STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR

BY

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

POSTSCRIPT

 

Stalin was embalmed. On 9 March 1953, Molotov, Beria and Khrushchev spoke at his funeral, after which he was laid in the Mausoleum beside Lenin. Polina Molotova was still in the Lubianka. The next day, Beria invited Molotov to his office there. When Molotov arrived, Beria rushed ahead to greet Polina: “A heroine!” he declared. Her first question was “How’s Stalin?” She fainted when she learned he was dead. Molotov took her home.

Beria moved to liberalize the regime and arrested those responsible for the Doctors’ Plot but his proposal to free East Germany provoked an uprising that alarmed the other magnates. Khrushchev began to plan Beria’s destruction. He won over Premier Malenkov and Defence Minister Bulganin. Molotov still admired Beria but agreed to support Khrushchev because of the German crisis. Surprisingly, President Voroshilov supported Beria. When he was consulted, Mikoyan said he distrusted Khrushchev because he was so close to Beria and Malenkov. Khrushchev did not tell Mikoyan the whole story, but he agreed that Beria should be demoted to Petroleum Minister. Kaganovich typically sat on the fence. But Marshal Zhukov and his generals provided the muscle.

On 25 June, Beria was swinging gaily on his hammock at his dacha, singing Georgian songs. He had been called to a special meeting of the Presidium. Nina warned him to be careful but he was not worried because he explained that Molotov supported him. At about 1 p.m. next day, Khrushchev stood up at the meeting and attacked Beria. Bulganin joined in but Mikoyan was surprised to hear that Beria was to be arrested.

“What’s going on, Nikita?” Beria asked. “Why are you searching for fleas in my trousers?” When it was Malenkov’s turn to support the coup, he lost his nerve and gave a secret signal to the generals waiting outside. Marshal Zhukov burst in and seized Beria.

Nina Beria, her son Sergo and daughter-in-law Martha Peshkova were also arrested and imprisoned. From his cell, Beria bombarded Malenkov with letters begging for his help and mercy for his family. On 22 December, he, along with Merkulov, Dekanozov and Kobulov, was sentenced to death by a secret political court for treason and terrorism, charges of which these killers were obviously innocent.

Beria was stripped to his underwear; hands manacled and attached to a hook on the wall. He frantically begged to be allowed to live, making such a noise that a towel was stuffed in his mouth. His eyes bulged over the bandage wrapped round his face. His executioner—General Batitsky (later promoted to Marshal for his role)—fired directly into Beria’s forehead. He was cremated. His protégé and then rival, Abakumov, was tried for the Leningrad Case and shot in December 1954. Many of Stalin’s crimes were blamed on them.

When the new leaders began to release prisoners, their reactions were often similar. Kira Alliluyeva, herself newly released, picked up her mother Zhenya from the Lubianka.

“So finally, Stalin saved us after all!” declared Zhenya.

“You fool!” exclaimed Kira. “Stalin’s dead!” Zhenya admired Stalin up to her death in 1974. Her sister-in-law Anna Redens, like Budyonny’s second wife, Olga, had lost her mind in confinement and never recovered. Vlasik returned broken from prison but he and Poskrebyshev remained friends, both dying in the mid-sixties.

Khrushchev emerged as the dominant leader. Malenkov was removed as Premier and replaced by Bulganin. In 1956, Khrushchev, backed by Mikoyan, famously denounced Stalin’s crimes in his “Secret Speech.” Five years later, Stalin’s body was removed from the Mausoleum and buried in the Kremlin wall.

In 1957, Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov, backed by Voroshilov and Bulganin, managed to overthrow Khrushchev in the Presidium. However, Khrushchev mobilized the Central Committee, flying in his supporters in planes organized by Marshal Zhukov.

At a Plenum, Stalin’s murderous magnates scrambled to blame one another for their crimes: “Sleeves rolled up, axe in hand, they lopped off heads,” Zhukov accused them—and Khrushchev himself. Khrushchev attacked Malenkov who replied: “Only you are completely pure, Comrade Khrushchev!” Kaganovich insisted “the whole Politburo signed” the death lists. Khrushchev accused him back but Kaganovich roared: “Didn’t you sign death warrants in Ukraine?” Finally Khrushchev shouted: “All of us taken together aren’t worth Stalin’s shit!” As a recent historian has written, “this was certainly no Nuremberg” but it was the “closest Stalin’s henchmen came to a day of reckoning.” Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov were sacked. Kaganovich and Malenkov were despatched to run a potash factory and power station respectively in distant regions. Malenkov’s daughter says her father found this minor job a calming relief; Kaganovich’s grandson reports that “Iron Lazar” immediately discarded his notorious temper and never shouted again, becoming a cosy grandfather.

Molotov became Soviet Ambassador to Mongolia and then, in 1960, Soviet Representative at the UN Atomic Agency in Vienna so that he was present, ignored in the background, when President Kennedy and Khrushchev met there with their delegations in June 1961.

Khrushchev, like Stalin before him, became Premier as well as First Secretary. Marshal Zhukov became Defence Minister as a reward for his help but his pugnacity and fame threatened the increasingly vainglorious Khrushchev who sacked him for “Bonapartism.” By 1960, when the senile Voroshilov retired as President, Khrushchev and Mikoyan were the last of Stalin’s magnates in power. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was Mikoyan who flew to Havana, accompanied by his son Sergo, to persuade Castro to agree to Khrushchev’s compromise, and then on to Washington to talk to Kennedy. Mikoyan, who had helped carry Lenin’s coffin, also attended JFK’s funeral.

After the scare of the Missile Crisis and the autocratic folly of his agricultural panaceas, Khrushchev was overthrown in 1964 by a cabal of Stalin’s young stars, Brezhnev, Kosygin and their éminence grise, Suslov, who ruled until their deaths in the eighties. Mikoyan survived even this upheaval and became President, retiring in 1965.

The old magnates found it hard to cope with their fall. They had expected to be arrested so were all relieved to be alive. When they left their apartments in the Kremlin in 1957, Kaganovich and Andreyev found they did not even own their own towels or sheets. Many of them were granted apartments in the palatial Granovsky buildings where the shrewd Molotov managed to secure two apartments as well as a dacha. Kaganovich and Malenkov retired to spartan but large apartments in another building on the Frunze Embankment but avoided each other. These famous and blood-spattered old pensioners spent their retirements writing their memoirs, receiving Stalinist admirers, avoiding the hostile stares of former victims they encountered in the street, applying for readmission to the Party, and shuffling through papers in the Lenin Library: they were non-people but spotting them became a thrilling form of living archaeology.

Happily and lovingly reunited, Molotov and Polina remained un-apologetic Stalinists: Svetlana wrote that visiting them was like entering a “palaeontological museum.” The prickly disdain between Molotov and Kaganovich lasted until their deaths but was as nothing compared to their loathing for Khrushchev. He admitted being “up to his elbows” in the blood of his victims and “that burdens my soul.” He defied his successors by dictating his selectively honest memoirs, dying in 1971. Andreyev died the same year: the commemorative plaque on the wall outside Granovsky makes him the last of Stalin’s butchers to be celebrated. Mikoyan wrote frank but equally selective memoirs until his death in 1978.

Three others survived into another era: while Polina died in 1970, Molotov left his remorseless reminiscences to posterity in conversations with a sympathetic journalist. He survived to see the ascension of Gorbachev, passing away in 1986. Malenkov remained a Stalinist but enjoyed the poetry of Mandelstam and rediscovered the Christian faith of his childhood that may have been a sort of repentance. In 1988, he was buried beneath a cross and the (utterly inappropriate) statue of the “lion of justice,” sculpted by his grandson. Kaganovich, ever the most cautious and pusillanimous, outlived everyone to witness the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union that he had helped build, dying in 1991.

Their families have enjoyed mixed fortunes and take very different views of Stalin and their parents’ roles: most became editors, architects or scientists. Vasily Stalin was sent to prison, released, remarried and finally died tragically of alcoholism in 1962. His son Alexander, who uses his mother’s name, is a respected theatrical designer in Moscow but his two children by Marshal Timoshenko’s daughter both died young—of alcoholism. Svetlana Alliluyeva defected and returned to Russia and then left again, married an American by whom she had a daughter, lived in Harvard and Cambridge, made and lost a fortune with her beautifully written memoirs, finally found herself without means in sheltered housing in Bristol, England, and is now living alone in obscurity in the American Midwest. Having embraced liberalism and rejected Stalinism, she has displayed both her father’s intelligence and his paranoia. Her Russian children, Joseph Morozov and Katya Zhdanova, are both doctors in Russia.

Yury Zhdanov remarried and returned to academia, becoming Rector of Rostov-on-Don University where he still lives as an honoured professor emeritus, admirer of Stalin and defender of his father. Artyom Sergeev remained in the military, rose to Lieutenant-General and lives outside Moscow. The rest of the Alliluyev family remains close: Kira Alliluyeva worked as an actress and is as irrepressible today as she was when she refused to climb under Stalin’s billiard table in 1937.

Stepan Mikoyan flourished as a test pilot and also rose to Lieutenant-General. His younger brother Sergo edited a magazine on Latin America. Both live in Moscow. Kaganovich’s daughter Maya married and had children and cared for her father in old age, only outliving him for a few years.

Sergo Beria and Martha Peshkova were released and moved to Kiev with Beria’s widow Nina, who never stopped loving her husband. In 1965, Martha divorced Sergo who continued to work as a missile scientist under his mother’s name, Gegechkori. Shortly before his death in 2000, he published his memoirs and appealed to the Russian Supreme Court to rehabilitate his father. The Court upheld the trumped-up charges against Beria. Martha, who has kept her looks, still lives in her large dacha on the old estate of her grandfather, Gorky. Beria’s charming grandchildren, who use the Peshkov name, are an interior decorator, an art academic and an electronics expert.

Lilya Drozhdova, Beria’s “last love,” never betrayed him. She lives in Moscow and, in her early sixties, remains beautiful.

Budyonny’s third wife still lives in his apartment on Granovsky filled with life-sized paintings of the Marshal on horseback. The apartments there are now worth over a million dollars so that the Molotovs rent out theirs to American investment bankers, perhaps proving right Stalin’s suspicions of Vyacheslav’s “Rightist” tendencies. Molotov’s grandson Vyacheslav Nikonov was one of the leading liberals of 1991, who helped open up the KGB archives and became one of President Yeltsin’s top advisers, serving on his re-election team in 1996. He now runs one of Moscow’s most respected political think tanks and is writing his grandfather’s biography.

Perhaps Stalin was right about the Mikoyans too: Anastas’s grandson Stas became a Soviet rock star, set up his own record label during the nineties and is now the leading Russian rock impresario, their Richard Branson. Beria’s hope that his grandchildren would study at Oxford was not realized but his great-grandson has just left the English public school Rugby and now mixes easily in London high society. Malenkov’s daughter Volya, an architect, followed her father’s later religious journey to become a builder of churches in her old age: her business cards feature pictures of the churches she has built. She and her brothers, both professors of science, remained convinced of their father’s innocence.

Stalin’s confidant Candide Charkviani survived to see an independent Georgia in 1991 and wrote his unpublished memoirs. His son Gela served as the chief political adviser to President Shevardnadze from 1992 to his overthrow in 2003.

To this day, the friendships and feuds of Stalin’s reign survive among the children of the magnates. The families of the grandees who remained in power, Mikoyans, Khrushchevs and Budyonnys, are regarded as a Soviet aristocracy even now. Nina Budyonny, still a Stalinist, is best friends with Julia Khrushcheva, who is not. The friendship of Marshals Budyonny and Zhukov is enjoyed not only by their daughters but by their grandchildren too. Stepan Mikoyan remains friends with Natasha Andreyeva even though the former is a liberal, the latter a diehard Stalinist. Artyom Sergeev remains in contact with those close pals, Nadya Vlasik and Natasha Poskrebysheva. But the Malenkovs and Andreyevs still despise Khrushchev.

It is only natural that all defend their fathers’ parts in the Terror. The Khrushchevs and Mikoyans have the courage and decency to admit the truth, reflecting their fathers’ attempts to correct the worst of Stalin’s (and their own) atrocities. Nonetheless, many of the magnates’ children still enthusiastically defend the Terror and many prefer to blame Beria for Stalin’s own crimes.

Martha Peshkova, who was brought up with Gorky in Sorrento, who still believes her grandfather and father were murdered, who as a child played with Stalin, reflects that “Stalin was as clever as he was cruel. Politics in Stalin’s time was like a closed jar with intriguers fighting one another to the death. What a frightening time! But if Beria had had his way after Stalin, he’d have improved the lifestyle of the country and we’d probably have avoided the destruction and poverty of today!”

Vladimir Alliluyev (Redens), whose father was shot on Stalin’s orders and whose mother lost her mind in his prisons, insists he was a “great man with good and bad sides.” Natasha Poskrebysheva, whose mother was shot by Stalin, admires him enormously and claims to be his daughter. Natasha Andreyeva, who lives in straitened circumstances in an apartment filled with her father’s art deco Kremlin furniture, remains the most aggressively Stalinist. “I have inherited my mother’s intuition,” she warned this author during his interview for this book. “I can see an Enemy by their eyes. Are you an Enemy? Are you afraid of the Red Flag?” She still supports the Terror: “We had to destroy spies before the war.” Despite the bulging file chronicling her father’s murderous spree in 1937, she asserts his innocence and claims, “Khrushchev’s dirty hands killed far more in Ukraine!” The “system,” not Stalin, were to blame for any “mistakes,” Andreyeva concludes. “But you Western capitalists have killed many more in Russia with your AIDS than Stalin ever did!”

Those who lived the extraordinary, terrible and privileged life as a child of Stalin’s grandees remain linked together and it is no surprise that their attitudes defy time—and the fate of their own families. The passionately optimistic ideals of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism and the imperial triumphs of the Generalissimo’s armies remain as potent and persuasive as the presence of Stalin himself, of whom they are never free. Old Molotov was asked if he dreamed about Stalin: “Not often but sometimes. The circumstances are very unusual. I’m in some sort of destroyed city and I can’t find a way out. Afterwards, I meet HIM...”[1]

---

[1] This is mainly based on interviews with: Vyacheslav Nikonov, Natalya Andreyeva, Joseph Minervin, Stas Namin, Martha Peshkova, Julia Khrushcheva, Sergo and Stepan Mikoyan, Nina Budyonny, Igor and Volya Malenkov, Yury Zhdanov, Leonid Redens, Vladimir Alliluyev (Redens), Kira Alliluyeva. Beria’s fall: Mikoyan’s Tak bylo, pp. 584–8 (fleas in my trousers), and the familiar account in Khrushchev Remembers. Also Amy Knight’s Beria; for Beria’s death, towel in mouth, see Michael Parrish, The Lesser Terror, and for acid bath, see Vlast, vol. 22, 2000, pp. 46–7. Beria’s death and 1957 Plenum/ “Nuremberg”: W. Taubman, Khrushchev, Man and Era, pp. 256, 321–4. See also Svetlana Alliluyeva’s Only One Year and Twenty Letters; Medvedev’s All Stalin’s Men; Khrushchev, quoted as “up to elbows in blood” by Shapoval, Taubman’s Khrushchev, p. 41. Dream: quoted in Molotov Letters, p. 1.

 

STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR

BY

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

PART TEN

THE LAME TIGER 1949–1953

 

53. Mrs. Molotov’s Arrest

While Stalin anointed successors in the south, the indomitable Envoy Extraordinary of the new State of Israel, Golda Myerson (known to history as Meir) arrived in Moscow on 3 September to tumultuous excitement among Soviet Jews. The Holocaust and the foundation of Israel had touched even the toughest Old Bolshevik internationalists like Polina Molotova. Voroshilov’s wife (née Golda Gorbman) amazed her family by saying, “Now we have our Motherland too.”

On Jewish New Year, Meir attended the Moscow Great Synagogue: jubilant Jews waited outside because the synagogue was full yet it was hardly a riot. Even Polina Molotova, now fifty-three, made an appearance. At Molotov’s 7 November diplomatic reception, Polina met Golda Meir, two formidable, intelligent women from almost identical backgrounds.

Polina spoke Yiddish, the language of her childhood, which she always used when she met Mitteleuropeans, though she tactfully called it “the Austrian language.” Meir asked how she knew Yiddish. “Ikh bin a yidishe tokhter,” replied Polina. “I’m a daughter of the Jewish people.” As they parted, Polina said, “If things go well for you, then things will be good for Jews all over the world.” Perhaps she did not know how Stalin resented her pushy intelligence, snobbish elegance, Jewish background, American businessman brother and, as he told Svetlana, “bad influence on Nadya.” Her sacking in May was a warning but she did not know that Stalin had considered murdering her in 1939.[1]

The synagogue “demonstration” and Polina’s Yiddish schtick outraged the old man on holiday, confirming that Soviet Jews were becoming an American Fifth Column. No wonder Molotov had supported a Jewish Crimea. On 20 November, the Politburo dismantled the Jewish Committee and unleashed an anti-Semitic terror, managed by Malenkov and Abakumov. Mikhoels’s colleagues were now arrested, together with some brilliant Jewish writers and scientists, from the Yiddish poet Perets Markish to the biochemist Lina Shtern. They also arrested the father of Svetlana’s newly divorced husband: “The entire older generation’s contaminated with Zionism,” Stalin lectured her, “and now they’re teaching the young people too.”

Stalin ordered the prisoners to be tortured to implicate Polina Molotova while spending the steamy evenings over dinner at Coldstream, telling Charkviani folksy tales of his childhood. He suddenly missed his old friends, particularly a priest named Peter Kapanadze with whom he had studied at the seminary. After the Revolution, the priest had become a teacher but Stalin sometimes sent him money. Now he invited Kapanadze and MGB Lieut.-Gen. Sasha Egnatashvili, the Gori family friend whom Stalin called “the innkeeper’s son,” to a dinner party. Charkviani hurried back to Tiflis to gather the guests. The seven old friends were soon singing Georgian songs led by the “host with the sweet voice.” Stalin insisted that some of them stay for a week by which time, like all his guests, they were desperate to escape. Finally one of them displayed considerable ingenuity by singing a folk song at dinner with the refrain: “Better go than stay!”

“Oh I see,” said Stalin, “you’re bored. You must be missing your grandchildren.”

“No, Soso,” replied the guest. “It’s impossible to be bored here but we’ve been here almost a week, wasting your time . . .” Stalin let them go, returning on 2 December to Moscow, brooding about the dangerous duplicity of Molotov. He had discovered (probably from Vyshinsky) that Molotov had travelled alone in a special railway carriage from New York to Washington when he had perhaps received instructions to undermine the USSR with a Jewish homeland. It was Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s alter ego, who “started to hint” to Molotov: “Why did they assign you a special car?” Molotov put “two and two together” but there was nothing he could do.

Amazingly, it was an opera that finally convinced Stalin to move against the Molotovs. Soon after his return, Stalin saw an Armenian opera, Almast, that told the story of a prince whose wife betrays him. “He saw treason could be anywhere with anyone” but especially among the wives of the great. Stalin, fortified operatically and armed with Abakumov’s testimonies, confronted Molotov with Polina’s guilt. “He and I quarrelled about it,” said Molotov.

“It’s time for you to divorce your wife,” said Stalin. Molotov agreed, partly because he was a Bolshevik but partly because obedience might save the woman he loved.

When he told her the charges against her, she shrieked: “And you believe them! If this is what the Party needs, we’ll divorce,” she agreed. In its queer way, it was a most romantic divorce, with both sacrificing themselves to save the other. “They discussed how to save the family,” says their grandson. Polina moved in with her sister. They waited nervously but, said Molotov, “a black cat had crossed our path.”

Stalin ordered Malenkov and Abakumov to put together the Jewish Case. Malenkov insisted to Beria that he was not anti-Semitic: “Lavrenti, you know I’m Macedonian. How can you suspect me of Russian chauvinism?”

Since its centrepiece was the plan for the Jewish Crimea, on 13 January 1949 Malenkov summoned Lozovsky, ex-overlord of the Jewish Committee, to Old Square for an interrogation. This was already a matter of life and death for Lozovsky—but it also had its dangers for that punctilious but murderous “clerk” Malenkov, because his eldest daughter Volya was married to the son of a Jewish official named Shamberg whose sister was married to Lozovsky.

“You sympathized . . .” with the Jewish Crimea, said Malenkov, “and the idea was vicious!” Stalin ordered Lozovsky’s arrest.

Malenkov extricated his family from its Jewish connections. Volya Malenkova divorced Shamberg. Every history repeats that Stalin ordered this divorce and that Malenkov enforced it. Volya Malenkova vigorously denies this, claiming that the marriage had not worked because Shamberg had married her for the wrong reasons—and had “bad artistic taste.” “My father even discouraged me saying, ‘Think carefully and seriously. You rushed into the marriage. Careful before rushing out of it.’ ” But this was not how it appeared to Shamberg, who was summoned to Malenkov’s office. Just as Vasily Stalin accelerated Svetlana’s divorce, so Malenkov’s bodyguard fixed Volya’s.[2]

As many as 110 prisoners, most of them Jews, were suffering “French wrestling” at the hands of the vicious Komarov in the Lubianka. “I was merciless with them,” boasted Komarov later, “I tore their souls apart . . . The Minister himself didn’t scare them as much as me . . . I was especially pitiless with (and I hated the most) the Jewish nationalists.” When Abakumov questioned the distinguished scientist Lina Shtern, he shouted at her: “You old whore . . . Come clean! You’re a Zionist agent!” Komarov asked Lozovsky which leaders “had Jewish wives,” adding, “no one is untouchable.” The prisoners were also encouraged to implicate the Jewish magnates, Kaganovich and Mekhlis, but Polina Molotova was the true target. Abakumov told Stalin that she had “contacts with persons who turned out to be Enemies of the People”; she attended synagogue once, advised Mikhoels, “attended his funeral and showed concern for his family.”

Five days later, Stalin gathered the Politburo to read out the bizarre sexual-Semitic accusations against Polina. A young man testified about having had an affair and “group sex” with this Bolshevik matron. Molotov could hardly believe this “terrible filth” but, as Stalin read on, he realised that “Security had done a thorough job on her!” Even the iron-bottomed Molotov was scared: “My knees trembled.” Kaganovich, who disliked Molotov, and as a Jew had to prove his loyalty, viciously attacked Iron-Arse, recalling how “Molotov couldn’t say anything!”

Polina was expelled from the Party for “close relations with Jewish nationalists” despite being warned in 1939, when Molotov had abstained on a similar vote. Now, remarkably, he abstained again but sensing the gravity of the case, he buckled. “When the Central Committee voted on the proposal to expel PS Zhemchuzhina . . . I abstained which I acknowledge to be politically incorrect,” he wrote to Stalin on 20 January 1949. “I hereby declare that after thinking the matter over, I now vote in favour . . . I acknowledge I was gravely at fault in not restraining in time a person close to me from taking false steps and from dealings with such anti-Soviet nationalists as Mikhoels . . .”

On 21 January, Polina was arrested in her squirrel-fur coat. Her sisters, doctor and secretaries were arrested. One of her sisters and a brother would die in prison. Her arrest was ominous for the other leaders who secretly sympathised with her.[3]

Polina, who was not tortured, denied everything: “I was not at the synagogue . . . It was my sister.” But she also faced more accusations of sexual debauchery: the confrontation with Ivan X reads like a bad farce: “Polina, you called me into your office [and] proposed intimacy!”

“Ivan Alexeevich!” exclaimed Polina.

“Don’t deny it!”

“I had no relationship with X,” she asserted. “I always regarded Ivan Alexeevich X as unreliable but I never thought he was a scoundrel.”

But X appealed to her mercy: “I remind you of my children and my broken family to make you admit your guilt towards me . . . You forced me into an intimate relationship.”

Meanwhile Polina continued to play the grande dame in the nether-world. Another prisoner heard her shouting, “Phone my husband! Tell him to send my diabetes pills! I’m an invalid! You’ve no right to feed me this rubbish!”

No one heard anything more of Polina, who became Object No. 12. Many believed she was dead but Beria, who played little part in the Jewish Case, knew better from his contacts. “Polina’s ALIVE!” he whispered to Molotov at Politburo meetings.

Stalin and Abakumov discussed whether to make her the leading defendant in their Jewish trial but then decided Lozovsky would be the star. Polina was sentenced to five years in exile, a mild sentence considering the fates of her co-prisoners, in Kustanai, Central Asia. She turned to drink but overcame it. “You need three things” in prison, she told her daughters later, “soap to keep you clean, bread to keep you fed, onions to keep you well.” Ironically, she was befriended by some deported kulaks so that the innocent peasants, whom she and her husband had been so keen to liquidate, were the kind strangers who saved her life.

She never stopped loving Molotov, for during her imprisonment, she wrote: “With these four years of separation, four eternities have flowed over my strange and terrible life. Only the thought of you forces me to live and the knowledge that you may still need the remnants of my tormented heart and the whole of my huge love for you.” Molotov never stopped loving her: touchingly, he ordered his maids to lay a place for her at table every evening as he ate alone, aware that “she suffered because of me . . .”

Stalin now excluded Molotov from the highest echelons, scrawling that documents should be signed by Voznesensky, Beria and Malenkov “but not Comrade Molotov who doesn’t participate in the work of the Buro of the Council of Ministers.” However, he still trusted Mikoyan just enough to send that worldly Armenian on a secret mission to size up Mao Tse-tung who was about to complete his conquest of China.

The Chinese Civil War was in its last throes. Stalin had miscalculated how quickly Chiang Kai-shek’s regime would collapse. Until 1948, Mao Tse-tung’s success was an inconvenience to Stalin’s policy of a realpolitik partnership with the West but the Cold War changed his mind. He began to think of Mao as a potential ally even though he told Beria that the Chairman was a “margarine Marxist.”

On 31 January 1949, in great secrecy, Mikoyan reached Mao’s headquarters in Xibaipo in Hopei province where he met Mao and Chou En-lai and presented Stalin’s gifts. One present was typically venomous: Mikoyan had to tell Mao that an American at his court was a spy and should be arrested. Stalin (Comrade Filipov) kept in contact with Mikoyan (Comrade Andreev) through Mao’s Russian doctor, Terebin, who doubled as decoder. The visit was a success even though Mikoyan admitted that he had hoped for a rest from Stalin’s nocturnal habits, only to find that Mao kept the same hours.

On his return, Mikoyan found a shock awaiting him. Stalin sacked Molotov and Mikoyan as Foreign and Foreign Trade Ministers, though both remained Deputy Premiers. Then he accused Mikoyan of breaking official secrecy about his Chinese trip. Mikoyan had only told his son Stepan: “Did you tell anyone about my Chinese trip?” Mikoyan asked Stepan.

“Svetlana,” replied Stepan.

“Don’t blab.” An innocent comment by Svetlana to her father had endangered the Mikoyans. Stalin had not forgotten the arrest of Mikoyan’s children in 1943. They were still under surveillance.

“What happened to your children who were arrested?” Stalin suddenly asked Mikoyan ominously. “Do you think they deserve the right to study at Soviet institutions?” Mikoyan carefully did not reply—but he understood the threat, particularly after Polina’s arrest. He expected the boys to be arrested, yet nothing happened. Stalin started to mutter that Voroshilov was “an English spy” and hardly saw him[4] while the diminished Molotov and Mikoyan just hung on. But now Stalin’s chosen successors succumbed to the brutal vendetta of Beria and Malenkov in a sudden blood-bath.[5]

 

 

 

54. Murder and Marriage: The Leningrad Case

The “two scoundrels” played for only the highest stakes: death. But Stalin himself was always ready to scythe down the tallest poppies— those gifted Leningraders—to maintain his own paramountcy.

Stalin’s heir apparent as Premier, Nikolai Voznesensky, “thought himself the cleverest person after Stalin,” recalled the Sovmin manager, Chadaev. At forty-four, the youngest Politburo member distinguished himself as a brilliant planner who enjoyed an unusually honest relationship with Stalin. However, this made him so brash “that he didn’t bother to hide his moods” or his strident Russian nationalism. Rude to his colleagues, no one made so many enemies as Voznesensky. Now his patron Zhdanov was dead, his enemy Malenkov resurgent. Beria “feared him” and coveted his economic powers. Mikoyan loathed him. Voznesensky’s arrogance and Stalin’s touchiness made him vulnerable.

During 1948, Stalin noticed that production rose in the last quarter of the year but dipped in the first quarter. This was a normal seasonal variation but Stalin asked Voznesensky to level it out. Voznesensky, who ran Gosplan, promised he would. However, he failed to do so and, afraid of Stalin, he concealed the statistics. Somehow this legerdemain was leaked to Beria who discovered that hundreds of secret Gosplan documents had gone missing. One night at Kuntsevo, Beria sprung it on Stalin, who, observed Mikoyan, “was astonished,” then “furious.”

“Does it mean Voznesensky deceives the Politburo and tricks us like fools?”

Beria then revealed the damning secret about Voznesensky that he had treasured ever since 1941: during Stalin’s breakdown, Voznesensky had told Molotov, “Vyacheslav, go forward, we’ll follow you!” That betrayal clinched it. Andreyev, that relentless bureaucratic killer, was brought in to investigate. Frantic, Voznesensky called Stalin but no one would receive him. Sacked from the Politburo on 7 March 1949, he spent his days at his Granovsky flat writing an economics treatise. Once again, that dread duo, Malenkov and Abakumov, took over the Gosplan Case.

The other anointed heir was “young handsome” Kuznetsov, who had helped Zhdanov remove Malenkov in 1946 and replaced Beria as curator of the MGB, thus earning their hatred. Sincere and affable, Kuznetsov was the opposite of Voznesensky: virtually everyone liked him. But decency was relative at Stalin’s court: Kuznetsov had aided Zhdanov in anti-Semitic matters and forwarded Stalin a report on the sexual peccadilloes of Party officials. He worshipped Stalin, treasuring the note he had received from him during the war—yet he did not understand him. He made the mistake of examining old MGB files on Kirov’s murder and the show trials. Kuznetsov’s blundering into such sensitive matters aroused Stalin’s suspicions.

Simultaneously, Malenkov alerted Stalin that the Leningrad Party had covered up a voting scandal and held a trade fair without government permission. He managed to connect these sins with a vague plan mooted by Zhdanov to create a Russian (as opposed to a Soviet) Party alongside the Soviet one and make Leningrad the Russian capital. These trivialities may hardly sound like crimes punishable by death but they masked the fault lines in the Soviet Imperium and Stalin’s dictatorship.[6] Besides, a Russian Party could not be led by a Georgian. Stalin championed the Russian people as the binding force of the USSR but he remained an internationalist. Voznesensky’s nationalism worried the Caucasians: “For him not only Georgians and Armenians but even Ukrainians aren’t people,” Stalin told Mikoyan. Beria must have worried about his future under the Leningraders.

Malenkov had shrewdly amassed a collage of mistakes that touched all Stalin’s sensitive places. “Go there and take a look at what’s going on,” Stalin ordered Malenkov and Abakumov who arrived in Leningrad with two trains carrying five hundred MGB officers and twenty investigators from the Sled-Chast, the department “to Investigate Especially Important Cases.” When “Stalin orders him to kill one,” Beria said, “Malenkov kills 1,000!” Malenkov attacked the local bosses, stringing together disparate strands into one lethal conspiracy. The arrests began, but Voznesensky and Kuznetsov lingered at their flats in the pink Granovsky block, convinced that Stalin would forgive them: 1937 seemed a long time ago. Even Mikoyan thought blood-letting was a thing of the past.

He had reason to hope so because his youngest son Sergo, now eighteen, was engaged to Kuznetsov’s “charming, beautiful” daughter Alla.

When her father fell, Alla gave Sergo the chance to avoid marrying an outcast: “Does it change your intentions?” But Sergo loved Alla and his parents had come to adore her “like our own daughter.” Mikoyan supported the marriage.

“And you allow this marriage? Have you gone crazy?” the pusillanimous Kaganovich whispered to Mikoyan. “Don’t you understand that Kuznetsov’s doomed? Stop the marriage.” Mikoyan was adamant. On 15 February 1949, Kuznetsov was sacked as Party Secretary and accused of “non-Bolshevik deviation” and “anti-State” separatism. Three days later, the couple got married. Kuznetsov was cheerfully oblivious, “a courageous man,” thought Mikoyan, “with no idea of Stalin’s customs.” Mikoyan gave the couple a party at Zubalovo but Kuznetsov, finally realizing his plight, telephoned Mikoyan to say he could not come because he had an “upset stomach.”

Mikoyan would not hear of it: “We’ve enough lavatories in the house! Come!”

“I’ve no car,” answered Kuznetsov. “You do better without me.”

“It’s indecent for a father to miss his daughter’s wedding,” retorted Mikoyan who sent his limousine.[7] At the party, Kuznetsov could not relax. He felt he was endangering his daughter.

“I feel unwell,” he said, “so let’s drink to our children!” Then he left.

That dangerous spring, poor Kuznetsov attended another Politburo marriage that involved the beleagured Zhdanov faction. “Stalin had always wanted me to marry Svetlana,” recalls Yury Zhdanov, still at the Central Committee. “We were childhood friends so it wasn’t daunting.” But marrying a dictator’s daughter was not so straightforward: Yury was not sure to whom he should propose, the dictator or the daughter.

He went to Stalin, who tried to dissuade him: “You don’t know her character. She’ll show you the door in no time.” But Yury persisted. “Stalin didn’t give any lectures but told me that he trusted me to look after Svetlana,” says Yury.

Stalin now played matchmaker, according to Sergo Beria: “I like that man,” Stalin told Svetlana. “He has a future and he loves you. Marry him.”

“He made his declaration of love to you?” she retorted. “He’s never looked at me.”

“Talk to him and you’ll see,” said Stalin.

Svetlana still loved Sergo Beria and told him: “You didn’t want me? Right, I’ll marry Yury Zhdanov.”

However, she became fond of “my pious Yurochka” and they agreed to marry. But “my second marriage was the choice of my father,” explained Svetlana, “and I was tired of struggling so went through with it.”

The Generalissimo did not attend the wedding party at the Zhdanovs’ dacha seven miles beyond Zubalovo along the Uspenskoye Road. The guests included another Politburo couple: Natasha, the daughter of Andreyev and Dora Khazan, was there with her husband, Vladimir Kuibyshev, the son of the late magnate. “There were also schoolmates . . . from comparatively ordinary families too,” remembers Stepan Mikoyan who was also a guest. Then there was dancing and a feast: Yury, like his father, played the piano. It was natural that Kuznetsov was there because he had been Zhdanov’s closest ally but everyone knew he was under a cloud.

Yury and Svetlana, along with her son Joseph Morozov, now aged four, lived with Zhdanov’s widow in the Kremlin. “I never saw my own father,” Joseph recalled. “I called Yury ‘Daddy.’ Yury loved me!”

A few days later, they were visiting Zubalovo when Vlasik called: Stalin was on his way. “What do you want to move to the Zhdanovs’ for?” he asked her. “You’ll be eaten alive by the women there. There are too many women in that house.” He wanted the young couple to move into Kuntsevo, adding a second floor but in his maladroit way he could not ask directly and probably did not want to be bothered.

Svetlana remained with the prissy widows of Zhdanov and Shcherbakov: soon she loathed her mother-in-law Zinaida who combined “Party bigotry” with “bourgeois complacency.” Her marriage was not loving: “the lesson I learned was never to go into marriage as a deal.” Sexually it was, in her words, “not a great success.” She never forgave Zinaida Zhdanova for telling her that her mother had been “mad.” However, they had a daughter, Katya, though Svetlana was so ill during the birth that she wrote to her father saying she felt abandoned and was delighted to receive his brusque reply.[8]

Besides, the wedding was not well timed for the Zhdanovs. Kuznetsov and Voznesensky were on the edge of the precipice. Yury sensed the Leningrad Affair “was undoubtedly aimed at my father” but “I wasn’t afraid then. I discovered later I should have been destroyed . . .” He was right: the prisoners were later tortured to implicate Zhdanov.

Stalin mulled over Kuznetsov’s fate. Poskrebyshev invited the Leningrader to dinner at Kuntsevo but Stalin refused to shake his hand: “I didn’t summon you.” Kuznetsov “seemed to shrink.” Stalin expected a letter of self-criticism from Kuznetsov but the naïve Leningrader did not send one. “It means he’s guilty,” Stalin muttered to Mikoyan.

Yet Stalin had doubts. “Isn’t it a waste not letting Vosnesensky work while we’re deciding what to do with him?” he asked Malenkov and Beria who said nothing. Then Stalin remembered that Air Marshal Novikov and Shakhurin were still in jail.

“Don’t you think it’s time to release them?” But again the duo said nothing, whispering in the bathroom that if they released Shakhurin and Novikov, “it might spread to the others”—the Leningraders. While he considered these matters of life and death, Stalin drove off to his dacha at Semyonovskoe, passing on the way a queue of bedraggled citizens waiting in the rain at a bus stop. Stalin stopped the car and ordered his bodyguards to offer the people a lift but they were afraid.

“You don’t know how to talk to people,” growled Stalin, climbing out and ushering them into the limousine. He told them about the death of his son Yakov and a little girl told him of the death of her father. Afterwards Stalin sent her a school uniform and a satchel. Three weeks later, he ordered Abakumov to arrest, torture and destroy the Leningraders who had only recently been his anointed successors.[9]

On 13 August, Kuznetsov was summoned to Malenkov’s office. “I’ll be back,” he told his wife and son Valery. “Don’t start supper without me.” The boy watched him head down Granovsky towards the Kremlin: “He turned and waved at me. It was the last time I ever saw him,” says Valery. He was arrested by Malenkov’s bodyguard.

Yet Stalin hesitated about Voznesensky, whose arrest would leave him in the hands of Malenkov and Beria. Stalin still invited him to Kuntsevo for the usual dinners and talked of appointing him to the State Bank. On 17 August, Voznesensky wrote pathetically to Stalin, begging for work: “It’s hard to be apart from one’s comrades . . . I understand the lesson of Party-mindedness . . . I ask you to show me trust,” signing it, “Devoted to you.” Stalin sent the letter to Malenkov. The duo kept up the pressure. The ailing but drear Andreyev exposed all manner of “disorders in this organization”: 526 documents had gone missing from Gosplan. This invented case was one of Andreyev’s last achievements. Voznesensky admitted he had not prosecuted the culprits because there were “no facts . . . Now I understand . . . I was guilty.” Khrushchev later accused Malenkov of “whispering to Stalin” to make sure Voznesensky was exterminated. “What!” Malenkov replied. “That I was managing Stalin? You must be joking!” Stalin was unmanageable but highly suggestible: he remained in absolute command.

Four months later, Voznesensky was arrested in this sweep of Zhdanovites, joining Kuznetsov and 214 other prisoners who were tortured in a frenzy of “French wrestling.” Brothers, wives and children followed them into the maw of Abakumov’s MGB. Kuznetsov was thrashed so badly his eardrums were perforated. “I was beaten until the blood came out of my ears,” one prisoner, Turko, testified after Stalin’s death. “Komarov smashed my head against the wall.” Turko implicated Kuznetsov.

The torturers asked Abakumov if they should beat prisoner Zakrizhevskaya who was pregnant: “You’re defending her?” bellowed Abakumov. “The law doesn’t ban it. Get on with your business!”

She was tortured and miscarried: “Tell us everything,” the torturers told her. “We’re the vanguard of the Party!”

The fallen vanguard, Kuznetsov and Voznesensky, were held in a Special Prison on Matrosskaya Tishina Street set up by Malenkov who arrived incognito with Beria and the Politburo to interrogate the prisoners.

The sinisterly genial Bulganin, who was also under threat, was given the duty of interrogating his old friend, Voznesensky’s brother, Alexander, who had been Rector of Leningrad University. When the prisoner saw him, he thought he was saved: “He rushed to me,” Bulganin admitted later, “and cried, ‘Comrade Bulganin, my dear, at last! I’m not guilty. It’s great you’ve come! Now Comrade Stalin will learn the truth!’ ”

Bulganin snarled back at his erstwhile friend: “The Tambov wolf’s your friend,” a Russian saying that meant “no friend of yours.” Bulganin felt he had no choice: “What could I do?” he whined. “I knew Beria and Malenkov sat in the corner and watched me.” Like all of Stalin’s cases, the guilt was elastic and could be extended on his whim: Molotov, who was close to Voznesensky, was vaguely implicated too.

By the time Kuznetsov’s daughter Alla and her new husband Sergo Mikoyan rushed back from their honeymoon, just days later, her father had already been beaten into a signed confession. Anastas Mikoyan received his daughter-in-law in his Kremlin study. “It was very hard for me to speak to Alla,” wrote Mikoyan. “Of course I had to tell her the official version.” Alla ran out sobbing.

“I ran to follow,” Sergo recalls, “afraid she’d kill herself.”[10] Mikoyan called back Sergo and showed him Kuznetsov’s confession, which Stalin had distributed. Sergo did not believe the charges.

“Every page is signed,” said Mikoyan.

“I’m sure the case will clear up and he’ll return,” replied Sergo.

“I couldn’t tell him,” wrote Mikoyan, “that Kuznetsov’s fate was already predetermined by Stalin. He would never return.” [11]

The Leningrad Case was not Beria’s only success: just after Kuznetsov’s arrest in late August 1949, Beria set out in a special armoured train for a secret nuclear settlement amid the Kazakh steppes. Beria was frantic with worry because if things went wrong, “we would,” as one of his managers put it, “all have to give an answer before the people.” Beria’s family would be destroyed. Malenkov comforted him.

Beria arrived in Semipalatinsk-21 for the test of the “article.” He moved into a tiny cabin beside Professor Kurchatov’s command post. On the morning of 29 August, Beria watched as a crane lowered the uranium tamper into position on its carriage; the plutonium hemisphere was placed within it. The explosives and the initiator were in place. The “article” was then wheeled out into the night onto a platform where it would be raised to the top of the tower. Beria and the scientists left.

At 6 p.m., they assembled in the command post ten kilometres away with its control panel and telephones to Moscow, all behind an earthen wall to deflect the shock wave. Kurchatov ordered detonation. There was a bright flash. After the shock wave had passed, they hurried outside to admire the mushroom cloud rising majestically before them.

Beria was wildly excited and kissed Kurchatov on the forehead but he kept asking, “Did it look like the American one? We didn’t screw up? Kurchatov isn’t pulling our leg, is he?” He was very relieved to hear that the destruction at the site was apocalyptic. “It would have been a great misfortune if this hadn’t worked out,” he said. He hurried to the telephone to ring Stalin, to be the first to tell him. But when he rang, Stalin replied crushingly that he already knew and hung up. Stalin had his own sources. Beria punched the general who had dared tell Stalin first, shouting, “You’ve put a spoke in my wheel, traitor; I’ll grind you to pulp.” But he was hugely proud of his “colossal achievement.” Four years after Hiroshima, Stalin had the Bomb.

Beria had another reason to be happy: he had met a good-looking woman named Drozhdova whose husband worked in the Kremlin. He may have had an affair with her before she introduced him to her daughter, Lilya, only fourteen but already a “blue-eyed, long-legged paragon of Russian beauty with long blonde plaits,” recalls Martha Peshkova. Beria was entranced: “his last great love.” The mother wanted all the benefits: “Don’t let him do it until you’ve got a flat, car, dacha,” she said to Lilya, according to Peshkova.

Beria set her up in style. Nina Beria tolerated this affair but in the summer when she and Martha were in Gagra, her husband entertained Lilya at the dacha. “The whole of Moscow knew,” says Martha. Beria and Malenkov were riding high but it turned out that someone else would benefit most from the power vacuum left by the Leningraders.

Stalin summoned Khrushchev from Kiev. “I couldn’t help but feel anxious,” he admitted, when Kuznetsov and Voznesensky were being tortured. He called Malenkov who comforted him: “Don’t worry. I can’t tell you now why you’ve been called but I promise you’ve got nothing to fear.”

Khrushchev had governed the Ukraine since 1938, ruthlessly purging the kulaks before the war, crushing the Ukrainian nationalists, ordering the assassinations of Uniate bishops afterwards and, in February 1948, organizing the expulsion of “harmful elements” from villages: almost a million were arrested on Khrushchev’s initiative, a colossal crime which approached the deportation of the kulaks in brutality and scale. Small wonder that in retirement, he reflected, “I’m up to my elbows in blood.” Apart from the short period in 1947 when Stalin sent Kaganovich to replace him in Kiev, Khrushchev, “vital, pigheaded, jolly” but now bald and almost spherical in shape, was an enduring favourite. His plain speaking made his sycophancy sound genuine. Stalin regarded this dynamic cannonball of a man as a semi-literate peasant— “Khrushchev’s as ignorant as the Negus of Ethiopia,” he told Malenkov. Yet he did not completely underestimate his “deep naturalness, pure masculinity, tenacious cunning, common sense and strength of character.”

“With him,” Stalin reflected, “you need a short leash.” When Khrushchev arrived in Moscow, he hurried to Beria’s house for further reassurance. There was a growing solidarity among Stalin’s courtiers. Beria comforted him too.

Stalin appointed Khrushchev CC Secretary and Moscow boss but confided, “things aren’t going very well . . . We’ve exposed a conspiracy in Leningrad. And Moscow’s teeming with anti-Party elements.” He wanted Khrushchev to “check it out.” As the Leningrad Case showed, the system encouraged Terror entrepreneurialism. The magnates could either douse a case or inflame it into a massacre: it was then up to Stalin to decide whether to protect the victims, save the evidence for later or slaughter them immediately.

“It’s the work of a provocateur,” Khrushchev replied. Stalin accepted his judgement. He soon placed him in charge of Agriculture. “Stalin treated me well.” Having destroyed the Leningrad connection, and undermined Molotov and Mikoyan, the “two scoundrels” were perfectly placed for the succession. Khrushchev was recalled to balance their power. However, this plan did not quite work because Khrushchev became “inseparable” from Beria and Malenkov. The Khrushchevs and the Malenkovs[12] lived close to one another at Granovsky while Beria’s limousine seemed to be constantly parked on the street waiting for them. Sometimes he hailed the young Khrushchevs as they went to school: “Look at you! The very image of Nikita!”

The threesome joked about Stalin’s plan while betraying one another to him. After Malenkov had failed to master the impossible job of Agriculture, Andreyev took it over but was then discredited and forced to recant, marking the end of his career. Now Khrushchev was in charge but his plan for gigantic agricultural centres, “agrotowns,” rebounded on him. Stalin, Beria and Malenkov forced him to recant publicly. Molotov and Malenkov wanted him sacked but Beria, who underestimated the “round-headed fool,” intervened to save him. Stalin protected Khrushchev, tapping his pipe on his head—“it’s hollow!” he joked.

On 5 September, Stalin began his holiday in Sochi where Beria joined him for a barbecue of shashlyks to celebrate the Bomb which, along with the destruction of the Leningraders, had temporarily returned him to favour. But it would not last. Stalin’s distrust of the men around him was now overwhelming. He moved south to New Athos, the smallest and cosiest of his houses, where he spent most of his last holidays.

When the Supreme Soviet announced the Soviet Bomb, Stalin mused to his young confidant Mgeladze about the new world order: “If war broke out, the use of A-bombs would depend on Trumans and Hitlers being in power. The people won’t allow such people to be in power. Atomic weapons can hardly be used without spelling the end of the world.” He was so happy that he burst into song, singing “Suliko” accompanied by Vlasik and Poskrebyshev, in a rendition that hit the notes perfectly, just like Beria’s Bomb.

“Chaliapin sang it a little better,” beamed Stalin.

“Only a little bit better,” chorused his companions.

Old Stalin was thinking more and more about Nadya. Walking in the gardens with Mgeladze, Stalin lamented his disasters as a parent. First there was Yasha: “Fate treated Yakov badly . . . but he died a hero,” he said. Vasily was an alcoholic: “He does nothing, but drinks a lot.” Then Svetlana, his feminine alter ego, “does whatever she wants.” This most destructive of husbands was sensitive enough about Svetlana’s marriages: “Morozov was a good fellow but for Svetlana, it wasn’t love . . . It’s just fun for her. She walked all over him . . . Naturally this made the marriage unsuccessful. Then she got married again. Who knows what next? . . . Svetlana can’t even sew on a button, the nannies didn’t teach her. If her mother had raised her, she’d be more disciplined. You understand, there was always too much pressure on me . . . No time for the children, sometimes I didn’t see them for months . . . The kids didn’t get lucky. Ekaterina!” He fondly mentioned his first wife Kato, then “Oh Nadya, Nadya!” Mgeladze had never seen Stalin so sad. “Comrade Wolf, I ask you not to say a word about what you’ve heard.”[13]

 

 

55. Mao, Stalin’s Birthday and the Korean War

On 7 December 1949, Stalin arrived back in Moscow in time for two momentous events: the arrival of the new Chinese leader, Chairman Mao Tse-tung, and the celebration of his own seventieth birthday. At noon on 16 December, Mao, who had taken Peking in January, arrived at Yaroslavsky Station where he was met by Molotov and Bulganin in his Marshal’s uniform.[14] The visit started as awkwardly as it ended. Mao invited the Russians to a Chinese meal on the train but Molotov refused. Mao sulked, the beginning of a sulk as monumental in its way as the Great Wall itself. Over-awed by Stalin’s greatness but also contemptuous of his consistent lack of support and misreading of China, the tall, gangling Mao was taken directly to one of Stalin’s dachas, Lipki.

At 6 p.m., Mao and Stalin met for the first time at the Little Corner. The two Communist titans of the century, both fanatics, poets, paranoics, peasants risen to rule empires whose history obsessed them, careless killers of millions, and amateur military commanders, aimed to seal America’s worst nightmare: a Sino-Soviet treaty that would be Stalin’s last significant achievement. Yet they observed each other coolly from the Olympian heights of their own self-regard. Mao complained of being “pushed aside for a long time.”

“The victors are never blamed,” answered Stalin. “Any ideas or wishes?”

“We’ve come to complete a certain task,” said Mao. “It must be both beautiful and tasty.”

A cantankerous silence followed. Stalin appeared baffled by this enigmatic allusion which meant a treaty that was both symbolic and practical, standing for both world revolution and Chinese national interests. Stalin’s first priority was protecting his Far Eastern gains, agreed at Yalta and confirmed in the old Sino-Soviet Treaty. He would sign a new treaty if it did not alter the old one. Mao wished to save face before signing away Chinese lands. This was stalemate. Mao suggested summoning Chou En-lai, his Premier, to complete the negotiations.

“If we cannot establish what we must complete, why call for Chou?” asked Stalin.

They parted: Mao claimed Stalin refused to see him but he had his own reasons to wait. He remained miserably in Moscow for several weeks before the two sides came together, grumbling bitterly that there was “nothing to do there but eat, sleep and shit.” The prim Russians were shocked at Mao’s scatological jokes both in person and on their bugs.

“Comrades,” said Stalin, “the battle of China isn’t over yet. It’s only just beginning.” Beria joked to the others that Stalin was jealous of Mao for ruling a bigger nation.

Mao was not completely ignored: Molotov, Bulganin and Mikoyan visited him at the dacha. Stalin wondered if the Chinese enigma was a “real Marxist.” Like an abbot testing a novice, Molotov patronizingly tested Mao’s Marxist knowledge, deciding the Chairman was a “clever man, a peasant leader, something like a Chinese Pugachev”[15] but not a real Marxist. After all, Molotov repeated prissily to Stalin, Mao “confessed he had never read Das Kapital. ”[16]

On 21 December, Mao and the entire Communist world gathered at the Bolshoi to celebrate the birthday of their supreme pontiff. Something between a religious pilgrimage and an imperial triumph, a royal wedding and a corporate junket, the festivities cost 5.6 million roubles and attracted thousands of pilgrims. Stalin, torn between contempt for their worship and craving for it, played the modest curmudgeon as Malenkov, always at the forefront of the basest acts of idolatry, tried to persuade him that “the people” expected a celebration—and to accept a second Hero of the Soviet Union star.

“Don’t even think of presenting me with another star,” he growled.

“But Comrade Stalin, the people . . .”

“Leave the people out of it.” But he finally accepted the medal and happily reviewed the arrangements. The archives contain the extraordinary preparations: President Shvernik headed the “Committee for Preparations of Comrade Stalin’s Birthday” which self-consciously contained “ordinary workers,” magnates, marshals and artists such as Shostakovich, who gravely debated the creation of an Order of Stalin, the guest list, placement—and a Stalin gift pack. At a total cost of 487,000 roubles, every delegate was to receive a dressing gown, slippers, razor and a set of Moskva soap, talc and scent (the proudest creation of Polina Molotova, now in jail).

In Pravda, Khrushchev hailed Stalin’s “sharp intransigence to rootless cosmopolitans,” the Jews. Poskrebyshev praised Stalin’s brilliance at growing lemons. The wives of the magnates brought their own presents—Nina Beria made walnut jam “as a little souvenir . . . of your mother,” to which Stalin wrote a thank-you letter:

“As I eat your jam, I remember my youth.”

Beria rolled his eyes: “Now you’ll be lined up for this chore every year.”

Famous artistes and élite children rehearsed their tributes. Parents had never been pushier: Poskrebyshev managed to land his daughter Natasha the plum role of reciting an idolatrous ditty then presenting Stalin (who had ordered the death of her mother) a bouquet. At the Bolshoi, ballerinas practiced “curtsies to the God.”

At the Little Corner, the night before, Stalin changed the placement so that he was no longer in the centre but Malenkov insisted he had to be in the front row. He pointedly placed himself between Mao and Khrushchev, the new favourite. Later he felt pressure on his neck, then staggered from a dizzy spell, but Poskrebyshev steadied him. He would not call the doctors. Poskrebyshev prescribed one of his remedies.

The next night, the packed Bolshoi awaited the magnates. Stalin’s exotic entourage, including Mao, Ulbricht of Germany, Rakosi of Hungary and Bierut of Poland, mingled in the avant-loge until everything was ready. When they trooped out, the audience applauded madly. Stalin sat to the left of centre under a jungle of scarlet banners and a giant portrait of himself. Then the endless speeches started, hailing the birthday boy as a genius. Stalin gestured to General Vlasik and whispered that guests were to speak in their own languages, an internationalist gesture by “the father of peoples.” Togliatti spoke in Italian which he translated into Russian himself. Mao’s address, in his surprisingly high-pitched voice, won a standing ovation. Stalin was exhausted from standing up so often. Then the schoolgirls, in their Pioneer dresses, emerged led by Natasha Poskrebysheva to recite their poem. Poskrebyshev winked at his daughter who scampered up and presented the bouquet of red roses: “Papa and Stalin both loved red roses,” she says.

“Thanks ryzhik, redhead, for the roses!” Stalin said and pointed at his devoted Poskrebyshev who beamed with pride.

The party reassembled for a huge banquet at the Kremlin’s Georgievsky Hall and for a concert starring the tenor Kozlovsky, the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and the soprano Vera Davydova. Vlasik personally checked their dressing rooms for assassins or bombs. When she danced, Maya noticed “the Emperor’s bewhiskered face in the first row at the long festive table facing away from the stage and half turned to me [with] Mao next to him.”[17]

Mao’s superlative sulk was wearing thin. Face had been saved. When he tried to call Stalin, he was told he “was not at home and it would be better to talk to Mikoyan.” Finally, on 2 January, Stalin sent Molotov and Mikoyan to begin negotiations. Chou En-lai[18] arrived on the 20th and started to negotiate with the new Foreign Minister, Vyshinsky, and Mikoyan. Mao and Chou were invited to the Kremlin only to be reprimanded by Stalin for not signing a critique of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s recent speech.

When Mao grumbled about Stalin’s resistance to the treaty, Stalin retorted: “To hell with that! We must go all the way.” Mao sulked even more. In the limousine out to Kuntsevo, the Chinese interpreter invited Stalin to visit Mao.

“Swallow your words!” Mao hissed in Chinese to the interpreter. “Don’t invite him!” Neither of the titans spoke for the entire thirty-minute drive. When Stalin invited Mao to dance to his gramophone, a singular honour for a visiting leader, he refused. It did not matter: the game of poker was over. While reserving for himself the supreme priesthood of international Communism, Stalin allowed Mao a leading role in Asia.

At the banquet at the Metropol Hotel on 14 February, after the treaty was signed, Stalin pointedly denounced Titoism—and Mao continued his heroic sulk. The two giants barely spoke: “sporadic” exchanges subsided into “endless pauses.” Gromyko struggled to keep the conversation going. Stalin may not have liked Mao but he was impressed: “Of the Marxist world, the most outstanding is Mao . . . Everything in his Marxist-Leninist life shows principles and drive, a coherent fighter.” The alliance was immediately tested on the battlefields of Korea.[19]

Kim Il Sung, the young leader of Communist North Korea, now arrived in Moscow to ask Stalin’s permission to invade South Korea. Stalin encouraged Kim but shrewdly passed the buck to Mao, telling the Korean he could “only get down to action” after consulting with “Comrade Mao Tse-tung personally.” In Peking, the nervous Mao referred back to Stalin. On 14 May, Stalin cunningly replied, “The question should ultimately be decided by the Chinese and Korean comrades together.” He thus protected his dominant role but passed the responsibility. Nonetheless, his magnates were worried by his reckless challenge to America and failing powers of judgement. At 4 a.m., on Sunday, 25 June 1950, North Korea attacked the south. Driving all before them, the Communists were soon poised to conquer.

On 5 August, a weary, ageing Stalin departed by special train for his longest holiday so far. It was to be four and a half months, brooding on his anti-Jewish case, on his anger towards Molotov and Mikoyan, distrust of Beria, and dissatisfaction with the ruthlessness of Abakumov’s MGB— while the world teetered on the brink thousands of miles away in Korea.

No sooner had he arrived to rest than disaster struck in the faraway peninsula. Stalin had withdrawn from the UN to protest against its refusal to recognize Mao’s China instead of Taiwan as the legitimate government but President Truman called Stalin’s bluff by convening the Security Council to approve UN intervention against North Korea. The Soviet Union could have avoided this but Stalin wrongly insisted on boycotting the session, against Gromyko’s advice. “Stalin for once was guided by emotion,” remembered Gromyko. In September, the powerful U.S. counter-attack at Inchon, under the UN flag, trapped Kim’s North Koreans in the south and then shattered their army. Once again, Stalin’s testing of American resolve had backfired badly—but the old man simply sighed to Khrushchev that if Kim was defeated, “So what. Let it be. Let the Americans be our neighbours.” If he did not get what he wanted, Russia would still not intervene.

As the Americans advanced into North Korea towards the Chinese border, Mao desperately looked towards Stalin, fearing that if they intervened and fought the Americans, their Sino-Soviet Treaty would embroil Russia too. Stalin replied, with Nero-like nonchalance, that he was “far from Moscow and somewhat cut off from events in Korea.” But on 5 October, Stalin fired off a telegram of blunt realpolitik and shameless bluff: America was “not prepared . . . for a big war” but if it came to it, “let it happen now and not in a few years when Japanese militarism will be restored.” Thus Stalin pulled the sting out of Mao’s reservations and pushed his ally one step closer to war.

Mao deployed nine divisions but despatched Chou to Stalin’s holiday house, probably New Athos, to discuss the promised Soviet air cover for the Chinese troops. On 9 October, a tense Chou, accompanied by Mao’s trusted protégé, the fragile but talented Lin Piao, later his doomed heir apparent, faced Stalin, Malenkov, Beria, Kaganovich, Bulganin, Mikoyan and Molotov.

“Today we want to listen to the opinions and thinking of our Chinese comrades,” Stalin opened the meeting. When Chou stated the situation, Stalin replied that Russia could not enter the war—but China should. Nonetheless, if Kim lost, he offered the North Koreans sanctuary. He could only help with military equipment. Chou, who had been counting on Soviet air cover, gasped. Afterwards, Stalin invited the Chinese to a Bacchanal from which only Lin Piao emerged sober.

This was one of the occasions when Beria disagreed with Stalin and, as ever, he was the most daring in expressing himself. When he came out of the meeting on sending Chinese forces into Korea, he found the Georgian boss, Charkviani, waiting outside: “What’s he doing?” Beria, who understood the nuclear threat, exclaimed nervously. “The Americans will be furious. He’ll make them our enemy.” Charkviani was amazed to hear such heresy.

“It’s hard for me to trust a man 100% but I think I can rely on him,” Stalin reflected to Mgeladze over dinner, having manoeuvred Mao into fighting the Americans without Soviet air cover.

On 19 October, Mao deployed his waves of Chinese cannon fodder to throw back the surprised Americans. Henceforth, even when the front finally stabilized along the 38th Parallel and the North Koreans begged for peace, Stalin refused to agree: attrition suited him. As he told Chou at a later meeting, in a phrase that illustrates Stalin’s entire monstrous career, the North Koreans could keep on fighting indefinitely because they “lose nothing, except for their men.”[20]

While the old Generalissimo basked in the sun pulling the strings in Korea, he was also killing his own men. On 29 September, Kuznetsov and Voznesensky were tried at the Officers’ Club in Leningrad before an MGB audience. Before the trial finally started, the accused were ordered to leave Zhdanov out of their testimony. The main accused were sentenced to death by shooting next day and the Politburo endorsed the sentences. “He’d sign first,” admitted Khrushchev, “and then pass it around for the rest of us to sign. We’d sign without even looking . . .” Did they sign the death list over dinner on the veranda?

Kuznetsov defiantly refused to confess, which outraged Stalin and embarrassed Abakumov:

“I’m a Bolshevik and remain one in spite of the sentence I have received. History will justify us.” The accused were said to have been bundled into white sacks by the Chekists and dragged out to be shot. They were killed fifty-nine minutes after midnight on 1 October, their families exiled to the camps.

There is some evidence that Stalin marked the lists with symbols specifying how they were to die. Voznesensky may have been kept alive for a while because Stalin later asked Malenkov: “Is he in the Urals? Give him some work to do!” Malenkov informed Stalin that Voznesensky had frozen to death in the back of a prison truck in sub-zero temperatures.

After Stalin’s death, Rada Khrushcheva asked what had happened to Kuznetsov: “He died terribly,” replied her father, “with a hook through his neck.”[21]

This little massacre consolidated the power of Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev and Bulganin—the last men standing as Stalin entered his final years—but it was the swan song of Abakumov. That sensuous, flashy sadist would soon roll up his bloody carpet for good. Perhaps it was over-confidence that led him to close the Jewish Case in March 1950: no one was released. The tortures were so grievous that one victim counted two thousand separate blows on his buttocks and heels.

Yet as that main case temporarily subsided, Stalin was orchestrating another anti-Semitic spasm from his holiday. Anti-Semitism now “grew like a tumour in Stalin’s mind,” said Khrushchev, yet he himself praised it in Pravda. Stalin called in the Ukrainian bosses for a dinner at which he briefed them on orchestrating a similar anti-Semitic campaign in Kiev. The hunt for “Zionist danger” was pursued through the government with thousands of Jews being sacked.[22]

Stalin was particularly fascinated by a case against Jewish managers in the prestigious Stalin Automobile Plant that made his limousines: they had sent Mikhoels a telegram celebrating the foundation of Israel.

“The good workers at the factory should be given clubs so they can beat the hell out of those Jews at the end of the working day,” Stalin told Khrushchev in February.

“Well, have you received your orders?” Beria asked sardonically. Khrushchev, Malenkov and Beria, that inseparable threesome, summoned the Jewish ZiS managers to the Kremlin and accused them of “loss of vigilance” and complicity in an “anti-Soviet Jewish nationalistic sabotage group.” The terrified manager fainted. The three magnates had to resuscitate him with cold water. Stalin released the manager but two Jewish journalists, one a woman, who had written about the factory, were executed. His personal intervention made the difference between life and death. Another Jewish manager, Zaltsman, was saved because, during the war, he had sent Stalin a desk set shaped like a tank with the pens forming the guns.

The Jews were not Stalin’s only target: his suspicions of Beria were constantly fanned by the ambitious Mgeladze, his boss in Abkhazia, who shrewdly revealed Beria’s crimes and vendettas of the late thirties. Stalin encouraged him and denounced Beria during their chats over dinner. Mgeladze’s was only one voice that informed Stalin of how corruptly the Mingrelians ran Georgia. Beria was a Mingrelian, so was Charkviani who had run it since 1938. Stalin ordered Abakumov to check the notoriously venal Georgia, and build a case against the Mingrelians, not forgetting Beria himself: “Go after the Big Mingrelian.”[23]

On 18 November, towards the end of his holiday, Stalin agreed to arrest the first Jewish doctor. Professor Yakov Etinger, who had treated the leaders, was bugged talking too frankly about Stalin. Etinger was tortured about his “nationalistic” tendencies by one of Abakumov’s officers, Lieut.-Col. Mikhail Riumin, who forced him to implicate all the most distinguished Jewish doctors in Moscow but he somehow failed to please his boss. Abakumov ordered Riumin to desist but the officer tortured Etinger so enthusiastically that he died of “heart paralysis”—a euphemism for dying under torture. Riumin was in trouble—unless he could destroy Abakumov first.

Abakumov was not guilty of idleness: Stalin was now redoubling the repression. Arrests intensified. In 1950 there were more slaves in the Gulags—2.6 million—than ever before. But Abakumov knew too much about the Leningrad and Jewish cases. Worse, Stalin sensed the foot-dragging of the MGB—and Abakumov himself. It was Yagoda all over again—and he needed a Yezhov.

The brakes on the Jewish Case, the rumours of corruption, the whispers of Beria and Malenkov, possibly the strutting bumptiousness of the man himself, turned Stalin against Abakumov. There was no sudden break but when Stalin returned from holiday,[24] just after his seventy-first birthday, on 22 December, he did not summon Abakumov. The weekly meetings ceased, as they had for Yagoda and Yezhov. Within the MGB snakepit, the ebbing of Stalin’s favour and the death of Etinger presented Riumin with an opportunity. “Little Mishka” or, as Stalin nicknamed him, “the Midget” or “Pygmy”—the “Shibsdik,” was the Vozhd’s second murderous dwarf.

 

56. The Midget and the Killer Doctors: Beat, Beat and Beat Again!

Riumin, thirty-eight, plump and balding, stupid and vicious, was the latest in the succession of ambitious torturers who were only too willing to please and encourage Stalin by finding new Enemies and killing them for him. Unlike Yezhov, who had been so popular until he became an inquisitor, Riumin was already an enthusiastic killer even though he had passed eight school grades, qualifying as an accountant. As Malenkov showed, education was no bar to mass murder. He had his own problems. Dismissed for misappropriating money in 1937—and now in danger for killing the elderly Jewish doctor, the Midget decided to act. Perhaps to his own surprise, he lit the fuse of the Doctors’ Plot.

On 2 July 1951, Riumin wrote to Stalin and accused Abakumov of deliberately killing Etinger to conceal a Jewish medical conspiracy to murder leaders such as the late Shcherbakov. This brought together Stalin’s fears of ageing, doctors and Jews. It was not Beria but Malenkov who sent Riumin’s letter to Stalin. This is confirmed by Malenkov’s assistant though he claimed that Riumin wrote the letter “for his own reasons.” The Doctors’ Plot worked against Beria and the old guard like Molotov but this swelling case could threaten Malenkov and Khrushchev too. So often at Stalin’s court, a case would start coincidentally, be encouraged by some magnate and then be spun back at them by Stalin like a bloody boomerang. Malenkov sometimes allied himself with Khrushchev, sometimes with Beria, but it was always Stalin making the big decisions. Riumin’s allegation of medical murder may have been prompted by Stalin himself—or it may have been the spark that inspired him to reach back to Zhdanov’s death and create a maze of conspiracies to provoke a Terror that would unite the country against America outside and its Jewish allies within.

He now ordered Beria and Malenkov to examine the “Bad Situation at the MGB,” accusing Abakumov of corruption, ineptitude and debauchery. Around midnight on 5 July in the Little Corner, Stalin agreed to Malenkov’s suggestion to appoint Semyon Ignatiev, forty-seven, as the new boss. At 1 a.m., Abakumov was called in to hear of his downfall. At 1:40 a.m., Riumin arrived to receive his prizes: promotion to general and, later, Deputy Minister. Serving a short spell as a Chekist in 1920, Ignatiev was an eager, bespectacled CC bureaucrat who was a friend of Khrushchev and Malenkov. Indeed Khrushchev described Ignatiev as “mild and considerate” though the Jewish doctors would hardly have agreed with him. Beria again failed to regain control over the secret police. Henceforth Stalin himself ran the Doctors’ Plot through Ignatiev. Stalin sent Malenkov to tell the MGB that he wanted to find a “grand intelligence network of the U.S.A.” linked to “Zionists.”

The next day, 12 July, Abakumov was arrested. In the tradition of fallen secret policemen, his corruption was lovingly recorded: 3,000 metres of expensive cloth, clothes, sets of china, crystal vases—“enough for a shop”—were found in his homes. In order to build his flats Abakumov removed sixteen families and spent a million roubles to make a “palace” using two hundred workers, six engineers and the entire MGB Construction Department. Yet the downfall of monsters also destroyed the innocent: Abakumov’s young wife, Antonina Smirnova, with whom he had a two-month-old son, had received 70,000 roubles’ worth of presents, including an antique Viennese pram. So she was arrested: the destiny of the girl and the baby are unknown.[25]

Abakumov, no longer a Minister but just a number, Object 15, spent three months shackled in the refrigerator cell, being viciously interrogated by his nemesis, the Midget: “Dear LP,” he wrote pitifully to Beria, “I feel so terrible . . . You’re the closest man to me, and I wait for you to ask me back . . . You will need me in the future.”

Abakumov had been destroyed for failing to push the Jewish Case. Ignatiev and the egregious “Midget” Riumin set about torturing the Jewish officials of the JAFC and the doctors to “substantiate the evidence of espionage and nationalistic activity.”[26]

The impresario of this theatre of plots and pain was now ageing fast. He sometimes became so giddy that he fell over in his Kremlin apartment. The bodyguards had to keep a close eye on him because “he didn’t look after himself.” He hardly bothered to read all his papers. Kuntsevo was strewn with unopened boxes. He still corrected Bulganin’s speeches like a schoolmaster but then forgot Bulganin’s name in front of the rest of the Politburo: “Look, what’s your name?”

“Bulganin.”

“Right yes . . . that’s what I meant to say.”

Riven by arthritis, diminished by raging arteriosclerosis, dazed by fainting spells, embarrassed by failing memory, tormented by sore gums and false teeth, unpredictable, paranoid and angry, Stalin left on 10 August for his last and longest holiday. “Cursed old age has caught up with me,” he muttered. He was even more restless than usual, travelling from Gagra to New Athos, Tsaltubo to Borzhomi and back. At Lake Ritsa, the woods, lakeside and paths were peppered with strange green metal boxes, containing special telephones so Stalin could call for help if taken ill on a stroll.

But dizzy spells were not going to stop him cleansing his entourage: “I, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov—we’re all old . . . we must fill . . . the Politburo with younger . . . cadres,” he ominously told Mgeladze. Yet his paranoia gave him no rest: “I’m finished,” he told Mikoyan and Khrushchev who, like all the magnates, were on holiday nearby so they could visit Stalin twice a week. “I don’t even trust myself.”

At dinner, he surveyed his courtiers and “puffing out his chest like a turkey,” he embarked on that favourite but lethal subject—his successor. It could not be Beria because he “wasn’t Russian,” nor Kaganovich, a Jew. Voroshilov was too old. He did not even mention Mikoyan (an Armenian) or Molotov. It could not be Khrushchev because he was a “country boy” and Russia needed a leader from the intelligentsia. Then he named Bulganin, the very man whose name he tended to forget, as his successor as Premier. None were ideologically qualified to lead the Party but he had not mentioned Malenkov who perhaps took this as an encouraging sign. He ordered books and started frantically studying.

“Well, Comrade Stalin requires me to study political science.” Malanya, caught reading Adam Smith, asked a colleague, “How long will it take to master?”

The magnates were convinced that Stalin was becoming senile but actually he was never more dangerous, determined and in control. He lashed out in every direction, at his comrades, Jews, Mingrelians, even banana importers. The story of the bananas sums up the governing style of the ageing Stalin.

Vlasik learned a shipment of bananas had just arrived and eager to soothe the bad teeth of the Master, he bought some for Stalin. At dinner at Coldstream with all the magnates, Vlasik proudly presented the bananas. Stalin peeled one and found it was not ripe. He tried two more. They too were not ripe. “Have you tried the bananas?” he asked his guests. Stalin summoned Vlasik: “Where did you get these bananas?” Vlasik tried to explain but Stalin shouted: “These crooks take bribes and rob the country. What was the name of the banana ship?”

