Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

by Stephen Kotkin

Among the key instruments of the swaggering cobbler’s son was a Tsaritsyn Cheka, which had just announced its existence in May 1918 when it took over a two-story mansion overlooking the Volga. It made the top floor into offices and living quarters, and partitioned the lower floor into cells, which were soon stuffed with prisoners beaten unconscious to “confess.” Targets included “bourgeois,” clergy, intelligentsia, and tsarist officers, many of whom had answered a local appeal to join the Red Army. Workers and peasants were also arrested as counterrevolutionaries if they dared to criticize the arbitrary arrests and torture, or if someone said they had.83 Rumors of atrocities constituted part of the Cheka’s mystique: the Kharkov Cheka was said to scalp victims, the Yekaterinoslav Cheka to stone or crucify them, and the Kremenchug Cheka to impale them on stakes.84 In Tsaritsyn, the Cheka was said to cut through human bones with handsaws.85 Alexander I. Chervyakov (b. 1890), who had emerged as the regional Cheka boss in Tsaritsyn, conducted himself like a tyrant, and he and his leather-clad thugs settled their own scores, including with other Cheka operatives, but now they answered to Stalin.86 An eyewitness, the Bolshevik Fyodor Ilin, who had taken the name Raskolnikov from the Dostoevsky character, recalled that “Stalin in Tsaritsyn was everything”—de facto boss of the regional Cheka, and soon, of the regional Red Army.87