Shocking and depressing but morbidly fascinating - Rated 
Despite my familiarity with reading about the horrors of Stalin's rule, I found this a more than usually deeply depressing read, though interesting in shedding light on the background of some of the less well known horrible personalities in the history of Cheka-OGPU-NKVD. Perhaps the most shocking aspect is the continuing high esteem in which some of these characters are held in Putin's Russia, witnessed by the issuing of Cheka anniversary postage stamps depicting Artuzov and Balitsky, not two of the highest leaders but nevertheless deeply horrible and murderous characters; and the continued existence of the Belomorkanal cigarette brand, equivalent to an Auschwitz cigarette brand subsisting in Germany.
The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die (B. Brecht) - Rated 
D. Rayfield's book gives us sharp portraits of Stalin himself as well as his hangmen Dzier¿yñky, Vychinski, Iagoda, Ezhov and Beria. Together those men are responsible for the death of millions of innocent citizens, organizing the longest and most terrible bloodbath in the history of mankind (one other contender is Mao Zedong, see Jung Chang).
The author correctly states that Stalin was not a Marxist: `Marxists declare man to be naturally good, all evil stems from social injustice. Stalin knew all human beings to be sinners in need of punishment and expiation.'
Not Marx, but Machiavelli was his tutor: `he saw the retention of power by all means as the sole task for a ruler. He not only killed political rivals, but also wiped out any class from which future opposition might spring.'
There is also an essential difference between Stalin and Hitler: Hitler did not turn his aggression on his own kind.
The result of Stalin's policies was a Hobbesian world: `Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, when society loses the complex play of forces - judiciary, army, executive, public opinion, religion, culture - that keep each other in check, and both anarchy and tyranny at bay.'
But why did the Russian population not react? `They had incentives to collaborate with its oppressors. If you did not run with the hounds, you were a hare to be torn apart by them, and those who disappeared left behind vacant jobs, rooms to live in, clothes, food and drink. The urban terror pitched the young, the dispossessed and unskilled against the middle-aged who had riches and skills.'
Even the foreign observers and intellectuals didn't (want to) see the disaster around them.
This book contains excellent analyses of the murder of Kirov, the show trials and the policies of Beria after Stalin's death (he wanted a reunification of Germany).
And Russia today? `Any genuinely democratic politician or journalist has not much more life expectancy today than under the Bolsheviks ... School history textbooks pass over in silence the record of Stalinism.'
The reader needs a strong stomach to digest this relentless stream of slaughtering in a mere gigantic power struggle.
This book with excellent graphic material is a must read for all those interested in the history of mankind.
An appaling catalogue of crime. - Rated
Brilliantly researched. I came fairly new to the subject of Stalin and his regime, and found this to be a horrifying, gripping and easily read introduction. Rayfield cleverly uses portraits of Stalin's homicidal lackeys to intertwine his biography of the monster himself, whilst creating a flowing historical narrative of Soviet crime.
Massively informative - Rated
Rayfield presents an astonishingly detailed account of how Stalin manipulated his underlings into decades of murder, torture, and the systematic destruction of their own country.
I addition to the normal brutal tactics of smashing anyone who go in his way (which some might argue were a legitimate means to an end), Stalin took a special delight in confusing those close to him by sending his favourites off for torture, or by holding grand funerals for people whose murder he himself had arranged. He commissioned a sycophantic biography and then had its author murdered. Many of his top murderers and torturers ended up on the receiving end of the treatment they had meted out. This way, nobody knew where they stood. The book makes it clear that Stalin's aim was absolute power for himself, not any kind of communist dream. The peasants were not producing enough food for the cities, so the answer was to torture and starve the peasants. They still did not produce enough, so the answer was more of the same. Entire nations were sent into slave camps or internal exile (often without even a change of clothing) with no apparent purpose other than to terrify everyone. Even the president of the USSR had to stand by while his wife was tortured and imprisoned. People arrested more or less at random were tortured for months until they "betrayed" the names of totally innocent friends, who would be imprisoned and tortured in their turn. Thus the farms, universities, military etc. lost millions of people, to no apparent end except Stalin's power.
Aside from the relentless horror of Stalin's regime, which gets a lot less popular attention than Hitler's very different brutality, Rayfield does us a favour with staggering amounts of detail. How many hours of Stalin's time a particular acolyte was allowed, who looked at whom in a threatening way at a meeting, exactly how many grammes of bread the slaves in Siberia were allowed per day, how many cattle trucks were used to transport Turkic nomads to into exile and starvation, who betrayed whom after how many weeks of torture, and so on.
I hesitate to find fault with a work of such monumental scholarship, but two things must be said. Firstly, this is not a fun book. You will not sleep well after reading it. Secondly, Rayfield's English is not always easy to read. His word order gets tangled up so you have to read some sentences twice, and many of the translations from Russian don't seem to make sense at all.
I strongly recommend this book to anyone with any interet in Russia, 20th century history, or the nature of dictatorship.
Stalin's Willing Executioners - Rated
Baudelaire once wrote: "I am the wound and the knife! I am the blow and the cheek! I am the limbs and the wheel - The victim and the executioner!" In many respects that sums up the lives of Stalin's (and Lenin's) henchmen that ran the USSR's security apparatus from the Russian (October) Revolution through the death of Stalin. Donald Rayfield's "Stalin and His Hangmen" provides an excruciatingly morbid examination of the men and the organization that facilitated Stalin's rise to total power and the means they used to achieve that end. Rayfield, a professor of Russian and Georgian at the University of London, has provided a scholarly, yet compelling history of the men who built and maintained the Soviet security regime. As stated in his preface, Rayfield's purpose in writing this book was not to add yet another biography of Stalin but, rather, to examine the means by which Stalin gradually assumed total power in the USSR. He does so by focusing on the men who facilitated that rise to power by creating a brutally efficient killing machine exceeded in the 20th century only (perhaps) by Hitler's Holocaust. Rayfield focuses on the lives and bloody career of five leaders of those security organs (commonly known by a succession of acronyms or initials, the Cheka, GPU, NKVD, MVD, MGB, and KGB): F. Dzerzhinsky, V. Menshinksy, G. Iagoda, N. Ezhov, and L. Beria. Along the way we see the machinations that caused the ousting of Trotsky from power and his eventual murder. Rayfield explores the role the security organs played in Stalin's cat-and-mouse games with Bukharin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev and his suppression, imprisonment, and/or murder of the Russian Orthodox Church, ethnic nationalities, kulaks, and millions of enemies, real or imagined None of this is particularly new ground for anyone with an interest in the subject matter. However, Rayfield, by examining these events with an eye towards the symbiotic relationship between Stalin and his hangmen, manages to cast a fresh eye on old horrors. Hannah Arendt coined the phrase banality of evil. Although it has a certain ring of truth to it Rayfield's look into the lives of these leading `Chekists' shows that some, if not all of them, were far from banal. Some considered themselves poets and tried to develop relations with the Soviet intelligentsia (before sending them to the Gulag). They each managed to kill hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, including many lives taken by their own hands. They each, with the possible exception of the rather puritanical Dzerzhinsky, were perverse (their sexual depravity was legion and is well chronicled here) and brutal psychopaths. Yet some, particularly Beria had exceptional managerial skills and a broad range of intellectual interests. Ultimately, they all knew that the fires of death they fueled would ultimately consume them yet, like moths to the flame they stayed on until the bitter end of their own lives, as Baudelaire put it, both victims and executioners. Rayfield does not attempt to explain why these Chekists played out their horrible roles with such gusto. I'm not sure an explanation is possible and I think it was a wise choice to avoid exploring the myriad motivations behind such collective complicity in horrible acts. I think it sufficient simply to set out the lives of these men and their separate and collective relationships with Stalin and let the facts speak for themselves. Although a scholarly work, Rayfield's prose is accessible to anyone with an interest in Soviet history. Highly recommended.
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