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

Kamenev and Zinoviev saw that it was mad to take part in a half-baked plot: there was no hope even of making Stalin revert to the collective leadership of 1923, let alone of his stepping down. When Rykov heard the phrases Bukharin had uttered, and to whom, he yelled at Bukharin (according to Anna Larina, who was to be Bukharin’s last wife), “You’re an old woman, not a politician!” Gods like Stalin demented their victims before destroying them. It boggles the mind that Kamenev and Bukharin, who had spent decades before 1917 evading detection, could be such bungling conspirators.

Stalin had from Iagoda and Agranov in OGPU a full record of these damning discussions and Kamenev’s reflections, too. Just after Stalin gracefully let Kamenev and Zinoviev back into the party, OGPU reported Kamenev speculating, “The only progressive cause that this group (Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky) can achieve is to remove Stalin from the post of general secretary. . . . I think their chances are less than 25 percent. . . . But actually removing Stalin by this group would mean a right-winger taking Stalin’s place. . . . It is extremely likely that when Stalin has beaten the right, he will himself turn doubly right.” Kamenev outlined five courses of action of which only one appealed to him: “To seek a union with Stalin on acceptable terms.” ⁹ He decided to avoid Bukharin, to attack him in print, and to contact Stalin—a meeting which Stalin had just refused. Kamenev feared Stalin might outmaneuver him by making a pact with Trotsky and his notes end on a pessimistic note with a very astute prediction of Stalin’s future entourage: Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Orjonikidze, Kalinin, Kirov.

Martemian Riutin, a Moscow Bolshevik who would mount in 1932 the last attempt to depose Stalin, recalled Bukharin “totally demoralized, in tears” and saying, “I now feel that I have been literally smeared with shit from head to toe.” Bukharin recovered sufficiently by the end of 1929 to publish an article, “An economist’s notes,” denouncing the collectivization of the peasantry as “irresponsible and opportunist.” When attacked in the Politburo, Bukharin boldly called Stalin a “petty oriental despot.” Bukharin lost his posts. In November 1929 Stalin removed him from the Politburo. Then Bukharin broke. He variously groveled or snorted defiance, as in his letter to Stalin of October 1930:

Koba. After our telephone conversation I immediately left work in a state of despair. Not because you “frightened” me—you can’t scare me and won’t frighten me off. But because those monstrous accusations you threw at me clearly point to the existence of some satanic, foul and low provocation which you believe, on which you build your policies and which will end badly even if you were to destroy me physically with the same success with which you are destroying me politically. . . .

I consider your accusations monstrous mad slander, crazy and, in the final count, stupid. . . . Or does the fact that I don’t lick your behind or write articles in your praise à la Piatakov make me “a preacher of terror”? Then say so! God, what hellish madness is happening now! And you, instead of explanations, ooze spite against someone who is full of just one thought: to help in any way, to pull the cart with everybody, but not to turn into a sycophant, there are a lot of them and they are ruining us.¹⁰