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

Stalin and Ezhov allowed Bukharin a cell where he could smoke and write before standing trial with twenty others in March 1938.²⁶ This trial strained even Vyshinsky’s imagination. He had to tie together Genrikh Iagoda, Bukharin’s right-wing opposition, three Kremlin doctors, three former Trotskyists, and Gorky’s and Kuibyshev’s secretaries on charges dating back to 1917 of serial murder, sabotage, induced famine, treason, and terrorism on behalf of the intelligence services of every major European and Asiatic state. When tried before the carefully screened audience, Bukharin adopted the same tactics as Iagoda: he pleaded guilty in general but cast doubt on every detail. Like Iagoda, he rebutted Vyshinsky’s efforts to blacken him as a foreign spy. Nevertheless, Bukharin ended his ordeal with utter self-abasement: the only reason for not shooting him, he said, was that “the former Bukharin has now died, he no longer exists on earth.” An observer of the show trials would have had to conclude that all Lenin’s party except for a tiny circle around Stalin had for some reason carried out a simulated Bolshevik revolution at the behest of world capitalism.

Bukharin had at least come to understand why he had to die:

Stalin has some big and bold political idea of a general purge a) in connection with the prewar period and b) with a transition to democracy. This purge takes in a) the guilty, b) the suspect, c) potential suspects. In this case I couldn’t be excluded. Some are made harmless one way, others another, others a third way . . . great plans, great ideas, and great interests outweigh everything and it would be petty to raise the question of my own person in the face of universal-historical tasks that weigh first of all on your [Stalin’s] shoulders.²⁷

Nevertheless, Bukharin still hoped for mercy: “if I am given a death sentence . . . instead of shooting, let me have poison in my cell (give me morphine to go to sleep and not wake up) . . . Have pity! I beseech you for this.” In other letters he offered to go to the Arctic camps for twenty-five years and found universities and museums there, or to America for an indefinite time where he “would smash Trotsky’s face in.”

Bukharin’s final note to Stalin began, “Koba, why do you need my life?” This note Stalin did not put in his archive; all his life he kept it under a newspaper in a desk drawer at his dacha. On March 15, 1938, Bukharin’s decade of torment ended. Together with Iagoda and all but three of the other defendants at the third great show trial, he was shot. The three were shot in Oriol prison in 1941. Five days too late, Romain Rolland wrote to Stalin, “a mind like Bukharin’s is a precious resource for his country, he could and ought to be preserved for Soviet science and thought.” He invoked Gorky’s name and warned Stalin of the remorse which the French, even Jacobins, had felt after guillotining the chemist Lavoisier. Stalin did not reply.²⁸ Instead, he screened a film, The Court’s Sentence Is the People’s Sentence,

which starred Vyshinsky at his most rabid. Of Bukharin’s family, only his first wife was shot. His second and his third teenage wives went to the GULAG, his son went to an NKVD orphanage and grew up not even knowing who his father had been.

Other damned men including Abel Enukidze and Jan Rudzutak, despite torture, would not or could not give public testimony; they were tried in secret and shot separately.²⁹ Elsewhere, the trials of others whom Stalin distrusted had already taken place. Beria had already exterminated Budu Mdivani, Orakhelashvili, and most of the older Georgian communists.

Fewer Western observers—with the spectacular exception of the American ambassador, Joseph Davies, who informed his government of “proof beyond reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of guilty”—were deceived this time. Romain Rolland was shaken. Stalin was wrecking the unity of the antifascist left with the internecine murders his NKVD carried out in Spain and with this trial. He could now resort only to accommodation with Hitler for his security. Mussolini’s organ Popolo d’Italia

mused: “Has Stalin become a secret fascist?” Il duce was rubbing his hands because “nobody exterminated so many communists as Stalin.”

Disarming the Army