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

Mekhlis was as ridiculous as he was atrocious: when he found captured Germans with playing cards depicting naked women, he printed 11 million leaflets to shower on the enemy: “How Hitler is depraving his army.” Officers were arrested not for fighting badly, but because they had been arrested before, had received secondary education under the Tsar, or were sons of priests. General V. Kachalov, who had already been killed in his tank, was sentenced to death because he was seen putting into his pocket a German leaflet as he drove off to the front; the general’s wife and mother-in-law went to the GULAG.

A real test came in the Crimea, which in 1942 the Red Army was trying to hold against the Germans. Never had Mekhlis been so frenetic in giving battle orders, recruiting political workers, and dismissing officers; this was ground he had conquered twenty-two years ago. Now everything went wrong. Mekhlis was responsible for the disaster of May 1942, when the Russians were swept off the peninsula by a German army half their size. Mekhlis escaped without a scratch but with a besmirched military reputation. A key territory, 400 tanks, 400 aircraft, and nearly half a million men had been lost. Stalin sent a menacing telegram:

You hold a strange position, as if you were a bystander or observer not responsible for the deeds on the Crimean front. This position is very convenient, but it is rotten through and through. . . . If you had used attack aviation against tanks and enemy forces, and not on sideshows, the enemy would not have broken through the front....⁸

Oddly, back in Moscow Mekhlis was not court-martialed; Stalin set up a party military and political propaganda unit, in which he could do less harm. He nevertheless continued to range over the fronts, encouraging blocking squads to shoot retreating soldiers and moving on when he had enraged local commanders. When political commissars were abolished, the panic had abated, and victory over Hitler seemed certain, Mekhlis became just a bogeyman, and commanders could even appeal against his slanders. Now they might be demoted, but not shot.

War had changed Soviet society. Initiative had been encouraged, even rewarded when it succeeded. Victory over a real enemy, not some Trotskyist chimera invented by Stalin, had restored the individual’s faith in himself. The Red Army—into which nearly a quarter of the entire population had been recruited—had become more powerful, more supportive, and more worth fighting for than the party. Above all, German bullets had steeled men and women to overcome their fears. It would need a very heavy hand indeed after victory in 1945 to return the population to the servile and gullible state of the 1930s. Stalin, Abakumov, Beria, and Mekhlis would have to use all the punitive force at their command to get the population back into its cage.

Like Stalin, Mekhlis was more perturbed than jubilant when the Red Army moved into central Europe: “Not just in the history of the Soviet Union, but in the history of our Fatherland, for the first time millions of people have visited abroad. They will bring back all sorts of things. Much of what they will see makes no sense to our people. . . . And what would they say if they’d been to America (skyscrapers, industry)?” ⁹ Stalin and Mekhlis were right. The sight of prosperity beyond a Russian soldier’s dreams, even in war-ravaged Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, did have an effect on his mind. Mekhlis would have to combat the corrupting effect of capitalism on the army of occupation. This prompted Stalin in March 1946 to make him once again minister of state control, where he could cut out the rot in the bureaucracy and the officer caste.

Evacuation, Deportation, and Genocide

Send, o Lord, the Soviets Thy help,

And from the master race protect our land,

Because Thy sacred Ten Commandments

Are broken more by Hitler than by us.

Nikolai Glazkov