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

Shoot me peacefully, without agonies. Neither the court nor the Central Committee will believe I am innocent. If my old mother is still alive, I ask for her old age to be provided for and for my daughter to be brought up. Please do not repress my relatives, my nephews, since they are guilty of absolutely nothing. . . . Please tell Stalin that everything that has happened to me is just a coincidence of circumstances and it is quite possible that enemies whom I missed have had a hand in it. Tell Stalin that I shall be dying with his name on my lips.⁵⁰

The judges pretended to deliberate for half an hour. Ezhov fainted at the verdict, then scrawled a petition for mercy; it was read out over the telephone to the Kremlin and rejected. Ezhov was taken in the dead of night to a slaughterhouse he himself had built near the Lubianka. Dragged screaming to a special room with a sloping cement floor and a log-lined wall, he was shot by the NKVD’s chief executioner, Vasili Blokhin. Beria gave Stalin a list of 346 of Ezhov’s associates to be shot. Sixty of them were NKVD officers, another fifty were relatives and sexual partners.

Ezhov’s mother, Anna Antonovna, and sister, Evdokia Babulina-Ezhova, survived. The Ezhovs’ adopted daughter, Natalia, was, like Iagoda’s son, taken to a provincial orphanage and given a new surname. In 1958 she voluntarily went to live in the GULAG world of the Kolyma, where she taught music. All her life Natalia Khaiutina has demanded Ezhov’s rehabilitation, arguing that he was no more guilty of murder than other Politburo members who did Stalin’s bidding.

EIGHT

THE RISE OF LAVRENTI BERIA

Why Beria?

IN MID-1938, surveying a country where most were paralyzed by terror and many fired by suspicion and fanaticism, where the only initiative shown was in writing denunciations, a state bereft of its best professionals—army officers, physicists, translators, engineers, agronomists— Stalin may have paused for reflection. His own world had also been devastated: his wife had made the ultimate gesture of rejection; his two sons, terrified and repelled, avoided him; he had put to death two of his most trusted Georgian friends, Abel Enukidze and Sergei Orjonikidze. The yea-saying conversation of his loyal robots Kaganovich, Molotov, Voroshilov, Andreev, and Zhdanov provided little consolation; the note of comradely affection disappears from Stalin’s missives.

Clearly, the center of power had shifted. The NKVD was no longer the chief agency of Stalin, the Politburo, and the party, but a power that could bring down the highest echelons.

Stalin’s choice of Lavrenti Beria first to oversee then replace Ezhov was a logical decision. It worked on a personal plane: Stalin knew all about Beria, from the stains on his character to his fifteen-year-long record of intelligent, flexible, and ruthless efficiency. Unlike Ezhov, Beria knew when to hold back, when to step back. Beria was not just a vindictive sadist, he was an intelligent pragmatist, capable of mastering a complex brief, and one of the best personnel managers in the history of the USSR. With very slight adaptations, he could have made himself a leading politician in any country of the world.

Beria had proved himself as the Stalin of the Caucasus, murdering and terrorizing like Ezhov and Stalin combined but managing the economy more skillfully than Kaganovich, and the intelligentsia more masterfully than Andrei Zhdanov. Beria combined Ezhov’s energy and unscrupulousness with Menzhinsky’s intelligence and finesse. He could sustain the atmosphere of terror and yet repair the damage caused to the USSR’s economic and military strength. Only the disgust Beria aroused in almost every Bolshevik had stopped Stalin bringing Beria to Moscow before. But now that those who knew the worst about him—Sergo Orjonikidze, Sergei Kirov, Abel Enukidze—were dead, nobody in Stalin’s circle was so fastidious as to object to working with such a murderous, devious, ambitious, and utterly unscrupulous lecher. Fifteen years would pass before Kaganovich, Molotov, and Voroshilov would be as frightened of Beria as they had been of Ezhov.

Beria in the Caucasus