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

The new generation was strongly represented in the NKVD. The chekisty of the civil war period had moved into the bureaucracy and into industry, carrying with them their belief in ruthless repression as the best means of administration. Some, who persuaded themselves that they had not lost all semblance of humanity, retired into academia or literature. Their places were taken by the orphans of the civil war, by party workers who had been drafted into, or felt drawn to, an organization where their authority would be unquestioned. The new intake was ethnically more Russian and less Jewish, Latvian, or Polish; it was less well educated, often semiliterate. It had no interest in, let alone sympathy for, the ideas of Trotsky or Bukharin, or any ideas at all. It saw itself as a punitive weapon in Stalin’s and Iagoda’s hands. Under Nikolai Ezhov it would prove itself a mindless tool of a paranoiac murderer. Even in 1935 the NKVD no longer questioned the most absurd indictments and directives from above.

By mid-1935, except for a few Chechen outlaws, the entire population of the USSR was under the NKVD’s total control. Iagoda had knuckled under to Stalin’s new favorite Nikolai Ezhov and was concocting material for the show trials of those opposition leaders who were still alive, some even at liberty. Ezhov began writing for Stalin a pamphlet entitled “From Fractionalism to Open Counterrevolution.” He was instructed to argue that Trotsky had made terrorists of ideological opponents like Kamenev and Zinoviev and to blame Iagoda for lack of vigilance.³⁶

Lazar Kaganovich had now covered Moscow with asphalt and furnished it with an underground railway. The city began to impress foreign visitors. Iagoda cleared Moscow of its 12,000 professional beggars: instead of going back to their villages, where begging was a respected profession, they were sent to Kazakhstan. Thanks to the GULAG’s output of timber, coal, and nonferrous and precious metals, the Soviet economy was growing. The camps had over 500,000 inmates in 1934, and 750,000 in 1935. The GULAG was also more efficient: inmates’ annual mortality dropped from 15 percent in 1933 to 4 percent in 1935. Deported kulaks added their labor as industrial workers or farmers in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Their death rate also dropped to a fraction of the appalling 13 percent of 1933.

Iagoda was rewarded; the NKVD got new ranks and uniforms. On November 26 Iagoda became general secretary (a rank that hitherto only Stalin had enjoyed) of state security, equivalent to an army marshal. He ordered himself a tunic covered with gold stars and raspberry-striped dark blue trousers; his underlings were only slightly less garish. They exemplified William Cobbett’s “pigs in the parlour, peacocks on parade.” Secret police the NKVD were not.

Iagoda should have known that these marks of favor augured doom. Stalin had never forgotten that Iagoda had been named by Bukharin as a potential supporter of a right coup. He also failed to provide the forced labor he had promised for the Moscow–Volga canal and the Moscow underground; these projects were completed with paid and voluntary labor. The economic uses of the GULAG were limited.

In October 1935 the curious case of the old army commander Gai Gai-Bzhishkian exhausted Stalin’s patience with Iagoda. Gai had told a drinking companion, “Stalin has to be gotten rid of.” He was denounced and sentenced to five years in prison. On the train taking him away, his guards let him go to the lavatory, where he smashed the window and leapt onto the track. Gai, Iagoda had to admit to Stalin, had escaped. Two days later, he was found by a peasant.

Stalin was furious. He raged:

To catch one sniveling wretch the NKVD mobilized 900 men from frontier guard school, all their own workers, party members, Communist Youth, farmers and made a ring that must have consisted of several thousand people over 100 kilometers. One wonders who needs a Cheka and why it exists anyway if every time, in every trivial case, it has to ask for help from Communist Youth, farmers, and the whole population? Moreover, does the NKVD understand how disagreeable for the government is the uproar created by such mobilizations? . . . I think that the Cheka part of the NKVD is suffering from a serious disease. It’s time we started treating it.³⁷