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

In the Cheka and the party, Lenin feared, Jewish brains were as much a drawback as an advantage, and the Jews themselves were only too aware of the backlash they might provoke. Lenin took care to see that Trotsky’s name was removed from the commission set up to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church. Zinoviev, visiting the Ukraine, warned that there were “too many Jews.” Kaganovich, in the mid-1920s general secretary of the Ukrainian party and a Ukrainian Stalin, cut within three years Jewish representation at Kharkov university from 40 to 11 percent and raised that of Ukrainians from 12 to 38 percent. Any initiative known to emanate from Trotsky or Iagoda could make Russia’s smoldering anti-Semitism flare up. Jews loomed large in the repressive organs of government and in the party, while their proportion among the semi-starving, freezing population of Petrograd and Moscow for a while sharply declined. In 1922, they reached their maximum representation in the party (not that they formed a coherent group) when, at 15 percent, they were second only to ethnic Russians with 65 percent.

The Chekist as Intellectual and Organizer

WHEN THE FIRST WORLD WAR ended, the old empires of Britain and France and the largely middle-class governments of the newly independent states of the Baltic and central Europe turned their attention to the threat posed by Bolshevik Russia. The Cheka had to divert resources from internal repression to external enemies, and both espionage and counterintelligence assumed greater importance. The Cheka would need educated linguists as desperately as it had sharpshooters. To deal with spies, to devise propaganda, agents needed skills in disinformation, manipulation, and falsification. For these tasks men with higher education, not just experience in killing, were needed. Jewish recruits best filled this need. Few Baltic or Polish recruits to the Cheka were intellectuals, although Baron Romuald Pillar von Pilchau, a renegade German aristocrat from Latvia, and the fastidious Petrograd lawyer Ronchevsky were outlandish exceptions to the rule.

The Cheka was an essential instrument not just for suppressing counterrevolution or providing intelligence, but for making the shattered economy function. From the start, Lenin and Trotsky secretly planned the totalitarian organization of labor, with mobile labor armies and cooperatives of peasants on state land. In summer 1918 Trotsky organized the first concentration camps in the southeast of the country. Nothing could shake Trotsky’s belief that “the unproductive nature of compulsory labour is a liberal myth,” but it took a decade for Cheka labor camps to make any perceptible contribution to the economy.

Anticipating Hitler, the Cheka’s activities were economically important in more primitive and horrible ways. Desperately needed money accrued to the Soviet state not just from nationalizing banks and businesses; the murdered Tsaritsa’s crown jewels, delivered to Moscow in ten suitcases by her killers, fetched about $100 million. When sentenced to be executed, real or imaginary counterrevolutionaries forfeited their property to the Cheka. In late 1919, when the Cheka spawned its provincial and departmental offspring—railways, factories, and military units as well as districts, parishes, and towns got their own Cheka units—executions in the open were abandoned. A shot in the back of the neck in a cellar or garage became standard practice. Victims were first stripped naked and usable clothing stored. Lenin himself received a suit, a pair of boots, a belt, and braces worn by a victim of the Moscow Cheka.²⁰ Underwear went to Red Army soldiers or Cheka prisoners. Gold teeth were prized from the corpses. (Mikhail Frinovsky, a chekist who was to become notorious in the Great Terror of 1931 and whose teeth were kicked out by a recalcitrant prisoner, had himself a complete set of implants made from the gold teeth of his victims.)

Soviet forces were desperately short of supplies by the end of the civil war; they needed loot to operate. A report to Iagoda from a unit sent to put down a peasant rebellion in Simbirsk runs: “Because of the complete absence mainly of footwear in the Red Army no conspiracies or counterrevolutionary manifestations have been noted.”²¹ Red Army units would list every trophy they won after successful actions. In 1920, at Kazan, Commander N. Epaneshnikov proudly reported to headquarters that he was sending them “64 ram-rod guns, 17 hunting rifles . . . 86 various rifles, one axe, 16 tanned sheep- and goat-skins, 11 old greatcoats, 1 ripped greatcoat . . . 2 knitted underpants . . . 10 ordinary underpants, 2 sacks of newspaper, 45 raw horse skins . . . a bell . . . and a distilling pipe.”²²

Vladimir Zazubrin, in 1918 a deserter from the White forces and later a lively writer of fiction and memoirs, shot by Stalin in 1938 for his frankness, recalled the hard life of the Cheka executioners: