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

Anyone who lived in the same building as arrestees or was related to them was natural prey. NKVD men scanned lists in concierges’ offices and arrested those with unusual surnames as spies. Just possessing a desirable apartment or furniture was a motive for arrest. Most victims were sentenced by a troika or a joint commission of the Public Prosecutor and the NKVD; some received quasi-judicial sentences from the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court. Nearly all were sentenced under Article 58, covering counterrevolution, of the Soviet criminal code. Most of Ezhov’s victims were charged with those crimes (Article 58, Paragraphs 10 and 11) that needed least evidence—“propaganda and group activity”—offenses which could be committed by a chance remark or playing cards with friends.

Because it had so many officials, professionals, and persons from other regions and countries, Moscow province and city, with twice the population of Leningrad, had three times as many casualties. Here too the executioners were overstretched. In 1937, some time before Hitler, Stalin’s NKVD hit on gassing as a means of mass execution. Trucks advertising bread drove around the Urals, pumping exhaust gases into the rear compartment where naked prisoners lay roped together in stacks, until their loads were ready for the burial pits.

The society called Memorial has traced 21,000 buried just in the Butovo military area south of Moscow. The victims include hundreds of local peasants, most of the monks and priests of the Troitse-Sergeev monastery in Zagorsk who had survived earlier purges, inmates from the Dmitlag—the camps which supplied the labor force for the Moscow– Volga canal—and thousands from central Moscow prisons. Many professionals vital to the economy, such as Leopold Eikhenvald, a professor of radio-electronics, had naturally studied and researched abroad; their “spylike way of life and anti-Soviet agitation” doomed them. There was no gratitude: the Tsar’s head of gendarmerie, the elderly General Dzhunkovsky who had taught the Cheka all he knew about countersubversion, was shot. Any contact with Europe was lethal. The Commissariat of Foreign Affairs lost ten diplomatic couriers to the pits at Butovo. Forty-seven Austrian refugees from Hitler were shot as Nazi spies, as were 600 Germans and over 1,000 Latvians. Butovo specialized in artists: over a hundred painters, iconographers, sculptors, and designers, the 1920s Moscow avant-garde, perished in December 1937 and January 1938.

As men and women were shot, their names were struck off endless typed lists which bore the signatures of an NKVD troika or, if the condemned were of any importance, of Politburo members. Attached to the lists were photographs of harrowed and beaten faces, taken shortly after arrest—the NKVD owned perhaps the world’s largest photographic archive, of some 10 million faces. The execution orders bore just one instruction: “When carrying out the sentence it is obligatory to check the person against the photograph.”

Butovo was a killing ground from August 8, 1937, to September 19, 1938. The flow of corpses peaked in September 1937 (3,165) and March 1938 (2,335), and varied from a handful to 474 victims in one night. Most of the 21,000 were executed by a small team of NKVD hangmen: M. I. Semionov, I. D. Berg, and P. I. Ovchinnikov. Most killers in the NKVD never rose high and few were ever held to account; their usual punishment was alcoholism.

When Ezhov vanished—unmourned, unmentioned in the press— and the terror paused before taking new directions, it was assumed that Stalin had reasserted control over the purges which he had temporarily lost. But now it is indisputable that he was aware of all Ezhov’s actions in detail and in advance. Ezhov not only enthusiastically sought authority to purge more and more spheres of industry or classes of person; Stalin himself spurred Ezhov on, pointing out, for instance, the Baku oil fields as an area likely to be harboring great numbers of saboteurs and spies. Whenever senior party members or key professionals were sentenced, lists went to the Politburo—to Stalin, Kaganovich, Molotov, and Voroshilov—for their emendations. The names of some 7 percent of the victims of the Great Terror—40,000—were perused by one or more of these four. Occasionally Stalin crossed out a name or substituted imprisonment for death; Molotov, for reasons he would not later recall, did the opposite. All four added comments: “deserves it,” “prostitute,” “scum.” On one day they confirmed over 3,000 death sentences. Georgi Malenkov had, as the Central Committee’s personnel officer, a hard job finding replacements and Stalin told each new commissar to appoint two deputies to take over if he was arrested. From time to time Stalin would gently apply the brakes, requiring a party secretary or prosecutor to sanction certain arrests.