Stalin and His Hangmen (18 page)

In the early stages of the revolution Dzierżyński had several times sided with Trotsky. When Lenin caved in to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk in January 1918 Dzierżyński, like Trotsky, refused to endorse what he called ‘a capitulation of our entire programme’. Unlike Trotsky, however, Dzierżyński distrusted anyone who had been in Tsarist service: for the Cheka he recruited almost nobody who had served in the Tsar’s secret police.

The instant dislike that Stalin and Trotsky had taken to each other in Vienna in 1913 now erupted into a feud that would only end when one killed the other. In 1918 Trotsky countered Stalin’s interventions around Tsaritsyn with a threat: ‘I order Stalin to form immediately a Revolutionary Council for the Southern Front on the basis of non-interference by commissars in operational business. Failure to carry out this order within twenty-four hours will force me to take severe measures.’
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On the same day Stalin complained at length to Lenin:

Trotsky, generally, can’t refrain from histrionic gestures… Now he’s striking a new blow with his gesture about discipline, and all this Trotskyist discipline actually consists of having the most prominent people active at the front watching the behinds of military specialists from the ‘non-party’ camp of counter-revolutionaries and not stopping these people from ruining the front… Trotsky can’t sing without falsetto… Therefore I ask now, before it is too late, for Trotsky to be put in his place, given limits, for I fear that Trotsky’s crazy commands… handing the whole front to so-called bourgeois military specialists who inspire no confidence… will create discord between the army and the command…
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Shooting commanders
pour encourager les autres
was a strategy common to Stalin and Trotsky. Their overall styles were, however, very different. Trotsky’s train carried motor cars, a cinema photographer and a brass band; stations ahead were telegraphed to lay in butter, quails and asparagus
for the commissar. Shootings of deserters and retreating officers alternated with rousing speeches to the soldiery. Stalin, on the other hand, travelled in ostentatious discomfort; he had no praise for the soldiery, and even less trust: ‘I must say that those non-working elements who constitute the majority of our army, the peasants, won’t fight for socialism, they won’t! They refuse to fight voluntarily… Hence our task is to make these elements go into combat…’
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The Whites besieging Tsaritsyn ultimately failed to capture the city, but Stalin’s brutality had done more damage to his own side than to the enemy. Voroshilov was threatened by Trotsky with a court martial; Lenin concurred, telling the southern army it could appoint anyone as commander except Voroshilov. This humiliation made Voroshilov dependent on Stalin for his military future. Stalin had now collected two men, Voroshilov and Dzierżyński, whom Lenin and Trotsky had humiliated and spurned.

When demoralized Reds surrendered the Ural city of Perm at the end of 1918 to the Whites, thus allowing British forces to link up with Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, ruler of Siberia, Stalin and Dzierżyński were dispatched together, in their first collaborative venture, to punish and rally the army. All January 1919, based at Viatka, where Dzierżyński had spent his first exile, he and Stalin were inseparable inquisitors. They were so ruthless that in February 1919 the party’s Central Committee had to issue an order releasing the surviving officers ‘arrested by Stalin’s and Dzierżyński’s commission to be handed over for the appropriate institutions to deploy’.

This, Dzierżyński’s first visit to the front, shook his morale but not his resolve, and in April 1919 he wrote to his sister Aldona:

But you can’t understand me – a soldier of the revolution, warring so that there shall be no more injustice in the world, so that war shall not give whole millions of people as booty for rich conquerors. War is a terrible thing… The most wretched nation has been the first to rise up in defence of its rights – and has put up resistance to the whole world. Would you want me to stand aside here?
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The following year Dzierżyński moved even closer to Stalin. In 1920, waiting in the Ukraine for the Soviet conquest of Poland, the Dzierżyńskis lived in a dacha near Kharkov with the couple then most
intimate with Stalin, the poet Demian Bedny and his wife. That summer, as the Red Army pushed the Poles out of the Ukraine and back to the outskirts of Warsaw, Stalin and Dzierżyński worked together and again showed Lenin and Trotsky their limitations. Stalin had promised Lenin in July 1920 an unimaginable victory: ‘Now that we have the Comintern, a defeated Poland… it would be sinful not to encourage revolution in Italy… and in states that are not yet strong like Hungary, Czechoslovakia… In short, we have to loose the anchor and move before imperialism has time to put its broken cart in order…’ But for all the brilliance and experience of Commander Tukhachevsky, who had begun his career as a Tsarist officer, by August 1920 the Red cavalry, like that of the Mongols 700 years before, was bogged down in the Polish forests and marshes with neither tents nor coats to keep off the incessant rain. Stalin, however, loudly insisted that the Soviet government should reject David Lloyd George’s offer to mediate peace with the Poles on the basis of the Curzon line boundary (today’s Polish – Belorussian – Ukrainian border) and grab as much Polish territory as possible before any truce could be negotiated. As a result, the Red Army spent resources besieging Lwów, the capital of the Polish Carpathians. The Poles counter-attacked and took 100,000 Russian prisoners, forcing the Soviets to concede a vast belt of territory. The glory went to Poland’s ruler Piłsudski, the disgrace to Dzierżyński and Stalin.
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Dzierżyński had expected to join the Red Army in Warsaw to help form a Soviet Polish government. He amused his fellow Poles among the Bolsheviks, Karl Radek in particular, by his modest surmise that he might take on the ministry of education in the new Poland, after putting Piłsudski up against a wall. The defeat of the Red Army on the Vistula left him crestfallen. Stalin, Dzierżyński and Voroshilov had anticipated victory. Now Dzierżyński, like Voroshilov in 1918, was bound to Stalin in disgrace. Voroshilov wrote to Orjonikidze with amazement, ‘We expected rebellions and revolution from the Polish workers and peasants but got chauvinism and stupid hatred of “Russians”.’
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Trotsky was mercilessly sarcastic about Stalin’s lapses – whose treatment twenty years later of the Polish officers who had disabused his dreams would be as barbarous as his reckoning with him. Voroshilov lost for a short time all taste for command: in March 1921 he served as a common soldier, attacking the mutinous sailors of Kronstadt across the
ice. In November 1921 he wrote to Stalin, ‘Working in the war department no longer appeals to me… I suppose I shall be more useful in a civilian career… I’ll take any work [in the Don basin] and hope to shake myself out of it, for I’ve started to get poorly (mentally). I embrace you strongly…’
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In February 1921, the Red Army invaded Georgia and completed the reconquest of Transcaucasia. The Georgian communists who gained power were, however, not Leninist puppets and pursued a liberal line – leaving at liberty members of the Menshevik government who had not fled the country. Budu Mdivani and Pilipe Makharadze resisted Stalin’s decision to subsume the Georgian republic into a Transcaucasian federation. Likewise, the Soviet detachment of Abkhazia from Tbilisi’s rule, making it an autonomous republic amenable to Russian exploitation, upset the Georgians. Stalin often expressed contempt for his native country: ‘Tbilisi is picturesque, but Baku is more interesting,’ he would write to DemianBedny. In 1923 he told Trotsky, ‘Georgians behave like an imperial power towards Armenians, Abkhaz, Ajarians, Osetians. This deviancy is of course less dangerous than Russian imperialism, but it’s still dangerous enough…’
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Stalin showed such ruthlessness in the Caucasus – in autumn 1920 he supervised the bloody suppression of Circassians and Osetians – that Lenin remarked that there was nobody worse than a ‘Russified aborigine’ at imposing Russification with insensitivity.

The task of dealing with the Georgians was handed over to Sergo Orjonikidze, who had demonstrated his ruthlessness by shooting Azeri and Armenian nationalists, whether communists or not. When Georgian communists complained to Lenin, Stalin and Orjonikidze were furious and the latter struck one of them in the face for calling him ‘Stalin’s mule’. Lenin was furious with Orjonikidze – ‘he had no right to the irritability that he and Dzierżyński blame everything on’ – and put Stalin and Dzierżyński in charge of a commission to investigate and repair the damage. These two, however, exonerated Orjonikidze. Lenin could only attempt to placate the offended Georgians with a short note in March 1923, the last he dictated before arteriosclerosis took away his speech: ‘Strictly secret. To comrades Mdivani, Makharadze et al. Copy to Trotsky and Kamenev. Respected comrades! I follow your cause with all my heart. I am indignant at Orjonikidze’s coarseness and Stalin’s and Dzierżyński’s connivance. I am preparing notes and a speech for you.’
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There were personal reasons why Stalin gathered a coterie around him of men such as Voroshilov, Dzierżyński and Orjonikidze. Stalin was a loner. During the civil war, he stood out in his isolation. Other Bolsheviks had intimate allies: wives, sisters and mistresses. Even Dzierżyński, once Zofia had arrived from Zurich, was eventually cajoled into living in the Kremlin; his wife found work first in the Commissariat for Education, then as a party propagandist. Wives of leading revolutionaries were placed in inconspicuous but crucial government and party posts. Zinoviev’s second wife Zlata Lilina was a power in education, while her brother Ionov controlled state publishing in Petrograd. Olga Bronstein, Kamenev’s wife and Trotsky’s sister, although she had never been to school, recruited major poets to teach the proletariat to create; later she ran the theatres and then the Lenin museum. Lenin’s wife Krupskaia was nominally in charge of education: in 1923 she issued circulars banning the publication or teaching of Plato, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, John Ruskin, Friedrich Nietzsche and Tolstoi. Trotsky’s wife Natalia Sedova controlled the State Depository of Confiscated Valuables and the museums.

Divorce and remarriage linked people’s commissars to poets, painters, university professors but, despite the Bolsheviks’ proclamation of sexual equality, very few free female spirits – Larisa Reisner, Aleksandra Kollontai – roamed the fringes of power. The wives of Bolshevik leaders (but not Zofia Dzierżyńska) had salons where those intellectuals who had not emigrated or were in hiding sought protection from these influential and underemployed consorts. Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek and Bukharin – not to mention Lenin – were patrons whose friends, counsellors, admirers and supplicants coalesced, even before the civil war was over, into a new class of hangers-on: the revolutionary intelligentsia. The process worked in reverse, too. The poet Larisa Reisner, who had flirted with Blok and Mandelstam and slept with Gumiliov, became, as soon as revolution broke out, the consort of the commander of a group of Petrograd sailors Raskolnikov, and later of the wittiest and most cynical of the Bolshevik inner circle Karl Radek. But she never burnt her bridges with the world of poetry and gave such apolitical outsiders as Anna Akhmatova and Mandelstam protection.

Such half-revolutionary, semi-decadent bourgeois circles were alien to Stalin. No intellectual except Demian Bedny would, until Stalin
acquired total power, be seduced into a dialogue. Stalin’s child bride Nadezhda was no use in forging alliances; the only connection she gave Stalin was with the Alliluevs. They were Bolsheviks, but apart from Stanislav Redens, head of the Odessa Cheka and married to Nadezhda’s elder sister, they offered Stalin no useful contacts. Even Stalin’s underlings Molotov and Voroshilov had wives who opened more doors.

Stalin, however, had one particular resource to win him allies and neutralize enemies: his fellow Caucasians. Apart from Sergo Orjonikidze, he had another boon companion in Nestor Lakoba, the Abkhaz leader famed for his aquiline eyesight and profound deafness. With Stalin’s assistance Lakoba, once a junior policeman, detached his small Black Sea homeland from Georgia and made it an island of prosperity in a war-ravaged Caucasus. The Bolsheviks connived at Lakoba’s avoidance of reforms and purges; the pre-revolution palaces and villas along the coast were neither sacked nor destroyed. Stalin invited Lakoba to stay at his dacha at Zubalovo.
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When Dzierżyński’s mental and physical health faltered and he agreed to take annual breaks, Stalin sent not just him but most of the Cheka leaders to Lakoba.
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Sergo Orjonikidze wrote to Lakoba on 25 September 1922:

Dear Comrade Lakoba,
… Comrades Dzierżyński, Iagoda and others are coming to stay with you for two months. They must be put in the best villa (clean, with no insects, with heating, lighting, etc.) right on the sea. You must be in all respects a hospitable host worthy of the Abkhaz name, which I do not have the slightest doubt about. The bearer of this note will give you more details. Be well. I shake your hand warmly. Your Sergo.
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Caucasian hospitality, after decades of sunless privation, seduced even the ascetic Dzierżyński. Lakoba, whom Stalin cultivated for fifteen years, was his best tool for managing and eliminating rivals. When Lenin’s death was imminent, Stalin’s close protege Abram Belenky, then Kremlin commandant, had Trotsky sent off for two months to Abkhazia, ostensibly for his health. Belenky told Lakoba on 6 January 1924: