Stalin and His Hangmen (63 page)

After war between Germany and the USSR broke out in June 1941, about two thirds of the Polish soldiers sent to the GULAG were retrieved to fight against the Nazis. Most opted to serve alongside the British in North Africa and Sikorski continued to press for news of the missing officers. Stalin pretended to telephone Beria about them and then claimed that they had walked to Manchuria or had not been reported by lazy camp commandants. Vyshinsky claimed they had been freed in Poland. Stalin told General Anders that the Germans must have captured them. In 1942 100,000 Poles with their families left the USSR through Iran; tens of thousands remained in Russia, increasingly harassed.

On 13 April 1943 the Germans began exhuming Katyn, and Stalin added falsification to prevarication. The Germans called in the Swiss Red Cross, but to their disgrace the British and Americans denounced the Swiss report and concurred with the Russian version, that the Germans had buried old newspapers with the corpses to calumniate the innocent Soviets. In January 1944, the Soviets set up their own special commission, from which the party and the NKVD were conspicuously absent. Two academicians, a metropolitan bishop, the chairman of the Soviet Red Cross and the writer Aleksei Tolstoi connived to produce ‘witnesses’ to prove German ‘provocation’. A film was also made. Aleksei Tolstoi, as perceptive as he was unprincipled, warned Nikolai Shvernik, Stalin’s head of anti-German propaganda, that the film ‘is not only unfit for showing but can even have a negative effect… the witnesses seem to be repeating a lesson they have learnt by heart…’

When in March 1946 at the Nuremberg trials Goering’s defence tried to bring up Katyn, the Soviet commission led by Vyshinsky protested forcibly. Katyn was not discussed. In Minsk, German officers were hanged for allegedly massacring Polish officers at Katyn. The lying went on until 1988.

The treatment of two Polish Jews taken prisoner in October 1939 was just as calamitous as Katyn for Soviet credibility and the war effort. Henryk Erlich and Wiktor Alter were leaders of the Jewish socialist Bund, effectively the heart and mind of a Jewish anti-Hitler committee. They were taken to Moscow and charged as Polish spies and hostile critics of the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact. Beria’s men worked slowly;
the war with Germany had been raging for a month by the time Alter was sentenced to death. Instead of death, however, Erlich and Alter were first given ten years’ imprisonment and then offered their freedom if they would head a Jewish anti-fascist committee. By mid-September they had offices in the Hotel Metropol and were looked after by Beria’s Polish liaison officer. Beria proposed Erlich as president and Alter as secretary, while the world-famous Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels would be vice-president. But things did not go according to Beria’s plan. Erlich and Alter used their initiative: they worked with the British, Polish and American ambassadors, and proposed a Jewish legion to fight alongside the Red Army. They also began to search for missing Polish officers. Beria sent Leonid Raikhman to arrest them on 4 December 1941, this time as Nazi agents spreading pacifism. Erlich hanged himself in prison the following May while Alter wrote letters to Stalin threatening suicide. Only in early 1943, when the discovery of Katyn ruined relations with the Poles and Stalin felt he had little to lose, did Molotov reply to the enquiries of Albert Einstein and other distinguished Americans and instruct Litvinov to announce that both Erlich and Alter had been shot for treason on 23 December 1941. Beria in fact had Alter shot three days after this announcement. Sergei Ogoltsov, head of the NKVD in evacuation at Kuibyshev, personally supervised the execution and the burning of his possessions. Roosevelt and Churchill both silenced protests in their own countries, but Jewish trust in Stalin as their saviour collapsed.

In 1940 and 1941 Stalin’s instincts and cunning had completely failed him. Initiating a winter war with Finland when the Red Army had been lobotomized by the NKVD ruined his prestige. Sanctioning the murders of Poland’s officer corps and two internationally respected Jewish activists were acts as stupid as they were atrocious. Appearing to dismiss as Anglo-American disinformation all the reports that his intelligence received about Hitler’s intentions was his most catastrophic failure. About the first two lapses Stalin was uncharacteristically unvindictive. He quarrelled with Voroshilov over the latter’s inept conduct of the Finnish campaign, but when Voroshilov in fury retorted, ‘You killed all the senior officers!’ smashed a plate and stormed out, Stalin did nothing. Voroshilov was replaced as commissar and given less crucial defence posts – where he performed with equal incompetence – but never fell
from favour. Nor did Beria, Merkulov and Bogdan Kobulov suffer for killing those Polish officers who would have been so useful a year later.

