Stalin and His Hangmen (51 page)

In autumn 1936 Ezhov first had to complete Iagoda’s tasks: to prepare two show trials, which would dispose of those, first on the left, then on the right, implicated at the trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev. To make the NKVD do as Ezhov wished it was to be purged; the hangmen themselves were first in line for the gallows. Each previous new leader had made a smooth transition. Even when Iagoda took over from Menzhinsky, quarrelling with many who disliked his ‘sergeant-major’ rudeness, OGPU-NKVD had remained cohesive. On that occasion Stalin had removed only a handful – Stanisław Messing, Meer Trilisser – whom he either disliked or needed for other work.
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Just a few – Efim Evdokimov, Iakov Agranov – genuinely objected to Iagoda’s style. They disliked the fabrications in the early 1930s not because they found them distasteful; they wanted more sophisticated methods of falsification.

Ezhov laid waste the NKVD, as he would the party, the army, the intelligentsia and the urban population. He first removed the most prominent – sometimes letting them stew for a few months in provincial demotion. The moment Ezhov took over, a chief of the secret political directorate, I. V. Shtein, killed himself. After Iagoda’s arrest, Gleb Bokii, the terror of Petrograd and Turkestan, was seized. Georgi Molchanov, Iagoda’s head of the secret political directorate, was arrested a month before Iagoda and shot ‘by special arrangements’, in other words without formal interrogation or sentence, after violent questioning from his colleagues Nikolai Nikolaev-Zhurid, the Latvian Ans Zalpeter and Sergei Zhupakhin, the axe man of Vologda, who would themselves soon follow their victim. Molchanov, a handsome man, was beaten into a shadow of his former self and must have found execution a relief. One of Stalin’s candidates for Iagoda’s post, Vsevolod Balitsky, was shot by Ezhov as a Polish spy.

Neither his acumen, nor having Stalin as his neighbour at Zubalovo, nor helping to topple Iagoda saved Iakov Agranov. He helped Ezhov settle in, prepared Radek and Piatakov for trial, and after three transfers in seven months was arrested in July 1937. Agranov was tormented for over a year before being shot. Efim Evdokimov, whom Stalin had proposed to Ezhov as the interrogator of Iagoda, was also ill rewarded: in May 1938 he was transferred to the Commissariat of Water Transport, which had now become death row for
chekisty
. Soon Lavrenti Beria would exterminate Efim Evdokimov and all the north Caucasus men who owed their careers to him. Iagoda’s head of the Gorky (Nizhni Novgorod) NKVD, Matvei Pogrebinsky, shot himself when Iagoda was arrested; a few days later I. I. Chertok, Iagoda’s deputy head of counter-espionage, jumped to his death. Even one of Ezhov’s favourites, Commissar of State Security third rank Vladimir Kursky, who took over from Georgi Molchanov, killed himself on 8 July 1937; the last straw for him was the order to interrogate and dispatch Zinaida Glikina, Ezhov’s unwanted mistress. The last aristocrat in the NKVD, Pillar von Pilchau was arrested as a Polish spy. Of Iagoda’s 110 most senior men, ninety were arrested by Ezhov. Most perished. Ezhov arrested 2,273
chekisty
at all levels and, on his own count, dismissed another 11,000.

The NKVD purge first hit non-Russians. Jews and those who had affiliations with Germany and with the so-called
limitroph
countries,
Poland, Romania, the Baltic states – countries where communists could expect no protection – were marked men. The NKVD paid heavily for its cosmopolitanism. In recent years only two senior NKVD officers, Bliumkin and his friend Rabinovich, had been shot; many non-Russian
chekisty
had voluntarily or involuntarily changed careers. In vain: every famous Latvian – such as Peterss – and Pole – such as Messing and Unszlicht – in the economy or in cultural life followed their former colleagues into oblivion.

