Stalin

Secret military cooperation with Germany, in violation of the Versailles Treaty, had been under way for years. More than 100 Soviet officers had attended German general staff academy courses on state-of-the-art military science. (Some German officers, such as Friedrich von Paulus, presented guest lectures in Moscow.)⁶⁷ Most of the Soviet brass, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky, made brief trips to Germany, but a few, such as Jeronimas Uborevičius, known as Uborevich, studied there for long stretches (in his case, from late 1927 through early 1929).⁶⁸ A peasant from Lithuania (a land of free peasants) who had graduated from imperial Russia’s artillery school, then joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, Uborevičius spoke fluent German, resembled a German general staff type—precise, punctual, professional—and admired that country’s technology and organization. He became a favorite of the Reichswehr while enjoying Stalin’s favor, who assigned him to the new armaments directorate.⁶⁹ The entire Red Army tank park numbered perhaps ninety units, mostly of Great War vintage, such as French-made tanks captured from the Whites. Artillery had been an area of rapid technological change since the Great War, but in August 1929 Stalin received yet another damning report deeming Red Army artillery “on the same technical level as in 1917, if not 1914,” despite considerable expenditure.⁷⁰ In late summer and fall 1929, almost the entire artillery directorate and inspectorate were arrested for wrecking. Ten people were executed; others “testified” against tsarist-era military specialists beyond those in artillery, foreshadowing more arrests to come.⁷¹

TIGHT LEASH

All dictators risk overthrow when, for their own power, they empower a secret police. Kamenev’s “notes” of his conversation with Bukharin included the latter’s assertions about the OGPU’s supposed sympathies (“Yagoda and Trilisser are with us”). Genrikh Yagoda and Meyer Trilisser, aka Mikhail Moskvin, the longtime head of OGPU foreign intelligence and, like Yagoda, an OGPU deputy chairman, had been compelled to submit explanations to Stalin, with a copy to Orjonikidze at the party Control Commission.⁷² Yagoda had to admit that he met regularly with Rykov, who, after all, was the head of the government, including in Rykov’s private apartment (in the same building as Stalin’s). Yagoda and Rykov both hailed from the Volga region.⁷³

Complicating the situation, the OGPU chairman, Mężyński, suffered numerous ailments, from severe asthma to a spinal injury as a result of a car accident in Paris. (He often received subordinates while half lying on a couch.) People whispered that he had never fully recovered his spirits after his young wife had died during surgery.⁷⁴ Stalin ignored his requests to resign. On April 21, 1929—precisely the moment of Stalin’s machinations against the right deviation—Mężyński had a massive heart attack. He was ordered to curtail his smoking and sugar intake and to rest. After several months, on August 1, the doctors allowed him to return to work, but only if he went to the office every other day and for no more than five hours each time; Mężyński rejected these conditions and returned to Lubyanka anyway.⁷⁵ But his absences and continued illness heightened the already sharp jockeying in the secret police. With Yagoda down south on holiday, Trilisser, at a meeting of the Sokolniki ward of the Moscow party organization where OGPU officials were registered, demanded self-criticism to rid the secret police of unworthy people, and accused Yagoda of “retreating from the general line of the party with the right deviation.”⁷⁶

Police operatives had recently been instructed to omit the name and location of their branch even when signing their secret internal correspondence, so as to reduce any outsider’s ability to decipher the organization’s structure in case of a leak.⁷⁷ Now, Stalin wrote to Mężyński (September 16, 1929), “it turns out you (the Chekists) have taken a course toward full-bore self-criticism inside the GPU. In other words, the Chekists are committing the same mistakes that were committed not long ago in the military body. . . . Do not forget that the GPU is no less a militarized agency than the military body. . . . Would it be impossible to undertake decisive measures against this evil?”⁷⁸ Trilisser lost out, replaced by Stanisław Messing, who was close to his fellow Pole Mężyński. At the same time, the Stalin favorite, Yefim Yevdokimov, was brought from the North Caucasus to run the central OGPU secret-political directorate, which oversaw the secret, counterintelligence, special (army), informational (intelligence analysis), Eastern, and operative departments—a counterweight to Yagoda.⁷⁹