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

The case of those accused of preparing or committing terrorist acts is to be dealt with in an accelerated way; judicial organs may not hold up the carrying out of death sentences because of appeals for mercy from criminals of this category. The organs of the NKVD are to carry out death sentences passed on criminals of the above categories as soon as the court has pronounced sentence.

When Stalin got back from Leningrad, the law was made more specific:

The investigation of such cases must be completed in no more than ten days;

The charges will be handed to the accused twenty-four hours before the court examines the case;

The case will be heard with no participation by other parties;

No appeals for quashing the verdict or for mercy will be allowed;

The death sentence is to be carried out as soon as it has been pronounced.¹

Stalin made this ruthless decree the basis for dispatching hundreds of thousands until more legalistic measures were introduced in 1939.

Many believe that Stalin drafted this law and ordered his special train to Leningrad before Kirov’s murder, in other words that he had planned it. Stalin’s office register shows, however, that the law was signed by Kalinin and Enukidze between 6 and 8 p.m., and the railway archives that the train was booked after the murder.² Party commissions between 1956 and 1990, witnesses’ testimonies, and archival searches have not proved Stalin’s complicity, and the simplest explanation seems the best: that Leonid Nikolaev was a demented, aggrieved killer acting on his own, aided only by luck in encountering Kirov when he was unguarded.

Stalin had several times in the 1920s shown that he could order the death of a man whom he had only days before embraced, but he began to terrify his inner circle only after 1934. Why should he turn on Kirov, whom he had sent to replace Zinoviev in Leningrad and whose record since the revolution had been to consistently follow and applaud his policies? Some of the very few delegates to the seventeenth party congress of spring 1934 who survived Stalin alleged that there were meetings of malcontents—one in the quarters of Sergo Orjonikidze, then Stalin’s closest friend—plotting to vote for Kirov rather than Stalin as general secretary. In the event there were, it seems, only three votes against Stalin. Some say that Stalin had several hundred ballot papers burned. Others allege that Kirov told Stalin of the plot and then despaired, convinced that his “head was on the scaffold,” that “Stalin would never forgive” his being nominated. But these accounts emanate from persons, such as Kirov’s sister-in-law Sofia, who were not close to him, and they contradict known facts. It is true that three surviving delegates who counted ballots agree that there were two or three votes against Stalin and that there were about 300 fewer ballot papers than delegates, but had papers crossing out Stalin’s name been destroyed or had some delegates failed to vote?

Nobody saw a burned ballot paper and its seems unlikely that Kirov would have let his name go forward. Kirov shunned high-level politics; although a good orator, he preferred contact with the party and factory workers in Leningrad, as he had in the north Caucasus. He had no vision of his own. He had last seen Stalin on November 28 when they had been to the theater together and Stalin saw him off at the railway station. The Kirovs had been family friends of the Stalins for years. After Nadezhda’s suicide, Kirov and Orjonikidze kept Stalin company through the night. During summer breaks in the Caucasus Kirov and Stalin took the Matsesta mud baths together. Kirov was one of only two men in front of whom Stalin would undress. (Nikolai Vlasik, Stalin’s bodyguard, enjoyed the same intimacy.) They played skittles together, Stalin partnering a kitchen worker, Kirov partnering Vlasik. The only blot on Kirov’s copybook was that he had been a versatile and open-minded journalist on a politically middle-of-the-road Vladikavkaz newspaper before the revolution, but Stalin liked his subordinates to have a questionable past.