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

IN EARLY 1921 the civil war wound down, the Caucasus was reconquered, and the Poles and the Baltic states signed peace treaties with the USSR. The Cheka, like the Red Army, was opposed mainly by those in whose name it had been fighting as internecine war broke out between Bolsheviks and peasantry. On the Volga grain surpluses and seed corn were confiscated by army and Cheka units to feed soldiers and urban workers, and during the “Antonov” rebellion the peasants were crushed by army units under men like Tukhachevsky, directed by Trotsky, and mopped up by the special purpose units of ’s deputy Józef Unszlicht. Tukhachevsky’s ruthless slaughter of hostages and rebels worsened the famine brought by war and drought. Few remained alive for the Cheka to torture or kill.

Before the “Antonov bandits” could be shot or sent to camps, the factories and garrisons of Moscow and Petrograd went on strike. Bread rations were at starvation levels; fuel had dried up. The workers, seeing the Whites defeated, could not understand why they were still hungry, cold, out of work, and under martial law. In March 1921, the naval garrison on the fortress island of Kronstadt outside Petrograd demanded free elections, free speech, and land for the peasantry. Their delegation was arrested and Trotsky and Tukhachevsky bullied troops into crushing the uprising. The Petrograd Cheka was in disgrace for not forestalling the rising: sent a fellow Pole, Stanisław Messing, with another senior chekist, Iakov Agranov, from Moscow to try the rebel sailors, many of whom were shot.

Menzhinsky and his colleague in the Cheka Dr. Mikhail Kedrov drafted a warning to the Central Committee. Lenin, Zinoviev, and Stalin were told that the peasant rebellions were well organized and that if conditions deteriorated the metropolitan workers would strike in solidarity with the peasantry. They also warned that the trade union movement— courted by Trotsky—was undermining the party and that the Red Army was no longer a reliable tool. The note recommended that only special purpose detachments—the Cheka’s own forces—be used to restore order in army units and factories.

Ensuing disasters proved the Cheka right. Menzhinsky tried to explain this to Trotsky, whom he had previously warned that Stalin was intriguing against him. Trotsky rashly refused to respond—he thought Menzhinsky inconsequential—but he conceded that Menzhinsky was right on one point: the Petrograd Cheka had been secretly sympathetic to the Kronstadt rebels. Menzhinsky’s role in liquidating the Kronstadt rebellion had been to dispatch a thousand dissident sailors to Odessa— which nearly led to the subsequent rebellion there. Eight years passed before Menzhinsky took part in more mass repressions.

During the early 1920s Menzhinsky oversaw the intelligentsia. In spring 1921 the poets Aleksandr Blok and Fiodor Sologub pleaded for exit visas.⁵ Anatoli Lunacharsky, commissar for education and the softest of the Soviet leaders, had himself been a symbolist dramatist. He sympathized: “We have literally driven Blok to the point of no return.” Maxim Gorky interceded for Blok and Sologub even though he disliked their verse. For the Cheka, Menzhinsky and Unszlicht took a harsher view: Unszlicht complained of the “completely impermissible attitude of the People’s Commissariat for Education on travel by artistic forces abroad. There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of performers and artists who travel abroad are lost to Soviet Russia. . . . Moreover, many of them conduct open or covert campaigns against us abroad.”

Of twenty-four allowed out, only five had returned. Menzhinsky was adamant: “Not just Lunacharsky but Bukharin vouched for Konstantin Balmont [who stayed in France]. Blok is a poetic nature; if anything makes a bad impression on him he will quite naturally write verse against us. I don’t think he ought to be let out, Blok should be given good conditions in some sanatorium.”⁶ Lunacharsky protested to Lenin over Menzhinsky’s stance. When the Politburo decided on July 23, 1921, in Blok’s favor, the poet was dying. The agony of Russia’s best-loved poet embarrassed the Politburo to the extent that it let Blok’s close friend Andrei Bely, symbolist poet and novelist, immigrate to Berlin.

Menzhinsky clashed with Lunacharsky again in 1926. He overruled the commissar and banned Mikhail Bulgakov’s play The Day of the Turbins. Only in his last years did Menzhinsky protect fellow writers: when Mikhail Kuzmin went to see him in 1931, he was promised that his lover Iuri Iurkun would not be harassed by OGPU, a promise that was kept until Kuzmin’s death in 1936.