Stalin and His Hangmen (65 page)

The Red Army had not just the enemy and SMERSH to fear; the military collegium of the Soviet supreme court also travelled the front, holding court martials and issuing death sentences on the most trivial pretexts.
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It was headed by Ulrikh’s deputy I. O. Matulevich; he and his men, hardened by the terror of 1937–8, typed thousands of death sentences on slips of cigarette paper. A soldier had only to admire the quality of German aircraft design or to roll a cigarette in a German leaflet he had picked up, a nurse had only to treat a wounded German, to be shot. In such a terrible war some soldiers greeted the firing squad with indifference, even relief, and so on 19 April 1943 Stalin took a leaf from the Germans’ book and brought in execution by public hanging: ‘Shooting is abolished because of the leniency of this punishment’. This measure resulted in spectacles that revolted even Matulevich: destitute civilians would strip the bodies of the hanged for their clothes. But public hanging was a punishment Stalin kept in his arsenal until the end of his life.

Stalin’s least-known but most vicious scorpion – whom the army loathed even more than they did Beria, Abakumov and Matulevich – was Lev Mekhlis. Stalin had met him on the south-western front in the civil war, where Mekhlis was a political commissar who detested former Tsarist officers as deeply as Stalin did. Mekhlis helped Rozalia Zemliachka murder captured White officers in the Crimea.
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From the Crimea Mekhlis moved to join Stalin in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, and then, with Bazhanov and Tovstukha, became Stalin’s secretary. In 1926, Mekhlis was sent with Nikolai Ezhov to be educated at the Communist Academy, where he contrived to adopt and, at the right time discard, the Bukharinite views of the academy’s teachers. By 1931 Mekhlis was literate enough to become editor of
Pravda
, which he turned into Stalin’s mouthpiece, receiving material from Stalin on former party leaders to be denounced in the paper and then arrested by Ezhov. For seven years Mekhlis took not a single day off and dragged into the paper, against their better judgement, fine writers such as Mikhail Koltsov, to make
Pravda
more readable.

Mekhlis was the sole new member of the party’s Central Committee of summer 1937 who survived the terror. In December of that year, with the purge of the Red Army under way, Stalin made Mekhlis head of its political directorate. Mekhlis travelled across Siberia to pick out officers and political commissars for arrest.
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There was a wave of suicides in Mekhlis’s wake: in 1940, over a thousand Red Army men killed themselves ‘for fear of being held responsible’. Mekhlis spoke to Stalin over the head of Voroshilov. Officers hated Mekhlis for his bullying and denunciations, even if they grudgingly conceded his courage. Like Voroshilov, Mekhlis was unafraid of bullets; he made political commissars hold their propaganda meetings at the front, not in the safety of the rear. By summer 1940, however, Stalin judged that the army had suffered enough. He created for Mekhlis a new Commissariat of State Control, primarily to frighten the Soviet bureaucracy – an institution three times the size of the Red Army – into a semblance of honesty, efficiency and frugality. Here Mekhlis worked with Malenkov to build up a small army of 4,500 inspectors. By the time war broke out – to his disbelief, as much as Stalin’s – Mekhlis could investigate or veto any expenditure or plans by any of forty-six other commissariats.

To replace the military intelligence apparatus he had destroyed. Mekhlis recruited thousands of men in his own image, many from his old school, the Institute of Red Professors. They acted as political commissars and brought back dual command, political and military, to the Red Army. This system of command contributed to the defeats of 1941 and 1942, and Stalin and Mekhlis reluctantly rescinded it.

Mekhlis had army officers trained on the basis of Stalin’s textbook
The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – A Short Course
, a book which singled out Mekhlis for praise, while the rank and file learnt slogans glorifying Stalin. Mekhlis worked almost without sleep as Stalin’s troubleshooter and Stalin backed him on most points, baulking only at issuing arms to untrained ‘communist squads’. Over two years, Mekhlis raced thousands of miles across the fronts, killing as many Red Army generals as the Germans. His cruelty was legendary: if the Germans used human shields of Russian POWs or women and children, the Red Army was to mow them down. The NKVD was to slaughter all prisoners in cities that lay in the enemy’s path. A solider who answered back to a sergeant was to be shot in front of the ranks.

