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

While Trotsky was in Alma-Ata, OGPU summarized for Stalin hundreds of letters and telegrams that linked him to a network of unrepentant supporters. Menzhinsky then stopped Trotsky’s correspondence, arrested his courier, and forbade Trotsky even to shoot pheasants around the city. Trotsky was cut off from his younger daughter, Nina, who, harassed by the police and refused medical help, died of tuberculosis in June 1928. Stalin wanted Trotsky out of the country but Politburo members balked at setting such a precedent for the treatment of a former leader. Stalin spoke mildly: “I propose to send him abroad. If he comes to his senses, the way back won’t be barred.”

Only Turkey agreed to accept such a notorious deportee. On December 16, 1928, OGPU called on Trotsky and told him that they were raising “the question of a change of address for you.” A month later Trotsky was transported across Russia, avoiding railway stations where demonstrations might be held. Trotsky protested by calling his towel Iagoda and his socks Menzhinsky. He, his wife, and elder son were delivered to Istanbul where, after an unhappy stay in the Soviet consulate, he was allotted a magnificent brick villa in which Sultan Abdul Hamid’s chief of security had once lived, on the island of Büyükada in the Sea of Marmara.

Menzhinsky’s and Iagoda’s mistake was to let Trotsky take most of his archive. That archive, despite raids by Stalin’s agents, gave ammunition to Trotsky for a ten-year propaganda barrage. During his four years on Büyükada, Trotsky was a magnet not just for OGPU’s agents but for dissident socialists, Soviet and European. Iakov Bliumkin, forgiven for murdering the German ambassador in 1918 and now OGPU’s most flamboyant agent, was operating, as Sultan-Zadeh, in Istanbul, trading in Hebrew incunabula (he spoke fluent Hebrew, Turkish, and Persian). In 1923 Bliumkin had worked in Trotsky’s secretariat, editing articles on the civil war to reflect the glory of Trotsky’s command of the Red Army. Bliumkin remained, despite the danger, so drawn to Trotsky that he not only visited him, but took back to Moscow a letter from Trotsky instructing his supporters how to act.

Bliumkin thus became a hare to his own hounds. His mistress was set up to ensnare him, and a former Trotskyist whom he told about the letter denounced him to Stalin. Bliumkin shaved off his beard, hijacked a car, but was caught and interrogated—“with prejudice,” as Stalin instructed. The sentence was dictated by Stalin to Menzhinsky. Iagoda co-opted his hated rival Trilisser, Bliumkin’s protector, onto the OGPU troika that condemned Bliumkin. Menzhinsky and Iagoda outvoted him and imposed the first death sentence carried out for Trotskyism. In autumn 1929 Bliumkin had thus made history again as the first senior OGPU man to be killed by Stalin. The rest of OGPU drew its conclusions.

Otherwise, deporting Trotsky was a success. His supporters were demoralized and Trotskyists in the USSR could now only carp at the “empirical” (i.e., brutally inefficient) way in which Stalin’s henchmen were carrying out the policies they had advocated. Some Trotskyists were tired of provincial exile and, like Kamenev and Zinoviev a year earlier, wanted to worm their way back into power and the metropolis. If Stalin stopped using Article 58 of the criminal code (anti-Soviet crimes from agitation to treason) against them, they would reunite with the party. Four of Trotsky’s supporters announced a “rupture, in ideas and organization, from Trotskyism”: Ivan Smirnov, who had opposed Stalin since 1923; Ivar Smilga, a libertarian Latvian; Evgeni Preobrazhensky, who with Trotsky had opposed the Brest-Litovsk treaty and who had overseen the killing of the Tsar and his family; the party’s wit and cynic Karl Radek.²⁹

Stalin did not deign to speak personally to penitent Trotskyists. Emelian Iaroslavsky, secretary to the party’s Central Control Commission, Stalin’s panegyrist and nicknamed for his militant atheism “the Soviet priest,” had them sign a public recantation. Not all Trotskyists gave in. The Bulgarian communist Khristian Rakovsky, who had been Soviet ambassador to Britain and France and felt that, despite being exiled to Saratov, he was shielded by his prestige in the Comintern, demanded democratic discussion within the party. Some 500 “oppositionists” in ninety-five labor colonies and prisons supported Rakovsky’s demand, but by shooting Iakov Bliumkin, the messenger, Stalin and Iagoda had made contact with Trotsky a capital offense.