Stalin and His Hangmen

Table of Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Acknowledgments

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHRONOLOGY

PREFACE

ONE - THE LONG ROAD TO POWER

Childhood and Family

Being Georgian

Stalin as a Thinker

Political Initiation

Prison and Exile

The Lone Sadist

TWO - STALIN,, AND THE CHEKA

Prelude to Power

Feliks: The First Forty Years

The Extraordinary Commission

Poles, Latvians, and Jews

The Chekist as Intellectual and Organizer

Stalin andin Tandem

From Cheka to State Political Directorate

THREE - THE EXQUISITE INQUISITOR

A False Dawn

Viacheslav Menzhinsky’s Belated Rise

Repressing Peasants and Intellectuals

Control of the Church

Stalin’s Struggle for Sole Control

A New Role for OGPU

FOUR - STALIN SOLO

Clearing the Terrain

The First Show Trials

Bringing the Writers to Heel

Operations Abroad

Enslaving the Peasantry

The Peasantry: The Final Solution

FIVE - IAGODA’S RISE

Toward Sole Dictatorship

Bringing Up a Guard Dog

The Trophy Writer

Fellow Travelers Abroad and Dissent at Home

From Unity to Uniformity

SIX - MURDERING THE OLD GUARD

The Killing of Sergei Kirov

Removing Zinoviev and Kamenev

Hitler’s Lessons

Women and Children

Pigs in the Parlor, Peacocks on Parade

Iagoda’s Fall

Monolithic Power

SEVEN - THE EZHOV BLOODBATH

The Birth of the Great Terror

How the Hedgehog Got Its Prickles

Purging of the Guard

Targets for Extermination

The Last Show Trials

Disarming the Army

Martyrdom for Poets

Disposing of Ezhov

EIGHT - THE RISE OF LAVRENTI BERIA

Why Beria?

Beria in the Caucasus

Beria as Satrap

Mopping Up After Ezhov

The Last of the Intellectuals

Ethnic Cleansing

The Katyn Massacres

Trotsky’s End

NINE - HANGMEN AT WAR

“Brothers, Sisters!”

Beria Shares Power

Evacuation, Deportation, and Genocide

Prisoners of War

Liberating Europe

The Scent of Freedom

TEN - THE GRATIFICATION OF CRUELTY

Senescence

Exploding the Bomb

Crushing the Last of the Literati

Jews and Cosmopolitans

Vengeance on Leningrad

Stalin’s End

Beria’s Hundred Days

The Hangmen’s End

NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

About the Author

Also by Donald Rayfield

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