Mekhlis was as ridiculous as he was atrocious: when he found captured Germans with playing cards depicting naked women, he printed eleven million leaflets to shower on the enemy: ‘How Hitler is depraving his army’. Officers were arrested not for fighting badly, but because they had been arrested before, had received secondary education under the Tsar or were sons of priests. General V. Kachalov, who had already been killed in his tank, was sentenced to death because he was seen putting into his pocket a German leaflet as he drove off to the front; the general’s wife and mother-in-law went to the GULAG.

A real test came in the Crimea, which in 1942 the Red Army was trying to hold against the Germans. Never had Mekhlis been so frenetic in giving battle orders, recruiting political workers and dismissing officers; this was ground he had conquered twenty-two years ago. Now everything went wrong. Mekhlis was responsible for the disaster of May 1942, when the Russians were swept off the peninsula by a German army half their size. Mekhlis escaped without a scratch but with a besmirched military reputation. A key territory, 400 tanks, 400 aircraft and nearly half a million men had been lost. Stalin sent a menacing telegram:

You hold a strange position, as if you were a bystander or observer not responsible for the deeds on the Crimean front. This position is very convenient, but it is rotten through and through… If you had used attack aviation against tanks and enemy forces, and not on sideshows, the enemy would not have broken through the front…
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Oddly, back in Moscow Mekhlis was not court-martialled; Stalin set up a party military and political propaganda unit, in which he could do less harm. He nevertheless continued to range over the fronts, encouraging blocking squads to shoot retreating soldiers and moving on when he had enraged local commanders. When political commissars were abolished, the panic had abated and victory over Hitler seemed certain, Mekhlis became just a bogeyman, and commanders could even appeal against his slanders. Now they might be demoted, but not shot.

War had changed Soviet society. Initiative had been encouraged, even rewarded when it succeeded. Victory over a real enemy, not some Trotskyist chimera invented by Stalin, had restored the individual’s faith
in himself. The Red Army – into which nearly a quarter of the entire population had been recruited – had become more powerful, more supportive and more worth fighting for than the party. Above all, German bullets had steeled men and women to overcome their fears. It would need a very heavy hand indeed after victory in 1945 to return the population to the servile and gullible state of the 1930s. Stalin, Abakumov, Beria and Mekhlis would have to use all the punitive force at their command to get the population back into its cage.

Like Stalin, Mekhlis was more perturbed than jubilant when the Red Army moved into central Europe: ‘Not just in the history of the Soviet Union, but in the history of our Fatherland,
for the first time
millions of people have visited abroad. They will bring back all sorts of things. Much of what they will see makes no sense to our people… And what would they say if they’d been to America (skyscrapers, industry)?’
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Stalin and Mekhlis were right. The sight of prosperity beyond a Russian soldier’s dreams, even in war-ravaged Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, did have an effect on his mind. Mekhlis would have to combat the corrupting effect of capitalism on the army of occupation. This prompted Stalin in March 1946 to make him once again minister of state control, where he could cut out the rot in the bureaucracy and the officer caste.

Evacuation, Deportation and Genocide

Send, o Lord, the Soviets Thy help,

And from the master race protect our land,

Because Thy sacred Ten Commandments

Are broken more by Hitler than by us.

Nikolai Glazkov

Beria, less easily fooled by Hitler than was Stalin, took in what he heard from Sorge in Tokyo and Dekanozov, who in 1940 shuttled between Moscow and Berlin. In Moscow the German ambassador Schulenburg, a Russophile, told Dekanozov Hitler’s plans. Stalin ordered that bearers of bad tidings should be told to ‘fuck their mothers’. Beria sycophantically concurred; even on 21 June 1941, the night before German tanks crossed
the Bug river, he promised that ‘accomplices of international provocateurs will be ground into GULAG dust’. He had the gall to ask Stalin to recall his own protégé Dekanozov from Berlin for ‘bombarding’ him with reports of imminent attack. To judge by the change in Beria and Bogdan Kobulov’s treatment of Polish officers from summer 1940, they well knew that war was looming; when in spring 1941 General Wołkowicki asked for permission to fight the Germans in Yugoslavia, Beria was sympathetic. But Beria never confronted Stalin, who had made up his mind that Hitler would not attack the USSR until he had finished off Britain.

