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

Lacis later became, like , an overlord of the Soviet economy; he was always pushing the Cheka to extend its remit far beyond security. In his tribute to , he declared: “whoever hinders if only by laxness the development of the country’s productive forces . . . is liable to eradication and the Cheka must deal with all of this.” ¹⁷ As his energy flagged Lacis became a member of the Latvian section of the Union of Writers and even saw his plays performed in the Latvian theater in Leningrad. He died, apparently of a ruptured aorta, in 1937, commanding railway paramilitaries in eastern Siberia, just before Ezhov’s arrests would have swept him away along with almost every other senior Latvian chekist.

The prominent role of Jews in the killings of 1918–21 is a very thorny question, if only because one has to share debating ground with Russian chauvinists and plain anti-Semites.¹⁸ From Trotsky down to the executioners of Odessa, Russia’s Jews ruthlessly avenged the victims of a century’s pogroms, and the perceived Jewishness of the Cheka, in the minds of not just anti-Semitic fascists but even otherwise fair-minded Russian monarchists and liberals, reflected a widespread view of the Bolshevik party and its Central Committee as a Jewish cabal. We cannot dismiss the upsurge of violence in 1918–21 by Jews against Russians as simply redressing the balance after centuries of Tsarist oppression. One might compare it to the violence in 1947–48 of the Stern gang and Irgun in Israel against Arab inhabitants and British rulers, an explosion of self-assertion after a far worse persecution. The motivation of those Jews who worked for the Cheka was not Zionist or ethnic. The war between the Cheka and the Russian bourgeoisie was not even purely a war of classes or political factions. It can be seen as being between Jewish inter-nationalists and the remnants of a Russian national culture.

In the traditional Russian and Nazi definition of Jewishness, where parentage and surname counts as much as religious and cultural affiliation, such a view is plausible. But what was Jewish except lineage about Bolsheviks like Zinoviev, Trotsky, Kamenev, or Sverdlov? Some were second- or even third-generation renegades; few even spoke Yiddish, let alone knew Hebrew. They were by upbringing Russians accustomed to a European way of life and values, Jewish only in the superficial sense that, say, Karl Marx was. Jews in anti-Semitic Tsarist Russia had few ways out of the ghetto except emigration, education, or revolution, and the latter two courses meant denying their Judaism by joining often anti-Jewish institutions and groups.

The Bolsheviks had strong support among the ordinary Jewish population of the miserable shtetls of western Russia and the Ukraine. Firstly, because for the first years of Soviet power the authorities did not regard Zionism as a heinous crime.¹⁹ Secondly, the Jewish Bund, which many even nonintellectual or pro-Zionist Jews supported, was a socialist party in alliance, like the Bolsheviks, with a wide spectrum of social democrats. And thirdly, the 5 million Jews of Russia, particularly in the thirty years before the removal of restrictions in 1913, had been subject to violent pogroms and fantastical accusations, and were denied access to major cities, civic rights, and the professions. One Russian minister of the 1880s, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, is credited with the remark that Russia’s Jews should be dealt with by “one third emigration, one third assimilation, and one third extermination.” In the First World War the front line between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian armies had cut through a region of Jewish townships. Over half a million Jews were in 1915 summarily deported east. Between 1918 and 1920, during the civil war, Jews suffered from pogroms at the hands of White Cossacks, Ukrainian nationalists, and Polish invaders; White generals such as Anton Denikin did not always rein in their juniors’ anti-Semitism. Among the Red Army, only Semion Budionny’s Cossacks consistently committed anti-Jewish atrocities.