Lev Mekhlis
Lev Mekhlis was born in Odessa in 1889, in a Jewish family. After a period of homeschooling, he attended a commercial school, and then began to work as a clerk at the age of fourteen-fifteen. Two and a half years later, he became a schoolteacher. While his family was not poor, seeing as they could afford to homeschool their son, they were not wealthy enough to fully provide for him in his teenage years, and so he had to earn money on his own. There is no information about his parents. Later, Mekhlis indicated in the official documents that his mother tongue was Russian, but that he also spoke the "Jewish" (Yiddish) language. Following the pogroms in Odessa (the largest of which took place in 1905), he became a member of a Jewish self-defense organization. In 1907, he joined the Jewish social-democratic Poale Zion party, becoming affiliated with the Zionist workers' movement. He occasionally got into trouble with the authorities, but not in any serious way. In 1911, he was drafted into the Russian Imperial Army, and served in the 2nd Grenadier Artillery Brigade. In 1912, he received the rank of a bombardier. Following the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he found himself in the 11th Army of the Southwestern Front. He served in the horse-drawn artillery, taking care of logistics.
Mekhlis met the Revolution of 1917 in the army, but he quickly decided to desert, and returned to his home city of Odessa. In 1918, after the city had been occupied by German and Austrian troops, he traveled to the Crimea and took an active part in the establishment of Soviet rule there. It was in the Crimea that he joined the Communist Party. He went on to work in railway reconstruction in Kharkov (Ukraine). However, when White troops approached Kharkov, Mekhlis was drafted into the Red Army, in the high political rank of divisional commissar. Until 1920, he remained a political worker in the Red Army (the commissar of a brigade, then of the 46th Division, and finally of a group of forces). He urged for an increase in the number of political instructors in the army, used corporal punishment (beating delinquent soldiers with ramrods), and clashed with the unit commanders on military and ideological questions. Mekhlis was renowned for his bravery, and was wounded in the battles for the Crimea. During the Russian Civil War, he met Stalin, and this meeting was to determine the course of his future career. In 1921–1922, he headed the administrative inspectorate at the People's Commisariat of Worker-Peasant Inspection (Rabkrin), which was headed by Stalin – thus, he effectively served as Stalin's personal secretary. In 1925, he unexpectedly quit his post in order to study at the Communist Academy and the Institute of Red Professors. In 1929, Mekhlis graduated from it, and his intelligence and abilities were remarked upon by his teachers. At the time, he also contributed some educational materials to Bolshevik, the major communist magazine. He completed a doctorate in economics, using a strongly Marxist approach.
In 1922–1926, he served as assistant secretary and director of the bureau of the Secretariat of the Central Committee. When Stalin ordered the forced collectivization of agriculture in 1929, Mekhlis helped purge the Institute of Red Professors of Stalin's opponents. He was also behind the publication of an open letter in Pravda on May 30, 1930, denouncing the influence of the "right-wing opposition" (i.e., Nikolai Bukharin and his supporters) at the Industrial Academy of Moscow. From 1930, Mekhlis was head of the press corps of the Central Committee, and then the editor-in-chief of Pravda, the central press organ of the Party. In this post, he replaced Nikolai Bukharin, who had led the opposition to collectivization, incurring Stalin's displeasure, and who would later be arrested and executed. In fact, the whole state apparatus of press censorship was now concentrated in the hands of Mekhlis, who set its general course. Every day, Pravda published calls to intensify the struggle against those who deviated from the Stalinist orthodoxy (which kept changing all the time) and exposés of alleged conspiracies against the Soviet regime, helping incite spy mania among the population. While this campaign accorded with the suspicious nature of Mekhlis himself, it was ultimately instigated by Stalin. Mekhlis was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1934, and promoted to full membership in October 1937. In December that year, during the "Great Purge" (1936-1938), Mekhlis was appointed head of the Political Administration of the Red Army, a post that had been left vacant since the death of its previous holder, Yan Gamarnik (another Jew), who had committed suicide when the NKVD came to arrest him. Nicknamed "the Shark" and "the Gloomy Demon," Mekhlis oversaw a drastic purge of the 30,000 political commissars attached to the army, which led to the removal of at least 20,000 of them. In 1938, as head of the Red Army Political Directorate, Mekhlis was dispatched to the Far East (allegedly by Stalin), to carry out mass arrests and gather incriminating evidence against Marshal Vasily Blyukher, commander of the Far Eastern Army. Shortly thereafter, Blyukher was arrested by the NKVD and beaten to death. In this way, Mekhlis clearly accomplished the task set to him by Stalin. Together with the deputy head of the NKVD, Mikhail Frinovsky, Mekhlis organized an extensive purge in the Russian Far East. In September 1940, Mekhlis was appointed the People's Commisar of State Control and Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union.
During the Winter War against Finland in 1939-40, Mekhlis was sent to the front, to investigate the reasons why the Red Army was being beaten back by the Finns, and report his findings personally to Stalin. He attributed the setbacks to treachery, and the Soviet commanderAlexey Vinogradov, his chief of staff, and the chief of the political department were shot in front of the troops.
In June 1941, following the Nazi invasion of the USSR, Mekhlis was made Army Commissar of the 1st rank, which corresponded to the title of General of the Red Army. In 1942, he served as representative of the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. Mekhlis blamed the artillery commander of the Northwestern Front, Vasily Goncharov, for the disastrous setbacks suffered by the Red Army in 1941, and ordered him to be shot in front of the headquarters. "After the outbreak of war, the paranoia of this man grew boundless. He still failed to understand that war had its own laws – and that neither repressions, nor constant vigilance, nor party intrigues could win it" (Yury Rubtsov, The Shadow of The Vozhd. Moscow, 2007. p. 259). In June 1942, Mekhlis became head of the army's Main Political Dictorate. The influence he exercised in this post was contained by resistance from senior military officers, such as Georgy Zhukov and Kliment Voroshilov. Nevertheless, the number of political instructors in the military increased during his tenure, and they were required to be the "ears and eyes" of the Communist Party. In the course of the war, Mekhlis was assigned to numerous fronts, and he fabricated charges against the local commanders on each of them. Upon his initiative, the generals D. Pavlov, V. Klimovskikh, A. Grigoryev, A. Korobkov, N. Klych, K. Kachanov, and others were tortured, sentenced to death, and executed.
In early 1942, Mekhlis was sent to Kerch (on the Crimean Front), to help organize the defense of the peninsula. Already in the first battle, in whose planning he had actively interfered, Mekhlis demonstrated his illiteracy in matters of military strategy. The war correspondent and writer Konstantin Simonov wrote:
"He does not justify himself in any way — neither for his incompetent actions in the Finnish War, nor for the Kerch disaster, for which he bears the main responsibility. In my opinion, he is not brave; he is nervous, agitated, fanatical. By the way, I was present at Stalin's discussion of the outcome of the Finnish War <…> Mekhlis made several comments then.… Stalin said: -- Mekhlis is a fanatic, he should not be allowed anywhere near the army."
Konstantin Simonov, Through the Eyes of a Man of my Generation. Reflections on Joseph Stalin. Moscow, 1990. p. 389.
Conversely, Kirill Meretskov, commander of the Volkhov Front, wrote about Mekhlis in his memoirs: "He was an honest and brave man, but prone to suspicion and very rude" (Kirill Meretskov. In the Service of the People. Moscow, 1968. pp. 320-321).
During the two months spent on the Crimean Front, Mekhlis failed to make any headway. In the end, he was recalled to Moscow and dismissed from the posts of Deputy People's Commissar of Defense and Chief of the Main Political Administration of the Red Army. According to eyewitness accounts, when Mekhlis came to see Stalin shortly after the defeat, the latter shouted at him and slammed the door in his face. Mekhlis was demoted in rank, down to corps commissar, but not for long. He quickly recovered from his demotion, and from late 1942 he was a lieutenant-general, before being promoted to colonel-general in 1944. In those years, he was a member of the Military Councils of various fronts. In the course of the war, Mekhlis was awarded two Orders of the Red Banner; the Order of Kutuzov, 1st class, and the Order of Suvorov, 1st class.
After the end of the war, from 1946 to 1950, Mekhlis returned to his earlier post as Minister of State Control of the USSR. When the Health Minister, E. Smirnov, proposed that Stalin put Mekhlis in charge of one of the government committees, Stalin began to laugh. In his opinion, Mekhlis could only wreck and destroy, and was incapable of any constructive work. Nevertheless, Stalin always valued him, especially for his aptitude for repression of all sorts.
In 1950, Mekhlis was discharged due to ill health. He died in February 1953. His ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, in the Red Square in Moscow.
