Stalin and His Hangmen (46 page)

Children were induced to transfer their affections from their families to Stalin; children who denounced their parents were lionized. Lenin had abolished the pre-revolutionary Boy Scouts and shot their leaders; Stalin had by 1931 formed the Pioneers to replace them.

In rural areas the Pioneers were unpopular and it needed an act of terror to promote them. In 1932, in the Urals village of Gerasimovka – though the Pioneers had not yet reached the area – OGPU fabricated a Pioneer martyr Pavlik Morozov, who had fought and died for his Soviet principles against grain-hoarding kulaks. The Pioneers became a mass movement. Pioneers all over the Soviet Union called for ‘Murdering kulaks to be shot!’

Maxim Gorky acclaimed the martyr: ‘Pavlik Morozov’s heroic action… could have had very broad social and educational significance in the eyes of Pioneers. Many of them would probably realize that if a “blood” relative is an enemy of the people, he is no longer a relative, but just an enemy and there are no further reasons to spare him.’ Every Soviet child for the next fifty years would be indoctrinated with the Morozov legend.

The real story was unearthed in a thorough and very brave investigation by Iuri Druzhnikov from the 1950s to the 1980s, when witnesses in the Morozov affair were still alive.
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Pavlik Morozov’s father Trofim was for a time the chairman of the village council, trying to balance the authorities’ demands for grain against the villagers’ desire to survive. Gerasimovka was surrounded by camps for displaced kulaks from southern Russia who were desperate to flee and offered bribes for false papers. Meanwhile, the prosperous peasants of Gerasimovka were themselves being deported to the Siberian tundra. In November 1931, Pavlik denounced Trofim to OGPU for protecting kulaks; Trofim went to a camp for ten years.

Pavlik did not benefit by his actions – his own family’s property was confiscated as part of Trofim’s punishment – but he began to denounce
any villager hoarding grain, selling potatoes or expressing discontent. He was ostracized by the villagers until his reign of terror ended on 4 September 1932 when his body and that of his brother Fedia were found under cranberry bushes deep in the forest.

The authorities acted with alacrity: the boys were buried with no autopsy. After three months imprisonment, their grandparents (in their eighties), a nineteen-year-old cousin and an uncle were put on trial in the village hall – to which journalists and an audience from the nearest town were bussed. The defence counsel abandoned his clients; the prisoners, admitting nothing, nevertheless pleaded guilty. The prosecution berated kulaks generally. After the verdict, the four were led to a pit, undressed and shot. Trofim Morozov was apparently shot in the camps after hacking out his grave in the permafrost.

Pavlik and Fedia Morozov were, most likely, dispatched by the bayonet and rifle butt of an OGPU killer, Spiridon Kartashov.
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The order to stage such a murder must have come from Iagoda, and probably from Stalin; such a fabrication was too important to be left to local initiative. The subject remained very sensitive for the Soviet censors; when Sergei Eisenstein made a film about the child martyr, using the title of Turgenev’s story
Bezhin Meadow
, Stalin was furious at the iconographic portrayal of Pavlik Morozov and his uncle as Isaac and Abraham and the film was largely destroyed. Stalin henceforth forbade making any film without every word in the script being vetted.

There were more Pavlik Morozovs. Druzhnikov found fifty-seven cases in the 1930s. Denunciations overwhelmed the NKVD: some denouncers asked for a month’s stay in a sanatorium as a reward for their tireless efforts. Adults even denounced children. Childish absurdities were taken seriously. For instance, on 5 July 1935, little Niura Dmitrieva from Volsk on the lower Volga sent Stalin a ten-page letter listing in detail ‘all the children who have been teasing, hitting and making fun of me’. Niura also denounced her teacher for setting too much homework. Stalin had a commission sent to Volsk to punish the guilty and bring the girl to an elite boarding school in Moscow.
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Pigs in the Parlour, Peacocks on Parade

A generation of children had grown up in the USSR with no memories of life before the revolution. Their education, apart from exposing them to a few Russian classics, gave them no hint that there was any morality, let alone conscience, outside Stalin’s Communist Party by which they should be governed. They grew up believing, many of them fanatically, that foreigners were spies, that the children of the bourgeoisie, the rich peasantry and the clergy were renegades, that all political prisoners were guilty, that the NKVD and the courts were infallible.

The new generation was strongly represented in the NKVD. The
chekisty
of the civil war period had moved into the bureaucracy and into industry, carrying with them their belief in ruthless repression as the best means of administration. Some, who persuaded themselves that they had not lost all semblance of humanity, retired into academia or literature. Their places were taken by the orphans of the civil war, by party workers who had been drafted into, or felt drawn to, an organization where their authority would be unquestioned. The new intake was ethnically more Russian and less Jewish, Latvian or Polish; it was less well educated, often semi-literate. It had no interest in, let alone sympathy for, the ideas of Trotsky or Bukharin, or any ideas at all. It saw itself as a punitive weapon in Stalin and Iagoda’s hands. Under Nikolai Ezhov it would prove itself a mindless tool of a paranoiac murderer. Even in 1935 the NKVD no longer questioned the most absurd indictments and directives from above.

By mid-1935, except for a few Chechen outlaws, the entire population of the USSR was under the NKVD’s total control. Iagoda had knuckled under to Stalin’s new favourite Nikolai Ezhov and was concocting material for the show trials of those opposition leaders who were still alive, some even at liberty. Ezhov began writing for Stalin a pamphlet entitled ‘From Fractionalism to Open Counter-revolution’. He was instructed to argue that Trotsky had made terrorists of ideological opponents like Kamenev and Zinoviev and to blame Iagoda for lack of vigilance.
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Lazar Kaganovich had now covered Moscow with asphalt and furnished
it with an underground railway. The city began to impress foreign visitors. Iagoda cleared Moscow of its 12,000 professional beggars: instead of going back to their villages, where begging was a respected profession, they were sent to Kazakhstan. Thanks to the GULAG’s output of timber, coal, non-ferrous and precious metals, the Soviet economy was growing. The camps had over 500,000 inmates in 1934, and 750,000 in 1935. The GULAG was also more efficient: inmates’ annual mortality dropped from 15 per cent in 1933 to 4 per cent in 1935. Deported kulaks added their labour as industrial workers or farmers in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Their death rate also dropped to a fraction of the appalling 13 per cent of 1933.

Iagoda was rewarded; the NKVD got new ranks and uniforms. On 26 November Iagoda became general secretary (a rank that hitherto only Stalin had enjoyed) of state security, equivalent to an army marshal. He ordered himself a tunic covered with gold stars and raspberry-striped dark blue trousers; his underlings were only slightly less garish. They exemplified William Cobbett’s ‘pigs in the parlour, peacocks on parade’. Secret police the NKVD were not.

Iagoda should have known that these marks of favour augured doom. Stalin had never forgotten that Iagoda had been named by Bukharin as a potential supporter of a right coup. He also failed to provide the forced labour he had promised for the Moscow– Volga canal and the Moscow underground; these projects were completed with paid and voluntary labour. The economic uses of the GULAG were limited.

In October 1935 the curious case of the old army commander Gai Gai-Bzhishkian exhausted Stalin’s patience with Iagoda. Gai had told a drinking companion, ‘Stalin has to be got rid of.’ He was denounced and sentenced to five years in prison. On the train taking him away, his guards let him go to the lavatory, where he smashed the window and leapt onto the track. Gai, Iagoda had to admit to Stalin, had escaped. Two days later, he was found by a peasant.

Stalin was furious. He raged:

To catch one snivelling wretch the NKVD mobilized 900 men from frontier guard school, all their own workers, party members, Communist Youth, farmers and made a ring that must have consisted of several thousand people over 100 kilometres. One wonders who needs a Cheka and why it exists anyway if every time, in every trivial case, it has to ask for help from Communist Youth, farmers and the whole population? Moreover, does the NKVD understand how disagreeable for the government is the uproar created by such mobilizations?… I think that the Cheka part of the NKVD is suffering from a serious disease. It’s time we started treating it.
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Iagoda received from Gai in prison a tearful letter of penitence: ‘I miss nothing, not my family, my little daughter, nor my invalid elderly father, I miss to the point of burning pain my old name, Gai, combat commander of the Red Army. Comrade Iagoda, it’s very painful for me to talk about this to you… Give me the chance to atone for my guilt with blood. It’s dark in the cell and tears make it hard to write.’
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Iagoda had Gai examined by the Kremlin doctors, who diagnosed pneumonia. On 7 November 1935 a note, signed by Agranov not Iagoda, reported to Stalin that Gai had died. In fact he was very much alive. Stalin must have found out Iagoda’s deceit, for Gai was shot two years later.

Typically, Stalin pretended to forgive Iagoda’s lapse and made him general commissar of state security. Important tasks were, however, taken out of his hands. While Iagoda’s men summoned Kamenev and Zinoviev from prison for further interrogation, Stalin, with Kaganovich and Ezhov, rewrote their confessions and dictated the course of further questioning. Iagoda and the NKVD now came under the party secretariat’s control. The forthcoming show trial was outlined by Stalin more minutely than the wreckers’ trials which Menzhinsky had prepared under his supervision.

Nothing shifted Stalin from his determination to physically ‘finish off’ those he had destroyed politically. Kamenev, whose sentence had been increased from five to ten years, kept a stoic silence, bargaining with his persecutors only for his family’s survival. Zinoviev showered the Politbiuro with appeals from his prison cell. On one occasion he begged Stalin to let him publish the memoirs he was writing in prison and to help his ‘academically talented’ Marxist son. To his oppressor he wrote:

One desire burns in my soul: to prove to you that I am no longer an
enemy. There is no demand which I would not meet in order to prove
that… I am reaching the point where I stare for long periods at portraits
in the newspapers of you and other members of the Politbiuro with the
thought: look into my soul, can’t you see that I am no longer your enemy,
that I am yours body and soul, that I have understood everything, that I
am ready to do everything to earn forgiveness, mercy?
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Stalin had however decided to show that Zinoviev and Kamenev were Trotsky’s agents, aiming to overthrow the Soviet state by violence. He would prove to socialists abroad that Trotsky was a terrorist and a Gestapo collaborator. Formally, in July 1936, Iagoda and the chief prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky asked Stalin for the go-ahead to retry Kamenev and Zinoviev on the grounds that they had secured light prison sentences in 1935 by concealing their guilt. Iagoda arrested Zinoviev’s former secretary Pikel and an old associate of Trotsky, Dreitser, and broke them by sleep deprivation into signing the necessary statements. Zinoviev and Kamenev were not, strictly speaking, tortured although Zinoviev was kept in overheated cells, where he suffered from asthma and liver pains. He was a broken man; perhaps he believed assurances that Stalin ‘would not shed the blood of old Bolsheviks’.
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Kamenev was resigned.

So well did Kaganovich and Ezhov supervise Iagoda that Stalin could spend all August and September on holiday in the Caucasus, while the fantastic Trotsky-Zinoviev ‘Moscow centre’ was set up and then demolished. Kaganovich, like Ezhov and, one suspects Stalin, was able to hypnotize himself into believing his inept conspiracy fantasies. On 6 July 1936 Kaganovich announced to Stalin:

I’ve read the statements by those bastards Dreitser and Pikel. Though it was clear before, they are revealing with all details the true bandit face of the murderers and provocateurs Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Smirnov. Now it is absolutely clear that the main inspiration of this gang is that mercenary shit Trotsky. It’s time I think to declare him ‘outside the law’ and to shoot the rest of the swine whom we have in our prisons.
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Iakov Agranov worked viciously on those of Zinoviev and Kamenev’s co-defendants who had not yet broken. Ivan Smirnov, a Siberian civil war veteran and former supporter of both Zinoviev and Trotsky, had in 1927 publicly called for Stalin’s removal. He went on hunger strike. So
did the Armenian Vagarshal Ter-Vaganian, who slit his wrists and wrote to Stalin in his own blood: ‘People are slandering, slandering vilely, shamelessly, their slander is shriekingly obvious… Nevertheless I am powerless against these brazen lies.’ Agranov force-fed both men. Other defendants were designated to show that Trotsky worked for the Gestapo. Four German-Jewish communists stood trial for their lives – Moise Lourié, W. Olberg, G. B. Berman-Jurin and I. I. Fritz-David. They had taken refuge in the USSR, not dreaming that Stalin would kill far more German communists than Hitler.