Stalin and His Hangmen (14 page)

This time, Dzierżyński was kept in closed city prisons, first Warsaw, then Oriol in central Russia (designated for revolutionary recidivists), finally in Moscow. This experience was far worse than Stalin’s exile in
Turukhansk. Dzierżyński was kept in leg irons until his muscles tore; clean underwear came once a fortnight; there were over a hundred men in a cell designed for fifteen; tuberculosis was rife. Conditions were nearly as bad as those Dzierżyński would preside over five years later. Dzierżyński had little human contact and few books. By all accounts, he was despondent in Oriol, but he did get a cell to himself and his siblings’ gifts of money and newspapers kept him nourished and informed.
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Like Stalin, Dzierżyński was not released until the revolution of February 1917 suspended all political imprisonment.

Letters to Aldona when world war broke out suggest that Dzierżyński survived on fanatical faith in the future: ‘When I think of the hell you are all now living in, my own little hell seems so small…’ Like Lenin, he approved of this hell, for he wrote to his wife in 1915 from his prison cell: ‘When I think of what is happening now, about the universal smashing of all hopes, I come to the certainty that life will blossom all the more quickly and strongly, the worse the smashing is today.’ His siblings’ and Zofia’s letters sustained Dzierżyński: Zofia used citric acid as invisible ink, and a code based on a poem they both loved by Antoni Lange, ‘Dusze ludzkie samotnice wieczne’ (Human souls eternally alone). Feliks wrote verse for Jasiek:

Felek has his son on the wall

in three photographic snaps

stuck on with prison bread

If I look at the first, I hear laughter…

If I look at the second, there, concentrated,

Jasiek studies the world.

as though tears had frozen in his eyes.

And from the child’s eyes, at the father

looks the lonely pain of the mother

in the anguish of the prisoner’s heart…

Jasiek’s father turns and tosses in his dreams

and stillness embraces his breast,

and his heart looks for his son’s heart

and tries hard to hear if from afar

his anguished voice should cry…

Stalin was physically and spiritually toughened by four years of Siberian exile; Dzierżyński was physically weakened and intellectually narrowed by five years of Russian prisons. All that he learnt, when moved to the Moscow prison of Butyrki where he was employed in the workshops supplying the army, was to cut and stitch trousers and tunics. Nevertheless, as a leader among prisoners, organizing hunger strikes, protests and inquisitions, he narrowed the single-minded fanaticism that enabled him to make the Cheka an autonomous body with the desire and ability to control an entire population. But, a guard dog in need of a master, Dzierżyński needed political direction, and it would be Stalin whose guidance he found most intelligible and consistent.

The Extraordinary Commission

The first Cheka (Extraordinary Commission) was intended just to guard the revolution’s headquarters in Petrograd. But on 20 December 1917, Dzierżyński persuaded Lenin to expand the Cheka to the Extraordinary Committee to Combat Counter-revolution and Sabotage. Not all Lenin’s associates applauded Dzierżyński’s idea. Leonid Krasin, a factory director who became one of Lenin’s most persuasive diplomats and ruthless requisitioners, recorded:

Lenin has become quite insane and if anyone has influence over him it is only ‘Comrade Feliks’ Dzierżyński, an even greater fanatic and, in essence, a cunning piece of work who scares Lenin with counter-revolution and the idea that this will sweep us all away, him first. And Lenin, I am finally convinced, is very much a coward, trembling for his own skin. And Dzierżyński plays on that.

Lenin’s concern for his own skin was not without justification. Sailors who had never forgiven their officers the vicious reprisals for the mutinies of 1905; soldiers who had been sent to die at the front with no boots or rifles while their officers stayed in the rear; factory workers whose wages no longer bought bread and vodka – the urban population would rob, assault or murder anyone they perceived as an exploiter. Kerensky’s provisional government had released thousands of convicted criminals
and psychopaths who provided the catalyst in an explosive mixture, and the dissolving Tsarist army not only set loose thousands of men habituated to killing, but more criminals who had been released from penal servitude to serve at the front. Many of these convicts were to become killers on behalf of the new authorities. The Bolsheviks had been swept to power on the wave of violence that swept first Petrograd then Moscow, including the murder of two government ministers in their hospital beds by sailors. The vengeance of the populace was now to be channelled into a judicial and extra-judicial system for hunting down, detaining and disabling the class enemy. The Cheka was this channel.

The cheapest and surest method of waging this internal war was by shooting. The Bolsheviks had loudly protested when Kerensky’s government reintroduced the death penalty for army deserters, but in February 1918, after just two months in power, the Bolsheviks gave the Cheka the formal right to shoot its victims without anyone else’s sanction, even without charge or trial. Power of life and death invigorated the Cheka; it spawned offspring with lightning speed. By June 1918 every province and district under a Soviet council of workers and soldiers was setting up its own Cheka. The remit was broad and vague: counter-espionage, controlling the bourgeoisie, enforcing Soviet decrees; their character depended on local personalities and feelings. Only gradually, as the White armies withdrew from the centre of Russia, were these local groups – frequently barbarous and unpredictable in their behaviour but also sometimes controlled by more moderate Marxists and Social Revolutionaries – brought under Dzierżyński control in Moscow.

Those, like Adolf Joffe, who were attempting to represent the Soviet government abroad as a civilized body, were embarrassed by the Cheka’s autonomy and violence. On 13 April 1918 Joffe asked the Petrograd Biuro to abolish the Cheka: ‘Uritsky’s and Dzierżyński’s commissions do more harm than good and apply completely impermissible, clearly provocational methods…’ Even pro-Bolshevik lawyers were horrified. On 12 July V. A. Zhdanov, who had defended the assassin of Grand Duke Sergei in 1903, protested to Professor Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, who had access to Lenin:

The absence of control, the right to decide cases, the absence of defence, publicity or the right to appeal, the use of provocation is inevitably leading the Cheka, and will result in it being a place where a nest of people will be made who under the cover of secrecy and crazy, uncontrolled power will do their personal and party deeds. I maintain that the activity of the Cheka will inevitably be the strongest element discrediting Soviet power.

Shortly before they died, two grand old men of Russian thought and letters, the writer Vladimir Korolenko and the anarchist Prince Piotr Kropotkin, wrote eloquent protests against the death penalty. In vain: Dzierżyński retained his power of life and death.

As the Cheka became centralized, it divided by fission, evolving into a complex organism that spread over the whole country. It took over counter-espionage and control of the armed forces; it oversaw Russia’s railways; it intercepted letters and telegrams; it neutralized political opponents including members of other left-wing parties; it fought ‘sabotage’; it conducted espionage abroad. The handful of party workers, soldiers and sailors in Petrograd expanded in two years to an organization of 20,000 armed men and women of very varied backgrounds united by the conviction of their rightness, or at least their impunity. When they were not fired by enthusiasm, they were motivated by panic. In Petrograd, under Grigori Zinoviev’s hysterical rule, the chiefs of the Cheka were replaced every few weeks, each one more ruthless than the last.
Chekisty
were overworked: each interrogator had a hundred cases to process.

Equipping the Cheka was easy. The First World War had left for both Cheka and Trotsky’s Red Army enough small arms, machine guns and ammunition for three years of civil war and red terror. A consignment of leather coats, sent from western Europe for Russia’s air force pilots, was appropriated by Dzierżyński to clothe his men hygienically: the typhus louse that killed so many soldiers preferred woollen greatcoats. Recruiting men who were not disobedient psychopaths was harder. Dzierżyński sought men with ‘a burning heart, a cool head and clean hands’; Lenin’s remark that for every decent man nine bastards had to be employed was nearer the mark.

At first the Cheka recruited not just Bolsheviks, but left Social Revolutionaries and even a few anarchists. Piotr Aleksandrovich, the leader of the Social Revolutionaries in the Cheka, was a nuisance: he insisted on making the Cheka accountable to local soviets, in which his party still
had a say. In summer 1918 the Social Revolutionaries among the Cheka were tricked into mounting a revolt and were crushed. The Cheka then became the unquestioning agent of Lenin’s party. Accountability disappeared in March 1919: Dzierżyński was made commissar of internal affairs as well as chairman of the Cheka, thus becoming answerable to himself.

Dzierżyński was not at that time a member of the Politbiuro, the inner cabinet where seven Bolshevik leaders – Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Trotsky, Stalin, Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky – and three non-voting ‘candidate’ members – Bukharin, Molotov, Kalinin – took all major decisions. Lenin dismissed Dzierżyński as a mere organizer.
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Dzierżyński himself confessed to Trotsky that he ‘was not a statesman’. But voting for the Central Committee of the party shows how respected Dzierżyński was by the party rank and file: in March 1919, Lenin received the maximum number of votes, 262, while Dzierżyński got 241, fewer than Bukharin or Stalin (258) but more than Trotsky (219) or Kalinin (158). Not until 1924 was Dzierżyński made even a non-voting candidate member.

Dzierżyński therefore needed a close relationship with a Politbiuro member to influence policy in the Cheka’s favour. He edged towards Stalin.

Poles, Latvians and Jews

The ethnic composition of the Cheka aroused as much hostility and terror as its powers. With some justification, emigres asserted that the Russian revolution was ‘made by Jewish brains, Latvian bayonets and Russian stupidity’. Up to the mid-1930s Russians were a minority in the Cheka and its successor organizations. A few of Dzierżyński’s formidable henchmen were Russians: Ivan Ksenofontov, a former factory worker and army corporal, chaired revolutionary tribunals and organized mass shootings of hostages. Like Dzierżyński a puritan – he tried to ban
chekisty
from drinking alcohol – he too worked himself to exhaustion: by 1922, at the age of thirty-eight, Ksenofontov was known as Grandad. Transferred to the Commissariat for Social Security, he died of stomach cancer in 1926. A more horrifying Russian
chekist
was the semi-qualified doctor
and virtuoso pianist Mikhail Kedrov, who would slaughter schoolchildren and army officers in northern Russia with such ruthlessness that he had to be taken into psychiatric care. Kedrov’s consort Revekka Maizel personally shot a hundred White officers and bourgeois and then drowned another 500 on a barge.

The Caucasians in the Cheka were a small, fearsome clique. For a short time, there was a Georgian in the Cheka’s governing body, Stalin’s close ally Sergo Orjonikidze. A Georgian, Aleksi Sajaia, calling himself Dr Kalinichenko, tortured prisoners in Odessa. Georgians, Armenians and Azeris brought to the Cheka a sadism their own country had got used to under Mongol and Persian overlords. Georgi Atarbekov, whom Stalin knew well, machine-gunned a train-load of Georgian doctors and nurses who were returning to Georgia from Russian war hospitals; he hacked a hundred hostages in Piatigorsk to death with a sabre; he murdered his own secretary in his office; and in Armavir, a town of exiled Armenians, he killed several thousand hostages. Dzierżyński furiously defended Atarbekov’s actions.
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Dzierżyński surrounded himself with fellow Poles, notably a trusted friend from the Warsaw underground in the 1900s, Józef Unszlicht. Unszlicht was to command the Cheka’s 300,000 paramilitaries, an army of ‘special purpose units’ which came into existence despite Trotsky’s opposition to splitting up the armed forces and fell upon rebellious civilians, obstreperous peasants, Cossacks and routed soldiers until 1925. Dzierżyński and Unszlicht anticipated revolution triumphing in eastern Europe and Germany; until Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s Poland defeated the Red Army in August 1920, they planned to incorporate Poland into a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of Europe and Asia. Their dislike of Russia was overriden by a crusade on behalf of the world’s proletariat but the Poland that snatched independence in 1917 was a nationalistic country, led by its landed gentry. The Polish left and Polish Jews who wanted political equality were marginalized by Marshal Piłsudski’s state and saw their best chance of power as a Soviet-inspired revolution – hence the prominent role they played in the Cheka.