Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  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.281

  It was said that the Aragvi restaurant was full of Beria’s Georgians that night, toasting Zhdanov’s death.5

  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.6

  PART TEN

  The Lame Tiger 1949–1953

  53

  Mrs. Molotov’s Arrest

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

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

  Polina spoke Yiddish, the language of her childhood, which she always used when she met Mitteleuropeans, though she tactfully called it “the Austrian language.” Meir asked how she knew Yiddish. “Ikh bin a yidishe tokhter,” replied Polina. “I’m a daughter of the Jewish people.” As they parted, Polina said, “If things go well for you, then things will be good for Jews all over the world.” Perhaps she did not know how Stalin resented her pushy intelligence, snobbish elegance, Jewish background, American businessman brother and, as he told Svetlana, “bad influence on Nadya.” Her sacking in May was a warning but she did not know that Stalin had considered murdering her in 1939.282

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Malenkov extricated his family from its Jewish connections. Volya Malenkova divorced Shamberg. Every history repeats that Stalin ordered this divorce and that Malenkov enforced it. Volya Malenkova vigorously denies this, claiming that the marriage had not worked because Shamberg had married her for the wrong reasons—and had “bad artistic taste.” “My father even discouraged me saying, ‘Think carefully and seriously. You rushed into the marriage. Careful before rushing out of it.’ ” But this was not how it appeared to Shamberg, who was summoned to Malenkov’s office. Just as Vasily Stalin accelerated Svetlana’s divorce, so Malenkov’s bodyguard fixed Volya’s.283

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

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

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

  On 21 January, Polina was arrested in her squirrel-fur coat. Her sisters, doctor and secretaries were arrested. One of her sisters and a brother would die in prison. Her arrest was ominous for the other leaders who secretly sympathised with her.1

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

  “Ivan Alexeevich!” exclaimed Polina.

  “Don’t deny it!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Svetlana,” replied Stepan.

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

  “What happened to your children who were arrested?” Stalin suddenly asked Mikoyan ominously. “Do you think they deserve the right to study at Soviet institutions?” Mikoyan carefully did not reply—but he understood the threat, particularly after Polina’s arrest. He expected the boys to be arrested, yet nothing happened. Stalin started to mutter that Voroshilov was “an English spy” and hardly saw him284 while the diminished Molotov and Mikoyan just hung on. But now Stalin’s chosen successors succumbed to the brutal vendetta of Beria and Malenkov in a sudden blood-bath.2

  54

  Murder and Marriage: The Leningrad Case

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

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