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

The excuse that , Lenin, and Stalin made for the Cheka’s brutal excesses was inexperience. Sailors, schoolteachers, and factory workers could not be expected to maintain professional calm or observe consistent legality in such a furnace of counterespionage and counterterror. In all spheres of government during the first years after the revolution there was a desperate shortage of competent leadership. Men undertook tasks for which they had not the most elementary competence or qualifications. For a soldier, doctor, stoker, or peasant to become a chekist only a short apprenticeship was required to inure him to the violence of the job.

If we take a typical chekist we are as likely to find upward mobility from the dispossessed Jewish shtetl as downward mobility from a Russian middle-class family. Mikhail Frinovsky, for instance, was one of eight children born to comfortably off parents (his father was a schoolteacher and his mother a landowner). Like the son of a somewhat sadistic man and like Stalin educated in a theological seminary, Frinovsky may seem to have been predestined to rebel. But, like many Russians of his generation, Frinovsky was so patriotic that he falsified his age in order to volunteer to serve in the Tsar’s army, and he quickly became an NCO in the cavalry. Disillusioned by the slaughter, he deserted. Once outside the law he gravitated to anarchism and terrorism, and in 1917 took part in torturing a major general to death. He hid from the authorities as a bookkeeper in a military hospital, and when the Bolsheviks took over his crimes were transformed into qualifications for the Cheka. After brief service in the Red Army he became one of the most brutal chekisty in Moscow, and then with Stalin was let loose at the front in the 1920 war against Poland.

Then there were chekisty like Naftali Frenkel, who, but for the war and the revolution, would have remained a chancer and fixer on the fringes of the building trade and gangster rackets in Odessa. Frenkel had become rich on wartime building contracts and dock work, and when revolution broke out and nobody built or imported anymore, he helped the Cheka take Odessa from the Whites. Most of the gangsters were then shot by their former allies but Frenkel’s organizing talents were too good to waste. He was allowed to continue racketeering in the port and also worked for the Cheka until found the combination too compromising. Frenkel was sent, ostensibly as a prisoner, to the far north, where he became a de facto concentration camp commandant and rose to become the chief contractor on the slave-labor White Sea canal in the 1930s.

There were tens of thousands of Frinovskys and Frenkels in the Cheka. It took in men who ten years earlier had intended to pursue wealth or a career and disseminated those it had corrupted throughout Soviet society. Success in the Cheka meant being delegated to take charge of any failing area, military or economic. Thus executioners and interrogators spread into every sector of government, applying their methods to problems once solved by negotiation and persuasion. From mid-1919 on, , like Stalin and Trotsky, was sent by Lenin to any part of the front where the army was collapsing, to any province where stores of grain might be requisitioned for the starving cities, to any local party which was becoming fractious—wherever ruthlessness and blind belief in the cause could salvage the situation.

Despite constantly losing men to other commissariats, by mid-1919 had set up a Union-wide Cheka that could work in his absence. His immediate subordinates, Peterss, Lacis, Ksenofontov, Menzhinsky, and Iagoda—particularly the latter two—were as devoted to the cause as he.³³ The atmosphere was remarkably amicable for such a vipers’ nest; the leadership had charisma, and the lower echelons, who knew where their interests lay, showed them loyalty. Together they created a myth that ennobled the sordid bloodshed.