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

White, grey carcasses (undressed people) collapsed onto the floor. Chekisty with smoking revolvers ran back and cocked the triggers immediately. The legs of those shot jerked in convulsions. . . . Two men in grey greatcoats nimbly put nooses round the necks of the corpses, dragged them off to a dark niche in the cellar. Two others with spades dug at the earth, directing steaming rivulets of blood. Solomin, his revolver in his belt, sorted out the linen of those shot. He carefully made separate piles of underpants, shirts and outer clothing. . . . Three men were shooting like robots, their eyes were empty, with a cadaverous glassy shine. . . .

Like Lacis or Zazubrin, other chekisty fancied their talents as writers—just as some writers were later to test their skills as NKVD interrogators. In 1921, in newly conquered Tbilisi, the chekisty published an anthology, The Cheka’s Smile. The contribution by Aleksandr Eiduk, executioner and roving military emissary, ran:

There is no greater joy, not better music

Than the crunch of broken lives and bones.

This is why when our eyes are languid

And passion begins to seethe stormily in the breast,

I want to write on your sentence

One unquavering thing: “Up against a wall! Shoot!” ²³

While in the Moscow Cheka Eiduk admitted “with enjoyment in his voice, like an ecstatic sexual maniac” to a diplomat friend that he found the roar of truck engines, used to drown the noise of prisoners being executed in the inner courtyard of the Lubianka, “Good . . . blood refines you!” Eiduk, shot on Stalin’s orders in 1938, was in 1922 assigned by the Soviet government to watch over the American Relief Agency as it fed 10 million starving peasants on the Volga.

More deplorable even than Eiduk’s verses were contributions from poets with reputations once worth defending such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, who declared, “Enough of singing of moon and seagull, I shall sing of the Extraordinary Committee . . . ” and then advised, “Any youth thinking over his future, / deciding on whom to model his life, I shall tell, without hesitating: ‘Base it / On Comrade .’ ”

Chekisty and poets were drawn to each other like stoats and rabbits—often with fatal consequences for the latter. They found common ground: the need for fame, an image of themselves as crusaders, creative frustration, membership of a vanguard, scorn for the bourgeoisie, an inability to discuss their work with common mortals. There was an easily bridged gap between the symbolist poet who aimed to épater le bourgeois and the chekist who stood the bourgeois up against a wall.

One outstanding intellectual chekist was the twenty-year-old Social Revolutionary Iakov Bliumkin. Joining the Odessa Cheka, he became notorious as “Fearless Naum” and startled the world when he entered the German embassy in Moscow with a mandate bearing ’s signature and shot the ambassador, Count Mirbach, dead—allegedly to avenge the humiliating Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and to provoke a breach with Germany and thus world revolution. Bliumkin received only a nominal prison sentence (Had this Social Revolutionary coup in fact been stage-managed by the Bolsheviks?) and reappeared as a Cheka officer in Kiev in 1919.