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

WHY DID SOVIET WRITERS let themselves be penned in like sheep by the party shepherds and OGPU dogs? Some, a decade earlier, had proved their indomitable courage. Isaak Babel, a bespectacled Jew, had ridden with, and then written about, Cossack cavalry attacking Ukrainian gentry, Polish invaders, White Guards, and the Jews of western Russia. But even he adopted the “genre of silence.”

In 1934 a mass protest against Stalin’s apparatchiks might still have made an impact; when the survivors saw what came of their acquiescence in 1937 they must have regretted their falling in line behind Gorky and the party minions. They had betrayed the Russian peasantry, for whom the major classic Russian writers, from Pushkin to Chekhov, had made a stand. With just a few exceptions—Zabolotsky, Mandelstam— they had disowned the truth and applauded lies about the society whose conscience they were supposed to guard. Excuses can be made: the tour of the White Sea canal had confronted the conformists with writers whose integrity had made them doomed slaves digging frozen bogs. After 1929 exile was not an option. A German writer protesting against Hitler might do so from the safety of asylum in the United States; a Soviet writer against Stalin could not.

But there can be no excuse for the Western observers who attended Soviet Union of Writers’ banquets in 1934. A few quibbled, like Malraux, but none disseminated the truth about collectivization, famine, arrests, and executions. If Louis Aragon, Romain Rolland, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bertolt Brecht, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells had chosen to be honest, what risk would they have run? They chose to fawn on Stalin and lie with impunity. Iagoda had no trouble assembling a chorus of Stalinist flatterers from the left wing of Western writers.

For French writers, as for Gorky, Iagoda found beautiful, polyglot women. In France Romain Rolland’s fame was waning after Jean Christophe, his roman-fleuve, so Iagoda commissioned a twenty-volume Russian edition of his works and recruited the enchanting Maria Kudasheva to translate them. Rolland married Kudasheva but found Iagoda hard to like. “An enigmatic personality. A man who looks as if he is refined and cultured. . . . But his police functions inspire horror. He speaks softly to you as he calls black white and white black, and his honest eyes look at you with amazement if you begin to doubt his word,” he wrote in his diary. But he was bewitched by Stalin. Rolland’s conversations with Stalin in 1935 are on record, and the respective gullibility and cynicism are breathtaking.

Rolland: Why are twelve-year-old children now subject to adult criminal penalties?

Stalin: We discovered in our schools groups of ten to fifteen boys and girls who aimed to kill or to debauch the best pupils, the prize scholars. They drowned them in wells, inflicted stab wounds on them, terrorized them in every way. . . . We have in the Kremlin women librarians who visit the apartments of our executive comrades in the Kremlin to keep their libraries in order. It turns out that some of these librarians had been recruited by our enemies for carrying out terror. We found that these women were carrying poison, intending to poison some of our executive comrades. Of course we have arrested them, we don’t intend to shoot them, we are isolating them. . . .³⁵

Henri Barbusse, a nobler figure than Rolland, had won fame with novels on the First World War and in old age took part in the Congress of Friends of the USSR in Cologne in 1928. Barbusse interviewed Stalin three times in his Kremlin office and wrote an adulatory short biography. But Barbusse’s admiration for Trotsky worried Iagoda and for this reason on his 1932 visit to Moscow he was not even met at the station. But when celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of Gorky’s literary debut began, Stalin rose from his seat on the stage, had Barbusse brought up from the stalls and surrendered his seat to the Frenchman.

The communist poet Louis Aragon married Elza Triolet, the sister of Lili Brik, a known OGPU agent and the inamorata of Mayakovsky. Other Frenchmen were more elusive: Malraux and Gide ultimately double-crossed Stalin.

Rolland, Barbusse, and Aragon were the decoys for Europe’s intellectuals. Warier luminaries like George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells asked more awkward questions. Stalin declared that handling Shaw had proved “rather more complicated” but gained his fatuous approval, which carried more weight than Rolland’s or Barbusse’s. Wells entered Stalin’s study a wise man—“This lonely, overbearing man, I thought, may be damned disagreeable, but anyhow he must have an intelligence far beyond dogmatism”—and came out three hours later none the wiser.³⁶ Stalin discovered that inviting established writers for mutual flattery was even more effective than direct propaganda.