Pidakov faithfully fulfilled his duty. He endured public scorn with great pain, trampled on his glorious past, and sought only to save the lives of his loved ones – his wife and son – at the cost of these sacrifices.
He, too, like the other defendants, was given the opportunity to make a “final statement” before the trial court went into the full courtroom to produce its verdict. His statement was short, but there were a few words full of pathos and deep emotion that will always be engraved in my mind.
“No sentence imposed by the court can be more severe to me than the confession itself – in a few moments, you will read out your verdict; how dirty I am standing before you now …… have lost my own party, my own home, myself.”
On January 30, 1937, a military tribunal of the Supreme Court sentenced thirteen of the seventeen defendants to death. Among the thirteen were Pidakov, Serebryakov and several other close comrades of Lenin. They were all shot in the basement of the NKVD building.
The third week after Pidakov’s murder, an obituary appeared in the newspaper: Serguei Ordzhonikidze, People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry, had died suddenly of heart paralysis at the age of fifty. The funeral of Ordzhonikidze was so solemn that the Central Committee asked the Party organizations at all levels to hold memorial services to pay due tribute to the death of “Stalin’s faithful comrade and comrade, the People’s Commissar of Steel”.
About two months later, a messenger arrived in Spain from the Soviet Union to escort the diplomatic mail. This young man, who had just been transferred as a diplomatic courier, used to work in the secret service of the Ministry of the Interior, and was strong and strong, with a brazen face and fluffy yellow hair, like a haystack. When he arrived in Spain, he met up with an old friend, who was one of my men. After they had talked for a short time, my subordinate came to me in a hurry and revealed to me, in great secrecy, a number of secret stories that he had just heard from the messenger’s mouth. For example, it seems that the Secret Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs had evidence that Mikhail Koltsov, a correspondent of Pravda in Spain at that time, had “defected to the British” and often provided the British spy agencies with secret information about the Soviet Union. Another example is that Serguei Ordzhonikidze seems to have died not from illness, but from murder.
I was upset to hear someone speak badly about Mikhail Kerzhov, because he was a good friend of mine. Of course, this does not mean that I do not believe at all that the NKVD has any material against him. The NKVD is like a big, big mailbox into which anyone can throw his irresponsible fabrications. The news that Ordzhonikidze seemed to have died in a murder, I also thought, was mostly a rumor, although after Kirov’s murder I should have believed it to be true. But at that time (spring of 1937) Stalin had not yet killed his old comrades who were not satisfied with his actions, so I can hardly imagine that he would have killed Ordzhonikidze, knowing that this was the last person in the Kremlin with whom he could speak his native Georgian.
In October 1937, Shpigelglias, the deputy head of the Foreign Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, came to Spain on a business trip. Before this, that is, in the summer of 1937, a series of appalling events took place in Moscow. Beginning in May, one by one, Stalin’s own closest comrades and most loyal men, who had never been part of any opposition, were inexplicably thrown into prison. In Moscow, in all the major cities of the country, people disappeared every day, and they were all important and famous people: people’s commissars, chairmen of the supreme soviets of the constituent republics, state party secretaries, high-ranking generals of the army, etc. In Moscow, two government officials, recognized as Stalin’s close friends, disappeared from their homes on the streets of the city’s central district when they left for work. Along with them, their cars and drivers disappeared. Even the leaders of the Ministry of Internal Affairs did not escape being arrested in secret!
Shpigelglias’ head was stuffed with such terrible news. I am afraid that he was allowed to leave the country this time only because he had hostages in Moscow – his wife and daughter. I could hear from his conversation that he was very afraid for his life. In fact, I had heard the stories he told, but I didn’t know them as much and in as much detail as he did, knowing that Shpigelglias was not an idle person in the NKVD.
I could see that Shpigelglias was very envious of my ability to live abroad with my family, because the wave of arbitrary arrests and killings at home was growing. He repeatedly hinted that he wanted to come to Spain to work and that he wanted my “assistance”. Once, when he saw that I did not respond to these hints, he simply stated nakedly that he would be willing to serve as my deputy if I would take the initiative to ask Moscow to transfer him to Spain. Apparently, in his opinion, Spain was the ideal refuge from the bloodshed in the Soviet Union, despite the smoke of the civil war that was hanging over it.
One day, we went by car from Valencia to Barcelona. On the way, he talked about the wave of purges. He gave a long list of names of party officials and interior ministry heads who had recently committed suicide or disappeared, most of whom we knew very well. Finally, out of the blue, he said, “They killed Ordzhonikidze, too!”
I shivered. Although he confirmed the news that the diplomatic courier had brought last time, I still unconsciously blurted out, “This, this is impossible!”
“A thousand times true,” retorted Shpigelglias. “I know the full details of this incident. Ordzhonikidze, who also had Caucasian blood in his veins, quarreled with his master. One of them was harder than the other. It’s all about Pidarkov ……”
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