peasants are hiding their grain: “At the Vashchaevsk kolkhoz, they poured kerosene on the women’s legs and hems of their skirts, set them on fire, and then put them out: ‘Will you tell me where the pit is? I’ll light it again if you don’t.’”
There are many stark examples of torture, threats, and violence in Sholokhov’s letters to Stalin; he piles them up, like an experienced writer, and remarkably, dares to pressure him by threatening to denounce the Soviet regime in his new book: “I decided that it was better to write to you than to use this material for the last volume of
How did Stalin react? Khrushchev recalled later that Stalin, whenever he was told about something wrong, would usually grow irritable, even if he knew the situation had to be corrected: he would agree but be angry. This complex brew of contradictory emotions can be seen in Stalin’s reply to Sholokhov (dated May 6, 1933), in which he thanks the writer for his alarmist letters, “since they lift the scab from our party-Soviet work, reveal that sometimes our workers, wanting to shackle the enemy, accidentally strike our friends and even become sadistic.”
But Stalin also points out to Sholokhov that the peasants the writer wanted to protect (Stalin mockingly refers to them as the “esteemed grain-harvesters”) were in his view saboteurs who were trying to deny bread to the workers and the Red Army and that those “esteemed grain-harvesters were in fact waging a ‘quiet’ war against Soviet rule. A war of starvation, dear Comrade Sholokhov.” At the same time, Stalin gave orders to send food to Sholokhov’s starving fellow countrymen. That was a typical move for Stalin, making temporary and small concessions while basically pressing on with his plans.
Sholokhov appealed to Stalin with another long letter on February 16, 1938, at the peak of the Great Terror. The writer was threatened with arrest as an enemy of the people (a detained member of a Cossack choir testified under duress that Sholokhov ordered him to assassinate a government official during the choir’s performance in Moscow), but Sholokhov spends most of the letter defending his friends who were in prison and being tortured: “Comrade Stalin! This method of investigation in which the prisoner is given into the hands of the investigators without any control is profoundly corrupt…. We must put an end to the shameful system of torture used on prisoners.”
Sholokhov was called into the Kremlin to see Stalin and there, in the presence of the much-feared head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, he told a joke making the rounds. A hare making a headlong dash is asked why he’s running.
“I’m afraid they’ll shoe me!”
“They don’t shoe hares, they shoe camels!”
“Once they catch you and put shoes on you, go prove that you’re not a camel!”
Telling the dictator a political joke was really working without a net. As Sholokhov recalled later, Yezhov laughed out loud; Stalin, not so much, and said sarcastically, “They say you drink a lot, Comrade Sholokhov?” Sholokhov continued in the same jesting tone, “A life like this, Comrade Stalin, will drive you to drink.”
There was no point in denying it: the writer had been brought to the Kremlin from a Moscow restaurant where he had been drinking heavily with Fadeyev, who also had a weakness for booze. Stalin forgave both of them. His personal secretary, Alexander Poskrebyshev, had a much more severe reaction to the drunken writer’s appearance in the Kremlin. “Blotto, you motley fool?” Before Sholokhov’s audience with Stalin, the secretary threw him into a hot shower, gave him a fresh shirt with a white celluloid collar, and sprayed him with cologne, to disguise the vodka reek.
Stalin, who generally disliked so-called immoral behavior, overlooked more than Sholokhov’s drinking. At the time of that conversation, he knew—and he knew that Yezhov also knew—that the NKVD chief’s beautiful wife, thirty-four-year-old Yevgenia (“Zhenya”) Khayutina-Yezhova, had been Sholokhov’s mistress for several months.
The boldest novelist might have hesitated over a plot like this, but its reality was confirmed by secret documents declassified in 2001. Dubbed the Iron Commissar by friends and the Bloody Dwarf by enemies, Yezhov was put in charge at age forty-one of the Great Terror, a policy that became known as
The matchmaker—intentionally or not—in this relationship was the omnipresent Fadeyev, in whose company Sholokhov, who had come to Moscow, went to visit Khayutina in August 1938. The three had lunch at the National Hotel, where Sholokhov was staying. The next day Khayutina came back to see Sholokhov at the National, but alone. The transcripts of the recording made by the secret police in Sholokhov’s bugged room notes not only the conversation (“We have a difficult love, Zhenya,” “I am afraid”) but sounds as well (“go into the bathroom,” “kiss,” “lie down”).16
Khayutina had good reason to be afraid. It is strange that the wife of the head of the secret police did not realize that the rooms at the National, one of Moscow’s most choice hotels, would be bugged. In any case, the transcript was on Yezhov’s desk the next day; he took it home to the dacha that night and slapped his wife in the face with it (a female friend was a witness), but did not go further. The recently omnipotent commissar (Babel used to say, “When Yezhov calls in members of the Central Committee, they dump into their pants”) was beginning to feel the ground beneath his feet slipping away.
Stalin had apparently decided that the Great Terror had achieved its aim and that the pressure could be eased. That is why he appeared to agree with Sholokhov’s emotional protest against the lawlessness of the secret police. A special resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars and the Central Committee appeared on November 17, 1938, “On arrests, procuratorial supervision, and investigative procedures,” which read like a direct reply to Sholokhov’s complaints: “The mass operations of destroying and rooting out hostile elements implemented by the organs of the NKVD in 1937–1938, with a simplified investigation and trial, could not have avoided leading to a number of major flaws and perversions in the work of the organs of the NKVD and the Procurator’s Office.”
Now Stalin would make Yezhov the scapegoat. Khayutina took a fatal dose of sleeping medication on November 21, 1938, and two days later, Yezhov handed Stalin his resignation as head of the NKVD. When the Bloody Dwarf was arrested six weeks later, the charges were “treasonous and espionage ties” with Poland, Germany, England, and Japan, but they also included poisoning his wife: the investigators fabricated a theory that Yezhov, Khayutina, and her lover Babel had planned to assassinate Stalin and that Yezhov killed his wife to cover up traces of the conspiracy.
Yezhov was executed on February 4, 1940, eight days after Babel and two days after the execution of Khayutina’s other lover, Koltsov. Her third lover, Sholokhov, had another fate in store: a little over a year later, he became the Stalin Prize winner—not only as a writer (for two novels simultaneously) but as a public figure in the traditional Russian cultural role of “defender of the people” as well (Stalin had told him, “Your letters are not literary writing, they’re nothing but politics”), and even as a colorful personality.
If Sholokhov was walking a tightrope in his relations with Stalin, so was Sergei Eisenstein, who won the Stalin Prize for his famous 1938 film
