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

The events in Russia during Gorky’s winters on Capri—the roundups of Trotskyists, the deportation of kulaks, the suicide of Nadezhda Allilueva—were conveyed to him by Iagoda as acceptable if unfortunate events in a heroic war. Gorky kept Iagoda’s letters with pride. He, his son, and his daughter-in-law, Timosha, were caught in Iagoda’s web. Gorky became devoted to his captor: “I have got very ‘used’ to you, you have become ‘one of the family,’ and I have learned to value you. I very much love people like you. There aren’t many of them, by the way. Please give a cordial greeting to Menzhinsky. . . .”

Timosha became Iagoda’s mistress. (Max was complaisant.) Stalin was assured that Gorky would settle permanently in the USSR, organize writers into “engineers of the soul,” and create an international chorus to praise the leader. But when Gorky asked Stalin to spare Shostakovich the vicious tirades in Pravda which he had commissioned, he had gone too far. Moreover, he was disparaging the cult of Stalin in his diary, which his secretary Kriuchkov was certainly leaking to Iagoda. Gorky would now pay for his golden cage. On May 11, 1934, his son Max died of pneumonia after lying outside all night on the grass. He had been drinking iorsh—beer and vodka—with Piotr Kriuchkov, Gorky’s secretary. Iagoda was later accused of murdering Max. It is true that Iagoda, in love with Timosha, had an interest in Max’s death, and neither he nor Dr. Leonid Levin, appointed by OGPU to look after Gorky’s family, discouraged his drinking. Iagoda and Stalin tried to comfort the inconsolable father; the latest giant passenger aircraft was named Maxim Gorky. It crashed.

A luxury river cruiser, also named Maxim Gorky, staffed with an OGPU crew, took Gorky down the Volga and away from human contact. He saw nothing of the famine that had depopulated the Volga the previous year. The journey must have been unbearable for Iagoda, who had secured adjacent cabins on the boat with Timosha and had an intercommunicating door knocked through between them. Timosha however was still in shock from her husband’s mysterious death and very likely overcome by revulsion for her lover. Iagoda, grim and silent, left the cruise at the first stop. He remained as infatuated with Timosha as he was hypnotized by Stalin, but from that summer of 1934 he became even more of a cornered rat than before. He sensed that he would be compelled to frame and murder the people to whom he was drawn: the intellectuals of the party and the professionals. They could not be called his friends—Iagoda had no friends—but they provided respite from his dark, hangman’s life and offered him the comforts of wine, beautiful women, poetry, witty conversation. Always a stranger at the feast of life, at least he could be a spectator. As Stalin’s policies grew grimmer and Iagoda was directed to repress those closest to him, and as those closest to him—Gorky’s family—began to sense the degree to which he was their jailer not their protector, Iagoda became more withdrawn, sluggish and melancholy, less and less capable of taking any measures that would avert Stalin’s wrath.

Gorky died on June 18, 1936. In 1938 Iagoda, together with three doctors—Leonid Levin (who had attended ), Dmitri Pletniov (Russia’s leading cardiologist), and Ignati Kazakov (an unorthodox therapist patronized by Menzhinsky)—would be accused of killing him. Like Chekhov, Gorky had worn out his heart, pumping blood through lungs ravaged by tuberculosis. On June 8 he was semiconscious; given a massive dose of camphor he then had an impassioned discussion with Stalin on his future plans. ³² For nine days Gorky read and wrote. A witness (the testimony is thirdhand) claims that on June 17 Iagoda’s car brought Moura Budberg to the dacha, and that Gorky then died.

The circumstances of Gorky’s death repay study.³³ First, Dr. Levin was an NKVD doctor whose diagnoses were often suspiciously at odds with autopsy reports; Stalin had foisted him on Gorky, even sending him at Christmas 1930 to Capri for six weeks. Second, Stalin’s office diary for June 17, 1936, mentions no visitors to his office except for a stenographer. Third, Stalin was now about to try Kamenev and Zinoviev for their lives and Gorky would have protested. Fourth, there were four sudden deaths of writers who had displeased Stalin—Panait Istrati, Henri Barbusse, Gorky, and Eugène Dabit.³⁴ Fifth, Moura Budberg vanished to London after Gorky’s funeral. Budberg, Timosha, and Ekaterina Peshkova refused all their lives to discuss his last days.

At Gorky’s funeral Iagoda stood in the guard of honor, Stalin bent over the coffin and his brother-in-law Stanislav Redens controlled the crowds outside.

Fellow Travelers Abroad and Dissent at Home

General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.

William Blake