Stalin and His Hangmen (25 page)

OGPU began to present itself as a band of principled intellectuals, many with legal training, but still executed 2,550 people in 1924. It did, however, clean up its act and find its worst sadists other work. It sent a commission to the special purpose northern camps between Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, extermination camps manned by
chekisty
who had disgraced themselves in metropolitan areas. One camp, Kholmogory, in the hands of a sadistic Lithuanian called Bachulis, was as bad as any of Hitler’s would be. The surviving prisoners were sent to the monastery complexes of the Solovetsky islands; the guards went with them. In 1929 Stalin and Iagoda had 600 of them shot, together with many of the prisoners.

This retreat emboldened the liberals in the party: a commission charged OGPU with 826 judicial killings and widespread bribe-taking. To stop depraving soldiers and policemen still further, Lunacharsky, Radek and Krylenko demanded that only criminals should act as executioners. Mass murderers such as the Siberian bandit Kultiapy were therefore reprieved in 1924 and set to work as prison executioners. A few young sadists, however, were too useful to lose: Mikhail Frinovsky, a man who like Stalin had left theological college to become a murderer, was to rise to ministerial status in the 1930s, while Vsevolod Balitsky, who had tortured and raped in Kiev, became chairman of the Ukraine GPU and then Ukraine’s commissar for internal affairs. Stalin would order him to starve the Ukraine’s peasants to death.
²⁷

The top OGPU echelons, if they wanted to keep their fiefdoms, had to serve the intrigues of a new master. In 1925, step by step, Stalin was eradicating his potential rivals: ‘the superb measurer of doses’ as his victims, only belatedly feeling the cumulative effects of his poisons, called him. Manipulating rivals to eliminate enemies, Stalin showed real genius. He used his insight into the base side of human nature, an ability to work while opponents slept or convalesced, a magisterial calmness in the face of righteous indignation and an understanding of games theory which only the best poker players have. Above all, he assured OGPU of a prominent future role in government.

Trotsky, and others ousted by Stalin, blamed their defeat on
naznach-enstvo,
Stalin’s fixing of appointments. The posts that Stalin occupied in the party and in government let him determine who went where to serve the state. By 1925 the Soviet bureaucracy was more numerous than that of Tsarist Russia; posts of any importance were reserved for members
of the
nomenklatura,
the list of politically reliable party members; and appointments were decided by the party apparatus. As one Central Committee party member put it, ‘You were hardly likely to vote “no” if you then got sent to Murmansk or Tashkent.’ Party gatherings voting on debating points put forward by Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev were packed with those who depended on Stalin’s favours.

Stalin prepared meticulously for each encounter. He filled plenary meetings, conferences and congresses with his claque; he spoke as a prosecutor, forcing his opponents onto the defensive. Stalin’s intimates had no doubts of the outcome for all who got in his way. In July 1924 Demian Bedny asked Stalin, long before the latter had Zinoviev removed from the Politbiuro, ‘Have you heard the latest joke? The English are willing to let us have Marx’s ashes… in exchange for Zinoviev’s.’ Stalin’s private correspondence with Demian Bedny shows the anti-Semitism behind the campaign against Trotsky. In 1926 Bedny wrote to Stalin:

If I touch on Trotsky,

The whole opposition roars.

What’s the problem, ethnic claque?

Explain it to me carefully:

If I hit Shliapnikov, I get a brawl!

If I go for Trotsky it’s a
pogrom
!
²⁸

The differences between Trotsky and Stalin were in style, not substance. They were both Leninists: they believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat, in world revolution and in turning the peasantry into workers on the land. Where they differed was on emphasis and timing. Trotskyism – a term of abuse devised by Stalin’s supporters, who called themselves true Leninists – was nostalgia for the Red Army’s glories and the inclination to pour oil on any revolutionary fire, whether in Germany reeling from hyperinflation, in Britain facing a general strike or in China torn apart by warlords. Stalin had caution and reticence on his side. Trotsky promised to wind up the NEP, to squeeze resources from the peasantry and begin massive industrialization as well as world war. Stalin bided his time, meanwhile letting the right wing, notably Bukharin, relax the state’s pressure on the economy so that the peasants built up reserves worth confiscating.

Trotsky and Stalin criticized each other’s records of heresy from October 1917 to the end of the civil war, their successes and failures in forcing Red Army commanders on to victory and the number of occasions each had angered Lenin. In such arguments Trotsky came off worse.

At first Stalin let Zinoviev and Kamenev, who envied Trotsky his military laurels, do the dirty work. On 4 January 1925 Zinoviev drafted a proposal: ‘To deem it impossible, in the present condition of things that Trotsky has created, for Trotsky to hold such posts as the Chairman of the Military Council and member of the Politbiuro…’ Stalin and Bukharin meanwhile wore masks of neutrality. Trotsky reacted wildly: he declared himself too ill to take part in the plenum and published in
Pravda
a defence against ‘monstrous accusations’, but his sense of party discipline was so entrenched that he obeyed the Central Committee.

Dzierżyński wrote Trotsky off. ‘The party has had to dethrone Trotsky solely because he, by virtually attacking Zinoviev and Kamenev and other members of the Central Committee of our party, has raised his hand against party unity…’ he wrote to Stalin and Orjonikidze on 6 October 1925. By now Stalin could dispose of his temporary allies: Zinoviev and Kamenev, used by Stalin to weaken Trotsky’s grip, were themselves declared to be a faction. Dzierżyński, as unhappy as a sheepdog whose flock has scattered, hated factional infighting; he accused Zinoviev and Kamenev of self-serving cowardice, of setting the workers against the peasants. He and OGPU were now entirely Stalin’s men – there was no other shepherd for the sheepdogs to follow.

The dispute in 1925 and 1926 between Zinoviev and Kamenev on the one hand, and Stalin and Bukharin on the other had real basis. Zinoviev and Kamenev’s supporters were Leningrad (as Petrograd had been renamed in 1924) and Moscow factory workers, aggrieved by unemployment and by the low purchasing power of their wages when in work; their real income was half what it had been before the revolution. ‘What did we struggle for?’ was the workers’ slogan. The prosperity of the NEPmen, who lived by retail trade, gambling and racketeering, and the peasantry, too poor to purchase manufactured goods but self-sufficient, made the workers resentful. They supported Zinoviev and Kamenev who, within a few months of disarming Trotsky, were arguing for Trotsky’s programme: winding up the NEP and dispossessing
the peasantry for the sake of the urban proletariat who had made the revolution.

In December 1925 at the fourteenth party congress Zinoviev spoke out against Stalin’s moderate line on agriculture and industrialization but the brilliance of his oratory was useless. Stalin, not Zinoviev, received an orchestrated ‘storm of applause’. Zinoviev was removed from the Politbiuro, from his chairmanship of the Comintern and from his power base in Leningrad. Too late, Zinoviev saw Stalin for what he was: ‘a bloodthirsty Osetian who doesn’t know what conscience is…’ That remark sealed his fate.

Stalin kicked hardest when his opponent was down; he rounded on Zinoviev for neglecting his job in the state planning office. Zinoviev tried to rouse the rabble in his fiefdom in Leningrad.
²⁹
But Stalin’s cronies had grudges against Zinoviev and Stalin himself loathed the whole of Leningrad as a nest of opposition vipers.

Opposing Stalin at the party congress, Kamenev chose words more judicious but just as damning as Zinoviev’s: ‘We are against the theory of single rule, we are against creating a “leader”… I think that our general secretary is not the person who can unite the old Bolshevik headquarters around himself Kamenev first lost his full membership of the Politbiuro and then, in January 1926, was made commissar for trade. A few months later he was ambassador to Italy and out of the Politbiuro.

During their struggle Stalin and the Zinoviev – Kamenev duo had both made conciliatory overtures towards Trotsky.
³⁰
Trotsky was still tempted by power, but his last conversation with Stalin disabused him and he looked for other straws to clutch at. However, Dzierżyński’s death in July 1926 removed the last influential Bolshevik who truly believed in reconciliation. In his letter to Stalin and Orjonikidze of October 1925 he had warned them, and Zinoviev and Kamenev:

Without unity, without this condition, Thermidor is inevitable… The result is inevitable: Leninists, like spiders, will devour each other, as foreseen by the Mensheviks and by Trotsky, who are now coming onto the scene, the first as ‘equality and democracy’, the other as a ‘communist’ Bonaparte… You claim to be the official and sole heirs of the leader [Lenin] of the workers and peasants. Ambition is killing you…
³¹

It was too late: the spiders were set to devour each other.

For a few months Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev forgot the insults they had hurled at each other and formed an opposition. Still unsure that Stalin would win, Menzhinsky was slow to close down their printing presses. In 1926 and 1927 opposition leaflets made it seem, at home and abroad, that debate, even a two-party system, might be burgeoning in the USSR: Stalin and Bukharin would be the conservatives, and Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev the radicals.

But Stalin had ground his axe. His draft circular to the Politbiuro shows the care and feeling that he put into his attack: ‘On a personal question’:

1) Comrade Trotsky is wrong to say that Lenin ‘insisted’ on Stalin being removed from the post of general secretary. Actually, Lenin ‘suggested’ the party congress ‘consider’ the question about transferring Stalin,
leaving the decision on the question to the party congress. And the congress
, after consideration decided
unanimously
to leave Stalin in the post of secretary, a decision which Stalin was bound to submit to.
2) Comrade Trotsky is wrong to assert than if Stalin had not been secretary ‘there would not be the struggle we now have.’ Stalin was not secretary either in 1920 or 1918 when Trotsky waged a frantic campaign against the party and Lenin both in 1918 (Brest treaty) and in 1920 (trade union movement)… it is stupid to attribute discord in the party to a ‘personal aspect’.
3) Comrade Trotsky is wrong to assert that ‘Stalin is calling him a revisionist of Leninism’. Not Stalin but the thirteenth party conference… Not just Stalin but first and foremost Zinoviev, Kamenev and Krupskaia [did so]…
³²

Trotsky’s arrogance undid him. He considered Dzierżyński a mindless agent of others’ policies, Menzhinsky an effete spook and Orjonikidze a Caucasian bandit. Dzierżyński and Menzhinsky resented being patronized by Trotsky and swung the pro-Trotsky element within OGPU, against all its instinctive revolutionary romanticism, over to Stalin. At the end of 1927 Trotsky was thrown out of the party with seventy-five of his prominent supporters including Kamenev and Zinoviev. Zinoviev became rector of Kazan university; Kamenev took on the scientific and
technical directorate of the Commissariat for the Economy. Trotsky, deluded by his faith in the intuition of the workers and by his sense of destiny, lost his last post, the fur concession, and was deported to Kazakhstan.

A New Role for OGPU

In 1927 OGPU was not yet a centralized, miniature totalitarian state. The credit (or blame) for the reforms that enabled OGPU to dominate political and economic life in the USSR and made it Stalin’s chief instrument of rule by the late 1920s is Menzhinsky’s. Although he never held a revolver or watched an execution Menzhinsky took firm control of the psychopaths, criminals or intellectuals who dispatched their victims with enjoyment in Stalin’s cause. Menzhinsky and Genrikh Iagoda adopted the same motto as Dzierżyński – ‘a cold head, a warm heart and clean hands’ – in their dirty but vital task, anticipating Himmler, a man too fastidious to wring a chicken’s neck who yet urged the SS on to slaughter Jews.

The samurai at the head of OGPU had higher politics in mind, while still condoning sadism and class murder in the Russian provinces, in the Ukraine, the Caucasus and central Asia. Their dual role as political arbiters and repressive policemen caused overwork and illness; they took the waters of the north Caucasus more and more often. Dzierżyński wrote from his sanatorium to Iagoda in summer 1925:

The most serious attention must be paid to Comrade Menzhinsky’s health. I ask for a concilium of doctors, appropriate specialists, to be organized to outline the treatment: where, in what conditions, for how long, etc…