THE XVII PARTY CONGRESS, BILLED AS “THE CONGRESS OF VICTORS,” met in Moscow at the end of January 1934. The atmosphere was one of confident solidarity, with Stalin rapturously welcomed by the delegates and the rest of the team prominently on display, sometimes engaging in friendly and jocular cross talk. It was a message of celebration, addressed both to the home public and to watchers outside the Soviet Union, to whose reactions, hostile or sympathetic as the case might be, Stalin was particularly sensitive. Stalin gave the political report on behalf of the Central Committee, a statesmanlike presentation contrasting the growth of Soviet industrial might under the First Five-Year Plan with the Depression in the rest of the world. Molotov, Kuibyshev, Kaganovich, and Rudzutak also made reports. Kalinin was there, making the occasional folksy intervention. Mikoyan, Andreev, Voroshilov, Ordzhonikidze, and Kirov joined in the discussion of Stalin’s report from the standpoint of their own bailiwicks (supply, transport, defense, heavy industry, and Leningrad), as was expected of them. Some future members of the team did the same, with Beria contributing on Georgia, Khrushchev on Moscow, and Zhdanov on Gorky (formerly Nizhny Novgorod, recently renamed in honor of the writer Maxim Gorky). No factional quarreling marred the serenity of the proceedings. As befitted a congress of victors, reconciliation with old opponents was the order of the day: Zinoviev and Kamenev, recently readmitted to the party though not to high office, spoke as repentant converts to the Stalinist program, as did the former Rightists. Bukharin was even allowed a comeback of a sort and offered an analysis of the international situation, in addition to endorsing Stalin’s leadership.
There really were achievements to celebrate. Perhaps the best that could honestly be claimed for collectivization was that they did it and made it stick, with the hope that now that the famine was over, morale and collective farm productivity would improve. But as far as heavy industry was concerned, facts had sprung up on the ground all over the Soviet Union: new steel mills, tractor plants, blast furnaces, and power plants, symbolized by the giant metallurgical complex at Magnitogorsk, the “socialist city” that had risen out of nowhere on the Urals steppe. For all this spirit of celebration, nobody was likely to forget in a hurry how hard the battle for collectivization and industrialization had been. The very fact that this national party congress had been so long delayed, almost four years after the last one, was testimony to that. Despite the effusive public praise of Stalin’s bold and wise leadership, the costs of the past four years of domestic war had been so high that some of the delegates, carefully chosen though they were, surely had private reservations.1
Some votes were votes cast against Stalin in the election of the new Central Committee at the end of the congress, and it appears that some of these dissident ballots were thrown out under Kaganovich’s direction. The numbers involved were not large, and neither of these things was particularly remarkable: even the party’s leaders often had votes cast against them, and according to Kaganovich, who as party secretary in charge of organization ought to know, votes were habitually added to make team members look more popular in the party than they actually were. But this particular case has aroused a lot of interest because it is linked with the story—unconfirmed but firmly embedded in Soviet myth—that a move was afoot in the corridors of the congress to get Stalin out of the office of general secretary and put Kirov in his place.
From the welter of conflicting testimony and confused memories, it looks as if some critical opinions were expressed in the corridors about Stalin’s leadership, though these may initially have been flushed out by an inquiry among delegations initiated by Stalin himself. Certainly there was a move to bring Kirov in from Leningrad to Moscow as a party secretary, but it was originally suggested by Stalin and strongly resisted by Kirov, who was now as determined to remain in Leningrad as he had earlier been to stay in Baku. Ordzhonikidze supported Kirov, arguing that his presence in Leningrad, one of the country’s industrial powerhouses, remained essential to the success of the industrialization drive. This resulted in the compromise decision that Kirov should become one of the party secretaries but not, for the time being, give up his Leningrad position and residence. Those who criticized Stalin’s leadership may have looked to Kirov as a possible replacement, although there is no suggestion that Kirov himself countenanced this. Molotov later poured scorn on the idea that Kirov could have been regarded as a possible replacement for Stalin—he just wasn’t in that league, Molotov claimed, and “wouldn’t have been accepted as top man, particularly by the senior cadres.”
Kirov was indeed elected as one of the party secretaries, but he retained his Leningrad position and Leningrad residence. His fellow secretaries were Kaganovich and a new appointee, rising star Andrei Zhdanov, who was to be brought in from the Volga to Moscow, presumably to take on part of the workload that would have fallen to Kirov if he had been willing to move. As for Stalin, he quietly stopped using the title of “general secretary,” signing himself simply as “secretary of the Central Committee.”2
By now, perhaps, the title was irrelevant, for Stalin’s status as leader (yozhd′) was well established. He was no longer the backroom operator with a knack for dealing with personnel questions. The beginnings of the Stalin cult, which Stalin publicly disclaimed but probably privately enjoyed, date back to Stalin’s fiftieth birthday in December 1929. On 21 December, Pravda devoted almost its entire eight-page issue to an unprecedented celebration of his achievements (“Stalin and industrialization,” “Stalin and the Red Army”) and birthday greetings. Reading “ecstatic articles” by Kalinin, Kuibyshev, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Ordzhonikidze, Mikoyan, and others, a young Moscow Communist commented critically in his diary, “Of course comrade Stalin is a great man. But aren’t these praises excessive?” Such mutterings continued in party circles for a few years, but an up-and-coming young Communist economist, Nikolai Voznesensky (who would rise into the Politburo in the 1940s before a spectacular fall) thought that the critics were just hidebound conservatives who didn’t recognize Stalin’s genius as a mass communicator.
Mikoyan retrospectively attached special blame to Kaganovich for fueling the cult by filling his speeches as Moscow party secretary with exaggerated praise of Stalin, but others thought Mikoyan himself, with his Armenian blarney, contributed. A huge portrait of Stalin in a military greatcoat, flanked by smaller portraits of the other Politburo members, hung in front of the Lenin Mausoleum during the big physical culture parade in 1933, the first time such a thing had happened. When the real-life Stalin and his team stood reviewing the parade on top of these massive representations of themselves, they seemed puny by comparison. He stood “surrounded by his closest comrades-in-arms—Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Kalinin and Ordzhonikidze,” wrote Karl Radek, a repentant Oppositionist, who was probably consciously laying it on thick. “His calm eyes gazed reflectively at the hundreds of thousands of proletarians marching past Lenin’s tomb with the firm step of a shock troop of future conquerors of the capitalist world. He knew that he had fulfilled the oath taken ten years earlier over Lenin’s coffin.” On the anniversary of Lenin’s death a few weeks later, Pravda proudly proclaimed that Leninism had had “a great world-historic victory … Under Stalin’s leadership the Bolsheviks have brought it about that SOCIALISM IN OUR COUNTRY HAS WON.”
