Stalin and His Hangmen (13 page)

They were also diametrically different. Feliks Dzierżyński was a Polish noble, even if his family had been reduced to a manor house and some two hundred acres on the borders of Lithuania and Belorussia. Unlike Stalin, Dzierżyński was cosseted by loving siblings – particularly his sisters – and brought up by a well-educated mother. But Dzierżyński had, like Stalin, a harsh father who soon vanished from his life and a religious mother. Above all, he remained affectionately attached to his siblings and his nephews and nieces. Unlike Stalin, Dzierżyński had a dual nature; in April 1919, when the Cheka was slaughtering hostages by the thousand, Dzierżyński could write to his elder sister:

I can tell you one truth: I have remained the same. I sense that you can’t come to terms with the thought that this is me – and, knowing me, you can’t understand. Love. Today, as years ago, I hear and feel a hymn to it. This hymn demands war, unbending will, tireless work. And today, apart from the idea, apart from striving for justice, nothing has any weight on the scales of my actions. It’s hard for me to write, it’s hard to argue. You see only what is, and what you hear about in exaggerated colours. You’re a witness and victim of the Moloch of war. The ground you once lived on is subsiding under your feet. I am an eternal wanderer, in motion, in the process of change and creating a new life. You turn your thoughts and soul to the past – I see the future and want, and have, to be in movement. Have you ever reflected what war really is? You have pushed aside the images of bodies ripped apart by shells, of the wounded on the floor, of the crows pecking out the eyes of the living… And you can’t understand me, a soldier of the revolution… My Aldona, you don’t understand me – it’s hard for me to write any more to you. If you saw how I live, if you looked into my eyes, you’d understand, rather you’d sense that I have remained the same I always was. I kiss you powerfully. Your Fel
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Edmund-Rufin Dzierżyński, Feliks’s father, earned his living by teaching. He seduced a pupil, Elena Januszewska. They married, but had to
leave Lithuania. Edmund-Rufin went to the southern Russian port of Taganrog to teach mathematics, where his pupils included three Chekhov brothers, including Anton. The historian of the Taganrog grammar school, himself a pupil of the hated Pole, reported in 1906 that Dzierżyński senior was ‘a pathologically irritable man who tormented boys’.
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In 1875 Edmund-Rufin was forced to resign and returned to his family estate.

Feliks was the only one of seven children to rebel; his siblings tried to live middle-class lives. The eldest girl Aldona, seven years older than Feliks, became a second mother to the family when their father died unexpectedly in 1883. Other tragedies hit the family. When Feliks and his elder brother Stanisław were handling a rifle, one of them killed their fourteen-year-old sister Wanda. This accident may have prompted Feliks’s sudden apostasy. He never spoke of Wanda’s death but attributed his loss of faith in God and Tsar to witnessing Cossacks attacking Lithuanian peasants in 1893. Like Stalin, Dzierżyński sublimated his fellow countrymen’s crusade against their Russian conquerors into hatred for all governing classes. He confessed later, ‘I dreamt of a cap of invisibility and of the annihilation of all Muscovites.’

Feliks’s mother Elena died in 1896, leaving Aldona to bring up the younger children alone. The Dzierżyński family loved their black sheep: Aldona visited Feliks in prison, sent him parcels and letters, even after his rise to head the Cheka. Aldona married and remained in Poland, personally devoted if politically opposed to Feliks.
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Feliks’s other elder sister Jadwiga was to be, together with her daughter (also Jadwiga), his helpmate in Russia. (In 1949 Jadwiga senior died in Stalin’s camps.) Stanisław Dzierżyński, who became a biologist, was murdered on the family estate by bandits in 1917.
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Two of Feliks’s brothers, the youngest Władysław, a professor of medicine, and Kazimierz, an engineer, paid dearly for their surname: they were murdered by the Gestapo in 1943 and 1942 respectively. Of Feliks’s brothers only Ignacy (1880 – 1953) died of natural causes.

Feliks, like Stalin, left educationjust before his final examinations. He plunged into the factories and slums of Vilnius as a Marxist agitator rousing the proletariat to action, for which he learnt Yiddish and Lithuanian as well as Russian. Before he was twenty he had made an impact on the Polish social democrats, urging them to abandon Polish nationalism
and parliamentarianism in favour of international revolutionary socialism. The adolescent Feliks, like Stalin, combined fanatical rebelliousness with moonstruck romantic musing. Dzierżyński’s unpublished poetry echoes the decadence of the ‘Young Poland’ modernists such as his own favourite, Antoni Lange. Typically morbid are Feliks’s lines:

Every night something comes to see me

Incorporeal and soundless,

A mysterious vision

Stands over me in silence.

It gives me the present of a kiss,

This gift does not tell me:

Are you offering me your heart,

Or are you mocking me, cold Lady?

Dzierżyński, unlike Stalin, remained in thrall to sentimental morbid chivalry, even when acting with cold-blooded ruthlessness. Years of exile and prison blinkered him, and he had little understanding of real life: he was to apply Karl Marx and Lenin to public life with the same naivety as he adapted Polish romanticism to his private life. On 27 May 1918 he wrote, as if he were a saint in the desert, to his wife (who remained in Zurich until 1919):

There is no time to think of my family or myself… the more powerful wheel of enemies that encircles us, the closer it is to my heart… Every day I have to take up more terrible weapons… I have to be myself just as terrible, so as like a faithful hound to tear apart the villain… I live just on my nerves… My thought orders me to be terrible and I have the will to follow my thought to the end…

Like Stalin in Vologda, Dzierżyński in exile attracted women. Stalin played mentor to Polina Onufrieva, while Dzierżyński was the pupil in his relationship with Rita (Margarita Fiodorovna Nikolaeva), a fellow exile three years older than him, in the northern Russian town of Viatka in 1898.
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Dzierżyński was then twenty-one; this was his first exile and his first love. Declaring himself Rita’s fiancé, he volunteered to follow her further north to Nolinsk. Here, on an allowance of five and a half
roubles a month each, they set up house. She was the well-educated daughter of a priest; thanks to her Dzierżyński acquired fluent Russian and even struggled through
Das Kapital.
But classics such as Goethe’s
Faust,
Dzierżyński confessed to her, were beyond him.

Dzierżyński had even then discovered his personal power: he wrote to his sister: ‘When I get carried away and begin to defend my views too ardently, the expression in my eyes becomes so frightening to my opponents that they cannot look me in the face.’ Twenty years later, in 1919, he told Aldona with relish: ‘For many people there is nothing so frightening as my name.’

The Russian gendarmes found Dzierżyński not frightening but ‘hot-tempered, irritable, unrestrained’. InJanuary 1899 they exiled him further north, to the settlement of Kaigorodskoe. Dzierżyński spent days with a rifle, shooting game. Fellow exiles gave him a bear cub as a pet; he trained it to dance and it caught him pike-perch on command. As the bear grew, it started killing chickens and attacking cows so Dzierżyński chained it. The bear lunged at passers-by; he shot his pet dead. The relationship with Rita lingered on through daily letters. She persuaded the authorities to let her settle in Kaigorodskoe with Dzierżyński. He found her, like the bear, troublesome. In August 1899 he made the first of his escapes. This involved little danger: the police circulated just a description of a tall auburn-haired man with a ‘good figure’ whose ‘exterior gives an impression of arrogance’. In a few weeks, Dzierżyński was back in Poland, splitting off from the Polish social democrats the hard-line internationalist and Marxist Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. Rita was forsaken.
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By 1900 Dzierżyński was behind bars, where another liaison affected him more deeply: he nursed his fellow prisoner Antek Rosół who was dying of tuberculosis. The suffering of Rosół haunted Dzierżyński, and the suffering that he in turn inflicted on his prisoners was undoubtedly justified in his mind to some extent by what the Tsar’s government did to Rosół.
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Two years later Feliks was exiled again, to Arctic Yakutia, after fomenting in a Siberian jail a strike of political prisoners. In Siberia he again spent his days hunting. His wife recalls that he shot a female swan, and when the male returned, fired to put it out of its misery, but missed; the swan then plunged to its death. ‘Józef [Feliks’s underground name] told this with emotion and amazement at the swan’s fidelity.’
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Dzierżyński escaped again in 1903. A few weeks later, now a legendary figure, he was a refugee first in Berlin, then in Kraków, at the time part of Austro-Hungarian Galicia. Dzierżyński’s next fiancée, Julia Goldman, was a romantic figure more like the phantoms of his lyrics: she died of TB in 1904. In 1905, Dzierżyński went back to Russian territory, to Warsaw, to stir up violent unrest. Strikes and arrests led to concessions and amnesties from the new Russian parliamentary government. Dzierżyński became a key figure in the Russian social democrat movement: in 1906 he was in Stockholm, where he met Lenin (as well as Stalin, Voroshilov, Rykov and Plekhanov). Lenin liked Dzierżyński’s phenomenal single-mindedness. Like Stalin, in Lenin’s eyes Dzierżyński was uncouth but valuable as an unquestioning executive. Years passed before Dzierżyński resented being patronized by Lenin.

