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

Kaganovich reported to Stalin on the second day of the trial that all the foreign correspondents’ telegrams made a special point of the evidence incriminating the right wing. The best-informed outside observer, Trotsky, was gagged; the Norwegian government feared a Soviet boycott of its herrings, and Kaganovich drafted a letter from Stalin to Norwegian minister of justice Trygve Lie, naming Trotsky as the main organizer of terrorism in the USSR and demanding his removal. Trotsky, the first foreigner to be interned and held incommunicado in Norway, was not allowed to sue those European newspapers that repeated Vyshinsky’s slanders from the trial.

Western radical opinion in 1936 had no desire to annoy Stalin. Hitler had invaded the Rhineland; General Franco had risen against the Spanish republic; Japan was invading China; the USSR was sending a delegation to a European peace congress. Democrats believed that in the cause of fighting fascism critics of Stalin’s judicial murders had to be muzzled. Historians, jurists, and diplomats assured the European public that the trial had been legally impeccable. Writers like Theodore Dreiser and Bernard Shaw vouched for Stalin’s character. Bertolt Brecht, on the other hand and with impenetrable cynicism, told a friend perplexed by the confessions of Kamenev and Zinoviev: “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die.”⁴⁵ Kamenev and Zinoviev knew what Stalin had done and what he might yet do: if they were innocent of plotting his death, they had sinned by not committing tyrannicide, an act which even St. Thomas Aquinas condoned: “God looks with favor upon the physical elimination of the Beast if a people is freed thereby.” Bertolt Brecht probably meant something else, but if ever tyrannicide was a moral imperative, then in 1936 failing to assassinate Stalin was a crime that deserved the death penalty.

Iagoda’s Fall

. . . this leader had usually a favourite as like himself as he could get, whose employment was to lick his master’s feet and posteriors . . . This favourite is hated by the whole herd, and therefore to protect himself, keeps always near the person of his leader. He usually continues in office until a worse can be found; but the very moment he is discarded, his successor, at the head of all the Yahoos in that district, young and old, male and female, come in a body, and discharge their excrements upon him from head to foot.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

THE FALLOUT from the trial had not been enough for Stalin. All September he had complained to Kaganovich, Molotov, and Ezhov that Pravda was explaining the case badly:

It reduces everything to the level of personalities: that there are nasty people who desire to seize power, and nice people in power. . . . The articles should have said that struggling against Stalin, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Kosior, and others is struggling against the soviets, against collectivization, against industrialization, therefore a struggle to restore capitalism in the towns and villages of the USSR. For Stalin [he spoke of himself in the third person] and the other leaders are not isolated persons, but the personification of all the victories of socialism in the USSR . . . i.e., the personification of the efforts of workers, peasants, and hard-working intellectuals to smash capitalism and let socialism triumph.

Stalin ended this self-deification on a religious note: “Finally it should have said that the fall of these bastards to the state of White Guards and fascists was the logical consequence of their Fall from Grace [grekhopadenie] as oppositionists in the past. . . . This is the spirit and the direction in which agitation ought to have been conducted....” ⁴⁶