Stalin and His Hangmen (15 page)

Latvians were an even more effective ethnic group at both the highest and lowest levels of the Red Army and the Cheka. The Latvian Joachim Vacetis saved Lenin’s government in July 1918 when the junior party in the revolution, the Social Revolutionaries, assassinated the German
ambassador and kidnapped Dzierżyński. Vacetis’s disciplined Latvian troops shelled the building that held the Social Revolutionary division of the Moscow Cheka and destroyed the Social Revolutionaries, who commanded wide support among the peasantry, as a political force. Repression was no new role for Latvians in Russian tyranny: they had been hired to help Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great achieve absolute power. The Latvians in the Soviet Cheka were not, however, mere mercenaries. Latvia won its independence in 1919 in the turmoil of world and civil wars, but the new middle-class state had no patience with the left-wing agitators infesting Riga’s factories. Militant working-class Latvians became a community of exiles in Russia, numbering perhaps a quarter of a million and living from Petrograd to the Pacific, with their own journals and cultural centres. Some 12,000 Latvian soldiers, from Latgale in eastern Latvia, an area where Russian was understood, fought hard in the First World War, to be abandoned in 1917 by their Russian officers and cut off from their homeland by the Germans. Brutalized by their betrayal, they were natural recruits for the Red Army and the Cheka. In 1919 75 per cent of the Cheka’s central management was Latvian. When Russian soldiers refused to carry out executions, Latvians (and a Chinese force of some 500 men) were brought in. Latvians won battles in the Urals against the White Army and Vacetis was commander of the Red Army for a year. From their formation in April 1918 to their dissolution in November 1920 the Latvian riflemen had an influence wholly disproportionate to their numbers.

Two formidable Latvians assisted Dzierżyński: Jekabs Peterss and Mārtiņš Lācis. In Riga Peterss was an agitator among the dock workers; in 1905 he was interrogated by the Tsar’s police during which his fingernails were ripped out. He emigrated to London with a group of Latvian and Russian Social Democrats to raise money by armed robbery. Peterss won notoriety in the 1911 Siege of Sidney Street, when three policemen were killed. Peterss was working with so-called anarchists, including two of his cousins, Peter Piaktov (Peter the Painter) and Fritz Svaars. At the Old Bailey Peterss was acquitted, thanks to a barrister hired by the Social Democrat Party and to the laziness of Scotland Yard who, despite eyewitness evidence, let the policemen’s deaths be blamed on a dead anarchist. While on the run, Peterss challenged the British authorities: ‘You had best take care of your Van when riding up to the police
station… We mean KILL… I am here in Manchester; We will have that bloddy swine of a Churchill before ere long the days are numbered… Yours, Peters’.

Peterss married an Englishwoman, May Freeman, and had a daughter, Maisie, by her. In 1917 he went to Russia to join the Cheka. In Moscow Peterss entrapped the British agent Robert Bruce-Lockhart, who was sounding out possible anti-German collaboration between the Allies and the Bolsheviks. After the assassination of the German ambassador, when Dzierżyński in a hysterical fit resigned his post for two months, Peterss took over as head of the Cheka. He subsequently remained its deputy chief, as head of the Petrograd Cheka. Like other Latvians, Peterss insisted that the Cheka should answer to nobody except the head of the government and that it must be free to carry out ‘searches, arrests, executions’. In Moscow Peterss led raids which killed a hundred anarchists, and in Petrograd he used the pre-revolutionary telephone book to round up the middle classes, merchants, civil servants, intelligentsia and officer corps as hostages for reprisals.

Peterss’ brutality earned him a posting to central Asia, where in the early 1920s he took charge of suppressing the nationalist rebellion by the Uzbek and Turkmen Basmachi. Yet, Robert Bruce-Lockhart testifies: ‘There was nothing in his character to indicate the inhuman monster he is commonly supposed to be. He told me that he suffered physical pain every time he signed a death sentence.’
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Clearly, the pain quickly abated; typical of Peterss was the joint Cheka – party operation with Stalin in Petrograd on 12–13 June 1919 involving 15,000 armed men. Hundreds of suspects, some merely relatives of deserters, were rounded up and shot.

