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

The Cheka accused Petrograd’s intellectuals of being the puppet masters of the Kronstadt sailors. Iakov Agranov, Menzhinsky’s deputy, constructed out of the sailors’ rebellion one of the first imaginary anti-Bolshevik conspiracies.⁷ Agranov first lured back to Russia those sailors who had fled to Finland: Cheka couriers, pretending to be White Guard agents, smuggled sailors across the border to “safe houses” in Petrograd. Then Agranov claimed that the Kronstadt sailors were linked to a “Petrograd Fighting Organization” led by members of the intelligentsia. (The only signs of such an organization were two explosions at monuments to the two Bolsheviks assassinated in Petrograd in 1918, Moisei Uritsky and Moisei Volodarsky-Goldstein.) Agranov employed as provocateur a certain Korvin-Kriukovsky, the scion of a distinguished family, to act as a malcontent chekist and inveigle Professor Vladimir Tagantsev, a soil scientist, into a few symbolic actions including sticking up dissident flyers. The professor was thereupon arrested with his father (an elderly senator), his entire family, and a truckload of others.

Summer 1921 in Petrograd was the Cheka’s first successful rehearsal of the techniques for terror perfected in the mid-1930s. In 1921 it took Agranov forty-five days to make Professor Tagantsev accept an ultimatum: to confess and name all fellow conspirators or be executed together with everyone arrested. They signed an agreement on July 28, 1921, ending: “I, Agranov, promise, provided that Tagantsev keeps his side of the bargain, that neither Tagantsev, nor his associates nor any other accused, even the couriers from Finland, will be subject to the death penalty.”⁸ Tagantsev was given a cell with a shower, meals from the staff kitchen and within a couple of days—one of which he spent being driven round the city to establish the addresses of his contacts—had given Agranov 300 suspects, so many that on the appointed night every motor vehicle at the Cheka’s disposal was out rounding them up. After consulting and Lenin, Agranov broke his bargain with Tagantsev and sentenced over one hundred to death. Tagantsev, the chemist Professor Mikhail Tikhvinsky, and, to widespread public horror when the Cheka published the list of condemned, Nikolai Gumiliov—now Russia’s greatest living poet and still growing in stature—were to be shot together with many former civil servants. To accuse Gumiliov of conspiracy, a cavalier monarchist who engaged only in open combat, was absurd.

The sentences produced a flurry of telephone calls, telegrams, and personal visits to , Lenin, and Krupskaia in Moscow. Krupskaia rescued some victims but Lenin refused to save Professor Tikhvinsky, a man with whom he was on Christian-name terms, saying that “counterrevolution and chemistry are not mutually exclusive.” Lenin reacted too late to appeals on behalf of Gumiliov from Gorky and from women admirers. In Petrograd Grigori Zinoviev, atoning for his laxness over Kronstadt, was impatient for blood. The Petrograd Cheka treated the condemned atrociously. Put in a large cell, handcuffed to each other, and left for thirty-six hours without food, water, or lavatory facilities, they were loaded at dawn onto trucks and driven out to a firing range. Tagantsev, Gumiliov, and some eighty others dug their own graves, were undressed, shot by riflemen, and buried, wounded or dead.

A similar trial in Moscow that spring, of the so-called Tactical Center, involved operatives including Menzhinsky who were subtler than Agranov. But these prisoners were braver and more eloquent than Tagantsev: they refused to bargain for their freedom or lives. The accused included Tolstoi’s daughter Aleksandra, the philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev, and the historian Sergei Melgunov; the death sentences were commuted. In Moscow Agranov, entrusted only with interrogation, was shamed into silence by the retorts of Tolstoi’s daughter.

The prosecution was conducted with a parody of legality by Nikolai Krylenko. Krylenko, who had a law degree, had achieved fame by being appointed the first commander-in-chief of the Russian army after the Tsar’s General Nikolai Dukhonin had refused to swear loyalty to the Soviets and been murdered by his troops. In summer 1918, Krylenko went back to the law, which he twisted to fit Soviet requirements. Krylenko had an appreciation of the absurd. In June 1918, after the Soviets had voted to abolish the death penalty, as the prosecutor responsible for sending Admiral Shchastny to the firing squad for not scuttling the Baltic fleet, he declared that the admiral was to be shot, not executed. During the “Tactical Center” trial, Krylenko burst out laughing when the defense exposed the Cheka’s absurdity.