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

Stalin had paralyzed his opponents. Trotsky still conducted a copious correspondence from Alma-Ata—all the better for OGPU to keep track of the opposition—but he was about to be deported. Zinoviev and Kamenev were grateful for small mercies. Bukharin writhed like a worm on the hook. All would be physically destroyed in a decade; already they were corpses politically. OGPU used provocateurs against them. While Bukharin recuperated in the high Caucasus from the shock of his fall— now he had lost the editorship of Pravda—he was doorstepped by a young man called Platonov who claimed to be a Communist Youth member horrified by the treachery of OGPU toward the workers and Bukharin. Platonov elicited enough from Bukharin for Stalin to damn him in the eyes of the Central Committee. In a similar sting, OGPU “unmasked” as a former White Guards officer Trotsky’s printer.

The events of 1928 demonstrated the speed and ruthlessness of Stalin as a politician. He had rehearsed his methods for eliminating not only political rivals but also any class from which future opposition might spring. He had one more device still to try out: the fabricated show trial, a spectacle which Menzhinsky and his subordinates including Iakov Agranov had been rehearsing for nearly a decade.

The First Show Trials

With him, pretence was so spontaneous that it seemed he himself became convinced of the truth and sincerity of what he was saying.

Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin

IN 1926 Stalin asked Menzhinsky to stage a show trial that would swing public opinion at home and abroad. Not until 1930 did Menzhinsky do this, although in 1928, under Genrikh Iagoda’s less expert supervision, OGPU staged the Shakhty trial of mine engineers from the Don basin in southern Russia. Like the grain requisitions of 1928, the trial was counterproductive. If the country needed grain, why terrorize the producers? If the country needed engineers, why arrest hundreds and put fifty on trial? If foreign specialists were needed to pass on modern technology, why arrest thirty-two German engineers and try three of them? Stalin, accusing others of sabotage, was throwing wrenches in his own works.

Each repression was followed by token relenting: individuals in the judiciary and OGPU were reprimanded for overdoing the persecutions; engineers were praised as a caste whom the state would cherish. Foreigners, however, remained vulnerable: in 1930 British electrical engineers from Metro-Vickers stood trial for sabotage and corruption. The repercussions of such trials forced Stalin to guarantee the safety of foreign specialists and in 1932, when the great Dnepr dams were built, the American engineer Hugh L. Cooper was rewarded not with arrest but with the Red Banner of Labor.

The motives behind the Shakhty trial related to the disparity between promised prosperity and the actual penury of the country. This had to be blamed on someone and foreign saboteurs were an easy target. Moreover Stalin loathed foreign specialists and wanted Soviet citizens to shun them. In addition, the effects of a show trial on the judiciary and public needed to be tested again, and Stalin wanted to see if OGPU could make defendants repeat their confessions in open court before he used show trials on famous old Bolsheviks, not just obscure engineers.

Since Lenin’s death the Soviet judiciary and some of Tsarist Russia’s surviving defense lawyers had recovered a vestige of self-confidence—at least when OGPU did not express an interest in the outcome. Stalin needed judge and prosecutor able to give his kangaroo court credibility, but wanted to warn off any lawyers who might defend enemies of the state. He was fortunate that Andrei Vyshinsky and Nikolai Krylenko were at his disposal. After sharing a cell with Andrei Vyshinsky, Stalin was sure of his loyalty.

Nikolai Krylenko had conducted with deadly rhetoric prosecutions in the first years of the revolution: he had sent Roman Malinovsky to his death, and arranged trials of Social Revolutionaries and bourgeois intellectuals in the early 1920s. Krylenko, however, was suspect to Stalin: he was a formidable chess player, and organized international tournaments.¹¹ Krylenko, like Bukharin, also conquered peaks in the Pamir mountains, and he had one named after him. All this implied individualism, cunning, and competitiveness. For all his cruelty and willingness to subvert justice for political expediency, Krylenko, like Bukharin, had a charisma which doomed him in Stalin’s eyes and, consequently, in Vyshinsky’s.