Stalin and His Hangmen (17 page)

Not all
chekisty
were men. In the Crimea Stalin’s Baku comrade Rozalia Zemliachka and her lover Béla Kun, with Lenin’s approval, murdered 50,000 White officers who had trusted Commander Frunze’s safe conduct. Zemliachka, a Cheka sadist who would live to enjoy a pension, tied the officers in pairs to planks and burned them alive in furnaces, or drowned them in barges that she sank offshore. She had been educated in a Kiev grammar school and at the Sorbonne.

Two women in the Odessa Cheka were particularly feared: Vera Grebeniukova, known as Dora, who for two and a half months in 1918 mutilated 700 prisoners before shooting them, and the ‘Pekinese’, a Latvian sadist, who was chief executioner. In the Kiev Cheka a Hungarian, Remover, was consigned to a psychiatric ward after she began shooting not just prisoners but witnesses. And in Moscow’s central prison in 1919, a woman executioner specialized in fetching the condemned from the hospital ward and whipping them down to the cellars.

Many Cheka killers were convicts, for example Iankel-Iakov Iurovsky the killer of the Tsar, and the sole black in the Cheka, Johnston of Odessa, who flayed his victims alive. Some of these killers went uncontrollably mad: Saenko of Kharkov, who worked in a special torture chamber, attacked his superiors and was shot; the same fate befell Maga, chief executioner in Moscow. When the killer was of political importance, milder measures were taken. Béla Kun was put in a psychiatric hospital, from where he was released to play a key role in the Comintern. Dr Mikhail Kedrov, friend and publisher to Lenin and cousin of two Central Committee members, was relieved of his post when, after re-enacting the drownings of the French Revolution with captive White officers, he prepared to exterminate the inhabitants of Vologda and other northern towns. Kedrov suffered from hereditary madness; his father, a violinist, had died in a lunatic asylum. The son spent some time in psychiatric care before re-emerging to work, just as cruelly, for the
Cheka around the Caspian Sea. He retired from the Cheka after the civil war and was head of a neurosurgical institute when Beria arrested him ini939.
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The White armies, too, were guilty of mass murder and terror. The killing of 30,000 Reds by the Finnish Marshal Karl Mannerheim in January 1918 provoked Bolshevik revenge, as did the concentration camps used by the new Estonian and Finnish governments to confine Bolsheviks. In the south of Russia, there were White atrocities, although such lapses were infrequent in the White army, which was staffed with many principled officers and backed up an administration which had not completely discarded its ethics. Insane sadists like Baron Roman Ungern-Sternberg, who killed thousands in Mongolia, were exceptional. Only the Ukrainian ‘anarchist’ Nestor Makhno and some Cossack forces systematically employed terror on a scale comparable to the Red Terror.

Red Terror and civil war thus produced in the USSR a body of men and women for whom summary arrest and execution, often en masse, was a normal, salutary procedure. The holocaust that took place between 1918 and 1922 seems less horrific than Hitler’s or Stalin’s only because it was directed more at a class than at a race, because most survivors remained cut off from the Western world, because the paper trail has been destroyed and because, as Stalin liked to say, ‘Victors are not put on trial’ Above all, the terror was never repented, let alone atoned for. In the later 1920s, like a dormant infection, those capable of slaughtering ‘class enemies’ without remorse waited for the moment when they could ravage the body politic again.

The easiest way to comprehend the scale of the holocaust that Lenin, Trotsky, Dzierżyński and Stalin unleashed is through demographic statistics. We can compare the actual population figures of the USSR in the 1920s with the figures predicted ten years earlier; we can use the reliable 1926 census figures, and extrapolate from figures produced in areas where records were maintained. From 1914 to mid-1917 just under three million men of the Russian empire were killed in the war, as were over 300,000 civilians. From 1917 to 1920 the population of European Russia declined by six million (5 per cent), and proportionately the Ukraine, Belorussia and the Caucasus suffered equally.
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Major Russian industrial cities had always had higher death rates than birth rates; they grew by sucking in fresh working forces from the countryside, where on average
there were 60 deaths to 100 births before the revolution. But from 1917 to 1920 deaths outnumbered births in the countryside and in the cities mortality more than doubled. Epidemics and famines were bigger killers even than the bullets of the Cheka or Red Army. Lenin in December 1919 declared that, ‘Either the [typhus] louse will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat the typhus louse.’ Tuberculosis, heart disease and dysentery, arising from malnutrition, cold and stress, ravaged the country.

Overall, the number of people killed during the revolution and civil war amounted to: nearly two million soldiers of the Red Army and Cheka with over 500,000 in the White armies; 300,000 Ukrainian and Belorussian Jews in pogroms by Ukrainian, Polish and White armies; five million dead of starvation in the Volga region in 1921. Moreover, two million Russians emigrated to Europe and Asia. This amounts to ten million fewer inhabitants. How many other human beings should have been alive in the USSR in 1922 but were not is a matter for conjecture. Plausible evidence reveals that the actual numbers executed or sent to death camps vastly exceeded the official figures of 12,000 shot in1918, and 9,701 shot and 21,724 sent to campsfon921. The repression that followed the rebellions in Kronstadt or Tambov in 1921 alone resulted in tens of thousands of executions.

The age, class and gender of the victims aggravated the disaster: soldiers killed were typically men in their twenties, while the emigres lost to the country were largely members of the professional classes. Those most needed to plough the land, rebuild the factories and run the economy had gone. Dzierżyński understood this very well. The Bolshevik leadership had lost two generations; their only hope for the future was the children, many of whom were starving, homeless orphans, a waste of human resources and a threat to public order. They would be the raw material of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Strategy not sentiment motivated the Cheka, GPU and NKVD to establish colonies for homeless children. Orphanages, children’s communes and theories of education were a major concern for the secret police; having created the mass of orphaned children, they wanted to use them.
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The excuse that Dzierżyński, Lenin and Stalin made for the Cheka’s brutal excesses was inexperience. Sailors, schoolteachers and factory workers could not be expected to maintain professional calm or observe
consistent legality in such a furnace of counter-espionage and counter-terror. In all spheres of government during the first years after the revolution there was a desperate shortage of competent leadership. Men undertook tasks for which they had not the most elementary competence or qualifications. For a soldier, doctor, stoker or peasant to become a chekist only a short apprenticeship was required to inure him to the violence of the job.

If we take a typical chekist we are as likely to find upward mobility from the dispossessed Jewish
shtetl
as downward mobility from a Russian middle-class family. Mikhail Frinovsky, for instance, was one of eight children born to comfortably off parents (his father was a schoolteacher and his mother a landowner). Like Dzierżyński the son of a somewhat sadistic man and like Stalin educated in a theological seminary, Frinovsky may seem to have been predestined to rebel. But, like many Russians of his generation, Frinovsky was so patriotic that he falsified his age in order to volunteer to serve in the Tsar’s army, and he quickly became an NCO in the cavalry. Disillusioned by the slaughter, he deserted. Once outside the law he gravitated to anarchism and terrorism, and in 1917 took part in torturing a major general to death. He hid from the authorities as a bookkeeper in a military hospital, and when the Bolsheviks took over his crimes were transformed into qualifications for the Cheka. After brief service in the Red Army he became one of the most brutal
chekisty
in Moscow, and then with Stalin was let loose at the front in the 1920 war against Poland.

Then there were
chekisty
like Naftali Frenkel, who, but for the war and the revolution, would have remained a chancer and fixer on the fringes of the building trade and gangster rackets in Odessa. Frenkel had got rich on wartime building contracts and dock work, and when revolution broke out and nobody built or imported any more, he helped the Cheka take Odessa from the Whites. Most of the gangsters were then shot by their former allies but Frenkel’s organizing talents were too good to waste. He was allowed to continue racketeering in the port and also worked for the Cheka until Dzierżyński found the combination too compromising. Frenkel was sent, ostensibly as a prisoner, to the far north, where he became a de facto concentration camp commandant and rose to become the chief contractor on the slave-labour White Sea canal in the 1930s.

There were tens of thousands of Frinovskys and Frenkels in the Cheka. It took in men who ten years earlier had intended to pursue wealth or a career and disseminated those it had corrupted throughout Soviet society. Success in the Cheka meant being delegated to take charge of any failing area, military or economic. Thus executioners and interrogators spread into every sector of government, applying their methods to problems once solved by negotiation and persuasion. From mid-1919 on, Dzierżyński, like Stalin and Trotsky, was sent by Lenin to any part of the front where the army was collapsing, to any province where stores of grain might be requisitioned for the starving cities, to any local party which was becoming fractious – wherever ruthlessness and blind belief in the cause could salvage the situation.

Despite constantly losing men to other commissariats, by mid-1919 Dzierżyński had set up a Union-wide Cheka that could work in his absence. His immediate subordinates Peterss, Lācis, Ksenofontov, Menzhinsky and Iagoda – particularly the latter two – were as devoted to the cause as he.
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The atmosphere was remarkably amicable for such a vipers’ nest; the leadership had charisma, and the lower echelons, who knew where their interests lay, showed them loyalty. Together they created a myth that ennobled the sordid bloodshed.

Dzierżyński himself considered that two years in the Cheka was all that could be expected of a recruit, and like Himmler, he saw virtue in the carnage he oversaw. Mārtiņš Lācis declared, ‘However honourable a man may be, however crystal-clear his heart, Cheka work, carried out with almost unlimited rights and in conditions which have an exceptional effect on the nervous system, leaves its mark.’ None ever expressed doubts, but their bodies rebelled with fainting fits, colic and headaches. Like Trotsky, Dzierżyński was prone to hysterical crises which led to breakdowns. Dzierżyński broke down hysterically after the assassination of Count Mirbach in July 1918: detained by Social Revolutionaries, he bared his chest, inviting them to shoot him. When he was released and the Social Revolutionaries had been crushed, he resigned. In autumn, humiliated by his failure to prevent the assassination of Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin’s life, Dzierżyński shaved his hair, forged himself Polish papers in the name of Feliks Domanski, and turned up in Switzerland at the house where his unsuspecting wife and son lived. Only after an interlude on Lake Lugano did he recover and return to Russia. Dzierżyński’s
wife and son followed when the Swiss expelled the Soviet diplomatic mission from Berne. From 1919 on, now supported by a wife, a sister, a sister-in-law and two nieces, but still sleeping in his office and subsisting on bread and tea, Dzierżyński was used by Lenin in a series of special missions. This brought him into Stalin’s orbit.

Stalin and Dzierżyński in Tandem

Until the civil war ended, Commissar for Nationalities Stalin had little to do except formulate policy. Stalin’s real remit was to solve, by any means, supply problems – getting munitions and men to the front, grain to the cities – and to swing the party’s weight behind repressive measures taken by the Cheka or Red Army. The first of Stalin’s missions was from May to September 1918 with his old friend Klim Voroshilov to Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, now Volgograd). Stalin’s task was to bring grain from the still-productive south up to Moscow and Petrograd, but instead he and Voroshilov, who commanded an army approaching Tsaritsyn, interfered in the defence of the city against the Whites. Stalin branded the Red commander Andrei Snesarev, who was a protege of Trotsky, a deserter and a collaborator with the French. Well out of artillery range on the Volga, Stalin and Voroshilov presided over a tribunal which summoned officers from Tsaritsyn. The officers were put on barges on the Volga which were then raked with machine guns. Stalin also commandeered all available troops in the area, including six detachments on their way to Baku to rescue the Bolsheviks there from a takeover by Social Revolutionaries and the British; the deaths of the twenty-six Bolshevik Baku commissars can thus be laid at Stalin’s door.

Stalin was accompanied by his new bride, the seventeen-year-old Nadezhda Allilueva, and made his brother-in-law Fiodor take part in the killing of suspected
‘spetsy’,
the career Tsarist officers on whose skills the ill-trained Red Army depended. Fiodor Alliluev went mad. Stalin however cemented his alliance with Voroshilov and with the Cossack commander Budionny. Their hostility to professional army officers simmered for almost twenty years before it was to boil over into a campaign of extermination. Stalin, strongly supported by Dzierżyński, clashed with
Trotsky over the latter’s use of
spetsy.
Trotsky, as commander-in-chief, responded by forcing Dzierżyński to release Tsarist officers from prison for service in the Red Army, their loyalty assured by the threat of imprisoning or shooting their wives and children if they deserted. Dzierżyński was pushed further towards Stalin, who from this point began to replace Trotsky as the ultimate patron of the Cheka.