Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

himself from the early days of their romance. When Glikina’s arrest made her own inevitable, Yevgenia sent a note bidding Yezhov goodbye. On 19 November, she took the Luminal.

At 11 p.m., as Yevgenia sank into unconsciousness, Yezhov arrived at the Little Corner, where he found the Politburo with Beria and Malenkov, who attacked him for five hours. Yevgenia died two days later. Yezhov himself reflected that he had been “compelled to sacrifice her to save himself.” She had married a monster but died young to save their daughter which, in its way, was a maternal end to a life devoted to innocent fun. Babel heard that “Stalin can’t understand her death. His own nerves are made of steel so he just can’t understand how, in other people, they give out.” The Yezhovs’ adopted daughter[137] Natasha, nine, was taken in by his ex-wife’s sister and then sent to one of those grim orphanages for the children of Enemies.⁶

Two days after Yevgenia’s death, on 23 November, Yezhov returned for another four hours of criticism from Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov, after which he resigned from the NKVD. But he remained in limbo as CC Secretary, Commissar of Water Transport, and a candidate Politburo member, living in the Kremlin like a tiny ghost for a little longer, experiencing what his victims had known before him. His friends “turned their back upon me as if I was plague-ridden… I never realized the depth of meanness of all these people.” He blamed the Terror on the Vozhd, using a Russian idiom: “God’s will—the Tsar’s trial” with himself as the Tsar and Stalin as God.

Yezhov consoled himself with a series of drunken bisexual orgies in his Kremlin apartment. Inviting two drinking buddies and homosexual lovers from his youth to stay, he enjoyed “the most perverted forms of debauchery.” His nephews brought him girls but he also returned to homosexuality. When one crony, Konstantinov, brought his wife to the party, Yezhov danced the foxtrot with her, pulled out his member, and then slept with her. On the next night, when the long-suffering Konstantinov arrived, they drank and danced to the gramophone until the guest fell asleep only to be awoken: “I felt something in my mouth. When I opened my eyes, I saw that Yezhov had shoved his member into my mouth.” Unzipped and undone, Yezhov awaited his fate.⁷

Beria, whom Stalin nicknamed “The Prosecutor,” was triumphantly appointed Commissar on 25 November,[138] and summoned his Georgian henchmen to Moscow. Having destroyed the entourages of the Old Bolshevik “princes,” Stalin now had to import Beria’s whole gang to destroy Yezhov’s.

Ironically, Beria’s courtiers were much more educated than Kaganovich or Voroshilov but education is no bar to barbarism. The grey-haired, charming and refined Merkulov, a Russified Armenian, who was to write plays under the pseudonym Vsevolod Rok that were performed on Moscow stages, had known Beria since they studied together at the Baku Polytechnic and had joined the Cheka in 1920. Beria, who, like Stalin, coined nicknames for everyone, called him “the Theoretician.” Then there was the renegade Georgian prince (though aristocrats are as plentiful in Georgia as vines) Shalva Tsereteli, once a Tsarist officer and member of the anti-Bolshevik Georgian Legion, who had the air of an old-fashioned gentleman but was Beria’s private assassin, among his other duties in the NKVD’s Special Department. Then there was the bejewelled 300-pound giant—“the worst man God put on the face of the Earth”—Bogdan Kobulov. “A burly oversized Caucasian with muddy brown bullish eyes,” the “fat face of a man [who] likes good living… hairy hands, short bow legs,” and a dapper moustache, he was one of those hearty torturers who would have been as at home in the Gestapo as in the NKVD. He was so squat that Beria called him “the Samovar.”

When Kobulov beat his victims, he used his fists, his elephantine weight and his favourite blackjack clubs. He arranged wiretaps of the magnates for Stalin but he also became a court jester, replacing the late Pauker, with his funny accents. He soon proved his usefulness: Beria was interrogating a victim in his office when the prisoner attacked him. Kobulov boasted about what happened next: “I saw the boss [he used the Georgian slang— khozeni] on the floor and I jumped on the fellow and crushed his neck with my own bare hands.” Yet even this brute sensed that his work was not right for he used to visit his mother and sob to her like an overgrown Georgian child: “Mama, mama, what are we doing? One day, I’ll pay for this.”

The arrival of these exotic, strutting Georgians, some even convicted murderers, must have been like Pancho Villa and his banditos riding into a northern town in one of Beria’s favourite movies. Stalin later made a great play of sending some of them home, replacing them with Russians, but he remained very much a Georgian himself. Beria’s men gave Stalin’s entourage a distinctly Caucasian flavour. On the official date of Beria’s appointment, Stalin and Molotov signed off on the shooting of 3,176 people so they were busy.

Beria appeared nightly in Lefortovo prison to torture Marshal Blyukher, assisted by “The Theoretician” Merkulov, “The Samovar” Kobulov, and his top interrogator, Rodos, who worked on the Marshal with such relish that he called out: “Stalin, can you hear what they’re doing to me?” They tortured him so hard that they managed to knock out one of his eyes and he later died of his wounds. Beria drove over to tell Stalin who ordered the body’s incineration. Meanwhile, Beria settled scores, personally arresting Alexander Kosarev, the Komsomol chief, who had once insulted him. Stalin later learned this was a personal vendetta: “They told me Beria was very vindictive but there was no evidence of it,” he reflected years later. “In Kosarev’s case, Zhdanov and Andreyev checked the evidence.”

Beria revelled in the sport of power: Bukharin’s lovely widow, Anna Larina, still only twenty-four, was shown into his Lubianka office by Kobulov who then brought in sandwiches like an infernal Jeeves.

“I should tell you that you look more beautiful than when I last saw you,” Beria told her. “Execution is for one time only. And Yezhov would certainly have executed you.” When she would not betray anyone, Beria and Kobulov stopped flirting. “Whom are you trying to save? After all, Nikolai Ivanovich [Bukharin] is no longer with us… You want to live?… If you don’t shut up, here’s what you’ll get!” He put a finger to his temple. “So will you promise me to shut up?” She saw that Beria wanted to save her and she promised.⁸ But she would not eat Kobulov’s sandwiches.[139]

* * *

Stalin was careful not to place himself completely in the hands of Beria: the chief of State Security (First Branch), his personal security, was a sensitive but dangerous position. Two had been shot since Pauker but now Stalin appointed his personal bodyguard, Vlasik, to the job, in charge of the Leader’s security as well as the dachas, food for the kitchens, the car pool and millions of roubles. Henceforth, explains Artyom, Stalin “ruled through Poskrebyshev in political matters and Vlasik in personal ones.” Both were indefatigably industrious—and sleazy.

The two men lived similar lives: their daughters recall how they spent only Sunday at home. Otherwise they were always with Stalin, returning exhausted to sleep. No one knew Stalin better. At home they never discussed politics but chatted about their fishing expeditions. Vlasik, who lived in the elegant villa on Gogolevsky Boulevard, was doggedly loyal, uneducated and drunkenly dissolute: he was already an insatiable womanizer who held parties with Poskrebyshev. He had so many “concubines,” he kept lists of them, forgot their names, and sometimes managed to have a different one in each room at his orgies. He called Stalin Khozyain , but “Comrade Stalin” to his face, rarely joining him at table.

Poskrebyshev’s social status was higher, often joining the magnates at dinner and calling Stalin “Joseph Vissarionovich.” He was the butt and perpetrator of jokes. He sat doggedly at his desk outside Stalin’s office: the Little Corner was his domain. The magnates cultivated him, playing to his dog’s vanity so that he would warn them if Stalin was in a bad mood. Poskrebyshev always called Vyshinsky to say that Stalin was on his way to Kuntsevo so the Procurator could go to bed, and he once protected Khrushchev. He was so powerful that he could even insult the Politburo. The “faithful shield-bearer,” in Khrushchev’s words, played his role in Stalin’s most mundane deeds and the most terrible, boasting later about their use of poison. He was a loving husband to Bronka, and an indulgent father to the two children, Galya by her first husband and his own Natalya. But when the vertushka rang on Sundays, no one else was allowed to answer it. He was proud of his position: when his daughter had an operation, he lectured her that she had to behave in a way that befitted their station. Poskrebyshev worked closely with Beria: they often visited each other’s families but if there was business to conduct, they walked in the garden. But ultimately both Vlasik and Poskrebyshev were obstacles to Beria’s power.⁹ The same could no longer be said of the Alliluyev family.

27. DEATH OF THE STALIN FAMILY A Strange Proposal and the Housekeeper