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

For interrogating Tikhon, a quiet but resilient man, the Cheka chose Evgeni Tuchkov. He had won his laurels crushing a rebellion by the Turkic Bashkirs in the Urals.¹⁹ Tuchkov had two missions: to break the Church into warring factions, each controlled by the GPU; to inveigle Tikhon into making treasonable statements.

International protests grew even louder. For the first time in 900 years, the Pope in Rome expressed concern for the Eastern Church; he also offered to buy back all the Orthodox Church’s valuables. The Pope was outraged when Polish Catholic priests were publicly tried in Minsk and Bishop Konstantin (Romuald) Budkiewicz was shot. Fridtjof Nansen told Trotsky that if Tikhon was executed famine relief for Russia would stop and an American senator warned that diplomatic relations with the USSR would not be established. backed down, and proposed calling off Tikhon’s trial. Even Stalin wavered.

Menzhinsky tried a new tack: he asked Tikhon to lure the émigré bishops back to Russia where the GPU could arrest them. “Do you think they’d come here?” Tikhon asked. After making all the concessions he could, Tikhon was detained in a monastery 300 miles from Moscow. Tuchkov called a Church synod and GPU agents fixed a vote to depose Tikhon. This failed, since a synod without the patriarch was illegal by canon law. Tikhon died on April 7, 1925, probably unnaturally; Stalin composed the death announcement in Pravda. Tikhon’s designated successor, Piotr Poliansky, was arrested; Menzhinsky ordered newspaper articles “compromising Piotr” to be printed and Poliansky began a long road to his own Golgotha: a decade of imprisonment culminating in the announcement of his death in 1936 and his execution in 1937. In 1927 Piotr’s replacement, Metropolitan Sergi, formally surrendered the Orthodox Church to the Bolshevik party and state. Menzhinsky set up an antireligious commission; a youth movement and a workers’ organization called The Militant Godless were formed; Stalin’s crony the publicist Emelian Iaroslavsky founded a journal, The Godless, to which millions of workers and peasants had to subscribe.

Energetically repressing émigrés, intellectuals, and clerics, Menzhinsky had proved his value; he would now help Stalin crush all opposition, within the party and without.

Stalin’s Struggle for Sole Control

Whosoever hath any thing fixed in his person that doth induce contempt, hath also a perpetual spur in himself to rescue and deliver himself from scorn. Therefore all deformed persons are extreme bold: . . . Also, it stirreth in them industry, and especially of this kind, to watch and observe the weakness of others, that they may have somewhat to repay. Again, in their superiors, it quencheth jealousy towards them, as persons that they may at pleasure despise; and it layeth their competitors and emulators asleep, as never believing they should be in possibility of advancement. . . .

Francis Bacon, Of Deformity

FROM SPRING 1923 Lenin was a living corpse, unable to call anyone to order. The New Economic Plan for Lenin had been a necessary but unwelcome step backward; for the Politburo it represented a weakening of both the monopoly and the severity of the party’s power.

For Stalin, however, this was the time to secure that monopoly for himself. “Personnel decides everything” ten years later became one of Stalin’s famous slogans. From April 4, 1922, when Stalin secured his own position as general secretary of the party—a “cook who will make some hot dishes,” Lenin warned—he put this slogan into practice by turning the secretariat of the Central Committee into a party and state personnel office.

If Stalin had genius, it was as a personnel officer. He recruited apparently mediocre men and used them to great effect. The party’s Central Committee became Stalin’s instrument: he installed as fellow secretaries his sidekicks Viacheslav Molotov and Valerian Kuibyshev, the latter a loyal Stalinist who had shown considerable initiative in the civil war but was now a malleable alcoholic. Stalin cannily turned the secretariat from an administrative service into a political powerhouse. He funneled or withheld information, he compiled agendas, he kept records, and thus directed the agenda and decided the participants in party deliberations.