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

Stalin enjoyed blackmailing Kollontai: he showed her a letter for his eyes only from . The letter contained a semiliterate peasant’s complaints about the orgies at a Siberian peasant commune named after her. Kollontai rode out the storm: she went to Mexico City for a year before returning to Scandinavia. From Oslo Kollontai sent a photograph of herself to Stalin and consoled him for the deaths of Sergei Kirov and, two months later, Kuibyshev:

Dear, much respected Iosif Vissarionovich. On a day when two persons close to you have been ripped out of life, I couldn’t help having warm personal thoughts about you and what you are going through. Many years ago you helped me so responsively and simply at a very, very bad moment in my life. I shall never forget it.³⁰

By 1935 Kollontai had many responsibilities including monitoring “deviations” in the Norwegian Communist Party. When Trotsky was seeking asylum, Kollontai persuaded Stalin that assassinating Trotsky in Norway would be “too noisy” and suggested a solution: to stop purchases of herring until he had been expelled to a country where Stalin’s NKVD could operate freely against him.³¹

Kollontai writhed in private: “Executions . . . They are always, invariably, my grief and agony,” she wrote in the original version of her diary.³² She even wondered if Stalin was paranoiac. Soviet instructions often made her a laughingstock in Oslo, for instance when she asked the Norwegian government to ban performances by the émigré ballerina Anna Pavlova. Norwegians began to shun her; Stalin transferred her to the Stockholm embassy, where the military attaché and first secretary had just defected. Here too Kollontai looked foolish; the Swedes refused to hand over the two defectors. She confessed her failure to Stalin in terms that he would accept: “I consider the main reason for defection to be the presence of opposition in the party and the intensification of provocative work by foreign forces hostile to us.” Kollontai remained an asset to Stalin: she soothed the Scandinavians even when Stalin invaded Finland.

No Soviet ambassador had so much leeway from Stalin as Kollontai. When she complained that OGPU’s arrest of a Swedish engineer, Rossel, undermined her position, Stalin telephoned Menzhinsky: “Make sure that Rossel is not on Soviet territory within twenty-four hours.” In Moscow Stalin, with schadenfreude, invited Kollontai to dine with him and with her former husband Dybenko. Stalin poured wine and made Dybenko (whom he soon had shot) sing Ukrainian songs. When dinner was over, Stalin asked, “Why did you break up with Kollontai? You did a very stupid thing, Dybenko.”

Stalin disempowered women but empowered children. Stalin’s corruption of tens of millions of young people is perhaps an even greater evil than the premature deaths of so many millions of innocent adults.

When all ideological resistance had been crushed there still remained instinctive, family values. These had always been a hindrance to Russian tyrants. In medieval times the notion of “mutual responsibility” (krugovaia poruka) held spouses, parents, children, even neighbors of miscreants responsible for their actions. Lenin and reintroduced krugovaia poruka to keep Tsarist officers loyal to the Red Army; Stalin extended it to defectors and any “traitor to the motherland.” A spouse had to divorce a counterrevolutionary immediately if they hoped to escape their fate. Such evil idiocies reached their nadir when in 1936 Georgi Piatakov, deputy commissar for heavy industry and under investigation, begged Nikolai Ezhov to let him shoot his convicted wife.

Children were induced to transfer their affections from their families to Stalin; children who denounced their parents were lionized. Lenin had abolished the prerevolutionary Boy Scouts and shot their leaders; Stalin had by 1931 formed the Pioneers to replace them.

In rural areas the Pioneers were unpopular and it needed an act of terror to promote them. In 1932, in the Urals village of Gerasimovka— though the Pioneers had not yet reached the area—OGPU fabricated a Pioneer martyr, Pavlik Morozov, who had fought and died for his Soviet principles against grain-hoarding kulaks. The Pioneers became a mass movement. Pioneers all over the Soviet Union called for “Murdering kulaks to be shot!”