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

Cheka killings escalated. Assassination attempts and advancing White armies, aided by Anglo-French forces invading from the north, the south, and the west, were the pretexts for an orgy of killing that lasted three years. The moral effect on ’s organization was horrendous: an explosion of criminal sadism swept the country. In a matter of days, hundreds were shot in Moscow. Uritsky’s successor in Petrograd, the redoubtable pervert Gleb Bokii, shot 1,300, although the target set by was 500.²⁶ Trotsky and Karl Radek acclaimed the terror; Radek even wanted executions to be public. Lenin in July 1918, before he was fired on, had argued for hangings, rather than shootings, so that the public could better contemplate the corpses.²⁷

Killings also arose from the panic and vindictiveness of civil war: fearful atrocities occurred in cities like Kiev or Astrakhan which changed hands several times between 1918 and 1920. Convicted criminals and certified psychopaths appointed themselves officers of the Cheka and terrorized, raped, and murdered whom they liked. Surrendering White army officers, given safe passes, were summoned to “register” and then shot, burned in furnaces, drowned on barges, or hacked to death. Other executions aimed to improve results on the battlefield by decimating Red Army deserters and retreating units, a party policy that Trotsky, Stalin, and other roving emissaries enforced at the front. Statistics exist only for 1921, a mild year and the last of the civil war, when 4,337 were shot in the army alone. ²⁸ Sometimes a whole ethnic group was declared White and genocide took place. Iona Iakir, a famous Red Army general, had 50 percent of male Don Cossacks exterminated, and used artillery, flamethrowers, and machine guns on women and children.²⁹ Red Cossacks declared their non-Russian neighbors White and massacred Circassian villagers and Kalmyk cattle-herders. In Moscow, under ’s command, indiscriminate mass murder took place. “Counterrevolutionaries” were executed by list; in 1919 all Moscow’s Boy Scouts and in 1920 all members of the lawn tennis club were shot.

Not all chekisty were men. In the Crimea Stalin’s Baku comrade Rozalia Zemliachka and her lover Béla Kun, with Lenin’s approval, murdered 50,000 White officers who had trusted Commander Frunze’s safe conduct. Zemliachka, a Cheka sadist who would live to enjoy a pension, tied the officers in pairs to planks and burned them alive in furnaces, or drowned them in barges that she sank offshore. She had been educated in a Kiev grammar school and at the Sorbonne.

Two women in the Odessa Cheka were particularly feared: Vera Grebeniukova, known as Dora, who for two and a half months in 1918 mutilated 700 prisoners before shooting them, and the “Pekinese,” a Latvian sadist, who was chief executioner. In the Kiev Cheka a Hungarian, Removér, was consigned to a psychiatric ward after she began shooting not just prisoners but witnesses. And in Moscow’s central prison in 1919, a woman executioner specialized in fetching the condemned from the hospital ward and whipping them down to the cellars.

Many Cheka killers were convicts, for example Iankel-Iakov Iurovsky, the killer of the Tsar, and the sole black in the Cheka, Johnston of Odessa, who flayed his victims alive. Some of these killers went uncontrollably mad: Saenko of Kharkov, who worked in a special torture chamber, attacked his superiors and was shot; the same fate befell Maga, chief executioner in Moscow. When the killer was of political importance, milder measures were taken. Béla Kun was put in a psychiatric hospital, from where he was released to play a key role in the Comintern. Dr. Mikhail Kedrov, friend and publisher to Lenin and cousin of two Central Committee members, was relieved of his post when, after reenacting the drownings of the French Revolution with captive White officers, he prepared to exterminate the inhabitants of Vologda and other northern towns. Kedrov suffered from hereditary madness; his father, a violinist, had died in a lunatic asylum. The son spent some time in psychiatric care before reemerging to work, just as cruelly, for the Cheka around the Caspian Sea. He retired from the Cheka after the civil war and was head of a neurosurgical institute when Beria arrested him in 1939. ³⁰