STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR

BY

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

PART NINE

THE DANGEROUS GAME OF SUCCESSION 1945–1949

 

44. The Bomb

Too bad we couldn’t take him alive,” Stalin told Zhukov. “Where’s Hitler’s body?”

“According to General Krebs, his body was burned.” Stalin banned negotiations, except for unconditional surrender. “And don’t ring me until the morning if there’s nothing urgent. I want some rest before tomorrow’s parade.”

At 10:15 a.m., Zhukov’s artillery bombarded the city centre. By dawn on the 2nd, Berlin was his. On 4 May, a Smersh colonel discovered the wizened, charred remains of Hitler and Eva. The bodies were spirited away. Zhukov was not told. Indeed, Stalin enjoyed humiliating the Marshal by asking if he had heard anything about Hitler’s body.[1] Meanwhile Stalin was fascinated by the Nazi leadership: “I’m sending you . . . the correspondence of the top Germans . . . found in Berlin,” Beria wrote to him, listing Himmler’s letters to Ribbentrop.

After the war, during a late dinner on the Black Sea coast, Stalin was asked whether Hitler was a lunatic or an adventurer: “I agree that he was an adventurer but I can’t agree he was mad. Hitler was a gifted man. Only a gifted man could unite the German people. Like it or not . . . the Soviet Army fought their way into the German land . . . and reached Berlin without the German working class ever striking against . . . the Fascist regime. Could a madman so unite his nation?”[2]

On 9 May, Moscow celebrated Victory Day but the curmudgeonly conqueror was wearily impatient with the jubilation. Stalin was furious when a junior general signed the German surrender at Reims and, pacing the floor, ordered Zhukov to sign a proper surrender in Berlin, “whence German aggression sprang.” But the glory days of the generals were over: Vyshinsky arrived to “handle political matters” and spent the entire ceremony “bobbing up to whisper instructions in Zhukov’s ear.” Stalin closely watched Zhukov and his supposed delusions of grandeur. Later in the year, he summoned him to the Kremlin to warn him that Beria and Abakumov were gathering evidence against him: “I don’t believe all this nonsense but stay out of Moscow.”

That was not a problem since Zhukov was Stalin’s proconsul in Berlin. Stalin despatched his satraps to rule his new empire. Mikoyan flew in to feed the Germans. Malenkov and Voznesensky arrived to fight about whether to loot German industry or preserve it to build a Soviet satellite regime. Zhdanov held court in Finland, Voroshilov in Hungary, Bulganin in Poland, Vyshinsky in Romania. When Khrushchev called to congratulate him, Stalin cut him off for “wasting his time.”

A call from Svetlana cheered Stalin: “Congratulations on victory, Papa!”

“Yes we’ve won,” he laughed. “Congratulations to you too!”

At 8 p.m. on 24 May, Stalin hosted a banquet for the Politburo and marshals, singers, actors and even Polish miners, in the Georgevsky Hall. There was a traffic jam of limousines all the way to the Borovitsky Gate. The guests found their seats and waited eagerly. When Stalin appeared, “ovations and shouts of ‘Hurrah’ shook the vaulted halls . . . with a deafening roar.” Molotov toasted the marshals who clinked glasses with the Politburo. When Admiral Isakov, who had lost his leg in 1942, was toasted, Stalin, still a master of the personal touch, walked all the way over to his distant table to clink glasses. Then Stalin praised the Russian people and referred to his own mistakes: “Another people could have said to the government: you have not justified our expectations, go away and we will install another government which will conclude peace with Germany and guarantee us a quiet life.”

Later, Stalin asked Zhukov and the marshals: “Don’t you think we should celebrate the defeat of Fascist Germany with a victory parade?”

Stalin decided to take the review on horseback. He could not ride but his hunger for glory still burned and he started secretly training to ride a white Arabian stallion, chosen by Budyonny. Around 15 June, a week before the parade, a spurred and booted Stalin in jodhpurs, apparently accompanied by his son Vasily, mounted the steed. He jerked his spurs. The horse reared. Stalin grabbed the mane and tried to stay in the saddle but was thrown, bruising his shoulder. Pulling himself to his feet, he spat: “Let Zhukov take the parade. He’s a cavalryman.” At Kuntsevo, he asked Zhukov if he had forgotten how to ride.

“I haven’t,” replied Zhukov. “I still ride sometimes.”

“Good . . . You take the parade.”

“Thanks for the honour. But . . . you’re the Supremo and by right you should take it.”

“I’m too old . . . You do it. You’re younger.”

Zhukov would ride a white Arabian stallion which Budyonny would show him. The next day, Zhukov was reviewing the rehearsals at the central airfield when Vasily Stalin buttonholed him: “I’m telling you this as a big secret. Father had himself been preparing to take the parade but . . . three days ago, the horse bolted . . .”

“And which horse was your father riding?”

“A white Arab stallion, the one on which you’re taking the parade. But I beg you not to mention a word of this.” Zhukov mastered the Arabian.

At 9:57 a.m. on 24 June, Zhukov mounted the stallion at the Spassky Gate. It was pouring with rain. The clocks struck ten: “Parade-shun!”

“My heart beat faster,” wrote Zhukov. Simultaneously, Marshal Rokossovsky was waiting on Budyonny’s own black charger, appropriately named Polus—the Pole—at the Nikolsky Gate. Stalin, in his greatcoat, showing no expression, walked clumsily, slowly, out on his own then lightly bounded up the steps to the Mausoleum, with Beria and Malenkov sweating breathlessly in their efforts to keep up. When the crowds saw him, hurrahs resounded across the Square. The rain poured, the water running down his vizor. He never wiped his face. As the chimes rang out, Zhukov and Rokossovsky rode out, both soaked, the bands played Glinka’s “Slavsya!”—Glory to You—and tanks and Katyushas rumbled over the cobblestones. Silence fell on Red Square. “Then a menacing staccato beat of hundreds of drums could be heard,” wrote Yakovlev. “Marching in precise formation and beating out an iron cadence, a column of Soviet soldiers drew nigh.” Two hundred veterans each held a Nazi banner. At the Mausoleum they did a right turn and flung the banners, emblazoned with black and scarlet swastikas, at Stalin’s feet where the downpour soaked them. Here was the climax of Stalin’s life.

As soon as it was over, Stalin and the top brass poured into the room behind the Mausoleum for a buffet and drinks. It was here, according to Admiral Kuznetsov, that one of the marshals, probably Koniev, first proposed promoting Stalin to Generalissimo. He waved this away but then declared that he was now sixty-seven and weary: “I’ll work another two or three years, then I’ll have to retire.”

The Politburo and the marshals cried out on cue that he would live to rule the country for a long time yet. During the hard-drinking festivities, Stalin laughed as Poskrebyshev slipped the ceremonial dagger out of Vyshinsky’s diplomatic uniform and replaced it with a pickle. Much to Stalin’s amusement, the pompous ex-Procurator strutted around for the rest of the day oblivious of the vegetable in his scabbard, and the smirks of the magnates.

That night, at a banquet for 2,500 officers, Stalin, who was already thinking about how to tighten discipline and bind the Union together, toasted the “Russian people . . .” and the “screws,” the ordinary people, “without whom all of us, marshals and commanders of fronts and armies . . . would not be worth a damn.”

In these carefully phrased toasts, Stalin set down a marker for his courtiers. The marshals were “not worth a damn” compared to the Russian people whom only the Party (Stalin) could represent. His talk of retirement unleashed a brutal struggle among ruthless men to succeed a twentieth-century emperor who had no intention of ever retiring. Within five years, three of the contenders would be dead.[3]

Koniev’s proposal to Molotov and Malenkov that they promote Stalin to Generalissimo to differentiate him from the marshals was not completely Ruritanian—Suvorov had been Generalissimo—but there was now something of the South American juntaabout it. Stalin was against the idea. He was endowed with all the prestige of a world conqueror, a “deity . . . an ungainly dwarf of a man who passed through gilded and marble Imperial halls,” but the magnates were determined to honour him with the gold star of Hero of the Soviet Union, another Order of Victory, and the rank of Generalissimo.

“Comrade Stalin doesn’t need it,” he replied to Koniev. “Comrade Stalin has the authority without it. Some title you’ve thought up! Chiang Kai-shek’s a Generalissimo. Franco’s a Generalissimo—fine company I find myself in!” Kaganovich, proud inventor of “Stalinism,” also suggested renaming Moscow as Stalinodar, an idea that had first been suggested by Yezhov in 1938. Beria seconded him. This simply “outraged” Stalin: “What do I need this for?”

The wise courtier senses when his master secretly wants him to disobey. Malenkov and Beria had Kalinin sign the decree. Three days after the parade, Pravdaannounced Stalin’s new rank and medals. He was furious and summoned Molotov, Malenkov, Beria, Zhdanov and old Kalinin, who was already extremely ill with stomach cancer. “I haven’t led regiments in the field . . . I’m refusing the star as undeserved.” They argued but he insisted. “Say what you like. I won’t accept the decorations.” But they noticed that he had taken care to accept the Generalissimo.

Since the marshals now resembled Christmas trees of braid and clanking medals, the Generalissimo’s uniform had to be completely over-the-top: the tailor of the élite, Lerner, created a gilded Ruritanian extravaganza with a golden cape. Khrulev dressed three strapping officers in these Göringesque outfits. When Stalin wandered out of his office to see Poskrebyshev, he snarled: “Who are they? What’s this peacock doing here?”

“Three samples of the Generalissimo’s uniform.”

“They’re not right for me. I need something more modest . . . Do you want me to look like a doorman?” Stalin finally accepted a white gilded high-collared tunic with black and red–striped trousers which made him look like a bandmaster, if not a Park Avenue doorman. When he put it on, he regretted it, muttering to Molotov: “Why did I agree?”

Malenkov and Beria were left with the gold star of the Hero of the Soviet Union: how to get him to accept it? Here Stalin’s court dissolves into an opéra bou fe farce in which the cantankerous Generalissimo was virtually pursued around Moscow by courtiers trying to pin the medal on him. First Malenkov agreed to try but Stalin would not listen. Next he recruited Poskrebyshev who accepted the mission but gave up when Stalin resisted energetically. Beria and Malenkov tried Vlasik but he too failed. They decided it was best to ambush Stalin when he was gardening because he loved his roses and lemon trees so they persuaded Orlov, the Kuntsevo commandant, to present it. When Stalin asked for the secateurs to prune his beloved roses, Orlov brought the secateurs but kept the star behind his back, wondering what to do with it.

“What are you hiding?” asked Stalin. “Let me see.” Orlov gingerly brought out the star. Stalin cursed him: “Give it back to those who thought up this nonsense!”

Finally, he accepted the medal: “You’re indulging an old man. Won’t do anything for my health!” Stalin did not just accept the rank of Generalissimo in order to join Franco. Vanity merged with politics: it helped diminish the dangerously prestigious marshalate. On 9 July, he further watered down their honours by promoting Beria, their scourge, to Marshal, equal to Zhukov or Vasilevsky.

The victor’s good humour, though, could be chilling. Whenever he saw the Shipbuilding Commissar Nosenko, he joked “Haven’t they arrested you yet?” The next time he saw him, he chuckled: “Nosenko, have you still not been shot?” Nosenko each time smiled anxiously. Finally at a celebratory Sovnarkom meeting, Stalin declared, “We believed in victory and . . . never lost our sense of humour. Isn’t that true, Comrade Nosenko?”[4]

A week later, Stalin, who, according to Gromyko, now “always looked tired,” mounted his eleven-coach armoured train for the journey to Potsdam: he travelled in four green carriages that had been taken from the Tsar’s train in some museum, along a route of exactly 1,923 kilometres, according to Beria, who organized perhaps the tightest security ever for a travelling potentate. “To provide proper security,” he wrote to Stalin on 2 July, “1,515 NKVD/GB men of operative staff and 17,409 NKVD forces are placed in the following order: on USSR territories, 6 men per kilometre; on territory of Poland, 10 men per kilometre; on German territory, 15 men per kilometre. Besides this on the route of the special train, 8 armoured trains will patrol—2 in USSR, 2 in Poland and 4 in Germany.” “To provide security for the chief of the Soviet delegation,” there were seven NKVD regiments and 900 bodyguards. The inner security “will be carried out by the operative staff of the 6th Department of the NKGB” arranged “in three concentric circles of security, totalling 2,041 NKVD men.” Sixteen companies of NKVD forces alone were responsible for guarding his phone lines while eleven aeroplanes provided quick links to Moscow. In case of urgent need, Stalin’s own three planes, including a Dakota, stood ready. The secret police were “to guarantee proper order and purges of anti-Soviet elements” at all stations and airports.[5]

The night before he arrived in Potsdam, Stalin called Zhukov: “Don’t get it into your head to meet us with an honour guard and band. Come to the station yourself and bring anyone you consider necessary.”

At 5:30 a.m. on 16 July, the day of Stalin’s arrival, the United States tested a nuclear bomb in New Mexico that would change everything and, in many ways, spoil Stalin’s triumph. The news was telegraphed to Harry S. Truman, who had succeeded Roosevelt as President, with the understatement of the century: “Babies satisfactorily born.”

Stalin and Molotov, attended by Poskrebyshev, Vlasik and Valechka, found the platform virtually empty except for Zhukov, Vyshinsky and a table bearing three telephones connected to the Kremlin and the armies. “In good spirits,” Stalin raised his hat and climbed into the waiting ZiS 101 armoured limousine but then he opened the door and invited Zhukov to ride with him to his Babelsberg residence, “a stone villa of two floors” with “fifteen rooms and an open veranda,” Beria informed him, “supplied with all necessary electricity, heating and organized telephone stations with VCh for 100 numbers.” It had been Ludendorff’s home. Stalin hated the extravagant furniture and ordered much of it to be removed—as he once had done in his Kremlin flat.

Stalin was late for the conference but it mattered little: the great decisions had been made at Yalta. The other leaders had arrived on the 15th and gone sightseeing to Hitler’s Chancellery. Beria, who was already in Berlin to oversee the arrangements, accompanied by his son Sergo, longed to visit the ruins but obediently waited to ask Stalin’s permission. Stalin refused to go himself, no tourist he. So Beria, in a baggy suit and open-necked shirt, went with the immaculate Molotov.

At midday on Tuesday the 17th, Stalin, resplendent in a fawn Generalissimo’s uniform, arrived at Truman’s “Little White House” for their first meeting. The new President said nothing about the topic that dominated the conference. Sergo Beria wrote that his father, informed by spies in the American nuclear project, gave Stalin the news during this week: “I didn’t know then, at least not from the Americans,” was how Stalin put it. Beria had first informed him of the Manhattan Project in March 1942: “We need to get started,” said Stalin, placing Molotov in charge. But, under Iron Arse, it advanced with excruciating, ponderous slowness. Finally in September 1944, the leading Russian nuclear scientist, Professor Igor Kurchatov, wrote to Stalin to denounce plodding Molotov and begged Beria to take it over. Stalin had little conception of nuclear fission’s world-shattering importance nor of the vast resources it would require. He and Beria distrusted their own scientists and spies. Nonetheless, they were aware of the urgency in procuring uranium, and twice during the conference, Stalin and Beria debated how to react to the Americans.[6] They had agreed that Stalin should “pretend not to understand,” when the subject was mentioned. But so far, Truman said nothing. They discussed Russia’s entry into the war against Japan. Truman asked Stalin to stay for lunch but he refused: “You could if you wanted,” said Truman.

Stalin stayed, unimpressed by the Missouri haberdasher who was no substitute for FDR: “They couldn’t be compared,” he said later. “Truman’s neither educated nor clever.” (Truman was nonetheless charmed: “I like Stalin!” but, revealingly, he reminded the President of his patron, T. J. Pendergast, the machine politician boss of Kansas City.)

Stalin, ever more sartorially aware, changed into his white, gilded Generalissimo’s magnificence with the single Hero of the Soviet Union gold star, and arrived last for the first session at the Cecilienhof Palace, built in 1917 for the last Crown Prince, mocking its Kaiserine grandeur: “Hmm. Nothing much,” he told Gromyko. “Modest. The Russian Tsars built themselves something much more solid.” At the conference, Stalin sat between Molotov and his interpreter Pavlov, flanked by Vyshinsky and Gromyko. Champagne glasses were brought to toast the conference. Churchill, puffing at a cigar, approached Stalin who was himself smoking a Churchillian cigar. If anyone were to photograph the Generalissimo with a cigar, it would “create an immense sensation,” Churchill beamed, “everyone will say it is my influence.” Actually British influence was greatly diminished in the new world order of the superpowers in which they could agree on the de-Nazification of Germany but not on reparations or Poland. Now Hitler was gone, the differences were mountainous.

When Stalin decided he wanted a stroll in the gardens after a session, a British delegate was amazed to see “a platoon of Russian tommy-gunners in skirmishing order, then a number of guards and units of the NKVD army. Finally appeared Uncle Joe on foot with his usual thugs surrounding him, followed by another screen of skirmishers. The enormous officer who always sits behind Uncle at meetings was apparently in charge of operations and was running around directing tommy-gunners to cover all the alleys.” After a few hundred yards, Stalin was picked up by his car.

At 8:30 p.m. on the 18th, Churchill dined at Ludendorff’s villa, noticing that Stalin was ill, “physically oppressed.” Smoking cigars together, they discussed power and death. Stalin admitted that the monarchy held together the British Empire, perhaps considering how to hold together his own.[7] No psephologist, he predicted that Churchill would win the election by eighty seats. Then he reflected that people in the West wondered what would happen when he died but it had “all been arranged.” He had promoted “good people, ready to step” into his shoes.

Finally, on 24 July, two monumental moments symbolized the imminent end of the Grand Alliance. First Churchill attacked Stalin for closing off Eastern Europe, citing the problems of the British mission in Bucharest: “An iron fence has come down around them,” he said, trying out the phrase that would become “the iron curtain.”

“Fairy tales!” snapped Stalin.[8] The meeting ended at 7:30 p.m. Stalin headed out of the room but Truman seemed to hurry after him. Interpreter Pavlov deftly appeared beside Stalin. Churchill, who had discussed this moment with the President, watched in fascination as Truman approached the Generalissimo “as if by chance,” in Stalin’s words.

“The U.S.A.,” said Truman, “tested a new bomb of extraordinary destructive power.”

Pavlov watched Stalin closely: “no muscle moved in his face.” He simply said he was glad to hear it: “A new bomb! Of extraordinary power! Probably decisive on the Japanese! What a bit of luck!” Stalin followed the plan he had agreed with Beria to give the Americans no satisfaction but he still thought the Americans were playing games: “An A-bomb is a completely new weapon and Truman didn’t exactly say that.” He noticed Churchill’s glee too: Truman spoke “not without Churchill’s knowledge.”

Back at Ludendorff’s villa, Stalin, accompanied by Zhukov and Gromyko, immediately told Molotov about the conversation. But Stalin knew that, as yet, the Americans only possessed one or two Bombs—there was just time to catch up.

“They’re raising their price,” said Molotov, who was in charge of the nuclear project.

“Let them,” said Stalin. “We’ll have to talk it over with Kurchatov and get him to speed things up.” Professor Kurchatov told Stalin that he lacked electrical power and had not enough tractors. Stalin immediately ordered power to be switched off in several populated areas and gave him two tank divisions to act as tractors. The Bomb’s revolutionary importance was still percolating when the first device was dropped on Hiroshima. The scale of resources needed was just dawning on Stalin.

He then convened a meeting with Molotov and Gromyko at which he announced: “Our Allies have told us that the U.S.A. has a new weapon. I spoke with our physicist Kurchatov as soon as Truman told me. The real question is should countries which have the Bomb simply compete with one another or . . . should they seek a solution that would mean prohibition of its production and use?” He realized that America and Britain “are hoping we won’t be able to develop the Bomb ourselves for some time . . .” and “want to force us to accept their plans. Well that’s not going to happen.” He cursed them in what Gromyko called “ripe language,” then asked the diplomat if the Allies were satisfied with all the agreements.

“Churchill’s so riveted by our women traffic police in their marvellous uniforms that he dropped his cigar ash all over his suit,” replied Gromyko. Stalin smiled.

Next morning, Churchill and the Labour leader Clement Attlee flew back to London where they discovered that the warlord had been roundly defeated in the general election, thereby ending the triumvirate of Teheran and Yalta. Stalin preferred Roosevelt but he most admired Churchill: “A powerful and cunning politician,” he remembered him in 1950. “In the war years, he behaved as a gentleman and achieved a lot. He was the strongest personality in the capitalist world.”

During this interval, Stalin met up with his son Vasily, now stationed in Germany, who reported that Soviet aeroplanes were still inferior to the American’s, and dangerous to boot. Vasily’s denunciations may have been well-meaning but Stalin always found a deadly use for them. At lunchtime on the 25th, Stalin met Queen Victoria’s great-grandson, a cousin of Nicholas II, and Allied Supreme Commander, Southeast Asia, the ebullient Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten who flattered him that he had diverted his trip from India to Britain “specially to meet the Generalissimo,” having long been “an admirer of the Generalissimo’s achievements not only in war but in peace as well.”

Stalin replied that he had done his best. “Not everything” had been “done well” but it was the Russian people “who achieved these things.” Mountbatten’s real motive was to wangle an invitation to visit Russia where he was convinced his Romanov connections would be appreciated, explaining that he had frequently visited the Tsar as a child for “three or four weeks at a time.”

Stalin inquired drily, with a patronising smile, whether “it was some time ago that he had been there.” Mountbatten “would find things had changed very considerably.” Mountbatten repeatedly asked for an invitation and returned to his imperial connections which he expected to impress Stalin. “On the contrary,” says Lunghi, Mountbatten’s interpreter, “the meeting was embarrassing because Stalin was so unimpressed. He offered no invitation. Mountbatten left with his tail between his legs.”[9]

Potsdam ended with an affable but increasingly chilly impasse: Stalin possessed Eastern Europe but Truman had the Bomb. Before he left on 2 August, he realized the Bomb would require a colossal effort and his most dynamic manager. He removed Molotov and commissioned Beria to create the Soviet Bomb. Sergo Beria noticed his father “making notes on a sheet of paper . . . organizing the future commission and selecting its members.” Beria included Malenkov and others in the list.

“What need have you to include these people?” Sergo asked Beria.

“I prefer that they should belong. If they stay outside they’ll put spokes in the wheels.” It was the climax of Beria’s career.

 

 

45. Beria: Potentate, Husband, Father, Lover, Killer, Rapist

On 6 August 1945, America dropped its Bomb on Hiroshima. Stalin did not wish to miss out on the spoils, sending his armies against Japan, but the destruction of Hiroshima made a far greater impact than Truman’s warning. Svetlana visited Kuntsevo that day: “Everyone was busy and paid no attention to me,” she grumbled. “War is barbaric,” reflected Stalin, “but using the A-bomb is a superbarbarity. And there was no need to use it. Japan was already doomed!” He had no doubt that Hiroshima was aimed at himself: “A-bomb blackmail is American policy.”

Next day, Stalin held a series of meetings at Kuntsevo with Beria and the scientists. “Hiroshima has shaken the whole world. The balance has been destroyed,” he told them. “That cannot be.” Now Stalin understood that the project was the most important in his world; code-named “Task Number One,” it was to be run “on a Russian scale” by Beria’s

“Special Committee” that functioned like an “Atomic Politburo.” The scientists had to be coaxed and threatened. Prizes and luxuries were vital: “Surely it’s possible to ensure that several thousand people can live very well . . . and better than well.” Stalin was “bored” by the science but treated Kurchatov kindly: “If a child doesn’t cry, the mother does not know what she needs. Ask for whatever you like. You won’t be refused.”[10]

Beria threw himself into Task Number One as if his life depended on it—which it did. The project was on a truly Soviet scale, with Beria managing between 330,000 and 460,000 people and 10,000 technicians. Beria was the pre-eminent Terror entrepreneur, telling one of his managers, “You’re a good worker but if you’d served six years in the camps, you’d work even better.” He controlled his scientists in the sharashki, special prisons for technical experts, described by Solzhenitsyn in The First Circle: when one expert suggested he might work better if he was free, Beria scoffed, “Certainly. But it would be risky. The traffic in the streets is crazy and you might get run over.”

Yet he could also be “ingratiating,” asking the physicist Andrei Sakharov charmingly, “Is there anything you want to ask me?” His handshake, “plump, moist and deathly cold,” reminded Sakharov of death itself: “Don’t forget we’ve plenty of room in our prisons!” His name was enough to terrify most people: “Just one remark like ‘Beria has ordered’ worked absolutely without fail,” remembered Mikoyan. When he called Vyshinsky, he “leapt out of his chair respectfully” and “cringed like a servant before a master.”

Task Number One, like all Beria’s projects, functioned “as smoothly and reliably as a Swiss clock.” Kurchatov thought Beria himself “unusually energetic.” But he also won the scientists’ loyalty by protecting them, appealing to Stalin who agreed: “Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.” Mephistophelian brutality, Swiss precision and indefatigable energy were the hallmarks of Beria who was “incredibly clever . . . an unusual man and also a great criminal.”

Beria was one of the few Stalinists who instinctively understood American dynamism: when Sakharov asked why their projects so “lag behind the U.S.A.,” only Beria would have answered like an IBM manager: “we lack R and D.” But the scientific complexities completely foxed Beria himself and his chief manager, Vannikov, the ex-Armaments boss. “They’re speaking while I blink,” admitted Vannikov. “The words sound Russian but I’m hearing them for the first time.” As for Beria, one scientist joked to Sakharov: “Even Lavrenti Pavlovich knows what mesons are.” His solution was high-handed arrogance and the threat: “If this is misinformation, I’ll put you in the dungeon!”

This fusion of Beria’s bludgeon and Kurchatov’s mesons led to some bombastic rows. In November 1945, Pyotr Kapitsa, one of the most brilliant Soviet scientists, complained to Stalin that Beria and the others behaved “like supermen.” Kapitsa reported his argument with Beria: “I told him straight, ‘You don’t understand physics.’ ” Beria “replied that I knew nothing about people.” Beria had “the conductor’s baton” but the conductor “ought not only to wave the baton but also understand the score.” Beria did not understand the science. Kapitsa suggested that he should study physics and shrewdly ended his letter: “I wish Comrade Beria to be acquainted with this letter for it is not a denunciation but useful criticism. I would have told him all this myself but it’s a great deal of trouble to get to see him.” Stalin told Beria that he had to get on with the scientists.

Beria summoned Kapitsa who amazingly refused him: “If you want to speak to me, then come to the Institute.” Beria ate humble pie and took a hunting rifle as a peace offering. But Kapitsa refused to help anymore.

Stalin meanwhile wrote him a note: “I have received all your letters . . . There is much that is instructive and I’m thinking of meeting you sometime . . .” But he never did.[11]

Beria was at the centre not only of Stalin’s political world but also of his private one. Now their families almost merged in a Georgian dynastic alliance. Svetlana, still suffering from the end of her first love affair with Kapler, spent much time at Beria’s houses with his wife, Nina, blond, beautiful (though with stocky legs), and a qualified scientist from an aristocratic family who also managed to be a traditional Georgian housewife. Stalin still treated her paternally even as he began to loathe Beria himself. “Stalin asked Nina to look after Svetlana because she had no mother,” said Beria’s daughter-in-law.

Beria always craved athletic women, haunting the locker rooms of Soviet swimmers and basketball players. Nina herself was something of an Amazon, always exercising, playing tennis with bodyguards, cycling on a tandem. Beria was, like many a womanizer, a very jealous husband and the bodyguards were the only men allowed close to her. Beria lived in some style: he divided his grand town mansion into offices and private rooms on one side, and apartments for his wife and family on the other. His wife and son mainly lived at his “sumptuous, immense” white dacha at Sosnovka near Barvikha, which “was in Jugend style, lots of glass and stone, like art deco with a terrace and lots of guards around,” as well as pet bear cubs and foxes.[12] Yet Nina kept it “cosy” and it was always littered with English and German magazines and books. On holidays in the south, Beria, who was a trained architect, designed his own dacha at Gagra close to Stalin’s. The Master often invited over the Berias, who brought along their son Sergo.

By the end of the war, the balding broad-faced Beria with his swollen, moist lips and the cloudy brown eyes, was “ugly, flabby and unhealthy-looking with a greyish-yellow complexion.” The life of a Stalinist magnate was not a healthy one. No one worked harder than the “inhumanly energetic” Beria, but he still played volleyball every weekend with Nina and his team of bodyguards: “Even though he was so unfit, he was amazingly fast on his feet.” In common with other human predators, Beria became a vegetarian, eating “grass” and Georgian dishes but only rarely meat. He came home at weekends, practised shooting his pistol in the garden, watched a movie in his cinema and then drove off again.

Dressing like a southern winegrower, Beria hated uniforms, only sporting his Marshal’s uniform during 1945: usually he wore a polo-neck sweater, a light jacket, baggy trousers and a floppy hat. Beria was cleverer, brasher and more ambitious than the other magnates and he could not resist letting them know it. He teased Khrushchev about his looks and his womanizing, saying, “Look at Nikita, he’s nothing much to look at but what a ladykiller!,” tormented Andreyev about his illnesses, Voroshilov about his stupidity, Malenkov about his flabbiness and he told Kobulov that he dressed like Göring. No one ever forgot any of Beria’s wisecracks. Nina begged him to be more circumspect: “she hated his way of wounding people,” wrote their son. His own courtiers, who “idealized him,” met like modern corporate directors at his box at the Dynamo football stadium. The major organizations had their own football teams—Beria’s MVD had Dynamo, the trade unions had Spartak. The competition was so vicious that in 1942 Beria had the successful manager of the Spartak team, Nikolai Starostin, arrested and sent into exile. An invitation to watch a game in Beria’s box for a young Chekist meant entering his circle.

An inventory of his desk after his later arrest revealed his interests: power, terror and sex. In his office, Beria kept blackjack clubs for torturing people and the array of female underwear, sex toys and pornography that seemed to be obligatory for secret-police chiefs. He was found to be keeping eleven pairs of silk stockings, eleven silk bodices, seven silk nighties, female sports outfits, the equivalent of Soviet cheerleaders’ costumes, blouses, silk scarves, countless obscene love letters and a “large quantity of items of male debauchery.”

Despite his mountainous workload, Beria found time for a Draculean sex life that combined love, rape and perversity in almost equal measure. The war had given him the opportunity to engage in a life of sexual brigandage even more intense and reckless than that enjoyed by his predecessors in the job. The secret-police chiefs always had the greatest sexual licence: only Smersh watched Beria; otherwise he could do whatever he wanted. It was once thought Beria’s seductions and rapes were exaggerated but the opening of the archives of his own interrogation, as well as the evidence of witnesses and even those who were raped by him, reveals a sexual predator who used his power to indulge himself in obsessive depravity. It is often impossible to differentiate between women he seduced who went to him to plead for loved ones—and those women he simply kidnapped and raped. Yet mothers often pimped their daughters in return for limousines and privileges. Beria himself could also be a gentleman, treating some mistresses so kindly that they never criticized him even when he had been exposed.[13] He combined seduction with espionage: he seduced a willing female friend of Kira Alliluyeva’s by saying, “What lovely cherry lips you have! A figure like Venus!” Afterwards, he quizzed her on her circle, recruiting her to spy on the Alliluyevs.

He was a familiar sight in Moscow as he cruised the streets in his armoured Packard and sent his Caucasian bodyguards Colonels Sarkisov and Nadaraia to procure women for him. The colonels were not always happy with their role—indeed, Sarkisov kept a record of Beria’s perversions with which to denounce him to Stalin. The girls were usually taken to the town house where a Georgian feast and wine awaited them in a caricature of Caucasian chivalry. One of the colonels always proffered a bouquet of flowers on the way home. If they resisted, they were likely to get arrested. The film star Zoya Fyodorovna was picked up by these Chekists at a time when she was still breastfeeding her baby. Taken to a party where there were no other guests, she was joined by Beria whom she begged to let her go as her breasts were painful. “Beria was furious.” The officer who was taking her home mistakenly handed her a bouquet at the door. When Beria saw, he shouted: “It’s a wreath not a bouquet. May they rot on your grave!” She was arrested afterwards.

The film actress Tatiana Okunevskaya was even less lucky: at the end of the war, Beria invited her to perform for the Politburo. Instead they went to a dacha. Beria plied her with drink, “virtually pouring the wine into my lap. He ate greedily, tearing at the food with his hands, chattering away.” Then “he undresses, rolls around, eyes ogling, an ugly, shapeless toad. ‘Scream or not, doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Think and behave accordingly.’ ” Beria softened her up by promising to release her beloved father and grandmother from prison and then raped her. He knew very well both had already been executed. She too was arrested soon afterwards and sentenced to solitary confinement. Felling trees in the Siberian taiga, she was saved, like so many others, by the kindness of ordinary people.

These women were just the tip of a degenerate iceberg. Beria’s priapic energy was as frenzied and indefatigable as his bureaucratic drive. “I caught syphilis during the war, in 1943 I think, and I had treatment,” he later confessed. After the war, it was Vlasik and Poskrebyshev, who, remembering Bronka, told Stalin about the syphilis. Lists were already a Stalinist obsession so this sex addict felt compelled to keep a record of his conquests. His colonels kept the score; some say the list numbered thirty-nine, others seventy-nine: “Most of those women were my mistresses,” he admitted. Beria ordered Sarkisov to destroy the list which he did but being a Chekist, the bodyguard kept a copy, later used against his master . . .

Some mistresses, like “Sophia” and “Maya,” a student at the Institute of Foreign Relations, inconveniently became pregnant. Once again, Colonels Sarkisov and Nadaraia were called upon to arrange abortions at the MVD’s Medical Department—and when a child was born, the colonels placed it in an orphanage.[14]

Beria was also notorious among the magnates themselves: Stalin himself tolerated the peccadilloes of his potentates as long as they were politically reliable. During the war, when Beria was running half the economy, and Stalin was informed of his priapism, but answered indulgently, “Comrade Beria is tired and overworked.” But the less he trusted Beria, the less tolerant he became. Once, hearing that Svetlana was at Beria’s house, Stalin panicked, rang and told her to leave at once. “I don’t trust Beria.” Whether this referred to his sexuality or to his politics is not clear. When Beria told Poskrebyshev that his daughter was as pretty as her mother, the chef de cabinet told her, “Never accept a lift from Beria.” Voroshilov’s daughter-in-law was followed by Beria’s car all the way back to the Kremlin. Voroshilov’s wife was terrified: “It’s Beria! Say nothing! Don’t tell a soul!”

The leaders’ wives hated Beria. “How can you work with such a man?” Ashken Mikoyan asked her husband.

“Be quiet,” Mikoyan would reply, but Ashken would not go to functions if Beria was likely to be present: “Say I’ve a headache!”

Beria’s wife Nina told Svetlana and other friends that she “was terribly unhappy. Lavrenti’s never home. I’m always alone.” But her daughter-in-law remembers that “she never stopped loving Beria.” She knew that he had other women “but she took a tolerant Georgian view of this.” When he came home for the weekend, “she spent hours having manicures and putting on makeup. She lived downstairs in her own room but when he came home, she moved upstairs to share his bed.” They “sat cosily by the fire, watching Western films, usually about cowboys and Mexican banditos. His favourite was Viva Villa! about Pancho Villa. They chatted lovingly in Mingrelian.” Nina never believed the scale of his exploits: “When would Lavrenti have found time to make these hordes of women his mistresses? He spent all day and night at work” so she presumed these women must have been his “secret agents.”[15] But gruesome new evidence suggests Beria really was a Soviet Bluebeard.[16]

Sergo Beria, now twenty-one, named after Ordzhonikidze, had been at School No. 175 with Svetlana Stalin, Martha Peshkova and most of the élite children. As a father, Beria was absent much of the time but he was enormously proud of Sergo. Theirs was a typically formal relationship between a Bolshevik and his son. “If Sergo wanted to talk to his father,” recalled his wife, “Lavrenti would say, ‘Come and see me in the office.’ ” Like Malenkov and most of the other leaders, Beria was determined that his son should not go into politics.

Like all Politburo parents, he encouraged him to become a scientist: Colonel Beria rose to prominence in military technology as head of the sprawling missile Design Bureau Number One. Sergo had grown up around Stalin, and Beria therefore could not prevent the Generalissimo inviting him to the wartime conferences.

Sergo was intelligent, cultured and, according to Martha Peshkova, Svetlana Stalin’s best friend, “so beautifully handsome that he was like a dream—all the girls were in love with him.” In 1944, Svetlana fell for him too, a fact that she leaves out of both her memoirs and her interviews. When Sergo wrote his own memoirs and claimed this was so, many historians disbelieved it. Yet Svetlana wanted to marry him, an ambition she never gave up even when he himself married someone else. When he was in Sverdlovsk during the war, Svetlana got her brother to fly her there. After the Kapler affair, this crush worried the Berias: “Don’t you realize what you’re doing?” Nina Beria told Svetlana. “If your father finds out about this, he’ll skin Sergo alive.”

Stalin wanted her to marry one of his potentate’s sons, specifying to Svetlana that she should marry either Yury Zhdanov, Sergo Beria or Stepan Mikoyan. But this honour appalled Beria.

“That would be terrible,” he said to Mikoyan. Even though Stalin had shown interest in the idea, both knew that he would actually “interpret this as an attempt to worm your way into his family,” as Beria told Sergo.

Svetlana was determined to marry Sergo but the Berias put a firm stop to it. As she obliquely admitted: “I wanted to marry someone when I was a young girl . . . But his parents would not accept me because of who I am. It was a very painful blow.”[17]

Worse was to follow: Martha Peshkova was now “as pretty and plump as a quail” and seemed to exist in a “warm scented cloud of strange attraction”: it was, recalled Gulia Djugashvili, “difficult to have Martha as a friend.” Martha’s boyfriend was Rem Merkulov, the son of the MGB boss. Perhaps, having grown up around Yagoda, she had a taste for Cheka princelings because she now fell in love with Sergo Beria whom she married soon afterwards. The Berias did not have a big wedding: “it was not the style of the time,” says Martha. Beria told Sergo that Stalin would not approve of “your getting connected with that family”—the Gorkys. Sure enough, Stalin invited Sergo to Kuntsevo: “Gorky himself wasn’t bad but what a lot of anti-Soviet people he had around him. Don’t fall under your wife’s influence,” warned Stalin, always suspicious of wives.

“But she’s quite non-political,” answered Sergo.

“I know. But I regard this marriage as a disloyal act on your part . . . not to me, but to the Soviet State. Was it . . . forced on you by your father?” He accused Beria of making connections with the “oppositionist intelligentsia.” Instead Sergo blamed Svetlana for introducing him to Martha.

“You never breathed a word of it to Svetlana,” Stalin replied. “She told me herself.” Then he smiled at Sergo: “Don’t take any notice, old people are always peevish . . . As for Marfochka, I saw her grow up.”

Martha moved into the Berias’ dacha where she got to know, and love, the most infamous man of his time.[18] Beria could not have been kinder to her: “I was very fond of him. He was very cheerful and very funny, always singing the Mexican song, ‘La Paloma,’ and telling comical anecdotes of his life” such as how he lost his virginity in Romania, getting entangled in the woman’s voluminous pantaloons. He claimed that as a Herculean baby, he was found crawling in the garden holding a snake in his hands. On Sundays, his only rest day, he and Nina slept late and then played Martha and Sergo at volleyball, each assisted by the bodyguards. When Martha gave Beria his first grandchild, “he couldn’t have been sweeter, spending hours sitting by the cradle just looking at her. In the morning, he’d have the baby brought into his and Nina’s room where he’d sit her between them and just smile at her.” He was so indulgent of the child that “he let her put her whole hands into her birthday cakes.”

Martha was less keen on Nina. Her mother-in-law turned out to be as despotic in the house as her father-in-law was out. Nina was lonely and Martha soon found she was seeing more of her mother-in-law than her husband. She wanted them to set up their own home but Nina told her, “If you mention that again, you’ll find yourself very far from your children.”

Beria, says Martha, was “the cleverest person around Stalin. In a way, I’m sorry for him because it was his fate to be there at that time. In another era, he would have been so different. If he’d been born in America, he would have risen to something like Chairman of General Motors.” She was sure he was never a real Communist: he once amazed her when he was playing with his granddaughter. “This girl,” he said, “will be tutored at home and then she’s going to Oxford University!” No other Politburo member would have said such a thing.[19]

Svetlana Stalin rebounded from Sergo into an unsuitable marriage. At Vasily’s apartment in the House on the Embankment, Svetlana met Grisha Morozov, who served in the war in the traffic police. “A friendship developed,” recalls Svetlana, but “I wasn’t in love with him.” However, he was in love with her. Stalin was dubious about Morozov, another Jew: after Kapler, he began to feel these Jews were worming their way into his family. But Svetlana was attracted to their warmth and culture, so Stalin said, “It’s spring . . . You want to get married. To hell with you. Do what you like.”

“I just wanted to get over the rejection,” explained Svetlana years later, “so we married but under other circumstances, it wasn’t my choice. My first husband was a very good person who always loved me.” There was no ceremony: they just went to the register office where the official looked at her passport and asked: “Does your papa know?”

Marrying into Stalin’s family, Morozov “instantly became rather grand,” says Leonid Redens. They quickly had their first baby—a son named Joseph, of course. Svetlana found herself unprepared for marriage: “I had a son when I was nineteen . . . My young husband was a student too. We had people to look after the baby. I had three abortions and then a very bad miscarriage.” Meanwhile Stalin refused to meet Morozov.

Svetlana was still in love with Sergo Beria. “She never forgave me for marrying him,” says Martha. Svetlana reminded Sergo that Stalin “was furious” about the marriage. She still visited Nina, her surrogate mother. Once Svetlana suggested that they remove Martha, who could take the elder daughter and then she would move in with Sergo and raise the younger one. “She’s just like her father,” Mikoyan said. “She always gets what she wants!”

However, she could also be very kind. When Yakov’s heroism in German captivity had been proven, his widow Julia was released but found that her seven-year-old daughter, Gulia, hardly knew her. Svetlana agreed to look after Gulia and one day she announced, “Today we’re going to meet Mama.” But the child was afraid of the stranger, so daily, with the most touching sensitivity, Svetlana took her to see her mother until gradually the two bonded. This had to be done surreptitiously because, while Gulia was brought up by nannies, her mother remained outside the family. Finally, Julia wrote to Stalin: “Joseph Vissarionovich, I ask you very much not to refuse my request because it’s hard to see Gulia. We live in the hope of seeing you and talking about things not put in this letter. We would like you to meet Gulia . . .” Later, thanks to Svetlana, Stalin did meet his first granddaughter.[20]

 

 

46. A Night in the Nocturnal Life of Joseph Vissarionovich: Tyranny by Movies and Dinners

The true victor of the war, Stalin enjoyed the prestige of a world conqueror yet the disparity between his political power and his personal exhaustion made him feel vulnerable.

The Generalissimo and Molotov were satisfied, though never satiated, by their prizes. At a southern dinner, Stalin sent Poskrebyshev to bring the new map. They spread it on the table. Using his pipe as a baton, Stalin reviewed his empire: “Let’s see what we’ve got then: in the north, everything’s all right, Finland greatly wronged us, so we’ve moved the frontier farther from Leningrad. The Baltic States, which were Russian territory from ancient times, are ours again, all the Belorussians are ours now, Ukrainians too, and the Moldavians are back with us. So to the west everything’s okay.” But he turned to the east: “What have we got here? The Kurile Islands are ours and all of Sakhalin . . . China, Mongolia, all as it should be.” The Dunhill pipe trailed round to the south: “Now this frontier I don’t like at all. The Dardanelles . . . We also have claims on Turkish territory and on Libya.” This could have been the speech of a Russian Tsar—it was hardly that of a Georgian Bolshevik. Molotov shared this mission: “My task as Foreign Minister was to expand the borders of our Motherland. And it seems Stalin and I coped . . . quite well. Yes I wouldn’t mind getting Alaska back,” he joked. But Molotov understood that there was no contradiction between Bolshevism and empire-building: “It’s good the Russian Tsars took so much land for us in war. This makes our struggle with capitalism easier.”[21]

But Stalin’s courtiers noticed that his triumph had turned his head. “He became conceited,” said Molotov, “not a good feature in a statesman.” His prestige was so great that he was absolute in all matters: his mere words were taken as “Party orders and instantly obeyed.” Yet he now ruled in a very different way: he “stepped aside from direct ruling,” said one of his officials, and assumed the Olympian mantle of a paramount leader, like the old Chairman Mao, who liked to guide his men with anecdotes, signs and hints. He used secrecy, caprice and obscurity to maintain his mastery over his younger, stronger, ambitious magnates. He dominated his entourage by mystery.

“He never gave direct orders,” wrote his Georgian boss, Charkviani, “so you had to make your own conclusions.” Stalin understood that “it doesn’t matter what part of the pool you throw a stone, the ripples will spread.” He once showed his Abkhazian leader, Mgeladze, his beloved lemon trees again and again until the apparatchik finally understood and declared that Abkhazia would produce lemons for the whole USSR.

“Now you’ve got it!” smiled Stalin. Unless he was in a temper, he usually ended his orders: “Do as you wish” but no one mistook his meaning. If, on the other hand, he gave a direct order, writing “I don’t think my reasons need to be discussed, they are perfectly clear,” or simply shouted his wishes, he was instantly obeyed. In the MGB, the mere mention of the Instantsiya justified any act of barbarism.

However, the Generalissimo was also weaker and older than before. Shortly before the victory parade, Stalin had experienced some sort of heart attack or what Svetlana called “a minor stroke,” hardly surprising given the strain of warlordism on his remarkably durable metabolism. “Certainly overexhausted,” observed Molotov, Stalin already suffered from arthritis but it was the hardening of his arteries, arteriosclerosis, that reduced the flow of blood to the brain and could only impair his mental faculties. After returning from Potsdam, he fell ill again, making him feel weaker at the very moment when his position was strongest. They brought him under the power of doctors, a profession he despised and which he had corrupted (making his own physician Vinogradov testify at the show trials during the thirties). Poskrebyshev, the ex-nurse, became his secret doctor, prescribing pills and remedies.

These contradictions gave Stalin a deadly unpredictability, lashing out at those around him. The hopes and freedoms of the war made no difference to his belief that the problems of the USSR were best solved by the elimination of individuals. The poverty of his empire compared to the surging wealth of America dovetailed with his own feeling that his powers were failing, and the inferiority complexes of a lifetime.

Usually “calm, reserved and patient,” he often “exploded instantly and made irrelevant and wrong decisions.” Khrushchev said, “after the war, he wasn’t quite right in the head.” He remained a supreme manipulator though it is likely that the arteriosclerosis exacerbated his existing tempers, depression and paranoia. He was never mad: indeed, his strangest obsessions always had a basis in real politics. Yet mortality made him realize the sterility he had created inside himself: “I’m a most unfortunate person,” he told Zhukov, “I’m afraid of my own shadow.” But it was this supersensitivity that made him such a frightening but masterful politician. His fear of losing control of his empire was based on reality: even in his own Politburo, Mikoyan felt the war was a “great school of freedom” with no need to “return to terror.”

Stalin despised this laxity. He even joked about it when he sent some writers to tour conquered Japan and asked Molotov if they had departed. It turned out they had put off the trip: “Why didn’t they go?” he asked. “It was a Politburo decision. Maybe they didn’t approve of it and wanted to appeal to the Party Congress?” The writers left quickly. But he sensed this lax attitude all around him.

“He was very jittery,” said Molotov. “His last years were the most dangerous. He swung to extremes.” He was jealous of Molotov and Zhukov’s prestige, suspicious of Beria’s power, and disgusted by the soft smugness of his magnates: even when he was ill and old, he was never happier than when he was orchestrating a struggle. It was his gift, his natural state. Some backs would have to be broken.[22] Stalin ruled “through a small group close to him at all times” and formal “government ceased to function.” Even on long holidays away from Moscow, he maintained his paramount power by directing each portfolio through his direct relationship with the official in question, and no one else. His interventions were almost deliberately capricious and out of the blue.

More than ever, his courtiers had to know how to handle him but first, they had to survive his nocturnal routine. It is no exaggeration to say that henceforth Stalin ruled, from Berlin to the Kurile Islands, from the dinner table and the cinema. The defiance of time itself is the ultimate measure of tyranny: the lights in his capitals—from Warsaw to Ulan Bator, from Budapest to Sofia—shone throughout the night.

The magnates met at the Little Corner after which the Generalissimo always proposed a movie. He led his guests along the red-and-blue-carpeted corridors to the cinema which had been luxuriously built in the old winter garden on the second floor of the Great Kremlin Palace. Beria, Molotov, Mikoyan and Malenkov remained his constant companions but his proconsuls in Finland and Ukraine, Zhdanov and Khrushchev, often visited too.

Then there was the whole new court of European vassals: his favourites were the Polish leader Boleslaw Bierut, “polite, well-dressed, well-mannered,” a “perfect gentleman with women” but a ruthless Stalinist with “a fanatical faith in the dogma,” his deputy Jakob Berman, the Czech President Clement Gottwald, Hungary’s Matyas Rakosi. The prouder Yugoslavs, Marshal Tito and Milovan Djilas, were less liked. Each of them was honoured to come to Moscow to pay homage and receive Stalin’s sacerdotal wisdom and imperial commands. They too had to learn how to behave in the cinema and at dinner.

The sight of the Generalissimo and his guards approaching was a terrifying one for any young official who happened to be walking along these corridors. The plain-clothed guards walked twenty-five steps in front and two metres behind Stalin, while the uniformed guards followed him with their eyes. Amid this phalanx of myrmidons, walking noiselessly but quickly and jauntily, with a heavy, pigeon-toed step, came the potbellied emperor with his fine mountain man’s head, his sloping shoulders, the tigerish creases of his roguish smile. Anyone who saw him approaching had to stand back against the wall and show their hands. Anatoly Dobrynin, a young diplomat, once found himself in this dilemma: “I pressed my back against the wall.” Stalin “did not fail to notice my confusion” and asked “who I was and where I worked.” Then “stressing his words by a slow moving of the finger of his right hand” before Dobrynin’s face, he declared, “Youth must not fear Comrade Stalin. He is its friend.” Dobrynin shuddered.

The walk to the cinema took a few minutes. Decorated in blue, there were rows of soft upholstered armchairs set in pairs, with tables between each seat with mineral water, wine, cigarettes, boxes of chocolates. The carpet was grey with rugs on it. Before Stalin arrived, the Politburo took their seats, leaving the front row empty. They were met by the Minister of Cinema, Ivan Bolshakov, who had run the film industry since 1939 and became a vital but comical presence in the entourage. Bolshakov was terrified of Stalin since his two cinematic predecessors had been shot. As Stalin got older, the cinema became an obsessive ritual, as well as an aid, and venue, for governing.

Bolshakov’s big decision was which film to show. This he judged by trying to guess Stalin’s mood. He observed the Leader’s gait, intonation of voice and sometimes, if he was lucky, Vlasik or Poskrebyshev gave him a clue. If Stalin was in a bad mood, Bolshakov knew it was not a good idea to show a new movie. Stalin was a creature of habit: he loved his old favourites from the thirties like Volga! Volga! or foreign films such as In Old Chicago, Mission to Moscow, the comedy It Happened One Night, or any Charlie Chaplin.

Stalin now possessed a new library of American, English and German films that had until recently been the property of Goebbels. If Stalin was in a bad mood, one of the Goebbels films would please him. He liked detective films, Westerns, gangster films—and he enjoyed fights. He banned any hint of sexuality. When Bolshakov once showed him a slightly risqué scene involving a naked girl, he banged the table and said: “Are you making a brothel here, Bolshakov?” Then he walked out, followed by the Politburo, leaving poor Bolshakov awaiting arrest. From then on, he cut even the slightest glimpse of nudity.

Stalin ordered Bolshakov to interpret the foreign films. Yet Bolshakov spoke only pidgin English. He therefore spent much of his time preparing for these midnight sessions by having interpreters go over the film for him and then learning the script. This was a challenge because at any time, he had hundreds of films to show Stalin. Thus his interpretation was usually absurdly obvious and very late, long after it was clear what the character had already said. The Politburo laughed and teased the flustered Bolshakov on his translations. Beria pointed at the screen and called out: “Look he’s started running . . .” All laughed—but Stalin, who evidently enjoyed this farce, never demanded a proper interpreter.

In 1951, Bolshakov asked Stalin to approve the film Tarzan: one imagines his translation of Tarzan’s jungle-swinging shriek and courting grunts with Jane thoroughly entertained his audience. If Bolshakov showed the old favourite, Volga! Volga!, Stalin liked to show off how well he knew it and would perform every part just before the actor.

If Stalin was in a good mood, Bolshakov had the chance to choose a new Soviet movie. Stalin remained the censor of the entire industry: no movie could be shown without his personal approval. When he was in the south for months, no decision could be made so he had to see all the new films when he returned.

As Stalin approached, Bolshakov took up position outside the cinema. He once frightened Stalin by lurking in the shadows: “Who are you? What are you doing?” Stalin barked. “Why are you hiding?” Stalin scowled at Bolshakov for weeks afterwards. Taking his seat in the front row with his guests around him, usually mixing a spritzer of Georgian wine and mineral water, he always asked: “What will Comrade Bolshakov show us today?” Bolshakov announced the movie, sat down at the back and ordered the projectionists to begin. Once, one of them dropped and broke part of the projector, which spread mercury on the floor. They were accused of attempting to assassinate the Generalissimo.[23]

Stalin talked throughout the film. He enjoyed cowboy films especially those directed by John Ford, and admired Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable but he also “cursed them, giving them an ideological evaluation,” recalled Khrushchev, “and then ordering new ones.”[24]

Stalin admired the actors, frequently asking “Where’ve we seen this actor before?” After the war, actors and directors often joined Stalin’s dinners, particularly the Georgian director of films featuring the heroic Leader, Mikhail Chiaureli, and the actors who often played him, Mikhail Gelovani (who did Stalin with a Georgian accent) and Alexei Diky (increasingly after the war, with a Russian accent). “You’re observing me thoroughly,” Stalin told Gelovani. “You don’t waste time do you?” He once asked Diky how he would “play Stalin.”

“As the people see him,” replied the actor.

“The right answer,” said Stalin, giving him a bottle of brandy.

When the film was over, Stalin always asked his fellow intellectual:

“What will Comrade Zhdanov tell us?” Zhdanov gave his pompous verdict followed by Molotov’s laconic judgement and Beria’s sarcastic jokes. Stalin enjoyed joking about the auteurs: “If Comrade [director or screenwriter]’s no good, Comrade Ulrikh’ll sign his death sentence.”

Bolshakov once called Beria and Molotov to ask if Zhukovsky, a film about the aviator, could be launched on Air Force Day, but Stalin, on holiday, had still not seen it. It was his decision not theirs, they replied, so Bolshakov launched the film. When Stalin returned, he watched Zhukovsky and then said: “We know you decided to put it on the screens of the USSR! They want to trick me but it’s impossible.” Bolshakov froze. On whose authority, asked Stalin? Bolshakov replied that he had “consulted and decided.”

“You consulted and decided,” repeated Stalin quietly. He got up and walked to the door, opened it and repeated: “You decided.” He went out, leaving a doom-laden silence. Then he opened the door again, smiling: “You decided correctly.” If Stalin hated the film, he would simply walk out but not before teasing Bolshakov.

Bolshakov made notes of all these august critiques. In the morning, he called the directors or scriptwriters and passed on the comments without specifying their source but no doubt his quivering voice and breathless awe made it obvious.[25]

Stalin imposed politics on film but also film on reality. Djilas noticed how he seemed to mix up what was going on “in the manner of an uneducated man who mistakes artistic reality for actuality.” He revelled in films about murdering friends and associates. Khrushchev and Mikoyan repeatedly sat through a British film, no doubt one of the Goebbels collection, about a pirate who stole some gold and then, “one by one,” killed his accomplices to keep the swag.

“What a fellow, look how he did it!” exclaimed Stalin. This was “depressing” for his comrades who could not forget that, as Khrushchev put it, “we were temporary people.” Stalin’s isolated position made these films increasingly powerful. After the war, Stalin wanted to impose taxes on the peasants even though the countryside was stricken with famine. The whole Politburo sensibly opposed this, which angered Stalin. He was convinced the peasants could afford it: he pointed to the plenty shown in his propaganda movies, allowing him to ignore the starvation. After seeing the movie on Catherine the Great’s admiral, Ushakov, Stalin became obsessed with building a powerful fleet, quoting a character in the film who says: “Land forces are a sword in one hand, sea forces a sword in the other.”

He often insisted on seeing two movies in a row and afterwards, around 2 a.m., would say: “Let’s go and get something to eat,” adding “if you have time” as if there was any choice in the matter.

“If that’s an invitation,” replied Molotov, “with the greatest satisfaction.” Then Stalin turned to his guests, often Tito or Bierut: “What are your plans for tonight?” as if they would have any at that hour. Stalin laughed. “Hmm, a government without a state plan. We’ll take a bite.” The average “bite” lasted the interminable six hours until dawn.[26]

Stalin ordered the omnipresent Poskrebyshev to summon the cars but when they were delayed, he trembled “with rage, shouted, his features distorted, sharply motioned and poured invective into the face of his secretary who was . . . paling as if he had heart failure.” Poskrebyshev rounded up other guests. The guests had to prepare for the dinners, resting in the afternoon because “those sleeping at Stalin’s table came to a bad end,” said Khrushchev.[27] Sometimes he invited his Georgian film directors and actors to liven up the party: “Do you know if Chiaureli and Gelovani are in Moscow now?”

Foreign guests rode with Stalin who always sat in the fold-up seat right behind the driver and sometimes turned on a light above him to read. Molotov usually took the other folding seat with the favourite, Zhdanov, and any other guests in the back seats. Beria and Malenkov, “that pair of scoundrels” as Stalin called them, always shared a car.[28] As the cars sped out of the city at the speed that Stalin relished, he planned the route, taking “strange detours” to confuse terrorists.

After driving ten miles up the Government Highway, they reached a barrier, turned left and approached a clump of young fir trees. After another checkpoint, they entered the gates of Kuntsevo. Once inside, they passed a big map in the hall where Stalin, Zhdanov and Molotov stopped to make grand geopolitical statements and capricious decisions. Zhdanov, his rival Malenkov and Voznesensky always had their notebooks ready to record Stalin’s orders while Molotov and Mikoyan, Old Bolsheviks, regarded themselves as above such sycophancy.

The lavatories were in the basement and when the guests washed before dinner, Molotov joked at the urinals: “We call this unloading before loading!” This lavatory was one of the only rooms in Moscow where the magnates could indulge in honest discussion: Beria and the others whispered to each other about the tedium of Stalin’s tales of his Siberian exile. When he claimed to have skied twelve kilometres to shoot twelve partridges, Beria, already coming to loathe Stalin, insisted, “He’s just lying!”

They entered the roomy dining room with a long table with about fourteen covered chairs along each side; there were comfortable chairs alongside it, high windows with long drapes, and two chandeliers and lights set in the walls. As in all Stalin’s houses, the walls, floors and ceilings were made of light Karelian pine panelling. It was so clean, so “dead quiet” and so “isolated from the other world,” that visitors imagined they were “in a hospital.”

Stalin always sat to the left of the head of the table with Beria at the end, often as tamada, and the guest of honour on Stalin’s left. As soon as they sat down, the drinking started. At first it was civilized, with a few bottles of wine, sometimes weak Georgian “juice” and some champagne, which Stalin greatly enjoyed. Mikoyan and Beria used to bring wine.

“Being Caucasian, you understand wine better than the others, try it . . .” Stalin would say: it was soon clear that he was testing the wines for poison so they stopped bringing it. Stalin provided his own wine and genially opened the bottles himself. As the evening went on, the toasts of vodka, pepper vodka and brandy became more insistent until even these iron-bellied drinkers were blind drunk. Stalin liked to blame Beria for the excessive drinking. At Georgian dinners, hosts customarily play at forcing their guests to drink, and then taking umbrage if they resist. But by now, this hospitality was grossly distorted and represented nothing but power and fear. After Stalin’s binges in 1944–45, Professor Vinogradov warned him to cut down on the drinking and he started to water down his drinks, diluting wine with mineral water. Nonetheless he occasionally over-imbibed and Svetlana saw him singing a duet with the legless but proud Health Minister. Forcing his tough comrades to lose control of themselves became his sport and a measure of dominance.

The drinking started with Stalin not Beria: he “forced us to drink to loosen our tongues,” wrote Mikoyan. Stalin liked the old drinking game of guessing the temperature. When Djilas was there, Beria was three degrees out and had to drink three vodkas. Beria, whom Svetlana called “a magnificent modern specimen of the artful courtier,” played up to Stalin’s longing to see his courtiers humiliate themselves, and policed the drinking, ensuring that no one missed a bumper.

“Come on, drink like everyone else does,” Beria tormented Molotov because he “always wanted to make a show in front of Stalin—he would never lag behind if Stalin said something.” Sometimes Stalin defended foreign visitors and he spared Kaganovich because “Jews weren’t great drinkers.” Even during these sessions, Beria’s mind throbbed with sexual imagery: after forcing Djilas to down a pepper vodka, he sneered that it was “bad for the sexual glands.” Stalin gazed at his guest to see if he was shocked, “ready to burst out laughing.”

Secretly, Beria hated these drinking sessions—he complained bitterly about them to Nina, Khrushchev and Molotov. Nina asked why he did it: “You have to put yourself on the same level as the people you’re with,” he replied, but there was more to it than that. Beria relished his power: in this, as in many other things, “I couldn’t resist it.” Khrushchev agreed that the dinners were “frightful.”

Sometimes the drinking at these Bacchanals was so intense that the potentates, like ageing, bloated students, staggered out to vomit, soiled themselves or simply had to be borne home by their guards. Stalin praised Molotov’s capacity but sometimes even he became drunk. Poskrebyshev was the most prolific vomiter. Khrushchev was a prodigious drinker, as eager to please Stalin as Beria. He sometimes became so inebriated that Beria took him home and put him to bed, which he promptly wet. Zhdanov and Shcherbakov could not control their drinking and became alcoholics: the latter died of the disease in May 1945 but Zhdanov tried to fight it. Bulganin was “practically an alcoholic.” Malenkov just became more bloated.

