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

Once general secretary, Stalin appointed another crony, Lazar Kaganovich, to the party’s organizing and distributing section. This section decided which members were posted where, and who would attend party congresses. Stalin already had a second source of authority as a Politburo member where, for the time being, he spoke less and listened more to his eloquent fellow leaders. These two posts gave him a preponderance of power during Lenin’s last illness, but Stalin also had his hand on a third lever of power: he was a member of the small Orgburo, the body which decided how and by whom Politburo resolutions were carried out. Stalin dominated the Orgburo: apart from Molotov and Kuibyshev, who always concurred, he had only to win over and Andrei Andreevich Andreev, a former waiter whom Stalin had made a secretary to the Central Committee, to have his way, with the “liberals” Rykov and Tomsky easily outvoted.

Stalin also controlled the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, which reviewed all government decisions, and ran the Commissariat of National Minorities, which in the early 1920s, against Lenin’s intentions, made the Soviet Union a centralized empire rather than a federation of nation-states. As commissar, Stalin oversaw with GPU help the crushing of national rebellions from his native Georgia to Bashkiria. Non-Russian communists were arrested, and some shot, for “nationalist” deviations: they had misunderstood the role of the Russian Federal Republic in the Soviet Union and had taken their own autonomy seriously. They had not heeded Stalin’s and Zinoviev’s speeches explaining the difference between the Tsar’s imperialism and Soviet centralization. Zinoviev in 1919 expressed Stalin’s idea with inimitable cynicism: “We cannot do without Azerbaijan’s oil or Turkestan’s cotton. We take these things which we need, but not in the way that the old exploiters took them, but as elder brothers who are carrying the torch of civilization.”

Finally, Stalin dominated the Comintern. Here his cronies the Hungarian sadist Béla Kun and the robotic Finnish journalist Otto Kuusinen ensured blind adherence by most foreign communists to Stalin’s line. No wonder, then, that Lenin’s famous “testament” of 1922 accused Stalin of concentrating enormous power in his hands.

Lenin’s testament reads like a headmaster’s report. The six most likely candidates to succeed were all weighed and found wanting. Stalin was singled out for his reckless use of power and capriciousness (his sulks when thwarted) and, in a postscript, for his coarseness and disloyalty. But Lenin advised only that the party should “consider” removing Stalin from his general secretaryship. None of Stalin’s faults were, in Bolshevik eyes, grave. Coarseness and impoliteness were virtues in a revolutionary, and Stalin, whenever anyone threw the testament in his face, retorted, “Yes, comrade, I actually am coarse. Ilyich suggested you find somebody else who differs from me by being more polite. All right, try and find him!” Lenin’s critiques of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were far more damning: they had all committed heresy by being against armed revolt at some point before October 1917. Bukharin and Piatakov were damned for their poor Marxist credentials: the first was an economist, the second an administrator.

There was no way of holding together the collective leadership that Lenin wanted to succeed him. Trotsky and Stalin, the two leading contenders in the eyes of the party’s rank and file, were both set on sole dictatorship; the satraps of Petrograd and Moscow, Zinoviev and Kamenev, saw themselves as a duumvirate but had limited and localized support. Zinoviev was also something of a joke. Few could take seriously a man who resembled Chico Marx and served his guests with a dish of steaming horse meat cooked by himself and within minutes was screaming that he would shoot them all.²⁰ As for Piatakov and Bukharin, they preferred playing second fiddle, the former to Trotsky, the latter to Stalin, although in the early 1920s Bukharin, the only one of them who might have won a popular election in Soviet Russia, pondered his chances of ruling without Stalin. He even sounded out Stalin’s zombie head of state Mikhail Kalinin about the feasibility of dispensing with Stalin’s leadership. Kalinin kept silent about this approach but felt guilty and afraid all his life. After he died in 1946, his daughter passed on to Stalin his written confession: