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

On the night of the 8th and 9th the Polish revolutionary Montwiłł was executed. While it was still light they took off his leg-irons and moved him to the condemned cell. The trial had been on the 6th. He had no illusions and on the 7th he said goodbye to us through the window as we were taking our exercise. He was executed at 1 A.M. The executioner Egorka got, as usual, 50 rubles for the job. The anarchist K. told me, by knocks on the ceiling, that “they had decided not to sleep all night,” and the gendarme told me that just the thought of execution “sends a shiver through you and you can’t get to sleep and you keep turning over.” And after his horrible crime nothing here has changed: bright sunny days, soldiers, gendarmes, changing the guard, exercise. Only in the cells things are quieter, the voices of people singing are not to be heard, many await their turn. . . .

The diary rails at the cruelty of the Tsar’s courts, the use of torture to get confessions, and vaunts the discipline of social democrats, so unlike the depravity of anarchists. The reader is struck first by ’s fair-mindedness and then by puzzlement that the man who wrote this would soon be a jailer far more ruthless than those whom he denounced. Narrow-minded conceit blinded to his contradictions. He preened himself, outwitting the gendarmes who interrogated and guarded him; he praised his own psychological subtlety in identifying a female informer, Hanka, who, liberated from a madhouse by radicals, denounced her liberators and blamed another woman for the betrayal.

Eighteen months passed before was sentenced again to exile in Siberia. The diary stops, but he continued to write in similar vein to his sister Aldona. Again, he escaped within days, and in 1910, after making the revolutionary’s equivalent of the hajj—a visit to the radical Russian writer Maxim Gorky on the island of Capri—he was back in Kraków.

That year married one of his admirers, Zofia Muszkat, the twenty-eight-year-old daughter of a rebellious bookshop worker. Zofia was an acolyte, ready to carry out dangerous archival and secretarial duties for the party; she was resigned to separation and exile. took her walking in the Tatra mountains. Back in Warsaw, in a room furnished with two iron bedsteads and a table, fathered a son. He did not see his little Jasiek for years: Zofia was arrested in Warsaw; the baby was born prematurely in prison and suffered from convulsions and malnutrition. Zofia was exiled to Siberia; Jasiek was fostered. Not until 1912 did Zofia escape from Siberia and reclaim her child; by then had been rearrested.

This time, was kept in closed city prisons, first Warsaw, then Oriol in central Russia (designated for revolutionary recidivists), finally in Moscow. This experience was far worse than Stalin’s exile in Turukhansk. was kept in leg irons until his muscles tore; clean underwear came once a fortnight; there were over a hundred men in a cell designed for fifteen; tuberculosis was rife. Conditions were nearly as bad as those would preside over five years later. had little human contact and few books. By all accounts, he was despondent in Oriol, but he did get a cell to himself and his siblings’ gifts of money and newspapers kept him nourished and informed. ¹⁰ Like Stalin, was not released until the revolution of February 1917 suspended all political imprisonment.

Letters to Aldona when world war broke out suggest that survived on fanatical faith in the future: “When I think of the hell you are all now living in, my own little hell seems so small. . . .” Like Lenin, he approved of this hell, for he wrote to his wife in 1915 from his prison cell: “When I think of what is happening now, about the universal smashing of all hopes, I come to the certainty that life will blossom all the more quickly and strongly, the worse the smashing is today.” His siblings’ and Zofia’s letters sustained : Zofia used citric acid as invisible ink, and a code based on a poem they both loved by Antoni Lange, “Dusze ludzkie samotnice wieczne” (Human souls eternally alone). Feliks wrote verse for Jasiek: