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

When Demidov falls for Anna, a secretary in his office, Menzhinsky’s novel ends in an improbable idyll. Both women are in Demidov’s apartment, Elena sorting out rags, Anna dropping clothes on the floor— a realization of the “three-in-a-bed” love lyric which Menzhinsky has his hero recite at a school concert:

Under passionate searches so passionately

Your body writhes!

I, a great artist, laugh,

No tears, no shame—only yells,

And sighs and quivering do you know.

[ . . . ]

It has come! I have seen another woman

With my burning tensed gaze,

I tickle and kiss her,

I have bent down, I embrace her, you are next to us.

Demidov’s Affair shows how well Menzhinsky understood his future self: when Demidov becomes a legal official, he reflects that he was “the smallest spoke in the chariot of justice and he felt no personal guilt if that chariot crushed anybody.”

In 1907, in the anthology A Thawed Patch (Protalina), in the company of two leading poets—Aleksandr Blok and Mikhail Kuzmin— Menzhinsky published two prose poems, pastiches of the Gospels, “Jesus” and “Barabbas.” Menzhinsky’s Christ is an epileptic, a suicidal charismatic not a messiah, who takes his disciples to view Golgotha; Barabbas, the killer of tax gatherers, is acclaimed by the mob, released by Pontius Pilate, and discreetly killed by the Romans.

29. There was nobody who would cry out “Release Jesus.”

30. But the crowd yelled, “Give us Barabbas, and crucify Jesus.”

31. And Barabbas, standing in the crowd, saw Jesus dragged to

the place of execution.

32. And Barabbas did not die as a slave on the cross.

33. The Romans killed him in the wilderness and the fifty men

who were faithful to him.

34. Barabbas fell with his sword in his hand, and Judaea wept for

him, and Galilee tore its hair, groaning:

35. “Barabbas has died, Barabbas the terror of the dishonorable,

the destroyer of Romans, the exterminator of tax collectors!”

As in Gorky’s play The Lower Depths, in Menzhinsky’s verses the Christian hero is superseded by the revolutionary bandit.⁴ Menzhinsky’s verses not only echo Stalin’s distrust of an ungrateful mob, they give us an uncanny insight into how Menzhinsky would treat the Jesuses, Pontius Pilates, and Barabbases he would work against, for, and with in Soviet Russia. Messianic obsessions link Menzhinsky to and to Stalin. What drew them together was repressed Christian piety. All three are unquiet Dostoevskian atheists. Denying God was not enough; they longed to usurp him.

Like Stalin, Menzhinsky, after abandoning creative writing, took a morbid interest in poetry and poets. Both intervened, as patrons, censors, or hangmen, in poets’ work and lives but in Menzhinsky’s first years in the Cheka, with a blotted ideological copybook, he was precluded from rooting out Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, anarchists, or other heretics. He was valued for his ability, rare in an institution largely staffed with illiterates and foreigners, to draft a letter, resolution, or verdict in Russian which combined a lawyer’s precision with a poet’s elegance. But despite his backroom role, as the Cheka evolved into OGPU, Menzhinsky stood out. Those he interviewed were struck by the hunched body, the spectacles or pince-nez, the couch and the rug. He made much of his long pianist’s fingers, rubbing his hands with pleasure, smiling, excruciatingly polite, even—or especially—when he was sending his collocutor to execution.

Repressing Peasants and Intellectuals