Rank and file NKVD men were dismissed or transferred; arrest and shooting were largely reserved for senior staff. Fear spread through the service. The new NKVD – Beria would finish what Ezhov began – would look very different. On I October 1936, of the II0 senior operatives, only 42 were Russians, Ukrainians or Belorussians; 43 declared themselves Jews, there were 9 Latvians, 5 Poles and 2 Germans. By September 1938, just before Ezhov fell, senior staff had increased to 150, but Russians predominated with 98; there were no Latvians and only one Pole, while Jews had diminished to 32. A year later, under Beria, there were 122 Russians and only 6 Jews. The only significant non-Slavs were Beria’s 12 Georgians.
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Ezhov’s Russification of the NKVD reflected Stalin’s conversion to Tsarist chauvinism. Operations abroad, already crippled when Stalin in 1936 closed down the NKVD network in Germany to avoid annoying Hitler, became a shambles for they depended on polyglots of Baltic, German or Jewish origin. Ezhov got rid of Abram Slutsky, the head of the foreign directorate of the NKVD, with a lethal injection as an arrest might have frightened Slutsky’s subordinates into defecting. Ezhov then had Artur Artuzov, his best counter-intelligence officer, arrested; he was half-Swiss, half-Estonian, and had lived next door to Iagoda.

Ezhov also homogenized the NKVD’s class structure. Iagoda had employed more white-collar executives; under Ezhov, the workers and peasants took over, a trend that Beria accelerated. Iagoda had used former gentry and petit bourgeois, even a former priest and a Baltic baron; under Ezhov they were almost all purged. Likewise, the educational level of the NKVD’s senior men changed. Those with just elementary schooling still formed 35 – 40 per cent of the personnel (Beria was to reduce this by half by introducing two-year courses in literacy and arithmetic), but Ezhov reduced the proportion of staff with higher education from 15 to
10 per cent. Beria then recruited intellectuals, so that over a third of the NKVD’s management had degrees by 1939. These purges meant promoting younger officers and drafting in new staff from Communist Youth and orphanages. Between 1937 and 1939 the average age of senior NKVD men dropped from 42 to 35. The promotion of youth over age, of Slav over non-Slav, of peasant over white collar reflected Stalin’s bias towards persons with no outside ties and no past.

Those few who held on to their posts in the NKVD cadres after Iagoda’s and Ezhov’s falls were low-flyers: rarely seen at headquarters, they skulked in remote regions. Typical of these lucky few was Dmitri Orlov, in charge of exiled kulaks on the steppes of northern Kazakhstan. NKVD men realized that a summons to Moscow for a posting or an award was in fact a death sentence. Surprisingly few tried to evade their fate. Some committed suicide after a telephone call from Ezhov: for instance, Vasili Karutsky, who had just been promoted to run the Moscow province NKVD, or, at the end of Ezhov’s reign, Daniil Litvin, who had conducted the slaughter of nearly 50,000 in Leningrad during 1938. Some defected, like Genrikh Liushkov, who crossed the Manchurian border in thick fog ostensibly to meet an agent, and then worked for the Japanese until they dispensed with him in 1945. The commissar of the Ukrainian NKVD Aleksandr Uspensky faked suicide, adopted a new identity and raced the length and breadth of European Russia, sheltering with mistresses or old friends for five months, before he was caught outside the left luggage office at a remote station in the Urals.

Most NKVD men, like Ezhov, drowned fear for their own fates in alcohol and sadism: they hated the innocents who were slow to confess, for the interrogator who failed to secure a statement might follow his prisoner to the executioner. Nobody now called Ezhov ‘blackberry’ or ‘hedgehog’; the lasting pun on his name was
ezhovye rukavitsy
, literally ‘hedgehog-skin gauntlets’ or ‘rod of iron’.

In 1937 Stalin authorized the use of active physical torture and the horrors at the Lubianka were replicated in dozens of provincial centres.
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The NKVD archives of Novosibirsk in central Siberia tell a grim story.
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Novosibirsk was praised by Ezhov as the second most efficient city outside the capital for the numbers of spies, wreckers and hostile social elements it filtered out of the population – probably some 10 per cent of the male adults and adolescents of the area. Many kulaks and Trotskyists
had been exiled to Novosibirsk so targets for arrest were easily met. In April 1937 Ezhov sent out one of Iagoda’s men, Lev Mironov, to arrest as many as he could in the army garrisons and railway depots of the region. Two months later, exhausted, Mironov was arrested. Karl Karlson, a Latvian chekist, formerly deputy commissar of the Ukrainian NKVD and ranking second to Ezhov, went to central Siberia in August 1937. By January 1938, he too had been arrested. The experienced Grigori Gorbach replaced Karlson; he lasted less than a year. Gorbach terrified his colleagues: Ezhov had instructed him to find enemies not just in central Siberia but within the Novosibirsk NKVD.
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After Gorbach came Major Ivan Maltsev, the most demented of all; he was to die in the camps.

Novosibirsk bonded its men in blood; all officers took part in mass executions called ‘marriages’. One officer, Konstantin Pastanogov, denounced his own uncle but demurred when ordered to shoot him. He survived only because Lev Mironov took pity on him. The special and secret political directorates of the Novosibirsk NKVD were at half strength from purges within their ranks. The deficit was made up with men who found writing up statements more laborious than beating victims into signing them. Ezhov sent out fifty students from Moscow’s NKVD school to help.

Targets for Extermination

What have the little piglets done

That they should be slaughtered year after year, just

To keep these foxes in luxury? The very sacred Dragon

In the ninefold depth of his pool, does He know

That the foxes are robbing him and gobbling up His little piglets,

Or does He not?

Bertolt Brecht, after Po Chiu-i

In spring 1937 terror spread from the party leadership to the urban population. Ezhov assigned targets (
limity
) to each region for arrests, executions (‘Category 1’ – 73,000 in all) and imprisonment (‘Category
2’ – just under 200,000) of enemies of the people. Eighteen months later these targets had been exceeded ninefold. The Smolensk NKVD chief was told by Ezhov, ‘better to overdo it than not do enough’. Novosibirsk soon exceeded its target of 5,000: by 4 October the local NKVD had arrested 25,000 and sentenced 13,000 of these of death. As Novosibirsk had, until 1938, Japanese and German consulates, thousands were designated spies. The NKVD was backed up by the militia, which was diverted from detaining thieves and hooligans to hunting enemies of the people. They arrested anyone who came to a police station, even on an innocent errand; they visited farms and removed a percentage of peasants as saboteurs. In 1937 the Novosibirsk militia arrested 7,000 people in this way.

There was some official resistance: one prosecutor, M. M. Ishov, arrested the most eager hangmen including Maltsev and freed their victims. Ishov was soon arrested himself, with his brother and colleagues, and badly beaten by Maltsev although, extraordinarily, he lived to be reinstated. Even at the end of 1938, when Ezhov’s writ no longer ran, and memoranda from Moscow rebuked the NKVD for illegal procedures, Maltsev could not stop. When Beria finally removed the incorrigible heads of the Novosibirsk NKVD, the region was left to the mercy of their juniors, psychotic drunkards who beat their wives, fell down mine shafts, stole public and private property and were sent away to prisons or sanatoria. In southern Russia and the Caucasus, even before Stalin authorized torture, the sadism was such that the living envied the dead; few of those tortured were fit for the GULAG.

For one measure Ezhov won popularity: he reversed the Soviet policy of treating common criminals as redeemable brothers of the working class. In April 1937 Ezhov proposed, to Stalin’s approval, rearresting recidivists and career criminals, who would now be deported and executed. By July 40,000 common criminals, mingled with kulak refugees, had been arrested. Of these 8,000 were shot. The streets of Moscow and Leningrad were still dangerous at night, but now that banditry was punished almost as severely as telling anti-Soviet jokes, some of the public regained confidence.

Ezhov sent those he spared the bullet into the GULAG, which he expanded into a hitherto unimaginable inferno. When Iagoda fell, over 800,000 slaves were working in the GULAG, while NKVD prisons held another quarter of a million and many hundreds of thousands of
exiles worked in conditions indistinguishable from slavery. By 1936 annual mortality in the GULAG had dropped to about 20,000 and in Iagoda’s last year of power the NKVD recorded only 1,118 executions.
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This was, in the poetess Anna Akhmatova’s phrase, a ‘vegetarian’ era, compared with the carnivorous Ezhov period.

Under Ezhov the growth of the camps was limited only by the harsh terrain of the Soviet Arctic and the logistics of transporting, housing, guarding and exploiting prisoners. Purges within the NKVD killed off the GULAG’s best managers. In December 1938 the GULAG population passed the million mark, and there were nearly as many in the prisons and other labour colonies. In 1938 mortality in the GULAG – overcrowded, chaotic, run by inexperienced and frightened administrators – soared to 90,000 or 10 per cent of the inmates. Even so, the camps could not keep up with the mass arrests; those detained in grotesquely overcrowded prisons often died of typhus, dysentery, heat, malnutrition or torture before they could be executed.