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

Iakov Agranov worked viciously on those of Zinoviev and Kamenev’s codefendants who had not yet broken. Ivan Smirnov, a Siberian civil war veteran and former supporter of both Zinoviev and Trotsky, had in 1927 publicly called for Stalin’s removal. He went on hunger strike. So did the Armenian Vagarshal Ter-Vaganian, who slit his wrists and wrote to Stalin in his own blood: “People are slandering, slandering vilely, shamelessly, their slander is shriekingly obvious. . . . Nevertheless I am powerless against these brazen lies.” Agranov force-fed both men. Other defendants were designated to show that Trotsky worked for the Gestapo. Four German-Jewish communists stood trial for their lives—Moise Lourié, W. Olberg, G. B. Berman-Jurin, and I. I. Fritz-David. They had taken refuge in the USSR, not dreaming that Stalin would kill far more German communists than Hitler.

In August 1936 Kaganovich told Stalin that he, the prosecutor Vyshinsky, and Judge Ulrikh had fully rehearsed the trial for performance from the 19th to the 22nd, and Kamenev and Zinoviev would appear as the seventh and eighth of sixteen abject penitents. “The role of the Gestapo is to be brought out in full. If the accused name Piatakov and others [on the right] they will not be stopped.” On the first day Zinoviev confessed to knowing all about Kirov’s murder as it happened, and Smirnov admitted receiving instructions from Trotsky. The second day, Kaganovich and Ezhov reported, went even better. All defendants were singing the same tune and Zinoviev’s demeanor was “more depressed than any of the others.” Only Kamenev—Kaganovich underlined this point—was “keeping up a pose that was defiant compared with Zinoviev’s. He’s trying to put on airs, acting the leader.” Best of all, the victims’ statements would damn every other of Stalin’s opponents: Rykov, Tomsky, Bukharin on the right; Radek, Grigori Sokolnikov, Piatakov, and Leonid Serebriakov on the left were all mentioned.

So vile were the smears that on the last day of the trial Mikhail Tomsky shot himself—as Stalin’s former secretary Boris Bazhanov had predicted he would—at his dacha. The suicide note ran:

. . . here is my last request—don’t believe Zinoviev’s brazen slander . . . Now I end this letter after reading the court’s resolution that I should be investigated. . . . I feel that I shan’t be able to endure that, I am too tired for such shocks as being put in the same dock as fascists. . . . I ask forgiveness from the party for my old mistakes, I ask that Zinoviev and Kamenev be not believed. . . . P.S. Remember our nighttime conversation in 1928. [At a barbecue in Sochi a drunken Tomsky had warned Stalin, who was grilling the kebabs, “Our workers will soon begin firing at you.”] Don’t take what I blurted out seriously—I have been repenting that deeply ever since. But I couldn’t change your mind, for you’d never have believed me. If you want to know the names of the people who pushed me down the road of right-wing opposition in May 1928, ask my wife personally, then she’ll say who they were.⁴²

Maria Tomskaia, the widow, would not talk to the NKVD’s secret department so Stalin and Kaganovich sent Nikolai Ezhov with the suicide note to her. She hinted that Iagoda had “been playing a very active role in the trio who led the right [opposition] . . .” A niche was ready for Tomsky’s ashes in the Kremlin wall and his death mask was taken. But Stalin, who unlike Hitler hated disgraced comrades to commit suicide, ordered him to be buried in his garden; the body was later dug up and disposed of. Two years later the rest of the right opposition could only envy Tomsky.

Tomsky’s suicide note, Ezhov told Stalin, implicated Iagoda:

. . . who has played a very active part in the guiding troika of the right and has regularly provided them with material about the state of play in the Central Committee . . .