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

The treatment of two Polish Jews taken prisoner in October 1939 was just as calamitous as Katyn for Soviet credibility and the war effort. Henryk Erlich and Wiktor Alter were leaders of the Jewish socialist Bund, effectively the heart and mind of a Jewish anti-Hitler committee. They were taken to Moscow and charged as Polish spies and hostile critics of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. Beria’s men worked slowly; the war with Germany had been raging for a month by the time Alter was sentenced to death. Instead of death, however, Erlich and Alter were first given ten years’ imprisonment and then offered their freedom if they would head a Jewish antifascist committee. By mid-September they had offices in the Hotel Metropol and were looked after by Beria’s Polish liaison officer. Beria proposed Erlich as president and Alter as secretary, while the world-famous Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels would be vice president. But things did not go according to Beria’s plan. Erlich and Alter used their initiative: they worked with the British, Polish, and American ambassadors, and proposed a Jewish legion to fight alongside the Red Army. They also began to search for missing Polish officers. Beria sent Leonid Raikhman to arrest them on December 4, 1941, this time as Nazi agents spreading pacifism. Erlich hanged himself in prison the following May while Alter wrote letters to Stalin threatening suicide. Only in early 1943, when the discovery of Katyn ruined relations with the Poles and Stalin felt he had little to lose, did Molotov reply to the inquiries of Albert Einstein and other distinguished Americans and instruct Litvinov to announce that both Erlich and Alter had been shot for treason on December 23, 1941. Beria in fact had Alter shot three days after this announcement. Sergei Ogoltsov, head of the NKVD in evacuation at Kuibyshev, personally supervised the execution and the burning of his possessions. Roosevelt and Churchill both silenced protests in their own countries, but Jewish trust in Stalin as their savior collapsed.

  In 1940 and 1941 Stalin’s instincts and cunning had completely failed him. Initiating a winter war with Finland when the Red Army had been lobotomized by the NKVD ruined his prestige. Sanctioning the murders of Poland’s officer corps and two internationally respected Jewish activists were acts as stupid as they were atrocious. Appearing to dismiss as Anglo-American disinformation all the reports that his intelligence received about Hitler’s intentions was his most catastrophic failure. About the first two lapses Stalin was uncharacteristically unvindictive. He quarreled with Voroshilov over the latter’s inept conduct of the Finnish campaign, but when Voroshilov in fury retorted, “You killed all the senior officers!” smashed a plate and stormed out, Stalin did nothing. Voroshilov was replaced as commissar and given less crucial defense posts—where he performed with equal incompetence—but never fell from favor. Nor did Beria, Merkulov, and Bogdan Kobulov suffer for killing those Polish officers who would have been so useful a year later.

What was going through Stalin’s mind in 1940? All his enemies dead, with Beria running internal affairs and Molotov external affairs, as hopeful as Neville Chamberlain that he had brought “peace in our time,” Stalin withdrew into what he took to be philosophy. He had taken Hitler seriously enough to have had Mein Kampf translated and studied. Stalin read the same books as Hitler—Clausewitz’s On War and Otto von Bismarck’s memoirs—but drew different conclusions. Reading Clausewitz, Stalin could well have concluded that no German leader would repeat Napoleon I’s mistake of invading Russia; reading Bismarck, that no German leader would dare fight another war on two fronts. Stalin and Hitler were both gamblers: Stalin was a calculating player; Hitler, staking everything on one card, blitzkrieg, played a different game.

While his minions ruled, Stalin recast both history and himself. Since the Marxist historian Pokrovsky had died, the moving force of history had, for Stalin, reverted from class struggle to kings and queens. Soviet textbooks in the 1930s reflected this change by showing Russian nationalism and empire building in a positive light. In 1938 Stalin had the “newly literate” languages of the USSR switch from the Roman to the Cyrillic alphabet. Tsarism was now “progressive”: it had built a multiethnic centralized nation. Anniversaries of Russian classic authors were celebrated with pomp and ceremony throughout the USSR; generous Stalin prizes were awarded to any composer, painter, film director, or writer who glorified Russia’s past as the prelude to an even greater future. Andrei Zhdanov commissioned patriotic operas, films, and novels.