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

Stalin appreciated the gloss that Gorky put on the camps and he wanted Gorky as commissar for literature. The present commissar, Anatoli Lunacharsky, once a decadent poet and a relatively liberal even principled man, was dying. The literary atmosphere had darkened. Iagoda’s brother-in-law Leopold Averbakh was terrorizing literature, attacking in print and in letters to Stalin any non-proletarian, unengaged writing. Averbakh believed himself untouchable: he was Sverdlov’s nephew and Iagoda’s brother-in-law, while his wife, Elena Bonch-Bruevich, was the daughter of an old friend of Lenin’s. Averbakh believed he had the party and OGPU behind him. But his Association of Proletarian Writers stifled creativity and the proletarians wrote no plays Stalin could watch with pleasure or novels which depicted heroes convincingly. Stalin’s chief of cavalry, Budionny, wanted Isaak Babel shot for his portrayal of marauding Cossacks in Red Cavalry, Pilniak infuriated Stalin by implying he was a murderer, and Zoshchenko put caricatures of Stalin in his stories but they entertained Stalin, and he even read Zoshchenko out loud to his daughter. Gorky’s homecoming raised hopes that Averbakh’s grip on literature would loosen.

Through Gorky, Iagoda now had access to artists who could speak to OGPU chiefs. Iagoda loved directing writers’ lives. He never achieved the understanding dialogue that, for instance, Iakov Agranov had with Mayakovsky, but he had the satisfaction of dispatching Mandelstam to the Urals and Nikolai Kliuev to Siberia. Writers who had not yet fallen foul of OGPU were intimidated by Iagoda’s “magpie’s eyes.” The novelist Leonid Leonov was aghast: “Once Gorky and I were at the same table. Iagoda stretches across the table toward me, drunk, flushed with cognac, his eyes popping and literally croaks: ‘Listen, Leonov, answer me, why do you need hegemony in literature? Answer, why do you need it?’ I then saw in his eyes such spite that I knew I would fare ill if he could get me.”

Suborning Gorky was Stalin’s triumph over the imagination. The party now corrupted lesser writers using reassurance, even affection. Small services—material to be used, approaches to be taken—were requested and paid for, and soon the victims accepted with joy whatever was forced on them.

Much blame for the loss of their honor and conscience attaches to Soviet writers, who had even before the revolution aped revolutionary parties by forming mutually warring groups, ostracizing those who would not accept their ideology. Theater directors taught Menzhinsky, Iagoda, and Stalin how to run their show trials. Meierkhold and his Georgian acolyte Sandro Akhmeteli treated actors as the party treated its members. In 1924 Tbilisi’s Rustaveli theater actors signed pledges: “I shall have no brothers, sisters, parents, friends, or kith and kin outside the membership; I submit absolutely, and always will, to the corporation’s decisions, I sacrifice my life and future to the corporation’s will.” It was easy for such bullies and cowards to adjust to Bolshevik dictates.

Soviet writers irretrievably abased themselves in 1932 when they took a cruise on a government mission along the White Sea canal, 140 miles from Lake Onega to the White Sea. The canal had been built on Iagoda’s initiative by OGPU’s political prisoners, kulaks, and convicts. Even the engineers were prisoners. Iagoda prided himself on the speed and cheapness with which he built this canal—under two years, for a fifth of the budget—which showed Stalin what OGPU might do for the economy. The death toll was well above 100,000. Some 300,000 prisoners —underfed, freezing in winter, tormented by midges in summer— had cut through bogs and granite. There was little reinforcing iron for the concrete; human bones and tree branches were used. All for nothing. The canal was too shallow for ships that could withstand the Arctic Ocean; it was ice-free only for half the year and in any case the canal duplicated an all-weather railway to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. Before it was finished it was crumbling and has since been reconstructed twice.²⁰