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

My personal opinion: 1) London’s agents are deeper entrenched here than we think, and their meeting places will persist; 2) mass arrests must be used to destroy English spy links, for recruiting new collaborators among those arrested in Artuzov’s department and to develop a system of volunteers among young people to help OGPU and its organs; 3) it would be good to set up one or two show trials in the courts on the lines of English espionage, so as to have official material to be used in England and Europe; . . . 5) the publication of such evidence has enormous significance if you set it up skillfully and find authors of the appropriate articles on espionage in the military, aviation, the navy. When do you plan to publish Reilly’s statements? This business has to be set up skillfully. Greetings, Stalin.⁴⁰

Stalin was already fascinated by foreign spies and the prospect of show trials. Menzhinsky and OGPU counterintelligence encouraged this mania and began to frequent Stalin’s office. They were often the last to report to Stalin before he went to the Black Sea to rest, and the first to report when he returned, even though, in the mid-1920s, intelligence and foreign relations were not among Stalin’s many official remits.

OGPU’s widely publicized counterintelligence operations established the Soviet secret services as the most formidable and well funded in the world. Within the Soviet Union there was a conviction that only the Cheka and OGPU worked efficiently, so much so that for every emergency an Extraordinary Commission would be set up. There was even a Cheka for the production of felt boots.

The Tikhon affair of 1922–5 had shown Stalin that Menzhinsky could stage a trial as a theater director stages a play, every actor working from a carefully composed script. When Stalin decided to get rid of foreign and prerevolutionary experts in order to give the party a signal that all dissent was now fatal and the public the message that all failures in the economy were due to sabotage, Menzhinsky was given the task of providing proof. The Shakhty, Prompartiia, and Menshevik trials were not as well rehearsed as the trials of the Great Terror—Menzhinsky and Iagoda would not use physical violence on the accused and could not convince all of them that justice was dead—but Menzhinsky’s show trials did require OGPU leaders and underlings to suspend any vestigial notions of justice, morality, or verisimilitude, and to work for months with little sleep.

One important set of documents published in the last five years is the register of visitors to Stalin’s Kremlin office from 1924 to his death. We see that representatives of every department of government and party were summoned to his Kremlin office, but that OGPU officers came more often and stayed longer. The records also show that, during his battle for sole control, Stalin felt sufficiently secure to take a month’s holiday each year from 1924 to 1926, relying on couriers and encrypted telegrams from Molotov in the government and from Iagoda and Menzhinsky in OGPU to maintain his grip. Once assured that his opponents had been defeated, Stalin was free to devise at leisure grander scenarios for OGPU to stage.

By 1926, Stalin was sure that OGPU depended on him as much as he on them: they had no one else capable of offering patronage. On the other hand, the chiefs of OGPU were not Stalin’s men, in that they had not been appointed by him. It would be ten years before Stalin could make OGPU as much his creature as the party Central Committee and Politburo had become. Menzhinsky and Iagoda and their underlings enjoyed the company of sophisticated intellectuals such as Bukharin and Rykov. When Stalin turned against Bukharin and the right he would also need to weed them out of OGPU and replace them with thugs and automatons from his party apparatus.

FOUR

STALIN SOLO

. . . we doubt if any man ever passed through life, sympathising so slightly with mankind; and the most wonderful part of his story is, the intensity of sway which he exerted over the minds of those in whom he so seldom permitted himself to contemplate anything more than the tools of his own ambition.