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

Menzhinsky belonged to the ruling classes; his elder brother Aleksandr was an auditor for the Tsar’s Ministry of Finances and Viacheslav began his own career as a law student. His dissertation, “Communal Land Ownership in Populist and Marxist Literature,” was returned as “unsatisfactory” by one professor who read it and as “unlikely to be assessable by a civilian” by another. The dissertation scornfully surveyed the peasantry whom thirty years later Menzhinsky would help Stalin destroy. “The peasant commune,” Menzhinsky asserted in 1898, is “one of the major brakes on Russia’s agricultural development . . . the commune is disintegrating, dying a natural death.”¹

In the early 1900s Menzhinsky practiced law, but his literary ambitions drew him into the decadent circle around a notorious homosexual, satanist, and multifarious genius, Mikhail Kuzmin. Menzhinsky left little trace in this circle. He also dabbled in Bolshevism: his mother Maria Nikolaevna was a friend of the great-aunt of Elena Stasova, who was close both to Lenin and to Stalin in his Tbilisi years. On weekends Menzhinsky followed the family hobby of workers’ education and preached revolution. The authorities paid him little attention; he was apparently leading a respectable life in a villa in the provincial town of Iaroslavl, employed as a railway administrator. A bourgeois on workdays, a Bolshevik on Sundays, and a decadent at night, Menzhinsky showed remarkable duplicity.

For a decade Menzhinsky was married to Iulia Ivanovna, who had been governess to the Russian branch of the Nobel family and was preoccupied with the theory and practice of bringing up children. The topics of the Menzhinskys’ correspondence with their friends the Verkhovskys in the early 1900s are the most bourgeois of any Bolshevik’s: office, garden, children. Only Menzhinsky’s distress at literary set-backs—his friends insisted on shortening the novel he eventually published—and references to the Nietzschean superman hint at his longing for fame.

In February 1905 the Menzhinskys suffered a trauma: their young daughter died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Menzhinsky left Iaroslavl for St. Petersburg, where he worked with Lenin and Krupskaia, and after the crackdown on Bolsheviks in 1906 underwent two weeks of imprisonment, his only ordeal in the name of the revolution. He went on hunger strike and was released. Menzhinsky’s marriage broke up; his wife took the children. She devoted herself to pedagogy and never mentioned Menzhinsky again. ² Menzhinsky drifted abroad. He roamed France, Italy, and Britain and even the United States for eleven years, working as a bank clerk for Crédit Lyonnais in Paris, as a watercolor painter, as a teacher at the Bolshevik school in Bologna. Like , Menzhinsky was more deeply attached to his sisters than to any other human being. Neither Vera nor Liudmila ever married. With Vera he hiked over the hills of northern Italy, and the death of Liudmila in 1932 was the worst blow in his life.

What Menzhinsky did in 1909 should have blighted his future prospects with the Bolsheviks forever: in the Russian émigré journal Our Echo he attacked Lenin for “appropriating” the proceeds of Bolshevik banditry for his own personal use. Menzhinsky abused Lenin: “another half-mad Tsar Paul I . . . The Bolsheviks’ aim is power, influence over the people, their desire is to bridle the proletariat. Lenin is a political Jesuit, twisting Marxism according to his own whim and using it for ephemeral aims. . . . Leninists are not a political group but a noisy gypsy camp. They like waving whips around, they imagine that they have an inalienable right to be the cattle-drovers of the working class.” But Menzhinsky shared the views he ascribed to Lenin: a friend recalls him declaring: “the peasantry are cattle to be sacrificed to revolution.” Both Lenin and Stalin knew of Menzhinsky’s outbursts. Lenin dismissed them with casual contempt as he always dismissed attacks from those beneath him; Stalin, on the other hand, cultivated men who had lapses that made them hostages to fortune. In any case, Stalin likewise saw peasants as “cattle” and Lenin as the “cattle-drover.”

Returning to Russia from France in spring 1917 via Britain and Finland, Menzhinsky was a bystander during the October revolution. He played Chopin waltzes on a grand piano in the Smolny Institute when all around him was chaos and panic. The Petrograd Bolsheviks nevertheless found work for Menzhinsky. Thanks to his and his brother’s banking experience he was appointed commissar for finance. Lenin first met Menzhinsky fast asleep on a divan in a corridor. To the divan was stuck a label, “People’s Commissariat of Finances,” and Menzhinsky was so far its sole employee.