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

Corruption, endemic in the bureaucracy at all but the highest levels, undermined the Russian state. Bribery and infiltration crippled the Tsar’s gendarmerie—even if, by the standards of today’s Russian militia (which a cynic might call the uniformed branch of the mafia), the gendarmerie was an efficient and dedicated force.

In 1908 the prophets of doom—and their voice was loud among Russia’s newspaper tycoons, philosophers, theologians, and poets— sensed that Russia’s Armageddon would come from a world war into which its alliance with Britain, France, and Serbia, and the myopia of the Tsar’s family, would drag it. There was no good reason for Russia to be drawn into a quarrel with the Kaiser’s Germany or Habsburg Austria-Hungary; Russia had no seas whose waves they needed to rule, no colonies to expand at the expense of other empires. The rush toward 1914 was that of Gadarene swine.

The Bolsheviks attacked the Russian state not because it was oppressive but because it was weak. The Russia of 1908 did nearly as much for its citizens as the states of western Europe did for theirs. Trial by jury, equality before the law, enlightened treatment of ethnic minorities, religious tolerance, cheap credits for farmers, an efficient postal and railway service, a free press, flourishing universities with leading scientists, doctors, and scholars, universal (if impoverished) primary education and primary medical care, the most powerful outburst of creativity in all the arts that Europe had known since the Italian Renaissance—all this outweighed for many observers the endemic alcoholism and syphilis, the idleness and bribery, the foul roads, the idle bureaucrats, the general poverty. Russia’s ills seemed curable by economic progress.

Lenin’s followers had a clever motto: “The worse, the better.” They actively encouraged (if only by not assassinating them) brutal governors-general, stupid gendarmerie colonels, exploitative factory owners, because these men might create a resentful proletariat who would follow the social democrats.

When Stalin went to prison and into exile, he was not isolated or disadvantaged. He could educate himself further, meet other revolutionary socialists from all over the Russian empire and, when he left this incubation stage, emerge all the more effective and dangerous a pestilence.

Prison and Exile

. . . from the forest a rifle fired, it shot Diambeg dead . . . and wounded next to him Giorgola, who heard a voice: “I am Koba! I have avenged my friend Iago!”

Aleksandre Qazbegi, The Parricide

AWAITING DEPORTATION in cell No. 3 of Baku’s Bailov prison, Koba was visited by his mother and a girl, a neighbor from Gori. He valued his fellow inmates more than visitors, forging bonds with two in particular: Sergo Orjonikidze, a Transcaucasian bandit and party organizer, and Andrei Vyshinsky, a well-educated Menshevik lawyer from Kiev. Orjonikidze was emotional if brutal, and loyal. Vyshinsky was the most calculating and cynical of all Stalin’s associates; for twenty years he would provide the oratory and the legal framework to send hundreds of thousands to their death. Even in prison Vyshinsky found a comfortable niche: he was cell monitor and worked in the prison kitchens.

Koba made two escape attempts, but by early 1909, delayed en route by typhus, he was in exile in the north of Russia, at Solvychegodsk, fifteen miles over a frozen river from the railhead at Kotlas. Little detained Koba there; as exiles remarked, only those who couldn’t be bothered to escape stayed. Koba fled first to St. Petersburg, where his future father-in-law Sergei Alliluev found him a safe house owned by a concierge. (Concierges in Russia as in France, trusted by the police, provided the safest refuge for criminals on the run.)

That summer Koba was hiding in Baku, printing newssheets. He saw neither his mother nor his son. Another woman entered Koba’s life: Stefaniia Petrovskaia, who had left her Odessa home when her father remarried and entered into a common-law marriage with a political exile in Solvychegodsk, but fell in love with Koba and followed him to Baku.

In March 1910, Koba pronounced his first death sentence on a party member. When the typesetters refused to continue working at the Bolshevik underground printworks, Koba believed that the party had been infiltrated by half a dozen informers and demanded that one, Nikolai Leontiev, be summoned to a meeting and killed. Leontiev, however, fought back and demanded a “trial,” agreeing to die if found guilty. Support for a kangaroo court evaporated and Leontiev lived. Shortly afterward, Koba was again arrested.