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

In private Jekabs Peterss was just as ruthless. Releasing Bruce-Lockhart, he gave him a letter to deliver to his wife in London, and in March 1921 May and Maisie arrived in Moscow, to discover that Peterss now had a Russian wife and a son. Peterss refused to let his first family leave the country. ¹⁴ The journalist Mikhail Koltsov, writing from the safety of the Ukraine, interviewed Peterss in 1918: “He hunched his shoulders at the spring slush and began pulling his gloves on his big hands. Old, worn-out suede gloves. The fingertips were worn through and sewn up with thick thread, badly, as lonely old men sew. This is how unpleasant sullen bachelors living in sour-smelling nasty low-ceilinged furnished rooms darn.”¹⁵

Lacis was more articulate than Peterss. Before and after the revolution he composed satirical and civic verse and comic plays in Latvian. He wrote a parody of the paternoster, addressed to Tsar Nicolas II: “Our father, Who art in Petersburg, Cursed be Thy name, Destroyed be Thy power . . . ” In 1912 he published his poem “The Heart Aches . . . ” dedicated to his ancestral mother, Latvia. His investigative work began in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), then still the semblance of a normal government ministry. In May 1918 Lacis spectacularly exposed a monarchist conspiracy and was promoted to the Cheka, and in 1919 he distinguished himself in Kiev, where his nephew Paraputs also worked as a chekist and was infamous for appropriating victims’ money and jewelry. Lacis and Peterss devised intricate traps, for instance opening in Kiev a “Brazilian consulate” which sold visas for large sums of money and then arrested all visitors in the name of the Cheka; Peterss himself acted as the Brazilian consul. When Kiev was recaptured by the Whites some 5,000 corpses were discovered, and 7,000 other Cheka detainees could not be accounted for.

Lacis became the Cheka’s publicist, defending it from the strictures of the People’s Commissariat for Justice, and founded a journal called The Red Sword to publish execution statistics (grossly underestimated) broken down by gender, social origin, and time of year. He declared:

The Cheka is not just an investigative organ: it is the battle organ of the party of the future. . . . It annihilates without trial or it isolates from society by imprisoning in concentration camps. Its word is law. The Cheka’s work must cover all areas of public life. . . . When interrogating, do not seek material evidence or proof of the accused’s words or deeds against Soviet power. The first question you must ask is: what class does he belong to, what education, upbringing, origin, or profession does he have? These questions must determine the accused’s fate. This is the sense and essence of red terror. . . . It doesn’t judge the enemy, it strikes him. It shows no mercy, but incinerates anyone who takes up arms on the other side of the barricades and who is of no use to us. . . . But it isn’t a guillotine cutting off heads at a tribunal’s instance. . . . We, like the Israelites, have to build the Kingdom of the Future under constant fear of enemy attack. ¹⁶

Lacis claimed that only 21,000 persons were executed between 1918 and 1920. He exulted in the details, however: the crushing of a Social Revolutionary rebellion in Iaroslavl in July 1918, shooting 57 rebels on the spot and 350 after surrender, after bombing the city from the air and engulfing it in artillery fire from an armored train.