- Year Plans, straining every sinew
to build and set in motion giant steel works, power stations, arms and
ammunition plants, aircraft and tank factories. Schools and universities had
multiplied, and a large technical and cultural intelligentsia had been created.
Science and technology had made great strides, and Soviet military and
strategic science was highly regarded in the West. By the time Stalin died in
1953, he could claim that within one generation he had overseen the development
of the USSR from a backward state into nuclear ‘superpower’ status.
In the 1930s, moreover,
the Soviet Union was widely perceived in the West— especially by industrial
workers and intellectuals—as a country that had saved the working class from
the jungle law of the capitalist system, from unemployment and exploitation,
and to have done so by getting rid of the owners as a class, by introducing
public ownership throughout, and, in particular, by organizing national output
on the basis of rational planning. While the industrialized countries of the
West were languishing in mass unemployment and widespread social distress and
were drifting rudderless towards an unknown future, they saw a USSR that was in
full production and being guided towards the bright future of communism by the
intelligent, far-seeing and above all the rational leadership of Joseph Stalin.
To many people in the West, to say nothing of his own country, Stalin
represented a force for good—for the greater good of mankind as a whole,
indeed. Although his public appearances were extremely rare, his image was to
be seen everywhere throughout the country. Like a Colossus, he stood astride
the pinnacle of the Soviet state, a symbol of its might and a beacon to the
world.
willy-nilly, into the war
against Germany. After recovering from the shock of the initial attack and the
massive defeats inflicted on the Red Army, Stalin began to educate himself in
the art of modern warfare and in due course was able to make a constructive and
effective contribution to the Soviet war effort and the great victory of 1945.
The war greatly enhanced Stalin’s standing in the world. Half of Europe was
under his control, and the USSR emerged from the war no longer the pariah state
it had been before 1941. After the war, while the Soviet people were still
traumatized from its horrors and their huge losses, in every sense, Stalin
roused them again to make a supreme effort in the reconstruction of the country
and its economy. When he died, hundreds of thousands of people packed into the
streets near the Kremlin, there was widespread weeping and many people have
testified that they thought it was the end of the world as they had known it.
This picture of Soviet
achievement had an reverse side, however. The feelings of mastery that workers
had experienced from the victory of a revolution carried out in their name
would barely outlast the Civil War, as the new regime took over the trade
unions and introduced its own brand of coercion into the industrial scene. The
peasants were given a brief period of free trade in order to revive the
agrarian economy, but by the end of the 1920s Stalin had decided that they must
be brought under state control, and, using the most savage means, had driven
them into collective farms. At least five million of the most
‘recalcitrant’—among them the most successful farmers, condemned as ‘kulaks’—
died in the process, either exterminated by Red Army units, or starved to death
in the northern wastes to which they had been forcibly deported. The rapidly
expanding intelligentsia soon found that intellectual and cultural freedom were
not communist goals, and from the late 1920s both artists and academics found
themselves mobilized into state service to promote the Communist Party’s
propaganda slogans or to rewrite the country’s history to conform to a new
pattern. Failure to conform or obey resulted in disastrous consequences.
Although Marxist aims had
always been expressed in terms of the impersonal forces of history and the laws
of economics, the Russian Revolution—and other communist revolutions that
followed it, for that matter, for example in China, North Korea, Cuba— erected
monumental personalities before the people as the embodiment of its ideals.
From 1917 until his death in 1924, it was Lenin who fulfilled this role, and
indeed, until the end of the system itself in 1991 it was Lenin who, as an
embalmed relic in the Kremlin Mausoleum or a name to be uttered whenever
ideological authority was needed, was the acknowledged guide to a brilliant
future.
Stalin had set about
securing his position as Lenin’s chosen heir and successor as soon as Lenin
departed the scene. As a first step it was necessary to rewrite the history of
the revolution in a way that would highlight and magnify Stalin’s role,
diminishing that of others with a better claim in the process. Throughout the
1920s and 1930s, books and articles were written and revised in numerous editions
by Bolshevik memoirists and official historians with this aim in mind. By the
mid-1930s, when it seemed the Soviet Union was not only secure economically,
but also entering a phase of social stability, Stalin had become virtually a
demi-god, an ubiquitous icon, and an omnipotent dictator with more power than
ever.
In some respects, the
Stalinist approach to social mobilization worked. The economy was re-energized
and the country was made strong again. But alongside industrial and agrarian
coercion and constantly raised targets, under Stalin the propaganda machine
completely blurred the
distinction between political exhortation and outright lies. Objective criteria
were virtually extinguished and only ‘the Party line’, i.e. Stalin’s word, was
acceptable currency. He operated a system of fear and terror in which the
entire population were made to inform on each other. A word out of turn,
uttering an opinion that was politically correct only yesterday but not today,
a moment’s hesitation in carrying out an order, let alone questioning it—any
such ‘misdemeanour’ could result in the dreaded knock on the door in the small
hours. Literally millions were arrested and taken away, to face execution,
decades in prison or concentration camp or harsh exile in homicidal conditions.
Trials on the whole were reserved for those whose testimony— invariably false
and extracted under torture—could be used by Stalin’s henchmen to arrest
further echelons of ‘enemies of the people’.
Since its inception, the
regime had been characterized by repressive and coercive practices. Political
opponents were deported abroad, executed or sent into camps and exile from
1918, and persecution in various forms continued right through the Stalin era
and after, uninterrupted even by the war. Stalin did not maintain a lofty
distance between himself and the penal process: he personally scrutinized lists
of those who had been arrested—hundreds of thousands of them—and he personally
scrawled the sentence they were to receive beside their names, all too frequently
writing ‘death penalty’. Like Lenin, who had established the terror state,
Stalin was personally vengeful. But if repression was one of the main hallmarks
of the entire Stalin period, it was the year 1937 that sharpened that image to
the point of extremism. The country was convulsed by a series of show trials
and a terror campaign that led to the deaths and incarceration of millions of
innocent people. Those affected included half a million Communist Party
functionaries, ranging from Stalin’s closest and Lenin’s oldest comrades down
to lowly clerks, 45,000 senior officers of the Red Army—15,000 of whom were
shot—factory and farm managers, leading scholars, writers, heads of research
institutes and often their entire staffs, educationists and their students,
simple workers and peasants, and even swathes of the penal service, the NKVD,
itself. The gamut of society was traumatized by this assault. Show trials of
the Bolshevik Old Guard ‘proved’ that virtually all the top layers of Party and
state administration had been engaged in various conspiracies to eliminate
Stalin, and all allegedly on the orders of the disgraced, absent, hunted, and
best-known hero of the revolution, Trotsky.
The country was pervaded
by a climate of distrust and betrayal. The ‘long night’ of 1937 was revisited
in the post-war 1940s in a series of psychopathic campaigns that might have
gone even further, had not Stalin died when he did. Stalin suffered from
pathological suspiciousness, as his successor Nikita Khrushchev—no saint himself—put
it. Always guarded and defensive, he had never been as convivial as his
comrades. His rewriting of Party history exposed obvious insecurity about his
revolutionary credentials, and his resort to harsh methods, even if it was a
development of Lenin’s approach, never appeared to be out of character.
Nevertheless, the precise cause of the scale and savagery of the violence of
the mid-1930s has never been definitively explained.
Was the permanent climate
of fear manufactured by Stalin precisely in order to create a submissive and
obedient system, one that was deemed essential if the country was to become
strong enough to resist a surrounding world that was hostile to its very
existence? It is difficult to reconcile that idea with the fact that large numbers
of his most loyal executives, his closest aides and even their families were
among the victims. Did he
sacrifice them as a
constant reminder to others that no one, however exalted, was safe from the
Leader’s long reach?
Was this the ‘normal’
behaviour of a dictator, who, by virtue of his omnipotence, must expect to be
surrounded by potential enemies who wish to diminish his power? It would have
been surprising if Stalin could not have pointed to real potential
enemies. But he so dominated the Party organization and its rank-and-file
membership that his word came to represent the Party line, and all opposition
to it was therefore doomed. Similarly, the country as a whole accepted the
propaganda, adoring their omnipotent leader, as the populations of other
dictatorships were doing elsewhere in Europe. Under these circumstances, it is
natural to suppose that real opposition no longer existed.
Were Stalin’s political
actions a reflection of his personality? Had he become lethally affected by the
power he inherited when he succeeded Lenin? Did his pathological outlook
originate in the taciturn young provincial of limited culture, who had watched
as more brilliant intellectuals dominated Party debate and ideological
argument, and shone as orators on the streets of Petrograd in 1917 and later in
the Civil War as tribunes to the front-line troops? Stalin had always been more
of a ‘backroom boy’, rather than one for the grandstand. But, though limited,
he was not ignorant of Marxist scripture; indeed, he was probably a better
Marxist scholar than any of his successors.
It is Roman Brackman’s
view, demonstrated throughout this book, that Stalin harboured so dark a secret
about himself, one that was so compromising, that his need to prevent its
disclosure in the mid-1930s drove him to his homicidal excesses. The canon of
personal morality in the revolutionary underground knew no more heinous crime
against the sacred cause of revolution than betrayal of one’s comrades to the
Okhrana, the tsarist secret police. Suspicion that Stalin had indeed been a
police spy was aroused as early as 1899, when he was an underground
revolutionary in Georgia, but it was his subsequent impressive record of
arrests and escapes that prompted a belief in wider party circles that he must have
police protection. Had he been exposed when the police archives were partly
opened after the February Revolution of 1917 he would have been shot or
committed suicide, like many other secret agents, and the world would never
have heard of him. Various attempts to establish Stalin’s collaboration with
the St Petersburg Okhrana in the years just before the First World War were
made at intervals throughout the Soviet era by Western researchers and Soviet
defectors, largely based on inside knowledge of Soviet intelligence circles.
Since the late 19808, when writers began to fill the ‘blank pages’ of Soviet
history, researchers have dug deeper, survivors have surfaced and their
memories recorded, and the Party archives have yielded significant new
material.
This fascinating book is
Roman Brackman’s carefully researched account of the question. Focusing his
attention on the obscure fate of a ‘Stalin File’ that was held by the St
Petersburg Okhrana and unearthed in the mid-1920s, he penetrates the most
secret part of a system that was itself obsessed with secrecy—the world of the
NKVD. He has reassessed all the known material and fitted it together with new
archival and other unpublished sources, shedding light on many hitherto obscure
aspects of the explosive story and explaining their significance with valuable
insight. The result is a compelling account of one of the most intriguing
mysteries of Soviet history.
Professor Harold Shukman
St Antony’s College, Oxford
‘Strange fact: in none of
Stalin’s biographies does he come to life!’ the historian Bertram D.Wolfe
observed some years ago.1 In his recent biography Robert Conquest
refers to Stalin as ‘unreal’.2 But Stalin was real enough to the
millions he sent to their deaths and to the generations he forced to live in
terror and abject misery. Yet it is also true that Stalin emerges from his
previously published biographies as unreal indeed. They describe someone quite
mousy who gives birth to a colossal mountain of horrors, leaving the reader
with the sensation of an almost palpable disparity between cause and effect.
The torrent of revelations in the era of glasnost has done little to
dispel the mystery of Stalin the man and to fill in the blanks in his life and
in Soviet history.
Stalin’s secrets have
remained hidden because during his rule, lasting more than a quarter of a
century, he was able to destroy or distort much of the evidence about his past,
and to cover up many of his crimes. He almost succeeded in his drive to hide
his real self. Stalin was obsessed with the destruction of archival documents
and bent on murdering witnesses; he forged documents to replace truth with
fraud; he habitually lied and practiced the precise opposite of what he
preached. A gigantic propaganda machine worked for decades to glorify him.
All of this has made the
task of Stalin’s biographers extremely difficult. At best, they have made a
modest attempt to explore the almost barren terrain of his early years. None of
them mentions the bitter family conflict caused by the belief that Stalin was
the child of an adulterous affair, a belief that poisoned the lives of his
parents and led to the family’s breakup. No biographer mentions the severe
beatings by Stalin’s father Vissarion, which left the 10-year-old boy’s arm
crippled for life. These traumas left Stalin’s soul crippled as well. And none
delves into the murders instigated by Stalin as a young man, including that of
his own father. But it is only in the light of Stalin’s childhood traumas and
the early murders that the carnage of his rule will begin to become
comprehensible. He turned into a brutal and cunning ‘serial killer’ long before
the Revolution furnished him with the opportunity to gratify his craving for
blood on a giant scale.
Only one, early, biography
mentions in passing that Stalin was an agent of the tsarist secret police, the
Okhrana.3 Yet the story of Stalin’s Okhrana career is crucial, even
central, to an understanding of his psychological makeup and character, of the
course of Soviet history and the very nature of the Soviet police state that
inflicted deep psychological damage on generations of people. But, however
important the story of Stalin’s Okhrana career might be on its own merit, it
pales into insignificance in comparison with the horrors that Stalin’s fear of
revelation of his Okhrana past burdened Soviet history.
evidence I have assembled
argues overwhelmingly that the ‘rumors’ were based on truth and that the revelations
that emerge from the evidence—although indeed sensational— have nothing to do
with sensationalism. Stalin’s paranoia, which his biographers often cite, had
roots in reality, and the history of Stalin’s Okhrana file makes
comprehensible, if no less horrible, the bloody convulsions of Stalin’s era.
This book is the result of
historical detective work to recover the truth. In this salvage operation, I
neglected no piece of information, however minute, and left unexplained no
omission or displacement of data. I closely scrutinized Russian secret police
archives, old publications, newspaper reports, memoirs, recent revelations in
Soviet archives and the press, even old movies Stalin had sponsored. I also
interviewed scores of witnesses and their descendants. The process was akin to
the slow and painstaking restoration of a portrait that had been torn to
pieces. Its often tiny, warped and widely scattered fragments had to be
collected and placed in the proper relationship with respect to each other. The
result makes intelligible many baffling and seemingly inexplicable events that
took place during Stalin’s rule and occurred even decades after his death. The
reader will discover the real Stalin, the great imposter, hiding behind the
mask of a revolutionary zealot; the deranged despot, haunted by fear of
exposure of his crimes and duplicity; a massmurderer without a conscience, who
himself was poisoned. A man who, having climbed to the pinnacle of power,
plunged into the abyss of insanity. Stalin’s true story is more dreadful and
bizarre than any fiction, but he emerges from it as quite real.
Ironically, Stalin himself
often unintentionally helped salvage the truth about himself. The records of
the macabre show trials he staged during his rule reveal one of his peculiar
passions—his irresistible craving to force his victims to confess to the
selfsame crimes he himself had committed. These confessions, like the play
within Shakespeare’s Hamlet, contained fragments of events that indeed
had taken place—not in the lives of the show trial defendants but in Stalin’s
own life. Thus the show trial confessions are criminal evidence that is unique
in history.
Another peculiarity of
Stalin also provides a rich mine of information about his hidden past: he was
victim to a compulsive urge to use political and social issues, individual
people, and whole ethnic groups as props and surrogates on which to project and
act out his personal emotional conflicts, re-enacting over and over the
traumatic events of his life.
Yet another of Stalin’s
obsessions was helpful in recovering the truth: he inundated Soviet archives
with fake documents in order to hide the record of his Okhrana service and to
glorify his past as a revolutionary. But he did it in a peculiar way: he
‘doctored’ many real Okhrana documents, inserting fraudulent information and
erasing some statements, thus changing the documents’ true meaning, but leaving
some of the text intact. Fortunately, these fabrications are crude and easily
detectable. Many particles of truth that Stalin failed to erase from these
documents proved to be extremely valuable in the reconstruction of his career.
During the many years of
my research, I had the feeling that if I failed to unearth Stalin’s story, it
might remain buried forever, and the numerous bits and pieces of evidence I had
gathered would disappear with the passage of time, unnoticed or neglected by
others. With the information that emerged from decades of inquiry, I gained a
unique insight into Stalin’s personality, the ‘method in his madness’. Rightly
or wrongly, I also
felt that the
circumstances of my own life had conspired to burden me with the task of
unearthing Stalin’s story.
I was born and grew up in
Moscow, on Arbat Street, the usual route taken by Stalin and his entourage
speeding in their limousines to and from the Kremlin. During my childhood, I
often stayed with my grandparents. I loved and respected my grandfather, whom I
remember well: a tall scholarly man with a full gray beard, who, in referring
to Stalin, would often mutter, ‘The bandit!’ in a low voice meant only for my
grandmother’s ears. But I heard him. As a child, my classmates and I had to
attend the parades in Red Square. As the columns moved past the Kremlin, I
would look at Stalin, standing on top of the Lenin mausoleum, waving his hand
from time to time. I thought of my grandfather and wondered why all these
people around me were shouting hysterically, ‘Long live Stalin!’
In 1950 two of my
classmates and I, 19-year-old students at the time, were arrested for
attempting to escape across the Soviet-Turkish border and for ‘anti-Soviet
propaganda’. Five years later, in the amnesty of the post-Stalin thaw, my
friends and I were released, like millions of other prisoners. During the five
years I spent in the gulag, I met many people, and their stories left a deep
impression on me. Many of them could not explain why they had been arrested.
They kept asking: ‘Why?’
Perhaps my research
started then, in the gulag, with my repeatedly encountering that ‘Why?’ Or maybe
it was prompted even earlier by my grandfather’s derogatory muttering and my
puzzlement as to why a man he called a bandit was adulated by vast crowds. In
any case, Stalin’s story emerged after many years of hunting down sources,
following leads, and piecing together fragments of information. The result is
this book. It is never too late to uncover the truth and to explain why
historical events happened the way they did. The end of the calamity that
Stalin left behind is not yet in sight. The truth about the greatest criminal
and tyrant in modern history may help to explain his legacy, which is at the
roots of the turmoil and violence that threaten to flare up in the former
Soviet empire. Russian people today, almost half a century after the dictator’s
death, are still in the process of freeing themselves from the consequences of
Stalin’s rule. People who have been denied the knowledge of their past tend to
repeat it. The purpose of this study is to recover the truth and make this
process irreversible.
NOTES
1.
Bertram D.Wolfe, Three
Who Made a Revolution, vol. 2, New York, 1964, p. 89.
2.
Robert Conquest, Stalin:
Breaker of Nations, New York, 1991, p. 323.
3.
Edward Ellis Smith, The
Young Stalin—The Early Years of an Elusive Revolutionary, London, 1968.
I bear sole responsibility
for collecting, evaluating and citing the evidence and for the contents of the
narrative. Finally, I must add that without the exceptional forbearance and
help of my wife Nadine and my children this effort would not have succeeded.
THE ROOTS OF EVIL
Early in 1874, a tall,
broad-shouldered stranger with a full black beard arrived at Gori, a small
provincial town located in the heart of Georgia, then a southern province of
the Great Russian Empire. In appearance he seemed one of the recently freed
serfs who had left their native villages to escape poverty and find employment
in the cities and towns. His name was Vissarion Dzhugashvili, and his arrival
at Gori was in a way a return to the land where his peasant ancestors, all serfs,
had once lived.
Vissarion’s knowledge of
his ancestors was limited to a few stories about his grandfather Zaza
Dzhugashvili, a serf born in about 1800 in a village near Gori, shortly before
Georgia was absorbed into the Russian empire. Zaza took part in several peasant
uprisings suppressed by Russian troops. He was captured twice, but managed to
escape and hide in a remote mountain hamlet, where he herded sheep. Later he
settled in the village of Didi-Lilo and got married and had children.1
(A number of his descendants still lived in Didi-Lilo in the 1930s.2)
One of Zaza’s sons, Vano,
had a vineyard. Children in Didi-Lilo started early helping their parents in
the fields, or else they learned a trade. Vano’s son, Vissarion, left Didi-
Lilo at the age of 14, after the abolition of serfdom in 1864. Vissarion went
to work at the shoe factory of an Armenian businessman Adelkhanov in Tiflis,
the capital of Georgia. Ten years later, he moved to Gori to work at another
shoe factory, where he was offered more money.3
The inhabitants of Gori
assumed that Vissarion Dzhugashvili came from Ossetia, which borders Georgia in
the north, since his name had the same root as the common Ossetic name
Dzhukaev. They were wrong. Ossets often migrated to Georgia and became assimilated
there, but Vissarion was not one of them. The name Dzhugashvili consists of two
words, shvili, which means ‘son of,’ and dzhuga, which is not
used in contemporary Georgian but existed in Old Georgian and meant ‘yoke for
oxen’. The word was absorbed into Old Georgian from a language of one of the
Indo-European tribes that in ancient times dwelt in the area. Words of the same
root and similar meaning, such as the Russian word igo (yoke), are
common to all Indo-European languages, to which Georgian however does not
belong.4 One of Vissarion’s remote Georgian ancestors was probably a
craftsman who made yokes for oxen, devices in great demand then. The
Dzhugashvili family name dates back to that time.
died soon afterwards. In
Gori, the family stayed together in the same house. Keke helped her mother
while her brothers opened a pottery shop.5
Vissarion was 24 when he
proposed to Keke, who was then 16. The register of marriages for the year 1874
states: ‘Joined in wedlock on 17 May [1874] Vissarion Dzhugashvili, peasant,
temporary resident of Gori, Orthodox Christian, age of bridegroom 24, and
Ekaterina, daughter of Glakh Geladze, peasant, formerly resident of Gori,
deceased. Orthodox Christian, her first marriage, age 16.’6 The
couple had a splendid Georgian Orthodox ceremony in a Gori church, conducted by
the priest Koba Egnatashvili.7
But happiness was not to
be the couple’s lot. In the first three years of marriage, Keke gave birth to
three children who either died in early infancy or were stillborn. In later
years she once mentioned that she had two sons, and another time she spoke of
three babies, which suggests that one of them was a girl.8 The
causes of their deaths and even their names remain unknown.
The fourth child, a boy,
was born a month before the Eastern Orthodox Christmas, 1878. A photocopy of
the entry in the records of the Uspensky Sobor (the Cathedral of the
Assumption) in Gori states: ‘Iosif Dzugashvili born 6 December 1878. Christened
17 December [1878], parents Vissarion Ivanovich Dzugashvili, peasant, and his
lawful wedded wife, Ekaterina Georgievna, residents of the township of Gori.
Godfather— Tsikhatrishvili, peasant, resident of Gori.’9 This boy
survived. Everyone called him Soso, the Georgian diminutive of Iosif. He was to
become known to the world as Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. Contrary to the
church birth record, Stalin’s official biography, starting from 1922, began to
claim that he was born a year later, on 21 December 1879. For decades to come
this invented date was celebrated as Stalin’s birthday. This was one of the
earliest and perhaps the least significant of Stalin’s fabrications.
The one-room house where
Soso was born stands today as the only remaining Stalin museum. All buildings
in the neighborhood were destroyed in 1937 to turn the area into a park. The
house became a shrine, protected from nature by an imposing marble enclosure.
In Stalin’s youth this house was considered a typical modest dwelling. A
creaking plank front door led into a single room, whose floor comprised broken
bricks stamped into the ground. Two small glass windows left the room in
constant semidarkness; its muggy air, dank from rain, wet clothes and cooking,
never circulated. A huge Georgian-style ancestral bed, the resting place for
the entire family, took up half the available space. The other half was filled
with a few pieces of simple furniture: a four- drawer commode with a round
mirror, a small table with tripod stools, a small cupboard and a wardrobe. In
one corner stood clay pots for storing drinking water, and a wooden basin
caught the rain that leaked through the roof. A small square patch of backyard
with an outhouse was surrounded by a high wooden fence.10
In Stalin’s youth, Gori’s
population was some 8,000, mostly Georgians. There was also a sizable number of
Armenian Christians who had fled to Georgia from Turkey and Persia to escape
Muslim persecution. Other inhabitants were Ossets, Tartars, and a few families
of Georgian Jews. Maxim Gorky visited Gori at the turn of the century and
recorded his impressions:
Along the slopes and also
sprawled at the bottom of the hill are small huts
and tiny houses, scattered wide, all built of limestone. Over the whole area
lies
an aura of nonconformity and wild originality. A white-hot sky hangs over the
town…not far away stand mountains with evenly distributed caverns—this is a
cave-town. Motionless white clouds are always suspended upon the horizon: these
are the mountains of the main chain, covered with silver, everlasting snow.11
To the relatives and
neighbors, the newborn Soso appeared normal except for a slight deformity in
his left foot: the second and third toes were fused.12 The deformity
attracted attention and started gossip, which with the passage of time was
distorted and turned into a rumor, still alive in Georgia today, that Stalin
had six fingers.13 In ancient times, and as late as the Middle Ages,
it was common to kill babies with physical abnormalities. To superstitious
minds, they signified the mystical intervention of diabolical forces, evil
spirits, dragons and so on. Such superstitions have survived in the mythology
of our time. Grigory, one of the characters in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers
Karamazov, believes that his six-fingered son is a ‘dragon’ and is glad
when the baby dies.
There is no evidence to
suggest that Vissarion thought Soso was a dragon, but his behavior toward Soso
suggests that he hated his son for another reason. The family’s neighbors believed
that Vissarion suspected Keke of infidelity and doubted that Soso was his son.
The rumor was that Vissarion hated Soso because he suspected him of being a
bastard child. The neighbors long remembered Vissarion’s brutal beatings of the
boy.14 One of them recalled that Soso once had asked Vissarion for
money to buy paint, for he liked to paint pictures. Vissarion was drinking wine
with friends, and he angrily flung a coin at him. When Soso asked for more,
Vissarion, unable to control his rage, threw a hammer at the boy, barely
missing him. Soso ran away, pursued by Vissarion, who cursed and called him nabichuari
(‘bastard’ in Georgian).15 Hints at Stalin’s illegitimacy appear
early in his biographies. Trotsky mentions in passing that some Georgians cited
‘ticklish facts’.16 Boris Souvarine refers to Georgian Bolsheviks
who ‘adduce rather unpleasant facts by way of proof’.17 Roy Medvedev
makes the claim that ‘in Georgia, even today, there are rumors which attempt to
give Stalin higher status, as the illegitimate son of an aristocrat or
high-placed clergyman’.18 But such rumors would hardly have been
created out of nothing in order to elevate Stalin’s status in
Georgia—illegitimacy has long been considered a disgrace and the ultimate
insult among Georgians with their traditions of family ties, kinship and honor.
The name that invariably comes up in rumors identifying Stalin’s ‘true’ father
is Koba (Yakobi) Egnatashvili, the Gori priest who officiated at Vissarion’s
and Keke’s wedding.19
The Egnatashvili family
belonged to the aznauri, the numerous and proud Georgian gentry, whose
members traditionally went into military or civil service or took the cloth.
Egnatashvili was married and had a large family, but of all his children only
two sons survived the smallpox epidemic of the winter of 1887. This epidemic
almost claimed Soso’s life as well, leaving his face extensively pockmarked.20
During Stalin’s rule, Egnatashvili’s two sons for many years enjoyed Stalin’s
protection. Alexander Yakovlevich Egnatashvili was promoted by Stalin into the
Georgian Secret Police and then transferred to Moscow, where he became a
general in Stalin’s personal bodyguard. He was known among the officers there
as Stalin’s half-brother.21 He was also known among them as
‘rabbit’, because his main responsibility was to taste all the food that was
served at the table of his ‘brother’, to ensure that it contained no poison.22
(General
Egnatashvili disappeared
at the time of Stalin’s death. He was probably shot either on Stalin’s orders
or on the orders of the chief of the Soviet security police, Beria.23)
Egnatashvili’s other son,
Vasily Yakovlevich Egnatashvili, was the editor of the Georgian Communist Party
paper Zaria vostoka (‘Dawn of the East’) and later a secretary of the
Georgian Supreme Soviet. A vain and ignorant man, he could not resist the
temptation to brag, often hinting that he was Stalin’s brother. Once he told
the prominent Georgian movie director David Rondeli, ‘You know, my brother
liked your movie’, uttering the words ‘my brother’ with special emphasis. ‘Who
is your brother?’ asked Rondeli. ‘Don’t you know that Koba is my brother?’
exclaimed Vasily with an air of surprise, adding in a low voice: ‘Koba Stalin
is my brother.’ (Koba was Stalin’s nickname, widely known in Georgia.) When he
learned of Vasily’s indiscretions, Stalin was annoyed by this threat to the
aura of adoration he had created around his name, and ordered Vasily’s arrest.
After Stalin’s death, Vasily was released from prison. His wife, Maria, was
prone to complain: ‘Stalin was my husband’s half-brother. Our family suffered
because of Stalin. All Georgia suffered.’ In 1955 Vasily’s son Koba
Egnatashvili got into a fist fight with a classmate, Zviat Gamsakhurdia (who
many years later became a leading Georgian dissident and in 1989 was elected
president of Georgia). Gamsakhurdia shouted, ‘Stalinis deda bozi ikho’
(‘Stalin’s mother was a whore’).24
Clearly, the rumor of
Stalin’s illegitimacy was widespread. Egnatashvili and Soso’s mother, Keke—the
only people who could have definitively answered the question of his
paternity—died a long time ago. If Soso was their child, they could hardly have
revealed this. Such a confession would have started a bloody feud among the
Dzhugashvili, Egnatashvili and Geladze families. The ancient tradition of siskhus
akheba, or bloody revenge for a man’s injured pride and soiled honor,
exists in Georgia even today. The question of whether Soso was Egnatashvili’s
son may never be answered. But far more important than whether or not the rumor
was based on reality is the fact that the belief in the adultery did exist, and
that it probably destroyed Soso’s family. Georgians do not use the word nabichuari
lightly. Vissarion would not have called his son a bastard had he not suspected
Keke of having been unfaithful to him. The suspicion that his wife had given
birth to a bastard profoundly affected Vissarion. He turned from an outgoing,
cheerful man, an engaging storyteller and a fine singer, into a bully and a
drunkard who spent all his earnings on alcohol, and was feared and avoided by
Soso.25
In 1884, when Soso was 5,
Vissarion left Gori for Tiflis, where he again began to work at the Adelkhanov
shoe factory. Keke and Soso remained in Gori.26 For the next five
years, Vissarion lived in Tiflis alone, not visiting them even once. In
September 1888 Soso was enrolled in the first grade of Gori’s Preparatory
Ecclesiastic School, where usually only the sons of the gentry and clergy were
accepted. A neighbor pointed out years later that ‘it was at that time highly
unusual for a boy with a peasant background and a peasant name like
Dzhugashvili to be accepted at an Ecclesiastic School. Soso was given a
stipend: he was to receive three rubles a month. His mother worked for the
teachers and school, earning up to ten rubles a month. They lived on these
funds.’27 The stipend and Keke’s job had been arranged by
Egnatashvili.28
Some two years after he
started school, 10-year-old Soso was almost killed during a Christmas
celebration. He was standing in a group of schoolboys, when a fast-moving
horse-drawn carriage knocked him off his feet, the wheels rolling over his
legs. Soso lost consciousness. But when he was brought home, he told his mother
not to worry. She
immediately called a
doctor, who stopped the bleeding and told her that no internal organs were
injured. Soso stayed in bed for two weeks and then went back to school. He
convinced himself later that a miracle had saved him from death, heralding a
special destiny.29
Soon after this accident,
Vissarion wrote to Keke that he intended to take Soso to Tiflis to teach him
the shoe-making trade. He came to Gori sometime in early spring of 1890. Soso
was attending the second preparatory grade at that time. Despite Keke’s
objections, Vissarion was determined to take Soso out of school and force him
to come to work with him in Tiflis. Keke, knowing that Vissarion loathed Soso,
feared that he would abuse the boy. Besides, she had always wanted her son to
become a priest. Vissarion was enraged by her objections. ‘You want my son to
become a priest?’ he shouted at her. ‘You’ll never live to see that happen! I’m
a shoemaker. My son must also be a shoemaker. No matter what, he’ll be a
shoemaker.’30
Egnatashvili was on Keke’s
side. He argued with Vissarion that it would be absurd to take Soso out of
school. Vissarion did not budge. Soso’s attending the Ecclesiastical School as
well as Egnatashvili’s intervention on the boy’s behalf, may well have been for
Vissarion the final proof of Keke’s adultery. To take Soso with him may have
been his revenge for the insult to his honor. That Soso was afraid of him and
did not want to leave Gori further enraged him. ‘Look at this nabichuari!’,
he shouted. ‘He doesn’t want to be a shoemaker like me!’31
Soso was to remember for
the rest of his life his father’s fights with his mother during that visit.
Stalin told his daughter Svetlana how, while defending his mother, he threw a
knife at Vissarion, who ran after him screaming.32 A neighbor
recalled another fight in which Vissarion called Keke a whore and knocked her
down and began to strangle her. Soso ran to the neighbors and pleaded with
them, ‘Help!Come quick, he is killing my mother!’ Vissarion resisted the
neighbors’ attempts to restrain him; they had to club him and tie him up.33
Keke gave a decorous account of these fights years later when she stated,
Soso
studied excellently, but his father—my late husband, Vissarion— took it into
his head to remove the boy from school so that he could teach Soso the
shoe-making trade. I did oppose it and argued as much as I could, I even
quarreled with my husband, but to no avail: my husband insisted, and his wish
prevailed. After some time, I nevertheless succeeded once again in enrolling
Soso in school.34
Keke’s oddly redundant
reference to Soso’s father as ‘my late husband, Vissarion’ suggests that she
wanted to dispel any doubts about who Soso’s father was. In the statement
‘after some time, I nevertheless succeeded once again in enrolling Soso in
school’, Keke glossed over a series of dramatic events that took place in
Tiflis in the summer of 1890.
Vissarion and Soso lived
in a small rented room in Avlabar, a slum section of Tiflis populated mostly by
laborers and craftsmen.35 Vissarion made Soso work at the Adelkhanov
shoe factory, where he helped the workers wind thread and served as an errand
boy.36 Meanwhile, Keke and Egnatashvili petitioned His Eminence, the
Exarch of Georgia, the head of the Georgian Orthodox Church, who had great
influence in
administrative and
educational matters, to intervene in the conflict in the Dzhugashvili family,
to protect 10-year-old Soso from Vissarion’s beatings and to return him to his
mother, thus giving the boy the opportunity to continue his religious
education. Koba Egnatashvili, as a priest and a member of the Georgian gentry,
had comparatively easy access to the court of the Exarch, under whose
jurisdiction the Gori Ecclesiastical School was. The Exarch offered a
compromise: leave Soso in Vissarion’s custody, but allow him to attend a church
school in Tiflis and sing in the choir instead of working at the factory.
Teachers at the Gori Ecclesiastical School concurred and advised that Soso stay
in Tiflis—as employees of the Department of Religious Affairs, however, they
could hardly disagree with the Exarch’s recommendation. The officials of the
Exarch’s court gave Keke the same advice, but her mind was unchanged. She was
determined to bring her son back to Gori.37
The Exarch’s attempt at a
compromise failed. Vissarion refused to allow Soso to return to school,
insisting that he alone had the right to decide on what to do with his son.
Since his custody rights could be annulled only by the courts, he had the law
on his side. Only fragments remain of the events that led to Soso’s liberation.
Keke’s laconic ‘after some time, I nevertheless succeeded again in enrolling
Soso in school’, is supported by a neighbor’s account: ‘After some time the
mother, in her turn, went to Tiflis and took her son away from the factory.’38
The ‘in her turn’ indicates that someone went to Tiflis before Keke did to help
her free Soso from Vissarion. The only person likely to have gone to Tiflis in
an attempt to retrieve Soso is Koba Egnatashvili, but the neighbor’s account,
as many other recollections quoted in Stalin’s childhood biography, was
truncated by Stalin, and the information is missing.
A clue as to what happened
in Tiflis was provided by Stalin himself. Once, explaining how his left arm,
which was shorter than his right by a couple of inches, was crippled, he, with
unusual candor, told his wife’s family that it was injured during his childhood
when there was no one to help after blood poisoning developed. He said, ‘I
don’t know what saved me then. Either it was my strong constitution or the
ointment of the village quack, but my health improved.’39 In his
childhood, Soso was without his mother only during his sojourn with Vissarion
in Tiflis in 1890. Stalin did, however, confide to his second wife’s family
that it was Vissarion who had injured his arm during one of his usual beatings,
but this revelation remained the family’s secret for many years.40
After injuring Soso,
Vissarion did not call a doctor, possibly because he was indifferent to Soso’s
condition or feared that a doctor would notify the police about the injury. Keke
and Egnatashvili learned about Soso’s grave illness and rushed to the Exarch,
pleading with him to take Soso away from Vissarion. This time the Exarch
demanded that the police arrest Vissarion and the courts punish him for gravely
injuring the boy. At the trial Soso testified about the numerous beatings he
had suffered, including the one that had injured his arm. The court sentenced
Vissarion to a prison term and voided his custody rights.41 Crushed
and humiliated after serving his term, Vissarion became a vagrant and a drunk.
Vissarion left his wife
and son with a heavy burden of bitter memories, hatred and shame. Decades
later, his son compulsively staged show trials in which the scene of boys
testifying against their fathers and demanding severe punishment for them was
re-enacted over and over again. During his rule Stalin also created a cult
around Pavlik Morozov, a young peasant boy who testified in a Soviet court
against his doomed father. In glorifying
Pavlik Morozov, Stalin was
glorifying himself. In this and many other cases, he reenacted the traumatic
events of his own life.
Soso returned to Gori at
the end of September 1890, a few weeks after the beginning of the school year.
He was admitted to the first regular grade of the Gori Ecclesiastical School.
His injured left arm healed slowly. In time the arm regained its strength, but
its growth was impaired by the damaged bone, developing osteomyelitis, a bone
disease resulting from infection, which in Stalin’s youth, before the discovery
of antibiotics, was more often than not fatal. Soso’s left arm became shorter
by a couple of inches than his right one only later, as he grew. It was never a
‘withered’ arm. It looked normal in all respects other than its length. Soso
told no one, not even his childhood friends, what he had lived through in
Tiflis.42 Keke and Egnatashvili, too, kept silent about what had
happened there.
Soso fully recovered and
became a strong boy, always eager to demonstrate his physical prowess and
determined to assert his superiority by any means. He challenged a classmate to
a wrestling match, which onlookers declared a tie. The wrestlers rearranged
their clothing and started to walk away, but Soso suddenly seized his opponent
from behind and slammed him to the ground, triumphantly driving his knee into
the boy’s chest. His followers clapped and cheered. The other boys protested
vehemently, but Soso proclaimed himself the winner.43
Soon after returning to
Gori, Soso adopted the nickname ‘Koba’. His classmates probably assumed that he
chose this name after the hero of the popular romantic story Father Killers,
by the Georgian writer Prince Kazbegi. In this novel the hero Koba, the
Georgian diminutive of Yakobi, or Jacob, a daring, fierce outlaw—a kind of
Caucasian Robin Hood—avenges the death of his friends Yago and Yago’s bride
Nunu. The novel’s bandit villain, Girgola, collaborates with the Russian
invaders. He abducts Nunu and accuses her of murdering her own father. Yago is
killed in a skirmish with Girgola’s band and Nunu dies in prison. Koba escapes
and later ambushes Girgola and mortally wounds him. When the dying Girgola
hears Koba’s triumphant shout, ‘It’s me, Koba!’ he confesses to the murder of
Nunu’s father.44
Despite the popularity of
Kazbegi’s romantic novel, it is doubtful that Soso took the name Koba from its
hero. There was a far more important Koba in Soso’s life, his benefactor, Koba
Egnatashvili. Children traumatized by the brutality of their fathers often
reject them and postulate a new origin for themselves, which they symbolize by
choosing a new name.45 They tend to do this even when no logical
choice for the newly appointed father presents itself. After the traumatic
events in Tiflis, it would have been natural for Soso to reject Vissarion as
his father and to assume Egnatashvili to be his father. But in Soso’s case
there was also a ‘legitimate’ basis for his rejection of Vissarion: he had
heard Vissarion call his mother a whore and him a bastard. He may even have
known of the rumor that Koba Egnatashvili was his true father.46
Egnatashvili was an obvious choice for a worthy father, and Koba became
Stalin’s first pseudonym. He never explained his choice, but once the young
Stalin had decided on it, he insisted on being called Koba.
Koba had learned early in
life to keep his thoughts and feelings to himself. Certain events had deep
meaning for him. One such event took place in February 1892, soon after his
twelfth birthday. A description of the event appeared in recollections of
Koba’s classmates that Stalin included in his childhood biography and edited
himself. On that day, Gori residents gathered in a public square, where gallows
had been erected for the
public hanging of two
Georgian peasants sentenced to death for murder. Koba stood in a group with his
classmates, watching the execution. One of the condemned, Dzhioshvili by name,
was a tall man with broad shoulders and a full black beard. His resemblance in
appearance and name to Vissarion could not have escaped Koba. A priest holding
a cross appeared on the scaffold to perform the last rites. Koba watched the
hanging silently, expressing no emotion. The two pages of recollections of this
event in Stalin’s childhood biography contain no mention of his reaction to the
execution or of the name of the priest holding the cross, but they describe
other people’s pity and sympathy for the condemned. The inclusion of the
hanging in the biography suggests that it affected Koba profoundly, possibly by
making him imagine that he was witnessing not the execution of two strangers
but the hanging of his enemy, Vissarion, who had been given the last rites by
Koba Egnatashvili.47
Stalin’s daughter Svetlana
stated that if her father felt any attachment to people, it was only to those
he associated with his mother.48 Despite the fact that he took pride
in having been chosen to sing in a church trio because of his voice and musical
ear, Koba expressed heretical thoughts about God that frequently shocked his
classmates.49 Koba felt free to approach his teachers with
suggestions to forgive the offenses and shortcomings of his classmates and to
advise them on how to help failing students.50 In placing himself in
the position of benevolent intermediary between higher authority and his fellow
students, he practiced an ostensible altruism; in fact, his behavior was
self-serving, since it promoted him to a position of superiority.
Duplicity had, however,
already entered into the picture; while courting authority, Koba was provoking
confrontations with the teachers behind their backs. The 1890 school year began
with the introduction of a Russian government decree ordering teachers and
pupils to speak only Russian, and specifically prohibiting use of the Georgian
language. The new rule aroused nationalist anger among pupils and parents, with
Koba instigating a series of assaults against school authorities. One morning a
group of pupils attacked a school inspector, a Russian, who freed himself,
swinging his fists wildly and calling his attackers ‘savages’. Several pupils
were punished, but Koba was not one of them. His role as the instigator of the
attack remained unknown to the authorities.51
In the spring of 1894,
Koba graduated from the Ecclesiastical School and enrolled in the Tiflis
Orthodox Seminary, where he got free tuition, room and board, as well as an
allowance.52 All this was arranged by Egnatashvili.53
Until the beginning of his third year at the seminary, Koba was a good student,
and he was considered one of the best singers in the choir.54 Then
the trouble began. At first it was minor disobedience; Koba was disciplined for
having been caught patronizing a city library and reading the works of Victor
Hugo, a subversive author according to school officials. Then Koba began to
insult the teachers; the record book reports that he was ‘disrespectful and
rude’.55 In 1897 Koba and several of his classmates joined a Young
Socialists Circle for the study of Marxism. He demanded that the circle members
defend his ‘opinions’, which invariably ran counter to the opinions of their
lecturer. Although Koba did not tolerate criticism of his views, his opinion
often abruptly and drastically changed. The search for truth did not interest
him’, recalls one of his classmates. ‘He would often dispute positions which he
previously maintained, and defend views which he previously condemned.’ Some
members of the circle ‘became confused, others became reticent and cautious,
and
avoided participation in
the political discussions—either out of fear or the realization of the futility
of any attempt to convince Koba, or even to persuade him to adopt a more
tolerant position’. The circle split into supporters and opponents of Koba.
‘Only the intellectually shallow types, who were willing to toady up to Koba,
remained with him.’56
Toward the end of 1898,
Koba’s relations with seminary officials became increasingly hostile. He
refused to bow to the inspector, who complained to the Board of Supervisors.57
An entry in the Seminary’s records states that in the course of a search of the
fifth-grade dormitories, ‘Iosif Dzhugashvili tried several times to enter into
an argument with seminary officials, expressing dissatisfaction with the
repeated searches of students, and declaring that such searches were never made
in other seminaries.’58 What the record book fails to mention is that
Koba was directly responsible for the search. Koba tried to induce some 45 of
his fellow students to drop out of the Seminary and join the revolutionary
underground. They refused, arguing that their parents would disapprove and
terminate their financial support. Koba responded with a brazen provocation
aimed at ruining the careers of these students, smuggling illegal pamphlets and
inflammatory leaflets into their dormitory, and placing them under pillows and
mattresses. He then denounced them to the rector, who ordered the dormitory
searched.59 Koba used the occasion to demonstrate his extreme
indignation by loudly protesting about the searches in order to deflect any
suspicion from himself of having provoked the incident. According to the
record, ‘Iosif Dzhugashvili was reprimanded and put for five hours in a
punishment room by the order of the Father Rector.’60 The rector,
the monk Germogen, had no choice but to reprimand Koba: he had to hide the fact
that it was Koba who had informed him about the illegal pamphlets. Germogen
encouraged Koba to continue his studies, but he found him unwilling or unable
to do so. Koba became the Seminary’s worst student and his behavior became
intolerable. He answered his teachers’ criticism with ‘malicious, scornful laughter’.61
On 27 May 1899 Koba failed to take the exams he had to pass in order to be
transferred to the fifth and last grade. He did not respond to Germogen’s offer
to take the exams at a later date and refused to provide an explanation,
leaving Germogen with no choice but to expel him. On 29 May 1899 a laconic
entry was made in the Seminary’s record book: ‘Iosif Dzhugashvili was expelled
for not taking the examinations; reason unknown.’62
Soon thereafter some 45
students who had been implicated by Koba in the scandal of the illegal leaflets
were also expelled from the Seminary. The expelled students found out that it
was Koba who had planted the incriminating leaflets, and also informed on them.
They accused him of causing their expulsion. Their parents besieged the rector
with petitions to reinstate their sons, who, they complained, were innocent
victims of Koba’s provocation. Koba did not deny the charge, remarking blithely
that his motive had been to give these students the opportunity to become ‘good
revolutionaries’. 63
At the time of his
expulsion from the Seminary, Koba looked bleary-eyed and ill.64 His
mother later stated: ‘I took him home on account of his health. When he entered
the Seminary, he was as strong as a boy could be. But overwork had weakened him
by the time he was nineteen, and the doctors told me that he might develop
tuberculosis. So I took him away from the school. He did not want to leave. But
I took him anyway. He was my only son.’65 Koba’s deteriorating
health, as well as his academic failure and hostility toward teachers and
fellow students, suggest a profound emotional crisis had affected his ability
to function. A hint at a traumatic event that may have contributed to or even
caused this crisis is
found in Stalin’s childhood biography. A curious literary insertion hints that
Koba may have encountered his father Vissarion at the end of 1897 or the
beginning of 1898. Vissarion had by that time been released from jail. Inserted
in the biography is the poem ‘Musha’ (‘The Porter’), in which the great
Georgian poet Prince Ilia Chavchavadze describes an encounter with a
porter-vagrant, a man whose fate bears an unmistakable resemblance to that of
Vissarion:
MUSHA
His life is spent in toil
But brings him no reward.
Hurrying from Middle
Market in Tiflis, suddenly in the heat of noon I saw you, Musha lying against a
wall under the cruel, burning sun, and your quiet song filled my heart with
anguish. I sensed suffering in your plaintive song, I heard a tale of torment
and inner sorrow. Wherefore did you come to the slums of this city? Did you
flee your master, unable to bear the whip? You left behind your family, your
hut and garden, your fields, your streams and free mountain vistas. Perhaps you
sought shelter and work in this city, in your heart you were led by the hope of
succor. What did your soul lose when you left your village? And what did you
find in its stead in Tiflis, unlucky Musha?66
The image of this
porter-vagrant was obviously associated in Koba’s mind with something important
to him, something Stalin did not want mentioned directly in his childhood
biography but nevertheless felt compelled to hint at. Musha stood for Vissarion
in Koba’s mind. A sea of contradictory feelings must have rushed to the
surface—hatred, disgust, guilt, memories of fear and pain—all producing a
severe emotional strain, which found expression in rebellion against
authorities and ill health. Stalin’s relations with Vissarion left a deep
imprint on his personality. A childhood friend of his wrote that Koba’s ‘heart
was filled with the inexpressibly malicious hatred his merciless father had
already begun to engender in him when he was still a child…’. When Koba left
the Seminary, ‘he took with him a grim, sullen hatred…it was a hatred for every
form of authority… Everywhere and in everything he saw only the negative, the
base, and he did not credit mankind with any lofty ideals or noble qualities.’67
NOTES
1.
V.Kaminsky and
I.Vereshchagin, Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia: documenty, zapiski, rasskazy
[Childhood and Adolescence of the Leader, Stalin’s childhood biography],
Moscow, 1939, pp. 24ff.
2.
H.R.Knickerbocker, ‘Stalin
Mystery Man Even to His Mother,’ New York Evening Post, 1 December,
1930, p. 2.
3.
Kaminsky and Vereshchagin,
Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia, pp. 20–5.
4.
See Evreiskaya
entsiklopediya (Jewish Encyclopedia in Russian), vol. VI, St Petersburg,
1913, pp. 808f, for the analysis of the Georgian language by the academic
N.Ya.Marr, a prominent linguist, who at the turn of the century claimed that
the Georgian language was of
Semitic origin. Other linguists have argued that it is
related to a group of Caucasian languages.
5.
Kaminsky and Vereshchagin,
Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia, pp. 25ff.
6.
Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin,
New York, 1996, p. 19 (quoting from Gori archive).
7.
Kaminsky and Vereshchagin,
Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia, p. 26.
8.
Knickerbocker, ‘Stalin
Mystery Man’. See also Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography,
New York and London, 1968, p. 2.
9.
Radzinsky, Stalin,
p. 12.
10.
J.Iremaschwili, Stalin
und die Tragödie Georgiens, Berlin, 1932, pp. 8–11.
11.
Kaminsky and Vereshchagin,
Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia, quoting Maxim Gorky, pp. 23ff.
12.
Okhrana Report no. 5500,
dated 1 May 1904, in Roy Medvedev’s New Pages from the Political Biography
of Stalin, in Robert C.Tucker (ed.), Stalinism, New York, 1977, pp.
200ff.
13.
The historian Andrey
Amalrik related this popular belief in an interview with the author in
Chappaqua, New York, 1976.
14.
Iremaschwili, Stalin,
pp. 11ff.
15.
Taped interview with
Nugzar Sharia in Sag Harbor, Long Island, in 1971.
16.
Lev Trotsky, Stalin,
New York, 1941, p. 8.
17.
Boris Souvarine, Stalin:
A Critical Survey of Bokhevism, London, 1939, p. 3.
18.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, p. 337.
19.
Robert Conquest, Stalin:
Breaker of Nations, pp. 4, 9, 12. Also Kazakhstanskaya pravda, 10
November 1988. See also L.Kafanova, ‘O velikom druge i vozhde’, Novoe
Russkoe slovo, 23 and 24 March 1977.
20.
Kaminsky and Vereshchagin,
Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia, p. 38.
21.
Related to Nugzar Sharia
by Stalin’s bodyguard Gogi Zautashvili. Taped interview with Nugzar Sharia.
22.
Felix Svetlov, a former
Soviet lawyer and son of a high-ranking Soviet Secret Police official, told the
author about Stalin’s ‘rabbit’ during an interview in New York in 1989.
23.
Nugzar Sharia, taped
interview.
24.
Nugzar Sharia, taped
interview.
25.
Iremaschwili, Stalin,
pp. 11ff.
26.
Kaminsky and Vereshchagin,
Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia, p. 28.
27.
Ibid., p. 34.
28.
Anatoly Rybakov, ‘Deti
arbata’, Druzhba narodov, nos 4–5. See also L.Kafanova, ‘O velikom druge
i vozhde’, Novoe russkoe slovo, 23 March 1977. Kafanova quotes the
prominent Soviet composer Vano Muradeli, a native of Gori.
29.
Kaminsky and Vereshchagin,
Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia, p. 37.
30.
Ibid., p. 43ff.
31.
Interview with Nugzar
Sharia.
32.
Svetlana Allilueva, Only
One Year, New York, 1969, p. 360.
33.
Joseph Darvichewy, Ah!
Ce qu’on rigolait bien avec mon copain Staline, p. 34. Quoted in Daniel
Rancour-Laferriere, The Mind of Stalin, Ann Arbor, 1988, pp. 36ff.
34.
Kaminsky and Vereshchagin,
Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia, p. 44.
35.
Ibid., p. 59. (Kaminsky
and Vereshchagin quote Maxim Gorky’s article in Nizhegorodskii listok,
no. 174, 28 June 1898.)
36.
Ibid. p. 45.
37.
Ibid.
38.
Ibid.
39.
A.S.Allilueva, Vospominaniya,
Moscow, 1946, p. 36.
40.
F.D.Volkov, Vzlet i
padenie Stalina, Moscow, 1992, p. 24. Volkov quotes from oral testimony by
Anna Allilueva, Nadezhda Allilueva’s sister-in-law.
41.
Andrey Amalrik related the
story of Vissarion’s imprisonment in an interview with the author in Chappaqua,
New York, in 1976.
42.
Iremaschwili, Stalin,
p. 5ff.
43.
Ibid., p. 5.
44.
A.Kazbegi, Otseubiitsy,
Izbrannye Sochineniya, vol. I, Tbilisi, 1941.
45.
For a discussion of
Hitler’s similar rejection of his father see Walter C.Langer, The Mind of
Adolf Hitler, New York, 1972, pp. 146–60.
46.
L.Kafanova, ‘O velikom
druge i vozhde’, 23 March 1977. She quotes a prominent Soviet composer Vano
Muradeli, a native of Gori, who recalled, ‘Koba seemed to have learned the
truth about how this kind and loving priest was related to him.’ It is unlikely
that, in all his years at Gori, Koba never once heard the rumor that Egnatashvili
was his real father.
47.
Kaminsky and Vereshchagin,
Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia, pp. 48ff.
48.
Allilueva, Only One
Year, p. 361.
49.
Iremaschwili, Stalin,
p. 8.
50.
Kaminsky and Vereshchagin,
Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia, p. 41.
51.
Ibid., p. 39. Also
Iremaschwili, Stalin, p. 7ff.
52.
Iremaschwili, Stalin,
p. 16.
53.
Anatoly Rybakov, ‘Deti
arbata’, Druzhba narodov, no. 4–5, 1987.
54.
Iremaschwili, Stalin,
pp. 16–18.
55.
Kaminsky and Vereshchagin,
Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia, p. 71.
56.
Iremaschwili, Stalin,
pp. 19–22.
57.
Kaminsky and Vereshchagin,
Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia, p. 84.
58.
Ibid., p. 84.
59.
Andrey Amalrik interview.
Also S.Vereshchak, ‘Stalin v tur’me’, Dni, 22 and 24 January 1928.
60.
Kaminsky and Vereshchagin,
Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia, p. 84.
61.
Ibid.
62.
Ibid., p. 86.
63.
R.Arsenidze, ‘Iz
vospominanii o Staline’, Novy zhurnal, no. 72, June 1963. Vereshchak,
‘Stalin v tur’me’, Andrey Amalrik interview.
64.
Iremaschwili, Stalin,
p. 20.
65.
Knickerbocker, ‘Stalin
Mystery Man’.
66.
Kaminsky and Vereshchagin,
Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia, p. 59.
67.
Iremaschwili, Stalin,
p. 24.
‘SAMEDOV DISEASE’
In December 1899 Koba
started to work at the Tiflis Geophysical Observatory as a record keeper,
moving into a small room in the dormitory. Lado Ketskhoveli, a close friend,
helped him to get this job.1 Lado was born into the family of an
impoverished nobleman, a priest in a village near Gori. Like Koba, Lado had
been abused by his father, who severely punished him for bad behavior and poor
grades. Lado had graduated from the Gori Ecclesiastical School four years
earlier than Koba and, like Koba, attended the Tiflis Seminary. In 1893—the
year before Koba enrolled there—Lado was expelled from the Seminary for
‘Georgian nationalism’ and was exiled to Kiev. In the fall of 1897, he returned
illegally to Tiflis. The newly appointed chief of the Tiflis secret police,
E.P.Debel, reported to St Petersburg Lado’s arrival but did not order his
arrest.2 In all probability, Lado turned police informer at that
time, in return for permission to live in Tiflis. Lado went to work for a
printer by the name of Kheladze.3 It was probably Lado who, toward
the end of 1889, supplied Koba with the illegal leaflets that provoked the
expulsion of 45 students from the Tiflis Seminary. Lado may well have involved
Koba in other provocations sponsored by the Tiflis secret police.4
In 1898, Lado introduced
Koba to the Social Democratic group in Tiflis, which sent him to two workers’
circles as a propagandist. But the Tiflis Social Democratic leaders Noi
Zhordania and Silvester Dzhibladze soon found out that Koba was conducting propaganda
not against the government and capitalists but against them, charging them with
a ‘lack of militancy’ and ‘betrayal of the proletariat’. These leaders also
learned of Koba’s planting of illegal leaflets at the Seminary, which was much
discussed in Tiflis at that time. Annoyed, they told Koba to stop smearing them
and to stay away from the workers’ circles.5
Planting illegal leaflets
was a typical method of provocation used by the Russian secret police Okhrannoe
Otdelenie (Security Section) of the Department of Police, but commonly
referred to as Okhrana, which, at the turn of the century, employed aggressive
counterintelligence methods when revolutionary agitation was on the rise. The
Okhrana made extensive use of provokatsiya (provocation), as part of its
intelligence operations. Okhrana agents and informers were usually called agents
provocateurs, but the Okhrana applied this term more narrowly.
A.T.Vasiliev, the last director of the Department of Police, described the agent
provocateur as a secret collaborator who ‘himself sets on foot some
revolutionary movement and then betrays to the authorities the people he has
befouled’.6
and to print illegal
leaflets to implicate revolutionaries, who could then be arrested and sent to
Siberia. The vacancies thereby created allowed Okhrana agents to advance to
leadership positions in the revolutionary organizations. Zubatov’s career
followed a pattern found time and again in the long history of the
revolutionary movement. He was arrested in his youth as a member of a
revolutionary student group. While in prison, he turned informer and betrayed
his comrades. Then he became a ‘secret collaborator’, or agent. By betraying
his friends he advanced his career and was promoted to the rank of officer.
Eventually, he became chief of the Moscow Okhrana Section. His philosophy was
reflected in the fact that Okhrana agents—either on being prodded by their case
officers or on their own initiative—committed provocations, instigated violence
and caused scandals that embarrassed the Okhrana. Zubatov’s methods of using agents
provocateurs became known in Russian history collectively as Zubatovshchina.
They were so common and extreme that some Okhrana officers suspected Zubatov of
being a ‘hidden revolutionary’ who had wormed his way into the Okhrana to
subvert the government from within.7
In 1901, a scandal caused
by a Zubatov-style provocation rocked the Tiflis Okhrana, prompting an
investigation by top officials in the Department of Police and in the Ministry
of the Interior. It was established that Iosif Dzhugashvili and Lado
Ketskhoveli, both informers handled by an officer of the Tiflis Okhrana
Samedov, had printed illegal leaflets. (In the investigation, Samedov claimed
he had known nothing of Koba’s and Lado’s action.) These leaflets came from a
‘secret press’ made of a typesetting board against which sheets of paper could
be pressed, allowing the production of some 700 leaflets in 24 hours. The press
was located in the basement of a house on Lotkin Street in Tiflis.8
The printing was done by a
young criminal known in the Tiflis underworld as Kamo Somekhi (‘Kamo the
Armenian’), whom Koba had met in Tiflis. In the years that followed, Kamo was
to play a major role in Koba’s schemes, rising from printer of provocative
leaflets to murderer at Koba’s instigation. Koba used him like a puppet, and
Kamo was invariably deceived about the true reasons behind the acts that Koba
made him commit. The deception began with the first job Kamo did for Koba. Kamo
had no idea that in printing the leaflets he was taking part in an Okhrana
provocation. He printed the leaflets on yellow paper, with large uneven
letters, in Russian, Georgian and Armenian. The leaflets stated in part: ‘We
appeal to all of you to come to the First of May celebration to join in a
unanimous and energetic protest against the present social and political system.’9
Kamo distributed the leaflets in various public places in Tiflis. Their
inflammatory message alarmed the chief of the Tiflis Okhrana, Captain Lavrov,
who was ignorant of the fact that they had been produced by informers working
for one of his officers, and started an investigation.
On 15 March 1901 Lavrov
received a report by his officer, Samedov, stating that the leaflets had been
issued by a Marxist ‘secret circle’ in Tiflis, headed by Victor Kurnatovsky,
and that they had been printed at the press owned by Kheladze (the press owner
for whom Lado worked). Samedov had received this information from Koba and
Lado. Kurnatovsky was a revolutionary of long standing.10 On 21
March 1902 all members of Kurnatovsky’s secret circle and Kheladze were arrested.11
Lado and Koba hurriedly planted the ‘evidence’ at Kheladze’s press.
Kurnatovsky, the members
of his circle, and the press owner Kheladze denied that they had anything to do
with the illegal leaflets. Okhrana investigators analyzed the leaflets and determined
that they had not been printed at Kheladze’s press but somewhere else.
A.T.Vasiliev wrote many years later about a provocation in one of the southern
cities: an Okhrana informer, in order to implicate the owner of a print shop
and divert attention from himself, ‘quickly arranged typesetting to correspond
to the leaflet, and if not for his little bit of carelessness in doing this,
the scheme would probably have succeeded, and the absolutely innocent printer
would have been sent to Siberia’. The printer was released, and the minister of
the interior issued the order for the officer in charge of the section to quit
his office at once, and for the commander of the gendarmerie to be informed
without delay of his dismissal.12 The printer, Kheladze, was released
from prison. Somewhat later, Captain Lavrov was dismissed from his post. The
members of Kurnatovsky’s circle, however, remained behind bars to face charges
of revolutionary activities, although the charge relating to the 1 May criminal
leaflets was dropped. The case of the Okhrana officer Samedov and his informers
Koba and Lado was turned into a ‘special secret investigation’ to avoid
exposure of a scandal that might embarrass the Okhrana. In his defense, Samedov
blamed Lado and Koba for acting without his knowledge. Learning of this and
fearing arrest, Koba and Lado left Tiflis on 28 March 1901, seven days after
the Okhrana dragnet. Koba returned to Gori, while Lado made his way to Baku,
the Caspian Sea port and growing center of the oil industry. Kamo stayed in
Tiflis. He knew nothing about the Okhrana scandal that the leaflets had caused.
Moving from place to place with his primitive press, he continued to print
leaflets, and the Okhrana’s attention turned to him.
Kamo’s real name was Simon
Ter-Petrosian. His father, a well-to-do Gori Armenian merchant, at the age of
35 married a 16-year-old girl. His wife gave birth to 11 children, but only
Simon and five sisters survived. The boy’s history was one of abuse: his father
often whipped him for being ‘rebellious’. Kamo was expelled several times from
school for bad behavior and poor grades. His father pleaded with school
officials each time to readmit his son, sweetening his pleas with the
traditional bribes of bleating lambs. When Kamo grew older, he threatened to
kill his father.13 When Kamo was 16, his mother fell ill and died
soon afterwards. His father sent him to Tiflis to live with an aunt, who hired
private tutors for him, one of whom was Koba. The aunt did not know that Kamo
and his tutor frequented the town’s criminal hangouts, where Kamo acquired his
nickname from his mispronunciation of the Russian word komu (whom). He
pronounced it kamo, with the accent on the ‘o’. This amused his
companions, who mocked him with the chant, ‘Kamo! Kamo!’ and the
nickname stuck.14 (Years later, when Lenin was first told about
Kamo, whose expertise at armed robbery he was to draw upon to procure funds,
Lenin laughed and asked, ‘Did I catch that correctly? The accent is on
“o”—Kamo?’) Kamo became a source of income for Koba, giving him money from
armed robberies. Kamo had a secret hiding place in the cellar of the house at 2
Goncharnaya Street, a criminal hangout run by an ageing madam, where he kept
his revolvers and bombs.15
Koba, too, was known in
the underworld by a nickname not of his own choosing, nicknames among criminals
usually reflecting physical defects, habits of speech or ethnic background.
Koba’s face suggested the Georgian nickname Chopur, or ‘Pockmarked’. (At
the Tiflis Okhrana, similarly, Koba was recorded as Riaboy, ‘Pockmarked’
in Russian.16) Koba, Kamo and Lado had come to Tiflis from Gori,
which may well have
contributed to their
becoming friends. More importantly, they also shared similar childhoods of
abuse at the hands of their fathers and the physical and emotional traumas of
such abuse. All three had complex and ambivalent relationships with their
fathers, and shared habits of thought and attitudes: they despised authority
and its symbols, and were indifferent to accepted ideas about good and evil.
The leaflets printed by
Kamo contributed to the violence that occurred when, on 1 May 1901, a large
demonstration by Tiflis workers was dispersed by Cossack troops. Fourteen
workers were killed, many more were wounded, and 50 were arrested. Koba came to
Tiflis from Gori to watch the bloody confrontation from a safe distance. On his
return to Gori, he gleefully told his childhood friend Iosif Iremashvili how
Cossack sabers and whips had spilled the blood of ‘proletarian workers’. Koba’s
excitement over the bloody violence disconcerted Iremashvili and left him with
the impression that Koba was ‘intoxicated by workers’ blood’.17 In
his early articles, Koba repeatedly described ‘proletarian workers’ falling
under the blows of Cossack sabers and whips. But in one of these articles, he
drew a portrait of a ‘typical proletarian worker’. He stated:
Imagine
a shoemaker who had a tiny workshop but could not stand the competition of big
business. That man closed his shop and hired himself out to, say, Adelkhanov at
the Tiflis shoe factory. He went to Adelkhanov’s factory not to remain a worker
forever, but to save money, to lay aside a small capital, and to reopen his own
shop. As you see, the position of this shoemaker is already that of a
proletarian; his consciousness, however, is not yet proletarian, but
petty-bourgeois through and through.18
This was to a large extent
Vissarion’s story, including such detail as the Adelkhanov factory, where
Vissarion had worked and Koba had suffered abuse from him and been an errand
boy for the ‘proletarian workers’. The passage barely veils its author’s
contempt for the workers whose champion he sets himself up to be. Koba’s
vehement outburst and his vilifying of the Cossacks with their sabers and whips
has the elements of a Freudian reaction formation: the opposite of the hidden
impulse of relish.19
The Okhrana dragnet in
March and May of 1901 left the Tiflis Social Democratic organization in a
shambles. In October of 1901 Koba returned to Tiflis and attempted to promote
himself into a leadership position during a meeting of workers gathered to
elect new representatives to the Tiflis Committee of the Social Democratic
Party. Koba addressed the gathering stating, ‘Here they flatter workers. I ask
you, are there among you even one or two workers fit to join the Committee?
Tell the truth, with your hands on your hearts!’ The workers voted against
Koba. One of them depicted him as a man ‘driven by personal caprice and
striving for absolute power’, a man who ‘persisted in spreading slander, trying
to discredit the popular and recognized leaders of the Social Democratic
movement, thus attempting to capture a leadership position in the party
organization’.20
On 11 November 1901 Koba
was invited to a meeting of the committee members, who had investigated his
statements slandering party leaders. One of the participants wrote, ‘This was
the first time in the history of Georgian Social Democracy for a party member
to be tried by a party court. The committee voted unanimously to expel Koba from
the
Tiflis organization as a
slanderer and intriguer.’21 In late November 1901, Koba left Tiflis
for Batum, a growing Black Sea port near the Turkish border. Kamo also moved
there, taking his press with him. In a statement to Batum workers, Koba
declared: ‘Your revolutionary work is moving slowly; it must move more swiftly.
The Tiflis workers sent me to you, comrades, to talk with you. The Tiflis
workers, as you know, have awakened from their sleep and are preparing for
struggle with their enemies. The Batum workers are still peacefully sleeping. I
appeal to you to follow the example of the Tiflis workers.’22 This
was a shameless lie. No one had sent Koba to Batum; he had been expelled from
the Tiflis party organization. Koba also accused the leaders of the Batum
workers, Chkheidze and Ramishvili, of ‘cowardice, lack of ability, and treason
against the working class’.23 They in turn called Koba a ‘madman’
and ‘troublemaker’. Noi Zhordania, a leading Georgian Social Democrat, stated
that Koba’s behavior ‘could not be called anything other than provocation’.24
Early in 1902, Koba left
Batum for Baku to visit Lado.25 The Okhrana investigation of the
leaflets case was in progress, and Koba needed to plot a common strategy with
Lado to place the blame for the provocation on their Okhrana handler, Samedov.
While Koba was in Baku, almost all the members of the Batum Workers’ Committee
were arrested.26 When Koba returned to Batum, there was a vacuum at
the top of the workers’ organization. Koba’s intrigues, his absence when the
mass arrests of prominent party leaders took place, and his return at a perfect
time to move into a leadership position aroused the workers’ suspicion that the
arrests had resulted from his informing to the Okhrana on the Batum leaders,
and that his brief absence had been timed to cloud his role in the arrests. The
workers started to avoid Koba, accusing him of being an Okhrana informer.27
In early March 1903 a
strike began at the Batum factories. Events moved swiftly. On 7 March 1902 the
Okhrana arrested some 30 workers. In the following days prison guards and
Cossack troops opened fire, killing 15 and wounding 54 workers. Over 500 people
were arrested.28 On 12 March 1903 during a funeral procession in
honor of the dead workers, Kamo distributed a leaflet written by Koba who,
among other things stated, ‘All honor to your shades that hover over us and
whisper in our ears, “Avenge our blood!”29 Inspired by violence and
death, Koba was becoming an eloquent voice for further bloodshed.
The workers’ suspicion of
Koba’s involvement with the Okhrana grew as these events unfolded, but his
arrest some three weeks after the workers’ funeral restored some of his
prestige and kept him from being unmasked as an agent provocateur.30
The workers did not know that Koba was arrested not by the Okhrana but by the
Batum criminal police, who were conducting an investigation into a local
criminal gang with which he was connected. Koba’s involvement with the Batum
underworld had begun when he moved into the house of the Darakhvelidze
brothers, who ran a counter-feiting operation and were also involved in armed
robberies, in which Kamo took part. Koba became the ‘cashier’ of the band and
the ‘arbiter’ of disputes among its members. (He almost caused the murder of a
band member, a young Georgian whom he accused of stealing the band’s money.
Koba sentenced the thief to death and assigned another member of the band to
shoot him during a boat ride on the Black Sea. When the condemned man
understood the danger, he dropped to his knees and pleaded for his life,
swearing that he had not stolen the money. Unable to bring himself to pull the
trigger, the would-be executioner ordered
the man to swim to the
nearby Turkish shore and never again return to Batum. A few days later, Koba
said with apparent regret that the money had been found and the man been killed
for nothing. One of the members of the band recalled that when Koba heard that
the accused man had not been killed, he ‘said nothing, only turned gloomy like
a cloud’.31)
The police raided the
house of the Darakhvelidze brothers on the night of 5 April 1903 arresting them
and two members of their band, Kostia Kandelaki and Koba. The arresting officer
stated in his report: ‘Iosif Dzhugashvili: expelled from the Theological Seminary;
has been living without a passport and no definite address in Batum…’.32
Finding himself behind bars for the first time in his life, Koba made an offer
to his interrogators: he would give them information about the revolutionary
underground in return for his release from prison. Colonel Shabelsky, the chief
of the Batum Okhrana, responded: ‘Free him, if he agrees to give the Gendarme
Department information about the activity of the Social Democratic Party.’33
Back in his cell, Koba
accused one of the prisoners of being a police informer and incited his fellow
prisoners to attack the man. His body, covered with blood, was carried away by
the guards.34 The incident was symptomatic of Koba’s lifelong
psychological peculiarity: time and again throughout his life, Stalin accused
innocent people of acts that he himself was guilty of and had them punished for
those acts.
Colonel Shabelsky intended
not to initiate criminal proceedings against Koba and to release him, but
unforeseen developments tied his hands: on 17 June 1903 he received an Okhrana
communication stating that the Tiflis gendarmerie was investigating
I.V.Dzhugashvili and that he should be arrested ‘in connection with the case of
the Secret Circle in Tiflis’.35 Shabelsky notified the Tiflis Okhrana
of Koba’s arrest and received the instruction to keep Koba in the Batum prison
for further investigation. The Tiflis Okhrana made this decision in order to
keep members of Kurnatovsky’s circle, who were still under investigation in the
Tiflis prison, from learning that Koba and Lado had provoked their arrest. More
than two months after Koba’s arrest, Colonel Shabelsky was forced to create a
file on Koba. The first entry read: ‘Iosif Vissarionov Dzhugashvili; Height: 2
arshina, 4.5 vershkov [5ft 4in]. Build: medium. Age: 23. Second and third toes
on left foot fused together. Appearance: ordinary. Hair: dark brown. Beard and
mustache: brown. Nose: straight and long. Forehead: straight and low. Face:
long, swarthy and pockmarked.’ Shabelsky also reported Koba’s nickname, Riaboy
(‘Pockmarked’), which earlier had been recorded by the Tiflis Okhrana.36
Koba, still in prison
after two months, hoped to stay in Colonel Shabelsky’s good graces by giving
him Lado’s address in Baku. Lado was arrested and taken to the Metekh prison in
Tiflis, where he was placed in a solitary cell next to the section assigned to
common criminals, in order to keep him isolated from the members of
Kurnatovsky’s circle and prevent them from determining who had provoked their
arrest. The Okhrana was still unable to arrest Kamo, who kept moving from place
to place, leaving a trail littered with leaflets. The ‘secret case’ of the
provocation involving the Okhrana officer Samedov and his informers Koba and
Lado was decided in midsummer 1903. Koba was charged ‘in connection with the
case of a secret circle of the RSDWP [the Russian Social Democratic Workers’
Party] in the city of Tiflis’ and was sentenced ‘on the basis of the HIGHEST
AUTHORITY decree of 9 June 1903, to be exiled administratively to eastern
Siberia in the Balagan region of Irkutsk province under open police
surveillance for the
term of three years’.37
A similar decision was reached in the case of Lado. Of the three perpetrators
of the leaflets provocation, Kamo alone was still at large. Samedov was fired
from the Okhrana and exiled to Siberia, but the memory of his role in the
provocation lingered for a long time among the Okhrana officers in Tiflis, and
they wryly labeled provocations involving Okhrana officers and their informers
‘Samedov disease’.38
The members of
Kurnatovsky’s secret circle were sentenced to various terms of exile. On 4
August 1904 16 of them were being marched off from the courtyard of the Tiflis
prison to the railway station for a train to Siberia, when a strange event took
place. Lado was watching them from the window of his solitary cell. Suddenly he
began singing the ‘Marseillaise’ and shouting, ‘Long live socialism!’ He paid
no attention to the guards ordering him to stop. An officer in charge told one
of the guards to take aim. Instead of moving away from the window, Lado kept
shouting slogans. The officer ordered the guard to fire, and he pulled the
trigger, killing Lado.39 What prompted Lado to this act of defiance
is impossible to say. Perhaps he hoped to prove to the Kurnatovsky circle
convicts and to himself that he was a true revolutionary. Perhaps the brooding
loneliness of solitary confinement had made him susceptible to the excitement
of the moment and feelings of guilt. In any case, his life glowed most brightly
when he sacrificed it at that moment of glory. (Years later Stalin was to point
to Lado’s portrait in his Kremlin office, calling him his first mentor and
claiming that Lado was a greater revolutionary than even Lenin himself.40)
Two weeks after this
incident, on 19 August 1903 Koba was transferred from the Batum to the Kutais
prison with a group of prisoners who had been convicted for taking part in the
Batum demonstration. He pretended to be one of them. (Later in his biographies,
Stalin insisted that he had been sentenced in 1903 for leading the Batum
demonstration.) At the beginning of September 1903 the Batum convicts were
shipped to their places of exile, but Koba remained at the Kutais prison for
another month. The reason for his detention was that the Kutais Okhrana hoped
to use Koba to apprehend Kamo, who at that time was distributing leaflets in
the city. Koba did not provide the Okhrana with Kamo’s address or the names of
Kamo’s contacts—either because he did not know the Kutais underworld or because
he saw no advantage in revealing the information. He probably offered to find
Kamo, provided he was freed, but the Okhrana could not release a convict from
prison in disregard of a ‘HIGHEST AUTHORITY’ decision to exile him. The
alternative, to arrange a bogus ‘escape’ from prison— sometimes done in special
cases—required permission from someone at the level of the director of the
Department of Police. Such escapes were also risky because prison guards were
liable to learn of them and expose the fraud, as had happened on occasion.41
Exposure of the fraud naturally rendered the ‘escapee’ useless to the
Okhrana, since it unmasked the agent. Usually, the Okhrana did not arrange
prison escapes but would help collaborators to ‘escape’ from their places of
exile, where there was only token police surveillance and actual escapes were
common.
Toward the end of
September 1903 Koba was sent under guard to the village of Novaya Uda, near
Irkutsk, in eastern Siberia, but he did not stay there long. He was followed by
a telegram addressed to the Irkutsk Okhrana by the Kutais Okhrana stating:
‘I.V.Dzhugashvili plans to leave. Do not stop him. Render assistance.’42
Toward the end of October, Koba left Novaya Uda carrying the identification
document of an Okhrana agent he had obtained from the local Okhrana. At a
railway station he showed this
document to a gendarmerie
officer, who allowed him to proceed to Batum where he told a story of how he
had ‘fabricated an identity document in the name of an agent of one of the
Siberian policemen’ and had shown it to a gendarmerie officer, who had helped
him on his journey.43 Koba did not explain how he, a young exile in
a remote Siberian village, had managed to ‘fabricate’ the personal
identification document of an Okhrana agent. Such documents were given only
under extraordinary circumstances to convicts who entered into a secret
agreement with the Okhrana.44 Koba arrived at Batum in midNovember
of 1903.45 He managed to establish contact with Kamo and send him a
message asking him to come. On 26 November 1903 Kamo stepped off the train at
the Batum railway station and into the hands of an Okhrana officer waiting for
him with a warrant for his arrest. Kamo offered the officer money to let him
go, but to no avail.46 This was Kamo’s first but by no means his
last arrest.
At the end of December
1903 Koba arrived at Tiflis and met there for the first time a young Social
Democrat, Lev Kamenev, whom one of the party leaders, V.I.Lenin, had sent to
Tiflis to take the place of the arrested Kurnatovsky. Kamenev had become
Lenin’s disciple at the Second Social Democratic Party Congress in London in the
summer of 1903. At the congress, Lenin had advanced his program of ‘democratic
centralism’, by which he meant the dictatorship of a small group of
‘professional revolutionaries’ under his leadership. Lenin’s supporters were a
very small minority in the Social Democratic Party. Lenin performed a
propaganda sleight of hand by declaring his small group of supporters a
‘majority’. At this point the party had split into the ‘Bolsheviks’, or the
majority faction, and ‘Menshevik’, or minority, who opposed Lenin and demanded
free discussion of all questions of party policy. Kamenev hoped that Koba, a
young escapee from Siberian exile, would help him set up a Bolshevik
organization in Tiflis. From Kamenev, Koba learned for the first time about
Lenin and the split in the party. On 5 January 1904 shortly after meeting Koba,
Kamenev was arrested.47 On the same day, an officer in the Tiflis
Okhrana made an entry in Koba’s file: ‘On 5 January 1904 Dzhugashvili
disappeared from his place of exile.’48 The date, 5 January 1904, of
this entry and the same date of Kamenev’s arrest strongly suggests that the
Okhrana officer was compelled to report Koba’s ‘escape’ because he used Koba’s
information to arrest Kamenev and felt the need to protect himself from any
possible charge that he, while aware of Koba’s presence in Tiflis, had not
reported his escape from exile. An added incentive to protect himself must have
been this officer’s knowledge that Koba was connected with Kamo, whose case was
being considered at the highest level in St Petersburg.
On 27 April 1904 the
Minister of Justice, N.K.Muraviev, wrote to the Minister of the Interior,
V.K.Plehve: ‘I, on my part, would prefer to decide this case by administrative
order and to exile Simon Ter-Petrosov (Kamo) to the Arkhangelsk gubernia
[region] for four years under open police surveillance.’ Muraviev recommended
that the case of Kamo, the 21-year-old criminal, be decided in secret, to avoid
revealing the scandal in the Tiflis Okhrana and to allow him to present this
secret case for ‘decision by the HIGHEST AUTHORITY’. In his petition to the
Tsar, Muraviev stated that ‘in the interest of the preservation of State order
and public tranquility’ the court proceedings should be held behind closed
doors.49
The scandal in the Tiflis
Okhrana was typical of that period. Another similar scandal led to Zubatov’s
downfall. In 1903 one of Zubatov’s agents, Dr Shaevich, organized a
strike by Jewish workers
in Odessa that led to a serious confrontation with police. Prime Minister
Plehve, already outraged by numerous acts of violence and disorder that had
been provoked by Okhrana agents, summoned Zubatov to his office. After
upbraiding him for the violence that Zubatov and his ‘Jew Boy, Shaevich’ had
instigated, Plehve fired Zubatov.50 (Zubatov was to commit suicide
at the time of the 1917 February Revolution.)
Although Zubatov was fired
and his network of Okhrana agents purged, Zubatovshchina survived and continued
to spread. (Plehve himself was soon assassinated in a terrorist act directed by
the top secret Okhrana agent Evno Azef.) What happened at the Tiflis Okhrana
was similar to what happened everywhere: the Tiflis Okhrana was purged on
orders from St Petersburg. Captain Lavrov was fired and replaced by Colonel
N.A. Zasypkin, who purged the network of Okhrana agents and informers recruited
by Lavrov. A new warrant, issued by the Department of Police on 1 May 1904, for
the arrest of Iosif Dzhugashvili arrived at Tiflis.51 Koba learned
about it and immediately left for Gori.
Koba’s mother was happy
about his return. She hoped that her 25-year-old son would marry and settle
down. One of Koba’s former Seminary classmates, Alexander Svanidze, introduced
Koba to his 18-year-old sister, whose name, like that of Koba’s mother, was
Katerina, or Keke. Her name may have had some bearing on Koba’s decision to
marry her. People for whom he felt affection were invariably those he could in
some way or other associate with his mother.52 Despite Koba’s
frequent maligning of religion and church ritual, his mother insisted on a
church wedding,53 and Koba married Keke Svanidze on 21 June 1904 in
one of Gori’s eight churches. Koba Egnatashvili officiated at the wedding.54
The young bride was deeply religious, having been brought up in the traditional
Georgian ways. The young couple made their home in Didi-Lilo because Koba’s
wife wanted to stay close to her family. But Koba soon left for Tiflis, and in
the years that followed, rarely visited his wife. ‘She regarded him as a
demigod and lived in fear for his safety, spending countless nights in ardent
prayer, waiting for her husband to return from his secret trips, so displeasing
to God, and would learn to lead a peaceful life of toil and contentment.’55
NOTES
1.
V.Kaminsky and
I.Vereshchagin, Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia: documenty, zapisky, rasskazy, Moscow,
1939, PP. 87–90.
2.
Ibid., pp. 63 and 74. See
also L.Beria, ‘Lado Ketskhoveli’, Pravda, no. 189, 11 July 1937.
3.
Kaminsky and Vereshchagin,
Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia, p. 83.
4.
F.D.Volkov claims that
documents stating that Stalin was recruited as an agent of the tsar’s secret
police are in the possession of Nikolay Stepanovich Shumsky, Dean of the
Department of Philosophy of the Taganrog Teachers Institute. F.D.Volkov, Vzlet
i padenie Stalina, Moscow, 1992, p. 16, n. 19.
5.
N.Vakar, ‘Stalin po
vospominaniyam N.N.Zhordania’, Poslednie novosti, Paris, 16 December
1936.
6.
A.T.Vasiliev, The
Okhrana, London, 1930, pp. 57ff.
7.
B.P.Kozmin, Zubatov i
ego korespondenty, Moscow, 1928. V.D.Novitsky, Iz vospominanii
zhandarma, Leningrad, 1929. A.I.Sokolova, Moskovskaya suysknaya
politsiya, Petrograd, 1916. Vasiliev, The Okhrana, pp. 57ff.
Vasiliev praises Zubatov highly.
8.
Kaminsky and Vereshchagin,
Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia, pp. 91ff.
9.
Ibid., p. 15.
10.
G.Volchek and V.Voinov, Viktor
Kurnatovsky, Moscow, 1961.
11.
Ibid., pp. 95ff.
12.
Vasiliev, The Okhrana,
pp. 63ff.
13.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
pp. 7–13.
14.
Ibid., pp. 14f.
15.
Ibid.
16.
Okhrana Report, dated 17
June 1902, signed by the chief of the Batum Okhrana Section, Colonel
S.P.Sabelsky. On file at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Copy in
the author’s archive. See also the reproduction of the report in Boris
Souvarine, Stalin: a Critical Survey of Bolshevism, London, 1939, p. 46
and Edward Ellis Smith, The Young Stalin—The Early Years of an Elusive
Revolutionary, London, 1968, p. 102.
17.
J.Iremaschwili, Stalin
und die Tragödie Georgiens, Berlin, 1932, pp. 27ff.
18.
I.V.Stalin, Sochineniya,
vol. I, Moscow, 1946–51, pp. 314ff.
19.
For a discussion of
reaction formation, see any elementary psychology textbook.
20.
S.T.Arkhomed, Rabochee
dvizhenie i sotsial-demokratiya na Kavkaze, Geneva, 1910, p. 74.
21.
G.Uratadze, ‘Moi
vospominaniya’. Manuscript on file at the Hoover Institution, Stanford
University, pp. 56ff.
22.
Batumskaya demonstratsiya
1902-go goda, Moscow, 1937, p. 152.
23.
N.Vakar, ‘Stalin po
vospominaniyam N.N.Zhordania,’ Poslednie novosti, Paris, 16 December
1936, p. 2.
24.
Ibid.
25.
B.Souvarine, Stalin: a
Critical Survey of Bolshevism, London, 1939, p. 46. Also R.Arsenidze,
‘L.Beria: K Voprosu ob istorii bolshevitskikh organizatsii v Zakavkazie’, Caucasian
Review, no. 1 1955.
26.
R.Arsenidze, ‘Iz
vospominanii o Staline’, Novy zhurnal, no. 72, 1972. Also ‘L.Beria…’, Caucasian
Review, no. 1, 1955.
27.
Vakar, ‘Stalin’, p. 2.
Also E.E.Smith, The Young Stalin, London, 1968, p. 99.
28.
Batumskaya demonstratsiya
1902-go goda, pp. 150–3.
29.
Stalin, Sochinenia,
vol. I, p. 419.
30.
Vakar, ‘Stalin’, p. 2.
Also Smith, The Young Stalin, p. 99.
31.
Ludmila Kafanova, ‘O
velikom druge i vozhde’, Novoe russkoe slovo, 23 and 24 March 1977. See
also Batumskaya demonstratsiya 102-go goda, pp. 150–3 and S.Vereshchak,
‘Stalin v tur’me: vospominaniya politicheskogo zakluchennogo’, Dni, 22 and 24
January 1928. (Vereshchak describes the counterfeiting operation of the
Darakhvelidze brothers.)
32.
Lev Trotsky, Stalin,
New York, 1941, pp. 34ff.
33.
For a brief account of
Colonel S.P.Shabelsky’s career, see Smith, The Young Stalin, p. 103.
Also see Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, New York, 1971, pp. 319–23.
Medvedev states that in the early 1930s the historian, Professor Sepp, author
of The October Revolution in Documents, happened upon the file of a
police agent, Iosif Dzhugashvili, and that the file contained Dzhugashvili’s
request to be released from prison. A note on the request stated: ‘Free him, if
he agrees to give the Gendarme Department information about the activity of the
Social Democratic Party.’ (Shabelsky did not know of Koba’s work as an informer
in Tiflis: Koba would not have mentioned it, having fled Tiflis to avoid arrest
in connection with the leaflets provocation. Okhrana policy was to keep the
identity of informers secret even within Okhrana departments. Communication
between the Okhrana departments of different cities was always routed through
the Special Section of the Department of Police in St Petersburg.)
34.
Batumskaya demonstratsiya
102-go goda, pp. 120–2. See also Vereshchak for
similar incidents of Koba accusing other prisoners of being Okhrana agents.
35.
Okhrana Report no. 5500,
dated 1 May 1904, on file at the Hoover Institution and published in Robert
C.Tucker (ed.), Stalinism, New York, 1977, pp. 200ff.
36.
Souvarine, Stalin,
p. 44.
37.
Okhrana report no. 53–c,
dated 14 March 1911 and other Okhrana documents, including the circular letter
attached to Okhrana report no. 97984, dated 19 April 1913, which states that
I.V. Dzhugashvili was exiled by the ‘HIGHEST AUTHORITY decree of 9 June 1903
for a state crime…’.
38.
R.Bagratuni’s letter to
I.D.Levine, dated 8 May 1967. In I.D.Levine’s archive. Copy in the author’s
archive.
39.
S.Alliluev, Proidennyi
put’, Moscow, 1946, pp. 63ff.
40.
Nugzar Sharia, taped
interview with the author, Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York, 1971. Nugzar
Sharia related recollections of his uncle, Peter Sharia, Stalin’s assistant.
Starting in 1937, Stalin ordered publication of numerous articles and books
glorifying Lado. One of the many authors was Lavrenty Beria—see, for instance,
his Lado Ketskhoveli, Moscow, 1938.
41.
Colonel A.Eremin, for
example, released the provocateur Solomon Rys from a Kiev prison in 1906
after securing the permission of the director of the Department of Police,
M.I.Trusevich. See Chapters 6 and 8.
42.
Dr Norman Syrkin, in a
letter, dated 4 January 1975, addressed to the author. Also Syrkin’s interview
with the author and Vitaly Svechinsky in Haifa, Israel, in January 1972.
Syrkin’s father, Zalman Syrkin, who worked for many years in the USSR Academy
of Sciences, learned in 1964 that this telegram had been found in the Irkutsk
Okhrana archive, but was not published because Khrushchev was deposed that year
and his de-Stalinization campaign ended with Leonid Brezhnev’s assumption of
power.
43.
Batumskaya demonstratsiya
1902-go goda, p. 140. See also Batumskaya
demonstratsiya 1902-go goda, p. 140. See also M.A.Bulgakov, Sobranie
Sochinenii, in 5 vols, Vol. 3, Moscow, 1990, ‘Khudozhestvennaya
Literatura’, p. 697.
44.
M.A.Bulgakov, Sobranie
sochinenii, vol. III, Moscow, 1990, commentary on pp. 697ff. In 1937,
Stalin commissioned Bulgakov to write a play (titled Batum) based on a
hurriedly published book on the Batum Demonstration of 1902 (Batumskaya
demonstratsiya 1902-go goda). Bulgakov underlined the book’s recollections
of how Stalin explained his escape from Novaya Uda. Stalin withdrew the
commission for the play before it was completed by Bulgakov. The commentary to
the play describes the ‘personal identity’ document of an Okhrana agent.
45.
E.Yaroslavsky, Vazhneishie
vekhi zhizni i deyatelnosti tovarishcha Stalina, Moscow, 1940/London, 1942,
p. 31.
46.
I.Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
Moscow, 1974, pp. 32ff.
47.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
46, fn. 9.
48.
Okhrana Report no. 101145,
dated 31 March 1911 signed by the vice director of the Department of Police,
Vissarionov, and the chief of the Special Section, Colonel Eremin. On file at
the Hoover Institution. Copy in the author’s archive.
49.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
p. 34.
50.
I.V.Alekseev, Provokator
Anna Serebriakova, Moscow, 1932.
51.
Okhrana Report no. 5500,
dated 1 May 1904.
52.
Svetlana Allilueva, Only
One Year, New York, 1969, p. 367. Svetlana states: ‘Everyone to whom he
[Stalin] had ever been attached, for whom he had ever felt any affection, had
been connected in his consciousness with his mother. His first wife bore her
name Catherine.’
53.
Ibid., p. 367. Svetlana
writes: ‘This quiet pretty girl had pleased the mother, and at the mother’s
insistence the marriage had been solemnized in church.’
54.
Budu Svanidze, My Uncle
Joe, London, 1952, pp. 6 and 16. ‘Budu Svanidze’ was a pen name of the
Soviet diplomat Bessedovsky, who knew Stalin personally and who, having
defected in 1930, wrote several books under various pen names. Bertram Wolfe
points out in his book The Diary of Maxim Litvinov that Bessedovsky did
not invent anything but invariably wrote of what he actually knew.
55.
Iremaschwili, Stalin,
pp. 30–9.
MEETING THE ‘MOUNTAIN EAGLE’
Kamo escaped from the
Batum prison on 11 September 1904. On the same day, Colonel Tiapkin, the chief
of the Kutais Okhrana, sent a telegram to St Petersburg, stating: ‘Urgent. To
the chief of the Special Section, Vasiliev. Simon Arshakov Ter-Petrosov (Kamo)
escaped from the Batum prison… I have the honor of requesting an All-Empire
search.’1 Batum was under the jurisdiction of the Kutais Okhrana,
which made Tiapkin responsible for the investigation of Kamo’s case. Tiapkin
summoned Koba to Kutais in the hope that he would help him locate Kamo. While
in Kutais, Koba submitted several reports to the Okhrana providing information
on local Social Democrats.2 But this time, he was not inclined to
turn Kamo in, probably fearing that he would arouse Kamo’s suspicion if he once
again delivered him into the Okhrana’s hands. Besides, Kamo promised to be a
great asset to him as a source of funds acquired from ‘expropriations’— a
euphemism for armed robberies of banks, post offices and wealthy individuals—
activities that were growing in popularity among revolutionary groups and
common criminals.
Toward the end of 1904,
strikes, robberies and violence spread throughout the Russian Empire. The
Russo-Japanese war, which had begun in January 1904, was going badly for
Russia. Her army had lost over 400,000 soldiers, dead or wounded; her navy had
lost most of its ships. On 20 December 1904, the Russian Pacific Naval Base
Port Arthur was surrendered to the Japanese. The war was to drag on for nine
more months. On 5 September 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt arranged the
signing of the Russo- Japanese Peace Treaty at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. By
that time, the revolution of 1905 was threatening to topple the tsarist regime.
The military defeats and worsening economic conditions were the main causes of
revolutionary upheaval. Okhrana agents added to the general turmoil by
provoking confrontations with the authorities. An Okhrana agent, Father George
Gapon, provoked a major revolutionary explosion that took place on 9 January
1905 and became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. On that day Gapon, an Orthodox priest
and the leader of the ‘Assembly of Russian Workers’, led a large column of
workers carrying icons and singing patriotic hymns to the Tsar’s Winter Palace
in St Petersburg. He intended to submit a petition to the Tsar demanding
respect for civil rights, amnesty for political exiles, and an eight-hour
working day. The troops guarding the palace tried to stop the marchers, but
they continued to advance. The soldiers opened fire, and the workers fled,
leaving behind hundreds of dead and wounded. The massacre might have been
avoided had Nicholas II been there, but he was not in the palace that day. The
Tsar wrote in his diary: ‘A grim day!… Many were killed or wounded. God, how
sad and grim!’3
by him, the leader of the
Bolsheviks. After Bloody Sunday, Father Gapon went to Geneva, where Lenin
welcomed him with open arms as a hero and offered him membership in the
Bolshevik organization. Gapon agreed, but mastering the intricacies of Marxist
idiom proved to be too great a challenge for this confused and illiterate
priest and Okhrana agent. Gapon parted company with Lenin and tried to
re-establish his reputation as a workers’ leader, but he was soon unmasked by
members of the Social Revolutionary Party. One of them lured Gapon to a secret
meeting place in Finland and hanged him 4
there.
Koba was far from these
events. He was 26, but had not been drafted into the army because of his
crippled left arm. Early in 1905, he joined a small Bolshevik group in Tiflis
headed by Stepan Shaumian, who had met Lenin while studying abroad. Lenin had
sent Shaumian to Tiflis to take the place of the arrested Kurnatovsky and
Kamenev. The Tiflis Bolsheviks voted to send Shaumian to Lenin’s Third Party
Congress, scheduled to be held in April 1905 in London. But Shaumian was unable
to attend: Koba denounced him to the Okhrana and he was arrested—the third
Bolshevik leader to have been betrayed by Koba. Shortly before Shaumian’s
intended departure, the new chief of the Tiflis Okhrana, Colonel N.A.Zasypkin
(who had replaced Captain Lavrov), had arrested Koba on a Tiflis street.
According to the warrant issued by the Department of Police on 1 May 1904,
ordering Koba’s arrest and exile, Zasypkin was supposed to send Koba to
Siberia. But Koba told the colonel that his ‘escape’ from Novaya Uda had been
sanctioned by the Okhrana and that he had helped the Okhrana to apprehend Kamo.
Koba informed Zasypkin of Shaumian’s plans and promised to provide information
about an underground Menshevik press in Tiflis that was printing subversive
leaflets. Koba signed a pledge to collaborate with the Okhrana.5
Zasypkin released him and arrested Shaumian. During Shaumian’s interrogation,
Zasypkin slipped up, mentioning the address of Shaumian’s secret apartment in
Tiflis. Shaumian at once recalled that the only person to whom he had told this
address was Koba, and realized who had betrayed him.6 Shaumian’s
arrest gave Koba the opportunity to make his first contact with Lenin. In lieu
of Shaumian, Koba’s close friend Mikha Tskhakaya went to London. He was about
30 and considered by the Tiflis Bolsheviks to be an ‘old man’. He had a long
prison record and was known in the criminal underworld by the nicknames ‘Old
Man Mikha’, ‘Gurgen’ and ‘Gambeta’.7 Lenin introduced Tskhakaya to
the Congress as the ‘delegate from the Tiflis Bolsheviks’. Lenin told Tskhakaya
about his idea of a secret, conspiratorial Bolshevik organization. He was
impressed by what Tskhakaya told him about Koba and Kamo and their expertise in
armed robberies. Lenin also liked a leaflet composed by Koba and printed by
Kamo, in which they quoted a fraudulent report that they themselves had
fabricated, supposedly by a high police official, General Lopukhin, that ran:
‘It is necessary to inflame ethnic and racial hatred; it is necessary to
organize “Black Hundreds” [Russian nationalistic vigilantes]…; it is necessary
to transform the struggle between the police and the revolutionary circles into
the struggle of one half of the people against the other half of the people…’.8
The provocative leaflet was written using Koba’s characteristic repetitive
style. Lenin must have recognized the document as the obvious forgery it was,
but he had thousands of copies of it printed for smuggling into Russia. The
brief comment he added was: ‘We, too, are for civil war… Long live the
revolution. Long live the open civil war against the tsarist government and its
supporters!’9 That the ‘Lopukhin report’ was a crude fabrication
apparently did not bother Lenin.
Tskhakaya also told Lenin
about the leaflets with which Koba and Kamo had ‘wrecked the career’ of the
chief of the Tiflis Okhrana, Captain Lavrov.10 This information may
have suggested to Lenin that Koba and Kamo had been involved in an Okhrana
provocation and connected with the printing of the leaflets that had caused the
arrest of Kurnatovsky and his secret circle. Tskhakaya, after his return to
Tiflis, told Koba about Lenin’s idea of a conspiratorial Bolshevik organization
and his request for money from expropriations to finance party work. Lenin’s
concept of a highly secretive party organization led by a strong leader
appealed to, and was in tune with, Koba’s conspiratorial nature. He also
realized that the more secretive such a party was, the more valuable to the
Okhrana would be information about it. He sensed in Lenin a man with character
traits similar to his own and resolved to meet him personally. The opportunity
came when Lenin arranged the Bolshevik Conference in Tammerfors, Finland, in
December 1905.
At the end of November, a
Baku worker, Peter Montin, was elected to represent Caucasian workers at
Tammerfors, but on the eve of his departure for Finland he was assassinated. A
stranger shot him in the head as Montin was walking at night with his bride.
The murderer was never apprehended. Suspicion fell on Sergey Alliluev, Koba’s
friend (and future father-in-law). But Alliluev presented an alibi in court
that he was to recall in great detail and with puzzling contradictions in his
memoirs some three decades later:
Montin
returned to Baku on December 6, but I, without seeing him, went on the same day
to Tiflis, where after a five-year prohibition I again received permission to
work in the railroad shops. I was met at the Tiflis railroad station by
comrades holding a telegram, which stated that on the evening of December 6,
Peter Montin had been killed by a shot through the head… His body lay on the
street all night.11
Alliluev does not mention
the names of the ‘comrades holding a telegram’, and does not explain how he
managed to go to Tiflis on 6 December, the day Montin was killed, and to be met
there by a telegram telling about the murder and the fact that Montin’s body
had lain in the street all night. (The distance between Baku and Tiflis is some
300 miles, and Alliluev should have arrived at Tiflis no later than the night
of Montin’s murder.) Alliluev adds that Montin’s bride testified that ‘the
bullet hit Montin in the temple, but he managed to take a pistol out of his
pocket and fire a shot’.
In her memoirs, Alliluev’s
daughter, Anna, repeats her father’s earlier story, but adds one peculiar
detail: she states that Montin was murdered by the Okhrana.12 Anna
published her memoirs in 1946, four decades after the murder that took place
when she was 7 years old. Alliluev himself makes no such assertion. This
assertion was suggested by Stalin, who habitually accused others of crimes he
himself had committed.
Sergey Alliluev lost his
mother early in life and never saw his father, a wandering gypsy. He was raised
by an uncle on his mother’s side. He was unable to keep a job and several times
was fired after quarreling with his employers. In May 1903, during the workers’
unrest in Tiflis, he was arrested and interrogated for taking part in the
demonstration, but he was soon released by the chief of the Tiflis Okhrana, Captain
Lavrov (the same Lavrov whose career had been wrecked by Koba, Lado and Kamo).
In
1937 Stalin forced
Alliluev to write his memoirs and provided him with documents found in
Alliluev’s file in the Tiflis Okhrana archive; Alliluev quotes verbatim from
his conversation with Captain Lavrov, who made him an offer to become an
informer. At this point, Alliluev stops quoting and begins paraphrasing,
stating that he indignantly refused the offer. Despite his refusal, writes
Alliluev, he was released while another man, Nikifor Beridze, became an
informer, was exposed and then killed.13 In fact, however, Alliluev
was released after he had signed a pledge to collaborate with the Okhrana. A
year later, when Lavrov was fired and the network of agents in the Tiflis Okhrana
purged, Alliluev was exiled to Baku, with a 5-year prohibition against living
in Tiflis. He received permission to move to Tiflis when he went there the day
of Montin’s murder.
Koba was a victim of the
same purge. It was clear that Alliluev had been exiled to Baku as a dismissed
Okhrana informer. There was also a connection between Alliluev and Kamo, whose
biographer states that Alliluev was ‘tied to Kamo by many deals’.14 Whether
the murder of Montin was one of those deals is unknown, as were the whereabouts
of Kamo on 6 December 1905. But it is known that Kamo was arrested again two
weeks later, on 18 December. On that day, his band was almost wiped out by
Cossack troops in a skirmish in a Tiflis suburb. Kamo was wounded in the arm
and captured. The Cossacks hanged him, but the rope snapped and Kamo’s almost
lifeless body fell to the ground. Frightened by this obviously divine
intervention, the Cossacks decided to deliver their captive alive to the Tiflis
prison. Alliluev saw Kamo, covered with blood and barely able to walk, being
led to prison, and told Kamo’s aunt what had happened.15
Koba left for Finland to
attend the Tammerfors Conference in lieu of Montin the day after Montin’s
murder. This development makes Koba an obvious suspect in the murder, since he
was the only clear beneficiary. But Koba had an alibi: he was in Tiflis at the
time of the murder and had witnesses to prove it. Alibi or no, it would have
been out of character for Koba personally to murder someone; bloodying his own
hands was not Koba’s style. All his life Stalin practiced blackmail and
manipulated people to commit his crimes. (Dostoyevsky in The Possessed
describes how Peter Verkhovensky instigates the murder of a student and then
manipulates the murderers by threatening to expose them.) Alliluev devoted a
large space in his memoir to the murder of Montin and to his own tortured
alibi. His lifelong servility to Stalin suggests a similar type of
relationship.
At the Tammerfors
Conference, Koba met Lenin, a man he at first described as ‘a most ordinary
looking man, below average in height; in no way, literally in no way,
distinguishable from ordinary mortals’.16 Earlier he had imagined
him as a ‘mountain eagle’. Actually Lenin was a very short and bald man, with
wide, protruding cheekbones and slightly slanted Kalmyk eyes. He helped Koba
gain admittance to the conference, where Koba registered under the codename
‘Ivanovich’. At the conference, Lenin first advocated participation in the
elections to the state Duma, the newly established Russian parliament, arguing
that the revolution could be preached from the Duma platform the same way it
could be preached from a ‘dung heap’ or in a ‘pigsty’, so why not do it in the
‘pigsty of the Duma’? But he soon changed his mind and called for a boycott of
the Duma elections. He stated that the time for preaching was over and called
for armed insurrection. There were some 40 delegates at the conference.
Anticipating a revolutionary uprising, they used the intervals between sessions
to learn to shoot.
Lenin believed the
revolution was gaining momentum, when in fact it was about to collapse. The
Tsar had been forced to make many concessions to opposition groups and in
October 1905 issued the ‘Manifesto of the Seventeenth of October’, which
virtually abolished autocracy: it proclaimed that no law could be passed
without the consent of the Duma. Count S.Y. Witte, a liberal and farsighted
statesman, was the driving force behind the Manifesto and the reforms. He was
appointed prime minister, but his authority was challenged by the Soviets
(Councils) of Workers’ Deputies, which sprang up in various industrial centers.
The St Petersburg Soviet aspired to the role of national government, issuing
appeals that were obeyed by the public while the Tsar’s decrees were ignored.
On 14 December 1905 the Soviet appealed to all citizens to stop paying taxes
and to demand that wages be paid in gold. It warned foreign powers that the
future revolutionary government of Russia would honor no loans made to the
tsarist regime. Two days later, all the members of the St Petersburg Soviet
were arrested. One of those arrested was Lev Trotsky, who had been elected
President of the St Petersburg Soviet on 12 December 1905, the day the
Tammerfors Conference opened.17 While at Tammerfors, Koba and Lenin
held secret meetings, discussing expropriations. Koba promised to provide Lenin
with money. The Conference closed on 17 December 1905, the day after the
arrests in St Petersburg. The Tammerfors delegates called for insurrection.
After the conference,
Lenin invited Koba to travel to St Petersburg with him. There they visited the
party headquarters and the offices of the party newspaper, and attended a
secret gathering, at which Lenin and other party leaders discussed
Bolshevik-Menshevik unity. The St Petersburg Okhrana received a detailed report
from an informer, codenamed ‘Ivanov’, describing this meeting and stating that
‘the Social Democratic Central Committee and a number of delegates, Menshevik
and Bolshevik, met at 9 Zagorodny Prospect in St Petersburg to discuss unity…’.
Informer ‘Ivanov’ listed the names of all the people who had attended the
meeting, including ‘Ivanovich, the delegate from Tiflis’.18 The
informer ‘Ivanov’ and ‘Ivanovich, the delegate from Tiflis’, were one and the same
person. ‘Ivanovich’ was still unidentified in the first party history published
in 1926. Stalin was afraid that he could be exposed as the Okhrana informer
‘Ivanov’ if the identity of ‘Ivanovich’ were established.19
At the beginning of 1906,
when Koba returned to Tiflis, he learned that Kamo had been arrested. He met
with the survivors of Kamo’s band in a Tiflis wine cellar and ordered them to
murder General Griaznov, the Military Governor of the Caucasus, explaining that
Griaznov was a symbol of oppression. In Griaznov, a figure of power and
authority, his ‘grim, sullen hatred…for every form of authority’ found a ready
target.20 One of the members of the band drew the lot to carry out
the assassination. It was the general’s habit to take rides in an open
carriage. The assassin threw a bomb, killing him. Koba watched the scene from a
safe distance. A policeman rushing to the bloody site shouted at him, ‘What are
you loitering here for?’ and pushed him aside. The assassin was caught and
tried in a martial court, then hanged in a Tiflis square.21
During these events, Kamo
was in prison, looking for a way to escape. His wounded arm healed. The prison
authorities were unable to establish his identity. On 8 February 1906, he
impersonated one of his cellmates, who had been called to be released from
prison, and walked out a free man. He soon found Koba, who told him about
Lenin’s request to organize a major expropriation. For this endeavor, they
needed more men. A large band operated in the town of Telavi in eastern
Georgia; Koba and Kamo went there
to recruit new members for
Kamo’s band.22 Early in March, Kamo and his band hijacked money
transports in Kutais and on the Kodzhor road near Tiflis. Kamo went to the
Finnish resort village of Kuokkala, where Lenin and his wife were renting a dacha,
to deliver the money. This was Kamo’s first meeting with Lenin who watched
intensely as Kamo unpacked a ‘strange thing’, which turned out to be a leather
wine bag with a double bottom in which the money was hidden. Lenin initially
seemed tense, sat sideways, covered his face with his hands as if trying to
hide from the light of the lamp. But Kamo noticed his probing eyes, peeking
through his loosely folded fingers.23 Lenin took the money and
thanked Kamo. Then he sent him to St Petersburg to join a band that was
preparing further expropriations and assassinations.
NOTES
1.
I.Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
Moscow, 1974, p. 36.
2.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, p. 319.
3.
Dnevnik imperatora
Nikolaya II, Russkii revolutsionnyi arkhiv,
Berlin, 1923, p. 194.
4.
Sidney Harcave, First
Blood: The Russian Revolution of 1905, New York, 1964, p. 69. See also
Edward Ellis Smith, The Young Stalin: The Early Years of an Elusive
Revolutionary, London, 1968, p. 133.
5.
See Chapter 5. Also see
Colonel N.A.Zasypkin’s report in Shkola fillerov, Byloe, no. 3 (25),
1917, pp. 66ff. Quoted in Smith, pp. 165f.
6.
N.Vakar, ‘Stalin po
vospominaniyam N.N.Zhordania’, Poslednie novosti, Paris, 16 December
1936, p. 2.
7.
See Chapter 5 below for
Tskhakaya’s role in the liquidation of the Avlabar underground press in Tiflis.
8.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
pp. 37–42.
9.
V.I.Lenin, Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii, Moscow, 1958–65, vol. 9, p. 334.
10.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
p. 39.
11.
S.Alliluev, Proidennyi
put’, Moscow, 1946, p. 157. Alliluev’s recollections are riddled with
inconsistencies.
12.
Anna S.Allilueva, Vospominaniya,
Moscow, 1946, p. 63.
13.
Alliluev, Proidennyi
put’, pp. 69–72. Photocopies of the Okhrana documents that Stalin provided
for Alliluev are found in the appendix to Alliluev’s memoirs.
14.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
p. 52.
15.
Ibid.
16.
I.V.Stalin, O Lenine,
Moscow, 1951, pp. 22f.
17.
At this historic moment,
Trotsky was already a prominent revolutionary leader. He had not yet met Koba,
nor heard about this shadowy figure just emerging from the murky border where
the criminal underworld and revolutionary movement met and often merged. See
Joel Carmichael, Trotsky, London, 1975, pp. 68ff.
18.
Isaac Deutscher, Stalin:
A Political Biography, New York and London, 1968, p. 81. Also see
F.Matasova, ‘Nabludenie za V.I.Leninym’, Krasnaya letopis’, no. 1 (12),
1925, pp. 123– 5.
19.
See Chapters 6 and 12 for
additional information on the identity of the St Petersburg Okhrana informer
‘Ivanov’.
20.
J.Iremaschwili, Stalin
und die Tragödie Georgiens, Berlin, 1932, p. 24.
21.
H.Montgomery Hyde, Stalin:
the History of a Dictator, New York, 1971, pp. 70ff., quoting Essad-Bey, Stalin:
the Career of A Fanatic, New York and London, 1932, pp. 71–5. See also
Boris Souvarine, Stalin: a Critical Survey of Bolshevism, London, 1939,
p. 100, and Lev Trotsky, Stalin, New York, 1941, p. 101.
Acknowledgements
No book can be the effort
of only one person. My gratitude therefore goes to many people who contributed
to this book in various ways, first of all to my family, to my wife Nadine, to
my sons Alexander and Peter, and to my daughter Yvette for their encouragement,
support and endurance during many years of my research and writing.
A very small group of
pioneers dared to venture into the murky and forbidden terrain of Stalin’s
Okhrana (Tsarist Secret Police) career. They blazed the trail of his top-secret
Okhrana file, the story that makes intelligible many unexplained and baffling
events and atrocities during Stalin’s long and brutal reign.
I am most thankful to
Ambassador George F.Kennan, Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced
Study, School of Historical Studies at Princeton, who has been deeply involved
in the study of Stalin’s Okhrana career and has greatly contributed to my
research by advice, information and encouragement.
I also owe a great deal to
the late Isaac Don Levine, who pioneered the first biography of Stalin (1931)
and published the book Stalin’s Great Secret. I am especially grateful
to him for sharing with me his insights and important documents in his archive
on Stalin.
My gratitude goes also to
the late Edward Ellis Smith, a CIA expert on Russia, for initiating research
(1956) in the Okhrana Collection at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution
and Peace at Stanford University and also for providing me with many important
documents on Stalin that he had collected in his archive. His book The Young
Stalin (1967) was an important contribution to the search for the real
Stalin. He signed his book: ‘To Roman Brackman. With high regards and all best
wishes in the murky world of Stalin. Best of luck. Edward Ellis Smith.’
I want to express my great
appreciation to Dr John J.Dziak, a 31-year veteran expert on Russia with the
United States Department of Defence military intelligence, currently professor
at universities in Washington, for his advice, trust in me, and for his
encouragement.
I also want to express my
deep gratitude to the late Raymond Rocca, a specialist on Russia and a veteran
of many years of US intelligence service and its expert on Russia, for being a
staunch advocate for publication of my manuscript on Stalin.
I am also grateful to my
old friend Michael Steinhardt for his support, unwavering trust in me and his
strong belief in the historical importance of my book on Stalin.
I am deeply indebted to
Professor Peter Reddaway for his help in bringing the manuscript to the
attention of Frank Cass Publishers.
My gratitude goes to all
people whom I mention in the source references. They preserved widely scattered
particles of truth that were helpful in bringing to light Stalin’s story.
22.
L.Beria, K Voprosy ob
istorii bolshevitskikh organizatsii v Zakavkazie, Leningrad, 1936, p.
40.
See also R.Arsenidze,
interview, on file at the Radio Liberty Committee; copy in the author’s
archive.
23.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
pp. 58–60.
THE MURDER OF VISSARION
All Stalin’s biographers
have insisted that his father, Vissarion Dzhugashvili, died in 1890. They refer
to a statement by Koba’s childhood friend, Iosif Iremashvili, who in his
memoirs, published in 1932 in Berlin, mentioned in passing Vissarion’s death in
Tiflis in 1890.1 Iremashvili did not know Vissarion personally. He
met Koba for the first time at the end of September 1890 in the first grade of
the Gori Ecclesiastical School, soon after Koba’s return from Tiflis. They
became friends and Iremashvili often visited Koba’s home. Koba and his mother never
mentioned Vissarion in Iremashvili’s presence, but he heard stories from Gori
residents about the brutal beatings to which Vissarion had subjected Koba and
Keke. He thought that they had nothing good to say about Vissarion and
interpreted their silence in the light of the old custom of not speaking ill of
the dead. This deduction led him to surmise that Vissarion had died in Tiflis
during Koba’s sojourn there in the summer of 1890.
Actually, Vissarion was
murdered 16 years later, in 1906. In his childhood biography, which Stalin
edited in 1939, he inserted a footnote: ‘Vissarion Ivanovich Dzhugashvili died
in 1906.’2 Stalin also told his daughter, Svetlana, that his father
had ‘died in a drunken brawl—somebody stabbed him with a knife’. Like Stalin,
she provided this information in a footnote in her memoirs.3 No
police record of the murder has ever come to light, and the exact day when it
took place remains unknown. It was Stalin’s habit of gathering archival
documents referring to him in his personal secretariat. It is possible that he
destroyed this record during his rule.
But some clues survive,
suggesting that by 8 March 1906 Koba already knew that Vissarion was dead. On
that day, he published an article, ‘The State Duma and the Tactics of Social
Democracy’, signed ‘I.Besoshvili’ (‘Son of Beso’). Beso is a diminutive of
Vissarion. A profound transformation had taken place in Koba’s mind: he had
suddenly become a loving son of Vissarion and his hatred had been swept away by
an ardent desire for identification with him. This transformation suggests that
Koba knew about the murder.4 In his article, Koba criticized the new
Russian parliament, the Duma, calling it ‘a parliament-bastard’, an echo of
Vissarion’s taunt of nabichuari.5 Koba’s verbal attack on the
Duma was a description of a murder: he repeats the word ‘blow’ 14 times,
mentioning a ‘double blow’, a ‘blow from both sides’, a ‘blow from the top’, a
‘blow from below’, a ‘blow from outside’, and a ‘blow from inside’. Was he
describing the murder, substituting the ‘parliament-bastard’ for Vissarion?
During March 1906 Koba
wrote three more articles, all entitled ‘On the Agrarian Question’, and all
signed ‘I.Besoshvili’.9 Never again was he to use this pen name. In
these articles Koba fervently championed the interests of the peasantry,
advocating redistribution of land among it. On this issue he disagreed even
with Lenin, who was for nationalization of land. Besoshvili wrote about the
‘breaking of the old customs’ and the ‘rebellious village’, about the peasantry,
which ‘only yesterday was beaten down and humiliated, but today gets on its
feet and straightens its back…yesterday helpless, today, like a turbulent
stream, it thrusts itself against the old order; get out of my way— otherwise I
will knock you down’.10 A confused mix of impulses was behind Koba’s
fervent declarations on behalf of the peasantry. Koba, the son of Beso, felt an
ardent desire for identification with Vissarion, who in his mind was connected
with the village and peasants. On the other hand, this passionate statement
contained a figurative reference to himself: he, Koba, had been helpless,
beaten down and humiliated by Vissarion, but was now on his feet, having swept
his enemy from his path. Koba was feigning the role of a political journalist, but
the issues he wrote about had meaning for him only as refections of his
personal conflict, in which he used these issue as proxies.
The silence surrounding
Vissarion’s murder, Koba’s sudden identification with Vissarion, and the
projection of the murder scene on a ‘false target’ raises the question of
Koba’s involvement in this murder. Koba did not mention Vissarion’s death when
he was questioned by the Okhrana. Okhrana reports as late as 1909 and 1913
stated that Koba’s father ‘leads the life of a vagrant’ and his ‘whereabouts
are unknown’.11 This misleading information could have come only
from Koba, who chose to conceal from the Okhrana the fact of his father’s death
in order to avoid questions about the time, place and circumstances of the
murder, fearing, perhaps, that such questioning could lead to exposure of his
involvement in the crime.
The question of where
Vissarion was murdered was answered by one of Stalin’s grandsons, Evgeny
Dzhugashvili, at the time a captain in the Soviet Rocket Forces. He learned of
the location of Vissarion’s grave on 30 August 1967, when he was invited to
join in the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the murder of Prince
Ilia Chavchavadze, the great Georgian poet and public figure (whose poem
‘Musha’ was inserted in Stalin’s childhood biography). Evgeny and other guests
gathered in Chavchavadze’s former estate near Telavi, the capital of Kakhetia,
the eastern province of Georgia. One of the other guests, an elderly Telavi
resident, offered to lead Evgeny to the grave of his great-grandfather
Vissarion in the old Telavi cemetery. A fervent admirer of Stalin, Evgeny was
glad to visit the forgotten grave.12
These fragments of
information—Vissarion meeting a violent end sometime before 8 March 1906, not
in Tiflis but in Telavi—only partly dispel the mystery that has surrounded
Vissarion’s death. To reconstruct the murder and the role Koba may have played
in it requires other clues, which Stalin himself unwittingly provided by his
actions in later years. He had the peculiar compulsion to ‘re-enact’ the
traumatic events of his life in order to appease his psychological need to
externalize them by projecting his crimes on to other people. He frequently
gave very detailed orders on how to murder his hated enemies. For example, in
1940 he instructed an assassin to murder Trotsky by striking him with an axe.13
And in 1948 he ordered a squad of secret police assassins to murder a prominent
public figure, Solomon Mikhoels, in a bizarre way: Mikhoels was to be struck
‘with an axe wrapped in a wet quilted jacket’.14 These peculiar
instructions point to an
obsession connected with a
compulsive re-enactment of a murder by an axe, having roots in an earlier crime
that was highly charged emotionally. There was no murder during Stalin’s life
that could have been more emotionally charged than that of his father.
Trotsky’s assassin had to carry a heavy coat in which he wrapped an axe on a
hot August day in Mexico City, while Mikhoels was murdered with an axe wrapped
in a wet quilted jacket on a freezing January night in Minsk. Stalin’s bizarre
orders begin to make sense only if we recognize them as the result of a
fixation on an axe as a murder weapon. This fixation appeared elsewhere, too:
Stalin suggested numerous scenes in the Sergei Eisenstein movie Ivan the
Terrible—commissioned by Stalin to glorify his favorite Tsar—in which an
axe in the hands of an executioner played a prominent role. He ordered that the
following refrain be provided as a continuous choral background for major scenes:
‘And the axes kept swinging, kept swinging…’. In many scenes, Tsar Ivan was
shown hiding behind a Kremlin wall, watching his enemies being beheaded with an
axe or assassinated with a knife. Stalin eventually ordered all copies of the
film destroyed, realizing perhaps that this portrayal of Tsar Ivan bore too
obvious a resemblance to him. But one of the copies was hidden away and
preserved by a courageous studio worker. After Stalin’s death the film was
shown in Russia and abroad.
Although Ivan the Terrible
portrays the Tsar as a mass murderer, it does not depict him murdering anyone
with his own hands. In Stalin’s record, similarly, nothing has been discovered
implicating him personally in anyone’s murder. Stalin instigated murders or
ordered his henchmen to murder his enemies; he did not bloody his own hands. If
Stalin was involved in the murder of Vissarion, he most probably remained
behind the scenes. Stalin’s fixation on murder with an axe offers an important
clue to the identity of the actual murderer. This can be found in Stalin’s
instruction as to how to murder Solomon Mikhoels in 1948. In addition to
ordering that Mikhoels be killed ‘with an axe wrapped in a wet quilted jacket’,
Stalin instructed his agents to run the body over with a truck.15
This instruction mirrors an earlier murder: in 1922, Kamo was killed on
Stalin’s orders—he was run over with a truck as he was cycling at night in
Tiflis.16 The two murders, one by axe, the other by a truck, merged
in the case of Mikhoels. This merging of two murders suggests that there was a
connection between them in Stalin’s mind. The question is, what was this
connection?
The truck in Mikhoels’s
murder points to Kamo as the murderer. This clue is reinforced by an argument
that if Kamo murdered Vissarion at the instigation of Koba, then Stalin,
playing his lifelong alternating roles of instigator and avenger, may well have
had Kamo killed in revenge for the murder of Vissarion. This suggestion is
further strengthened by a striking revelation: Stalin’s hatred ofKamo did not
stop with Kamo’s murder in 1922, 16 years after Vissarion’s murder, but erupted
again much later, in 1938, 16 years after Kamo’s own death, when Stalin ordered
Kamo’s grave and gravestone in the Tiflis cemetery to be destroyed in an explosion
of hatred and revenge.17
Kamo’s record indicates
that he was a cold-blooded murderer, and axe was his favorite murder weapon. As
a youth he once broke into his parents’ bedroom and chased his own father with
an axe in hand, trying to kill him.18 In 1906, he murdered a certain
‘Volodka’, who was accused, most probably by Koba, of being an Okhrana
informer.19 The mere mention of the word ‘informer’ in Kamo’s
presence was enough to throw him into a blind rage. He swore to murder all
informers, if he could only find them.20 Like many of Stalin’s
accomplices, he accepted Stalin’s assertions as divine revelations.21
All
it would have taken was
for Koba to assert that Vissarion was a police informer to provoke Kamo to
murder him.
As the first
‘I.Besoshvili’ article suggests, Vissarion was murdered shortly before 8 March
1906. On 8 February 1906, Kamo, who until then had been incarcerated in Tiflis
prison, fooled the guards and escaped. He and Koba went to Telavi to recruit
there members of a large band, whom they needed for the planned hijacking of
money transports.22 It was probably during this visit to Telavi that
Koba encountered Vissarion, who lived there with his brother Glakh. The fateful
encounter might have taken place anywhere, possibly in a Telavi wine cellar,
one of the local dukhans, where drunkards, vagrants and criminals
congregated, sipping Kakhetian wine to pass the time. Vissarion was 55 years
old by then. Koba would still have recognized him, but it is doubtful that
Vissarion would have recognized his 27-year-old son, whom he had last seen as a
10- year-old boy.
February and March are
part of the rainy season in Georgia. It was, most likely, raining in Telavi the
night of the murder and Kamo wore a quilted jacket that must have become soggy
by the time he took it off and wrapped an axe in it to hide the weapon. He
probably stalked Vissarion in a deserted Telavi street and struck him on the
head with the axe still wrapped in the wet jacket and then killed his
unconscious victim by stabbing him repeatedly with a knife. Stalin’s later
fixation on axes and multiple ‘blows’ (knife stabs) from all sides suggests
that he watched the murder from a safe distance, hiding behind houses and
fences. The police in this provincial town did not pay much attention to the
murder of one of the local drunkards. It stated that Vissarion had been knifed
to death in a drunken brawl. Stalin’s daughter Svetlana heard this police
version from her father many years later and mentioned it in her memoirs. He,
of course, did not tell her about his role in this murder. But Koba’s fear of
being accused of the murder was not his only reason for hiding the truth from
the police and his daughter. He was also hiding it from himself, blotting out
the memory of the crime and projecting it on a false target, thereby purging
himself of guilt and shame.
Freud called parricide the
‘principal and primal crime of humanity as well as of the individual’. He
recognized it as ‘the main source of the sense of guilt…and the need for
expiation…’. He wrote ‘it can scarcely be owing to chance that three of the
great masterpieces of literature of all time—Oedipus Rex of Sophocles,
Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov—all
deal with the same subject, parricide’. Freud pointed out that in these
masterpieces ‘the motive for the deed, sexual rivalry for a woman, is laid
bare’.23
To what extent Koba’s
hatred of Vissarion may have had roots in the Oedipal complex rather than in
the abuse he suffered from his father is difficult to say. It may appear
logical to suggest that Koba’s motive for the murder was revenge for the
beatings he had suffered as a child, for his crippled arm, and for the
mistreatment of his mother. But what seems to be obvious often turns out to be
quite misleading. Freud suggested that the main symptoms of neurosis in young
men are sexual impotence and a ferocious hatred of their father, and that these
symptoms are inter-related. A man exhibiting these symptoms cannot approach a
woman sexually and usually finds a wife only after his father’s death.24 Koba
does not seem to fit this description, since he got married two years before
the murder of his father. But his relationship with his young wife was
peculiar: he rarely visited her, and she was forever waiting for him to return
home from his secret journeys.
They had no children
during the first two years of their marriage. It is perhaps significant that
their first child was born two years after the murder of Vissarion. There is no
evidence that prior to his marriage Koba ever fell in love, or that he had a
tender relationship, or even a female companion. Sexual incapacity and the
inability to form emotional attachments—common afflictions of fanatics and
criminals—may have lurked behind his hectic life of expropriations, service in
the Okhrana and party intrigues.
A person with a
battered-child past, who was brutally abused by his father, usually manages
later in life to blot out and psychologically exclude his father in order to
function. Such exclusion is often possible when the hated father stays away,
which creates the illusion of his death. But if a man with a battered-child
past suddenly encounters his father, he no longer can exclude him
psychologically, and in extreme cases he may ‘exclude’ him by homicide.25
Such an extreme situation may have arisen when Koba encountered Vissarion in
Telavi, and the murder may have become for him a matter of psychological and
sexual survival.
Soon after the murder of
Vissarion, Koba visited Gori to inspect a tunnel that Kamo’s band had dug under
the Gori state bank for a planned robbery.26 While Koba was in Gori
his benefactor, priest Koba Egnatashvili, was murdered. The priest’s body was
found in his home, lying in a pool of blood. Vano Muradeli, a prominent Soviet
composer and a native of Gori, recalled years later that ‘Suspicion concerning
the murder fell upon Koba. He had come to Gori from Tiflis just for that day.
There was talk among us in Gori that Koba seemed to have learned the truth
about how this kind and loving priest was related to him.’ (Like many other
inhabitants of Gori, Muradeli believed that Egnatashvili was Koba’s true
father.27) The Gori police questioned Koba, but ruled out his
involvement in the murder. To the policemen in this small provincial town it
must have been inconceivable to suspect Koba of having anything to do with the
murder of the priest— according to rumors his real father—who had treated him
with kindness and love, and generously helped in his upbringing and education.
For them to suspect Koba of this dreadful deed would have defied all common
sense. They could not have realized that common sense had very little to do
with the world in which Koba lived.
After the traumatic events
in Tiflis in 1890 Koba rejected Vissarion as his abusive father and accepted
Koba Egnatashvili as his true father. In postulating this new origin for
himself Koba planted a psychological time bomb. All father-son relationships
are ambivalent, but in Koba’s case, the ambivalence ran very deep. Even though
as a boy Soso may have chosen the nickname Koba as a symbolic act of denying
that Vissarion was his father and accepting Koba Egnatashvili as his father
substitute, in 1906 he suddenly assumed the pen name ‘I.Besoshvili’ (son of
Beso). ‘Son of Beso’ felt a strong need to identify with his murdered father,
which may have been complemented by an equally strong need to hate
Egnatashvili, Vissarion’s rival and a convenient false target on which to
project guilt. Love transformed into hate is a not uncommon psychological
phenomenon.28 Such a transformation could have made it possible for
Koba to cast Egnatashvili in the role of Vissarion’s murderer. Koba, by
instigating the murder of the priest, could fantasize avenging the murder of
Vissarion, thus exculpating himself. Many of the crimes Koba was to engineer in
later years show such a distortion of reality. In Stalin’s mind, his crimes
invariably underwent precisely this kind of transformation, and he played the
alternating roles of the villain and the avenger of the crimes he himself had
committed.
The murder of Egnatashvili
attracted no more attention from the people of the Great Russian Empire than
that of Vissarion. But on 30 August 1907 another murder shocked Georgia and the
rest of the Russian Empire. Prince Ilia Chavchavadze, the great Georgian poet,
writer and an advocate of liberal reforms, was murdered by Koba’s close friends
Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Filip Makharadze, and several other assassins, instigated
by Koba. Chavchavadze was ambushed at the Black River crossing near Telavi, on
the road to his ancestral estate. Koba, as usual, did not personally take part
in the murder, but he ordered and directed it.29 (Sixty years later
Chavchavadze was canonized by the Georgian Orthodox Church, but the names of
his assassins were revealed only in 1987; their graves subsequently were
desecrated in a belated outburst of outrage over their crime.30)
The assassins may have
believed Koba’s assertion that Prince Chavchavadze was a ‘class enemy’. But
Koba was driven by hidden motives and impulses rooted in traumas of his
personal life. In Koba’s mind, Chavchavadze was connected to Vissarion: Stalin
inserted Chavchavadze’s poem ‘Musha’ in his childhood biography which suggests
that this poem had an important hidden meaning for him, reminding Koba of
Vissarion’s cruel fate, of the encounter with him in Tiflis in 1898, of
Vissarion’s murder, and prompting the projection of guilt on to the author of
the poem, thus arousing the need to ‘avenge’ the murder by projecting it on
this ‘false target’.
NOTES
1.
J.Iremaschwili, Stalin
und die Tragödie Georgiens, Berlin, 1932, p. 12.
2.
V.Kaminsky and
I.Vereshchagin, Detstvo i yunost’ vozhdia: documenty, zapiski, rasskazy, Moscow,
1939, p. 44.
3.
Svetlana Allilueva, Twenty
Letters to a Friend, New York, 1967, p. 158, fn.
4.
I.V.Stalin, Sochineniya,
vol. 1, Moscow, 1946–51, pp. 206–13. It is not clear whether the date, 8 March
1906, is Old Style or New Style. Stalin often changed dates to correspond to
New Style. If he changed the date here to correspond to New Style, this would
mean that Vissarion was murdered sometime in February 1906. If he did not
change the date to New Style, this would mean that Vissarion was murdered
either in February or early March 1906 Old Style.
5.
This article is not
available in its Georgian original, but the Russian word ubliudok with
which Stalin refers to the Duma means ‘bastard’ (nabichuari in
Georgian).
6.
Stalin, Sochineniya,
pp. 206–13.
7.
I.V.Alekseev, Provokator
Anna Serebriakova, Moscow, 1932, p. 160. Stalin, under the pen name I.
V.Alekseev, wrote this chapter, as well as the foreword to this book, which is
mostly a collection of Okhrana documents.
8.
Sigmund Freud, Freud:
Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, New York, 1969, p. 112; see also Walter C.
Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler, New York, 1972, p. 183.
9.
Stalin, Sochinenia,
vol. 1, pp. 214–29.
10.
Ibid., p. 214.
11.
Department of Police
Report no. 15179, dated 19 August 1909, and no. 97984, dated 19 April 1913,
citing a copy of a Tver Okhrana report no. 245, dated 21 March 1913. On file at
the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. All copies in the author’s
archive.
12.
Interview with Nugzar
Sharia, Sag Harbor, NY, 1972.
13.
See Chapter 32 below for
the murder of Trotsky.
14.
Taped testimony of Vasily
Rudich. See Chapter 36 below for the murder of Mikhoels.
15.
See Chapter 36 below for
the murder of Mikhoels.
16.
See Chapter 15 below for
the murder of Kamo.
17.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, p. 202.
18.
I.Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
Moscow, 1974, pp. 91f.
19.
V.D.Bonch-Bruevich, quoted
in Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo, p. 62.
20.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
pp. 126, 157, 165.
21.
Alexander Orlov, Tainaya
istoria stalinskikh prestuplenii, New York/Jerusalem/Paris, 1983, pp.
323–35. Orlov cites an example of what kind of people Stalin selected as his
point men: they exhibited a doglike devotion to him and accepted his statements
as divine revelations.
22.
Lavrenty Beria, K
Voprosy ob istorii bolshevitskikh organizatsii v Zakavkazie, Leningrad,
1936, p. 40. See also R.Arsenidze, interview, on file at the Radio Liberty
Committee; copy in the author’s archive.
23.
Sigmund Freud,
‘Dostoyevsky and Parricide’, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, vol. XXI, (1927–31), London, 1961, p. 183.
24.
Sigmund Freud, Moses
and Monotheism, New York, 1939, pp. 98–101.
25.
See Thomas A.Harris, I’m
OK—You’re OK, New York, 1973, p. 128.
26.
H.Montgomery Hyde, Stalin:
The History of a Dictator, New York, 1971, pp. 71f., quoting Zhgenty and
Zhordania.
27.
Ludmila Kafanova, ‘O
velikom druge i vozhde’, Novoe russkoe slovo, 23 March 1977.
28.
See Freud, Dictionary
of Psychoanalysis, p. 112.
29.
J.Iremaschwili, Stalin
und die Tragödie Georgiens, p. 37ff. The fact that Stalin’s two close
assistants Ordzhonikidze and Makharadze took part in the assassination of
Chavchavadze confirms Stalin’s complicity in this murder.
30.
V.M.Gurgenidze (director
of the Archive of the Georgian SSR), ‘Ubiistvo Il’i Chavchavadze v arkhivnykh
dannykh’, in T. and E.Gudava’s article in Novoe russkoe slovo, 1 April
1988, p. 9, and Boris Gass, 15 March 1988, p. 4.
THE BETRAYAL OF THE AVLABAR
PRESS
On 29 March 1906 Colonel
Zasypkin, the new chief of the Tiflis Okhrana, arrested Koba on a Tiflis
street. Several Social Democrats saw Koba being escorted to the Okhrana
headquarters. They were surprised when he emerged from there a few hours later,
explaining that Zasypkin had made him an offer to become an Okhrana agent but
that he had refused. Sometime later Koba would claim that he had escaped from
prison.1
A year earlier, in April
1905 when Zasypkin had for the first time arrested and released him, Koba had
betrayed Stepan Shaumian and had promised to provide Zasypkin with information
about the location of an underground press where Tiflis Mensheviks printed
illegal leaflets.2 Koba did not provide this information for almost
a year. The press was producing a large amount of subversive literature, which
alarmed Zasypkin and, having arrested Koba for the second time, he demanded the
promised information. Koba had learned the location of the press shortly before
that second arrest on 29 March 1906 when, following the unification of the
Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, Koba’s friend Mikha Tskhakaya had joined the
entirely Menshevik Tiflis party organization, and was put in charge of a
laboratory that produced explosive devices. Tskhakaya moved the laboratory to
the location of the press, which was in the Avlabar section of Tiflis. Koba
learned through Tskhakaya where the press was and bought his freedom by
revealing its whereabouts to Zasypkin.