The new rituals of applause, with their reported gradations (from “Applause” to “Thundering, continuing applause. All rise”) were now part of all kinds of celebratory meetings, not only party congresses. A Soviet reporter, fascinated by the sight, published an almost anthropological account of a meeting celebrating the achievements of Stakhanovites (outstanding workers) at which Stalin, Ordzhonikidze, and other leaders were present. “Applause burst forth, now dying down, now rising with new force, in honor of the leader of the people, comrade Stalin. When everything had quietened down, an excited voice from the depths of the hall suddenly shouted out a welcoming greeting in honor of Stalin in Kazakh. The Stakhanovites rose to their feet; Stalin, together with the party and government leaders, rose too; and for a long time, wordlessly, they passionately applauded each other.”
Stalin was the centerpiece of these new rituals of celebration, but he didn’t stand alone. Vozhd′, the term for a special type of top or charismatic leader, was used in the 1930s not only in the singular, for Stalin, but in the plural (vozhdi) for the team. Celebration of the vozhdi was particularly adulatory at the big national meetings of wives of senior managers in industry and commanders in the army attended by Stalin and the team in the mid-1930s. There was no sign of the team’s own wives here (they were generally completely invisible in the Soviet media); it was all a matter of ecstatic interaction between wives of second-tier bosses and the team, with Voroshilov, Ordzhonikidze, and Kaganovich, along with Stalin, particularly feted by “their” women, that is, the wives of commanders in their fields of the military, heavy industry and transport, respectively. Valentina Shtange, the wife of a senior railway official, seeing Kaganovich up close for the first time, recorded that “He is rather handsome, and his eyes are simply wonderful, so expressive! Above all, enormous serenity and intelligence, then firmness of purpose and an unyielding will, but when he smiles, his basic goodness shows through.”3
The new genre of Soviet folklore—songs and poems by bards from the people, traditional in form, contemporary in content—not only celebrated Stalin in effusive terms but had a new name for Stalin’s closest associates: they were the “knights” in his band. Among the knights, Voroshilov—“Klim-Our-Light Efremovich,” as the folk bard Maria Kriukova liked to refer to him—was by far the popular favorite, no doubt thanks to his frequent appearance in dramatic roles in public, for example, at the Revolution Day parade in 1935, when he “reviewed the parade on a marvelous horse in a new marshal’s uniform.” It was the time of the return of army uniforms and decorations, which had been abolished in the first puritan years after the revolution; the troops reviewed by Voroshilov were also in new uniforms with epaulettes, not seen since tsarist times. In “Poem about Voroshilov” by the Kazakh folk bard Dzhambul, Voroshilov’s experience in “smoke and fire” in the Civil War was celebrated, as well as his contemporary role at the head of the army (“Father Voroshilov on a chestnut horse / Gallops about the square bolder than the wind”). Voroshilov’s special status with the public is indicated by the fact that his extensive popular correspondence included a genre that was his alone: letters from people claiming to be his relatives.
Ordzhonikidze was another knight, a sidekick to Stalin in a Civil War folk epic in which “the strong and mighty lad Stalin rises to his swift feet, walks about, strokes his black locks, twirls his moustache, and lights his pipe. He knows what must be done … His plan is approved and Lenin tells him to take the heroes [cavalry leader Semen] Budenny and Ordzhonikidze to fight against the Whites.” Kalinin’s image was not knightly; he figured in the folklore as a peasant elder raised to national scale, welcoming visitors to the Kremlin and giving them food and drink. Huge numbers of people wrote to Kalinin or came to see him in his office at the Supreme Soviet. You are “my only joy,” one correspondent told him. Kirov, though locally popular in Leningrad, was not a subject of particular national attention during his lifetime, and even picked up a bit of unfavorable comment (“spell his name backward and you get vorik, petty thief”). But after his untimely death, he became a common subject of folk lament.4
To be sure, the folk had other modes of expression in which their comments on the leadership had a different tone. Anonymous letters to the leaders were a popular outlet, though the NKVD did their best to track down the authors. Some complained that the party was run by Jews, and that the non-Jews like Stalin and Kirov had sold out to them. Given that the team was, in fact, less Jewish than its former factional rivals, this might seem simply mindless reiteration of a timeworn grievance against revolutionaries, but it seems to have been known that Molotov had a Jewish wife, as well as falsely rumored that Stalin had married a daughter or sister of the Jewish Kaganovich. Some anonymous denouncers focused on another aspect of the team’s non-Russianness: the prevalence of men from the Caucasus. “The supreme lord Caucasian prince Stalin and his true executant, peasant elder Kalinin” were the target of sarcasm from one anonymous writer, who wondered why they forgot to include the building of prisons in the Five-Year Plan.
Tne uncharismatic Molotov failed to catch the imagination of folk bards, but by the end of the 1930s his public recognition had risen substantially. His fiftieth birthday in 1940 produced a number of celebratory publications, and in the period 1939–41, he led the whole team (including Stalin) in the bestowal of his name on towns, collective farms, factories, and institutes, not to mention the city of Perm in the Urals, named after him in 1940. To be sure, he was a relative latecomer in the naming game. Stalin’s name had been given to the Volga city of Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad), where he was based during the Civil War, as well as to the Ukrainian industrial town of Yuzovka (Stalino) in the mid-1920s. Tver, an old city north of Moscow, took Kalinin’s name in 1931. Vyatka in the Urals and Samara on the Volga were renamed for Kirov and Kuibyshev after their deaths in the mid-1930s, and Voroshilov got Lugansk and Stavropol soon after. The North Caucasus city of Vladikavkaz took Ordzhonikidze’s name in 1931, and four years later the industrial Ukrainian city of Enakievo was named for him as well. But there was a lesson here on the fleeting quality of fame, as for the previous six years Enakievo’s name had been Rykovo, after the Rightist Alexei Rykov.5
If in domestic imagination Stalin stood with his knights around him, for foreign publicity consumption he usually stood alone. This was not because the rest of the team were excluded from foreign policy matters: on the contrary, it’s quite surprising how energetically Stalin sought to involve them, both in formal Politburo settings and outside them. This applies not only to Molotov, who was Stalin’s main confidant on international affairs, but to the others as well. There was, however, a constraint on team members talking to foreign journalists, which is one reason why they are so often invisible in prewar foreign accounts. Stalin himself rarely talked to foreigners either, but when he did, it was a big event—and, unlike his other business meetings, he did these interviews alone except for interpreters, without team members in attendance. In conversation with New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, the writers H. G. Wells and Lion Feuchtwanger, and US ambassador Joseph Davies, among others, he presented himself with remarkable success as a straight-talking, sensible, and modest man, deploring the popular adulation of his person but accepting it as a necessary concession to a backward public; more of a realpolitiker than a wild revolutionary.
