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

By autumn 1916 the Russian army’s losses in the war were so horrendous that the authorities began calling up political exiles: even Stalin, aged thirty-seven and with a withered arm, was summoned to the recruiting office in Krasnoyarsk. In February 1917 he was rejected as unfit for service. The Tsar’s regime was collapsing; political exiles were effectively released. Stalin was allowed to settle, with Kamenev, in the town of Achinsk on the Trans-Siberian railway. On March 2 the Tsar abdicated, a provisional parliamentary government took power in Petrograd, as St. Petersburg had been renamed in 1915, and the old regime was dismantled. Peasants, burghers, and officials celebrated. At a meeting Lev Kamenev proposed a congratulatory telegram to the Tsar’s brother for refusing the throne—a conciliatory message that Stalin would never let him forget. On March 12 Stalin, Kamenev, and other exiles arrived in Petrograd to begin months of conspiratorial work to prepare for the return of Lenin and the seizure of power. First, Stalin and Kamenev took control of Pravda and typeset their own articles. All Koba’s rudeness, perversity, and surliness were set aside by his colleagues in the interests of the struggle.

The Lone Sadist

Thought unrevealed can do no ill

But words past out turn not again.

Be careful aye for to invent

The way to get thine own intent.

King James VI of Scotland

UNTIL 1913, Stalin in the Caucasus and Vologda was not outstandingly different from other revolutionaries in behavior, thought, and morality. In 1917, an embittered recluse after his journey to Kraków and Vienna and four years in Siberia, he was now an outsider. He now brooked no equals and recognized only one superior, Lenin. He was on intimate terms with fellow revolutionaries, such as Kamenev, but they could presume no intimacy. After the deaths of Kato Svanidze and Suren Spandaryan, both women and men deluded themselves if they thought they had a personal relationship with Stalin.

Stalin had for some time been complicit in murders—assassinations or retributions possibly including the betrayal of comrades. But he could not, on his euphoric return from exile in Siberia to the threshold of power in Petrograd, have contemplated the killing of enemies and the manipulation of comrades on the scale that was to come. The maelstrom of revolution, the temptations of power, the character of his comrades and underlings, as much as his unscrupulous personality, determined this escalation.

Cynical about everything else, Stalin nevertheless professed one constant ideal: Leninism. From his first encounters with Lenin in 1906 and 1907 to the point when he became Lenin’s manager, caretaker, and interpreter, Stalin looked up to him as a disciple looked to Jesus Christ. We may see Stalin as Saint Paul, Saint Peter, Saint Thomas, or Judas, but Lenin’s writings were for Stalin holy writ.

Stalin’s sincerity is most evident in his correspondence with the Bolshevik poetaster Demian Bedny.³⁰ Before Stalin outgrew, or suppressed, his need for permanent friends, Demian Bedny was one of very few correspondents who could write to Stalin freely and coarsely, and receive a reply in the same vein. The letters of 1924 between Stalin and Demian, the latter at the time in the Caucasian resort of Essentuki, like Stalin’s scrawls in the margins of books, are unguarded words, which give us some insight into Stalin’s personality: ³¹

Stalin to Demian July 15: Our Philosophy is not “cosmic grief,” our philosophy was rather neatly put by the American Whitman: “We are alive. Our scarlet blood boils with the fire of unused strength.”

Demian to Stalin July 29: I can’t boast that I know you “inside out.” And anyway that would be unrealizable. What would you be worth then? But “grasping Stalin” must attain a certain, maximum degree . . . you are my “benchmark,” “axial” friend. . . . If you venture far into the Caucasus, then bring me a nice Circassian girl.

Stalin to Demian August 27: Greetings, friend. You’re utterly right that it is impossible to know somebody “inside out” . . . But I am always ready to help you in this respect. [There then follows a ten-page exegesis of Lenin’s views of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as distinct from the dictatorship of the party, ending] . . . as for the proletariat, the party cannot be a force for dictatorship. I ask you not to copy this letter of mine, not to make a noise about it.