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

5. The suspicious death of the sole eyewitness to Kirov’s murder has further fueled conspiracy theories, but the condition of the truck and the shocked reactions of the driver and guard are well attested.

6. Stalin i Kaganovich, 2001, 411–12, 425.

7. Ibid., 419.

8. V. V. Sapov (ed.), Makiavelli: pro i contra, St. Petersburg: 2002, 502–06.

9. The only justifiable arrests and trials—apart from Nikolaev’s—were of the NKVD men answerable for Kirov’s safety. Filipp Medved was arrested; on December 7 his deputy and likely successor, Ivan Zaporozhets, was detained, although he had been nursing a broken leg in the Caucasus at the time of the murder and had not worked since summer. Eleven chekisty were convicted of “criminal neglect of duty.” For the time being, they served short spells of imprisonment. Medved and Ivan Zaporozhets were sent to the farthest part of the USSR, Kolyma. Here, the GULAG chief Jan Berzin treated them as colleagues; they were joined by their wives and children and began redeeming themselves by hard work. They were shot only when Berzin fell from grace.

10. Vadim Rogovin, Stalinskii nèonèp, 1994, 89.

11. Enukidze had been a confidant of Stalin’s second wife and the second person, after the nanny, to find her dead body. He got on well enough with Stalin to intercede for petitioners. He was notorious for womanizing and for his aristocratic lifestyle.

12. The diary, with Stalin’s and Iagoda’s annotations, is in GASPI 558, 11, 69. Extracts in B. V. Sokolov, Narkomy strakha, Moscow, 2001, 24–37.

13. When in October 1934 a Soviet sailor jumped ship in Poland, Stalin rounded on Iagoda: “Tell me without delay: have the members of this sailor’s family been arrested . . . If not, then who is responsible for the inertia of the authorities, and has this new criminal been punished?” GASPI 558, 11, 69. The sailor turned out to have no relatives to punish.

14. Akulov, his friends recalled, loved life, nature, music, family, and friends, and was unfitted for judicial killing: He fell seriously ill in 1936. Akulov’s successor, Andrei Vyshinsky, and his former deputy, Grigori Roginsky, both sent their best wishes. A year later, under torture, Akulov confessed he was a Trotskyist. On October 31, 1937, as he was led out to be shot, Akulov turned to Roginsky, now his prosecutor, and said, “You know I’m not guilty.” Roginsky responded with virulent abuse. See A. G. Zviagintsev and Iu. G. Orlov, Raspiatye revoliutsiei: rossiiskiei sovetskie prokurory 1922–1936, Moscow, 1998, 256.

15. See Il’inskii, 2002, 241.

16. Hitler had them arrested, so Stalin detained several German citizens. Molotov and Kaganovich reported to Stalin on October 21, 1933, that “Hitler has personally given an order to allow our journalists . . . to the trial. He expressed his certainty that our journalists will be objective. . . . The person responsible for arresting them will be punished.”

17. Stalin i Kaganovich, 397–8.

18. Mikhail Geller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopiia u vlasti, Moscow: 2000, 270.

19. Stalin i Kaganovich, 569–70.

20. Valerii Shambarov, Gosudarstvo i revoliutsii, Moscow: 2001, 301.

21. Fascism was no bar to cooperation. In the 1920s the USSR bought minesweepers from Mussolini to rebuild its navy, which had been shrunk badly when the Whites used the Russian Black Sea fleet to evacuate their soldiers to Istanbul.

22. To avoid publicity, handcuffs and rubber truncheons were bought from Germany via third countries.

23. GASPI 558, 11, 85, 26.

24. Sergei Gorlov, Alians Moskva–Berlin 1920–1933, Moscow, 2001, 315.

25. In 1934, the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs was the only Soviet ministry allowed two differing opinions. While Commissar Litvinov opted for joining France and Britain against Germany, the ambassador to Berlin, Surits, friendly with Hermann Goering’s cousin Herbert, shared Kandelaki’s Germanophilia.

26. Dmitrii Volkogonov, Stalin triumf i tragedia, 1990, I, 209.

27. Despite Krupskaia’s demoralized compliance, Stalin laid into her for encouraging Marinetta Shaginian to write a biography of Lenin revealing that his maternal grandfather was a Jew. The biography was banned.

28. Krupskaia’s death in 1939, immediately after tasting a birthday cake sent from the Kremlin, may not have been of natural causes.

29. In 1951 she submitted her diary pages for 1934, wherever Stalin was mentioned, for Stalin’s approval. See GASPI 558, 11, 750.

30. GASPI 558, 11, 749, 14, February 3, 1935.

31. GASPI 558, 11, 749, 21, October 10, 1936.

32. Arkadii Vaksberg, Valkiriia revoliutsii, Smolensk, 1998, 393.

33. Iurii Druzhnikov, Russkie mify: Donoschik 001 ili Voznesenie Pavlika Morozova, Ekaterinburg: 2001.

34. Kartashov virtually confessed to Druzhnikov in the 1960s.