RUSSIA: Death of Sergo

Apart from the fact that they all freely said they had tried to have Dictator Joseph Stalin killed, the most striking feature of the Second Moscow Old Bolsheviks Trial (TIME, Feb. 8 et ante) was the agreement of the prisoners that they had also done their best to rid Russia of darkling, high-powered Grigoriy Konstantinovich Ordzhonikidze.

As Commissar for Heavy Industry he was called “The World’s Biggest Businessman.” Certainly he was one of J. Stalin’s two or three closest friends. The recent trial shifted any blame for the present lagging of Soviet Heavy Industry from Ordzhonikidze to the “Trotskyism” of his Vice-Commissar, Grigoriy Piatakov, who was sentenced to death. Piatakov was not only one of the very biggest Reds but a warm and human character by comparison with the cold, brusque Ordzhonikidze. Russia has long been a land of personal vengeance and Piatakov was the kind of man whose Russian friends would risk their lives to avenge him. After the death sentence was passed on Piatakov, the “sudden death” of Ordzhonikidze was something Moscow correspondents not so much expected as awaited. They were handed one day last week a bulletin in which the Soviet official agency Tass stated that at 5:30 p.m. on the day before, at the high-walled Kremlin Fortress in which live Dictator Stalin and the rest of the Biggest Reds, sudden death had come to the Commissar for Heavy Industry by “paralysis of the heart.”

The episode reminded observers of the Tass report three years ago on the death in the Kremlin of the Dictator’s young and robust wife (TIME, Nov. 21, 1932). She had been seen by hundreds of Moscowites attending a play two nights before, visibly in high spirits, yet the official verdict was death “after long illness.” It was said that she always insisted on tasting the Dictator’s food before letting him touch it, and ever since her passing, which affected Stalin so deeply that he had her buried in consecrated ground, any death in the Kremlin has set tongues wagging “Poison!”

The “biggest funeral since Lenin’s” was promptly got under way for “Sergo”—Stalin’s nicknamefor Ordzhonikidze. Other programs were switched off andSoviet radio stations broadcast elaborate eulogies of Sergo. Accompanied by an endless dirge, a solemn death watch over the body was begun, the Dictator himself joining in a guard which was changed every few hours, maintained day & night, with Big Reds clamoring for the honor of standing at the four corners of the bier while tens of thousands shuffled past.

Although Ordzhonikidze had long been famed as Russia’s greatest uprooter of bureaucracy and slasher of red tape in Soviet production, the official newsorgans said that whoever succeeded him as Commissar of Heavy Industry will “face the task of uprooting bureaucracy and restoring morale.” Observed a Christian Science Monitor dispatch from Moscow: “The authorities never permit any suggestions that there might be ineradicable defects in the very system of centralized control of all Soviet industry under ‘planned economy’ directed by politicians. Any person making such a suggestion would automatically become a ‘counter-revolutionary.’ “