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

Trotsky claimed that Menzhinsky had trouble forcing the banks to disgorge their funds to the revolution so Lenin and Trotsky then tried to utilize Menzhinsky’s suave manners and knowledge of languages. In April 1918 he was sent to the Soviet mission in Berlin where, during the mission’s seven months of life, Menzhinsky made a positive impression, and not just with his polyglot skills—he spoke most European and several oriental languages—but with his flair for intelligence gathering and analysis. When the Germans expelled the Soviet mission for spreading revolutionary propaganda, Menzhinsky was given riskier work. He spent much of 1919 as commissar for national inspection in the Ukraine, where the Russian Bolsheviks were targets for Ukrainian nationalists. Here Menzhinsky proved his fearlessness, enough for to make him the third Pole in the Cheka leadership.

A shrewd judge of men and information, a chess player who used real people as pawns and—it turned out—a prodigious fabricator of plots and scenarios, Menzhinsky took over from even before the latter’s death in 1926 and kept his post until his death in May 1934. Apart from People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgi Chicherin (an intimate member of Mikhail Kuzmin’s decadent circle), Menzhinsky was the only commissar who looked like a banker, in a three-piece suit, tie, and bowler hat. Like Chicherin, he was also constantly ill. In exile he suffered from kidney infections and a hernia; a car accident in Paris had given him spondylitis, and he was unable to stand or even sit for long. He interrogated prisoners reclining on a divan under a traveling rug which his second-in-command Genrikh Iagoda tucked round his legs. Menzhinsky also had the “Kremlin syndrome”: arteriosclerosis, an enlarged heart, and migraines.

Without Menzhinsky’s shrewdness, Stalin could not have in the 1920s defeated his enemies abroad and at home; without Menzhinsky’s ruthlessness, Stalin could not have pushed through collectivization in 1929, nor staged the show trials of the early 1930s. However far apart in education and origin, Stalin and Menzhinsky had a real affinity. They shared a calm ruthlessness: neither ever raised his voice or spoke at unnecessary length. Menzhinsky cultivated silence to extremes; on the tenth anniversary of the revolution, expected to make a forty-minute speech on the Cheka’s glorious role, he mounted the tribune, said, “The main merit of a chekist is to keep silent,” and stepped down.

Like Stalin, Menzhinsky had been a poet. Stalin’s lyrics reveal a tortured psyche obsessed by the moon, swinging between euphoria and depression, expecting ingratitude and even poison from his audience, and terrified of old age. Menzhinsky’s persona is an arrogant and depraved cynic. Perhaps it is significant that Stalin was an adolescent and Menzhinsky in his early thirties when each was first published.

Menzhinsky’s published writings give us the best insight into his mentality.³ His novel Demidov’s Affair appeared in 1905 in The Green Anthology (resembling the English decadent Yellow Book) next to thirteen sonnets by Mikhail Kuzmin. Menzhinsky’s piece was singled out by one critic as the best in the anthology. The story of Vasili Demidov, “a very elegant youth” who values “only the freedom of the individual,” has the blend of depravity and socialism that we find in Oscar Wilde. The novel is narcissistic: its hero is a handsome young lawyer who helps radical women to run workers’ Sunday and evening classes but shocks women teachers with blasphemous and erotic lyrics, which he recites at a college gathering. The austere director of the college, Elena, fourteen years older, falls in love with Demidov despite disapproving of him. Their subsequent marriage is strained: the repressed woman and the hedonist prove incompatible. The work mixes decadent amorality with chekist ruthlessness.

Menzhinsky’s hero recites a “Poem to the God of Temptation.” In this version of the Book of Job, God challenges the poet:

Can you measure the radiance of my freedom,

The gravity of the abyss, the joy of being one’s self?

You cower? Stand back. Not everyone can grasp

The wondrous art of seeing in dreary commandments

Lighthouses only for bold temptations,

The goal of happiness in separation, the path to betrayal in friendship.

To which challenge Menzhinsky’s Job replies:

Enough! I have decided. The field is yours.

I shall build an eternal shrine to you.