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

By the time the Soviets reached Berlin, Beria’s men had arrested 27,000 Poles, mostly resistance fighters against the Germans. The unreliability of the puppet Lublin Polish forces, who deserted to their families or to the partisans at the first opportunity, forced Beria and Serov to use cunning. In March 1945 Beria had Serov invite General Okulicki and seven key figures in the Polish resistance to talks with the NKVD at which, guaranteed immunity from arrest, they would meet a General Ivanov and fly with him to London to reach a compromise between the London and Lublin governments with the terms agreed by Russian, American, and British representatives. On March 28 the eight Poles were taken to an airport. There was no General Ivanov; the plane flew them to Moscow, where they went straight to the Lubianka to be interrogated by Beria’s deputy, Vsevolod Merkulov. They were followed by 113 other Poles. Okulicki had been in the hands of the NKVD before, from 1939 to 1941 in Lwów. He confessed that he had been waiting for the war to end in order to join with the British in a battle against the USSR. On June 18 sixteen Poles were tried by Ulrikh, who was for this delicate occasion restrained, on Stalin’s orders, by Molotov, Beria, and Vyshinsky. The Poles were allowed defense lawyers; the sentences were mild. Leopold Okulicki came off worst with ten years’ imprisonment. However, Okulicki and two others soon died in prison. Poland had had the first taste of the techniques Beria and Abakumov would use all over eastern Europe to secure Stalin’s control.

Bolesław Bierut’s government was nervous about reaction to Okulicki’s fate and interceded for Armija Krajowa members and for judges, professors, schoolboys, and others among the thousands arrested. Stalin granted most an amnesty. Bierut’s government included a number of Jews; endemic Polish anti-Semitism flared up. In Kraków Polish policemen joined in a pogrom. On July 4, 1946, in Kielce, a runaway Polish child, Henryk Blaszczyk, was induced by state security officers to say that he was fleeing from Jews who meant to eat him. A crowd of some 15,000, again led by policemen, slaughtered forty-two Jews. These pogroms, which in total killed perhaps 2,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, were led by Poles who saw Jews and communists as one and the same. A 1947 leaflet in Bydgoszcz declared, “a handful of degenerate Jews have taken over the state.” But the Soviet-backed Polish Ministry of Security joined the frenzy: one of its bulletins read, “Once again a nine-year-old girl has disappeared. It may be that Jews from Rzeszów have eaten her. . . .” Poles complained that Russian films had been dubbed into Polish by Jews so the Soviet authorities employed ’s widow and son to check the dubbing actors for Jewish accents.

Other countries that the Red Army invaded caused the NKVD fewer headaches. In Bulgaria elections were rigged to give Dimitrov’s communists and their Soviet advisers control by the end of 1945. In Czechoslovakia, where even noncommunists revered Stalin as the leader of the Slavs and the USSR as the sole country that had not betrayed them at Munich, the survivors of the prewar communist party, strengthened by the Moscow nominees Gottwald and Clementis, needed less assistance than Polish communists and infiltrated Eduard Beneš’s social democrat government. The communists took over policing, public and secret, and banished or murdered politicians who stood in their way. The Red Army and the NKVD helped the Czechs in their most popular enterprise: to drive out 3 million Germans from the Sudetenland. The government handed over the land to Czech peasants and the factories to Red Army engineers for dismantling and removal to the USSR.

By the end of 1944, the Soviet authorities had installed in Romania their nominee Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. As in Czechoslovakia, they needed three years to disable other political parties. (One minister, Gheorghe Tatarescu, said, “We shall put some in prison, liquidate others, and the rest we shall deport.”) Romania, unlike Poland or Czechoslovakia, was not to be ethnically homogenized: the Hungarian-speaking west of the country was kept intact, and many Romanian Jews had survived. Stalin insisted on Gheorghiu-Dej giving ministerial posts to a Jew, Ana Pauker, and an ethnic Hungarian, Vasile Luca—although both were soon purged.