Terror Continues

最高会議幹部会議長夫人、外相夫人も疑惑の対象に

As the world watched Stalin and Hitler carve up the East, the Vozhd was probing the submissions of his comrades by investigating and sometimes killing their wives. His fragile trust in women was irreparably undermined by Nadya’s suicide but this had been exacerbated by his own destruction of the wives of Enemies. As Khrushchev said, he became interested in other men’s wives for the unusual reason that they were possible spies rather than mistresses. (p. 281)

Polina Moltova, the First Lady, was in danger. She was now Commissar of Fishing, a CC candidate member and mistress of her perfume empire. Yet Beria now started investigating her, discovering ‘vandals’ and ‘saboteurs’ secreted in her staff. She had ‘unknowingly facilitated their espionage’. Stalin may have been sending another anti-Semitic signal to Hitler.

On 10 August, when Stalin and Molotov were plotting their diplomatic somersaults, the Politburo indicted Polina…. On 24 October, she was relieved of her Commissariat, reprimanded for ‘levity and hastiness’ but declared innocent of ‘calumnies’…. Stalin and Beria considered kidnapping and murdering her. She was lucky to be alive.

On 25 October 1938, Beria arrested President Kalinin’s wife (Ekaterina Ivanovna). In a land where the Head of State’s wife was in prison, no one was safe from the Party…. [She and her friend] were bugged grumbling about Stalin’s blood lust. The lady friend was executed, Kalinina sent into exile, like Budyonny’s wife before her…. Not everyone was as lucky as Molotova and Kalinina.

In April 1937, Dr Bronka Poskrebysheva, twenty-seven, pretty wife of the chef de cabinet,… came to [see Stalin] to ask for the release of her arrested brother Metalikov, the Kremlin doctor, indirectly related through his wife to Trotsky…. Stalin hated women pleading for relatives though one of the tragedies of Soviet life at this time was that women did beg potentates for the lives of their loved ones, offering anything they could, even their bodies. Bronka’s mission failed. She was terrified of being tarred with the Trotskyite brush.

… But Bronka did not give up. On 27 April 1939, she called Beria and asked if she could come to discuss her brother. She was never seen again.

… [Stalin, Beria and Poskrebyshev] met, possibly around midnight on 3 May…. Beria produced a confession implicating Bronka…. Poskrebyshev begged Stalin to release her….

‘Don’t worry, we’ll find you another wife,’ Stalin supposedly replied…. After two years, Bronka was shot aged just thirty-one as the Germans approached Moscow. (pp. 283-284)

「パイオニア・マヤ」

Before he turned to wantonly kill another of his friend’s wives, Stalin capriciously saved two old friends from death…. [Sergo] Kavtaradze consistently joined the oppositions yet Stalin always forgave him. Arrested in the late twenties, Stalin brought him back and ordered Kaganovich to help him. He was arrested again in late 1936, appearing on Yezhov’s death-lists. His wife (Princess Sofia Vachnadze, whose godmother had been Empress Maria Fyodorovna, Nicholas II’s mother) was also arrested. His daughter Maya, then eleven, thought both parents were already dead but she courageously wrote to Stalin to beg for their lives, signing her letters: ‘Pioneer Maya Kavtaradze’. Both Kavtaradzes were tortured but… their lives were spared. Now, in late 1939, ‘Pioneer Kavtaradze’s letters reminded Stalin to ask Beria if his old friend was still alive.

Delivered to the Hotel Lux, [Kavtaradze] found his wife was there, a frail shadow of her former self – but alive. Their daughter arrived from Tiflis. Soon afterwards, Kavtaradze was called: ‘Comrade Stalin is waiting for you….’….

A few weeks later, the [Kavtaradze] family received a bizarre and revealing visitation (by Stalin and Beria).

‘Ah, it’s you – “Pioneer Kavtaradze.”’

Maya was charmed: ‘He was so kind, so gentle – he kissed me on the cheek and I looked into his honey-coloured, hazel, gleaming eyes,’ she recalls, ‘but I was so anxious.’ (pp. 284-285)

Stalin appointed Kavtaradze to publishing job that involved another prisoner, Shalva Nutsibidze, a celebrated Georgian philosopher…. While in jail, Nutsibidze started translating the Georgian epic poem by Rustaveli, The Knight in the Panther Skin, into Russian. Every day, his work was taken from him and returned marked with the pen of anonymous editor.

… Nutsibidze was released and, on 20 October 1940, Kavtaradze picked him up in a limousine and the two ‘lucky stiffs’ drove to the Little Corner to report to Poskrebyshev on the Rustaveli translation. When they were shown into the office, Stalin was smiling at them:

‘You’re Professor Nutsibidze?’ he said. ‘You’ve been offended a bit but let’s not rake up the past,’…. ‘… I take great pleasure in being your editor.’ He then invited the two to dinner…. (p. 286)

イェゾフの処刑

On 16 January 1940, Stalin signed 346 death sentences, a list of the tragic flotsam of the outstanding talents of the arts, such as Babel, theatre director Meyerhold, and Yezhov’s lover, the journalist Koltsov (on whom Karpov in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is based), as well as Yezhov himself with his innocent brother, nephews and socialite mistress, Glikina, and the fallen magnate Eikhe.

… At 1.30 a.m. on 27 January 1940, Babel was shot and cremated.

When Beria had convinced himself he could not get a confession [from Eikhe]… he ordered… to lead him away to be shot.’

It was now Yezhov’s turn. On 1 February, Beria called his predecessor to his office at Sukhanovka to propose that if he confessed at his trial, Stalin would spare him. To his meager credit, Yezhov refused: ‘It’s better to leave this earth as an honourable man.’

On 2 February, Ulrikh tried him in Beria’s office…. He denied all charges of spying for what he called ‘Polish landowners… English lords and Japanese samurai’ but ‘… my fate is obvious,’….

When Ulrikh pronounced the sentence, Yezhov toppled over but was caught by his guards, loaded into a Black Crow in the early hours of 3 February and driven to his special execution yard…. (pp. 287-288)

… [b]ut after the war, Stalin admitted: ‘One can’t believe a lot of evidence from 1937. Yezhov couldn’t run NKVD properly and anti-Soviet elements penetrated it. They destroyed some honest people, our best cadres.’

Looking back, he also questioned Beria’s Terror: ‘Beria runs too many cases and everyone confesses.’ But Stalin was always aware that the NKVD invented evidence…. [N]o ruler has supervised his secret police as intimately as he.

…. Stalin’s brother-in-law Stanislas Redens (implicated by Yezhov) was shot on 12 February, 1940. (pp. 288-289)

日本語の「罪と罰」関連サイトを見ると……、あれ、カタカナでは、“Raskolnikov” を「ラスコールニコフ」ではなく、「ラスコーリニコフ」としているようだ。キリル文字の発音すらできんし、ロシア語も読めんので、理由は不明。この作品は何度も映画化されているので、ひとつぐらい見てもいいかな。