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

16. For a full account, see D. Rayfield, “The Death of Paolo Iashvili,” Slavonic & East European Review 68, London: October 1990, 631–64. For Georgian Union of Writers sessions see fond 8, opis 1, file 2 in the Georgian Central State Archive for Literature and Art. In 1991 Zviad Gamsakhurdia had some files destroyed.

17. The defiant Geronti Kikodze survived.

18. Under his real name, Janjghava, too difficult for Russians to articulate, he had supervised the draining of Georgia’s marshes.

19. Kirill Stoliarov, Igry v pravosudie, Moscow, 2000, 289–90.

20. Shvartsman’s sexual proclivities appealed to Beria. Shvartsman liked to make love with a female colleague in an office where they could hear tortured prisoners screaming. For details of Ezhov’s hangmen whom Beria kept, see Arkadii Vaksberg, Neraskrytye tainy, Moscow, 1993, 107–54.

21. Its theme song “Fragrant flower of the prairie, Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria” never got past rehearsal.

22. Bulgakov had written to Stalin asking for Erdman to be forgiven. Erdman was, however, aghast at his new job: “Would you expect to have a Gestapo song and dance ensemble?” he exclaimed. Erdman’s plays had to wait until the 1990s to be performed, but Beria saved him physically.

23. This story was filmed by Evgeni Tsymbal in Zashchitnik Sedov (1986).

24. See A. G. Zviagintsev and Iu. G. Orlov, Prigovorionnye vremenem: rossiiskie i sovetskie prokurory 1937–1953, Moscow, 2001, 118–24.

25. Roginsky’s legal and personal talents were best shown in his own defense. He resisted two years of interrogation by feigning madness and insisting on better prison conditions. Although he was moved to Sukhanovka, where Ezhov was broken, Roginsky confessed only to lesser crimes and delayed his trial until after war began. He forced the judges to spend not twenty minutes but two hours trying him. He escaped execution but died in the camps. See Zviagintsev and Orlov, 2001, 190–94.

26. See Voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv, 1997, 107–14.

27. The details of these murders emerged in the interrogation of Beria’s subordinates in 1953. See Stoliarov, 2000, 240–48. Kulik himself was shot in 1950.

28. Koltsov’s brother Boris Efimov was Pravda’s cartoonist and compensated for his conformist ideology with grotesque draftmanship.

29. Stalin sent Babel and Pasternak, both mute with shock, to the congress’s last session.

30. Vladimir Stavsky, general secretary of the writers’ union, was a hated apparatchik; Fadeev’s sanction carried more weight with the intelligentsia.

31. Antonov-Ovseenko, 1999, 251.

32. Eisenstein’s tireless enemy Boris Shumiatsky, head of Soviet cinematography, once refused to drink a toast to Stalin; born in Buriat-Mongolia, he was shot as a Japanese agent. Eisenstein then became a favorite of Stalin’s.

33. Vlast’ i intelligentsiia, 1999, 456.

34. Text cited from GARF in Izvestiia, June 5, 2002, “Nauka” section, II.

35. In the early 1970s, Lysenko was interviewed by young Soviet geneticists. He suddenly screamed three times, “I didn’t kill Vavilov!” In the 1990s the KGB pensioner Aleksandr Khvat proudly told television cameras that he had done his duty by torturing Vavilov.

36. In 1950 it was Stalin himself, not Beria, or even Soviet linguists, who demolished Marrism.

37. Even the few hundred Eskimos on the Soviet side of the Bering Strait were now forbidden from canoeing across to visit their cousins in Alaska.

38. In northern Korea the Japanese deported Koreans as potential Soviet spies.

39. For this and other detailed reminiscences of the deportations, see Svetlana Alieva (ed.) Tak èto bylo, 3 vols., Moscow, 1993.

40. Certain categories, including 8,000 prostitutes, were sent to Kazakhstan.

41. These are the best attested figures, based on the NKVD’s own unashamed documentation. Other estimates, extrapolated from lists of missing persons or from later censuses, are very much higher. See Pavel Polian, Ne po svoei vole, Moscow, 2001, 98–102.

42. The fullest collection of primary materials is in Polish: Katyn. Dokumenty zbrodni, 4 vols., Warsaw: 1998. The most important original Russian documents are in Katyn: plenniki neob”iavlennoi voiny, Moscow, 1999 and Katyn: mart 1940 g.—sentiabr’ 2000 g., Moscow, 2001.

43. It was ironic that Polish officers of the 1920 campaign were rewarded with land-holdings in the newly acquired eastern provinces, which ensured that they would be captured by the Soviets in 1939.

44. This was convenient when the crime was later blamed on the Nazis, but Blokhin brought Walther revolvers simply because they did not jam in continuous use.

45. Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov (eds.) Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsia, 1999, 445–6.