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

asked Iagoda to write a report on “completely open, obvious profiteering, enrichment and brazenness” to persuade the Central Committee to employ OGPU to expel profiteers and their families from major cities, confiscate their property, and colonize with these people the wildernesses of northern Russia and Siberia. The Politburo took halfhearted action against smugglers and bar owners; the commissar of finances had to protect the urban retail trade from ’s narrow-minded obsessions.

A real blow to OGPU came from Bukharin in autumn 1924:

Dear Feliks . . . I consider that we must as soon as possible move to a more “liberal” form of Soviet rule: fewer repressions, more legality, more discussion, more self-rule (under the party’s guidance naturaliter [Bukharin liked to use Latin]), etc. . . . That is why I sometimes speak out against proposals to widen the rights of the GPU, etc. Understand, dear Feliks (you know how much I love you) that you have no reasons whatsoever to suspect me of any bad feelings to you personally or the GPU as an institution....²³

passed the letter to Menzhinsky with his own commentary:

We have to take account of such moods in the Central Committee’s ruling circles, and pause for thought. It would be a very great political mistake if in principle the party on the question of the GPU were to surrender to the philistines and give them a holiday—as a party line, as a policy, as a declaration. That would mean giving in to capitalist enterprise, philistinism, tending to the denial of Bolshevism, this would be the triumph of Trotskyism and a surrender of positions. To counteract these moods we must re-examine our practice, our methods and get rid of whatever might feed such moods. This means that we (the GPU) have perhaps to be a bit quieter, more modest, resort to searches and arrests more cautiously, with better evidence. . . . We have to re-examine our policy on letting people go abroad— and visas. . . .²⁴

The hangmen had to try a new tack. OGPU was under attack from Commissar for Foreign Affairs Chicherin as its methods undermined his diplomatic efforts abroad. Commissar for Justice Nikolai Krylenko, reverting to the legality he had been trained in, also put pressure on OGPU: he demanded that crimes, even against the state, be dealt with by the prosecutor’s office, the prokuratura, under his commissariat. To Zinoviev, complained: “A very difficult stage has come for OGPU. Its workers are mortally tired, some to the point of hysterics. But in the higher echelons of the party a well-known section is beginning to doubt the necessity of OGPU (Bukharin, Sokolnikov, Kalinin).”²⁵ complained bitterly that Krylenko was usurping the role of OGPU: suppose, he said, the Commissariat for Justice took over political cases, “that would, at a time when the political circumstances are changing, threaten the very existence of the Soviet Union.”²⁶

OGPU began to present itself as a band of principled intellectuals, many with legal training, but still executed 2,550 people in 1924. It did, however, clean up its act and find its worst sadists other work. It sent a commission to the special purpose northern camps between Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, extermination camps manned by chekisty who had disgraced themselves in metropolitan areas. One camp, Kholmogory, in the hands of a sadistic Lithuanian called Bachulis, was as bad as any of Hitler’s would be. The surviving prisoners were sent to the monastery complexes of the Solovetsky islands; the guards went with them. In 1929 Stalin and Iagoda had 600 of them shot, together with many of the prisoners.