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

1. Quoted in Stanislav Kuniaev and Sergei Kuniaev, Rasterzannye teni, 1995, 82. Vasiliev was released in 1932 despite these verses being in his dossier. He was shot on August 13, 1937.

2. The Osetians are an Iranian people settled in the central Caucasus. Osetians were until recently integrated with their Georgian neighbors; Stalin’s possibly Osetic blood is no more significant to Georgian or Russian history than Henry Tudor’s Welshness is to English history.

3. N. Tlashadze, GASPI 8, 2:1, 48, 20.

4. GASPI 71, 1, 275, 23.

5. GASPI 558, 11, 721, 68.

6. GASPI 558, 11, 722, 51.

7. See Iakob Gogebashvili, Rcheuli tkhzulebani, 1990, vol. 2, 80–98.

8. Bezbozhnik, December 21, 1939, quoted in E. S. Gromov, Stalin, 1998, 38.

9. Pasha subsequently married and had a child. Her husband, her child, and her mother all died in the mid-1930s and, shortly before her husband’s aunt wrote to Stalin to find her, she herself vanished, no doubt arrested, from the streets of Moscow. See B. S. Ilizarov, Tainaia zhizn’ Stalina, 2002, 284–6.

10. K. Gamsakhurdia, Davit Aghmashenebeli, Tbilisi: 1942, 465.

11. Roman Brackman asserts that Stalin chose the name Koba after his natural father, Prince Koba Egnatashvili.

12. See Ilizarov, 2002, 411–53 for a full analysis of Stalin’s reading of Dostoevsky.

13. Stalin took steps to set up an institute of experimental medicine under a certain Professor Bogomoltsev, who promised an elixir of life. When Bogomoltsev himself died aged only sixty-five, Stalin laughed bitterly.

14. GASPI 558, 3, 406.

15. Most of Russia’s Esperantists were later shot as cosmopolitans and spies.

16. Stalin appears also to have had a reading knowledge of French. On May 4, 1923, he circulated Fridtjof Nansen’s protest (in French) on the impending execution of Patriarch Tikhon to the Politburo, and only Tomsky marked the document, “Did not read, for unfortunately I have not studied French.” (Politburo i tserkov’, 1997, 1, 302–03).

17. Pravda, December 21, 1994. Underneath Stalin appended in blue pencil: “Alas, what do we see, what do we see?”

18. Cartoons attributed by Ilizarov in Tainaia zhizn’ Stalina, 2002, to Stalin, such as a doodle of the finance minister Briukhanov hanging by his genitals, do not tally with the geometric, abstract nature of his doodling.

19. Grigol Eliava died in 1925, but his son, the bacteriologist Gogi Eliava, was arrested by Beria and shot in 1937.

20. Archive documentation neither supports nor fully refutes this suspicion. Much archival material quoted here was first published by Aleksandr Ostrovsky in his monograph, Kto stoial za spinoi Stalina, St. Petersburg, 2002.

21. Zaria Vostoka, December 23, 1925.

22. In 1944, living enviably uneventfully as a housewife, Polina wrote her memoirs, and was made to surrender these and all her gifts from Stalin to the party archives. GASPI 558, 4, 647.

23. Petrovsky’s claim to fame is that he was the only member of this Central Committee Stalin allowed to survive the terror of the 1930s.

24. This dossier is not available; it may be in the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation.

25. Ozolinņš published his memoir in 1933 when, as director of the Latvian Bank, he was negotiating a trade agreement with the USSR; his critique of Stalin was therefore tactful. He was nevertheless shot on Stalin’s orders in 1941. For a Russian translation of Ozolinņš’s memoir and Boris Ravdin’s article on it, see Daugava,Riga, 2002, 4, 126–42.

26. The Bolsheviks had a fashion for “hard” pseudonyms: apart from Stalin (steel) there was Kamenev (stone) and Molotov (hammer), not to mention Fiodor Raskol’nikov who named himself after Dostoevsky’s axe-murderer.

27. Kibirov was posted to Turukhansk as a punishment for misdemeanors in the Caucasus, which explains why he sided with Stalin against the gendarme.

28. This son, Aleksandr, was subsequently adopted by a peasant, Davydov, to whom Lidia was later married off. Aleksandr Davydov became a major in the Red Army and died in 1987.

29. GASPI 558, 1, 54, 1–3.

30. Bednyi means “the poor”; his real surname was more appropriate, Pridvorov (of the court). He was probably the illegitimate son of one of the Tsar’s cousins.

31. GASPI 558, 11, 701.

32. GASPI 558, 11, 721, 126.

33. Obshchaia gazeta, St. Petersburg, No. 9, March 1–7, 2001, 15.

34. The fate of Shapiro, arguably the bravest man in Stalin’s entourage, is unknown.

35. Chuev, 100 razgovorov, as cited by D. V. Koliosov, I. V. Stalin, 2000, 200–01.

TWO • Stalin, , and the Cheka