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

Eitingon’s plan was more subtle. His agent Ramón Mercader was a fanatical Stalinist, physically strong but morally weak, and had fought in Spain. His mother, Caridad, had for three years been an NKVD agent. Mercader had many aliases: the Belgian Jacques Mornard, the Canadian Frank Jackson. Sudoplatov and Eitingon instructed him to court Trotsky’s assistant Sylvia Ageloff, to express no interest in Trotsky or Trotskyism, and to insinuate himself into the house as her apolitical husband. Despite Mercader’s lack of credentials, political knowledge, or personal charm, Trotsky was too polite or too resigned to assassination to investigate him or to avoid being alone with him. On August 20, 1940, Mercader smashed an ice pick into Trotsky’s skull. Mercader was caught; Eitingon and Caridad Mercader were already on their way to California. If there was any doubt that Trotsky’s death was Stalin’s doing, it was unwittingly dispersed by Pravda’s triumphant announcement before even the Mexican police knew that Trotsky had been killed “by a member of his inner circle.”

Stalin was so pleased by this success that he personally assured Naum Eitingon, “not a hair will ever fall from your head.” ⁴⁸ Three weeks later Stalin’s magnanimity went further: he told a Central Committee meeting that enemies should be portrayed in films not as monsters, but as people hostile to our society, but not devoid of some human characteristics. The vilest villain has human traits, he loves somebody, he respects somebody, he wants to make sacrifices for somebody. . . . Why not represent Bukharin, however much he was a monster, but he did have some human features? Trotsky is an enemy, but he is [corrected to “was” in the stenogram] a capable man, without argument, represent him as an enemy who had negative features, but he also had good qualities, because without argument he did.⁴⁹

Having disposed of Trotsky, on January 30, 1941, Beria became general commissar of state security. It did not worry him that he might last no longer than Iagoda or Ezhov after Stalin had awarded them that rank.

NINE

HANGMEN AT WAR

“Brothers, Sisters!”

HITLER’S ATTACK on the USSR on June 22, 1941, did not alter Stalin’s view of his people. When he had recovered from the shock of Hitler’s “treachery” and the humiliating rout of the Red Army, Stalin broadcast to the nation in terms he had never used before and would never use again, speaking like a Christian, calling on his “brothers and sisters.” However, nothing significant had changed in Stalin or his hangmen. Beria and Merkulov’s secret police went on shooting prisoners, including those arrested for anti-German statements. Absurdly draconian measures were announced to deter troops from surrendering or retreating, however inevitable or logical such a tactic might be.

What altered on June 22, 1941, was the attitude of the Soviet people. German cannon and SS extermination squads, scorched earth, and starvation neutralized fear of the party and NKVD. Some gave vent to despair. Anna Akhmatova was heard declaring, “I hate, I hate Hitler, I hate Stalin, I hate those who are bombing Leningrad, I hate those who are bombing Berlin, I hate everyone who is conducting this absurd, horrible war.” Some felt uplifted by the suffering of a just war. Pasternak’s poem “A Terrible Fairy Story” announces that “The fear that has furrowed faces / Will never be forgotten,” but anticipates, as did very many Soviet citizens, that for this suffering there would be a compensation: “A new better age will dawn.” What made the horrors of the 1940s more tolerable than those of the 1930s was that everyone’s fate was bound together. If the Soviet people gave in to the Nazis, Stalin and all his henchmen would go down with them. For once, the leaders of the country depended on the people, and had to show it. Pasternak called the war “a purifying storm, a stream of fresh air, a wafting of redemption.” The Leningrad poet Olga Berggolts exulted: “In mud, dark, hunger, grief, / Where death followed our heels like a shadow, / We felt such happiness, / We breathed such stormy freedom, / That our grandchildren would envy us.” For free speech, people still paid with their lives—in punishment battalions or by firing squad—but the fear had abated.