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Stalin and his Hangmen: The Tyrant
and Those who Killed for Him Donald Rayfield |
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Stalin did not act
alone. The mass execution, 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. Founded by Felix 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. As Rayfield
shows, Stalin and his henchmen worked relentlessly to coerce and suborn
leading Soviet intellectuals, artists, writers, lawyers, and scientists.
Maxim Gorky, Alexander Fadeev, Alexei Tolstoi, Isaak Babel, and Osip Mendelstam 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, spanning half a century, of the intersection of political fanaticism,
personal vulnerability, and blind lust for power. Though Beria lost his power - and his life - after Stalin's
death in 1953, the fundamental methods of the hangmen persisted 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, Stalin and His Hangmen is a devastating indictment of the
individuals and ideology that kept Stalin in power. Donald Rayfield is professor of Russian and Georgian at the |
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