Beria, Malenkov and Mikoyan managed to suborn a waitress to serve them “coloured water” but they were betrayed to Stalin by Shcherbakov. After swallowing some colossal brandies, Mikoyan staggered out of the dining room and found a little room next door with a sofa and a basin. He splashed his face with water, lay down and managed to sleep for a few minutes, which became a secret habit. But Beria sneaked to Stalin who was already turning against the Armenian: “Want to be smarter than the rest, don’t you!” Stalin said slowly. “See you don’t regret it later!” This was always the threat chez Stalin.[29]

Stalin’s Mitteleuropean vassals coped no better. Gottwald became so inebriated that he requested that Czechoslovakia join the USSR. His wife, who came with him, heroically volunteered: “Allow me, Comrade Stalin, to drink in my husband’s place. I’ll drink for us both.” Rakosi foolishly told Beria that the Soviets were “drunkards.”

“We’ll see about that!” scoffed Stalin who joined Beria in “pumping” the Hungarian with drink.

In summertime, the guests staggered outside onto the verandas. Stalin asked Beria or Khrushchev’s advice on his roses (which he lovingly clipped), lemons and kitchen garden. Stalin supervised the planting of a vegetable garden where he devised new varieties such as crossing pumpkins with water melons. He fed the birds every day. Once, Beria built a greenhouse as a present to Stalin. “What fool ordered this?” Stalin asked. “How much electricity do you spend on floodlights?” He had it destroyed.

The standard of drunken horseplay was not much better than a university fraternity house. Khrushchev and Poskrebyshev drunkenly pushed Kulik into the pond—they knew Stalin had lost respect for the buffoon. Kulik, famously strong, jumped out soaking and chased Poskrebyshev who hid in the bushes. Beria warned: “If anyone tried something like that on me, I’d make mincemeat of them.” Poskrebyshev was regularly pushed in until the guards became so worried that a drunken magnate would drown that they discreetly drained the pond. The infantilism delighted Stalin: “You’re like little children!”

One evening, Beria suggested that they do some shooting in the garden. There were quails in a cage. “If we don’t shoot them,” said Beria, “the guards’ll eat them!” The Leader, who was probably already drunk, staggered out and called for guns. Stalin, old, weak and tipsy, not to mention his frail left arm, first felt “giddy” and fired his gun at the ground, only just missing Mikoyan. He then fired it in the air and managed to pepper his bodyguards, Colonels Tukov and Khrustalev, with shot. Afterwards Stalin apologized to them but blamed Beria.[30]

In the dining room, the maids, plump peasant women wearing white pinafores, like Victorian nurses, emerged with an array of Georgian dishes which they laid on the sideboard or the other end of the long table, then disappeared. When one of them was serving tea to Stalin and the Polish leaders, she stopped and hesitated. Stalin noticed immediately: “What’s she listening to?” If there were no foreign eminences, dinner was served by one of the housekeepers, usually Valechka, and a bodyguard. The guests helped themselves, then joined Stalin at the table.

“Gradually Stalin began to take a great interest in his food,” recalled Mikoyan. The weary Generalissimo was fuelling his failing energy with “enormous quantities of food suitable for a much larger man.” “He ate at least twice as much as I did,” wrote Mikoyan. “He took a deep plate, mixed two soups in it, then in a country custom that I knew from my own village, crumbled bread into the hot soup and covered it all by another plate—and then ate it all up to the end. Then there would be entreés, the main course and lots of meat.” He liked fish, especially herring, but “he also liked game—guinea-fowl, ducks, chickens” and boiled quails. He even invented a new dish which he called Aragvi, made of mutton with aubergines, tomatoes, potatoes and black pepper, all in a spicy sauce, which he ordered frequently. Yet he was so suspicious that he usually tried to persuade Khrushchev, the greediest of the magnates, to try his lamb or herring before he did.

The dinners were a sort of culinary imperialism, designed to impress with their simplicity yet awe with their power—and they worked. While the independent Yugoslavs were appalled by the coarseness of the company, the pliant Poles were impressed by the “delicious roast bear” and regarded their host as “a charming man” who treated them with paternal warmth, always asking if their families enjoyed their Crimean holidays. With outsiders, Stalin retained his earlier gift of being a masterful practitioner of “the human touch.” This charm had its limits. Bierut persisted in asking Stalin what had happened to the Polish Communists who had disappeared in 1937.

“Lavrenti, where are they?” Stalin asked Beria. “I told you to look for them, why haven’t you found them?” Stalin and Beria shared a relish for these sinister games. Beria promised to look for the vanished Poles but when Stalin was not listening, he turned on Bierut: “Why fuck around with Joseph Vissarionovich? Fuck off and leave him alone. Or you’ll regret it.” Bierut did not mention his lost friends again.

Stalin suffered from bad teeth which affected his court since he would only eat the softest lamb or the ripest fruit. His dentures, when they were fitted, unleashed yet another vicious competition. This gourmand also insisted on Bolshevik austerity, two instincts that were hard to match as his courtiers competed to procure the choicest cuts for him. Once he enjoyed a delicious lamb but asked a bodyguard: “Where did you get the lamb?”

“The Caucasus,” replied the guard.

“How did you fuel the plane? With water? This is one of Vlasik’s pranks!”[31] Stalin ordered a farm to be built at Kuntsevo where cows, sheep and chickens could be kept and the lake stocked with fish, and this was managed by a special staff of three agricultural experts. When Beria delivered thirty turbots, Stalin teased his guards: “ You couldn’t find turbot but Beria could.” The guards sent them for laboratory analysis and revealed that Beria’s fish were rotten.

“That trickster can’t be trusted,” said Stalin. Despite his swelling paunch, Stalin criticized the spreading flab of “Malanya” Malenkov, ordering him to take exercise in order to “recover the look of a human being.” Beria joined in teasing his ally: “So, that human-being look, where is it? Have you lost any weight?” But Khrushchev’s gluttony entertained Stalin who whispered to the guards: “He needed more than two fish and some pheasants, the glutton!” Yet he encouraged the spherical Khrushchev to eat more: “Look! The giblets, Nikita. Have you tried them yet?”

The potentates tried to control their diets by living on fruit and juices one day a week to “unload,” but it did not seem to work. Beria insisted on eating vegetables as his diet, for he was already as fat as Malenkov.

“Well Comrade Beria, here’s your grass,” announced Stalin’s housekeeper.[32]

Stalin believed his dinners resembled a “political dining society” but his “fellow intellectual” Zhdanov persuaded him their wide-ranging discussions were the equivalent of the symposia of the ancient Greeks. Nonetheless these vomit-flecked routs were the closest he came to cabinet government. The Imperium was truly being “governed from the dining table,” Molotov said. The leadership was like “a patriarchal family with a crotchety head whose foibles caused the home folks to be apprehensive” but “unofficially and in actual fact,” wrote Djilas, “a significant part of Soviet policy was shaped at these dinners. It was here that the destiny of the vast Russian land, of the newly acquired territories and . . . the human race was decided.” The conversation meandered from jokes and literature on to “the most serious political subjects.” The Politburo exchanged news from their fiefdoms but the informality was illusionary: “The uninstructed visitor might hardly have detected any difference between Stalin and the others but it existed.”

At dinner, Zhdanov, “the Pianist,” was the most loquacious, showing off about his latest cultural campaign or grumbling that Molotov should have let him annex Finland, while his chief rival, the obese super-clerk, Malenkov, was usually silent—“extreme caution with Stalin” was his policy. Beria, the most sycophantic yet the most irreverent, was artful at provoking and manipulating Stalin or, as his wife put it, “playing with the tiger”: he could shoot down anyone else’s proposal if they had not first checked it with him. Beria was “very powerful” because he could “pick the exact moment to . . . turn Stalin’s goodwill or ill will to his advantage.”

When foreigners were absent, the fate of men was often decided. Yet Stalin talked about their acquaintances murdered during the thirties “with the calm detachment of a historian, showing neither sorrow nor rage, just a light humour.” Once he wandered up to one of his marshals who had been arrested and released: “I heard you were recently in confinement?”

“Yes, Comrade Stalin, I was, but they figured out my case and released me. But how many good and remarkable people perished there.”

“Yes,” mused Stalin thoughtfully, “we’ve lost a lot of good and remarkable people.” Then he walked out of the room into the garden. The courtiers turned on the Marshal. “What did you say to Comrade Stalin?” demanded Malenkov who always behaved like the school prefect. “Why?” Then Stalin reappeared holding a bouquet of roses which he presented to the Marshal as a weird sort of apology.

Supreme power is often the supreme power to bore: nothing beats the obligatory tedium and inebriated verbosity of the absolute monarch in decline. The old Generalissimo had become repetitive, irritable and forgetful. Beria and Khrushchev knew by heart Stalin’s exaggerated exploits in exile, his trips to London and Vienna, his childhood beatings at the hands of his father. Stalin dwelt more and more on the curious happiness of his exile, perhaps the only true harmony he had known. He now received an appeal for help from a friend from his Turukhansk exile during the First World War: “I am daring to trouble you from the village of Kureika,” wrote an old teacher named Vasily Solomin who lived on a pension of 150 roubles. “I remember when . . . you caught a sturgeon. How much happiness it gave me!”

“I got your letter,” replied Stalin. “I haven’t forgotten you and my friends from Turukhansk and be sure I’ll never forget you. I send you 6,000 roubles from my deputy’s salary. The sum isn’t very large but it’ll be useful. Good health, Stalin.”

Each magnate policed the others, constantly vigilant to protect their interests and avoid provoking the old tiger. It became increasingly difficult to discuss real politics. When Mikoyan told Stalin there was a food shortage, Stalin became anxious and, while feasting on the myriad dishes, kept asking “Why’s there no food?”

“Ask Malenkov, he’s in charge of Agriculture,” replied Mikoyan. At that moment, the heels of both Beria and Malenkov landed hard on Mikoyan’s foot under the table.

“What’s the use of it?” Beria and Malenkov attacked Mikoyan afterwards. “It just irritates Stalin. He begins to attack one or other of us. He should be told only what he likes to hear to create a nice atmosphere, not to spoil the dinner!”[33]

They studied Stalin like zoologists to read his moods, win his favour and survive. The key was to understand Stalin’s unique blend of supersensitive discomfiture and world-historical arrogance, his longing to be liked and his heartless cruelty: it was vital not to make him anxious. When Mikoyan’s aircraft designer brother was in trouble, he “advised Artyom how to handle Stalin.” Khrushchev noticed how the Pole, Bierut, “managed to avoid disaster because he knew how to handle Stalin.”

There were certain key rules which resemble the advice given to a tourist on how to behave if he is unlucky enough to encounter a wild animal on his camping holiday. The first rule was to look him straight in the eyes. Otherwise he asked: “Why don’t you look me in the eye today?” But it was dangerous to look into his eyes too much: Gomulka, one of the Polish leaders, took notes and showed respect but his intensity made Stalin nervous: “What kind of fellow’s Gomulka? He sits there all the time looking into my eyes as though searching for something.” Perhaps he was an agent?

The visitor had to maintain calm at all times: panic alarmed Stalin. Bierut “never made Stalin nervous and self-conscious.” Visitors must show respect by taking notes, like Malenkov, but not too frantically like Gomulka: “Why does he bring a notepad with him?” Stalin wondered. If the guards were over-formal in clicking their heels, Stalin became flighty: “Who are you? Soldier Svejk?” he snapped. Yet firmness and humour with Stalin usually worked well: he admired and protected Zhukov and appreciated Khrushchev for their strong views.

He knew Beria and Malenkov tried to prefix decisions so he appreciated Voznesensky’s honesty. But he no longer appreciated the bluntness of old comrades. Voroshilov, “the most illustrious of the Soviet grandees” whom he now distrusted for his taste for splendour and Bohemian circle, tried to remind him of their long friendship: “I don’t remember,” Stalin replied. Mikoyan was one of the frankest and often contradicted Stalin, which had been acceptable during the war, but no longer: once when they were discussing the Kharkov offensive, Mikoyan courageously blurted out that the disaster was Stalin’s fault. The military genius was furious, becoming ever more suspicious of Molotov and Mikoyan.

The potentates could never meet in private: “Danger lurked in friends and friendship,” wrote Sergei Khrushchev. “An innocent meeting could end tragically.” Although Khrushchev, Malenkov, Mekhlis, Budyonny and others lived on Granovsky Street, they virtually never visited their neighbours. Stalin relished their mutual hatreds: Beria and Malenkov loathed Zhdanov and Voznesensky; Mikoyan hated Beria; Bulganin hated Malenkov. Their homes were all now bugged. (“I’ve been bugged all my life,” Molotov admitted when his bodyguard confided that his own house was wired.) But Beria claimed that he deliberately criticized policy at home because otherwise Stalin would become suspicious. Their importance depended not on seniority but purely on their relationships with Stalin. Thus Poskrebyshev, a factotum, if CC member, openly insulted Mikoyan, a Politburo member, when the latter was under a cloud.

Stalin had to be consulted about everything, however small, yet he did not want to be harassed for decisions because this too made him nervous. Beria boasted that while Yezhov rushed to Stalin with every detail, he himself only consulted him on major questions. If Stalin was on holiday, the safest option was to make no decisions at all, a strategy perfected by Bulganin who rose without trace as a result. If in doubt, appeal to Stalin’s sagacity: “Without you no one will solve this question,” read one such note. Stalin liked to hear everyone else’s opinion before giving his own but Mikoyan preferred “waiting to hear what Stalin would say.”

Beria said the only way to survive was “always to strike first.” It was sensible to denounce your fellow bosses at all times or, as Vyshinsky put it, “keep people on edge.” When Molotov made a mistake, Vyshinsky revelled in it. But the denouncers were on edge too: Manuilsky wrote a ten-page denunciation of Vyshinsky: “Dear Comrade Stalin, I’m turning to you about the case of Vyshinsky . . . Abroad without the control of the CC, he is a person of petit bourgeois and boundless self-importance, for whom his own interests take precedence.” Stalin decided to do nothing with this but, as always, he informed the victim: later that day, Vyshinsky was found staring into oblivion: “I’m only theoretically alive. I just got through the day. Well at least that’s something, thank God!”

The overriding rule was to conceal nothing from Stalin: Zhdanov neutralized his crisis in Leningrad, Khrushchev, his youthful Trotskyism, by submissive confession to Stalin. Stalin’s eye for any weakness was aquiline: when Vyshinsky felt ill and walked out of a diplomatic meeting, Stalin heard about it instantly and phoned his subordinate, Gromyko: “What happened to Vyshinsky? Was he drunk?” Gromyko denied it. “But the doctors say he’s an alcoholic . . . Oh well all right!”[34]

After dinner, Stalin solemnly toasted Lenin whose illuminated bust flickered on the wall: “To Vladimir Illich, our leader, our teacher, our all!” But this sacerdotal blessing ended any remaining decorum. When foreigners were not present, Stalin criticized Lenin, the hero who had turned against him: he even told young Sergo Beria stories about Lenin’s affairs with his secretaries. “At the end of his life,” Khrushchev thought he “lost control over what he was saying.” It was probably after 4 a.m.; the guests were desperately drunk, tired and nauseous but the omnipotent insomniac was awake, vigilant and almost sober.

There was a short rest to wash their hands, another opportunity to roll their eyes at Stalin’s latest peccadillo: the magnates chuckled at the ever-increasing number of locks on the doors and whispered about another of Stalin’s boasts of his drinking exploits: “You see, even in youth, he’d drink too much!” Then it was back to the dinner which now sank to the level of a Neanderthal stag night.

Sometimes Stalin himself “got so drunk he took such liberties,” said Khrushchev. “He’d throw a tomato at you.” Beria was the master of practical jokes along with Poskrebyshev. The two most dignified guests, Molotov and Mikoyan, became the victims as Stalin’s distrust of them became more malicious. Beria targeted the sartorial splendour of the “dashing” Mikoyan. Stalin teased him about his “fancy airs” while Beria delighted in tossing Mikoyan’s hat into the pine trees where it remained. He slipped old tomatoes into Mikoyan’s suits and then “pressed him against the wall” so they exploded in his pocket. Mikoyan started to bring spare pairs of trousers to dinner. At home, Ashken found chicken bones in his pockets. Stalin smiled as Molotov sat on a tomato or Poskrebyshev downed a vodka full of salt that would make him vomit. Poskrebyshev often collapsed and had to be dragged out. Beria once wrote “PRICK” on a piece of paper and stuck it onto Khrushchev’s back. When Khrushchev did not notice, everyone guffawed. Khrushchev never forgot the humiliation.

Sometimes Svetlana popped in during dinner but could not hide her embarrassment and distaste. She thought the magnates resembled “Peter the Great’s boyars” who had almost killed themselves with drink to entertain the Tsar at his drunken “Synod.”

After dinner, “Stalin played the gramophone, considering it his duty as a citizen. He never left it,” said Berman. He relished his comic records, including one of the “warbling of a singer accompanied by the yowling and barking of dogs” which always made him laugh with mirth. “Well, it’s still clever, devilishly clever!” He marked the records with his comments: “Very good!”

Stalin urged his grandees to dance but this was no longer the exhilarating whirligig of Voroshilov and Mikoyan tripping the light fantastic. This too had become a test of power and strength. Stalin himself “shuffled around with his arms spread out” in Georgian style, though he had “a sense of rhythm.”

“Comrade Joseph Vissarionovich, how strong you are!” chirped the Politburo. Then he stopped and became gloomy: “Oh no, I won’t live long. The physiological laws are having their way.”

“No no!” Molotov chorused. “Comrade Joseph Vissarionovich we need you, you still have a long life ahead of you!”

“Age has crept up on me and I’m already an old man!”

“Nonsense. You look fine. You’re holding up marvellously . . .”

When Tito was present, Stalin waved away these reassurances and looked at his guest whose assassination he would later order: “Tito should take care of himself in case anything happens to him. Because I won’t live long.” He turned to Molotov: “But Vyacheslav Mikhailovich will remain here.” Molotov squirmed. Then, in a bizarre demonstration of his virility, Stalin declared: “There’s still strength in me!” He slipped both arms around Tito’s arms and thrice lifted him off the floor in time to the Russian folk song on the gramophone, a pas de deux that was the tyrannical equivalent of Nureyev and Fonteyn.

“When Stalin says dance,” Khrushchev told Mikoyan, “a wise man dances.” He made the sweating Khrushchev drop to his haunches and do the gopak that made him look like “a cow dancing on ice.” Bulganin “stomped.” Mikoyan, the “acknowledged dancer,” still managed his wild lezginka, and “our city dancer” Molotov immaculately waltzed, displaying his unlikely terpsichorean talent. Ever since the thirties, Molotov’s party trick had been gravely slow-dancing with other men to the guffaws of Stalin: his last male partner, Postyshev, had been shot long ago.

Polish security boss Berman was amazed when the Soviet Foreign Minister asked him to slow-dance to a waltz. “I just moved my feet in rhythm like the woman,” said Berman. “Molotov led. He wasn’t a bad dancer. I tried to keep in step but what I did resembled clowning more than dancing. It was pleasant but with an inner tension.” Stalin watched from the gramophone, grinning roguishly as Molotov and Berman glided across the floor. It was Stalin who “really had fun. For us,” said Berman, “these dancing sessions were a good opportunity to whisper to each other things that couldn’t be said out loud.” Molotov warned Berman “about being infiltrated by various hostile organizations,” a warning prearranged with Stalin.[35]

There were rarely women at these dinners but they were sometimes invited for New Year’s Eve or on Stalin’s birthday. When Nina Beria was at Kuntsevo with her husband, Stalin asked her why she was not dancing. She said she was not in the mood so Stalin went over to a young actor and ordered him to ask Nina to dance. This was to tease the jealous Beria who was furious. Svetlana hated her visits to these orgies. Stalin insisted she dance too: “Well go on, Svetlana, dance! You’re the hostess so dance!”

“I’ve already danced, Papa. I’m tired.” Stalin pulled her hair, expressing his “perverse affection in its brutish form.” When she tried to flee, he called: “Comrade Mistress, why have you left us poor unenlightened creatures without . . . direction? Lead us! Show us the way!”

When Zhdanov moved to the piano, they sang religious hymns, White anthems and Georgian folk songs like “Suliko.” When Georgian actors and directors such as Chiaureli were present, the entertainment was more elevated. Chiaureli’s “imitations, songs, anecdotes made Stalin laugh.” Stalin loved singing and was very good at it. The two choirboys, Stalin and Voroshilov, joined Mikoyan, Beria and Zhdanov at the piano.[36]

It was almost dawn but the haunting nostalgia of these songs from those lost worlds of seminaries and church choirs was instantly shattered by Stalin’s explosions of anger and contempt. “A reasonable interrogator,” said Khrushchev, “would not behave with a hardened criminal the way Stalin behaved with friends at his table.” When Mikoyan disagreed with Stalin, he flared up: “You’ve all got old. I’ll replace you all.”

At about 5 a.m., Stalin dismissed his exhausted comrades who were often so drunk they could hardly move. The guards ordered the cars round to the front and the chauffeurs “dragged away their charges.” On the way home, Khrushchev and Bulganin lay back, relieved to have survived: “one never knows,” whispered Bulganin, “if one’s going home or to prison.”

The guards locked the doors of the dacha and retired to their guardhouse. Stalin lay on one of his divans and started to read. Finally, drink and exhaustion soothed this obsessional Dynamo. He slept. His bodyguards noted the light go out in Stalin’s quarters: “no movement.”[37]

47. Molotov’s Chance: “You’ll Do Anything When You’re Drunk!”

The war,” Stalin admitted, “broke me.” By October 1945, he was ill again. Suddenly at dinner, he declared: “Let Vyacheslav go to work now. He’s younger.” Kaganovich, sobbing, begged Stalin not to retire. There is no less enviable honour than to be appointed the heir of a murderous tyrant. But now Molotov, the first of a deadly line of potential successors, got his chance to act as proxy leader.

On 9 October, Stalin, Molotov and Malenkov voted “to give Comrade Stalin a holiday of a month and a half”—and the Generalissimo set off in his special train for Sochi and then Gagra on the Black Sea. Sometime between 9 and 15 October, Stalin suffered a serious heart attack. A photograph in the Vlasik family archive shows a clearly ailing Stalin, followed by an anxious Vlasik, probably arriving at Sochi, now a sizeable green two-storey mansion built around a courtyard. Then he headed south to Coldstream near Gagra. This was Stalin’s impregnable eyrie, cut out of the rock, high on a cliff over the sea. Rebuilt, by Merzhanov, into a green southern house that closely resembled Kuntsevo, this became his main southern residence for the rest of his life, a sort of secret Camp David. Its studded wooden gates could only be reached by a “narrow and sharply serpentine road.” It was completely surrounded by a Georgian veranda and there was a large sunroof. A rickety wooden summerhouse perched on the edge of the mountain.[38]

In this beautiful isolation, Stalin recuperated in a restful and hermetic holiday rhythm, sleeping all morning, walking during the day, breakfasting on the terrace, reading late, receiving a stream of paperwork, including the two files he never missed: NKGB reports and translations of the foreign press. Perhaps because he so closely supervised the Soviet press, he had surprising faith in foreign journalists.

During his absence, Molotov ran the government with Beria, Mikoyan and Malenkov, the Politburo Four. But Molotov’s moment in the sun was soon overshadowed by unsettling rumours that Stalin was dying, or already dead. On 10 October, TASS, the Soviet news agency, announced that “Comrade Stalin has left for a rest.” But this only awakened curiosity and aroused Stalin’s vigilance. The Chicago Tribune reported that Stalin was incapacitated. His successors would surely be Molotov and Marshal Zhukov—a report sent southwards as “Rumours in Foreign Press on the State of Health of Comrade Stalin.” Stalin’s suspicions deepened when he read an interview with Zhukov in which the Marshal took the credit for victory in the war, only deigning to praise Stalin rather late in the proceedings. Stalin focused on why these rumours had appeared. Who had spread them, and why had Soviet honour, in his person, been desecrated?

Perhaps “our Vyacheslav” was so thrilled at last to have the responsibility that he did not notice the brooding in Abkhazia. Molotov was at the height of his prestige as an international statesman. He had only just returned from a series of international meetings. There had been tension between them when Stalin had demanded that his Minister put pressure on Turkey to surrender some territory: Molotov argued against it, but Stalin insisted—Soviet demands were rebuffed. In April, Molotov had visited New York, Washington and San Francisco to meet President Truman and attend the opening of the UN. In an unpleasant meeting, Truman confronted Molotov on Soviet perfidy in Poland. “We live under constant pressure not to miss anything,” Molotov wrote to “Polinka my love” but as ever he gloried in his eminence: “Here among the bourgeois public,” he boasted, “I was the focus of attention, with barely any interest in the other ministers!” As ever, “I miss you and our daughter. I shan’t conceal sometimes I am overcome with impatient desire for your closeness and caresses.” But the essential thing was that “Moscow [i.e., Stalin] really supports our work and encourages it.”

In September, Molotov was in London for the Council of Foreign Ministers where he pushed for a Soviet trusteeship in Italian Libya, joking drily about the Soviet talent for colonial administration. Unlike Stalin who restlessly pushed for radical leaps, Molotov was a realistic gradualist in foreign policy and he knew the West would never agree to a Soviet Libya. He made some gaffes but Stalin forgave him for the conference’s failure, blaming it on American intransigence. Molotov again complained to Polina of the “pressure not to fail.” He hardly left the Soviet Embassy, watching movies like An Ideal Husband by Wilde, but “Once, only once I went to Karl Marx’s tomb.” In typically Soviet style, he congratulated Polina on her “performance of the annual [textiles] plan” but “I want to hold you close and unburden my heart.”

Now, with Stalin recuperating and Molotov acting slightly more independently, the temperature was rising. Molotov felt the time was right for a deal with the West. Stalin overruled him: it was time to “tear off the veil of amity.” When Molotov continued to behave too softly towards the Allies, Stalin, using the formal vy, attacked him harshly. “Molotov’s manner of separating himself from the government to portray himself as more liberal . . . is good for nothing.” Molotov climbed down with a ritualistic apology: “I admit that I committed a grave oversight.” It was a telling moment for the magnates: even Stalin and Molotov ceased to address each other informally—no more “Koba,” just “Comrade Stalin.”

On 9 November, Molotov ordered Pravda to publish a speech of Churchill’s praising Stalin as “this truly great man, the father of his nation.” Molotov had not grasped Stalin’s new view of the West. Stalin cabled a furious message: “I consider the publication of Churchill’s speech with his praise of Russia and Stalin a mistake,” attacking this “infantile ecstasy” which “spawns . . . servility before foreign figures. Against this servility, we must fight tooth and nail . . . Needless to say, Soviet leaders are not in need of praise from foreign leaders. Speaking personally, this praise only jars on me. Stalin.”

Just as the foreign media was trumpeting Stalin’s illness and Molotov’s succession, Molotov got tipsy at the 7 November reception and proposed the easing of censorship for foreign media. Stalin called Molotov who suggested treating “foreign correspondents more liberally.” The valetudinarian turned vicious: “You blurt out anything when you’re drunk!”

Stalin devoted the next three days of his holiday to the crushing of Molotov. By the time the New York Times had written about Stalin’s illness “in a ruder way even than has taken place in the French yellow press,” he decided to teach Molotov a lesson, ordering the Four to investigate—was it Molotov’s mistake? The other three tried to protect Molotov by blaming a minor diplomat but they admitted he was following Molotov’s instructions. On 6 December, Stalin cabled Malenkov, Beria and Mikoyan, ignoring Molotov, and attacking their “naïvety” in trying to “paper over the affair” while covering up “the sleight of hand of the fourth.” Stalin was burning at this “outrage” against the “prestige” of the Soviet government. “You probably tried to hush up the case to slap the scapegoat . . . in the face and stop there. But you made a mistake.” Hypocritically referring to the pretence of Politburo government, Stalin declared: “None of us has the right to act single-handedly . . . But Molotov appropriated this right. Why? . . . Because these calumnies were part of his plan?” A reprimand was no longer sufficient because Molotov “cares more about winning popularity among certain foreign circles. I cannot consider such a comrade as my First Deputy.” He ended that he was not sending this to Molotov “because I do not trust some people in his circle.” (This was an early reference to the Jewish Polina.)

Beria, Malenkov and Mikoyan, who sympathized with poor Molotov, summoned him like judges, read him Stalin’s cable and attacked him for his blunders. Molotov admitted his mistakes but thought it was unfair to mistrust him. The three reported to Stalin that Molotov had even “shed some tears” which must have satisfied the Generalissimo a little. Molotov then wrote an apology to Stalin which, one historian writes, was “perhaps the most emotional document of his life in politics.”

“Your ciphered cable is imbued with a profound mistrust of me, as a Bolshevik and a human being,” wrote the lachrymose Molotov, “and I accept this as a most serious warning from the Party for all my subsequent work, whatever job I may have. I will seek to excel in deeds to restore your trust in which every honest Bolshevik sees not merely personal trust but the Party’s trust—something I value more than life itself.”

Stalin let Molotov stew for two days, then at 1:15 a.m. on 8 December replied to the Four again, restoring his errant deputy to his former place as First Deputy Premier. But Stalin never spoke of Molotov as his successor again and stored up these mistakes to use against him.[39]-[40]

This was only the beginning. Stalin was feeling better but he had mulled angrily over the challenges from abroad, indiscipline at home, disloyalty in his circle, impertinence among his marshals. He was bored and depressed by stillness and solitude but his angry energy and zest for life were stimulated by struggle. He revelled in the excitement of personal puppeteering and ideological conflict. Returning in December with a glint in his yellow eyes and a spring in his step, he resolved to reinvigorate Bolshevism and to diminish his over-mighty boyars in a deft sweep of arrests and demotions.

Having shaken Molotov, Stalin turned on Beria and Malenkov. He did not need to invent the scandal. When Vasily Stalin had visited him at Potsdam, he reported the disastrous safety record of Soviet planes: of 80,300 planes lost in the war, 47 percent were due to accidents, not enemy fire or pilot error. Stalin had mused over this on holiday, even inviting the Aircraft Production Minister, Shakhurin,[41] to Sochi. Then he ordered the investigation of an “Aviators’ Case” against Shakhurin and the Air Force Commander, Air Marshal Novikov, one of the heroes of the war, whom he had jokingly threatened at de Gaulle’s banquet.

On 2 March, Vasily Stalin was promoted to Major-General. On 18 March, Beria and Malenkov, the two wartime potentates, were promoted to full Politburo membership—just as the Aviators’ Case nipped at their heels. Then Shakhurin and Air Marshal Novikov were arrested and tortured. Their agonies were carefully directed to kill two birds with one stone: the overlord of aircraft production was Malenkov.

Abakumov, the Smersh boss and Stalin’s protégé, arranged the Aviators’ Case which was also aimed at Beria. Stalin’s old fondness for the Mingrelian had long since turned to a surly disdain. Beria’s theatrical sycophancy and murderous creativity disgusted Stalin as much as his administrative genius impressed him. Stalin no longer trusted “Snake Eyes.” His first rule was to maintain personal control over the secret police. “He knows too much,” Stalin told Mikoyan. Stalin’s resentment burned slowly. They were strolling in the Kuntsevo gardens with Kavtaradze when Stalin hissed venomously at Beria in the Mingrelian dialect (which no one except Georgians understood): “You traitor, Lavrenti Beria!” Then he added “with an ironic smile”: “Traitor!” When he dined at Beria’s house, he was charming to Nina but dismissive of Lavrenti: in his toasts, he damned Beria with the faintest of praise. Beria reminisced about his first meeting with Stalin in 1926.

