special attention to Comrade Beria and hurry up. Molotov.” That weather vane of Stalin’s favour, Poskrebyshev, stopped calling Yezhov by the familiar ty and started visiting Beria instead.11
Beria brought a new spirit to the NKVD: Yezhov’s frenzy was replaced with a tight system of terror administration that became the Stalinist method of ruling Russia. But this new efficiency was no consolation to the victims. Beria worked with Yezhov on the interrogations of the fallen magnates, Kosior, Chubar and Eikhe, who were cruelly tortured. Chubar appealed to Stalin and Molotov, revealing his agonies.12
Stalin, Blackberry and Beria now turned to the Far East where the army, under the gifted Marshal Blyukher, had largely escaped the Terror. In late June, the “gloomy demon,” Mekhlis, descended on Blyukher’s command with rabid blood-lust. Setting up his headquarters in his railway carriage like a Civil War chieftain, he was soon sending Stalin and Voroshilov telegrams like this: “The Special Railway Corps leaves bits and pieces of dubious people all over the place …There are 46 German Polish Lithuanian Latvian Galician commanders… I have to go to Vladivostok to purge the corps.” Once there, he boasted to Stalin, “I dismissed 215 political workers, most of them arrested. But the purge… is not finished. I think it’s impossible to leave Khabarovsk without even more harsh investigations…”
When Voroshilov and Budyonny tried to protect officers, Mekhlis sneaked on Voroshilov (they hated each other) to Stalin: “I reported to CC and Narkom (Voroshilov) about the situation in the Secret Service Department. There are a lot of dubious people and spies there… Now C. Voroshilov orders the cancellation of the trial… I can’t agree with the situation.” Even Kaganovich thought Mekhlis “was cruel, he sometimes overdid it!”
As Mekhlis headed east, the Japanese Kwangtung Army probed Soviet defences west of Lake Khasan, leading to a full-scale battle. Blyukher attacked the Japanese between 6 and 11 August and drove them back with heavy losses. Encouraged by Mekhlis, and alarmed by the losses and Blyukher’s hesitations, Stalin berated the Marshal down the telephone: “Tell me honestly, Comrade Blyukher, do you really want to fight the Japanese? If you don’t, then tell me straight, like a good Communist.”
“The sharks have arrived,” Blyukher told his wife. “They want to eat me. Either they eat me or I eat them, but the latter is unlikely.” The killer shark sealed Blyukher’s fate. Mekhlis arrested four of Blyukher’s staff, requesting Stalin and Voroshilov to let him “shoot all four without prosecution by my special order.” Blyukher was sacked, recalled and arrested on 22 October 1938.13
“Now I am done for!” sobbed Yezhov in his office, as he went on executing any prisoners who “may turn against us.” On 29 September, he lost much of his power when Beria was appointed to run the heart of the NKVD: State Security (GUGB). He now co-signed Yezhov’s orders. Blackberry tried to strike back: he proposed to Stalin that Stanislas Redens, Beria’s enemy married to Anna Alliluyeva, become his other deputy. There was no hope of this.
Yezhov sat boozing at his dacha with his depressed cronies, warning that they would soon be destroyed, and fantasizing about killing his enemies: “Immediately remove all people posted in the Kremlin by Beria,” he loudly ordered the head of Kremlin security during one such bout, “and replace them with reliable people.” Soon he said, in a slurred voice, that Stalin should be killed.14
26. THE TRAGEDY AND DEPRAVITY OF THE YEZHOVS
News of the lion-hunting literary sex life of Yevgenia Yezhova suddenly reached Stalin. Sholokhov, one of his favourite novelists, had started an affair with her. Yezhov bugged his room at the National Hotel and was furious to read the blow-by-blow account of how “they kissed each other” then “lay down.” Yezhov was so intoxicated and jealous that he slapped Yevgenia in the presence of their lissom house guest, Zinaida Glikina (with whom he was sleeping) but later forgave her. Sholokhov realized he was being followed and complained to Stalin and Beria. Stalin summoned Blackberry to the Politburo where he apologized to the novelist.1
The magnates steered cautiously between Yezhov and Beria. When Yezhov arrested one commissar, Stalin sent Molotov and Mikoyan to investigate. Back at the Kremlin, Mikoyan acclaimed the man’s innocence and Beria attacked Yezhov’s case. “Yezhov displayed an ambiguous smile,” wrote Mikoyan, “Beria looked pleased” but “Molotov’s face was like a mask.” The Commissar[136] became what Mikoyan called a “lucky stiff,” back from the dead. Stalin released him.2
