Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

31. Orjonikidze’s brother was arrested on capital charges and his widow, Zinaida, spent many years in psychiatric wards; her only influential friend was ’s widow. She insisted that the NKVD had killed her husband. Officially, he died of a heart attack and towns and railways were named after him; Stalin would not, however, let statues be put up to him.

32. Voroshilov had a collection of silk embroidery given to him by the wives of his commanders. The collection was destroyed along with all Voroshilov’s possessions in 1953, when his grandson set fire to a Christmas tree and the Voroshilov dacha burned down.

33. This theory was not touched on when Red Army commanders were interrogated in 1937. In 1945 German officers, questioned by Soviet intelligence, said that they had recruited nobody but one NKVD disinformation officer.

34. Budionny proved his loyalty in summer 1937 by taking his second wife, the opera contralto Olga Mikhailova, in his own car to imprisonment in the Lubianka; she had refused to bear him children and was friendly to foreigners. Budionny then married his housekeeper. When after Tukhachevsky’s execution arrests continued, Voroshilov is said to have calmed Budionny’s nerves by saying that Stalin was liquidating “only the clever marshals.”

35. Feldman’s interrogator, Zinovi Ushakov, was not normally so humane; he was shot a year later.

36. On the contradictory behavior of Voroshilov, see Vadim Rogovin, 1997, 160–69.

37. Kaminsky was doomed after a clash with Stalin, which began with Kaminsky’s remark “If we go like this we’ll shoot the whole party!” to which Stalin retorted, “You wouldn’t by chance be friends of these enemies? . . . Well, then, you’re birds of a feather.”

38. Vladimir Osipovich Piatnitskii, Zagovor protiv Stalina, Moscow: 1998.

39. Vlast’ i intelligentsia, 1999, 317.

40. Ibid., 348.

41. Ibid., 365–7.

42. Vitali Shentalinskii, Raby svobody, Moscow: 1995, 242–3.

43. Vlast’ i intelligentsia, 365–7.

44. See Iurii Murin, Pisatel’ i vozhd’, Moscow: 1997 for the Sholokhov–Stalin correspondence.

45. See Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: Ezhov, Hoover, 2002.

46. For Russian diaries of the 1930s see Véronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, Intimacy and Terror, New York: 1995.

47. See B. I. Ilizarov, 2002, 284–6.

48. Stalin had Trotsky’s other son, Sergei, killed in the USSR. Both Trotsky’s daughters had died, one of suicide, the other of tuberculosis.

49. In 1956 Rodos was the last KGB man shot on Khrushchiov’s orders for excessive cruelty.

50. Aleksei Polianskii, Ezhov, Moscow, 2001, 304–05.

EIGHT • The Rise of Lavrenti Beria

1. The Berias’ first son died in infancy of smallpox and their daughter, Tamara, or Eteri, became deaf-mute after measles. There was no contact with two children from Marta’s previous marriage. A cousin, Gerasime Beria, was to be an intelligence officer in the Soviet army which invaded Georgia in 1921.

2. The dossiers (some thirty volumes) of Beria’s 1953 interrogation are locked in FSB archives. An unsuccessful attempt to steal them was made in 2003.

3. Anastas Mikoyan probably knew the truth, but he was the only Baku commissar to escape the bullets fired by Azeri nationalist police on British orders in 1918 that killed the other twenty-six, and Baku was a sore point for him. Beria’s ally Mir-Jafar Bagirov led the Azeri party, and had likewise worked for the Musavat and therefore kept quiet.

4. At some point Beria also learned French. In the 1930s he impressed Svetlana Allilueva’s teacher, Mlle. Lavranche, with his fluency (and his manners).

5. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, Beria, 1999, 31.

6. In 1932 Beria had Kaganovich halve grain requisitions from Georgia and divert trucks and buses from Moscow’s depots to Tbilisi.

7. Beria got his closest aide, Bogdan Kobulov, to beat Mamia Orakhelashvili to death.

8. V. F. Nekrasov (ed.) Beria: konets kar’ery, Moscow, 1991, 354.

9. Lakoba archive, Hoover Institute.

10. Lakoba archive.

11. Minuvshee 7, Moscow, 1992, 472.

12. GASPI 558, 11, 722, 63.

13. Khanjian’s body was wrapped in a bloodstained carpet and delivered to his hotel in the trunk of Beria’s car. He was reported to have committed suicide.

14. Robakidze later won notoriety with his essays “Adolf Hitler, Seen by a Foreign Poet” and “Mussolini: Visions on Capri.”

15. Galaktion, despite his Baudelairean poetics, was declared persona grata by Beria in 1935. He kept his distance from other poets and Russian sympathizers and feigned alcoholism. His notebooks include lines declaring himself “too tired to go near the writers’ palace / Where Beria’s wolves growl.” Galaktion’s wife was exiled to northern Russia and murdered in 1944. The very popular Grishashvili, now more bibliophile than poet, was indiscreet enough, even in 1937, to mock Lenin in verse.