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

If Ramzin’s statements are confirmed and fleshed out in statements by the other accused (Groman, Larichev, Kondratiev and Co., etc.) this will be a major success for OGPU, since material we get this way we shall make available to sections of the Comintern and workers of all countries, we shall start a very wide campaign against interventionists and we shall succeed in paralyzing and subverting attempts to intervene for the next year or two, which is very important for us.

Get it? Greetings! I. Stalin.¹⁷

Ramzin happily clowned at the trial of the Prompartiia: he helped the lame-duck prosecution over many stiles, affirming that he had met the capitalist Riabushinsky two years after the latter’s death and that he himself had been briefed by both Poincaré and Lawrence of Arabia. The trial was accounted a success. Five of the eight were sentenced to death but reprieved for performing well in court.¹⁸

Menzhinsky and Stalin now pressed on with a trial of the harmless remnants of prerevolutionary Russia’s law-abiding socialists. The accused had never been, or no longer were, Mensheviks but they had underground experience and OGPU had trouble breaking them. Iagoda threatened to arrest his victims’ sick wives and elderly parents—and did so, even after the accused caved in and signed dictated formulaic confessions, sixty volumes of them.

With the benefit of his now considerable experience Menzhinsky could see that only fourteen of the 122 accused would perform reliably in open court so the rest were dealt with behind closed doors. Even so, Nikolai Krylenko, prosecuting, was wrong-footed in court. One Menshevik who had escaped abroad, Rafail Abramovich, was said to have visited Russia to brief the conspirators but was able to prove that he was in western Europe all that time and successfully sued two German newspapers that printed reports of the trial. Even loyal Bolsheviks had trouble suspending their disbelief at the ludicrous testimony. One noted in his diary:

A hall flooded with lights, microphones, sound recorders, judges, stenographers. One impression only: a trial that had been over-rehearsed. Ramzin was examined when I was there. He was led across the hall. . . . A heap of correspondents filling the front rows fired their cameras at him for several minutes, sitting on top of each other. Ramzin was wearing a white collar, a jacket buttoned up to the neck, standing by the microphone and not waiting for questions from the prosecution, spent at least a whole hour giving his evidence. He said really shattering things . . . . ¹⁹

Bringing the Writers to Heel

IF THE SOVIET PEOPLE had any hope of intercession at the end of the 1920s, before everyone’s conscience and common sense was obliterated by terror, that hope lay with the creative intellectuals, especially the writers. For over a hundred years, from Pushkin to Tolstoi, Russian poets, novelists, and philosophers had stood up for the people against oppression, enduring prison, exile abroad or in Siberia, poverty, and obloquy. But if the novelist Leo Tolstoi and the philosopher Vladimir Soloviov had courted repression to save the lives of those whom the Tsarist state proposed to kill, their successors Vladimir Mayakovsky and Mikhail Bulgakov stood back from the brink. Five years of the New Economic Plan had given them back a semblance of the security, prestige, and prosperity poets and novelist had once enjoyed but they had not recovered the moral security destroyed by the civil war. They might intervene for close friends, and would still protest when OGPU purloined their diaries or when Glavlit banned their works, but they did little more.