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

Only one traditional legal skill was upheld by Andrei Vyshinsky. Koni and Plevako, two eminent Russian lawyers of the nineteenth century, had loved the sound of their own rhetoric and published their speeches. But Koni and Plevako had been defense lawyers whereas Vyshinsky’s genius for invective was placed exclusively at the prosecution’s service. Vyshinsky and Krylenko fought to dominate the legal system and in 1935 attacked each other in print. Vyshinsky triumphed, passing to Stalin Krylenko’s fatal remark that legal decisions need not heed Stalin’s speeches. Krylenko was no saint but he did publish in SovietJustice a feature called “Black Tables,” exposing miscarriages of justice or failures to observe the policies of the Commissariat for Justice. Another column called “Red Tables” lauded judicially or politically correct actions. Just one of Vyshinsky and Krylenko’s colleagues—Faina Niurina—took justice seriously. She lobbied for the independence of the investigator from the prosecution—a tradition of the Tsarist legal system. Her naive energy and “token woman” status took her some way until, in 1937, she fell foul of Vyshinsky and was shot a year later. Of six judges in the Court of Appeal, five were killed and one sent to the camps. Soviet justice was virtually extinct.

Hitler’s Lessons

HISTORIANS ARE TEMPTED to take Hitler and Stalin in tandem, as parallel studies of the psychopathic dictator. In fact, they differ from each other as much as either differs from a normal human being. They are alike as totem figures of evil, striving to dominate the world, brooking no contradiction, unconstrained by remorse or affection. They are unlike in all other ways: Hitler left, as much as he could for his purposes, Germany’s social, legal, and economic structure unchanged; he chose an ideology, anti-Semitism, that appealed to all classes in Germany, to the Christian churches, to the European nations he would conquer; he used rhetoric and armed force as his main instruments. Stalin finished Lenin’s mission of demolishing the social, legal, and economic structure of Russia’s society; he made revolutionary socialism a hollow container for his own fascism—he was no more a communist than a Borgia pope was a Catholic; he expressed himself in silences, gestures, and clichés, and, except for two years at the height of the Second World War, no dictator did more to keep his armed forces under his heel. Hitlerism was like a cancer on the body politic, letting the body apparently function normally until the cancer destroys it; Stalinism was more like the larva of a parasitic wasp—devouring and converting to itself the body politic that it has invaded. But despite their differences and their enmity, Hitler and Stalin had common interests for a decade, from 1932 to 1941.

For most of the 1920s Germany and the Soviet Union, the two nations left hungry at the feast of the Treaty of Versailles, had an understanding that went beyond common diplomatic and commercial interests. When Hitler took power on a program hostile to the USSR, Stalin naturally had to sound out new alliances and Hitler became a valuable bogeyman. From 1932 until 1939 the USSR and the Comintern, managed by Stalin’s puppets Kuusinen and Béla Kun, depicted Hitler’s Germany as a menace so great that all antifascists had to overlook Soviet blemishes. Was not the USSR now the sole defender of peace, the Jews, and the workers? Correspondingly, Hitler made the Bolsheviks into a bogeyman for all anticommunists: were not the Bolsheviks and international Jewry the source of all the world’s evils?

But antagonism concealed respect, although Hitler seemed at first to Stalin, as he did to Western leaders, a malleable buffoon. Because he thought he would be able to manipulate Hitler, Stalin’s Comintern forbade German communists to join the social democrats in resisting the rise of the Nazis. Stalin thus helped Hitler to gain power, just as his vendetta against other parties of the left helped General Franco defeat the republic of Spain.

Hitler’s first political actions imitated Stalin: setting up concentration camps, attacking homosexuality and “degenerate art.” Stalin had outlawed male homosexuality after Iagoda reported on December 19, 1933: