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

BETWEEN THE MURDER of Kirov and the dismissal of Iagoda, Stalin operated with maniacal energy and cold, calculated purpose. Everything he did gave the Soviet state what later observers believed was its magical source of strength: its monolithic power. Stalin eliminated, politically and then physically, all politicians who had shown a capacity to act or even think independently. He set in stone a pyramidal power structure: himself, his Politburo, the NKVD, the party’s bureaucracy. He asserted total control over every government commissariat, from foreign policy to culture and light engineering. He structured the population so that there was no social basis for any revolt or dissent: the peasants were crushed, the intelligentsia suborned or terrified, the workers tied to their workplaces. Only the army remained self-governing, and not for long. Stalin pushed women away from power; a few token women did his bidding on the Central Committee but the valkyries of the revolution were all disarmed. He made divorce difficult, abortion nearly impossible, and homosexuality illegal. There was no prospect of a new generation shattering the monolith; children and adolescents were organized into the Communist Youth Movement, which kept a tight grip on their activities and ideology from puberty to adulthood. The class system was allegedly abolished although actually a caste system was emerging. The party became self-perpetuating. There were no more spectacular mésalliances like the marriage of Kollontai and Dybenko; party, NKVD, and intelligentsia interbred: Gorky’s granddaughter married Beria’s son and Stalin’s grandson Fadeev’s daughter.

A few genuine scientists, as well as a horde of charlatans, still contributed to Soviet thinking, but Stalin had congealed thought too. Genetics and modern physics were declared heretical. Music not in C major, poetry not paraphrasable, painting and cinema not monumental or strictly representational, were all banned. The whole country even began to look alike: from standard-issue clothing to standard housing and transport, Stalin created a seemingly unchangeable world where Everyman’s monotony was broken only by the garish pageants and uniforms of the party and police elite. Stalin’s precautions against his assassination reached absurd levels. Nothing but an invasion by outside forces— and here Stalin was convinced that his own cunning was defense enough—could shake the foundations of the world he seemed to have created single-handedly in 1935–6.

SEVEN

THE EZHOV BLOODBATH

A camel claimed political asylum on the Polish border: “They’re exterminating all the rabbits in the USSR.” “But you’re a camel,” said the border guard. “You try proving you’re not a rabbit!” replied the camel.

The Birth of the Great Terror

May my prayer be received

As incense before Thee,

Raised up by my hand,

A Vespers sacrifice.

Hear me o Lord

Orthodox hymn occasionally sung by Stalin, Voroshilov, and Molotov in the 1930s

AS STALIN was condemning the last of the old Bolshevik guard to death, he was also preparing his own remedy for dissidence and free thought in the general population. The ensuing “Great Terror” raged across the Soviet Union from spring 1937 to autumn 1938 and resulted in around 750,000 executions and twice as many sentences to lingering death in the camps. What minds could conceive then organize such a massacre? More puzzling still: how could a literate urban population submit to a reign of terror and actively, even enthusiastically, collaborate in offering victims up to it?

Stalin in the 1930s exemplified the degenerative psychotic who, with every enemy exterminated, saw yet more enmity to be extirpated and whose serial killing progressed not arithmetically but geometrically. Then there was Nikolai Ezhov, who was promoted to conduct the terror and then removed when the ravages were complete. We shall try to unravel something of the psyche of Nikolai Ezhov. As for Kaganovich and Molotov, their murderousness, like that of other Politburo members who survived Stalin including Malenkov, Mikoyan, and Khrushchiov, stemmed not from any inner compulsion to kill, but from a total, doglike submission to their psychopathic master. The difference between the terror of 1937–8 and the killings that had gone before was its cannibalism. The two main instruments of terror, the 4-million-strong Communist Party and the NKVD, were also its victims.