“I don’t know,” said Vlasik, “I didn’t take an interest . . .”

“Take an interest! I’ll put you on trial with the rest of them!” bellowed Stalin. Poskrebyshev rushed off to find out the name of the ship and order arrests. Malenkov pulled out his notebook and took notes. Stalin ordered Mikoyan to sack the new Trade Minister. But Beria was eager to beat Mikoyan to the banana, as it were.

The dinner ended at 5 a.m. At 6 a.m., Stalin called Beria to tell him to sack the Minister. When Mikoyan called Moscow just after 6 a.m., he found that Beria had already reprimanded the unfortunate. A few days later, Mikoyan arrived to say goodbye and Stalin was still talking about those bananas. The Minister was sacked. Charkviani wrote that this was typical of Stalin’s “eruptions leading to irrelevant decisions.” Stalin, concluded Mikoyan drily, “was simply very fond of bananas.”[27]

Stalin’s limbs ached but when he took the waters at Tsaltubo, the weather was too hot. He decided to take the waters at Borzhomi and visit a house with special memories. He had stayed at the Likani Palace, a neo-Gothic mansion owned by Grand Duke Michael, Nicholas II’s brother, overlooking the Kura River, with Nadya in happier times. It had become a museum and was barely habitable, without bedrooms, which suited Stalin. It suited his magnates less: he ordered Khrushchev and Mikoyan to stay too. They rushed over from Sochi and Sukhumi but, without beds, they had to camp together, sharing a room like Boy Scouts.

Stalin ate every day at a table laid under a tree by the Kura in idyllic lush countryside. When he went for walks, he cursed at the bodyguards, bumping into them by suddenly changing direction. He decided to visit Bakuriani but the locals mobbed his car, placing carpets and banqueting tables across the road. The supreme curmudgeon had to dismount and join his overexcited fans for a Georgian feast. “They open their mouths and yell like dunderheads!” he muttered, face twitching. He never made it to Bakuriani and returned to Abkhazia.

At the Palace, where Nadya had rested after Vasily’s birth, Stalin brooded on his family. Vasily, now pitifully ill with alcoholism, visited. “His health’s so poor, his stomach’s sick, he can’t even eat,” Stalin confided in Charkviani.

Like a Western millionaire booking his playboy son into the Betty Ford Clinic, Stalin intervened to enrol Vasily in a drying-out programme but here too he searched for a culprit and found one in the banana procurer: “Vlasik and his friends did it, they turned his drinking into an addiction!” Stalin had been cursing Vlasik’s corruption for years. A denunciation letter and Malenkov’s investigation into MGB venality revealed Vlasik’s orgies and shenanigans. Stalin was upset but felt mired in corruption. He finally sacked his most devoted retainer.[28]

Svetlana’s marriage to Yury was over after just two years. In a letter to her father, she called him a “heartless bookworm” and an “iceberg.” Stalin told Mgeladze that Svetlana wore the trousers:

“Yury Zhdanov’s not the head of that family—he can’t insist on anything. He doesn’t listen to her nor she to him. The husband should run a family . . . that’s the main thing.” But Yury himself would never dare ask Stalin for a divorce so Svetlana came to see him instead.

“I know what you want to say,” he said. “You’ve decided to divorce him.”

“Father,” Svetlana answered in a begging tone. Charkviani, who was present was embarrassed and excused himself but Stalin insisted he stay.

“So why’re you divorcing him?” Stalin asked.

“I can’t live with my mother-in-law. She’s impossible!”

“What does your husband say?”

“He supports his mother!”

Stalin sighed: “If you’ve decided to divorce him, I can’t change your mind, but your behaviour isn’t acceptable.” She blushed and left, walking out of the Zhdanov family and moving into a flat in the House on the Embankment with her two children.

“Who knows what next?” muttered Stalin.

“Stalin wasn’t too happy when it ended,” admits Yury, but he was not too surprised either. He did not hold it against Yury but invited him to stay at Lake Ritsa where they chatted half the night about Stalin’s visit to London in 1907. When they naturally talked about the campaign against cosmopolitanism, Zhdanov, who had played his own role in hunting out Jewish scientists, asked Stalin if he thought it was “assuming a lopsided national character,” meaning it was aimed too much against the Jews.

“Cosmopolitanism’s a widespread phenomenon,” replied Stalin. When he finally got up to go to bed in the early hours, he cited a Jewess he admired: “Maria Kaganovich—there’s a real Bolshevik! One should pay attention to social position, not national condition!” and he staggered off to sleep. In the morning the table was laid on the bank of Lake Ritsa and Yury watched Stalin peruse Pravda. “What are they writing about?” he snarled, reading out, “Long live Comrade Stalin, leader of all nations!”— and he tossed it away in disgust.

After entertaining other old friends, who complained that the Mingrelians were notoriously corrupt, Stalin headed back to New Athos and then dared Mgeladze to be there within seventeen minutes. The ambitious Abkhazian boss, who sensed his hours of chatting with the old man were about to bear fruit, made it in fifteen and finally convinced Stalin that Charkviani was running “a bordello!”

He furiously summoned the Georgian MGB boss, the crude, barrel-chested Rukhadze. “The Mingrelians are totally unreliable,” said Stalin, who in old age embraced the parochial hatreds of different regions of Georgia. Thousands of Mingrelians were arrested but Stalin wanted to destroy Beria. Perhaps he suspected that Lavrenti was no Marxist: “He’s become very pretentious . . . he’s not how he used to be . . . Comrades who dine with him say he’s utterly bourgeois.”

Stalin was “afraid of Beria,” thought Khrushchev, “and would have been glad to get rid of him but didn’t know how to do it.” Stalin himself confirmed this, sensing that Beria was winning support: “Beria’s so wily and tricksy. He’s become so trusted by the Politburo that they defend him. They don’t realize he’s pulled the wool over their eyes. For example— Vyacheslav [Molotov] and Lazar [Kaganovich]. I think Beria has his eye on a future goal. But he’s limited. In his time, he did great work but as for now . . . I’m not sure he wouldn’t misuse his power.” Then Stalin remembered his closest allies: “Zhdanov and Kirov thought poorly of him but . . . we liked Beria for his modesty and efficiency. Later he lost these qualities. He’s just a policeman.”

Ignatiev sent sixty MGB interrogators and a torture specialist carrying a special medical case filled with his instruments, down to Tiflis. Stalin phoned Charkviani, with whom he had spent hours discussing literature and family, and without saying hello, threatened:

“You’ve closed your eyes to corruption in Georgia . . . Things’ll go badly for you, Comrade Charkviani.” He hung up. Charkviani was terrified.

The Beria family, Nina and Sergo, sensed this tightening garrote. Stalin appointed Beria to give the prestigious 6 November address but three days afterwards, he dictated an order about a Mingrelian conspiracy that directly threatened Beria, using his wife Nina’s links to the Menshevik émigrés in Paris.

Vasily Stalin naïvely confided to Sergo Beria that relations between their fathers were “tense,” which he blamed on anti-Georgian Russians in the Politburo. Svetlana, who was so close to Nina, warned her that something was afoot. Beria’s marriage to Nina was under strain because Lilya Drozhdova had given birth to a daughter by Beria whom they named Martha after his mother. Lilya was now about seventeen and she had lasted as Beria’s mistress for a couple of years. The bodyguards told Martha Peshkova that when Lilya was at the dacha, the baby was placed in the same cradles as Sergo’s children. Not surprisingly, the arrival of the baby upset Nina. She unhappily decided she needed a separate life and built herself a cottage in Sukhumi.

On 22 December 1951, Stalin, like a lame, restless and hungry tiger, returned to Moscow, clearly intent on enforcing a new Terror, with specific anti-Semitic features. The torture chambers of Ignatiev and Riumin groaned with new Jewish and Mingrelian victims to destroy Molotov and Beria. Stalin did know how to “get rid” of Beria, but the “master of dosage” had always worked with agonizing patience. But now he was old. Stalin loathed Beria yet “when in a morose mood, he came to see us seeking human warmth.” Stalin admitted to Nina he could barely sleep anymore: “You can’t know how tired I am. I have to sleep like a gun dog.”

Beria played Stalin well: he shrewdly offered to purge Georgia himself. In March 1952, Beria sacked Charkviani,[29] replaced him with Mgeladze and publically admitted: “I too am guilty.”

Stalin and Beria despised each other but were linked by invisible threads of past crimes, mutual envy and complementary cunning. Stalin still discussed foreign policy with Beria, even letting him write a paper proposing a neutral, reunified Germany. Beria could still manipulate the Generalissimo with what Khrushchev called “Jesuitical shrewdness” but he was too clever by half, riling Stalin. “You’re playing with a tiger,” Nina warned him.

“I couldn’t resist it,” replied Beria.

The gap between Beria’s dreams and his reality had made him “a deeply unhappy man,” wrote his son. Without the ideological fanaticism that bound the others to Stalin, Beria now questioned the entire Soviet system: “The USSR can never succeed until we have private property,” he told Charkviani. He despised Stalin, whom he considered “no longer human. I think there is only one word that describes what my father felt in those days,” wrote Sergo Beria. “Hatred.” Beria became ever more daring in his denunciations of Stalin: “For a long time,” he sneered sarcastically, “the Soviet State had been too small for Joseph Vissarionovich!” Always the most craven and most irreverent, he denounced Stalin but the other leaders were afraid to join in: “I considered it an attempt to provoke us,” said Mikoyan.

Yet, gradually, their shared fears and Stalin’s unpredictability created a “sense of solidarity,” a support system among ambitious killers who wanted to survive and protect their families. Even Beria became the unlikely avuncular comforter for bruisers like Khrushchev and Mikoyan in these uneasy times. The others revelled in Beria’s eclipse—and shared his fears. Malenkov warned him, Khrushchev teased him. Molotov and Kaganovich were so impressed with Beria that even when Stalin criticized him, they defended him. Yet any and all were ready to destroy the others. It was not long before Ignatiev and his MGB torturers were even trying to link Stalin’s two obsessions: Beria, they whispered, was secretly Jewish.[30]

That spring, Stalin was examined by his veteran doctor, Vinogradov, who was shocked by his deterioration. He suffered from hypertension and arteriosclerosis with occasional disturbances in cerebral circulation, which caused minor strokes and little cysts in the brain tissue of the frontal lobe. This exacerbated Stalin’s anger, amnesia and paranoia. “Complete rest, freedom from all work,” wrote Vinogradov on the file but the mention of retirement infuriated Stalin who ordered his medical records destroyed and resolved to see no more doctors. Vinogradov was an Enemy.

On 15 February, Stalin ordered the arrests of more doctors who admitted helping to kill Shcherbakov, which in turn led to Dr. Lydia Timashuk, the cardiologist who had written to Stalin about the mistreatment of Zhdanov. Stalin called in Ignatiev and told him that, if he did not accelerate the interrogations of the Jewish doctors already under arrest, he would join Abakumov in prison. The MGB were “nincompoops!”

“I’m not a supplicant of the MGB!” barked Stalin at Ignatiev. “I can knock you out if you don’t follow my orders . . . We’ll scatter your group!” He now talked more to his bodyguards and Valechka than to his comrades. The death of the Mongolian dictator Marshal Choibalsang in Moscow that spring worried him enough to confide in his chauffeur: “They die one after another. Shcherbakov, Zhdanov, Dmitrov, Choibalsang . . . die so quickly![31] We must change the old doctors for new ones.” The bodyguards could talk quite intimately to Stalin and Colonel Tukov replied that those doctors were very experienced. “No, we must change them for new ones . . . The MVD insists on arresting them as saboteurs.” Valechka heard him say he was not sure about the case. But Stalin was not for turning: he wanted the Jewish Crimea case to be tried imminently. Lozovsky and a distinguished cast of Jewish intellectuals again became the playthings of Riumin and Komarov.

Meanwhile, Vasily Stalin’s treatment for alcoholism had failed completely. At the May Day parade, the weather was bad and the planes should not have been allowed to fly but a drunken Vasily ordered the flypast to proceed. Two Tupolev-4 bombers crashed. Stalin watched darkly from the Mausoleum and afterwards sacked Vasily as Moscow air-force commander, sending him back to the Air Force Academy.[32]

Eight days later, at midday on 8 May, the “trial of the Jewish poets” starring Solomon Lozovsky, former Deputy Foreign Minister, and the Yiddish poet Perets Markish opened in the Dzerzhinsky Officers’ Club at the Lubianka. Stalin had already specified that virtually all the defendants were to be shot.

Lozovsky had been tortured but his pride in his Bolshevik and, more surprisingly, Jewish pedigrees was unbroken. His speech shines out of this primordial darkness as the most remarkable and moving oration of dignity and courage in all of Stalin’s trials. He also shredded Riumin’s imbecilic Jewish-Crimean conspiracy.

“Even if I had wanted to engage in such activity . . . would I have gotten in touch with a poet and an actor? . . . After all, there is an American Embassy . . . swarming with intelligence officers. The doorman at the Commissariat of Finance would not do such a thing, let alone the Deputy Foreign Minister!”

Lozovsky was so convincing that the judge, Lieut.-Gen. Alexander Cheptsov, stopped the trial, a unique happening which suggests that Stalin was forcing a new Terror onto an unwilling and no longer blindly obedient bureaucracy. Cheptsov complained of its flimsiness to Malenkov in the presence of a rattled Ignatiev—and humiliated Riumin. Malenkov ordered the trial to proceed. On 18 July, Cheptsov sentenced thirteen defendants to death (including two women), sparing only the scientist Lina Shtern, perhaps because of her research into longevity. But Cheptsov did not carry out the executions, ignoring Riumin’s shrill orders to do so, and appealed to Malenkov.

“Do you want to bring us to kneel before these criminals?” Malenkov retorted. “The Politburo has investigated this case three times. Carry out the Politburo’s resolution.” Malenkov admitted later that he had not told Stalin everything: “I did not dare!”

Stalin rejected official appeals. Lozovsky[33] and the Jewish poets were shot on 12 August 1952.[34]

Stalin refused to take a holiday that August: instead, unhappy at the dominance of Malenkov and Khrushchev, he decided to call a Congress in October, the first one since 1939, to anoint new, younger leaders and destroy his old comrades.

By September, Ignatiev, assisted by “Midget” Riumin, had tortured the evidence out of his prisoners to “prove” that the Kremlin doctors, led by Stalin’s own physician, had indeed murdered Zhdanov, Shcherbakov, Dmitrov and Choibalsang. A new crop were arrested but not yet Vinogradov. On the 18th, Stalin told Riumin to torture the doctors. Riumin, who possessed a macabre gift for primitive theatre, designed a special torture chamber at Lefortovo, furnished like a dissection room and operating theatre, to intimidate the doctors. Long before Laurence Olivier played the Nazi dentist in Marathon Man, Stalin was torturing his own doctors in a ghastly surgical parody.

“You’re acting like a whore! You’re an ignoble spy, a terrorist!” Riumin shouted at one of the doctors. “We’ll torture you with a red-hot iron. We have all the necessary equipment for that . . .” Stalin’s family was included in a bizarre medical melodrama, spawned by Stalin’s furious imagination and Riumin’s diabolical obedience: the doctors had deliberately subverted Vasily Stalin’s treatment for “nervous disorders” and had failed to prevent toxicosis in Svetlana Stalin after the birth of her child Katya Zhdanov in the spring of 1950. A surreal touch, if any was needed, was added by the case of Andreyev who had been ill since 1947: the doctors prescribed cocaine for his insomnia so it was hardly surprising he was unable to sleep. Andreyev[35] had become dependent on the drug, one of history’s more unlikely coke addicts.[36]

Absurd as the details may sound, the Doctors’ Plot had the beautiful enveloping symmetry of a panacea, one of Stalin’s fantastical masterpieces: working alone, only informing his grandees when he had results, and keeping complete control over all the parallel threads through the “Midget,” he weaved a tapestry that sewed together every intrigue and leading victim since the war, in order to mobilize the Soviet people against the external enemy, America, and its internal agents, the Jews, and therefore justify a new Terror. New research shows Stalin would toss into this cauldron various “murderous” Jews and doctors, Abakumov and his “unvigilant” Chekist “nincompoops,” and the executed Leningrader, Kuznetsov, who would be the link between the Jews, Zhdanov’s death, and the magnates—especially Mikoyan, via their children’s marriage. Just as in 1937 a man did not have to be a Trotskyite to be shot as one, so now the victims did not have to be Jewish to be accused of “Zionism”: Abakumov, no philo-Semite, was now smeared with Zionism. As for the sturdily Russian Molotov, Stalin had not nicknamed him “Molotstein,” in the twenties, for nothing.

Did Stalin really believe it all? Yes, passionately, because it was politically necessary, which was better than mere truth. “We ourselves will be able to determine,” Stalin told Ignatiev, “what is true and what is not.”

Stimulated by his labyrinth of secret investigations, Stalin did not give up his literary and scientific interests. As his brain atrophied, Stalin still “swotted like a good pupil,” as Beria put it, studying to dominate new fields and solve ideological problems. “I am seventy yet I go on learning just the same,” Stalin boasted to Svetlana. He read all the entries for the Stalin Prize and chaired the Committee to choose the winners in his office. That year, pacing as usual, he decreed that a novelist named Stepan Zlobin should win. Malenkov however pulled out a file and said, “Comrade Stalin, Zlobin conducted himself very badly when he was in a German concentration camp . . .”

Stalin walked round the table three times in dead silence then asked: “To forgive?” He continued pacing the table in silence. “Or not to forgive? To forgive or not to forgive?” Finally, he answered: “Forgive!” Zlobin won the prize. Stalin then attacked anti-Semitism: he had lately insisted that Jewish writers must have their Semitic names published in brackets after their Russian pseudonyms. Now he asked the surprised Committee: “What’s this for? Does it give pleasure to someone to underline that this man is Jewish? Why? To promote anti-Semitism?” As usual the old fox was playing several games in parallel.

He had always been interested in the study of linguistics: the field had been dominated by Professor Marr who had established Stalinist orthodoxy by arguing that language, like class, would ultimately disappear and merge into one language as Communism approached. A Georgian linguistics scholar, Arnold Chikobava, wrote to Stalin to attack the theory. Stalin, keen to buttress his national Bolshevism by overturning Marrism, summoned Chikobava to a dinner that lasted from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. taking notes diligently like a student. He then held an open debate in Pravda, finally intervening with his own article, “Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics” which immediately altered the entire field of Soviet science and ideology.[37]

Just before the Congress opened, Stalin proudly distributed the other fruit of his studies, his turgid masterpiece Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, which declared the “objectivity” of economic laws and reasserted the orthodoxy that the imperialist states would go to war, but it also leapt some of the stages of Marxism, to claim that Communism was achievable in his lifetime. Faith in ideology was always vital to Stalin but those old believers Molotov and Mikoyan did not agree with this “Leftist derivation.” When they came to dinner at Kuntsevo, Stalin asked: “Any questions? Any comments!” Beria and Malenkov, never ideologists, praised it. But even now, in danger of his life, Molotov would not agree with an ideological deviation. He just mumbled and Mikoyan said nothing.

Stalin noticed their silence and, later, smiled maliciously at Mikoyan: “Ah, you’ve lagged behind! Right now, the time has come!”

When they met to discuss the Presidium of the Congress, Stalin said, “No need to enter Mikoyan and Andreyev—they’re inactive Politburo members!” Since Mikoyan was immensely busy, the Politburo chuckled.

“I’m not joking,” snapped Stalin. “I suggest it seriously.” The laughter stopped instantly, but Mikoyan was included. Even at the height of his tyranny, Stalin had to feel his way in this close-knit oligarchy: Mikoyan and Molotov were prestigious Politburo titans, respected not only by their colleagues but by the public. Stalin proposed they expand the Politburo into a Presidium of twenty-five members. Mikoyan realized this would make it easier to remove the old Politburo members. “I thought— ‘something’s happening.’ ” Mikoyan was suddenly afraid: “I was just knocked off my feet.” They realized Stalin had meant it when he shouted:

“You’ve grown old! I’ll replace you all!”[38]

At 7 p.m. (to suit Stalin’s own timetable) on 5 October 1952, the Nineteenth Congress opened. The leaders sat bunched together on the left with the ageing Stalin alone on the right. Stalin himself only attended the beginning and the end of the Congress but giving the major reports to Malenkov and Khrushchev placed them in pole position for the succession.[39] He only spoke at the end of the Congress for a few rambling minutes but a punch-drunk Stalin boasted to Khrushchev: “There, look at that! I can still do it!”

Khrushchev was ill during the Congress: when an old doctor visited him on Granovsky and treated him kindly, “I was tormented because I already had the testimony against the doctor. I knew no matter what I said, Stalin would not spare him.” But the real action was on 16 October at the Plenum to elect the Presidium and Secretariat. No one was ready for Stalin’s ambush.

 

 

57. Blind Kittens and Hippopotamuses: The Destruction of the Old Guard

Stalin loped down to the rostrum two metres in front of the pew-like seats where the magnates sat. The Plenum watched in frozen fascination as the old man began to speak “fiercely,” peering into the eyes of the small audience “attentively and tenaciously as if trying to guess their thoughts.”

“So we held the Party Congress,” he said. “It was fine and it would seem to most people that we enjoy unity. However, we don’t have unity. Some people express disagreement with our decisions. Why did we exclude Ministers from important posts . . . Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov? . . . Ministers’ work . . . demands great strength, knowledge and health.” So he was bringing forward “young men, full of strength and energy.” But then he unleashed his thunderbolt: “If we’re talking unity, I cannot but touch on the incorrect behaviour of some honoured politicians. I mean Comrades Molotov and Mikoyan.”

Sitting just behind Stalin, their faces turned “pale and dead” in the “terrible silence.” The magnates, “stony, strained and grave,” wondered “where and when would Stalin stop, would he touch the others after Molotov and Mikoyan?”

First he dealt with Molotov: “Molotov’s loyal to our cause. Ask him and I don’t doubt he’d give his life for our Party without hesitation. But we cannot overlook unworthy acts.” Stalin dredged up Molotov’s mistake with censorship: “Comrade Molotov, our Foreign Minister, drunk onchartreuse at a diplomatic reception, let the British Ambassador publish bourgeois newspapers in our country . . . This is the first political mistake. And what’s the value of Comrade Molotov’s proposal to give the Crimea to the Jews? That’s a huge mistake . . . the second political mistake of Comrade Molotov.” The third was Polina: “Comrade Molotov respects his wife so much that as soon as we adopt a Politburo decision . . . it instantly becomes known to Comrade Zhemchuzhina . . . A hidden thread connects the Politburo with Molotov’s wife—and her friends . . . who are untrustworthy. Such behaviour isn’t acceptable in a Politburo member.” Then he attacked Mikoyan for opposing higher taxes on the peasantry: “Who does he think he is, our Anastas Mikoyan? What’s unclear to him?”

Then he pulled a piece of paper out of his tunic, and read out the thirty-six members of the new Presidium, including many new names. Khrushchev and Malenkov glanced at each other: where had Stalin found these people? When he proposed the inner Bureau, everyone was astonished that Molotov and Mikoyan were excluded.[40] Then, returning to his seat on the tribune, he explained their downfall: “They’re scared by the overwhelming power they saw in America.” He ominously linked Molotov and Mikoyan to the Rightists, Rykov and Frumkin, shot long before, and Lozovsky, just shot in August.

Molotov stood and confessed: “I am and remain a loyal disciple of Stalin,” but the Generalissimo cupped his ear and barked:

“Nonsense! I’ve no disciples! We’re all disciples of Lenin. Of Lenin!”

Mikoyan fought back defiantly: “You must remember well, Comrade Stalin . . . I proved I wasn’t guilty of anything.” Malenkov and Beria heckled him, hissing “liar,” but he persisted. “And as for the bread prices, I completely deny the accusation”—but Stalin interrupted him: “See, there goes Mikoyan! He’s our new Frumkin!”

Then a voice called out: “We must elect Comrade Stalin General Secretary!”

“No,” replied Stalin. “Excuse me from the posts of General Secretary and Chairman of the Council of Ministers [Premier].” Malenkov stood up and ran forward, chins aquiver, with the desperate grace of a whippet sealed inside a blancmange. His “terrible expression” was not fear, observed Simonov, but an “understanding much better than anyone else of the mortal danger that hung over all: it was impossible to comply with Stalin’s request.”

