Stalin and His Hangmen: New Book on Stalin

Resisting Stalin

    The more we learn of Josef Stalin, the more alluring he becomes.

By Lewis H. Siegelbaum

For reasons that seem obvious, if a little ghoulish, readers can’t get enough of Josef Stalin and the horrors he committed. This past year alone, we have been treated to several blockbuster biographies, of which Simon Sebag Montefiore’s “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar” made the greatest splash. Reports that Saddam Hussein modeled his unsavory career on Stalin’s only whetted the public’s appetite for one of the greatest WMDs of all time.

The more we learn of Stalin — and we have learned a great deal since the archives began offering up their secrets in the early 1990s — the more nasty but also the more fascinating he becomes. Variously diagnosed by biographers as insecure, mistrustful, paranoid, vengeful, cynical, fanatical, and in nearly constant physical pain, he channeled whatever it was that ailed him into besting his more eloquent, better educated and less psychotic rivals for the mantle of Communist Party leadership, and presiding over the Soviet empire for more than a quarter of a century…..

But, argues Donald Rayfield in this angry and accusatory book, he didn’t do it alone. Stalin needed men nearly as loathsome as he to carry out the dirty work of whipping his socialist society into shape and stifling real or suspected opposition. Rayfield’s argument pushes an already open door, for others have written about “all Stalin’s men,” his lieutenants, magnates, henchmen, inner circle, and the like.

Usually included in this gallery of rogues are Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Klement Voroshilov, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenty Beria. Rayfield focuses on the leaders of the Cheka security force and its successors, which brings “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky and Genrikh Yagoda into the mix.

A professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary, University of London, and author of a biography of Anton Chekhov and a literary history of Georgia, Rayfield offers a wealth of information about these men, their associates and the security forces in general. His observations on the intellectual and cultural milieus in which his subjects revolved are particularly acute, as in when he considers the influence of Georgia’s medieval past on Stalin’s conception of a ruler, or asks why so many writers (he says poets, but the point applies no less to writers of prose) were drawn to the Cheka and vice versa.

He also comes up with several arresting aphorisms about Stalin’s Marxism (“Stalin was a Marxist in the same sense that Machiavelli was a Christian: both saw the retention of power as the sole task for a ruler”) and dedication to communism (“he was no more a communist than a Borgia pope was a Catholic.”)

But the book suffers from some serious debilities. One is the sheer volume of detail, much of which barely hints at explanatory significance. It turns out that Dzerzhinsky, Menzhinsky and Yagoda were all sentimentalists to one degree or another and depended on their sisters to a perhaps abnormal extent, though what one is to make of this is unclear.

The same goes for references to Stalin’s seduction of a pre-pubescent 13-year-old girl during his Siberian exile, Menzhinsky’s pre-1917 literary decadence, Yagoda’s weakness for fine wines, dildos and pornography, Yezhov’s affair with and second marriage to Yevgenia Feigenberg, their move to an apartment on Strastnoi (Passion!) Bulvar, and his subsequent “active and passive bisexual” behavior, and Beria’s … well, I’ll leave Beria’s peccadilloes to the imagination. So many are Rayfield’s digressions, in fact, that one almost forgets what the point of his book is.

A more serious problem still is the author’s penchant for statements that appear pregnant with meaning, but on inspection turn out to be rather silly or totally unsubstantiated. The reader is informed, for example, that “one in three great dictators, artists, or writers witness before adolescence the death, bankruptcy or disabling of their fathers.” By whose reckoning, one wonders. Who qualifies as “great,” what exactly does “witness” mean with respect to pre-adolescent children, and how does the sorry fate of their fathers compare statistically to the general population?

In the chapter devoted to the Civil War, we are presented with a series of truly horrific acts committed by members of the secret service. Revekka Maizel, the “consort” of the “semi-qualified doctor, virtuoso pianist” and slaughterer of schoolchildren Mikhail Kedrov, “personally shot a hundred White officers and bourgeois and then drowned another 500 on a barge,” Rayfield writes. Personally? Does that mean they did it all alone? What is the evidentiary basis for this claim?

Rayfield does provide citations for statements such as the “almost plausible theory” that the attempted assassination of Vladimir Lenin by the Socialist Revolutionary and former anarchist Fanny Kaplan was part of a coup plotted by none other than Yakov Sverdlov, the first head of the Soviet state. But there are none confirming that Chekist Georgy Atarbekov “hacked a hundred hostages in Pyatigorsk to death with a saber,” that Red Army commander Iona Yakir “had 50 percent of male Don Cossacks exterminated” or that “Stalin’s Baku comrade,” Rozalia Zemlyachka, and her lover, Bela Kun, “murdered 50,000 White officers.”

rumor or take into account such well-researched books as George Leggett’s 1981 history of the Cheka does not promote confidence in the author’s judgment. Neither do his claims that an “extermination camp” set up in northern Russia during the Civil War “was as bad as any of Hitler’s would be,” that the “fate of … the kulaks was as horrific as the fate of Poland’s Jews under Hitler,” that “Stalin would kill far more German communists than Hitler,” or that “Stalin’s attack on the peasantry ravaged Russian agriculture … to such an extent that for perhaps a century Russia would be incapable of feeding itself.” I could go on (for there are numerous minor, but to someone familiar with Soviet history, glaring errors of fact), but I won’t.

Stalin and his “hangmen” did enough damage without larding an account of their exploits with statements of dubious accuracy.

The fall of the Soviet Union, the opening of its archives, and the emergence of a new generation of historians both in Russia and abroad has led to considerable improvement in the quality of the history being written about the Stalin era. Unfortunately, these same developments also gave license for writing and getting published almost anything about the Soviet Union that is sufficiently sensationalist. As educators, we should to try to aim higher than pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Lewis H. Siegelbaum is a professor of history at Michigan State University. His most recent book, together with Andrei Sokolov, is “Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents.”

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