Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

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

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

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

  Beria played Stalin well: he shrewdly offered to purge Georgia himself. In March 1952, Beria sacked Charkviani,297 replaced him with Mgeladze and publically admitted: “I too am guilty.”

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

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

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

  Yet, gradually, their shared fears and Stalin’s unpredictability created a “sense of solidarity,” a support system among ambitious killers who wanted to survive and protect their families. Even Beria became the unlikely avuncular comforter for bruisers like Khrushchev and Mikoyan in these uneasy times. The others revelled in Beria’s eclipse—and shared his fears. Malenkov warned him, Khrushchev teased him. Molotov and Kaganovich were so impressed with Beria that even when Stalin criticized him, they defended him. Yet any and all were ready to destroy the others. It was not long before Ignatiev and his MGB torturers were even trying to link Stalin’s two obsessions: Beria, they whispered, was secretly Jewish.3

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

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

  “I’m not a supplicant of the MGB!” barked Stalin at Ignatiev. “I can knock you out if you don’t follow my orders . . . We’ll scatter your group!” He now talked more to his bodyguards and Valechka than to his comrades. The death of the Mongolian dictator Marshal Choibalsang in Moscow that spring worried him enough to confide in his chauffeur: “They die one after another. Shcherbakov, Zhdanov, Dmitrov, Choibalsang . . . die so quickly!298 We must change the old doctors for new ones.” The bodyguards could talk quite intimately to Stalin and Colonel Tukov replied that those doctors were very experienced. “No, we must change them for new ones . . . The MVD insists on arresting them as saboteurs.” Valechka heard him say he was not sure about the case. But Stalin was not for turning: he wanted the Jewish Crimea case to be tried imminently. Lozovsky and a distinguished cast of Jewish intellectuals again became the playthings of Riumin and Komarov.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Stalin rejected official appeals. Lozovsky299 and the Jewish poets were shot on 12 August 1952.5

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

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

  “You’re acting like a whore! You’re an ignoble spy, a terrorist!” Riumin shouted at one of the doctors. “We’ll torture you with a red-hot iron. We have all the necessary equipment for that . . .” Stalin’s family was included in a bizarre medical melodrama, spawned by Stalin’s furious imagination and Riumin’s diabolical obedience: the doctors had deliberately subverted Vasily Stalin’s treatment for “nervous disorders” and had failed to prevent toxicosis in Svetlana Stalin after the birth of her child Katya Zhdanov in the spring of 1950. A surreal touch, if any was needed, was added by the case of Andreyev who had been ill since 1947: the doctors prescribed cocaine for his insomnia so it was hardly surprising he was unable to sleep. Andreyev300 had become dependent on the drug, one of history’s more unlikely coke addicts.6

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

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

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

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

  He had always been interested in the study of linguistics: the field had been dominated by Professor Marr who had established Stalinist orthodoxy by arguing that language, like class, would ultimately disappear and merge into one language as Communism approached. A Georgian linguistics scholar, Arnold Chikobava, wrote to Stalin to attack the theory. Stalin, keen to buttress his national Bolshevism by overturning Marrism, summoned Chikobava to a dinner that lasted from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. taking notes diligently like a student. He then held an open debate in Pravda, finally intervening with his own article, “Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics” which immediately altered the entire field of Soviet science and ideology.301

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

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

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

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

  “You’ve grown old! I’ll replace you all!”7

  At 7 p.m. (to suit Stalin’s own timetable) on 5 October 1952, the Nineteenth Congress opened. The leaders sat bunched together on the left with the ageing Stalin alone on the right. Stalin himself only attended the beginning and the end of the Congress but giving the major reports to Malenkov and Khrushchev placed them in pole position for the succession.302 He only spoke at the end of the Congress for a few rambling minutes but a punch-drunk Stalin boasted to Khrushchev: “There, look at that! I can still do it!”

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

  57

  Blind Kittens and Hippopotamuses: The Destruction of the Old Guard

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

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

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

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

  Then he pulled a piece of paper out of his tunic, and read out the thirty-six members of the new Presidium, including many new names. Khrushchev and Malenkov glanced at each other: where had Stalin found these people? When he proposed the inner Bureau, everyone was astonished that Molotov and Mikoyan were excluded.303 Then, returning to his seat on the tribune, he explained their downfall: “They’re scared by the overwhelming power they saw in America.” He ominously linked Molotov and Mikoyan to the Rightists, Rykov and Frumkin, shot long before, and Lozovsky, just shot in August.