Stalin and His Hangmen (47 page)

In August 1936 Kaganovich told Stalin that he, the prosecutor Vyshinsky and Judge Ulrikh had fully rehearsed the trial for performance from the 19th to the 22nd, and Kamenev and Zinoviev would appear as the seventh and eighth of sixteen abject penitents. ‘The role of the Gestapo is to be brought out in full. If the accused name Piatakov and others [on the right] they will not be stopped.’ On the first day Zinoviev confessed to knowing all about Kirov’s murder as it happened, and Smirnov admitted receiving instructions from Trotsky. The second day, Kaganovich and Ezhov reported, went even better. All defendants were singing the same tune and Zinoviev’s demeanour was ‘more depressed than any of the others’. Only Kamenev – Kaganovich underlined this point – was ‘keeping up a pose that was defiant compared with Zinoviev’s. He’s trying to put on airs, acting the leader.’ Best of all, the victims’ statements would damn every other of Stalin’s opponents: Rykov, Tomsky, Bukharin on the right; Radek, Grigori Sokolnikov, Piatakov and Leonid Serebriakov on the left were all mentioned.

So vile were the smears that on the last day of the trial Mikhail Tomsky shot himself – as Stalin’s former secretary Boris Bazhanov had predicted he would – at his dacha. The suicide note ran:

… here is my last request – don’t believe Zinoviev’s brazen slander… Now I end this letter after reading the court’s resolution that I should be investigated… I feel that I shan’t be able to endure that, I am too tired for such shocks as being put in the same dock as fascists… I ask forgiveness from the party for my old mistakes, I ask that Zinoviev and Kamenev be not believed… PS Remember our night-time conversation in 1928. [At a barbecue in Sochi a drunken Tomsky had warned Stalin, who was grilling the kebabs, ‘Our workers will soon begin firing at you.’] Don’t take what I blurted out seriously – I have been repenting that deeply ever since. But I couldn’t change your mind, for you’d never have believed me. If you want to know the names of the people who pushed me down the road of right-wing opposition in May 1928, ask my wife personally, then she’ll say who they were.
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Maria Tomskaia, the widow, would not talk to the NKVD’s secret department so Stalin and Kaganovich sent Nikolai Ezhov with the suicide note to her. She hinted that Iagoda had ‘been playing a very active role in the trio who led the right [opposition]…’ A niche was ready for Tomsky’s ashes in the Kremlin wall and his death mask was taken. But Stalin, who unlike Hitler hated disgraced comrades to commit suicide, ordered him to be buried in his garden; the body was later dug up and disposed of. Two years later the rest of the right opposition could only envy Tomsky.

Tomsky’s suicide note, Ezhov told Stalin, implicated Iagoda:

… who has played a very active part in the guiding troika of the right and has regularly provided them with material about the state of play in the Central Committee…

A lot of failings have been shown up in the NKVD and in my view they can in no way be tolerated any more… Among the ruling clique of
chekisty
moods of self-satisfaction, complacency and bragging are more and more blatant. Instead of drawing conclusions from the Trotskyist case and criticizing their own faults and correcting them, these people are dreaming now only of medals for the case they have cleared up…

We’ll have to shoot quite an impressive quantity. Personally I think that we have to face up to this and once and for all finish with this scum [Zinoviev and other defendants].
⁴³

All the defendants received death sentences. Most declared that they expected nothing less. Even Kamenev ended abjectly: ‘The practical management of organizing this terrorist act [killing Kirov] was carried out not by me, but Zinoviev.’ Vyshinsky excelled himself in the absurdity of his rhetoric: ‘In their dark cellar Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev throw out a vile call: get rid of him, kill him! An underground machine begins to work, knives are sharpened, revolvers loaded, bombs
assembled.’ Vyshinsky attacked Zinoviev as a ‘villain, a murderer weeping for his victim’. Not a scrap of evidence was produced, and, thanks to Iagoda’s carelessness, the confessions could easily be proven false. One minor defendant, E. S. Goltsman, alleged he had met Trotsky’s elder son in 1932 in the Copenhagen Hotel Bristol; Lev Trotsky junior was sitting his examinations at the time in Berlin, and the hotel had been demolished in 1917.

Ulrikh took twenty-four hours to deliver the verdicts. Stalin in Sochi insisted on editing them and told Kaganovich:

It needs stylistic polishing… you must mention in a separate paragraph of the verdict that Trotsky and Sedov [Lev Trotsky junior] are liable to trial or being tried, or something like that. This has great significance for Europe, bourgeois and workers… You must cross out the final words: ‘The sentence is final and cannot be appealed.’ These words are superfluous and make a bad impression. We mustn’t allow an appeal, but it is stupid to put that in the sentence…

The next morning fifteen of the sixteen petitioned Stalin for a reprieve, which was immediately refused. All were shot a few hours later. Nikolai Ezhov was present. He extracted the bullets from the corpses and wrapped these souvenirs in paper slips with the condemned men’s names. Kamenev and Smirnov walked to the execution cellar stoically, but Zinoviev clung to the boots of his guards and was taken down by stretcher. This scene was re-enacted several times at supper at Stalin’s dacha, the bodyguard Karl Pauker playing the part of Zinoviev – begging for Stalin to be fetched and then crying out ‘Hear, o Israel’ – until even Stalin found the charade distasteful.
⁴⁴

Writers within the USSR put up little or no opposition to the trial and the executions. Ehrenburg, Sholokhov and Aleksei Tolstoi had clamoured for the execution of their former patrons whom they knew to be innocent, at least of the crimes of which they were convicted. A very few, like Pasternak, withstood the pressure to sign petitions demanding that the accused be shot. Ehrenburg and Sholokhov’s compliance is more pardonable than the complicity of Western intellectuals and observers. Some had watched Hitler’s Reichstag trial, admired the spirited defence put up by the Bulgarian communist Dimitrov, and applauded his acquittal. They claimed that Vyshinsky and Ulrikh’s
pastiche of European legal proceedings could not have been wholly falsified, that the Soviet judiciary had not sold its soul to Stalin.

Kaganovich reported to Stalin on the second day of the trial that all the foreign correspondents’ telegrams made a special point of the evidence incriminating the right wing. The best-informed outside observer, Trotsky, was gagged; the Norwegian government feared a Soviet boycott of its herrings, and Kaganovich drafted a letter from Stalin to Norwegian Minister of Justice Trygve Lie, naming Trotsky as the main organizer of terrorism in the USSR and demanding his removal. Trotsky, the first foreigner to be interned and held incommunicado in Norway, was not allowed to sue those European newspapers that repeated Vyshinsky’s slanders from the trial.

Western radical opinion in 1936 had no desire to annoy Stalin. Hitler had invaded the Rhineland; General Franco had risen against the Spanish republic; Japan was invading China; the USSR was sending a delegation to a European peace congress. Democrats believed that in the cause of fighting fascism critics of Stalin’s judicial murders had to be muzzled. Historians, jurists and diplomats assured the European public that the trial had been legally impeccable. Writers like Theodore Dreiser and Bernard Shaw vouched for Stalin’s character. Bertolt Brecht, on the other hand and with impenetrable cynicism, told a friend perplexed by the confessions of Kamenev and Zinoviev: ‘The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die.’
⁴⁵
Kamenev and Zinoviev knew what Stalin had done and what he might yet do: if they were innocent of plotting his death, they had sinned by not committing tyrannicide, an act which even St Thomas Aquinas condoned: ‘God looks with favour upon the physical elimination of the Beast if a people is freed thereby.’ Bertolt Brecht probably meant something else, but if ever tyrannicide was a moral imperative, then in 1936 failing to assassinate Stalin was a crime that deserved the death penalty.

Iagoda’s Fall

… this leader had usually a favourite as like himself as he could get,
whose employment was to lick his master’s feet and posteriors…
This favourite is hated by the whole herd, and therefore to protect
himself, keeps always near the person of his leader. He usually
continues in office until a worse can be found; but the very moment
he is discarded, his successor, at the head of all the Yahoos in that
district, young and old, male and female, come in a body, and
discharge their excrements upon him from head to foot.

Jonathan Swift,
Gulliver’s Travels

The fallout from the trial had not been enough for Stalin. All September he had complained to Kaganovich, Molotov and Ezhov that
Pravda
was explaining the case badly:

It reduces everything to the level of personalities: that there are nasty people who desire to seize power, and nice people in power… The articles should have said that struggling against Stalin, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Kosior and others is struggling against the soviets, against collectivization, against industrialization, therefore a struggle to restore capitalism in the towns and villages of the USSR. For Stalin [he spoke of himself in the third person] and the other leaders are not isolated persons, but the personification of all the victories of socialism in the USSR… i.e. the personification of the efforts of workers, peasants and hard-working intellectuals to smash capitalism and let socialism triumph.

Stalin ended this self-deification on a religious note: ‘Finally it should have said that the fall of these bastards to the state of White Guards and fascists was the logical consequence of their Fall from Grace [
grekhopadenie
] as oppositionists in the past… This is the spirit and the direction in which agitation ought to have been conducted…’
⁴⁶

Promises to spare family members were broken. Within days Kamenev’s wife, who was also Trotsky’s sister, was in the Lubianka. The worst fears of the right wing were confirmed. Piatakov, Orjonikidze’s right-hand man in the Commissariat for Heavy Industry, was, at Stalin’s
insistence, moved to the Urals, a prelude to arrest. Bukharin and Rykov were told that ‘the investigation had not found a legal basis for holding them criminally responsible’, a hint to both of them that this basis would soon be found. Within days of the executions, Kaganovich told Stalin, ‘I have the impression that perhaps Bukharin and Rykov did not maintain a direct organizational link with the Trotsky – Zinoviev bloc, but in 1932 – 3 and perhaps afterwards they were informed of Trotskyist business. The right clearly had its own organization.’ Kaganovich claimed that in purging Trotskyists from the railways, his remit as commissar for transport, he had uncovered right-wing saboteurs, too.

On 25 September 1936 Stalin finally pounced on Genrikh Iagoda. Together with Andrei Zhdanov, in whose hand the directive was written, and using a channel closed to the NKVD, Stalin telegraphed Kaganovich, Molotov and the rest of the Politbiuro:

One. We deem it absolutely essential and urgent to appoint Comrade
Ezhov to the post of commissar of internal affairs. Iagoda [not Comrade
Iagoda] has blatantly shown himself not to be on top of his job in exposing the
Trotsky – Zinoviev bloc. OGPU is four years late in this business. All the
party workers and most of the provincial representatives of the NKVD are
saying this. Agranov can stay as Ezhov’s deputy in the NKVD.
Two. We deem it essential and urgent to remove Rykov from
the Commissariat of Communications and to appoint Iagoda to the post. We
think this needs no explaining since it is clear as it is.
[…]
Four. As for the Party Control Commission, Ezhov can be left concurrently as its chairman, providing he gives nine tenths of his time to the NKVD…
Five. Ezhov agrees to our proposals.

The Politbiuro was overjoyed: Kaganovich wrote immediately from his spa to Orjonikidze: ‘Our latest main news is Ezhov’s appointment. This the remarkably wise decision of our Parent [as Kaganovich now called Stalin] has come to fruition and has had an excellent reception in the party and country.’
⁴⁷
The coup was carefully prepared: Ezhov had talked to Agranov, whose loyalty to his chief Iagoda was frayed. Agranov later reported, ‘Ezhov summoned me to his dacha. I must say that this
meeting was conspiratorial. Ezhov passed on Stalin’s remarks about faults which the investigation had allowed to happen with the Trotskyist centre case and instructed me to take measures…’
⁴⁸

Stalin sent Iagoda a separate telegram. Iagoda was too clever a rat not to smell the poison in the sweet:

To Comrade Iagoda. The Commissariat of Communications is a very important business. This commissariat has defence significance. I don’t doubt you will be able to put it on its feet. I ask you particularly to agree to work in the Commissariat of Communications. Without a good commissariat we feel helpless. It can’t be left in its present state. It has to be put on its feet urgently. I. Stalin.