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

Western reaction to this second trial was muted: the Spanish Civil War made it unseemly for the left to criticize Stalin, the Spanish republic’s last supporter. British MPs and journalists assured the public that the accused had confessed because the evidence was overwhelming. Japanese and German correspondents declared the trial an outrageous fabrication, but because they were fascists, they were not believed in Britain or America. Any improbabilities which Western observers had noticed in the confessions, explained the exiled German writer Lion Feuchtwanger, were due to faults in translation. In court Karl Radek denied that he had been coerced: “If the question is raised whether we were tortured during interrogation, then I have to say that it wasn’t me who was tortured, but the interrogators who were tortured by me, since I caused them unnecessary work.”

Why did the accused not retract their confessions in court? The guards would not have beaten them in public and they certainly could not have trusted Stalin’s promises to spare them or their families; they knew of the extermination of Kamenev, Zinoviev, and almost all their kin. Were they unsophisticated enough to believe that it was their duty to admit guilt as a sacrifice for the party? They didn’t appear to have been drugged. The full dossier covering their interrogation is not yet in the public domain, and in any case it may have been largely falsified. Either their torturers made threats which we can only guess at, or they had motives for complicity which surpass our understanding. Fear alone does not explain the defendants’ behavior, unless they had been threatened with tortures even more unspeakable than what they had endured.

The third great show trial of this series, in 1938, of Bukharin, Rykov, Iagoda, and their fellow defendants, took a whole year to organize. Was the delay due to Ezhov’s inability to devise scenarios, Iagoda’s recalcitrance, or Stalin’s sadism? Was Stalin loath to end an amusing game of cat and mouse with Bukharin, who remained editor of Izvestiia even while the newspaper called for his demise? His letters to Stalin in 1936 and 1937 have a psalmodic quality, perhaps a key to the martyr complex of the defendants. “If you could only really know my ‘soul’ as it is now!” he wrote in February 1936. “I still want to do something good. And now I must tell you straight: my only hope is you.”²⁴

In spring 1936 Stalin had even let Bukharin go abroad to retrieve the archives of the now banned German Social Democratic Party. Bukharin spoke fatalistically to the émigré historian Boris Nikolaevsky, Rykov’s brother-in-law, and wrote saccharine letters to Stalin: “You keep swelling, so that anyone can see how needed you are now—perhaps more than ever, my dear!” In August Stalin let Bukharin go mountaineering for the last time in the Pamirs. In autumn 1936 the net closed and Radek was arrested. Bukharin stood up for Radek as someone “ready to give his last drop of blood for our country.” The more Bukharin’s name figured in indictments of others, the more he pleaded to Stalin:

I ardently beg you to allow me to come and see you. . . . There is no greater tragedy than when one is surrounded by hostile distrust and one is guilty of nothing, not a jot. . . . Only you can cure me. . . . I ask not for pity, not for any forgiveness, for I am not guilty of anything. But the atmosphere is such that only a super-authority (only you) can take on yourself to the end the boldness of saving an innocent man who because of the tactics of the enemy has got into an exceptional situation. . . . Interrogate me, turn my skin inside out. . . .

When Stalin told him to stay on at Izvestiia Bukharin sent him “A Poem About Stalin in Seven Cantos” that he had composed “in one of my sleepless nights.” In blank verse, it begins with the death of a genius—Lenin—and continues with Stalin’s Great Oath, his Path of Fire and Struggle, and Victory. Canto Five is The Leader:

Here he stands, in gray greatcoat, the leader Of innumerable creative millions . . . And powerfully Gives a mighty strength To the momentum of a new triumphant life.