everything. I recommend you talk less.”4
The Commissar-General was at his peak. On holidays, Yezhov was filmed strolling through the Kremlin, laughing with Stalin while absurdly smoking what appears to be a very big cigarette. During the long November 6th speeches at the Bolshoi Theatre, US Ambassador Davies watched “Stalin, Voroshilov and Yezhov obviously whispering and joking among themselves.”
He and Yevgenia now lived luxuriously in a dacha, with the usual cinema, tennis court and staff, at Meshcherino near Leninsky Gorky where many leaders had their homes. They had adopted a daughter, Natasha, an orphan from a children’s home. Yezhov was tender, teaching her to play tennis, skate and bicycle. In the photographs, he stands next to his friends, hugging Natasha like any other father. He spoiled her with presents and played with her on his return from work.
When Yezhov began to feed foreign Communists and returned emigres into the meat grinder, he received an appeal from an anxious, pretty and very pregnant Russian emigre named Vera Trail, who was the daughter of Alexander Guchkov, the pre-revolutionary moderate conservative. She received a call after midnight.
“Kremlin speaking. The Comrade Commissar will see you now.” A limousine took her into the Kremlin where she was led into his long, dimly lit study with a green lampshade. The aphrodisiac of power working its wonders, she immediately admired his “finely chiselled face,” his “brown wavy hair and blue eyes—the deepest blue I’d ever seen” and his “small graceful slender hands.” She mentioned a list of friends, mainly writers, who had been arrested. He was acutely perceptive, “a marvellous listener.” Blackberry dismissed his guards to receive her: “I certainly don’t make the habit of receiving total strangers unprotected.”
“I’m not even carrying a handbag,” she flirted back at him.
“No, only Belomor cigarettes. But you said you were pregnant.”
“Said? Can’t you see?” Her belly was enormous.
“I see a bulge,” joked Yezhov, “but how am I to know it’s not a time bomb cleverly wrapped in a pillow? You weren’t searched… were you?”
Yezhov stood up and walked around the desk as if he was about to feel her belly but halfway he stopped and sat down, laughing: “Of course you’re pregnant. I was only joking.” Here was an authentic Yezhovian moment in which the Commissar displayed his clunkingly puerile humour (though thankfully, an improvement on the farting contests), the swagger of menace—and his paranoia. He promised to review her case and receive her again, kindly suggesting that she must go straight to bed.
The next night, Yezhov’s office called again: “Leave for Paris at once.” She left on the train the next morning and was convinced that he had, for whatever reason, gone out of his way to save her life. Every one of the friends on her list were destroyed—but he saved her. 6
Yet personal attraction was rarely a reason to save the life of an Enemy: Blackberry had enjoyed a love affair with another Yevgenia, the wife of the Ambassador to Poland, throughout the thirties, offering to maintain her in Moscow. However, Yevgenia Podoskaya refused, was arrested in November 1936 and shot on 10 March 1937.7
Yezhov bombarded Molotov with reports of the conspiracies he had discovered.8 He and Kaganovich were enthusiasts: “I’ve always considered that those chiefly responsible were Stalin and we who encouraged it, who were active. I was always active, I’d always supported the measures taken,” said Molotov. “Stalin was right—‘better an innocent head less…’” Kaganovich agreed: “Otherwise we’d never have won the war!” Molotov notoriously reviewed one list of arrests and personally wrote “VMN” next to a woman’s name. It was Molotov who signed and apparently added names to the list of wives of Enemies such as Kosior and Postyshev, who were all shot. Of the twenty-eight Commissars under Premier Molotov in early 1938, twenty were killed. When he found the name of a Bolshevik named G. I. Lomov on a list, Stalin asked: “What about this?”
“In favour of immediate arrest of that bastard Lomov,” wrote Molotov. In the case of some unfortunate professor, Molotov asked Yezhov: “Why is this professor still in the Foreign Ministry and not in the NKVD?” 9 When some books by Stalin and Lenin were burned by mistake, Molotov ordered Yezhov to accelerate the case.10 When Molotov heard that a regional Procurator had grumbled about the Purge and joked, quite understandably, that it was amazing Stalin and Molotov were still alive when there were so many terrorists trying to kill them, he ordered the NKVD: “Investigate, having agreed with Vyshinsky [the official’s boss in Moscow]. Molotov.” Kaganovich boasted there was not one railway “without Trotskyite/Japanese wreckers,” writing at least thirty-two letters to the NKVD demanding eighty-three arrests—and signing death lists for 36,000. So many railwaymen were shot that an official telephoned Poskrebyshev to warn that one line was entirely unmanned.