In private Jekab Peterss was just as ruthless. Releasing Bruce-Lockhart, he gave him a letter to deliver to his wife in London, and in March 1921 May and Maisie arrived in Moscow, to discover that Peterss now had a Russian wife and a son. Peterss refused to let his first family leave the country.
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The journalist Mikhail Koltsov, writing from the safety of the Ukraine, interviewed Peterss in 1918: ‘He hunched his shoulders at the spring slush and began pulling his gloves on his big hands. Old, worn-out suede gloves. The fingertips were worn through and sewn up with thick thread, badly, as lonely old men sew. This is how unpleasant sullen bachelors living in sour-smelling nasty low-ceilinged furnished rooms darn.’
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Lācis was more articulate than Peterss. Before and after the revolution he composed satirical and civic verse and comic plays in Latvian. He wrote a parody of the paternoster, addressed to Tsar Nicolas II: ‘Our father, Who art in Petersburg, Cursed be Thy name, Destroyed be Thy power…’ In 1912 he published his poem ‘The Heart Aches…’ dedicated to his ancestral mother, Latvia. His investigative work began in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), then still the semblance of a normal government ministry. In May 1918, Lācis spectacularly exposed a monarchist conspiracy and was promoted to the Cheka, and in 1919 he distinguished himself in Kiev, where his nephew Paraputs also worked as a
chekist
and was infamous for appropriating victims’ money and jewellery. Lācis and Peterss devised intricate traps, for instance opening in Kiev a ‘Brazilian consulate’ which sold visas for large sums of money and then arrested all visitors in the name of the Cheka; Peterss himself acted as the Brazilian consul. When Kiev was recaptured by the Whites some 5,000 corpses were discovered, and 7,000 other Cheka detainees could not be accounted for.

Lācis became the Cheka’s publicist, defending it from the strictures of the People’s Commissariat for Justice, and founded a journal called
The Red Sword
to publish execution statistics (grossly underestimated) broken down by gender, social origin and time of year. He declared:

The Cheka is not just an investigative organ: it is the battle organ of the party of the future… It annihilates without trial or it isolates from society by imprisoning in concentration camps. Its word is law. The Cheka’s work must cover all areas of public life… When interrogating, do not seek material evidence or proof of the accused’s words or deeds against Soviet power. The first question you must ask is: what class does he belong to, what education, upbringing, origin or profession does he have? These questions must determine the accused’s fate. This is the sense and essence of red terror… It doesn’t judge the enemy, it strikes him. It shows no mercy, but incinerates anyone who takes up arms on the other side of the barricades and who is of no use to us… But it isn’t a guillotine cutting off heads at a tribunal’s instance… We, like the Israelites, have to build the Kingdom of the Future under constant fear of enemy attack.
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Lācis claimed that only 21,000 persons were executed between 1918 and 1920. He exulted in the details, however: the crushing of a Social
Revolutionary rebellion in Iaroslavl in July 1918, shooting 57 rebels on the spot and 3 50 after surrender, after bombing the city from the air and engulfing it in artillery fire from an armoured train.

Lācis later became, like Dzierżyński, an overlord of the Soviet economy; he was always pushing the Cheka to extend its remit far beyond security. In his tribute to Dzierżyński, he declared: ‘whoever hinders if only by laxness the development of the country’s productive forces… is liable to eradication and the Cheka must deal with all of this.’
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As his energy flagged Lācis became a member of the Latvian section of the Union of Writers and even saw his plays performed in the Latvian theatre in Leningrad. He died, apparently of a ruptured aorta, in 1937, commanding railway paramilitaries in eastern Siberia, just before Ezhov’s arrests would have swept him away along with almost every other senior Latvian
chekist.

