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

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.

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.

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.

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, dekul

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 execution