Product Description

Stalin, like Hitler and other tyrants, won and held power because he had collaborators - hangmen. Drawing on newly released archival material, Donald Rayfield gives us a fuller and more colourful picture of Stalin's inner circle than ever before. Stalin was not the sole author of Stalinism. What motivated his chiefs of police, Feliks Dzierzynski, Viacheslav Manzhinsky, Genrikh Iagoda, Nikolai Ezhov and Lavrenti Beria? What did they want? What were their relations with the regime and its ruler? How did their upbringing and experience mould them? And how does the terror they create connect with the terror they felt? Stalin and His Hangmen reconstructs the psychological mechanism of a whole regime and what it held together. The extent of the misery caused by Stalin and his Hangmen can be compared in Europe only to that brought about by Hitler and his henchmen. But Stalin's heritage is, if possible, even worse than Hitler's. His rule enslaved three generations, not one, the horror of what he did has not yet been fully understood and his countrymen have not yet found the strenth to disavow him. All the more important, then, that this diabolical tale should be told.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #110565 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-31
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 584 pages

Daily Telegraph
‘A superb and chilling analysis of the Stalinist soul through the characters and barbarities of its hangmen’

Guardian
‘A thorough study of the half a dozen men who made the USSR a hell on earth for three decades’

Sunday Telegraph
'Portraits of successive Soviet enforcers – Dzerzhinsky, Menzhinsky, Iagoda, Ezhov and Beria – which possess a ghastly fascination’

Customer Reviews

Stalin's Willing Executioners
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.

Massively informative
Rayfield presents an astonishingly detailed account of how Stalin manipulated his underlings into decades of murder, torture, and the systematic destruction of their own country.

I addition to the normal brutal tactics of smashing anyone who go in his way (which some might argue were a legitimate means to an end), Stalin took a special delight in confusing those close to him by sending his favourites off for torture, or by holding grand funerals for people whose murder he himself had arranged. He commissioned a sycophantic biography and then had its author murdered. Many of his top murderers and torturers ended up on the receiving end of the treatment they had meted out. This way, nobody knew where they stood. The book makes it clear that Stalin's aim was absolute power for himself, not any kind of communist dream. The peasants were not producing enough food for the cities, so the answer was to torture and starve the peasants. They still did not produce enough, so the answer was more of the same. Entire nations were sent into slave camps or internal exile (often without even a change of clothing) with no apparent purpose other than to terrify everyone. Even the president of the USSR had to stand by while his wife was tortured and imprisoned. People arrested more or less at random were tortured for months until they "betrayed" the names of totally innocent friends, who would be imprisoned and tortured in their turn. Thus the farms, universities, military etc. lost millions of people, to no apparent end except Stalin's power.

Aside from the relentless horror of Stalin's regime, which gets a lot less popular attention than Hitler's very different brutality, Rayfield does us a favour with staggering amounts of detail. How many hours of Stalin's time a particular acolyte was allowed, who looked at whom in a threatening way at a meeting, exactly how many grammes of bread the slaves in Siberia were allowed per day, how many cattle trucks were used to transport Turkic nomads to into exile and starvation, who betrayed whom after how many weeks of torture, and so on.

I hesitate to find fault with a work of such monumental scholarship, but two things must be said. Firstly, this is not a fun book. You will not sleep well after reading it. Secondly, Rayfield's English is not always easy to read. His word order gets tangled up so you have to read some sentences twice, and many of the translations from Russian don't seem to make sense at all.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone with any interet in Russia, 20th century history, or the nature of dictatorship.

An invaluable addition to Stalinaria
Rayfield writes fluidly and concisely carrying the reader through at as steady pace through the Principle characters of Stalins regime. His portraits of Djerzinksky and Beria are of particular interest. One learns in some details of the humble origins of the Cheka, forerunners of todays FSB via a train of other incarnations.
These portraits are not as luridly revealing as Sebag's 'In the Court of the Red Tsar', but they unflinchingly counterpoise the brutality of the principle characters actions with their personal traits that may seem incongruent to a reader.

It is clear that in part, absorption into the party apparatus meant a dramatic and awful transformation for men, capable of familial love, filial fraternity, and yet imbued with the intoxicating vision of an almost Godlike power, utter corruption beyond recognition, a vile descent into perversion, cruelty and sadism, a cruelty and callouness only matched by the Holocaust.
Characters like Yezhov, loveable, mischievous, transformed into monsters in the course of bloody duties enthusiastically taken on.
This book makes it explicit that normal men from normal backgrounds, with talents that might raise the soul in the direction of human kindness, could be channelled and deformed by all recognition by the power and obsessional absorption in the politics of power.
These men killed millions by their actions and their own hands. Yet they were husbands, father, lovers, friends, poets even!
This book is a prescient reminder of the capabilities of transformation and corruption that lie within ALL men...