The prominent role of Jews in the killings of 1918 – 21 is a very thorny question, if only because one has to share debating ground with Russian chauvinists and plain anti-Semites.
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From Trotsky down to the executioners of Odessa, Russia’s Jews ruthlessly avenged the victims of a century’s pogroms, and the perceived Jewishness of the Cheka, in the minds of not just anti-Semitic fascists but even otherwise fair-minded Russian monarchists and liberals, reflected a widespread view of the Bolshevik party and its Central Committee as a Jewish cabal. We cannot dismiss the upsurge of violence in 1918–21 by Jews against Russians as simply redressing the balance after centuries of Tsarist oppression. One might compare it to the violence in 1947–8 of the Stern gang and Irgun in Israel against Arab inhabitants and British rulers, an explosion of self-assertion after a far worse persecution. The motivation of those Jews who worked for the Cheka was not Zionist or ethnic. The war between the Cheka and the Russian bourgeoisie was not even purely a war of classes or political factions. It can be seen as being between Jewish internationalists and the remnants of a Russian national culture.

In the traditional Russian and Nazi definition of Jewishness, where parentage and surname counts as much as religious and cultural affiliation, such a view is plausible. But what was Jewish except lineage about Bolsheviks like Zinoviev, Trotsky, Kamenev or Sverdlov? Some were second- or even third-generation renegades; few even spoke Yiddish, let
alone knew Hebrew. They were by upbringing Russians accustomed to a European way of life and values, Jewish only in the superficial sense that, say, Karl Marx was. Jews in anti-Semitic Tsarist Russia had few ways out of the ghetto except emigration, education or revolution, and the latter two courses meant denying their Judaism by joining often anti-Jewish institutions and groups.

The Bolsheviks had strong support among the ordinary Jewish population of the miserable
shtetl
s of western Russia and the Ukraine. Firstly, because for the first years of Soviet power the authorities did not regard Zionism as a heinous crime.
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Secondly, the Jewish Bund, which many even non-intellectual or pro-Zionist Jews supported, was a socialist party in alliance, like the Bolsheviks, with a wide spectrum of social democrats. And thirdly, the five million Jews of Russia, particularly in the thirty years before the removal of restrictions in 1913, had been subject to violent pogroms and fantastical accusations, and were denied access to major cities, civic rights and the professions. One Russian minister of the 1880s, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, is credited with the remark that Russia’s Jews should be dealt with by ‘one third emigration, one third assimilation and one third extermination’. In the First World War the front line between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian armies had cut through a region of Jewish townships. Over half a million Jews were in 1915 summarily deported east. Between 1918 and 1920, during the civil war, Jews suffered from pogroms at the hands of White Cossacks, Ukrainian nationalists and Polish invaders; White generals such as Anton Denikin did not always rein in their juniors’ anti-Semitism. Among the Red Army, only Semion Budionny’s Cossacks consistently committed anti-Jewish atrocities.

In the Cheka and the party, Lenin feared, Jewish brains were as much a drawback as an advantage, and the Jews themselves were only too aware of the backlash they might provoke. Lenin took care to see that Trotsky’s name was removed from the commission set up to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church. Zinoviev, visiting the Ukraine, warned that there were ‘too many Jews’. Kaganovich, in the mid-1920s general secretary of the Ukrainian party and a Ukrainian Stalin, cut within three years Jewish representation at Kharkov university from 40 to 11 per cent and raised that of Ukrainians from 12 to 3 8 per cent. Any initiative known to emanate from Trotsky or Iagoda could make Russia’s smouldering
anti-Semitism flare up. Jews loomed large in the repressive organs of government and in the party, while their proportion among the semi-starving, freezing population of Petrograd and Moscow for a while sharply declined. In 1922, they reached their maximum representation in the party (not that they formed a coherent group) when, at 15 per cent, they were second only to ethnic Russians with 65 per cent.

The
Chekist
as Intellectual and Organizer

When the First World War ended, the old empires of Britain and France and the largely middle-class governments of the newly independent states of the Baltic and central Europe turned their attention to the threat posed by Bolshevik Russia. The Cheka had to divert resources from internal repression to external enemies, and both espionage and counter-intelligence assumed greater importance. The Cheka would need educated linguists as desperately as it had sharpshooters. To deal with spies, to devise propaganda, needed skills in disinformation, manipulation and falsification. For these tasks men with higher education, not just experience in killing, were needed. Jewish recruits best filled this need. Few Baltic or Polish recruits to the Cheka were intellectuals, although Baron Romuald Pillar von Pilchau, a renegade German aristocrat from Latvia, and the fastidious Petrograd lawyer Ronchevsky were outlandish exceptions to the rule.