Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

Let's Take a Pass on the Unitary Executive

Nagant M1895 pistol, with a sample cartridge.

"In my experience, the most difficult part of discovering and gaining personal knowledge of genocide is accepting the truth about what happened. To know all the details while at the same time being able to continue to live a full life, without forgetting or hiding what one knows about the past." 

- Father Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets (2008) p. 61. 

I confess I'd never given any thought to executioners' dry cleaning bills. And yet here is one of Stalin's executioners, Vasily Blokhin: "He had been one of the main killers during the Great Terror, when he had commanded an execution squad in Moscow. He had been entrusted with some of the executions of high-profile defendants of show trials, but had also shot thousands of workers and peasants who were killed entirely in secret. At Kalinin he wore a leather cap, apron, and long gloves to keep the blood and gore from himself and his uniform. Using German pistols, he shot, each night, about two hundred and fifty men, one after another." (Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, 2010. p. 137.) 

Let's unpack this paragraph a little bit. Snyder is describing Blokhin in 1940, during something that later became known as the Katyn massacre. After the Germans and the Soviets invaded and conquered Poland in the fall of 1939, the Soviets placed about 15,000 officer prisoners and civilian internees in three camps at Ostashkov and Kozelsk in Russia, and Starobilsk in Ukraine. (See Snyder p. 125.) 

The people in those three camps thought, until the day they died, that they would be going home fairly soon. That's what the Soviets told them. But Joseph Stalin actually had other ideas. The prisoners were a significant part of the Polish elite. Certainly the regular army officers, but also the reserve officers, who in their civilian lives were school teachers, professors, doctors, lawyers, engineers, journalists, and so forth. And the civilian internees were in the camps precisely because they were considered politically dangerous. (See pp. 125, 135.) 

After some consideration, Stalin decided that these people would not be going home, where they would almost certainly form a significant part of the resistance to Soviet rule in Poland. And so they were sent, still thinking they were about to go home, to three sites of execution. One of these was in Kalinin (now Tver), where Vasily Blokhin worked. The most famous of the three sites was Katyn. 

Why did Katyn become so famous? Because the Germans discovered it. How did that happen? Because Hitler, who had worked with Stalin to carve up Poland, decided it was time for him to carve up the Soviet Union. German troops attacked in June 1941, pushing across the Soviet-occupied part of Poland on the way to Moscow. In the early going, things looked a lot like the blitzkrieg in France, just a year earlier. But German troops never did get to Moscow, or Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). The offensive stalled, and the Russians eventually seized the initiative and found their way to Berlin. 

But that's another story. Back to Katyn. At some point in late 1942, or possibly very early in 1943, rumors began to reach the higher echelons of the German military command in the area, telling of a mass grave in the Katyn forest, located a little to the west of Smolensk. When the news finally got to Berlin, Joseph Goebbels recognized the value of the story, and he launched a propaganda blitz on April 13, charging the Soviets with mass murder. 

Nazi propaganda poster. Artist: Theo Matejko.

Goebbels may not have been expecting the Soviet response on April 15, which was effectively the old schoolyard riposte "No, you!" (I'll never forget the moment when Donald Trump, in a debate with Hillary Clinton, actually said, "No, you!" There are more adult ways to say the same thing.)

The Berlin wall fell in 1989, and the Soviet empire began to crumble. In 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, agreed that the Germans had been right all along about Katyn. In 1991 the Soviet empire disintegrated. 

It appears that the other two sites remained official secrets until this time. I'm a little shaky on exactly when they became public items. I did find an interesting article online reporting that rumors about the Mednoye site began to circulate in 1988. As a note of explanation, Blokhin killed his 7,000 in the basement of the NKVD headquarters in Kalinin - a very impressive building that now houses a university. And Kalinin is now Tver. If you're starting to feel confused, you are not alone. Stay with me.

The people Blokhin killed were transported a short distance away from Kalinin, where the bodies were dumped into a mass grave that had been previously excavated. The burial site was in a forested area near the village of Mednoye, but its exact location was not known to the outside world. 

A group of volunteers from the Memorial organization confirmed the location of the burial site - one of the volunteers says they located the site after a KGB officer gave him the coordinates: “It definitely wasn’t legal, but we couldn’t wait.” says Sergei Glushkov. “We just climbed over the metal fence and started digging.” 

About the other site, in Kharkiv, I was stumped for a while. But I eventually found a 2021 story in the Euromaidan Press. The Polish prisoners from Starobilsk were transported to Kharkiv, where they were executed in the basement of the local NKVD headquarters. The bodies were then moved to a wooded area near the village of Pyatikhatky, not far from Karkhiv. They were buried in pits that had been dug in advance. The graves seem to have been discovered in 1969 by a group of teenagers, but the KGB moved quickly put a stop to visits by civilians, eventually erecting a fence. In 2000 the Ukrainian government created a memorial at the site, and in 2009 it declassified documents related to the murders. 

The term Katyn massacre has come to refer to all three sites. 

The slaughter at Kalinin was Vasily Blokhin's masterpiece - he actually holds the Guinness World Record for "Most prolific official executioner." He personally shot 7,000 prisoners over 28 nights, averaging 250 per night.

In addition to his leather apron, hat, and very long gloves, Blotkhin showed up with a briefcase full of Walther P2 semiautomatic pistols. This was a small handgun that had been around for a while and was apparently quite popular with German police officers. 

Blokhin chose the Walther P2 because, as his Wikipedia profile puts it, "he did not trust the reliability of the standard-issue Soviet TT-30 for the frequent, heavy use he intended." The TT-30, or Tokarev, had been in service with the Russian army since 1931. 

The Walther P2 was a very early model from this company, which is perhaps most famous today for the Walther PPK, carried by James Bond. I haven't been able to find a usable picture of a Walther P2, so here's a picture of Sean Connery with a PPK strutting its stuff. 

(I was going to say that this picture puts me in mind of the photographs of Civil War soldiers, patiently confronting a long-exposure camera while displaying their weapons, which were frequently Navy Colt revolvers. But that would be a digression.)

Another option was the Nagant M1895 revolver, which the Imperial Russian army adopted in 1895.  The design was obsolete in 1895, but the Russians kept it in service until well after World War II. The main problem (but not the only problem) with the Nagant was reloading. The Nagant was a revolver, meaning it had a cylinder that contained cartridges; the cylinder rotated each time the pistol was fired, placing a fresh cartridge under the firing pin. Spent cartridges had to be ejected one at a time through a gate in the revolver's frame. 

This is the same system used in the famous Colt .45 Peacemaker, adopted by the U.S. army in 1873.  In 1892, three years before the Nagant came on scene, the U.S. army replaced the Peacemaker with the Colt M1892, which had a cylinder that could swing out to the side, greatly increasing the ease of reloading and greatly reducing the time involved. In 1911 the U.S. army joined the twentieth century when it moved to a semi-automatic pistol, the Colt M1911. The M1911 was loaded, basically, by placing a full magazine in the handle of the pistol. When the magazine was empty, the shooter pressed a button on the side of the frame; the empty magazine dropped out of the handle, and the shooter replaced it with a full magazine. 

In the Soviet Union, the Nagant remained in active service until well after World War II. I'm amazed that such an obsolete pistol lasted so long. Maybe it says something about the inner workings of the Soviet Union. But I'm not here to speculate. Blokhin was in a position to name his weapons, and he chose the Walther P2. As we shall see, executioners below his pay grade often found themselves using the Nagant revolver. 

The executions at Kalinin were the high point of Blokhin's career, but as Professor Snyder notes above, this highlight was only one part of a long and very bloody career. It began in 1926 when Joseph Stalin appointed him chief executioner of the NKVD. The NKVD had a lot of executioners, and he was the boss of all of them. The fact that he actually shot large numbers of people himself strikes me as odd, but again there may be an insight into the Soviet mentality here that I'm not grasping. 

