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

Two prose writers—Pilniak and Babel—had a year or two to wait before martyrdom, although terror had already silenced both. Andrei Platonov was ostracized, and his adolescent son arrested. Only Bulgakov, dying of kidney disease, still worked, dictating to his wife the last part of The Master and Margarita with its Manichaean vision of Stalin as Satan, the Professor Woland whose cosmic evil is the artist’s refuge against the mundane evil of his enemies.

One writer alone—Mikhail Sholokhov—dared denounce, at length, Ezhov’s horrors to Stalin.⁴⁴ Sholokhov’s dogged courage, or blind despair, may have steered Stalin toward thinking that the Great Terror had done enough, and that Ezhov could now go. Living with servants, a motor car, and his own livestock like a feudal lord among the Cossacks who furnished the material for Quiet Flows the Don, Sholokhov would not stay quiet. With his friends he sat on the district party committee and ran his Vioshenskaia Cossack station as best he could. Unable to finish Quiet Flows the Don, he feuded with the NKVD and party authorities that ruled the Cossacks from Rostov on the Don. The enemy was Ezhov’s ally Efim Evdokimov. Sholokhov’s associates and a cousin were charged with counterrevolution and tortured. Sholokhov got his closest friend released, and took the war onto Ezhov’s territory.

The previous autumn Sholokhov had been received by Stalin twice, on both occasions with Molotov and Ezhov; they talked for over two hours. On February 16, 1938, Sholokhov sent Stalin a twenty-page letter. He accused the local NKVD of aiming to “destroy all the Bolshevik leadership” in the district and told Stalin, “it is time to unravel this tangle.” He denounced Evdokimov, the torture and the falsifications. Absurdly, Sholokhov’s cousin, a schoolmaster, had been accused of uprooting 10,000 fruit trees from school grounds of less than an acre. Stalin admired the power of Sholokhov’s portrayal of Cossacks divided by revolution and collectivization, even though Sholokhov’s querulous-ness exasperated him. Stalin had Sholokhov’s friends released, but made only perfunctory gestures to relieve the fear gripping Vioshenskaia and its Cossacks.

Stalin scrawled over Sholokhov’s letter, “Check this!” He sent Matvei Shkiriatov from the party Control Commission to investigate. Shkiriatov freed only three of the hundreds arrested around Vioshenskaia and found no reason to punish any NKVD officers. Sholokhov came to Moscow and saw Stalin twice more, getting his word in before Ezhov entered the office. The second time, on October 31, 1938, with him were two delegations, one of persecuted officials from Vioshenskaia, the other from the Rostov NKVD. In the presence of Beria, Ezhov was grilled by Stalin. In Moscow Sholokhov took even more extraordinary risks: he visited Ezhov and then, like Babel, slept with Ezhov’s wife. Their lovemaking in the Hotel National was recorded and a transcript given to Ezhov.⁴⁵ But by October 1938 Ezhov was enfeebled: he could not take retaliatory action without Beria’s countersignature, although only Stalin’s intervention saved Sholokhov from the fate of others who had slept with either of the Ezhovs.

Sholokhov’s was a lone voice. Others blocked out their terror by celebrating the mirage of happiness over the Soviet horizon. Using Bukharin’s drafts, Stalin had in 1936 promulgated a constitution that promised secret ballots, freedom of speech, inviolability of the person, and privacy of correspondence. The census figures of 1937 were pulped; the demographic catastrophe that had happened was denied. Some memoirs of the mid-1930s evoke a golden age. The new Soviet elite with its special shops, sanatoria, villas, and servants could pretend, if it drank enough, to be secure. Just as elderly Germans maintain that they were unaware of the fate of their Jewish neighbors and recall in the mid-1930s only full employment, national pride, and public order, so some elderly Russians, often the pampered children of the new bureaucracy, deny being afraid for themselves or sorry for others at that time. Today’s cynical neo-Stalinists argue that the terror affected barely 1.5 percent of the population and that this price was worth paying to guarantee victory in the Second World War.

But what Soviet family or community was not scarred by Stalin’s tyranny? Was the price of victory not so high because the country’s morale, population structure, and armed forces had been crippled? Diaries of the 1930s, even when lyrical and hedonistic, have false, hysterical tones that betray fear and guilt.⁴⁶