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

All around nature is dying, the world is rocking, impoverished . . . now, bowlegged with pain, I hear: the heavens howl. Now a beast trembles, predestined to turn the wheel’s system. I beg, reveal, reveal it, friends: are all people really lords over us?

Collectivization had brutalized victims and perpetrators to such a degree that civilized society no longer existed in the USSR. The cruelty and passivity it induced in Soviet citizens made it possible for Stalin and his hangmen to proceed to an even more violent campaign in the party and among the urban population.

FIVE

IAGODA’S RISE

. . . if you magnified an ordinary flea several thousand times you’d get the most fearful animal on earth which nobody would be strong enough to control . . . But history’s monstrous grimaces produce such magnifications in the real world, too. Stalin is a flea which Bolshevik propaganda and the hypnosis of fear have magnified to unbelievable proportions.

Gorky’s diary, according to witness¹

Toward Sole Dictatorship

The Czar can send any of his officials to Siberia, but he cannot rule without them, or against their will.

John Stuart Mill

FORCED COLLECTIVIZATION confirmed Stalin’s tyranny. Not just public opinion, but the party, the Central Committee, and now the Politburo could be set aside. From 1930 onward, all power in the USSR flowed from Stalin’s Kremlin office, ten minutes’ walk from his chief executive agency, Menzhinsky and Iagoda’s OGPU. Stalin’s office, together with those of his closest circle in the Kremlin, was the nerve center from noon to about two in the morning, and spent annually nearly a million rubles on secretaries and OGPU couriers, encrypted telegrams communicating Stalin’s decisions, and generous rations of food, tea, and cigarettes.²

Stalin entrenched himself in an office that worked better after dark. A spider at the center of a web, he was alert to any disturbance and could neutralize any threat. In the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) and in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, Stalin had only his cronies appointed. Kalinin, head of state, the last remaining leader appointed in Lenin’s time, blackmailed for his promiscuity in private, his liberalism in politics, and a dossier that proved he had been an informant for the Tsar’s gendarmerie, was enslaved to Stalin. Once Stalin ousted the last of the right, Rykov—“He was getting under our feet,” Stalin wrote to Gorky—he made Molotov chairman of Sovnarkom, effectively prime minister. Key commissariats were in Stalinist hands: Orjonikidze controlled the super-ministry for the economy, while Voroshilov held, to the army’s contempt, the Commissariat for War.³

All power in the Soviet Communist Party’s four organs—Politburo, Secretariat, Orgburo, Central Control Commission—was in Stalin’s hands. After Bukharin’s removal, only vestiges of the right remained in the Politburo, which was controlled by men who never disagreed with Stalin—Molotov, Voroshilov, Kalinin—backed up by equally loyal candidate members like Andreev, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan. As general secretary, Stalin controlled the party’s agendas and membership, and Stalin, Molotov, and Kaganovich—the Secretariat—formed a triumvirate that brooked no contradiction. The party’s Orgburo was dominated by the same triumvirate. Stalin sat everywhere but on the Central Control Commission, which purged party membership, but since Orjonikidze was the chairman and Stalin’s sycophant Iaroslavsky was a secretary, this too was Stalin’s instrument.

Stalin’s cronies were chosen on the same principles that a lion tamer chooses his lions: “the lion that is the most amenable . . . is the omega animal,” as Yann Martel’s hero remarks in The Life of Pi. Generally, Stalin reciprocated the loyalty of his omega animals; they remained in post even if they lost wives, brothers, and friends to the GULAG and the executioner. Ever since 1912 Stalin had sensed what others missed in Molotov, the uncommunicative pen pusher. Others knew Molotov as “stone arse” for his desk-bound outlook.⁴ Molotov lacked human warmth outside his immediate family and his passion came to the fore only when he signed death warrants. Even his own underlings he protected only if he thought them irreplaceable and defensible. His initials VM also stood for vysshaia mera (highest measure), the death sentence; on lists of the condemned Molotov would append not just “VM” but “Bastards” or “They deserve it.” Molotov remained an unapologetic believer until his death in 1986, forgiving Stalin even the arrest of his beloved wife, Polina.⁵