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

Gorky had his reasons to return. While he was widely read in the Soviet Union, his reputation in the West was waning. The sagas he now composed about decaying Russian merchant families were dreary; Stalin himself found The Artamonov Business hard going.¹⁴ Homesickness and penury bothered Gorky while OGPU and Stalin felt that Gorky on Capri was a magnet for undesirable heretics. Stalin had always found Gorky unreliable; he had crossed swords with him in 1917, calling his protests “geese cackling in intellectual marshes,” but he longed for a sage to validate his actions, a bard to laud his genius. Stalin had silenced the USSR’s wittiest political panegyrists, Kamenev and Bukharin, and needed better flattery than Demian Bedny’s doggerel or the proletarian hacks’ stilted dramas. Gorky had written encomia to Tolstoi and Lenin; he could do the same for Stalin, who now put off other potential hagiographers.¹⁵ Stalin calculated that in Gorky’s wake intellectuals from Britain, America, France, and Germany would flock to the USSR.

The conversation of Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Molotov (Gorky privately called them “camp-following trash”) must have stultified Stalin, who now had no literate penfriend. Demian Bedny, slow to follow changes in Stalin’s taste, had disgraced himself by writing the anti-Russian satire, Get off the Stove! and Stalin had broken off their friendship. Stalin began to discuss in letters to Gorky the plays he had read. Their correspondence reads like exchanges between a publisher’s reader and a copy editor, or the reports of a minister to a president. Stalin wrote, “We’re moving the cart: of course, it squeaks, but we are moving ahead. . . . Transport is in a poor state (too overloaded), but we’ll get it right very soon.” ¹⁶

Both Iagoda and Stalin baited Gorky with secret material on “wreckers” for a play: “I’ve gathered some new material,” wrote Stalin, sending transcripts from OGPU’s questioning of the economist Kondratiev and of the Mensheviks. Gorky enthused about the punishment meted out but never wrote the promised play. In return Gorky fed Stalin flattering snippets: Moura Budberg, Gorky’s mistress, had told him that London’s bestselling book was a treatise on the Soviet five-year plan and that Bertrand Russell had declared that only in the USSR could scientists experiment on human beings. Gorky advised Stalin to publish a book on how laws are made in the Soviet Union.

In December 1931 Gorky showed Stalin how much he cared:

There is particular verbal raging from monarchists and their terrorist organizations. All in all, they are stalking you intensively, one can’t help thinking that now efforts will increase. And you, dear comrade, I hear and I have seen, behave rather carelessly, you drive at night to No. 6 Nikitskaia [Gorky’s apartment]. I am completely sure that you have no right to behave like that. Who would replace you if the bastards knock you off? Don’t be angry, I have a right to worry and give advice.

The Politburo subsequently passed a resolution, after a communication from OGPU, that Stalin should cease going about Moscow on foot. With Gorky’s help, Iagoda had secured a major victory: Stalin could no more play Harun-al-Rashid, walking the streets, dropping in unannounced to see writers and commissars. His contacts outside the Kremlin were overseen by OGPU, and he was as much a prisoner of OGPU as its overlord.¹⁷

Gorky’s chief asset as a writer was curiosity, his weakness vanity. He was lured back to the USSR with promises that he would be told everything. His jubilee would be celebrated, all the literary initiatives begun under Lenin would be resumed. He would revitalize Russian literature. For the first five years after his return he spent May to September in Russia and the winter in Capri for his lungs. From 1933, when Hitler’s rise made it even less conscionable for a Soviet writer to live in fascist Italy and Stalin feared that Gorky could be infected by Trotskyism, Gorky was kept in golden cages in Moscow and the Crimea. His hometown Nizhni and Chekhov’s Moscow Arts Theater would both take his name but the tribute he most appreciated was Stalin’s establishment of the Gorky Literary Institute, which was to nurture gifted writers.