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

. . . there were two guiding rules. One: the more harm a leader does, the more good he does for the fatherland. If he abolishes learning, good; if he burns down a city, good; if he terrifies the population, even better. . . . Two: to have as many bastards as possible to do your bidding. . . .

Then [the leader] gathered the “bastards” and said to them: “Bastards, write denunciations!” . . . They write denunciations, draw up harmful plans. . . . And all this semi-literate stinking matter gets to the zealous leader’s office. . . .

[The leader] gathered the “bastards” and said: “Tell me, bastards, what do you think real harm consists of?”

And the bastards replied unanimously: “. . . That the harm we bastards do should count as good; and good, if done by anyone else, count as harm. That nobody should dare to say a word about us bastards, while we bastards can yap what we like about whomever we want to. . . .”

Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Tale of the Zealous Leader (Stalin’s own underlining, c. 1951)³⁰

STALIN WAS NOT only carrying out a cull of everything suspect in the general population; he made the February–March plenum of 1937 endorse a yet more demented campaign that would threaten to cripple the economy. The logic was that every commissariat must be badly infested by enemies. Kaminsky at health and Orjonikidze at heavy industry demurred; their commissariats, they were sure, were clean. These denials cost them their lives. Kaminsky was arrested, and on February 18, 1937, Orjonikidze, the last man to talk to Stalin as an equal, either shot himself or was shot by Stalin’s emissary.³¹

At first Voroshilov, war commissar, also resisted Stalin and Ezhov’s thesis. Voroshilov argued that the army took only the best sons of the people, but then changed his mind and announced to the assembled Central Committee news that “will make even your steel-hard hearts shake.” Several commanders were under arrest. At the plenum forty-two army officers spoke up in support of Voroshilov and against their comrades—thirty-four of them were to perish. Voroshilov was to preside over the murder of the army’s commanders, but he hung on to their gifts, cushions embroidered by their wives.³²

Beheading the Red Army was certainly a successful preemptive strike. An army of NCOs could never mount a coup d’état, nor would the killing of army officers stir up the same horror among the intelligentsia as the slaughter of the peasantry or the urban professional classes; like Kamenev and Zinoviev, Tukhachevsky and his fellow civil war commanders were up to their necks in blood. And Stalin’s blow at his own power base had its paranoiac logic. The army was the last force outside Ezhov’s NKVD that could conceivably overthrow Stalin and it still contained officers from the Tsarist army. In addition, most Red Army commanders had been appointed by Trotsky and many despised the performances of Stalin and Voroshilov in the civil war—two had published accounts of the 1920 campaign against the Poles that showed Stalin at his worst. Moreover, for fifteen years the officers had collaborated with the German army in tactics and technology and, who knows, in ideology. Stalin especially distrusted the supreme commander, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky. The marshal had charisma, and was so admired abroad that the German and the émigré Russian press had called him the USSR’s future Bonaparte.

Tukhachevsky had been arrested in 1923 and, with other commanders, came under Menzhinsky’s suspicion in 1930. Suspect officers were sent abroad as attachés, which in 1937 made them foreign spies. Did they really plot against Stalin? In his dotage Molotov insisted that Tukhachevsky had planned a coup; the NKVD defector Aleksandr Orlov alleged that Tukhachevsky had gotten hold of a document proving that Stalin had been an Okhranka agent. Tukhachevsky must have considered a coup d’état at some point. But, given the all-pervading NKVD—every two senior officers were monitored by a political commissar—and its overwhelming strength around the Kremlin, a coup could not be discussed, let alone mounted.

Stalin’s ingratitude toward the Red Army, without whose brilliance and energy he could have died on the gallows in 1919 or 1920, is attributed by some to a German sting. Soviet agents in the 1930s reported Nazi leaders mooting an officers’ plot against Stalin; in early 1937 Pravda received reports, which Stalin saw, that Alfred Rosenberg was cultivating anti-Semitic Red Army officers. The Gestapo and Abwehr allegedly concocted documents proving that Tukhachevsky’s staff was in German pay, and fed them to the NKVD through Beneš, the Czechoslovak foreign minister.³³