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

Feliks was the only one of seven children to rebel; his siblings tried to live middle-class lives. The eldest girl, Aldona, seven years older than Feliks, became a second mother to the family when their father died unexpectedly in 1883. Other tragedies hit the family. When Feliks and his elder brother Stanisław were handling a rifle, one of them killed their fourteen-year-old sister Wanda. This accident may have prompted Feliks’s sudden apostasy. He never spoke of Wanda’s death but attributed his loss of faith in God and Tsar to witnessing Cossacks attacking Lithuanian peasants in 1893. Like Stalin, sublimated his fellow countrymen’s crusade against their Russian conquerors into hatred for all governing classes. He confessed later, “I dreamed of a cap of invisibility and of the annihilation of all Muscovites.”

Feliks’s mother, Elena, died in 1896, leaving Aldona to bring up the younger children alone. The family loved their black sheep: Aldona visited Feliks in prison, sent him parcels and letters, even after his rise to head the Cheka. Aldona married and remained in Poland, personally devoted if politically opposed to Feliks.⁴ Feliks’s other elder sister, Jadwiga, was to be, together with her daughter (also Jadwiga), his helpmate in Russia. (In 1949 Jadwiga senior died in Stalin’s camps.) Stanisław , who became a biologist, was murdered on the family estate by bandits in 1917.⁵ Two of Feliks’s brothers, the youngest Władysław, a professor of medicine, and Kazimierz, an engineer, paid dearly for their surname: they were murdered by the Gestapo in 1943 and 1942 respectively. Of Feliks’s brothers only Ignacy (1880–1953) died of natural causes.

Feliks, like Stalin, left education just before his final examinations. He plunged into the factories and slums of Vilnius as a Marxist agitator rousing the proletariat to action, for which he learned Yiddish and Lithuanian as well as Russian. Before he was twenty he had made an impact on the Polish social democrats, urging them to abandon Polish nationalism and parliamentarianism in favor of international revolutionary socialism. The adolescent Feliks, like Stalin, combined fanatical rebelliousness with moonstruck romantic musing. ’s unpublished poetry echoes the decadence of the “Young Poland” modernists such as his own favorite, Antoni Lange. Typically morbid are Feliks’s lines:

Every night something comes to see me

Incorporeal and soundless,

A mysterious vision

Stands over me in silence.

It gives me the present of a kiss,

This gift does not tell me:

Are you offering me your heart,

Or are you mocking me, cold Lady?

, unlike Stalin, remained in thrall to sentimental morbid chivalry, even when acting with cold-blooded ruthlessness. Years of exile and prison blinkered him, and he had little understanding of real life: he was to apply Karl Marx and Lenin to public life with the same naïveté as he adapted Polish romanticism to his private life. On May 27, 1918, he wrote, as if he were a saint in the desert, to his wife (who remained in Zurich until 1919):

There is no time to think of my family or myself . . . the more powerful wheel of enemies that encircles us, the closer it is to my heart. . . . Every day I have to take up more terrible weapons. . . . I have to be myself just as terrible, so as like a faithful hound to tear apart the villain. . . . I live just on my nerves. . . . My thought orders me to be terrible and I have the will to follow my thought to the end. . . .

Like Stalin in Vologda, in exile attracted women. Stalin played mentor to Polina Onufrieva, while was the pupil in his relationship with Rita (Margarita Fiodorovna Nikolaeva), a fellow exile three years older than him, in the northern Russian town of Viatka in 1898.⁶ was then twenty-one; this was his first exile and his first love. Declaring himself Rita’s fiancé, he volunteered to follow her farther north to Nolinsk. Here, on an allowance of five and a half rubles a month each, they set up house. She was the well-educated daughter of a priest; thanks to her acquired fluent Russian and even struggled through Das Kapital. But classics such as Goethe’s Faust, confessed to her, were beyond him.