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

OGPU, UNDER MENZHINSKY AND STALIN, spread its wings abroad as an organization parallel to the Soviet diplomatic corps. After entrapping Boris Savinkov, OGPU set up more fictitious centers of resistance but, once bitten twice shy, émigrés no longer fell for them. Agent Opperput was sent, or perhaps fled, to Finland and persuaded the Russian General Warriors’ Union that he had changed sides again. They backed Opperput’s botched attempt to blow up a GPU hostel in Moscow but Opperput’s group was finally gunned down near Smolensk. The only retaliations the union mounted were the assassinations of a Soviet diplomat in Warsaw and a chekist in Belarus, and the bombings of a Leningrad Communist Party club and the Lubianka reception room.

The more the émigrés proved that they were too weak and disunited to be any threat to the Soviet regime, the more OGPU nurtured Stalin’s obsessions. His suspicions fed by the first defectors from his inner circle, Stalin decided that no citizen who fled the Soviet Union should be left unpunished; no activists among the White army in exile should be left alive. On New Year’s Day 1928 Stalin’s personal secretary Boris Bazhanov slipped across the Iranian border, evading his GPU pursuers. He wrote a sensational memoir of his time in Stalin’s office, but lived. Shortly afterward Georgi Agabekov, OGPU resident in Turkey, also defected and wrote a book about the Cheka; it took nine years for Stalin’s killers to reach him.

Stalin was hindered by his diplomats, especially by Chicherin, who reminded him how badly he needed capitalist financial credits and technology, from taking violent action against all defectors and ill-wishers abroad. Although in 1927 Britain broke off relations because of Soviet support for the General Strike, Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union enjoyed throughout the 1920s a close but covert military relationship. There was also an understanding between the Abwehr and OGPU. In the early 1920s, Atatürk’s Turkey and the Soviet Union had together fought off dismemberment by the British and French, though this friendship turned sour when Atatürk suppressed Turkish communists. For seven years, the Soviet secret services and military had intervened in China, in the strife between the Kuomintang, communists, and warlords. OGPU had also kidnapped the Cossack leader Boris Annenkov and a White general.²⁸ OGPU’s success in China collapsed when the Soviet resident Mikhail Borodin, with Stalin’s approval, backed a communist coup, against diplomatic and military advice. Chiang Kai-shek slaughtered the Shanghai communists and—to cries of “I told you so” from Trotsky—Soviet influence in China evaporated. Only in Poland did OGPU mount successful attacks. In 1923 Józef Unszlicht took pleasure in blowing up the Warsaw citadel where he had been a prisoner; the explosion killed over a hundred and nearly obliterated Warsaw’s Jewish quarter.

Russian émigrés and defectors were concentrated in France, which also had a large communist movement and became OGPU’s main base. In February 1927 the French Sûreté arrested over one hundred Soviet agents, but the French government stopped short of a full purge lest it harm trade with the USSR. In 1928 and 1929 two cautious émigré leaders in France, General Piotr Vrangel and Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaievich, died; the Russian General Warriors’ Union was now led by General Aleksandr Kutiopov, whose slogan was, “We cannot wait for the death of Bolshevism, we must annihilate it.” In January 1930 Kutiopov was kidnapped by OGPU agents and delivered in a wooden box to a Soviet cargo boat waiting offshore. He died from the chloroform that the kidnappers used.

OGPU corrupted many in the Russian diaspora: General Nikolai Skoblin, fallen on hard times, was induced by his wife, the singer Nadezhda Plevitskaia, a woman of no political convictions or scruples, to help OGPU kidnap other Tsarist generals; the businessman Sergei Tretiakov was offered concessions in Russia if he handed over to OGPU refugees and defectors who sought his help. Other émigrés were exploited: the Tsar’s ambassador to London Nikolai Sablin sent to another former Tsarist ambassador, Mikhail Giers, better information on British foreign policy than any Soviet agent could obtain; copies went to Moscow. OGPU usually managed to smooth over the diplomatic rows provoked by trails of corpses across France and Switzerland. Their expertise in political murders had no peer among international secret services.

Menzhinsky was busy with fodder for show trials; his deputy Iagoda was repressing the kulaks and turning overflowing concentration camps into a pool of slave labor. Meer Trilisser ran foreign operations in 1930. Trilisser had organized terror in the civil war in Siberia and despised Iagoda as an “office rat.” Their quarreling, and Stalin’s dislike of the bespectacled, giggling Jewish chekist, led to Trilisser leaving OGPU.