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

When war broke out, Vsevolod Merkulov had the wit to steal others’ intelligence. Naum Eitingon was entrusted with nurturing five traitors in the British intelligence services—Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt, and Cairncross. Through them, once the British had cracked the German Enigma encoding machine, Merkulov obtained for Stalin and his generals information on German armaments and plans. There were Soviet spies in Nazi Germany, but their warnings were dismissed and they were so carelessly handled that the Gestapo soon caught them. Moreover, Stalin insisted on raw intelligence; in his conceit, he would not let professionals analyze the information they gathered.³

Even as commissar for state security, Merkulov devoted time to creative work. He had already written a pamphlet about Beria, “Loyal son of the Lenin-Stalin party.” Using the grandiose pseudonym Vsevolod Rokk (all-powerful fate), Merkulov staged his play Engineer Sergeev to applause all over Russia from 1942 to 1944. In the first disastrous months of the war, Sergeev has to blow up the electricity station he built. German agents, a former kulak, a White Guard, and a Baltic German officer try to stop him. Helped by an NKVD lieutenant Sergeev destroys his beloved power station, killing himself and the German agents.

After Hiroshima, when Stalin conceded that the USSR had to have its atom bomb, Merkulov came into his own. With his education in physics, he understood what questions to ask his spies in Britain and America. Until then, Merkulov performed best his traditional NKVD work: reporting to Stalin on everything writers and filmmakers said when they thought they were not overheard. Stalin and Zhdanov’s attack on the intelligentsia in 1946 was fueled by intellectuals’ utterances during the war, when they felt courted, even treasured, and began to think aloud.

Beria’s other rival was Viktor Semionovich Abakumov. Supposedly born in 1908 to a hospital boilerman and a laundress, and without formal education, Abakumov matched Merkulov’s patrician style but was violent, uncultured, and devious.⁴ Outside secret police work, Abakumov, tall and handsome, was interested only in women and luxury. In his early days Abakumov was called “Foxtrotter” but in 1934 his career faltered when he began taking dancing partners to OGPU safe houses, not only for sex but to make them denounce whomever he next proposed to arrest. He was demoted to GULAG guard. In 1937 he found a new niche in the secret political and operational directorates of the NKVD for whom he installed listening equipment, and made searches and arrests. His physical strength and love of the job at tracted the attention of Bogdan Kobulov, who induced Beria to let Abakumov run the turbulent southern city of Rostov on the Don. In February 1941, when Beria’s empire was cut in two, Stalin arranged for Abakumov to replace Merkulov as Beria’s deputy in the NKVD.

At first Abakumov ran border guards, uniformed police, and fire brigades, but when war began, Stalin put Abakumov in charge of military counterintelligence. Here Abakumov made an impact. He answered directly to Stalin and could ignore Beria. In spring 1943, as the fortunes of war turned in Russia’s favor, counterintelligence became a powerful force. Abakumov became deputy to Stalin, who made himself both commissar of defense and supreme commander. Abakumov’s organization, even more dreaded than Beria’s, was SMERSH (Death to Spies). It had seven branches: it conducted surveillance over the army staff and all forces, it pursued and killed deserters and self-mutilators, it formed “blocking squads” to shoot retreating soldiers, it supervised quartermasters and field hospitals, it filtered suspected collaborators in reoccupied territory, it watched over contact with allies and the enemy. SMERSH terrorized the army and all who lived in combat zones, and squeezed everything it could from German prisoners. SMERSH made death in battle preferable to retreat for Russians and to surrender for Germans, but as an intelligence organization it was a liability. Most of its men were as aggressive and ignorant as Abakumov; they shot or hanged many loyal and able officers and men.

Abakumov controlled his empire from a building opposite the Lubianka, from which he would emerge to stride the streets of Moscow, flinging 100-rouble notes to beggar women. Like Beria, Abakumov was considered just, even compassionate, only by his subordinates. In 1945 Stalin put Abakumov on the Soviet commission to prepare for the Nuremberg trials of German war criminals. In 1946 Abakumov took Merkulov’s place as minister of state security, and held it until 1951. Beria, absorbed by the campaign to build atomic weapons, was no longer a rival, but although Abakumov oversaw two purges and numerous murders for Stalin, even he ultimately proved insufficiently vicious.