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

46. Naum Eitingon’s brother Max dealt with Trotsky and made a fortune out of the Soviet fur trade, then managed by Trotsky. Max Eitingon spent his money subsidizing the Berlin Institute for Psychiatry, another of Trotsky’s hobbies. See Aleksandr Ètkind, Èros nevozmozhnogo, St. Petersburg, 1993, 269–310.

47. Siqueiros escaped to Chile, helped by the poet Pablo Neruda; years later Siqueiros apologized for his crime. Grigulevich had Sheldon Harte shot dead.

48. The promise was broken in 1951: Eitingon and other Jewish MVD officers were arrested.

49. Artizov and Naumov, 1999, 451.

NINE • Hangmen at War

1. Sorge, under cover as a German businessman in Tokyo, was providing the German ambassador, as well as the NKVD, with information on Japanese intentions, and the NKVD with information on German intentions. His assurances that the Japanese would not attack the Soviet Union in the east were believed; his warnings that Hitler would attack in the west were disregarded.

2. Two months before the invasion, Golikov stopped assuring Stalin of the Germans’ peaceful intentions: he noted troop movements toward the border, but desisted from comments that might irritate Stalin.

3. Merkulov often blundered: when the Americans retrieved from the Finns a half-burned book of Soviet codes, he failed to change the ciphers, and as a result, from 1944 all traffic between the NKVD and Soviet missions in the United States was intercepted. Merkulov also failed to assassinate General Vlasov when the latter organized a small army out of millions of Soviet POWs to fight alongside the Germans. By 1946 Merkulov had outlived his usefulness and Stalin attacked him for not pursuing Trotskyists during the war. Merciful or forgetful, Stalin allowed Merkulov life and liberty; he stayed in the Central Committee of the party and became responsible for Soviet property abroad.

4. If he was born in 1908, then he was a child when he joined ’s special purpose units. His decrepit health at the end of his life, discounting the effects of torture, also suggests he was much older.

5. See Iakov Aizenshtat, Zapiski sekretaria voennogo tribunala, London: 1991.

6. Zemliachka, until her death in 1947, and her sister were among the very few persons whom Mekhlis could call friends.

7. In the skirmishes with the Japanese at Khasan, where Bliukher distinguished himself, Mekhlis countermanded Bliukher’s orders. Bliukher said of Mekhlis and Ezhov’s deputy Frinovsky, “Sharks have come to gobble me up; I don’t know if they’ll eat me or I them—the latter is unlikely.”

8. Iu. Rubtsov, Alter ègo Stalina, Moscow, 1999, 226.

9. Ibid., 262.

10. See V. K. Abarinov, Katynskii labirint, Moscow: 1991.

11. The story is widespread but undocumented. The fullest documentation on this deportation is to be found in N. Bugai, «Ikh nado deportirovat’», Moscow: 1992, 36–83; statistics are collated in Pavel Polian, Ne po svoei vole, Moscow: 2001, 102–10.

12. When the moment came, the military would denounce Beria for nearly losing them the Caucasus, but in November 1952, when Stalin, paranoiacally jealous, disliked public praise of Beria, General Ivan Maslennikov stuck his neck out by printing in Military Thinking a tribute to Beria’s leadership on the Caucasian front. Maslennikov had helped Beria tame the military in 1939, instituted the dreaded blocking squads behind the front line, and had commanded an army in the Caucasus.

13. See Alieva, 1993, vol. 2, 42.

14. Gvishiani escaped punishment when Beria’s men were arrested as he was the son-in-law of Aleksei Kosygin, future co-ruler with Brezhnev.

15. The German Foreign Ministry was sympathetic to the lobbying of the Turkish ambassador, Nuri Pasha, to establish an autonomous republic of Caucasian peoples and a free Tatar state in the Crimea, but the Germans nevertheless exterminated large numbers of Crimean Tatars, burning villages they suspected of sheltering partisans and sending thousands as forced labor to Germany. See Bugai, 1992, 151.

16. The most convincing demographic statistics are to be found in V. B. Zhiromskaia, Naselenie Rossii v XX veke, Moscow, 2001, vol. 2. They are nevertheless conservative, as they are based on extant documentation. It is likely that actual deaths were higher, but few demographers allow more than 10 percent for undocumented mortality.

17. In early 1942, 3,000 died of starvation every day in Leningrad; the NKVD killed another twenty or so daily for such crimes as wishing aloud for the Germans to enter the city and finish the siege. See Nikita Lomagin, Neizvestnaia blokada, Moscow: Olma, 2002.