Stalin and His Hangmen (37 page)

Dzierżyński and Menzhinsky had fatal flaws and arrogance, but their probity was never doubted, and they received solemn state funerals. Compared to them Iagoda was a petty figure; his arrogance and his cruelty reflected an inner insecurity, which was to be his undoing. His ashes would be thrown in a nameless pit, not placed in a mausoleum.

The Trophy Writer

One night a werewolf slipped away

From wife and child and went to see

A village teacher in his grave

And asked him, ‘Please, will you decline me?’

The pedagogue climbed up and out

Onto his coffin of brass and lead

And spoke to the werewolf, who, devout,

Crossed his paws in front of the dead…

                                       Christian Morgenstern

In 1929 Stalin put the litterateur Menzhinsky in charge of crushing the peasantry, and chose the provincial ignoramus Genrikh Iagoda to bring the literati to heel. The choices follow Stalinist logic: the hangman should have nothing in common, and no sympathy, with the condemned, although, for all his ignorance, Iagoda had two links to the literary world. His brother-in-law Leopold Averbakh was a critic, and Iagoda himself was virtually a kinsman of Russia’s most prestigious left-wing writer, Maxim Gorky. In 1928 Iagoda’s career was boosted when Stalin used him to bring Maxim Gorky back to the USSR. For six years, ostensibly for his health, Gorky had lived on the island of Capri.
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Gorky had his reasons to return. While he was widely read in the Soviet Union, his reputation in the West was waning. The sagas he now composed about decaying Russian merchant families were dreary; Stalin himself found
The Artamonov Business
hard going.
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Homesickness and penury bothered Gorky while OGPU and Stalin felt that Gorky on Capri was a magnet for undesirable heretics. Stalin had always found Gorky unreliable; he had crossed swords with him in 1917, calling his protests ‘geese cackling in intellectual marshes’, but he longed for a sage to validate his actions, a bard to laud his genius. Stalin had silenced the USSR’s wittiest political panegyrists, Kamenev and Bukharin, and needed better flattery than Demian Bedny’s doggerel or the proletarian hacks’ stilted dramas. Gorky had written encomia to Tolstoi and Lenin; he could do the same for Stalin, who now put off other potential
hagiographers.
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Stalin calculated that in Gorky’s wake intellectuals from Britain, America, France and Germany would flock to the USSR.

The conversation of Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Molotov (Gorky privately called them ‘camp-following trash’) must have stultified Stalin, who now had no literate penfriend. Demian Bedny, slow to follow changes in Stalin’s taste, had disgraced himself by writing the anti-Russian satire
Get off the stove!
and Stalin had broken off their friendship. Stalin began to discuss in letters to Gorky the plays he had read. Their correspondence reads like exchanges between a publisher’s reader and a copy editor, or the reports of a minister to a president. Stalin wrote, ‘We’re moving the cart: of course, it squeaks, but we are moving ahead… Transport is in a poor state (too overloaded), but we’ll get it right very soon.’
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Both Iagoda and Stalin baited Gorky with secret material on ‘wreckers’ for a play: ‘I’ve gathered some new material,’ wrote Stalin, sending transcripts from OGPU’s questioning of the economist Kondratiev and of the Mensheviks. Gorky enthused about the punishment meted out but never wrote the promised play. In return Gorky fed Stalin flattering snippets: Moura Budberg, Gorky’s mistress, had told him that London’s best-selling book was a treatise on the Soviet five-year plan and that Bertrand Russell had declared that only in the USSR could scientists experiment on human beings. Gorky advised Stalin to publish a book on how laws are made in the Soviet Union.

In December 1931 Gorky showed Stalin how much he cared:

There is particular verbal raging from monarchists and their terrorist organizations. All in all, they are stalking you intensively, one can’t help thinking that now efforts will increase. And you, dear comrade, I hear and I have seen, behave rather carelessly, you drive at night to No. 6 Nikitskaia [Gorky’s apartment]. I am completely sure that you have no right to behave like that. Who would replace you if the bastards knock you off? Don’t be angry, I have a right to worry and give advice.

The Politbiuro subsequently passed a resolution, after a communication from OGPU, that Stalin should cease going about Moscow on foot. With Gorky’s help, Iagoda had secured a major victory: Stalin could no more play Harun-al-Rashid, walking the streets, dropping in unannounced
to see writers and commissars. His contacts outside the Kremlin were overseen by OGPU, and he was as much a prisoner of OGPU as its overlord.
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Gorky’s chief asset as a writer was curiosity, his weakness vanity. He was lured back to the USSR with promises that he would be told everything. His jubilee would be celebrated, all the literary initiatives begun under Lenin would be resumed. He would revitalize Russian literature. For the first five years after his return he spent May to September in Russia and the winter in Capri for his lungs. From 1933, when Hitler’s rise made it even less conscionable for a Soviet writer to live in fascist Italy and Stalin feared that Gorky could be infected by Trotskyism, Gorky was kept in golden cages in Moscow and the Crimea. His home town Nizhni and Chekhov’s Moscow Arts Theatre would both take his name but the tribute he most appreciated was Stalin’s establishment of the Gorky Literary Institute, which was to nurture gifted writers.

Without Iagoda, Stalin could not have coaxed Gorky back. Iagoda had recruited Piotr Kriuchkov, Gorky’s secretary, into OGPU. Through Kriuchkov, Iagoda not only learnt everything about Gorky’s life; he could also feed Gorky with ideas and books that inclined Gorky to see Soviet Russia as the only bulwark against fascism.

Iagoda made Moura Budberg, previously the mistress of Robert Bruce-Lockhart and of H. G. Wells, indispensable to Gorky. No woman who entered Gorky’s orbit ever left it. His legal wife Ekaterina Peshkova, who had the thankless task of running the Soviet Red Cross for Political Prisoners, still adored him. So did the actress Maria Andreeva, a long-standing Bolshevik from the Moscow Arts Theatre; Iagoda retrieved Maria Andreeva from exile in Berlin to join the harem in Capri. Moura Budberg had been beholden to the Cheka ever since she had been blackmailed by Jekabs Peterss over her marriage to an aristocrat and her affair with the British agent Bruce-Lockhart in 1918. She engineered the return of Gorky, and his archive, to the Soviet Union.

Gorky looked on Iagoda not just as a fellow countryman from Nizhni, he was kith and kin. In the 1890s Gorky had adopted Zinovi, Yakov Sverdlov’s rebellious brother, who was both third cousin and uncle by marriage to Iagoda. Zinovi took Gorky’s surname Peshkov.
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OGPU kept Gorky’s household on Capri under surveillance, as did
Mussolini’s secret police. Both Moura Budberg and Gorky’s son Max Peshkov worked for Iagoda (Max confided to the poet Khodasevich that he was once given a confiscated stamp collection by Dzierżyński as payment for helping the Cheka make arrests). Gorky felt that returning to Moscow would give him peace but on his first homecoming in 1928 his Moscow apartment, which belonged to his wife, was effectively controlled by Iagoda. It seethed even more than Capri with competing women: Ekaterina Peshkova, Maria Andreeva, the nurse Lipa Chertkova (once wardrobe mistress in the Moscow Arts Theatre) and Timosha, Max’s wife, who many suspected preferred her father-in-law to her feckless husband. Gorky remarked, ‘I never had luck with women. There’ve always been a lot, but did any sense come out of it?’

Stalin broke Gorky in gently; the writer was not at first told of the Shakhty death sentences. Iagoda moved him to a dacha that had belonged to the merchant Savva Morozov, who had financed the Moscow Arts Theatre and the Bolsheviks before the revolution. Back in Europe Gorky found himself ostracized by Russian émigrés for shaking Stalin’s hand. He tried to make the best of his ambiguous position: from Sorrento he wrote to Iagoda, asking for reprieves for an ornithologist in the Urals, an elderly Ukrainian littérateur and a Siberian Esperantist. Iagoda proved more responsive than Dzierżyński to Gorky’s appeals. When in May 1929 Gorky returned to Moscow Iagoda had more intimate reasons to stay close: he was infatuated with Gorky’s daughter-in-law Timosha. Despite this, Genrikh and Ida’s only child Garik was born that year.

Iagoda sent Gorky, supervised by an OGPU major from Nizhni, to the special purpose camps in the former monasteries on the Solovetsky islands. Gorky willingly put on his blinkers. He met famous academics dying in the frozen north, but all he and Timosha expressed to Iagoda on their return was their delight at the clean sheets, good food, daily newspapers and rehabilitation which OGPU officers gave their prisoners. Emboldened by Gorky’s appreciation, Iagoda responded: ‘Some frontier guards have asked me to send you a collection of their poems for your opinion. This is their own work, there is some pretty good verse… I personally add my voice to theirs. That’s all I ask. But I would so much like to see you… You seem to have forgotten your “intimate friend”. Perhaps you’ll write, eh? Timosha also is upsetting me – she’s quite, quite forgotten me!’
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Gorky was, he willingly admitted, two-faced and sly; he had always played up to his patrons, whether rich merchants or OGPU chiefs. He was, he confessed to Chekhov, ‘absurd… a locomotive with no rails’, but he drew the line at writing a preface to poetry by frontier guards. They were, he told Iagoda, ‘graphomaniacs’ who would be mocked by the critics. But Gorky would write admiringly about frontier guards. He could not write fully about the Solovetsky camps for the Cheka had purloined his notebooks, but by 1932 he was writing ‘about the unprecedented, fantastically successful experiment of re-educating socially dangerous people in conditions of free socially useful work’.

Stalin appreciated the gloss that Gorky put on the camps and he wanted Gorky as commissar for literature. The present commissar, Anatoli Lunacharsky, once a decadent poet and a relatively liberal even principled man, was dying. The literary atmosphere had darkened. Iagoda’s brother-in-law Leopold Averbakh was terrorizing literature, attacking in print and in letters to Stalin any non-proletarian, unengaged writing. Averbakh believed himself untouchable: he was Sverdlov’s nephew and Iagoda’s brother-in-law, while his wife Elena Bonch-Bruevich was the daughter of an old friend of Lenin’s. Averbakh believed he had the party and OGPU behind him. But his Association of Proletarian Writers stifled creativity and the proletarians wrote no plays Stalin could watch with pleasure or novels which depicted heroes convincingly. Stalin’s chief of cavalry Budionny wanted Isaak Babel shot for his portrayal of marauding Cossacks in
Red Cavalry,
Pilniak infuriated Stalin by implying he was a murderer and Zoshchenko put caricatures of Stalin in his stories but they entertained Stalin, and he even read Zoshchenko out loud to his daughter. Gorky’s homecoming raised hopes that Averbakh’s grip on literature would loosen.

Through Gorky, Iagoda now had access to artists and artists could speak to OGPU chiefs. Iagoda loved directing writers’ lives. He never achieved the understanding dialogue that, for instance, Iakov Agranov had with Mayakovsky, but he had the satisfaction of dispatching Mandelstam to the Urals and Nikolai Kliuev to Siberia. Writers who had not yet fallen foul of OGPU were intimidated by Iagoda’s ‘magpie’s eyes’. The novelist Leonid Leonov was aghast: ‘Once Gorky and I were at the same table. Iagoda stretches across the table towards me, drunk, flushed with cognac, his eyes popping and literally croaks: “Listen, Leonov,
answer me, why do you need hegemony in literature? Answer, why do you need it?” I then saw in his eyes such spite that I knew I would fare ill if he could get me.’

Suborning Gorky was Stalin’s triumph over the imagination. The party now corrupted lesser writers using reassurance, even affection. Small services – material to be used, approaches to be taken – were requested and paid for, and soon the victims accepted with joy whatever was forced on them.

Much blame for the loss of their honour and conscience attaches to Soviet writers, who had even before the revolution aped revolutionary parties by forming mutually warring groups, ostracizing those who would not accept their ideology. Theatre directors taught Menzhinsky, Iagoda and Stalin how to run their show trials. Meierkhold and his Georgian acolyte Sandro Akhmeteli treated actors as the party treated its members. In 1924 Tbilisi’s Rustaveli theatre actors signed pledges: ‘I shall have no brothers, sisters, parents, friends or kith and kin outside the membership; I submit absolutely, and always will, to the corporation’s decisions, I sacrifice my life and future to the corporation’s will’ It was easy for such bullies and cowards to adjust to Bolshevik dictates.