Yezhovshchina
The purges had swollen from liquidating Party members to reducing the general population, and the indefatigably compliant four-foot-eleven, forty-two-year-old Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov had been put in charge of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Not long before his one-way trip to the Kommunarka shooting ground, Nikolai Bukharin had written, “In the whole of my — now, alas, already long life — I had to meet few people who, by their nature, were as repellent as Yezhov.” And yet Yezhov knew how to charm. Only a few years before, Nadezhda Mandelstam, not yet a widow, described him as a “modest and rather agreeable person.”
The General Secretary liked Yezhov for his dog-like fealty, his poverty of scruples and wealth of sadism, but perhaps most of all for his diminutive stature. Joseph Vissarionovich himself stood only five-foot-five. At Potsdam, Harry Truman, at five-eight, once referred to him as a “little squirt.” Perhaps the day this remark of the President was reported to Stalin was the one the Cold War started.
On November 11, 1937, Nastya Mikhailovna Plokiyov decided to visit Comrade Yezhov. Her husband Gerasim Fyodorovich, was chief deputy to Vyacheslav Molotov, not yet foreign minister, but Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR. Nastya Mikhailovna, a tall, good-looking woman, fifteen years younger than her uxorious and overweight spouse, liked to dress fashionably. Her wardrobe, among the best in Moscow, included imported dresses and high-heeled shoes which she received as gifts from the Western diplomats she mixed with at receptions and with whom she occasionally and discreetly slept. Her opinion of Gerasim, whom she could barely stand but knew well how to deceive, was much like Bukharin’s of Yezhov.
Nastya Mikhailovna wanted out of her marriage but, because of her husband’s position, going to the courts was unthinkable. Seeking a divorce would, at a minimum, cost her status and protection. Still, the prospect of more years with Gerasim was intolerable. When she came across an article in Pravda extolling a twelve-year-old girl who had informed on her parents for listening to short-wave broadcasts, she formulated a bold plan. Telling him she was studying English, she asked one of her particular friends, a counselor at the British embassy, for some books. He gave her three in a Harrod’s bag. He had wrapped them in thick brown paper tied up not with string but heavy rope. Nastya, who spoke Russian like the native she was, but knew no English words except “Yes, my dear” and only a few polite dinner-party phrases in French, was unable to read any of them.
On November 11, dressed elegantly but demurely, she put one of the books in her handbag and presented herself at the forbidding Lubyanka. Taking no notice of the swarm of armed guards, she walked straight to the reception desk, identified herself as the wife of Gerasim Plokiyov, and said that she wished to see the Chief on a matter of urgency, haughtily declaring that she would speak only with Comrade Yezhov. The two uniformed men behind the desk looked her up and down. The one she had addressed frowned; the other looked confused and picked up his phone. Evidently, messages passed from floor to floor, always upward, away from the dungeons below. Nastya was shown into a small room off the lobby. It was furnished with a thick Caucasian rug, a large potted plant (Monstera deliciosa), two matching armchairs, and a leather love seat. The guard who had conducted her to the room waited with her. Here she sat impatiently crossing and recrossing her long legs, at which the stoical guard pretended not to look. She clutched her bag to her chest. After half-an-hour, an official came in blowing his nose. He wore a badly tailored blue suit and looked a good deal like Gerasim.
“Comrade Yezhov has agreed to see you. Come with me.”
The official wheezed a good deal and struggled to keep up with Nastya as they mounted the stairs to the top floor.
“Come,” he gasped, and walked her to the door at the back of a wide room filled with men and women typing away. They all looked up furtively without stopping. “You’re expected.”
Yezhov’s office was as much on a grand scale as he was not. The little man, nicknamed The Bloody Dwarf in whispers, had risen high on the corpses of people at whose murders he had connived. He sat behind a colossal desk, dwarfed by it.
The official announced her and Yezhov got briefly to his feet, though his head was no higher than it had been when he was seated. His face struck Nastya as rather handsome, though the smile with which he greeted her looked as if it might crack an underlying grimness. He waved the Gerasimesque official away.
He did not ask Nastya to sit. He couldn’t have as there were no chairs other than his own.
“I’m told, Nastya Mikhailovna,” he said in a high-pitched voice, “that you’ve asked to see me on a matter of urgency. I presume this means you have knowledge of some danger to the state.” Then he posed the two questions he had asked many times before. “What is it? Whom does it concern?”
Nastya did not pretend to be reluctant to reply. She was as direct as Yezhov had been.
“It is about disloyalty, Comrade Yezhov, and it concerns my husband, Gerasim Fyodorovich Plokiyov.”
“I believe your husband occupies a position of trust in the office of Comrade Molotov.”
“Misplaced trust, Comrade.”
“Yes?”
“My husband is in contact — unofficially, you understand — with a counselor at the British embassy whom I believe to be an intelligence agent.”
“A most serious charge. Have you proof?” Yezhov looked at her sternly, but Nastya didn’t flinch.
She opened her bag and handed the book to Yezhov. “He is receiving reading matter from the Englishman. It could be subversive literature or, as I suspect, the key to a code.”
Yezhov raised his eyebrows. “A code?”
“A letter code. I’ve read about them.”
Yezhov paged indifferently through the book.
“So, you think your husband should be arrested and questioned?”
“I do. Yes.”
Yezhov smiled at Nastya. It was not a warm smile.
He held up the book. “Do you know what this is?”
“I have no English,” said Nastya proudly, as if her ignorance was a proof of her patriotism.
“This is a collection of stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doble, Sherlock Holmes stories. This book was banned in 1929; however, the First Secretary is personally an admirer of Doyle. He has even made copies of this book available to a select group of officials, people like me. For training the mind, he said.”
Nastya did not know what to say.
“As it happens,” said Yezhov coldly, “we have a file on your husband.”
Nastya evinced no surprise. No one in Russia would.
“But,” said the Chief of the NKVD, “we have a far thicker one on you.” Yezhov pushed a button. Two guards, both over six feet tall, entered at once. Each took one of Nastya’s shapely arms and escorted her down all six floors to the cellars.
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Reader Comments
Good one! A chilling and plot-twisty depiction of totalitarianism.