“I never met a man more sincere, decent and honest,” H. G. Wells gushed (he had expected “a sort of Bluebeard”). Until Stalin warmed up, he seemed to Wells almost shy. “There is nothing dark and sinister about him. I had thought before I saw him that he might be where he was because men were afraid of him, but I realize that he owes his position to the fact that no one is afraid of him and everyone trusts him … He is completely lacking in the cunning and craftiness of Georgians.” Astonishingly, this was accounted as only a partial public relations triumph, since Wells remained critical of Soviet use of violence and restriction on freedom of speech: “We didn’t manage to seduce the girl,” commented the cynical Radek when he translated Wells’s comments into Russian for Stalin. But there could have been no doubt about Stalin’s complete success with Ambassador Davies—backed up, in this case, by a charm offensive on the part of Polina Zhemchuzhina, directed at the ambassador’s wife, the extremely wealthy Marjorie Merriweather Post. Stalin was “sharp, shrewd, and, above all things else, wise,” with “a sly humour,” Davies wrote to his daughter. “A child would like to sit in his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.”6
This success was all the more remarkable considering the handicap and sense of inferiority that Stalin and the rest of the team had felt in the early years when dealing with foreigners. Talking to the German writer Emil Ludwig in 1931, Stalin put the best face on it, conceding that while “those of us who did not live long abroad [before the revolution] lost something,” but on the other hand, they “had the chance to do more for the revolution than those who were émigrés abroad.” Privately, however, the lack of European exposure rankled. Compared to their cosmopolitan political opponents in the 1920s, the Stalin team were hicks who had never lived in Europe and didn’t know foreign languages. Stalin had made brief trips to Stockholm and London for the party congresses in 1906 and 1907 (held abroad because of the underground nature of the party in Russia), adding a week in Paris to the latter trip; and in 1912 he had spent ten days in Krakow with Lenin and Krupskaya, as well as briefly visiting Vienna and staying with the Troyanovskys. He had tried, with only limited success, to learn German, French, and English, not to mention Esperanto, while in prison and exile before 1917, but his German, like Molotov’s, was not good enough to speak or understand without an interpreter. Molotov had never been abroad before the revolution, and his only visit to Europe until the late 1930s was a short visit to Italy when his wife was undergoing medical treatment. He was appalled when, in the late 1920s, Stalin insisted that he take over leadership of the Comintern, previously held by cosmopolitans Zinoviev and Bukharin. He never lost the feeling of disadvantage, even after many years as Soviet foreign minister in the 1940s and 1950s. “What kind of diplomat am I?” he said to his interviewer Felix Chuev in the 1970s. “I don’t know a single language. I could read German and French and understand something in conversation, but it was hard for me to reply. It was my chief disadvantage in diplomacy.”
Kaganovich, similarly, had no experience abroad and knew no foreign languages, except perhaps a smattering of Polish from his youth in the multiethnic Pale. Mikoyan had never been abroad, as of the late 1920s, and spoke no foreign languages. The same was true of Voroshilov, Kirov, and Kuibyshev, though Kuibyshev may have had some German from school. Ordzhonikidze had spent a couple of months in Paris in 1912, but spoke no French, though he did perhaps know some Persian from a year of making revolution in Iran in 1909–10. The working-class Rudzutak, with no direct experience of Europe, was the exception among the team, as he had worked so hard on his self-study of French in prison that he was willing to try to translate it at sight (but the multilingual Trotsky scoffed at his mistakes).7
In the team’s attitude to the West in the 1920s, fear and suspicion were the dominant motifs. This was based on the experience of foreign intervention in the Civil War, consciousness of “capitalist encirclement,” and the renewed fears of foreign military attack of the late 1920s. Spy fears were a constant, perhaps understandably in view of the ubiquitous presence of foreign spies in Petrograd and Moscow in the early years after the revolution, even though this had been much reduced by the end of the decade. The spy fears rose to fever pitch—as with the panic about Polish spying in Ukraine during the famine—whenever political tensions were high. The series of show trials of “bourgeois specialists” in the late 1920s and 1930s dramatized the presumption of capitalist hostility, pointing the finger specifically at Britain (always suspected of being at the center of a web of international conspiracy against the Soviet Union) and France. Fears of imminent foreign attack may have been overhyped for domestic consumption in the late 1920s, but when the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931 and Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, they acquired real substance.
The Soviet Union closed its borders under Stalin, trying to keep the spies out as well as the natives in. Dealing with and traveling to the West became the prerogative of a diplomatic caste, which, until the Great Purges at the end of the 1930s, consisted largely of Old Bolshevik émigré revolutionaries (many of them also former Oppositionists) with foreign languages. Travel to the German or Swiss spas for medical treatment became a cherished privilege of the political and cultural elite, but such trips had to be approved by a special Central Committee commission. Interestingly, the Politburo members themselves, though often ailing, rarely went abroad for medical treatment or for any other reason, although their wives (including Stalin’s, incognito) sometimes did. Mikoyan was the sole Politburo member to make an extended foreign business trip in the 1930s.8
Europe’s dangers included an émigré Russian community whose socialist wing continued to be infuriatingly well supplied by high-level Soviet gossip. The Menshevik Boris Nicolaevsky, related by marriage to Rykov and editor of the Berlin-based journal Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, was an egregious offender. In 1936 he published “Letter of an Old Bolshevik,” his own work but drawing freely on indiscreet conversations with Bukharin among others. The exiled Trotsky and his followers were another tremendous threat in the eyes of Stalin, the team, and the security agencies. While he himself had been packed off to Istanbul rather than his preferred destination of Western Europe, he had a small but noisy following in all the major European countries that was a constant irritant for all national Communist parties, and he infuriated Stalin and the Comintern by setting up a rival institution, the Fourth International.
When the team thought about European politics, including cultural politics, the Trotsky factor was never far from their minds. “Could be Trotskyites involved,” Kaganovich wrote apprehensively to Stalin in 1934, apropos of a planned international conference against fascism and war. On this occasion Stalin was less alarmed, saying it was not a problem as long as the Trotskyites were denied access to the conference. But in general Stalin, who read all of Trotsky’s émigré publications and critiques of his rule, was the most obsessed with Trotsky of them all. Since Trotsky’s departure in 1929, Soviet foreign espionage had been trailing the family, including Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov, who helped manage his European affairs from Paris before dying in mysterious circumstances in 1938, but it was during the Spanish Civil War, when Soviet intelligence and Trotskyists were locked in conflict on the ground, that matters came to a head. In 1939, Stalin allegedly told Beria, “Trotsky should be eliminated within a year, before war inevitably breaks out. Without the elimination of Trotsky, as the Spanish experience shows, when the imperialists attack the Soviet Union we cannot rely on our allies in the international Communist movement.” Fortunately, he said, “there are no important political figures in the Trotskyite movement except Trotsky himself. If Trotsky is finished the threat will be eliminated.” This death sentence was carried out the next year.9
Suspicion of foreigners extended to those residing in the Soviet Union, despite the fact that most of them were socialists with Soviet sympathies, including the large contingent of refugees arriving from Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s. “All bourgeois foreign specialists are or could be spies,” Stalin reminded the team. His approach to Western journalists, similarly, was that, while a few could be usefully manipulated, their real function was to discredit the Soviet Union, which made them essentially spies. He was infuriated when some of the correspondents got out to the famine areas in 1933 (“These gentlemen must be forbidden to go travelling about the USSR. We’ve got enough spies in the USSR as it is”). He seems always to have taken a tougher line on disciplining foreign correspondents than the rest of the team, railing in 1932 about “our stupidity” in not expelling one who had written for the German press on taboo subjects like forced labor (“We are silent, like idiots, and tolerate the slander of this running dog of capitalist shopkeepers. Bol-she-viks, ha ha!”). In this case, Kaganovich agreed that “appropriate measures” would be taken, but it was a full five years before the man was expelled.
The surveillance on foreign residents, including sympathizers, increased. Among the more than a million Poles in the Soviet Union, there were mass arrests of peasant refugees in 1933, and two years later NKVD attention shifted to the political émigré community. The foreigners working at the French-language journal were arrested, despite protests from the Soviet foreign ministry and attempted intercession by the genial patron Voroshilov, no doubt alerted by one of his artist clients. German and Hungarian political émigrés in Hungarian Communist Eugen Varga’s Institute of World Economy came under suspicion from the NKVD at the same time, despite Varga’s good connections with Stalin, and Molotov’s personal German tutor was arrested. A census of political émigrés began, registering a total of 811 political émigrés from Germany as of early July 1936. Compromising evidence had already been gathered against more than half of them.10
Although suspicious of foreigners, Stalin and the team were deeply interested in impressing them. The Paris Exhibition of 1935, where the Soviet pavilion sat challengingly opposite the German, was one such example. The team’s interest in Soviet participation in competitions that their people had a good chance of winning was so strong that the Politburo agendas for the 1930s are dotted with items about sending chess players, footballers, and musicians to international competitions, with European tours for the Moscow Art Theatre and the Red Army Ensemble of Song and Dance thrown in for good measure. The Politburo took the trouble to approve the addition of child prodigy Busya Goldshtein to the list of Soviet entrants in the Brussells International Competition for Violinists in Brussels in 1937. When David Oistrakh won first prize, it was front-page news in Pravda.
Nor was this concern with Western opinion limited to stunning them with cultural prowess. Western reactions seem never to have been far from Soviet leaders’ minds as they contemplated the country’s achievements and setbacks. Kaganovich worried that the way Pravda was proposing to publish the trade-union budget would confuse the reader, “especially the foreign one,” who might not appreciate how much money the Soviets were spending on construction of workers’ housing. Reporting to Stalin on the first of the Moscow show trials of leading former Oppositionists in 1936, Kaganovich emphasized the “stunning impression” the confessions of guilt by the accused had made on the foreign correspondents in the courtroom. When the 1937 and 1939 census came in with population figures well under Soviet expectations, it immediately prompted fears that hostile Western observers would seize it as evidence of the disastrous impact of the 1932–33 famine.11
Stalin—who once gave his profession as “writer (publicist)”—was the team member most alert to the messages conveyed by the Soviet press, and he tried to inculcate the same attentiveness in Molotov and Kaganovich. Reminding them that, with regard to Japanese designs on China, “our military interference is, of course, ruled out, and diplomatic interference is not desirable at present, as it would only unite the imperialists, when it is advantageous to us that they quarrel,” he went on to give instruction on spin. The party newspaper Pravda and the state newspaper Izvestia should take different tacks, he suggested, presumably to suggest lack of unanimity in Soviet ruling circles to foreign Kremlinologists. “Let Pravda abuse the interventionists and shout that the imperialist pacificists of Europe, America and Asia are dividing up and enslaving China. Izvestia must run the same line, but in a moderate and hyper-cautious tone. The moderate tone for Izvestia is absolutely necessary.”
Despite the setback of his tutor’s arrest, Molotov kept trying to improve his English and German in the 1930s; so did Stalin, Mikoyan, Kuibyshev, and others on the team. This might seem strange, given their ideological premise that exalted the Soviet Union as the world’s first proletarian socialist nation and inevitable victor over the decadent, capitalist West. The inevitable victory, however, was yet to come; the West, despite the Depression, had not yet collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, and the Stalin team’s condescending public superiority toward the West had an undertone of cultural cringe. Or, to put it in their terms, knowledge of the major European languages was part of being cultured, which was not only the leaders’ prescription for the population but also their aspiration for themselves.
If there was some internal cringing, Stalin was keen not to let it show. By the 1930s, he already saw himself as the team’s specialist on foreign affairs, coaching his closest associates, Molotov and Kaganovich, on how to handle international questions. Stalin had various maxims on dealing with the capitalist West: never trust them, recognize their cunning but be sure to outfox them, exploit their differences. Never forget that they want to destroy the Soviet Union and are just waiting for the next chance to invade. Realize that they are all likely to be spies, whether they present themselves as journalists, diplomats, or scholars, and regardless of their professed attitudes to the Soviet Union. This advice from Stalin is normally attributed to paranoia, but there was realism in it too—and it surely also reflected Stalin’s wary sense that he didn’t know enough about foreigners to be able to tell if they were who they claimed to be or not.
Conflict between capitalist powers should be encouraged. In the autumn of 1935, Stalin read Kaganovich and Molotov a lesson on the matter, apropos of the foreign ministry’s doubts about exporting Soviet grain to Italy in light of Abyssinian conflict. It was really a conflict between two blocs, he explained, Italy and France on the one hand, and England and Germany on the other. “The stronger the quarrel between them will be, the better for the USSR. We can sell grain to both of them, so that they can quarrel. It’s not in our interest that now one of them beats the other. It is in our interest that their quarrel is as long as possible, but without a quick victory for one or the other.” Not being intimidated by the West was crucial, and this often meant talking tough. This applied to internal discussions (“swindlers” was one of the terms Stalin liked to apply to Western leaders) but also to public discourse. “We gave it to them right on the nose,” Molotov reported with satisfaction in 1929. A few years later, Stalin congratulated Molotov on achieving just the right note in one of his speeches on the international situation: “a tone of contemptuous assurance in relation to the ‘great’ powers, confidence in our strength, a delicately simple spitting in the pot of the swaggering ‘powers’—very good. Let them ‘eat it.’ ”12
For the team, as for Stalin himself, the early 1930s were a period of intensive learning on foreign affairs. No team member was left completely free of foreign policy–related tasks in these years, with Stalin and Molotov taking the main burden and Voroshilov, Ordzhonikidze, and Mikoyan often drawn in on their area of specialization (military affairs, industry, foreign trade). Diplomats played only a limited role in the formation of Soviet diplomacy, according to later testimony from Molotov, because the issues were so immediate and challenging: “everything was squeezed into Stalin’s hand, into my hand—it couldn’t be otherwise at that period.”
This no doubt underestimates the role of Maxim Litvinov, foreign minister from 1930 to 1939, but then Molotov, who was to succeed him in that role in 1939, was never a great admirer of his. He was a clever man and a good diplomat, experienced in foreign affairs, Molotov conceded, but “spiritually” not one of them, inwardly “not always in agreement with the decisions we took,” so “of course, he couldn’t enjoy our full trust.” Still, Litvinov was an Old Bolshevik with long revolutionary credentials and a lack of Opposition connections quite unusual for a former émigré Jewish intellectual with good foreign languages. Molotov judged that he “had a favorable attitude to Stalin” while in office, although his later view of others on the team was highly jaundiced. (His eccentric and literary English wife, Ivy, was less restrained in her comments, even when he was foreign minister.) Throughout the 1930s, Litvinov was a regular attendee at formal Politburo meetings, as well as informal meetings with Stalin and top team members, when he was in town, but his inferior party status was indicated by the fact that he was never elected to membership of the Central Committee, let alone the Politburo, and never became part of the team’s social circle.
Litvinov’s name is associated with Soviet policies of entrance into the League of Nations and the search for an anti-German alliance in the 1930s. These were, of course, also Stalin’s policies at the time, though no doubt Litvinov and Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to Britain, added their own flavor of positive preference for the Western democracies, whereas Stalin and Molotov were simply focused on keeping out of war and, if that proved impossible, not facing the likely aggressor (Germany) alone. True, Stalin and others on the team made numerous snide references to Litvinov in their correspondence, often on the grounds that, mixing as he did with foreigners on a regular basis, he was likely to be conned by them. But anti-fascism was not just the foreign ministry’s line; from the mid-1930s, it was also that of the Comintern—the only Comintern policy that ever proved to have broad appeal to the international Left.13
The team didn’t mix with foreigners, on the whole, and even their close contacts with people who dealt with foreigners professionally were quite limited. There were exceptions, of course, but many fewer than had been the case with the cosmopolitan Oppositionists. Stalin used Eugen Varga, a Hungarian, as advisor on the international economy, and both he and Molotov consulted Otto Kuusinen, a Finn. Molotov had a close friend from boyhood, Alexander Arosev, who had replaced Olga Kameneva as head of the Society for Cultural Relations Abroad and spent much of his time in Europe in the 1930s, taking a Czech woman as his second wife. Two of Stalin’s brothers-in-law, Alexander Svanidze and Pavel Alliluyev, both intimates of his family circle, spent time in Berlin in the 1920s as trade envoys. When the Bulgarian hero of the Reichstag fire, Georgy Dimitrov, settled in Moscow in 1934 and became head of the Comintern soon afterward, he was admitted to an outer circle of team sociability. In this capacity he had many opportunities to see the very low regard in which Stalin and his associates held the Comintern and European Communists. Although the West was preoccupied by the Comintern as a symbol of international conspiracy, Stalin, Molotov, and the rest were dismissive to an extent remarkable for Communists, who paid at least lip service to the movement’s internationalism.
The United States had a different and more positive resonance for the team than old Europe. Capitalist it might be, but not decadent and class-bound like Europe, and in terms of technological modernity, it was the world leader. Stalin could speak with some warmth about American know-how and entrepreneurial spirit, recommending these as qualities the Soviets should emulate. He knew it only secondhand, of course, being sparing even in his face-to-face meetings with American diplomats, journalists, and businessmen. But several big Soviet industrialization projects had relied on expert American consultants.
Fittingly, therefore, it was to America that Mikoyan was sent in the summer of 1936 for an unprecedented two-month trip to study the food industry and its new technologies. It was Stalin’s idea, apparently an off-the-cuff one, since it meant a last-minute cancellation of the Mikoyan family’s planned vacation in the Crimea and the inclusion (by way of apology) of his wife Ashkhen in the group, along with assorted industrial experts. In a curious, homespun expedient, Stalin supplied the group with an interpreter in the form of a nephew of his daughter Svetlana’s governess, an English-speaking German from the Caucasus, who, according to Mikoyan, did a good job, not only interpreting but also advising (on the basis of what knowledge is unclear) on local mores. The West was completely new to Anastas and Ashkhen, and they had a wonderful time; Mikoyan learned so much from the trip that he later referred to it as his “university.” For Mikoyan, temperamentally not inclined to the intense suspicion and vigilance characteristic of Stalin and others on the team, Americans were welcoming, friendly, and helpful. They showed him ice-cream plants, packing materials factories, and the Chicago slaughter yards. They took him to Detroit, where he saw cars being built and met Henry Ford, who he was surprised to find was a vegetarian. Mikoyan couldn’t talk to the Americans directly for lack of English, but it didn’t seem to matter. He met Secretary of State Cornell Hull, at Ambassador Troyanovsky’s insistence, and found him as nice as the rest of the Americans. He came back not only full of knowledge about refrigeration, American industrial processes, and department stores, but also determined to introduce the Soviet public to ice cream and frankfurters.14
Another foreign affairs initiative that resonated with the Soviet public was support for the republican side in the Spanish Civil War. There were no doubt strong elements of calculation in Stalin and Molotov‘s approach to the matter, but the Soviet public embraced the cause, responding warmly to rallies in support of the Spanish republicans and contributing funds for Spanish orphans. That emotional embrace evidently extended to some on the team, judging by Kaganovich’s enthusiastic report to Ordzhonikidze in a private letter, that while the actual war in Spain might not be going too well, “the campaign developing in the country shows what a remarkable, great people we have, and how much international feeling and consciousness they have.” Kaganovich, whose adopted son Yury was reputed to be a Spanish orphan, was in awe of Stalin’s diplomatic strategy on Spain (sending direct Soviet military aid while formally abiding by collective security and nonintervention): “Brother, that’s really great dialectics,” he wrote to Ordzhonikidze, “which our great friend and parent has mastered to the nth degree.”
The Spanish campaign was an integral part of the rapprochement with foreign Leftist intellectuals, especially European, and fostered intensively from the mid-1930s as a complement to official diplomacy. Until that time, the assumption in the Comintern and Soviet agencies had been that the Soviet Union should court and support Communist and Far Left intellectuals, scorning the more middle-of the-road (and, often, better-known and more distinguished) contingent with the same vigor that the Comintern parties scorned and battled the socialists. The stimulus for a new policy—in effect, a forerunner of the Popular Front for culture—came from the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, a European cosmopolitan with broad contacts, who wrote to Stalin in 1934 suggesting a move away from the focus on a narrow sectarian public. What was needed, he wrote, was “a broad anti-fascist organization” that would attract non-Communist writers with high visibility and international reputations. It should have the dual purpose of “struggle with fascism” and “active defence of the USSR.” Stalin endorsed this and told Zhdanov and Kaganovich to see to its implementation.
The result was the Congress for the Defense of Culture, held in Paris in June 1935 and attended by luminaries such as André Malraux, E. M. Forster, André Gide, Aldous Huxley, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Benjamin, along with some of the Soviet Union’s most distinguished writers, including Ehrenburg, Isaac Babel, and the (non-Communist) poet Boris Pasternak. On a parallel track, European intellectuals were warmly invited to the Soviet Union to see the “Soviet experiment” for themselves and make contact with artists and scholars in their fields under the auspices of Arosev’s organization. Many came, including Bernard Shaw and the Webbs (Sidney and Beatrice) from Britain, André Gide from France, Lion Feuchtwanger from Germany, and Paul Robeson from the United States, and the results were generally gratifying from the Soviet standpoint. The Webbs wrote a massive tome entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (removing the question mark on the second edition). Lion Feuchtwanger got an interview with Stalin and published a favorable appraisal, despite having been in Moscow during the first of the show trials of Old Bolsheviks. Only Gide proved a disappointment, publishing critical Afterthoughts to his memoir Back from the USSR, and was treated as a renegade thereafter. Feuchtwanger, like the Webbs, was impressed by Stalin and scarcely aware of the team, with whose members he had little or no contact. This aspect of Soviet foreign relations was definitely Stalin’s personal territory.15
At home, Stalin and the team paid the same kind of wary, half-respectful attention to the Russian intelligentsia that they did to foreigners abroad. With its long tradition of regime criticism, which was carried over from tsarist times into the 1920s, the intelligentsia, having been subjected to the stick during the Cultural Revolution and then offered the carrot of privilege in its aftermath, was only beginning to come to terms with the Communists, but the process of Sovietization proceeded apace in the 1930s. As with foreigners, Stalin and his team were initially ill at ease with the intelligentsia, daunted by the Opposition’s much closer connections and cultural credentials, although the genial Voroshilov quickly made friends with artists who painted his portrait. Stalin was still reticent about his own cultural credentials in the 1920s. Someone like Trotsky, with his knowledge of languages, wide reading, and quick wit, could easily put him down as an ignoramus. This, however, was a mistake. Stalin was an indefatigable reader, with an estimated norm of five hundred pages a day, covering history, sociology, economics, and Russian literature— classical and contemporary—as well as contemporary affairs. He followed the periodical press in Russian (both local and émigré) and had important publications in European languages translated. He often went to the opera and theater. While the security services limited his theatergoing to the Bolshoi, the Maly, and the Moscow Art Theatres after Kirov’s death, he had earlier been more adventurous, attending, for example, a concert of Persimfans, the first conductorless orchestra (not a good idea, he concluded: orchestras, like political teams, need a leader).
Stalin made a tentative foray into the arts in the second half of the 1920s when he started cultivating young militants from the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) and the Communist graduate schools in the social sciences, who were out to challenge the “bourgeois” cultural and academic establishments. This ended badly. The leader of RAPP, Leopold Averbakh, a young Jewish (nonproletarian) Communist, related by marriage to police chief Yagoda, annoyed Stalin by playing high politics and failing to develop a relationship of personal discipleship. The young Indian Cominterner M. N. Roy, whom Stalin selected as part of a personal foreign-policy brains trust that fizzled, quit Moscow, and ultimately the Comintern, amid disappointment on both sides. As for liaison with the graduate students at the Institute of Red Professors and the Communist Academy, Stalin made the unwise decision to depute the nonintellectual Kaganovich, who was no match for the competition (Bukharin).
In April 1932, RAPP and the other proletarian organizations were closed down by the Politburo, to the great relief of the rest of the cultural world, which they had mercilessly bullied. It was the beginning of a new era in the party’s relationship with the intelligentsia. Attacks on the Bolshoi Theatre (always a bulwark of artistic conservatism, but also a national icon) were called off. Privileges to “specialists” were restored and expanded. A new dacha colony was built in Peredelkino outside Moscow for writers, and not just Communists either—Boris Pasternak got one.
Within the team by the mid-1930s, Stalin was justly regarded as their most erudite and cultured, as well as most intelligent, member. His special interest in cultural matters was signified by his choice of supervisory fields in the Politburo in the mid-1930s: others might keep an eye on agriculture, finance, industry, railways, and so on, but the fields Stalin took under his own supervision were state security and culture. He was still feeling his way in the cultural field, however. An attempt to assert theoretical preeminence in scholarship, orchestrated by Kaganovich in 1931, left a sour note: the young Communist intellectuals were not impressed by Stalin’s “Letter to the editor of Proletarskaia revoliutsiia,” and other scholars, forced to hold formal discussions of this (to them) meaningless document, were inclined to mock.16
Kaganovich, despite his unsuitability for the task, was still to the fore in Stalin’s next cultural enterprise: organizing the hoopla over the return of the famous Russian writer Maxim Gorky to the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s. Gorky, though close to Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders since the 1910s, and of lower-class origins, had been an energetic defender of the old intelligentsia under Cheka persecution in the Civil War years, and this, along with his weak health from tuberculosis, led to his departure and residence in an ambiguous, not-quite-émigré status in Capri for most of the 1920s. But he always wanted to come back, if only he could be sure of a strong enough position, and in the late 1920s Stalin managed to get him to commit. The package included enormous privileges and perks, including a townhouse in the center of Moscow (the old art nouveau Ryabushinsky mansion, picked out personally by Stalin), and dachas in the Crimea and outside Moscow, but the most flattering offer of all was Stalin’s friendship and unrestricted access to him. Stalin and the team had many things on their minds in 1932, among them oncoming famine, industrial construction problems, mass flight from the countryside, and drastic food shortages in towns. Yet at the height of all these crises, Stalin, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov spent hours and days with Gorky, getting to know one another and talking about how to organize a new inclusive Union of Writers.
