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

In April 1930 Stanisław Messing, Menzhinsky’s deputy and a Polish veteran of the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising, set up a vast economic empire. Its nominal head was Lazar Kogan, who had run OGPU’s border guards; Kogan’s deputies were Matvei Berman, the most ruthless exploiter of unskilled labor in history, who would at the age of thirty-four take over the GULAG, and Iakov Rapoport, one of just two GULAG pioneers who would survive Stalin.

Most of the inmates who flowed into these camps were not convicts, but “socially dangerous elements” by OGPU’s criteria: kulaks of the first category, in other words prosperous farmers who might resist dispossession. Arrests and deportations at first nearly overwhelmed the system. Menzhinsky and Iagoda atoned for their mishandling of the first show trials and of Trotsky’s departure by taking energetic measures to provide a pool of labor, albeit unskilled, for the mines of the far north. Iagoda’s strategy, which Stalin backed, was to change the raison d’être of OGPU’s empire from a political to an economic one. Political prisoners had formerly been idle playthings for sadistic, disgraced Cheka officers. As Menzhinsky sickened, Iagoda took the initiative and replaced feral camp administrations with more subservient ones; he directed prisoners’ physical strength into whatever earned, or saved, foreign currency: logging, mining, and finally massive construction projects like the White Sea canal.

Arrests and executions carried out by OGPU soared: 162,726 persons were arrested in 1929, mostly for “counterrevolutionary activity,” 2,109 were shot, some 25,000 were sent to camps and as many again into exile. In 1930 arrests doubled to a third of a million and executions increased tenfold to 20,000.³² The camps received over 100,000. By 1934 there would be half a million slave laborers. The camp economies, with their terrible mortality and relentless thirst for expendable laborers, would come to dictate the number of arrests.

Stalin’s five-year plan involved urbanization, and depopulating the countryside was the obvious method. The grain requisitioning of 1928 and the taxation that had beggared every farmer gave the peasantry no incentive to stay on the land and the state continued to pillage and terrorize the countryside. The “great turnabout” announced by Stalin in November 1929, a program of total collectivization in grain-producing regions, was the next step. Collectivization had been officially under way since 1921, but less than 5 percent of peasants had joined, even on paper, collective farms.

Skirmishes escalated into civil war in the winter of 1929–30, with hundreds of thousands of peasants armed with pitchforks and shotguns against OGPU paramilitaries with machine guns. In many areas, despite Menzhinsky’s fears about their loyalties, Red Army units used artillery and aerial bombardment. In the Ukraine, the civil war commanders Iona Iakir and Vitali Primakov led punitive raids. All resistance, even demonstrations in which communist activists were merely beaten up, was met with overwhelming force. A few army men defected to the peasantry and on one occasion pilots were shot for refusing to bomb rebellious villages. Even OGPU men revolted: in March 1930, in the Altai mountains of Siberia, Fiodor Dobytin, the district GPU plenipotentiary, arrested eighty-nine party members, shot nine of them, and liberated 400 imprisoned kulaks, whom he armed with rifles. ³³

The last opposition in the Politburo, Bukharin and his liberal economists, was gagged, while the capitalist world, indifferent to the holocaust, seemed happy to sell machinery and technology for Soviet industrialization. Stalin did as he wished. Targets for collectivization were stepped up as the process became irreversible. Over 27,000 party activists were mobilized. Molotov urged Stalin to even more severe measures and in mid-January 1930 took overall charge, on a commission with Krylenko, Iagoda, and one of OGPU’s most bestial men, Efim Evdokimov.