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

Questioned by clever interrogators, Beria’s notorious Shvartsman and Raikhman, Koltsov admitted links with those already shot or about to be shot: he had been a friend of Karl Radek; he had known Iagoda’s deputy Georgi Prokofiev and had employed his wife as a journalist; he was the employer and lover of Ezhov’s wife; he had known the NKVD defectors in Spain, Valter Krivitsky and Aleksandr Orlov. Shvartsman and Raikhman gave Koltsov a list of those living and at liberty whom they needed to incriminate. His conscience suffered little when he named the secretary of the Union of Writers, Vladimir Stavsky, and he did no harm by naming André Malraux as a spy. But by May 1939 Koltsov had been tortured into implicating people he respected: Vsevolod Meierkhold, the charismatic director of experimental theater, five Soviet ambassadors—Vladimir Potiomkin and Iakov Surits in Paris, Ivan Maisky in London, Boris Shtein in Rome, Konstantin Umansky in Washington—and Commissar for Foreign Affairs Litvinov. These “cosmopolitan intellectuals” had supposedly been corrupted by Western intelligence services.

To back up Koltsov’s admissions, Beria arrested Evgeni Gnedin, the press officer at the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. Gnedin miraculously lived to publish his memoirs: “Beria and Kobulov put me on a chair and sat on either side and punched me on the head, playing ‘swings.’ They beat me horribly, with the full force of their arms, demanding I give evidence against Litvinov.” By August the NKVD could confront Gnedin and Koltsov and make them leaders of an anti-Soviet conspiracy of intelligentsia and diplomats.

Late at night on February 1, 1940, Mikhail Koltsov was tried before Vasili Ulrikh. He retracted all his confessions but was, of course, found guilty and shot that night. The same night Vsevolod Meierkhold was dragged out—both his legs had been smashed—to be shot. Meierkhold also retracted his confessions at his trial and wrote a protest to Andrei Vyshinsky:

I was placed facedown on the floor, beaten on the heels and back with a truncheon; when I sat on a chair I was hit by the same rubber truncheon on the legs (from above, with a lot of force) the pain was such that I thought they had poured boiling water on the injured sensitive parts of my legs (I shouted and wept with pain).³¹

A week later Ulrikh sentenced Isaak Babel to death. All three were shot by Vasili Blokhin, and their ashes thrown into Burial Pit No. 1 at the Donskoe cemetery. Ulrikh smilingly assured Koltsov’s brother that the official sentence of “ten years without right of correspondence” meant that Koltsov was alive in a camp in the Urals.

Many in the Koltsov affair survived untouched. Ehrenburg was allowed to return to live in France. None of the diplomats named were shot: Maisky remained ambassador to London. Litvinov lived, but was replaced by Molotov in May 1939; the Nazi Ribbentrop would not have signed a pact with so prominent a Jew as Litvinov.

In a separate case, Stalin had the novelist Boris Pilniak shot, revenge for Pilniak’s Tale of the Extinguished Moon. Russia’s last prose writers were dead or cowed. Mikhail Bulgakov was blind and dying, Andrei Platonov deeply depressed. After Meierkhold’s arrest and the gory murder of his wife, Zinaida Raikh, Russia’s theater directors came to heel. Stalin decided personally to oversee cinema directors like Sergei Eisenstein. ³²

 For all his engineering training, Beria was—at least until world war broke out—as vicious to technologists or scientists as to writers. In Georgia he had killed a world-class bacteriologist, Gogi Eliava, whose mistress he fancied, and a great engineer, Volodia Jikia. In Moscow the first arrests that Beria ordered included those of Andrei Tupolev, Russia’s most productive aircraft designer, and Sergei Koroliov, the pioneer of rocket engineering. Beria realized quickly enough the importance of such men and reprieved them. They did their engineering in special technical prisons, the carrot being: “The plane flies, you get a Stalin prize and freedom,” the stick: “It crashes and you’re shot.”