Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

quota of 268,950 arrests and 75,950 executions. The quota was later raised. Ten percent of the Georgian Party, which was particularly well known to Stalin, were killed. Beria distinguished himself by personally performing the torture of Lakoba’s family, driving his widow mad by placing a snake in her cell and beating his teenage children to death.⁹

The solution was the despatch of Stalin’s favourites to destroy the “princes”; also a useful test of a magnate’s loyalty. There was no better blooding than a trip to the regions. Like the warlords of the Civil War they set off riding shotgun in armoured trains packed with NKVD thugs. Mikoyan, Foreign Trade and Food Supply Commissar, enjoys the reputation of one of the more decent leaders: he certainly helped the victims later and worked hard to undo Stalin’s rule after the Leader’s death. In 1936, however, Mikoyan praised the executions of Zinoviev and Kamenev—“how just the verdict!” he enthused to Kaganovich—and in 1937, he too signed death lists and proposed the arrest of hundreds of his officials. Throughout Stalin’s reign, Mikoyan was shrewd enough to avoid intrigues, eschew ambition for the highest offices, and with his sharp intelligence and prodigious capacity for work, concentrate on his responsibilities: he knew how to play the game and do just enough.

The magnates saved friends but they mainly saved them in 1939 in a different environment. Andreyev’s anteroom, his daughter claimed, “was full of those he helped” but Kaganovich honestly admitted that “it was impossible to save friends and relatives” because of “the public mood.” They had to kill a lot to save a few. Mikoyan probably did more than most, appealing to Stalin about his friend Andreasian who had been accused of being a French agent by the moronic investigators because his first name was “Napoleon.”

“He’s as French as you!” joked Mikoyan. Stalin burst out laughing.[122] Voroshilov, who was responsible for so many deaths, passed on the appeal of a friend’s arrested daughter to Stalin himself who wrote on it as usual: “To Comrade Yezhov, check this out!” Her father was released and called to thank Voroshilov, who asked: “Was it terrible?”

“Yes, very terrible.” The two friends never discussed it again.

Stalin was so besieged with requests that he passed a Politburo decree banning appeals. If a leader intervened to save a friend, the vital thing was to avoid him falling into the hands of another bloodthirsty grandee. Mikoyan managed to save one comrade and begged him to leave Moscow immediately but the Old Bolshevik, with all the punctiliousness of a knight who must have his sword returned, insisted on getting his Party card back. He called Andreyev who had him rearrested.

Perhaps Mikoyan’s kindnesses reached Stalin’s ears for he suddenly cooled towards him. In late 1937, he tested Mikoyan’s commitment by despatching him to Armenia with a list of three hundred victims to be arrested. Mikoyan signed it but he crossed off one friend. The man was arrested anyway. Just as he was speaking to the Yerevan Party meeting, Beria arrived in the room, to watch him as much as to terrorize the locals. A thousand people were arrested, including seven out of nine Armenian Politburo members. When Mikoyan returned to Moscow, Stalin warmed to him again.¹⁰

All the magnates set off on bloody tours of the country. Zhdanov purged the Urals and Middle Volga. Ukraine was unfortunate enough to welcome Kaganovich, Molotov and Yezhov. Kaganovich visited Kazakhstan, Cheliabinsk, Ivanovo and other places, spreading terror: “First study… shows the Obkom Secretary Epanchikev must be arrested at once…” began his first telegram from Ivanovo in August 1937, which continued: “Right-Trotskyite wrecking has assumed broad dimensions here, in industry, agriculture, supply, healthcare, trade, education and political work… exceptionally infested.” ¹¹ But this was nothing compared to the killing frenzy of the two most prolific monsters on tour.

Andrei Andreyev, now forty-two, small, moustachioed and hangdog of countenance, had failed to rise to the challenge of the Soviet railways but he came into his own running the CC Secretariat with Yezhov. One of the rare proletarians among the leadership, this quiet Tchaikovsky addict, mountaineer and nature photographer, married to Dora Khazan, to whom he wrote loving postcards about their children, became the unchallengeable master of these murderous road shows.