Blokhin particularly flourished during Stalin's Great Terror of 1937-1938. At this point, I need to stop and take a deep breath. I've been researching and writing about mass murder for several months now. I just noticed that it's starting to look normal to me. There is in fact nothing normal about the Great Terror, just as there was nothing normal about the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932-1933, which killed 3.9 million. Or Reinhard Heydrich and his Einsatzgruppen, or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, or, on a smaller scale, the complete destruction of the little village of Lidice in Czechoslovakia. All of these things are, in my opinion, insane. But they were carried out by seemingly rational people, who wrote long bureaucratic memoranda, and many of whom lived at least superficially normal lives. And I see this horror standing in the doorway, just outside the living room that is the United States. So I will write a little more, to try to warn people about just how bad it could get here. And then I think I will take a break and write about more pleasant things, even things that might help make the future better - that's more fun than trying to stave off the worst. 

Okay. Joseph Stalin woke up one day and decided he wanted to kill 681,692 people, and he set the wheels in motion. We should look first at his favorite whipping boys, the kulaks. These were farmers who were more prosperous than the average peasant. They also tended to be leaders in their communities - the kinds of people who might actually be skeptical of orders coming down from on high, and also influence their fellow villagers to think independently of the party line. In other words they were a threat to Stalin's complete control of his country. Stalin killed 378,326 kulaks during the Great Terror. (Pp. 78-79, 83, 107.) 

Timothy Snyder describes a typical execution: "Killings were always carried out at night, and in seclusion. They took placed in soundproofed rooms below ground, in large buildings such as garages where noise could cover gunshots, or far from human settlement in forests. The executioners were always NKVD officers, generally using a Nagan [sic] pistol. While two men held a prisoner by his arms, the executioner would fire a single shot from behind into the base of the skull, and then often a 'control shot' into the temple." (P. 83.) 

National minorities, particularly the Poles, received the same treatment. Professor Snyder again: "In 1937 and 1938, a quarter of a million Soviet citizens were shot on essentially ethnic grounds. ... In fact, the Soviet Union in the late 1930s was a land of unequalled national persecutions." Again, the reasoning was that they were not reliable supporters of the regime. (P. 89.) 

The Soviets worked very successfully to keep these killings secret, just as they had largely succeeded in keeping the full extent of the Great Famine of 1932-1933 from the public. On the other hand, they assiduously publicized a series of show trials, which began in August 1936 and initially focused on people who had been Stalin's political opponents. The trials went on from there, most notably decapitating the Soviet armed forces (the trial of the generals and certain other trials were secret) and were supplemented by purges of lower-ranking people who did not receive the formality of a trial. In all, about 50,000 people were executed. (Pp. 73-75.) 

I'm going to let Timothy Snyder summarize, starting with the obliviousness of the outside world: "Insofar as the Great Terror was noticed at all, it was seen only as a matter of show trials and party and army purges. But these events, noticed by specialists and journalists at the time, were not the essence of the Great Terror. The kulak operations and the national operations were the essence of the Great Terror. Of the 681,692 executions carried out for political crimes in 1937 and 1938, the kulak and national orders accounted for 625,483." (P. 107.) 

Valery Blokhin.

In 1953, Joseph Stalin had a stroke; he died a few days later, on March 5. Subsequent leaders tried to walk quietly away from this legacy, but I think the lesson is stark. As Lord Acton put it, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." 

Stephen Miller visits Chestnut Street, Philadelphia.

See also Somotomo, A Lesson From the Berlin Wall, The Real Parallels Are With Weimar, What Can Pierre Laval Tell Us About Donald Trump? and Unleashing the Oligarchs, What Caused the French Revolution? and Jim Crow Was a Failed State, Giacomo Matteotti (1885-1924), What Happened in Ferrara?