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

The cinema became for Stalin the supreme art. Sinners among film directors were forgiven. He even let Kapler, who had been beaten for kissing Svetlana Allilueva, work, although in 1943 he was sent to the camps for ten years. Sergei Eisenstein, who had come close to arrest for his years in America and for his religious portrayal of the peasantry in Bezhin Meadow, was recruited. Together with Lev Sheinin, Vyshinsky’s favorite interrogator, Eisenstein proposed a film about the trial and acquittal of the Jew Mendel Beilis, accused in Kiev of drinking a Christian infant’s blood for Passover. But a Jewish project was anathema to Stalin; anti-Semitism was part of his Russian chauvinism. Eisenstein was directed to make a film not about honest Russian jurymen, but about Ivan the Terrible. Stalin saw himself too as a harsh, divinely appointed ruler who would save his country in a war on two fronts: the Germans and the Japanese of 1941 were reincarnations of the Livonians and Tatars of 1540. Aleksei Tolstoi, with clairvoyant perception of what Stalin wanted, drafted a three-part drama on Ivan. Stalin edited the first published version until Ivan came across as sufficiently stable and unrepentant for his taste.

Not Ivan the Terrible, but Russia’s great generals obsessed Stalin in 1940. A film was proposed glorifying Catherine the Great’s General Aleksandr Suvorov, who had fought Swedes and Turks with equal success. Stalin read the script and told the director to make Suvorov less kindly. Stalin’s Suvorov was in his own image as generalissimo:

The script doesn’t reveal Suvorov’s characteristic policies and tactics: 1) correctly taking into account the enemy’s faults, and knowing how to exploit them fully; 2) a properly thought-out and bold attack combined with a diversion to strike the enemy in the rear; 3) the ability to choose experienced and bold commanders and to direct them to the object of attack; 4) the ability to promote boldly to senior posts those who excel, without regard to rank, taking little notice of the official seniority or origins of those promoted; 5) the ability to sustain in the army harsh, truly iron discipline.⁴⁵

Trotsky’s End

KATYN HAD BEEN BERIA’S WORST MISTAKE, but in August 1940 he had a resounding success: he had Trotsky killed. For seven years, since Trotsky had left Turkey for France, the NKVD’s pursuit of the only enemy Stalin took seriously had been a gruesome farce. The French authorities were fed up with the trail of bullet-ridden corpses and the émigrés and diplomats who helped the killers; the NKVD, apart from killing Trotsky’s children, his parents, his sister, his sister-in-law, and some of his political followers, had murdered eight secretaries. When in January 1937 Trotsky moved to Mexico, the NKVD could plan anew as the Stalinist Mexican Communist Party had influential supporters, and Mexico’s refugees from Spain included NKVD collaborators. Stalin’s determination was not lessened by Trotsky’s newly conciliatory position toward him. To the dismay of his followers, Trotsky had approved Stalin’s division of Poland with Hitler, on the grounds that the USSR was a workers’ state and that the Baltic states and Poland would now benefit by joining a proletarian empire.

Beria had inherited from Ezhov a few Spanish Civil War adventurers. One was Naum Eitingon, who had operated as a guerrilla with the republican forces under the name of General Kotov, and who took over from the defector Aleksandr Orlov as the NKVD’s main agent in Spain.⁴⁶ Eitingon was assisted by Iosif Grigulevich and by a new recruit to the NKVD’s main directorate, Pavel Sudoplatov—the only one of Beria’s men to publish a full, if mendacious, account of his activities. They were allotted $300,000 to mount their operation, which produced two plans, both using new agents unknown to Trotsky. One, organized by Grigulevich, was an amateurish machine-gun attack on May 24, 1940, by Mexican Stalinists led by the painter David Siqueiros and assisted by the treachery of Trotsky’s last secretary, Robert Sheldon Harte. Siqueiros’s men riddled Trotsky’s room but failed to search it. The Trotskys hid under the bed.⁴⁷