“I don’t remember,” Stalin replied crushingly. Beria’s attempt to speak Georgian to him at meetings now irritated Stalin: “I keep no secrets from these comrades. What kind of provocation is this! Talk the language everyone understands!”

Stalin sensed, correctly, that Beria, the industrial and nuclear magnifico, wanted to be a statesman. “He’s ambitious on a global scale,” he confided in a Georgian protégé, “but his ammunition isn’t worth a penny!” Stalin decided something was rotten in the Organs. During his holiday, he asked Vlasik about the conduct of Beria. Vlasik, delighted to destroy Beria, denounced his corruption, incompetence and possibly his VD. At a dinner in the south, Stalin told a joke about Beria: “Stalin loses his favourite pipe. In a few days, Lavrenti calls Stalin: ‘Have you found your pipe?’ ‘Yes,’ replies Stalin. ‘I found it under the sofa.’ ‘This is impossible!’ exclaims Beria. ‘Three people have already confessed to this crime!’ ”

Stalin relished stories about the power of the Cheka to make innocent people confess. But he became serious, “Everyone laughs at the story. But it’s not funny. The law breakers haven’t been rooted out of the MVD!”

Stalin moved swiftly against him: Beria was retired as MVD Minister in January, but remained curator of the Organs with Merkulov as MGB boss. Then Merkulov was denounced by his secretary. Beria washed his hands of him. On 4 May, Stalin, backed by Zhdanov, engineered the promotion of Abakumov to Minister of State Security: his qualifications for the job were his blind obedience and independence from Beria. When Abakumov modestly refused, Stalin jokingly asked if he would “prefer the Tea Trust.”

Abakumov remains the most shadowy of Stalin’s secret-police bosses just as the post-war years remain the murkiest of Stalin’s reign, although we now know much more about them. The coming atrocities were Abakumov’s doing, not Beria’s, even though most histories blame the latter. Beria, who, as Deputy Premier in charge of the Bomb and the missile industry, now moved his office from the Lubianka to the Kremlin, was henceforth “sacked” from the Organs. He bitterly resented it.

“Beria was scared to death of Abakumov and tried at all costs to have good relations . . .” recalled Merkulov. “Beria met his match in Abakumov.” Like a rat on a sinking ship, Beria’s pimp Colonel Sarkisov denounced the sexual degeneracy of the Bolshevik “Bluebeard” to Abakumov who eagerly took it to Stalin: “Bring me everything this arsehole will write down!” snapped Stalin.

 

 

48. Zhdanov the Heir and Abakumov’s Bloody Carpet

Abakumov, tall with a heart-shaped, fleshy face, colourless eyes, blue-black hair worn broussant, pouting lips and heavy eyebrows, was another colourful, swaggering torturer, amoral condottiere and “zoological careerist” who possessed all Beria’s sadism but less of his intelligence.[42]Abakumov unrolled a blood-stained carpet on his office floor before embarking on the torture of his victims in order not to stain his expensive Persian rugs. “You see,” he told his spy Leopold Trepper, “there are only two ways to thank an agent: cover his chest with medals or cut off his head.” He was hardly alone in this Bolshevik view.

Until Stalin swooped down to make him his own Chekist, Victor Abakumov was a typical secret policeman who had won his spurs purging Rostov in 1938. Born in 1908 to a Moscow worker, he was a bon viveur and womanizer. During the war, he stashed his mistresses in the Moskva Hotel and imported trainloads of plunder from Berlin. His splendid apartment had belonged to a soprano whom he had arrested and he regularly used MGB safehouses for amorous assignations. He loved jazz. The band-leader Eddie Rosner played at his parties until jazz was banned.

Abakumov dealt directly with Stalin, seeing him weekly, but never joined the dining circle: “I did nothing on my own,” he claimed after Stalin’s death. “Stalin gave orders and I carried them out.” There is no reason to disbelieve him. He cultivated Stalin’s children. At one Kremlin dinner, “he suddenly started, jumped up and obsequiously inclined his head before a short and reddish-haired girl”—Svetlana Stalin. Stalin’s grandeur was such that people now bowed to his daughter. Abakumov went drinking with Vasily Stalin. Together, they fanned the Aviators’ Case. Vasily purloined Novikov’s dacha while the “father of the Soviet air force” was tortured. Stalin asked for Abakumov’s recommendations:

“They should be shot.”

“It’s easy to shoot people,” replied Stalin. “It’s more difficult to make them work. Make them work.” Shakhurin received seven years’ hard labour, Novikov ten years—but their confessions implicated bigger fish.

On 4 May, Malenkov was abruptly removed from the Secretariat. His family remembered that they had to move out of their dacha. Their mother took them on a long holiday to the Baltic. Malenkov was despatched to check the harvest in Central Asia for several months, but never arrested. Beria tried to persuade Stalin to bring him back, which amused the Generalissimo: “Why are you taking such trouble with that imbecile? You’ll be the first to be betrayed by him.”

Beria had lost his Organs and his ally, Malenkov, so the success of the Bomb was paramount. Later in the year, he rushed to Elektrostal at Noginsk, near Moscow, to see Professor Kurchatov’s experimental nuclear reactor go critical, creating the first Soviet self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Beria watched Kurchatov raise the control rod at the panel and listened to the clicks that registered the neutrons rise to a wail.

“It’s started!” they said.

“Is that all?” barked Beria, afraid of being tricked by these eggheads. “Nothing more? Can I go to the reactor?” This would have been a delicious prospect for millions of Beria’s victims but they dutifully restrained him, so helping to preserve the diminished Beria.

The reversal of fortunes of Beria and Malenkov marked the resurrection of their enemy, Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s special friend, that hearty, pretentious intellectual who, after the stress of Leningrad, was a plump alcoholic with watery eyes and a livid complexion. Stalin openly talked about Zhdanov as his successor. Meanwhile, Beria could hardly conceal his loathing for Zhdanov’s pretensions: “He can just manage to play the piano with two fingers and to distinguish between a man and a bull in a picture, yet he holds forth on abstract painting!”[43]

“The Pianist” had become a hero in Leningrad where he was apt to boast that the siege had been more important than the battle for Stalingrad. Sent as Stalin’s proconsul in Finland in 1945, he mastered Finnish history, displayed an encyclopaedic knowledge of Helsinki politics and even charmed the British representative there. When he pushed to annex Finland (a Russian duchy until 1917), Molotov reprimanded him: “You’ve gone too far . . . You’re too emotional!” But none of this harmed his standing with Stalin who recalled him from Leningrad and promoted him to Party Deputy in charge of both Agitprop and relations with foreign Parties, making him even more powerful than he had been before the war. His family, particularly his son Yury, became close to Stalin again. Indeed, they wrote to him en famille: “Dear Joseph Vissarionovich, we cordially congratulate you on . . . the anniversary of Bolshevism’s victory and ask you to accept our warmest greetings, Zinaida, Andrei, Anna and Yury Zhdanov.”

Zhdanov had played his cards cleverly since returning in January 1945. He consolidated his triumph over Malenkov and Beria by persuading Stalin to promote his own camarilla of Leningraders to power in Moscow: Alexei Kuznetsov, the haggard, long-faced and soft-spoken hero of the siege, received Malenkov’s Secretaryship. Zhdanov understood that Stalin did not wish Beria to control the MGB so he suggested Kuznetsov to replace him as curator of the Organs. It was “naïve” of Kuznetsov to accept this poisoned chalice; “he should have refused,” said Mikoyan, but he was “unworldly.” Kuznetsov’s promotions earned him the undying hatred of the two most vindictive predators in the Stalinist jungle: Beria and Malenkov.

By February 1946, with Stalin in semi-retirement, Zhdanov seemed to have control of the Party as well as cultural and foreign policy matters, and to have neutralized the Organs and the military.[44] Zhdanov was hailed as the “second man in the Party,” its “greatest worker,” and his staff whispered about “our Crown Prince.” Stalin toyed with appointing him General Secretary. During 1946, Zhdanov signed decrees as “Secretary” alongside Stalin as Premier: “the Pianist” was so important that the Yugoslav Ambassador noticed how, when a bureaucrat entered his office, he bowed “to Zhdanov as he was approaching” and then retreated backwards, managing to cover “six or seven yards and in bowing himself out, he backed into the door, nervously trying to find the doorknob with his hand.” At the November parade, Zhdanov, in Stalin’s absence, took the salute with his Leningrad camarilla filling the Mausoleum.

Yet his health was weak.[45] Zhdanov never wanted to be the successor. During Stalin’s serious illnesses, he was terrified at the prospect, telling his son, “God forbid I outlive Stalin!”[46]

Stalin and Zhdanov picked up where they had left off before the war, debating how to merge the patriotic Russianness of the war with the Bolshevism of the Revolution in order to eradicate foreign influence and restore morality, pride and discipline. Like two crabby professors, obsessed with the greatness of nineteenth-century culture and repulsed by the degeneracy of modern art and morals, the old seminarist and the scion of provincial intelligentsia reached back to their youths, devising a savage attack on modernism (“formalism”) and foreign influence on Russian culture (“cosmopolitanism”). Poring over poetry and literary journals late into the night, these two meticulous, ever-tinkering “intellectuals,” who shared that ravenous Bolshevik appetite for education, cooked up the crackdown on the cultural freedom of wartime.

Steeped in the classics, despising new-fangled art, Zhdanov embarked on a policy that would have been familiar to Tsars Alexander I and Nicholas I. Victory had blessed the marriage of Russianness and Bolshevism: Stalin saw the Russians as the binding element of the USSR, the “elder brother” of the Soviet peoples, his own new brand of Russian nationalism very different from its nineteenth-century ancestor. There would be no new freedoms, no foreign influences, but these impulses would be suppressed in an enforced celebration of Russianness.

The Leningrad journals were the natural place to start because they published the works of the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, whom Stalin had once read to his children, and the poetess Anna Akhmatova, whose passionate verses symbolized the indestructible dignity and sensitivity of humanity in terror and war. Zhdanov’s papers reveal in his own words what Stalin wanted: “I ask you to look this through,” Zhdanov asked the Master, “is it good for the media and what needs to be improved?”

“I read your report. I think it’s perfect,” Stalin replied in crayon. “You must hurry to publish it and then as a book. Greetings!” But “there are some corrections”—which expressed Stalin’s thinking: “if our youth had read Akhmatova and been educated in such an atmosphere, what would have happened in the Great Patriotic War? Our youth [has been] educated in the cheerful spirit able to win victory over Germany and Japan . . . This journal helps our enemies to destroy our youth.”[47]

On 18 April, Zhdanov launched his cultural terror, known as the Zhdanovshchina, with an attack on the Leningrad journals. In August, the literary inquisitor travelled to Leningrad to demand: “How weak was the vigilance of those citizens in Leningrad, in the leadership of the journal Zvezda, for it to publish, in this journal, works . . . poisoned with the venom of zoological hostility to the Soviet leadership.” He castigated Akhmatova as this “half-nun, half-harlot or rather harlot-nun whose sin is mixed with prayer,” a grotesque distortion of her own verses. He followed this up with attacks on film-makers and musicians. At a notorious meeting with Shostakovich and others, “the Pianist” tinkled on the piano to demonstrate easily hummed people’s tunes, a vision as absurd as Joseph II admonishing Mozart for writing “too many notes.” Yury Zhdanov went to the theatre with his father and Stalin. When they talked to the actors afterwards, the cast boasted that their show had been acclaimed in Paris:

“Those French aren’t worth the soles of your shoes,” replied Stalin. “There’s nothing more important than Russian theatre.”

Bantering playfully, the omnipotent double act, Stalin and Zhdanov, held conversazione to guide writers and film directors. On the night of 14 May 1947, they received Stalin’s two favoured literary bureaucrats, the poet Simonov and the hack novelist Fadeev, the head of the Writers’ Union. Stalin first set the pay for writers. “They write one good book, build their dacha and stop working. We don’t begrudge them the money,” laughed Stalin, “but this can’t happen.” So he suggested setting up a commission.

“I’ll join!” declared Zhdanov, showing his independence.

“Very modest!” Stalin chuckled. As they discussed the commission, Zhdanov opposed Stalin thrice before being overruled, another example of how his favourite could still argue with him. Stalin teased Zhdanov fondly. When “the Pianist” said he had received a pitiful letter from some writer, Stalin joked: “Don’t believe pitiful letters, Comrade Zhdanov!”

Stalin asked the writers: “If that’s all, I’ve a question for you: what kind of themes are writers working on?” He launched into a lecture about “Soviet patriotism.” The people were proud but “our middle intelligentsia, doctors and professors don’t have patriotic education. They have unjustified admiration for foreign culture . . . This tradition comes from Peter . . . admiration of Germans, French, of foreigners, of assholes”—he laughed. “The spirit of self-abasement must be destroyed. You should write a novel on this theme.”

Stalin had a recent scandal in mind. A pair of medical professors specializing in cancer treatment had published their work in an American journal. Stalin and Zhdanov created “courts of honour,” another throw-back to the Tsarist officer class, to try the professors. (Zhdanov chaired the court.) Stalin set Simonov to write a play about the case. Zhdanov spent an entire hour giving literary criticism to Simonov before Stalin himself rewrote the play’s ending.[48]

In August, Bolshakov, the cinematic impresario, showed Stalin a new movie, Ivan the Terrible, Part Two. Knowing from MGB reports that Eisenstein compared The Terrible with Yezhov, Stalin rejected this “nightmare,” hating its lack of Russian pride, its portrayal of Ivan (and the length of his kisses, and beard). Eisenstein shrewdly appealed to Stalin. At 11 p.m. on 25 February 1947, Eisenstein and his scriptwriter arrived in the Little Corner where Stalin and Zhdanov gave them a master class on national Bolshevism, a most revealing tour d’horizon of history, terror and even sex. Stalin attacked the film for making the Tsar’s MGB, the Oprichnina, resemble the Ku Klux Klan. As for Ivan himself, “Your Tsar is indecisive— he resembles Hamlet,” said Stalin. “Tsar Ivan was a great wise ruler . . . wise . . . not to let foreigners into the country. Peter the Great’s also a great Tsar but treated foreigners too liberally . . . Catherine, more so. Was Alexander I’s Court Russian? . . . No, it was German . . .” Then Zhdanov gave his own view, with its interesting reflection on Stalin’s own nature:

“Ivan the Terrible seems a hysteric in the Eisenstein version!”

“Historical figures,” added Stalin, “must be shown correctly . . . Ivan the Terrible kissed his wife too long.” Kisses, again. “It wasn’t permitted at that time.” Then came the crux: “Ivan the Terrible was very cruel,” said Stalin. “You can show he was cruel. But you must show why he needed to be cruel.” Then Zhdanov raised the crucial question of Ivan’s beard. Eisenstein promised to shorten it. Eisenstein asked if he could smoke.

“It seems to me there’s no ban on smoking. Maybe we’ll vote on it.” Stalin smiled at Eisenstein. “I don’t give you instructions, I merely give you the comments of a viewer.”[49]

Zhdanov’s campaign to promote Russian patriotism was soon so absurd that Sakharov remembered how people would joke about “Russia, homeland of the elephant.” More ominously, the unleashing of Russian nationalism and the attacks on “cosmopolitans” turned against the Jews.

 

 

49. The Eclipse of Zhukov and the Looters of Europe: The Imperial Elite

Early in the war, Stalin realized the usefulness of Soviet Jewry in appealing for American help but even then the project was stained with blood.[50] Stalin then ordered Beria to set up the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, controlled by the NKVD but officially led by the famous Yiddish actor, Solomon Mikhoels, “short, with the face of a puckish intellectual, with a prominent forehead and a pouting lower lip,” whom Kaganovich had perform King Lear for Stalin. When Mikhoels toured America to raise support for Russia in April 1943, Molotov briefed him and Stalin emerged from his office to wave goodbye. The JAFC was supervised by Solomon Lozovsky, a grizzled Old Bolshevik with a biblical beard who was the token Jew in the highest echelons of Molotov’s Foreign Commissariat.

The ghastly revelations of the Nazi Holocaust, the Mikhoels tour and the attractions of Zionism to give the Jewish people a safe haven, softened the stern internationalism of even the highest Bolsheviks. Stalin tolerated this but encouraged a traditional anti-Semitic reaction. When casting Ivan the Terrible, Part Two, Bolshakov openly rejected one actress because “her Semitic features are clearly visible.” Anyone too Jewish-looking was sacked.

When the advancing Soviet Army exposed Hitler’s unique Jewish genocide, Khrushchev, the Ukrainian boss, resisted any special treatment for Jews staggering home from the death camps. He even refused to return their homes, which had meanwhile been occupied by Ukrainians. This habitual anti-Semite grumbled that “Abramoviches” were preying on his fiefdom “like crows.”

This sparked a genuine debate around Stalin. Mikhoels complained to Molotov that “after the Jewish catastrophe, the local authorities pay no attention.” Molotov forwarded this to Beria who, to his credit, was sympathetic. Beria demanded that Khrushchev help the Jews who “were more repressed than any others by the Germans.” In this he was taking a risk since Stalin had decreed that all Soviet citizens suffered equally. Stalin later suspected Beria of being too close to the Jews, perhaps the origin of the rumour that Beria himself was a “secret” Jew. Molotov forwarded Beria’s order. Khrushchev agreed to help his “Abramoviches.”

Encouraged by this growing sympathy, Mikhoels and his colleague Fefer, a poet[51]and MGB plant, suggested a Jewish republic in the Crimea (now empty of Tartars), or in Saratov (now empty of the Volga Germans) to Molotov and his deputy in charge of the JAFC, Lozovsky. Molotov thought the Volga German idea ridiculous, “it’s impossible to see a Jew on a tractor,” but preferred the Crimea: “Why don’t you write a memorandum to me and Comrade Stalin, and we’ll see.”

“Everyone,” recalls Vladimir Redens, “believed Jewish Crimea would happen.” Molotov, showing more independence than before, may have discussed this with Beria but his judgement almost cost him his life. Most of those involved were dead within five years.

On 2 February 1944 Mikhoels delivered his letter to Molotov, copied to Stalin who now decided that the actor had moved from Soviet to Jewish propaganda. Stalin, with his acute awareness of anti-Semitism, sent Kaganovich to pour cold water on the idea of this “Jewish California”: “Only actors and poets could come up with such a scheme,” he said, that was “worth nothing in practice!” Zhdanov supervised the making of lists of Jews in different departments and recommended closing down the JAFC.[52] Like Molotov in 1939, Zhdanov loosed his hounds against Jews in theapparat which, he said, had become “some kind of synagogue.”

Stalin’s anti-Semitism remained a mixture of old-fashioned prejudice, suspicion of a people without a land, and distrust, since his enemies were often Jewish. He was so unabashed that he openly told Roosevelt at Yalta that the Jews were “middlemen, profiteers and parasites.” But after 1945, there was a change: Stalin emerged as a vicious and obsessional anti-Semite.

Always supremely political, this was partly a pragmatic judgement: it matched his new Russian nationalism. The supremacy of America with its powerful Jewish community made his own Jews, with their U.S. connections restored during the war, appear a disloyal Fifth Column. His suspicion of the Jews was another facet of his inferiority complex towards America as well as a symptom of his fear of the new self-assertive confidence of his own victorious people. It was also a way to control his old comrades whose Jewish connections symbolized their new cosmopolitan confidence after victory. Equally, he loathed any people with mixed loyalties: he noticed the Holocaust had touched and awakened Soviet Jewry even among the magnates. His new anti-Semitism flowed from his own seething paranoia, exacerbated when Fate entangled the Jews in his family.

Yet he still played the internationalist, often attacking people for antiSemitism and rewarding Jews in public, from Mekhlis to the novelist Ehrenburg. Soon this malevolent whirlpool threatened to consume Molotov, Beria and his own clan.[53]

“As soon as hostilities end,” Stalin said at Yalta, “the soldiers are forgotten and lapse into oblivion.” He wished this was so but the prestige of Marshal Zhukov had never been higher. The Western press even acclaimed him as Stalin’s successor. Stalin liked Zhukov but “didn’t recognize personal ties” and he probed to see if this idea had any support.

“I’m getting old,” he casually told Budyonny, his old pal and Zhukov’s friend. “What do you think of Zhukov succeeding me?”

“I approve of Zhukov,” he replied, “but he’s a complicated character.”

“You managed to govern him,” said Stalin, “and I can manage him too.”

Stalin “managed” Zhukov by using the Aviators’ Case against him, torturing Air Marshal Novikov to implicate him.[54] “Broken morally, brought to desperation, sleepless nights, I signed,” admitted Novikov later. Abakumov tortured seventy other generals to get the necessary evidence. In March, Zhukov was recalled to Moscow. Instead of reporting directly to the Generalissimo, he was summoned by Stalin’s deputy as Armed Forces Minister, Bulganin, “the Plumber” (as Beria called him) who was in high favour. Zhukov grumbled at Bulganin’s arrogance and Bulganin grumbled that Zhukov had pulled rank on him, resisting orders from the Party. Stalin ordered “the Plumber” to prepare a kangaroo court against Zhukov.

Abakumov searched Zhukov’s homes which turned out to be an Aladdin’s cave of booty: “We can simply say,” Abakumov reportedly gleefully to Stalin, “that Zhukov’s dacha is a museum,” filled with gold, 323 furs, 400 metres of velvet and silk. There were so many paintings, some even hung in the kitchen. Zhukov even went so far as to hang over his bed “a huge canvas depicting two naked women . . . we did not find a single Soviet book.” Then there were “twenty unique shotguns from Holland & Holland.”

They left the trophies (returning for them in 1948) but for now they bizarrely confiscated a doll of one of the Marshal’s daughters, and his memoirs: “Leave history writing to the historians,” Stalin warned Zhukov.

In early June, Zhukov was summoned to the Supreme Military Council. Stalin strode in “as gloomy as a black cloud.” Without a word, he tossed a note to Shtemenko.

“Read it,” he snapped. Shtemenko read out Novikov’s testimony that Zhukov had claimed credit for the Soviet victory, criticized Stalin and created his own clique. He had even awarded a medal to the starlet Lydia Ruslanova, with whom he may have been having an affair.

This was “intolerable,” declared Stalin, turning to the generals. Budyonny (who had been coached by Bulganin) vaguely criticized his friend but not damningly. Zhukov’s rival, Koniev, called him difficult but honest. Only Golikov, whom Zhukov had removed from the Voronezh Front in 1943, really denounced him. But Molotov, Beria and Bulganin attacked the Marshal for “Bonapartism,” demanding that Zhukov “be put in his place.” Zhukov defended himself but admitted to having inflated his importance.

“What shall we do with Zhukov?” asked Stalin who, typically, had expressed no opinion. The potentates wanted him repressed, the soldiers did not. Stalin, seeing this was not 1937, suggested demoting Zhukov to the Odessa Military District. The Terror against the victors was a deliberate policy, with Admiral Kuznetzov, among others, arrested (though also only demoted). Ex-Marshal Kulik was bugged grumbling on his telephone that politicians were stealing the credit from the soldiers. This was heresy: he was quietly shot in 1950. Zhukov himself was expelled from the CC, his trophies confiscated, friends tortured, and then further demoted to the Urals. He suffered a heart attack but Stalin never let Abakumov arrest him for planning a Bonapartist coup: “I don’t trust anyone who says Zhukov could do this. I know him very well. He’s a straightforward, sharp person able to speak plainly to anyone but he’ll never go against the CC.”

Finally Stalin demonstrated the subordination of the generals by writing this note to the Politburo: “I propose Comrade Bulganin be promoted to Marshal for his distinction in the Patriotic War.” In case anyone wished to query “the Plumber’’ ’s utterly undistinguished war—and civilian— record, Stalin added: “I think my reason requires no discussion—it’s absolutely clear.”[55]

Zhukov was not alone in his “museum” of gold and paintings. Corruption is the untold story of Stalin’s post-war Terror: the magnates and marshals plundered Europe with the avarice of Göring, though with much more justification after what the Germans had done to Russia. This imperial élite cast aside much of their old “Bolshevik modesty.” Yet “Comrade Stalin,” foreign visitors were told, “cannot endure immorality” though he had always believed that conquerors could help themselves to some booty and local girls. He laughed about the luxuries of his generals with their courtesans and batmen yet his archives overflow with denunciations of corruption which he usually filed away for later.

The marshals benefited from the feudal etiquette of plundering whereby officers stole their booty and then paid a sort of tribute to their superiors. Some needed no such help: Air Marshal Golovanov, one of Stalin’s favourites, dismantled Goebbels’ country house and flew it back to Moscow, an exploit that ruined his career.

The soldiers reached the treasures first but it was the Chekists who enjoyed the best swag. At Gagra, Beria pursued and impressed female athletes in a fleet of plundered speedboats. Abakumov drove around Moscow in Italian sports cars, looted Germany with Göringesque extravagance, sent planes to Berlin to commandeer Potemkinesque quantities of underwear, assembling an antique treasure trove like a department store. He flew in the German film star and international woman of mystery, Olga Chekhova, for an affair. When actress Tatiana Okunevskaya (already raped by Beria) refused him, she got seven years in the Gulags. Stalin’s staff were mired in corruption. Vlasik, the vizier who ran a luxurious empire of food, drink and mansions, entertained his courtesans at official rest homes with a crew of raffish painters, thuggish Chekists and sybaritic bureaucrats. Limousines delivered the “concubines,” who received apartments, caviar, tickets, to Red Square parades and football games. Vlasik seduced his friends’ wives by showing them his photographs of Stalin and maps of Potsdam. He even pilfered Stalin’s own houses, stripping his villa at Potsdam, stealing 100 pieces of porcelain, pianos, clocks, cars, three bulls and two horses, transported home in MGB trains and planes. He spent much of the Potsdam Conference drinking, fornicating, or stealing.

Then there was the massive wastage of food at Stalin’s dachas. Vlasik was soon denounced for selling off the extra caviar, probably by Beria whom he had denounced in turn. In 1947, he was almost arrested but, instead, Stalin let him explain his sins: “Every time, the mealtime was changed by [Stalin], part of the dishes were not used. They were distributed among the staff.” Stalin forgave him—and ordered less food than before. Vlasik kept his job.

Yet Vlasik’s mistresses, like Beria’s pimps, informed on him to Abakumov who in turn was denounced by his MGB rival, General Serov, who wrote to Stalin about the Minister’s corruption and debauchery. Stalin stored the letters for later use. Serov himself was said to have stolen the crown of the King of Belgium. By now courtesans, procurers and MGB generals were informing on each other in a merry-go-round of sexual favours and betrayals.

Stalin’s potentates now existed in a hothouse of rarefied privilege, their offices bedecked with fine Persian carpets and broad oil paintings.[56] Their houses were palatial: the Moscow boss now occupied the whole of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich’s palace. Stalin himself fostered this new imperial era when, after Yalta, he took a fancy to Nicholas II’s Livadia and Prince Vorontsov’s Alupka Palaces: “Put these palaces in order,” Stalin wrote to Beria on 27 February 1945. “Prepare for responsible workers.” He so liked Alexander III’s palace at Sosnovka in the Crimea that he had a dacha built there which he only visited once. Henceforth, the magnates and their children booked these palaces through the MGB 9th Department: Stepan Mikoyan honeymooned at Vorontsov’s palace; Stalin himself holidayed at Livadia. The families flew south on a special section of the State airline—Sergo Mikoyan remembers flying home on this with Poskrebyshev. The children enjoyed their privileges but had to set an example and follow Party dictums: when Zhdanov denounced jazz, Khrushchev broke his son’s beloved jazz records in a temper.

Svetlana Stalin noticed how the dachas of the Mikoyans, Molotovs and Voroshilovs were “crammed with gifts from workers . . . rugs, gold Caucasian weapons, porcelain” which they received like “the medieval custom of vassals paying tribute.” The magnates travelled in armoured ZiS limousines, based on the American Packards, on Stalin’s orders, followed by another “tail” of Chekists, with sirens blaring. Muscovites called this procession “a dog’s wedding.”

An entire detachment, commanded by a colonel or a general, was assigned to each leader, actually living at their dachas, half an extended family, half MGB informers. There were so many of them that each Politburo family was able to form a volleyball team, with the Berias playing the Kaganoviches. But Kaganovich refused to play on his own team: “Beria always wins and I want to be on the winning side,” he said. In MGB vernacular, the magnate was called “the subject,” their house “the object” and the guards “attachments to the subject,” so the children used to laugh when they heard them say, “The subject’s on his way to the object.” Malenkov often walked to the Kremlin from Granovsky Street surrounded by a phalanx of “attachments.”

The Politburo ladies now had their own haute couture designer. All the “top ten families” went to the atelier on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, controlled by an MGB department where Abram (Donjat Ignatovich according to Nina Khrushcheva) Lerner and Nina Adzhubei designed the men’s suits and the women’s dresses. Lerner was a traditional Jewish tailor who designed uniforms including Stalin’s Generalissimo extravaganza. If he was the Politburo’s Dior, Nina Adzhubei, “short, round, pug-nosed and very strong,” trained by “monks in a monastery,” was its Chanel. Heaps of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue lay around. She would either copy fashions from Dior, from Vogue or Harper’s or design her own, “but she was as good as Chanel,” says her client Martha Peshkova, Beria’s daughter-in-law. “You didn’t have to pay if you didn’t ask the price,” explains Sergo Mikoyan. “My mother always paid but Polina Molotova didn’t.” This practice was finally denounced, like everything else, to Stalin who reprimanded the Politburo: Ashken Mikoyan threw the bills in Anastas’s face, proving she always paid. Adzhubei “made Svetlana Stalin’s first dress.”[57]

The dressmaker was discovered by Nina Beria but Polina Molotova, the grand “first lady,” was her best client. Once the grandees of Victorian Europe had taken the waters at the Bohemian resort of Carlsbad. Now Zinaida Zhdanova and Nina Beria held court there. “Lavishly dressed and covered in furs,” with her daughter in a “mink stole,” Polina often arrived at the same spa in an official plane with an entourage of fifty. Her daughter Svetlana, a “real Bolshevik princess,” was chauffeured daily to the Institute of Foreign Relations, where many of the élite studied, arriving in a cloud of Chanel No. 5, “wearing a new outfit every day.”

Stalin retained his control of these privileges, continuing to choose the cars for every leader so that Zhdanov received an armoured Packard, a normal Packard and a ZiS 110, Beria got an armoured Packard, a ZiS and a Mercedes, while Poskrebyshev got a Cadillac and a Buick. He consoled the family of Shcherbakov, the Moscow boss who died of alcoholism, with a shower of cash.[58] Stalin specified: “Give them an apartment with a dacha, rights to the Kremlin Hospital, limousine . . . NKVD special staff . . . teacher for children . . .” He awarded Shcherbakov’s widow 2,000 roubles a month, his sons 1,000 a month until graduation, his mother 700 a month, his sister 300. His wife also received a lump sum of 200,000 roubles and his mother 50,000 roubles—sums of unthinkable munificence for the average worker. Here was Stalin’s new imperial order.[59]

“Crown Prince” Vasily set a new standard for corruption, debauchery and caprice. Even when officers complained about him to Stalin, they used a special formula to define Vasily’s sacred place: “He is close to the Soviet people because he is your son.” Yet beneath the arrogance, Vasily was the most terrified of all the courtiers: Stalin scoffed that he would “walk through fire” if he ordered it. Vasily especially feared the future.

