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

Iagoda saw the White Sea canal as a personal triumph. His brother-in-law Leopold Averbakh, with Semion Firin, deputy chief of the GULAG, and Gorky, led boats laden with Soviet intelligentsia. Averbakh, Firin, and Gorky contributed to a book glorifying OGPU’s humanity and expertise, and the re-education of criminals and subversives by labor. Among the writers who volunteered for, or were cajoled into, this act of prostitution were the “Soviet Count” Aleksei Tolstoi and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko. Prince Dmitri Sviatopolk-Mirsky, recently repatriated from England, and the innovative Victor Shklovsky were two literary critics on the flotilla of ships, and the graphic Hemingway style of the 600-page panegyric to slave labor betrays the latter’s hand. Imprisoned writers like the futurist Igor Terentiev were presented to the tourists as seekers of redemption by labor. Nobody on board could have been fooled. The statistics in The Stalin White Sea–Baltic Canal are lies: a figure of 100,000 laborers is given—the number at any one time and a third of those actually used. Fewer than 13,000 of the survivors were freed when the canal was finished.

Only one contribution to this volume can be read without revulsion: Mikhail Zoshchenko wrote “History of a Re-forging,” the biography of a con man, Abram Rottenberg, a Jew from Tbilisi. Rottenberg’s cosmopolitan adventures end on the White Sea canal, but unlike other prisoners portrayed Rottenberg is reluctant to redeem himself, and Zoshchenko concedes that he could take up fraud again. Apart from Zoshchenko, who refrained from murderous slogans, every contributor also valiantly called, like Gorky and Stalin, for “the enemy to be finished off.”²¹

The one foreign correspondent who wrote objectively about forced labor, the German journalist Nikolaus Basseches, got short shrift from Stalin. Kaganovich and Molotov, who had “like idiots put up with this capitalist shopkeepers’ puppy,” were told “to pour filth on the pages of Pravda and Izvestiia over this capitalist scum, and after a short time chase him out of the USSR.”²² Just one major Russian poet, Nikolai Kliuev, beggared and ostracized, living on the charity of friends and foreigners, wrote the truth about the White Sea canal. The lines only survive because he later quoted them under interrogation by the NKVD in Siberia:

That was the White Sea canal of death

Akimushka dug it,

So did Prov from Vetliuga and Auntie Fiokla.

Great Russia got soaked

To the bones with the red shower

And hid its tears from people,

From others’ eyes in alien bogs

[ . . . ]

Russia! Better to be in smoke and soot

Than the blood of canal locks and the lice of brushwood causeways

From Ararat to the Northern seas.

Before 1931, when Stalin still roamed the streets late in the evening, he, Molotov, and Voroshilov would stroll over from the Kremlin, sometimes several times a week, to see Gorky. They stayed, eating, drinking, and talking, until late at night. A motley group of writers came to these gatherings and many were awed by Stalin’s modest bonhomie. Conspiratorially cautious as ever, Stalin always sat facing the door. He fed the gathering tidbits of inner party gossip: “Lenin knew he was dying. Once, when we were alone, he asked me to bring him potassium cyanide. ‘You’re the cruelest man in the party, you can do it,’ he said.” Stalin invited writers to speak their minds.²³ “There will be unity only in the cemetery,” he told them, but few appreciated how close they were to that cemetery. Like Mao Tse-tung and his slogan “Let a thousand flowers bloom,” Stalin wanted to mark out the weeds in his literary garden.

A few writers were emboldened by the relaxed atmosphere. One declared that Politburo members should not be portrayed as demigods, that Stalin should be shown with his pockmarks. Another interrupted a toast, declaring that Stalin must be fed up with all this acclaim. Neither survived very long. Korneli Zelinsky noted: “When Stalin talks, he plays with a mother-of-pearl penknife. . . . When he laughs, his eyebrows and mustache move apart and something cunning appears. . . . He has caught everything on the radio station of his brain, which operates on all wavelengths. . . . But be on your guard if he is being charming. He has an enormous range of anesthetics at his disposal.”