{"product_id":"stalin-and-his-hangmen-isbn-9780375757716","title":"Stalin and His Hangmen","description":"Stalin did not act alone. The mass executions, the mock trials, the betrayals and purges, the jailings and secret torture that ravaged the Soviet Union during the three decades of Stalin’s dictatorship, were the result of a tight network of trusted henchmen (and women), spies, psychopaths, and thugs. At the top of this pyramid of terror sat five indispensable hangmen who presided over the various incarnations of Stalin’s secret police. Now, in his harrowing new book, Donald Rayfield probes the lives, the minds, the twisted careers, and the unpunished crimes of Stalin’s loyal assassins.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFounded by Feliks Dzierzynski, the Cheka–the Extraordinary Commission–came to life in the first years of the Russian Revolution. Spreading fear in a time of chaos, the Cheka proved a perfect instrument for Stalin’s ruthless consolidation of power. But brutal as it was, the Cheka under Dzierzynski was amateurish compared to the well-oiled killing machines that succeeded it. Genrikh Iagoda’s OGPU specialized in political assassination, propaganda, and the manipulation of foreign intellectuals. Later, the NKVD recruited a new generation of torturers. Starting in 1938, terror mastermind Lavrenti Beria brought violent repression to a new height of ingenuity and sadism.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs Rayfield shows, Stalin and his henchmen worked relentlessly to coerce and suborn leading Soviet intellectuals, artists, writers, lawyers, and scientists. Maxim Gorky, Aleksandr Fadeev, Alexei Tolstoi, Isaak Babel, and Osip Mandelstam were all caught in Stalin’s web–courted, toyed with, betrayed, and then ruthlessly destroyed. In bringing to light the careers, personalities, relationships, and “accomplishments” of Stalin’s key henchmen and their most prominent victims, Rayfield creates a chilling drama of the intersection of political fanaticism, personal vulnerability, and blind lust for power spanning half a century.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThough Beria lost his power–and his life–after Stalin’s death in 1953, the fundamental methods of the hangmen maintained their grip into the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, Rayfield argues, the tradition of terror, far from disappearing, has emerged with renewed vitality under Vladimir Putin. Written with grace, passion, and a dazzling command of the intricacies of Soviet politics and society, \u003ci\u003eStalin and the Hangmen\u003c\/i\u003e is a devastating indictment of the individuals and ideology that kept Stalin in power.Donald Rayfield is professor of Russian and Georgian at the University of London and the author of a number of books on Russian writers and intellectuals, including an acclaimed biography of Anton Chekhov.Childhood and Family\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eInstead of saying something like “X was raised by crocodiles in a  septic tank in Kuala Lumpur,” they tell you about a mother, a father .  . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMartin Amis, Koba the Dread\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the Russian empire, especially Georgia, 1878 was not a bad year to  bring a child into the world. True, Georgians of all classes seethed  with resentment. Their Russian overlords, into whose hands the last  Georgian kings had surrendered their shattered realm at the beginning  of the nineteenth century, ruled the country through a bureaucracy that  was often callous, corrupt, and ignorant, while those Georgian children  who went to school were instructed in Russian. The Russian viceroy in  Tbilisi, however humane and liberal, was determined to keep things as  they were: Armenians ran commerce, foreign capitalists controlled  industry, while Georgian aristocrats and peasants, upstaged in their  own capital city, led a more or less tolerable life in the fertile  countryside.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGeorgians had some reasons to be grateful for Russian rule. For nearly  a century Georgia had been free of the invasions and raids by its  neighbors that had devastated and periodically nearly annihilated the  nation since the thirteenth century. Russians might impose punitive  taxes, Siberian exile, and cultural humiliation, but, unlike the Turks,  they did not decapitate the entire male population of villages and,  unlike the Persians, they did not drive away the survivors of massacres  to be castrated, enslaved, and forcibly converted to Islam. Under  Russian rule towns had been rebuilt and railways linked the capital to  the Black Sea, and thus the outside world. The capital city, Tbilisi,  had newspapers and an opera house (even if it had no university). A new  generation of Georgians, forced to become fluent in Russian, realized  the dreams of their ancestors: they were now treated as Europeans, they  could study in European universities and become doctors, lawyers,  diplomats—and revolutionaries. Many Georgians dreamed of regaining  independent statehood; so far, few believed that they should work  toward this by violence. Most Georgians in the 1870s grudgingly  accepted Russian domination as the price of exchanging their Asiatic  history for a European culture.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor the inhabitants of the empire’s metropolis, St. Petersburg, 1878  was a year that threatened to totter into anarchy. The terrorists who  would kill Tsar Alexander II in 1881 were already tasting blood: the  honeymoon between the Russian government and its intellectuals and new  professional classes was over. The seeds of revolution found fertile  ground not in the impoverished peasantry nor in the slums that housed  the cities’ factory workers, but among the frustrated educated children  of the gentry and the clergy who were not content to demand just human  rights and a constitution. They went further and were plotting the  violent overthrow of the Russian state. Such extremism might be  fanatical but was not unrealistic. A rigid state is easier to destroy  than to reform, and the Russian state was so constructed that a  well-placed batch of dynamite or a well-aimed revolver, by eliminating  a handful of grand dukes and ministers, could bring it down. The  weakness of the Russian empire lay in its impoverished social fabric:  the state was held together by a vertical hierarchy, from Tsar to  gendarme. In Britain or France society was held together by the warp  and weft of institutions—judiciary, legislature, Church, local  government. In Russia, where these institutions were only vestigial or  embryonic, the fabric was single-ply.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe killers of Tsar Alexander II, the generation of Russian  revolutionaries that preceded Lenin, saw this weakness but they had no  popular support and no prospect of achieving mass rebellion. Russia in  the 1880s and 1890s was generally perceived as stagnant, retrograde,  even heartless and cynical—but stable. Episodes of famine, epidemics,  and anti-Jewish progroms rightly gave Russia a bad international name  in the 1880s. The 1860s and 1870s had been a period of reform, hope,  and, above all, creativity: Fiodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Leo  Tolstoi, and Nikolai Leskov were writing their greatest novels. But the  zest was gone: only the music of Piotr Tchaikovsky and the chemistry of  Dmitri Mendeleev testified to Russian civilization. Nevertheless, there  was tranquillity in stagnation. This was the Russian empire’s longest  recorded period of peace. Between Russia’s victory over Turkey in 1877  and its defeat by Japan in 1905, half a human lifetime would elapse.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAround the time Ioseb Jughashvili was born on December 6, 1878, in the  flourishing town of Gori, forty miles west of Tbilisi, the atmosphere  among the town’s artisans, merchants, and intellectuals was quietly  buoyant. A boy whose parents had a modest income could secure an  education that would make a gentleman of him anywhere in the Russian  empire. Few observers had cause to agree with the prophecies of  Dostoevsky and the philosopher Vladimir Soloviov: that within forty  years a Russian tyranny so violent and bloody would be unleashed that  Genghis Khan’s or Nadir Shah’s invasions would pale into insignificance  by comparison. Even less did anyone sense that Ioseb Jughashvili, as  Joseph Stalin, would be instrumental in establishing this tyranny over  the Russian empire and would then take sole control of it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eyyyThe family that begot Ioseb (Soso) Jughashvili had no more reason  than other Georgians to fear the future. The cobbler Besarion  Jughashvili was in 1878 twenty-eight years old, a skilled and  successful artisan working for himself; he had been married six years  to Katerine (Keke), who was now twenty-two. She was a peasant girl with  strong aspirations, well brought up, and had even been taught to read  and write by her grandfather. Their first two sons had died in infancy;  this third son, by Georgian (and Russian) tradition, was a gift from  God, to be offered back to God. Katerine Meladze’s father had died  before she was born, and she was brought up by her uncle, Petre  Khomuridze. In the 1850s the Khomuridzes had been serfs from the  village of Mejrokhe near Gori but in 1861 Tsar Alexander II made them,  like all serfs, freemen. Petre Khomuridze, once freed, proved an  enterprising patriarch: he raised his own child and the children of his  widowed sister. Katerine’s brothers Sandro and Gio became a potter and  a tile-maker respectively; when Katerine became a cobbler’s wife, all  the Meladze siblings had succeeded in rising from peasant to artisan  status.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe family of Stalin’s father Besarion seemed to be on the same upward  course. Stalin’s paternal great-grandfather, Zaza Jughashvili, had also  lived near Gori, in a largely Osetian village. Zaza was also a serf. He  took part in an anti-Russian rebellion in the 1800s, escaped  retribution and was resettled, thanks to a charitable feudal prince, in  a hovel in the windswept and semi-deserted village of Didi Lilo, ten  miles north of Tbilisi. Here Zaza’s son Vano moved up the social  ladder: he owned a vineyard. Zaza’s two grandchildren Giorgi and  Besarion seemed destined to climb further. After Vano’s death, Giorgi  became an innkeeper but their rise to prosperity was brutally  interrupted: Stalin’s uncle Giorgi was killed by robbers, and his  younger brother Besarion, destitute, left for Tbilisi to be a cobbler.  By 1870 the Jughashvilis had resumed their climb: working for an  Armenian bootmaker, Besarion acquired not only his craft, but learned  to speak some Russian, Armenian, and Azeri Turkish, as well as  Georgian. Unlike most Georgian artisans at that time, Besarion was  literate.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne in three great dictators, artists, or writers witness before  adolescence the death, bankruptcy, or disabling of their fathers.  Stalin, like Napoleon, Dickens, Ibsen, and Chekhov, was the son of a  man who climbed halfway up the social ladder and then fell off. Why did  Besarion Jughashvili fail, when everything seemed to favor a man of his  origins and skills? Contemporaries recall little of Besarion. One  remembers that the Jughashvilis never had to pawn or sell anything.  Another remembers: “When Soso’s father Besarion came home, we avoided  playing in the room. Besarion was a very odd person. He was of middling  height, swarthy, with big black mustaches and long eyebrows, his  expression was severe and he walked about looking gloomy.” Whatever the  reasons, in 1884, when Stalin was six, Besarion’s affairs went sharply  downhill. The family moved house—nine times in ten years. The cobbler’s  workshop lost customers; Beso took to drink.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEarly in 1890 the marriage of Stalin’s parents broke up. This was the  last year the young Stalin had any contact with his father: the  twelve-year-old boy was run over by a carriage and his father and  mother took him to Tbilisi for an operation. Besarion stayed in the  capital, finding work at a shoe factory. When the boy recovered,  Besarion gave him an ultimatum: either become an apprentice cobbler in  Tbilisi or return to Gori, follow his mother’s ambitions, train to be a  priest, and be disowned by his father. Soso went back to school in Gori  in autumn 1890. Besarion, after visits to Gori to beg Katerine to take  him back, vanished. (Stalin later stated in official depositions that  his father had abandoned the family.) Besarion Jughashvili became an  alcoholic tramp. On August 12, 1909, taken to the hospital from a  Tbilisi rooming house, he died of liver cirrhosis. He was buried in an  unmarked grave, mourned only by one fellow cobbler.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome Georgians found it hard to believe that Stalin could have such  lowly origins: they speculated that Stalin was illegitimate, which  would explain Besarion deserting his “unfaithful” wife and her  offspring. Legend puts forward two putative fathers for Stalin: Nikolai  Przhevalsky, explorer of central Asia, and a Prince Egnatashvili. It is  true that Stalin physically resembled Przhevalsky but the latter was a  misogynistic homosexual, camped on the Chinese border when Stalin was  begotten. In Soviet times two Egnatashvili brothers, related to the  priest who married both Stalin and Stalin’s parents, and to the Prince  Egnatashvili for whom Katerine allegedly did housework, led remarkably  charmed lives. Stalin was frequently called a bastard and whoreson, but  the abuse was figurative. Adultery in a small Georgian town was rare:  Keke was a conventional, if strong-willed, wife and mother, and Ioseb  was undoubtedly Besarion’s son.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStalin discouraged prying into his origins and was most evasive about  his father; only in 1906 did he give him the most cursory  acknowledgment when he briefly adopted a new pseudonym for his  journalism: Besoshvili (son of Besarion). Katerine exerted a more  prolonged influence on her son. She bequeathed her obstinacy in  pursuing goals. Ruined then deserted, constantly moving house, demoted  from artisan’s wife to drudge, she nevertheless scraped together the  money and cajoled the authorities to get her son off the streets and  into school. By several accounts she beat Ioseb as often as Besarion  did, but for nobler reasons. Religious piety and instinct told her that  education, preferably directed at the priesthood, provided the only way  in which her son could make his way in the world. Katerine was nothing  if not single-minded; religion and her son were her only interests. Her  sole surviving letter to Stalin, from the 1920s, shows how much she had  in common with him: “My dear child Ioseb first of all I greet you with  great love and wish you a long life and good health together with your  good family. Child, I ask nature to give you complete victory and the  annihilation of the enemy. . . . Be victorious!