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

Slaughtering generals and sparing lieutenants could, a cynic might think, reanimate rather than demoralize an army. One can argue that the Red Army’s fiascos—the attack on Finland in 1940 and the retreat from Hitler in 1941—were compensated for by the prowess of its youthful command in 1943. But not even Voroshilov could have believed that the surgery he, Stalin, and Ezhov inflicted on the Red Army would make it fitter to defend the USSR. Paranoia and resentment, not military logic, dictated Stalin’s purge.

For potential opponents in Japan, Germany, Poland, and the Baltic states, the Red Army purge was a godsend; the Soviet public, however, applauded the murders of civil war heroes only feebly. They had gotten used to seeing Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Bukharin as opposition, but the Red Army leaders had remained official heroes right until their arrests. It was hard to regard Tukhachevsky, who in 1935 had written on the menace of Hitler’s new army, as a German spy. The intelligentsia, whose salons had sought out the suave Tukhachevsky at a time when it was suicidal to seek patronage from the old Bolshevik guard, composed no hosannas for this slaughter.

Stalin then gave his neighbors in eastern Europe a second present: he purged the Comintern, throwing foreign communists and their Soviet controllers to Ezhov’s wolves, in particular to Aleksandr Ivanovich Langfang. Langfang worked with excessive enthusiasm: he beat Jaan Anvelt, the Estonian communist leader, to death on December 11, 1937, and was reprimanded for “hindering by clumsy actions the exposure of a dangerous state criminal.” The Yugoslav Josip Broz (Tito), the Bulgarian Dimitrov, the Czech Klement Gottwald, the Italian Ercoli (Palmiro Togliatti), the German Wilhelm Pieck, the Finn Otto Kuusinen survived only by denouncing rivals. Survival came by Stalin’s whim: Langfang extracted incriminating evidence on everyone in the Comintern—Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai—and even some of the Politburo—Andreev, Zhdanov, and Kaganovich. Comintern members tried to show Stalin that they were his, body and soul: Kuusinen’s son was arrested, and when Stalin asked why he had not protested, Kuusinen replied, “No doubt there were serious reasons for his arrest.” (Kuusinen junior was released.) Some, like Harry Pollitt of Britain or Jacques Duclos of France, survived because their countries’ embassies did not wash their hands even of communists.

Stalin claimed that the Comintern was infected with Trotskyism and cosmopolitanism. Osip Piatnitsky, former secretary of the Comintern, and his friend Commissar for Health Kaminsky at the 1937 plenary meeting called Ezhov “a cruel man with no soul.”³⁷ Stalin gave Piatnitsky two weeks to recant.³⁸

In a vote condemning Piatnitsky, only Krupskaia and Litvinov abstained. At a banquet in November 1937 for the depleted Comintern under Dimitrov’s secretaryship, Stalin proclaimed, “We shall destroy every enemy, even an old Bolshevik, we shall annihilate his kith and kin.”

Martyrdom for Poets

IN 1937, EVERY ORGANIZATION, from writers’ unions to collective farms, held, under the supervision of local party and NKVD officers, a miniature version of the February–March Central Committee plenum. Writers, composers and artists, engineers, doctors, and academics sentenced each other to expulsion and arrest. Panicked ranks offered up, in propitiation, their most talented members for sacrifice.

Writers were already at loggerheads with the Politburo. Ezhov’s acolyte V. Ostroumov collated reports on the conversations, regardless of prestige or talent, of authors from Babel to Demian Bedny. Babel, a lover of Ezhov’s wife, attracted special attention.³⁹

He had, said an informer, spread rumours that Gorky had been murdered on orders from above. On Trotsky Babel had remarked, “it’s impossible to imagine the charm and the strength of his influence on anyone who encounters him”; on Kamenev, “the most brilliant connoisseur of language and literature.” Pasternak had been praised by Bukharin, had relatives in Britain, had complimented André Gide, and was repeatedly denounced. ⁴⁰

Ostroumov informed Stalin that the poet Mikhail Svetlov had said, “everyone’s being rounded up, literally everyone. Commissars and their deputies have moved to the Lubianka. But what is ridiculous and tragic is that we walk among these events without understanding a thing about them. . . . What are they so afraid of ? . . . we are just pathetic remnants of an era that has died . . . This isn’t trial, but organized murder.”

Demian Bedny again missed an ideological about-face: he produced an operatic satire, Mythical Heroes, which set a burlesque medieval Russia to music by Borodin. But Stalin now thought medieval Russia an edifying prelude to his own rule and approved of the conversion to Christianity in the tenth century. Demian’s opera was banned, and he was excluded from the party for “moral degeneracy.” His reaction, according to the NKVD source, was suicidal: