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

Agranov, Menzhinsky, and —who explained to intercessors that he could not reprieve a major poet without reprieving all the condemned—belatedly grasped that the Petrograd executions of August 1921 had put professionals and intellectuals off working for, as well as against, the regime. The misjudgment was one reason for reforming the Cheka as the GPU in 1922. A revised criminal code, drawn up by Lenin, provided a new punishment for dissidents: deportation from the Soviet Union.⁹ In May 1922 this penalty was inflicted on those intellectuals whom a committee—Lenin, , Menzhinsky, and Unszlicht— classified as undesirables. Stalin, preoccupied that summer with unleashing bloody repression on central Asia and enforcing discipline in Georgia, made no objection to such gentle measures. Even the bloodthirsty Zinoviev supported the venture: “We are now resorting to a humane measure, to deportation; we can resort to a less humane measure, we shall not hesitate to unsheathe the sword.”¹⁰

Hitherto deportation had been voluntary; the first intellectuals granted deportation had been those Jewish writers, headed by Khaim Bialik, who wrote in Hebrew. Jews were encouraged to write in Russian and allowed to write in Yiddish, but Hebrew, the language of Zionism, was banned by Lenin in 1920. In Moscow a hundred Zionist congress participants were arrested and nineteen put in prison. Trotsky’s own brother-in-law by his first marriage Ilia Sokolovsky belonged to the Hebrew writers’ group. Sokolovsky decided to ask his brother-in-law for “a ticket out of this paradise you are making.” Khaim Bialik made a fraught journey through the war-ravished Ukraine to Moscow, saw Gorky and obtained from Lenin the visas that took Hebrew literature out of Russia to Palestine.

Famine as well as Cheka bullets thinned out independent-minded intellectuals: seven academicians including the mathematician Aleksandr Liapunov and the linguist Aleksei Shakhmatov starved to death. Only Russia’s Nobel Prize winner, Ivan Pavlov, whose experiments in vivisection were seen as Bolshevism in biology, was given extra rations. Lenin was enraged by “professors and writers . . . counter-revolutionaries, complicit with the Entente, spies, corrupting our youth.” Even in 1919 he had written to Gorky about intellectuals “who think themselves the nation’s brains . . . actually not brains, but shit.” On May 19, 1922, he set on them but nine days later had his second stroke. Incoherently but intransigently, four days after recovering his handwriting, Lenin scrawled to Stalin on July 17:

Has it been decided to eradicate all the National Socialists? . . . I think all should be deported. They’re worse than any Social Revolutionary because they are more cunning . . . . The Mensheviks Rozanov (a doctor, devious). . . . S. L. Frank (author of Methodology) . . . A commission under Messing and Mantsev [two senior GPU men] must draw up lists and several hundred such gentlemen should be mercilessly expelled abroad. We’ll clean Russia up for a long time. . . . This must be done right away. By the end of the trial of the Social Revolutionaries, no later. Arrest several hundred and without declaring the reasons, “out you go, gentlemen!” All the authors of The House of Writers, of Thought in Petersburg, turn over Kharkov, we don’t know that town, it’s abroad for us. . . . ¹¹

Lenin sent lists of “active anti-Soviet intellectuals” whose names he could still recall for Menzhinsky and Unszlicht to track down, whether they were at liberty or in a GPU prison, and asked Kamenev and Unszlicht for further names. Editors of academic journals who gave contributors too much freedom; doctors who at conferences kept up prerevolutionary traditions of free speech; economists and agronomists with their own ideas on factories and land—all had to go. The expulsion by the dying dictator of the country’s greatest doctors anticipated Stalin’s “doctors’ plot” of thirty years later.

On September 4, 1922, discussed the list with Lenin and instructed Unszlicht to comb through all contributors to academic and literary journals. Unfortunately, neither Pole knew enough Russian philosophy or literature to judge whom to deport and whom to keep. wrote: