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

The cheapest and surest method of waging this internal war was by shooting. The Bolsheviks had loudly protested when Kerensky’s government reintroduced the death penalty for army deserters, but in February 1918, after just two months in power, the Bolsheviks gave the Cheka the formal right to shoot its victims without anyone else’s sanction, even without charge or trial. Power of life and death invigorated the Cheka; it spawned offspring with lightning speed. By June 1918 every province and district under a Soviet council of workers and soldiers was setting up its own Cheka. The remit was broad and vague: counterespionage, controlling the bourgeoisie, enforcing Soviet decrees; their character depended on local personalities and feelings. Only gradually, as the White armies withdrew from the center of Russia, were these local groups—frequently barbarous and unpredictable in their behavior but also sometimes controlled by more moderate Marxists and Social Revolutionaries—brought under ’s control in Moscow.

Those, like Adolf Joffe, who were attempting to represent the Soviet government abroad as a civilized body, were embarrassed by the Cheka’s autonomy and violence. On April 13, 1918, Joffe asked the Petrograd Buro to abolish the Cheka: “Uritsky’s and ’s commissions do more harm than good and apply completely impermissible, clearly provocational methods. . . .” Even pro-Bolshevik lawyers were horrified. On July 12 V. A. Zhdanov, who had defended the assassin of Grand Duke Sergei in 1903, protested to Professor Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, who had access to Lenin:

The absence of control, the right to decide cases, the absence of defense, publicity, or the right to appeal, the use of provocation is inevitably leading the Cheka, and will result in it being a place where a nest of people will be made who under the cover of secrecy and crazy, uncontrolled power will do their personal and party deeds. I maintain that the activity of the Cheka will inevitably be the strongest element discrediting Soviet power.

Shortly before they died, two grand old men of Russian thought and letters, the writer Vladimir Korolenko and the anarchist Prince Piotr Kropotkin, wrote eloquent protests against the death penalty. In vain: retained his power of life and death.

As the Cheka became centralized, it divided by fission, evolving into a complex organism that spread over the whole country. It took over counterespionage and control of the armed forces; it oversaw Russia’s railways; it intercepted letters and telegrams; it neutralized political opponents including members of other left-wing parties; it fought “sabotage”; it conducted espionage abroad. The handful of party workers, soldiers, and sailors in Petrograd expanded in two years to an organization of 20,000 armed men and women of very varied backgrounds united by the conviction of their rightness, or at least their impunity. When they were not fired by enthusiasm, they were motivated by panic. In Petrograd, under Grigori Zinoviev’s hysterical rule, the chiefs of the Cheka were replaced every few weeks, each one more ruthless than the last. Chekisty were overworked: each interrogator had a hundred cases to process.

Equipping the Cheka was easy. The First World War had left for both Cheka and Trotsky’s Red Army enough small arms, machine guns, and ammunition for three years of civil war and red terror. A consignment of leather coats, sent from western Europe for Russia’s air force pilots, was appropriated by to clothe his men hygienically: the typhus louse that killed so many soldiers preferred woolen greatcoats. Recruiting men who were not disobedient psychopaths was harder. sought men with “a burning heart, a cool head, and clean hands”; Lenin’s remark that for every decent man nine bastards had to be employed was nearer the mark.

At first the Cheka recruited not just Bolsheviks, but left Social Revolutionaries and even a few anarchists. Piotr Aleksandrovich, the leader of the Social Revolutionaries in the Cheka, was a nuisance: he insisted on making the Cheka accountable to local soviets, in which his party still had a say. In summer 1918 the Social Revolutionaries among the Cheka were tricked into mounting a revolt and were crushed. The Cheka then became the unquestioning agent of Lenin’s party. Accountability disappeared in March 1919: was made commissar of internal affairs as well as chairman of the Cheka, thus becoming answerable to himself.