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

The chief prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, easily adapted to Beria’s regime. He staged public demonstrations of legality: a group of veterinarians accused of spreading anthrax among horses found a lawyer, Boris Menshagin, to defend them and were released.²³ Vyshinsky himself moved into government, as deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. As always, Vyshinsky survived by throwing his colleagues to the wolves. In the previous two years he had denounced any prosecutor with a sense of legality or conscience to Ezhov. Faina Niurina, vulnerable as a woman and a Jew, had signed her own death warrant in 1937 when she quoted the guillotined French revolutionary Olympe de Gouge: “If a woman has the right to mount the scaffold, she has the right to join the tribunal.”²⁴ Now the ruthless Grigori Roginsky, whom Vyshinsky had used to dispatch rival prosecutors such as Krylenko, was sanctimoniously handed over to Beria as a counterrevolutionary. Beria put Roginsky in the hands of his hardest men, Bogdan Kobulov and Lev Vlodzimirsky.²⁵ By 1940 the prokuratura was run by Viktor Bochkov, an army officer who knew no law but had advised Ezhov on which army officers to arrest. Beria could rely on Bochkov to fit the law to the NKVD’s needs.

Arrests in the Red Army dwindled under Beria in 1939. That year only 847 officers were dismissed and forty-one arrested; under Ezhov some 38,000 had been dismissed of whom nearly 10,000 were repressed. The naval officer Piotr Smirnov-Svetlovsky, arrested in March 1939, was perhaps the last accused conspirator in the armed forces. In 1939 Beria even had some 5,570 dismissed officers reinstated.²⁶ Two years later the NKVD recorded at least 18,000 Red Army men alive in its prisons and camps, and some were retrieved for service in the Second World War.

The GULAG population nevertheless grew relentlessly—by January 1, 1939, to 1,344,408, with another 315,584 in corrective labor camps and the same number in prison. The courts began to acquit some of those accused of counterrevolution; convictions for political crimes fell to a tenth of the 1938 figures. Shootings also tailed off. Beria and Stalin cut counterrevolutionary executions from 328,618 in 1938 to 2,552 in 1939 and a mere 1,649—if the murder of 21,000 captured Poles and the thousands of shootings in the GULAG camps are ignored—in 1940. The mortality of prisoners in the GULAG fell to 50,000, half the 1938 figures. Beria is credited with an amnesty, but in reality fewer (223,622) were freed from the GULAG in 1939 than had been in 1938 (279,966). In 1940 over 300,000 were let out. These figures however pale beside the influx of new prisoners: 749,647 in 1939 and 1,158,402 in 1940. Terror under Beria was just as massive, only less immediately deadly.

Stalin wanted a more pliable, not a more humane, NKVD, and on occasion gave Beria orders to kill without arrest, let alone trial. Under Iagoda and Ezhov such killings had been largely done abroad; now they happened in the USSR. The first victim, in July 1939, was the Soviet ambassador to China, Ivan Bovkun-Luganets. He was not to be arrested lest his colleagues still in China panic and defect. Beria and Bogdan Kobulov reserved a Pullman railway carriage to take Bovkun-Luganets and his wife, Nina, to Georgia, to the mountain resort of Tsqaltubo. Three senior NKVD men shared the carriage, two of Beria’s acolytes, Lev Vlodzimirsky and Shalva Tsereteli, and the bodyguard Veniamin Gulst, an Estonian Jew. Tsereteli killed the ambassador with a hammer, Vlodzimirsky battered the ambassador’s wife, and Gulst strangled her. At Kutaisi station the bodies were unloaded in sacks. The head of the Georgian NKVD, Akvsenti Rapava, had the bodies driven into the mountains. An accident was staged. The driver of the car was shot and all three bodies were buried in Tbilisi. The ambassador and his wife— but not the chauffeur—were then exhumed and reburied with full honors on Stalin’s orders.

The same summer Stalin decided that Marshal Grigori Kulik must be punished for protesting at the army killings in 1938. But because of the Finnish war of winter 1939–40 the marshal himself, an artillery specialist, seemed temporarily indispensable. It was decided in 1940 just to kill his wife, and for two weeks the killers of the Bovkun-Luganetses, Vlodzimirsky, Tsereteli, and Gulst, staked out the marshal’s apartment until she came out alone. She was interrogated by Beria and, believing she had been recruited as an agent, sent by Kobulov to be shot by Blokhin at Sukhanovka prison. Marshal Kulik reported her as a missing person.²⁷ Vlodzimirsky and Tsereteli were given medals; Gulst was made deputy commissar for internal affairs in newly conquered Estonia. Stalin had Beria put on hold plans to kill Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maksim Litvinov and the nuclear physicist Piotr Kapitsa. For the first lover of Stalin’s daughter, the film director Aleksei Kapler, Beria’s men merely arranged a beating.