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

NKVD men who had fled to other areas of government were hounded down, as they had been by Ezhov; almost none previously arrested were spared by Beria. Béla Kun underwent another year’s interrogation before being shot in November 1939. His consort Rozalia Zemliachka kept her post in Party Control. Stalin shielded her for sentimental reasons—in 1903 she had been almost the first of Lenin’s emissaries to contact the young Jughashvili.

A very few NKVD men arrested by Ezhov were retrieved by Beria. Andrei Sverdlov, the son of the first head of the Soviet state, had as a boy stolen Iagoda’s cigarettes and later been found work as the GPU’s youngest interrogator. Ezhov, no doubt at Stalin’s behest, had Sverdlov arrested. He was interrogated unusually gently and delivered to the Lubianka. Beria apologized to him on behalf of the Central Committee and appointed him assistant to the man who had just interrogated him. Sverdlov, at twenty-eight, became Beria’s specialist in academicians, poets, and the wives of arrested old Bolsheviks; he was noted for mixing physical violence with sophisticated conversation.

Beria was resisted by only one veteran chekist, Mikhail Kedrov, now head of an institute of neuropsychology. Kedrov’s son Igor, a serving NKVD officer, was horrified at Beria’s promotion and urged his father to tell Stalin what he had last said in 1923—that Beria had been an Azeri police agent. Beria arrested Mikhail Kedrov in February 1939 and Igor two months later. Kedrov senior was, to Beria’s fury, acquitted by the USSR’s supreme court. Not until October 1941, when Beria evacuated a trainload of prisoners to Saratov on the Volga, could he shoot Kedrov out of hand.

Beria extinguished the last spark of humanity in Ezhov’s satrapy. Lefortovo prison, which broke prisoners who held out in the Lubianka, had a hospital where torture victims were restored so that interrogation could resume. Anna Anatolievna Rozenblium, the “good fairy of Lefortovo,” reverted to the Tsarist tradition of compassionate prison doctors, like Dr. Haas who had nursed the young Dostoevsky back to sanity in Omsk. Anna Rozenblium in two years’ service at Lefortovo certified forty-nine cases in which prisoners died under torture and nursed many more back to health. The few who survived Lefortovo and the GULAG remember her as the last human being in the NKVD. On January 31, 1939, Beria arrested Anna Rozenblium, and Boris Rodos trampled her. Convicted as a Polish spy, she emerged fifteen years later from the GULAG to testify against her torturers.

The NKVD was superficially reformed: officers still took the furniture and apartments of those they arrested, but Beria now stipulated “that the furniture is to be stock-checked and temporarily given to employees quartered in these apartments,” although no NKVD or KGB man ever gave back to rehabilitated survivors the possessions they stole. Prisoners were no longer driven about the streets in marked vehicles, but were discreetly transported in vans signed “Vegetables” or “Meat,” thus serving two propaganda purposes at once.

Beria decided to give the NKVD the same cultural gloss as the Red Army, establishing the world’s only secret-police song and dance ensemble. It was to perform for Stalin’s official sixtieth-birthday celebrations in December 1939.²¹ This ensemble would give in 1941 an unlikely refuge to the satirical dramatist Nikolai Erdman, who had infuriated Stalin in the 1920s with his play The Suicide. In 1933 Erdman had incurred arrest and three years’ exile in Siberia by inducing the actor Vasili Kachalov to recite in front of Stalin his fable:

The GPU arrested Aesop

And smashed his glasses and his teeth up.

The moral of our fable’s this:

Don’t ever dare to take the piss. ²²

The belief that Beria would restore justice and moderation to NKVD activities was fostered by the release of prisoners when an NKVD investigator was arrested or dismissed. Those released were able to protest their innocence and denounce illegal torture; little did they know that in 1939 Stalin repeated in writing the telegraphed authorization he had in 1937 given the NKVD to use “physical methods of influence.”