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

Even Bukharin, an economist of some standing, was blackballed— by the physiologist Ivan Pavlov—on the grounds that “Bukharin’s hands are covered in blood.” Only when Bukharin burst in, uninvited, on Pavlov’s family having dinner, inspected his butterfly collection and proved that he was a knowledgeable lepidopterist, did Pavlov relent: the Politburo had one representative in the academy. Ivan Pavlov, famous for making dogs salivate at the sound of a bell, enjoyed unique immunity: Lenin ordered Zinoviev in 1920 to ensure that Pavlov had whatever he needed to keep his staff and animals alive. By 1928, Pavlov, born in 1849, was so unafraid of death that he could proclaim Jesus of Nazareth, not Lenin, to be the greatest human being, and tell Molotov with impunity that the Soviet government was “shit.” In 1929, on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the biologist Ivan Sechenov, Pavlov began a speech: “O stern and noble comrade! How you would have suffered if you had remained among us! We live under the domination of a cruel principle: state power is everything, the individual personality is nothing. . . . On this foundation, gentlemen, no cultured state can be built, and no state whatsoever can hold out for long.”

Hundreds remembered that speech. Pavlov asked his audience to stand and, quivering with fear, they did so. In the 1930s Ivan Pavlov was the only prominent citizen in the Soviet Union apart from Stalin who spoke his mind with no regard for the consequences.²⁵ Academicians quaked whenever Pavlov spoke as they knew that Stalin’s vengeance would be wreaked on them.

OGPU left Pavlov alone, but harassed as “spies” academicians who had “foreign collaborators.” In the academy 15 percent of the tenured academics and 60 percent of the untenured lost their jobs. Then Menzhinsky prepared a show trial of 150 leading scholars and scientists. The academy was alleged to be hiding state secrets in its archives. Arrests began in October 1929: OGPU first took four leading historians, among them Sergei Platonov. Platonov was, like Pavlov, very old. He admitted that he was a monarchist by conviction; in his youth he had taught the Tsar and his brothers.²⁶

The academy case was conducted by hardened chekisty like Agranov and Jekabs Peterss. After auditioning the 150 detainees, they chose sixteen victims, mostly historians, for public trial. Menzhinsky took a pedantic interest, even correcting the German grammar in statements from the historian Evgeni Tarle, who confessed that academicians kept guns and ammunition in the Pushkin House in Leningrad, and titillated the Bolshevik historian Pokrovsky with statements squeezed out of the detained academics (Menzhinsky and Pokrovsky had been friendly as exiles in Paris). OGPU did all it could to help the “Professor with the Pike,” as Pokrovsky was called, to bring the academy under the heel of his Institute of Red Professors.

Academicians who would not incriminate Platonov were put in cells infested with typhus-bearing lice. They were promised leniency for testimony and crippling beatings for silence. Platonov was frail and his death under interrogation would have been politically embarrassing. As it was, international protests at his detention provoked Maxim Gorky to write in Pravda that foreign critics were silent about arrests and trials of communists in their own countries but raised a hue and cry about the fate of monarchists like Platonov, who was then given a room with clean sheets in the remand prison where he was even allowed to have his cat with him. After a year he confessed to running an underground military organization and to receiving large sums from the Polish government.²⁷ Platonov, like Tarle, was spared public trial and given a mild sentence of exile. When Pokrovsky died and Stalin reverted to the old monarchist view of Russian history, these two were still in good health and were rehabilitated.

It took another decade to drag the academy to Moscow, where it would be under the nose of the party, and to interest Stalin more keenly and balefully in the academy’s research into mathematics, genetics, and linguistics. Then the NKVD would terrorize the academy into surrendering its greatest members to the Lubianka and accepting scoundrels like Vyshinsky as members. But for the first half of the 1930s the Academy of Sciences was the last beacon of free thought in the USSR.

Operations Abroad