Yenukey made up his mind to cut off all relations with Stalin from now on. But Stalin could not forget his former close friend: as long as he had ill feelings towards someone, Stalin would not sleep in peace. Since he had missed the opportunity to force Yenukidze to kneel down as a wrongdoing friend, he had to throw him into a concentration camp as an enemy. And to do this, Stalin had many effective means. Stalin had a whole range of methods for dealing with disgraced senior officials. The first and least humiliating method was called “legging,” which deprived the disgraced official of the right to a car and driver. The next punishment is called “belly strike,” which deprives the offender of the right to eat in the Kremlin cafeteria and to buy goods in the internal store. If the offender was a government official, he was removed from government buildings and his former personal security guards were removed. Now, these measures are being applied to Yenukidze one after another.
After more than two months of “cooling off” in Tbilisi, Yenukidze is back in Moscow. It goes without saying that the government hotel, which was reserved for high-ranking officials who came to the capital on business, was no longer open to Yenukidze, and he had to stay at the Hotel Pachinko, which was reserved for ordinary cadres from all over the world who came to Moscow on business, as well as for some foreign journalists and tourists.
Yagoda and several other close associates of Stalin would go to the hotel and persuade Yenukidze to write a general letter of repentance, admitting that he had made “mistakes” against the party. But Yenukidze refused. So, Stalin ordered Yagoda to quickly collect materials on Yenukidze and submit a report to the Politburo.
It had been known for a long Time that Yenukidze had a number of faults. For example, he and his friend, Karakhan of the Foreign Ministry, were known as special protectors of the arts, because they had an affair with some young and beautiful ballerinas of the Bolshoi Theatre. Of course there was absolutely nothing criminal in this. They were both very attractive men and prominent figures in the Kremlin, and it was an honor for the ballet dancers to be able to attract their attention. Besides, not only Yenukidze, but also, as I remember, Karakhan was an old bachelor at that time, so surely, not only one girl had the fantasy of marrying them. In addition, Yenukidze had the “sin” (which I have already mentioned) of having warmly and generously helped the wives and children of many arrested party members, who, of course, had been his friends. All this, Stalin knew for a long time and did not pursue it in the past, but now he wants to put a new color on these things.
Yagoda, if he had dug a little deeper, could also have found a material from the archives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which recorded another issue of Yenukidze. There were two beautiful female secretaries in the Central Executive Committee secretariat who had an unorthodox relationship with Yenukidze. One day, the two girls, who were tired of playing with each other, were called into his office, and he wrote them each a certificate of merit in person. He signed it. And stamped with the President’s seal, and then gave them both a considerable amount of foreign currency for several months, their names into a government trade mission to go abroad in the roster. But the two girls left the country, but did not want to return to the Soviet Union.
All this was not very serious. According to the instructions given by Stalin, Yagoda mainly accused Yenukidze of getting many suspicious elements into the Central Executive Committee and the Kremlin and making a mess of the whole organ. In fact, it is precisely this charge that is pure nonsense. It is the responsibility of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to examine the political situation of the Kremlin staff, and it is not the business of Yenukidze at all. However, in order to make sense of this accusation, the Interior Ministry immediately declared a dozen of Yenukidze’s staff politically questionable and dismissed them from their posts.
Among the Kremlin staff was an old woman of advanced age. She had served in the palace since long before the October Revolution. This was a woman who never asked about politics and never offended anyone. She was very cultured and was an expert in the appreciation and collection of works of art left by the tsar. In addition, she was the only one among the Kremlin officials who knew how to set up state banquets and official receptions. She also gave special classes on social etiquette to the rustic nouveau riche of the Kremlin, revealing the secrets of high society socializing. From Stalin on down, every party official was aware of the old woman’s presence in the Kremlin and never saw her as a dissident. But now, in order to trap Yenukidze, Stalin instructed Yagoda to “promote” this gentle old woman as a duchess and to invent a complete myth of how she got into the Kremlin with Yenukidze’s admiration and assistance. Stalin’s Kremlin was infiltrated by duchesses of the Tsarist era! Stalin really lived up to his talent when it came to making up such sensational stories.
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