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

Stalin nevertheless needed the Cheka, but one with a changed ethos in order to harass his opponents. For Stalin, ’s only defect was fastidiousness: he disliked fabricating evidence. Still less was he willing to repress party members, even when Stalin persuaded him that fractions menaced the party and that all fractious discussion was therefore counterrevolutionary. One reason ’s energy was diverted first into the railways and then into restoring the Russian economy was that Stalin needed the services of the cleverer, more inventive, and less principled deputy heads of the GPU (the Cheka’s name from 1922), namely Viacheslav Menzhinsky and Genrikh Iagoda, and began to deal with them directly.

From Cheka to State Political Directorate

SHOT chekisty found taking bribes; he deducted alimony from the salaries of unfaithful married men. But the Cheka chiefs did not even mildly reprimand those who shot the innocent or battered prisoners into confessing. The decision to slaughter the Tsar’s family in Ekaterinburg and Perm, taken in July 1918 by local party and Cheka officials, was not authorized by the Moscow Cheka but the fait accompli was approved. When the Tsar’s family and servants were dead Gorky pleaded, and Lenin apparently agreed, that the killings could stop. But Jekabs Peterss ordered the Cheka to kill the grand dukes imprisoned in Petrograd, including the harmless and respected historian Nikolai Mikhailovich. The grand dukes were beaten, stripped half-naked, and, some on stretchers, shot. Peterss was not even reproved.

Only when cases were fabricated en masse did sometimes act. In June 1921 at Sebezh on the Latvian border the chekist Pavlovich invented a conspiracy called Tempest (Vikhr) and rounded up a hundred victims to be shot. Vasili Ulrikh, who was to preside over Stalin’s worst show trials in the 1930s, and Agranov, ’s acolyte, believed in Tempest; it took months to expose the fabrication and have Pavlovich shot. Within a year, however, stopped such investigations, and a series of fabricated trials in the early 1920s cost hundreds their lives.

In early 1920 the death penalty was abolished. Although, because of the war with Poland, it was reinstated on May 22, the Cheka announced its humanity: a directive of outrageous disingenuousness was signed by and Iagoda:

Those arrested in political cases, members of various anti-Soviet parties, are often kept in extremely bad conditions; the attitude taken to them by the administration of places of detention is wrong and often even rough. The Cheka points out that these categories of person must be considered not as persons to be punished, but as persons temporarily isolated from society in the interests of the revolution, and the conditions of their detention must not be of a penal nature.

In 1922 the death penalty was briefly abolished again, except in frontier zones; the Cheka moved its condemned prisoners to frontier zones for shooting. A few surviving grand old radicals still called for the total abolition of capital punishment (the death penalty had been more vehemently opposed in Tsarist Russia than in any other country) and in 1925 the distinguished Tolstoyan Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov pleaded with the Politburo on the hundredth anniversary of the execution of the five Decembrist rebel leaders: “Are we really going to greet the tenth anniversary of the triumph of communists (who began the condemnation of the death penalty) and the coming centenary of Tolstoi with shootings, with laws on bloody reprisals? Are you really going to drag on without end in this way along the inhuman, bloody, senseless path trod by the Tsarist tradition?”⁵²

The year 1921 had seemed a disaster for the Cheka. In March the Council of People’s Commissars cut its funding by a quarter; in November Lenin relegated it “to purely political tasks” and commissioned Kamenev and to find it less punitive roles. He did this reluctantly, presumably impelled by economic necessity, as he had yielded to pressure to restore private trade in the New Economic Plan. On one note from Kamenev he wrote, presumably about Kamenev’s willingness to give way on questions of security: “Poor, weak, timid, intimidated little man.”⁵³