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

On February 6, 1922, in a decree encouragingly entitled “On the abolition of the All-Union Extraordinary Commission and on the rules for carrying out searches, confiscations and arrests,” the Cheka became the GPU (State Political Directorate) and was made nominally answerable to the Ministry of the Interior. Also encouraging for the Soviet population were the execution statistics: by 1923 executions of political offenders had fallen (officially) to 414 from 1,962 in 1922 and 9,701 in 1920.

ruled the GPU as he had the Cheka, but he had less scope for his insatiable energy. His time—when he was not ill—was spent restoring the railways, requisitioning grain, and spreading, if not terror, then a spirit of panic in the economy. His tendency to put revolutionary sentiment before economic logic put him at loggerheads with better-educated commissars, on the left and on the right. Kamenev and Rykov in the Union of Labor and Defense set up in 1923 to revive the economy treated him condescendingly. turned to Stalin for support. He wrote to him on August 3, 1923 (the letter was apparently never sent), “Given my weak voice, which can’t reach its goal, another voice must be raised.” Doubts left “iron Feliks” hopelessly malleable: “But then there will be cracks in our Soviet building.”⁵⁴

Like Stalin, was impatient and incompetent with economics; he used retribution to tackle economic problems. When workers complained of devalued earnings, wrote (March 28, 1923) to Iagoda demanding confiscation of all property and the exile from cities of all speculators, bar owners, and money dealers, but the state’s own currency operations broke down and the money dealers had to be pardoned. ⁵⁵ , however hard he worked, was uneasy with economists. One economist found ’s presence at discussions unnerving: “It was hard to keep the thread of one’s thoughts in one’s head, to keep track of Rykov’s objections and to reply to him. I felt that ’s cold pupils were boring right through me like X-rays and, after me, were vanishing somewhere in the stone wall.” By the mid- 1920s, however, trains ran, factories produced goods, and the public credited these achievements, however shoddy, to ’s self-sacrificing energy. To inject life into any sphere of activity, was made chairman: although he never went to a cinema, he was chairman of a film association and, more appropriately, he was elected chairman of the Society for Interplanetary Relations. was left desolated and vulnerable by Lenin’s death. In a long letter to Stalin and Orjonikidze, he confessed: “I am not a theoretician and I am not a blind follower of persons—in my life I have personally loved only two revolutionaries and leaders. Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin—nobody else.” ⁵⁶ The film that commissioned of Lenin’s funeral was the only cinema film he ever watched.

When Lenin died, ’s personal power was at its peak: he was at last a member (if nonvoting) of the Politburo; he was people’s commissar for transport and soon to become commissar for the whole economy; he was co-chairman with Menzhinsky of OGPU, the United State Political Directorate that consolidated the GPU in September 1923. His attachment to Stalin was not based on affection but panic that the party would fall apart without him. The monosyllabic and unexcitable Stalin seemed to and many others a calm center in the struggle between the hysterical polemics of the left (Trotsky) and of the right (Bukharin). The left threatened to engulf the USSR in a worldwide revolutionary conflagration; the right seemed ready to abandon the dictatorship of the proletariat for some Scandinavian compromise between socialism and capitalism. , as a fanatical but fearful Bolshevik, had no choice but to support Stalin.

Like Stalin in the effect of his gaze, resembled Stalin in refusing to delegate the smallest trifle. Every detail—passengers traveling without tickets, rats in baggage compartments, matchboxes that contained not 100 but 85 matches—bothered him more than the general economic desolation and financial destitution facing the Soviets in 1923. The more was mocked by Trotsky, the more he relied on Stalin. He asked Stalin for the right to deport “speculators, idlers, leeches” as those responsible for price inflation.⁵⁷ Trotsky recalled: “ would catch fire on any question, even a secondary one, his fine nostrils would shiver, his eyes spark, his voice would tense and often break. . . .” ’s boast was: “I never ever spare myself. And that is why all of you here love me, because you trust me.”