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

The task of dealing with the Georgians was handed over to Sergo Orjonikidze, who had demonstrated his ruthlessness by shooting Azeri and Armenian nationalists, whether communists or not. When Georgian communists complained to Lenin, Stalin and Orjonikidze were furious and the latter struck one of them in the face for calling him “Stalin’s mule.” Lenin was furious with Orjonikidze—“he had no right to the irritability that he and blame everything on”—and put Stalin and in charge of a commission to investigate and repair the damage. These two, however, exonerated Orjonikidze. Lenin could only attempt to placate the offended Georgians with a short note in March 1923, the last he dictated before arteriosclerosis took away his speech: “Strictly secret. To comrades Mdivani, Makharadze et al. Copy to Trotsky and Kamenev. Respected comrades! I follow your cause with all my heart. I am indignant at Orjonikidze’s coarseness and Stalin’s and ’s connivance. I am preparing notes and a speech for you.”⁴²

There were personal reasons why Stalin gathered a coterie around him of men such as Voroshilov, , and Orjonikidze. Stalin was a loner. During the civil war, he stood out in his isolation. Other Bolsheviks had intimate allies: wives, sisters, and mistresses. Even , once Zofia had arrived from Zurich, was eventually cajoled into living in the Kremlin; his wife found work first in the Commissariat for Education, then as a party propagandist. Wives of leading revolutionaries were placed in inconspicuous but crucial government and party posts. Zinoviev’s second wife, Zlata Lilina, was a power in education, while her brother Ionov controlled state publishing in Petrograd. Olga Bronshtein, Kamenev’s wife and Trotsky’s sister, although she had never been to school, recruited major poets to teach the proletariat to create; later she ran the theaters and then the Lenin museum. Lenin’s wife, Krupskaia, was nominally in charge of education: in 1923 she issued circulars banning the publication or teaching of Plato, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, John Ruskin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Tolstoi. Trotsky’s wife, Natalia Sedova, controlled the State Depository of Confiscated Valuables and the museums.

Divorce and remarriage linked people’s commissars to poets, painters, university professors but, despite the Bolsheviks’ proclamation of sexual equality, very few free female spirits—Larisa Reisner, Aleksandra Kollontai—roamed the fringes of power. The wives of Bolshevik leaders (but not Zofia Dzieryska) had salons where those intellectuals who had not emigrated or were in hiding sought protection from these influential and underemployed consorts. Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, and Bukharin—not to mention Lenin—were patrons whose friends, counselors, admirers, and supplicants coalesced, even before the civil war was over, into a new class of hangers-on: the revolutionary intelligentsia. The process worked in reverse, too. The poet Larisa Reisner, who had flirted with Blok and Mandelstam and slept with Gumiliov, became, as soon as revolution broke out, the consort of the commander of a group of Petrograd sailors, Raskolnikov, and later of the wittiest and most cynical of the Bolshevik inner circle, Karl Radek. But she never burned her bridges with the world of poetry and gave such apolitical outsiders as Anna Akhmatova and Mandelstam protection.

Such half-revolutionary, semi-decadent bourgeois circles were alien to Stalin. No intellectual except Demian Bedny would, until Stalin acquired total power, be seduced into a dialogue. Stalin’s child bride, Nadezhda, was no use in forging alliances; the only connection she gave Stalin was with the Alliluevs. They were Bolsheviks, but apart from Stanislav Redens, head of the Odessa Cheka and married to Nadezhda’s elder sister, they offered Stalin no useful contacts. Even Stalin’s underlings Molotov and Voroshilov had wives who opened more doors.

Stalin, however, had one particular resource to win him allies and neutralize enemies: his fellow Caucasians. Apart from Sergo Orjonikidze, he had another boon companion in Nestor Lakoba, the Abkhaz leader famed for his aquiline eyesight and profound deafness. With Stalin’s assistance Lakoba, once a junior policeman, detached his small Black Sea homeland from Georgia and made it an island of prosperity in a war-ravaged Caucasus. The Bolsheviks connived at Lakoba’s avoidance of reforms and purges; the prerevolution palaces and villas along the coast were neither sacked nor destroyed. Stalin invited Lakoba to stay at his dacha at Zubalovo.⁴³ When ’s mental and physical health faltered and he agreed to take annual breaks, Stalin sent not just him but most of the Cheka leaders to Lakoba.⁴⁴ Sergo Orjonikidze wrote to Lakoba on September 25, 1922:

Dear Comrade Lakoba,