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

The Last of the Intellectuals

THE FIRST BIG PROJECT assigned to Beria by Stalin was the show trial of a vast network of alleged spies. Dozens of intellectuals and party officials made hundreds of confessions, incriminating virtually every writer who had not yet been arrested and every ambassador and official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Between the first arrests and the final executions two years would pass but Stalin finally decided against the show trial itself. At the end of 1939 his pact with Hitler and the partition of eastern Europe would occupy the limelight. In any case, some of those incriminated might yet be of service to the Soviet state.

The scapegoat was the journalist Mikhail Koltsov. If Pravda featured a readable piece in the 1930s, Koltsov was probably the author. His versatility and courage—he was a pioneer pilot and had been a a front-line war correspondent from Kronstadt to Barcelona—belied his frail appearance and made him genuinely popular. Koltsov could toe the Stalinist line and would even help the NKVD murder “enemies of the people” with whom he was acquainted, but in his writing he could be bitingly satirical. ²⁸ He was also famous in Europe for his Spanish Diary, which had recorded as graphically, if not honestly, as George Orwell the corrupted idealism of the Spanish Civil War. The USSR had been officially neutral in this war and Koltsov had invented an alter ego, Don Miguel, for his fighting role.

Stalin, Ezhov, and Beria distrusted Soviet participants in the Spanish war. Military advisers like Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, the Soviet general consul in Barcelona, and journalists like Koltsov were open to infection by the heresies, especially Trotsky’s, prevalent among the republic’s supporters. NKVD agents sent to Spain were therefore keener on abducting and murdering anti-Stalinists among republican leaders and International Brigade commanders than on fighting Franco. The defeat of the republic, in Stalin’s eyes, was caused not by the NKVD’s diversionary efforts, but by the treachery of the heretics.

Stalin had twenty years’ worth of grudges against Koltsov. He had spent 1918 in his native city Kiev, where under Kaiser Wilhelm’s benign occupation the Ukrainian press had printed his liberal and anti-Bolshevik articles. In 1923, against Stalin’s wishes, Koltsov had printed in Ogoniok —the magazine he founded and which outlasted the Soviet Union—a photomontage “A Day in the Life of Trotsky.” When Koltsov organized the world 1935 congress of writers in support of culture against fascism, he had failed to make the participants praise Stalin as loudly as they condemned Hitler. Moreover Koltsov had made Stalin give in to blackmail: unless the USSR sent real writers such as Babel and Pasternak not just Soviet party hacks—all dressed in identical coats and suits ordered for the occasion—the French delegates would walk out.²⁹ Koltsov was friendly with French leftists like André Malraux, who were distancing themselves from Stalin, and had invited André Gide to Russia, let him meet Soviet intellectuals unmonitored by the NKVD, and had failed not only to stop Gide publishing his Retour de l’URSS, but also to refute Gide’s “slanders.”

Stalin greeted Koltsov jovially on his return from Spain and on May 14, 1938, summoned him for an hour’s meeting with himself, Voroshilov, and Ezhov to discuss why republican Spain was losing the war to the fascists. Koltsov was alarmed by his parting exchange with Stalin: “Do you own a revolver?” “Yes.” “You’re not thinking of using it to shoot yourself, are you?” Koltsov told his brother that he read in Stalin’s eyes the judgment “too smart.” Arrested on December 13, 1938, Koltsov found his interrogator, who could not write two words without three spelling mistakes, convinced of the existence of a conspiracy by all Russia’s major prose writers and poets still at liberty. Koltsov’s arrest was sensational; nobody believed that a man admired all over Europe could be disgraced.

Whenever a writer was arrested, Stalin would summon the novelist Aleksandr Fadeev, secretary of the presidium of the Union of Writers, to accept complicity in the repression.³⁰ Fadeev saw Stalin reading two files of the statements that Koltsov had been tortured into making and perused them himself. “Now do you believe in his guilt?” Stalin asked. Koltsov was accused of being recruited by both French and German intelligence, together with his French friends and German communists in Russia including Koltsov’s refugee German girlfriend, Maria Osten. Babel, Pasternak, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Aleksei Tolstoi were implicated in Koltsov’s statements.