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

He made me wait for two hours in the reception room. When I went in . . . he didn’t look up, didn’t raise his head. I lost my temper. How could he treat someone so, degrade someone? I stood on the threshold and thought of turning round straightaway and leaving forever. Too late. He raised his head, made a vague gesture as if to say, “Come on in, why are you standing?” I went up to him and said hello. He didn’t even nod in reply to my greeting. He gave a harsh laugh and said haughtily, “What have you got to say for yourself, know-it-all?” . . . He flung his black pipe at me and swore at me in Georgian. . . . Since then I have been waiting for the ax to fall.

Lominadze, like other Georgians threatened by Stalin, did not wait for the ax to fall. His chauffeur reports: “We were driving onto the Upper Urals high road . . . both in sheepskin jackets, warm and comfortable. Suddenly I heard a sharp bang like a shot. I stopped, turned to Lominadze and said with annoyance, ‘A tire’s burst.’ He said, ‘No, it’s not a burst tire, I’ve put a bullet in my chest. . . .’ ”⁴⁶ Lominadze was buried in Magnitogorsk; the monument was soon torn down, the grave leveled, and all of his staff arrested.

The second challenge to Stalin came in 1932. Martemian Riutin, who had once worked in a candy store and was now secretary of the Krasnaia Presnia district of Moscow, mounted, from this lowly post, a challenge to Stalin’s dictatorship. Like Syrtsov, Riutin had been a career Stalinist, telling Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1927 that “the party will walk over the opposition’s head and the opposition will be thrown onto history’s rubbish heap.” Like Syrtsov, Riutin was sickened by Stalin’s destruction of the Siberian peasants.

In June 1932 two documents circulated around Moscow, written by Riutin as a member of the “Union of Marxist-Leninists” within the Bolshevik party. The papers became known as the Riutin Platform. One document of 167 pages was called “Stalin and the Crisis of Proletarian Dictatorship.” Riutin was not the sole author; others—identifiable outcasts from both right and left—had left stylistic and ideological traces in his text. A lecture by Riutin called “Crisis in the Party and Proletarian Dictatorship” was worked into a short “Address to the Party.” This manifesto demanded “liquidation of the dictatorship of Stalin and his clique,” new elections to party organs, an immediate party congress and elections to the soviets, a new judiciary, a “decisive” purge of OGPU, and slower industrialization. Stalin had turned party leaders, according to Riutin, into “a band of unprincipled, mendacious, cowardly intriguers. . . . Not even the boldest and most brilliant provocateur could have devised a better way to destroy proletarian dictatorship and to discredit Leninism than Stalin and his clique’s leadership.”

Copies of the Riutin Platform reached academics and party members and were read in the Ukraine, Belorussia, even Poland. Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda, read the manifesto, which circulated in the industrial academy where she was studying. Stalin’s suspicion that she had read the document and said nothing was one of the straws that broke the back of their marriage.

Menzhinsky and Iagoda mishandled the Riutin Platform, which OGPU did not show to Stalin until September 1932. A wave of arrests and a purge of half a million party members ensued. Balitsky and Molchanov of OGPU interrogated Riutin, who quickly recanted. His daughter, who brought him fresh underwear, was convinced from the state of his linen that he was being physically tortured. At Riutin’s premises OGPU “discovered” documentation that incriminated Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin.⁴⁷

On October 11, 1932, Menzhinsky, Iagoda, and Balitsky, with an OGPU prosecutor, sentenced Riutin to death. In 1932 death sentences on party members still had to be confirmed by the Politburo. It is believed that only Stalin voted for shooting Riutin; his subordinates Kirov, Kuibyshev, and Orjonikidze voted for ten years’ solitary confinement, while Molotov and Voroshilov abstained. Riutin went to prison.⁴⁸