Quotes from Donald Rayfield

Two things reminded Stalin's immediate circle that he was an alien: his Georgian accent (more pronounced in public speaking than in private) and a preference for red wine over vodka.

A more horrifying Russian chekist was the semi-qualified doctor and virtuoso pianist Mikhail Kedrov, who would slaughter schoolchildren and army officers in northern Russia with such ruthlessness that he had to be taken into psychiatric care. Kedrov's consort Revekka Maizel personally shot a hundred White officers and bourgeois and then drowned another 500 on a barge.

Genghis Khan who's read Marx," to quote Bukharin.

best evoked in The Apocalypse of Our Time by the philosopher Vasili Rozanov in 1919, who had died that same year of emaciation in the Troitse-Sergeev monastery: La divina Commedia With clanking screeching an iron curtain is lowered over Russian History.

The performance is over." The audience got up. "It's time to put on your fur coats and go home." They looked round. But it turned out that there were no fur coats and no homes.

These questions must determine the accused's fate. This is the sense and essence of red terror. . . . It doesn't judge the enemy, it strikes him. It shows no mercy, but incinerates anyone who takes up arms on the other side of the barricades and who is of no use to us. . . . But it isn't a guillotine cutting off heads at a tribunal's instance. . . . We, like the Israelites, have to build the Kingdom of the Future

under constant fear of enemy attack. 16

It can be seen as being between Jewish inter-nationalists and the remnants of a Russian national culture.

Stalin had always found Gorky unreliable; he had crossed swords with him in 1917, calling his protests "geese cackling in intellectual marshes

Vladimir Zazubrin, in 1918 a deserter from the White forces and later a lively writer of fiction and memoirs, shot by Stalin in 1938 for his frankness, recalled the hard life of the Cheka executioners: White, grey carcasses (undressed people) collapsed onto the floor.

Chekisty with smoking revolvers ran back and cocked the triggers immediately. The legs of those shot jerked in convulsions. . . . Two men in grey greatcoats nimbly put nooses round the necks of the corpses, dragged them off to a dark niche in the cellar. Two others with spades dug at the earth, directing steaming rivulets of blood. Solomin, his revolver in his belt, sorted out the linen of those shot. He carefully made separate

piles of underpants, shirts and outer clothing. . . . Three men were shooting like robots, their eyes were empty, with a cadaverous glassy shine. . . .

In 1921, in newly conquered Tbilisi, the chekisty published an anthology, The Cheka's Smile. The contribution by Aleksandr Eiduk, executioner and roving military emissary, ran: There is no greater joy, not better music

Than the crunch of broken lives and bones. This is why when our eyes are languid And passion begins to seethe stormily in the breast, I want to write on your sentence One unquavering thing: "Up against a wall! Shoot!" 23

Lenin supported extreme measures. On March 19, 1922, he wrote to the Politburo: . . . the only moment when we can smash the enemy's head with a 99 percent chance of success . . . Now and only now, when there is cannibalism in the famine areas and hundreds, if not thousands of corpses are lying on the roads, we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of Church valuables with the most furious and merciless energy, not stopping at the crushing of any resistance. . . .

They read denunciations, certificates, cases. They hurriedly signed sentences. They yawned. They drank wine. [ . . . ] At night they chased barefooted, naked people Over ice-covered stones Against a northeast wind Into wastelands outside town. [ . . . ] They threw them, not all killed yet, into a pit. They hurriedly covered them with earth.

In the traditional Russian and Nazi definition of Jewishness, where parentage and surname counts as much as religious and cultural affiliation, such a view is plausible. But what was Jewish except lineage about Bolsheviks like Zinoviev, Trotsky, Kamenev, or Sverdlov? Some were second- or even third-generation renegades; few even spoke Yiddish, let alone knew Hebrew.

And then with an expansive Russian song They returned home to town.

A clever writer on political questions [Machiavelli] rightly said that if it is necessary for the realization of a political goal to go for a series of atrocities, then they must be carried out in the most energetic way and in the shortest time, for the popular masses will not endure prolonged application of atrocities. . . .

In the Cheka and the party, Lenin feared, Jewish brains were as much a drawback as an advantage, and the Jews themselves were only too aware of the backlash they might provoke. Lenin took care to see that Trotsky's name was removed from the commission set up to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church.

Therefore I come to the inevitable conclusion that it is now that we must give the most decisive and merciless battle to the obscurantist clergy and crush its resistance with such cruelty that they won't forget it for several decades.17 On only one point was Lenin sensitive: he feared an anti-Semitic backlash if Jews were seen to be running this "pogrom in reverse" against Russian Christians, so an ethnic Russian had to be nominally in charge of crushing the Church.

Any measures whatsoever must be officially announced only by Comrade Kalinin—never under any circumstances may Comrade Trotsky make any public statements in print or any other way.

A real blow to OGPU came from Bukharin in autumn 1924:

Dear Feliks . . . I consider that we must as soon as possible move to a more "liberal" form of Soviet rule: fewer repressions, more legality, more discussion, more self-rule (under the party's guidance naturaliter [Bukharin liked to use Latin]), etc. . . . That is why I sometimes speak out against proposals to widen the rights of the GPU, etc. Understand, dear Feliks (you know how much I love you) that you have no reasons whatsoever to suspect me of any