25

Beria and the Weariness of Hangmen

On 4 April, Yezhov was appointed Commissar of Water Transport which made some sense since the building of canals was the task of the NKVD’s slave labour. But there was a worrying symmetry because Yagoda had been appointed to a similar Commissariat on his dismissal. Meanwhile Yezhov ravaged even the Politburo: Postyshev was being interrogated; Eikhe of West Siberia was arrested. Stalin promoted Kosior from Kiev to Moscow as Soviet Deputy Premier. However, in April 1938, Kosior’s brother was arrested. His one hope was to denounce his kin.

“I’m living under suspicion and distrust,” he wrote to Stalin. “You can’t imagine how that feels to an innocent man. The arrest of my brother casts a shadow over me too . . . I swear on my life I’ve not only never suspected the real nature of Casimir Kosior, he was never close to me . . . Why has he invented all this? I can’t understand it but Comrade Stalin, it was all invented from start to finish . . . I ask you Comrade Stalin and all the Politburo to let me explain myself. I am a victim of an Enemy’s lies. Sometimes I think this is a silly dream. . .” How often these victims compared their plight to a “dream.” On 3 May he was arrested, followed by Chubar. Kaganovich claimed, “I protected Kosior and Chubar,” but faced with their handwritten confessions, “I gave up.”¹

Yezhov, living a vampiric nocturnal existence of drinking and torture sessions, was being crushed under the weight of his work. Stalin noticed Blackberry’s degeneration. “You call the ministry,” Stalin complained, “he’s left for the Central Committee. You call the Central Committee, he’s left for the ministry. You send a messenger to his apartment and there he’s dead drunk.”² The pressure on these slaughtermen was immense: just as Himmler later lectured his SS butchers on their special work, so now Stalin worked hard to reassure and encourage his men. But not all of them were strong enough to stand the pace.

The executioners survived by drinking. Even the sober purgers were dizzy with death. The official investigating the Belorussian Military District admitted to Stalin that “I didn’t lose my teeth but I must confess . . . I became disorientated for a while.” Stalin reassured him. Even dread Mekhlis almost had a breakdown at the beginning of the Terror when he still ran Pravda, writing an extraordinary letter to Stalin that gives a fascinating window onto the pressures of being a Stalinist potentate in the whirlwind of terror:

Dear Comrade Stalin,

My nerves did not stand up. I did not comport myself as a Bolshevik; especially I feel the pain of my words in our “personal talk” when I personally owed my whole life and my Partiinost to you. I feel absolutely crushed. These years take away from us a lot of people . . . I must run Pravda in a situation when there is no secretary and no editor, when we have not approved a theme, when I found myself finally in the role of “persecuted editor.” This is organized bedlam which can eat up everybody. And it has eaten up people! In the last days, I’ve felt ill without sleep and only able to get to sleep at eleven or twelve in the morning . . . I’m all the more frantic in my apartment after sleepless nights at the newspaper. It’s time to relieve me [of this job]. I can’t be chief of Pravda when I’m sick and sleepless, incapable of following what is happening in the country, economics, art and literature, never getting the chance to go to the theatre. I had to tell you this personally but it was silly, lying. Forgive me my dear Comrade Stalin for that unpleasant minute I gave you. For me it’s very hard to experience such a trauma!

The Procurator-General Vyshinsky also felt the pressure, finding this on his desk: “Everyone knows you’re a Menshevik. After using you, Stalin will sentence you to Vishka . . . Run away . . . Remember Yagoda. That’s your destiny. The Moor has done his duty. The Moor can go.”

Constantly drunk, Yezhov sensed Stalin was, as he later wrote to his master, “dissatisfied with the NKVD work which deteriorated my mood still further.”³ He made frantic attempts to prove his worth: he was said to have suggested renaming Moscow as “Stalinodar.” This was laughed off. Instead Yezhov was called upon to kill his own NKVD appointees whom he had protected. In early 1938, Stalin and Yezhov decided to liquidate the veteran Chekist Abram Slutsky, but since he headed the Foreign Department, they devised a plan so as not to scare their foreign agents. On 17 February, Frinovsky invited Slutsky to his office where another of Yezhov’s deputies came up behind him and drew a mask of chloroform over his face. He was then injected with poison and died right there in the office. It was officially announced that he had died of a heart attack.¹³² Soon the purge began to threaten those closer to Yezhov.⁴ When his protégé Liushkov was recalled from the Far East, Yezhov tipped him off. Liushkov defected to the Japanese. Yezhov was so rattled by this fiasco that he asked Frinovsky to go with him to tell Stalin: “On my own I did not have the strength.” Yezhov “literally went mad.” Stalin rightly suspected Yezhov of warning Liushkov.⁵

Sensing his rising doubts, Stalin’s magnates, who had proved their readiness to kill, began to denounce Yezhov’s degeneracy and lies. Zhdanov in particular was said to oppose Yezhov’s Terror. Zhdanov’s son Yury claims his father had wanted to talk to Stalin alone but Yezhov was always present: “Father finally managed to see Stalin tête-à-tête and said, ‘Political provocation is going on . . .’ ” This is convincing because Zhdanov was closest to Stalin personally but Malenkov’s children tell a similar story. Molotov and Yezhov had a row in the Politburo in mid-1938. Stalin ordered the latter to apologize. When another NKVD agent, Alexander Orlov, the resident agent in Spain, defected, Yezhov was so scared of Stalin that he tried to withhold this information.

