Stalin and His Hangmen (82 page)

i.
Iakov Agranov, NKVD’s specialist for intellectuals and associate of Mayakovsky

Notes

Abbreviations for archives: GASPI = Russian State Archive of Social-Political History; GARF = State Archive of the Russian Federation. The numbers given refer (in order) to the
fond
, the
opis
, the
delo
and the page(s).

ONE * The Long Road to Power

1.
Quoted in Stanislav Kuniaev and Sergei Kuniaev,
Rasterzannye teni
, 1995, 82. Vasiliev was released in 1932 despite these verses being in his dossier. He was shot on 13 August 1937.

2.
The Osetians are an Iranian people settled in the central Caucasus. Osetians were until recently integrated with their Georgian neighbours; Stalin’s possibly Osetic blood is no more significant to Georgian or Russian history than Henry Tudor’s Welshness is to English history.

3.
N. Tlashadze, GASPI 8, 2:1, 48, 20

4.
GASPI 71, 1, 275, 23

5.
GASPI 558, 11, 721, 68

6.
GASPI 558, 11, 722, 51

7.
See Iakob Gogebashvili,
Rcheuli tkhzulebani,
1990, vol. 2, 80–98.

8.
Bezbozhnik,
21 December 1939, quoted in E. S. Gromov,
Stalin,
1998, 38

9.
Pasha subsequently married and had a child. Her husband, her child and hermother all died in the mid-1930s and, shortly before her husband’s aunt wrote to Stalin to find her, she herself vanished, no doubt arrested, from the streets of Moscow. See B. S. Ilizarov,
Tainaia zhizn’ Stalina,
2002, 284–6.

10.
K. Gamsakhurdia,
Davit Aghmashenebeli,
Tbilisi: 1942, 465

11.
Roman Brackman asserts that Stalin chose the name Koba after his natural father, Prince Koba Egnatashvili.

12.
See Ilizarov, 2002, 411–53 for a full analysis of Stalin’s reading of Dostoevsky.

13.
Stalin took steps to set up an institute of experimental medicine under a certain Professor Bogomoltsev, who promised an elixir of life. When Bogomoltsev himself died aged only sixty-five, Stalin laughed bitterly.

14.
GASPI 558, 3, 406

15.
Most of Russia’s Esperantists were later shot as cosmopolitans and spies.

16.
Stalin appears also to have had a reading knowledge of French. On 4 May 1923 he circulated Fridtjof Nansen’s protest (in French) on the impending execution of Patriarch Tikhon to the Politbiuro, and only Tomsky marked the document, ‘Did not read, for unfortunately I have not studied French.’
(Politbiuro i tserkov,
1997, 1, 302–03)

17.
Pravda,
21 December 1994. Underneath Stalin appended in blue pencil: ‘Alas, what do we see, what do we see?’

18.
Cartoons attributed by Ilizarov in
Tainaia zhizn’ Stalina,
2002, to Stalin, such as a doodle of the finance minister Briukhanov hanging by his genitals, do not tally with the geometric abstract nature of his doodling.

19.
Grigol Eliava died in 1925, but his son, the bacteriologist Gogi Eliava, was arrested by Beria and shot in 1937.

20.
Archive documentation neither supports nor fully refutes this suspicion. Much archival material quoted here was first published by Aleksandr Ostrovsky in his monograph
Kto stoial za spinoi Stalina,
St Petersburg, 2002.

21.
Zaria Vostoka,
23 December 1925

22.
In 1944, living enviably uneventfully as a housewife, Polina wrote her memoirs, and was made to surrender these and all her gifts from Stalin to the party archives. GASPI 558, 4, 647

23.
Petrovsky’s claim to fame is that he was the only member of this Central Committee Stalin allowed to survive the terror of the 1930s.

24.
This dossier is not available; it may be in the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation.

25.
Ozoliņš published his memoir in 1933 when, as director of the Latvian Bank, he was negotiating a trade agreement with the USSR; his critique of Stalin was therefore tactful. He was nevertheless shot on Stalin’s orders in 1941. For a Russian translation of Ozoliņš’s memoir and Boris Ravdin’s article on it, see
Daugava,
Riga, 2002, 4, 126–42.

26.
The Bolsheviks had a fashion for ‘hard’ pseudonyms: apart from Stalin (steel) there was Kamenev (stone) and Molotov (hammer), not to mention Fiodor Raskol’nikov who named himself after Dostoevsky’s axe-murderer.

27.
Kibirov was posted to Turukhansk as a punishment for misdemeanours in the Caucasus, which explains why he sided with Stalin against the gendarme.

28.
This son, Aleksandr, was subsequently adopted by a peasant, Davydov, to whom Lidia was later married off. Aleksandr Davydov became a major in the Red Army and died in 1987.

29.
GASPI 558, 1, 54, 1–3

30.
Bednyi means ‘the poor’; his real surname was more appropriate, Pridvorov (of the court). He was probably the illegitimate son of one of the Tsar’s cousins.

31.
GASPI 558, 11, 701

32.
GASPI 558, 11, 721, 126

33.
Obshchaia gazeta,
St Petersburg, No. 9, 1 –7 March 2001, 15

34.
The fate of Shapiro, arguably the bravest man in Stalin’s entourage, is unknown.

35.
Chuev,
100 razgovorov,
as cited by D.V. Koliosov,
I.V. Stalin,
2000, 200–01.

TWO * Stalin, Dzierżyński and the Cheka

1.
Even in Polish, despite his talent for graphic writing, Dzierżyński was an outsider: he spoke both Polish and Russian with a Lithuanian accent. GASPI 76, 4, 139: circular of 29 October 1920, when Leon Skrzędzienko, a schoolmate of Dzierżyński’s, reported seeing him in disguise on the streets of Warsaw. The Red Army was approaching Białystok with a group of proposed ministers for a Soviet Polish republic including Dzierżyński. The
‘dyktator czrezvyczajki’
is described as tall, thin, bald, about forty-five.

2.
Feliks Dzierżyński,
Listy do siostry Aldony,
1951, 155–6

3.
P. Filevskii,
Ocherki iz proshlogo Taganrogskoi gimnazii,
Taganrog: 1906

4.
She died in 1966 at the age of 96.

5.
It is typical of Feliks’s punctiliousness that after Stanisław’s murder he confiscated the family estate and assets for the Soviet government, sending Aldona just a few trinkets.

6.
See Lev Korneshov, ‘Liubimaia zhenshchina Dzerzhinskogo’,
Rossiiskaia gazeta,
17 February 1994, 7.

7.
She later became the protector of another romantic killer and died curator of the Lermontov museum in Piatigorsk.

8.
8. Rosół was released in 1901 ‘just skin and bones’ and died in Kaunas in 1902, his last words, Dzierżyński claimed, being, ‘Long live the Polish Social Democrat Workers’ Union.’

9.
See Zofia Dzierżyńska,
Lata wielkich bojów,
Warsaw: 1969.

10.
Ironically this prison would be death row for Stalin’s political enemies – including the leader of the social revolutionaries Mariia Spiridonova and his own brother-in-law Aliosha Svanidze – whose executions he put
off
until August 1941 when Beria had all 150 shot.

11.
Lenin’s secretary Fotieva recounted an episode in which Lenin asked Dzierżyński how many counter-revolutionaries he had under arrest. Dzierżyński passed him a slip of paper with the figure of 1,500. Lenin returned the paper, marking it with a cross to show that he had read it. Dzierżyński, Fotieva claims, interpreted the cross as a death sentence and had all 1,500 shot.

12.
A plane crash in 1925 that killed Atarbekov and two other
chekisty
was greeted by many as divine vengeance even though the young and ambitious Georgian
chekist
Lavrenti Beria was suspected of sabotage.

13.
Bruce-Lockhart found Dzierżyński much more intimidating: ‘his eyes deeply sunk, they blazed with a steady fire of fanaticism. They never twitched. His eyelids seemed to be paralysed.’ For Bruce-Lockhart Stalin, who took part with Dzierżyński in these first Anglo-Soviet soundings, was beneath notice: ‘a strongly-built man with a sallow face, black moustache, heavy eyebrows and black hair worn
en brosse
… He did not seem of sufficient importance to include in my gallery of Bolshevik portraits.’

14.
Peterss never relented. In Russia Maisie became, against her father’s wishes, a pupil of Isadora Duncan. In 1938 Peterss, like almost every adult Latvian in the party and the Cheka, was arrested as a fascist spy, tortured and shot. His son became an NKVD informer. May Freeman died during the Second World War; Maisie, often hungry, found work at the British embassy, but despite contacting the British foreign minister Ernest Bevin and an affair with a military attaché, was arrested in 1949 by the KGB and sentenced to ten years in the camps for spying. She died in 1971, still hoping for an exit visa. See Valentin Shteinberg, ‘Svecha na vetru’,
Zemlia
(Riga) 5 January-2 February 1993.