After receiving this
information, Zasypkin promoted Koba to the status of agent of the Tiflis
Okhrana.3 Zasypkin also agreed to Koba’s taking a trip to Stockholm,
where the Fourth Party Congress was to open on 11 April 1906. Shortly after his
release by Zasypkin, Koba left for St Petersburg and from there proceeded to
Stockholm.
Koba told Zasypkin that
Mikha Tskhakaya maintained contact with the press and the laboratory through
his mistress, Nina Aladzhalova.6 Zasypkin arrested Aladzhalova and
accused her of involvement in terrorist activities, which could mean the death
penalty. She was frightened and agreed to become an Okhrana informer. Zasypkin
in return promised her and her lover, Tskhakaya, immunity from prosecution. He
ordered her to move to an apartment overlooking the Avlabar press and to help
the Okhrana identify people visiting it. In his report to his superiors in St
Petersburg, he stated that ‘the most experienced surveillance agents were
ordered to begin observation…’.7 But Zasypkin had to admit to ‘one
unforeseen, meaningless occurrence…involving one of the surveillance agents who
unexpectedly ran into a person under observation…’. The agent, not knowing how
to take precautionary measures and, proceeding several steps, turned around and
noticed the subject under surveillance staring intensely at him.’8
Zasypkin added that the agent had reported this episode to him and that he had
decided to act promptly.
On 15 April 1906 Captain
Yulinetz and a detachment of gendarmes and Cossacks searched the small
one-storey building and discovered a deep well with a side tunnel leading to
‘vaulted underground quarters’ with printing presses and a laboratory with
explosives. In his report, Zasypkin talked of ‘a fantastic conspiracy…on a
grandiose scale, with bombs, infernal machines and forged documents…’.9
He expressed regret that ‘none of the residents of this printing plant had been
apprehended. A day or two later the surveillance agent who had been identified
by his subject was killed on the street by the revolutionaries.’ In conclusion,
Zasypkin stated that ‘thanks to the surveillance, the entire Social Democratic
organization and documents establishing the connection between the said
printing plant and laboratory were seized’ at the party meeting in the
editorial offices of Elva, the Georgian Menshevik newspaper.10
The Russian press gave
this operation front-page coverage, describing it as an important Okhrana coup
and a serious blow to the revolutionary movement. The director of the
Department of Police, A.T.Vasiliev, submitted a report to the interior
minister, P.N.Durnovo, who in turn reported the event to the prime minister,
Count Witte.11
In all, 26 people were
arrested, including Tskhakaya and Aladzhalova. These two were kept in prison
for a month and a half and then released. The other 24 Georgian Mensheviks were
kept in prison for 20 months and on 24 December 1907 sentenced to various terms
of exile. Shortly after his release from prison, Tskhakaya went abroad and
joined Lenin in Geneva, where he remained until the February 1917 Revolution.
Meanwhile Aladzhalova stayed in Tiflis.
Tskhakaya and Aladzhalova
were the only comrades of Stalin whom he did not destroy during his rule.
Tskhakaya suffered from severe megalomania and told everyone who cared to
listen that he was the greatest revolutionary who had ever lived. Stalin
allowed him the rare luxury of dying a natural death in a mental asylum.
Trotsky was to wonder why Stalin spared Tskhakaya the fate of his other
comrades—the firing squad or Siberian exile. ‘Tskhakaya managed to outlive
himself’, Trotsky remarked.12
As for Aladzhalova, she
managed to outlive even Stalin. After the February Revolution she was arrested
by the Georgian Menshevik Government and accused of being an Okhrana agent.
When Soviet troops occupied Georgia in 1921 she was released from prison.
During Stalin’s rule she served in many party and government positions in
Georgia. In this respect, she shared the privilege of many former Okhrana agents
whom Stalin patronized during his rule and ‘kept on the hook’, blackmailing
them with
documents from Okhrana
archives. She retired with a lavish pension and a large, prestigious apartment
in Tbilisi (the former Tiflis, renamed during Stalin’s rule). After Stalin’s
death, she published a four-page recollection in which she presented her
version of the Okhrana raid on the Avlabar press, explaining that shortly
before the raid she had moved into an apartment overlooking the press. The
gendarmes, she wrote, broke into this apartment, knocking on her door and
announcing the delivery of a telegram. She stated that despite a thorough
search they had found nothing incriminating, but had nevertheless arrested her.
Her tale had a happy ending: ‘After a month and a half I was free’, she wrote.13
Three decades after the
Okhrana raid on the Avlabar press, Stalin, too, presented his own fanciful
version of the events: he started to claim that he had ordered the
establishment of the Avlabar press in 1903 from his prison cell in Batum and
that it had been operated under his leadership until its liquidation by the
Okhrana.
NOTES
1.
R.Arsenidze, ‘Iz
vospominanii o Staline’, Novy zhurnal, no. 72, June 1963, p. 75. See
also Lev Trotsky, Stalin, New York, 1941, p. 447.
2.
‘Shkola Filerov’, Byloe,
no. 3 (25), pp. 66ff.; quoted in Edward Ellis Smith, The Young Stalin: The
Early Years of an Elusive Revolutionary, London, 1986, pp. 165ff. Zasypkin
recounted the events leading to the raid on the underground Avlabar press at
the hearings, in November 1909, of the Department of Police special commission
headed by Major-General A.V.Gerasimov, which was gathering information on ways
to improve the Okhrana’s effectiveness.
3.
Zasypkin reported to St
Petersburg that he received information about the Avlabar press from an
‘agent’. See his report in ‘Shkola Filerov’, p. 66; quoted in Smith, The
Young Stalin, pp. 119, 165.
4.
Istoricheskie mesta
Tbilisi, 1944, p. 119, quoted in H.Montgomery
Hyde, Stalin: the History of a Dictator, New York, 1971, p. 72, fn.
5.
See Smith, The Young
Stalin, p. 395, fn. 343.
6.
Okhrana Report no. 53–c,
dated 14 March 1911, on file at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
7.
‘Shkola Filerov’, p. 66ff.
8.
Ibid.
9.
Ibid.
10.
Ibid.
11.
Avlabarskaya nelegalnaya
tipografiya, Tbilisi, 1954, pp. 74ff.
12.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
60.
13.
Avlabarskaya nelegalnaya
tipografiya, pp. 60–3.
THE HOTEL BRISTOL
Before traveling to
Stockholm in April 1906 to attend the Fourth Party Congress, Koba stopped
briefly at St Petersburg. He went to the Okhrana headquarters and offered to
provide information about the congress. In line with standard procedures, the
St Petersburg Okhrana reported Koba’s offer to the chief of the Okhrana Foreign
Agency, Arkady Mikhailovich Garting, whose responsibility was to gather
information on the activities of revolutionaries abroad. The Foreign Agency had
very few personnel. It received support, in the form of agents sent from the St
Petersburg or the Moscow Okhrana, only on important occasions, such as when the
observation of a socialist congress or a conspiracy abroad required the
strengthening of the services in western Europe.1 The Okhrana knew
about the departure of the Social Democratic delegates for the Stockholm
congress. The St Petersburg Okhrana saw in Koba’s offer the opportunity to send
this informer to attend the congress and work with Garting.2 At this
moment, Garting was very interested in information about the Stockholm
congress. He arranged for an Okhrana officer to travel to Stockholm to escort
Koba to a rendezvous with him. The officer and Koba agreed to travel to
Stockholm separately to avoid being seen together, to meet there in the lobby
of the Hotel Bristol, and from there to proceed to meet Garting.3
Koba arrived in Sweden
with a passport bearing the name ‘Ivan Ivanovich Vissarionovich’.4
This passport had been fabricated at the Avlabar press, which had facilities for
such forgeries.5 The Swedish border police recorded that ‘Ivan
Ivanovich Vissarionovich, a journalist’ intended to reside at the Hotel Bristol
during his stay in Stockholm. The Stockholm police, as was customary, followed
up on this information by checking at the hotel and recorded that
Vissarionovich had not registered there.6 Koba indeed was not
staying at this expensive hotel. He never went beyond the lobby, where he met,
as planned, his Okhrana contact who led him to Garting.
Garting,
né Avraam Gekkelman, was born around 1860 into a well-to-do
Jewish family in the town of Pinsk, near the Russian-Polish border. He was
admitted to a Russian gymnasium at Pinsk—one of the few Jews who managed to be
included in the low quota allowed for Jewish students. After graduating, he
enrolled at the Geological Institute in St Petersburg, where he joined a
student revolutionary group and was arrested. During his interrogation, he
agreed to turn informer and was released. In 1883, he became an agent of the St
Petersburg Okhrana, taking the codename ‘Landezen’. His fellow students soon
began to suspect him of collaborating with the Okhrana, and he left for Riga,
where he enrolled at the Polytechnic Institute. There, too, he was suspected of
collaboration with the Okhrana, and in 1884, he fled to Switzerland and
enrolled at the Zurich Polytechnic Institute. In May 1885, he became an agent
of the chief of the Okhrana Foreign Agency in Paris, P.I.Rachkovsky. In 1890,
he was granted the title of ‘Honorary Citizen’ for his betrayal of the
‘People’s Will’ group in Paris that planned to
assassinate Tsar Alexander
III. In 1892, he was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church in Wiesbaden,
Germany, and adopted the name Arkady Mikhailovich Garting. His godfather was
the Secretary of the Russian embassy in Berlin, Count N.K.Muraviev, later to
become the Russian foreign minister. Garting married Madeline Palot, a Catholic
woman from a prominent Belgian family. From 1900 to 1902, he was the chief
Okhrana resident in Berlin, where he recruited a number of agents, among them
Lenin’s close friend Dr Yakov Zhitomirsky. In June 1905, Garting was appointed
chief of the Okhrana Foreign Agency.7
In April 1906 Garting
recruited Koba. The Stockholm Fourth Party (Unity) Congress opened on 11 April 1906.
Koba claimed to represent the ‘Burchalo Social Democratic organization’, but
the Congress’s Credentials Commission established that no such organization
existed. Lenin asked the Menshevik delegation ‘not to object’ to Koba’s
presence at the congress ‘as a participant with advisory status’. The
Mensheviks, wishing to avoid disagreements with the Bolsheviks, accepted the
arrangement. Koba was registered under the alias ‘Ivanovich’.8
(Again, he did not choose this name by accident—it was Vissarion’s patronymic.)
At the congress Lenin
declared that the revolutionary tide was rising and that therefore ‘the party
should recognize guerrilla raids by fighting squads as party policy that is
acceptable in principle’. The Mensheviks strongly objected, stating in their
resolution that ‘classless layers of society, the criminal elements, and the
jetsam of the urban population have always used revolutionary upheavals for
their own antisocial goals, and the revolutionary people have had to undertake
extreme measures against the bacchanalia of stealing and pillage’.9
(The Georgian Mensheviks initially did not support their Russian comrades on
this point, and cooperated with the Bolsheviks for some time.) The Menshevik
resolution was approved by a vote of 68 to 4, one of the dissenting votes being
Lenin’s. Koba, as a non-delegate, did not vote. During the debates on the
agrarian question, Koba joined a small group of delegates who advocated
distribution of land among the peasants. As he had done shortly after
Vissarion’s murder in his articles on agrarian reform, Koba defended the social
class of peasants, to which his father and he officially belonged. On the
agrarian question, he disagreed even with Lenin, who advocated nationalization
of the land. The Mensheviks were for ‘municipalization’ of the land, that is,
ownership of the land by local municipalities.
Despite the resolution
against guerrilla raids, Lenin set up a secret group consisting of L.B.Krasin,
A.A.Bogdanov and himself to direct armed robberies as a ‘simple way of
replenishing the cash register’.10 Lenin introduced Koba to Krasin
and Bogdanov as a successful ‘expropriator’, who, together with Kamo, had
provided him with money. Koba promised that he and Kamo would deliver more
money. Lenin also told Koba that he had sent Kamo to St Petersburg to take part
in a planned expropriation.11
In his Okhrana report to
Garting, Koba described the debates at the congress and listed its
participants.12 He did not mention Lenin’s plans for robberies and
his own role in them. Returning from Stockholm, Koba stopped briefly in St
Petersburg to see Kamo, who had joined the ‘Maximalist’ (extreme left-wing)
faction of the Left Social Revolutionary Party. Kamo was involved in a scheme
to expropriate money from banks and assassinate high government officials. Koba
found Kamo learning to master a new bomb that had been invented by two of
Lenin’s friends, the engineer Leonid Krasin and Professor M.M.Tikhvinsky. Lenin
had great hopes for this bomb, writing with his usual
underscoring that it would
become ‘a necessary part of popular armaments’.13 Having
learned from Kamo about the robberies and assassinations planned by the
Maximalists and Bolsheviks, Koba reported this information to the St Petersburg
Okhrana, signing his report with the codename ‘Ivanov’. He had used the same
codename at Tammerfors four- and-a-half months earlier.14
During Koba’s brief
presence in St Petersburg, Kamo murdered ‘Volodka’, one of the members of the
Bolshevik-Maximalist group, claiming that Volodka was an Okhrana informer.
After murdering him, Kamo threw his body into the Neva.15 It was
never established that Volodka was an Okhrana informer, however, and the facts
that he was murdered while Koba was in St Petersburg and that Kamo was the
murderer are suggestive. Koba was in the habit of accusing others of what he
himself was guilty of, and Kamo hated informers and blindly believed everything
Koba told him. The accusation against Volodka probably came to Koba’s mind
during his presence in St Petersburg, and the murder was his way of purging
himself of the guilt he felt for providing information to the Okhrana.
When the chief of the St
Petersburg Okhrana, General A.V.Gerasimov, received a report by the informer
‘Ivanov’ about the Maximalists’ criminal plans, he attached great importance to
this information and brought it to the attention of M.I.Trusevich, the director
of the Department of Police.16 Trusevich was alarmed and ordered the
Okhrana to find a source confirming Ivanov’s report. This order was received by,
among others, Colonel A.M.Eremin, the acting chief of the Kiev Okhrana
temporarily substituting for Colonel A.I.Spiridovich, who had been seriously
wounded in a terrorist attempt on his life.17 Eremin reported to
Trusevich that he had arrested a member of the Maximalist group, a certain
Solomon Ryss, who offered to become an informer and expose the assassinations
and armed robbery schemes of the Maximalists if he were released. Trusevich
ordered Eremin to arrange Ryss’s bogus escape from a Kiev prison and to bring
him to St Petersburg so he could personally interrogate him. In June 1906 Ryss
‘escaped’. He left together with Eremin by train for St Petersburg. Trusevich
hoped to use Ryss to check agent ‘Ivanov’s’ report, but Ryss intended to
mislead Trusevich and help his Maximalist friends to carry out their plans by,
as he put it, ‘wagging the Okhrana by the nose’.18
The summer of 1906 was a
difficult period in the history of Russia. The country was in turmoil. An
attempt to advance toward parliamentary democracy failed. The Constitutional
Democrats Party (Kadets), the largest Duma faction, proposed legislation that
was designed to break up large estates of nobles and to distribute the land
among peasants, with nominal compensation to the landlords. They also demanded
the formation of a cabinet responsible not to the Tsar but the Duma. The
Menshevik faction supported this demand, while the tiny Bolshevik faction, on
Lenin’s insistence, opposed it. Lenin agitated against the participation of the
Social Democrats in the proceedings of the Duma. To Lenin’s delight, the Tsar
dissolved the Duma, and its deputies issued an appeal to the Russian population
to protest by refusing to pay taxes or serve in the army. To aggravate the
crisis, the Social Revolutionary Party, the Esers (or SRs), issued their
‘Manifesto to All Russian Peasants’, calling for insurrection.
On 21 July 1906 the Tsar
appointed P.A.Stolypin as prime minister. Kamo and his ‘fighting squad’ of
Bolsheviks and Maximalists took note and set off a large explosion in
Stolypin’s dacha. Stolypin narrowly escaped death, but his son and
daughter were
maimed. The same fighting
squad then attacked a money transport in Fanarny Lane in St Petersburg. Since
Solomon Ryss had provided no information on either terrorist act, and since the
report of the informer ‘Ivanov’ was at odds with Ryss’s informa-tion, Director
Trusevich began to suspect Ryss of double-dealing and ordered his arrest. Ryss
fled to the small Ukrainian coal-mining town of Yuzovka. He was arrested there
in April 1907 and hanged in January 1908.19
In September 1906, a month
after the attempt on his life, Stolypin signed a decree ordering court-martial
proceedings to punish terrorists severely for anti-government violence. Those
condemned for armed attacks were to be executed by hanging. (The noose was
quickly labeled ‘Stolypin’s necktie’.) This was the proverbial stick; but
Stolypin also offered a carrot by introducing, in November 1906, his agrarian
reform, designed to distribute parcels of land among peasants and thus
stimulate the emergence of a large and prosperous class of small landowners
with a vested interest in supporting the tsarist government. In a short while
Stolypin’s reforms began to pacify the country. The revolutionary tide began to
ebb.
After the attempt on
Stolypin’s life, Kamo hurriedly left St Petersburg for Tiflis in August 1906.
Koba was waiting there with a plan for creating a purely Bolshevik ‘unit’ for
the expropriation of state funds.20 Kamo’s unit attacked a train at
the Chiatura rail junction in Georgia, hijacking 21,000 rubles. Koba set aside
15,000 rubles for Lenin and kept the rest for himself and Kamo. Kamo again went
to Finland to hand over the money to Lenin. Some months later, Lenin decided to
use Kamo for shipments of arms to the Caucasus. He insisted on armed uprising
and robberies and hoped that his call for it would be approved at the next
party congress, which was scheduled for April 1907 in Copenhagen.
Late in March 1907, Koba
left Tiflis for Copenhagen, where he again met Garting. He told Garting that he
was not sure about his chances of being admitted to the congress, because, as
in the previous year, he was not a delegate. On 24 April 1907 Garting wired a
report to his superiors in St Petersburg, stating that he had applied all his
efforts and ‘undertaken all measures’ to assure ‘the presence of the Foreign
Agency at the congress’. He added:
In
connection with it I have issued 1,000 francs to an agent for his traveling
expenses due to his efforts connected with the organization of the congress.
Today I sent him another 500 francs, following his request for additional funds
for travel to London, although there is no guarantee that he will be able to
take part in the congress.21
Koba indeed had unforeseen
expenses: the Danish king, in deference to his nephew, the Tsar, did not give
the Russian Social Democrats permission to hold their congress in Denmark. The
delegates went to Sweden, but the Swedish chief of police refused to allow them
to stay. He remembered all too well that the previous year he had had to raise
funds to buy return tickets for poor Russian socialists. Chased out of Sweden,
the hapless delegates proceeded to Oslo, but the Norwegian government was just
as unwilling to allow them to hold their congress there. Koba went to Oslo
together with the rest of the delegates, and Garting followed them there.22
Finally, the British socialists secured
permission for their
Russian comrades to hold their congress in London. For the trip there Garting
gave Koba 500 rubles.
Among the participants at
the London congress were two Okhrana agents. One was Dr Yakov Zhitomirsky, a
close friend of Lenin’s, who headed the Bolshevik émigré organization
in Europe and had the status of a fully accredited delegate. The other was one
of the four non-delegates admitted to the congress at Lenin’s insistence. Lenin
made a proposal to ‘adopt without discussion’ a resolution granting these four
non-delegates ‘advisory status’. The Menshevik leader Martov shouted from his
place in the presidium, ‘I would like to know who is being granted advisory
status. Who are these people, where do they come from, and so forth?’ Lenin
replied evasively, ‘I really don’t know, but the congress may rely on the
unanimous opinion of the Credentials Commission.’ The Mensheviks did not want
to quarrel over what seemed a minor point and granted Lenin’s request. They had
no idea that Koba and the three other non-delegates, L.B.Krasin, A.A.Bogdanov
and Maxim Litvinov, were members of Lenin’s secret group, who, in defiance of
the party resolution banning armed robberies, were planning new expropriations.
The London congress again passed a Menshevik resolution against all types of
violence. As at Tammerfors and Stockholm, Koba registered under the alias
‘Ivanovich’.23
Koba provided Garting with
a report on the debates and the views of delegates on various issues. Garting
then sent Koba’s report to St Petersburg, describing his agent as a ‘Social
Democrat’ who had performed ‘quite valuable services’ for the Okhrana, following
the Okhrana’s strict rule of never mentioning the names of its agents. Garting
recommended an award for his agent of 1,500 rubles, a large sum at the time.24
In London, Koba met for the first time Maxim Litvinov, a man mentioned in
Okhrana documents by his real name, Meir Vallakh, and several aliases:
‘Papasha’ (Daddy), ‘Finkelshtein’, ‘Felix’. His other alias, ‘Maxim Litvinov’,
would be the name he adopted for the rest of his life. After the London
congress, Litvinov, Krasin, Bogdanov and Koba went to Berlin for a secret
meeting with Lenin. They discussed a large expropriation to be carried out by
Kamo’s band in Tiflis.25
NOTES
1.
A.T.Vasiliev, The
Okhrana, London, 1930, pp. 38ff.
2.
For a similar example of
the St Petersburg Okhrana providing such support for the Foreign Agency, see
the report ‘Absolutely Secret’ of 13 May 1910, no. 125483. On file at the
Hoover Institution. Copy in the author’s archive. See also Vasiliev, The
Okhrana, pp. 38ff.
3.
See E.S.Holtzman’s
‘confession’ at the Kamenev-Zinoviev trial (in Chapter 25 below and in
H.Montgomery Hyde, Stalin: the History of a Dictator, New York, 1971,
pp. 338ff).
4.
The name is mentioned in a
police record in the Stockholm City Police Archive. Copy in Edward Ellis
Smith’s archive; see The Young Stalin: the Early Years of an Elusive
Revolutionary, London, 1968, pp. 176, 396, ref. no. 363.
5.
The Okhrana seized several
passports and passport blanks at the Avlabar press and in the offices of the
Georgian Menshevik paper Elva during the raid on 15 April 1906. See S.Meglakelidze
and A. Iovidze, ‘Revolutsia 1905–1907 gg.’, Novoe vremia, St Petersburg,
27 April 1906, p. 780. Also see Novoe vremia, St Petersburg, 22 April
1906, cited in Smith, pp. 164–7. Early in April 1905 Mikha Tskhakaya traveled
to London to attend the Third (Bolshevik) Congress, carrying a passport
manufactured, according to Kamo’s biographer, ‘by Kamo’s own hands’.
(I.M.Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo, Moscow, 1974, p. 37.) But it is
unlikely that the passport had been made by Kamo,
since his forgeries tended to be crude. Tskhakaya was in close contact with the
Tiflis Mensheviks and he probably obtained his passport from their Avlabar
press and provided Koba with a passport from the same source. It is highly
unlikely that the Okhrana would provide its obviously non-Russian agents with
passports bearing a distinctly Russian name like ‘Ivan Ivanovich
Vissarionovich’.
6.
Stockholm City Police
Archive. A copy of the archive record is in Smith’s archive; see Smith, The
Young Stalin, London, 1968, p. 176 and fn. 363 on p. 396. See also
H.M.Hyde, Stalin, p. 76, fn.
7.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. VII, Moscow/Leningrad, 1925, p. 322; also vol. I, p. 327, and vol. III,
pp. 75 and 494.
8.
G.I.Uratadze, ‘Moi
vospominaniya’, p. 140, On file at the Hoover Institution, cited in Smith, p.
396, fn. 363a.
9.
‘Chetvertyi
(obyedinitelnyi) syezd RSDRP, April 1906 goda: protokoly’, pp. 262–7 and 336f.
10.
Lev Trotsky, Stalin,
New York, 1941, p. 99, quoting G.Alexinsky and N.Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife.
11.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
pp. 61ff.
12.
Garting received reports
on the congress from two agents, Dr Yakov Zhitomirsky and Koba. Both reports
were, as was usually the case, unsigned by the agents. On file at the Hoover
Institution. See also Hyde, Stalin, p. 82, fn.
13.
Lenin, Polnoe sobranie
sochinenii, vol. XI, Moscow, 1958,–65, p. 269. Also Dubinsky- Mukhadze, Kamo,
pp. 61f.
14.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
Burtsev’s testimony, vol. 1, pp. 311f.
15.
V.D.Bonch-Bruevich, quoted
in Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo, p. 62.
16.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
Burtsev’s testimony, vol. I, pp. 311f.
17.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. VII, p. 420.
18.
Ibid, pp. 310–12.
19.
Ibid.
20.
Boris Souvarine, Stalin:
A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, London, 1939, p. 99.
21.
Garting’s report no. 152
dated 24 April 1907 (Old Style) on file at the Hoover Institution; see also
Smith, pp. 183 and 397, fn. 375b.
22.
See Chapter 27 below for
how the Oslo trip appeared in Piatakov’s ‘confession’ at his show trial in
January 1937.
23.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
90.
24.
Garting’s ‘top secret’
report no. 225, dated 26 May 1907 (Old Style) to the director of the Department
of Police. On file at the Hoover Institution; see also Smith, pp. 186f and 397,
fn. 387.
25.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
108.
THE GREAT TIFLIS BANK ROBBERY
After the London congress
in April 1907 Lenin summoned Koba, Litvinov, Krasin and Bogdanov to Berlin
because of extraordinary developments.1 At the end of 1906 Kamo and
Litvinov paid a large sum of money for arms but failed to smuggle them to the
Caucasus. Their yacht Zora with the arms shipment had been swept into
shallow waters and sank off the Rumanian coast of the Black Sea. Kamo was
arrested by the Rumanian police. The director of the Department of Police,
Trusevich, announced that the Zora had been carrying ‘no less than 2,000
rapid-fire rifles, 650,000 rounds of ammunition, many boxes of bombs and
grenades and a considerable quantity of illegal literature’.2 The
Russian government requested Kamo’s extradition, but the Rumanian authorities
released him. Litvinov urgently asked Lenin for money to buy a new shipment of
arms, and this was the reason for the meeting in Berlin. The decision reached
was for Koba and Kamo to stage a massive expropriation in Tiflis in the summer
of 1907.
At the time of the
meeting, the Central Committee was in the hands of the Mensheviks. They
strongly objected to armed robberies, so much so that the Georgian Mensheviks
decided to return to the Russian government 200,000 rubles that had been robbed
from the State Bank in the Georgian town of Kvirili. Garting sent a report to
St Petersburg stating, ‘Litvinov is here [in Paris]. He has an argument with
the Central Committee. It spent 40,000 rubles and does not want to give [the
money] back to him.’3 Koba and Kamo had been involved in the Kvirili
raid.
Koba and Litvinov traveled
to Tiflis. Kamo joined them there in June 1907 and worked on preparations for
the planned raid. At that time, Koba was reporting information on underground
activities to his handler, the Tiflis Okhrana officer Mukhtarov, who was
responsible for a group of agents and reported their information to Colonel
Zasypkin, the chief of the Tiflis Okhrana. Koba told Mukhtarov that
revolutionaries were planning a robbery and promised to inform him of where and
when it would take place. In fact, he had no intention of doing so.4
only 91,000 rubles were in
small enough bills to be untraceable by the police. Krasin, Lenin’s ‘cashier’,
paid Bolshevik debts with part of this money and sent some of it to Koba.6
The remaining 250,000 rubles were in 500-ruble notes and had serial numbers known
to the police.
During the robbery Koba
was seen standing in the doorway of a house, smoking and watching the bloody
scene. Later in the day his Okhrana handler Mukhtarov and several other
officers brought Koba to one of their secret apartments on the outskirts of
Tiflis. Mukhtarov asked Koba why he had not warned him about the robbery. Koba
insisted that he had told Mukhtarov about the plan for the holdup of the money
transport in time to prevent it. Mukhtarov denied this and accused Koba of
deliberately deceiving him and of diverting the Okhrana’s attention. After a
long argument with Koba, the outraged Mukhtarov lost control and struck Koba in
the face. Not knowing whom to believe, the other Okhrana officers restrained
Mukhtarov. The testimonies of Koba and Mukhtarov were recorded and given to
Colonel Zasypkin who found it difficult to decide who was telling the truth. He
sent the testimony of both men to St Petersburg.7
The Tiflis bank robbery
was a front-page sensation. The serial numbers of the 500- ruble banknotes were
sent to banks and police departments all over Europe. The Ministry of the
Interior and the Department of Police sent a special commission to Tiflis to
investigate the case. Several months later, the commission had still reached no
decision. Mukhtarov was suspended from Okhrana employment, while Koba was
ordered to leave Tiflis for Baku and wait there for the decision on his case.
He left for Baku in July of 1907, taking with him his wife Keke and 20,000
rubles from the bank loot. Koba and Keke settled in a house belonging to a
local Muslim.
Toward the end of the
summer, Sergey Alliluev, who also had been ordered by the Okhrana to leave
Tiflis, visited Koba in Baku. Some three decades later, he wrote in his
memoirs, ‘I told Koba about my decision to go to St Petersburg and the
circumstances forcing me to take this step.’ Alliluev’s leaving conveniently
obscured these ‘circumstances’. Koba brought a bundle of money from another
room and gave it to Alliluev, saying, ‘Yes, you have to go. Shubinsky will not
leave you alone.’8 Shubinsky, a Tiflis Okhrana officer, was in
charge of purging the network of agents and informers in the Tiflis Okhrana,
while the St Petersburg investigators were purging and reorganizing the Okhrana
officers’ staff.9 Alliluev was one of the informers who became a
victim of the purge. The Tiflis bank robbery, just like the scandal of the
illegal leaflets planted by Koba and Lado in 1901, had implicated the Tiflis
Okhrana in a scandal involving its agents, informers and officers. The Tiflis
Okhrana was once again afflicted with ‘Samedov disease’.
Following the robbery,
many members of Kamo’s band escaped abroad, among them Alexander Svanidze,
Koba’s brother-in-law. He was to live in Vienna until the revolution.10
Kamo himself, after delivering the money to Lenin, stayed at Lenin’s dacha in
Finland during July and August 1907, ‘the two happiest months of his life’,
according to his biographer.11 At the beginning of September, he
went to Paris and then, together with Litvinov, to Belgium to buy arms and
ammunition for smuggling to Russia. Then he traveled to Bulgaria, where he
bought 200 detonators. Early in October, he arrived in Berlin with an
introductory letter from Lenin to Dr Yakov Zhitomirsky, the head of the Party
Central Bureau in Europe and an Okhrana agent. In his letter, Lenin asked
Zhitomirsky to find the best medical help to treat Kamo’s eye, which had been
injured in
an accidental explosion
while Kamo was manufacturing bombs. Zhitomirsky told his Okhrana handler,
Garting, everything he was able to learn from Kamo. On 22 October 1907 Garting
sent a coded telegram to Director Trusevich:
Kamo
in Berlin. Keeps in his room suitcase with 200 bomb detonators for
millions-of-rubles expropriation in Russia known only to Nikitich [Krasin] and
Vallakh [Litvinov]. Because of extreme difficulty in tracing the suitcase,
which is soon to be sent to Finland, the only solution is to search Kamo in
Berlin, to arrest him and to demand extradition. I ask your urgent reply so
that I have enough time to go there without delay for negotiations with
officials.12
Trusevich replied: ‘Go to
Berlin. Enter agreement with police president. Immediately on arrival telegraph
address.’13 In a subsequent report to Trusevich, Garting described
Kamo as a Georgian and stated that Kamo had a band of some 15 people ready to
stage the largest bank robbery in history. Garting added that Kamo had ‘found
somewhere in Russia a bank with fifteen million rubles in government funds;
part of it, about six million, is in gold’.14
Berlin’s Police President
von Yagov agreed to arrest Kamo. The Berlin police found a suitcase in his room
with 200 bomb detonators and a passport in the name of an Austrian citizen,
‘Dmitrius Mirsky’. When questioned, Kamo refused to reveal his real name.
Zhitomirsky was of no help, since he didn’t know it. In one of his reports
Garting wrote: ‘Kamo needed a good long range telescope for his gigantic
expropriation, and it is possible to conclude on the basis of some indications
that the target of this expropriation is located on a mountain, or that it is
possible to observe it from some elevation.’15 This was the only
useful information that Kamo had related to Zhitomirsky. Trusevich reported it
to Prime Minister Stolypin, who sent urgent messages to the finance minister,
Count V.N. Kokovtsev, trying to determine which bank Kamo had in mind. It was
imperative to determine the bank’s location as soon as possible, since Kamo had
told Zhitomirsky that his band was on its way there. Garting also sent a report
stating that Kamo had been involved in the Tiflis bank robbery and knew where
the stolen money was.16 Trusevich ordered the chief of the Tiflis
Okhrana, Colonel Zasypkin, to establish the identity of Kamo and the location
of the stolen Tiflis bank money. Zasypkin summoned Koba from Baku to Tiflis in
late November 1907.17 As a result of his meeting with Zasypkin, Koba
went to Europe with a passport, provided by the Okhrana, bearing the name
‘Gaioz Vissarionov Nizheradze’. This Georgian name on his passport would seem
more convincing to a border guard or a policeman looking at a man of Koba’s
appearance and with a Georgian accent than would the Russian name ‘Ivan
Ivanovich Vissarionovich’ on his other passport, which had been fabricated at
the Avlabar press.
Toward the end of November
1907 ‘the case of Mukhtarov and Dzhugashvili’ was turned over to the St
Petersburg Department of Police and then submitted for ‘Administrative Decision
of the Special Council of the Interior Ministry’.18 This was the usual
procedure for dealing with Okhrana officers and agents who were suspected of
involvement in provocations. Soon after Koba’s departure to Europe an Okhrana
officer, Alexander Bagratuni, arrived in Tiflis for his Christmas vacation. He
visited his friends in the Tiflis Okhrana headquarters, where he had served
before the purge that had begun
after the Tiflis bank
robbery. He inquired of his fellow officers how the Dzhugashvili- Mukhtarov
case had ended. ‘Dzhugashvili shows improvement’, one of the officers told
Bagratuni, ‘We’ll watch what happens next. If Dzhugashvili misleads us again,
we’ll have to seal him in an envelope.’ (‘Sealing in an envelope’ was an
Okhrana expression for sending people into exile.19)
At the time of Koba’s
departure for Europe, Lenin, who was in Finland, told his followers to cash the
stolen 500-ruble banknotes—no minor feat, since there were 500 of these
banknotes to be cashed. Having learned about Kamo’s arrest, Lenin was worried
that he, too, could be arrested as a common criminal and accomplice in the
robbery. He and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, fled from Finland by walking over
the frozen surface of a lake to the nearest shore. They arrived in Berlin on 22
December 1907.20 Lenin was met there by several of his followers,
among them Koba. He stayed in Berlin for three days. Then he and his wife left
for Switzerland. But the shadow of the Tiflis bank robbery pursued them even
there. Krupskaya was to recall that ‘the good Swiss burghers were frightened to
death by this incident. The only thing we heard talked about was the Russian
expropriators. They were discussed with horror around the dining table in the
boarding house where Ilyich and I usually dined.’21 Lenin kept
silent about his role in the robbery.
Having found safety in
neutral Switzerland, Lenin waited for his emissaries to cash the 500-ruble
banknotes. The cashing was to be done simultaneously in various European cities
in January 1908. Lenin put Maxim Litvinov in charge of this operation. Garting
was well informed by his agent Zhitomirsky about the people involved in the
cashing of the banknotes. He asked the police chiefs in various countries to
arrest anyone trying to cash the stolen banknotes. After their meeting with
Lenin, Koba and Litvinov left Berlin for Paris in late December 1907. Garting’s
agents reported that they saw Litvinov ‘in the company of two Armenians whose
identity they did not know’. Garting reported to Director Trusevich that
according to the description of his agents, ‘one of the Armenians was below
medium height, with brown hair and a wedge-shaped beard; he looked like a
Frenchman and was mean’. Garting continued: ‘Here the two Armenians lived in
the Hotel de Luxembourg, but because of a personal quarrel with the hostess
they left and their whereabouts proved impossible to establish, but it is known
that they had to take part in the cashing.’ Garting reported that the name of
the ‘mean Armenian’ was ‘something like Sharshadze’.22
To Garting’s French
agents, Armenians and Georgians must have been indistinguishable. The Georgian
name ‘Nizheradze’, used by Koba, sounded ‘something like Sharshadze’ to them.
The second ‘Armenian’ was probably Koba’s brother-in-law, Alexander Svanidze, a
member of Kamo’s band. Garting suggested that according to the information he
had received, the cashing planned by Vallakh (Litvinov) was to be done by a
large number of Armenians who had taken part in the Tiflis expropriation.23
In his next report to St Petersburg, Garting wrote that, according to
additional informa-tion from his French agents, the man with the
‘something-like-Sharshadze’ name was about 28 and had a heavily pockmarked
face—‘the whole face and nose heavily pitted’. This ‘pockmarked man’, wrote
Garting,
had 48 banknotes of 500
rubles each, and he had been assigned by
Litvinov to cash them, but, fearing that the police had seen him on the
street
together with Vallakh [Litvinov], he took the banknotes to a certain Melik
Osepian, who was also involved in the operation. Then, following the advice of
‘Victor’ and ‘Diadia Misha’ [Mikha Tskhakaya] he took these banknotes to a
person known to me, but so far it has been impossible to retrieve them.24
The ‘person known to’
Garting was Dr Zhitomirsky. Not knowing that Zhitomirsky was Garting’s agent,
Koba brought the 48 banknotes to him. Garting could not retrieve them without
blowing his agent’s cover. Garting concluded that ‘because of intelligence
considerations it will be necessary to delay the search of this person’. He
meant Dr Zhitomersky. Garting did not recognize Koba in the description of the
pockmarked Armenian supplied by Zhitomirsky and the French agents, but Koba
sensed the danger of an impending police crackdown and feared that he might be
caught in the dragnet. On 2 January 1908 he and his companion disappeared from
Paris. Garting reported to Trusevich that the ‘two Armenians’ left Paris two
days prior to the arrest of Litvinov.25
Litvinov was arrested on
January 4 1908. The next day Garting reported to Trusevich that
Vallakh
[Litvinov] was under surveillance for three days and nights and all railway
stations in Paris were guarded, for which purpose fifteen additional French
police agents were needed besides all the available agents of the Foreign
Agency. Vallakh has here a mistress, a medical doctor named Fanny Yampolskaya
who also disappeared from her apartment three days ago, but it was established
that Vallakh and Yampolskaya lodged together in another part of the city in the
Hotel Moderue.26
Garting also reported that
Litvinov had intended to go to London to cash there the Tiflis banknotes ‘with
the assistance of the old revolutionary Simon Kogan, whose sons have there a
colonial and money exchange shop’.
Litvinov and his mistress
Yampolskaya were arrested by the Paris police as they were about to board a
train at the Gare du Nord. ‘The police’, Garting stated, ‘found twelve
banknotes of 500 ruble denomination from the Tiflis expropriation…and this
fact, in the privately expressed opinion of a court investigator, is absolutely
sufficient for the extradition of Vallakh to the Russian government as a common
criminal, accused of an armed robbery.’27
But despite the material
evidence, the French minister of justice, Aristide Briand, ordered that
Litvinov and Yampolskaya be released from prison and expelled from French
territory rather than extradited to Russia. The Russian government was outraged
and protested. Garting reported to Trusevich that Briand was influenced by the
socialist leaders in the French Parliament and also by ‘pressure on him from
Vallakh’s lawyer, the influential socialist deputy Williams, and, finally, by
the fact that Vallakh has good personal relations with Ely Rubanovich, who is
known to the Department of Police’. Garting complained that the French
government’s official explanation for Litvinov’s release from prison, namely,
that the Russian ambassador’s written request for the extradition of Vallakh
was not received in time, was absolutely incredible, because no
government could submit a
request for extradition at the time of arrest. He concluded, ‘In the opinion of
all serious Frenchmen the act of the French Government in any case was
incorrect.’28 Garting nevertheless petitioned Trusevich to honor the
director of the Sûreté Générale and other French officials with
decorations and monetary compensation for their efforts in apprehending the
criminals.29
As to other attempts to
cash the 500-ruble banknotes from the Tiflis robbery, a number of Lenin’s
followers were arrested in the act on 4 January 1908, in Paris, Munich,
Stockholm, Geneva, Copenhagen, Sofia and Rotterdam. However, only a small
fraction of the total of 500 notes was recovered in these arrests.30
While others were being caught in the dragnet, Koba was on his way to Tiflis.
He stopped in Leipzig to change trains.31
According to Okhrana
reports, Lenin also took part in the cashing of the banknotes and for this
purpose traveled to Moscow, where he stayed until 11 February 1908. The chief
of the St Petersburg Okhrana sent two coded telegrams, dated 25 January and 9
February 1908, to the chief of the Moscow Okhrana. The first telegram stated
that ‘an unknown woman has to give Lenin ten thousand rubles for the 500-ruble
banknotes, having cashed them by private persons. On receiving this money Lenin
will go to Geneva.’32 The Moscow Okhrana received a photograph of
Lenin with a detailed description of his appearance: ‘not tall, stocky, short
neck, round red face, beard and mustache shaved, sharp eyes, bold, high
forehead, almost always carries in his hand a rainproof overall…’. On 1 March
1908 the chief of the St Petersburg Okhrana sent a second telegram to Moscow,
stating that Lenin, having received the money, had left Moscow for Geneva on 11
February (1908).33
By this time Koba was back
in Tiflis. He arrived there in the middle of January 1908 and learned that the
chief of the Tiflis Okhrana, Colonel Zasypkin, the man who had sent him abroad
to gather information about the banknotes and the identity of Kamo, had been
replaced by Colonel Alexander Mikhailovich Eremin.
NOTES
1.
See H.Barbusse, Stalin,
New York and London, 1935, p. 40. Stalin told Barbusse that he conferred with
Lenin in 1907 in Berlin on two occasions. See also Edward Ellis Smith, The
Young Stalin: the Early Years of an Elusive Revolutionary, London, 1968, p.
448.
2.
I.M.Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
Moscow, 1974, pp. 64–71.
3.
Ibid., p. 68.
4.
The events are described
in Rafael Bagratuni’s handwritten testimony, dated 8 May 1967, on file in
I.D.Levine’s archive. Copy in the author’s archive. In his testimony, Bagratuni
relates information he received from his relative, Alexander Bagratuni, a
gendarme officer who served in the Tiflis Okhrana until the end of summer 1907.
5.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
pp. 71–85.
6.
Ibid., p. 84.
7.
Rafael Bagratuni’s
testimony.
8.
S.Alliluev, Proidennyi
put’, Moscow, 1946, p. 182.
9.
Rafael Bagratuni’s
testimony.
10.
Svetlana Allilueva, Dvadtsat’
pisem k drugu, New York, 1967, p. 70.
11.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
p. 85.
12.
Ibid., p. 86.
13.
Ibid., p. 87.
14.
Ibid., p. 86.
15.
Ibid., p. 94.
16.
Ibid., pp. 94–6.
17.
I.V.Stalin, Sochineniya,
vol. II, Moscow, 1946–51, pp. 408ff.
18.
Rafael Bagratuni’s
testimony.
19.
Ibid.
20.
V.I.Lenin, Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii, vol. XV, p. 571, and vol. XVI, Moscow, 1958–65, pp.
680–86.
21.
N.K.Krupskaya, Reminiscences
of Lenin, Moscow and London, 1959, p. 174.
22.
Garting’s report no. 11,
dated 5/18 January 1908 (the two dates refer to Old Style and New Style). On
file at the Hoover Institution. Copy in the author’s archive.
23.
Ibid.
24.
Garting’s report no. 13,
dated 7/20 January 1908. On file at the Hoover Institution. Copy in the author’s
archive.
25.
Ibid.
26.
Garting’s report no. 11,
dated 5/18 January 1908. On file at the Hoover Institution. Copy in the
author’s archive.
27.
Ibid.
28.
Garting’s report no. 29,
dated 14/27 January 1908. On file at the Hoover Institution. Copy in the
author’s archive.
29.
Garting’s report no. 23,
dated 10/23 January 1908, and his report no. 29, dated 14/27 January 1908. On
file at the Hoover Institution. Copies in the author’s archive.
30.
A year later, a report to
Garting describing money obtained by Lenin’s cashier, Krasin, referred to the
possibility that the 200,000 rubles mentioned in the report may have been
obtained by cashing the money stolen in Tiflis in 1907. See report no. 127089,
dated 5 April 1909, of the chief of the Okhrana Foreign Agency. On file at the
Hoover Institution. Copy in author’s archive. See Chapter 8 for a more detailed
discussion of this report.
31.
Lord Moran, Winston
Churchill: the Struggle for Survival, London, 1966, p. 275. See also
Stalin, Sochineniya, vol. XIII, p. 124.
32.
Bolsheviki,
Moscow, 1918, pp. 237f.
33.
Ibid.
COLONEL EREMIN
Colonel Alexander
Mikhailovich Eremin assumed the post of chief of the Tiflis Okhrana at the
beginning of January 1908, at the age of 35. He was born in 1872 to a family of
Ural Cossacks and, after receiving a traditional military education in cavalry
and officer schools, was appointed in 1903 to the Corps of Gendarmes and served
as a staff officer in Okhrana Sections in several cities.1 In 1905
Eremin was appointed acting chief of the Kiev Okhrana, replacing Colonel Spiridovich,
who had been seriously wounded in a terrorist attack. This turned out to be a
fateful appointment, starting his rapid promotion within the Okhrana and
leading to his eventual encounter with Koba. Eremin’s involvement with the case
of the Maximalist Solomon Ryss in 1906 gave him the opportunity to meet in
person the director of the Department of Police, Trusevich, who transferred him
to the Special Section of the Department of Police at St Petersburg. The
Special Section was the Okhrana’s virtual nerve center, a clearing house for
its operations throughout the empire.
The Tiflis bank robbery
took place during his tenure in the Special Section. Eremin was involved in the
Tiflis bank robbery investigation, which made him the ideal man to participate
in the effort to foil the 15 million ruble bank robbery planned by Kamo. The
Special Section was called upon to locate the bank Kamo had in mind.2
On 29 November 1907 Prime Minister Stolypin sent the Special Section a list of
large banks in Russia with his handwritten instruction: ‘To the Special
Section. Determine through the chiefs of gendarmerie administrations the
landscape surrounding these institutions.’3 Among the 58 reports
received by the Special Section there was one noting that a state bank in the
city of Rostov-on-Don could be observed from a nearby mountaintop, and that a
‘large group of Armenians and Georgians’ had arrived in the city. Their arrival
was connected with the planned bank robbery.4
Russia; Mukhtarov was to
be exiled for three years in eastern Siberia.5 Eremin had the option
of arresting Koba or delaying his arrest and letting him continue to cooperate
with the Okhrana. The information in Koba’s file in the Tiflis Okhrana was
contradictory, so Eremin must have had doubts about Koba’s trustworthiness.
Some of Koba’s reports, such as the information he had furnished on the Avlabar
press, had made an important contribution to Okhrana intelligence operations.
But the provocation with the illegal leaflets, which had caused a scandal in
the Tiflis Okhrana in 1901, and Koba’s role in the Tiflis bank robbery must
have made Eremin wonder. He decided to delay Koba’s arrest but not to reinstate
him as a Tiflis Okhrana agent. Koba was to live in Baku and relay information
to Eremin through the chief of the Baku Okhrana, Captain P.I.Martynov.
Koba’s personal life may
also have played a role in Eremin’s decision. Koba’s wife Keke was in her last
months of pregnancy. The decision to postpone Koba’s exile until after the
birth of their first child may have been Eremin’s way of expressing recognition
of Koba’s service to the Okhrana. Keke gave birth to a son on 16 March 1908.
Koba named his son Yakobi (Yakov in Russian), but called him Koba (the Georgian
diminutive of Yakobi).6 Koba therefore named his son after himself
or, rather, gave the boy the name he had chosen for himself. Nine days later,
on 25 March 1908, the administrative decision in the Dzhugashvili-Mukhtarov
case caught up with Koba, and he was arrested, still carrying a passport in the
name of ‘Gaioz Vissarionov Nizheradze’. For the next six months, he remained in
Baku’s Bailov prison, waiting to be shipped to his next place of exile in north
European Russia.7 His wife and child left Baku and returned to her
family in Didi-Lilo.
During his half year in
the Bailov prison, Koba wrote several reports to Captain Martynov, who relayed
them to Eremin.8 Eremin was eager to determine Kamo’s identity, so
that the Russian government could file formal deposition papers for his
extradition from Germany. The German police sent a photograph of Kamo to the
Russian Foreign Ministry, which in turn passed it on to the Okhrana. On 22
April 1909, a month after Koba’s arrest, Colonel Eremin wired a telegram to St
Petersburg stating that ‘the man in the photograph is Kamo Ter-Petrosian, a
native of Gori’.9 If Koba was the one to identify Kamo, it was not
the first time he had betrayed his friend.
Kamo’s extradition took
time. Lenin’s friend Karl Liebknecht, a leading German Social Democrat,
retained a prominent lawyer, Oskar Kohn, a Social Democratic member of the
Reichstag. Kohn declared Kamo mentally unfit to stand trial. A team of German
psychiatrists was assigned to evaluate Kamo, who provided them with evidence of
his insanity: he ate his own excrement, pulled his hair, tore his clothes,
screamed, wept, and several times attempted suicide by hanging. Once, he was in
convulsions when prison guards cut the rope and revived him. The
court-appointed psychiatrists concluded that Kamo was afflicted with a neurotic
disease of a ‘hysterical type’ and cited the possibility of a ‘hereditary
predisposition’ and ‘degeneration’. They argued that Kamo’s ‘characteristic
behavior could not be simulated for a long period of time’ and only a truly
sick person in a state of mental retardation could behave in this way. The
Russian government requested Kamo’s extradition to Russia as a common criminal.
The German Social Democratic press and left-wing members of the Reichstag
loudly protested, accusing the German government of ‘a betrayal of Russian
revolutionaries to the tsarist hangmen’. Kamo was transferred to a psychiatric
hospital. In his report to Director Trusevich, Garting stated that the reason
for the transfer of Kamo was to make it possible
for him to ‘escape from
there with the help of German Social Democrats who are supporting him’.10
At that time Koba was in
the Bailov prison in Baku, where strange and bloody events were taking place.
Koba spread the rumor that a prisoner, a young Georgian worker, was an Okhrana agent
provocateur. Incited by Koba, the prisoners attacked the man, who had to be
rescued by the guards, who carried him out, blood-covered and almost lifeless.
Koba’s cell mate, Semeon Vershchak, a Social Revolutionary, recalled years
later that ‘the prisoners began asking one another who had known that the man
was an agent, a provocateur? Only much later did it become clear
that Koba had started the rumor. Whether the Georgian was indeed a provocateur
was never established.’11 Koba’s friend ‘Mitka the Greek’, a common
criminal who at that time proclaimed himself a Bolshevik, stabbed to death a
young Georgian. None of the prisoners knew the murdered man. It turned out that
Mitka himself did not know his victim, and admitted that Koba had told him that
the man was a police informer; Koba’s allegation was never proven. (Both events
were reminiscent of what had happened some six years earlier, in the Batum
prison, when Koba had ‘exposed’ an alleged informer who, he claimed, was posing
as a worker, thus provoking a murderous assault on the man.) Vereshchak pointed
to Koba’s strange trait: ‘the ability to quietly provoke others but to remain
himself on the sidelines’. Vereshchak stated that Koba had been involved in
robberies and was friendly with counterfeiters and expropriators who were
imprisoned together with him, but he was never tried for these crimes. Koba attacked
in the most odious manner the Social Revolutionary Party (Esers) for their
terrorist and expropriation activities.12 He attributed his own
crimes to ‘false targets’, Koba’s fundamental trait.13
In his denunciations of
the Mensheviks, Koba revealed an ‘absolutely peculiar hatred’. He called them
‘scoundrels’ and declared that in the struggle against the Mensheviks ‘any
means are fair’.14 Koba frequently stated that the Mensheviks were
mostly Jews. He stated that:
Lenin
is exasperated that God sent him such comrades as the Mensheviks. Really, what
kind of people are these Martovs, Dans, Axelrods! Nothing but circumcised
Kikes! And that old bitch, Vera Zasulich! All right! Go work with them! They
won’t fight and there is no rejoicing at their feasting, cowards and
shopkeepers! Don’t the workers of Georgia know that the Jewish people produce
only cowards who are useless in the fight?!15
A virulent anti-Semitism
was at the heart of Koba’s hatred of the Mensheviks. In a newspaper article
that he wrote shortly after his return from the London Congress in 1907 Koba
stated that ‘somebody among the Bolsheviks remarked in jest that since the
Mensheviks were the faction of the Jews and the Bolsheviks that of the native
Russians, it would become us to have a pogrom in the party’.16
Koba’s anti-Semitic record in later years suggest that this ‘somebody’ was Koba
himself and that he was not joking.
According to the
administrative decision of the Special Council, Koba was to be exiled to the
town of Sol’vychegodsk in the Vologda province in northern European Russia. On
29 September 1908 he left Baku in a group of convicts; by the end of October,
he arrived in Sol’vychegodsk. He stayed there until the end of June 1909, when
he ‘escaped’ with a
passport from Eremin. Captain Martynov, the chief of the Baku Okhrana, sent
Eremin a report on 30 September 1909 stating that Dzhugashvili had escaped from
his place of exile, arrived in Baku, and ‘now holds passport no. 982 in the
name of Oganes Vartanov Totomyantz, resident of the city of Tiflis, issued by
the Tiflis chief of police on 12 May of this year and valid for one year…’.17
Martynov did not arrest Koba in September 1909, because he knew that Eremin had
procured the passport for ‘Oganes Vartanov Totomyantz’ and sanctioned Koba’s
‘escape’. In May 1910, when this passport expired, Martynov supplied Koba with
another one in the name of ‘Zakhar Grigorian Melikantz’.18
An Armenian terrorist
group, the Dashnaks, were assuming growing importance in Eremin’s and
Martynov’s intelligence operations.19 Having lived for a long time
in Gori, Tiflis and Baku, all places with a large Armenian population, Koba
spoke Armenian fluently and could pass for an Armenian. Eremin and Martynov
hoped that Koba would be able to provide valuable information on the Dashnaks’
criminal activities. Eremin also hoped to find out from Koba more information
on the Armenian Kamo who had recruited some members for his band from among the
Dashnaks.
The German authorities did
finally extradite Kamo. On 19 October 1909, handcuffed and dragging his
shackles and chains, Kamo arrived at the Tiflis prison.20 Also on 19
October 1909 Captain Martynov sent Eremin a secret cable stating that Koba had
‘departed for Tiflis to participate in the conference’, after which he must
‘return to Baku and be involved at once in technical matters’. Martynov asked
Eremin to ‘telegraph [Koba’s] departure from Tiflis and the train number’.21
Koba was summoned by Eremin to identify Kamo. Koba stayed in Tiflis for two
days, living in a ‘secret apartment’, and he received there some Bolshevik
friends which led to a strange encounter. Eremin was paying him a visit when
one of Koba’s friends appeared. When Eremin had left, Koba’s friend asked,
‘What do you have to do with the gendarmes? Why was that gendarme here?’ Koba
replied, ‘He’s helping us in the gendarmerie.’22 In a way, Koba was
right: Eremin was helping him avoid exile in Sol’vychegodsk, while Koba was
helping Eremin tighten the noose around Kamo’s neck.
But Kamo was not destined
to be hanged. The European press demanded that the Russian government terminate
his case, and Prime Minister Stolypin received numerous letters and telegrams
from European human rights organizations. One of the wires read: ‘The League of
Defense for the Rights of Man and Citizen would consider it insulting even to
suspect the Prime Minister of Russia capable of using for evil ends the
unheard- of act of the Prussian police in regard to Ter-Petrosov.’23
Stolypin wrote in the margin: ‘What nonsense!’ In a letter to the Governor of
the Caucasus, he observed that the ‘democratic press of Europe with special
passion discusses the fate of Arshakov [a.k.a. Mirsky and Ter-Petrosian]… The
press attacks would definitely increase if Arshakov- Mirsky were to be
sentenced to death, and this would have a negative influence on Russian
interests in the question of the extradition of anarchists.’24
Indirectly, Stolypin was instructing the governor to prevent the execution of
Kamo.
Eremin, having completed
his investigation, submitted Kamo’s case to the Tiflis military tribunal. Each
of the six indictment articles called for the death penalty. But the tribunal,
pressured by the governor, took into account the opinion of appointed
psychiatrists that Kamo was ‘no doubt mentally ill’ and decided to set his case
aside, ruling, on 26 April 1910, that ‘Simon Ter-Petrosian has to be submitted
to an
examination and prolonged
observation in a psychiatric hospital.’25 On 20 September 1910 the
chief psychiatrist of that hospital, D.I.Orbelli, stated in his diagnosis that
‘Simon Ter-Petrosian at present suffers from hysterical psychosis evolving into
senility’, and that he was ‘definitely mentally incompetent to stand trial.’
The tribunal ordered Kamo moved to the psychiatric ward of the Tiflis prison.26
The Tiflis bank robbery
had not been much help to Lenin, who had a falling out with his ‘cashier’
Leonid Krasin. This squabble became known to the Okhrana. On 5 April 1909,
Garting received a report stating that Krasin had ‘obtained close to 200,000
rubles…possibly, this is the result of the cashing of the money stolen in
Tiflis… Lenin protested the violation of party rules and the snatching of party
money by Krasin.’27 But Lenin had other sources of money besides
Koba and Kamo. In July 1907 he took 6,000 rubles from a group of expropriators
under the command of Lbov, promising to deliver arms in return. He never
fulfilled his promise. In 1909 a member of Lbov’s band, ‘Sasha’, appeared in
Paris, demanding that Lenin return the money. Lenin offered to pay 500 rubles
in return for a 6,000 ruble receipt. Sasha complained to V.R.Menzhinsky (one of
the future chiefs of the Soviet Secret Police), who at the time opposed Lenin. Menzhinsky
formulated Sasha’s complaint in an open letter to the Bolshevik Center, stating
in part:
Comrades,
stop this game… You took the money… And these years, when the members of the
Lbov detachment had been caught one by one, when they were kept in prison,
hungry and in rags, for months waiting for help, or for execution…you, comrades
from the Bolshevik Center, used our money. Are you waiting for us all to be
caught and hanged…? I appeal to you, comrades, workers. Sasha.
Sasha never received the
money. Menzhinsky also attacked Lenin, accusing him of fraud.28
The fraud began in
December 1905 when Nikolay Shmidt urged the workers at the furniture factory he
had inherited to go on strike and burn the factory, which they did. Shmidt was
then arrested and later died in prison. According to the testimony of
M.I.Mikhailov, a lawyer and Bolshevik sympathizer, Shmidt bequeathed his estate
to the Bolsheviks. The court, ignoring this assertion, ruled that the legal
heir was Shmidt’s younger brother, a minor. Lenin sent his emissaries to
blackmail the boy into renouncing his claims to the inheritance in favor of his
two sisters, Ekaterina and Elizaveta. Lenin ordered two of his followers to
marry the Shmidt sisters and give him the money. The younger sister, Elizaveta,
agreed to marry the Bolshevik V.F.Lozinsky, alias ‘Viktor Taratuta’, and gave
all her money to Lenin. With the older sister, Ekaterina, Lenin encountered
problems. He sent Nikolay Andrikanis, a paralegal, to marry her. Andrikanis,
according to an Okhrana report, ‘entered into an intimate relationship with
Ekaterina Shmidt and lives with her in civil marriage, having made a
declaration to the Central Committee that he is ready to give up one third of
the inheritance. In view of this, the Central Committee decided to appoint a
three-member court, because the Bolsheviks wanted to press the matter and to
receive all the inheritance.’29 Early in June 1908 the three-member
court decided to divide Ekaterina’s inheritance equally between Lenin and
Ekaterina, who agreed to pay 125,000 rubles in cash. Another Okhrana report,
dated 19
November 1908 stated that
Lenin’s representatives had ‘received 45,000 rubles from the older sister,
Ekaterina, and will receive from her 80,000 rubles; besides, the Bolsheviks
will receive 500,000 francs from the younger sister’.30
Despite these riches
falling into Lenin’s hands, it probably never occurred to him to send Koba some
financial help when he was in prison and exile. Koba also suffered a great
personal tragedy. In the autumn of 1909, after his ‘escape’ from Sol’vychegodsk
and return to Baku, Koba lost his wife, Keke, who left him a
1-and-a-half-year-old son. The cause of Keke’s death has remained shrouded in
almost total silence; she was 23 years old. Koba’s childhood friend Iosif
Iremashvili wrote that Keke, being a very religious woman, begged Koba before
her death to arrange her funeral in accordance with the rites of the Georgian
Orthodox Church. Iremashvili recalled Koba saying after her death, ‘I promised
Keke that she would be buried in accordance with Orthodox rites, and I shall
keep my promise.’ Iremashvili wrote that the Svanidze family, too, ‘insisted on
a church burial’.31
This repeated insistence
on a burial according to Orthodox rites is puzzling. In Georgia, as well as in
the whole of the Russian Empire, cemeteries were under the jurisdiction of
various religious communities, which did not allow a burial without the
appropriate rites. Keke would ordinarily have been buried in accordance with
the rites of the Georgian Orthodox Church to which she belonged. Under only one
circumstance would she have been denied these rites and therefore burial in a
cemetery: if she had committed suicide. If Keke took her own life, that would
explain the almost total silence that has surrounded her death: her family had
to conceal the truth or she could not have been put to rest in a cemetery. This
custom found its way into poetry devoted to the fate of a suicide: ‘A doctor
glanced at the corpse fleetingly and allowed it to be buried somewhere, without
church eulogy, without incense, nothing that consecrates the grave.’32
Keke was buried near the
village of Didi-Lilo. Koba walked behind the coffin in the funeral procession,
carrying his little son. In his recollections, Iremashvili describes how Koba
grasped his arm and whispered to him, ‘Soso, this creature softened my heart;
now she is dead, and with her passing goes my last drop of feeling for
mankind.’ His hand on his chest, Koba continued, ‘Here, in here, everything is
empty, unutterably empty.’33
Koba returned to Baku
after the funeral. He was 30 now, a minor figure in the revolutionary movement.
Toward the end of 1909 his relations with the Baku workers became strained.
Members of the Baku Printers Union discovered that a leaflet distributed in the
name of a mysterious ‘Baku Social Democratic Committee’ had been printed by
Koba on a secret press run by the Okhrana. The president of the union accused
Koba of being an agent provocateur.34 The accusation was
echoed by leading Baku Mensheviks. ‘You are nothing but a provocateur!’
one of them charged Koba.35 The leader of the Baku Bolsheviks,
Stepan Shaumian, who had known Koba since 1905—and whom Koba had denounced to
the Okhrana on several occasions—openly accused him of cooperating with the
Okhrana.36 Koba’s difficulties came to a head when on 23 March 1910
the Social Democratic Party Committee in Baku called for a secret meeting to
look into the accusation that Koba was an Okhrana agent. The chief accuser was
Shaumian. Another charge involved a worker named Zharinov, who accused Koba of
having instigated an almost lethal attack on him. He had been nursed back to
health by peasants who had found his almost lifeless body.37 Koba
promised to come and face the charges,
but the house where the
meeting was to take place was surrounded by Okhrana officers, and all the
members of the ‘court’ were arrested. Finding themselves in prison, they
decided to carry the proceedings to an end, but, as one of them recalled dryly,
‘the prison conditions were not exactly suitable for that. The trial was
postponed.’38
Colonel Eremin, too, had
found himself in a difficult position; as Okhrana General A.Spiridovich
recalled some 40 years later: ‘Eremin worked brilliantly in the Caucasus. He
built an excellent agent network among the Social Democrats and broke up
revolutionary parties active there, especially the party of Dashnaktsatyun (the
Dashnaks). This turned the Viceroy’s circles against Eremin.’39 The
Dashnaks, Armenian nationalists, were supported by wealthy and influential
Armenian businessmen, many of whom had interests in the growing Baku oil
industry. They needed the Dashnaks as protectors against local Muslims and as
strikebreakers in their conflict with trade unions, which often instigated
unrest among workers in Armenian-owned businesses. The Viceroy of the Caucasus,
Count Vorontsov-Dashkov, had strong ties with wealthy Armenians. They pleaded
with him to recall Eremin from the Caucasus. The recall was masked by a
promotion: on 21 January 1910 Eremin was appointed Chief of the Special Section
of the Department of Police, the third highest post in the Department.40
General Spiridovich also recalled that when Eremin had been transferred from
Kiev in 1907, he ‘took with him to St Petersburg some of his secret
collaborators whom…he was unable to pass on to his successor’.41 But
while working in the Special Section Eremin could not personally deal with
agents and informers, because the Special Section did not have a budget to pay
for their services. The Special Section served as the center for coordination
of all Okhrana sections and did not have its own agents. Eremin could, however,
transfer Koba to an officer in the St Petersburg Okhrana, or could have passed
him on to Colonel I.I.Pastrulin, his successor. Eremin did neither, most likely
because he suspected Koba of double dealing and did not want to impose him on
someone who might think of Koba as a reliable agent.
Captain Martynov, chief of
the Baku Okhrana, was transferred from the Caucasus for the same reason as
Eremin—he, too, treated the Dashnaks harshly.42 Martynov’s transfer
put an end to Koba’s employment with the Baku Okhrana and to his Okhrana career
in the Caucasus. Before leaving Tiflis, Eremin ‘sanitized’ Koba’s file in the
Tiflis Okhrana, removing from it all documents that could point to Koba’s
employment as an agent.43 This was the usual procedure for an
Okhrana handler, whose responsibility it was to protect the cover of his agents
and informers. Only the handler who recruited them was supposed to know their
identity. Captain F.I. Galimbatovsky, who had replaced Captain Martynov as
chief of the Baku Okhrana, stated in his report to St Petersburg that because
of Koba’s ‘two escapes from the locality of his exile, as a result of which he
has not served a single administrative penalty imposed on him, I suggest that
the strictest measure of punishment be applied to him—exile for five years to a
remote district of Siberia’.44 This report had to pass through the
Special Section, and it was probably its new chief, Colonel Eremin, who
softened the recommendation. In the end, Koba was exiled to Sol’vychegodsk to
complete the remaining six months of his two-year prison term, arriving in
Sol’vychegodsk on 29 December 1910.
Koba’s clouded career in
the Caucasus ended, and the memory of him began to fade among the
revolutionaries of the region. Some of those who knew him were to recall that
he had been suspected of being an Okhrana agent provocateur and of being
the author of
anonymous Ohkrana denunciations. Others
remembered that ‘Koba was considered a common coward in Georgia, a man capable
only of provocations and of encouraging others to blackmail and expropriations,
hiding his identity and keeping out of danger.’45 Another
revolutionary recalled that Koba left ‘a strong sensation of something
abnormal, something strange, in all his words, movements, manners…a dry,
heartless and soulless robot in the shape of a man, who strives to destroy
something, only to put something else in its place.’46
NOTES
1.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. VII, Moscow/Leningrad, 1925, p. 339.
2.
I.M.Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
Moscow, 1974, p. 94.
3.
Ibid., p. 95.
4.
Ibid., p. 96.
5.
Rafael Bagratuni’s
testimony, dated 8 May 1967, on file in I.D.Levine’s archive. Copy in the
author’s archive.
6.
Yakov’s date of birth can
be found in the newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, Berlin, 24 July 1941.
The paper carried an article reporting the capture of Stalin’s son by German
troops at Liasno, near Vitebsk. He stated his date of birth as 16 March 1908.
See also Edward Ellis Smith, The Young Stalin: the Early Years of an Elusive
Revolutionary, London, 1968, p. 392, fn 262a, and Major A.N.Kolesnik,
‘Voennoplennyi starshii leitenant Yakov Dzhugashvili’, Voenno-istricheskii
zhurnal, December 1988.
7.
Krasny arkhiv,
no. 2, 1934, p. 3.
8.
See Martynov’s letters to
Eremin in Lavrenty Beria, K Vosprosy ob istorii bolshevitskikh organizatsii
v Zakavkazie, Leningrad, 1936, p. 90, and M.D.Bagirov, Iz istorii
bolshevitskoi organizatsii Baku i Azerbaidzhana, Moscow, 1946, pp. 101ff.
9.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
pp. 64ff. See photocopy of Colonel Eremin’s wire, dated 22 April 1908.
10.
Ibid., pp. 112–22.
11.
S.Vereshchak, ‘Stalin v
tur’me’, Dni, 22 and 24 January 1928.
12.
Ibid.
13.
For a discussion of this
kind of projection, see Walter C.Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler, New
York, 1972, pp. 183–5.
14.
Vereshchak, ‘Stalin v
turme’.
15.
R.Arsenidze, ‘Iz
vospominanii o Staline’, Novyi zhurnal, no. 72, June 1963, pp. 218–21.
16.
I.V.Stalin, Sochineniya,
vol. II, Moscow, 1946–51, p. 46ff.
17.
Beria, K voprosu ob…,
p. 90.
18.
Ibid. See also Okhrana
report no. 101145, dated 31 March 1911, and Smith, p. 230.
19.
See General
A.Spiridovich’s letter, dated 13 January 1950, to Vadim Makarov. In
I.D.Levine’s archive. Copy in the author’s archive.
20.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
pp. 124ff.
21.
Bagirov, Iz istorii…,
pp. 101ff.
22.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, p. 319 and fn 61.
23.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
p. 134.
24.
Ibid., pp. 134ff.
25.
Ibid., pp. 134–9.
26.
Ibid.
27.
Report of the chief of the
Okhrana Foreign Agency no. 127089, dated 5 April 1909. On file at the Hoover
Institution. Copy in the author’s archive.
28.
Roman Gul’, Dzerzhinsky,
New York, 1974, pp. 150–3.
29.
Bolsheviki,
Moscow, 1918, pp. 101ff, fn.
30.
Ibid.
31.
J.Iremaschwili, Stalin
und die Tragödie Georgiens, Berlin, 1932, p. 40.
32.
N.A.Nekrasov, poem Pokhorony
(Funeral), Selected Works, Gospolitizdat, Moscow, 1946, p. 85.
33.
Ibid.
34.
S.Vereshchak, ‘Stalin v
turme’.
35.
Leontii Zhgenti, Prichiny
revolutsii na Kavkaze i rukovodstvo, Paris, 1963, pp. 58–62.
36.
Ibid. See also N.Vakar,
‘Stalin po vospominaniyam N.N.Zhordania’, Poslednie novosti, 16 December
1936.
37.
Smith, The Young
Stalin, pp. 208–10.
38.
Zhgenti, Prichiny
revolutsii na Kavkaze i rukovodstvo, pp. 58–62.
39.
General Spiridovich’s
letter to Vadim Makarov, dated 13 January 1950 in I.D.Levine’s and the author’s
archives.
40.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. VII, p. 339.
41.
General Spiridovich’s
letter to Vadim Makarov, dated 13 January 1950, in I.D.Levine’s and the
author’s archives.
42.
See ‘Spisok obschego
sostava chinov otdelnogo korpusa zhandarmov, 1911’, p. 613; quoted in Smith, The
Young Stalin, p. 401, fn. 482.
43.
See Chapter 9. Colonel
Pastrulin, Eremin’s successor in Tiflis, discovered in 1911 that Koba’s file in
the Tiflis Okhrana archive was almost empty.
44.
Beria, K voprosu,
p. 225.
45.
H.Montgomery Hyde, Stalin:
the History of a Dictator, New York, 1971, pp. 71ff. Hyde quotes Zhgenti
and Zhordania, two leading Georgian revolutionaries.
46.
Arsenidze, Iz
vospominanii, p. 220.
KOBA AND MALINOVSKY
Shortly after Koba’s
arrival in Sol’vychegodsk, he sent a letter to one of Lenin’s supporters in
Paris, Issak Shwartz, addressing him as ‘Comrade Semeon’ and signing it ‘K.S.’
and in parentheses ‘Ivanovich’. As Koba anticipated, his letter was read and
copied by the Okhrana.1 On 24 January 1911 Koba sent a letter to a
Moscow Bolshevik, Vladimir Bobrovsky, stating, ‘I end my exile in July of this
year. Ilyich [Lenin] and Co. are enticing me to one of their centers, without
waiting for the end of the term (a legal person has more leeway), but if there
is a great need (I am waiting for their answer), then, of course, I’ll take
off.’ Koba was intentionally candid in providing his full name and address:
‘Sol’vychegodsk, Vologodskaya Gubernia, Political Exile Iosif Dzhugashvili.’2
This was because he wanted the Okhrana to know that he was the author of
this letter. He also lied: at this point ‘Ilyich and Co.’ knew nothing of
Koba’s intention to go to one of the ‘centers’.
As Koba anticipated, his
two letters attracted the attention of the Okhrana. The new director of the
Department of Police, Stepan Petrovich Beletsky, had ordered the Okhrana to
encourage divisiveness among the revolutionaries. Beletsky’s policy was in
complete agreement with Lenin’s splinter tactics but for the Okhrana’s own
reasons: Beletsky strove to ‘divide and conquer’ the revolutionary movement.
Lenin, on the other hand, wanted to usurp the party leadership. In the eyes of
Beletsky, the Bolsheviks were an extremist fringe group that was easily
infiltrated by Okhrana agents and could be controlled and used to weaken the
much larger and more influential Mensheviks. As he himself stated, Beletsky
wanted to split the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks so that ‘these two movements
could not unite and form a formidable power, which would be difficult to
defeat’.3
Copies of Koba’s letters
were sent to the chief of the Special Section of the Department of Police,
Colonel Eremin, who sent one copy of each letter to the recently appointed
chief of the Okhrana Foreign Agency in Paris, A.A.Krasilnikov. Arkady Garting
had retired in November 1909. He could not have transferred Koba to Krasilnikov
because he had lost contact with him in 1907, and Eremin’s covering letter
provided no information about Koba.4 Krasilnikov did not communicate
with agents personally, but left this to gendarmerie officers assigned to him.5
The copies of Koba’s two letters were placed in the archive of the Foreign
Agency in Paris.
information about his
arrests and exiles. Pastrulin then ordered his agents to gather information
about Koba from Tiflis revolutionaries, but they provided contradictory data
because memories of him had become blurred, since he had left Tiflis years
earlier and his role in the underground had always been confusing. In his
report, Pastrulin stated that, ‘according to secret information’ provided by
his agents, in 1903 Koba had ‘headed the Batum committee’ and was known there
under the alias Chopur, ‘Pockmarked’ in Georgian. This was indeed Koba’s
nickname; not among revolutionaries but among criminals.
Pastrulin also reported
that Koba ‘in 1906–1907 lived illegally in Batum, where he was arrested…’. In
fact, Koba lived in Tiflis in 1906–07. He was arrested not once but twice in
Baku, where he lived from the end of 1907 to the end of 1910. Pastrulin’s
agents knew nothing of Koba’s involvement in the Tiflis bank robbery in 1907,
but they reported to Pastrulin that Koba ‘in 1905 was arrested in Tiflis and
escaped from prison’. (In fact, Colonel Zasypkin had arrested and released him
twice after Koba had signed a pledge to collaborate with the Okhrana.) The fact
that information as important as an arrest and escape from prison was not
mentioned in Koba’s Okhrana file should have suggested to Pastrulin that Koba had
been an Okhrana agent and that his file had been ‘sanitized’ to protect his
cover. But if Pastrulin understood this, he could not mention it in his report:
it was contrary to Okhrana rules to commit to paper anything that might expose
an agent. On 14 March 1911 Pastrulin sent his report to the Special Section and
to the chiefs of the Moscow and Vologda Okhrana.6 On 18 May 1911 the
chief of the Vologda Okhrana, Colonel Konissky, stated in his report: ‘The
mentioned Dzhugashvili lived in the house of Grigorov in Sol’vychegodsk from
December 29 1910 to January 10 1911, but at present lives in the house of
Kuzakova. It is true that only six months remain to complete his exile (from
December 31 1910 to June 27 of this year).’7
Koba at that moment was in
a delicate situation that threatened to become unpleasant. The widow Maria
Kuzakova, in whose house he lived, finding herself pregnant, threatened to
accuse Koba of having raped her. The scandal was heatedly discussed by the
locals and exiles. The Okhrana, which supervised the conduct of the exiles,
intervened and helped Koba settle the case.8 Koba probably promised
to marry Kuzakova and convinced her to withdraw her charges. Towards the end of
1911 she gave birth to a son and named him Konstantin Kuzakov, but by then Koba
was no longer in Sol’vychegodsk. In the late 1920s, when Stalin was already the
most powerful man in Russia, Mariya Kuzakova brought Konstantin, then still a
teenager, to Moscow and asked Stalin to help her and the boy. Stalin
indirectly, through subordinates, advanced the professional and party career of
his illegitimate son, but avoided close personal encounters with him.9
After Stalin’s death, Kuzakov worked at the Moscow Television Station. His
striking resemblance to Stalin often frightened people, who thought that they
had encountered ‘a strange double of Stalin, looking at them with the somewhat
arrogant and impenetrable gaze of his yellow eyes…’.10 Throughout
his rule Stalin directed Kuzakov’s appointments to well-paid positions and in
1947 protected him from arrest, saying, ‘I do not see any reason for Kuzakov’s
arrest.’ In 1995 Konstantin Kuzakov, by then an elderly man in his mid-80s,
revealed his story for the first time and allowed publication of a 1935
photograph of himself, his mother, and his 3-year-old son.11
Koba’s exile ended on 27
June 1911, but he stayed in Sol’vychegodsk until 19 July 1911, before moving to
Vologda, to wait for Lenin’s response to his idea of establishing
‘Russian centers’ at St
Petersburg and Moscow. Lenin agreed to this idea in a letter sent via Sergo
Ordzhonikidze, a 26-year-old former medical orderly who had long been involved
with Koba and Kamo, and since 1902 had acquired a list of criminal credentials.
He came from a family of impoverished Georgian gentry. An orphan from early
childhood, he was unruly and a poor student. In 1902, when he was barely 16,
Ordzhonikidze left his native village for Tiflis, where he met Koba, Kamo and
Lado. He helped them print the leaflets, not suspecting that he was thereby participating
in an Okhrana provocation. He was arrested in the course of the investigation
of this case, but released shortly afterward as a minor. He took part in a
number of Kamo’s armed robberies, in the Tiflis bank robbery, and in the
assassination of Prince Chavchavadze. After the murder of the prince,
Ordzhonokidze went to Baku, where he was arrested and exiled to Siberia. He
then escaped to Iran, but soon returned to his native village. Fearing arrest,
he escaped abroad again and joined Lenin in Paris.
Ordzhonikidze’s arrival in
Paris coincided with Lenin’s learning about Koba’s letters to Shwartz and
Vladimir Bobrovsky. These letters convinced Lenin to set up the ‘Russian
centers’ that Koba had promoted in his letters. Lenin decided to send Koba,
Ordzhonikidze and Bobrovsky to Moscow to set up a ‘Russian Organizational
Commission’ there and select delegates to a Bolshevik conference that Lenin
planned to hold early in 1912 in Prague. According to Lenin’s plan, Koba was to
take part in organizing this conference, and Ordzhonikidze was to convey this
decision to Koba, who was still in Vologda.12
On his arrival in Moscow,
Ordzhonikidze was introduced by Cecilia Bobrovskaya, Vladimir Bobrovsky’s
sister, to a man by the name of Roman Malinovsky. Cecilia thought of Malinovsky
as a rising star in the workers’ movement, and admired him as ‘a commanding
person in all respects’.13 What she did not know was that Malinovsky
was an Okhrana agent. Ordzhonikidze revealed to Malinovsky Lenin’s plan to hold
a conference in Prague and to make Koba a part of the Moscow center. Malinovsky
reported this information to the chief of the Moscow Okhrana, Colonel
P.P.Zavarzin, who decided to prevent Koba’s arrival in Moscow in order to
promote Malinovsky to the position of the head of the planned ‘Russian center’
there and to ensure that Malinovsky would head the Moscow delegation to Lenin’s
conference in Prague. Zavarzin arrested Bobrovsky and several other Bolsheviks,
among them Aleksey Rykov (a future head of the Soviet government), who in 1911
advocated unification with the Mensheviks. In arresting Rykov, Zavarzin
followed the ‘divide and conquer’ strategy of the director of the Department of
Police, Beletsky. He also played into the hands of Lenin, who proclaimed that
the Prague conference would ‘wipe out forever the vestiges of formal unity with
the Mensheviks and would regenerate our revolutionary Bolshevik Party. I
underscore regenerate because Bolshevism has existed as a trend of
political thought and as a political party since 1903!’14 On 17
August 1911 Zavarzin sent a letter, marked ‘Absolutely Secret: Personal’ to the
chief of the Vologda Okhrana, Colonel Konissky, notifying him that ‘the money
for Koba’s traveling expenses will be sent to Peter Alekseevich Chizhikov,
Ishmetov Store, Vologda’.15
Zavarzin requested the St
Petersburg Okhrana to arrest Koba on his way to Moscow. Zavarzin could not have
known about Koba’s Okhrana ties. Nor did Koba have any inkling that Malinovsky
was about to emerge as his rival, not only in the party, but also in the
Okhrana. Malinovsky in many respects resembled Koba: some of the parallels
appear
almost uncanny. Malinovsky
was born in 1878 in the village of Gladova near the town of Plotsk in the part
of Poland that belonged to the Russian Empire. He was a Pole and spoke Russian
with a heavy accent; as a child he contracted smallpox, which left his face
heavily pockmarked; he committed robberies, for which he received prison
sentences in 1894, 1896 and 1899; he was also charged with a rape, sentenced
and imprisoned for it. His parents, whom he lost in early childhood, were poor
peasants. Malinovsky lived with distant relatives and wandered from one shelter
to another. After working for several years in Germany as a tinker, he returned
to Poland to work as a tailor’s apprentice. In 1902 he enlisted in the Russian
elite Izmailovsky Guards Regiment by resorting to a fraud: he impersonated a
cousin having the same name and used his identity card to conceal his own
criminal past and true age. He began his career as an Okhrana informer in 1902,
reporting on soldiers and officers of his regiment.16 After the
Russo-Japanese War he was discharged from the army. In 1906, he came to St
Petersburg and found a job as a lathe operator. The trade union movement was
just getting organized, and he rapidly advanced as an activist because of his
talent for demagoguery.17
Malinovsky began his
career in the Okhrana in 1906 initially under the codename ‘Ernest’ as a ‘shtuchnik’
(piecemeal informer) usually paid 25–50 rubles for each report. He was
‘arrested’ by the Okhrana several times during the period 1906–09 and released
for ‘lack of evidence’. These arrests enhanced his popularity among the
workers. Toward the end of 1909, however, Malinovsky’s position in the union became
shaky, as workers accused him of intrigues against the union chairman and
members. Malinovsky was also charged with several instances of embezzlement and
with being too extravagant, vain and quick tempered, but his arrest by the
Okhrana on 15 November 1909 saved him from being fired from his union posts.
After keeping him in prison for two months, the Okhrana terminated his service
and exiled him to Moscow. He was a victim of a general purge of the Okhrana
agent network in the wake of the scandal surrounding the exposure of the
infamous Okhrana agent provocateur Evno Azef, which shook the entire
police establishment.18
The party organization in
Moscow was in the hands of the Mensheviks, but there was also a small group of
Lenin supporters. On 13 May 1910 Malinovsky was arrested. He offered his
services as an informer to Moscow Okhrana interrogator V.G.Ivanov, who reported
the offer to Colonel Zavarzin. The colonel personally recruited Malinovsky as a
‘secret collaborator’, or salaried agent. By the end of 1911, Malinovsky had
submitted 57 reports in poor Russian, signed Portnoy (tailor). When
Malinovsky reported the arrival of Ordzhonikidze in Moscow, Zavarzin saw an
opportunity to advance Malinovsky to the top of Lenin’s organization and
ordered him to declare himself a Bolshevik.
Ordzhonikidze directed
Filip Goloshchekin, a dentist turned revolutionary who had just escaped from
exile, to deliver Lenin’s message and money to Koba in Vologda. Goloshchekin
arrived in Vologda and, together with Koba, left for St Petersburg. An exile,
M.M.Lashevich, wrote on this occasion, ‘Filia [Goloshchekin] has been here,
took Koba with him and left.’19 The chief of the Vologda Okhrana,
Colonel Konissky, sent cables to the Moscow and St Petersburg Okhrana, stating
that Koba had boarded a train on 6 September 1911 and that he was carrying a
passport in the name of ‘Peter Alekseevich Chizhikov’.20 Koba
decided to stay in St Petersburg for a while. Goloshchekin proceeded to Paris
to join Lenin there.
Koba could not have chosen
a more unfortunate moment for renewing his contact with the St Petersburg
Okhrana. On 5 September 1911, the day before Koba’s departure from Vologda,
Dmitry Bogrov, a member of the Social Revolutionary Party shot and killed Prime
Minister Stolypin in a Kiev theater. The Okhrana was in turmoil: not only had
it failed to protect the prime minister, but Bogrov also was soon revealed as
having been an Okhrana agent. This inflamed suspicions that the Okhrana was
involved in the murder. Various ‘hidden hand’ theories were born. The most
popular version insisted that Bogrov was a ‘blind tool’ in the hands of an
influential clique at the imperial court and of the empress herself, who were
purportedly dissatisfied with Stolypin’s policies.21 The other
conspiracy theory, propagated by ‘Jewish-hand’ theorists, focused on the fact
that Bogrov was a Jew, and claimed that his motive was to protest at Stolypin’s
reputed anti- Semitism.22
A more likely explanation
is found in the state of mind of the murderer. He had joined the Social
Revolutionary Party, had been arrested by the Okhrana and, fearing severe
punishment, had agreed to become an informer. When his friends suspected him of
ties to the Okhrana, he pleaded with them not to doubt his loyalty, all the
while despising himself for his cowardice and betrayal. Entangled in the
contradictory circumstances of his life, Bogrov was a very confused young man,
who decided with one shot to put an end to the emotional conflict that was
consuming him. In assassinating Stolypin, he desperately wanted to prove to
himself and to his friends that he was a true revolutionary.23 This
explanation has not convinced the proponents of conspiracy theories.24
The assassination of
Stolypin once again exposed the danger of uncontrollable Okhrana agents and
probably influenced Eremin’s decision to agree to Koba’s arrest. He could not
but notice the warning signs in Koba’s personality and in his checkered Okhrana
career. There was also another problem: at that time Eremin already knew about
Kamo’s escape on 15 August 1911 from the psychiatric ward of the Tiflis Metekh
prison. Kamo’s escape had been daring. The rope on which he lowered himself
from his prison window snapped, and he landed on the rocks of the Kura
riverbank, badly injuring himself and losing consciousness. He recovered and
with the help of friends escaped abroad. His bones not yet fully mended, he
knocked at the door of Lenin’s apartment in Paris. Lenin listened with
amazement to Kamo’s saga and advised him to restore his health by resting for a
while, and then, as soon as possible, to go to the Caucasus to organize a bank
robbery. As always, Lenin needed money.25
Eremin was aware of the
connection between Kamo and Koba, who arrived in St Petersburg three weeks
after Kamo’s escape. Eremin feared that Kamo’s escape might activate the Tiflis
bank robbery case and threaten his own career. But his immediate reason for
agreeing to Koba’s arrest was Colonel Zavarzin’s request to prevent Koba’s
arrival in Moscow by detaining him in St Petersburg. Koba visited Sergey
Alliluev, who had moved to St Petersburg after the Tiflis Okhrana purge in
1907. Alliluev noticed Okhrana agents near his home and told Koba about them.
Koba remained unperturbed.26 In the evening, he went to the Hotel
Rossiya, where he was arrested. He was brought to the Preliminary Detention
prison and remained there for three months. Then he was allowed to choose his
next place of exile for three years under open police surveillance for his
crime of ‘going over to an illegal status’.27 Koba chose Vologda and
received ‘free
passage’ along with
‘voyage document no. 23602’. On 14 December 1911 he took a train to Vologda.28
In his report to Director
Beletsky, Colonel Zavarzin stated triumphantly that ‘the arrest of Rykov and
his supporters in August 1911 had an impact that was outstanding in its
significance… All the representatives of the Leninist faction remain free and
in control of the situation.’29 Bolsheviks selected ‘Bina’
(Valentina Lobova) to represent them in Prague.30 Her husband,
Aleksey Ivanovich Lobov, a Bolshevik, was an important Moscow Okhrana agent.31
Zavarzin threatened him with the arrest of his wife and ordered him to feign
serious illness to prevent her departure for Prague. When Bina, not suspecting
anything, declined to go to Prague, Zavarzin ordered another Okhrana agent,
Kukushkin, to call a meeting of Moscow Bolsheviks, who selected Malinovsky as
the delegate to the Prague conference. Malinovsky cabled Lenin, requesting that
the opening of the conference be delayed until his arrival.32
Lenin greeted Malinovsky
warmly. He liked what he said were the qualities of this ‘good boy, not an
intellectual’.33 He later recalled that ‘Malinovsky had appeared at
the conference with the reputation of an outstanding leader of the labor
movement…a man who was much discussed in Menshevik circles, which regarded him
as one of their own, even calling him the “Russian August Bebel”.’34
(Bebel was one of the founders of the German Social Democratic Party and a
member of the Reichstag.) One of the delegates recalled that ‘Malinovsky was
tall, strongly built, and dressed almost fashionably. Deep, numerous pockmarks
gave his face a fierce expression, as if it had been through a fire…his yellow
eyes slid and jumped quickly from one object to another. He seemed too loud and
fussy. Talking to him made me feel tired immediately.’35
The Prague conference
opened on 6 January 1912 with only 13 delegates present. Three of them were
Okhrana agents: M.I.Briandinsky, A.S. Romanov, and Malinovsky.36 ‘We
had no people at all’, complained Lenin’s wife Krupskaya.37 Lenin
insisted on holding an election to the Central Committee of what he called ‘the
new Bolshevik Party’. He moved among the delegates, whispering the names of
people he wanted to get elected and pleading to ‘give a little vote to
Malinovsky…he has connections, and he is a working man’. Then Lenin collected
what he called secret ballots. Most of the delegates declared themselves to be
against Malinovsky, but Lenin soon leaked out the ‘confidential’ news that
Malinovsky had been elected. ‘Everyone was astonished’, one of the delegates
recalled.38 Lenin announced the members of the Central Committee:
himself, Zinoviev, Malinovsky, Shwartz, Goloshchekin, Ordzhonikidze and Elena
Stasova. After the vote, he proposed Malinovsky as the Bolshevik candidate to
represent the workers of the Moscow Gubernia, the second largest electoral
district in population, size and political clout, in the approaching elections
to the Fourth Duma. His proposal 39
was accepted.
Lenin’s complete break
with the Mensheviks became widely known and provoked an angry controversy. The
Okhrana intercepted a letter, dated 29 February 1912, in which an outraged
Menshevik wrote that Lenin’s conference was illegal: ‘In short, nine-tenths of
the party were absent… All the members are united against this usurpation of
the party banner… today a meeting was held with 150 people present; all, with
the exception of eight, agreed that this conference was illegal and that it was
necessary to protest it.’40 The Mensheviks appealed to the Second
Socialist International for arbitration, complaining about the illegality of
the Prague conference and demanding investigation of charges that
Lenin had been involved in
armed expropriations and that he had pocketed the loot. Lenin vehemently denied
these charges. The investigation was scheduled to start in August 1914, some
two-and-a-half years after the Prague conference, but the outbreak of the First
World War made this impossible.
After the conference,
Lenin ‘co-opted’ Koba as an ‘agent of the Central Committee’ without revealing
to anybody, except Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the hidden meaning of this appointment:
he sent Sergo Orzhonikidze to Vologda to instruct Koba to go to the Caucasus to
meet Kamo there and help him carry out an expropriation. Koba told Sergo
Ordzhonikidze that he was pleased by his appointment. On 24 February 1912
Ordzhonikidze sent a letter to Lenin. ‘I have seen Ivanovich and have a
definite understanding with him. He is greatly pleased with the turn of events
and greatly impressed.’41 Koba left Vologda for the Caucasus, where
he expected to meet Kamo. He appeared in Tiflis early in March 1912, but Kamo
was not there. He was in a Turkish prison, having been arrested in
Constantinople for illegal transport of arms to the Caucasus. The Turks soon
released him into the custody of the local Georgian priests, from whom Kamo
escaped to Bulgaria, where he was rearrested. A prominent Bulgarian
revolutionary, Blagoev, a friend of Lenin, engineered Kamo’s escape from
prison. Kamo loaded a small steamer with weapons and explosives and was on his
way to the Caucasian shores when the Turks again arrested him. This time Kamo
bribed his way out of prison, and at the end of summer 1912 he finally appeared
in Tiflis.42 By that time, Koba was no longer there.
Not finding Kamo in
Tiflis, Koba went to Baku, where he was investigated by the local
revolutionaries, who suspected him of being an Okhrana agent. They called a
secret meeting and invited Koba. An Okhrana agent, David Vissarionovich
Bakhradze, also known as ‘Nikolay Stepanovich Eriyuv’, who signed his Okhrana
reports with the codename ‘Fikus’, was present at this meeting and sent the
following report: ‘To Baku Okhrana Section. Yesterday the Baku Committee of the
RSDWP was in session. Dzhugashvili, who arrived from the center, and the
Committee member “Kuz’ma”, [S.Shaumian] and others were present. The
participants at the meeting accused Dzhugashvili of being a provocateur,
an Okhrana agent. Dzhugashvili responded with the same accusations against
them. Fikus.’43
Investigation of the
charges against Koba was entrusted to Boris Nikolaevsky, a prominent Menshevik
(and future émigré historian).
Nikolaevsky and Koba met at the home of a Baku Bolshevik, Lev Sosnovsky.44
Koba sat down far from the light so that his face could not be seen. He denied
that he was an Okhrana agent, but Nikolaevsky found his answers evasive. They
agreed to meet again but Koba did not show up, having left Baku by the end of
March 1912. Nikolaevsky noticed Okhrana agents following him, and was soon
arrested.45 Early in April 1912 Koba arrived in Moscow, where
Ordzhonikidze introduced him to Malinovsky. This was their first encounter and
Koba could not but notice some obvious similarities between himself and
Malinovsky: both their faces were heavily pockmarked; both had yellow eyes with
a quick, penetrating, almost predatory look, which made a memorable impression
on people; both spoke Russian with an accent. Soon Koba made another discovery:
he realized that Malinovsky was an Okhrana agent and that both of them made
treachery a way of life. Superficially, they immediately became close friends.
Koba visited Malinovsky’s apartment in Moscow several times and became friendly
with his wife and two sons. Once Koba came when only one of the boys
was at home. Koba talked
to him for some time, but suddenly took the boy by the shoulder and hit him on
the cheek, saying he should remember who was talking to him. Malinovsky was
baffled when his son told him about Koba’s outburst.46 Malinovsky
reported Koba’s and Sergo’s presence in Moscow to Zavarzin, who ordered
surveillance of both of them and sent a special report to Director Beletsky
with a copy of the Bolshevik platform for the forthcoming elections to the
Fourth Duma, which Malinovsky had borrowed from Sergo and copied for Zavarzin.
In his report Zavarzin asked Beletsky to order the arrest of Koba and Sergo,
but stressed that the existence of the platform was known only to them and
Zavarzin’s informer, and that the arrests and investigation of Koba and Sergo
had therefore to be conducted extremely carefully and not in Moscow because it
might expose his ‘secret central agent’.47
On 9 April 1912 Koba and
Sergo boarded a train leaving for St Petersburg. Zavarzin sent a cable there:
Urgent.
Petersburg. Personally for the chief of the Okhrana Section. Central Committee
Social Democrats Sergo and co-opted Koba departed from Moscow to Petersburg
from Nikolaev station, train no. 8. Accept surveillance data from agents
Andreev, Astakhov, Pakhomov… Liquidation is desirable, but must be done
exclusively by local ties without revealing Moscow sources. Colonel Zavarzin.48
To protect Malinovsky’s
cover, Zavarzin insisted that the arrests not be made in Moscow. While boarding
the train to St Petersburg, Koba noticed three ‘tails’, and realized that
Malinovsky had betrayed them. Without telling Ordzhonikidze, he slipped away
from him and the Okhrana agents. A few days after his arrival in St Petersburg,
Ordzhonikidze was arrested. (He was imprisoned for three years and then exiled
to Siberia, to be released only after the February Revolution.) After his own
arrival in St Petersburg, Koba moved into the home of Bolshevik Duma Deputy N.G.Poletaev,
who enjoyed parliamentary immunity, and lived there for several days, helping
Poletaev edit the first issue of the Bolshevik Pravda, which was
financed and controlled by the Okhrana.49 Director of Police
Beletsky wanted to strengthen the Bolshevik faction by enabling Pravda
to compete with the Menshevik Luch. The first issue of Pravda was
published on 22 April 1912; that very day, Koba was arrested and brought to the
St Petersburg Preliminary Detention Prison. A few days before his arrest, Koba
had written a letter to Klara Zetkin, a Polish Social Democrat and Lenin’s
friend, who lived in Paris. Koba learned from Ordzhonikidze that Lenin had
given Klara Zetkin some of the Tiflis 500- ruble banknotes. Koba wrote to her,
requesting that she transfer the party money she had been given for safekeeping
to the Central Committee, for financing the election campaign in the Fourth
State Duma. He did not sign the letter.50 Koba knew that Klara
Zetkin would show the letter to Lenin; he meant to remind Lenin that it was he
who had organized the Tiflis robbery and therefore should have a say in how the
money was spent. The letter was intercepted by the Okhrana and brought to
Eremin’s attention. On 20 April 1912, two days before Koba’s arrest, Eremin
sent a copy of the letter to the Okhrana Foreign Agency in Paris with a
covering note, stating that he could not identify the author of the unsigned
letter.51
Finding himself in prison,
Koba attempted to bargain his way out by betraying Kamo and accusing Shaumian
of planning an expropriation. On the basis of Koba’s denunciation, the Okhrana
sent the chief of the Tiflis Okhrana, Colonel Pastrulin, a cable stating:
‘Please, report immediately about the measures taken in connection with
Shaumian’s expected attempt to escape from exile and the arrival with stated
purpose of Kamo (Ter-Petrosian).’52 Pastrulin’s agents searched in
vain for Kamo in Tiflis. Then Pastrulin himself rushed to Baku with a large
retinue of officers and detectives, but Kamo was not to be found there either.
On 6 June 1912 Pastrulin cabled to Beletsky: ‘Simon Ter-Petrosian [Kamo] has
not been found in Baku.’53
The reopening of the
Tiflis bank robbery case threatened to expose Koba’s role in the robbery as
well as Eremin’s coverup of Koba’s criminal involvement in it. Eremin knew that
the author of the letter to Klara Zetkin was Koba. In his covering note to the
chief of the Okhrana Foreign Agency in Paris, he had lied when stating that he
did not know who the letter’s author was. In order to cover himself against the
possible charge of concealing information, he sent an ‘afterthought’ letter to
the chief of the Foreign Agency on 11 June 1912 in which he stated:
In
addition to the report of April 20 1912, no. 100007, the Department of Police
notifies Your High Excellency that the author of the document without signature
from St Petersburg might be Iosif Vissarionov DZHUGASHVILI, a peasant of Tiflis
Gubernia and province, village of Didi-Lilo, who was exposed as being
engaged in revolutionary activity in the ranks of the Russian Social Democratic
Workers’ Party, and who had been exiled from St Petersburg to the town of
Vologda under open police surveillance for three years, whence he escaped on
February 29 of this year, but on April 22 of this year Dzhugashvili was
arrested in St Petersburg.
The report was signed by
Eremin and co-signed by Vice-Director S.Vissarionov.54
Eremin’s uncertainty in
stating that Koba ‘might be’ the author of the letter to Klara Zetkin appears
furtive, in light of Koba’s imprisonment in St Petersburg. Koba had been in
detention for almost two months by the time Eremin sent this updated response,
although it would have been easy for Eremin to determine whether Koba was
indeed the author of the letter to Klara Zetkin. Besides, Eremin had a
seven-page report to the Okhrana, handwritten by Koba in prison a week before
Eremin had sent his updated covering letter, with information on the status of
the revolutionary parties and their leaders. In his report, Koba twice
mentioned money that Lenin had, but he called it money from the Shmidt
inheritance. He did not mention the Tiflis banknotes. Eremin ordered his
secretary to type two copies of Koba’s report, leaving out only Koba’s
complaint that Malinovsky was an untrustworthy Okhrana agent. Eremin sent one
copy to the St Petersburg Okhrana Section, where Ordzhonikidze was undergoing
interrogation: the arrests of Koba and Ordzhonikidze were related, since both
had been prompted by Zavarzin’s request. Moreover, Koba mentioned ‘Sergo’ in
his report as one of the leading Bolsheviks. Eremin sent the other copy of
Koba’s report to the chief of the Foreign Agency, Krasilnikov, together with
his 11 June 1912 covering letter stating that Koba ‘might be’ the author of the
letter to Klara Zetkin. This covering letter was attached to a
copy of Koba’s unsigned
report without mentioning his complaint againt Malinovsky. In his covering
letter, Eremin did not mention either this attached unsigned report or that
Koba was the author of it. Eremin was determined not to reveal that the
attached unsigned document was actually a copy of a report written by his
former agent, Iosif Dzhugashvili.
Koba’s report to the
Okhrana is a strange document. The way it is written makes it difficult to
recognize it as a report by an Okhrana agent. Were it not for a listing of
Bolshevik leaders, their addresses, assignments and responsibilities, the
document could pass for a partisan commentary on various Social Democratic
factions by a devoted member of Lenin’s organization. Entitled ‘Personnel
composition’, the list reads:
CENTRAL COMMITTEE consists
of seven members, among whom are known ‘Sergo’ and ‘Semeon’.
CENTRAL ORGANS: ‘Social
Democrat’ and ‘Workers’ Gazette’— Lenin, Grigory Radomyslsky [ZINOVIEV] and
Kamenev.
BUREAU OF FOREIGN ORGANIZATIONS.
‘Inesa’ Armand, Dr. Britman, Aleksey, Semashko and Vladimirsky.
TRANSPORT—in Leipzig, in
the hands of Tarshis (Piatnitsa).
BUREAU OF PARIS SECTION OF
FOREIGN ORGANIZATIONS
OF R.S.D. W.P.Aleksey
(lives in the apartment of Shatsky, 1 rue Lenereux), Valentin (Sorokin), lives
in Fonteray aux Roses, Chernov (Grechnev), lives at rue de Lolbiac, apartment
number not known.
CORRESPONDENCE with
Russian groups is in the hands of Lenin’s wife. (4, rue Marie-Rose.) The most
important Leninists live in Paris: Lenin, Grigory Radomyslsky, Yury Kamenev,
Mikhail Morozov, Semashko, Vladimirsky, Grechnev, Shapovalov, Zhitomirsky,
Aleksey, Yury Begzadian, Bogdan Zezulinsky, Isaak, ‘Nikolay Vasilievich’ and
others.55
Koba’s report must have
made Eremin wonder what kind of person his former agent was. On the one hand,
Koba provided valuable and detailed information about various party factions,
including the Bolsheviks. Out of seven members of the Bolshevik Central
Committee, he knew Lenin, Sergo Ordzhonikidze and Semeon Shwartz, and mentioned
only them. But as if he had forgotten that he was writing a report for the
Okhrana, Koba many times stressed with unmistakable admiration that Lenin’s
faction was ‘the most active and the strongest’, that ‘the Leninist party’,
‘the Party of Lenin’ was ‘the only party that has strengthened its position in
Russia and abroad’, and so on. Other revolutionary groups, especially the
Menshevik-liquidators, Koba treated with obvious disdain, stressing repeatedly
that they were ‘in a pitiful condition’. Koba in his report expressed contempt
for Trotsky, who ‘represents only literary power’. Eremin must have realized
that Koba’s allegiance was at this point not with the Okhrana, but with Lenin.
It was an allegiance that had its logic. In Prague, Lenin had co-opted Koba to
the position of an agent of the Central Committee, while the Okhrana had
arrested Koba twice in the course of less than a year and seemed unwilling to
promote him to a meaningful position. A year later, Eremin was to state in a
report to Director Beletsky: ‘After the election of Dzhugashvili to the Central
Committee of the party in the city of Prague he, having
returned to Petersburg,
went over into open opposition to the Government and broke completely his
connection to the Okhrana.’56
Eremin must also have
realized that in his report Koba had purposely avoided mentioning the stolen
Tiflis banknotes by making a crafty substitution: he referred twice to the
Shmidt inheritance, as if it, rather than the Tiflis banknotes, had been the
money he had in mind when writing to Klara Zetkin. In fact, Lenin had spent the
Shmidt inheritance years earlier.57
Although the typist who
copied Koba’s report corrected it here and there, some of his
non-Russian-sounding phrases remained intact. Following Eremin’s instruction,
the typist did not copy a part in which Koba complained about Malinovsky’s
misleading the Okhrana. Clearly, Eremin did not want the fact that Malinovsky
was an Okhrana agent mentioned anywhere, following the Okhrana’s strict rule to
protect its agents’ identity. But he kept Koba’s handwritten report, including
his complaint against Malinovsky, intact and placed it in Koba’s file in the
archive of the Special Section.58 One of the officers in the Special
Section, Lieutenant-Colonel Ivan Petrovich Vasiliev, learned about Koba’s
complaint regarding Malinovsky, and this was to have far-reaching consequences.
NOTES
1.
Koba’s letter was
intercepted by the Okhrana and a copy of it was sent to the Paris Okhrana
headquarters with covering letter no. 97373, dated 10 January 1911. On file at
the Hoover Institution. Copy in the author’s archive.
2.
Koba’s ‘Iosif’ letter was
intercepted by the Okhrana and a copy of it sent to the Paris Okhrana
headquarters with a covering letter #98570, dated 7 February 1911. On file at
the Hoover Institution. Copy in the author’s archive.
3.
See Padenie tsarskogo
rezhima, vol. III, Moscow/Leningrad, 1925, p. 286. See also Alexander
Kerensky, The Crucifixion of Liberty, New York, 1934, p. 246.
4.
Covering letter no. 98570,
dated 7 February 1911, sent with Koba’s ‘Iosif’ letter. On file at the Hoover
Institution. Copy in the author’s archive.
5.
See Padenie tsarskogo
rezhima, vol. VII, p. 359. The names of the officers assigned to
Krasilnikov were Dolgov, Ergardt, Liustikh and Likhovsky.
6.
Okhrana Report no. 101145,
dated 14 March 1911. On file at the Hoover Institution. Copy in the author’s
archive.
7.
Okhrana report no. 217
from the chief of the Vologda Province Gendarme Administration, dated 18 May
1911. On file at the Hoover Institution. Copy in the author’s archive.
8.
V.Rudich’s taped testimony
citing Olga Shatunovskaya’s statement that a commission of Old Bolsheviks
during the Khrushchev era investigated the rape case against Stalin at the time
of his exile in Sol’vychegodsk. See also S.Vereshchak’s articles, recounting
Stalin’s conversation with S.Surin, one of the exiles there and an Okhrana
agent, about his stormy relations with Kuzakova.
9.
Alexander Kolesnik, Mify
i pravda o Staline, Kharkov, 1991, p. 10.
10.
Ludmila Kafanova, ‘O
velikom druge i vozhde’, Novoe russkoe slovo, 24 March 1977, p.
29,
fn 10. See also Svetlana
Allilueva, Only One Year, New York, 1969, pp. 381ff.
11.
Evgeny Zhirnov,
‘K.Kuzakov—syn I.V.Stalina’, Argumenty i fakty, No. 39, 1995.
12.
I.M.Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Ordzhonikidze,
Moscow, 1963, pp. 74ff.
13.
T.S.Bobrovskaya, Provocateurs
I Have Known, London, 1931, pp. 26ff.
14.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Ordzhonikidze,
p. 74.
15.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, p. 321, quoting Zavarzin’s ‘Absolutely
Secret; Personal’ letter, dated 17 August 1911, to Colonel Konissky.
16.
See N.V.Krylenko, Za
piat’ let, 1918–1922 g., Moscow, 1923, p. 331; Ralph Carter Elwood, Roman
Malinovsky: a Life without a Cause, Newtonville, MA, 1977, p. 24; see also Vechernie
izvestiya Moskovskogo soveta, no. 91, 5 November 1918.
17.
A.E.Badaev, Bolsheviki
v gosudarstvennoi dume, Moscow, 1954, p. 156.
18.
On Malinovsky’s career see
Delo provokatora Malinovskogo, Respublika, Moscow, 1992. Also Paul
Sacardy, ‘Lenin’s Deputy: the Story of a Double Agent’, unpublished manuscript
on file at the Radio Liberty Committee; B.K.Erenfeld, ‘Delo Malinovskogo’, Voprosy
istorii, no. 7, 1965; Padenie tsarskogo rezhima, vol. VII, p. 374
and listed references; ‘Ot ministerstva yustitsii’, Vestnik vremennogo
pravitelstva, 16 June 1917; Bolsheviki, Moscow, 1918, p. X.
Evno Azef, an
engineer by profession, was the head of the terrorist arm of the Social
Revolutionary Party and a top-secret Okhrana agent. He masterminded many
terrorist acts, among them several assassinations of high government officials.
Driven by dark predatory impulses, Azef managed for many years to remain beyond
the suspicion of both the Okhrana and the revolutionaries. General A.A.Lopukhin
(to whom Koba and Kamo in 1905 had attributed their forged ‘Lopukhin Report’)
was outraged by Azef’s duplicity and confided to Vladimir Burtsev, a Social
Revolutionary journalist and self-appointed exposer of Okhrana spies, that Azef
was an Okhrana agent. Lopukhin was exiled for his exposure of Azef, who managed
to escape and died in anonymity in Berlin. His handler, chief of the St
Petersburg Okhrana, General Gerasimov, was forced to resign. The Azef scandal
resulted in a long and thorough investigation of Okhrana practices and in the
firing of many of its agents and informers. (It was in the course of this
investigation that Okhrana Colonel Zasypkin submitted the report about the
exposure and liquidation of the Avlabar press.) The Okhrana purge created a
vacancy for Eremin’s transfer to St Petersburg and Beletsky’s appointment to
the post of acting Vice-Director of the Department of Police. On Azef’s career,
see B.I.Gul’, Azef; see also Padenie tsarskogo rezhima, vol. VII,
p. 300 and listed references. On Lopukhin and Gerasimov see Padenie
tsarskogo rezhima, vol. VII, pp. 369 and 323 and listed references.
19.
Report of the chief of the
Vologda Gendarmerie Department no. 622, dated 14 October 1911, quoting
Lashevich’s letter, attached to Okhrana covering letter no. 97527, dated 25
February 1912, with enclosed copy of Zavarzin’s report no. 292791, dated 17
February 1912. On file at the Hoover Institution. Copy in the author’s archive.
20.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, p. 322.
21.
Yulian Semenov, a
prominent Soviet writer, suggested in a manuscript based on Okhrana documents
that Bogrov was a tool of the Okhrana. He told the author about his findings on
3 February 1988, in New York, in the presence of Ilia Levkov.
22.
This opinion was widely
held at the time.
23.
See Padenie tsarskogo
rezhima, vol. VII, p. 310 and cited references.
24.
‘Shkola filerov’, Byloe,
no. 3 (25), 1917.
25.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
Moscow, 1974, pp. 142–54. See also his book Ordzhonikidze, Moscow, 1963,
pp. 70–2.
26.
Anna S.Allilueva, Vospominaniya,
Moscow, 1946, pp. 107–10; Lev Trotsky, Stalin, New York, 1941, p. 135.
27.
Okhrana Report no. 102383,
dated 11 June 1912. On file at the Hoover Institution. Copy in the author’s
archive.
28.
Krasny arkhiv,
vol. 2 (105), 1941, p. 23.
29.
‘Bolsheviki i departament
politsii’, Russkoe slovo, 19 May 1917.
30.
Bolsheviki,
pp. 210ff.
31.
Ibid., p. 211 and cited
references.
32.
Bobrovskaya, Provocateurs,
pp. 26ff. P.P.Zavarzin, Zhandarmy i revolutsionery, Paris, 1930, p. 195;
‘Bolsheviki i departament politsii’, p. 1.
33.
V.I.Lenin, Polnoe
Sobranie sochinenii, Moscow, 1958–65, p. 36, in letter to Maxim Gorky.
34.
Delo provokatora
Malinovskogo, Moscow, 1992, pp. 49–53. See also
Lenin’s testimony before the Extraordinary Investigative Commission of the
Provisional Government, ‘Ot ministerstva yustitsii’, Vestnik vremennogo
pravitelstva 16 June 1917.
35.
A.K.Voronsky, The
Waters of Life and Death, London, 1936; quoted in Elwood, Roman
Malinowsky, p. 27.
36.
‘Bolsheviki i departament
politsii’. See also references under their names in Bolsheviki.
37.
N.K.Krupskaya, Reminiscences
of Lenin, Moscow and London, 1959, p. 216.
38.
Voronsky, The Waters,
p. 312; quoted in Elwood, Malinovsky, p. 27.
39.
Ibid.
40.
Okhrana Report no. 98536,
dated 16 March 1912, with an intercepted letter from ‘Grisha’ in Paris to
N.N.Silinskaya in Odessa, dated 29 February 1912. On file at the Hoover
Institution. Copy in the author’s archive.
41.
Krasny arkhiv,
no. 5 (78), 1936, p. 21.
42.
I.Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
Moscow, 1974, pp. 156–62.
43.
Dmitry Tabachnik,
‘Obyknovennyi provokator’, Rabochaya gazeta, Kiev, 27 March 1989. Also
‘Seksot’, Kaleidoskop, no. 323, 30 March 1989, pp. 6–9. The report had
been discovered in the Baku archive by G.A.Arutunov.
44.
Lev Sosnovsky was a
relative of the present author. A prominent Soviet journalist, he perished in
the Great Purges.
45.
Edward Ellis Smith, The
Young Stalin: the Early Years of a Revolutionary, London, 1968, pp. 252–6
and p. 403, fn. 535a.
46.
Medvedev, Let History,
p. 337 and fn. 88. Medvedev’s ‘famous Bolshevik in Moscow’ in 1912 can refer
only to Malinovsky.
47.
Ibid. See also Krasny
arkhiv, vol. 2 (105), 1941, p. 26.
48.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Ordzhonikidze,
p. 104.
49.
‘Bolsheviki i departament
politsii’. See also S.T.Possony, Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary,
London, 1966, p. 162, fn.
50.
Stalin, Sochineniya,
vol. II, p. 417. See also Smith, p. 257; Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo, pp.
156ff. The copy of Koba’s letter to Zetkin was apparently removed from the
Hoover Institution by an earlier researcher. When the author looked for it in
1974, both it and Eremin’s accompanying covering letter no. 100007, dated 20
April 1912, were missing from the archive. The only thing remaining was a
reference (to both the letter to Zetkin and to Eremin’s covering letter no.
100007) in Okhrana report no. 102383, dated 11 June 1912 and signed by
Vice-Director Vissarionov and the chief of the Special Section, Eremin.
However, some of the earlier researchers in the archive, including Stanford
professor S.T.Possony and his wife, had seen Koba’s letter to Zetkin and
remembered what it said about the Tiflis money.
51.
Covering letter no. 100007
of 20 April 1912. See previous reference.
52.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
p. 163.
53.
Ibid.
54.
Okhrana report no. 102383,
dated 11 June 1912. On file at the Hoover Institution. Copy in the author’s
archive.
55.
Covering letter no.
102383, dated 11 June 1912 and printed on the Special Section stationery, was
signed by Vice-Director S.Vissarionov and the chief of the Special Section,
Eremin. Attached are seven typewritten pages of Koba’s report to the Okhrana
(unsigned) with a penciled note ‘Spravka bez no. (reference without
number), 5/18 June 1912’. On file at the Hoover Institution. Copy in the
author’s archive.
Also see
Z.Serebriakova, ‘Stalin i tsarskaya okhranka’, in Sovershenno secretno,
no. 7, Moscow, 1990, p. 21. Serebriakova writes about two documents she found
in Soviet archives: (1) Stalin’s original handwritten statement, which includes
a complaint about Roman Malinovsky and which Eremin preserved in his office and
placed in Stalin’s file; (2) the shortened copy of the same report, which
Eremin sent to the St Petersburg Okhrana, where Sergo Ordzhonikidze was being
interrogated. Serebriakova found this shortened copy (without the complaint
against Roman Malinovsky) in Ordzhonikidze’s file. The other shortened copy
Eremin sent to the Okhrana Foreign Agency in Paris under the heading ‘Spravka
bez no., 5/18 June 1912.’
The report begins
with a brief summary of the ‘general condition’ of the Russian Social
Democratic Workers’ Party and praises the ‘Bolshevik-Leninist faction, the most
active and most united, remains the only one with some financial means, which
are left over from the Shmidt inheritance’. The report continues to downgrade
and ridicule all other factions of the Russian Social Democratic party’ and
praises the ‘Party of Lenin.’ The report ends with a list of leading
Bolsheviks, entitled ‘Personnel composition.’
56.
See Eremin’s report to
Beletsky in Chapter 10, below.
57.
On the Shmidt inheritance
see Chapter 7 above, and Bolsheviki, pp. 101 and 243.
58.
Z.Serebriakova, who found
the original in the Central State Archive, and a copy (from which Stalin’s
complaint against Malinovsky is missing) in Ordzhonikidze’s Okhrana file,
describes her discoveries in ‘Stalin i tsarskaya okhranka’. Serebriakova writes
that the original of Stalin’s report (which appears in published form as
‘Circular Letter No. 1 on the Final Composition of the Central Committee of the
RSDWP’ in Stalin’s Sochineniya, vol. II, p. 417) ‘miraculously survived
and is now discovered, moreover, in two archival deposits’. (That was the
handwritten version in the Central State Archive and the typed copy in
Ordzhonikidze’s Okhrana file.) ‘This alone proves Stalin’s ties to the
Okhrana’, Serebriakova writes.
Stalin’s report to
the Okhrana survived because Stalin redefined it when he found it in his St
Petersburg Okhrana file. He began to refer to it as his first circular letter
to the party. Stalin did not know that Colonel Eremin had shortened copies of
this report made and sent to the Okhrana Foreign Agency headquarters in Paris
and to Ordzhonikidze’s interrogator under the heading Spravka bez no..
The copy in Ordzhonikidze’s file was discovered by Serebriakova in 1990. How
Stalin’s report to the Okhrana survived is told in subsequent chapters, as is
the story of his Okhrana file.
THE ‘GREAT STATE SCANDAL’
Lieutenant-Colonel Ivan
Petrovich Vasiliev served in the Special Section of the Department of Police,
where Colonel Eremin headed a staff of ten officers and 12 secretaries. Because
of his rank and long career, Vasiliev was considered a senior assistant to
Eremin and often signed covering letters for him. He was born in 1872. After
graduating from a military school in 1891, Vasiliev served in reserve army
units until 1900, when he was transferred to the Separate Corps of Gendarmes
and assigned to the Moscow Okhrana. He served there under its chief, Zubatov.
Vasiliev was known to his fellow officers as a notorious Zubatovetz (follower
of Zubatov). He was involved in instigating Jewish pogroms and printing
anti-Semitic pamphlets, among them the infamous Protocols of the Elders of
Zion. He was also close to extreme chauvinist groups like the Black
Hundreds.1 Among his fellow officers Vasiliev was also known as a
‘drunkard and intriguer’.2 In May 1910, he was assigned to the
Special Section of the Department of Police.
Koba, in his June 1912
report to the Okhrana, accused Malinovsky of being an untrustworthy agent who
was misleading the Okhrana. This accusation attracted Vasiliev’s attention.
Koba probably repeated this accusation during interrogation by Okhrana
officers, among them Vasiliev. It so happened that by summer 1912, when the
campaign for the election to the State Duma was on its way, Malinovsky’s name
was gaining prominence as a likely candidate from the Moscow electoral
district. Vasiliev took Koba’s assertion of Malinovsky’s ties to the Okhrana
seriously. He also came to the conclusion that high Department of Police officials
were manipulating the elections, intending to plant their agent in the State
Duma. This insight had an obvious ramification: if Malinovsky were exposed, it
would provoke a state scandal concerning the criminal meddling by high police
officials in the Duma electoral process. Such a scandal would topple Vasiliev’s
superiors in the Okhrana, including Eremin, thus creating vacancies for his own
promotion to the top of the police establishment. The man Vasiliev hoped to
replace was his immediate superior, Colonel Eremin. Vasiliev knew that Koba, by
trying to unmask Malinovsky, intended to take Malinovsky’s place as Lenin’s
right-hand man and also to become at the same time the top Okhrana agent in the
Bolshevik organization. Vasiliev had learned about Koba from reports that had
been received by the Special Section; he had even signed some of the covering
letters referring to Koba.3 Thus, the unmasking of Malinovsky would
serve the mutual interests of Vasiliev and Koba.
Malinovsky and to
determine whether his candidacy might be derailed by any criminal record.
According to electoral law, a candidate had to obtain a ‘Certificate of Good
Standing’, stating that the candidate had no criminal record. Vissarionov
learned that Malinovsky had been sentenced for rape and petty theft. Despite
this revelation, Beletsky and Vissarionov were inclined to promote Malinovsky’s
election to the Duma, but the chief of the Special Section, Colonel Eremin,
objected, pointing out that it was illegal to interfere in the Duma electoral process
and, besides, it was too dangerous because Malinovsky’s criminal background and
ties to the Okhrana might be exposed and, if they were, there would be a ‘great
state scandal’.4 Despite Eremin’s objection, Beletsky decided to
plant Malinovsky in the Duma. He reported his decision for approval to the
assistant minister of the interior, I.M.Zolotarev, who personally informed the
minister of the interior, A.A.Makarov. The minister gave his consent. For the
sake of secrecy, it was decided that only Beletsky and Vissarionov would have
contact with Malinovsky.5
Malinovsky went to his
native Plotsk, where he bribed a town clerk into giving him the needed
Certificate of Good Standing.6 According to electoral law, he also
needed proof of six months of uninterrupted employment. Malinovsky obtained a
job at a textile factory near Moscow, but he quarreled with his foreman, who
threatened to fire him. Malinovsky reported this to Colonel Zavarzin, who asked
Director Beletsky’s advice. Beletsky’s response was confusing. He stated that
Malinovsky ‘should not be deprived of his full rights, which are very important
to him at the moment’.7 Zavarzin interpreted this statement to mean
that the foreman should be temporarily arrested, and on 25 April 1912 he was.8
(Several months later, after Malinovsky’s election, the man was released.)
On 2 July 1912, when the
Duma election campaign was in progress, Koba was exiled to the town of Narym in
western Siberia. Soon after his arrival in Narym, Koba infuriated his fellow
exiles by befriending an Okhrana officer named Kibirov. The exiles summoned
Koba to a comradely court, demanding an explanation. Koba said that Kibirov was
not an enemy at the moment, but that he would not hesitate to kill him in the
future revolutionary struggle. Some time later, he was summoned again to a
‘comradely court’, where one of the exiles, a petty thief named Bulanov, was
accused of stealing from the peasants of a nearby village. Koba defended him,
saying: ‘Bulanov is a fighter for the cause of the exploited classes.’ Bulanov
confessed the crime, cried, and promised not to steal again. The exiles were
insulted by Koba’s demagoguery and one of them, a Georgian Jew, made a
passionate speech in protest. Koba angrily snapped back in Georgian: ‘Uria
mamatskhali’ (‘stinking Jew’). A Georgian Menshevik shook his head and
commented, ‘Bolsheviks are Bolsheviks…now they suddenly turn into anti-Semites
as well.’9
In Narym, Koba met Semeon
Surin, an Eser-Maximalist whom he had first met in 1906 in St Petersburg while
visiting Kamo. At that time Surin was a member of the Maximalist-Bolshevik
group with which Kamo cooperated. Later, Koba and Surin had served terms of
exile in Sol’vychegodsk. Having known each other for years, they met as old
friends who had no secrets from each other. Surin asked Koba how his affair
with Maria Kuzakova, who had accused Koba of raping her, had ended.10
Surin also confided to Koba that a scheme to assassinate the Tsar was in
progress and that the attempt would be made during the forthcoming celebration
of the 300th Anniversary of the House of Romanov. Koba decided to use this
information to reinstate his relations with the Okhrana. He sent two letters to
Lieutenant-Colonel I.P.Vasiliev, asking him to arrange a
meeting with a high
official responsible for the security of the Tsar so that he could help thwart
a planned assassination attempt.11 Vasiliev passed Koba’s message on
to I.M.Zolotarev, the assistant minister of the interior, who was responsible
for the security of the Tsar and the royal family. Zolotarev agreed to meet
Koba. For Koba to meet a man as important as Zolotarev would have been a
fantastic feat had Zolotarev not been anxious to obtain vital information about
a planned attempt on the Tsar’s life. Koba’s offer was given credibility by
corroborating reports from other sources, among them an Okhrana agent living in
Paris. (The assassination scheme was abandoned because the conspirators were
warned that their plan was known to this informer12.)
On 1 September 1912 Koba,
carrying a passport in the name of ‘Ivanov’, left Narym almost openly. A short
while later, Semeon Surin also ‘escaped’—together with an Okhrana officer
posing as a journalist.13 Surin became an Okhrana agent in September
1912, when he was brought to St Petersburg and threatened with the death
penalty for his role in the assassination conspiracy against the Tsar but he
was offered clemency in exchange for helping to thwart the plot. (In April
1917, when many Okhrana agents were exposed, Surin was listed among them as ‘a
member of the Petrograd organization of the Social Revolutionary Party, who
turned into a provocateur before the February Revolution’.14)
Koba and Zolotarev met in
a private room of a fashionable restaurant.15 Koba offered to help
the Okhrana foil the plot to assassinate the Tsar, saying: ‘I can provide you
with information—a terrorist act is being hatched, but I haven’t yet fully
uncovered it, I need some time, and for this I need money.’ Zolotarev agreed to
Koba’s request.16 He could not provide Koba with money out of his
ministerial budget, which did not have a provision for payment to Okhrana
agents and informers, but he could arrange for Koba to be employed by the St
Petersburg Okhrana and authorize his compensation through the Okhrana payroll.
On Zolotarev’s recommendation, Koba was employed as an agent of the St
Petersburg Okhrana section in September 1912.17 In late September he
went to Moscow, where he took part in a party meeting at which Malinovsky’s
Duma candidacy was approved.18
By this time, Colonel
Zavarzin was no longer Malinovsky’s handler. On 10 July 1912 Zavarzin had been
succeeded by Colonel A.P.Martynov (not to be confused with the former chief of
the Baku Okhrana) as the new chief of the Moscow Okhrana. On 30 September 1912
Malinovsky reported to Martynov that he had been chosen as one of the electors
from Moscow.19 Martynov requested Beletsky’s opinion on whether the
scheme of Malinovsky’s election to the Duma should be allowed to proceed.
Beletsky again consulted with Zolotarev and Interior Minister Makarov, and they
gave their consent. Lenin contributed 300 rubles to Malinovsky’s election
effort. Two Moscow Bolsheviks and Okhrana agents informed the Okhrana about
Lenin’s contribution.20
On 11 October 1912
Vice-Director Vissarionov sent a letter to his superior Beletsky stating that
electoral law prohibited people with a criminal record from running for a Duma
seat and advised him to ask Interior Minister Makarov ‘whether the Moscow
Governor should be informed of this prohibition, or this person should go
unnoticed by him’. Vissarionov had in mind the Moscow governor, General V.F.
Dzhunkovsky, who by law had to approve Malinovsky’s candidacy. Beletsky wrote
on the margin of this letter: ‘The minister was informed. Let the elections
take their natural course. S.B.’ General Dzhunkovsky, not suspecting the
existence of Malinovsky’s criminal record and
of the Okhrana’s scheme to
plant its agent in the Duma, approved his candidacy.21 On 17 October
1912 Beletsky cabled Martynov: ‘The question of the person known to you
participating in the election to be left to its natural course.’ Martynov
replied: ‘The case is left to its natural course. Success guaranteed. Colonel
Martynov.’22 On 26 October 1912 Malinovsky was elected to the Duma.
The same day Martynov cabled Beletsky: ‘Carried out successfully.’23
Lenin was triumphant. ‘For
the first time we have an outstanding worker-leader among our people
in the Duma’, he wrote with heavy underscoring.24 Malinovsky,
with his wife and two sons, moved from Moscow to St Petersburg, where they
rented a spacious apartment. In addition to his lucrative Duma salary,
Malinovsky’s Okhrana salary was raised from 100 to 500 rubles, and then
increased to 700 rubles per month. By comparison, the salary of General
Dzhunkovsky, the governor of Moscow, was only 500 rubles per month. Malinovsky
was also paid 25–50 rubles for every piece of information related to party
activities in Moscow that he sent to Moscow Okhrana Chief Martynov. He was
given the status of a ‘special agent of the Department of Police’ with the
codename ‘X’. He reported only to Beletsky or Vissarionov, communicating with
them either by a special telephone installed in his apartment, in private rooms
of fashionable restaurants, or in their homes. Beletsky, Vissarionov and
Martynov considered Malinovsky the ‘pride of the Okhrana’.25
Lenin moved from Paris to
the city of Cracow, in the Austrian part of Poland near the Russian border, to
make it easier for him to maintain contact with Malinovsky and other Bolshevik
Duma deputies. Among the 442 elected deputies were 13 Social Democrats, 6 Bolsheviks
and 7 Mensheviks. Lenin insisted on the Menshevik-Bolshevik split, and Beletsky
was just as strongly in favor of it.26 Lenin sent drafts of his
speeches to Malinovsky, who took them to Beletsky or Vissarionov for review and
minor corrections and then delivered them in the Duma.27
But dark clouds began to
appear over this Okhrana-Bolshevik symbiosis. LieutenantColonel I.P.Vasiliev
started a secret campaign, attempting to expose Malinovsky’s ties to the
Okhrana. He sent a number of anonymous letters to the Menshevik newspaper Luch,
stating that Malinovsky was an Okhrana agent. The paper’s editors ignored
what they considered to be slanders, but rumors began to spread. Vasiliev then
wrote an anonymous letter to Lidia Dan, the wife of the Menshevik leader
F.I.Dan, offering to meet her secretly and prove that he was a high Okhrana
official and that he had evidence of Malinovsky’s duplicity. He suggested that
Dan signify her agreement to this meeting by a certain newspaper advertisement;
she ignored the offer.28
Koba, meanwhile, was
hoping to expose Malinovsky for his own reasons.29 Early in November
1912 he went to Cracow to see Lenin, intending to inform him of Malinovsky’s
Okhrana ties. Upon his arrival Koba quickly recognized the futility of any
attempt to convince Lenin of Malinovsky’s treachery, as Lenin was far too fond
of having Malinovsky as his mouthpiece in the Duma. Koba decided that exposing
Malinovsky would have to wait for an opportune moment. At the end of November
1912 Koba returned to St Petersburg to work on the editorial board of Pravda.
Before parting with Lenin, he informed him that he had chosen a new alias,
‘Vasiliev’, to take the place of ‘Ivanovich’. This alias reflected his secret
alliance with his new Okhrana ‘godfather’, Lieutenant-Colonel Ivan Petrovich
Vasiliev. From this point on, Lenin and other initiated party members referred
to Koba as ‘Vasiliev’, or its derivatives ‘Vasily’ and ‘Vaska’.
At the end of November
1912 Koba returned to St Petersburg. He initiated an editorial policy in total
contradiction to Lenin’s instructions and to the policy of Beletsky: instead of
advocating a Bolshevik-Menshevik split, Koba’s articles called for ‘unity in
the proletarian class-struggle…unity at all costs’.30 Koba also
delayed publication of Lenin’s articles. He even refused to pay Lenin for them.
Lenin was extremely annoyed: ‘Why has the money not been sent yet? We need
money. It is very important’, he complained.31 Spite against
Lenin and the Okhrana for promoting Malinovsky instead of him was at the heart
of Koba’s new stance.
In December 1912, in a
letter to the Pravda editorial board, Lenin attacked Koba personally.
‘Get rid of Vasiliev as soon as possible, otherwise he cannot be saved; he has
already done the most important work, but he is still needed.’32
Perhaps what Lenin had in mind was that Koba had done important work in
expropriations and might still be needed to do such work, and that otherwise
there was no point in retaining him. Director Beletsky reported to Assistant
Minister of the Interior Zolotarev, ‘The situation in the Social Democratic
Duma faction is such now that it is possible for the six Bolsheviks to be
induced to split the faction into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Lenin supports
this. See his letter.’33 Zolotarev agreed to Beletsky’s proposal
that Malinovsky be instructed to provoke the split. Lenin intended to give the
same instruction to Malinovsky. At the end of December 1912 he asked the
Bolshevik Duma deputies to come to Cracow for a conference. Lenin summoned Koba
too, in order to remove him from the Pravda editorial board. At the
conference, Lenin insisted on splitting the Duma faction and all agreed. After
the conference, Malinovsky sent a long and detailed report to Beletsky, listing
all those present, among them Koba, and described the agenda discussed.34
Also after the conference,
Koba wrote to Zolotarev, reminding the assistant minister of the interior that
he had had the honor of being introduced to him in a restaurant and stating
that he had observed Malinovsky closely at Cracow and that Malinovsky was at
heart with Lenin and worked more zealously for the Bolsheviks than for the
Okhrana. Koba asked Zolotarev to remove Malinovsky from the Okhrana and offered
himself as the chief agent in the Bolshevik organization.35
Zolotarev was extremely annoyed and threatened by Koba’s letter. He was afraid
of being held personally responsible, as in fact by law he was, for all Okhrana
operations, including the scheme to plant Malinovsky in the Duma.36
He also resented Koba’s communication with him over the head of his Okhrana
handler. On the margin of Koba’s letter Zolotarev wrote that it was not
permissible for an agent to go ‘over the heads of his superiors’, adding, ‘This
agent should be deported to Siberia for good. He is asking for it.’37
Zolotarev gave Koba’s letter to Vissarionov, who was substituting for Beletsky.
Vissarionov placed the letter in Koba’s file at the Special Section. A short
while later, on 25 January 1913, Zolotarev resigned and was transferred to another
post; two years later, he became a senator. General V.F.Dzhunkovsky, the
governor of Moscow at the time of Malinovsky’s election, was appointed the new
assistant minister of the interior in place of Zolotarev.38
Koba hoped that his letter
to Zolotarev would lead to the dismissal of Malinovsky from the Duma and the
Okhrana. While waiting for Malinovsky’s downfall, he tried his hand at
theoretical writing. Lenin needed a non-Russian to publicize his views on the
nationalities problem. Under Lenin’s guidance, Koba wrote a short article,
which was published on 12 January 1913 in the Russian newspaper Sotzial-Demokrat
in Paris. He signed the article ‘K.Stalin’. This was the first time he used the
name by which he was to
become known to history.39
Early in January 1913 Lenin sent Koba to Vienna with an introductory letter to
Alexander Troyanovsky and his wife, Elena Rozmirovich, who at that time joined
Lenin’s supporters. In their apartment, Koba met Nikolay Bukharin, a young
Marxist from Moscow, who had just escaped from exile. The circumstances of his
arrest had convinced Bukharin that Malinovsky was an Okhrana agent. Bukharin
attempted to prove this to Lenin. He was unsuccessful: Lenin accused him of
‘malicious slander’ and threatened to brand him a traitor if he did not stop
slandering Malinovsky. Lenin insisted that the Mensheviks were behind the ‘dark
campaign of slander being waged against this wonderful Bolshevik’.40
While staying in
Troyanovsky’s apartment, Koba for the first time met Lev Trotsky, who barely
heeded him. Years later, all Trotsky recalled about the meeting was a ‘glint of
animosity’ in Koba’s ‘yellow eyes’.41 Koba and Trotsky were to
remain enemies for the rest of their lives. As for Bukharin, Koba must have
found him an eager, if unwitting, ally in his scheme to expose Malinovsky.
While waiting for an opportunity to destroy his rival, Koba, on Lenin’s advice,
worked on an essay entitled ‘Marxism and the Nationalities Problem’, an
enlargement of his earlier article. Lenin asked Bukharin and Troyanovsky to
help Koba locate and translate related works by Austrian authors, since Koba
knew no German, and he edited Koba’s essay. The most striking feature of this
essay was the attention it devoted to the Jews and the Jewish Bund: in all,
there were 174 comments concerning Jews, all hostile. Again, Koba signed the
essay K. Stalin.42
In January 1913, Lenin
asked Koba to help Kamo organize a large expropriation in the Caucasus. Koba at
once saw an opportunity to expose Malinovsky, and the advice he offered Lenin
was in effect a tangled provocation. On Koba’s suggestion, Lenin sent Elena
Rozmirovich to Tiflis with a message to Kamo after providing her with 500-ruble
banknotes with undoctored serial numbers. Before her departure, Koba sent an
anonymous message to the Okhrana, revealing the time and purpose of her trip
there and her plan to visit her parents in Kiev on her way to Tiflis. When
Rozmirovich crossed the border, she came under the observation of Okhrana
agents, who, knowing her destination to be Tiflis, gave her the codename
‘Tiflisskaya’.43 After her arrival in St Petersburg, on 20 January
1913, Rozmirovich was arrested. The Okhrana found on her ‘highly incriminating
material evidence’—a message to Kamo and the stolen Tiflis banknotes. A long
prison sentence seemed unavoidable. A few days earlier, the Tiflis Okhrana
reported Kamo’s arrest.44 Kamo had arrived in Tiflis at the end of
the summer of 1912, after escaping from his Turkish and Bulgarian captors. Not
finding Koba there, he had gone to Baku, where the local revolutionaries had
urged him to abandon expropriations and escape abroad. Kamo then went to Moscow
to visit Leonid Krasin, who had parted company with Lenin and was working as an
engineer. ‘You are indeed crazy if you are thinking of an expropriation at this
time’, Krasin told him.45 Kamo returned to Tiflis and managed to
gather a small band of local criminals with whom, on 24 September 1912, he
unsuccessfully attacked a money transport on the Khodzhar highway. Heavy rain
helped the robbers avoid capture. Colonel Pastrulin reported Kamo’s robbery
attempt to Director Beletsky, who ordered the Okhrana to spare no effort in
apprehending Kamo. Nevertheless, Kamo managed to evade capture for several
months, before being arrested in Tiflis on 10 January 1913.46
Elena Rozmirovich’s
parents notified her husband Alexander Troyanovsky about her arrest. Koba and
Bukharin, who were still in Vienna, convinced Troyanovsky that
Malinovsky had caused
Elena’s arrest. Troyanovsky sent a letter to Elena’s parents in Kiev, stating
that their daughter’s arrest took place ‘under strange circumstances. If she is
not set free in the next few days, it will provide me with indisputable proof
that a certain important party leader masterminded a provocation and I shall
get even with him.’ He threatened to expose this leader as an Okhrana agent and
thus cause a great state scandal.47 Troyanovsky’s letter was
intercepted by the Okhrana and a copy brought to Beletsky, who showed it to
Malinovsky. Malinovsky immediately understood that Troyanovsky was threatening
to expose him and became hysterical. He swore that he had nothing to do with
Rozmirovich’s arrest and pleaded, tears in his eyes, with Beletsky to release
her at once. Beletsky attempted to calm him down and to explain that her
release would only prove that Troyanovsky’s suspicion was correct. Malinovsky
would not listen, and Beletsky reluctantly ordered Rozmirovich’s release.48
As Beletsky predicted, Troyanovsky interpreted his wife’s release as proof of Malinovsky’s
treachery and told Lenin about his conclusion. Lenin, however, once again
categorically dismissed the accusation; as a result, Troyanovsky broke off
contact with him. Elena Rozmirovich was greatly surprised by her release from
prison. She did not suspect Malinovsky of having betrayed her, since she had
not told him of her planned arrival in St Petersburg or her mission in Tiflis,
and she sided with Lenin in defending Malinovsky against her husband.
Malinovsky, meanwhile, had
no idea who had instigated the arrest of Rozmirovich. Koba behaved like an old
friend towards him. On 20 January 1913, the day of Elena Rozmirovich’s arrest,
Koba sent Malinovsky a letter, stating ‘From Vasily. Greetings, druzhishche
[old pal].’ He mentioned ‘Galina’—Elena Rozmirovich’s alias. He signed it,
‘Your Vas.’49 The fact that Koba twice refers to ‘Galina’ in his
letter suggests the letter was meant as a diversion, intended to avert any
suspicion of his involvement in the provocation of her arrest. Both Malinovsky
and Beletsky were at a loss as to who had engineered the ‘Rozmirovich
provocation’. At first, Beletsky suspected Yakov Sverdlov, who shortly
thereafter had come from Cracow to work on the Pravda board. Sverdlov
was arrested on 10 February 1913. The suspicion proved unfounded, but Sverdlov
was not released. On 15 February 1913 Beletsky arrested the editor of Pravda,
M.E.Chernomazov, an Okhrana agent.50 During his interrogation,
Chernomazov convinced Beletsky that he had no knowledge of Rozmirovich’s visit
to Russia and could not have provoked her arrest.
Koba arrived in St
Petersburg on 16 February 1913.51 He hoped that, by this time,
Malinovsky had been exposed. Koba did not know that Beletsky was racking his
brains trying to determine who had provoked Rozmirovich’s arrest. Malinovsky
reported Koba’s arrival to Beletsky, who ordered that Koba’s Okhrana file be
brought to him. Beletsky found there Koba’s letter to Zolotarev, in which Koba
accused Malinovsky of being an untrustworthy Okhrana agent, and Zolotarev’s
instruction to exile Koba to Siberia ‘for good’. Beletsky also discovered in
Koba’s file his report to the Okhrana, in which he leveled the same charge
against Malinovsky. Beletsky realized that Koba’s obvious motive in provoking
Rozmirovich’s arrest was his intense rivalry with Malinovsky.
Rozmirovich’s plan to go
to Tiflis and establish contact with Kamo focused Beletsky’s attention on
Koba’s Tiflis roots and also brought up the nagging question of his involvement
in Kamo’s current expropriation schemes and earlier crimes, including the
Tiflis bank robbery. Beletsky, who had closely followed Kamo’s case, knew that
Colonel
Eremin had played an
important role in the investigation of the Tiflis robbery. He asked Eremin
about Koba. Eremin replied that Koba had been his agent in the past and had
supplied him with information at the time of his service in Tiflis.
On 22 February 1913
Beletsky ordered the release from prison of Pravda editor Chernomazov.
The same day, Chernomazov told Malinovsky that in the course of his
interrogations he understood that an Okhrana agent was operating at the top of
the party leadership and that the Okhrana had known in advance that ‘Galina’
was to travel to Tiflis and Kiev. At the time of her arrest only a very limited
number of the most important leaders could have known about her arrival in St
Petersburg. Malinovsky immediately reported this conversation to Beletsky,
saying that besides him another Okhrana agent was operating among the top
Bolsheviks, someone who threatened him personally, and that ‘all these
circumstances prove, that there is a person near the “six” who is connected to
the intelligence organs of the Empire’.52 (‘The six’ referred to the
six Bolshevik deputies in the Duma.) Beletsky confided in Malinovsky that this agent
provocateur was Koba and that he would be exiled for a long time and would
not be able to escape. Beletsky instructed Malinovsky to invite Koba to a
fund-raising party for Pravda, scheduled to take place on 23 February
1913, so that Koba could be arrested. Koba came and sat at a table next to
Bolshevik Duma deputy Shagov.53 Several gendarmes walked into the
hall and moved toward Koba. ‘Dzhugashvili’, one of the officers said, ‘we have
finally got you!’ Koba angrily replied, ‘I am not Dzhugashvili, my name is
Ivanov.’ The officer laughed, saying, ‘Tell these stories to your grandmother’,
and ordered Koba to follow him.54 Malinovsky walked next to Koba,
protesting his arrest and promising to take all necessary measures to free him.55
Two days later Malinovsky
sent a brief letter to Troyanovsky at his Vienna address. He twice mentioned
‘Galia’ (Rozmirovich) but refrained from making any reference to Koba’s arrest.56
Chernomazov, the editor of Pravda and an Okhrana agent, wrote to Lenin
the same day, reporting Koba’s arrest, using Koba’s alias ‘Vasily’. In his long
and emotional letter, Chernomazov stated that he had been greatly surprised to
see ‘Vasily’ at the fund-raising party. He concluded his letter on a highly
emotional note, stating: ‘Someone is interfering. I am racking my brains trying
to figure out who it is. The situation is terrible. The snatching of the
Georgian [Koba] has cast me down. I have the feeling of careening down the pass
of misery…’.57
That same day, 25 February
1913, Lenin, as yet unaware of Koba’s arrest, wrote to Malinovsky, ‘Why is
there no news from Vasily? We are worried.’58 In another letter,
sent on the same day to Bolshevik Duma deputy N.N.Podvoysky, Lenin wrote,
‘Vaska must be protected. Of course, he is unstable, he is too sick.’59
Five days later, on 1 March 1913, Lenin, still unaware of Koba’s arrest, wrote
to a St Petersburg Bolshevik, A.E.Akselrod, complaining that he had received
only ‘one letter from Vasily, the other was lost’.60
Among many Okhrana cases
of concern to Beletsky at the time was the ‘Finkelshtein case’, which, it
turned out, involved Koba. A Berlin newspaper applied for permission for its
correspondent Finkelshtein (one of the aliases of Maxim Litvinov) to come to
Russia to cover the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the House of
Romanov. According to secret information received by the Okhrana, Finkelshtein
intended to come to Russia under journalistic cover to take part in an attempt
on the Tsar’s life.61 Litvinov probably intended to come to Russia
to help Koba and Kamo organize an expropriation, as in Tiflis
in 1907. (It is possible
that Koba invented the assassination plot in order to divert attention from the
Tiflis robbery case.) In the course of investigating the Finkelshtein case it
was discovered that some of the documents had been lost. Beletsky summoned his
assistant (a distant relative), N.V.Veselago, to his office, and asked him to
locate these documents, since Veselago was in charge of this particular case.
Veselago recalled years later that Beletsky suddenly became silent and pensive.
‘Nikolay Vladimirovich’, he then said to Veselago, ‘if one of these
documents—which, by the way, are to be obtained as soon as possible—refers to
“Koba”, bring it directly to me.’ Veselago had never heard the name Koba. ‘Yes,
sir, but may I inquire who Koba is?’, he asked. ‘Might he appear in a document
under another name?’ Beletsky thought for a moment. ‘You have a point’, he
replied. ‘Koba might indeed be recorded as “Dzhugashvili”—his real name. He is
one of our agents. That’s all. Many thanks.’62
This may have been the
point at which Meer Valakh’s aliases ‘Finkelshtein’ and ‘Maxim Litvinov’
triggered an association with Koba and Kamo in Beletsky’s mind. Beletsky knew
the ruling of the Tiflis regional court: ‘According to the deposition of the
prosecutor, the defendant Simon Arshakov Ter-Petrosian [Kamo] at present does
not suffer from disintegration of mental faculties.’63 This meant a
new investigation of the Tiflis robbery case, in which Kamo might incriminate
Koba as his accomplice and implicate the Okhrana. A few days later, when
Veselago was about to take a train to Moscow to work in the Okhrana archive
there, Beletsky summoned him again. ‘When you arrive in Moscow, tell Colonel
Martynov that he should not worry about Malinovsky’, he told Veselago.
‘Everything is in order with Malinovsky. The Colonel will understand.’64
Beletsky thought that in having arrested Koba he had eliminated the threat of
Malinovsky’s exposure, and he wanted to assure Martynov on this point.
Beletsky requested
information on Koba not only from the Special Section, but also from the local
Okhrana in places where Koba might have committed provocations. Reports on Koba
from other Okhrana sections were piling up on Beletsky’s desk.65 One
such report stated that Koba was ‘not married; father Vissarion, place of
residence unknown. Mother Ekaterina lives in Gori…’. Seven years after
Vissarion’s murder, Koba was still hiding his father’s death from the Okhrana.
The report also provided Koba’s physical description: ‘chin sharp, voice quiet,
ears of middle size, usual posture, birthmark on left ear…second and third toes
fused’.66 Beletsky’s and Eremin’s fears that Kamo would expose
Koba’s real role in the expropriations did not materialize: Kamo did not
produce any evidence against him. Kamo’s interrogator reported: ‘The defendant
TerPetrosian gives very verbose testimony. The investigation is not able to
trace his party contacts, or expose or indict his co-conspirators.’
On 1 March 1913, Kamo’s
case was brought for an open hearing before the Tiflis Military Tribunal. His
lawyer later stated: ‘Kamo did not deny facts that related to him personally,
but he did not give any real data, either to the judges or the interrogators,
about other persons.’67 On 1 March 1913 Kamo was sentenced to death
by hanging on four counts: taking part in the armed uprising in 1905; the
Tiflis bank robbery in 1907; his escape from prison in 1911; and the armed
robbery on the Khodzhar highway in 1912. But his death sentence was commuted to
20 years’ imprisonment in the general amnesty declared on the occasion of the
300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty.68 Koba’s case, on the
other hand, was decided in secret, as were all cases of provocations by Okhrana
collaborators. When Beletsky completed his investigation, he obtained a
‘Decision of the Highest
Authority’ to exile Koba for four years to a remote Siberian village. On 2 July
1913 Koba was transported by train to the Siberian town of Krasnoyarsk, from
where he was shipped down the Yenisey River to the village of Turukhansk.
Before closing Koba’s
case, Beletsky ordered Colonel Eremin to submit a written report on what he
knew about Koba’s Okhrana career. Eremin provided Beletsky with a brief summary
of what he knew about Koba, which was typed on Department of Police Special
Section stationery. The report read:
Benevolent Sir Stepan
Petrovich,
Iosif Vissarionov
Dzhugashvili, who has been exiled by Administrative Decree to the Turukhansk
region, provided the Chief of Tiflis G.G.A. [Gubernia Gendarmerie
Administration] with valuable intelligence information when he was arrested in
1906.
In 1908 the chief of the
Baku Okhrana Section received from Dzhugashvili a series of intelligence
reports, and afterward, upon his arrival in St Petersburg, Dzhugashvili became
an agent of the St Petersburg Okhrana Section.
Dzhugashvili’s work was
distinguished by accuracy, but was fragmentary. After the election of
Dzhugashvili to the Central Committee of the party in the city of Prague he,
having returned to St Petersburg, went over into open opposition to the
Government and broke completely his connection to the Okhrana.
I am informing you, dear
sir, of the above for your personal consideration in the conduct of operational
work.
With assurance of my high
esteem,
A.Eremin69
The report was factual and
fair, which was in line with the opinion of N. V.Veselago about its author:
‘Colonel Eremin was a strict, demanding person and a follower of formalities.’70
While writing his report, Eremin already knew that he had been demoted from the
position of the chief of the Special Section and appointed chief of the
Gendarmerie Administration in Finland. Eremin’s demotion, Beletsky’s request to
Eremin to write a report on Koba, and Koba’s exile happened at the same time
and were not coincidences. Beletsky suspected Eremin of protecting a dangerous provocateur,
and he also suspected him of helping Koba in his attempt to expose Malinovsky.
Beletsky based his suspicion on the fact that Eremin from the very beginning
was against the Okhrana’s meddling in Malinovsky’s election to the Duma.
Besides, Beletsky knew that some high-placed Okhrana officer had sent anonymous
letters to the Menshevik paper Luch and had contacted Lidia Dan, in an
effort to expose Malinovsky. Beletsky suspected the wrong man: the treacherous
high Okhrana officer was not Eremin but Eremin’s assistant, I.P.Vasiliev.
(Vasiliev did finally become chief of the Special Section of the Department of
Police, but his tenure was short-lived. Appointed to the post on 15 January
1917 he surrendered to the Provisional Government on 1 March 1917).71
The order for Eremin’s
transfer to Finland was issued on 11 June 1913.72 Eremin signed his
last Special Section document on 19 June 1913. On the same day, Director
Beletsky sent the ‘top secret’ instruction to all Okhrana sections to address
all correspondence ‘until further notice’ to deputy chief of the Special
Section M.E.Broetsky.73 But on Friday 12 July 1913 Eremin was still
in the Special Section, winding up his duties there.74 Beletsky
placed Eremin’s report on Koba in a ‘TOP SECRET’ file marked IOSIF VISSARIONOV
DZHUGASHVILI. The rubber-stamped warning on it read, ‘NOT TO BE OPENED WITHOUT
THE PERMISSION OF THE HIGHEST AUTHORITY’, that is, the authority of the Tsar.
Beletsky collected in this file all Okhrana reports on Koba that he had been
able to locate: intercepted letters from and to Koba; Koba’s letter to
Zolotarev; Koba’s prison photographs; his reports to the Okhrana; his signed
depositions, and his signed receipts for money he had been paid by the Okhrana.
The file with all these documents was sealed and placed in a large iron safe
located in a guarded secret room of the Special Section of the Department of
Police together with all files of former Okhrana agents who were no longer
active because they had retired, died, or been dismissed.75
Beletsky could not have
foreseen that future events in Russia would turn Koba’s file into a time bomb
of immensely destructive power, that it would shake off the archival dust and
emerge at the center of secret conspiracies and bloody purges that would
convulse the entire country and hurl millions of people into an abyss of
suffering.
NOTES
1.
See E.Evseev, ‘Istoriya
sionizma v tsarskoi rossii’, Voprosy istorii, 5 (May 1973), p. 72.
2.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
Moscow/Leningrad, 1925, vol. III, p. 176, and vol. VII, p. 314.
3.
See Vasiliev’s signature
‘for the Chief of the Special Section’ on the copy of Colonel Pastrulin’s
Report No. 53–C, dated 14 March 1911. On file at the Hoover Institution. Copy
in the author’s archive.
4.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. III, p. 281, and vol. V, pp. 212–13. See also ‘Ot ministerstva yustitsii’,
Vestnik vremennogo pravitelstva, 16 June 1917; ‘Bolsheviki i departament
politsii’, Russkoe slovo, 19 May 1917, p. 1.
5.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. III, pp. 108 and 280.
6.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. III, p. 283. See also N.V.Krylenko, Za piat’ let, 1918–1922 g.,
Moscow, 1923, p. 343.
7.
Rabochaya gazeta,
62, 21 May 1917, p. 3. See also Ralph Carter Elwood, Roman Malinovsky: A
Life without a Cause, Newtonville, MA, 1977, p. 82, fn. 62, for other
references.
8.
Ralph Carter Elwood, Roman
Malinovsky: a Life without a Cause, p. 35.
9.
See N.Karganov, ‘Iz
proshlogo Stalina’, Vozrozhdenie, 13 January 1929.
10.
S.Vereshchak, ‘Stalin v
tur’me: vospominaniya politicheskogo’, Dni, 24 January 1928.
11.
See Chapter 29, below for
I.A.Zelensky’s ‘confession’ at the Bukharin Show Trial. Zelensky ‘confessed’
that he had sent from his place of exile in Narym two letters to an officer of
the gendarmerie whom he knew as ‘Vasily Konstantinovich’. From Zelensky’s
forced ‘confession’—one of many instances in which Stalin forced his victims to
confess slightly altered versions of events in his own life—Stalin’s relations
with Vasiliev can be inferred.
12.
See Padenie tsarskogo
rezhima, vol. I, pp. 293, 298, 318, 319. V.L.Burtsev suspected a certain
S.A. Shtakelberg and he convinced the conspirators to refrain from carrying out
the attempt on the Tsar’s life. Shtakelberg was indeed a secret collaborator of
the Okhrana. Ibid., vol. VII, p. 438.
13.
Boris Souvarine, Stalin:
a Critical Survey of Bolshevism, London, 1939, p. 128; Karganov;
Vereshchak; Edward Ellis Smith, The Young Stalin: The Early Years of an
Elusive Revolutionary, London, 1968, p. 260.
14.
Russkoe slovo, 15
April 1917, p. 3. ‘Provokatory’.
15.
See Alexander Orlov, ‘The
Sensational Secret behind the Damnation of Stalin’, Life, 23 April 1956.
16.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. V, p. 62. After the February Revolution, Zolotarev testified about his
encounter with a person in a private room of a restaurant, who offered to foil
an assassination attempt. Zolotarev said that had he not agreed to the offer,
the agent ‘would have simply walked out on me’ and the assassination conspiracy
would not have been exposed.
17.
Evidence of Koba’s
employment by the St Petersburg Okhrana is found in a report written by Eremin
summarizing Koba’s activities in the Okhrana.
18.
I.V.Stalin, Sochineniya,
Moscow, 1946–51, vol. II, p. 420.
19.
Bolsheviki,
Moscow, 1918, pp. X and XI.
20.
The agents’ names were
A.A.Poliakov and A.S.Romanov. See ‘Bolsheviki i departament politsii; Ot
ministerstva yustitsii’; N.V.Krylenko, Za piat’ let, 1918–1922 q.,
Moscow, 1923, p. 334.
21.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. V, pp. 85ff.
22.
Bolsheviki,
pp. XI–XII; also ‘Bolsheviki i departament politsii’.
23.
Ibid.
24.
V.I.Lenin, Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii, 1958–65, vol. XLVIII, p. 133. See also Elwood, Young
Stalin, p. 28.
25.
Bolsheviki,
Introduction. Padenie tsarskogo rezhima, vol. III, p. 280; vol. V, p.
212.
26.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. III, p. 286.
27.
‘Bolsheviki i departament
politsii’.
28.
See Pisma P.B.Akselroda
i Yu. O.Martova 1902–1916, pp. 291–92. Bertram Wolfe, Three Who
Made a Revolution, New York, 1964, vol. II, p.269. Wolfe writes:
Some official high in the
Ministry of the Interior or the Police was privy to the arrangement and did not
like it. From the outset, this still today [1964] unknown personage tried to
communicate with the socialist ‘underworld’ without revealing his identity. When
Malinovsky was elected, Luch received an anonymous warning on his
Okhrana ties. A year later the wife of Fedor Dan received a letter telling her
that a high police official wanted to see her in confidence, and that she could
signify acceptance of the appointment by a code advertisement in a stipulated
newspaper. Both warnings were ignored.
Given clues
unwittingly provided by Stalin at the Bukharin Show Trial (see Chapter 29) and
in other instances, the probability is high that the ‘high police official’ was
I.P.Vasiliev.
29.
John J.Dziak, Chekisty,
Lexington, MA, 1988, pp. 8–9.
30.
I.V.Stalin, Sochineniya,
vol. II, Moscow, 1946–51, p. 417.
31.
Lev Trotsky, Stalin,
New York, 1941, p. 146.
32.
Okhrana Report, dated 13
December 1912 (O.S.), with the attached intercepted letter, dated 14 December
1912 (O.S.), from N.Krupskaya to A.E.Akselrod in St Petersburg. (Krupskaya
wrote Lenin’s letters.) On file at the Hoover Institution. Copy in the author’s
archive.
33.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. I, p. 316; vol. III, p. 485; vol. V, p. 220; see also ‘Bolsheviki i
departament politsii’.
34.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
149ff.
35.
Orlov, ‘Sensational
Secret’.
36.
See Utro rossii, 23
June 1917. Clipping can be found in the Nikolaevsky Collection at the Hoover
Institution. After the February Revolution Zolotarev was indicted in the
Malinovsky case.
37.
Ibid.
38.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. VII, pp. 342f. and p. 334.
39.
Stalin, Sochineniya,
vol. II, p. 437.
40.
Wolfe, Three Who,
vol. II, p. 269; D.Shub, Lenin, Garden City, NY, 1948, pp. 119ff.
G.Aronson, ‘Malinovsky—Agent Lenina’, Rossiya nakanune revolutsii:
istoricheskie etudy, 1962, pp. 24–60.
41.
L.Trotsky, Stalin,
New York, 1941, p. 244.
42.
Ronald Hingley, Joseph
Stalin: Man and Legend, New York, 1974, p. 72; also Smith, The Young
Stalin, p. 294.
43.
Bolsheviki, p.
227. Also F.N.Samoilov, Vospominaniya, Moscow/Leningrad, 1923–27, vol.
III, pp. 27ff.
44.
I.Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
Moscow, 1974, p. 169.
45.
Ibid., pp. 164–8.
46.
S.Shumsky, ‘Troyanovsky’, Poslednie
novosti, Paris, 1 January 1934, p. 3. Also see Shumsky’s unpublished
manuscript in the Nikolaevsky Collection at the Hoover Institution.
47.
Shumsky, ‘Troyanovsky’, p.
3.
48.
Okhrana Report no. 94182,
dated 25 January 1913, with attached copy of Stalin’s intercepted letter signed
‘Your Vas.’ On file at the Hoover Institution. Copy in the author’s archive.
49.
Bolsheviki, p.
ix.
50.
Smith, The Young
Stalin, p. 297; K.Sharikov, ‘Vazhneishie mesta prebyvaniya i revolutsionnoi
deyatelnosti I.V.Stalina v Peterburge-Petrograde-Leningrade 1909–1934’, Propaganda
i agitatsiya, no. 32, 1939, p. 60.
51.
Bolsheviki, p.
131.
52.
Krasny arkhiv,
no. 62, 1935, p. 239; see also the note on the bottom of the same page.
53.
David Shub, Politicheskie,
New York, 1969, p. 122.
54.
A.Shotman, Kak iz iskry
razgoralos’ plamia, Leningrad, 1935, p. 175.
55.
Okhrana Report no. 95677,
dated 26 February 1913 with attached copy of Malinovsky’s letter to
Troyanovsky, dated 25 February 1913, and signed ‘R.Mal.’ On file at the Hoover
Institution. Copy in the author’s archive.
56.
Okhrana Report no. 95691,
dated 27 February 1913, with attached copy of Chernomazov’s letter, dated 25
February 1913. On file at the Hoover Institution. Copy in the author’s archive.
57.
Okhrana ‘top-secret’
covering letter no. 95796, dated 28 February 1913, to the chief of the Okhrana
Foreign Agency, with attached copy of N.Krupskaya’s letter, dated 25 February
1913, to ‘Number 3’ (i.e., to Roman Malinovsky, who was third in importance
behind Lenin and Zinoviev). On file at the Hoover Institution. Copy in the
author’s archive.
58.
Okhrana Report no. 96088,
dated 16 March 1913, with attached copy of Lenin’s letter, dated 10 March 1913
(N.S.), to N.I.Podvoysky. On file at the Hoover Institution. Copy in the
author’s archive.
59.
Okhrana Report no. 96395,
dated 13 March 1913, with attached copy of Lenin’s letter to A.E. Akselrod. On
file at the Hoover Institution. Copy in the author’s archive.
60.
Information on the
Finkelshtein case is in a taped interview with N.V.Veselago, conducted by
Edward Ellis Smith. The original and the translated English version are on file
at the Hoover Institution under the number MS HV 82256 S 646, see pp. 24–8.
Veselago’s
handwritten recollections in Russian with his covering
letter to I.D.Levine, dated 25 June 1956, are in I.D.Levine’s and in the
author’s archives. See also Burtsev’s testimony in Padenie tsarskogo
rezhima, vol. I, pp. 318–20.
61.
N.V.Veselago, interview
and handwritten recollections.
62.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
p. 170.
63.
N.V.Veselago, interview
and handwritten recollections.
64.
See Zelensky’s testimony
at the Bukharin Show Trial, pp. 276ff.
65.
Okhrana Report no. 97084,
dated 19 April 1913, with attached copy of Okhrana Report no. 245, dated 21
March 1913, from the chief of the Tver’ Gendarmerie Administration.
66.
Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
pp. 171ff.
67.
Ibid., p. 173.
68.
See Chapter below 28 for a
reconstruction of the original text of Eremin’s report. For the reproduction of
Stalin’s forgery of Eremin’s report, see I.D.Levine, ‘A Document on Stalin as
Tsarist Spy’, Life, vol. 40, no. 7, 23 April 1956. See also I.D.Levine, Stalin’s
Great Secret, New York, 1956.
69.
N.V.Veselago’s letter,
dated 25 June 1956, to I.D.Levine, with five pages handwritten in Russian, p.
2. The letter is in I.D.Levine’s archive and a copy is in the current author’s
archives. See also N.V.Veselago’s typed manuscript in English on file in the
Hoover Institution archive at Stanford University (MS), Hv 8225 S 646, copy in
the author’s archive.
70.
See Chapter 12 below.
71.
Report of the Headquarters
of the Separate Corps of Gendarmes no. 8468, dated 21 June 1913, to the
Governor General of Finland. At the Okhrana archive in Helsinki, Finland. Copy
in the author’s archive.
72.
See B.I.Kaptelov and
Z.I.Peregudova, ‘Byl li Stalin agentom okhranki’, Voprosy istorii KPSS,
April 1989, p. 97.
73.
N.V.Veselago’s letter,
dated 25 June 1956, to I.D.Levine, p. 4. In I.D.Levine’s and copy in the
author’s archive.
74.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. I, p. 317; V.Maksakov, ‘Arkhiv revolutsii i vneshnei politiki XIX–XX
vekov’, Arkhivnoe delo, no. XIII, 1927.
‘IOSIF DZHU…? WE’VE FORGOTTEN.
VERY IMPORTANT!’
Koba and a fellow exile,
Yakov Sverdlov (who had also been arrested in February 1913), arrived in
Turukhansk by the end of September 1913. Lenin asked Malinovsky to arrange
Koba’s and Sverdlov’s escape. Malinovsky reported Lenin’s request to Director
Beletsky, who ordered the chief of the Yeniseisk Okhrana, Captain
V.F.Zhelezniakov, to transfer Koba and Sverdlov to Kureika, a small settlement
near the Arctic Circle. An escape from Kureika was considered virtually
impossible.1 As all political exiles, Koba received a monthly
stipend sufficient to live on modestly. Occasionally, he wrote to Sergey
Alliluev, who sent him parcels through the Red Cross. The outbreak of the First
World War in August 1914 did not affect his way of life.
Upon his return to Russia,
Malinovsky attacked the use of Okhrana agents provocateurs against
Social Democratic members and sponsored a Duma protest to the Minister of the
Interior. He delivered ardent speeches, his voice ringing with indignation,
denouncing the Okhrana. In his October 1913 Duma speech, he protested the
arrest of workers by the Okhrana.6 These impassioned performances
won him widespread admiration.7 Lenin, in enthusiastic praise of
this vociferous champion, wrote, ‘How wonderfully has the Workers’ Party in the
Duma carried out its duties.’8 Malinovsky was a star, but his
Okhrana career was nearing its end, and so was his career in the Duma.
On 14 January 1914
Beletsky resigned from the Department of Police and was appointed senator.9
Shortly before that Vice-Director Vissarionov had also resigned.10 The
new director, V.A.Briun-de-Sent-Ippolit, and the new vice-director,
A.T.Vasiliev (not to be confused with Lieutenant-Colonel I.P.Vasiliev, Koba’s
ally) refused to maintain the Okhrana’s relationship with Malinovsky. Beletsky
attempted to intercede on Malinovsky’s behalf with A.T.Vasiliev, but Vasiliev
refused, because the order to terminate all relations with Malinovsky came from
the assistant minister of the interior, General V.F.Dzhunkovsky, who learned
about Malinovsky’s Okhrana ties from Lieutenant-Colonel Ivan Petrovich
Vasiliev. I.P. Vasiliev had never given up trying to expose Malinovsky, but
while Beletsky, Vissarionov and Zolotarev remained in office, his attempts
would fail. (Vasiliev had even gone so far as to tell Burtsev about Malinovsky,
but Burtsev had refused to believe him.11)
Vasiliev tried to elevate
his position within the Okhrana by exposing Malinovsky. He told General
Dzhunkovsky about Malinovsky’s Okhrana employment and how his election had been
manipulated by the Okhrana.12 Dzhunkovsky was genuinely outraged by
the Malinovsky affair. As he was to testify several years later, he found this
Okhrana meddling in the Duma elections intolerable.13 He was also
incensed to learn that, when he had been governor of Moscow, the Okhrana had
concealed Malinovsky’s criminal record, resulting in his approval of
Malinovsky’s candidacy.14 An additional discovery did not mollify
his anger: Malinov-sky’s salary was higher than his own as governor of Moscow
or as assistant minister of the interior. On 22 April 1914 Duma Chairman
M.V.Rodzianko received an anonymous telephone call warning him that on
Malinovsky’s initiative the left-wing Duma deputies were planning to
demonstrate against Prime Minister I.L.Goremykin during his speech in the Duma.
Rodzianko called Dzhunkovsky and reported this information. Dzhunkovsky was
furious. He hesitated for a moment, then asked Rodzianko to give him his word
of honor to keep silent, confided that Malinovsky was an Okhrana agent and
promised to force Malinovsky out of the Duma and out of the country.15
The planned Duma
demonstration led by A.F.Kerensky submitted a resolution to postpone all Duma
proceedings until complete parliamentary immunity and freedom of speech were
guaranteed. The resolution was defeated by a vote of 140 to 76. Goremykin made
one of his rare visits to the Duma to introduce the new state budget. His
appearance was met by shouts and desk-pounding by left-wing deputies. Rodzianko
suspended Malinovsky and ten other left-wing deputies for 15 days. Malinovsky
walked out without resisting, but Trudovik A.F.Kerensky, Bolshevik
G.I.Petrovsky and Menshevik I.I.Chkhenkeli were removed by the police. Shouting
resumed when Goremykin started to speak again. After ten more deputies were
removed, he was finally able to finish his address. Immediately after this
incident Malinovsky was contacted by the chief of the St
Petersburg Okhrana,
P.K.Popov, who gave him 6,000 rubles and related to him Dzhunkovsky’s orders:
he was to resign from the Duma and leave the country. Popov left it to
Malinovsky to find a suitable pretext for resigning.16 Malinovsky
realized that he had no choice but to comply. He began talking with his Duma
colleagues about his disillusionment with parliamentary struggle and suggested
calling the masses to revolutionary action.17 His colleagues refused
to support his idea. On 7 May 1914 Malinovsky provoked a scandal by making a
blistering attack on the government, demanding the declaration of absolute
freedom of speech. Kerensky read this proposed declaration in his speech to the
Duma. Rodzianko warned him nine times to ‘stop insulting the Duma’ and then
deprived him of the right to speak. When Malinovsky delivered his speech,
Rodzianko, after two warnings, ordered him to stop, but Malinovsky refused. The
Duma police removed him from the hall by force. The next day, Malinovsky walked
into Rodzianko’s office and threw his resignation on the desk, saying, ‘Excuse
me, I am leaving the Duma. I have no time. Excuse me.’18
On 13 May 1914 the
Menshevik Nasha rabochaya gazeta printed a front-page article about the
‘curious’ silence of Pravda concerning ‘rumors of Bolshevik azefshchina’
(provocations like those of the infamous agent provocateur Evno Azef).19
The right-wing Rabochii followed with a blunt report on Malinovsky’s
involvement with the Okhrana.20 In the Duma, the right-wing deputy
N.E.Markov II kept interrupting Bolshevik speakers with the sarcastic query,
‘But where is Malinovsky?!’ On 12 May 1914, Lenin wrote to Inessa Armand that
‘the Malinovsky affair is warming up’ and that newspapers were publishing
stories in which ‘Malinovsky is accused of being a provocateur. You can
imagine what it means!! Very improbable but …[Lenin’s ellipsis] you can easily
imagine how much I am worried.’21 On 15 May 1914 Malinovsky came to
see Lenin in Pronin. He explained that he had left the Duma because the Okhrana
had blackmailed him over a rape he had committed as a young man. After he left,
Lenin established a three-man committee consisting of himself, and his
assistants, Zinoviev and Y.S.Ganetsky. On 25 May 1914 the committee announced
that it was ‘convinced without a doubt of Malinovsky’s political honesty’.
Nevertheless, Malinovsky was removed from all official party positions for his
‘scandalous breach of discipline’. Lenin wrote, ‘We have judged and resolutely
condemned the deserter. There is nothing more to be said. The case is closed.’22
The Mensheviks disagreed, and they set up a commission of inquiry to
investigate the Malinovsky affair. However, the outbreak of the First World War
made it impossible to complete the investigation.
When the war started,
Malinovsky was arrested in Germany and placed in a prisoner- of-war camp. On 16
September 1914 it was erroneously reported that he had been drafted and killed
in action.23 Lenin wrote an obituary which appeared in the Bolshevik
émigré journal
Sotsial-Demokrat, stating that ‘Roman Malinovsky…was an honest man, and
accusations of political dishonesty were filthy fabrications.’24
Lenin learned that
Malinovsky was very much alive when he received a letter from him from the
prisoner-of-war camp. Malinovsky pledged personal loyalty to Lenin and devotion
to socialism.25 Lenin decided to use him in defeatist propaganda
against the Russian government. In early 1915 Lenin secretly met in Zurich with
Dr Alexander Parvus, an agent of the German Foreign Ministry and the General
Staff whose real name was Alexander Helfand.26 Parvus had in his
youth taken an active part in the revolutionary movement in Russia. After the
suppression of the 1905 Revolution, he had
escaped to Germany and
become an agent of German intelligence. With the start of the war in August
1914 Parvus, in a proposal to the German General Staff, described the
Bolsheviks as the most extreme opposition group and pointed out that Lenin
would welcome Russian military defeat since he saw it as an opportunity for his
own advancement to power. Parvus’s advice was to use Lenin’s organization for
anti-Russian defeatist propaganda. This idea was accepted. When Parvus met
Lenin in Zurich, they struck a secret agreement according to which Parvus would
channel German money to Lenin through intermediaries whom Lenin would
designate.27 Lenin created the ‘Commission to Help Russian War
Prisoners’ and appointed his wife, Krupskaya, and his friend G.L. Shklovsky to
distribute defeatist literature among Russian prisoners of war in Germany and
Austria. Malinovsky became one of the most ardent agents of this commission,
distributing its newspaper V plenu (In Captivity) and advocating the
defeat of the Russian Army. Lenin was receiving ‘very enthusiastic reports’
about Malinovsky and began to correspond with him regularly. Krupskaya sent him
parcels of clothing and food.28 Parvus set up a ‘Research Institute’
in Copenhagen, where Russian émigrés, followers of Lenin, worked on
‘scientific projects’ financed by the Germans to obtain information about
Russia. Russian military intelligence reported that the ‘Institute’ was engaged
in espionage. Malinovsky’s propaganda among the prisoners of war also came to
the attention of Russian military intelligence.29
Another individual in whom
Russian military intelligence and the Okhrana became interested was Maxim
Litvinov. On 29 July 1915 the chief of the Okhrana Foreign Agency, Krasilnikov,
sent an ‘absolutely secret report’ to the director of the Department of Police,
V.A.Bruin-de-Sent-Ippolit, informing him that Maxim Litvinov had been engaged
in spying on military installations in various parts of England. The report
stated that ‘Litvinov transmits the information to the Germans. Litvinov has
lots of money in some bank, the origin of which is not known.’ Krasilnikov further
reported that ‘Litvinov, in a group of his close friends, once said that he
maintains ties with the German Social Democrats and corresponds with them
through Holland…’. He described in detail Litvinov’s behavior and his trips to
areas where British defense industry was located, adding that ‘the moral
qualities of Litvinov are very questionable’. Krasilnikov concluded that the
information he had obtained from his agents provided grounds ‘for identifying a
German spy in the person of Litvinov-Harrison’.30
Meanwhile, Koba was still
in the Siberian settlement of Kureika. His official biography states that from
there he sent a letter to Lenin, criticizing the Social Democratic parties for
their support of the war. Actually, he sent a letter, dated 27 February 1915 to
the Okhrana Foreign Agency’s old Paris address at 79 rue de Grenelle, not
knowing that Garting had retired in 1909 and that, on the request of Eremin,
the Agency’s address had been changed in May 1910.31 Koba’s unsigned
letter was delivered to Lenin, who was confused about the identity of its
author. A report from Paris, dated 25 May 1915 from the chief of the Okhrana
Foreign Agency Krasilnikov to his superior in the Department of Police in St
Petersburg stated that:
according
to agents’ information, a letter that fell into Lenin’s hands had been
supposedly written in Zurich and addressed to the Russian Consulate in Paris,
79 rue de Grenelle. The letter described some sort of a conference of various
factions of the Social Democratic Workers Party,
and, by the way, the
details indicate that the author had erroneous information about opinions of
certain members of the [Jewish] Bund, and, according to Lenin’s opinion, the
author is a Bolshevik….
Krasilnikov pointed out
that Lenin was trying to determine who the author of the letter was. ‘For some
reason Lenin is not attempting to identify the handwriting. Very possibly, he
knows only the contents of the letter.’32
Koba was suddenly on
Lenin’s mind. In a letter to Zinoviev in July 1915 he asked: ‘Do you remember
Koba’s last name?’ And in a letter to a Bolshevik, V.A.Karpinsky, Lenin wrote:
‘Do me a big favor: find out from Stepko [Spandarian], or Mikha [Tskhakaya], or
someone the last name of Koba. (Iosif Dzhu…? We’ve forgotten. Very important.)’33
Lenin’s suspicion focused on the letter’s distorted information about the
Jewish Bund, because Lenin knew Koba’s hostility toward the Jews. Another
reason for Lenin’s suspicion may have been hints by Malinovsky, with whom Lenin
had renewed contact by the summer of 1915, pointing to Koba’s ties to the
Okhrana.34
In October 1916 all
political exiles in Russia were ordered to appear before the mobilization
boards to be drafted into the armed forces, which by this time had suffered
five million casualties, almost two million dead and three million seriously
wounded or taken prisoner. At the end of December 1916 Koba in a group of
exiles arrived in Krasnoyarsk. The local military board rejected him for
service in the army because of his short left arm.35 But some exiles
suspected him of having avoided the draft with the help of the local Okhrana,
because they learned of a trip he had taken to the local Okhrana office in
Eniseisk, near Krasnoyarsk.36 Koba was allowed to spend the
remaining several months of his four-year term in Archinsk, where, in the words
of a fellow exile, ‘the only brick buildings were a couple of churches and half
a dozen houses belonging to well-to- do merchants. Nothing ever happened in
this peaceful Siberian backwater, and life generally was dreary, drab, and
cheap.’37 In Archinsk, Koba often visited Lev Kamenev, also in
exile, and his wife Olga, Trotsky’s sister. In their home, Koba met many
exiles, some of whom he accused of having ties with the Okhrana.38
One of the exiles, Anatoly Baikalov, was struck by Koba’s coarse manners and
rudeness, and provocative and cynical attitude. Koba spoke haltingly, with a
strong Georgian accent, like a poorly educated man whose main stock of ideas
‘was borrowed from popular two-kopek Socialist pamphlets’.39
Meanwhile, momentous
events were taking place in the Russian capital (renamed Petrograd because of
anti-German sentiment). In February 1916, Prime Minister Goremykin had been
replaced by Boris Vladimirovich Shturmer, a descendant of Russified German
aristocracy, which outraged nationalist circles. The Kadet (Constitutional
Democrats) party leader in the Duma, Pavel Miliukov, gave a sensational speech
in which he mentioned the Tsarina, born a German princess, and Shturmer: he
punctuated each reference to the Tsarina and Shturmer with the question, ‘Is
this stupidity or treason?’40 A nationalist Duma deputy, Vladimir
Purishkevich, accused the ‘holy man’ Rasputin of being the evil power behind
the throne and of having a magic influence over the Tsarina. In December 1916
Purishkevich, Prince Yusupov and several of their friends lured Rasputin to a
dinner, poisoned him with cyanide and shot him several times, then threw his
body into the Neva. No one was charged with the murder.
Also in December 1916, the
name of Roman Malinovsky suddenly reappeared in the Russian press under strange
circumstances. Ivan Petrovich Vasiliev, who had risen to the rank of colonel,
again told Burtsev that Malinovsky was an Okhrana agent and that his election
to the Duma had been manipulated by the Okhrana. This time, Burtsev believed
Vasiliev and published the information. He did not mention his source because,
as acting chief of the Special Section of the Department of Police, Colonel
Vasiliev would have been subject to severe punishment for any revelation of
police secrets.41 Vasiliev’s aim was probably to establish his own
reputation as that of a ‘progressive’ Okhrana officer, who had always opposed
Okhrana provocations. In January 1917 Vasiliev was finally appointed chief of
the Special Section.
On 8 March 1917 (23
February old style) crowds surged into the Petrograd streets, rioting against
the bread shortage. Three days later, as ri-oting continued, the Tsar, who was
at the Supreme Headquarters in Mogilev, ordered suspension of the Duma. His
order was ignored. Duma deputies elected a Provisional Committee, composed
mainly of members of the ‘Progressive Bloc’: Constitutional Democrats (Kadets)
and Progressive Nationalists. The Committee included two members of the
left-wing parties: the Trudovik (Labor) Party was represented by Alexander
Kerensky; the Mensheviks were represented by N.S.Chkheidze, a Georgian. On the
same day, 12 March 1917 (27 February 1917 old style) a group of workers entered
Tavrida Palace, where the Duma sessions were being held, and proclaimed
themselves the ‘Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies’. The February 1917
Revolution was under way.
The Tsar tried to reach
Petrograd the next day, but his train was diverted to auxiliary rails in the
town of Pskov. There, in his railroad car, the Tsar received his chief of
staff, General M.V.Alekseev, several other top generals, and two Duma deputies,
the Progressive Nationalist V.V.Shulgin and the Octobrist, A.I.Guchkov, all of
whom pleaded with him to abdicate. The Tsar decided to abdicate in favor of his
12-year-old son, Tsarevich Alexey, but Alexey’s personal physician stated that
the Tsarevich suffered from hereditary hemophilia and that his life was always
in danger. Because of the Tsarevich’s disease, Tsar Nicholas resolved to
abdicate in favor of his brother, Grand Duke Mikhail. But this decision came
too late: at that very moment, the Provisional Committee of the Duma proclaimed
itself the Provisional Government of Russia, without waiting for the Grand
Duke’s ascension to the throne, which, given this turn of events, Mikhail
decided not to pursue. The 300-year-old dynasty of the Romanovs had come to an
end.
The Duma deputies who
participated in the negotiations with the Tsar could not have foreseen what
kind of vacuum of power and legitimacy was to result from the Tsar’s abdication
and chain of events. Russia was thrown into the hands of power-hungry besy, the
bestial creatures, ‘those uncrowned lackeys’, as Merezhkovsky called those Dostoyevskyan
‘possessed’ types, who had been waiting for this moment to emerge from the
bottom of the Russian criminal underworld and put the country under the yoke of
their merciless brutality.
At this time, Lenin was
enjoying the hospitality of neutral Switzerland, while Koba in Archinsk was
counting the days left of his almost completed term of exile.
NOTES
1.
I.V.Stalin, Solchineniya,
vol II, Moscow, 1946–51, p. 422.
2.
Ralph Carter Elwood, Roman
Malinovsky: A Life without a Cause, Newtonville, MA, 1977, p. 37.
3.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. 1, Moscow/Leningrad, 1925, pp. 313ff. Bertram D.Wolfe, Three Who Made a
Revolution, vol. II, p. 537.
4.
Bertram D.Wolfe, Three
Who Made a Revolution, vol. II, New York, 1964, p. 537.
5.
I.P.Koniavko, ‘V podpolie
i v emigratsii, 1911–1922’, Proletarskaya revolutsiya, no. 16, 1926.
6.
S.B.Chlenov, Moskovskaya
Okhranka i ee sekretnye sotrudniki, Moscow, 1919, p. 69.
7.
Paul Sacardy, ‘Lenin’s
Deputy: the Story of a Double Agent’, p. 11. Manuscript on file at Radio
Liberty Committee Research Library. Bolsheviki, Introduction; ‘Ot
ministerstva iustitsii’, Vestnik vremennogo pravitelstva, 16 June 1917.
I.P.Koniavko, ‘Parizhskaya sektsiya bolshevikov do nachala voiny’, Proletarskaya
revolutsiya, no. 4, 1923, pp. 166ff.
8.
A.E.Badaev, Bolsheviki
v gosudarstvennoi dume, Moscow, 1954, p. 198.
9.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. VII, p. 307.
10.
Ibid., vol. VII, p. 317.
11.
Ibid., vol. I, p. 315.
12.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
Burtsev’s testimony, vol. I, p. 315. I.M.Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Ordzhonikidze,
Moscow, 1963, p. 78.
13.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. I, p. 315.
14.
Ibid., vol. III, p. 498.
See also M.V.Rodzianko, Byloe, no. 12, 1923, p. 249; V.I.Burtsev, ‘Otvet
na postavlennyi vopros’, Russkoe slovo, 25 March 1917 (O.S.);
‘Bolsheviki i departament politsii’, Russkoe slovo, 19 May 1917.
15.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. III, p. 498; vol. V, pp. 81–8 and p. 222; vol. VII, pp. 167–8. Rodzianko’s
account in Byloe, no. 12, 1923, p. 249. A.T.Vasiliev, The Okhrana,
London, 1930, p. 246.
16.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. V, p. 85.
17.
Elwood, Roman
Malinovsky, p. 45.
18.
Rodzianko, Byloe,
no. 12, 1923, p. 249.
19.
Elwood, Roman
Malinovsky, p. 48.
20.
Rabochii,
no. 5, 28 May 1914.
21.
V.I.Lenin, Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii, vol. XLVIII, Moscow, 1958–65, p. 293. (The last two
sentences are in English in the original.)
22.
Ibid., vol. XXV, p. 341.
23.
The newspapers Russkoe
slovo, 16 September 1914 and Golos, 13 October 1914, reprinted this
report as front-page news. See Elwood, p. 58 and p. 94, fn. no.
24.
Sotsial-Democrat,
no. 33, 19 October/1 November 1914, p. 2. See also Lenin’s letter to V.A.
Karpinsky in Lenin, vol. XLIX, p. 18, and Elwood, p. 58 and p. 94, fnn. 111 and
112.
25.
V.I.Lenin, Polnoe
Sobranie Sochinenii, letters to Zinoviev and Inessa Armand, vol. XLIX, pp.
261, 282–3. Lenin’s correspondence with Malinovsky was submitted to the
Investigatory Commission of the Provisional Government in May 1917 (see Pisma
P.B.Akselroda i Yu. O.Martova, p. 292) but never published. See Elwood, Roman
Malinovsky, p. 94, fn. 116.
26.
David Shub, ‘Politicheskie
deyateli rossii’, Novy zhurnal. See also Z.A.B.Zeman and W.B. Scharlau, The
Merchant of Revolution: the Life of Alexander Israel Helfand (Parvus) 1867–
1924, London 1966.
27.
Shub, ‘Politicheskie
deyateli rossii’, pp. 205ff.
28.
Gerard Walter, Lenine,
Paris, 1950, p. 251; quoted in Elwood, Roman Malinovsky, pp. 59, 94, fn.
119.
29.
Elwood, Roman
Malinovsky, p. 94, fn. 119.
30.
Okhrana Report no. 933
from Paris, dated 29 July/11 August 1915. On file at the Hoover Institution.
Copy in the author’s archive.
31.
Colonel Eremin’s letter
no. 125483, dated 13 May 1910, to the chief of Okhrana Foreign Agency
A.A.Krasilnikov. On file at the Hoover Institution. Copy in the author’s
archive.
32.
Okhrana Report no. 933
from Paris, dated 29 July/11 August 1915. On file at the Hoover Institution.
Copy in the author’s archive.
33.
Leninski sbornik,
edn 2, vol. XI, p. 193.
34.
Elwood, Roman
Malinovsky, p. 95.
35.
Anna S.Allilueva, Vospominaniya,
Moscow, 1946, pp. 81, 167. Also see ‘Kakie bolezny prepiatstvuyut postupleniyu
na voennuyu sluzhbu’, Moskovskoye izd; quoted in Edward Ellis Smith, The
Young Stalin: The Early Years of an Elusive Revolutionary, London, 1968, p.
321.
36.
Maya Ulanovskaya, taped
interview, Israel, 1979. Her father was an anarchist exile in Krasnoyarsk and
knew Stalin personally.
37.
A.Baikalov, I Knew
Stalin, London, 1940, p. 27.
38.
Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret
tirana, New York, 1980, p. 178.
39.
Baikalov, I Knew
Stalin, p. 27.
40.
Donald W.Treadgold, Twentieth
Century Russia, Chicago, 1976, p. 119.
41.
Birzhevye vedomosty, 5
December 1916. See also Padenie tsarskogo rezhima, vol. I, p. 315.
‘VASILY…SO FAR UNIDENTIFIED’
During the first days of
the February Revolution street mobs stormed the Department of Police buildings
in Petrograd. Bonfires burned day and night, consuming reference books, piles
of loose documents and case files, which covered the floors and the courtyards.
A mob also charged into the Moscow Okhrana headquarters located on Bolshoi
Gnezdnikovsky Lane, causing similar devastation. All types of people were in
the crowds: some were simply caught up in the excitement of the moment, others
snatched documents, reference books and photographs as souvenirs.1
Others were venting their hatred of the Okhrana for past persecution. But there
were in the crowds also agents and informers who attempted to destroy evidence
of their service in the Okhrana, which explains why many personal files of
secret collaborators, agents’ reports and intelligence notes disappeared from
the Okhrana archives during the looting of the Okhrana and police headquarters.2
Despite this destruction,
only a small part of the Okhrana archives perished. The Special Section of the
Department of Police suffered almost no loss of documents. The safe with the
politically most important files remained intact.3 This safe
contained the ‘top-secret’ files with the warning ‘Do Not Open without the
Permission of the Highest Authority’, among them the ‘dead’ files of the former
Okhrana agents Roman Malinovsky and Iosif Dzhugashvili.
On 3 March 1917 the
Provisional Government ordered the police archive transferred for safekeeping,
partly to the Petrograd Academy of Sciences and partly to the Petrograd Pushkin
Museum. The files were transported without being indexed and were placed in
rooms not suitable for storage. Another part of the archive was left in the
Department of Police building. Thus, the original archive became fragmented.4
The Extraordinary Investigative Commission of the Provisional Government,
headed by the prominent attorney N.E.Muraviev, was set up to investigate
officials of the tsarist regime who had been involved in Okhrana provocations.
The Commission became known as the ‘Muraviev Commission’. A research group,
headed by P.E Shchegolev, was set up to inspect the Department of Police
archive.5 Shchegolev’s group gathered a large amount of material to
aid the Muraviev Commission in its investigation and it compiled a number of
lists of the Okhrana’s secret collaborators, which were published in 1917 by
the Ministry of Justice of the Provisional Government.6 The members
of the Muraviev Commission were mostly interested in investigating criminal
meddling in Roman Malinovsky’s election to the Duma by top government and
Department of Police officials.
Finland nevertheless
revealed that Eremin had used a number of agents provocateurs.7 Eremin
fled abroad; for many years he and his family lived anonymously in Chile.8
Colonel I.P.Vasiliev on 15
January 1917 was appointed chief of the Special Section. His last day in office
was 27 February 1917. Following the order of the chairman of the Duma for all
Okhrana officers to surrender to the Provisional Government, Vasiliev went to
the Duma on 1 March 1917 and was placed under arrest. On 6 March 1917 he submitted
a special report to the Provisional Government, accusing top police officials
of sponsoring numerous Okhrana provocations; he described these in great detail
and provided the names of agents provocateurs and their Okhrana
handlers.9 He emphasized the case of the Okhrana’s meddling in
Malinovsky’s election to the Duma, which he considered his trump card and the
most criminal of all Okhrana provocations, pointing out that he had made a
number of attempts to expose Malinovsky. Vasiliev’s report was patently
self-serving. He stressed that he, ‘on his own initiative’, had given written
testimony to V.L.Burtsev describing the Malinovsky affair. Vasiliev described
himself as an honest and ‘progressive’ Okhrana officer, who was on the side of
the Revolution, and offered to serve the Provisional Government. He provided
his home address: ‘Petrograd, Zhukovsky Street, House No. 8, Apartment No. 5’.10
Vasiliev was released from detention.
The news of the February
Revolution and of the burning of the Okhrana archives reached Archinsk early in
March 1917. On 8 March 1917 a group of exiles, among them Koba, boarded a train
and headed for Petrograd. At each stop M.K.Muranov, one of the exiled Bolshevik
Duma deputies, spoke before enthusiastic rallies. From the town of Perm
(Molotov during Stalin’s rule), the three returning Bolshevik exiles sent a
telegram to Lenin in Switzerland: ‘Fraternal greetings. Starting today for
Petrograd. Kamenev, Muranov, Stalin.’11 At this point, the pen name
‘Stalin’ replaced all other aliases, codenames and nicknames that Iosif
Dzhugashvili had used in the past. He had used the name Stalin only twice
before, once in sign-ing his article on the nationalities question at the end
of 1912, and once in signing his pamphlet on the same subject early in 1913. He
signed the telegram to Lenin with the name Stalin because he could be
reasonably sure that Lenin would remember that name from the article and
pamphlet, both of which Stalin had written under Lenin’s guidance. Lenin was
more likely to remember this pen name than the alias ‘Vasily’, or the even
earlier one, ‘Ivanovich’. As for ‘Dzhugashvili’, Stalin may have doubted that
Lenin would remember a name so strange to the Russian ear. ‘Stalin’ was to
remain Iosif Dzhugashvili’s name for the rest of his life.
Stalin arrived in
Petrograd on 12 March 1917. On that day the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda,
as well as other newspapers, published the first list of exposed Okhrana agents
provocateurs. The newly formed Commission for the Research of Archives had
decided to forward the discovered files of exposed Okhrana agents and informers
to the InterParty Court of Conscience, which adopted the practice of punishing
the exposed agents by jailing them and ruling that, after the Constituent
Assembly had been formed, following elections, their fate would be decided
there. A special bureau was created to provide newspapers with lists of exposed
Okhrana agents.12 Stalin scrutinized these published lists, afraid
of spotting the name Iosif Dzhugashvili on one of them. That his name did not
appear on any of the lists must have made him hope that his Okhrana file had
been destroyed during the turmoil of the first days of the Revolution.
V.L.Burtsev, who had for
many years specialized in exposing Okhrana agents, also scrutinized these
lists, expecting to see the name of Roman Malinovsky; but it did not appear.
Burtsev was interested in Malinovsky, because, early in December 1916, he had
published information about Malinovsky’s Okhrana ties without mentioning the
name of his source, Colonel I.P.Vasiliev.13 In March 1917 Burtsev,
not finding Malinovsky’s name among those of the exposed Okhrana agents,
approached the former vice-director of the Department of Police,
S.E.Vissarionov, and the former chief of the St Petersburg Okhrana, P.K.Popov,
asking them to confirm or deny his information that Malinovsky had been an
Okhrana agent. They confirmed it and provided Burtsev with details of
Malinovsky’s Okhrana career. In March 1917 Burtsev published the information
they provided in the journals Russkoe slovo and Rabochaya gazeta.
In his articles, he stated that Malinovsky ‘for many years had been an agent of
the Okhrana and the Department of Police’.14 On the same day the
Bolshevik Pravda, too, reported that Malinovsky had been exposed as an
Okhrana agent. In publishing this report, the editors of Pravda—
Muranov, Kamenev and Stalin—disregarded an article by Lenin arguing against the
publication of such embarrassing revelations. Lenin refused to admit in his
article that the former chief editor of Pravda, M.E.Chernomazov, had
been an Okhrana agent, although Chernomazov’s name had appeared on a published
list of exposed Okhrana agents.15 Lenin complained that the enemies
of the Bolsheviks were using the issue of Okhrana agents provocateurs
‘in an attempt to drown our party in slander and filth’.16 Lenin’s
defense of Malinovsky was creating a scandal. Alexander Troyanovsky, in a
letter to the newspaper Edinstvo (Unity), wrote: ‘As early as summer
1913 many comrades insisted on an investigation of Malinovsky’s behavior. Lenin
and Zinoviev rejected this demand, thus assuming full responsibility. The
details are scandalous. An investigation is imperative.’17
Lenin was against such an
investigation, not only because it would expose Bolshevik ties to the Okhrana,
but, more importantly, because it might reveal Lenin’s and Malinovsky’s
cooperation with German intelligence in spreading defeatist anti-Russian
propaganda. This was known to Russian military intelligence, which had
collected information on Lenin and his contacts, among them Malinovsky, during
the war. The Provisional Government received intelligence reports, identifying
Lenin, Malinovsky, and others as German agents and their activities as treason.
After the February Revolution, Alexander Parvus in a memorandum to the German
government, advised increased financial support for the Bolsheviks, whom he
described as ‘an extreme left revolutionary movement’ whose goals were
compatible with German interests. He argued that the Bolsheviks would incite
civil war and would promise to give land to the peasants, thus inducing them to
desert from the army and return to their villages to take part in the land
redistribution. Parvus promised that the Bolsheviks would agree to sign a
separate peace with Germany. In two or three months, prophesied Parvus, the
most dreadful anarchy would reign in Russia, and he advised that when that
moment arrived, the German Army should launch an offensive and occupy large parts
of Russian territory.18
The German government
found Parvus’s advice attractive and decided to expedite Lenin’s departure to
Russia. Parvus offered Lenin and Zinoviev safe conduct through German territory
from Switzerland to Russia. But Lenin feared that if only he and Zinoviev were
given safe conduct, they might be accused of being German agents. He sent a
telegram to his and Parvus’s intermediary, Y.S.Ganetsky, stating: ‘Diadia
[uncle]
wants to know details.
Official passage for only a few is unacceptable.’ Ganetsky reported Lenin’s
objection to Parvus, who consulted with the German officials. They agreed to
arrange passage through Germany for Lenin and 40 followers, among whom were
Stalin’s old friend Mikha Tskhakaya and several other participants in the
Tiflis expropriations. Parvus’s friend Karl Radek joined Lenin’s group and told
Lenin that Parvus was waiting for them in Stockholm. Lenin, unwilling to be
compromised by a personal meeting with Parvus, used Ganetsky and Radek as
intermediaries. On 31 March 1917 Parvus assured them that Germany would
continue its substantial financial support for Lenin.19
Lenin crossed the Russian
border on 3 April 1917 at Belo Ostrov. Kamenev and a small group of Lenin’s
supporters climbed aboard to greet him. Stalin was not among them. Lenin’s
first words were an angry rebuke to Kamenev: ‘What’s this you’re writing in Pravda?
We’ve seen several issues and have really cursed you!’20 The ‘we’
was Lenin. His anger was not only directed at Pravda’s publication of
reports about Malinovsky’s ties to the Okhrana but also of the paper’s
editorial board advocating support of the Provisional Government in its policy
to continue the war. On his arrival in Petrograd, Lenin made a declaration that
became known to history as his ‘April Theses’. He stated that the ‘imperialist’
war should be transformed into a ‘civil’ war between the ‘bourgeois
dictatorship’, represented by the Provisional Government, and the
‘revolutionary democratic dictatorship of proletariat and peasantry’, represented
by the Bolshevik Party, advancing the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’. At the
same time he stated: ‘This transition is characterized, on one hand, by a
maximum of legality (Russia is now the freest of all the belligerent countries
of the world); on the other, by the absence of oppression of the masses.’21
He hoped to exploit with impunity the ‘maximum legality’ that all of the
parties in Russia enjoyed at the moment and he called for the overthrow of the
Provisional Government. He appealed for an end to the ‘imperialist war’ by
‘fraternization’ between the soldiers of the opposing armies. The April Theses
in their entirety repeated the main points of Parvus’s memorandum to the German
government.
Parvus’s German aid to
Lenin was cloaked in the guise of a business. He established an import-export
firm in Stockholm with Ganetsky as manager. Germany sent to Ganetsky various
goods for which there was great demand in Russia. The proceeds from sales were
deposited to Parvus’s account in the Nea Bank in Stockholm, and from there the
money was transferred back to Russia, to a special account in the Siberian Bank
in Petrograd. This account belonged to Mrs Sumenson, the Petrograd
representative of the firm Nestlé. Lenin had full access to this
account.22 Two weeks after his arrival in Petrograd, Lenin began the
publication of newspapers aimed at the soldiers at the front: Okopnaya
pravda (Trench Truth), Soldatskaya pravda (Soldiers’ Truth), and
other Bolshevik newspapers, advocating an immediate separate peace and overthrow
of the Provisional Government. Russian military intelligence reported to the
Provisional Government that Bolshevik propaganda was financed by the well-known
German agent Alexander Parvus.23
The Seventh Party Congress
opened on 24 April 1917 without the Mensheviks. Lenin made a speech, declaring
that ‘international revolution’ was approaching. He introduced Stalin and
recommended his election to the Central Committee, stating: ‘Comrade Koba has
been known to us for a great many years… A good worker in all responsible
jobs’.24 Stalin was elected a full member of the Central Committee;
he delivered a report on the
nationalities question.25
Lists of exposed Okhrana agents were still being published by the press. After
his arrival in Petrograd, Stalin remained in the shadow of the Pravda editorial
board. He stayed with the family of Sergey Alliluev. The children welcomed
Stalin as one of the true heroes of the victorious revolution and an old friend
of their father.
In May 1917 information
about Malinovsky uncovered by the Muraviev Commission was leaked to the press.
On 19 May 1917 the Petrograd newspaper Russkoe slovo (Russian Word)
published a sensational article entitled ‘Bolsheviks and the Okhrana’ which
questioned the legitimacy of the Bolshevik Party.26 Starting on 21
May 1917, and for the next few days, Boris Nikolaevsky, a leading Menshevik,
published a five-part article entitled ‘The Malinovsky Affair’ in the Menshevik
paper Rabochaya gazeta, quoting extensively from testimony at the
Muraviev Commission’s hearings. He called Malinovsky the ‘Bolshevik Azef’.27
Nikolaevsky did not know that the true Bolshevik Azef was the new full member
of the Bolshevik Central Committee, Iosif Stalin.
On 28 May 1917, Lenin and
Zinoviev were subpoenaed to testify before the Muraviev Commission on what they
knew about Malinovsky. The Commission ordered Lenin to submit all documents and
correspondence relevant to the Malinovsky affair, but Lenin submitted only part
of the correspondence.28 He withheld anything that might have
revealed his and Malinovsky’s involvement in anti-Russian defeatist propaganda
and could have been used as evidence of his treasonous ties with Germany. For
Lenin, there were two sides to the Malinovsky scandal. The fact that Malinovsky
had been an Okhrana agent was deeply embarrassing but was not a criminal
matter. The Muraviev Commission was conducting an investigation of those high
government and police officials who had been responsible for the manipulation
of Malinovsky’s election to the Duma, but Malinovsky himself and Lenin were not
accused. On the other hand, Lenin’s and Malinovsky’s involvement in
anti-Russian defeatist propaganda, financed by the Germans at a time of war,
constituted the serious crime of treason.29 The possibility of being
accused of treason worried Lenin and dictated extreme caution in his handling
of the Malinovsky affair. A related concern was the German money he had
received, and was still receiving. To address both of these issues, in May
1917, Lenin created a secret group, which he called the ‘Politburo’. It
consisted of Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin.30 Lenin had
previously (in March 1917) given the name ‘Politburo’ to the Stockholm group of
Ganetsky, Kozlovsky, Radek, Vorovsky and Kollontay, who had served as intermediaries
between him and Parvus.31 He placed Zinoviev and Kamenev in the
Petrograd Politburo because he considered them his most trusted confidants. In
including Stalin as well, Lenin was probably motivated by another
consideration: he knew that Stalin and Malinovsky had been rivals in the past
and that Stalin had taken a lively interest in the Malinovsky affair and was
the best informed man to deal with this particular case. It is also possible
that Lenin remembered that Malinovsky had told him about Stalin’s involvement
with the Okhrana. Perhaps Lenin retained a small suspicion that Stalin had been
the author of a letter to the former Okhrana headquarters in Paris that had
come to his attention at the time when he was urgently inquiring about the full
name of Iosif Dzhu.32 At any rate, Lenin clearly thought of Stalin
as someone potentially useful to him in dealing with this problem.
The Muraviev Commission
held 88 hearings and questioned 59 witnesses. The story of the ‘Rozmirovich
provocation’ and of the role that an Okhrana agent ‘Vasily’ had
played in this provocation
appeared in the testimony of the director of the Department of Police,
Beletsky. The part of Beletsky’s testimony before the Muraviev Commission
mentioning ‘Vasily’ was omitted from the records of the Commission published in
1924– 26 and entitled Padenie tsarskogo rezhima (The Demise of the
Tsarist Regime), but it was remembered by some of those present at the
hearings.33 The Commission did not intend to prosecute ‘Vasily’, and
it is doubtful that five years after his brief encounter with ‘Vasily,’
Beletsky would have remembered his actual name, Iosif Dzhugashvili. After all,
even Lenin, who had already known Stalin for more than ten years, did not
remember that name in 1915. More than likely, Beletsky did not even try to
recall Vasily’s name, since it was of no interest to him or the members of the
Muraviev Commission. The Commission’s focus was not Okhrana agents but the
crimes of top police and government officials in connection with Malinovsky’s
election to the Duma. Okhrana agents themselves were not criminals in the eyes
of the Provisional Government, but only in the eyes of the revolutionaries.
Colonel I.P.Vasiliev must
have been invited to testify before the Muraviev Commission because he had
attempted to expose Malinovsky in the past and had written about him in his
special report, but whether he did in fact testify is not known. His name is
not among those of the 59 witnesses whose testimonies were cited in the Soviet
published record of the hearings. It is possible that he was murdered before he
had a chance to testify. After the February Revolution, many Okhrana officers
were murdered by their secret collaborators, who feared exposure. It is also
possible that Vasiliev testified before the Muraviev Commission and was
murdered after his testimony, which was years later expunged from the published
record in the same way that his special report had been. At any rate, Vasiliev
disappeared without trace in the summer of 1917. His name is neither among
those of the officers killed during the civil war, nor among the names of those
who fled abroad. Most probably, he was murdered on Stalin’s order, possibly by
Kamo, who had in the past murdered people on Stalin’s instigation. Kamo was in
Petrograd from May to July 1917, and he and members of his band often gathered
in the Alliluev’s apartment where Stalin lived at the time. During those days
of upheaval, murders often went unrecorded.
What is certain is that
there is no mention of Vasiliev’s testimony in the censored seven-volume
version of the Muraviev Commission’s records, published during Stalin’s rule as
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima. By that time, Stalin’s position would have
made it easy for him to purge these records of references to the Okhrana agent
‘Vasily’. Significantly, it was Stalin who ordered publication of the Muraviev
Commission’s records, which, in their Soviet published form, contained no
reference to him. To remove Vasiliev’s testimony could have been no more
difficult than to withhold Vasiliev’s special report, which also did not appear
in the Soviet published record, even though it had existed in the complete
original record of the Muraviev Commission. But in 1930, Stalin allowed
publication of Vasiliev’s special report, having purged it of all references to
Malinovsky and ‘Vasily’.34 This omission is startling, since the
exposure of Malinovsky had for years been Vasiliev’s major preoccupation. In
doctoring Vasiliev’s report, Stalin in effect sought to ‘prove’ that Vasiliev
had never written anything about Malinovsky and ‘Vasily’.35 By then,
Stalin had removed all references to Malinovsky even from Lenin’s collected
works, which were published during Stalin’s rule.
On 23 June 1917 the
Muraviev Commission indicted six former tsarist government and police officials
charged with fraud in Malinovsky’s election to the Duma: I.A.Makarov, the
minister of the interior; I.M. Zolotarev, the assistant minister of the
interior; S.P.Beletsky, the director of the Department of Police;
S.E.Vissarionov, the vice-director of the Department of Police; A.P.Martynov,
the Moscow Okhrana chief; and V.G.Ivanov, a Moscow Okhrana officer. The case
was submitted to the Investigative Committee of the Supreme Tribunal.36
Malinovsky was not indicted, but a special investigator was appointed to
collect information about him. Pravda appealed to its readers to submit
all available information about Malinovsky to the Commission.37
By that time, the country was
more interested in the current political turmoil than in past Okhrana
provocations, which were fading into history. On 3 May 1917 Prime Minister
Prince Lvov had formed the first coalition government, in which Kerensky took
over the post of defense minister. He went to the front to address soldiers
declaring: ‘I summon you forward, to the struggle for freedom, not to a feast,
but to death. We revolutionaries have the right to death.’38 By 1
July 1917, the Russian offensive against the Austrian forces in the direction
of Lvov had been stopped. The Germans and Austrians counterattacked, and the
Russian front collapsed. Soldiers fled in disorder, some deserting. Lenin urged
the Petrograd Soviet to sponsor a demonstration against the Provisional
Government. The Bolsheviks led a large crowd to Tavrida Palace, the site of the
Provisional Government.39 Minister of Justice P.N.Pereverzev
delivered a speech before representatives of Petrograd military units, stating
that Russian military intelligence had intercepted correspondence by Lenin that
proved him to be a German agent and that this correspondence would be
published. The newspaper Zhivoe slovo (Living Word) printed them under
the headline ‘Lenin, Ganetsky and Co.—German Spies.’40 Military
units loyal to the Provisional Government wrecked Pravda’s presses and
editorial offices. Other Bolshevik newspapers were closed.41
Newspapers published reports of the huge sums of money that Lenin had received
from Germany.42 Burtsev in the Menshevik Lech wrote: ‘Parvus
is not an agent provocateur. He is more than that. He is an agent of
Wilhelm II.’43 On 6 July 1917 the Provisional Government ordered
Lenin, Zinoviev, Parvus, Ganetsky and other ‘German spies’ arrested. The
Provisional Government accused Lenin of ‘state treason’ and of ‘organizing an
uprising against the existing government’.44 ‘Now they will shoot us
all. This is the most suitable moment for them to do it,’ Lenin told Trotsky.
Years later, Trotsky commented: ‘Our enemies were still lacking such
consistency and such decisiveness.’45
Lenin together with
Zinoviev went to the apartment of Duma deputy N.G.Poletaev, but someone started
the rumor that Poletaev, according to documents of the Department of Police,
was an Okhrana agent provocateur.46 This rumor gave Stalin an
opportunity to prove his loyalty to Lenin. He convinced Lenin and Zinoviev to
hide at a ‘safer place’, which turned out to be Alliluev’s apartment. Lenin and
Zinoviev stayed with the Alliluevs for five days, from 7 July to 11 July 1917.
The apartment at that time was a hangout for members of Kamo’s old band and
other hard-core criminals who, like the political exiles, had been set free by
the February Revolution. Kamo had walked out of the Kharkov prison on the
morning of 6 March 1917 after the guards had left their posts following the
collapse of the old regime. He had first gone to Tiflis, but in May 1917 he was
already in Petrograd.47 He frequented Alliluev’s apartment, feeling
at home with his
comrades, among them
Stalin and Ordzhonikidze, who had come to Petrograd from Siberian exile.
At that time, holdups,
armed robberies, and murders became commonplace occurrences in Petrograd.48
The Provisional Government appointed an artillery colonel B.V.Nikitin, to
organize a security unit to safeguard order, but his efforts in fighting the
growing anarchy proved futile. Years later he was to reminisce that ‘criminals
formed the vanguard of countless hordes who came from the convict prisons and
penal settlements of Siberia and other places of banishment. All over Russia
the whole of the old criminal fraternity were liberated and swelled the ranks
of the scum of the population which boiled over in the tragic upheaval…’.49
Nikitin was powerless to deal with criminals like Kamo, let alone to arrest
Lenin and other ‘German agents’.
Most of Lenin’s supporters
thought that he should prove his innocence in court, and did not believe that
the German government had spent huge sums, more than 50 million gold marks, to
finance Bolshevik propaganda.50 Only the very narrow circle of
people around Parvus and Ganetsky and the Politburo members Zinoviev, Kamenev
and Stalin knew about the German money, and they advised Lenin not to risk a
trial. Lenin expressed the view that there would not be an open court. Stalin
agreed, suggesting that the arresting officers would kill Lenin on the way to
prison. That very moment Elena Stasova, Lenin’s confidante, came in and said
that a rumor had been spread that Lenin ‘according to the documents of the
police department, was a provocateur’. Everybody fell silent. Stasova’s
announcement ‘produced an incredibly strong impression on Lenin. A nervous
shudder ran over his face, and he declared with the utmost determination that
he must go to jail.’51 Lenin’s determination was short-lived,
however, and he decided to go into hiding. On 11 July 1917 he and Zinoviev
wrote a letter to the Provisional Government in which they stated:
Everybody
knows that Ganetsky had money deals with Parvus, but we had nothing to do with
Ganetsky…. Not only have we never, either directly or indirectly, taken part in
the business deals of Ganetsky and Kozlovsky, but in general we have not
received even a kopek of money personally or for the party.52
Having sent this letter,
Lenin put on a wig, which drastically changed his appearance, while Zinoviev
shaved his head and glued on a mustache. Stalin led them to the small village
of Razliv, near Petrograd, where a worker, N.A.Emelianov, and his three sons,
had built a makeshift hut in a nearby forest for their summer outings. Lenin
and Zinoviev stayed in this hut for a month and then escaped to Finland.53
Trotsky had been in the United States during the war, and Lenin had not told
him about the German money. Trotsky believed that Lenin’s April Theses ‘flowed unfailingly’
from Trotsky’s theory of ‘permanent revolution’.54 He did not know
that Lenin’s April Theses were also in full accord with the views of Parvus and
the plans of the German government.
By August 1917, the
Provisional Government was in a state of crisis. Kerensky became prime
minister. With every passing day, his cabinet was weakened by military defeats
at the front. The position of the Bolsheviks also deteriorated; Lenin and
Zinoviev were in Finland, while Trotsky and Kamenev were in prison. Of the
Politburo members, only Stalin was free, until he was joined by Kamenev who had
been released from prison
because he was able to
prove that before the February Revolution he had been in exile and had had no
contact with any German agent. Immediately after Kamenev’s release, the rumor
spread that he had been an Okhrana agent. Kamenev demanded an investigation to
clear his name and to determine who had started this rumor. The Bolshevik
Central Committee appointed Stalin to discuss with one of the leaders of the
Social Revolutionary Party, Abram Gots, the creation of a ‘commission in the
case of Kamenev’ to investigate this rumor.55 Stalin himself had in
the past spread such rumors about party comrades, including Yakov Sverdlov and
Grigory Petrovsky, but apparently his comrades now entrusted him with the
investigation of Kamenev. It is possible he maneuvered himself into this
assignment to avert suspicion of any ties he may have had with the Okhrana and
to remind all that he was a member of the Politburo, which had been created to
deal with problems like the Malinovsky affair.
In an article published in
August 1917, Stalin strongly defended Kamenev and attacked his
‘counter-revolutionary’ accusers with shrill denunciations that had a hidden
meaning:
The reptilian hissing of
the counter-revolution is again becoming louder. The disgusting serpent of
reaction thrusts its poisonous fangs from around the corner. It will sting and
slink back into its dark lair… The infamous baiting, the bacchanal of lies and
calumnies, the shameless deception, the low-grade forgery and falsification
assumed proportions hitherto unknown in history… At first they tried to smear
tested revolutionary fighters as German spies, and that having failed, they
want to make them out to be Tsarist spies. Thus they are trying to brand those
who have devoted their entire conscious life to the revolutionary struggle
against the Tsarist regime as Tsarist spies… The political meaning of all this
is self-evident: the masters of the counter-revolution are intent at all cost
on rendering Kamenev harmless and removing him as one of the recognized leaders
of the revolutionary proletariat.56
Rhetorically,
Stalin performed a convoluted trick here: he equated the accusation of the
revolutionaries as being ‘German spies’ with that of their being ‘tsarist
spies’; then he dismissed both charges as calumnies. By this cunning equation,
the Okhrana agent Stalin placed himself on an equal footing with Lenin and
other accused ‘German agents’. He also prepared a defense for himself in case
he was accused of having been an Okhrana agent: he would call such claims
‘infamous baiting, a bacchanal of lies and calumnies, shameless deception,
low-grade forgery and falsification’.
The German offensive,
which Parvus had advocated in his memoranda, began in August 1917. On 20 August
Riga fell. German troops were moving toward Petrograd. Kerensky, fearing that
Petrograd might fall into German hands, ordered the evacuation of the State
Treasury and all archives. The preparations were haphazard, and the archive
materials were broken up into disjointed parts, the files being placed in boxes
and transported to various places: to the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery in the
north, to the Moscow State Archive, and to Kremlin basements. Boxes of files
delivered to the monastery were piled up inside and in the rooms of its
ecclesiastical school. Some parts of the archives remained in Petrograd, stored
in boxes and ready for transportation.57 During the March–
August 1917 period, the
Muraviev Commission had gathered some of the Department of Police files that it
needed for investigation of the most important cases of Okhrana provocations.
In September 1917 the Commission stopped its proceedings because of Kerensky’s
order to evacuate the archives, and its material together with the files of
Okhrana agents were placed in boxes that were sealed and stored in expectation
of evacuation, which, however, did not take place. The files remained in boxes
for the next two years, and at the end of 1919 were transported to Moscow
together with the archive of the Investigative Commission of the Supreme
Tribunal.58
The file of Okhrana agent
Iosif Dzhugashvili was not in this shipment. His name had not attracted the
attention of the members of the Muraviev Commission, and they had not asked for
his file.59 In 1917 ‘Iosif Vissarionov Dzhugashvili’, which was how
Stalin’s file was labeled, meant nothing to the people who searched the
archives. Stalin’s actual name might have been known only to a few people in the
party and the Okhrana. Of those who once had known his name, not all remembered
it. Even Lenin, who had personally known Stalin since 1905, was unable to
recall his name in 1915. A Bolshevik Party history of the period before 1917,
published in 1926, did not mention Stalin even once. Moreover, he was not
included in its index of some 500 names of party members who were in any way
prominent during this time. This index mentions only an ‘Ivanovich’ who was
present at the Tammerfors conference. But the identity of the person hiding
behind this alias remained a mystery to the party historians as late as 1926.60
Stalin would have been interested in revealing who Ivanovich was except for the
fear that this might have led to the realization that Ivanovich and the
unidentified Okhrana agent ‘Ivanov’ were one and the same person. (Burtsev in
his testimony before the Muraviev Commission referred to an unidentified
Okhrana agent ‘Ivanov’ who in 1906 competed with the double agent Solomon Ryss
in providing the Okhrana with information about the plans of the
Bolshevik-Maximalist terrorists, among them Kamo. Burtsev knew nothing about
Kamo’s friend Dzhugashvili-Stalin.61)
Many files of Okhrana
agents were taken out of the archive and transferred to the Commission for the
Investigation of Archives, which had offices in Petrograd and Moscow. The file
with the name ‘Iosif Vissarionov Dzhugashvili’ was delivered to the Petrograd
office of the Commission. It was there among the files that were in line to be
inspected. But there was not enough time to do that. When the evacuation order
was issued, all these files were placed in boxes for delivery to a Petrograd
railway station. Whoever placed the file of Iosif Dzhugashvili into one of the
boxes could have had no inkling that this file was a time bomb of enormous
destructiveness. Some of the boxes were loaded into railway cars, while others
were stored in warehouses for future transportation to Moscow, which was
delayed until a more favorable time. Unpredictable events were rushing the
country into an unknown future. (The stored boxes, neglected for years, were
transported to Moscow in the summer of 1926, and it was then that the file of
Iosif Dzhugashvili was discovered.)
The work of the Moscow
Commission for the Investigation of Archives was not interrupted by evacuation.
The Commission prepared lists of Okhrana agents in various parties, including
the Bolshevik, basing its research on the documents of the Moscow Okhrana
archive and information that emerged from the hearings of the Muraviev
Commission. In April 1918, after the Bolsheviks came to power, the Commission
published a book, titled Bolsheviki, which listed the 12 most important
Okhrana agents in
the Bolshevik Party:
M.I.Briandinsky, I.A.Zhitomirsky, I.G.Krivov, A.I.Lobov, R.V.Malinovsky,
A.K.Marakushev, A.A.Poliakov, A.S. Romanov, I.P.Sesitsky, M.E.Chernomazov,
V.E.Shurkhanov, and one so far unidentified, who had the party alias ‘Vasily’.62
Also in Bolsheviki
is an index of names, aliases and codenames. This index has entries for the
names ‘Koba’ and ‘Dzhugashvili.’ The entry under ‘Koba’ refers to
‘Dzhugashvili’. The entry under ‘Dzhugashvili’ refers to two aliases, ‘Koba’
and ‘Stalin’, and to pages 100, 101 and 120. These pages do not mention
‘Stalin’.63 Stalin’s aliases, ‘Vasily’ and ‘Ivanovich’, are also not
mentioned. (It may seem strange that in 1918 no one remembered Stalin’s party
alias ‘Vasily’ that he had used six years earlier. Besides Lenin, Malinovsky
and Chernomazov, no one among the Bolsheviks left any record of having known
the alias ‘Vasily’, which implies that Stalin did not use it widely. Indicative
of how ephemeral names were during that period is that in 1926, when the first
history of the party was published, Stalin was not even mentioned and no one remembered
Stalin’s alias ‘Ivanovich’. More than 500 prominent party workers were
mentioned, but ‘Ivanovich’ was listed in the index only as an unidentified
participant at a party conference.)
Researchers at the Moscow
Commission for the Investigation of Archives did not have documentary evidence
that Stalin had once had the alias ‘Vasily’. The records of the Muraviev
Commission, including the testimony of Director Beletsky and the special report
of Colonel Vasiliev, were evacuated from Petrograd and were not available to
the Moscow Commission. Of the few party members who knew who ‘Vasily’ was,
Malinovsky was in a prisoner-of-war camp, Chernomazov was in hiding, and Lenin
denied to the bitter end even the well-established fact of Malinovsky’s ties to
the Okhrana—hence he was unlikely, even if he remembered Stalin’s alias
‘Vasily’, to admit that Stalin, a member of his government, might be a former
Okhrana agent. (The fact that Stalin had ever had the party alias ‘Vasily’ was
made public for the first time in 1940, after Stalin recovered his St
Petersburg Okhrana file and allowed the publication of several reports taken
from it.64)
The researchers at the
Moscow Commission for the Investigation of Archives stated that the 12
mentioned Okhrana agents ‘constitute only a small segment of all the provocateurs
and ordinary “informers” who had worked in the Social Democratic Party. The
publication of a complete list of these people is an undertaking for the, it is
hoped, not-too-distant future.’65
NOTES
1.
See V.Maksakov, ‘Archiv
revolutsii i vneshney politiki XIX i XX vekov’, Archivnoe delo, no.
XIII, 1927, pp. 29–35. Several partly burned documents were collected by an
American journalist who witnessed the burning of the archives in Petrograd.
These documents are on file at the Hoover Institution. Copies are in the
author’s archive.
2.
Ibid.
3.
Ibid., p. 35.
4.
Ibid., pp. 35ff.
5.
After the Bolsheviks came
to power, Shchegolev became the chief of the Political Department of the
Archival Fund, which was under the supervision of the Soviet Secret Police.
6.
V.Maksakov, ‘Archiv
revolutsii i vneshei politiki XIX–XX vekov’, Arkhivnoe delo, no XIII,
1927, P. 39.
7.
Russkoe slovo, 14
April 1917, p. 3.
8.
Letters from the Tolstoy
Foundation, dated 9 October 1974, and 9 December 1974, report on the results of
the search for Eremin’s family in Chile. In the author’s archive. In 1957,
Eremin’s two daughters came to New York with the intention of selling Eremin’s
papers; they found no buyer. After their return to Chile, they disappeared, most
probably lured to Russia by a Soviet agent. The author obtained this
information when interviewing I.D.Levine.
9.
P.E.Shchegolev, Okhranniki
i avanturisty, Moscow, 1930, pp. 138–49.
10.
Ibid., p. 140.
11.
Leninsky sbornik,
vol. XIII, p. 271.
12.
Maksakov, ‘Archiv revolutsii’,
p. 30.
13.
Birzhevye vedomosty, 5
December 1916. See also Padenie tsarskogo rezhima, vol. I, Moscow/
Leningrad, 1925, p. 315.
14.
V.L.Burtsev, ‘Otvet na
postavlennyi vopros’, in Russkoe slovo, 25 March 1917 (O.S.). See also Padenie
tsarskogo rezhima, vol. I, pp. 315ff, and Ralph Carter Elwood, Roman
Malinovsky: A Life without a Cause, Newtonville, MA, 1977, p. 61.
15.
V.I.Lenin, Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii, vol. XXXI, Moscow, 1958–65, pp. 79–82 and 521f. See
also Elwood, Roman Malinovsky, p. 96, fn. 8.
16.
Lenin’s letter, dated 17
March 1917 (O.S.), in Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. XLIX, p.
423.
17.
Bolsheviki,
Moscow, 1918, p. XIII, fn.* Quoting from Edinstvo and Russkaya volia
(Russian Freedom), 24 April 1917.
18.
David Shub, Politicheskie
deyateli rossii, New York, 1969, pp. 213–27.
19.
Leninsky sbornik,
no. XIII. See also Shub, Politicheskie, pp. 213–17.
20.
F.F.Raskolnikov, Kronshtadt
i piter v 1917, Moscow/Leningrad, 1925, p. 54. See also Raskolnikov, Na
boevykh putiakh, Moscow, 1964, pp. 63f.
21.
Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie,
vol. XX, pp. 109–45.
22.
Shub, Politicheskie,
pp. 217ff.
23.
Ibid., pp. 217–21.
24.
Robert M.Slusser, Stalin
in October—the Man Who Missed the Revolution, Baltimore/London, 1987, p.
85.
25.
Ibid., pp. 81–101.
26.
‘Bolsheviki i departament
politsii’, Russkoe slovo, 19 May 1917.
27.
‘Delo malinovskogo i dr.’,
Rabochaya gazeta, no. 62, 21 May 1917, pp. 2f. See also no. 63, 24 May
1917, p. 2; no. 67, 28 May 1917, pp. 2f.; no. 83, 17 June 1917, pp. 23; no. 85,
20 June 1917, p. 2; no. 87, 22 June 1917, p. 2.
28.
Pisma P.B.Akselroda i Yu.
O.Martova 1902–1916, p. 292.
29.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. II, p. 317.
30.
I.Tovstukha, ‘Joseph
Stalin’, in Georges Haupt and Jean-Jacques Marie, Makers of the Russian
Revolution, Ithaca, 1974, pp. 67ff.; also quoted in Slusser, p. 96. See
also Slusser, ‘Lenin’s Deal with Stalin, April 1917’, lecture at Yale
University, 26 January 1978; Slusser, ‘On the Question of Stalin’s Role in the
Bolshevik Revolution’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, vol. XIX, no. 4,
December 1978. Also E.Yaroslavsky, Landmarks in the Life of Stalin, Moscow,
1940, p. 97.
31.
Shub, Politicheskie,
p. 218. D.Shub quotes from Z.A.B.Zeman and W.B.Scharlau, The Merchant of
Revolution: The Life of Alexander Israel Helfand (Parvus) 1867–1924,
London, 1926. Lenin had a history of inventing names for such emergency groups.
The name ‘Politburo’ was no accident but had to do with his associating the
word ‘buro’ with secret groups operating on foreign soil. The Zagranichnoe
Buro, or ‘Foreign Bureau’, had been headed for years by Dr Yakov
Zhitomirsky, Lenin’s friend and an Okhrana agent. The
Petrograd Politburo was a kind of extension of the
Stockholm Politburo because both were addressing the same dangerous issue of
the German money.
32.
See Chapter 11 above.
33.
The omitted portions of
Beletsky’s testimony were described by Shumsky in his article ‘Troyanovsky’, Poslednie
novosty, 1 January 1934. See also the handwritten manuscript by Shumsky in
the Nikolaevsky Collection at the Hoover Institution, file 132, box 4, no. 27.
Shumsky describes the Rozmirovich provocation and Beletsky’s conversation with
Malinovsky as it was presented in Beletsky’s testimony at the Extraordinary
Commission’s hearings and was also described in the article ‘Bolsheviki i
departament politsii’. Colonel I.P.Vasiliev’s report on illegal Okhrana
activities was not included in the seven volumes of the Extraordinary
Commission material published in Padenie tsarskogo rezhima. Almost all
references to Malinovsky and ‘Vasily’ had been removed from this censored
version.
Vasiliev’s report in abbreviated form was published on
Stalin’s order in 1930 in a book by P.E.Shchegolev titled Okhranniki i
avanturisty, Moscow, 1930, pp. 138–49. All references to Malinovsky and
‘Vasily’ are missing in this book.
34.
Shchegolev, Okhranniki
i avanturisty, pp. 138–49.
35.
See Shumsky,
‘Troyanovsky’. Also the author’s interview with George Kennan in which Kennan
described a book published in Czechoslovakia, depicting Stalin’s Okhrana
career. Kennan said that all the copies of the book had mysteriously
disappeared. A distorted echo of this mystery could be found in a report, ‘A
Czarist Spy Named Stalin’, Newsweek, 7 November 1966, which read:
George Kennan, former US
ambassador to Russia and an astute student of Russian affairs at Princeton’s
Institute for Advanced Studies, has long suspected that as a young Bolshevik
Joseph Stalin was an agent of the Czar’s secret police. Now Kennan has
evidence. He recently learned that the passport Stalin used to attend a party
congress at Stockholm in 1906 was issued by the secret police. Kennan’s
research also uncovered the fact that Stalin admitted during a party seminar in
1920 that he had been a Czarist agent. The statement was published in a Soviet
theoretical magazine that disappeared a few months ago from all Russian
libraries. Kennan traced the activities of each member of the seminar group,
together with the Georgian and Armenian Communists who were closely associated
with Stalin between 1906 and 1912—and found that all had been liquidated in the
twenties.
When a news reporter
asked Ambassador Kennan about the accuracy of this account, Kennan declined to
comment beyond stating that it was ‘not entirely accurate’. See New York
Times, 31 October 1966, and H.Montgomery Hyde, Stalin: The History of a
Dictator, New York, 1971, p. 75, fn.
36.
Utro rossii, 23
June 1917. (Newspaper clipping in the Nikolaevsky Collection at the Hoover
Institution, file 132, box 4, no. 27.)
37.
Pravda,
no. 73, 17 June 1917, p. 3.
38.
Donald W.Treadgold, Twentieth
Century Russia, Chicago, 1976, p. 132.
39.
Ibid., p. 133.
40.
Slusser, Stalin in
October, pp. 145ff, quoting Lenin, vol. XXI, pp. 9ff.
41.
Ibid., p. 149; Slusser is
quoting Rabinovich, Prelude, p. 201.
42.
These reports were
published in the Soviet journal Proletarskaya revolutsiya, no. 9, 1922.
43.
Luch, 20
July 1917.
44.
Shub, Politicheskie,
pp. 219ff.
45.
Lev Trotsky, O Lenine,
Moscow, 1924, pp. 58f.
46.
I.Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Ordzhonikidze,
Moscow, 1963, p. 149.
47.
I.Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
Moscow, 1974, pp. 180–2.
48.
John Reed, Ten Days
That Shook the World, New York, 1960; London, 1962, p. 49.
49.
B.V.Nikitine, The Fatal
Years: Fresh Revelations on a Chapter of Underground History, London, 1938,
p. 24.
50.
Eduard Bernstein, ‘Ein
dunkeles Kapitel’, Vorwärts, Berlin, 14 January 1921. Also Shub, Politicheskie,
p. 187.
51.
Lev Trotsky, Stalin,
New York, 1941, p. 211. See also Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Ordzhonikidze, p.
150.
52.
Shub, Politicheskie,
p. 186.
53.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, pp. 200ff.
54.
Lev Trotsky, Stalin’s
School of Falsification, New York, 1962, p. 5.
55.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
221.
56.
Ibid., pp. 221ff.
57.
V.Maksakov, ‘Arkhiv
revolutsii i vneshnei politiki XIX–XX vekov’, p. 33.
58.
Ibid., pp. 32f.
59.
All materials and Okhrana
files of the Extraordinary Commission were delivered to Moscow at the end of
1919. On Stalin’s file, see Chapter 17 below.
60.
Trotsky, Stalin,
pp. 222ff.
61.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima,
vol. I, p. 312.
62.
Bolsheviki,
Introduction, p. ix.
63.
Ibid, p. 202.
64.
See Chapter 30 below.
65.
Bolsheviki,
Introduction, p. xxix.
‘THE GRAY BLUR’
On the eve of the October Revolution,
Stalin was leading a secretive life, intently watching the rapidly unfolding
events and fearing that he might get caught on the losing side. Lenin, from his
hideout in Finland, demanded that the Bolsheviks stage an armed uprising
against the Provisional Government. The commander in chief of the Russian army
General Kornilov accused the Provisional Government of acting under the
pressure of the Bolshevik majority of the Soviets who were in full agreement
with the German General Staff.1 Suspecting that Kornilov wanted to
replace him as prime minister, Kerensky ordered his dismissal and appointed
himself commander in chief; Kornilov, however, refused to relinquish his
position.
By that time, Lenin had
large sums of German money available and was financing a propaganda campaign
aimed at weakening the Russian army and achieving a Bolshevik majority in the
Soviets. He renewed his slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ and called for
resistance to ‘Kornilov’s counter-revolutionary mutiny’ and ‘conspiracy against
the people’, which, he insisted, aimed to reinstate the tsarist regime.2
Kerensky, in his role as commander in chief, appointed General N.N.Dukhonin as
chief of staff. By the end of September, Kerensky formed the Third Coalition
Government, which consisted of ten socialists and six liberals. Under pressure
from the radical left, he proclaimed Russia a federated republic and arrested
several public figures who were critical of his policies. He also released from
prison Trotsky and some other Bolsheviks accused in July of being German
agents.
Kerensky’s attempt to
restore discipline in the army failed. The Bolshevik slogan ‘Land and Liberty!’
had a strong appeal to the soldiers, whom Lenin called ‘peasants in uniform’.
They deserted to take part in land redistribution, ignoring the appeals of the
Provisional Government to stop and wait for the Constituent Assembly, which was
expected to proclaim land reform.3 By October, the price of food in
Petrograd climbed as supplies dwindled. Plants and factories were closing down
because of a shortage of raw materials and workers’ unrest. In letters from
Finland, Lenin declared that the moment was right to seize power: ‘The victory
is ours, because people are already close to desperation and bestiality.’4
Lenin threatened to resign from the Central Committee if his demand for an
uprising was not heeded. ‘We shall ruin the revolution’, he warned ‘history
will not forgive us if we do not assume power now.’5
The Provisional Government
announced that elections to the Constituent Assembly would be held in November
1917. On 7 October 1917, 550 members of the Provisional Council of the Republic
met to establish electoral procedures. The Bolsheviks walked out of the first
session, preparing for an insurrection in late October. Kerensky declared, ‘I
have more strength than I need. The Bolsheviks will finally be smashed.’6
Lenin insisted that the
insurrection start at once and claimed that the Provisional Government was
ready to surrender Petrograd to the Germans, and that the ‘imperialist powers’
were prepared to sign a separate peace treaty in order to strangle the Russian
revolution and organize a ‘second Kornilov mutiny’.
In reality, it was Lenin
who was helping the Germans in their plan to capture Petrograd by subverting
the Russian Army through German-financed propaganda, and it was Lenin who
intended to sign a separate peace treaty with the Germans. And Lenin, not
Kornilov, called for armed insurgency against the Provisional Government. Felix
Dzerzhinsky, a recent recruit into Lenin’s inner circle, did not know of the
existence of the secret Politburo, which Lenin had formed in May 1917. He
proposed to set up a ‘Bureau for the Political Guidance of the Insurrection’.
Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin, the members of the original Politburo,
were elected to this new Politburo, together with Trotsky, Sokolnikov and Bubnov.
At the next meeting of the Central Committee, on 16 October 1917, Lenin again
insisted on an immediate insurrection, stating: ‘One cannot be guided by the
mood of the masses for it is changeable and impossible to calculate; we must be
guided by an objective analysis and assessment of the revolution.’7
Lenin’s resolution was approved, with only Zinoviev and Kamenev voting against.
On 18 October Kamenev
published a letter in Novaya zhizn’, stating his and Zinoviev’s
objections to insurrection. Lenin, hiding in Finland, was furious. He wrote a
letter to Pravda, in which he called Zinoviev and Kamenev
‘strike-breakers’ and demanded their expulsion from the party.8
Stalin, in an unsigned editorial, defended Zinoviev and Kamenev, stating, ‘The
sharp tone of Comrade Lenin’s article [against Zinoviev and Kamenev] does not
change the fact that, fundamentally, we remain of one mind.’9 The
Second Congress of the Soviets was originally scheduled to open on 20 October
1917 but, because of organizational problems, was postponed to 25 October 1917,
giving the Bolsheviks five more days to prepare for insurrection. On 24 October
1917 Fedor Dan, a leading Menshevik, and Abram Gots, a prominent Social
Revolutionary, attempted to convince Kerensky to sign a peace treaty immediately
and proclaim land reform. Kerensky interpreted this as an ultimatum and
threatened to resign. The threat was an empty gesture; by then military units
directed by Trotsky were already moving to take control of the nerve centers of
Petrograd.
In Lenin’s own words, the
October coup was ‘easier than lifting a feather’.10 There was no
resistance to the Bolshevik takeover, except for a short-lived skirmish in the
Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government was defended by young cadets
and a women’s battalion. Bolshevik soldiers and sailors under the command of
V.A.Antonov- Ovseenko overran the palace in the early morning of 26 October.
The takeover claimed only six casualties. Kerensky fled in a car flying an
American flag. The ministers of the Provisional Government were locked up in
the cells of the old tsarist prison—the Peter and Paul Fortress. The victors
helped themselves to the liquor and food stocked in the basement of the Winter
Palace.
Stalin did not take part
in the coup. He neither attended a Central Committee meeting held on 24 October
in preparation for the coup, nor appeared at Smolny Palace the next day to take
part in the assignment of duties. Instead, he spent the evening of 24 October
and the day of 25 October with the Alliluev family.11 The historian
N.N.Sukhanov aptly notes that Stalin gave ‘the impression of a gray blur,
looming up now and then dimly, not leaving any trace’.12
The Second Congress of the
Soviets opened during the Bolshevik uprising on 25 October, which became the official
day of the ‘October Revolution’ (7 November, N.S.). Of the 650 delegates, 390
declared themselves to be Bolsheviks. Mensheviks and moderate Social
Revolutionaries walked out in protest against what they called the ‘Bolshevik
adventure’. The Left Social Revolutionaries remained in the hall, indicating
that they were the sole representatives of the peasantry.13 They
agreed to join the ‘Soviet Government’, which made it possible for Lenin to
claim that his power was broadly based and represented the joint dictatorship
of the proletariae and the poor peasantry. On 26 October 1917 Lenin announced
the creation of the ‘Council of People’s Commissars’, having rejected the
traditional title of ‘minister’ as being too ‘bourgeois’, and named himself the
‘Chairman of the Council’. He appointed Trotsky Commissar of Foreign Affairs.
At the bottom of the list was the name of I.V.Dzhugashvili, the ‘Commissar of
Nationalities Affairs’.
Lenin saw in Stalin a
‘non-Russian’ spokesman on the nationalities problem, an important issue given
the persistent conflict between various ethnic groups in the Russian empire.
Lenin considered that his chief enemies were the Mensheviks, among whom were
two prominent leaders, Tsereteli and Chkheidze, both Georgians. Lenin needed
his own ‘wonderful Georgian’, a man who had the additional qualification of
having written a theoretical pamphlet titled ‘Marxism and the Nationalities
Problems’. Lenin was also returning the favor for Stalin’s past services: the
expropriations and, more recently, Stalin’s help in sheltering him in the
Alliluevs’ apartment and leading him to a hiding place in Rosliv when an order
for his arrest had been out.
The first session of the
Bolshevik government took place in Smolny Palace, in Lenin’s office. Stalin
attempted to strike up a conversation with Trotsky, who cut him short. Trotsky
felt that Stalin’s advances were out of place and found him unendurably vulgar.
Stalin’s face changed, and in his yellow eyes appeared the same glint of
animosity that Trotsky had noticed during their brief encounter in Vienna in
1913.14 On his first day on the job in Smolny Palace, Stalin
furnished his corner of a room with a desk and two chairs, pinning above them a
sheet of paper on which he had written, ‘People’s Commissariat of Nationalities
Affairs’.15 He moved from the Alliluevs’ apartment to Smolny Palace
and settled there in two small rooms on the ground floor.16 This
made it possible for him to be near Lenin at all times. At 2 am on 9 November
1917 Stalin was at Lenin’s side when Lenin called the chief of staff of the
Russian Army, General Dukhonin, and demanded immediate peace negotiations with
the Germans. Dukhonin refused, so Lenin issued an order for the removal of
Dukhonin and the appointment of N.V.Krylenko in his place. (At the outbreak of
the First World War, Krylenko had deserted and fled abroad. In October 1915
Krylenko and his wife, Elena Rozmirovich, had secretly returned to Russia on an
espionage mission of Parvus’s ‘Research Institute’, settling in Moscow under the
fictitious names ‘Tsorn’ and ‘Sidorov’, but on 4 November 1915 they had been
arrested by the Okhrana and exiled. The February Revolution had set them free.17)
Krylenko left for the Russian Army headquarters in Mogilev, where he instigated
the execution of General Dukhonin by Red Guards. Krylenko ordered all frontline
units to arrange their own cease-fire agreements with opposing enemy forces,
and on 22 November 1917 concluded the preliminary armistice agreement with the
Germans at Brest-Litovsk. Russian soldiers abandoned their trenches and headed
home in entire units.
The German government
concluded that the millions it had spent to support the Bolsheviks had been
well invested. In his report of 3 December 1917 German Foreign Minister von
Kuhlmann wrote:
Only
when the Bolsheviks began to receive from us a constant flow of funds through
various channels and under various names did it become possible for them to
place their main organ Pravda on a sound footing, launch energetic
propaganda, and to widen considerably the initially narrow base of their party.
Now the Bolsheviks have come to power… They need peace to strengthen their own
position… Signing a separate peace would mean the achievement of the desired
military goal, namely, a breakup between Russia and her allies.18
On 17 November 1917 Parvus
arrived in Stockholm and met Radek, who was elated—he considered Parvus one of
the most influential people of the time and admired his financial success.19
Parvus told him that he intended to ask Lenin’s permission to return to Russia
and was ready to defend himself against accusations of being a German agent. He
asked Radek to relate his request to Lenin. Radek immediately left for
Petrograd, accompanied by Ganetsky. On 18 November 1917 they crossed the
Finnish border and sent Lenin a telegram, ‘We travel by express train to
Petrograd. We have a very important assignment. Asking for immediate
conference.’20 Lenin turned down Parvus’s request, replying, ‘The
cause of the Revolution should not be marred by dirty hands.’21
Lenin’s reluctance to deal with Parvus was understandable; now that he had
established direct contact with the Germans through their official
representatives, he no longer had any use for Parvus, and any further
association with the notorious German agent could only be a liability.
The news of the Bolshevik
putsch reached Roman Malinovsky in his prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. He
wrote a petition to the German Ministry of War, asking to be released and to be
allowed promptly to return to Russia ‘because the party to which I belong has
taken power in Russia, my presence in Russia at this time could bring great
benefits’.22 The Germans, however, decided not to release Malinovsky
until the general prisoner-of-war exchange took place as part of the peace
settlement.
After the October
insurrection the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda had declared, ‘Comrades, by
shedding your blood you have assured the convocation of the Constituent
Assembly.’23 Lenin accused Kerensky of sabotaging the elections to
the Constituent Assembly on 12 November 1917 when, despite the well-financed
Bolshevik propaganda, the results of the elections were not in their favor.
Altogether 703 deputies were elected: 380 Right Social Revolutionaries, 39 Left
Social Revolutionaries, 168 Bolsheviks, 18 Mensheviks, 17 Kadets and their
allies, 4 Popular Socialists, and 77 representatives of minority groups.24
Lenin ordered the arrest of several deputies in order to intimidate the others.
He outlawed the Kadet Party. Two Kadet leaders, A.I.Shingarev and
F.F.Kokoshkin, were arrested. A few weeks later they were murdered in a prison
hospital. Lenin in his statements insisted that the Constituent Assembly would
be allowed to convene on 18 January 1918, if it voted approval of the Soviet
government. On 6 December 1917, there was an assassination attempt on Lenin’s
life, which gave him an excuse to unleash the ‘Red Terror’.
Next day Lenin created the
Soviet Secret Police, which became known as the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission
to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage), of which Felix Dzerzhinsky was
appointed chairman. Among the eight Cheka collegium members was Stalin’s old
friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze. The official duties of the Cheka were limited to
preliminary investigation of criminal activities, but in fact it became Lenin’s
instrument of terror.
The Constituent Assembly
held its opening session in Petrograd’s Tavrida Palace on 18 January 1918. The
leader of the Right Social Revolutionaries, Viktor Chernov, was elected
chairman. Three resolutions were adopted: one on land reform, one on the appeal
for a ‘general democratic peace’, and one proclaiming Russia a democratic
federal republic. The session continued all night. At 5 am on 19 January 1918 a
Red Guard sailor by the name of Zhelezniak interrupted the proceedings,
declaring that the Assembly had to leave because ‘the guards are tired’. At
noon, the deputies returned but were prevented by Cheka detachments from
entering Tavrida Palace. The Constituent Assembly was dispersed.
Peace negotiations with the
Germans had begun at Brest-Litovsk on 22 December 1917. The Soviet strategy was
based on the assumption that world revolution would start in the near future
and it was necessary to stall the negotiations until the German communists came
to power. ‘Our final negotiations will be with Karl Liebknecht’ (leader of the
German Communists), declared Trotsky.25
German Foreign Minister
von Kuhlmann and General von Hoffmann approached the peace issue from different
perspectives. They considered the Bolsheviks to be German agents, deeply
indebted to Germany for a sum in excess of 50 million gold marks that Lenin had
received.26 Von Kuhlmann had no intention of allowing the Bolshevik
delegation to forget that they were on the payroll of the German government. On
5 January 1918 General von Hoffmann brought in a map and, pointing to a line on
it, said that this was the future boundary of Russia. The line he indicated was
the armistice front line, which cut deeply into the territory of former
Imperial Russia. On 8 February 1918 the Soviet government adopted the New Style
(Gregorian) calendar, bringing Russia into line with the West. (Hereafter, all
dates are given in New Style.) In early February, the Bolshevik Central
Committee debated the German terms. Lenin proposed that they be accepted, but
Trotsky advanced a strange ‘no peace, no war’ formula, while Bukharin was for a
‘revolutionary war’ against the Germans. Stalin voted with Lenin, but Trotsky’s
‘no war, no peace’ formula was approved. Germany and Austria concluded a peace
treaty with the Ukrainian Rada (parliament), which had proclaimed
Ukrainian independence. To the astonishment of von Kuhlmann and General von
Hoffmann, Trotsky declared that the Brest-Litovsk Peace Conference was closed
and added, ‘We are out of the war, but we refuse to sign the peace treaty.’27
With these words, he left the conference and set out for Petrograd.
On 15 February 1918 the
Germans announced the termination of the Brest-Litovsk armistice agreement and
the German Army began its advance inside Russia. On 21 February 1918 Lenin’s
government proclaimed ‘Holy Revolutionary War against the bourgeoisie and
imperialists of Germany.’28 Trotsky proposed to ask Britain and
France, the allies of Imperial Russia, to provide the Bolsheviks with aid. Lenin
sent a note to him, stating his agreement: ‘I ask to add my vote in favor of
taking potatoes and arms from the bandits of Anglo-French imperialism.’29
On 23 February 1918 Berlin delivered new and
much harsher German peace
terms. Lenin demanded that the Central Committee immediately accept them.
Stalin voted with Lenin. On 3 March 1918 the Bolshevik delegation, headed by
Grigory Sokolnikov, signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The old Russian empire
lost Poland, the Baltic states, the Ukraine, Finland, Bessarabia and a strip of
Kars-Trebizond territory on the Russian-Turkish border. The total loss in
population was close to 62 million people. A secret financial agreement was
also added to the Brest- Litovsk Treaty, signed in Berlin and dated 27 August
1918. This reveals that Lenin shipped 90 tons of gold to Germany, which was
probably the amount that the German government had spent to finance the
Bolshevik takeover.30
In March 1918 the Seventh
Party Congress approved the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and gave a new name to the
party: ‘Communist Party (b)—(Bolsheviks)’. The widespread popular disapproval
of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, and
growing poverty and unemployment threatened Lenin’s government. On 18 March
1918 Petrograd workers issued an appeal, stating that workers’ committees in
factories had been turned into the ‘submissive tools of the Soviet government’
and trade unions had become ‘strictly government bodies and no longer express
the opinions of the masses of workers’.31 The anti-Bolshevik mood of
Petrograd workers forced Lenin to order the evacuation of the Soviet government
from Petrograd to Moscow on 12 March 1918. The evacuation was carried out
secretly, as if it were a military operation.32 Lenin’s decision to
seek security behind the ancient walls of Moscow’s Kremlin was a symbolic
reflection of the very essence of the Bolshevik putsch. The Bolsheviks claimed
to represent the ‘progressive’ wave of the future communist utopia, but in fact
they returned Russia to the medieval barbarity of the old Muscovy with its
deranged Tsar Ivan the Terrible hiding behind the Kremlin walls. Stalin was one
of the Soviet officials secretly moved from Petrograd to Moscow.
On 18 March 1918 the
Petrograd newspaper Vpered (Forward) published an article by Menshevik
leader Yuly Martov, stating that Stalin had been ‘expelled from the party
organization for having had something to do with expropriations’.33
Stalin was enraged and demanded that Martov be tried for ‘criminal libel of a
Soviet official and slander of the Soviet government’. He stated with fervent
indignation: ‘Never in my life was I placed on trial before my party and
expelled. This is a vicious libel… One has no right to come out with
accusations like Martov’s except with documents in one’s hands. It is dishonest
to throw mud on the basis of mere rumors…’.34 Martov asked the court
to collect affidavits from prominent Georgian revolutionaries who had expelled
Stalin from the party and knew about the charge by a worker named Zharinov that
Stalin had instigated an almost fatal attack on him.35 The court
assigned the prominent Menshevik and historian Boris Nikolaevsky to collect the
testimony. When he returned to Moscow with the affidavits of the Georgian party
members, he discovered that all the records of the court proceedings had
disappeared. On 17 April 1918 the Petrograd newspaper Zaria rossii (Dawn
of Russia) stated that the court refused to rule on Stalin’s complaint because
the complaint did not fall within its jurisdiction.36
In March 1918 a book
titled Bolsheviki was published in Moscow with the stated purpose of
relating the history of the Bolshevik party from 1903 to 1917. The introduction
read:
The
jubilant arrival of the Bolshevik leader Lenin on 4 February 1917 in Petrograd
through Germany in a ‘sealed’ rail car created great turmoil in the minds of
Russian citizens, inspiring endless gossip at all kinds of public gatherings
and in the press. The Bolsheviks, until then known to very few, became a
subject of discussion for the millions.37
Bolsheviki was
intended to dispel the widely held notion of the Bolsheviks as German spies and
Okhrana agents. But the book’s authors could not erase from public memory the
reports, published in 1917, about Bolsheviks like Roman Malinovsky who had been
exposed as Okhrana agents, or the published Bolshevik list of 11 other such
agents, among them one ‘so far unidentified, who had the party alias Vasily’.38
The head of the Cheka,
Dzerzhinsky, controlled the Okhrana archives in order to enlist into service
former Okhrana officers and agents, as well as common criminals, prostitutes,
and others vulnerable to blackmail. He issued a top-secret guide on how to
recruit such people.39 Dzerzhinsky had no specific interest in
finding out who the unidentified Okhrana agent ‘Vasily’ was. Stalin, on the
other hand, used his position as a member of Lenin’s government to obscure the
fact that he and ‘Vasily’ were the same person. It was at this point that
Stalin made sure that the index of names, aliases and codenames in Bolsheviki
would not identify him as either ‘Vasily’, or ‘Ivanovich’, or ‘Ivanov’.
The new German Ambassador
to Moscow, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, arrived early in April 1918. After
surveying the scene, he wrote to the German chancellor, Betmann- Gelveg:
The
Bolshevik power in Moscow is mainly supported by Latvian battalions, and also
by a large number of iron-plated cars, requisitioned by the government, which
are continuously rushing around the city and can immediately deliver soldiers
to vulnerable places when needed.40
On 17 May 1918 Mirbach sent a
telegram to Foreign Minister von Kuhlmann stating,
I
continue to do my best to counteract the efforts of the Allies and support the
Bolsheviks. I, however, would be grateful to receive your instructions in
regard to whether the general situation would justify spending large sums of
money in our interests.
The next day, 18 May 1918, Mirbach
received von Kuhlmann’s reply:
Please
spend large sums, because it is very much in our interests that the Bolsheviks
remain in power. Ritzler’s funds are at your disposal. If you need more money,
please wire how much.41
The German money helped
Lenin’s government to survive, but it was the ruthless Red Terror of the Cheka
that ensured the submission of the populace. Early in June 1918, popular
anti-Bolshevik sentiment noticeably increased. Mirbach ascribed this to the
manipulations of Russia’s former allies, Britain and France. On 3 June 1918
Mirbach
wired to the German
foreign ministry: ‘Because of the strong rivalry of the allies, three million
marks a month are needed.’ Mirbach’s adviser, Trautmann, sent a memorandum to
von Kuhlmann stating:
The
fund which until now we had at our disposal for distribution in Russia has been
exhausted. Because of this it is necessary for the Secretary of the Imperial
Treasury to provide a new fond for our disposal. Taking into account the
above-mentioned circumstances, this fund has to be, at least, no less than 40
million marks.42
By early June 1918 Russia
was on the brink of famine and civil war, Lenin decided to organize ‘Committees
of Poor Peasants’ which were intended to ‘carry the class struggle to the
village’. This was a policy of ‘divide and conquer’ by inciting the ‘poor’
peasants into attacking the ‘rich’ peasants, with the purpose of requisitioning
their grain to feed the starving cities and the expanding party cadres. Rich
peasants were labeled kulaks (‘fist’, an epithet for a peasant who keeps
his crops in his tight fist) and were accused of keeping food from the starving
population. In reality, there were no sharp class divisions among Russian
peasants, almost all of whom owned some land and livestock. The ‘Committees of
Poor Peasants’ attracted opportunists and lazy peasants who wanted to avenge
private grievances. They formed an army of informers, who helped the Red Guards
‘requisition’ the crops of kulaks and often to execute them. The period of ‘War
Communism’ had begun. The peasants were initially confused as to who was behind
the state-organized requisition of the fruits of their labor: ‘I am for the
Bolsheviks but against the communists’, was a typical claim. They remembered
that the Bolshevik propaganda had promised them ‘land, bread and peace’.
The Left Esers (SRs)
assumed their traditional role of defenders of the peasantry, criticizing the
‘Committees of Poor Peasants’ as ‘cliques of village loafers’, and demanding
termination of forced requisitioning of crops and annulment of the Brest-
Litovsk Treaty. These demands fueled the conflict between the Bolsheviks and
the Left Esers, who decided to carry out an anti-Bolshevik coup. The
assassination of the German Ambassador von Mirbach was to serve as the signal
for it. On 6 July 1918 two Left Esers, Yakov Blumkin and Nikolay Andreev,
entered the German embassy at Number 5, Denezhny Lane in Moscow and asked to
see Ambassador von Mirbach. Blumkin was a ranking member of the Cheka, while
Andreev was a member of the Revolutionary Tribunal. They presented a Cheka
document authorizing them to meet von Mirbach:
The All-Russian
Extraordinary Commission delegates its member Yakov Blumkin and the
representative of the Revolutionary Tribunal Nikolay Andreev to enter into
negotiations with the Ambassador to the Russian Republic in connection with a
case that has direct relation to the Ambassador. Chairman Dzerzhinsky,
Secretary Ksenafontov.43
Blumkin and Andreev were
seated at a large marble table in a reception hall. Von Mirbach, his adviser Dr
Ritzler, and a translator sat opposite them. Blumkin told a story about an
arrest by the Cheka of a ‘Count Robert von Mirbach’, supposedly a relative of
the Ambassador. When Von Mirbach said that he knew of no such relative, Andreev
intervened, saying, ‘Perhaps
the Ambassador wants to know what measures will be taken by the Tribunal in the
case of Count Robert von Mirbach?’ This was an agreed signal. Blumkin opened
his briefcase saying, ‘Yes, yes, now I’ll show the Ambassador…’. With these
words, Blumkin drew a revolver and fired three shots, all of which missed. Von
Mirbach rushed towards the door, but Andreev shot him in the back and threw a
bomb, which exploded, killing Von Mirbach. Blumkin and Andreev jumped out of
the window and were spirited away in a waiting car. German embassy officials
called Lenin, who ordered Dzerzhinsky to go immediately to the German embassy.
‘What do you say now, Mr Dzerzhinsky?’ Ritzler reproached Dzerzhinsky,
referring to the fact that the German embassy had repeatedly passed on to
Dzerzhinsky information about plots to kill the German Ambassador. Ritzler
showed Dzerzhinsky the Cheka authorization to meet the Ambassador, bearing
Dzerzhinsky’s own signature. Dzerzhinsky rushed to the Left Eser headquarters,
where he learned that the uprising had already begun. A Left Eser leader by the
name of Proshian said, ‘Comrade Dzerzhinsky, do not bother looking for Blumkin.
Count Mirbach was killed according to the decision of the party of Left Esers
and the responsibility for the assassination we, the members of the Central
Committee, take upon ourselves.’44 Dzerzhinsky was disarmed and
locked in a room. His assistant, M.I.Latsis, was captured in the Cheka Lubianka
headquarters. ‘No point in taking him anywhere, put this scum against the wall!’
shouted a sailor, but one of the leaders, Alexandrovich, intervened, saying,
‘There is no need to kill, comrades; arrest him, but do not kill.’45 Dzerzhinsky’s
assistant Yakov Peters was urgently summoned by Trotsky, who ordered him to
crush the uprising by attacking the Left Eser headquarters. Alexandrovich was
caught at a railway station, and Latsis, whom he had saved from execution,
personally shot him. Mass executions in Cheka prisons followed. Dzerzhinsky
submitted his resignation to placate the Germans, who blamed him for not
preventing the murder of Mirbach, but a month later was reinstated: ‘Comrade
Dzerzhinsky, whose resignation was accepted more than a month ago on his own
request, is again appointed chairman of the VCheka [Cheka].’46 Lenin
needed Dzerzhinsky.
Stalin had left Moscow by
train for the Volga port of Tsaritsyn on 3 June 1918, a month before the Left
Eser uprising, on a mission to requisition grain from peasants in the Volga
region. He was accompanied by Sergey Alliluev and Alliluev’s youngest daughter
Nadezhda, who had turned 17 and had asked to be Stalin’s secretary. One night,
Sergey Alliluev heard screams coming from Nadezhda’s compartment. He rushed in
with a pistol in his hand. Nadezhda, sobbing, told him that she had been raped by
Stalin. Stalin pleaded with Alliluev not to turn the episode into a scandal and
offered to marry Nadezhda. Because she was too young, their marriage was
registered a year and a half later, on 24 November 1917.47 Their
son, who was born at that time, was named Vasily. The name Vasily continued to
have special significance for Stalin.
NOTES
1.
Donald W.Treadgold, Twentieth
Century Russia, Chicago, 1976, pp. 135ff.
2.
Ibid.
3.
W.H.Chamberlain, The
Russian Revolution, 1917–1921, vol. 1, New York, 1935, pp. 254ff.
4.
David Shub, Politicheskie
deyateli rossii, New York, 1969, p. 98.
5.
V.I.Lenin, Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii, 5th edn, vol. VI, Moscow, 1958–65, p. 217.
6.
Treadgold, Twentieth
Century Russia, p. 144.
7.
Robert M.Slusser, Stalin
in October: the Man Who Missed the Revolution, Baltimore/London, 1987, p.
230, quoting from Protokoly tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP(b), August 1917
to February 1918, PP. 93ff.
8.
Ibid., p. 109.
9.
Ibid., p. 115.
10.
Lev Trotsky, Stalin,
New York, 1941, p. 239.
11.
Anna S.Allilueva, Vospominaniya,
Moscow, 1946, p. 61; quoted by Edward Ellis Smith, The Young Stalin: the
Early Years of an Elusive Revolutionary, London, 1968, p. 374.
12.
N.N.Sukhanov, The
Russian Revolution, 1917; Eyewitness Account, vol. II, New York and London,
1955. PP. 229ff. Also quoted in Trotsky, Stalin, p. 194, and Smith, p.
345.
13.
Ibid., vol. II, p. 624.
14.
Lev Trotsky, Stalin,
pp. 243ff.
15.
Ibid., p. 245. Trotsky is
quoting from Pestkovsky’s memoirs.
16.
Ibid., p. 243. Trotsky is
quoting from Sergey Alliluev, ‘Moi vospominaniya’.
17.
Bolsheviki,
Moscow, 1918, pp. 227ff.
18.
Shub, Politicheskie,
p. 232, quoting Z.A.Zeman, Germany and the Revolution in Russia 1915–1917,
London, 1958, p. 95.
19.
Shub, Politicheskie,
p. 236, quoting A.Litvak, Collected Works, pp. 245, 252, 256.
20.
Shub, Politicheskie,
p. 234.
21.
Ibid.
22.
S.Passony, Der Monat,
Heft 71, August 1954, p. 495.
23.
Pravda, 26
October 1917.
24.
Oliver Henry Radkey, The
Election to the Russian Constituent Assembly of 1917, Cambridge, 1950, pp.
16ff.
25.
Treadgold, Twentieth
Century Russia, p. 152.
26.
Shub, Politicheskie,
pp. 187ff., quoting Eduard Bernstein, ‘Ein Dunkeles Kapitel’, Vorwärts, Berlin,
14 January 1921.
27.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
459.
28.
Ibid., p. 460.
29.
Treadgold, Twentieth
Century Russia, p. 154.
30.
Lenin Sent Gold to Germany
by the Ton, see Novoe Russkoe Slove, 27
November 1997, p. 5. See also Dr Vladlen Sirotkin, ‘Russian Gold and Real
Estate Abroad’, International Life, Moscow, 1997.
31.
Kontinent,
no. 2, 1975; reproduction on back cover.
32.
I.Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
Moscow, 1974, pp. 81ff.
33.
Y.Martov, ‘Artilleriyskaya
podgotovka’, Vpered, 18 March 1918.
34.
Bertram D.Wolfe, Three
Who Made a Revolution, New York, 1964, p. 395.
35.
See Chapter 8 above. See
also Smith, The Young Stalin, pp. 208–10.
36.
Zaria rossii, 17
April 1918. Also see Grigory Aronson, ‘Stalinskii protest protiv Martova’, Sotsialisticheskii
vestnik, no. 7–8, 1939, pp. 84–9.
37.
Bolsheviki,
Introduction, p. i.
38.
Ibid., p. ix.
39.
A leading dissident, Petr
Yakir, discovered this brochure in 1967 in the library of the widow of a
high-placed Cheka official, and at that time showed it to many dissidents,
among them Vitaly Svechinsky, Pavel Litvinov and Viktor Krasin. The brochure
was taken from Yakir during a KGB search of his apartment in Moscow.
40.
Shub, Politicheskie,
p. 232, quoting Z.A.Zeman, Germany and the Revolution in Russia 1915–1917,
London, 1958, p. 121.
41.
Ibid.
42.
Ibid., p. 233.
43.
‘Roman Gul’, Dzherzhinsky,
New York, 1974, p. 114.
44.
Ibid., pp. 113–22.
45.
Ibid., p. 120.
46.
Iz istorii vserossiiskoi
chrezvychainioi komissii, 1917–1921 gg., Sbornik dokumentov,
pp. 150ff. Also P.I. Pimenov, ‘Kak ya iskal shpiona Raili’, Materialy
samizdata, no. 14/72, 6 April 1972, p. 14.
47.
Taped interview with
I.P.Itskov.
RED TERROR
Before leaving for
Tsaritsyn on 3 June 1918, Stalin had expressed to Lenin and Sverdlov his strong
opinion that the Tsar should under no circumstances be surrendered to the White
Guards.1 Stalin was preaching to the converted: Lenin had made up
his mind long before the Revolution to destroy the Tsar and his entire family.
He often quoted his idol Sergey Nechaev, who in one of his revolutionary
appeals posed the question of who in the House of Romanov should be killed and
answered it with the words: ‘The full ektenia’ (a prayer asking God to
bless those mentioned in it, usually the entire royal family). ‘“Who of them,
after all, should be killed?” a simple-minded reader would ask himself. “The
entire House of Romanov!” was the answer he should have given himself. Look,
this is so simple that it has the touch of genius.’2 Lenin declared
that it was ‘necessary to cut off the heads of at least a hundred Romanovs’.3
He considered Nechaev a ‘titan of the revolution’ and blamed Dostoyevsky for
discrediting him in the eyes of Russian intelligentsia by depicting Nechaev as
the provocateur Peter Verkhovensky in The Possessed. Nechaev in
his Revolutionary Catechism had sermonized: ‘A revolutionary knows only
one science—the science of destruction and extermination. He lives in the world
with this sole aim: to leave not one stone unturned; as many ruins as possible,
the extinction of most of the revolutionaries—that is the perspective. Poison,
the knife, the noose—the revolution consecrates everything.’4 Lenin
shared Nechaev’s belief that the Revolution consecrated every crime—provided
that it was Bolshevik driven.
On 18 July Sverdlov
announced that ‘The Presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet had adopted the
decision to shoot Nikolay Romanov which was carried out on 16 July. The wife
and son of Nikolay were sent to a secure place. Documents of the exposed
conspiracy were sent to Moscow by special courier.’8 Lenin listened
to Sverdlov’s announcement without lifting his head or taking his eyes from the
papers in front of him, as if the murder had nothing to do with him. In
response to repeated inquiries from the German Embassy about the fate of the
Tsar’s family, Radek and Foreign Commissar Chicherin insisted that only the
Tsar had been shot, and that the members of his family were safe and well.
On 18 July a telegram
signed by Beloborodov was sent to Sverdlov from the Urals stating that the
former Grand Princes had been abducted in Alapaevsk ‘by an unknown band’.9
The corpses of the murdered princes were found in an abandoned mine after the
White Army captured Alapaevsk. Autopsies revealed that Grand Prince Sergey
Mikhailovich had been shot in the head. The other victims had been thrown into
the mine alive, and their deaths had been caused by the fall.10 The
rest of the Tsar’s relatives, who had been held as hostages in Petrograd’s
Peter and Paul Fortress, were executed there.
Ten years before the
Revolution, Viacheslav Menzhinsky, a future head of the Soviet Secret Police,
wrote that Lenin considered himself ‘a natural heir to the Russian throne’ and
that if he ever became the ruler of Russia, ‘this illegitimate child of Russian
autocracy [would] really mess things up’.11
Lenin knew that the murder
of the Tsar would cause turmoil and would throw the country into a maelstrom of
violence and bloody civil war. This was in line with his agenda. ‘Our slogan is
civil war’, he proclaimed. ‘Let us raise the flag of civil war!’12
He also knew that the murder of the Tsar would create an immense emotional void
in the people and he intended to fill that void with his own persona. He wanted
to establish a new legitimacy for his ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which
in reality meant his own autocratic rule. The ‘illegitimate child of Russian
autocracy’ did not mask his goal but stated brazenly that:
The
speeches about equality, freedom and democracy in the present situation are
gibberish… Already in 1918 I pointed out the necessity of one-person rule, the
necessity of accepting the dictatorial power of one person from the point of
view of implementing the Soviet idea. All phrases about equality are nonsense.13
Stalin, too, was an
illegitimate child of Russian autocracy, who was to ‘mess things up’ no less
than Lenin—but he was to do so while exercising great care in masking his
actions with demagoguery.14 Scholars have argued that in The
Brothers Karamazov Dostoyevsky depicted Russian psychological types on the
eve of the Revolution and that in the murder of Fedor Karamazov by the bastard
Smerdiakov he foretold the murder of the Tsar. ‘Where do they come from, these
crowned lackeys, these Smerdiakovs, this triumphant rabble?’ wondered
D.Merezhkovsky, a prominent literary figure, as he watched the dregs of Russian
society at the turn of the century rising from the pit of depravity to inundate
the country: Okhrana provocateurs, expropriators, assassins, wildeyed
demagogues, political con artists and pretenders.15 Hordes of
criminals set free by the February Revolution joined in an orgy of violence.
Marxist postulates served them as
a convenient cover and
justification for redressing real or imaginary grievances and for satisfying
sadistic impulses.
Both Lenin and Stalin knew
that the murder of the Tsar inflicted deep emotional injury on the Russian
people, but Stalin sensed the severity of this injury more acutely than Lenin,
for he had experienced a very similar trauma in his personal life: the murder
of his father Vissarion was in psychological terms akin to the murder of Tsar
batiushka (Father Tsar). Stalin instinctively understood the Russian
people’s collective trauma. For him, the Tsar assumed the enormously magnified
image of Vissarion. Just as he kept silent about Vissarion’s murder, Stalin
during his rule also maintained absolute silence about the murder of the Tsar.
Having assumed power,
Lenin continued to use criminal types to incite violence. Accounts of his
encouragement of murders appeared in the press, which in early 1918 still dared
to publish such information. In April 1918 the Petrograd newspaper Novyi
den’ (New Day) published an article titled ‘The Case of the Shooting of Six
Students’, describing how a detachment of Red Sailors during a search of an
apartment house on 2 March 1918 had arrested six students who were having a
party with their girlfriends. The students were taken to Smolny Palace, where
Commissar Panushkin, the head of the detachment, reported their arrest to
Lenin. ‘And what did you do with the arrested persons? Did you shoot them?’
asked Lenin. ‘No, we did not’, answered Panushkin. ‘Deliver them to
Dzerzhinsky’s Commission’, said Lenin. ‘But if something should happen to them
on the way there, I would have nothing against it.’ Panushkin interpreted
Lenin’s suggestion as the order to execute the students. Several Chekists
volunteered to do the shooting. The students were driven to the outskirts of
Petrograd and told to line up, facing a wall. When they refused, they were
pushed against the wall by force and shot. Investigation of the case, initiated
by parents anxious to find out what had happened to their sons, led to Lenin.
Lenin claimed that he knew nothing about the shooting. The inquiry was soon terminated.16
Soon after the murder of
the Tsar, attempts to assassinate Bolshevik leaders began. Lenin was alarmed.
On 26 June 1918 he wrote a letter to Zinoviev castigating him for not ordering
mass executions after Sergeev, a Petrograd worker, had shot the Bolshevik
Volodarsky. On 9 August 1918 Lenin sent a telegram to the local Soviet in
Nizhny Novgorod (later named Gorky) stating that ‘You must immediately launch
mass terror, shoot and exile hundreds of prostitutes who tempt soldiers to
drink, former officers and so on. Not a minute to temporize. You must act with
full might; mass searches. Shoot for keeping arms. Mass deportations of
Mensheviks and unreliable people.’17
During one government
meeting, he asked Dzerzhinsky how many people were in the Lubianka prison.
Dzerzhinsky wrote down a figure and passed the note back to Lenin. Lenin put a
cross next to the figure and returned it to Dzerzhinsky. Having glanced at the
cross, Dzerzhinsky left the room to order the execution of all Lubianka
prisoners. (The shootings generally took place in the prison’s basement; the
doomed prisoners were shot in the head with revolvers or rifles.) Krupskaya
later on insisted that, in putting a cross next to the number of prisoners,
Lenin had simply acknowledged the information, but Dzerzhinsky, knowing Lenin
well, had no trouble decoding the real meaning.
Regarding the role of the
courts in the unleashed terror, Lenin stated that ‘The courts must not curb the
[Bolshevik] terror, for to promise this would be a self-deception and
deception, they must rather in principle guarantee and legalize the terror
clearly, without
falsehood and without
embellishments.’18 In a telegram Lenin sent in August 1918 he called
for the establishment of a ‘concentration camp’ stating: ‘It is necessary to
launch merciless mass terror against kulaks, priests and White Guards; those
about whom there are doubts should be placed in a concentration camp outside a
city…’.19 (A few years later Stalin and Hitler made concentration
camps the mainstay of their regimes.)
On 30 August 1918 a
Petrograd poet Leonid Kenigisser, who had just turned 20, assassinated the
chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, M.S.Uritsky. Kenigisser was executed along
with scores of other suspects.20 On the same day, Lenin was severely
wounded in an attempt on his life after addressing a meeting of workers at a
factory in Moscow. He was about to get into his Rolls Royce (which had been the
Tsar’s personal car), when three shots were fired and he fell.21 Two
bullets struck him, one of them becoming lodged dangerously near his heart.