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf Stalin avoided speaking of his father, he was conventionally, if  casually, fond of his mother. He sent her short letters and sporadic  gifts of money. In the 1930s Katerine could be seen, an austere widow  in black, carrying her basket to Tbilisi’s collective-farm market  accompanied by a squad of smart NKVD guards—at the fawning initiative  of Lavrenti Beria, not at her son’s behest. Stalin visited his mother  twice in the 1920s and once in 1935. He just sent a wreath to her  funeral.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAll who came across Stalin in power were struck by his self-sufficiency  and solitude. Perhaps Stalin’s solitary habits came from being the only  son of an impoverished and lonely woman, but was his childhood the  solitary hell that would produce a psychopath? What we can glean of  Ioseb’s childhood does not bear this out. The Jughashvilis lived on  amicable terms with their neighbors, who were cosmopolitan, upwardly  mobile artisans. Nearby lived Katerine’s extended family—craftsmen and  innkeepers, with connections to merchants and even aristocrats. Like  Beso’s first two short-lived sons (Mikhail 1875, Giorgi 1876) Ioseb  Jughashvili had prominent godfathers on whom the family could also  count for support. The young Stalin had for company a foster brother  (apprenticed to Besarion) a year younger than himself, Vano  Khutsishvili. Vano had no complaints when in 1939 he recalled their  apparently happy childhood in a letter to Stalin.6 Even after Besarion  parted from his wife and son, Katerine and Ioseb kept up contact with  that side of the family. Besarion’s sister was married to a Iakob  Gveseliani, and although they lived near Tbilisi their offspring,  Ioseb’s cousins, often visited Gori. As for Katerine, she and her  children were part of an extended family in Gori, including her cousin  Mariam Mamulashvili, who had seven children. Not until his twenties  could Stalin have known involuntary solitude.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStalin’s cousins—particularly Pepo (Euphemia) Gveseliani on his  father’s side and Vano Mamulashvili on his mother’s side—kept in touch  with him until his death. They sent letters—ingratiating, begging,  sometimes affectionate. They came to Moscow and on two occasions  threatened to commit suicide if Stalin refused to see them. His cousins  were the only family category for whom Stalin never sanctioned arrests  (Stalin’s in-laws, the Svanidzes and Alliluevs, suffered the same  near-extermination as did other “old Bolsheviks”). Admittedly, Stalin  did his blood relatives few favors—they endured the same hardships all  Georgia’s peasantry and artisans underwent after the revolution—but  they were the only human beings with whom Stalin sustained a semblance  of normal relations. In his old age he would send them and some  schoolmates parcels of cash (his earnings as a Supreme Soviet deputy).  In 1951, General Nikolai Vlasik, the commandant at Stalin’s dacha, drew  up a list of Stalin’s surviving relatives and schoolmates for a bus  trip to a reunion in Georgia. Vlasik would not have dared to do so had  Stalin not shown some last flicker of human affection.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe most telling events in Stalin’s childhood are his brushes with  death: his years in Georgia were marked by crippling illnesses and  ghastly traffic accidents. All his life Stalin was rarely free of  physical pain—which must have stimulated his sadism and  irritability—and most of his pain, mental as well as physical, was a  residue of childhood. He survived all the childhood illnesses—from  measles to scarlet fever—that had carried off his infant brothers but  in 1884 caught smallpox and was left badly scarred, earning the  nickname Chopura (Poxy). Soon afterward he was run over by a carriage,  and the subsequent blood poisoning apparently withered his left  shoulder and arm. In early 1890 in another street accident his legs  were run over by a carriage and Ioseb acquired another nickname, Geza  (Crooked).[quote] --Anne Applebaum, The Sunday Times (London)","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300189065445,"sku":"NP9780375757716","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375757716.jpg?v=1767737156","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/stalin-and-his-hangmen-isbn-9780375757716","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}