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

While liquidating recently a union of pederasts in Moscow and Leningrad, OGPU has ascertained the existence of salons and dens where orgies have been arranged. . . . Pederasts have been recruiting and debauching completely healthy young people, Red Army men, navy men and students. We have no criminal law to enable us to prosecute pederasts. . . . I would consider it essential to issue an appropriate law to make pederasty answerable as a crime. In many ways this will clean up society, will rid it of nonconformists.¹⁵

Hitler impressed Stalin when he burned down the Reichstag in summer 1933, then framed communists for the arson. Hitler had not sufficiently suborned German judges to carry off the fabrication, but he was imitating Menzhinsky’s show trials. Stalin sent two Soviet journalists to cover the Reichstag trial. ¹⁶ Commissar for Foreign Affairs Litvinov was traveling via Berlin, and was happy, “if Hitler desires, to talk with him too . . . if they propose signing a protocol that all conflicts are settled, then we can agree to that, if they express in an apologetic form regret for a number of incorrect actions....”¹⁷

In summer 1934 Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives also excited Stalin’s admiration. Hitler killed the leader of the brownshirts, Erich Röhm, with scores of his followers, thus getting rid of his own left deviation. Stalin exclaimed, it is reported, “Clever man, that’s how to deal with opposition, cut them out in one go!” Stalin told his army intelligence, “The events in Germany . . . must lead to the consolidation of the regime and to the strengthening of Hitler’s own power.”¹⁸ He drew analogous conclusions for himself.

At the Nuremberg rallies of summer 1935 Goebbels and Rosenberg berated the Soviet Union. Stalin held back Kaganovich and Molotov: “My advice is not to make a hysterical noise in our press and not to give in to the hysterics of our newspapermen. Nuremberg is a response to the Communist International, if you recall that the Comintern congress poured filth over them and besmirched them. Let Pravda criticize them in a principled, political way, but without street language.” In Hitler’s virulent anti-Soviet Reichstag speech Stalin saw “no basis for protest.”¹⁹

The differences in principle between Hitler’s national and Stalin’s Leninist socialism can be reduced to Hitler’s declaration: “My socialism is not the class struggle, but order.” However, Stalin’s socialism converged with Hitler’s in that it too became national. From 1933 Stalin encouraged Russian chauvinism, implying that Russians were politically and culturally superior—elder brothers to the other peoples of the USSR and the Slavs, just as the Germans were a superior race among the Aryans. True, Stalin’s anti-Semitism was inconsistent, but only in temperament were Hitler and Stalin diametrically opposite.

Once Hitler secured power, Stalin nevertheless sought friendlier relations with Britain and France; he was hedging his bets. To sever economic relations with Germany was not, however, in the Soviet Union’s interests. Some in Hitler’s entourage, particularly Goering, felt that it was not in Germany’s either. The countries had shared political goals: the crushing of Poland, for both Hitler and Stalin an upstart and a usurper of national territory. Germany and the USSR also remained territorial victims of the Treaties of Versailles and Genoa. They still felt the grievances against Britain and France that had allied them in 1922 when they signed the Treaty of Rapallo. A militarily revived Germany in Stalin’s eyes could provoke a war which would destroy Western capitalism and thus initiate a world proletarian revolution. Even in 1935, Marshal Tukhachevsky speculated that Hitler’s anti-Soviet rhetoric was “just a convenient umbrella to cover up revanchist plans against the west and the south.”²⁰