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

Obsessed with pursuing power and crushing opposition, Stalin remained in some areas of his life relatively normal. He was active sexually: Nadezhda had two live births and, her medical records show, ten abortions during their marriage. After her death, to judge by Stalin’s well-documented routine, there was little time for sexual relationships. His young housekeeper Valentina Istomina probably met his occasional needs and a few ballerinas and opera singers claimed to have been Stalin’s mistresses in the 1930s and 1940s. By all accounts Stalin’s sexual behavior was peremptory and rough, but there is no psychosexual theory explanation of Stalin’s sadism; it was cold-blooded.

Perhaps in his austerity we can find the key to Stalin’s remorseless concentration on the task at hand, his refusal to soften: there were few people close to him whom he was not prepared to destroy and few objects that had any value for him. With the resources of half the world at his disposal he lived in ill-furnished rooms and slept on uncomfortable divans. His wardrobe was sparse, without silk or fur. If not as ascetic (not as chaste and abstemious) as Hitler, Stalin had little interest in physical pleasure. In food he valued simplicity, not delicacy; he checked only that it was not poisoned. His alcohol and tobacco intake was controlled: he made his guests drunk, not himself, and the famous pipe was a rarely lit prop.

One explanation for the Marquis de Sade’s need to inflict pain was that he himself was never free of it. Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man” proclaims that anyone suffering from toothache badly wants others to feel the same pain. This is plausible in the case of Stalin. The agony he inflicted on others grew out of his own. His medical records imply that he was in constant pain.³³ In addition to his scarred face and webbed toe, his left arm atrophied so much that in his fifties it could barely lift a cup. Stalin’s annual checkups in the Kremlin suggest a middle-aged man in chronic pain: in the mid-1920s Stalin had sciatic pain in all his limbs and was plagued by chronic myalgia, arthritis, and eventually muscular atrophy. From 1926 he had irritable bowel syndrome, which caused constant diarrhea and public embarrassment. Prison and Siberia had given him, like other old Bolsheviks, tuberculosis, and although the disease abated, he was left with a weakened right lung stuck to his pleura. His voice was never strong enough to make a speech without a microphone. In the 1920s his teeth rotted and gave him hell: a dentist, Shapiro, extracted eight roots and filed and crowned most of his remaining teeth in Sochi in 1930.³⁴ In 1921 Stalin was operated on for appendicitis. All the time he held power he had attacks of dizziness, respiratory and bowel infections, and would complain, by the time he took his extended late-summer breaks in the south, of mental symptoms: exhaustion, irritability, inability to concentrate, bad memory.

Stalin’s paranoiac suspicions of the doctors who treated him were not entirely unjustified: the misdiagnoses and sudden deaths of Feliks in 1926 and Andrei Zhdanov in 1948 suggest that the Kremlin professors of medicine were fallible, or worse. Stalin’s suspicions caused him to have his medicines fetched from the pharmacy under a false name, and he would have a bodyguard take any medication first. Dr. Shneiderovich was asked by Stalin in 1934: “Doctor, tell me just the truth: do you occasionally feel a desire to poison me?” To Shneiderovich’s denial, Stalin responded, “Doctor, you’re a timid weak person, you’d never do it, but I have enemies who are capable of doing it.” In January 1937 Stalin turned to Dr. Valedinsky at dinner and, apropos of nothing, growled, “There are enemies of the people among the doctors.” Fifteen years were to pass before Stalin took a step unprecedented even for tyrants, and had most of his doctors arrested.

While physical and mental pain do not account for the extermination of whole classes and conditions of mankind, they do explain the sudden bursts of fury with which Stalin would turn on loyal servants before he threw them to his wolves.

One simple explanation of Stalin was clear to Trotsky and other victims: they saw him as a bandit, murderer, impostor, traitor—“Genghis Khan who’s read Marx,” to quote Bukharin. But the boundary between expropriation and robbery, execution and murder, betrayal and tactical maneuver is fuzzy, and most revolutionaries confuse or overstep it. Stalin can be singled out from Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, and the rest only in his willingness to take criminal measures as first, rather than last resorts, and to use them on intimates as well as strangers. The revolution relied on many criminals’ lack of inhibitions to seize power and kill their opponents; Stalin can be seen as just a criminal on whose services the revolution was forced to depend.