Lenin’s chauffeur raced to the Kremlin, where several prominent Moscow
physicians, urgently summoned, saved his life. Cheka agents arrested Fannia
Kaplan, a Right Eser who in 1906 had been sentenced to life imprisonment for a
terrorist act, and released during the February Revolution. Kaplan confessed
that she shot Lenin, but refused to name her accomplices.22 She was
executed in a Kremlin courtyard by the chief of the Kremlin guards.23
(The execution was reported in the press, but for some reason the myth
persisted for decades that Lenin spared her life and that she was sentenced to
life imprisonment. As late as 1950, inmates in Butyrki prison in Moscow would
point at a window in one of the towers, claiming that Kaplan was still
incarcerated there.24)
On the day after the
attempt on Lenin’s life, the Soviet government proclaimed the launching of ‘Red
Terror’ and the Cheka declared the ‘system of hostages’ and ‘mass executions of
individually innocent class enemies.’25 Soviet archives contain more
than 7,000 unpublished documents with Lenin’s signed orders, in which he
instigates mass terror such as: ‘Secretly prepare terror: necessary and quick’;
‘Punish Latvia and Estonia by military means; for example, breach the border
somewhere by at least one mile and hang 100–1000 of their bureaucrats and
wealthy.’ In these documents, Lenin calls for incitement to ethnic conflict,
especially in the Caucasus, the ‘sovietization’ of Lithuania, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia and Rumania, and the suppression of independence movements by
means of mass executions. Lenin also gave orders to create concentration camps
for foreign citizens and to wage campaigns to discredit foreign diplomats. (In
December 1990, Soviet party officials discussed the publication of some 3,000
of these documents; the decision not to publish them being due to their
embarrassing nature.26)
On 30 August 1918, the day
Lenin was wounded, the Soviet govern-ment published the statement: ‘We do not
doubt that here will be found the footprints of the hirelings of the English
and the French.’27 Cheka detachments broke into the British Embassy
in Petrograd and murdered one of the diplomats, Captain Cromie. Dzerzhinsky
declared that ‘the main headquarters of counterrevolution are located in the
foreign embassies and missions’ and that it was necessary ‘to gather
unquestionable proofs of diplomats’ criminal activities’.28 (The
Soviet government was at that time being financed through the German Embassy.)
On the night of 31 August
the chief of the Kremlin guards, Malkov, broke into the Moscow apartment of
Bruce Lockhart, who was representing British interests in Russia, and arrested
him and his mistress Maria (Mura) Benkendorf, a Cheka agent. Lockhart was
accused of plotting to overthrow the Soviet regime. The myth of the ‘Lockhart
Plot’,
the first Soviet
international provocation, was born. It was to grow for decades into a highly
profitable theme in the Soviet Union as well as in the West.
This provocation had a
history. Before the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty, Lenin had asked
the British to send troops to defend military supplies against German and
Finnish attempts to capture them in the area of Archangel. After the signing of
the treaty, the Germans demanded withdrawal of the British forces from the
area. Lenin, Stalin and Dzerzhinsky decided to use Lockhart to infiltrate the
headquarters of the commander of the British detachment in Archangel and to
lure the British troops to a place where they could be easily surrounded and
defeated.29
On Dzerzhinsky’s order, a
Cheka agent introduced himself to Lockhart as British intelligence officer
Lieutenant Sidney G.Reilly. Actually his name was Rellinsky. He traded arms
during the war and after the Bolsheviks came to power was arrested by the Cheka
and recruited as an agent. His identity card with the name ‘Sidney Grigorievich
Rellinsky’ was signed by a Cheka officer, former Okhrana agent V.Orlovsky.30
He was sent to spy on the Whites during the Civil War, and later was assigned
to work in the anti-Soviet organization ‘Trest’, created by the Cheka. (He was
recalled to Moscow in 1927 and shot on Stalin’s order as a British spy.31)
Back in 1918 ‘Reilly’
succeeded in befriending Lockhart, who was arrested with his lover Mura
Benkendorf the day after the attempt on Lenin’s life. Lockhart was accused of
taking part in a ‘plot to overthrow the Soviet government’. He was soon
exchanged for the Soviet representative in London Maxim Litvinov, who had been
arrested for spying for the Germans. Lockhart’s lover Mura Benkendorf had been
earlier recruited as a Cheka agent by Yakov Peters, Dzerzhinsky’s assistant,
who later wrote that she had been a ‘German spy’.32 Mura was
released and sent abroad to carry out other Cheka assignments, among them to
report on the activities of the writer Maxim Gorky. In 1920, she became the
lover of H.G.Wells, who boasted that he had ‘slept with Gorky’s secretary’.33
In the summer of 1918
Stalin was in Tsaritsyn where, in one of his directives he demanded that
villages in areas of resistance to Soviet rule should be burnt down to the
ground.34 The power entrusted to him by the Politburo in the area
under his control made it possible for the first time in his life to arrange a
mass murder. He ordered the arrest of military specialists—former Russian Army
officers who had been drafted into the Red Army. The arrested officers were
placed on a barge on the Volga. The floating prison was sunk, and the officers
perished.35 In this particular mass murder, Stalin went against
Lenin and Trotsky, who considered military specialists indispensable for making
the Red Army a credible fighting force in the civil war that had begun after
the disbandment of the Constituent Assembly. Efrem Voroshilov and Semeon
Budenny, on Stalin’s urging, disobeyed orders of the Commander of the Southern
Front former tsarist general N.N.Sytin. Trotsky complained to Lenin that Stalin
had disrupted military operations. On 18 October Lenin recalled Stalin to
Moscow and sent Trotsky to Tsaritsyn. At a small station, where their trains
met and stopped briefly, Stalin asked Trotsky to be lenient with Voroshilov and
Budenny.
On 22 October 1918 Stalin
arrived in Moscow. The day after his arrival, he learned that his old rival
Roman Malinovsky had just been arrested in Petrograd. Malinovsky had been
released from a German prisoner-of-war camp in accordance with the
Brest-Litovsk Treaty. He could have stayed in Germany, where he had once lived
and worked, or he
could have settled in his
native Poland and begun a new life there. But he decided to return to Russia
and attempt to gain readmission to the Bolshevik Party’s top leadership. What
mental gyrations led him to this decision is an intriguing question. He knew
that he had been exposed as an Okhrana agent, yet for some reason he must have
believed that, as in the past, Lenin would protect him and accept him into his
inner circle. Bizarre though this belief may seem, it might have been based on
more than wishful thinking. Malinovsky knew about Stalin’s service in the
Okhrana, having learned about it in 1913 from the director of the Department of
Police, Beletsky. Having learned that Stalin had become a member of Lenin’s
government, Malinovsky may have surmised that his own Okhrana past would not be
held against him and that he, too, might get a similar appointment. If this
were his reasoning, he must not have known that Stalin had still not been
identified as an Okhrana agent.
Zinoviev remembered
Malinovsky and ordered his arrest when he appeared at Smolny Palace. Two days
later Malinovsky was transferred to Moscow and was cross-examined by People’s
Commissar of Justice M.I. Kozlovsky (who a year earlier had been one of the
intermediaries between Lenin and Parvus and accused by the Provisional
Government of being a German agent). During his interrogation, Malinovsky
insisted that he had returned to Russia because he wanted to ‘redeem the sins
of his life’. Kozlovsky complained that Malinovsky utilized ‘all his remarkable
talents in order to defend himself,36 The trial of Malinovsky took
place on 5 November 1918 in the Kremlin in a secret session of the Highest
Revolutionary Tribunal. The prosecutor was N.V.Krylenko, who, together with his
wife Elena Rozmirovich, had been arrested by the Okhrana in 1915 as a German
spy. Krylenko read the indictment, after which the Tribunal heard the
testimonies of several witnesses, among them the former assistant minister of
the interior, Dzhunkovsky, the former director of the Department of Police,
Beletsky, and the former vice-director, Vissarionov, who were summoned from
their prison cells to testify. Former Bolshevik Duma deputies Badaev and
Petrovsky and Malinovsky’s wife Stefania also testified. Malinovsky delivered a
six-hour-long speech in his own defense. Lenin was present at the hearings, but
did not testify. He listened to Malinovsky’s speech without looking at him, at
some points reacting with an occasional nod. While answering the accusation
that he had received German money for his anti-Russian propaganda during the
war, Malinovsky admitted the charge and said, ‘It will ill become you to sit in
judgment upon that.’37
No transcripts of the
proceedings have ever been published, but several years later Krylenko stated
in his memoirs that in his speech Malinovsky expressed remorse and declared
that he deserved the death sentence for his crimes.38 If Malinovsky
had indeed said so, the reason may have been that he assumed his breast-beating
would be seen as the obligatory rhetoric of contrition, to be rewarded with a
mild sentence. But the Tribunal, unmoved, sentenced him to death. A few hours
later, in the early hours of 6 November 1918 he was led into a Kremlin
courtyard and shot. The tsarist officials Beletsky, Vissarionov, Dzhunkovsky
and others were shot a few days later.
No information about
whether or not Stalin was present in the courtroom has come to light. If any
documents or recollections about his role in the court proceedings existed, he
probably destroyed them during his rule. He also executed all those who had
anything to do with Malinovsky’s trial, including Krylenko, Rozmirovich and
Kozlovsky. He destroyed every-thing that in his mind was in any way connected
with Malinovsky, even
to the point of
obliterating every mention of Malinovsky’s name in Lenin’s writings published
during Stalin’s rule. The records of Malinovsky’s interrogations, of his speech
at the trial, the testimonies of witnesses, and other court documents are
missing from the Soviet archives. Malinovsky’s Okhrana file was not mentioned
at the trial. Some pertinent documents, among them Lenin’s testimony before the
Muraviev Commission on 26 May 1917 and Zinoviev’s testimony there on the same
day, were found among Stalin’s personal papers after his death. These were
published for the first time in 1992.39
Malinovsky might have
tried to expose Stalin as a fellow ex-Okhrana agent. If he had, Stalin could
counter the accusation by calling it slander. He could—as he had done eight
months earlier, when Martov had accused him of having been expelled from the
party— defend himself by indignantly protesting that no one had the right to
accuse a member of the Soviet government without documentary evidence. The
existence of such evidence was not known at the time. Still, Stalin must have
been apprehensive throughout the trial and very much relieved when it was over
and Malinovsky had been silenced.
During Malinovsky’s trial,
Vladimir Burtsev, the famous exposer of Okhrana agents, was in prison and
shared his cell with the former director of the Department of Police, Beletsky.
Later Beletsky was executed, but Burtsev was released. He escaped abroad,
settling for the rest of his days in Paris, where he wrote his memoirs, in
which he recalled his conversations with Beletsky in prison. Burtsev’s
reminiscences make no mention of Beletsky’s having remembered the Okhrana agent
Iosif Dzhugashvili. Beletsky may have been aware that this ex-agent was now a
member of Lenin’s government, or may have feared the wrath of Stalin. Five
years had passed since Beletsky had sealed the file of this agent and exiled
him to Siberia. By 1918 Beletsky may well have forgotten the name
‘Dzhugashvili’. For the director of the Department of Police, Iosif Dzhugashvili
was one of innumerable Okhrana agents of no particular importance whom he
encountered during his many years of service. Beletsky may well have been
unaware that ‘Dzhugashvili’ and Stalin were one and the same person. The
thought that any Okhrana agent would become one of the most important figures
of the twentieth century was inconceivable in 1918.
NOTES
1.
Lev Trotsky, Stalin,
New York, 1941, p. 414. Trotsky is quoting Bessedovsky, who recalled Stalin
saying: ‘Under no circumstances must the Tsar be surrendered to the White
Guards.’
2.
V.D.Bonch-Bruevich, Lenin
o khudozhestevennoy literature, Moscow, 1934, p. 18. See also David Shub, Politicheskie
deyateli rossii, New York, 1969, pp. 92f.
3.
V.I.Lenin, Polnoe sobranie
sochinenii, Moscow, 1958–65, vol. XV, p. 285. See also Shub, p. 96.
4.
S.Nechaev, Revolutionary
Catechism, quoted in Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, New York,
1971, p. 334. Medvedev states that Yuri Karyakin in his article on Dostoyevsky
(in Problemy mira i sotsialisma, no. 5, 1963, and English translation in
World Marxist Review, no. 5, 1963) drew an analogy between Stalin and
Nechaev that had some validity. Karyakin also revealed to Medvedev that
Nechaev’s archive, thought to be lost, was returned to its place after 1953,
from Stalin’s office (p. 335).
5.
N.Sokolov, Ubiystvo
tsarskoy semi, Buenos Aires, 1969, pp. 265f.
6.
Ibid., pp. 134ff. and p.
245.
7.
Ibid., pp. 235ff.
8.
Ibid., p. 246.
9.
Ibid., p. 260.
10.
Ibid., p. 264.
11.
Roman Gul’, Dzerzhinsky,
New York, 1974, p. 154.
12.
V.I.Lenin, Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii, vol. XXXV, 4th edn, p. 129. Also quoted in Shub, Politicheskie,
pp. 275–8.
13.
V.I.Lenin, Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii, vol. XXX, 4th edn, pp. 472–5. Also Shub, Politicheskie,
p. 277.
14.
How determined and
methodical Stalin was in suppressing incriminating evidence has become apparent
over the years. When V.Korotich, editor of the Soviet journal Ogonek, stated
in 1988 that Stalin was responsible for mass terror, he was accused of slander
by the Soviet State Prosecutor who argued that Stalin’s responsibility could
not be proved since Stalin’s signature could not be found on any order of mass
execution. Interview with V. Korotich by phone on 29 May 1992.
15.
D.S.Merezhkovsky, Griadushchii
kham, 1906, p. 21.
16.
‘Delo rasstrela shesti
studentov’, Novyi den, no. 20, 17/4 April 1918.
17.
V.I.Lenin, Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii, XXXV. 4th edn, p. 286.
18.
V.I.Lenin, Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii, vol. XXVII, 2nd edn, p. 296.
19.
V.I.Lenin, Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii, vol. XXIX, 2nd edn, p. 489.
20.
Gul’, Dzerzhinsky,
pp. 121ff.
21.
I.P.Itskov, in a typed
interview with the author, stated that at the time of the transfer of the Tsar
from Tsarskoe Selo to Tobolsk, his staff had secretly dug a large hole in the
ground and buried in it the Rolls Royce and the Tsarina’s personal car, a
Delane Belville, in the hope that the cars would be saved when the Royal Family
returned to Petrograd. One of the Tsar’s attendants was a sailor, Maxim
Nikandrov. After the October insurrection, Nikandrov joined the Bolsheviks. He
led Red Guards to the buried cars, and they were dug out. The Tsar’s Rolls
Royce was taken over by Lenin; the Tsarina’s limousine was given to Trotsky.
Nikandrov was rewarded by being appointed chief of the Kremlin garage.
22.
Historian Boris Orlov of
Jerusalem University claims in a research paper that Fannia Kaplan did not
shoot Lenin and that she was only on a lookout for other Eser assassins, who
escaped. See Boris Orlov, ‘Mif o Fannia Kaplan’, Vremia i my, nos 2 and
3, December 1975 and January 1976.
23.
I.P.Itskov, taped
interview.
24.
The present author heard
this story many times during his incarceration in Butyrki and Lubianka in
1950–55
25.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
462.
26.
Serge Schmemann, ‘Soviet
Archives’, The New York Times, 8 February 1993, p. A-8.
27.
P.I.Pimenov, ‘Kak ya iskal
shpiona Raili’, Materialy Samizdat, p. 20.
28.
Ibid., pp. 39–42.
29.
Ibid., p. 17.
30.
Ibid., p. 19. Rellinsky,
born in Odessa in 1874, was the illegitimate child of a certain Rosenblum and
learned English from sailors. Rellinsky had several wives, one of whom was the
daughter of a British merchant marine captain by the name of Reilly. Rellinsky
adopted and russified her name.
31.
Pimenov, ‘Kak ya iskal
shpiona Raili’, pp. 7–12.
32.
Y.Piters, ‘Rabota v cheka
v pervye gody revoliutsii’, Proletarskaya revolutsiya, no. 10, 1924, p.
29.
33.
See the story of
M.I.Zakrevskaya-Benkendorf-Budberg (Mura) in N.Berberova, Zheleznaya
zhenshchina, New York, 1982.
34.
Pravda, 20
September 1963; quoted in Medvedev, Let History, p. 15.
35.
Medvedev, Let History,
p. 13.
36.
Pravda,
no. 237, 1 November 1918, p. 4.
37.
Vladimir L.Burtsev, ‘Lenin
i Malinovsky’, Russkoe slovo, vol. I, no. 9/10, 17 May 1919, p. 139.
38.
N.Krylenko, Za piat’
let, 1918–1922 g., Moscow, 1923, p. 348.
39.
‘Delo provokatora
Malinovskogo’, Respublika, 1992, pp. 49–57.
‘THE OLD MAN WANTS POISON’
On 11 November 1918 the
First World War ended with the signing of the armistice agreement. The
Hohenzollern and Hapsburg Empires were toppled not by socialist revolution, as
Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolsheviks had prophesied, but by military defeat. The
Soviet government annulled the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and ordered the Red Army to
recapture the ceded territories. Winston Churchill called on the former allies
of Russia to help the Whites in the Civil War to fight the Red Bolsheviks, but the
Western democracies, exhausted by four years of bloody conflict, had no desire
to enter another war. French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau called merely
for a cordon sanitaire around the Soviet state, perceiving Bolshevism as
a kind of plague threatening mankind.
Early in 1919 Stalin and
Dzerzhinsky were sent to the Ural front, where they immediately started summary
executions. Then Stalin was sent to the southern front, where he interfered
with the orders of career Russian army officers drafted in the Red Army, before
being recalled to Moscow by Trotsky. At the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919
Voroshilov and Stalin’s other ‘Tsaritsyn boys’ came out in opposition to the
policy of drafting former tsarist officers as military specialists. Stalin claimed
that this opposition was not aimed against Lenin, but against Trotsky. The
Congress passed a resolution, stating that there was ‘no military policy of
Trotsky’s …only the military policy of the Central Committee, which Trotsky was
carrying out’. Stalin countered with a semantic diversion by proposing that
opposition to the military policy not be considered as opposition.1
On 4 March 1919 Stalin and
Nadezhda Allilueva were married. Nadezhda retained her maiden name, thus
symbolically affirming the emancipation of women, which at that time was
fashionable among party members. Soon after, their son Vasily was born. The
family moved into a small apartment in the Poteshny (Amusement) Palace in the
Kremlin, where all members of Lenin’s government lived. On 16 March Yakov
Sverdlov, whom Stalin had once accused of being an Okhrana agent, died
suddenly. Rumor immediately spread that Sverdlov had been poisoned. At the
time, no one suspected Stalin of poisoning a rival, but, given Stalin’s later
history, if this was a case of premeditated poisoning Stalin could be
considered a likely suspect. Stalin was not averse to the idea of using poison,
as is clear from a remark he made after hearing of the poisoning of an
opposition leader in Turkey: ‘This is how a political conflict should be
ended…’.2
elements of the White Army
regrouped in the Crimea under General P.N.Wrangel’s command, but within a few
months the Red Army defeated the Whites.
On 7 May 1920 the Polish
Army of General Pilsudsky, the leader of Poland, occupied Kiev. Red Army units
under the command of Mikhail Tukhachevsky (the future Soviet marshal) were sent
to the Polish front. On 1 August 1920 those units broke through the northern
sector of the Polish front and captured Brest-Litovsk. Ten days later
Tukhachevsky was nearing the suburbs of Warsaw. In the rear of Tukhachevsky’s
army rode Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Pole, whom Lenin intended to appoint dictator of
Poland. Dzerzhinsky savored the expected capture of Pilsudsky: ‘I myself will
put him against the wall and shoot him.’5
Stalin was sent to the
southwestern front, where A.I.Yegorov was in command. On Stalin’s insistence,
Yegorov disregarded Trotsky’s order to attack the Polish Army near Warsaw and
led his cavalry in the direction of Lvov. On 15 August 1920 Stalin, urged on by
Lenin and Trotsky, agreed to move Yegorov’s cavalry to Warsaw, but it was too late.
Tukhachevsky’s army was defeated and retreated from Polish territory. The
armistice treaty with Poland was signed on 12 October 1920. Tukhachevsky blamed
Stalin for the defeat of his forces at Warsaw.6
In May 1920, Lenin signed
a peace treaty with the Georgian Republic, where the Mensheviks were in power.
But Lenin had no intention of relinquishing what he considered his inheritance
from the tsars. Less than a year later, on 11 February 1921, the Red Army
invaded Georgia. The decision to invade was made secretly by Lenin, Stalin and
Ordzhonikidze; at the time Trotsky was in the Ural area. On 21 February 1920
Trotsky requested an explanation for the invasion of Georgia, asking, ‘When did
these operations begin, by whose order…?’7 The question was moot. By
that time, Georgian Mensheviks, nationalists and other opponents of Soviet rule
were being arrested by Cheka troops.
The Tenth Party Congress,
which opened on 8 March 1921, adopted Lenin’s proposal to declare any kind of
opposition to Politburo policy illegal. The Congress also approved Lenin’s New
Economic Policy (known as the NEP). The policy was Lenin’s attempt to reach a
compromise with the peasantry, which resisted forced requisition of food by
refusing to produce it, thereby causing famine in many areas. In the Volga and
Ukraine region cases of cannibalism were reported. Legions of abandoned
children, whose families had been torn apart by the Civil War and famine,
roamed the impoverished land in search of food and shelter. Lenin decided to
strike a deal with the peasantry by replacing the forced requisition of food
with a policy of taxation in kind. Lenin was also frightened by peasant
uprisings in many areas, the largest of which flared up in the Tombov region.
Red Army units were ordered to crush the peasant rebels who were called
‘bandits’. An order of 1 September 1920 demanded the application of ‘merciless
Red Terror to the families of the rebels. Arrest all members of such families
starting from the age of eighteen without regard to gender, and if the bandits
want to continue the rebellion, shoot them.’8 A special order was
issued, listing the categories of peasants to be shot.9 On 18 March
1921 Trotsky led Red Army units to crush the rebellion of sailors in the
fortress of Kronstadt, near Petrograd, at the mouth of the Neva river. Four
years earlier, the Kronstadt sailors had been the backbone of the Bolshevik
putsch.
In July 1921, Stalin
visited Tiflis for the first time in ten years. His son Yakov, who was 13 years
old, and members of the family of his first wife, Keke Svanidze, came to
see him. Yakov had been a
year and a half old when his mother had died in 1909, and had grown up in the
Svanidze family. It so happened that Yakov’s school teacher was Iosif
Iremashvili, Stalin’s childhood friend, a Menshevik, who was in prison awaiting
execution when Stalin arrived in Georgia. His sister pleaded with Stalin to
save his old friend. Yakov may also have pleaded for his teacher. Stalin
ordered the release of Iremashvili and allowed him to go abroad.
At the end of 1921 Yakov
came to Moscow to join his father. Stalin was not in favor of having his son
living with him, but Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, accepted Yakov. She was
only six years older than Yakov, but she was determined to be a good stepmother
to the boy, who spoke almost no Russian. Because of the addition to his family,
Stalin asked Lenin to assign him a larger Kremlin apartment. Stalin was by then
an important member of the government, Commissar of Nationalities Affairs. In
1919 Lenin had appointed Stalin to the post of Chairman of the ‘Workers and
Peasants Inspection’. Stalin’s responsibility was to fight corruption and
criminal neglect in all branches of the Soviet government and industry. The
position gave him the power to prosecute people, as well as to appoint his
cronies in important positions. In a country suffering from hunger and
shortages of every commodity, Stalin’s appointments meant precious access to
means of survival. Even Lenin felt his dependence on Stalin. In a letter dated
4 June 1921 he complained that he could not help his old friends find jobs.
Stalin was placing his own men in key bureaucratic positions, paying no
attention to even Lenin’s recommendations, while accusing Lenin of favoritism.10
At the Eleventh Party Congress,
which opened on 27 March 1922, Lenin proposed the creation of the post of
general secretary to improve the effectiveness of party bureaucracy. Zinoviev
suggested Stalin for the post. There were no other candidacies or objections,
and the proposal was accepted.11 ‘It was one of many such events to
which no one paid any attention’, Lenin’s friend Drabkina was to write years
later.12 The future was to reveal how mistaken this perception was.
Stalin transformed a seemingly insignificant appointment into an office of
great importance. He had a photographic memory for names, events and figures
which he used to consolidate his power.13 Stalin’s memory and keen
sense of spite made him a formidable enemy. Trotsky took note of Stalin’s
uncanny ability to remember: ‘All of his hurts, resentments, bitterness, envy,
and attachments he transferred from the small scale of the province to the
grand scale of the entire country. He did not forget anything. His memory is
above all spiteful. He creates his own five-year plan and even ten-year plan of
revenge.’14
One of these plans of
revenge Stalin realized on 14 July 1922. That day Kamo was run over by a truck
as he rode his bicycle on his way home from his office. Stalin did not come to
the funeral of his old friend, but shortly after, a special envoy from Moscow
visited Kamo’s wife and sisters and took all of his papers for ‘transfer to the
archives’. Suspicions arose that Kamo’s murder had been orderd by Stalin and
Ordzhonikidze, and the Georgian Bolsheviks made an attempt to bring both to
trial for the crime.15 During the preceding years Kamo had
maintained contact with Lenin, who helped him get various government
appointments. Early in 1922 he had been appointed chief of the Customs
Administration of the Caucasian Region, with an office in Tiflis. In May 1922
Lenin contemplated ‘taking Kamo along’ on his trip to the Caucasus.16
Lenin continued to
maintain friendly relations with Stalin until September 1922, when he learned
that on Stalin’s instruction the journal Proletarskaya revolutsiya
(Proletarian
Revolution) had published
two telegrams confirming the accusation that Lenin had been receiving German
money.17 Lenin had always denied this.18 The publication
of the telegrams exposed him as a liar and confirmed the Provisional
Government’s charges that he had been an agent of Germany. Lenin learned that
I.P.Tovstukha, Stalin’s protégé, who had earlier been the head of
Stalin’s Secretariat at the Commissariat of Nationalities, had, on Stalin’s
behest, been appointed editor of Proletarskaya revoliutsiya. It so
happened that at the Ninth Party Congress Kamenev had been asked to prepare for
publication Lenin’s collected works, and he needed an assistant. Tovstukha was known
for his phenomenal memory, and Stalin recommended him, stating that Tovstukha
‘knew Lenin’s writings even better than Lenin’. Tovstukha searched the
Provisional Government archives, finding there Lenin’s correspondence with
Parvus’s agents, intercepted by Russian military intelligence. Lenin
interpreted the publication of the telegrams as a brazen attempt by Stalin to
blackmail him. Stalin, fearing that his full role in the intrigue might be
exposed, quickly sacrificed Tovstukha, whom he fired from all his posts.19
The post Tovstukha had held in the Central Committee went to his assistant
A.N.Poskrebyshev.20 (After Lenin’s death Stalin reinstated Tovstukha
as the head of his Secretariat, and in 1927 Tovstukha published the first
biography of Stalin.21 A year later, he developed tuberculosis and
was fired by Stalin who was afraid of becoming infected. Tovstukha soon died,
and Poskrebyshev was moved into his position.22)
Lenin, not mollified by
the firing of Tovstukha, decided to remove Stalin from his position of power as
general secretary. ‘That cook will prepare nothing but peppery dishes’, he said
to Trotsky, informing him of his decision.23 Lenin might have feared
that other compromising archival documents had wound up in Stalin’s hands, as
by this time he had developed a deep distrust of Stalin. In October 1922
Krupskaya, pointing at Stalin’s Kremlin apartment, told Trotsky in a hushed
voice that Lenin considered Stalin ‘devoid of the most elementary honesty, the
simplest human honesty’.24 Removing Stalin from his posts was no
longer an easy task, however. Lenin chose a political issue as a smoke screen
behind which he hid his real motives in attacking Stalin. He focused on an
event that took place in October 1922. In an angry clash with Georgian Bolsheviks
in Tiflis, Ordzhonikidze, as was his habit, struck one of them in the face. He
routinely used to beat his secretary Semushkin and to throw full ink pots at
him.25 The Georgian Bolsheviks complained to Lenin about
Ordzhonikidze’s brutality, and on 21 October 1922 Lenin sent Stalin a note,
stating that ‘conflict, conducted in a more seemly and loyal tone, should be
settled by the Secretariat’.26 Shortly thereafter, Lenin received a
letter from M.Okudzhava, a member of the Georgian Central Committee, who added
more information to the previous complaint against Ordzhonikidze. Lenin decided
to devote serious attention to the ‘Georgian affair’ and to accuse Stalin of
encouraging violence.27
On 24 November 1922 Stalin
suggested that a ‘commission of inquiry’ into the ‘Georgian affair’ be formed,
with Dzerzhinsky as its chairman. Dzerzhinsky was still the chief of the Soviet
secret police, recently renamed GPU (Gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe
upravlenie or State Political Administration). Lenin’s intention was to
create the impression that the Cheka, notorious for its mass repressions, had
been replaced by a more humane organ. In fact, the GPU was given much wider
power than the Cheka had ever had. Unlike the Cheka it was, for instance,
authorized to arrest party members; even they now began to fear Dzerzhinsky.
Lenin, suspecting Dzerzhinsky of collusion with Stalin, objected and asked
Aleksey Rykov, formerly one of his chief lieutenants and now
Commissar for Internal
Affairs, to go and personally investigate the Georgian complaint. On 9 December
1922 Rykov gave Lenin his version of the scandal, and three days later
Dzerzhinsky submitted his report, which confirmed Lenin’s suspicion that Stalin
and Dzerzhinsky had been conniving to suppress the inquiry and to cover up
Ordzhonikidze’s violence, while protecting themselves from charges of
complicity. Lenin’s secretary Maria Fotieva recorded in Lenin’s diary that
Dzerzhinsky’s report ‘upset him deeply’.28 On 13 December 1922, the
day after reading Dzerzhinsky’s report, Lenin sent a letter to Trotsky inviting
him to join hands against Stalin. ‘I think we have arrived at full agreement,
and I am asking you to announce our solidarity at the plenary session’, wrote
Lenin.29 Hours later, he suffered two heart attacks. On 16 December
1922, Lenin had another, very serious attack.
Two days later, at a
meeting of the Central Committee, Stalin was appointed chairman of a medical concilium,
consisting, besides himself, of Politburo members Kamenev and Bukharin, as well
as several Kremlin doctors. The purpose of the concilium, the resolution
stated, was to monitor Lenin’s health, and to inform the party and the country
of any changes in his condition. Stalin’s duty was to keep informed about
everything that happened at Lenin’s bedside.30 Citing his concern
for Lenin’s health, Stalin insisted on Lenin being isolated from all sources of
information on current affairs that might upset him.31 Krupskaya was
allowed by Lenin’s physician, Dr Forster, a member of the concilium, to
take brief dictation from Lenin. Stalin learned about this and called her on
the telephone, cursed her in obscene language, and accused her of ‘disobeying
doctor’s orders’. She was deeply hurt, but decided not to tell Lenin about
Stalin’s outburst, fearing she would upset him. But she did complain to
Kamenev, who promptly reported the conversation to Stalin.32
Several days later, on 23
December 1922, Lenin felt a little better. He summoned Maria Volodicheva, a
secretary, and told her to take dictation, which he entitled ‘Letter to the
Congress’. He stated: ‘Comrade Stalin on becoming general secretary
concentrated enormous power in his hands and I am not sure he always knows how
to use this power carefully enough.’33 Knowing that Stalin had to be
informed about everything that happened at Lenin’s bedside, Volodicheva sent a
copy of the dictation to him. The next day Lenin continued his dictation,
belatedly telling Volodicheva, ‘What was dictated yesterday and today is absolutely
secret.’ Volodicheva decided not to send Stalin a copy of the second dictation,
but told Nadezhda Allilueva, Stalin’s wife, who worked in Lenin’s Secretariat,
that Lenin had dictated some messages criticizing Stalin. Nadezhda passed this
on to Stalin, who summoned Volodicheva, telling her to bring Lenin’s dictation.
In Stalin’s office she found Zinoviev, Kamenev and Dzerzhinsky, all examining
Lenin’s dictations. ‘Burn all of them’, Stalin instructed her; Volodicheva
refused. By this time she had begun to realize that Lenin’s dictations were of
great importance and ought to have been kept secret.34 But the
damage had been done; Stalin had learned that Lenin was plotting his downfall.
On 27 December 1922 Lenin
dictated a letter to Politburo members in which he supported Trotsky in a
conflict with Bukharin on the question of the State Planning Agency.35
Bukharin did not realize that Lenin and Stalin were using political issues as
props to hide their real motives and he wound up being an unwitting ally of
Stalin against Lenin and Trotsky. Zinoviev and Kamenev also sided with Stalin,
for personal reasons. They considered Trotsky the most likely successor to
Lenin and feared that, if he came to
power, he would threaten
their positions in the party leadership. Zinoviev was afraid that Trotsky would
remove him from his position, as he had done in October 1919. Besides, Trotsky
had deeply offended Zinoviev and Kamenev by recalling in his published memoirs
that they had opposed the October Revolution and that Lenin had branded them
‘strike-breakers’ and demanded their expulsion from the party. The fact that
Stalin had defended them from Lenin’s criticism inspired their gratitude. The
personal resentment against Trotsky greatly contributed to the formation of the
‘triumvirate’ of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin.
The triumvirate had
existed in an embryonic state since 11 September 1922, when Lenin proposed to
appoint Trotsky deputy chairman of the Soviet of People’s Commissars—that is,
in effect, his deputy—but Trotsky refused. Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev were
relieved, but Stalin immediately decided to utilize Trotsky’s refusal. On 14
September 1922 he submitted a motion to censure Trotsky for ‘dereliction of
duty’ in refusing to accept Lenin’s and the party’s appointment.36
By the end of December Lenin and Trotsky took a joint stand against the
positions of the triumvirate on the questions of state monopoly. The members of
the Central Committee supported Lenin and Trotsky. ‘We have captured the
position without firing a shot’, Lenin said in a note to Trotsky. ‘I propose
that we do not stop, but press on with the attack…’.37 On 4 January
1923 he did a brief dictation, advising the Central Committee to remove Stalin
from the post of general secretary, stating that ‘Stalin is too rude, and this
defect…becomes intolerable in a general secretary. This is why I suggest that
the comrades think about a way to remove Stalin from that post…’.38
On 24 January 1923 Lenin
asked his secretary, Maria Fotieva, to bring him documents on the Georgian
affair, but Stalin refused to release the documents, pointing to the
Politburo’s decision to allow Lenin, because of his health, only ten minutes a
day for dictation and to forbid him access to any information that might be a
‘cause for reflection and anxiety’. Fotieva repeated Lenin’s request at the
next Politburo meeting. ‘Since Vladimir Ilyich insists, I think it would be
even worse to refuse’, said Kamenev, turning to Stalin, who replied with
undisguised annoyance, ‘I don’t know. Let him do as he likes.’39
Then, addressing all the Politburo members, Stalin declared that he wanted to
be released from the responsibility of supervising Lenin’s recovery. As he had
expected, his request was denied.
Stalin’s political
survival depended on Lenin’s total isolation. Fotieva attempted to obtain the documents
on the Georgian affair from Aron Solts, a member of the Central Control
Commission, whom many party members considered the conscience of the party.
Solts said that the documents had disappeared. ‘What do you mean disappeared?’
she asked. ‘Just disappeared’, Solts answered.40 Fotieva reported
this conversation to Lenin, who at once set up a ‘clandestine commission of
inquiry’ consisting of his personal secretaries Fotieva, Gorbunov and Maria
Gliasser, and told them to locate the lost documents. On 14 February 1923 he
dictated a note to Fotieva: ‘Did Stalin know [of the Ordzhonikidze incident]?
Why didn’t he do something about it?’ He added: ‘The label “deviationist” for
chauvinistic deviation and Menshevism indicates the same deviation among the Great
Russian chauvinists.’41 Lenin accused Stalin and Ordzhonikidze of
brutal treatment of their own ethnic minority which was typical of Great
Russian chauvinists. Lenin also identified Stalin’s method of pinning labels on
opponents and
charging them with exactly
the same crimes of which he himself was guilty. Identifying this method was
easy for Lenin, since he himself had been a practitioner of it.
In the preceding years,
some changes in Lenin’s personality had taken place, suggesting that his
attitude towards others was softening. In 1920, for instance, he helped his old
enemy, the Menshevik leader Yuly Martov, to escape abroad, stating that ‘some
commissars are more Leninist than I’. He had Stalin in mind, knowing that
Stalin sought revenge for the March 1918 article in which Martov had accused
Stalin of having at one time been expelled from the party. When Lenin learned
that Martov was dying in Berlin, he eulogized him by saying that Martov had
been a wonderful comrade and what a pity it was that Martov was not at his
side.42
Lenin was alarmed by
Stalin’s packing the Twelfth Party Congress with delegates loyal to him
personally and invited Trotsky to join in attacking Stalin. ‘I propose a bloc’,
said Lenin. ‘It is a pleasure to form a bloc with a good man’, answered
Trotsky. Lenin dictated an article titled ‘Better Fewer, But Better’, in which
he criticized Stalin’s ‘bureaucratic misrule and wantonness’. Stalin glibly
observed, ‘I suppose there is no need to print this, especially as we do not
have Lenin’s authorization.’43 Trotsky demanded publication of the
article, and Stalin’s crony Valerian Kuibyshev suggested a ‘compromise’: to
publish the articles in a bogus issue of Pravda and to show it to Lenin.
Trotsky objected, and the idea was abandoned.44
During the month of
February, Stalin appeared at Politburo meetings, in Trotsky’s words, ‘morose,
his pipe firmly clenched between his teeth, a sinister gleam in his jaundiced
eyes, snarling back instead of answering’. Trotsky’s interpretation was that
Stalin knew his fate was at stake and that he was resolved to overcome all
obstacles.45 Stalin had learned of the Lenin-Trotsky ‘bloc’ by
listening in on telephone conversations between Lenin, Trotsky and other
Politburo members on the secret Kremlin telephone system, called vertushka
(cranker), which had been installed by a Czech engineer on Lenin’s request when
he had fallen ill. Stalin ordered a central listening device installed in his
desk. When the system was ready, Stalin told Dzerzhinsky’s assistant Genrikh Yagoda
that the Czech engineer was a spy. He was then arrested and shot. Stalin
secretly listened in on telephone conversations for hours.46
After a Politburo meeting
at the end of February 1923 Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin remained
alone; Stalin said that Lenin had asked to have poison brought to him. Trotsky
knew that Dr Guetier had said a few days earlier, ‘Vladimir Ilyich can get on
his feet again. He has a powerful constitution.’ Trotsky also thought of Lenin
as the incarnation of the will to live. It did not occur to Trotsky to question
the motive of Stalin’s claim. (Only decades later Trotsky arrived at the
conclusion that Stalin was doing the groundwork for a scheme in which Lenin’s
death by poison would be explained as suicide.) ‘Naturally, we cannot even
consider carrying out this request!’ exclaimed Trotsky. ‘Guetier has not lost
hope. Lenin can still recover.’ Trotsky was struck by how Stalin’s face, a
sickly smile transfixed on it, was extraordinarily enigmatic and out of tune
with the circumstances of the request. ‘I told him all that’, Stalin replied
with a touch of annoyance, ‘but he wouldn’t listen. The Old Man is suffering.
He says he wants to have the poison at hand…he’ll use it only when he is
convinced that his condition is hopeless.’ Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev were
familiar with the striking discrepancy between Stalin’s facial expression and
the substance of his words. This time Trotsky found this discrepancy utterly
insufferable. The horror of it was magnified by Stalin’s refusal to
express any opinion about
Lenin’s request, as if he were expecting others to respond and wanted to catch
their reaction without committing himself. Kamenev, who was sincere in his
devotion to Lenin, stood pale and silent. Zinoviev appeared bewildered, as he
always was in difficult moments. It was not clear to Trotsky whether Stalin’s
two allies had known about Lenin’s request beforehand or whether Stalin’s
announcement was as great a surprise to them as to him. ‘Anyway, it is out of
the question’, insisted Trotsky. ‘He might succumb to a passing mood and take
an irrevocable step.’ Zinoviev seemed to agree. ‘The Old Man is suffering’,
repeated Stalin, staring vaguely past his three colleagues and, as before, not
committing himself one way or the other. This was an informal conference and no
vote was taken, so Trotsky assumed that the agreement was not to send poison to
Lenin, but he was left with the sensation that Stalin’s behavior was baffling
and that thoughts not in harmony with his words were running through his mind.47
Lenin learned about
Stalin’s rude treatment of Krupskaya. On 5 March 1923 he dictated a ‘highly
secret, personal’ letter to Stalin, with ‘copies to Comrades Kamenev and
Zinoviev’. The letter read, ‘You had the effrontery to call my wife on the
phone and to swear at her… I do not intend to forget it so easily. What is done
against my wife I consider done against myself.’ Lenin asked Stalin to
apologize or ‘break all relations between us’.48 Next day, Lenin
called Volodicheva and dictated an urgent letter to Trotsky to be communicated
immediately over the phone. The letter read, ‘To Trotsky: I earnestly ask you
to undertake the defense of the Georgian affair in the Central Committee of the
party. That affair is now under ‘prosecution’ by Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, and I
cannot rely on their impartiality. Indeed, quite the contrary!’ Trotsky agreed.
Fotieva wrote that Lenin ‘is getting worse and is in a hurry to do what he
can’. She added that Lenin was preparing a ‘bombshell’ for Stalin, which he
intended to explode at the Twelfth Party Congress.49 Kamenev learned
about the ‘bombshell’ from Krupskaya, who told him that Lenin was planning to
‘crush Stalin politically’. Kamenev then rushed to consult with Stalin and
Zinoviev, who delegated to Kamenev the task of initiating negotiations with
Trotsky, hoping that, as a member of Trotsky’s family (he was married to
Trotsky’s sister), Kamenev would be able to reach an agreement with him. On 7
March 1923 Kamenev appeared in Trotsky’s office. He seemed contrite and anxious
to mollify Trotsky, and he told Trotsky that the triumvirate was ready to
satisfy Lenin’s and his terms. Trotsky forgot Lenin’s warning about the ‘rotten
compromise’ that Stalin would offer. ‘I am against removing Stalin’, he said, ‘and
I am against expelling Ordzhonikidze and disciplining Dzerzhinsky…but I agree
with Lenin in substance.’ Trotsky’s terms were easy to satisfy: he asked Stalin
to condemn ‘Great Russian Chauvinism’, apologize to Krupskaya, stop bullying
the Georgians, and be more polite to his party colleagues. Stalin readily
agreed to all these demands; he would have agreed to many more for the sake of
his political survival.50
On that day, 7 March 1923,
Lenin suffered a severe stroke. The right side of his body was paralyzed, and
he lost the ability to speak. Trotsky had lost his powerful ally. He still had
Lenin’s notes on the Georgian affair and could have used them to remove Stalin,
but his promise not to read them to the Twelfth Party Congress, which opened on
17 April 1923, overrode his earlier promise to Lenin to take up the defense of
the Georgian affair and to crush Stalin politically. Instead, he submitted
Lenin’s notes to the Politburo, not to the Congress.51 Stalin,
trying to appease Trotsky, asked him to address the Congress in
the name of the Central
Committee. Trotsky, in a fit of fatal magnanimity, suggested that Stalin
deliver the address as general secretary, to which Stalin modestly replied,
‘No, the party would not understand it…the report must be made by the most
popular member of the Central Committee.’52 It was decided that
Zinoviev would deliver the main address. Trotsky gave a report on economic
matters. The Georgian Bolsheviks felt betrayed, and so did Lenin.
On 10 March 1923
newspapers had begun publishing daily bulletins on the state of Lenin’s health,
and on 15 May 1923 Lenin was moved from the Kremlin to a dacha in Gorki,
in the rolling hills near Moscow. By July his health had dramatically improved.
He took walks, made local visits, and
1.
House of the Dzhugashvili family, where Stalin was born. [Source:
David King Collection]
2.
Stalin’s mother, Ekaterina Georgievna Dzhugashvili (née Geladze). [Source: F.D.Volkov, The
Rise and Fall of Stalin, Moscow, Spektor, 1992]
3.
Kamo being delivered from Germany in shackles to the Tiflis prison
in 1909. [Source:
I.M.Dubinsky-Mukhadze,
Kamo, Moscow, Molodaya Gvardia, 1974]
4.
Prison photographs of Stalin at the time of his last arrest in 1913,
taken from Stalin’s St Petersburg Okhrana file. [Source: David King Collection]
5.
The ‘Eremin Letter’, published in Life magazine, 23 April
1956, in L.D.Levine’s article ‘A Document on Stalin as Czarist Spy’. Eremin’s
engraved signature on the silver decanter was displayed by Levine to prove that
the signature on the ‘Eremin Letter’ was geniuine. The letter was actually
fabricated by Stalin in June 1937. He forged Eremin’s signature, adding to it a
long slanted flourish to prove that the letter was a forgery, as well as some
other detectable ‘mistakes’. [Source: Life magazine]
6.
A copy of the original Okhrana document, dated 31 March 1911, with
quite legible authentic signature of Colonel Eremin ending with Russian letter
‘n’ and a period. Eremin usually signed official Okhrana communications as
‘Colonel Eremin’ when addressing them as a military officer to a person with a
military rank. This document is in the Okhrana archive at the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University. [Source: courtesy of the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University]
7.
Ekaterina Svanidze, first wife of Stalin. [Source:
F.D.Volkov, The Rise and Fall of Stalin, Moscow, Spektor, 1992]
8.
Fabricated photograph of Lenin sitting next to Stalin. This
propaganda fake of the two leaders was originally two separate photos of
different sizes and the men were sitting on obviously different chairs. These
two photos were pasted together in a crude fabrication intended to demonstrate
their friendship on the eve of Lenin’s death. This fabrication was published in
numerous books. [Source: David King Collection]
|
9. Roman
Malinovsky. [Source: Edward Ellis Smith, The Young Stalin, London,
Cassell] |
10.
Nadezhda Allilueva, Stalin’s second wife, shortly before her suicide
in 1932. [Source: David King Collection]
|
11. Marshal
Mikhail Tukhachevsky. [Source: David King Collection] |
12.
Prison camp inmates building the White Sea-Baltic Canal. [Source:
David King Collection]
13.
Stalin with Yezhov (right) and Molotov and Voroshilov (left), at the
opening of the White Sea-Baltic Canal. [Source: David King Collection]
14.
People’s demonstration in Red Square in 1938. [Source: David
King Collection]
15.
Chief prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky at the Moscow show trial. [Source:
David King Collection]
16.
Stalin’s son Yakov Dzhugashvili, captured by the Nazis. [Source:
David King Collection]
17.
Stalin and Ribbentrop watching as Molotov signs the Nazi-Soviet Pact
in August 1939. [Source: David King Collection]
18.
Lev Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova arrive in Mexico in 1937.
[Source: David
King Collection]
19.
A Mexican policeman holds up the axe that killed Trotsky. [Source:
David King Collection]
20.
Funeral procession in March 1953 with the coffin of Stalin. In the
first row are Beria, Voroshilov, Khrushchev and Mikoyan. [Source: David
King Collection]
started to write with his
left hand. In August he convinced his doctors to allow him to read newspapers.
On 18 October 1923 he went to the Kremlin, took a walk in the streets of
Moscow, visited an agricultural exhibition, and returned to his Kremlin office,
where he sat for a while silently. Then, he returned to the Gorki dacha.
A number of officials and friends visited him there between 24 November and 16
December 1923. Stalin was not among them.
On 16 December 1923
Stalin, despite optimistic prognoses of Lenin’s physicians, ordered all visits
to Lenin stopped. He was well aware that the improvement in Lenin’s health
boded ill for his own political survival. Isolating ‘the old man’ would at
least hinder Lenin’s struggle to demote him. The possibility of Lenin’s recovery
forced Stalin to look for ways to save himself. Zinoviev, Kamenev and
Dzerzhinsky visited Stalin in his dacha in Zubalovo, near Moscow. They
were drinking wine when Stalin said that his greatest pleasure in life was, ‘To
choose the victim, to prepare the blow with care, to slake an implacable
vengeance, and then to go to bed…there is nothing sweeter in the world.’53
Stalin knew that at the moment he had no greater and more powerful enemy than
Lenin.
On 20 December 1923 Stalin
invited Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin to an informal Politburo meeting at
which he stated that arrangements should be made for Lenin’s funeral in case
his health should take a turn for the worse. Stalin suggested that Lenin’s body
should be embalmed and placed in a mausoleum. He explained that Lenin was
Russian, and that his funeral should be arranged in accordance with Russian
customs and traditions. Bukharin, the only ethnic Russian in the group, was
puzzled: he had never
heard of such a custom in
Russia. In the Russian Orthodox Church, the tradition of worshiping moschi,
the skeleton remains of saints, existed, but Stalin proposed to preserve not
Lenin’s skeleton, but his mummy. This idea was more akin to the ancient
Egyptian custom of embalming their Pharaohs than to the Russian tradition.
Besides, the church was unlikely to canonize Lenin. Kamenev objected to the
idea of embalming. Since the discussion was informal, no vote was taken. Lenin
was alive, and the question seemed academic.54 But it had been
raised, and for Stalin it was not academic.55
On 18 December 1923 Pravda
carried an article by Stalin in which he stated that party leadership without
Trotsky was ‘unthinkable’. Shortly afterwards Trotsky suddenly became ill. His
physicians could not determine the nature of the infection. On 21 December 1923
five Kremlin doctors and the commissar of health, Semashko, signed the
diagnosis of Trotsky’s illness: influenza, catarrh in the upper respiratory
organs, enlargement of bronchial glands, persistent fever, loss of weight and appetite,
and reduced capacity for work. They advised that Trotsky be released from all
his duties and sent to the Caucasus for a ‘climatic cure for at least two
months’. Ordinarily, a diagnosis of this nature was not made public, but this
time it was published in Pravda, on 8 January 1924, without Trotsky’s
knowledge. Trotsky interpreted this as a ‘polite way’ of exiling him. On 18
January 1923 he left Moscow for the Caucasus.56 On 19 January, as
Trotsky’s train was traveling hundreds of kilometers south of Moscow, Lenin
watched a hunting party in a forest near his Gorki dacha. His health was
improving.
On 21 January 1924 Lenin’s
health suddenly deteriorated. He called Gavril Volkov, his cook, and scribbled
a note, ‘Gavrilushka, I have been poisoned… Go fetch Nadia [Krupskaya] at once…
Tell Trotsky… Tell everyone you can.’57 Volkov called Maria
Ulianova, Lenin’s sister, who found him silently and helplessly crying. Lenin
died the same day at 6:50 pm.
Stalin made all the
arrangements for the funeral, and sent a coded wire announcing Lenin’s death to
Trotsky, whose train was approaching Tiflis. For Trotsky, Lenin’s death was an
unexpected and devastating blow. Before he left Moscow, Lenin’s doctors had
assured Trotsky that Lenin was on the road to recovery. Trotsky sent a message
to Stalin, ‘Lenin is no more. These words fall upon our mind as heavily as a
gigantic rock falls into the sea. I deem it necessary to return to Moscow. When
is the funeral?’ Stalin replied, ‘The funeral will take place on Saturday. You will
not be able to return in time. The Politburo thinks that because of the state
of your health, you must proceed to Sukhum. Stalin.’ Trotsky followed Stalin’s
instructions.58
Stalin had lied. The
funeral in fact took place six days later, on 27 January 1924, owing to
difficulties in arranging the embalming. No embalming specialists could be
found in Russia. GPU agents brought to Moscow from Kharkov a prominent
pathologistanatomist by the name of Vorobiev and his assistants, who joined
Professor B.I.Zbarsky. Their experience was limited to embalming organs and
animals for scientific purposes, but they could not disobey the mighty
Politburo. The mummified body of Lenin, enclosed in a glass catafalque, was
placed on display in the House of Columns. A long line of mourners inched
along, day and night, in the freezing cold. People stopped briefly at burning
piles of wood to warm themselves and then moved on to see Lenin’s body.
Stalin’s farewell speech, which he read from a sheet of paper, was an odd
litany in which overtones of Byzantine invocation were mixed with Marxist
idioms, ‘In leaving us Comrade Lenin ordained us to keep and strengthen the
dictator-ship of the proletariat. We
vow to thee, Comrade
Lenin, that we shall not spare our lives to fulfill your commandment.’59
Stalin punctuated his speech with a plethora of vows of this kind.
Stalin’s half-mythical
oath before the corpse of his fallen enemy may appear to be sheer hypocrisy,
but it should not be perceived as such. It was but a reflection of the workings
of his peculiar mind, for at that moment Stalin may indeed have been
overwhelmed by a deep need for identification with Lenin. Almost two decades
earlier he had felt a strong emotional need to identify with his dead father,
Vissarion, whose murder he had instigated. In his mind, Lenin had replaced
Vissarion—the embodiment of his image of the stern and punishing father. Stalin
also had an intuitive understanding of the emotional need of the Russian masses
to identify with their dead leader. The great majority of the Russian people
were deeply religious, illiterate peasants. The liturgical style of the
invocation delivered by Stalin, a seminary dropout, evoked in them the memory
of centuries-old religious traditions and found a ready response in the consciousness
of all those in whom the murder of Tsar batiushka (Tsar the Father) had
created a spiritual vacuum. Stalin sensed the longing for this vacuum to be
filled, and at once set out to create a Lenin cult, in which he would assume
the role of Lenin’s heir. Zinoviev was the most active in fostering this cult,
and on 30 January 1924, he wrote in an article in Pravda stating, ‘How
good that they thought of this in time! To bury Ilyich’s body in the
ground—that would be unendurable.’60 By ‘they’ Zinoviev meant that
he, Stalin, Kamenev and Bukharin had agreed on the embalming.
The official communiqué attributed
Lenin’s death to arterial sclerosis. When Trotsky returned to Moscow, he asked
Kremlin doctors about the cause of Lenin’s death. They disagreed with the
official communiqué,
but were at a loss to explain the death. Lenin’s friends, who
had been assured that Lenin was recovering, were equally stunned by his death.61
An autopsy was not performed because the embalming made it impossible. Besides,
Trotsky would not have demanded an autopsy, since at the time the thought that
Stalin might have poisoned Lenin did not cross his mind. He also did not ask
Krupskaya’s opinion, because he did not want to cause her more pain. Some two
years later, Trotsky asked Kamenev and Zinoviev about the circumstances under
which Lenin had died. They answered in monosyllables, avoided his eyes, and
were unwilling to discuss the matter. Trotsky wondered whether they knew
something or were merely suspicious; he began to suspect that they did know
something but did not want to tell him.62 Fifteen years later,
Trotsky came to the conclusion that Stalin had resorted to embalming because,
he may have feared that I
would connect Lenin’s death with last year’s conversation about poison, would
ask the doctors whether poisoning was involved, and demand a special autopsy.
It was, therefore, safer in all respects to keep me away until after the body
had been embalmed, the viscera cremated and a postmortem examination inspired
by such suspicions no longer feasible.63
Genrikh Yagoda,
Dzerzhinsky’s assistant, had been a pharmacist before the Revolution. He took
part in revolutionary activities and was arrested by the Okhrana and released
after agreeing to become an Okhrana agent. His Okhrana file was found in the
archives and wound up in the hands of one of Dzerzhinsky’s assistants,
M.A.Trilisser, who gave
the file to Stalin.64
Stalin kept such documents in his personal archive for use in blackmailing
people into committing crimes on his instigation. Yagoda was one of the first
victims of this kind of blackmail. His expertise in drugs allowed him to set up
a secret laboratory to produce poisons.65 Stalin asked Yagoda to
make poison for Lenin and passed on to him Lenin’s gratitude for sending him a
‘means of deliverance’. Stalin explained to Yagoda that Lenin had ‘written a
few words to thank you… He is terribly distressed by the thought of a fresh
attack…’.66 Yagoda, fully aware that Stalin had at his hands the
means of his destruction, was only too eager to believe the same invented story
about Lenin’s request for poison that Stalin had earlier told Trotsky, Zinoviev
and Kamenev.
It is unknown which of
Stalin’s agents at the Gorki dacha put poison in Lenin’s food. The
nature of the poison remains also unknown. Bazhanov, Stalin’s secretary, who
fled abroad in 1926, wrote in his memoirs that Stalin had ‘made a certain
amount of progress since the days of Caesar Borgia’ in using poison. Bazhanov
suggested that Stalin used ‘a culture of Koch bacilli mixed into food and
systematically administered’ which ‘gradually led to galloping consumption and
sudden death…’.67 It is far more likely that Stalin used a
conventional poison. (In later years cyanide became his poison of choice
against his enemies.68)
After Lenin’s death,
rumors that Stalin poisoned him began to circulate. These rumors originated
mostly among Georgian Bolsheviks, who knew about the conflict over the Georgian
affair and were familiar with Stalin’s character.69 Some old
Bolsheviks did not believe the official explanation of Lenin’s death. They
thought that he had died of inherited or acquired syphilis. In the privacy of
their homes, they would point at Lenin’s portrait, which traditionally hung on
a wall, and refer to Lenin as ‘that sifilitik’ (syphilitic), sometimes
in the presence of their little children or grandchildren, who would point to
Lenin’s portrait, saying ‘this is uncle Titi-Liti’.70
To direct suspicion away
from himself, Stalin fabricated letters supposedly sent to the Politburo by
ordinary people in the provinces, demanding the embalming of Lenin’s body. He
gave these to Professor Zbarsky, who wrote a book, stating ‘The idea to
preserve the body of V.I.Lenin originated in the very thick of the population.
The most insistent demands came from the faraway provinces.’ He then quoted at
length some of these ‘demands’. A group of Kiev railroad workers allegedly
wrote: ‘Immediately assign needed specialists to work on the problem of
preserving the body of our dear Vladimir Ilyich for thousands of years…’. A
group of ‘Rostov-on-Don students’ allegedly demanded that The body of Ilyich
should not be buried in the ground but embalmed and placed in a central museum;
by doing this the workers of the future centuries will have the opportunity to
see the leader of the proletariat.’71
Half a century later
Stalin’s fabrications were still accepted as genuine letters. A Russian author,
L.Lanina, stated that if the demands to embalm Lenin’s body came from among the
people, it means that ‘having broken through all the restraining dikes, archaic
instincts gushed from the depth of the unconscious to the very surface of
life’, and that only there could have originated ‘the monstrous idea of
embalming the vozhd [the leader] and to place him in a central museum’.72
Actually, archaic instincts, with a considerable admixture of very pragmatic
calculations by a hardened criminal, gushed to the surface not from the
unconscious mind of the Russian people, but from the dark recesses of Stalin’s
own mind. Which is not to say that they did not find a response in the masses.
In
1927 a marble mausoleum
for Lenin’s embalmed body was built in Red Square on Stalin’s order. For the
next quarter of a century, Stalin was to greet military parades and civilian
demonstrations from the top of this mausoleum. Under his feet, Lenin’s corpse
lay enclosed in a glass sarcophagus.
Many years after Lenin’s
death, Stalin let slip unguarded references to the poisoning of Lenin. In the
early 1930s, Stalin and Bukharin attended a dinner at Maxim Gorky’s home in
Moscow. The guests, as usual, were drinking a great deal. Stalin suddenly
started to recount how the ailing Lenin had pleaded for poison so that he might
put an end to his suffering. Stalin added a new detail to this invented story,
stating that he had given Lenin his ‘word of honor’ to bring the poison. ‘Lenin
had complete trust in me’, said Stalin, ‘but I decided not to give poison to
Lenin, but to ask the Politburo members to relieve me from the burden of my
word of honor, and the Politburo members relieved me from my word of honor.’
Stalin looked at Bukharin, who had listened silently. Stalin suddenly grabbed
him by the beard. Turning to the guests, he shouted, ‘Do you believe me, or do
you believe Bukharin?’ A chorus of frightened guests shouted, ‘You! You!’ One
guest was slow to respond. ‘Ah, you are afraid?’ shouted Stalin, and the
frightened man joined the chorus of believers.73
When drunk, Stalin
sometimes let the truth out. Once in the mid-1930s, he invited a group of
Soviet writers to a dinner in his dacha. He drank copiously, and at one
point he suddenly began to brag that only he knew how and from what Lenin had
died. I.M.Gronsky, at that time an Izvestia editor and Stalin’s liaison
with the literary circles, stayed sober, since it was his duty to maintain
order and keep his eye on the guests. Gronsky realized that Stalin was bragging
about his role in Lenin’s death. He led Stalin to his room, where he fell
asleep. ‘What a sober man keeps in his mind, a drunk keeps on the edge of his
tongue’, Gronsky thought. He ordered the drunken writers to be driven home by
bodyguards. When Stalin awoke, he began to recall what had happened at the
dinner. He suddenly shouted, ‘Ivan! Tell me the truth! What was I saying
yesterday about Lenin’s death?’ Gronsky pretended to have heard nothing and
claimed that everybody had been too drunk to remember anything. ‘Ivan! But you
were not drunk!’ shouted Stalin. ‘What did you hear?’ Gronsky, realizing that
all the maniacal suspiciousness of Stalin would be directed against him,
claimed that he had heard nothing about Lenin. Soon afterward he was arrested
as an ‘enemy of the people’, and spent more than 16 years in the Kolyma camp.
Released and ‘rehabilitated’ after Stalin’s death, he told this story. He was
certain that Stalin had poisoned Lenin.74
In the mid-1980s, KGB
researchers established that Stalin poisoned Lenin, but this discovery was not
reported, although it circulated in KGB circles as ‘confidential information’.
Yulian Semenov, the author of many stories about daring exploits of Soviet
intelligence, enjoyed the trust of KGB officers and the head of KGB Yury
Andropov. Semenov stated that the KGB did not reveal Stalin’s role in the
poisoning of Lenin because this was a ‘very sensitive subject’.75
NOTES
1.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, pp. 12–15.
2.
Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret
tirana, New York, 1980, p. 178.
3.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, p. 41.
4.
Lev Trotsky, Stalin,
New York, 1941, p. 466.
5.
Roman Gul’, Dzerzhinsky,
New York, 1974, p. 133.
6.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
467.
7.
Ibid., p. 468.
8.
S.Melgunov, Kak
bolsheviki zakhvatili vlast’; quoted in Vladimir Maximov, Novoe russkoe
slovo, 20 May 1988, p. 3.
9.
Ibid.
10.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, p. 19.
11.
Ibid., p. 17.
12.
E.Drabkina, ‘Zimnii
pereval’, in Roy Medvedev’s Almanakh XX Vek, no. 2, p. 17.
13.
Andrey Gromyko, who knew
Stalin well, claimed that Stalin had the memory of a computer.
14.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
415.
15.
A.Avtorkhanov, Zagadka
smerty Stalina, Frankfurt, 1976, p. 50.
16.
I.Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Kamo,
Moscow, 1974, pp. 216f., quoting V.I.Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii,
Moscow, 1958–65, vol. LIV, p. 230.
17.
Proletarskaya revolutsiya,
no. 9, 1922, and David Shub, Politicheskie deyateli rossii, New York,
1969, p. 218.
18.
Shub, Politicheskie
deyateli rossii, p. 186, quoting Rabochy soldat, 26 July 1917.
19.
Avtorkhanov, Zagadka
smerty Stalina, pp. 19–24.
20.
Alexander Poskrebyshev,
who was to become Stalin’s alter ego for the next three decades, was born in
1891 to a peasant family in a village near Ekaterinburg. His criminal career
began on 16 July 1918, when, as a member of the Ekaterinburg Gubernia Soviet of
Deputies, he signed the death sentence of the Tsar and the royal family. Later
on, he distinguished himself in mass executions. In 1921, Stalin transferred
Poskrebyshev to Moscow, where for a while he operated in Tovstukha’s shadow.
21.
I.P.Tovstukha, Iosif
Vissarionovich Stalin, Moscow, 1927.
22.
Interview with I.P.Itskov,
in New York, 1989.
23.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
372.
24.
Ibid., p. 375.
25.
Interview with I.P.Itskov.
26.
Lenin, Polnoe sobranie
sochinenii, vol. XIV, p. 608.
27.
R.Pipes, The Formation
of the Soviet Union, Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923, Cambridge, MA,
1964, p. 281.
28.
Lenin, Polnoe sobranie
sochinenii, vol. XIV, p. 596. See also L.A.Fotieva, Iz vospominanii o
V.I. Lenine, dekabr 1922 g.–mart 1923 g., Moscow, 1964, p. 54.
29.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, p. 20.
30.
Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s
Last Struggle, New York, 1968, pp. 70f.
31.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, p. 22.
32.
Lewin, Lenin’s Last
Struggle, p. 71.
33.
Lenin, Polnoe sobranie
sochinenii, vol. XLV, p. 345.
34.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, p. 25.
35.
Lenin, Polnoe sobranie
sochinenii, vol. XXXVI, pp. 548f.
36.
Isaac Deutscher, The
Prophet Unarmed, New York, London, 1954, pp. 65f. Deutscher is quoting from
Lev Trotsky’s archive.
37.
Ibid., p. 67. See also Lev
Trotsky, Stalin’s School of Falsification, New York, 1962, pp. 58– 63.
38.
Lenin, Polnoe sobranie
sochinenii, vol. XLV, p. 346.
39.
L.A.Fotieva, Iz vospominanii
o V.I.Lenine, dekabr 1922 g.–mart 1923 g., Moscow, 1964, pp. 64f.
40.
Ibid., p. 75.
41.
Lenin, Polnoe sobranie
sochinenii, vol., XLV, p. 107. See also Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle,
pp. 96f.
42.
Interview with I.P.Itskov,
1989.
43.
Deutscher, The Prophet
Unarmed, p. 68, fn. 2.
44.
Ibid., p. 89.
45.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
374.
46.
B.Bazhanov, ‘Stalin’, Kontinent,
no. 8, 1978, pp. 296–300.
47.
Trotsky, Stalin,
pp. 376f.
48.
Lenin, Polnoe sobranie
sochinenii, vol. XIV, pp. 329f.
49.
Ibid., p. 75.
50.
Deutscher, The Prophet
Unarmed, p. 90.
51.
Trotsky, Stalin’s
School of Falsification, p. 73.
52.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
366.
53.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
378; also E.Lyons, Stalin, the Czar of All the Russias, Philadelphia/New
York and London, 1940, p. 37.
54.
Robert C.Tucker, Stalin
as Revolutionary, New York, 1973, pp. 282f., citing N.Valentinov, ‘Novaya
economicheskaya politika’, Vospominaniia (Stanford, 1971), pp. 90–2.
55.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
382.
56.
Ibid., p. 387.
57.
See Elizabeth Lermolo, Face
of a Victim, New York, 1956, pp. I36f.
58.
Trotsky, Stalin,
pp. 381f.
59.
I.V.Stalin, Sochineniya,
vol. VI, Moscow, 1946–51, p. 48.
60.
Pravda, 30
January 1924.
61.
See Lidia Shatunovskaya,
‘Zagadka odnogo aresta’, Vremia i my, no. 5, 1979, pp. 206–16.
62.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
382.
63.
Ibid.
64.
Alexander Orlov, Tainaya
istoria Stalinskikh prestupleniy, New York, Jerusalem, Paris, 1983, pp.
248f. See also Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, New York, 1973, p. 75.
65.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
419. See Chapter 18 below for the poisoning of another enemy of Stalin’s.
66.
See Yves Delbars, The
Real Stalin, London, 1953, pp. 129f. ‘Yves Delbars’ was a pen name of
Nikolay Kossiakov. Kossiakov states that he learned about Lenin’s poisoning
from a man in Stalin’s secretariat.
67.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
419.
68.
Orlov, Tainaya, pp.
228f.
69.
Avtorkhanov, Zagadka
smerty Stalina, p. 50.
70.
Interview with Pavel
Litvinov (grandson of Maxim Litvinov) in Chappaqua, New York, 1975.
71.
L.Lanina, ‘Madam Tusso i
tovarishch Krupskaya’, Moscow independent journal Referendum; from the
reprinted article in the Russian language journal Panorama, Israel, 3
July 1988, pp. 6f.
72.
Ibid.
73.
Taped interview with Boris
Shragin in Chappaqua, New York, 1979.
74.
Taped interview with Lidia
Shatunovskaya-Tumerman. Also see Lidia Shatunovskaya, ‘Zagadka odnogo aresta’,
pp. 206–16.
75.
Yulian Semenov, in a
conversation with the author in the presence of the publisher I.Levkov, 3 April
1988, in New York City.
‘JEWISH ORIGIN’
Shortly after Lenin’s
funeral, the question of who would succeed him as chairman of the Council of
the People’s Commissars was raised at a Politburo meeting. Trotsky was still in
the Caucasus and could not take part in the discussion. During Lenin’s illness
Kamenev had been the acting chairman—in effect, Lenin’s deputy—since Trotsky
had earlier refused the post. Kamenev’s appointment as Lenin’s successor
appeared certain, but Stalin objected, claiming that Kamenev’s ‘Jewish origin’
ruled him out as a Russian leader. ‘We must consider the peasant character of
Russia’, said Stalin, adding that the Russian peasants, the great majority of
the country, would resent having a Jew head their government.1
Stalin exaggerated
Kamenev’s ‘Jewish origin’. His father was indeed a Jew (Rosenfeld by name),
which in the eyes of many made Kamenev Jewish, although his mother was a member
of the Russian nobility. Kamenev did not think of himself as Jewish. Zinoviev
was unsuitable as Lenin’s successor for the same reason—he was Jewish (his
family name was Rodomyslsky). It was also widely known that Trotsky, born Lev
Davidovich Bronstein, was Jewish. The Politburo members silently accepted
Stalin’s argument. Anti-Semitism ran deep in Russia, even among those who did
not express it openly. Stalin was able to make a point by stating that the
Jewish origins of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev would prevent them from leading
the country despite the fact that the party’s major doctrine was
‘internationalism’. The true irony was that Lenin himself was one-quarter
Jewish. He had hidden the fact that his maternal grandfather, Alexander Blank,
had been a baptized Jew. Responding to a census questionnaire in 1922, Lenin
filled in the blank pertaining to his maternal grandfather with the statement:
‘I do not know.’2
On 10 July 1923 at a
session of the Party Central Committee Stalin attacked Sultan- Galiev and
mentioned ‘treasonable documents’, which were supposedly found on Sultan-
Galiev during a search. Stalin declared that these documents were ‘genuine’ and
that Sultan-Galiev ‘fully confessed his guilt and repented’.4
Sultan-Galiev was sentenced to a prison term and soon perished. Zinoviev and
Kamenev supported Stalin in this trumped- up charge, but were to express regret
at having done so a few years later.5
The Thirteenth Party
Congress, held in May 1924, was the first to take place without Lenin.
Krupskaya wanted Lenin’s letters, which she called ‘Lenin’s Testament’, read to
the delegates. Lenin had dictated these documents attacking Stalin, starting in
December 1922. She gave copies of the ‘Testament’ to all Politburo members.
After reading his copy, Stalin exploded with obscene swearing at Lenin in the
presence of Kamenev and Zinoviev, an action ill-suited to the quasi-religious
cult he had been creating around the dead leader.6 In his
‘Testament’, Lenin criticized Stalin, calling him a ‘social-nationalist’ and
‘crude Great Russian Derzhimorda’ (‘Ugly Mug’, a repulsive character in
Gogol’s Inspector General, an uncouth, primitive, xenophobic character).
Lenin stated that ‘Stalin and Dzerzhinsky must be held politically responsible
for this entire Great Russian Nationalist campaign.’7 He complained
about the concentration of ‘enormous power’ in Stalin’s hands, his rudeness,
lack of tolerance, disloyalty and capriciousness, and insisted on his removal
from the post of general secretary. But Lenin also criticized Trotsky for
‘excessive self-assurance’ and ‘excessive preoccupation with the purely
administrative side of the work’. He warned the party of the danger of a
conflict between Stalin and Trotsky, stating, ‘These two qualities of the two
outstanding chiefs of the present Central Committee may result in a split, and
if our party does not take measures to prevent this, then the split could come
about quite unexpectedly.’ He added by stating that, ‘the mutual relations of
Trotsky and Stalin, this is no trifle, or rather, it is a trifle which may
acquire decisive importance’.8
Trotsky chafed at Lenin’s
criticism of him and at being put on the same level with Stalin as one of ‘the
two outstanding chiefs of the present Central Committee’. Zinoviev and Kamenev,
too, were upset: Lenin not only demoted them to secondary figures below Trotsky
and Stalin, but had recalled the most shameful moment in their lives, the
‘October episode’ of 1917 when they opposed the Bolshevik insurrection. Like
Stalin, they were against having Lenin’s views made known to the delegates at
the Congress, but feared that Trotsky would insist on revealing the
‘Testament’. Trotsky, as Lenin had foreseen, agreed to a ‘rotten compromise’
with them: he agreed to have Lenin’s Testament read by Kamenev at only the
special closed session of the Central Committee on 22 May 1924. Boris Bazhanov,
Stalin’s secretary, described the scene: ‘Terrible embarrassment paralyzed all
those present. Stalin, sitting on the steps of the presidium, felt small and
miserable. I studied him closely: notwithstanding his self-possession and show
of calm, it was clear that his fate was at stake…’.9
It hardly seemed possible
for the Central Committee members to ignore Lenin’s wish, having loudly pledged
to ‘hold Lenin’s word sacred’. But Zinoviev and Kamenev did the impossible.
Stalin’s fate was in their hands; they could have used Lenin’s words to remove
Stalin from power, but instead rushed to his rescue, imploring the Central
Committee not to deny him the post of general secretary. ‘Lenin’s word is
sacred’, Zinoviev exclaimed. ‘But Lenin himself, if he could have witnessed, as
you all have, Stalin’s sincere efforts to mend his ways, would not have urged
the party to remove him.’
Displaying a considerable
flair for theatrical performance, Kamenev and Zinoviev persuaded delegates that
Stalin was a reformed man.10 The majority voted in Stalin’s favor.
Trotsky watched the scene, remaining aloof and silent. Stalin pretended to
offer his resignation, but Zinoviev and Kamenev ‘persuaded’ him to stay. The
decision was not to read Lenin’s Testament to the delegates of the congress and
not to enter it into the congressional record. Trotsky did not utter a word in
protest against the suppression of Lenin’s final words, although he had no
illusion about the meaning of what was taking place. Karl Radek leaned toward
him during the proceedings and said, ‘Now they won’t dare to go against you.’
Trotsky disagreed. ‘On the contrary’, he said, ‘they will have to go to the
limit, and moreover as quickly as possible.’11
Why Trotsky did not use
Lenin’s ‘Testament’ as a weapon to fight Stalin remains an unanswered question.
Perhaps he felt bound by his promise to Kamenev not to raise the matter of the
‘Georgian affair’, but more probably was held back by something else, an issue
that paralyzed him then and years later. Two years later, he was to hint at
this issue at a Politburo meeting, when he asked in indignation, ‘Is it true,
is it possible that in our Party, in Moscow, in Workers’
Cells, anti-Semitic agitation should be carried out with impunity?!’ The
Politburo members pretended to know nothing of this anti-Semitic agitation and
preferred to ignore the issue. Only Bukharin blushed with shame and
embarrassment.12
Trotsky realized that
Lenin saw in Stalin and himself not just two different personalities but
symbols of two historical and ideological tendencies: internationalism and
Great Russian chauvinism. Trotsky was paralyzed by a feeling of helplessness in
the face of the emerging chauvinist mood in the party and the country,
encouraged by Stalin. Zinoviev and Kamenev were blinded by their hostility
toward Trotsky and did not realize the threat posed to them by Stalin. Trotsky
did not help matters: he enraged Zinoviev and Kamenev in October 1924, by
publishing his pamphlet The Lessons of October, in which he recalled their
role in the 1917 ‘October episode’ and mentioned that Lenin at that time called
them ‘strikebreakers of the revolution’. They were eventually bound to part
company with Stalin because of their internationalist outlook. The major theme
of Trotsky’s pamphlet was his theory of ‘permanent revolution’, according to
which the October Revolution was only the first in a series of forthcoming
revolutionary upheavals elsewhere in the world. The theory was not new: Lenin
and most Bolsheviks were convinced that socialism could not win in Russia
without victorious revolutions in other countries, and were disappointed that
the revolutions in Germany and Hungary had suffered defeat. In a pamphlet
titled Foundations of Leninism, published in early 1924, Stalin stated that
socialism could not be built in one country before the victory of revolutions
in other countries. But his opinion underwent a sudden change a few months
later when he published another pamphlet, entitled Problems of Leninism,
in which he introduced his new theory of ‘building socialism in one country,
taken separately’. The essence of Stalin’s new theory was that even if other
countries did not follow the Russian example, the Russian people alone could go
on building socialism. A moment would come, argued Stalin, when the other
countries would join the world revolution. Trotsky interpreted Stalin’s theory
as a ‘conservative nationalist deviation from Bolshevism’.13
Zinoviev and Kamenev
initially paid little attention to Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country’ idea and
continued to support Stalin in his intrigues against Trotsky. In January 1925
the Central Committee removed Trotsky from his powerful position of war
commissar. The fear was
that he might use the Red Army to seize power. Trotsky did not fight back,
stating, ‘I know one must not be right against the party.’ Stalin’s slogan of
‘socialism in one country’ was approved by the majority of the delegates to the
Fourteenth Party Conference in March 1926. By then, the triumvirate of Stalin,
Zinoviev and Kamenev had broken up, and Stalin joined Bukharin, Rykov and
Tomsky, the head of the Soviet trade union organization, in alliance against
Zinoviev and Kamenev, who continued calling for international revolution.
Kamenev was demoted to the status of ‘candidate member’ of the Politburo. After
the congress, Stalin added to the Politburo his three supporters: Voroshilov,
Kalinin and Molotov, whom he controlled by threatening to expose their past
misdeeds.14 Usually, he blackmailed such people with documents found
in Okhrana archives.
By the summer of 1926,
Stalin had considerably improved his position within the party apparatus by
appointing the ‘right’ people to key posts. He was very close to his goal of
achieving absolute power. His name, however, was still hardly known outside
narrow party circles. The imminent defeat of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, on
whom Stalin was pinning the label ‘Jewish intellectuals’, appeared almost
inevitable. It seemed that only a miracle could save them from annihilation at
the forthcoming plenum (plenary session) of the Central Committee, which was to
open on 14 July 1926. This miracle almost happened during the plenum.
NOTES
1.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, p. 44.
2.
See L.Horwitz, ‘Lenin and
the Search for Jewish Roots’, The New York Times, 5 August 1992, p.
A–22. The author reports that archival documents about Lenin’s grandfather were
on display in Lenin’s Museum in Moscow in June 1992 (the museum was closed in
October 1993). Soviet archivist V.V.Tsapeen reported in the Spring 1992 edition
of the journal Arkhivy rodiny (Native Land Archives) that he found
documents about Lenin’s Jewish ancestry in Russian and Ukrainian archives.
Lenin’s grandfather, Israel Blank, was born in 1804 to Moshke and Miriam Blank
and in 1820 applied for conversion to the Russian Orthodox Church to gain
admission to the Medical-Surgical Academy, having changed his name to Alexander
Dmitrievich Blank. He graduated in 1824. This information, suppressed by Stalin
(who had found out about it earlier), was nevertheless known to Lenin’s
biographer Margorita Shaginian (Radio Liberty Committee, NY Program no. 103/72)
and is referred to by Louis Fischer in The Life of Lenin, New York,
1964, p. 34.
3.
Dr I.Frankel, ed., Jerusalem
University Collection of Documents on Soviet Jews. See there M.I.Kalinin, Yevrei-zemledel’tsy
v soyuze narodov SSSR, pp. 35f., and A.Bragin and M.Koltsov, Sudba
evreiskikh mass v sovetskom soyuze, pp. 21–6.
4.
I.V.Stalin, Sochineniya,
Moscow, 1946–51, vol. V, p. 308.
5.
Lev Trotsky, Stalin,
New York, 1941, p. 417.
6.
Trotsky, Stalin,
pp. 375f.
7.
V.I.Lenin, Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii, vol. XLV, Moscow, 1958–65, pp. 356–60.
8.
Ibid., pp. 345f.
9.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
376. Trotsky is quoting B. Bazhanov.
10.
Isaac Deutscher, The
Prophet Unarmed, New York, 1965, p. 137.
11.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
376.
12.
Deutscher, The Prophet
Unarmed, p. 258.
13.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
396.
14.
Ibid., p. 388.
STALIN’S OKHRANA FILE FOUND IN
1926
From the early days of
Soviet rule, Stalin maintained a very close relationship with Felix
Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Secret Police. Dzerzhinsky supplied him with
documents, found mostly in the Okhrana archives, that revealed compromising
information about Soviet officials and party members. Stalin gathered these
documents in his own personal archive and used them to blackmail people into
slavish obedience to him by threatening to expose their past. Those who refused
to submit to him were crushed or committed suicide. A special group of Stalin’s
agents, headed by Matvey Shkiriatov and Yemelian Yaroslavsky, worked within the
Central Control Commission, sorting out such documents. Stalin, for instance,
kept in his archive a document exposing Kalinin, the figurehead ‘President of
the USSR’, as an Okhrana collaborator.1 Trotsky stated that Kalinin
surrendered to Stalin ‘gradually, groaning and resisting’.2 Kalinin
told friends that Stalin was a ‘horse that would some day drag our wagon into a
ditch.’ Stalin placed a caricature of Kalinin in a Soviet magazine with the
caption ‘Last warning’.3
One of the first victims
of blackmail was Trotsky’s secretary Glazman, whose Okhrana file fell into
Stalin’s hands. Stalin warned Glazman by threatening to make public a document
that confirmed an instance of his cooperation with the Okhrana. Glazman committed
suicide, refusing to live in fear of exposure and slavish dependence on Stalin.
His suicide shocked many party members.4
The search for files of
Okhrana agents in the old police archives was proceeding slowly. In 1918, soon
after the flight of Lenin’s government from Petrograd to Moscow, Lenin ordered
all old archives to be transferred there. Dzerzhinsky was interested in the
records of former Okhrana officers, agents and informers, some of whom he hoped
to recruit into the Cheka. His recruiting technique was highly effective:
threat of exposure and execution unless they joined. In some cases, former
Okhrana agents were tried in court and executed. Ex-agent Ivan Okladsky was one
such example. Another Okhrana agent tried in open court was Anna Serebriakova. The
files of both were found in 1924 in one of the Department of Police archives
that had been transferred to Moscow that year. By that time, both these former
agents were aged invalids of no use to the Cheka.
codename—he eventually
became the Chief of the Okhrana Foreign Agency in Paris), who had escaped
abroad to avoid being exposed. Okladsky retired before the Revolution, and his
file was placed in the ‘top-secret’ safe in the Special Section of the
Department of Police. His file was found in 1924. Okladsky was arrested and
shot.5
Anna Serebriakova’s story
was less convoluted. She was recruited in 1884; her handler was Zubatov, the
Chief of the Moscow Okhrana. Although she never joined either the Mensheviks or
the Bolsheviks, members of both parties used her apartment in Moscow as a ‘safe
house’ and entrusted many party secrets to her. Her Okhrana codenames at
different times were Subotina, Tuz (the Ace) and Mamasha (Mommy).
In 1909, Burtsev published an article accusing her of being an Okhrana agent.
Serebriakova and her husband and son indignantly denied the charge. The scandal
died down, and she soon retired with an Okhrana pension of 1,200 rubles a year.
In addition, she received several large emergency grants for medical treatment
for an eye disease. She was completely blind when her file was found in 1924
and GPU agents came to arrest her. Initially, Serebriakova stubbornly denied
any ties with the Okhrana, but admitted to it when the documents from her file
were read to her. These included numerous receipts of Okhrana payments signed
by her, the last one dated January 1917, the eve of the February Revolution.
Her trial began on 15 April 1926 and continued for 11 days. Nineteen witnesses,
among them prominent Soviet officials who had known her for many years,
testified. Serebriakova’s son appeared as a witness for the prosecution. He
declared that he had lost all feelings for her as his mother and ‘despite her
blindness, I refuse to help her financially. I reject her as a mother and her
future fate is of no concern to me.’6 The trial proceedings included
testimony by four ‘experts on the Okhrana’, who were summoned to advise the
court on technical details of Okhrana operations, codenames and terminology
encountered in various documents. They stated that Serebriakova’s Okhrana file
had been found only recently, in 1924, and that, contrary to the widely held
assumption that the Okhrana archives had been destroyed, ‘most of the
Department of Police archives have been preserved.’7
On 26 April 1926
Serebriakova was sentenced to seven years in prison, confiscation of her
property, and annulment of all her civil rights for five years following the
end of her prison term. The verdict stated that her crime called for ‘the
highest measure of punishment’, that is, the death penalty, but that the court
took into account her advanced age, her blindness, and the fact that ‘at
present she does not pose any threat to society’. She was 69 years old at the
time. Article 67 of the Criminal Code, under which she was sentenced, read:
‘Active efforts or active struggle against the workers’ class and the revolutionary
movement while serving in responsible or highly secret agent positions during
the tsarist regime.’8
In April 1925, at the time
of Anna Serebriakova’s trial in Moscow, another trial took place in Baku.
Newspapers described the defendants as Mensheviks, Esers, Azerbaijanian
mussavatists, Armenian dashnaks and White Army officers, all of whom were
accused of collaboration with ‘British interventionists’ and of complicity in
the murder of 26 Baku commissars in 1918, among them Stepan Shaumian (who on
several occasions had accused Stalin of betraying him to the Okhrana). Only one
of the condemned commissars, Anastas Mikoyan, had been able to convince the
executioners to spare him. That Mikoyan had managed to save his own life by
collaborating with the executioners was known to Stalin, who used this to keep
Mikoyan ‘on the hook’. The difference
between the fate of Anna
Serebriakova and Anastas Mikoyan was one of relative utility to Stalin:
Serebriakova, useless, was sentenced to imprisonment in April 1926; Anastas
Mikoyan was useful to Stalin as one of his close assistants at the Central
Committee plenum when it opened on 14 July 1926.
This plenum was of great
importance to Stalin: he intended to use it to destroy the United Opposition,
headed by Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev. In the spring of 1926, Zinoviev and
Kamenev, having parted company with Stalin, invited Trotsky to form with them a
United Opposition. Stalin was not impressed. ‘Ah, they have granted themselves
mutual amnesty’, he said scornfully.9 Zinoviev had been removed from
his post as the head of the party organization in Leningrad (Petrograd was
named Leningrad after Lenin’s death). Stalin had sent Sergey Kirov to Leningrad
to replace Zinoviev. An even more important change was that the Red Army fell
under Stalin’s control after the death of Mikhail Frunze, an old Bolshevik who
had replaced Trotsky as war commissar a few months earlier. The death of Frunze
was most convenient for Stalin. He had resisted GPU intervention in military
affairs and refused to support Stalin in his conflict with the opposition.
There were rumors that he was even preparing a military coup to depose Stalin.
Frunze suffered from a stomach ulcer. Stalin, in charge of supervising the
medical care of Soviet officials, ordered a council of Kremlin doctors to
perform surgery. Frunze’s physician objected, stating that Frunze’s heart would
give out if he were subjected to chloroform. Stalin nevertheless ordered that
Frunze undergo surgery; he then died during the operation. (His death was
depicted as a barely veiled murder in the 1927 story The Tale of the
Unextinguished Moon, by Boris Pilniak. Stalin forced Pilniak to admit his
‘error’ in a public statement and ordered all copies of the book confiscated
and destroyed.10) After Frunze’s death, Stalin appointed his old
crony Klement Voroshilov to Frunze’s post as war commissar. Voroshilov was
Stalin’s creature because of incriminating Okhrana documents found in the old
police archives.11 With this appointment, Stalin came close to
becoming an absolute dictator.
Stalin’s confidence in
being able to defeat the United Opposition at the July 1926 plenum might have
turned out to be a bit premature. While the plenum was in session, an event
took place that had the potential to utterly ruin him: some time in July 1926
Stalin’s St Petersburg Okhrana file was found in one of the last shipments of
the Okhrana archives to Moscow. The transfer of old archives to Moscow had
begun in June 1918 when the Soviet government had issued a decree creating Glavarkhiv
(the Main Archive Administration), which was ordered to gather all archives in
Moscow. Toward the end of 1919, Glavarkhiv transferred to Moscow the
files of the Provisional Government’s Investigative Commission of the Supreme
Tribunal. These contained the materials of the Muraviev Commission, which had
investigated Okhrana provocations.12 The file of Okhrana agent Iosif
Dzhugashvili was not in this shipment. Transfer of the archives took place
under the direction of the chairmen of Glavarkhiv, first by
M.H.Pokrovsky, later by D.B.Riazanov. The files were shipped in boxes,
sometimes in bags, and piled up in a number of temporary locations, none
suitable for study, indexing and cataloguing. Following the decision of the
collegium of Glavarkhiv, early in 1925 Riazanov ordered all the old
displaced archives, including the Department of Police archives, to be moved to
a specially equipped building in Moscow. Various archives were moved there,
including the ‘Petrograd Historic-Revolutionary Archive’, parts of which had
been stored in the former Department of Police building, in the Pushkin Museum,
and in railroad
warehouses and freight
cars in Leningrad. ‘In the summer of 1926, all archival materials of the
Petrograd Historic-Revolutionary Archive were transferred to Moscow.’13
It was then, during the
inventory of one of the last shipments in July 1926, that the file of Iosif
Dzhugashvili was found. The director of the Department of Police, S.P.Beletsky,
had placed it in the ‘Top-Secret’ safe in the Special Section. An employee of
the archive, perhaps the same one who found the file, secretly sent the
information to David Shub, editor of the Menshevik journal Sotsialistichesky
vestnik in Berlin, stating that Stalin’s Okhrana file contained documents
proving that Stalin had for many years been an Okhrana agent. Shub felt that
such monumental and unbelievable information could not be made public without
supporting documentation, which this informant did not supply.14 To
Shub the thought that the leader of the Soviet Union was a former Okhrana agent
appeared fantastic. For all his hostility toward the Bolshevik usurpers of the
Russian Revolution, and especially toward the rising dictator Stalin, Shub
could not imagine that Stalin, for all his duplicity, could be a creature of
the Okhrana. In any case, he could not publish the information without having
in his hands unimpeachable documentary proof. But Shub confided this
information to a trusted friend, I.D.Levine, a prominent American journalist and
author.15
The discovery of Stalin’s
Okhrana file coincided in time with Dzerzhinsky’s demise under very strange
circumstances. As usual, the discovered file was brought to Dzerzhinsky,
probably on 18 July 1926. He decided to stay overnight at his Lubianka office
and remained there the next day, returning home at 3 am on 20 July 1926. Later
in the morning he left home early and went to his Lubianka office, but stayed
there only briefly and then went to the Kremlin to take part in the party
plenum, which had already been in session for four days, to deliver a speech on
the state of heavy industry.16 At that time, Dzerzhinsky served as
both chairman of the GPU and commissar of heavy industry. He had the fervent
ambition to prove that he was capable of more than executing enemies of Soviet
power and could also direct important sectors of the Soviet economy. Stalin had
satisfied this ambition by making him the commissar of heavy industry.
Dzerzhinsky knew that the leaders of the United Opposition—Trotsky, Zinoviev
and Kamenev— considered him a narrow-minded fanatic incapable of constructive
leadership. He hated them for this, and knew his career depended on Stalin’s
victory over the opposition. Given this weighty reason for supporting Stalin,
he must have been in agony over the question of what to do with the file of
Okhrana agent Iosif Dzhugashvili.
On his arrival at the
plenum, Dzerzhinsky behaved in a frantic, bizarre, almost hysterical fashion.
Stalin noticed his odd behavior at once. He may have learned from secret agents
in social-democratic circles in Berlin that David Shub had received information
about the discovery of his Okhrana file. He knew that such files were always
brought to Dzerzhinsky. Alarmed, Stalin sent Anastas Mikoyan to find out what
was the matter with Dzerzhinsky. When Mikoyan reported to Stalin what he had
learned, Stalin’s suspicion increased. He decided to prevent Dzerzhinsky from
speaking to the plenum and instead to assign Grigory Piatakov, Dzerzhinsky’s
deputy, to deliver the report on the state of heavy industry. ‘Strange,
Piatakov is my deputy, but he didn’t even inform me about his intention to
speak!’ exclaimed Dzerzhinsky, and indignantly demanded to be allowed to
address the plenum. Stalin gave in and let him speak, to keep him from creating
pandemonium with his protest.17
Dzerzhinsky’s
two-hour-long speech was exceedingly disjointed and punctuated by hysterical
outbursts, diatribes against the leaders of the opposition, threats and
complaints of dubious meaning, and he was repeatedly interrupted by protests.
At one point he shouted: ‘You know perfectly well what my power consists of! I
do not spare myself… And because of this you all here love me, because you
trust me… I have never twisted my soul! It is difficult for me alone to tackle
this problem and, therefore, I beg your help…’.18
Dzerzhinsky was tormenting
his soul: Stalin’s Okhrana file posed a dreadful dilemma for him. He saw no
solution to it and was begging for help without being able to tell anyone about
it. For two days before his appearance at the plenum, he had read with horror
the file of Okhrana agent Iosif Dzhugashvili. He had read Colonel Eremin’s
letter to Director Beletsky, describing Dzhugashvili’s Okhrana career,
Dzhugashvili’s letter to Assistant Minister of the Interior Zolotarev,
complaining about Malinovsky’s devotion to Lenin and disloyalty to the Okhrana,
Zolotarev’s instruction to exile Dzhugashvili to Siberia ‘for good’ as a
punishment for his threat to expose Malinovsky. The file had Dzhugashvili’s
reports to the Okhrana, including his report on the condition of the Social
Democratic Party which he wrote in June 1912, his signed pledges to cooperate
with the Okhrana, and his signed receipts for the money he was paid for this
cooperation. As head of the GPU, Dzerzhinsky saw a great many such Okhrana
files, and he had no doubt that these were genuine documents, proving that
Stalin had for many years been an Okhrana agent. Dzerzhinsky was a fanatic who
made all his actions subservient to the Revolution: he recruited former Okhrana
agents into the service of the Soviet secret police as willingly as he executed
them if they were of no use to him. But the astounding fact that as despicable
a creature as an Okhrana agent had wormed his way to the pinnacle of Soviet
power was beyond his comprehension. He found himself in an untenable position
at a crucial moment in the party’s power struggle. Dzerzhinsky realized that by
removing Stalin he would destroy himself, because victory by the opposition
would mean that he, too, would be removed from all his posts. He also feared
that Stalin would destroy anyone who knew of the file’s discovery. Agonizing
over what to do with Stalin’s file, Dzerzhinsky on his way to the plenum on the
morning of 20 July 1926 stopped at his Lubianka office and hid the file among
personal papers.19 He would never touch it again.
During his speech
Dzerzhinsky drank from a glass of water that was periodically brought to him.
Before finishing his speech, he suddenly turned pale, lost consciousness,
collapsed and fell off the rostrum. He was carried to the lobby, where he died
before the eyes of delegates who gathered around him.20 Some of the
delegates at the plenum had no doubt that Dzerzhinsky had been poisoned. Rumors
to that effect immediately started to spread among the delegates and later in
party circles in Moscow.21 There was no investigation and no
autopsy. Dzerzhinsky’s body was cremated, and ashes that may or may not have
been his were immured in the Kremlin wall, the usual way in later years to
enshrine the remains of Kremlin dignitaries. But Stalin left some evidence that
incriminated him.
The falsification of
historical truth and the cover-up of the poisoning started immediately. Stalin
concocted an official version of Dzerzhinsky’s death from a heart attack, which
allegedly took place not at the plenum but in Dzerzhinsky’s apartment, in his
own bed. Thus, the death was moved from the actual scene and time of the crime.
This distortion and shifting of the event in space and time automatically
resulted in
Stalin’s having an alibi.
That many delegates saw Dzerzhinsky die at the plenum made no difference to
someone as dedicated to ‘rewriting’ history as Stalin. The new version of
Dzerzhinsky’s death was presented by Stalin in his speech at the funeral and
enlivened with a dizzying and confounding mixture of fact and myth:
Today the Party was struck
by a heavy blow. Comrade Dzerzhinsky, the terror of the bourgeoisie, devout
knight of the proletariat, noble-blooded fighter for the Communist Revolution,
militant builder of our industry, eternal worker and fearless soldier of great
battle, died suddenly of a heart attack. Comrade Dzerzhinsky died instantly, on
returning home after his speech—as always a passionate one—at the Central
Committee plenum. His ailing, completely overburdened heart refused to work and
death struck him down in a single moment. Glorious death at a front line post!22
Stalin was up to his old
habit of rephrasing the same lie several times in order to plant it as the
truth in the minds of his listeners and in his own mind. According to Stalin’s
fraudulent version, Dzerzhinsky died of a heart attack, ‘suddenly…instantly…in
a single moment’—not at the plenum, but ‘on returning home after his speech’.
This version was later enriched by Soviet authors with other fantastic
inventions, among which could be found some surviving particles of truth. In
one such story, Dzerzhinsky took ill and fell near the rostrum, but after a
while he ‘felt a little better, got up and headed home. …he was very pale and
moved slowly…he firmly shook his wife’s hand and silently went into his
bedroom…he fell unconscious between the two beds. Belenky and Redens lifted and
placed him on his bed.’23
Abram Belenky was the head
of the Kremlin bodyguards at the time (he was to perish during the purges in
the 1930s).24 Stanislav Redens was Dzerzhinsky’s assistant and
nephew (he was also shot during the purges). Redens was married to the sister
of Stalin’s wife Nadezhda Allilueva, which made Stalin and Redens in-laws and
Stalin and Dzerzhinsky remote relatives. What in fact had happened was that
Stalin ordered Belenky and Redens to carry Dzerzhinsky’s corpse home. It was
they, not Dzerzhinsky, who ‘firmly’ shook his wife’s hand and placed his body
on the bed. He had dropped dead before the very eyes of bewildered plenum
delegates. This was why Belenky and Redens had not taken him to the Kremlin
Hospital. Furthermore, the reason they did not take his body to a morgue was
that Stalin wanted to avoid an autopsy.
Dzerzhinsky was the first
casualty of Stalin’s Okhrana file after its emergence from the dusty archives.
Stalin may have tried to talk himself into believing that Dzerzhinsky had
destroyed the file, but the fear that it was preserved and might fall into the
hands of his enemies must have continued to unnerve him.
NOTES
1.
Taped Interview with
Mikhail Agursky in Israel, in 1971. Agursky stated that documents establishing
Kalinin’s ties with the Okhrana were found among Stalin’s personal papers after
the dictator’s death.
2.
Lev Trotsky, Stalin,
New York, 1941, pp. 388f.
3.
Ibid., p. 388.
4.
Ibid., p. 390.
5.
See Lev Sheinin, Zapiski
sledovatelia, Moscow, 1968, pp. 385–412. Okladsky’s story was also told in
a book by Larisa Raizner, the wife of the high Soviet official Fedor
Raskolnikov. She obtained Okladsky’s Okhrana file from the GPU with which she
maintained close relations. She died suddenly in 1926, shortly after publishing
her book. Ten years later, Raskolnikov, then the Soviet Ambassador to Bulgaria,
defected and was thrown out of a Paris hotel window by Stalin’s agents.
6.
Pravda, 24
April 1926.
7.
Ibid. See also Archivnoe
delo, vol. XIII, 1927, p. 35.
8.
Pravda, 27
April 1926.
9.
Isaac Deutscher, Stalin,
a Political Biography, New York and London, 1968, p. 307.
10.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
418.
11.
On Voroshilov’s
connections with the Okhrana, see Lev Trotsky, Stalin, p. 388ff.
12.
V.Maksakov, ‘Arkhiv
revoliutsii i vneshnei politiki XIX–XX vekov’, Arkhivnoe delo, no. XIII,
1927, p. 32.
13.
Ibid., p. 41.
14.
David Shub’s notification
of the discovery of Stalin’s Okhrana file and his reaction to it are described
in a letter by I.D.Levine to the author, dated 7 August 1976. On file in the
author’s archive.
15.
Interview with I.D.Levine.
Levine’s letter in the author’s archive.
16.
A.Tishkov, Dzerzhinsky,
Moscow, 1974, p. 374.
17.
Ibid., pp. 374f.
18.
Ibid.
19.
See Chapter 19 below for
the discovery of Stalin’s Okhrana file among Dzerzhinsky’s personal papers.
20.
Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet
Unarmed, New York, 1980, p. 279.
21.
Ibid. See also Anton
Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret tirana, New York, 1980, p. 334.
22.
Tishkov, Dzerzhinsky,
pp. 377f.
23.
Ibid., pp. 376f.
24.
Abram Belenky’s sister,
Emilia Solomonovna Belenkaya-Ravich, an architect, was the author’s neighbor in
a Moscow apartment on Lobkovsky Street. She mentioned her brother and spoke of
Dzerzhinsky’s death.
‘CASTRATED FORCES’
Beginning in July 1926,
when his Okhrana file was found in the old archives, Stalin’s behavior markedly
worsened. He had always been irritable and quicktempered, but now members of
his own family suffered from his increasing intolerance and angry outbursts. In
August 1926, his relations with his wife Nadezhda Allilueva deteriorated to
such an extent that Nadezhda left Stalin, taking along their 6-month-old
daughter Svetlana and their 7-year-old son Vasily to live with her parents in
Leningrad. Yakov, Stalin’s 18-year- old son from his first marriage, stayed
with his father but grew so unhappy that he attempted suicide by shooting
himself in the chest in the kitchen of their now deserted Kremlin apartment.
The wound was not fatal, and doctors at the Kremlin hospital saved Yakov’s
life. ‘He can’t even shoot straight’, was Stalin’s heartless comment.1
Stalin telephoned Nadezhda
several times and pleaded with her to return. He finally succeeded in
persuading her, but a few weeks after her return, she wrote to her sister Anna
in Kharkov that she wanted to move in with her. Anna’s husband Stanislav Redens
had been transferred to the Kharkov GPU after the death of his uncle
Dzerzhinsky. Anna advised Nadezhda to stay with Stalin and for the sake of the
children not to break up the family. Nadezhda followed her advice. Her decision
probably also had to do with her knowledge that by this time no one in Russia
could hide from Stalin.
Nadezhda was deeply
disappointed in Stalin. The revolutionary hero she had worshiped had turned out
to have little to do with the reality of her marriage. The discovery of
Stalin’s Okhrana file and his fear of imminent exposure must have been on
Stalin’s mind day and night. He began to suffer from insomnia, and his
shortened arm bothered him periodically. Stalin’s condition worsened to the
point where he sought the help of V.M.Bekhterev, the eminent Russian
psychiatrist, neuropathologist and physiologist. Stalin also considered
Bekhterev a political ally in the conflict with Trotsky over the question, much
discussed in the mid-1920s among high Soviet officials, of whether to allow
publication of Sigmund Freud’s work. Trotsky was for publication, while Stalin
insisted that Freud was a charlatan and consequently opposed it. Bekhterev was
a supporter of Pavlov’s theory of reflexes and considered Freud’s
psychoanalysis unscientific. Stalin needed Bekhterev’s reputation to dismiss
Freud’s theories and, at the same time, to deliver a blow to Trotsky which was
ever a high priority on Stalin’s agenda.
suffered from a severe
case of split personality, paranoia and schizophrenia.4 Bekhterev
was elected honorary chairman of the congress, and many participants gathered
around and were in a position to overhear his comments. Bekhterev was a
sociable, candid and fearless man. Before the Revolution, he had expressed his
ideas openly to the Tsar, who, upon being told of Bekhterev’s arrival, used to
tell court officials to give Bekhterev’s institute everything he asked for,
‘otherwise I would give him even more’. Bekhterev was politically on the side
of liberal and socialist groups, and at times organized secret meetings of
revolutionaries in his office. During the infamous Beilis trial, he delivered
an impassioned speech against anti-Semitism.5 Bolshevik rule did not
change him and he voiced his thoughts as openly as ever. He had many years’
experience in the treatment of paranoia. When he made the discovery that the
general secretary was a paranoiac, he felt no compunction to keep his diagnosis
from his colleagues.
Bekhterev’s opinion was
reported to Stalin. In the evening, Bekhterev and his colleagues went to the
Bolshoi Theater. According to an account of what happened there, several men
came up to Bekhterev during an intermission. They were not delegates and no one
knew them. They led him to a buffet, where he had drinks and ate sandwiches.
They then disappeared and were not seen again. That night Bekhterev died. The
rumor spread that he had been poisoned on Stalin’s order.6
Bekhterev’s son P.V.Bekhterev, a chief engineer in a weapons factory, wanted to
bury his father in the family plot in the Leningrad cemetery, but he was told
that, according to Bekhterev’s wishes, his body would be cremated without
autopsy. The urn supposedly containing Bekhterev’s ashes was sent to Leningrad
with permission for his son to bury it where he liked.7
The newspaper Izvestiya
initially blurted out that Bekhterev had died on the evening of 23 December
1927, immediately after returning from the Bolshoi Theater, but subsequent
reports moved the time of death to the next day. As usual, Stalin shifted the
death further in time from when the murder had occurred. According to the
official report, Bekhterev died of ‘heart paralysis’.8 But
Bekhterev’s son insisted that his father had been poisoned, although he
suspected his stepmother rather than Stalin. Nevertheless, Bekhterev’s son was
arrested and sentenced to ‘ten years in prison without the right to
correspondence’. In fact, he was executed by shooting. His wife died in a
prison camp, and their three children were sent to orphanages.
Bekhterev’s diagnosis of
Stalin was paranoia, a mental disorder characterized by highly systematized
delusions of persecution or grandeur. Any fact that contradicts the delusion is
dismissed by paranoiacs with contempt. People who do not share their
convictions are considered enemies. Paranoiacs pursue their ideas stubbornly
and with great inventiveness, and they are liable to accuse imagined ‘enemies’
of what they are guilty of themselves. Freud considered this trait as
‘projection’, the most characteristic symptom of paranoia. He wrote: ‘The most
striking characteristic of symptom formation in paranoia is the process which
deserves the name of projection. An internal perception is suppressed,
and, indeed, its content, after undergoing a certain degree of distortion,
enters consciousness in the form of an external perception.’9
Stalin staged the infamous
show trials, in which he paraded innocent people and forced them to ‘confess’
to crimes that he himself had committed, thus projecting on to his victims his
own guilt. He suppressed his internal perception of the truth and, after it had
undergone some distortion, it reappeared as an external perception, which he
accepted as reality and believed his invented accusations against his ‘enemies’
were true.
Early in 1928 Stalin
instigated the prosecution of coal-mining engineers of the town of Shakhty in
the Northern Caucasus. The engineers were charged with ‘wrecking’ the coalmining
industry. In a speech before a party plenum on 13 April 1928 Stalin declared:
‘The facts show that the Shakhty affair was an economic counterrevolution,
plotted by a section of bourgeois experts, former coal mine owners… We have
internal enemies. We have external enemies. This, comrades, must not be
forgotten for a single moment…’.10
The interrogations of the
engineers, 50 of them Soviet citizens, three of them foreigners, were conducted
by Stalin’s friend Efim Evdokimov, the head of the GPU of the Shakhty region.
He was a former common criminal who had been set free by the February
Revolution. During the Civil War, he joined the Red Army in Tsaritsyn, where he
met Stalin, who turned him into a drinking companion and in later years often
invited him on vacation trips to the Caucasus. Staging the Shakhty case was
decided on one such trip. Evdokimov gave the depositions of the ‘wreckers’ to
the head of the GPU, Menzhinsky, who dismissed their ‘confessions’ as
fabrications and declared that prosecution of such a case would be tantamount
to sabotage of Soviet industry. Evdokimov complained to Stalin, who told him:
‘Nonsense. Go back to the North Caucasus and immediately adopt whatever
measures you consider necessary. From now on send all your information to me
only, and I will take care of Comrade Menzhinsky myself.’11
The Shakhty trial was held
in the Moscow Hall of Columns. A few of its highlights suffice to convey its
grimness. One defendant did not appear because, as one of the judges explained,
he had gone mad in his cell. When one of the accused engineers, Nikolay Skorutto,
started to read his ‘confession’, his wife shouted, ‘Kolia, darling, don’t lie!
Don’t! You know you are innocent!’ Thereupon Skorutto denied his guilt; the
next morning he again confessed his guilt, saying that his wife’s outcry had
confused him.12 Another of the defendants, a man of 80, denied his
guilt and challenged one of the men who had confessed, ‘Why do you lie, eh? Who
told you to lie?’ Yet another defendant, a Jew, shouted: ‘One day another Zola
will arise and will write another J’Accuse to restore our name to
honor.’13
At one point during the
proceedings a 12-year-old boy rose from his seat in the audience and proclaimed
that his father, one of the defendants, the engineer Kolodub, was ‘a traitor
and enemy of the working class’. The boy demanded that his father be shot. ‘I
reject him and the name he bears’, he shouted. ‘From now on I shall no longer
call myself Kolodub, but Shakhtin.’14 Similar scenes of sons
denouncing their fathers and demanding their execution were to take place
during subsequent show trials. Stalin kept staging his personal trauma—his own
court testimony against his father Vissarion in 1890 in Tiflis. The Shakhty
trial ended with the defendants being sentenced to various prison terms. But
Stalin re-enacted the events of his past not only on the stage of his show
trials but in ‘real life’ as well, projecting them on to other people as if
these events had taken place not in his own life but in theirs. In 1927 he
ordered Menzhinsky to assign a GPU agent by the name of Stroilov to set up an
‘underground Trotskyite printing press’ and to plant illegal leaflets there in
order to incriminate opposition leaders. Stroilov’s press was liquidated by the
GPU, and he was declared to be a White Guard officer, while opposition leaders
were accused of counter-revolutionary activities. ‘Stalin was a master of such
little sensations’, wrote Alexander Orlov, a top GPU officer at the time, not
knowing that a similar provocation had been set up by the Okhrana informer
Iosif
Dzhugashvili in Tiflis as early
as 1900.15 Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev complained to Menzhinsky
that his GPU had staged a provocation. Menzhinsky did not deny the accusation
and confirmed that the leaflets were forgeries. ‘Do you think that Stalin alone
would be able to cope with the task [of building socialism]?’ Kamenev asked
him. Menzhinsky skirted the question and asked instead, ‘Why then did you let
him grow into such a formidable force? Now it is too late.’16
Throughout 1927 Stalin
turned the debates in the Politburo and Central Committee into spectacles aimed
at destroying the ‘United Opposition’. Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev were
expelled from the Politburo, Zinoviev was dismissed as the head of the
Comintern (Communist International), which became virtually a GPU front. Stalin
himself contemptuously referred to it as ‘eta lavochka’ (‘this criminal
hangout’).17 The Central Committee became an appendix to Stalin’s
Secretariat. In Trotsky’s words: ‘The line of attack against the Opposition was
prearranged… The tone of the baiting became more unbridled… The stage director
of all this was Stalin. He walked up and down at the back of the presidium…and
made no attempt to hide his approval when the swearing addressed to some
Oppositionist assumed an utterly shameful character.’18
Stalin’s resolve to
eliminate the opposition was vehement. When one of his old Georgian friends,
Budu Mdivani, once tried to persuade him to reach an agreement with Trotsky,
Zinoviev and Kamenev, Stalin at first listened in silence, pacing back and
forth. Then he suddenly walked up to Mdivani. The expression on his face was
menacing. Rising up on his toes and raising one arm, Stalin screamed, ‘They
must be crushed!’19 On 7 November 1927, the tenth anniversary of the
October Revolution, two columns of demonstrators moved down Tverskaya Street
toward Red Square. The right column was carrying placards with slogans approved
by the Politburo, while the left column displayed those of the opposition,
among them the slogan ‘Let us carry out Lenin’s Testament’, a reminder of
Lenin’s advice to remove Stalin from his high party posts. Trotsky, Kamenev and
a few other members of the opposition stood on the balcony of the Paris Hotel
and greeted the demonstration. Suddenly, they were attacked by GPU agents
hurling rotten eggs and shouting, ‘Down with the traitor Trotsky!’ The agents
tore up the placards of the opposition and forced its column to join the
‘correct’ one.20 Trotsky made several public speeches before Moscow
workers. At the Paveletsky railway station his speech was interrupted by
Molotov, who demanded in the name of the Central Committee that the ‘illegal
gathering’ be disbanded. Trotsky, losing self-control, accused ‘Stalin and his
camarilla’ of being the ‘grave-diggers of the Revolution’. The next day a Pravda
article accused Trotsky of ‘creating an illegal party’.21
Stalin labeled the
opposition ‘Trotskyite deviation’, and he referred to the opposition’s members
as ‘Jewish intellectuals’. At the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927,
Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev were expelled from the party. Trotsky refused to
accept expulsion and was exiled to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan. Zinoviev and Kamenev
renounced their opposition views, and Stalin benevolently allowed them to be
readmitted to the party. Trotsky’s supporters, on the other hand, he exiled to
different parts of the country to make it difficult for them to communicate
with each other. The ‘castrated forces’ of the opposition, as he called them,
were scattered and no longer posed any danger to him. After the Fifteenth Party
Congress, two Stalinists, Yan Rudzutak and Valerian Kuibyshev, were added to
the Politburo.
In 1927 Stalin promoted a
war psychology in Russia by kindling fear of foreign intervention. Soviet
relations with the West deteriorated. Britain broke off diplomatic relations
with Moscow, and France declared a de facto break. The Soviet ambassador
to Poland, Peter Voikov, was assassinated in revenge for his role in the murder
of the Tsar’s family, of which he liked to brag. Stalin’s policy toward China
suffered a setback, which provided Trotsky with an opportunity to accuse him of
serious mistakes. Trotsky continued advocating a policy of support for the
Chinese communists, while Stalin formed an alliance with Chiang Kai-shek and
his Kuomintang government. In April 1927 Chiang Kai-shek’s troops massacred
communists in Shanghai. Stalin recalled Soviet military advisers and called on
the Chinese communists to rise in revolt against the Kuomintang. In December
1927 Chiang Kai-shek brutally suppressed the ‘Canton commune’. Stalin reacted
by ordering Karl Pauker, the chief of the GPU Operations Department and the
head of Stalin’s bodyguards, to arrest all the Chinese in Moscow. Pauker
carried out the order, rounding them all up, from those running laundries to
members of the Chinese section of the Comintern and university professors.
Stalin then received a telephone call from the Comintern official Osip
Piatnitsky, who complained that the entire staff of the Chinese section had
been arrested. Stalin summoned Pauker and asked him, ‘Did you arrest all
the Chinese?’ Pauker proudly answered ‘yes’, whereupon Stalin struck him in the
face and ordered, ‘Release them all!’ Pauker scurried to carry out the order.
All the Chinese were released as suddenly as they had been arrested. Pauker,
carrying an understandable grudge, stayed away from Stalin’s office for several
days, and did not go on his usual trip with Stalin to his dacha. Stalin
finally summoned him and awarded him the Order of the Red Banner and an edict explaining
that the citation was in recognition of the ‘exemplary carrying out of an
important assignment’. The staff of Stalin’s Secretariat joked that Pauker
should wear the medal not on his chest, but on his cheek.22
Stalin’s fear of the
Chinese threat engendered a preposterous idea, which was made public some three
months after Chiang Kai-shek’s suppression of the Canton commune: the settling
of Jews in the Birobidzhan area (named after its two rivers, Bira and Bidzhan),
the eastern Siberia region along the Soviet-Chinese border. The plan under
consideration called for the establishment in Birobidzhan of a ‘Jewish
Autonomous Region’. Stalin’s earlier reason for suggesting the creation of a
Jewish autonomous republic (in the Crimea) had been an attempted bribe to
secure Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s allegiance. He no longer needed that
allegiance, and this newly proposed relocation of the Jews was meant to serve
quite a different purpose.
On 28 March 1928 the
Soviet government announced a plan to ‘assign the Birobidzhan region for the
settlement of the toiling Jewish masses’.23 Mikhail Kalinin, by then
the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, and Stalin’s earlier mouthpiece on the
proposal for Jewish resettlement in the Crimea, this time proclaimed:
The
Jews as a nation [are] one of the most vital and politically influential
nations. That is why the creation of the Jewish republic would have enormous
significance. This is a weighty thing… I am a sinner, I proposed Biro-Bidzhan a
long time ago, despite the fact that it is located near China… There were some
cries: ‘Only not under China!’ Two hundred years ago China was beyond reach.
But now people say, ‘So
what,
it takes a week to reach China’ … The Jewry, which in the USSR consists of
about three million, should have at least a little republic. And then everybody
would know, that this nationality has its own ‘state title’ on our territory,
if I may say so.24
In fact, Kalinin was not
the initiator of this ‘crazy idea’, and his statement that he had been in favor
of sending Jews to Birobidzhan even earlier was a lie. He had earlier promoted
Stalin’s idea of giving the Crimea to the Jews. As was often the case in these
scripted performances, Stalin’s hidden motives inadvertently leaked out in
Kalinin’s statements: Stalin intended to make Birobidzhan a buffer area in case
of military conflict with China and to use the Jews as hostages in this
conflict. As a ‘politically influential nation’, they would mobilize world
support for the Soviet Union in the event of a war with China.
A territory less suitable
for colonization than Birobidzhan was difficult, if not impossible, to find in
all of the Soviet Union. An investigation of conditions in the area undertaken
by the Tsarist colonial administration established that it was ‘unsuitable for
agricultural colonization’, because it had ‘permanently frozen subsoil,
marsh-ridden terrain, made uninhabitable by gnus [blood-sucking insects:
gnats, horseflies, midges], floods, prolonged below 40° frosts, cultural
isolation, more than a thousand verst [about 700 miles] distance from
the sea, unbearable intensity of labor, short growing period under unfavorable
seasonal distribution of precipitation…’.25
For Stalin to contemplate
sending a large number of Jewish settlers into such an inhospitable region
leaves no doubt that he was motivated by more than military considerations
alone: his pathological anti-Semitism, too, was at work. While Stalin was
hatching his monstrous plan, one prominent party official, Yan Sten, who knew
Stalin quite well, noted in a small circle of personal friends that, ‘Koba will
do things that will make the trials of Dreyfus and Beilis pale in comparison.’26
Trotsky, who knew Stalin less well and wanted to believe in communism as an
international movement transcending the parochial ideas of nations and races,
denied for a long time that Stalin was an anti-Semite. But he finally accepted
the fact that ‘Stalin and his henchmen even stooped to fish in the muddied
waters of anti-Semitism.’ He was outraged by the antiSemitic cartoons in the
party press, which were received with sly snickers. In response to Trotsky’s
protests, Stalin made the glib statement: ‘We are fighting Trotsky, Zinoviev
and Kamenev not because they are Jews, but because they are oppositionists.’
Trotsky finally recognized the true intention of Stalin’s statement: it was a
reminder to all not to forget that the leaders of the opposition were Jews.27
On Stalin’s order, the
country’s annual solemnization of Lenin’s cult did not take place on Lenin’s
birthday, but on the anniversary of his death on 21 January. On that day in
1929, five years after Lenin’s death, Politburo members approved Stalin’s
decision to exile Trotsky from the Soviet Union. Bukharin abstained from
voting. The only country that agreed to accept Trotsky was Turkey, where he
enjoyed the status of an ‘Honorary Citizen’, which the Turkish leader Kemal Atatürk bestowed
on him for cooperation with the Turks during the Civil War in Russia. On 12
February 1929 Trotsky, his wife Natalia Sedova, his older son Lev Sedov,
Sedov’s wife Anna Riabukhina and their baby son were brought to the heavily
guarded port of Odessa, where the freighter Ilyich—named in honor of
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin—was waiting for them. Stalin liked such symbolic
‘coincidences’ and marked important
events in his life with them. Trotsky’s younger son Sergey refused to go
abroad, saying that he had nothing to do with the political activities of his
father. Trotsky and his wife went aboard the Ilyich first, followed by
Lev Sedov, but Sedov’s wife Anna and their baby son were prevented from
boarding and were led away. Trotsky, his wife, and Lev Sedov shouted their
protests, but the guards ignored them. The Ilyich left Odessa and headed
for Istanbul.
NOTES
1.
I.D.Levine, Stalin,
New York, 1931, p. 325; Svetlana Allilueva, Twenty Letters to a Friend, New
York, 1967, p. 101.
2.
Oleg Moroz, ‘Poslednii
diagnoz’, Literaturnaya gazeta, 28 September 1988.
3.
Lidia Shatunovskaya, Life
in the Kremlin, New York, 1982, p. 75.
4.
Taped interview with
Vasily Rudich, 1976.
5.
Oleg Moroz, ‘Poslednii
diagnoz’.
6.
Ibid. Oleg Moroz quotes
psychiatrist M.I.Buyanov:’ everyone invariably insisted that Stalin had
murdered Bekhterev—of course not with his own hand, but with the help of his
henchmen’.
7.
Ibid.
8.
Ibid. Oleg Moroz quotes
from the journal Vestnik znaniya, no. 24, 1927.
9.
Sigmund Freud,
‘Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia
(Dementia Paranoides)’, Collected Papers, vol. 1, ch. 3.
10.
Pravda
no. 90 18 April 1928. See also I.V.Stalin, Sochineniya, vol. XI, Moscow,
1946–51, pp. 53f.; H.Montgomery Hyde, Stalin: The History of a Dictator,
New York, 1971, p. 277.
11.
Hyde, Stalin, p.
277.
12.
Robert Conquest, The
Great Terror, New York, 1973, p. 732.
13.
Hyde, Stalin, p.
279.
14.
Ibid.
15.
Alexander Orlov, Tainaya
istoria Stalinskikh prestuplenii, New York, Jerusalem, Paris, 1983; Lev
Trotsky, Stalin, New York, 1941, p. 392.
16.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
392.
17.
Interview with Iosif
Berger in Israel, 1969.
18.
Trotsky, Stalin,
pp. 413f.
19.
Ibid., p. 414.
20.
I.P.Itskov, ‘Dvadtsatye
gody’, Novoe russkoe slovo, 22 September 1987, p. 14.
21.
Isaac Deutscher, The
Prophet Unarmed, New York, 1965, pp. 373–5.
22.
Alexander Orlov, Tainaya,
pp. 329–31.
23.
I.Frankel, ed., Jerusalem
University Collection of Documents on Soviet Jews, pp. 98–136, citing Tribuna,
no. 6, 1928, p. 1.
24.
Ibid., quoting
M.I.Kalinin, Evrei v SSSR, pp. 12–15.
25.
Y.Larin, Evrei i
antisemitism v SSSR, pp. 183ff., quoted in Collection of Documents on
Soviet Jews, pp. 102f.
26.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, pp. 224f.
27.
Trotsky, Stalin,
pp. 399f.
BLUMKIN’S FAILED MISSION
In early 1929 Stalin
ordered the head of the GPU, Menzhinsky, to appoint Yakov Blumkin in place of
the GPU resident in Turkey, G.A.Agabekov, who had defected to the West. In
October Blumkin was instructed to return to Moscow and on his way there to
visit Trotsky, who had rented a house on the island of Prinkipo in the Sea of
Marmora, near Istanbul. Stalin counted on Blumkin’s ability to, in the words of
an old Bolshevik, do the ‘job of winning Trotsky’s confidence and killing him’.1
Stalin believed that Blumkin was capable of committing a murder, because in
July 1918, as a young member of the Left Esser party and Cheka officer, he had
made history by taking part in the assassination of the German ambassador Count
von Mirbach. Blumkin was tried by a military tribunal and sentenced to death,
but, thanks to the interference of Trotsky, was pardoned in order to ‘expiate
his guilt in the battles in defense of the Revolution’.2 He served
on Trotsky’s staff during the Civil War and joined the Bolshevik Party during
that time.3 After the Civil War, he resumed his service in the
Cheka, and during the 19208 he was often sent by Soviet intelligence on secret
missions abroad.
Blumkin was a bachelor,
and, when in Moscow, frequently invited guests to parties in his large,
well-furnished apartment. He was popular with women, liked to brag about his
conquests and to show off, at times in dramatic ways: once he drew a gun in a
restaurant and threatened to shoot the poet Osip Mandelstam, a fragile and
gentle man who, Blumkin felt, had insulted him. Mandelstam’s wife, Nadezhda,
related in her memoirs that ‘Blumkin was always brandishing his gun’. She added
that later, when it became known that Blumkin had joined the Cheka and went on
secret missions abroad, she failed to understand ‘how such ostentation could be
reconciled with the secrecy demanded by his work’.4
The pretext for Blumkin’s
visit to Prinkipo was Trotsky’s request to the GPU to have bodyguards assigned
to him, since he feared an assassination attempt by White Guards who had
escaped to Turkey and sought revenge for their defeat in the Civil War.
Trotsky’s request for protection probably gave Stalin the idea to use Blumkin
in arranging the assassination of his hated enemy. Blumkin’s first task,
however, was to arrange an attempt on the life of another enemy of Stalin, his
former secretary Boris Bazhanov, who had escaped abroad in January 1928 and
been granted asylum in France. Blumkin, en route to Turkey, took a detour to
Paris. There, he enlisted his cousin, Arkady Maximov, a GPU informer, to
arrange the assassination of Bazhanov. The car accident Maximov staged was
unsuccessful. (In the summer of 1935, Maximov fell, was pushed, or jumped to
his death from the first level of the Eiffel Tower.5) Blumkin, on
arrival at Trotsky’s, explained that he wanted to determine how the GPU might
provide for Trotsky’s security.
how to reply to your
arguments. Nothing of the kind. He is figuring out how to liquidate you without
being punished.’ Zinoviev had added at the time that Stalin ‘could have put an
end to you as far back as 1924’ but ‘postponed killing you until certain that
he could do this with impunity.’6 Having disregarded these warnings
and having no inkling of Stalin’s scheme, Trotsky treated Blumkin as an old
revolutionary and friend. He even asked Blumkin to deliver a personal letter to
a close friend of his in Moscow, David Riazanov, the director of the Marx-Lenin
Institute. In the letter, he thanked Riazanov for contracting him to do
translations of Marxist literature during his earlier exile in Alma- Ata.
Without this income, Trotsky would have been in dire financial straits.7
Upon his arrival in
Moscow, Blumkin reported to his superiors in the GPU about his visit to Trotsky
and received permission to pass his letter on to Riazanov. Menzhinsky and the
chief of the GPU Foreign Department, Meir Trilisser, valued Blumkin’s work
highly and planned to send him on a new assignment in Europe in December 1929.8
While Blumkin was waiting for his new assignment, one of his friends,
Rabinovich, the assistant chief of the Secret Political Department of the GPU,
made a stunning discovery: he found Stalin’s Okhrana file while inspecting the
personal papers of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Rabinovich’s position in the Secret
Political Department gave him access to documents in the personal archives of
Cheka-GPU chiefs. He was sorting through Dzerzhinsky’s papers to prepare them
for deposition in the GPU’s general archive.9
The documents in Stalin’s
file stunned Rabinovich. For a communist of his generation, the thought that
the leader of the Communist Party and Soviet Union could be an ex- Okhrana
agent was outrageous. What to do with this damning discovery was an agonizing
problem. By the end of 1929 any attempt to expose the ex-Okhrana agent Stalin
within the borders of the Soviet Union would have been tantamount to suicide:
the GPU with numerous agents and informers, Stalin’s bodyguards, the army and
party apparatus—all were in Stalin’s hands. Rabinovich recognized that if
Stalin learned of the discovery of his Okhrana file and in whose hands it was,
he would easily retrieve it and destroy anyone who knew of its existence. He
decided to ask Blumkin to undertake the dangerous mission of delivering
Stalin’s Okhrana file into Trotsky’s hands.
Blumkin was no less
stunned than Rabinovich by the documents in the file of Okhrana agent Iosif
Dzhugashvili. He felt it was his revolutionary duty to save the country by
exposing the entrenched Okhrana agent. Ironically, in December 1929, when these
documents fell into Blumkin’s hands, Stalin was mobilizing his entire
propaganda apparatus for the celebration of his 50th birthday. The official
slogan was ‘Stalin is the Lenin of today.’ At the same time Lenin’s close
comrades Trotsky and other heroes of the October Revolution and the Civil War
were languishing in exile. This must have struck Blumkin as a monstrous
perversion of everything he held sacred. He knew that fate had put into his
hands the opportunity to destroy the dictatorship of the Okhrana impostor who
had usurped the Russian Revolution.
Blumkin made one crucial
mistake: rather than keeping his mission secret, he hinted at it in talking to
Karl Radek, one of Trotsky’s friends and allies in the past. Having spent most
of 1929 abroad, Blumkin did not know that Radek had switched his allegiance to
Stalin, who had allowed him to return to Moscow from exile and given him a
party sinecure. What exactly Blumkin told Radek about the discovery of the file
or his mission to smuggle it to Trotsky is not known, but whatever Radek
learned, he promptly reported to Stalin, who realized that his Okhrana file was
in Blumkin’s hands.
Stalin at once resolved to
lure Blumkin into a trap in order to recover the file. He ordered Menzhinsky
and Yagoda, as well as the chief of the Foreign Department of the GPU,
Trilisser, to arrest Blumkin at the railway station the moment he prepared to
leave Moscow for his assignment abroad. Stalin also ordered that anyone with
whom Blumkin established contact before his departure be placed under
surveillance. Yagoda called into his office a GPU agent, Liza Gurskaya, a
beautiful young woman, telling her to drop ‘bourgeois prejudices’ and enter
into an intimate relationship with Blumkin in order to determine his plans ‘in
the interest of the Party’. She did her best to make Blumkin reveal his secrets,
but Blumkin remained circumspect and the ‘love affair’ did not yield the
hoped-for information.10
Blumkin’s departure abroad
was scheduled for 21 December 1929, the day of Stalin’s 50th birthday. Blumkin
went through the usual procedures for a GPU officer going on a secret mission
abroad, receiving fabricated passports and a suitcase with foreign currency for
expenses and payments to agents and informers. He placed Stalin’s Okhrana file
in his suitcase on top of the foreign currency. Blumkin was on his way to the
railway station when he noticed GPU surveillance agents following him and
realized that he was about to walk into a trap. The idea occurred to him
somehow to get a passport with the photograph of a man resembling him in order
to sneak out of the Soviet Union undetected. He thought of a prominent artist,
Raphael Falk, who had just returned from Paris, where he had taken part in an
international exhibition of artists promoting their paintings. Falk physically
resembled Blumkin, and Falk’s wife Raisa had been Blumkin’s high-school
sweetheart. The Falk couple’s apartment was in the Vkhutekhmas (the All-Union
Artistic and Technical Studios) building opposite the Post Office on
Miasnitskaya Street. Luckily, Raisa was home, and she invited Blumkin to come
in. Blumkin sat down on a sofa in the living room and placed the suitcase next
to him. ‘Raisa, I need your husband’s passport’, he said. His request
frightened her, and she told him that she couldn’t give it to him. ‘My husband
and I would go to prison for that. This would be a serious crime’, she
protested. Blumkin pointed to his suitcase and said, ‘Look, in here is Stalin’s
Okhrana file, the documents proving that he was an Okhrana agent. I must
smuggle this file abroad. Stalin’s regime will collapse in 24 hours after I
cross the border.’ While Blumkin was explaining his reason for needing Falk’s
passport, friends of Raisa’s came in. Seeing that she had company, they
apologized and left. Their sudden appearance unnerved Blumkin. He clutched his
head and said, ‘I’m like a trapped mouse, I want to live. No matter how, no
matter what, I want to live.’ He again asked for the passport, but Raisa still
refused to give it to him. He finally gave up, saying, ‘Please, hide this
suitcase and don’t tell anybody about it.’ With these words he rushed out of
the apartment. From a window, Raisa saw several GPU agents seize him as he
emerged from the building and push him into a waiting car. The car sped to the
GPU’s Lubianka headquarters a short distance away. Five agents of the GPU’s
Operational Department knocked on the door of the Falks’ apartment. ‘Was
Blumkin here?’ the one in charge asked. Raisa, knowing it would be futile and
possibly lethal to lie, said yes. ‘What did he tell you?’ the agent asked,
entering the apartment with the rest of his group. ‘Blumkin was very upset. He
was saying something I couldn’t understand. He was obviously sick…’, Raisa
lied. ‘We’ll cure him’, said the agent, and he asked her whether Blumkin had
left anything with her. Raisa hesitated, but afraid to say nothing to the GPU,
she pointed at the suitcase standing next to the sofa where Blumkin had been
sitting a few minutes earlier. The agent in
charge placed the suitcase
on a table, took from his pocket an otmychka (a lock-breaking tool used
by criminals), and prised the suitcase open. His attention was at once
attracted by the neatly stacked bundles of foreign currency bills stuffed in
the suitcase. On top of the bills was a file, which the agent lifted, but his
eyes were fixed on the foreign bills. ‘Valiuta!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is what
Blumkin busied himself with!’ The agents of the Operational Department did not
know that when going on a mission abroad intelligence officers like Blumkin
usually carried large sums of foreign currency. At that time, the Operational
Department was heavily engaged in the ‘mobilization of internal resources’
campaign, the mass confiscation of all kinds of valuables from Soviet citizens:
foreign currency, gold coins, paintings, and jewelry. Hiding or trading of
those valuables was punishable by death. Satisfied that Blumkin was involved in
currency smuggling and speculation, the agent placed the file back into the
suitcase without looking at it. He took the suitcase, saying to his group,
‘Let’s go!’11
Blumkin and his suitcase
were delivered to Menzhinsky, who looked through the documents in the file and
at once understood why Stalin had been eager to trap Blumkin. Menzhinsky also
realized that Stalin would destroy anyone who knew about the file and that he
was inviting certain death if he dared give it to Stalin. He hid the file among
his personal papers and did not tell Stalin about it.12 But
Menzhinsky feared that Blumkin, Rabinovich and another man, named Silov, who
was also involved in the attempt to smuggle the file abroad, would reveal under
interrogation that the file was in the suitcase that Blumkin had left with
Raisa Falk. But Stalin might also reasonably assume that Blumkin had destroyed
the file before being captured. If Blumkin was kept from talking, figured
Menzhinsky, Stalin might never learn what had happened to his file. To
guarantee Blumkin’s silence, Menzhinsky immediately carried out Stalin’s order
to execute Blumkin. Also executed were Rabinovich and Silov, who were arrested
on the same day as Blumkin’s accomplices. Menzhinsky thus denied Stalin the
opportunity to find out what had happened to the file.13
Menzhinsky worried that
Raisa Falk might know something about the file. The day after Blumkin’s arrest
and execution Raisa Falk was summoned to the GPU Lubianka headquarters, where
she was led into a half-dark room and invited to sit on a chair in a corner. A
man sitting at a desk in the opposite corner, his face hidden in the dark, did
not introduce himself. He apologized for summoning her to discuss ‘Blumkin’s
case’, mentioning in passing that Blumkin had been executed for
‘counter-revolutionary activities’. Then he asked her what she knew about
Blumkin. Raisa said that she had known Blumkin since their high-school years
and had seen him afterwards on rare occasions; he had visited her the previous
day, looking very upset, and had soon left. The official did not ask about
Blumkin’s suitcase. He thanked her graciously and parted with her with
exquisite gallantry. She was surprised to have found so pleasant a man in the
dreaded Lubianka prison and relieved to have gotten away so easily. Raisa was
not summoned to the Lubianka again. She kept to herself for many years
Blumkin’s visit and her strange Lubianka interrogation.14 What Raisa
Falk did not know was that she had been interrogated by Menzhinsky himself.
Other women interrogated by him were also impressed by his courteousness and
‘insinuating manners, gestures and smiles.’ Menzhinsky was ‘charming in
manner’, one of them wrote. He behaved with the same gallantry toward women
whom he sent to execution cellars as toward those whom he set free.15
Menzhinsky was a cruel and
unscrupulous but very clever man. Stalin, after having poisoned Dzerzhinsky,
appointed Menzhinsky to head the GPU, no doubt convinced that Menzhinsky would
pass on to him any embarrassing documents that might have fallen into GPU hands
should he come across any such document. Stalin’s assessment was based on
Menzhinsky’s lack of scruples, on dark spots in his past, and on the fact that
he was decidedly not a Bolshevik fanatic of the ‘Iron Felix’ Dzerzhinsky type.
His father was a russified Pole and became a tsarist official with good
connections at the court; his brother was a wealthy banker who escaped abroad.
Menzhinsky had published a number of biting articles in the Russian émigré press
in which he criticized the Bolsheviks and Lenin in particular, calling Lenin an
‘illegitimate child of Russian autocracy’, a ‘political manipulator’, and a
‘political Jesuit’. Menzhinsky also drew a parallel between Lenin and
Chichikov, the con man in Gogol’s Dead Souls.16 Lenin, in
turn, called Menzhinsky ‘my decadent neurotic.’ Stalin trusted Menzhinsky
because he blackmailed him with all these anti-Lenin statements. He referred to
Menzhinsky as ‘my amiable but watchful Polish bear’.17
The executions of Blumkin,
Rabinovich and Silov were never officially announced, but the rumor that they
had been secretly shot spread widely. With the exception of his execution,
nothing has ever been revealed about the identity of Silov. Many foreign
communists enquired in Moscow about Blumkin’s fate. On Stalin’s orders,
Blumkin’s execution was categorically denied. The communist Viennese newspaper Die
Rote Fahne stated that the ‘mythical Blumkin’ had never existed and,
therefore, could not have been executed.18 On 25 December 1929 one
of Trotsky’s followers in Moscow sent him a letter, signed ‘Your N’, in which
he described rumors started by Stalin:
You know, of course, about
the execution of Blumkin and that it was done on Stalin’s personal insistence.
This vile act of revenge already now worries quite wide party circles. But they
worry silently. They feed on rumors. One of the sources of these rumors is
Radek. His nervous verbosity is well known. Now he is totally demoralized…
Regarding Radek, the following is being spread: Blumkin at first found Radek,
with whom he used to meet more often than with others during the last years and
in whom he got used to seeing one of the leaders of the opposition… He, of
course, did not realize that the opposition already has a bitter enemy in the
person of Radek, who, having lost the last remnants of moral equilibrium, would
not stop at any infamy. Here one has to take into account Blumkin’s tendency to
idealize people and his close relationship with Radek in the past. Blumkin
related to Radek the thoughts and plans of L.D. [Trotsky]… Radek in response
demanded that Blumkin immediately go to the GPU and report everything.
Some comrades say that Radek threatened Blumkin that he would report him if he
did not do it himself. This is very likely in view of the present mood of this
depraved hysteric. We have no doubt that this was how it happened. Blumkin
delivered Trotsky’s letter to one of the oppositionists and, because of this
breach of discipline, demanded to be shot (literally!). Stalin decided to
‘satisfy’ Blumkin’s request and ordered Menzhinsky and Yagoda to shoot Blumkin…
How should one understand this official version? Its fraudulence hits one in
the eye. No exact information is available, because Blumkin, according to what
we know by now, did not have time to send any information out of prison.19
‘N’ had no idea that
Blumkin was executed for attempting to smuggle Stalin’s Okhrana file out of the
country. Trotsky, too, knew nothing of the file, but Boris
Bazhanov, one of Stalin’s secretaries
who had fled abroad in 1926, learned that Blumkin had been shot for his attempt
to smuggle abroad ‘highly sensitive documents’.20
Several years after Stalin’s death,
when the fear of the ‘security organs’ had considerably lessened, Raisa Falk
finally dared to tell her son and a few close friends about Blumkin’s visit to
her more than a quarter of a century earlier and what he had then told her
about Stalin’s Okhrana file. The sofa on which Blumkin sat that day was still
in the same spot in her living room. ‘Blumkin was sitting right there’, said
Raisa, pointing at the sofa as if asking it to bear witness to the story that
only she knew.21
NOTES
1.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, p. 140, quoting a Latvian Old Bolshevik,
I.I. Sandler, imprisoned in Varkuta.
2.
Dmitry Volkogonov, ‘Demon
revolutsii’, Pravda, 9 September 1988.
3.
Lev Trotsky, Stalin,
New York, 1941, p. 337.
4.
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope
Against Hope: A Memoir, London, 1989, pp. 101f. Mandelstam did not suspect
that this irreconcilable contradiction may have been the fatal flaw that led to
Blumkin’s downfall. In her book’s index of names, she writes that Blumkin was
executed in 1929 for delivering to David Riazanov a letter written by Trotsky,
a lie spread by Stalin.
5.
Boris Bazhanov, Kontinent,
no. 10, 1976, pp. 244f.
6.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
417.
7.
Biulleten oppozitsii,
ed. L.Trotsky, vol. I (1929–30), no. 9, 1930, pp. 9f.
8.
Alexander Orlov, The
Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes, New York, 1953, pp. 192f.
9.
Interview with I.P.Itskov,
who knew Rabinovich, the assistant chief of the GPU Secret Political Department
in the late 1920s. See also Chapter 26, describing how I.L.Shtein, the
assistant chief of the NKVD Secret Political Department, discovered Stalin’s
Okhrana file in Menzhinsky’s office in 1936. See also Biulleten oppozitsii,
No. 10, April 1930, p. 1 on Rabinovich and Silov.
10.
Alexander Orlov, Tainaia
istoriya stalinskikh prestuplenii, New York, Jerusalem, Paris, 1983, pp.
191–3.
11.
Taped interview with
Vasily Rudich.
12.
Alexander Orlov, ‘The
Sensational Secret behind Damnation of Stalin’, Life, 23 April 1956.
Orlov relates the discovery in Menzhinsky’s office of Stalin’s Okhrana file in
1936 by the assistant chief of the Secret Political Department, I.L.Shtein.
13.
Biulleten oppozitsii,
vol. I, no. 10, 1930, p. 1.
14.
Taped interview with
Vasily Rudich.
15.
Roman Gul’, Dzerzhinsky,
New York, 1974, pp. 159f. Gul quotes P.Melgunova-Stepanova.
16.
Ibid., pp. 153–5.
17.
Ibid., p. 150.
18.
Biulleten oppozitsii,
vol. I, no. 10, 1930, p. 8, quoting Die Rote Fahne.
19.
Ibid., vol. I, (1929–30),
no. 9, 1930, pp. 9f.
20.
Boris Bazhanov, ‘Polet v
nochi’, Kontinent, no. 10, 1976, p. 245.
21.
Taped interview with
Vasily Rudich.
When no hint of his
Okhrana file appeared after the execution of Blumkin, Rabinovich and Silov,
Stalin must have hoped that Blumkin had destroyed the file before his arrest.
But the fear of its having fallen into unknown hands continued to haunt him. He
decided to discredit the documents in the file in advance if it were to
reappear, by ‘proving’ that the documents Blumkin had tried to smuggle abroad
were forgeries. Stalin had resorted to a similar strategy in August 1917, when
he published an article in which he had stated that the enemies of the
Bolsheviks used ‘low-grade forgery and falsification’ to malign ‘revolutionary
fighters’ as ‘German and tsarist spies’.1 A month earlier, Lenin and
Trotsky had branded as calumnies the Provisional Government’s accusations that
Lenin was an agent of the German general staff.2
In 1926, soon after his
Okhrana file was discovered, Stalin assigned V.Maksakov, a GPU ‘expert’ on
Okhrana documents, to reconstruct the history of the Okhrana archives from the
time of the February Revolution. With Stalin’s heavy-handed ‘advice’, Maksakov
published an article in which he declared that the ‘enemies of the party of the
proletariat’ fabricated fraudulent Okhrana ‘documents’ (he bracketed the word
documents with sarcastic quotation marks). Maksakov added: ‘The old Okhrana
officers widely used the tsarist archives, “serving” the Provisional Government
in its struggle with the Bolshevik party… These “documents” were intended to
serve as a weapon in the struggle with the hated Bolshevik party.’3
Again, Stalin’s old habit
of repeating a lie several times was at work, with the usual intention of
giving the lie the appearance of unimpeachable truth in the minds of others, as
well as perhaps in his own mind. In order to buttress this ‘truth’ even more
strongly, Stalin decided to stage a show trial in which a tsarist general would
be forced to confess that he had directed the fabrication of documents aimed at
discrediting the Soviet leader. Stalin decided to parade the former tsarist
army general A.P.Kutepov as the chief culprit at the trial. Kutepov lived in
Paris, where he served as the chairman of the ROVS (AllRussian Union of Army
Veterans), an émigré organization of White Guard officers.
To carry out his scheme, Stalin ordered the GPU to kidnap Kutepov in Paris and
bring him to the Lubianka prison in Moscow.
The car sped away. The
Russian émigré dailies
in Paris, Vozrozhdenie (Rebirth) and Poslednie novosty (The
Latest News), as well as the French press, protested the kidnapping of General
Kutepov and demanded that the French Government break diplomatic relations with
Moscow. A crowd of Russian émigrés threatened to storm the Soviet
Embassy on rue Grenelle, but the police prevented the attack.
The French government
initiated an official inquiry, while GPU agents spread an assortment of
fanciful lies about Kutepov’s disappearance. The most blatant of them, reported
by the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya on 3 February 1930, was that Kutepov
had stolen a large sum of money from the ROVS and escaped to South America. The
French police learned that the day of his disappearance Kutepov wrote ‘Sk’ in
his diary. At that time, the police did not decipher the meaning of the
abbreviation. The name it stood for was not revealed until seven years later,
during the investigation of a similar kidnapping in Paris, that of General
E.K.Miller, Kutepov’s successor. Only then was it established that Kutepov’s
assistant General N.V. Skoblin and his wife Nadezhda Plevitskaya were Soviet
agents and had played an important part in the kidnapping of both tsarist
generals. But in 1930 Skoblin and Plevitskaya pretended to be solicitous
friends: they often visited Kutepov’s wife to express their support, and they
assured her that Kutepov would soon return.4 Skoblin and Plevitskaya
had been recruited by Dr Max Eitingon, a GPU resident stationed in Vienna.
(Eitingon, interestingly, was a prominent psychoanalyst, one of Sigmund Freud’s
famous ‘six disciples’. In 1922 Freud told Eitingon, ‘I suggest we continue our
relationship, which has developed from friendship to sonship, until the end of
my days.’5) Max Eitingon’s brother, Leonid Eitingon, codename
‘Naumov’, a tall, powerfully built top GPU operative, was one of the most
trusted of Stalin’s agents.6 (In 1940, Leonid Eitingon, on Stalin’s
orders, organized the murder of Trotsky.) He was one of the two men in yellow
overcoats who abducted Kutepov. The other GPU agent was S.V.Puzitsky, also a
man of imposing physique.7 Thirty-five years later, on 22 September
1965, the Soviet Army newspaper Krasnaya zvezda (Red Star) published an
article, stating that ‘Commissar Second Rank of State Security Sergey
Vasilievich Puzitsky took part not only in the capture of the bandit Savinkov
and in the destruction of the counter- revoluntionary monarchist organization
“Trust”, but also brilliantly carried out the operation to arrest Kutepov.’8
Puzitsky was executed in
1937. The GPU agent dressed in a police uniform was Lev Rudminsky.9
A number of Soviet diplomats, most of whom were GPU agents, were also involved
in Kutepov’s kidnapping and hastened to leave Paris for Moscow.10
(Fifteen years later, the Soviet Army occupied Prague and Soviet Secret Police
arrested Kutepov’s wife and his son Pavel, who had moved there from Paris. They
were incarcerated in the infamous ‘Political Isolator’, called Vladimir
Central, where they spent more than ten years. After Stalin’s death, both were
released but not allowed to leave Russia, despite having French citizenship.
They died soon after, still not knowing why Stalin had ordered the kidnapping
of General Kutepov.11)
Kutepov was brought to
Moscow’s Lubianka prison in early February 1930. He was accused of directing
the fabrication of Okhrana documents that were planted in Russian archives to
discredit Stalin. After Kutepov had been executed, Stalin assigned Alexander
Svanidze, the brother of Stalin’s first wife, to carry out the destruction of
what he called the ‘Kutepov documents’.12 Trotsky received a report
stating that ‘some 150–200 people had been arrested in Moscow’.13
GPU agents spread rumors that ‘Trotskyites had
sabotaged railway
transports, derailing trains during the transfer of troops for the struggle
with Chiang Kai-shek…’.14 Trotsky wrote that Stalin spread this
‘idiotic version in order to invent some kind of justification for his
Thermidorian crimes against the Bolshevik- Leninists Blumkin, Rabinovich and
Silov, who had nothing to do with “sabotage”. The fact that Stalin till now has
not admitted the execution of Blumkin indicates that he has nothing to say to
justify his loathsome crime.’15 Stalin must have been relieved to
find that Trotsky did not know the true reason for Blumkin’s execution.
Material evidence was needed
to prove the charges against Kutepov: a forgery that could be proved to be
Kutepov’s fabrication. By the end of the 19208 Stalin had established a highly
professional operation for the mass production of all kinds of fakes. Alexander
Svanidze was in charge of a printing operation which, starting in 1927, was
producing tens of millions of counterfeit dollars, inundating the markets of
the United States, Europe and China. The FBI for some time had difficulty in
identifying the counterfeit bills. Soviet agents used Chicago gangsters to
launder them. On 4 January 1933 FBI arrested Dr Valentine Gregory Burtan, an
American communist and heart specialist; he was sentenced to 15 years in jail
for masterminding this operation.16
There was, however, a
substantial risk with Kutepov’s appearance at his show trial which would
confirm his kidnaping on French soil. This had the potential to ignite an
international scandal, possibly leading to a break in French-Soviet diplomatic
relations. Besides, Stalin did not have a document from his Okhrana file which
he could have doctored in a way that would prove it was fraudulent. These
considerations forced Stalin to abandon the idea of a show trial, although
toward the spring of 1930 the necessary testimonies were prepared and the trial
was almost completely rehearsed.17 The accused ‘confessed’ that they
were members of a counter-revoluntionary organization TKP (Toiling Peasants
Party), which supposedly consisted of some 200,000 kulaks, Social
Revolutionaries and White Guards. This imaginary conspiracy was code-named Vesna
(Spring), because the Kutepov show trial was scheduled for spring 1930. But
Stalin changed his mind and ordered that all of the defendants be ‘liquidated
administratively’, that is, secretly shot without formalities.18
Besides the charge of
fabricating Okhrana documents, General Kutepov was also accused of forming a
large monarchist organization in the Red Army. Some 800 military commanders,
among them the head of the Military Academy, A.E.Snesarev, were accused of
being members of this mythical organization and arrested. (In 1918, Snesarev, a
former tsarist officer, had been appointed by Trotsky as commander of the
Tsaritsyn front. Stalin had accused Snesarev of treason and had arrested him,
but Snesarev had been reinstated on Lenin’s and Trotsky’s orders. Stalin had
not forgetten this insult.) When Snesarev was arrested in early 1930 no one
could save him.19 During this period, Stalin’s inflamed imagination
conjured up several conspiracies. After the executions of General Kutepov and
his ‘accomplices’, Stalin ordered preparations for another show trial of
‘saboteurs and spies’, which was scheduled to take place in autumn 1930. But
Stalin suddenly canceled it and ordered that all 46 defendants be secretly
shot.20
The ‘Industrial Party’
show trial opened in the Moscow’s Hall of Columns on 25 November 1930. The
chief defendant was Professor Leonid Ramzin, an old Bolshevik and a leading
specialist on thermo-dynamics. He ‘confessed’ that he had been a ‘wrecker’ of
the Soviet economy and the head of the 2,000-member ‘Industrial Party’. The
other seven accused men, officials of the Gosplan (State Planning
Agency) also confessed.
Ramzin testified that he
had met Lawrence of Arabia in London; as it turned out, Lawrence was not in
England at the time Ramzin supposedly visited him. He also confessed to having
received ‘wrecking instructions’ from two wealthy Russian émigrés, Riabushinsky
and Vishnegradsky. The Western press reported that both men had died long
before their alleged meeting with Ramzin. Finally, Ramzin admitted to having
met with President Raymond Poincaré of France and discussed plans for an
invasion of Russia, an admission so absurd that Poincaré must
have felt ridiculous when he denied it.21 Stalin’s mind, gripped by
paranoia, was producing fantasies which the GPU investigators did not dare to
question, knowing that any inquiries along rational lines might cost them their
jobs, if not their lives. Nikolay Krylenko, the public prosecutor, expressed in
an oddly garbled way his concern about the lack of documentary evidence
supporting the charges. He was especially puzzled by the fact that the
defendants in their signed depositions prominently mentioned various
‘documents, circular letters, reports, and records’ that were not produced in
court. Krylenko pointed to this fact in his summation of the case: ‘What
evidence can there be? Are there, let us say, any documents? I inquired about
that. It seems that where the documents existed, they were destroyed … But, I asked,
perhaps one of them has accidentally survived? It would be futile to hope for
that.’22 When Krylenko asked Stalin about these missing documents,
his reply reflected Stalin’s wishful thinking and produced the glib answer,
‘Where these documents existed, they were destroyed…’ and ‘it would be futile
to hope’ that even one of them survived. Stalin fervently hoped none had
survived and possibly was able to convince himself of that. At the closing
session of the show trial a familiar scene took place. A boy, the son of one of
the defendants, Xenophon Sitnin, rose from his seat in the spectators’ gallery
and demanded that his father be shot. ‘To me my father is a class enemy,
nothing more!’ declared the boy. The press glorified him as a model for Soviet
youth.23
Stalin’s Okhrana file
appeared in a disguised form at the next show trial, that of the mythical
‘Union Bureau of the Central Committee of the Menshevik Party’. This show trial
took place in March 1931. The only Menshevik among the defendants was Nikolay
Sukhanov, a prominent historian whom Lenin had praised highly for his Memoirs
of the Revolution, but whom Stalin hated for having described him as a
‘gray blur’ hardly noticeable during the revolutionary period. Sukhanov was
forced to ‘recall’ that in 1928 he had had a meeting with the Menshevik leader
Rafael Abramovich, an émigré who allegedly had come secretly to
Russia to organize an anti-Soviet plot. Abramovich issued a statement,
declaring that he had not visited Russia and had been attending the International
Socialist Congress in Brussels at the time.24
The Union Bureau ‘members’
were accused of attempting to wreck the Soviet economy. One peripheral
accusation contained a particle of truth, distorted almost beyond recognition.
A 45-year-old economist, I.I.Rubin, who was arrested on 23 December 1930, half
a year after the arrests of other defendants, was accused of giving a ‘sealed
file of documents for safekeeping’ to David Riazanov, the Director of the Marx-
Engels-Lenin Institute, the same Riazanov whom Trotsky, in a letter delivered
by Blumkin, had thanked for providing him with paid translation work in
Alma-Ata exile.25 Riazanov, an Old Bolshevik, was until 1926 the
Chairman of Glavarkhiv (Main Archive Administration), which in Stalin’s
eyes may have made him a likely suspect in the discovery of his Okhrana file
that year. But the fact that Blumkin had brought Trotsky’s
letter to Riazanov just
before attempting to smuggle the file abroad may also have triggered Stalin’s
suspicion that his file was in Riazanov’s hands. Any suspicion he might have
had would have been fed by Stalin’s long-standing hatred of Riazanov: back in
1921, at a party meeting, Riazanov sharply criticized Stalin, who shouted back,
‘Shut up, you clown!’ Riazanov’s reply was equally rude.26
The Blumkin-Riazanov
‘connection’ in Stalin’s mind assumed ominous significance. The purpose of
Rubin’s arrest was to ‘prove’ that Riazanov was hiding Stalin’s Okhrana file.
Rubin had no idea why the interrogators insisted on his implicating Riazanov, a
man whom he highly respected and was indebted to for advancing his career. He
came to realize that the only reason for his arrest was for him to accuse
Riazanov of taking the ‘sealed file of documents for safekeeping’. Rubin
categorically denied that he ever gave any sealed file to Riazanov. He was
transferred to a special prison converted from a centuries-old monastery in the
ancient Russian town of Suzdal. In the distant past this monastery had been
used for the incarceration of heretics in small cells, actually damp stone
caves.27 Rubin was locked in one of these caves. It was so small he
could barely move, and he soon came down with influenza and an old ulcer flared
up, which caused him excruciating pain. He was summoned to interrogations day
and night, and was not allowed to sleep. The interrogators took turns
questioning him in the ‘conveyor’ system. Sometimes they beat him, but mostly
applied psychological pressure. His chief interrogator, M.I.Gay, played the
part of the man concerned for Rubin’s well-being: ‘Isaac Ilyich, confess. It’s
necessary for the Party’, he kept admonishing him. Gay expressed no interest in
the nature of the documents in the ‘sealed file’ that Rubin had supposedly
given to Riazanov.
On the night of 29 January
1931 Rubin was led from his cell to the prison basement. Several GPU officers
were holding a prisoner whose name, they told Rubin, was Vasilevsky. Turning to
Vasilevsky, one of the officers said, ‘We are going to shoot you now, if Rubin
does not confess.’ Vasilevsky dropped to his knees and begged, ‘Isaac Ilyich,
what does it cost you to confess?!’ Rubin kept silent, and Vasilevsky was shot
before his eyes. On the next night, Rubin was again taken to the basement. A
young man, whom the officers called Dorodnov, stood there surrounded by GPU
officers. ‘You will be shot, because Rubin does not want to confess’, one of
them said, Dorodnov tore open his shirt, baring his chest, and said quietly,
‘Fascists, gendarmes, shoot!’ He was shot before Rubin’s eyes. Something shattered
inside Rubin. He agreed to sign the confession stating that he had given the
‘sealed file’ to Riazanov. Sick and emotionally devastated, he was taken back
to Moscow’s Lubianka prison, where his old cellmates hardly recognized him.28
Riazanov was fired from
his job and expelled from the party for ‘aiding the Menshevik traitors’.29
During a face-to-face confrontation with Riazanov in an interrogator’s office,
Rubin, pale and tormented by guilt and shame, turned to Riazanov and said,
‘David Borisovich, you remember I handed you a file.’ The confrontation was
interrupted, and Rubin was taken back to his cell. When the door behind him
closed, he beat his head against the wall in a futile attempt to take his own
life.30 On 1 March 1931 the 14 defendants, among them Rubin, went on
trial. In his coat pocket Rubin carried his typed confession with Gay’s
corrections in red pencil. He testified how he had given Riazanov the ‘sealed
file’. ‘Didn’t you establish any organizational [Menshevik] connection?’
Prosecutor Krylenko asked. According to the script of his signed deposition,
Rubin was supposed to
answer that he had indeed established such a connection, but for some reason,
he rebelled. ‘No, there was no organizational connection’, he replied. ‘There
was only his great personal trust in me.’ Krylenko announced a court recess.
The defendants were taken to an adjacent room, where Krylenko came up to Rubin
and said angrily, ‘You did not say what you should have said. After the recess
I will call you back to the stand, and you will correct your reply.’ Rubin
refused. In his closing speech Krylenko singled out Rubin for the most spiteful
abuse. Instead of the agreed-upon sentence of three years’ imprisonment, Rubin
was sentenced to five years’ solitary confinement. He was released in 1935 and
decided not to return to Moscow, ashamed to see his former acquaintances. In
the fall of 1937, he was again arrested and this time he perished in prison.
Riazanov was arrested after the Union Bureau show trial and was shot a few years
later.31
Shortly after the
Menshevik Show trial Stalin wrote and published a book entitled Provokator
Anna Serebriakova, using the pseudonym ‘I.V.Alekseev’. (The initials of
Alekseev’s first and middle name point to Stalin’s usual manner of hinting at
the truth.) This is the fascinating product of a mind observing itself while
purportedly analyzing someone else. Its true authorship was never revealed, but
there is a wealth of evidence pointing to Stalin as its author.32
The book consists mostly of reports, circular letters, receipts and other
documents reproduced from the file of the exposed Okhrana agent Anna
Serebriakova, who had been imprisoned in 1925 and died in a Moscow prison. The
book’s concluding chapter gives a strikingly perceptive psychological profile
of an Okhrana agent, actually Stalin’s own psychological self-portrait. In the
preface, Stalin stated that the show trials’ defendants had been connected with
their ‘ancestral father…the provocateur of the tsarist Okhrana’. He
wrote:
The
village kulak who uses a stick and a sawn-off shotgun, the professor Ramzin and
the writer Sukhanov, who had been preparing an intervention, are people of the
same kind… The same class threads that bind together the kulaks, the
professors, and the literati also stretch deep into history, thus uniting the
past with the present. And there, in history, we find the ancestral father of
the present day wrecker—the provocateur of the tsarist Okhrana.33
In his typical style of
repeated similar questions Stalin continued:
does
one have to write about provocateurs and spies? After all, this page was
turned forever; the wheel of history does not spin backwards. Does one have to
harass these archival bones, does one have to introduce the contemporary reader
to the sphere of the gloomy and base deeds of tsarism?
Stalin provided the
answer:
It seems to us that we
should harass archival bones. The provocateur,— we say,—the strange
punctuation in the Russian original is left unchanged here] is a close relative
of the kulak and the wrecker. Ramzin used the
trust of the proletariat,
just as Azef used the trust of his party. Azef— served the Okhrana,
Ramzin—served the international bourgeoisie.
Stalin did not want his
‘archival bones’ to be harassed.
Anna Serebriakova was not
involved in murders and armed robberies. These crimes were committed by Azef,
as well as by Stalin. But in this remarkable passage Stalin describes not
Serebriakova but himself, as well as Azef. The preface concludes with a ‘stern
warning to all those who, out of cowardice, greed or by vocation, trade in
people, as in merchandise’.34 This was the warning to all those who
would dare to harass his archival bones. This warning has a familiar ring to
it. V.Maksakov, Stalin’s ‘expert’ on Okhrana operations, wrote in his 1927
article that after the February Revolution the archival workers were selling
lists of exposed Okhrana agents to newspapers for a ‘certain honorarium’.
Maksakov oddly gloated, ‘This attempt, as one should have expected, did not
benefit the initiators of it…’.35 A similarly odd triumphant note
creeps into Stalin’s writing: ‘The life story of the provocateur
Serebriakova is, undoubtedly, instructive. Her story represents the history of
the revolutionary movement reflected in the cross section of the life of one
extraordinary person…’.36
Only one man in Soviet
Russia could have made this startling statement. No one but Stalin would have
dared to characterize an Okhrana agent as an ‘extraordinary person’ whose life
story represented the ‘the history of the revolutionary movement’—the turn of
praise that described Stalin as he saw himself.
The book concludes with a
sketch of an Okhrana agent’s psychological profile. Stalin states that it is
‘difficult to determine, imagine and describe’ this profile, but he,
nevertheless, points to ‘psikhologicheskuyu razdvoennost’ (psychological
duality) as the agent’s ‘two natures’, his ‘split personality’, and his ability
to ‘separate his thoughts from his words’, which demand ‘gigantic will power’
and ‘stainless steel stamina to control his words’. Stalin admires such an
Okhrana agent, stating,
This
split personality did not crush Serebriakova. On the contrary, this duality
became the foundation of her character, the pivot of all her life… The duality
stopped being a torture that was forced on her from the outside and of which
she had to remind herself in order to live under its control: the duality
itself became the way of life, the meaning of life.37
The ‘gigantic will power’
and ‘stainless steel stamina’ of such an agent created a sense of pride in
‘uniqueness’ and ‘importance’ in being the ‘keeper of a secret’, which lifted
the agent above all other people. Such an agent also experienced a ‘feeling of
superiority’ over his Okhrana handler, saying to himself: ‘On me and on people
like me rests the security of the regime that you are called on to defend.’
Stalin quite appropriately cited the habit of such an agent to accuse others of
what he himself was guilty of, a habit that Stalin quite appropriately called the
‘false target’ method.38
The perceptiveness of this
psychological profile raises the question to what extent was Stalin aware that
he was practicing this selfsame method by attacking the ‘false targets’. On the
one hand, the psychological mechanism of freeing himself from guilt by
transferring it to others would have been ineffective if Stalin had recognized
himself in his projections.39 On the other hand, the unmistakable
praise that Stalin bestows on the
Okhrana agent argues that
on some level Stalin was perfectly aware of his own ‘two natures’, or ‘two
personalities’. He masterfully describes the psychological profile of the agent
provocateur, noting coyly: ‘We repeat, but we will not take upon ourselves
the mission to unwrap the mystery of this person. If it is true that ‘man’s
soul is darkness, then the “soul” of any provocateur is indeed a gloomy night
and Serebriakova’s soul is three times gloomier.’40
Stalin’s fear that his
Okhrana past might be discovered prompted him to systematically destroy and
falsify archival documents in order to ‘prove’ by its omission that the
information had never existed. Thus in 1924–27 the doctored and abridged
version of the records of the ‘Muraviev Commission’ was published under the
editorial direction of P.E.Shchegolev.41 Shchegolev omitted all
references to Stalin’s rivalry with Malinovsky and all references to Elena
Rozmirovich’s arrest. In addition, the depositions of Lenin and Zinoviev in the
case of Malinovsky, which they submitted to the Muraviev Commission in May
1917, are missing from the published record. Also missing is the testimony of
Colonel I.P.Vasiliev of 21 March 1917 in which he described the Malinovsky case
in detail, presenting it as the most outrageous Okhrana provocation. But
Colonel Vasiliev’s testimony suddenly surfaced in 1930 in the book Okhranniki
i avanturisty (Okhrana Officers and Adventurers) written by the same
P.E.Shchegolev. In this book, Shchegolev writes that Vasiliev ‘presented
himself as the exposer of the provocation schemes of his colleagues in the
intelligence service, and, if anything, he could not be denied the honor of
being the most informed man’. Given this glowing assessment of Vasiliev, the
book suffers from a curious omission: the Malinovsky case had been Vasiliev’s
trump card. From 1912 on, he had been persistent in his attempts to expose
Malinovsky, presenting himself as a ‘progressive’ Okhrana officer eager to
expose Okhrana provocations. But Malinovsky appears nowhere in Okhranniki i
avanturisty. Shchegolev claimed, ‘I quote Vasiliev’s report in its
entirety.’ In fact, he quotes the report very selectively, and among his major
omissions is that of all mentions of the Okhrana agent ‘Vasily’.42
NOTES
1.
Lev Trotsky, Stalin,
New York, 1941, p. 222.
2.
Ibid., p. 210.
3.
V.Maksakov, ‘Arkhiv
revolutsii i vneshnei politiki XIX–XX vekov’, Archivnoe delo, no. 12,
1927, pp. 27–31.
4.
B.Prianishnikov,
‘Pokhishchenie generala Kutepova’, Novoe russkoe slovo, 9 December 1979.
5.
Stephen Schwartz,
‘Intellectuals and Assassins—Annals of Stalin’s Killerati’, The New York
Times Book Review, 24 January 1988, pp. 3 and 31. See also John J.Dziak, Chekisty:
A History of the KGB, Lexington, MA, 1988, pp. 100–2.
6.
Felix Svetlov, interview
in New York City, 1990. Also see Vitaly Rapoport and Yury Alekseev, Izmena
rodine, London, 1988, pp. 502f.; Stephen Schwartz, ‘Intellectuals and
Assassins’, pp. 3 and 31; Dziak, Chekisty, pp. 100–2.
7.
Interview with Felix
Svetlov, New York City, 1993.
8.
B.Prianishnikov,
‘Pokhishchenie generala Kutepova’, Novoe russkoe slovo, 9 December 1979.
9.
The author served his
prison term in the Norilsk prison camp while Lev Rudminsky was a prisoner
there. A native of the Crimean town of Theodisia, Rudminsky had known the
author’s parents since childhood. Rudminsky was
arrested in 1937 and worked as a labor manager in the construction of housing
in Norilsk. He was supplied with opium by camp medical personnel. When he was
high on opium, he sometimes bragged about his past heroic exploits, including
the kidnapping of General Kutepov. Rudminsky never mentioned Blumkin or
Stalin’s Okhrana file—apparently he had no idea that the kidnapping of Kutepov
had been connected with this file.
10.
One of them was Lev
Gelfand, who later defected to the West and lived to an advanced age as ‘Mr
Moore’, an American businessman. See Priandishnikov, ‘Pokhishchenie generala
Kutepova’.
11.
I.P.Itskov was an inmate
with Kutepov’s son in the Vladimir Central prison and got to know him.
12.
Rafael Bagratuni. Letter
to I.D.Levine, dated 8 May 1967. In Levine’s archive. Copy in the author’s
archive.
13.
Biulleten oppozitsii,
no. 10, April 1930, p. 19.
14.
Ibid., p. 8.
15.
Ibid., p. 1.
16.
Walter G.Krivitsky, In
Stalin’s Secret Service, New York, 1939, p. 133.
17.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, p. 114.
18.
H.Montgomery Hyde, Stalin:
the History of a Dictator, New York, 1971, p. 282.
19.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, p. 137.
20.
Ibid., p. 114.
21.
Hyde, Stalin, pp.
281–3.
22.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, p. 119, quoting Proletarskii prigovor nad vrediteliami-
interventami (record of court proceedings), Moscow, 1930, p. 32.
23.
E.Lyons, Stalin, the
Czar of All the Russias, Philadelphia/New York and London, 1940, p. 370.
Also quoted in Hyde, Stalin, p. 280.
24.
Hyde, Stalin, p.
283.
25.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, pp. 132–7.
26.
Ibid., p. 34.
27.
Ibid., pp. 132f.
28.
Ibid., pp. 132–4.
29.
Ibid., p. 132.
30.
Ibid., pp. 134–6.
31.
Ibid., p. 132.
32.
Even on the grammatical
level there is evidence of Stalin’s authorship: the book contains the same type
of mistakes found in Stalin’s other writings, which are common to people who
are not native speakers. There are incorrect usages (starchestvo instead
of the correct starost to describe Sebriakova’s advanced age) and
non-Russian sounding phrases: (proshedshee s nastoyashchim instead of
the correct proshloe s nastoyashchim; liudi odnogo poriadka instead of liudi
odogno poshiba; krepkie sviazi instead of prochnye sviazi).
33.
I.V.Alekseev, Provokator
Anna Serebriakova, Moscow, 1932, pp. 3f.
34.
Ibid.
35.
V.Maksakov, ‘Arkhiv
revolutsii…,’ Arkhivnoe delo, no. XIII, 1927, p. 30.
36.
Alekseev, Provokator
Anna Serebriakova, p. 4.
37.
Ibid., pp. 160–80.
38.
Ibid., pp. 175f.
39.
See Sigmund Freud,
‘Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia
(Dementia Paranoides)’, Collected Papers, London, 1958–86, vol. 1, ch.
3. See also Walter C.Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler, New York, 1972,
pp. 183–5.
40.
I.V.Alekseev, Provokator
Anna Serebriakova, p. 180.
41.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima, 7
vols, Moscow/Leningrad, 1925.
42.
Shchegolev, Okhranniki
i avanturisty, pp. 138–49.
‘I KNOW WHAT KIND OF
REVOLUTIONARY YOU ARE!’
In 1930, Stalin’s wife
Nadezhda Allilueva enrolled in the Industrial Academy to study textile
manufacturing. The director of the academy was the only one there who knew that
she was Stalin’s wife. The GPU placed two agents in Nadezhda’s class; other
agents drove her to school and let her out a block away from the academy.1
Stalin at that time ordered a campaign of forced collectivization of the
peasantry. From her classmates Nadezhda learned about the horrors of executions
and mass deportations of peasants, the systematic extermination of the kulaks,
famine in the Ukraine, Northern Caucasus and other areas of the country. She
learned about hordes of orphaned children searching for food and shelter, women
who sold themselves for crumbs from the tables of privileged party bureaucrats.
She told Stalin about what she had heard, but he dismissed the accounts as
‘Trotskyite rumors’. When, on another occasion, Nadezhda told him about cases
of cannibalism in the Ukraine, Stalin became enraged and accused her of
spreading ‘anti-Soviet propaganda of the enemies of the people’. He ordered
Karl Pauker, the chief of the GPU Operations Department, to arrest the students
from whom she had heard of these conditions. He also forbade Nadezhda to attend
classes, but she resumed her studies when Avel Enukidze, Stalin’s close friend
and the family’s ‘good uncle’, intervened and changed Stalin’s mind.2
In May 1930 Stalin ordered
that all institutions of higher education be purged of members of the ‘right’
opposition, headed by Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, which had emerged at the
Fifteenth Party Congress in 1927, when he had proclaimed the policy of mass
collectivization of the peasantry. Bukharin ventured that Stalin had in his
hands something with which he could blackmail Politburo members Voroshilov and
Kalinin and that gave him control over them.3 A free peasantry was
incompatible with Stalin’s thirst for unlimited power. A peasant who could
provide for his family and himself without being dependent on the dispensations
of the Party apparatus was in Stalin’s eyes a class enemy. Collectivization did
not move Russia any closer to the socialism the Left Opposition leaders
envisioned. It was throwing the country back into medieval serfdom.
willing to put your
signature on it?’ asked Mekhlis. Khrushchev, unaware that the letter had been
fabricated by Stalin, said, ‘I don’t even know who the author is.’ Mekhlis
replied, ‘This is not important. Your name and the author’s name won’t figure
in this business at all. I’m asking you to sign it because I trust you…’,
Khrushchev said, ‘Very well, I’ll sign it.’4 This was the beginning
of Khrushchev’s Kremlin career. Years later, Khrushchev stated that this
unsigned letter had been ‘like a clap of thunder out of a clear blue sky. The
academy was immediately thrown into a turmoil. Classes were suspended and…a
meeting was called at which all the academy delegates to the Bauman District
Conference were recalled… I was made chairman of the meeting and was put on the
new delegation.’
The whole country was undergoing
purges similar to the one at the Industrial Academy: the ‘old Bolsheviks’,
Party members since before the Revolution, were bullied by the power-hungry and
unscrupulous ‘new’ Khrushchev-type recruits. Khrushchev recalled that at the
time he had enrolled in the academy in 1929, it was ‘teeming with rightists,
and they’d gotten control of the Party cell’. The chairman of the cell in the
academy was Khakharev, a party member since 1906, whom Khrushchev described as
belonging to ‘what we called the Old Guard…[who were] against Stalin and the
General Line of the Party. The Old Guard at the Academy consisted of Old
Bolsheviks…’. Khrushchev states that Stalin disliked the Old Bolsheviks saying,
‘The Central Committee doesn’t have confidence in them so it removes them from
their Party posts…’.
Stalin catered to the
ambition of relatively new arrivals in the party such as Khrushchev. He was
born in 1894 in a village on the Russian-Ukrainian border. When his father got
a job at a coal mine in the Ukrainian town of Yuzovka, the family moved there.
During the First World War, Khrushchev worked in the mine as a metal fitter,
thus avoiding the draft, since mine workers were exempt. He was mobilized into
the Red Army during the Civil War, when he joined the Bolshevik Party. In 1922,
he returned to Yuzovka and learned that his wife had died of starvation during
the famine of the preceding year. He married a second time and for two years
worked as a Party organizer in the mine. He also started to attend Rabfak
(Workers’ School), established to provide elementary education for workers. In
1925, Khrushchev was sent to the Ukrainian Ninth Party Congress, which was
chaired by Stalin’s protégé Lazar Kaganovich, who began promoting
Khrushchev to various positions in the Ukrainian Party organization.
In 1927 Khrushchev was
sent to Moscow to attend the Fifteenth Party Congress. There, he saw Stalin for
the first time, witnessed the defeat of the opposition, and voted for Stalin’s
‘General Line’. In 1929, he was sent to study metallurgy at the Industrial
Academy in Moscow, but at first was not admitted because of insufficient
education. Kaganovich applied ‘pressure from above’, and Khrushchev was
admitted as a first-year student. In May 1930, Kaganovich, in a conversation
with Stalin, mentioned Khrushchev as his protégé. Stalin needed a student to
sign the fabricated letter. Khrushchev attended as a ‘non-delegate’ the
Sixteenth Party Congress in June-July of 1930 at which Stalin proclaimed his
‘Five-Year Plan in Four Years’ and called for ‘the liquidation of the kulaks as
a class’. After the congress, Khrushchev was appointed secretary of the party
organization in the Industrial Academy. Stalin’s speech to the graduating class
made a great impression on him. In his memoirs, he recalls thinking, ‘Here is
the man who knows how to direct our minds and our energies toward the priority
goals.’5 Stalin
noticed that Khrushchev
looked at him with adoration. Years later, other people, too, noticed that
Khrushchev was a ‘receptacle’ who tended to submit to strong personalities.6
In January 1931 the
secretary of the party committee in the Bauman District of Moscow A.P.Shirin
was arrested and executed. Khrushchev was appointed in his place. Six months
later, in July 1931, the secretary of the Party committee of the Krasnaya
Presnia district of Moscow, M.N. Riutin was arrested. Stalin appointed
Khrushchev in his place. Riutin was the author of two anti-Stalin pamphlets
known as the ‘Riutin Platform’ and his fate suggests that he knew of Stalin’s Okhrana
file. Martimian Nikitich Riutin was born in 1890 in the remote Siberian village
of Verkhnee Riutino, on the shores of the Angara River. During the Civil War,
Riutin served as a commissar in one of the Red Army units. He was appointed
secretary of the party organization in Irkutsk and in 1924 was transferred to
Moscow, where Stalin appointed him secretary of the party committee of the
Krasnaya Presnia district. For the next six years, Riutin supported Stalin in
his conflict with the opposition. At the Sixteenth Party Conference in April
1929, he was elected candidate member of the Party Central Committee.7
However, a little more
than a year later, at the Sixteenth Party Congress in June–July 1930, Riutin
angrily accused Stalin of being a ‘great agent-provocateur’ and the
‘gravedigger of the Revolution’.8 Stalin demanded that the GPU
arrest and execute Riutin, but Menzhinsky (who by then had Stalin’s Okhrana
file in his hands) referred Riutin’s case to the party’s Central Control
Commission, which decided to expel Riutin from the party and to arrest him for
‘defamation of the party’s leadership’ and ‘dvurushnichestvo’ (double-dealing),
a term invented by Stalin, meaning the double-dealing of Okhrana agents
provocateurs. However, on 17 January 1931 the collegium of the GPU
acquitted Riutin, citing the ‘unproven accusations’ against him. Riutin even
received back his party card and his post of secretary of the Krasnaya Presnia
district. Half a year later he was fired and on 23 September 1931 he was arrested
again on the charge of having written two anti-Stalin pamphlets. One was some
50 typewritten pages and entitled ‘Stalin and the Crisis of Proletarian
Dictatorship’. The second was 200 pages long and entitled ‘Appeal to All Party
Members’. Riutin declared that Stalin was ‘the evil genius of the Russian
Revolution, who, motivated by a personal desire for power and revenge, brought
the Revolution to the verge of ruin’.9 Riutin wrote: ‘Even the most
daring, genius-like provocateur could not have invented anything better
than what Stalin and his clique did to bring about the destruction of the
proletarian dictatorship…we must put an end to Stalin’s rule as soon as
possible…’. Riutin and his friends had made copies of these pamphlets and
distributed them among party members with an attached short note that read,
‘Having read it, pass it on to another person. Multiply and distribute.’ On 21
August 1932 a small group of people gathered for the discussion of the ‘Riutin
Platform’ in the apartment of a minor Soviet official Peter Silchenko. Someone
reported this discussion— not to the GPU but to Stalin personally.10
On 20 September
Silchenko’s apartment was searched. Three days later, all the participants in
the discussion were arrested. Among those arrested was Peter Petrovsky, the son
of Grigory Petrovsky, the former Duma deputy whom Stalin often invited to visit
him and whom he had ‘kept on the hook’, blackmailing him with Okhrana documents
found in the archives. ‘We know everything about you’, Stalin told Grigory
Petrovsky. ‘In 1905 you caroused with the chief of police in Pavlograd… Look
out, it might prove unpleasant!’11 On another occasion Stalin
produced Petrovsky’s Okhrana file and shouted
at him, ‘We shoot people
like you, but I will have mercy on you.’12 Grigory Petrovsky
outlived Stalin, but his son Peter was charged with the crime of not reporting
to the authorities about the ‘secret meeting of the plotters’ for the
discussion of the ‘Riutin Platform’ and was sentenced to ten years’
imprisonment (after completing his prison term he was executed in 1941).
The intensity of Stalin’s
rage at the ‘Riutin Platform’ surprised many GPU officers. He demanded the
immediate execution of Riutin. Menzhinsky refused and referred the case to Yan
Rutzutak, the chairman of the Central Control Commission. The commission met in
an extraordinary session at the beginning of November 1932 to decide the case
of ‘Riutin and others’. It ruled to expel them from the Party as ‘degenerates’
and ‘traitors’. Among the 20 ‘plotters’ were Zinoviev and Kamenev: both were
accused of not reporting to the GPU what they knew about the Riutin Platform.
The GPU was ordered to accuse both of them ‘in accordance with the full
severity of revolutionary justice’.13 Stalin demanded the death penalty for all
the accused, but Menzhinsky refused to execute them and referred the case to
the Politburo, where Stalin met unexpected resistance from Kirov, Kuibyshev and
Ordzhonikidze. He had to agree to ‘soft’ sentences of prison terms. Riutin was
sentenced to ten years, but this was soon changed to 15 years.14 He
was incarcerated in the infamous ‘Susdal Isolator’. His wife and his two sons,
Vissarion and Vasily, as well as his younger daughter Luba were thrown out of
their home. (A few years later, all of them except Luba had been executed.)
Stalin had good reason to
suspect Riutin of knowing about his Okhrana file: in 1930 Riutin suddenly
changed from an ardent supporter into an implacable enemy who accused him of
being a ‘great agent provocateur’ and ‘genius-like provocateur’.
Although no direct information has yet surfaced to prove this, Riutin might
have learned of Blumkin’s attempt to smuggle Stalin’s Okhrana file abroad.
Riutin had supported Stalin for years, as late as at the Sixteenth Party
Conference in April 1929, but he angrily attacked him as a ‘great agent
provocateur’ at the Sixteenth Party Congress little more than a year later,
which argues that a drastic change in Riutin’s attitude toward Stalin occurred
in the period between the conference and the congress. Two dramatic events
stand out in that period: the discovery by Rabinovich of Stalin’s Okhrana file
among Dzerzhinsky’s papers and Blumkin’s attempt to smuggle the file abroad in
December 1929. Stalin insisted on the death sentence for Riutin, which at the
time was a departure from the norm. The execution of Blumkin at the end of 1929
was the first time a Party member had been secretly executed by the GPU, and
such executions did not become routine for several years.
At the time of Blumkin’s
execution, and for a few years thereafter, rumors of Stalin’s Okhrana file
circulated in Moscow and reached foreign journalists abroad. In 1938, Isaac Don
Levine, an American journalist and the author of one of the first Western
biographies of Stalin, wrote that he had ‘long been familiar with reports that
some of the old Bolsheviks had in their possession a secret file from the
archives of the Okhrana proving that Stalin was a super spy for the Czar…’.15
The timing and the secrecy surrounding A.P.Shirin’s execution in 1930 suggest
that Stalin suspected him, too, of knowing about the file. Menzhinsky’s refusal
to execute Riutin alarmed Stalin. He suspected that Menzhinsky was plotting
against him. Stalin ordered confiscation of all copies of the Riutin Platform
and ordered the Soviet military intelligence chief Yan Berzin and his officers
to conduct searches.16 Having this document in one’s home
became a crime. Stalin was
not mistaken: Menzhinsky indeed was plotting to depose Stalin.17 He
resisted not only Riutin’s arrest and execution but also Stalin’s drive to
transform the GPU into Stalin’s ‘private power base’.18 Menzhinsky
probably hoped to use Stalin’s Okhrana file, which he kept hidden in his
office, to depose Stalin. But any such scheme was growing increasingly
unrealistic. Stalin was surrounding himself with his cronies and an army of
bodyguards. Menzhinsky was physically deteriorating: he suffered from
progressive tabes dorsalis and became an invalid who spent most of his
time lying on a sofa in his office. The GPU was effectively under the control
of his assistant Yagoda.
One of the reports that
reached Stalin’s desk attracted his attention: a peasant boy, Pavlik Morozov,
in the tiny Ural village of Gerasimovka denounced to the GPU his father Trofim
Morozov, the chairman of the village soviet, accusing him of hiding grain and
resisting the drive for collectivization. Pavlik testified in court against his
father, something that must have reminded Stalin of how he, as a 10-year-old
boy, had testified in a Tiflis court in 1890 against his father Vissarion.
Stalin’s overt reaction was one of disgust: ‘What a little swine, denouncing
his own father!’ he said. But he quickly decided to glorify the boy and use him
for propaganda in the collectivization campaign,19 turning him into
a hero and a martyr.
The tragedy of the Morozov
family began when Pavlik’s father Trofim left his wife and four children and
moved in with another woman in the same village. His wife told their oldest
13-year-old son Pavlik to complain to the local GPU, hoping to scare Trofim and
force him to return to his family. Her calculations turned out to be
disastrously wrong. The GPU officers coached Pavlik on giving ‘politically
correct’ testimony against his father in court. Trofim was sentenced to ten
years in a labor camp. At this point, Stalin intervened in the affairs of the
Morozov family and events moved quickly according to his script. Trofim Morozov
perished in the camp under unknown circumstances, and on 6 September 1932 a
relative of Morozov, a GPU informer by the name of Ivan Potupchik, led
Gerasimovka peasants to the corpses of Pavlik and his younger brother Fedia,
buried in a shallow grave in a nearby forest. He claimed that the boys had been
killed by kulaks. What had in fact happened was that on 4 September 1932, two
days before Potupchik ‘discovered’ the corpses of Pavlik and Fedia, the
assistant chief of the provincial GPU, Kartashev, ordered his agent Potupchik
to murder Pavlik and thus started the case of Pavlik Morozov’s ‘political
murder’. Fedia accidentally witnessed the murder of his brother, and Potupchik
was forced to silence him. The case was ‘investigated’ under the close scrutiny
of Stalin. Stalin gave instructions through the head of the special sector of
his personal secretariat, Poskrebyshev, a native of the area, who passed them
on to Kartashev. A number of villagers and Pavlik’s relatives on his father’s
side, including his 80-year-old grandfather, were arrested, accused of
murdering Pavlik, and executed immediately after the trial. Kartashev was to
boast sickeningly of how he executed kulaks: ‘I counted that 37 persons were
shot by me personally. I sent a large number of people to the camps. I can kill
in such a way that the shot is not heard. The secret is this: I force them to
open their mouths and shoot there. I am splattered by warm blood, like by a
cologne, but nothing is heard. I am good at killing.’
Soviet newspapers declared
that Pavel Morozov was not alone—there were legions of boys like him, who, if
necessary, would place their fathers on the defendant’s bench.
During the following half
century, a plethora of streets, squares, Pioneer houses, factories, and so on
were named after Pavlik Morozov, and many books and articles were written about
him. Stalin ordered a memorial statue of Pavlik to be placed at the entrance to
Red Square and commissioned songs and poems, even a cantata for chorus and
symphony orchestra after a poem titled ‘Pavlik Morozov’. There was even the
opera Pavlik Morozov, in which the father sang ruefully about his son,
‘Why did I let him join the Pioneers?’—this despite the fact that at the time of
Pavlik’s murder that youth group did not exist in his village. As late as 1982
a Soviet writer stated that Pavlik’s story ‘still awaits its Shakespeare’.20
Two months after the
murder of Pavlik Morozov and the arrest of Riutin’s group, Stalin’s wife Nadezhda
Allilueva committed suicide. Her and Stalin’s relationship had worsened in the
course of the past several years, and they quarreled over personal as well as
political matters. ‘You are a tormentor, that’s what you are!’ shouted Nadezhda
in one angry exchange. ‘You torment your own son… You torment your wife…you
torment the whole Russian people!’21 Stalin as usual responded with
curses and vulgarities. During one quarrel, Nadezhda shouted at Stalin, ‘I know
what kind of revolutionary you are!’22 This was a barely veiled
reference to Stalin’s shameful Okhrana past, which she and her brother Pavel
Alliluev knew.23 Nadezhda had suffered for many years from the
blatant contradiction between the deified image of Stalin presented by the
Soviet press and the man she knew intimately. But what finally became
unbearable was Stalin’s despotism in family matters. By the autumn of 1932,
Nadezhda, then 30, looked far older than her years. She was last photographed
walking along a narrow Kremlin street, her head bowed, her back bent, her eyes
hidden, a trapped and forlorn woman.
The 7 November 1932 was
the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution. As usual, there was a
military parade and civilian demonstrations with columns moving through Red
Square past the Lenin mausoleum, on top of which stood Stalin and Politburo
members. In the evening, Stalin and Nadezhda went to a dinner in Voroshilov’s
apartment. The guests, as usual, drank much vodka, toasting Stalin. Nadezhda
did not drink, which angered Stalin. ‘Hey, you, have a drink!’ he shouted at
her from across the table. ‘Don’t you dare “hey” me!’ Nadezhda shouted back.
One of their typical quarrels followed. Nadezhda rushed out of the room, and
Molotov’s wife Polina Zhemchuzhina followed to comfort her. The two women
walked for some time around the Kremlin grounds and then wished each other good
night. In her room, Nadezhda wrote a long letter to Stalin. Then, with a small
pistol that her brother Pavel had given her as a present, she shot herself.
When toward morning Stalin came home, Nadezhda was dead. Not knowing this, he
went to sleep in his room. In the morning a housemaid found Nadezhda’s body
lying on the floor. One of the bodyguards was later to describe the scene:
‘When we rushed in, she was lying on the floor, in a black dress, her hair done
in curls. The pistol was on the floor.’24 Stalin was awakened.
Molotov, Enukidze and other family friends came to console him. They found
Nadezhda’s letter and gave it to him. He read it in silence, and then read it
over and over again.25 Years later, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana was
to reveal what she had learned about this letter from those who saw it. She
wrote: ‘It was a terrible letter, full of reproaches and accusations. It wasn’t
purely personal; it was partly political as well. Svetlana added that ‘at times
Stalin was gripped by anger, rage. This was because my mother left this letter
for him.’26
The Soviet population learned for the
first time that Stalin had had a wife from a brief official announcement:
‘Party member and Stalin’s comrade-in-arms Nadezhda Allilueva died suddenly and
prematurely.’27 Nadezhda’s remains were placed in the Hall of
Columns. Svetlana, then 6 years old, was led to the coffin. Seized by fear, the
little girl drew back and started crying. Enukidze led her away and tried to
calm her down. Stalin approached the coffin. Suddenly he pushed it away, turned
on his heels and left.28 He did not walk in the funeral procession
to the Novodevichy Convent.29
NOTES
1.
Alexander Orlov, The
Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes, New York, 1953, pp. 301f.
2.
Ibid.
3.
Donald W.Treadgold, Twentieth
Century Russia, Chicago, 1976, p. 226.
4.
N.S.Krushchev, Khrushchev
Remembers, Boston, Toronto, 1970, pp. 40f. Khrushchev does not reveal
whether he found out at a later time that the letter had been written by
Stalin.
5.
Ibid., pp. 37–42.
6.
Soviet film director Efim
Sevela stated in an interview with me in Chappaqua, New York, in 1971 that a
well-known movie director of Stalin’s era, Georgy Chukhrai, had described
Khrushchev as a ‘receptacle’ of psychic influence.
7.
Arkady Vaksberg, ‘Kak
zhivoi’s zhivymi’, Literaturnaya gazeta, 29 June 1988. Also Lev Razgon,
‘Nakonets’, Moskovskie novosti, no. 26, 26 June 1988.
8.
Walter G.Krivitsky, I
Was Stalin’s Agent, London, 1939, p. 182.
9.
Robert Conquest, The
Great Terror, New York, 1973, p. 52, quoting Boris Nikolaevsky, Power
and the Soviet Elite, New York, 1965, p. 29. Also Lev Razgon, ‘Nakonets.’
10.
Vaksberg, ‘Kak zhivoi’s
zhivymi’.
11.
I.D.Levine, Stalin,
New York, 1931, p. 337. Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, New York, 1971,
p. 295. Medvedev quotes from papers in the archive of the Petrovsky family.
12.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, p. 295. Medvedev quotes from papers in the archive of the Petrovsky
family.
13.
Vaksberg, ‘Kak zhivoi’s
zhivymi’.
14.
Razgon, ‘Nakonets’.
15.
I.D.Levine, ‘Stalin
Suspected of Forcing Trials to Cover His Past’, Journal American, 3
March 1938.
16.
Krivitsky, I Was
Stalin’s Agent, p. 182.
17.
Komsomolskaya pravda, 13
November 1964.
18.
Izvestia, 31
August 1964.
19.
Robert Conquest, Stalin:
Breaker of Nations, New York, 1991, p. 11.
20.
Yury Druzhnikov, ‘Saga o
Pavlike Morozove’, Strana i mir, no. 2(44), March–April 1988, pp.
114–17.
21.
Alexander Orlov, Tainaya
istoria stalinskikh prestuplenii, New York, Jerusalem, Paris, p. 303.
22.
Elizabeth Lermolo, Face
of a Victim, New York, 1956, p. 167.
23.
Orlov, Tainaya istoriya
stalinskikh prestuplenii, pp. 309–11.
24.
Ibid., pp. 300f.
25.
Poslednie novosti,
Paris, 8 August 1934.
26.
Svetlana Allilueva, Dvadtsat
pisem k drugu, New York, 1967, pp. 107f.
27.
Izvestia, 12
November 1932.
28.
Svetlana Allilueva, Twenty
Letters to a Friend, New York, 1967, p. 108.
29.
Orlov, Tainaya istoria
stalinskikh prestuplenii, pp. 306f.
‘WHY DID YOU KILL SUCH A NICE
MAN?’
At the Seventeenth Party
Congress in January 1934 Stalin proclaimed that the Soviet Union was free from
‘backwardness and medievalism’. The Soviet press reported that Stalin’s speech
was greeted by ‘stormy and prolonged applause’. Khrushchev in his statement to
the Congress called Stalin ‘the greatest leader of all times and all peoples’
and ‘our Leader-Genius’. Kirov’s speech produced a long standing ovation and
shouts of ‘Long live our Mironych [Kirov’s patronymic]!’ After the secret
voting in the election of the Central Committee, V.P.Zatonsky, the chairman of
the elections commission, counted the ballots. He discovered that 1,108 ballots
out of the total of 1,966 had Stalin’s name crossed out, while Kirov’s name had
been crossed out on only three. Zatonsky reported the results to Lazar
Kaganovich and to Stalin. They decided to conceal the voting results and
declared that Stalin’s name had been crossed out by only three delegates, as
had Kirov’s.1 During a Politburo meeting Stalin expressed his desire
to resign. Predictably, all expressed confidence in him. Molotov stated, ‘No
one could replace you.’ Stalin readily agreed: ‘Only enemies can say that you
can remove Stalin and nothing will happen!’ Kirov, too, urged Stalin to remain
in post, but advised him to be more sensitive in how he treated people. ‘When I
was walking out of Stalin’s office’, Kirov later told his friend Chudov, ‘I had
the feeling that my head was placed on the block. Stalin’s stare was such…that
I knew I had signed my own death sentence.’2
Actually, Kirov had signed
his death sentence more than a year earlier when he had objected to the
execution of Riutin—and he was not alone: Ordzhonikidze, Kuibyshev and
Menzhinsky had also expressed opposition to the execution and were therefore on
Stalin’s list of ‘enemies’ to be disposed of as soon as possible or convenient.
Menzhinsky tried to protect Riutin, which had given Stalin cause to fear that
he was plotting against him. As a countermove, Stalin used the Seventeenth
Party Congress to remove Menzhinsky from the Central Committee. Stalin had his
secret schedule for the murders of Kirov, Ordzhonikidze, Kuibyshev, and
Menzhinsky.
ampules of a special
poison dissolved in acid on curtains and carpets in Menzhinsky’s office.4
Menzhinsky died on 10 May 1934. His office was closed and remained sealed for
more than two years. No one was allowed to enter it, ostensibly because of its
poisoned air and furniture. (Stalin’s Okhrana file remained hidden among
Menzhinsky’s personal papers, to be found two years later.5)
Menzhinsky was cremated, and the urn with his ashes was placed with great
fanfare in the Kremlin wall in the last slot to the right of the passage
between the wall and Lenin’s mausoleum. A spot on the wall immediately to the
left of the passage was where Ordzhonikidze’s urn would be placed three years
later. The place immediately to the left of this spot Stalin reserved for
Kirov’s urn, and it was to be filled after Kirov’s murder.6
Stalin’s intention was to
implicate the opposition leaders in Kirov’s assassination, and he chose a more
dramatic method to eliminate him. In the first attempt, Stalin’s agents
approached two imprisoned common criminals, the Vasiliev brothers, offering to
set them free if they agreed to murder Kirov. The brothers agreed and were
released from prison, but when they attempted to break into Kirov’s apartment
they heard the voices of several men inside and fled. When this was reported to
Stalin, he immediately ordered their execution.7 Another plan formed
in Stalin’s mind when he received a letter from a certain Leonid Nikolaev, a
disgruntled low-level official who complained about the abuse he had suffered
from Kirov and the Leningrad party apparatus. ‘Dear Iosif Vissarionovich!’
wrote Nikolaev. ‘I have been driven to desperation by undeserved persecution.
Now I am ready to do anything.’ The words ‘ready to do anything’ attracted
Stalin’s attention. He ordered that Nikolaev be investigated. The report that
he received stated that Nikolaev was a 30-year-old invalid who had been born a
cripple and who until the age of 14 had been unable to walk. During the Civil
War, Nikolaev had joined the Bolsheviks and taken part in requisitioning bread
from peasants. He became a minor party func-tionary but was expelled when he
refused to leave Leningrad to take part in the collectivization drive. At this
point, he wrote his letter to Stalin.8
By that time, Stalin had
rearranged the state security apparatus. On 19 July 1934 the GPU was absorbed
by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, or secret police), and
Genrikh Yagoda was appointed commissar of internal affairs. Stalin wanted to
appoint Efim Evdokimov (a common criminal who on Stalin’s order directed the
‘investigation’ of the Shakhty case in 1928) to the post of the deputy chief of
the Leningrad NKVD, but the chief there, Filip Medved, strongly objected to
this appointment. Stalin then arranged the appointment of another of his
cronies, Ivan Zaporozhets, whom he had promoted in the security apparatus.
During the Civil War Zaporozhets had been a prominent figure in the anti-Soviet
anarchist peasant army of Nester Makhno in the Ukraine, and Stalin used this
fact to blackmail him. Zaporozhets planted an agent in the circle of Nikolaev’s
friends. This agent gave Nikolaev a revolver, took him to target practice, and
provided him with a pass to the Smolny Palace, where Kirov had his office.
Nikolaev was twice arrested in the streets by Kirov’s bodyguards when his
behavior aroused their suspicion, but both times Zaporozhets ordered his
release and the return to him of the revolver and a diary in which Nikolaev
wrote about his intention to kill Kirov. On 1 December 1934 Nikolaev went to
the Smolny Palace, where the guards, having checked his pass, let him in
without inspecting his briefcase. Hiding behind the partly opened door to a
men’s room on the third floor, Nikolaev waited for Kirov, who appeared without
his bodyguard Borisov, detained by NKVD agents on the
instruction of
Zaporozhets. Nikolaev shot Kirov in the head, killing him instantly. He then
attempted to kill himself with a shot to his own head but succeeded only in
stunning himself. He collapsed next to Kirov’s body.9
Stalin was ready for the
news of Kirov’s assassination. He had prepared a special decree, ordering a
speedy investigation, ruling out pardons, and making mandatory the immediate
carrying out of death sentences. He summoned his old friend Avel Enukidze, the
chairman of the presidium of the USSR’s Central Executive Committee, and had
him sign this decree, dating it 1 December 1934, the day of Kirov’s murder.10
The next day, Stalin’s train with special NKVD troops arrived in Leningrad.
Nikolaev, his head bandaged, was brought into Stalin’s office. ‘Why did you
kill such a nice man?’ asked Stalin in a voice touched with tenderness.
Nikolaev said that he had ‘fired at the Party’. Then Stalin asked, ‘And where
did you get the revolver?’ Nikolaev gave a startling reply, having recognized
Ivan Zaporozhets who was standing next to Stalin, as a man to whom he had been
introduced by the friend who had given him the revolver. Nikolaev understood
now that his ‘friend’ was a NKVD provocateur. ‘Ask him!’, said Nikolaev,
pointing at Zaporozhets. ‘He coached me for four months, saying that the Party
needed it.’ Stalin was enraged. He understood that Nikolaev could expose the
murder as an NKVD provocation. ‘Take him away!’, he shouted. Snapping
‘Bungler!’, he threw Nikolaev’s file in Yagoda’s face. Zaporozhets, his head
lowered, walked out of the room.11 Stalin immediately started the
coverup. Kirov’s bodyguard Borisov was murdered with a blow by a heavy metal
rod as he was being driven from prison to an interrogation.12
Nikolaev’s ‘friend’, the NKVD agent, was quietly executed.13 Stalin
delayed the execution of Nikolaev, intending to force him to implicate the
opposition in the murder of Kirov. Since it might have taken some time to
wrench from Nikolaev such an accusation, Stalin returned to Moscow, taking Kirov’s
body with him. The open coffin was placed in Moscow’s Hall of Columns, where
Politburo members took turns as honor guards. Stalin, apparently overcome with
emotion, embraced the body and kissed it on the cheek. He said, ‘Goodbye, my
dear friend. We will avenge you.’14
Stalin’s display of
tenderness toward the enemy he had had murdered may appear an act of stark
hypocrisy. But as in the case of the murders of many of his other enemies, the
truth was more complicated. Stalin’s capacity for reshaping reality to suit his
political and emotional needs made it possible, now that Kirov was dead, for
him to imagine that not he, but the opposition leaders, headed by Trotsky, had
guided Nikolaev’s hands and that Kirov had to be avenged. When parting with his
dead victims, Stalin was prone to identify with them and to be sentimentally
moved by their deaths, as if blameless.
Stalin invented a detailed
scheme of how to implicate the opposition leaders in the murder of Kirov. He
divided a sheet of paper into two sections by drawing a vertical line. One side
he labeled ‘Moscow Center’, and he entered on it the name Kamenev; the other
side he labeled ‘Leningrad Center’, and he entered on it the name Zinoviev and
also the name Nikolaev. In the course of several days, Stalin added a total of
13 more names to the list, sometimes shifting the names from one side to the
other.15 Then he ordered the arrest of these people, who were
accused of plotting to assassinate Stalin, Molotov and Kaganovich. The alleged
assassins refused to admit their guilt. Nikolaev’s diary did not contain the
name of a single member of the opposition, and Stalin ordered the court to
declare it a forgery.16 Failing to obtain confessions, Stalin on 29
December 1934 ordered that Nikolaev and 13 co-defendants be executed.
The Soviet press and the
resolutions adopted at the mass meetings around the country called for
‘revenge’ and ‘vigilance,’ vaguely referring to the plots of ‘enemies of the
people’ and ‘White Guards’. Since Nikolaev had refused to implicate the
opposition leaders, Stalin initially placed the blame for the murder on former
White Guards, who had plotted the assassination in alliance with some foreign
power. But he did not abandon his original scheme to use the murder of Kirov as
a convenient pretext for the annihilation of the opposition. In a secret letter
to the party organizations titled ‘The Lessons of the Evil Murder of Comrade
Kirov’, Stalin called for the arrest and expulsion from the Party of former
oppositionists. He also ordered secret executions of jailed members of the
opposition. Mass arrests took place in Moscow and Leningrad.17 On 16
December 1934 Zinoviev and Kamenev were brought to the Lubianka from their
places of imprisonment, where they had been serving terms for ‘not reporting’
on the Riutin Platform. They were now accused of instigating the murder of
Kirov. They vehemently denied involvement, pointing out that during the two
preceding years they had been in prison. Stalin reduced the charge to the
milder one of ‘responsibility for political and moral support’ for the murder.
On 15 January 1935 Kamenev, Zinoviev, and several opposition members admitted
their ‘mistakes’ and were sentenced to various prison terms. Zinoviev was
sentenced to ten years and Kamenev to five years in prison.18 Yet
Stalin was unhappy with these terms, and on 27 July 1935 Kamenev was secretly
sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for plotting to poison Stalin. The verdict
asserted that Kamenev’s sister-in-law on Kamenev’s instruction gave harmful
medication to Stalin in the Kremlin Hospital where she worked. Kamenev’s
brother even testified against his own wife.19
But thousands of people
faced a more terrible fate. Stalin was ‘avenging’ the murder of Kirov by mass
executions. In a country in which people had grown accustomed to standing in
line for everything from bread to shelter, a new type of line was added:
prisoners in the Lubianka, Butyrki, Lefortovo and other jails waiting in line
to be taken down to the cellar or courtyard for execution. ‘No pushing! No
crowding! Wait your turn!’ the guards would shout amidst the din of shots and
cries of the victims. At intervals, the line would stop moving while the
executioners took time out to fortify themselves at a buffet of food and vodka.
The corpses were disposed of in secret burial grounds.20
Ivan Zaporozhets and Filip
Medved were charged with ‘lack of vigilance’ and sentenced to three years in a kontslager
(concentration camp).21 A specially furnished train delivered them
to a camp, where they were given comfortable quarters and management positions
in the camp administration and special privileges. Their wives were allowed to
visit and spend time with them. Still, Zaporozhets felt that Stalin had treated
him too harshly.22 Not knowing Stalin well, he hoped to be set free
soon. A few years later, he was executed. NKVD officers talked among themselves
about the suspicious circumstances behind the murder of Kirov and pointed to
Stalin as its instigator. Stalin, receiving reports concerning these rumors,
was greatly dissatisfied with the way the affair had been handled.23
For Stalin’s next murder,
that of Valerian Kuibyshev, he reverted to poisoning. Kuibyshev had committed a
number of sins in Stalin’s book. As the chairman of Gosplan (the State
Planning Committee) he had objected to the arrests of his subordinates, the
defendants at the ‘Menshevik’ and ‘Prompartia’ show trials. He had also
objected to the
execution of Riutin and,
in January 1935, protested the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev. On 26 January 1935
ten days after that trial, it was announced that Valerian Kuibyshev had died of
heart disease. (Three years later, his secretary Maximov-Dikovsky was accused
of poisoning him.24) The Soviet newspapers praised Kuibyshev for his
‘uncompromising struggle against all deviations from the general Party line…’.25
His native town Samara was renamed after him, and his body was cremated and the
ashes placed in the Kremlin wall to the left of Kirov’s urn.
NOTES
1.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, p. 156.
2.
Ibid. See also
A.Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret tirana, New York, 1980, p. 120.
3.
Alexander Orlov, The
Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes, New York, 1953, pp. 259ff.
4.
Bulanov described this
type of poisoning in his ‘confession’ at the Bukharin show trial. See Bukharin
Trial, New York, 1865, pp. 480–5.
5.
See Chapter 26 for the
discovery of Stalin’s Okhrana file.
6.
Taped interview with
I.P.Itskov in New York City in 1989.
7.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, p. 158.
8.
Elizabeth Lermolo, Face
of a Victim, New York, 1956, p. 73. See also Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret,
pp. 121–3.
9.
H.Montgomery Hyde, Stalin:
the History of a Dictator, New York, 1971, pp. 302–5.
10.
Medvedev, Let History,
p. 161. See also N.S.Khrushchev, ‘Special Report to the Twentieth Party
Congress’ The New York Times, 5 June 1956, also referred to as
Khrushchev’s secret speech.
11.
Hyde, Stalin, pp.
306f.
12.
Olga Shatunovskaya’s
testimony in interview with Vasily Rudich. See also Khrushchev’s secret speech,
and H.Montgomery Hyde, Stalin, p. 307.
13.
H.Montgomery Hyde, Stalin,
p. 308.
14.
A.T.Rybin, ‘Riadom’s
I.V.Stalinym’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, no. 3, 1988.
15.
Khrushchev’s secret
speech.
16.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, p. 163.
17.
Robert Conquest, The
Great Terror, New York, 1973, pp. 86–8.
18.
Ibid., pp. 89–92.
19.
Vitaly Rapoport and Yury
Alekseev, Izmena rodine, London, 1988, p. 277. Also Conquest, The
Great Terror, p. 133, and Anton Ciliga, The Russian Enigma, London,
1940, p. 283.
20.
Hyde, Stalin, p.
310.
21.
Conquest, The Great
Terror, p. 93.
22.
Alexander Orlov, Tainaya
istoria stalinskikh prestuplenii, New York, Jerusalem, Paris, 1983, pp.
17–55
23.
Ibid.
24.
Bukharin Trial,
Maximov-Dikovsky’s testimony, New York, 1965, p. 679.
25.
Krasny arkhiv,
no. 68, 1935, p. 6.
In 1935 the journal Krasny
arkhiv (Red Archive) published a lead article titled ‘Revolutionary
Vigilance’. The article quoted Stalin who had castigated ‘archival rats’ who
‘dig out accidentally selected documents’. Stalin stated that ‘The archival
institutions must exercise special vigilance…in utilizing the historical
documents… We know that wicked double dealers and contrabandists do not shrink
from committing fraud and falsification…’. Stalin’s subordinates echoed his
concern in their statements. Politburo member P.P.Postyshev declared:
Archival
work, after all, is the sector of the sharpest class struggle. A Trotskyite or
a Nationalist, no doubt, will try to use and to interpret this or that archival
material not in the interests of, but to harm the cause of socialism.1
Postyshev did not suspect
that in mentioning ‘double dealers and contrabandists’ Stalin had in mind
Blumkin, who had been executed for the attempt to smuggle abroad Stalin’s
Okhrana file. Postyshev also did not know that it was Stalin who did not shrink
from committing ‘fraud and falsification’ and that he created the ‘Stalin
Institute’ specially for the fabrication of his ‘true biography’ and the
glorification of his ‘revolutionary past.’ At the head of this factory of lies
he placed Lavrenty Beria, whom he trusted with many of his secrets.
Beria was born in 1899 in
a remote village in Megrelia, a western province of Georgia. His parents were
divorced, and he left home early and went to Baku, where at the age of 16 he
became an informer for the Okhrana officer M.Bagirov. After the Revolution, he
continued to work for Bagirov, who became an officer of the secret police of
the Musawat government in Azerbaijan. In 1919, Beria was an informer for the
British Embassy during the occupation of Baku by the British Expeditionary Force.2
In 1920, he moved to Georgia and became an agent of the Security Division of
the Menshevik government there. After the Red Army occupied Georgia, Beria
returned to Baku, where he became an assistant to his old ‘handler’ Bagirov,
who by that time had established himself as the chairman of the Cheka in
Azerbaijan. (On Dzerzhinsky’s order, many former Okhrana officers were
recruited into the Cheka.) In 1921, Dzerzhinsky sent his assistant, Kedrov, to
Baku to inspect Bagirov’s staff, and Kedrov recommended firing Beria, finding
him an untrustworthy agent of several intelligence services. Nothing came of
this recommendation;3 Dzerzhinsky trusted Bagirov, who in turn
trusted Beria.
photographic memory
allowed him to retain information on a large number of people. Beria was
recommended to Stalin by Bagirov, whom Stalin trusted and to whom he assigned
the task of writing his falsified biography. Stalin decided that he could use
Beria, and he frequently expressed his approval of him in calling him karge
bicho (‘good boy’ in Georgian).4 Soon after Stalin’s return to
Moscow in the fall of 1931, he summoned the Party leaders from the Caucasus
and, as if in passing, mentioned Beria’s appointment to the post of second
secretary of the Transcaucasian Party Committee. He met with objection. ‘I am
not going to work with that charlatan!’ protested the Georgian first secretary,
Lavrenty Kartvelishvili. Stalin’s proposal was not approved. Such
insubordination was still possible in 1931, but Stalin was not about to give
in. ‘Well, so what, we’ll settle this question in the routine way’, he said.
After the meeting, the Caucasian leaders went to Ordzhonikidze, who explained
that he had refused to attend the meeting because he did not want to be present
at the ‘coronation of Beria’. Ordzhonikidze was familiar with Beria’s
background. ‘I’ve been telling Stalin for a long time that Beria is a crook,
but Stalin won’t listen to me, and no one can make him change his mind’, he
said. Three months later, Stalin appointed Beria to the post of first secretary
of the Georgian Communist Party; later, he made him first secretary of the
entire Transcaucasian Federation.5
In July 1935, Beria
delivered a speech to the Tbilisi (formerly Tiflis) Party committee,
criticizing some Party leaders, including Stalin’s friend Avel Enukidze, who
had ‘distorted certain historical facts and events’. Beria declared that ‘we
already gathered materials and documents from the history of our Party
organizations’ and that he was assigned to ‘provide an explanation to certain
questions (facts and events) from the history of the Bolshevik
organizations of Transcaucasia and Georgia’. Beria criticized historians for
not giving due tribute to the leading revolutionary role of the ‘great Comrade
Stalin’, and declared that ‘nothing that so far has been written reflects the
real and true role of Comrade Stalin, who actually led the struggle of the
Bolsheviks in the Caucasus for a good many years’. The congress decided to
‘sharpen even more the vigilance of all party organizations in Georgia against
attempts at distortion of the history of Bolshevism’ and to create the Stalin
Institute to study Stalin’s life.6 Beria also recalled Stalin’s 1931
article in which Stalin had written that it was necessary ‘to sharpen vigilance
against the Trotskyites and all the other falsifiers of the history of our
party by systematically ripping off their masks’.7
Stalin ordered Beria to
‘select’ material and documents for his new biography and at the same time to
‘purge’ old archives of documents exposing Stalin’s ties to the Okhrana. Such
documents, referred to by Stalin as ‘Kutepov documents’, had, he claimed, been
forged by former Okhrana officers to defame him.8 Beria, although
pretending to believe Stalin’s claim, knew very well that there were no
‘Kutepov documents’ and that Stalin was worried about genuine archival
documents that pointed to his collaboration with the Okhrana. Stalin ordered
Beria and his subordinates to deliver to him personally all Okhrana documents
in which the name ‘Iosif Dzhugashvili’ was mentioned.9
Dzerzhinsky, who had
directed the recruitment of former Okhrana agents into the Cheka, had given
Stalin documents from their files, which made them vulnerable to blackmail.
Stalin trusted Beria and Bagirov because he knew of their Okhrana past. When
Stalin’s Okhrana files were discovered, Beria and Bagirov delivered them to
Stalin, pretending that they believed them to be the ‘Kutepov documents’.
Stalin’s Tiflis
Okhrana file was
discovered in 1925, but it did not contain incriminating evidence against
Stalin, since it had been sanitized by Colonel Eremin in 1910. Stalin’s Baku
Okhrana file was discovered sometime in the early thirties. Bagirov, chairman
of the GPU in Azerbaijan, delivered this file to Stalin. Stalin’s Batum Okhrana
file was discovered in the early 1930s by the historian Sepp, author of The
October Revolution in Documents, on which he was doing research in the
Batum Okhrana archives. Sepp delivered the file on informer Iosif Dzhugashvili
to Beria, who immediately went to Moscow and gave it to Stalin. Stalin said
that the file contained the ‘Kutepov documents’, and he thanked Beria for
bringing them. Then he ordered Beria to execute Sepp. Following Beria’s return
to Tbilisi, Sepp was arrested and shot. When in the mid-1930s another
researcher found a file with Iosif Dzhugashvili’s secret reports in the Kutais
Okhrana archive, he brought this file to Bakhcho Kabulov, a criminal turned
head of the Kutais NKVD, who gave it to Beria. Beria then delivered this file
to Stalin.10 The name of the man who found the file remained
unrecorded.
Starting in July 1935, Pravda
began publishing Beria’s articles about Stalin’s ‘leading role in the
Revolution.’ By this time, Stalin’s files from the Tiflis, Baku, Batum and
Kutais Okhrana archives had been delivered to him. He knew that Blumkin had
attempted to smuggle abroad his St Petersburg Okhrana file. He hoped, and may
well have convinced himself, that this file had been destroyed.
One thing is certain:
Stalin’s past as an Okhrana agent was being systematically replaced by a new
version of his past, in which he assumed the role of a great revolutionary and
Lenin’s closest comrade-in-arms. Beria and Bagirov wrote books, and the journal
Krasny arkhiv published articles in which ‘Okhrana documents’ were
reproduced that Stalin had had doctored to prove his invented history. Stalin
had these documents doctored and perverted, inserting in them flattering
statements and erasing embarrassing information. He did it in a peculiar way:
these deceitful fakes were technically almost flawless, but contained crude
absurdities. Stalin ordered the dates of many of the doctored Okhrana documents
changed from Old to New Style, but kept part of the text intact. The doctoring
of the documents was done in a secret Kremlin press headed by Alexander
Svanidze, the brother of Stalin’s first wife.11 For example, the
report of the chief of the Tiflis Okhrana, Captain Lavrov, which preceded the
arrests of the members of Kurnatovsky’s circle in Tiflis in 1901, had a clearly
fictitious insertion and a wrong date. The forged report, dated 28 March 1901
states, ‘According to agent information the following persons are included in the
Tiflis Social Democratic circle: ‘An employee in the Tiflis Physical
Observatory, Iosif Dzhugashvili—an intellectual…; an engineer-chemist Victor
Kurnatovsky—an intellectual…’. A list of names follows.12 Stalin had
not been a member of the Kurnatovsky circle, and his name had not appeared at
all on that list, let alone at the top of it. Kurnatovsky was the head of the
circle and his name was on top of that list. The genuine report of Captain
Lavrov was not dated 28 March 1901, but 15 March 1901 (the difference between
the Old and New Style dates in the twentieth century being 13 days).13
Another Okhrana document doctored by Stalin states, ‘In autumn of 1901 the
Tiflis Committee of the RSDWP [The Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party]
sent Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili to the city of Batum as a delegate…’.14
In fact, the Tiflis Committee at that time expelled Stalin from the Party for
slander and intrigues against its leaders.15 Yet another doctored
Okhrana document, dated 21 March 1910 had an underlined statement, asserting
that Stalin had
‘always occupied a very
important position’ in the revolutionary movement.16
Again, the truth was a different story: in March 1910 Stalin was called to
appear before a party court assembled in Baku to answer charges of having
betrayed revolutionaries to the Okhrana. The members of the court were arrested
before Stalin appeared to face the charges.17
Stalin placed many such
forged documents in Soviet archives, labeling them with index numbers. Their
lies were endlessly quoted in articles, books and dissertations, in which
Stalin was exalted as the ‘greatest revolutionary’ and the ‘leader of the world
proletariat’. Trotsky was amazed by the fabrications of the Stalin Institute.
He wrote, ‘Never before under the vault of heaven had there been such
large-scale invention of falsehood. I do not think that in all of human history
anything could be found even remotely resembling the gigantic factory of lies
which was organized by the Kremlin under the leadership of Stalin. And one of
the principal purposes of this factory is to manufacture a new biography of
Stalin.’18
Many authors were forced
to disclaim their earlier published historical research and memoirs, which were
in conflict with Stalin’s new version. Stalin ordered destroyed anything
containing contradictions to his invented biography. Stalin’s close friend Avel
Enukidze published an article, expressing his regrets about ‘mistakes’ he had
made in his earlier writings about the revolutionary underground in the Caucasus.
This repentant article appeared in Pravda on 16 January 1935. But Stalin
was still not satisfied. ‘What more does he want?’, Enukidze complained to his
friends, ‘I am doing everything he asked me to do, but it is not enough for
him. He wants me to admit that he is a genius.’19 Stalin demanded
from Enukidze not only effusive praise but unqualified support in the drive to
destroy the opposition. Enukidze failed to satisfy Stalin’s demands. Shortly
before the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev in January 1935, Enukidze admonished
Stalin saying, ‘Soso, there can be no argument that they have hurt you, but
they have suffered enough for it: you have expelled them from the party, you
have kept them in prison, their children have nothing to eat. Soso, they are Old
Bolsheviks, as you and I. You will not spill the blood of the Old Bolsheviks!
Think what the entire world will say about us!’ Enukidze later recalled that
Stalin looked at him ‘as if I had killed his father, and said: “Remember, Avel,
who is not with me, is against me!”’20
In February 1935 Enukidze
was expelled from his apartment in the Kremlin and transferred to Tiflis; but
Stalin was not satisfied with these half-measures. His suspicions of Enukidze
were growing, as Enukidze knew the contents of Nadezhda Allilueva’s last letter
to Stalin, in which she had stated that she knew ‘what kind of revolutionary’
Stalin was. Once Stalin’s suspicion of someone was aroused, the decision to
eliminate this ‘enemy’ was not far behind, although there was sometimes a delay
between the decision and its execution. At the beginning of July 1935 Nikolay
Yezhov, Stalin’s new crony, attacked Enukidze in Pravda for ‘political
and moral disintegration’.21 Nikita Khrushchev, by then secretary of
the Moscow party organization, and Andrey Zhdanov, who had replaced Kirov in
the Leningrad party organization, made similar accusations in speeches against
Enukidze.22 Enukidze was arrested and charged with ‘betrayal of the
motherland and espionage’, but was not executed until two years later.23
Enukidze deeply offended
Stalin when he equated him with Old Bolsheviks like Kamenev and Zinoviev.
Stalin considered himself vastly superior to any of the Old Bolsheviks, and he
hated all of them, knowing full well that if they discovered his Okhrana past
they would attempt to destroy him. On 25 May 1935 he ordered the
liquidation of the Society
of Old Bolsheviks as well as of their publishing house. Soon thereafter the
Society of Former Political Exiles was also closed. Members of these societies
were arrested one after the other. Grigory Petrovsky, the former Duma deputy,
explained that Stalin did ‘not like Old Bolsheviks’.24 Stalin was
comfortable only with people whose record, like Petrovsky’s, was sullied by
ties to the Okhrana.
In the paper blizzard of
adoration for him, Stalin especially liked a short booklet by Karl Radek titled
The Architect of Socialist Society, in which Radek described the ideal
future of the USSR at the end of the twentieth century in the form of a lecture
to be delivered by a history professor and devoted to the ‘Great Stalin—the
Genius of All Humanity’. Stalin ordered millions of copies of Radek’s book to
be printed.25
NOTES
1.
Krasny arkhiv,
no. 68, 1935, p. 12.
2.
A.Sarkisov, ‘Sudba
Marshala’, Kommunist, no. 147 (16426), 22 June, 1988.
3.
I.Viktorov, Podpolshchik,
voin, chekist, Moscow, 1968, pp. 71–7. Also quoted in Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, pp. 241–3.
4.
Interview with Nugzar
Sharia.
5.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, pp. 242f.
6.
Lavrenty Beria, K
Voprosy ob istorii bolshevitskikh organizatsii v zakavkazie, 21–2 July
1935.
7.
Proletarian Revolution,
no. 6, 1931, quoting Stalin’s article ‘On Some Questions about the History of
Bolshevism’.
8.
See Chapter 20 above for
General Kutepov’s kidnapping and prosecution.
9.
A.Sarkisov, ‘Sudba
Marshala’.
10.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, p. 319.
11.
Writen testimony of
Raphael Bagratuni in I.D.Levine’s and in the author’s archives. Bagratuni
stated: ‘Svanidze gathered over many years materials in Soviet archives to
compose a biography of Stalin; but this was a ruse. Svanidze, heading a group
of loyal Georgians, destroyed documents in Soviet archives compromising Stalin
under the pretext that they had been fabricated by Trotskyites. While he was
destroying documents, Svanidze, backtracking in time (using the old
orthography), reissued certain historical documents.
12.
Beria, K voprosu ob
istorii bolshevitskikh organizatsi v Zakavkazie, pp. 19f.; also Edward
Ellis Smith, The Young Stalin: The Early Years of an Elusive Revolutionary,
London, 1968, p. 78.
13.
See Chapter 2 above.
14.
Beria, K voprosu,
pp. 96f.
15.
See Chapter 2 above.
16.
Beria, K voprosu,
pp. 96f.
17.
See Chapter 8 above.
18.
Lev Trotsky, Stalin,
New York, 1941, p. xiv.
19.
Ibid., p. 389.
20.
Alexander Orlov, Tainaya
istoria stalinskikh prestuplenii, New York/Jerusalem/Paris, 1983, pp. 298f.
21.
Pravda, 8
June 1935.
22.
Pravda, 16
June and 19 June 1935.
23.
See below Chapters 26–9.
24.
Robert Conquest, The
Great Terror, New York, 1973, p. 131.
25.
Orlov, Tainaya
istoria…, pp. 194f.
‘OLD BEAR WITH A RING IN HIS NOSE’
Stalin knew that Maxim
Gorky, whom he had proclaimed the ‘great proletarian writer’, was a longtime
friend of Kamenev whom he planned to parade, together with Zinoviev, as
‘enemies of the people’ in a staged show trial in the summer of 1936. Stalin
also knew that Gorky would voice objections to the trial. Many years of living
in Italy had helped Gorky lose touch with the reality of the Soviet Union.
After his return to the Soviet Union in May 1933, Gorky for some time supported
Stalin. For instance, in an article ‘If the enemy does not surrender, he should
be destroyed’, Gorky had justified the Prompartia show trial. Stalin ordered
three million copies of this article to be printed. Gorky also praised the
‘Menshevik Union Bureau’ show trial held in 1931.1
Stalin hoped to use
Gorky’s pen for self-aggrandizement. Yagoda organized Gorky’s visits to
specially selected prisons and camps that would impress him favorably with the
Soviet penal system. Initially, Gorky was misled. He visited the Solovky prison
camp in the north of Russia and wrote a favorable article, describing the
‘good’ conditions there for reforming criminals.2 After visiting the
prison camps engaged in the construction of the Belomor-Baltic Canal, Gorky
also approved the use of forced labor in the growing Soviet prison camp system,
the Gulag. Gorky’s apologetic writings have led some historians to accuse him
of contributing to Stalin’s ‘spiritual enslavement of the country’.3
Stalin’s cronies tried to
induce Gorky to write a biography of ‘The Great Stalin’. Yagoda, who bribed
Gorky with privileges, ordered an NKVD officer by the name of Pogrebinsky to
convince Gorky to write the biography. ‘I approached Gorky from this side and
from that side, but he stubbornly avoided conversation about the book’,
complained Pogrebinsky.4 Stalin also ordered Yagoda to ask Gorky to
write an article titled ‘Lenin and Stalin’ for Pravda on the occasion of
the seventeenth anniversary of the October Revolution, but Gorky refused. He
also refused to write articles against Kamenev and Zinoviev, whom Stalin
accused of instigating the murder of Kirov, and of other crimes.5
On Gorky’s insistence,
Stalin freed Kamenev from prison in 1933 and allowed him to return to Moscow,
where he was appointed assistant chair-man of the publishing house Academia,
chaired by Gorky, who hoped to publish works of great Russian writers, among
them Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed and The Brothers Kammazov.6
Stalin considered Dostoyevsky’s books to be dangerous propaganda, and in a
sense they were, since characters like the ‘possessed’ Peter Verkhovensky and
the revolting ‘bastard’ Smerdiakov bore a striking psychological resemblance to
members of Stalin’s entourage and indeed to Stalin himself. Stalin sensed that
Dostoyevsky’s books might help Soviet readers to recognize in these types the
men who had control over them.
passport allowing him to
travel to Italy. His demand was not heeded. At the end of January 1935 David
Zaslavsky, Stalin’s mouthpiece, published two articles in Pravda, criticizing
Gorky for promoting ‘literary decay’.7 Zaslavsky, whom Lenin
described as ‘a notorious slanderer,’ had been before the Revolution an
anti-Bolshevik journalist and a member of the Jewish Bund. He became Stalin’s
leading mouthpiece, while Lenin’s closest comrades were sent to jail.8
Gorky felt helpless and isolated from his friends. ‘I am very tired’, Gorky
complained to I.Shkapa, who was soon to be arrested. ‘It is as if I am
surrounded by a fence—I cannot step over it!… Surrounded…trapped…not backward,
not forward! I am not accustomed to this!’9 In a letter to the
French Communist writer Romaine Rolland, Gorky complained that he was trapped
and felt like an ‘old bear with a ring in my nose’.10
On 27 July 1935 Kamenev
was secretly sentenced to ten years in prison for an ‘attempt on Stalin’s
life’.11 This new imprisonment of Kamenev troubled Gorky deeply. In
July 1935 he was invited to attend the International Congress of Writers in
Defence of Peace in Paris, but on orders from Moscow an NKVD agent Maria
Kudasheva, the wife of Romaine Rolland, convinced her husband to visit Gorky in
Moscow precisely at this time. Gorky’s trip abroad was thus prevented. Stalin
had good reason to fear that Gorky would not return to the Soviet Union. Gorky
kept writing to Stalin, protesting the persecution of Kamenev and other Old
Bolsheviks; Stalin did not respond. Letters that Gorky sent abroad were
intercepted and handed over to Stalin.12 Gorky asked Mikhail
Koltsov, at that time the Pravda correspondent in Paris, to notify the
French writers André Gide and Aragon of his urgent plea
for them to visit him as soon as possible. Louis Aragon was to recall: ‘The
tone of Gorky’s appeals, which we received through Koltsov, changed. In them
one felt the fear of death.’13
Gorky feared that his
‘archive’, a suitcase containing letters to him from a large group of people,
might fall into Stalin’s hands and pose a danger to people who had corresponded
with him. Before returning to the Soviet Union in 1933 he had given this
‘archive’ for safe keeping to Baroness Maria (Mura) Budberg (a.k.a.
Maria Zakrevskaya- Benkendorf), who for many years belonged to the circle of
Gorky’s friends and occasionally did secretarial work for him. (Mura had become
a Cheka agent at the beginning of 1918 and had taken part in the ‘Lockhart
Plot’, having become a lover of Lockhart, a British diplomat. She was then sent
abroad on Cheka assignment to infiltrate Gorky’s circle of friends and gather
information on Western intellectuals.14) After Gorky returned to the
Soviet Union, Mura Budberg settled in London, having become a lover of the
writer H.G. Wells, whom she first met in 1920, when he visited Gorky in the
Soviet Union. Wells later ungallantly bragged that he had ‘slept with Gorky’s
secretary’.15 (In 1934, after an interview with Stalin, Wells gave a
remarkable assessment of him, stating that he was a ‘kindly man’ who ‘owes his
position to the fact that no one is afraid of him and everyone trusts him’.16)
In the summer of 1935
Gorky attempted to retrieve from Mura Budberg the suitcase containing his
correspondence. His wife Ekaterina Peshkova approached Mura in London, but she
refused to hand over the suitcase knowing that Stalin wanted to get hold of
Gorky’s entire archive.17 After his Okhrana files were discovered in
the old archives, these archival bones became even more of an idée fixe for
Stalin, and the call for Vigilance on the archival front’ became his obsession.
In the spring of 1936, an attempt was made by NKVD to steal Trotsky’s papers
from his home in Norway, and in the same
year Stalin’s agents stole
Trotsky’s archive at the International Institute of Social History in Paris,
where Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov headed a Trotskyite organization.18
Also in 1936, Stalin ordered the NKVD to confiscate all of Gorky’s letters in
O.Piatnitsky’s archive. In the same vein, a top-ranking NKVD officer conveyed
to Mura Budberg Stalin’s order to deliver the suitcase with Gorky’s
correspondence to Moscow, telling her that an officer would accompany her and
provide a special railway car that would take her from the border crossing at
Negoreloe to Moscow and then back to the border. Early in 1936 Mura Budberg
secretly delivered Gorky’s correspondence to Stalin and returned to London.19
With the letters in Stalin’s hands, Gorky and his
correspondents were in danger. Knowing that Gorky tried to hasten the arrival
in Moscow of his friends, André Gide and Louis Aragon, the NKVD ordered Elsa
Triole (Elizaveta Kagan), Aragon’s wife and an NKVD agent, to prevent Aragon’s
journey, but she failed to do so. She did manage, however, to arrange their
travel by boat to Leningrad, where she wanted to visit her sister Lilia Brik,
former lover of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Lilia Brik and her new lover, the
commander of the Leningrad Military District, Vitaly Primakov, lived in a large
luxury apartment and were at the center of the city’s social life. Primakov, a
legendary leader of the Red Cossacks during the Civil War, had abandoned his
Jewish wife Anna Yakovlevna Kirshenblat, a gynecologist, and their 6-year-old
son Evgeny Primakov.20 (Evgeny Primakov grew up to become an MGB and
then a KGB operative specializing in Arab countries and anti-Israeli
propaganda. He became a high-ranking member of the Soviet intelligence service.
After the collapse of the Soviet Empire he became chief of the Russian
Intelligence Service and was later appointed foreign minister and then, on 10
September 1998, was appointed prime minister.21)
Elsa Triole talked Aragon into staying in Leningrad
for several days. Aragon years later was to recall: ‘We, probably, should have
rushed to Moscow, where Gorky was waiting for us. But, of course, my
sister-in-law did not want to let us go easily.’22 (Elsa Triole was
to write in her memoirs in 1969: ‘My husband is a communist. Communist because
of me. I am a tool of Soviet power. I love to wear jewelry, I am a society
woman, and I am a dirty whore.’23) On 6 June 1936 Pravda
reported that Gorky had contracted influenza.24 This was not the
first time Gorky had been ill, but never before had the state of his health
been reported in the press. He strongly objected to his illness being
publicized, and Stalin ordered one issue of Pravda and one of Izvestiya
to be printed for Gorky but without a medical report. In the regular issues,
the reports were to be continued.25 On 16 June Gorky felt much
better, and his doctors predicted a speedy recovery. Gorky eagerly awaited the
arrival of Gide and Aragon. ‘The shadow of Gide and his forthcoming visit
protects you’, said one of Gorky’s friends, Soviet writer Isaac Babel.26
The report of Gorky’s illness had made Gide schedule his departure for Moscow
on 12 June 1936. On 11 June Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg arrived in Paris and
phoned Gide. He told him that Gorky’s health was improving and urged him to
delay his visit because Moscow preferred his arrival to be ‘not earlier than 18
June’.27 Ehrenburg successfully carried out Stalin’s urgent
assignment to delay Gide’s visit.28 Gide arrived in Moscow on 17
June 1936. At the airport, he was met by Mikhail Koltsov. They went to see
Gorky the following morning, but it was too late. Gorky died on 18 June 1936,
at 11:10 am. His house was surrounded by security troops and the gates were
closed. Aragon had arrived in Moscow on 15 June, but Elsa Triole had talked him
into delaying
his visit to Gorky until
18 June.29 The next day, Pravda reported that Gorky died of
‘paralysis of the heart’.30 Pravda also reported that on 8
June 1936 Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov had visited Gorky, who had been so
elated that his health noticeably improved and ‘he literally had risen from a
coffin’.31 But the rumor that Gorky had been poisoned spread.
Stalin ordered Yagoda to
search Gorky’s house. Yagoda found Gorky’s diary in the library. When he
finished reading it, he angrily cursed Gorky and muttered, ‘No matter how much
you feed a wolf, he always dreams of a forest.’32 Stalin had ‘fed
the wolf in vain.
Two years later, three
physicians, Levin, Kazakov and Pletnev were accused of shortening Gorky’s life
by poisoning him.33 Half a century later, on 4 February 1988, the
Supreme Court of the USSR annulled the verdict and terminated the case against
them for ‘lack of criminal substance’.34 Alexander Novikov, a former
NKVD officer taken prisoner by the Germans during the Second World War, told a
French prisoner of war, a fellow inmate in the Buchenwald camp, that Stalin had
poisoned Gorky. Asked why the postmortem examination had failed to detect
poison in Gorky’s body, Novikov said, ‘You don’t understand anything! The
record of the examination had been compiled before his death!’35.
A German communist, Brigitte Gerland, after being released from the Gulag and
allowed to return to Germany in 1954, wrote that in a Vorkuta camp she met Dr
Pletnev and learned from him that Gorky’s health had suddenly deteriorated as a
result of eating poisoned candies that Stalin had sent to him as a present, and
that two medical orderlies, who were on duty that day and whom Gorky treated to
the candies, also suddenly died.36 In the summer of 1963 American
author Isaac Don Levine, who had met Gorky on many occasions in the 19208 and 305,
visited Moscow and talked to Gorky’s widow. He asked her whether Gorky had died
a natural death. She became agitated and exclaimed, ‘It’s not quite so, but
don’t ask me about it! I won’t be able to sleep a wink for three days and
nights if I tell you!’37
NOTES
1.
L.Fleishman, Boris
Pasternak v tridtsatye gody, Jerusalem, 1984, pp. 30–3.
2.
M.Geller, Kontsentratsionny
mir i sovetskaya literatura, London, 1974, pp. 84–95.
3.
M.Geller and A.Nekrich, Utopia
u vlasti, vol. 1, London, 1982, p. 290.
4.
Alexander Orlov, The
Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes, New York, 1953, p. 264.
5.
Ibid., pp. 266f.
6.
M.Gorky, ‘Ob izdanii
romana besy’, Pravda, 24 January 1935.
7.
D.Zaslavsky, ‘Zametki
chitatelia’, Pravda, 20 and 25 January 1935.
8.
V.I.Lenin, Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii, 5th edn, vol. 49, Moscow, 1958–65, p. 441.
9.
I.S.Shkapa, Sem’ let s
Gorkim, Moscow, 1964, pp. 318 and 383f.
10.
J.Perus, Correspondance
Romain Rolland et Maxime Gorki, Paris, 1991, p. 320, quoting Romain
Rolland’s diary. See Michele Nike, K voprosu o smerti M.Gorkogo, Paris,
1988, pp. 343f, fn. 90 and 93. Also P.Moroz, ‘Gorky v SSSR. Vstrechi s Gorkim’,
Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, 1954, no. 1, pp. 15–18.
11.
Zinoviev Trial
(Report of Court Proceedings), Moscow, 1936, p. 174. See also Anton Ciliga, The
Russian Enigma, London, 1940, p. 283.
12.
Fleishman, Boris
Pasternak v tridtsatye gody, pp. 239–42. Also Nike, K voprosu o smerti
Gorkogo, pp. 345f., fnn. 99–101; also Georges Duhamel, Le Livre de
l’Amertume, Paris, 1983, pp. 185 and 417.
13.
Michele Nike, ‘K voprosu o
smerti M.Gorkogo’, pp. 329f., quoting L.Aragon, L’Oeuvre poétique, vol.
VII (1936–7), pp. 96, 100, 107.
14.
See Chapter 14 above.
15.
N.Berberova, Zheleznaya
zhenshchina, New York, 1982, pp. 261f. Also Boris Bazhanov, Paris, 1980, Vospominania
byvshego sekretaria Stalina, p. 95.
16.
H.Montgomery Hyde, Stalin:
The History of a Dictator, New York, 1971, p. 316.
17.
Berberova, Zheleznaya
Zhenshchina, p. 264.
18.
Ibid., pp. 259–65. See
also Joel Carmichael, Trotsky, London, 1975, pp. 428f.
19.
Berberova, Zheleznaya
zhenshchina, pp. 264f.
20.
Rakhil Mdinazadze,
Georgian émigrée, of
Brooklyn, NY.
21.
The author knew Evgeny
Primakov well, since they were classmates in the Moscow Oriental Institute
(Arabic Division) in 1948–50.
22.
L.Aragon, L’Oeuvre Poétique, vol.
VII, Paris, 1977, pp. 115f.
23.
Berberova, Zheleznaya
zhenshchina, p. 269.
24.
Pravda, 6
June 1936, p. 2.
25.
One of the special copies
is preserved in the Moscow Gorky Museum.
26.
P.Herbart, La Ligne de
Force, Paris, 1980, p. 105.
27.
Nike, ‘K voprosu o smerti
M.Gorkogo’, p. 344, quoting Les Cahiers de la Petite Dame
(1929–1937)—‘Cahiers André Gide’,
1974, vol. 5, pp. 539 and 547. Also R.Maurer, André Gide
et l’URSS, Bern, 1983, pp. 53 and 96.
28.
Ehrenburg recalls in his
memoirs certain documents with ‘yellowing’ pages that Khrushchev found in
Stalin’s archive after Stalin’s death and sent to Ehrenburg. He does not
explain their nature, but clearly the documents were incriminating and were
used by Stalin to blackmail Ehrenburg. See I.Ehrenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn’,
Moscow, 1967.
29.
Izvestia, 18
June 1936, p. 2. See also Michele Nike, K voprosu…, pp. 344–6.
30.
Pravda, 19
June 1936.
31.
Pravda, 20
June 1936. Also Kolkhoznik, no. 6, 1936; Michele Nike, K voprosu…,
p. 335, fnn. 31–3.
32.
Alexander Orlov, Tainaya
istoria stalinskikh prestuplenii, New York, Jerusalem, Paris, 1983, p. 267.
33.
See Chapter 29 below.
34.
A.Loginov, ‘Tri versii
smerti Gorkogo’, Argumenty i fakty, no. 1, January 1989.
35.
Nike, K voprosu o
smerti Gorkogo, p. 337, fn. 43. The letter of M.Braun, dated 16 December
1986, is in Nike’s archive.
36.
B.Gerland, ‘Kto otravil
Gorkogo’, Sotsialistichesky vestnik, no. 6, 1954, pp. 109f.
37.
I.D.Levine, I
Rediscover Russia, New York, 1964, p. 175.
‘THEY’LL SWALLOW IT’
In 1935 Stalin decided to
stage a show trial finally to destroy Kamenev and Zinoviev, whom he now branded
podlye dvurushniki (vile double-dealers), suggesting that they had been
Okhrana agents-provocateur.1 He ordered Yagoda to prepare
documentary ‘proof’ to support this charge.2 In June 1935 Stalin
appointed Andrey Vyshinsky to the post of State Prosecutor and assigned to him the
leading role in the show trial. He first met Vyshinsky in 1907 in Baku. At that
time Vyshinsky was a Menshevik, but this was the least blemish on his record.
Stalin kept in Vyshinsky’s dossier an order, signed by Vyshinsky in 1917, to
arrest Lenin. Vyshinsky kept in his safe a red file, sent to him by Stalin with
a letter signed by a ranking Comintern official and the Soviet diplomat
D.Z.Manuilsky, which Manuilsky had supposedly written to Stalin, warning him
not to trust Vyshinsky, ‘a man without principles’, who had ‘worked for the
tsarist Okhrana’. The letter contained the names of several ‘Baku Bolsheviks’
whom Vyshinsky had supposedly betrayed. Stalin forwarded this letter to
Vyshinsky, having written across its upper left corner: ‘To Comrade Vyshinsky.
I.St.’3 Manuilsky may indeed have written this letter to Stalin, but
it is also possible that Stalin had it fabricated and had given it to Vyshinsky
in order to make him ‘toe the line’, and, at the same time, to attribute to him
the betrayal of Baku Bolsheviks whom Stalin himself may have betrayed. Whoever
was the author of the letter, Stalin’s blackmail worked: Vyshinsky was his
obedient tool. The Old Bolsheviks despised Vyshinsky, whom they called ‘a rat
in human image’, and he hated them for this.4 Stalin first used
Vyshinsky’s animosity toward the Old Bolsheviks in 1928 when he appointed
Vyshinsky to preside over the Shakhty show trial.5 Vyshinsky
performed to Stalin’s satisfaction, and Stalin chose him to play the leading
role of prosecutor in the show trial of Kamenev, Zinoviev and other defendants
scheduled for the summer of 1936.
In preparation for this
trial, Stalin assigned N.I.Yezhov, whom he had appointed earlier in 1935
chairman of the Party Control Committee to supervise the interrogation of
defendants. The chief of the NKVD Secret Political Administration,
G.A.Molchanov, was given the responsibility of supervising a group of some 40
interrogators assigned to take depositions from the defendants. Yezhov
announced Stalin’s order that each NKVD interrogator should have on his desk at
all times the text of the 7 April 1935 law allowing the death sentence to be
passed on children of 12 years and over.6 Three hundred members of
the opposition, many of them parents and grandparents, were brought to Moscow
from prisons, camps and places of exile. This group was deemed by Stalin to be
a large enough pool of people from which to draw a sizable number of defendants
who could be coerced into signing self-incriminating depositions to save their
children and grandchildren.
they planned to
assassinate Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and Kaganovich, and that their ultimate
goal was the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union. This Politburo
information, Molchanov claimed, was ‘absolutely reliable’.7 The
interrogators had to force the defendants to confess their roles in the plot,
the details of which had been provided by Stalin who probably convinced himself
that the plot indeed existed. But to buttress his conviction, he felt the need
to force the defendants to confess their involvement in it. When some of his
subordinates dared to suggest that many people at home and abroad would not
believe these accusations against Old Bolsheviks, Stalin’s contemptuous reply
was: ‘Never mind, they’ll swallow it!’8
Stalin created the show
trial scenario in which true events in his life appeared in the ‘confessions’
of the defendants in distorted but recognizable versions where the truth was
turned upside down and projected on to innocent people. For instance, in 1930,
soon after the execution of Blumkin, Stalin had ordered a GPU agent Valentine
Olberg to infiltrate Trotsky’s circle in order to win Trotsky’s confidence and
organize his assassination. Trotsky, however, distrusted Olberg and ousted him.9
In preparation for the Zinoviev- Kamenev show trial, Stalin decided to use
Olberg again, but in a different role. Olberg was ordered to write a report,
accusing several students of plotting to assassinate Stalin during a parade on
Red Square. Molchanov explained to Olberg that he was chosen to help the party
in exposing Trotsky at the forthcoming show trial. Molchanov promised Olberg
that he would be set free and appointed to an important position. Olberg signed
a deposition, stating that Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov had sent him to the Soviet
Union to organize a terrorist act against Stalin, and that Sedov was an agent of
the Gestapo and that Trotsky was aware of it.
But Stalin decided that
the testimony of Olberg was not convincing enough, and ordered Molchanov to
force two more NKVD agents, Fritz David and K.B.Berman- Yurin, to ‘confess’
that in December 1932 they had met Trotsky in Copenhagen and had received from
him the assignment to assassinate Stalin and other Politburo members. This
invention, too, had a particle of truth turned upside down: a GPU agent, Yakov
Sobol, had met Trotsky in Copenhagen in 1932 on Stalin’s orders and had
attempted to gain his confidence in order to murder him; the attempt failed.10
None of the defendants was
directly accused of being an Okhrana agent, but one episode from Stalin’s
Okhrana career appeared in a disguised form in the confession of the defendant
E.S.Holtzman, who was forced to testify that in 1932 he had met Trotsky’s son
Lev Sedov in Berlin and arranged to go with him to Copenhagen for a conference
with Trotsky. ‘I agreed’, Holtzman testified, ‘but told him that we could not go
together for reasons of secrecy. I arranged with Sedov to be in Copenhagen
within two or three days, to put up at the Hotel Bristol, and to meet him
there. I went to the hotel straight from the station, and met Sedov in the
lounge. At about 10 am we went to Trotsky.’ Holtzman testified that Trotsky had
told him that ‘it was necessary to remove Stalin’ and ‘to choose cadres of
responsible people fit for the task’.11 In fact, Iosif Dzhugashvili
had gone to the Hotel Bristol in 1906 to meet an Okhrana officer, who
introduced him to the chief of the Okhrana Foreign Agency, Arkady Garting.12
When Holtzman’s testimony
was published in the Soviet press, Trotsky immediately declared that it was
entirely false. Danish newspapers also declared Holtzman’s testimony a
fabrication, informing their readers that the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen had
been demolished in 1917, that is, 15 years before Holtzman’s alleged meeting
with
Trotsky’s son Sedov. The
‘Hotel Bristol scandal’ attracted the attention of the John Dewey Commission of
Inquiry, which had been organized in the US to investigate the Moscow show
trials. In its published report the Commission stated: ‘The fact that there was
not a Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen in 1932 is now a matter of common knowledge.
It would, therefore, have been obviously impossible for Holtzman to meet Sedov
in the lobby of the Hotel Bristol.’13 Stalin did not blame himself
for the mistake. ‘What the devil did you need a hotel for?’ he shouted at the
NKVD chiefs. ‘You ought to have said they met at the railway station. A railway
station is always there!’14
According to Stalin’s
scenario, besides Zinoviev and Kamenev, one of the most important defendants at
the show trial was Ivan Nikitich Smirnov, a Civil War hero and close friend of
Trotsky. Stalin wanted Smirnov to confess that he had received ‘coded
instructions’ from Trotsky to organize a terrorist attempt on Stalin’s life.
Smirnov denied the accusations, pointing out that he could not have committed
the crimes of which he was accused, if only because he had been in prison since
1 January 1933. Yagoda’s assistant Y.D.Agranov, who was assigned to interrogate
Smirnov, said to Stalin: ‘I am afraid that we won’t be able to accuse Smirnov.
He, after all, was in prison for a number of years.’ Stalin gave Agranov an
angry look and replied: ‘Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid, that’s all!’ Agranov
arrested Sergey Mrachkovsky, also a Civil War hero and Smirnov’s friend and
used him to break Smirnov. Mrachkovsky suffered from a mental disorder—he
believed himself to be the greatest military strategist of all time—and Stalin
was always quick to capitalize on people with mental problems. In 1932 Stalin
urged Mrachkovsky to attack the opposition and offered him the post of
commander of a large military region, on the condition that Mrachkovsky end his
friendship with Smirnov and his relationship with the opposition. ‘Break up
with them’, Stalin urged Mrachkovsky. ‘What is binding you, a famous worker, to
this Jewish Sanhedrin?’ When he was arrested, Mrachkovsky expressed regret that
he had not followed Stalin’s advice. During a face-to-face confrontation with
Smirnov, he said: ‘Zinoviev and Kamenev have already agreed to testify. If they
agreed to do this, it means that there is no other way out.’ Smirnov was stunned.
‘I will remind you, Ivan Nikitich’, said Mrachkovsky, ‘that I gave myself to
the disposal of the Party. It means that I will have to testify against you in
court!’ Smirnov replied: ‘I always knew you were a coward.’
Several days later Agranov
showed Smirnov a deposition signed by his former wife, Safonova, who stated
that in 1932 Smirnov had received ‘terrorist instructions’ from Trotsky. During
an arranged confrontation between Smirnov and Safonova, she, sobbing, pleaded
with her former husband to save her and himself by agreeing to testify at the
trial. ‘Then the whole world would be looking at all of you’, she explained,
‘and they would not dare to shoot you.’ Smirnov agreed to testify on the
condition that Safonova would not be hurt.
When it was reported to
Stalin that Zinoviev and Kamenev had ‘held firm’ and refused to sign
incriminating depositions, he shouted: ‘Tell them—this goes for Zinoviev and
Kamenev—that no matter what they do, they will not stop the advance of history.
The only thing they can do is die or save their hides. Work on them until they
crawl on their bellies with their confessions in their teeth.’ When the chief
of the NKVD Economic Administration, L.G.Mironov, reported to Stalin that
Kamenev refused to confess and that there was little hope he could be broken,
Stalin asked: ‘Do you think that Kamenev will not confess? Do you know how much
our state weighs, with all the factories,
machines, the army with
all the arma-ments, and the navy?’ Mironov did not know what to make of Stalin’s
question, but Stalin insisted on an answer. Feeling like a schoolboy failing an
examination, Mironov said: ‘Nobody knows that, Iosif Vissarionovich. It is in
the realm of astronomical figures.’ Stalin goaded him: ‘Well, and can one man
withstand the pressure of that astronomical weight?’ Mironov’s answer was no.
‘So, don’t tell me anymore that Kamenev, or any other defendant, can withstand
this pressure’, Stalin concluded the lesson. ‘Don’t come to report to me until
you have in this briefcase of yours Kamenev’s confession.’
Zinoviev, too, refused to
sign a confession. Stalin told Yezhov to offer him a deal. Zinoviev was brought
to the office of Agranov. Also present were Yezhov, Molchanov and Mironov.
Yezhov conducted the interrogation, constantly glancing at the list of Stalin’s
instructions. He stated at the outset that Zinoviev must help the party to
‘deliver a crushing blow to Trotsky and his gang’. Zinoviev, suffering from
asthma and chronic liver disease, was very pale and his breathing was heavy.
‘What is demanded of me?’ he asked. Yezhov said the Politburo wanted Zinoviev
and Kamenev to testify in court that they, in agreement with Trotsky, had
plotted the murder of Stalin and other Politburo members. Zinoviev angrily
refused. Yezhov then read Stalin’s conditions: if Zinoviev voluntarily agreed
to face an open court proceeding and confessed to everything, his life would be
spared; if he refused, he would be judged by a military tribunal behind closed
doors. In this case, he and other members of the opposition would be
liquidated. ‘Tell Stalin that I refuse…’, Zinoviev said in a weak voice. Yezhov
made a similar offer to Kamenev, but he, too, refused to sign anything. Then,
Yezhov showed Kamenev a deposition of one of the defendants, stating that Kamenev’s
son intended to assassinate Stalin and Voroshilov. Kamenev jumped to his feet
and shouted that Yezhov was a scoundrel and a grave-digger of the Revolution.
Yezhov left the room, a grimace of hate on his face. He soon summoned Kamenev
and told him that his submission to the ‘will of the Politburo’ could save his
and his son’s lives. Kamenev said nothing. Yezhov lifted the telephone receiver
and ordered Molchanov to arrest Kamenev’s son.
In July 1936 Zinoviev
requested a talk with Kamenev. Yagoda, seeing in this a sign that the chief
defendants were about to give in, wanted to deny Yezhov, and claim for himself,
the credit. He summoned Zinoviev to his office and agreed to allow he and
Kamenev talk privately, having ordered microphones be installed in the office.
During the meeting Zinoviev told Kamenev that it might be necessary to testify
at the show trial, provided Stalin personally promised that their lives would
be spared and their families and opposition members would not suffer. Kamenev,
after some wavering, agreed, on the condition that Stalin make this promise in
the presence of all Politburo members. Yagoda, Molchanov and Mironov reported
to Stalin, who, rubbing his hands, exclaimed: ‘Bravo, friends! Well done!’ A
few days later, Molchanov and Mironov delivered Zinoviev and Kamenev to
Stalin’s office in the Kremlin. Yagoda was already there. Stalin and Voroshilov
were the only Politburo members present. ‘Well, what are you going to say?’
asked Stalin. ‘We were told that our case would be discussed at the Politburo
meeting’, Kamenev protested. ‘Before you is the commission of the Politburo
that is empowered to hear everything that you say’, said Stalin. Zinoviev rose
and said that they had received many promises during the past several years,
none of which had been kept. In a halting voice and with tears in his eyes,
Zinoviev pleaded with Stalin to abandon the scheme for this show trial, which
would besmirch not only them, but the
whole party ‘as a snake
pit of intrigues, treachery and murders.’ Zinoviev fell back in his chair,
sobbing. Stalin waited for him to calm down and then in a quiet voice delivered
a long speech, ending it with the words: ‘You have only yourselves to thank if
your case ends most sadly, so gravely that it could not be worse.’ Kamenev
asked Stalin, ‘Where are the guarantees that we will not be shot?’ Stalin
looked at him with an air of amazement and exclaimed: ‘Guarantees? Precisely
what guarantee could there be here? Maybe you want an official agreement
certified by the League of Nations?’ Voroshilov stated that the two of them
‘should fall on their knees before Comrade Stalin to thank him for saving their
lives. If they do not want to save their hides, let them perish. To hell with
them!’ Stalin rose and began walking up and down the office. He called Zinoviev
and Kamenev ‘comrades’ and said, ‘we, Bolsheviks, are the pupils and heirs of
Lenin and that we do not want to spill the blood of the old Party members…’.
Stalin’s words rang with deep feeling and sincerity. Zinoviev and Kamenev
exchanged glances. Kamenev rose from his chair and said that he and Zinoviev
agreed to testify at the show trial provided they received the promise that
none of the Old Bolsheviks would be executed, that their families would not be
persecuted, and that there would be no death sentences for past participation
in the opposition. ‘This goes without saying’, said Stalin. The bargain was
struck.15
But Stalin was not
satisfied. He was consumed by the desire to wrench from Kamenev and Zinoviev a
last-minute ‘confession’ about their ties to the Okhrana and continued to
insist that Yagoda find proof that they had been Okhrana agents. Yagoda
realized that it would be impossible to force these two Old Bolsheviks to
confess to such a degrading crime and that they might refuse to testify at all.
He also understood that by ‘proof’ Stalin meant the fabrication of false
documents. This was a relatively simple task. The NKVD secret printing press
fabricated many forgeries, but Yagoda pointed out to Stalin that it was dangerous
to present such things in court because Zinoviev and Kamenev, as well as
Trotsky, would demand that they be submitted to independent experts for
analysis. He said that the best way would be to select former Okhrana officers,
who would testify that they had recruited Kamenev and Zinoviev to spy on the
revolutionary underground. Stalin agreed, but he also realized that the Okhrana
charge against Kamenev and Zinoviev would enormously complicate the
preparations for the show trial, which he wanted to start as soon as possible,
and might delay or even thwart the trial. He, therefore, abandoned the idea.16
The show trial of the
‘Trotskyite-Zinovievite Center’ opened on 19 August 1936 in the October Hall of
the Trade Union House. The hall had only 350 seats; all of them were reserved
for NKVD officers and clerks. Of the more than 300 original defendants, only 16
were to be sentenced. The rest, except for the prominent scientist Ioffe, were
executed ‘administratively’. Stalin crossed Ioffe’s name from the list of
defendants, saying: ‘Release him. He may be useful to us.’17
Prosecutor Vyshinsky read the list of charges, while the chairman of the court,
Vasily Ulrikh periodically glanced at the defendants. A sadistic bully, Ulrikh
was remembered by many NKVD officers for his brutality during his earlier
service in the Cheka.
In the course of three
days, the defendants described their crimes, among them their roles in a
conspiracy, headed by Trotsky, to assassinate Kirov and Stalin, their plans to
wreck Soviet industry and agriculture, and so on. When Mrachkovsky testified
that Smirnov had been the ‘leader of the underground center’, Smirnov made the
sarcastic
remark: ‘You need a
leader? Very well, take me!’ Laughter in the audience dispelled for a moment
the gloomy atmosphere of the trial.18 Vyshinsky’s closing speech at
the trial was a shrill tirade: ‘These mad dogs of capitalism… They killed our
Kirov, they wounded our hearts… I demand that these dogs gone mad should be
shot—every one of them!’ The defendants read their ‘final word’ approved by
Stalin who had crossed out all references to their revolutionary past,
closeness to Lenin, former posts in the party and government, and had inserted
self-denigrating epithets such as ‘dregs of society, traitors and murderers who
do not deserve any mercy’.19 When these self-flagellations had
ended, Kamenev asked permission to say a few words, addressed to his sons. One
was an air force pilot, the other an adolescent (both eventually perished). ‘No
matter what my sentence may be’, Kamenev said, ‘I, in advance, consider it
just. Don’t look back. Go forward. Together with the Soviet people, follow
Stalin.’ Kamenev sat down and covered his face with his hands. Everyone seemed
shaken. Even the faces of the judges for a fleeting moment lost their stony
expression. Zinoviev, in a voice barely audible, read his own final words,
which had Stalin’s jargon-rife insert: ‘My defective Bolshevism became
transformed into anti-Bolshevism. And through Trotskyism I arrived at Fascism.
Trotskyism is a variety of Fascism and Zinovievism is a variety of Trotskyism.’
At 2:30 am on 24 August
1936 Ulrikh announced that the defendants, without exception, were sentenced to
death by shooting. All the defendants, including the planted NKVD agents, were
executed the same night. Stalin fooled everyone, including the NKVD
interrogators, many of whom had believed that Stalin would keep his promise to
spare the lives of the defendants in exchange for their confessions.20
Yezhov, Yagoda and the
head of Stalin’s bodyguards, Karl Pauker, watched as the doomed men were led to
the cellar. Kamenev walked as if in a dream. He was shot from behind. He fell,
moaning. ‘Finish him off!’ shouted an officer, kicking Kamenev. Zinoviev was
lying on his cot with a high fever when he was told to get dressed. ‘We have
orders to transfer you to another place’, the same officer told him. Zinoviev
could not walk. The guards threw a pail of water on his face and tried to drag
him to the cellar, but even held by them he could not stand on his feet and
fell to the floor. The officer ordered the guards to push him into the nearest
empty cell and, grabbing his bushy hair and jerking his head down, put a bullet
in it. He received a citation for acting expeditiously under difficult conditions.21
According to a rumor in
NKVD circles, the 16 executed defendants, among them Kamenev and Zinoviev, were
thrown into a mass grave in Khodynka Field. But there were many ‘secret burial
grounds’ in Moscow. Khodynka Field may have become the rumored site because it
was associated in the minds of Muscovites with a mass burial there 40 years
earlier: in 1896 hundreds of people had been trampled to death there by a crowd
celebrating the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II.
After the execution of the
show trial defendants, Stalin, Yagoda and Pauker went to Stalin’s dacha
in the Caucasus, near Sochi. Before his departure on 1 September 1936 Stalin
ordered Yagoda to execute 5,000 imprisoned members of the opposition. This was
the first mass execution of party members.22 Stalin thus
strengthened his dictatorship. But another reason for this mass execution was
probably his fear, fed by rumors that were reaching him, that his Okhrana file
was in the hands of Old Bolsheviks.23 He needed to destroy them
before they were in a position to destroy him. Stalin ordered the chief of the
Secret Political Department, Molchanov, to tell NKVD interrogators that
preparations for
a new show trial were soon
to begin. Molchanov called a meeting in his office and declared: ‘This year you’ll
have to forget about vacations. The investigation is not finished: that was
just the beginning of it!’24
NOTES
1.
Krasny arkhiv,
no. 68, 1935, pp. 7–12.
2.
Alexander Orlov, ‘The
Sensational Secret Behind Damnation of Stalin’, Life, 23 April 1956.
3.
Inkvisitor
no. 6, Moscow, 1992, pp. 80–2.
4.
Robert Conquest, The
Great Terror, New York, 1973, pp. 37f.
5.
See Chapter 18 above.
6.
Alexander Orlov, Tainaya
istoria stalinskikh prestuplenii, New York, Jerusalem, Paris, 1983, p. 56.
7.
Ibid., pp. 56 and 71f.
8.
Roy Medvedev, Let History
Judge, p. 666. Also B.I.Nikolaevsky, ‘Letter of an Old Bolshevik’, p. 64;
Walter G.Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service, New York, 1939, p. 207.
9.
Orlov, Tainaya istoria,
p. 73.
10.
I.D.Levine, The Mind of
an Assassin, New York, 1959, p. 26.
11.
Zinoviev Trial,
Holtzman’s testimony, Moscow, 1936, pp. 155–78.
12.
See Chapter 6 above.
13.
Dewey Commission Report, Not
Guilty, New York, 1937, p. 85.
14.
Orlov, Tainaya istoria,
pp. 66–9.
15.
Ibid. p. 105.
16.
Alexander Orlov, ‘The
Sensational Secret Behind the Damnation of Stalin’, Life, 23 April 1956.
17.
Orlov, Tainaya istoria,
p. 88.
18.
Ibid., pp. 159–65.
19.
Conquest, The Great
Terror, pp. 167f.
20.
Orlov, Tainaya istoria,
pp. 165–9.
21.
Conquest, The Great
Terror, p. 170.
22.
Orlov, Tainaya istoria,
p. 170.
23.
See Chapter 26 below for
the rediscovery of Stalin’s Okhrana file.
24.
Orlov, Tainaya istoria,
p. 170.
THE FATAL FIND IN MENZHINSKY’S
OFFICE
During the preparations
for the Zinoviev-Kamenev show trial, Yagoda assigned to the assistant chief of
the NKVD Secret Political Department, Isaac Lvovich Shtein, the task of
locating in the NKVD archive documents of former Okhrana officers, whom Yagoda
intended to use as witnesses. These officers, according to Stalin, were needed
to ‘confirm’ that they had recruited the ‘double dealers’ Kamenev and Zinoviev
as Okhrana collaborators.1 In connection with this search, Yagoda
ordered the examination of the personal papers of Viacheslav Menzhinsky in his
old office, which had been closed and sealed after his death in May 1934.2
Around this time, it was also decided to renovate Menzhinsky’s spacious office
for Yezhov, who was spending much of his time in the Lubianka, supervising
preparations for the show trials.
Shtein, Molchanov’s
deputy, had access to the papers of the heads of the secret police, as had his
predecessor, the assistant chief of the GPU Secret Political Department,
Rabinovich, who had discovered Stalin’s Okhrana file in 1929 among
Dzerzhinsky’s papers and who had then been executed together with Blumkin.3
Shtein’s assignment was to sort through the personal papers of Menzhinsky and
to place them in the central NKVD archive. While sifting through Menzhinsky’s
papers, Shtein came across the Okhrana file of ‘Iosif Vissarionov
Dzhugashvili’. He opened it and saw a prison photograph of the young Stalin and
many documents that, at first glance, seemed to confirm the widely publicized
heroic revolutionary past of the ‘Great Soviet Leader’.4 Shtein was
elated. His first impulse was to report immediately to Yagoda that he had found
documents of extreme historical importance, proof of Stalin’s glorious deeds.
But an instinctive doubt held him back, and he began to read the contents of
the file. As he did so, his elation turned into horror when he realized that a
number of documents in the file identified Stalin as an important Okhrana
agent. He was most astounded of all by the letter of the chief of the Okhrana
Special Section, Colonel Eremin, to the director of the Department of Police,
Beletsky, in which Eremin described major points of Stalin’s Okhrana career,
and by Stalin’s letter to the assistant minister of the interior, Zolotarev, in
which Stalin complained about the ‘treachery’ of Roman Malinovsky and advised
that Malinovsky be dismissed from the Okhrana, offering himself for the
position of top Okhrana agent in the Bolshevik Party.5
that he could entrust his
find neither to Yagoda nor to his immediate superior Molchanov—both of whom
were unprincipled lackeys of Stalin. Shtein’s closest friends, with whom he had
worked since the days of the Civil War and whom he trusted, were in Kiev: the
NKVD chief in the Ukraine, V.A.Balitsky, and his deputy, Zinovy Katsnelson.
Taking Stalin’s Okhrana file with him, Shtein took a train to Kiev.
Balitsky and Katsnelson
were at first incredulous, suspecting that the documents were forgeries. But
they put them through the necessary tests and came to the conclusion that they
were genuine. Their decision was to do all they could to save the country from
the ex-Okhrana agent. As well-informed NKVD officers, they knew the extreme
difficulty of their task. Stalin surrounded himself with an army of bodyguards,
and he had the mighty NKVD apparatus with multitudes of informers and troops at
his disposal. The only force in the country that stood any chance of deposing
Stalin was the Red Army, where Balitsky had close friends: Marshal Mikhail
Tukhachevsky, first deputy commissar of defense and a candidate member of the
Central Committee, and Yan Gamarnik, also first deputy commissar of defense and
head of the political administration of the Red Army. Gamarnik was also a full
member of the Central Committee. Balitsky gave them Stalin’s Okhrana file, and
together they decided to topple Stalin.
A conspiracy, headed by
Marshal Tukhachevsky, was born. As usually happens in such cases, each of the
plotters had his own trusted friends who joined the conspiracy. Among the first
to join were Iona Yakir, the commander of the Kiev military district and a
member of the Central Committee, I.P.Uborevich, the commander of the Byelorussian
military district, and Corps Commander Boris Feldman, the chief of the main
administration of the Red Army. A number of photocopies were made of documents
in the file for the participants in the conspiracy.6 The document
most suitable for this purpose was the report of Colonel Eremin with a concise
description of Stalin’s Okhrana career. Some of the officers insisted that
Stalin be executed and his Okhrana file presented to the Central Committee.
Others thought that he should be arrested and put on trial, with his Okhrana
file used as material evidence. The decision was to lure Stalin to the military
maneuvers in the Byelorussian military district and to arrest him there.
Tukhachevsky and Gamarnik insisted that Stalin should be judged by a secret
party court. They feared that if Stalin’s ties to the Okhrana were made public,
it would discredit not only him but all the important achievements of the
Soviet Union and would undermine the very legitimacy of Soviet power.
Corps Commander Boris
Feldman was of a different opinion: he insisted that Stalin must be killed
immediately and only then should his file be submitted to the party court.
Feldman was convinced that a delay would risk the exposure of the conspiracy.
‘Don’t you see where all this is leading to?’, he asked. ‘He will strangle all
of us, one by one, like baby chicks. We must act.’ Tukhachevsky objected to
what he saw as advice to overthrow the government, and he refused to
participate.7 Procrastination was threatening to doom the
conspiracy—the widening of the circle of plotters increased the risk that
Stalin would learn about it. Indeed, Stalin was alarmed by a report that some
documents potentially harmful to him had wound up in the hands of Nikoly
Tomsky, the head of Soviet trade unions. This report came from the NKVD agent
Mark Zborovsky, who had penetrated the Paris circle of Trotsky’s supporters.
Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov, had received information about the discovery of
Stalin’s Okhrana file from the NKVD resident in Switzerland, Ignace Reiss, who,
having learned from one of the plotters about
the file’s discovery,
decided secretly to inform Trotsky about it. Trotsky, however, had long
considered any reports about Stalin’s ties to the Okhrana as fantastic
inventions, and he forbade his son to take such reports seriously. Sedov,
nevertheless, mentioned this ‘fantastic invention’ in the presence of Zborovsky
and mentioned Tomsky. American journalist and writer Isaac Don Levine, too,
learned about this report from people in Sedov’s circle.8
Stalin immediately reacted
to this report. On 23 August 1936 Vyshinsky mentioned Tomsky at the last
session of the Kamenev-Zinoviev show trial as a suspect in a pending case of
‘anti-Soviet conspiracy’ that was under investigation. On the same day, Stalin,
bringing a bottle of wine, visited Tomsky at his dacha in Bolshevo near
Moscow. Perhaps Stalin hoped Tomsky would loosen up under the influence of
alcohol and tell him what he knew about the Okhrana file. For a while Stalin
and Tomsky spoke alone in Tomsky’s study. Suddenly, the door was flung open and
Stalin stormed out, followed by Tomsky, who was cursing him loudly. The car
with Stalin and his bodyguards sped away. A few minutes later, Tomsky’s son
Yury heard a shot; Tomsky had committed suicide.9
NOTES
1.
Alexander Orlov, ‘The
Sensational Secret Behind [the] Damnation of Stalin’, Life, 23 April
1956. Also, R.S.Osinina (V.Svechinsky’s aunt Rosa) worked as a secretary with
Balitsky, Katznelson and Shtein in the Kharkov GPU before 1934. She remembered
I.L.Shtein well. Taped interview with R.S.Osinina in Haifa, Israel on 18 August
1975. See also F.D.Volkov, Vzlet i padenie Stalina, Moscow, 1992, p. 18.
2.
See Chapter 22 above.
3.
See Chapter 19 above.
4.
This photograph was later
published by Stalin as a prison photograph taken in 1913.
5.
See Chapter 10 above.
6.
Orlov, ‘The Sensational
Secret,’ pp. 35f.
7.
Vitaly Rapoport and Yury
Alekseev, Izmena rodine, London, 1988, p. 359.
8.
I.D.Levine, ‘Stalin
Suspected of Forcing Trials to Cover His Past’, Journal American, 3
March 1938. Also Levine’s interview with the author.
9.
Robert C.Tucker (ed.), Stalinism,
New York, 1977, p. 213.
THE ‘TUKHACHEVSKY DOSSIER’
While Marshal Tukhachevsky
and his group of officers were waiting for an opportune moment to depose
Stalin, he, without knowing of their plot, was fabricating and accumulating
‘evidence’ for a new show trial with Tukhachevsky as the chief villain. Stalin
nursed an old grudge against Tukhachevsky dating back to the 19208 when he had
started to gather what became known to history as the ‘Tukhachevsky Dossier’.
During the First World War, Tukhachevsky, an officer in the Russian Army, had
been taken prisoner by the Germans. After the war he had returned to Russia and
joined the Bolshevik Party and the Red Army. Because of his Polish name, Lenin
and Trotsky appointed him commander of the Warsaw front during the
Soviet-Polish war of 1920. Tukhachevsky blamed Stalin for the Red Army’s defeat
at Warsaw: Stalin had delayed carrying out Trotsky’s order to send in the First
Cavalry to bolster the Red Army at Warsaw. Stalin, in turn, called Tukhachevsky
‘the demon of the Civil War’.1
In 1926 Stalin fabricated
an unsigned letter to Mikhail Frunze, the commissar of defense, complaining
about Tukhachevsky. Frunze wrote on this letter: ‘The Party has always trusted
Comrade Tukhachevsky, trusts him now, and will always trust him in the future.’
After the execution of Blumkin in December 1929 several hundred former tsarist
officers were arrested in preparation for the planned show trial of the
kidnapped General Kutepov. Two of the arrested officers signed depositions
stating that they had taken part in a ‘monarchist plot’ headed by Tukhachevsky.
Stalin sent these to Sergo Ordzhonikidze with the note: ‘I am asking you to
familiarize yourself with this. Since the possibility of it is not excluded, it
is possible.’ In 1935, the NKVD received a report about a plot in the Red Army,
headed by ‘General Turguev’. (Tukhachevsky visited Germany in 1931 on an
official mission, using the pseudonym Turguev.) On receiving this report,
Yagoda shrugged it off as ‘not serious material’ and ordered it deposited in
the archive.2 But Stalin considered this ‘material’ very serious.
“degenerate” state like
France!’4 Neither Litvinov nor Tukhachevsky knew that Stalin through
his personal agents, was secretly attempting to enter into an alliance with
Hitler.
Stalin’s courting of
Hitler began after Hitler, on 30 June 1934, crushed the putsch led by Ernst
Roehm, the chief of staff of the SA and leader of the Brown Shirts. To Stalin,
the bloody purge Hitler carried out suggested a kindred spirit. NKVD and Soviet
military intelligence agents expressed the opinion that the Roehm purge was an
indication of a deepening crisis in Germany, signaling the impending downfall
of Hitler. Stalin disagreed and stated that, to the contrary, Hitler had
enhanced his power by liquidating Roehm.5 Hitler may well have been
the example that encouraged Stalin to purge the Old Bolsheviks and murder
Kirov. Stalin assigned to his personal agent David Kandelaki, a member of the
criminal gang in Batum to which Stalin had also belonged some 30 years earlier,
the task of initiating friendly contact with Hitler’s circle.6
Litvinov and Tukhachevsky were sure to voice objections to this policy on
ideological, political and strategic grounds.
Defendants at the
Kamenev-Zinoviev trial testified about a ‘terrorist military group’ of Red Army
officers, mentioning the names of Shmidt, Kuzmichev and others, which added
‘evidence’ to the ‘Tukhachevsky Dossier’. It was reported that the case of
military officers was under investigation.7 D.Shmidt, a tank
division commander in the Kiev military district, and B.Kuzmichev, the chief of
staff of an Air Force unit, were arrested at the beginning of July 1936 and
accused of taking part in a ‘counter-revolutionary plot’.8 Shmidt
had supported the opposition in the 19208. During a conference in the Kremlin
in 1927 he had come up to Stalin and, grabbing the hilt of his saber, had
threatened to lop off Stalin’s ears. Stalin turned pale but said nothing.9
The episode was taken as a joke then, but Stalin had no sense of humor when it
came to slights against him, and he had a long memory.
Shmidt was interrogated by
the chief of the Special Department, M.I. Gai, and his deputy, Z.M.Ushakov.
When the commander of the Kiev military district, Iona Yakir, received
permission to see Shmidt, he barely recognized him. To Yakir, Shmidt looked
like a ‘dweller of the planet Mars’. Shmidt told Yakir that all his
‘confessions’ had been obtained under torture. Yakir reported this to
Voroshilov, who later called Yakir and told him that Shmidt had again confirmed
his earlier testimony. Voroshilov did not reveal that after Yakir’s
intervention Shmidt had been forced to confess that he had prepared a revolt in
his tank division on Yakir’s instruction.10
In August 1936 Vitaly
Primakov, the deputy commander of the Leningrad military district, was
arrested.11 (Louis Aragon and his wife Elsa Triole had stayed in
Primakov’s home a few days before Maxim Gorky’s death.12) Whether
Primakov was aware of Stalin’s intrigue against Gorky is not known, but the
main reason for his arrest was Stalin’s desire to liquidate ‘Tukhachevsky’s
nest’ by forcing his friends, among them Primakov, to sign testimonies
implicating Tukhachevsky. At the beginning of September 1936 another friend of
Tukhachevsky’s, Vitovt Putna, the military attaché in London, was recalled to
Moscow and arrested.13 As the ‘Tukhachevsky Dossier’ grew thicker
with additional ‘confessions’, the noose around the marshal’s neck was
tightening.
Toward the end of 1936 the
country faced a bizarre situation in which two files were in mortal combat for
survival. The Okhrana file with genuine documents, exposing Stalin as a tsarist
agent provocateur, was competing with the fabricated ‘Tukhachevsky
Dossier’, containing fraudulent ‘proof of Tukhachevsky’s treason. These two
files were
at the center of two
conspiracies that depended on whether Stalin or Tukhachevsky would strike
first. Stalin did not suspect that his Okhrana file was in the hands of
Tukhachevsky, while Tukhachevsky did not know that he had been singled out by
Stalin as his next victim.
During the
Kamenev-Zinoviev show trial, the defendants mentioned the names of the leading
Party officials—Bukharin, Rykov, Piatakov, Radek, and Uglanov—all of whom
Stalin intended to put on trial together with Tukhachevsky. But Stalin met with
opposition from Ordzhonikidze and the Politburo and Central Committee members
Kosior, Chubar and Postyshev. On 10 September 1936 Pravda published a
brief note stating that the case against Bukharin and Rykov had been terminated
due to lack of criminal evidence.14 In the middle of September 1936,
Stalin received Yagoda’s report on the public’s reaction to the Kamenev-Zinoviev
trial. Yagoda mentioned public opinion abroad, where the obvious fraudulence of
the ‘Hotel Bristol’ testimony reinforced the opinion that the trial was nothing
but Stalin’s revenge on his political enemies. Yagoda also brought to Stalin’s
attention the growing sympathy among the Soviet population for the executed
defendants and the appearance on the walls of factories of such slogans as:
‘Down with the Murderer of the Leaders of October!’ and, ‘What a Pity They Did
Not Finish Off the Georgian Skunk!’15 Stalin was enraged. He
interpreted Yagoda’s report as advice to refrain from further show trials and,
in particular, to abandon the planned trial of Tukhachevsky. Having decided to
stage the trial, Stalin was annoyed by Yagoda’s apparent advice to stop the
purge. He was already dissatisfied with Yagoda’s services, mostly because the
murder of Kirov had been poorly managed and because Yagoda had failed to
fabricate ‘proofs’ of Kamenev’s and Zinoviev’s ties to the Okhrana.
Dissatisfaction with somebody invariably resulted in Stalin’s suspecting that
person of disloyalty. On 25 September 1936 Stalin sent a telegram to the
Politburo members, signed by him and his new comrade-in-arms, Andrey Zhdanov.
The telegram read: ‘We consider it absolutely necessary and urgent that Comrade
Yezhov be appointed to head the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs.
Yagoda has obviously proved unequal to the task of exposing the
Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc. The GPU was four years late in this matter.
All party officials and most of the NKVD agents in the region are talking about
this.’16 Stalin suggested that the state security organs should have
‘exposed’ the members of the opposition four years earlier, in 1932. This was
the year when the Riutin Platform was circulating among party members. As a
result of Stalin’s telegram, Yagoda was moved to the post of commissar of
communications and Yezhov became the head of the NKVD.
At the end of 1936 Riutin
was still alive. He had been incarcerated in the Suzdal Special Purpose Prison
since the end of 1932, which made it difficult to accuse him of any new crime,
but Stalin decided to include Riutin in the cast of defendants at the show
trial of the ‘Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center’, planned for January 1937. On
Stalin’s order Genrikh Liushkov, the deputy chief of the NKVD Special
Department, sent an ‘absolutely secret’ order to deliver to the Lubianka
‘political prisoner Riutin…in a separate train compartment under increased
security and a special convoy’. On his arrival at the Lubianka, Riutin refused
to sign any deposition and demanded paper to write a letter to Stalin. Liushkov
gave him three uneven sheets of brown wrapping paper. Riutin wrote on them that
he did not consider himself guilty of anything, was not going to incriminate
himself and others falsely, and was not afraid of death; he dated this
statement 4 November 1936.
Stalin read Riutin’s statement and ordered it to be placed in his personal
archive, where it stayed for half a century until being published during the
era of glasnost.17 Toward the end of 1936 the telephone rang
in the apartment of Riutin’s sons. Liushkov called from his Lubianka office,
and he handed the receiver to Riutin. This was the last time Riutin’s family
heard from him. This telephone conversation did not produce results: Riutin
refused to sign any testimony. He thus cheated Stalin out of the pleasure of
seeing the self-abasement of his hated enemy. Riutin’s resistance made him
unsuitable for the show trial and Stalin, enraged, ordered his execution. On 10
January 1937 Riutin was brought before the chairman of the Military Collegium
of the Supreme Court, Vasily Ulrikh, who asked the usual questions and then
recorded that Riutin refused to sign any testimony and to make his ‘final
statement’.18 Immediately after the passing of the death sentence,
Riutin was taken to the Lubianka basement and shot in the back of his head. His
two sons were also shot, and his wife imprisoned and tortured to death in 1947.
Only his daughter, Luba, survived.19
According to Stalin’s
plan, the defendants at the forthcoming show trial of the ‘AntiSoviet
Trotskyite Center’ had to confess that they had ‘intended to seize power’. When
one of the defendants, Karl Radek, was arrested, he complained to his
interrogator Molchanov: ‘After all I have done for Stalin—such ingratitude.’ He
had in mind his betrayal of Blumkin in December 1929, the book he had written
glorifying Stalin, and the numerous articles in which he had maligned Trotsky
and the opposition. Radek naively expected gratitude when he should have feared
Stalin above all others: anyone who knew the true reason for Blumkin’s
execution—his possession of Stalin’s Okhrana file—was bound to be on Stalin’s
list of enemies. Radek pleaded with Molchanov to arrange a meeting between him
and Stalin. Initially, Molchanov refused. Radek was worked over by
interrogators, who put him through a ‘conveyor’—continuous questioning for days
and nights without sleep. He was amazingly resilient. When Molchanov was
conducting the interrogation, Radek said: ‘All right, I agree to confess that I
wanted to murder all of the members of the Politburo and place Hitler on the
Kremlin throne. But to my confessions I want to add one small detail that,
besides those co-conspirators that you have attached to me, I had one more
conspirator, with the name of Molchanov.’20 Frightened, Molchanov
reported Radek’s request to see Stalin to Yezhov, stating that Radek refused to
sign any testimony until he spoke to Stalin. Yezhov told Radek to write a
letter to Stalin, asking for a meeting with him. The meeting was arranged.
Radek was led into Yezhov’s office, where Stalin was waiting for him. Stalin
promised to spare his life if he agreed to testify in court to having been
Trotsky’s agent and if he mentioned Tukhachevsky in his testimony. Radek agreed
and on returning to his cell asked for a pen and ink. He composed his
testimony, eloquently describing Stalin’s fantastic charge of a Trotsky-Hitler
conspiracy and assigning to himself and other defendants suitable roles. Stalin
was delighted with Radek’s creation and ordered the testimonies of all the
other defendants rewritten to conform to Radek’s new version.21
Radek’s version sped up
preparations for the planned show trial. Stalin was in a good mood. On 20
December 1936 he invited top NKVD chiefs to his dacha to celebrate his
57th birthday and the eighteenth anniversary of the founding of the Cheka, the
original Soviet secret police. Newspapers published the usual congratulations
from ‘toiling people’ all over the country and from abroad, where Stalin had
many admirers in ‘progressive circles’. As usual, the guests soon got drunk and
asked Karl Pauker to
perform the scene of
Zinoviev’s execution, which they knew Stalin relished. Stalin always enjoyed it
when Pauker, a barber and the valet in the Budapest Operetta before the First
World War, performed ‘comical’ scenes and told Jewish anecdotes with a Yiddish
accent, which Stalin liked the most.22
Another reason for
Stalin’s good mood was that he was confident that he would soon be able to add
more ‘criminal evidence’ to the Tukhachevsky Dossier’. He ordered A.Slutsky,
the chief of the NKVD Foreign Department, to plant abroad fraudulent ‘proof’ of
Tukhachevsky’s links with Hitler and Trotsky. On arriving in Paris, Slutsky summoned
Walter Krivitsky, the head of Soviet military intelligence in Europe, and told
him that his mission was ‘not a routine affair’. He said that the job ‘involves
a case of such colossal importance that I have had to drop all my other work
and come here to put it through…. We have got to have two men who can play the
part of thoroughbred German officers. And we have to have them at once. This
job is so important that nothing else matters.’23 Krivitsky said
that his two best agents would report to Slutsky shortly. Slutsky ordered the
two agents to impersonate officers of the German general staff and to give a
film roll with a plan of a German attack on Czechoslovakia to a Soviet
official, who would meet them in a certain café in Prague. Slutsky ordered
the NKVD resident in the Soviet embassy in Berlin, Israilovich, to meet
‘important officers of the German general staff’, who would give him ‘espionage
information’. At the same time Slutsky notified the Czechoslovak police of the
meeting with ‘German spies’. Israilovich was arrested by the Czechoslovak
surveillance agents and during interrogation ‘revealed’ that the German
officers were his agents and that the film he had received from them contained
photographs of secret documents from the German general staff. The police
released him. President Edvard Beneš of Czechoslovakia took the ‘secret
documents’ seriously and was alarmed by their ‘proof’ of German conspiracy with
Tukhachevsky. He instructed the Czech ambassador in Moscow to report the
intercepted information ‘if possible, to Stalin personally’. Stalin thanked
Beneš warmly for the ‘friendly act’ and intimated that Israilovich had in fact
maintained contact with German military intelligence as a go-between for
Tukhachevsky.24 Beneš sent this information to the British and
French, who also took it very seriously.25 Stalin put this
incriminating ‘evidence’ into the ‘Tukhachevsky Dossier’.
But Stalin was not yet
satisfied. He developed a scheme to plant with Czech intelligence a briefcase
full of ‘espionage documents’ implicating Tukhachevsky. At the end of December
1936, Slutsky had arrived in Prague with a briefcase containing a photocopy of
a German ‘military plan for the seizure of the Sudetenland’ and several forged
passports, a doctored photograph of Trotsky posing with a group of German
officers, several documents with Tukhachevsky’s signature, and a formula for
making invisible ink. Slutsky assigned an NKVD informer to plant this briefcase
in the apartment of a local Trotskyite by the name of Grilevich and then
informed the Czech police that Grilevich was a German spy. Suspecting a
provocation, the Czech police did not act on this information. Slutsky
attempted to have Grilevich arrested, employing various machinations, including
bribing Czech police officials—without success. An alarming telegram from
Yezhov arrived: ‘Ivan Vasilievich wants to know results of operation.’ ‘Ivan
Vasilievich’ was Stalin’s NKVD codename. (The name had special meaning for
Stalin: it included his pre-Revolutionary codenames ‘Ivanov’, ‘Ivanovich’ and
‘Vasiliev’.) Slutsky knew that when ‘Ivan Vasilievich’ wanted to ‘know the
results’, this
meant that these results
had better be delivered immediately. He paced his office in the Soviet embassy
in Prague, cursing the ‘shirkers and loafers’ of the Czech police. ‘Drunkards!’
he fumed. ‘If they had been told that Grilevich had hidden unlicensed vodka,
they would have come running at once, but when they are given a serious
political case, they sit like sleepy flies.’26
Slutsky returned to
Moscow. During a discussion Stalin suddenly turned to him and told him that it
was imperative for Piatakov to testify that he had received the instruction to
assassinate Stalin from Trotsky personally during a trip to Oslo in December
1935. Piatakov had gone to Berlin in 1935 on an official mission to purchase
heavy machinery. Stalin stated that Piatakov had used this opportunity to
travel to Oslo. At the next conference Slutsky reported to Stalin that
Piatakov’s trip to Oslo from Berlin was quite improbable in view of the facts
that the round trip there would have taken at least two days and that, while in
Berlin, Piatakov had had daily appointments with German business leaders, who
must have kept records of their meetings with him, and their records might
prove that on the day of Piatakov’s alleged trip to Oslo he was actually in
Berlin. Stalin was not swayed. ‘What you said about the train schedule might be
true’, he said, ‘but why couldn’t Piatakov fly to Oslo in an airplane? Such a
flight there and back could most likely be made in one night.’ Slutsky replied
that planes carried only a few passengers and their names were registered by
the airlines; it would be easy to verify that Piatakov had not flown to Oslo.
Stalin was getting angry. ‘It must be said that Piatakov flew in a special
plane’, he said with an air of finality. ‘For such a job the German authorities
would gladly provide an airplane.’ Remembering the Hotel Bristol debacle,
Stalin ordered Slutsky to avoid mentioning any hotel in Piatakov’s confession.27
The conversation dismayed Slutsky. He understood that Stalin wanted to avoid
repeating the Hotel Bristol mistake, but he was at a loss how to explain why
Stalin was stubbornly insisting on this patently fictitious meeting of Piatakov
with Trotsky in Oslo, just as he had earlier insisted on the fictitious meeting
of Holtsman with Lev Sedov at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen. Slutsky had no
idea about the meetings of Iosif Dzhugashvili with the chief of the Okhrana
Foreign Agency, Arkady Garting, in 1906 in Copenhagen and in 1907 in Oslo, and
he did not have any conception of Stalin’s irresistible urge to attribute
events of his life to his victims and to re-enact these events many times over
by attributing them to innocent people. Searching for explanations to Stalin’s
inventions, Slutsky at times mentioned his doubts to his friends. Rumors about
such conversations were bound to reach Stalin at some point.
The show trial of the
‘Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center’, at which Piatakov was the chief defendant,
opened on 23 January 1937 in the cold, dark October Hall of the House of Trade
Unions. The judges—Ulrikh, Matulevich and Rychkov—sat facing the carefully
selected audience. The prosecutor, Vyshinsky, sat behind his desk on their
left. The defendants, one after another, ‘confessed’ their assigned roles in
sabotage, espionage and plots to assassinate Soviet leaders on the orders of
Trotsky and Hitler. Piatakov told about his flight to Oslo and meeting with
Trotsky. Radek in his testimony mentioned as if in passing the name of
Tukhachevsky, who, he said, did not take part in anti-Soviet activities.28
When Radek’s testimony was
published, General Walter Krivitsky, the chief of Soviet military intelligence
in Europe, read it in a Hague newspaper. Turning to his wife, he said,
‘Tukhachevsky is doomed.’ She disagreed. ‘But Radek again and again absolved
Tukhachevsky from any
connection with the conspiracy’, she reasoned. ‘Exactly’, Krivitsky said. ‘Does
Tukhachevsky need absolution from Radek? Do you think for a moment that Radek
would dare on his own accord to drag Tukhachevsky’s name into the trial?… Don’t
you understand that Radek speaks for Vyshinsky, and Vyshinsky for Stalin! I
tell you, Tukhachevsky is doomed.’29 Krivitsky was not mistaken.
The chief defendant,
although not present in court, was Trotsky, who was accused of meeting Adolf
Hitler and Rudolf Hess for the purpose of coordinating the assassination of
Stalin. In this accusation, as in other charges invented by Stalin, there was
some perverse correlation with actual events. In reality, it was Stalin who at
that moment was planning an attempt on Trotsky’s life while Stalin’s agents
were engaged in secret negotiations with Hitler’s aides. At the very time when
the defendants were confessing their crimes, Stalin’s personal agent David
Kandelaki met on 29 January 1937 with Hitler’s trusted intermediary Dr Hjalmar
Schacht and offered to conclude a Soviet- German treaty. Two weeks later, on 11
February 1937, Hitler wrote to Schacht that ‘if Russia were to develop further
along the lines of absolute despotism supported by the army’, then this
proposal would certainly be considered.30
On 30 January 30 1937 the
show trial came to an end. Thirteen defendants were sentenced to death and
four, among them Radek, received prison terms. Radek’s face lit up when he
heard his 10-year prison sentence pronounced. He turned to his fellow
defendants, shrugged, and flashed a guilty smile at the audience. The same
night, the 13 condemned men were shot.31
Soon after the executions
the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten reported that ‘Piatakov’s conference
with Trotsky in Oslo was quite improbable’, because no airplanes had landed at
the Oslo airport during December 1935 when Piatakov supposedly traveled there.
Another newspaper Arbeiderbladet, the organ of the Norwegian Social
Democratic Party, reported that not a single plane had landed at the Oslo
airport during the whole period between September 1935 and May 1936. To counter
these charges, Vyshinsky produced a document from the Soviet foreign trade
mission stating that according to official information planes could land
at the Oslo airport year round, which was true. But the fact remained that no
airplane had landed there during the period in question. Trotsky cited
this fact, as well as the ‘Hotel Bristol’ mix-up to prove that the
‘confessions’ were ‘false from beginning to end’.32
The execution of Piatakov
was a great blow to his superior, Ordzhonikidze. For years, Piatakov had been
deputy commissar of heavy industry. Ordzhonikidze, a poorly educated man, was
totally dependent on him and pleaded with Stalin not to persecute him. When he
did not prevail, he arranged a personal meeting with Piatakov in prison. He
told Piatakov that Stalin had given his word of honor not to execute him if he
signed the self-incriminating testimony. Piatakov agreed to sign. After his
execution, Ordzhonikidze realized that he had been cast in the role of a dupe
shamelessly used by Stalin. He angrily accused Stalin of breaking his word. To
scare him, Stalin ordered his Kremlin apartment searched. When Ordzhonikidze
called Stalin and complained, Stalin said, ‘That’s nothing extraordinary. The
NKVD is the sort of organization that’s capable of searching my place too.’
Then Stalin read to Ordzhonikidze some complaints against him. ‘See what people
say about you!’ he admonished him. Ordzhonikidze cursed Stalin and hung up.33
On 18 February 1937 Stalin
ordered Poskrebyshev, the chief of his personal secretariat, to go to
Ordzhonikidze’s apartment and shoot him.34 At 5:30 pm
Ordzhonikidze’s wife,
Zinaida, heard a shot. When she looked out the window, she saw a man running
across the Kremlin lawn. She went into her husband’s study, found him dead, and
called Stalin, whose apartment was nearby. ‘Heavens, what a tricky illness!’
Stalin said, feigning shock and sadness. ‘The man lies down to have a rest, and
the result is a seizure and a heart attack!’ The official medical report stated
that the death resulted from ‘paralysis of the heart’. Commissar of Health G.Kaminsky
and two Kremlin doctors, Levin and Khodorovsky, were forced to sign this
report. (Kaminsky was soon afterwards secretly shot, Levin and Khodorovsky were
to appear as defendants at a show trial a year later.35)
Ordzhonikidze’s body was
cremated, and the urn with his ashes was placed in the Kremlin wall in the
long-vacant spot to the left of the passage to the mausoleum. Stalin ordered a
pompous funeral to honor ‘our beloved Sergo’. Khrushchev delivered an emotional
oration in which, choking with tears and anger, he referred to the ‘enemies’,
stating: ‘It was they who struck a blow at thy noble heart. Piatakov, the spy,
the murderer, the enemy of the working people, is caught red-handed, caught and
condemned, crushed like a reptile.’36 At the February–March party
plenum Molotov spoke darkly about ‘the special danger of present-day saboteurs
and spies making themselves out to be Communists, ardent supporters of the
Soviet regime’.37 A show trial of ‘German spies’ headed by
Tukhachevsky was planned to start soon.
In February 1937 Slutsky
was still trying to induce the Czech police to arrest the Trotskyite Grilevich.
He sent Grilevich registered letters in coded language and invisible ink,
hoping that they would be intercepted and would trigger Grilevich’s arrest.
During a stay in Paris, Slutsky visited Alexander Orlov, the Soviet
intelligence adviser to the Spanish Republican government, who was recuperating
from an illness in a Paris hospital. Slutsky told Orlov about the ‘flight of
Piatakov to Oslo,’ the assignment of two ‘German officers, the Grilevich
provocation and other strange fabrications of “Ivan Vasilievich”’. Orlov could
find no logical explanation for these strange stories.
Soon after Slutsky left,
Orlov had another visitor—his cousin Zinovy Katsnelson, the deputy chief of the
Ukrainian NKVD, who happened to arrive in Paris on official business and
learned of Orlov’s illness. Katsnelson confided to Orlov what he knew about the
discovery by Shtein of Stalin’s Okhrana file and about the documents in the
file exposing Stalin as an ex-Okhrana agent. He also told Orlov about the
conspiracy of military officers to depose Stalin. His story provided some
explanation for Stalin’s bizarre behavior and a clue to his personality. Orlov,
like Katsnelson, hoped that the plot headed by Tukhachevsky to depose Stalin
would succeed.38
In March 1937 Stalin
ordered the execution of a large group of NKVD officers who had served under
Yagoda. Yezhov ordered all the chiefs of the departments besides Slutsky and
Pauker to go on ‘inspection tours’. They never returned. At the first stop
outside Moscow they were arrested and shot. Their deputies, too, were executed.
Some 3,000 NKVD officers were arrested and shot during this period. Molchanov,
the chief of the secret political department, who had managed the preparations
for the two Moscow show trials, was arrested and shot. There were many suicides
among the NKVD officers at that time. Molchanov’s deputy, Shtein, who had
discovered Stalin’s Okhrana file, also committed suicide—whether at this time
or somewhat later is not clear.39
On 18 March 1937 Yezhov
delivered a speech before newly recruited NKVD officers, devoting it to the
liquidation of ‘Yagoda’s nest’ and stating that Yagoda had been
exposed as an ‘Okhrana agent
provocateur’ who had wormed his way into the Soviet secret police to
mastermind a network of spies in the NKVD and had attempted to escape abroad
‘with a suitcase full of valiuta’. Stalin attributed to Yagoda not only
the Okhrana past, but also projected on to him Blumkin’s attempt to flee abroad
with a suitcase full of foreign currency. Despite this grave charge, Yagoda
remained free for two more weeks; he was arrested on 3 April 1937. When brought
to Slutsky’s office, Yagoda said: ‘You may put it down in your report that I
have said that there must be a God after all.’ Slutsky was stunned. Yagoda
explained: ‘Quite simple. From Stalin I deserve nothing but gratitude for my
faithful service. From God I deserve the most severe punishment for having
broken his commandments a thousand times. Now, look where I am, and judge for
yourself whether there is a God or not!’40 According to Stalin’s
scenario, Yagoda and Tukhachevsky were to appear as chief defendants at the
next show trial, the one concerning ‘German spies’ and ‘Okhrana agents’.
Stalin was delaying
Tukhachevsky’s arrest while waiting for the ‘evidence against him to be
discovered in the briefcase planted in Grilevich’s apartment in Prague, as well
as additional criminal evidence’ that he expected to receive from Hitler’s
secret police. Somewhat earlier, on 16 December 1936, the former tsarist
general N.V.Skoblin, an NKVD agent in Paris (who had taken part in the
kidnapping of General Kutepov in 1930), on Slutsky’s order relayed to a
representative of the SD (German military intelligence) the ‘information’
proving that Tukhachevsky was heading a plot to depose Stalin and was in
contact with top German Army generals and military intelligence officers.
Skoblin provided the same ‘information’ to a Russian émigré group
in Berlin, the ‘Guchkov Circle’, which had been infiltrated by several NKVD
agents, including Guchkov’s own daughter.41 Skoblin’s ‘information’
reached Reinhardt Heydrich, the head of the SD, who reported it to Hitler in
order to plant in Hitler’s mind suspicion about the loyalty of German Army
generals. Heydrich also wanted to warn Hitler about the possibility that the
dangerous ‘Red Bonaparte’ Tukhachevsky, who was known as a capable military
strategist and as a man who held strong anti-German views, might come to power.
Heydrich suggested to Hitler that ‘evidence’ be fabricated of Tukhachevsky’s
conspiring with the German high command, thus provoking his arrest, which would
suit German interests. Hitler agreed with this idea and ordered the fabrication
of the necessary documents to be passed on to Stalin. Heydrich’s assistant,
Janke, was against the forgery scheme, arguing that Skoblin might be a Soviet
agent and his information might be fraudulent and intended to misinform the
German government. Heydrich had Janke placed under house arrest and ordered SD
forger Franz Putzig to add Tukhachevsky’s signature to documents that had been
stolen from the German general staff. Heydrich told his assistant, H.Behrens:
‘Even if Stalin wanted simply to mislead us with this Skoblin information, I
will supply our little Kremlin uncle with enough proof that his lie is a pure
truth.’42 Putzig fabricated 15 documents implicating Tukhachevsky.43
Heydrich ordered Behrens to go to Prague to offer these forgeries to Czech
president Beneš who referred him to the Soviet embassy in Berlin, to contact
there an official by the name of Israilovich (who earlier had received
‘espionage information’ from ‘two German officers’). Behrens showed Israilovich
two letters with Tukhachevsky’s forged signature and offered to deliver the
rest of the 15 documents. Israilovich asked about the price, but Behrens only
shrugged. Several days later, Israilovich introduced Behrens to Leonid
Zakovsky, who said that he represented Yezhov. Zakovsky looked through the
documents and asked how
much they would cost. Heydrich, in order to impress Stalin with the documents’
value, had instructed Behrens to ask for three million rubles, but to lower the
price if he met with resistance. Zakovsky did not bargain and silently nodded.
The forgeries were in Stalin’s hands at the beginning of May 1937.44
(The three million rubles proved to be of no use to the Germans—they were in
large banknotes and the serial numbers were known to the NKVD. German agents
who used them were arrested.45)
Stalin also received
information about Tukhachevsky’s ‘espionage activities’ from Soviet diplomats
who repeated the rumors spread by NKVD agents. In January 1937, the Czech
ambassador to Germany, Mastny, sent a coded cable to President Beneš stating
that a group in the Red Army was plotting to depose Stalin, which could bring
about a change in the balance of power in Europe in Germany’s favor. Beneš
repeated this information to the Soviet ambassador to Czechoslovakia,
C.Alexandrovsky, who flew to Moscow to report it to Stalin. At the same time,
French premier Eduard Daladier asked the Soviet ambassador to France, Vladimir
Potemkin, whether there was any truth to reports that Red Army generals were
involved in a conspiracy with the Germans. Potemkin wired a coded message,
describing his conversation with Daladier.46
In the beginning of May
1937 the ‘Tukhachevsky Dossier’ was almost complete, containing numerous
forgeries. Stalin was close to ordering Tukhachevsky’s arrest. The only delay had
to do with the suitcase planted in the Prague apartment of the Trotskyite
Grilevich, who still had not been arrested by the Czech police. Slutsky was
receiving angry inquiries from ‘Ivan Vasilievich’. Stalin attributed great
importance to this briefcase, because in it was ‘proof’ not only of
Tukhachevsky’s ties to the Germans but also to Trotsky, who appeared in one of
the forged photographs in the company of German officers. Despite Stalin’s
urging, it took Slutsky almost five months to get Grilevich arrested. In June
1937, a bribe to a Czech police official finally had the desired effect, but
Grilevich was soon released. Ironically, by then Stalin no longer had the
slightest interest in Grilevich’s briefcase. An event that occurred on 19 May
1937 forced him to realize that weaving a web of lies around Tukhachevsky had
been a waste of time.
NOTES
1.
Vitaly Rapoport and Yury
Alekseev, Izmena rodine, London, 1988, p. 468, fn. 1.
2.
Boris Viktorov, ‘Zagovor
krasnoi armii’, Pravda, 29 April 1988.
3.
Gustav Hilger and Alfred
G.Meyer, The Incompatible Allies, New York, 1971, p. 271.
4.
Ibid., p. 269.
5.
Walter G.Krivitsky, I
Was Stalin’s Agent, London, 1939, pp. vii–xv.
6.
Hilger and Meyer, The
Incompatible Allies, p. 269.
7.
Zinoviev Trial,
Moscow, 1936, p. 36.
8.
Robert Conquest, The
Great Terror, New York, 1973, pp. 287f.
9.
Alexander Barmine, One
Who Survived, New York, 1945, pp. 89f.
10.
P.I.Yakir and Y.I.Geller, Kommandarm
Yakir, Moscow, 1963, p. 207.
11.
I.Dubinsky, Primakov,
Moscow, 1968, pp. 164 and 173.
12.
See Chapter 24 above.
13.
Conquest, The Great
Terror, p. 290.
14.
Pravda, 10
September 1936.
15.
Alexander Orlov, Tainaya
istoria stalinskikh prestuplenii, New York, Jerusalem, Paris, 1983, pp.
172f.
16.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, p. 174.
17.
Arkady Vaksberg, ‘Kak
zhivoy s zhivymy,’ Literaturnaya gazeta, 29 June 1988.
18.
Ibid.
19.
Lev Razgon, ‘Nakonets,’ Moskovskie
novosti, 26 June 1988. Also Arkady Vaksberg, ‘Kak zhivoy s zhivymy’.
20.
Orlov, Tainaya istoria,
pp. 195f.
21.
Ibid., pp. 197–200.
22.
Ibid., p. 335.
23.
Walter G.Krivitsky, In
Stalin’s Secret Service, New York, 1939, pp. 216–18.
24.
Alexander Orlov, ‘The
Sensational Secret Behind Damnation of Stalin’, Life, 23 April 1956, p.
36.
25.
Winston Churchill, The
Second World War, vol. 1, London, 1948, p. 224. Also John Erickson, The
Soviet High Command: A Military-Political History, 1918–1941, London, 1962,
p. 433.
26.
Alexander Orlov, The
Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes, New York, 1953, pp. 206–8.
27.
Ibid. pp. 181–3.
28.
Piatakov Trial,
Moscow, 1936, p. 146.
29.
Krivitsky, In Stalin’s
Secret Service, p. 216.
30.
Conquest, The Great
Terror, p. 299.
31.
Orlov, Tainaya istoria,
p. 204.
32.
Ibid., pp. 182f.
33.
Conquest, The Great
Terror, pp. 259f.
34.
Ibid., p. 260. Also
I.P.Itskov, taped interview.
35.
Ibid., pp. 260f.
36.
Conquest, The Great
Terror, p. 261, quoting Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 2nd edn, under
‘Ordzhonikidze’.
37.
Ibid., p. 346.
38.
Orlov, ‘The Sensational
Secret’.
39.
Ibid.
40.
Orlov, Tainaya istoria,
p. 253.
41.
Walter Krivitsky, I Was
Stalin’s Agent, London, 1939, p. 237. Also Dlya vas, no. 48, 27
November 1938, p. 12.
42.
Panorama,
no. 56, 3 July 1988, quoting from Paul Karell, Hitler’s War on Russia,
London, 1966.
43.
Lev Nikulin, Marshal
Tukhachevsky, Moscow, 1961, pp. 189–94.
44.
Conquest, The Great
Terror, p. 302.
45.
Panorama,
no. 56, 3 July 1988, quoting from Paul Karell.
46.
Conquest, The Great
Terror, p. 302.
THE FORGERY THAT TELLS THE
TRUTH
On the night of 19 May
1937, during a routine search of the apartment of one of the arrested Red Army
officers, NKVD operatives happened upon a photocopy of a document from Stalin’s
Okhrana file. It was a copy of Colonel Eremin’s report in 1913 to the director
of the Department of Police, S.P.Beletsky, with a brief description of Stalin’s
Okhrana career.1 The copy was handed over to Karl Pauker, the chief
of the NKVD Operations Department, a man of limited intelligence and poor
knowledge of the Russian language. Pauker, a drinking companion of Stalin for
many years, radiated a dog-like devotion to him and had no idea about the
danger this document posed to him. He at once brought it to Stalin.2
Stalin immediately grasped
the document’s meaning: his St. Petersburg Okhrana file was in the hands of
military plotters who intended to destroy him. He ordered Yezhov to declare a
state of emergency and to cancel all passes into the Kremlin, to surround it
with NKVD troops, and to place detachments of bodyguards at his office and
living quarters. The reason he cited for ordering these extraordinary security
measures was that he had uncovered a vast conspiracy to murder Yezhov.3
(As usual, he pointed at a ‘false target’ in order to divert attention from
himself.) Stalin ordered Yezhov to arrest and execute a large number of Red
Army officers whom he suspected of involvement in the conspiracy.
Stalin’s vision of the
‘enemy’ underwent a drastic change. Having schemed to fabricate evidence of
Tukhachevsky’s imagined conspiracy, he was suddenly confronted with an actual
conspiracy on the part of unknown plotters who were in possession of his
Okhrana file and who in his thinking at this point had no connection with
Tukhachevsky. This real threat of his Okhrana file wiped the invented
‘Tukhachevsky Dossier’ from his mind. Curiously, he did not suspect initially
that Tukhachevsky had anything to do with his Okhrana file. He repeated his
usual mistake of striking rashly at suspected plotters and destroying important
sources of information. He ordered Yezhov to execute Karl Pauker and his deputy
Volovich, stating that they were ‘Polish and German spies’.4 By
murdering Pauker, Stalin denied himself the opportunity to determine where
exactly the photocopy of Eremin’s report had been found and to trace the
threads of the conspiracy from there. He had done the same in December 1929,
when he had ordered the execution of Blumkin without first finding out from him
what had happened to the file Blumkin had tried to smuggle out of the country.5
What’s going on in the
country?’ Frinovsky told him that the worst was over and that the country had
lived through an extremely dangerous situation brought on by a conspiracy.
‘We’ve just uncovered a gigantic conspiracy in the Army, such a conspiracy as
history has never known’, Frinovsky explained. ‘And we’ve just now learned of a
plot to kill Nikolay Ivanovich [Yezhov] himself! But we have got them all. We
have got everything under control.’ Far from convinced that everything was under
control, Krivitsky departed. He left Moscow amidst great alarm and confusion.
Something near panic had seized the officers corps of the Red Army as hourly
reports of fresh arrests reached them. Krivitsky felt like he was leaving a
city in the midst of a series of earthquakes.6
Every new arrest
threatened to expose the military conspiracy headed by Tukhachevsky. Among the
arrested might be an officer who under torture would reveal the names of other
conspirators. A month earlier, Tukhachevsky’s friends, Corps Commanders
A.I.Gekker and I.I.Garkavi, had been arrested. Because Garkavi was married to a
sister of Yakir’s wife, Yakir arranged an audience with Stalin, who pretended
to be friendly, saying that there were serious charges against Garkavi, but if
he was innocent, he would be released.7
May began with the usual 1
May parade in Red Square. Tukhachevsky appeared a few minutes before the start
and went to his place in front of the mausoleum, on top of which stood Stalin
and Politburo members. Then came Deputy Commissar of Defense Yan Gamarnik. He
did not look at Tukhachevsky. Both of them knew that Stalin was watching them
from the top of the mausoleum. After the military parade Tukhachevsky left Red
Square, not waiting for the civilian demonstration. On 4 May 1937 he was
scheduled to go to London on an official visit, but his trip was suddenly
canceled.8
Brigade Commander
A.R.Medvedev was arrested on 8 May 1937 and accused of being a Trotskyite. He
was forced by the investigator Z.M. Ushakov to sign a deposition stating that
he had known since 1931 about the existence of a Trotskyite group in the Red
Army, of which Tukhachevsky’s friend Corps Commander B.M.Feldman was a member.
Yezhov ordered Feldman’s arrest.9 The chief of staff of the Far
Eastern Army, Corps Commander Lapin, and the head of the Frunze Military
Academy, Corps Commander Kork, were arrested on 11 May 1937. The same day,
Voroshilov notified Tukhachevsky that he had been appointed commander of the
Volga military district.
On 19 May 1937 Ushakov, a
notorious sadist, accused Feldman of taking part, together with Tukhachevsky
and Yakir, in a plot to subvert the Soviet state. Two decades later, Ushakov
testified: ‘I summoned Feldman to my office, locked him and myself up, and
towards the evening of 19 May Feldman wrote his testimony about the conspiracy
with Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Eideman, and others taking part in it.’10
Ushakov insisted that it was he who had uncovered the Red Army conspiracy and
congratulated himself on having made history by forcing Feldman to confess,
thus unleashing a gigantic purge in the Red Army. In fact, on 19 May Stalin did
not pay attention to the confessions elicited by torture from military officers
whom he had had arrested only to wrench from them ‘criminal evidence’ to be added
to the ‘Tukhachevsky Dossier’. From the moment when Pauker brought him the
photocopy of Colonel Eremin’s report, Stalin lost interest in contrived
evidence against Tukhachevsky and became preoccupied with the search for his
Okhrana file, not suspecting that Tukhachevsky was plotting to use it against
him.
On 25 May 1937, before
leaving for Kuibyshev to assume his new post as commander of the Volga military
district, Tukhachevsky went to say goodbye to Yan Gamarnik,
Deputy Commissar of
Defense and Chief Political Commissar of the Red Army. Although Gamarnik was
suffering from a cold, he had come to his Department of Defense office see
Tukhachevsky off. Stalin’s Okhrana file was hidden in Gamarnik’s office, but,
knowing that walls have ears, the two did not say a word about it. Both men
knew that mass arrests and executions were claiming many of their close friends
and must have fervently hoped that the opportunity to depose Stalin would
present itself soon. ‘Happy journey, Mikhail Nikolaevich!’ Gamarnik said. ‘Get
well, Yan Borisovich!’ replied Tukhachevsky.11
The following day,
Tukhachevsky was arrested during a meeting at the Kuibyshev party headquarters.
An express train delivered him to Moscow. He was taken to the Lubianka prison
and interrogated by Ushakov, who had earlier tortured Feldman.12 ‘Tukhachevsky
was given to me’, Ushakov was to testify two decades later: ‘I already had him
confessing on May 26.’13 Tukhachevsky, bandaged and carried on a
stretcher, was brought to the Kremlin for personal interrogation by Stalin.14
It remains unknown which of the arrested officers broke under torture and
revealed that Tukhachevsky knew that Stalin’s Okhrana file was in the hands of
Gamarnik. On 28 May, a detachment of NKVD troops surrounded the Department of
Defense and NKVD agents sealed all the offices there. On 29 May, Voroshilov
called the army commander I.P.Uborevich in Minsk and ordered him to come to
Moscow. Uborevich’s wife and daughter, who had come to the station to see him
off, witnessed his arrest. The next day, Voroshilov called Yakir in Kiev and
ordered him to come to Moscow immediately. Yakir was arrested during the stop
of the Kiev-Moscow train at Briansk station. A ‘Black Raven’ (prison wagon)
traveling at high speed delivered him to the Lubianka prison. The same day, 30
May 1937 A.S.Bulin, the newly appointed chief of the Cadres Administration of
the Red Army and his deputy, I.V.Smorodnikov, on Stalin’s order went to
Gamarnik’s apartment and took from him the keys to the safe in his office in the
Department of Defense. There they found Stalin’s Okhrana file, and turned it
over to Stalin.15 On 31 May at 5 pm Bulin and Smorodnikov returned
to Gamarnik’s apartment. This time, they had Stalin’s order to murder him. The
two men asked his wife to take them to the bedroom. She showed them the bedroom
door and went to the kitchen. Shortly afterward, she heard two shots and in the
hall saw Bulin and Smorodnikov getting ready to leave. They pretended to be as
surprised as she was by the shots and together with her went back into the
bedroom. Gamarnik was dead.16 The next day, 1 June 1937, Pravda
published a report, stating that ‘former member of the Central Committee
Y.B.Gamarnik, having been entangled with anti-Soviet elements, and fearing that
he would be unmasked, had committed suicide.’17 Voroshilov told
Smorodnikov, ‘as far as the funeral is concerned, the crematory has already
received orders’.18 Rumors about the two gunshots were spreading.
Some NKVD officers were convinced that Gamarnik had been murdered.19
(Somewhat later Bulin and Smorodnikov were accused of being Japanese spies and
shot.20)
Finally, the file Stalin
had worried about for many years was in his hands. Now, he had to exterminate
everyone who might have known about its existence. Soon after Gamarnik’s
murder, Alexander Orlov, the top Soviet intelligence adviser to the Spanish
Republican government, had a conversa-tion with G.K.Zhukov (the future marshal
and Soviet defense minister) who in 1937 came to Spain from Moscow. Zhukov told
Orlov that Voroshilov had been ‘unable till now to recover’ after the exposure
of the military conspiracy: ‘Only the determination of Stalin and the swiftness
of Yezhov saved the
situation. Yezhov’s boys
shot them [the conspirators] without ceremony. Klim [Voroshilov] said that in
this case not a single hour could be lost… He was especially shocked by the
treachery of Gamarnik. That was incomprehensible indeed: we all regarded
Gamarnik as a saint…’.21
From 1 June to 4 June 1937
the Military Council, presided over by Voroshilov, castigated the ‘renegade
counterrevolutionary military fascist organization’. Stalin, his hands behind
his back, walked up and down the hall, watching the reaction of the
participants. Those who expressed doubts about the validity of the charges were
arrested during the recesses.22 Stalin singled out Gamarnik’s
‘treachery’ for exceptionally violent posthumous abuse. On 6 June 1937 the Red
Army newspaper Krasnaya zvezda (Red Star) labeled him a ‘Trotskyite,
Fascist and spy’.23 Stalin’s Okhrana file was not mentioned at the
Military Council, or at the interrogations of the arrested military men. The
arrested generals knew that any mention of it would bring about immediate
execution and no interrogator would have dared to record such testimony. The
generals were tortured and forced to sign their testimony as blood was dripping
from their wounds. (Two decades later, during the Khrushchev years, the
brownish spots on their ‘confessions’ were proved to be dried blood.24)
Stalin’s version of the conspiracy changed somewhat: instead of the initial
charge of plotting to kill Yezhov, the generals were now accused of plotting to
remove Voroshilov. The defendants were promised in the name of rukovodstvo
(the leadership) that their ‘good behavior’ in court would favorably affect
their sentence, that is, that they had better confirm their testimonies if they
hoped to stay alive.
On 11 June, 1937, Pravda
reported: ‘The case of Tukhachevsky M.N., Yakir I.E., Uborevich I.P., Kork
A.I., Eideman R.P., Feldman B.M., Primakov V.M. and Putna B.K. arrested by the
organs of the NKVD at different times, has been brought to investigative
conclusion and transferred to the court…’.25 The trial began on 11
June, at 9 am, and ended at 11 am. Ulrikh again was the presiding judge. Each
of the defendants had an armed guard standing behind him and an interrogator
sitting at his side. One by one, they stood up and said, ‘Plead guilty, have no
complaints.’ At any departure from their scripted testimony, Ulrikh yelled,
‘Don’t deliver lectures, just testify!’ As usual, particles of distorted truth
appeared here and there in the testimonies. Uborevich testified that the
generals had ‘in essence conspired with Gamarnik to attack Voroshilov, and that
Gamarnik said that he would come out ‘krepko (sturdily) against
Voroshilov’. In fact, the generals had assigned to Gamarnik, a member of the
Central Committee, the role of attacking Stalin at the Central Committee
meeting, presenting Stalin’s Okhrana file, and strongly arguing the case
against him as an entrenched Okhrana imposter. The incorrect, non-idiomatic
Russian expression ‘krepko’ had a familiar ring: Stalin often used it in
his statements. Here, too, he was the author of the ‘confessions’. The generals
in their ‘final word’ asked to be forgiven and expressed devotion to ‘Comrade
Stalin’. With the exception of General Vitaly Primakov’s, their final word was
brief. Primakov, who had been arrested in August 1936, nearly a year earlier
than the other defendants, delivered a long speech. Its style of questions and
answers, peculiar logic, and abundant repetition of the same idea left no doubt
that it had been penned by Stalin:
I must tell the final
truth about our plot. Neither in the history of our
revolution, nor in the history of other revolutions, has there been such a
plot
as ours, neither in the composition nor in the means which this plot choose for
itself. Of whom did this plot consist? Whom did the fascist banner of Trotsky
unite? It united all the counterrevolutionary elements, all that was
counterrevolutionary in the Red Army it gathered in one place, under one
banner, under the fascist banner of Trotsky. What means did this plot chose for
itself? All means: treason, betrayal, defeat of their country, wrecking,
espionage, terror. For what purpose? For the reinstatement of capitalism… What
forces did the plot gather to achieve this plan? I named to the investigation
more than 70 people—the conspirators, whom I had recruited myself… I have
formed an opinion about the social face of the plot, that is, of what groups
our plot consists, the leadership, the center of the plot. The composition of
the plot consists of people who do not have deep roots in our Soviet country,
because every one of them has his own second motherland. Every one of them
personally has family ties abroad. Yakir has relatives in Bessarabia, Putna and
Uborevich in Latvia; Feldman is tied to South America no less than to Odessa;
Eideman is more connected with the Baltic countries than with our country.26
The idea that the plotters
were not Russian patriots, but Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, Latvians—and that
their treachery could hence be seen as the plotting of outsiders— suggests that
Primakov’s final statement was a surviving relic of a testimony which was
prepared for the planned show trial that Stalin had aborted. Whether Primakov
actually delivered this speech, or it was just deposited in the archive is not
clear. All of the defendants, including Primakov, received sentences of the
‘highest measure of punishment’. They were shot immediately after the trial.
On the same day, 11 June
1937, not far from Moscow in the ancient town of Dmitrov, thousands of inmates,
mostly common criminals, celebrated their release from the Gulag on the
occasion of the opening of the Moscow-Volga Canal on the construction of which
they had worked. They were awarded citations as udarniki
(shock-workers). The citations, dated 11 June 1937, were signed by Zinovy
Katsnelson, who had been earlier appointed chief of the Gulag.27 On
that day, Stalin still did not know that the conspiracy to depose him had begun
in the summer of 1936, when Shtein brought his Okhrana file to Katsnelson and
Balitsky.
From 23 to 29 June 1937
Stalin presided over a special party plenum. He planned to undertake a gigantic
purge and demanded the approval of ‘extraordinary emergency powers’ for Yezhov.
Osip Piatnitsky, the chief of the Political-Administrative Department of the
Central Committee, objected, saying that he had information about illegal
methods of investigation practiced by the NKVD under Yezhov’s leadership. The
next day, Yezhov declared that the NKVD possessed ‘undeniable data, proving
that before the Revolution, Piatnitsky had been an informer of the Okhrana
Section of the Department of Police’. Yezhov suggested that the plenum cast a
vote of no confidence in Piatnitsky and delegate to the NKVD the investigation
of Piatnitsky’s past ‘to sort out the truth from the lies’.28
Ironically, Stalin became reacquainted with the truth when his file fell into
his hands: he had found there his report, Spravka bez no. 5/18 June 1912,
in which he listed the names and aliases of the most important Bolsheviks,
among them
Piatnitsky, of whom he
wrote: ‘TRANSPORT—in Leipzig in the hands of Tarshis (Piatnitsa).’29
(Tarshis was Piatnitsky’s actual family name.) Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow,
pointed to the many years of friendship between Lenin and Piatnitsky and tried
to intervene on his behalf, but Stalin warned her that if she did not stop
bothering him, the party would proclaim that not Krupskaya but the Old
Bolshevik Elena Stasova was Lenin’s widow. ‘Yes, the Party can do anything’,
Stalin told her.30 Piatnitsky was arrested on 7 July 1937 and shot
some time later. His wife, having gone insane, perished in a prison camp. His
daughter Yulia survived.31
Toward the beginning of
July 1937 Stalin learned that the conspiracy to depose him started with Shtein
delivering his Okhrana file to Katsnelson and Balitsky.32 Knatselson
was arrested early in July and executed. Shtein, realizing that his arrest was
imminent, committed suicide when he saw Yezhov walking into his office.33
Balitsky was arrested somewhat later, in mid-July, in the course of Stalin’s
exceptionally uncanny provocation which was centered on a remarkable fabricated
document, known to history as the ‘Eremin Letter’. This forgery has continued
to inspire debate among historians and biographers of Stalin, some of whom
still believe it to be a genuine document.
Stalin’s main purpose in
fabricating the ‘Eremin letter’ was to discredit Colonel Eremin’s genuine
report and to ‘prove’ that this report had been forged by Stalin’s enemies with
the aim of maligning the revolutionary past of the great leader. On a quite
rational level Stalin assumed that despite mass arrests and executions, some
photocopies of the genuine Eremin report might have survived the dragnet and
ended up in Trotsky’s hands. Stalin hoped that the fabricated ‘Eremin Letter’
could readily be proven to be a bona fide forgery and would discredit the copy
of the original document. But beyond that calculated rational motive Stalin was
also satisfying a strong emotional need to discredit, in his mind, Eremin’s
genuine report. The ‘two natures’ and ‘split personality’ of an agent-provocateur
he so masterfully described in his book Provocateur Anna Serebriakova
were actually not her but his own psychological traits. He produced the ‘Eremin
Letter’ forgery to convince himself, firstly, that Colonel Eremin’s report and
other genuine documents in his Okhrana file had been fabricated by his enemies.
While Stalin was engrossed
in the mopping up of military and NKVD personnel whom he suspected of
disloyalty, he also invented an ingenious cover-up scheme which was a carbon
copy of his earlier scheme in 1930 when he concocted the bogus ‘Kutepov
documents’ conspiracy. He ordered identical kidnapping of a White Guard general
in Paris and devised plans for a gigantic show trial with numerous defendants,
whom he intended to force to confess that they had fabricated Okhrana documents
in order to falsely accuse him of having been an Okhrana agent. The only new
twist to this old scheme was that this time he knew what documents were in his
Okhrana file and was able to distort them to furnish material evidence of
forgery. This idea was not new to Stalin. As early as August 1917 he had
accused the Provisional Government of fabricating Okhrana documents in order to
besmirch ‘true revolutionary fighters’. On Stalin’s order this accusation was
repeated in 1927 by his assistant Maksakov who described the history of the
Okhrana archives. Stalin repeated the same accusation in articles he published
in the journal Krasny arkhiv (Red Archive) in 1935.
Stalin’s scheme had many
offshoots, but it began in Moscow. In June 1937 Stalin ordered Alexander
Svanidze, the brother of his first wife Keke, to forge the ‘Eremin Letter’ and
three other Okhrana documents. Svanidze was in charge of a secret Kremlin
printing shop that had
earlier specialized in producing counterfeit foreign currency and forged
foreign passports for Soviet intelligence operatives. In the 1930s, Svanidze,
on Stalin’s orders, also forged Okhrana documents to glorify Stalin’s
revolutionary past and doctored actual Okhrana documents that had been found in
the old archives, inserting in them laudatory statements about Stalin’s role in
the underground and often changing dates to conform to the New Style. These
changes of dates and the laudatory insertions made these doctored Okhrana
documents easy to recognize as forgeries. They were inserted in the Soviet
archives. In forging the ‘Eremin letter’ and the three other Okhrana
‘documents’, Svanidze on Stalin’s order made several intentional and glaring
mistakes in all of them. Stalin knew that these ‘mistakes’ would be noticed,
thereby ‘proving’ that the documents were forgeries. Svanidze fabricated an
almost exact copy of the genuine Colonel Eremin report. In appearance and
content, the forged report differed only slightly from the genuine one, but the
‘mistakes’ were easily detectable. Typed on a doctored version of stationery of
the Special Section of the Department of Police, with rubber stamps, incoming
and outgoing numbers and notations, the forgery was addressed to the ‘Chief of
the Yeniseysk Okhrana Section, Captain Aleksey Fedorovich Zhelezniakov.’ It
read:
Absolutely secret Persona1
M.V.D
CHIEF OF THE
SPECIAL SECTION OF THE
*D*E*P*A**R*T*M**E*NT
OF POLICE
12 July 1913 # 2893
To Benevolent Sir
Aleksey Fedorovich!
Iosif Dzhugashvili-Stalin,
who had been exiled by administrative decree to the Turukhansk region, provided
the chief of the Tiflis G.G.A. [Guberniya Gendarmerie Administration] with
valuable intelligence information when he was arrested in 1906.
In 1908 the chief of the
Baku Okhrana Section received from Stalin a series of intelligence reports, and
afterward upon Stalin’s arrival in Petersburg Stalin became an agent of the
Petersburg Okhrana Section.
Stalin’s work was
distinguished by accuracy, but was fragmentary.
After Stalin’s election to
the Central Committee of the Party in Prague, Stalin, upon his return to
Petersburg, went over into open opposition to the Government and completely
broke off his connection with the Okhrana.
I am informing you,
Benevolent Sir, of the above for your personal considerations in the conduct of
operational work.
Please, accept my
assurance of my highest esteem.
Eremin’s forged signature
on the letter resembled his genuine signature, except for a long downward
curving flourish at the end of it instead of the legible letter ‘n’ in the real
signature, which did not have this flourish.34
Eremin’s genuine report
was addressed to the director of the Department of Police, Stepan Petrovich
Beletsky, while the forgery was addressed to Captain Aleksey Fedorovich
Zhelezniakov. The captain’s actual name was not Aleksey, but Vladimir; this
‘mistake’ was easy to spot, since the names of Okhrana officers were published
annually and reference books indicated where their names were to be found in
many archives and libraries. There was also a grammatical ‘mistake’ in the
stationery letterhead, and the letter had the outgoing number 2893, which was
not even close to the numbers used at this time. The actual report of Colonel
Eremin had no number, since he labeled it ‘Absolutely secret: Personal’ and
addressed it to Director Beletsky in connection with Beletsky’s personal
investigation of a provocation by the Okhrana agent Iosif Dzhugashvili. The
names of Okhrana agents, even their codenames, were never mentioned in internal
Okhrana correspondence, which passed through certain channels and was assigned
outgoing and incoming numbers. Stalin did not change the salutation ‘Benevolent
Sir’ with which Colonel Eremin addressed Beletsky, a civilian official and
Eremin’s immediate superior. If Eremin had indeed addressed his report to
Captain Zhelezniakov, he would have used the salutation ‘Your Honor’ and would
have signed the report ‘Colonel Eremin,’ as he did in correspondence with
gendarmerie officers. (In correspondence with civilian officials, he signed his
name not ‘Colonel Eremin’, but simply ‘A. Eremin.’35)
Stalin did not change the
text of the genuine report of Colonel Eremin, reproducing it in full for the
fabricated ‘Eremin Letter’, except for his pen name ‘Stalin’ that had been
inserted in several places. In 1913 the Okhrana did not know this pen name. It
knew his aliases ‘Vasily’, ‘Ivanov’, ‘Ivanovich’, and his nickname ‘Koba’. He
had used the pen name ‘Stalin’ only once in 1913. The ‘Eremin letter’ forgery
contained these obvious mistakes: the addressee’s wrong first name, Eremin’s
crudely forged signature, the improbable use of the name Stalin and the
outgoing and incoming numbers. In addition to the ‘Eremin letter’, Stalin also
fabricated a report allegedly written by a former Yeniseysk Okhrana officer,
V.N.Russianov, who, after the Civil War, escaped to China and lived with his
family in Shanghai, working as a driver for a wealthy American family.
Russianov’s forged ‘report’ was addressed to M.D.Golovachev, ‘Chairman of the
Council of Representatives of Organizations of Autonomous Siberia’ and was
written in longhand on stationery with the letterhead:
Former
CHIEF OF THE YENISEYSK
OKHRANA
SECTION
March 13 1935
No. 51
The report purportedly
informed Golovachev that Stalin had been an Okhrana agent, and ended with the
words: ‘I believe my material in your reliable hands could be used now in full
measure. I am certain, that you will be able to make it a weapon in the
struggle against the Third International.’36 It was signed ‘Major
General Russian’. The final ‘n’ in this signature was followed by a long
downward-curving flourish identical to the one in
the signature on the
forged ‘Eremin Letter’, which suggests that both forgeries were fabricated by
the same hand at the ‘Stalin Institute’. The ‘Russianov Report’ listed four
attached ‘Okhrana documents, including the ‘Eremin Letter’ and a fabricated
letter from Russianov to A.T.Vasiliev (the director of the Department of
Police), as well as two reports from an agent by the name of ‘David’, dated 10
October 1915 and 12 January 1916. These two ‘reports’ had supposedly been sent
by ‘Turukhansk Okhrana Section Officer Kibirov’ to the ‘Chief of the Yeniseysk
Okhrana section’. The events described in these two ‘agent reports’ indeed took
place, but not in Turukhansk and not on those dates. They took place in 1912 in
Narym, where Stalin briefly served his term of exile and maintained friendly
relations with an Okhrana officer by the name of Kibirov, for which he was
reproved by the ‘comradely court’ of his fellow exiles. Kibirov could not have
sent the ‘agent reports’ from Narym to the Yeniseysk Okhrana, since Narym had
no administrative ties to Yeniseysk.37 The ‘Eremin Letter,’ the
‘Russianov Report’, and the two ‘Kibirov Reports’– all purposely infested with
easily detectable ‘mistakes’ were fabricated on Stalin’s order in order to be
identified as forgeries. All showed the same pattern of crude fabrications:
they told a story he could easily discredit by pointing to ‘mistakes’ in the
obviously forged documents.38
In mid-July 1937 Stalin
summoned Genrikh Liushkov, whom he had recently appointed deputy chief of the
NKVD Secret Political Department, replacing Shtein at this post, and appointed
him to the post of chief of the Far Eastern NKVD. Stalin gave Liushkov the four
forged Okhrana documents, among them the ‘Eremin Letter’, and ordered him
deliver these forgeries to M.D.Golovachev, a Soviet agent in China, and to
arrange with him for their publication in the émigré newspaper.39
Stalin selected Liushkov for this top-secret personal mission because Liushov
enjoyed Stalin’s trust. A former member of Odessa’s criminal underworld,
Liushov was known among NKVD officers for his extensive use of provocations.
Stalin entrusted to him especially important missions. During the preparations
for the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial, Liushkov headed a team of ‘interrogators’ who
tortured the defendants. In late 1936 Stalin had assigned him the interrogation
of his much-hated enemy Riutin, and in early 1937, had sent him to conduct a
purge in Rostov. He was described by a fellow NKVD officer as an ‘arrogant,
arbitrary and sadistic bully’.40
Toward the end of July
1937 Liushkov arrived in Khabarovsk at the head of a detail of two officers and
five soldiers and called NKVD headquarters from the railway station. He spoke
to V.A.Balitsky, who in April 1937 had been appointed chief of the Far Eastern
NKVD. Liushkov asked Balitsky to pick him up at the station. (Liushkov had known
Balitsky for a long time; he had worked with him, Katsnelson and Shtein in the
Kharkov GPU for many years.41) Balitsky drove to the station and was
seized at gunpoint by Liushkov’s detail; an express train then transported him
to Moscow. Liushkov drove to the NKVD headquarters in Balitsky’s car and
announced that he was the new chief ‘with personal orders from Stalin’. He had
a list of army men whom Stalin had ordered arrested and shot, and he was under
orders by Stalin to watch closely the commander of the Far Eastern military
district, Marshal V.Bliukher, who had just returned from Moscow, where he had
reluctantly put his signature on the verdict to execute Tukhachevsky and the
other generals.42
In July 1937, Liushkov
traveled to Shanghai under an assumed name and gave the Eremin Letter and other
forgeries to M.D.Golovachev, a Russian émigré and NKVD
informer. Golovachev
agreed to publish the forgeries in a Russian-language émigré newspaper
in China on receiving Liushkov’s signal.43 Golovachev was also
instructed to insist that he had received these documents from the former
Okhrana officer Russianov. He knew from the outset that the documents he
received from Liushkov were forgeries. Golovachev was a devious, unscrupulous
man, after whom the lawyer Komarovsky, Lara’s seducer in Boris Pasternak’s
largely autobiographical novel Doctor Zhivago, was patterned. Before the
Revolution Golovachev had been a lawyer; during the Civil War he was a Cheka
informer in Petrograd. Lenin appointed him assistant foreign minister of the
puppet ‘Far Eastern Republic’. In Pasternak’s novel, Komarovsky, also a
Petrograd lawyer, is appointed by Lenin to that same post. Golovachev went to
China after this ‘republic’ became defunct, as does Komarovsky in the novel. At
this point, Komarovsky disappears from Pasternak’s novel.
Among the Russian émigrés in
China, Golovachev had the reputation of being a suspicious character, and was
suspected of being a Soviet agent who was setting up various kinds of societies
and ‘institutes’ as fronts for Soviet intelligence.44 Fearing that
Japanese intelligence might take an interest in his activities, Golovachev left
Harbin for Shanghai when the Japanese occupied Manchuria in 1934. In Shanghai,
he misrepresented himself as ‘Professor Golovachev’, to account for the various
‘institutes’ he had been setting up. He kept his contacts with North Chinese
publications, that is, Russian-language newspapers in Japanese-occupied
Manchuria. The cultural attaché of the French embassy in Shanghai
provided him with the following letter of reference for obtaining an American
entry visa: ‘Mr Golovachev is a highly cultured man who has made good use of
his intelligence and knowledge in Shanghai intellectual circles, always keeping
above the mêlée of
politics. Mr M.D.Golovachev has acquired the best of reputations in the Chinese
and foreign circles of Shanghai.45 The letter left the exact nature
of Golovachev’s ‘good use’ of his intelligence unspecified.
Liushkov instructed
Golovachev to claim that he had obtained the Okhrana documents from the former
Okhrana officer Colonel Viktor Nikolaevich Russianov, who had served at the
Yeniseysk Okhrana post before the Revolution. The plan was for the Chinese
police on the Soviet government’s advice to search Russianov’s home and come up
with criminal evidence. To prove that Russianov had been involved in the
fabrication of the ‘Eremin Letter’ and other forgeries, Stalin had Liushkov
plant in Russianov’s home a package containing Okhrana stationery, rubber
stamps, and other paraphernalia, among them ten photographs, including some of
Stalin, Trotsky and Malinovsky.46
Stalin deliberately chose
Russianov as a victim of this provocation. He must have remembered him well
from the time of his last exile: before the February Revolution, Russianov had
had the rank of subaltern and been assistant to the chief of the Yeniseysk
Okhrana, Captain Zhelezniakov. He was appointed chief shortly before the
Revolution.47 The day after the February Revolution, he was arrested
by the Menshevik Boris Nikolaevsky, at the time a political exile in Yeniseysk,
who was elected mayor of the town. Nikolaevsky found Russianov burning records
in his Okhrana office and ordered that he be arrested and kept in prison.48
A few months later Siberia fell into the hands of Admiral Kolchak, and
Russianov was released from prison. He joined the White Army, rising to the
rank of colonel. After the defeat of the Whites, Russianov escaped to China. By
August 1937, when Russianov was working as a chauffeur in Shanghai, the Eremin
Letter and other forgeries were in the hands of Golovachev, who was waiting for
Liushkov’s signal to
publish them. The package with the Okhrana paraphernalia had already been
planted in Russianov’s home in Shanghai.
The other part of the
provocation was the kidnapping of General Miller in Paris which had to be
carried out before Stalin gave the signal to publish the Eremin Letter. In
preparation for the kidnapping, the deputy chief of the NKVD Foreign
Department, Mikhail Shpigelglas, had arrived in Paris in July 1937. He summoned
the resident of Soviet military intelligence in Europe, General Walter
Krivitsky, and told him he needed to borrow two agents from him who could
impersonate ‘German officers’, explaining only that he was on an ‘especially important
mission’, but did not reveal that he needed the agents for the kidnapping of
General Miller.49
On 22 September 1937
General Miller told his assistant, General Kusonsky, that he had to attend a
business meeting. Before he left, he gave Kusonsky a sealed envelope and said,
‘Don’t think that I’ve lost my mind, but if I don’t come back from this
meeting, then, please, open this envelope and read my note.’ Around 1 pm, one
of General Miller’s friends saw him and General Skoblin near the Soviet villa
on the Boulevard de Montmorency. Skoblin motioned Miller to go inside. Behind
Miller appeared a tall, husky man. The next moment all three disappeared behind
the gates of the villa.50
Miller’s wife recalled the
kidnapping of General Kutepov and called General Kusonsky, who sped to Miller’s
office and opened the envelope left by Miller. The note inside read: ‘I have an
appointment at 12:30 today with General Skoblin at the corner of rue Jasmine
and rue Raffat. He is to take me to a rendezvous with a German officer, Colonel
Strohmann, a military attaché in one of the Balkan countries, and
someone named Verner, an official in the local German embassy. They both speak
Russian well. This meeting has been arranged at the initiative of General
Skoblin. It is possible that this is a trap—this is why I am leaving you this
note.’51 General Kusonsky recalled what Miller had said to him seven
years earlier: ‘If you go to an unknown or suspicious meeting it is always
necessary to leave a note. And Kutepov should have done that.’52
Skoblin, summoned to
Kusonsky’s office, denied knowing anything about the disappearance even when
confronted with Miller’s note. He was told to go to police headquarters. He was
the first to walk out of the office while Kusonsky and the others traded
glances. ‘His behavior is strange, isn’t it?’ Kusonsky whispered to the others
as they were leaving. They returned to the office briefly to exchange ideas.
When they walked out, Skoblin was nowhere to be found.
The French police soon
established some important facts: the Soviet ambassador to France, Vladimir
Potemkin, had bought a gray truck on 13 August 1937; on 22 September 1937, the
day Miller disappeared, this truck pulled up to a pier in Le Havre where the
Soviet merchant liner Maria Ulianova (named after Lenin’s sister) was
docked, and two men carried a large wooden box on board; a few minutes later,
the Maria Ulianova was on her way to Leningrad. Prime Minister Eduard
Daladier was informed of these facts and, to appease French public opinion,
summoned Ambassador Potemkin and demanded the return of the Maria Ulianova
to Le Havre, threatening to send a military ship to intercept her. But an hour
later, he called Potemkin to apologize, saying that the Maria Ulianova
could not have been involved in the abduction of General Miller. With the
threat of war with Germany looming, Daladier wanted to avoid straining
relations with Stalin. Despite Daladier’s reluctance to antagonize Stalin, the
investigation
proceeded. In Skoblin’s
home the French police found secret codes, bogus passports, and other evidence
proving that he and his wife Nadezhda Plevitskaya were Soviet agents.
Plevitskaya was arrested and on 5 December 1938 was sentenced to 25 years in
prison. She died in prison in 1944, during the German occupation.
When the German Army
occupied Paris in 1940, Gestapo agents searched the offices of the Russian Army
Veterans’ organization. They found secret microphones, wires from which led to
the apartment of the Russian émigré Tretiakov, who lived on the floor above.
Arrested by the Gestapo, Tretiakov confessed that he had been a Soviet agent
and had cooperated with General Skoblin. He said that on the day of General
Miller’s kidnapping, in which he did not take part, Skoblin, instead of going
to police headquarters as he had been ordered to do, went upstairs and hid in
Tretiakov’s apartment. Tretiakov knew nothing of what happened to Skoblin after
that. Skoblin fled to the Soviet Union, where his fate is unknown.
Ten days after Plevitskaya
was sentenced, the French police arrested Lidia Grozovskaya, an NKVD agent
working under cover at the Soviet embassy in Paris. These developments made it
clear to Stalin that it was impossible to use General Miller as a defendant at
a show trial: his appearance would confirm Soviet criminal kidnapping on French
territory and might explode into an international scandal, and lead to a break
in diplomatic relations with France. Stalin was forced drastically to curtail
the show trial that he had planned from the time his Okhrana file had fallen
into his hands in May 1937. On 15 December 1937 the lives of many of the
prospective defendants were cut short by a mass execution. The names of some of
them were later made public.53 Others were executed secretly,
Generals Miller and Skoblin probably among them.
The scandal over the
kidnapping of General Miller forced Stalin to abandon his plan for a show trial
and to use the ‘Eremin Letter’ and other forgeries as criminal evidence, but
the story of these forgeries did not end there. Like a genie let out of a
bottle, they acquired lives of their own.
NOTES
1.
See Chapter 10 above.
2.
This reconstruction of the
events is supported directly and indirectly by several things:
(a)
Yury Kogan, the son of one
of the executed top officers in Uborevich’s circle of plotters stated in two
taped interviews that, during the search of the apartment of an arrested
officer in Minsk, a copy of a document incriminating Stalin and pointing to the
existence of a plot was discovered. Yury Kogan learned of this from one of his
father’s friends, who survived the purge. The interviews took place in 1979 in
Jerusalem with Michael Meerson-Aksenov, a Russian Orthodox priest, and in 1981
in Beer-Sheva (Israel) with Viktor Shwartzburg.
(b)
As was revealed by
Alexander Orlov, a number of photocopies of documents from Stalin’s Okhrana
file had been made by the plotters. The photocopy most likely to have been
found during the search of the arrested officer’s apartment was that of
Eremin’s report. That report was a one-page document concisely describing
Stalin’s Okhrana career. It hence lent itself perfectly to photocopying and
distribution among the plotters. The fact that Stalin fabricated an almost
exact copy of Eremin’s report in order to discredit it (as this chapter shows)
indicates that his
motive was to discredit other copies
of Eremin’s report in case one or more of them survived his dragnet.
(c)
The fact that Pauker was
secretly executed shortly after the copy of Eremin’s report was found in the
arrested officer’s apartment suggests that it was Pauker who brought the copy
to Stalin. Besides, as the chief of the Operations Department, Pauker was in
charge of all arrests and searches. If there was anything to report to Stalin
in the domain of Pauker’s responsibilities, it was he who would personally
bring it to Stalin’s attention.
3.
Walter G.Krivitsky, In
Stalin’s Secret Service, New York, 1939, pp. 229–31.
4.
Bukharin Trial,
New York, 1965, p. 582.
5.
See Chapter 19 above.
6.
Krivitsky, In Stalin’s
Secret Service, pp. 229–31.
7.
P.I.Yakir and Ya.I.Geller,
Komandarm Yakir, Moscow, 1963, p. 212.
8.
N.I.Koritsky, Marshal
Tukhachevsky, Moscow, 1965, pp. 128–34. Also I.Rachkov, ‘Iz vospominaniy o
Y.B.Gamarnike’, Voenno-istorichesky zhurnal, no. 5, 1965, pp. 67–70.
9.
Boris Viktorov, ‘Zagovor
krasnoi armii’, Pravda, 29 April 1988.
10.
Ibid.
11.
I.Rachkov, ‘Iz
vospominaniy o Y.B.Gamarnike’, p. 69.
12.
Lev Nikulin, Marshal
Tukhachevsky, Moscow, 1961, pp. 189–94.
13.
Viktorov, ‘Zagovor krasnoi
armii’.
14.
P.Yakir heard of
Tukhachevsky’s being interrogated by Stalin in the camps. The author heard of
it in the Norilsk camp from an inmate, the former NKVD officer A.Y.Tsynman.
15.
Unpublished memoirs of
Olga Shatunovskaya, an Old Bolshevik and a member of a Party committee that
investigated Stalin’s crimes during the Khrushchev era. Shatunovskaya’s recollections
were related by Vasily Rudich in a taped interview with me. In my archive.
Also, Rachkov, ‘Iz vospominaniy o Y.B.Gamarnike’, pp. 69–72, and Vitaly
Rapoport and Yury Alekseev, Izmena rodine, London, 1988, p. 300.
16.
Rachkov, ‘Iz vospominaniy
o Y.B.Gamarnike’, pp. 69f.
17.
Pravda, 1
June 1937, p. 4.
18.
Rachkov, ‘Iz vospominanii
o Y.B.Gamarnike’, p. 70.
19.
Krivitsky, In Stalin’s
Secret Service, p. 232.
20.
L.Gaglov and I.Selishchev,
Komissary, Moscow, 1961.
21.
Alexander Orlov, The
Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes, New York, 1953, pp. 238f. In his 1953
book, Orlov refers to Zhukov as ‘General N’, but in his 23 April 1956, Life
article, ‘The Sensational Secret Behind Damnation of Stalin’, Orlov on p. 44
refers to Zhukov’s photo, taken in Spain at the time of Orlov’s service there,
and writes: ‘I knew General Zhukov when he came to Spain as an observer during
the civil war. I talked to him a number of times and I carried away the
impression that Zhukov was no courtier and no stooge of Stalin. The 1937 blot
on the honor of the Red Army must have bothered his military conscience ever
since.’
22.
Viktorov, ‘Zagovor krasnoi
armii’.
23.
Krasnaya zvezda, 6
June 1937.
24.
Viktorov, ‘Zagovor krasnoi
armii’.
25.
Ibid.
26.
Ibid.
27.
The award citation, dated
11 June 1937 and signed by Zinovy Katsnelson, is among the papers of the
author’s father Ya.I.Brakhtman, a former prisoner in the Dmitrov camp, who
received the award on this day.
28.
Genady Zhavoronkov, ‘I
edinozhdy ne solgavshiy’, Moskovskie novosti, 10 April 1988. Also Iosif
Kosinsky, ‘Za chto borolis?’, Novoe Russkoe slovo, 22 April 1988.
29.
See Chapter 10 above for
Colonel Eremin’s cover letter, dated 11 June 1912 with attached Spravka bez
no. 5/18, p. 7.
30.
Orlov, Tainaya istoria,
p. 262.
31.
Yulia Piatnitskaya, Dnevnik
zheny bolshevika, New York, 1987, p. 172. Also Zhavoronkov, ‘I edinozhdy ne
solgavshiy’, and Kosinsky, ‘Za chto borolis?’
32.
The discovery of Stalin’s
Okhrana file in Menzhinsky’s old office was to appear in a somewhat distorted
form in the ‘confessions’ at the Bukharin show trial in March 1938 (see Chapter
29 below). Indications are that Stalin learned where the file was found from
the arrested officers and he must have learned it sometime before July 1937,
since he ordered the arrest of Katsnelson and Balitsky that month.
33.
V.Lulechnik, ‘Zagovor protiv
Stalina i delo Tukhachevskogo’, Panorama, no. 735, 10–16 May 1995, p.
20. Lulechnik states that E.G.Plimak ‘firmly established the fact of
I.L.Shtein’s suicide after meeting distant relatives of Shtein’s’. See also
Evgeny Plimak and Vadim Antonov, ‘Stalin znal, chto delal’, Novoe Russkoe
Slovo, 22 March 1996, p. 50.
34.
The ‘Eremin Letter’
forgery was first published by Isaac Don Levine in his article, ‘A Document on
Stalin as Czarist Spy’, in Life magazine on 23 April 1956, p. 47. See
also John J.Dziak, Chekisty, Lexington, 1988, pp. 9–10.
35.
Eremin’s signature
‘A.Eremin’ appears on his letters addressed to civilian officials of the
Department of Police. See, for instance, his letter no. 125483, dated 13 May
1910, to the chief of the Okhrana Foreign Agency, A.A.Krasilnikov. Eremin
starts his letter with the salutation ‘Milostivy Gosudar’ (‘Benevolent
Sir’), the same way he started his letter to Beletsky, and he does not mention
his military rank.
36.
Columbia University, New
York, Library of Rare Manuscripts, Bakhmetiev Archive, M.P. Golovachev’s
Collection. See also reprints of Stalin’s ‘Okhrana documents’ in the newspaper Evreisky
mir, New York, 30 October (no. 23), 6 November (no. 24) and 13 November
(no. 25), 1992.
37.
N.Karganov, ‘Iz proshlogo
Stalina’, Vozrozhdenie, 13 January 1929. See also Chapter 10 above.
38.
Columbia University, New
York, Library of Rare Manuscripts, Bakhmetiev Archive, M.P. Golovachev’s
Collection. See also reprints of Stalin’s ‘Okhrana Documents’ in the newspaper Evreisky
mir, New York, 30 October (no. 23), 6 November (no. 24), and 13 November
(no. 25), 1992.
39.
Alvin D.Coox, ‘L’Affaire
Liushkov’, Soviet Studies, January, 1968, p. 62.
40.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, pp. 244f.
41.
Taped interview with
R.S.Osinina, widow of Liushkov’s assistant Osinin.
42.
Coox, ‘L’Affair Liushkov’,
p. 408.
43.
Golovachev never revealed
that he received the forgeries from Liushkov. He maintained that he had
obtained them from the former Okhrana officer Russianov. His claim was an
obvious lie for several reasons: Russianov would not have made mistakes that
clumsy in fabricating the forgeries. He would obviously be expected to know the
first name and patronymic of Captain Zhelezniakov, a man under whose command he
had worked for several years in Yeniseysk. Also, Stalin would never have
assigned the planting of the forgeries to anyone he did not know personally and
trust. Liushkov, who specialized in provocations and had carried out personal
assignments for Stalin in the past, was the ideal choice—just as Golovachev was
the ideal choice for Liushkov as a Soviet agent who could get the forgeries
published in China.
44.
Taped interview with
General T.V.Gerbov, a Russian émigré in Harbin who knew
Golovachev personally, Nayak, NY, in 1975. The tape is in the author’s archive.
45.
The letter, signed by
Grosbois and dated 8 June 1948 is in I.D.Levine’s archive. Copy in the present
author’s archive.
46.
Russianov’s son, who had
emigrated to Australia, sent this package of Okhrana material to I.D. Levine.
It was examined by the author in Levine’s archive at his Virginia farm.
47.
N.M.Ulanovskaya spoke in a
taped interview about her husband, Soviet intelligence officer A. Ulanovsky,
who met Stalin during his exile in Yeniseysk. She recalled that Stalin was
known among the exiles for visiting the Okhrana office there.
48.
H.Montgomery Hyde, Stalin:
the History of a Dictator, New York, 1971, p. 613.
49.
Krivitsky, In Stalin’s
Secret Service, pp. 216–18.
50.
Lev Rudminsky, who was
imprisoned in the Norilsk Gulag, had taken part in General Kutepov’s and
General Miller’s kidnapping. He recalled that the fabrication of documents to
defame Soviet leaders was the reason the generals were kidnapped. The timing of
both kidnappings supports this claim: Kutepov’s took place shortly after
Blumkin’s attempt to smuggle Stalin’s file abroad, Miller’s shortly after
Stalin recovered his Okhrana file.
51.
S.Rozhdestvensky,
‘Pokhishchenie generala Millera’, Novoe russkoe slovo, 19 May 1979.
52.
Ibid.
53.
Bukharin Trial.
THE STAGED ‘TRIFLE’
Stalin considerably
reduced the scope of his next planned show trial because of the scandal over
the kidnapping of General Miller. He decided that at the trial no mention of
the general and of the fabrication of Okhrana documents should be made. The
trial was scheduled for the beginning of March 1938. But before it opened
several important events took place.
In July 1937 Ignaz Reiss,
the NKVD resident in Switzerland, had written a letter to the Central
Committee, declaring his opposition to ‘Stalin’s counter-revolution’ and
calling for a ‘return to Lenin, his teachings and his cause’.1
Stalin was convinced that Reiss had learned about the discovery of his Okhrana
file and was the source of the information about it that had reached Trotsky’s
son Lev Sedov. Stalin ordered the murders of Reiss, Lev Sedov, and two of
Trotsky’s aides, Erwin Wolf and Rudolf Klement, who had also learned about the
file from Reiss.2 In the early morning of 4 September 1937 the Swiss
police found the body of Ignaz Reiss, the NKVD resident in Switzerland. Reiss’s
body was riddled with bullets. The murder of Reiss was carried out by a mobile
group of killers under the command of Mikhail Shpigelglas, the deputy chief of
the NKVD Foreign Department. Mark Zborovsky, an NKVD agent who had gained Lev
Sedov’s trust, learned where in Switzerland Reiss and his wife and daughter
were staying. Shpigelglas ordered NKVD agent Gertrude Shildbach, a close friend
of the Reiss family, to invite Reiss into her car, where the killers would be
waiting for him. After Reiss’s body was found, the police also found the car,
which turned out to have been rented by Renate Steiner, another NKVD agent.
Steiner was arrested, and she named the assassins and told the authorities at
which hotel they were staying. By the time the police got there, the killers
had left. In their rooms, the police found luggage containing a box of poisoned
chocolates, Stalin’s ‘present’, which Gertrude Shildbach for some reason had
failed to give to Reiss’s wife and daughter. The investigation of Reiss’s
murder threatened to expose a large network of Soviet agents in Europe and lead
the police to the center of this network in the Soviet embassy in Paris. (Like
the Okhrana’s Foreign Agency before it, the main branch of the NKVD’s Foreign
Department was located in Paris.)
In October 1937
Shpigelglas arrived in Spain to carry out several assassinations ordered by
Stalin.4 He had a meeting with Alexander Orlov, the Soviet adviser
on intelligence matters to the Spanish Republican government, During a long car
ride Shpigelglas shared with Orlov his apprehension about the mass arrests and
executions, mentioning incidents when prominent Soviet officials ‘disappeared
together with their cars and personal drivers’.5 He mentioned
several cases of suicide among NKVD and government officials, for which he
could find no explanation. Orlov had earlier learned from his cousin Zinovy
Katsnelson of the discovery of Stalin’s Okhrana file, but decided not to reveal
this information to anyone. Shpigelglas asked Orlov to help him secure a
transfer to Spain as Orlov’s assistant. Orlov realized that Shpigelglas feared
for his life and hoped to find shelter in Spain until the wave of arrests and
shootings was over. He thought that Shpigelglas wanted to bring his wife and
daughter to Spain and become a defector like Krivitsky.6
Meanwhile, events
continued to unfold. By October 1937 most of the Soviet agents in Europe had
been recalled to Moscow and executed. Despite their apprehensions, most of them
returned to save the lives of their wives, children and relatives whom they had
left in the Soviet Union. According to a 8 June 1934 decree, all the relatives
of military personnel who escaped abroad or refused to return to Russia were to
be exiled for ten years to Siberia, even if they had no prior knowledge of such
‘betrayal of the motherland’. By a secret addition to this law, all relatives
of NKVD ‘traitors’ were to be executed if the traitor revealed ‘state secrets’.
Few agents could bring themselves to face such consequences. Krivitsky’s
defection was followed by that of his two agents, ‘Paul’ and ‘Bruno’, who had
impersonated German officers in the kidnapping of General Miller and in the
earlier provocation in Prague in forging Tukhachevsky’s dossier’.7
Dr Max Eitingon, the NKVD resident in Vienna, also defected. He was the
‘handler’ of the NKVD agents General Skoblin and his wife Nadezhda Plevitskaya.
She testified in a French court that Eitingon was her ‘angel-protector’ and for
years had given her money and also paid for expensive dresses and jewelry.8
Plevitskaya also mentioned that Eitingon had visited her and Skoblin in Paris
after the kidnapping of General Miller to say goodbye before going to Jerusalem
to settle there and open a psychiatric clinic. (He died, and possibly was
assassinated, in Jerusalem in 1944.9)
Among the recalled Soviet
agents who complied with the order to return to the USSR was Sergey Efron, a
literary critic and husband of the great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva (who did
not know of her husband’s connections with to the NKVD). After leaving Paris,
he for a while corresponded with Tsvetaeva; then letters from him stopped.
Their daughter went to Moscow to find out what had happened to her father and
was arrested. (In 1939, Tsvetaeva, too, went to Moscow to find out what had
happened to her daughter and husband. She was exiled to the remote Siberian
village of Elabug, where she hanged herself on 31 August 1941. Efron was shot
in prison in October 1941. Their daughter spent the next 16 years in the Gulag,
emerging after Stalin’s death an emotional and physical cripple.10)
After the murder of Reiss,
three people whom he had told about the discovery of Stalin’s Okhrana file,
were also murdered. On 16 February 1937 Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov was murdered:
Mark Zborovsky, an NKVD agent, brought Sedov to the hospital for an
appendectomy and tipped off NKVD killers who murdered Sedov in his hospital
bed. Zborovsky also guided the killers to Trotsky’s secretaries Erwin Wolf and
Rudolf
Klement. Wolf was murdered
in Spain. The decapitated body of Klement was found floating in the Seine.
(Zborovsky settled in the United States after the occupation of France by the
Germans and was arrested as a Soviet agent. He helped the FBI expose a large
Soviet espionage network and struck a deal with the prosecution, pleading
guilty to a perjury charge in exchange for a short prison term. After serving
his sentence, he worked in various hospitals and universities.11)
On 16 February 1937, the
same day that Lev Sedov was murdered in Paris, Abram Slutsky, the chief of the
NKVD Foreign Department, was poisoned. Yezhov’s deputy, Frinovsky, invited
Slutsky to his Lubianka office for a ‘business discussion’ and treated him to
tea and cookies. Slutsky died instantly. Half an hour later, Frinovsky phoned
Slutsky’s deputy, Shpigelglas, and asked him to come over. Shpigelglas saw
Slutsky’s body slumped in an armchair. Frinovsky told him that the doctor had
just left and that ‘medicine can’t help in this case’. He added that Slutsky
had died of a heart attack. Slutsky’s body lay in state in the NKVD club with a
guard of honor, and his colleagues paid their respects. NKVD officers knew the
rudiments of forensic medicine and noticed characteristic spots pointing to
poisoning by hydrocyanic acid. Pravda published an obituary signed by a
‘group of friends’. Stalin was destroying all people who, like Slutsky, knew
too much. Slutsky had been in the habit of bragging to his friends of his
closeness to Stalin and had mentioned to them some ‘strange’ behavior of
Stalin. For example, he told some NKVD officers how Stalin insisted on
attributing to Piatakov an obviously fictitious trip to Oslo. At the time he
was murdered, Slutsky was taking an active part in preparations for the show
trial scheduled to begin early in March 1938. He was assigned to interrogate
Yagoda, one of the chief defendants, and related to friends Stalin’s odd claims
that Yagoda and other defendants had been Okhrana agents. Slutsky’s talk was
reaching Stalin.
Mass arrests and murders
made foreign diplomats in Moscow wonder and whisper about the ‘sick man in the
Kremlin’, surmising that Stalin’s purges could only be the work of someone in
the throes of persecution mania. But, as Alexander Orlov wrote, ‘this was not
the case. The almighty dictator was not a lunatic. When all the facts connected
with the case of Tukhachevsky become known, the world will understand: Stalin
knew what he was doing.’12
The role of the chief
villain at the forthcoming show trial Stalin assigned to Nikolay Bukharin; the
trial became known in history as the ‘Bukharin Trial’. During the
Kamenev-Zinoviev show trial, Bukharin’s name was mentioned by some defendants.
Speakers at public meetings demanded that Bukharin be ‘put in the dock’.
Bukharin was invited to Kaganovich’s office, where a confrontation with his
arrested friend Grigory Sokolnikov was arranged. Sokolnikov said that he and
Bukharin belonged to an ‘antiSoviet organization’.13 (Sokolnikov
had struck a deal with Stalin, agreeing to incriminate himself and implicate
Bukharin and others in exchange for Stalin’s promise to spare his life and not
persecute his family.14)
Bukharin was summoned to
the Central Committee Plenum and Yezhov, in Stalin’s presence, accused him of
treason, terrorist activities and involvement in the murder of Kirov. Stalin
very calmly said that there was no need to hurry with Bukharin’s arrest.
Bukharin spent the next three months in his Kremlin apartment, which had
formerly belonged to Stalin. His study was in the room where Nadezhda Allilueva
had committed suicide. Bukharin felt guilty for causing harm to his second wife
Anna, some 25 years his
junior. A few months
earlier, she had given birth to their first son. Once Anna saw Bukharin with a
revolver in his hand, but he assured her that he would not commit suicide. He
wrote Stalin several letters, addressing him as ‘Dear Koba!’ There was no
reply. Early in February 1937 he wrote to the Central Committee: ‘In protest
against unheard of accusations. I declare a hunger strike to the death…’. A day
later, three NKVD officers arrived with the order to evict him from his Kremlin
apartment. Upon their arrival, the telephone rang. ‘How are you doing,
Nikolay?’ Stalin asked. ‘Here, they’ve come to evict me from the Kremlin’, said
Bukharin. ‘And you send them to the devil’s mother’, said Stalin, and ordered
that the eviction be stopped. Bukharin’s former wife wrote Stalin a letter
stating that she did not want to be a party member at a time when Bukharin, a
true revolutionary, was falsely accused of monstrous crimes. She was arrested
and executed.15
On 27 February 1937
Bukharin was summoned before the party plenum and arrested. Until 19 May 1937,
when the mass arrests and executions started, the interrogation of Bukharin
proceeded in the usual way: he was pressured to ‘confess’ his role in the
assassination of Kirov and other ‘anti-Soviet activities’. But on 19 May 1937
Stalin’s attention was diverted to the discovery of his Okhrana file, and the
case of Bukharin was put on ice for seven months. Then, on 15 December 1937,
Stalin, having changed his mind, had a large number of the defendants summarily
executed. (Among those who were executed was Stalin’s old friend Enukidze, who
was initially charged with being the mastermind behind anti-Soviet conspiracy.)
At this point Bukharin became the leading villain at the revised show trial.
The ‘Bukharin Trial’
opened on 2 March 1938 in the October Hall of the Moscow House of Unions. The
defendants, as usual, admitted their guilt and described crimes they had never
committed. Stalin’s old friend Enukidze, who had been executed on 15 December
1937, was presented as the past mastermind of a gigantic conspiracy. On 3 March
1938, the day after the trial began, Isaac Don Levine, an American journalist
and writer, published an article in Journal American under the headline,
‘Stalin Suspected of Forcing Trials to Cover His Past’. Levine wrote:
Is Stalin a former agent
of the Czar’s Okhrana trying to wipe out in blood the preserved traces of his
past career in the secret service of the Romanoffs?
As the author of the first
biography of Stalin, the writer has long been familiar with reports that some
of the old Bolsheviks had in their possession a secret file from the archives
of the Okhrana proving that Stalin was a super spy for the Czar when he joined
forces with Lenin…
So incredible did this
charge appear, in spite of the fact that there are suspicious circumstances in
Stalin’s career, that one did not dare to make it public without further
substantiation…
Levine found this charge
analogous to Benedict Arnold testifying ‘that Alexander Hamilton had plotted
the assassination of George Washington’.16
Levine’s article was
widely dismissed as sensationalist, but he had known for many years about the
rumours of Stalin’s links with the Okhrana. As early as 1926 he had received
information about the
discovery
of Stalin’s Okhrana file in the old archives.17 Although he kept
receiving bits and pieces of similar information, he long refrained from making
any of it public without further substantiation. He had received the latest
information about the discovery of Stalin’s Okhrana file from Lev Sedov’s
assistants Erwin Wolf and Rudolf Klement, who had received it from Reiss. The
murder of all four finally convinced Levine that the reports of the file’s
discovery were true and that the murders were the result of Stalin’s drive to
seal the lips of everyone who knew anything about the file.18 Levine
did not know at the time he published his article that Stalin had acted on the
tip of the NKVD agent Mark Sborovsky, codename ‘Etienne’, who had penetrated
the Sedov-Trotskyite group in Paris.
It was inevitable that
Stalin would bring up the accusations of ties with the Okhrana at least against
some defendants, and several alleged ‘Okhrana agents’ were scripted to confess
their crimes. In the final script, the Okhrana charge against Bukharin was
dropped, but instead he was pressed to admit that, having suspected Lenin of
being a German spy, he had intended to kill him in 1917. ‘Stalin wants to put
the dead Lenin in the dock as well!’ Bukharin exclaimed when his interrogator
made these charges.19 Stalin equated charges of collaboration with
the Okhrana with the old claim that Lenin had been a German agent. In August
1917 he put these two charges on an equal footing in an article castigating the
Provisional Government: ‘First they tried to smear tested revolutionary
fighters as German spies, and, that having failed, they want to make them out
to be Tsarist spies.’20 Bukharin categorically refused to sign
testimony having anything to do with his alleged suspicion of Lenin having been
a German spy, even after Stalin promised to spare his life. Stalin then ordered
that Karl Radek be brought from the camp to the Lubianka prison, in order to
show that he kept his word when he promised to spare someone’s life. But Radek
failed to extract from Bukharin testimony about his intention to murder Lenin.
Bukharin’s only concession was his agreement to testify that he had intended to
arrest Lenin for a single day.21
The mysterious ‘Rykov
secret file’ suddenly made its appearance in the proceedings of the Bukharin
Trial. Yagoda’s assistant P.Bulanov was testifying: ‘I shall proceed directly
to the specific crimes in which I personally took part. I know from what Yagoda
told me that the decision to assassinate Nikolay Ivanovich Yezhov…’. Vyshinsky
abruptly interrupted, ‘Did you know where Rykov’s secret file was kept?’
Bulanov immediately replied, ‘Yagoda had it.’ Vyshinsky persisted, ‘The
conspiratorial file?’ Bulanov readily replied, ‘If it was not conspiratorial,
Rykov would hardly have sought such a reliable place for it. I now pass to the
attempt on the life of Nikolay Ivanovich Yezhov. According to Yagoda…’. This
time Vyshinsky did not interrupt Bulanov and allowed him to proceed with his
fantastic story about vast conspiracies, poisonings and murders, which Bulanov
said had been directed by ‘Enukidze, who acted on behalf of Trotsky’. But his
fellow defendant Rykov did not let the issue of the file pass unchallenged. He
interjected, ‘Bulanov spoke here about my archives, which were found in
Yagoda’s possession. I should like him to tell us about what was found, where
those archives came from, what their contents are, and how he knows about
them.’ Vyshinsky called on Bulanov, who gave a strange answer:
If I
knew exactly what they contained and the dimensions of the archives, I would
most certainly answer my fellow-accused. Unfortunately, I have no such
information at my disposal. I spoke about those archives on the basis of the
following: when Yagoda was moving to different premises during the renovation
of the building, I do not remember under what circumstances it happened, but,
at any rate, I found a file of documents among some of the things which had
been lying for a long time in the safe. I asked Yagoda about it. He said:
‘Don’t unpack them, these are Rykov’s archives.’ It seemed to me that was
sufficient grounds for me to make that statement.
At this point, Ulrikh cut
short the enquiry into ‘Rykov’s secret archives’ and announced, ‘Adjournment
for 30 minutes.’
During the next session,
Yagoda described the poisoning of Menzhinsky, Kuibyshev, Gorky and Gorky’s son
Peshkov, as well as the murder of Kirov. He said that he had committed these
crimes following the orders of Enukidze. Yagoda did not mention Rykov’s secret
file, but Rykov used the first opportunity to say, ‘I have a question to ask
Yagoda regarding the archives about which Bulanov spoke.’ Yagoda replied: ‘I
had no archives of Rykov’s.’ Vyshinsky pursued the issue, ‘I have a question to
Bulanov’, he said. ‘What archives of Rykov’s did you say were in Yagoda’s
keeping?’ Bulanov’s interrogators had not prepared him for such insistent
questioning. Not knowing what to say, he displayed confusion and annoyance:
I
spoke of that in my testimony to the court. I will repeat. While participating
in a change of premises, I discovered a number of documents of a personal
character. I don’t remember what they were. It was clear that they were
personal documents of Alexey Ivanovich Rykov. I asked Yagoda, who confirmed my
opinion, but as to what was there, and how much of it, I have said and say now
that I do not know.
This time Yagoda became
curious about Rykov’s file. He turned to Bulanov and said, ‘Allow me to raise a
question. Perhaps you will recall one document, at least, and will say what it
was?’ Bulanov’s curt answer was, ‘Had I remembered, I would already have said
it.’ Yagoda persisted, thinking aloud: ‘Rather strange. He establishes that
this was Rykov’s archive, but by what documents? Just by name, or what?’
Turning angrily to Yagoda, Bulanov said:
In
reply to that, I can only say one thing: that Yagoda at one time did not doubt
for a single second my ability to find my bearings and apprise things very
rapidly under any circumstances. I don’t know why he now denies a thing that is
unquestionably clear to me: I said what I knew and considered it necessary to
say so.
Yagoda had the final word
on ‘Rykov’s secret archives’: ‘In any case, had the archives really existed, in
comparison with the other crimes, the Rykov archives are a trifle.’22
He did not know that this ‘trifle’ was the essence of Stalin’s show. In
Stalin’s original script,
which Stalin had
considerably altered, Rykov was accused of having been an Okhrana agent while
Bulanov was to state that Rykov’s Okhrana file had been found in Menzhinsky’s
office ‘during a change of premises’. Fragments of this original version
survived and appeared at the Bukharin Trial. ‘Rykov’s secret file’ was but one
such fragment.
Several alleged ‘Okhrana
agents’ testified that they had been Okhrana agents before the Revolution.
Familiar details of Stalin’s Okhrana career emerged in their testimony. The
first ‘exposed Okhrana agent’ to testify on 3 March 1938 was V.I.Ivanov,
People’s Commissar of the Timber Industry. He declared: ‘My first downfall
dates back to 1911, when I was a student at the Tula gymnasium in the eighth
grade. The tsarist Okhrana managed to recruit me as one of its agents.’ Ivanov
also stated, ‘I was expelled from the university; a large number of students
were expelled at that time.’ Ivanov did not know that he was describing the
expulsion of Tiflis seminarians that Stalin had provoked some four decades
earlier. Ivanov further stated, ‘In Moscow, the Okhrana department again got
hold of me.’23 Vyshinsky was satisfied by Ivanov’s testimony and
asked him few questions.
During the session on 5
March 1938, I.A.Zelensky, another ‘exposed Okhrana agent’, who before his
arrest was director of cooperative organizations, described his Okhrana career,
beginning his testimony with the statement: ‘First of all I must dwell on my
gravest crime—my work in the tsarist Okhrana.’ At one point in his lengthy
testimony Zelensky said, ‘It goes without saying that I used to meet at a
secret rendezvous an officer of the gendarmerie. I did not know his name; he
was called Vasily Konstantinovich.’ Zelensky further testified that after his
arrest by the Okhrana, he wrote a petition, ‘requesting to be summoned for
examination because I wanted to know the reason for my arrest’. He was summoned
by ‘Vasily Konstantinovich’, who explained to him that it was ‘better for you
that we arrested you’. Zelensky probably did not suspect that he was describing
not his but Stalin’s relations with Okhrana gendarmerie Lieutenant Colonel
I.P.Vasiliev. ‘I remained in prison for six months, after which I was exiled to
the Narym territory’, stated Zelensky. ‘Before starting out, I was visited in
prison by the same officer of the gendarmerie with whom I had meetings at the
secret rendezvous, and he demanded that I reported from my place of exile.’
Zelensky testified that from Narym he had sent two letters to this officer, but
addressed to ‘Averbukh’s print shop’. He added, ‘I was told by my investigator,
that later, on the basis of this testimony, Averbukh, when examined, fully
confirmed what I had said.’ (L.Averbukh, the husband of Yagoda’s sister, by
that time was in no position to confirm anything. He had been executed on 15
December 1937, when Stalin had modified the original scenario of the trial and
ordered the shooting of a large number of defendants. Averbukh was one of the
‘exposed Okhrana agents’ who in the original scenario had been appointed to
mouth fragments of Stalin’s Okhrana past.)
Zelensky described
recognizable events in Stalin’s career in 1912, when Stalin began his
cooperation with Lieutenant-Colonel I.P.Vasiliev. Zelensky also mentioned a ‘provocateur
Polonko’, stating: ‘I must say that aside from being in direct contact with the
gendarmerie officer, the Okhrana put me in touch with another agent—the provocateur
Polonko, who delivered part of the information which I supplied…he was the
liaison man.’ Hiding behind ‘provocateur Polonko’ was Stalin’s rival in
the Okhrana, Roman Malinovsky, a Pole, who was spitefully demoted by Stalin to
the role of liaison
man in this
reinterpretation of the past. Zelensky further stated that he had broken off
his relations with the Okhrana in 1912. Colonel Eremin in his report to
Director Beletsky wrote that Stalin broke off contact with the Okhrana after
the Prague conference in 1912.
Stalin’s aliases ‘Vasily’
and ‘Vasiliev’ came up in the testimony of yet another ‘exposed Okhrana agent’,
P.T.Zubarev, an official in the Agriculture Commissariat. ‘Tell us under what
circumstances you became an agent of the tsarist Okhrana’, asked Vyshinsky.
Zubarev corrected him, ‘Not the Okhrana, but the tsarist police.’ Vyshinsky
then asked, ‘Is there any difference?’ Zubarev replied, ‘There is a slight
difference, but in substance they are the same.’ Vyshinsky agreed, ‘I think so
too.’ (Stalin’s rivalry with Malinovsky made this difference important: after
his election to the Duma Malinovsky’s status changed from an agent of the
Moscow Okhrana to the top secret agent of the Department of Police; he reported
exclusively to its Director and Vice Director.)
Zubarev described how he
had been recruited by a police officer ‘Vasiliev’, who told him, ‘If you,
Zubarev, want to escape punishment, the only way you can do so is to accept my
proposal that you become an agent of the police.’ Zubarev said that he had
agreed to Vasiliev’s proposal and provided him with information on the
revolutionary underground and ‘on the character of some of its most active
leaders’. Zubarev said that when he moved to another town, he resumed his work
as an agent under the codename ‘Paren’. Vyshinsky then asked, ‘This was your
second pseudonym?’ Zubarev replied, ‘Yes, Vasily was my first one.’ Then
Vyshinsky asked, ‘Did you have another pseudonym?’ Zubarev said that in the
city of Ufa he had had the pseudonym ‘Prokhor’. Vyshinsky asked when he had
acquired this pseudonym. ‘At the beginning of 1916’, Zubarev answered.24
Asked by Vyshinsky on another occasion whether he received any remuneration for
this work, Zubarev replied: ‘On two occasions Inspector Vasiliev gave me 30
rubles.’ ‘Thirty pieces of silver on each occasion?’ Vyshinsky asked. ‘Yes’,
replied Zubarev. ‘Twice as much as Judas received!’ Vyshinsky exclaimed;
Zubarev agreed.
At this point, Ulrikh
intervened and said to Zubarev, ‘Tell us about your espionage activities.’
Zubarev began to elaborate on his supposed spying ‘for the benefit of fascist
Germany’. But he was interrupted by Vyshinsky, who wanted to return to the more
pressing matter of Zubarev’s recruitment by officer ‘Vasiliev’ in 1908. ‘I
request that inspector Vasiliev, who enlisted Zubarev, be called as a witness
in order to verify this circumstance’, said Vyshinsky. An elderly man was led
into the courtroom. He said that his name was Dmitry Nikolaevich Vasiliev, that
he was born in 1870, and that he had served as police inspector from 1906 to
1917. His appearance was greeted with a stir of approving whispers and laughter
from the audience that even extracted the semblance of a good-natured smile
from Vyshinsky’s otherwise stern face. This time, Ulrikh led the questioning.
He asked Vasiliev: ‘In particular, did you enlist Zubarev?’ to which Vasiliev
readily replied, ‘Zubarev…yes.’ Ulrikh then said, ‘Tell us in a few words how
you did this.’ Vasiliev told how he had recruited Zubarev some 30 years earlier
and got a signed pledge from him. ‘What was the nature of the pledge?’, asked
Ulrikh. ‘To the effect that he undertook to supply the police with information.
In making the pledge, he said that his pseudonym would be “Vasily”’, replied Vasiliev.
‘Did he say that?’, asked Ulrikh, and Vasiliev readily replied, ‘Yes, he said
it. I remember it very well.’ Vyshinsky interjected, ‘How is it that you
remember him so well? Much time has elapsed since then, and yet you remember
this Zubarev so well.’ To which Vasiliev replied, ‘I have not set eyes on
him since 1909.’ Turning
to Ulrikh, Vyshinsky asked, ‘May I question Zubarev?’ Given permission, he
asked Zubarev, ‘Do you remember? Is this man the Vasiliev who was the inspector
at that time?’ Zubarev was uncertain what he was supposed to say. ‘Thirty years
have elapsed since then and it’s hard for me to remember’, he said, hesitating
for a moment, ‘but I think that is the man… I don’t deny it.’ Vyshinsky probed
further. ‘Does he resemble him?,’ he asked. ‘Yes’, said Zubarev. ‘He was
younger then’, Vyshinsky encouraged him. ‘Of course’, Zubarev agreed. Vyshinsky
then asked, ‘Did you yourself choose the pseudonym “Vasily”?’ Zubarev replied,
‘I don’t remember whether I adopted it myself, or whether he proposed it; I
don’t remember, and I wouldn’t deny that he gave it to me, or that I chose it
myself, but the fact occurred.’25 Despite the fact that Zubarev
claimed to have used the aliases ‘Paren’ and ‘Prokhor’ during the later and
more important part of his alleged service for the tsarist police, only the
alias ‘Vasily’ inspired Vyshinsky’s keen interest. The source of this
‘interest’ was Stalin himself, who had instructed Vyshinsky to call ‘Inspector
Vasily’ as a witness in order to ‘establish’ the origin of this alias which was
mentioned in the documents in his Okhrana file.
On 12 March 1938 the
Bukharin show trial ended. In their final pleas the defendants demanded severe
punishment for their heinous crimes. Stalin had allowed Bukharin to modify his
testimony and deny that he had intended to murder Lenin and taken part in the
murders of Kirov, Menzhinsky, Kuibyshev and Gorky. For this concession, Stalin
demanded that Bukharin deliver his last plea, written by Stalin. In it,
Bukharin mentioned in passing that ‘some of the Western European and American
intellectuals’ do not understand that ‘in our country the antagonist, the
enemy, has at the same time a divided, a dual, mind’. The statement was
intended to attribute to Stalin’s enemies the divided and dual mind of Stalin
himself. Stalin perceptively described such a mind in his psychological
portrait of the provocateur Anna Serebriakova. Bukharin denied that the
psy-chology of Dostoyevsky’s characters still existed in Russia. Dostoyevsky’s
characters were, he claimed, a thing of the remote past in the Soviet Union.
Bukharin continued, ‘Such types do not exist in our country, or exist perhaps
only on the outskirts of small provincial towns, if they do even there. On the
contrary, such psychology is to be found in western Europe.’26
Stalin pointed Bukharin’s finger far away from himself.
At 4 am on 13 March 1938
Ulrikh read out death sentences on 18 defendants, including Bukharin, Yagoda,
Rykov and all ‘exposed Okhrana agents’. Three defendants received long sentences
that none of them survived. The death sentences were carried out immediately.
Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent in Moscow for many
years, described Ulrikh as a ‘hard judge but a just one’ in a book he published
in 1942.27 A few months earlier, Duranty had written that the
Gamarnik’s suicide ‘proved that he had been engaged in some deal with the
Germans’.28 The American ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph
Davies, in his report to Washington on 7 March 1938 wrote that the trials
offered proof ‘beyond reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of guilty of
treason’.29 In his lectures Davies drew laughter when in his reply
to questions about a fifth column in Russia, he cracked the joke, ‘There aren’t
any, they shot them all.’30
NOTES
1.
Alexander Orlov, Tainaya
istoria stalinskikh prestuplenyi, New Yorkm Jerusalem, Paris, 1983, p. 223.
2.
I.D.Levine received
information about the file from Wolf and Klement. Their subsequent murders
convinced him that their claims were authentic. Interview with Levine in
Chappaqua, New York, 1976.
3.
Orlov, Tainaya
istoria…, p. 224.
4.
John J.Dziak, Chekisty:
A History of the KGB, Lexington, 1988, pp. 99f. Also Stephen Schwartz,
‘Intellectuals and Assassins—Annals of Stalin’s Killerati’, The New York
Times Book Review, 24 January 1988.
5.
Orlov, Tainaya
istoria…, p. 188.
6.
Ibid. p. 188f.
7.
Ibid. pp. 223–5.
8.
S.Rozhdestvensky,
‘Pokhishchenie generala Millera’, Novoe russkoe slovo, 19 May 1979.
9.
Schwartz, ‘Intellectuals
and Assassins’, pp. 3 and 29–31. The first reports about Max Eitingon’s
connections with Skoblin and Plevitskaya appeared in the Russian-Language émigré newspaper
Vozrozhdenie, Paris, 9 December 1938 and in an earlier unsigned
Russian-language manuscript, dated December 1937. See Dziak, Chekisty…,
p. 99, fn. 79.
10.
Robert Conquest, The
Great Terror, New York, 1973, p. 444. Also Pavel Antokolsky, Novy mir,
no. 4, 1966. Also Marina Tsvetaeva, Izbrannye sochineniya, Introduction,
Moscow/Leningrad, 1964, Efron is listed among prisoners executed in October
1941.
11.
Dziak, Chekisty,
pp. 99f. Also Schwartz, ‘Intellectuals and Assassins’.
12.
Orlov, Tainaya istoria,
pp. 228–32.
13.
Felix Medvedev, Ogonek,
no. 26–30, Moscow, 1987. See also Soviet Media Digest, Radio Liberty, 8
August 1987, nos 725–05 to 725–13.
14.
Orlov, Tainaya istoria,
p. 271. (The author met Yury Sokolnikov in the Norylsk Special Regime camp No.
4 in 1952 and was very close to him during the Norylsk uprising in the summer
of 1953. After his release from prison camp Yury did not have permission to
live in Moscow, but was allowed to settle 100 kilometers from Moscow, according
to the regulations.)
15.
Felix Medvedev, Ogonek,
no. 26–30, Moscow, 1987. See also Soviet Media Digest, Radio Liberty, 8
August 1987.
16.
I.D.Levine, Journal
American, 3 March 1938. The article’s subtitle reads: ‘Levine Probed
Reports of Secret File Proving Red Leader Czarist Spy.’
17.
See Chapter 17 above for
I.D.Levine’s letter to the author, mentioning this report. The report about the
discovery of the file reached the magazine Sotsialistichesky vestnik,
published in Berlin, in 1926. Davis Shub, the editor of this magazine, told
Levine about this report.
18.
I.D.Levine in a
conversation with the author in 1976 in Chappaqua, New York.
19.
Orlov, Tainaya
istoria…, pp. 271f.
20.
Lev Trotsky, Stalin,
New York, 1941, pp. 221f.
21.
Alexander Orlov, Tainaya
istoria…, pp. 271f.
22.
Bukharin Trial,
New York, 1965, pp. 478–99
23.
Ibid., pp. 110f.
24.
Ibid., pp. 272–5.
25.
Ibid., pp. 144–9.
26.
Ibid., p. 666. Stalin’s
deep distrust of Dostoyevsky’s insight into a certain type of mind is indicated
by his banning of Dostoyevsky’s works.
27.
Walter Duranty, The
Kremlin and the People, New York, 1941, p. 37.
28.
Ibid., p. 55.
29.
Joseph E.Davies, Mission
to Moscow, vol. 1, New York, 1941, p. 39.
30.
Conquest, The Great
Terror, p. 673.
THE MYSTERIOUS ‘WORKER VASILY’
During 1937 and 1938
alone, Yezhov submitted for Stalin’s signature 383 lists of party members
selected for liquidation. These lists were usually signed, ‘Approved: J.Stalin,
V.Molotov’.1 Sometimes Stalin and Molotov sanctioned the execution
of more than 3,000 people a day.2 The surviving Old Bolsheviks, most
in prison camps, were frightened and kept silent when Stalin began to rewrite
his biography in 1937. He published A Short Course of Party History, a
book that bore little resemblance to the party’s actual past. In rewriting his
past, Stalin as usual did not replace the facts with complete inventions, but a
distorted version of the mutilated truth.
Until 1939 all official
biographies of Stalin listed his five arrests and four escapes from places of
exile. But in his new biography, published in 1939 to mark his 60th birthday,
Stalin listed seven arrests and six escapes, two of which he allegedly made
from prison. Documents in his Okhrana file brought back his memory of two
‘arrests’ and ‘escapes’ in Tiflis in February 1905 and in March 1906 when he
had been arrested by the chief of the Tiflis Okhrana, Colonel Zasypkin. On the
first occasion he betrayed Stepan Shaumian, whom Zasypkin arrested; upon his
second arrest Stalin had provided Zasypkin with information about the Avlabar
press, which had led to its liquidation.3 In his new biography,
Stalin began to claim that he had organized the Avlabar press in 1903 and had
directed its work from his prison cell!
Stalin did not destroy all
the documents in his St Petersburg Okhrana file. For instance, he placed his
original report to the Okhrana, dated 5/18 June 1912, in the Soviet archives,
describing it as his ‘circular letter to the Party no. 1’ and he mentioned it
in his collected works.7 In 1941 for the first time Stalin also made
public his alias ‘Vasily’, which was mentioned in two circular reports he found
in his Okhrana file and also placed in the Soviet archives.8 One of
them, dated 7 March 1913, describes Stalin as having assumed the party aliases
of ‘Koba’ and ‘Vasily’. The other, dated 19 April 1913, also mentions these
aliases.
In rewriting the story of
his life, Stalin devoted great attention to creating a script for a movie about
his role in the October Revolution. In the summer of 1938 he invited Aleksei
Kapler, a prominent Soviet screenwriter, to his dacha in Kuntsevo and
commissioned him to write a screenplay for a film about Lenin. Mikhail Romm, a
prominent Soviet director, was chosen to direct the film. Stalin frequently
discussed the script with Kapler and Romm, offering his advice. ‘Here Stalin
enters the hall’, Stalin would say. Kapler would enquire what Comrade Stalin
was saying at this point. ‘Something wise, wise’ was Stalin’s answer.9
One repercussion of Kapler’s frequent visits was that Stalin’s daughter
Svetlana, 13 at the time, fell in love with Kapler, a handsome man of 34.
(Stalin at first did not notice Svetlana’s infatuation. When he did, he had
Kapler accused of being a British spy and imprisoned.10)
Kapler’s script turned out
much too long for one movie, Stalin ordered him to turn it into a two-part
movie and suggested the titles: Lenin in October and Lenin in 1918.
The major role in both films was assigned not to Lenin, nor even to Stalin, but
to a mysterious character ‘Worker Vasily’, who appeared larger than life and
had no family name or patronymic. His role was played by a movie star Nikolay
Okhlopkov. ‘Worker Vasily’ over-shadowed Lenin, who appeared in the movie
helpless and without the wise advice of this mysterious personage. Stalin was
presented in the movie in a modest role compared with that of ‘Worker Vasily’.
Critics were certain that this towering figure represented the wisdom of the
proletarian masses.
Stalin attributed to
‘Worker Vasily’ the leading role in the film which had a familiar ring: in July
1917 ‘Worker Vasily’ leads Lenin to a hiding place, a makeshift hut in the
suburbs of Petrograd, whence Lenin later escapes to Finland. Infact, it was
Stalin who led Lenin and Zinoviev to a hut in a forest near the village of
Razliv to hide them ‘from the bloodhounds of the Provisional Government’ in
July 1917. In 1939, when the movie appeared on the screen, no one was in a
position to challenge this version of events: Lenin was dead; Zinoviev had been
shot in 1936. The owner of this makeshift hut, the worker Emelianov, his wife,
and their three sons had been arrested in 1935 and perished.11
Krupskaya, who knew Emilianov and the story about this makeshift hut, died just
before ‘Worker Vasily’ appeared on the screen. Rumors spread that she had been
poisoned.12
It is clear that ‘Worker
Vasily’ was Stalin’s idealized ‘double’ and that Stalin, not Lenin, was the
chief hero in the movies. In both movies Stalin substituted his past as Okhrana
agent ‘Vasily’ with the enormously magnified screen image of ‘Worker Vasily’.
In his perception of himself, reality and fiction blended in a bewildering
tangle of truth and myth. Thus, an Okhrana agent, one of the 12 listed in the
1918 book Bolsheviki, described there as ‘yet unidentified, who had the
alias “Vasily”’, was ‘unmasked’ by Stalin during the Bukharin trial when
P.T.Zubarev was forced to ‘confess’ that his
Okhrana alias was ‘Vasily’ and that
he had been recruited by an Okhrana officer by the name of Vasiliev. Stalin had
forced Zubarev to ‘confess’ to an event in Stalin’s own life.13
NOTES
1.
Z.T.Serdyuk, speech to the
Twenty-second Party Congress, Pravda, 31 October, 1961.
2.
D.Volkogonov, TV
interview; broadcast in the U S on NBC on 27 March, 1991.
3.
See Chapter 5 above.
4.
Batumskaya demonstratsiya
1902-go goda, Moscow, 1937, p. 140.
5.
M.A.Bulgakov, Sobranie
sochinenii, vol. III, Moscow 1990, p. 698.
6.
V.Kaminsky and
I.Vereshchagin, Detstvo i yunost vozhdia, Moscow; 1939, p. 88.
7.
See I.V.Stalin, Sochineniya,
vol. II, Moscow, 1946–51, p. 417. See also Z.Serebriakova, ‘Stalin i tsarskaya
okhrana’, in Sovershenno secretno, no. 7, 1990, Moscow. Serebriakova
found the original of Stalin’s report in the Central State Archive and its copy
in Ordzhonikidze’s Okhrana file (Stalin’s complaint against Malinovsky is
missing in this copy). Serebriakova writes that the original of Stalin’s report
‘miraculously survived and is now discovered, moreover, in two archival
deposits’. (That is, the handwritten version in the Central State Archive and
the typed copy in Ordzhonikidze’s Okhrana file.) ‘This alone proves Stalin’s
ties to the Okhrana’, states Serebriakova. Stalin’s report to the Okhrana
survived because Stalin redefined it when he found it in his St Petersburg
Okhrana file, calling it ‘Circular Letter No. 1 on the Final Composition of the
Central Committee of the RSDWP.’ What Stalin did not know was that Colonel
Eremin had copies of this report made, ordering the typist to delete Stalin’s
complaint about Malinovsky, and sent the copies to the Okhrana Foreign Agency
headquarters in Paris and to Ordzhonikidze’s interrogator under the heading
‘Spravka bez no.’ (reference without number). The copy in Ordzhonikidze’s file
was discovered by Serebriakova.
8.
Krasny arkhiv,
vol. 2 (105), Ogiz, Chief Archive Administration of the NKVD of the USSR, 1941,
pp. 30f.
9.
Taped interview with Efim
Sevela at Chappaqua, New York, 1976. In the present author’s archive.
10.
Jennifer Dunning, ‘Aleksey
Kapler’, The New York Times, 15 September 1979, p. 12.
11.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, pp. 200f.
12.
The author heard these
rumors from various people.
13.
H.Montgomery Hyde, Stalin:
The History of a Dictator, New York, 1971, pp. 376f.
INHALING ‘POISON GAS’
In May 1938 Stalin sent
his personal assistant Lev Mekhlis and Yezhov’s deputy Frinovsky to the Far
East to ‘liquidate’ the ‘Balitsky nest’ in the NKVD and the ‘Gamarnik-Bulin
gang’ in the Red Army. (A year earlier Stalin had ordered Bulin to murder
Gamarnik. In June 1938 Khrushchev delivered a speech in which he called
Balitsky a ‘Fascist agent’.1) Trucks with arrested NKVD and Red Army
officers were delivering their human cargo to the Khabarovsk prisons. Frinovsky
personally shot 16 top NKVD personnel.2
The chief of the Far
Eastern NKVD, Genrikh Liushkov, was not among the executed officers. Stalin was
delaying sending an order to Liushkov to signal his permission to publish the
‘Eremin Letter’ and other forged Okhrana documents in the Russian émigré press
in China. Stalin was uncertain about what to do with these forgeries. On the
one hand, he did not need them as ‘criminal evidence’ against General Miller,
who had been executed. On the other, he wanted them available to discredit any
embarrassing Okhrana documents that might have survived his dragnet. Most of
all, he wanted to have these forgeries to reinforce his own wishful thinking
that the accusations about his Okhrana past were inventions of his enemies.
Liushkov was watching with
alarm the purge that was swallowing up his associates. A morally blind former
hardcore common criminal, he was not blind to his chances for survival. He knew
that Stalin was delaying his arrest only because of the assignment to publish
the ‘Eremin Letter’ and other forged Okhrana documents. Being familiar with
Stalin’s provocations, Liushkov realized that these forgeries were meant to
discredit genuine Okhrana documents and probably surmised that Stalin intended
the purge to cover up his Okhrana past. He knew that sooner or later the purge
would swallow him as well.
On 9 June 1938 Liushkov
told his deputy Grigory Osinin-Vinnitsky that he had to go to the
Soviet-Manchurian border to meet a ‘very important agent’. He left Khabarovsk,
having taken from a secret fund 4,000 Manchurian gobi to ‘encourage’ this
agent. Upon his arrival at a border guard detachment, Liushkov donned a
civilian disguise. He was accompanied by an intelligence officer, who hid some
distance behind Liushkov, waiting for his return. But Liushkov did not return;
he faded into the night and the fog that soon turned into heavy rain.3
diplomats had been
instructed to insist that the real Liushkov was still in Russia and that the
one in Tokyo was an ‘imposter’.4
Liushkov’s defection was
widely disbelieved in the West. A 4 June 1938 New York Times editorial
entitled ‘Diary for a Japanese Schoolboy’ depicted it as an anti-Soviet
invention. The Germans, however, took his defection seriously. Admiral Wilhelm
Canaris, the chief of Nazi intelligence, sent an agent to interrogate Liushkov.
Major Schol, the German assistant military attaché in Tokyo, received
information about the interrogation of Liushkov and shared it with his friend
Richard Sorge, the top Soviet agent in Tokyo, who was posing as a correspondent
for a German newspaper. Sorge was ordered to relate all available information
on Liushkov: ‘Transmit immediately’, Moscow demanded.5
Liushkov was very
selective in what he told his Japanese interrogators. He gave them some limited
information about the location of Soviet troops but did not expose Soviet
agents in China or Japan.6 He also kept quiet about his own role in
the mass purges and preparations for the show trials, such as his interrogation
of Kamenev, Zinoviev, Riutin and other prominent party members. Nor did he talk
about the deportation of Koreans from the Soviet Far East, which he had
directed in December 1937 and for which he was given an award (Korea being then
under Japanese rule).7 Finally, Liushkov did not mention the forged
Okhrana documents he had been assigned to plant in China. He did not have these
forgeries to prove such a fantastic charge. Liushkov stood to gain nothing from
implicating himself in Stalin’s provocations, in the mass purges and show
trials, and he had no desire to discredit either Stalin personally or the
Soviet system, which had elevated him to one of the top positions in the NKVD.
Despite the meagerness of the information that the Japanese obtained from him,
there was a report that the Soviet embassy in Tokyo directed the Japanese
Communist Party to liquidate Liushkov.8
After Liushkov’s escape,
the number of arrests and executions in the Far East increased sharply. Marshal
Vasily Bliukher, the commander of the Far Eastern forces, was arrested, taken
to Lubianka, tortured and shot. Twenty-two NKVD officers were executed, among
them Liushkov’s deputy, Grigory Osinin-Vinnitsky, who was declared a Japanese
spy.9 M.M. Zapadny, who had been appointed chief of the Far Eastern
NKVD after Liushkov’s defection, was also executed. On 29 July 1938 it was
reported that the purge in the Far East had been ordered personally by Stalin
in order to stop Japanese penetration of Soviet defenses.10 Special
troops replaced the frontier guards in the area of Liushkov’s defection and
several times opened artillery fire on Japanese positions across the border.
The Japanese responded by attacking in the area of Khal Kin Gol and Lake
Khasan, to verify Liushkov’s information on Soviet troops. Large battles
occurred in these areas, with substantial losses on both sides. The Soviet
press maintained total silence about Liushkov. Stalin removed from Soviet
archives all documents related to these battles.11 After Liushkov’s
defection, Stalin performed one of his ‘false target’ escapades, which allowed
him to vent his rage. He ordered Yezhov’s deputy, Frinovsky to go to a border
crossing to capture ‘a dangerous spy’ who was supposed to come there. Frinovsky
was then arrested and executed for trying to ‘flee abroad’.12 (The
final chapter of Liushkov’s story was written in 1945. He was at the
headquarters of the Japanese Army in the Manchurian city of Dairen when the
Soviet Army entered the city. A Japanese general shot him dead to keep him from
being captured alive by the Soviets.13)
After Liushkov’s
defection, Romm and Nagi, two NKVD residents in China, and other Soviet agents
there were recalled to Moscow and executed. M.D.Golovachev, the NKVD informer
to whom Liushkov had given the ‘Eremin Letter’ and other forged Okhrana
documents, was not recalled to Moscow, because he was not a staff intelligence officer,
but one of numerous shtuchniks (piecemeal informers) who worked for the
NKVD in various countries. After Liushkov’s defection, Golovachev remained in
possession of the forgeries, not knowing what to do with them. He was left
without guidance by his NKVD handlers who had been recalled to Moscow.14
Golovachev understood that the documents were intended to play an important
role in some major provocation. He must have worried that this provocation
might end up hurting him. He made no attempt to find out from Soviet officials
what to do with these forgeries. (Three years later Golovachev attempted to
sell the ‘Eremin Letter’ to the Germans.15)
Soon after Liushkov’s
defection, an event took place that attracted no attention in the world press:
Colonel Russianov, the man Golovachev had been instructed to implicate as the
forger of the ‘Eremin Letter’ and the other forgeries, suddenly died. He was 59
years old. Russianov’s family suspected that he had either been poisoned, or
had committed suicide. His son found a strange package in their home,
containing Okhrana stationery, rubber stamps and photographs of Stalin, Trotsky
and Malinovsky. The son could not explain the origin of the package and decided
to preserve it. There was no investigation into the cause of Russianov’s death,
he was one of many Russian émigrés in Shanghai who were of no interest
to the Chinese police. His family did not press for an investigation: they
wanted to bury him in the Russian Orthodox cemetery and feared that they would
be turned away if it were established that the cause of death was suicide by
poisoning. (Russianov’s family left Shanghai ten years later before the capture
of the city by the Chinese Communists and moved to Australia. In 1956,
Russianov’s son sent the package with the Okhrana paraphernalia to Isaac Don
Levine, the American journalist who at that time was investigating the origin
of the ‘Eremin Letter’.16)
On 9 July 1938 Alexander
Orlov, the chief Soviet intelligence adviser to the Spanish Republican
government, received Yezhov’s order to return to Moscow.17 He knew
that this would be the end of him. He recalled his last conversation with Pavel
Alliluev, the brother of Stalin’s late wife Nadezhda. Orlov, long acquainted
with Pavel, had met him in Paris at the Soviet exhibition in September 1937.
They went for a long walk and recalled old friends, many of whom were no longer
alive. Alliluev complained that NKVD agents were following him everywhere.
Orlov asked Alliluev what was behind the execution of Tukhachevsky and other
generals. Alliluev fell silent and then said very slowly: ‘Alexander, don’t
ever enquire about the Tukhachevsky affair. Knowing about it is like inhaling
poison gas.’ A few months later Orlov read a short obituary in a Soviet paper:
Pavel Alliluev had ‘died while carrying out his official duties’. Orlov
recalled Alliluev’s ‘poison gas’ remark and concluded grimly that Stalin had
had him murdered.18 (Ten years later Stalin was to accuse Evgenia
Alliluev, Pavel Alliluev’s wife, of poisoning her husband.19)
From his conversation with
Alliluev, Orlov surmised that Alliluev knew about Stalin’s Okhrana file and its
role in the Tukhachevsky conspiracy, and that by ‘poison gas’ Alliluev had
meant that acquiring knowledge about Stalin’s Okhrana file was tantamount to
committing suicide. Orlov himself had caught a whiff of this poison when his
cousin, Zinovy Katsnelson, had told him in February 1937 about I.L.Shtein’s
discovery of
Stalin’s Okhrana file.
Orlov knew that Katsnelson had been executed and Shtein had committed suicide.
To escape their fate, Orlov drove across the border to France and, together
with his wife and daughter, boarded a ship to Canada. On 13 August 1938 the
Orlovs arrived in Washington and applied for political asylum, which he
obtained without much difficulty. Then, he and his family lived anonymously for
15 years although he believed that the US authorities would in the long run be
unable to protect him from the NKVD. Eventually, he wrote a book entitled The
Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes, but did not publish it until 1953, the
year of Stalin’s death, stating that the case of Marshal Tukhachevsky and the
other executed generals was ‘destined to occupy a much more significant place
in history than it deserves in its own right’. Orlov wrote:
I am
making this assertion because I know from an absolutely unimpeachable and
authoritative source that the case of Marshal Tukhachevsky was tied up with one
of Stalin’s most horrible secrets which, when disclosed, will throw light on
many things that seemed so incomprehensible in Stalin’s behavior.20
(In 1956 he published an
article in Life magazine, recounting what he knew about the Tukhachevsky
plot.21)
In December 1938 Yezhov
was removed from the post of NKVD chief and Beria appointed in his place. Stalin
then ordered him to destroy ‘Yezhov’s nest’. Yezhov was still alive in March
1939 when he appeared as a delegate at the Eighteenth Party Congress. During
one of the sessions, Stalin asked Yezhov to come close to the podium. ‘Well,
what do you think about yourself? Can you be a member of the Central
Committee?’ he asked him. Yezhov, his voice breaking, said that he had devoted
his whole life to the party and Stalin and that he loved Stalin more than his
own life. ‘Is that so?’ asked Stalin with an air of amazement and enquired:
‘Then who was Frinovsky? Did you know Frinovsky?’ Yezhov answered, ‘Frinovsky
was my deputy.’ (Frinovsky, arrested for his alleged attempt to escape across
the Manchurian border, was by then signing depositions accusing Yezhov.) Before
Yezhov could go on, Stalin interrupted him to ask who Shapiro was, who Ryzhova
was, who Fedorov was. All of these aides of Yezhov had been shot by then.
‘Iosif Vissarionovich! But you know it was I—I myself!—who exposed their plot.
I came to you and reported’, Yezhov pleaded. Stalin interrupted him with an
angry tirade:
Yes,
yes, yes! When you thought you were going to get caught, then you came all in a
hurry. But what happened before that? Did you organize a plot? Did you want to
kill Stalin? Top people in the NKVD were hatching a plot and you supposedly had
nothing to do with it! Do you think I don’t see anything? Well, let me refresh
your memory. Who was it that you sent to stand guard over Stalin one day? Who?
Did they have revolvers? Why be near Stalin with revolvers? To kill Stalin? And
what if I hadn’t noticed? What then?22
Stalin was again rewriting
history. He wanted to forget that on 19 May 1937, after Karl Pauker brought to
him a photocopy of Colonel Eremin’s report, he had declared a state of
alert, and Yezhov and
Frinovsky had placed armed guards to protect him from ‘a gigantic conspiracy in
the Army, such a conspiracy as history has never known’.23 Yezhov
knew it was useless to argue when Stalin turned these events upside down.
‘Well? Get going! That’s all’, Stalin concluded. Addressing the audience, he
mused, ‘I don’t know, comrades, can this man remain as a member of the Central
Committee?’ He paused as if pondering the question and added, ‘I have my
doubts. Of course, you think it over… It’s up to you, as you wish… But I have
my doubts!’24 Soon thereafter, Yezhov was arrested and executed.
Stalin explained to Alexander Yakovlev, a leading airplane designer: ‘That
scoundrel Yezhov! He finished off some of our finest people. He was utterly rotten.
That’s why we shot him.’25
The greatest devastation
was suffered by the party apparatus, the cadres of the NKVD, and the army in
the Ukraine, where, as Stalin found out, the Tukhachevsky conspiracy against
him had taken root. The purge there was directed by Nikita Khrushchev, who was
appointed first secretary of the Ukrainian Party in January 1938. Khrushchev
executed all members of the Ukrainian Politburo. Out of the 102 members of the
Central Committee of the Ukrainian Party only three remained alive, among them
Grigory Petrovsky. All members of the Ukrainian government were arrested.26
Stanislav Kossior, the head of the Ukrainian government, was brought to
Stalin’s office for interrogation. Stalin also summoned Grigory Petrovsky.
‘Well, talk!’ Stalin said to Kossior. ‘What can I say? You know I’m a Polish
spy’, Kossior replied. Turning to Kossior, Petrovsky objected, ‘Stasik, why do
you tell lies about yourself and me?’ Kossior replied meekly, ‘I made
depositions and I won’t take them back.’ Stalin exclaimed, ‘There, you see,
Petrovsky, you didn’t believe that Kossior had become a spy. Now do you believe
he is an enemy of the people?’ Petrovsky did not respond at once, and Stalin
ordered that his file be brought in. ‘We shoot people like you’, he shouted at
Petrovsky, ‘but I will have mercy on you.’27 Petrovsky’s file
contained a document with information about his ties to the Okhrana, yet
despite this, or maybe because of it, he was never arrested, although both of
his sons were imprisoned.28
Many of the people
arrested at that time were accused of having been Okhrana agents. One was the
respected theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was accused of working for
the Okhrana under the alias ‘Semenych’,29 and of being a Japanese
spy. This latter accusation was probably a consequence of Liushkov’s escape to
Japan. It so happened that soon after Liushkov’s escape, a Japanese couple,
Yoshido Yoshima and his wife, came to Moscow to study Meyerhold’s approach to
theater. They were arrested and accused of being spies and were executed (after
Stalin’s death, they were declared innocent). Meyerhold was arrested on 20 June
1939. A few days later the body of his wife, Zinaida Raikh (formerly married to
the poet Sergey Esenin), was found in their apartment. Her body had 17 knife
wounds, and her eyes had been cut out, apparently from the superstitious fear
that they retained the image of her murderers. The only things taken from the
apartment were documents. Their NKVD file was opened under the joint name of
‘Meyerhold-Raikh, V.E.’ On 13 January 1940, three days before his trial,
Meyerhold wrote an appeal to Vyshinsky, not knowing that Vyshinsky was no
longer the chief prosecutor but had been promoted to the position of deputy
commissar of foreign affairs. Meyerhold wrote: ‘Interrogator Rodos broke my
left hand and left my right one unbroken so that I could sign my depositions
with it. My depositions are false: I could not withstand tortures and
denigration. He forced me to drink urine, to crawl—me, an old
man.’30 Meyerhold
was brought before Ulrikh, who hurriedly asked a few formal questions.
Meyerhold denied the accusations, and was then taken to the Lubianka cellars
and shot in the back of the head.
Usually, the bodies of
executed men and women were disposed of in secret ‘burial grounds’. One such
mass grave was located on the outskirts of Moscow, near the Abelman Zastava
(checkpoint), in a deep ravine next to the Kalitnikovskoe cemetery. An old road
paved with wornout cobblestones led to a former slaughterhouse. Since long
before the Revolution, this road had been known as Skotogonnaya Doroga
(Cattle Drive Road). It had been used by peasants from villages near Moscow,
who drove their livestock there to supply Moscow with meat. In the 1930s this
road was often traveled by covered gray-blue trucks in which NKVD officers in
yellow rubber aprons delivered the bodies of executed men and women, usually
some 30 corpses per delivery. The officers swung the corpses by the hands and
feet and threw them into the ravine and hurriedly threw shovels of earth over
them. There were layers upon layers of corpses.31
NOTES
1.
Robert Conquest, The
Great Terror, New York, 1973, p. 348, fn. 74 (which cites Bilsovik
ukrainy, 6 June 1938).
2.
Conquest, The Great
Terror, pp. 617f.
3.
Vladimir Mikhailov and
Viacheslav Bondarenko, Kurier, no. 58, 3–9 June 1993, pp. 1 and 24.
4.
Alvin D.Coox, ‘L’Affaire
Liushkov’, Soviet Studies, January 1968, p. 411.
5.
Ibid.
6.
Mikhailov and Bondarenko, Kurier,
no. 58, 3–9 June 1993, pp. 1 and 24.
7.
Coox, ‘L’Affaire
Liushkov’, p. 400, citing Pravda report on Liushkov, dated 20 December
1937.
8.
Ibid. p. 413, fn. 21.
9.
R.S.Osinina, who was
earlier divorced from Gregory Osinin-Vinnitsky, provided this information in a
taped interview with the author in Haifa, Israel, in 1979. She was an aunt of
Vitaly Svechinsky. In the author’s archive.
10.
Coox, ‘L’Affaire
Liushkov’, p. 407.
11.
V.A.Korotich, the former
editor of Ogonek, provided this information in a telephone interview
with the author on 9 September 1992, when he was in Massachusetts. Korotich
stated that he had attempted to find these documents with the help of KGB chief
Kruchkov.
12.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, p. 323.
13.
A.Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret
tirana, New York, 1980, p. 209. See also Mikhailov and Bondarenko, Kurier,
no. 58, 3–9 June 1993, pp. 1 and 24.
14.
See Chapter 28 above.
15.
See Chapter 34 below.
16.
The author examined this
package at I.D.Levine’s farm in Waldorf, Virginia. It is in Levine’s archive.
17.
Alexander Orlov, Tainaya
storiia stalinskikh prestuplenii, New York/Jerusalem/Paris, 1983, p. 13.
18.
Ibid., pp. 309–11.
19.
I.P.Itskov, taped
interview. Itskov, a lawyer, represented Evgenia Allilueva in her ‘rehabilitation
case’. See also Svetlana Allilueva, Twenty Letters to a Friend, New
York, 1967, pp. 182f.
20.
Alexander Orlov, The
Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes, New York, 1953, p. 240.
21.
Alexander Orlov, ‘The
Sensational Secret Behind Damnation of Stalin’, Life, 23 April 1956, pp.
34–44.
22.
Medvedev, ‘Dvadtsatyi
vek’, Obshestvenno-politicheskii i literatumyi almanakh, no. 2, pp. 41f.
23.
See Chapter 22 above.
24.
Medvedev, ‘Dvadtsatyi
vek’, pp. 41f.
25.
H.Montgomery Hyde, Stalin:
The History of a Dictator, New York, 1971, p. 377.
26.
Conquest, The Great
Terror, pp. 348–50.
27.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, pp. 295f.
28.
Ibid., p. 295. Medvedev
quotes from papers in the archive of the Petrovsky family.
29.
Ibid., p. 316.
30.
V.A.Chalikova, ‘Arkhivnyi
yunosha’, Neva, October 1988, p. 152.
31.
Alexander Milchakov,
‘Ovrag na kalitnikovskom’, Semiya, no. 40, Moscow, 1988.
THE MURDER OF TROTSKY
Soon after the murder of
Ignaz Reiss, Stalin ordered the NKVD to assassinate Trotsky.1 After
Reiss informed Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov about the discovery of Stalin’s Okhrana
file, Sedov in turn reported this information to his father. Stalin feared that
Trotsky might publicize this information. The first attempt on Trotsky’s life
was made in January 1938, shortly before the murder of Sedov. Trotsky escaped unharmed.
His suspicion that Stalin was behind this assassination attempt increased after
his son’s murder in February and the murders of Trotsky’s aides Rudolf Klement
and Erwin Wolf. Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, were greatly hurt by the
death of their son, in whom they lost not only a beloved son but a devoted
assistant as well. Ironically, if Sedov reported to Trotsky the discovery of
Stalin’s Okhrana file, the news fell on deaf ears: Trotsky always denied all
accusations that Stalin had ever been an Okhrana agent. To Trotsky, such
blasphemy seemed inconceivable.
Trotsky devoted the summer
of 1938 to drafting the program for the Founding Congress of the Fourth
International, which opened on 3 September 1938 in the house of Alfred and
Marguerite Rosmer outside of Paris. Twenty-eight delegates, representing
Trotsky’s supporters in 11 countries, were present. Trotsky could not attend
because he had no passport: his Soviet citizenship had been terminated and he
did not want to apply for citizenship elsewhere. In Stalin’s words, Trotsky was
a ‘passportless vagrant’. He was living in a villa in Coyoacan, a suburb of
Mexico City.
At the congress, the fear
of the Kremlin’s long hand hung over the delegates. They decided to have only
one session in order to prevent Stalin’s agents from infiltrating the congress.
But Mark Zborovsky, the NKVD agent who had organized the murder of Lev Sedov,
was an active participant: he officially represented the ‘Russian Section’ of
the Fourth International. Another NKVD agent, whose true name was Ramon
Mercader, attempted to attend the congress but was not admitted. Sylvia Agelof,
one of Trotsky’s secretaries, introduced Mercader to Alfred and Marguerite
Rosmer as Jacques Mornard. Agelof met Mercader for the first time—by accident,
she thought—shortly before the opening of the congress, when she arrived in
Paris from New York. In fact, her meeting with Mercader had been carefully
orchestrated by NKVD agents in New York and Paris. The encounter was part of
Stalin’s scheme to assassinate Trotsky.
Agelof was known as
Trotsky’s trusted assistant and had easy access to him, she was selected as the
object of Mercader’s courtship; he was to charm and ‘marry’ her, to gain access
to Trotsky’s household. Their ‘accidental’ meeting in Paris was the beginning
of a love affair.2
Mercader showered Agelof
with attention. Agelof was a young woman active in the Russian-Jewish emigrant
leftist circles of New York. She was plain and unaccustomed to being courted by
men, and fell for Mercader’s charm. In February 1939 she returned to New York,
and in September of that year Mercader arrived there carrying a bogus Canadian
passport with the improbably spelled name ‘Jacson’, a mistake by the NKVD
forger. He explained that he was using this passport to avoid being drafted
into the Belgian Army. In October 1939 Mercader left for Mexico, telling Agelof
that he was going there on business. She promised to visit him and at the same
time to help Trotsky with his book on Stalin, which he was writing at the time.
Toward the end of 1939
Agelof went to Mexico. Mercader often drove her to Trotsky’s villa and picked
her up after work. The villa was like a small fortress surrounded by a high
wall. One of Trotsky’s followers was always on guard at the gate. The Mexican
police had also built a brick hut nearby to keep Trotsky’s villa under
surveillance. Mercader’s assignment at that time was merely to learn about the
villa’s defenses, while Eitingon, in preparation for an attack, gathered
together the group of assassins, who by that time had returned from Spain to
Mexico. Among them was one of the leaders of the Mexican Communist Party, the
prominent painter David Siqueiros, who was also a leading official in the
miners’ union. Other members were Vittorio Codovilla, one of the founders of
the Argentine Communist Party, and Vittorio Vidali, Eitingon’s assistant in Spain.3
At 4 am on 23 May 1940
four cars dropped off at Trotsky’s villa 20 of Eitingon’s assassins, dressed in
the uniforms of Mexican police. The guard at the gate let them in and was then
overwhelmed. The assassins swooped into the courtyard, forced the other guards
to surrender, placed a machine gun in front of Trotsky’s bedroom and opened
fire. Trotsky and his wife crawled under their bed. After firing at the house
for 20 minutes, the assailants left as suddenly as they had arrived, taking
with them Trotsky’s two cars and a guard. Trotsky got away with minor scratches
from broken window glass. Colonel Salazar, the head of the Mexican secret
police, asked Trotsky whether he suspected anyone. ‘The author of the attack is
Joseph Stalin’, replied Trotsky.4
Four days later Sylvia
Agelof introduced Mercader to Trotsky as her husband. Two weeks later,
Mercader, claiming he had to go to New York on business and would soon be back,
generously left his car for Trotsky to use. During Mercader’s absence, the
Mexican police established the names of the attackers. The corpse of the guard
who had been kidnapped by the assassins was found buried in the courtyard of
the farm they had rented. David Siqueiros was arrested, but released on bail.
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, a prominent communist and a diplomat, helped
Siqueiros escape to Chile. The rest of the assassins were tried in court for
stealing Trotsky’s cars. The charges of attacking Trotsky’s villa and murdering
the guard were dismissed. The question of Stalin’s involvement in the
assassination attempt was not raised.
Upon his arrival in New
York, Mercader was given a new assignment by Eitingon and Gaik Ovakimian, the
NKVD agent who was officially the Soviet General Consul in New York. They
received instructions from ‘Ivan Vasilievich’ (Stalin’s codename in secret
communications), spelling
out exactly how Mercader should murder Trotsky. Enraged by the failure of the
23 May assassination attempt, Stalin had decided to direct the assassination of
Trotsky personally and to provide detailed instructions how the murder should
be carried out. A number of years later, in January 1948, Stalin acted out his
compulsion to re-enact the murder of his father Vissarion. He ordered his
secret police to murder Solomon Mikhoels by striking him on the head with an
‘axe wrapped in a wet quilted jacket’.5 Stalin decided that the
assassination of Trotsky was to be carried out by Mercader, who was to use an
‘axe wrapped in a wet quilted jacket’ as the murder weapon. Stalin’s
instruction must have made little sense to Eitingon, Ovakimian and Mercader,
but they were in no position to argue with ‘Ivan Vasilievich’. Nevertheless, to
wear a quilted jacket would have been absurd in Mexico in the summer. Eitingon
and Ovakimian therefore decided that Mercader would wrap the axe in an
overcoat. They told Mercader that the fate of his mother would depend on the
success of his mission, since she would be executed if he failed.
Mercader returned to
Mexico in a highly nervous state. On 17 August 1940 he went to Trotsky’s villa.
The day was hot, but he wore a hat and was clutching a black overcoat. He said
that he had written a draft of an article about the split among American
Trotskyites and asked whether Trotsky would look at it and make corrections.
Trotsky sat down behind his desk and started to read the draft. Mercader
waited, his hat still on and his overcoat in his hands. His strange behavior
made Trotsky feel uneasy, and ten minutes later he came out of his study
visibly upset. He told his wife and his chief bodyguard, Joseph Hansen, that he
was through with Mercader. He suspected that Mercader was engaged in some
‘shady financial machinations’ and had ties with the fascists.
But three days later, on
20 August 1940, Trotsky yielded to Sylvia Agelof’s request and again agreed to
take a look at Mercader’s article. That day, too, Mercader wore a hat and kept
hugging a black overcoat. Trotsky’s wife asked him, ‘Why are you wearing a hat
and carrying a raincoat in the sun?’ He replied, ‘It might rain.’6
Trotsky, interrupting his work on Stalin’s biography, invited him into the
study and, sitting down behind the desk, began reading Mercader’s article.
Mercader, sitting on the edge of the desk, quietly took the axe out of his
overcoat and brought it down hard on Trotsky’s head. The plan had apparently
been for him to kill Trotsky on the spot and to leave the villa unnoticed.
Eitingon was waiting for him in a car parked not far from the villa, ready to
speed him away before the murder was discovered. Instead, a wild scene ensued.
Trotsky let out a terrible cry, leapt to his feet, and flung his recording
machine and everything he could lay his hands on at Mercader. Then, he hurled
himself at his assassin, bit Mercader’s hand, and yanked the axe out of his
grip. Stunned by the attack, Mercader had no opportunity to pull out the dagger
hidden in his overcoat. Natalia and the guards rushed in and subdued him.
Afraid his guards might kill Mercader, Trotsky murmured slowly, spacing the
words: ‘He must not be killed…he must talk.’ Mercader, fearing Trotsky’s guards
would kill him nevertheless, shouted: ‘They made me do it. They’re holding my
mother, they have put my mother in gaol!’7 Trotsky died the next
day, 21 August 1940.
That day Stalin, as usual,
arrived in his Kremlin office at noon. His secretary, Poskrebyshev, quietly
placed before him a telegram: ‘Trotsky has been mortally wounded, possibly
killed. Details later.’8 Poskrebyshev knew how important this report
was to Stalin. He had experienced Stalin’s hatred of Trotsky in his own life. A
few
months earlier, on 30
April 1940, Stalin had ordered Beria to poison Poskrebyshev’s wife Bronislava,
one of whose sisters had been married to Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov.9
By that time, Trotsky’s younger son Sergey had been executed in a prison camp
in Kazakhstan, and most of the relatives of Trotsky and his first wife had been
arrested and perished in the camps. The arrests of Trotsky’s relatives began
shortly after his exile abroad. One of his friends in Moscow wrote to Trotsky
soon after the execution of Blumkin in December 1929 that Trotsky’s eldest
daughter (from his first marriage) had been arrested and that his younger
daughter had died in prison. ‘Platon Volkov, the husband of your [older]
daughter, was sent into exile two months ago’, wrote the friend. ‘M.Nevelson,
the husband of your deceased daughter, has been in prison for a long time. But
this revenge is too common and therefore insufficient.’ The friend added:
The
thirst for revenge was stronger than Stalin. In Party circles the story is
often mentioned how Stalin one evening in 1923 in Zubalovo said to Dzerzhinsky
and Kamenev: ‘To choose the victim, to prepare the blow with care, to slake an
implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed…there is nothing sweeter in life.’
Bukharin hinted at this conversation (‘Stalin’s philosophy of sweet vengeance’)
in his discussion last year about the struggle with the Stalinists.10
When Trotsky’s death was
confirmed, Stalin wrote an editorial for Pravda, headed ‘The Death of An
International Spy’. Stalin declared that Trotsky ‘was finished off by the same
terrorists whom he had taught to murder from behind a corner’ and that he had
‘worked for the intelligence services and general staffs of England, France,
Germany, Japan…’ and that having ‘organized the villainous murders of Kirov,
Kuibyshev, M.Gorky, he became the victim of his own intrigues, betrayals,
treason, evil deeds…’.11 The Soviet satirical journal Krokodil
displayed a caricature of Trotsky on its cover, his skull split wide open with
an axe and blood pouring into a large metal basin.12
Stalin was in a good mood
when he received Caridad Mercader, the mother of the assassin, and presented
her with decorations for her and her son.13 Eitingon was also
received by Stalin, who embraced and decorated him with the Order of Lenin, and
promised him that he would not allow a ‘hair to be touched’ on Eitingon’s head.14
Ramon Mercader was sentenced by a Mexican court to 20 years in jail. He did not
reveal that he had murdered Trotsky on orders from the NKVD. Stalin paid for
his silence by arranging the most comfortable prison condition possible for
Mercader: a sunny cell with an open patio. He was also allowed female
companionship on a regular basis, his food was brought to him from the best
restaurants, and he was supplied with books, newspapers and journals.15
(In August 1960, Mercader walked out of prison and was greeted by
representatives from the Czechoslovakian Embassy, who handed him a passport.
Until the ‘Prague Spring’ and Soviet invasion of 1968, Mercader lived in
Prague. He was spirited off to Moscow after the invasion and soon became known
among well-connected Moscovites as the man who had murdered Trotsky and who
always had Western cigarettes, liqueur and imported food.16 When he
died, his gravestone in a Moscow cemetery gave his name as ‘Reimond Lopez’. His
mother, a hopeless addict, died, a victim of the drugs with which the secret
police supplied her. Ramon Mercader’s brother, Louis, was for years a lecturer
in the Communications Institute in Moscow. He left the
Soviet Union with his
family and settled in Madrid, where he wrote a book about his brother, the
murderer of Trotsky.17)
Stalin had many reasons
for murdering Trotsky. Among the most compelling of these was that he learned
of Trotsky’s intention to accuse him of poisoning Lenin.18 He
probably also suspected that Trotsky would accuse him of having been an Okhrana
agent. Trotsky was finally shedding his remaining illusions about Stalin,
writing prophetically that Stalin ‘seeks to strike, not at the ideas of his
opponent, but at his skull’. Stalin knew that Trotsky was working on a
biography Stalin and that he was to point out the true significance of
the ‘confessions’ at the show trials. Shortly before his death Trotsky wrote:
With his monstrous trials
Stalin proved much more than he wanted; rather, he failed to prove what he set
out to prove. He merely disclosed his secret laboratory, he forced 150 people
to confess to crimes they never committed. But the totality of these
confessions turned into Stalin’s own confession.19
Trotsky was an implacable
enemy of fascism and was a fervent critic of Stalin’s policy of rapprochement
with Hitler and of the non-aggression pact with Germany that Stalin signed in
1939. In 1938 he wrote:
Fascism goes from victory
to victory and finds the main help…in Stalinism. Terrible military threats
knock at the door of the Soviet Union, but Stalin chooses this moment to
undermine the Army… The time will come when not he, but history will put him on
trial.20
NOTES
1.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, p. 140, fn. 23. See also Volkogonov’s
chapter on Trotsky The Demon of the Revolution’, published in Pravda, 9
September 1988, p. 4 (see note 8 below). Although the fact that Stalin ordered
the murder of Trotsky is widely known, no official confirmation of it has ever
been published during the Soviet and postSoviet period. Party and government
spokesman Colonel-General Dmitry Volkogonov in his biography of Stalin devoted
a whole chapter, titled ‘The Demon of the Revolution’, to Trotsky. (Volkogonov
considers Trotsky the ‘Demon’ and describes him with unrestrained hostility.)
Volkogonov comes close to admitting that Trotsky was murdered on Stalin’s
order. He hints: ‘After Trotsky’s death, Beria received promotion. In the West
it was held for a long time that Beria was the chief executioner and organizer
of the decision regarding Trotsky. I think, however, that in the foreseeable
future it will be impossible to obtain documentary evidence to support or deny
these versions.’ Despite numerous revelations of Stalin’s crimes that have been
published since his death, many of his crimes still remain unacknowledged by
government and archive officials. The murder of Trotsky is one of these
official secrets.
2.
Robert Conquest, The
Great Terror, New York, 1973, pp. 600f.
3.
Ibid., p. 599.
4.
Joel Carmichael, Trotsky,
London, 1975, pp. 473f.
5.
See Chapter 36 below for
the murder of Mikhoels in 1948. For the murder of Vissarion, see Chapter 4
above.
6.
Carmichael, Trotsky,
pp. 477f.
7.
Ibid., pp. 480f.
8.
D.Volkogonov, ‘Demon
revolutsii’, Pravda, 9 September 1988.
9.
Bronislava had been
earlier married to a prominent Party member, I.P.Itskov, whom she divorced to
marry Poskrebyshev, hoping that this would protect her relatives from
persecution. On the day of her murder, Beria phoned her and told her to come to
his Lubianka office, saying that he had something important to show her.
Bronislava’s body was carried out of Beria’s office in a bag and taken to the
Lubianka’s Internal Prison, where her death was recorded as heart failure. Then
the body was delivered to the Moscow crematorium and her cremation registered
the same day. Itskov reconstructed these events from official records two
decades later. Taped interview with I.P.Itskov in New York in 1989. In the
author’s archive.
10.
Biulletin oppositsii,
no. 9, February–March 1930, pp. 9–11.
11.
Pravda, 24
August 1940.
12.
Krokodil,
September 1940. The cartoon was one of the author’s childhood recollections.
13.
Conquest, The Great
Terror, p. 603, quoting from E.Castro Delgado, J’ai Perdu la Foi à Moscou,
Paris, 1950.
14.
Vitaly Rapoport and Yury
Alekseev, Izmena rodine, London, 1988, p. 504.
15.
Conquest, The Great
Terror, p. 603.
16.
Boris Shragin, interview
in Chappaqua, New York, in 1976.
17.
Interview with Felix
Svetlov in New York, 4 August 1991. Also, interview with Vladimir Gutkin in New
York in 1993. Gutkin worked with Louis Mercader in Moscow. In the author’s
archive.
18.
Lev Trotsky, Stalin,
New York, 1941, p. 373. and fn. 2. In 1937, Trotsky for the first time wrote
down his recollections of the days in 1923–24 when, as he came to believe,
Stalin arranged the poisoning of Lenin. In October 1939 Trotsky wrote a
magazine article describing these events. Stalin no doubt had received
information about Trotsky’s intention to publish his recollections in this
article and in the book he was writing.
19.
Trotsky, Stalin, p.
421.
20.
Biulletin oppositsii,
vol. 65, 1938. Quoted in Volkogonov, ‘Demon revolutsii’.
‘IVAN SUSANIN’ AND THE ‘EASTERN
QUESTION’
After Stalin’s Okhrana
file fell into his hands in May 1937, he was able to conjecture through whose
hands it had passed. By a strange coincidence, the major roles in the history
of this file were played by persons of Polish descent, or, more precisely, by
people whom Stalin considered to be Poles because of their Polish family names,
although some of these ‘Poles’ had been Russified generations back. Of such
remote Polish descent was the director of the Department of Police,
S.P.Beletsky, who, after having investigated the Stalin-Malinovsky feud, had
ordered Stalin’s exile and placed his file in the archive. Elena Rozmirovich
came from a prominent military family of Russified Polish gentry. Stalin’s arch
rival in the Okhrana, Roman Malinovsky, was a Pole also. In the summer of 1926,
when Stalin’s Okhrana file was discovered in the old archives, it fell into the
hands of the chief of the secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, another Pole. Then,
after Blumkin’s arrest, the file was intercepted by Dzerzhinsky’s successor,
V.P. Menzhinsky, yet another Pole. Finally, the file wound up in the hands of
Marshal Tukhachevsky, who came from a long-Russified Polish family.1
V.A.Balitsky, S.V.Kossior and other Russified Poles played an important role in
the Tukhachevsky conspiracy. Stalin ordered executions not only of the
participants in the conspiracy but of the families and relatives of
Dzerzhinsky, Menzhinsky, Tukhachevsky, all four Kossior brothers, Stanislav
Redens—the NKVD chief in Moscow and Dzerzhinsky’s nephew— and many other
‘Polish spies’.2
Stalin had the
psychological trait of transferring his hatred of individuals to the entire
social or ethnic groups to which he believed they belonged. The purge swallowed
thousands of foreign communists and many officials of the Comintern (Communist
International), but usually Stalin spared the lives of a small group of leaders
of ‘fraternal communist parties’. The Polish Communist Party was completely
liquidated. A single Polish leader, Wladislaw Gomulka, survived because he was
in a Polish prison at the time of the massacre. Ten thousand Poles were shot in
Moscow and 50,000 in the provinces.3 The wives of the arrested Poles
received the standard sentence of eight years, forced labor. Few survived, and
the orphanages were filled with the children of imprisoned and executed Poles.
These children were taught to chant: ‘We thank Comrade Stalin for our happy
childhood!’4
Moscow, volunteered to
guide a detachment of Polish soldiers to Moscow the shortest way, but instead
lured them into a dense virgin forest where they all perished. Susanin’s heroic
deed gave birth to many poems and songs, including a poem by K.F.Ryleev, which
Glinka adopted as the libretto for his opera. Stalin avidly watched the scene
of the dying Polish soldiers. In front of him in his secret box stood a large
plate of hard-boiled eggs. From time to time he would take an egg and eat it,
all the while keeping his eyes fixed on what was taking place on the stage.5
(An interesting similarity is found between Stalin’s behavior and that of an
accused murderer examined by Bekhterev in 1898. Bekhterev was assigned by a
court to examine a certain Russian country squire named Shebalin, who was
accused of murder. Bekhterev’s diagnosis was paranoia, persecution mania
combined with megalomania, and he concluded that the lives of others had no
value for Shebalin, who lived in constant fear of assassination. Shebalin’s
diet consisted mostly of hard-boiled eggs because he thought it was impossible
to inject them with poison.6)
Stalin’s obsessive
interest in the death of Polish soldiers in Ivan Susanin was indicative
of his hatred for the entire Polish people. Having destroyed tens of thousands
of Poles on Soviet territory, Stalin became obsessed with the idea of
partitioning Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union and, at the same time,
securing a Soviet-German alliance, using Poland as the bait. The Munich
agreement to partition Czechoslovakia, signed by the Western democracies with
Hitler on 30 September 1938, was interpreted by Stalin as the capitulation of
Britain and France, which strengthened his respect for Hitler and his contempt
for the ‘decadent’ European democracies. Vladimir Potemkin, whom Stalin had
made assistant commissar for Foreign Affairs, began openly to promote the idea
of the partition of Poland in order to attract Hitler’s attention. ‘My poor
friend, what have you done?’ Potemkin said to the French ambassador to Moscow,
R.Coulondre, shortly after the end of the Munich conference. ‘I don’t see any
other conclusion than a fourth partition of Poland.’7 (The three
partitions of Poland, in 1772, 1793 and 1795, by Russia, Austria and Prussia
respectively, had been part of an intricate diplomatic arrangement between
these three great European powers at the time, the purpose of which was to
avoid military conflicts over the ‘Eastern Question’, that is, over their
competing claims in dividing up the inheritance of the decaying Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Turks were retreating from the European continent, from the
Balkans, and from North Africa and the Near East; the European powers used
Polish territory as an exchangeable commodity to compensate each other for
concessions made when their interests were in conflict. As a result of the
three partitions, the Russian Empire absorbed eastern Poland with its large
Ukrainian, Byelorussian and Jewish populations.)
Stalin’s scheme of the
‘fourth partition’ of Poland completely lacked the geopolitical considerations
that had been at the heart of the three partitions of Poland at the end of the
eighteenth century. His true aim was to provoke the Germans into attacking
Poland in order to destroy it, using Hitler as his ‘hit man’. The scheme was in
line with his customary approach of murder by proxy—only the scale of the
crimes changed: whereas before the Revolution Stalin had provoked the murders
of individual victims, he now provoked mass executions and toward the end of
the 1930s he prepared for the destruction of the entire Polish nation.
Until March 1939, Stalin’s
attempts to reach an agreement with Hitler failed despite the efforts of his
personal emissary David Kandelaki.8 In the words of the German
ambassador to Moscow, Count F.W.Schulenburg, Kandelaki ‘enjoyed the confidence
of
Stalin’.9 On 10
March 1939 Stalin in his speech at the Eighteenth Party Congress warned of
unidentified ‘war-mongers who are accustomed to have others pull chestnuts out
of the fire for them’. He expressed the Soviet Union’s desire to improve
Soviet-German relations and stated that the British, French and American press
had been trying to ‘incense the Soviet Union against Germany, to poison the
atmosphere, and to provoke a conflict, when no sensible reasons for such a
conflict exist’. The Soviet Union intended to stay out of the ‘new imperialist
war’, which, Stalin stated, was ‘already in its second year’. These
declarations were received favorably in Berlin.10 Hitler did not
suspect that Stalin’s aim was to destroy Poland and that he had been
chosen to pull the Polish chestnut out of the fire for Stalin.
The United States embassy
in Moscow reported to Washington that the message of Stalin’s speech was that
Germany ‘may count on Soviet neutrality in the event of war against the Western
powers’.11 The German embassy in Moscow in its report to Berlin
offered an interpretation of Stalin’s motives that was closer to the truth,
pointing out that the Soviets wanted to ‘bring about war between Germany,
France and Britain, while they, to begin with, preserve their freedom of action
and further their own interests’.12 Hitler acted soon after Stalin’s
speech. On 15 March 1939 the German Army occupied Czechoslovakia. Hitler was
faced with the problem of what to do with the 700,000 Ukrainians living in the
part of Czechoslovakia known as Ruthenia, or Carpatho-Ukraine. They proclaimed
their independence and requested the protection of the Third Reich. On 3
December 1939 Schulenburg wrote to Berlin that Stalin was against granting
independence to Carpatho-Ukraine and thought it might become ‘a crystallizing
point for the Ukrainian independence movement’.13 both the Soviet
Union and Poland had large Ukrainian populations. Hitler initiated secret
negotiations with Poland, offering Carpatho-Ukraine in exchange for the port
city of Danzig (Gdansk) and a ‘corridor’ (a strip of land for rail and road
through Polish territory, linking Germany with east Prussia). He promised to
support future Polish gains at the expense of the Soviet Ukraine. When his
offer was rejected, Hitler began to consider seriously Stalin’s idea of
partitioning Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union.14 Hitler
ceded Carpatho- Ukraine to Hungary, which had possessed this area before the
defeat of the Austro- Hungarian Empire in the First World War, and ordered
Schulenburg to improve Soviet- German relations.15
On 3 April 1939 Hitler
ordered the Wehrmacht to prepare for an attack on Poland, and on 28 April 1939
he renounced the Polish-German peace treaty. Stalin was certain that his idea
of the partition of Poland had been accepted by Hitler and that negotiations on
this issue would soon start. On 17 April 1939 Soviet Ambassador to Berlin Aleksey
Merekalov suggested to the German foreign ministry that a process of
improvement be started in Soviet-German relations.16 Throughout
April 1939 emissaries of Stalin, operating under diplomatic cover, broached the
theme of improving relations in talks with German officials.17
One man obviously unsuited
for negotiation with Hitler was the Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim
Litvinov, since he was known in Berlin as a supporter of rapprochement with
the Western democracies and was a Jew. On 1 May 1939 Litvinov was present at
the usual military parade and civilian demonstration in Red Square, but later
that day was dismissed from his post. The next evening Stalin called him and
ordered him to give to Molotov a list of the most important foreign ministry
officials. Stalin appointed Molotov
People’s Commissar of
Foreign Affairs. V.M.Molotov, L.P.Beria, his assistant, V.G.Dekanozov, and
Stalin’s assistant, G.M. Malenkov, entered Litvinov’s office. Molotov placed on
Litvinov’s desk the list of 30 diplomats that had been prepared by Litvinov.
One after the other these diplomats were summoned to Litvinov’s office, where
Beria and Dekanozov questioned them, after which each one was arrested. (Only
one, Evgeny Gnedin, the illegitimate son of Alexander Parvus, survived torture
and prison to be released after Stalin’s death.) From May to August 1939
Lubianka interrogators were preparing a show trial of ‘Litvinov’s case’, and
the arrested diplomats were forced to sign depositions accusing Litvinov of
various crimes. In the end Stalin decided to abandon the idea and spare
Litvinov’s life.18
The Soviet chargé d’affaires
in Berlin, Grigory Astakhov, was ordered to find out Hitler’s reaction to the
dismissal of Litvinov. Astakhov reported that Hitler was very pleased by the fact
that his replacement, Molotov, was not Jewish. (Schulenburg, an ardent
supporter of improvement in Soviet-German relations, knew about Hitler’s
‘distaste’ for Jews and did not report to him that Molotov’s wife Polina
Zhemchuzhina was Jewish.) Hitler said that the dismissal of Litvinov was the
‘decisive’ factor in his decision to start negotiations with Stalin.19
He ordered Schulenburg to approach Stalin with the suggestion of an agreement
between the Soviet Union and Germany.20 In a letter to Mussolini,
Hitler pointed to the ‘readiness on the part of the Kremlin to arrive at a
reorientation of its relations with Germany, which became apparent after the
departure of Litvinov.’21
On 20 May 1939 Schulenburg
suggested to Molotov the starting of trade negotiations between Germany and the
Soviet Union. Molotov replied that a ‘necessary political base’ had to be
established first.22 Stalin wanted to arrive at an agreement with
Hitler on the partitioning of Poland before the trade questions were addressed.
Hitler agreed to that. On 23 May 1939 Hitler told German generals that he
intended to invade Poland even if Britain and France came to Poland’s defense.
The generals objected to starting a war over Poland against the Western powers,
especially since Russia, too, might come to the defense of Poland. Hitler
responded by stating that it was not out of question that Russia would show
itself disinterested in the destruction of Poland.23 He did not
suspect that the destruction of Poland was the main motive behind Stalin’s
drive to improve relations with Germany. The German foreign minister, Joachim
von Ribbentrop, predicted that if Hitler could secure a friendly agreement with
Stalin to maintain at least neutrality in the German-Polish conflict, Britain
and France would not declare war on Germany. A week later, on 30 May 1939,
Ribbentrop’s deputy Weizsacker sent to the German embassy in Moscow the
following coded wire: ‘Contrary to the policy previously planned, we now have
decided to undertake definite negotiations with the Soviet Union.’24
On 27 July 1939 Julius
Schnurre, the man in charge of commercial negotiations with Russia, invited the
Soviet officials Astakhov and Baburin to a dinner in a Berlin restaurant and
during the dinner conversation pointed out that such ‘virile countries’ as
Russia and Germany were more similar to each other in world outlook than they
were to the ‘decadent’ democracies. Astakhov agreed and asked what would be the
fate of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian parts of Poland if Poland should cease
to exist. Schnurre acknowledged Soviet interest in these parts of Poland.
Astakhov then pointed out that the Soviet Union was interested in the Baltic
states and the Bessarabian part of Rumania.
Schnurre said that Germany
sympathized with Soviet aspirations. Astakhov reported the conversation to
Moscow.25
Hitler set the date for
the invasion of Poland for the end of August 1939, before the autumn rains
would render Polish roads difficult to use for the Wehrmacht’s motorized
divisions. On 18 August 1939 Hitler ordered Ribbentrop to sign the
Soviet-German treaty. Stalin attempted to delay the signing, but Hitler sent
him a personal letter, urging that Ribbentrop sign the treaty by 23 August
1939. Stalin wired his assent. When Stalin’s reply was brought to Hitler, he
pounded on the wall with his fists and shouted: ‘I have the world in my
pocket!’26
On 23 August 1939
Ribbentrop arrived in Moscow, and the same evening signed the non-aggression
pact. The partition of Poland was spelled out in an additional secret protocol.
Poland was to be divided between Germany and the Soviet Union by a line that
ran through the middle of the country along the Vistula river. Stalin put his
signature on the map on which the line was drawn. (More than half a century
later, the secret protocol with this map was found in the Soviet Communist
Party archive and was published.27) It also stated that Estonia,
Latvia and Finland were in the sphere of interest of the Soviet Union, while
Lithuania was relegated to the German sphere. (Somewhat later, Stalin exchanged
the Polish-populated area of Lublin for Lithuania.) Stalin also expressed his
interest in the Bessarabian part of Rumania, and the Germans took note of this.
The signing ceremony was
followed by a reception and a banquet. ‘I know how much the German nation loves
its Führer’, Stalin
said in his toast. ‘I should therefore like to drink to his health.’ Ribbentrop
toasted Stalin and Molotov.28 When in the morning the German
delegation was leaving the Kremlin, Stalin took Ribbentrop by the arm and said:
‘The Soviet government takes the pact very seriously. I can guarantee on my
word of honor that the Soviet Union will not betray its partner.’29
The next day, Ribbentrop gave Stalin a draft for a joint communiqué. Stalin
read it, smiled wistfully and said: ‘Don’t you think that we have to pay a
little more attention to public opinion in our countries? For many years we
have been pouring buckets of slop over each other’s heads… Public opinion in
our country, and probably in Germany too, will have to be prepared slowly for
the change in our relations which this treaty is to bring about…’.30
Stalin’s more moderately
worded communiqué was
accepted. On his return to Berlin, Ribbentrop said that in Stalin’s entourage
he felt as if he were among his old Nazi comrades. He was praised for his
accomplishment by a jubilant Hitler, who called him the ‘new Bismarck’. Hitler
intended to order the German Army to march into Poland on 26 August 1939 but
the British, having received a report about his plan from their intelligence
service, surprised him by repeating on 25 August 1939 their earlier pledge to
come to Poland’s defense, if attacaked. Hitler was furious. ‘What now!’ he
shouted at the ‘new Bismarck’, who had predicted that Great Britain would cave in
if the Soviet- German pact was signed. Hitler rescinded the order for the
invasion.31 For Hitler and Stalin the next several days were filled
with anxiety. Hitler’s top-secret memorandum of 1936 had envisioned the German
economy being able to support a major war by 1940, but now he risked such a war
a year earlier. Stalin, eager to see Hitler crush Poland, was afraid that the
threat of a wider war might force Hitler to abandon the attack on Poland. But
toward the end of August 1939 Hitler made the fateful decision to order the
German Army into battle. ‘Let us not have another war of flowers’, he said.
‘Even the bravest
army becomes demoralized
by bloodless victories like those we had in the Rhineland, in Austria and in
Czechoslovakia. ‘32
Hitler expected that at
the time of the German attack, Stalin would move the Red Army into the
territory assigned to the Soviet Union by the secret protocol and he was
alarmed by intelligence reports about the Soviet Army’s withdrawal from the
Polish frontier. Molotov provided a dubious explanation to the effect that the
USSR was a constitutional state and that the Soviet-German pact had to be
ratified by the Supreme Soviet, which had not yet found time to do so. Hitler,
however, would not stand for such nonsense. The Supreme Soviet ratified the
pact on 31 August 1939. The next morning, German troops crossed the Polish
frontier.
On 3 September 1939
Britain and France declared war on Germany. ‘May God have mercy on us, if we
lose’, said Goering when he heard the news.33 On 6 September 1939 a
Polish request for help arrived in Moscow, but Molotov told the Poles that his
government had no intention of helping them. By then the Polish Army was in
disarray. Outnumbered and lacking in modern equipment, it was, for all its
gallantry, no match for the mechanized German divisions. The Wehrmacht rolled
across Poland, approaching the secretly agreed-upon Soviet-German border along
the Vistula River. Schulenburg kept telling Molotov to move in Soviet troops to
claim Russia’s share of Poland. But Stalin was not yet ready to issue marching
orders. He was aware that in the eyes of the civilized world his partnership
with Hitler in the division of Poland would be seen as a criminal act and, as
usual, was looking for ways to hide responsibility for it and to create the
impression that he had nothing to do with the destruction of the Polish state.
‘Of course, it’s all a game to see who can fool whom’, he said. ‘I know what
Hitler’s up to. He thinks he’s outsmarted me, but actually it’s I who have tricked
him.’34
On 17 September 1939
Stalin finally ordered the Red Army to cross the Polish border. The Soviet
propaganda machine presented the move as an innocent act of extending a
‘brotherly hand’ to the Ukrainian and Byelorussian peoples, who were supposedly
threatened by the advancing German Army. The Soviet Army met no resistance.
Polish General Mecheslav Smoravinsky ordered his troops not to fight the
advancing Soviet units, and the Polish government ordered all units of the
Polish Army to surrender to Soviet troops. Soviet planes dropped leaflets with
appeals to Polish soldiers to kill their officers and government officials.
Many Polish officers were killed by Soviet troops at the time of their
surrender, and some 15,000 officers were taken prisoner and transported to the
Soviet interior, where they were interned in three separate camps. Most of the
officers were reservists who had been called to active duty at the onset of the
war. In December 1939 they were allowed to send Christmas cards to their
families, which they assumed to be an indication of their speedy release.
Immediately after the
partition of Poland, 180,000 Poles were deported to Siberia from the
Soviet-occupied area. Another 1,200,000 were sent there in the course of the
next two years. On 5 March 1940 Stalin called a Politburo meeting and got
approval for his proposal to execute the 14,700 Polish officers held in the
camps in Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkovo, as well as 11,000 arrested Polish
officers, factory owners, landlords, government officials, and priests held in
various prisons and camps in territories incorporated into the Soviet Union.
Stalin put his signature on the record of this decision. (The record was found
in October 1992 in the personal archive of Mikhail Gorbachev,
and was published by the
Yeltsin government.35) The chiefs of the NKVD in the annexed Polish
territories directed the executions in these areas.
A special system was
instituted for the execution of the Polish officers in the three camps.
B.Z.‘Bakhcho’ Kobulov, deputy of Lavrenty Beria, summoned the chiefs of the
NKVD administrations in the Smolensk, Kalinin and Kharkov regions and read to
them the ‘highest authority’ order to execute the Polish officers held in the
camps in their areas. The officers from the Ostashkovo camp were driven to the
NKVD prison in Kalinin on Sovetskaya Street, where the commandant, NKVD
Lieutenant A.M. Rubanov, prepared a special sound-proof death chamber. The
Polish officers were led into the adjacent ‘Lenin room’, and their hands were
tied with ropes. Then, they were pushed into the death chamber, where Rubanov
and a Moscow representative, Major B.M.Blokhin, waited behind the door and shot
their victims in the back of the head. The massacre went on for many days. The
same method was used in the Kharkov NKVD prison, where the Starobelsk camp
officers were murdered.36
The execution of the
Kozelsk camp officers was carried out differently. They were told that they
would be transported to another camp. Before the departure, they were vaccinated—against
typhus and cholera, they were told. Their personal belongings were not taken
from them. Only after their arrival in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk did the
officers begin to suspect that this was the end. One of them, Major Solsky,
kept a journal in which he recorded his observations until moments before his
death. He made his last entry on 9 April 1940: ‘A few minutes before 5 am they
woke us up and put us on trucks which had little cells, each one guarded. We
arrived in a little wood which looked like a holiday place. They took away our
rings and watches which showed the time was 6:30 am. What will happen to us?’37
The officers’ hands were
tied with ropes; they were herded in small groups and led to prepared graves,
where they were shot, one by one, in the back of the head. The executioners
were rushed to finish their assignment and did not search the corpses. Because
of this, many personal items and documents, including Major Solsky’s diary,
were buried in the mass graves. Some Poles offered resistance; they were
dragged to the grave with their long military tunics tied over their heads,
pushed to the edge of the pit, and shot. Some had their heads crushed, others
were finished off with bayonets. When it was over, the executioners covered the
graves with earth and planted young pine trees to cover the traces of the
massacre. The murdered Polish officers were educated men. Some of them may have
even heard the opera Ivan Susanin, but they could not have imagined that
their execution was a bizarre re-enactment of a scene in this opera,
orchestrated by Stalin.
On 26 October 1940 Beria
signed a secret order to present 144 NKVD officers in the Smolensk, Kalinin and
Kharkov regions with various awards ‘for successful execution of special
assignments’. Forty-four officers were awarded an extra month’s salary, the
rest received 800 rubles each. At the top of the list of those given rewards
was the name of Captain F.K.Ilyin, the deputy chief of the NKVD in the Smolensk
region. He directed the Katyn Forest massacre. Not much is known about the
others on that list. One of them, Sukharev, who bragged after the incident that
‘today I have done a good job’ and was awarded 800 rubles, shot himself years
later. Rubanov and Blokhin became drunkards and also committed suicide. As for
the others, in the words of Adam Ulam, ‘Besides the Last Judgment, nothing
threatens them.’38
After the partition of
Poland, relations between Stalin and Hitler continued to be good for several
months, but signs of trouble began to appear here and there. On 27 September
1939, Ribbentrop came to Moscow. Stalin told him that ‘to partition the Polish
population would create sources of unrest from which discord between Germany
and the Soviet Union might arise…’. Stalin offered to give to Germany the
Lublin region, populated by Poles, in exchange for Lithuania. Ribbentrop
agreed, but requested that the oil-rich Drogobych area be given to Germany,
because the Soviet Union already had a great deal of oil while Germany had
none. Stalin said that ‘the Ukrainian people had strongly pressed their claims
to the area’ and promised to sell oil to Germany.39 The
Soviet-German communiqué stated that since the disappearance
of Poland from the political map of Europe was a fact of life, there was no
need for the continuation of the war and declared that Britain and France were
the aggressors, responsible for the hostilities. It also stated that the Soviet
Union and Germany intended ‘to engage in mutual consultations in regard to
necessary measures’ in case the war should continue.40 The two
countries also agreed to a mutual exchange of citizens. The NKVD handed over to
the Gestapo a large number of German refugees, most of them German Jews who had
sought safety on Soviet soil. The agreement had a provision for consultations
to coordinate police measures in combating Polish nationalist agitation.
In October 1939 Stalin
forced Latvia and Estonia to sign a ‘mutual assistance’ pact that allowed
Soviet bases on their territories. He attempted to coerce Finland into a
similar arrangement, but the Finns balked. On 29 November 1939 Stalin accused
Finland of shelling the Leningrad area, and the Red Army invaded Finland. Otto
Kuusinen, a Finnish communist whose son was imprisoned in Moscow, was made the
head of a puppet government ready to be installed in Finland. The Finns,
however, put up strong resistance, the Red Army suffering 250,000 casualties:
50,000 dead and 200,000 wounded—this number exceeded that of the entire Finnish
Army. The heroic Finnish resistance inspired an outpouring of sympathy in the
Western democracies as well as in Germany. Great Britain and France were
urgently debating sending military help to the Finns. The Soviet Union was
expelled from the League of Nations. In March 1940 Stalin sued for peace,
settling for minor mutual land concessions. The Finnish campaign dramatically
exposed the weakness of the Red Army after the mass arrests and executions of
its officers following the failure of the Tukhachevsky plot. Stalin, as usual,
did not blame himself. In March 1940 he ordered the NKVD to prepare a new show
trial of ‘not yet exposed participants of the Tukhachevsky conspiracy’. A new
wave of arrests swept through the Red Army.
Stalin’s show trials made
a strong impression on Hitler. They convinced him that Stalin was an enemy of
‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and that Stalin’s personal dictatorship was quite
compatible with German fascism. Hitler expressed his admiration for Stalin. He
called him ‘the cunning Caucasian’, and stated that Stalin commanded his ‘unconditional
respect’ and was, ‘in his own way, just one hell of a fellow! He knows his
models Genghis Khan and the others very well.’ In a paroxysm of praise Hitler
described Stalin as ‘one of the most extraordinary figures in world history’.41
In a letter to Mussolini, he wrote: ‘Stalin pretends to have been the herald of
the Bolshevik Revolution. In actual fact, he identifies himself with the Russia
of the Tsars, and he merely resurrected the tradition of Pan-Slavism. For him
Bolshevism is only a means, a disguise designed to
trick the German and Latin
peoples.’42 Hitler also considered Stalin a ‘worthy rival’.43
He felt that in Stalin he had found a ‘kindred soul’.44
Stalin, too, considered
Hitler a kindred soul, nowhere more so than in the question of their shared
hatred of the Jews. On this issue Stalin could not help but envy the openness
with which Hitler preached and practiced his anti-Semitism. Stalin had to
pretend to be an avid internationalist and to pay lip service to the proclaimed
Bolshevik doctrine. Stalin may well have been envious of Hitler’s credentials:
Hitler was not an imposter but a true ideologue and the founder as well as the
leader of the German National Socialist Party. He had no need to fear being
exposed as a traitor to his party by archival documents. But the inevitable
break in relations between Hitler and Stalin had nothing to do with this
difference in their pasts nor with hidden envy on the part of Stalin. Rather,
its roots lay in an irreconcilable conflict of interest in the perennial
‘Eastern Question’.
Events did not unfold in
the way that the two dictators had planned. On 10 May 1940 Winston Churchill
became the British prime minister. That same day Hitler ordered the German Army
to attack France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium. On 21 May the German
Army advanced to the English Channel, forcing the British to flee from Dunkirk.
The French Army was crushed. On 10 June 1940 Italy declared war on Britain and
France. French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud, who had earlier replaced Daladier,
resigned. The new French prime minister, Marshal Pétain, a
First World War hero, promptly sued for peace. For the moment, the defiant
Britain of Winston Churchill faced the Germans alone.
The fall of France led
Stalin to believe that German victory was near. He promptly ordered the
occupation of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, and in July 1940 these Baltic
states were ‘admitted’ into the USSR as constituent republics. In late June
1940, Stalin annexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina as well, proclaiming this
formerly Rumanian territory part of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic.
But in annexing northern Bukovina, Stalin had gone beyond the agreed limits of
the secret protocol. Hitler decided not to wait for Stalin to swallow what was left
of Rumania. In August and September 1940 the German Army moved into Rumania,
and Hitler assigned part of its Transylvanian province to Hungary and the
province of Dobrudja to Bulgaria. The dark shadow of the ‘Eastern Question’
fell over German-Soviet relations. Territories that once were part of the
Ottoman Empire turned into a bone of contention between Germany and Russia, as
had happened in the late eighteenth century in relations among Prussia, Russia
and Austria. But this time Poland was already partitioned, and sections of it
could not be used as a bargaining chip in the territorial aspirations of Stalin
and Hitler. Bukovina was only the beginning of the conflict between the two
dictators over the ‘Eastern Question’.
In September 1940 the
Tripartite Pact of Germany, Italy and Japan was signed. Stalin intended to join
this victorious coalition in order to participate in the distribution of the
spoils. The purpose of Molotov’s visit to Berlin in November 1940 was to reach
an agreement with Hitler on the conditions under which the Soviet Union would
join the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo ‘Axis’. Hitler greeted Molotov warmly on his arrival
in Berlin on 12 November 1940. After a few words of welcome, he went into a
long presentation of his grandiose plans for the division of the world between
Germany and its allies. Molotov listened with great attention and replied that
he agreed in principle, though some terms would have to be clarified.45
On the same day Ribbentrop told Molotov what he thought were Hitler’s terms for
the division of the world. Speaking about German and Italian
Lebensraum
(‘living space’) Ribbentrop said that the German aspirations were limited to
the former German colonies of Central Africa, while the interests of Italy were
focused on North and East Africa. Then, Ribbentrop suggested that Russia might
also turn to the south, in the direction of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian
Sea, for a natural outlet to the open sea. He asked whether at the same time
certain aspirations of Russia in this part of Asia—in which Germany was
completely uninterested—could not also be realized.46 Molotov liked
the offer. The problem was that Ribbentrop did not know about Hitler’s latest
plans for the area of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea.
The next day Hitler took over
negotiations with Molotov. Ribbentrop no longer mentioned the Persian Gulf and
the Arabian Sea as the focal point of Soviet aspirations. Instead, he spoke of
the future partition of the British Empire, suggesting that the Soviet Union
should extend its sphere of influence in the direction of India and find there
an outlet into the Indian Ocean. Gustav Hilger, the German foreign ministry’s
expert on Soviet affairs, wrote that ‘the conflict of aims of the partners in
the negotiations became so obvious that it was clear even then that there was
little hope for the possibility of reaching an understanding’.47
Hitler declared that, according to a Soviet-German oral agreement, the former
Austrian territories were to fall within the German sphere of influence.48
This meant that the Balkan states, which at one time had belonged to the
Ottoman Empire and later were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were within
the German sphere. Hitler pointed out that the underlying rationale of the
secret protocol of the 1939 Soviet-German Pact was the agreement to restore the
territorial possessions of the two empires he and Stalin had inherited. Hitler
viewed himself as the heir of the old German and Austrian empires, whereas
Stalin wanted to restore the old Russian Empire. It was unavoidable that the
two dictators would also inherit the old claims and bitter rivalries that had
divided these empires.
After his conversation
with Molotov on 12 November 1940 Hitler told Goering of his decision to crush
the Soviet Union.49 Hitler was not present at the final discussion,
which was conducted in an air-raid shelter because of the British bombing of
Berlin on the evening of 13 November 1940. Ribbentrop said that the decisive
question was whether the Soviet Union was ‘prepared and in a position to
cooperate with us in the great liquidation of the British Empire’. He offered
the German draft of a new secret protocol, expressing the hope that ‘an
agreement could be reached on possible Soviet aspirations in the direction of
British India, if an understanding were reached between the Soviet Union and
the Tripartite Pact’.50 Molotov insisted on Soviet interest in the
‘Near East’, in Turkey, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Greece.
Ribbentrop asked Molotov to sign another secret protocol with the statement:
‘The focal point of the territorial aspirations of the Soviet Union would
presumably be centered south of the territory of the Soviet Union in the
direction of the Indian Ocean.’51 Molotov said that he could not
take a ‘definite stand’ on this without Stalin’s agreement.52
That the last conversation
between Molotov and Ribbentrop took place in a bomb shelter made a deep
impression on Stalin because it drove home a coded message he had received on
11 November 1940, the day before Molotov’s arrival in Berlin: the Soviet
ambassador to Great Britain, Ivan Maisky, had reported that in his opinion
Germany had lost the air war over England. This message and the British air
raid on Berlin led Stalin to believe that Hitler was in a weak position and
that therefore the time was right to extract from him concessions in the area
of the Near East. On 25 November 1940 Stalin sent
Hitler a note stating that
‘The Soviet Union is prepared to accept the draft of the Four Powers Pact’ with
a modification (the Four Powers being Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet
Union). The main modification was the point that ‘the area south of Batum and
Baku in the general direction of the Persian Gulf is recognized as the center
of aspirations of the Soviet Union’. In his note, Stalin repeated this idea
twice. He also demanded the establishment of a Soviet naval base on the
Bosporus and the Dardanelles, and stated that, in the case of Turkish
resistance, ‘the Soviet Union agrees to work out and carry through the required
military and diplomatic measures’.53
Before November 1940
Hitler had not expressed much interest in the Near East, but by the time of
Molotov’s visit to Berlin, his strategic thinking had undergone a drastic
change: he decided to make the Near East a zone of German interest. This
decision was dictated by the German defeat in the air war over Britain, which
threatened to prolong the conflict. It meant a sharp rise in German dependency
on oil supplies from abroad, as Germany had no oil resources of its own. An
important factor in Hitler’s decision to occupy Rumania in August 1940 was the
need to secure for Germany the oil-producing Rumanian Ploesti fields. (Stalin
had earlier refused Hitler’s request to cede to Germany the oil-producing
region of Drogobych.) Hitler was attracted by the vast oil resources of Iran
and Iraq, where his agents were inflaming anti-British rebellions and where
various organizations sympathetic to Germany were active. Stalin’s claims to
the ‘territory south of the Batum-Baku line’, meaning Iran and Iraq, were in
direct conflict with Hitler’s plans. Hitler was also driven by irrational
motives, the most powerful of which was his pathological hatred of the Jews.
The Jewish population of Palestine, which was under British mandate, appeared
to Hitler as a major ‘Jewish threat’, and he intended to destroy it. In 1939
Arab fanatics in Palestine set up a shadow cabinet under the leadership of
Hajji Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who incited riots that led to
the Arab rebellion of 1939. The result was a bloody Jewish pogrom. The Mufti
al-Husseini openly sided with Hitler, and joined in hate propaganda against
Britain and the Jews. He appealed to Hitler to destroy the Palestine Jews and
free the Muslim world from ‘the Jewish and British yoke’. (In May 1941, the
pro-German organizations were crushed by the British, and al-Husseini fled to
Germany.54) Hitler cultivated pro-German feelings among Arab
nationalists, who agitated against Britain’s policy of creating a ‘national
home’ for the Jews in Palestine.55 In 1939 German radio took over
from the Italians the Arabic-language broadcasting of anti-Jewish and
anti-British propaganda.56 Hitler viewed all these activities as
indications of Germany’s favorable prospects in the Near East and decided that
Stalin’s claims to this area were incompatible with German interests. He did
not answer the Soviet note of 25 November 1940. On 18 December 1940 he signed a
secret order, codenamed ‘Operation Barbarossa’, to the German high command,
stating: ‘The German Wehrmacht must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a
quick campaign.’57 The date for the invasion was set for 15 May
1941.
NOTES
1.
J.Pilsudski, Rok 1920 z
povody pracy M.Tuchaczewskiego ‘Pochod za Wisle’, Warsaw, 1931,
Tukhachevsky’s Polish ‘origin’ was the reason he was appointed commander of the
Soviet forces advancing on Warsaw in the 1920 Soviet-Polish war. Also
V.Primakov in his ‘last word’, which was almost certainly penned by Stalin,
referred to the non-Russian ethnic origin of his fellow defendants at the 11
June 1937 trial (see Chapter 28 above).
2.
Robert Conquest, The
Great Terror, New York, 1973, p. 582.
3.
Ibid., pp. 583–5.
4.
Recollections of Richard
Vinaver, one of the Polish children who were placed in orphanages. Interview
with Vinaver in Moscow in 1957.
5.
Galina Vishnevskaya,
Bolshoi Theater singer and the wife of cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, states in
her recollections that in Stalin’s box ‘there was always a big bowl of hard
boiled eggs on a table…’. See the excerpt from her autobiography My Russia,
My Love, New York Post, 26 September 1984, p. 31.
6.
Oleg Moroz, ‘Poslednii
diagnoz,’ Literaturnaya gazeta, 28 September 1988.
7.
R.Coulondre, De Staline
à Hitler,
Paris, 1950, p. 165.
8.
Walter G.Krivitsky, I Was
Stalin’s Agent, London, 1939, pp. 38f.
9.
Lionel Kochan, The
Struggle for Germany 1914–1945, New York, 1967 p. 118, fn. 65, quoting
Schulenburg’s report to Berlin, GFM-2/1907/429293–4.
10.
Documents on German
Foreign Policy 1919–1945, series D, vol. VII, Washington
and London, 1954–62, pp. 225–9.
11.
Kochan, The Struggle
for Germany, p. 73, quoting Foreign Relations of the United States,
Soviet Union 1933–1939, PP. 748f.
12.
Documents on German
Foreign Policy, 1918–45, series D, vol. III, p.
139.
13.
Ibid., series D, vol. V,
pp. 138–40.
14.
Donald W.Treadgold, Twentieth
Century Russia, Chicago, 1976, p. 335.
15.
Kochan, The Struggle
for Germany, p. 120, fn. 89, quoting Documents on German Foreign Policy,
1918–1945, series D, vol. IV, pp. 441, 590.
16.
Adam B.Ulam, Stalin,
New York, 1973, p. 508, quoting R.J.Sontag and J.S.Beddie (eds), Nazi-Soviet
Relations 1939–1941: Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Office,
p. 2.
17.
Kochan, The Struggle
for Germany, p. 74, and p. 120 fn. 90, quoting Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–1941,
vol. I, pp. if.
18.
Evgeny Gnedin, Katastrofa
i vtoroe rozhdenie, Amsterdam, 1977, pp. 107–09.
19.
Documents on International
Affairs, 1928–1963, vol. I, 1939–1946, p. 446.
20.
Gustav Hilger and Alfred
G.Meyer, The Incompatible Allies, pp. 296f.
21.
Nazi-Soviet Relations
1939–1941, Washington, 1948, p. 81.
22.
Ibid., p. 6.
23.
International Military
Tribunal, vol. XXXVII, Nuremberg, 1947, p.
550.
24.
Ulam, Stalin, p.
508.
25.
Ibid.
26.
Ibid., p. 510.
27.
The secret protocol with
the map and Stalin’s signature was published by the Yeltsin government, New
York Times, 19 August 1989, pp. A1–5.
28.
Documents on German
Foreign Policy 1919–1945, series D, vol. VII,
Washington and London, 1954–62, pp. 225–29.
29.
Alan Bullock, A Study
in Tyranny, New York, 1964, p. 531.
30.
Hilger and Meyer, The
Incompatible Allies, p. 304.
31.
Ulam, Stalin, p.
512.
32.
Albert Speer, ‘Nazi
Invasion of Poland? September 1 1939,’ The New York Times, 31 August
1979, p. A–23.
33.
Ulam, Stalin, p.
512.
34.
N.S.Khrushchev, Khrushchev
Remembers, Boston, Toronto, 1970, p. 128.
35.
The New York Times, 15
October 1992, pp. 1 and 8.
36.
Novoe vremia,
no. 46, 1992, p. 48.
37.
Report of the Polish Red
Cross, The New York Times, 17 February 1989, p. A–9.
38.
Ulam, Stalin, p.
513.
39.
Novoe vremia,
no. 46, 1992, p. 48.
40.
Documents on German
Foreign Policy 1918–1945, series D, vol. VIII, p.
160.
41.
Solomon F.Bloom, Commentary,
May 1957, p. 417.
42.
Ibid.
43.
Robert G.L.Waite, The
Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, New York, 1977, p. 76.
44.
Bloom, Commentary,
p. 417.
45.
Hilger and Meyer, The
Incompatible Allies, p. 323.
46.
Nazi-Soviet Relations
1939–1941, Washington, 1948, pp. 221f.
47.
Hilger and Meyer, The
Incompatible Allies, p. 323.
48.
Nazi-Soviet Relations
1939–1941, pp. 234–37.
49.
Alan Bullock, A Study
in Tyranny, New York, 1964, p. 622.
50.
Nazi-Soviet Relations
1939–1941, pp. 221f.
51.
Ibid., pp. 247–54.
52.
Ibid.
53.
Ibid., pp. 258f.
54.
George E.Kirk, A Short
History of the Middle East, New York, 1964, pp. 194–99.
55.
Ibid.
56.
Ibid.
57.
Documents on German
Foreign Policy 1918–1945, series D, vol. XI, p.
899.
THE WAR AND THE OCTOBER 1941
MASSACRE
Events in Yugoslavia prevented
Hitler from attacking the Soviet Union on 15 May 1941 as originally planned. On
20 March 1941 Yugoslavia joined the Axis, but the overthrow of the Belgrade
government by Serbian officers opposed to an alliance with Germany forced
Hitler to order German troops, which had been moving into Poland, to move into
Yugoslavia and suppress the rebellion.1 This development postponed
the invasion of the Soviet Union by more than a month.
On 3 April 1941 Churchill
sent a message to Stalin, informing him of Hitler’s intention to invade the
Soviet Union.2 Stalin was receiving similar warnings from various
sources, but shrugged them off as attempts by Britain to sow discord between
him and Hitler. A former Czech agent in Berlin, code-named ‘Shkvor’, reported
to Soviet intelligence the concentration of German troops along Soviet borders.
Stalin read Shkvor’s report and wrote on it in red pencil, ‘English
provocation’. He ordered the NKVD to assassinate Shkvor.3 A number
of warnings of the impending German attack came from Richard Sorge, the Soviet
master spy in Japan. Stalin disregarded his information (Sorge was arrested by
the Japanese and executed in 1943). Stalin’s own intelligence organs did not
help matters: Marshal F.I.Golikov, chief of Soviet military intelligence,
presented warnings about an imminent German invasion as coming from ‘doubtful
sources’. Golikov was afraid he would be seen by Stalin as an ‘English provocateur’.4
Stalin, meanwhile, was
confronting his ‘enemies’ in the military, whom he suspected of plotting to
kill him. A new wave of arrests of officers had started in spring of 1940. They
were accused of taking part in a military conspiracy to assassinate Stalin and
were forced to sign depositions accusing the deputy commissar of defense,
General K.A.Meretskov, of heading this conspiracy. Some 40 such depositions had
been signed by the end of spring 1941. Stalin planned to arrest Meretskov in
June and to stage his show trial soon thereafter. Thereafter, several events
conspired to change his mind.
went up to the German
ambassador, Count Schulenberg, put his arm around his shoulders and said, ‘We
must remain friends, and you must do everything to that end!’ He found in the
crowd General Hans Krebs, the acting German military attaché, and
told him, ‘We will remain friends with you—whatever happens!’6
On 1 May 1941 Stalin
appeared as usual on top of the Lenin mausoleum, reviewing the military parade
and civilian demonstration. Next to him, always a position of honor, stood the
newly appointed ambassador to Germany, Beria’s assistant, V.G.Dekanozov. An
Armenian native of Gori and a common criminal in his youth, Dekanozov enjoyed
Stalin’s trust. On 6 May 1941 Stalin assumed the post of chairman of the
Council of People’s Commissars, a position equivalent to prime minister.
Schulenburg reported to Berlin that, in his opinion, Stalin wanted to correct
the recent mistakes of Molotov’s foreign policy, which had led to the cooling
of Soviet-German relations.7 In the opinion of Gustav Hilger, who
was Schulenburg’s adviser at the time, Stalin wanted to ‘use all the authority
of his person and his official position’ to improve Soviet-German relations.
Hitler, however, had other plans. On 30 April 1941, Schulenburg returned to
Moscow after a brief visit to Berlin, where he had had an audience with Hitler.
Schulenburg left for Moscow, convinced that Hitler had secretly decided to
attack the Soviet Union. ‘The die has been cast’, he told embassy officials
when his plane landed at the Moscow airport. ‘War against Russia has been
decided!’8
On 13 May 1941 the Soviet
news agency TASS stated that ‘rumors’ of the German intention to launch an
attack against the Soviet Union were without foundation.9 Trying to
appease Hitler, Stalin ordered the closing of the Yugoslav and Greek embassies.
On 18 June 1941 the Soviet ambassador to Great Britain, Ivan Maisky, reported
to Stalin the transfer of 147 German divisions to areas along the Soviet borders—information
he had learned from British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. Despite this,
Stalin left on the same day for his annual vacation in the Caucasus, having
issued an order to avoid ‘provocations’ along the Soviet-German border. Stalin
arrived in Sochi on 20 June and there received Commissar of the Navy Nikolay
Kuznetsov’s report that all German merchant ships had left Soviet waters.
Stalin took this report more seriously than previous warnings and gave several
orders to increase combat preparedness. He also ordered Molotov to start a
diplomatic offensive through Schulenburg to repair ties with Hitler. At 9 pm on
21 June 1941 Molotov met with Schulenburg, who promised to do his best to
improve relations between their countries.
Early next morning German
troops attacked along the entire Soviet-German border from the Baltic to the
Black Sea. Motorized divisions of the Wehrmacht moved rapidly inside Soviet
territory, easily breaking the Red Army’s resistance and taking entire units
prisoner. Schulenburg returned to Molotov’s office early in the morning and
read the declaration of war. ‘I know it is war’, said Molotov. ‘Your aircraft
have just bombarded some ten open villages. Can it really be that we have
deserved that?’10 At noon Soviet radio transmitted Molotov’s
announcement that the war had begun with a sudden attack of the ‘fascist
brigands’. For the next ten days Stalin did not issue a single statement to the
Soviet people, who expected him to rally them for the defense of the country.
War with Germany did not fit into his plans, and he did not want to part with
his wishful vision of his alliance with Hitler. Stalin’s tendency to mistake
wishful thinking for reality was in full force: to accept the fact that the
alliance was a thing of the past took time. At a time when the motorized units
of the Wehrmacht were moving deeply inside Soviet
territory, Stalin clung to
the notion that the attack was a ‘provocation’ by some undisciplined German
units.11 His attention was fixed on the imaginary plot of General
K.A.Meretskov, whom he intended to ‘expose’ at the planned show trial.
The day after German
troops moved into Soviet territory, General Meretskov received the order to
come to Moscow immediately. He was arrested as soon as he arrived. Beria’s
deputies V.N.Merkulov and L.E. Vladzimersky accused the general of taking part
in a ‘military conspiracy’ and in ‘conspiring with Kork and Uborevich to give
battle to Stalin’. The non-Russian sounding phrase ‘to give battle to Stalin’
indicates that the author of this accusation was Stalin. Meretskov was shown
depositions of some forty military ‘plotters’ who had confirmed this charge. He
denied ever having plotted with Kork and Uborevich, who had been executed in
June 1937 together with Tukhachevsky. Merkulov and Vladzimersky applied to
Meretskov ‘measures of physical influence’, a euphemism for beatings with
rubber sticks, to obtain a confession.12 Among Meretskov’s
‘co-conspirators’ were People’s Commissar of the Defense Industry B.L.
Vannikov, Lieutenant-General Y.V.Smushkevich, Colonel-General G.M.Shtern, and
several other top military commanders. Two days after the war started, Major
Maria Nesterenko, an Air Force ace and commander of a special purposes brigade,
was arrested. She was married to Lieutenant-General P.B.Rygachov, one of the
arrested officers. The accusation against her read: ‘Having been the darling
wife of Rygachov, she could not but know about the treacherous activities of
her husband.’13
During the first week of
the war, Stalin refused to see any Politburo members except Beria, with whom he
discussed the depositions of Meretskov and other ‘plotters’ and the scenario of
the planned show trial. But on 30 June 1941 a group of Politburo members saw
Stalin and pleaded with him to take immediate steps to improve the situation at
the front.14 Stalin began to face the reality of the threat the war
posed to his regime. He appointed himself supreme commander-in-chief and head
of the stavka (military headquarters). His radio address was
tape-recorded in Sochi and the tape was broadcast several times during 3 July
1941 while Stalin was on his way to Moscow. He spoke in a nervous, halting
voice with the familiar Georgian accent. His train made frequent stops along
the way while the track was checked for mines (Stalin chose to travel by train
because he was afraid of flying).15
Upon his arrival in
Moscow, Stalin ordered Beria to force several arrested men to sign depositions
stating that Mikhail Kaganovich, the younger brother of Politburo member Lazar
Kaganovich, was Hitler’s agent and that Hitler intended to appoint him ‘vice
president of Russia’ after German victory. Before the war Mikhail Kaganovich
had been the people’s commissar of the aviation industry, and because of this
Stalin also accused him of ordering aircraft factories to be built near the
border so that the Germans would capture them in case of war. Stalin informed
the Politburo members of these charges; Lazar Kaganovich said, ‘Well, so what?
If it’s necessary, arrest him!’ Stalin praised Lazar Kaganovich for being a
‘man of principles’. Mikhail Kaganovich was taken to Mikoyan’s office for a
face-to-face confrontation with a prisoner who had been ordered to repeat the
accusations. As usual, the charges contained a generous measure of truth about
Stalin himself, which he projected on to Mikhail Kaganovich. Hitler had
expressed the opinion that it would be best, after victory over Russia, to
entrust the administration of the country to Stalin—under German
supervision—since he was the best man to handle the Russians.16 And
it was Stalin who had ordered the construction of airplane
factories near the border
with Germany because he considered Hitler an ally and did not foresee a war
against him. According to Mikoyan’s asser-tion, Mikhail Kaganovich asked permission
to go to the toilet, from where a shot was heard moments later.17 It
is unlikely that Kaganovich shot himself—with the exception of Stalin’s
bodyguards, no one was allowed to enter the Kremlin with firearms. Most
probably, Kaganovich was shot by Stalin’s bodyguards. He was buried at the
Novodevichy cemetery, near the grave of Stalin’s late wife, Nadezhda Allilueva.
Mikhail Kaganovich’s wife was to be buried there a few years later.18
The rapid advance of the
German Army inside the Soviet Union forced Stalin to seek help from the Western
democracies. On 11 July 1941 the ‘Agreement for Joint Action’ between Britain
and the Soviet Union was signed and took effect immediately.19 Among
those present was Maxim Litvinov, former commissar of foreign affairs, whom
Stalin suddenly appointed ambassador to the United States. By the end of July,
Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s special emissary, arrived in Moscow. He
was impressed by Stalin’s knowledge of Soviet military needs and by his ability
to remember details and figures. Hopkins did not know that Stalin had a
photographic memory, and he came away with the impression that talking to
Stalin ‘was like talking to a perfectly coordinated machine’. Litvinov
interpreted the conversation. His sudden reappearance in the Kremlin reminded
Hopkins of ‘a morning coat which had been laid away in moth-balls when Russia
retreated into isolation from the West, but which had now been brought out,
dusted off, and aired as a symbol of changed conditions’. Stalin asked Hopkins
to relate to Roosevelt that the Soviet government ‘would welcome American
troops on any part of the Russian front under the command of the Americans’.20
On 16 July 1941 the
Germans captured near Vitebsk hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers and officers.
Among them was 33-year-old First Lieutenant Yakov Dzhugashvili, Stalin’s older
son by his first wife. German planes dropped leaflets with a photo of Yakov
with the appeal to Soviet soldiers to follow his example and surrender. When
one of the leaflets was brought to Stalin, he ordered the arrest of Yakov’s
Jewish wife, Yulia Meltser, accusing her of being a German spy and of ‘tricking
Yakov into German hands.’ The daughter of Yulia and Yakov, Gulia Dzhugashvili,
was 4 years old.
Yakov refused to cooperate
with the Germans. One of the German interrogators recorded: ‘Good, clever face
of a typical Georgian. Behaved properly. For the last time spoke to his father
by phone before going to the front. Categorically rejected a compromise between
capitalism and communism. Did not believe in German final victory.’21
In the autumn of 1941 Hitler ordered that preferential treatment be extended to
Yakov.22 He was placed in the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, where an
attempt was made to use him for propaganda purposes. Georgian immigrants in
Germany were allowed to visit him, but Yakov refused to cooperate with them as
well as with the Germans. In April 1942 he was transferred to a prisoner-of-war
camp near Lübeck where
his bunk neighbor in the barrack was René Blum, son of the former
prime minister Léon Blum. Hitler offered to trade Yakov for captured Field
Marshal von Paulus, but Stalin sent a reply through Count Bernadotte, the
Swedish chairman of the Red Cross, stating: ‘I do not trade marshals for
soldiers.’ Yakov often felt depressed and refused to eat. He was especially
hurt by Stalin’s slogan: ‘There are no prisoners-of-war, only traitors’, which
was repeatedly transmitted by the camp radio. After several attempts at escape,
Yakov was transferred to the Sachsenhausen death camp. His fate was marked by
an irony: his
close friends in the camp
were Polish officers who had been captured by the Germans in 1939. They, like
the British and French officers, were receiving parcels and money transfers
from their relatives through the Red Cross and they also received aid from the
Polish government in exile in London. Yakov and the other Soviet
prisoners-of-war received nothing from relatives or the Soviet government.
Polish officers allotted to Yakov a monthly portion from their parcels of food,
and he became friendly with Poles who spoke Russian. Together with them he
attempted to escape on several occasions.23 On the night of 14 April
1943 a scuffle broke out between Yakov and some British officers who accused
him of not cleaning up after himself, and one of them hit Yakov in the face. He
ran out of the barrack and threw himself on the electrified barbed wire. A
guard on duty fired. Yakov was killed, and his body was burned in the camp
crematorium.24 (Two years after Yulia’s arrest, Stalin ordered her
release from solitary confinement in Lefortovo prison when he learned that
Yakov had been killed in the prisoner-of-war camp and that Yakov had refused to
collaborate with the Germans. Yulia left the prison a cripple. She died some
time later.25 Gulia, their daughter, survived.26)
In August 1941, Churchill
and Roosevelt held a conference aboard a warship off the coast of Newfoundland
and agreed to set up the Lend-Lease program to help the Soviet Union. William
Bullitt, who had been the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, urged
Roosevelt to insist that Stalin, in return for Lend-Lease, issue definite,
written, public pledges of no territorial expansion in the Far East and the
pledge that the postwar boundaries of the Soviet Union in Europe should be
those of August 1939. He warned Roosevelt of Stalin’s imperialistic claims,
which would only be checked if Stalin renounced Soviet territorial acquisitions
in Poland, the Baltic states and Rumania. Roosevelt disagreed. ‘I just have a
hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man’, said Roosevelt. ‘Harry [Hopkins]
says he’s not…and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask
nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex
anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.’ Bullitt
replied that when Roosevelt ‘talked of noblesse oblige he was not
speaking of the Duke of Norfolk, but of a Caucasian bandit whose only thought
when he got something for nothing was that the other fellow was an ass’.
Roosevelt was annoyed and ended the exchange by saying, ‘It is my
responsibility not yours, and I’m going to play my hunch.’27
On 28 September 1941 the
British minister of aircraft production, Lord Beaverbrook, and Roosevelt’s
roving ambassador, Averell Harriman, arrived in Moscow. That day German tanks
broke through Red Army defenses and were about to capture Orel, the last major
city on their rapid advance to Moscow. Stalin had persistently asked Churchill
to open a second front ‘somewhere in the Balkans’ or France, but in September
1941 he suddenly requested the landing of some 30 British divisions in the
Soviet port of Archangel or their transfer to the Soviet Union through Iran.
Churchill had great difficulty raising two divisions for defense of the
Middle East from the advancing German army. ‘It is almost incredible that the
head of the Russian Government with all the advice of their military experts
could have committed himself to such absurdities’, commented Churchill. ‘It
seemed hopeless to argue with a man thinking in terms of utter unreality.’28
On the other hand, Harriman and Beaverbrook saw in Stalin a capable leader who
understood the reality of the threat to his country. During a meeting on 30
September 1941 Beaverbrook noticed that Stalin was doodling numerous pictures
of wolves and was filling in the background with red pencil.29
Others on different occasions
also noticed Stalin’s
habit of drawing wolves. Beaverbrook did not know that the wolf symbolized an
‘enemy’ for Stalin.30 He also did not know that Stalin was occupied
by the imaginary threat of the military ‘plotters’, whom he intended to execute
with a stroke of his red pencil.
All the arrested military
men, except for Colonel-General A.D. Loktionov, signed confessions extracted
under torture. During a face-to-face confrontation with Meretskov, the
purported head of the conspiracy, Loktionov, writhing in pain and stretching
his bleeding hands toward Meretskov, pleaded, ‘Kirill Afanasievich, you know
that this did not happen, did not happen, did not happen!’ He fell silent when
his eyes met the tired stare of Meretskov, who had lived through the same
torture.31
But, in what must have
seemed a miracle to them, Stalin decided to release from prison some of the
accused plotters. By the end of September 1941 he realized that they would be
more useful to him alive than dead. People’s Commissar of the Defense Industry
B.L.Vannikov, having been tortured and forced to sign fantastic confessions,
was expecting execution when he received Stalin’s order ‘to describe in writing
your proposals in regard to the development of production of armaments under
condition of commenced military actions’.32 Vannikov was released
and reinstated in his post. Stalin also ordered the release of General Meretskov,
whom he invited to visit him in the Kremlin. When Meretskov entered his office,
Stalin took several steps toward him. He greeted him, ‘Good day, Comrade
Meretskov! How do you feel?’33 Meretskov, too, was returned to his
post. But a different fate awaited the other arrested military men. On 15
October 1941 most were evacuated from Moscow with the instruction that the
investigation of their ‘case’ be continued.
By mid-October 1941 German
troops had advanced to the suburbs of Moscow. Panic and looting of stores
erupted in several sections of the capital. Stalin ordered all government
offices evacuated to the city of Kuibyshev (Samara). He told the relatives of
his late wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, to leave Moscow. A special train was waiting
for him at a secret junction ready to depart for Kuibyshev, where a deep
underground shelter would protect him. Earlier, on 7 October 1941, Stalin had
appointed G.K. Zhukov commander of the western front and had ordered him to
defend Moscow.34 Zhukov transferred some 400,000 troops from Siberia
and the Far East and deployed them in the city’s defense. Stalin had been
assured by Richard Sorge, the Soviet master spy in Japan, that the Soviet
eastern borders were safe because the Japanese were preparing to attack
American bases in the South Pacific. (Sorge’s intelligence was to prove correct
two months later when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.)
Because of the transfer of the Siberian reinforcements and the unusually early
onset of a bitterly cold winter, for which the German troops were woefully
unprepared, the German offensive came to a halt.
Despite the panic in
Moscow, Stalin paid attention to the case of the ‘military plotters’. On 18
October 1941 he gave the order to terminate the investigation and to execute
immediately 25 especially important defendants who were undergoing
interrogation. On 28 October Maria Nesterenko was being questioned in the
Kuibyshev NKVD when Beria’s assistant Rodos suddenly entered the room and said
to her, ‘Let’s go!’ Shortly thereafter, five covered trucks left the prison,
heading toward a special lot near the small village of Barbysh, where 20
accused officers were executed.35 The remaining five defendants
could not be found in the Kuibyshev prison because they had
been transferred by
mistake to Saratov. On 28 October 1941 they were executed there. Executed at
the same time in the city of Orel were the wives and children of Gamarnik,
Kork, Uborevich and other Red Army generals who had been shot in 1937 together
with Marshal Tukhachevsky.36 All these executions were, in Stalin’s
mind, connected with the conspiracy of Tukhachevsky and the history of his
Okhrana file.
But Filip Goloshchekin was
executed at that time because in Stalin’s mind he was connected with Roman
Malinovsky. Generals G.M.Shtern and Y.B.Smushkevich were also executed in
Kuibyshev. They had directed the fighting with the Japanese in the Far East in
1938, which Stalin connected with the defection of Genrikh Liushkov and the
planting of the ‘Eremin Letter’. Also in October 1941, Stalin ordered Beria to
promise Alexander Svanidze, the brother of his first wife, that his life would
be spared if he confessed that he had fabricated Okhrana documents to discredit
Stalin. ‘What should I ask forgiveness for?’ Svanidze replied, ‘I have
committed no crime.’ He was executed. ‘See how proud he is!’ said Stalin. ‘He
died without asking forgiveness.’37 As always, Stalin’s accusations
contained fragments of distorted truth. Svanidze had indeed forged Okhrana
documents in the secret Kremlin printing press, but had done so on Stalin’s
orders to glorify Stalin’s revolutionary past. Stalin placed these forgeries in
Soviet archives. On Stalin’s order, Svanidze had also fabricated the ‘Eremin
Letter’ and similar fakes intended to discredit true documents linking Stalin
with the Okhrana. The execution of Svanidze was connected in Stalin’s mind with
events in far away Shanghai that reminded him of the ‘Eremin Letter’ forgery.
When German troops reached the suburbs of Moscow in October 1941 M.D.Golovachev
decided to sell the ‘Eremin Letter’—which he had received from Liushkov—to the
German embassy in Shanghai, thinking that Stalin’s regime was about to be
destroyed. On 26 November 1941 a cable with Golovachev’s offer was sent to the
German foreign office in Berlin. Soon, a request for additional information
about the origin of the ‘Eremin Letter’ and its history went from Berlin to
Shanghai. On 5 January 1942 the German embassy in Shanghai sent a secret cable
to Berlin, stating that Golovachev’s document ‘had been hidden at the time by
tsarist police officers’ and that it was ‘smuggled out only in 1934’.38
Gustav Hilger, a top specialist in Russian affairs at the German foreign office
in Berlin, at that time took part in the discussion of what to do with
Golovachev’s offer. He recollected that it was decided not to follow up on this
matter because German officials felt that during the war they would be unable
to put the ‘Eremin Letter’ through the necessary external tests.39 Stalin
no doubt knew from Soviet intelligence reports of Golovachev’s attempt to sell
the forgery to the Germans.
In November 1941 Soviet
troops under the command of Zhukov rolled the German units back from the
suburbs of Moscow. The commander of the German panzer divisions, General
H.Guderian, wrote in his diary early in December 1941: ‘The offensive on Moscow
has ended. All the sacrifices and efforts of our brilliant troops have failed.
We have suffered a serious defeat.’40 The decisive battle took place
around Stalingrad (Tsaritsyn Volgograd), where one of the Soviet army corps was
commanded by General Rodion Malinovsky. The general’s name was mentioned during
a meeting in Stalin’s office. Stalin grew alarmed and asked Khrushchev several
times, ‘Who is this Malinovsky?’ Khrushchev did not know what to say. ‘When you
return to the front, you’d better keep a close watch on him’, Stalin urged.
‘Check up on all his orders and decisions. Follow his every move.’ Khrushchev
replied, ‘Very well, Comrade Stalin, I
won’t let Malinovsky out
of my sight.’ Not knowing that the name ‘Malinovsky’ reminded Stalin of his
Okhrana rival Roman Malinovsky, Khrushchev was puzzled by Stalin’s order. He
wrote in his memoirs: ‘When I got back to the front I had to spy on Malinovsky
every hour of the day. I had to watch him even when he went to bed to see if he
closed his eyes and really went to bed to sleep. I did not like having to do
this one bit.’ Khrushchev added that in General Malinovsky’s case ‘perhaps the
practical demands of wartime reality compelled Stalin to hold his anger and
suspiciousness in check’.41
NOTES
1.
Documents on German
Foreign Policy 1918–1945, series D, vol. XII,
Washington and London, 1954–62, p. 126.
2.
H.Montgomery Hyde, Stalin:
The History of a Dictator, New York, 1971, p. 426.
3.
John Erickson, The
Soviet High Command, London, 1955, p. 577. Also Hyde, Stalin, p.
427.
4.
Hyde, Stalin, p.
427, citing Soviet source G.A.Deborin, quoted in Survey, April 1967, p.
443.
5.
Gustav Hilger and Alfred
G.Meyer, The Incompatible Allies, New York, 1974, pp. 327f. The authors
state, ‘Nothing the Russians did between 1939 and 1941 made Hitler more angry
than the treaty with Yugoslavia; nothing contributed more directly to the final
break; and Stalin must have sensed it’. years later wrote Gustav Hilger, the
adviser to Count Schulenburg, the German ambassador to the Soviet Union.
6.
Winston Churchill, The
Second World War, vol. II, London, 1948, p. 511. Hyde, Stalin, p.
429, quoting Documents of German Foreign Policy 1918–1945, series D,
vol. XII, p. 537.
7.
Documents on German
Foreign Policy 1918–1945, series D., vol. XII, p.
870.
8.
Hilger and Meyer, The
Incompatible Allies, p. 329.
9.
Nazi-Soviet Relations
1939–1941, Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Office,
Washington, 1948, p. 345.
10.
Hilger and Meyer, The
Incompatible Allies, p. 336.
11.
Hyde, Stalin, p.
435, quoting Khrushchev’s ‘Special Report to the Twentieth Party Congress’ (his
secret speech).
12.
Arkady Vaksberg, ‘Taina
Oktiabria 1941-go’, Literatumaya gazeta, 1988; reprinted in Mir, no. 165,
5–11 May 1988.
13.
Ibid.
14.
Khrushchev’s secret
speech.
15.
Hyde, Stalin, pp.
438f.
16.
Albert Speer, Inside
the Third Reich, New York, 1970, p. 306.
17.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, p. 310.
18.
I.P.Itskov in a taped
interview with the present author.
19.
Sir Ernest Llewellyn
Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, London, 1962,
pp. 152f.
20.
Robert E.Sherwood, The
White House Papers of Harry L.Hopkins, vol. I, 1949, pp. 343–5.
21.
A.N.Kolesnik,
‘Voennoplennyi starshii leitenant Yakov Dzhugashvili’, Voenno-istoricheskii
zhurnal, Moscow, December 1988.
22.
Speer, Inside the Third
Reich, p. 306.
23.
A.N.Kolesnik,
‘Voennoplennyi starshii leitenant Yakov Dzhugashvili’.
24.
The New York Times, 19
February 1968, p. 7.
25.
Svetlana Allilueva, Dvadtsat’
pisem k drugu, New York, 1967, pp. 151f. See also Ya.L.Sukhotin, ‘Iosif
Vissarionovich bolshoe gnezdo…’, Novoe Russkoe Slovo, April 8–9 1996.
26.
Recollections of Nadine
Brackman, the present author’s wife, who was a classmate of Gulia in the second
through sixth grades. She remembers that Yulia and her daughter Gulia lived in
the secret police building on Bolshoi Komsomolsky Lane
not far from the Lubianka. Gulia attended school no. 644 in the nearby
Armiansky Lane. In the morning, a maid would accompany her to school, carrying
her books and notes. After classes, the maid escorted her home. The girl was a
loner. She hardly talked to her classmates and usually stood alone near a
corridor window during breaks between classes.
27.
Beatrice Farnsworth, William
C.Bullitt and the Soviet Union, 1967, pp. 3 and 173.
28.
Churchill, The Second
World War, vol. III, pp. 405 and 411.
29.
Sherwood, The White
House Papers of Harry L.Hopkins, vol. I, p. 392.
30.
See Chapters 35 and 36
below.
31.
Arkady Vaksberg, ‘Taina
Oktiabria 1941-go’. Litteratumaya gazeta, reprinted in Mir, no.
165, 5–11 May 1988.
32.
Ibid.
33.
Ibid.
34.
Hyde, Stalin, pp.
459f.
35.
Vaksberg, ‘Taina Oktiabria
41-go’.
36.
V.A.Chalikova, ‘Arkhivnyi
yunosha’, Neva, October 1988, p. 153.
37.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, p. 311. Also Khrushchev’s secret speech.
38.
The ‘J’ letter is on file
in I.D.Levine’s archive, and a copy of it is in the present author’s archive.
This confidential letter from a high State Department official, who signed the
letter ‘J’, to Isaac Don Levine, dated 17 July 1956. The Letter referred to two
secret cables, dated 26 November 1941 and 5 January 1942, from the German
mission in Shanghai to the German foreign office in Berlin. The cables were
discovered in File AA/18 at the Alexandria Repository of captured German Second
World War documents.
39.
Ibid.
40.
Avon, the Earl of, The
Reckoning, London, 1960–65, p. 206.
41.
N.S.Khrushchev, Khrushchev
Remembers, Boston, Toronto, 1970, pp. 203–5.
GENERALISSIMO WITH A CRIPPLED
ARM
Paradoxically, the war
years were psychologically the most normal time during Stalin’s rule: for once,
the country was not fighting ‘enemies of the people’ who were figments of his
imagination. The threat of defeat forced Stalin to seek help even from those he
most hated, among them the Polish people: he agreed to allow the formation of a
Polish Army on Soviet territory. At the end of July 1941 General Wladislaw
Sikorsky, the head of the Polish government in exile, and Ivan Maisky, the
Soviet ambassador to Britain, signed an agreement that all Polish citizens and
prisoners-of-war would be released from Soviet camps and jails and allowed to
join the Polish Army. The question of the Soviet-Polish frontier was left
unsettled. It was stated only that all the Nazi-Soviet treaties of 1939 had
‘lost their validity’. The existence of the secret protocols on the partition
of Poland was not known at the time.
In October 1941, when
German troops were threatening Moscow, Beria summoned to his office Polish
General Zigmunt Berling, one of the few surviving Polish officers who had been
released from prison following the Soviet-Polish agreement, to discuss a plan
for organizing the Polish Army. General Berling said that, according to
information he had received, there were many Polish officers in three camps in
Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkovo; there would be enough to organize the
Polish Army. Beria’s assistant V.N.Merkulov dropped an alarming hint: ‘No, not
these. In regard to them we made a big mistake.’1
an idea: ‘Well, for
instance, to Manchuria,’ he suggested, perhaps recalling Liushkov’s defection
there. ‘It isn’t possible that they have all fled’, General Anders protested.
‘They must have been released, only they haven’t arrived yet’, insisted Stalin.
‘Please understand that the Soviet Government has no reason whatever for
detaining a single Pole.’3
Stalin’s comment about
people he sent to their deaths was: ‘There is no need to remember the victims,
because they all are odnim mirom mazany [‘tarred by the same brush’].’4
The silence of mass graves seemed to assure Stalin that his victims had been
forgotten. But the case of the murdered Polish officers began to haunt him soon
after the Germans found the secret burial grounds in occupied Soviet territory.
Hitler did not attach much importance to these mass graves, but paid attention
to the one discovered in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk when told that it
contained the remains of executed Polish officers. The discovery was made by
accident: in July 1941, when the Germans occupied Smolensk, one of two NKVD
officers who had been assigned to detonate explosives in the NKVD archive, had
instead shot his partner and defected to the Germans, handing them the archive
intact. Among the documents were records of the execution of the Polish
officers in the spring of 1940. An elderly peasant named Parfen Kiselev and a
village smith named Ivan Krovozertsov led the Germans to the mass graves of the
Polish officers. Exhumation began a year later, and the first report about the
Katyn massacre of thousands of Polish officers by the NKVD was broadcast by
Berlin radio on 13 April 1943. Two days later, Soviet radio accused the Germans
of the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest in the summer of 1941
when the Germans occupied the Smolensk region.
Germany invited
representatives from several countries and the Red Cross to investigate the
case. The Red Cross commission established the identities of the executed
officers by their personal belongings, like diaries and letters, as well as by
their uniforms. It also established that the executed officers were from the
Kozelsk camp and had been murdered in the spring of 1940 that is, more than a
year before the German invasion. General Sikorsky forwarded the report of the
Red Cross commission to Winston Churchill, but Churchill decided not to publish
it, stating that if the officers were dead then nothing could bring them back
to life.5 Nevertheless, the Polish government in exile persisted in
demanding that the Soviets account for the Katyn massacre and for the fate of
the officers in the Starobelsk and Ostashkovo camps. Stalin decided to break
off relations with Sikorsky’s government and to set up a puppet Polish
government on Soviet territory. Soon thereafter, Sikorsky died in a plane
crash.
After the Soviet Army
recaptured the Katyn area in January 1944 a column of covered trucks delivered
wooden boxes with the bodies of 925 Polish officers from Katyn to the Moscow
Institute of Judicial Medicine, where NKVD personnel manipulated the remains,
equipping them with ‘material proof like newspaper articles and forged diaries,
aimed at substantiating Stalin’s assertion that the executions took place after
the German occupation of the Smolensk area. The next night these trucks
carrying the remains headed back to Katyn. On 24 January 1944 the Soviet
government published a statement that a ‘special commission’ had determined
that the execution of the Polish officers had taken place in the summer of 1941
when the area was under German occupation. (After the war Stalin attempted to
include the Katyn massacre in the record of the Nuremberg Nazi War Crimes
Tribunal, but after briefly considering the case early in July 1946 the
tribunal
decided not to list Katyn
among the Nazi crimes. The British and American governments also decided not to
submit to the Nuremberg Tribunal the Red Cross report charging the Soviet Union
with the Katyn massacre and thus pointing to Stalin as a war criminal. On
Stalin’s order a small stone monument was erected at Katyn. The inscription
read: ‘Here were buried prisoners—officers of the Polish Army, who perished in
horrible torment at the hands of German-Fascist occupiers in the fall of 1941.’6)
Stalin hoped to implicate
his Western Allies in a mass murder similar to the Katyn Forest massacre:
during the Teheran Conference, which started on 27 November 1943 he at one
point suddenly suggested to Roosevelt and Churchill that 50,000 German officers
be executed at the end of the war. Churchill objected: ‘The British Parliament
and the public will never tolerate mass executions. The Soviets must be under
no delusion on this point.’ Stalin insisted, saying, ‘Fifty thousand must be
shot. The general staff must go.’ Churchill was outraged. By that time he knew
from the Red Cross report that the Katyn massacre had been perpetrated by
Stalin’s secret police. ‘I would rather be taken out into the garden here and
now and shoot myself than sully my own and my country’s honor by such infamy’,
he said. Roosevelt intervened, joking, ‘I have a compromise to propose. Not 50
thousand, but only 49 thousand should be shot’ His son Elliott, who had been
invited to the dinner, said that he wholeheartedly agreed with Marshal Stalin’s
plan and was sure that the United States Army would support it. Churchill,
greatly annoyed, left the table, saying that he resented ‘this intrusion’.
Stalin followed him, claiming that all this had been a ‘joke’.7
During the Teheran
Conference Roosevelt was eager to establish a close personal relationship with
Stalin. He tried to please Stalin by teasing Churchill and making disparaging
remarks about him. Roosevelt later recalled Stalin’s reaction: ‘A vague smile
passed over Stalin’s eyes, and I decided I was on the right track… I began to
tease Churchill about his Britishness, about John Bull, about his cigars, about
his habits… I kept it up until Stalin was laughing with me… The ice was broken
and we talked like men and brothers.’8 Sir Alan Brooke, the British
chief of the imperial general staff, wrote in his diary: ‘This conference is
over when it has only just begun. Stalin has got the President in his pocket.’
Brooke realized that Stalin had by then definite ideas as to how he wanted the
Balkans run after the war, and that he intended to bring Turkey and the whole
Eastern Mediterranean into the sphere of Soviet influence.9 What
Brooke did not know was that Stalin had a few years earlier attempted to reach an
agreement with Hitler about the inclusion of these very areas in the Soviet
sphere of interest, and that his disagreement with Hitler in this matter had
led to the war between Germany and the Soviet Union. The perennial ‘Eastern
Question’, which had historically led to conflict, was now threatening
relations between Stalin and his Western allies.
Churchill was annoyed by
Roosevelt’s attempts to please the Soviet dictator and saw in a possible
Roosevelt-Stalin alliance a threat to British interests. He was alarmed when
Stalin invited Roosevelt to move into the Soviet embassy compound during the
Teheran Conference under the pretext that Soviet intelligence had uncovered a
German plot to kidnap Roosevelt and to assassinate Churchill and Stalin.
Roosevelt accepted Stalin’s invitation. Stalin visited him and they spoke for
an hour through their interpreters. Roosevelt said that he was in favor of
self-determination for the peoples of the British Empire, and he mentioned with
pride that the United States had given independence to the Philippines. He
warned Stalin not to mention the question of India, as if he and Stalin
had already agreed on
Indian independence and Churchill was their adversary in this issue. Stalin
readily assumed the role of the earnest champion of independence of all the
peoples of the world, saying that India was unquestionably a painful problem
for Churchill. Roosevelt said that the change in India should start at the
bottom; Stalin agreed, noting that ‘reforms from the bottom mean revolution’.10
By the time of the Teheran
Conference, Stalin felt confident of victory. The German Army had suffered
defeat at Stalingrad and had been driven from the Caucasus, which opened the
route for delivery of aid through Iran by his Western allies. On 6 March 1943
Stalin bestowed upon himself the rank of ‘Marshal of the Soviet Union’, and he
was proclaimed ‘the greatest strategist of all times and all peoples’. In June,
Stalin received a report that British and American troops had landed on the
shores of Normandy, opening the second front.
On 20 June 1944 a group of
German officers attempted to assassinate Hitler, hoping that with him out of
the way Germany would be able to end the obviously lost war. The plotters were
executed. Goebbels’s propaganda machine poured hate on them in a manner
reminiscent of Vyshinsky’s oratory at the Moscow show trials. In the newspaper Angriff
he stated: ‘Degenerates to their very bones, blue-blooded to the point of
idiocy, nauseatingly corrupt, and cowardly like all nasty creatures—such is the
aristocratic clique which the Jew has sicked on National Socialism… We must
exterminate this filth, extirpate it root and branch.’11 The attempt
on Hitler’s life reminded Hitler of Stalin’s mass purge in the military in
1937–38. Hitler expressed regret that he had failed to follow Stalin’s example
and purged the German Army the same way. He said that he had always believed
the charges in the Moscow show trials to have been trumped up, but after the
attempt on his life his new-found insight was that he could no longer exclude
the possibility of treasonous collaboration between the Russian and German
general staff. Hitler stated that the assassination attempt on his life had
made him, finally, realize that in trying Tukhachevsky, Stalin had taken the
decisive step toward successful conduct of the war. This new interpretation of
the Tukhachevsky case inspired Hitler’s confidence that he had reached the
great turning point in the war. ‘The days of treason are over’, he exclaimed.
‘New and better generals will assume command.’12
By the end of July, the
Soviet Army had reached the Vistula River. Warsaw was within Stalin’s reach,
but he ordered General K.K.Rokossovsky not to cross the river without his
personal order. He knew from Soviet intelligence sources that the Polish
underground army, under the command of General Tadeusz Bor-Komorovsky, was
ready to stage an armed uprising against the Germans. The uprising began on 1
August 1944. The German Army was ordered to crush the Poles and to destroy whole
sections of Warsaw. Churchill, Roosevelt and the head of the Polish government
in exile, Stanislav Mikolajczyk, pleaded with Stalin to help the Poles, but on
16 August 1944 Stalin cabled Churchill: ‘Things being what they are, Soviet
headquarters have decided that they must dissociate themselves from the Warsaw
adventure since they cannot assume either direct or indirect responsibility for
it.’ On 20 August 1944 Churchill and Roosevelt sent Stalin an urgent message:
‘We hope that you will drop immediately supplies and munitions to the patriot
Poles in Warsaw, or you will agree to help our planes in doing it very quickly.
We hope you will approve. The time element is of extreme importance.’13
Stalin was only too happy
to have the Poles slaughtered by the Germans. The Polish uprising lasted for
two agonizing months. When the Germans finally crushed it, some
15,000 Polish fighters had
been killed and 250,000 inhabitants of Warsaw met their deaths under the ruins
of their city. On 17 January 1945, three months after the surrender of General
Bor-Komorovsky and his fighters, the Soviet Army entered Warsaw. Churchill
bitterly complained that the Russians found there ‘little but shattered streets
and the unburied dead’.14
Churchill was well
informed about Roosevelt’s desire to promote movements for independence in the
British colonial possessions in the Far East and the Mediterranean. Churchill
was forced to seek Stalin’s support in the hope of counterbalancing Roosevelt.15
On 9 October 1944 Churchill arrived in Moscow. Roosevelt refused to travel
there, because of the presidential election in which he, despite failing
health, was running for his fourth term. ‘Let us settle our affairs in the
Balkans’, Churchill said at his first session with Stalin. ‘So far as Britain
and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have 90 per cent
predominance in Rumania, for us to have ninety per cent of the say in Greece,
and go 50–50 per cent in Yugoslavia?’ While Stalin was listening to the
translation of this offer, Churchill took a piece of paper and wrote ‘50–50 per
cent for Hungary, 75 per cent for Russia in Bulgaria’. Churchill pushed the
paper across the table to Stalin, who, after a short pause, took a blue pencil
and signed his consent. Then he pushed the paper back to Churchill and Eden.
‘Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these
issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhanded manner?’ asked
Churchill introspectively. ‘Let us burn the paper.’ Stalin, who had no intention
of honoring any agreement, was not concerned with such trifles. ‘No’, he said
without hesitation, ‘you keep it.’16
In January 1945, Stalin’s
attention was drawn to reports of Soviet intelligence that a Swedish diplomat
Raoul Wallenberg had helped save a large number of Hungarian Jews. Wallenberg
was not Jewish, but had strong ties to the Jews of Palestine, where he had
worked in the banking system. Wallenberg was asked by a group of American Jews
to join the Swedish embassy in Budapest in order to save Jews from death in
Nazi concentration camps. On his arrival in Budapest in July 1944, Wallenberg
issued 20,000 Swedish passports to Hungarian Jews and placed 13,000 more of
them in Swedish-owned houses. Stalin assumed that Wallenberg was an ‘American
and Zionist spy’. Stalin had earlier opposed the Allies’ plans to bomb Nazi
concentration camp crematoriums because he did not want to stop the killing of
the Jews.17 On 17 January 1945 Soviet troops entered Budapest and
the 33-year-old Wallenberg was arrested by V.S.Abakumov, the head of Smersh
(‘Death to Spies’), the Soviet counterintelligence organization. The Swedish
foreign ministry was informed that Wallenberg was under Soviet ‘protection’,
but later inquiries of the Wallenberg family, the Swedish government, and
various Jewish organizations met with the claim by Soviet authorities that they
knew nothing of his fate. On 17 July 1947 the head of the Lubianka Prison
Hospital Dr A.L.Smoltsov sent a report to the minister of state security
V.S.Abakumov (who as chief of Soviet counterintelligence had arrested
Wallenberg two and a half years earlier) stating: ‘I report that the prisoner
Wallenberg, of whom you know, suddenly died at night in his cell, apparently of
myocardial infarction. In view of your instruction to personally observe
Wallenberg’s condition, I request your instruction as to whom to assign the
autopsy.’ Smoltsov, after delivering this report to Abakumov, returned to his
office and recorded the following: ‘I personally reported to the minister. His
order was to cremate the body without autopsy.’ On the same day, Abakumov sent
a report to the minister of foreign
affairs, V.M.Molotov,
notifying him about the termination of the ‘Wallenberg case’ in view of his
‘sudden’ death.18 The body was cremated, and the cremation recorded
under a secret number by the registrar of the Moscow crematorium.19
Molotov had been besieged by enquiries about Wallenberg’s fate, which annoyed
him and Stalin. Molotov passed on to Abakumov Stalin’s decision to quietly
liquidate this ‘spy’. Abakumov, in turn, ordered Dr Smoltsov or another agent
to poison Wallenberg and to cover up the poisoning by cremation of the body
without autopsy.
The question of the future
of Poland proved to be the most difficult. Churchill did not know about the
existence of the Soviet-German secret protocol, detailing the partition of
Poland, and agreed to an unspecified percentage of Soviet hegemony over Poland
in exchange for Stalin’s promise to back Britain’s control over Hong Kong and
not to threaten her possessions in the Middle East. (The record of Churchill’s
negotiations with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944 were made public 30 years
later, in 1973, by the opening of British wartime archives. However, the part
dealing with the ‘political conversations’ between Stalin and Churchill was
found in complete disorder, with many documents missing. Officials at the
archives claimed they were at loss to explain the papers’ disappearance.20)
The ‘Eastern Question’ and
the fate of Poland were again discussed at the Yalta Conference, which started
on 5 February 1945. Stalin declared that the Polish territories that had been
taken over by the Soviet Union in September 1939 would not be returned, but
that Poland would be compensated by German Silesia, which was rich in mineral
resources. Churchill objected, saying that Poland would not be able to absorb
the large German population of Silesia, but Stalin stated, ‘When our troops
come in, the Germans will run away.’ Stalin demanded most of east Prussia with
Königsberg as compensation for the Soviet Union. He promised to declare war on
Japan within three months of victory over Germany in exchange for large Soviet
territorial acquisitions at the expense of Japan: the Kuril Islands, the
southern part of Sakhalin Island, access to the port of Dairen, the lease of
Port Arthur as a Soviet naval base, and joint Sino-Soviet operation of the
Manchurian railroads. Roosevelt took upon himself to secure Marshal Chiang
Kai-shek’s acceptance of these agreements, which were spelled out in secret
protocols signed by Roosevelt and Stalin. Churchill, for the sake of unity,
reluctantly added his signature. British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden called
these secret protocols ‘a discreditable byproduct of the Conference’.21
On 12 April 1945 Stalin
learned of Roosevelt’s death and sent the new American president Harry S.Truman
a letter of condolence, describing the late president as ‘a great statesman of
world stature and champion of postwar peace and security’.22 Soon
thereafter, Stalin sent a letter to General Dwight D.Eisenhower, asking him to
hold his armies back to allow Soviet troops to enter Berlin before the Western
Allies, ‘according to [the] agreement with Roosevelt and in view of the amount
of blood our people had shed’. Eisenhower halted his offensive.23
Stalin’s aim was for Soviet forces to capture Hitler. He was also eager to
capture the German foreign ministry archive to prevent the world from learning
of the existence of the secret protocols detailing his and Hitler’s agreement
in 1939 on the partition of Poland and the absorption of the Baltic states by
the Soviet Union.
On 21 April 1945 Soviet
armies commanded by Generals Zhukov, Konev and Rokossovsky began their final
drive on Berlin by massive bombardment followed by
street fighting. Most of
the city was in flames. On 30 April 1945 Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun
committed suicide, and on 1 May the German General Hans Krebs reported the
deaths of Hitler and Braun to the Soviet headquarters and presented the offer
of the new German government to start capitulation talks. Zhukov called Stalin,
who said, ‘So the play was up, the scoundrel. It’s a pity that we couldn’t
capture him alive. Where is Hitler’s body?’ Zhukov replied that according to
General Krebs, Hitler’s body had been burned.24 On the morning of 2
May 1945 Soviet troops broke into the courtyard of Hitler’s Chancellery, where
they found two badly burned bodies wrapped in still smoldering rugs and buried
in a shallow grave. The gasoline that had been splashed on the bodies had been
partly absorbed by the freshly dug ground. The bodies were not burned
completely. Hitler’s dentist confirmed that the jaw and teeth matched those on
Hitler’s x-rays.25 Hitler’s body was flown to Moscow for an autopsy,
which was performed on 8 May 1945.
On 8 May 1945, the day on
which the autopsy of Hitler’s body was recorded in Moscow, Soviet Deputy
Foreign Minister Vyshinsky came to Berlin with Stalin’s instruction to Zhukov
to suppress information about Hitler’s death. Zhukov at a press conference
abruptly changed his story about Hitler’s death and declared: ‘The
circumstances are very mysterious. We have not identified the body of Hitler. I
can say nothing about his fate. He could have flown out of Berlin at the very
last moment.’26 (Two decades later, in 1965, long after Stalin’s
death, Zhukov was to state publicly for the first time that ‘Hitler and
Goebbels, seeing no other way out, ended their lives by suicide.’27)
In his statements to the allies, Stalin insisted that Hitler was hiding ‘somewhere’.
He also said that Hitler had fled in a large submarine to Japan; on other
occasions, he mentioned South America as the place from which Hitler continued
to threaten the human race. As always, Stalin pointed at a ‘false target’ to
deflect attention away from himself. The implications of these innuendoes were
that the Western powers were Hitler’s protectors and had inherited Hitler’s
mantle as the enemies of mankind, while the Soviet Union was mankind’s greatest
hope and a bastion of peace and democracy. On 9 May 1945 Stalin, standing on
top of Lenin’s mausoleum, reviewed the Victory Parade by Red Army units, during
which captured German flags were thrown on the ground before his eyes. On this
occasion Stalin bestowed upon himself the rank of ‘Generalissimo’, the ‘Order
of Victory’, and the medal of ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’.
The Potsdam Conference was
scheduled to open on 15 July 1945. Truman, Churchill and Stalin intended to
settle some problems left unresolved after the war. The conference was delayed
by a report that Stalin had suffered a slight heart attack. As always, Stalin
refused to fly because he was afraid to travel by air, and a special train of
11 cars delivered him and his entourage, and a large contingent of security
troops. The train included four luxury cars that had belonged to the Tsar’s
family and had been taken from a museum. Stalin chose to travel through
Lithuania and east Prussia in order to circumvent the normal route through
Poland, which he considered dangerous. He apologized for the one-day delay when
he paid a courtesy call on Truman, saying that his doctors would not let him
fly due to a ‘weakness in the lungs’. Truman invited Stalin to stay for lunch.
Apparently fearing that he might be poisoned, Stalin said that he could not.
‘You could, if you wanted to’, replied Truman. Stalin, persuaded by Truman’s
bluntness, stayed. During lunch, Stalin baffled Truman by insisting that Hitler
was alive and hiding somewhere in Spain or Argentina. The previous day, while
waiting for
Stalin’s arrival, Truman
and Churchill had gone on a tour of Berlin ruins and had been shown Hitler’s
bunker in the Reich Chancellery. Soviet soldiers had pointed to a spot where
they had found the badly burned bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. Truman could not
believe his own ears when Stalin said that a careful search by Soviet
investigators had found no trace of Hitler’s remains or any other positive
evidence of his death.28
The evening before
Stalin’s arrival, Truman received a report about the successful test of the
first atom bomb at the Alamogordo Air Base in the New Mexico desert. He passed
the news on to Churchill, noting that Soviet entry into the war with Japan
would not matter much in view of America’s mighty new weapon. Churchill
remarked that here was a speedy end to the Second World War and perhaps to much
else besides.29 They decided to inform Stalin about the bomb. Stalin
displayed no interest in it, saying, ‘That’s fine. I hope you make good use of
it against the Japanese.’30 In fact, Stalin was not surprised by the
news, since Soviet intelligence was keeping him informed about progress on
America’s development of the atom bomb. But he knew that the successful test
considerably strengthened the position of the Western powers in negotiations, and
he wanted to downplay the bomb’s importance in order to elicit concessions from
the Allies. Stalin had a sizable list of demands, all of them related to the
‘Eastern Question’. He wanted to absorb Iran, or at least its northern part
with its Azerbaijanian population, into the Soviet Union. He demanded that
Libya be brought into the Soviet sphere of interest and claimed the Soviet
right to participate in the international administration of Tangier. His most
insistent demands were for the establishment of a Soviet naval base in the
Bosporus. All these demands were rejected by Truman and Churchill. In Truman,
Stalin did not have as accommodating an ally as he had had in Roosevelt. Truman
did not seek to please Stalin and did not harass Churchill, whom he respected
and whose opinions he took seriously. Churchill, seeing that Stalin had
established tight control over the Soviet- occupied eastern European countries,
thus breaking his October 1944 agreement, came to the conclusion that Stalin
did not keep his word. Pointing to the Soviet secret police’s reign of terror
in these countries, Churchill in Truman’s presence said that ‘an iron fence has
come down’ on eastern Europe. ‘All fairy tales’, retorted Stalin.31
During the Potsdam
Conference the Labour Party’s landslide victory in the British general election
led to Clement Attlee taking over as prime minister. Churchill’s defeat gave
Stalin no advantage, since at this point Truman assumed the role of the
guardian of the West’s interests. On 1 August 1945, at the closing of the
Potsdam Conference, a camera recorded this strange scene: Stalin, dressed in
his generalissimo uniform, was briskly walking to a chair. A witness described
the scene: ‘his crooked left arm jerked and dangled helplessly from the
shoulder, as though its mechanism had suddenly gone out of control. Then that
swinging, dangling arm, which appeared to have no connection with him, like the
arm of a marionette, gradually resumed its normal position.32
Less than a week after
Stalin returned from Potsdam the first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. On 6
August 1945, Svetlana came to the Kuntsevo dacha with her 3- month-old
son, Iosif. All the Politburo members were there, but no one paid attention to
her because they were absorbed in the news of the Hiroshima bombing. Stalin
realized that Japan’s surrender was imminent and that he had to enter the war
at once if he was to claim his share of the spoils. On 8 August 1945 he
declared war on Japan, and Soviet troops crossed the border into Manchuria. The
second atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and Japan’s unconditional surrender
followed, but Soviet troops continued
their advance. Genrikh
Liushkov, the former chief of the Far Eastern NKVD, who had defected to the
Japanese in 1938, was in the Manchurian city of Port Arthur, having been sent
there from Tokyo as a ‘consultant on Russian affairs’. Fearing capture by the
approaching Soviet troops, Liushkov escaped to the headquarters of the Japanese
Kwantung Army in the Manchurian city of Dairen and demanded to be immediately
evacuated to Tokyo. General Yanagito Gendzo, the chief of staff of the Kwantung
Army, decided that if Liushkov refused to commit suicide, he should be shot. On
19 August 1945, at 9 pm, General Takeoka invited Liushkov to his office and for
two hours tried to convince him to commit suicide. Liushkov kept refusing and
insisting that his escape to Tokyo be arranged. Pretending that he would take
Liushkov to the port at Dairen to find a boat suitable for his escape, General
Takeoka led him downstairs into the courtyard, where, he shot him in the chest.
Liushkov’s body was cremated, and the urn with his ashes was placed in a
Buddist Temple in Dairen under the name of a Japanese officer. General Takeoka
recounted the story of Liushkov’s death to Soviet interrogators and later told
it to the inmates of a Kolyma prison camp. Liushkov’s urn is still in the
Buddhist Temple in Darien.33 With Liushkov’s death, Stalin was now
the only person alive who knew the truth behind the ‘Eremin Letter’.
The Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs
employed in the top secret ‘Manhattan Project’ in Los Alamos, where American
physicists were developing the bomb, passed information to the Soviets. In 1943
I.V.Kurchatov started to work on a similar atom bomb project. On 25 January
1945 Stalin discussed this project with Beria, Molotov and Kurchatov. By this
time the Soviet spies, Fuchs, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, as well as a
not-yet-identified spy codenamed ‘Parseus’, provided Beria with considerable
information about the first American atom bomb. Stalin demanded that Kurchatov
create and test an atom bomb as soon as possible. He inquired whether there was
enough plutonium for two bombs, so that one could be held in reserve.34
Winston Churchill was the
first to sound the alarm over Stalin’s aggressive designs. In a speech at the
American College in Fulton, Missouri on 5 March 1946 he said:
From
Stettin, in the Baltic, to Trieste, in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has
descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the
States of Central and Eastern Europe—Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest,
Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia…35
Stalin’s angry response
appeared in an interview published in Pravda on 13 March 1946, in which
he compared Churchill to Hitler, calling him ‘the warmonger of the Third World
War’.36 He invited a delegation of the British Labour Party, which
included Alice Bacon, the left-wing Member of Parliament. She declared that
Stalin was ‘very human, a man with a fine sense of humour and keen intellect’.37
Other visitors came away with a different impression. Lord Montgomery recalled
in his memoirs that during a conversation Stalin abruptly asked him, ‘Have you
seen Lenin?’ Baffled by the question, Montgomery answered, ‘I thought he was
dead.’ Stalin agreed, ‘So he is. But all the same you ought to go and see him
in the mausoleum in Red Square.’ Recalling his tour of Lenin’s mausoleum,
Montgomery wrote that Lenin looked to him ‘pretty waxen and yellow’. He also
recalled that Stalin looked much older than two years earlier, when they had
met at the Potsdam Conference.38
When the British Labour
government announced its decision to withdraw its assistance to Greece, Stalin
instigated a civil war there. Stalin’s scheme included absorbing Greece into
the Soviet sphere of interest and forcing Turkey to acquiesce in the
establishment of a Soviet military base in the Bosporus. Stalin’s ambitions
were frustrated by President Truman, who on 12 March 1947 declared America’s
determination to take ‘immediate and resolute action’ in support of any nation
resisting communist aggression. In what became known as the Truman Doctrine, he
stated:
I
believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free
peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside
pressures. I believe that we must assist free people to work out their
own destinies in their own way.39
In July 1947 Stalin
rejected the Marshall Plan, which aimed at fostering peaceful economic
development of all the countries ravaged by the war. Thus began the Cold War.
In the ensuing months, Stalin’s health declined. He suffered from high blood
pressure and periodically experienced heart trouble. In the summer of 1947,
Stalin renovated his dacha at Kuntsevo. He improved security
arrangements, adding a safety zone around the dacha with two rows of
barbed wire between which there was a passage for guard dogs. In January 1948
Yugoslav Politburo member Milovan Djilas visited Stalin and was invited to
Kuntsevo for dinner. Djilas noticed that Stalin had aged. He was surprised that
Stalin laughed at stupid jokes cracked by Politburo members. At the end of the
dinner Stalin proposed a toast: ‘To the memory of Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin], our
leader, our teacher— our all!’ Djilas was unable to decide whether Stalin was
serious or joking. During the dinner Stalin asked Djilas whether there were
many Jews in the Yugoslav Politburo, noting that in his there were none. He
suddenly shouted at Djilas, ‘You are an antiSemite, an anti-Semite!’ Stalin
turned on a record player and tried to dance a Caucasian lizginka, but
soon stopped, saying, ‘Age has crept up on me and I’m already an old man!’
Politburo members began to chant, ‘No, no, nonsense. You look fine. You’re
holding up marvelously.’ As the guests were about to leave, Stalin played
another record, a loud cacophony of yowling, barking and howling wolves or
dogs. Stalin kept laughing until he noticed that Djilas was baffled. ‘Well,
still it’s clever, devilishly clever’, said Stalin.40 Djilas did not
know what to make of Stalin’s odd excitement. He had no idea that Stalin
symbolically saw wolves as Jews and that there was a connection between
Stalin’s earlier comments about Jews and the sounds on that record. At the time
of Djilas’s visit, Stalin was already planning the mass deportation of Jews, a
scheme that, had he lived to see it carried out, would have resulted in
millions of deaths.
NOTES
1.
A.Antonov-Ovseenko,
‘Katyn’, Novoe russkoe slovo, 27 May 1988, p. 20.
2.
Stanislaw Kot, Conversations
with the Kremlin and Dispatches from Russia, London, 1963, p. 106.
3.
Ibid., p. 140.
4.
V.A.Chalikova, ‘Arkhivnyi
yunosha’, Neva, October 1988, p. 153.
5.
Nikolas Betell, ‘Katyn
1940’, Kontinent, no. 11, 1977.
6.
Antonov-Ovseenko, ‘Katyn’.
7.
Lord Moran, Winston
Churchill: the Struggle for Survival 1940–1965, London, 1966, pp. 141f.
8.
Frances Perkins, The
Roosevelt I Knew, London, 1974, pp. 70f.
9.
Lord Moran, Winston
Churchill, pp. 133–5.
10.
H.Montgomery Hyde, Stalin:
the History of a Dictator, New York, 1971, pp. 491–3. See also Robert
E.Sherwood, The White House Papers of Harry L.Hopkins, vol. II, 1949,
pp. 771f; the Soviet Government publication of the complete transcript in International
Affairs, Moscow, July and August 1961, nos. 7 and 8; and Winston Churchill,
The Second World War, vol. V, London, 1948, P. 303.
11.
Albert Speer, Inside
the Third Reich, New York, 1970, p. 390.
12.
Ibid., pp. 390f.
13.
Winston Churchill, The
Second World War, London, 1948, vol. VI, pp. 118–20.
14.
Ibid., p. 128.
15.
The wartime papers of Sir
Winston Churchill were made public in August 1973. They revealed that his fear
of Roosevelt’s hostility to British colonial interests was the reason why
Churchill sought Stalin’s support in a deal that sealed the fate of Poland. See
‘Churchill, Stalin Made Polish Deal’, The New York Times, 5 August 1973.
16.
Churchill, The Second
World War, vol. VI, p. 198.
17.
Arthur D.Morse, While
Six Million Died, New York, 1967, p. 290.
18.
The New York Times, 28
Dec. 1991, p. 6.
19.
I.P.Itskov, taped
interview with the author in New York in 1989. Itskov investigated the murder
of his former wife, Bronislava, and searched the Lubianka archives, as well as
the records of the Moscow crematorium. He was also interested in the fate of
Raoul Wallenberg, and in doing his research kept Wallenberg in mind. He came to
the conclusion that Wallenberg was poisoned in 1947 and was cremated. The
author remembers Dr A.L.Smoltsov, a man of medium height, about forty years
old, with a very low forehead and cold, small black eyes, who made regular
visits to the Lubianka prison cells.
20.
‘Churchill, Stalin Made
Polish Deal’, The New York Times, 5 August 1974.
21.
Avon, the Earl of, The
Reckoning, London, 1960–65, p. 513.
22.
I.V.Stalin, Stalin’s
Correspondence with Churchill, Attlee, Roosevelt and Truman 1941– 1945,
Moscow and London 1957–58, vol. II, p. 214.
23.
Hyde, Stalin, p.
331.
24.
G.K.Zhukov, Vospominaniya
i razmyshleniya, Moscow, 1974, pp. 631f.
25.
Erich Kuby, The
Russians and Berlin, 1945, London, 1968, p. 175.
26.
Churchill, The Second
World War, vol. II, p. 903.
27.
G.K.Zhukov, ‘Bitva za
Berlin’, Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, June 1965.
28.
James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt:
The Soldier of Freedom 1940–1945, London, 1971, p. 68.
29.
Churchill, The Second
World War, vol. VI, p. 552.
30.
James F.Byrnes, Speaking
Frankly, New York and London, 1947, p. 263.
31.
Ibid., p. 76.
32.
Robert Payne, The Rise
and Fall of Stalin, New York, 1965, London, 1966, p. 624.
33.
V.Mikhailiv and
V.Bondarenko, ‘Zhizn’ i smert’ komissara Liushkova’, Kurier, 3 June
1993. See also Alvin D.Coox, ‘L’Affaire Liushkov’, Soviet Studies,
January 1968, p. 418; Also A.Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret tirana, New York,
1980, pp. 208f.
34.
Serge Schmemann, article
in The New York Times, 14 January 1993, p. 14.
35.
The Times,
London, 6 March 1946.
36.
Pravda, 13
March 1946.
37.
Daily Herald,
London, 16 August 1946.
38.
Hyde, Stalin, p.
555, citing Field Marshal Montgomery, Memoirs, London, 1958, p. 445.
39.
Harry Truman, Years of
Trial and Hope 1946–1953, London, 1966, p. 111.
40.
Milovan Djilas, Conversations
with Stalin, New York and London, 1962, pp. 157–61.
‘MURDERERS IN WHITE GOWNS’
At the end of November
1947 Solomon Mikhoels, the director of the Moscow Jewish Theater and chairman
of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, delivered a speech before a largely
Jewish audience in the hall of the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow. Mikhoels began
his speech by saying that A.A.Gromyko, the Soviet representative to the United
Nations, had declared Soviet support for the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine
and thus pointed out the road to the Land of Israel. The applause was
deafening. When the event was reported to Stalin he at once ordered the arrest
of people who directly or indirectly had connections to Mikhoels.1
The economist
I.I.Goldshtein was arrested on 19 December 1947; the literary critic
Z.G.Grinberg was arrested on 28 December. At the same time, several of Stalin’s
relatives were also arrested, among them Anna Redens, the sister of Stalin’s
late wife Nadezhda Allilueva (Anna’s husband Stanislav Redens had been executed
in 1938), and Olga Allilueva, the widow of Nadezhda’s brother Pavel Alliluev,
who had died suddenly in 1938. Olga had remarried, and her second husband, a
Jew, was arrested together with her. Stalin explained to his daughter Svetlana
that the reason why her aunts had been arrested was, ‘They knew too much. They
blabbed a lot. It played into the hands of our enemies.’2 He did not
tell Svetlana that Olga was also accused of poisoning her husband Pavel
Alliluev. Stalin suspected that Stanislav Redens and Pavel Alliluev had known
about his Okhrana past, the discovery of his Okhrana file, and the true reason
behind the execution of Tukhachevsky and other generals. He probably also
suspected that Redens and Alliluev had shared these secrets with their wives,
who might ‘blab’ about them to their Jewish friends. Among those arrested were
Olga’s neighbors Lev Tumerman and Lidia Shatunovskaya, who also knew Mikhoels
personally. Anna, Olga and their neighbors were initially accused of taking
part in an anti-Soviet conspiracy headed by Mikhoels. But after 13 January 1948
their interrogation records were rewritten, and the name of Mikhoels was erased
from them. A few months later the defendants were sentenced by the MGB Special
Council to various terms of imprisonment in the Vladimir Tsentral Jail.3
over by a truck.
Immediately after this meeting, Stalin called Abakumov and ordered him to
liquidate Mikhoels. Shortly after Stalin’s death Lavrenty Beria submitted a
report to the Presidium of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, dated 2
April 1953, which said that in his deposition Abakumov (who had been arrested)
had stated: ‘As I recall, the head of the Soviet Government, I.V.Stalin, gave
me an urgent order—to organize immediately the liquidation, by MGB USSR
personnel, of Mikhoels, assigning it to special persons.’6 Abakumov
further revealed that Stalin ordered him to assign the MGB officers Ogoltsov
and Shubnikov, as well as the minister of state security of Byelorussia,
Lavrenty Tsanava, a nephew of Beria, to carry out the assassination, which
could look like a road accident.7
While visiting Minsk,
Mikhoels was invited by Tsanava’s agent to a wedding on the evening of 13
January 1948. Mikhoels and his companion, the literary critic V.Golubov-
Potapov, an MGB agent, were driven by a ‘friend’ to Tsanava’s dacha
outside Minsk. They arrived there around 10 pm and were taken out of the car
and murdered. Their bodies were run over by a truck. At midnight their bodies
were taken to one of the deserted snow-covered streets and dumped there. The
next morning the severely mutilated bodies were found by passers-by.
Stalin’s daughter Svetlana
visited her father the evening of Mikhoels’ murder. As she walked into the
room, the telephone rang. Stalin listened to the caller and then quietly, as if
he were making a suggestion, said, ‘Well, it’s an automobile accident.’ He hung
up and greeted her. A few minutes later he told her, ‘Mikhoels was killed in an
automobile accident.’ Svetlana realized that what she had witnessed was the
report of a murder ordered by her father. She concluded that Stalin had
invented the car accident to cover up the crime. ‘I knew all too well my father’s
obsession with “Zionist” plots around every corner’, she was to recall.8
The newspapers reported
that Mikhoels and Golubov-Potapov had died in a car accident. The coffin with
Mikhoels’s body was placed on the stage of the Moscow Jewish Theater. Deep wounds
left by the axe blows were clearly visible despite the heavy makeup. A large
crowd gathered outside the theater because there was not enough room inside.
Although Mikhoels was buried with full official honors, the rumor spread that
he had been murdered by MGB agents.9 At the time of the murder of
Mikhoels the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC), of which he had been the
chairman for a number of years, was already under investigation by the MGB.
Members of the JAFC were accused of ‘Jewish bourgeois nationalism’ and of
involvement in an ‘anti-Soviet conspiracy’, headed by Mikhoels.
The JAFC was created on
Stalin’s order in August 1941 when the German Army was rapidly advancing deep
into Soviet territory. Stalin hoped through this organization to mobilize
Jewish support in the West for the Soviet war effort. He believed that the Jews
had great political and financial clout. On 24 August 1941 S.A.Lozovsky, the
deputy foreign minister and the head of the Soviet Information Bureau, was
ordered by Stalin to set up the JAFC.10 Initially, Stalin planned to
make the JAFC an international organization. He ordered Beria to release from
prison Henrik Erlich and Victor Alter, two widely known Jewish Social
Democratic leaders in Poland, who were awaiting execution, having been arrested
as ‘spies’ in September 1939 in the Soviet-occupied part of Poland. Their death
sentences were annulled and they were released from prison and on 24 September
1941 they appealed to Polish Jews to enlist in the Polish Army, which was
being formed on Soviet
soil. Erlich and Alter often met with the Polish ambassador to the Soviet
Union, Stanislav Kot, who at that time was trying to determine what had
happened to the 15,000 Polish officers held in three prisoner-of-war camps.
Among these officers were many Polish Jews. After being evacuated from Moscow
to Kuibyshev in October 1941, when the German army came close to the suburbs of
Moscow, Erlich and Alter were placed in a hotel in Kuibyshev (Samara). In the
privacy of their rooms, they discussed the rumors about the disappearance of
the Polish officers. Their conversations were tapped and reported to Stalin. On
4 December 1941 Erlich and Alter were arrested and executed as ‘German spies’.
Stalin appointed Solomon Mikhoels chairman of the JAFC, having dropped the idea
of making it an international organization. During the war, Mikhoels directed
the effort to mobilize Jewish support in various countries for the Soviet
Union.11 His appeal found an enthusiastic responce in the Jewish
community in Palestine which sent money and medical supplies to the Soviet
Union. This good will led to consequences reaching far beyond the immediate war
needs. Stalin became interested in Palestine and sent a number of agents to
explore the possibility of using the Jewish community to advance Soviet
strategic interests in the Middle East. Soviet agents were impressed by the
strong leftist pro-Soviet sentiment in the Jewish community in Palestine at the
time and by the ‘socialist nature’ of its economy. As the war was coming to an
end, Stalin decided to support the creation of a Jewish state, hoping to turn
it into a Soviet anti-Western satellite with the help of the communist and
other leftist parties. After the war Stalin watched closely the struggle of the
Palestine Jews against the British, who prevented them from transporting Jews
to Palestine from camps for displaced persons in Europe.12 Early in
1946 Stalin ordered Soviet intelligence to use Jewish-British conflict to
promote his scheme of bringing the new state of Israel into the Soviet sphere
of interest.13 The resident of Soviet intelligence in London, Viktor
Kukin, told Mordekhai Oren, one of the leaders of the Jewish leftist party
Mapam, that the left-of-center Jewish groups in Palestine, striving to create a
socialist Jewish state, would have Soviet support if they followed a pro-Soviet
policy in international relations. ‘We are going to help you’, said Kukin.14
Mikhoels did not travel to
Palestine, which had not much to offer by way of donations. Early in 1943 he
and poet I.S.Fefer (an MGB agent) traveled to America to raise funds for the
Soviet war effort. In New York, Mikhoels met Chaim Weizman, the future
president of Israel. When they were alone for a few moments, Weizman asked in
Yiddish, ‘How do the Jews fare in Russia?’ Mikhoels cast a frightened look
around, raised his hands to heaven, and, expressing his horror, whispered,
‘Gewalt!’ Weizman recorded this episode in his diary.15
Soon after Mikhoels’s
murder, Stalin ordered his agent to poison the Secretary of the JAFC, Shakhno
Epshtein. This agent, posing as a representative of the Central Committee,
spoke with Epshtein for a few minutes behind closed doors. Then the door opened
and the visitor announced that Epshtein had died of a heart attack.16
The members of the JAFC were arrested one by one and accused of plotting to
turn the Crimean peninsula into an ‘American-Zionist base for an attack on the
Soviet Union.’17 (This accusation was rooted in the idea that had
originated in Stalin’s own mind early in 1923, then he had ordered Mikhail
Kalinin to promote the creation of a ‘Jewish Autonomous Republic’ in the
Crimea. Three years later he had decided to send the Jews not to the Crimea but
to the Birobidzhan area in the Siberian Far East.) In 1944, after ordering the
mass deportation to
Siberia and Central Asia of the Crimean Tartars, the native population of the
Crimea, Stalin decided to implicate the Jews in this crime. He instructed
Solomon Lozovsky, the chairman of the Soviet Information Bureau who was also a
member of the JAFC, to suggest the idea of ‘Crimea for the Jews’ to members of
the JAFC and tell them to put it in a petition addressed to him. On 15 February
1944 Lozovsky told Solomon Mikhoels, Shakhno Epstein, and I.S.Fefer to send
Stalin a letter, proposing the creation of a ‘Jewish Crimean Autonomous
Republic’. The rumor about the idea of ‘giving Crimea to the Jews’ was briefly
circulated among the Jewish refugees and in the camps for displaced persons in
Europe. Stalin soon dropped the idea and it faded away, but Stalin did not
forget it. On 12 October 1946 the MGB, on Stalin’s order, sent to the Council
of Ministers a report titled, ‘On Nationalistic Manifestations of Some Members
of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’, accusing it of plotting to create a
Crimean ‘anti-Soviet base’. On 26 November 1946 M.A.Suslov, a Secretary of the
Central Committee and an ideological watchdog, sent a similar report to Stalin,
in whose mind the scenario for a ‘Crimean case’ had already taken shape.18
At the beginning of
November 1948 Suslov summoned all the members of the JAFC to his office and
said that ‘the time to act has arrived’. In the opinion of the Central
Committee, a Jewish Autonomous Republic must be created on the basis of the
Jewish Autonomous Region in Birobidzhan … All the Jews living on the territory
of the Soviet Union must be resettled in this Autonomous Republic.’19
Solomon Lozovsky responded by saying that he, an internationalist all his
conscious life, did not see anything positive in resettling the Soviet Jews in
Birobidzhan. The poet Peretz Markish, who became chairman of the JAFC after the
murder of Mikhoels, also expressed his objection to the idea, stating in
conclusion, ‘I cannot stab my people in the back.’20 Suslov fidgeted
in his chair while listening and then ended the meeting. He reported to Stalin
the JAFC members’ response. On 20 November 1948 Stalin submitted to the
Politburo Resolution Number 81 which read:
The
Bureau of the Council of Ministers of the USSR orders the Ministry of State
Security of the USSR to liquidate the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, because,
as the facts proved, this committee has been the center of anti-Soviet
propaganda and has regularly supplied the organs of foreign intelligence with
anti-Soviet information. In connection with this decision, the newspapers of
this committee must be closed and the files confiscated. For the time being not
to arrest anybody.21
On 13 January 1949, the
first anniversary of the murder of Mikhoels, Politburo member G.M.Malenkov summoned
Lozovsky and demanded that he confessed his role in the conspiracy to separate
the Crimea from the Soviet Union and turn it into an ‘American and Zionist
base’. (Stalin’s old habit of marking certain dates that were meaningful to him
by staging notable events had resurfaced.) Malenkov confronted Lozovsky with
‘criminal evidence’ of his guilt: the letter, dated 15 February 1944 signed by
Mikhoels, Epshtein and Fefer, in which they supported Stalin’s own idea of
creating a ‘Jewish Autonomous Republic’ in the Crimea. On 18 January 1949
Lozovsky was expelled from the party. Eight days later he was arrested; by
then, all the other members of the JAFC had also been arrested.22
Stalin had been
anti-Semitic from his early youth, prone to making derogatory statements about
Jews, although he learned to hide his anti-Semitism behind the mask of the
official party line of internationalism. His hatred became more intense in the
late 1930s when he learned that a large number of Jews had played important
roles in the history of his Okhrana file: Rabinovich, who found the file among
Dzerzhinsky’s papers; Yakov Blumkin who tried to smuggle the file abroad;
I.L.Shtein, who discovered the file in Menzhinsky’s office; Zinovy Katsnelson
who received the file from Shtein; Yan Gamarnik, who kept the file in the safe
in his office and who, together with Tukhachevsky, headed the military plot
against Stalin; Ignaz Reiss, who informed Trotsky’s supporters about the file’s
discovery; the chief of the Far Eastern NKVD, Genrikh Liushkov, to whom Stalin
assigned the task of planting the forged ‘Eremin Letter’ and who escaped to
Japan; Walter Krivitsky and Alexander Orlov, both of whom defected to the West
and who also were connected in Stalin’s mind with knowledge of his secrets. His
hatred for Jews grew even more intense than his loathing of the Polish people.
Stalin’s daughter Svetlana wrote that her father was an anti-Semite but ‘did
not yet express his hatred of the Jews openly—he started doing so only later,
after the war’.23 Khrushchev, too, wrote that Stalin during the last
five ‘crazy’ years of his life ‘couldn’t keep his anti-Semitism hidden’.24
Stalin’s intense hatred of the Jews hurt Svetlana’s personal life: he exiled
the screenwriter Aleksei Kapler, her first love, and refused to meet her Jewish
husband, Grigory Moroz.
One of the most bizarre
aspects of Stalin’s anti-Semitism was its explosion precisely at a time when he
was pursuing a policy of support for the newborn State of Israel. He hoped to
turn Israel into a Soviet satellite similar to the ‘Popular Democracies’ he was
setting up in Eastern Europe. The murders of Mikhoels and Epshtein and the
arrests of the members of the JAFC actually took place after Stalin had decided
to turn the Jewish state into a Soviet satellite. At the end of the Teheran
Conference Roosevelt told Stalin that he intended ‘to review the entire
Palestine question’ with the king of Saudi Arabia. Stalin replied vaguely that
the Jewish problem was ‘extremely difficult’ and that the Soviet Union had tried
to establish a national home for the Jews, but they had stayed there only two
or three years before returning to the cities. The Jews were ‘natural traders’,
he informed Roosevelt, and he added that only ‘small groups’ of them were
settled in agricultural areas. Stalin had in mind Birobidzhan and the project
he intended to undertake: the relocation of all Soviet Jews, and perhaps Jews
from other countries as well, to the ‘Jewish Autonomous Area’ of Birobidzhan in
the Siberian Far East.25
When the creation of the
State of Israel was proclaimed on 14 May 1948, Soviet and American recognition
followed almost immediately. Stalin, hoping to bring Israel into the Soviet
sphere of interest, ordered that Israel be supplied with weapons when the
armies of seven Arab states attacked Israel. Since the Suez Canal was under
British control, Stalin entertained the idea of building an alternate canal
through the Negev desert to connect the Mediterranean and the Red Seas.26
Meanwhile, events in
eastern Europe, especially the example of a ‘Popular Democracy’ in Poland that
Stalin had installed, were a clear warning to many Israeli Jews. The communist
coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, and the murder of Czech foreign
minister Jan Masaryk was another warning. Masaryk’s body was found lying in the
courtyard of the foreign ministry. A bullet hole behind his ear indicated that
he had been shot and then thrown out of the window.27 The conflict
between Stalin and
the president of
Yugoslavia, Marshal Joseph Tito, in the summer of 1948, as well as the Soviet
blockade of Berlin in the same year, also alarmed many Jews in Israel. Israeli
president Chaim Weizmann opposed the Jewish leftists who worshipped Stalin.
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had no illusions about Stalin. In 1938 he had
protested against the Moscow show trials, denouncing Stalin as a kham
ha-gruzini (a coarse Georgian bully).28
Molotov’s Jewish wife
Polina Zhemchuzhina, like her husband, was a fanatical admirer of Stalin. At a
Kremlin reception she dared to say a few friendly words in Yiddish to the first
Israeli ambassador to Moscow, Golda Meir. Zhemchuzhina was promptly arrested
and exiled. Beria periodically whispered in Molotov’s ear: ‘Polina is alive.’29
Hardly anyone could have imagined at the time that Stalin and the Politburo
members were discussing a plan to exile all the Soviet Jews to the Siberian
wilderness of Birobidzhan and other remote areas. But precursors of this
impending catastrophe were already appearing. On 30 December 1949 all Jews in
the towns of Kuntsevo and Davydkovo, which were close to Stalin’s dacha,
were evicted. Their neighbors, encouraged by MGB agents, helped themselves to
the belongings of the expelled Jews.30 Stalin started a campaign
against ‘cosmopolitans, rootless parasites, people without kith and kin, and
passportless wanderers’ whose obviously Jewish names were supplied in
parentheses. These code phrases were easily recognized as transparently
anti-Jewish. (For Stalin, the collective image of the ‘passportless wanderer’
stood for Trotsky, to whom he had denied Soviet citizenship in 1930 and who
died a ‘passportless wanderer’.) The MGB began mass arrests of ‘cosmopolitans,
Jewish bourgeois nationalists, and Zionists’. No information about these
arrests appeared in the Soviet press.
Stalin’s 70th birthday
occurred on 21 December 1949. Presents from all over the world were placed in a
special museum. Among them was a fur coat made by some Jewish tailors in New
York. (His greatest present Stalin had already received in August 1949, when
the successful test of the first Soviet atom bomb was announced.) The Soviet
propaganda machine was convulsed by paroxysms of flattery. The writer Leonid
Leonov in a Pravda article predicted that Stalin’s birthday would be
celebrated by people all over the world and that the new calendar would begin
not with the birth of Christ but with that of Stalin.
In May 1950 Israel sided
with the United States in condemning the communist aggression in Korea. Stalin
realized that his plan of making Israel a Soviet base in the Middle East had
failed. He was infuriated by what he perceived to be Jewish ingratitude and
betrayal. The Soviet press kept silent about the retreat of the North Korean
troops. It devoted most of its pages to Stalin’s articles titled, ‘The Question
of Linguistics’. The hidden theme was the ‘Jewish Question’, although the Jews
were not mentioned at all. Stalin had become interested in ‘linguistics’ by
accident: during the mass arrests of Jews in 1949 and confiscations of their
privately held Jewish Encyclopedia, which became criminal evidence of
‘Jewish bourgeois nationalism.’ Stalin examined the 16 volumes of this
Russian-language Jewish Encyclopedia which had been published in 1913. He
spotted there a brief entry under the heading ‘Georgian Language,’ stating that
at the turn of the century a young linguist by the name of Niko Marr postulated
a theory that the Georgian language was of Semitic origin. In 1896 Marr wrote
an article in the Georgian journal Iveria and in 1907 published a short
pamphlet arguing his theory.31 Toward the end of his life, Marr
became a prominent Soviet academician. When he died in 1934, he
left behind many disciples
who were not even aware that in his youth he had ‘sinned’ before Stalin by
postulating the Semitic origin of the Georgian language.
The long-deceased Marr (he
died in 1934) could not be forced to recant his heretical theory. Nevertheless,
in his articles Stalin furiously attacked Marr, castigating the dead linguist
on the pages of Pravda.32 Stalin invited the Georgian
linguist and academician A.S.Chikobaba to a dinner at the Kremlin and brought
up the subject of linguistics. Khrushchev, who was present at the dinner, did
not know what to make of Stalin’s sudden interest in linguistics.33
Stalin ordered A.N.Poskrebyshev, the chief of his secretariat, to find
pre-Revolutionary publications on linguistics. At one point, he interrupted a
meeting with an admiral when Poskrebyshev brought in some of these old books.
‘What doesn’t Stalin study!’ thought the admiral in awe and admiration.34
Stalin never revealed the
true reason behind his attack on Marr whose offense was too hideous even for
condemnation. In his articles, Stalin dismissed all of Marr’s views and claimed
that language was not a ‘superstructure’, but was simply language. Deep down
Stalin feared that there was some truth to Marr’s theory. In 1949, he ordered
that the name of the Georgian magazine Iveria (the ancient and poetic
name for Georgia in the Old Georgian language) be changed to Sakartvelo
(Georgia in contemporary Georgian language). Marr had cited the word ‘Iveria’
as evidence of the Semitic origin of the Georgian language. Stalin ordered that
the word Iveria be expunged from all publications, including his own
childhood poems. Marr’s disciples were fired from their jobs, their
dissertations annulled, their careers ruined and many of them arrested. None of
them suspected that Stalin was punishing them for Marr’s almost forgotten
theory of the Semitic origin of the Georgian language.
Stalin was also disturbed
by another linguistic theory, that the Basques, Albanians and Georgians all
belonged to the Iberian group of people who lived in the Mediterranean basin in
ancient times. His ‘insight’ probably was that Iveria, Iberian, Evrei
(Jew in Russian) and Uria (a derogatory word for Jew in the Georgian
language) were all words of the same root, pointing to the perception that the
Jews, as well as Georgians, belonged to the ‘Iberian group’. This would explain
why he began to develop a strong dislike for Georgians too. He told his
daughter Svetlana that the Georgians ‘open their mouths and yell like fools’.35
He started denying his Georgian origin and began statements with the words: ‘We
Russians…’. His interest in questions of ethnic origin startled some of his
visitors. During a meeting with Yugoslav Vice Premier Edvard Kardelj, Stalin
suddenly asked him, ‘What is the origin of the Albanians?’ Kardelj said that
the Albanians were descendants of the Illyrians. ‘I remember Tito told me they
were related to the Basques’, said Stalin. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ replied
Kardelj. They seem to be rather primitive and backward people’, Stalin said.
‘But they are very brave and faithful’, Kardelj replied. ‘Yes, they can be as
faithful as a dog; that’s one of the traits of the primitive’, retorted Stalin.36
Stalin attempted to provoke the Yugoslavs to attack Albania and destroy it. To
Yugoslav Politburo member Milovan Djilas he said, ‘Yugoslavia is free to
swallow Albania any time she wishes to do so.’ To illustrate his point, he
licked his lips, pointed his finger at his throat, and made his eyes big,
imitating a boa constrictor devouring its prey. Djilas was disturbed to see the
‘Greatest Leader’ so cavalier about the forceful annexation of a country.
‘Comrade Stalin, there is no question of swallowing Albania, only one of
friendly and allied relations between the two countries’, he protested.
Whereupon Molotov
attempted to reassure him with the statement, ‘Well, this is one and the same
thing.’37
The failure to turn Israel
into a Soviet satellite added fuel to Stalin’s anti-Semitism. The director of
the Stalin Automobile Factory in Moscow, A.I. Likhachev, received a report that
the Jewish engineers working there were involved in sabotage. Likhachev told
one of his Jewish friends, Georgy Meerson, whom he had known for many years,
‘Take my advice, Georgy, quit your job at once. Otherwise, I’ll have to fire
you in order to save you. Don’t ask questions.’38 Meerson quit his
job, and was the only one to survive, all the other Jewish engineers at the
factory being arrested and executed in a spets. uchastok (special
lot) outside Moscow. The guards ordered them to run and unleashed their dogs.
Chief Engineer Edinov died first. Weakened by torture, he was unable to run.39
Late in 1951, Stalin had a
regular checkup by his personal physician, Professor V.N.Vinogradov. During the
examination Stalin said that the Politburo members A.S.Shcherbakov (in 1946)
and A.A.Zhdanov (in 1948) had been poisoned by Kremlin doctors. Stalin mentioned
the names of the doctors, all of whom were Jewish. Vinogradov knew them well
and said he had absolute trust in their honesty and professional competence.
After the checkup, Vinogradov advised Stalin to rest more and work less. To
Stalin this advice had a familiar ring: three decades earlier, plotting to
hasten Lenin’s death and pretending to worry about his health, he had insisted
that Lenin be kept from his daily duties. Stalin at once suspected Vinogradov
of conspiring against him and ordered his arrest. Vinogradov, who came from a
family of prestigious Russian physicians, was accused together with a group of
Jewish Kremlin doctors of poisoning Shcherbakov and Zhdanov. The fact that
Stalin accused Kremlin physicians of poisoning these Soviet leaders points to
his habit of accusing ‘false targets’ and suggests that these leaders were
poisoned on his own orders, and, as in other cases, he felt the emotional need
to attribute the crimes to someone else. Both deaths at the time they took
place were attributed to heart disease. In August 1947 Stalin’s daughter
Svetlana, who by then had divorced her Jewish husband and married Zhdanov’s son
Yury, was present at a family dinner at which Stalin suddenly turned to Andrey
Zhdanov and shouted, ‘Look at him sitting there, like Christ, as if nothing was
of concern to him! There—looking at me now as if he was Christ!’ Zhdanov turned
pale and drops of sweat appeared on his forehead. Everyone fell silent.40
In 1947 Stalin’s illegitimate son Konstantin Kuzakov was pressed by the MGB to
accuse Zhdanov of ‘loss of vigilance in atomic espionage’.41 The
‘Leningrad case’ broke out in 1949–50, when the whole of ‘Zhdanov’s nest’, as
Stalin called it, was destroyed and thousands of Leningrad officials, headed by
Politburo member and Deputy Chairman of the Council of MinistersN.
A.Voznesensky, were dismissed and many executed. Molotov, Khrushchev and
Malenkov dared to mention Voznesensky’s name in Stalin’s presence. ‘Before you
go on, you should know that Voznesensky was shot this morning’, Stalin told
them, ‘Are you telling me that you, too, are enemies of the people?’42
In May 1951 Stalin,
ordered M.D.Riumin, the chief of the MGB Special Investigative Department, who
had earlier worked in Stalin’s personal secretariat, to induce the Kremlin
hospital x-ray technician Lidia Timashuk, an MGB ‘unofficial collaborator’, to
write a report accusing Jewish doctors, her superiors, of poisoning Zhdanov and
Shcherbakov.43 Using her report, Riumin fabricated the ‘case of the
Kremlin doctors’ and handed it for approval to the minister of state security,
Abakumov, who in turn reported it
to Beria. Both realized
that the case was a monstrous anti-Semitic provocation that might explode into
a great scandal, and that its upshot might well be that the MGB and they
personally would be charged with a lack of vigilance in protecting the security
of Soviet leaders. Abakumov called Riumin a ‘stupid adventurer’ and ordered him
to throw out the charges of poisoning. Riumin complained to Stalin that
Abakumov and Beria were obstructing the investigation.44 Stalin for
the moment took no action and went to Georgia for a vacation. He ordered his
daughter not to visit Beria, telling her, ‘I don’t trust that man!’45
Stalin ordered the arrest
of all of ‘Beria’s men’ in order to create a vacuum around Beria. He issued a
secret decree, accusing the Mingrelians, an ethnic subgroup of Georgia to which
Beria belonged, of treason, and decided to exile all Mingrelians to Siberia.46
Stalin summoned the chief of the Georgian MGB, N.M.Rukhadze, to the
Barzhomi dacha, ordering him to arrest all Mingrelian generals. On the
way back to Tbilisi, Rukhadze smoked one cigarette after another. ‘Is anything
wrong?’ his driver, Colonel Samson Parulava, a Mingrelian, asked him. ‘Bad,
very bad’, Rukhadze replied.47
After his return from
Barzhomi in August 1951, Stalin learned that Abakumov had arrested Riumin for
his refusal to drop the poisoning charge against the Kremlin doctors. Abakumov
was frisked and arrested by General Vlasik, the head of Stalin’s bodyguards, as
he entered an elevator to Stalin’s second-floor Kremlin office. Vlasik took
away Abakumov’s belt, ripped off his shoulder bands and drove him to the
Lubianka prison. Colonel Mironov, the chief of the MGB Lubianka Internal
Prison, could not believe his eyes when he saw the new prisoner, the minister
of state security, to whom he had submitted a routine report a few hours
earlier. Pointing at Abakumov, Vlasik said, ‘Take him!’48 Abakumov
wound up in the same cell from which a few minutes earlier Riumin had walked
out with Stalin’s order to press on with the investigation of the doctors’
case.
On 20 October 1951
S.D.Ignatiev, the new minister of state security, signed the order for the
arrest of Lev Sheinin, an investigator of ‘specially important cases’, who for
years had carried out many of Stalin’s personal assignments and had written
books about the heroic exploits of the Soviet secret police. Sheinin was
accused of being a foreign spy and the head of the ‘murderers in white gowns’,
meaning the Jewish Kremlin doctors.49 Stalin was punishing Sheinin
for his attempt to investigate the murder of Solomon Mikhoels. Sheinin did not
know that Mikhoels had been murdered on Stalin’s order, and he refused to
accept the ‘automobile accident’ cover-up version. Stalin sent an MGB general
to ‘explain’ to Sheinin that ‘Zionists killed Mikhoels, a staunch Soviet
patriot, because he would not cooperate with them’. Sheinin did not accept this
explanation and continued to search for the murderers. Annoyed by Sheinin’s
meddling in his affairs, Stalin ordered his arrest. As the interrogation of
Sheinin progressed, Stalin changed the original accusation and removed him from
the list of defendants in the case of the ‘murderers in white gowns’ and
transferred him to another case, that of Jewish writers and poets who wrote in
Russian. The accused included Vasily Grossman, Alexander Stein, and Konstantin
Finn.50 The screenwriter Aleksei Kapler, with whom Svetlana had
fallen in love some years earlier, was brought to the Lubianka from the Vorkuta
camp and included in the cast of the writers’ case. (Earlier he had been
accused of being an English spy.) Kapler was now charged with being a ‘Jewish
nationalist’.
In the summer of 1952, for
the first time in many years, Stalin did not go to the Caucasus on vacation. He
intended to stage a show trial of the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee defendants. The
military tribunal of the Soviet Supreme Court disposed of the ‘Crimean Case’ in
secret proceedings that took place from 8 May to 18 July 1952. The arrested
members of the JAFC, among them writers, poets and actors, were accused of
conspiring to make the Crimea a ‘Zionist and American base’. Thirteen
defendants, among them Solomon Lozovsky, were sentenced to death by shooting. Lina
Shtern, a leading expert on longevity, a topic of great interest to Stalin, was
sentenced to a three- year prison term. One of the accused died during
interrogation. Another group of no Jewish intellectuals arrested in connection
with the ‘Crimean Case’ were secretly tried later. Ten were executed, five died
during interrogation, the others were sentenced to various prison terms,
ranging from five to 25 years.51
On 5 October 1952 Stalin
opened the Nineteenth Party Congress, the first since 1939. Khrushchev,
Malenkov and Poskrebyshev in their reports stressed the need for ‘political
vigilance’ and warned against aggression by the ‘American imperialists’. They
portrayed the United States and the West as ‘warmongers.’ Stalin made a brief
statement about the ‘struggle for the preservation and maintenance of peace’.
He was greeted with a roar of applause. In a photograph taken during the
congress he appears in his generalissimo uniform in the midst of a large group
of marshals, generals and admirals. Stalin’s intention was to blackmail the
West with the threat of nuclear war. He was encouraged by the successful test
of the Soviet hydrogen bomb in 1952 and gave orders to speed up the production
of long-range jets and rockets capable of delivering nuclear weapons on to
American soil.52 ‘We will show this Jewish shopkeeper how to attack
us!’ Stalin was fond of saying (he had somehow become convinced that President
Truman was Jewish). An air force colonel, a friend of Stalin’s son Vasily, told
Svetlana, ‘Now is the time to fight and to conquer, while your father is alive.
At present we can win!’53
During the Party Congress,
the Politburo was renamed ‘Presidium’ and enlarged from nine to 25 members.
(Years later Khrushchev wrote that by replacing the old Politburo with the
Presidium Stalin intended to ‘annihilate the old Politburo members and, in this
way, to cover up all of [his] shameful acts’.54 But Stalin’s
intentions were more complex. In erasing the very name of ‘Politburo’ he
intended to obliterate yet another connection to the past and to his Okhrana
career. He was the only surviving member of the original Politburo, which had
been set up by Lenin in great secrecy in May 1917 to deal with the scandal
connected with the exposure of Roman Malinovsky, Stalin’s rival in the Okhrana
and in Lenin’s entourage.)
The 7 November 1952 was
the 35th anniversary of the October Revolution. As usual, Stalin stood on top
of the mausoleum, reviewing the military parade and civilian demonstration. In
the evening, he attended a reception at the Bolshoi Theater. Whenever his name
was mentioned, the audience rose and cheered. Pravda described him as
‘the wise leader and teacher, the organizer and inspirer of the historic
victories of the Soviet people, the genius of all progressive mankind’. The
Indian ambassador Krishna P.S.Menon, who was present at the reception, wondered
by what means Stalin, that short, ageing and graying man, ‘wielded greater, and
more concentrated power, than any mortal had ever had’.55
During November 1952 Stalin’s
attention was fixed on the show trial that was being staged in the People’s
Court in Prague. The defendants were Czechoslovak leaders, most of them Jews.
The chief defendant was the secretary general of the Communist Party, Rudolf
Slansky. They had been arrested in November 1951, when Anastas Mikoyan
arrived in Prague with
instructions from Stalin to the Czechoslovak president Klement Gotwald to
arrest Slansky, who might otherwise ‘escape abroad’. Slansky and the other
defendants were accused of providing Israel with weapons during the
Arab-Israeli war of 1948–49. In fact, the defendants considered themselves
‘internationalists’ and were ideologically opposed to Stalin’s policy of
supporting the Jewish State. True to form, Stalin blamed them for a failed
policy that he himself had ordered. Mordekhai Oren, one of the leaders of the
Israeli leftist party Mapam, was arrested in Czechoslovakia. (Five years
earlier, in 1946, Oren had told a Soviet intelligence officer in London that
the Jews in Palestine would create a pro-Soviet state.) Now, Oren was
interrogated by M.T.Likhachev, the deputy chief of the MGB Investigations
Department for Especially Important Cases, who had been assigned to Prague.
‘Why did you fool us?’ Likhachev asked Oren.56 The question echoed
Stalin’s outrage that the leftist Jews in Israel had ‘fooled’ him by failing to
carry out their pledge to turn Israel into a Soviet satellite. ‘So they thought
they could fool Stalin! Just look at them, it’s Stalin they tried to fool!’ was
his angry response to the Jewish ‘betrayal’.57
The Prague show trial
ended with Slansky and ten other defendants being sentenced to death by
hanging, a highly unusual form of execution in Czechoslovakia and in the Soviet
Union. Stalin re-enacted the hanging of the two Georgian peasants in the Gori
public square, which he, then a 12-year-old boy, had watched, imagining that
one of the condemned was his hated father Vissarion. Memorable events of his
distant youth were becoming vivid in Stalin’s mind while his memory of contemporary
events was becoming increasingly faulty. During the last years of his life
Stalin often could not recall the names of even close associates with whom he
was in daily contact. During a dinner at his dacha he turned to
N.A.Bulganin, his defense minister, and started to say something but stopped.
‘You there, what’s your name?’ he asked. When Bulganin replied, Stalin said,
‘Of course, Bulganin. That’s what I wanted to say.’58 Childhood
traumas, on the other hand, Stalin remembered well, and was driven to re-enact.
Early in 1953 he
encouraged a rumor in Georgia that Jews murdered Christian children with the
aim of using their blood in the making of matzo. On his prompting the secret
police let a hysterical woman, Nataly Kavtaradze, run in the streets of
Tbilisi, screaming that the Jews had been caught murdering Christian children
and rolling them in wooden barrels studded with nails, in order to drain their
blood for use in matzo.59 Such an accusation had last been heard in
Georgia in Stalin’s early childhood, when several Georgian Jews had been
accused by a Russian investigator of killing a Christian girl and using her
blood, drained in a barrel studded with nails, for making matzo. Her body was
found with numerous little wounds on it, which the police took to be nail
punctures. This accusation instilled in many Georgians fear for their children.
The mass hysteria continued for some time, even after several prominent Russian
lawyers repudiated the police version and proved in court that the girl had drowned
during heavy rain and that her wounds were the bites of small animals. The Jews
were acquitted.60
Stalin also reenacted one
of his early traumas on the stage of the Moscow Youth Theater. He commissioned
the play Pavlik Morozov and ‘suggested’ the script, according to which
Pavlik, in the key court scene, condemns his father Trofim. Pavlik’s mother
also accuses Trofim, ‘He was a beast, and remained a beast!’ A friend of
Pavlik’s father, exclaimed, ‘Way back Trofim came to me, begging, “Be my boy’s
godfather…”. I agreed. Ugh, if I had only known what kind of little serpent I
was baptizing, I would have
drowned him in the font…’.61
Stalin ordered a statue of Pavlik Morozov to be placed at the entrance to Red
Square. Fearing that Pavlik’s remains might reveal the secret of his death,
Stalin ordered the transfer of his grave to a new place beneath a two-yard-deep
concrete foundation under his statue in the center of Pavlik’s native village.
This transfer of Pavlik’s remains was done at night.62
Toward the end of his
life, Stalin decided to destroy all evidence of his crimes. The task was
formidable. He needed, for one thing, to obliterate the ‘burial grounds’
containing the remains of hundreds of thousands of his executed victims so that
these mass graves could not be discovered, as had happened with the Katyn
Forest graves of Polish officers. To destroy thousands of mass graves all over
the Soviet Union was a titanic undertaking and needed time. A number of these
graves, such as the one in Kuropaty near Minsk, were excavated and the
skeletons destroyed.63 Then there was evidence in print that needed
to be destroyed. In January and February 1953 Komsomol (Communist Youth) and
Party members were mobilized to peruse newspapers and magazines in Soviet
libraries and archives and to remove articles containing negative references to
Stalin or positive statements about ‘enemies of the people’, such as Trotsky
and other members of the opposition.64 Stalin also had Soviet agents
destroy newspaper articles dating as far back as 1917—on file in American and
European libraries—that described Bolshevik-Okhrana ties.65 Stalin
also was urgently trying to ensure his immortality by having numerous statues
of himself erected, some consuming hundreds of tons of bronze.66
Early in January 1953, the
Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR printed a million copies of a booklet
titled, Why It Is Unavoidable to Exile Jews from the Industrial Centers of
the Country.67 The booklet was written on Stalin’s instruction
by D.I.Chesnokov, a lecturer on Marxism-Leninism at Moscow University, who was
a friend of Svetlana’s husband Yury Zhdanov and was promoted to the post of
editor— firstly of the journal Problems of Philosophy and then of the
journal Communist. Chesnokov was at the right place at the right time
when he was invited to Svetlana’s birthday party. He was introduced by Yury
Zhdanov to Stalin. During his conversation with Stalin, Chesnokov stated that
he was interested in developing the theoretical basis for the deportation of
Chechens, Volga Germans, Crimean Tartars and others, whom Stalin had exiled a
few years earlier. Stalin told Chesnokov to concentrate on the deportation of
the Jews and sent him to the Central Committee’s dacha near Moscow to
prepare publication of a thesis on Jewish deportation. By the beginning of
February 1953 this theoretical analysis had been approved by Stalin and
millions of copies were printed and ready for distribution.68
(Earlier, on 5 October 1952, when Stalin chaired the Nineteenth Party Congress,
he had promoted Chesnokov to membership of the newly formed Presidium.)
By that time Gulag
prisoners were being used by the ministry of internal affairs in the hasty
construction of numerous barrack complexes, actually concentration camps, in Birobidzhan,
the island of Novaya Zemlia, and other areas of Siberia to which the deported
Jews were to be brought.69 Stalin created a special ‘Deportation
Commission’ accountable only to him. He appointed M.A.Suslov chairman, and
N.N.Poliakov secretary of this commission. Poliakov revealed years later, that,
according to Stalin’s initial plan, the deportation was to begin in the middle
of February 1953, but the monumental task of compiling lists of Jews had not
been completed by that time. There
were two types of lists:
the ‘pure-blooded’ Jews were to be deported first. Those Jews with one Jewish
parent, the so-called polukrovki (half breeds) were to be deported
later. The delay in compiling the lists forced Stalin to order a strict
timetable: the trial of the Kremlin doctors was to be held over 5–7 March 1953.
Their executions (on the lobnoe mesto—the center of Red Square, where
executions had taken place centuries earlier) were to take place on 11 and 12
March.70 According to Stalin’s plan, the public hanging of the
Kremlin doctors in Red Square before the eyes of the incensed populace was to
serve as the signal for a Jewish pogrom. Stalin intended to use this pogrom as
justification for the exile of the Jews. He planned to play the role of the
‘savior’ of the Jews, who would be sent to ‘safe places’ to protect them from
the enraged Russian populace.71
On 13 January 1953, the
fifth anniversary of the murder of Mikhoels, Pravda published the first
report by the Soviet news agency TASS about the arrest of a group of Kremlin
doctors, who were accused of being agents of the Jewish organization the Joint
Distribution Committee and of American intelligence, and whose orders had
supposedly been passed on to them by the ‘well-known bourgeois nationalist
Solomon Mikhoels’.72 The doctors were also accused of shortening the
lives of the Politburo members Zhdanov and Shcherbakov, as well as of harming
the health of Soviet marshals, generals and admirals. Doctor Vinogradov was
accused of being an agent of British intelligence. Pravda in a
front-page editorial, titled ‘Foul Spies and Murderers under the Mask of
Doctors and Professors’, also accused the ‘gang of doctors-poisoners’ and their
American and British ‘bosses’ of ‘feverishly preparing for a new world war’ and
blamed the ‘organs of state security’ for their ‘lack of vigilance’, reminding
readers that the doctors Levin and Pletnev had earlier ‘killed the great
Russian writer A.M.Gorky and the outstanding Soviet statesmen V.V.Kuibyshev and
V.R.Menzhinsky’.73
The charge of ‘lack of
vigilance’ was directed against Beria and the arrested minister of state
security, Abakumov. In the beginning of 1953 Stalin spread the rumor that Beria
was a Jew. Arrested MGB generals, all of whom were Mingrelians, were accused of
a plot to separate the west Georgian province of Mingrelia from the Soviet
Union. They were forced to sign confessions confirming their guilt and
implicating Beria. In Stalin’s mind, the Jews and the Mingrelian ‘plotters’
became connected.74 The files with the signed depositions of the
Mingrelian generals were brought to Stalin for review, and he gave instructions
not to forget ‘the chief Mingrelian’ (that is, Beria). On the files, Stalin
wrote in red pencil, ‘Death to the Mingrelian bandits.’75 The houses
and apartments of Mingrelians in Tbilisi and other Georgian cities were placed
on special lists in expectation of the order for their exile to Siberia, which
was to take place at the same time as the exile of the Jewish population.
Cossack troops with sabers and whips arrived in Mingrelian cities to carry out
the order. Their appearance and pre-revolutionary uniforms startled the local
population.76
The daily barrage of
statements against the ‘murderers in white gowns’ created a pogrom atmosphere
in the country. The deprived populace sensed blood in the air. The Gulag
administration was ordered to incite the inmates to murder Jewish prisoners.77
The relentless anti-Jewish campaign did not remain unnoticed in Israel. On 9
February 1953 Jewish terrorists exploded a bomb in the Soviet embassy in
Tel-Aviv. Stalin used this incident to break diplomatic ties with Israel. He
gave the general director of TASS, Ya.S.Khavinson, and the chief of the Party
Propaganda Department, M.B.Mitin, both
Jews, a list of prominent
Soviet Jews who had to sign an appeal to Stalin, the text of which he himself
wrote. The appeal condemned the ‘murderers in white gowns’ and called for their
execution, while pleading with the ‘great and wise vozhd [leader]
Comrade Stalin’ to save the Jewish population from the ‘understandable
indignation of the Russian people’ by ‘relocating’ the Jews to ‘safe areas’ in
Siberia and the Far East. Khavinson and Mitin, who enlisted the prominent
journalist David Zaslavsky and the academician and historian I.I.Minz, signed
this appeal and promised to ask the prominent Jews on Stalin’s list to sign it
too and help to convince the Jews to cooperate with the authorities during the
‘relocation to the safe areas’. They went to all the prominent Jews mentioned
on Stalin’s list and asked them to sign. Most of them did, fearing Stalin’s
wrath. Only a few refused: General Yakov Kreizer, the singer Mark Reizen, the
writer Veniamin Kaverin, and Professor Arkady Ierusalimsky, Svetlana’s teacher.
The writer Ilya Ehrenburg in a letter to Stalin asked his advice on whether he
should or should not sign the appeal, pointing out that the deportation of Jews
might do much harm to the Soviet image abroad and to the peace movement. Stalin
did not reply.78
Years later, the rumor was
spread that Lazar Kaganovich had refused to sign the appeal and had thrown his
party card on Stalin’s desk in protest. In fact, Kaganovich was appointed by
Stalin to direct the deportation.79 His name on this Jewish list was
crossed out in red pencil by Stalin. Stalin’s choice of Kaganovich, a Jew, for
carrying out the deportation was a clever ruse: who could accuse a Jew of
anti-Semitism? Stalin saw Kaganovich not as a Jew but as a fellow criminal who
had sided with him even in the murder of his own brother Mikhail. He could
count on Kaganovich—who was not merely a fellow criminal but also an
anti-Semitic Jew and an utterly depraved and immoral creature—to help him in
the extermination of the Jewish people. Khrushchev, unaware that anti-Semitism
is rooted in psychological makeup, found it difficult to believe, exclaiming in
his memoirs: ‘A Jew himself, Kaganovich was against the Jews!’80 If
Kaganovich had refused to sign the appeal, he would not have survived this act
of insubordination. But rumors often contain a particle of truth. Someone in
Stalin’s entourage did protest and refuse to sign the appeal. The
signing of the appeal took place around 13 February 1953. On 14 February 1953 Pravda
announced that ‘one of the prominent leaders of the Communist Party and the
Soviet Union, the member of the Central Committee’ Lev Mekhlis had died of
heart failure.81
Stalin assigned to
Khrushchev an important role in inciting anti-Semitism in the Ukraine, the area
of Khrushchev’s responsibility at the time. ‘The good workers at the factory
should be given clubs so they can beat the hell out of those Jews,’ he told
Khrushchev. At the beginning of 1953, Stalin invited Khrushchev and two
Ukrainian high officials, Melnikov and Korotchenko, to a dinner. As usual, they
soon got drunk, and Stalin told the Ukrainian officials that they should
organize pogroms in the Ukraine. At first they were surprised to hear the
‘great internationalist’ Stalin making such statements, but they knew that
Stalin’s instructions had to be carried out.82 On their return to
the Ukraine, they organized the pogroms.83 Leonid Brezhnev, a protégé of
Khrushchev, was elevated to candidate member of the Presidium in October 1952.
Stalin sent him to Moldavia to supervise the deportation of the Jewish
population from this area.
Some of Stalin’s cronies
had Jewish wives who became objects of Stalin’s most intense suspicion, because
in his mind they were connected with the Biblical story of Esther, a story he,
the ex-seminarian, knew well. He knew that at the end of February and
beginning of March 1953
the Jews would celebrate Purim, thanking God for giving them Esther, a Jewish
wife of an ancient Persian king. She had saved the Persian Jews from the hands
of their enemy Haman, who had plotted to destroy them. Stalin planned to start
the pogrom during Purim to show the Jews that this time that they would be
celebrating their deliverance prematurely. But Stalin feared that among the
Jewish wives of his subordinates was a new Esther, who might prevent him from
carrying out the deportation. He exiled Voroshilov’s Jewish wife and called
Voroshilov a British spy. He ordered the arrest of Andrey Andreyev’s wife, Dora
Khazan. Andreyev was expelled from the Politburo and lived in fear of arrest.
Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, had earlier been exiled to Kustanai,
Kazakhstan, where she remained under the codename ‘Object Number 12’ until
January 1953 when she was transferred to the Moscow Lubianka prison and
included in the cast of the Kremlin doctors’ case. (She was released by Beria a
few days after Stalin’s death and returned to Molotov.84) Stalin
accused Molotov of being an American spy. General Khrulev’s Jewish wife was
arrested and imprisoned in the topsecurity prison Vladimir Tsentral. Many
Jewish wives were kept there.85 Marshal Zhukov was one of those he
suspected of being Jewish.86 Before exiling Zhukov to the Urals,
Stalin showed him a report, signed by Beria, stating: ‘We established that
Marshal G.K.Zhukov for more than 15 years has been an agent of British
Intelligence and continuously informed the hostile power about the defense
secrets of the Soviet Union.’87 Lieutenant-General N.Vlasik, the
chief of Stalin’s bodyguards for many years, was arrested on 15 December 1952
and accused of ‘loss of vigilance’, having maintained friendly relations with
his Jewish neighbor, to whom he allegedly passed on secret information.88
Early in January 1953, Stalin fired the chief of his personal secretariat,
Alexander Poskrebyshev, his closest assistant for many years. Stalin remembered
that Poskrebyshev’s Jewish wife, who had been poisoned on his order in 1940,
was a distant relative of Trotsky. Poskrebyshev expected to be arrested.89
Most of February 1953
Stalin spent in Kuntsevo with his bodyguards, mainly Russians and a few
Georgians from his native town of Gori. He fired all the Mingrelians. He
ordered the minister of state security, Ignatiev, to torture Vinogradov and the
other Kremlin doctors, threatening, ‘If you do not obtain confessions from the
doctors, we will shorten you by a head.’90 He viciously cursed
Ignatiev. Khrushchev later recalled, ‘Stalin was crazy with rage, yelling at
Ignatiev and threatening him, demanding that he throw the doctors in chains,
beat them to a pulp and grind them into powder.’91 The ‘liberation’
of the Soviet Union from the ‘Jewish yoke’ was openly discussed in party and
government circles.92 The technical problems of transportation of
Jews to Birobidzhan were addressed in the Council of Ministers. ‘I thought I
would go crazy when I learned about it’, recalled the Old Bolshevik
O.I.Goloborodko, who worked there at the time.93 When Stalin was
told about the difficulty in transporting a large number of Jews to the remote
area, he replied, ‘Half of them will die on the way there.’94 Some
ten years earlier, hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tartars, Chechens,
Kabardins and Volga Germans had been exiled in cattle trains from their native
lands to Siberia and the Far East. Almost half of them had perished on the way
to their destinations.
On 17 February 1953 Stalin
invited Krishna P.S.Menon, the Indian ambassador to the Soviet Union, who was
the last foreigner to see Stalin alive. As they talked, Stalin, as usual, kept
doodling wolves in various aggressive postures, standing alone, in pairs and in
packs. Noticing that Menon was looking at his drawings, Stalin suddenly said:
‘The
Russian peasant is a very
simple man but a very wise one. When the wolf attacks him, he does not attempt
to teach it morals, but tries to kill it. And the wolf knows this and behaves
accordingly.’95 The thought occurred to Menon that for Stalin the
wolves symbolized his enemies. He was startled when Stalin suddenly asked about
the impurity of the languages spoken by the peoples of India. Menon had no idea
about Stalin’s hatred of the Jews or his outrage at Niko Marr’s theory of the
Semitic origin of the Georgian language.
In the last days of
February 1953, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana felt an atmosphere of rising fear in
which ‘everything grew quiet, as before a storm’.96 Stalin ordered
his defense minister, Bulganin, to bring to Moscow and other large cities
hundreds of cattle trains which were to be put on reserved lines nearby. Stalin
planned to organize assaults by ‘people’s avengers’ on the deported Jews.97
By the estimation of one historian, 30–40 per cent of the deported Jews would
not have reached their destination.98
At the end of February
1953 Stalin was ready to stage the trial of the Kremlin doctors. That year
Purim was to start at sundown on Saturday, 28 February. According to the Jewish
lunar calendar, it was the 14th day of the month Adar, 5713.
NOTES
1.
Yakov Aizenshtat, O
podgotovke Stalinym genotsida evreev, Jerusalem, 1994, p. 38.
2.
S.Allilueva, Only One
Year, New York, 1969, p. 154.
3.
Interview with Lidia
Shatunovskaya and Lev Tumerman in Rehavot, Israel, 1975. In the author’s
archive.
4.
‘V komissii Politburo TK
KPSS’, Izvestia TK KPSS, January 1989. Protocol no. 7, dated 29 December
1988.
5.
Taped interview with
Vasily Rudich. In the author’s archive. See also N.S.Khrushchev, Khrushchev
Remembers, Boston, 1970, pp. 261f. Vasily Rudich related the testimony of
Olga Shatunovskaya, a member of the Special Commission of the Presidium of the
Central Committee. She together with N.M.Shvernik (the Special Commission’s
chairman), the general prosecutor of the USSR, R.A.Rudenko, the chairman of the
KGB, A.N.Shelepin, and the director of the Central Committee Section on
Administrative Organs, N.R.Mironov, interrogated Politburo member G.M.Malenkov,
who described Stalin’s order to murder Mikhoels.
6.
A.Borshchagovsky, Obviniaetsia
krov’, Moscow, 1994, pp. 5–8, and Aizenshtat, O podgotovke…, pp.
39–41, quoting a report by Beria, dated 2 April 1953, to the Presidium of the
Party Central Committee.
7.
Ibid. Also Robert
Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations, New York, 1991, p. 306.
8.
Allilueva, Only One
Year, p. 154.
9.
The present author with
his classmate Mikhail Margulis were present at the funeral and heard the rumor.
Two years later, Soviet movie director Mikhail Kalik was arrested and accused
of stating that Mikhoels was murdered by MGB agents.
10.
Pravda, 25
August 1941.
11.
Y.A.Gilboa, The Black
Years of Soviet Jewry, Boston, Toronto, 1971, pp. 42–56.
12.
George E.Kirk, A Short
History of the Middle East, New York, 1964, pp. 202–6.
13.
Interview with Matetiahu
Shmulevich in Yaffa, Israel, 1969 (in the author’s archive); see also Y.A.
Gilboa, The Black Years of Soviet Jewry, pp. 202–06 and 64ff.; See also
interview with Samuil Tornopoler in Tel-Aviv, Israel, February 1969 (in the present
author’s archive). see also interview with David Ben-Gurion in Sde-Boker and
Tel-Aviv in 1969 (in the
author’s archive); see also Ben-Gurion’s letter to
Gilboa, dated 31 January 1967 in Y.A.Gilboa, The Black Years of Soviet
Jewry, p. 352, fn. 20.
14.
Interview with Mordekhai
Oren in Israel in 1969. In the author’s archive.
15.
Interview with Boris
Guriel, director of Chaim Weizman’s archive, in Tel-Aviv in 1969. In the
author’s archive.
16.
Interview with Natalia and
Alexander Rodovsky in Haifa, Israel, 1979. In the author’s archive.
17.
Interview with Lidia
Shatunovskaya and Lev Tumerman, Rechavot, Israel, 1973.
18.
‘V komissii Politburo TK
KPSS’, Izvestia TK KPSS, January 1989. Protocol no. 7, 29 December 1988,
p. 37.
19.
A.Vaisberg, ‘Evreisky
antifashistsky komitet u M.A.Suslov’, Zveniya-istorikeskii almanakh, Moscow,
1991, pp. 535–54.
20.
Ibid., p. 546.
21.
‘V komissii Politburo TK
KPSS’, Isvestia TK KPSS, January 1989. Protocol no. 7, dated 29 December
1988. See also Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin Against the Jews, New York, 1994,
pp. 198–202.
22.
Ibid.
23.
Allilueva, Dvadtsat’
pisem k drugu, New York, 1967, p. 150.
24.
Khrushchev, Khrushchev
Remembers, Boston, Toronto, 1970, pp. 258–69. Also Khrushchev, Khrushchev
Remembers? The Last Testament, Boston, 1970, pp. 78 and 150.
25.
Edward R.Stettinius, Jr, Roosevelt
and the Russians: the Yalta Conference, London, 1950, p. 278.
26.
Interview with David
Lifshitz in Tel-Aviv, Israel, 1969. In the author’s archive; interview with
Matetiahu Shmulevich in Yaffa, Israel, 1969. In the author’s archive;
G.S.Nikitina, Gosudarstvo Izrail, Moscow, 1968, pp. 58f, fn. 74.
27.
Henry Kamm, ‘Inquiry on
Jan Masaryk’s Death’, in 1948 is demanded in Prague, The New York Times,
April 3 1968. Also C.L.Sulzberger, ‘Foreign Affairs: Murder Will Out,’ The
New York Times, April 17 1968. C.L.Sulzberger, ‘Foreign Affairs: Murder
Will Out’, The New York Times, 17 April 1968.
28.
Interview with David
Ben-Gurion in Sde-Boker and Tel-Aviv in 1969.
29.
Yury Idashkin, ‘Lichny
drug Stalina: Bogi zhazhdut,’ Literaturnaya Russia, 22 July 1988.
30.
Interview with Anna and
Boris Glick, residents of Davydkovo and victims of the exile order, in New
York, 1967. In the author’s archive.
31.
Evreiskaya entsiklopedia,
vol. VI, St Petersburg, 1913, pp. 808f.
32.
M.Gorbanevsky, ‘Tovarishch
Stalin vy bolshoi ucheny’. Interview in Nedelia, no. 45, 5–11 November
1990, p. 4.
33.
Khrushchev, Khrushchev
Remembers, pp. 270f.
34.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, pp. 332f.
35.
Allilueva, Twenty
Letters to a Friend, New York, 1967, p. 187.
36.
Vladimir Dedijer, Tito
Speaks: His Self Portrait and Struggle with Stalin, London, 1953, pp.
300–12.
37.
Milovan Djilas, Conversations
with Stalin, New York and London, 1962, pp. 176–81.
38.
Interview with Mikhail
Meerson-Aksenov, son of Grigory Meerson, in New York in 1989. In the author’s
archive.
39.
A.Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret
tirana, New York, 1980, p. 325.
40.
Allilueva, Only One
Year, p. 384.
41.
Evgeny Zhirnov,
‘K.Kuzakov—syn I.V.Stalina’, Argumenty i fakty, no. 39, 1995.
42.
H.Montgomery Hyde, Stalin:
the History of a Dictator, New York, 1971, p. 575, citing Khrushchev’s
secret speech (Special Report to the Twentieth Party Congress.)
43.
Nikita Khrushchev’s secret
speech. Also Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, pp. 282–6.
44.
Boris Nikolayevsky, ‘The
Strange Death of Mikhail Ryumin’, The New Leader, 4 October, 1954, pp.
15–18. See also John J.Dziak, Chekisty: A History of the KGB, Lexington,
MA, 1988, p. 127.
45.
Allilueva, Only One
Year, p. 386.
46.
Khrushchev, Khrushchev
Remembers, p. 312.
47.
Interview with Nugzar
Sharia in Sag Harbor, New York, 1972.
48.
Taped interview with
I.P.Itskov in New York City in 1988.
49.
Arkady Vaksberg, ‘The
Grand Inquisitor’s Right-Hand Man’, Literary Gazette International, vol.
I, no. 5, April 1990, p. 7.
50.
Ibid.
51.
‘V komissii Politburo TK
KPSS’, Izvestia TK KPSS, January, 1989. Protocol no. 7, dated 29
December 1988.
52.
Interview with Israeli
diplomat Yakov Yanai in Tel-Aviv, Israel, 1971. In the author’s archive. Yanai
met a Soviet general in a prison camp who told him about Stalin’s interest in
the building of a long-range bomber that would make it possible to attack the
US with nuclear weapons.
53.
Allilueva, Only One
Year, p. 155.
54.
Nikita Khrushchev’s secret
speech.
55.
K.P.S.Menon, The Flying
Troika, London, 1963, p. 7.
56.
Interview with Mordekhai
Oren, Israel, 1969,
57.
Allilueva, Only One Year,
p. 392.
58.
Khrushchev, Khrushchev
Remembers, pp. 307f.
59.
Interview with Nugzar
Sharia, Sag Harbor, 1971.
60.
Evreiskaya Entsiklopedia,
vol. IX, pp. 938–40.
61.
Pravda, 18
January 1953.
62.
Yuri Druzhnikov, ‘Saga o
Pavlike Morozove’, Strana i mir, no. (2)44, March–April 1988, p. 119.
63.
Zenon Pozniak and Evgeny
Shygalev, ‘Kuropaty-doroga smerti’, Novoe russkoe slovo, 24 June 1988,
p. 6. Also Yury Turin, ‘S odnoi storony, s drugoi storony’, Ogonek, no.
39, Moscow, 1988.
64.
Interview with Yakov and
Diana Vinkovetsky (Pavel Litvinov’s friends) in Chappaqua, New York, 1975. They
took part in this censoring operation.
65.
The author in 1974
discovered that collections of Russian newspapers in the libraries at Columbia,
Stanford, Yale, and several other universities had articles on Bolshevik-Okhrana
ties removed. A 19 May 1917 article was missing from the newspaper Russkoe
slovo, and one of 16 June 1917 was missing from the newspaper Den’.
The collections were otherwise intact.
66.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, p. 508.
67.
Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret
Tirana, p. 326.
68.
Aizenshtat, O
podgotovke Stalinym…p. 79. Also, Z.Sheinis, Grozila deportatsiya,
Moscow, 1991.
69.
Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret
Tirana, pp. 325f. Also Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 496, and
interview with Boris Zubok, who saw the Novaya Zemlia barracks. His interview
with the author in Chappaqua, New York, 1975.
70.
Z.Sheinis, Provokatsiya
veka, Moscow, 1994, quoting the record of the testimony of the secretary of
the Deportation Commission, N.N.Poliakov.
71.
Aizenshtat, O
podgotovke Stalinym, pp. 70–4.
72.
Pravda, 13
January 1953.
73.
Ibid.
74.
Conquest, Stalin:
Breaker of Nations, p. 306.
75.
Interview with Nugzar
Sharia, Sag Harbor, New York 1972. Sharia told the author about the
recollections of his uncle Peter Sharia, one of the arrested ‘Mingrelian
bandits’ to whom Beria had shown the files.
76.
Ibid. Nugzar Sharia
recalled the account of the Hero of the Soviet Union Meliton Kantaria, a
Mingrelian. Also The New York Times, 31 December 31 1993, p. A–24.
77.
The present author
witnessed incidents of Jewish prisoners being attacked in the Norilsk prison
camp by criminal inmates.
78.
Aizenshtat, O
podgotovke Stalinym, pp. 70–2. Also Strana i mir, Munich, 1984, no.
10, p. 4. Ehrenburg’s letter is published in Vaksberg, Stalin Against the
Jews, pp. 263f.
79.
Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret
Tirana, p. 325. Also Medvedev, Let History Judge, pp. 495–7.
80.
Khrushchev, Khrushchev
Remembers, p. 243.
81.
Pravda, 14
February 1953, p. 1.
82.
Khrushchev, Khrushchev
Remembers, pp. 258–64.
83.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, pp. 495f.
84.
Vaksberg, Stalin
Against the Jews, p. 272. See also Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers,
p. 308.
85.
Interview with Lidia
Shatunovskaya, Rechavot, Israel, 1973. She was one of the prisoners in Vladimir
Tsentral.
86.
Djilas, Conversations with
Stalin, pp. 160f.
87.
Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret
Tirana, p. 327.
88.
A.N.Kolesnik, ‘Glavny
telokhranitel’ vozhdia’, Voenno-istoricheski zhurnal, no. 12, 1989, pp.
85–92.
89.
Interview with I.P.Itskov,
New York City, 1988.
90.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, p. 494.
91.
Khrushchev, Khrushchev
Remembers. pp. 286f.
92.
Allilueva, Only One
Year, p. 155.
93.
Antonov-Ovseenko, Portret
Tirana, p. 326.
94.
Interview with Alexander
Radovsky in Haifa, Israel, 1990.
95.
K.P.S.Menon, The Flying
Troika, London, 1963, p. 29. Also H.Montgomery Hyde, Stalin: The History
of a Dictator, New York, 1971, p. 591.
96.
Allilueva, Only One
Year, p. 155.
97.
Aizenshtat, O
podgotovke Stalinym, p. 70 and pp. 74f, quoting Bulganin’s statement to
Professor Yakov Etinger, in ‘Khronika dela vrachey’, pp. 4–7.
98.
The historian was E.V.Tarle.
He is quoted in Yakov Aizenshtat, O podgotovke Stalinym, p.
83.
37
Stalin spent the last days
of February 1953 mostly at his Kuntsevo dacha. He stayed there late on
Saturday night 28 February and went to bed at 4 am. On Sunday morning, 1 March
1953, the bodyguard Gogi Zautashvili, a native of Gori, was manning a control
board on which bulbs lit up indicating which of the doors in Stalin’s three
identical rooms were open. Gogi Zautashvili became alarmed when one of the bulbs
lit up and did not go off. It meant that Stalin had opened a door to one of his
three rooms and the door had not closed after him automatically, as it should
have. Zautashvili waited for a few moments, then notified the chief bodyguard
on duty that night, M.Starostin who at first was afraid to disturb Stalin, but
an hour later he tried calling him on the internal telephone. There was no
response. After several more attempts to reach Stalin by phone, Starostin
ordered the guards to break through the steel-plated door of his apartment.
They found Stalin lying on the floor in the doorway between the second and
third rooms, his body curled in a fetal position, his head resting on his arm.
He could not talk. The right side of his body was paralyzed. The bodyguards and
Stalin’s maid placed him on a couch.1 Starostin reported Stalin’s
condition to S.D.Ignatiev, the minister of state security, who refused to take
action and told Starostin to call Politburo members Beria and Malenkov. Beria
did not answer his phone. Malenkov called back half an hour later and said, ‘I
couldn’t find Beria. Try to find him yourself.’ Then Beria called and ordered,
‘Don’t tell anybody about Stalin’s illness, and don’t call anybody!’ Beria and
Malenkov arrived at Kuntsevo at 3 am Monday morning, 2 March. Malenkov took off
his squeaky shoes and tiptoed over to Stalin. Beria was already looking
intensely at Stalin’s face. He knew that Stalin intended to destroy him and saw
in Stalin’s condition the chance to save himself by murdering him. Turning to
the bodyguard in the room, he snapped, ‘Don’t raise a fuss, don’t bother us,
and don’t disturb Comrade Stalin.’ Then he cursed Starostin in the Kremlin
slang, unprintable except for the words: ‘Who appointed you idiots to serve
Comrade Stalin?’ Beria and Malenkov left, saying that physicians would arrive
soon. They arrived around 9 am, six hours later.2
The Kuntsevo dacha
was isolated from the rest of the country. Only a very narrow circle of people
knew what was happening, but none of those in the know who were close to Stalin
could have imagined that Beria had decided to murder him. Their own fanatical
worship of Stalin would have made the mere thought of such an act blasphemy.
Beria, very far from worshiping Stalin, nevertheless played the game and
pretended to do all he could to save him. He brought to the dacha
several prominent physicians, including the heart specialist P.E.Lukomsky,
without telling them who their patient was to be. When they saw Stalin, they
were so frightened that they began to shake. Beria scared them even more with
the grim question, ‘Do you guarantee Comrade Stalin’s life?’4
V.A.Negovsky, the founder
of Soviet ‘reanimation science,’ and his assistant Galina Chesnokova were
brought to Kuntsevo. They carried their equipment to an assigned room, were
followed every step by armed bodyguards, and told, ‘Sit down. The members of
the government want to talk to you.’ Beria, Malenkov, and other Politburo
members entered the room. ‘Now, you will tell us what you intend to do, and I
will listen to you very attentively!’ Beria said to them. Chesnokova recalled
later, ‘We immediately felt that here he [Beria] was the foremost boss.’ They
were led into a large living room where Stalin was lying on a sofa, his
clenched fists on a white sheet. Next to him sat his daughter Svetlana.5
On Sunday, 1 March,
Svetlana had tried to telephone Stalin but had not been able to get through
because all communication with the Kuntsevo dacha had been cut off.
Monday morning, 2 March, Svetlana was attending a lecture at the Institute of
World Literature, when she was told that her father was ill and that she should
go to Kuntsevo. On her arrival there, she met Khrushchev and Bulganin, who
arrived at the same time. ‘Let’s go in. Beria and Malenkov will tell you
everything’, they said to her. They, like Svetlana, had been told that morning
to come to Kuntsevo. When she walked in and saw her father, she felt that ‘He
was dying…everything around, the whole house, everything was dying in front of
my eyes. They all felt that something portentous, something almost majestic,
was going on in this room, and they conducted themselves accordingly.’ Only
Beria behaved differently: ‘There was only one person who was behaving almost
obscenely. That was Beria. He was extremely agitated… He was trying so hard, at
this moment of crisis, to strike the right balance, to be cunning, yet not too
cunning. It was written all over him…’. Stalin was dying a horrible death. His
face darkened and changed, gradually his features became unrecognizable, his
lips blackened. During the last two hours he was suffocating. Svetlana wrote
that at the end something very strange happened:
The
agony was awful. He literally choked to death. At what seemed like the very
last moment, he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everybody in
the room. It was a horrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of fear of
death…then something incomprehensible happened… He suddenly lifted his left
hand as though he was pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on
us all… The next moment, after a final effort, the spirit wrenched itself free
from the flesh.6
Stalin raised his crippled
left arm as if he was cursing his enemies, the ‘wolves’ he had meant to
destroy, and their prototype, his father Vissarion, who had caused him so much
suffering. When Stalin
breathed his last, Beria suddenly ordered, ‘Take Svetlana away!’ No one paid
attention. A few minutes earlier, Stalin’s son Vasily, drunk as usual, had been
led out of the room when he shouted, ‘Scoundrels, you murdered my father!’
Seeing that Stalin was dead, Beria in a triumphant voice ordered the chief
bodyguard, Khrustalev: ‘Get my car!’ Svetlana recalled that ‘Beria could hardly
restrain his joy. Not only I, but many people there understood that. But he was
much feared, and they all knew that at the moment of my father’s death no one
in Russia had as much power as this horrible person.’
Other close associates of
Stalin were crying. Khrushchev, in the old peasant tradition, dropped to his
knees next to Stalin, loudly sobbing. The servants and bodyguards one after the
other came close to the body of their khoziain (boss), whom they had
venerated for many years, to pay their respects. Tears rolled down their faces.
Soon all left except Svetlana, Bulganin and Mikoyan. On the morning of 5 March
Stalin’s body was removed in a white ambulance. It was embalmed.7 In
having Stalin embalmed, Beria destroyed any traces of poison in Stalin’s body,
and he did not destroy the ‘personality cult’ by treating Stalin’s body with
the same veneration that had been accorded to Lenin’s remains. In the circle of
the Mingrelian generals, whom he had set free, Beria bragged that he had
poisoned Stalin and thus saved them from death and prevented the deportation of
the Mingrelians and Jews to Siberia.8
Stalin’s embalmed body was
placed in the Hall of Columns, where he had staged the show trials and where
thousands of defendants had confessed to crimes that they had never committed.
Stalin’s ‘comrades-in-arms’, the ‘guard of honor’ headed by Beria, stood next
to his body. Past them moved grief-stricken mourners in a long line stretching
for many streets. Thousands of mounted militiamen, security police and soldiers
tried to maintain order, but they could not stop the human avalanche. Large
crowds were pouring into Moscow’s streets, stampeding and crushing under their
feet thousands of crazed worshipers of Stalin, whom he was dragging along with
himself into the grave even after his death. The death toll was especially high
near Trubnaya Square.9 A similar frenzy had seized the city more
than half a century earlier, in 1896, when Moscovites had rushed to Khodynka
Field to celebrate the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II. The crowd crushed under
its feet hundreds of people. Moscovites proved to be unchanged in their
emotional fervor, whether they celebrated a coronation or mourned the demise of
their idols. One difference was that in 1896 they solemnized the ascendance of
the legitimate heir to the Russian throne, the scion of a 300-year-old dynasty,
while in March 1953 they lamented the death of the greatest criminal in
history, whose appalling carnage they could not comprehend then and would be
unable to admit to decades after his death.
Shortly before his death
Stalin ordered the translation into Russian and publication of H.G.Wells’s
scientific fiction The Island of Dr Moreau. Stalin did not realize that
the horror story of Dr Moreau could some day be seen as an allegory of his own
true atrocities. In Wells’s tale, the deranged Dr Moreau is driven by a craving
to create ideal human beings by exploring the ‘extreme limit of plasticity in a
living shape’. He performs plastic surgery and organ transplanting on the oxen,
wolves, apes, pigs and other animals who survive the torture of his experiments
only to be forced to chant certain commandments, known as ‘the Law’ which
become woven into their minds without any possibility of disobedience or
argument. Finally, while Dr Moreau is performing an operation on a puma, the
animal breaks its fetters and runs away. He
pursues the terrified and
bleeding puma and is killed in the ensuing struggle. The rumor that their
tormentor is dead spreads among the deformed and terrified creatures. As time
passes, dread of the mad doctor fades from their minds, and they slowly revert
to their original animal state.10 Wells first published this
masterpiece of the macabre in 1896. He could not have foretold the emergence of
the Soviet dictator. He did not recognize the mad doctor in Stalin when he
interviewed him in 1934. Wells described Stalin as a very kind man who ‘owes
his position to the fact that no one is afraid of him and everyone trusts him’.
After Stalin’s death
millions of Gulag prisoners sensed that the end to their misery was in sight. A
few victims of the Great Purge were still alive then and some sincerely cried,
lamenting Stalin’s demise.11 But the great majority rejoiced. A
prisoner, Roman Romanyuk, a Ukrainian, shouted joyfully, ‘I just heard the
mustached scum bag either got sick or dropped dead.’12 Like Dr
Moreau’s tortured animals, the Soviet people, paralyzed by fear, needed time to
shed it. Beria was the first among those close to Stalin to defy his legacy,
but he was cautious not to move too quickly. He began the process of eroding
the ‘personality cult’. Beria immediately rescinded Stalin’s order to deport
the Jewish and Mingrelian populations to Siberia and terminated the ‘case of
the Kremlin doctors’. Those who had survived torture were in appalling physical
condition. He ordered that they be given medical help and good food. On 3 April
1953, a month after Stalin’s death, the doctors were released and driven to
their homes. They could barely walk and were unable to climb even a few stairs
without the help of the guards. The next day, an event unprecedented in the
history of the Soviet Union took place: Pravda announced that the
‘former USSR ministry of state security’ had acted ‘incorrectly and without any
lawful basis’ in arresting the Kremlin doctors and that all doctors ‘accused in
this case have been completely exonerated of the accusations against them…and
released. The persons accused of incorrect conduct of the investigation have
been arrested and criminal charges have been brought against them.’13
Beria abolished Stalin’s new Presidium and reinstated the old Politburo with
its pre-October 1952 composition. He also abolished the ministry of state
security and merged it with the ministry of internal affairs to concentrate two
main organs of power in his own hands.
Soon after Stalin’s death
Beria invited Molotov to his office. When Molotov walked in, his wife Polina
Zhemchuzhina rushed to him. They embraced and kissed and cried, while Beria
stood behind his desk, smiling. He released all the other imprisoned Jewish
wives, as well as Stalin’s relatives Anna Redens and Olga Allilueva together
with their neighbors and friends. Among the released prisoners was the
screenwriter Aleksei Kapler.14 The overcrowded cells of the Lubianka
and other prisons were almost emptied. Beria proceeded with a mass ‘unloading’
of the Gulags. On 27 March 1953, three weeks after Stalin’s death, an amnesty
for millions of prison camp inmates was issued, which also applied to
‘political prisoners’ with sentences of up to five years.15
On 6 April 1953 Pravda
published an editorial, titled ‘Soviet Socialist Legality Should Not Be
Violated’, which accused ‘despicable adventurers of the Riumin type’ of
inflaming national antagonism and slandering the Soviet people. The article
stated that ‘careful investigation has established, for example, that an honest
public figure, the People’s Artist of the USSR, Mikhoels, was slandered in this
way’.16 Stalin’s close associates knew that it was he who had
ordered not merely Mikhoels’ slander but his murder, but they kept silent. The
process of dismantling the ‘personality cult’ was only in
its initial stage. The
veneration of the dead dictator as ‘the greatest genius of mankind’ was
prevalent among the common people as well as among the Politburo members, with
Beria being the only exception.
The millions of released
Gulag prisoners were the first to shed their fear of the dead dictator. In May 1953
‘special regime’ camps in Norilsk, Vorkuta, Karaganda, and other areas were
swept by uprisings. During Stalin’s rule such a thing would have been
unthinkable. Any such uprising would immediately have been suppressed by force
and ended in mass executions. The uprising in the Norilsk camps was triggered
by the shooting of a prisoner for his refusal to go to work on 3 May 1953. On 7
May a special commission arrived from Moscow, telling the prisoners that
‘Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria himself sent us to discuss your demands’. A secret
prisoners’ committee submitted a list of demands, which included review of all
sentences, removal of numbers from prisoners’ garb, and permission to
correspond with relatives.17 In June 1953 a workers’ uprising in
Soviet-occupied East Berlin was suppressed by tanks under the command of
Marshal Zhukov.
Zhukov continued to admire
Stalin and thought naively that he had been exiled because of an espionage
charge fabricated by Beria. He shared with Bulganin a resentment against Beria.
The two started a conspiracy to arrest him. They were joined by Khrushchev, who
at that time was on friendly terms with Bulganin. All three plotters were
united by the suspicion that Beria had shortened Stalin’s life and by the fear
that he intended to change drastically Stalin’s domestic and foreign policies.
For Khrushchev and Bulganin their hostility toward Beria was a natural
extension of Stalin’s plan to destroy ‘Mingrelian bandits’. As for domestic
policy, they objected to Beria’s reversal of Stalin’s idea of ‘russifying’ all
Soviet republics and ethnic groups. Beria revoked Stalin’s order to appoint
Russian officials to all top positions in the non-Russian republics, especially
to the posts of first secretaries. Khrushchev and Bulganin saw manifestations
ofBeria’s Georgian nationalism in these changes. They considered Stalin to be a
Russian, but Beria remained in their minds as a Georgian, and they were
incensed that the destiny of the Soviet Union was in the hands of a
non-Russian. They were equally opposed to Beria’s foreign policy. Beria wanted
to ease international tension by withdrawing Soviet forces from Austria and
East Germany.18 To Khrushchev, Bulganin and Zhukov, all of these
actions meant the betrayal of Stalin’s legacy.
On the morning of 26 June
1953 Bulganin secretly summoned to his office ColonelGeneral K.Moskalenko,
Lieutenant General P.Batitsky, Major General A.Baksov, Colonel I.Zub, and
Lieutenant-Colonel V. Yuferov whom Zhukov recommended. Riding in two cars
together with Zhukov and Bulganin, the group was admitted to the Kremlin under
the pretext of attending a conference. They entered a small room next to
Stalin’s former office. Khrushchev and Bulganin walked in. ‘Do you know why we
invited you?’, Khrushchev asked. They did not. ‘You are assigned to arrest
Beria’, Khrushchev said and warned them that should the operation fail, they
would be declared ‘enemies of the people’. Zhukov and the five officers entered
Stalin’s former office, where Politburo members were gathered for a conference.
They surrounded Beria. ‘Comrades, don’t worry!’, Zhukov said to the Politburo
members, most of whom did not know what was happening. Turning to Beria, he
snapped, ‘Get up! Follow me!’ and he ordered the officers, ‘Shoot him on the
spot if he tries to escape.’ Beria was placed in the underground shelter of the
headquarters of the Moscow military district. Bulganin told
the five officers, ‘Forget
all you know and all you’ve seen.’ He promised to award them with Hero of the
Soviet Union medals and kept his promise.19
On 10 July 1953, two weeks
after Beria’s arrest, Pravda announced that Beria was ‘an enemy of the
Communist Party and the Soviet people’ and was detained to face trial. That
day, Beria’s ‘personal representative’, Colonel Kuznetsov, and his group of
negotiators disappeared from Norilsk. At the beginning of August, all six
special political camps of the Norilsk Gulag were surrounded by the troops of
the ministry of internal affairs. The soldiers opened fire and the uprisings
were suppressed, with many dead and wounded. The uprisings in Vorkuta and other
areas of the Gulag were also brutally suppressed. Stalin was dead, but his
methods turned out to be very much alive. The most active participants in the
camp uprisings were sent to prisons and punishment camps. Among the inmates in
one punishment camp, 101 kilometers from Norilsk was a certain Chabuk
Amiragibi, a scion of a long line of Georgian grand dukes. He was one of the
authors of the appeal connected with the uprising in Norilsk Camp Number 4.
Shortly before Beria’s arrest, he received a message from his sister Rodam, a
wife of the poet Mikhail Svetliv and a close friend of Beria. She wrote that
Chabuk would soon be released, that Beria would empty the Gulag camps, increase
the production of goods, and improve relations with the West by withdrawing
Soviet troops from Germany and Austria.20
Beria’s arrest slowed down
the de-Stalinization process. Khrushchev and Bulganin, supported by Zhukov and
the Army, assumed power. In September 1953 the ‘security organs’ were
re-created under the name of ‘Committee of State Security’ (KGB). In October
1953 it was announced that the Soviet hydrogen bomb had been successfully
tested, which assured Khrushchev of the eventual victory of the ‘Lenin-Stalin
undertaking’. At that time, Stalin was still Khrushchev’s idol. Beria was
interrogated by the officers who had arrested him. They were forbidden to
record any statement in which he accused Stalin of any crimes. During the
interrogation they forbade him even to mention Stalin’s name. They replaced all
reference to Stalin with the word instantsiya (authority) in Beria’s
testimony. One of the officers, I.Zub, elevated to the rank of general for his
role in Beria’s arrest, wrote years later: ‘Three and a half months after
Stalin’s death nobody had yet whispered a word about the cult [of personality].
For everybody in the country Stalin still remained Stalin—the great, the
infallible, the indisputable. At that time the sorrow of his death had not yet
settled in the hearts of the people.’21 ‘Beria’s case’ grew into 19
volumes. More than 200 women testified that he had raped them. He did not deny
that charge, but, when accused of murder, he repeatedly stated that he had only
carried out Stalin’s orders—‘the orders of instantsiya’, as the
interrogators wrote. When he was accused of collaborating with the Mussavatist
government of Azerbaijan and with British intelligence, he answered that Stalin
had been an agent of the Okhrana. The interrogators ordered him to stop
mentioning this. When he was accused of fabricating false charges against
innocent people, including Marshal Zhukov, Beria replied that these charges
were fabricated by Stalin, who forced him to sign them. When he was charged
with shortening Stalin’s life, he did not deny the charge, but stated that
Stalin intended to destroy all Politburo members, including him, and that his
death had prevented the deportation of the Jewish and Mingrelian populations.22
Beria’s testimony was read by Politburo members, and it may have been then that
Khrushchev began to suspect that ‘the greatest genius of mankind’ had been an
evil genius of mankind and to surmise that Beria, by shortening Stalin’s life,
had saved millions of people, including
Khrushchev, from death.
But at that time Khrushchev was still very far from putting an end to Stalin’s
personality cult. He decided to place on Beria all responsibility for Stalin’s
crimes.
Beria’s secret trial took
place on 18–23 December in the headquarters of the Moscow military district.
His six close assistants, Dekanozov, Vlodzimersky, Merkulov, Meshik, Goglidze
and Kobulov were tried at the same time. The chairman of the court was Marshal
Konev, the state prosecutor was Rudenko. All the defendants were sentenced to
death by shooting. Beria was executed first. His hands were tied behind his
back and he was taken to the bomb shelter, where he was tied to a large wooden
board (to keep bullets from rebounding and striking the executioners). Marshal
Konev and all the officers who had taken part in Beria’s arrest, except for
Marshal Zhukov, took part in the execution. Prosecutor Rudenko read the
sentence. ‘Allow me to say’, Beria began, but Rudenko interrupted him: ‘You
have already said everything. Plug his mouth with a towel. Carry out the sentence.’
General Batitsky volunteered to do the shooting and took out his pistol.
Batitsky pulled the trigger and Beria’s body slumped. It was wrapped in a bed
sheet and delivered to the crematorium. Beria’s assistants were executed the
same day.23
NOTES
1.
Taped interview with
Nugzar Sharia in 1972, in Sag Harbor, NY. These events were described by Gogi
Zautashvili to Nugzar Sharia. In the author’s archive; see also A.Rybin,
‘Riadom s I.V. Stalinym’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, no. 3, 1988.
2.
Ibid.
3.
Interview with Nugzar
Sharia, Sag Harbor, NY, 1972. Sharia recounted the recollections of his uncle
Peter Sharia and other Mingrelian generals. Peter Sharia, one of the top
Mingrelian officials in the Kremlin, was the only one to survive. His sentence
was 10 years’ imprisonment in Vladimir Tsentral.
4.
Rybin, ‘Riadom s
I.V.Stalinym’.
5.
V.Likholitov, ‘Interview c
meditsinskimi rabotnikami prisutstvovavshimi pri smerti’, Meditsinskaya
gazeta, 11 November 1988, p. 8.
6.
Svetlana Allilueva, Dvadtsat’
pisem k drugu, New York, 1967, pp. 5–10.
7.
V.Likholitov, ‘Kak
balzamirovali Stalina’, Meditsinskaya gazeta, 10 August 1988.
8.
Interview with Nugzar
Sharia, who recounted recollections of Stalin’s Georgian bodyguards who had
spoken openly about Beria’s role in poisoning Stalin, recalling how he had
bragged that he had saved the Mingrelian generals from execution and the
Mingrelian population from deportation to Siberia by hastening Stalin’s death.
9.
Recollections of author’s
wife Nadine Brackman. Also interview with Nathan Finegold, New York City, 13
June 1974.
10.
H.G.Wells, Ostrov
doktora Moro (Russian [Island of Dr Moreau]) (Moscow, 1955).
11.
Interview with Vitaly
Svechinsky. In the author’s archive.
12.
The author heard
Romanyuk’s jubilant words.
13.
Pravda, 4
April 1953.
14.
The New York Times, 15
September 1979, p. 12.
15.
Pravda, 28
March 1953.
16.
Pravda, 6
April 1953.
17.
Chabuk Amiragibi,
presently a member of the Georgian parliament, and the author wrote this
appeal. See also Semen Badash, Kolyma ty moya, Kolyma, New York, 1986,
pp. 68–79.
18.
Amy Knight, ‘Beria, the
Reformer’, The New York Times, 3 November 1993.
19.
S.Bystrov, ‘Dozvoleno k
pechati’, Krasnaya zvezda, 18–20 March 1988.
20.
Chabuk Amiragibi told the
author about this message during the incarceration at the ‘101 Kilometer Camp’
in August–September 1953.
21.
Bystrov, ‘Dozvoleno k
pechati’.
22.
Taped interview with
Nugzar Sharia.
23.
Bystrov, ‘Dozvoleno k
pechati’. Also A.Antonov-Ovseenko, ‘Beria’, Yunost, December 1988.
‘YOU CAN’T WHITEWASH A BLACK
DOG’
Soon after Beria’s
execution Khrushchev and the Party Politburo assigned a secretary of the
Central Committee, P.N.Pospelov, to write a report on Beria’s crimes.1
An accidental discovery changed Khrushchev’s mind. Construction workers
converting Stalin’s Kremlin apartment into a museum found a secret safe
inserted in a wall. The safe was brought to Khrushchev. Years later, he
mentioned only one of the documents he found in it: the letter in which Lenin
had threatened to break off all relations with Stalin. ‘I was astonished that
this note had been preserved. Stalin had probably forgotten all about it’,
Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs.2 Khrushchev did not reveal the nature
of any of the other documents he had discovered in Stalin’s safe. His
colleagues in the Politburo strongly objected to revelations of any
embarrassing information about Stalin’s past.3 The other documents
in the safe were too scandalous for Khrushchev even to mention them. But slowly
these documents continued to erode Khrushchev’s veneration of Stalin and he
decided to attack his ‘personality cult’. Despite the objections of Politburo
members, Khrushchev delivered a secret report on 24 February 1956 at the
Twentieth Party Congress, condemning Stalin’s ‘personality cult’. His report
became known as ‘Khrushchev’s secret speech’. Its transcript was secretly read
to party members at various places of work all over the Soviet Union.4
Leaders of Communist Parties in eastern Europe also received the text of
Khrushchev’s secret speech, which was leaked to the West and published there.5
Alexander Orlov, the NKVD
general who had defected to the United States in 1938, read Khrushchev’s secret
speech. In April 1956 Life magazine published Orlov’s article ‘The
Sensational Secret Behind Damnation of Stalin’, in which Orlov revealed the
information he had received in February 1938 from his cousin Zinovy Katsnelson
about the discovery of Stalin’s Okhrana file and about the Tukhachevsky
conspiracy. Orlov wrote: ‘However it happened, it seems to me certain that the
documentary proof that Stalin had been a czarist police agent was placed before
the current collective leadership.’6
government. George F.Kennan,
the leading expert on Soviet affairs at the time, about to be appointed
ambassador to the Soviet Union, remembered that ‘for various reasons it did not
seem to me suitable that our government should occupy itself with material of
this nature, and therefore the document was not purchased’.9
Golovachev sold the ‘Eremin Letter’ for $15,000 to three prominent Russian émigrés: the
former Russian ambassador to the United States, Boris Bakhmetiev, a pioneer of
Russian aviation, Boris Sergievsky, and a research engineer, Vadim Makarov, the
son of a famous Russian admiral. They passed the letter on to Clare Boothe
Luce, a conservative politician and diplomat married to the publisher of Life
magazine. In 1946 Luce invited Levine to her Connecticut estate and asked him
to investigate the letter to determine whether or not it was a genuine
document.
Levine was greatly
interested in the answer. Since 1926, he had been receiving reports from
various sources about Stalin’s ties to the Okhrana and the discovery of Stalin’s
Okhrana file in the old Okhrana archives. During the Bukharin show trial in
March 1938, Levine published an article titled, ‘Stalin Suspected of Forcing
Trials to Cover His Past’, in which he stated that he had long been familiar
with reports about the discovery of Stalin’s Okhrana file, exposing him as a
tsarist agent.10 Levin hoped that the Eremin Letter might finally be
documentary evidence proving Stalin’s service in the Okhrana.
For the next ten years
Levine tried to establish whether the ‘Eremin Letter’ was genuine. He
questioned former Okhrana officers and asked specialists on documents for their
opinion. His research took him to the outskirts of Paris, to the home of the émigré Okhrana
general Alexander Spiridovich, who had known Eremin well. Spiridovich showed
Levine a silver decanter and told him it had been presented to him by his
subordinates after his recovery from a 1905 assassination attempt. Among the
several signatures engraved on the decanter was Eremin’s. His signature looked
very similar to that on the ‘Eremin Letter’. Spiridovich gave the decanter to
Levine as a present. ‘I was deeply moved by his gift’, Levine wrote. ‘I now
owned the final piece of evidence which proved to me that Stalin had been a
czarist spy.’11
From the time in 1946 when
Levine began his investigation of the Eremin Letter, Soviet agents in the
United States and Europe must have reported to Stalin about his enquiries, but
Stalin did nothing to prevent the publication of the forgery he himself had
manufactured. He may have held on to his original idea of using its publication
in the West as the opportunity to discredit not only the forgery itself, by
pointing out its obvious mistakes, but, by a logical extension, to discredit
the very notion that he had ever been an Okhrana agent. Stalin was devious but
not subtle, and it probably did not occur to him that the ‘mistakes’ he had
inserted in the forgery might be viewed as much too glaring, much too easy to
detect to have been made unintentionally. It probably did not occur to him that
the unavoidable conclusion would be that these mistakes had been done on
purpose in order to discredit the truth and that the only person interested in
doing that would be Stalin himself.
Levine’s and Orlov’s
articles were published under the headline: ‘What Khrushchev Isn’t Telling:
Stalin’s Guiltiest Secret’. Orlov’s article was met with almost total silence.
Historians and Sovietologists avoided the question of Stalin’s service in the
Okhrana and the role Stalin’s Okhrana file might have played in the history of
the Soviet Union. They could not completely dismiss the information presented
in Orlov’s article, because his 1953 book, The Secret History of Stalin’s
Crimes, was accepted as a credible and
important source that was
widely quoted, and especially because Khrushchev’s secret speech substantiated
many of Orlov’s claims. Nevertheless, Orlov’s revelations about Stalin’s
Okhrana file and the Tukhachevsky conspiracy were ignored for decades by the
historians of the West. One exception was Bertram D.Wolfe, who stated, ‘If the
Levine document [the Eremin Letter] requires further checking, the Orlov
article carries complete conviction.’12
Levine’s article citing
the ‘Eremin Letter’ started a heated controversy. Stalin was dead, but KGB agents
and Soviet sympathizers in the United States attempted to discredit Levine
personally and thus to prove that the letter was a forgery. Martin K.Tytell,
who presented himself as an ‘expert on questionable documents’, delivered a
lecture, titled ‘Exposing a Documentary Hoax’, in which he attacked Levine’s
veracity.13 (Tytell had earlier been a witness for the defense at
the trial of Alger Hiss, accused of spying for the Soviet Union.) The US Senate
Internal Security Subcommittee held several hearings on the question of the
role of Soviet intelligence in the campaign to discredit the ‘Eremin Letter’.14
Grigory Aronson, a scholar of Soviet history, took a radically different tack,
arguing that the question of whether Stalin was a tsarist spy was a ‘trifle’ and
should not be used to divert attention from the issue of exposing the truly
horrible facts about his reign of terror.15 Levine replied that ‘the
Free World has had quite a dose of these facts, although there can be no limit
to the quest for truth… If it were established that Stalin was a Czarist spy
and a traitor to the Revolution, we could deliver a blow which at the moment
would rock the Soviet dictatorship to its foundation.’ He added that his
forthcoming book would ‘leave not a shadow of a doubt that Stalin was a Czarist
agent’ and would be ‘but an opening chapter in the hunt for the solution to the
great mystery in Stalin’s life’.16 In his book Stalin’s Great Secret,
Levine insisted that the ‘Eremin Letter’ was a genuine document.17
In June 1956, amidst
heated debate over the ‘Eremin Letter’, M.G. Golovachev, who had brought the
letter to the West in 1946, published an article in the Russian-language
newspaper Rossia in New York, denying accusations that he had sold a
forged document. ‘I must state that this is an unquestionably genuine document
which is a part of official archival material that relates to the role of
Stalin in pre-Revolutionary Russia’, wrote Golovachev. He promised to publish
in the near future additional documents proving Stalin’s ties to the Okhrana
and to reveal how these documents had fallen into his hands.18
Golovachev died before making any further revelations. For obvious reasons, he
could not prove the genuineness of the ‘Eremin Letter’ or of the other
forgeries in his possession, and he had no intention of telling the truth: that
he had obtained all these documents from Stalin’s agent, the chief of the Far
Eastern NKVD, Genrikh Liushkov. After Golovachev’s death his widow donated his
entire ‘official archival material, including three additional forgeries, to
the Bakhmetiev Archive at Columbia University in New York. They are still
there.19
The fact that the ‘Eremin
Letter’ was a forgery was established in 1957 when the Okhrana Foreign Agency
archive was open for research at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. The
16 large wooden crates containing the Okhrana Foreign Agency’s documents had
been brought there from the Russian Imperial Embassy in Paris in 1924 by the
ambassador of the Russian Provisional Government to France, Vasily Maklakov. He
donated the documents to the Hoover Institution. In accordance with a signed
agreement, these documents were not to be shown to the public until at least
three months
after Maklakov’s death.20
The Okhrana archive at the Hoover Institution contained many documents with
Colonel Eremin’s signature. It was established that his signature did not end
with the long slanting curve as did the signature on the forged ‘Eremin
letter’. The archive also had on file the register of the Okhrana officers on
active duty in 1913, which listed the name of Captain Vladimir Fedorovich
Zhelezniakov. The Eremin Letter was addressed to ‘Alexey Fedorovich
Zhelezniakov’. These ‘mistakes’ alone proved that the ‘Eremin Letter’ was a
forgery, which led many scholars to the conclusion that it had been fabricated
in order to discredit Stalin and, consequently, that Stalin had not been an
Okhrana agent. This was precisely the reaction Stalin had counted on. Not all
scholars were taken in, however. George F.Kennan declared that the ‘Eremin
Letter’ was ‘one of those curious bits of historical evidence of which it can
be said that the marks of spuriousness are too strong for us to call it
genuine, and the marks of genuineness are too strong for us to call it entirely
spurious’.21
Soon after the ‘Eremin
Letter’ was exposed as a forgery in 1957, Eremin’s two daughters arrived in New
York from Chile, hoping to find someone interested in buying their
recollections about their father, Alexander Eremin, since his name had been mentioned
prominently in Levine’s article. They were too late. By then, interest in the
‘Eremin Letter’ and their father had subsided; besides, they had no documents
that might have thrown light on Stalin’s career in the Okhrana. Eremin himself
had died—no one asked his daughters when or how. Finding no buyer for their
story, they returned to Chile.22 An attempt to locate them in 1974
was unsuccessful. A report from Chile stated that ‘indeed the Eremin family
lived at one time in Chile. Now it is impossible to find any trace of them.’23
Until 1989 the Soviet
press did not mention the ‘Eremin Letter’, but it had been secretly discussed
in the Kremlin since its publication in the West in 1956. Khrushchev, in the
wake of his secret speech, assigned to a group of several surviving Old
Bolsheviks the task of investigating Stalin’s crimes, including the accusation
of his service in the Okhrana. A special commission within the Party Control
Committee was created for this purpose. The commission established that Stalin had
doctored and fabricated Okhrana documents in order to glorify himself as a
great revolutionary and had inundated Soviet archives with these doctored
documents and forgeries. A Soviet historian, who took part in the inquiry,
stated that ‘In 1962 O.G. Shatunovskaya, a member of the Party Control
Committee and of the commission dealing with the rehabilitation of the victims
of the personality cult, raised before the Central Committee of the Communist
Party the question of making public all the materials exposing Stalin as an
Okhrana agent.’ But Khrushchev at that time did not yet dare openly to disclose
the commission’s findings, claiming that to do so ‘would reveal that for more
than 30 years the country was ruled by an agent of the tsarist Okhrana…’.24
The Old Bolsheviks established that several of Stalin’s Okhrana files had been
found in the old archives and delivered to Stalin.25 They submitted
to Khrushchev the articles by Orlov and Levine, from which he learned about the
discovery of Stalin’s Okhrana file by I.L.Shtein, about the rivalry between
Stalin and the top Okhrana agent Roman Malinovsky, and about the Tukhachevsky
conspiracy.26 Khrushchev must have recalled how, during the war,
Stalin had become alarmed by mention of the name of general Rodion Malinovsky
and had ordered Khrushchev to follow the general’s every move. He must have
realized that the rivalry with the Okhrana agent Roman Malinovsky was the cause
of Stalin’s sudden suspicion.
By 1962 Khrushchev began
to think of exposing Stalin as an Okhrana agent. Probably on Khrushchev’s
order, the ‘Eremin Letter’ was stolen from the Bakhmetiev Collection at
Columbia University and delivered to Moscow. (In 1956, the forgery had been
placed in the safe of the Tolstoy Foundation in a New York bank.27
Later it was deposited in the Bakhmetiev Archive at Columbia University. Access
to this collection has been almost unrestricted.) In 1962 several party
historians, assigned by Khrushchev to research Stalin’s Okhrana past, were
allowed to examine the ‘Eremin Letter’ when it was delivered to Moscow.28
By 1962 a sinister picture of a tsarist spy haunted by the fear of exposure, a
mass murderer bent on covering up his ignoble past, emerged in Khrushchev’s
mind.
The question of Stalin’s
service in the Okhrana was not the only cause of Khrushchev’s growing hatred of
his former idol. He was increasingly consumed by the emotional need to avenge
the humiliations to which Stalin had subjected him personally. Stalin had been
in the habit of cleaning his burning pipe by knocking it against Khrushchev’s
bald head, saying, ‘Durachok ty, Nikitushka, durachok!’ (‘You’re a
little fool, Nicky boy, a little fool!’), while Khrushchev had to ingratiate
himself, smiling and cringing with pain.29 Stalin also liked to
place burning paper between the fingers of Politburo members and watch how they
endured this torture.30 Khrushchev recalled how Stalin used to force
him, an overweight and ageing man, to drink glasses of vodka and dance the
Ukrainian gapak, causing him excruciating pain, to the enjoyment of
Stalin’s guests. He was ashamed to recall how he, in boundless devotion to
Stalin, cried, kneeling next to the body of the dead dictator and kissing his
hand.31 These and similar recollections filled Khrushchev with
hatred of Stalin and shame of himself. He was driven by the urge to expose the
tyrant, the despicable creature of the Okhrana, and to avenge his own
humiliation. But Khrushchev met with stubborn resistance from most of the
Politburo members, who had the backing of the party bureaucracy.
In 1957 Politburo members
Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov attempted to depose Khrushchev, accusing him
of undermining the Soviet system by exposing Stalin’s crimes. Khrushchev was
supported by Marshal Zhukov, whose command of the army assured his victory.
Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov were sent to ‘work’ far away from Moscow.
Bulganin and Voroshilov, too, were soon removed from the Politburo. Khrushchev,
having used Zhukov, dismissed him, accusing the marshal of harboring
‘bonapartist schemes’. The places of Stalin’s old cronies in the Politburo were
taken over by Khrushchev’s protégés, among them the future general
secretaries Brezhnev, Chernenko and Andropov. Although this new crop of
Politburo members did not owe their rise to power to Stalin, they did not share
Khrushchev’s hatred of him, and felt that exposing Stalin as an Okhrana agent
would discredit the Soviet system, cutting off the branch on which they were
sitting.
Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin
drive created a rift in the communist camp. Mao Tse-tung and Albania’s staunch
Stalinist leader Enver Hoxha refused to attend the Twenty-second Party
Congress, which opened in Moscow in October of 1961. In his speech, Khrushchev
said that all he was trying to accomplish by criticizing Stalin was to prevent
a similar ‘personality cult’ from emerging ever again. He accused the Albanian
leader of using Stalin’s methods of repression against his own people.32
Because of the opposition of the majority of Politburo members, Khrushchev
decided not to deliver his prepared speech in which he intended to accuse
Stalin of organizing the murder of Kirov.33 But Khrushchev
delivered a blow to Stalin
in another way: during the night of 31 October 1961 Stalin’s embalmed body was
secretly removed from the mausoleum and buried near the Kremlin wall. A black
granite plate with inscription ‘I.V.Stalin 1879–1953’ was placed over the
grave. Stalin’s name, too, was removed from the mausoleum. Lenin was once again
the sole occupant of this shrine. Stalin’s burial was carried out by a
detachment of soldiers under the headlights of military vehicles.34
In the summer of 1962 the
remains of Ivan the Terrible, idolized during the Stalin era as one of Russia’s
greatest statesmen, were removed from his tomb in the Kremlin Cathedral of the
Archangel Michael, where they had been since the Tsar’s death in 1584. The
remains were subjected to scientific analyses. One test revealed the presence
of a considerable amount of arsenic, raising the possibility that the Tsar had
been poisoned. A prominent Soviet anthropologist, Mikhail Gerasimov, who had
earlier reconstructed the facial features of the prehistoric Java and Peking
men, made a bust of Ivan the Terrible based on the skeletal remains. Gerasimov
determined that Tsar Ivan had been 6ft 3in tall, a giant by sixteenth-century
standards.35 Not content with disturbing the Tsar’s tomb and
demythologizing Ivan by the cold light of science, Khrushchev initiated a press
campaign against Stalin’s glorification of Tsar Ivan. Books praising Ivan were
sharply criticized.36
With the passing of time,
Khrushchev began to imagine that he could outdo Stalin, in whom he began to see
a competitor for his own place in history. Once, during a reception in the
Yugoslav embassy, Khrushchev got drunk and dropped down on all fours, declaring
that he was the ‘locomotive of history’. When drunk, he began to tell his
generals that under his leadership the Soviet Union would achieve greater
victories in any war with capitalist countries than Stalin had achieved in the war
with Hitler’s Germany. In a fit of self-aggrandizement, he ordered that Soviet
nuclear rockets be installed in Cuba. He visited the United States, declaring
that he would show the West ‘where the crayfish spends the winter’, and he made
the famous boast: ‘We will bury you!’ During a speech at the United Nations he
took off his shoe and banged the podium with it. Americans were intrigued by
this peculiar way of making a point. They tried to determine the meaning of the
Russian saying to show someone ‘where the crayfish spends the winter’—which is
roughly equivalent to ‘teaching someone a lesson’. The explanations of media
commentators were quite varied, one indication of the width of the chasm
between the West and the world from which Khrushchev came.
Khrushchev kept pursuing
his aim to discredit Stalin. Early in March 1963 he delivered a speech about
class struggle in which he mentioned Stalin several times. At one point he said
that in the history of the Bolshevik Party there had been ‘more than one case
of betrayal and treason to the cause of the Revolution, for example, the
activities of the double agent Malinovsky, a member of the Bolshevik faction of
the State Duma’.37 Khrushchev’s hint of ‘more than one case of
betrayal’ was not lost on those who suspected Stalin of ties to the Okhrana. In
the summer of 1964, some KGB officers learned that Khrushchev decided to make
public the history of Stalin’s rivalry with Malinovsky by publication of an
article exposing Stalin’s ties to the Okhrana. The KGB officers knew that the
Politburo opposed Khrushchev’s decision.38 On 19 July 1964
Khrushchev delivered a speech at a reception in Moscow in honor of a Hungarian
Party delegation. At one point he shouted in a high-pitched and halting voice:
‘In vain are the attempts of those who want to alter the leadership in our
country and take under their protection all the evil deeds that Stalin
committed… No one can whitewash him… You
can’t whitewash a black
dog…’.39 For the first time Khrushchev also publicly hinted that Stalin
had been murdered: ‘In human history there have been many cruel tyrants, but
all of them met their death by an axe, the same axe with which they had
maintained their power.’40 This part of his speech was cut from the
version published in the Soviet Union. The metaphor of the axe suggests that
Khrushchev knew Stalin had been murdered by his own henchman, Beria. In view of
Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes, this made Beria not the villain,
as he was officially portrayed, but a hero, and his poisoning of Stalin a
heroic deed. But Politburo members were against such a radical rewriting of
Soviet history. They were also alarmed by a statement made by Enver Hoxha on 24
May 1964: ‘The Soviet leaders are plotters who have the impudence to say openly,
as Mikoyan has been doing, that they secretly hatched a conspiracy to murder
Stalin.’41 Hoxha had in mind Khrushchev as one of the ‘plotters’: by
1964 of all of Stalin’s close ‘comrades-in-arms’, only Khrushchev and Mikoyan
remained members of the Politburo.
Brezhnev and his Politburo
allies decided that in revealing Kremlin secrets Khrushchev was behaving
irrationally and that he should be removed from power. When Khrushchev was
vacationing in the Black Sea resort of Pitsunda in October 1964, they accused him
of ‘voluntarism’ and of harboring ‘harebrained ideas’. Brezhnev, on assuming
power, suppressed the story of the Stalin-Malinovsky rivalry that was about to
be published. Only the part related to Malinovsky’s Okhrana story was printed
in 1965.42 It did not mention Stalin at all.
Brezhnev attempted to
restore Stalin’s prestige as a ‘Great Leader’, but he failed: Khrushchev’s
secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress had considerably tarnished
Stalin’s reputation. The speech itself was no longer secret after its
publication in the Soviet Union in 1959.43 Another force opposing
Brezhnev’s attempt to rehabilitate Stalin was the millions of prisoners who had
been released from the Gulag system during Khrushchev’s rule. The Gulag story
entered Soviet literature with the Khrushchev- sponsored publication in 1962 of
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The
prison-camp jargon, created by generations of Gulag inmates, poured into the
Russian language. Dissident groups appeared, secretly writing and distributing
anti-Soviet samizdat. In June 1968 Pavel Litvinov (a grandson of Maxim
Litvinov) and a group of dissidents staged a protest in Red Square against the
Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. They were arrested and exiled. But the repressions
did not stop the dissident movement. The fear of Stalin’s era was fading away
from the ‘island of Doctor Moreau’.
After Brezhnev’s death,
his successors renewed attempts to rehabilitate Stalin. Minister of Defence
D.F.Ustinov declared at the 12 July 1984 Politburo meeting: ‘In general there
would not be that outrageous infamy that Khrushchev permitted in relation to
Stalin. Stalin, whatever you might say, is our history. Not one foe brought us
as much grief as Khrushchev with his policy in relation to the history of our
Party and state, and in relation to Stalin.’ The chairman of the Council of
Ministers N.Tikhonov concurred, proclaiming that Khrushchev ‘dirtied us and our
policies and blackened them before the whole world’. The chairman of the KGB, V.M.Chebrikov,
added: ‘Apart from that, under Khrushchev a whole series of people were
rehabilitated illegally. The fact of the matter is that they were punished
entirely justly. Take, for example, Solzhenitsyn.’44
On becoming General
Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed the policy of perestroika
(reconstruction) and glasnost (openness), promising to fill in all the
‘blanks’
in Soviet history. His
actual intention was not to change the Soviet system but merely to make it more
efficient. He wanted to retain party and police control over the political and
economic life of the country. The ‘blanks’ were being filled in by the revived
memories of a no-longer frightened people. The Soviet empire was collapsing,
the satellite states of eastern Europe were breaking away, self-determination
movements in the Soviet republics were asserting themselves. Gorbachev did not
expect that by proclaiming perestroika and glasnost he would
speed up the disintegration of the system he wanted to save. Filling in the
blanks in Soviet history slipped out of Gorbachev’s control. Information about
Stalin’s crimes, kept under the lid for generations, broke out in a torrent of
revelations. Newspapers began reporting the discoveries of mass graves all over
the Soviet Union.45 A Memorial Society was created. Its members at a
1988 meeting in Moscow stated that the Soviet Union was a ‘country built on
skeletons’. A former inmate of the Vorkuta camps, Igor Dobroshan, added: ‘There
is no one who was not touched by Stalin’s repressions. The terror during the
French Revolution is incomparable to the Stalinist terror. We will be busy
eradicating this infection for 200 years.’46 L.Lanina, a journalist,
wrote in a Moscow independent magazine:
In
millions of nameless mass graves rest nameless victims with tags on their feet
…in Kolyma and Solovky, in Vorkuta and Kazakhstan. These graves are the real
sacred shrines that have been trampled down, and the salvation and expiation of
the nation depends now on whether it will find the sacred path to them.47
Heated polemics erupted
all over Russia in 1989 after a history professor at the Moscow Institute of
International Relations, F.D.Volkov, stated that Stalin had been an Okhrana
agent, citing the ‘Eremin Letter’ as proof. He declared, ‘For 30 years we were
ruled by a tsarist agent.’48 In an article in Moskovskaya pravda,
Volkov argued that the ‘Eremin Letter’ was a genuine document.49 On
19 April the journal Voprosy istorii KPSS (‘Problems of the History of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’) published a long official rebuttal in
an article titled, ‘Was Stalin an Okhrana Agent?’ The article’s authors pointed
to a number of errors in the ‘Eremin Letter’ and stated that it was a forgery.
They insisted that the Soviet archives had no documents pointing to Stalin’s
service in the Okhrana. Nevertheless, they were careful to note: ‘In pursuing
our review of documents and publications we by no means attempted to answer
definitely the question of whether Stalin was a secret [Okhrana] collaborator.’50
On 2 July 1989 Moskovskaya
pravda published ‘Official Reference of the Central State Archive of the
October Revolution’, which described in detail the mistakes in the ‘Eremin
Letter’, concluding that it had been fabricated with the purpose of
discrediting Stalin. In support of this conclusion, the officials of the
archive stated that even ‘the most critically disposed biographers of Stalin,
including his most bitter enemy Trotsky, having in mind the issue of Okhrana
provocation, rejected this charge as monstrous and absolutely unprovable.’51
The conflicting views in
the Soviet press about Stalin’s Okhrana ties confused many readers. An author
of one letter offered to resolve the controversy in what he thought a very
simple way: ‘Everything would be perfectly clear to the supporters and
opponents of
the Okhrana version if the
personal file of the secret agent I.V.Dzhugashvili were to be unfolded before
them.’52
Another question widely
discussed was whether Stalin had been mentally ill. It was reported that
Bekhterev had diagnosed Stalin as a paranoiac before his death. Some prominent
Soviet psychiatrists agreed with this diagnosis, while others suggested a
number of other definitions of Stalin’s malady: ‘paranoid schizophrenia,
delirious condition, derived from paranoid psychopathy, heavy psychopathy’,
placing Stalin in the category of ‘epileptic-psychopaths’. During a panel
discussion, a psychiatrist stated that Stalin was ‘cruel, devoid of any feeling
of pity, completely amoral, easily excitable. I personally consider [his
condition] a psychical monstrosity, a moral depravity. It is an anomaly but not
a sickness.’ Another psychiatrist reminded the audience of Hamlet’s ‘method in
the madness’, adding that Stalin was afflicted with ‘megalomania of a limitless
scale’. Another objected that too little was known about Stalin to allow a
final judgement:
Psychopathy is a depravity
of character, which is formed either genetically or emerges as a result of
various traumas in childhood. It cannot exist without manifestations in the
early stages of life, in the early years and the period of maturation. But what
do we know about Stalin of this time of his life? Nothing special, except that
he was cruel to animals.
But a colleague argued
that what was known about Stalin made clear that ‘for 30 years the country was
ruled by a man with a sick soul’. A moderator of the discussion, a layman,
concluded:
We
simply have no other alternative, because if we accept Stalin as a sane man—the
man who senselessly destroyed the flower of a great nation— this would mean
that all of us were insane, and it would be enlightening to learn, how it
happened that tens of millions of my fellow countrymen were murdered.53
Russel V.Lee, clinical
professor emeritus at the Stanford University Medical School, wrote:
An inquiry in depth into
the role of madness in human affairs would provide a fascinating field to be
cultivated by a team of historians and psychiatrists. The harvest of bizarre
events wrought by deranged leaders would be a rich one. The events of the
terrible twentieth century provide the best example of the power of madmen to
abolish rational behavior. In our time we have seen one of the most highly
developed and intellectual peoples of all time completely subjected to the
absolute power of a textbook paranoiac—Adolf Hitler. Such phenomena, alas for
mankind, tend to be recurrent… In Russia there was Joseph Stalin, the man of
steel and ruthless slayer of millions of his own people; completely devoid of
scruples of any kind, he was a sociopath, a moral imbecile, and in complete
control of Russia.54
NOTES
1.
N.S.Khrushchev, Khrushchev
Remembers, Boston, Toronto, 1970. p. 344, fn. 14; also p. 345, fn. 15.
2.
Ibid., p. 44; also fn. 12.
3.
Ibid., pp. 347–51.
4.
The author was present at
the reading of Khrushchev’s secret speech at the Rossmetaloproekt firm in
Moscow, in March 1956.
5.
A member of the Polish
Communist Party, Seweryn Bialer, defected to the West with a copy of
Khrushchev’s speech.
6.
Alexander Orlov, ‘The
Sensational Secret Behind Damnation of Stalin’, Life, 23 April 1956, p.
44.
7.
Isaac Don Levine, the
first Western biographer of Stalin, published an article titled ‘A Document on
Stalin as Czarist Spy’, Life, 23 April 1956, p. 51.
8.
Interview with I.D.Levine
in Chappaqua, New York, 1976.
9.
George F.Kennan, ‘The
Historiography of the Early Political Career of Stalin’, a lecture read on 12
November 1970 and published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society, Vol. 115, no. 3, June 1971, p. 167.
10.
Journal American, 3
March 1938.
11.
I.D.Levine, ‘A Document on
Stalin as Czarist Spy’, Life, 23 April 1956, p. 51.
12.
Life
magazine, 11 May 1956.
13.
Senate Internal Security
Subcommittee Report, hearings held on 8 February 1957, p.
4184.
14.
Ibid., hearings held on 1
October 1957, pp. 4126–56.
15.
Grigory Aronson, ‘Was
Stalin a Tsarist Agent?’, The New Leader, 20 August 1956.
16.
I.D.Levine, ‘Stalin Was a
Tsarist Agent’, typescript of an article for The New Leader, in I.D.
Levine’s archive. Copy in the author’s archive.
17.
I.D.Levine, Stalin’s
Great Secret, New York, 1956. The book reiterates the points made in
Levine’s article in Life.
18.
The clipping of
Golovachev’s article in Rossia is in M.P.Golovachev’s collection in the
Bakhmetiev Archive in the Library of Rare Documents and Manuscripts at Columbia
University. These documents were reprinted in the New York Russian-language
newspaper Evreisky mir, 30 October (no. 23), 6 November (no. 24), and 13
November (no. 25), 1992.
19.
These forgeries are in the
M.P.Golovachev collection in the Bakhmetiev Archive in the Library of Rare
Documents and Manuscripts at Columbia University. The forgeries were reprinted
in the New York Russian-language newspaper Evreisky mir, 30 October (no.
23), 6 November (no. 24), and 13 November (no. 25), 1992.
20.
Edward Ellis Smith, The
Young Stalin: The Early Years of an Elusive Revolutionary, London, 1968, p.
vii.
21.
Kennan, ‘The
Historiography of the Early Political Career of Stalin’, p. 167.
22.
Interview with I.D.Levine,
Chappaqua NY, 1976.
23.
Letters from the Tolstoy
Foundation, dated 9 October 1974 and 9 December 1974. In the author’s archive.
24.
F.D.Volkov, Vzlet i
padenie Stalina, Moscow, 1992, p. 23.
25.
Roy Medvedev, Let
History Judge, New York, 1971, pp. 315–23. Also Medvedev, ‘Dvadtsatyi vek’,
Obshchestvenno-politicheskii i literaturnyi almanakh, no. 2, London,
1977, pp. 10f.
26.
A letter written by
O.G.Shatunovskaya and C.B.Shaboldaev to the editors of Moskovskaya pravda,
where it was published on 2 July 1989, p. 4. Also Alexander Orlov, ‘The
Sensational Secret Behind Damnation of Stalin’, Life, 23 April 1956, p.
37.
27.
I.D.Levine, ‘A Document on
Stalin as Czarist Spy’.
28.
Moskovskaya pravda, 30
March 1989. Also F.D.Volkov, Vzlet i padenie Stalina, Moscow, 1992, p.
16.
29.
Taped interview with
Nugzar Sharia in Sag Harbor, Long Island, NY in 1972.
30.
Medvedev, Let History
Judge, p. 331.
31.
B.Ravich, a chemistry
professor and secretary of the Communist Party organization at the Moscow
Institute of Nonferrous Metals (and my neighbor in Moscow communal apartment)
related Khrushchev’s behavior to me. It was well known at that time among Party
officials. See also Svetlana Allilueva, Dvadtsat’ pisem k drugu, p. 6.
Svetlana recounts Khrushchev crying at the time of Stalin’s death. Khrushchev
in his memoirs attributes to Beria his own behavior, stating: ‘Beria threw
himself on his knees, seized Stalin’s hand, and started kissing it’ Khrushchev
Remembers, p. 318.
32.
T.T.Rigby, The Stalin
Dictatorship: Khrushchev’s Secret Speech and Other Documents, Sydney, 1968,
P. 95.
33.
Taped interview with Vasily
Rudich in Chappaqua, NY in 1975. Rudich related the testimony of
O.G.Shatunovskaya, a member of the Party Control Committee, who recalled that
A.N. Shelepin, the KGB chief at the time, kept Khrushchev from delivering the
planned part of the speech relating to Kirov’s murder. Shelepin, nicknamed
‘Iron Shurik’ was at the time ‘re-Stalinizing’ the Soviet secret police. In
November 1961 he was promoted to the Central Committee secretariat. See John
J.Dziak, Chekisty: A History of the KGB, Lexington, MA, 1988, p. 152.
34.
F.Konev, ‘Kak
perezakhoranivali Stalina,’ Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, Moscow, 1989.
35.
The New York Times, 28
April 1963; 29 July 1963. See also Robert Payne, ‘A Man Like No Other’, The
New York Times, 8 September 1963.
36.
S.M.Dubrovsky, ‘Protiv idealizatsii
deyatelnosti Ivana IV’, Voprosy istorii, no. 8, August 1956, pp. 121–8.
37.
Pravda, 10
March 1963.
38.
Interview with Yury
Krotkov, the author of the book The Red Monarch and a KGB agent who
defected to the West, in New York in 1972. Krotkov related the inside story of
Khrushchev’s intention to make public the Stalin-Malinovsky rivalry in the
Okhrana. The article he mentioned was published in censored form after
Khrushchev had been removed: the part detailing the Stalin-Malinovsky Okhrana
rivalry was suppressed. See B.K.Erenfeld, ‘Delo Malinovskogo’, Voprosy
istorii, no. 7, 1965, pp. 106–16.
39.
Pravda, 20
July 1964.
40.
Radio Moscow I, 19 July
1964, Radio Liberty Archive, monitoring tape recording.
41.
Robert Conquest, The
Great Terror, New York, 1973, p. 172.
42.
B.K.Erenfeld, ‘Delo
Malinovskogo’, Voprosy istorii, no. 7, 1965.
43.
Khrushchev, Doklad na
zakrytom zasedanii XX s’ezda KPSS.
44.
The New York Times, 8
February 1993, p. A-8.
45.
Ogonek,
no. 39, 1988; Sputnik, no. 109, 1988; Zenon Pozniak, ‘Perezhitoe’, Moskovskie
novosty, 1988; Zenon Pozniak and Evgeny Shygalev, ‘Kuropaty-doroga smerti’,
Literatura i mastatstva, Minsk, 3 June 1988; Komsomolskaya pravda,
Moscow, 7 August 1989; Novoe russkoe slovo, 24 June 1988; The New
York Times, 25 March 1989; Novoe russkoe slovo, 7 March 1989.
46.
Shmidt-Choier, Sputnik,
Israel, 17 November 1988, pp. 4f.
47.
L.Lanina, ‘Madam Tusso i
tovarishch Krupskaya’, Panorama, 3 July 1988. A reprint from the Moscow samizdat
journal Referendum.
48.
Shmidt-Choier, Sputnik,
pp. 4f.
49.
G.Arutunov and F.Volkov,
‘K sydu istorii’, Moskovskaya pravda, 30 March 1989.
50.
B.I.Kaptelov and
Z.I.Peregudova, ‘Byl li Stalin agentom okhranki?’, Voprosy istorii KPSS, Moscow,
April 1989.
51.
‘Versiya ne
podtverzhdaetsa’, Moskovskaya pravda, 2 July 1989, pp. 4f.
52.
Ibid.
53.
Oleg Moroz, ‘Poslednii
diagnoz’, Literaturnaya gazeta, 28 September 1988. Also Novoe russkoe
slovo, 18 August 1989, pp. 6f.
54.
Russel V.Lee, ‘When
Insanity Holds the Specter’, The New York Times, 12 April 1974.
Almost half a century
after Stalin’s death, Russia still lives in his shadow. Millions were executed
or perished in the Gulag prison camps, with no family left untouched. Having
exterminated ten million Russian peasants, Stalin enslaved the rest of them as
serfs in his kolkhoz (collective farm) system. He left behind a
dysfunctional economic system that defeats all attempts at economic and land
reform. The great majority of Russians continue to suffer from the abject
poverty, misery and deprivation while a few corrupt nouveau riche, the oligarchs,
and mafiosi enjoy opulence and privileges in the post-Soviet Russia, as did the
party elite during Stalin’s reign. Stalin threw Russia back to the barbarity of
the medieval reign of his favorite Tsar, the deranged Ivan Grozny (Ivan the
Terrible).
Stalin’s legacy permeates
the daily lives of the country in the most striking and incessant way: all
Soviet leaders since Stalin, except for Boris Yeltsin, have had a secret police
career. Lavrenty Beria was the head of Soviet secret police for many years. Nikita
Khrushchev began his Kremlin career in the 1930s as Stalin’s agent
provocateur and later served as Stalin’s henchman during the purges. Leonid
Brezhnev carried out the purges in Ukraine in the 1930s. Stalin sent him to
Moldavia in the early 1950s to exile the Jewish population to Siberia. Yury
Andropov had been the head of KGB for many years before becoming General
Secretary in November 1982. Konstantin Chernenko started his career during the
purges in the 1930s as a head of an execution detachment in the Far East, and
then joined Brezhnev in Dnepropetrovsk, and later in Moldavia. Chernenko became
General Secretary in February 1984. With his death on 10 March 1985 the line of
Stalin’s heirs, who had been involved in the bloodshed of the purges, ended. But
the dominant role of the secret police at the pinnacle of power in Russia was
far from over.
Mikhail Gorbachev became
General Secretary of the Party in March 1985. Because of his age, he had not
been involved in the Great Purges. But, in a somewhat different way, he was
also a creature of the Soviet secret police, which had helped him get enrolled
in the Moscow University’s Law Department, where he was ‘elected’ secretary of
the Komsomol (Union of Communist Youth) cell, a post in Stalin’s time reserved
for MGB (Ministry of State Security) collaborators. He rose up the party ranks
with the support of the KGB (Committee of State Security, after 1953), and
became a close friend of KGB Chief Andropov, who made him a member of the
Politburo. It was in fact Andropov who introduced the word perestroyka
(‘reconstruction’) and initiated the reconstruction of the Soviet system to
save it from economic and political meltdown. When he become General Secretary
Gorbachev promised to institute perestroyka and glasnost (‘openness’)
and to fill in the ‘blanks’ in Soviet history. In fact, he intended to preserve
the communist system and perpetuate himself as paramount Soviet leader. The
result of his halfmeasures was the eventual disintegration of the Soviet
Union.
the party apparatus in
Soviet times was totally isolated from the secret police, but in Yeltsin’s case
the ties to it were minimal. He was the timeliest figure among the Soviet party
elite to break with the Stalinist past. As President, he was in the best
position to reestablish the legitimacy of power in Russia, which had been
brutally interrupted on 17 July 1918, when the Tsar and his family were
murdered on Lenin’s order. Eighty years later, on 17 July 1998, Yeltsin took
part in a state funeral of the discovered remains of Tsar Nicholas II and his
family. Yeltsin told the nation the horrible truth in his TV address: ‘The
truth has been concealed for 80 years. And we have to tell the truth tomorrow,
and I should take part. This will be the right thing to do from the human point
of view.’1 But despite the many revelations during the Gorbachev and
Yeltsin years, far from the whole truth was told to the Russian people. During
the Yeltsin presidency in 1993 a law prohibiting release of information from
Russian archives was approved. This is why many Russians still venerate Stalin
and Lenin as sacrosanct idols. Crowds still visit Lenin’s embalmed corpse in
his mausoleum in the Red Square, and some 25 percent of Russians voted for the
Communist Party in the 1999 Duma elections. Yeltsin resigned on the eve of new
millennium, apologizing to the Russian people for not being able to fulfill all
their hopes.
Yeltsin, for all his good
intentions, succumbed under the weight of Stalin’s legacy, which still burdens
the life of the Russian people. Yeltsin twice unleashed brutal war against the
Chechen people, all of whom Stalin had exiled to Siberia on 23 February 1944.
Shortly before his resignation, during his visit to Peking, Yeltsin rattled the
Russian nuclear saber, threatening the West with Russia’s ‘full nuclear
arsenal’. This was reminiscent of Khrushchev’s banging his shoe on the podium
in UN and threatening the West with ‘We will bury you.’
Yeltsin compensated for a
lack of KGB ties in his career by appointing three KGB career officers, Sergey
Stepashin, Evgeny Primakov and Vladimir Putin, to the post of Russian prime
minister. On the day of his resignation he appointed Putin Acting President of
Russia, thus making it almost certain that he would be elected the next
President of Russia. Putin served for years as KGB liaison officer with the
notorious East German secret police, the STASI, spying on the West and the
Germans on both sides of the Berlin wall. His KGB nickname was ‘Stasy’. Putin’s
popularity soared when he promised to ‘liberate’ Chechnya, to destroy ‘bandits
and terrorists’ and to restore ‘Russian national pride’. He bragged of having
‘liberated Grozny,’ not mentioning the fact that the Russian Army had actually
obliterated the city, with no building left standing to fly the Russian
tricolor. Putin stopped any uncensored reporting from Chechnya from reaching
the Russian people and the world, and ordered monitoring of e-mail and Internet
use. He sharply increased the budget of the secret police. The Russian
intelligence service is being merged with the interior ministry, creating a new
KGB-style colossus.2
Grigory Yavlinsky, the
leader of the liberal Yabloko Party, described the alliance of Putin supporters
and the large communist Duma faction as an ‘aggressive and obedient majority’.
A century and a half earlier the great Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov had been
sent into exile. On his departure he said: ‘Goodbye unwashed Russia, the land
of slaves and masters, and goodbye to you, blue uniforms, and to you, obedient
to them people’. In Pushkin’s time some 90 percent of the Russian population
were enslaved serfs and the ‘blue uniforms’ were officers of the Separate Corps
of Gendarmes, the secret police. ‘Blue uniforms’ reach deep into Russian
history, pointing to a continuity that
could be traced back to oprichniki
(separate corps), actually palace guards, recruited mostly from criminals who
terrorized the country during the reign of Ivan Grozny, murdering anyone whom
his deranged mind perceived as enemies. The Separate Corps of Gendarmes was the
backbone of the Okhrana, the Russian secret police at the turn of the twentieth
century. This period became known in history as Zubatovshchina, after a
practice of using Okhrana agent provocateurs to dominate the political
life of the country, introduced by the Moscow Okhrana chief Zubatov, also known
as ‘Police Socialism’.
Stalin was a creature of
the Okhrana. His secret police under its various names was an enormously
magnified Okhrana. This has been Stalin’s most enduring legacy and is the
essence of this book, which tells a largely unknown story. People who do not
know history are doomed to repeat it. It will take generations to overcome habits
of thought formed during Stalin’s long and brutal rule. By the law of nature,
nations and individuals can find happiness only in freedom, and no nation can
be free if it continues to suppress its own and other peoples. The struggle for
a free Russia goes on.
NOTES
1.
‘Yeltsin, in Reversal,
Will Attend Rite for Czar and Family’, The New York Times, 17 July 1998,
p. A–3.
2.
New York Post, 11
February 2000, p. 26.
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Mikhailiv, V. and V.Bondarenko. ‘Zhizn’ i smert’
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Moroz, P. ‘Gorky v SSSR. Vstrechi s Gorkim’, Sotsialisticheskii
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gazeta, 24 and 28 May, 17, 20, and 22 June
1917.
In the Nikolaevsky Collection
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Nikolashvili, N. ‘Stikhi yunnogo Stalina’, Zaria
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——‘Noveishaya fabrikatsiya istorii KPSS’, Novoe
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——‘Natsionalnyi vopros i sotsial-democratiya’, Prosveshchenie,
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——‘Nazvat poimenno’, Novoe russkoe slovo, 24
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——‘Taina oktiabria 1941-go’, Literaturnaya gazeta,
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29 April 1988.
Volkogonov, D. ‘Demon revolutsii’, Pravda, 9
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Yaroslavsky, E. ‘Vazhneishie vekhi zhizni i
deyatelnosti tovarishcha Stalina’, V pomoshch’ marksistsko-leninskomu obrazovaniu,
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Zaslavsky, D. ‘Zametki chitatelia’, Pravda, 20
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Zhilinsky, V. ‘Organizatsiya i zhizn’ okhrannogo
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Zhirnov, Evgeny ‘K.Kuzakov—syn I.V.Stalina’, Argumenty
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Zhukov, Y. ‘Gori-Tbilisi’, Novy mir, no. 12,
1939.
NON-ENGLISH-LANGUAGE
PERIODICALS
‘Bolsheviki i departament politsii’, Russkoe slovo,
19 May 1917.
‘Delo Malinovskogo i. dr.’, Rabochaya gazeta,
no. 62, 21 May 1917.
‘Delo passrela shesti studentov’, Novy den’,
no. 20, 17/4 April 1918.
Dlia Vas, no. 48, Harbin, China, 27
November 1938.
‘Epoka reaktsii (1908–1910)’, Krasny arkhiv,
no. 1(16), 1934.
‘Iz istorii prazhskoi konferentsii’, Krasny arkhiv,
no. 6(97), 1938.
‘Iz otcheta o perlustratsii departamenta politsii za
1908 g.’, Krasny arkhiv, no. 2(27), 1928.
‘Iz proshlogo: stat’i i vospominaniya iz istorii
bakinskoi organizatsii i rabochego dvizheniya v Baku’, Bakinskii proletarii,
1923.
‘Iz vospominanii russkogo uchitelia pravoslavnoi
gruzinskoi dukhovnoi seminarii’, Russkaya pechatnia, 1907.
‘K delu Malinovskogo’, Vestnik vremennogo
pravitelstva, 22 June 1917.
‘Kak departament politsii otpustil Lenina zagranitsu
dlia bolshevitskoi propagandy’, Byloe, vol. II, 1926.
‘Kakie bolezni prepiatstvuyut postupleniyu na voennuyu
sluzhbu’, Moskovskoe izd., Moscow, 1915.
‘Neopublikovannye materialy iz biografii tovarishcha
Stalina’, Antireligioznik, no. 12, 1939.
‘Novye dannye ob ubiistve Lado Ketskhoveli’, Krasnyi
arkhiv, no. 6, (91), 1938.
‘Provokatory’, Russkoe slovo, 15 April 1917.
‘Shkola filerov’, Byloe, no. 3(25), 1917.
‘V komissii Politburo TK KPSS’, Izvestia
TK KPSS, January 1989, Protocol no. 7, 29 December 1988.
ENGLISH-LANGUAGE
PERIODICALS
Aronson, Grigory. ‘Was Stalin a Tsarist Agent?’,
review of ‘Stalin’s Great Secret’ by I.D.Levine, The New Leader,
20 August 1956.
Bloom, Solomon F. Commentary, May 1957.
Coox, Alvin D. ‘L’Affaire Liushkov’, Soviet
Studies, January 1968.
‘Czarist Spy Named Stalin, A.’ Newsweek, 7 November
1966.
Dunning, Jennifer. ‘Alexsey Kapler’, The New York
Times, 15 September 1979.
Duranty, W. ‘Stalin: Man, Mouthpiece, Machine’, The
New York Times Magazine, 18 January 1931.
Hansen, Joseph. ‘With Trotsky to the End’, Paris,
October 1940.
Horwitz, L. ‘Lenin and the Search for Jewish Roots’, The
New York Times, 5 August 1992.
Kamm, Henry. ‘Inquiry on Jan Masaryk’s Death’, The
New York Times, 3 April 1968.
Kennan, George F. Review of The Young Stalin: the
Early Years of an Elusive Revolutionary, by Edward Ellis Smith, American
Historical Review, October 1968.
——‘The Historiography of the Early Political Career of
Stalin’. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 115,
no. 3, June 1971.
Kernberg, Otto. ‘Structural Derivatives of Objective
Relationships’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 47, 1966.
Khrushchev, N.S. ‘Special Report to the Twentieth
Party Congress’, The New York Times, 5 June 1956.
Knickerbocker, H.R. ‘Stalin, Mystery Man Even to His
Mother’, New York Evening Post, 1 December 1930.
Knight, Amy. ‘Beria, the Reformer’, The New York
Times, 3 November 1993.
Lee, Russel V. ‘When Insanity Holds the Specter’, The
New York Times, 12 April 1974.
Levine, I.D. ‘A Document on Stalin as Czarist Spy’, Life,
23 April 1956.
——‘Stalin Suspected of Forcing Trials to Cover His
Past’, Journal American, 3 March 1938.
Medvedev, Felix. Soviet Media Digest, 8
December 1987.
Nikolayevsky, Boris. ‘The Strange
Death of Mikhail Ryumin’, The New Leader, 4 October 1954,
pp. 15–18.
Orlov, Alexander. ‘The Sensational Secret Behind
Damnation of Stalin’, Life, 23 April 1956.
Schmeman, Serge. ‘Soviet Archives’, The New York
Times, 8 February 1993.
Schwartz, Stephen. ‘Intellectuals and
Assassins—Annals of Stalin’s Killerati’, The New York Times Book Review,
24 January 1988.
Slusser, Robert M. ‘On the Question
of Stalin’s Role in the Bolshevik Revolution’, Canadian Slavonic Papers,
vol. XIX, no. 4, December 1978.
Speer, Albert. ‘Nazi Invasion of
Poland—September 1 1939’, The New York Times, 31 August 1979.
Sulzberger, C.L. ‘Foreign Affairs: Murder will Out’, The
New York Times, 17 April 1968.
Vaksberg, Arkady. ‘The Grand Inquisitor’s Right-Hand
Man’, Literary Gazette International, Moscow-Washington, vol. I, no. 5,
April 1990.
PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED REFERENCE
MATERIALS
Agursky, M. ‘My Father and the Great Terror’. A letter
dated 15 June 1975.
Arkhivnye materialy o deyatelnosti I.V.Stalina,
1908–1913 gg. Krasny arkhiv, No. 2, 1934.
Avlabarskaya nelegalnaya tipografiya kavkazskogo
soyuznogo komiteta RSDRP (1903–1906 gg.); Sbornik materialov i documentov.
Tbilisi, 1954.
Bagratuni, Rafael, handwritten letter, dated 8 May
1967. In I.D.Levine’s archive; copy in the author’s archive.
Batumskaya demonstratsiya 1902-go goda.
Moscow, 1937.
Biro-Bidzhanskii raion Dalne-Vostochnogo kraya,
Komitet po zemelnomu ustroistvy trudiashchikhsia evreev, 2
vols. Moscow, 1928–30.
Biulleten oppositsii,
ed. Lev Trotsky. New York.
Bolsheviki. Documenty po istorii bolshevizma s 1903 po
1916 gody byvshego moskovskogo okhrannogo otdeleniya,
ed. M.A.Tsiavlovsky, Zadruga. Moscow, 1918.
Brakhtman, Ya.I. An award citation to labor camp
prisoner Ya.I.Brakhtman (the author’s father) on the occasion of the
Moscow-Volga Canal completion, dated 11 June 1937 and signed by the chief of
the Gulag, Zinovy Katznelson. In the author’s archive.
Bukharin Trial: The Great Purge Trial,
ed. Robert C.Tucker and Stephen F.Cohen. New York, 1965. Referred to as
‘Bukharin Trial’.
‘Chrezvychainoe sobranie upolnomochennykh fabrik i
zavodov, Petrograd’. A leaflet published in Kontinent, no. 2, 1975, back
cover.
‘Chetvertyi (obyedinitelnyi) syezd RSDRP, April 1906
goda: protokoly’. Moscow, 1959.
Delo provokatora Malinovskogo.
Moscow, 1992.
Dnevnik Imperatora Nikolaya II.
Berlin, 1923.
Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945,
series D, vols VIII–XII. Washington and London, 1954–62.
Documents on International Affairs, 1928–1963,
London, 1929–1973, Annual Record of Royal Institute of International Affairs,
1938, vol. I, 1939–1946.
Dvadtsat’ piat’ let bakinskoi organizatsii
bolshevikov. Baku, 1924.
Eighteenth Congress of the Communist Party, The.
Moscow, 1939.
Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’. St
Petersburg, 1893–1906.
Evreiskaya entsiklopediya
(Jewish Encyclopedia in Russian) 16 vols. St Petersburg, 1913.
Golovachev, M.P. Collection in the Bakhmetiev Archive
at Columbia University’s Library of Rare Manuscripts.
Gruzia v datakh,
‘Khronika vazhneishikh politicheskikh, ekonomicheskikh i kulturnykh sobytii’.
1961.
History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
(Bolsheviks) Short Course, New York, 1939. International
Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol. XXXVII,
Nuremberg, 1947.
Iz istorii vserossiiskoi chrezvychainioi komissii
1917–1921 gg., Sbornik Dokumentov, Moscow, 1958.
‘J.’ A confidential letter to I.D.Levine, dated 17
July 1956, from an unidentified high State Department official who signed his
letter ‘J’, describing two secret cables, dated 26 November 1941 and 5 January
1942, that had been sent from the German mission in Shanghai to the Foreign
Ministry in Berlin concerning Golovachev’s proposed sale of the ‘Eremin Letter’
(forgery). The cables were found in File AA/18 at the Alexandria Repository of
captured German documents. ‘J’ letter contains a reference to Gustav Hilger’s
verbal statement that the German Foreign Ministry did not follow up on
Golovachev’s proposal because of the difficulty during the war of obtaining the
documents and putting them through the customary external tests.
Jerusalem University Collection of Documents on Soviet
Jews, ed. I.Frankel, Jerusalem, 1965.
Levine, I.D. Typewritten statement ‘The Perjury Record
of the Daily Worker’s Distinguished Scientist—the Man who Built the Hiss
Typewriter’, 20 January 1958, Waldorf, MD.
——Letter to author, dated 9 July 1974, referring to
the visit to New York of Eremin’s daughters.
——Letter to author, dated 7 August 1976, with the
reference to the 1926 report from Moscow to Sotsialisticheskii vestnik
about a discovery of Stalin’s Okhrana file. In the author archive. The
1926 Moscow report about the
discovery of Stalin’s Okhrana file is in David Shub’s archive, deposited with
Gene Sosin, an official of Radio Liberty in New York.
——‘Stalin Was a Tsarist Agent’.
Unpublished typewritten article for The New Leader, 1956. In
I.D.Levine’s and the author’s archives.
Londonskii syezd
rossiiskoi sotsial-democraticheskoy rabochei partii (1907 g),
Paris, 1909.
Malaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya,
Moscow, 1st ed., 1930–1931; 2nd ed., 1933–1947; 3rd ed., 1958–61.
Martynov, A.P. ‘My Service in the Separate Corps of
Gendarmes, 1898–1917’, manuscript on file at the Hoover Institution.
Nazi-Soviet Relations 1939–1941, Documents from the
Archives of the German Foreign Office, ed. Raymond J.Sonntag and James
S.Beddie, Washington, 1948.
Nikolaevsky Collection at
the Hoover Institution on War and Peace, Stanford University. Contains valuable
clippings from newspapers of the Revolutionary period available nowhere else.
Not Guilty
(Report of the John Dewey Commission), New York, 1937.
Okhrana Archive at
the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. This is the Okhrana Foreign Agency
Paris archive from the Russian Imperial Embassy in Paris brought to the United
States by the Russian ambassador of the Provisional Government, V.Maklakov.
Orlov, Boris, ‘Fania Kaplan’.
Research paper at Jerusalem University.
‘Osnovnye vekhi zhizni i deyatelnosti
I.V.Stalina’, Propaganda i agitatsiya, no. 23, 1939.
‘Ot ministerstva yustitsii’, Vestnik
vremennogo pravitelstva, 16 June 1917.
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima
(Stenograficheskie otchety doprosov i pokazanii, dannykh v 1917 g. v
Chrezvychainoy Sledstvennoy Komissii Vremennogo Pravitelstva) ed. by
P.E.Shchegolev, 7 vols, Moscow/Leningrad, 1925.
Piatakov Trial.
‘Report of the Court Proceedings: The Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite
Center’, English edn, Moscow, 1936. Referred to as ‘Piatakov Trial’.
Pis’ma P.B.Akselroda i
Yu.O.Martova 1902–1916, Berlin, 1924.
Proletarskii prigovor nad
vrediteliami-interventami, record of court
proceedings, Moscow, 1930.
Radio Libery Archive, Washington DC,
and Prague, Czechoslovakia.
Rybin, A.T. (recollections of Stalin’s bodyguard),
‘Vremia, Idei, Sudby’, Sotsialisticheskie issledovaniya, no. 3, 1988.
Sacardy, Paul. ‘Lenin’s Deputy: The Story of a Double
Agent.’ Manuscript on R. Malinovsky, dated October 1967, on file at Radio
Liberty Committee Research Library. Copy in the author’s archive.
Sarkisov, A. ‘Sud’ba Marshala’, Kommunist,
no. 147, 22 June 1988.
Senate Internal Security
Subcommittee Report, dated 10 January 1958, of hearings
held on 8
February, 7 June, and 1 October 1957,
designated part 66, exposing Martin K. Tytell as perjurer.
Shaginian, Margorita. On Lenin’s
Jewish grandfather, in Radio Liberty Committee broadcast from New York on
Program no. 103/72.
Shumsky, S. Manuscript in Nikolaevsky
Collection, file 132, box 4, no. 27. Relates Beletsky’s testimony before the
Muraviev Commission in 1917 about the Rozmirovich provocations.
Slusser, Robert M. ‘Lenin’s Deal with
Stalin, April 1917’. Lecture at Yale University on 26 January 1978.
Smith, Edward Ellis. Letter to the
author, dated 19 August 1974.
Spiridovich, General Alexander.
Letter to I.D.Levine, dated 19 July 1949.
Spiridovich, General Alexander.
Letter to Vadim Makarov, dated 13 January 1950. Russian original text and
English translation in the author’s archive.
‘Spisok obschego sostava chinov
otdelnogo korpusa zhandarmov’, 1911.
Tytell, Martin. ‘Exposing a
Documentary Hoax’, Paper presented to the American Association for the
Advancement of Science’, 29 December 1956. Copy in Levine’s and the author’s
archives.
Uratadze, G.I. ‘Moi vospominaniya’.
Manuscript on file at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
‘V komissii Politburo TK KPSS’, Izvestia TK KPSS,
January, 1989. Protokol no. 7, 29 December 1988.
Veselago, N.V. Former Okhrana officer and a relative
of S.P.Beletsky, director of the Department of Police 1909–12), Veselago’s
letter to I.D.Levine, dated 25 June 1956, with his analysis of the Eremin
Letter forgery. Copies in Levine’s and the author’s archives.
——‘The Department of Police, 1911–1913’. From the
recollections of Nikolay Vladimirovich
Veselago, unpublished taped interview with Edward
Ellis Smith, on file at the Hoover Institution (Ms. HV 8225/S646). Copies in
Smith’s and the author’s archives.
Zinoviev Trial.
‘Report of Court Proceedings: the Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist
Center’, English edn, Moscow, 1936. Referred to as ‘Zinoviev Trial’.
INTERVIEWS
Agursky, Melik. Historian. Jerusalem, 1975.
Avigur, Saul. Head of the Russian Desk in the Israeli
Intelligence. 1969.
Ben-Gurion, David. Prime Minister of Israel.
Sde-Boker, 24 April 1969 and Tel-Aviv, 3 May 1969.
Berger, Iosif. Israel, 1969.
Chaplia, Alexander. Former Soviet officer and Gulag
inmate related his recollections about the ‘General Dubrovsky case’, of which
he had been one of the defendants. Miami, 1 June 1974.
Cohen, Aaron. Member of Mapam, arrested as a Soviet
agent. Haifa, 1969.
Drapkina, Sara. Story on Poskrebyshev and Itskov,
Tel-Aviv, 18 August 1975.
Fedoseev, Victor. Telephone interview from London, 16
June 1971.
Finegold, Nathan. Dissident, present at Stalin’s
funeral procession. New York, Hotel Tudor, 13 June 1974.
Gerbov, Tikhon Vasilievich. Tsarist army general.
Testimony on Golovachev, Nayak, New York, February 14 1975.
Glick, Anna and Boris. New York City, 1967
Guriel, Boris. Head of the Weizman Archive. Tel-Aviv,
1969.
Gutkin, Vladimir. New York City, 1993.
Itskov, I.P. New York, 1989.
Kalik, Mikhail. Former Soviet movie director and Gulag
inmate who is presently in Israel. 1971.
Kennan, George. Interview in his office at the
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, May 1979.
Kogan, Yura. Son of an executed high official in
Minsk, on arrest of a general with a copy of the Eremin report. Mikhail Meerson
taped this interview in Jerusalem, 1978.
Krotkov, Yury. New York City, 1972.
Levine, I.D. Chappaqua, New York, 19 June 1976.
Lifshitz, David. Head of Israeli bank. Tel-Aviv, 1969.
Litvinov, Pavel. Grandson of Maxim Litvinov.
Chappaqua, New York, 1975.
Marshak, Beni. Former Political ‘commissar’ of
Palmakh. Israel, 6 July 1969.
Meerson-Aksenov, Mikhail. New York City, 1969.
Mikunis, Samuel. Israeli M.P. and the leader of the
Israeli Communist Party. Jerusalem, 12 May 1969.
Oren, Mordekhai. Member of Mapam, arrested in 1951 as
defendant in Slansky trial. Israel, 1969.
Osinina, Rosa Solomonovna. Vitaly Svechinsky’s aunt
and the widow of the high-ranking NKVD officer Grigory Osinin-Vinnitsky and
herself a secretary of NKVD chiefs Balitsky and Katznelson. Haifa, 18 August
1975.
Rodovsky, Alexander. Haifa, Israel, 1990.
Rodovsky, Natalia and Alexander. Haifa, Israel, 1979.
Rudich, Vasily. Yale University
lecturer. Several taped interviews, starting 15 September 1975 at Brookline,
MA, and ending in 1979 in Chappaqua, New York.
Selman, Abraham. Tel-Aviv, Israel, 1969.
Semenov, Yulian. Soviet writer. 1968 and 1988.
Sevela, Efim. Soviet movie director
and writer, on Stalin’s role in several movies. Chappaqua, 30 November 1974, 13
December 1975 and 15 February 1976.
Sharia, Nugzar. Honorary Actor of the
Georgian SSR, presently at Radio Liberty Georgian Desk in Munich. A nephew of
Stalin’s assistant Peter Sharia. Sag Harbor, July 1971 to August 1973.
Shatunovskaya, Lidia, a Kremlin
insider and Gulag inmate, and Tumerman, Lev. Weizman Institute, Rehavot,
Israel, 18 August 1975.
Shatunovskaya, Olga. An Old
Bolshevik. Unpublished memoirs related in taped interviews with V.Rudich and
A.Tamarchenko.
Shmulevich, Matetiahu. Lehi terrorist. Yaffa, 1969.
Shragin, Boris. Leading dissident. Chappaqua, New
York, 11 November 1979.
Spivakovsky, Efim. Dissident and former Gulag inmate.
On the ‘Kremlin Doctors’ case, Chappaqua, 5 May 1974.
Svechinsky, Vitaly. Former Gulag inmate and author’s
co-defendant. Haifa and New York, 1971.
Svetlov, Felix. New York City, 1990 and 1991.
Tornopoler, Samuel. Editor of Al-Hamishmar.
Tel-Aviv, Israel, February 1969.
Tumerman, Alexey. Son of Lidia and Alexander Tumerman,
co-defendants in 1947–53 ‘Zionist
Plot’ case. Chappaqua, 5 October 1974.
Ulanovskaya, Maya. Daughter of Soviet
intelligence officer. On Soviet intelligence in the USA in the 1930s and on the
Alger Hiss-Chambers story. Jerusalem, 20 February 1979.
Vinkovetsky, Yakov and Diana. Chappaqua, 1975.
Volkovich, Samuel. Polish officer sent to Palestine in
1942. Tel-Aviv, Israel, 1969.
Yanai, Yakov. Israeli diplomat. Tel-Aviv, Israel,
1971.
Zubok, Boris. On barracks for Jews in Novaya Zemlia.
Chappaqua, New York 1 March 1975.
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