Stalin and His Hangmen (43 page)

On 4 December Stalin returned to Moscow with Kirov’s body. He seemed distressed at the lying-in-state and was heard to say, ‘Sleep in peace, my dear friend, we’ll avenge you.’ Stalin’s revenge was the trigger for a mass psychosis that would rage through the Soviet Union for four years.

Today’s Stalinists and even a number of non-Stalinists argue that everything Stalin had done, however murderous and cruel, until Kirov’s murder was ultimately necessary and for the best. They maintain that the USSR had to become industrially strong, to deter its external enemies, and that in the wake of the Great Depression its exports were insufficient to buy the technology necessary for industrialization. They also argue that the USSR’s only realizable asset was grain, and the peasantry would not produce enough for export unless they were collectivized. The proof of Stalin’s success is that in 1943 – 5 the USSR defeated Hitler and deterred Japan. Humanity, the Stalinist argument runs, should therefore be grateful for Stalin’s strength of purpose, for had Adolf Hitler and Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto shaken hands somewhere in the Urals in 1942, the whole world would have been enslaved by fascism for generations to come, and would have endured a genocidal holocaust far worse than Stalin’s purges.

But until 1937 nobody was planning armed action against the USSR, except in Stalin’s paranoiac fantasies. Moreover, when the earning potential of the USSR’s natural resources, even in the depressed 1930s, and the success of such programmes as Roosevelt’s New Deal in converting inefficient agricultural workers into builders of dams and factories, are considered, the revenue justifications for collectivization collapse. An evil action can have good consequences, and vice versa, but it needs exceptional generosity of spirit, not to say naivety, to ascribe to Stalin’s pursuit of total power and the murder of millions humanitarian motives.

Events in the USSR after 1934 defy logic as well as morality. With the exception of Viacheslav Molotov, who maintained to his death that
Stalin and he had exterminated a fifth column that would have betrayed the USSR to the Nazis, nobody has been able to rationalize Stalin’s vengeance for Kirov’s death. His murder was the trigger to exterminate every Bolshevik who had opposed Stalin, or who might conceivably take his place. If Kirov had not been killed, we can reasonably suppose that some other event would have provided a pretext.

There had been no loud protests against the events of 1929– 34, because there was virtually no civil society left in the USSR. The Church had been reduced to a few frightened priests hiding in ruins. The legal profession had nothing left of its former power but its rhetoric. The prestigious medical profession was suborned to the Kremlin hospital. The creative intellectuals had been exiled, imprisoned, terrorized, driven to ramshackle ivory towers or bought off. But the
total
absence of protest after December 1934 is still amazing, if for no other reason than that the hangmen must have guessed from Stalin’s actions that they were now themselves in danger. To many in OGPU, the party and above all the armed forces, the escalation of terror, as Stalin breached one taboo after another, was palpable. He was insisting on death for political dissenters, real or imaginary. What was there to lose by stepping up dissent into rebellion? What held back Iagoda in OGPU, Tukhachevsky in the Red Army or Sergo Orjonikidze in the Politbiuro from attempting to neutralize Stalin? Why did they not get their blow in first?

Back in the Kremlin in December 1934, Stalin took a pencil and sketched out a scheme: opponents were assigned to a ‘Leningrad centre’ and a ‘Moscow centre’ and alleged to have conspired to assassinate Kirov. This time some thirty-three persons were gathered in Stalin’s office, among them Ivan Akulov, the chief prosecutor, his deputy Krylenko and the inventive legislator Professor Andrei Vyshinsky. The fabrication of the two ‘centres’ and the indictment of their supposed members took another month.

Removing Zinoviev and Kamenev

The works [of Machiavelli] have thus played a prominent role in
the great work of revealing the true nature of power in a class
society, a work which has been taken to its end only today, in the
works of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin.
                             Lev Kamenev, Introduction to Volume I of the

Works of Machiavelli

Zinoviev and Kamenev were in 1934 contrite hacks, hoping to rise again when Stalin’s anger and suspicion had been allayed. Zinoviev began writing on Marx and Engels. Stalin kept a vengeful eye open and on 5 August 1934 condemned Zinoviev’s commentary on Engels in
The Bolshevik
: ‘We can’t leave
The Bolshevik
in the hands of morons which Comrade Zinoviev can always make dunces of. Those guilty must be found and removed from the editorial office. Best of all to remove Comrade Zinoviev.’
⁷

Stalin treated Kamenev more subtly. Their early acquaintance was founded on Kamenev’s gift to Stalin of Machiavelli’s
The Prince
; the last inch in the rope that Stalin allowed Kamenev was a foreword to the first volume of a new edition of Machiavelli. Kamenev’s essay shows belated insight into what he and Stalin had inherited from Cesare Borgia, Lorenzo de’ Medici and Niccolò Machiavelli:

Machiavelli made of his treatise a strikingly expressive and wide-ranging catalogue of rules, which a ruler of his time must be guided by in order to win power, keep it and victoriously resist all attempts against him. This is far from being the
sociology
of power, but this set of recipes gives us splendidly the
zoological
features of the struggle for power… The immorality, the criminality, the cruelty of Machiavelli’s book about
The Prince
is entirely contained by the fact that he decided… to speak out about things as they are.
⁸

When Kamenev and Zinoviev were charged with Kirov’s murder, the new edition of Machiavelli was stopped, and the volume with Kamenev’s foreword was pulped.

Weeks passed before Zinoviev and Kamenev were charged. First, Stalin and Iagoda replaced the disgraced Leningrad NKVD men with their Moscow chiefs. Iakov Agranov, who had fabricated conspiracies ever since 1921, conducted the main interrogations assisted by an articulate prosecutor, Lev Sheinin, who made a good living writing up his investigations in the style of Sherlock Holmes stories. Agranov and Sheinin, a sledgehammer and a crowbar, broke everyone who had unluckily befriended, or merely met, Leonid Nikolaev. Soon a worse ogre than Agranov appeared. Nikolai Ezhov, although officially a Central Committee not an NKVD man, came to interrogate some of the accused.

Stalin personally wrote out the indictment of Nikolaev and his alleged associates. Stalin’s text delighted Vyshinsky, who had only to add the finishing touches. The indictment stated that the accused were wreaking vengeance on Kirov for crushing the Zinovievites. The decree of 1 December was made retroactive. The trial started at 2.40 p.m. on 28 December and sentence was pronounced at 6.40 the next morning. On 25 December Vasili Ulrikh, by now a notorious hanging judge, had visited Stalin to find out what sentence to pass. Nevertheless, Ulrikh telephoned Stalin twice during the trial, so perturbed was even he by Nikolaev’s insistence that he had acted alone. Ulrikh’s fellow judges and his common-law wife both recall that he wanted to refer the case for further investigation, but that Stalin was adamant: ‘No further investigation, finish the trial… they must all have the same sentence – shooting.’ This snuffed out the last spark of legality in Ulrikh. He never demurred again.

All fourteen were shot that same morning. Agranov and Vyshinsky stood by the cells as the victims went to the death cellar. Nikolaev’s executioner reminisced: ‘I picked Nikolaev up by his trousers. I was crying. I was so sorry for Kirov.’ The last to be shot was the second arrested, Ivan Kotolynov. Agranov and Vyshinsky asked him, ‘You’ll be shot now, so tell the truth, who organized Kirov’s murder, and how?’ A guard testified twenty-two years later that Kotolynov replied, ‘The whole of this trial is nonsense. People have been shot. I’m going to be shot now. But none of us, except Nikolaev, is guilty of anything.’

These executions were only the beginning. In March, Nikolaev’s wife, sister-in-law and brother-in-law were shot. Leningrad party officials were told to list former Zinoviev supporters. They replied that it would
be easier to list those who had not supported Zinoviev.
⁹
Throughout December 1934 and January 1935, the Leningrad party was cleared of those who had worked under Zinoviev: 663 were exiled to Siberia, 325 to other cities in European Russia. Almost every Bolshevik who had belonged to a fraction, even before Lenin’s death, was expelled and hundreds of ‘democratic centralists’ and trade unionists were sent to the backwoods, effectively holding pens for the condemned. After Leningrad’s NKVD and party came the former aristocrats, civil servants, merchants and bourgeois who were still at large: several train-loads left Leningrad in early 1935.

Stalin closed in slowly on his quarry; Kamenev was even included in the guard of honour at Kirov’s funeral. He and Zinoviev avoided each other. On their reinstatement in the party in 1933, when each was received by Stalin in his office for the first time in four years and the last time ever, they had decided never to say or do anything that OGPU could use against them. Kamenev had, thanks to Gorky, found refuge in literary work. Zinoviev, however, scorned journalism: only political power interested him.

At the seventeenth party congress in February 1934 both right and left oppositions had prostrated themselves. Bukharin proclaimed Stalin ‘a mighty herald not just of economic but of technical and scientific progress on the planet… a glorious field marshal of proletarian forces’ and qualified his earlier statements as ‘Parthian arrows bordering on the criminal’. Kamenev made an act of contrition: ‘We aimed our most powerful sting, all the weapons we then had, at the man who hit us harder, who more penetratingly than anyone pointed out the criminal road we had taken, at Comrade Stalin.’ Zinoviev excelled them both: ‘Stalin’s report was… a
chef-d’æuvre
which joined the treasury of world communism the moment it was pronounced.’

As Zinoviev’s apartment was being searched by OGPU on 16 December 1934, he penned a letter to Stalin: ‘In no way, in no way, in no way am I guilty before the party, before the Central Committee or before you personally… I beseech you to believe my honest word. I am shaken to the depth of my soul.’
¹⁰
A week later, the NKVD were still ferreting for evidence against Zinoviev and Kamenev. The two were rearrested in mid-January 1935, when a former supporter broke down under questioning. The subsequent first trial of the ‘left opposition’ was
a travesty, even by Soviet standards of the 1930s. Kamenev was told as the trial opened that if he repeated his confessions his life would be spared. Ulrikh gave Zinoviev ten years in prison, and Kamenev five. Later Iagoda applied tougher interrogation techniques, and Zinoviev and Kamenev faced capital charges. Meanwhile, seventy-seven alleged members of ‘the Zinoviev Leningrad opposition group’ went to prison or into exile, and another 12,000 members of the ‘exploiting classes’ were deported from Leningrad.

Before finishing off the left opposition, Stalin took a broom to his own stables. Iagoda’s men combed the Kremlin, arresting cleaners, librarians, secretaries and guards for plotting to murder Stalin, their pretext that relatives of Kamenev worked in the Kremlin. There was one surprising victim of this operation: one of Stalin’s most trusted friends, a Georgian he had known in Baku, Abel Enukidze.
¹¹
Expelled from the party for ‘depravity’, he found himself a niche running the spas around Kislovodsk. Stalin then demoted Enukidze to running road transport in Kharkov, where he was two years later arrested. Enukidze was the only rightist victim of 1935, and was presumably victimized for personal reasons. Stalin first eliminated the remnants of the left, after adopting their policies of forced collectivization and industrialization, because the left were close to Trotsky, and despite Trotsky’s impotence in exile, Stalin feared them more.

Stalin had other reasons to strike again at enemies he had knocked down eight years before. In February 1935, during the Kremlin purge, Iagoda arrested Mikhail Prezent, the secretary of the journal
Soviet Construction
. Prezent was small fry except that he was Abel Enukidze’s friend. Prezent was not shot; deprived of insulin, he died in prison in three months. His diary was a bombshell. Iagoda passed it on to Stalin.
¹²
Prezent knew Gorky, Demian Bedny and many Trotskyists, whose gossip he recorded from their fall in 1928 to their partial rehabilitation in the early 1930s. Stalin annotated the diary and, where it exasperated him, tore pages out before returning it to Iagoda. Trotsky was described as the last intelligent man in Soviet politics, someone to whom ‘today’s barking pack of dogs used to hand his galoshes and brush the dust off his suit’. Prezent recorded sarcasms at Stalin’s expense, some from favourites like Demian Bedny and the journalist Mikhail Koltsov making fun of Stalin’s uncouth habits such as opening uncut pages in books with his
greasy thumb. Prezent’s diary showed that the semi-rehabilitated left felt that they still mattered. Their jokes did not amuse Stalin. One he underlined: ‘Trotsky decided to commit suicide, so sent Stalin a letter challenging him to socialist competition.’