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

As Lenin lay paralyzed and speechless, the danger of civil war in the Soviet Union between an army that admired Trotsky and a bureaucracy that depended on Stalin had the rank and file of OGPU, itself both an army and a bureaucracy, vacillating. held a meeting of OGPU functionaries during which he shouted hysterically, “I hate you!” at his co-speaker, the convinced Trotskyist Evgeni Preobrazhensky, editor of Pravda and co-author of The Alphabet of Communism. By the end of 1923, Stalin’s power, still threatened by those closest to Lenin, nevertheless had a wider basis than his rivals.’ Stalin thrived, for he held three crucial posts in the party and the government: he was general secretary of the party, the dominant figure in the party’s organizational bureau, and he was commissar for national minorities. But , traveling the length and breadth of the Soviet Union to inspect OGPU, the railways, and the economy, was physically and spiritually flagging. His secretary Vladimir Gerson protested but got no understanding from Stalin’s aides. One telegraphed:

Omsk. ’s health is now worse than in Moscow, the work no less. He gets more worked up, he curses more, since things are as bad as they could be. ’s presence here is indispensable, otherwise we could have complete collapse. There is no need for medical examination, I don’t understand how you, Gerson, can demand he be examined so that he doesn’t know, why don’t you tell me how?⁵⁸

was suffering from years of malnutrition, tuberculosis, and a heart condition exacerbated by frenetic work and travel. Once Lenin was dead, only Menzhinsky, Iagoda, and Gerson cared if wore himself out. Apart from their personal affection for him, he was the only chekist who had any charisma, and they basked in his chivalrous image. In 1925 Stalin instructed , whom he now no longer needed, to reduce his working week to thirty-five hours; the Kremlin doctors forcibly X-rayed him and tested his blood. Together with Menzhinsky, his neighbor in the country, and Iagoda, took the waters at Essentuki in the Caucasus. The doctors prescribed warm showers, regular enemas, a semi-vegetarian diet, Caucasian mineral water, and long weekend breaks. got no better. Typical of his attitude to his health and doctors is a letter to his secretary a year before he died: “I am still coughing, especially at night. I have thick yellow phlegm. Please give me medicine to disinfect my lungs and fix the phlegm. I need not be examined. I can’t stand the sight of doctors and will not consent to being examined. I request that the question not even be raised.” ⁵⁹

On July 20, 1926, in the middle of a rambling, impassioned speech defending the peasantry against the left opposition’s program of collectivization, collapsed; he recovered briefly at home and then died. The autopsy revealed that his coronary arteries were blocked: he died, like Lenin, of arteriosclerosis.

Managing the Soviet economy, had had to concede that there was no alternative to the market and moved closer to Bukharin’s position. He even stopped attacking Trotsky who, as mere chief of science, technology, and trade concessions, was now a spent force. It was dawning on that Stalin, an apparent advocate of the New Economic Plan, would be the man to undo it. But disillusion with Stalin came too late. Seventeen days before he died, prophesied in a letter to Stalin’s protégé Valerian Kuibyshev:

Dear Valerian. I am aware that my speeches could strengthen those who will certainly lead the party to perdition, i.e. Trotsky, Zinoviev, Piatakov, Shliapnikov. But what am I to do? I am completely convinced that we will deal with all our enemies if we can find and adopt the right line for managing the country and the economy in practice. . . . If we don’t find the line and the tempo, the opposition will grow and the country will then find its dictator the grave digger of the revolution. . . . Almost all dictators now are former Reds—Mussolini, Piłsudski. I am tired of these contradictions. ⁶⁰