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

John Gibson Lockhart,

Napoleon Buonaparte

Clearing the Terrain

IN MID-JANUARY 1928 Stalin and Trotsky each took trains across the Urals. One traveled by choice, the other by compulsion. Stalin was beginning his first year of tyranny, of ruling without allies; Trotsky was in exile, on the road to oblivion. How had Stalin managed to outmaneuver and silence men more articulate than him, more educated in political theory and economics; men who had thirty years of intrigue and opposition under their belts; men who were better known to, and sometimes better liked by, the public?

Stalin’s chief technique had been dissimulation. He was the con man who pretends to be duped. Three forces—Kamenev and Zinoviev’s uncompromising Marxist left, Bukharin and Rykov’s flexible right, and Trotsky’s militancy—aimed to take power after Lenin’s death. All three sides had seen Stalin and his cronies as the center ground that had to be captured if they were to overthrow the other two. Kamenev and Zinoviev, certain that they were Lenin’s ideological heirs, had embraced Stalin in order to disempower Trotsky. When Trotsky had been sidelined, Bukharin, Rykov, and the other “soft” Social Democrats had supported Stalin against Kamenev and Zinoviev to prevent the New Economic Plan coming to a premature end.

Now in 1928, with Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Trotsky all out of the running, Stalin and his underlings Kaganovich, Molotov, and Menzhinsky turned against Bukharin. In a volte-face, they were going to deal with the peasantry as Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky had proposed: they would take their grain and their liberty and use their wealth and their labor to create an industrialized and militarized totalitarian society. Only Zinoviev and Kamenev would have no part to play in the industrialization, and Trotsky had been removed from control of the armed forces. The rationale for letting Bukharin share power vanished once liberal economic policies were disavowed and Stalin began a ten-year game that would end with a bullet in Bukharin’s neck.

Stalin’s skill in ousting all the old guard while implementing many of their ideas shows his profound understanding firstly of the weaknesses of human nature, especially the self-esteem of the intellectual in power, and secondly of the importance of the levers of power, primarily the intelligence apparatus. From January 1928 Stalin gathered the power, as well as the will, to destroy the lives not only of Lenin’s Politburo, but of millions of peasants, intellectuals, and workers. There would be no more constraints on his paranoia.

A few months before, in September 1927, apart from on the street and in the semi-legal press, there was just one forum where Trotsky might challenge Stalin, the Comintern. To foreign communists Trotsky repeated Lenin’s warnings about Stalin and Bukharin: “Stalin’s personal misfortune, which is more and more that of the party, is a grandiose disproportion between Stalin’s resources in ideas and the might which the party-state apparatus has concentrated in his hand.” Kuusinen and Bukharin parried this attack and Stalin did not need to say a word. The Comintern voted unanimously to expel Trotsky.

Stalin had let Bukharin and Trotsky argue each other to exhaustion; now he used Menzhinsky to deliver the knockout blow. In November 1927, Stalin presented to the Central Committee a sensationally imaginative report by Menzhinsky in which OGPU said it had proof that Trotsky and “the opposition” were planning a coup.¹ The aim was to seize the Kremlin, the post office, and the radio stations, and to blow up railway lines. The conspirators had also supposedly fomented mutiny in army garrisons in Leningrad and the Ukraine. Menzhinsky outbid Stalin: he recommended “liquidating” the opposition leaders “before it is too late.”

Stalin postponed any liquidation and kept a moderate face. Three months later, Trotsky was handed his sentence by OGPU: “In accordance with the law punishing any person for counterrevolutionary activity, citizen Lev Davidovich Trotsky is to be deported to Alma-Ata. No time limit for his stay there is indicated. The date for dispatch to exile is January 16, 1928.”

Stalin was bombarded with protests from Trotsky’s admirers. An anonymous letter of 1927 runs: