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

While Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov enjoyed the company of writers, and did not mind meeting Menzhinsky, Iagoda, and other OGPU agents at Gorky’s, they loathed crossing paths with Bukharin and Kamenev, of whom Gorky was fond. Gorky tried to reconcile them, even forcing Bukharin and Stalin to kiss. Offering his lips for the kiss, Stalin said: “You won’t bite?” “If I bit you,” said Bukharin, “I’d break my teeth; you have iron lips.”²⁴

Gorky persuaded Stalin to give the two opposition leaders a respite before “finishing them off” (dobit, Stalin’s favorite verb). Bukharin became editor of the government newspaper Izvestiia, while Kamenev ran the publishing house Akademiia. Kamenev published memoirs and world classics of a quality and with an objectivity not seen in the Soviet Union before or since. Bukharin made Izvestiia as readable a newspaper as censorship and Stalin would permit. From Stalin’s point of view only on Zinoviev was Gorky sound: Gorky never forgave Zinoviev his lust for intellectuals’ blood. In 1935 Zinoviev was in prison awaiting his first trial, accused of “moral responsibility” for Sergei Kirov’s murder. He was allowed to appeal to Gorky:

. . . to be honest, I have often thought that personally you have never liked me. But a lot of people write to you. So let me too, one of the most unhappy persons in the whole world, turn to you. You are a great artist. You know the human soul. You are a life teacher. . . . I beg you, think hard for a minute what it means for me to be now in a Soviet prison. . . . Of course I realize that the party cannot fail to punish me very severely. But still I fear more than anything ending my days in an asylum for the insane. . . . I end this letter January 28, 1935, in remand prison, and today I’m told I am being taken away. . . . I don’t know where yet. Help, help!²⁵

Gorky did not intercede for Zinoviev, but he did for Kamenev and Bukharin, which disgruntled Stalin. Iagoda was told to isolate Gorky further. Dubious figures were visiting Gorky including Prince Sviatopolk-Mirsky, the literary historian and son of a Tsarist minister who had converted to communism while a lecturer in London. He was denounced to Iagoda as a British agent and only Gorky’s favor delayed his arrest.²⁶ Similarly, the Franco-Russian journalist Victor Serge, arrested for protests against repressions, was released when Gorky and Romain Rolland combined forces.

Gorky’s glorification of Stalin’s terror—“If the enemy doesn’t surrender he is to be annihilated”—was a betrayal but he was able to rescue some. He had Chinese herbs brought by diplomatic courier to treat an illness that was apparently threatening Sholokhov’s life and commended him to Stalin’s protection; Evgeni Zamiatin, unable to publish in the USSR, was allowed to leave for France; the Moscow Arts Theater was ordered to employ Mikhail Bulgakov, and OGPU had to return to Bulgakov the notebooks it had impounded.²⁷ Even Vladimir Zazubrin, the celebrator of Cheka executioners but now in disgrace, was, thanks to Gorky, brought back from Siberia and given a job in publishing (he was shot in 1938). Gorky begged Stalin not to punish the editors who attacked Gorky’s “softness.” He lobbied for publishing nineteenth-century Russian classics even when they repudiated communist ideology.²⁸

Stalin now devised an obligatory ideology for all the representative arts, “socialist realism,” and in 1932 set up the Union of Writers. Gorky agreed to preside over its first congress in 1934 although, despite his brilliant table talk, he floundered on public platforms. To his credit, Gorky loathed those writers, such as Aleksandr Fadeev and Vladimir Stavsky, whose chief talent was political wrangling and who dominated the new union. Gorky’s price for conducting the first congress was that Stalin should let Bukharin take a leading role in the proceedings.

Gorky sent a draft of a frank opening speech for Stalin’s comments. On August 14, Kaganovich, an unlikely critic, reported his misgivings to Stalin, who was relaxing in the Caucasus: