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

Now I am on the threshold of death I have recalled something from the past which, to be honest, I had not thought significant before. Probably it was in the first year after Lenin died. . . . After a session [of the Politburo] Bukharin invited me to his apartment to look at his hunting trophies. When he was showing me various birds and small animals he asked me, as if by the way, what I would think of a leadership without Stalin. . . . I understood even then that I was being sounded out. ²¹

Charisma won few votes in a party congress or on the Central Committee; patronage was decisive. The Bolsheviks were polarized between Trotsky and Stalin. Trotsky’s reputation had soared in times of war and danger; Stalin’s apparent moderation was attuned to the fatigue that now beset the party after a turbulent decade. In August 1924, to shut out Trotsky, Stalin hived off from the Politburo a group of seven “to agree on the most odious questions,” as Kalinin put it. Its membership was approved by a claque of twenty Central Committee members—Stalin and his supporters—who called themselves the governing collective. Stalin was thus able to decide in advance the Politburo’s agenda and make it accountable only to his exclusive group of seven.

Stalin’s struggle for sole control passed unremarked by the Russian public. They were relieved that 1923 had been a year of relative normality compared to the shocks and upheavals of the past six. The horrors of revolution were best evoked in The Apocalypse of Our Time by the philosopher Vasili Rozanov in 1919, who had died that same year of emaciation in the Troitse-Sergeev monastery:

La divina Commedia

With clanking screeching an iron curtain is lowered over Russian

History.

“The performance is over.”

The audience got up.

“It’s time to put on your fur coats and go home.”

They looked round.

But it turned out that there were no fur coats and no homes.

By the summer of 1923 city trams ran, the theaters were open and there were even casinos; those who had money could buy goods. Books printed in Berlin were sold in Moscow and writers could travel between the two cities. In the countryside the peasantry had enough grain for their own needs, for seed corn and even to sell privately. But compare the first Soviet Petrograd directory of 1923 with the last Tsarist edition of 1917 and you see a metamorphosis: the addresses and buildings were the same, but only 10 percent of those in the 1917 directory were still there six years later. The city had been drained of its bourgeoisie and filled with soldiers, workers, and peasants. The change in Russia is best summarized in two lines by Nikolai Gumiliov: “Only snakes shed their skins. We change our souls, not our bodies.” The populace which the Politburo fought among themselves to control had lost all continuity with Tsarist civic society. By 1923 nobody dreamed of influencing the government; people were reduced to fear, their best hope that they would be left alone.

While Stalin and the Politburo wrangled, the state seemed to retreat and OGPU became more discreet. In 1923, according to official figures, only 414 persons were shot, the lowest number since Tsarist times and until 1947 when Stalin suspended the death penalty.²² In fact Menzhinsky had retracted one tentacle of OGPU and extended others. The Cheka had shifted its tactics from brutality to more subtle but no less lethal surveillance. Menzhinsky’s foreign department concentrated on settling scores with émigrés and was a polyglot elite of imaginatively murderous experts under a chief who enjoyed his métier. In domestic affairs, OGPU took a leaf or two from the book of Dmitri Tolstoi, minister of the interior under Tsar Alexander II, who had designated three classes of men with close contact with the population—schoolteachers, gendarmes, and priests—police informers. OGPU had 40,000 literate employees intercepting mail and telephone calls and thousands of others—20,000 in Moscow alone—informing on citizens’ conversations and discussions so that regular summaries of the mood of the public could be compiled. Even with this enormous covert civilian army, OGPU fought for new territory.