Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

Table of Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Acknowledgments

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHRONOLOGY

PREFACE

ONE - THE LONG ROAD TO POWER

Childhood and Family

Being Georgian

Stalin as a Thinker

Political Initiation

Prison and Exile

The Lone Sadist

TWO - STALIN,, AND THE CHEKA

Prelude to Power

Feliks: The First Forty Years

The Extraordinary Commission

Poles, Latvians, and Jews

The Chekist as Intellectual and Organizer

Stalin andin Tandem

From Cheka to State Political Directorate

THREE - THE EXQUISITE INQUISITOR

A False Dawn

Viacheslav Menzhinsky’s Belated Rise

Repressing Peasants and Intellectuals

Control of the Church

Stalin’s Struggle for Sole Control

A New Role for OGPU

FOUR - STALIN SOLO

Clearing the Terrain

The First Show Trials

Bringing the Writers to Heel

Operations Abroad

Enslaving the Peasantry

The Peasantry: The Final Solution

FIVE - IAGODA’S RISE

Toward Sole Dictatorship

Bringing Up a Guard Dog

The Trophy Writer

Fellow Travelers Abroad and Dissent at Home

From Unity to Uniformity

SIX - MURDERING THE OLD GUARD

The Killing of Sergei Kirov

Removing Zinoviev and Kamenev

Hitler’s Lessons

Women and Children

Pigs in the Parlor, Peacocks on Parade

Iagoda’s Fall

Monolithic Power

SEVEN - THE EZHOV BLOODBATH

The Birth of the Great Terror

How the Hedgehog Got Its Prickles

Purging of the Guard

Targets for Extermination

The Last Show Trials

Disarming the Army

Martyrdom for Poets

Disposing of Ezhov

EIGHT - THE RISE OF LAVRENTI BERIA

Why Beria?

Beria in the Caucasus

Beria as Satrap

Mopping Up After Ezhov

The Last of the Intellectuals

Ethnic Cleansing

The Katyn Massacres

Trotsky’s End

NINE - HANGMEN AT WAR

“Brothers, Sisters!”

Beria Shares Power

Evacuation, Deportation, and Genocide

Prisoners of War

Liberating Europe

The Scent of Freedom

TEN - THE GRATIFICATION OF CRUELTY

Senescence

Exploding the Bomb

Crushing the Last of the Literati

Jews and Cosmopolitans

Vengeance on Leningrad

Stalin’s End

Beria’s Hundred Days

The Hangmen’s End

NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

About the Author

Also by Donald Rayfield

Copyright Page

Allen Knechtschaffenen An alle Himmel schreib ich’s an, die diesen Ball umspannen: Nicht der Tyrann ist ein schimpflicher Mann, aber der Knecht des Tyrannen. To All the Enslaved I write it all over the heavens That encompass our earthly sphere: It’s not the tyrant we should abuse, But the serf who works for the tyrant.

Christian Morgenstern

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have many people to thank for their assistance: among them Mikhail Voroshilov in the Russian State Archive of Social-Political History, Natalia Volkova in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, and Rezo Kverenchkhiladze of the Georgian Union of Writers. The staff of the Memorial Society in Moscow, as well as the manuscript department of the Russian State Library, and the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg who compiled the Leningrad Martyrology, have been very helpful, as has Memed Jikhashvili of Batum. Olga Makarova, Vika Musvik, and other friends located ephemeral periodical material I would have missed otherwise. Boris Ravdin helped me with texts in Latvian, as well as with certain sources. Anna Pilkington lent me help, linguistic and ideological, with hundreds of bits of text, not to mention an objective critical eye.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Section One

1. “Koba” Stalin, police photograph, Baku, 1910

2. Suren Spandaryan and Koba, c. 1911

3. Stalin with fellow exiles, Monastyrskoe (Siberia), July 1915

4. , Peterss, and senior chekisty, 1918

5. ’s funeral, 1926

6. Menzhinsky with his first wife, Iulia; his two daughters; and his son, Rudolf, Iaroslavl, 1904

7. Menzhinsky in the Cheka, c. 1919

8. American Relief Agency clinic, Volga famine, 1921

9. Stalin, Rykov, Zinoviev, and Bukharin at dacha, 1924

10. Sergei Kirov and Sergo Orjonikidze, north Caucasus, 1920

11. Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev, mid-1920s

12. Delivering prisoners to the Lubianka, 1928

13. Boris Savinkov, 1922

14. Menzhinsky, 1925

15. Menzhinsky’s funeral, 1934

16. Stalin relaxing at dacha, c. 1930

17. Mayakovsky shortly after his suicide, 1930

18. Pavel Dybenko and Aleksandra Kollontai with Dybenko’s sister and parents, 1918

Section Two

19. Genrikh Iagoda and Maxim Gorky, 1934

20. Famine, Kharkov province, 1932

21. Stalin and Voroshilov fishing, Abkhazia, 1933

22. Stalin and his second wife, Nadezhda Allilueva-Stalina, c. 1928

23. Stalin, his daughter, Svetlana, and second son, Vasili, 1936

24. Stalin’s NKVD guards, Sukhum, 1933

25. Molotov and his daughter, Svetlana, c. 1930

26. Leonid Nikolaev, killer of Sergei Kirov, c. 1933

27. OGPU boss Filipp Medved, White Sea canal, 1931

28. Kirov in his coffin, December 1934

29. Prisoners at work, White Sea canal, 1933

30. Svirlag corrective labor camp, Leningrad province, 1936

31. Judges at Menshevik trial, 1931