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

I have tried, rather than write a new biography of Stalin or another his-tory of the USSR, to examine Stalin’s path to total power and the means—and the men—which enabled him to hold on to it. The careers and personalities of Stalin’s henchmen occupy the foreground, especially the five who headed the security forces and secret police which we call by a sequence of different names: the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission), GPU and OGPU ([United] State Political Directorate), NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs), MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs), and MGB (Ministry of State Security). After Stalin, the latter became known as the KGB and is today the Russian FSB.

Of these five—Feliks , Viacheslav Menzhinsky, Genrikh Iagoda, Nikolai Ezhov, and Lavrenti Beria—the last two were appointed by Stalin, while the first three were induced to do his bidding. They were the instruments of a mind more malevolent than theirs. They looked after the means, while Stalin looked after the end. A study of their motivations and actions sheds a strong light on Stalin’s tyranny.

The Nuremberg trials established the principle that obeying orders is no defense against charges of crimes against humanity. There is a moral, not just a legal and tactical, aspect to obeying orders, even if disobedience is fatal. What Stalin’s and Hitler’s henchmen lacked was a social or moral structure firm enough to induce them to disobey. Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, a much criticized but important book, established (a) that the murder of the Jews was known to most Germans and (b) that involvement was not required on pain of death, at least for most who participated in this genocide. Goldhagen’s thesis needs revision if we apply it to Stalin’s Soviet Union. Abstaining from the witch hunt for enemies, real or imaginary—bourgeois, Trotskyists, Bukharinites, saboteurs, fascists, Zionists—would have classed the dissenter as an enemy. But there were situations and spheres of activity in which a moral choice was offered, particularly for intellectuals, who were, admittedly, the state’s dependents and servants, but who had been brought up to follow professional and ethical codes, and who knew or guessed what was happening. As in Nazi Germany, a few individuals stood their ground against threats, privations, torture, and death. But why so few, and why did Stalin, supported by a group of fanatics, cynics, sadists, and moral cowards, never encounter serious resistance?

Stalin valued in his underlings the ability to choose managers and executives; he himself excelled at personnel management. As well as the heads of the secret police, others in Stalin’s close circle—after 1930, when he no longer compromised with other politicians—were as impenetrably callous as and his successors. We must delve deeply into the activities of Viacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, and Klim Voroshilov, who signed death warrants by the thousand, for without their spellbound submission Stalin could not have done what he did.

Parallel study of Stalin and Hitler often misleads. The differences are as striking as the similarities. The Nazis had a symbiotic relationship with German business and the German army, and their murderous aggression was directed at others, whether Slav or Jew, homosexual or communist. An ordinary German citizen wearing large blinkers could, making allowances for the horrors of total war, live much as he or she had under other regimes. Stalin’s aggression turned on his own kind: loath to make war on his neighbors, he would murder his own generals, his professional elite, even his own family—people on whom his economic and political lifeblood depended. However revolting, there is consistency, even logic, in Adolf Hitler’s gamble: genocide and blitzkrieg united a people and gave it goals. Stalin’s policies dragged others deep into his paranoia. An amoral intellect like Albert Speer’s could throw in his lot with Hitler; mere calculation was not enough for throwing in your lot with Stalin—it needed extreme fear, sadism, moral idiocy, or delusion as well.

Every country has a heritage which its heirs cannot easily renounce, but Russia’s fate in the twentieth century cannot be dismissed as that of a barbarous, semifeudal country erupting into primeval violence. Russia in the 1900s and 1910s lagged behind the rest of Europe economically; its political institutions had grave flaws. But the culture that gave the world novelists like Fiodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoi also had historians, newspaper magnates, philosophers, lawyers, doctors, and politicians the equal of any in the world. It had a small, highly motivated middle and professional class, as well as a gentry and merchant class that had not lost its social coherence. Nineteenth-century Russia was more brutal, corrupt, and ignorant than England or France, but not by many orders of magnitude.