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

When Lenin died, Stalin with extraordinary cunning arranged the succession so that his authority would be undisputed. He placated Lenin’s leftist heirs, Zinoviev and Kamenev, by joining them in what would be a short-lived triumvirate. The liberal right he reassured by seeing to it that Rykov was chosen as “prime minister,” i.e., chairman of the Council of Commissars. Stalin, as the party’s general secretary, held the reins of power, and he ensured the Soviet economy came under his control by making economic overlord. Meanwhile, ’s agents sampled public reaction to Lenin’s death and reassured Stalin that the Soviet man in the street was most afraid of Trotsky seizing power, bringing back militant communism and ending the New Economic Plan. The NEP allowed private capital to set up small businesses and even operate state concessions; it let peasants farm the land as if they owned it and allowed businessmen and intellectuals to travel abroad. But the authors of the NEP saw it as only a temporary retreat from socialism to allow the economy and population to prepare for the next stage in the creation of a communist society.

While Trotsky languished in the Caucasus, Stalin and took care of everything from Lenin’s embalming to the Politburo’s agenda. It dawned too late on Trotsky how disastrous his acquiescence had been. The evening after Lenin died, Stalin composed a telegram: “To Iagoda, to be given immediately to Trotsky. I regret the technical impossibility of your arriving in time for the funeral. There are no reasons to expect any complications. In these conditions we see no necessity to interrupt your treatment. Naturally we leave a final decision to you....”⁴⁹ Trotsky saw that he would have no say in the Politburo until May 1924, when Lenin’s last will and testament would be read out to the thirteenth congress of the Russian Bolshevik party. This secret “Letter to the Congress,” Trotsky hoped, would name him the legitimate heir to power and Stalin unfit to inherit Lenin’s mantle. Until then his demands would be modest. “Do you consider my immediate return to Moscow a good idea? My physical state makes it possible to take part in closed sessions, but not in public speeches. Trotsky.” ⁵⁰

readily acquiesced in politically disabling Trotsky, who was clearly erratic and divisive, but found Stalin’s suppression of other dissident voices within the Bolshevik party harder to swallow. The stroke that silenced Lenin in spring 1923 had deprived the party of the force that could pull everyone together. Lenin, unlike Stalin, allowed others to let off steam before he imposed his own views, and did so without recriminations. But, at Stalin’s insistence, the Cheka moved from suppressing other left-wing parties to actions that contradicted the policy of Democratic Centralism preached by Lenin in order to make Stalin’s the controlling voice in the Politburo.

and the Cheka actually had a motivation as strong as Stalin’s for repressing dissent: the Cheka needed something to do when peace came or it risked dissolution. In autumn 1919 the White armies had been definitively repulsed from central Russia. Civil war raged for two more years, but the existence of the Soviet state was no longer in doubt. The need for the Cheka came under question. sought new roles and on May 1, 1920, he had won the Cheka peacetime powers: “The law gives the Cheka the possibility of using administrative measures to isolate those who infringe labor rules, parasites, and persons who arouse suspicion of being counterrevolutionary, persons for whom there is not enough evidence for judicial punishment and where any court, even the most harsh, will always or most often acquit them.”⁵¹ In March 1921, Zinoviev, aggrieved by malcontents in Petrograd’s factories, invited to put Cheka groups in every trade union branch: the unions, which Trotsky had seen as the foundation of workers’ power, were emasculated.

Information was the Cheka’s commodity in its transactions with Stalin. In 1918 it had been concerned with who people were, not what they thought; now the control of thought and speech offered expansion instead of retrenchment. When Russia’s postal services were restored to a shadow of their former glory, the Cheka took on enough perlustrators to intercept and read every item of mail. Information on the public mood—on conversations in queues, on dissident intellectuals, on grumbling peasants—was gathered from informers into weekly reports for Stalin and the party. But real counterrevolutionaries were now extinct and the surviving populace was too tired, hungry, and dejected. Even though factory workers in 1922 were once again faced with starvation, as inflation ravaged the Soviet economy as badly as Weimar Germany and the authorities looted pay packets for fictitious grain or gold bonds, there was no resistance that would tax even a local Cheka.