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

I think that things won’t progress if Comrade Menzhinsky himself does not undertake it. Have a word with him and give him this note. We must work out a plan, constantly correcting and adding to it. We must divide all the intelligentsia into groups. For example: 1) literary writers; 2) journalists and political writers; 3) economists, and here we need subgroups: a) financial, b) energy, c) transport, d) trade, e) cooperatives, etc.; 4) technical (more subgroups): a) engineers, b) agronomists, c) doctors, d) general staff; 5) professors and teachers, etc., etc. Each intellectual must have a file. . . . It must be remembered that our section’s task is not just deportation, but active help in straightening out the [party] line on specialists, i.e. causing disintegration in their ranks and bringing forward those who are prepared without reservations to support Soviet power. . . .¹²

In autumn 1922 the cream of Moscow’s intelligentsia was gathered at the Lubianka (similar roundups took place in Petrograd, Kazan, Minsk, Kiev). Most were charged with counterrevolutionary activity; a few got their names taken off the list; some were classified essential workers by Soviet institutions. OGPU failed to trace some deportees while others were in their custody awaiting “trial” on other political charges. The detainees did not realize how lucky they were; those who were allowed to stay in the motherland rarely survived more than fifteen years. By the end of September 1922 Genrikh Iagoda had arranged for the remaining 130 or so to be deported to Germany. The German chancellor protested that “Germany is not Siberia” but the consul in Moscow issued visas to those deportees who certified that they were leaving voluntarily. All deportees naturally did so, and, forbidden to take books or manuscripts with them, assembled on the Petrograd docks.

The two shiploads that left for Stettin were Russia’s greatest gift to Europe and America. We owe structural linguistics to Trubetskoi and Iakobson, and Christian existentialism to Nikolai Berdiaiev. The historians Sergei Melgunov and Aleksandr Kizevetter were major influences on Western historiography. Prague’s Russian Academy and Paris’s Sorbonne were enriched by this forced exodus. Conversely, the USSR was deprived of some of its best minds, while those that remained drew the obvious conclusions and withdrew into themselves. The deportations of 1922 were as catastrophic for civic society in the USSR as the executions of 1921.

Negotiating with such eloquent and self-assured victims was an education for the GPU. In one interrogation, , Menzhinsky, and Lev Kamenev were subjected to an hour-long lecture by the idealist philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev. was dumbfounded; he could only mutter, perhaps thinking of himself, “One can be a materialist in theory and an idealist in life or, conversely, an idealist in theory and a materialist in life,” after which he ordered Menzhinsky to find a motorcycle and sidecar to take Berdiaev home. In the summer and autumn of 1922, the Moscow and Petrograd chekisty were subjected to many more hours of principled refutation of everything they claimed to stand for. When Menzhinsky told the historian Melgunov that he would never see Russia again, the latter retorted, “I’ll come back in two years; you won’t hold on any longer.” Menzhinsky replied, “No, I think we’ll last another six.”

Appeals and intercessions grated on Lenin. He decided on foreign sanatoria for men like Gorky and Korolenko who opposed his repressions but were too prestigious to execute, imprison, or deport. To Commissar for Health Nikolai Semashko he wrote in March 1922: “Please appoint a special person (best, a well-known doctor) knowing abroad (and known abroad) to send abroad to Germany Tsiurupa, Krestinsky, Osinsky, Kuraev, Gorky, and Korolenko. It needs skillful inquiries, requests, propaganda, writing to Germany, helping the sick, etc. Do it ultra-carefully (taking pains). . . .”