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

Personally, Stalin and had much in common, apart from dour fathers and doting mothers. From childhood to adolescence they had been destined by their family and temperaments to be priests; the adolescent Stalin could have said what told his brother Kazimierz: “If I ever concluded that God did not exist, I’d put a bullet through my head.” Both at the age of nineteen underwent violent conversion to atheism and revolution. Equally unsmiling and uncommunicative in private life, they spent years of political resistance brooding in prisons and hunting in Siberia. They did not debate in Swiss cafés nor study in French libraries. Unlike the uxorious Lenin and Trotsky, their solitude was broken by only a few months of arid marital life and they both left in their native lands young sons whom they hardly knew. Both had been poets: they declaimed and catechized, they did not expatiate or analyze. Both were shy of public speaking and arcane Marxism. Neither finished his education, and both spoke Russian as a foreign language.¹ Stalin and prided themselves on their aloofness, and on their nose for treachery. No wonder then that their meeting in Petrograd in summer 1917 after a brief encounter in Stockholm in 1906 led to an alliance.

They were also diametrically different. Feliks was a Polish noble, even if his family had been reduced to a manor house and some two hundred acres on the borders of Lithuania and Belorussia. Unlike Stalin, was cosseted by loving siblings—particularly his sisters—and brought up by a well-educated mother. But had, like Stalin, a harsh father who soon vanished from his life and a religious mother. Above all, he remained affectionately attached to his siblings and his nephews and nieces. Unlike Stalin, had a dual nature; in April 1919, when the Cheka was slaughtering hostages by the thousand, could write to his elder sister:

I can tell you one truth: I have remained the same. I sense that you can’t come to terms with the thought that this is me—and, knowing me, you can’t understand. Love. Today, as years ago, I hear and feel a hymn to it. This hymn demands war, unbending will, tireless work. And today, apart from the idea, apart from striving for justice, nothing has any weight on the scales of my actions. It’s hard for me to write, it’s hard to argue. You see only what is, and what you hear about in exaggerated colors. You’re a witness and victim of the Moloch of war. The ground you once lived on is subsiding under your feet. I am an eternal wanderer, in motion, in the process of change and creating a new life. You turn your thoughts and soul to the past—I see the future and want, and have, to be in movement. Have you ever reflected what war really is? You have pushed aside the images of bodies ripped apart by shells, of the wounded on the floor, of the crows pecking out the eyes of the living. . . . And you can’t understand me, a soldier of the revolution. . . . My Aldona, you don’t understand me—it’s hard for me to write any more to you. If you saw how I live, if you looked into my eyes, you’d understand, rather you’d sense that I have remained the same I always was. I kiss you powerfully. Your Fel²

Edmund-Rufin , Feliks’s father, earned his living by teaching. He seduced a pupil, Elena Januszewska. They married, but had to leave Lithuania. Edmund-Rufin went to the southern Russian port of Taganrog to teach mathematics, where his pupils included three Chekhov brothers, including Anton. The historian of the Taganrog grammar school, himself a pupil of the hated Pole, reported in 1906 that senior was “a pathologically irritable man who tormented boys.” ³ In 1875 Edmund-Rufin was forced to resign and returned to his family estate.