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

Koba was soon free of family ties. On November 22, 1907, Kato died, perhaps of TB. Koba handed his baby son Iakov over to his sister-in-law and did not ask after the child for fourteen years. On March 25, 1908, the Baku gendarmerie rounded up Baku’s Bolsheviks, including Koba, now known as Kaioz Nizheradze. Incompetence and perhaps corruption blinded them to the fact that Koba was a leading Bolshevik organizer on the run from Siberia. Besides, times had changed in Russia: the Tsar’s government had conceded a parliament and political prisoners were amnestied. Koba claimed he had been abroad all 1904 and 1905 and thus qualified for the 1905 amnesty. Even when the truth emerged, he was dealt with leniently: three years’ exile in northern Russia, in Vologda province.

Why did the Russian state treat with such leniency those it knew were trying to overthrow it by organizing assassinations, armed robberies, sabotage, and strikes? In 1908 in France, Koba and Kamo would have gone to the guillotine, in Britain to the gallows, in America to the electric chair. True, revolutionaries in Russia were often tried by military tribunals, convicted on flimsy evidence, and hanged; but this happened mostly in the west of Russia, in Vilnius, Kiev, or Odessa, where governors-general ruled and where the revolutionaries were more often than not reviled Poles or Jews. Piotr Stolypin, the most effective prime minister that Tsarist Russia ever had, for all his pragmatic liberalism was so willing to hang those who threatened the state that the hangman’s rope became known as the Stolypin necktie.

Nevertheless, Stalin and his kind—Sverdlov, Kalinin, Kamenev— could get away with a few months in prison followed by an amnesty. In prison their secondary education entitled them to be treated as gentlemen—to receive visitors, good food, medical treatment, and polite warders. When they were sent to Siberia, they were given a living allowance that provided ample heating, food, even a servant and a cow. They lived among a friendly population; even the gendarmes who guarded them usually looked kindly on them, and when they were bored with each other’s company or the long Siberian winter, they could easily escape. In Britain, Switzerland, France, or America, they found a sympathetic reception. Nobody in western Europe believed that intellectual socialist revolutionary refugees from Russia posed a danger to anybody, and tolerating them provided some leverage on the Russian state, should it threaten the colonial empires of Britain or France in the Far East.

Tolerance apart, the Russian state had two fatal flaws in the second decade of the twentieth century. First, it spoke with a forked tongue. One fork was the Tsar, Nicholas II, a constitutional, not an absolute monarch after 1905, he still had enormous power. Under the influence of his wife, a woman far more willful than he and just as stupid, he would dismiss any minister who seemed to diminish his authority. The other fork was the new parliament, the Duma, which talked up radical reform. Each successive Duma had a more restricted electorate and thus became less radical, but despite the presence of a monarchist right wing, its liberals and socialists demanded human rights and economic reforms. Between the Tsar and the Duma stood the ministers. The Russian state was sustained by a series of wise, energetic self-sacrificing ministers—Count Sergei Witte, who made the Russian ruble one of Europe’s strongest currencies; Piotr Stolypin, who for five brief years truly liberated the Russian peasant; Piotr Sviatopolk-Mirsky, who brought about the liberal spring of 1904. But the uncomprehending conservatism of the Tsar and the irresponsibility of the Duma nullified their efforts.

The economic boom that gathered strength in 1908 deceived most observers. They underestimated the weakness of Russia’s political structures and discounted the threat posed by the revolutionary left. Even the Ministry of the Interior and the gendarmerie had a liberal view of their educated opponents. Russian public opinion generally adopted a Christian attitude toward criminals, particularly politically motivated ones. When the anarchist Giashvili was sentenced to death for exploding a bomb that killed a senior government official, nobody in Tbilisi would act as his executioner. He was reprieved—laudable in a Christian or humanistic culture, but disastrous for a state whose weaknesses were being probed by embittered fanatics.

Because these fanatics were split into factions, the consensus was that they were too weak to cause serious damage. The Social Revolutionaries, whose incoherent mysticism made them spectacular assassins, aroused most alarm, while the Bolshevik Social Democrats, who used violence selectively and who seemed in thrall to obscure German political ideas, were belittled despite their nearly overturning the state with their workers’ and soldiers’ soviets in the 1905 uprising.