Stalin and His Hangmen (19 page)

I consider the best place for housing him is… where you used to put up Comrades Dzierżyński and Zinoviev. The doctors have prescribed Comrade Trotsky complete peace and although our people will provide Trotsky’s guards, I nevertheless ask you, dear Comrade Lakoba, with your sharp eye and care, to take Comrade Trotsky under your wing, then our minds will be completely at rest… we have no need to speak any more
on
this subject, I am sure you will have understood me completely. Obviously there are to be no meetings or formal parades… Comrades Dzierżyński and Iagoda send you a warm cordial greeting.
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By the last year of Lenin’s life Dzierżyński shared Stalin’s hostility to Trotsky and he actively helped Stalin get him out of the way. A civil war hero, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, who had admired Trotsky’s organizational genius, was rebuked by Dzierżyński: ‘You’ve gone too far and you are not devoted to the party and revolution… keeping the dictatorship of the proletariat… demands from the party the greatest unity of ideas and unity of action… And that means Trotsky has to be fought with.’

Trotsky’s vulnerable point was his hypochondria. Dzierżyński had arranged treatment for him before, and in May 1921 Lenin was worried by Trotsky’s symptoms: chronic colitis, arterial spasms, fainting fits. The Politbiuro decided on 23 April 1921: ‘Comrade Trotsky is to be told to leave for treatment in the country, taking into account his doctors’ prescriptions when choosing the place and time. Supervision of Trotsky’s compliance with this decision is the responsibility of Comrade Dzierżyński.’
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Trotsky was sent to the north Caucasus.
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On 5 January 1924, as the struggle to dominate the post-Lenin USSR intensified, Stalin saw to it that ‘leave for Trotsky’ was the first item on the agenda for the Politbiuro. A week later, three days before Lenin died, Dzierżyński made it even clearer to Lakoba that he must keep Stalin’s rival away from the levers of power:

Comrade Lakoba! Dear Comrade! Because of the state of Comrade Trotsky’s health, the doctors are sending him to Sukhum. This has become widely known even abroad and therefore I am afraid lest there be any attempts on his life by White Guards. My request to you is to bear this in mind. Because of his state of health, Comrade Trotsky will not generally be able to leave his dacha and therefore the main task is not to let any outsiders or unknown persons in…

When Lenin died, Stalin with extraordinary cunning arranged the succession so that his authority would be undisputed. He placated Lenin’s leftist heirs, Zinoviev and Kamenev, by joining them in what would be a short-lived triumvirate. The liberal right he reassured by seeing to it that Rykov was chosen as ‘prime minister’, i.e. chairman of the Council of Commissars. Stalin, as the party’s general secretary, held the reins of power, and he ensured the Soviet economy came under his control by making Dzierżyński economic overlord. Meanwhile, Dzierżyński’s agents sampled public reaction to Lenin’s death and reassured Stalin that the Soviet man in the street was most afraid of Trotsky seizing power, bringing back militant communism and ending the New Economic Plan. The NEP allowed private capital to set up small businesses and even operate state concessions; it let peasants farm the land as if they owned it and allowed businessmen and intellectuals to travel abroad. But the authors of the NEP saw it as only a temporary retreat from socialism to allow the economy and population to prepare for the next stage in the creation of a communist society.

While Trotsky languished in the Caucasus, Stalin and Dzierżyński took care of everything from Lenin’s embalming to the Politbiuro’s agenda. It dawned too late on Trotsky how disastrous his acquiescence had been. The evening after Lenin died, Stalin composed a telegram: ‘To Iagoda, to be given immediately to Trotsky. I regret the technical impossibility of your arriving in time for the funeral. There are no reasons to expect any complications. In these conditions we see no necessity to interrupt your treatment. Naturally we leave a final decision to you…’
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Trotsky saw that he would have no say in the Politbiuro until May 1924, when Lenin’s last will and testament would be read out to the thirteenth congress of the Russian Bolshevik party. This secret ‘Letter to the Congress’, Trotsky hoped, would name him the legitimate heir to power and Stalin unfit to inherit Lenin’s mantle. Until then his demands would be modest. ‘Do you consider my immediate return to Moscow a good idea? My physical state makes it possible to take part in closed sessions, but not in public speeches. Trotsky.’
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Dzierżyński readily acquiesced in politically disabling Trotsky, who was clearly erratic and divisive, but found Stalin’s suppression of other dissident voices within the Bolshevik party harder to swallow. The stroke that silenced Lenin in spring 1923 had deprived the party of the force
that could pull everyone together. Lenin, unlike Stalin, allowed others to let off steam before he imposed his own views, and did so without recriminations. But, at Stalin’s insistence, the Cheka moved from suppressing other left-wing parties to actions that contradicted the policy of Democratic Centralism preached by Lenin in order to make Stalin’s the controlling voice in the Politbiuro.

Dzierżyński and the Cheka actually had a motivation as strong as Stalin’s for repressing dissent: the Cheka needed something to do when peace came or it risked dissolution. In autumn 1919 the White armies had been definitively repulsed from central Russia. Civil war raged for two more years, but the existence of the Soviet state was no longer in doubt. The need for the Cheka came under question. Dzierżyński sought new roles and on 1 May 1920 he had won the Cheka peacetime powers: ‘The law gives the Cheka the possibility of using administrative measures to isolate those who infringe labour rules, parasites and persons who arouse suspicion of being counter-revolutionary, persons for whom there is not enough evidence for judicial punishment and where any court, even the most harsh, will always or most often acquit them.’
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In March 1921, Zinoviev, aggrieved by malcontents in Petrograd’s factories, invited Dzierżyński to put Cheka groups in every trade union branch: theunions, which Trotsky had seen as the foundation of workers’ power, were emasculated.

Information was the Cheka’s commodity in its transactions with Stalin. In 1918 it had been concerned with who people were, not what they thought; now the control of thought and speech offered expansion instead of retrenchment. When Russia’s postal services were restored to a shadow of their former glory, the Cheka took on enough perlustrators to intercept and read every item of mail. Information on the public mood – on conversations in queues, on dissident intellectuals, on grumbling peasants – was gathered from informers into weekly reports for Stalin and the party. But real counter-revolutionaries were now extinct and the surviving populace was too tired, hungry and dejected. Even though factory workers in 1922 were once again faced with starvation, as inflation ravaged the Soviet economy as badly as Weimar Germany and the authorities looted pay packets for fictitious grain or gold bonds, there was no resistance that would tax even a local Cheka.

Stalin nevertheless needed the Cheka, but one with a changed ethos in order to harass his opponents. For Stalin, Dzierżyński’s only defect
was fastidiousness: he disliked fabricating evidence. Still less was he willing to repress party members, even when Stalin persuaded him that fractions menaced the party and that all fractious discussion was therefore counter-revolutionary. One reason why Dzierżyński’s energy was diverted first into the railways and then into restoring the Russian economy was that Stalin needed the services of the cleverer, more inventive and less principled deputy heads of the GPU (the Cheka’s name from 1922), namely Viacheslav Menzhinsky and Genrikh Iagoda, and began to deal with them directly.

From Cheka to State Political Directorate

Dzierżyński shot
chekisty
found taking bribes; he deducted alimony from the salaries of unfaithful married men. But the Cheka chiefs did not even mildly reprimand those who shot the innocent or battered prisoners into confessing. The decision to slaughter the Tsar’s family in Ekaterinburg and Perm, taken in July 1918 by local party and Cheka officials, was not authorized by the Moscow Cheka but the fait accompli was approved. When the Tsar’s family and servants were dead Gorky pleaded, and Lenin apparently agreed, that the killings could stop. But Jekabs Peterss ordered the Cheka to kill the grand dukes imprisoned in Petrograd, including the harmless and respected historian Nikolai Mikhailovich. The grand dukes were beaten, stripped half-naked and, some on stretchers, shot. Peterss was not even reproved.

Only when cases were fabricated en masse did Dzierżyński sometimes act. In June 1921 at Sebezh on the Latvian border the chekist Pavlovich invented a conspiracy called Tempest
(Vikhr)
and rounded up a hundred victims to be shot. Vasili Ulrikh, who was to preside over Stalin’s worst show trials in the 1930s, and Agranov, Dzierżyński’s acolyte, believed in Tempest; it took Dzierżyński months to expose the fabrication and have Pavlovich shot. Within a year, however, Dzierżyński stopped such investigations, and a series of fabricated trials in the early 1920s cost hundreds their lives.

