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

In the lower ranks, in one year Beria dramatically raised the educational level of the NKVD: graduates rose from 10 to over 35 percent, while those with no secondary education fell from 42 to 18 percent. Ezhov’s Slav chauvinism was mitigated by the transfer of half a dozen men, not all of them Georgians but mostly from Tbilisi’s NKVD, notably Sergo Goglidze, a commissar of state security under Ezhov, and Goglidze’s deputy Mikeil Gvishiani. Beria sent Goglidze to Leningrad and Gvishiani to Vladivostok as his satraps. The Belorussians came under the control of Lavrenti Tsanava.¹⁸ The Uzbeks too were policed by a Georgian, Aleksi Sajaia. Twenty years before, under his pseudonym Dr. Kalinichenko, Sajaia had been notorious as the most sadistic chekist in Odessa. In 1939 the whole of the USSR could be said to be controlled by Georgians and Mingrelians.

Notable among Beria’s parvenus were the Tbilisi Armenian brothers Bogdan and Amayak Kobulov, Vladimir Dekanozov, a Georgian from Baku, and Solomon Milshtein, a Vilnius Jew who had joined the Transcaucasian Cheka with Beria and whose promotion of physical education in Tbilisi made him into the fittest of Beria’s torturers. Amayak Kobulov soon became councilor at the Soviet embassy in Berlin, and Dekanozov also went to Germany, as Stalin’s ambassador to Hitler. Bogdan Kobulov, a man who rationalized his brutality by seeing himself as part of an elite with a right to rule, graduated to be Beria’s deputy.¹⁹ Solomon Milshtein was to oversee the USSR’s railways.

The intellectual in Beria’s team was a Caucasian Russian, Vsevolod Merkulov, who had studied physics for three years at St. Petersburg University and had proved his mettle in quelling the Ajarian rebellion of 1929. Beria’s most violent henchman, a Jew from Tbilisi, Leonid Raikhman, held a key post in the NKVD’s training school. Someone whom Beria genuinely liked and brought to Moscow was Prince Shalva Tsereteli, a brave dimwit who had been in prison with Beria in Kutaisi in 1920, escaped to become a bandit and joined the Georgian Cheka as a professional killer. As under Iagoda, the secret police again included a token aristocrat. Beria also brought from Tbilisi the Latvian A. P. Eglitis. Two men who would have a future in the KGB were picked by Beria from the Red Army: Sergei Kruglov, a tank mechanic, took charge of NKVD personnel, and Ivan Serov, the butcher of Budapest in 1956, learned his trade as commissar of the Ukrainian NKVD.

Beria kept on very few key figures from Ezhov’s regime: Pavel Meshik, a Ukrainian specializing in state security, was too talented to shoot and still young enough to retrain as an economist for the NKVD; Iakov Rapoport, the only long-lived Latvian Jew in the NKVD elite, continued to build canals with GULAG labor; Leonid Fokeevich Bashtakov, chief disciplinary officer in the OGPU and NKVD training schools, was chosen by Beria to deal with extrajudicial killings, euphemistically called special operations. Lev Vlodzimirsky, a Russian despite his Polish surname, had ruled the north Caucasus under Iagoda, been brought to Moscow by Ezhov, and was now promoted by Beria to take charge of the directorate for investigations.

Beria kept on especially talented interrogators such as Esaulov, who questioned Ezhov. Lev Aronovich Shvartsman, a semiliterate promoted by Ezhov for his talent in beating prisoners and editing their statements, was promoted. So was his close colleague Boris Veniaminovich Rodos, who battered Ezhov into submission. Rodos enjoyed Beria’s confidence, and his purview included all who had ever brought up Beria’s role as a double agent in Baku. On Beria’s behalf Rodos tortured and dispatched many Caucasians including Betal Kalmykov, first secretary of the Kabarda-Circassian party, and Sergo Orjonikidze’s younger brothers and secretaries. The miracle is that Beria let Rodos, who knew so much, outlive him.

Beria let Rodos loose on the central Asian party leadership in spring and summer 1939. Working in the specially equipped Moscow prison of Lefortovo and scorning the usual truncheons, drugs, or electrodes, he trampled victims with his boots or urinated into their mouths. Another of Ezhov’s men Beria singled out, Aleksandr Langfang, made a brilliant career. A former concrete pourer, he was known for his brutality as a “chopper” (kolun), reducing many former diplomats and Comintern representatives into unrecognizable pulp. Even more fearsome was Shvartsman, who specialized in torturing women and then editing their incoherent confessions, despite his lack of education, with an elegance and grammatical correctness unrivaled in the Lubianka.²⁰