Stalin and His Hangmen (22 page)

Of twenty-four allowed out, only five had returned. Menzhinsky was adamant: ‘Not just Lunacharsky but Bukharin vouched for Konstantin Balmont [who stayed in France]. Blok is a poetic nature; if anything makes a bad impression on him he will quite naturally write verse against us. I don’t think he ought to be let out, Blok should be given good conditions in some sanatorium.’
⁶
Lunacharsky protested to Lenin over Menzhinsky’s stance. When the Politbiuro decided on 23 July 1921 in Blok’s favour, the poet was dying. The agony of Russia’s best-loved poet embarrassed the Politbiuro to the extent that it let Blok’s close friend Andrei Bely, symbolist poet and novelist, emigrate to Berlin.

Menzhinsky clashed with Lunacharsky again in 1926. He overruled the commissar and banned Mikhail Bulgakov’s play
The Day of the Turbins.
Only in his last years did Menzhinsky protect fellow writers: when Mikhail Kuzmin went to see him in 1931, he was promised that his lover Iuri Iurkun would not be harassed by OGPU, a promise that was kept until Kuzmin’s death in 1936.

The Cheka accused Petrograd’s intellectuals of being the puppet masters of the Kronstadt sailors. Iakov Agranov, Menzhinsky’s deputy, constructed out of the sailors’ rebellion one of the first imaginary anti-Bolshevik conspiracies.
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Agranov first lured back to Russia those sailors who had fled to Finland: Cheka couriers, pretending to be White Guard agents, smuggled sailors across the border to ‘safe houses’ in Petrograd. Then Agranov claimed that the Kronstadt sailors were linked to a ‘Petrograd Fighting Organization’ led by members of the intelligentsia. (The only signs of such an organization were two explosions at monuments to the two Bolsheviks assassinated in Petrograd in 1918, Moisei Uritsky and Moisei Volodarsky-Goldstein.) Agranov employed as provocateur a certain Korvin-Kriukovsky, the scion of a distinguished family, to act as a malcontent chekist and inveigle Professor Vladimir Tagantsev, a soil scientist, into a few symbolic actions including sticking up dissident fly-posters. The professor was thereupon arrested
with his father (an elderly senator), his entire family and a lorry-load of others.

Summer 1921 in Petrograd was the Cheka’s first successful rehearsal of the techniques for terror perfected in the mid-1930s. In 1921 it took Agranov forty-five days to make Professor Tagantsev accept an ultimatum: to confess and name all fellow conspirators or be executed together with everyone arrested. They signed an agreement on 28 July 1921 ending: ‘I, Agranov, promise, provided that Tagantsev keeps his side of the bargain, that neither Tagantsev, nor his associates nor any other accused, even the couriers from Finland, will be subject to the death penalty.’
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Tagantsev was given a cell with a shower, meals from the staffkitchen and within a couple of days – one of which he spent being driven round the city to establish the addresses of his contacts – had given Agranov 300 suspects, so many that on the appointed night every motor vehicle at the Cheka’s disposal was out rounding them up. After consulting Dzierżyński and Lenin, Agranov broke his bargain with Tagantsev and sentenced over one hundred to death. Tagantsev, the chemist Professor Mikhail Tikhvinsky and, to widespread public horror when the Cheka published the list of condemned, Nikolai Gumiliov – now Russia’s greatest living poet and still growing in stature – were to be shot together with many former civil servants. To accuse Gumiliov of conspiracy, a cavalier monarchist who engaged only in open combat, was absurd.

The sentences produced a flurry of telephone calls, telegrams and personal visits to Dzierżyński, Lenin and Krupskaia in Moscow. Krupskaia rescued some victims but Lenin refused to save Professor Tikhvinsky, a man with whom he was on Christian-name terms, saying that ‘counter-revolution and chemistry are not mutually exclusive’. Lenin reacted too late to appeals on behalf of Gumiliov from Gorky and from women admirers. In Petrograd Grigori Zinoviev, atoning for his laxness over Kronstadt, was impatient for blood. The Petrograd Cheka treated the condemned atrociously. Put in a large cell, handcuffed to each other and left for thirty-six hours without food, water or lavatory facilities, they were loaded at dawn onto trucks and driven out to a firing range. Tagantsev, Gumiliov and some eighty others dug their own graves, were undressed, shot by riflemen and buried, wounded or dead.

A similar trial in Moscow that spring, of the so-called ‘Tactical Centre’, involved operatives including Menzhinsky who were subtler
than Agranov. But these prisoners were braver and more eloquent than Tagantsev: they refused to bargain for their freedom or lives. The accused included Tolstoi’s daughter Aleksandra, the philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev and the historian Sergei Melgunov; the death sentences were commuted. In Moscow Agranov, entrusted only with interrogation, was shamed into silence by the retorts of Tolstoi’s daughter.

The prosecution was conducted with a parody of legality by Nikolai Krylenko. Krylenko, who had a law degree, had achieved fame by being appointed the first commander-in-chief of the Russian army after the Tsar’s General Nikolai Dukhonin had refused to swear loyalty to the Soviets and been murdered by his troops. In summer 1918, Krylenko went back to the law, which he twisted to fit Soviet requirements. Krylenko had an appreciation of the absurd. InJune 1918, after the Soviets had voted to abolish the death penalty, as the prosecutor responsible for sending Admiral Shchastny to the firing squad for not scuttling the Baltic fleet, he declared that the admiral was to be shot, not executed. During the ‘Tactical Centre’ trial, Krylenko burst out laughing when the defence exposed the Cheka’s absurdity.

Agranov, Menzhinsky and Dzierżyński – who explained to intercessors that he could not reprieve a major poet without reprieving all the condemned – belatedly grasped that the Petrograd executions of August 1921 had put professionals and intellectuals off working for, as well as against, the regime. The misjudgement was one reason for reforming the Cheka as the GPU in 1922. A revised criminal code, drawn up by Lenin, provided a new punishment for dissidents: deportation from the Soviet Union.
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In May 1922 this penalty was inflicted on those intellectuals whom a committee – Lenin, Dzierżyński, Menzhinsky and Unszlicht – classified as undesirables. Stalin, preoccupied that summer with unleashing bloody repression on central Asia and enforcing discipline in Georgia, made no objection to such gentle measures. Even the bloodthirsty Zinoviev supported the venture: ‘We are now resorting to a humane measure, to deportation; we can resort to a less humane measure, we shall not hesitate to unsheathe the sword.’
¹⁰

Hitherto deportation had been voluntary; the first intellectuals granted deportation had been those Jewish writers, headed by Khaim Bialik, who wrote in Hebrew. Jews were encouraged to write in Russian and allowed to write in Yiddish, but Hebrew, the language of Zionism, was banned
by Lenin in 1920. In Moscow a hundred Zionist congress participants were arrested and nineteen put in prison. Trotsky’s own brother-in-law by his first marriage Ilia Sokolovsky belonged to the Hebrew writers’ group. Sokolovsky decided to ask his brother-in-law for ‘a ticket out of this paradise you are making’. Khaim Bialik made a fraught journey through the war-ravished Ukraine to Moscow, saw Gorky and obtained from Lenin the visas that took Hebrew literature out of Russia to Palestine.

Famine as well as Cheka bullets thinned out independent-minded intellectuals: seven academicians including the mathematician Aleksandr Liapunov and the linguist Aleksei Shakhmatov starved to death. Only Russia’s Nobel Prize winner, Ivan Pavlov, whose experiments in vivisection were seen as Bolshevism in biology, was given extra rations. Lenin was enraged by ‘professors and writers… counter-revolutionaries, complicit with the Entente, spies, corrupting our youth’. Even in 1919 he had written to Gorky about intellectuals ‘who think themselves the nation’s brains… actually not brains, but shit.’ On 19 May 1922 he set Dzierżyński on them but nine days later had his second stroke. Incoherently but intransigently, four days after recovering his handwriting, Lenin scrawled to Stalin on 17 July:

Has it been decided to eradicate all the National Socialists?… I think all should be deported. They’re worse than any Social Revolutionary because they are more cunning… The Mensheviks Rozanov (a doctor, devious)… S. L. Frank (author
of Methodology)
… A commission under Messing and Mantsev [two senior GPU men] must draw up lists and several hundred such gentlemen should be mercilessly expelled abroad. We’ll clean Russia up for a long time… This must be done right away. By the end of the trial of the Social Revolutionaries, no later. Arrest several hundred and without declaring the reasons, ‘out you go, gentlemen!’ All the authors of
The House of Writers,
of
Thought
in Petersburg, turn over Kharkov, we don’t know that town, it’s abroad for us…
¹¹

Lenin sent lists of ‘active anti-Soviet intellectuals’ whose names he could still recall for Menzhinsky and Unszlicht to track down, whether they were at liberty or in a GPU prison, and asked Kamenev and Unszlicht for further names. Editors of academic journals who gave
contributors too much freedom; doctors who at conferences kept up pre-revolutionary traditions of free speech; economists and agronomists with their own ideas on factories and land – all had to go. The expulsion by the dying dictator of the country’s greatest doctors anticipated Stalin’s ‘doctors’ plot’ of thirty years later.

On 4 September 1922 Dzierżyński discussed the list with Lenin and instructed Unszlicht to comb through all contributors to academic and literary journals. Unfortunately, neither Pole knew enough Russian philosophy or literature to judge whom to deport and whom to keep. Dzierżyński wrote:

I think that things won’t progress if Comrade Menzhinsky himself does not undertake it. Have a word with him and give him this note. We must work out a plan, constantly correcting and adding to it. We must divide all the intelligentsia into groups. For example: 1) literary writers; 2) journalists and political writers; 3) economists (here we need subgroups): a) financial, b) energy, c) transport, d) trade; e) cooperatives, etc.; 4) technical (more subgroups): a) engineers, b) agronomists, c) doctors, d) general staff; 5) professors and teachers, etc., etc. Each intellectual must have a file… It must be remembered that our section’s task is not just deportation, but active help in straightening out the [party] line on specialists, i.e. causing disintegration in their ranks and bringing forward those who are prepared without reservations to support Soviet power…
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In autumn 1922 the cream of Moscow’s intelligentsia was gathered at the Lubianka (similar round-ups took place in Petrograd, Kazan, Minsk, Kiev). Most were charged with counter-revolutionary activity; a few got their names taken off the list; some were classified essential workers by Soviet institutions. OGPU failed to trace some deportees while others were in their custody awaiting ‘trial’ on other political charges. The detainees did not realize how lucky they were; those who were allowed to stay in the motherland rarely survived more than fifteen years. By the end of September 1922 Genrikh Iagoda had arranged for the remaining 130 or so to be deported to Germany. The German chancellor protested that ‘Germany is not Siberia’ but the consul in Moscow issued visas to those deportees who certified that they were leaving voluntarily. All
deportees naturally did so, and, forbidden to take books or manuscripts with them, assembled on the Petrograd docks.

The two ship-loads that left for Stettin were Russia’s greatest gift to Europe and America. We owe structural linguistics to Trubetskoi and Iakobson, and Christian existentialism to Nikolai Berdiaiev. The historians Sergei Melgunov and Aleksandr Kizevetter were major influences on Western historiography. Prague’s Russian Academy and Paris’s Sorbonne were enriched by this forced exodus. Conversely, the USSR was deprived of some of its best minds, while those that remained drew the obvious conclusions and withdrew into themselves. The deportations of 1922 were as catastrophic for civic society in the USSR as the executions of 1921.

Negotiating with such eloquent and self-assured victims was an education for the GPU. In one interrogation, Dzierżyński, Menzhinsky and Lev Kamenev were subjected to an hour-long lecture by the idealist philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev. Dzierżyński was dumbfounded; he could only mutter, perhaps thinking of himself, ‘One can be a materialist in theory and an idealist in life or, conversely, an idealist in theory and a materialist in life,’ after which he ordered Menzhinsky to find a motorcycle and sidecar to take Berdiaev home. In the summer and autumn of 1922, the Moscow and Petrograd
chekisty
were subjected to many more hours of principled refutation of everything they claimed to stand for. When Menzhinsky told the historian Melgunov that he would never see Russia again, the latter retorted, ‘I’ll come back in two years; you won’t hold on any longer.’ Menzhinsky replied, ‘No, I think we’ll last another six.’

Appeals and intercessions grated on Lenin. He decided on foreign sanatoria for men like Gorky and Korolenko who opposed his repressions but were too prestigious to execute, imprison or deport. To Commissar for Health Nikolai Semashko he wrote in March 1922: ‘Please appoint a special person (best, a
well-known
doctor) knowing abroad and
known abroad
) to send abroad to Germany Tsiurupa, Krestinsky, Osinsky, Kuraev, Gorky and Korolenko. It needs skilful enquiries, requests, propaganda, writing to Germany, helping
the sick
, etc. Do it ultra-carefully (taking pains)…’