Stalin and His Hangmen: An authoritative portrait of a tyrant and those who served him - Tapa dura

Stalin, like Hitler and other tyrants, won and held power because he had collaborators - hangmen. This is a study not just of Stalin but of the men who enabled him. The focus is new, and so are the sources: a mass of Russian archival material that has come into the
public domain over the last decade and a half. Donald Rayfield gives us a fuller and more colourful picture of Stalin's inner circle and the bonds that held them together. Stalin remains at the centre, and what we now know about the workings of his mind reveals him to be even
more diabolical than we once thought. But Stalin was not the sole author of Stalinism. What were the
motives of those whom he recruited or won over? What
did they want? What were their relations with the
régime and its ruler? How did their upbringing and
experience mould them? And how does the terror they
create connect with the terror they felt - at what
they were doing and what would befall them?
This book tries to reconstruct the psychological
mechanism of a whole régime, the force that binds it
together. A totalitarian régime is a pyramid. At the
top, Stalin could not function without his hangmen,
nor they without him. At the base, the executioners
could not exist without compliant victims, gaolers,
and apologists.
Donald Rayfield focuses on the psychological chain
that connected Stalin with the first members of the
Cheka and, after he achieved dictatorial power in
1929, with those he chose as executioners, in all
senses of the word. Stalin depended on a mutual
attraction to laconic, ruthless controllers, and on an
antipathy for 'chatterers', articulate intellectuals
such as Trotsky. To understand Stalin we can look at
him as abused child, trainee priest, resentful victim
of imperial power, bandit, éminence grise,
puppet-master and eventually lonely 'Greatest Genius
of All Time'. In the end we are left with the term
'psychopath'. We find the same make-up in all his
chiefs of police, from Dzierzynski to Beria. Stalin
and his hangmen mirror each other.
The extent of the human misery that Stalin and his
hangmen caused can be compared in Europe only to what
Hitler and his henchmen did. Stalin's heritage is, if
possible, even worse than Hitler's. His rule enslaved
three generations, not one, and the full horror of
what he did has not yet been appreciated and his
countrymen have not yet found the strength to disavow
him. All the more important, then, that the diabolical
and horrible tale should be told.

Donald Rayfield is Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary (University of London). He is the author of a number of books, such as The Literature of Georgia - A History (1994/2000), Anton Chekhov - A Life (1997), and articles on a variety of topics - Russian and Georgian poetry, Stalin, Beria. He is currently leading a team compiling a Georgian-English
dictionary.