Stalin and His Hangmen (20 page)

When Lenin died, Dzierżyński’s personal power was at its peak: he
was at last a member (if non-voting) of the Politbiuro; he was people’s commissar for transport and soon to become commissar for the whole economy; he was co-chairman with Menzhinsky of OGPU, the United State Political Directorate that consolidated the GPU in September 1923. His attachment to Stalin was not based on affection but panic that the party would fall apart without him. The monosyllabic and unexcitable Stalin seemed to Dzierżyński and many others a calm centre in the struggle between the hysterical polemics of the left (Trotsky) and of the right (Bukharin). The left threatened to engulf the USSR in a worldwide revolutionary conflagration; the right seemed ready to abandon the dictatorship of the proletariat for some Scandinavian compromise between socialism and capitalism. Dzierżyński, as a fanatical but fearful Bolshevik, had no choice but to support Stalin.

Like Stalin in the effect of his gaze, Dzierżyński resembled Stalin in refusing to delegate the smallest trifle. Every detail – passengers travelling without tickets, rats in baggage compartments, matchboxes that contained not 100 but 85 matches – bothered him more than the general economic desolation and financial destitution facing the Soviets in 1923. The more Dzierżyński was mocked by Trotsky, the more he relied on Stalin. He asked Stalin for the right to deport ‘speculators, idlers, leeches’ as those responsible for price inflation.
⁵⁷
Trotsky recalled: ‘Dzierżyński would catch fire on any question, even a secondary one, his fine nostrils would shiver, his eyes spark, his voice would tense and often break…’ Dzierżyński’s boast was: ‘I never ever spare myself. And that is why all of you here love me, because you trust me.’

As Lenin lay paralysed and speechless, the danger of civil war in the Soviet Union between an army that admired Trotsky and a bureaucracy that depended on Stalin had the rank and file of OGPU, itself both an army and a bureaucracy, vacillating. Dzierżyński held a meeting of OGPU functionaries during which he shouted hysterically ‘I hate you!’ at his co-speaker, the convinced Trotskyist Evgeni Preobrazhensky, editor of
Pravda
and co-author of
The Alphabet of Communism.
By the end of 1923, Stalin’s power, still threatened by those closest to Lenin, nevertheless had a wider basis than his rivals’. Stalin thrived, for he held three crucial posts in the party and the government: he was general secretary of the party, the dominant figure in the party’s organizational bureau, and he was commissar for national minorities. But Dzierżyński,
travelling the length and breadth of the Soviet Union to inspect OGPU, the railways and the economy, was physically and spiritually flagging. His secretary Vladimir Gerson protested but got no understanding from Stalin’s aides. One telegraphed:

Omsk. Dzierżyński’s health is now worse than in Moscow, the work no less. He gets more worked up, he curses more, since things are as bad as they could be. Dzierżyński’s presence here is indispensable, otherwise we could have complete collapse. There is no need for medical examination, I don’t understand how you, Gerson, can demand he be examined so that he doesn’t know, why don’t you tell me how?
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Dzierżyński was suffering from years of malnutrition, tuberculosis and a heart condition exacerbated by frenetic work and travel. Once Lenin was dead, only Menzhinsky, Iagoda and Gerson cared if Dzierżyński wore himself out. Apart from their personal affection for him, he was the only chekist who had any charisma, and they basked in his chivalrous image. In 1925 Stalin instructed Dzierżyński, whom he now no longer needed, to reduce his working week to thirty-five hours; the Kremlin doctors forcibly X-rayed him and tested his blood. Together with Menzhinsky, his neighbour in the country, and Iagoda, Dzierżyński took the waters at Essentuki in the Caucasus. The doctors prescribed warm showers, regular enemas, a semi-vegetarian diet, Caucasian mineral water and long weekend breaks. Dzierżyński got no better. Typical of his attitude to his health and doctors is a letter to his secretary a year before he died: ‘I am still coughing, especially at night. I have thick yellow phlegm. Please give me medicine to disinfect my lungs and fix the phlegm. I need not be examined. I can’t stand the sight of doctors and will not consent to being examined. I request that the question not even be raised.’
⁵⁹

On 20 July 1926, in the middle of a rambling, impassioned speech defending the peasantry against the left opposition’s programme of collectivization, Dzierżyński collapsed; he recovered briefly at home and then died. The autopsy revealed that his coronary arteries were blocked: he died, like Lenin, of arteriosclerosis.

