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

But Stalin is too easily categorized as a serial killer. Extrapolating twenty years back from the 1930s leads to unfounded allegations such as Roman Brackman’s that Stalin hired an ax murderer to kill his father in Telavi in 1906. There were violent deaths among Stalin’s companions and enemies that he welcomed, but a causal link is often undemonstrable and even ludicrous.

Stalin is often dismissed as a bandit. In 1907 he sought Lenin’s agreement, against the policy of the Social Democrats, Menshevik and Bolshevik, to fund the party by armed robbery; he may also have taken part in wrecking a ship off Batumi. Such expropriations, however, were a vital source of funding, and Stalin’s enthusiastic banditry does not set him morally or ideologically apart from most terrorists.

The most odious criminal charge against Stalin (to his fellow revolutionaries) is of cooperating with the Okhranka, acting as a secret police agent, betraying his colleagues and the cause. The evidence is copious but, discounting obvious forgeries which Stalin may have engineered to discredit real evidence, ambiguous. For one thing, collaboration with the Okhranka was often justified. Both socialists and gendarmes wanted a Bolshevik party strong enough to split the left, especially the Social Democrats, and several colonels in the Russian secret service maintained a working relationship with those they were supposed to be jailing, exiling, and hanging. In the 1900s the interpenetration of secret service and revolutionary underground was so tangled that agents of either side could find it hard to remember what aims were paramount in their activities. Stalin’s sources of income, his apparent ability to travel from Siberia to Baku without hindrance, even faster than the train timetables allowed, and the ease with which he crossed the Russian, Polish, and Finnish frontiers with dubious papers all make it plausible that he had come to arrangements with the Okhranka.

For the whole of the 1920s and some of the 1930s, Stalin’s Okhranka file was considered a bombshell that could destroy him or whoever tried to use it against him while the files of other old Bolsheviks were carefully stored to damn any whom Stalin needed to discard. This however is not enough to categorize Stalin as a traitor. Like Lenin and Sverdlov, only with less hesitation, he used any means for his absolute end. If cooperation with the Okhranka proves that a Bolshevik was an impostor, then the whole of Lenin’s Politburo and their revolution becomes a capitalist plot, as absurd and pointless as the legendary last session of the Communist Party of the State of Utah, when it dawned on the seventeen participants that they were all FBI agents.

The striking quality that marks Stalin apart from his comrades is isolation. Before he first saw Lenin in 1905, he worshipped no living human being. There were Georgians at the seminary whom he admired: the murdered thinker and poet Lado Ketskhoveli, for instance. He also admired Seit Devdariani, who led a group of radical students. Devdariani became a philosopher and was in 1937 shot by Beria, unquestionably with Stalin’s assent, and the only copy of his manuscript A History of Georgian Thought perished, except for a brief fragment, with him. Stalin’s serious intellectual rivals in the Tbilisi seminary did not live long.

In Stalin’s few friendships he dictated the agenda and he was more loved than loving. Lenin, even after his brain had been shattered by strokes, however, remained a superior being in Stalin’s eyes: as ruthless and peremptory as himself, even more charismatic and, above all, with the ability to produce the right words for every theory and the right theory to justify every event, using irony, logic, and abuse to convince. This worship was not fully reciprocated. Lenin saw Koba as “the marvelous Georgian” but had trouble remembering the surname Jughashvili. From the start, Koba stood out from Lenin’s comrades as an atavistic executor of the party’s, especially of Lenin’s, will, balking at nothing, yet calm and collected (when not rude and irritable), a factotum who could even write polemical treatises and expound doctrine, if not an original thinker.

Lenin gave Stalin enough praise to encourage his conceit. From newspaper articles in Georgian, summarizing what he had read in Russian, Stalin in 1913 graduated to treatises in Russian. In Lenin’s ruthless cynicism about the means used to achieve the end and in his readiness to take drastic measures, to deceive and manipulate, Stalin found a kindred soul.

Lenin held sacred the famous principle of democratic centralism: decisions reached after a vote in the party’s Central Committee were binding on all. (In fact, where necessary, a minority opinion was massaged into a majority opinion.) Stalin was an adept pupil, as he explained to Molotov: