Stalin and His Hangmen : The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

Rating:
Summary: Stalin's Willing Executioners
Review: Baudelaire once wrote: "I am the wound and the knife! I am the blow and the cheek! I am the limbs and the wheel - The victim and the executioner!" In many respects that sums up the lives of Stalin's (and Lenin's) henchmen that ran the USSR's security apparatus from the Russian (October) Revolution through the death of Stalin. Donald Rayfield's "Stalin and His Hangmen" provides an excruciatingly morbid examination of the men and the organization that facilitated Stalin's rise to total power and the means they used to achieve that end.

Rayfield, a professor of Russian and Georgian at the University of London, has provided a scholarly, yet compelling history of the men who built and maintained the Soviet security regime. As stated in his preface, Rayfield's purpose in writing this book was not to add yet another biography of Stalin but, rather, to examine the means by which Stalin gradually assumed total power in the USSR. He does so by focusing on the men who facilitated that rise to power by creating a brutally efficient killing machine exceeded in the 20th century only (perhaps) by Hitler's Holocaust.

Rayfield focuses on the lives and bloody career of five leaders of those security organs (commonly known by a succession of acronyms or initials, the Cheka, GPU, NKVD, MVD, MGB, and KGB): F. Dzerzhinsky, V. Menshinksy, G. Iagoda, N. Ezhov, and L. Beria. Along the way we see the machinations that caused the ousting of Trotsky from power and his eventual murder. Rayfield explores the role the security organs played in Stalin's cat-and-mouse games with Bukharin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev and his suppression, imprisonment, and/or murder of the Russian Orthodox Church, ethnic nationalities, kulaks, and millions of enemies, real or imagined None of this is particularly new ground for anyone with an interest in the subject matter. However, Rayfield, by examining these events with an eye towards the symbiotic relationship between Stalin and his hangmen, manages to cast a fresh eye on old horrors.

Hannah Arendt coined the phrase banality of evil. Although it has a certain ring of truth to it Rayfield's look into the lives of these leading `Chekists' shows that some, if not all of them, were far from banal. Some considered themselves poets and tried to develop relations with the Soviet intelligentsia (before sending them to the Gulag). They each managed to kill hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, including many lives taken by their own hands. They each, with the possible exception of the rather puritanical Dzerzhinsky, were perverse (their sexual depravity was legion and is well chronicled here) and brutal psychopaths. Yet some, particularly Beria had exceptional managerial skills and a broad range of intellectual interests. Ultimately, they all knew that the fires of death they fueled would ultimately consume them yet, like moths to the flame they stayed on until the bitter end of their own lives, as Baudelaire put it, both victims and executioners.

Rayfield does not attempt to explain why these Chekists played out their horrible roles with such gusto. I'm not sure an explanation is possible and I think it was a wise choice to avoid exploring the myriad motivations behind such collective complicity in horrible acts. I think it sufficient simply to set out the lives of these men and their separate and collective relationships with Stalin and let the facts speak for themselves.
Although a scholarly work, Rayfield's prose is accessible to anyone with an interest in Soviet history. Highly recommended.


Rating:
Summary: Crimes of the Century
Review: This is an interesting and well researched work (which uses a large range of sources - recently released archives, private letters, memoirs, etc.) that focuses more on Stalin's "hangmen" than the dictator himself. Feliks Dzierzynski, Viacheslav Menzhinsky, Genrikh Iagoda, Nikolai Ezhov, and Lavrenti Beria were the five heads of the secret police that propped up Stalin's criminal regime.

This book, like many other recent books on Soviet terror (Koba the Dread, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, The Black Book of Communism, The Unknown Lenin, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, etc.), makes clear that the campaign of torture and mass murder that ravaged Russia started well before Stalin was in charge (Lenin himself had argued for the hangings of rich peasants, priests and landowners, so that the public could better contemplate the corpses). Dzierzynski formed the bloody Cheka immediately after the Bolshevik coup detat in 1917. This ruthless machine of terror unleashed a holocaust that destroyed hundreds of thousands of innocent lives during the Red Terror and Russian civil war. The atrocities recounted are indeed horrific, ranging from the shooting of all Moscow's Boy Scouts and the members of the lawn tennis club to the genocidal extermination of the Don Cossacks and the use of flamethrowers and machine guns on women and children. Not surprisingly, many Chekists went insane after torturing and killing so many people (similar to the Ensatzgruppen killers who went mad carrying out Hitler's "war of extermination" in the East during "Operation Barbarossa"). Saenko, a notorious sadist who worked in a special torture chamber in Kharkov, attacked his superiors and was shot. A Hungarian woman in the Kiev Cheka was consigned to a psychiatric ward after she began shooting not just prisoners but witnesses. While Dzierzynski himself had no problem ordering thousands to be executed, he didn't like killing people personally. He only did once - shooting a drunken sailor who was swearing at him. He had a convulsive fit afterwards (this reminds me of Hitler's hangman Heinrich Himmler nearly fainting after witnessing a mass execution).

Menzhinsky, although not quite as notorious as the other four, was responsible for more deaths than any of them (ironic considering he never held a revolver or watched an execution). He was in charge of the OGPU and enforced Stalin's brutal policies of collectivization, dekulakization and forced famine in the early 30's, which obliterated an estimated 7.2 to 10.8 million human lives. At Stalin's behest he confiscated grain from starving regions and excess piles were left rotting in the rain. Thanks to Stalin's draconian "of five ears of corn" law, starving peasants caught taking even a handful of grain were imprisoned or shot by the OGPU. Within a year 6,000 had been executed and tens of thousands imprisoned.

The other three hangmen are somewhat better known. Iagoda, who came from a Polish Jewish family, called himself "a guard dog on a chain." It was on his initiative that the White Sea canal was constructed with the OGPU's political prisoners (forced laborers); the death toll was well over 100,000. Ezhov (aka "the Bloody Dwarf," "Blackberry") carried out the bloodbath known as the "Great Terror" of 1937-38, in which around 750,000 were executed and twice as many were sentenced to slow death in the camps. During this dark time the NKVD ran out of paper to record sentences and executions. Beria (aka "Stalin's Himmler") was a depraved sadist who personally tortured and killed many people. He was also a sexual predator who was guilty of many rapes and of violating young girls. Surprisingly, as head of the NKVD from 1938-53 executions were reduced from the chaotic Ezhov years, but he still carried out some of Stalin's worst crimes: the deportations and massacres in the Baltic States, Western Ukraine and Poland during the Nazi-Soviet pact and the ethnic cleansing of minorities in the USSR - Volga Germans, Kalmyks, Karachai, Ingush, Crimean Taters, Chechens - accused of "collaboration" with the Germans. When the population couldn't be deported, they were sometimes killed. In one incident at Khainakh, one of Beria's henchmen, Mikeil Gvishiani, locked several hundred villagers, from newborn babies to men over 100, in stables and set fire to them, gunning down those who broke out.

Rayfield points to a disturbing trend in Russia today. Unlike in Germany, where Nazi hangmen are universally condemned and even denying the Holocaust is punishable by prison time, Russia seems to be glorifying its genocidal killers. The mayor of Moscow has proposed restoring the statue of Feliks Dzierzynski in front of the Lubianka. In 2002 the Russian post office issued a set of stamps: "The 80th Anniversary of Soviet counterintelligence." The stamps include portraits of Sergei Puzitsky, who organized the mass murder of 500,000 Cossacks in 1931; Vladimir Styrne, who butchered thousands of Uzbeks in the 1920's; Vsevolod Balitsky, a torturer and rapist who purged the Ukraine and enslaved the peasantry. This received little comment abroad. World reaction would have been much different had Germany issued stamps of Heinrich Himmler's or Reinhard Heydrich's minions. It's because of this shameless double standard in atrocity that books such as this one are so important. Otherwise the crimes against humanity committed by Stalin and his hangmen, which are indeed some of the worst in human existence, might vanish into history's black hole. Somebody once said that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Looking at Putin's actions in Russia and Chechnya today it seems that's exactly what's happening.


Rating:
Summary: *****
Review: While I disagreed with a few things in this book, it is over all a great rundown of Stalin's tyranny and those who helped him carry it out. I got the same feeling toward the end as when reading THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM. I almost started to feel physically ill that so many of the human species could act this horrendously (or put up with such behavior so passively) in such sheer numbers over such a long period of time. I recently visited Russia, and liked it a lot more than I expected, especially the people. So to know that similarly wonderful people had their lives so scorched for so long is an incomprehensible tragedy that this book gives a glimpse of.