Malenkov, tottering on the edge of the stage, raised his hands as if he was praying and piped up: “Comrades! We must all unanimously demand that Comrade Stalin, our leader and teacher, remain as General Secretary!” He shook his finger, signalling. The whole hall understood and began to cry out that Stalin had to remain at his post. Malenkov’s jowls relaxed as if he had “escaped direct, real mortal danger.” But he was not safe yet.

“One doesn’t need the applause of the Plenum,” replied Stalin. “I ask you to release me . . . I’m already old. I don’t read the documents. Elect yourselves another Secretary.”

Marshal Timoshenko replied: “Comrade Stalin, the people won’t understand it. We all as one elect you our leader—General Secretary!” The cheering went on for a long time. Stalin waited, then, waving modestly, he sat down.

Stalin’s decision to destroy his oldest comrades was not an act of madness but the rational destruction of his most likely successors. As Stalin remembered well, the ailing Lenin had attacked his likely successor (Stalin himself) and proposed an expanded Central Committee with none of the leaders as members. It was now that the magnates realized “they were all in the same boat” because, Beria told his son, “none of them would be Stalin’s successor: he intended to choose an heir from the younger generation.” There was probably no secret heir: only a “collective” could succeed Stalin[41].

Stalin was satisfied by Molotov’s ritual submission but asked him to return the secret protocols of the Ribbentrop Pact, clearly to form part of the case against him.

As for Mikoyan, Stalin was shocked at his defiance. At Kuntsevo, in the absence of his two bugbears, Stalin grumbled to Malenkov and Beria: “Look, Mikoyan even argued back!” In the days after the Plenum, Molotov and Mikoyan continued to play their usual roles in the government but Stalin was now supervising the climax of his Doctors’ Plot, burning with fury against Professor Vinogradov for recommending his retirement. Yet it was typical of this stealthy old conspirator that he had suppressed his anger and waited eleven months to gather the evidence to destroy his own physician.

Now it all came bursting out. Ordering Ignatiev to arrest Vinogradov, he shouted: “Leg irons! Put him in irons!”[42]

On 4 November, Vinogradov was arrested, touching every Politburo family because, as Sergo Beria wrote, he was “our family doctor.”

Three days later, Svetlana, now entangled in another dangerous relationship, this time with Johnreed Svanidze, the son of those executed “spies” Alyosha and Maria, brought over her two children to play with their grandfather. It was the Revolution holiday, the twentieth anniversary of Nadya’s suicide. At the height of the Jewish Terror, Stalin really “hit it off” with his half-Jewish grandson, Joseph Morozov, now seven, with his “huge shiny Jewish eyes and long lashes.”

“What thoughtful eyes,” said Stalin, pouring the children thimbles of wine “in the fashion of the Caucasus.” “He’s a smart boy.” Svetlana was touched. He had recently met Yakov’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Gulia Djugashvili, whom he delighted by letting her serve the tea.

“Let the khozyaika do it!” he said, tousling her hair, kissing her. Gulia, better than anyone, catches his febrile excitement at the great enterprise of a new struggle: “His face was very tired but he could hardly stay still.”

Stalin was infuriated by Riumin’s slowness in beating the evidence out of the doctors, calling the MGB a herd of “hippopotamuses.” He shouted at Ignatiev: “Beat them! What are you? Do you want to be more humanitarian than Lenin who ordered Dzerzhinsky [founder of the Cheka] to throw Savinkov out of the window? . . . Dzerzhinsky was no match for you but he didn’t shirk the dirty work. You work like waiters in white gloves. If you want to be Chekists, take off your gloves.” Malenkov repeated Stalin’s orders to use “death blows.”

On 13 November, a few days after little Joseph’s visit, Stalin ordered the petrified Ignatiev to sack Riumin: “Remove the Midget!” As for the doctors, “Beat them until they confess! Beat, beat and beat again. Put them in chains, grind them into powder!” Stalin offered Vinogradov his life if he admitted “the origins of your crimes . . . You may address your testimony to the Leader who promises to save your life . . . The whole world knows our Leader has always kept his promises.” Vinogradov knew no such thing.

“My situation is tragic,” the doctor replied. “I have nothing to say.” He tried to name dead people whom his testimony could no longer harm. Stalin then lashed out at Ignatiev himself for his backsliding. Ignatiev suffered a heart attack and took to his bed.[43]

Now Stalin turned on his dogged retainer, Vlasik, destroying his debauched bodyguard just as he had the colourful Pauker in 1937. Vlasik had been on drinking terms with the homicidal doctors but he also knew too much, particularly that Stalin had been informed of Zhdanov’s mistreatment and done nothing about it. Vlasik himself had probably only ignored Timashuk’s letters on Stalin’s lead. But now he was arrested, brought to Moscow and accused of concealing the evidence with Abakumov. He never betrayed the Boss. But his arrest was a cunning move because Vlasik’s “treason” helped cover Stalin’s own role. All his mistresses and drinking cronies were arrested and questioned by Malenkov. Vlasik was tortured: “My nerves were broken and I suffered a heart attack. I had months without sleep.” Stalin knew that Poskrebyshev, his other devoted old retainer, was best friends with Vlasik: had he played some role in suppressing the evidence against the killer doctors? He had distrusted Poskrebyshev ever since his article on Stalin’s lemon-growing skills in 1949: was someone encouraging his grim amanuensis to step out of the shadows? But Stalin also learned that Poskrebyshev had shared Vlasik’s orgies. He was mired in “filthy affairs,” said Molotov. “Women can serve as agents!” Poskrebyshev arrived at Beria’s house in a panic: everyone ran to Beria for reassurance but he himself was in equal danger.

Stalin sacked Poskrebyshev (his deputy, Chernukha, replaced him), moved him to be Secretary of the Presidium and received him for the last time on 1 December. He had removed his two most loyal servants[44]. Stalin now had enough evidence to escalate the hysteria.

After seeing the heart-broken Poskrebyshev, Stalin unveiled the horror of what he called “the killers in white coats” to the Presidium: “You’re like blind kittens,” he warned them at Kuntsevo. “What will happen without me is that the country will die because you can’t recognize your enemies.” Stalin explained to the “blind kittens” that “every Jew’s a nationalist and an agent of American intelligence” who believes “the U.S.A. saved their people.” He linked these killer-doctors to the medical murderers of Gorky and Kuibyshev and repeated his mantra-like justification for 1937. A Great Terror was again imminent. He turned to the secret police: “We must ‘treat’ the GPU,” he said. “They know they’re sitting in shit!”

The magnates understood this ominous reference because an anti-Semitic trial was already underway in Prague where the Czech General Secretary, Rudolf Slansky, a Jew, was accused of “anti-State conspiracy.” Three days later, he and ten other mainly Jewish Communists were hanged. Stalin planned something similar in Warsaw for he asked Bierut about his Jewish lieutenants: “Who’s dearer to you—Berman or Minc?”

Bierut to his credit replied: “Both equally.”

Stalin ordered more schemes to assassinate Tito.[45]

The Czech executions brought the noose closer to Molotov and Mikoyan who debated the court etiquette of condemned men. Stalin called them “American or British spies.” “To this day,” Molotov reminisced, “I don’t know precisely why. I sensed he held me in great distrust.”

They kept turning up for dinner as if nothing had happened. “Stalin wasn’t glad to see them,” noticed Khrushchev. Finally Stalin banned Molotov and Mikoyan: “I don’t want those two coming around anymore.” But the staff secretly told them when the dinners were taking place. So Stalin banned the staff from talking to them. Still, they kept turning up because Khrushchev, Beria, Malenkov and Bulganin, the Four, alerted them—a sign of growing sympathy, because they appreciated that “they were trying to stay close to save themselves . . . to stay alive.”

Mikoyan asked Beria’s advice: “It would be better if you lay low,” he suggested.

“I’d like to see your face when . . . you’re sacked,” replied Mikoyan.

“That happened to me years ago,” said Beria.

Molotov and Mikoyan, realizing their lives were in danger, met in the Kremlin to decide what to do. Mikoyan had always trusted Molotov not to repeat his comments—and “he never let me down or used my trust against me.” Both were hurt, and angry.

“It’s practically impossible to rule a country in your seventies and decide all issues at the dinner table,” Molotov said aloud at a meeting, a risky act of lèse-majesté that would have been unthinkable before the Plenum.[46]

The magnates would all have assisted in the liquidation of Molotov and Mikoyan. Stalin was old, raging, vindictive, paranoid and in a hurry. Yet his sense of the possible, the patience and charm that balanced his cruelty and his roughness still worked, as he methodically, logically micro-managed the case. The unpredictable fury, frantic hastiness and implacable paranoia ironically drove the magnates closer together. Beria and Khrushchev were against Stalin’s changes. Malenkov comforted Beria who comforted Mikoyan; Khrushchev and Beria comforted Molotov. During whispered consultations in the Kuntsevo lavatories, the Four laughed off Stalin’s suspicions and mocked the Doctors’ Plot.

“We should protect Molotov,” Beria told the other three, “he’s still needed by the Party.”

December 21 was officially Stalin’s seventy-third birthday. Molotov and Mikoyan had not missed his birthday for thirty years. He rarely invited anyone—one just arrived for supper. The outcasts discussed what to do. Mikoyan thought that if they did not go, it would “mean that we had changed our attitude to Stalin.” They phoned the Four, who told them they had to come.

So at 10 p.m. on the 21st, they arrived at Kuntsevo, where Stalin had hung plangent magazine photographs on the walls of children feeding lambs and famous historical scenes like Repin’s Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, his favourite picture. Svetlana was there too. Stalin was quiet but friendly, proud that he had given up smoking after fifty years. But he was already suffering from breathing difficulties. His face was livid and he had put on weight, suggesting high blood pressure. He sipped light Georgian wine. As Svetlana was leaving, Stalin asked her: “Do you need any money?”

“No,” she answered.

“You’re only pretending. How much do you need?” He gave her 3,000 roubles for herself and for Yakov’s daughter, Gulia, useful housekeeping money but Stalin thought it was millions. “Buy yourself a car but show me your driving licence!” Underneath, Stalin was “angry and indignant” that the Four had invited Molotov and Mikoyan.

“You think I don’t realize you let Molotov and Mikoyan know? Stop this! I won’t tolerate it,” he warned Khrushchev and Beria. He ordered them to give this message to the outcasts: “It won’t work: he’s not your comrade anymore and doesn’t want you to visit him.”

This really alarmed Mikoyan: “It was becoming clear . . . Stalin wanted to finish with us and that meant not only political but physical destruction.”

The four last men standing decided, according to Beria’s son, “not to let Stalin set them against each other.” Stalin sometimes asked the Four: “Are you forming a bloc against me?” In a sense they were, but none of them, not even Beria, had the will. Mikoyan discussed, probably with Molotov, the murder of Stalin but, as he later told Enver Hoxha, “We gave up the idea because we were afraid the people and the Party would not understand.”[47]

On 13 January 1953, after two, maybe even five, years’ patient plotting, Stalin unleashed a wave of hysterical anti-Semitism by announcing the arrest of the doctors in Pravda: “Ignoble Spies and Killers under the Mask of Professor-Doctors,” a phrase that he had personally coined and scrawled on to the draft article which he annotated carefully.[48] On 20 January, Doctor Timashuk, Zhdanov’s cardiologist, was called to the Kremlin where Malenkov gave her Stalin’s personal thanks for her “great courage” and the next day, she received the Order of Lenin. But Stalin was still using Ehrenburg as his decoy when a week later, on 27 January, he awarded him the Stalin Prize. Meanwhile throughout January and February, the arrests intensified.

The article revealed the lack of vigilance in the security services, a signal that Beria himself was a target. Not only were Beria’s allies arrested in Georgia; his protégés in Moscow, such as the Chief of Staff, Shtemenko, were sacked. His ex-mistress V. Mataradze was also arrested. He “expected the death blow . . . at any minute,” wrote his son. Beria “expressed his disrespect for Stalin more and more boldly,” noted Khrushchev, “insultingly.” He even boasted to Kaganovich that “Stalin doesn’t realize if he tried to arrest me the Chekists would organize an insurrection.”

Apart from their fears for their own lives, the magnates were worried about nuclear war with America: Stalin, who was still stoking the Korean War, inconsistently swung between fear of war and the ideological conviction that it was inevitable. Beria, Khrushchev and Mikoyan feared the effect on America of Stalin’s alarming unpredictability.[49] Stalin ringed Moscow with anti-aircraft missiles. As his own campaign inspired fear of American attack, he even discussed it with his bodyguards: “What do you think—will America attack us or not?” he asked Kuntsevo’s Deputy Commandant, Peter Lozgachev.

“I think they’d be afraid to,” replied the officer, at which Stalin suddenly flared up: “Clear out—what are you doing here anyway? I didn’t call you.”

But he was sensitive to the guards in a way that was unthinkable with the politicians. He called in Lozgachev: “Forget that I shouted at you but just remember: they will attack us. They’re Imperialists, and they certainly will attack us. If we let them. That’s the answer you should give.”

Stealing sleep on his sofas like “a gundog,” Stalin calmed himself by repeatedly playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23. Visitors found him “greatly changed”—a “tired old man” who “talked with difficulty” between “long pauses”—but he managed his Terror tenaciously.[50] Stalin orchestrated the drafting of a letter, to be signed by prominent Soviet Jews, begging for Jews to be deported from the cities to protect them from the coming pogrom. The letter itself has never been found but Mikoyan confirmed that “the voluntary-compulsory eviction of Jews” was being prepared. Kaganovich was hurt when he was asked to sign it but found a loyal way of refusing.

“Why won’t you sign?” asked Stalin.

“I’m a member of the Politburo, not a Jewish public figure, and I’ll only sign as a Politburo member.”

Stalin shrugged: “All right.”

“If it’s necessary, I’ll write an article.”

“We might need an article,” said Stalin.

Even Kaganovich complained about Stalin, confiding in Mikoyan:

“It’s so painful for me that I’ve always been consciously struggling against Zionism—and now I have to ‘sign off on it.’” Khrushchev claimed that Kaganovich “squirmed” but signed the letter. (Neither Kaganovich nor Khrushchev is a truthful witness when it comes to their own roles.) However, Ehrenburg, who saw it and managed to avoid signing by appealing to Stalin, said it was addressed to the Politburo and signed by “scholars and composers” which suggests that Kaganovich had managed to “squirm” successfully. The latest evidence shows that two new camps were being built, perhaps for the Jews.[51]

Stalin closely read the testimonies of the tortured doctors, sent daily by Ignatiev. He ordered the likely star in his Jewish Case, Object 12 (otherwise known as Polina Molotova), brought back to Moscow and interrogated. But the Jewish Case was not Stalin’s only business during these weeks.

He rarely saw diplomats, but on 7 February, he received the young Argentine Ambassador, Leopoldo Bravo, who thought Stalin “healthy, well-rested and agile in conversation.” Stalin admired Peron, offering generous loans because, despite his Fascist past, he appreciated Peron’s anti-Americanism. But he was most interested in Eva Peron.[52]

“Tell me,” he asked Bravo, “Did she owe her rise to her character or her marriage to Colonel Peron?” Bravo was the second-last outsider to see Stalin alive.[53]

Seven days later, at 8 p.m. on 17 February, Stalin visited the Little Corner for the last time to receive the Indian diplomat K. P. S. Menon. Stalin’s mind was on his plots for he spent the half-hour sketching wolves’ heads on his pad, reflecting, “The peasants are right to kill mad wolves.” At 10:30 p.m. Stalin left with Beria, Malenkov and Bulganin, probably for dinner at Kuntsevo.

He was still working up a case against Beria and his other Enemies: he ordered his new Georgian boss Mgeladze to get Beria to sign an order to attack the MGB, effectively against himself. Beria was not happy but had to agree. One of the Premier’s last meetings was to order another assassination attempt on Tito.

At 8 p.m. on 27 February, Stalin arrived alone at the Bolshoi to watch Swan Lake. As he left, he asked his “attachment,” Colonel Kirillin, to thank the cast for him, speeding to Kuntsevo where he worked until about 3 a.m. He rose late, read the latest interrogations of the Jewish doctors and the reports from Korea, walked around the snowy garden and ordered Commandant Orlov: “Brush the snow off the steps.”

That afternoon, Stalin may have taken a steam bath. As he got older the heat eased the arthritis in his stiff arm, but Professor Vinogradov had banned banyas as bad for high blood pressure. Beria had told him he did not have to believe doctors. Now he threw caution to the winds. In the evening, he was driven into the Kremlin where he met his perennial companions, Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin, in the cinema. Voroshilov joined them for the movie, noting Stalin was “sprightly and cheerful.” Before he left, he arranged the menu with Deputy Commandant Lozgachev and ordered some bottles of weak Georgian wine.

At 11 p.m., Stalin and the Four drove out to the dacha for dinner. The Georgian buffet was served by Lozgachev and Matrena Butuzova (Valechka being off duty that night). Bulganin reported on the stalemate in Korea and Stalin decided to advise the Chinese and North Koreans to negotiate. Stalin called for more “juice.” They talked about the doctors’ interrogations. Beria is supposed to have said that Vinogradov had a “long tongue,” gossiping about Stalin’s fainting spells.

“Right, what do you propose to do now?” said Stalin. “Have the doctors confessed? Tell Ignatiev if he doesn’t get full confessions out of them, we’ll shorten him by a head.”

“They’ll confess,” replied Beria. “With the help of other patriots like Timashuk, we’ll complete the investigation and come to you for permission to arrange a public trial.”

“Arrange it,” said Stalin. This is Khrushchev’s account: he and Malenkov later blamed Beria for all Stalin’s crimes but their own parts in the Doctors’ Plot remain murky. It is unlikely that Beria was the only one encouraging Stalin.

The guests were longing to go home. Stalin was pleased with the suave Bulganin but growled that there were those in the leadership who thought they could get by on past merits.

“They are mistaken,” he said. In one account, he then stalked out of the room, leaving his guests alone. Perhaps he returned. The accounts seem contradictory—but then, so was his behaviour. At about 4 a.m., on the morning of Sunday, 1 March, Stalin finally saw them out. He was “pretty drunk . . . in very high spirits,” boisterously jabbing Khrushchev in the stomach, crooning “Nichik” in a Ukrainian accent.

The relieved Four asked the “attachment,” Colonel Khrustalev, for their limousines: Beria as usual shared his ZiS with Malenkov, Khrushchev with Bulganin. Stalin and the guard escorted them to their cars. Indoors, Stalin lay down on a pink-lined divan in the little dining room, with its pale wooden panelling, which was where this old itinerant conspirator had chosen to sleep that night—not helpless, not mad, but a brutal organizer of Terror at the awesome peak of his power.

“I’m going to sleep,” he cheerfully told Khrustalev. “You can take a nap too. I won’t be calling you.” The “attachments” were pleased: Stalin had never given them a night off before. They closed the doors.

At midday that Sunday morning, the guards waited for the Boss to get up, sitting in their guardhouse that was linked to his rooms by a covered passageway twenty-five yards long. But there was “no movement” all afternoon. The guards became anxious. Finally, at 6 p.m., Stalin switched on the light in the small dining room. He was obviously up at last. “Thank God, we thought,” said Lozgachev, “everything’s all right.” He would call for them soon. But he did not.

One, three, four hours passed but Stalin did not appear. Something was wrong. Colonel Starostin, the senior “attachment,” tried to persuade Lozgachev to go in to check on the old man. “I replied, ‘You’re senior, you go in!’” recalled Lozgachev.

“I’m afraid,” said Starostin.

“What do you think I am? A hero?” retorted Lozgachev. They were not the only ones waiting: Khrushchev and the others expected the call to dinner. But the call did not come.

 

 

 

 

58. “I Did Him In!”: The Patient and His Trembling Doctors

At around 10 p.m., the CC mail arrived. The short, burly Lozgachev, gripping the papers, stepped nervously into the house, going from room to room. He was especially noisy because “we were careful not to creep up on him . . . so he’d hear you coming.” He “saw a terrible picture” in the small dining room. Stalin lay on the carpet in pyjama bottoms and undershirt, leaning on one hand “in a very awkward way.” He was conscious but helpless. When he heard Lozgachev’s steps, he called him by “weakly lifting his hand.” The guard ran to his side: “What’s wrong, Comrade Stalin?”

Stalin muttered something, “Dzhh,” but he could not speak. He was cold. There was a watch and a copy of Pravda on the floor beside him, a bottle of Narzan mineral water on the table. He had wet himself.

“Shall I call the doctor maybe?” asked Lozgachev.

“Dzhhh,” buzzed Stalin. “Dzhhh.” Lozgachev picked up the watch: it had stopped at 6:30 when the stroke had hit him. Stalin gave a snore and seemed to fall asleep. Lozgachev dashed to the phone and called Starostin and Butuzova.

“Let’s put him on the sofa, it’s uncomfortable . . . on the floor,” he told them and the three lifted him onto the sofa. Lozgachev kept vigil—“I didn’t leave the Boss’s side”—while Starostin telephoned MGB boss Ignatiev, in charge of Stalin’s personal security since Vlasik’s dismissal in May 1952. He was too frightened to decide anything. He had the power to call doctors himself but he had to act carefully. He ordered Starostin to call Beria and Malenkov. He probably also warned his friend Khrushchev because he needed protection against Beria who blamed him for the Doctors’ Plot and the Mingrelian Case, and wanted his head. Beria was probably the last to find out.

Meanwhile the “attachments” moved Stalin onto the sofa in the main dining room where the famous dinners took place, because it was airier there. He was very cold. They covered him with a blanket and Butuzova rolled his sleeves down. Starostin could not find Beria, probably entangled with his mistress somewhere, but contacted Malenkov who said he would search for him. Half an hour later, he called back: “I haven’t found Beria yet,” he admitted.

After another half-hour, Beria called: “Don’t tell anybody about Comrade Stalin’s illness,” he ordered, “and don’t call.” Lozgachev sat anxiously beside Stalin. He said his hair went grey that night.

Malenkov had also called Khrushchev and Bulganin: “The Chekists have rung from Stalin’s place. They’re very worried, they say something’s happened to Stalin. We’d better get out there . . .” Yet Khrushchev claimed that when they arrived at the guardhouse, they “agreed” not to enter but to leave this sensitive matter to the guards. Stalin was now sleeping and would not want to be seen “in such an unseemly state. So we went home.” The guards do not remember this visit. It seems more likely that Khrushchev, Bulganin, and probably Ignatiev, after frantic consultations, sent in Beria and Malenkov to find out if anything was really wrong. Somehow, during the night, the anti-Semitic campaign in Pravda was halted by someone— or was it Stalin’s deliberate pause?[54]

At 3 a.m. the morning of Monday 2 March, this little delegation arrived at Kuntsevo, over four hours after Starostin’s first call to Malenkov. Both men acted in character: Beria was the dynamic, keyed-up (possibly drunk) adventurer, Malenkov, Stalin’s measured, nervous clerk. While Beria marched into the hall, Malenkov noticed to his horror that his shoes were creaking and slipped them off. “Malanya” tucked his shoes under his arm and tiptoed forward in his socks with the grace of a flabby dancer.

“What’s wrong with the Boss?” They looked at the sleeping Generalissimo, snoring under his blanket, and then Beria turned on the “attachments.”

“What do you mean . . . starting a panic?” he swore at Lozgachev. “The Boss is obviously sleeping peacefully. Let’s go, Malenkov.”

“Malanya” tiptoed out in his socks while Lozgachev tried to explain that “Comrade Stalin was sick and needed medical attention.”

“Don’t bother us, don’t cause a panic and don’t disturb Comrade Stalin!” The worried guards persisted but Beria swore: “Who attached you fools to Comrade Stalin?”

The limousine drove away to meet the waiting Khrushchev and Bulganin. The bargaining for power surely started that night. Lozgachev returned to his vigil while Starostin and Butuzova went to sleep in the guardhouse.

Dawn broke over the firs and birches of Kuntsevo. It was now twelve hours since Stalin’s stroke and he was still snoring on the sofa, wet from his own urine. The magnates surely discussed whether to call doctors. It was extraordinary that they had not called a doctor for twelve hours but it was an extraordinary situation. This is usually used as evidence that the magnates deliberately left Stalin without medical help in order to kill him. But in their fragile situation, at a court already bristling with spy-mania against the killer-doctors, it was not just hyperbole to fear causing panic. Stalin’s own doctor was being tortured merely for saying he should rest. If Stalin awoke feeling groggy, he would have regarded the very act of calling doctors as an attempt to seize power. Furthermore, they were so accustomed to his minute control that they could barely function on their own.

