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

What was done to innocent victims in the USSR is not unique to totalitarian regimes; the difference is that it was done at home, to those of the same national group. The British committed atrocities on the other side of the world: they founded concentration camps in the Transvaal, the Andaman Islands, and Kenya, and mined African tin with forced labor. King Leopold II of Belgium killed and maimed as large a proportion of the Congolese as Stalin did of the Russians. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and when the fabric of a complex society is torn to shreds by world war, famine, and emigration, absolute power falls into the hands of whoever grabs it.

Historians must learn from zoology: nothing is more violent than a large group of chimpanzees or baboons when short of food or territory under the leadership of an alpha male. Life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” to quote Thomas Hobbes, when a society loses the complex play of forces—judiciary, army, executive, public opinion, religion, culture—that keep each other in check, and both anarchy and tyranny at bay. Russia and Germany were unlucky in that evil geniuses— Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Hitler—seized power when world war and pariah status in the postwar world had left their countries shattered. And even in a society protected by a balance of authorities, enough people can be found in a small town to staff Auschwitz, as the American psychologist Stanley Milgram proved. In the 1960s Milgram had no trouble inducing two thirds of volunteers from the public to obey men in white overalls and administer what they were told were lethal electric shocks to actors pretending to be inadequate pupils in a game of “teacher and pupil.”

In Germany, “Holocaust deniers” have no credibility outside a lunatic fringe. The last articulate writer to deny Hitler’s Holocaust, David Irving, does however serve one useful purpose: he forces historians to marshal their facts again and tell the story more cogently than before, in order to silence him. But people still deny by assertion or implication, and not only in Russia, Stalin’s holocaust.

The Nuremberg trials, however many criminals escaped judgment, began a process of rehabilitation for Germany. In the USSR, neither the shooting of a dozen of Beria’s men, nor Nikita Khrushchiov’s twentieth Communist Party congress speech of 1956 brought the Soviet population face-to-face with the realities of the past. The guilty were, by and large, not brought to account nor even removed from power. Despite all the revelations in ten years of perestroika, Stalinism remains a deep-seated infection in Russia’s body politic, liable to flare up at any crisis. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has rejoined the world community but it does not so much deny as set aside Stalin’s holocaust, by celebrating Stalin instead as the architect of victory and the KGB as Russia’s samurai. The mayor of Moscow has proposed reerecting the statue of opposite the Lubianka. In 2002, without comment abroad or at home, the Russian post office issued a set of stamps, “The 80th Anniversary of Soviet Counterintelligence”: the stamps show Artur Artuzov né Frautschi, one of the most dreaded OGPU leaders in the early 1920s; Sergei Puzitsky, who organized the killing of half a million Cossacks in 1931; Vladimir Styrne, who slaughtered thousands of Uzbeks in the 1920s; Vsevolod Balitsky, who purged the Ukraine and enslaved the Soviet peasantry. Imagine the uproar if Germany issued stamps commemorating Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler, and Adolf Eichmann. Nobody in Germany smokes “Auschwitz” cigarettes but Belomorkanal cigarettes, commemorating a camp where 100,000 were exterminated, are still sold in Russia. The city of Dzerzhinsk, appropriately the most polluted township in the world, still commemorates Feliks . (Admittedly, there is a sprinkling of rues Robespierres in France—another case of pride in the atrocities of the past.) How can Stalin and his hangmen be exorcised if we fail to take heed when George W. Bush and Tony Blair drink beer with Putin and the Russian army carries on Beria’s genocidal work in Chechnya?

A new focus is one reason for writing this book; a second is the flood of material. Like the Nazis, the Stalinists left a trail of paper behind their most shameful crimes. In 1989 the Soviet archives, themselves under the control of the KGB, opened their doors to researchers, foreign and Soviet. In the early 1990s both the Presidential Archive and even the KGB’s offered access. For most researchers, the State Archive of Social-Political History (formerly the Communist Party Archives, then the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Modern History) and the State Archive of the Russian Federation have been the richest resources. Recently the Presidential Archive has declassified less and less, and restricted access, while the new FSB opens its archives only to the families of the repressed or to its former employees.