Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

swinging their fists from a great height… The intolerable physical and emotional pain caused my eyes to weep unending streams of tears…”

Over the next few days, Stalin’s hanging judge Ulrikh sentenced all to “the highest measure of punishment” in perfunctory trials at Lefortovo prison before attending a Kremlin gala, starring the tenor Kozlovsky and the ballerina Lepeshinskaya. Babel was condemned as an “agent of French and Austrian intelligence… linked to the wife of Enemy of the People Yezhov.” At 1:30 a.m. on 27 January 1940, Babel was shot and cremated.

Eikhe was subjected to one last session of “French wrestling” at Sukhanov prison. Beria and Rodos “brutally beat Eikhe with rubber rods; he fell but they picked him up and went on beating him. Beria kept asking him, “Will you confess to being a spy?” Eikhe refused. “One of Eikhe’s eyes had been gouged out and blood was streaming out of it but he went on repeating ‘I won’t confess.’ When Beria had convinced himself he could not get a confession… he ordered them to lead him away to be shot.”

It was now Yezhov’s turn. On 1 February, Beria called his predecessor to his office at the Sukhanovka to propose that if he confessed at his trial, Stalin would spare him. To his meagre credit, Yezhov refused: “It’s better to leave this earth as an honourable man.”

On 2 February, Ulrikh tried him in Beria’s office. Yezhov read out his last statement to Stalin, dedicated to the sacred order of Bolshevik chivalry. He denied all charges of spying for what he called “Polish landowners… English lords and Japanese samurai” but “I do not deny I drank heavily but I worked like a horse. My fate is obvious,” but he asked “one thing: shoot me quietly, without putting me through any agony.” Then he requested that his mother be looked after, “my daughter taken care of” and his innocent nephews spared. He finished with the sort of flourish that one might expect to find from a knight to his king at the time of the Round Table: “Tell Stalin that I shall die with his name on my lips.”

He faced the Vishka less courageously than many of his victims. When Ulrikh pronounced the sentence, Yezhov toppled over but was caught by his guards, loaded into a Black Crow in the early hours of 3 February and driven to his special execution yard with the sloping floor and hosing facilities at Varsonofyevsky Lane. There Beria, the Deputy Procurator (N. P. Afanasev) and executioner, Blokhin, awaited him. Yezhov, according to Afanasev, hiccuped and wept. Finally his legs collapsed and they dragged him by the hands. That day, Stalin met Beria and Mikoyan for three hours, probably discussing economic matters, but there is no doubt that he would have wished to know the details of Blackberry’s conduct at the supreme moment.

The ashes of these men, Yezhov the criminal, Babel the genius, were dumped into a pit marked “Common Grave Number One—unclaimed ashes 1930–42 inclusive” at old Donskoi Cemetery. Just twenty paces away there is a gravestone that reads: “Khayutina, Yevgenia Solomonovna 1904–1938.”⁴ Yezhov, Yevgenia and Babel lie close.[163]

Yezhov’s eminence was eradicated from the memories of the time. Henceforth he was portrayed as a blood-crazed renegade killing innocents against Stalin’s wishes. The era was named the Yezhovshchina, Yezhov’s time, a word that Stalin probably coined for he was soon using it himself. Yagoda and Yezhov were both “scum,” thought Stalin. Yezhov was “a rat who killed many innocent people,” Stalin told Yakovlev, the aircraft designer. “We had to shoot him,” he confided to Kavtaradze. But after the war, Stalin admitted: “One can’t believe a lot of the evidence from 1937. Yezhov couldn’t run the NKVD properly and anti-Soviet elements penetrated it. They destroyed some honest people, our best cadres.”

Looking back, he also questioned Beria’s Terror: “Beria runs too many cases and everyone confesses.” But Stalin was always aware that the NKVD invented evidence: he jested and grumbled about it but often he chose to believe it because he had already decided who was an Enemy. More often, he had created it himself. “Meyerhold was a huge talent,” Stalin reflected in 1950, but “our Chekists don’t understand artists who all have faults. The Chekists collect them and then destroy good people. I doubt Meyerhold was an Enemy of the People.” He protested too much. Stalin had carefully followed their careers. He disapproved of “frivolous” Babel and his Red Cavalry “of which he knows nothing”—and he signed the death lists: no ruler has supervised his secret police as intimately as he.

Now Beria, cleaning the Augean stables of Yezhov’s detritus, brought Stalin the death sentence for Blokhin the executioner himself. Stalin refused Beria’s request, saying that this “chernaya rabota”—black work—was a difficult job but very important for the Party. Blokhin was spared to kill thousands more. Stalin’s brother-in-law Stanislas Redens (implicated by Yezhov) was shot on 12 February 1940.[164] His wife Anna was still convinced he would return and often called Stalin and Beria to inquire. Finally Beria told her to forget her marriage. After all, it had never been registered… ⁵

30. MOLOTOV COCKTAILS The Winter War and Kulik’s Wife

Stalin was in high spirits after the Ribbentrop Pact but he remained dangerously paranoid, especially about the wives of his friends. In November 1939, the phone rang at the dacha of Kulik, the bungling Deputy Defence Commissar who had commanded the Polish invasion. He and his long-legged, green-eyed wife, Kira Simonich, said to be the finest looking in Stalin’s circle, were holding his birthday party attended by an Almanac de Gotha of the elite, from Voroshilov and the worker-peasant-Count Alexei Tolstoy, to the omnipresent court singer, Kozlovsky, and a flurry of ballerinas. Kulik answered it.

“Quiet!” he hissed. “It’s Stalin!” He listened. “What am I doing? I’m celebrating my birthday with friends.”

“Wait for me,” replied Stalin who soon arrived with Vlasik and a case of wine. He greeted everyone and then sat at the table, where he drank his own wine while Kozlovsky sang Stalin’s favourite songs, particularly the Duke’s aria from Rigoletto.

Kira Kulik approached Stalin, chatting to him like an old friend. The most unlikely member of Stalin’s circle was born Kira Simonich, the daughter of a count of Serbian origins who had run Tsarist intelligence in Finland then been shot by the Cheka in 1919. After the Revolution she had married a Jewish merchant exiled to Siberia: she went with him and they then managed to settle in the south where she met Grigory Kulik, the stocky, “always half- drunk” bon vivant who had commanded Stalin’s artillery at Tsaritsyn, but whose knowledge of military technology was frozen in 1918. The Countess was his second wife: they fell in love on the spot, leaving their respective spouses—but she was trebly tainted, for she was an aristocrat with links to Tsarist intelligence and the ex-wife of an arrested Jewish merchant. Like Bronka, Kira Kulik chatted to Stalin informally and “shone at Kremlin parties,” recalled one lady who was often there herself. “She was very beautiful. Tukhachevsky, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria all paid court to her.” Naturally there were rumours that Stalin himself had made her his mistress.

Now, by the piano at the party, Kira and other young women surrounded him: “We drink to your health, Joseph Vissarionovich,” said a famous ballerina, “and let me kiss you in the name of all women.” He kissed her in return, and toasted her. But then Kira Kulik made a mistake.

When she was alone by the piano with just Stalin, she asked him to free her brother, a former Tsarist officer, from the camps. Stalin listened affably, then put on the gramophone, playing his favourites. Everyone danced except Stalin.[165] Stalin gave Kulik a book inscribed “To my old friend. J Stalin,” but Kira’s approach, presuming on her familiarity and prettiness, set a mantrap in his suspicious mind.¹

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Days later, Kulik ordered the artillery barrage that commenced the Soviet invasion of Finland, the fourth country in their sphere of influence, which like the Baltic States had been part of the Russian Empire until 1918 and which now threatened Leningrad.

On 12 October, a Finnish delegation met Stalin and Molotov in the Kremlin to hear the Soviet demands for the cession of a naval base at Hango. The Finns refused the Soviet demands, much to Stalin’s surprise. “This cannot continue for long without the danger of accidents,” he said. The Finns replied that they needed a five-sixths majority in their Parliament. Stalin laughed: “You’re sure to get 99 percent!”

“And our votes into the bargain,” joked Molotov. Their last meeting ended with less humour: “We civilians,”