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

A few months before, another loner, Artiom Nakhaev, had attempted violence against the Bolshevik leadership, and after three months’ interrogation by Agranov had confessed that he was the tool of émigrés and foreigners. On August 5, 1934, just outside Moscow, Nakhaev, an artillery commander, had called on a squad of cadets he was training to seize firearms from an arsenal and attack the Kremlin. “The state is enslaving workers and peasants. There is no freedom of speech, Semites are running the country. Comrade workers, where are the factories you were promised, comrade peasants, where are the lands you were promised? Down with the old leaders, long live the new revolution!” The cadets froze in horror. Nakhaev swallowed poison, but was resuscitated and arrested. Stalin ordered Nakhaev to be “annihilated,” and instructed Iagoda to fabricate a conspiracy. A few days before Nikolaev, the demented Nakhaev was shot after being indicted as an emissary of a Tsarist general in the pay of the Estonian consulate in Moscow.⁶

Stalin raged to Kaganovich:

Nakhaev’s case is dastardly . . . Of course (of course!) he’s not a loner. He must be pressed to the wall, made to talk, to give the whole truth and then be punished with all severity. He has to be a Polish-German (or Japanese) agent. Chekisty are becoming ridiculous when they discuss his “political views” with him (call that interrogation!). A mercenary scoundrel has no political views—else he wouldn’t be an agent of outside forces.

On December 4 Stalin returned to Moscow with Kirov’s body. He seemed distressed at the lying-in-state and was heard to say, “Sleep in peace, my dear friend, we’ll avenge you.” Stalin’s revenge was the trigger for a mass psychosis that would rage through the Soviet Union for four years.

Today’s Stalinists and even a number of non-Stalinists argue that everything Stalin had done, however murderous and cruel, until Kirov’s murder was ultimately necessary and for the best. They maintain that the USSR had to become industrially strong, to deter its external enemies, and that in the wake of the Great Depression its exports were insufficient to buy the technology necessary for industrialization. They also argue that the USSR’s only realizable asset was grain, and the peasantry would not produce enough for export unless they were collectivized. The proof of Stalin’s success is that in 1943–5 the USSR defeated Hitler and deterred Japan. Humanity, the Stalinist argument runs, should therefore be grateful for Stalin’s strength of purpose, for had Adolf Hitler and Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto shaken hands somewhere in the Urals in 1942, the whole world would have been enslaved by fascism for generations to come, and would have endured a genocidal holocaust far worse than Stalin’s purges.

But until 1937 nobody was planning armed action against the USSR, except in Stalin’s paranoiac fantasies. Moreover, when the earning potential of the USSR’s natural resources, even in the depressed 1930s, and the success of such programs as Roosevelt’s New Deal in converting inefficient agricultural workers into builders of dams and factories, are considered, the revenue justifications for collectivization collapse. An evil action can have good consequences, and vice versa, but it needs exceptional generosity of spirit, not to say naïveté, to ascribe to Stalin’s pursuit of total power and the murder of millions humanitarian motives.

Events in the USSR after 1934 defy logic as well as morality. With the exception of Viacheslav Molotov, who maintained to his death that Stalin and he had exterminated a fifth column that would have betrayed the USSR to the Nazis, nobody has been able to rationalize Stalin’s vengeance for Kirov’s death. His murder was the trigger to exterminate every Bolshevik who had opposed Stalin, or who might conceivably take his place. If Kirov had not been killed, we can reasonably suppose that some other event would have provided a pretext.