In the panic and despondency of July 1941, Stalin kept Beria close by, using him as his number two on the State Defence Committee. Beria took specific responsibility for the defence industry as so many of its factories and workers were part of the GULAG empire. Another of his tasks was to liquidate potential collaborators and to scorch the earth wherever the Red Army was in retreat, so that Hitler, like Napoleon 130 years before, would find neither food, fuel nor sympathizers.

The NKVD was one of the first commissariats to set up, together with the diplomatic corps shepherded by Andrei Vyshinsky, in evacuation at Samara on the Volga. Of 3,000 prisoners sent to the Volga from Butyrki prison the 138 most important were shot in October. They included Abram Belenky, Lenin’s chief bodyguard and one of Stalin’s oldest cronies, Béla Kun, Mikhail Kedrov the chekist and neuropsychologist, several air force generals whose planes had been destroyed on the ground in the first hours of the war, and the last head of Red Army intelligence Iosif Proskurov, who shared the fate of his six predecessors. Generals who survived the first attacks on the western front were arrested by Vsevolod Merkulov and also shot in Samara.

From Oriol prison, reserved for prominent political prisoners – Dzierżyński had spent four years there – 154 were taken into the forests and shot. They included an unusual number of women, among them Trotsky’s sister Olga Kameneva and the legendary Social Revolutionary Mariia Spiridonova, as well as victims of the show trials who had been promised their lives such as Gorky’s doctor, Pletniov. These murders Beria assigned to the organizers of the Katyn killings, Bogdan Kobulov and Leonid Bashtakov. Worse were the massacres perpetrated on Beria’s orders in the newly acquired western Ukraine: perhaps 100,000 civilian
prisoners were shot in Lwów as the Red Army retreated.
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When the Germans captured a city very rapidly, as at Poltava, the local NKVD, to make flight easier or to avoid leaving behind anyone who might welcome the invaders, would kill prisoners and ‘untrustworthy’ citizens on its own initiative. Other deaths were ordered from Moscow: in November 1941, in eight days, 4,905 persons were shot on Beria’s orders.

The losses of men in 1941 – 2,841,900 of the Red Army killed or captured in summer and autumn alone – forced Beria to limit executions and to retrieve military manpower from wherever he could. Two generals in the GULAG, Kirill Meretskov and Boris Vannikov, were patched up in a sanatorium and sent to their commands. Meretskov was one of the few who had fought well in the Finnish war. He was so crippled by torture that he became the only general allowed to report to Stalin sitting down. Vannikov had been commissar for the defence industry until his arrest two weeks before war broke out; he recovered from his ordeals better than Meretskov and eventually provided the military coercion for Beria’s atom bomb project.

Only in November 1941 did Stalin dare trust Sorge’s assurances from Tokyo that Japan would not attack and move Siberian troops to the European front, but prisons and GULAG resources – more than 80 per cent of the two million prisoners were men of military age – were still untapped. However, just 3,000 kulak exiles were considered safe material for the Red Army and in 1941 over 200,000 more peasants and ‘socially dangerous elements’ had been exiled east for forced labour. From 1941 to 1944 over a million men out of a total of twenty-nine million conscripted into the Soviet forces during the war were taken from the GULAG to the front. The NKVD’s executioners were still busy. Officially, only 1,649 counter-revolutionaries not including Polish officers were shot in 1940; in 1942 the toll was 23,278, excluding untold thousands shot out of hand by NKVD or military tribunals. Long after the rout of 1941, Stalin still had senior officers shot. The choice of victim was arbitrary: some, like General Kozlov, who had lost the Crimea and nearly lost the Caucasus to the Germans, lived on.