(…) the communal apartments crammed with recent migrants from the countryside; the fancy shops selling sturgeon and czarist antiques to the Soviet elite and the endless flow of visiting progressives from the West; the just-completed marvel of Soviet engineering that brought the five seas to Moscow, the Moscow-Volga Canal (whose opening celebration coincided with the arrest, persecution, and execution of the overseers of its construction)
(…)
He reproduces the inventory of luxuries from the apartment of Genrikh Yagoda, the head of the NKVD (1,229 bottles of wine “mainly imported … from the 1897, 1900 and 1902 vintages,” 43 astrakhan pelts, 3,915 pornographic photos and films, 11,075 imported cigarettes, “including Egyptian and Turkish” ones), compiled by his former henchmen when the Terror turned against him. Schlögel details the gala concert at the Bolshoi Theatre that the NKVD threw for itself and its predecessor organization, the Cheka, in December 1937, on its 20th anniversary—a celebration presided over by Yagoda’s successor, Nikolai Yezhov, who in just under three years would himself be shot by the very organization he was lauding.„Moscow Under Terror”
Benjamin Schwarz