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

To the July 1928 plenum of the Central Committee, Stalin justified what he had done: Russia had to hit the peasantry hard in order to build railways and hydroelectric power stations. “England squeezed the juice out of all its colonies for hundreds of years. . . . Germany built its industry on 5 billions of reparations after the Franco-Prussian war. . . . America developed its industry by raising loans in Europe . . . our country cannot, must not, go in for robbing colonies or foreign countries. . . . ” Extraordinary measures, Stalin insisted, “have saved the country from a general economic crisis.” He claimed that in future years there would be reserves of grain and that the requisitions had been a one-off measure. Bukharin bickered about the brutality and Stalin set his cronies on him: “Give us your panacea,” shouted Voroshilov. When Bukharin complained that he had to spend two days at OGPU to get the facts, Menzhinsky was asked, “Why did you lock him up in OGPU?” to which Menzhinsky replied, to loud laughter, “For panicking.”

Bukharin’s group had to grovel in order to hang on to a shred of power. They applauded the first show trials, knowing that the allegations were absurd and the confessions forced; they assented to exporting grain in order to finance industrialization. Only in June 1928, when Stalin decided that the peasantry would have to enter collective farms not just the cooperatives that Bukharin had envisaged, did he protest to Stalin: “Koba, I’m writing to you, not orally, since anyway I am too upset to talk and I fear you won’t hear me out, while you will still read a letter to the end. I consider the country’s internal and external situation to be very bad . . . people are afraid to talk. . . . I shan’t fight and I don’t want to. . . . ”⁷ He was ready, once he had finished presiding over the Comintern, “to go wherever you like, with no fight, no noise, no struggle.”

Bukharin knew very well that all his movements and conversations were monitored by OGPU and that Stalin had installed a fifth telephone in his office to monitor calls made by any senior member of the party or government. ⁸ Stalin had read to Bukharin a transcript of Zinoviev’s most intimate telephone conversations. Nevertheless, on July 11, when Kamenev came to Moscow, Bukharin phoned him to arrange a meeting. How did Bukharin imagine that Kamenev and Zinoviev would deal with him after years of relentless hounding in which Bukharin had sided with Stalin? Did Bukharin fear that Stalin, having turned against the peasantry, might bring Kamenev and Zinoviev back into power, in which case Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky would be isolated? Bukharin’s desperate ploy was to recruit them first.

Kamenev was skeptical and yet gullibly optimistic—he expected a counteroffer from Stalin. He took notes on the conversation in order to brief Zinoviev. Later, Kamenev made sure that Trotsky, too, had a summary. Kamenev had known Stalin for over twenty years; he must have known OGPU and Stalin would find out everything. His behavior was as staggering as Bukharin’s, but the prospect, however dim, of retaining power clearly blinded them both to Stalin’s inexorable vindictiveness.

In 1930 Kamenev’s secretary was arrested by OGPU, who found concealed in a relative’s bedstead minutes of the conversation. Bukharin’s bridge-building to the left opposition gave Stalin the material in order to destroy, one after the other, the left and right deviations in the party. Only now did Bukharin appreciate Trotsky’s point. Calling Stalin a “Genghis Khan who had read Marx” he said, “Stalin knows only one means: vengeance and putting a knife into your back at the same time.” Kamenev knew that too; he had been present in 1923 when Stalin told that his ideal of happiness was to prepare revenge and then go to bed.

During their conversation Bukharin told Kamenev that Stalin had said to Bukharin in 1928, when preparing the Politburo’s agenda, “You and I are Himalayas, the rest are nonentities. . . . ” When Kamenev asked Bukharin who was backing him, the latter named the rest of his troika, Rykov and Tomsky. Bukharin also said that the deputy head of OGPU, Genrikh Iagoda, and its head of foreign intelligence, Meer Trilisser, were sympathetic, an allegation that was to damn Iagoda and Trilisser in Stalin’s eyes. Bukharin posed the dilemma: “1) If the country perishes, we perish; 2) If the country manages to get out of the crisis, Stalin steps back in time and we still perish.” Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky felt that it “would be far better if, instead of Stalin, we now had Zinoviev and Kamenev.”