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

After this trial, if the accused became obstreperous in rehearsals, then the trial, if held at all, was behind closed doors, and the public saw only newspaper reports that saboteurs had been sentenced to death. Thus forty-eight officials in the food industry were shot, and the readers of Pravda were left to infer that food shortages were due to subversive state employees. An epidemic of anthrax and distemper among horses was likewise blamed on bacteriologists, who paid with their lives for fighting the epidemic.

Menzhinsky consistently met Stalin’s demands for reprisals for imaginary campaigns of sabotage. To every economic problem Stalin had a punitive response. The shortage of consumer goods and the excessive money supply of the second half of the 1920s, said Georgi Piatakov, then chairman of the State Bank, could be solved conventionally by increasing production, importing fewer consumer goods, and exporting agricultural produce. No, retorted Stalin, the money supply could be reduced by confiscating coins from “speculators” who kept small change because the silver content exceeded its nominal value. Stalin had another solution, as paranoiac as it was crass: “Without fail shoot two or three dozen wreckers from the Commissariat of Finance and the State Bank.” Five old bankers were sentenced to die. Just one member of the intelligentsia, the poet Osip Mandelstam, last keeper of the public conscience, protested at this judicial murder. To the amazement of all who knew of his protest, the old men were spared. Nobody, however, was inspired by Mandelstam’s courage to emulate him. Civic courage in the USSR was dead, and Mandelstam was regarded as mad.

Stalin was undeterred. He fired the chairman of the State Bank and instructed Menzhinsky: “Can you possibly send a memorandum on the results of the struggle (by GPU methods) with speculators in small change (how much silver has been removed, what institutions are most implicated, the role of foreign countries and their agents, how many people have been arrested, who they are, etc.).” Menzhinsky replied humbly: “Your view is correct. There is no doubt about that. But the trouble is that the results of the operation to take out small silver coins are almost deplorable. 280,000 rubles . . . clearly, we had a go at the cashiers and then relaxed, as often happens with us. That’s bad.”¹³

Under Stalin’s watchful eye, Menzhinsky staged at the end of 1930 a show trial in Moscow of eight leading metropolitan engineers and physicists, but first came a summer of arrests, interrogations, and the writing of an elaborate scenario. The first wave of arrests took out Russia’s best economists, notably Aleksandr Chaianov and Nikolai Kondratiev, the author of a controversial theory on the relationship of booms and depressions to sunspot cycles.¹⁴ He allegedly led a secret Labor Peasant Party, connected with an émigré Republican Democrat Union and with Mensheviks at home and abroad. Stalin first proposed to Molotov, “Kondratiev, Groman, and a couple or two of other bastards [sic] must definitely be shot.” He wanted Menzhinsky and Iagoda to link Kondratiev with Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky, and when Menzhinsky failed to find a link, Stalin asked OGPU, “Would the gentlemen accused consider confessing their mistakes and cover themselves properly with spit politically speaking by recognizing at the same time the solidity of Soviet power and the correctness of collectivization methods? That wouldn’t be bad. . . .”¹⁵

Kondratiev would not “cover himself in spit,” as Stalin saw from the regular statements that Iagoda brought him. Stalin told Menzhinsky, “Delay handing the Kondratiev case to the courts. It is not without its dangers. In the middle of October we’ll decide this question together. I have some considerations against.” Kondratiev and his fellow accused were dealt with behind closed doors and were finally shot in 1937. Menzhinsky meanwhile went on “checking up and smashing faces,” as Stalin phrased it.

“Evidence” from Kondratiev’s case fed the Industrial Party (Prompartiia) case at the end of 1930. In this fabrication a deal was struck with the defendants led by Professor Leonid Ramzin. Stalin liked Ramzin; his confessions implicated (and thus silenced) the Soviet head of state, Mikhail Kalinin, and Stalin circulated details to the Central Committee. Leonid Ramzin sang like a canary. In return he was promised his life and full reinstatement.¹⁶ Stalin needed Ramzin’s reprieve as an example to more important victims, to get confessions to any accusations, however absurd, in exchange for a reprieve, for the survival of kith and kin—promises that were later rarely kept.