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

 Between 1930 and 1932 there were two serious explorations of how to overthrow Stalin. Both were quickly detected and crushed, and Stalin by all accounts was not much shaken. The first centered around Sergei Syrtsov and Beso Lominadze, neither rightists or leftists. The serious dissident was Syrtsov, an economist and candidate Politburo member, party secretary in Siberia and possessor of impeccable Stalinist credentials: in the civil war he had slaughtered Cossacks, and in 1928 facilitated Stalin’s grain requisitioning expedition to Siberia. Lominadze was a handsome young Georgian and a friend of Sergo Orjonikidze. In 1924 Lominadze had been removed from the Georgian government for nationalism, in other words leniency toward anticommunists. Stalin, lenient in turn, found him work in the International Youth Movement, and in 1930 let him go back to the Caucasus.

Syrtsov had disliked Stalin’s “great turnabout.” From autumn 1930 he protested at OGPU’s proposals to use short-term prisoners as slave construction workers. He criticized the bad quality of industrial output, the waste of resources, the falsification of statistics, the bureaucracy— the latter a keyword for Trotskyist critics of Stalinism. Syrtsov was backed by other economists, particularly in Siberia. Beso Lominadze in the Caucasus, where agriculture was largely small-scale sheepherding and fruit-growing, went further. His “Address from the Transcaucasian Party Committee” called collectivization “pillage” and blamed Stalin personally.

In autumn 1930, while Stalin was away on the Black Sea coast, Lominadze was summoned to Moscow to explain himself. There he and Syrtsov joined forces as “Marxist-Leninists” or, as Stalin was to call them, the “Left-Right Fraction.” They decided to try to remove Stalin at the December plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission.

The Politburo banned Syrtsov from publishing his criticisms of the economy and dismissed his demand that Stalin be recalled from the Caucasus to deal with the economic crisis. Lev Mekhlis, editor of Pravda, heard about Syrtsov and Lominadze’s plan to “remove” (ubrat) Stalin. This word meant to Stalin and many of his circle one thing only: kill. Mekhlis denounced Syrtsov as a dissident. On October 21, 1930, the day after Stalin received the denunciation, Syrtsov was hauled before an interrogating commission chaired by Orjonikidze, which included the butcher of the Crimea, Rozalia Zemliachka. The commission bullied Syrtsov and Lominadze into admitting “antiparty” activity, and by December they had been expelled. Stalin now had a pretext to get rid of any rightists still in office. He replaced Rykov, chairman of the Council of Commissars, with his automaton Molotov. Disarmed so rapidly, Syrtsov and Lominadze realized that their fellow conspirators must have been planted on them by OGPU.

Syrtsov and Lominadze were at first dealt with mildly, perhaps because of Orjonikidze’s affection for the latter. Orjonikidze found Syrtsov work in the Urals. Here he lived until the Great Terror, despite being denounced in 1935 for commenting, “Stalin is paving his road to power on Kirov’s bones.”⁴³

In the Great Terror, Stalin turned against his old ally Orjonikidze principally because he had shielded Lominadze:

Comrade Orjonikidze had a very bad, unpleasant and un-party-like letter from Lominadze. He came to see me and said, “I want to read you Lominadze’s letter.” “What’s it about?” “Something nasty.” “Give it to me, I’ll bring it to the Politburo’s attention, the Central Committee must know what sort of people it has working for it.” “I can’t.” “Why not?” “I gave him my word.” ⁴⁴

Orjonikidze packed Lominadze off to the Urals too, employing him in industrial Magnitogorsk. But Lominadze was a fellow Georgian, and his disloyalty had insulted Stalin who, it is said, envied Lominadze’s guardsman height. On the evening of May 29, 1934, Stalin summoned Lominadze, with Orjonikidze, for a two-hour dressing-down.⁴⁵