The Great Terror

Soon after Ordzhonikidze’s death, rumors began to come out of Russia. These varied as to detail, some saying that he had been forced to kill himself under threat of immediate arrest as a Trotskyite, others that he had actually been shot, or poisoned under the supervision of Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s secretary.¹⁶⁵ For example, Kravchenko, in his book published a decade before Khrushchev’s revelations at the XXth Party Congress, says that some believed that he committed suicide, others that he was killed.¹⁶⁶ But no one had any doubt that he died by violence, that his end was not “natural.”

Khrushchev said in 1961 that he had believed what was said about Ordzhonikidze’s heart attack, and only “much later, after the war, I learned quite by chance that he had committed suicide.”¹⁶⁷ But we know from Soviet sources that the suicide story had circulated widely in the Party. Amirdzhanov, a “worker of the Baku Soviet”—scarcely a very senior position—was “repressed” in 1937 because when “a certain section of the Party

aktiv” had—already—learned of the suicide story, he had passed it on to “an intimate circle of comrades.”¹⁶⁸ It was circulating in Kazan prison by April 1937.¹⁶⁹ Again, we are told that Nazaretyan, “one of the first” to learn the truth about Ordzhonikidze’s death, was arrested in June 1937 and had already learned it by then.¹⁷⁰

In the NKVD, too, rumors circulated to the same effect.¹⁷¹

In the USSR, the natural-death version remained official until in February 1956 Khrushchev remarked in his Secret Speech:

Beria also cruelly treated the family of Comrade Ordzhonikidze. Why? Because Ordzhonikidze had tried to prevent Beria from realizing his shameful plans. Beria had cleared from his way all persons who could possibly interfere with him. Ordzhonikidze was always an opponent of Beria, which he told Stalin. Instead of examining this matter and taking appropriate steps, Stalin permitted the liquidation of Ordzhonikidze’s brother and brought Ordzhonikidze himself to such a state that he was forced to shoot himself.

This account is clearly misleading. Khrushchev represents Ordzhonikidze’s death as simply due to the failure of an attempt to hamper Beria, as a result of which Stalin turned against him. But at this time, Beria was in the Caucasus, and though he was certainly influential he played little part in the great affairs of state going on at Politburo level in Moscow. The interest of the 1956 version is elsewhere, in the “he was forced to shoot himself.”

Indeed, Khrushchev himself, when he raised the matter for the first time in a nonsecret speech, omitted the Beria angle, which by 1961 was no longer a “must.” He said:

Comrade Ordzhonikidze saw that he could no longer work with Stalin, although previously he had been one of his closest friends … circumstances had become such that Ordzhonikidze could no longer work normally, and in order to avoid clashing with Stalin and sharing the responsibility for his abuse of power, he decided to take his life.¹⁷²

This version has not since been amended or contradicted. It may be worth examining the other possibilities. There are, in effect, three stories (now that natural death has been eliminated): suicide out of despair—a voluntary act, straight murder, and suicide as the result of a threat of worse alternatives by Stalin. Khrushchev implies the first. But it seems reasonable to think that, at most, he is making the best of a forced suicide—just as, in the Kirov Case, he could not quite, in a public speech, bring himself to accuse Stalin directly of murder.

A close friend of Ordzhonikidze’s widow relates that she thought he had been killed by others, and had seen men running across the lawn away from the house at the time of his death.¹⁷³ A Caucasian Party official who was in Moscow at the time says that Stalin sent several secret policemen to Ordzhonikidze, offered him the alternative of arrest or suicide, and gave him a revolver.¹⁷⁴ This account fits in with the fact that a dossier against Ordzhonikidze had been accumulated. It does not, of course, give any guarantee that the fatal shot was fired by Ordzhonikidze himself. In fact, there seems no real point in making him shoot himself, when the NKVD men could do that equally easily. One recent Soviet account has it that the first guard on the spot after his death noted that Ordzhonikidze’s revolver had no signs of having been fired, and so reported (being soon shot himself).¹⁷⁵

The stories associating Poskrebyshev with the death would be probable, in such circumstances. Ordzhonikidze could scarcely have been expected to accept a political ultimatum or, indeed, to commit suicide at all, on a threat from a lesser NKVD officer; the presence of Stalin’s personal representative is a reasonable idea. Ordzhonikidze’s own NKVD guards must, of course, have been given suitable orders.