When one NKVD officer needed the chief’s signature, Yezhov was nowhere to be found. Beria told him to drive out to Yezhov’s dacha and get his signature. There he found a man who was either “fatally ill or had spent the night drinking heavily.” Regional NKVD bosses started to denounce Yezhov.3
The darkness began to descend on Yezhov’s family where his silly, sensual wife was unwittingly to play the terrible role of black widow spider: most of her lovers were to die. She herself was too sensitive a flower for Yezhov’s world. Both she and Yezhov were promiscuous but then they lived in a world of high tension, dizzy power over life and death, and dynamic turmoil where men rose and fell around them. If there was justice in Yezhov’s fall, it was a tragedy for Yevgenia and little Natasha, to whom he was a kind father. A pall fell on Yevgenia’s literary salon. When a friend walked her home to the Kremlin after a party, she herself reflected that Babel was in danger because he had been friends with arrested Trotskyite generals: “Only his European fame could save him…” She herself was in greater peril.4
Yezhov learned that Beria was going to use Yevgenia, an “English spy” from her time in London, against him so he asked for a divorce in September. The divorce was sensible: in other cases, it actually saved the life of the divorcee. But the tension almost broke the nervy Yevgenia, who went on holiday to the Crimea with Zinaida to recover. It seems that Yezhov was trying to protect his wife from arrest, hence her loving and grateful letter to him.
“Kolyushenka!” she wrote to her beleaguered husband. “I really ask you—I insist that I remain in control of my life. Kolya darling! I earnestly beg you to check up on my whole life, everything about me… I cannot reconcile myself to the thought that I am under suspicion of committing crimes I never committed…”
Their world was shrinking daily: Yezhov had managed to have her ex-husband Gladun shot before Beria took control of the NKVD, but another ex-lover, the publisher Uritsky, was being interrogated. He revealed her affair with Babel. Yezhov’s secretary and friends were arrested too. Yezhov summoned Yevgenia back to Moscow.
Yevgenia waited at the dacha with her daughter Natasha and her friend Zinaida. She was desperately worried about the family—and who can blame her? Her nerves cracked. In hospital, they diagnosed an “asthenic- depressive condition perhaps cyclothymia,” sending her to a sanatorium near Moscow.
When Zinaida was arrested, Yevgenia wrote to Stalin: “I beg you Comrade Stalin to read this letter… I am treated by professors but what sense does it make if I am burned by the thought that you distrust me?… You are dear and beloved to me.” Swearing on her daughter’s life that she was honest, she admitted that “in my personal life, there have been mistakes about which I could tell you, and all of it because of jealousy.” Stalin doubtless already knew all her Messalinian exploits. She made the sacrificial offer: “Let them take away my freedom, my life… but I will not give up the right to love you as everybody does who loves the country and the Party.” She signed off: “I feel like a living corpse. What am I to do? Forgive my letter written in bed.” Stalin did not reply.
The trap was swinging shut on Yevgenia and her Kolyushenka. On 8 October, Kaganovich drafted a Politburo resolution on the NKVD. On 17 November, a Politburo commission denounced “very serious faults in the work of the Organs of NKVD.” The deadly
At the 7 November parade, Yezhov appeared on the Mausoleum but lingered behind Stalin. Then he disappeared and was replaced by Beria in the blue cap and uniform of a Commissar First Class of State Security. When Stalin ordered the arrest of Yezhov’s friend, Uspensky, Ukrainian NKVD chief, the dwarf forewarned him. Uspensky faked suicide and went on the run. Stalin (probably rightly) suspected that Yezhov was bugging his phones.
In her own way, Yevgenia loved Yezhov, despite all their infidelities, and adored their daughter Natasha, because she was willing to sacrifice herself to save them. Her friend Zinaida Ordzhonikidze, Sergo’s widow, visited her in hospital, a heroic act of loyalty. Yevgenia gave her a letter for Yezhov in which she offered to commit suicide and asked for a sleeping draught. She suggested that he send a little statuette of a gnome when the time came. He sent Luminal, then, a little later, he ordered the maid to take his wife the statuette. Given Yezhov’s dwarfish stature, this deadly gnome seems farcical: perhaps the statuette was an old keepsake representing “darling Kolya”
