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

THE PUBLIC OF PETROGRAD and Moscow had heard only of Lenin and Trotsky; other Bolsheviks were shadows emerging from the underground. Stalin was, as backstage manager of the revolution, the least visible of the Bolshevik Central Committee that took power. Leon Trotsky was a genius, creating the Red Army out of disaffected soldiers, workers, and peasants. Vladimir Lenin bullied and cajoled fractious colleagues into a semblance of unity. Nevertheless, the revolution needed a third man against its enemies: it had to be armed against the unseen threat from those on the left and the right who wanted not a Marxist dictatorship but a pluralistic, democratic forum.

Within six weeks of the October revolution, Lenin’s men felt surrounded by such hostility that they set up a secret police. Feliks , a middle-aged Pole, pallid from years in prison, created a punitive, deterrent, and intelligence organization, the Cheka. became the role model for all future Soviet secret police chiefs, just as Lenin set the example for leaders of the Soviet party and state. It was the symbiosis of and Stalin which would determine the fate of the USSR after Lenin fell ill and died.

, who put himself forward for the post despite being as unlikely a leader as Stalin, was the ideal chief for a repressive organization. Like Stalin, he was neither Russian nor an intellectual in the sense that Lenin and Trotsky considered themselves. He had unique experience: nobody had worked as hard in eleven years of prison and exile on unmasking traitors to the revolutionary movement—chairing a committee of prisoners that interrogated suspected provocateurs, as his widow proudly recorded. Nobody was as flamboyantly self-sacrificing for the cause as : his sense of propriety and duty were hypertrophied. From 1918 on, in his Lubianka office interrogated prisoners and rummaged through their files and drove out to make arrests—like Stalin taking advantage of the lowest point in his victims’ biorhythms; liked working late at night. The only task he, like Stalin, left to his underlings was executions. Only once did shoot anybody dead—a drunken sailor who was swearing at him— and this induced a convulsive fit. In power even more ascetic than Stalin, subsisted as he had in prison, on mint tea and bread, in an unheated office, his greatcoat for a blanket. He rolled cigarettes from rough Russian tobacco. Unlike Stalin, was a pedantic purist. He threw away pancakes cooked by his sister because she had bought flour from a private trader; he dismissed his niece, and the man who had given her a job, from service on the railways because she had profited from the family name. fled in indignation on the only occasion he went to an art gallery, never attended a concert and read only Polish romantic poetry or Marxist exegeses. had his son fostered in a working-class family, where “it is easiest to preserve and enrich one’s soul.” ’s aesthetic sense was sublimated in work. His successor Menzhinsky wrote in his obituary: “Were it not for his artistic nature, his love of art and nature . . . for all his experience underground, he would never have reached the perfection of Chekist art in taking his opponents apart, which made him stand head and shoulders above all his colleagues.”

gave the Cheka and its subsequent acronymic transformations a pseudo-chivalrous image of “sword and flame of the revolution,” and the conviction that they should be the central, sometimes supreme, power. The principles—“every communist must be a chekist”—and the extrajudicial powers of the Cheka were established by , although he always meant it to be subject to the party’s leader: to implement and enforce, not create, ideology and policy.

Without ’s authority and support, Stalin might never have come to power. In 1922 would swing the half-million paramilitaries he controlled away from Trotsky’s principled “opposition,” to Stalin’s “loyal support” for Lenin’s appeasement of those in the party who wanted civil peace, a partial restoration of capitalism, and the rule of law. From 1917 to 1922, as Lenin’s faithful hound, he did more than Stalin for revolutionary unity but sided with Stalin when choices between fractions had to be made.

What brought together these two men of largely incompatible temperament, class, and nationality? and Stalin were drawn to each other, as other Georgian and Polish intellectuals and rebels always had been. For Georgians, Poland was a congenial part of the Russian empire for university study or exile. Poles and Georgians shared a tradition of eloquence, a cult of honor, and pride in a heroic medieval age of chivalry. Both nations also believed that they had been chosen by God to defend Christian values—the Poles the Catholic faith and Western culture, the Georgians the Orthodox religion and Byzantine civilization— against the barbarians of the East.