Sergo Dead, Bukharin and Rykov Arrested

COULDN’T SLEEP… AHHHH…

From “Stalin” (Montefiore):

Stalin’s thoughts in 1937 reveal the broadest reason for the imminent murder of hundreds of thousands of people for little apparent reason: ‘Maybe it can be explained by the fact that you lost faith,’ Stalin addressed the Old Bolsheviks. (p. 186)

Sergo Ordzhonikidze kills himself in his room on 18 February 1937. The Plenum of the same month decides to arrest Politburo members, Nikolai Bukharin, who edited Pravda and Izvestiya, and Alexei Rykov, who succeeded Lenin as Premier.

‘Sergo, why are you upset?’ said Stalin. “This Organ can search my place at any moment too.’ Stalin summoned Sergo who rushed out so fast, he forgot his coat. His wife Zina hurried after him with the coat and fur hat but he was already in Stalin’s apartment. Zina waited outside for an hour and a half. Stalin’s provocations only confirmed Sergo’s impotence, for he ‘sprang out of Stalin’s place in a very agitated state, did not put on his coat or had, and ran home’. He started retyping his speech, then, according his wife, rushed back to Stalin who taunted him more with his sneering marginalia: ‘Ha-ha!’

Sergo told Zina that he could not cope with Koba whom he loved. The next morning, he remained in bed, refusing breakfast. ‘I feel bad,’ he said. He simply asked that no one should disturb him and worked in his room. At 5:30 p.m. Zina heard a dull sound and rushed into the bedroom.

Sergo lay bare-chested and dead on the bed. He had shot himself in the heart, his chest powder-burned. Zina kissed his hands, chest, lips fervently and called the doctor who certified he was dead. She then telephoned Stalin who was at Kuntsevo. The guards said he was taking a walk but she shouted:

‘Tell Stalin it’s Zina. Tell him to come to the phone right away. I’ll wait on the line.’

‘Why the big hurry?’ Stalin asked. Zina ordered him to come urgently: ‘Sergo’s done the same as Nadya!’ Stalin banged down the phone at this grievous insult….

‘What shall we say to people now?’ she asked.

‘This must be reported in the press,’ Stalin replied. ‘We’ll say he died of a heart attack.’ (p. 189)

… In Stalin and Nadya’s old apartment in the Poteshny Palace, Bukharin worked frantically on a letter to a future Central Committee and Posterity, asking his beautiful wife Anna, just twenty-three, to memorize it. ‘Again and again Nikolai Ivanovich read his letter in a whisper to me and I had to repeat after him,’ she wrote. ‘Then I read and reread it myself, softly repeating the phrases aloud. Ah how he gripped [me] when I made a slip.’

Just across the river, in his apartment in the House on the Embankment, Rykov would only say: ‘They’ll send me to prison!’ His wife suffered a stroke as the attacks on his husband became deadly. His devoted 21-year-old daughter, Natalya, helped him dress each day for the Plenum – as his mother had done. (p. 192)