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

This retreat emboldened the liberals in the party: a commission charged OGPU with 826 judicial killings and widespread bribe-taking. To stop depraving soldiers and policemen still further, Lunacharsky, Radek, and Krylenko demanded that only criminals should act as executioners. Mass murderers such as the Siberian bandit Kultiapy were therefore reprieved in 1924 and set to work as prison executioners. A few young sadists, however, were too useful to lose: Mikhail Frinovsky, a man who like Stalin had left theological college to become a murderer, was to rise to ministerial status in the 1930s, while Vsevolod Balitsky, who had tortured and raped in Kiev, became chairman of the Ukraine GPU and then Ukraine’s commissar for internal affairs. Stalin would order him to starve the Ukraine’s peasants to death. ²⁷

The top OGPU echelons, if they wanted to keep their fiefdoms, had to serve the intrigues of a new master. In 1925, step by step, Stalin was eradicating his potential rivals: “the superb measurer of doses” as his victims, only belatedly feeling the cumulative effects of his poisons, called him. Manipulating rivals to eliminate enemies, Stalin showed real genius. He used his insight into the base side of human nature, an ability to work while opponents slept or convalesced, a magisterial calmness in the face of righteous indignation, and an understanding of game theory which only the best poker players have. Above all, he assured OGPU of a prominent future role in government.

Trotsky, and others ousted by Stalin, blamed their defeat on naznachenstvo,Stalin’s fixing of appointments. The posts that Stalin occupied in the party and in government let him determine who went where to serve the state. By 1925 the Soviet bureaucracy was more numerous than that of Tsarist Russia; posts of any importance were reserved for members of the nomenklatura, the list of politically reliable party members; and appointments were decided by the party apparatus. As one Central Committee party member put it, “You were hardly likely to vote ‘no’ if you then got sent to Murmansk or Tashkent.” Party gatherings voting on debating points put forward by Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were packed with those who depended on Stalin’s favors.

Stalin prepared meticulously for each encounter. He filled plenary meetings, conferences, and congresses with his claque; he spoke as a prosecutor, forcing his opponents onto the defensive. Stalin’s intimates had no doubts of the outcome for all who got in his way. In July 1924 Demian Bedny asked Stalin, long before the latter had Zinoviev removed from the Politburo, “Have you heard the latest joke? The English are willing to let us have Marx’s ashes . . . in exchange for Zinoviev’s.” Stalin’s private correspondence with Demian Bedny shows the anti-Semitism behind the campaign against Trotsky. In 1926 Bedny wrote to Stalin:

If I touch on Trotsky,

The whole opposition roars.

What’s the problem, ethnic claque?

Explain it to me carefully:

If I hit Shliapnikov, I get a brawl!

If I go for Trotsky it’s a pogrom!²⁸

The differences between Trotsky and Stalin were in style, not substance. They were both Leninists: they believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat, in world revolution, and in turning the peasantry into workers on the land. Where they differed was on emphasis and timing. Trotskyism—a term of abuse devised by Stalin’s supporters, who called themselves true Leninists—was nostalgia for the Red Army’s glories and the inclination to pour oil on any revolutionary fire, whether in Germany reeling from hyperinflation, in Britain facing a general strike, or in China torn apart by warlords. Stalin had caution and reticence on his side. Trotsky promised to wind up the NEP, to squeeze resources from the peasantry and begin massive industrialization as well as world war. Stalin bided his time, meanwhile letting the right wing, notably Bukharin, relax the state’s pressure on the economy so that the peasants built up reserves worth confiscating.

Trotsky and Stalin criticized each other’s records of heresy from October 1917 to the end of the civil war, their successes and failures in forcing Red Army commanders on to victory, and the number of occasions each had angered Lenin. In such arguments Trotsky came off worse.