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

Trotsky, generally, can’t refrain from histrionic gestures. . . . Now he’s striking a new blow with his gesture about discipline, and all this Trotskyist discipline actually consists of having the most prominent people active at the front watching the behinds of military specialists from the “non-party” camp of counterrevolutionaries and not stopping these people from ruining the front. . . . Trotsky can’t sing without falsetto. . . . Therefore I ask now, before it is too late, for Trotsky to be put in his place, given limits, for I fear that Trotsky’s crazy commands . . . handing the whole front to so-called bourgeois military specialists who inspire no confidence . . . will create discord between the army and the command. . . .³⁵

Shooting commanders pour encourager les autres was a strategy common to Stalin and Trotsky. Their overall styles were, however, very different. Trotsky’s train carried motor cars, a cinema photographer, and a brass band; stations ahead were telegraphed to lay in butter, quails, and asparagus for the commissar. Shootings of deserters and retreating officers alternated with rousing speeches to the soldiery. Stalin, on the other hand, traveled in ostentatious discomfort; he had no praise for the soldiery, and even less trust: “I must say that those non-working elements who constitute the majority of our army, the peasants, won’t fight for socialism, they won’t! They refuse to fight voluntarily. . . . Hence our task is to make these elements go into combat. . . .”³⁶

The Whites besieging Tsaritsyn ultimately failed to capture the city, but Stalin’s brutality had done more damage to his own side than to the enemy. Voroshilov was threatened by Trotsky with a court martial; Lenin concurred, telling the southern army it could appoint anyone as commander except Voroshilov. This humiliation made Voroshilov dependent on Stalin for his military future. Stalin had now collected two men, Voroshilov and , whom Lenin and Trotsky had humiliated and spurned.

When demoralized Reds surrendered the Ural city of Perm at the end of 1918 to the Whites, thus allowing British forces to link up with Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, ruler of Siberia, Stalin and were dispatched together, in their first collaborative venture, to punish and rally the army. All January 1919, based at Viatka, where had spent his first exile, he and Stalin were inseparable inquisitors. They were so ruthless that in February 1919 the party’s Central Committee had to issue an order releasing the surviving officers “arrested by Stalin’s and ’s commission to be handed over for the appropriate institutions to deploy.”

This, ’s first visit to the front, shook his morale but not his resolve, and in April 1919 he wrote to his sister Aldona:

But you can’t understand me—a soldier of the revolution, warring so that there shall be no more injustice in the world, so that war shall not give whole millions of people as booty for rich conquerors. War is a terrible thing. . . . The most wretched nation has been the first to rise up in defense of its rights—and has put up resistance to the whole world. Would you want me to stand aside here?³⁷