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

Documents can lie, and rumors can tell the truth. A number of issues, such as Stalin’s part in the deaths of Mikhail Frunze, Sergei Kirov, and Sergo Orjonikidze, the degree of initiative shown by henchmen such as Ezhov, and the motivation for Beria’s sea change in March 1953, need a juror’s intuition as much as a judge’s trained logic to resolve. I have tried to indicate degrees of certainty in a legalistic way. First comes “beyond reasonable doubt,” in other words, sufficient to secure conviction in a criminal court. An example is Stalin and Viktor Abakumov’s murder of Solomon Mikhoels. Second comes the “balance of probabilities” sufficient to decide a civil case (for instance, the poisoning of Nestor Lakoba by Beria). Third are cases in which there is sufficient evidence to begin a prosecution (Stalin’s plans to deport the Jews en masse) but not to reach a conclusion. Fourth, as in the murder of Kirov, the evidence suffices to begin an investigation but not to prosecute. Fifth is se non è vero, è ben trovato, in which, with or without regret, our suspicions have to be discarded (for example, Molotov’s assertion that a real military coup was planned by Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky).

The bibliography, as well as remarks in the text and notes, shows not just sources, but the degree of my reliance on, and trust in, them. Sources have been referenced to original language sources, printed or archival. In some cases, where the source is readily identifiable, I have not always given detailed references: for instance, a letter from Stalin to Lazar Kaganovich or Molotov on a specific date will be found quickly in editions of Stalin’s correspondence with these associates.

Russian names are presented in a slightly simplified readable version of the standard Anglo-American system; Polish spellings are used for Poles, and Georgian names are transliterated directly from Georgian. Thus we have , not Dzerzhinsky, Jughashvili, not Dzhugashvili. All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

ONE

THE LONG ROAD TO POWER

O muse, today sing of Jughashvili, the son of a bitch, He has artfully combined the donkey’s stubbornness and the fox’s cunning, By cutting a million nooses he has made his way to power.

Pavel Vasiliev 1

Childhood and Family

Instead of saying something like “X was raised by crocodiles in a septic tank in Kuala Lumpur,” they tell you about a mother, a father . . .

Martin Amis, Koba the Dread

IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE, especially Georgia, 1878 was not a bad year to bring a child into the world. True, Georgians of all classes seethed with resentment. Their Russian overlords, into whose hands the last Georgian kings had surrendered their shattered realm at the beginning of the nineteenth century, ruled the country through a bureaucracy that was often callous, corrupt, and ignorant, while those Georgian children who went to school were instructed in Russian. The Russian viceroy in Tbilisi, however humane and liberal, was determined to keep things as they were: Armenians ran commerce, foreign capitalists controlled industry, while Georgian aristocrats and peasants, upstaged in their own capital city, led a more or less tolerable life in the fertile countryside.

Georgians had some reasons to be grateful for Russian rule. For nearly a century Georgia had been free of the invasions and raids by its neighbors that had devastated and periodically nearly annihilated the nation since the thirteenth century. Russians might impose punitive taxes, Siberian exile, and cultural humiliation, but, unlike the Turks, they did not decapitate the entire male population of villages and, unlike the Persians, they did not drive away the survivors of massacres to be castrated, enslaved, and forcibly converted to Islam. Under Russian rule towns had been rebuilt and railways linked the capital to the Black Sea, and thus the outside world. The capital city, Tbilisi, had newspapers and an opera house (even if it had no university). A new generation of Georgians, forced to become fluent in Russian, realized the dreams of their ancestors: they were now treated as Europeans, they could study in European universities and become doctors, lawyers, diplomats—and revolutionaries. Many Georgians dreamed of regaining independent statehood; so far, few believed that they should work toward this by violence. Most Georgians in the 1870s grudgingly accepted Russian domination as the price of exchanging their Asiatic history for a European culture.