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

Novosibirsk bonded its men in blood; all officers took part in mass executions called “marriages.” One officer, Konstantin Pastanogov, denounced his own uncle but demurred when ordered to shoot him. He survived only because Lev Mironov took pity on him. The special and secret political directorates of the Novosibirsk NKVD were at half strength from purges within their ranks. The deficit was made up with men who found writing up statements more laborious than beating victims into signing them. Ezhov sent out fifty students from Moscow’s NKVD school to help.

Targets for Extermination

What have the little piglets done

That they should be slaughtered year after year, just

To keep these foxes in luxury? The very sacred Dragon

In the ninefold depth of his pool, does He know

That the foxes are robbing him and gobbling up His little piglets,

Or does He not?

Bertolt Brecht, after Po Chiu-i

IN SPRING 1937 terror spread from the party leadership to the urban population. Ezhov assigned targets (limity) to each region for arrests, executions (“Category 1”—73,000 in all), and imprisonment (“Category 2” —just under 200,000) of enemies of the people. Eighteen months later these targets had been exceeded ninefold. The Smolensk NKVD chief was told by Ezhov, “better to overdo it than not do enough.” Novosibirsk soon exceeded its target of 5,000: by October 4 the local NKVD had arrested 25,000 and sentenced 13,000 of these to death. As Novosibirsk had, until 1938, Japanese and German consulates, thousands were designated spies. The NKVD was backed up by the militia, which was diverted from detaining thieves and hooligans to hunting enemies of the people. They arrested anyone who came to a police station, even on an innocent errand; they visited farms and removed a percentage of peasants as saboteurs. In 1937 the Novosibirsk militia arrested 7,000 people in this way.

There was some official resistance: one prosecutor, M. M. Ishov, arrested the most eager hangmen including Maltsev and freed their victims. Ishov was soon arrested himself, with his brother and colleagues, and badly beaten by Maltsev although, extraordinarily, he lived to be reinstated. Even at the end of 1938, when Ezhov’s writ no longer ran, and memoranda from Moscow rebuked the NKVD for illegal procedures, Maltsev could not stop. When Beria finally removed the incorrigible heads of the Novosibirsk NKVD, the region was left to the mercy of their juniors, psychotic drunkards who beat their wives, fell down mine shafts, stole public and private property, and were sent away to prisons or sanatoria. In southern Russia and the Caucasus, even before Stalin authorized torture, the sadism was such that the living envied the dead; few of those tortured were fit for the GULAG.

For one measure Ezhov won popularity: he reversed the Soviet policy of treating common criminals as redeemable brothers of the working class. In April 1937 Ezhov proposed, to Stalin’s approval, rearresting recidivists and career criminals, who would now be deported and executed. By July 40,000 common criminals, mingled with kulak refugees, had been arrested. Of these 8,000 were shot. The streets of Moscow and Leningrad were still dangerous at night, but now that banditry was punished almost as severely as telling anti-Soviet jokes, some of the public regained confidence.

Ezhov sent those he spared the bullet into the GULAG, which he expanded into a hitherto unimaginable inferno. When Iagoda fell, over 800,000 slaves were working in the GULAG, while NKVD prisons held another quarter of a million and many hundreds of thousands of exiles worked in conditions indistinguishable from slavery. By 1936 annual mortality in the GULAG had dropped to about 20,000 and in Iagoda’s last year of power the NKVD recorded only 1,118 executions. ¹⁹ This was, in the poetess Anna Akhmatova’s phrase, a “vegetarian” era, compared with the carnivorous Ezhov period.

Under Ezhov the growth of the camps was limited only by the harsh terrain of the Soviet Arctic and the logistics of transporting, housing, guarding, and exploiting prisoners. Purges within the NKVD killed off the GULAG’s best managers. In December 1938 the GULAG population passed the million mark, and there were nearly as many in the prisons and other labor colonies. In 1938 mortality in the GULAG— overcrowded, chaotic, run by inexperienced and frightened administrators—soared to 90,000 or 10 percent of the inmates. Even so, the camps could not keep up with the mass arrests; those detained in grotesquely overcrowded prisons often died of typhus, dysentery, heat, malnutrition, or torture before they could be executed.