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

Hitler was always anti-Bolshevik. Some of his ministers, however, believed that Stalin was extirpating the worst, in other words the Jews, in Bolshevism. Karl Radek, the Bolshevik most appreciated in Germany, where he spent many years either in exile or in secret negotiations with government ministers and with revolutionaries, famously joked, “What’s the difference between Moses and Stalin? Moses got the Jews out of Egypt, Stalin is getting them out of the Politburo.” In the 1930s Jews were to disappear—at Stalin’s behest—from the NKVD and the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs until only two remained in Stalin’s entourage, Kaganovich and Lev Mekhlis. Mekhlis lurked in the shadows, and Kaganovich, as Joachim von Ribbentrop remarked with relief, “had nothing Jewish about him at all.” Goebbels and Ribbentrop overlooked the fact that Stalin was repressing ethnic Germans with even more alacrity.

In the late 1920s military collaboration was the backbone of the German–Russian alliance. Forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles to modernize its forces, Germany obtained, as well as naval facilities, three bases in Soviet Russia: Lipetsk, 300 miles southeast of Moscow, to train its air force; Kazan in Tataria, 400 miles east of Moscow to test tanks; and Tomka for experimenting with chemical weapons.

Collaboration had its teething troubles. The first Soviet agents with one hand negotiated the purchase of naval vessels and with the other incited the workers of Hamburg to rise up in the “Red October” of 1923 against their government. But by 1926 dealings were more professional: Józef Unszlicht, ’s colleague, went to Germany and established relations with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who would head Hitler’s Abwehr. The security services of the two countries, when the time came, found cooperation easy.

In return for providing Germany with testing grounds and bases, Russia received technology for high-quality steelmaking, and was helped to build tanks, artillery, and airplanes. German facilities in Kazan and Lipetsk trained Soviet troops and airmen, and their technology promised better aviation. Stalin had difficulty with aircraft: throughout the 1930s Soviet aircraft were so unsafe—there was at least one crash on most days—that party officials who were not pilots were forbidden to fly; Stalin himself did not board an aircraft until 1943. Stalin feigned concern for human life on June 24, 1932, when he wrote to Voroshilov: “The most alarming thing is the accidents and the deaths of our pilots. The loss of airplanes is not as terrible (to hell with them) as the death of living people, pilots. Living people are the most valuable and most important thing in all our cause, especially in aviation.” The only pilots whose lives Stalin willingly ended were those who complained of having to test “flying coffins.” High-ranking officers commuted between the two countries; the Red Army under Tukhachevsky developed jointly with the Germans blitzkrieg tank tactics.²¹

France could not offer Stalin comparable help. Although after Hitler came to power imports from Germany dropped to less than a tenth of their 1931 level, when Stalin exchanged grain for steel, in 1934 Stalin bought for some 64 million marks military hardware and technology.²² Stalin’s trade representative in Berlin, even in autumn 1934, was permitted by the Nazis to visit all plants and factories supplying goods to the USSR. ²³ Hitler did close the German army’s operations at Lipetsk, Kazan, and Tomka, but on the nonideological pretext that he had to cut spending. By 1936 Soviet imports of technology from Germany were doubling again. ²⁴

From 1934 to 1937 Stalin had a secret go-between with Hitler: a Georgian, David Kandelaki, whom Stalin knew through his first in-laws, the Svanidzes. Kandelaki had been educated in Germany. Officially, he headed the Soviet trade mission to Germany and Scandinavia, but he answered to neither the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs nor the NKVD. His remit went beyond trade. ²⁵

Two Nazis looked eastward. Hermann Goering’s cousin Herbert wanted to work with the Soviet Union against France and Britain. Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, the finance minister, despite planning to invade the Soviet Ukraine and share it with Poland, offered Stalin 500 million marks’ credit in exchange for oil for Germany’s military. “Tell Kandelaki,” Stalin told Kaganovich in September 1935, when Germany and the Soviet Union were disowning each other publicly, “to insist on getting from the Germans everything we need for military purposes and for dyes.”