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

The Soviet Union and its successor states have never achieved what psychiatrists call closure. Khrushchiov’s “destalinization” was essentially a series of political maneuvers to achieve sole power at the expense of his co-conspirators Molotov and Malenkov. It was impossible for him, and for the rest of the old guard such as Mikoyan, to entirely renounce Stalin without offering themselves up for trial as murderers. Many victims of Stalin, Trotskyists for instance, had in Khrushchiov’s and his successor Brezhnev’s eyes deserved their fate. Survivors of the GULAG and relatives of those executed received not justice, not even an act of contrition, but a “rehabilitation” that consisted of an often mendacious certificate and a month’s salary. Whenever Soviet historians or novelists dared to take destalinization a step further, the brakes were applied—books were banned, people lost their jobs—and the public was upbraided about the sanctity of Lenin’s heritage and the “positive” aspects of Stalin’s leadership. Even after perestroika, when historians began to publish archival secrets and mass graves were opened up, the KGB—soon to be the FSB—took part in the process in order to limit and then stop the revelations.

It is a paradox that Russia’s two greatest novelists, Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoi, in all their work insisted that only by full confession could the crimes of the past be absolved and life become endurable again, yet today’s Russian state refuses to abjure Stalin and his hangmen. Denunciations have come either from nongovernmental organizations—Memorial, the Sakharov Center—using whatever material they have been able to compile or extract, or else from men who, like Khrushchiov, were up to their neck in blood. Stalin and his secret services are still lauded in print and in official speeches. The official myth, passively or actively believed by much of the population, is that Stalin’s murders and terrorism were aberrations into which he was inveigled by Ezhov and Beria. Today’s secret police, the FSB, take pride in their Cheka ancestry. They foster the cult of themselves as ’s samurai, this time protecting the Russian nation, rather than the working class, against its enemies. It takes breathtaking ignorance to regard Menzhinsky’s and Iagoda’s murderers as noble warriors who fell victim to an inferior tribe of butchers under Ezhov and Beria, but the corrupt Russian media and ramshackle educational system do little to dissipate it. The dwindling number of victims receive no recognition of their suffering; their elderly torturers get big pensions and parade their medals with pride.

The Russian state in 2004 is ruled by a man who is, by career and choice, a successor to Iagoda and Beria. And while Russia’s political prisoners number hundreds, not hundreds of thousands, the FSB has taken, in alliance with bandits and extortioners, the commanding heights of the country’s government and economic riches, and goes on lying to, and when expedient murdering, its citizens. Russia is now locked into a global economy and today’s rulers have no reason to murder millions of peasants or terrorize the professional classes. Genocide, however, is carried on by other means, and not only in Chechnya. In the last ten years, for instance, half of the indigenous peoples of Russia’s Arctic regions have perished: 240,000 were alive in 1989, 120,000 are alive today. By destroying their pastures and fishing grounds, removing every support for their existence except vodka and tobacco, Russia’s present government has proved as lethal as the GULAG. For Chechens, today’s war of extermination is even worse than yesterday’s repressions and deportations, for there is no effort to conceal the horrors, given the compliance and complacency of the rest of the world.

As the fates of Galina Starovoitova, Sergei Iushenkov, and Dmitri Kholodov have shown, any genuinely democratic politician or journalist in Russia has not much more life expectancy today than under the Bolsheviks. Russian citizens are too preoccupied with making ends meet and surviving to old age to be interested in forcing the state to account for itself, or to insist on electing honest men and women to power. Much of the truth about the past is locked up in closed archives which with every month grow even less accessible. School history textbooks, with few exceptions, pass over in silence the record of Stalinism.⁵² Until the story is told in full, and until the world community insists that the legacy of Stalin is fully accounted for and expiated, Russia will remain spiritually sick, haunted by the ghosts of Stalin and his hangmen and, worse, by nightmares of their resurrection.

NOTES

Abbreviations for archives: GASPI = Russian State Archive of Social-Political History; GARF = State Archive of the Russian Federation. The numbers given refer (in order) to the fond, the opis, the delo, and the page(s).

ONE • The Long Road to Power