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

Isaak Babel: The congress proceeds as dead as an imperial parade, and nobody abroad believes in it. Our press can inflate its stupid fictions about the delegates’ colossal enthusiasm. But there are foreign correspondents who will shed the right light on this literary requiem. Look at Gorky and Demian Bedny. They hate each other, but they sit at the congress together like turtledoves.

Iagoda and Agranov had unsettling feedback: Malraux had reacted to honors bestowed as “a coarse attempt to bribe me”; writers were signing an appeal for the return of Nikolai Kliuev; a parody of Aleksandr Pushkin’s tribute to Gavriil Derzhavin was circulating: “Our congress was joyful and bright, / And this day was terrible nice— / Old Bukharin noticed us / And, seeing us off to the coffin, blessed us.”

The Politburo dictated the congress’s final resolutions: the writers’ mission was to glorify the crushing of class enemies and the leadership of Stalin, and the union’s “leading organs” were to improve and increase production of “works of art of high artistic standard, imbued with the spirit of socialism.”

Nobody at the congress spoke of the two suicides that had shaken the Russian literary world. Esenin had hanged himself from a heating pipe in December 1926, and Mayakovsky, who had reproached Esenin for “taking the easy way out,” had in spring 1930 shot himself, an act that Pasternak daringly called “Mount Etna surrounded by cowardly hillocks.” Just as Tsar Nicholas I had been blamed for the fatal duels of Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, so OGPU was implicated in both suicides. Esenin had been led astray by Iakov Bliumkin, and Mayakovsky by Iakov Agranov, who gave him the fatal revolver. Esenin and Mayakovsky had felt themselves rejected. By 1926 peasant poets like Esenin were being condemned as the voice of the kulak. Mayakovsky, in his late play The Bedbug, depicted a future puritanical communist society in which poets are as undesirable as bedbugs.

For letting Bukharin speak freely at the congress, as well as earlier blunders, Stalin sent Iagoda a signal in June 1931 by temporarily demoting him from first to second deputy head of OGPU. Now Iagoda needed Gorky’s advocacy if he was to succeed Menzhinsky as head of OGPU.

Iagoda made strenuous efforts. He manipulated Gorky into praising show trials. It is said that Gorky accused Iagoda of murdering innocents when he heard that forty-eight officials accused of sabotaging food supplies were shot, but archive documents show Gorky approving such reprisals. Gorky did not read exposés in the Western press that proved OGPU’s falsifications. Gorky’s letters to Iagoda, “Dear Friend and Fellow-countryman,” ooze sadism, sycophancy, and, worse, sincerity: “I’d very much like to come to the trial and look at the ugly mugs of these ‘people come down in the world’ . . . at these crushed villains . . . . I have been reading the statements of these sons of bitches about organizing terror and was extremely astounded. If they hadn’t been such vile cowards they might have shot at Stalin. And you [Iagoda], I hear, walk quite carefree down the streets. You walk and drive about. An odd attitude to your life. . . .”

Iagoda, knowing that Stalin would read copies of these letters, wrote pathetically to Gorky:

Like a dog on a chain, I lie by the gates of the republic and chew through the throat of anyone who raises a hand against the peace of the Union. . . . Do you know, Aleksei, what pride stirs one when one knows and believes the party’s strength and how enormous the party’s strength is when it falls like lava on any fortress; add to this the leadership of a million-strong party by such an exceptional leader as Stalin. True, I have something to live for, to struggle for. I am very tired, but my nerves are so tensed that you don’t feel the tiredness. Now, I think, the kulak has been finished off, and the peasant has realized, and thoroughly so, that if he doesn’t sow, if he doesn’t work, he’ll die, and there is nothing more to be hoped for from counterrevolution. . . . I’m almost alone now, Viacheslav [Menzhinsky] is ill....³¹