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

Bliumkin had genius: he was fluent in many European and Asiatic languages, he wrote verse and, despite the sadistic jokes he played, fascinated admirers with his exploits. Bliumkin personified to the extreme the brilliant intellectual corrupted by the license to kill with impunity. In June 1918, before the killing of the German ambassador, the poet Osip Mandelstam heard Bliumkin boast that he was having a “spineless intellectual” shot and raised a storm of protest. Through Larisa Reisner, Mandelstam, who had a reckless disregard for his own safety, obtained an interview with . The Cheka boss responded to his indignation: the intellectual may have been saved. Bliumkin also befriended the peasant poet Sergei Esenin and took him to Iran, where in 1920 there was a short-lived Soviet republic thus inspiring Esenin’s Persian lyrics. Bliumkin’s circle was the first where chekisty and poets mingled. Even the principled monarchist poet Nikolai Gumiliov, shortly to be shot by the Cheka, was proud to meet Bliumkin. He wrote in his poem “My Readers”: “A man who had shot an emperor’s envoy in a crowd of people came up to shake my hand, to thank me for my verses.” These associations of poet and chekist were mutually destructive. Few of ’s men, or Russia’s poets, would live out their allotted spans. Esenin committed suicide and Bliumkin was shot by Menzhinsky for his links with Trotsky. Mayakovsky was to kill himself, and his Cheka friend Iakov Agranov was executed.

Whether aghast at power like Mandelstam, who found authority as “revolting as a barber’s hand,” or fascinated by it like Mayakovsky and Esenin, the paths of poets and chekisty intersected. In 1919 the greatest of the Russian symbolist poets, Aleksandr Blok, was interrogated by the Cheka as a Social Revolutionary and “mystical anarchist” sympathizer. He periodically interceded, sometimes successfully, for other detainees: Blok’s chekist contact Ozolin, who had himself supervised mass murder in Saratov, declared himself a fellow poet. Max Voloshin, a poet whose reputation as a magus overawed both Reds and Whites, who survived atrocities as the Crimea was conquered and lost by both sides, eloquently testified in 1921 as to what the demented deposed leader of the Hungarian soviets, Béla Kun, and his consort Rozalia Zemliachka had done:

Terror

They gathered to work at night.

They read denunciations, certificates, cases.

They hurriedly signed sentences.

They yawned. They drank wine.

[ . . . ]

At night they chased barefooted, naked people

Over ice-covered stones

Against a northeast wind

Into wastelands outside town.

[ . . . ]

They threw them, not all killed yet, into a pit.

They hurriedly covered them with earth.

And then with an expansive Russian song

They returned home to town.

Béla Kun had summoned Voloshin to read through lists of condemned, ostentatiously deleted the poet’s own name, and then invited him to perform an act of unbearable complicity: crossing off the name of one man in ten.²⁴

It was harder for intellectuals to mix with chekisty once the latter began mass killing. “Red Terror” was decreed on September 1, 1918, as a defensive measure which suspended both legality and morality. The pretext was the assassination on August 30 by the young poet Leonid Kannegiser of the head of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Uritsky—ironically, Uritsky was one chekist who loathed bloodshed. Lenin was unhappy with ’s plans to proceed with mass terror against counterrevolutionaries, but on August 31 he was hit by a bullet allegedly fired by a former anarchist, Fanny Kaplan, and was temporarily put out of action. Kaplan was an unlikely assassin. Not even Lenin’s entourage knew until the last moment that he would be speaking at the Moscow factory where he was shot and Kaplan suffered from periodic total loss of sight, caused by an explosion in a terrorist bomb factory a decade before. A revolver was “found” four days later, but could not have fired the bullet extracted from Lenin’s neck. Kannegiser, Uritsky’s killer, was quickly arrested and confessed, but was interrogated for a whole year in the hope that he would name co-conspirators before being shot. Fanny Kaplan told the Cheka nothing, even when questioned by Peterss, and was handed over to Kremlin interrogators. She was shot a week later in a garage by Pavel Malkov, the Kremlin commandant; the poet Demian Bedny, Stalin’s closest friend among the intellectuals, helped Malkov cremate her in a steel oil drum.²⁵