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

was not at that time a member of the Politburo, the inner cabinet where seven Bolshevik leaders—Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Trotsky, Stalin, Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky—and three nonvoting “candidate” members—Bukharin, Molotov, Kalinin—took all major decisions. Lenin dismissed as a mere organizer.¹¹ himself confessed to Trotsky that he “was not a statesman.” But voting for the Central Committee of the party shows how respected was by the party rank and file: in March 1919, Lenin received the maximum number of votes, 262, while got 241, fewer than Bukharin or Stalin (258) but more than Trotsky (219) or Kalinin (158). Not until 1924 was made even a nonvoting candidate member.

therefore needed a close relationship with a Politburo member to influence policy in the Cheka’s favor. He edged toward Stalin.

Poles, Latvians, and Jews

THE ETHNIC COMPOSITION of the Cheka aroused as much hostility and terror as its powers. With some justification, émigrés asserted that the Russian revolution was “made by Jewish brains, Latvian bayonets, and Russian stupidity.” Up to the mid-1930s Russians were a minority in the Cheka and its successor organizations. A few of ’s formidable henchmen were Russians: Ivan Ksenofontov, a former factory worker and army corporal, chaired revolutionary tribunals and organized mass shootings of hostages. Like a puritan—he tried to ban chekisty from drinking alcohol—he too worked himself to exhaustion: by 1922, at the age of thirty-eight, Ksenofontov was known as Grandad. Transferred to the Commissariat for Social Security, he died of stomach cancer in 1926. A more horrifying Russian chekist was the semi-qualified doctor and virtuoso pianist Mikhail Kedrov, who would slaughter schoolchildren and army officers in northern Russia with such ruthlessness that he had to be taken into psychiatric care. Kedrov’s consort Revekka Maizel personally shot a hundred White officers and bourgeois and then drowned another 500 on a barge.

The Caucasians in the Cheka were a small, fearsome clique. For a short time, there was a Georgian in the Cheka’s governing body, Stalin’s close ally Sergo Orjonikidze. A Georgian, Aleksi Sajaia, calling himself Dr. Kalinichenko, tortured prisoners in Odessa. Georgians, Armenians, and Azeris brought to the Cheka a sadism their own country had gotten used to under Mongol and Persian overlords. Georgi Atarbekov, whom Stalin knew well, machine-gunned a trainload of Georgian doctors and nurses who were returning to Georgia from Russian war hospitals; he hacked a hundred hostages in Piatigorsk to death with a saber; he murdered his own secretary in his office; and in Armavir, a town of exiled Armenians, he killed several thousand hostages. furiously defended Atarbekov’s actions.¹²

surrounded himself with fellow Poles, notably a trusted friend from the Warsaw underground in the 1900s, Józef Unszlicht. Unszlicht was to command the Cheka’s 300,000 paramilitaries, an army of “special purpose units” that came into existence despite Trotsky’s opposition to splitting up the armed forces and fell upon rebellious civilians, obstreperous peasants, Cossacks, and routed soldiers until 1925. and Unszlicht anticipated revolution triumphing in eastern Europe and Germany; until Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s Poland defeated the Red Army in August 1920, they planned to incorporate Poland into a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of Europe and Asia. Their dislike of Russia was overriden by a crusade on behalf of the world’s proletariat, but the Poland that snatched independence in 1917 was a nationalistic country, led by its landed gentry. The Polish left and Polish Jews who wanted political equality were marginalized by Marshal Piłsudski’s state and saw their best chance of power as a Soviet-inspired revolution—hence the prominent role they played in the Cheka.