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

The oppression and terror in the USSR are such that neither literature nor science is possible. . . . It seems I’ve been in a party, 99.9 percent of whom were spies and provocateurs. Stalin is a horrible person and is often motivated by personal scores. All great leaders always created around themselves brilliant pleiades of comrades in arms. But whom has Stalin created? He’s exterminated everybody, there’s nobody, everyone’s been annihilated. Only Ivan the Terrible did anything like that. . . . The army is completely destroyed. . . . The peasants are afraid of nothing because they think that prison is no worse than the collective farm.⁴¹

Stalin mercifully let his old friend die in his bed of diabetes. He penned a note to be read aloud to Demian, saying that “we Soviet people have enough literary junk anyway, so it is unlikely to be worth your while increasing the layers of such literature with yet another fable . . .” and apologizing to “Demian-Dante for my involuntary frankness.”

Three of Russia’s greatest poets, Osip Mandelstam, Nikolai Kliuev, and the young Nikolai Zabolotsky, were marked out for destruction. The writers’ union secretary, Vladimir Stavsky, wrote to Ezhov on March 16, 1938:

In a section of the writers’ milieu the Osip Mandelstam question has been discussed with a great deal of apprehension. As you know, for obscene libelous verses and anti-Soviet agitation, Mandelstam was exiled to Voronezh three or four years ago. The term of his exile has ended. He now lives with his wife near Moscow (outside the 100-kilometer zone). But in fact he often visits his friends, mainly literary people, in Moscow. They support him, collect money for him, make him into a “martyr,” a poet of genius whom nobody recognizes. . . . The question is about the attitude of a group of prominent Soviet writers to Mandelstam. And I am turning to you, Nikolai Ivanovich, with a request for help.

Mandelstam has just written a series of poems [the Voronezh notebooks that became famous thirty years later]. But they have no particular value—even in the general opinion of the comrades whom I have asked to take a look at them (especially Comrade Pavlenko, whose report I enclose). ⁴²

Piotr Pavlenko, both police spy and critic for years, confirmed that Mandelstam was dispensable—“not a poet, but a versifier . . . his language is complex, obscure, and smells of Pasternak.” In May, at a sanatorium to which he was lured, Mandelstam was arrested and given ten years in the camps, a sentence which not even a healthy man could expect to survive. He died in his first Vladivostok winter.

Stalin rarely bothered to inquire about the fate of those the NKVD sent to the GULAG, even when he himself sanctioned the arrest. They were “camp dust,” as good as dead to him. Stalin took only an initial predatory interest in Mandelstam. But nobody understood Stalin better than this other Joseph. In 1937 Mandelstam imagined Stalin as a dehumanized prisoner of the Kremlin:

Inert, inside a mountain lies an idol In thrifty, boundless, happy rooms, And from his neck drips the fat of necklaces, Guarding the ebb and flow of dreams . . .