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

Without Iagoda, Stalin could not have coaxed Gorky back. Iagoda had recruited Piotr Kriuchkov, Gorky’s secretary, into OGPU. Through Kriuchkov, Iagoda not only learned everything about Gorky’s life; he could also feed Gorky with ideas and books that inclined Gorky to see Soviet Russia as the only bulwark against fascism.

Iagoda made Moura Budberg, previously the mistress of Robert Bruce-Lockhart and of H. G. Wells, indispensable to Gorky. No woman who entered Gorky’s orbit ever left it. His legal wife, Ekaterina Peshkova, who had the thankless task of running the Soviet Red Cross for Political Prisoners, still adored him. So did the actress Maria Andreeva, a long-standing Bolshevik from the Moscow Arts Theater; Iagoda retrieved Maria Andreeva from exile in Berlin to join the harem in Capri. Moura Budberg had been beholden to the Cheka ever since she had been blackmailed by Jekabs Peterss over her marriage to an aristocrat and her affair with the British agent Bruce-Lockhart in 1918. She engineered the return of Gorky, and his archive, to the Soviet Union.

Gorky looked on Iagoda not just as a fellow countryman from Nizhni, he was kith and kin. In the 1890s Gorky had adopted Zinovi, Yakov Sverdlov’s rebellious brother, who was both third cousin and uncle by marriage to Iagoda. Zinovi took Gorky’s surname, Peshkov.¹⁸

OGPU kept Gorky’s household on Capri under surveillance, as did Mussolini’s secret police. Both Moura Budberg and Gorky’s son Max Peshkov worked for Iagoda (Max confided to the poet Khodasevich that he was once given a confiscated stamp collection by as payment for helping the Cheka make arrests). Gorky felt that returning to Moscow would give him peace but on his first homecoming in 1928 his Moscow apartment, which belonged to his wife, was effectively controlled by Iagoda. It seethed even more than Capri with competing women: Ekaterina Peshkova, Maria Andreeva, the nurse Lipa Chertkova (once wardrobe mistress in the Moscow Arts Theater), and Timosha, Max’s wife, who many suspected preferred her father-in-law to her feckless husband. Gorky remarked, “I never had luck with women. There’ve always been a lot, but did any sense come out of it?”

Stalin broke Gorky in gently; the writer was not at first told of the Shakhty death sentences. Iagoda moved him to a dacha that had belonged to the merchant Savva Morozov, who had financed the Moscow Arts Theater and the Bolsheviks before the revolution. Back in Europe Gorky found himself ostracized by Russian émigrés for shaking Stalin’s hand. He tried to make the best of his ambiguous position: from Sorrento he wrote to Iagoda, asking for reprieves for an ornithologist in the Urals, an elderly Ukrainian littérateur, and a Siberian Esperantist. Iagoda proved more responsive than to Gorky’s appeals. When in May 1929 Gorky returned to Moscow Iagoda had more intimate reasons to stay close: he was infatuated with Gorky’s daughter-in-law Timosha. Despite this, Genrikh and Ida’s only child Garik was born that year.

Iagoda sent Gorky, supervised by an OGPU major from Nizhni, to the special purpose camps in the former monasteries on the Solovetsky islands. Gorky willingly put on his blinkers. He met famous academics dying in the frozen north, but all he and Timosha expressed to Iagoda on their return was their delight at the clean sheets, good food, daily newspapers, and rehabilitation which OGPU officers gave their prisoners. Emboldened by Gorky’s appreciation, Iagoda responded: “Some frontier guards have asked me to send you a collection of their poems for your opinion. This is their own work, there is some pretty good verse. . . . I personally add my voice to theirs. That’s all I ask. But I would so much like to see you. . . . You seem to have forgotten your ‘intimate friend.’ Perhaps you’ll write, eh? Timosha also is upsetting me—she’s quite, quite forgotten me!” ¹⁹

Gorky was, he willingly admitted, two-faced and sly; he had always played up to his patrons, whether rich merchants or OGPU chiefs. He was, he confessed to Chekhov, “absurd . . . a locomotive with no rails,” but he drew the line at writing a preface to poetry by frontier guards. They were, he told Iagoda, “graphomaniacs” who would be mocked by the critics. But Gorky would write admiringly about frontier guards. He could not write fully about the Solovetsky camps for the Cheka had purloined his notebooks, but by 1932 he was writing “about the unprecedented, fantastically successful experiment of re-educating socially dangerous people in conditions of free socially useful work.”