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

1. Even in Polish, despite his talent for graphic writing, was an outsider: he spoke both Polish and Russian with a Lithuanian accent. GASPI 76, 4, 139: circular of October 29, 1920, when Leon Skrzeņdzienko, a schoolmate of ’s, reported seeing him in disguise on the streets of Warsaw. The Red Army was approaching Białystok with a group of proposed ministers for a Soviet Polish republic including . The “dyktator czrezvyczajki” is described as tall, thin, bald, about forty-five.

2. Feliks , Listy do siostry Aldony, 1951, 155–6.

3. P. Filevskii, Ocherki iz proshlogo Taganrogskoi gimnazii, Taganrog: 1906.

4. She died in 1966 at the age of ninety-six.

5. It is typical of Feliks’s punctiliousness that after Stanisław’s murder he confiscated the family estate and assets for the Soviet government, sending Aldona just a few trinkets.

6. See Lev Korneshov, “Liubimaia zhenshchina Dzerzhinskogo,” Rossiiskaia gazeta, February 17, 1994, 7.

7. She later became the protector of another romantic killer and died curator of the Lermontov museum in Piatigorsk.

8. Rosół was released in 1901 “just skin and bones” and died in Kaunas in 1902, his last words, claimed, being, “Long live the Polish Social Democrat Workers’ Union.”

9. See Zofia Dzieryska, Lata wielkich bojów, Warsaw: 1969.

10. Ironically this prison would be death row for Stalin’s political enemies—including the leader of the social revolutionaries, Mariia Spiridonova, and his own brother-in-law Aliosha Svanidze—whose executions he put off until August 1941 when Beria had all 150 shot.

11. Lenin’s secretary Fotieva recounted an episode in which Lenin asked how many counterrevolutionaries he had under arrest. passed him a slip of paper with the figure of 1,500. Lenin returned the paper, marking it with a cross to show that he had read it. , Fotieva claims, interpreted the cross as a death sentence and had all 1,500 shot.

12. A plane crash in 1925 that killed Atarbekov and two other chekisty was greeted by many as divine vengeance even though the young and ambitious Georgian chekist Lavrenti Beria was suspected of sabotage.

13. Bruce-Lockhart found much more intimidating: “his eyes deeply sunk, they blazed with a steady fire of fanaticism. They never twitched. His eyelids seemed to be paralyzed.” For Bruce-Lockhart Stalin, who took part with in these first Anglo-Soviet soundings, was beneath notice: “a strongly-built man with a sallow face, black mustache, heavy eyebrows and black hair worn en brosse . . . He did not seem of sufficient importance to include in my gallery of Bolshevik portraits.”

14. Peterss never relented. In Russia Maisie became, against her father’s wishes, a pupil of Isadora Duncan. In 1938 Peterss, like almost every adult Latvian in the party and the Cheka, was arrested as a fascist spy, tortured, and shot. His son became an NKVD informer. May Freeman died during the Second World War; Maisie, often hungry, found work at the British embassy, but despite contacting the British foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, and an affair with a military attaché, was arrested in 1949 by the KGB and sentenced to ten years in the camps for spying. She died in 1971, still hoping for an exit visa. See Valentin Shteinberg, “Svecha na vetru,” Zemlia (Riga) January 5–February 2, 1993.

15. See Viktor Fradkin, Delo Kol’tsova, Moscow: 2002, 46.

16. Martinņš Lacis, Chrezvychainaia komissiia po bor’be s Kontr-revoliutsiei, Moscow: Gosiz, 1921.

17. Martinņš Lacis, “ i Cheka” in F. Dzierzynski, 1931.

18. The first attempt to look the ugly facts in the face without reverting to Russophile anti-Semitism was in the second volume of Solzhenitsyn’s Dvesti let vmeste (Russians and the Jews: Two Hundred Years Together), Moscow: 2003. Inevitably, the facts feed anti-Semitic propaganda, but ignoring them is to do anti-Semites an even greater service.

19. In 1924 wrote of Zionism to his deputies Menzhinsky and Iagoda: “We must assimilate only the most insignificant % of Jews, that’s enough. The others must be Zionists. . . . Let’s meet the Zionists halfway and try to give jobs not to them but to those who consider the USSR, not Palestine, their homeland.” But in 1918 Zionists had their funds and archive confiscated; “right-wing” Zionists were arrested in 1920. The Politburo gave Stalin on May 6, 1920, the task of negotiating with Semion Dimanshtein, the Bolshevik commissar for Jewish affairs, to make Jews conform to Soviet nationalities policies.

20. His receipt is printed in V. I. Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 51, Moscow, 1975.

21. Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie v Povolzh’e, Moscow, 2002, 707.

22. Ibid., 462.

23. Valerii Shambarov, Gosudarstvo i revoliutsii, 2001, 17.