REVIEW BY ANDRÉ VAN LOON
To get straight to the point: the strength of Soviet Secret Police Chiefs lies in its weakness. It is an engrossing read and yet a partial historical account, which leaves the deepest questions about the Soviet Union’s murderousness unanswered. As much as you are likely to be fascinated by the book’s individuals, not least the forbidding mystery of Stalin, you are also bound to scratch your head about the system that engineered so much loss of life. Just how did this happen?
The book’s pleasure and its trouble starts with its fairly classic structure. We get the different police chiefs in turn: Feliks Dzerzhinskii (police chief in 1917-1926), Vyacheslav Menzhinskii (1926-1934), Genrikh Yagoda (1934-1936), Nikolai Yezhov (1936-1938), Lavrenti Beria (1938-1946), and Viktor Abakumov (1946-1951). Only Dzerzhinskii and Menzhinskii died apparently natural deaths; all the others were executed by the very regime they supported.
Each chapter then follows a birth-to-death story, with sometimes several pages of ancestry discussion. This descends into farce in the case of Yezhov, the leader of the Great Purge of 1936-1938, who claimed Russian birth but was actually Lithuanian, and whose birthday of 1 May (International Workers’ Day) has also been contested. Sokolov notes wryly that not much trust can be placed in documentation, as so much of it was destroyed or forged.
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