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

War forced Stalin to dismantle his monolith. Within months he had learned that he could not micromanage a successful response to blitzkrieg, that generals and colonels had to make their own decisions. He had to allow the Church to rally the people. He could not win without the support of the hated West, and he had to make concessions. At times Stalin even had to tell the truth to his people. In his decree of July 28, 1942, he admitted: “The population is beginning to be disillusioned by the Red Army, and many curse it for handing our people to the yoke of the German oppressors, while retreating to the east . . . we no longer prevail over the Germans in human resources or supplies of grain.” British and then American officers had to be allowed to walk the streets of Moscow and the northern ports, even fraternizing with Soviet officers and befriending Soviet women. Winston Churchill set aside all his knowledge and hatred of the Bolsheviks and welcomed Russia as an overnight ally, the first ray of hope for a beleaguered Britain. German planes would for a time have no more fuel from the Soviet oil fields, and the troops poised to invade Britain were now pouring east. Roosevelt, when six months later the United States joined the war, had no hesitation in embracing Stalin as an ally—or at least a deterrent—to tie down a significant number of Japanese divisions. Just as pragmatically, Stalin had to mask his contempt for Western statesmen and make some concessions in order to receive from his new allies leather, meat, vehicles, munitions, and information that might stem the German tide. Stalin pretended to forget about Anglo-American intervention against the Bolsheviks in 1919; the British and Americans enforced silence in their own countries about Stalin’s crimes against humanity.

Stalin’s hangmen abandoned prophylactic killing; they had to see to their own survival and the nation’s. For a short while they encouraged Stalin to avenge the army’s defeats by shooting one hapless general after another, but within a year, like Stalin, they understood that professional officers, engineers, and administrators were too precious to waste. The blood of the rank and file, civilians or soldiers, was still shed prodigiously, but the hangmen observed a truce in their war of attrition against the professional classes.

Beria Shares Power

IN 1941, AS WAR LOOMED, Stalin began to manipulate his henchmen in a new way. The dangers of arrest and execution receded, but so did the security of power. Stalin began to duplicate powers, to split commissariats, to switch his favors from one to another, to make his underlings jealous and suspicious of each other. The change in Stalin can be ascribed to his realization that his mental and physical powers were waning—he was now sixty-two years old—and that, for the first time since he had achieved power, his plans were going awry. The Red Army almost defeated by the Finns, Hitler sweeping through the Balkans, first isolating, then threatening the USSR, all proved his fallibility. He could no longer crush every obstacle in his path. He trusted nobody—not even himself, as he told Khrushchiov—and saw a potential assassin in every guard and every associate. Even more than before, he duplicated the channels that fed him information and avoided written instructions, often even verbal ones. A clenched fist to his teeth, a raised eyebrow was an order which could more easily be disavowed. Stalin began to be unpredictable and his hangmen reacted accordingly. They too hesitated to take any course of action that could not be stopped or reversed. They cooperated less and watched each other more. Even the old circle of Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Molotov lost its coherence.

Beria was better equipped, by personality and intelligence, than anyone else to cope with an aging Stalin, but even he must have been dismayed on February 3, 1941. Days after making him general commissar of state security, Stalin sliced his empire in two. Beria remained commissar for internal affairs, but his remit was now mundane: traffic police, firemen, and the GULAG empire. A separate Commissariat for State Security was hived off and Stalin appointed Beria’s loyal deputy, Vsevolod Merkulov, to the new commissariat. Beria had been warned not to monopolize power, but he was not in as precarious a position as Iagoda and Ezhov had been when they had lost sole command of state security. Beria and Merkulov were after all old allies; their working and personal relationships remained close.

Vsevolod Merkulov’s appointment was typical of the new tactics. Stalin was throwing several scorpions into the box to see if one would kill the others. Another of Beria’s subordinates, Viktor Abakumov, replaced Merkulov as Beria’s deputy and was subsequently put in charge of military counterintelligence. After the war, a couple of lesser scorpions from the security services, Rukhadze and Riumin, were thrown in to counteract these three.