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

Just as he refrained from citing Stalin as his accomplice—he had been warned not to—Beria gallantly asked the court to withhold the names of female witnesses testifying to his moral depravity. None expressed any affection for him; the mother of one even demanded Beria’s property as compensation for her daughter’s lost honor. Beria’s own cousin Gerasime Beria gave evidence that he had been a Menshevik spy when in prison in Kutaisi. Even Beria’s son Sergo linked him to enemies of the people. Witnesses accused Beria of engineering murder after murder, from the infamous Tbilisi airplane crash of 1925 that killed Mogilevsky, Atarbekov, and Aleksandr Miasnikian to Solomon Mikhoels’s death in Minsk.

Beria’s six henchmen denied him all merit and virtue, and gave graphic accounts of prisoners beaten not just on his orders but by his own hand. Beria admitted charges that were self-evidently true— murders of innocent citizens, membership of the Azeri Musavat party, sexual intercourse with minors—but denied everything else: he had not plagiarized his book on Stalin’s leading role in the Caucasus; he had not protected foreign spies.

The sentence for Beria and his co-defendants on December 23, 1953, was, as expected, death.⁴⁵ All were shot on the same night. For Beria a special execution cell was set up, with a wooden shield to which he was tied so that no ricochet could injure the spectators. Beria was dressed in his best black suit for death. He faced his executioners with courage and tried to speak but Rudenko had his mouth stuffed with a towel. There was a scuffle among the officers over who would fire the first bullet. In the event, General Batitsky, who had been guarding Beria for six months, shot him straight in the forehead, and the body was wrapped in canvas and driven to the crematorium. Only the prison carpenter who had made the shield and brought Beria his food was upset by the spectacle.

Beria’s relatives were hounded and deported to the Urals, Kazakhstan, and Siberia. Mirtskhulava wrote from Georgia on August 25, 1953, “His close relatives are busy with baseless vicious conversations, they are sources for the spreading of various provocational rumors. Beria’s mother, Marta Beria, a deeply religious woman, visits churches and prays for her son, an enemy of the people.”⁴⁶ Beria’s two female cousins were imprisoned for complaining about his fate.

Khrushchiov and Malenkov were not consistent in punishing Beria’s associates and Stalin’s other surviving hangmen. Many languished in prison. Bogdan Kobulov’s younger brother, Amayak, and Solomon Milshtein were not executed until October 1954. Shalva Tsereteli, the illiterate aristocrat who had specialized in abduction and murder, was flown from retirement to Moscow and shot. Lev Shvartsman again simulated insanity—he claimed to have invented a miraculous loom—but was shot in April 1955. Akvsenti Rapava, the head of the Georgian MVD, was not shot until November 1955. The last to die, in April 1956, was Shvartsman’s sadistic partner Boris Rodos.⁴⁷

In April 1957 Aleksandr Langfang was the last, perhaps the vilest, of Beria’s henchmen to be tried. He defended himself vigorously: “If you’re trying me, why not try Molotov, whose guilt is proven?” When the prosecutor demanded twenty-five years, Langfang asked for shooting on the grounds that he would be murdered in prison. The Soviet supreme court appealed against Langfang’s sentence of ten years. He finally got fifteen. Constantly protesting his honor, Langfang served his sentence and then lived a further eighteen years.⁴⁸ Others got off more lightly: Leonid Raikhman, described by his interrogator as “a large, terrible beast, experienced, sly, skillful, one of the immediate perpetrators and creators of lawlessness,” served one year in prison before the amnesty of 1957, and then lived until 1990.

Those who had served Beria and then Abakumov in foreign intelligence, such as Naum Eitingon and Pavel Sudoplatov, were given tolerable prison conditions. Beria’s more intellectual friends were also treated gently. The novelist Konstantine Gamsakhurdia never had to account for his twenty years’ friendship with Beria and even acquired moral authority and wealth as Georgia’s greatest living writer, living like a feudal lord in Tbilisi and preparing his son to rule their country. Petre Sharia, the editor of Stalin’s Georgian works, went back to prison, where he again wrote verse:

It’s hurtful, bitter to perish, not knowing why. For I have nothing to repent of, or to struggle with! If only I knew what fateful force Burns me so slowly on the fire.