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

When Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin met in Yalta in February 1945, not one of these indigenous inhabitants of the Crimea was left. Their fishermen’s houses and their vineyards had been torn down to build villas and sanatoria for Russian party officials. The ethnic cleansing of the Crimea was completed by deporting 15,000 Greeks, 12,000 Bulgarians, and 10,000 Armenians. By the end of 1945, nearly half the deported Tatars had died of cold, hunger, disease, and despair. Many died on the journey and were buried in sand and ballast by the railway tracks. Their barracks in Kazakhstan had no glass in the windows; the bread ration was cut to 150 grams a day. There were no schools for the children; dysentery and scabies, as the NKVD admitted, raged. Those Tatar men who survived the war, however many medals they had, were dispatched on demobilization into exile. The only Tatars released were women married to Russians.

Beria still had some mopping up to do. Muslims in the Caucasus were again the victims. In 1944 47,000 Meskhi, Turkish-speaking Georgians living near the Turkish border, were dispatched to central Asia, as were 1,400 Hemshins (Muslim Armenians), the 9,000 remaining Kurds in Armenia, and some 30,000 people of unspecified nationality. Again, over half of the deportees were children. Between 12 and 33 percent of these deportees died. A few hundred Laz, a Muslim people living around Batumi and related to the Georgians, were mistaken for Meskhi and also deported but the Laz intellectual Mukhamed Vanlishi succeeded in persuading Beria to repatriate, and even compensate, the survivors a year later. In this final phase 413 NKVD men received medals for “bravery” and “fighting merit.”

Prisoners of War

THE DEATH AND MISERY inflicted on the USSR between June 1941 and May 1945 are of course primarily Hitler’s responsibility. In all, 11,285,100 Soviet citizens in the armed forces were killed, reported missing, or taken prisoner. Of these, 939,700 missing reappeared and about half came back of the 3 million prisoners of war—the POW figure is a round one since the Germans and Soviets used different definitions. Thus, over 8 million men and women—predominantly young men—in uniform were killed. Civilians under German occupation fared even worse: the figure of 9,987,000 deaths produced at the Nuremberg trials is roughly correct. Perhaps 4 million—mainly Jews—were shot; the remainder died of cold, disease, famine, and massacre as a result of the German occupation exacerbated by the Soviet scorched-earth retreat. Thus approximately 18 million deaths in the USSR from 1941 to 1945 can be attributed directly to the Nazis. ¹⁶

But how much blame must Stalin and his hangmen take? Did Stalin criminally shed the blood of his armies in futile attacks or last stands? Was the scorched-earth policy a legitimate means of denying the enemy sustenance? Beria, Abakumov, Merkulov, and Mekhlis shot and hanged soldiers, civilians, and prisoners indiscriminately to a level far exceeding the official figure of 40,000 executions for the four years of war. The conditions in Soviet camps became atrocious, as bad as Dachau or Buchenwald. In 1942 alone, 352,560 prisoners, a quarter of the GULAG, died. Some 900,000 GULAG prisoners died of maltreatment during the war, though their camps were thousands of miles from the front. Civilian mortality in both cities and countryside in the unoccupied part of the USSR soared. At the worst periods, the spring of 1942 and the winter of 1943, in some areas half the infants died before their first birthdays. During the blockade of Leningrad, 750,000 perished. ¹⁷ The actual 37 million civilian deaths in the occupied and unoccupied areas of the USSR from 1941 to 1945 exceed by some 23 million the expected number, had mortality stayed at peacetime levels. The structure of the surviving population was distorted to the extent that in some country areas there were three women for every man left alive. Moreover, the draconian retribution exacted on the Soviet population in reconquered areas cannot be blamed on Hitler, while the deaths of half a million deportees and of one and a half million German POWs are entirely due to decisions made by Stalin and carried out by Beria and other commissars.