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

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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. There were female Cheka killers who were just as sadistic as their male counterparts. Vera Grebeniukova (aka Dora) in two months mutilated 700 prisoners before shooting them. Rozalia Zemliachka and her lover Bela Kun murdered 50,000 White officers (with Lenin's approval). They were tied in pairs to planks and burned alive in furnaces; or drowned in barges that she sank offshore. Cheka murderers also included convicts, such as Irovsky, the murderer of the Tsar and his family and Johnston, the sole black in the Cheka, who enjoyed flaying his victims alive. 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.

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.

I have read several books on russian history and when i saw this book i wasnt really sure i wanted to read another book about Stalin.However Mr Rayfield takes the reader deep into the machinations and way of thinking ( or lack of) of Stalin and his gang of merciless goons.I like Mr Rayfield approach to this subject because he is non-nonsense author who is not afraid of calling things by their name and to let us know who's responsible in the deaths of so many people in Russia.He clearly explains some of Stalin's stupidity in dealing with the New Econmic Plan and the handle of minorities in Russia.Very good book to understand how still today Russia is haunted by Stalin.

There are many books detailing Stalin's horrendous crimes, but this one does a very good job telling us about the lackies and cronies who actually did his dirty work, and how--time and time again--they did not hesitate to shoot dozens or hundreds of people they deemed disloyal. But perhaps the most haunting part is the book's last two pages--I just finished it--where the author reminds us that Russia has still neither fully acknowledged nor atoned for the crimes of the Cheka and its successor organizations.

We can see much the same thing here, I'm sorry to say. Nazi crimes are justly condemned, but few risk being called a "McCarthyist" by saying that the KGB murderers still alive should be called to account. Thousands of former Russians now live in New York City alone. But no effort has even been made, as far as I know, to try to even gather information from them about these crimes. I'm no lawyer, but couldn't a KGB goon living on our soil be prosecuted here for such crimes against humanity? On TV's LAW & ORDER, "Hang 'em High Jack McCoy" has prosecuted a Chilean fascist (no, I'm not kidding), two different serving U.S. Naval officers in two different episodes, plenty of ex-Nazis and neo-Nazis, and (in a two-parter) a special prosecutor who was supposed to be a parody of Kenneth Starr (hint, hint). I never saw an episode of him wondering about how many ex-KGB men are living in his jurisdiction, with the blood of thousands on their hands. Instead I see them being interviewed on the HISTORY CHANNEL (that's right, INTERVIEWED)--and not a little finger is lifted to bring these murderers to justice.

Rayfield should have spent more time making the point that it was not only the Bertolt Brechts and the Walter Durantys and the George Bernard Shaws of the world who were morally culpable for fawning over Stalin, but also all those living today who are willing to forget about the USSR doing things that Nazi Germany could not be--and was not--forgiven for. Some double standards may have to be tolerated in this world, but the kind that apologize for mass murder cannot be.

This painstakingly thorough compendium of knowledge on Stalin, the Communist movement, Bolshevik leaders and the enslaved masses is one of the best books available on its subject. Rayfield tells you all the news you already know about the Red Terror, and some you didn't- he began his research shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when many secret documents and personal possessions of Stalin's became publicly accessible. These resources allowed him to paint a more complete picture of the Stalinist government than was previously possible, untangling endless webs of intrigue.

Rayfield occasionally writes too long on insignificant subjects, but his generally focused and thorough style works. It's a bit reminiscent of "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by Shirer, and almost as masterful. Rayfield restrains himself from sensationalism throughout, then concludes with a brief and needed social critique on Russia's failure to acknowledge the criminal nature of the Cheka, the NKVD and the other deadly machinery of Russian Communism.

This is one of the best places to start reading about Stalin, and may have just enough new information to satisfy seasoned readers. I especially recommend it to those who have read books focused on Stalin himself, but haven't yet examined the hangmen who made his slaughter possible.

Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) was Ivan the Terrible with a copy of Karl Marx in his hand. In fact, Stalin (Russian for "steel") was much worse than Ivan. Under Stalin's dictatorship the Soviet Union underwent years of murders; shootings; forced removal of millions of ethnic and other groups; persecution of a wide array of groups:
(Jews; physicians, professors, religious leaders, non-ethnic Russian citizens, artists; writers; actors; lawyers-you name it!)
Stalin seized power by ruthlessly murdering his opponents. As he emerged with total power in 1927 "Koba" (to use a nickname) ruled the Soviet Union with cruelty, stupidity and crimes so immense it takes Rayfield 500 small printed pages to describe them in searing detail!!
Lenin had established Soviet rule but it was Stalin with such loathsome cronies as Iagoda; Estov and the repulsive Lavria Beria who launched a reign of terror on the very people they governed! Millions were slaughtered by bullet, ax or starvation. In the Great Purge of 1937-1938 millions were relocated to distant lands; sent into slavery in the GULAG in the far east or murdered after a short kangaroo court proceeding.
Justice was absent from the Soviet lexicon under the evil Stalin.
Stalin trusted no person. He executed those who had worked hard to establish him in power. Most of the powerful men who were vassals of Stalin's whims died betrayed by him.
On the eve of World War II Stalin purged the Red Army of gifted generals. When Nazi Germany launched its attack against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 the Soviets were woefully unprepared. Generals were murdered: Pows returning from German captivity were executed as spies. In all over 20 million Soviet citizens would die in the war. Many of these victims died at the hands of the evil sorcerer of the Kremlin.
Donald Rayfield teaches Russian and Georgian at the University of London. His book on playwright Anton Chekhov was well received. In this book he shows us the Soviet hell on earth world of sudden death; betrayal; cruelty beyond belief; hatred; racial and ethnic hatred that boggles the mind of anyone with a claim to be a member of the human race!
Stalin and his hangmen were thugs; bullies and merciless killers of all that is decent and good in the human soul. Rayfield suggests at the end of his book that he fears democracy in the new Russia under Putin is very fragile.The ghosts of Stalin may again materialize in the Russia of the 21st century.
Anyone who lives in a Western democracy should thank God that they did not first see daylight in the Soviet Union in the black days of Stalin and his cruel cronies.
Rayfield's book is well written. Though he is a scholar the book can be
read by one who has little familiarity with the history of this sad chapter of human history (the chapter on the Katyn Forest of Polish officers is just one case among countless tales told in the book which will break your heart). Stalin killed women, children, the old and the poor, the wealthy and the smart. He was an indiscriminate murderer of all he feared in his paranoic isolatiion inside tall Kremlin walls. He also was adept at turning people against one another. Several cases are related where a husband would volunteer to murder his own wife if this was the ukase ultimatum from Stalin which would prove the man's loyalty!
As one who has read several books on Stalin I would give this book five stars. Every page has something to shock the reader. We should know what Stalin did as we honor his millions of helpless victims.

Brilliantly researched and written this is a vital and substantial contribution to the sorry and depressing history of life in the former Soviet Union under the rule of the psychotic, evil Stalin and his miserable bunch of hyena type acolytes. After out scheming and removing the old Bolsheviks, Stalin was able to put himself up as the top hyena at the top of the pack and corrupt his close associates and eventually the Cheka to inflict his paranoiac ideas and schemes on the Communist Party and Soviet Union.

The book commences with the long road to power for Stalin and deals with his early life, the experience of his religious education in the Tbilisi seminary and the ideas he probably gained from it and his Bolshevik revolutionary life. Chapters are then devoted to the history of each of the leaders of the Cheka with details of their pre-Cheka life and how they performed in the top job.

Dzierzynski with the agreement of Lenin and his men formed the Cheka within 6 weeks of the October revolution and was immediately up to his armpits in blood; the period 1918-1921 saw the Cheka involved in widespread arrests, brutal interrogations and mass shootings of some real and many thousands of imagined enemies. Dzierzynski was similar to Stalin with a religious background that was savagely shattered at age 19 in a conversion to atheism and revolution and these two got on well together. In 1922 Dzierzynski swung a half million paramilitaries from Trotsky to support Stalin and was a crucial influence in Stalin's rise to power. He died in 1926 but directed his efforts to combat counter revolution, espionage etc outside of the party not inside, l got the impression he would have opposed many of Stalin's later crazy schemes as party unity was vital to him and he personally disliked fabricating evidence (of all things!) and was not willing to suppress party members.

