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

Vavilov was picked up in August 1940, and after 1,700 hours of interrogation by the notorious Lieutenant Aleksandr Khvat, confessed to being a saboteur working for Iakov Iakovlev, the executed commissar of agriculture. Vavilov’s elderly teacher, Academician Dmitri Prianishnikov, appealed to Beria. Prianishnikov had a little leverage as he was supervising the dissertation that Beria’s wife, Nina, was writing. Vavilov was sentenced to death; after two appeals the sentence was commuted to twenty-five years. In Saratov Prison Vavilov was offered a milder regime and work in a laboratory but, wrecked by torture and famine, he died of malnutrition in January 1943.³⁵ Two experimental biologists, Vavilov’s associates Nikolai Koltsov and Nikolai Ivanov, died suddenly and mysteriously on December 2 and 3, 1940. Prianishnikov begged Beria at least to release Vavilov’s followers and save what was left of biology and genetics in the USSR. Beria did not respond.

Nikolai Vavilov’s younger brother Sergei was a physicist. In June 1945 Stalin made him president of the Academy of Sciences. Stalin liked to have in the highest posts people whose brothers, sons, or wives were in prison or had been executed. Sadism apart, Stalin felt safer when he held his appointees as moral hostages. Vavilov wanted to know his brother’s fate so Stalin telephoned Beria and let him listen in: “Lavrenti, what’s happened to our Nikolai Vavilov? He died! Oh, how could we have lost such a man!”

Lysenko was not the only charlatan Stalin cultivated. In linguistics Stalin was much taken with Nikolai Marr, the son of a Scottish adventurer and a Georgian peasant girl. Marr achieved a professor’s chair for discovering and editing a Georgian translation of a lost Greek commentary to the Song of Solomon. After 1917, Marr invented Marxist linguistics, the Japhetic theory, which grew from an idea about the unity of Caucasian languages into sheer lunacy: all language, he stated, had developed with the evolution of social classes from the four magic syllables “sal,” “ber,” “yon,” and “rosh.” Marr died in 1934. His ravings did include intuitions about language that were far ahead of his time, but his protégés, mediocre sorcerer’s apprentices, made Marrism their road to promotion. Linguists who kept to the mainstream were for fifteen years denounced as the dupes of émigrés and foreign intelligence.³⁶

Ethnic Cleansing

IN 1939 STALIN, as Kaganovich would reminisce, changed personality. The mass cull of his own citizens stopped and he started to leave not just the day-to-day administration but many major political decisions to his henchmen, especially Molotov and Beria. Stalin viewed the storm gathering over Europe as good weather for the USSR: Germany, Britain, and France would fight each other to exhaustion while Russia would peacefully benefit, economically and territorially. To judge by his scribbles in the margins of books, Stalin devoted much of his time to reading: he devoured and annotated film scripts, historical novels and monographs, Georgian and Russian literature, linguistics. His cultural tastes became markedly conservative, his politics more nationalistic than socialist.

In spring 1939 Stalin broke off overtures to Britain and France and made an accommodation with Hitler. The gigantic administrative and policing tasks that ensued from the division of Poland and the annexation of the Baltic states, which Stalin and Hitler secretly agreed to in May 1939, left Lavrenti Beria no time to pursue his purge of the intelligentsia and the diplomatic corps. If Russians now slept better at night, non-Russians became insomniacs. What Ezhov had unleashed on Soviet citizens, Beria turned on Poles, Ruthenians (Western Ukrainians), Moldavians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians, not to mention German and Jewish refugees from Hitler.

Beria’s was not the first ethnic cleansing in the USSR. Genrikh Iagoda and Nikolai Ezhov, at Stalin’s behest, had already singled out those ethnic groups that straddled the USSR’s borders and those within the country which might have allegiance to another state.³⁷ Between Leningrad and the Finnish border had lived 200,000 Inkeri Finns. After Kirov’s murder, their Finnish-language schools, newspapers, collective farms, and village councils were shut down, and in spring 1935 Iagoda had 30,000 deported to northern Russia and Tajikistan. Leningrad lost the dairy products that the Inkeri Finns had supplied. Then 45,000 Poles and Germans were deported to Kazakhstan from the frontier areas of the Ukraine. In 1937 Ezhov had singled out Poles and Latvians living, usually as Soviet citizens, in Russia’s cities for extermination. The next stage was to dispense with any pseudo-legal framework of arrest, trial, and sentence, and to move whole peoples away from border areas to the steppes of Kazakhstan and other areas of Siberia and central Asia, where pastoral nomads had been virtually eradicated in the early 1930s.