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

After two years’ careful disinformation Savinkov fell for Opperput’s bait of an anti-Bolshevik underground, a National Union for the Defense of Homeland and Freedom allied to liberal democrats with connections in OGPU waiting for Savinkov to come to Moscow and help them overthrow the Bolsheviks. Together with his mistress and her husband, the Derentals, Savinkov crossed the border. At breakfast in a Minsk apartment he was arrested by his hosts Pillar and Filipp Medved. “Nice work,” Savinkov told the chekisty. “May I finish my breakfast please?” He then joined his fellow conspirators in a special carriage for Moscow. In the Lubianka, Savinkov and Artuzov treated each other with respect. Savinkov’s mistress, Liubov Dikgof-Derental, was allowed to live with him.

In just twelve days Savinkov was tried, pleaded guilty to charges of counterrevolution, and was sentenced to death. However in intensive negotiations with and Menzhinsky he agreed to write to his associates, insisting that further resistance to the Soviet regime was pointless. He was told that his life would be spared, that he would soon be found work to match his talent. OGPU’s bargain was not kept. Savinkov wrote to on May 5, 1925: “there’s no point reforming me: life has reformed me. This was how the question was put in conversation with Menzhinsky, Artuzov, and Pillar: either shoot me or give me an opportunity to work.” had wanted to shoot Savinkov from the start and Menzhinsky’s plans to save his rival were thwarted by Stalin after the trial: “I am in favor of a ten-year sentence. This sentence can’t be shortened, it’s dangerous, the change from death penalty to three years, when applied to somebody like Savinkov, won’t be understood.”³⁷

Menzhinsky had played cat and mouse with Savinkov for eight months before breaking off contact and leaving him to stew. On May 7, 1925, Savinkov fell to his death from the window of a fifth-floor office. The sequence of events suggests suicide, but a casual remark by Stalin in the 1950s implies that , on Stalin’s instructions, ordered the murder. ³⁸ Stalin himself edited the communiqué that published in Pravda announcing Savinkov’s death.

The Trust and another OGPU front, Syndicate-2, had other successes before they were wound up by Menzhinsky. In 1925 the British spy and common murderer Sidney Reilly (Shlomo Rozenblium), who had escaped a death sentence in 1918 for counterrevolution in his native Odessa, was lured across the Finnish border. After a number of polite discussions with Jekabs Peterss, Reilly was shot in the back during a walk in the forest on Stalin’s orders. ³⁹ In 1926 Menzhinsky’s best disinformation exercise was to arrange for the monarchist Vasili Shulgin to visit Soviet Russia in disguise and, escorted by chekisty pretending to be counterrevolutionaries, to search for his son, who had in fact just died in a psychiatric hospital. The OGPU agents escorted Shulgin back out of the country, urging him to write a book. This had a double effect: it persuaded readers that there was an underground opposition operating in the USSR and, at the same time, that Soviet Russia was a flourishing state with popular support.

These plots and the successful abduction, assassination, and recruitment of émigrés justified OGPU’s existence. Stalin was more paranoiac than Menzhinsky and particularly suspected the British of subverting Russia, convinced they were taking revenge for Soviet support for the General Strike. When Reilly was caught, and after an explosion in Moscow attributed to British agents, Stalin telegraphed Menzhinsky: