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

I have relied on my own research in these archives and others (the Georgian Central State Archive, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art) and a few private holdings, notably the surviving Nestor Lakoba Archive (now acquired by the Hoover Institute). There is enough material for seven maids with seven mops for seven thousand years, and much remains unexplored, particularly since archival catalogues give only the vaguest indication of what anything may hold.

Fortunately, several dozen dedicated and ill-rewarded Russian historians have published in the last decade some 200 important monographs and many hundreds of articles, and these I have drawn on, in some cases heavily. The most important are compilations of formerly inaccessible documents—unedited records of Central Committee meetings and Politburo discussions, telegrams, telephone calls, and letters from and to Stalin (particularly to his inner circle), NKVD indictments, interrogations, and sentences, biographical records of hundreds of NKVD men, correspondence of intellectuals, economists, and scientists, diaries, OGPU and NKVD reports of public and private opinion, and so on.

In using articles and monographs, one must bear in mind the bias and background of the writer, and Russian and Western historians fall into several categories. The rarest and most valuable group gives a presentation as objective as possible of the material, and suggests rather than imposes an interpretation of the relative weight to be attached to, or the reasons behind, events. These include, above all, Oleg Khlevniuk and A. I. Kokurin; Aleksandr Ostrovsky, the author of a pioneering study of the early Stalin, Kto stoial za spinoi Stalina (Who Backed Stalin?); K. A. Zalessky, who compiled a biographical encyclopedia, Imperia Stalina: biograficheskiièntsiklopedicheskii slovar (Stalin’s Empire); the biographers of Ezhov, Marc Janson, and Nikita Petrov; the latter, with Skorkin, co-author of the biographical reference work Kto rukovodil NKVD 1934–1941 spravochnik (Who Ran the NKVD 1934–1941); and Michael Parrish, who followed up Robert Conquest with his The Lesser Terror.

A valuable group arranges original material to make a good story: Leonid Mlechin, Kirill Stoliarov, Arkadi Vaksberg, Vitali Shentalinsky, Boris Sokolov, the late Dmitri Volkogonov.

Another useful group comprises those who were personally involved, either as victims or relatives of the victims, or oppressors or their children. They have information and sometimes access denied to others; they have axes, some good, to grind. Former KGB operatives have access to otherwise closed archives, but a lifetime devoted to disinformation imposes caution on the reader.

To be used with great reserve are historians with an ideological position. Some of the most prolific and cogent, such as the late Vadim Rogovin, believe that Stalin has to be understood as a betrayer of Leninism-Trotskyism. Others, such as Valeri Shambarov, believe the West to bear responsibility for destroying Russia in 1917, 1941, and 1991.

Western historians naturally lag behind but have written a number of peerless works. Forty years later, Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror remains a classic. Though his sources were a tiny fraction of today’s in quantity, Conquest got it right. Catherine Merridale’s chronicle of death and mourning, Night of Stones, and Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar show that non-Russian writers can provide insights as deep as any native historian or sociologist.

The only useless works are those that justify Stalin’s ways. The majority (both in titles and print runs) of works in Russian bookshops today belong to this category. Some authors, like Iuri Mukhin, even assert that the Katyn forest massacres were carried out by the Nazis.