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

had even then discovered his personal power: he wrote to his sister: “When I get carried away and begin to defend my views too ardently, the expression in my eyes becomes so frightening to my opponents that they cannot look me in the face.” Twenty years later, in 1919, he told Aldona with relish: “For many people there is nothing so frightening as my name.”

The Russian gendarmes found not frightening but “hot-tempered, irritable, unrestrained.” In January 1899 they exiled him farther north, to the settlement of Kaigorodskoe. spent days with a rifle, shooting game. Fellow exiles gave him a bear cub as a pet; he trained it to dance and it caught him pike perch on command. As the bear grew, it started killing chickens and attacking cows so chained it. The bear lunged at passersby; he shot his pet dead. The relationship with Rita lingered on through daily letters. She persuaded the authorities to let her settle in Kaigorodskoe with . He found her, like the bear, troublesome. In August 1899 he made the first of his escapes. This involved little danger: the police circulated just a description of a tall auburn-haired man with a “good figure” whose “exterior gives an impression of arrogance.” In a few weeks, was back in Poland, splitting off from the Polish social democrats the hard-line internationalist and Marxist Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. Rita was forsaken.⁷

By 1900 was behind bars, where another liaison affected him more deeply: he nursed his fellow prisoner Antek Rosół who was dying of tuberculosis. The suffering of Rosół haunted , and the suffering that he in turn inflicted on his prisoners was undoubtedly justified in his mind to some extent by what the Tsar’s government did to Rosół.⁸ Two years later Feliks was exiled again, to Arctic Yakutia, after fomenting in a Siberian jail a strike of political prisoners. In Siberia he again spent his days hunting. His wife recalls that he shot a female swan, and when the male returned, fired to put it out of its misery, but missed; the swan then plunged to its death. “Józef [Feliks’s underground name] told this with emotion and amazement at the swan’s fidelity.”⁹

escaped again in 1903. A few weeks later, now a legendary figure, he was a refugee first in Berlin, then in Kraków, at the time part of Austro-Hungarian Galicia. ’s next fiancée, Julia Goldman, was a romantic figure more like the phantoms of his lyrics: she died of TB in 1904. In 1905 went back to Russian territory, to Warsaw, to stir up violent unrest. Strikes and arrests led to concessions and amnesties from the new Russian parliamentary government. became a key figure in the Russian social democrat movement: in 1906 he was in Stockholm, where he met Lenin (as well as Stalin, Voroshilov, Rykov, and Plekhanov). Lenin liked ’s phenomenal singlemindedness. Like Stalin, in Lenin’s eyes was uncouth but valuable as an unquestioning executive. Years passed before resented being patronized by Lenin.

In 1908 he was arrested again. This time he spent long enough in prison to become expert in interrogation, denunciation, and retribution. Many instructions he would issue the Cheka ten years later were based on the practices of his own interrogators and wardens or were derived from his observation of prisoner psychology. was a doctrinaire Bolshevik, arguing with heretics, especially the non-Marxist social revolutionaries, and investigating, calculating, confronting in order to establish which prisoners were stool pigeons, traitors, or double agents— skills which served him well in power.

All this articulated graphically in his Diary of a Prisoner (Pamietnik wieznia ), printed in the Polish-language Red Standard from May 1908 to August 1909. Ironically for a future hangman, describes as movingly as Victor Hugo or Dostoevsky the effect of hangings on victims, prisoners, and wardens, emphasizing the utter depravity and horror of the death penalty. One wonders how could have failed to remember, when ordering the deaths of thousands, lines he had written just ten years previously: