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

7. Agranov, not yet thirty, was a frustrated poet. He eventually became a boon companion of Mayakovsky and mixed with Pilniak and Mandelstam. In 1921 he could break into intellectual circles only with a revolver.

8. See Zven’ia I, 1991, 470.

9. It also decreed death for any deportee who returned without permission.

10. G. Latyshev, Rassekrechennyi Lenin, Moscow: 1996, 202.

11. GASPI 2, 2, 1338. See Latyshev, 1996, 263–4.

12. Latyshev, 1996, 216–17.

13. See M. V. Zelenov, Apparat CK RKP (b) VKP (b): Tsenzura i istoricheskaia nauka v 1920-e gody, Nizhni Novgorod, 2000.

14. Surta became a neuropathologist and rose to become commissar for health in Belorussia. He was shot in 1937.

15. A. Krivova, Vlast’ i tserkov’ v 1922–1925 gg., Moscow: 1997, 128.

16. N. Pokrovskii and S. G. Petrov, Politburo i tserkov’ 1922–1925 gg., Moscow, 1997, I, 9.

17. Ibid., I, 141–2.

18. Ibid., I, 232–8.

19. The Bashkir cavalry fought against the Bolsheviks. On February 17, 1920, Lenin and ordered all Bashkir leaders to be arrested and the rebellion in the area to be “liquidated with the harshest measures.” (Politburo session, GASPI 17, 3, 62, 1).

20. Zinoviev was called Grisha, not always affectionately and not only by Stalin. He reminded his colleagues of Grigori Rasputin and Grisha Otrepiev, the seventeenth-century pretender who claimed to be a son of Ivan the Terrible.

21. GASPI 558, 11, 753.

22. The GPU’s statistics are mendacious: in the Solovetsky islands concentration camps alone some 700 prisoners were shot in 1923.

23. Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 297–8.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., 298.

26. Ibid., 305. Letter to Mekhlis, editor of Pravda, before May 1, 1925.

27. Balitsky’s contribution to Soviet security was marked by Vladimir Putin with a commemorative postage stamp in 2002.

28. GASPI 558, 11, 701, 37.

29. Stalin reported to Rykov: “Grisha was saying, ‘Everything here is getting worse, collapse is inevitable, etc.’ Bukharin gave him an exemplary thrashing. . . . Grisha got a reasonable reception at first, then people began interrupting and booing him. Bukharin was received very well, had an ovation, etc. There were about 2,000 present. I’m told there were about 30–40 on the side of the opposition.” GASPI 558, 11, 131, 73: May 10, 1927.

30. Trotsky’s energies were dissipated by minor posts: one of his jobs was exporting Russian furs to Germany, where the proceeds were used to fund the Berlin Institute for Psychiatry, in which he had an interest.

31. Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 309–12.

32. GASPI 558, 11, 131, 14 et seq.

33. GASPI 76, 3, 245, 19 & 26.

34. GASPI 2, 2, 380 & 447.

35. When Dzhunkovsky, as head of Moscow’s gendarmerie, denounced Rasputin’s orgies, he was immediately dismissed on the Tsaritsa’s orders.

36. While Menzhinsky was alive, Dzhunkovsky was protected. He was shot in 1937.

37. GASPI 558, 11, 726, 38. Letter to Kamenev, , Kalinin, August 9, 1924.

38. Leonid Mlechin, KGB: predsedateli organov bezopasnosti, Moscow: 2001, 364. Much of Mlechin’s account relies on Khrushchiov’s uncorroborated memoirs.

39. See Andrew Cook, On His Majesty’s Secret Service—Sidney Reilly, London: 2002.

40. GASPI 558, 11, 71: June 22, 1926.

FOUR • Stalin Solo

1. See Mikhail Reiman, “Dokumenty kanuna stalinshchiny” in Sintaksis 13, Paris, 1985, 132–62.

2. Pis’ma vo vlast’ 1917–1927, Moscow, 1998, 401.

3. Article 107 of the legal code.

4. Tragediia sovetskoi derevni I, 1999, 159.

5. Ibid., 212.

6. V. Kvashonkin et al., Sovetskoe rukovodstvo: perepiska 1928–1941, Moscow: ROSSPÈN, 1999, 78–9.

7. Vadim Rogovin, Vlast’ i oppozitsiia, Moscow: 1993, 45.

8. Bazhanov in his Memoirs says that a Czech communist who specialized in automatic telephone exchanges was instructed by Stalin to install a system giving Stalin access to all calls made in the Kremlin, and that Stalin then told Iagoda to kill the Czech engineer. A special monitoring telephone certainly existed, but there are no records of any missing Czech telephone engineer.

9. Ibid., 48–54.

10. See Rogovin, 1993, 166–7.

11. Chess was for the Soviet Union an avenue for international contacts. Krylenko declared in 1932, “We must once and for all condemn the formula ‘chess for chess’s sake,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shock-tactics brigades of chess players and immediately start carrying out a five-year plan for chess.”

12. Kak lomali NÈP, Moscow: 2000, I, 412.

13. Pis’ma I. V. Stalina V. M. Molotovu 1925–1936, Moscow, 1995, 178–81.

14. Part of the evidence against Chaianov was a science fiction novel set in 1984, My Brother Aleksei’s Journey to the Land of Peasant Utopia, published in 1920.

15. Rogovin, 1993, 198.