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

Iagoda received from Gai in prison a tearful letter of penitence: “I miss nothing, not my family, my little daughter, nor my invalid elderly father, I miss to the point of burning pain my old name, Gai, combat commander of the Red Army. Comrade Iagoda, it’s very painful for me to talk about this to you. . . . Give me the chance to atone for my guilt with blood. It’s dark in the cell and tears make it hard to write.”³⁸ Iagoda had Gai examined by the Kremlin doctors, who diagnosed pneumonia. On November 7, 1935, a note, signed by Agranov not Iagoda, reported to Stalin that Gai had died. In fact he was very much alive. Stalin must have found out Iagoda’s deceit, for Gai was shot two years later.

Typically, Stalin pretended to forgive Iagoda’s lapse and made him general commissar of state security. Important tasks were, however, taken out of his hands. While Iagoda’s men summoned Kamenev and Zinoviev from prison for further interrogation, Stalin, with Kaganovich and Ezhov, rewrote their confessions and dictated the course of further questioning. Iagoda and the NKVD now came under the party secretariat’s control. The forthcoming show trial was outlined by Stalin more minutely than the wreckers’ trials which Menzhinsky had prepared under his supervision.

Nothing shifted Stalin from his determination to physically “finish off” those he had destroyed politically. Kamenev, whose sentence had been increased from five to ten years, kept a stoic silence, bargaining with his persecutors only for his family’s survival. Zinoviev showered the Politburo with appeals from his prison cell. On one occasion he begged Stalin to let him publish the memoirs he was writing in prison and to help his “academically talented” Marxist son. To his oppressor he wrote:

One desire burns in my soul: to prove to you that I am no longer an enemy. There is no demand which I would not meet in order to prove that. . . . I am reaching the point where I stare for long periods at portraits in the newspapers of you and other members of the Politburo with the thought: look into my soul, can’t you see that I am no longer your enemy, that I am yours body and soul, that I have understood everything, that I am ready to do everything to earn forgiveness, mercy?³⁹

Stalin had however decided to show that Zinoviev and Kamenev were Trotsky’s agents, aiming to overthrow the Soviet state by violence. He would prove to socialists abroad that Trotsky was a terrorist and a Gestapo collaborator. Formally, in July 1936, Iagoda and the chief prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, asked Stalin for the go-ahead to retry Kamenev and Zinoviev on the grounds that they had secured light prison sentences in 1935 by concealing their guilt. Iagoda arrested Zinoviev’s former secretary Pikel and an old associate of Trotsky, Dreitser, and broke them by sleep deprivation into signing the necessary statements. Zinoviev and Kamenev were not, strictly speaking, tortured although Zinoviev was kept in overheated cells, where he suffered from asthma and liver pains. He was a broken man; perhaps he believed assurances that Stalin “would not shed the blood of old Bolsheviks.”⁴⁰ Kamenev was resigned.

So well did Kaganovich and Ezhov supervise Iagoda that Stalin could spend all August and September on holiday in the Caucasus, while the fantastic Trotsky-Zinoviev “Moscow center” was set up and then demolished. Kaganovich, like Ezhov and, one suspects, Stalin, was able to hypnotize himself into believing his inept conspiracy fantasies. On July 6, 1936, Kaganovich announced to Stalin:

I’ve read the statements by those bastards Dreitser and Pikel. Though it was clear before, they are revealing with all details the true bandit face of the murderers and provocateurs Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Smirnov. Now it is absolutely clear that the main inspiration of this gang is that mercenary shit Trotsky. It’s time I think to declare him “outside the law” and to shoot the rest of the swine whom we have in our prisons. ⁴¹