With Stalin’s blessing, Gorky became an international spokesman for the Soviet Union on cultural matters and, within the country, the go-to man for the intelligentsia, particularly its non-Communist part. He was the de facto defender of cultural figures in trouble with the security police, as well as maintaining contacts, to Stalin’s annoyance, with old Communist friends who had ended up in Opposition. Increasingly critical of Stalin’s regime and unable to travel, he began to feel like a prisoner, albeit a highly privileged one. The budding friendship with Stalin, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov doesn’t seem to have lasted: as far as Stalin and Gorky were concerned, disappointment was mutual. An additional irritant, from Stalin’s point of view, was that the man deputed to keep an eye on Gorky at the highest level—police chief Yagoda, who had known Gorky since youth and was almost a relative—ended up falling in love with Gorky’s daughter-in-law Timosha, who along with Gorky’s son and granddaughter Marfa Peshkova was a part of Gorky’s extensive household. Young Marfa, as it happened, was the one in the Gorky household who became closest to Stalin by virtue of being a childhood friend of Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana. Gorky was lionized and feted until his death in 1936, and canonized in the Soviet Union thereafter, but there was a gruesome postscript during the Great Purges when Yagoda, now labeled a criminal, was accused of murdering Gorky’s son (and Timosha’s husband) Maxim Peshkov, a dissolute type who had died in May 1934, probably after a drinking bout.
With Gorky, Stalin in a sense subcontracted out his own cultural patronage, preferring in the 1930s to remain aloof, a man of mystery whom writers literally dreamed of meeting, initiator of unpredictable telephone calls to writers of high reputation among the intelligentsia, like Mikhail Bulgakov and Boris Pasternak, which quickly became the stuff of legend. The NKVD, which monitored public reception of these telephone calls, reported that they worked beautifully: after Stalin called Bulgakov, a dramatist whose work had been under political attack and who was himself an object of suspicion to the security police, it was all around the Moscow grapevine the next day that Stalin had “given a slap in the face” to the rascals who had been persecuting Bulgakov, and in the intelligentsia they were now speaking of Stalin “warmly and with love.” The call to Pasternak a few years later had similar success from Stalin’s standpoint, although not from Pasternak’s: when Stalin asked him if Osip Mandelstam—in trouble because of his political views, including a sharp satirical poem about Stalin—was really a great poet, Pasternak, who disliked conceding greatness to anyone else, fumbled his answer, allowing Stalin to rebuke him for failing to stand up for a friend.17
While it was beneath Stalin to be an ordinary patron to individual writers and artists, the rest of the team plunged into the patronage game, along with assorted military and secret police leaders from the next echelon down. The client-patron relationship, involving a personal and often social connection, brought the patron cultural prestige. For the client, it offered protection against the OGPU, censorship, or other misfortunes; help in organizing publication, exhibitions, or performances; and obtaining perks like dachas, apartments, and, in the most fortunate cases, cars with a chauffeur and foreign trips. By the mid-1930s, it would be hard to find a member of the team—Stalin excepted—who was not established as a patron to whom particular writers, artists, theater people, musicians, and scholars would turn in time of need, and equally hard to find a member of the cultural establishment (Communist and non-Communist) who lacked patronage ties at the highest level (though they might be mediated by Gorky or another cultural broker). Voroshilov, the earliest to start in the patronage business, was one of the most enthusiastic, with a stable of artists, especially painters, some of whom became friends as well as clients. He was a patron in the musical world, too, most famously for Bolshoi Theatre people but also for the up-and-coming young composer Shostakovich, who made contact with him early in his career. Molotov thought Voroshilov got too friendly with his artistic clients, and said Stalin thought so too. But Molotov himself was a patron, albeit usually without the affective ties of a Voroshilov or Rudzutak: his government mailbox was full of requests for help from writers, artists, scientists, and scholars, which he did his best to respond to.
