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

Stalin personally wrote out the indictment of Nikolaev and his alleged associates. Stalin’s text delighted Vyshinsky, who had only to add the finishing touches. The indictment stated that the accused were wreaking vengeance on Kirov for crushing the Zinovievites. The decree of December 1 was made retroactive. The trial started at 2:40 p.m. on December 28 and sentence was pronounced at 6:40 the next morning. On December 25 Vasili Ulrikh, by now a notorious hanging judge, had visited Stalin to find out what sentence to pass. Nevertheless, Ulrikh telephoned Stalin twice during the trial, so perturbed was even he by Nikolaev’s insistence that he had acted alone. Ulrikh’s fellow judges and his common-law wife both recall that he wanted to refer the case for further investigation, but that Stalin was adamant: “No further investigation, finish the trial . . . they must all have the same sentence—shooting.” This snuffed out the last spark of legality in Ulrikh. He never demurred again.

All fourteen were shot that same morning. Agranov and Vyshinsky stood by the cells as the victims went to the death cellar. Nikolaev’s executioner reminisced: “I picked Nikolaev up by his trousers. I was crying. I was so sorry for Kirov.” The last to be shot was the second arrested, Ivan Kotolynov. Agranov and Vyshinsky asked him, “You’ll be shot now, so tell the truth, who organized Kirov’s murder, and how?” A guard testified twenty-two years later that Kotolynov replied, “The whole of this trial is nonsense. People have been shot. I’m going to be shot now. But none of us, except Nikolaev, is guilty of anything.”

These executions were only the beginning. In March, Nikolaev’s wife, sister-in-law, and brother-in-law were shot. Leningrad party officials were told to list former Zinoviev supporters. They replied that it would be easier to list those who had not supported Zinoviev.⁹ Throughout December 1934 and January 1935, the Leningrad party was cleared of those who had worked under Zinoviev: 663 were exiled to Siberia, 325 to other cities in European Russia. Almost every Bolshevik who had belonged to a fraction, even before Lenin’s death, was expelled and hundreds of “democratic centralists” and trade unionists were sent to the backwoods, effectively holding pens for the condemned. After Leningrad’s NKVD and party came the former aristocrats, civil servants, merchants, and bourgeois who were still at large: several trainloads left Leningrad in early 1935.

Stalin closed in slowly on his quarry; Kamenev was even included in the guard of honor at Kirov’s funeral. He and Zinoviev avoided each other. On their reinstatement in the party in 1933, when each was received by Stalin in his office for the first time in four years and the last time ever, they had decided never to say or do anything that OGPU could use against them. Kamenev had, thanks to Gorky, found refuge in literary work. Zinoviev, however, scorned journalism: only political power interested him.

At the seventeenth party congress in February 1934 both right and left oppositions had prostrated themselves. Bukharin proclaimed Stalin “a mighty herald not just of economic but of technical and scientific progress on the planet . . . a glorious field marshal of proletarian forces” and qualified his earlier statements as “Parthian arrows bordering on the criminal.” Kamenev made an act of contrition: “We aimed our most powerful sting, all the weapons we then had, at the man who hit us harder, who more penetratingly than anyone pointed out the criminal road we had taken, at Comrade Stalin.” Zinoviev excelled them both: “Stalin’s report was . . . a chef-d’oeuvre which joined the treasury of world communism the moment it was pronounced.”

As Zinoviev’s apartment was being searched by OGPU on December 16, 1934, he penned a letter to Stalin: “In no way, in no way, in no way am I guilty before the party, before the Central Committee or before you personally. . . . I beseech you to believe my honest word. I am shaken to the depth of my soul.”¹⁰ A week later, the NKVD was still ferreting for evidence against Zinoviev and Kamenev. The two were rearrested in mid-January 1935, when a former supporter broke down under questioning. The subsequent first trial of the “left opposition” was a travesty, even by Soviet standards of the 1930s. Kamenev was told as the trial opened that if he repeated his confessions his life would be spared. Ulrikh gave Zinoviev ten years in prison, and Kamenev five. Later Iagoda applied tougher interrogation techniques, and Zinoviev and Kamenev faced capital charges. Meanwhile, seventy-seven alleged members of “the Zinoviev Leningrad opposition group” went to prison or into exile, and another 12,000 members of the “exploiting classes” were deported from Leningrad.