Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

with Yezhov and Vyshinsky, he was amazed to encounter his childhood friend Grigory Sokolnikov, a venerable Old Bolshevik, who was delivered to the room by the NKVD. The “confrontation” was one of Stalin’s bizarre rituals in which, like an exorcism, Good was meant to confront and vanquish Evil. They were presumably designed to terrify the accused but also, and this may have been their main function, to convince the presiding Politburo members of the victim’s guilt. Kaganovich played impartial observer while Sokolnikov declared there was a Left-Right Centre, involving Bukharin, which was planning the murder of Stalin.

“Can you have lost your reason and not be responsible for your own words?” Bukharin “turned on the tears.” When the prisoner was led out, Kaganovich boomed: “He’s lying, the whore, from beginning to end! Go back to the newspaper, Nikolai Ivanovich, and work in peace.”

“But why is he lying, Lazar Moisevich?”

“We’ll find out,” replied an unconvinced Kaganovich who still “adored” Bukharin but told Stalin his “role will yet be uncovered.” Stalin’s antennae sensed that the time was not right: on 10 September, Vyshinsky announced that the investigation against Bukharin and Rykov had been closed due to lack of criminal culpability. Bukharin returned to work, safe again, while the investigators moved on to their next trial—but the cat did not stop caressing the mouse.⁴

* * *

Stalin remained on holiday, directing a series of parallel tragedies in his escalating campaign to eliminate his enemies while devoting much of his energy to the Spanish Civil War. On 15 October, Soviet tanks, planes and “advisers” started arriving in Spain to support the Republican government against General Francisco Franco, backed by Hitler and Mussolini. Stalin treated this less as a rehearsal for World War II and more as a replay of his own Civil War. The internecine struggle with the Trotskyites on his own side and the Fascists on the other created a war fever in Moscow, stoking up the Terror. Stalin’s real interest was to keep the war going as long as possible, embroiling Hitler without offending the Western powers, rather than helping the Republicans win. Furthermore, like an accomplished “barrow boy,” Stalin systematically swindled the Spanish of several hundred million dollars by rescuing their gold reserves and then tricking them into paying inflated prices for their arms.[96]

Gradually, instructing Voroshilov in military, Kaganovich in political, and Yezhov in security matters by telephone from Sochi, he presided over the effective NKVD takeover of the Republic itself, where he found himself in a genuine struggle with the Trotskyites. He set about the liquidation of Trotskyites along with his own men. The Soviet diplomats, journalists and soldiers serving in Spain spent as much time denouncing one another as fighting the Fascists.

After a short stay at the new little dacha built for him by Lakoba at Novy Afon (New Athos),[97] to the south in Abkhazia right beside Alexander III’s monastery, Stalin returned to Sochi where he was joined by Zhdanov and President Kalinin. Yezhov was expanding the lists of suspects to include the whole of the old oppositions but also entire nationalities, particularly the Poles. Simultaneously he was pushing for the role of NKVD chief, attacking Yagoda for “complacency, passivity, and bragging,” in a letter that may have been sent to Stalin in a shameless job application: “Without your intervention, things will come to no good.” Meanwhile Yagoda bugged Yezhov’s calls to Stalin, learning that Blackberry had been summoned to Sochi. Yagoda left immediately for Sochi, but when he arrived, Pauker turned him back from the gates of Stalin’s dacha.

On 25 September, Stalin, backed by Zhdanov, decided to remove Yagoda and promote Yezhov: “We consider it absolutely necessary and urgent to appoint Comrade Yezhov to the post of People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs. Yagoda is not up to the task of exposing the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Bloc… Stalin, Zhdanov.”⁵

Sergo visited the dacha to discuss Yezhov’s appointment and his own battles with the NKVD. Stalin felt he needed to win over Sergo to Yezhov’s appointment, even though Blackberry and his wife were family friends of Sergo. “This remarkably wise decision by our father suits the attitude of the Party and country,” Kaganovich wrote cheerfully to Sergo after he had sacked Yagoda and appointed him to Rykov’s job as Communications Commissar.