15.
See Viktor Fradkin,
Delo Kol’tsova,
Moscow: 2002, 46.

16.
Mārtiņš Lācis,
Chrezvychainaia komissiia po bor’bes Kontr-revoliutsiei, Moscow:
Gosiz, 1921

17.
Mārtiņš Lāciš, ‘Dzierżyński i Cheka’ in
F. Dzierżyński,
1931

18.
The first attempt to look the ugly facts in the face without reverting to Russophile anti-Semitism was in the second volume of Solzhenitsyn’s
Dvesti let vmeste (Russians and the Jews: Two Hundred Years Together)
, Moscow: 2003. Inevitably, the facts feed anti-Semitic propaganda, but ignoring them is to do anti-Semites an even greater service.

19.
In 1924 Dzierżyński wrote of Zionism to his deputies Menzhinsky and Iagoda: ‘We must assimilate only the most insignificant % of Jews, that’s enough. The others must be Zionists… Let’s meet the Zionists halfway and try to give jobs not to them but to those who consider the USSR, not Palestine, their homeland.’ But in 1918 Zionists had their funds and archive confiscated; ‘right-wing’ Zionists were arrested in 1920. The Politbiuro gave Stalin on 6 May 1920 the task of negotiating with Semion Dimanshtein, the Bolshevik commissar for Jewish affairs, to make Jews conform to Soviet nationalities policies.

20.
His receipt is printed in V. I. Lenin,
Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii,
vol. 51, Moscow, 1975.

21.
Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie v Povolzh’e,
Moscow, 2002, 707

22.
Ibid. 462

23.
Valerii Shambarov,
Gosudarstvo i revoliutsii,
2001, 17.

24.
Chekisty
often took a reciprocal interest in the writing of poetry: when the Armenian poet Ovanes Tumanian died in 1923, a critique of his ‘creative and social worth’ was published in Erevan under the pseudonym Martuni by Aleksandr Miasnikiants, who had, on behalf of the party and the Cheka, just slaughtered Tumanian’s closest friends.

25.
There is an almost plausible theory that Lenin’s shooting was an attempted
coup d’état
by Sverdlov. Trotsky was at the front at Kazan, Stalin at Tsaritsyn, Zinoviev and Dzierżyński in Petrograd. Sverdlov took over the reins of power, gave the order for Kaplan to be killed without a confession, let alone trial, and did all he could to dissuade Lenin from resuming work until late October. Hitherto healthy, Sverdlov died, apparently of flu, the following March, and his post (chairman of the Executive Committee) was given to Stalin and Lenin’s puppet, Mikhail Kalinin.

Moscow’s first crematorium was opened shortly afterwards in the Donskoi monastery. Muscovites objected to firewood being used to burn the dead when the living were freezing for lack of fuel. The Cheka’s victims had priority.

26.
See Shambarov, 2001, 132. Bokii, after further killings in Turkestan, ran a commune at Kuchino, where his guests and underlings mixed with naked prostitutes and Bokii’s daughters during orgies and mock executions.

27.
See A. G. Latyshev,
Rassekrechennyi Lenin,
1996, 57.

28.
Dmitrii Volkogonov,
Trotskii I,
1999, 295.

29.
This was too liberal for Aleksandr Beloborodov, who had signed the order for the killing of the Tsar and his family and was now plenipotentiary for suppressing Cossack uprisings: ‘those who are captured are not be tried: they are to suffer mass reprisals’. See
Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo: perepiska 1912–1927,
Moscow, 1996, 95.

30.
Kedrov is unique among arrested chekists in that a trial actually acquitted him, in 1941. Beria had him shot nevertheless.

31.
Only in Siberia – through migration, deportation and isolation from fighting – did the population grow.

32.
Zofia Dzierżyńska in her memoirs insists that Felix loved children and that they were drawn to him. Dzierżyński sent his own son Jasiek to a summer camp run by the Cheka.

33.
In February 1920 Dzierżyński acquired an even more devoted colleague, his secretary Vladimir (Veniamin) Gerson, who fussed over his health to the day he died. Gerson was later shot by Beria.

34.
Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo,
53

35.
Ibid. 156

36.
Izvestiia TsK KPSS,
1989, 11, 174