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

Whether or not Stalin thought peaceful coexistence possible with Hitler, he eagerly stirred up rivalry between France and Germany for the Soviet Union’s support. “The old entente has gone,” Stalin wrote to Kaganovich and Molotov on September 2, 1935. “Instead two ententes are forming: that of Italy and France on one hand, and of England and Germany on the other hand. The worse the fight between them, the better for us. . . . It is not at all to our advantage for one of them to smash the other. Our advantage lies in their fight being as prolonged as possible, without a quick victory for one over the other.”

Social democracy or Trotskyism stuck in Stalin’s throat far more than fascism. In September 1933 Mussolini and Stalin added neutrality and friendship to their nonaggression pact; in 1936, Mussolini’s press acclaimed the shooting of Zinoviev and Kamenev as proof of Stalin’s conversion to views compatible with Italian fascism.

By 1937, Stalin had become so confident of Hitler’s strength and France’s and Britain’s weakness that he had Kandelaki draft a pact with Hitler. The author was rewarded with the Order of Lenin, but was shot a year before the pact was signed.

Women and Children

THE FATE OF ZINOVIEV and Kamenev and the mystery around Kirov’s murder were enough to convince anyone in the Central Committee of the party, let alone the Politburo, of the lethal consequences of dissidence. However, one group, barely represented in the top echelons, could still risk speaking out: women. Under the Tsars women had been prominent in opposing tyranny—with guns and bombs as well as words—and the state, with some remnant of chivalry, had hesitated to come down on them with the same force that it applied to male revolutionaries. In the USSR the voice of female protest was far weaker, but it could still be heard until the mid-1930s.

Stalin removed women from power as assiduously as he dismissed Jews. Women Trotskyists shared exile with male Trotskyists, and the wives of Stalin’s real or imaginary political opponents were subjected to measures only a degree or two milder than were their husbands, unless they had renounced and divorced them. Nevertheless, 95 percent of those sentenced to the camps or to death for counterrevolutionary activity were men.

Three dowagers exerted vestigial influence. The most important was Nadezhda Krupskaia, Lenin’s widow. In the mid-1930s she remained a deputy commissar for education and sat on party commissions. Stalin had loathed her ever since December 1922, when he had abused her for taking dictation from Lenin against doctors’ orders. She had begged Kamenev and Zinoviev to “protect me from coarse interference in my private life, from unworthy cursing and threats. . . .” Since then Krupskaia had been overridden by Stalin on every question including the mummification of Lenin and the cult of his name. “If you want to respect Lenin’s name, then build nurseries, kindergartens, houses, schools, and so on,” she had said.

Krupskaia had first gravitated to Zinoviev and Kamenev, the most Leninist in education and outlook of the leadership. When Zinoviev and Kamenev were ousted, Krupskaia, like Lenin’s sister Maria, moved right, to Bukharin. When collectivization began in 1929 Krupskaia took Bukharin’s side, claiming that Lenin had intended cooperatives, not collective farms, to supersede the peasant smallholder. Krupskaia, the daughter of an army lieutenant and a governess, was a narrow-minded bigot compared to whom, on questions of culture and education, Stalin was a liberal, but she could not tolerate the repression of Lenin’s colleagues. She protested at Stalin’s falsification of party history; he lambasted her for idolizing Trotsky. Stalin saw to it that foreign visitors were kept away from her and even threatened to declare the compliant old Bolshevik Elena Stasova Lenin’s real widow if Krupskaia did not cave in. “In what way actually is Comrade Krupskaia different from any other responsible comrade?” Stalin asked, calling Krupskaia’s speech at the fourteenth party congress “pure rubbish.”²⁶

Krupskaia’s protests became fainter as Stalin’s recriminations became harsher. On March 19, 1935, for the first and last time, she was summoned to Stalin’s office where she remained for two hours. Agranov, Iagoda’s deputy, and Nikolai Ezhov, shadowing the NKVD for Stalin, had arrived two hours earlier. To judge from the gaggle of NKVD and commissars present that afternoon, the subject was the forthcoming prison sentences to punish Zinoviev and Kamenev for “moral” responsibility for Kirov’s murder. Krupskaia was mute when Kamenev and Zinoviev were tried for the third time and shot. After that she connived at Stalin’s murders and was too compromised to speak out. In 1937, on a commission with Politburo members to decide Bukharin’s fate, Krupskaia even voted for the harshest proposal: expulsion, arrest, and shooting. ²⁷