strong” and sending some presents: a headdress, a jacket and some medicine.14
Back in Moscow,[88] Stalin decided to reopen and expand the Kirov Case that had subsided with the shooting of Nikolaev and sentencing of Zinoviev and Kamenev in early 1935. Now the two Old Bolsheviks were reinterrogated and the net of arrests was spread wider. Then a former associate of Trotsky’s named Valentin Olberg was arrested by the NKVD in Gorky. His interrogation “established” that Trotsky was also involved in the murder of Kirov. More arrests followed.15
16. TAKE YOUR PARTNERS; MOUNT YOUR PRISONERS
Oblivious of these lengthening shadows, Stalin’s birthday party, attended by the magnates, Beria and the family, was “noisy and cheerful.” Voroshilov was resplendent in his new white Marshal’s uniform while his dowdy wife stared jealously at Maria Svanidze’s dress from Berlin. After dinner, there were songs and dancing like old times: with Zhdanov on harmonies, they sang Abkhazian, Ukrainian, student and comic songs. Stalin decided to order a piano so Zhdanov could play. Amid general hilarity, Postyshev, one of the Ukrainian bosses, slow-danced with Molotov—and “this couple very much amused Joseph and all the guests.” Here was the first example of the notorious stag slow dancing that was to become more forced after the war.
Stalin took over the gramophone and even did some Russian dancing. Mikoyan performed his leaping
In the spring of 1936, the arrests of old Trotskyites spread further and those already in camps were resentenced. Those convicted of “terror” offences were to be shot. But the real work was the creation of a new sort of political show: the first of Stalin’s great trials. Yezhov was the supervisor of this case—this hopeful theoretician was even writing a book about the Zinovievites, corrected personally by Stalin.2 Yagoda, Commissar-General of State Security, who was sceptical about this “nonsense,” remained in charge but Yezhov constantly undermined him. This process exhausted frail Yezhov. Soon he was once again so debilitated that Kaganovich suggested, and Stalin approved, that he be sent on another special holiday for two months with a further 3,000 roubles.3
The chief defendants were to be Zinoviev and Kamenev. Their old friends were arrested to help persuade them to perform. Stalin followed every detail of the interrogations. The NKVD interrogators were to devote themselves body and soul to achieving the confessions. Stalin’s instructions to the NKVD were suggestive of this terrible process: “Mount your prisoner and do not dismount until they have confessed.”
The NKVD defector Alexander Orlov left the best account of how Yezhov rigged up this trial, promising the “witnesses” their lives in return for testifying against Zinoviev and Kamenev who refused to cooperate. Stalin’s office phoned hourly for news.
“You think Kamenev may not confess?” Stalin asked Mironov, one of Yagoda’s Chekists.
“I don’t know,” replied Mironov.
“You don’t know?” said Stalin. “Do you know how much our State weighs with all the factories, machines, the army with all the armaments and the navy?” Mironov thought he was joking but Stalin was not smiling. “Think it over and tell me?” Stalin kept staring at him.
“Nobody can know that, Joseph Vissarionovich; it is the realm of astronomical figures.”
“Well, and can one man withstand the pressure of that astronomical weight?”
“No,” replied Mironov.
“Well then… Don’t come to report to me until you have in this briefcase the confession of Kamenev.” Even though they were not physically tortured, the regime of threats and sleeplessness demoralized Zinoviev, suffering from asthma, and Kamenev. The heating was turned up in their cells in midsummer. Yezhov threatened that Kamenev’s son would be shot. 4
While the interrogators worked on Zinoviev and Kamenev, Maxim Gorky was dying of influenza and bronchial pneumonia. The old writer was now thoroughly disillusioned. The dangers of his Chekist companions became obvious when Gorky’s son Maxim died mysteriously of influenza. Later, Yagoda would be accused, with the family doctors, of killing him. After his death, Maxim’s daughter Martha remembers how Yagoda would visit the Gorky household every morning for a cup of coffee and a flirtation with her mother, on his way to the Lubianka: “he was in love with Timosha and wanted her to return his affection,” said Alexei Tolstoy’s wife.
“You still don’t know me, I can do anything,” he threatened the distraught Timosha: the writer Alexander Tikhonov claimed they began an affair; her daughter denies it. When Stalin visited, Yagoda lingered, still in love with Timosha and increasingly worried about himself. After the Politburo had left, he asked Gorky’s secretary: “Did they come? They’ve left now? What did they talk about?… Did they say anything about us…?” 5
Stalin had asked Gorky to write his biography, but the novelist recoiled from the task. Instead he bombarded Stalin and the Politburo with crazy proposals such as a project to commission Socialist Realist writers to “rewrite the world’s books anew.” Stalin’s apologies for late replies became ever more extreme: “I’m as lazy as a pig on things marked ‘correspondence,’” confessed Stalin to Gorky. “How do you feel? Healthy? How’s your work? Me and my friends are fine.” The NKVD actually printed false issues of
In the first week of June, Gorky slept much of the days as his condition worsened. He was supervised by the best doctors but he was failing.
“Let them come if they can get here in time,” said Gorky. Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov were pleased to see that he had recovered—after a camphor injection. Stalin took control of the sickroom: “Why are there so many people here?” he asked. “Who’s that sitting beside Alexei Maximovich dressed in black? A nun, is she? All she lacks is a candle in her hands.” This was Baroness Moura Budberg, the mistress Gorky shared with H. G. Wells. “Get them all out of here except for that woman, the one in white, who’s looking after him… Why’s there such a funereal mood here? A healthy person might die in such an atmosphere.” Stalin stopped Gorky discussing literature but called for wine and they toasted him and then embraced.
Days later, Stalin arrived only to be told that Gorky was too ill to see him: “Alexei Mikhailovich, we visited you at two in the morning,” he wrote. “Your pulse was they say 82. The doctors did not allow us to come in to you. We submitted. Hello from all of us, a big hello. Stalin.” Molotov and Voroshilov signed underneath.
Gorky started to spit blood and died on 18 June, of TB, pneumonia and heart failure. Later it was claimed that his doctors and Yagoda had murdered him deliberately: they certainly confessed to his murder. His death was convenient before Zinoviev’s trial but his medical records in the NKVD archives suggest that he died naturally.6
Yagoda was skulking in the dining room at Gorky’s house but Stalin had already turned against him. “And what’s that creature hanging around here for? Get rid of him.”7
Finally in July, Zinoviev asked to be able to talk to Kamenev on his own. Then they demanded to speak to the Politburo: if the Party would guarantee there would be no executions, they would confess. Voroshilov was itching to get at the “scum”: when he received some of the testimonies against them, he wrote to Stalin that “these bad people… all typical representatives of
Yagoda accompanied these two broken men on the short drive from the Lubianka to the Kremlin, where they had both once lived. When they arrived in the room where Kamenev had chaired so many Politburo meetings, they discovered that only Stalin, Voroshilov and Yezhov were present. Where was the rest of the Politburo?
