Stalin and His Hangmen (16 page)

The Cheka was an essential instrument not just for suppressing counter-revolution or providing intelligence, but for making the shattered economy function. From the start, Lenin and Trotsky secretly planned the totalitarian organization of labour, with mobile labour armies and cooperatives of peasants on state land. In summer 1918 Trotsky organized the first concentration camps in the south-east of the country. Nothing could shake Trotsky’s belief that ‘the unproductive nature of compulsory labour is a liberal myth’, but it took a decade for Cheka labour camps to make any perceptible contribution to the economy.

Anticipating Hitler, the Cheka’s activities were economically important in more primitive and horrible ways. Desperately needed money accrued to the Soviet state not just from nationalizing banks and businesses;
the murdered Tsaritsa’s crown jewels, delivered to Moscow in ten suitcases by her killers, fetched about one hundred million dollars. When sentenced to be executed, real or imaginary counter-revolutionaries forfeited their property to the Cheka. In late 1919, when the Cheka spawned its provincial and departmental offspring – railways, factories and military units as well as districts, parishes and towns got their own Cheka units – executions in the open were abandoned. A shot in the back of the neck in a cellar or garage became standard practice. Victims were first stripped naked and usable clothing stored. Lenin himself received a suit, a pair of boots, a belt and braces worn by a victim of the Moscow Cheka.
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Underwear went to Red Army soldiers or Cheka prisoners. Gold teeth were prised from the corpses. (Mikhail Frinovsky, a chekist who was to become notorious in the Great Terror of 1931 and whose teeth were kicked out by a recalcitrant prisoner, had himself a complete set of implants made from the gold teeth of his victims.)

Soviet forces were desperately short of supplies by the end of the civil war; they needed loot to operate. A report to Iagoda from a unit sent to put down a peasant rebellion in Simbirsk runs: ‘Because of the complete absence mainly of footwear in the Red Army no conspiracies or counter-revolutionary manifestations have been noted.’
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Red Army units would list every trophy they won after successful actions. In 1920, at Kazan, Commander N. Epaneshnikov proudly reported to headquarters that he was sending them ‘64 ram-rod guns, 17 hunting rifles… 86 various rifles, one axe, 16 tanned sheep- and goat-skins, 11 old greatcoats, 1 ripped greatcoat… 2 knitted underpants… 10 ordinary underpants, 2 sacks of newspaper, 45 raw horse skins… a bell… and a distilling pipe.’
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Vladimir Zazubrin, in 1918 a deserter from the White forces and later a lively writer of fiction and memoirs, shot by Stalin in 1938 for his frankness, recalled the hard life of the Cheka executioners:

White, grey carcasses (undressed people) collapsed onto the floor.
Chekisty
with smoking revolvers ran back and cocked the triggers immediately. The legs of those shot jerked in convulsions… Two men in grey greatcoats nimbly put nooses round the necks of the corpses, dragged them off to a dark niche in the cellar. Two others with spades dug at the earth, directing steaming rivulets of blood. Solomin, his revolver in his belt, sorted out the linen of those shot. He carefully made separate piles of underpants, shirts and outer clothing… Three men were shooting like robots, their eyes were empty, with a cadaverous glassy shine…

Like Lācis or Zazubrin, other
chekisty
fancied their talents as writers – just as some writers were later to test their skills as NKVD interrogators. In 1921, in newly conquered Tbilisi, the
chekisty
published an anthology,
The Cheka’s Smile.
The contribution by Aleksandr Eiduk, executioner and roving military emissary, ran:

There is no greater joy, not better music

Than the crunch of broken lives and bones.

This is why when our eyes are languid

And passion begins to seethe stormily in the breast,

I want to write on your sentence

One unquavering thing: ‘Up against a wall! Shoot!’
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While in the Moscow Cheka Eiduk admitted ‘with enjoyment in his voice, like an ecstatic sexual maniac’ to a diplomat friend that he found the roar of truck engines, used to drown the noise of prisoners being executed in the inner courtyard of the Lubianka, ‘Good… blood refines you!’ Eiduk, shot on Stalin’s orders in 1938, was in 1922 assigned by the Soviet government to watch over the American Relief Agency as it fed ten million starving peasants on the Volga.

