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

573 Pages·2005·5.76 MB·English

by  Donald Rayfield

Table of Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
CHRONOLOGY
PREFACE
ONE - THE LONG ROAD TO POWER
Childhood and Family
Being Georgian
Stalin as a Thinker
Political Initiation
Prison and Exile
The Lone Sadist
TWO - STALIN, , AND THE CHEKA
Prelude to Power
Feliks : The First Forty Years
The Extraordinary Commission
Poles, Latvians, and Jews
The Chekist as Intellectual and Organizer
Stalin and in Tandem
From Cheka to State Political Directorate
THREE - THE EXQUISITE INQUISITOR
A False Dawn
Viacheslav Menzhinsky’s Belated Rise
Repressing Peasants and Intellectuals
Control of the Church
Stalin’s Struggle for Sole Control
A New Role for OGPU
FOUR - STALIN SOLO
Clearing the Terrain
The First Show Trials
Bringing the Writers to Heel
Operations Abroad
Enslaving the Peasantry
The Peasantry: The Final Solution
FIVE - IAGODA’S RISE
Toward Sole Dictatorship
Bringing Up a Guard Dog
The Trophy Writer
Fellow Travelers Abroad and Dissent at Home
From Unity to Uniformity
SIX - MURDERING THE OLD GUARD
The Killing of Sergei Kirov
Removing Zinoviev and Kamenev
Hitler’s Lessons
Women and Children
Pigs in the Parlor, Peacocks on Parade
Iagoda’s Fall
Monolithic Power
SEVEN - THE EZHOV BLOODBATH
The Birth of the Great Terror
How the Hedgehog Got Its Prickles
Purging of the Guard
Targets for Extermination
The Last Show Trials
Disarming the Army
Martyrdom for Poets
Disposing of Ezhov
EIGHT - THE RISE OF LAVRENTI BERIA
Why Beria?
Beria in the Caucasus
Beria as Satrap
Mopping Up After Ezhov
The Last of the Intellectuals
Ethnic Cleansing
The Katyn Massacres
Trotsky’s End
NINE - HANGMEN AT WAR
“Brothers, Sisters!”
Beria Shares Power
Evacuation, Deportation, and Genocide
Prisoners of War
Liberating Europe
The Scent of Freedom
TEN - THE GRATIFICATION OF CRUELTY
Senescence
Exploding the Bomb
Crushing the Last of the Literati
Jews and Cosmopolitans
Vengeance on Leningrad
Stalin’s End
Beria’s Hundred Days
The Hangmen’s End
NOTES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
About the Author
Also by Donald Rayfield
Copyright Page
Allen Knechtschaffenen An alle Himmel schreib ich’s an, die diesen Ball
umspannen: Nicht der Tyrann ist ein schimpflicher Mann, aber der Knecht des
Tyrannen. To All the Enslaved I write it all over the heavens That encompass our
earthly sphere: It’s not the tyrant we should abuse, But the serf who works for the
tyrant.
Christian Morgenstern
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have many people to thank for their assistance: among them Mikhail
Voroshilov in the Russian State Archive of Social-Political History, Natalia
Volkova in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, and Rezo
Kverenchkhiladze of the Georgian Union of Writers. The staff of the Memorial
Society in Moscow, as well as the manuscript department of the Russian State
Library, and the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg who compiled the
Leningrad Martyrology, have been very helpful, as has Memed Jikhashvili of
Batum. Olga Makarova, Vika Musvik, and other friends located ephemeral
periodical material I would have missed otherwise. Boris Ravdin helped me with
texts in Latvian, as well as with certain sources. Anna Pilkington lent me help,
linguistic and ideological, with hundreds of bits of text, not to mention an
objective critical eye.