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

Prose writers suffocated under mindless censorship and complained. When in March 1930 Bulgakov complained to Stalin, his letter fell first into Iagoda’s hands. Iagoda underlined certain lines—with sympathy or disapproval, we do not know. “Fighting censorship, of whatever kind and under whatever regime, is my duty as a writer, just as calling for freedom of the press is. I am an ardent supporter of this freedom and I believe that if any writer were to try to prove that he doesn’t need it, he would be like a fish publicly declaring it doesn’t need water.” Zamiatin in desperation published his anti-utopia We abroad and protested to Stalin the following year: “The author of this letter, sentenced to the highest measure of punishment [death], turns to you with a request for this measure to be substituted by another [exile].”

From Unity to Uniformity

IN THE EARLY 1930s the party was too preoccupied with purges within its ranks to even think of debating the human cost of collectivization. Better to be accused of genocide than be suspected of loyalty to Bukharin, Kamenev, or Trotsky. From spring 1930 to autumn 1932 the party could see where Stalin’s policies, which they had endorsed, were leading. Many feared the consequences of collectivization and the impossibly ambitious industrial projects, and believed that strikes and uprisings could encourage the USSR’s neighbors to invade. Yet what alternative was there to Stalin? Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had by recanting their deviations lost all credibility and had nothing in common but their demand for “democracy” within the party. New men were known only to one region of the country or within one field of industry, the bureaucracy or the party.

Undoubtedly, there was discontent, dismay, and even moral turmoil among party members, especially the middle and older generations who owed little to Stalin. But they failed to act. They had no leaders with any leverage on power; they had no clear idea of how to industrialize the economy without violence against the peasantry. Above all, they had no political principles, no civic beliefs and, consequently, little civic courage. Most were just sick of the bloodshed and feared for their own lives at the hands of the Politburo and OGPU.

Doubters knew that Stalin had to be voted out if policies were to change. They also knew that such a vote, if it failed, would be suicidal, and no more than a quarter of the members of the Central Committee, which Stalin had packed with his cronies, would vote against him. The only other recourse—which had been suggested to, and rejected by, Trotsky a decade earlier—was armed force. Some Red Army commanders like Bliukher deplored Stalin’s policies but others such as Marshal Tukhachevsky had no inhibitions about slaughtering peasants, and without Trotsky there was no political figure the army respected enough to follow in revolt. In any case, senior officers were so closely shadowed by party commissars and OGPU agents that any conspiracy would almost certainly be nipped in the bud. OGPU, citing denunciations from teachers at the military academy, warned Stalin that the army had “rightist” sympathizers at its highest levels—including Tukhachevsky— who might try to arrest Stalin and seize power. On September 10, 1930, Menzhinsky, who thrived on exciting his leader’s suspicions, advised Stalin, then resting in the Caucasus, to get his blow in first:

It is risky to arrest the members of this grouping one by one. There can be two ways out: either immediately arrest the most active participants of the group, or wait for you to arrive, and meantime just use surveillance, so as not to be caught unprepared. I consider it necessary to note that at the moment all rebel groups get ready very quickly and the second solution carries a certain risk.⁴¹

Stalin, for once, was skeptical; he consulted nobody except Molotov, and wrote only to Orjonikidze after musing over Menzhinsky’s warning for a fortnight: “Tukhachevsky, it appears, has been in thrall to anti-Soviet elements among the right. . . . Is that possible? Apparently the right are ready to have even a military dictatorship in order to get rid of the Central Committee. . . . This business can’t be dealt with the usual way (immediate arrest, etc.). We have to think it over very carefully. . . .” ⁴² In the chaos of collectivization Stalin needed the military to back up OGPU and dared not let his suspicions carry him away. Stalin and the military did nothing except grumble and speculate about each other.