ABSTRACT
From the early days of Soviet rule, Stalin maintained a very close relationship with Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Secret Police. Dzerzhinsky supplied him with documents, found mostly in the Okhrana archives, that revealed compromising information about Soviet officials and party members. Stalin gathered these documents in his own personal archive and used them to blackmail people into slavish obedience to him by threatening to expose their past. Those who refused to submit to him were crushed or committed suicide. A special group of Stalin’s agents, headed by Matvey Shkiriatov and Yemelian Yaroslavsky, worked within the Central Control Commission, sorting out such documents. Stalin, for instance, kept in his archive a document exposing Kalinin, the figurehead ‘President of the USSR’, as an Okhrana collaborator.1 Trotsky stated that Kalinin surrendered to Stalin ‘gradually, groaning and resisting’.2 Kalinin told friends that Stalin was a ‘horse that would some day drag our wagon into a ditch.’ Stalin placed a caricature of Kalinin in a Soviet magazine with the caption ‘Last warning’.3
