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

35. GASPI 558, 11, 727, 38–57.

36. Stalin added his comments to Ezhov’s text, but the treatise was never published.

37. Stalin i Kaganovich, 613–15.

38. Il’inskii, 2002, 236.

39. See V. A. Kovaliov, Raspiatie dukhom, Moscow, 1996, 151.

40. A. Orlov, Tainaia istoriia stalinskikh prestuplenii, 1953, 133.

41. Stalin i Kaganovich, 627.

42. I. Gorelov, Tsugtzvang Mikhaila Tomskogo, 2000, 233–4.

43. L. Mlechin, Ministry inostrannykh del 2001, 128.

44. Pauker had arrested both Kamenev and Zinoviev on Iagoda’s warrant. He ran the NKVD charity The Children’s Friend as well as managing the Dinamo soccer team of which Iagoda was patron. Pauker did not outlive Iagoda; he was shot in August 1937.

45. Told to Sidney Hook; see New Leader, October 10, 1960, 22–3.

46. Stalin i Kaganovich, 665.

47. Voprosy istorii, 1995, 1, 8.

48. Khlevniuk, 1996, 203–04.

49. GASPI 17, 2, 575, 1–143; see also Voprosy istorii Moscow, 1995, 1.

50. Extracts from Iagoda’s statements are to be found in Il’inskii, 2002, 150–54, and Sokolov, 2001, 764–6.

51. Il’inskii, 2002, 404–11.

52. Sokolov, 2001, 76–8.

53. Il’inskii, 2002, 448–9.

SEVEN • The Ezhov Bloodbath

1. But in prerevolution Russia eleven-year-old boys were not employed in major factories, and youths went into the army after their twentieth birthday.

2. An émigré recalled a St. Petersburg concierge’s son called Ezhov who tormented cats and bullied smaller children.

3. One of his sponsors was a certain Shifris; like nearly everyone who had recommended Ezhov, he was shot in 1938.

4. Petrov would be charged in 1935 with “hindering Ezhov from carrying out Leninist-Stalinist policies,” and on May 10, 1938, after appealing to Ezhov for mercy, he was shot. A small Mari town was named Ezhov.

5. Five years later, Ezhov, at Stalin’s behest, took great trouble to have Mayakovsky’s works published in an exemplary edition.

6. Stalin i Kaganovich, 244.

7. Ibid., 432.

8. Ibid., 572.

9. These talks were minuted by Lakoba and the minutes kept in the Lakoba museum in Sukhum, which was destroyed totally by the Georgian “army” in 1992.

10. Lakoba archive: Stalin to Lakoba and Meladze, October 19, 1929.

11. He begged Lakoba to help a GPU man who’d gone too far: “Do what you have to for his rehabilitation, everything he is charged with is rubbish, he would never have done that and he won’t, and if he did do it, it was in the interests of the cause.”

12. In 1937 Beria shot Mikhail Lakoba dead in Sukhum NKVD headquarters.

13. There is ironic justice in Lakoba’s fate. In 1822 his ancestor Urus Lakoba had poisoned at dinner a Georgian vassal, the hereditary prince of Abkhazia.

14. Trilisser was moved to the Comintern and given the surname Moskvin.

15. See N. V. Petrov and K. V. Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD 1934–1941, Moscow: 1999, 492–500.

16. Stalin’s authorization of torture was at this point given by encrypted telegram; in 1939 it was stated openly, as a measure to be used against “enemies who refuse to disarm.”

17. See A. G. Tepliakov, “Personal i povsednevnost” novosibirskogo NKVD . . .” in Minuvshee, Moscow/St. Petersburg, 1997, 240–95.

18. A. A. Papchinskii and M. A. Tumshis, Shchit, raskolotyi mechom: NKVD protiv VChK, Moscow, 2001, 188.

19. These figures omit people rounded up and shot in outlying regions without notifying the center.

20. A. Ia. Razumov (ed.) Leningradskii martirolog, vols. 1–4 (more to appear), St. Petersburg, 1995–9.

21. Butovskii poligon 1937–1938 gg., Moscow, 1999, III, 344.

22. Il’inskii, 2002, 256–7.

23. Ibid., 258.

24. Bukharin’s letters to Stalin are in GASPI 558, 11, 710, 3–184. See also Bukharin’s letters in Istoricheskii arkhiv, 1999, 1, 48–78.

25. The proceedings are summarized in V. Rogovin, 1937, Moscow, 1996, 201–11.

26. The 1,000 pages of political history, fiction, and poetry, as well as desperate letters to Stalin, that Bukharin composed in prison all ended up in Stalin’s personal archive.

27. See N. I. Bukharin, Tiuremnye tetradi, Moscow, 1994; Istochnik, Moscow, 1993, 1, 23–5; V. Rogovin, Partiia rasstreliannykh, Moscow, 1997, 40–42.

28. Romain Rolland tried once more. In August 1937 he begged Stalin to spare Aleksandr Arosev, formerly Soviet ambassador to Lithuania and one of Molotov’s closest friends. Arosev was shot a few months later.

29. Enukidze was notorious as a womanizer with a penchant, like Stalin, for pubescent girls; as an old friend of Stalin, he knew far too much to be trusted with a public appearance.

30. GASPI 558, 3, 231, 302.