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

3. Only one commissariat, foreign affairs, needed a less thuggish face, acceptable to the West. Stalin put up with Georgi Chicherin, a refined polyglot and long-standing friend of Menzhinsky and of decadent poets, an alcoholic and a notorious homosexual (thus perpetuating the traditions of the Tsars’ Foreign Ministry, which was under Baron Lamsdorf called “a male brothel”). As diabetes and multiple sclerosis disabled Chicherin, he handed over to Litvinov, whose English wife and Anglophilia grated on Stalin.

4. It was small comfort that in his childhood a chunk had been torn out by a dog.

5. See the apologia recorded from Molotov’s lips by Feliks Chuev, in Molotov: poluderzhavnyi vlastelin, Moscow, 2002. Chuev rarely put a pointed question to Molotov, who admitted even more rarely his supererogatory brutality.

6. Iagoda registered himself as Jewish, and stressed his name the Polish-Jewish way Iagóda (Jehuda) not the Russian way, which Stalin preferred to tease him with: Iágoda (berry).

7. The facts about Iagoda’s early life are to be found in Mikhail Il’inskii, Narkom Iagoda, 2002.

8. Ibid., 62.

9. Iagoda told Stalin he had refused exit visas to three delegates to the Hague conference in June 1922 because they had counterrevolutionary records.

10. See Robert Urch, The Rabbit King of Russia, London, 1939.

11. See A. N. Pirozhkova and N. N. Iurgeneva, Vospominaniia o Babele, Moscow: 1989, 271, and Minuvshee 10, Moscow, 1992, 70.

12. Il’inskii, 2002, 13–17.

13. It was only mildly embarrassing that the doyen of Soviet realism was living in fascist Italy, for relations between Mussolini and Stalin were amicable.

14. Stalin had no illusions about Gorky’s genius. On the last page of the juvenile poem “The Maiden and Death” Stalin scrawled, “This thing is more powerful than Goethe’s Faust.” In 1951, the editors reproduced this page with Stalin’s inscription in Gorky’s Collected Verse, unaware that Stalin made the remark in drunken mockery. In Stalin’s copy of Collected Verse the facsimile is angrily crossed out in red pencil.

15. In the end, Stalin canceled Gorky’s commission to write his biography. Gorky’s American publisher had advertised it as containing revelations in which Stalin would say what he thought about Lenin and Trotsky.

16. Novyi mir, 1997, 9, 168–92.

17. O. V. Khlevniuk, Politburo, 1996, 98–9.

18. Zinovi Peshkov continued to rebel against his family by joining the French Foreign Legion. By 1927 he was a general attached to the Kuomintang, killing communists in Shanghai, a fact which did not stop his nephew Andrei Sverdlov becoming one of the NKVD’s most brutal interrogators.

19. Il’inskii, 2002, 364.

20. The next canal project Iagoda supervised, the Moscow–Volga canal, was designed by free engineers, and the slaves were backed up by proper materials and machinery.

21. Like the GULAG men and Iagoda who built the canal, those who celebrated it mostly perished as counterrevolutionaries. The book on the canal was three years later to be withdrawn from the market and from libraries. See the facsimile edition of The Stalin White Sea–Baltic Canal, Moscow: 1998.

22. Stalin i Kaganovich, 2001, 224.

23. Two such encounters in autumn 1932 were documented by Korneli Zelinsky. See Voprosy literatury, 1990, 1 and Minuvshee 10, 1992, 88–120.

24. Viktor Shklovsky’s memoir in Benedikt Sarnov, Nash sovetskii novoiaz, Moscow, 2002, 28.

25. See Vadim Baranov, Bezzakonnaia kometa, Moscow: 2001, 164–5.

26. See Minuvshee 10, 1992, 65–88; also G. S. Smith, Dmitri Sviatopolk-Mirsky, Cambridge, 2000.

27. Bulgakov, Gorky told Stalin, was “no kith or kin to me, but a talented writer . . . There is no sense making martyrs for an idea out of [such people]. An enemy must be either annihilated or re-educated. In this case I vote for re-education.” Gorky advised Stalin to meet Bulgakov personally. (Novy mir, 1997, 9, 188–9).

28. Both Gorky and Stalin liked Dostoevsky’s Devils, with its bloodthirsty, paranoiac, and treacherous revolutionaries: in 1935, The Devils came out in a magnificent edition.

29. Stalin i Kaganovich, 2001, 436–7.

30. Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, Moscow, 1999, 227–8. It is conceivable that OGPU fabricated the document just to see who would fail to report it or even dare to circulate it.

31. Extracts from the Gorky–Iagoda correspondence are to be found in Il’inskii, 2002, 361–82.

32. See Aleksandr Afinogenov’s diary, quoted in Vadim Baranov, Bezzakonnaia kometa, Moscow, 2001, 148.

33. For a full consideration of the evidence that Stalin wanted, and had, Gorky (and other writers) killed, see Vadim Baranov, Gor’kii bez grima: taina smerti, Moscow: Agraf, 2001.