dangers of the Spanish Civil War, the inexplicable industrial failures caused by Soviet incompetence, and the resistance of the regional “princes,” into a web of conspiracies that dovetailed with the paranoic soul and glorious, nostalgic brutality of the Russian Civil War, and the personal feuds of the Bolsheviks. Stalin was particularly suspicious of the infiltration of spies across the porous border with Poland, traditional enemy of Russia’s western marches that had defeated Russia (and Stalin personally) in 1920.[101] At the Plenum, Khrushchev was denounced as a secret “Pole.” Chatting in the corridor to his friend Yezhov, Stalin walked over, pushing a finger into Khrushchev’s shoulder: “What’s your name?”
“Comrade Stalin, it’s Khrushchev.”
“No you’re not Khrushchev… So-and-so says you’re not.”
“How can you believe that? My mother’s still alive… Check.” Stalin cited Yezhov who denied it. Stalin let it pass but he was checking those around him.
Stalin was finally determined to bring the regional “princes” to heel: Ukraine was a special case, the grain store, the second republic with a strong sense of its own culture. Kosior and Chubar had demonstrated their weakness during the famine while the Second Secretary, Postyshev, behaved like a “prince” with his own entourage. On 13 January, Stalin struck with a telegram attacking Postyshev, for lacking the “most basic Party vigilance.” Kaganovich, already the scourge of the Ukraine which he had governed in the late twenties, descended on Kiev, where he soon managed to find a “little person” crushed by the local “prince.” A half-mad crone and Party busybody named Polia Nikolaenko had criticized Postyshev and his wife, also a high official. Mrs. Postyshev expelled the troublesome Nikolaenko from the Party. When Kaganovich informed Stalin of this “heroic denunciatrix,” he immediately grasped her usefulness.16
On 21 December, the family and magnates danced until dawn at Stalin’s birthday party. But the struggles and conspiracies took their toll on the actor-manager: Stalin often suffered from chronic tonsillitis when under pressure. Professor Valedinsky, the specialist from the Matsesta Baths, whom he had brought to Moscow, joined his personal physician, the distinguished Vladimir Vinogradov, who had been a fashionable doctor before the Revolution and still lived in an apartment filled with antiques and fine pictures. The patient lay on a sofa with a high temperature for five days, surrounded by professors and Politburo. The professors visited twice a day and kept vigil at night. By New Year’s Eve, he was well enough to attend the party where the whole family danced together for the last time. When the doctors visited him on New Year’s Day 1937, he reminisced about his first job as a meteorologist and his fishing exploits during his Siberian exiles. But Stalin’s duel with Sergo again took a toll on him as he prepared for his most reckless gamble since collectivization: the massacre of Lenin’s Party.17
Stalin arranged a “confrontation” between Bukharin and Pyatakov before the Politburo. Pyatakov, the abrasive industrial manager soon to star in his own show trial, testified to Bukharin’s terrorism but was now a walking testament to the methods of the NKVD. “Living remains,” Bukharin told his wife, “not of Pyatakov but of his shadow, a skeleton with its teeth knocked out.” He spoke with his head lowered, trying to cover his eyes with his hands. Sergo stared intensely at his former deputy and friend: “Is your testimony voluntary?” he asked.
“My testimony is voluntary,” retorted Pyatakov.
