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

On any scale of odiousness Andrei Ianuarievich (sometimes called Iaguarovich for his feline predations) Vyshinsky ranks high among Stalin’s hangmen. Vyshinsky was of Polish origin. In private life, like Molotov, he was a loving husband and father, capable of kindness if it did not interfere with politics. Before the revolution he lived a comfortable privileged existence; he had no traumas to avenge and had been trained in one of the world’s most idealistic legal systems. He was, however, deeply cynical and sadistic and possessed no gratitude. He had no compunction about sending his former professor of law and many—in fact most—of his colleagues to their deaths. He developed a theory of law in which “confession is the queen of evidence”; he bullied into mute submission defendants whom he knew to be innocent of trumped-up charges. But Vyshinsky had a gift for legalistic phrasing as well as foul-mouthed oratory and proved himself a brilliant organizer in education, law, and eventually foreign affairs.

As a revolutionary in Baku, Vyshinsky had specialized in killing provocateurs and police agents. The chief blot on his copybook, which Stalin valued as a means of blackmailing him, was that, as a youthful prosecutor of the provisional government, he had issued a warrant for Lenin’s arrest. After the Bolshevik takeover, Stalin’s arrival in Petrograd saved Vyshinsky, who was given a post organizing food supplies. In the party purges, Vyshinsky, as a former Menshevik, was sometimes denied a party card, but by 1925 he was voted in—the sole candidate—as rector of Moscow University.

Vyshinsky’s first service to Stalin was in 1927 to arrange the funeral of the neuropathologist Professor Vladimir Bekhterev. The professor’s death by poisoning, two days after diagnosing paranoia in Stalin, was suspicious. A few years later Vyshinsky instructed a court to sentence Bekhterev’s son to death and his family to the camps. The Shakhty trial was Vyshinsky’s first public test, and as he was a prosecutor rather than a judge, the court had to be designated a “special session.” Vyshinsky’s job was not to decide a verdict or sentence—Stalin had already decided those—his task was to oversee the Shakhty defendants, to rehearse their confessions and court testimony.

Efim Evdokimov, a former convict and OGPU chief in the north Caucasus, had the physical work of wringing confessions from the fifty-three defendants and making them fit for public testimony in May 1928 in the marble Hall of Columns in Moscow, a venue whose theater equipment made it ideal for show trials.

Before the trial Stalin declared all the defendants guilty of sabotaging industry at the behest of French intelligence:

The facts tell us that the Shakhty case is economic counterrevolution, initiated by some of the bourgeois specialists who have already taken control of the coal industry. The facts also tell us that these specialists, organized in a secret group, received money for sabotage from the former owners of the mines who are now émigrés, and from counterrevolutionary organizations in the West.¹²

Nobody in the Central Committee stood up for the accused. Bukharin, now begging Stalin to rehabilitate him, demanded death for all of them.

Not everything went according to plan. Some of the defendants, especially the Germans, naively thought acquittal possible and pleaded not guilty; others pointed out the absurdity of the idea that French intelligence was commissioning sabotage to facilitate an invasion of Russia. The defense lawyers, notably Pavel Maliantovich, who was Vyshinsky’s superior and had been minister of justice in the provisional government before the revolution, tried too hard. The six-week trial attracted mockery from the foreign press. Krylenko, to Vyshinsky’s amusement, for he resented his rival’s flamboyant reputation, allowed his prosecution to flounder in arcane aspects of engineering and of the “class position” in Marxist jurisprudence. Nor was even the Soviet public yet ready to applaud such witnesses as the twelve-year-old boy who demanded that his accused father be shot. Eventually Vyshinsky overrode Stalin’s instructions: of the eighteen accused, he let seven walk free, and sentenced only eleven to death. Moreover, international pressure was such that Stalin could only have five actually executed. Three defendants who had refused to testify were shot without trial by Iagoda the following May. Stalin complained to the party that there were still “Shakhty men sitting in all branches of our industry.”