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

The scattered bones are tied into a bundle, The knees, the hands, the shoulders humanized. He smiles with his most serene mouth, He thinks in bone and feels with his brow And tries to recollect his human guise.

Many Leningrad writers were also engulfed; the NKVD invented a conspiracy linking children’s writers, translators, and poets to the civil war poet Nikolai Tikhonov. The NKVD and the editor Nikolai Lesiuchevsky, who advised them, as Pavlenko did in Moscow, were however disconcerted when Stalin and Tikhonov took a shine to each other at the Pushkin jubilee celebrations. The NKVD nevertheless drove mad the surreal poet Daniil Kharms, who had recently written his best-known lines for children:

He kept going straight and ahead, and kept looking ahead. He didn’t sleep, he didn’t drink, he didn’t drink, He didn’t sleep, he didn’t sleep, drink or eat. And then one day at sunset he entered a dark forest, And since then, since then, since then he has vanished.

They also arrested the maverick poet Nikolai Oleinikov. His interrogator, Major Iakov Perelmuter, himself shot in 1940, told him, “I know you’re innocent, but the lot has fallen on you and you must sign this fake statement, or else you will be beaten until you sign it or die.” Oleinikov was shot as a Japanese spy on November 24, 1937.

Nikolai Zabolotsky was luckier: on March 19 he was arrested and tortured, but his vivid imagination caused him to go mad. His tormentors were bored by psychiatric cases and Zabolotsky was sent to the GULAG. His charm and talent as a draftsman saved him from hard labor; he was the only important poet to survive the camps and convey what he experienced:

So here it was, the land of melancholy, The Hyperborean barracks, In which Pliny the Ancient had seen An orifice stretching into hell!

Any poet who had, like Mandelstam, been exiled by Iagoda was certain of death from Ezhov. Nikolai Kliuev, denounced to Iagoda by Gronsky, editor of Izvestiia, was in the wilds of Siberia. His appeals to the Political Red Cross and to Kalinin went unanswered even though he recanted: “I respect and exalt the Great Leader of the world’s proletariat, Comrade Stalin!” Kliuev was moved 300 miles nearer Moscow, to Tomsk where, half-paralyzed, he was embroiled by the Tomsk NKVD in the fictitious “Union for the Salvation of Russia.” After months of agony Kliuev was shot in a batch of hundreds on waste ground outside Tomsk around October 24, 1937. When the victims were exhumed in 1956, in the presence of Kliuev’s arresting officer, now rector of Tomsk University, Kliuev’s suitcase with his last manuscripts was found by his bones.

The theatrical world was handled more gingerly as the party bosses valued theater for relaxation. The Bolshoi and Moscow Arts theaters, which provided ballerinas for the Politburo’s beds and informers for the NKVD, received awards and pay increases. Other theaters trembled— Stalin exploited directors’ egos, inducing Vsevolod Meierkhold and Aleksandr Tairov to denounce each other—but of all Leningrad’s and Moscow’s directors and theaters only Meierkhold and his theater were doomed, partly because the actress Zinaida Raikh, Meierkhold’s wife, wrote to Stalin on April 29, 1937:

I keep arguing with you in my head, trying all the time to prove how wrong you sometimes are about art. . . . You are being so infinitely, infinitely deceived, they hide from you and lie to you that you have now rightly addressed the masses. For you I am now the voice of the masses and you have to listen to the bad and the good from me. . . . I have planned a meeting with you for the 5th of May, if you can. . . . I shall now write to Nikolai Ezhov about organizing this meeting....⁴³