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

Only the hardbitten like the critic Viktor Shklovsky—his brother, a priest, had been shot—had an inkling of what Stalin would do: “Victory will give us nothing good. . . . Our regime has always been the most cynical of any that have ever existed; the anti-Semitism of the communist party is just delightful. . . . I have no hope of the allies exerting any beneficial influence. They will be declared imperialists the moment peace talks begin.” Even a conformist like Aleksei Tolstoi feared that “when war comes to its completion we shall still have to fight our allies for the partition and remaking of Europe.” The novelist Sergei Golubov was equally grim:

Any kind of changes for the better, any freedom of thought, of artistic creation is out of the question for us, for we have the inertia of power, of an order which has been established for all time. The authorities are incapable, even if they wanted to, of the slightest concessions in public life or the collective farms, the economy, for that might make a crack into which all the dissatisfaction that has piled up would gush.

Like many writers, Golubov was overwhelmed by poverty: “Where else, except in the USSR, can a writer be asked such a crazy question as: ‘Are you suffering from malnutrition?’ A writer can be gratified with a sack of potatoes or a pair of trousers.”

By summer 1944, optimism was fading. Books were not passing the censor; writers were being reprimanded by cretinous party officials. Kornei Chukovsky, the translator and much-loved children’s poet from Leningrad, complained of the most terrible centralization of literature, its subordination to the tasks of the Soviet empire. . . . I am living in an anti-democratic country, in the country of despotism. . . . The dependence of our press today has led to the silence of talents and the squawk of the sycophants. . . . With the fall of the Nazi despotism, the world of democracy will find itself facing our Soviet despotism.

Stalin and Merkulov cracked down on the self-assertion of intellectuals as mercilessly as they had on the national identity of the Chechens or Crimean Tatars. Merkulov announced that all writers who had expressed rebellious opinions were being “worked on.” The monthly journals, their main outlet and source of income, were brought to heel. Stricter editors were installed. Writers and film directors were told to produce epics showing Stalin’s wise and heroic conduct of the war.

Stalin’s younger acolytes Georgi Malenkov and Andrei Zhdanov, relatively well-educated members of the Politburo, were told they had to restore order in the arts. The Leningrad journal Zvezda (Star) annoyed them most. Leningrad, despite its authoritarian rule by Andrei Zhdanov, nurtured the illusion that its extraordinary suffering during the war entitled it to speak more freely. The poetry in Zvezda spoke too much of the realities of war: “bridges made of frozen corpses,” “a rotten scum of bile and anguish,” tuberculosis, and prostitution. Contributors failed to see that the alliance with America was over and continued being conciliatory to religion and the bourgeoisie. Nikolai Aseev, otherwise a Stalinist poet, had written to the Americans: “You have an Abraham, we have a Joseph . . . let’s make a new Bible.”

The self-esteem of the intelligentsia and of the Red Army’s generals had to be crushed; Stalin was preoccupied with preventing his satraps getting above themselves. Beria, Abakumov, Molotov, and Malenkov all found their freedom of action and their certainty of power curtailed. Stalin had gotten all he wanted from the Allies in Potsdam in summer 1945 and had quickly joined the war against Japan in August, but in that same month everything changed with the American detonation of two atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Arguably, these bombs saved many more lives than they took. Not only were the Americans spared the loss of life that an invasion of Japan would have cost, but, having lost the atomic race, the Soviets could no longer contemplate overwhelming the smaller forces of the British and Americans in Europe and realizing Lenin and Trotsky’s dream of a Soviet Union from the Atlantic to the Pacific.