Stalin

Stalin, in parallel, kept a watch on military technology. In mid-June 1931, with Voroshilov in tow, he visited the central aerodrome, in Moscow, to inspect Soviet aircraft, climbing into the cabin of the new Polikarpov I-5 fighter, under the direction of Alexander Turzhansky (b. 1898), of the Air Force Research Institute. “Listening to my explanations, Stalin suddenly asked, ‘Where’s the radio?’” Turzhansky recalled. “‘On fighters there is no radio yet.’ ‘And how do you fight an air battle?’ ‘By maneuvering the aircraft.’ ‘That is unacceptable!’” A radio engineer hastened to the rescue, reporting that there was a prototype plane with a radio, but it awaited testing. Next up for inspection was a French Potez aircraft. Stalin asked, “‘And the French plane has a radio?’” Turzhansky answered in the negative. “‘Aha!’ said a surprised Stalin. ‘All the same, we need a radio on our fighters. And before them.’”⁷²

UPHEAVAL

Some OGPU operatives looked askance at the primitive fabrications against what were unthreatening military administrators and teachers already on a short leash. Additionally, although Yagoda liked to advertise his office on the third floor of Lubyanka, 2, as open, many operatives despised him. Messing, the second deputy chief and head of foreign espionage, teamed up with Olsky, Yevdokimov, and Abram Levin (who oversaw the regular police and was known as Lev Belsky), to accuse Yagoda and Balytsky of artificially “inflating” cases.⁷³ The rebels were hardly strangers to fabrication (Yevdokimov and Olsky had recently framed a group of microbiologists).⁷⁴ But they saw Yagoda as walking on eggshells over alleged ties to the right deviation. Mężyński’s continuing ill health helped spur the intrigue as well. His weight had ballooned to more than 250 pounds, exacerbating his heart condition, bronchial asthma, and endocrinal deficiency, and he had been reporting to work at Lubyanka perhaps twice a week for a few hours, before finally being sent to Crimea.⁷⁵

(He evidently spent time studying Persian, dreaming of reading the verses of the medieval polymath Omar Khayyám in the original.)⁷⁶ Mężyński returned to work only on June 8, 1931, and not at full strength.⁷⁷

Stalin could have seized on the intrigues to promote a favorite, such as Yevdokimov. The latter knew Stalin had no fondness for Yagoda, but he had miscalculated the dictator’s appetite for disorder in the organs, and for having Chekists force personnel decisions on him. On July 15, 1931, Stalin had Yevdokimov sent on holiday to the spa town of Kislovodsk and, ten days later, installed Ivan Akulov (a deputy head of the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate) as first deputy chief of the OGPU. Yagoda nominally fell to second deputy. Stalin also advanced Balytsky to third deputy, a new post.⁷⁸ Akulov’s appointment from outside was Stalin’s response to the criticisms of OGPU illegalities.⁷⁹ Balytsky’s spot in Ukraine was given to Stanisław Redens, Stalin’s brother-in-law (through his first wife). Yevdokimov was assigned to run the OGPU in Leningrad in place of Filipp Medved (who was reassigned to Belorussia), but then the politburo reversed itself.⁸⁰

Medved stayed; Yevdokimov ended up in Central Asia.⁸¹ The regime warned those transferred not “to bring along any functionary at all close to him from the regions they were leaving when transferring from one place to another,” an entrenched practice of cliques that no decree could halt.⁸² A clique was how Stalin had achieved and exercised power.

Global financial shocks were spiraling, but how much Stalin understood or paid attention remains uncertain. France and the United States together held two thirds of the world’s gold, but their monetary authorities intervened to hold down the money supply, thereby failing to check the inflows of gold and causing global deflation. On July 6, 1931, France reluctantly accepted Herbert Hoover’s proposal for a one-year moratorium on intergovernmental payments, including Germany’s reparations. Hoover was concerned that Germany would default after the failure, in spring 1931, of Creditanstalt, Austria’s largest bank, founded by the Rothschilds and considered impregnable (but lacking liquidity because of efforts to sustain the country’s old industrial structure). That, in turn, had provoked bank runs in Hungary and Germany, too, and attacks on sterling. On July 8, strict controls were imposed on all German foreign exchange transactions, but five days later, one German bank collapsed. British officials fumed over France’s perceived intransigence vis-à-vis Germany’s hardship. “Again and again be it said,” British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald confided to his diary (July 22), “France is the enemy.”⁸³ British recognition of the need to “fix” the Versailles Treaty had only become more acute.