On 20 July, he arrived in Saratov to ravage the Volga German Republic: [123] “All means are necessary to purge Saratov,” he told Stalin in the first of a stream of excited, fanatical telegrams. “The Saratov organization meets all decisions of CC with great pleasure.” This was hard to believe. Everywhere he discovered how the local bosses “did not want to discover the terrorist group” and had “pardoned exposed Enemies.” By the next day, Andreyev was frantically arresting suspects: “we had to arrest the Second Secretary… On Freshier, we have evidence he was a member of a Rightist-Trotskyite organization. We ask permission to arrest.” One group consisted of “twenty, very obstructively working in the Machine Tractor Station. We decided to arrest and prosecute two of the directors” who turned out to be part of a “Right-kulak organization” that had “wrecked tractors” or rather they had worked slowly since “only 14 out of 74 were ready.” At 11:38 that night, Stalin replied in his blue pencil: “Central Committee agrees with your proposals about prosecution and shooting of former MTS workers.” Twenty were shot. Three days later, Andreyev boasted to Stalin that he had found “a Fascist organization—we plan to arrest at once the first group of 50–60 people… We had to arrest the Premier of the Republic, Luf, for proven membership of Right-Trotskyites.” He proceeded to Kuibyshev and then to Central Asia where he removed all the leaderships since Stalin had told him: “Generally, you can act as you consider.” The result was that in Stalinabad, “I have arrested 7 Narkoms, 55 CC chiefs, 3 CC Secretaries” and returning to Voronezh, he declared cheerfully: “There is no Buro here. All arrested as Enemies. Off to Rostov now!”¹²

Andreyev was accompanied on these manic trips by a plump young man of thirty-five, Georgi Malenkov, the killer bureaucrat whose career benefited the most from the Purges but who hailed from the provincial intelligentsia, a scion of Tsarist civil servants, and a nobleman.[124] He travelled with Mikoyan to Armenia and Yezhov to Belorussia. One historian estimates that Malenkov was responsible for 150,000 deaths.

Small, flabby, pale and moon-faced with a hairless chin, freckles across his nose and dark, slightly Mongol eyes, his black hair hanging across his forehead, Malenkov had broad, female hips, a pear shape and a high voice. It is no wonder that Zhdanov nicknamed him “Malanya” or Melanie. “It seemed that under the layers and rolls of fat,” a lean and hungry man was trying to get out. His great-great-grandfather had come from Macedonia during the reign of Nicholas I but, as Beria joked, he was hardly Alexander the Great. Malenkov’s ancestors had governed Orenburg for the Tsars. Descended from generals and admirals, he saw himself in the tradition of a posadnik, an elected administrator of old Novgorod, or a chinovnik like his forefathers. Unlike Stalinist bullies such as Kaganovich, who shouted and punched officials, Malenkov stood when subordinates entered his room and spoke quietly in fine Russian without swearing, though what he said was often chilling.

Malenkov’s father had shocked the family by marrying a formidable blacksmith’s daughter who had three sons. Georgi, who loved his dominant mother, was the youngest. He studied at the local classical Gymnasium , learning Latin and French. Malenkov, like Zhdanov, passed among cobblers and joiners for an educated man, qualifying as an electrical engineer. Like many other ambitious youngsters, he joined the Party during the Civil War: his family unconvincingly claim that he rode in the cavalry but he was soon on safer ground on the propaganda trains where he met his domineering wife, Valeria Golubseva, who came from a similar background.

Happily married, Malenkov was known as a wonderful father to his highly educated children, teaching them himself and reading them poetry even when he was exhausted at the height of the war. His wife helped get him a job in the Central Committee where he was noticed by Molotov, joined Stalin’s Secretariat and became secretary of the Politburo during the early thirties, one of those keen young men like Yezhov who won first Kaganovich’s, then Stalin’s notice, for their devotion and efficiency. Yet in company, he had a light sense of humour.

This cunning but “eunuch-like” magnate never spoke unless necessary and always listened to Stalin, scribbling in a notebook headed “Comrade Stalin’s Instructions.” He succeeded Yezhov as head of the CC Personnel Registration department that selected cadres for jobs. In 1937, Mikoyan said, he played a “special role.” He was the bureaucratic maestro of the Terror. One note in Stalin’s papers laconically illustrates their relationship:

“Comrade Malenkov—Moskvin must be arrested. J.St.” The young stars Malenkov, Khrushchev and Yezhov were such close friends, they were called “the Inseparables.” Yet in this paranoic lottery, even a Malenkov could be destroyed. In 1937, he was accused at a Moscow Party Conference of being an Enemy himself. He was talking about joining the Red Army in Orenburg during the Civil War when a voice cried out: “Were there Whites in Orenburg at the time?”