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

Gorky, however, would neither shut up nor pack up. In August Lenin insisted: “You are having hemorrhages, and not going! Tut, tut, this really is shameful and irrational. In Europe you will have treatment in a proper sanatorium and work three times as much. Really. But we have no treatment, no work—only fussing about. . . . Go away, get cured. Don’t be stubborn, I beg you.”

In October 1921 Gorky left for Berlin and then convalescence in Capri, a paradise from which only Stalin could coax him back.

The executions of Tagantsev and Gumiliov, the deportations of Berdiaev and Gorky, at first seem like monstrous overkill, depriving the state of the very people it needed to entrench and validate it. But these draconian measures had the desired effect. After 1922 few professionals and intellectuals at liberty in the USSR saw any future in living by their traditional codes of free speech and love of humanity. If science or art was to survive in any form, then it had to collaborate with the Bolshevik regime. For the next thirty years, with very few suicidal exceptions, dissent dared not speak its mind, and formerly free spirits sought only terms on which they could capitulate.

But there was no point putting muzzles on the writers without blinders on the readers. Soviet ideology resented the trickle of imported literature and the emergence of private publishers allowed by the New Economic Plan. In summer 1922 Glavlit, the directorate for literature, was set up. ¹³ It answered to the liberal Commissar of Education Lunacharsky, but Stalin put his own protégé Pavel Lebedev-Poliansky in charge. Lebedev-Poliansky was the same age as Stalin and likewise educated at Church school and theological college. He had to steer an ingenious course between moronic demands from party extremists to ban great classics of literature and philosophy, and the excessive tolerance of liberal socialists.

Glavlit, supervised by the GPU, warned in October 1922: “It is to be deemed indispensable that we move from preliminary censorship to a punitive form of censorship,” in other words not just banning undesirable works but punishing those responsible for offering them for publication. Józef Unszlicht of the GPU insisted that publications should also be read by the Politburo, which became a literary committee. Trotsky, the most widely read, was given the greatest load: he read all military and religious literature as well as sharing economics with Lenin. Zinoviev and Kamenev read journalism, philosophy, and fiction. Rykov and Tomsky shared industry and agriculture. Stalin was the least burdened: he shared military works with Trotsky and read works on ethnic minorities. As Glavlit acquired police powers and a monopoly on censorship, the Politburo was able to shift this load. Nevertheless, the highest authority in the Soviet Union—including of course Stalin—never ceased to take a direct interest in literature.

Citizens’ private letters were read as thoroughly as publications. Even under the Tsarist regime, although interception of the mail was illegal (as it would be under the Soviet constitution) the government had practiced perlustration, reading 38,000 letters a year by 1882. The GPU created a directorate for political control, run by Ivan Surta, a paramedic.¹⁴ Surta developed the system to such an extent that every correspondent in the USSR could be sure of being read by the GPU: by the end of 1923 5 million letters and 8 million telegrams a year were being read, 250 letters and 2,500 telegrams per perlustrator per day. OGPU’s readers, writers, and informants were former soldiers and clerks, men who under the Tsar would have been sucked into the bureaucracy after seven years’ schooling, or literate recruits from those who had been adolescents when the revolution broke off their education and their prospects of normal office work.

Control of the Church

The wicked shall go to the sanctuary, with axes and with fire they will break down and burn its doors; and they will take the just men and burn them in the center of the city.

Savonarola, Sermon of 1491