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

For a few months Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev forgot the insults they had hurled at each other and formed an opposition. Still unsure that Stalin would win, Menzhinsky was slow to close down their printing presses. In 1926 and 1927 opposition leaflets made it seem, at home and abroad, that debate, even a two-party system, might be burgeoning in the USSR: Stalin and Bukharin would be the conservatives, and Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev the radicals.

But Stalin had ground his ax. His draft circular to the Politburo shows the care and feeling that he put into his attack: “On a personal question”:

Comrade Trotsky is wrong to say that Lenin “insisted” on Stalin being removed from the post of general secretary. Actually, Lenin “suggested” the party congress “consider” the question about transferring Stalin, leaving the decision on the question to the party congress. And the congress, after consideration decided unanimously to leave Stalin in the post of secretary, a decision which Stalin was bound to submit to.

Comrade Trotsky is wrong to assert than if Stalin had not been secretary “there would not be the struggle we now have.” Stalin was not secretary either in 1920 or 1918 when Trotsky waged a frantic campaign against the party and Lenin both in 1918 (Brest treaty) and in 1920 (trade union movement) . . . it is stupid to attribute discord in the party to a “personal aspect.”

Comrade Trotsky is wrong to assert that “Stalin is calling him a revisionist of Leninism.” Not Stalin but the thirteenth party conference . . . Not just Stalin but first and foremost Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Krupskaia [did so]. . . . 32

Trotsky’s arrogance undid him. He considered a mindless agent of others’ policies, Menzhinsky an effete spook, and Orjonikidze a Caucasian bandit. and Menzhinsky resented being patronized by Trotsky and swung the pro-Trotsky element within OGPU, against all its instinctive revolutionary romanticism, over to Stalin. At the end of 1927 Trotsky was thrown out of the party with seventy-five of his prominent supporters including Kamenev and Zinoviev. Zinoviev became rector of Kazan University; Kamenev took on the scientific and technical directorate of the Commissariat for the Economy. Trotsky, deluded by his faith in the intuition of the workers and by his sense of destiny, lost his last post, the fur concession, and was deported to Kazakhstan.

A New Role for OGPU

IN 1927 OGPU was not yet a centralized, miniature totalitarian state. The credit (or blame) for the reforms that enabled OGPU to dominate political and economic life in the USSR and made it Stalin’s chief instrument of rule by the late 1920s is Menzhinsky’s. Although he never held a revolver or watched an execution Menzhinsky took firm control of the psychopaths, criminals, or intellectuals who dispatched their victims with enjoyment in Stalin’s cause. Menzhinsky and Genrikh Iagoda adopted the same motto as —“a cold head, a warm heart and clean hands”—in their dirty but vital task, anticipating Himmler, a man too fastidious to wring a chicken’s neck yet who urged the SS on to slaughter Jews.

The samurai at the head of OGPU had higher politics in mind, while still condoning sadism and class murder in the Russian provinces, in the Ukraine, the Caucasus, and central Asia. Their dual role as political arbiters and repressive policemen caused overwork and illness; they took the waters of the north Caucasus more and more often. wrote from his sanatorium to Iagoda in summer 1925:

The most serious attention must be paid to Comrade Menzhinsky’s health. I ask for a concilium of doctors, appropriate specialists, to be organized to outline the treatment: where, in what conditions, for how long, etc. . . .

Dear Genrikh Grigorievich! Here I am, the fifth day now. I can feel I am getting better, although I shall only start the Narzan baths on Sunday. Viacheslav Rudolfovich [Menzhinsky] has become considerably better, but to consolidate this improvement and to complete treatment, treatment must nevertheless be prolonged until October 1.³³