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

Before finishing off the left opposition, Stalin took a broom to his own stables. Iagoda’s men combed the Kremlin, arresting cleaners, librarians, secretaries, and guards for plotting to murder Stalin, their pretext that relatives of Kamenev worked in the Kremlin. There was one surprising victim of this operation: one of Stalin’s most trusted friends, a Georgian he had known in Baku, Abel Enukidze.¹¹ Expelled from the party for “depravity,” he found himself a niche running the spas around Kislovodsk. Stalin then demoted Enukidze to running road transport in Kharkov, where he was arrested two years later. Enukidze was the only rightist victim of 1935, and was presumably victimized for personal reasons. Stalin first eliminated the remnants of the left, after adopting their policies of forced collectivization and industrialization, because those on the left were close to Trotsky, and despite Trotsky’s impotence in exile, Stalin feared them more.

Stalin had other reasons to strike again at enemies he had knocked down eight years before. In February 1935, during the Kremlin purge, Iagoda arrested Mikhail Prezent, the secretary of the journal Soviet Construction. Prezent was small fry except that he was Abel Enukidze’s friend. Prezent was not shot; deprived of insulin, he died in prison in three months. His diary was a bombshell. Iagoda passed it on to Stalin. ¹² Prezent knew Gorky, Demian Bedny, and many Trotskyists, whose gossip he recorded from their fall in 1928 to their partial rehabilitation in the early 1930s. Stalin annotated the diary and, where it exasperated him, tore pages out before returning it to Iagoda. Trotsky was described as the last intelligent man in Soviet politics, someone to whom “today’s barking pack of dogs used to hand his galoshes and brush the dust off his suit.” Prezent recorded sarcasms at Stalin’s expense, some from favorites like Demian Bedny and the journalist Mikhail Koltsov making fun of Stalin’s uncouth habits such as opening uncut pages in books with his greasy thumb. Prezent’s diary showed that the semi-rehabilitated left felt that they still mattered. Their jokes did not amuse Stalin. One he underlined: “Trotsky decided to commit suicide, so sent Stalin a letter challenging him to socialist competition.”

If Kirov’s death was tragedy, Prezent’s diary was the farce preceding the massacre, but Iagoda seemed increasingly unlikely to be the one to conduct it. His lapses of vigilance were disqualifying him.¹³ Soft sentences on the Leningrad NKVD and on Zinoviev and Kamenev looked like inertia. Iagoda stuck out like a sore thumb. Younger men brought in to replace the ousted old Bolsheviks were not inhibited by the unwritten rules that had settled party disagreements bloodlessly. They had been children in the civil war; often they had lost or left their parents. Stalin was their father and Stalinism the only ideology they knew. They saw nothing sacred about Bukharin or Kamenev and nothing absurd in the idea that Lenin’s cohorts might be spies and saboteurs.

Stalin had a new framework for repression. As well as the law of 1932 which had put stealing a handful of food on the level of treason and accelerated the procedure for trying terrorists, a wider concept of treason, “betraying the motherland,” now applied to citizens who left the country or failed to return: their relatives, cohabitants, and dependents were punished by five years’ exile. “Special sessions” (oso ) had first been introduced by Tsar Alexander III to exile revolutionaries; under Stalin an oso could execute its victim. Each oso consisted of an NKVD man, a prosecutor, and a party official. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners a year could be processed as quickly as cattle through a slaughterhouse.

The lawyers mutely assented. Krylenko agreed with Stalin that there was an emergency, that the fewer class enemies there were left, the harder they would resist. Only the chief prosecutor, Ivan Akulov, whom Stalin had in 1931 thought tough enough to replace Iagoda, demurred. Akulov ran the first trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev but would not condemn them for Kirov’s murder. In mid-1935 he was transferred to less bloodthirsty work.¹⁴

Ulrikh and the other hanging judges never questioned the sentences prescribed. Only to embarrass Iagoda did the Politburo periodically display token leniency. In September 1934 a committee was set up to “free innocent persons who have suffered . . . to purge OGPU of those who use ‘specific techniques’ [torture] and to punish them, whoever they are.” A few defense lawyers had previously taken on cases where the NKVD was prosecuting; one was Nikolai Borisovich Polynov, editor of The Lawyer ( Iurist) before the revolution. Before 1933 he occasionally secured an acquittal, even when the verdict had been dictated by OGPU, but now defense lawyers were appointed by the prosecution.