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

BERIA, LESS EASILY FOOLED by Hitler than was Stalin, took in what he heard from Sorge in Tokyo and Dekanozov, who in 1940 shuttled between Moscow and Berlin. In Moscow the German ambassador, Schulenburg, a Russophile, told Dekanozov Hitler’s plans. Stalin ordered that bearers of bad tidings should be told to “fuck their mothers.” Beria sycophantically concurred; even on June 21, 1941, the night before German tanks crossed the Bug River, he promised that “accomplices of international provocateurs will be ground into GULAG dust.” He had the gall to ask Stalin to recall his own protégé Dekanozov from Berlin for “bombarding” him with reports of imminent attack. To judge by the change in Beria and Bogdan Kobulov’s treatment of Polish officers from summer 1940, they well knew that war was looming; when in spring 1941 General Wołkowicki asked for permission to fight the Germans in Yugoslavia, Beria was sympathetic. But Beria never confronted Stalin, who had made up his mind that Hitler would not attack the USSR until he had finished off Britain.

In the panic and despondency of July 1941, Stalin kept Beria close by, using him as his number two on the State Defense Committee. Beria took specific responsibility for the defense industry as so many of its factories and workers were part of the GULAG empire. Another of his tasks was to liquidate potential collaborators and to scorch the earth wherever the Red Army was in retreat, so that Hitler, like Napoleon 130 years before, would find neither food, fuel, nor sympathizers.

The NKVD was one of the first commissariats to set up, together with the diplomatic corps shepherded by Andrei Vyshinsky, in evacuation at Samara on the Volga. Of 3,000 prisoners sent to the Volga from Butyrki prison the 138 most important were shot in October. They included Abram Belenky, Lenin’s chief bodyguard and one of Stalin’s oldest cronies, Béla Kun, Mikhail Kedrov, the chekist and neuropsychologist, several air force generals whose planes had been destroyed on the ground in the first hours of the war, and the last head of Red Army intelligence, Iosif Proskurov, who shared the fate of his six predecessors. Generals who survived the first attacks on the western front were arrested by Vsevolod Merkulov and also shot in Samara.

From Oriol prison, reserved for prominent political prisoners— had spent four years there—154 were taken into the forests and shot. They included an unusual number of women, among them Trotsky’s sister Olga Kameneva and the legendary Social Revolutionary Mariia Spiridonova, as well as victims of the show trials who had been promised their lives such as Gorky’s doctor, Pletniov. These murders Beria assigned to the organizers of the Katyn killings, Bogdan Kobulov and Leonid Bashtakov. Worse were the massacres perpetrated on Beria’s orders in the newly acquired Western Ukraine: perhaps 100,000 civilian prisoners were shot in Lwów as the Red Army retreated.¹⁰ When the Germans captured a city very rapidly, as at Poltava, the local NKVD, to make flight easier or to avoid leaving behind anyone who might welcome the invaders, would kill prisoners and “untrustworthy” citizens on its own initiative. Other deaths were ordered from Moscow: in November 1941, in eight days, 4,905 persons were shot on Beria’s orders.

The losses of men in 1941—2,841,900 of the Red Army killed or captured in summer and autumn alone—forced Beria to limit executions and to retrieve military manpower from wherever he could. Two generals in the GULAG, Kirill Meretskov and Boris Vannikov, were patched up in a sanatorium and sent to their commands. Meretskov was one of the few who had fought well in the Finnish war. He was so crippled by torture that he became the only general allowed to report to Stalin sitting down. Vannikov had been commissar for the defense industry until his arrest two weeks before war broke out; he recovered from his ordeals better than Meretskov and eventually provided the military coercion for Beria’s atom bomb project.