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

Stalin gathered information—the chief source of his power—not just from Menzhinsky and Iagoda but through his own channels. Through his secretariat he double-checked information from the party, the commissariats, and OGPU. His secretaries Ivan Tovstukha and Aleksandr Poskriobyshev were the only recourse for citizens to whom nobody else listened. Tovstukha, a discreet, cunning sifter of rumors, had been Stalin’s trusted aide since the leader had been just commissar for ethnic minorities. Poskriobyshev channeled the information that could have inundated Stalin into a manageable flow. Unlike Tovstukha, Poskriobyshev without demur organized and covered up murders. Stalin could not have ruled as he did without the particular unscrupulousness of Molotov and Poskriobyshev.

Bodyguards, assigned to Stalin by the operative department of OGPU, were another source of information. Karl Pauker, a hairdresser and makeup artist in the Lwów operetta when the city was in Austria-Hungary, deserted to the Russians in the First World War and headed Stalin’s guard for thirteen years. An uproarious clown at Stalin’s parties, Pauker told Stalin the OGPU gossip that Menzhinsky or Iagoda thought unfit to pass on.

Stalin’s final information channel was the press. In 1930 Stalin replaced Bukharin as editor of Pravda with an Odessa Jew, Lev Mekhlis. Mekhlis had been Stalin’s chief assistant in the party secretariat and, despite his Zionist background, was as valuable as Poskriobyshev, operating over a range of posts staggering for a former office boy and schoolteacher. Mekhlis made Pravda Stalin’s mouthpiece, turgid but compulsory reading. Like Stalin’s secretariat, Pravda was a magnet for citizens’ complaints and, like OGPU, was snowed under by denunciations. Mekhlis’s summaries of letters received but not printed were even more use to Stalin than those that Iagoda supplied.

By 1931 OGPU’s independence was weaker. Menzhinsky’s diseased back, heart, and kidneys forced him to delegate his work. In his last two years, mental distress after the death of his beloved sister Liudmila disabled him. Menzhinsky had no scruples; he had even before the revolution called the peasantry “cattle,” and his Nietzschean adoration of the strong kept him loyal to Stalin, but he liked neatness in the tragedies he engineered. A Jacobean fifth act, strewn with corpses, was not his style. The ground that Menzhinsky had prepared for Stalin—staging show trials, creating the strongest foreign spying organization in history, using forced labor, getting OGPU troops to do what the Red Army might not, and, furthest from the original remit of the Cheka, repressing dissent within the party—all this would be cultivated by Iagoda, who lacked Menzhinsky’s authority and was easier to command.

The scale and duration of Menzhinsky’s work belies Trotsky’s casual dismissal of him as an intellectual dilettante caught up with professional thugs. More intelligent than , more educated than any other head of the Cheka, polite and sensitive, he was Stalin’s enabler for the crucial period between the death of Lenin and the murder of Kirov, when Stalin was still working toward total control.

Bringing Up a Guard Dog

AS MENZHINSKY’S HEALTH deteriorated at the end of the 1920s, Stalin had to deal more frequently with his deputy Genrikh Iagoda. Stalin’s tone to Iagoda was far cooler, while Iagoda’s responses and reports were guarded, fearful, and dull. Stalin had reasons for disliking Iagoda. He had been a protégé of the first Soviet head of state, Iakov Sverdlov, with whom Stalin had quarreled as early as 1913; Iagoda had maintained friendly relations with such enemies as Bukharin and, worse, had been named by Bukharin as one man in OGPU on whom the opposition could rely, should Stalin be overthrown. However, Iagoda not only knew where all the corpses were buried; he was a hardworking, unscrupulous, and compliant henchman. It would take Stalin five years to be sure that he had a replacement; someone who would be loyal not to OGPU but to him, who would be ruthless and energetic, and who would willingly face down the hostility of professional chekisty to an outsider. This man would be Nikolai Ezhov.

In the meantime, Iagoda had neither ’s fanaticism nor Menzhinsky’s erudition. He was evasive and self-serving—a “guard dog on a chain,” he called himself. He had no creative talent, even if in later life he liked to recite poetry with pathos. Iagoda’s private letters are strained and inexpressive. He was an awkward provincial in the metropolis, both envious and enamored of those more suave than he. But he understood Stalin well enough to fear the future. His last years gave his sulky personality a tragic aura; one’s revulsion is tinged by pity.