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

The poem ends with Friendship of Nations and Trumpet Signals, at which Stalin leads armies to fight fascism: “And wisely he looks afar, staring with testing gaze / At the hosts of enemies, Great Stalin.”

Once Pravda was unleashed against him, Bukharin asserted his innocence “in word, deed, and thought.” When Kamenev and Zinoviev were executed, Bukharin groveled. He told Vyshinsky, “I am terribly glad the dogs have been shot.” Three chekisty came to evict him from his apartment in the Kremlin, but a phone call to Stalin got rid of the intruders. The year 1937, however, was all despair. The death of Sergo Orjonikidze in February 1937 deprived Bukharin of his last friend in power. He admitted to Stalin:

. . . I was embittered against you (that’s true): I didn’t understand your objective political rightness. . . . But I am not the person I was. I cannot even weep over the body of an old comrade. On the contrary, his death will serve as a pretext for certain people to dishonor me. . . . I know that you’re suspicious and often happen to be very wise in your suspiciousness . . . but I am a living person walled up alive and spat on from all sides. . . . I repeat to you my request that I shouldn’t be harassed and should be allowed to “live out the rest of my days” here.

The February–March 1937 plenum of the Central Committee was surely one of the most grotesque meetings in the history of humanity. ²⁵ Two thirds of the 1,200 delegates would be dead within the next two years, yet, in a frenzy, they called for terror against more enemies. Bukharin and Rykov, fresh from confrontations with former associates beaten by the NKVD into incriminating them, were thrown into the ring. To this mindless throng, presided over by a taunting Politburo— Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov—Bukharin pleaded for compassion: “Comrades, I beg you not to interrupt me, because I find it very hard, it’s simply physically hard to speak. . . . I haven’t eaten for four days . . . because it is impossible for me to live with such accusations. . . . Understand it’s hard for me to live.” To which Stalin interjected, “It’s easy for us, is it?” Bukharin dared not parry Stalin’s assertion that all previous defendants had freely confessed and provoked only laughter when he declared that everything in the trials of the Trotskyists was plausible except that which incriminated him. Stalin intervened more than anybody else—a hundred times—during this witch hunt. At times Stalin softened: “You must not, you have no right to slander yourself . . .” he said. “You must see it our way. Trotsky and his disciples Zinoviev and Kamenev used to work with Lenin and have now come to terms with Hitler.” Bukharin claimed he was mentally ill. “Excuse and forgive . . . So that’s it,” retorted Stalin. Rykov attempted a more spirited self-defense, but when he tried to defend Bukharin, Stalin interrupted: “Bukharin hasn’t told the truth even here.”

Ezhov had the last word: he accused Bukharin of keeping a file of anti-Soviet utterances hidden from the GPU, and promised to arrest him: “The plenum will allow Bukharin and Rykov to convince themselves in reality of the objectivity of the investigation and to see how investigations are conducted.” A commission of thirty-five would decide their fate: they agreed to expel and arrest the two. Ezhov proposed shooting them; a minority voted for ten years’ imprisonment. Stalin, wearing his arbiter’s mask, had the commission “direct the Bukharin–Rykov case to the NKVD”—which meant that he had instructed Ezhov to annihilate them. When the plenum voted on the commission’s remit only Bukharin and Rykov abstained.