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

Krupskaia received hundred of letters from victims—often children—of Stalin’s repression who hoped that she could make Stalin set injustices right, but her only protests were against Russian chauvinism: she deplored the damage to minority languages from having Russian compulsorily taught in all schools.

Lenin’s youngest sister, Maria Ulianova, was the second dowager. She was even more peremptorily disempowered (though she had always disclaimed privilege). Ulianova was a close friend, as well as political ally, of Bukharin and, on his breach with Stalin in 1929, she lost her post of secretary to Pravda. She died, ostracized in semi-exile, in 1937. Stalin rendered harmless a third widow without having to imprison or kill her.²⁸ Until 1939 Gorky’s legitimate widow, Ekaterina Peshkova, ran the Political Red Cross, which in the 1920s had been able to monitor and even alleviate the conditions in which some political prisoners were held by OGPU. While Iagoda was in office—if only because he was in love with her daughter-in-law—Peshkova secured a few reprieves, or at least relief, for the repressed and their families, but when he fell, Peshkova offered only guarded sympathy.

One woman, and the least likely, was singled out by Stalin for a real political role. Aleksandra Kollontai, daughter of one Tsarist general and, by her first marriage, the wife of another, left her husband and child in 1898 to become a feminist, a libertine, and a Bolshevik. Exceptionally beautiful and a talented writer, although six years older than Stalin she enchanted him, as she did many men and women. She suspended his Georgian predilection for discreet, silent, and chaste women.

Trotsky loathed Kollontai, and perhaps Stalin loved her for this alone. When revolution broke out, she began a torrid affair with a man seventeen years her junior, Pavel Dybenko, a muscular Ukrainian sailor who became commissar for the navy. Sailors ignored orders from Trotsky unless Dybenko confirmed them and Trotsky had Dybenko court-martialed. Kollontai, now commissar for social security, begged prosecutor Nikolai Krylenko to release Dybenko. Krylenko made her abjure her principles and become Dybenko’s wife. Kollontai’s love letters were copied by the Cheka to the Politburo and the couple inspired scabrous verse in Petrograd:

Russia has turned into a brothel,

The Bolsheviks’ orchestra roars out,

And various scum is dancing

A Soviet can-can with no knickers.

The crook Lenin greets the guests.

The glasses are brimming over,

And seeing the blood in them, hysterically

Bawls that whore Kollontai.

Kollontai had to be sent away until the scandals died down. Stalin appointed her a semiofficial envoy to Sweden and Norway; the latter was persuaded to recognize Soviet Russia partly because it had herrings to sell. Kollontai—an exemplary socialist—charmed the Scandinavian bourgeoisie and proved herself the Soviet Union’s most effective diplomat, even though the Swedes expelled her for political and sexual profligacy (she had long since cast off Dybenko). Thanks to Kollontai, the USSR secured half a million tons of Norwegian herring, and a grateful fishing industry stopped the Oslo press calling her a whore.

In 1925, however, Pravda began attacking Kollontai’s depravity. She had helped write the first Bolshevik family code, which recognized a woman’s right to abortion and divorce on demand, but the party’s mood had changed. Again, Kollontai turned to Stalin for protection, professing loyalty to the “general,” in other words Stalinist, line. Pravda fell silent. Kollontai’s carefully edited diary shows that she was a genuine Stalinist, loyal to his every political twist, although she did admit to lingering unhappiness about the lack of democracy within the party.²⁹ The memoirs of her lovers and the diary pages that she failed to edit suggest that her fondness for Stalin was like her infatuation with Dybenko: a love of coarse, self-assured authority. Her mind, however, was as clear as her conscience was murky. Stalin, she told one lover, lacked Trotsky’s culture and oratory but had two merits: “hellish patience” and insight. She found Molotov, eventually commissar for foreign affairs and thus her boss, “the incarnation of greyness, dullness and servility,” but she still preferred Stalin’s entourage to the intellectuals of Zinoviev’s or Bukharin’s circles. She broke with anyone like Karl Radek who incurred Stalin’s disapproval. In 1923, with prescience, Kollontai asked Stalin never to link her name with Dybenko’s again.