It seems absurd that Sergo even had to ask the question but to do more would be to go against the Politburo itself where men like Voroshilov were working themselves up into paroxysms of hatred: “Your deputy turned out to be a swine of the first class,” Klim told him. “You must know what he told us, the pig, the son of a bitch!” When Sergo read the signed pages of Pyatakov’s interrogation, he “believed it and came to hate him,” but it was not a happy time for him.18
Stalin was supervising Pyatakov’s coming trial of the “Parallel Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre” that was really an assault on Sergo’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry where ten of the seventeen defendants worked. Stalin’s intimate role in the famous trials has always been known but the archives reveal how he even dictated the words of Vyshinsky’s summing-up. Recovering from his tonsillitis, Stalin must have seen Vyshinsky at Kuntsevo. One can imagine Stalin pacing up and down, smoking, as the cringing Procurator scribbled in his notebook: “These villains don’t even have any sense of being citizens… they’re afraid of the nation, afraid of the people… Their agreements with Japan and Germany are the agreements of the hare with the wolf…” Vyshinsky noted down Stalin’s words: “While Lenin was alive, they were against Lenin.” He used exactly the same words in court on 28 January. But Stalin’s thoughts in 1937 reveal the broadest reason for the imminent murder of hundreds of thousands of people for little apparent reason: “Maybe it can be explained by the fact that you lost faith,” Stalin addressed the Old Bolsheviks. Here was the essence of the religious frenzy of the coming slaughter. 19
Stalin’s tonsillitis flared again. He lay on the dining room table so the professors could examine his throat. Then the Politburo joined Stalin and the doctors for dinner. There were toasts and after dinner, the doctors were amazed to see the leaders dancing. But Stalin’s mind was on the brutal tasks of that terrible year. He toasted Soviet medicine, then added that there were “Enemies among the doctors—you’ll find out soon!” He was ready to begin.20
18. SERGO: DEATH OF A “PERFECT BOLSHEVIK”
The legal melodrama opened on 23 January and immediately expanded the Terror to thousands of new potential victims. Radek, who may have been coached personally by Stalin, revelled in his black humour, joking that he was not tortured under interrogation; on the contrary, he had tortured his investigators for months by refusing to cooperate. Then he delivered what were probably Stalin’s own lines: “But there are in our country semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth Trotskyites, people who helped us [Trotskyites], not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us.” The message was clear and when it is combined with Vyshinsky’s own notes, the mystery of the crazy randomness of the Terror is solved. Those without blind faith were to die.
At 7:13 p.m. on 29 January, the judges retired to confer and at 3:00 next morning, they returned. Thirteen of the defendants, including Pyatakov, were sentenced to death but Radek received ten years. Blokhin again supervised the executions. Yezhov was rewarded with the rank of Commissar-General of State Security, and a Kremlin apartment.
In Moscow, 200,000 people, bedazzled by propaganda, massed in Red Square, despite temperatures of – 27°C, bearing banners that read: “The court’s verdict is the people’s verdict.” Khrushchev addressed them, denouncing the “Judas-Trotsky,” a line that strongly implied that Stalin was the metaphorical Jesus. (We know from Yury Zhdanov that he jokily compared himself to Jesus.) “By raising their hand against Comrade Stalin,” Khrushchev told the crowds, “they raised their hand against all the best that humanity has, because Stalin is hope… Stalin is our banner. Stalin is our will, Stalin is our victory.” The country was swept by the emotional effervescence of hatred, fear and blood-lust. Maria Svanidze wrote in her diary that Radek’s “human baseness… exceeded all imagination. These moral monsters deserved their end… How could we so blindly trust this band of scoundrels?”
Today it seems impossible that virtually every factory and railway line was being sabotaged by Trotskyite terrorists within their management, but Soviet industry was riddled with mistakes and cursed with thousands of accidents thanks to poor management and the breakneck speed of the Five-Year Plans: for example, in 1934 alone, there were 62,000 accidents on the railways! How could this happen in a perfect country? “Enemies” among the corrupt elite had surely caused the failures. The arrest of saboteurs and wreckers in the industrial factories and railways spread. The staffs of Sergo and Kaganovich were again hit hard.1
Stalin carefully prepared for the Plenum that would formally open the Terror against the Party itself. On 31 January, the Politburo appointed the two industrial kingpins to speak about wrecking in their departments. Stalin reviewed their speeches. Sergo accepted that wreckers had to be stopped. But he wanted to say that now that they had been arrested, it was time to return to normality. Stalin angrily scribbled on Sergo’s speech: “State with facts which branches are affected by sabotage and exactly how they are affected.” When they met, Sergo seemed to agree but he quietly despatched trusted managers to the regions to investigate whether the NKVD was fabricating the cases: a direct challenge to Stalin.
An ailing Sergo realized that the gap between them was widening. He faced a rupture with the Party to which he had devoted his life.
“I don’t understand why Stalin doesn’t trust me,” he confided to Mikoyan, probably walking round the snowy
