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

The NKVD began making arrests: a beekeeper who gave his fellow officers lectures was removed for “counterrevolution.” The camp authorities broadcast recordings of Molotov’s speeches, put on films and lectures, arresting Poles who asked “casuist” questions of the lecturer. Playing cards and money were confiscated; chess sets were issued. Hospitals were set up, and in some months in some camps mortality dropped to zero. A few provisions of the Soviet decree on treatment of POWs, a pastiche of the Geneva convention, were observed.

The Polish officers expressed no gratitude for small mercies. In Starobelsk camp a group of colonels demanded protection from a foreign embassy with a Polish interests office and from the Red Cross; they wanted their relatives informed and, if arrested, they wanted formal charges. They asked to be spared watching films that “offend our national feelings.” They were indignant at the infrequency of mail. (Those in German captivity received all the letters they wanted and could write once a month.) The more reasonable the requests, the more brutal the response. By January 1940, in the Ostashkov camp, on Beria’s orders the NKVD had photographed and fingerprinted all the prisoners in order to charge them with “struggling against the international communist movement.” Intransigent individuals were sent to Kiev or Moscow for trial. Other camps followed suit in February. The NKVD contemplated deporting the officers together with other Polish prisoners, a total of 140,000, across Arctic Siberia to the permafrost of the Kolyma. Nevertheless, some lists of names were given to the Red Cross in February 1940.

Overwhelmed by his charges and expecting more prisoners from the war against Finland, Soprunenko was the first to suggest “unloading” (razgruzka) the camps. He recommended releasing the old, the sick, convinced (or convincing) communists, and murdering frontier police, staff, and intelligence officers. Beria passed this on to Merkulov, who relieved Soprunenko of some of his burdens by recommending moving 22,000 civil servants and landowners to city prisons. But the camps were still crowded.

Beria finally made an unambiguous recommendation to Stalin on March 5, 1940: “They are all thoroughgoing enemies of Soviet power, saturated with hatred for the Soviet system . . . the only reason they wait for liberation is to be able to take up the fight against Soviet power. . . .” The inmates of three camps, 14,700 POWs, and 11,000 Poles held in prisons “should be dealt with by special measures and the highest measure of punishment, shooting, should be applied to them.” The victims were not to be informed of the charges or the sentence. The Politburo voted the same day in favor of murder. Stalin signed first, then Voroshilov, Molotov, and Mikoyan; Kaganovich and Kalinin agreed by telephone.

What made Stalin’s inner circle so eager to murder these officers who the whole world knew were in NKVD hands? Clearly, neither Stalin nor Voroshilov had ever gotten over the defeat which the Red Army, under their direction, had suffered at the hands of these same men in 1920. Now, with the Finns also wreaking havoc on the Red Army, they were doubly frustrated by their incompetence.⁴³ The age-old mutual hatred of Poles and Russians, nations that straddle the fault line between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy, only inflamed the viciousness. Russians had never appreciated being portrayed as the barbarians against whom only Polish chivalry shielded western Europe.

Beria may have initiated this solution. Stalin, when he could tear himself away from his books, was depressed to the point of inertia by the defeats that the Red Army—an army without generals—was suffering at the hands of the well-trained, well-armed, and highly motivated Finns. The only meetings Beria had in Stalin’s office in February and March were with army marshals and it is unlikely that Polish POWs figured much on the agenda. Stalin did however make a curious amendment to Beria’s proposals: from the troika—Beria, Merkulov, and the head of special operations Bashtakov—that would sign the death sentences, Stalin crossed out Beria’s name and substituted that of his subordinate Bogdan Kobulov. Did he foresee the operation going wrong and want to spare Beria becoming a scapegoat, or was mass murder too routine an operation for the commissar of the NKVD and Stalin’s best adviser when a world war was in the offing?