What was going through Stalin’s mind in 1940? All his enemies dead, with Beria running internal affairs and Molotov external affairs, as hopeful as Neville Chamberlain that he had brought ‘peace in our time’, Stalin withdrew into what he took to be philosophy. He had taken Hitler seriously enough to have had
Mein Kampf
translated and studied. Stalin read the same books as Hitler – Clausewitz’s
On War
and Otto von Bismarck’s memoirs – but drew different conclusions. Reading Clausewitz, Stalin could well have concluded that no German leader would repeat Napoleon I’s mistake of invading Russia; reading Bismarck, that no German leader would dare fight another war on two fronts. Stalin and Hitler were both gamblers: Stalin was a calculating player; Hitler, staking everything on one card, blitzkrieg, played a different game.

While his minions ruled, Stalin recast both history and himself. Since the Marxist historian Pokrovsky had died, the moving force of history had, for Stalin, reverted from class struggle to kings and queens. Soviet textbooks in the 1930s reflected this change by showing Russian nationalism and empire building in a positive light. In 1938 Stalin had the ‘newly literate’ languages of the USSR switch from the Latin to the Cyrillic alphabet. Tsarism was now ‘progressive’: it had built a multi-ethnic centralized nation. Anniversaries of Russian classic authors were celebrated with pomp and ceremony throughout the USSR; generous Stalin prizes were awarded to any composer, painter, film director or writer who glorified Russia’s past as the prelude to an even greater future. Andrei Zhdanov commissioned patriotic operas, films and novels.

The cinema became for Stalin the supreme art. Sinners among film directors were forgiven. He even let Kapler, who had been beaten for kissing Svetlana Allilueva, work, although in 1943 he was sent to the camps for ten years. Sergei Eisenstein, who had come close to arrest for his years in America and for his religious portrayal of the peasantry in
Bezhin Meadow
, was recruited. Together with Lev Sheinin, Vyshinsky’s favourite interrogator, Eisenstein proposed a film about the trial and acquittal of the Jew Mendel Beilis, accused in Kiev of drinking a Christian infant’s blood for Passover. But a Jewish project was anathema to Stalin; anti-Semitism was part of his Russian chauvinism. Eisenstein was directed to make a film not about honest Russian jurymen, but about Ivan the
Terrible. Stalin saw himself too as a harsh, divinely appointed ruler who would save his country in a war on two fronts: the Germans and the Japanese of 1941 were reincarnations of the Livonians and Tatars of 1540. Aleksei Tolstoi, with clairvoyant perception of what Stalin wanted, drafted a three-part drama on Ivan. Stalin edited the first published version until Ivan came across as sufficiently stable and unrepentant for his taste.

Not Ivan the Terrible, but Russia’s great generals obsessed Stalin in 1940. A film was proposed glorifying Catherine the Great’s General Aleksandr Suvorov, who had fought Swedes and Turks with equal success. Stalin read the script and told the director to make Suvorov less kindly. Stalin’s Suvorov was in his own image as generalissimo:

The script doesn’t reveal Suvorov’s characteristic policies and tactics: 1) correctly taking into account the enemy’s faults, and knowing how to exploit them fully; 2) a properly thought-out and bold attack combined with a diversion to strike the enemy in the rear; 3) the ability to choose experienced and bold commanders and to direct them to the object of attack; 4) the ability to promote boldly to senior posts those who excel, without regard to rank, taking little notice of the official seniority or origins of those promoted; 5) the ability to sustain in the army harsh, truly iron discipline.
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Trotsky’s End

Katyn had been Beria’s worst mistake, but in August 1940 he had a resounding success: he had Trotsky killed. For seven years, since Trotsky had left Turkey for France, the NKVD’s pursuit of the only enemy Stalin took seriously had been a gruesome farce. The French authorities were fed up with the trail of bullet-ridden corpses and the émigrés and diplomats who helped the killers; the NKVD, apart from killing Trotsky’s children, his parents, his sister, his sister-in-law and some of his political followers, had murdered eight secretaries. When in January 1937 Trotsky moved to Mexico, the NKVD could plan anew as the Stalinist Mexican Communist Party had influential supporters, and Mexico’s refugees from Spain included NKVD collaborators. Stalin’s determination
was not lessened by Trotsky’s newly conciliatory position towards him. To the dismay of his followers, Trotsky had approved Stalin’s division of Poland with Hitler, on the grounds that the USSR was a workers’ state and that the Baltic and Poland would now benefit by joining a proletarian empire.

Beria had inherited from Ezhov a few Spanish Civil War adventurers. One was Naum Eitingon, who had operated as a guerrilla with the republican forces under the name of General Kotov, and who took over from the defector Aleksandr Orlov as the NKVD’s main agent in Spain.
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Eitingon was assisted by Iosif Grigulevich and by a new recruit to the NKVD’s main directorate, Pavel Sudoplatov – the only one of Beria’s men to publish a full, if mendacious, account of his activities. They were allotted $300,000 to mount their operation, which produced two plans, both using new agents unknown to Trotsky. One, organized by Grigulevich, was an amateurish machine-gun attack on 24 May 1940 by Mexican Stalinists led by the painter David Siqueiros and assisted by the treachery of Trotsky’s last secretary, Robert Sheldon Harte. Siqueiros’s men riddled Trotsky’s room but failed to search it. The Trotskys hid under the bed.
⁴⁷

Eitingon’s plan was more subtle. His agent Ramén Mercader was a fanatical Stalinist, physically strong but morally weak, and had fought in Spain. His mother Caridad had for three years been an NKVD agent. Mercader had many aliases: the Belgian Jacques Mornard, the Canadian Frank Jackson. Sudoplatov and Eitingon instructed him to court Trotsky’s assistant Sylvia Ageloff, to express no interest in Trotsky or Trotskyism, and to insinuate himself into the house as her apolitical husband. Despite Mercader’s lack of credentials, political knowledge or personal charm, Trotsky was too polite or too resigned to assassination to investigate him or to avoid being alone with him. On 20 August 1940, Mercader smashed an ice pick into Trotsky’s skull. Mercader was caught; Eitingon and Caridad Mercader were already on their way to California. If there was any doubt that Trotsky’s death was Stalin’s doing, it was unwittingly dispersed by
Pravda
’s triumphant announcement before even the Mexican police knew that Trotsky had been killed ‘by a member of his inner circle’.

Stalin was so pleased by this success that he personally assured Naum Eitingon, ‘not a hair will ever fall from your head’.
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Three weeks later
Stalin’s magnanimity went further: he told a Central Committee meeting that enemies should be portrayed in films

not as monsters, but as people hostile to our society, but not devoid of some human characteristics. The vilest villain has human traits, he loves somebody, he respects somebody, he wants to make sacrifices for somebody… Why not represent Bukharin, however much he was a monster, but he did have some human featureŠ Trotsky is an enemy, but he is [corrected to ‘was’ in the stenogram] a capable man, without argument, represent him as an enemy who had negative features, but he also had good qualities, because without argument he did.
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Having disposed of Trotsky, on 30 January 1941 Beria became general commissar of state security. It did not worry him that he might last no longer than Iagoda or Ezhov after Stalin had awarded them that rank.

NINE
Hangmen at War

‘Brothers, Sisters!’

Hitler’s attack on the USSR on 22 June 1941 did not alter Stalin’s view of his people. When he had recovered from the shock of Hitler’s ‘treachery’ and the humiliating rout of the Red Army, Stalin broadcast to the nation in terms he had never used before and would never use again, speaking like a Christian, calling on his ‘brothers and sisters’. However, nothing significant had changed in Stalin or his hangmen. Beria and Merkulov’s secret police went on shooting prisoners, including those arrested for anti-German statements. Absurdly draconian measures were announced to deter troops from surrendering or retreating, however inevitable or logical such a tactic might be.

What altered on 22 June 1941 was the attitude of the Soviet people. German cannon and SS extermination squads, scorched earth and starvation neutralized fear of the party and NKVD. Some gave vent to despair. Anna Akhmatova was heard declaring, ‘I hate, I hate Hitler, I hate Stalin, I hate those who are bombing Leningrad, I hate those who are bombing Berlin, I hate everyone who is conducting this absurd, horrible war.’ Some felt uplifted by the suffering of a just war. Pasternak’s poem ‘A Terrible Fairy Story’ announces that ‘The fear that has furrowed faces / Will never be forgotten’, but anticipates, as did very many Soviet citizens, that for this suffering there would be a compensation: ‘A new better age will dawn’. What made the horrors of the 1940s more tolerable than those of the 1930s was that everyone’s fate was bound together. If the Soviet people gave in to the Nazis, Stalin and all his henchmen would go down with them. For once, the leaders of the country depended on the people, and had to show it. Pasternak called the war ‘a purifying storm, a stream of fresh air, a wafting of redemption’. The Leningrad poet Olga Berggolts exulted: ‘In mud, dark, hunger, grief, / Where death followed our heels like a shadow, / We felt such happiness, / We breathed such stormy freedom, / That our grandchildren would envy us.’ For free speech, people still paid with their lives – in punishment battalions or by firing squad – but the fear had abated.