Managing the Soviet economy, Dzierżyński had had to concede that there was no alternative to the market and moved closer to Bukharin’s
position. He even stopped attacking Trotsky who, as mere chief of science, technology and trade concessions, was now a spent force. It was dawning on Dzierżyński that Stalin, an apparent advocate of the New Economic Policy, would be the man to undo it. But disillusion with Stalin came too late. Seventeen days before he died, Dzierżyński prophesied in a letter to Stalin’s protégé Valerian Kuibyshev:

Dear Valerian. I am aware that my speeches could strengthen those who will certainly lead the party to perdition, i.e. Trotsky, Zinoviev, Piatakov, Shliapnikov. But what am I to do? I am completely convinced that we will deal with all our enemies if we can find and adopt the right line for managing the country and the economy in practice… If we don’t find the line and the tempo, the opposition will grow and the country will then find its dictator the grave digger of the revolution… Almost all dictators now are former Reds – Mussolini, Piłsudski. I am tired of these contradictions.
⁶⁰

The phrase ‘grave digger of the revolution’ was Trotsky’s sobriquet for Stalin.

THREE
The Exquisite Inquisitor

In stormy student years he became famous for his cynical statement
at a meeting that he didn’t care about his comrades… Mixing with
people who considered it shameful to play the piano when people
all round were dying of hunger, Demidov ardently rushed into
music studies… Indifferent to mockery, indignation or abuse,
Demidov was still not pleased with himself. He wanted to win total
inner freedom.

Viacheslav Menzhinsky,
Demidov’s Affair

A False Dawn

Imagine if the Bolshevik government had been overthrown on Lenin’s death in January 1924. Suppose that the surviving Politbiuro and OGPU chiefs had been brought to trial on charges of mass murder, treason, torture and robbery. Their lawyers would have advised Trotsky, Stalin and Dzierżyński to admit guilt, but plead mitigation on five grounds: they were engaged in the overthrow of an unjust and repressive political system; they withdrew from a war that was claiming millions of lives; they were defending themselves against enemies who would have acted as badly or worse; they were fighting foreigners and the ruling classes not the people; they were motivated by the ideal of a just, non-exploitative society in which dictatorship was a temporary phase. And it seems there might have been some grounds for leniency.

After civil war ended in Russia in 1921 there were dramatic drops in executions, enforced labour sentences, political trials and repressed rebellions. The New Economic Plan (NEP) gave citizens limited rights to engage in trade and manufacture for profit. There was a civil service of a kind. A judiciary and quasi-independent lawyers began to function. The improvements just before and after Lenin’s death in 1924 might bear out the claim that the killings and injustices of 1917–21 were an inevitable product of revolution and civil war and not simply instruments by which the Bolsheviks meant to seize and consolidate power. A closer examination of the post-war period, however, shows that there was no real relaxation in the terror. The same men, but now at each other’s throats, remained in power. The institutions of repression, notably the Cheka-OGPU, had briefly contracted, but they were being more professionally and permanently organized. OGPU was recruiting a new type of officer. They now intended to disable the surviving intelligentsia and bourgeoisie, and their new and better method for doing so was to recruit educated men from these doomed groups.

The approach to the enemy was subtle: not just fear and bullets, but flattery, corruption and rewards. OGPU evolved from a paramilitary
organization which valued heroism and violence into a bureaucratic structure which placed secrecy, hierarchy and system above revolutionary clichés. This process paralleled OGPU men transferring their allegiance from Trotsky and the commanders of the Red Army to Stalin and his civilian cohorts. Dzierżyński had already shifted OGPU in this direction; his deputy and successor Viacheslav Menzhinsky was, however, much better suited by temperament, talents and origin to the business of turning OGPU into Stalin’s chief instrument of power. Menzhinsky ran OGPU for a decade but stayed in the shadows, making no speeches, holding no party posts. No cities were named after him, nor statues raised. A man few have praised and very few have liked, even among Soviet apologists for the Cheka, Menzhinsky has long deserved history’s full obloquy.

