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

At the Duma’s Christmas break, Koba left for Kraków via Finland and Germany—his longest and his last journey abroad for thirty years. He stayed in apartments in Kraków and Vienna. His energy pleased Lenin—“the wondrous Georgian writing an article on the nationalities question” wrote his first substantial treatise, “Marxism and the Nationality Question,” laboriously plowing through German sources. Koba thus gained enough status as a Marxist theoretician to ensure that he would be minister for nationalities in the first Soviet government. On this journey he made two more acquaintances, Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin.

By 1913 he had made an impression, positive or negative, on virtually everyone who would participate in the October 1917 revolution. Above all, like , he had won Lenin’s trust: here was a comrade who could and would do anything the party asked and, unlike Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, or Bukharin, would not argue policy, tactics, or morals but would stay contentedly in the background. The secret of Stalin’s charm was that the deeper their acquaintance with him, the more his admirers wondered at the mixture of ruthless activity and well-hidden intellect. He still struck them as a coarse, monoglot barbarian, but they would at some point be stunned by his mastery of information, human character, and his ability to orientate himself in any group.

Another ten years would pass before Stalin, as general secretary of the Communist Party, could exercise his own judgment in choosing, not whom to flatter or court, but whom to appoint, whom to dismiss. But long before the revolution, by 1913, he had met most of those who would play a part in his rise to power—whom he would follow, patronize, or kill. Of those he would need most, he had gotten to know Mikhail Kalinin, his puppet head of state, in 1900 and Emelian Iaroslavsky, his most effective propagandist, in 1905. In 1906 Stalin met , who would swing Lenin’s secret police behind him, and Klim Voroshilov, who would subordinate the army to Stalin’s will and then supervise the slaughter of every possible dissident senior officer. In 1907 he acquired a loyal ally in Sergo Orjonikidze, and in 1908 the unprincipled lawyer Vyshinsky, who would organize the parody of legal process by which terror could be instituted. In 1910 Stalin won over the most devoted of his subordinates, Viacheslav Molotov. Lazar Kaganovich was the only figure close to Stalin during the revolution whom he had not met in the revolutionary underground.

Likewise, by 1913 Stalin had met, and taken a dislike to, the party’s theoreticians, the rivals whom he would exterminate. He met Kamenev in 1904, Rykov in 1906, Trotsky and Zinoviev in 1912, and Bukharin in 1913. They would pay for their condescension to Koba decades later.

Trotsky disliked Stalin at first sight: “The door was flung open, without a preliminary knock, an unknown person appeared on the threshold—squat, with swarthy face and traces of smallpox.” Koba poured himself tea and without a word walked out. Bukharin, a daily visitor to the apartment where Koba stayed, reacted to him with a mix of admiration, affection, fear, and horror. To judge from Koba’s letters intercepted by the Russian secret service, he felt unhappy in the bourgeois luxury of Vienna and, despite Lenin’s admiration, Russian intellectuals in exile irritated him. “There’s nobody to let my hair down with. Nobody to have a heart-to-heart,” he complained to an unknown girlfriend. Koba’s recent encounter with three persons in Lenin’s entourage—Zinoviev, Trotsky, and Bukharin—was a blow to his self-esteem which gave him no peace until he had killed all three.

Nineteen thirteen, the year the Romanov dynasty celebrated its three hundredth anniversary, seemed to doom Koba to ignominy and obscurity. He fell into a depression that lasted four years. First, Malinovsky was denounced as a police agent in a calculated blow to the left wing by Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, the head of the gendarmerie. Lenin would not believe it. The Bolsheviks now looked like a farcical band of deluded intellectuals, its Central Committee a handful of Okhranka puppets. Second, the police rounded up virtually every important Bolshevik activist at large in Russia. Third, the Romanov tercentenary, Russia’s economic boom, and liberal legislation had dulled the proletarian grievances that fueled Bolshevik popularity. Fourth, as Europe headed for war, as in Germany so in Russia the Social Democrats collapsed as an internationalist party: its members put nation first and socialism second. The revolution was indefinitely postponed.