“I’ve only got two ways out,” he told Artyom. “The pistol or drink! If I use the pistol, I’ll cause Father a lot of trouble. But when he dies, Khrushchev, Beria and Bulganin’ll tear me apart. Do you realize what it’s like living under the axe?”

He callously abandoned his wife, Galina, taking their son Sasha to live with him at the House on the Embankment. She so longed to see Sasha that the nanny secretly met her so she could play with him. But Galina was too frightened to demand a flat or housekeeping from him. Vasily then married Marshal Timoshenko’s daughter Ekaterina, “a pretty Ukrainian.” His apartment was not grand enough for the scions of the Generalissimo and the Marshal so he demanded General Vlasik’s elegant villa on Gogolevsky. He flew back from Germany with a plane filled with “loot”: “golden ornaments, diamonds, emeralds, dozens of carpets, lots of ladies’ lingerie, a huge number of men’s suits, overcoats, fur coats, fur wraps, astrakhan” until Vasily’s house was “bursting with gold, German carpets and cut glass.” There was so much that his wife Timoshenka gradually sold it and pocketed the money. When his marriage to Timoshenka collapsed, he married a swimming star, the statuesque Kapitolina Vasileva, with whom he was happiest. Svetlana thought he was looking for his mother in his wives because he called her “mama” and she even wore her hair in a bun like Nadya.

Vasily commanded the air force in the Moscow Military District, a job beyond his capabilities. He demanded that his strutting entourage call him Khozyain like his father. “Vasily drank heavily almost every day,” testified his adjutant later, “didn’t turn up for work for weeks on end and couldn’t leave the women alone.”

Once, Crown Princes proudly drilled their own regiments. Now, like a Western millionaire’s son, Vasily was determined to make his own VVS (air force) football team top of the league. He immediately sacked the football manager, having decided to rescue Starostin, Russia’s pre-eminent soccer manager exiled by Beria, for plotting to assassinate Stalin, from the Gulag. Starostin was called into his camp commandant’s office and handed the vertushka: “Hello, Nikolai, this is Vasily Stalin.” General Stalin’s plane arrived to fly Starostin back to Moscow. Vasily hid him there while he tried to get the sportsman’s sentence reversed.

Abakumov, now boss of the Dynamo team, was furious. The MGB kidnapped Starostin. Vasily, using air-force intelligence officers, grabbed him back. Abakumov kidnapped him again. When Vasily phoned the Minister, he denied any knowledge of the footballer but Starostin managed to get a message to Vasily who despatched the head of air-force security to bring him back yet again. That day, Vasily attended the Dynamo game in the government box, with Starostin beside him. The MGB brass were foiled. Vasily called Abakumov’s deputy and shouted: “Two hours ago you told me you didn’t know where Starostin was . . . He’s sitting here right beside me. Your boys abducted him. Remember, in our family, we never forgive an insult. That’s told to you by General Stalin!”[60]

When he visited Tiflis, he got drunk, took a fighter-plane up over the city and caused havoc by swooping over the streets. If he did not get his way, he denounced officers to Abakumov or Bulganin. The only escape was to denounce him to Stalin himself: “Dear Joseph Vissarionovich, I ask you to tell Vasily Josephovich not to touch me,” wrote the air-force officer N. Sbytov, who had spotted the first German tanks approaching Moscow. “I could help him.”

Sbytov revealed that Vasily was constantly name-dropping: “When my father approved this job, he wanted me to have an independent command,” he whined.

Vasily certainly behaved like a boy brought up by Chekists: when some “Enemies” were found in his command, he set up an impromptu torture chamber in his own apartment and started “beating the soles of the man’s feet with a thin rod” until this ersatz-Lubianka broke up into a party.[61]

Days after Zhukov’s exile, President Kalinin, who was ill with stomach cancer, started to deteriorate. Stalin was fond of Papa Kalinin, personally arranging to send him down to recuperate in Abkhazia, calling the local boss to demand “maximum care,” and later ordering his bodyguards to look after him tenderly. Yet he also tormented the half-blind Kalinin, remembering Papa’s dissent in the twenties for which he had excluded him from active government for two decades. When Tito offered Kalinin some cigarettes at a banquet, Stalin quipped: “Don’t take any of those Western cigarettes!” Kalinin “confusedly dropped them from his trembling fingers.”

The 71-year-old Kalinin lived with his housekeeper and two adopted children while his adored wife festered in the camps. Emboldened by his imminent death, Kalinin appealed to Stalin: “I look calmly on the future of our country . . . and I wish only one thing—to preserve your power and strength, the best guarantee of the success of the Soviet State,” he started his letter. “Personally I turn to you with two requests—pardon Ekaterina Ivanovna Kalinina and appoint my sister to bring up the two orphans living with me. With all my soul, a last goodbye. M. Kalinin.”

Stalin, Malenkov and Zhdanov voted to pardon Kalinin’s wife after she had admitted her guilt, the usual condition for forgiveness: “I did bad things and was severely punished . . . but I was never an enemy to the Communist Party—pardon me!”

“It’s necessary to pardon and free at once, and bring the pardoned to Moscow. J Stalin.”

Before he died, on 24 June, Kalinin wrote an extraordinary but pathetic letter to Stalin, inspired by his bitter need of Bolshevik redemption: “Waiting for death . . . I must say that during all the time of the oppositions, no one from the opposition ever proposed hostility to the Party line. This might surprise you because I was friendly with some of them . . . Yet I was criticized and discredited . . . because Yagoda worked hard to imply my closeness to the oppositions.”

Now he revealed a secret he had kept for twenty-two years: “In the year after Lenin’s death, after the row with Trotsky, Bukharin invited me to his flat to admire his hunting trophies and asked—would I consider ‘ruling without Stalin?’; I replied I couldn’t contemplate such a thing. Any combination without Stalin was incomprehensible . . . After the death of Lenin, I believed in Stalin’s policy . . . I thought Zinoviev most dangerous.” Then he again requested that Stalin care for his sister and the orphans, and “commit this letter to the archive.”

At the funeral, when photographers hassled Stalin, he pointed at the coffin, growling: “Photograph Kalinin!”[62]

On 8 September, Stalin headed off on his holiday while Molotov shuttled around the world to attend meetings with the Allies to negotiate the new Europe. In Paris, he defended Soviet interests in Germany while still trying to win a protectorate over Libya, against the ever-hardening opposition of the Western Allies. It seems that Stalin still hoped to consolidate his position by negotiations with his former allies.

Stalin, writing in code as “Druzhkov” or Instantsiya , praised Molotov’s indomitable defiance. Molotov was very pleased with himself too. When he found himself relegated to the second row at a French parade, he stormed off the podium but then wrote to Stalin for approval: “I’m not sure I did the right thing.”

“You behaved absolutely correctly,” replied Stalin. “The dignity of the Soviet Union must be defended not only in great matters but in minutiae.”

“Dear Polinka honey,” the vain Molotov wrote exultantly. “I send greetings and newspaper pictures as I left the parade on Sunday! I enclose Paris-Midi which shows the three pictures of 1. me on the tribune. 2. I start to leave; and 3. I leave the tribune and enter my car. I kiss and hug you warmly! Kiss Svetusya for me!” Molotov flew on to another session in New York, which Stalin again supervised from Coldstream in Gagra: Stalin cared less about the details of Italian reparations than about Soviet status as a great power. Molotov was in favour again: on 28 November, Stalin wrote tenderly: “I realize you are nervous and getting upset over the fate of the Soviet proposal . . . Behave more calmly!” But faced with Ukrainian famine and American rivalry, the cantankerous Vozhd sensed dangerous weakness, corruption and disloyalty around him.

While Molotov was triumphant at having signed the peace treaties with the defeated nations, Stalin contrived another humiliation. Stalin was already a member of the Academy of Sciences and now Molotov was offered the same honour, with the Vozhd’s blessing. Molotov dutifully sent the Academy a grateful cable, upon which Stalin swooped with aquiline spite: “I was struck by your cable . . . Are you really so ecstatic about your election as an honorary Academician? What does this signature ‘truly yours, Molotov’ mean? I never thought you could become so emotional about such a second-rate matter . . . It seems to me that you, a statesman of the highest type, must care more about your dignity.”

Stalin continued to seethe about the inconvenience of his people starving, Hungry Thirty-Three all over again.[63] First he tried to joke about it, calling one official “Brother Dystrophy.” Then, when even Zhdanov reported the famine, Stalin blamed Khrushchev, his Ukrainian viceroy as he had done in 1932: “They’re deceiving you . . .” Yet 282,000 people died in 1946, 520,000 in 1947. Finally he turned on the Supply maestro, Mikoyan. He ordered Mekhlis, resurgent as Minister of State Control, to investigate: “Don’t trust Mikoyan in any business because his lack of honest character has made Supply a den of thieves!”

Mikoyan was clever enough to apologize: “I saw so many mistakes in my work and surely you see it all clearly,” he wrote to Stalin with submissive irony. “Of course neither I nor the rest of us can put the issue as squarely as you can. I will do my best to study from you how to work as necessary. I’ll do everything to learn lessons . . . so it will serve me well in my subsequent work under your fatherly leadership.” Like Molotov, Mikoyan’s old intimacy with Stalin was over.

Khrushchev too fell into disfavour about his attitude to the famine: “Spinelessness!” Stalin upbraided him and, in February 1947, sacked him as Ukrainian First Secretary (he remained Premier). Kaganovich, who now resembled “a fat landowner,” replaced him and arrived in Kiev to batter him into shape.

Stalin’s disfavour always brought debilitating stress to his grandees: Khrushchev collapsed with pneumonia. His name vanished from Ukrainian newspapers, his cult withered. But Kaganovich ordered doctors to treat Khrushchev with penicillin, one of the Western medicines of which Stalin so disapproved. Even if he recovered, was Stalin’s “pet” doomed?[64]

 

 

50. “The Zionists Have Pulled One Over You!”

In 1947, the American Secretary of State, George Marshall, unveiled a massive programme of economic aid to Europe that initially sounded attractive to the shattered Imperium. Molotov was immediately despatched to Paris to find out more. At first the leaders thought of the Plan like Lend-Lease with no strings attached, but Stalin soon grasped that it would resuscitate Germany and undermine his East European hegemony. Molotov initially favoured the Plan and still leaned towards a negotiated settlement but Stalin rejected Marshall.

Stalin and Zhdanov resolved to tighten their control over Eastern Europe. Simultaneously, Stalin supported the foundation of the Jewish state, which he hoped would become a Middle Eastern satellite. On 29 November, he voted for it at the UN and was the first to recognize Israel. He gave Mikhoels the Stalin Prize. But it soon became clear Israel was going to be an American ally, not a Russian one.

In the cauldron of Stalin’s irrational prejudices, razor-sharp political instincts and aggressively Russian sensibilities, Mikhoels’s dream of a Jewish Crimea became a sinister Zionist/American Trojan horse,[65] a Hebraic Marshall Plan. Zionism, Judaism and America became interchangeable in Stalin’s mind. He was obviously supported by his magnates: even after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev sympathetically explained to some Polish Communists, “We all know Jews; they all have some connection with the capitalistic world because they have relatives living abroad. This one has a granny . . . The Cold War began; the imperialists were plotting how to attack the USSR; then the Jews want to settle in the Crimea . . . here’s the Crimea and Baku . . . Through their connections, the Jews had created a network to carry out American plans. So he squashed it all.” This view was held not only in Stalin’s councils: his nephew, Vladimir Redens, agreed with complaints that “the Committee was giving off terrible Zionist propaganda . . . as if the Jews were the only people who suffered.” Stalin’s anti-Semitism dovetailed with his campaign of traditional nationalism. Even his prejudices were subordinate and complementary to realpolitik .

Stalin ordered Abakumov to gather evidence that Mikhoels and the Jewish Committee were “active nationalists orientated by the Americans to do anti-Soviet work,” especially through Mikhoels’ American trip when “they made contact with famous Jewish persons connected with the U.S. secret service.” Mikhoels played into Stalin’s hands.

Mikhoels, the Yiddish actor out of his depth in this duel with the Stalinist Golem,wanted to appeal to Stalin. He called the second most influential Jew after Kaganovich, Polina Molotova, to ask whether to appeal to Zhdanov or Malenkov.

“Zhdanov and Malenkov won’t help you,” replied Polina. “All power in the country’s in Stalin’s hands alone and nobody can influence him. I don’t advise you write to Stalin. He has a negative attitude to Jews and won’t support us.” It would have been unthinkable for her to speak in such a way before the war.[66]

Mikhoels made the tempting but spectacularly ill-timed decision to reach Stalin through Svetlana. Stalin was already brooding about Svetlana’s taste for Jewish men. After Kapler, there was Morozov whom she had married on the rebound from Sergo Beria. Stalin had nothing against Morozov personally, “a good fellow,” he said, but he had not fought in the war, and he was Jewish. “The Zionists have pulled one over you,” Stalin told her. Malenkov’s daughter Volya had just married the Jewish grandson of Lozovsky, who ran Mikhoels’ Jewish Committee. Molotov proposed Mikhoels’ Jewish Crimea letter and his wife Polina’s brother was a Jewish American businessman. These American agents were everywhere. Now it got worse.

Mikhoels, frantic to protect the Jewish community, asked Zhenya Alliluyeva who mixed with the Jewish intelligentsia, if he could meet Svetlana. The élite children were wary of suitors using them for their connections: “One of the unpleasant things of being daughter of a chinovnik was that I couldn’t trust young people around me,” says Volya Malenkova. “Many wanted to marry me. I didn’t know if they wanted me or my father’s influence.”

The Alliluyevs warned Zhenya against meddling in dangerous Jewish matters: “All stirred together in this pot,” says Vladimir Redens. “We knew it wasn’t going to end well.” But it seems that Zhenya did introduce Mikhoels to Svetlana and Morozov. Stalin heard about this immediately[67] and erupted in a rage: the Jews were “worming their way into the family.” Furthermore, Anna Redens was once again irritating Stalin, publishing a tactless memoir of his early days and nagging Vasily who complained to Stalin. Thus Mikhoels innocently stumbled into a hornets’ nest.

Stalin ordered Abakumov to investigate the Alliluyev connection to American-Zionist espionage, muttering to Svetlana that Zhenya had poisoned her husband Pavel in 1938. Shrewd people began to divorce their Jewish spouses. Svetlana Stalin divorced Morozov: every history book repeats that Stalin ordered this and Svetlana’s cousin Leonid Redens also claims that he did. But she herself explained, “My father never asked me to divorce him,” adding in more recent interviews that she had not been in love with Morozov: “We divorced because I wasn’t in love with him.” This rings true as far as it goes: Leonid Redens adds that “there were many men in Svetlana’s life; she’d had enough of Morozov.” But Stalin himself told Mikoyan that “if she doesn’t divorce Morozov, they’ll arrest him.” She left Morozov: “No one would have left me,” said this Tsarevna. It seems that Stalin got his son to fix the matter. “Vasily took Morozov’s passport,”[68] says Redens, “and brought him a new one without the wedding stamp.”

Abakumov started to arrest the Alliluyevs’ Jewish circle. On 10 December, he arrested Zhenya Alliluyeva, once so intimate with Stalin, accusing her of “disseminating foul slander about the Head of the Soviet Government.” Zhenya’s husband, her vivacious actress daughter Kira, and Anna Redens joined her. Prominent Jews were pulled in.

The Instantsiya, that dread euphemism for the sacred eminence in the Kremlin, believed the Jewish/Alliluyev set had “expressed interest in the personal life of the Head of the Soviet Government, backed by foreign intelligence.” Stalin permitted “methods of persuasion” to implicate Mikhoels. The “French wrestling,” as the torturers called it, was led by Komarov, a vicious anti-Semitic psychopath, who announced to his victims: “Your fate’s in my hands and I’m not a man, I’m a beast,” adding, “All Jews are lousy bastards!” Abakumov supervised this diabolical sadist, ordering the prisoners “a deadly beating!”

Goldshtein, who had introduced Mikhoels to the Alliluyevs, testified later how “they started to beat me with a rubber baton on the soft parts of my body and my bare heels . . . until I couldn’t sit or stand.” They beat his head so hard “my face was swollen terribly and my hearing affected. Exhausted by day- and night-time interrogations, terrorized by beatings, curses and threats, I fell into a deep depression, a total moral confusion and began to give evidence against myself and others.”

“So you say Mikhoels’s a swine?” Abakumov shouted.

“Yes he is,” replied the broken Goldshtein who admitted that Mikhoels had asked him to “notice all the small details of the relationship between Svetlana and Grigory . . . [to] inform our American friends.” When Stalin read this, it confirmed his worst fears about Mikhoels.

Vladimir Redens, at twelve, had now lost both mother and father. His young cousins, Zhenya’s boys, had lost their parents and sister. Vladimir rushed to tell Olga, his grandmother, who had continued to live in the Kremlin after the death of her husband Sergei in 1946. To his amazement, she had never forgiven Zhenya for marrying so fast: “Thank God!” she said on hearing about Zhenya’s arrest, and crossed herself. But she called Stalin about Anna’s arrest: “They were used by the Enemy,” replied Stalin.

When the family wished “someone would tell Stalin,” the old lady replied, “nothing happened without him knowing.” They naïvely blamed Beria, not realizing that Abakumov reported only to Stalin.

Svetlana tried to intercede for the “Aunties” but Stalin warned her “they talked too much. You make anti-Soviet comments too.” Kira Alliluyeva, Svetlana’s first cousin also arrested, claims that Stalin warned his daughter: “If you act as their defender we’ll also put you in jail.” Both she and Vasily cut dead the Alliluyev children.

Now that Svetlana was single again, Stalin started to talk about whom she should next marry, telling his magnates, “She said she’d marry either Stepan Mikoyan or Sergo Beria.” The Politburo fathers were alarmed. The Tsarevna did not seem to mind that both boys were not only already married but in love with their wives.

Stalin told the anxious Mikoyan and Beria: “I told her neither one nor the other. She should marry Yury Zhdanov.” Simultaneously, this clumsy, tyrannical matchmaker told Yury to marry Svetlana.

On 16 July, Stalin embarked on a road trip to meet the people and see the country, something he had not done since 1933. It was to be a reflective and nostalgic three-month holiday, a mark of his exhaustion and his new style as a distant but paramount leader. He left the indecisive Bulganin in charge.[69]

While Abakumov tortured Jews to create a new “American” conspiracy and destroy Mikhoels, Stalin and his convoy of armoured ZiS 110s headed south, accompanied by Valechka, towards Kharkov.

 

 

51. A Lonely Old Man on Holiday

The Generalissimo ordered that there was to be no tedious ceremony and all passed off “without any sensationalism—which greatly pleased Stalin,” wrote Vlasik, who found the expedition exhausting. Stalin himself had only slept for about two hours but he was “in a good mood which made us all happy.” He inspected everything, muttering that he would not have seen anything “from my desk.”

He even experienced some aspects of ordinary life: his car broke down near Orel. Stalin got out for a stroll, surrounded by his “attachments,” and came upon some parked trucks whose drivers were struck dumb when he introduced himself. At Kursk, Stalin stayed the night in the flat of a local Chekist. In the morning, he thought they should leave the couple a present so he left a bottle of scent on the lady’s dressing table. At Kharkov, Stalin noticed people were still living in dugouts. He told Valechka that this upset him. When out-of-favour Khrushchev arrived, reassuring Stalin that the famine was much exaggerated and presented him with some juicy melons, Valechka was naïvely appalled, grumbling to Svetlana that they deceived “your father—of all people!”

Finally, the relieved Vlasik loaded Stalin onto the special train that took them down to Yalta where he probably stayed at the Livadia before the cruiser Molotov conveyed him to Sochi. The weather was gorgeous, the crew thrilled by their passenger. Vlasik, court photographer, took so many photographs that Stalin, “always sensitive,” noticed: “Vlasik’s doing well but no one photographs him. Someone must photograph him with us.”

In Sochi, Stalin strolled around the town, followed by Vlasik, Poskrebyshev and the frantic bodyguards who struggled to control the campers holidaying on the coast. When some schoolchildren gathered round his car, he offered them a ride to the local café, the Riviera, where a little girl cried because she had not got any sweets. Stalin put her on his knee and told her to choose anything she liked. Porcine Vlasik paid the bill, then turned to the children and cried: “Now children! A Pioneer Hurrah for Comrade Stalin”—the Soviet version of “Hip hip hurrah!” One can imagine him punching the air as “the children shouted a harmonious hurrah!”

They then drove down to Stalin’s spiritual home in these twilight years, Abkhazia, where he believed the air and the food ensured longevity: “Do you remember how amazed that English writer J. B. Priestley was when he met an Abkhazian peasant aged 150?” he reflected. “If I lived here, I might live to 150!”[70]

Stalin often told Molotov how he missed his homeland. Stalin had championed the Russian people as the ties that bound his empire; it was they who provided the dynamic power to promote Bolshevism and guaranteed his glory. His destiny was Russian. Hence Vasily said, “Papa was once a Georgian.” But his personal Russianness has been exaggerated. His lifestyle and mentality remained Georgian. He talked Georgian, ate Georgian, sang Georgian, personally ruled Georgia through the local bosses, becoming involved in parochial politics, missed his childhood friends, and spent almost half of his last eight years in his own isolated, fantasy Georgia.

Stalin based himself at Coldstream but constantly moved to new houses. It is claimed that they were gloomy. Certainly the wood panelling was sombre but when one visits them in the summer, they are delightful. Stalin usually ate and worked outside on the verandas and all had lush gardens full of flowers where he loved to walk. Above all, the houses were chosen for their vistas: the views from these grave houses are all breathtakingly beautiful.

He now started staying at the white mock-Baroque mansion in the lush gardens of Dedra Park at Sukhumi where Mandelstam had watched Yezhov dance the gopak. During the thirties, he had holidayed at a small dacha built by Lakoba, at New Athos; now he had another Cuban-style villa built next to it, all on one floor and with a splendid sea view. There was already a CC sanatorium by the lake at the remote Lake Ritsa which could only be reached by a long drive through a scenic gorge beside a bubbling torrent. In 1948, he ordered a new house to be joined to the old.[71]

Stalin had access to any of the innumerable State dachas, but there seem to have been about five around Moscow, several in the Crimea, including two imperial palaces, three in Georgia proper, and about five in Abkhazia that he used regularly. At least fifteen were kept staffed. Yet in many ways, he remained the itinerant, restless Georgian revolutionary of his youth. Accompanied by Poskrebyshev, constantly supplied by air with the latest CC papers, summoning his potentates at will, despatching telegrams round the world, he was always the fulcrum of power.

When he arrived, there was one ritual that was an echo of older times: Stalin had hung Lenin’s death mask on the wall at Kuntsevo where it was illuminated like an icon with a burning lamp. Whenever he went on holiday, the icon would travel with him. He ordered his commandant Orlov “to hang the face in the most visible place.”

As he moved in, the magnates and the entire Georgian leadership arrived simultaneously at their local houses, waiting to be summoned. Abakumov was ready to fly down at a moment’s notice with news of the latest interrogations. If there were Politburo rows, he summoned the magnates for Solomonic judgement. They dreaded having to spend any time with Stalin on holiday, which “was worse than the dinners,” according to Khrushchev who once endured a whole month. Fighting the Ukrainian famine and separatism, Khrushchev remained under a temporary cloud as he recuperated. Stalin ordered Kaganovich to supervise Khrushchev and beat any nationalism out of the Ukrainians, a feat he had formerly achieved in the late twenties. Khrushchev and Kaganovich, long-time allies, lived cheek by jowl, their families going on walks every weekend. Inevitably, they soon became mortal enemies. Both appealed to Stalin who summoned them to Coldstream. Over dinner and a movie, he stoked their hatred, enforced peace and ultimately recalled Kaganovich to Moscow.

His East European vassals, especially Gottwald, Bierut and Hoxha, did not dare resist a summons. But the two favourites were the local chiefs with whom Stalin could relax, partly because both were in their mid-thirties, partly because they were Georgians. Confiding in them more than in his own children, he appeared divine to them but also paternal.

Candide Charkviani, the cultured Georgian First Secretary, visited him “every second day.” It helped that Stalin had been taught the alphabet by a priest named Charkviani, even though he was no relation to Candide. He trusted Charkviani so much that he not only revealed his sleeping arrangements but when Candide told him about a Georgian prince who changed his underwear daily, Stalin showed him a chest of drawers full of “white cotton underclothes”: “It’s not hard for a prince,” Stalin quipped. “But I’m a peasant and I do the same.”

The other confidant was Akaki Mgeladze, the ruthless and sleekly handsome boss of Abkhazia, whom Stalin nicknamed “Comrade Wolf.” Stalin liked Charkviani for his knowledge of literature and Mgeladze for his political intriguing. He sometimes challenged Mgeladze to drive from his Sukhumi office to the dacha in seventeen minutes. Charkviani and Mgeladze hated each other, like their predecessors Beria and Lakoba.[72]

Valechka, Vlasik and Poskrebyshev, who stayed in nearby dachas, plus a stenographer and cipher officer, were his other regular companions. With his “sad face, swivelling eyes and cunning,” Poskrebyshev sorted out the papers that arrived each day by plane from Moscow and then brought them up to the villa. Poskrebyshev, whom Stalin had lately nicknamed “the Commander-in-Chief,” defended the Generalissimo from unwanted callers. When Mikoyan phoned in October 1947, Poskrebyshev chided him: “You’ve already been told you shouldn’t bother Comrade Stalin on this question and you do it again.” To outsiders, for whom the Politburo was the holy of holies, this was a shocking display.

Stalin ate his meals outside, on the verandas, in the summerhouse or by Lake Ritsa, reading the papers. There were open magazines and books on virtually every surface and piles of papers. Before he set off for the south, he scrawled to Poskrebyshev: “Order all these books. Stalin. Goethe’s Letters, Poetry of the French Revolution, Pushkin, Konstantin Simonov, Shakespeare, Herzen, History of the Seven Years War— and Battle at Sea 1939–1945 by Peter Scott.” He still worked late into the evenings, starting his dinners late.

Vlasik and Poskrebyshev did not always dine with the Boss but the chef de cabinetinvited guests with the drear words: “Stalin awaits you.”

When Poskrebyshev shepherded the guests to the door, Stalin joked: “So how’s our Commander-in-Chief?” Sunburnt, grey-haired, with a bald patch, thin-faced with a pot belly and sloping shoulders, Stalin met them on the veranda like an affable Georgian countryman, wearing a civilian suit like a safari costume. When it was very hot, there was a sprinkler on the Coldstream terrace that cooled the air, spraying an arch of water over the roof.

Sometimes, the housekeeper pointed the guests down the garden where they found Stalin wielding a spade, weeding his lemon trees assisted by General Vlasik: “I’m showing you how to work!” He showed off his lemons and roses: “he was a romantic about nature,” wrote Mgeladze.

But his favourite flower, the mimosa, was an organic metaphor for his own secretive sensitivity for when touched, it closed like a mouth. “The mimosa’s the earliest flower that anticipates the coming of spring,” Stalin told Mgeladze. “How Muscovites love mimosas, they stand in queues for them. Think how to grow more to make the Muscovites happy!” They often went for walks and sometimes even strolled through Sukhumi where Stalin asked schoolchildren questions like: “What do you want to do when you’re grown up?”

At the Georgian feast often laid up outside, Stalin genially opened the bottles. The “endless meals” were agonizing for the magnates but fascinating for the younger Georgians. Maps were brought in, empires admired, characters from the past discussed, jokes told, toasts raised.

Poskrebyshev toasted Stalin for destroying Bukharin and Rykov: “You were right, Comrade Stalin—if they’d won . . .” Poskrebyshev could afford a certain levity with Stalin who often appointed him “tamada.” “Now you’ll drink to my health!” Poskrebyshev ordered. Stalin obeyed.

Molotov hailed Stalin elaborately: “If you weren’t Stalin,” Iron Arse toasted, “the USSR would not have beaten Trotsky, won the war, gained the Bomb or conquered such an Empire for Socialism.” This pleased the host. The drinking often turned nasty when the Politburo or foreign vassals were guests but with the Georgians, it was much more cheerful and nostalgic.

When Stalin sang, Poskrebyshev and Vlasik provided the harmonies like a pair of grotesque choirboys. After dinner the guests usually stayed the night. Stalin could be unsettlingly kind: when Mikoyan’s brother Artyom, designer of the MiG (Mikoyan-Gurev) aircraft, suffered angina and was put to bed, he was aware of someone coming into his room and tenderly laying a blanket over him. He was amazed to see it was Stalin.

One thing united virtually all his guests: the desire to escape this strange nervy old man with his alternation of vicious, dangerous explosions, self-pitying regrets and excruciatingly boring reminiscences. Their frantic and creative efforts to find excuses to leave their all-powerful but super-sensitive host, without causing offence, provide a comical theme to these long nights.[73]

That year, Svetlana was one of the first guests, staying for three weeks in her own smaller house. She found the awkward dinners with Beria and Malenkov tedious. Escape was easier for her but nonetheless a struggle: once at dinner with Molotov, Mikoyan and Charkviani, she suddenly asked: “Let me go back to Moscow!”

“Why’re you in such a hurry?” replied her hurt father. “Stay ten days. Is it boring here?”

“Father, it’s urgent! Please let me go!”

Stalin became angry: “Stop going on about it! You’ll stay!” Then later, Svetlana started again.

“Go if you want!” barked Stalin. “I can’t make you stay!” He could not grasp the extent to which his political murders had sterilized and poisoned his world but perhaps he sensed it when he pathetically told Svetlana: “You aren’t in a stranger’s house.” Svetlana was still there when Zhdanov arrived. She managed to depart on good terms, sending “Father” a warm letter to which he replied: “Hello Svetka . . . It’s good you haven’t forgotten your father. I’m well . . . I’m not lonely. I’m sending you some little presents— tangerines. A kiss.”

Zhdanov came to help work out Stalin’s policy for securing his hold over Eastern Europe. Molotov’s tendency to negotiate with the West had ended with the rejection of the Marshall Plan. Now Zhdanov seemed to gain ascendancy in foreign as well as domestic policy, or rather he was naturally closer to his master’s voice. Their relationship remained almost paternal. Stalin marked Zhdanov’s speeches with schoolmasterly notes: “Must put in Lenin quotations!” he scrawled in brown crayon on one.

Together they created Zhdanov’s speech that divided Europe into “two camps,” the ideological basis for the Iron Curtain over the next forty years. To counteract the Marshall Plan and the discomforting independence of Tito’s Yugoslavia, Stalin ordered Zhdanov to create a new Communist International, the Cominform, to enforce Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe.

Zhdanov, accompanied by his hated rival Malenkov, recently recalled to a lower post, then flew up to the Polish town of Szklarska Poreba where the ruling Communist Parties from Poland to Yugoslavia awaited Moscow’s instructions. The conference took place in a secret police convalescent home, with Zhdanov and the rest of the delegates staying upstairs. Apart from giving his “two camps” speech on 25 September, Zhdanov behaved with all the blustering arrogance of an imperial viceroy. When Berman, one of the Polish leaders (the one who had waltzed with Molotov), expressed doubts about his Cominform, Zhdanov arrogantly replied, “Don’t start throwing your weight around. In Moscow we know better how to apply Marxism-Leninism.”

At every stage, “Comrade Filipov,” or Stalin on holiday, instructed “Sergeev and Borisov” (Zhdanov and Malenkov) on how to proceed. This was the high point of Zhdanov’s career and his greatest lasting achievement, if it can be called that. It was appropriate that the meeting was held in a sanatorium because, by the end of it, “the Pianist” was collapsing from alcoholism and heart failure. He may have triumphed over Molotov, Malenkov and Beria but he could not control his own strength. Zhdanov, only fifty-one but exhausted, knew “he wasn’t strong enough to bear the responsibility of succeeding Stalin. He never wanted power,” asserts his son. He flew back to the seaside to recover near Stalin, where the two called on each other, but then he suffered a heart attack.[74]

Zhdanov’s illness created a vacuum that was keenly filled by Malenkov and Beria who became so close, they even sent their greetings to Stalin jointly that November, writing “we derive great happiness from working under your rule . . . Devoted to you, L. Beria and G. Malenkov.” Yet their friendship was always political: Beria really thought Malenkov “spineless . . . nothing but a billy goat!” Nonetheless, Zhdanov noticed their resurgence, telling his son: “A faction has been formed.” Resting until December, he was too weak to fight this vicious battle.[75]

Once Molotov and Mikoyan, fresh from their recent humiliations, had also been to stay, Stalin found himself alone. He longed for the company of young people. Beria, according to his son, thought that Stalin’s loneliness was an act. He wanted his associates around him “to keep an eye on them, not from fear of solitude,” but this does not explain his yearning for the companionship of unimportant youngsters. “While everyone talks about the great man, genius in everything,” Stalin muttered to Golovanov, “I have no one to drink a glass of tea with.”

Zhdanov, on one of his visits, was accompanied by his son Yury, Stalin’s ideal son-in-law. Stalin often telephoned him to give career advice: “People say you spend lots of time on political activities,” he had once told Yury, “but I want to tell you politics is a dirty business—we need chemists!” Yury qualified as a chemist then took a master’s degree in philosophy.

Now twenty-eight, Yury and one of his aunts were driving along by the Black Sea and as they passed the road to the Gagra dacha, they were surprised to see a number of guards running towards them: “Comrade Stalin summons you, Comrade Zhdanov!” they said.

Yury sent a message that he was with his aunt and the guard ran back: “Both invited.” On the enclosed veranda, a suntanned, relaxed Stalin awaited them. After asking about his father’s health, Stalin, pouring the wine, came to the point: “Maybe you should work for the Party.”

“Comrade Stalin,” replied Yury, “you once told me politics was a dirty business.”

“This is a different era. Times change. You’ll do Party work, you’ll travel and see the regions. You’ll see how we make decisions and how they disagree with them immediately.”

“I’d better consult my mother and father,” said Yury Zhdanov who knew that no magnate wanted his children in the snakepit of Stalin’s court. But Zhdanov agreed: Stalin appointed Yury to the important job—for such a young man—of Head of the CC Science Department. Unwittingly, Yury was placing his head inside the jaws of the crocodile at the very moment that the battle for succession was about to burst into blood-letting. “I didn’t fear him,” says Yury now, “I knew him since childhood. Only later I realized that Ishould have been afraid.”

Yury did not have to stay, but another young man was less fortunate and endured nine days before he managed to escape. That October, Oleg Troyanovsky, a Foreign Ministry interpreter of twenty-six, was sent down to Gagra to interpret for Stalin at a meeting with some British Labour MPs.[76]

Handsome, brown-haired and erudite, Troyanovsky was another child of the élite. When Stalin first met young Troyanovsky, he liked him so much that he put on the Red Indian accent from Last of the Mohicans : “Send my regards to pale-faced brother from leader of redskins!” When Stalin had seen off the British MPs, he said to Troyanovsky: “Why don’t you stay on and live with us for a while. We’ll get you drunk and then we’ll see what sort of person you are.”

This was so unexpected and alarming that Troyanovsky stammered that surely it would be “a burden to Comrade Stalin,” but he insisted. Troyanovsky was understandably uneasy but Stalin summoned him to play billiards a few times, a game he played extremely well without even seeming to aim at the ball. They mainly met at dinner where they were sometimes joined by Poskrebyshev or Politburo members. The host personally served Troyanovsky. The conversation was “never awkward, no silences,” even though Troyanovsky was shrewd enough to ask no questions and proffer few opinions. Stalin did the talking, reminiscing about his stay with Oleg’s father in Vienna in 1913, his “first time with a Western-style family.” Otherwise Stalin just told him to rest but “it was hardly possible to describe anything to do with Stalin as restful.”

Troyanovsky, like every other guest, fretted about how to escape without offending Stalin. After nine nights, he plucked up the courage to ask Stalin if he could leave. Stalin seemed surprised until Troyanovsky explained that he was returning to Moscow to become a Party member.

“An important event,” said Stalin. “Good luck.” Presenting Troyanovsky with a basket of fruit, there was an awkward but telling moment as he saw him off: “It’s probably boring for you here. I’ve got used to loneliness. I got accustomed to it in prison.”[77]

On his return to Moscow on 21 November, this genial old host ordered Abakumov to murder the Yiddish actor, Mikhoels. Nine days later, he supported the UN vote for the creation of Israel.

 

 

52. Two Strange Deaths: The Yiddish Actor and the Heir Apparent

The Stalin Prize Committee sent Mikhoels to Minsk to judge plays at Belorussian theatres. When this was reported to Stalin, he verbally ordered Abakumov to murder Mikhoels on the spot, specifying some of the details with Malenkov present. Abakumov gave the task to his deputy, and the Minsk MGB boss, invoking the Instantsiya. Abakumov’s plan was to “invite Mikhoels to visit some acquaintances in the evening, provide him with a car . . . bring him to the vicinity of [Belorussian MGB boss] Tsanava’s dacha and kill him there; then take the corpse to a deserted street, place it across the road leading to the hotel and have a truck run over it . . .” The plan has all the hallmarks of the clumsy, gangsterish games that Stalin used to devise with Beria to liquidate those too celebrated to be arrested. Tsanava passed the orders down the line, always dropping the magic word—Instantsiya.

On 12 January, Mikhoels and his friend Vladimir Golubov-Potapov, a theatre critic and MGB agent, spent the day meeting actors, then dined at their hotel. At 8 p.m. they left the hotel to meet Golubov’s “friend.” Presumably the MGB car took them to Tsanava’s dacha where Mikhoels was probably injected with poison to stun him, another job for the MGB’s doctors. Perhaps he fought back. This exuberant artist, the last connection with the intellectual brilliance of Mandelstam and Babel, loved life and must have struggled. He was smashed on the temple with a blunt object, and shot too. Golubov, the duplicitous bystander, was killed as well. The bodies were then driven into town, run over with a truck and left in the snow.[78]

Stalin was informed of the killings probably before the bodies had been dumped in the street, and just as Svetlana was arriving to visit him at Kuntsevo. Stalin was on the phone, most likely to Tsanava: “Someone was reporting to him and he listened. Then to sum up, he said, ‘Well, a car accident.’ I remember his intonation very well—it was not a question, it was a confirmation . . . He was not asking, he was proposing it, the car accident.” When he had put down the phone, he kissed Svetlana and said, “Mikhoels was killed in a car accident.”

At seven the next morning, two bodies were found sticking out of the snow. Mikhoels’s body was returned to Moscow and delivered to the laboratory of Professor Boris Zbarsky, the ( Jewish) biochemist in charge of Lenin’s mummy: noticing the damaged head and the bullet hole, he was ordered to prepare the victim of the “road accident” for the lying-in-state in the Jewish Theatre, where no one was fooled by his “broken face” and “mutilated features made up with greasepaint.”

Mikhoels was an artistic hero to some of Stalin’s courtiers as well as to the public: on the 15th, the night before the funeral, Polina Molotova, who had rediscovered her Jewish roots during the war, quietly attended the lying-in-state and muttered, “It was murder.” After the funeral, Yulia Kaganovich, the niece of Lazar and daughter of Mikhail who had committed suicide in 1941, arrived at the Mikhoels’ and led his daughter into the bathroom. Here, with taps running, she whispered: “Uncle sends his regards,” adding an order from the anxious Kaganovich: “He told me to tell you—never ask anyone about anything.” The Jewish Theatre was renamed for Mikhoels; a murder investigation was opened. The Jewish Committee continued, and Stalin would be the first to recognize Israel.

However, out of the public eye, Mikhoels’ murderer, Tsanava, received the Order of Lenin “for exemplary execution of a special assignment from the government.” Zhenya Alliluyeva was sentenced to ten years, her daughter Kira to five years, “for supplying information about the personal life of [Stalin’s] family to the American Embassy.” Anna Redens also got five years. They were placed in solitary confinement.[79]

The MGB now started to build a case against Deputy Foreign Minister Solomon Lozovsky and other prominent Jews: Polina Molotova was quietly sacked from her job. Stalin openly joked about his own antiSemitism, teasing Djilas about Jews in the Yugoslav leadership:

“You too are an anti-Semite, you too . . .”[80]

Zhdanov, despite his “red puffy face and lively movements,” recovered his heartiness and power: “I might die at any moment and I might live a very long time,” he told Djilas. At dinners, he tried to resist alcohol and ate nothing but a plate of clear soup.

For a sick man, the next few months could hardly have been less restful: Stalin now encountered his first real opposition for almost twenty years. Marshal Tito was no vassal. His Partisans had fought valiantly against the Germans and not depended on the Red Army to liberate them. Now, the Yugoslavs bitterly denounced Zhdanov’s “dictatorial behaviour” at the Cominform conference. When Stalin read this, he could not believe the impertinence of it, scrawling in brown crayon: “Very queer information!”

Stalin had agreed to leave Greece to the West, reserving the right to choose when and where to confront America. Tito disregarded his orders and started to supply the Greek Communists. Stalin was determined to test American resolve in Berlin, not in some obscure Balkan village. The final straw was the planned Balkan federation agreed between the Bulgarian leader, (ex-Comintern chief) Dmitrov, and Tito, without Stalin’s permission. As the row heated up, Tito sent his comrades, Milovan Djilas and Edvard Kardelj, to negotiate with Stalin. At grisly Kuntsevo dinners, Stalin, Zhdanov and Beria tried to overawe Yugoslavia with Soviet supremacy. Djilas was fascinated but defiant. So, on 28 January, Pravda denounced Dmitrov’s plan.

On 10 February, Stalin summoned the Yugoslavs and Bulgarians to the Little Corner to humiliate them, as if they were impudent Politburo members. Instead of opposing the Bulgarian–Yugoslav plan, he proposed a collage of little federations, linking countries that already hated each other. Stalin was “glowering and doodling ceaselessly.”

“When I say no it means no!” said Stalin who instead proposed that Yugoslavia swallow Albania, making gobbling gestures with his fingers and gulping sounds with his lips. The scowling threesome—Stalin, Zhdanov and Molotov—only hardened Tito’s resistance.

Stalin and Molotov despatched an eight-page letter implying that Tito was guilty of that heinous sin—Trotskyism. “We think Trotsky’s political career is sufficiently instructive,” they wrote ominously but the Yugoslavs did not care. On 12 April, they rejected the letter. Stalin decided to crush Tito.

“I’ll shake my little finger,” he ranted at Khrushchev, “and there’ll be no more Tito!” But Tito proved a tougher nut than Trotsky or Bukharin.[81]

At Kuntsevo dinners, Zhdanov, the heir apparent but increasingly a frail alcoholic with a sick heart, “sometimes lost the willpower to control himself” and reached for the drink. Then Stalin “shouted at him to stop drinking,” one of the rare moments he tried to restrain the boozing, a sign of Zhdanov’s special place. But at other times, the pasty-faced, sanctimonious Zhdanov, sitting prissily and soberly while Stalin swore at Tito and smirked at scatological jokes, outraged him: “Look at him sitting there like Christ as if nothing was any concern to him! There—looking at me now as if he were Christ!”

Zhdanov blanched, his face covered with beads of perspiration. Svetlana, who was present, gave him a glass of water but this was only a routine eruption of Stalin’s blazing temper that usually passed as suddenly as it struck. Nonetheless, Stalin was increasingly irritated by Zhdanov’s over-familiar smugness and independence of mind. Beria and Malenkov were aided in their vengefulness from a surprising quarter.

Chosen by Stalin, growing closer to Svetlana and, at twenty-eight, Head of the CC Science Department, Yury Zhdanov was cock of the walk. He took his science as seriously as his father took culture. Yury resented the absurd dominance of Trofim Lysenko in the field of genetics: the scientific charlatan had used Stalin’s backing during the Terror to purge the genetics establishment of genuine scientists.

“Yury, don’t tangle with Lysenko,” Zhdanov jokingly warned his son. “He’ll cross you with a cucumber.” But Zhdanov may have been too ill to stop him.

On 10 April, 1948, young Zhdanov attacked both Lysenko’s so-called creative Darwinism and his suppression of scientists and their ideas, in a speech at the Moscow Polytechnic. Lysenko listened to the lecture through a speaker in a nearby office. This experienced courtier appealed to Stalin, attacking Yury’s impudence in speaking for the Party “in his own name.” Lysenko copied the letter to Malenkov who supported him. Wheels were turning. Malenkov sent the lecture to Stalin who now believed himself the “Coryphaeus”—the “choirmaster”—of science. He read Yury’s lecture with mounting disdain: “Ha-ha-ha!” he scribbled angrily. “Nonsense!” and “Get out!”

The impertinent puppy had contradicted Stalin’s views on heredity and evolution, and usurped his personal authority. When Yury claimed that these were his own personal views, Stalin exclaimed: “Aha!” and forwarded his comments to a delighted Malenkov.

Frustrated by Yugoslav resistance, tension in Berlin, and Zionist intrigues, Stalin had decided this was the moment to challenge America in Europe. He demanded Party discipline; Yury had flouted it. In an Olympian flash that changed Soviet science and politics, Coryphaeus intervened.

On 10 June, Stalin held one of his set-piece humiliation sessions in the Little Corner. Andrei Zhdanov humbly took notes at the front, his son lurked at the back while Stalin, pacing, “pipe in hand and puffing frequently,” muttered: “How did anyone dare insult Comrade Lysenko?” Zhdanov miserably noted Stalin’s words in his exercise book: “Report is wrong. ZHDANOV HAS BEEN MISTAKEN.” Then Stalin stopped and asked: “Who authorized it?”

His gaze chilled the room. “There was the silence of the grave,” wrote Shepilov, a Zhdanov protégé. Everyone looked down. Shepilov stood up to admit: “The decision was mine, Comrade Stalin.”

Stalin walked up to him and stared into his eyes. “I can honestly say,” recalled Shepilov, “I never saw such a look . . . His eyes seemed to possess some incredible force. Their yellow pupils transfixed me like . . . a cobra coiled to strike.” Stalin “did not blink for what seemed eternity.” Then he demanded: “Why did you do it?”

Shepilov tried to explain but Stalin interrupted: “We’ll set up a committee to clarify all the facts. The guilty must be punished. Not Yury Zhdanov, he’s still young,” but he pointed his pipe at “the Pianist”: “It’s necessary to punish the fathers.” Then, in a terrible silence, slowly pacing, he listed the members of the committee—Malenkov . . . but no Zhdanovs! Stalin deliberately waited until the end. Did this mean the Zhdanovshchina was over? “After long thought, Stalin uttered, ‘And Zhdanov,’ leaving a long silence before adding, ‘Senior.’ ”

Yury wrote an apology to Stalin, citing his own “inexperience”: “I unquestionably committed a whole series of grave mistakes.” Malenkov masterfully manipulated the unintentional impudence of Zhdanov junior to pull himself back into the centre: the apology was published in Pravda . But Stalin himself had engineered Zhdanov’s eclipse. The humiliation worsened Zhdanov’s health: he must have wished he had emulated the Berias and Malenkovs who kept their children far from politics.[82]

On 19 June, an exhausted Zhdanov, accompanied by his rival Malenkov, arrived at the second Cominform meeting in Bucharest to preside over the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the fold. “We possess information,” Zhdanov declared absurdly, “that Tito is an Imperialist spy.” The Yugoslavs were excommunicated.

On 24 June, Stalin imposed the Berlin Blockade, challenging the Western Allies and hoping to force them out by closing land supplies to their zone deep in Soviet East Germany. Both these challenges could only accelerate the vicious campaign against Jews in Moscow and the venomous fight for Stalin’s succession. It is usually claimed that Zhdanov had supported the Yugoslavs and therefore was blamed for the rift. Zhdanov and Voznesensky had indeed known the Yugoslavs well since 1945 but they not only supported Stalin’s stance but accelerated it by bringing Tito’s antics to his notice.

The Yugoslav schism was the unnecessary result of Stalin’s own obstinacy. While the country worshipped Stalin the God, familiarity bred contempt. By 1948, Djilas believed Stalin was “showing conspicuous signs of senility,” comparing everything to distant memories of his childhood or Siberian exiles: “Yes I remember the same things . . .” then “laughing at inanities and shallow jokes.” His own men observed his intellectual decline and dangerous unpredictability: “old and addled, we started to lose respect for him,” said Khrushchev. Beria too had gone through the same “evolution”—starting with zealous worship and ending with disillusion. But most of the magnates, particularly Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich and Khrushchev, remained fanatical believers in Marxism-Leninism, while virtually all of them, including Malenkov who saw himself as a civil servant chinovnik, believed Stalin was still on the side of history, for all his faults.[83]

In June, Zhdanov, back from Bucharest, suffered another cardiac crisis and a minor stroke, resulting in breathing difficulties and paralysis of the right side. “I’ve been told to have medical care and rest,” he told a protégé. “I don’t think I’ll be away for long.” On 1 July, Stalin replaced Zhdanov with his nemesis, Malenkov, as Second Secretary. He was a useful scapegoat but, in Stalin’s orbit, there was no need to destroy Zhdanov to promote Malenkov: it suited Stalin to run them in parallel. Zhdanov fainted on his way back from Kuntsevo: now, desperately ill, he could no longer perform his duties. Yury explains that his father “wasn’t dismissed— he simply fell ill and couldn’t defend his interests,” which is confirmed by the doctors: “Comrade Zhdanov needs two months rest, one in bed,” Professor Yegorov told Stalin in a Top Secret report on which Stalin wrote: “Where vacation? Where treatment?”

Stalin, recalls Yury, “became worried. Father’s illness caused a change in the balance of power.” Mikoyan confirmed this. Indeed Zhdanov’s allies, Voznesensky and Kuznetsov, remained ascendant. Yury kept his job.

Stalin sent his own doctors to supervise Zhdanov who was moved to a sanatorium at Valdai, near Novgorod. Nonetheless, Zhdanov felt power slipping through his sclerotic fingers: when, on 23 July, Shepilov called to update him on Malenkov’s return, Zhdanov shouted into the phone. That night, he had a heart attack. Stalin sent his deputy Voznesensky and his own physician Vinogradov to visit the patient.

Zhdanov’s obvious symptoms of arteriosclerosis and heart failure were misdiagnosed. Instead of daily cardiograms and total rest, he was prescribed exercise and harmful massages. On 29 August, he had another severe attack. Once again Stalin sent Vinogradov and ordered Voznesensky and Kuznetsov to check the treatment. Before the politicians arrived, a row broke out over the patient. Dr. Lydia Timashuk, the cardiographer, diagnosed a “myocardial infarction” (a heart attack), and she was almost certainly right, but the distinguished professors made her rewrite her report to specify a much vaguer “dysfunction due to arteriosclerosis and hypertension” in a typical piece of bureaucratic infighting. The doctors poohpoohed her grave diagnosis and prescribed walking in the park. Hence, Zhdanov suffered another heart attack.

Timashuk denounced her superiors and had Zhdanov’s chief bodyguard deliver the letter to General Vlasik to give personally to Stalin. When nothing happened, Timashuk, an MGB agent, wrote to the secret police. Abakumov forwarded the letter to Stalin that same day. Stalin signed it, wrote “Into the archive,” but did nothing. But he was “very anxious and sent back Voznesensky to check on Father,” says Yury who was already there.

On the 31st, Stalin’s fallen favourite got out of bed to visit the lavatory and died of a massive coronary. On Poskrebyshev’s orders, the post-mortem was carried out in an ill-lit, shoddy bathroom in Kuznetsov’s presence. The professors were terrified that their misdiagnosis and cover-up would be exposed so they sacked and denounced Timashuk who then wrote more damning letters to Stalin and Kuznetsov, MGB curator. But this time, Vlasik did not deliver the letter and Kuznetsov ignored his.

Timashuk became the villainess of the Doctors’ Plot because her letters were later used by Stalin but this was ironic since she was medically correct. Zhdanov may have been mistreated but the rumours of murder seem unlikely. The Kremlevka was meant to be the finest Soviet hospital but was so ruled by fear of mistakes, scientific backwardness and political competition that incompetent decisions were made by committees of frightened doctors. Famous patients, from Mekhlis to Koniev, were routinely mistreated. Even in democracies, doctors try to cover up their mistakes. If Stalin had really wanted to murder Zhdanov, it would not have taken five heart attacks over years but a quick injection. Zhdanov’s widow and son were convinced he was not killed: “Everything was simpler,” Yury recalls. “We knew his doctors well. Father was very ill. His heart was worn out.”

Yet why did the manically paranoid Stalin ignore the denunciation? Zhdanov’s illness was obviously serious and Stalin may well have been content to leave treatment to the top Kremlin doctors: besides he was irritated with Zhdanov. But at a deeper level, these medical squabbles were an opportunity for Stalin. He had used medical murder himself and forced doctors in the thirties to confess to killing Kuibyshev and Gorky. This meticulous opportunist and patient conspirator, older but still a genius for creating complex machinations, would exploit Zhdanov’s death when he was ready to create the Terror he was convinced was necessary. A year later, his old comrade Dmitrov, the Bulgarian Premier, died while being treated by the same doctor. Walking in the Sochi garden with his Health Minister, Stalin stopped admiring his roses and mused, “Isn’t it strange? One doctor treated them and they both died.” He was already considering the Doctor’s Plot but it would take him three years to return to Timashuk’s letters.

Stalin helped bear Zhdanov’s open coffin at the funeral, showing kindness to the family. At dinner afterwards, Stalin became drunk.[84]

It was said that the Aragvi restaurant was full of Beria’s Georgians that night, toasting Zhdanov’s death.[85]

On 8 September, Stalin, delayed in Moscow by the Berlin crisis and Zhdanov’s funeral, started a three-month holiday, moving restlessly from Sukhumi to the Livadia, where he entertained the Czech President Gottwald. At Museri, the old dacha built by Lakoba, he was visited by Molotov and Mikoyan. At dinner, Poskrebyshev rose and denounced Mikoyan: “Comrade Stalin, while you’re here resting in the south, Molotov and Mikoyan have prepared a plot against you in Moscow.”

Mikoyan leapt up, black eyes flashing: “You bastard!” he yelled, raising his fist to punch Poskrebyshev.

Stalin caught his hand: “Why do you shout like that?” he soothed Mikoyan. “You’re my guest!” Molotov sat “pale as paper like a statue.” Mikoyan protested his innocence. “If so, don’t pay any attention to him,” Stalin added, having inspired Poskrebyshev in the first place.

Stalin declared that these veterans were too old to succeed him. Mikoyan, just fifty-two, much younger than Stalin, thought this silly but said nothing. The successor, said Stalin, had to be a Russian, not a Caucasian. Molotov remained “the obvious person” but Stalin was disenchanted with him. Then, in a lethal blessing, Stalin pointed at the benign, long face of Zhdanov’s protégé, Kuznetsov: “here’s the man” he wanted to succeed him as General Secretary. Voznesensky would succeed as Premier. Mikoyan sensed “this was a very bad service to Kuznetsov, considering those who secretly dreamed of such a role.”

Stalin himself was bound to become suspicious of any anointed successor, especially given the failure of his Berlin Blockade, which had to be called off when the West energetically supplied their zones with a remarkable airlift. This only fuelled Stalin’s seething paranoia, already stimulated by his own illness, Tito’s defiance and Zionist stirrings among Russian Jews. Beria and Malenkov sharpened their knives.[86]

---

[1] The jawbone and a portion of skull were kept in Moscow; the rest of his cadaver was tested by Smersh and then buried beside a garage at a Soviet army base in Magdeburg where it remained until KGB Chairman Yury Andropov ordered it cremated and the ashes scattered in April 1970.

[2] Hitler: Mgeladze, p. 137: the dinner was in 1950. Zhukov III, pp. 244–66, 271; IV, pp. 269–70. Krebs in Moscow: Gorodetsky, p. 198. Overy, pp. 277–8. Elena Rzhevskaya, “B tot den pozdnei oseni” in S. S. Smirnov, Marshal Zhukov: kakim my ego pomnim, pp. 292–5. German letters and interrogations of Göring etc. GARF r9401.2.97.159–217, 366–445, Beria to Stalin 6 July 1945 and Serov to Stalin 17 July 1945.

[3] Victory: Voronov in Bialer (ed.), pp. 558–9; Yakovlev, p. 561. Zhukov III, pp. 271–9. Vyshinsky and Zhukov: D. D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, p. 1667. Vaksberg, Vyshinsky , p. 251. KR I, p. 240. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 193. Sudoplatov, p. 171. J. V. Stalin, Vystuplenie na prieme v Kremle v chest komman duyushchikh voiskami Krasnoi Armii, Works, ed. Robert McNeal, vol. 2, 1941–5, pp. 203–4. Holloway, p. 265. Parade: Zhukov III, pp. 304–8; IV, p. 297. Spahr, Zhukov, p. 192. Rzhevskaya, “B tot den pozdnei oseni,” p. 300. Yakovlev in Bialer (ed.), pp. 561–2; Kuznetsov, p. 562; Voronov, p. 559. GARF 9401c.3.99, NKVD Album of Victory Parade. Anfilov, Zhukov, Stalin’s Generals, p. 357. Zubok, p. 1. Vladimir Karpov, Marshal Zhukov: Opala, pp. 80–3. Vyshinsky and Poskrebyshev’s pickle: Vaksberg, Vyshinsky, p. 278. N. G. Kuznetsov, Memoirs, p. 110. Stalin bounds up steps ahead of fatties like Beria and Malenkov, Sergo B, p. 140.

[4] RGASPI 558.11.775.122, O. Meshakova to Stalin 8 May 1945. Djilas, p. 106. Generalissimo/Promotions: MR, pp. 175–6. V. Tukov in Rybin, Oktyabre 1941, p. 41. Promotions 9 July 1945: I. I. Kuznetsov, “KGB General Naum Isakovich Eitingon 1899–1991,” Slavic Military Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, Mar. 2001, p. 375. Brooks, Thank You C. Stalin, p. 186. Volkogonov, pp. 500, 525. Radzinsky, p. 523. Merkulov became General of the Army; Kobulov, Abakumov, Serov, Colonel-Generals. Most magnates were already Generals: Khrushchev, Lieutenant-Gen. Zhdanov Col.-Gen. Nosenko joke: Sovershenno Sekretno, 3, 2000, pp. 12–14.

[5] The NKVD had mended all the electrical systems of Babelsberg and, as at Yalta, they even brought their own fire brigade. More than that, Stalin had his own “organized store of economic supplies with 20 refrigerators . . . and 3 farms—a cattle farm, a poultry farm and a vegetable farm” plus “2 special bakeries, manned by trusted staff and able to produce 850 kg of bread a day.”

[6] Beria had also secured as much uranium as possible in a special operation in the ruins of Berlin: he and Malenkov reported to Stalin they had found “250 kgs of metallic uranium, 2 tons of uranium oxide and 20 litres of heavy water” at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, rounded up key German physicists, and spirited all this treasure back to the USSR. Roy Medvedev in his Neizvestnyi Stalin claims Beria did not tell Stalin about the American test until 20 or 21 August but we do not know the precise date.

[7] Stalin was a regicide who constantly compared himself to monarchs: he even joked with his Yugoslav visitors, “Maybe Molotov and I should marry princesses,” a prospect that no doubt sent a shiver through the Almanac de Gotha. He was happy to use monarchies when necessary, urging Tito to restore the young Yugoslav King: “You can always stick a knife in his back when no one’s looking.”

[8] Potsdam: GARF r9401c.2.97. 124–30, Beria to Stalin and Molotov 2 July 1945. On arrangements with English and Americans: GARF r9401c.2.97. 73-6, Beria to Stalin, Molotov and Antonov n.d. Stalin always tired: Gromyko, Memoirs, p. 100. Sergo B, pp. 15–18. Churchill 6, pp. 548–79. Zhukov III, pp. 325–36. N. G. Pavlenko, “Razmyshleniya o sudbe polkovodtsa” in VIZh, no. 12, pp. 30–1. Natalya Poskrebysheva; Nadezhda Vlasik: fathers at Postdam. Kuznetsov, Memoirs, p. 111–3: waiting at the station. Gromyko, pp. 97–114, Bohlen, pp. 227–40. Harriman-Abel, pp. 484–93. Overy, pp. 281–4. Charles L. Mee, Jr., Meeting at Potsdam, pp. 77, 90–3, 96–105, 118–120, 171–5, 218. Record of private conversation between PM and Generalissimo Stalin after Plenary session 17 July 1945 at Potsdam , PREM 3/430/7 Doc. 70, Churchill and Stalin. On Truman/ A-bomb: Mgeladze, pp. 130, 170. I likeStalin, Pendergast: Truman to wife, quoted in Roy Jenkins, Truman, p. 72. Sergo B, pp. 115–7. Stalin distrusts scientists, Molotov’s slowness, appoints Beria, Holloway, pp. 35, 117–9. Sudoplatov, p. 178. GARF 9401.2.97.283–99, Beria to Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov 8 July 1945 in Beevor, Berlin, pp. 324–5. N. Riehl and F. Seitz, Stalin’s Captive Nikolaus Riehl and the Soviet Race for the Bomb, p. 152. We need to get started: Medvedev, Neiznestnyi Stalin, no. 3 (1985), p. 8. Stalin and the atom bomb.

[9] This may be the reason this story appears in none of Mountbatten’s biographies and is told here for the first time. I am grateful to Hugh Lunghi for both his interview on the episode and his generous gift of his unpublished official minutes.

[10] Bomb: V. N. Pavlov, “Avtobiograficheskie Zametki,” Novaya i Noveishaya Istoria no. 4 (2000), p. 110. Harriman-Abel, p. 491. Gilbert, pp. 854–5. Mgeladze, pp. 129–30. Truman “as if by chance,” “New weapon,” “Churchill’s knowledge”: Volkogonov, Rise and Fall, p. 121. MR, p. 56. Zhukov III, pp. 325, 335. Tractors: Dobrynin, p. 23, quoting Gromyko. Female police: Gromyko, Memoirs, pp. 108–9. Sergo B, p. 174. Holloway, pp. 84, 114–27, 131–3, 178–86. Charles L. Mee, Potsdam, pp. 229, 249–50, 275–7. Overy, pp. 284–7. Stalin on Churchill: Mgeladze, p. 137. Hugh Lunghi, Minutes of Meeting between Generalissimo J. V. Stalin and Admiral Mountbatten at Babelsberg, Germany on 25th July 1945. Spahr, Zhukov, p. 197. Pavlenko, “Razmyshleniya,” pp. 30–1. Khrushchev, Glasnost, pp. 60–2. Stalin at 25 Jan. 1946 meeting with Molotov and Beria, quoted in Holloway, p. 147. Zubok: Stalin and Malenkov—Party, p. 141. Beria reports to Stalin on Kurchatov and scientists: GARF 9401.2.97.283/99, Beria to Stalin, Molotov and Malenkov 8 July 1945. Stalin on bomb “barbarity”: Mgeladze, pp. 129–30.

