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

. . . the only moment when we can smash the enemy’s head with a 99 percent chance of success . . . Now and only now, when there is cannibalism in the famine areas and hundreds, if not thousands of corpses are lying on the roads, we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of Church valuables with the most furious and merciless energy, not stopping at the crushing of any resistance. . . . A clever writer on political questions [Machiavelli] rightly said that if it is necessary for the realization of a political goal to go for a series of atrocities, then they must be carried out in the most energetic way and in the shortest time, for the popular masses will not endure prolonged application of atrocities. . . . Therefore I come to the inevitable conclusion that it is now that we must give the most decisive and merciless battle to the obscurantist clergy and crush its resistance with such cruelty that they won’t forget it for several decades.¹⁷

On only one point was Lenin sensitive: he feared an anti-Semitic backlash if Jews were seen to be running this “pogrom in reverse” against Russian Christians, so an ethnic Russian had to be nominally in charge of crushing the Church. “Any measures whatsoever must be officially announced only by Comrade Kalinin—never under any circumstances may Comrade Trotsky make any public statements in print or any other way.”

In the parishes some 2,700 priests and 5,000 monks and nuns perished. Across Russia there were 1,400 bloody confrontations between Cheka or Red Army and parishioners, and over 200 trials. On March 20, 1922, the Cheka “indicted” Patriarch Tikhon for counterrevolutionary activity despite the latter’s eagerness to compromise; Trotsky wanted to arrest the entire Holy Synod. Tikhon remained free while the evidence was concocted. In Moscow fifty-four senior clerics and parishioners were put on trial, and eleven sentenced to death. In the light of possible international repercussions, Kamenev proposed shooting only two, but was opposed by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin—“I personally vote against quashing the court’s decision”—and Molotov. They compromised: six were shot. Superstition rather than humanity made it hard for the executioners to shoot clergy so the priests were shaved and dressed in civilian clothes stripped from corpses before execution. The Petrograd Cheka, egged on by Zinoviev, put Bishop Veniamin on trial although he had meekly handed over Church treasures, and sentenced him and nine others to death. A Cheka commission reprieved six, but Veniamin and three others, including a professor of theology and a Church lawyer, were shot.

Menzhinsky’s GPU men ran puppet breakaway churches including the Living Church, or Church of Renewal, set up before the revolution by the defrocked priest Aleksandr Vvedensky. Most of its priests were GPU agents, and its costs were paid out of the proceeds of looted Church valuables, but their consciences were not entirely extinct. Vvedensky protested to Rykov: “If there are shootings, then we, the Living Church (and I above all personally), will be in the eyes of the mob the murderers of these wretches.” ¹⁸

Georgi Chicherin, commissar for foreign affairs, and Vatslav Vorovsky, the plenipotentiary in Switzerland working to win international recognition for the Soviet Union, warned the Politburo that all Europe was incensed by the persecution of the Church, but Stalin and Menzhinsky could not have cared less about foreign opinion, whatever the views of Soviet diplomats. On May 3, 1922, the GPU in Moscow formed a secret commission, headed by Unszlicht, Menzhinsky, and Iagoda, to “summon Patriarch Tikhon to the GPU to receive an ultimatum” requiring him to defrock and excommunicate all émigré Russian clergy. This proposal went to Trotsky and Stalin, who had the Politburo resolve “1) to bring Tikhon to trial; 2) to apply the death penalty to the priests.”