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

The White armies, too, were guilty of mass murder and terror. The killing of 30,000 Reds by the Finnish Marshal Karl Mannerheim in January 1918 provoked Bolshevik revenge, as did the concentration camps used by the new Estonian and Finnish governments to confine Bolsheviks. In the south of Russia, there were White atrocities, although such lapses were infrequent in the White army, which was staffed with many principled officers and backed up an administration which had not completely discarded its ethics. Insane sadists like Baron Roman Ungern-Sternberg, who killed thousands in Mongolia, were exceptional. Only the Ukrainian “anarchist” Nestor Makhno and some Cossack forces systematically employed terror on a scale comparable to the Red Terror.

Red Terror and civil war thus produced in the USSR a body of men and women for whom summary arrest and execution, often en masse, was a normal, salutary procedure. The holocaust that took place between 1918 and 1922 seems less horrific than Hitler’s or Stalin’s only because it was directed more at a class than at a race, because most survivors remained cut off from the Western world, because the paper trail has been destroyed, and because, as Stalin liked to say, “Victors are not put on trial.” Above all, the terror was never repented, let alone atoned for. In the later 1920s, like a dormant infection, those capable of slaughtering “class enemies” without remorse waited for the moment when they could ravage the body politic again.

The easiest way to comprehend the scale of the holocaust that Lenin, Trotsky, , and Stalin unleashed is through demographic statistics. We can compare the actual population figures of the USSR in the 1920s with the figures predicted ten years earlier; we can use the reliable 1926 census figures, and extrapolate from figures produced in areas where records were maintained. From 1914 to mid-1917 just under 3 million men of the Russian empire were killed in the war, as were over 300,000 civilians. From 1917 to 1920 the population of European Russia declined by 6 million (5 percent), and proportionately the Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Caucasus suffered equally.³¹ Major Russian industrial cities had always had higher death rates than birthrates; they grew by sucking in fresh working forces from the countryside, where on average there were 60 deaths to 100 births before the revolution. But from 1917 to 1920 deaths outnumbered births in the countryside and in the cities mortality more than doubled. Epidemics and famines were bigger killers even than the bullets of the Cheka or Red Army. Lenin in December 1919 declared that, “Either the [typhus] louse will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat the typhus louse.” Tuberculosis, heart disease, and dysentery, arising from malnutrition, cold, and stress, ravaged the country.

Overall, the number of people killed during the revolution and civil war amounted to: nearly 2 million soldiers of the Red Army and Cheka with over 500,000 in the White armies; 300,000 Ukrainian and Belorussian Jews in pogroms by Ukrainian, Polish, and White armies; 5 million dead of starvation in the Volga region in 1921. Moreover, 2 million Russians emigrated to Europe and Asia. This amounts to 10 million fewer inhabitants. How many other human beings should have been alive in the USSR in 1922 but were not is a matter for conjecture. Plausible evidence reveals that the actual numbers executed or sent to death camps vastly exceeded the official figures of 12,000 shot in 1918, and 9,701 shot and 21,724 sent to camps for 1921. The repression that followed the rebellions in Kronstadt or Tambov in 1921 alone resulted in tens of thousands of executions.

The age, class, and gender of the victims aggravated the disaster: soldiers killed were typically men in their twenties, while the émigrés lost to the country were largely members of the professional classes. Those most needed to plow the land, rebuild the factories, and run the economy had gone. understood this very well. The Bolshevik leadership had lost two generations; their only hope for the future was the children, many of whom were starving, homeless orphans, a waste of human resources and a threat to public order. They would be the raw material of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Strategy not sentiment motivated the Cheka, GPU, and NKVD to establish colonies for homeless children. Orphanages, children’s communes, and theories of education were a major concern for the secret police; having created the mass of orphaned children, they wanted to use them.³²