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

Menzhinsky, with his flair for languages and knowledge of Europe, focused OGPU not on domestic but on foreign enemies although Soviet Russia was now officially at peace with its neighbors. Foreign agents now fell under the remit of the intelligence services, not the Red Army. ’s Latvians in the Cheka had coped clumsily with espionage—shooting dead, for instance, the British consul in Petrograd— and had looked on the new nations of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, still forming in the crucible of war, as territory for armed forays. Menzhinsky was subtler: for him Tsarist White Guards were not an army to be fought in the field; they were saboteurs to be eliminated in cellars. Activity abroad had to be covert and, if revealed, disavowed.

In the early 1920s there were over 2 million White Russians split into factions spread over Europe and the Far East. Monarchists, liberals, and Social Revolutionaries believed that, with help from neighboring states, they might yet regain power in Russia. As Soviet Russia had only restricted diplomatic representation abroad it was hard to monitor émigré activities and any success by OGPU’s counterrevolutionary section came from intercepting the correspondence of small conspiracies inside Russia. Larger exercises were crude and counterproductive. For instance, Lenin had instructed to send chekisty disguised as counterrevolutionaries into Latvia and Estonia: “Cross the border for a kilometer somewhere and hang 100–1,000 of their officials and rich people. . . . Under the guise of ‘greens’ [nationalist bandits] (we’ll put the blame on them) we’ll go 10–20 kilometers and hang all the rich peasants, priests, landowners.”³⁴

Menzhinsky needed lessons in how to do the job better, and he took a step unique in the history of the Cheka. He consulted one of his prisoners, the nobleman Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, the sole senior official of the Tsar’s regime to pass on his wisdom to the Cheka. Dzhunkovsky had run the Tsar’s gendarmerie and secret services but was highly principled.³⁵ Unlike Dmitri Tolstoi, he had forbidden the recruitment as informers of teachers, army officers, or anyone with public trust. Dzhunkovsky had even outed his own agent Roman Malinovsky, leader of the Bolshevik faction in the Duma, as a police spy. After the revolution, Dzhunkovsky gave evidence to the tribunal which condemned Malinovsky to death and volunteered his services as a consultant to the Cheka, the one organization, in his view, that could restore stability after the revolution.³⁶ Dzhunkovsky taught , Menzhinsky, and Artur Artuzov a technique that had worked spectacularly well under Sergei Zubatov in the Tsar’s Ministry of the Interior. This involved creating a puppet legal opposition, supporting factions in illegal opposition and manipulating subversives into working for, not against, the state.

OGPU learned Dzhunkovsky’s technique well. Using the skills of the polyglot Artur Artuzov (né Frautschi) and of Latvians such as Pillar and Jekabs Peterss, Menzhinsky set up fictitious resistance movements to lure émigré agents into the arms of OGPU including the Trust, an imaginary counterrevolutionary union of monarchists and Social Revolutionaries. A real counterrevolutionary, a Latvian called Opperput, was offered his life in exchange for mounting a disinformation operation. Under the name Eduard Staunitz, Opperput became the Moscow resident and treasurer of the Trust, which was stuffed with press-ganged ex-officers from the Tsar’s army. They were to pose as counterrevolutionaries and were given genuine information to sell to Polish intelligence.

The target in this operation was by far the most fearsome exiled opponent of the Bolsheviks, Boris Savinkov. Menzhinsky and Savinkov knew each other well. They had studied law together in St. Petersburg, and had both made promising literary debuts before descending into the revolutionary underground. But Savinkov had become a Social Revolutionary, believing in terror to destroy the old regime, and in the peasantry to create a new world. He had fled Russia after being sentenced to death for organizing the murders of ministers and generals but returned after the revolution of February 1917 and was a minister in Kerensky’s government. After the Bolshevik takeover, Savinkov formed another revolutionary party, the Union of Defense of Homeland and Freedom, which fought the Bolsheviks. Savinkov then left for France and Poland. In France his novels, particularly The Pale Horse, won him an international reputation; the romantic view of modern revolutionary politics shared by André Malraux and Albert Camus stems from Savinkov. The novelist Ilya Ehrenburg thought Savinkov “the most inscrutable and terrifying person” he had ever met; Somerset Maugham felt that Savinkov was “what the ancient Romans feared, Fate looking at you.” Winston Churchill was struck by “his mortally pale face, quiet voice . . . impenetrable gaze.”