Stalin and His Hangmen (77 page)

The Russian state in 2003 is ruled by a man who is, by career and choice, a successor to Iagoda and Beria. And while Russia’s political prisoners number hundreds, not hundreds of thousands, the FSB has taken, in alliance with bandits and extortioners, the commanding heights of the country’s government and economic riches, and goes on lying to, and when expedient murdering, its citizens. Russia is now locked into a global economy and today’s rulers have no reason to murder millions of peasants or terrorize the professional classes. Genocide, however, is carried on by other means, and not only in Chechnya. In the last ten years, for instance, half of the indigenous peoples of Russia’s Arctic regions have perished: 240,000 were alive in 1989, 120,000 are alive today. By destroying their pastures and fishing grounds, removing every support for their existence except vodka and tobacco, Russia’s present government has proved as lethal as the GULAG. For Chechens, today’s war of extermination is even worse than yesterday’s repressions and deportations, for there is no effort to conceal the horrors, given the compliance and complacency of the rest of the world.

As the fates of Galina Starovoitova, Sergei Iushenkov and Dmitri Kholodov have shown, any genuinely democratic politician or journalist in Russia has not much more life expectancy today than under the Bolsheviks. Russian citizens are too preoccupied with making ends meet and surviving to old age to be interested in forcing the state to account for itself, or to insist on electing honest men and women to power. Much
of the truth about the past is locked up in closed archives which with every month grow even less accessible. School history textbooks, with few exceptions, pass over in silence the record of Stalinism.
⁵²
Until the story is told in full, and until the world community insists that the legacy of Stalin is fully accounted for and expiated, Russia will remain spiritually sick, haunted by the ghosts of Stalin and his hangmen and, worse, by nightmares of their resurrection.

1. ‘Koba’ Stalin, police photograph, Baku, 1910

2. Suren Spandaryan and Koba,
c
. 1911

3. Stalin (second left, back row) with fellow exiles, Monastyrskoe (Siberia), July 1915

4. Dzierzynski (centre, front), Jekabs Peterss (second left) and senior
chekisty,
1918

5. Dzierzyriski’s funeral, 1926. Left to right: Rykov,Yagoda, Kalinin,Trotsky, Kamenev, Stalin, Rakovsky Bukharin

6. Menzhinsky with his first wife Iulia, his two daughters and his son Rudolf, Iaroslavl, 1904

7. Menzhinsky in the Cheka,
c.
1919

8. American Relief Agency clinic, Volga famine, 1921

9. Left to right: Stalin, Rykov, Zinoviev and Bukharin at the dacha, 1924

10. Sergei Kirov (left) and Sergo Orjonikidze, north Caucasus, 1920

11. Left to right: Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev (front), mid-1920s