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

The following year moved even closer to Stalin. In 1920, waiting in the Ukraine for the Soviet conquest of Poland, the s lived in a dacha near Kharkov with the couple then most intimate with Stalin, the poet Demian Bedny and his wife. That summer, as the Red Army pushed the Poles out of the Ukraine and back to the outskirts of Warsaw, Stalin and worked together and again showed Lenin and Trotsky their limitations. Stalin had promised Lenin in July 1920 an unimaginable victory: “Now that we have the Comintern, a defeated Poland . . . it would be sinful not to encourage revolution in Italy . . . and in states that are not yet strong like Hungary, Czechoslovakia. . . . In short, we have to loose the anchor and move before imperialism has time to put its broken cart in order. . . .” But for all the brilliance and experience of Commander Tukhachevsky, who had begun his career as a Tsarist officer, by August 1920 the Red cavalry, like that of the Mongols 700 years before, was bogged down in the Polish forests and marshes with neither tents nor coats to keep off the incessant rain. Stalin, however, loudly insisted that the Soviet government should reject David Lloyd George’s offer to mediate peace with the Poles on the basis of the Curzon line boundary (today’s Polish–Belorussian–Ukrainian border) and grab as much Polish territory as possible before any truce could be negotiated. As a result, the Red Army spent resources besieging Lwów, the capital of the Polish Carpathians. The Poles counterattacked and took 100,000 Russian prisoners, forcing the Soviets to concede a vast belt of territory. The glory went to Poland’s ruler Piłsudski, the disgrace to and Stalin.³⁸

had expected to join the Red Army in Warsaw to help form a Soviet Polish government. He amused his fellow Poles among the Bolsheviks, Karl Radek in particular, by his modest surmise that he might take on the ministry of education in the new Poland, after putting Piłsudski up against a wall. The defeat of the Red Army on the Vistula left him crestfallen. Stalin, , and Voroshilov had anticipated victory. Now , like Voroshilov in 1918, was bound to Stalin in disgrace. Voroshilov wrote to Orjonikidze with amazement, “We expected rebellions and revolution from the Polish workers and peasants but got chauvinism and stupid hatred of ‘Russians.’ ”³⁹

Trotsky was mercilessly sarcastic about Stalin’s lapses—whose treatment twenty years later of the Polish officers who had disabused his dreams would be as barbarous as his reckoning with him. Voroshilov lost for a short time all taste for command: in March 1921 he served as a common soldier, attacking the mutinous sailors of Kronstadt across the ice. In November 1921 he wrote to Stalin, “Working in the war department no longer appeals to me. . . . I suppose I shall be more useful in a civilian career. . . . I’ll take any work [in the Don basin] and hope to shake myself out of it, for I’ve started to get poorly (mentally). I embrace you strongly. . . .” ⁴⁰

In February 1921, the Red Army invaded Georgia and completed the reconquest of Transcaucasia. The Georgian communists who gained power were, however, not Leninist puppets and pursued a liberal line— leaving at liberty members of the Menshevik government who had not fled the country. Budu Mdivani and Pilipe Makharadze resisted Stalin’s decision to subsume the Georgian republic into a Transcaucasian federation. Likewise, the Soviet detachment of Abkhazia from Tbilisi’s rule, making it an autonomous republic amenable to Russian exploitation, upset the Georgians. Stalin often expressed contempt for his native country: “Tbilisi is picturesque, but Baku is more interesting,” he would write to Demian Bedny. In 1923 he told Trotsky, “Georgians behave like an imperial power toward Armenians, Abkhaz, Ajarians, Osetians. This deviancy is of course less dangerous than Russian imperialism, but it’s still dangerous enough. . . .”⁴¹ Stalin showed such ruthlessness in the Caucasus—in autumn 1920 he supervised the bloody suppression of Circassians and Osetians—that Lenin remarked that there was nobody worse than a “Russified aborigine” at imposing Russification with insensitivity.