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

28. Not that Georgians were a favored nation. Fewer survived interrogation in prison, and fewer males survived the war in Georgia than in other republics.

29. Ibid., 358–9.

30. See GARF 9401, 2, 99, 386. Vyshinsky dribbled while listening to his telephone and in September 1945 it stopped working. Beria immediately sent two colonels, a captain, and a major, who diagnosed moisture in the microphone and replaced it. This was reported in detail to Stalin.

31. T. V. Volokitina et al. (eds.) Moskva i vostochnaia Evropa 1949–53, Moscow, 2002, 518.

32. Fifteen years later, when his victims were rehabilitated, Rákosi insisted that the torture had been justified.

33. Mlechin, 2001, 562.

34. Kaganovich had had a hand in his brother’s suicide in 1941: his telephone call warned Mikhail he was to be arrested.

35. Stoliarov, 2000, 212–13.

36. Mlechin, 2001, 386.

37. Pavel Sudoplatov (see Spetsoperatsii, Moscow, 1997, 547) claims that Beria proposed an amnesty for political prisoners too, but that this was rejected by the Presidium.

38. See A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov (eds.) GULAG 1918–1960, Moscow, 2000, 367–72. In February 1954 Khrushchiov and Malenkov handed the GULAG and prisons back to the MVD.

39. Beria was annoyed when the Lithuanian minister for internal affairs then sent his report to Moscow in Lithuanian.

40. In May 1953 Beria found that Malenkov had copied for his own speech at the nineteenth party congress a paragraph from a speech by a Tsarist minister of the interior. Beria ignored this damning evidence against Malenkov, but the fact that he knew was brought to Malenkov’s attention, a reason for the end of their alliance. See Sudoplatov, 1997, 554–5.

41. V. P. Naumov and Iu. Sigachiov, Lavrenti Beriia 1953, Moscow, 1999, 69–70.

42. The first publication of the unedited shorthand transcript is in Naumov and Sigachiov, 1999, 87–218.

43. The investigation dossier in the FSB archives is inaccessible, at least until 2040, when the last woman on whom Beria forced himself will have died. This account is based on the glimpses that previous researchers have had and from accounts by the investigators. See V. F. Nekrasov (ed.) Beria: konets kar’ery, 1991, 300–415.

44. Moskalenko suppressed evidence linking Beria’s actions to Stalin’s, notably the soundings in 1941–2 through the Bulgarian ambassador for peace with the Germans.

45. On May 29, 2000, the Russian supreme court reprieved three of the executed men, Dekanozov, Meshik, and Vlodzimirsky, and substituted twenty-five-year prison sentences so that their heirs could recover confiscated property. See Izvestiia, May 30, 2000, 1.

46. Naumov and Sigachiov, 1999, 380.

47. Imre Nagy, the prime minister of Hungary during the 1956 uprising, who was treacherously hanged on June 16, 1958, on Khrushchiov’s orders, might be counted as the last of Beria’s men to be executed.

48. The fate of Beria’s men is recounted in Vaksberg, 1995, 112–54.

49. O. Volin, “S Berievtsami vo Vladimirskoi tiur’me” in Minuvshee 7, Moscow, 1992, 357–72. Chichiko Pachulia, Beria’s head of the NKVD in Abkhazia, was released in 1970. He lived in Tbilisi and died suddenly outside his house while taking to the KGB a denunciation of his daughter and grandson for listening to Voice of America. See F. Blagoveshchenskii, “V gostiakh u P. A. Sharii” in Minuvshee7, 472.

50. K. A. Stoliarov, 2000: 98–100. In 1994 Abakumov and his co-defendants had their crimes reclassified as not treasonable. The death sentences were not quashed but his heirs, forty years later, could recover his confiscated property.

51. Ibid., 217–18.

52. One exception is the unofficial teachers’ handbook of documents on political repression and resistance to totalitarianism, produced by the Sakharov Center in Moscow: Kniga dlia uchitelia. Istoriia politicheskikh repressii i soprotivleniia nesvobode v SSSR, Moscow, Mosgorarkhiv, 2002.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

This is a selection of works that I have found useful. Sources to which I am heavily indebted are marked with an asterisk. A full bibliography would be the size of a monograph, and is best compiled by searching a website such as www.copac.ac.uk by subject, title, and author. Unlike in the text, where Russian names are given in a slightly simplified version of the standard Anglo-American system, here Russian names are presented in an exact transliteration.

LENINIANA

Arutiunov, Akim. Lenin. Lichostnaia i politicheskaia biografiia. Moscow: Veche, 2002 (2 vols.).

Latyshev, A. G. Rassekrechennyi Lenin. Moscow: Mart, 1996.

Lenin, V. I. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 51.

*Lenin, V. I. Neizvestnye dokumenty 1891–1922. Moscow: ROSSPÈN, 2000.

Volkogonov, Dmitrii. Lenin. Moscow: Novosti, 1999 (2 vols.).

STALINIANA

Antonov-Ovseenko, A. Teatr Iosifa Stalina. Moscow: AST, 2000.