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

The fates of Syrtsov, Lominadze, and Riutin discouraged other overt opposition. Stalin could by the end of 1932 be sure that, whatever the horrors in the countryside, no internal force could shake his rule. He was now cocooned in the Kremlin and his dachas, moving between them in bulletproof cars escorted by heavily armed convoys. He no longer visited intellectuals or incited them to speak their innermost thoughts. He no longer needed to charm or persuade anybody. Intimidation had proved quicker and more reliable.

On November 9, 1932, Stalin’s last remaining tie with normality was severed. His wife, Nadezhda, was found dead—they slept in separate rooms in the Kremlin—in a pool of blood, a small pistol which her brother had given her by her side. The previous evening at a party Stalin became, or acted, drunk and had thrown bread, cigarette ends, and orange peel at her, shouting, “Hey you, drink!” “Don’t ‘hey’ me,” she said, and left.⁴⁹ Bukharin, Molotov, Marshal Budionny, and Nikita Khrushchiov all had explanations for her suicide: Stalin had another woman; he uttered violent threats to her; she was a typically neurotic Alliluev; she was horrified by what she heard about ordinary citizens’ lives and wanted to punish her husband for his crimes against the people.

The letters that Stalin and Nadezhda exchanged in 1930 and 1931, when Stalin was in the Caucasus without her, show mutual affection, mingled with fearful resentment on her part and wrathful impatience on his. She showed jealousy: “I’ve heard about you from a young attractive woman who said that you looked splendid, she saw you at dinner at Kalinin’s, you were in remarkably good spirits and teased everyone mercilessly who was embarrassed at being there with you.” She interceded for those she felt were unjustly treated. She hinted at hardships: “The public’s mood in the trams and other public places is bearable: they grumble, but good-naturedly. . . . I must say that the mood about food supplies, among students and teachers, is only average, everyone is worn out by the queues. . . . Prices in the shops are very high, that’s why there are a lot of goods. Don’t be angry at such details, but I’d so much want these disparities to vanish from people’s lives....”⁵⁰

These were tame objections. Nadezhda applauded Stalin’s extreme actions, such as the demolition of the cathedral of Christ the Savior. His replies were curt and sometimes sarcastic—“For some reason recently you have started praising me. What does this mean?”—but his letters to Nadezhda also often ended in baby language—“kiss you wots and wots.” Whatever tipped the balance and made death better than life with Stalin happened in summer 1932 but the letters for that year have disappeared. Had Nadezhda grasped how much he was responsible for the miseries of the countryside? Did she agree with the Riutin Platform?⁵¹

Stalin forbade an autopsy, allegedly because, “All the same, it will be said that I killed her.” The death certificate signed by Dr. Vladimir Rozanov, one of Lenin’s doctors, who had treated Stalin for the previous ten years, states, “Committed suicide by a shot to the heart”; Dr. Boris Zbarsky, who had mummified Lenin and prepared Nadezhda’s body for her lying-in-state, told a friend a year before he died that he had masked a wound in her temple.⁵² Reports of Stalin’s behavior after her death are contradictory. He attended or he stayed away from the funeral; he kissed her body during the lying-in-state or he pushed the coffin angrily away. Over Stalin’s immediate circle her death cast a pall; the notion that he might have murdered his wife or driven her to suicide, as he had provoked his son Iakov to shoot himself, made his allies nearly as fearful as his opponents.

Stalin, a consummate actor, could not hide his bitterness. For him all suicides were betrayals. To the army commander Budionny he complained, “What normal mother would leave her children orphans? I didn’t have time to give them attention, and she has left me bereft. Of course, I was a bad husband; I didn’t have time to take her to the cinema.”⁵³ Not grief but murderous vindictiveness overcame Stalin. Those who had found Nadezhda’s body were soon in camps or condemned cells, as were most of her relatives and friends and, apart from Nikita Khrushchiov, her fellow students.

Kaganovich recalled that he had known Stalin as five or six different persons, and that a new personality began in 1932 and lasted until 1940. ⁵⁴ Stalin now felt vulnerable to assassination. Riutin had proposed “removing” him, then a year later at Sochi his motorboat came under fire from the shore—either because the frontier guards had not been notified that the boat would leave Soviet waters or because his host, the Georgian chekist Lavrenti Beria, was trying, as OGPU had the previous year, to impress on Stalin that he needed protection from assassins. After Nadezhda’s death, Stalin charged those he singled out for death with plotting his assassination.