Viacheslav Menzhinsky’s Belated Rise

‘Why Menzhinsky?’ Lenin asked, baffled when Dzierżyński put forward another Pole, Viacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky, in September 1919 to head the Cheka’s Special Plenipotentiary Section, which covered intelligence and counter-intelligence. ‘Who else?’ Dzierżyński replied. Lenin knew Menzhinsky as a dilettante who had failed to make his mark at law, poetry and prose, in revolutionary politics, music, painting, languages, finance and diplomacy. The choice was outlandish, but inspired.

Dzierżyński proposed Menzhinsky not as a fellow Pole or friend; before 1917 they had met only once, in 1910, in Paris. True, in the last form he ever filled in, his Moscow electoral card for 1933, Menzhinsky put, under ethnic affiliation, ‘Polish’, but his background, education and speech were wholly Russian. Menzhinsky’s father was a Russified Pole, a professor of history, whose lectures, reproduced on a duplicator, were popular cramming material; his mother was a woman of letters and helped Tolstoyans provide uplifting reading for the Russian peasantry.

Menzhinsky belonged to the ruling classes; his elder brother Aleksandr was an auditor for the Tsar’s Ministry of Finances and Viacheslav began
his own career as a law student. His dissertation, ‘Communal Land Ownership in Populist and Marxist Literature’, was returned as ‘unsatisfactory’ by one professor who read it and as ‘unlikely to be assessable by a civilian’ by another. The dissertation scornfully surveyed the peasantry whom thirty years later Menzhinsky would help Stalin destroy. ‘The peasant commune,’ Menzhinsky asserted in 1898, is, ‘one of the major brakes on Russia’s agricultural development… the commune is disintegrating, dying a natural death.’
¹

In the early 1900s Menzhinsky practised law, but his literary ambitions drew him into the decadent circle around a notorious homosexual, satanist and multifarious genius, Mikhail Kuzmin. Menzhinsky left little trace in this circle. He also dabbled in Bolshevism: his mother Maria Nikolaevna was a friend of the great-aunt of Elena Stasova, who was close both to Lenin and to Stalin in his Tbilisi years. At weekends Menzhinsky followed the family hobby of workers’ education and preached revolution. The authorities paid him little attention; he was apparently leading a respectable life in a villa in the provincial town of Iaroslavl, employed as a railway administrator. A bourgeois on work days, a Bolshevik on Sundays and a decadent at night, Menzhinsky showed remarkable duplicity.

For a decade Menzhinsky was married to Iulia Ivanovna, who had been governess to the Russian branch of the Nobel family and was preoccupied with the theory and practice of bringing up children. The topics of the Menzhinskys’ correspondence with their friends the Verkhovskys in the early 1900s are the most bourgeois of any Bolshevik’s: office, garden, children. Only Menzhinsky’s distress at literary setbacks – his friends insisted on shortening the novel he eventually published – and references to the Nietzschean superman hint at his longing for fame.

In February 1905 the Menzhinskys suffered a trauma: their young daughter died of a cerebral haemorrhage. Menzhinsky left Iaroslavl for St Petersburg, where he worked with Lenin and Krupskaia, and after the crackdown on Bolsheviks in 1906 underwent two weeks of imprisonment, his only ordeal in the name of the revolution. He went on hunger strike and was released. Menzhinsky’s marriage broke up; his wife took the children. She devoted herself to pedagogy and never mentioned Menzhinsky again.
²
Menzhinsky drifted abroad. He roamed France, Italy
and Britain and even the USA for eleven years, working as a bank clerk for Crédit Lyonnais in Paris, as a watercolour painter, as a teacher at the Bolshevik school in Bologna. Like Dzierżyński, Menzhinsky was more deeply attached to his sisters than to any other human being. Neither Vera nor Liudmila ever married. With Vera he hiked over the hills of northern Italy, and the death of Liudmila in 1932 was the worst blow in his life.