[11] Beria’s style: unusual but great criminal: Stefan Stazewski in Oni, p. 172. Colossal: Artyom Sergeev. Zubok, p. 142, quoting Vladimir Novikov, p. 310. Risky in streets: Golovanov quoted in editor’s notes, Sergo B, p. 346. Swiss clock: V. I. Novikov quoted in editor’s notes, Sergo B, p. 345. Sakharov, pp. 145–9. Holloway, pp. 134–41. Gromyko, Memoirs, p. 319. Kurchatov in Beria, pp. 137–9. Shoot them later: Holloway, p. 212. R&D: Sakharov, p. 145. Beria, p. 133. Lesser Terror, p. 47. RGASPI 558.11.744, Stalin to P. Kapitsa, 4 Apr. 1946. Technical bafflement: Holloway, p. 137. Sakharov, p. 79. Atomic Politburo: Roy Medvedev’s phrase, Neizvestnyi Stalin: Stalin and the bomb.

[12] Many of the Soviet leaders had their own zoos or menageries: Bukharin had collected bear cubs and foxes. Khrushchev had fox cubs and deer; Budyonny, Mikoyan and Kaganovich kept horses.

[13] On 17 January 2003, the Russian Prosecutor confirmed the existence of forty-seven volumes of files on Beria’s criminal activities which were gathered on his arrest after Stalin’s death. Even though the case against him was entirely political, with trumped-up charges, the files confirm the dozens of women who accused him of raping them. The State television network RTR was allowed to film the handwritten list of their names and telephone numbers. The files will not be opened for another twenty-five years.

[14] To this day, Beria’s illegitimate children are well known among Moscow and Tbilisi society: they include a highly respected Georgian Member of Parliament and a Soviet matron who married the son of a member of Brezhnev’s Politburo. After the war, Stalin changed the People’s Commissariats to Ministries so that the NKVD and NKGB became the MVD and MGB. The State Defence Committee, the GKO, was abolished on 4 September 1945. The Politburo once again became the highest Party body though Stalin ruled as Premier, leaving the Party Secretariat to Malenkov.

[15] Ugly flabby, greyish: Tatiana Okunevskaya in Vasilieva, Kremlin Wives, p. 156; and on BBC2: “Beria, Stalin’s Creature.” Beria A fair, Malyshev, p. 85. Sergo B, pp. 122, 141, 168. Sudoplatov, p. 103. A. I. Romanov, The Nights Are Longest There, p. 179. Dacha and basketball, cosiness at home: Martha Peshkova. Sumptuous, immense white villa, cosy, full of English and German books and papers: Svetlana OOY, pp. 355–6. Tireless, clever: “An interview with VM Molotov,” Literaturuli Sakhartvelo, 27 Oct. 1989, in Beria, pp. 195–274. MVD “idealisied” him, Beria, p. 203. On his guilt and rapes: Izvestiya TsK KPSS, 1991, no. 1, Plenum CC 2–7 July 1953. Sarkisov betrays Beria to Abakumov: Vlast 2000, no. 22, p. 44. “Comrade Beria is tired and overworked . . .” and Poskrebyshev tells Stalin, of Beria’s syphilis, office full of blondes, Deriabin, pp. 62–71. Ekaterina Katutova repeating Z. Fyodorovna’s story in Vasilieva, Kremlin Wives, p. 157; Tatiana Okunevskaya, pp. 159–60; Beria’s interrogation, Kremlin Wives, pp. 56, 150–1, 171. Beria and Poskrebyshev: Natalya Poskrebysheva. Seduction of her friend Valya: Kira Alliluyeva in Miklos Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, p. 454. Opening of 47 files on Beria’s guilt: Robin Shepherd, The Times, 18 Jan. 2003. Life at Home: Martha Peshkova. Bones in home: Strauss, Daily Telegraph, 23 Dec. 2003.

[16] Recently, Beria’s house—now the Tunisian Embassy—has yielded up some of its secrets: in 2003, the 50th anniversary of Beria’s death, the Tunisian Ambassador confirmed that alterations in the cellars had exposed human bones. Who were they? Tortured Enemies or raped girls? We shall probably never know. There is of course no proof that Beria is to blame—but anything, no matter how diabolical, seems possible in his case.

[17] Worming their way into Stalin family: Martha Peshkova on Sergo and Beria. Sergo B, pp. 151–2. Stalin mentions three boys. Stepan M, p. 145. Beria disapproves: Mikoyan, pp. 362–3. Also: Sudoplatov quotes Beria’s secretary Ludvigov, p. 321. Svetlana RR.

[18] I am fortunate that Martha Peshkova, Gorky’s granddaughter, Svetlana’s best friend and Beria’s daughter-in-law, helped with her unique memories and introduced me to the Gorky/Beria family including Beria’s granddaughters (see Postscript). As a wedding present,

[19] Martha’s prettiness: Sergo B, p. 191. Martha: scented cloud, difficult to have as a friend—Gulia Djugashvili, Ded, Otets, Mat i Drugie, p. 55. Stalin favours Yury Zhdanov, encourages friendship with Martha: Svetlana OOY, p. 319. Details of life at Beria’s: Martha Peshkova.

[20] Leonid Redens. Svetlana RR: “I was not in love with him.” Svetlana, Twenty Letters: Stalin wouldn’t meet but never asked her to divorce, pp. 193–6. Svetlana similar to Stalin: Charkviani, p. 58, quoting Mikoyan. Svetlana’s jealous threats: Martha Peshkova. Svetlana’s father furious: Sergo B, p. 192. RGASPI 558.11.727.92, Julia Djugashvili to Stalin 29 May 1946. Gulia Djugashvili, Ded, Otets, Mat i Drugie, p. 28.

[21] MR, pp. 8, 71. Mgeladze, pp. 78–9.

[22] Barminess and conceit: Kaganovich, p. 154. MR, pp. 73, 210, “most dangerous,” pp. 212–3. Mikoyan, pp. 465–6, 513. Mikoyan in Kumanev (ed.), p. 22. KR I, p. 333. Khrushchev, Glasnost, p. 66. Volya Malenkova: “My father said Stalin changed after the war.” Pebbles: Ehrenburg, Postwar Years, p. 131. Stalin: calmness and tempers, indirect orders, always obeyed, Charkviani, pp. 37, 70. Lemon trees: Mgeladze in MR, p. 175. “Stepped aside from direct ruling”— Smirtukov in Vlast, no. 7, 2000, p. 53. “My reasons are clear”: Stalin to Politburo, 3 Nov. 1947 in RGASPI 558.11.712.142 on Bulganin’s Marshalate. Exhaustion: MR, p. 190; Mgeladze, p. 68. View of doctors: “How they talk!” RGASPI 74.2.38.89, Stalin to Voroshilov n.d. “If I faithfully followed the advice of doctors, I’d be in my grave,” Harriman, pp. 349–53. Natalya Poskrebysheva. Rybin, Next to Stalin, p. 43. Yakov Rapoport, The Doctors’ Plot: Stalin’s Last Crime, pp. 17–8. Svetlana in Richardson, Long Shadow, p. 170. Writers: Simonov, “Glazami,” p. 41. My shadow: Rzhevskaya, “B tot den pozdnei oseni,” p. 307.

[23] Mercury poisoning had a special pedigree at Stalin’s court: Yezhov had sprayed his own office with mercury and claimed that Yagoda was trying to poison him.

[24] A recent biography of John Wayne claimed the film star’s symbolism as an American hero and enemy of Communism infuriated Stalin, who suggested that “Duke” should be assassinated. When Khrushchev visited Hollywood in 1958, he is said to have explained to Wayne: “That was the decision of Stalin in his last mad years. When Stalin died, I rescinded the order.” The story is based on rumor; it sounds like the sort of grim joke Stalin favoured in his cups. If true, it is hard to imagine why Wayne survived—and why Khrushchev did not use the tale against Stalin in his memoirs.

[25] Bolshakov survived Stalin to serve Khrushchev as Deputy Trade Minister. He died in 1980.

[26] Vassals: Bierut: Minc, p. 19, Berman, p. 308, in Oni. Dobrynin, p. 21. Show your hands: E. Zhirnov, in Vlast 25, p. 44. Cinema: Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 152. Bolshakov’s translations: KR I, p. 318. Papava story about movie Academician Ivan Pavlov, Gromov, Stalin, pp. 214–6. Bolshakov, cinema, Stalin’s mood, projectionists, Bolshakov’s “brothel,” Goebbels’s films, where have we seen this actor, Zhdanov’s comments, Zhukovsky film by Pudovkin, Comrade Ulrikh and where’s the next stop on your train: G. Mariamov, Kremlevsky Tzenzor: Stalin smotrit kino, pp. 7–13. Rise of Bolshakov and fall of Dukelsky and Shumiatsky: Kenez, pp. 116–8. Bolshakov gives Stalin a surprise: Zhirnov in Vlast, no. 25, 2000, p. 46. Bedell Smith, p. 219. Ivan the Terrible: “Stalin, Molotov i Zhdanov o vtoroy serii filma ‘Ivan Grozny,’ ” Moskovskie Novosti, no. 37, 7 Aug. 1988, inc. Ivan’s kiss. On Beria and MGB reports to Stalin on Eisenstein and Ivan the Terrible: GARF R9401.2.67.283–92, Beria to Stalin 5 Nov. 1944. Ivan,Part One: Zhdanov gives instructions Jan. 1941: Kenez, p. 179; Bolshakov and Eisenstein, pp. 196–8; Bolshakov, p. 190; masterpieces June 1948, p. 189; Kaganovich vs. Eisenstein, p. 138. Stalin to Kaganovich on Eisenstein: almost a Trotskyite, Kaganovich Perepiska, p. 101. Talented, watched Nevsky repeatedly: Mgeladze, p. 212. Stalin comments on movie scripts: e.g. RGASPI 558.11.713.115, Vsevelod Vishnevsky to Stalin with thanks for comments on his script, Unforgettable 1919, which Stalin sent via Mikhail Chiaureli, 20 Jan. 1950. Stalin makes comments on movie throughout, mixes up reality and film: Djilas, p. 103. KR I, p. 318. Mariamov, pp. 7–13. Believed Hitler’s propaganda film on Danzig, KR I, p. 158, but also believed his own films, p. 185. Discussion of policy—“certain special problems”—MR, p. 321. Films change policy: on aircraft carriers and navy, Stalin influenced by Ushakov movie: KR II, p. 20, and on surface to air: KR II, p. 43. Also on destruction of villages in front-line areas in WW2: Volkogonov, p. 478. Stalin loved Volga! Volga! and Charlie Chaplin; Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 198–9. Favourite foreign films: Leyda, p. 380. Stalin shows Hull film about Japan: Berezhkov, p. 234. Mikoyan and Khrushchev uneasy about Stalin’s enthusiasm for film about killing fellows: Mikoyan, p. 534. KR I, pp. 318–28. On Zhdanov and CC resolution on film: Leyda, pp. 390–1; Kenez, p. 195. On Bolshakov and USSR film industry: Leyda, pp. 299–391. Choosing films: Troyanovsky, p. 154. Chiaureli and Gelovani at Stalin’s: Charkviani, pp. 44–5. Tarzan:Istochnik no. 4, 1999, Bolshakov to Poskrebyshev, 31 Jan. 1951. On movie guests: Gelovani: Charkviani, pp. 44–5; Diky: Artyom Sergeev. Clark Gable/Spencer Tracy: Gulia Djugashvili in Biagi, pp. 81–3. John Wayne assassination: see Michael Munn, John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth, pp. 130–3, 205–6. Accents: Medvedev: Neiztvestnyi Stalin: Stalin as Russian nationalist.

[27] The magnates’ families recognized their tense waiting for the call to the cinema or dacha from Stalin’s secretaries. At weekends, the only chance they got to see their families, the leaders were especially tense whenever the phone rang. They did not eat during the day to leave room for the endless procession of dishes. But when the call came, Sergei Khrushchev noticed how hastily his father departed.

[28] The chauffeurs of the leaders were very pleased when their bosses were invited to Stalin’s place. Voroshilov was now invited less often than before the war. “My old man ain’t invited there very much anymore,” his veteran chauffeur would complain.

[29] Cars: K. Popovic in Dedijev, Tito Speaks, pp. 280–4. Chooses route: KR I, pp. 318, 320, 325. Djilas, pp. 67–9, 147. Guests “if you have time”: Chiaureli and Gelovani: Charkviani, pp. 44–5. Cleanliness: Popovic in Tito Speaks, p. 282. Notebooks: Djilas, pp. 67–9, 147–8: Zhdanov on German names, Voznesensky takes note also. Malenkov takes notes: “I hated such toadying,” Mikoyan, p. 586. Lavatories: Djilas, p. 148. KR I, p. 307, 320, 324: “Stalin lying,” “Even in childhood he drank too much.” Seating: Berman in Oni, pp. 235–7. Djilas, pp. 75–6, 108–9. Drink: champagne favourite—MR, p. 177. Mikoyan, pp. 353–4. KR I, pp. 330–2. Berman in Oni, p. 234. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 116; Stalin sometimes drunk, singing with Health Minister Y. Smirnov; Beria incites drinking, Svetlana OOY, pp. 332–3. Djilas, pp. 148, 155–7, resembling Beria’s conversation with Clark Kerr, see Yalta. Sergo B, p. 168, and couldn’t resist a drink, pp. 120–1. See also Troyanovsky, p. 156. Kaganovich, p. 106. Djilas on Molotov: practically a drunk, p. 77. Khrushchev’s hard drinking: MR, p. 177. Stepan M, p. 71. Food and cigarettes: Stalin’s own bottles of wine: see Karpov, Rastrelyanniye Marshaly, on Kulik’s dinner. On Egnatashvili as Rabbit, see Brackman, p. 4; as logistics/food MGB Lieut.-Gen., see Charkviani, pp. 5–7. On food testing: Svetlana OOY, p. 334. Khrushchev’s version of story: Beria, Malenkov and Mikoyan suborn waitress but claim they were betrayed by Shcherbakov, KR I, p. 322.

[30] This resembles the blinding in one eye of Marshal Masséna by the Emperor Napoleon on a shooting expedition. The incident convinced Beria and Khrushchev even more that Stalin’s shooting tales were lies and that he could not shoot at all.

[31] Vlasik and Lieut.-Gen. Sasha Egnatashvili, the trusted son of the Gori innkeeper and Keke’s protector, were probably responsible for Stalin’s food which was prepared at an MGB laboratory named “The Base” and then marked “No poisonous elements found.” A recent book claims that Egnatashvili was Stalin’s food taster, which is apparently a myth. Stalin however often did get his entourage to try food and wine before he did. When he arrived at a party, he brought his own box of wine and his own cigarettes which he opened himself. He would only eat or drink if he had broken the seal himself, leaving the food, unfinished wine and cigarettes to be divided up by Vlasik. The waste was vast; the temptation for venality irresistible but dangerous. Vlasik could never resist such goodies.

[32] Pond: Sergo B, p. 141. Svetlana OOY, pp. 332–3. KR I, pp. 330–2. Roses: Natalya Poskrebysheva. Birds: Shtemenko quoted in Jonathan Lewis and Philip Whitehead, Stalin: A Time for Judgement, p. 157. Gottwald: Khrushchev, Glasnost, pp. 131–3; Rakosi: KR I, pp. 325, 330–2. S. Khrushchev, Superpower, p. 31. Julia Khrushcheva. Volya Malenkova. Food: Mikoyan, pp. 353–5, 529–33. Food tasting before Stalin: KR I, p. 321. Food/waitress: Berman in Oni, pp. 235–7. Djilas, pp. 75–7. Malenkov’s and Khrushchev’s weight: Sergo B, p. 140. KR I, pp. 318–20. Djilas, p. 77. Beria’s vegetarianism: Martha Peshkova. Rybin, Ryadom, p. 88: P. Lozgachev—Beria, fish and pears, also small children. Peppering guards: Rybin, Kto Otravil Stalina; Lozgachev, pp. 5–10, and KR I, p. 324. Rybin, Oktyabre 1941, V. Tukov, p. 47. Rybin, Stalin i Zhukov: memoirs on gardens, lamb, hothouse, S. Solovev, pp. 42–4.

[33] Molotov and Mikoyan still argued with Stalin: Mikoyan and Kharkov: Khrushchev, Glasnost, pp. 60–2. Voroshilov: MR, pp. 224–5. Mikoyan, Stalin on Svanidze, p. 359; Malenkov’s caution, p. 586. KR I, pp. 226–7, on Malinovsky/Larin, p. 271, checking with Beria first. Djilas, pp. 71, 76–7, 148–56. Tiger: Sergo B, pp. 120–1. Stalin on the dead: calmness of a historian, Charkviani, p. 30. Apology to Marshal: Medvedev, pp. 332–3. Charm: Berman in Oni, p. 234; fuck off, Staszewski, p. 146. RGASPI 558.11.804.84–5, V. G. Solomin to Stalin, 16 Jan. 1947, and Stalin to Solomin 5 Mar. 1947. Tales of exile esp. shooting /freezing expedition, Beria “he’s lying”: KR I, pp. 322–3, 330–3. Vlasik, p. 44, Charkviani, p. 22. Beria stamps on feet: Mikoyan, p. 355. Most illustrious of grandees, Voroshilov: Svetlana OOY, p. 346.

[34] Guide to survival: Mikoyan, pp. 355, 521, 563, 564. Sergo B, p. 312. KR I, pp. 178, 277 (avoiding eyes). Lozgachev quoted in Radzinsky, p. 553. RGASPI 558.11.732.42–5, B. Dvinsky to Stalin 23 Sept. 1946. Gromyko, Memoirs, pp. 319–21. Bohlen, p. 255. RGASPI 588.2.156.31–41, Manuilsky to Stalin 28 Dec. 1948. S. Khrushchev, Superpower, p. 29. Woff on Rybalko in Stalin’s Generals, p. 214. KR I, p. 218, e.g. Khrushchev on Yeremenko, on Kulik and Pavlov, pp. 199–200, spring wheat, pp. 260–1, 335, checking with Beria, p. 271. Bugging: all leaders bugged—Deriabin, pp. 43–4. Molotov warned by Chekists: MR, p. 224. Voznesensky: Kovalev in Simonov, “Glazami,” p. 58. Sudoplatov, p. 231.

[35] This male slow-dancing symbolizes the sinister degeneracy of Stalin’s dictatorship but it was not unique. In November 1943, at President Roosevelt’s Thanksgiving party in Cairo, just before their departure to meet Stalin in Teheran, there was a shortage of female dancers. So Churchill happily danced with FDR’s military assistant General Edwin “Pa” Watson.

[36] They were so pleased with these sessions that they made a record of this murderous boy band with Voroshilov on lead vocals, backed up by Zhdanov on piano. There one can actually hear the fine voices and tinkling piano of a night at Kuntsevo. This remarkable recording is in the possession of the Zhdanov family.

[37] Stalin teases Mikoyan: Sergo B, p. 140. Beria’s jokes with tomatoes against Mikoyan and tossing his hat into the trees: Lozgachev in Rybin, Kto Otravil Stalina?, p. 10. Mikoyan vs. Beria: MR, p. 233; Beria “didn’t trust any Armenian,” Mikoyan, p. 582. Chicken bones—Stepan Mikoyan. Mikoyan dashing: Svetlana OOY, p. 346. Mikoyan, “fancy airs”: KR I, p. 406. Tricks, tomatoes, salt or vodka in wine, main victims Poskrebyshev and Mikoyan: Svetlana OOY, pp. 332–42. Sergo B, p 141. Lenin: Djilas, p. 161. KR II, p. 108. Gramophone, singing and dancing: the Georgians, Charkviani, pp. 44–5. Berman in Oni, pp. 235–7. Stalin dances: KR I, pp. 309–11. Djilas, p. 161. K. Popovic in Dedijer, Tito Speaks, p. 283. Sergo B, p. 142. Svetlana: KR I, pp. 309–11. Leaders dance: Bulganin “stomped”; Khrushchev does gopak, laughs at locks and drinking, KR I, pp. 309–11, 322–4, 330–3. Bulganin in Galina, p. 148. Molotov slow-dance with Berman in Oni, pp. 235–7. Stalin and Tito dance: Hugh Thomas, Armed Truce: The Beginnings of the Cold War 1945–6, pp. 45–7. Churchill 5, p. 330. On music: Stalin to Truman in Gromyko, Memoirs, p. 113. Zhdanov: Yury Zhdanov. Songs: MR, p. 189. Stalin throws tomatoes, threats, prison or home? KR I, pp. 277–9. Mikoyan, p. 573. Svetlana OOY, pp. 332–3. Stalin stories against Lenin: Sergo B, p. 135. Prick: W. Taubman, Khrushchev, Man and Era, p. 214.

[38] There was a little villa down the steps on the cliffside for Svetlana. When Stalin saw it, he

[39] Mikoyan too felt his icy disapproval. He sensed his two old comrades were closet Rightists, absurd in Molotov’s case. But during the complex arguments about whether to strip Germany of its industry or build the eastern sector as a satellite, and the endless crises of famine and grain, Mikoyan had become a moderating voice. When Mikoyan did not report properly from the Far East, he received another sharp note from Stalin: “We sent you to the Far East not so you could fill your mouth with water [say nothing] and not send information to Moscow.”

[40] “War broke me”: Mgeladze, p. 125. MR, p. 190. Kaganovich, pp. 52, 60. RGASPI 558.11.1481.45, Stalin to Molotov and Malenkov, 9 Oct. 1945. RGASPI 82.2.1592.40–5, Molotov to Polina Apr. 1945 in New York. RGASPI 82.2.1592.72, Molotov to Polina Sept. 1945? London. On Coldstream: Harriman-Abel, p. 511. On Stalin and Molotov: Vladimir O. Pechatnov, “The Allies are pressing on you to break your will . . .” Foreign Policy Correspondence between Stalin and Molotov and other Politburo members, Sept. 1945–Dec. 1946, Working Paper 26, Cold War International History Project. Also: A. O. Chubariyan and V. O. Pechatnov, “Molotov ‘the Liberal’: Stalin’s 1945 Criticism of his Deputy,” Cold War History, no. 1, Aug. 2000, pp. 129–40. Zubok, pp. 92–8. Veil of amity: Overy, p. 283. Mikoyan: RGASPI 558.11.732.42–50, Dvinsky to Stalin: “Mikoyan said we are spending too much on bread . . .” Stalin to Zhdanov, Voznesensky, Bulganin, Patolichev, Dvinsky and Khrulev. Beria to Poskrebyshev, enclosing Serov’s report to Beria. Mikoyan, pp. 484, 493. RGASPI 558.11.765.107–9, Stalin to Mikoyan, 22 and 25 Sept. 1945.

[41] It was Shakhurin whose son had killed his girlfriend and then himself on Kamennyi Most in 1943.

[42] Abakumov appears as the consummate cunning courtier, utterly submissive to Stalin’s mysterious whims, in Solzhenitsyn’s novel of the post-war Terror, The First Circle, and as a shrewd and debauched secret-police careerist in Rybakov’s Fire and Ashes, the last volume of his Children of the Arbat trilogy.

[43] On Vasily’s denunciations: RGASPI 45.1.807, N. Sbytov to Stalin 24 Mar. 1948. Svetlana OOY, pp. 315–20; Twenty Letters, pp. 221–9. KR I, p. 274. Pavlenko, “Razmyshleniya,” pp. 30–1. Purge of the victors: Erickson on Novikov in Stalin’s Generals, p. 173. Vladimir Karpov, “Rasprava Stalin nad Marshalom Zhukovym,” Vestnik Protivovozdushnoi Oborony, 7–8, 1992, pp. 69–72. Kostyrchenko, pp. 67–8. Lesser Terror, p. 179. Hahn, p. 35. Rybin, Next to Stalin, p. 69. MR, p. 209. Beria traitor: Kavtaradze, p. 74. Snake eyes: Golovanov, MR, p. 306. Beria “sacked,” resentful: Beria to Mikoyan in 1952: “I was sacked years ago” in Sergo B, p. 242. Stalin on Beria and at dinner with Beria, Mgeladze, pp. 64–7, 100; on Beria, pipes, MVD: p. 168. Knows too much: Mikoyan, pp. 563–6. Martha Peshkova. Vlasik, p. 130. Abakumov: Lesser Terror , pp. 115, 175–5. Abakumov showed independence of Beria: on 28 Apr. 1943, Abakumov arrested NKGB head of Secret Police Dept., V. N. Ilyin. Sudoplatov, p. 238. Malenkov vs. Merkulov: Sukhanov, Memoirs. Parrish, “Serov,” p. 120. Parrish, “Yezhov,” pp. 81, 98. Sudoplatov, p. 238. Abakumov vs. Beria: Merkulov quoted in Beria, p. 140. Abakumov and Stalin gather evidence on Beria’s sex life: Vlast 2000, no. 22, p. 44. Kuznetsov, “Abakumov,” pp. 149–65. Lesser Terror, pp. 251–2, L. N. Smirov quoted on “zoological careerist.” Leopold Trepper in Thomas, Armed Truce, p. 63. Jazz and Eddie Rosner: BBC2 Storyville programme. Abakumov and Svetlana: Voronov, Memoir of N. V. Voronov, VIZh 6, June 1994, pp. 61–2. Sudoplatov, p. 310: Vasily and Abakumov. Shooting Novikov: Sudoplatov, p. 310. Malenkov: Hahn, p. 44. N. S. Patolichev, Ispytanie na zrelost, pp. 280–4. Dacha loss: Igor Malenkov and Volya Malenkova. House arrest: Andrei Malenkov, O moem otse Georgie Malenkove, p. 53. Beria’s bomb in December: Holloway, p. 182. Sergo B, p. 160. Stalin mocks Beria’s help for Malenkov: Sergo B, p. 188. Resolution of PB on reorganization of MGB, 4 May 1946, in PB/Sovmin, pp. 207–20.

[44] Stalin himself soon retired as Armed Forces Minister, handing this to Bulganin, another ally of Zhdanov who hated Malenkov because he had removed him from the Western Front in 1943. The ruling inner circle of Five (Stalin, Molotov, Mikoyan, Malenkov and Beria) gradually expanded to embrace Zhdanov, Voznesensky, Bulganin and Kuznetsov, regardless of whether they were yet formally Politburo members.

[45] In late 1946, Zhdanov suffered heart trouble and had to rest in Sochi, reporting to Stalin on 5 January 1947, “Now I feel much better . . . I don’t want to end the course of treatment . . . I ask you to add 10 days to my holiday . . . Let me return the 25th . . . For which I’ll be enormously grateful. Greetings! Your Andrei Zhdanov.”

[46] Zhdanov’s return. Perfect: RGASPI 558.11.732.1, Stalin to Zhdanov 19 Sept. 1946. Happy Revolution Day: RGASPI 558.11.732.129, Zhdanov family to Stalin 6 Nov. 1947. Zhdanov letter to Stalin 5 Jan. 1947 in PB/ Sovmin, p. 398. Beria on Zhdanov pretensions, Sergo B, p. 160. Have you read that new book?—Stalin to Zhdanov, according to Zhdanov’s aide, A. Belyakov, quoted in Rybin, Oktyabre 1941, p. 51. “Most intellectual”: Svetlana OOY, pp. 336–8. Richardson, Long Shadow, p. 210. Zubok, pp. 116–8, pp. 120–4, 308. Jukka Nevakivi (ed.), Finnish-Soviet Relations 1944–1948, pp. 52, 73, 77, 79; Magill, p. 77. Finland “peanut,” Djilas, pp. 154–5. Hatred between Beria/Malenkov, Zhdanov/Kuznetsov: Mikoyan, pp. 563–5. Interviews: Volya and Igor Malenkov; Yury Zhdanov; Stepan and Sergo Mikoyan. Hahn, pp. 22–33, 35–9, 61—for example, on 20 Sept. 1946, Zhdanov signed kolkhozdecree as Secretary, Stalin as Premier. Yury Zhdanov confirmed this temporary arrangement. Bowing to Zhdanov: Dedijer, Tito Speaks, p. 307, memoirs of Yugoslav Ambassador Vladimir Popovic. Crown Prince: C. L. Sulzberger quoted in Raanan, pp. 132–3. Time magazine cover, 9 Dec. 1946. On Leningrad vs. Stalingrad: Zhdanov to Maxwell M. Hamilton, U.S. rep. in Finland, 13 Mar. 1945 in Raanan, p. 133. Zhdanov quoting Schiller’s “The King”: Yves Delbars, The Real Stalin, p. 400, quoted in Raanan, p. 133. Mikoyan, pp. 563–5. (Beria gave up the MVD in 1946 to Kruglov on 15 Jan.: see PB/Sovmin.) Patolichev, pp. 279–84, p. 113. Zhdanov’s rise up PB lists quoted in Bedell Smith, p. 60. Lesser Terror, p. 168. Nov. 1946 Parade: Raanan, p. 25. Sergo B, p. 354. Sukhanov: Zhdanov chaired both Secretariat and Orgburo after Malenkov’s dismissal. On Malenkov’s exile: Igor Malenkov; Volya Malenkova. Beria and Malenkov’s joint good wishes on 6 Nov. 1947: RGASPI 558.11.762.14, Beria and Malenkov to Stalin 6 Nov. 1947. On Kuznetsov as curator of MGB: RGASPI 17.3.1066.47, resolution of PB on supervision of MGB, 17 Sept. 1947, PB/Sovmin, p. 51. Yoram Gorlizki, Stalin’s Cabinet: The Politburo and Decision-Making in the Postwar Years, in Christopher Read, The Stalin Years: A Reader, p. 192–5.

[47] Zhdanov discussed the campaign with his son Yury, who had studied chemistry, taken a master’s degree in philosophy—and remained Stalin’s ideal young man and his dream son-in-law. Zhdanov explained that “after the war, with millions dead and the economy destroyed, we have to form a new concept of spiritual values to give a foundation to a devastated country, based on classical culture . . .” Zhdanov, raised on nineteenth-century “authors from Pushkin to Tolstoy, composers like Haydn and Mozart,” sought “an ideological basis in the classics.”

[48] “I have fulfilled the orders according to Comrade Stalin’s instructions which I wrote down about the play,” Simonov wrote to Poskrebyshev on 9 February 1949, delivering the work for inspection.

[49] Eisenstein died before he could shorten the beard, cut the kiss and show why The Terrible “needed to be cruel.” This was a mercy since it seems unlikely he would have survived the anti-Semitic purge of 1951–53.

[50] The first two candidates to lead this wartime PR campaign, Polish leaders of the Bund ( Jewish Socialist Party), V. Alter and G. Ehlich, demanded too much and were arrested, respectively being shot and committing suicide in prison.

[51] Fefer was the author of an absurd poem during WWII called “I a Jew” in which he praised the great Jewish Bolsheviks from King Solomon to Marx, Sverdlov and “Stalin’s friend Kaganovich” which no doubt enormously embarrassed the latter.

[52] Zhdanov’s chief ideological anti-Semite was the tall, thin and ascetic CC Secretary Mikhail Suslov, who had played a key role in the Caucasian deportations and then served as Stalin’s proconsul in the Baltics which he brutally purged after the war. Working alternately under both Zhdanov and Malenkov, he became one of Stalin’s youngish protégés.

[53] Zhdanovschina/Anti-Semitism: A. A. Zhdanov, “Doklad Zhdanova o zhurnalakh Zvezda i Leningrad,” Bolshevik no. 17–18, Sept. 1946, pp. 4–5. Yury Zhdanov: “He was quoting from HER poetry.” Zubok, pp. 115, 120–4, 308. RGASPI 558.11.732.1–18, Zhdanov to Stalin and Stalin to Zhdanov 14 and 19 Sept. 1946. See also: RGASPI 558.11.732.55, Zhdanov to Stalin and Stalin’s report “Good report” 4 Nov. 1946. RGASPI 558.11.806.104, Simonov to Poskrebyshev 9 Feb. 1949. Simonov, “Glazami,” pp. 52–61. On 5 June, Zhdanov chaired this court of honour and sent Stalin his speech: “I agree!” approved Stalin. RGASPI 558.11.732.87–8, Zhdanov to Stalin 29 May 1947. Kostyrchenko, pp. 71–2. Sakharov, p. 123. Jews, Mikhoels, Crimea: MR, pp. 191–2. RGASPI 82.2.1012.21–52, Suslov’s report on JAFC, Suslov and F. Alexandrov to Molotov and A. A. Kuznetsov 20 Nov. 1946. Kostyrchenko: anti-Semitism in the CC apparat, pp. 22–7: the sacking of General David Ortenberg, pp. 35–7, 51–61. Rubenstein and Naumov, Pogrom, pp. 14–23. Mikhoels: Ehrenburg, Postwar Years, p. 124. Sudoplatov, p. 290. King Lear, Medvedev, p. 483. RGASPI 82.2.1012–20, Mikhoels and Epshteyn to Molotov cc Malenkov, Mikoyan and Voznesensky 18 May 1944. Molotov to Beria cc Malenkov, Mikoyan and Voznesensky 20 May 1944. Beria to Molotov, Molotov to Khrushchev and Khrushchev to Molotov. Sergo Beria claimed that Stalin called Beria “Himmler” to discredit him because he suspected Beria of building ties with Jewish interests, Sergo B, pp. 110–13. Beria, 146–9. Fefer’s poem: Kostyrchenko, p. 41. RGASPI 17.125.246. Mikoyan, p. 497. Stalin to FDR: Bohlen, pp. 173–96, 203. Stalin attacks conductor Golovanov as anti-Semite: Gromov, p. 348. Birozhidan: Rubenstein and Naumov, Pogrom, pp. 34, 511; pp. 258–9 for Lozovsky’s testimony of Molotov and Crimean project. Lesser Terror, p. 202, quotes The Long Return by Esther Markish, p. 236. Sudoplatov, pp. 290–1. Zubok, pp. 123–5. Lists of Jews: Zhdanov receives lists of number of Jews from Kosygin in Minister of Finance on 29 May 1948: 15.5% were Jews, PB/Sovmin, pp. 264–5.

[54] Churchill himself had bouts of jealousy of his generals: “Monty wants to fill the Mall when he gets his baton! And he will not fill the Mall,” Churchill told Sir Alan Brooke on his way back from Moscow in October 1944. “He will fill the Mall because he is Monty and I will not have him filling the Mall!” It was, wrote Brooke, “a strange streak of almost unbelievable petty jealousy on his part . . . Those that got between him and the sun did not meet his approval.” There was a great tradition of rulers jealous of, and threatened by, brilliant but overmighty generals: Emperor Justinian humiliated Belisarius; Emperor Paul did the same to Suvorov.

[55] Zhukov case. Alanbrooke, pp. 605, 660. Stalin and Zhukov: Nina Budyonny. Kaganovich, pp. 101, 150. Beria, p. 129. Mikoyan (on Zhukov/Kulik cases), pp. 184, 557. Parrish, “Serov,” p. 119. VIZh 2, 1993, p. 27. Shtemenko, Generalnyi Shtab, vol. 2, pp. 18–21. Pavlenko, Razmyshleniya, pp. 30–1. G. K. Zhukov, “Korotko o Staline,” Pravda, 20 Jan. 1989, p. 3. Budyonny Notes, p. 41. RGASPI 82.2.896.126, Malenkov to Molotov on trial of Kuznetsov, Galler, 8 Apr. 1948. RGASPI 82.2.896.129, S. Dukelski to Molotov and Zhdanov, on Stalin’s request, re: work of Enemy agents in General Staff, 22 Mar. 1948. Koniev, Zapiski, pp. 594–7. Karpov, “Razprava Stalin,” pp. 69–72. Berlin book: Simonov, “Zametki,” pp. 49–50. Spahr, pp. 205–8. Volkogonov, Rise and Fall, p. 116. RGASPI 558.11.712.142, Stalin promotes Bulganin to Marshal 3 Nov. 1947. Search and look: N. N. Yakovlev, Zhukov, pp. 427–8. “Like a museum”: Voennyi Arkhiv Rossii, no. 1 (1993), p. 189, Abakumov to Stalin 10 Jan. 1948.

[56] The size and quality of their Stalin portrait was as much a mark of rank as the stars on an officer’s shoulder boards: a life-size oil original by a court artist like Gerasimov was the sign of a potentate. Budyonny and Voroshilov also boasted life-size portraits of themselves in military splendour on horseback with sabre by Gerasimov. These “grandees” were now so pompous, recalled Svetlana, that they made “authoritative speeches” on “any pretext,” even at lunch in their own homes while their families “sighed with boredom.”

[57] Nina Adzhubei joined the élite herself when her son married Khrushchev’s daughter, Rada. When Khrushchev became Soviet leader, Alexei Adzhubei became powerful as his father-in-law’s adviser and Izvestiya editor.

[58] Although Stalin was cynical about the renaming of places after his late magnates, he decided to build a statue and rename a region, street and factory after Shcherbakov. The original draft suggested naming a town after him, too, but Stalin crossed that out, scribbling: “Give his name to a cloth factory.” On 9 December 1947, the Politburo set annual salaries of the Premier and President at 10,000 roubles; Deputy Premiers and CC Secretaries 8,000 roubles. Stalin’s salary packets just piled up, unspent, in his desk at Kuntsevo.

[59] Imperial élite: VIZh 6, 1994. Lesser Terror, p. 185. Voennyi Arkhiv Rossii, no. 1 (1993), p. 189, Abakumov to Stalin 10 Jan. 1948. C. Stalin cannot endure: Djilas, p. 170. Vasily’s loot: Svetlana OOY, pp. 320–1. On officials looting: RGASPI 82.2.907.32, Abakumov to Molotov 2 Mar. 1948. Tribute system of booty: Kopelev, pp. 63–4. A. Vaksberg, “Delo marshala Zhukova: nerazorvavshayasya bomba,” Literaturnaya gazeta, no. 32, 5 Aug. 1992, p. 12. On corruption, Golovanov and Serov, see Medvedev, Neizvestnyi Stalin, “Stalin’s Personal Archive” chapter. Stalin tells stories on luxury of generals: Kavtaradze, p. 35. Vlasik Case confessions: GARF 7523.107.127.1–6, Vlasik request for pardon 18 May 1953. See also VIZh 12, 1989, pp. 85–92. Vlasik, p. 130: Beria’s guards. Abakumov denounced for corruption: Serov to Stalin 4 May 1948, Svobodnaia musl , no. 11, Nov. 1997, p. 115. Also: Voennyi Arkhiv Rossii, 1993, and VIZh 6, 1994. Parrish, “Serov,” p. 121. Kuznetsov, “Abakumov,” pp. 149–65. Lesser Terror, pp. 251–2. VIZh 12, 1989. Sarkisov betrays Beria to Abakumov: Vlast, 2000, no. 22, p. 44. Grandees: luxury, Svetlana OOY, pp. 45–62. Nina Budyonny. Martha Peshkova. Vasilieva, Kremlin Wives, p. 186. Vasily and Ekaterina Timoshenko’s booty: Svetlana OOY, p. 320; speeches, p. 326. A. Brot, chauffeur, quoted in Radzinsky, p. 526. Svetlana OOY, p. 346, and Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 197. Zoos: S. Khrushchev, Superpower, pp. 8–40. Stalin’s dachas, Sosnovka, Crimea: RGASPI 74.1.429.65, Ekaterina Voroshilova 21 June 1954. Stalin orders Livadia and Alupka for magnates: GARF 9401.2.93.319, Stalin and Chadaev to Beria 27 Feb. 1945. S. Khrushchev, Superpower, pp. 38–40. Oil paintings as marks of rank: Sakharov, p. 93. Special flights, Bolshoi loge: Sergo Mikoyan. Stepan Mikoyan. Stepan M, pp. 134–5. On bodyguards: Joseph Minervin; Julia Khrushcheva. Svetlana OOY, pp. 346, 357. Igor Malenkov. Kaganoviches and Berias basketball: Joseph Minervin and Martha Peshkova. Dresses: Paying for dresses and Stalin’s intervention: Sergo Mikoyan. Stepan Mikoyan. Julia Khrushcheva. Svetlana OOY, p. 346. Kremlin Wives, p. 186. Polina and Svetlana Molotov: Kremlin Wives, pp. 130–1. At Carlsbad: Zhdanova and Nina Beria, Sergo B, p. 160. Stalin’s cars: D. Babichenko and M. Sidorov, “Nevelika Pobeda,” Itogi no. 31 (269), 2001, p. 42. The families of dead leaders got their cars from Stalin too: Ordzhonikidze’s widow got a Ford 8 and the widow of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, got a Pobeda. Sofia Dzerzhinsky wrote to thank Stalin personally for her Pobeda and chauffeur, RGASPI 558.11.726.57,59,60, Sofia Dzherzhinsky to Stalin to denounce Comrade Varsky of Polish CP, 1 Jan. 1935; to thank Stalin for helping son enter military academy 2 Mar. 1935; for car 31 Dec. 1947. GARF 7523.65.208.1–24, Comrades Shvernik and Shkiryatov to Stalin and signed by Stalin, Chadaev, Sovmin, 10–11 May 1945. GARF 7523.65.208.23–29, Stalin/Chadaev—pensions for Vera Shcherbakova and her thank-you to Stalin. Salaries: see PB/ Sovmin, pp. 401–2. T. Okunevskaya, Tatianin den, p. 227.

[60] When Starostin was finally returned to his camp (where he ran the soccer team), Vasily hired the famous coach of Dynamo Tiflis and managed to make it to fourth place in 1950 and the semi-finals of the USSR Cup. He favoured Stalinist punishments and plutocratic incentives: when his team lost 0–2, he ordered their plane to dump them in the middle of nowhere, far from Moscow, as a punishment; when the team won, a helicopter landed on the field filled with gifts. When he bothered to turn up to his air-force command, he ruled there too with wild generosity and grim terror. Thanks to Zurab Karumidze for these anecdotes of his father-in-law, Vasily’s football manager.

[61] Vasily: RGASPI 45.1.807.85–92, N. Sbytov to Stalin 24 Mar. 1948: “close to the Soviet people.” Artyom Sergeev. Nadezhda Vlasika. Search for Nadya in Kapotilina: Svetlana RR. Stepan M, p. 125. Svetlana, Twenty Letters, pp. 221–9, OOY, p. 320. Vasily’s unpleasantness to Galina, her fear of not seeing children, cuts Redens on his mother’s arrest then kind to him: Leonid Redens. Dive-bombing Tiflis: Charkviani, pp. 55–7. Adjutant Polyansky on drinking and womanizing and deer reserve; B. Voitekhov on seduction of wife; Maj. A. Kapelkin on torturing—all Radzinsky, pp. 525–8. Vasily, pp. 156–60. Also: Zurab Karumidze’s interview with his father-in-law, Gaioz Djejelava, Vasily Stalin’s football coach 1949–52, was invaluable. Beria’s football entourage: Sudoplatov, p. 103.

[62] Kalinin. Tito dinner: Djilas, p. 102. Mgeladze: Stalin calls about Kalinin, p. 42. Stalin’s tenderness, funeral: Rybin, Kto Otravil Stalina? , pp. 37–9. RGASPI 558.11.753.19–20, Kalinin to Stalin 8 June 1944. GARF 7523.64.683.1–6, Stalin, Malenkov, Zhdanov, Shkiryatov, Supreme Soviet Presidium, 11 June 1945. Merkulov to Shvernik 24 May 1945. Kalinina to Shvernik 12 May 1945. Merkulov to Poskrebyshev and Stalin to Gorkin, Secretary of Presidium of Supreme Soviet, n.d. Kalinina to Stalin 9 May 1945. RGASPI 558.11.753.22–9, M. Kalinin to Stalin 24 June 1946. Stalin honoured these requests, also giving his daughter-in-law 25,000 roubles: GARF 7523.65.164.

[63] Not only could Stalin not feed his civilians but his correspondence with Beria and Serov (in Germany) shows that the Soviets were anxious that they could not feed their army in Germany, let alone the East Germans.

[64] Stalin vs. Molotov, Mikoyan, famine: MR, pp. 191–2. Mikoyan, p. 497. Rubenstein and Naumov, Pogrom, pp. 18–23; p. 259, for Lozovsky’s testimony of Molotov and Crimean project. Kostyrchenko, pp. 35–7. Lesser Terror, p. 202. Diplomacy: Molotov, Stalin, Polina: RGASPI 82.2.1592.19–20, Molotov to Polina 8 July 1946, Paris. RGASPI 82.2.1592.30–1, Molotov to Polina 28 Aug. 1946. Stalin holiday 1946: RGASPI 558.11.1481.49: 8 Sept. to 21 Dec. Beria’s dinner sing-song: Mgeladze, pp. 63–5. See also: Pechatnov, pp. 17–24. Zubok, pp. 91–103. Mikoyan/famine: RGASPI 558.11.731.120, Mikoyan to Stalin and Stalin to Zhdanov, Mikoyan, Kosygin and Beria 15 Sept. 1946. Famine: KR I, p. 249; II, p. 112. RGASPI 558.11.732.42–54, Serov to Beria, Beria to Stalin, Stalin to Voznesensky, Zhdanov and Patolichev, 15 Oct. 1946. RGASPI 558.11.765.113, Mikoyan to Stalin. RGASPI 558.11.156.47, Stalin to Beria 12 Sept. 1946. RGASPI 558.11.765.116–8, Dvinsky to Stalin, 22 Sept. 1946. Stalin ordered Minister of State Control Mekhlis to check Mikoyan. Khrushchev and famine, statistics: Shapoval in Taubman, pp. 33–4. Kaganovich to Ukraine: Resolution of PB on changes in Ukrainian leadership, 27 Feb. 1947, in PB/Sovmin, p. 46. Taubman, Khrushchev,Man and Era, pp. 203–5. Svetlana OOY, p. 353.

[65] Like so many of Stalin’s febrile fears, there was substance here: the Ottoman Sultans had controlled the Black Sea through their control of Crimea. Catherine the Great and Prince Potemkin annexed the Crimea in 1783 for the same reason, just as the Anglo-French armies landed there in 1853 to undermine Russia. Khrushchev controversially donated Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, a decision that almost caused a civil war in the 1990s between Ukrainians and those who wished to be ruled by Russia.

[66] Marshall Plan/Jewish Crimea: Zubok, pp. 105–7: Lend-Lease without strings, p. 104. Raanan, p. 81: Zhdanov pro-Arab. Khrushchev on Crimea/Jews: Stepan Staszewski in Oni, pp. 170–2. RGASPI 82.2.1012.21–52, Mikhoels and Epshteyn Fefer; Suslov’s report (pp. 24–38); Suslov and F. Alexandrov to Molotov and A. A. Kuznetsov 20 Nov. 1946 (pp. 46–51); Mikhoels and Fefer to Molotov (p. 52) 16 Apr. 1947; Abakumov to Molotov cc Stalin, Molotov, Zhdanov and Kuznetsov 26 Mar. 1948. Rubenstein and Naumov, Pogrom, pp. 19–40. Kostyrchenko, pp. 51–60. Vladimir Redens. Mikhoels prize “Shirma” decoy: Ehrenburg, Postwar Years, pp. 124–5. “Tell me why are there so many Jews in your organization?” Leopold Trepper quoted in Lesser Terror, p. 175. Sudoplatov, p. 291. Lesser Terror, p. 210, Abakumov arrested Maj.-Gen. I. F. Dashichev for anti-Semitism in July 1942.

[67] It was not long before Zhenya learned that her own husband was an MGB agent who had informed on her ever since their marriage, but every élite family had its informer. She divorced him.

[68] Grigory Morozov, who became a respected Soviet lawyer and always behaved with great discretion and dignity, refused to be interviewed for this book, saying, “I never want to relive 1947 again.” He died in 2002.

[69] Svetlana OOY, pp. 139–41, 319. Morozov puts on airs, Jews into family: Vladimir Alliluyev (Redens). “Worming their way into the family”: Svetlana quoted in Rubenstein and Naumov, Pogrom, p. 35. Interview Volya Malenkova. Example of Svetlana being asked favours: Yuri Soloviev asked her to inquire why he had been expelled from the élite Institute of Foreign Relations and she arranged a meeting with Deputy Minister Dekanozov. Svetlana RR: “Being who I am, no one left me . . .” Vasily helped chums: Svetlana OOY, p. 320. Kostyrchenko, pp. 79–85. Svetlana RR. Morozov’s father was soon arrested. “Stalin never asked me to divorce”: Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 196. Sergo Beria confirms Svetlana wanted to divorce—Sergo B, p. 152. If she doesn’t divorce, American spy, Mikoyan, p. 362. Vaksberg, Stalin Against the Jews, pp. 155–7. “ French wrestling”: GARF 8131.32.3289.117, Ivanov on methods of Vlodzirmirski, Rodos, Komarov and Shvartsman. GARF 8131.32.3289.181, Komarov to Prof. Yudin quoted in Rudenko at Beria’s trial. He later boasted of his bestial cruelty and hatred of his Jewish victims. Komarov’s letter to Stalin: Kostyrchenko, pp. 123–4. Rubenstein and Naumov, Pogrom , p. 281: Komarov to Lozovsky, p. 288. Vladimir Alliluyev: “Did Zhenya murder . . .” Rubenstein and Naumov, Pogrom, p. 40. Investigator G. Sorokin: testimony on Instantsiya in Stalin Against Jews, p. 156. “Lie low,” says Vlasik, Svetlana to jail too, Olga knows: Kira Alliluyeva. “Nothing happened without him knowing.” Leonid Redens: Svetlana and Vasily cut them dead. Yury Zhdanov. Mikoyan, pp. 362–3: Stalin on Svetlana’s marriages. Stepan M, p. 145. Interpreter: Oleg Troyanovsky. “Are you crazy?”: Yuri Soloviev. RGASPI 558.11.1481.51, Stalin’s 1947 holiday 16 July–21 Nov.

[70] Stalin had always taken a great interest in longevity. In 1937, he had sponsored Professor Alexander Bogomolov’s work into the phenomenon of the extraordinary life-spans of the people of Georgia and Abkhazia. Stalin is said to have believed this was due to water from glaciers and their diet—he therefore drank special glacial water.

[71] Most of Stalin’s houses were reached through an archway of the security building (though not Lake Ritsa and New Athos) before emerging in a lush garden with privet hedges and a path that led up to a Mediterranean-style villa surrounded by a veranda. Their biggest room was always the high-ceilinged wood-panelled dining room that boasted a long table that could be made smaller. All were painted a sort of military green, perhaps to camouflage them from the sky. All were virtually invisible, hidden up narrow lanes, and so concealed within palm and fir trees that it was hard to see them even from their own garden. Virtually all of them had their own jetties and all had summerhouses where Stalin worked and held dinners. All contained the tell-tale billiard room which was usually combined with a cinema, the film being projected out of little wooden windows across the billiard table onto the far wall. All had many bedrooms with divans and vast bathrooms with tiny baths made to fit Stalin’s height. All had been built or refashioned for Stalin by his court architect Miron Merzhanov who lived with Martha Beria’s mother, Timosha, Gorky’s daughter-in-law and Yagoda’s love. Merzhanov was arrested in the late forties like all of Timosha’s previous lovers.

[72] This is based on Charkviani’s memoirs. Mgeladze’s memoirs, that almost rank alongside Mikoyan’s for their intimacy, have only just been published in Georgia. The Georgian and Abkhazian bosses were naturally rivals: in the case of Beria versus Lakoba, the Tbilisi boss destroyed the Sukhumi boss but it worked the other way round with Charkviani and Mgeladze.

[73] Houses: based on author’s visits to Kholodnaya Rechka, Lake Ritsa, New Athos, Likani Palace, Livadia Palace, Sukhumi dacha etc., 2002. Lenin icon: Orlov in Rybin, Ryadom, p. 91. 1947 road trip: Vlasik, pp. 35–40. Upset on dugouts at Kharkov and Valechka: Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 197. Chats to children at seaside: Mgeladze, p. 87; missing Georgia, p. 82; J. B. Priestley and old peasant aged 150, p. 68: reading timetable, p. 113; gardening, roses, mimosa, pp. 53, 96, 142; singing “Suliko” with Vlasik and Poskrebyshev, p. 128. Books: RGASPI 558.11.786.131, Stalin to Poskrebyshev. Yury Zhdanov. Martha Peshkova. Livadia Palace 1948: Vlasik, p. 44. On Miron Merzhanov: Martha Peshkova. Also: Vasilieva, Deti Kremlya, p. 287. Dinners: KR I, pp. 325–8. Films: Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 198. Georgian government on permanent call: Charkviani, pp. 1, 34, 45, 53; Mgeladze, pp. 53, 95–7, 128, 142 etc. Interviews with: Alyosha Mirtskhulava; Eka Rapava; Nadya Dekanozova; Nina Rukhadze. Underwear and sofa sleeping: Charkviani, pp. 34–7. Yury Zhdanov. Martha Peshkova. Poskrebyshev as C-in-C: Mgeladze, pp. 72–5, 82; map: pp. 78–9; meeting schoolchildren, p. 87; racing to dacha, p. 146; toasts pp. 80–1. Songs: Charkviani, pp. 54, 64–66; Mgeladze, pp. 129–30. Kindness to Artyom Mikoyan: Mikoyan, p. 564. Stalin’s tempers: Charkviani, pp. 38–45. Making peace between Khrushchev and Kaganovich: interview Oleg Troyanovsky. Also Troyanovsky, pp. 148, 156–64.

[74] Zhdanov was not the only one: Andreyev, just fifty-two, fell ill in 1947 though he remained an active Politburo member until 1950; he lost his position in 1952.

[75] Svetlana leaves: Charkviani, p. 58. This account of the founding of the Cominform is based on Zubok, pp. 110, 130–4, 136, as well as the Zhdanov/Stalin correspondence in RGASPI, e.g. 558.11.731.19, Zhdanov to Stalin and Stalin to Zhdanov; RGASPI 77.3. Also: Molotov vs. Zhdanov: Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science, pp. 155–7. Holloway, p. 254. Jakob Berman in Oni, pp. 281–2. Raanan, p. 101. Dedijer, Tito Speaks , pp. 303–6. RGASPI 558.11.762.14, Beria and Malenkov to Stalin 6 Nov. 1947. Yury Zhdanov. On Rada staying with the Malenkovs: Igor Malenkov. Volya Malenkova. Julia Khrushcheva: Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 198. Malenkov, Beria’s “spineless . . . billygoat”: KR I, p. 336. Zhdanov’s illness and Prof. Yegorov asked Stalin to extend his holiday until 2 Dec. 1947: PB/Sovmin, p. 269 n.1.

[76] Stalin had stayed with Troyanovsky’s father Alexander in Vienna in 1913, appointed him first Soviet Ambassador to Washington and protected him during the Terror. Stalin liked but never quite trusted Troyanovsky who was an ex-Menshevik. Once he crept up on him, put his hands over his eyes and whispered, “Friend or foe?” In 1948, young Troyanovsky’s career as Stalin’s interpreter came to an abrupt end when Molotov suddenly moved him in order to protect him. His father, the old diplomat, had been playing bridge and criticizing the leadership, with the indomitable Litvinov. It was a dangerous time. Later Troyanovsky became Khrushchev’s foreign affairs adviser. This account is based on an interview with him. He died in 2003.

[77] Sergo B, p. 158. Golovanov in MR, p. 303. Yury Zhdanov. Oleg Troyanovsky. Also Troyanovsky, pp. 148, 156–64.

[78] The man in charge of the operation was Lavrenti Tsanava, black-haired with a dapper moustache, one of the Georgians Beria had brought to Moscow. Like so many in the Cheka, he was a criminal. Those who knew him well could only say that “he was a beast.” His real name was Djandjugava and he had been convicted for murder until Beria rescued him and he became boss of the Belorussian MGB. He did not prove a particularly loyal protégé since he was now close to Abakumov. After Stalin’s death, he was arrested and executed.

[79] The “Aunties” were in Vladimir prison. Zhenya Alliluyeva wanted to commit suicide and swallowed stones but survived. Like so many others, she was kept alive by the kindness of strangers. A Polish prisoner in the neighbouring cell knocked in prison code “Live for your children.”

[80] On verbal orders to the actual killers from the Instantsiya : Victor Levashov, Mikhoels: Ubiystvo Mikhoelsa, pp. 464–74. Kostyrchenko, pp. 90–1. Svetlana OOY, pp. 140–1. Broken face: Perets Markish poem in Kostyrchenko, p. 95. Greasepaint: Ehrenburg,Postwar, pp. 124–5. Molotova: Kostyrchenko, p. 97. Kaganovich in Vaksberg, Stalin Against Jews, pp. 168–179. Alliluyevs’ sentences: Kostyrchenko, p. 98. You too anti-Semite: Djilas, pp. 154, 170. The body: Zbarsky and Hutchinson, pp. 158–9. Rubenstein and Naumov, Pogrom, pp. 40–6, 397, Benjamin Zuskin’s testimony. Abakumov’s Deputy Minister Ogoltsov and the Belorussian Minister of State Security, Lavrenti Tsanava, were in charge of the operation on orders from the Instantsiya. Abakumov’s testimony: Argumenty i Fakty, no. 19, 1992. Abakumov’s testimony quoted in letter of L. P. Beria to G. M. Malenkov 2 Apr. 1953. Tsanava’s testimony and biography: GARF 7523.85.236.4–5 and 17–23, L. F. Tsanava’s appeal to President Voroshilov 5 July 1953 and interrogations. “A beast”—Kiril Mazurov, PB member under Brezhnev, Elena Durden-Smith. Parrish, “Serov,” p. 124. The needle: Sudoplatov, p. 297. The bullet: Zbarsky and Hutchinson, p. 158. The axe wrapped in a towel: Brackman, p. 373, based on interview with Vasily Rudich who related testimony of Olga Shatunovskaya quoting Malenkov.

[81] RGASPI 558.11.732.130, Poskrebyshev sends report of French Politburo brought by Djilas to Moscow to Stalin and Stalin’s note, 27 Feb. 1948. Zhdanov’s health: Djilas, p. 149. Soup: Bedell Smith, pp. 65, 218. Zubok, pp. 134–5, 194–7. Kostyrchenko, p. 265. Raanan, pp. 135–7, 143. Holloway, pp. 259–60. Dedijer, Tito Speaks, pp. 319–70. Little finger: Khrushchev, Secret Speech, KR I, p. 624. MR, p. 233.

[82] Zhdanov drinks/Stalin’s temper: Svetlana OOY, pp. 332, 359–62, 380. KR I, p. 305. Interview Yury Zhdanov. Yury A. Zhdanov, “Vo Mgle Protivorechiy,” in Voprosy Filosofii, no. 7, 1993, pp. 65–92. Shepilov, “Vospominaniya,” Voprosy Istorii, nos. 3, 4, 5, 6 (1998); vol. 6, pp. 9–11. Soyfer, Lysenko, pp. 165–172, and Shepilov interview pp. 178–9. Alexei Kojevnikov, Games of Stalinist Democracy, Ideological Discussions in Soviet Sciences 1947–1952, in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions, pp. 145–50, 154–160. Hahn, pp. 98–104. Zhores Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of Lysenko, pp. 112–28. Svetlana RR. Medvedev, p. 115. “My Yurochka is the best”: Gulia Djugashvili, Ded, Otets, Mat i Drugie, p. 60. Stalin’s comments on Zhdanov’s lecture: RGASPI 17.125.620.2–45, A. A. Zhdanov’s notes RGASPI 77.1.180. Pravda, 7 Aug. 1948. Holloway, pp. 259–60. Krementsov, Stalinist Science, pp. 153–67. Berlin Crisis: Zubok, pp. 51–3. Victor Gorbarev, “Soviet Military Plans and Actions During the First Berlin Crisis,” Slavic Military Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, Sept. 1997, pp. 1–23.

[83] Raanan, pp. 135–7, 143. Zubok, pp. 134–7, 194–7. Holloway, pp. 259–60. Dedijer, Tito Speaks, pp. 319–70. Khrushchev, Glasnost, pp. 102–3. Djilas, pp. 151–3, 181. Sergo B, pp. 144–5—the evolution from mad worship to realization.

[84] Perhaps Stalin was affected by Zhdanov’s death. He re-named the dead man’s birthplace, Mariupol on the Black Sea, Zhdanov. According to the bodyguards, after Zhdanov’s funeral, Molotov was worried about Stalin’s health and asked them not to let him garden. When Stalin discovered this interference in his private life, he mistrusted Molotov all the more.

[85] Yury Zhdanov. Voznesensky and Kuznetsov named successors/Zhdanov’s illness leads to Malenkov’s return: Mikoyan, p. 565. On appointment of Secretaries, Malenkov and Ponomarenko 1 July 1948 in PB/Sovmin, p. 58. Also: Stalin tells Malenkov that “Zhdanov very sick and Stalin proposed to appoint a young man from the regions,” Ponomarenko to Kumanev quoted in PB/Sovmin, pp. 58–9. Top Secret report on health of C. Zhdanov, CC Secretary, Prof. Yegorov to Stalin 5 July 1948, in PB/Sovmin , p. 268. Andreyev’s and later Mekhlis’s illnesses led to their retirement without falling from favour. Kostyrchenko, pp. 265–7. Natural death: Deriabin, p. 106: Zhdanov’s bodyguard, General Boris Sakharov, insisted death was natural. Lydia Timashuk: “Tsel byla spasti zhizhn bolnovo, Pisma Lidii Timashuk,” Istochnik, no. 1, 1997, pp. 3–17. “Don’t think I’ll be long”: Shepilov, “Vospominanya,” pp. 9–11. Ehrenburg, Postwar Years, p. 44. Bring back the body: Poskrebyshev orders Voznesensky and A. A. Kuznetsov, Vaksberg, Stalin Against the Jews , pp. 262–3. Funeral supper and Molotov orders guards to stop Stalin gardening: Rybin, Ryadom, p. 51. Timashuk’s first letter and Stalin’s reaction: Sudoplatov, p. 298. See also BBC2 Timewatch on Leningrad Affair which quotes American Professor of Cardiology William McKinnon saying the mistreatment was “deliberate.” Latest argument for deliberate mistreatment; Abakumov to Stalin 30 Aug. 1948; thoughts on Dmitrov, J. Brent and V. P. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime, pp. 13, 18–21, 26–7, 48–9, 107–9, 164, 168.

[86] RGASPI 558.11.1481.51, Stalin’s holiday 1948: 8 Sept.–2 Dec. Poskrebyshev accuses Mikoyan, p. 535; successors: pp. 656–66: Kuznetsov (ill service), Molotov (obvious person).