Dzierzynski was followed by the very able Menzhinsky who during the period 1928 to 1934 ably assisted Stalin to neutralize his opponents inside and outside the party and of course controlled the Cheka as it moved against the rural inhabitants and actioned the grain requisition of 1928 and the brutal forced farm collectivization which lead to the subsequent famine. Menzhinsky also worked with Stalin on the first show trials.

This sorry trend of brutal suppression and misery continues and gets worst as the book continues. Besides the main hangmen this books also presents the history of the other Cheka operatives i.e. the strategists, crackdown and arresting officers, interrogators, executioners, guards etc.
Many sadists, psychotics and cruel operatives performed the dirty work of Stalin and his hangmen.

Views of the Russian Revolution and its course have been transformed by the archival research opened up in the wake of the fall of the Bolshevik era, and the results are transforming our views of the Stalin period. This exceedingly blunt portrait of the henchmen of Stalin fairly well completes in the small the large scale picture seen in books like the _Black Book of Communism_. The closely focused detail of the criminality of the whole enterprise, especially the almost surreal world of the secret police chiefs, from Dzierzhinsky to Beria, makes for compelling reading. Explaining the resulting portrait of evil actually becomes harder, because it seems almost incomprehensible. Why by any standard would Stalin plot to exterminate the Kulaks? Is this merely stupidity mixed with psychopathic sadism? It almost seems like a will to fail. As in this instance the whole revolution foundered almost immediately as the untested shibboleths of ideology all failed at the first step, driving its perpetrators to extremes in the expectation of making it work. In the midst of this we find Stalin to be an intelligent bookworm and student of literature reading five hundred pages a day, and interested in the fate of Russian poetry. His psychology remains to be understood.
On the one hand we have the catastrophe of ambitious and ruthless men coming to power. But there is another side that shows much of the violence already present very early on, in lesser doses, even in the pre-Revolutionary years. All the principals seem to arrive at the critical Leninistic phase with their values set, falling into the traps of the confused ideologies of the Second Internationale, ready to provoke terror, the rules of the game already jelled. The result had little to do with Communism and more with the resurfacing legacy of the very world the revolutionaries said they were overthrowing. The point is clear from odd and chilling details, e.g. Stalin's inspiration from Ivan the Terrible. The book's conclusion suggests these latent strains are still at work, resurfacing in the current Russian exit phase, as if to turn around and move back into the nightmare. We should hope not! The disinformation of the Stalin 'mystique' in Russia itself apparently still operates, but all these new accounts will hopefully contribute to a better awareness of just what transpired.

I have read close to a dozen books on the Soviets, but this is one of the most haunting accounts for me. I needed many breaks away from this book to help me recover from the relentless bloodbath outlined in its pages. Stalin had a lot of violent and willing minions to help him terrorize an entire people. A system of terror that would often end up consuming even his most ardent henchmen. In addition to shedding light on who Stalin's Goebbels and Himmlers were - the author also focuses on Stalin's impact on the literary world and the media during Stalin's reign. Lots of letters/quotes/poems from the Soviet archives listed. Many chilling final letters penned as a last plea for their lives (to Stalin) by his former comrades. Love letters. Hate mail. The dark poetry inspired by the killings committed by the Chekists, and the guards of the gulags. Words that perfectly describe the banality of evil. Rayfield's haunting reminder of Russia's current political trends at the end of the book is very insightful as well. I think for anyone who is interested in Stalin/Soviet/Literature - this is a MUST read.

The author tells Stalin's story in a more cohesive way (that is it is easier to follow) than Simon Montefire in "Stalin: the court of the Red Tsar" (Simon's book, however, is richer in detail). And in the end Donald Rayfield is much more clear about which way, he thinks, Russia is going. Russia is moving back to something like the Soviet Union (but smaller thankfully). The FSB is now acting like the KGB and brutal Stalinist methods are being used in Chechnaya.
The overall impression I got from reading this book was that Stalin was so powerful and he ruled for so long that he imprinted his DNA on Russia's famous Soul.