But the Four had those hours to divide power. The decision to do nothing suited everyone. Beria and Malenkov, Stalin’s first deputies, in the government and Party respectively, were legally in charge until a full meeting of the Politburo and then of the Central Committee. If Stalin was dying, they needed time to tie up power. Possibly for the same reasons, it was in the interests of Khrushchev and Bulganin to delay medical help until they had protected their position. They seem to have promised to protect Ignatiev and promote him to the CC Secretariat.

Beria, the only one of the Four fearing for his life at that time, had every reason to hope the hated Stalin would die. (Molotov and Mikoyan did not yet know Stalin was ill.) Yet Beria was never alone with Stalin—he took care that Malenkov was with him. He was not in control of the MGB, nor the Doctors’ Plot, nor the bodyguards, hence his comment, “Who attached you fools to Comrade Stalin?” Even though Beria has always been blamed for the delay, Khrushchev and Ignatiev may actually have been the cause of it.

Whatever their motives, the Four delayed calling a doctor until morning. We will never know if this was medically decisive or not. There was the possibility of an operation to clear the blood clot but doctors agree that it had to take place within hours of the stroke and who would have dared to authorize it? In the fifties, there was a remote chance of such an operation being successful: it was more likely to kill the patient. Melodramatic accounts of Stalin’s death, of which there are no shortage, claim that Stalin was murdered. It is most likely that the denial of medical care made not the slightest difference. But Beria clearly thought it had: “I did him in!” he later boasted to Molotov and Kaganovich. “I saved you all!”

Recent research has suggested that he could have spiked Stalin’s wine with a blood-thinning drug such as warfarin, which, over several days, might cause a stroke. Perhaps Khrushchev and the others were accomplices, hence the cover-up suited them all—but there is no such evidence.

The Four now returned home to sleep, saying nothing to their families. At the imperial bedside, Lozgachev was desperate. He awoke Starostin and told him to call the Politburo—“otherwise he’ll die and it’ll be curtains for you and me.” The terror that prevented the leaders calling the doctors now made the guards demand them. They phoned Malenkov who told them to send in Butuzova to take another look. She announced it was “no ordinary sleep.” Malenkov called Beria.

“The boys have rung again from Stalin’s place,” Malenkov told Khrushchev. “They say there really is something wrong with Comrade Stalin. We’ll have to go back again. We agreed the doctors would have to be called.” Beria and Malenkov were making all the decisions but which doctors to call? So they asked Tretyakov, Minister of Health, to select some Russian (not Jewish) doctors. Khrushchev arrived at Kuntsevo to tell the relieved “attachments” the doctors were on their way. Colonel Tukov called Molotov, Mikoyan and Voroshilov, another sign that the Four had never approved of their exclusion.

“Call the Politburo. I’m on my way,” Molotov replied. When the phone rang in Voroshilov’s home, the old Marshal was transformed: “He became strong and organized,” wrote his wife in her unpublished diary, “as I saw him in dangerous situations in the Civil and Great Patriotic Wars . . . I understood unhappiness was coming. In great fear through running tears, I asked him, ‘What happened?’ He embraced me. ‘Don’t be afraid!’”

Voroshilov joined Kaganovich, Molotov and Mikoyan at the bedside. Molotov noticed “Beria was in charge.” Stalin opened his eyes when Kaganovich arrived and looked at his lieutenants one by one—and then closed his eyes again. Unlike the overbearing Beria, Molotov and Kaganovich were deeply moved. Tears ran down their cheeks. Voroshilov reverently addressed the patient: “Comrade Stalin, we’re here, your loyal friends and comrades. How do you feel dear friend?”

Stalin’s face was “contorted.” He stirred but never fully regained consciousness. Khrushchev was “very upset, I was very sorry we were losing Stalin.” He rushed home to wash and hurried back to Kuntsevo with no one in his family asking any questions. According to his son, Beria called home and told his wife about Stalin’s illness: Nina burst into tears. Like most of the Politburo wives, even those about to be killed, she was inconsolable.

At 7 a.m., the doctors, led by Professor Lukomsky, finally arrived but they were a new team who had never worked with Stalin before. They were brought to the patient in the big dining room which must have reeked of stale urine. With their colleagues under torture, they were awestruck by the sanctity of Stalin and petrified by Beria’s Mephistophelian presence lurking behind them. Their examination of the powerless, once omnipotent patient was a comedy of errors. “They were all trembling like us,” observed Lozgachev. First, a dentist arrived to take out Stalin’s false teeth but “he was so frightened, they slipped out of his hands” and fell onto the floor. Then Lukomsky tried to take Stalin’s shirt off in order to take his blood pressure. “Their hands were trembling so much,” noticed Lozgachev, “that they could not even get his shirt off.” Lukomsky was “terrified to touch Stalin” and could not even get a grip on his pulse.

“Hold his hand properly!” Beria snapped at Lukomsky.

The clothes had to be cut away with scissors. “I ripped open the shirt,” recalled Lozgachev. They began to examine the patient “lying on a divan on his back, his head turned to the left, eyes closed, with moderate hyperaemia of the face . . . There had been involuntary urination, [his clothes were soaked in urine.]” His pulse was 78; heartbeat “faint”; blood pressure 190 over 110. His right side was paralysed while his left limbs quivered sometimes. His forehead was cooled. He was given a glass of 10 percent magnesium sulphate. A neuropathologist, therapist and nurse stood vigil. The doctors asked the guards who had seen what. The guards now feared for their lives too: “We thought, this is it then, they’ll put us in a car and it’s goodbye, we’re done for!”

Stalin had suffered a cerebral catastrophe or, in their words, “middle-left cerebral arterial haemorrhaging . . . The patient’s condition is extremely serious.” It was official at last. Stalin would not be able to work again.

The bodyguards stepped back and faded into the furniture. There was little the doctors could actually do. They recommended: “Absolute quiet, leave the patient on the divan; leeches behind the ears (eight now in place); cold compress on the head . . . No food today.” When he was fed, it was to be with a teaspoon “to give liquid when there is no choking.” Oxygen cylinders were wheeled in. The doctors injected Stalin with camphor. They took a urine sample. The patient stirred. “Stalin tried to cover himself.”

Svetlana, who had celebrated her birthday the night before, was called out of a French class and told, “Malenkov wants you to come” to Kuntsevo. Khrushchev and Bulganin, both in tears, waved her car to a stop and hugged her.

“Beria and Malenkov will tell you everything.” It was again clear who was in charge. The bustle and noise astonished her: Kuntsevo had always been so quiet. She noticed that the doctors were strangers. When she came to the bedside, she kissed Stalin, realizing “I loved my father more tenderly than I ever had before.”

When he was summoned, Vasily was so scared of his father that he thought he would have to present his work and pitifully arrived with his air-force maps. He was soon drunk. Throughout the next two days, he lurched in and out of the quiet sickroom, shouting: “You swine haven’t saved my father!” Svetlana was embarrassed to hear him.

The leaders wondered whether to remove this loose cannon but Voroshilov took Vasily aside, soothing him: “We’re doing all we can to save your father’s life.”

Once it was proved that he was incapacitated, Beria “spewed forth his hatred of Stalin” but whenever his eyelids flickered or his eyes opened, Beria, terrified that he would recover, “knelt and kissed his hand” like an Oriental vizier at a Sultan’s bedside. When Stalin sank again into sleep, Beria virtually spat at him, revealing his reckless ambition, and lack of tact and prudence. The other magnates observed him silently but they were weeping for Stalin, their old but flawed friend, longtime leader, historical titan, and the supreme pontiff of their international creed, even as they sighed with relief that he was dying. Perhaps 20 million had been killed; 28 million deported, of whom 18 million had slaved in the Gulags. Yet, after so much slaughter, they were still believers.

At about ten, the entire old Politburo, from Beria and Khrushchev to Molotov, Voroshilov and Mikoyan, headed to the Kremlin where they met at 10:40 a.m. in the Little Corner to agree on a plan. Stalin’s seat stood empty. They had restored themselves to power. For ten minutes, Dr. Kuperin, the new Kremlevka chief, and Professor Tkachev nervously presented the report quoted above to the confused, upset and pent-up magnates. Afterwards, no one spoke, which made Kuperin even more nervous. It was perhaps too early to discuss what would happen next.

Finally, Beria, who had already emerged as the most active leader, dismissed the doctors with this ominous order: “You’re responsible for Comrade Stalin’s life. Do you understand? You must do everything possible and impossible to save Comrade Stalin!” Kuperin flinched, then withdrew. Malenkov, with whom Beria seemed to be coordinating everything, read out a decree for twenty-four-hour vigils by the leaders in pairs. Then Beria and Malenkov sped back to Kuntsevo to watch over the patient. Molotov and Mikoyan were not asked to keep vigil: Beria ordered Mikoyan to stay in the Kremlin and run the country.

Back at Kuntsevo, when Malenkov was on vigil with Beria, they requested the doctor’s prognosis. Kuperin displayed a chart of the blood circulation: “You see the clotted blood vessel,” he lectured the Politburo as if to medical students. “It’s the size of a five-kopeck piece. Comrade Stalin would remain alive if the vessel had been cleared in time.”

“Who guarantees the life of Comrade Stalin?” Beria challenged the doctors to operate if they dared.

“No one dared,” said Lozgachev. Malenkov asked for the prognosis:

“Death is inevitable,” replied the doctors. But Malenkov did not want Stalin to die yet: there could be no interregnum.

At 8:30 p.m., the leaders, chaired now by Beria, met again for an hour at the Little Corner. Kuperin’s official report did not present Stalin’s condition as hopeless but the patient had deteriorated. His blood pressure was now 210 over 120, breathing and heartbeat irregular. Six to eight leeches were applied around his ears. Stalin received enemas of magnesium sulphate, and spoonfuls of sweet tea.

That evening, Lukomsky was joined by four more doctors including the eminent Professor Myasnikov: the Politburo knew the top doctors were all in prison.

At Kuntsevo, Dr. Myasnikov found “a short and fat” Stalin lying there “in a heap . . . His face was contorted . . . The diagnosis seemed clear— a haemorrhage in the left cerebral hemisphere resulting from hypertension and sclerosis.” The doctors kept their detailed log, taking notes every twenty minutes. The magnates sat blearily in armchairs, stretching their legs, standing by the bedside, watching the doctors. These endless nights gave them the chance to plan the transfer of power.

“Malenkov gave us to understand,” wrote Myasnikov, “he hoped that medical measures would succeed in prolonging the patient’s life ‘for a sufficient period.’ We all realized he had in mind the time necessary for the organization of the new government.”

There were no more official meetings in the Kremlin until 5 March. While Beria and Malenkov whispered about the distribution of offices, Khrushchev and Bulganin wondered how to prevent Beria grabbing control of the secret police. Beria’s plans had been laid long before, probably with Malenkov: since no Georgian could rule Russia again, Malenkov planned to head the government while remaining Secretary. Beria would seize his old fiefdom, the MGB/MVD.

Late at night, Mikoyan looked in on the dying man. Molotov was ill but he appeared from time to time, thinking of his Polina whom he hoped was alive in exile. He did not know she was being interrogated in the Lubianka. But that evening, on Beria’s orders, her interrogations abruptly stopped. The interrogations of the doctors continued, however. The factotum of the Doctors’ Plot, Ignatiev, was noticed nervously peering at the prone Stalin from the doorway. He was still terrified of him.

“Come in—don’t be shy!” said Lozgachev. The next morning Khrushchev popped home to sleep and told his family that Stalin was ill.

There were moments when Stalin seemed to regain consciousness: they were feeding him with soup from a teaspoon, when he pointed up at one of the mawkish photographs on the wall of a girl feeding a lamb and then “pointed at himself.” “He sort of smiled,” thought Khrushchev. The magnates smiled back. Molotov thought it was an example of Stalin’s self-deprecating wit. Beria fell to his knees and kissed Stalin’s hand fervently. Stalin closed his eyes, “never to open them again.” At 10:15 that morning, the doctors reported that Stalin had worsened.

“The bastards have killed Father,” Vasily lurched in again. Khrushchev put his arm round this tiny terrified man, guiding him into the next room.

Beria, who went home for some lunch, was open about his relief. “It will be better for him to die,” he told his family. “If he survives it will be as a vegetable.” Nina was still weeping about Stalin’s death: “You’re a funny one, Nina. His death has saved your life.” Nina visited Svetlana daily to comfort her.

Late on the 4th, Stalin started to deteriorate, his breathing becoming shorter and shallower, the Cheyne-Stokes breathing pattern of a patient losing strength. Beria and Malenkov checked up on their Second Eleven of doctors. That night, three surprised prisoners, tortured daily in the Doctors’ Plot, were led off for another session. But this time, their torturer was not interested in the Zionist conspiracy but politely asked their medical advice.

“My uncle is very sick,” said the interrogator, and is experiencing “this Cheyne-Stokes breathing. What do you think this means?”

“If you’re expecting to inherit from your uncle,” replied the professor, who had not lost his Jewish wit, “consider it’s in your pocket.” Another distinguished professor, Yakov Rapoport, was asked to name the specialists who should treat this “sick uncle.” Rapoport named Vinogradov and the other doctors under arrest. But the interrogator asked if Doctors Kuperin and Lukomsky were good too. He was shocked when Rapoport replied, “Only one of the four [doctors treating Stalin] is a competent physician but on a much lower level than the men in prison.” The interrogations continued but the investigators had lost interest. Sometimes they fell asleep during the sessions. The prisoners knew nothing.

At 11:30 p.m. Stalin retched. There were long pauses between ragged breaths. Kuperin told the assembled grandees, who watched in awed silence, that the situation was critical.

“Take all measures to save Comrade Stalin!” ordered the excited Beria. So the doctors continued to struggle to keep the dying Generalissimo alive. An artificial respirator was wheeled in and never used but it was accompanied by young technicians who stared “goggle-eyed” at the surreal things happening all around them.

On the 5th, Stalin suddenly paled and his breathing became shallower with longer intervals. The pulse was fast and faint. He started to wiggle his head. There were spasms in his left arm and leg. At midday, Stalin vomited blood. The latest research has uncovered a first draft of the doctors’ medical notes, which reveal that his stomach was haemorrhaging, a detail deleted from the final report. Perhaps it was cut because it might suggest poisoning. Warfarin might well have caused such bleeding, which does indeed look suspicious, but it may just have marked the collapse of a sick old body.

“Come quickly, Stalin’s had a setback!” Malenkov told Khrushchev. The magnates rushed back. Stalin’s pulse slowed. At 3:35 p.m., his breathing stopped for five seconds every two or three minutes. He was sinking fast. Beria, Khrushchev and Malenkov had received the Politburo’s permission to ensure that Stalin’s “documents and papers, both current and archival, are put in proper order.” Now, leaving the other two at the bedside, Beria sped into the Kremlin to begin the process of searching Stalin’s safe and files for incriminating documents. First there may have been a will: Lenin had left a testament and Stalin had talked of recording his thoughts. If so, Beria now destroyed it. The files were filled with denunciations and evidence against all the leaders. There would have been evidence of Beria’s dubious role in Baku during the Civil War and there would also have been the missing documents that revealed the bloody role of Malenkov and Khrushchev in the Great Terror, the Leningrad Case and the Doctors’ Plot. That afternoon, these three began the destruction of documents. This successfully protected the historical reputation of Khrushchev and Malenkov, even if Beria’s was already beyond repair.[55]

Beria returned. The doctors reported on the latest decline. An official meeting of the whole regime, three hundred senior officials, was set for that evening. Now the magnates gathered informally in one of the other rooms to form the new government. Beria and his “billygoat” Malenkov had prearranged the “collective leadership,” taking turns proposing the appointments. Molotov and Mikoyan returned to the Presidium, shrunk to its previous size. Molotov returned as Foreign Minister, Mikoyan as Minister of Internal and External Trade. Khrushchev remained one of the senior Secretaries but he was excluded from the government. Beria was dominant, reuniting the MVD and MGB while remaining First Deputy Premier. Malenkov succeeded to both Stalin’s posts of Premier and Secretary. Yet the military were also strengthened: Defence Minister Bulganin’s new deputies were the old paladins, Zhukov and Vasilevsky. Voroshilov became President. No wonder Beria was exultant.

The illegitimate Mingrelian, trained as an architect but seasoned in the police, was already dreaming of ruling the Imperium, one of the nuclear superpowers, and becoming an international statesman, not just a secret policeman anymore. He had survived against all the odds; he was free of fear. He could unleash his loathing of Stalin: “That scoundrel! That filth! Thank God we’re free of him!” He could expose that phoney Generalissimo: “He didn’t win the war!” he was soon telling his confidants. “We won the war!” Furthermore, “We would have avoided the war!” He harnessed the phrase “the cult of personality” to denounce Stalin. He would free the nationalities, open the economy, liberate East Germany, empty the labour camps with a beneficent amnesty and expose the Doctors’ Plot. He did not doubt for a moment that his superior intelligence and fresh anti-Bolshevik ideas would triumph. Even Molotov realized “he was a man of the future.”

If his policies seemed to prefigure Gorbachev’s reforms, Beria always remained “just a policeman,” in Stalin’s words, for he was itching to avenge himself on those, such as Vlasik, who had betrayed him. He was not the successor, merely the strongman in a “collective leadership.” But many of the new potentates feared him, his brutality and his bid for popularity by de-Bolshevizing the regime. Beria underestimated Khrushchev and the marshals. Nonetheless, it was a remarkable achievement.

Afterwards, the magnates gathered beside the wheezing patient. Beria approached the bedside and announced melodramatically like a Crown Prince in a movie: “Comrade Stalin, all the members of the Politburo are here. Speak to us!” There was no reaction.

Voroshilov pulled Beria back: “Let the bodyguards and staff come to the bedside—he knows them intimately.” Colonel Khrustalev stood by the bed and spoke to him. Stalin did not open his eyes. The leaders queued to bid goodbye, forming up in pairs like a crocodile of schoolchildren in order of importance, with Beria and Malenkov first, then Voroshilov, Molotov, Kaganovich and Mikoyan, followed by the younger leaders. They shook his hand ritually. Malenkov claimed that Stalin squeezed his fingers, passing him the succession.

Leaving just Bulganin at the bedside, the potentates then rushed to the Kremlin where the Presidium, Council of Ministers and Supreme Soviet Presidium gathered to rubber-stamp the new government: they removed Stalin as Premier but strangely left him as a Presidium member. The three hundred or so officials confirmed the prearranged deal. There was a sense of “relief” among the magnates.[56]

They expected a call from Bulganin to announce Stalin’s death but none came. Stalin was still holding out and they headed back to Kuntsevo. After 9 p.m., he started to sweat. His pulse was weak, his lips turned blue. The Politburo, Svetlana Stalin, Valechka, and the guards gathered round the sofa. The junior leaders crowded outside, watching from the doorway.

At 9:30 p.m., Stalin’s breaths were forty-eight a minute. His heartbeat grew fainter. At 9:40 p.m. with everyone watching, the doctors gave Stalin oxygen. His pulse virtually disappeared. The doctors proposed an injection of camphor and adrenalin to stimulate his heart. It should have been Vasily and Svetlana’s decision but they just watched. Beria gave the order. Stalin gave a shiver after the injection and became increasingly breathless. He slowly began to drown in his own fluids.

“Take Svetlana away,” commanded Beria to prevent her seeing this dread vision—but no one moved.

“His face was discoloured,” wrote Svetlana, “his features becoming unrecognisable . . . He literally choked to death as we watched. The death agony was terrible . . . At the last minute, he opened his eyes. It was a terrible look, either mad or angry and full of the fear of death.” Suddenly the rhythm of his breathing changed. His left hand rose. A nurse thought it was “like a greeting.” He “seemed either to be pointing upwards somewhere or threatening us all . . .” observed Svetlana. It was more likely that he was simply clawing the air for oxygen. “Then the next moment, his spirit after one last effort tore itself from his body.” A woman doctor burst into tears and threw her arms around the devastated Svetlana.

The struggle was not over yet. A Brobdingnagian doctor fell on the corpse and started artificial respiration, athletically massaging the chest.

It was so painful to watch that Khrushchev felt sorry for Stalin: “Stop it please! Can’t you see the man’s dead? What do you want? You won’t bring him back to life. He’s already dead,” Khrushchev called out, showing his impulsive authority in the first order not given by Beria or Malenkov. Stalin’s features became “pale . . . serene, beautiful, imperturbable,” wrote Svetlana. “We all stood frozen and silent.”

Once again they formed up in that uneasy crocodile: Beria darted forward and ritually kissed the warm body first, the equivalent of wrenching a dead king’s ring off his finger. The others queued up to kiss him. Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Bulganin, Khrushchev and Malenkov were sobbing with Svetlana. Molotov cried, mourning Stalin despite his own imminent liquidation and that of his wife. Mikoyan hid his feelings but “it may be said I was lucky.” Beria was not crying: indeed he was “radiant” and “regenerated”—a bulging but effervescent grey toad, glistening with ill-concealed relish. He strode through the weeping potentates into the hall.

The sepulchral silence around the deathbed was suddenly “shattered by the sound of his loud voice, the ring of triumph unconcealed,” in Svetlana’s words: “Khrustalev, the car!” he bellowed, heading for the Kremlin.

“He’s off to take power,” Mikoyan said to Khrushchev. Svetlana noticed “they were all terrified of him.” They looked after him—and then with frenzied haste, “the members of the government rushed for the door . . .” Mikoyan and Bulganin remained a little longer but then they too called for their limousines. The Instantsiya had left the building. The colossus had vanished, leaving only the husk of an old man on a sofa in an ugly suburban house.

Just the servants and family remained: “cooks, chauffeurs and watchmen, gardeners and women who waited at table” now emerged out of the background “to say goodbye.” Many were sobbing, with rough bodyguards wiping their eyes with their sleeves “like children.” A weeping old nurse gave them valerian drops. Svetlana watched numbly. Some servants started to turn off the lights and tidy up.

Then Stalin’s closest companion, the comfort of the cruel loneliness of this unparalleled monster, Valechka, who was now aged thirty-eight and had worked with Stalin since she was twenty, pushed through the crying maids, “dropped heavily to her knees” and threw herself onto the corpse with all the uninhibited grief of the ordinary people. This cheerful but utterly discreet woman, who had seen so much, was convinced to her dying day that “no better man ever walked the earth.” Laying her head squarely on his chest, Valechka, with tears pouring down the cheeks of “her round face,” “wailed at the top of her voice as the women in the villages do. She went on for a long time and nobody tried to stop her.”[57]

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[1] Some Jews were sacked. Kaganovich continued as Deputy Premier and Politburo member but his elder brother Yuli lost his job. Like Polina, Kaganovich’s grandson recalls that Lazar too remembered the Yiddish of his childhood: when he met the German Communist Ernest Thalman he tried to use it. The “second lady of the state,” Andreyev’s wife Dora Khazan, was sacked as Deputy Minister of Textiles and General Khrulev’s Jewish wife was arrested. Mekhlis, like Kaganovich, continued as Minister of State Control and only retired in 1950 after a stroke. The Jewish Boris Vannikov continued to run the First Directorate of Sovmin in charge of the nuclear project.

[2] Shamberg “was heartbroken,” according to his friend Julia Khrushcheva. Both Svetlana Stalin and Volya Malenkova are adamant that they ended unhappy marriages but there can have been no greater incentive to end an unhappy Jewish marriage than the seething anti-Semitic paranoia of Stalin. Stalin did not need to say a word. The young people knew what to do. To Malenkov’s meagre credit, he managed to protect the Shambergs themselves, hiding the boy’s father Mikhail in the provinces. “Volya” was a name invented by Malenkov, meaning “Will” as in the People’s Will.

 

[3] Stalin vs. Molotovs: Golda Meir, My Life, quoted in Vaksberg, Stalin Against Jews, pp. 188–191. On Carp/Karp: Davies, Mission to Moscow, 5 June 1938, p. 224. Voroshilova: Vasilieva, Kremlin Wives, p. 236. Kostyrchenko, pp. 104, 112, 116, 117, 121–2. Rubenstein and Naumov, Pogrom, pp. 46–7: contaminated, Svetlana, p. 42. Stalin’s dinner in south: Charkviani, pp. 45, 55; on Egnatashvili, pp. 5–7. GARF 8131.32.3289.144, Rudenko on Abakumov/Beria/Polina Case. Vaksberg, p. 189. MR, railway carriage, p. 325. Kaganovich: opera, pp. 150–1. Polina sacked: Kostyrchenko, p. 120. How to save the family: interview Vyacheslav Nikonov. Svetlana RR. Polina “bad influence on Nadya,” Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 202. Lozovsky’s arrest, Kostyrchenko, pp. 36–9. Volya Malenkova’s marriage: interview Volya Malenkova. Interview with Shamberg, Rubenstein and Naumov, Pogrom, pp. 44–5. (Malenkova’s divorce was in Jan. 1949, according to Naumov; 1947 according to Volya Malenkova.) Mikhail Shamberg appointed deputy head Kostrama Regional Council—Kostyrchenko, p. 118. Julia Khrushcheva. Igor Malenkov also claimed: “There was no political reason for the divorce. It was impossible to influence Volya. She was unhappy—her love was over.” 110 arrests: Kostyrchenko, pp. 116–8. Komarov’s torture in Kostyrchenko, pp. 124–5. Rubenstein and Naumov, Pogrom, pp. 45–6, 325; Jewish wives, Komarov to Lozovsky, pp. 282–3. GARF 8131.32.3289.144–7, Rudenko on Abakumov/Beria/Polina Case. KR I, pp. 280, 313: Stalin ordered Malenkov to divorce Shamberg. Fadayev’s wife, Valeria Gerasimova, quoted in Stalin Against Jews, p. 189. Polina’s fur coat: Larisa Alexevna in Vasilieva, Kremlin Wives, p. 147. Sister and brother die: Vyacheslav Nikonov. Svetlana Molotova best dressed, Svetlana OOY, p. 351. Sergo B, pp. 169–70; no one who contradicted him kept his wife, p. 148; Malenkov denies anti-Semitism, p. 161. PB Resolution on excluding Zhemchuzhina from Party, 29 Dec. 1948, and Molotov’s letter admitting mistaken voting on P. S. Zhemchuzhina in PB/Sovmin, pp. 312–13.

[4] On 22 August 1946, Stalin listened to the weather forecast and was infuriated to hear that it was completely wrong. He therefore ordered Voroshilov to investigate the weather forecasters to discover if there was “sabotage” among the weathermen. It was an absurd job that reflected Stalin’s disdain for the First Marshal who reported the next day that it was unjust to blame the weather forecasters for the mistakes.

[5] Molotov Case: Komarov in Kostyrchenko, pp. 124–5. You old whore: Rubenstein and Naumov, Pogrom, p. 52. MR, pp. 322–6. Not at synagogue; no intimate relationship, phone my husband, four eternities: Vasilieva, Kremlin Wives, pp. 141–3, 149. Many thought she had been shot: KR I, p. 280. Kulaks: Vyacheslav Nikonov. Molotov: RGASPI 558.11.762.15, Stalin to Voznesensky, Beria and Malenkov 9 Apr. 1948. RGASPI 82.2.906.22–3, 24–7, MGB Deputy Minister Ogoltsov to Molotov about Vano Ivanovich Mikoyan and “sons of A. I. Mikoyan.” Voroshilov: MR, p. 225. Voroshilov, Stalin and weather: GARF P5446.54.31.148, Voroshilov to Stalin 23 Aug. 1946. Mao, Mikoyan: Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War, pp. 38–40. Mikoyan, pp. 528–9. Stepan M, pp. 136–40. Interview with Stepan Mikoyan. Zubok, pp. 57–9.

[6] These dangers were perfectly demonstrated in 1991 when Boris Yeltsin used his Russian Presidency to demolish Gorbachev’s USSR. The moving of the capital back to Leningrad, city of Zinoviev and Kirov, had been a deadly issue in Russian politics ever since Peter the Great. Men died for it in the eighteenth century and they would die for it in 1949. Stalin was also suspicious of the popular heroism of Kuznetsov and the city of Leningrad itself during WWII. It represented an alternative totem of military patriotism to himself and Moscow.

[7] Meanwhile just across the landing, in another apartment at Granovsky, a similar discussion in this tiny world was going on: Rada Khrushcheva, whose father was still in Kiev, was staying with her father’s friends the Malenkovs. She wanted to go to the wedding, but Malenkov, who knew how doomed Kuznetsov was, refused to give her the limousine to take her there. “I won’t give you the car—you’re not studying well.” But Rada went under her own steam.

[8] “Dear Svetochka,” Stalin wrote to Svetlana in hospital on May 1950. “I got your letter. I’m glad you got off so lightly. Kidney trouble is a serious business. To say nothing of having a child. Where did you ever get the idea I’d abandoned you? It’s the sort of thing people dream up. I advise you not to believe your dreams. Take care of yourself. Take care of your daughter too. The State needs people even those born prematurely. Be patient a little longer—we’ll see each other soon. I kiss you my Svetochka. Your ‘little papa.’ ” He did not devote all his time to the Leningrad Case. During these days, he also supervised the creation of the new Soviet Encyclopaedia, deciding every detail from its quality of paper to its contents. When the editor asked if he should include “negative persons” such as Trotsky, he joked, “We’ll include Napoleon, but he was a big scoundrel!”

[9] Leningrad Affair: Resolution of PB on removal of A. A. Kuznetsov, M. I. Rodionov and P. S. Popkov 15 Feb. 1949, PB/Sovmin pp. 66–7; Resolution of PB on removal of Voznesensky from PB 7 Mar. 1949, p. 69. Voznesensky arrogance of Mikoyan, pp. 559–60, 564–8, Ukrainians not people, p. 559. Affable at home: Sergo Mikoyan. Directness: Simonov quotes Stalin to Kovalev, “Glazami,” p. 58. Cleverest person after Stalin: Chadaev in Kumanev (ed.), p. 426. Stalin’s approval of Voznesensky’s food question and answers: RGASPI 558.11.731.126–34, Stalin to Zhdanov, Patolichev, Beria and Kosygin Sept. 1946. Beria vs. Voznesensky, MR, pp. 292–4. Sergo B, pp. 217–8. Kuznetsov and Zhdanov arrange Malenkov’s exile, IA 1 (1994), p. 34. Sergo Mikoyan: Kuznetsov’s son to Sergo Mikoyan on Kirov files. MR, AAK “a good lad,” p. 292; “handsome young Kuznetzov,” and Stalin refuses to shake his hand, Svetlana OOY. Mikoyan, “AAK nice, sincere, cheerful” and treasures from Stalin, pp. 559–65. Sudoplatov: Kuznetsov friends with Abakumov, pp. 325–7. Sexual antics of officials: Lesser Terror , pp. 214–21. Pride in letter: “Motherland won’t forget you” from Stalin: Valery A. Kuznetsov on BBC2, Timewatch, Leningrad Affair. Hahn, p. 123. See Kuznetsov, “Abakumov,” Slavic Military Studies, Mar. 1999. Deriabin: trains to Leningrad, p. 39. Volkogonov, pp. 520–1. Voznesensky on ice at dinner, KR I, p. 272. “Stalin says kill one, he kills 1,000” Beria on Malenkov, Sergo B, p. 162. Sergo and Alla: Mikoyan, pp. 565–7. Sergo Mikoyan: the wedding, “I feel unwell,” said Kuznetzov. Malenkov to Rada: “I won’t give you the car,” Julia Khrushcheva. Svetlana and Yury Zhdanov. Proposal to Stalin: no lecture, Yury Zhdanov. “I don’t know her character, you did not want me,” Sergo B, p. 152. “My Yurochka” in Gulia Djugashvili, p. 60. Wedding of Yury Zhdanov and Svetlana Stalin: Stepan Mikoyan and Natasha Andreyeva. Marriage, my father wanted it, never make a deal, sex not a success: Svetlana RR. Stalin comes to Zubalovo: Twenty Letters, pp. 200–1. “Our characters didn’t match,” Mikoyan, p. 362. Stalin no more attention than before: Svetlana OOY, p. 319. Birth of Katya, Stalin’s note, Zinaida Zhdanova: Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 207–9. “Means he’s guilty”: Mikoyan, p. 567. Might spread to others: KR I, pp. 272–5. RGASPI 558.11.713.110–4, meetings 13 June and 19 July on Encyclopaedia, S. Vavilov’s report of meetings with Stalin. Bus-stop ride: Tukov in Rybin, Ryadom, p. 87.

 

[10] Sergo and Alla were convinced this was “an intrigue by Malenkov and Beria who tricked Stalin. It’s amazing we believed this,” recalls Sergo. “But we never ONCE spoke about the case until after Stalin’s death.” His father allowed Sergo to see Kuznetsov’s son but not his wife because he knew she too would be arrested. As for the Kremlin children who lived in Granovsky Street, they noticed that suddenly their neighbours, the Voznesenskys and Kuznetsovs, had gone. “But no one mentioned it,” said Igor Malenkov, whose father was responsible. “I just concentrated on reading about sport.” Julia Khrushcheva “used to play with Natasha, Voznesensky’s daughter. Soon after her father’s arrest, I brought her home to our flat. But my mother said nothing.” The etiquette of unpersonage differed from family to family: while Natasha Poskrebysheva went on playing with Natasha Voznesenskaya, Nadya Vlasik “crossed the road whenever she saw her.” I am especially grateful to Sergo Mikoyan for sharing his account of this story.

[11] Mikoyan, pp. 567–8. Sergo Mikoyan. Igor Malenkov. Julia Khrushcheva. Natalya Poskrebysheva. Bulganin’s role: Vlast, no. 7, 2000, p. 53: Smirtukov on Bulganin. GARF 8131.sj.32.3289.1–11, Rudenko to Khrushchev, testimonies of I. M. Turko, ex-Secretary of Yaroslavsky Obkom, of Zakrizhevskaya, of investigator Putitsev; Abakumov to Stalin: “I propose to C. Stalin to arrest Kapustin . . . English spy”; list of sentences; Komarov orders accused to implicate Zhdanov and Kosygin but at last moment, Komarov orders them not to do so. Rudenko reports 29 Jan. 1954 and blames Abakumov 12 Feb. 1954. Khrushchev inseparable from Malenkov and Beria: Kaganovich, p. 64; Mikoyan, p. 587. Bulganin’s role: Budyonny Notes, p. 49. Interrogations: Lesser Terror, pp. 214–21. See Parrish, “Serov”; Kuznetzov, “Abakumov.” On Leningradskoe delo:Komsomolskaya Pravda 2/1990. Iu S. Aksenov in Voprosy Istorii, KPSS, Nov. 1990, pp. 102–3. Vozvrashchennaya Imeria, vol. 1, p. 317. Izvestiya TsK KPSS, 2, 1989. Sovi etskaya Militaria, 4, 1991. Volkogonov, pp. 520–1. Hahn, p. 123. Sergo B, p. 217. IA. Sudoplatov, p. 325. Trial:Argumenty i facty , no. 17, 1998, p. 7. KR I, pp. 251, 279. Molotov linked to Voznesensky: Vlast, no. 38, 2000, p. 53. Kuznetsov’s goodbye: Valery Kuznetsov in BBC2, Timewatch, Leningrad Affair. Khrushchev accuses Malenkov of “whispering to Stalin” at June 1957 Plenum, IA. Molotov and Beria “feared Voznesensky,” MR, p. 292. Zhukov on Gosplan Affair and Beria’s envy of Gosplan, IA vol. 3, 1993, pp. 22–7, and vol. 4, p. 74; on Kuznetsov vs. Malenkov: IA vol. 1, 1994, p. 34. Rodina, vol. 5, 1994, p. 82. On Voznesensky’s mistakes, Kruglov to Stalin 3 Mar. 1949; on leave of Voznesensky 7 Mar. 1949; Andreyev’s report 22 Aug. 1949; and notes of Voznesensky to Stalin on loss of secret documents 1 Sept. 1949, in PB/Sovmin, pp. 278, 285, 293–5, 297. RGASPI 83.1.5.96, Voznesensky to Stalin 17 Aug. 1949.

 

[12] They were now the heart of Stalin’s new inner “quintet,” along with Beria and Bulganin. Kaganovich enjoyed a partial return to favour. On Sundays, those two fat bureaucrat friends, Khrushchev and Malenkov, took bracing walks up Gorky Street, surrounded by phalanxes of secret policemen.

[13] Beria and Bomb: This account is completely based on Holloway, pp. 213–9, including “before the people”—Pervukhin; Beria’s July 1953 letter to Malenkov on his “comradely attitude” on departure for Semipalatinsk and “colossal achievement,” p. 143. “Grind you to pulp,” Beria, p. 139. Beria in favour, Vlasik, p. 130. Deriabin, pp. 62–3. Lilya Drozhdova, “beauty,” “don’t let him,” “great love”: Martha Peshkova. Khrushchev’s recall: KR I, pp. 249, 268–75; return, Moscow Case, favourite, balance with Malenkov/Beria, KR II, p. 95. On Moscow Case: Stalin to Malenkov: “I know the facts about Moscow. Maybe I’m guilty of not paying due attention to complaints because I trusted C. Popov. We must check it out . . .” RGASPI 558.11.762.30–1, Stalin to Malenkov on G. M. Popov and Moscow Case, 29 Oct. 1949. Naumov in Taubman, pp. 93–6; Barsukov in Taubman, pp. 44–8; Khrushchev’s brutalities, almost a million: Shapoval in Taubman, pp. 33–41. Khrushchev to Stalin on the need to expel “harmful elements from villages,” Feb. 1948, and Resolution of PB on Commission for resettled individuals, the organization of special prisons and camps, and expulsion from Ukraine of harmful elements, 10 Feb. 1948, PB/ Sovmin, pp. 250, 254: “Agrotowns.” Malenkov and Molotov vs. Khrushchev who is saved by Beria: author’s interview with A. Mirtskhulava. Negus of Ethiopia: Igor Malenkov. Simonov in Beria, p. 209: Beria underestimates Khrushchev: “fool” and “deep naturalness, pure masculinity etc.” Execution of Uniate Archbishop and Ukrainian nationalists: Sudoplatov, p. 249. “Jolly pigheaded,” Svetlana OOY, p. 163. “I his son,” Stefan Staszewski in Oni, p. 171. Hahn, pp. 137–41. RGASPI 82.2.897.101, Khrushchev to Stalin and Molotov, Mar. 1945. To limit Beria/short leash: Sergo B, p. 218. Malenkov and Khrushchev, S. Khrushchev, Superpower, p. 29. Granovsky life/walks: Julia Khrushcheva, Igor Malenkov, Volya Malenkova, Nina Budyonny. Inseparables: Kaganovich, p. 85. Mikoyan, pp. 581–3. RGASPI 73.2.23.143, Andreyev’s recanting on errors of his position on matter of organizing labour on collective farms, Feb. 1950. Khrushchev’s recanting to Stalin, 6 Mar. 1951, in PB /Sovmin, p. 334. Hollow head: Taubman, Khrushchev, Man and Era, p. 230. Inner leadership. Yoram Gorlizki, “Stalin’s Cabinet: the Politburo and Decision-making in the Postwar Years,” pp. 194–6, in Christopher Read: The Stalin Years. RGASPI 558.11.1481.51, Stalin’s holiday: 5 Sept. to 7 Dec. 1949. The Bomb and singing: Mgeladze, pp. 127–9; nannies: pp. 117–8, 120.

[14] Mao had brought a treasure trove of Chinese gifts and several carriages of rice. The lacquer ornaments still hang on the walls of Molotov’s retirement flat on Granovsky and Stalin divided the rice among his courtiers. In return, Stalin presented him with the names of his Soviet agents in the Chinese Politburo. Back in Peking, Mao swiftly liquidated them.

[15] Emelian Pugachev was the Cossack pretender claiming to be the dead Emperor Peter 111 who led a massive peasant rebellion against Catherine the Great in 1773–74.

[16] The following account of Mao’s visit and the Korean War is based on Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War, pp. 84–93, 111–29, and Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, pp. 36, 54–6, 62–72. Lipki: Rybin, Stalin i Zhukov, quoting V. Tukov, p. 39. Fedorenko, St.-Mao summit in Moscow, Far Eastern A fairs , Moscow, 2:1989. Gromyko, Memoirs, p. 249. Deriabin: bugging, battle of China, p. 109. Real Marxist, rice, Stalin jealous: Sergo B, p. 221. Mao at Kuntsevo, Chinese Pugachev: MR, p. 81. Metropol reception: Ehrenburg, Postwar Years, p. 302. Scatology: Lesser Terror, p. 190

 

[17] Birthday committee and medals: GARF 7523.65.218a.1–28. Medals: GARF 7523.65.218. Guest list: GARF 7523.65.181a.1–7. Gift packs: GARF 7523c.65.739. 1–14, Shvernik to Zverev. All dated 17 Dec. 1949. Brooks, Thank You C. Stalin, pp. 219–20. Volkogonov, pp. 525–8. Maya, p. 114. Sergo B, p. 219. Stepan M, p. 190. Natalya Poskrebysheva.

[18] Stalin admired Chou and President Liu Shao-chi as the most “distinguished” of Mao’s men but he thought that Marshal Chu-Teh was a Chinese version of “our Voroshilov and Budyonny.”

[19] Fedorenko, St.-Mao summit in Moscow, Far Eastern A fairs, Moscow, 2: 1989. Gromyko, Memoirs, p. 249. Deriabin: bugging, battle of China, p. 109; Uncertain Partners: pp. 84–93, 111–29. Zubok, pp. 36, 57–62. Real Marxist, rice, Stalin jealous: Sergo B, p. 221; Mao at Kuntsevo, Chinese Pugachev: p. 81. Metropol reception: Ehrenburg, Postwar Years, p. 302. Scatology: Lesser Terror, p. 190. Mgeladze, pp. 137–8.

 

[20] Korea: RGASPI 558.11.1481.51. Holiday 1950: 5 Aug.–22 Dec., Zubok, pp. 64–6. This account is also based on Holloway, pp. 277–83, and Goncharov, Lewis and Litai, pp. 135, 189–99. Outstanding Mao, trust: Mgeladze, p. 137. Gromyko, Memoirs, p. 102. Khrushchev, Glasnost, pp. 146–7. “Nothing except for their men,” Zubok, pp. 71, 299. Some accounts claim Chou En-lai met Stalin at the Sochi house but he spent most of this period at New Athos. “I think I can rely on him”—Mgeladze, p. 138. “What is he doing?”—Beria, Charkviani notes. Gela Charkviani.

 

[21] GARF 8131.sj.32.3289.1–11, Rudenko to Khrushchev. Volkogonov, pp. 520–1. Hahn, p. 123. MR, p. 292. Sergo B, p. 217. IA. Sudoplatov, p. 325. Trial: Argumenty i Facty, no. 17, 1998, p. 7. KR I, p. 279. On Stalin’s signs next to names of accused: Lev Voznesensky on BBC2 Timewatch, Leningrad Affair. On Voznesensky’s death: Andrei Malenkov, p. 54. Kuznetsov’s death: Julia Khrushcheva.

[22] Even Svetlana’s husband was now involved. In the Central Committee machine, Yury Zhdanov, Stalin’s son-in-law, that highly qualified paragon of Soviet education, reported to the orchestrator of the anti-Semitic hunt, Malenkov, that some scientists “had flooded theoretical departments of . . . Institutes with its supporters, Jews by origin.”

[23] Jews: Kostyrchenko, pp. 224–7, Zaltsman and ZiS Case. Kostyrchenko, on Yury Zhdanov, p. 244. Stefan Staszewski in Oni, pp. 170–2. Khrushchev on Jews: crows, Sudoplatov, p. 294, Abramoviches in Istochnik , 3, 1994, p. 96. Jews at car factory, KR I, pp. 280–9; tumour in Stalin’s mind and briefing of Ukrainian leaders Melnikov and Korotchenko, pp. 280–9. Kostyrchenko on ZiS Case: pp. 227–33. Rubenstein and Naumov, Pogrom, p. 51. On Mingrelian Affair: Beria, p. 158; Sudoplatov, pp. 321–5; Abakumov collects Beria’s perversions, p. 315. Stalin may have used the phrase “Big Mingrelian” to Ignatiev: Lesser Terror, pp. 236–7. Sarkisov betrays Beria to Abakumov/Stalin: Vlast, 2000, no. 22. Mgeladze is understandably reluctant to retell his own part in this affair but happily recounts his undermining of Beria: Mgeladze, pp. 99–100, 167–70. Charkviani notes, Gela Charkviani, Eka Rapava. Nina Rukhadze. Alyosha Mirtskhulava.

[24] “I want to delay my return because of bad weather in Moscow and the danger of flu. I’ll be in Moscow after the coming of frost,” Stalin wrote to Malenkov on December 1950.

 

[25] As in 1937, the Terror first destroyed the leadership of the MGB itself which was now arrested. Colonel Naum Shvartsman, one of the cruellest torturers since the late thirties and a journalist expert at editing confessions, testified that he had had sex not only with his own son and daughter but also with Abakumov himself, and, at night when he broke into the British Embassy, with Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, a momentous diplomatic development in Anglo-Soviet relations that had mysteriously passed unnoticed at the Court of St. James. Shvartsman claimed to have been poisoned with “Zionist soup”—an idea that harks back to the infamous plot by Enemies in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast during the thirties to poison Kaganovich’s gefilte. But he also delivered what Stalin wanted, implicating Abakumov, that unlikely Zionist sympathiser.

[26] Riumin: Lesser Terror, pp. 174, 230–5, 272. Kostyrchenko, pp. 125–6, 262. Gulags: A. Applebaum, GULAG, p. 522. Riumin vs. Abakumov: J. Brent and V. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Secret, pp. 107–25. Sudoplatov: role of Sukhanov/Malenkov, pp. 328–9; Doctors’ Plot as internal power struggle—Stalin, Malenkov and Khrushchev vs. Beria and old guard, pp. 298–300. Ignatiev was already the CC Secretary responsible for the MGB before becoming Minister: Sudoplatov, pp. 300–6. Sukhanov, Memoirs. Sergo B, p. 217; Sergo Beria claimed that Malenkov “dictated” Riumin’s letter, which is possible but neatly removes Beria from the equation. Beria, pp. 157–9. The Midget: see Kostyrchenko, pp. 125–6. Little Mishka Riumin: Deriabin, pp. 47–57, 89. Poskrebyshev: articles in Pravda, 13 Oct. 1952 and 30 Dec. 1952. GARF 7523.55.65.1, Ignatiev appointed MGB 5 July and officially 9 Aug.; Abakumov sacked 11 Aug. 1951; Riumin officially Deputy Minister 19 Oct. 1951, PB/Sovmin, pp. 343–8. GARF 8131.sj.32. 3289.26, Abakumov to Beria 15 Aug. 1952. Abakumov’s career and his part in destruction of Ordzhonikidze family inc. Konstantin Ordzhonikidze, GARF 8131.sj.32.3289.38, Rudenko to Khrushchev Jan. 1954. Abakumov’s luxuries: GARF 8131.32.3289.199–200, Rudenko on Beria. Naumov, pp. 53–5. Broken Abakumov: Golgofa, pp. 10–15, 21–8, 30–40. Ignatiev: Hahn, p. 142; “mild and considerate,” KR I, pp. 303–7. Beria’s disappointment with Merkulov: Beria, pp. 157–9. On curators: Nikita Petrov. Abakumov corruption and baby carriage: Deriabin, pp. 47–57; Shvartsman, Sudoplatov, pp. 300–6. Merkulov had also denounced Abakumov, hoping to regain the MGB. He was rewarded with the Ministry of State Control. Holiday RGASPI 558.11.1481.52; RGASPI 83.1.9.57, Stalin to Malenkov 13 Dec. 1950.

 

[27] Stalin’s holiday, 10 Aug.–22 Dec. 1951. Health: Tukov and Orlov quoted Rybin, Ryadom, pp. 91–4. Medvedev, Neizvestnyi Stalin, pp. 19–20. Visits Stalin twice a week: Mikoyan, p. 529. Lake Ritsa: author’s visit. “I’m finished”: KR I, p. 272. Ignores Voroshilov, MR, p. 225, and reads no papers, pp. 179–80. Bored with economic questions: Medvedev, p. 490. Delayed budget until last minute: Smirtukov in Vlast, 2000, no. 25, p. 46. Bulganin’s speech corrected: RGASPI 558.11.712.145, Nov. 1950. New cadres: Mgeladze, p. 125; movements: Mgeladze, p. 141. Malenkov’s studies: Shepilov, “Vospominaniya,” p. 3. Bananas: Mikoyan, pp. 529–33; Charkviani, pp. 40–1. Charkviani says this was at Coldstream, Mikoyan at New Athos: also inner leadership: Gorlizki, p. 197: Minister Menshikov sacked 4 Nov. 1951. Successors: Khrushchev, Glasnost, p. 39.

[28] Vlasik was despatched to be Deputy Commandant of a labour camp in the Urals whence he rashly bombarded Stalin with protestations of his innocence. But this did not place Beria in charge of his bodyguards who remained under Ignatiev’s MGB.

[29] Stalin protected Charkviani because the leader had been taught the alphabet as a boy by a Father Charkviani. Stalin moved him to work as a CC Inspector in Moscow. But Beria was powerless to defend himself or his protégés. When the Mingrelian secret policeman Rapava, who was a family friend of the Berias, was arrested, his wife bravely set off secretly to Moscow to ask Nina Beria’s help. But when the desperate woman called Beria’s house, Nina was too scared to come to the phone. The German housekeeper Ella said, “Nina cannot come to the phone.” This was how the Mingrelians realized that Beria himself was in trouble.

 

[30] Last holiday: KR I, pp. 325–8. Vlasik, p. 41. Mgeladze: movements between houses, pp. 141–7. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 200–1, 207–9, Nadya mentioned. Svetlana OOY, p. 319, and leaves Kremlin, p. 140. Svetlana RR. Nadya’s photos: Volkogonov, pp. 154–5. Invited old friends who grumbled: MR, p. 212. Svetlana marriage: Yury Zhdanov. Svetlana in charge and whatever next?: Mgeladze, pp. 117–20. Svetlana asked father for divorce: Charkviani, pp. 59–60. Yury as “iceberg” etc., quoted in Miklos Kun,Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, p. 372. Zhdanov’s renaissance: Raanan, p. 168. Mikoyan, p. 362. Stepan M, p. 145. Beria’s secretary Ludvigov in Sudoplatov, p. 321. Grandchildren: Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 75–8. Gulia Djugashvili, p. 28. False teeth: doctors’ reports in Vasily, p. 181. Mingrelian Case: Starts with anti-bribery case against C. Baramia on 9 Nov. 1951, then PB resolution on Georgian Communist Party, 27 Mar. 1952, in PB/Sovmin, p. 349. Lesser Terror, pp. 236–7. Sergo B, pp. 241–3; tiger, pp. 120–1; wisecracks, p. 168; Stalin sleeping like a gundog, fond of Nina, fear, Svetlana’s visits, pp. 241–2; “coming for warmth,” p. 148; Beria unhappy, p. 296; Soviet State too small: p. 235; Malenkov’s role: p. 247; solidarity, p. 239. C. H. Fairbanks, “Clientism and Higher Politics in Georgia 1949–53,” Transcaucasia. Charkviani, pp. 40–58. The phone call: Gela Charkviani. Mgeladze ran holiday homes, Sudoplatov, p. 359. Mgeladze and Mingrelian Affair: bordello, pp. 142–3, 162–3; race to the house, pp. 146, 180–4, 192–200; Stalin hated Beria, pp. 178–9; last dinners at New Athos with Khrushchev and his toasts, pp. 148–9; resistance of PB to young leaders, p. 191. Nina Rukhadze. KR I, pp. 271, 309–11. Lilya Drozhdova—Martha Peshkova. Tamara Rapava’s visit—Eka Rapava; similarly when Candide Charkviani, who had been made a CC Inspector in Moscow, asked to be received by Beria, he was unable to see him—Gela Charkviani. Beria and foreign policy, reunifying Germany in 1952: Zubok in Taubman, pp. 275–7. Mutual support: Mikoyan, pp. 536, 581–3; Vlasik: Nadezhda Vlasika. GARF 7523.107.127.1–6, Vlasik’s appeal for pardon. Guards: Deriabin, pp. 74, 83–5. Stalin complains that Beria is supported by Molotov and Kaganovich, Mgeladze, p. 178.

[31] Georgi Dmitrov, the Bulgarian leader, died in 1949.

[32] Doctors: Kostyrchenko, pp. 262–70. Vaksberg, Stalin Against Jews, p, 242. Vinogradov’s examination: Rapoport, pp. 216–8. Post-mortem by Dr. Myasnikov confirmed serious hardening of cerebral arteries, arteriosclerosis—see Beria, pp. 172, 270. Stalin on doctors: chattering: RGASPI 74.2.38.89, Stalin to Voroshilov, n.d. “Drinking”: Stalin to Edward Kardelj in Dedijer, Tito Speaks, p. 294. “In my grave”—Harriman-Abel, pp. 349–53. Poskrebyshev’s pills etc: Natasha Poskrebysheva. Volkogonov, p. 526. Destruction of medical records: Medvedev, Neizvestnyi Stalin, pp. 18–20. Symptoms described by bodyguards: Rybin, Ryadom, pp. 91–4. Talks to bodyguard V. Tukov on doctors: Rybin, Kto Otravil Stalina, p. 10, and to Valechka in Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 215. Vasily flypast: Stepan M, p. 171.

 

[33] One of the survivors of Stalin’s time, Maxim Litvinov, the Jewish ex–Foreign Commissar, managed to die in his bed on 31 December 1951. He was a perennial target of the MGB’s anti-Semitic cases. Molotov admitted that Litvinov should have been shot for his rambunctious indiscretions in the late war years: “It was only by chance that he remained among the living,” said Molotov chillingly. There was a plan to arrange a road accident à la Mikhoels but finally Litvinov died with his errant English wife by his bedside: “Englishwoman go home!” were his last words. “They did not get him,” said Ivy Litvinov who returned to London. Their daughter now lives in Brighton.

[34] Rubenstein and Naumov, Pogrom, pp. 55–61: Lozovsky’s deconstruction, p. 256; Kostyrchenko, pp. 126–35. Description of Lozovsky by Margaret Bourke-White in Rubenstein and Naumov, Pogrom, p. 219. Longevity: Prof. A. Bogolomov’s work: Medvedev, Neizvestyi Stalin, p. 17. Litvinov’s death: Carswell, p. 162.

 

[35] Andreyev had appealed to Malenkov in January 1949 to “check the treatment . . . I don’t feel good despite following doctors’ orders. My head’s dizzy . . . I almost fall over. I’m disastrous. I feel the treatment and diagnosis is wrong . . .” He was probably right since the cocaine was clearly the wrong medicine. He signed off: “I’m devilishly unhappy to be out of work.”

[36] RGASPI 83.1.35.35, Andreyev to Malenkov 7 Jan. 1949. Kostyrchenko, pp. 273–8, Andreyev’s cocaine, p. 284. Leg irons, Vaksberg, Stalin Against Jews, p. 242. Stalin to V. Tukov, bodyguard, in Rybin, Kto Otravil Stalina, p. 10. On war: Lozgachev quoted by Radzinsky, p. 551. We must prevent war: Sergo B, p. 357. Stalin trembled with fear about war: KR II, p. 11. Also: apologies to his guards and kindness to staff in Rybin, Ryadom, pp. 90–1. Rybin, Stalin i Zhukov, “Boss,” pp. 42–3. The latest research on the Doctors’ Plot: J. Brent and V. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime, p. 130–35, 184.

 

[37] Chikobava told Stalin that some of his Armenian colleagues had been sacked for sharing his views so Stalin immediately got the Armenian boss, Arutinov, on the telephone and asked about the professors. “They were removed from their posts,” replied Arutinov. “You were in too much of a hurry,” replied Stalin and hung up. The professors were woken up immediately and restored to their positions. His meeting with Chikobava probably took place on 12 April 1950 just as he was discussing the timing of the Korean War; Stalin’s article was published on 20 June that year. Chikobava’s original letter was sent to Stalin by Candide Charkviani, then Georgian First Secretary, which shows the power of those with direct access to the Vozhd.

[38] Sergo B, pp. 148, 236–7; “Islamic fanaticism,” p. 133. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 222. KR I, pp. 290–5. Thank You C. Stalin, p. 326. Stalin Prize meeting and antiSemitism: Simonov, “Glazami,” pp. 83–5. Mikoyan, pp. 569–71. Holloway, p. 289. Mekhlis , pp. 291–4: Mekhlis died on 13 Feb. 1953, three weeks before Stalin who allowed him a magnificent funeral. Chikobava/linguistics: Arnold Chikobava, “Kogda i kak eto bylo,” Ezhegodnik iberiysko-kavkazkogo yazykoznaniya, vol. 12, 1985 , pp. 9–14. Medvedev, Neizvestnyi Stalin: “Stalin and Linguistics:An Episode in the History of Soviet Science.” Alexei Kojevnikov, “Games of Stalinist Democracy, Ideological discussions in Soviet sciences 1947–1952” in Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions , pp. 162–9. Prestige of Molotov, Mikoyan: Gorlizki, p. 207.

[39] Molotov opened the Congress, Kaganovich spoke on the Party rules, and Voroshilov closed it, representing the status quo, which few guessed that Stalin was planning to radically overturn. But there were clues. Significantly Stalin changed the Party’s name from Bolshevik to Communist Party. In the new Presidium, Beria slipped from his usual third place after Molotov, and Malenkov to fifth after Voroshilov. Beria’s acolytes Merkulov and Dekanozov were dropped from the new CC.

[40] Yet Stalin still remembered his loyalest retainer Mekhlis, who had suffered a stroke in 1949. Now dying at his dacha, all he longed for was to attend the Congress. Stalin refused, muttering that it was not a hospital but when the new CC was announced, he remembered him. Mekhlis was thrilled—he died happy and Stalin authorized a magnificent funeral.

[41] One of these heirs would probably have been Mikhail Suslov, fifty-one, Party Secretary, who combined the necessary ideological kudos (Zhdanov’s successor as CC Ideology and International Relations chief) with the brutal commitment: he had purged Rostov in 1938, supervised the deportation of the Karachai during the war, suppressed the Baltics afterwards and presided over the anti-Semitic campaign. In 1948, he frequently met Stalin. Furthermore, he was personally ascetic. Beria loathed this “Party rat,” bespectacled, tall and thin as a “tapeworm” with the voice of a “grating castrate.” Roy Medvedev makes the educated guess that Suslov was “Stalin’s secret heir” in his new Neizvestnyi Stalin but there is no evidence of this. Suslov helped overthrow the de-Stalinizing Khrushchev in 1964 and became the éminence grise of the re-Stalinizing Brezhnev regime right up until his death in 1982. At the Plenum, Brezhnev himself was one of the young names elected to the Presidium. On his title, Stalin got his way: afterwards he appeared as the first “Secretary” but no longer as “General Secretary,” a change that persuaded some historians that he lost power at the Plenum. Until recently, the only account of this extraordinary meeting was Simonov’s but now we also have the memoirs of Mikoyan, Shepilov and Efremov.

[42] L. N. Efremov, “Memoir of Plenum” in Dosye Glasnosty, Spetsvypusk, 2001, p. 11. Simonov, “Glazami,” Znamya, pp. 97–9. Mikoyan, pp. 573–7. MR, p. 319. KR I, pp. 299–302, doctor, pp. 303–7. Sergo B, p. 342; Beria on Suslov, p. 161; none would succeed Stalin, p. 161. Beria, pp. 165–8. Resolution of Plenum of CC on composition of Presidium, Buro of Presidium and Secretariat, 16 Oct. 1952, in PB/Sovmin, p. 89. On Lenin: Service, Lenin, pp. 449–50. On final ideology: Zubok, p. 76. “Of Lenin! Of Lenin!”—“Neizvestnaya Rossiya,” 20th Century, vol. 1, 1992, p. 275, quoted in Zubok, pp. 73, 295. Stepan M, pp. 186–7. Deriabin, p. 95. Hahn, pp. 148–9. Rosenfeldt, pp. 191–2. Return of Ribbentrop protocols: Sudoplatov, p. 327. Suslov as successor: Medvedev, Neizvestnyi Stalin (Stalin’s Secret Heir). Suslov’s meetings with Stalin 1948: IA.

[43] The “Midget” plunged with the same speed that he had risen to an obscure desk in the Ministry of State Control and was replaced by SA Goglidze. Earlier, Stalin turned against his instrument in the Mingrelian Case, Georgian MGB boss Rukhadze, who had boasted of his intimacy with theVozhd. “The question of Rukhadze’s arrest is timely,” Stalin wrote to Mgeladze and Goglidze on 25 June 1952. “Send him to Moscow where we’ll decide his fate!” Riumin, Goglidze and Rukhadze were all shot after Stalin’s death.

[44] Sergo B on Dr. Vinogradov, p. 243. Stalin to Ignatiev—“Beat, beat”: KR I, pp. 303–7. Ignatiev: Lesser Terror, pp. 234–5. Stalin’s alliance with Riumin and Goglidze, Golgofa, p. 28. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 75–7, and Johnreed Svanidze, p. 87; Gulia Djagashvili, p. 28. Never still, and Svetlana’s affair with Johnreed Svanidze: G. Djagashvili in Biagi, pp. 60–3. Kostyrchenko, pp. 262, 280–1. Sergo B on Vinogradov: pp. 243–4. Put them in handcuffs and beat: Ludvigov to Sudoplatov, p. 306. Downfall of Rukhadze: RGASPI 558.11.135.88, Stalin to Goglidze, Mgeladze 25 June 1952. 6th and 7th November parades: Hahn, pp. 148–9. GARF 7523.107.127.1–6, Vlasik’s appeal for pardon. Kostyrchenko, pp. 285–7. Vaksberg, Stalin Against Jews, p. 246. Vlasik’s staff shot: Parrish, “Serov,” p. 125. Vlasik and caviar/Poskrebyshev appeals to Beria, Sergo B, pp. 242, 363. “You parasites!” Stalin to Vlasik, Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 217. On Poskrebyshev: articles in Pravda, 13 Oct. and 30 Dec. 1952. IA, 1997: KR I, p. 34. Volkogonov, pp. 528, 569, and Medvedev, Neizvestnyi Stalin, “Riddles of Stalin’s Death.” V. P. Malin was apparently designated his successor though it seems his deputy S. Chernukha continued to run the office. Natasha Poskrebysheva. Nadya Vlasika. Poskrebyshev often visited Beria: Martha Peshkova. Molotov on Poskrebyshev, Vlasik and women: MR, pp. 223, 235. On Poskrebyshev and missing papers: KR I, pp. 290–5.

[45] 1 Dec. PB meeting: Malyshev in Istochnik, 5, 1997, pp. 140–1. Kostyrchenko, pp. 285–7. European terror: Berman in Oni, pp. 318–22. Slansky case: Kostyrchenko, p. 279. Hippopotamuses/1937/white gloves—Ignatiev testimony: J. Brent and V. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime, pp. 212, 218–19, 252, 269, 272.

[46] Voroshilov, sacked and humiliated, seems to have respectfully resented Stalin too. His wife used to whisper that Stalin was jealous of Klim’s popularity—another unthinkable heresy.

[47] Molotov and Mikoyan: trust: “He never gave me away”; chats in flats, Beria’s provocations, Beria wants to protect Molotov: Mikoyan, pp. 536, 581–3. Tiger: Sergo B, pp. 120–1, 237–9. Molotov: Stalin held me in great distrust, MR, p. 325. Vyacheslav Nikonov: no fear after prison. KR I, pp. 303–7 (Koniev), 330–2, Beria attacks Stalin, p. 337; protecting Beria, p. 332. Malenkov reassures Beria re: Bomb; Beria to Malenkov July 1953. Kaganovich warns Mikoyan on Leningrad Case. Beria comforts Khrushchev, Poskrebyshev, Mikoyan. Malenkov comforts Khrushchev on recall to Moscow. Stalin notices Beria’s support from Molotov, Kaganovich etc. Molotov’s anger at Stalin over seventy: Oleg Troyanovsky. On Khrushchev and Malenkov: Julia Khrushcheva, Volya Malenkova. Beria and Khrushchev against the latest changes; Stalin senses disapproval and support for Beria: Mgeladze, p. 191. Stalin powerless against the Four: B. Ponomarenko, Sovershenno Sekretno, 3, 1990, p. 13. Birthday and after: Mikoyan, pp. 577–80. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 214–8. Medvedev, Neizvestnyi Stalin, pp. 19–20. Health: Rybin, Ryadom, pp. 91–4. Murdering Stalin:Hoxha: Artful Albanian, p. 144. Solidarity in the group: Sergo B, pp. 237–9.

[48] Stalin diligently added the following phrases in his handwriting: “For a long time, Comrade Stalin warned us our success had shadows . . . Thoughtlessness is good for our enemies who sabotage us . . .” They were the “slavemasters and cannibals of U.S.A. and England . . . What about the people who inspired the killers? They can be sure we’ll repay them . . . As long as there is wrecking, we must kill thoughtlessness in our people.”

[49] After Stalin’s death, Mikoyan told his sons that “if we didn’t have war when he was alive, we won’t have war now.” This was ironic since for all Stalin’s paranoia, inconsistencies and risk-taking in foreign policy, it was the clumsy and impulsive Khrushchev who brought the world closest to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

[50] Stalin reads Timashuk letter, KR I, pp. 303–7, 337. Timashuk: Pravda, 21 Jan. 1953. Kostyrchenko, pp. 285–300. Aimed at Beria: MR, p. 236. Beria’s men arrested, Deriabin, pp. 103–21. 14,000 arrested in Georgia: Lesser Terror, p. 239; Beria’s allies arrested, secret Jew, pp. 236–7. A. Malenkov in Zhurnalist 2, 1991, p. 64. Beria to Kaganovich at July 1953 Plenum: “Plenum TZK KPSS 2–7 July 1953,” Izvestiya TsK KPSS, nos. 1 and 2, 1991. “Beria, we should protect Molotov”—Mikoyan, p. 584. Jewish Case: K. M. Simonov, Literaturnaya Gazeta, 13 Jan. 1953. Pravda 13 Jan. 1953. Anti-Semitic panic: Ehrenburg, Postwar Years, p. 298. Sergo B, pp. 237–9. Mozart Piano Concerto 23: I. B Borev in Staliniade, quoted in Lesser Terror , p. 235. Fear of war with America: Stepan M: after Stalin’s death, Mikoyan said, “If we didn’t have war while Stalin was alive.” Beria’s fear of war: Candide Charkviani, Gela Charkviani. On war: Lozgachev quoted by Radzinsky, p. 551. “We must prevent war”—Sergo B, p. 357. Stalin trembled with fear about war—KR II, p. 11. Greatly changed: Sudoplatov, p. 333.

[51] RGASPI 558.11.157.9–14, Shepilov to Stalin and Stalin’s handwritten annotations, 10 Jan. 1953. Doctors’ Plot, Pravda, 16 Jan. 1953: “Protiv subyektivistshikh izvrashcheniy yestestvoznanii.” The Jewish letter: Mikoyan, p. 536. Kaganovich, p. 174. Lesser Terror, pp. 247–9. Nauka i Zhizn, no. 1, 1990. KR II, p. 78. Ehrenburg also refused to sign, with a clever letter to Stalin. Stalin Against Jews, pp. 257–70: according to Vaksberg, the idea for the deportation was first floated by Dmitri Chesnokov, editor-in-chief of Voprosy Filosofii, in 1952; he was named to the Presidium by Stalin in the October Plenum; Ehrenburg letter, pp. 263–4. Camps: J. Brent and V. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime, p. 295.

[52] Evita had died of ovarian cancer on 26 July 1952.

[53] Adalberto Zelmar Barbosa, El Federalismo Bloquista: Bravo o el pragmatismo politico, pp. 22–31. Also interview in Buenos Aires with Leopoldo Bravo and family; Stalin’s liking for Peron—Mikoyan, p. 549.

 

[54] Perhaps the other two waited outside in their ZiS. Ignatiev must also have been present. But already, it seems, Beria had taken control. No one knows who stopped the anti-Semitic media campaign that night. Suslov was the CC Secretary in charge of Ideology, but who ordered him to put it on hold? It remains a mystery.

[55]  Five telling letters were supposedly found under a sheet of newspaper in Stalin’s desk, Khrushchev told A. V. Snegov, who could only remember three of them to the historian Roy Medvedev. The first was Lenin’s letter of 1923 demanding that Stalin apologize for his rudeness to his wife, Krupskaya. The second was Bukharin’s last plea: “Koba, why do you need me to die?” The third was from Tito in 1950. It was said to read: “Stop sending assassins to murder me . . . If this doesn’t stop, I will send a man to Moscow and there’ll be no need to send any more.”

[56] Khrushchev and Bulganin did protect Ignatiev who became a CC Secretary but Beria later managed to get him sacked for his part in the Doctors’ Plot. Yet he was merely reprimanded and sent to Bashkiria as First Secretary before moving on to run Tataria. Khrushchev presented him as a victim not a monster in his Secret Speech. Most of the top Chekists of the Doctors’ Plot, including Ogoltsov, who had commanded Mikhoels’ murder, and Ryasnoi were protected under Khrushchev, and later under Brezhnev. Khrushchev’s punishment of Stalin’s crimes was highly selective. Ignatiev received medals on his seventieth birthday in 1974. The luckiest of Stalin’s MGB bosses, he was the only one to die, respected, in his bed aged seventy-nine in 1983.

[57] Final meetings: Mgeladze, p. 232. Menon in Georges Bortoli, Death of Stalin, p. 122. IA. Tito: Sudoplatov, p. 333. Rybin, Ryadom, pp. 83–99 inc. Vasily. KR I, pp. 338–41. Lozgachev in Radzinsky, pp. 550–8. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 13–21, and steambath, p. 215; encouraged by Beria, Volkogonov, Rise and Fall, p. 176. Medvedev, Neizvestnyi Stalin : pp. 21–44, on role of Ignatiev and Khrushchev in delay of doctors. Malenkov: Stalin squeezes hand—Smirtukov quoted in Vlast, vol. 5, 2000, p. 53. MR, pp. 236–7: Beria kissing, I did him in; Malenkov knew more. Kaganovich, Zapiski, p. 499: “he opened his eyes, looked at us.” Khrushchev’s comings and goings from home: S. Khrushchev, Superpower, pp. 31–2. Mikoyan, p. 580: I was lucky. Beria at home; Nina’s grief; Beria’s plans, succession agreed: Sergo B, pp. 248–9. Pointing at lamb and girl/Stalin’s wit/Molotov: Gromyko, Memoirs, p. 103. Government created before Stalin’s death: Istochnik, 1, pp. 106–11. Izvestiya TsK KPSS, no. 1, 1991, pp. 149–50. Medical records: Dr. A. L. Myasnikov, Literaturnaya Gazeta, 1 Mar. 1989, p. 13. Polina’s interrogations stopped—Kostyrchenko, p. 300. Cheyne Stokes questions to doctors in prison: Rapoport, pp. 151–3; Vaksberg, Stalin Against Jews, p. 271. Beria’s hand-kissing: MR, p. 237; KR I, pp. 338–41. “Off to take power,” Mikoyan, p. 587. Last night: Khrushchev quoted by Volkogonov, pp. 570–1. E. D. Voroshilova: RGASPI 74.1.429.47, diary, 2 Mar. 1953. Death mask and hands: RGASPI 45.1.1683.1–10, in profile, face on and hands. Doctors’ report: APRF 45.1.1486.1–156, quoted in Volkogonov, Rise and Fall, pp. 173–8. Meeting of government 5 Mar. APRF 45.2.196.1–7. IA. Meetings 2/5 Mar. in Stalin’s office. Relief: Simonov, “Glazami,” p. 228. N. Barsukov, “Mart 1953. Stranitsy istorii KPSS,” Pravda, 27 Oct. 1989. Warfarin theory and stomach haemorrhage: J. Brent and V. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime, pp. 321–2. Statistics on deaths, exiles, Gulags: A. Applebaum,GULAG, pp. 521–8. Beria on Stalin in days after his death: to M. Chiaureli: “Scoundrel and filth!” quoted in Krotkov Y. in Nekrasov, p. 257. “Avoided the war”: Beria to Sharia at Sharia’s trial in Istoricheskii Zhurnal , 10, 1991, p. 57. To Candide Charkviani: “Cult of personality” and “We won the war.” “Man of the future,” Beria, MR, p. 232. Last letters: Medvedev, Neizvestnyi Stalin, Stalin’s Personal Archives: Hidden or Destroyed? Facts and Theories.