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

A lot of failings have been shown up in the NKVD and in my view they can in no way be tolerated anymore. . . . Among the ruling clique of chekisty moods of self-satisfaction, complacency, and bragging are more and more blatant. Instead of drawing conclusions from the Trotskyist case and criticizing their own faults and correcting them, these people are dreaming now only of medals for the case they have cleared up. . . .

We’ll have to shoot quite an impressive quantity. Personally I think that we have to face up to this and once and for all finish with this scum [Zinoviev and other defendants].⁴³

All the defendants received death sentences. Most declared that they expected nothing less. Even Kamenev ended abjectly: “The practical management of organizing this terrorist act [killing Kirov] was carried out not by me, but Zinoviev.” Vyshinsky excelled himself in the absurdity of his rhetoric: “In their dark cellar Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev throw out a vile call: get rid of him, kill him! An underground machine begins to work, knives are sharpened, revolvers loaded, bombs assembled.” Vyshinsky attacked Zinoviev as a “villain, a murderer weeping for his victim.” Not a scrap of evidence was produced, and, thanks to Iagoda’s carelessness, the confessions could easily be proven false. One minor defendant, E. S. Goltsman, alleged he had met Trotsky’s elder son in 1932 in the Copenhagen Hotel Bristol; Lev Trotsky junior was taking his examinations at the time in Berlin, and the hotel had been demolished in 1917.

Ulrikh took twenty-four hours to deliver the verdicts. Stalin in Sochi insisted on editing them and told Kaganovich:

It needs stylistic polishing . . . you must mention in a separate paragraph of the verdict that Trotsky and Sedov [Lev Trotsky junior] are liable to trial or being tried, or something like that. This has great significance for Europe, bourgeois and workers. . . . You must cross out the final words: “The sentence is final and cannot be appealed.” These words are superfluous and make a bad impression. We mustn’t allow an appeal, but it is stupid to put that in the sentence. . . .

The next morning fifteen of the sixteen petitioned Stalin for a reprieve, which was immediately refused. All were shot a few hours later. Nikolai Ezhov was present. He extracted the bullets from the corpses and wrapped these souvenirs in paper slips with the condemned men’s names. Kamenev and Smirnov walked to the execution cellar stoically, but Zinoviev clung to the boots of his guards and was taken down by stretcher. This scene was reenacted several times at supper at Stalin’s dacha, the bodyguard Karl Pauker playing the part of Zinoviev—begging for Stalin to be fetched and then crying out “Hear, o Israel”—until even Stalin found the charade distasteful.⁴⁴

Writers within the USSR put up little or no opposition to the trial and the executions. Ehrenburg, Sholokhov, and Aleksei Tolstoi had clamored for the execution of their former patrons whom they knew to be innocent, at least of the crimes of which they were convicted. A very few, like Pasternak, withstood the pressure to sign petitions demanding that the accused be shot. Ehrenburg’s and Sholokhov’s compliance is more pardonable than the complicity of Western intellectuals and observers. Some had watched Hitler’s Reichstag trial, admired the spirited defense put up by the Bulgarian communist Dimitrov, and applauded his acquittal. They claimed that Vyshinsky and Ulrikh’s pastiche of European legal proceedings could not have been wholly falsified, that the Soviet judiciary had not sold its soul to Stalin.