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

Experience with Iagoda had taught Stalin that the security services could be controlled only by appointing someone from outside their remit. Stalin therefore promoted his former secretary and the editor of Pravda, Lev Mekhlis, into an intelligence and security overlord. Stalin was also tinkering again with the machinery of state. The party Politburo became a dead letter; decision-making passed to the government, the Council of Commissars, and, when the Germans invaded, to the State Defense Committee, which comprised Stalin and his closest cronies. Apart from Molotov, Stalin now tended to prefer younger men—Beria, Zhdanov, Malenkov, Khrushchiov. Their servility was balanced by ruthless infighting that ensured they would never conspire together. Kaganovich was shifted away from the center of power to terrorize the coal and oil industries and occasionally rally the armed forces’ morale with firing squads. Voroshilov was given tasks where he could do the war effort least damage.

Beria was too energetic and efficient to be dispensable. Stalin jokingly called him “our Himmler,” but he was also the Soviet Union’s Albert Speer. Like Kaganovich and Mekhlis, Beria used executions to terrify the hesitant, cowardly, or incompetent; unlike them, he grasped military and technical arguments and was a canny judge of character and ability. Beria remained cool in the face of opposition and danger.

Merkulov, the most articulate and least repulsive member of Beria’s inner circle, throughout the war supplied foreign intelligence. He was an officer’s son and had been a second lieutenant in the Tsar’s army. In Tbilisi Merkulov had taught for three years in a school for the blind and in September 1921 he joined the Georgian Cheka. He faithfully stuck to Beria until the last day of their lives. At the height of the terror Merkulov cannily left the NKVD for trade and transport. When in September 1938 Beria took Merkulov to Moscow and back into the NKVD, he at first balked at the physical torture of detainees. He was teased by Beria—“Theoretician!”

After dutifully organizing the killing of Poles at Katyn, Ostashkov, and Smolensk, Merkulov’s next mission was in summer 1940, when he went incognito to Riga to purge Latvia’s middle classes. On his appointment as commissar for state security Merkulov found the Soviet intelligence service laid waste by Ezhov’s purges with the remnants too frightened of Stalin to tell him unpalatable truths. The NKVD’s best spies, including Richard Sorge, were not trusted.¹ Two of Beria’s acolytes, Amayak Kobulov, Bogdan’s younger brother, and Dekanozov, were stationed in Berlin, Kobulov from September 1939 as first secretary and intelligence officer, Dekanozov from November 1940 as ambassador after spending the summer terrorizing Lithuania. Neither spoke German. The German Foreign Ministry did not know whether to be insulted or amused that the Soviet Union had sent such a physical and mental dwarf as Dekanozov, a toad with stubble, to match their urbane ambassador to Moscow, Count Schulenburg. Amayak Kobulov, on the other hand, was charming but dim, which made him an ideal conduit for Nazi disinformation. Vsevolod Merkulov thus transmitted to Stalin on May 25, 1941, what Stalin wanted to hear: “War between the Soviet Union and Germany is unlikely. . . . German military forces gathered on the frontier are meant to show the Soviet Union the determination to act if they are forced to. Hitler calculates that Stalin will become more pliable and will stop any intrigues against Germany, but above all will supply more goods, especially oil.”

Stalin had sent Molotov to Berlin in November 1940 to negotiate terms on which the USSR might become an ally of Germany, Japan, and Italy but the talks foundered on Molotov’s insistence that the USSR should take over Iran and western India. If Hitler contemplated letting the USSR take over parts of the British Empire, then, Stalin reasoned, the USSR was safe. Even Hitler’s attack on Yugoslavia in spring 1941 left Stalin unperturbed.

Beria himself had completed Ezhov’s work destroying Red Army intelligence: everyone of the rank of colonel or above had been shot. A few terrorized majors remained, their credentials having ethnically Russian surnames and knowing no foreign languages. To guess Hitler’s next move, they relied on gossip gleaned from central European military attachés or drunken SS officers. They drew no conclusions even when the German embassy in Moscow packed its furniture and families off home. They miscalculated the number of German troops on the Soviet frontier as 40 percent instead of 62 percent of all Hitler’s forces. As late as March 1941, Lieutenant General Filipp Golikov, the squat, bald, scarlet-faced blimp who now headed Red Army intelligence, perversely concluded: “Rumors and documents that speak of the inevitability of war against the USSR this spring must be assessed as disinformation emanating from English and even perhaps from German intelligence.” ²