Stalin and His Hangmen (21 page)

What Menzhinsky did in 1909 should have blighted his future prospects with the Bolsheviks for ever: in the Russian emigre journal
Our Echo
he attacked Lenin for ‘appropriating’ the proceeds of Bolshevik banditry for his own personal use. Menzhinsky abused Lenin: ‘another half-mad Tsar Paul I… The Bolsheviks’ aim is power, influence over the people, their desire is to bridle the proletariat. Lenin is a political Jesuit, twisting Marxism according to his own whim and using it for ephemeral aims… Leninists are not a political group but a noisy gypsy camp. They like waving whips around, they imagine that they have an inalienable right to be the cattle-drovers of the working class.’ But Menzhinsky shared the views he ascribed to Lenin: a friend recalls him declaring: ‘the peasantry are cattle to be sacrificed to revolution’. Both Lenin and Stalin knew of Menzhinsky’s outbursts. Lenin dismissed them with casual contempt as he always dismissed attacks from those beneath him; Stalin, on the other hand, cultivated men who had lapses that made them hostages to fortune. In any case, Stalin likewise saw peasants as ‘cattle’ and Lenin as the ‘cattle-drover’.

Returning to Russia from France in spring 1917 via Britain and Finland, Menzhinsky was a bystander during the October revolution. He played Chopin waltzes on a grand piano in the Smolny Institute when all around him was chaos and panic. The Petrograd Bolsheviks nevertheless found work for Menzhinsky. Thanks to his and his brother’s banking experience he was appointed commissar for finance. Lenin first met Menzhinsky fast asleep on a divan in a corridor. To the divan was stuck a label, ‘People’s Commissariat of Finances’, and Menzhinsky was so far its sole employee.

Trotsky claimed that Menzhinsky had trouble forcing the banks to disgorge their funds to the revolution so Lenin and Trotsky then tried to utilize Menzhinsky’s suave manners and knowledge of languages. In April 1918 he was sent to the Soviet mission in Berlin where, during the
mission’s seven months of life, Menzhinsky made a positive impression, and not just with his polyglot skills – he spoke most European and several oriental languages – but with his flair for intelligence gathering and analysis. When the Germans expelled the Soviet mission for spreading revolutionary propaganda, Menzhinsky was given riskier work. He spent much of 1919 as commissar for national inspection in the Ukraine, where the Russian Bolsheviks were targets for Ukrainian nationalists. Here Menzhinsky proved his fearlessness, enough for Dzierżyński to make him the third Pole in the Cheka leadership.

A shrewd judge of men and information, a chess player who used real people as pawns and – it turned out – a prodigious fabricator of plots and scenarios, Menzhinsky took over from Dzierżyński even before the latter’s death in 1926 and kept his post until his death in May 1934. Apart from People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgi Chicherin (an intimate member of Mikhail Kuzmin’s decadent circle), Menzhinsky was the only commissar who looked like a banker, in a three-piece suit, tie and bowler hat. Like Chicherin, he was also constantly ill. In exile he suffered from kidney infections and a hernia; a car accident in Paris had given him spondylitis, and he was unable to stand or even sit for long. He interrogated prisoners reclining on a divan under a travelling rug which his second-in-command Genrikh Iagoda tucked round his legs. Menzhinsky also had the ‘Kremlin syndrome’: arteriosclerosis, an enlarged heart and migraines.

Without Menzhinsky’s shrewdness, Stalin could not have in the 1920s defeated his enemies abroad and at home; without Menzhinsky’s ruthlessness, Stalin could not have pushed through collectivization in 1929, nor staged the show trials of the early 1930s. However far apart in education and origin, Stalin and Menzhinsky had a real affinity. They shared a calm ruthlessness: neither ever raised his voice nor spoke at unnecessary length. Menzhinsky cultivated silence to extremes; at the tenth anniversary of the revolution, expected to make a forty-minute speech on the Cheka’s glorious role, he mounted the tribune, said, ‘The main merit of a chekist is to keep silent,’ and stepped down.

