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

24. Chekisty often took a reciprocal interest in the writing of poetry: when the Armenian poet Ovanes Tumanian died in 1923, a critique of his “creative and social worth” was published in Erevan under the pseudonym Martuni by Aleksandr Miasnikiants, who had, on behalf of the party and the Cheka, just slaughtered Tumanian’s closest friends.

25. There is an almost plausible theory that Lenin’s shooting was an attempted coup d’etat by Sverdlov. Trotsky was at the front at Kazan, Stalin at Tsaritsyn, Zinoviev and in Petrograd. Sverdlov took over the reins of power, gave the order for Kaplan to be killed without a confession, let alone trial, and did all he could to dissuade Lenin from resuming work until late October. Hitherto healthy, Sverdlov died, apparently of flu, the following March, and his post (chairman of the Executive Committee) was given to Stalin and Lenin’s puppet, Mikhail Kalinin.

Moscow’s first crematorium was opened shortly afterward in the Donskoi monastery. Muscovites objected to firewood being used to burn the dead when the living were freezing for lack of fuel. The Cheka’s victims had priority.

26. See Shambarov, 2001, 132. Bokii, after further killings in Turkestan, ran a commune at Kuchino, where his guests and underlings mixed with naked prostitutes and Bokii’s daughters during orgies and mock executions.

27. See A. G. Latyshev, Rassekrechennyi Lenin, 1996, 57.

28. Dmitrii Volkogonov, Trotskii I, 1999, 295.

29. This was too liberal for Aleksandr Beloborodov, who had signed the order for the killing of the Tsar and his family and was now plenipotentiary for suppressing Cossack uprisings: “those who are captured are not to be tried: they are to suffer mass reprisals.” See Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo: perepiska 1912–1927, Moscow, 1996, 95.

30. Kedrov is unique among arrested chekists in that a trial actually acquitted him, in 1941. Beria had him shot nevertheless.

31. Only in Siberia—through migration, deportation, and isolation from fighting— did the population grow.

32. Zofia Dzieryska in her memoirs insists that Feliks loved children and that they were drawn to him. sent his own son Jasiek to a summer camp run by the Cheka.

33. In February 1920 acquired an even more devoted colleague, his secretary Vladimir (Veniamin) Gerson, who fussed over his health to the day he died. Gerson was later shot by Beria.

34. Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 53.

35. Ibid., 156.

36. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, 11, 174.

37. Feliks , 1951, 155–6.

38. The irony is that Piłsudski grew up on an estate neighboring ’s.

39. Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 156.

40. Latyshev, 1996, 282.

41. GASPI 558, 11, 816, 71, March 7, 1923.

42. Orjonikidze’s fiery temperament, his drinking and womanizing, and his readiness to use his fists had annoyed Lenin before.

43. Kamenev had a dacha at Zubalovo. In autumn 1922, once he had constructed a branch line and gotten a neighboring collective farm to provide food, Stalin persuaded Lenin to stay there too.

44. His first break for three years, from suppressing “bandits” and anarchists in the Ukraine, was a course of hydrotherapy in summer 1921 in Kharkov at Lenin’s insistence.

45. Lakoba archive, now in Hoover Institute.

46. Ibid.

47. V. I. Lenin, Neizvestnye dokumenty, 2000, 439.

48. When, in March 1922, Kamenev’s and Stalin’s mental states worried Lenin and was told to find them a dacha for restful weekends, Stalin voted the proposal down.

49. GASPI 558, 11, 816, 75.

50. GASPI 558, 11, 816, 177.

51. See V. Iu. Cherniaev (ed.), Piterskie rabochie i “diktatura proletariata”—Oktiabr’ 1917–29, 2000, 193.

52. A. Ia. Livshin et al. (eds.) Pis’ma vo vlast’ 1917–1927, 1998, 463–8.

53. Lenin, 2000, 487.

54. Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 277.

55. Ibid., 278.

56. Ibid., 311.

57. GASPI 76, 3, 231, 2. Only in despair did confess to Kamenev that the only way to revive the rural economy would be to restore the dispossessed landowners.

58. GASPI 76, 3, 237, 21. Telegram from Belenky to Gerson, November 7, 1922.

59. GASPI 76, 4, 30, 8.

60. GASPI 482, 1, 46, 9. Quoted by Nekrasov, 1995, 62.

THREE • The Exquisite Inquisitor

1. A typed copy of Menzhinsky’s dissertation is in OR 384, 25, 60.

2. His son, Rudolf, was killed in the First World War. Not until the late 1920s did Menzhinsky, then a sick man, remarry. His second wife was Alla Semionovna, by whom he had a son, another Rudolf (who died in 1951), in 1927.

3. Menzhinsky’s unpublished prose was lost in Paris; some lies in the FSB archives.

4. Menzhinsky, like , visited Gorky on Capri and, like Iagoda, forged a lifelong link with him.

5. Blok had asthma, scurvy, and paranoia; Sologub’s wife was going mad and doctors in Germany or Finland were their last hope.

6. Under arrest the previous year, Blok had told a fellow writer that the Bolsheviks “will kill us all and everything else.”