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

The Red Army had not just the enemy and SMERSH to fear; the military collegium of the Soviet supreme court also traveled the front, holding courts-martial and issuing death sentences on the most trivial pretexts.⁵ It was headed by Ulrikh’s deputy I. O. Matulevich; he and his men, hardened by the terror of 1937–8, typed thousands of death sentences on slips of cigarette paper. A soldier had only to admire the quality of German aircraft design or to roll a cigarette in a German leaflet he had picked up, a nurse had only to treat a wounded German, to be shot. In such a terrible war some soldiers greeted the firing squad with indifference, even relief, and so on April 19, 1943, Stalin took a leaf from the Germans’ book and brought in execution by public hanging: “Shooting is abolished because of the leniency of this punishment.” This measure resulted in spectacles that revolted even Matulevich: destitute civilians would strip the bodies of the hanged for their clothes. But public hanging was a punishment Stalin kept in his arsenal until the end of his life.

Stalin’s least-known but most vicious scorpion—whom the army loathed even more than they did Beria, Abakumov, and Matulevich— was Lev Mekhlis. Stalin had met him on the southwestern front in the civil war, where Mekhlis was a political commissar who detested former Tsarist officers as deeply as Stalin did. Mekhlis helped Rozalia Zemliachka murder captured White officers in the Crimea.⁶ From the Crimea Mekhlis moved to join Stalin in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, and then, with Bazhanov and Tovstukha, became Stalin’s secretary. In 1926, Mekhlis was sent with Nikolai Ezhov to be educated at the Communist Academy, where he contrived to adopt and, at the right time discard, the Bukharinite views of the academy’s teachers. By 1931 Mekhlis was literate enough to become editor of Pravda, which he turned into Stalin’s mouthpiece, receiving material from Stalin on former party leaders to be denounced in the paper and then arrested by Ezhov. For seven years Mekhlis took not a single day off and dragged into the paper, against their better judgment, fine writers such as Mikhail Koltsov, to make Pravda more readable.

Mekhlis was the sole new member of the party’s Central Committee of summer 1937 who survived the terror. In December of that year, with the purge of the Red Army under way, Stalin made Mekhlis head of its political directorate. Mekhlis traveled across Siberia to pick out officers and political commissars for arrest.⁷

There was a wave of suicides in Mekhlis’s wake: in 1940, over a thousand Red Army men killed themselves “for fear of being held responsible.” Mekhlis spoke to Stalin over the head of Voroshilov. Officers hated Mekhlis for his bullying and denunciations, even if they grudgingly conceded his courage. Like Voroshilov, Mekhlis was unafraid of bullets; he made political commissars hold their propaganda meetings at the front, not in the safety of the rear. By summer 1940, however, Stalin judged that the army had suffered enough. He created for Mekhlis a new Commissariat of State Control, primarily to frighten the Soviet bureaucracy—an institution three times the size of the Red Army—into a semblance of honesty, efficiency, and frugality. Here Mekhlis worked with Malenkov to build up a small army of 4,500 inspectors. By the time war broke out—to his disbelief, as much as Stalin’s—Mekhlis could investigate or veto any expenditure or plans by any of forty-six other commissariats.

To replace the military intelligence apparatus he had destroyed, Mekhlis recruited thousands of men in his own image, many from his old school, the Institute of Red Professors. They acted as political commissars and brought back dual command, political and military, to the Red Army. This system of command contributed to the defeats of 1941 and 1942, and Stalin and Mekhlis reluctantly rescinded it.

Mekhlis had army officers trained on the basis of Stalin’s textbook, The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—A Short Course, a book which singled out Mekhlis for praise, while the rank and file learned slogans glorifying Stalin. Mekhlis worked almost without sleep as Stalin’s troubleshooter and Stalin backed him on most points, balking only at issuing arms to untrained “communist squads.” Over two years, Mekhlis raced thousands of miles across the fronts, killing as many Red Army generals as the Germans. His cruelty was legendary: if the Germans used human shields of Russian POWs or women and children, the Red Army was to mow them down. The NKVD was to slaughter all prisoners in cities that lay in the enemy’s path. A solider who answered back to a sergeant was to be shot in front of the ranks.