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

Lazar Kaganovich likewise surrendered his family to Stalin: his brother shot himself on learning of his impending arrest. He took over from Stalin the organizational and distributive section of the party, so that acolytes took key posts and the untrusted were sent to the ends of the earth. As Stalin’s double—general secretary—in the Ukraine Kaganovich was so crass that he had to be recalled to Moscow. He was insensitive to others’ suffering (his father’s trade had been driving cattle to slaughter) and was vicious when it was safe to be so—he beat his crippled secretary, Misha Guberman. Kaganovich was a single-minded factotum who could govern while Stalin rested, and whose bullying forced the pace of any enterprise, such as building Moscow’s underground. Kaganovich genuinely adored Stalin. Unlike Molotov, Kaganovich was embarrassed by his inability to spell or to punctuate, and unlike Molotov, who used a dry workmanlike tone, Kaganovich became more servile every year. Responding to instructions in 1932, he wrote, “Comrade Stalin, you have put the question from the party point of view so broadly and clearly that there can be no serious vacillations. And anyway you have not only the official political, but also the comradely moral right to dispose of someone whom you have formed as a politician, i.e. me, your pupil.”

Of these Stalinists, only Sergo Orjonikidze had eventually to go. A fellow Georgian, Orjonikidze argued with Stalin and physically wrestled with him. His energy and self-confidence and his feudal loyalty to his protégés would lead to a head-on collision with Stalin, but for seven years, with brutality and ingenuity, he forced workers to turn some of the fantasies of the five-year plans into reality.

Two centers of power alone still evaded Stalin’s control: the Red Army and OGPU. Voroshilov coped as best he could with generals more distinguished than he: the Red Army was too vital for protecting the state against imaginary foreign enemies or real peasant rebels, and the alliances with German and Chinese generals that Tukhachevsky, Iakir, and Vasili Bliukher used to modernize and train the army were beyond the competence of Stalin’s acolytes to supervise. Only in 1937 was Stalin ready to crush the military. OGPU, like the Red Army, was run by men whom Stalin had not appointed, even if they worked closely with him. Menzhinsky, however ill, went to Stalin’s office many times between 1928 and 1931, especially when show trials were being prepared. These meetings were not minuted but the correspondence they generated suggests they resembled a Hollywood scriptwriters’ session, in which director and scriptwriter would agree on storylines and interpretations. These performers were more gladiators than actors. Pasternak, in a poem of 1932, saw Moscow like Nero’s Rome: “which, / Instead of rubbish and twaddle, / Demands from the actor not a reading / But full perdition in earnest. / When a line is dictated by feeling, / It sends a slave onto the stage, / And art ends there / And soil and fate breathe.”

Stalin usually saw Menzhinsky and Iagoda separately in his office as their functions were distinct. Menzhinsky dealt with words and fictions: counterintelligence, show trials, maneuvers against the left and the right in the party. Iagoda dealt with numbers and physical violence: organization, repressions, gathering incriminating evidence, exploiting convicts, mayhem, and murder. Some days when Iagoda visited, Stalin saw nobody else. On other occasions, Iagoda brought to Stalin his grimmest associates. Stanisław Messing, Gleb Bokii, and Efim Evdokimov, who had personally tortured, executed, and raped, sat with Stalin to discuss operations. The only OGPU officials who disgusted Stalin were those who handled foreign intelligence. Meer Trilisser was rarely admitted, and Artuzov was not invited until 1933, when Hitler’s advent to power forced Stalin to talk personally to OGPU’s foreign department.

Despite hours closeted together, Stalin kept Iagoda at a distance. Iagoda was related by blood, marriage, and friendship to circles hostile to Stalin, both left and right. By 1930 Stalin had for Iagoda’s post his own candidates. So far they merely monitored OGPU; very soon they would oversee and then veto and eventually direct it. At no point, however, did Stalin foresee a diminishing role for OGPU; when one enemy was crushed, he sought a new one.

Stalin looked on hostile elements as a homeopath views a drug: the more diluted the dose, the more powerful the effect. Stalin constantly asserted that the nearer to victory and homogeneity a socialist society was, the more desperate the battle with the remnants of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. For this reason he closely watched OGPU. In August 1931, when OGPU declared that it “remained the unsheathed sword of the working class and has accurately and skillfully smashed the enemy,” Stalin put the last phrase in the present tense: “is striking at the enemy.”