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

Felek has his son on the wall

in three photographic snaps

stuck on with prison bread

If I look at the first, I hear laughter. . . .

If I look at the second, there, concentrated,

Jasiek studies the world.

as though tears had frozen in his eyes.

And from the child’s eyes, at the father

looks the lonely pain of the mother

in the anguish of the prisoner’s heart. . . .

Jasiek’s father turns and tosses in his dreams

and stillness embraces his breast,

and his heart looks for his son’s heart

and tries hard to hear if from afar

his anguished voice should cry. . . .

Stalin was physically and spiritually toughened by four years of Siberian exile; was physically weakened and intellectually narrowed by five years of Russian prisons. All that he learned, when moved to the Moscow prison of Butyrki where he was employed in the workshops supplying the army, was to cut and stitch trousers and tunics. Nevertheless, as a leader among prisoners, organizing hunger strikes, protests, and inquisitions, he narrowed the single-minded fanaticism that enabled him to make the Cheka an autonomous body with the desire and ability to control an entire population. But, a guard dog in need of a master, needed political direction, and it would be Stalin whose guidance he found most intelligible and consistent.

The Extraordinary Commission

THE FIRST CHEKA (Extraordinary Commission) was intended just to guard the revolution’s headquarters in Petrograd. But on December 20, 1917, persuaded Lenin to expand the Cheka to the Extraordinary Committee to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage. Not all Lenin’s associates applauded ’s idea. Leonid Krasin, a factory director who became one of Lenin’s most persuasive diplomats and ruthless requisitioners, recorded:

Lenin has become quite insane and if anyone has influence over him it is only “Comrade Feliks” , an even greater fanatic and, in essence, a cunning piece of work who scares Lenin with counterrevolution and the idea that this will sweep us all away, him first. And Lenin, I am finally convinced, is very much a coward, trembling for his own skin. And plays on that.

Lenin’s concern for his own skin was not without justification. Sailors who had never forgiven their officers the vicious reprisals for the mutinies of 1905; soldiers who had been sent to die at the front with no boots or rifles while their officers stayed in the rear; factory workers whose wages no longer bought bread and vodka—the urban population would rob, assault, or murder anyone they perceived as an exploiter. Kerensky’s provisional government had released thousands of convicted criminals and psychopaths who provided the catalyst in an explosive mixture, and the dissolving Tsarist army not only set loose thousands of men habituated to killing, but more criminals who had been released from penal servitude to serve at the front. Many of these convicts were to become killers on behalf of the new authorities. The Bolsheviks had been swept to power on the wave of violence that swept first Petrograd then Moscow, including the murder of two government ministers in their hospital beds by sailors. The vengeance of the populace was now to be channeled into a judicial and extrajudicial system for hunting down, detaining, and disabling the class enemy. The Cheka was this channel.