On 29 July, Stalin signed another death list that included more of Yezhov’s protégés. Yezhov was so distraught with fear and foreboding that he started shooting prisoners who might incriminate him. Uspensky, the Ukrainian NKVD chief, was in Moscow and discovered that a thousand people were going to be shot in the next five days. “The tracks should be covered,” Yezhov warned him. “All investigation cases should be finished in an accelerated procedure so it’ll be impossible to make sense of it.”⁶

Stalin gently told Yezhov that he needed some help in running the NKVD and asked him to choose someone. Yezhov requested Malenkov but Stalin wanted to keep him in the Central Committee so someone, probably Kaganovich, proposed Beria. Stalin may have wanted a Caucasian, perhaps convinced that the cut-throat traditions of the mountains—blood feuds, vendettas and secret murders—suited the position. Beria was a natural, the only First Secretary who personally tortured his victims. The blackjack—the zhguti—and the truncheon—the dubenka—were his favourite toys. He was hated by many of the Old Bolsheviks and family members around the Leader. With the whispering, plotting and vengeful Beria at his side, Stalin felt able to destroy his own polluted, intimate world.

Yezhov probably tried to arrest Beria, but it was too late. Stalin had already seen Beria during the Supreme Soviet on 10 August. Beria was coming to Moscow.⁷

He had come a long way since 1931. Beria, now thirty-six, was complex and talented with a first-class brain. He was witty, a font of irreverent jokes, mischievous anecdotes and withering put-downs. He managed to be a sadistic torturer as well as a loving husband and warm father but he was already a priapic womanizer whom power would distort into a sexual predator. A skilled manager, he was the only Soviet leader whom “one could imagine becoming Chairman of General Motors,” as his daughter-in-law put it later. He could run vast enterprises with a mixture of villainous threats—“I’ll grind you to powder”—and meticulous precision. “Everything that depended on Beria had to function with the precision . . . of a clock” while “the two things he could not bear were wordiness and vagueness of expression.”¹³³ He was “a good organizer, businesslike and capable,” Stalin had told Kaganovich as early as 1932, possessing the “bull nerves” and indefatigability that were necessary for survival at Stalin’s court. He was a “most clever man,” admitted Molotov, “inhumanly energetic—he could work a week without sleep.” ⁸

Beria had the “singular ability to inspire both fear and enthusiasm.” “Idolized” by his own henchmen even though he was often harsh and rude, he would shout: “We’ll arrest you and let you rot in the camps . . . we’ll turn you into camp dust.” A young man like Alyosha Mirtskhulava, whom Beria promoted in the Georgian Party, was still praising Beria for his “humanity, strength, efficiency and patriotism” when he was interviewed for this book in 2002.¹³⁴ Yet Beria liked to boast about his victims: “Let me have one night with him and I’ll have him confessing he’s the King of England.” His favourite movies were Westerns but he identified with the Mexican bandits. Beria was well-educated for a Bolshevik magnate. Nevertheless, Stalin teased this architect manqué that his pince-nez were made of clear glass, worn to give an impression of intellectual gravitas.

This deft intriguer, coarse psychopath and sexual adventurer would also have cut throats, seduced ladies-in-waiting and poisoned goblets of wine at the courts of Genghis Khan, Suleiman the Magnificent or Lucrezia Borgia. But this “zealot,” as Svetlana called him, worshipped Stalin in these earlier years—theirs was the relationship of monarch and liege—treating him like a Tsar instead of the first comrade. The older magnates treated Stalin respectfully but familiarly, but even Kaganovich praised him in the Bolshevik lexicon. Beria, however, said, “Oh yes, you are so right, absolutely true, how true” in an obsequious way, recalled Svetlana. “He was always emphasizing that he was devoted to my father and it got through to Stalin that whatever he said, this man supported him.” Bearing a flavour of his steamy Abkhazia to Stalin’s court, Beria was to become even more complex, powerful and depraved, yet less devoted to Marxism as time went on but in 1938, this “colossal figure,” as Artyom puts it, changed everything.⁹

Beria, like many before him, tried to refuse his promotion. There is no reason to doubt his sincerity—Yagoda had just been shot and the writing was on the wall for Yezhov. His wife Nina did not want to move—but Beria was rapaciously ambitious. When Stalin proposed Beria as NKVD First Deputy, Yezhov pathetically suggested that the Georgian might be a good commissar in his own right. “No, a good deputy,” Stalin reassured him.

Stalin sent Vlasik down to arrange the move. In August, after hurrying back to Georgia to anoint a successor to run Tiflis, Beria arrived in Moscow where, on 22 August 1938, he was appointed First Deputy Narkom of the NKVD. The family were assigned an apartment in the doom-laden House on the Embankment. Stalin arrived to inspect the flat and was not impressed. The bosses lived much better in the warm fertile Caucasus, with its traditions of luxury, wine and plentiful fruit, than elsewhere: Beria had resided in an elegant villa in Tiflis. Stalin suggested they move into the Kremlin but Beria’s wife was unenthusiastic. So finally Stalin chose the Georgian new boy an aristocratic villa on Malaya Nikitskaya in the centre of the city, once the home of a Tsarist General Kuropatkin, where he lived splendidly by Politburo standards. Only Beria had his own mansion.

Stalin treated the newly arrived Berias like a long-lost family. He adored the statuesque blonde Nina Beria whom he always treated “like a daughter”: when the new Georgian leader Candide Charkviani was invited to dinner chez Beria, there was a phone call and a sudden flurry of activity.

“Stalin’s coming!” Nina said, frantically preparing Georgian food. Moments later, Stalin swept in. At the Georgian supra, Stalin and Beria sang together. Even after the Terror, Stalin had not lost a certain spontaneity.¹⁰

Beria and Yezhov ostensibly became friends: Beria called his boss “dear Yozhik,” even staying at his dacha. But it could not last in the jungle of Stalin’s court. Beria attended most meetings with Yezhov and took over the intelligence departments. Beria waged a quiet campaign to destroy Blackberry: he invited Khrushchev for dinner where he warned him about Malenkov’s closeness to Yezhov. Khrushchev realized that Beria was really warning him about his own friendship with Yezhov. No doubt Beria had the same chat with Malenkov. But the most telling evidence is the archives: Beria finagled Vyshinsky into complaining to Stalin about Yezhov’s slowness.¹³⁵ Stalin did not react but Molotov ordered Yezhov: “It is necessary to pay special attention to Comrade Beria and hurry up. Molotov.” That weather vane of Stalin’s favour, Poskrebyshev, stopped calling Yezhov by the familiar ty and started visiting Beria instead.¹¹

Beria brought a new spirit to the NKVD: Yezhov’s frenzy was replaced with a tight system of terror administration that became the Stalinist method of ruling Russia. But this new efficiency was no consolation to the victims. Beria worked with Yezhov on the interrogations of the fallen magnates, Kosior, Chubar and Eikhe, who were cruelly tortured. Chubar appealed to Stalin and Molotov, revealing his agonies.¹²

Stalin, Blackberry and Beria now turned to the Far East where the army, under the gifted Marshal Blyukher, had largely escaped the Terror. In late June, the “gloomy demon,” Mekhlis, descended on Blyukher’s command with rabid blood-lust. Setting up his headquarters in his railway carriage like a Civil War chieftain, he was soon sending Stalin and Voroshilov telegrams like this: “The Special Railway Corps leaves bits and pieces of dubious people all over the place ...There are 46 German Polish Lithuanian Latvian Galician commanders . . . I have to go to Vladivostok to purge the corps.” Once there, he boasted to Stalin, “I dismissed 215 political workers, most of them arrested. But the purge . . . is not finished. I think it’s impossible to leave Khabarovsk without even more harsh investigations . . .”

When Voroshilov and Budyonny tried to protect officers, Mekhlis sneaked on Voroshilov (they hated each other) to Stalin: “I reported to CC and Narkom (Voroshilov) about the situation in the Secret Service Department. There are a lot of dubious people and spies there . . . Now C. Voroshilov orders the cancellation of the trial . . . I can’t agree with the situation.” Even Kaganovich thought Mekhlis “was cruel, he sometimes overdid it!”

As Mekhlis headed east, the Japanese Kwangtung Army probed Soviet defences west of Lake Khasan, leading to a full-scale battle. Blyukher attacked the Japanese between 6 and 11 August and drove them back with heavy losses. Encouraged by Mekhlis, and alarmed by the losses and Blyukher’s hesitations, Stalin berated the Marshal down the telephone: “Tell me honestly, Comrade Blyukher, do you really want to fight the Japanese? If you don’t, then tell me straight, like a good Communist.”

“The sharks have arrived,” Blyukher told his wife. “They want to eat me. Either they eat me or I eat them, but the latter is unlikely.” The killer shark sealed Blyukher’s fate. Mekhlis arrested four of Blyukher’s staff, requesting Stalin and Voroshilov to let him “shoot all four without prosecution by my special order.” Blyukher was sacked, recalled and arrested on 22 October 1938.¹³

“Now I am done for!” sobbed Yezhov in his office, as he went on executing any prisoners who “may turn against us.” On 29 September, he lost much of his power when Beria was appointed to run the heart of the NKVD: State Security (GUGB). He now co-signed Yezhov’s orders. Blackberry tried to strike back: he proposed to Stalin that Stanislas Redens, Beria’s enemy married to Anna Alliluyeva, become his other deputy. There was no hope of this.

Yezhov sat boozing at his dacha with his depressed cronies, warning that they would soon be destroyed, and fantasizing about killing his enemies: “Immediately remove all people posted in the Kremlin by Beria,” he loudly ordered the head of Kremlin security during one such bout, “and replace them with reliable people.” Soon he said, in a slurred voice, that Stalin should be killed.¹⁴