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

himself considered that two years in the Cheka was all that could be expected of a recruit, and like Himmler, he saw virtue in the carnage he oversaw. Martinņš Lacis declared, “However honorable a man may be, however crystal-clear his heart, Cheka work, carried out with almost unlimited rights and in conditions which have an exceptional effect on the nervous system, leaves its mark.” None ever expressed doubts, but their bodies rebelled with fainting fits, colic, and headaches. Like Trotsky, was prone to hysterical crises which led to breakdowns. broke down hysterically after the assassination of Count Mirbach in July 1918: detained by Social Revolutionaries, he bared his chest, inviting them to shoot him. When he was released and the Social Revolutionaries had been crushed, he resigned. In autumn, humiliated by his failure to prevent the assassination of Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin’s life, shaved his hair, forged himself Polish papers in the name of Feliks Domaski, and turned up in Switzerland at the house where his unsuspecting wife and son lived. Only after an interlude on Lake Lugano did he recover and return to Russia. ’s wife and son followed when the Swiss expelled the Soviet diplomatic mission from Bern. From 1919 on, now supported by a wife, a sister, a sister-in-law, and two nieces, but still sleeping in his office and subsisting on bread and tea, was used by Lenin in a series of special missions. This brought him into Stalin’s orbit.

UNTIL THE CIVIL WAR ENDED, Commissar for Nationalities Stalin had little to do except formulate policy. Stalin’s real remit was to solve, by any means, supply problems—getting munitions and men to the front, grain to the cities—and to swing the party’s weight behind repressive measures taken by the Cheka or Red Army. The first of Stalin’s missions was from May to September 1918 with his old friend Klim Voroshilov to Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, now Volgograd). Stalin’s task was to bring grain from the still-productive south up to Moscow and Petrograd, but instead he and Voroshilov, who commanded an army approaching Tsaritsyn, interfered in the defense of the city against the Whites. Stalin branded the Red commander Andrei Snesarev, who was a protégé of Trotsky, a deserter and a collaborator with the French. Well out of artillery range on the Volga, Stalin and Voroshilov presided over a tribunal which summoned officers from Tsaritsyn. The officers were put on barges on the Volga which were then raked with machine guns. Stalin also commandeered all available troops in the area, including six detachments on their way to Baku to rescue the Bolsheviks there from a takeover by Social Revolutionaries and the British; the deaths of the twenty-six Bolshevik Baku commissars can thus be laid at Stalin’s door.

Stalin was accompanied by his new bride, the seventeen-year-old Nadezhda Allilueva, and made his brother-in-law Fiodor take part in the killing of suspected “spetsy,” the career Tsarist officers on whose skills the ill-trained Red Army depended. Fiodor Alliluev went mad. Stalin however cemented his alliance with Voroshilov and with the Cossack commander Budionny. Their hostility to professional army officers simmered for almost twenty years before it was to boil over into a campaign of extermination. Stalin, strongly supported by , clashed with Trotsky over the latter’s use of spetsy. Trotsky, as commander-in-chief, responded by forcing to release Tsarist officers from prison for service in the Red Army, their loyalty assured by the threat of imprisoning or shooting their wives and children if they deserted. was pushed further toward Stalin, who from this point began to replace Trotsky as the ultimate patron of the Cheka.

In the early stages of the revolution had several times sided with Trotsky. When Lenin caved in to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk in January 1918 , like Trotsky, refused to endorse what he called “a capitulation of our entire program.” Unlike Trotsky, however, distrusted anyone who had been in Tsarist service: for the Cheka he recruited almost nobody who had served in the Tsar’s secret police.

The instant dislike that Stalin and Trotsky had taken to each other in Vienna in 1913 now erupted into a feud that would only end when one killed the other. In 1918 Trotsky countered Stalin’s interventions around Tsaritsyn with a threat: “I order Stalin to form immediately a Revolutionary Council for the Southern Front on the basis of non-interference by commissars in operational business. Failure to carry out this order within twenty-four hours will force me to take severe measures.”³⁴ On the same day Stalin complained at length to Lenin: