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

The Russian theater had always lived on state patronage; now the Soviet authorities controlled the repertoire, the funding, and the fate of actors, authors, and directors. Literature was a more private and independent activity. Control required deep penetration by OGPU; writers had to be recruited to detect undercurrents that a simple chekist might miss. Poets acquired OGPU friends: Esenin had Iakov Bliumkin to report on his activities, while Mayakovsky was handled by Iakov Agranov—who gave him the revolver that he was to shoot himself with—and by his mistress’s husband, Osip Brik, on whose door someone once scrawled:

The man who lives here, Osip Brik, is Not just a linguist and a critic. He’s a grass, a police dog who Interrogates his friends for OGPU. ²³

Skilled chekisty wrote poor poetry; talented poets were bad secret policemen. One Bohemian “proletarian” poet, Ivan Pribludny, Esenin’s friend, was hauled in for his incompetence and in 1931 repented:

I formally took upon myself the obligation to be an OGPU collaborator some years ago, but I have done virtually no work and haven’t wanted to, because the demands I had to meet as a collaborator interfered with my private life and my literary creativity. When I was summoned to OGPU on May 15, I asked the comrade who summoned me permission to go to the lavatory. When I got permission, I went there and wrote the following on the door: “Lads, ring Natasha [his wife] on South Moscow 17644 and tell her I’m not there.” . . . I confess that I thus broke the conspiratorial status obligatory for me as a secret collaborator of OGPU. . . .²⁴

Certain genres of literature had priority for the Soviet state: writers of history were subjected to special ideological rigor. Mikhail Pokrovsky, an old Bolshevik who had edited Lenin’s work, helped set up a Communist Academy and an Institute of Red Professors; he worked until his death in 1932 to suppress conventional historical research. He recognized only his own doctrines, which saw even the Middle Ages as an era of proletarian struggle, and rejected all national history. Russia’s major historians lost first their right to publish, then their teaching jobs, and finally their liberty.

One institution of Tsarist Russia was not yet destroyed: the Academy of Sciences. Its membership had shrunk through emigration, execution, deportation, and starvation but enough men of international prestige survived for Stalin and OGPU to be circumspect with this last bastion of independent thought. Unlike the state and government, the academy remained in Leningrad until 1934, and not until 1925 did it even change its name from “Russian” to “All-Union.” Until 1934 it elected members from capitalist states including Lord Rutherford from Britain and Albert Einstein from Germany. Stalin’s Politburo tried to pack the academy with its own candidates and bribed academicians with trips abroad but in 1928 ungrateful academicians blackballed three communists. They had to hold a new ballot.