More deplorable even than Eiduk’s verses were contributions from poets with reputations once worth defending such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, who declared, ‘Enough of singing of moon and seagull, I shall sing of the Extraordinary Committee…’ and then advised, ‘Any youth thinking over his future, / deciding on whom to model his life, I shall tell, without hesitating: “Base it / On Comrade Dzierżyński.”’

Chekisty
and poets were drawn to each other like stoats and rabbits – often with fatal consequences for the latter. They found common ground: the need for fame, an image of themselves as crusaders, creative frustration, membership of a vanguard, scorn for the bourgeoisie, an inability to discuss their work with common mortals. There was an easily bridged gap between the symbolist poet who aimed to
épater les bourgeois
and the chekist who stood the bourgeois up against a wall.
One outstanding intellectual
chekist
was the twenty-year-old Social Revolutionary Iakov Bliumkin. Joining the Odessa Cheka, he became notorious as ‘Fearless Naum’ and startled the world when he entered the German embassy in Moscow with a mandate bearing Dzierżyński’s signature and shot the ambassador Count Mirbach dead – allegedly to avenge the humiliating Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and to provoke a breach with Germany and thus world revolution. Bliumkin received only a nominal prison sentence (Had this Social Revolutionary coup in fact been stage-managed by the Bolsheviks?) and reappeared as a Cheka officer in Kiev in 1919.

Bliumkin had genius: he was fluent in many European and Asiatic languages, he wrote verse and, despite the sadistic jokes he played, fascinated admirers with his exploits. Bliumkin personified to the extreme the brilliant intellectual corrupted by the licence to kill with impunity. In June 1918, before the killing of the German ambassador, the poet Osip Mandelstam heard Bliumkin boast that he was having a ‘spineless intellectual’ shot and raised a storm of protest. Through Larisa Reisner, Mandelstam, who had a reckless disregard for his own safety, obtained an interview with Dzierżyński. The Cheka boss responded to his indignation: the intellectual may have been saved. Bliumkin also befriended the peasant poet Sergei Esenin and took him to Iran, where in 1920 there was a short-lived Soviet republic thus inspiring Esenin’s Persian lyrics. Bliumkin’s circle was the first where
chekisty
and poets mingled. Even the principled monarchist poet Nikolai Gumiliov, shortly to be shot by the Cheka, was proud to meet Bliumkin. He wrote in his poem ‘My Readers’: ‘A man who had shot an emperor’s envoy in a crowd of people came up to shake my hand, to thank me for my verses.’ These associations of poet and chekist were mutually destructive. Few of Dzierżyński’s men, or Russia’s poets, would live out their allotted spans. Esenin committed suicide and Bliumkin was shot by Menzhinsky for his links with Trotsky. Mayakovsky was to kill himself, and his Cheka friend Iakov Agranov was executed.

Whether aghast at power like Mandelstam, who found authority as ‘revolting as a barber’s hand’, or fascinated by it like Mayakovsky and Esenin, the paths of poets and
chekisty
intersected. In 1919 the greatest of the Russian symbolist poets, Aleksandr Blok, was interrogated by the Cheka as a Social Revolutionary and ‘mystical anarchist’ sympathizer.
He periodically interceded, sometimes successfully, for other detainees: Blok’s chekist contact Ozolin, who had himself supervised mass murder in Saratov, declared himself a fellow poet. Max Voloshin, a poet whose reputation as a magus overawed both Reds and Whites, who survived atrocities as the Crimea was conquered and lost by both sides, eloquently testified in 1921 as to what the demented deposed leader of the Hungarian soviets Béla Kun and his consort Rozalia Zemliachka had done:

                                          Terror

They gathered to work at night.