There was relief at Yezhov’s appointment: many, including Bukharin, regarded it as the end of the Terror, not the beginning, but Kaganovich knew his protege better: he praised Yezhov’s “superb… interrogations” to Stalin, suggesting his promotion to Commissar-General. “Comrade Yezhov is handling things well,” Kaganovich told Sergo. “He’s dispensed with the bandits of the counter-revolutionary Trotskyites in Bolshevik style.” The dwarfish Blackberry was now the second most powerful man in the USSR.⁶

Stalin was deeply dissatisfied with the “sickness” inside the NKVD, which he rightly regarded as the ultimate Bolshevik old-boy network, filled with dubious Poles, Jews and Letts. He needed an outsider to get control of this self-satisfied elite and make it his own. There is evidence that during the thirties, he discussed appointing both Kaganovich and Mikoyan to run the NKVD and he had recently offered the job to Lakoba.[98]

Lakoba refused to move to Moscow from his paradisaical fiefdom. Loyal as he was to Stalin, Lakoba was better suited to playing the magnanimous host in the resorts of Abkhazia than torturing innocents in the cellars of the Lubianka. But his refusal drew attention to the rule of Lakoba’s clan in Abkhazia, known as “Lakobistan,” which he wanted to be made into a full Soviet republic, a dangerous idea in the fragile multinational USSR. There was no greater “prince” than Lakoba. Stalin had already banned the use of Abkhazian names in Lakoba’s fiefdom and foiled his plan to raise Abkhazia’s constitutional status.

On 31 October, Stalin returned to Moscow where he dined with Lakoba. All seemed well. But it was not. When Lakoba returned to Abkhazia, Beria invited him to dinner in Tiflis. Lakoba refused until Beria’s mother telephoned to insist. They dined on 27 December and then went to the theatre where Lakoba was overcome with nausea. Returning to his hotel, he sat by the window groaning, “That snake Beria has killed me.” At 4:20 a.m., Lakoba died of a “heart attack,” aged forty-three. Beria saw off the coffin on its way back by train to Sukhumi. Lakoba’s doctors were convinced he had been poisoned but Beria had the organs removed, later exhuming and destroying the cadaver. Lakoba’s family were also killed. He was denounced as an Enemy of the People.

Lakoba was the first of Stalin’s circle to be killed. “Poison, poison,” as Stalin wrote. He had given Beria carte blanche to settle scores in the Caucasus. In Armenia, Beria had earlier visited the First Secretary, Aghasi Khanchian, who had either killed himself or been murdered. Across the Imperium, the regions began to expose conspiracies of “wreckers”[99] to justify the inefficiencies and corruption. The clock was ticking towards war with Hitler’s Germany. But as tension was mounting with aggressive Japan in the Far East, and Soviet “advisers” fought in Spain, the USSR was already at war.⁷

* * *

Shortly before Lakoba’s sinister death, Beria arrested Papulia Ordzhonikidze, Sergo’s elder brother, a railway official. Beria knew that his former patron, Sergo, had warned Stalin that he was a “scoundrel.” Sergo refused to shake hands with Beria and built a special fence between their dachas.

Beria’s vengeance was just one of the ways in which Stalin began to turn the heat on to the emotional Sergo, the industrial magnifico who supported the regime’s draconian policies but resisted the arrest of his own managers. The star of the next show trial was to be Sergo’s Deputy Commissar, Yury Pyatakov, an ex-Trotskyite and skilled manager. The two men were fond of one another and enjoyed working together.

In July, Pyatakov’s wife had been arrested for her links to Trotsky. Shortly before the Zinoviev trial, Yezhov summoned Pyatakov, read him all the affidavits implicating him in Trotskyite terrorism and informed him that he was relieved of his job as Deputy Commissar. Pyatakov offered to prove his innocence by asking to be “personally allowed to shoot all those sentenced to death at the trial, including his former wife, and to publish this in the press.” As a Bolshevik, he was willing even to execute his own wife.

“I pointed out to him the absurdity of his proposal,” Yezhov reported drily to Stalin. On 12 September, Pyatakov was arrested. Sergo, recuperating in Kislovodsk, voted for his expulsion from the Central Committee but he must have been deeply worried. A shadow of his former self, grey and exhausted, he was so ill that the Politburo restricted him to a three-day week. Now the NKVD began to arrest his specialist non-Bolshevik advisers and he appealed to Blackberry: “Comrade Yezhov, please look into this.” He was not alone. Kaganovich and Sergo, those “best friends,” not only shared the same swaggering dynamism but both headed giant industrial commissariats. Kaganovich’s railway experts were being arrested too. Meanwhile Stalin sent Sergo transcripts of Pyatakov’s