Like Stalin, Menzhinsky had been a poet. Stalin’s lyrics reveal a tortured psyche obsessed by the moon, swinging between euphoria and depression, expecting ingratitude and even poison from his audience, and terrified of old age. Menzhinsky’s persona is an arrogant and depraved
cynic. Perhaps it is significant that Stalin was an adolescent and Menzhinsky in his early thirties when each was first published.

Menzhinsky’s published writings give us the best insight into his mentality.
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His novel
Demidov’s Affair
appeared in 1905 in
The Green Anthology
(resembling the English decadent
Yellow Book)
next to thirteen sonnets by Mikhail Kuzmin. Menzhinsky’s piece was singled out by one critic as the best in the anthology. The story of Vasili Demidov, ‘a very elegant youth’ who values ‘only the freedom of the individual’, has the blend of depravity and socialism that we find in Oscar Wilde. The novel is narcissistic: its hero is a handsome young lawyer who helps radical women to run workers’ Sunday and evening classes but shocks women teachers with blasphemous and erotic lyrics, which he recites at a college gathering. The austere director of the college, Elena, fourteen years older, falls in love with Demidov despite disapproving of him. Their subsequent marriage is strained: the repressed woman and the hedonist prove incompatible. The work mixes decadent amorality with chekist ruthlessness.

Menzhinsky’s hero recites a ‘Poem to the God of Temptation’. In this version of the Book of Job, God challenges the poet:

Can you measure the radiance of my freedom,

The gravity of the abyss, the joy of being one’s self?

You cower? Stand back. Not everyone can grasp

The wondrous art of seeing in dreary commandments

Lighthouses only for bold temptations,

The goal of happiness in separation, the path to betrayal in friendship.

to which challenge Menzhinsky’s Job replies:

                    Enough! I have decided. The field is yours.

                    I shall build an eternal shrine to you.

When Demidov falls for Anna, a secretary in his office, Menzhinsky’s novel ends in an improbable idyll. Both women are in Demidov’s apartment, Elena sorting out rags, Anna dropping clothes on the floor – a realization of the ‘three-in-a-bed’ love lyric which Menzhinsky has his hero recite at a school concert:

Under passionate searches so passionately

Your body writhes!

I, a great artist, laugh,

No tears, no shame – only yells,

And sighs and quivering do you know.

[…]

It has come! I have seen another woman

With my burning tensed gaze,

I tickle and kiss her,

I have bent down, I embrace her, you are next to us.

Demidov’s Affair
shows how well Menzhinsky understood his future self: when Demidov becomes a legal official, he reflects that he was ‘the smallest spoke in the chariot of justice and he felt no personal guilt if that chariot crushed anybody’.

In 1907, in the anthology
A Thawed Patch (Protalina),
in the company of two leading poets – Aleksandr Blok and Mikhail Kuzmin – Menzhinsky published two prose poems, pastiches of the Gospels, ‘Jesus’ and ‘Barabbas’. Menzhinsky’s Christ is an epileptic, a suicidal charismatic not a messiah, who takes his disciples to view Golgotha; Barabbas, the killer of tax gatherers, is acclaimed by the mob, released by Pontius Pilate, and discreetly killed by the Romans.

29 There was nobody who would cry out ‘Release Jesus.’
30 But the crowd yelled, ‘Give us Barabbas, and crucify Jesus.’
31 And Barabbas, standing in the crowd, saw Jesus dragged to the place of execution.
32 And Barabbas did not die as a slave on the cross.
33 The Romans killed him in the wilderness and the fifty men who were faithful to him.
34 Barabbas fell with his sword in his hand, and Judaea wept for him, and Galilee tore its hair, groaning:
35 ‘Barabbas has died, Barabbas the terror of the dishonourable, the
destroyer of Romans, the exterminator of tax collectors!

As in Gorky’s play
The Lower Depths,
in Menzhinsky’s verses the Christian hero is superseded by the revolutionary bandit.
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Menzhinsky’s
verses not only echo Stalin’s distrust of an ungrateful mob, they give us an uncanny insight into how Menzhinsky would treat the Jesuses, Pontius Pilates and Barabbases he would work against, for and with in Soviet Russia. Messianic obsessions link Menzhinsky to Dzierżyński and to Stalin. What drew them together was repressed Christian piety. All three are unquiet Dostoevskian atheists. Denying God was not enough; they longed to usurp him.

Like Stalin, Menzhinsky, after abandoning creative writing, took a morbid interest in poetry and poets. Both intervened, as patrons, censors or hangmen, in poets’ work and lives but in Menzhinsky’s first years in the Cheka, with a blotted ideological copybook, he was precluded from rooting out Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, anarchists or other heretics. He was valued for his ability, rare in an institution largely staffed with illiterates and foreigners, to draft a letter, resolution or verdict in Russian which combined a lawyer’s precision with a poet’s elegance. But despite his backroom role, as the Cheka evolved into OGPU, Menzhinsky stood out. Those he interviewed were struck by the hunched body, the spectacles or pince-nez, the couch and the rug. He made much of his long pianist’s fingers, rubbing his hands with pleasure, smiling, excruciatingly polite, even – or especially – when he was sending his collocutor to execution.

Repressing Peasants and Intellectuals

In early 1921 the civil war wound down, the Caucasus was reconquered and the Poles and the Baltic states signed peace treaties with the USSR. The Cheka, like the Red Army, was opposed mainly by those in whose name it had been fighting as internecine war broke out between Bolsheviks and peasantry. On the Volga grain surpluses and seedcorn were confiscated by army and Cheka units to feed soldiers and urban workers, and during the ‘Antonov’ rebellion the peasants were crushed by army units under men like Tukhachevsky, directed by Trotsky, and mopped up by the special purpose units of Dzierżyński’s deputy Józef Unszlicht. Tukhachevsky’s ruthless slaughter of hostages and rebels worsened the famine brought by war and drought. Few remained alive for the Cheka to torture or kill.

Before the ‘Antonov bandits’ could be shot or sent to camps, the factories and garrisons of Moscow and Petrograd went on strike. Bread rations were at starvation levels; fuel had dried up. The workers, seeing the Whites defeated, could not understand why they were still hungry, cold, out of work and under martial law. In March 1921, the naval garrison on the fortress island of Kronstadt outside Petrograd demanded free elections, free speech and land for the peasantry. Their delegation was arrested and Trotsky and Tukhachevsky bullied troops into crushing the uprising. The Petrograd Cheka was in disgrace for not forestalling the rising: Dzierżyński sent a fellow Pole, Stanisław Messing, with another senior chekist, Iakov Agranov, from Moscow to try the rebel sailors, many of whom were shot.

Menzhinsky and his colleague in the Cheka Dr Mikhail Kedrov drafted a warning to the Central Committee. Lenin, Zinoviev and Stalin were told that the peasant rebellions were well organized and that if conditions deteriorated the metropolitan workers would strike in solidarity with the peasantry. They also warned that the trade union movement – courted by Trotsky – was undermining the party and that the Red Army was no longer a reliable tool. The note recommended only special purpose detachments – the Cheka’s own forces – be used to restore order in army units and factories.

Ensuing disasters proved the Cheka right. Menzhinsky tried to explain this to Trotsky, whom he had previously warned that Stalin was intriguing against him. Trotsky rashly refused to respond – he thought Menzhinsky inconsequential – but he conceded that Menzhinsky was right on one point: the Petrograd Cheka had been secretly sympathetic to the Kronstadt rebels. Menzhinsky’s role in liquidating the Kronstadt rebellion had been to dispatch a thousand dissident sailors to Odessa – which nearly led to the subsequent rebellion there. Eight years passed before Menzhinsky took part in more mass repressions.

During the early 1920s Menzhinsky oversaw the intelligentsia. In spring 1921 the poets Aleksandr Blok and Fiodor Sologub pleaded for exit visas.
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Anatoli Lunacharsky, commissar for education and the softest of the Soviet leaders, had himself been a symbolist dramatist. He sympathized: ‘We have literally driven Blok to the point of no return.’ Maxim Gorky interceded for Blok and Sologub even though he disliked their
verse. For the Cheka, Menzhinsky and Unszlicht took a harsher view: Unszlicht complained of the ‘completely impermissible attitude of the People’s Commissariat for Education on travel by artistic forces abroad. There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of performers and artists who travel abroad are lost to Soviet Russia… Moreover, many of them conduct open or covert campaigns against us abroad.’