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

Nevertheless, a few literary decisions in 1928 were benevolent. Two of Bulgakov’s plays were authorized for performance, on the grounds that one gave experience to young actors and the other was the sole source of income for a small theater. Stalin’s most liberal authorization was for an edition of all Tolstoi’s work (eventually ninety volumes). Tolstoyans imprisoned and exiled by OGPU were partially amnestied, despite the opposition to Bolshevism that Tolstoi’s religious and philosophical work enjoins. Tolstoi’s disciple Vladimir Chertkov, deported by the Tsar to Great Britain in 1896, had an audience with in 1920 and with Stalin in 1925. He persuaded that Tolstoyans, like other nonviolent sectarians, were harmless to the state. Chertkov’s argument to Stalin was ingenious: he warned that Tolstoi’s works would be published abroad if the Soviet authorities did not preempt this. Tolstoyans suffered in the collectivization; their communal working of the land could not coexist with Stalin’s measures but Chertkov, and after his death in 1936 his son, secured for Tolstoi’s work and his followers indulgences that Stalin granted to no other unorthodox believers.²¹

One group of writers, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers and the Proletarian Theater, had already appointed themselves the secret police of poetry; they were nonplussed by Stalin’s apparent liberalism. They protested about performances of Bulgakov’s The Days of the Turbins and Flight, both showing the plight of the Whites in the civil war with some sympathy. A commission of the Central Committee, including Krupskaia and Rozalia Zemliachka, demanded instead mass printing of works by specified communist authors.

Stalin made himself the arbiter of literary disputes. Wearing his mask of tolerance, he told proletarian playwrights that concepts of right and left did not apply to “such a nonparty and incomparably broader sphere as is artistic literature, the theater, etc.” Stalin “would have nothing against the staging of Bulgakov’s Flight if he added to his eight ‘dreams’ one or two more showing the inner social springs of the civil war.” The Days of the Turbins was a good play, because it leaves the impression that “if even people like the Turbins are forced to lay down their arms and submit to the will of the people . . . then the Bolsheviks are invincible,” and if Bulgakov’s plays were staged frequently that was because proletarians couldn’t write good plays. “Literature should progress not by bans, but by competition.”²²

Talking to Ukrainian writers in February 1929, Stalin applauded literature in local languages and prophesied that when the proletariat conquered the globe French not Russian would be the universal language. Stalin even conceded: “You can’t insist that literature be communist.”

Stalin not only loved theater, he and Menzhinsky learned from it. OGPU developed Stanislavskian theories of acting and the theater in a direction more barbarous than Konstantin Stanislavsky could ever have dreamed of for their show trials, aiming to make their victims act as if they believed in their own guilt. The Bolshoi Theater for opera and ballet, and for drama Stanislavsky’s Moscow Arts Theater, were Stalin’s, and thus the Politburo’s, regular haunts. Few performers from either ended up in the Lubianka, except as informers. Stanislavsky, once the owner of cotton mills, was forgiven his past but was not allowed to forget it. His brother and nephews had been shot in the Crimea, and in the next few years he would lose a dozen nephews and other relatives to the GULAG and the executioner’s bullet. Chekhov’s widow, Olga Knipper, was forgiven her tours abroad during the civil war, and her letters of 1918 cursing the Bolsheviks as power-crazed killers. Her nephew the actor Mikhail Chekhov was allowed by Iagoda to leave for Germany and the United States, and his ex-wife Olga Tschechowa became one of Hitler’s and Goebbels’s favorite actresses. Stalin forbade reprisals against the family and Olga Knipper and at least one of her nephews became NKVD informers. Other theater directors, however left wing, were damned for their failure to bend their experimentalism to Stalin’s conformist tastes. The theater director Vsevolod Meierkhold, however outspokenly pro-Soviet, annoyed Stalin intensely with his modernism, which Stalin called in 1929 “affectation, mannerisms.” He was doomed.