Stalin and His Hangmen (49 page)

A few genuine scientists, as well as a horde of charlatans, still contributed to Soviet thinking, but Stalin had congealed thought too. Genetics
and modern physics were declared heretical. Music not in C major, poetry not paraphrasable, painting and cinema not monumental or strictly representational were all banned. The whole country even began to look alike: from standard-issue clothing to standard housing and transport, Stalin created a seemingly unchangeable world where Everyman’s monotony was broken only by the garish pageants and uniforms of the party and police elite. Stalin’s precautions against his assassination reached absurd levels. Nothing but an invasion by outside forces – and here Stalin was convinced that his own cunning was defence enough – could shake the foundations of the world he seemed to have created single-handedly in 1935 – 6.

SEVEN
The Ezhov Bloodbath

A camel claimed political asylum on the Polish border: ‘They’re exterminating all the rabbits in the USSR.’ ‘But you’re a camel,’ said the border guard. ‘You try proving you’re not a rabbit!’ replied the camel.

The Birth of the Great Terror

May my prayer be received

As incense before Thee,

Raised up by my hand,

A Vespers sacrifice.

Hear me o Lord

Orthodox hymn occasionally sung by
Stalin, Voroshilov and Molotov in the 1930s

As Stalin was condemning the last of the old Bolshevik guard to death, he was also preparing his own remedy for dissidence and free thought in the general population. The ensuing ‘Great Terror’ raged across the Soviet Union from spring 1937 to autumn 1938 and resulted in around 750,000 executions and twice as many sentences to lingering death in the camps. What minds could conceive then organize such a massacre? More puzzling still: how could a literate urban population submit to a reign of terror and actively, even enthusiastically, collaborate in offering victims up to it?

Stalin in the 1930s exemplifies the degenerative psychotic who, with every enemy exterminated, sees yet more enmity to be extirpated and whose serial killing progresses not arithmetically, but geometrically. Then there was Nikolai Ezhov, who was promoted to conduct the terror and then removed when the ravages were complete. We shall try to unravel something of the psyche of Nikolai Ezhov. As for Kaganovich and Molotov, their murderousness, like that of other Politbiuro members who survived Stalin including Malenkov, Mikoyan and Khrushchiov, stemmed not from any inner compulsion to kill, but from a total, dog-like submission to their psychopathic master. The difference between the terror of 1937 – 8 and the killings that had gone before was its cannibalism. The two main instruments of terror, the four-million-strong Communist Party and the NKVD, were also its victims.

As for the Soviet population of the mid-1930s, it is necessary to
understand how every bond linking one human being to another had been shattered by twenty years of Soviet rule and a decade of Stalinism. Hitler had to negotiate with the Protestant and Catholic Churches and even make minor concessions to them over, say, euthanasia for the congenitally ill; he had to soothe, admittedly with no difficulty, the relict ethical scruples of the military, of the business community, the legal and academic professions. Only in the furore of wartime, and by allowing the civil population to pretend that they were not complicit in mass murder, could Hitler proceed to his campaigns of mass extermination.

Stalin had to make no such compromises. The Orthodox Church had been crushed. The Red Army had no coherent code of behaviour; it had slaughtered civilians in the civil war and peasants in 1929– 32. The intelligentsia was abroad, in prison or compromised and bribed. There was no communal ethic left alive outside the party. The population had simply to endure each crisis and hope peace and stability would ensue. In 1917 – 18 they had acquiesced to the Bolshevik coup, in 1926 to the replacement of the collective leadership by a dictator, in 1929 to the enslavement of the peasantry. In 1937 – 8 effectively every tenth adult male in each city or town would vanish; surely Stalin and the party would then have finished and the survivors, like the Saved in an Anabaptist world, could live in paradise.

The population had incentives to collaborate with its oppressors. If you did not run with the hounds you were a hare to be torn apart by them, and those who disappeared left behind vacant jobs, rooms to live in, clothes, food and drink to be consumed. The terror also hit hardest those between thirty and forty-five in managerial and professional jobs. Like the war against the peasant, the urban terror pitched the young, the dispossessed and unskilled against the middle-aged who had riches and skills. Whether an anonymous slanderer or an arresting NKVD officer, the oppressor often had a personal vendetta or something to gain.

Stalin understood the worst in human nature and motivated his executives and the population accordingly. By installing Nikolai Ezhov, he had acquired the ideal instrument. Undoubtedly, had Ezhov refused to carry out the terror, Stalin would have used Kaganovich or Molotov or his newer acolytes Andreev or Zhdanov instead. But the terror was amplified by Ezhov’s uniquely maniacal compliance and the stimulation
that he and Stalin applied to each other. We know a little more today about Ezhov than we did, and he merits a biographical excursion.

How the Hedgehog Got Its Prickles

… the lion that is the most amenable to the circus trainer’s tricks
is the one with the lowest social standing in the pride, the omega
animal.

Yann Martel,
Life of Pi

In his party documents it is repeatedly stated that Nikolai Ivanovich Ezhov was born in St Petersburg on 1 May 1895, that he started work as an apprentice metalworker at the Putilov works in Petersburg in 1906 and was called up by the army in 1913.
¹
Ezhov once wrote that he had had only two years’ elementary schooling and had taught himself to read and write. In the 1920s he read so much that he acquired the sobriquet of ‘Nick the Bookman’ (Kol’ka-knizhnik). He was thus literate by the modest standards of Stalin’s Politbiuro.

Under arrest in 1939, Ezhov said his father Ivan was an army bandsman in Lithuania and later ran a Petersburg tea house of ill repute.
²
When Ezhov filled in his party card, he claimed to know some Polish and Lithuanian. Evdokia Babulina-Ezhova, in her sole contribution to our knowledge of her infamous brother, recalled spending holidays in the Suwałki-Mariampol region on the Polish – Lithuanian border. Ezhov’s mother Anna was a bandleader’s maid. Ethnically Russian, she had lived in Lithuania.

Possibly, Ezhov was born in 1892 in Suwałki; the only Ivan Ezhov listed in the St Petersburg directory for 1895 ran a public house. Certainly, Ezhov was wise to invent a wholly Russian and wholly proletarian origin for his career under Stalin. When he took over the NKVD from Iagoda, citizens hoped that a genuine Russian worker would mitigate the fanaticism of the Russophobe Poles and Jews who had run the Cheka and OGPU.

The Nikolai Ezhov of the 1920s is recalled as a considerate, friendly lad. Bukharin’s and Orjonikidze’s widows insisted that their husbands’ executioner was a good man fallen into bad company, a helpless marionette
in the hands of a master puppeteer: ‘You don’t blame the rope for hanging you,’ another survivor said. But Ezhov in his forties was Hyde to his younger Jekyll – an alcoholic prone to violent outbursts against his drinking companions, a voracious sexual predator, an active and a passive bisexual, seducing any woman or under-age girl he came across – with not a drop of sentiment, loyalty or remorse.

We know even less of Ezhov’s first twenty years than we do of Iagoda’s or Menzhinsky’s. Whereas their initiation into mass killing came in the bloodiness of the civil war and revolutionary terror, Ezhov cannot be blamed for many deaths until Stalin in 1936 put him in charge of a machine that slaughtered hundreds of thousands. No doubt Ezhov’s service in the Tsar’s army scarred him deeply, and at the height of his brief reign of terror he still liked to sing, with deep feeling and beautiful intonation, the traditional song of the fatally wounded soldier:

Black raven, black raven,

[…]

Why do you spread your talons out

Over my head?

Fly home to my land,

Give this bloodstained cloth

To my young wife.

Tell her she is free…

Ezhov, like Iagoda, owed his promotion to talents as a bureaucrat; his revolutionary honours, like Iagoda’s, were minor. He was, it seems, an agitator at the steelworks and later the artillery repair shop where he worked. When revolution came to Vitebsk in Belorussia, with its Russian, Jewish and Polish populations, Ezhov joined the Red Guard and the Communist Party and helped disarm by bluff a large Polish corps on its way to fight the Bolsheviks in Petrograd.
³

From 1919, when Ezhov joined the Red Army, the facts are verifiable. Barely five feet tall and unfit for the front, Ezhov was sent to a radiotelegraphic school in Saratov on the Volga. He became secretary of the garrison Communist Party in Saratov, brushed up his thick auburn hair and wore built-up heels to add to his height. From Saratov, as the
Whites approached, Ezhov’s school retreated up the Volga to the Tatar city of Kazan. Despite a reprimand for recruiting deserters into the school, he was promoted, and then in 1921 put in charge of party propaganda in central Kazan. Here Ezhov had to reconcile, under Lenin’s cosmetic multinationalism, the national aspirations of the Tatars with the Muscovite orientation of the Russians.

The latter half of 1921 is a blank in Ezhov’s record. He may have taken part with Malenkov in the Red Army’s suppression of an uprising in Bukhara in October 1921, which would account for his closeness to Malenkov in the mid-1930s. Certainly Ezhov was ill; all his life he had a hacking cough and feverish bouts followed by spells of treatment for tuberculosis. In Kazan Ezhov married Antonina Titova. Like Ezhov’s mother and adopted daughter, she miraculously survived him. She is not known ever to have spoken of her husband. The daughter of a village tailor, she was studying science at Kazan university when the revolution disrupted classes; she found secretarial work in the party. Small but muscular after working in a foundry, Nikolai Ezhov was an appealing suitor. For eight years they seemed a normal couple.

The Kazan party recommended Ezhov to Moscow from where he was sent to Ioshkar-Ola (then Krasnokokshaisk) in the Mari republic on the north Volga, where half the population was Mari, a Finnic people. Ezhov was to allay ethnic tensions. He arrived in March 1922, when the Mari held key appointments in the party and better-educated Russian communists seethed with resentment. The local party boss Ivan Petrov contemptuously called Ezhov in Mari Izi Miklai (Little Nick). Ezhov responded with techniques that later made him formidable: he created a secretariat, staffed with his own men, to usurp Petrov’s power; he reported to Moscow on the ‘ideological mess’ of Petrov’s party organization, uncovered fraud and called in from Moscow a commission to deal with the Mari. Ezhov then raised the stakes: he appointed his wife Antonina to manage the party organization and attacked Petrov and Mari ‘nationalists’: ‘Petrov has to be reigned in. I enclose documents.’ The conflict ended with both Petrov and Ezhov given indefinite leave, but his appeals to Moscow had introduced Ezhov to men of power around Stalin, and Kaganovich had Petrov deported.
⁴
Kaganovich and Ezhov had worked together before the Petrov affair. Kaganovich met Ezhov in 1917 in Vitebsk, where the former was rabble-rousing at the railway
workshops. The boyish Ezhov, to Kaganovich’s amazement, was the Vitebsk station commissar.