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

Abakumov set to work in 1949 to prove that the Leningrad party had planned to make the city the capital of a Russia autonomous within the USSR. Some Leningraders, notably the ideologist Mikhail Suslov and Aleksei Kosygin, had the foresight to abandon the Leningrad party as soon as Zhdanov died and align themselves in Moscow with Malenkov and Beria. Thousands of Leningrad officials lost their jobs and 200 were arrested. Aleksei Kuznetsov had been congratulated by Stalin for his leadership in Leningrad, moved to the Kremlin, told that “the motherland will never forget you,” and put in charge of party personnel. He had no inkling of his fate until he got into a lift with Malenkov, who cut him dead. Andrei Voznesensky, the former head of state planning, was arrested as he came home from a cordial supper with Stalin. He, Kuznetsov, and several dozen others were kept without sleep in the new Moscow special prison, Matrosskaia tishina (Sailor’s Silence), watched over by the head of party control, Matvei Shkiriatov. For torture they were driven at night to Lefortovo prison, where the airplane engines in an adjacent factory drowned out their screams.

However unscrupulous, Abakumov had no aptitude for falsification and preferred factual charges: Voznesensky’s indictment was for losing ministry papers. Abakumov ignored Kuznetsov’s links by marriage to other leaders which could have brought down Mikoyan, Aleksei Kosygin, and General Gvishiani. Stalin was impatient with this pettifogging investigation. He had Voznesensky’s brother and sister shot.

On January 12, 1950, “in view of requests from the national republics, trade unions, peasant organizations, and figures in the arts,” the death penalty was reintroduced “as an exception” for “traitors to the motherland, spies, subversive wreckers.” Kuznetsov and his fellow prisoners, convicted of slander, of defying the Central Committee, of squandering funds, just qualified for death. In the early hours of October 1 the Leningrad victims were sentenced, taken by electric train outside the city, shot, and buried. The Leningrad purge of 1949 was cruel, but smaller by several orders of magnitude than Ezhov’s purge of eleven years before. Dozens, not tens of thousands, were shot; hundreds, not hundreds of thousands, imprisoned. Older victims could have reflected that they were atoning for their own parts in much more murderous frame-ups.

The Leningrad sentences were not made public and the arrests petered out. Moreover the arrests of Jews and other “cosmopolitans” had not produced fabrications strong enough to withstand a public show trial, despite the efforts of several dozen interrogators. Lev Sheinin, the short-story writer and prokuratura interrogator, who in the 1930s had whipped up public enthusiasm for the NKVD’s purges, failed—he himself was Jewish—to compose a scenario that would persuade even an anti-Semitic public. Sheinin was dismissed and imprisoned with Abakumov’s men.

In June 1951 Stalin found a more ruthless hangman, Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Riumin, and a more compliant minister, Semion Denisovich Ignatiev. ¹⁸ Viktor Abakumov, to his own and his henchmen’s amazement, had to go.¹⁹

Riumin wrote to Stalin accusing Abakumov of corruption and suppressing evidence. Sitting in Ignatiev’s office, he had copied out what his masters had drafted—the real author being Malenkov’s aide Dmitri Sukhanov.²⁰ Riumin had been easily blackmailed: he had left secret files on a bus, he had concealed his dubious background—his father had been a cattle dealer, his siblings convicts, his father-in-law a White officer.

Riumin’s allegations were partly true. Abakumov had spent a fortune, the proceeds of plundering Germany, on an enormous apartment where he lived with his second, trophy wife. Abakumov had also in November 1950 arrested, at Stalin’s instigation, a Jewish doctor, Professor Iakov Ètinger. The professor read the English Jewish Chronicle, and his aspersions on Stalin to his stepson had been recorded. Being Beria’s physician did not save Ètinger; he died in Lefortovo prison after being put in a specially refrigerated cell, a torture Abakumov had copied from the Gestapo. Riumin accused Abakumov of suppressing Ètinger’s confession that he had conspired with other doctors to murder party leaders using inappropriate treatment.

Riumin had found the piece missing from Stalin’s jigsaw puzzle. The show trial of 1938 had put in the dock a chief hangman, Iagoda, with a mainly Jewish cast of Bolshevik intellectuals and three murderous doctors to do their bidding. The forthcoming trial would have the same mix.