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

Only in November 1941 did Stalin dare trust Sorge’s assurances from Tokyo that Japan would not attack and move Siberian troops to the European front, but prisons and GULAG resources—more than 80 percent of the 2 million prisoners were men of military age—were still untapped. However, just 3,000 kulak exiles were considered safe material for the Red Army and in 1941 over 200,000 more peasants and “socially dangerous elements” had been exiled east for forced labor. From 1941 to 1944 over a million men out of a total of 29 million conscripted into the Soviet forces during the war were taken from the GULAG to the front. The NKVD’s executioners were still busy. Officially, only 1,649 counterrevolutionaries not including Polish officers were shot in 1940; in 1942 the toll was 23,278, excluding untold thousands shot out of hand by NKVD or military tribunals. Long after the rout of 1941, Stalin still had senior officers shot. The choice of victim was arbitrary: some, like General Kozlov, who had lost the Crimea and nearly lost the Caucasus to the Germans, lived on.

Beria had one major deportation to undertake: 1,500,000 ethnic Germans, most skilled farmers in an autonomous republic on the left bank of the Volga, were moved. On August 3, 1941, Stalin, hearing that these Germans had fired on retreating Soviet troops, sent a note to Beria: “They must be deported with a bang.” It is said that Beria and Molotov had already tested the loyalty of the Volga Germans by sending in parachutists in German uniform and rounding up every household that gave them shelter. ¹¹ The deportation—by the standards of Beria’s later operations, even the standards of the British and American internment of enemy aliens—was humane: each family could take up to a ton of possessions and was given vouchers for the livestock they left behind, although these were rarely honored. Some 900,000 ethnic Germans were deported, largely to Kazakhstan; the rest were recruited into labor armies. Like the Koreans before them, the Germans had a strong social and religious structure and were respected by the Kazakhs. Their mortality in Kazakhstan was low, and the land around Alma-Ata flourished under their care.

Stalin twice sent Beria, in August 1942 and March 1943, to stiffen the Russian defense of the Caucasus. Stalin complained to Roosevelt and Churchill that he often had to visit the front, but in fact went only twice in the war as the noise of gunfire loosened his bowels. Beria showed no such cowardice, but the regular army had no faith in him.¹² In the winter of 1942–3 the Germans failed to take the passes over the Caucasus despite, or because of, Beria’s measures. Beria was no general: he replaced Caucasians—Armenians, Azeris, Dagestanis—in the ranks with Russians, and maintained a strong presence of NKVD troops, even if this meant denying arms and transport to the regular army battling on the passes with Hitler’s Edelweiss mountain units. Beria’s actions could always be disavowed. This is why Stalin let Beria’s men contact the Bulgarian ambassador and the short-lived pro-German Yugoslav government to sound out Hitler’s terms for peace. Beria also supervised experiments in bacteriological warfare and excelled himself moving the defense industry to the Urals, with the help of the GULAG and a labor army composed of those ethnic groups not trusted to fight. The production of steel and electricity soon exceeded that of the areas lost to the Germans.

In summer 1943, with the factories in the Urals working and the German tide ebbing, Stalin again hived off state security as a separate commissariat under Merkulov. This was not a diminution of Beria’s power; Stalin was allocating him some new tasks.