Yet all the leaders also knew that they themselves were constantly being tested: both Molotov’s secretaries were arrested.
“I sensed danger gathering around me,” he said as they collected testimony against him. “My first assistant threw himself down the liftshaft at the NKVD.”11 No one was safe: they had their families to consider. Stalin had made it amply clear that the Enemies had to be destroyed “without looking at their faces.” If they had hoped that their rank would protect them, the arrests of Politburo members like Rudzutak had corrected that impression. Testimonies were prepared against all, including Molotov, Voroshilov and Kaganovich. Their chauffeurs were arrested so frequently that Khrushchev grumbled to Stalin, who said: “They’re gathering evidence against me too.” All of them must have thought like Khrushchev who asked: “Do you think I’m confident… that tomorrow won’t transfer me from this office to a prison cell?”
The case of Marshal Budyonny surely concentrated their minds: on 20 June 1937 soon after the execution of Tukhachevsky, Stalin told the cavalryman: “Yezhov says your wife’s conducting herself dishonourably and bear in mind we won’t let anyone, even a wife, compromise you in the Party and the State. Talk to Yezhov about it and decide what to do if it’s necessary. You missed an Enemy near you. Why do you feel sorry for her?”
“A bad wife is family, not political business, Comrade Stalin,” replied Budyonny. “I’ll look into it myself.”
“You must be brave,” said Stalin. “Do you think I don’t feel sorry when my closest circle turn out to be Enemies of the People?” Budyonny’s wife, Olga, was a Bolshoi singer, who was best friends with the actress wife of Marshal Yegorov. It seems Olga was cuckolding Budyonny with a Bolshoi tenor and flirting with Polish diplomats. Budyonny went to Yezhov who told him that his wife “along with Yegorova, visits foreign embassies…” When he was inspecting the troops, his wife was arrested in the street, interrogated and sentenced to eight years and then another three. Budyonny sobbed, “the tears pouring down his cheeks.” Olga went mad in solitary confinement. There used to be a legend that Stalin was more merciful to women: certainly female CC members were more likely to survive.[117] But Galina Yegorova, forty, was shot even before her Marshal husband. No chivalry there. Her flirtation with Stalin on the night of Nadya’s suicide cannot have helped her case but he was always more pitiless if there was a hint of sexual debauchery.12
The Terror was, among many more important things, the triumph of prissy Bolshevik morality over the sexual freedom of the twenties. The destruction of Yenukidze, Tukhachevsky and Rudzutak involved what Molotov called that “weak spot… women!” The scent of actresses, the whirl of diplomatic balls and the glow of foreign decadence were sometimes enough to convince the lonely Stalin and the priggish Molotov, both reeking of Puritanical envy, that treason and duplicity lurked. But debauchery was never the real reason their victims were destroyed. That was always political. The accusations of sexual deviance were deployed to dehumanize them among their former colleagues. Yenukidze and Rudzutak were both said to seduce what Kaganovich called “little girls.” Since it is unlikely that the Central Committee contained a cell of paedophiles, as well as a web of terrorists and spies, it seems more likely these hedonistic grandees just “protected” ballerinas like millionaires past and present. Nonetheless Stalin had tolerated (and probably enjoyed) Yenukidze’s parties for years. Womanizers, such as Bulganin and Beria, continued to prosper, providing they were loyal and competent politically, but no one could say this was mere tittle-tattle at Stalin’s court.[118] People died of gossip.
Stalin was an awkward man of the nineteenth century: flirtatious with, and appreciative of, the well-dressed women of his circle, strictly prudish about his own daughter, shocked at the feminism and free love of the early twenties, yet crudely macho among his male friends. His prudishness was thoroughly “Victorian”: the appearance of Svetlana’s knees, even her bold stare in a photograph, provoked absurd crises. Stalin disapproved of the “first kiss” in Alexandrov’s
