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

Some books which Stalin read in his formative years sketch out his future actions. One work is credibly rumored to have authenticated for Stalin the principles of revolutionary dictatorship: Dostoevsky’s The Devils. The well-informed Georgian novelist Grigol Robakidze asserts in his novel

The Murdered Soul that the Tbilisi seminary library copy of The Devils was heavily marked up by Stalin. The most vociferously anti-revolutionary novel in Russian literature, it was approved by the seminary authorities. Dostoevsky’s plot, in which a cynical provocateur uses a self-destructive aristocrat and a nihilist philosopher to create a violent uprising in a provincial town, must have given Stalin ideas for how to organize a revolution. One of Dostoevsky’s characters, a theorist who demands that a hundred million heads roll to make future generations eternally happy, did not seem to Stalin as ghoulish as he did to the author.

Like Dostoevsky’s heroes, Stalin sought in philosophy a license to transgress human and divine law. The most significant statement that Stalin ever made is a note he made in red pencil on the back flyleaf of the 1939 edition of Lenin’s theoretical work Materialism and Empirocriticism

(a treatise on the existence of the real world outside our perception). Stalin’s comment gives a Machiavellian gloss to the credo of a Dostoevskian satanic antihero and is an epigraph to his whole career:

1) Weakness, 2) Idleness, 3) Stupidity. These are the only things that can be called vices. Everything else, in the absence of the aforementioned, is undoubtedly virtue. NB! If a man is 1) strong (spiritually), 2) active, 3) clever (or capable), then he is good, regardless of any other “vices”! 1) and 3) make 2)¹⁷

It is not surprising to learn that in 1915, when both were in Siberian exile, Lev Kamenev (shot by Stalin twenty years later but then Stalin’s mentor) gave him a copy of Machiavelli. Kamenev’s praise of Machiavelli reflects the political theorist’s enthusiasm for a precocious precursor; Stalin’s reading shows the pragmatist’s appreciation of a writer who authorizes what he has long been thinking and doing. Marxism provided Stalin (and Lenin) with the end—the terminology and justification for action; Machiavelli provided the means—the political tactics and amorality. Stalin was a Marxist in the same sense that Machiavelli was a Christian: both saw the retention of power as the sole task for a ruler and examined all the means by which power, once acquired, could be retained, regarding the ideology in whose name the ruler ruled as a mere rallying flag.

Stalin’s marginal doodling is sometimes mystifying: elaborate patterns of triangles and circles.¹⁸ Occasionally we come across two initial letters scrawled in the margin of a book: T and U. One can infer that T stands for Tbilisi and its seminary, and the psychological insights that Stalin had gained from a Christian education. U stands for uchitel’— teacher. Possibly, the teacher is Lenin, or perhaps it is Stalin’s view of himself.

Political Initiation

AFTER LEAVING THE SEMINARY in 1898 Stalin did not go back to Gori with his disappointed mother; he hid from the police in a village near Tbilisi. In autumn he was helped by his friend Lado Ketskhoveli’s younger brother Vano to secure an undemanding job as one of six observers at the Tbilisi meteorological station for twenty rubles a month. One might reasonably have predicted that the promising boy was now doomed to be a marginal, semi-educated clerk.

What saved Stalin was a chance to foment trouble for the authorities. In January 1900, with Lado Ketskhoveli, Jughashvili helped organize a strike of tram workers. The strike was soon broken. Lado fled to Baku, Vano was forced to leave the meteorological station, and Jughashvili was caught and imprisoned but, after his mother intervened, released.