For two years Ordzhonikidze, from time to time, suffered from attacks of stenocardia (angina pectoris) and cardiac asthma. The last such attack, which was a very serious one, occurred at the beginning of November 1936.
On the morning of 18 February Ordzhonikidze made no complaint about his health, but at 17.30, while he was having his afternoon rest, he suddenly felt ill and a few minutes later died of paralysis of the heart.
G. Kaminsky, People’s Commissar for Health, U.S.S.R.
I. Khodorovsky, Head of the Kremlin Medical-Sanitary Administration
L. Levin, Consultant to the Kremlin Medical-Sanitary Administration
S. Mets, Duty Medical Officer of the Kremlin Clinic.160
Of the four signatories, Kaminsky (who, we are told, was “very unwilling”161 to sign) was shot later in the year, Khodorovsky was referred to as a plotter in the Bukharin Trial, and Levin actually appeared as a defendant at that trial and was shot afterwards. What happened to the more obscure Mets is unknown.
Curiously enough, it was never alleged against the doctors, or anyone else, that Ordzhonikidze had been a victim of a murder plot by the opposition. It is true that at Ordzhonikidze’s funeral a few days later, Khrushchev was to remark,
It was they who struck a blow to thy noble heart. Pyatakov—the spy, the murderer, the enemy of the working people—is caught red-handed, caught and condemned, crushed like a reptile by the working class, but it was his counter-revolutionary work which hastened the death of our dear Sergo.162
And, indeed, the authoritative article on him in the Large Soviet Encyclopedia, describing him as “the favorite comrade-in-arms of the great Stalin” and saying that he “died at his post as a warrior of the Lenin-Stalin Party,” added that “the Trotskyite–Bukharinite degenerates of Fascism hated Ordzhonikidze with a bitter hatred. They wanted to kill Ordzhonikidze. In this the Fascist agents did not succeed. But the sabotage activity and monstrous treachery of the despicable Right–Trotskyite hirelings of Japanese–German Fascism greatly hastened the death of Ordzhonikidze.”163
But nevertheless, no one was ever charged with murdering him. This shows a curious restraint on Stalin’s part (though, of course, he may have been saving the case for one of the post-Bukharin trials which never occurred, at least in public). One of Ordzhonikidze’s deputies, Vannikov, was indeed summoned by Yezhov a few days after his death, to report on “wrecking” activities by Ordzhonikidze. It looks as though there was or had been some notion of posthumously attacking him, as Tomsky and Gamarnik had been attacked after their suicides. If so, this too was not pursued.164
It is now no longer disputed that Stalin did in fact procure Ordzhonikidze’s death. But the details are still debatable. And the way in which the original official version lost credence, first in the defector literature, and finally in the Soviet Union itself, is an interesting demonstration of the relative worth of the sources.
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.