Kalinin, Andreev, Zhdanov, Khrushchev, Kirov, Beria, and Malenkov all had their clients in the artistic, literary, and scholarly worlds. Voroshilov, Rudzutak, and Kuibyshev liked to socialize with their clients. Even Kaganovich, the least arty and most hardworking of the team, would go to the avant-garde theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s productions with the tickets Meyerhold had sent him, and had his special intelligentsia clients; he was also a patron of the union of architects. Those two generous and approachable men from the Caucasus, Mikoyan and Ordzhonikidze, were patrons for many, Mikoyan being the obvious man for Armenians to go to, Ordzhonikidze for Georgians, as well as engineers. As young Nikolai Ezhov was beginning the steep ascent that made him head of the security police and implementer of the Great Purges in 1937, he and his literary wife launched themselves with considerable success as patrons: the writer Isaac Babel was in their stable, though the poet Mandelstam declined Evgenia Ezhova’s approach in 1930, making the politically inept decision to stay as a client of Bukharin.18
The rapprochement of Soviet political leaders and the cream of the intelligentsia was just getting under way in the 1930s, and would develop further and faster in the 1940s as the team’s children grew up and embraced intelligentsia values and, in many cases, professions. The limits were still being worked out, a test case being literary and artistic salons. The journalist Evgenia Ezhova established one, whose regular attendees included her former lover Isaac Babel and jazz king Leonid Utesov (but not her husband Nikolai Ezhov, head of the NKVD). Another was run by Olga Mikhailova, an opera singer at the Bolshoi who was the second wife of Civil War hero Marshal Semen Budenny. Olga Bubnova, wife of Old Bolshevik Andrei Bubnov, a longtime friend of Voroshilov’s and Kuibyshev’s, was joint hostess of a salon that met regularly on Wednesdays and Fridays in the mid-1930s, where high-ranking Communists and military men mingled with celebrities from the artistic world. Her co-hostess was Galina Egorova, the film star wife of Marshal Egorov, with whom Stalin was allegedly flirting on the evening of Nadya’s death. Despite this connection, it is highly unlikely that Stalin ever attended: literary salons were not his or the team’s milieu. During the purges, most of the salon habitués, both political and artistic, were arrested, among them Olga Mikhailova (though not her husband, Budenny) and both the Bubnovs and Egorovs. Ezhova committed suicide in 1938, as her husband’s career darkened and it became clear that she personally faced arrest.19
“Life has become better, comrades, life has become more joyous.” That was the new slogan of the mid-1930s, indicating that the travails and hardships of the First Five-Year Plan period were in the past. Symbol of the good life to come was the Moscow Metro, whose first lines were built under the direction of Kaganovich and Khrushchev, and triumphantly opened in 1935—a rare exception to the team’s determination to put all available resources into heavy industry and defense. Stalin and a bunch of family members, along with Kaganovich and Molotov, took an impromptu midnight ride a few weeks before its formal opening. New Year’s trees, earlier banned as a bourgeois survival, made a comeback, thanks to an initiative from Pavel Postyshev. Polina Zhemchuzhina’s growing perfume industry offered new brands to women: Red Moscow, Red Star, and New Dawn were among the favorites. Men were smartening up, too. On his return from the American trip, Mikoyan abandoned the Civil War uniform of yore and took to wearing a Western-style suit. Admittedly, Stalin was a backslider, preferring his field jacket and boots to the end of his life. Still, he joined the rest for a posed photograph that appeared on the front page of a Moscow newspaper in July 1935 in which team members sported snazzy new white summer jackets. Best of all, after years of food shortage, frankfurters, ice cream, and even champagne became available to Soviet consumers, thanks to Mikoyan and his American trip. The old specialty grocer’s Eliseev reopened on Gorky Street in Moscow with a magical array of delicacies, admittedly expensive, including thirty-eight types of sausage, fifty kinds of bread, and fresh carp, bream, and pike swimming around in tanks.20
The new cultural shift, regarded as a sign of embourgoisement and “Soviet Thermidor” by carping critics like Trotsky in emigration, was popular with the elite and ordinary people alike. But the hope that life would really get better, with the coming of abundance and the end of terror, turned out to be a mirage. As the Soviet media were gearing up for the “joyous life” campaign with intensive publicity for the ending of bread rationing, which had been in force in the towns since the end of the 1920s, disaster struck. The date when rationing was to be lifted was 1 January 1935. Just a month earlier, on 1 December 1934, Kirov was murdered at the Leningrad party headquarters by a lone gunman, apparently with a personal grievance, and any hope of a cessation of terror in the foreseeable future disappeared.
Kirov’s murder, like Kennedy’s in the United States thirty years later, gave rise to endless conspiracy theories, despite the fact that the actual killer was a lone man who was immediately apprehended. Though many would like to believe that Stalin was behind it, no hard evidence of his involvement has been found, and in the nature of things, there can never be definite proof of his noninvolvement. The rumors about Stalin sprang up immediately, as they always did when a prominent person died unexpectedly. The team, judging by their later comments, gave no credence to the rumors at the time, though some thought differently in retrospect. To Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, hostile though she later became to her father, they never made sense: as both she and Molotov perceived it, Stalin was attached to Kirov, not threatened by him, and his death, following Nadia’s only a few years before, was a body blow. On hearing the news, Stalin rushed to Leningrad with Molotov and Voroshilov, leaving Kaganovich to mind the shop in Moscow, and personally participated in interrogation of the killer, Leonid Nikolaev.
Whatever Stalin’s initial involvement, there is no doubt that he quickly seized the opportunity to settle scores with his opponents. According to Molotov, Nikolaev admitted to being a follower of Zinoviev and was angry at having been expelled from the party, but Molotov saw him just as an “embittered man” rather than a “real Zinovievite.” (In fact, anyone who had been in the Leningrad party in the mid-1920s was in some sense a Zinovievite, since Zinoviev was the Leningrad party boss.) But Stalin took the ball and ran with it, telling the local NKVD to look for coconspirators among the Zinovievites. Not particularly enthusiastic at first, within ten days the NKVD nevertheless came up with interrogation testimony that pointed the finger at a terrorist “Moscow center” headed by Zinoviev and Kamenev. Zinoviev and scores of Oppositionists who had no connection to the murderer, but were considered guilty of poisoning the atmosphere by their very existence, were arrested for terrorism. On the same principle, more than ten thousand former aristocrats and other “class enemies” were arrested or deported precipitously from Leningrad. The young Nikolai Ezhov from the Central Committee office, already sufficiently in Stalin’s confidence to make the trip to Leningrad with him, organized the targeting of the Opposition on Stalin’s behalf; within a month, he had compiled a list of roughly 2,500 former Zinovievites in Leningrad, 238 of whom were immediately arrested. Nikolaev pleaded guilty in a secret trial at the end of December and was executed. In Moscow, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others associated with them were arrested, and their interrogators did their best to build up a case for direct involvement, but the two leaders would admit only that their oppositional stance might have created a climate encouraging others to act. At their trial in mid-January 1935, Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years in prison and Kamenev to six.21
Kirov used to stay overnight at Stalin’s on his visits from Leningrad, and he had spent part of his last summer with Stalin and Svetlana in Sochi. After Nadya’s death, according to his sentimental sister-in-law, Kirov had been the one who best comforted him: “he could approach him with simple affection and give him the warmth he was missing and peace of mind.” After Kirov’s death, talking to his brother-in-law Pavel Alliluyev, Stalin said, “I’ve become a complete orphan.” At his birthday, celebrated a few weeks later with the team in attendance, the first toast (from Ordzhonikidze) was to Kirov, and later Stalin proposed a toast to Nadya, “his face … full of suffering.” But after a mournful silence each time, the party resumed and even became quite noisy.
Not everyone mourned Kirov. A nasty little ditty making the rounds in the provinces had as its punchline “They’ve killed Kirov / We’ll kill Stalin, too.” Stalin had reason to be jumpy, although his suspicions were acquiring a paranoid cast. There were enemies all around, he felt, the more dangerous for being hidden. Shortly after Kirov’s death, Stalin was heard to say, “Do you notice how many of them [NKVD duty officers] are around? Each time you go down a corridor you think: which of them is it? If it’s that one, he will shoot you in the back, but if you go round the corner, then the next one will shoot you in the face. You go past and think about it.”22