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

The Soviet glitterati and their attitude to the NKVD remind one of the Eloi in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine—frolicking on lawns by day, sleeping in frightened huddles at night when out of subterranean shafts come apelike, pasty-faced Morlocks, the “human spiders” who snatch and eat them. Vladimir Stavsky, as he was snaring Osip Mandelstam for the NKVD, was enthusing to his diary about rescuing his cat, about rabbits and mice in the snow, the star-studded sky, Moscow’s new skyscrapers, and Lazar Kaganovich’s athletic physique. But Stavsky was bothered by his inability to write a single sentence of artistic worth, and in the summer of 1938 the beaches of Sochi, once crowded with the families of officials, were deserted. The prisons, camps, and mass graves overflowed. Institutions were breaking down for want of skilled workers.

Even though Stalin intervened directly in the management of terror, it still destroyed the very people that he needed to preserve. The USSR lost its astrophysicists when the Pulkovo Observatory in Leningrad was raided; Moscow’s low-temperature physics laboratory could have exploded when its physicists were taken by the NKVD. One also wonders what went through Stalin’s mind when he learned from a despairing relative’s letter in April 1938 that of the many thousands of women whom the NKVD had plucked from the streets in Moscow and lost in the camps one was his own daughter, Pasha Mikhailovskaia, the first of his illegitimate children.⁴⁷

In autumn 1938 the terror seemed to stop, as suddenly as it had started eighteen months before. Stalin had for some time been giving Ezhov conflicting signals. He was awarded the Order of Lenin in July 1937—he shaved his head for the occasion—and was brought into the Politburo in October. But he knew that promotion from Stalin often foretold a favorite’s doom. On December 20, 1937, when Ezhov was the star of the evening at the Cheka’s twentieth-anniversary celebrations, Stalin stood Ezhov up; Anastas Mikoyan delivered the encomium to the “Iron Commissar.” Ezhov had been put on a pedestal as high as ’s—panegyrics were commissioned from folk poets in Dagestan, towns named after him—but Stalin had snubbed him.

Ezhov’s worsening drinking bouts forced the Politburo to grant him leave in December 1937. In February 1938 Ezhov took his protégé Uspensky to Kiev to install him as commissar of the Ukrainian NKVD. With Nikita Khrushchiov’s help, Ezhov and Uspensky, often too drunk to stand, decimated the Ukrainian chekisty. Ezhov was now arresting his own appointees. Some perished for complicity with Iagoda; some, like Iakov Deich of Rostov on the Don and Piotr Bulakh of Vladikavkaz, were arrested on the previously inconceivable pretext of “excesses.” “Excesses” were condoned again in September 1938, when local NKVD chiefs were told by Stalin to pass death sentences without referring them to the center, in other words to Ezhov. This last frenzy—105,000 shot by regional troikas—was, however, limited to two months. Its end was also Ezhov’s.

Disposing of Ezhov

George’s son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live—and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o’clock that same day— another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion. . . .

Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

EZHOV KNEW his game was up in April 1938, when he was also made commissar of water transport, rather as Iagoda had been transferred to communications; the previous water transport commissar had been shot within a month of appointment. For two months Ezhov nevertheless plunged into water transport, as only he knew how, arresting much of the commissariat and bringing in his NKVD men to replace them.

NKVD overseas operations had suffered in the purges. Ezhov had failed to kill Trotsky, although he had infiltrated Trotsky’s inner circle in Paris and stolen parts of his archives. Ezhov’s last competent agent was Sergei Shpigelglas, who specialized in liquidating defectors and émigrés. Shpigelglas’s final action was to murder Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov, as the latter convalesced from an appendectomy.⁴⁸ This last murder was counterproductive: it alerted Trotsky and made him warier. Shpigelglas also left such a blatant trail of blood that he damaged Franco–Soviet and Swiss–Soviet relations.

Worse for Ezhov’s reputation were the defections of some NKVD men he had recalled to Moscow in order to arrest. Giorgi Liushkov on June 12, 1938, went over to the Japanese, Aleksandr Orlov on July 14, to the Americans. Liushkov published in Japanese frank accounts of Stalin’s crimes. Orlov offered Ezhov and Stalin a deal: he would keep quiet about Stalin’s crimes in exchange for the lives of his relatives; if he or they disappeared, his lawyers would reveal what the NKVD had done in Spain and in the USSR.