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

The year 1934 seemed to Soviet citizens and foreign observers to mark a change, perhaps for the better. To the Soviet public, the British and French were no longer portrayed as devils, although a worse devil, Hitler, was consolidating his hold on Germany. News, even visitors, from abroad seeped through. The harvest was good: the collective farms, supplied with working machinery and with several million fewer mouths to feed, delivered more food to the cities; OGPU executed a mere 2,000 for counterrevolution, down from 20,000 in 1930 and 10,000 in 1931. A record number, 139,000, of counterrevolutionaries had gone to the GULAG in 1933 and deaths in the camps shot up five times to more than 62,000, but these casualties were invisible to those in the cities. When the writers wound up their congress in September 1934 they assumed that Stalin had dealt with his opponents and had carried off, albeit by the skin of his teeth, his risky economic enterprise. They believed that they could breathe freely.

As for Iagoda, long before Gorky’s death his days were numbered. On October 29, 1932, Menzhinsky visited Stalin’s office for the last time; thereafter, he worked desultorily at his dacha. Stalin’s notes to Menzhinsky show that he, not Iagoda, had Stalin’s confidence:

Comrade Menzhinsky! I ask you to keep secret the content of our conversation about affairs in OGPU (for the time being!). I mean by this the OGPU collegium (including Iagoda), whose members must not know for the time being the content of our conversation. As for the secretaries of the Central Committee, you can talk to them completely freely. Greetings! I. Stalin.⁵⁵

But Menzhinsky’s days were numbered too. In summer 1933, at a sanatorium in Kislovodsk, he was watching only himself. His notebooks end: “No work. Just lie there for 24 hours a day, with an ice pack or a hot-water bottle on your chest, bath or massage. This is death. You lie all day in a hammock . . . what a pleasure it is to watch life passing! I’ve been forced to live, to take up psychology. . . .” He died on May 10, 1934, at the age of fifty-nine of heart and kidney disease, and his family was looked after. ⁵⁶ Iagoda was later accused of poisoning Menzhinsky (and others) with mercury vapor, and Menzhinsky’s nephew Mikhail Rozanov declares that to this day he can remember the smell of the lethal wallpaper Iagoda had installed in their apartments.

Iagoda helped organize Menzhinsky’s funeral. Not until July did Stalin, after sounding out other candidates, decide that he had, as yet, no alternative. In August OGPU underwent metamorphosis: Iagoda became the head of the giant NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) ministry of police and security.

Iagoda might have felt promoted had he not sensed the watchful eye of Stalin’s devoted favorite, the boyish chief of the Central Committee’s personnel department, Nikolai Ezhov.

SIX

MURDERING THE OLD GUARD

The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die.

Bertolt Brecht

The Killing of Sergei Kirov

Gherkins are green, tomatoes are red,

Stalin in a corridor shot Kirov dead.

Folk couplet of 1934

AT 4:30 P.M. on December 1, 1934, a shot was fired in Leningrad. In the next four years its ricochets would kill not only Genrikh Iagoda, but most of the party elite, commissars, judges, prosecutors, senior army officers, captains of industry, and over a million others. Leonid Nikolaev, a former employee of the Leningrad party, shot Sergei Kirov point-blank in the head. Kirov was Stalin’s protégé, the Leningrad party secretary, a member of the Politburo and secretary of the Central Committee. This was the first and last assassination of a Politburo member in Soviet history. After fifteen minutes the doctors gave up resuscitation and telephoned Stalin. Nikolaev had turned his gun on himself but missed; after two hours in hysterics, he shouted out, “I have avenged myself.”

When the news reached Stalin, he was closeted with Molotov, Kaganovich, and Andrei Zhdanov—whom he immediately appointed to succeed Kirov. He summoned his chief bodyguard, Karl Pauker, Iagoda, and a dozen members of the Politburo and secretariat; even Bukharin, now editor of Izvestiia, was called in. Stalin ordered a special train to take him to Leningrad and immediately drafted a decree to deal with “terrorists.” Kalinin as head of state and Abel Enukidze as secretary of Kalinin’s presidium then signed Stalin’s draft into law: