Red Army Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky. There are two conflicting stories about the circumstances of Rudzutaks's arrest. One, published in the Soviet press in 1963, is that he was in a lively conversation in his dacha with Aleksandr Gerasimov and two other painters when he was seized. The other is that he was holding a supper party after a visit to the theatre, when the NKVD arrived and arrested everyone present. Yevgenia Ginzburg, wife of a senior Bolshevik who survived the gulag, wrote about being forced to share a cell in Butyrki prison with 37 other women, four of whom were dressed in "absurd low-cut evening dresses, crumpled and bedraggled with high heeled shoes." A fellow prisoner explained that they were Rudzutaks's former dinner guests, who had been held for three months, and "the poor things haven't been allowed any parcels, so they're still in their evening dress." This was the first arrest of a sitting member or candidate member of the Politburo — with no record of ever having opposed the party line — and a signal that no one, however senior, apart from Stalin himself, was safe. Stalin's crony Vyacheslav Molotov was asked, some 40 years later, to explain, and said that Rudzutaks was arrested because "he was too easygoing about the opposition and considered it all nonsense, trifles. That was unforgivable" and because "he indulged too much in partying with philistine friends". Rudzutaks showed great courage under torture. Molotov was one of a delegation from the Politburo who confronted him in prison, and recalled: "Rudzutak said he had been badly beaten and tortured. Nevertheless he held firm. Indeed, he seemed to have been cruelly tortured". He broke down under torture and confessed to being a spy, but retracted and insisted that he was innocent. He was included in a list of 118 former high-ranking Bolsheviks, which was passed to Stalin in July 1938, just as Lavrentiy Beria was about to take over control of the NKVD from the murderous Nikolai Yezhov. Stalin instructed that they all be shot. At his trial, which lasted 20 minutes, Rudzutaks submitted a written statement protesting that "there is in the NKVD an as yet not liquidated center which is craftily manufacturing cases, which forces innocent persons to confess. There is no opportunity to prove one’s non-participation in crimes to which the confessions of various persons testify. The investigative methods are such that