In early 1920 the death penalty was abolished. Although, because of the war with Poland, it was reinstated on 22 May, the Cheka announced
its humanity: a directive of outrageous disingenousness was signed by Dzierżyński and Iagoda:

Those arrested in political cases, members of various anti-Soviet parties, are often kept in extremely bad conditions; the attitude taken to them by the administration of places of detention is wrong and often even rough. The Cheka points out that these categories of person must be considered not as persons to be punished, but as persons temporarily isolated from society in the interests of the revolution, and the conditions of their detention must not be of a penal nature.

In 1922 the death penalty was briefly abolished again, except in frontier zones; the Cheka moved its condemned prisoners to frontier zones for shooting. A few surviving grand old radicals still called for the total abolition of capital punishment (the death penalty had been more vehemently opposed in Tsarist Russia than in any other country) and in 1925 the distinguished Tolstoyan Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov pleaded with the Politbiuro on the hundredth anniversary of the execution of the five Decembrist rebel leaders: ‘Are we really going to greet the tenth anniversary of the triumph of communists (who began the condemnation of the death penalty) and the coming centenary of Tolstoi with shootings, with laws on bloody reprisals? Are you really going to drag on without end in this way along the inhuman, bloody, senseless path trod by the Tsarist tradition?’
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The year 1921 had seemed a disaster for the Cheka. In March the Council of People’s Commissars cut its funding by a quarter; in November Lenin relegated it ‘to purely political tasks’ and commissioned Kamenev and Dzierżyński to find it less punitive roles. He did this reluctantly, presumably impelled by economic necessity, as he had yielded to pressure to restore private trade in the New Economic Plan. On one note from Kamenev he wrote, presumably about Kamenev’s willingness to give way on questions of security: ‘Poor, weak, timid, intimidated little man.’
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On 6 February 1922, in a decree encouragingly entitled, ‘On the abolition of the All-Union Extraordinary Commission and on the rules for carrying out searches, confiscations and arrests’, the Cheka became the GPU (State Political Directorate) and was made nominally answerable to the Ministry of the Interior. Also encouraging for the Soviet population were the execution statistics: by 1923 executions of political
offenders had fallen (officially) to 414 from 1,962 in 1922 and 9,701 in 1920.

Dzierżyński ruled the GPU as he had the Cheka, but he had less scope for his insatiable energy. His time – when he was not ill – was spent restoring the railways, requisitioning grain and spreading, if not terror, then a spirit of panic in the economy. His tendency to put revolutionary sentiment before economic logic put him at loggerheads with better-educated commissars, on the left and on the right. Kamenev and Rykov in the Union of Labour and Defence set up in 1923 to revive the economy treated him condescendingly. Dzierżyński turned to Stalin for support. He wrote to him on 3 August 1923 (the letter was apparently never sent), ‘Given my weak voice, which can’t reach its goal, another voice must be raised.’ Doubts left ‘iron Feliks’ hopelessly malleable: ‘But then there will be cracks in our Soviet building.’
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Like Stalin, Dzierżyński was impatient and incompetent with economics; he used retribution to tackle economic problems. When workers complained of devalued earnings, Dzierżyński wrote (28 March 1923) to Iagoda demanding confiscation of all property and the exile from cities of all speculators, bar owners and money dealers, but the state’s own currency operations broke down and the money dealers had to be pardoned.
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Dzierżyński, however hard he worked, was uneasy with economists. One economist found Dzierżyński’s presence at discussions unnerving: ‘It was hard to keep the thread of one’s thoughts in one’s head, to keep track of Rykov’s objections and to reply to him. I felt that Dzierżyński’s cold pupils were boring right through me like X-rays and, after me, were vanishing somewhere in the stone wall’ By the mid-1920s, however, trains ran, factories produced goods, and the public credited these achievements, however shoddy, to Dzierżyński’s self-sacrificing energy. To inject life into any sphere of activity, Dzierżyński was made chairman: although he never went to a cinema, he was chairman of a film association and, more appropriately, he was elected chairman of the Society for Interplanetary Relations. Dzierżyński was left desolated and vulnerable by Lenin’s death. In a long letter to Stalin and Orjonikidze, he confessed: ‘I am not a theoretician and I am not a blind follower of persons – in my life I have personally loved only two revolutionaries and leaders. Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin – nobody else.’
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The film that Dzierżyński commissioned of Lenin’s funeral was the only cinema film he ever watched.