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

Ezhov exercised all his ingenuity to keep up the pace. His original target, agreed with Stalin, of 200,000 arrests and 73,000 executions, was exceeded ninefold, with Stalin’s full cooperation. Moreover, Stalin’s younger acolytes Malenkov, Khrushchiov, and Andreev never deviated from his line by a millimeter, and starred in the troikas that sent thousands to their death. Stalin brought Ezhov into the Politburo in October 1937 and saw him almost every day. In 1937 and 1938 they spent over 840 hours working together. Only Molotov saw more of Stalin at that time.

Either Ezhov needed a tight rein or Stalin found mass murder so enthralling that he could not delegate, but in 1937 and 1938 Stalin forwent the annual break of two months or so that he had taken in the Caucasus or on the Black Sea ever since ousting Trotsky from the Politburo. After terror came war, and Stalin would not take a holiday again until October 1945.

The Last Show Trials

Freedom of the person lies largely in protection from questions. The strongest tyranny is the one that allows itself the strongest question.

Elias Canetti, Mass and Might

SHOCK WAVES from the show trials by which Stalin got rid of the last remnants of the old Bolsheviks swept away up to three successive administrations in all districts of the Soviet Union; tens of thousands of loyal Stalinists were devoured by the leviathan that they had engineered and lauded. The last show trials of 1937 and 1938 were the epicenter, but the greatest suffering was at the periphery, among workers with no political interests.

Ezhov had a secondary role in the two show trials that would get rid of the last traces of opposition. He could beat prisoners into submission, but had no gift for devising scenarios for foreign journalists to observe. Stalin therefore settled with Andrei Vyshinsky what the prosecution and the accused would say in court. Stalin left Ezhov, together with Kaganovich, to bark at Central Committee plenary meetings; Ezhov’s underdogs would bully the defendants into learning the scripts that Vyshinsky would devise.

Despite sleep deprivation and other torments, it took a month to break the defendants of the “Parallel anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center” to be tried from January 23 to 30, 1937. Karl Radek, the only victim for whom Stalin had any residual respect, agreed to plead guilty only if he could write his own part; Radek’s desire to have memorable lines was stronger than his will to live. According to Stalin, he said, “You can shoot me or not, as you like, but I’d like my honor not to be besmirched.” Others in this trial had already been broken by a previous trial of Trotskyists in Siberia. Piatakov was prepared not just to damn his own wife as a traitor, but to shoot with his own hand those convicted in the first show trial. Stalin politely declined, explaining that in the USSR executioners had to remain anonymous.

Despite 400 pages of documentation, this second show trial was even more shoddily fabricated than that of Kamenev and Zinoviev in 1936. Piatakov was alleged to have flown to Oslo but the Norwegian authorities stated that no foreign aircraft had landed there at the time. The crimes were more implausible than Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s “assassinations,” Vyshinsky pathetically citing a signalwoman crippled in a train crash arranged by Trotsky’s agents. All but four of the accused were shot although the lucky four lived only a few years. Radek, who had teased Vyshinsky in court with the implausibility of the evidence and whom Stalin reprieved, was murdered in prison in 1939. Before the trial Radek read Vyshinsky his proposed last words. “Is that all?” Vyshinsky asked. “No good. Redo it, all of it. Try and admit this and that. . . . You are a journalist after all!” ²² Radek sent his wife a letter which the NKVD interpreted in one way and she, no doubt, in another: “I have admitted I was the member of a center, took part in its terrorist activity. . . . I don’t need to tell you that such admissions could not have been extracted from me by violent means nor by promises.”²³

Vyshinsky was rewarded with the dacha of Leonid Serebriakov, former commissar for roads and one of those he had condemned to death.