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

The Scent of Freedom

IT IS A TRUISM that after losing a war any Russian government makes concessions to its population, and after winning a war the ungrateful regime turns on its own people. Stalin in 1945, only a thousand times more brutally, did what Alexander I had done in 1813 and crushed his nation’s hopes that its loyalty and suffering would be rewarded.

In Russia’s western provinces and the Ukraine, the Soviet authorities faced a problem unique in Europe: they sometimes had to deal with people nostalgic for the German occupation. All German administrators of occupied territory had been murderous to Jews and communists; many had treated the rest of the population as subhuman slaves. Some, however, especially in the regions adjoining the Baltic, had given small towns and villages their first experience of good administration. Peasants had had their land restored and the tithes they had to supply the German occupiers with were not unduly onerous. These memories had to be eradicated. The peace that came with Germany’s unconditional surrender in May 1945 was illusory east of the Elbe. Stalin turned his war machine on his own minorities, on eastern Europeans who sought to revive their prewar independence, and, as in the 1930s, on his own too buoyant intelligentsia and party. The bourgeois contagion that the Anglo-American alliance had brought had to be scrubbed out.

The Red Army, however, was stimulated to unsocialist behavior by Stalin’s own policies. What remained of German industry and infrastructure was dismantled and sent back to the USSR as the beginning of war reparations. Not only industrial plants, but art galleries and museums were looted, sometimes recovering what the Germans had looted from the east. When Soviet soldiers raped German women and took German watches, bicycles, crockery, and clothes, they were only imitating the state. Officers packed whole trains with loot: cars, dinner services, books, even herds of cattle for their dachas. Stalin said that he saw nothing wrong with rape, and he tolerated the massive looting, noting that if he had to arrest a senior Red Army officer he could now easily find a pretext. The criminalization of the Red Army began in 1945. The USSR was flooded with foreign currency and consumer goods: American aid, from Jeeps to secondhand shoes; German loot, from prize cattle to cameras. The black market, which had virtually vanished in the mid-1930s, reappeared. Nothing that Stalin or his successors threatened could kill it off. Likewise, the underworld, so badly damaged by Ezhov, thrived on postwar inequalities. The cities were infested with deserters, demobilized soldiers, and thugs freed from the GULAG; in 1947 there were 10,000 murders and hundreds of thousands of violent robberies in the USSR.

Alliance with the Western democracies shook communist ideology and brought about the rehabilitation of the Russian Orthodox Church. When Easter bells rang out, on Stalin’s orders, in Moscow in 1942, the effect was astounding. On September 5 Metropolitan Sergi, accompanied by two senior bishops, all wearing ordinary suits, and by Molotov and Vsevolod Merkulov, talked to Stalin while Beria, Malenkov, and Mikoyan waited outside. The result was the restoration of Church property, generous funding, and permission to print the Bible. Andrei Vyshinsky was entrusted with finding a censor who could purge the Bible of anti-Soviet sentiments. The choice fell on the dramatist Nikolai Virta, who was paid 500,000 rubles by the Church and declared both the Old and New Testaments to be completely in accord with party ideology.

The Church was now, like that of Ivan the Terrible or Henry VIII of England, an arm of the state. In Stalin’s first broadcast to the Soviet people after the outbreak of war, he had flabbergasted his listeners by addressing them not as “comrades” but, like a Christian pastor, as “brothers and sisters.” Promoting Orthodoxy had been more effective in galvanizing the nation to fight than reiterating the slogans of Stalinism. Stalin may also have listened to an American envoy, who had pointed out that Congress would not hesitate to send the USSR military aid if religious suppression stopped. Right until Stalin’s death Russian metropolitan bishops were delivered in large black limousines to appear on international platforms, such as peace congresses, in the company of such stalwart atheists as Fadeev and Ehrenburg.