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

There had been no loud protests against the events of 1929–34, because there was virtually no civil society left in the USSR. The Church had been reduced to a few frightened priests hiding in ruins. The legal profession had nothing left of its former power but its rhetoric. The prestigious medical profession was suborned to the Kremlin hospital. The creative intellectuals had been exiled, imprisoned, terrorized, driven to ramshackle ivory towers, or bought off. But the total absence of protest after December 1934 is still amazing, if for no other reason than that the hangmen must have guessed from Stalin’s actions that they were now themselves in danger. To many in OGPU, the party, and above all the armed forces, the escalation of terror, as Stalin breached one taboo after another, was palpable. He was insisting on death for political dissenters, real or imaginary. What was there to lose by stepping up dissent into rebellion? What held back Iagoda in OGPU, Tukhachevsky in the Red Army, or Sergo Orjonikidze in the Politburo from attempting to neutralize Stalin? Why did they not get their blow in first?

Back in the Kremlin in December 1934, Stalin took a pencil and sketched out a scheme: opponents were assigned to a “Leningrad center” and a “Moscow center” and alleged to have conspired to assassinate Kirov. This time some thirty-three persons were gathered in Stalin’s office, among them Ivan Akulov, the chief prosecutor, his deputy Krylenko, and the inventive legislator Professor Andrei Vyshinsky. The fabrication of the two “centers” and the indictment of their supposed members took another month.

Removing Zinoviev and Kamenev

The works [of Machiavelli] have thus played a prominent role in the great work of revealing the true nature of power in a class society, a work which has been taken to its end only today, in the works of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin.

Lev Kamenev, Introduction to Volume I of the

Works of Machiavelli

ZINOVIEV AND KAMENEV were in 1934 contrite hacks, hoping to rise again when Stalin’s anger and suspicion had been allayed. Zinoviev began writing on Marx and Engels. Stalin kept a vengeful eye open and on August 5, 1934, condemned Zinoviev’s commentary on Engels in The Bolshevik: “We can’t leave The Bolshevik in the hands of morons which Comrade Zinoviev can always make dunces of. Those guilty must be found and removed from the editorial office. Best of all to remove Comrade Zinoviev.”⁷

Stalin treated Kamenev more subtly. Their early acquaintance was founded on Kamenev’s gift to Stalin of Machiavelli’s The Prince; the last inch in the rope that Stalin allowed Kamenev was a foreword to the first volume of a new edition of Machiavelli. Kamenev’s essay shows belated insight into what he and Stalin had inherited from Cesare Borgia, Lorenzo de’ Medici, and Niccolò Machiavelli:

Machiavelli made of his treatise a strikingly expressive and wide-ranging catalogue of rules, which a ruler of his time must be guided by in order to win power, keep it and victoriously resist all attempts against him. This is far from being the sociology of power, but this set of recipes gives us splendidly the zoologicalfeatures of the struggle for power. . . . The immorality, the criminality, the cruelty of Machiavelli’s book about The Prince is entirely contained by the fact that he decided . . . to speak out about things as they are.⁸

When Kamenev and Zinoviev were charged with Kirov’s murder, the new edition of Machiavelli was stopped, and the volume with Kamenev’s foreword was pulped.

Weeks passed before Zinoviev and Kamenev were charged. First, Stalin and Iagoda replaced the disgraced Leningrad NKVD men with their Moscow chiefs. Iakov Agranov, who had fabricated conspiracies ever since 1921, conducted the main interrogations assisted by an articulate prosecutor, Lev Sheinin, who made a good living writing up his investigations in the style of Sherlock Holmes stories. Agranov and Sheinin, a sledgehammer and a crowbar, broke everyone who had unluckily befriended, or merely met, Leonid Nikolaev. Soon a worse ogre than Agranov appeared. Nikolai Ezhov, although officially a Central Committee not an NKVD man, came to interrogate some of the accused.