Yagoda and Paukor had to mobilize all the civil police of Moscow and summon thousands of Cheka personnel from other cities to Moscow in an emergency. Every building through which the funeral procession was to pass was assigned to the city defense forces. Their task was to evict the occupants to rooms not facing the street and forbid them to come out of them. Sentries stood by every window and on every balcony facing the street. The streets were lined with “civilians” consisting of civilian police, Cheka, soldiers of the State Political Security Directorate, and mobilized communists. Both sides of the streets along the entire route of march were closed to traffic and cleared of pedestrians from early morning.
Finally, at 3 p.m. on November 11, the funeral procession departed from Red Square, escorted by mounted police and troops of the State Political Security Directorate. Stalin was indeed followed by the hearse, surrounded by other “leaders” and their wives. It seems that all possible measures were taken in order to save Stalin from any assassination. However, his courage did not last long. After ten minutes or so, just as he reached the first square to be passed on the way, he and Bokel left the ranks and got into the car waiting for him. A convoy of cars surrounded Stalin’s car and sped around the road to the new convent of virgins. There Stalin waited for the funeral procession.
As I have already mentioned, when A.H. Luyeva married Stalin, her brother Pavel Aliluyev also lived in Stalin’s apartment with him. In the first years of his Marriage, Stalin doted on his wife and treated her brother like a member of the Family. In Stalin’s house, Pavel met many Bolsheviks, all of whom were not very prominent at that Time, but who later held important state positions. One of them was Klim Voroshilov, who later became a People’s Commissar of Defense. Voroshilov treated Pavel well, often taking him to troop exercises and parades of airborne troops. Apparently, he wanted to arouse Pavel’s interest in the military career, but Pavel preferred some kind of a quieter job and wanted to be an engineer.
I first met Pavel Aliluyev at the beginning of 1929 in Berlin. At that time, Voroshilov had sent him on a Soviet commercial delegation to Berlin to check the quality of the air force equipment ordered by the Soviet Ministry of Defense from Germany. Pavel Aliluyev was married at that time and had two children. His wife worked in the foreign trade sector and was the daughter of an Orthodox priest. Aliluyev, on the other hand, was an engineer and an ordinary member of the basic party organization. In the large Soviet mission in Berlin, no one knew that Aliluyev was a relative of Stalin, except for a few leaders.
As a staff member of the state censorship authorities, my task was to monitor all import and export operations in the commercial sector, including secret military orders in Germany. Thus, Pavel Aliluyev belonged to my control in terms of work, and I worked together with him for almost two years.
I remember that when he first came into my office, I was overwhelmed by his resemblance to his sister in appearance – also a well-defined face, with oriental, depressed eyes. I was sure then that his character must be very similar to his sister’s – decent, sincere and extremely modest. I would like to emphasize that he had another advantage that few other Soviet officials had: he would never use weapons if his opponent had bare hands. As Stalin’s brother-in-law and friend of Voroshilov, he was undoubtedly a very influential man. However, he never flaunted his status and used his influence with those staff members of the delegation who did not know about him, if they slandered him out of motivation to move up or out of purely bad qualities.
I remember that there was an engineer under Aliluyev who took part in reviewing and receiving aircraft engines made by German manufacturers. On one occasion he made a small report to the head of the delegation that Aliluyev’s dealings with several German engineers were suspicious, and that he had succumbed to the influence of German engineers and was sloppy and irresponsible in examining aircraft engines shipped back to the Soviet Union. The informant found it necessary to add that Aliluyev also read newspapers run by White Russian expatriates.
The head of the commercial delegation handed over the small report to Aliluyev, and at the same time said that he would send the slandererer back to Moscow, expel him from the party, and remove him from the foreign trade department. Aliluyev, however, begged not to do so. He said that the man was an expert in engines and worked very hard. In addition to this, Aliluyev promised to talk to the man alone and advise him not to make false accusations against others in the future. This shows that Aliluyev is a man of very high moral character, who does not want to take revenge on the weak.
During our two years together, we talked about many things, but we talked very little about Stalin. This was mainly because I was not so interested in Stalin by then. What I knew was enough to make me hate the man with all my heart. Besides, what could Pavel say about him that was new? He told me once that Stalin, when he was drunk, tended to sing religious hymns. On another occasion I heard from Bavel that one day, at Sochi’s villa, Stalin came out of the dining room with a twisted, angry face, threw his dinner knife on the floor and shouted, “Even in prison, give me a much sharper knife!”
In 1931, I was transferred back to work in Moscow and separated from Aliluyev. For a long time afterwards we hardly saw each other again: sometimes I was in Moscow and he was abroad; sometimes it was the other way around.
In 1936 he was appointed head of the political department of the Panzer Army, topped by Voroshilov, the head of the political department of the Red Army, Gamalnik, and Marshal Tukhachevsky. As the reader already knows, the very next year Stalin charged Tukhachevsky and Gamarnik with treason and conspiracy to subvert the government, and had them shot.
At the end of January 1937, I received a warm letter from Aliluyev in Spain. He congratulated me on being awarded the Order of Lenin, the highest honor of the Soviet Union. But at the end of the letter there were a few accompanying sentences, the content of which was very strange. Pavel wrote that he would like to work with me again, and said that he would be ready to move if I could take the initiative and ask Moscow to appoint him to Spain. I did not understand why I had to make this request, knowing that it would be enough for Pavel to tell Voroshilov of his wish to do so. After much deliberation, I decided that Aliluyev had written this enclosed message purely out of courtesy, and that he had offered to resume working with me in order to express once again his goodwill and friendship for me from then on.
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