Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [131]
This position brought him the usual rewards; he had his own three-room flat, a phone, a car at his disposal, a daughter in Komsomol, and a son in the University of Moscow.
In the beginning of the purges, Azov became one of the most dreaded of the inquisitors. Tens, hundreds, thousands broke before him; he found the weakness of each person. On some there was use of brutality, on others, starvation. Some broke from the lack of sleep, others quickly succumbed to terror. Eventually he got them all.
But as the purges wore on they began to turn on the hunters. More and more members of the NKVD and OGPU received their own fatal midnight summons. Each day brought another former colleague to Azov to confess.
During these years of the terror he slept with one eye open awaiting the knock for him. The knock often came between midnight and one in the morning. He would lurch up in panic, his heart thumping, and dress in a state of drowsy fear. He would try to recall what he had said wrong or to whom he had spoken. Perhaps it was his own son! They had argued!
By some miracle the summons for Azov always came from Stalin. He would be whisked through the empty Moscow streets in the middle of the night at terrifying speeds to the villa in the suburbs hidden in a pine forest. Here Stalin held his nightly court. Those people summoned arrived one by one in black cars. Each time the cast changed; only Molotov and a personal secretary were there every time.
Stalin, in plain proletarian tunic, looking much like the millions of his portraits, greeted them and led them into a banquet room. The table buckled beneath the weight of roast pig, steaks, caviar, champagne, vodka, borsch, and rare lamb dishes of his native Georgia.
During these nightly orgies of food and drink the business of the Soviet Union was conducted by despots. Molotov and the aides made quick notes of Stalin’s edicts and random ramblings. Sometimes a word or a nod meant moving a half-million persons, putting a thousand to death.
The nights Azov attended it was generally for the purpose of getting the list of new persons to liquidate in the purge for the charges of being a Trotskyite, Bukharanite, deviationist, saboteur, speculator, traitor, opportunist or anti-party. He was stunned to receive names of marshals of the Red Army, members of the Politburo, heroes of the revolution, and great Leninists.
At four or five each morning Stalin would become quite drunk and took pleasure in berating everyone in the room, making them the butt of crude jokes. He shredded their dignity with drunken boisterousness. But Comrade Stalin never got so drunk as to lose his astuteness or deadliness.
“Comrade Azov! I have proposed a toast in honor of our Chief Prosecutor for People’s Justice, Comrade Vishinsky. Why do you refuse to drink? Fill his glass!”
Stalin knew very well of Azov’s ulcers, but Azov drank and his insides turned to flame and his eyeballs rolled back in his head and he burst into an icy sweat. Once during each summons Stalin made him drink a whole glass of vodka. Azov dared not pass out until the meeting broke up at dawn and he was in the car on the way to his office to carry out the new liquidations.
The years of the nightmare waned slowly with the police arms devouring each other and their own members. It was, indeed, a delicate time for Azov.
The climactic Purge Trial ended with a bit of poetic justice when Yagoda, the head of NKVD, was brought to people’s justice. V. V. Azov’s supreme achievement was in obtaining Yagoda’s confession.
Because of his past experience in Sovietizing the reluctant Ukraine, Azov was assigned during the Great Patriotic War to form a German People’s Liberation Committee.
And now, here in Berlin, it was Azov’s turn to do the midnight summoning. His table was not so lavish as Stalin’s, but his rule in Germany was as absolute, and what was more, no one could force him to drink vodka at this table.
Azov peeked through the drapes. In the driveway below the cars began to arrive: Wohlman, Hirsch, the rest of the Liberation Committee, Red