In 1908 he was arrested again. This time he spent long enough in prison to become expert in interrogation, denunciation and retribution. Many instructions he would issue the Cheka ten years later were based on the practices of his own interrogators and warders or were derived from his observation of prisoner psychology. Dzierżyński was a doctrinaire Bolshevik, arguing with heretics, especially the non-Marxist social revolutionaries, and investigating, calculating, confronting in order to establish which prisoners were stool pigeons, traitors or double agents – skills which served him well in power.

All this Dzierżyński articulated graphically in his
Diary of a Prisoner (Pamie̜_tnik wie̜ żnia),
printed in the Polish-language
Red Standard
from May 1908 to August 1909. Ironically for a future hangman, Dzierżyński describes as movingly as Victor Hugo or Dostoevsky the effect of hangings on victims, prisoners and warders, emphasizing the utter depravity and horror of the death penalty. One wonders how Dzierżyński could have failed to remember, when ordering the deaths of thousands, lines he had written just ten years previously:

On the night of the 8th and 9th the Polish revolutionary Montwiłł was executed. While it was still light they took off his leg-irons and moved him to the condemned cell. The trial had been on the 6th. He had no illusions and on the 7th he said goodbye to us through the window as we were taking our exercise. He was executed at 1 a.m. The executioner Egorka got, as usual, 50 roubles for the job. The anarchist K. told me, by knocks on the ceiling, that ‘they had decided not to sleep all night’, and the gendarme told me that just the thought of execution ‘sends a shiver through you and you can’t get to sleep and you keep turning over’. And after his horrible crime
nothing here has changed:
bright sunny days, soldiers, gendarmes, changing the guard, exercise. Only in the cells things are quieter, the voices of people singing are not to be heard, many await their turn…

The diary rails at the cruelty of the Tsar’s courts, the use of torture to get confessions, and vaunts the discipline of social democrats, so unlike the depravity of anarchists. The reader is struck first by Dzierżyński’s fair-mindedness and then by puzzlement that the man who wrote this would soon be a jailer far more ruthless than those whom he denounced. Narrow-minded conceit blinded Dzierżyński to his contradictions. He preened himself, outwitting the gendarmes who interrogated and guarded him; he praised his own psychological subtlety in identifying a female informer, Hanka, who, liberated from a madhouse by radicals, denounced her liberators and blamed another woman for the betrayal.

Eighteen months passed before Dzierżyński was sentenced again to exile in Siberia. The diary stops, but he continued to write in similar vein to his sister Aldona. Again, he escaped within days, and in 1910, after making the revolutionary’s equivalent of the haj – a visit to the radical Russian writer Maxim Gorky on the island of Capri – he was back in Kraków.

That year Dzierżyński married one of his admirers, Zofia Muszkat, the 28-year-old daughter of a rebellious book-shop worker. Zofia was an acolyte, ready to carry out dangerous archival and secretarial duties for the party; she was resigned to separation and exile. Dzierżyński took her walking in the Tatra mountains. Back in Warsaw, in a room furnished with two iron bedsteads and a table, Dzierżyński fathered a son. He did not see his little Jasiek for years: Zofia was arrested in Warsaw; the baby was born prematurely in prison and suffered from convulsions and malnutrition. Zofia was exiled to Siberia; Jasiek was fostered. Not until 1912 did Zofia escape from Siberia and reclaim her child; by then Dzierżyński had been rearrested.