They read denunciations, certificates, cases.

They hurriedly signed sentences.

They yawned. They drank wine.

[…]

At night they chased barefooted, naked people

Over ice-covered stones

Against a north-east wind

Into wastelands outside town.

[…]

They threw them, not all killed yet, into a pit.

They hurriedly covered them with earth.

And then with an expansive Russian song

They returned home to town.

Béla Kun had summoned Voloshin to read through lists of condemned, ostentatiously deleted the poet’s own name and then invited him to perform an act of unbearable complicity: crossing off the name of one man in ten.
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It was harder for intellectuals to mix with
chekisty
once the latter began mass killing. ‘Red Terror’ was decreed on 1 September 1918 as a defensive measure which suspended both legality and morality. The pretext was the assassination on 30 August by the young poet Leonid Kannegiser of the head of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Uritsky – ironically, Uritsky was one chekist who loathed bloodshed. Lenin was unhappy with Dzierżyński’s plans to proceed with mass terror against counter-revolutionaries, but on 31 August he was hit by a bullet allegedly fired by a former anarchist, Fanny Kaplan, and was temporarily put out of
action. Kaplan was an unlikely assassin. Not even Lenin’s entourage knew until the last moment that he would be speaking at the Moscow factory where he was shot and Kaplan suffered from periodic total loss of sight, caused by an explosion in a terrorist bomb factory a decade before. A revolver was ‘found’ four days later, but could not have fired the bullet extracted from Lenin’s neck. Kannegiser, Uritsky’s killer, was quickly arrested and confessed, but was interrogated for a whole year in the hope that he would name co-conspirators before being shot. Fanny Kaplan told the Cheka nothing, even when questioned by Peterss, and was handed over to Kremlin interrogators. She was shot a week later in a garage by Pavel Malkov, the Kremlin commandant; the poet Demian Bedny, Stalin’s closest friend among the intellectuals, helped Malkov cremate her in a steel oil drum.
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Cheka killings escalated. Assassination attempts and advancing White armies, aided by Anglo-French forces invading from the north, the south and the west, were the pretexts for an orgy of killing that lasted three years. The moral effect on Dzierżyński’s organization was horrendous: an explosion of criminal sadism swept the country. In a matter of days, hundreds were shot in Moscow. Uritsky’s successor in Petrograd, the redoubtable pervert Gleb Bokii, shot 1,300, although the target set by Dzierżyński was 500.
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Trotsky and Karl Radek acclaimed the terror; Radek even wanted executions to be public. Lenin in July 1918, before he was fired on, had argued for hangings, rather than shootings, so that the public could better contemplate the corpses.
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Killings also arose from the panic and vindictiveness of civil war: fearful atrocities occurred in cities like Kiev or Astrakhan which changed hands several times between 1918 and 1920. Convicted criminals and certified psychopaths appointed themselves officers of the Cheka and terrorized, raped and murdered whom they liked. Surrendering White army officers, given safe passes, were summoned to ‘register’ and then shot, burnt in furnaces, drowned on barges or hacked to death. Other executions aimed to improve results on the battlefield by decimating Red Army deserters and retreating units, a party policy that Trotsky, Stalin and other roving emissaries enforced at the front. Statistics exist only for 1921, a mild year and the last of the civil war, when 4,337 were shot in the army alone.
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Sometimes a whole ethnic group was declared White and genocide took place. Iona Iakir, a famous Red Army general,
had 50 per cent of male Don Cossacks exterminated, and used artillery, flame-throwers and machine guns on women and children.
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Red Cossacks declared their non-Russian neighbours White and massacred Circassian villagers and Kalmyk cattle-herders. In Moscow, under Dzierżyński’s command, indiscriminate mass murder took place. ‘Counter-revolutionaries’ were executed by list; in 1919 all Moscow’s Boy Scouts and in 1920 all members of the lawn tennis club were shot.